NIZHINSKY

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2010-04-24T08:40:00.001-07:00

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Two socialists, one bottle

2010-04-14T15:11:00.000-07:00

Europe has had an interesting double-act on his hands during the economic crisis, though not a great deal of attention has been paid to it.

On the surface there are many similarities. Britain and Spain both have socialist prime ministers, both of whom were in office well before the crisis struck and both of whom present themselves as the best people for the job of handling the mess they did more than a little to inflame.

Unlike the Greek socialists, both Gordon Brown and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero are in the difficult position of not being able to blame their predecessors for the almighty mess their countries are in. Zapatero has led his Socialist government 2004 while Brown has effectively held the reigns of the British economy since 1997. No escaping that one then.

But differences between the two become more apparent the further you dig. A feature in Monday's FT explained how "Spain was one of the few countries to run a budget surplus during the good times [and] entered the crisis with a low level of government debt - even now, at more than 55 per cent of GDP, it is 20 percentage points below the eurozone average"

The great difference between the two though comes, alas, from what they are actually willing to do about it. For Zapatero, the crisis gave a cold sobering slap in the face to a government that was riding on an artificially-induced post-euro euphoria. He now openly talks of 'austerity' and 'cuts', admitting that necessity commands he must do the unpopular but right thing.

What is Brown's answer? Mo' spending, mo' spending, mo' spending!

While his iberian counterpart talks frankly and honestly to the Spanish people about the hard times ahead, Brown prefers to hide his head up his own backside while criticising the leader of the opposition for saying the same thing. No wonder Ellie Gellard wanted to get rid.

This behaviour represents two things. Firstly, Labour's inability to engage with voters in an adult manner - why speak honestly when you can dangle debt-funded welfare treats infront of the electorate? Secondly, Brown's infamous inability to make tough decisions.

To his credit, Zapatero has excelled on this front, despite having a great deal to lose. The Spanish general elections are only two years away and, like Labour, the Spanish Socialists rely heavily on the trade unions, who are not going to be happy.

Undeterred, Zapatero told the FT (emphasis added): "We've just taken difficult decisions. Raising VAT, I can tell you that's not something that's been done to get people applauding us. You just have to look at the reaction of public opinion. From here to the elections our policy is going to have to be one of austerity and cost cutting ... There is no other way."

Can you imagine such talk from Brown? No, of course you can't. His claim to be a conviction politician has been exposed as the biggest single lie of his premiership (start as you mean to go on they say...)

Speaking of which, I couldn't help reading Zapatero's austerity plan without thinking of that other great conviction politician Brown facetiously compared himself to. Could this socialist be a Spanish Thatcher in the making?

The prospect is certainly an amusing one, but the evidence is compelling. Zapatero told the FT he plans to raise VAT, confront unions over labour reform, raise productivity, increase flexibility and emasculate the bureaucratic and spendthrift regional governments.

The idea of a Thatcherite socialist might sound something of a bad joke, but Zapatero's steadfast ability to look reality in the face and make tough fiscal decisions shows the only joke in the room to be Gordon Brown.

Another four years of Labour however would not be at all funny.

Even the Blair years showed the benefits for all of low taxes, so why are we going back?

2010-04-02T08:26:00.000-07:00

Henry Campbell-Bannerman said in 1903 as Liberal leader of the opposition: "To dispute free trade, after fifty years' experience of it, is like disputing the law of gravitation."

At the time he was railing against the Tories' colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain calling for protectionist tariffs.

The Conservatives have since learned from their mistakes regarding protectionism - we are now proudly a free-trade and free-market party, carrying the torch of classical Liberalism into the 21st century.

The Liberal Democrats seem to have forgotten these lessons they once so passionately taught us, while Labour seem to be suffering from learning difficulties.

Take for example the 50p tax rate, introduced this month. One financial crisis is all it took for Labour to return to their old unfounded, disproved prejudices regarding taxation.

Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson's incremental reductions in the top rate of tax from 83% in 1979 to 40% in 1988 cemented the growth of the British economy after the Thatcher years (with a minor blip in the early '90s) and greatly increased the wealth of the nation.

Figures published in yesterday's Financial Times from the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) show how this new orthodoxy continued under Blair and, crucially, remained the most effective means of redistributing wealth.

The IFS contrasted Labour's taxation plans in the 1992 election under Neil Kinnock and John Smith with the actual results under Blair and Brown between 1997 and 2010.

As alarming then as it sounds now, Labour planned to impose a 50p tax rate for all earnings above £36,375 - that's still only £56,000 in today's money. Yet by their own figures, the poorest in society could only hope to gain an extra £2 a week.

By contrast, since 1997 the poorest two deciles of society have seen their incomes rise by more than 10%. For the richest, their incomes have shrunk by around the same amount.

To dispute low taxation then, after thirty years' experience of it, is like disputing the shape of the earth.

But the first economic crisis Labour have had to deal with since the one they created in the '70s has exposed them for the flat-earthists they are. They simply cannot learn from their mistakes or, it seems, their successes.

As a small aside, the Financial Times claimed on the same page that levels of disposable income have greatly declined under Labour. According to the report,

The slowdown in household income has come as the population has increased fairly rapidly, but also as wages and salaries have been stagnant in spite of big rises in profits at companies.

Could this slowdown be a consequence of the minimum wage? After all, if firms have to pay their employees more, they are going to employ less of them. This increases unemployment (and with it, benefit payments) while those who are in work are heaped with greater and greater responsibilities - most likely less productively because of the stress they are under.

Businesses, refusing to see their profits shrink, come under pressure to compensate for this through further firing, slave-driving and generally treating their staff badly, perpetuating the cycle.

The minimum wage may go up every year, but it would not surprise me if the £5.80 received today is worth less in real terms than the £3 workers would have received before 1997.

No, this isn't 1979, but it is close

2010-03-28T15:53:00.000-07:00

I recently came across a left-wing Twitter post which criticised the deliberate association of today's strikes with those of the infamous 1978/79 'winter of discontent.' To be sure, it's an entirely fair point - there were some 29 million working days lost to industrial action in 1979, with only 760,000 in 2008. We can hardly complain.

Unpopular as the BA strike is, it's highly unlikely this election will be fought on the issue of the unions as it was before Margaret Thatcher's landmark victory. That said, while the scale of the issue is far smaller than it was 30 years ago, the old trends are still visible.

Again we are seeing militant unions conspiring to damage and defeat a democratically-elected government (does that include Gordon Brown?) it disagrees with. Friday's Financial Times speculated that the timing of the RMT and TSSA's Easter rail strikes (in which only a fifth of services will run) was calculated to 'maximise the political embarrassment to the government' by beginning on April 6 - the day the election is expected to be called. Hardly uncharacteristic for the openly-Communist general secretary of the RMT, Bob Crow.

One of the great themes of the 1979 election and indeed the 1984/85 miners' strike was the undemocratic nature of the unions. Five years earlier Edward Heath fought, and lost, the 1974 general election on the question of 'who governs?' - such was the union stranglehold on the workings of government.

Surely the most enduring legacy of Margaret Thatcher's premiership is this has not been an issue for almost a quarter of a century. The principles of Parliamentary supremacy, the 'open-shop' and democratic ballots for strikes have been firmly established.

But it would be foolish to think that these issues have gone away for good. The planned rail strikes threaten to leave only a fifth of services running up and down the country on the basis of a 54% vote for industrial action. Given the overtly political timing of the strike, it does call into question the authority of the unions to take such a measure.

I am sure I am not alone in saying that unions ought to be exclusively economic organisations - that their very existence as political bodies challenges the legitimacy of Parliament and the democracy we have worked so hard to develop and - uniquely in Europe - keep over the centuries.

So while party funding is still a hot topic in Westminster, it is worth asking whether it is desirable or even morally just to have one of the leading parties in British politics bankrolled to the tune of 92% by a handful of trade union bosses - whose representativeness and own coffers are highly dubious.

Francis Maude made the point two years ago that union members are generally not given a choice over whether they wish to pay the 'political levy' to the Labour party and while only half of their members tend to vote Labour, it is not unusual for the unions to claim that 100% had coughed up.

This is a highly undemocratic situation comparable to the 'pocket boroughs' of the eighteenth century. The political levy is essentially a life-support machine for Labour no matter how unpopular they become, made worse still because of the backhanded way in which it is collected.

It is conceivable that, were it not for union funding, the party would have been permanently annihilated as a political force in 1983 under a wave of Tory and Alliance votes. The SDP-Liberal Alliance did, after all, collect more than 25% of votes cast in that election.

