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Louise Bagshawe: In praise of Margaret Thatcher

I want to thank Tim Montgomerie and Sam Coates for the opportunity they gave me to write a column for ConHome this year. Partly, this chance was afforded me because Tim knows I have been a Cameroon voice on the site for some time, under both my own name and pseudonyms, and because the editors wish to recognise Conservatives who represent the full range of party opinion. But in considering myself a Cameroon, I remain, as I have always been, a Thatcherite. When submitting myself for selection I was lucky enough to be able to include quotes from friends who had known me since university, and who could attest to my profound hero worship of the greatest woman statesman. I am in an odd position; in that I have a number of friends from political families, I have several acquaintances who know Lady Thatcher socially. I can not, and likely will never, make that boast. I do not know Lady Thatcher. But politically, I worship her. I never had any doubt as to how my column on Conservative Home should end. Posters on this site should not worry when the media spins to them that Cameroon, modern compassionate Conservative MPs and candidates, want to distance themselves from Lady Thatcher. This is nonsense; I do not wish to distance myself. I wish instead merely to touch the hem of her garment.

How can I express my gratitude to the greatest living Conservative and politician? I was born in 1971, born when my father was forced by punitive taxation to look at emigrating, and persuaded against it by my mother on the grounds that walks in the English countryside were always free. I was born into a world where strike-ridden Britain was perceived to be in permanent decline. I was born into a world where the idea of social justice was capitulation to the unions and pacifism abroad even in the face of aggression. I was born into a world where over-employment seemed a fact of life and the Foreign Office was telling the PM her job was to “manage Britain’s decline”. BM (Before Margaret) we were taking loans from the IMF, like the proverbial banana republic. We were a charity case, an afterthought. We were quite simply losers.

Graeme Archer's Diary: Love, Actually

There’s a place for us. Somewhere, a place. For us. Hold my hand.

*
Hold my hand, and I’ll take you there. So, Saturday night, and like a few million others we’re agog at the X-factor final. I’m watching a nice young man from Wales singing a song from West Side Story, a song I’ve always been aware of, vaguely, without really, you know, focusing on it, and suddenly it transports me. It pierces me; whatever carapace I wear to get through life is pierced, is torn asunder, and I’m sat there with tears streaming down my face. Fully clothed and completely naked. George Orwell wrote about this, didn’t he, in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The potency of sentimental music.

*
Love, Actually was the name of the Richard Curtis film, which I gleefully nicked for the name of the first Platform piece which Tim kindly printed of mine. This is the last Column (didn’t you know?) [I told you not to mention that, and to write about politics, just for once – Ed] so I’ve re-nicked the title and, of course, the subject matter: the only “political” thing I really care about.

*
There have been twenty-six young people murdered so far this year in London. So far. That unconscious addition of “so far” is a telling example of Londoners’ expectations about crime. Not that it matters what time of year it is, but I find that the near-coincidence of the current death-toll with the countdown to Christmas has brought the horror home to me. Twenty-six families across London facing Christmas without their child.

Meantime we still have a Met chief who presided over the fatal shooting of an innocent Londoner on a tube train, but who refuses to take any institutional responsibility for it. Great message. Blair, of course, is kept in place by the Labour mayor, some of whose other cronies, we are now discovering (courtesy of some remarkable journalism from Andrew Gilligan in the Standard) appear to have siphoned of hundreds of thousands of pounds that were intended to give young people some sort of life-opportunity more attractive than street-crime. If the allegations against Livingstone’s cronies are proved (and there have been no convincing denials from his office) then there will be a direct line to be drawn: from the corruption over which he is accused of presiding, to the failure to empower local communities, to the ever-increasing cohort of dead London youth.

My fondest New Year political wish: a turbo-charged campaign from Boris. We don’t just need to defeat Livingstone in May: we need to chase him from office, covered in opprobrium.  Catharsis required.

Cameron Watt: Five for the future

After a rollercoaster of a political year, Conservatives end 2007 in good cheer. Cameron continues to grow in stature and has established a healthy lead in the polls. By contrast, Brown’s bottling and balls-ups may have inflicted irreparable damage to the Prime Minister’s reputation and, ultimately, his prospects of winning a General Election.

With such a disillusioned and volatile electorate, even the most encouraging polling numbers leave no room for complacency among Conservatives. Looking ahead, what gives me greatest confidence for British democracy in general, and Conservative fortunes in particular, is the quality of people committed to serving in politics.

Of course there are many exceptional individuals serving already on the Conservative green benches. Their ranks will surely be swelled significantly after the next election from the impressive cohort of parliamentary candidates already selected. In my final column of the year, I hope you’ll indulge me in briefly highlighting (in alphabetical order) five exceptional people I hope and expect to make a major contribution to our party’s future. They are engaging personalities and high achievers who are excellent ambassadors for a modern, authentic and compassionate Conservative Party.

