ConservativeHome's Columnists

Graeme Archer's diary

Greetings from the City of Brotherly Love. Beautiful Philadelphia is awash with that late summer sunshine which I so confidently predicted last week was now finished for the year. Gone in Hackney it may well be, but Pennsylvania remains very warm. I would tell you the temperature but of course it’s reported in “F” rather than “C” and I have no idea what it means so I can never remember it. It’s hot – I’m wearing shorts.  The shorts follow from the heat, not the other way round, by the way. 

*

I enjoyed an afternoon drink in the Groucho Club in Soho last Saturday, before I left for Philly. OK the truth is that I was at a creative writing class there and I was drinking a glass of water, which was the only substance we were allowed to consume, as non-members. Have you ever been to a creative writing class? They are a great fillip for winter months. There’s always the shocking moment when the girl with the sweetest face and the quietest voice starts reading her homework: You shut your f***** mouth you f***** f**** of a***** f***, he said, as she twisted the budgie’s neck. Even more embarrassing is when you introduce yourselves for the first time. “My name is Graeme and I’m a statistician. From Hackney” I announce, after listening to someone say “Hi, I’m a corporate lawyer, I’ve had two plays produced on Radio 4 and I’ve just submitted my second novel”. Anyway I labour on. It is surprising and a bit frightening sometimes to read what you produce when you’re forced to write without stopping for five minutes. Let’s hope no-one in our HR department ever reads them.

*

Cameron Watt: Shame of the NHS

Last year I made repeated visits to the Whittington Hospital in Archway, north London. An elderly relative in his late eighties was seriously ill there. In his ward, Ken enjoyed banter with staff, many of whom were very warm and kind to him. Yet in the few weeks leading up to his death, Ken was denied the level of care he deserved.

The hospital’s greatest failure was in ensuring that he received proper nutrition. Ken’s body was riddled with cancer and his appetite was failing. Yet even when he wanted to eat, Ken was not able to. With diminished strength, he could not use cutlery properly. Routinely meals would be placed in front of him only to be collected, uneaten, 45 minutes later. Only when family members were present to help feed him would Ken be able to eat as much as he wanted. Among the other problems Ken faced was a callous night nurse who denied repeated requests from the geriatric patients for extra bedding to keep out the cold. A fine Irishman who had voluntarily served in the British Army during the War was repaid with very mediocre care in his final few days.

Appallingly, Ken’s experience is typical of what elderly patients are receiving throughout the country. This week’s Healthcare Commission report found that thousands of older people are being treated without dignity or adequate privacy on hospital wards across England. Inspections at 23 acute hospital trusts found that only five are fully complying with national standards on dignity in care, even though they all claimed to do so.

It shows many patients are at risk of malnutrition, with barely one in six of those who need help with eating and drinking receiving it. Incontinent patients are being forced to wear nappies, and sometimes left for hours in soiled clothing. Years after Government promised to abolish the indignity of mixed-sex wards many still exist, with elderly male and female patients forced to share toilets and washing facilities. Trusts ordered to make improvements include seven of the Government's flagship foundation hospitals.

In recent weeks I have been encouraged as the nation’s broken covenant with our armed forces has been increasingly recognised. This is a vital pre-cursor for action to tackle it. However the neglect of the elderly in our hospitals is one symptom of an even more serious broken covenant between the generations. At the next general election, I hope our party puts providing dignified hospital care for the elderly at the heart of our campaigning on the NHS. And each of us must heed the Healthcare Commission’s appeal to blow the whistle whenever we have concerns about the treatment of vulnerable older people.

Theresa May MP: We’ve heard it all before, Gordon

Working my way through Gordon Brown’s speech at the Labour Party conference, I waited – and waited – for something new.  But there was nothing.  The speech was nothing more than a re-hash of every other speech he has given in the last few years.  And it wasn’t even just the content that was a re-hash – it turns out that even his rhetoric was a re-hash from old American campaign speeches.

He promised a ‘personalised’ NHS.  But he first announced his back in May 2004.  And he failed to deliver; in fact he spent all of his time as Chancellor seeking to restrict consumer choice.  As he once famously said: ‘In healthcare, we know that the consumer is not sovereign’.

He promised more competitive sport. But he has been announcing this since 2001.  And as ever with Gordon Brown, the truth is hidden in the small print.  Government figures show that Lottery money going to grassroots sport has been cut by 47 per cent since Labour came to power.

He promised to build ten new ‘eco-towns’.  But despite the fact that he has been talking about doing this for the last two years, Labour actually promised to build seven of them back in 1997 – when they called them ‘Millennium Communities’.  Gordon’s Brown’s protégé, Yvette Cooper, has admitted that only one in ten of these homes have been built.

Louise Bagshawe: Vote Labour

After her column on why we should vote Tory, Louise Bagshawe embraces Gordon's Big Tent and offers some reasons why you should vote Labour in a snap election.