While I doubt the Liberal Democrats are exactly popular with readers of this blog, I challenge anyone to argue that they could be less disastrous for this country than Labour have been in the last 70 years.

After all, Lord Harris did say in 1990 that Thatcherism was 'more or less common ground between Conservatives and Liberals in the nineteenth century.' And whatever else you may think of them, at least the Lib Dems take civil liberties seriously.

Back to 1979 though, there are further parallels. The recent collapse in the Tory lead over Labour has led to expectations that May will produce a hung parliament. Ignoring the fact that political betters seem to disagree, it is worth looking at the polls in the run up to the May 3, 1979.

In the BBC's 'Decision '79' election coverage, David Dimbleby opens with the following statement;

Tonight we might still be reporting a walkover for the Conservatives and Mrs Thatcher, but the polls narrowed a good deal as [the campaign] went on. It may be that we see a straight Tory victory but it is possible we could find the Tories not winning the 318 seats they need if they are automatically to form the next government. There's even an outside chance, depending on how the smaller parties do, perhaps of Mr Callaghan remaining in Downing Street, perhaps even as leader of a coalition ... There was a lead at the very beginning for the Tories of over 20%, then at one point a very slight Labour lead.

As it happened, Margaret Thatcher won the election comfortably with a majority of 43. The rest, as we know, is history. She went on to win every future election she fought, with landslide majorities of 144 and 102.

The lesson is, don't be too disheartened (or encouraged - Kinnock) by pre-election polls. They quite often mean nothing.

While we're on the subject of elections though, David Cameron has himself admitted that the party requires a swing larger than any in any election since 1931 to win a workable majority in May.

Well, let's take a look at that election. Stanley Baldwin led the Conservatives to a blistering 324 seat majority, while a discredited and divided Labour lost no less than 255 of their MPs. This was, by the way, in the middle of the greatest financial crisis the world had ever seen - sound familiar?

Europe's balkanisation has already begun

2010-03-14T09:36:00.000-07:00

'The sick man of Europe' is a term that has been used to describe, among others, the late Ottoman Empire and Britain in the 1970s (incidentally during Labour's last tenure of government).

I would say this term is no longer relevant - Europe is itself the sick man. In the last six months we have seen strikes and riots rock the continent as the EU's rigid economic system struggles to cope with the financial crisis; we have seen a quangocrat and a 'low grade bank clerk' elected by nobody to represent us; and democracy trampled on in another Brussels power-grab.

We have to ask ourselves how much longer we wish to share membership of an organisation which has, on one extreme, a socialist government that has handled its finances so poorly that it is on the verge of bankruptcy; and on the other a corrupt billionaire plutocrat who, apart from owning large swathes of his country's media, has made himself essentially immune from prosecution while conniving with his equally repulsive counterpart and friend in Moscow to persecute the family of Alexander Litvinenko.

Thankfully David Cameron, Václav Claus and Michał Kamiński already asked themselves this question, taking the courageous decision to form the European Conservatives & Reformists Group.

It would be interesting to see how bad things really have to get before any of these men wholeheartedly put their weight behind outright secession.

In the case of Italy the 'European pattern' is disturbingly familiar. The Prime Minister can now legitimately claim he is too busy to attend court hearings in which he is being prosecuted, making him effectively above the law. This is remarkable because the Italian legislature actually handed him this immunity on a plate.

The parallel with the Roman Senate sycophantically ceding more and more of its power to the caesars is disturbing, but accurate. As President, the Communist Giorgio Napolitano ought to step in, but has so far done nothing. Those monarchists who claim the Queen would refuse to ratify any undemocratic or unconstitutional legislation would do well to learn from this - Napolitano's role is essentially the same and just as toothless.

Berlusconi's flagrant abuse of his position highlights the weakness of the European Union but also its own superficial commitment to democracy. A body which forced the Irish to reconsider their decision on the Lisbon Treaty is unlikely to make its voice heard over the collapse of the rule of law in Italy. The concept has simply never gained any currency in Europe.

Though, harrowing as Italy's situation is (Tatiana Litvinenko's "I thought Europe had 100% rule of law" ought to be invoked at every session of the European Parliament), it is Greece that runs the risk of seriously destabilising the continent. The question over whether to bail out the country with taxpayers' money has already caused conflict between member states and resentment among their electorates.

Of all publications, it was the Independent that ran a piece on why the euro was to blame for the strikes that exploded over Greece and Europe earlier this year. The following paragraph, a stinging indictment of the single currency, is worth printing here in full (my emphasis);

During the relatively benign economic conditions that marked the first decade of the euro, fast growing economies such as Spain were able to enjoy the advantages of currency union, such as low interest rates, but allowed their prices and costs to gradually rise, leaving their economies uncompetitive by comparison with nations such as Germany. Traditionally, that cumulative build-up of cost and price differences would be dealt with by devaluation of the currency, but membership of the euro removes that flexibility. Thus Ireland, Greece , Spain and others are undergoing what economists euphemistically call "internal devaluation", slashing wages and costs and, if necessary, allowing unemployment to climb to record highs. The problem raised by the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz among others, is that those deflationary polices threaten to shrink their economies even more, triggering an even more urgent budget crisis as tax revenues collapse and unemployment payments rise.

I couldn't have put it better myself. Though perhaps more ominous was: "The democratic strains in nations that had been ruled, well within living memory, by fascist leaders or the military are growing."

It appears that the Federalists have learnt nothing from the Balkan conflict. The horrors of war and genocide in the former Yugoslavia ought to have taught the world, and especially Europe, that forcing people even as ethnically similar as the South Slavs into one political entity serves only to exasperate the differences between them.

It is one of those bizarre twists of history that a people who fought so bloodily to tear the Yugoslav union apart should be striving so hard to join a new one in from Brussels. The Yugoslav wars have shown us that multiethnic unions without dictatorial lynchpins like Tito make nationalism and ethnic conflict more, not less, likely.

So it is with great sadness that I receive the Liberal MEP and former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt's announcement that "The ultimate consequences of identity politics are the gas chambers of Auschwitz" (thanks to Dan Hannan for drawing attention to this). More still to hear that this Nazi analogy is frequently thrown at eurosceptics in Brussels.

The sad thing is the Federalists really cannot see what they are doing. In binding nations with very different economies into a single currency with single interest rates they are manufacturing financial collapse and industrial unrest - fertile soil for for nationalism and extremism to grow.

Worse still, their efforts to redress the problem are fermenting resentment between member states and their electors - who they have already shown their contempt for by their shameful dismissal of Lisbon referendums.

I know I will be mocked for predicting the EU causing the next European war and honestly, I pray that I'm wrong. But Britons should bear in mind that where, in the past, we have always had the option of staying out of such conflicts, we are now directly involved. Right at the heart of Europe, as Tony Blair used to say.

'Health and safety gone mad?' No, just a fatal lack of faith

2010-03-04T13:44:00.000-08:00

This morning I was quite irritatingly refused entry to a First bus in Sheffield on account of my carrying a medium black Americano from Caffè Ritazza. Despite the cup having a cover that was almost préservatif in its covering, I was not allowed to enter the vehicle. The driver, very apologetic, threw his hands into the air pleading ’sorry, it’s health and safety!’ while directing my eyes to a helpful no-food-and-drink logo.

It was a minor inconvenience and looking back I should have known better, so I will refrain from using such cliches as ‘hell in a handcart’ and ‘nanny state’ (though this didn’t stop my friends from teasing me with them on Facebook) – I still managed to get to college on time, after all.

But what stuck with me after as I sat back down in the bus shelter to a little more Vampire Weekend (which incidentally is very relaxing) was the resigned sense of powerlessness I observed from the bus driver. That look of frustration as he had to bypass his own common sense for the sake of this increasingly sentient monolith of instruction.

Health and safety, innit? It’s telling, in my view, that the term in itself is often enough to explain why these events occur. It’s almost personified. ‘It’s health and safety.’ Read that back – it doesn’t even make sense. Who is this health and safety?

Now, at this point I would accept your scorn – going off on one about a slightly delayed bus journey is just silly. It would say more about myself and my frame of mind than what I’m attempting to write about if that was, indeed what I was writing about.

But that is not what I’m writing about. In fact the ‘cult of health safety’ is not what I’m writing about either. What I am, in fact, writing about about is this peculiar distrust of common sense that seems to have crept up in the last decade or so. About that fundamental lack of faith in people and their abilities which James Purnell recently criticised his own party for a fortnight ago.

The pitiful irony is that such slavish and unthinking subservience to health and safety rules and regulations – which exist to protect us – actually puts lives in danger. In outlawing discretion and personal judgement it puts otherwise responsible adults into the mental framework of children. In situations where peoples’ lives are on the line, this becomes deadly.