Graeme Archer

I first met fellow-Scot Graeme at CH’s blog awards. Since then, I have increasingly admired his intelligent, witty and humane writing here and on Platform 10, even if the illustrations from formal logic and science are sometimes beyond my grasp.

All activists need motivation and commitment wherever they are involved. That much more is needed in areas where the party struggles. Graeme has worked hard to take ground for the Conservatives in Hackney, as has Andrew Boff, whose Mayoral campaign Graeme threw himself into.

I am particularly grateful for Graeme’s wholehearted supported for Iain Duncan Smith and the CSJ. We agree that a renewed Conservative focus on vulnerable people and communities is not just right in itself; it is also an important part of a positive, uniting agenda for the whole party.

Louise Bagshawe: Save the Gordon!

Merry Christmas to all, especially fellow Conservatives. It’s easy to live the season to be jolly when you’re hitting a steady 40% in most polls. And this time of year, we feel a particular need to be kind to the weak and helpless. Can we please prevail on cchq to mount a festive campaign to Save the Gordon?

Just think. Weak polls from Ming Campbell, following his many love-ins with Gordon Brown, and we harried him in office. He’s gone and the LibDems have Calamity Clegg. They have soared from eleven points to a mighty 14! Beware the new leader bounce!

Confession is good for the soul, so here goes; I felt a little stupid back in August. Months of polls showing a widening of our lead with Mr. Bean in charge, which I believed were accurate, were replaced with very different non-hypothetical numbers once he had actually kissed hands; Cameron down for the first time since his election. So what happened? Well, it seems those named leader polls, as PoliticalBetting pointed out this week, were accurate – but only after the new leader honeymoon had gone. Following wild highs and lows, they have settled for Gordon as predicted. But if there is any iron law in politics, I’ve learned the hard way it’s that a new leader, no matter who, will get a bounce. Do we want Gordon Brown out? I’m certain we could get him out. But why do it? The man should be up for one of Tim’s Conservative Politicians of the Year awards. No, no. Save the Gordon! True, people are heartily sick of the whole Labour government. Miliband, with his smirk, signing away our rights in Brussels. Jack Straw hectoring. Darling’s lack of shame. Even Gwyneth Dunwoody, Labour stalwart, is calling this Government of No Talents cynical and shameless. But Gordon Brown is the icing on the Labour disaster. We must not repeat the Ming episode. I take back all the cruel things I have said about Gordon in this column. He is a one-man Tory vote getting machine!

Peter Franklin: David Cameron doesn’t get the credit he deserves

94%. That’s David Cameron’s approval rating from the latest ConservativeHome readers’ survey. I don’t know what Vladimir Putin gets from the readers of UnitedRussiaHome, but it can’t be that much better.

So why don’t I think DC gets the credit he deserves?

Well, I suspect that a good chunk of that 94% is fair-weather support – simple appreciation of Conservative success at the expense of Labour and the LibDems. It is, of course, rather nice to be tickling the mid-forties in the opinion polls, but there’s a lot more to DC’s leadership than that.

First of all, there’s the man himself. The public like him and they respect him – a combination we’ve not had in a leader since Harold Macmillan.

Then there’s his resilience. Unlike the rest of the country, DC had a rather sticky summer, thanks to the Brown bounce and the recruitment of a few giddy GOATs from the Tory ranks. Many feared, and some hoped for, a meltdown of the Cameron project, but he kept his cool. Not only that, he stuck to his strategy. What a contrast to his predecessors who were all forced of the path they’d set for themselves: William Hague who left the kitchen table for a foreign land; the Quiet Man who turned up the volume and Michael Howard who took an awful long time to gather his thoughts – changing his strategy no less than seven times.

Andrew Lilico: Things to believe and to disbelieve about climate change

Until perhaps two years ago, whether climate change was occurring and whether it was anything to do with human activity were topics that politically-minded people debated.  Greens urged that the burning of fossil fuels was going to heat up the planet, raising sea levels, expanding deserts, and causing much misery.  Climate change sceptics urged that the evidence was not there, and that we should not shackle the Market, undermine trade and limit the development of poorer nations on the basis of scare stories and hype.

In my view that debate went on rather longer than was fruitful, and because some people still cling to the most sceptical positions there, the real debate that we should be having has been seriously hobbled.  I shall explain.