Because you are a Europhile, and long for ever-closer union

Those xenophobic Tories insist that we should keep our manifesto promise and hold a referendum on the European Constitution. We all know this is a simple excuse for the people to say "no" to a treaty they are too stupid to understand. Labour will send the treaty through on a nod, give up our veto in 60 areas, surrender our seat at the UN, sign up to an EU president and foreign minister and make Giscard d'Estaing a happy man. Nation states are an outmoded concept anyway.

You believe the State knows best

Vote Labour - we always hit the targets. We've got targets for hospitals, targets for police, targets for the public sector. And that's more important than dinosaur concepts like "bobbies on the beat".

You prefer an open-door policy to managed immigration

Social cohesion? Community housing? An affordable NHS? Who cares, we welcome whatever amount of migration there is and hang the consequences.

Peter Franklin: The greatest Prime Minister

Just occasionally, the broadcasters surprise us with a programme that makes no concessions to the lowest common denominator. One such was ‘Prime Ministers’, aired on BBC4 last weekend. Chaired by Andrew Marr, it featured Peter Hennessy, Anthony Howard, Simon Jenkins, Andrew Roberts and Polly Toynbee sitting in a studio debating the relative merits of the British Prime Ministers of the Twentieth Century – for a solid two hours. Blissful! 

With pleasing numerical symmetry, the Twentieth Century had twenty Prime Ministers. But which one was the greatest? 

Narrowing the field isn’t difficult. We can start with Lord Salisbury, whose Premiership was a Nineteenth Century affair straying into Twentieth as if out of sheer reactionary cussedness. Then there were six Prime Ministers whose time in office was too short to be of much significance: Arthur Balfour, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Andrew Bonar Law, Anthony Eden, Sir Alec Douglas-Home and James Callaghan. Callaghan could also fit into the next category – Prime Ministers whose premierships were destroyed by the unions, the other two being Harold Wilson and Edward Heath. Next we have two Prime Ministers destroyed by their relationship with their own parties: Ramsay Macdonald and John Major. Usually placed in a category of his own is Neville Chamberlain, but surely Stanley Baldwin deserves equal if not greater blame for the legacy of appeasement. 

Andrew Lilico: The reform of higher education

In September 2004 the Bow Group published a paper I had written (with the assistance of Karen Richardson) on the Reform of Higher Education. At the time it received quite a bit of press interest — e.g. here and here.  Since term is starting again, and since I believe that the arguments of the paper still largely stand, I thought I might summarize them for you.

I began by considering the rationale for state involvement in the sector.  It seems to me that this is always the first step — unless we understand why the Market or the voluntary sector is not best-placed or most appropriate to deliver goods and services, we will not understand what it is that government intervention is supposed to achieve, and hence are unlikely to develop optimal policy proposals.

Stephan Shakespeare: Cameron must offer bankable reasons for the uncool majority to vote Conservative (and quickly)

We could be within days of a general election being called, so this is a time to be constructive. How to be constructive when the polls are so gloomy for the Conservatives? Simple: all people are capable of changing their minds, so all elections are winnable. But that means Cameron’s people changing their minds too.

No, not by lurching to the left or right. Cameron has been clear that he will do neither, and he’s absolutely right. I’m not suggesting any weakening of the modernising message. I have always, from well before the rise of DC, argued that the Conservatives needed to fundamentally shift their image, from people who wax lyrical about General Pinochet to people who admire Mandela; from wallowing in nostalgia to appreciating today’s dynamic cultural diversity; from talking about privatisation to talking about social justice. On this front, Cameron has certainly succeeded.

The change that Team Cameron must now urgently make is to focus all their efforts on connecting with ordinary people. At the beginning, Team Cameron staked a great deal on their conviction that everything depended on winning over the commentariat - that a subtle chain-reaction would thus be set off, a trickle-down effect that would work its way from the Grays Inn Road to the Boston Stump. I think that was a mistake. It will never happen. Elections are bottom-up, voters don’t take their lead from pundits.

Mark Penn, the brilliant pollster to Clinton the First and now pollster to Clinton the Second, talks of the ‘impressionable elites’. They are the chatterers in the professional classes who are so comfortable in their daily lives, so free from the survival issues faced by the majority of society, that they can afford to become obsessed with the drama of personality played out in their own special theatre, rather than real policy that creates real change.

“The so-called herd in America,” he says, “is better educated and more issue-focused than ever. Today’s elites are like perpetual college students, far removed from the experiences and struggles shaping everyday life. And so it is a lot easier to spin America’s elites than it is to spin the voters.”

Positive mood music – rebranding and all that – is enough to win an election only if the electorate have firmly rejected the incumbents and have started looking around to see if the opposition might be acceptable. But if the public haven’t yet rejected the incumbents, then the opposition must offer much, much more.

Graeme Archer: Deirdre or Dave?