A chilling example of just this occurred in Ayreshire, Scotland in 2008; the inquest of which was reported in The Times yesterday.

Alison Hume, who had fallen down a 60ft mine shaft, was left there for four hours after emergency services arrived because health and safety rules specified that the lifting gear used to lower a firefighter down to her was to be used only by firefighters.

As such, a mountain rescue team were called to get her out. A paramedic who volunteered to treat her was also prevented from being lowered in. In the end she died of a heart attack as the mountain rescue team brought to the surface – six hours after falling down the shaft.

This should not have happened. Christopher Rooney, the first senior firefighter on the scene, told the inquest that ‘on the basis of the manpower and equipment available’ it would have been possible for the firefighters to bring Ms Hume to the surface themselves, without having to wait for the mountain rescue team.

So why was Ms Hume – a mother of two – allowed to die? For the sake of a human life, would it really have been such a crime for the firefighters to use their discretion, their responsibility, their common sense and heroism to break the rules and bring her up themselves?

Dominic Lawson once wrote that when all conduct is made enforceable, the ability for people to behave a certain way purely out of moral choice and conscience is removed. The net effect of this is that otherwise reprehensible behaviour becomes defensible with the get-out ‘it was within the rules’.

Lawson was speaking about MP’s expenses at the time, but the same principle applies. Though in this instance something far more precious was lost and, unlike taxpayer’s money, it can never to be replaced.

The left will always have a selective open mind

2010-02-26T15:24:00.000-08:00

Picture the scene. A Labour education minister smugly glides into a special press conference, knowing they're about to release something big. The room buzzes with a frustrated energy. Pens scratch nervously against their pads in anticipation. The minister produces his paper and with tender glee proceeds to revolutionise on the spot our whole perception of how our children should be educated.

We should take a few lessons from Buddha, he says. Teaching our children to meditate would give them the power of clear, focused thoughts and inner quiet. He adds that we should utilise what we know of psychology - letting children know why they feel the way they do gives them the opportunity to control it when needed. All this would help them become more confidant, responsible and creative adults.

Surely liberals, teachers and arts folks would go mental for this wouldn't they? It's a crying shame no party has ever considered it.

Except the thing is they have. Unfortunately it was proposed by Michael Gove, the Conservatives' education spokesman, meaning that the left have blindly torn it to pieces like the nest of vipers they are.

Now I admit to being no regular reader of the Independent. But I was shocked and appalled by the close-mindedness of the paper's columnists last week. I had always viewed the Independent as a 'progressive' paper (for better or worse), yet here were it's chief writers ridiculing what may be the most progressive proposals for our education system in half a century. And all because they came from the wrong party. Worse still, they proposed nothing more than business as usual.

The lesson from this is clear: if the Cameroons are serious about these radical policies then they should stick to them and implement them with vigour. However, if these spangly education and co-operative plans are a ploy to woo left-leaning voters and institutions then they are making a mistake.

Such a half-hearted commitment to what are essentially high-risk strategies would cause them to be implemented in a cackhanded way for people who never supported them in the first place. It would be a disaster.

The interesting thing is that the Conservatives are taking up policies that have traditionally been the preserve of 'libertarian socialists' of the far left. People like Noam Chomsky and the hoards of 'Black Block' marchers that gather in Trafalgar Square every May Day. For make no mistake - it is the statist Labourites and left 'liberals' that are the 'small-c' conservatives here.

It is not as though this is without precedent. There was an attempt in the 1830s to forge an alliance between 'paternalist' Tories and Radicals - two diametrically opposed factions - to protect the poor from what they saw as the wholesale exploitation by the newly-enfranchised bourgeois Liberals.

It was not a success primarily because the Whig government of the time - keen to keep power after so long out of office - implemented workplace regulation of their own. But the opportunity was there. In 1975, Tony Benn and Enoch Powell shared a platform for the 'no' vote in the referendum over the Common Market.

And while the Conservatives have been trying on Tony Benn's clothes, former Work & Pensions Secretary James Purnell revealed some of his own libertarian sympathies in The Times last week by criticising Labour's statism and calling on politicians to 'trust the people' - a longstanding Tory slogan.

One passage was particularly striking, in which Purnell could seriously have been reading from a Cameroon pamphlet: "People can be disempowered if society discriminates against them, if the market impoverishes them and if the State bullies them. The State can help them to be powerful in respect of all three. But we have other tools than the State."

'There is such a thing as society, it's just not the same thing as the State' - can you tell the difference?

He goes on to ape another well-established Tory attack: "Some of the critique of choice on the Left has been distrust of the people, dressed up as a fear of inequality. Saying we can’t have choice in schools because only the middle classes would use it betrays contempt for our voters."

Purnell's article ought to interest Conservatives because it highlights some of the common ground between 'libertarian socialists' like himself and free-market libertarians such as Dan Hannan. It identifies clearly our shared belief in liberty and peoples' right to organise themselves as they see fit.

Whether left or right, we should be working together in fighting against the statist 'small-c' conservatives such as those in the Cabinet and in papers like the Independent. Against those who would prefer to cling to the crumbling, failed system of their political friends than embrace the progressive policies of their enemies.

Tony Benn said not too long ago that issues unite people, whereas ideologies divide them. With the spectre of a hung parliament looming, we would do well to follow such advice.

Don't cry over Cadbury; there are far greater institutions under threat

2010-01-24T11:58:00.000-08:00

The sale of Cadbury last week to US 'plastic cheese-making' conglomerate Kraft has resonated an astounding level of emotion (and news coverage) amongst the proud chocolate-loving peoples of Great Britain. And rightly so. Cadbury is a national treasure, a shining and very British beacon for responsible, philanthropic entrepreneurial capitalism.

In a way I suppose we hoped it might never happen. We wanted to believe that this proud company, founded by those good Quaker types in 1824 would limp on through the recession and recover its strength on the other side. It's been through worse, right? One hundred and eighty-four more years!

Sadly, it was not to be. Comparable perhaps to the grief of a family who have just lost one of their own to a new life in the colonies, we have had to accept that Cadbury is now essentially an American company. Goodbye, old bean. You are now to Kraft what Rowntree Mackintosh is to Swiss giant Nestlé.

But hang on a minute... We still have Kit Kats don't we? You can still buy tins of Quality Streets with the famous Mackintosh toffee penny, right? What are we so hung up about?

Well, I can't put it as well as Boris Johnson, but there are two primary concerns I believe may explain why Kraft's bid has been so unpopular, not least with Cadbury itself. One is that Kraft was seen as being unlikely to respect the ethos of the company and would meddle in its working practices, perhaps laying off workers in the process.

Another is that the much-loved Cadbury recipe would be tampered with, perhaps into the fatty, sugary mulch that so excites the over stimulated American taste-bud; turning it into a cheaper, lower quality product.

What do those Yanks care about our chocolate anyway? They're only concerned with balance-sheets right? I too have had such a worry. After all, I was only three years old when Nestlé bought Rowntree Mackintosh, but I swear Yorkies didn't taste so much of sugar and lard when I was a nipper.

There is another dimension to this matter however, a concern I happened to catch broadcast on BBC News following confirmation of the sale. This concern quite rightly revolves around the concerns of Cadbury's staff, who - with the changeover - are fearing for their jobs and the working practices they have become accustomed to.

But we've covered this already. The angle the BBC put on the matter was that, with so many British firms now in foreign hands, the country is losing control of its economic levers. Their claim is that British workers would be vulnerable to Kraft laying off foreign rather than domestic workers - that, in a way we would be relinquishing our ability to control our employment statistics and even the welfare of our own people.

Oh dear. This smells suspiciously like 'British jobs for British workers' again. The foul stench of that national socialism the BNP have made so much their own of late. That populist drivel the Prime Minister was so keen to associate himself with in 2007, then drop like a lead balloon following the fascists' endorsement.

But this is beside the point. What really stings me is the gross hypocrisy of this position. Why is it that the BBC are so happy to present the sale of Cadbury to an American company in terms of a loss of control over the economy to foreigners - an issue of sovereignty if ever there was one - yet fail to report how busily engaged we are relinquishing far more important economic, financial, even democratic controls to unelected bureaucrats in Brussels? To report one at the expense of the other is simply madness.

Madness perhaps, or ulterior motive. Is the BBC's position really about sovereignty? Is it really about job losses when the EU is threatening our ability to control inflation and interest rates? Depriving us of the right to self-regulate the lynchpin of our international economy?

Or is that they do not report our loss of sovereignty to Brussels because, like Labour, they have resigned themselves to discarding democracy in order to stealthily impose their shared agenda onto the British people?

