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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

Theresa May MP: The questions Harman still has to answer

This week must have felt like an eternity for the Prime Minister.  The David Abrahams story that broke last Sunday has got worse and worse for the Labour Party.  Gordon Brown will now be the second British prime minister, after Tony Blair, to be questioned by the police.  His general secretary had to resign.  His chief fundraiser is on the rack.  And several ministers are in a state of nervous exhaustion.

So let me deal today with my opposite number, Harriet Harman.

On Tuesday, I wrote to Harriet demanding that she make a statement in the House of Commons in order to answer a series of questions about the donation she received from Janet Kidd.  Unsurprisingly, the Leader of the House of Commons – who is responsible for deciding what business is taken in Parliament – chose not to take my offer up.  Moreover, she failed to reply to my letter.  And most importantly, she failed to answer virtually all of the questions.

Amongst the questions were:

Why did you accept a donation for your deputy leadership campaign on 4 July – almost two weeks after your campaign ended?

Given that you say that you received the donation after you stepped down from the Department of Constitutional Affairs, why did you declare it to the Permanent Secretary of the DCA?

Why did you make the declaration to the Permanent Secretary three months after your received the donation?

Louise Bagshawe: Football clubs must pay to protect rail passengers from yobs

Louise Bagshawe wants clubs to protect travelers from football hooligans.

It’s tempting to write another anti-Labour column today, but the words “fish” and “barrel” spring to mind. Instead I thought I might explore one aspect of the social responsibility agenda; what football clubs ought to be doing about hooligans on public transport.

David Cameron’s early speech on flexible working suggested that politics had a duty to change the culture; to change how businesses contribute to society, other than making profits, through exhortation and not regulation. A light touch is the Conservative way. Certainly, Cameron has had great success with this; environmental progress like biodegradable plastic bags on the one hand, and national attention to the issue of sexualised children’s clothing on the other. On a morning when it looks likely that football will be hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons, I thought we might examine ways to encourage football clubs to increase their sense of social responsibility. Football is a game at the heart of our national life. The legendary Bill Shankly once said “"Football is not just a matter of life and death: it's much more important than that". Back in the bad old days, of course, there were a few occasions when football hooligans regrettably did use the beautiful game as an excuse for their ugly violence, and made it very much a matter of life and death. Thankfully, those days have long gone from English football. But there’s still a fair way to go. And one way I think football clubs could show a strong sense of corporate responsibility is by contributing to prevent anti-social behaviour caused by fans after the game.

I’m thinking particularly of safety on public transport.

Peter Franklin: We need a Cabinet Minister dedicated to delivering financial stability

In Britain, the quantity of banknotes and coins in circulation (plus certain Bank of England deposits) is known as M0. Higher M-numbers, such as M4, describe progressively broader definitions of the money supply. But I expect you knew that already. 

What you may not know is that there are negative M-numbers, which describe progressively narrower definitions of the money supply. For instance, minus M9 is the quantity of loose change currently stuck down the sides of the nation’s sofas – or, at least, it would be had I not just made it up.

Still, the sum of money thus taken out of circulation must be considerable – so much so that I have written to Alistair Darling urging him to consider the deflationary influence of soft furnishings on the British economy. So far, he has failed to reply to this or any of my letters – perhaps the green ink is putting him off. Next time, I’ll download my ideas onto a couple of CDs marked “really secret personal details of 25 million people” – which ought to get his attention.

Of course, the real prize would be to find the actual disks – which, you never know, could be lurking in the hidden recesses of your favourite armchair. So the next time you’re grubbing around for an errant fifty pence piece, have an extra good feel. It’s a longshot I grant you, but surely worth a try. I mean, just imagine if you found them!

If it were me, I’d send off the disks to our glorious leader, David ‘Dave’ Cameron, so that he could present them to Gordon Brown during PMQs. Either that or I’d auction them off to the highest bidder – probably the Russian mafia or maybe the promotions department at Readers’ Digest.