I know lots of very smart people who still don’t believe there is any good evidence of human-induced climate change.  I understand why, as intellectually-confident individuals with lots of letters after (an sometimes before) their names they feel able to defy the overwhelming consensus of a scientific community.  Presumably many people that have become environmental scientists in the past twenty years took up research in that area precisely because they already believed that there was human-induced climate change, having been influenced by the concerns of green writers in the late 1980s.  That their subsequent research has confirmed their initial prejudices may make figures along the lines of “99% of all climate scientists think that…”  My guess is that the proportion of experts in feminist ethics who think that women had a good deal in the 1950s or that the husband is the head of the wife will be rather small, also.

But although, given the likely biases in the climate change research community, I think it appropriate to be polite to listen to my very clever friends’ scepticism, the fact remains that we forfeited our right to be listened to concerning the details of this debate when we chose not to do environmental science.  So now our entertaining dinner table debates cannot hope to influence policy.

Stephan Shakespeare: We live in un-visionary times

The year ends with the Tories well up, and Labour well down. It’s been an exciting few months, from the point of view of the horse-race. But how far have we really moved forward in the battle of ideas?

The horse-race matters. It’s not always edifying, but it’s not a trivial part of the democratic process. The politicians’ need to add percents to their score, point by point, is the only fuel for the progress of policy when vision fails, and sadly we can’t expect our politicians to have visions every day. They have to do something, whether it’s a photo-opportunity, a row, or a nice little tit-bit like the inheritance tax cut. What works and what fails gives them some sense of where they might go next, in the absence of any inner drive.

I suspect that if either David Cameron or Gordon Brown could find a real inner drive, a genuine vision for how they might change the country, then their support levels would grow with more solidity. That’s their challenge for 2008. Maybe something in their Christmas crackers will trigger a series of thoughts and emotions that grips their imaginations and leads us somewhere new.

We seem to be in singularly un-visionary times, whether here in the UK, or in the US, or in Europe. We have branding campaigns, and policy-tinkering, but no mission. Many will think this a good thing. Missions and visions can do great harm as well as great good. The last thing we want is a revolution when things are pretty much ok as they are.

Graeme Archer is unwell (Christmas shopping)

Cameron Watt: Destitute asylum seekers deserve dignity

At Christmas, we are encouraged to consider those less fortunate than ourselves. With parties to attend, presents to buy and cards to write, there is never much time to do this. However we may manage to part with a few coins for the Salvation Army carol singers, or even Send a Cow to Africa. One exceptionally vulnerable group whose plight will be almost completely overlooked this Christmas are the tens of thousands of destitute asylum seekers throughout Britain.

The Government has lost control of our borders; in recent years Britain has experienced an unprecedented and unsustainable level of immigration. Urgent action is clearly needed to bring immigration down to a more sustainable level. An obvious starting point is targeting a reduction in economic migration from countries outside the EU, and David Cameron has committed to explicit annual limits on non-EU immigration, set at a level substantially lower than the current rate.

Currently almost three-quarters of the approximately 25,000 asylum claims made each year are turned down. However urgency to regain control of our borders and reduce the rate of immigration must not be accompanied by an indifference to asylum seekers. A civilised country should ensure that they are treated humanely both while applications are being considered and during unsuccessful applicants remaining time in this country.

As Nick Spencer has written:

“The fundamental tension in asylum policy is between the moral imperative of welcoming the vulnerable and the judicial imperative of securing borders against the dishonest.”

Presently our asylum system is failing in both these tasks.

Theresa May MP: Six months on - so how is he doing?

Do you remember what it was like when Tony Blair was Prime Minister?  With constant feuding between Numbers Ten and Eleven Downing Street, government became almost impossible.  And as the handover to Gordon Brown neared, it seemed that everybody who had ever worked with him was lining up to have a go at him.  So six months on, I thought I’d see if their assessment of his character was fair, now we have seen Gordon Brown in office.

1. Meaningless soundbites.  ‘[Brown] is the master of the meaningless soundbite, an initiative a day… They are gathering eye-catching policies for the first 100 days, though he will also want to keep some back for the General Election’ (unnamed Brown supporter). 

Well, if as Chancellor he was the master of the meaningless soundbite, as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown has surpassed himself.  When he promised “British jobs for British workers”, he knew that any policy that actually delivered that would be illegal.  And now we know that of the 1.7 million jobs created since 1997, 1.4 million of them have gone to immigrants.

2. Stalinist ruthlessness.  ‘You cannot help admire the sheer Stalinist ruthlessness of it all’ (Andrew Turnbull, former Cabinet Secretary).

What could be more Stalinist than Gordon Brown’s cynical approach to Tony Blair’s education reforms?  When he was in his ‘counter-intuitive’ phase, he was keen to emphasise the fact that he was retaining Lord Adonis as an education minister, and he said he would massively extend the number of city academies.  But then Ed Balls let it slip that they were going to quietly kill the academies, by restoring the role of local education authorities.