As Roy Hattersley explained in 1992; 'Labour has converted to Europe because Europe has converted to socialism'. Perhaps what he meant was that Labour has sold its soul because Europe has converted to socialism.

How has this country got to such a point? Only last week the press also saw it fit to publicise the views of a surgeon so lacking in respect and understanding of the basic foundations of liberal democracy that, with an entirely straight face, he called for the banning of butter.

What madness is this? What fever hangs over the minds of our broadcasters? I was initially rendered speechless, yet even now find it difficult in mustering the words to counter such an insane argument. The totalitarians among us must be absolutely elated.

It's a sad irony indeed that the liberalism of the 1960s which so raged against the 'ban this filth' Mary Whitehouses of this world should have bred such a socially intolerant and reactionary political class today. The unholy alliance of the far left and extremist muslims is an acute example of this.

What has happened to liberty? To democracy? To 'trust the people'? Are these just fusty old eighteenth century ideas? I tell you, if the Conservatives cannot in government invigorate our democracy, reclaim it from Brussels and reverse this totalitarian nanny culture at home then I am afraid to say they have very little use to us at all.

"Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad."

“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it”

2010-01-13T15:29:00.000-08:00

It is often said that in politics, personal attacks surface when the party or politician in question has nothing new to bring to the table - that they have neither coherent policies nor any remaining means of defending their position. How true this is of Gordon Brown and his beleaguered Government. Today we saw, yet again, the now rather tedious spectacle of the Prime Minister evading questions by personally insulting the Leader of the Opposition, this time on the somewhat trivial subject of whether or not his election poster had been airbrushed.

Putting aside the fact that it is very difficult to find any photographic close-up these days that is not touched-up, or indeed of the desirability of such a course of action when your face is being enlarged to around a hundred times its size; the Prime Minister's statements have a double-edged irony. The first is that these trivial side-tracks are coming from a man who we have all seen dismiss attacks by David Cameron over the cohesion the Government by claiming that he is not concentrating on the 'big issues'. The second of course is that in doing so, and so visibly displaying the Government's complete poverty of direction and ideas, he is exposing himself to that insult which he so often levies at David Cameron - that he has no policies and is simply unfit to govern.

But where, I believe I am right in saying, the Prime Minister distinguishes himself from all previous Governments is that this poverty of ideas has led to the increasingly frequent spouting of clear, obvious and really rather large lies from the Cabinet benches in a frenzied attempt to cling to power. I believe I am also right in saying that this is a most disgraceful and rotten way to conduct Government, one that does however have a precedent with the Prime Minister's predecessor surrounding the motives for entry into the Iraq War.

One of the largest and, to my mind, most baffling of Labour lies being peddled at the moment concerns the Conservatives' plans to abolish inheritance tax below £1 million. I would very much like to write at length on this particular point, were it not so self-explanatory. Kicking off the Labour election campaign early in the year, Ed Balls claimed that "They [the Conservatives] want to have an inheritance tax cut which goes to millionaires" - an impossibility surely, given that the qualification for this particular tax cut is that one is not a millionaire. However, it appears that this claim is so radically departed from reality that it has caused a collective silence on the minds of those who hear it. The lie is simply so huge that nobody dares to challenge it.

Another example was the bizarre spectacle this afternoon of watching the Leader of the Opposition attack the massive budget deficit Labour had incurred between 1997 and 2007 - the largest in the industrial world he said, and the reason why Britain was so hard hit by the financial meltdown - only for the Prime Minister to reply by claiming the exact opposite. The United Kingdom entered the recession with the lowest public debt of any industrial nation he said, and that is why the Government has been able to help so many families and business get through the recession.

There is no doubt in my mind that this is very deliberate. Call me an insane conspiracy theorist if you wish, but the New Labour machine has been characterised by, if nothing else, its extensive use of spin to get away with saying that black is indeed white. It does not take a massive stretch of the imagination to construe that this army of spin doctors may use psychological methods of deception - such as those championed by Derren Brown - to mislead voters. Indeed, they would not be doing their job properly (one I do not believe ought to exist) if they did not.

One example of this deliberate misleading of the electorate is the bizarre contention that the recent expenses scandal warrants changes to the constitution of this country. There is simply no connection between the two. It is an out-and-out lie as much as that which attempted (and succeeded) in forming an imaginary link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Both the US Government then and the UK Government now have exploited a catastrophe to further an entirely separate end.

It was The Times that yesterday claimed "The fall-out from the expenses scandal has shaken Parliament and called into question the way the Commons works." Why? How has it done this? The expenses scandal was committed by individual MPs abusing a system of financial renumeration for their own ends. Those to blame are the MPs themselves and those members of the Fees Office who thought it pertinent to authorise such blatant abuses of that system. Even if one were to argue that the system was to blame, there is still no link here to the constitution of this United Kingdom. Furthermore, as the Commons have now voted on a new expenses system, the matter ought surely to be laid to rest.

However, this Government clearly has too much to lose from leaving the matter there. They are perfectly aware that, facing electoral armageddon, a change in the voting system of this country would allow them to cling to power, most likely in coalition with the Liberals who have supported ailing and unpopular Labour Governments so many times in the past. It is a proposal that has, as far as I am aware, no popular clamour and would be pushed through Parliament in the most disgraceful of circumstances for the most perverse of intentions.

Yet, Brown knows now as much as Bush knew then (or at least their advisors) that a lie which so obviously contradicts the available evidence and is so departed from reality, repeated enough times becomes accepted wisdom. Perhaps millions of Americans still believe that the United States invaded Iraq to fight terrorism, despite in doing so toppling a dictator who loathed jihadists and creating Islamic terrorism where it had not hitherto existed. There is no difference in the principle of these two deceptions.

The supreme irony of course, is that our Prime Minister was no. 2 in a government which not only pledged to abolish boom and bust (thereby creating one of the most dramatic "busts" in living memory), but which was also elected in 1997 on the ticket of a new, open and transparent politics. They have either failed spectacularly on both counts or have built the last 12 years of administration on two twin pillars of treachery. Whichever it is, they are continuing to do so with more vigour each passing day. A general election is required now to remove this discredited Prime Minister of a discredited Government - voters would do well to do so, if only to assert their authority and righteous wrath. Let us all pray however, that a Conservative Government lives up to its promises where Labour's has not.

"A lie told often enough becomes the truth"
- Vladimir Lenin

“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it”
- Adolf Hitler

America today is an example of why we so desperately need electoral reform

2009-11-18T15:24:00.000-08:00

It's a familiar predicament to some Conservatives this side of the pond - who do you support in US politics, Republicans or Democrats? That might seem like a very simple question to many on both the centre-right and -left of the British political spectrum, but international affiliations aren't always so clean-cut.

To some it may seem baffling, but there was a considerable swell of support for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential elections from within the Conservative party. It may have been a minority, but it was also a large one - boasting among its members none other than the increasingly independent Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

A leaf through Obama's election manifesto gives some clues as to why this may have been the case - America strong but fair overseas, support for the middle classes, an enterprise culture, individual freedom, opportunity - all traditionally Conservative policies which reflect the far more right-wing nature of American society Obama needed to appeal to than here in Britain.

Then of course there was the historic lure of the first black president of the United States. For many - nearly 150 years since the abolition of slavery - this was reason in itself to support the Democratic ticket.

However, things change. Now that the post-election euphoria is over, President Obama is losing much support over his centralising and statist tendencies, particularly over healthcare. To some it no longer seems unjust or extreme to call him a socialist. Others see him as taking America down the same self-destructive road as Britain did in 1945.

Oppositions change also. Having faltered under an all-embracing moderate in John McCain, the Republican party is taking a particularly steep lurch towards its religious right, firstly with vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, and now with newly rising star Congressman Michele Bachmann. Theirs is a conservatism that, set out of the context of US politics, is quite peculiar and alien to many in the Conservative party.

For example, in response to Obama's health insurance plan, Bachmann told her supporters ;

What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this does not pass.

Supporters who by the way, dress up as Speaker Nancy Pelosi whilst holding "handfuls of bloody foetuses" and use photographs of Jewish corpses from the Holocaust under the heading 'National Socialist Healthcare', according the the Observer.

Aggressive, extremist and downright nasty, it is a conservatism that places great importance on opposing abortion and gay rights, while claiming that the 'real America' (in Palin's words) is the God-fearing Bible Belt of the South and the remote rural communities of the mid-West and Alaska. It is an essentially divisive brand of politics that could not be much farther from the inclusive politics of the Cameroons and the increasingly libertarian values of today's Conservative Future.