Andrew Lilico: On advisory juries

Juries have a surprisingly significant place in our cultural understanding of justice.  The trials of Socrates, of William Penn, of OJ Simpson, the refusal of juries to convict when death penalties would follow for adultery in the Commonwealth or for theft in the early nineteenth century, the dramas of 12 Angry Men or LA Law, the complexities of the Guinness Four or Louise Woodward cases — for the educated layman, these and other examples are branded into what we mean by due process.  In recent years, jury trial has taken on an added political dimension, as it has come to be seen as iconic of the struggle to sustain key British constitutional features against encroachment by Europhiles, leftist “modernisers”, and authoritarians.

One issue of recent interest has been precisely where it is best to draw the line between cases in which a jury trial is to be assumed or guaranteed (as opposed to being available, perhaps, upon appeal being granted to a higher court) and cases in which a judge (say, a magistrate) might hear a case without a jury.  Such a line has always existed, and it is a pragmatic question, into which issues such as expense or the threat of jury intimidation are normally thought to enter, where it should be drawn.  I would have much to say on the matter, but that is not what I want to talk about today.

On this occasion, I wish to focus on the recent debate as to whether certain sorts of cases are intrinsically unsuited to jury trial.  The kinds of cases people have in mind are those that turn crucially upon sometimes very involved expert evidence —fraud trials are perhaps the most well-known examples, though child abuse cases are also relevant, as would presumably be future criminal cases of alleged cartels.  The idea of the jury sceptic is that juries are fundamentally ill-suited to arbitrating in such cases, because understanding them requires either a level of technical expertise that juries do not have, or a degree of experience in listening to such evidence that juries do not have.  If the jury simply cannot understand the case properly, how can it come to a useful verdict?  Given these pragmatic vices of a jury, might it not, so the thought goes, be better to have a suitably expert judge, or perhaps a panel of suitably expert judges, come up with the verdict?

Stephan Shakespeare is away

Graeme Archer: Sex and the Single Woman

I know, I know: ID fiasco, Darling’s lies to the House about who’s to blame, broken military covenant, part-time defence secretaries, more foot-and-mouth (government sponsored!), Lord West publicly recanting his thoughtcrime (he loves the Big Clunking Fist, for ever), Charlie Whelan’s sad delusions printed in the Telegraph and 24 billion of our Earth Pounds being pumped into Northern Wreck (so presumably there’ll be no more rubbish about Tory “black holes”?). It’s almost Wagnerian in its horror, innit? Let’s close our eyes and pretend this government never happened. It is Sunday, after all. That’s better. And breathe out.

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The government has said that IVF should be available to single women and lesbian couples who want to have a child “of their own”, without involving anything as retro as a man. I nearly didn’t write about this, because I feel so strongly about it (which makes me suspicious of my motives); also I noticed what might look like an internal inconsistency in my reasoning, and, maybe, because I feared you would think “what’s it got to do with him?”, given that the closest I’ll ever come to child-rearing is the odd occasion we drag Keith’s nieces and nephews around London (“Can we go to Macdonald’s?” “No.” “I hate you. You’re a man and you’re married to my uncle. Ha ha ha ha ha … ” “Chicken-bits-burger or cow-bits-burger?”). Then a friend pointed me to this article on the BBC website, and I read, with a sense of outrage, this piece of anti-male orthodoxy from Carol Sarler in the Times and I thought, this is getting ridiculous.

Deliberately creating babies in the absence of a father is a terrible proposal and no matter how often I deleted my scribbled thoughts about it this week, I kept coming back to it. I can think of statistical, evolutionary and cultural reasons to reject the proposal.