Verona, Thursday evening

Here we are again, back in Piazza Bra’, gazing at the Arena. The opera season’s over now but there’s some sort of furniture show on at the Fiera di Verona which is driving the population wild. Apparently furniture’s “in” this season, the way that Crocs were last. Actually I don’t see many Crocs on the marbled Verona streets, which is a shame, because these slippy surfaces are probably one of the few places they would serve practical advantage. I spend the evenings wandering from square to square, clutching a novel under my arm, thinking: this is probably not the best preparation for writing a column about politics. Away with that pitying look, madam! I’m a happy-go-lucky statistician, and all of Europe is my oyster. Well, a small part of north-eastern Italy. And it’s not really mine. And I don’t like oysters. (Isn’t that the dirty line from Spartacus?)

Alright: oh God. I’m so, so sick of squeezing myself through airports and flying about, just to go to work. Airports heave with salarymen like me, being pushed like model soldiers across some war-gaming-board, mostly for reasons that could not be justified under any reasonable criteria (I mean: I work with some of the smartest minds on the planet. You’d think we’d have learned how to use a phone by now). Most of us are separated from our loved ones. I’m never apart from Mr Keith without wondering how many days we have left before The Event overtakes one of us. I doubt I’m unique in this? It’s such a short life, isn’t it? Am I getting the Quality Of Life balance right?

Whenever newspapers discuss quality of life, it’s always in terms of “Tories want to stop poor people going on holiday”. I think it’s more true to say “Tories would prefer that people who live in Scotland don’t have to fly to London in order to fly somewhere else on holiday”, but never mind. If by some miracle I ever found myself in front of a candidate selection panel, I can save them one question: No more airports or expansion thereof, in the south east, none, ever. I don’t know anyone who ever flies anywhere voluntarily, other than for their summer holiday.

And I think government could play it’s part. The company I work for has a beautiful suite of videoconferencing facilities that save us a lot of travel – we just don’t have enough of them. We should offer taxbreaks to large companies, to get them to switch from flying to videoconference. Maybe boroughs should build them, and hire them out to small businesses.

More taxbreaks could be offered to people to have them work at home. Am I wrong in this simple reasoning? If everyone who went to work in an office spent one day a week working at home, we’d reduce rush-hour traffic by a fair bit, no? I know, some people can’t work at home – but an awful lot more people could, than do currently. It strikes me as ridiculous that in 2007, so many people still undergo hell in order to get to an aesthetically repulsive office environment, to do work that could as easily be conducted from home. Everyone should experience the strange joy that comes of dialling into An Important Meeting while lolling around the bed in a scuzzy pair of trackies. Not that I ever do this.

Cameron Watt: Scrap Police Community Support Officers

Cameron Watt is Deputy Director of the Centre for Social Justice, he writes here in a personal capacity.  In addition to his call to scrap the 'plastic police' he remembers some unhappy Blackpool experiences.

The failure of two police community support officers (PCSOs) to attempt a rescue of ten-year-old Jordon Lyon from a pond in Wigan has caused an national outcry.

Understandably so. Surely few, if any, police constables would have stood idly at the side of that pond. (I know the PCSOs called for back-up, but that’s nothing more than anyone else could have done by calling 999 on their mobile.) Police officers recognise that they are expected to show initiative, bravery and resolve, even if they haven’t received specific training on how to deal with a particular situation. As Jordon’s step-father said, most members of the public would have reacted with greater courage and resolve. Depressingly, Greater Manchester Police have fully endorsed their PCSOs’ course of (in)action.

PCSOs clearly do not have the powers, training and sense of vocation to eqiup them for the job the public wants them to do. A recent Freedom of Information request revealed that, on average, PCSOs solve just one crime every six years. In several areas of the country, ‘officers’ failed to detect a single crime over the past year. Perhaps they are doing better at tackling the low-level disorder that blights contemporary Briatin? Regrettably, they are not; when it comes to issuing fines for anti-social behaviour, public disorder or motoring offences, PCSOs average just one every four months. Emboldened hoodies certainly do not fear PCSOs, who they know have no powers to arrest them.

Theresa May MP: Equal pay – your questions answered

As a firm believer in party democracy, I’ve always been keen to engage with Conservative Home, because it gives the opportunity for a better two-way relationship between MPs and Party members and supporters.  So today I want to answer some of the comments posted in response to the launch of our policy on equal pay.

To remind you, the gender pay gap between men and women is 17.2 per cent.  It means that the average woman will lose or forego £300,000 over the course of her lifetime.  But the causes of the gap are more complex and deep rooted than just outright discrimination, although that still persists.  That’s why our policy has to include intelligent, targeted solutions.  The Conservative policy on equal pay can be summed up by the following six point plan:

1. Compulsory pay audits for employers who are found to discriminate
2. A new ‘reasonableness’ test for the ‘material factor’ defence
3. Extending the right to request flexible working for all parents of children aged eighteen or younger
4. New measures to help women into work and up the careers ladder
5. Support for young women to make broader and more ambitious career choices
6. The Conservative Party has already taken action to be an exemplar employer and will  continue to take action as required at CCHQ       

Louise Bagshawe: Remembering September 11th

I thought I would take a break from politics for this column. In the middle of house buying, we are living in the Corby constituency in temporary rented accommodation and I am without the internet, so missed sending this in last week, the anniversary of September 11th, 2001. But the subject is seared on my memory and I still wanted to write about it.