3. Control freak.  ‘It's a controlling thing – [Brown] thinks he has to control everything’ (Charles Clarke).

Charles Clarke might have said this in public, but I’m sure David Miliband and Lord West are saying just the same thing in private.  Can you think of any other foreign secretary who has had his speech torn up and re-written by Downing Street?  Can you think of a minister who has had such an obvious dressing down as when Lord West said that the case for extending 28 days had not yet been made?

Louise Bagshawe: Heineken Tories

Opinion polls are making enjoyable reading at the moment, aren’t they? The last one gave David Cameron, on the swing, a decent workable majority. But what’s interesting to me is delving into the individual seats we need to win in order to get that majority. One of the greatest attractions of Anthony Wells’ Polling Report site is its constituency by constituency analysis. If you’re a true political anorak (guilty, m’lud) you may while away some time reading around the supposedly difficult seats and reading lots of comments that doubt the Tories can take them. Yet on UNS, those seats fall like dominoes.

There are a couple of ways of looking at this. The first is to acknowledge the axiom that a candidate really doesn’t make all that much difference in a general election, at least not on the positive side. If a candidate mis-steps they can lose the seat, but a positive effect seems to be capped, in conventional wisdom, at an absolute maximum of two thousand votes. Along with this, we must take note of what I believe Sean Fear called the “special pleading” effect, where local factors seem to weigh more heavily in the eye of the local beholder than they actually do in a general election; all kinds of Tory MPs in “we can’t lose here” seats with good personal reputations nevertheless were washed away by the massive Labour swing in ’97.

Fair enough. I acknowledge both those factors. But the difference between overall power and a hung parliament will be made by PPCs and local activists in “difficult but winnable” seats, seats where, if you analyse them, there are structural problems – perhaps some councillor losses, perhaps a large Labour/LibDem majority. We still have to take those seats, and plenty of them, for David Cameron to win a working majority.

And in order to win these seats, which I call “goalpost seats”, we’re going to have to be creative. We need to be Heineken Tories – refreshing the voters other Tories cannot reach. How is this to be achieved? Well, candidate selection is one part of it. Associations are picking modern, dynamic, likeable PPCs, and this has picked up good press. But I think there is a campaign strategy that will work well.

Peter Franklin: Monkey business at the White House - Must the President believe in evolution?

My Grandma Sally was the odd one out. My other grandparents were larger than life characters, always filling the air with loudly expressed opinions – as one might expect from a preacher, a poet and a paratrooper. Sally, however, never did anything out of the ordinary and mostly kept her thoughts to herself.  But like a lot of quiet people she guarded certain silent lines of belief, which if threatened would be resolutely defended.

An East End girl, I once asked her if she’d been born within the sound of Bow Bells. “Yes,” she replied, “but that doesn’t mean you have to talk like that.” Indeed not.

The only other time I provoked her into laying down the law was when, for some reason, I brought up the subject of evolution. “We did not come from monkeys,” she pronounced, with a firmness that might have quailed Richard Dawkins.

I thought of her last week after reading a piece by Danny Finkelstein on the excellent Comment Central.

It concerned Mike Huckabee, the dark horse candidate for the Republican nomination. I think it’s fair to say that the former is not the latter’s biggest fan – not because of what Mr Huckabee believes in, but because of what he doesn’t believe in – namely, neo-Darwinism:

“My big problem? That Huckabee doesn't believe in evolution.

“Huckabee contends that it doesn't matter, because he is not intending to insist that schools stop teaching evolution. But that really isn't the point.

“The reason that his support for intelligent design matters is that it is ridiculous. Who wants a President of the United States who doesn't accept the basic principles of science, taking refuge instead in a load of mumbo jumbo?”

Had Mr Finkelstein based one of his podcasts on this matter, I’d imagine there’d have been a Grandma Sally firmness to his voice. Nevertheless, I must respectfully disagree with him.

Andrew Lilico: How British politics would be changed by recession

Despite the credit squeeze, the Northern Rock affair, falling house prices, high oil prices, and the expected slowdown in the economy next year, mainstream economic forecasters are not at this stage expecting a recession.  And neither am I, yet.  But two and a half years to the next General Election is ample time, in terms of the economic cycle, for matters to turn nasty.  And if the economy did turn nasty, there is the risk that the sort of policy emphases we adopt today will be irrelevant to what are perceived as the major challenges in two and a half years’ time.  So it seems worth doing a bit of alternate futures thinking now…

During a recession, I suggest, the following seven political issues would be materially affected.