There is of course a reason for this - Britain's Conservatives are currently on the way up, while the defeated Republicans are doing much the same as Labour did after 1979 under Michael Foot - retreating to a safe yet self-destructive brand of radical extremism.

In this extremely polarised political climate - socialists to the left, religious fundamentalists to the right - one would be forgiven for thinking that the sensible American voter has very little room for manoevre, particularly when the two main parties together claim 96% of the popular vote. The Libertarian party - at present the largest third party - achieved only 0.8% in the 2006 midterm elections.

This is a recipe for political apathy, and it is no coincidence that voter turnout has rarely strayed above 60% in America for the last 100 years. Conversely, since 1945 British voter turnout has only dipped below the high 70s following Labour's landslide victory in 1997.

Interestingly, whilst America's current problem appears to be the lack of any real middle ground in politics, contemporary Britain appears to be suffering from an abundance of it. In my own canvassing around the Penistone & Stocksbridge constituency I am constantly being told by voters that they feel there is very little difference between the modern Labour party and the Conservatives, and that as such they do not feel inclined to vote.

One manifestation of this is that neither of the two main parties are willing to speak about immigration, despite appearing to be an issue of paramount importance to many of the voters I speak to. Another is that, in seeking the common ground, Labour has completely lost touch with its traditionally working class constituency.

Indeed, the most common response I hear while canvassing Penistone & Stocksbridge is that while the individual has voted Labour all their lives, they will never do so again. Some, attracted by socialist economic policies and a hard line on immigration, openly support the BNP.

In both systems there is a clear democratic deficit that must be closed. A situation in which voters will not vote for a party who best represents their views lest their vote be wasted is an incredibly unjust situation indeed. Worse still, when they vote for extremists because they feel they are not being listened to, this risks bringing down the democratic system itself.

The rise of militarism and fascism in 1920s/30s Japan, for example, happened largely because ordinary Japanese people had entirely lost faith in a corrupt two-party politics that they felt no longer represented them.

Some kind of electoral reform would go a long way towards renewing the youth of the state (to paraphrase Macaulay's speech on the Reform Bill, 1831) and giving people back the confidence of knowing that every one of their votes count - whether they wish to vote Labour, Conservative, UKIP, Green or Monster Raving Loony.

However, in this country there is one problem with introducing proportional representation or alternative voting, and that is the monarchy. Without a strong, directly elected presidency (as in France), a political system of this kind is at risk of deadlock and over-compromising consensus. This has been demonstrated no more vividly than in Belgium, which between June and December 2007 was unable to form even an interim government.

My own suggestions of republicanism have been met with a surprisingly passionate defence of monarchy, given the drubbing that the royal family frequently receive in the nation's press. However, that is not to say that there have not been sympathetic ears to the principle of the suggestion.

Some suggested making the position of prime minister elected - though this seems to have constitutional ramifications so complex as to make it impossible - whilst others suggested creating an elected position above the prime minister, serving as a constitutional representative of the sovereign (which in this case could mean either the monarch or the people) leaving the PM to represent the House of Commons.

Given that a similar situation exists in Commonwealth realms such as Canada and Australia, this doesn't sound like such an unlikely suggestion. While not an elected position, the Governer-General in these states serves as a representative of the Queen and fulfils the de facto duties of a head of state.

Whether this elected position would be named Governor-General, President, or even Lord Protector, the question of electoral reform cannot fail to be an issue in future parliaments. It is absolutely vital in order to ensure that Her Majesty's government is indeed representative of her subjects and that our democracy is both strengthened and perpetuated.

However, this must be done in the spirit of full, honest and careful debate in both the country and in the House of Commons. It must not be done, as has been attempted by this dying government, in the spirit of expediency, populism and panic.

Britain must stand up to the bullies in Brussels and in Washington

2009-10-27T07:23:00.000-07:00

We are quite accustomed in this country to the idea of Americans not really knowing what they're talking about, reducing all things down to their simplest forms and generally being a little slow on the uptake. This caricature of the ignorant American may be somewhat unfair to the American people themselves, but I do not believe it is a wholly unfair assessment of the American media.

Case in point is a recent and rather depressing article by Roger Cohen of the New York Times highlighted by ConservativeHome yesterday. Sadly, Cohen's complete ignorance on European affairs and the nature of the European Union serves well to disguise his Oxford education (then again, Nick Griffin went to Cambridge...), while his entirely genuine and shameless assumption that all western nations exist to serve the United States marks him out very clearly as the archetypal American.

In fact it really is quite difficult to decide where to start with this spectacularly bad piece of journalism. Perhaps the part where he asserts that, in forming the European Conservatives & Reformists Group (ECR), Cameron was "bowing to his party's Euroskeptics [sic]" rather than pushing to its logical conclusion the established Conservative desire to reform the European Union (hence the name!) into something more accountable and democratic. This is something that the European People's Party has thus far lacked the political will - some might say intent - to tackle, making the establishment of the ECR something akin to common sense.

Or perhaps I should have started with Cohen's clear lack of primary research. This is very sloppy journalism indeed. He is, for example, quite happy to paint Poland's Law & Justice and Latvia's For Fatherland & Freedom as "right-wing fringe parties" and "Cameron's loopy European Parliament allies". He seems unaware however, that one of these 'loopy fringe parties' currently provides Poland with its sitting President, while the other participates in Latvia's present governing coalition. The idea that these two nations are governed the extremists on the lunatic fringe is something that must be wholly offensive and contemptible to the good people who elected them.

Indeed, Cohen's knowledge of the facts seems so sparse that apparently the mere mention of the name For Fatherland & Freedom is enough to make his case! ("These include a Polish politician who thinks apologizing to Jews for World War II massacres is a bad idea and a Latvian party called For Fatherland and Freedom"). This is clearly designed to evoke western images of Nazi Germany and Robert Harris' novel, despite the term 'fatherland' being very common and entirely acceptable in eastern Europe.

Then of course there is Michał Kamiński. Cohen astutely observes that, on David Miliband's desk there "lay highlighted articles from the Jewish Chronicle about Michal Kaminski of Poland’s Law and Justice Party", and that Kamiński "claims Poland should not have apologized for massacring hundreds of Jews at Jedwabne in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1941". Jews ought to be pretty mad about this, right?

Let me direct you to some quotations from an article by the Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard. Funnily enough, it's titled 'David Miliband's insult to Michal Kaminski is contemptible'. I would not normally quote at such length in an article, but these lies have been blown so out of proportion I believe it is necessary that I do so;

Mr Kaminski is a mainstream centre-right politician who would, were he British, fit naturally into the Atlanticist, free-market wing of the Conservative Party.

...there is simply no evidence that Mr Kaminski is an antisemite, only a series of politically motivated assertions. It is not Kaminski who is odious; it is those using antisemitism as a tool for their own political ends who deserve contempt.

Mr Kaminsk’s argument was that apologising for the collective guilt of Poles let the individual murderers off the hook. Far from trying to cover up the massacre, Mr Kaminski was using the president’s apology to make a wider point.

The massacre was not committed by “the Poles” against “the Jews”, but was a vile crime committed by specific individuals. The victims were not “Jews”, as if they were the stateless people declared by the Nazis, but fellow Poles.

A further accusation is that, in an interview, he said that he would apologise only if someone "from the Jewish side" apologises for what "the Jews" did during the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland from 1939 to 1941. Mr Kaminski flatly denies this, and no one has yet produced a shred of serious evidence to contradict him.

David Miliband owes him a grovelling apology.

He most certainly does. But the lies and mud-slinging do not end there. Both Cohen and Miliband flatly deny that there is any chance of a federal European state emerging any time in the future.

Now, I am not entirely against the idea of a a federal European Union in itself - indeed, Winston Churchill was an early advocate - but what really gets me are the constant bare-faced lies, denials and deceptions by our politicians. These began with Edward Heath in 1970 ("There is no question of any erosion of essential national sovereignty") and have continued to this day.

In Cohen's article, Miliband claims that the Conservatives are chasing "the phantom ghost of federalism", while Cohen bleats in agreement that "Tory little-Englandism has become a strange anachronism since the end of the Cold War dictated a broad Europe rather than a deep one, a loose bloc rather than a United States of Europe" (dictated by whom? How?). Miliband is either very innocent to the facts or just blatantly lying, but many of his European counterparts do not feel the need to keep up such a pretence.

Helmut Kohl for example - the former Christian Democrat chancellor of Germany - declared in 1997 that "We want the political unification of Europe." His Social Democratic successor Gerhard Schröder followed this in 1999 by stating that the introduction of the euro was "in no way just an economic decision. Monetary union is demanding that we Europeans press ahead resolutely with political integration."