The potential inconsistency in my reasoning is that I am a supporter of the legislation which requires adoption agencies to consider gay couples as adoptive families for the children in their (the agencies’) care. Yet I find the concept of gay couples or single women engineering the creation of a child through IVF – if I’m honest – repulsive. After careful thought, and some statistical reasoning, I don’t find this an inconsistency. The difference is between what statisticians call marginal and conditional inference, about the outcomes for the child. Children who need families exist, now, and it seems to me to be impossible to say, with complete certainty, “none of those children could ever be raised well by a gay couple”. We have to condition on the existence of the child, and consider the options available to him or her: there is at least a finite probability that the child would be better off in a gay family than would be the case were he or she left in institutional care (and we know that no child would be so placed unless he or she would benefit). This is the conditional inference – a posteriori – conditional on the existence of the child. However, before a child is born – a priori – we cannot make specific inference about his or her outcomes (because he or she doesn’t exist): we can only make marginal inference, averaged over the population – an estimate of the outcomes for an as yet theoretical, but definitely fatherless, child. And we’ve got enough evidence now, haven’t we, that the average outcomes for fatherless children are bad enough for us not to seek to increase the number of children in the fatherless pool? Haven’t we?

I have sympathy, I am human, of course I have sympathy, for women who are driven by an intense biological longing to be a mother. That need, however strong it may be, does not overwhelm my distaste at willingly creating a child whose likely life outcome is profoundly at a disadvantage vis-à-vis those for a child born to a mother and father. To do a quick Richard Dawkins impersonation, there must be an evolutionary requirement for some people to be childless (it’s my favourite theory for homosexuality too), because such people (infertile heterosexuals, gay people) exist, generation after generation. My theory is that we require surplus (childless) adults, in order to enable the tribe as a whole to continue to thrive, because there’s not much more physically demanding than raising children. It requires on average slightly more than two people, in fact. That’s also why I find it ridiculous to read those articles by lazy journalists, bemoaning the fact that people with children sometimes get a bit of slack cut them at work, slack which, of course, the childless tend to pick up, as though those of us without children don’t benefit in any way at all from the raising of a generation of well-rounded children. What’s the alternative, anyway? That we encourage people to stop having children, so they can put in longer hours in the office? And that would lead to what, precisely, for a culture? Exactly. It leads to where we are now.

It is this cultural impact of fatherlessness which troubles me the most. Accepted, I have no paternal longings of my own; but like all of you, I had a father, and, like many of you, I can compare existence when he was alive with existence, now, without him. I think of him every time I cross London Fields to go to the Lido and see men kicking leaves for their children; I think of him every time I’m sat upstairs on the no.26, listening with half an ear to the tipsy, happy men phoning home to explain their lateness; I wonder if he would like Belle and Sebastian; I wonder what he would advise me to do about work (not that I’d listen, not at first, anyway); I think of him when Keith and I are falling about with laughter and then I wish, I wish every day, that he could meet Keith. I dream he’s alive quite often, and I suppose, in the sense that I am alive, and am a product of his love, that he is, metaphorically at least, still here. I told you before: most that is good in me, comes from my father. So. I’m unusual? I don’t think so. How can it be contemplated to willingly produce children – particularly boys – who will never have the love of a father?

I’ve written on a similar theme before, so apologies for the thematic repetition, but the educational and societal outcomes of the marginalisation of the male from families is all around us: and the government’s “solution” is to offer more of it? Society needs more children without fathers? Boys need less paternal input to their upbringing? Time for more deep breathing.

Cameron Watt: Time for a Treatment Tax on Alcohol

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

Around 12 million people in the UK are dependent on alcohol, or drink at dangerous levels. Thirty times more citizens have a drink problem than the 400,000 abusing hard drugs. Few readers will be well acquainted with a heroin addict; almost all of us have at least one friend or family member who has had a serious drink problem.

Of course drinkers immensely damage their health. Alcohol is now responsible for four times as many deaths as illegal drugs. Nearly half our 14-15 year-olds, and a quarter of all men, binge drink at least once each month. Alcohol related death and disease has doubled in 25 years. And while they’re wrecking their health, problem drinkers make life miserable for the rest of us. Half of all assaults and most night-time admissions to hospital are drink-related.