I was living with my American husband in a little village outside New York City. Sep 10th I'd had an appointment with my American publishers, which I forgot about, and so called them up to reschedule. Like most New York autumns, that one was gorgeous. Sep 11th dawned sunny. It was an important day; local election day. The morning papers were full of the coming tussle between Republicans and Democrats.

I picked up a coffee and jumped on the Metro-North into Manhattan. When I got on the train, America was one way; by the time I got off, everything had changed.

As we pulled in to Grand Central, there was an annoucement over the train system. "Folks, for those of you headed downtown there may be some delays. There's been an accident at the World Trade Center. A plane crash." Passengers looked at each other, dismayed. A plane crash! I think everybody assumed it was a small plane, or a glider, not a passenger jet. "Not sure what's going on," the conductor added.

Peter Franklin: Eurosceptics for Europe

Last week, Ming Campbell sidled up to the British electorate last week and made an improper suggestion:

“Psst, fancy a referendum?”

Well, a referendum would be lovely, in particular the one we were promised on the proposed EU constitution – now repackaged as the so-called “Reform Treaty.” However, the item on offer from Mr Campbell was something else altogether; namely, a referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union. As a proposition, it doesn’t even have the virtue of originality – Labour’s Keith Vaz, another EU enthusiast, was flashing it around earlier this summer.

If you ask me, the federalists are up to something. Indeed, one could say the whole business smells fishier than the Common Fisheries Policy – except that wouldn’t be very fishy at all, on account of there being no fish left. So let’s just say Ming’s idea of an all-or-nothing referendum stinks to high heaven.

It’s long been a federalist tactic to conflate anti-federalism with anti-Europeanism. But in this regard, they’ve had a great deal of inadvertent help from their bitterest enemies:

Though I consider myself a staunch eurosceptic, I can’t help noticing that some of my fellow sceps are a couple of paragraphs short of an EU directive. Now I don’t just mean the out-and-out loonies, the sort who equate Brussels with the ten-headed beast of Revelation. No, I mean those otherwise sane individuals whose principled scepticism is tainted by some very odd and deeply unhelpful misconceptions.

Foremost among these notions is what I call the ‘bad fantasy novel view of history’. Aficionados of fantasy fiction will be familiar with the make-believe maps that grace the opening pages of many sub-Tolkeinesque works of, ahem, literature. Usually, the heroes of the story live in the west of the imaginary continent thus depicted, while the east is home to sundry orcs, hobgoblins and other bugaboos – which just about sums up the mental map that many people in this country have of the real world.

Andrew Lilico: The key reform needed in the welfare state

In my view, the British welfare state suffers from two key failings. One is that it fails properly to reach or address the needs of an important class of the socially excluded.  This is an important issue, discussed for example in Iain Duncan-Smith’s Breakdown Britain and Breakthrough Britain reports, but I shall not discuss it further here.

The other key failing is that the way the welfare state works offer very little scope for working class and middle class people to prioritise their spending and saving so as to choose to receive more-than-average amounts of public services.  I have a relative who, in a foreign country in the 1960s, had her daughter go to a good school and later to university.  To help fund this she used to rise each morning at 5am and chop wood.  Other well-known practices include the jam jar into which savings were placed to pay the doctor if someone fell sick.  Throughout the ages the idea that parents might sacrifice something so that their children might have more opportunities — better health treatment, better education, and so on — than they did has been rightly seen as a definitive element of good parenting.  Similarly, providing the best care in old age that we could manage ourselves or otherwise afford has been seen as a key duty of children to their parents.

Stephan Shakespeare: Are our aspirant leaders engaged with the lives of ordinary people?

I’ve been banging on recently about the process of politics, arguing that the manner of policy development may be as important as the outcomes. My few readers probably find this theme tangential. But I think last week well illustrated my concerns.

We had a report from a Conservative commission on environmental policy. The purpose of the report was to put forward ideas for saving our planet. That must be good, even if one doesn’t agree with many of the proposed measures. The real problem was that it was put forward by people who in their own behaviour undermine many of the principles they want to impose on the rest of us. John Gummer wouldn’t even let the panel answer the question about how many flights they had all taken recently. Mr Gummer did venture that he needed a 4x4 because of the nature of his constituency. Others no doubt needed additional flights to visit their foreign estates, or to conduct their businesses, or to go on fact-finding missions.

But ordinary hard-working people need their holidays too, and they need to transport their families, and at the same time they need to keep as much of their hard-earned money. By refusing to allow a discussion about the everyday reality behind the principles being proposed, Mr Gummer was saying: We, the experts, know what’s right for you. That means: we’re better than you. And we don’t understand, or don’t care about, the lives you ordinary folk lead.

Graeme Archer's Diary: In praise of men

I was going to write about my father this week, since what would have been his seventieth birthday passed recently, and the daily ache I have for his company has been consequently more pronounced. But the drafts became too personal, so I’ve tried to rephrase in more general tones. I’d like to pay him some small dedication by talking about the lessons he taught me, if that’s OK with all of you.