These two politicians belong to the European Union's two largest political parties - the centre-right European People's Party and centre-left Party of European Socialists. This illustrates with extreme clarity the need for the ECR in the European Parliament if those opposed to federalism (and I assume this includes Miliband?) are to have their voices heard and their influence felt.

Not of course that this matters to the Americans. Cohen points out that "Under George W. Bush, friends were privileged. Under Obama, friends have ceded to American interests coldly assessed. And on issues from Afghanistan to climate change, Obama wants Europe to step forward." An article by the news weekly New Europe (featuring a disgustingly-used photograph of William Hague in mid-wave) goes on to ask "Could it be that the Americans best friends will not be the British, but the Germans? How will that affect Anglo-US relations?" before seemingly demolishing this concern by observing that "The ‘special relationship’ between Blair and Bush turned out to be more akin to the relationship between a dog and a lamppost."

This is, however what Anglo-American relations have always been since 1945. Any 'special relationship' has always been a personal one, not a political one. From Churchill & Truman to Thatcher & Reagan to Blair & Bush, it has only ever flourished between politicians, not states.

In reality the United States does not care about Britain and never has. Make no mistake, the fallacy of a 'special relationship' serves only two functions - to delude Britons into feeling they are important on the world stage and to serve the American national interest. Right now that national interest is Europe (though if the Americans believe that a strong EU will ever be strung along they are sadly mistaken), which means that both the 'special relationship' and our sovereign right to make our own decisions can go to hell. Obama wants us to fall into line so we'd better listen.

Now, perhaps paradoxically, I believe we ought to throw in our lot with Europe over America for this very reason, and so that we may strive to create the kind of union that as Conservatives we can whole-heartedly support. Only in doing so will we finally put to rest the lie of a special relationship between the United States and Britain. For let us not forget that this is a country that has consistently supported Irish republicanism in Northern Ireland and even at times the IRA. It is a nation that during the Suez crisis of 1956 sided with the dictatorial Abdul Nasser over her own British, French and Israeli allies - only for the Egyptian nationalist to repay the favour by aligning his country with the USSR!

It is true that we are not and never will be in a position to go it alone in the world isolated from Europe and America. Our imperial past and national character also prevent us from taking the road of nations such as Canada or Japan - quietly sitting a few rows back in politics while while still possessing financial clout. We need to be part of something greater.

So I say to you that we do not have a stake in the United States - that ended in 1783. So let's stop pretending and forget about it. We do however have a stake in Europe. This means that we have a duty to fight for the kind of union that we believe in - one that we can be an enthusiastic part of - and to stand up to the bullies who would deny us this, whether they come from Brussels or from Washington.

A conflict of loyalty

2009-06-06T12:57:00.000-07:00

With the European Parliament elections over and with all our dutifully placed X's in that increasingly meaningless little eurobox, I'd like to take this opportunity to seriously challenge every single Tory voter out there. Having tottered home from the polling booth to the quite exquisite sight of a Prime Minister-in-roasting, my question to you is this. How close did you get to doing it? You know what I mean. Come on... how many times did that string-tied little pencil dart from one end of the (rather large) ballot paper to the other? In all seriousness? For I hazard there was barely a blue finger in the land that did not totter, even for a moment, over that most tempting of forbidden fruits - I speak, of course, of voting Ukip.

It is a temptation that has, for better or worse, already consumed a number of Adams from the Conservative party in recent months. Lord Pearson, Lord Willoughby de Broke, Lord Dartmouth, Stuart Wheeler, and most recently former chairman Stanley Kalms. Lord Tebbit may prove to be the latest casualty of this trend if he doesn't learn to keep his mouth shut. At the end of Tory Bear's Conference after-party in Birmingham last year, I myself (vaguely) remember having to help convince one young member (while blind drunk) that remaining with the Conservatives was the wisest and, in the long term, more effective choice over joining Ukip (p.s. if you're ever in a position to be DJ-ing at Party Conference, lay off the free champers...).

It seems to me that the cause of this whole storm in a teacup may be the nature of politics itself. The question being; is it all about integrity and conviction or is it simply pragmatism and expediency? Arguably the fine art of politics is finding a balance between the two - between what you believe to be right and what you believe you can do. Yet, in a two-party system it can often seem as though the latter assumes a significantly greater importance. This seems particularly true concerning the European Union because its very structure, it's raison d'être goes right to the heart of so many core Conservatives ideas on democracy, the state, the rule of law, markets, liberty and national identity. Every single one is touched (one might say trampled) upon directly by the EU. This fundamentally undemocratic, unaccountable, protectionist, coercive, illiberal, wasteful and vastly bureaucratic monolith that undermines, in every one of its institutions, the very idea of sovereignty itself - whether that be national or popular.

Yet still two of the three main parties wholeheartedly support our membership of this gorgon. Furthermore, that the Conservatives' position is ambiguous at best, non-existent at worst makes the matter profoundly more frustrating. Splits orchestrated by a few 'big beasts' in the 1990s have naturally made discussion of EU membership a taboo subject in the upper echelons of the party machinery. Yet practically every grass-roots Tory you are likely to meet is, for whatever reason, virulently anti-EU and I dare say, strongly for withdrawal. All the same, the Conservative party does nothing. The fear of splits is all-embracing and, right before a general election, perfectly understandable. The much-celebrated presence of Kenneth Clarke in the Shadow Cabinet - who has already spoken against party policy on a number of occasions - becomes something of a liability in this respect.

And yet the most pressing argument on the subject is also the one that appears to be the least heard. Namely, that the Europe the British people approved membership of in the 1975 Referendum was not the same as the Europe we have today. It didn't even have the same name - the European Economic Community sold to us then was of a Common Market and nothing more. Edward Heath, the incumbent Conservative Prime Minister at the time of our accession (1973), was very vocal on this point, stressing that it did in no way entail any loss of sovereignty, then or in the future. Labour incidentally were very much against the Common Market, which is why the Referendum took place following their election victory in 1974. How times have changed.

The puzzle is that, even having made this promise to the nation, Heath maintained to his death in 2005 that gaining EEC membership for Britain was his greatest achievement - even after the EU had already made extensive inroads into our national sovereignty. Today, more than thirty years after the 1975 Referendum, the EU makes more than 75% of the laws passed in this country. Yet we have been a denied a referendum on a treaty that would enshrine an even further encroachment of this already precious remaining sovereignty. Time and time again the British public are told that they are wrong by the political class, despite 55% opposing EU membership.

This is the fear that appears to drive the many crises in faith we are seeing among Conservative members - that the only realistic way to stop this now very open and unabashed drive towards political federalism is unilateral withdrawal from the European Union. What I gather is making Ukip so appealing is the belief that the Conservatives are never likely to deliver on this. As the only vaguely eurosceptic of the main parties, their ambiguity appears to make Britain's absorption into a federal European super-state and the permanent loss of our sovereignty all but inevitable.

For make no mistake - if the Lisbon Treaty is successfully put into law, the sort of concessions that John Major extracted at Maastricht in 1993 will become a thing of the past. Britain's voice - which has always strayed far from the course taken by those in Europe - will be subsumed under a tidal wave of qualified majority voting in a 27-member union. Any who maintain the illusion that we have ever exercised any influence in shaping the EU would surely see this vanish under Lisbon. Our unique laws, legal system, economy and constitution would be mercilessly trampled under the stampeding tyranny of a foreign majority. Not for nothing did Peter Drucker claim in The End of Economic Man (1939) that 'The new freedom preached in Europe is ... the right of the majority over the individual'. Any power we have left to prevent the mauling of our constitution and our liberties would be lost. And let's face it - they've already taken quite a beating under Labour.

Don't get me wrong - I have no doubt that David Cameron dislikes the EU just as much as Nigel Farage. It's just that there is very little he can actually do. He leads a very broad-based party and would lead the country - both of which have very powerful and influencial voices against any radical change in Britain's membership. Some have a genuine enthusiasm for the EU, while others - though hardly enthusiastic europhiles - seem to believe that the consequences of our leaving would be too damaging to Britain's trade and standing with the rest of the world. It is also frequently leveled at the Conservatives - and not without justification - that any referendum on the Lisbon Treaty would be legally useless once and if it is ratified. The moment it becomes law, the only way to reverse it would be to leave the EU altogether. Indeed, this has been cited by Polly Toynbee and other 'liberal' voices as grounds for not giving the public a say in the matter at all. This kind of a headache I can perfectly understand David Cameron wishing to save for better days.