Why has there been such a steep rise in consumption? For a start, booze is 50% cheaper in real terms than it was 25 years ago. Alcohol is also more easily available than ever before through a massive growth in the concentration of pubs and clubs in town centres, along with 24-hour access in many supermarkets. What was once a male and pub dominated drinking culture now warmly embraces women, adolescents and children. As a nation, we seem to have imbibed the advice of those 1970s ads, “Any time, any place, anywhere…”, even if Martini is no longer the tipple of choice.

The Social Justice Policy Group’s final report, Breakthrough Britain was published in July. Its 191 proposals to tackle five key areas of social breakdown were warmly received, both inside and outside the party, with one notable exception: the treatment tax.

Theresa May MP: What does this Government actually know?

If October was a bad month for the Prime Minister, November is turning into a nightmare.

This week, the Government revealed that it has no idea where the CDs containing the personal details of 25 million people are.  But it was just one of three stories this week where the public was left wondering: what exactly does this Government know?

1. They don’t know where the discs are

So the Government loses the personal details of 25 million men, women and children.  The Prime Minister says he “profoundly regrets” what has happened.  But that’s not much consolation to the millions of families who have been left following Alistair Darling’s advice to “check their bank statements”.

And, typically for this Government, we’ve had denial and spin.  The denial came from the Prime Minister.  He claimed that the fiasco was for ‘operational’ reasons rather than ‘systemic’ failure.  But according to a written answer just three weeks ago, there were 2,111 security breaches at HMRC last year.  This latest incident was the third in a recent string of embarrassing events.  And there are reports that two more CDs are missing.  Make no mistake – this was down to systemic failure in HMRC – a department set up by Gordon Brown himself.

The spin came from Alistair Darling.  He hadn’t told Parliament immediately, we were told, because the banks wanted enough time to put “appropriate safeguards” in place.  He said “the banks were adamant that they wanted as much time as possible to prepare for this announcement”.  But the British Bankers Association said: “None of our members asked for any extra time.”

He also told us that the fatal decisions in HMRC were taken by “junior officials”.  But we now know that it was a ‘Senior Business Manager’ who took the decision to put the information onto the discs, and it was done with the knowledge of the ‘Assistant Director of HMRC, Process Owner for Tax Credits and Child Benefits’. 

The Chancellor’s version of events lies in tatters.  And meanwhile, they still don’t know where those discs are.

Louise Bagshawe: Nine questions for a Government that is falling apart

Louise Bagshawe argues that Brown and Darling must come clean with the public.

Today is a special day in the LoCicero (my married name) house. It’s my daughter’s birthday, and it’s Thanksgiving. Since my husband and three children are Americans, we celebrate the holiday. Under ordinary circumstances, this column would have been an unfashionably warm tribute to our foremost ally and the second greatest nation in the world, the United States.

But these are not ordinary circumstances. Labour is falling apart. It is catastrophic for the nation to have to be ruled by such a bunch of incompetents.  A few weeks back, I was writing about the election that wasn’t on the day it ought to have been called. Back then all PPCs were lamenting that we’d have to wait another two years, or more, to get this government out. I am starting to wonder if that is accurate. I am starting to wonder if the government will not fall over this.

Today there are multiple questions the Prime Minister and the Chancellor need to answer over successive policy disasters. Not all of them relate to Datagate.

1. Did the Chancellor mislead the House of Commons?

In his mind-blowing statement to MPs on Tuesday, Alastair Darling stated that the announcement that 25 million personal details were lost in the post had been delayed so that banks could put in place security procedures. He repeated this several times. But the Telegraph reports today:

“The British Banking Association said: "The BBA did not ask for more time and none of our members asked for more time."  The Association of Payment Clearing Services, which manages the movement of money between banks, said: "We found out on Friday and were given until Monday to sort it out. There was no request for a delay."