1. Macroeconomic management — Macroeconomic management has not been much of a political dividing point over the past ten years.  It has been a political issue — perhaps the biggest of all, for Tony Blair won two General Elections on the basis that the economy had been managed soundly.  But there has been very little political dispute over matters such as the inflation target or the government’s fiscal rules and whether these have, in combination, delivered optimal macroeconomic management. Yet in the past, when economic recessions were more regular, macroeconomic management was among the most central issues of political debate.
2. Unemployment — Unemployment is not an issue in the UK, and has not been so since perhaps 1994.  If there were to be a recession, unemployment would rise — though almost certainly not to the three million plus levels of the early 1990s and early 1980s.  Political parties would need policies to respond to rising unemployment.  Parties that chose active macroeconomic management (e.g. aimed to “borrow-and-spend their way out of recession”) might claim that that was their answer to unemployment.  Parties preferring to do something else would have to offer an account of how their preferred solutions would address unemployment.
3. Welfare benefits — During the late 1970s and through the 1980s, schemes for delivering unemployment benefits and income support were major political debating points.  How generous the schemes were, what incentives there were to find work, benefits to assist in retraining, the merits or otherwise of private unemployment insurance schemes, high marginal rates induced by benefit tapers, the slippery slope into incapacity and disablement benefits, and many related issues would come back onto the political agenda with a vengeance.
4. Housing — In recent years the form that housing has taken as a political issue has related to concerns about affordability in general, concerns about affordability for key workers in certain regions, allegations that there is an urgent need to build more new houses, and consequently concerns about building in green spaces and increased urban densities.  If there is a recession, this political context will change very dramatically.  House prices will fall markedly, and affordability will disappear as an issue.  In a context of falling prices, there will be much reduced pressure to engage in largescale new-build programmes overruling the will of local people.  The issue in housing will cease to be how to get more of it and how to make it cheaper, but instead the issue will become one of labour mobility — people with negative equity may be unwilling to move house and realise losses, meaning that labour mobility decreases, exacerbating unemployment.
5. Regional policy — Recession would be unlikely to be spread evenly over the country.  It is very difficult to say in advance where it might bite most, especially since (a) I’m not yet expecting one at all; and hence (b) I don’t know what exactly might be causing it.  Suppose that we assume the cause is a major correction in house prices, simply a result of the market returning to equilibrium, with the result that consumption and investment fall whilst people rebuild their balance sheets.  It is perhaps natural to assume that the greatest such falls would occur in London and the South-East, so perhaps these would be the regions hit hardest.  This would result in a major change of emphasis in regional policy.  Instead of such policy being aimed at dispersing enterprise and jobs away from London and the South-East, often by providing subsidies for businesses to locate elsewhere, regional policy might become more focused on assisting London and the South-East to escape from a malaise.  This would also have potentially profound political consequences, since it would be a recession that impacted most on relatively more Conservative-voting regions.
6. Social Cohesion — Issues of social cohesion have been relatively significant in recent years as Britain absorbed two great new waves of immigrant: the asylum seeker (usually bogus, in practice) and then the Eastern European.  But up to now, insofar as this involved economic elements, these were about whether immigrants had preferential treatment for local authority housing, or whether immigrant labour was very cheap and bid down wages, or whether immigrants claimed benefits and hence imposed a tax burden on others.  Recession would bring a new and vicious element: envy.  British-born people without jobs or otherwise under pressure will envy the jobs of immigrants, and are likely to suggest that immigrants are “stealing our jobs” (even though that’s not remotely how the economics of these situations work). Features of immigrant communities that seem merely irritating or even charming when times are good may start to seem very burdensome when times are harsher.  On the other hand, since a significant component of recent immigration has involved footloose Eastern European workers, if jobs become scarcer they may well move away from the UK to pastures greener — at which point we shall doubtless face scare stories in the press about Britain’s “collapsing population”.
7. Regulation — In a recession many businesses will fail, and many practices that one got away with during good times will be exposed. Both of these factors will create pressure to increase regulation in various ways.  But of course at the same time businessmen who were quite content to have all sorts of regulation when times were good — for it deterred new firms from entering their markets — will say that there must be significant deregulation for their industries to survive.  Political parties will need resolutions to this paradox.

Stephan Shakespeare: Will the next election be like 1992 or 1997?

Will the next election more closely resemble 1992 or 1997 – a narrow recovery for the incumbent or a landslide to bury him? Of course it’s completely unknowable, but DC’s intuition on this will make a huge difference to his boldness on strategy and policy. If 1992, then he will want to find new ways to attract the swing voters and will be more willing to take some risks to achieve it; if 1997, he will want to play it safe.

The parallels from recent history – Brown taking over from a long-serving, toppled leader as Major took over from Margret Thatcher – were analysed yesterday by Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. Rawnsley pointed out what is often forgotten, that Sir John was actually rather successful at first. After the first excitement and polling bounce of the ‘new man’, he went into a difficult period, but then recovered and won a victory with the polls all strongly against him (that was pre-YouGov; the idea that there was a big ‘late swing’ due either to the Sheffield Rally or the front page of The Sun is not taken seriously by the academics who have studied it closely; ‘late swing’ was just an excuse for polling error). It only went wrong for Sir John after that first victory. Rawnsley thinks that Brown still has a long way to go before he can be written off, and may well still pull of Major’s initial success.