***
I sometimes think that one of life’s grand ironies is that gay men appear to be the last group of people to celebrate the worth of heterosexual men. It feels that way to me, anyway, as I flick through the endless succession of adverts, sitcoms and “dramas” that make straight men out to be foolish, feckless and worthless. If we are to believe the chatter of the culture, men can no more pass GCSE English than they can select the correct laundry fluid for the weekly wash. The stereotypes of gay men are revolting enough – we’re not all obsessed with celebrity gossip, and most of us couldn’t tell a soft-furnishing from a screwdriver – but our ultra (numerical) minority status, and the usually auxiliary role we perform in child-rearing (the odd break for harassed parents provided by the uncles!) mean the gap between the media narrative and the truth about male homosexual experience remains a matter for private toe-curling, rather than a political problem. But what about straight men? They are nearly half the population and until recently seen as core components of successful child-rearing. What is the effect of the “all men are rubbish” narrative on them?

Cameron Watt: Giving the unborn a route out of poverty

Cameron Watt is Deputy Director of the Centre for Social Justice, he writes here in a personal capacity.

Earlier this week I accompanied IDS to NAVCA’s annual conference at Keele University. (NAVCA is the national umbrella body for community groups and the councils for voluntary service that support grassroots projects around the country.) The conference was entitled Breaking the exclusion cycle - can the voluntary and community sector help build a more equal society? and our old friend Polly Toynbee was chairing.

Unsurprisingly, the agendas Iain and Polly presented for tackling poverty were rather different. However there was one principle that both were agreed on: the need for effective early intervention in the lives of our most vulnerable infants to arrest and reverse intergenerational poverty. Iain stated that a full appreciation of the urgency of ensuring the most vulnerable under-threes are given every opportunity to thrive was been the most significant development in his thinking during his chairmanship of the Social Justice Policy Group (SJPG). A lack of proper nurture in a child’s first three years can do irrevocable damage to a child’s mental health and cognitive development. Clearly, parents from dysfunctional families often struggle to provide this, perpetuating disadvantage and the associated crime and disorder. 

Theresa May MP: Is Gordon Brown the only person in Britain that doesn’t get it? (No, Ming Campbell doesn’t either)

This week, Gordon Brown gave his first speech as prime minister to the TUC.  Unbelievably, for the government that gave the unions the social chapter, several employment relations acts, new union rights, a cop-out on public sector pensions, the Warwick Agreement, and the Union Modernisation Fund, some journalists are still prepared to say that, these days, Labour stand up to the unions.

But there’s one issue upon which the unions are right, and Gordon Brown is wrong.  And that is whether we need a referendum on the European Constitution, which was delayed, repackaged, and renamed in an attempt to hoodwink the peoples of Europe.

Let’s remember what Labour’s 2005 manifesto said on the matter.  The manifesto upon which they were elected states, very clearly: “We will put the EU Constitution to the British people in a referendum and campaign whole-heartedly for a ‘Yes’ vote”.  And let’s also remember what Gordon Brown has been saying about honesty and trust since he became prime minister.  Take this one: “the manifesto is what we put to the public. We’ve got to honour that manifesto. That is an issue of trust for me with the electorate”.

Gordon Brown’s defence is, as we know, that Britain’s ‘red lines’ were not crossed.  But even forgetting the red lines, the Treaty brings in an EU president, a single legal personality that will let the EU sign treaties in its own right, and the loss of sixty vetoes.  Meanwhile, the legal adviser to the Commons’ European Scrutiny Committee says that one of the red lines “may turn out to be meaningless”, that the guarantee on the Charter of Fundamental Rights is not watertight, and that “all the significant changes made in the constitutional treaty have been reintroduced in one form or another.”

Louise Bagshawe is away

Peter Franklin: Shining a light on dark Brown

Gordon Brown likes to claim the credit for Britain’s economic stability, but his real talent is for political instability. Never one for head-on confrontation, he has always acted to destabilise his opponents, allowing them to crumble before coming forward to step over the pieces.

Consider the fates of successive Home Secretaries – David Blunkett, Charles Clarke and John Reid – all of them seen as rival heirs to Blair at one point or another, but all destroyed by a combination of the Home Office’s native incompetence and the distinctively unhelpful machinations of Gordon Brown’s Treasury.

But, of course, these were just side shows to the main event – the long, slow destruction of Tony Blair’s Premiership. As with the Home Secretaries, Blair’s wounds were, in part, self-inflicted. But from the moment he entered 10 Downing Street, he had the undermining tactics of his neighbour to contend with. In the wake of Iraq, Blair no longer had the strength to resist. By 2004 he was forced to announce that he would not fight a fourth election. The fact that Blair hadn’t actually fought a third election was of no concern to Brown, who was quite happy to ride a lame duck on to the battlefield.