Peter Franklin: Consensus confounded

Far from merging in the middle, British politics stands on the brink of a historic divide.

It is said that Gordon Brown is always on the lookout for a political dividing line – that is, something that might put him on the winning side of an argument, with David Cameron on the other. This might take the form of an issue, such as the extended detention without trial of terrorist suspects; alternatively, there may be no policy content at all – merely a stunt of some sort, such as Gordon’s GOAT (government of all talents).

If you ask me, I’d say that the Prime Minister is no more convinced of Britain’s need for 56 day detention than he is of the Labour Party’s need for Quentin Davies – it’s just that he calculated that the fissures thus created would leave his opponents on the shakiest ground. Luckily for us, he’s the one that got rumbled, his high minded proclamations of a new kind of politics exposed as petty gamesmanship. And yet there is something to be said for his approach. What he almost understands, and various Tory strategists have utterly failed to grasp, is that success in politics is not about you moving to the middle ground – it’s about defining the dividing lines that put the middle ground where you want it to be.

For instance, for most of the 20th century the great divide in British politics was over state control of the economy. On one side of the line was the Left, in favour of state control; on the other side was the Right, in favour of free enterprise. Under Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative were able to highlight the growing economic opportunities offered by the market, making it increasingly clear as to which was the winning side.

This is something that Gordon Brown and Tony Blair understood when they started New Labour. However, they did a lot more than simply cross the old divide. They surveyed the new political territory they found themselves in and drew a new dividing line right across it. This was the divide between private gain and the common good, with themselves on the side of the latter. Where once there had only been Left and Right, there was now a Third Way – in favour of free enterprise and the common good.

Andrew Lilico: Why trade is green

I decided to have roast lamb for dinner on Sunday.  I had my fourteen-year-old at the supermarket with me, and when I reached for the delicious New Zealand leg joint we later enjoyed, he scolded me thus: “But Dad!  That’s from New Zealand!  That’s so environmentally unfriendly — why not get the British lamb over there?”  I was therefore obliged to offer him an extended discourse upon why, in fact, purchasing the sort of products we import into Britain is typically more environmentally friendly than buying the domestic variant, not less.  Since my son’s error is a common one, and even seems to be drifting into policy formation, I thought I would explain my thinking to you, Dear Readers.

The fundamental basis of trade was set out by David Ricardo, more than a century-and-a-half ago.  Economists call it by the intimidating title of the “Theory of Comparative Advantage”, but the idea is actually very simple and intuitive, and comes down to the same concept as Henry Ford’s famous “division of labour” — indeed, it is the main basis of all commerce, whether international or domestic.  The idea is this: People (and countries) differ in their relative capacities.  One of us might be, say, an excellent farmer but only moderately good at designing pension schemes.  Another might be moderately good at both farming and pension scheme design.  If the person with the relatively greater skill in farming specialises in that, and offers for trade the extra food she produces through this specialisation, then the person that is moderately good at each can focus on pension scheme design (eschewing farming) and trade the extra pension schemes he has time to produce in exchange for food.  Trade allows us each to focus on our area of relative (or “comparative”) advantage.

So if in trading with New Zealand the Britons find that New Zealand sells us lamb, what that means is that New Zealand is relatively better at producing lamb.  Let’s strip away the complexities here and say that what it means is that lamb produced in New Zealand is, for the same quality, cheaper.  What does “cheaper” mean?  Again, setting aside certain complexities, it means “produced employing fewer resources” — less land, less energy, fewer minerals, fewer trees felled, and so on.  But what about the fact that the New Zealand lamb is produced in New Zealand, and so has to be transported all the way here?  Doesn’t that destroy the argument?  Typically not.  For the price of New Zealand lamb sold in Britain incorporates the cost of transporting it to Britain.  So if the lamb imported into Britain is cheaper than the British variant (for the same quality), that means that, even after allowing for the costs of transporting it, New Zealand lamb is produced using fewer resources than is its British alternate.