The parallels are obviously not exact: John Major was not associated with the entire course of Thatcher’s administration the way Brown is with Blair’s. But still, what if there’s a certain momentum – the honeymoon bounce followed by the disappointment, then the second-chance giving him an election victory – that leaves David Cameron as a version of Neil Kinnock?

Unlikely, but certainly possible were DC to play his cards wrong. His biggest mistake would be to allow his team to think of Brown simply as a loser, one of life’s natural nearly-men. We hear there are some at CCHQ who think it’s all over for Brown and it’s a cruise from here on out; much safer to realise that Brown still holds some strong cards and could win, and that therefore something special is required from DC every week.

Graeme Archer: Ghosts

This is a civilised country, right? I mean, we moan about noisy children on buses, and the celebrity culture, and rubbish football managers, but we’re still a decent country where the vulnerable get a basic level of protection, aren’t we?

Steven Hoskin died on 5 July last year, age 39, after being tortured by Darren Stewart, a drug-dealer, and Stewart’s girlfriend, Sarah Bullock. Steven Hoskin had learning difficulties, so he was a nice easy target for Stewart and Bullock. They moved into his flat, where they dragged him around on a dog lead. After months of degradation – months during which Steven Hoskin contacted the police for help on twelve separate occasions, with no effect whatsoever – they’d had enough of their fun. They forced him to swallow 70 painkillers, marched him to a viaduct and pushed him over. What basic desire for life led Steven Hoskin to cling onto the edge of the viaduct? No matter. The seventeen year-old Bullock stamped on his fingers until he fell thirty metres to his death.

A special report into this horror concluded – surprise! – that the failure to help Steven – despite his repeated attempts to signal his distress to the many agencies which “cared” for him –was a lack of communication between those agencies. The report into his death, by Dr Margaret Flynn of Sheffield Hallam university, concludes that he would have been saved by “better inter-agency working”. Really? Imagine the scene at the police station. “Please help me, I’m being tortured.” “Sorry sir, you’ve got learning difficulties, so I’ll file a memo on that for social services and leave it on this pile here. Now get out”.

I don’t think so. The failure, obviously, is a failure of love. Some terrible failure of love led, first, to the manifestation of evil that is Darren Stewart and Sarah Bullock. That anyone could have come into contact with Steven and failed to move to his assistance is another failure, and I think is what causes that sick feeling in your stomach when you read of his death. What would I have done, if he had been my neighbour?

Are we supposed to believe that the problem would be solved, that no-one else with learning difficulties would be tortured to death, if only another committee writes another protocol for inter-agency communication? What a Labour solution, and how depressing in its poverty of insight. When are we going to learn that systems and processes do not prevent error, that the more you build up a machine to deliver care, the less humane will be the outcome. What is needed is not a Standard Operating Procedure: what we need is more space for humanity to flourish. I can see a connection with the social responsibility agenda, though it would be too crass to spell it out. We have to destroy these machines which bind us down and force us apart, the machines to which we’ve devolved our responsibility to care and our duty to act. Remember Iris Murdoch again: in the end, all our failures are failures of love.

Cameron Watt: Lee Jasper has a lot of explaining to do

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

Andrew Gilligan is to be commended for his impressive Evening Standard investigation into Lee Jasper, Ken Livingstone’s equalities and policing czar. It is alleged that at least £2.5 million in City Hall money has been channelled to organisations controlled by Jasper, his friends and business associates.

One project of which Jasper is patron, Brixton Base, received a grant of £290,000 from the Mayor’s London Development Agency for ‘premises’, even though it was occupying a LDA-owned building at that time. Another £230,000 was given to make the project a ‘creative training hub’ for the black community, although it appears that very little training was ever delivered. Quick inspection of the project’s website certainly does not inspire confidence that over half a million quid of taxpayer’s money has been invested wisely.

Jasper claims that he had no control over the LDA’s decision-making on its support of Brixton Base and other projects. However it seems that when senior LDA officials wanted to evict Brixton Base from their premises after a string of complaints, they were overruled by Jasper. In an email the Standard claims to have obtained, Jasper orders a senior LDA official to ‘ensure that this action [the eviction] is withdrawn immediately and ensure I am consulted on all major decisions affecting [Brixton Base]’.