Pausing only to help Alan Milburn on to his sword, Brown charged into a Labour third term – attempting not one but two coups in the course of 2006. The first of these, in the wake of local election defeat and botched reshuffle, was a failure. Brown’s self-serving call for “a stable and orderly transition” did him more damage than Blair. For the first time, the polls indicated that Brown would be less popular than Blair. The great destabiliser had managed to destabilise himself. Then came the second, more successful, coup attempt in September, a tumultuous month concluding with Blair making his last conference speech as party leader.

Andrew Lilico: Are all humans people?

I view every human animal as a person.  Throughout history this has been a minority point of view.  At almost all times and places, most people have considered that there were human animals that were not people — women, slaves, children, prisoners of war, members of certain races, members of certain religions, criminals, and committers of certain moral offences have all been regarded as less-than-fully-people.  To be a person required something more than just being human.

Today the most clear-cut class of human animals not normally regarded as people are the human embryos.  Many things are permitted to be done to these human animals that would not normally be thought unproblematic as things done to people — killing them; conducting medical experiments upon them; using their organs; and so on — and there are complex policies developed to regulate these activities (including, for example, the judgement of the HFEA last week that hybrid embryos can be created).  It does not follow from my belief that all human animals are people that no human animal should ever be killed or experimented upon or its organs used to help others — quite the reverse: we believe that, under certain circumstances all of these things can be done to people.  But I do believe that the same kinds of principles that guide and limit when we kill adults, experiment upon them, or use them for organs should also guide and limit our treatment of embryos.

In a moment I shall ponder some potential add-on features that might be thought necessary before a human animal really becomes a person.  But first I wish to dispel a certain confusion that some readers might have.  When we discuss what extra might be needed for a human animal to become a person we shall be discussing issues of philosophy, ethics, politics.  But some readers may wonder whether a human embryo really counts as a human animal at all.  This is not a matter of ethical debate.  It is simply a scientific fact, given only the following definition: a human animal is a working instance of a certain kind of creature with a certain DNA structure.

Stephan Shakespeare: The Tories aren't doing better in the marginals

When polls are spun, we should be very nervous. The purpose of a poll is to provide independent evidence about what people think, evidence that may be used to measure progress or justify a particular strategy. When polling data is misinterpreted, it’s therefore worse than having no data at all, because it gives us confidence in a proposition that may be false. A recent analysis of voter preference in the marginal seats presents just such a danger.

The Conservatives have certainly pulled the polling numbers back impressively recently; a week or so ago the Labour lead stood at 6%-8%, and now the average is down to just 3% using the last polls from ICM (5%), YouGov (3%) and Populus (1%).

However, an analysis of the three most recent Populus polls, separating the data from just the 120 most marginal seats, painted a rather too rosy picture by wrongly suggesting a better result for the Conservatives in the seats that matter most, the 120 ‘most marginals’, prompting ConservativeHome and others to think that the targeted campaigning effort being made in marginal seats is paying dividends.

It may or may not be paying dividends – but the poll analysis provided no evidence for it. In fact, the correct interpretation of the data is that change in voting intention is exactly the same in the marginals as it is in the rest of the country. And that change is zero.

Graeme Archer: Bob Crow, Ian McEwan and wire flowers

Bishopsgate, 7.30am  The world, someone once said, divides into two groups of people: those who divide the world into two groups of people, and those who don’t. I think I’m one of the former. The world also divides, another way, into people who are fairly relaxed about social interaction, and those for whom any attempt at organising a group event becomes an enervating, Abigail’s-Party type nightmare. I fear I’m closer to the latter there.   

Thus it was last night. Mr Keith and I invited a couple of friends over to our manor to sample a bit of Hackney life. You may have noticed, I’m very fond of Hackney; so I arranged to meet my mates at Bishopsgate, from where I planned a leisurely stroll through Spitalfields, pointing out Jeanette Winterson’s house, and the Hawksmoor church, up Brick Lane (really: I’ve read enough novels about Brick Lane now, thank you), over onto Columbia Road (flower market), past the Hackney city farm and up and over the Regent’s Canal to Broadway market, and then into the Evening Standard five-star, Fay Maschler loved, uber-trendy eaterie I’d selected to show off the East End at its culinary best.

Cameron Watt's column returns next week

Theresa May: Equal Pay - where Harman dithers, we will deliver

This week, some startling statistics published by the Chartered Management Institute showed that last year, the gender pay gap got bigger.  Male earnings grew at a faster rate than female earnings, despite the fact that women were found to enjoy faster career progression.  The same survey found that the average female team leader is five years younger than her male equivalent; the average female ‘department head’ three years younger; and the average female director four years younger.

Yet Harriet Harman’s only response was to issue a statement saying: “more needs to be done to tackle unequal pay.  Her priorities for women will include pressing forward with the Government’s commitment to reduce the pay gap between men and women.”  Too right, more needs to be done.  But we’ve had more than ten years of this Government.  Why hasn’t it already been done?  When is it going to be done?  Harriet Harman gave a statement to the House of Commons in July outlining her “priorities” for women – yet in that statement she failed to make a single decision or commitment, as I pointed out at the time.