So what will he do? At this point the answer seems quite uncertain - he could really go either way, and the decision will reveal much about the strength of his convictions. Does he believe he can achieve more in positive dialogue with the EU or in unleashing the British public's misgivings to it? The whole conflict reminds me very much of the personal and political antagonism between William Pitt and Charles James Fox. As a biographer of Pitt and future Foreign Secretary, I do hope that William Hague might appreciate the analogy. He will, after all be the public face of this government's action or inaction with regards to Europe.

Both Pitt and Fox led factions in the House of Commons that called themselves Whigs (though Pitt is now considered the first modern Tory) and their policies were broadly of the same aristocratic mould. Both favoured some degree of electoral and constitutional reform, in particular limiting the powers of the monarch. However, whilst Pitt - as the King's First Minister - approached this with a great deal of caution, Fox passionately bellowed from the Parliamentary hilltops as a matter of personal and political principle. Where the French Revolution had effectively torpedoed Pitt's must-cherished hopes of reform (and at times even pushed him to suspend habeas corpus), for Fox it served only to fan the flames of his already very vocal radicalism and hostility to George III. Indeed, since the American Revolution he had taken to wearing only the blue and cream colours of the Continental Army at all times.

Of course, the crucial thing to note about the careers of Pitt and Fox is that for the 20 years between 1783 and 1806, it was Pitt and his party that were in government while Fox was in seemingly eternal Opposition. Indeed, it brings us neatly back to that fundamental question - what is politics? Is it the Foxite expression of pure, undying principle and integrity, or the more Pittite art of the possible? More specifically; is an anti-federalist more influential in the Conservative party or in Ukip?

I believe this question is central to the conflict raging in the hearts of a good many otherwise loyal Tory supporters. It will be one of the many difficult issues facing the new Conservative government when this current motley crew finally goes overboard, and will need to be addressed with both sensitivity and boldness. Failure in this task would undoubtedly be a disaster both for the country and for the Conservative party, the latter of which have arguably suffered enough over the question of Europe. Nonetheless, it will need to be settled. For, if you will excuse the reference, if it is not, the time may come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which we have ourselves wrestled with for perhaps too long.

A salute to the heritage of the EU

2009-04-19T15:05:00.000-07:00

It's recently come to my attention that euro bank notes are probably the only paper currency in the world that don't have any historical or monarchical figures on them. No doubt this is because it would be near impossible to find the appropriate historical figures without offending a good handful of nations whose forebears didn't quite make it. Indeed, this is the case right down to the bridges and 'gateways' featured on the notes, which aren't even real structures, lest they incur the petty jealousies of member states.

Hence I've taken it upon myself to come up with a solution for this predicament. In a multi- and supra-national state, it would be understandably difficult to come up with any criteria for a historical figure that could justify leaving many nations' heroes out. However, there is one that to me seems perfectly reasonable - all the men who have laid the groundwork for the EU by attempting to force European unity.

True, this hardly includes all member states, but it makes a damn good tour of the continent. Candidates come from as far as Italy, Germany, France, Austria, and even Turkey. All these nations have, at one time or another, had rulers who have attempted to force Europe together under a common yoke, whether they liked it or (as was most often the case) not. What better way, I ask you, to celebrate the heritage of this great European project than the tyrants and despots who set such a precedent for it?

Julius Cæsar (100-44 BC)

Charlemagne (742-814)

Suleiman I of the Ottoman Empire (1494-1566)

Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire (1500-1558)

Louis XIV of France (1638-1715)

Napoléon I of France (1769-1821)

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)

Needless to say, most of these rulers (the exceptions being Cæsar and Charlemagne) failed in their ambitions to forcibly unite Europe. Usually this was a direct result of British intervention. I do hope the significance of this fact is not lost...

St. George's Day doesn't have to be all about football and skinheads

2009-03-24T14:25:00.000-07:00

I was struck the other day by an extraordinary, though admittedly rather odd similarity between two characters that will be familiar to Britons of all ages. Giants of popular culture; they're both yellow, rather portly, a little thick, have an obsession with snacking, and manage to be somehow both annoying and lovable at the same time. Who could I possibly be referring to? Yes I'm afraid it's my old friend Winnie-the-Pooh. And Homer J. Simpson.

Well don't look at me, I told you it was odd. But it does go beyond them both being fat, stupid and yellow... trust me. Consider this. Like Homer, Pooh's gluttony frequently gets him into tight spots (such as Rabbit's rabbit-hole), and he often breaks off, mid-conversation, to fantasise about or look for food. In Eeyore Loses a Tail (1926), for example, Pooh is in Owl's house, who is devising a plan to help find the missing appendage...

"We write a notice to say that we will give a large something to anyone who finds Eeyore's tail".
"I see, I see," said Pooh, nodding his head. "Talking about large somethings," he went on dreamily, "I generally have a small something about now - about this time in the morning," and he looked wistfully at the cupboard in the corner of Owl's parlour; "just a mouthful of condensed milk or what-not, perhaps with a lick of honey-"
"Well then," said Owl, "we write out this notice, and we put it up all over the Forest."
"A lick of honey," murmered Bear to himself, "or - or not, as the case may be".

Pooh then proceeds to follow Owl's conversation without a single clue over what is being said, giving generic responses along the lines of 'yes' and 'no' intermittently. Remind you of anybody?

In another story, Piglet and Pooh decide they are going to catch a Heffalump, using the last of Pooh's honey as bait in the trap they have set. In the middle of the night however, Pooh decides that he can't take it anymore and proceeds to get his honey back. Finding the jar, he realises that actually, he'd eaten most of the honey anyway so sticks his head into it to get to the bottom. The next morning, Piglet goes to check on the trap, believing he could hear a Heffalump inside. Scared, he calls for Christopher Robin, who in a fit of laughter realises that - in typical Simpsons style - the 'Heffalump' is in fact Pooh, ramming himself into a tree root, desperately trying to remove the honey pot from his head.

Am I seriously suggesting, I hear you cry, that Matt Groening subconsciously stole Winnie-the-Pooh's character? Perhaps. Winnie-the-Pooh was probably fairly popular in America to have been adapted at all. Pooh is, of course much more well-spoken than Homer, despite also being, by his own admission, "of very little brain"; but then that's because he's English, not American. And that's just the point isn't it? The world may be more familiar with Walt Disney's corruption of Milne's creation, but this giant of children's literature, in his original form, encapsulates so much of that traditional Englishness. Bumbling, well-mannered, a bit on the cheeky side perhaps but overall a lovable scamp... Not entirely unlike the current Mayor of London in fact, who I incidentally have already compared to Winnie-the-Pooh on these very pages.

Yes, you were right to have faith. This piece had to be moving somewhere. Boris Johnson has of course announced that he's going to give St. George's Day a proper send-off this year in London with a boon of official events celebrating hundreds of years of English culture throughout the week. And it's about time. We seem to be curiously cautious about our identity here in England at a time where our fellow islanders in Scotland and Wales are seeing a renaissance in theirs. And yet, in doing so we've enabled the crazies and the ruffians to hijack this rich and diverse tapestry, and in no way more than the cross of St. George itself. The English flag may adorn the top of every single Anglican church in the land, but somehow we've allowed it become more representative of football hooligans and knuckle-scraping racists. The very fact that even Billy Bragg is in agreement with me here demonstrates the urgency with which this needs to be addressed.

In fretting over ridiculous things such as whether muslims might be offended by a symbol of the crusades (which frankly, has to be offensive to the good sense of English muslims) we've forgotten that England, and its flag, can be just as much about Winnie-the-Pooh and Gillray, Elizabeth I and Shakespeare, Christopher Wren and Charles II, Jeeves & Wooster, Gladstone & Disraeli, Dickens and Darwin, Morecambe & Wise, John Lennon and Jarvis Cocker. Not only is England the absolute mother of all parliaments, not only did we bring trade and prosperity to the far corners of the earth and risk it all to free Europe from tyranny (twice); but it's hardly a stretch to say that we damn well have the finest comedians and musicians on the globe right now. The Americans would certainly testify to that - English bands and sitcoms have seldom seen such a enormous wave of popularity in the States, in a climate which we've become far more accustomed to it being the other way round. Cultural hegemony my fanny.

So I say break the habit of a lifetime everybody and stick St. George's Day on your calendars this year. It's April 23, which you'll of course already know happens to be William Shakespeare's birthday (I knew none of these things before today). After all, England's given a hell of a lot to the world, and we've very openly received a lot in return. So I think it's about time we started to feel good about the fact. All of us. And maybe even have a barbeque or something to celebrate. Yeah, barbeque. Cumberland sausage, anyone?