Stephan Shakespeare: Politics is still a matter of life and death

British society today is less divided, less ideological; there are no deep rifts in the public mind on basic policy issues or on values or on control; therefore politics is about personality, and winning elections is about mood music. So runs the familiar argument. As far as it goes, it has some validity.

Here’s an alternative angle: all life on earth is programmed for survival and dominance. Everything that really matters is therefore seen through the lens of “what difference will it make for me and my family?” It sometimes feels as if politics has gone pleasantly to sleep, but that can’t be right. If politics matters then it must be about survival and dominance, it must be a never-ending battle.

Maybe politics is no longer the medium for things that really matter? In a world of technocrats, have all the real decisions moved to another level? Certainly with interactive media there has been a huge growth of consumer power, and people are less subject to top-down government. But the politicians still have one basic power: To take something from us and give us something back.

They take some of our freedoms, and give back protections. They take some of our money, and they give back services. They command resources, and they redistribute them. How they do this is vitally important. Rely on an inefficient health service, and you’re more likely to die. Send your kids to a failing school, and you slash their chances of thriving. Politics creates our environment in a very basic, life-and-death way.

Graeme Archer: Common People

Monday 12 November, 7pm

So. I’m sat on this bus, heading up the Kingsland Road, the No. 242. I’ve never been on this bus before and I’ve never been so far up the Kingsland Road either: we’re about to go through Clapton, or so the very annoying, omnipresent Machine Voice keeps informing me. I’m going to the Homerton hospital, to visit John.

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About twenty minutes ago I was sat outside Caffe Nero on Bishopsgate, finishing off some “urgent” memo and then emailing it to my boss in Italy. One of the very few good aspects of modern life: wifi. Two years ago I’d have had to stay in Harlow until I’d finished work, and I’d not have had time to get to the hospital. Now I can draw my graphs and conclusions on the train, then email them from nearly every café in the City. When I was negotiating for my current position at work, I demanded: a huge pay rise; and –  I wanna be a vice-president; and – I want the smallest laptop money can buy. Well. I got the laptop. Two gay men sit down at the table behind me and instantly irritate me. Their conversation is about parties in New York and the emails they’d just sent each other from their iPhones. I want to shout Why don’t I get asked to parties? Why am I sat here drawing ****ing graphs? What happened to that youthful promise? Then I remember Mr Keith waiting at home for me, and where I’m going in a minute, and feel bad.

Cameron Watt on the Second 'Conservatives for Social Justice' international gathering

I have spent most of this week in Washington DC with Tim Montgomerie, Philippa Stroud and like-minded conservatives from the US, Canada and New Zealand.

Tuesday 13 November

Arriving at Dulles late afternoon, we face the usual hour long wait to clear passport control. Tim, whose flight landed ten minutes after ours, conscientiously declines the opportunity to save himself half an hour by ducking under the barrier to join us further up the queue.  I suppose the resulting extra delay is a small price to pay for maintaining our Editor’s integrity.

On leaving the airport, it’s uplifting to see that a new lounge has just opened for the exclusive use of American servicemen and their families. Can you imagine that at Heathrow? Later in the week at a shopping mall, I notice mobile phone provider Cingular is offering special deals to service personnel. BAA and Vodafone – please take note.

Wednesday 14 November

Philippa and I begin our day meeting Bob Woodson at his Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. A veteran of the 1960s civil rights movement, Bob left when he felt middle-class black Americans were using it to seek privilege from cultivating the status of victims. CNE works with community leaders based in many of America’s toughest urban areas, building their capacity through training and introductions to donors.

A man of sound conservative convictions, Bob’s network of grassroots poverty-fighters helped provide Newt Gingrich with the justification he needed to pioneer the 1996 federal welfare reforms. They told Gingrich that recipients of welfare in the communities they served would benefit most from a time limit on entitlement of just two years. The five year limit eventually settled seems rather generous in comparison.