The gender pay gap matters for all sorts of reasons.  First, and most obvious, it hits women in the pocket.  The Equal Opportunities Commission estimates that the average woman will lose or forego £300,000 over her lifetime as a result of the pay gap.  Second, there is a strong business case for employers to ensure fair and equal pay across the workforce.  And third, the gender pay gap is bad for the economy.  It is estimated that increased women’s employment could benefit the economy by £23 billion.  And making better use of women’s skills would help to finance public spending such as pension provision, as the population ages.

It’s not good enough for the Minister for Women to say that “she’ll get round to it at some point”.  Women are earning less than they could and should be, and that’s simply not fair. 

Look out in the coming weeks for the Conservatives’ proposals for how to bridge the gender pay gap.  Where Harriet Harman dithers, we will deliver.

Louise Bagshawe: Gimmick Brown

Louise Bagshawe salutes the new Sultan of Spin.

So, Gordon Brown is a Thatcherite, eh? He admires the greatest living politician and he actually compares himself to her. This from the lifelong Scotland fan who famously declared that one of his favourite sporting moments was Gazza's goal against Scotland in Euro '96.

You know what? There are a lot of people of Scottish descent living in Corby, the major town in my constituency. A town where Labour told civil servants with white collar jobs in one of the most deprived areas of Northants that they were, and I quote, too "white British" to meet government diversity targets. A town where low income people suffer from his scrapping of the 10% tax band. I intend using Mr. Brown's choice of Gazza's goal against Scotland in campaign literature. It matters here because it shows that Gordon Brown will do or say anything if he perceives it will get him a vote. Real Scotland fans will be unimpressed.

This week we have seen a pathetic attempt to grab the initiative after David Cameron wiped out his (truncated) honeymoon. Gordon Brown is promising a new kind of politics whilst hanging on with bitten fingernails to true Blairite spin. First, he "recruits" disaffected Tory and LibDem MPs as advisers, claiming bipartisanship but not checking with the party leaders. Secondly, as with his contemptible claim to have loved a rival's goal against the team he's supported all his life, he dares to compare himself to the colossus of Margaret Thatcher, a woman he reviled throughout his political career. Thirdly, terrified he's had the shortest honeymoon since Jessica Simpson, Brown brought out some classic Blairite gimmickry - "citizens' juries", ie glorified focus groups, to make policy - and he'd announced citizens' juries 17 times already before today.

Bottom line: Brown is not serious. He's a debate-ducking, Blairite-spinning, war-retreating, gimmick-loving politician. I can't pretend I'm too much of a football fan. But I watch when England plays, and I can say I never saw a goal against them that I enjoyed.

Goes to character, Your Honour. Gordon Brown, down in the polls, too "frit" to debate Cameron or call an election, has shown this week who is the true chameleon. This tax-raising, Thatcher-loathing Europhile is not worthy to invoke the great lady's name. Call an election, Prime Minister. We want to fight one. Phony Tony has been replaced by Gimmick Gordon.

Peter Franklin: The secret of wealth

Here is a website you may not have heard of: Arts and Letters Daily is one of the hidden gems of the Internet, consisting very simply of links to some of the best online writing in the English language. There is no obvious ideological bias to the selections, just a preference for articles and reviews of real substance. Of course, ‘aggregator sites’ such as this one could not exist were it not for the various newspapers, magazines and online equivalents publishing original work. Sadly, it would seem that from ALD’s lofty perspective, not many of these are British. With all too few exceptions, our media gives very little space to the extended essay, with serious factual writing relegated to the ghettos of academia and wonkland. We do, of course, have a flourishing blogosphere – but that is a medium where individual posts are typically counted in tens or hundreds of words, not thousands. This leaves a gap in the market. If you want anything meatier than, say, an article in the Spectator, then you have to go for a full-length pamphlet or book – you won’t find much in between.

That’s a shame, because British readers are missing out on articles like this one from the freemarket journal Reason (and featured on Arts and Letters Daily). Entitled ‘Our Intangible Riches’, it sets out the findings of a recent World Bank report on the make-up of the world’s wealth. Three categories are used:

• natural capital, which is farmland, forestry, fisheries, mined resources and the like);
• produced capital, which is machinery, equipment, buildings and other manmade structures; and
• intangible capital, i.e. human resources – whether in the form of the labour, skills and knowledge of individuals or the value of various institutions such as a country’s legal system.

Now, here’s the important bit. According to the report, natural capital accounts for just 5% of humanity’s wealth, produced capital a modest 18% and intangible capital a whopping 77%. This represents a spectacular confirmation of the theories of Hernan de Soto, the Peruvian economist who argued that the key to development in poor countries is the strengthening of civil institutions – in particular, local systems of property rights. It also goes a long way to explaining why old-fashioned aid policies, which have focused on increasing natural or produced capital, have so often ended in failure. All along they were ignoring the most important source of wealth, i.e. intangible capital.