Gilligan contends that at City Hall, ‘Mr Livingstone’s chosen representatives of different communities are wooed with favours and cash.’ Exploiting the politics of victimhood is of course second nature to Livingstone and Jasper. It is therefore not surprising that their allies, such as the Black Information Link website, are presenting the Standard’s investigation as an attack on all London’s black and minority ethnic communities. Such a crass deployment of the race card deserves short shrift. These serious allegations about the misuse of huge sums of public money are underpinned by a thorough investigation. Any person or group that has acted in the manner Gilligan alleges should be subject to full media and public scrutiny, irrespective of their ethnicity.

Jasper and Livingstone have a lot of explaining to do. Boris Johnson and the Conservative GLA group will continue to lead efforts to get full answers to all the allegations. If even only a few of the charges are proven, Jasper’s career at City Hall will surely be over. Whether this is marks the beginning of the end for the slippery Mr Livingstone himself remains to be seen.

Theresa May: The truth behind the great disappearing act

The nation’s media has been obsessing this week over John Darwin’s great disappearing act.  But while the press was reporting one suspect disappearance, there were five other cynical disappearing acts.

1. Where’s Jacqui?

Jacqui Smith wants to extend the period for which the police are allowed to detain terror suspects without charge.  We know that, because it was briefed to Thursday’s newspapers.  Afterwards, she published a written statement to Parliament – which turned out to be just one paragraph long.   

When he first became Prime Minister, Gordon Brown said: “we seek an all-party consensus on new provisions for pre-charge detention”.  But these proposals have been launched in a hurry without any consensus. Shami Chakrabati, from Liberty, says: “It seems more like politics than policy making”.  And she’s right.  But we didn’t get to put the very many questions we have about extending 28 days because Jacqui Smith failed to come to the House.

2. Where’s Harriet?

During her deputy leadership campaign, Harriet Harman took £5,000 from Janet Kidd.  But it turned out to be an illegal donation, because the money belonged in fact to David Abrahams.  And we have also learned that she borrowed £40,000 to pay for her campaign but, despite clear guidance, she failed to declare it to the Electoral Commission.

I have written to Harriet asking her a plethora of unanswered questions.  And I have twice called on her to make a statement to the House of Commons on the matter.  But she also refuses to come to the House, clarify her position, and take questions from MPs.   

Louise Bagshawe: Exhuming bad news

No, this isn’t a scene from “Goodfellas”. But would you like a spot of wholly metaphorical grave-digging? The Labour Government are trying to use their own legal problems to bury bad news. We shouldn’t let them.

The crises of recent days have offered Brown the proverbial silver lining to the multiple clouds that lour across his house. So obsessed are the press with the latest twists and turns of donorgate (try: Labour’s dodgy donations to be confiscated by the Electoral Commission, except they can’t pay them back, yet Culture Minister/Photoshop Hero James Purnell falsely states on Sunday that “we’ve paid the money back”; while a Glasgow property developer claims a Labour MSP assured him he could donate even if he wasn’t on the electoral roll) that they’ve forced a catalogue of Labour failures off the front pages.

The Government is falling apart. Not news to you? Fair enough; but I am talking, just now, about failures of its policy, not failures of its competence or honesty. I do realise it’s tough distinguishing all the areas in which this omni-challenged Government is failing, but bear with me. An earlier column, which I believe was pretty prescient, was called “Brown’s Bad News”. But today I don’t have to look into my crystal ball. I would rather invite ConHome readers to examine some of the recently announced Labour catastrophes they’d rather you overlooked.

Peter Franklin: Blogging - Revenge of the mainstream media

If there was a list of the top 100 listmakers, there’s a good chance that Iain Dale would take first place (and not because he’d be the one compiling the list). Though he’s branched out since, his listmaking media empire was founded on his unrivalled knowledge of blogs and blogmen. If you want to know who the 53^rd best blogger in Rutland is, just ask Iain.

It’s great that such an immense variety of people are able to share their thoughts without having to stand on street corners ranting at passers-by – but is anyone listening? In particular, are those in positions of influence paying heed to the blogosphere? Busy people don’t have the time to read through a list of 100 blogs, let alone read the blogs themselves. But, make no mistake, they do read some of them. What’s more it’ll be much the same collection bookmarked on browsers across the Westminster village.

Which ones are they? Rather than reel off a top ten or twenty, I’ll just keep going until my list comes to a natural conclusion (and don’t worry, this won’t take long): We’ll start off with the big three – Conservative Home, Guido Fawkes and, of course, Iain Dale. To these one ought to add the somewhat distinct, but hugely popular, Political Betting.

Next up, it’s Comment Central – an indispensable service courtesy of Danny Finkelstein and his colleagues at the op-ed pages of the Times. Then there’s the Spectator’s Coffee House blog, also worth checking several times a day. The Daily Mail’s Ben Brogan is another must-read. If you’ve got any time left, you might want to add the BBC’s Nick Robinson and Sky’s Boulton and Co to your regular beat. And that’s about it – though the Telegraph’s new Three Line Whip may make it a full top ten.