Andrew Lilico: Legalisation not Decriminalisation – the way forward for Cannabis control

Following Ann Widdecombe’s speech at Conservative Party Conference in 2000, the subsequent (apparently coordinated) confessions by Portillista Shadow Cabinet members to cannabis use, Peter Lilley’s SMF pamphlet and subsequent Telegraph article on the issue in summer of 2001, and Michael Portillo’s raising of the issue during the 2001 leadership election, the Conservative Party had a brief debate on whether it should favour cannabis legalisation.  At the time it seemed like the ultimate “moderniser” issue, and Radio 1 DJs, the Telegraph, and the Independent were combined in an unholy alliance of support for the Party.  Yet now this view appears to have been abandoned entirely, and even modernisers trumpet their “tough” stance on “drugs” as if these were an undifferentiated class.

I wish to argue that certain forms of cannabis should be legalised for sale, trade, possession, and recreational use.  But before I begin, I want to emphasize some things I shall not be arguing.

• I am not of the view that cannabis use is harmless.  I believe that cannabis is a dangerous substance, have never tried it myself, and would urge right-thinking people to avoid it.  Furthermore, I have great sympathy for the view that, if (against my urging here) it is to remain illegal, then its classification should be raised.
• I am not of the view that cannabis should be decriminalised, or that decriminalisation would be a useful first step.  Quite the reverse — I believe that decriminalisation would make the UK’s drug problem worse and would be generally retrograde.
• I am not of the view that legalising cannabis would be a first step to legalising other drugs such as heroin, or that the only coherent intellectual arguments for legalising cannabis would imply legalising these other drugs, also.  On the contrary, I shall, below, argue explicitly against the legalisation of Heroin.

Stephan Shakespeare is away

His column will return next week.

Graeme Archer's Diary: “If a man is tired of New York, he must be tired of walking in a grid pattern”

Where does one person end, and another begin? Such was the preoccupation of that great lady, Iris Murdoch, whose novels had a very powerful effect on my adolescence. Since she was also preoccupied with swimming – many of her characters spend a lot of time in the water – and since most of my mornings begin in the London Fields Lido, her fundamental question often forms itself in my head, as I make my stately progress from one end of the pool to the other, under the lowing greyness of the East End sky.

She didn’t mean, of course, that we all run into one another in some sort of biological mish-mash. I think she meant that all our actions have the potential to impact on everyone else. You see this very clearly in a swimming pool. So long as all the swimmers take care not to get in the way of the people close by them, the entire pool ‘works’ as though under the guidance of a supra-physical observer. By concerning yourself with your near neighbours, a harmonious steady-state is induced across the entire pool even though that is not your personal objective. By contrast, swimmers who think only of themselves induce a chaotic pattern of interference over the whole pool that spoils the experience for everyone.

There’s actually a mathematical under-pinning to this, known as the Hammersley-Clifford theorem, which I made great use of in writing my own utterly rubbish Ph.D. thesis (on parameter estimation in hidden Markov random fields, since you ask, about a hundred years before most of you were born, and subsequently read by precisely nobody). Well-defined neighbourhoods have the property that they can induce a global optimum. (God, as Iris may have been suggesting, is in the machine; but that’s another article.)

Not to stretch the analogy too far: but isn’t this what we mean by Social Responsibility? And isn’t it why left-wing people, for all their good intentions, don’t “get it”? Conservatives understand, on an intuitive level, that when you take care of your neighbourhood (either a physical or emotional neighbourhood), everyone helps to create an ordered society. When those local neighbourhoods break down, chaos will reign – everywhere – even if the neighbourhood breakdown is not universal: anarchy in the UK. Left-wing people, though often individuals of great kindness, cannot believe that optimum global conditions can arise from undirected local behaviour. To return to the Lido, the left-wing replacement for the good neighbourliness of my fellow morning swimmers would be a chap on a high chair, barking into a megaphone, issuing instructions: “You there! Middle lane! Red shorts! Wait at the end for her in the cap to pass you! Hey – matey with the tattoo in the slow lane – this is a pool not a social club”. Of course this wouldn’t work (but it’s an amusing thought, and I’m surprised that Hackney council haven’t tried to implement such a system).

Cameron Watt: Let’s pay MPs £100K – for working full-time

It’s probably safe to assume that the general public holds prison officers in higher esteem than Members of Parliament. Although the warders’ illegal strike this week cannot be condoned, I have some sympathy for their relatively modest pay demand. However I want to use this column to make what many will consider a much harder case in arguing for a large salary increase for MPs. In my view, their basic pay should be raised from just over £60,000 to around £100,000, and MPs with additional paid responsibilities should receive proportionate increases.

Last December, it was reported that both Labour and Conservative MPs had written to the Senior Salaries Review Board arguing such a rise was needed to bring them into line with senior civil servants and GPs. It is certainly true that in recent years, MPs’ pay has fallen well behind senior public sector workers, especially in health and education. Average pay for general practitioners in England is now £102,000. The MPs’ aspiration to be paid at such at level is entirely reasonable.