Andrew Lilico: We don't need more regulation of party funding, we need less

If I give £100,000 to Amnesty International, or the Church, or my local cats home, no-one need ever know.  The charity concerned may need to check that I’m not sending them the proceeds of crime, but they don’t need to publicize my donation if I don’t want it publicized.  And rightly so, for in many cases it is of the essence of charitable giving that it should be in secret.  Indeed, the Bible teaches us as follows:

“When you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honoured by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.  But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

(Matthew 6:2-4, NIV)

In contrast, if I donate money to a political party, everyone must be told; I shall be subject to extensive press scrutiny of my private life, any connection I have to public affairs, and any business I do for the public sector; my motives will be questioned — it will be assumed, inferred and alleged that I am corrupt and wicked for wanting to assist a political party; if anyone — including many thousands of people beyond my control — should use my money improperly or react to my donation by acting favourably towards me, I may be questioned by police, arrested, and have my public reputation and personal career destroyed.  Does this seem right?

The following is, if practicable, a highly desirable situation: anyone should be able to give any money they want to, without any publicity, to any political party.  Why?  For at least three sorts of reasons:

• First, it is an issue of personal freedom.  Unless there is good reason to prevent me from doing so, I should be able to dispose of my money as I like without answering to others.
• Second, it is a matter of democratic involvement.  If I want to participate in the democratic process, assisting ideas that I want to see put forward, aiming to have the views I myself prefer advanced in a coherent and well-argued way, I should be able to do so insofar as is feasible and reasonable.
• Third, it is a matter of competition and dynamism in the political process.  If we limit the donations of the wealthy — either by placing a cap on them or by deterring them from making donations in other ways (such as excessive and negative publicity) then we shall defend vested political interests and make it extremely difficult for new parties to break in.

Stephan Shakespeare: Who is driving the volatility in the polls?

First, a concession: I over-estimated Gordon Brown. I thought him a stronger politician than he has since proved. I thought his ‘bounce’ would be sustained longer. Had he announced a general election in the middle of the Labour Party conference, he would have easily beaten the Conservatives. But he proved weak, Cameron rallied, and of course now the tables have turned.

What is the true extent of that turnaround? Can the electorate really have moved from a double-digit lead for Labour to double-digits lead for the Tories? Has politics really changed that much? If true, then the volatility is quite extraordinary.

It may not be true. I have a pet theory about this, which I developed while polling in America around the party conventions of 2004. It’s a theory I’m all the more fond of because it’s almost impossible to prove.

As we all know, opinion poll ratings move sharply during the political conference season. There’s always a bounce in favour of the party in the spotlight, and under normal circumstances that bounce diminishes pretty quickly. But why should there be a bounce at all, when we know that people don’t pay much attention, and generally don’t enjoy what they see? Do people really change their mind as a result of some snippets of speeches on the TV and in the papers? And do they then change back when the snippets are gone? It seems inherently implausible.

My theory is based on the trickiest part of any pollster’s task, working out who will and who will not end up actually voting. When pollsters ask people how likely it is that they will vote, more people say they will than end up doing so. We can divide the electorate into three: those who know that they will vote (and do), those who know that they will not vote (and don’t), and those who say they will but won’t.

Graeme Archer: The Naming of Cats

I’m lying in a metal box, me and about fifty other humans. The others are fast asleep: the light is dim and the air is filled with the susurration of their snoring. I am unable to share this air of somnolent unconcern, because a moment ago the ground lurched from under my bed and my stomach attempted to find its way into my mouth. I’m gripping the sides of the bed in a cold funk, composing farewell letters to everyone I care for. Is this it? Welcome to BA’s overnight flight from Philadelphia to Heathrow. Not going to dine tonight, sir? asks the nice steward, but of course in my terror I hear Not going to die tonight, sir and I’m relieved. Until we hit the next bout of turbulence.

*
Yes, I know there’s an irony in the fact that someone who spends so much of his life strapped to a board above the Atlantic should be increasingly terrified of flying, especially given that he’s a statistician, since we all know that there’s nothing safer than flying. Don’t you think the aviation industry pushes that statistic a bit too much? Like, almost hysterically? I sort of think it’s a bit like sword-swallowing. Your risk of injury from sword-swallowing is vanishingly small, because most people don’t swallow swords. Condition on the fact that you decide to repeatedly swallow swords, however, and the risk potential surely rises dramatically. Sooner or later some plane I’m in is going to fall from the sky in a ball of flame. It will be of little comfort to me that I had previously been at greater risk by taking the bus down the Hackney Road.

Cameron Watt's column will return next week