The surveillance state we're in

2009-03-09T13:52:00.000-07:00

This Saturday your correspondent laid back after work - feet up, shoulders relaxed, and a plate of feta by his side for a quiet peruse through the Guardian weekend edition. And he was angry. Real angry. You know, blood pressure high, heart doing star jumps, steam out of the ears...the whole shebang. Hellenic dairy products were flung, plates crashed against the wall in the tradition of this fine cheese's home turf... Okay I didn't quite go that far. But what was it that so infuriated this laid back, jazz-tapping model of Tory serenity? Arthur Scargill dribbling tripe about the Miner's Strike? Polly Toynbee shrieking half-baked demands for proportional representation? (I do actually support the latter, but only on the provision of a strong executive - yep, that means a president folks!).

No, these trivial yet irritatingly mistaken points illicit only chuckles, or withering despair at best. What really ground my gears, as I imagine it did many a Guardian hack, was the story burning through the front page. It's a perfect example of the kind of issue that ought to unite both left and right of sensible British politics, though in practice it rarely does - namely, Labour's wholesale destruction and mangling of our civil liberties.

The investigation launched by the paper allegedly reveals that 'Police are targeting thousands of political campaigners in surveillance operations and storing their details on a database for at least seven years'. Now, I say allegedly, but this writer remembers very vividly, back in his half-arsed lefty-student days, watching police videorecord and photograph protesters at the 2005 May Day march whilst deliberately spooking kids they'd already 'looked into' by using their first names in speaking to them. Naturally, wise marchers like myself wore bandannas over our faces for that very reason, which gives me hope that I myself am not filed away on this assiduous exercise in voyeurism.

But that is not the most shocking revelation of the report. That the police are so diligently cataloging scruffy, idealistic lefty types is sadly not all that surprising - these people fit the bill perfectly for 'potentially dangerous' individuals to the narrow-minded and paranoid mindset the police so frequently employ. After all, they don't look quite right do they? And why are they out on the streets marching when they could be doing it on the Wii at home?

What does, however, really send shock-waves thundering down to the very foundation of our democracy is that the police appear to be specifically targeting journalists in their observations. Whether these people are part of the protest or merely doing their job and investigating activists' views, they somehow manage to command the full attention of the force whenever they waver into the view of that sinister lens, according to the Guardian's report.

What's so angering and just plain old nail-bitingly scary about all this is that both journalists and protesters are being treated as social deviants and potential criminals simply for engaging in 'activities' that are (a) accepted and (I had thought) encouraged in a healthily functioning democracy and (b) part of the very fabric of human nature itself. Yet here we see the journalist's natural sense of curiosity questioned, their inquisitive role in the workings of the free press treated with suspicion. For the protester, their very need to express themselves on issues which concern them is given a disapproving eye, treated almost as though it were an abomination to the species. It makes one think, childish as it sounds, that perhaps the police are not so satisfied in enforcing the law as much as social conformity and thought processes. After all, if you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear, right Jacqui? Yeh Blunky?

It's interesting that I find myself speaking out on this issue much as I would have all those years ago - that red moaning minnie that I've come to loathe so much. But this really is something that affects us all. Under Labour, this country seems to have become increasingly enthusiastic about treating good, law-abiding citizens as though they were dangerous threats to national security. These recent revelations come shortly after Jacqui Smith - the very latest in New Labour's long pedigree of nut-job, Stalin-esque Home Secretaries - announced her dream of an enormous government database storing text messages, emails, internet traffic and phone calls. All with the appropriate safeguards in place, you must understand.

But the central point to all this madness is thus - whether or not you believe these 'appropriate safeguards' actually mean anything (and let's face it - given the incompetence of our civil service they equate to precisely d**k), irrespective of whether you think Labour are mutilating our constitution with the best possible intentions, and entirely disregarding whether or not you think they can be trusted with this god-like responsibility upon their shoulders; the very nature of a democracy - hell, any state - is that there is absolutely no way of knowing for sure who is going to inherit all that information in the future.

How pleased do you think Hitler would have been to have found all leading 'trouble-makers', protesters and journalists conveniently gathered together with their personal details in one government database when he took office in 1933? Or how much bother do you think we could have saved the Bolsheviks and their army of Cheka spies if the Provisional Government had left them a handy device recording peoples' every correspondence when they seized power in 1917? I'm sure Ayatollah Khomeini would've had a far easier time butchering his opponents in 1979 if only he'd had all that at his fingertips. They included anyone who happened to disagree with him by the way - from revolutionary communists to moderate Muslims and middle-class democrats.

WAKE UP

It only takes one crisis, with only one group of well-organised and fanatical nut-jobs willing to exploit it (one of which is making remarkable electoral progress in local British politics) and then that's it. It's over. Your rights, your freedoms, your very ability to think for yourself. Gone. You may even be one of the many that find their way into a concentration camp or simply shot dead where they stand (a ride on the Tube, anybody?).

In Russia, as in Germany and more recently Iran, these seizures of power brought forth human tragedies on an unprecedented scale. With the surveillance powers currently enjoyed by the Government and security services, these people would have been able to eliminate any opposition overnight. The 'Night of Long Knives' and Kristallnacht would have looked like nativity plays in comparison. With the mind-bending proposals Jacqui 'Insanity' Smith is currently putting forward, they could ensure that it never, ever, ever surfaces again. And that, my friends, is what you call a real Orwellian Nightmare.

The ugly new face of socialism in Barnsley

2009-02-27T16:46:00.001-08:00

Zzzz..pffgh...bphff...nudge....NUDGE...huh? wah? hahh? Your correspondent was slumped on the precipice of catatonic vegetation at a local services committee in Dodworth, South Yorkshire. 'Any more questions?' Ripped out of this stupor by a panel of grinning nudge-nudge crony-socialist councillors, he for some reason felt it appropriate to blurt something out about the BNP's worrying surge at the last local elections (they'd come second in near every ward round here) and what exactly are you planning to do about it, eh? More fool you, the panel seemed to say - this geriatric slumber-party was strictly forbidden from discussing party politics (angers the blood you see) and besides, monotonous droning on the subject of what's allowed in which recycle bin and what to do about 'loitering' kids is far more interesting.

Anyway as it happened, one of the female councillors was quite keen to speak to me about this issue after the meeting. Turns out that at the very moment my mouth lept into auto-pilot on the BNP there was a member of this curious band of political mutants sat right behind me. Tosh, I thought. They know what people think of them and they should bally well be reminded. Naturally though Comrade 'Race-Hate' Porter felt the need to treat me to a passionate defence of that unique conflagration of idiocy and prejudice that so characterises the mind of homo nationalus.

What followed, as Porter oozed at indefatigable pace with seemingly no end was utterly bizarre. But like most things bizarre it was also utterly fascinating and really quite insightful. In one phrase Porter unshrouded the peculiar myseries of the BNP's success in threatening centuries of one-party Labour rule in Barnsley. While he was coughing up bile about the councillors present, your reporter chanced upon a diamond in the jetstream of slurry. Comrade Portly proudly, and with not a trace of irony touted inbetween his repeated and really quite annoying commitments to democracy that the BNP were 'more like old Labour'. Aha. Suddenly it began to make sense...

Anyone living in Barnsley will know exactly why the people round here have always voted Labour. Since the nineteenth century the town has been a predominantly mining borough, with a homogenous and heavily working class culture. In the '80s and '90s this appeared to be threatened as the remaining pits were closed under the Conservatives, which I can tell you has left a very real and lasting bitterness. The female councillor mentioned earlier seemed to think that the BNP's success was due to the recent trickle of immigrants into Barnsley (and I mean trickle) and what she called our more individualist and sectarian society, with people selfishly pursuing their own interests without regard for wider society. Now, this is typical and very familiar Labour windbagging of course, but in this case it reveals a particular weakness for Labour politicians - their inability to see that the working classes are beginning to feel abandoned by them. If anything, the truth is probably closer to what Captain Race-Hate said himself - that the BNP are indeed 'more like old Labour' in the ways that seem to count to folk round here.

For, what many people overlook is that the BNP are a staunchly anticapitalist party, and this is what makes them so dangerous. Take this festering nugget for instance, taken from a BNP magazine and posted on the Barnsley BNP blog

In its opposition to the global capitalist society, our rejection of free trade and call for tariffs on selected imports that can damage our remaining manufacturing base, all necessary steps to give some insulation from the worst aspects of unstable world markets, the BNP has again been proven right.

That of course could've been straight out of the mouths of the Socialist Worker's Party and no-one would have batted an eyelid. And, as anyone who has ever dealt with socialist groups before will know, if you oppose the entire economic and social composition of society as it stands then you can promise people pretty much anything. Combine this old-fashioned socialism with an almost ravenous opposition to political correctness and a good dollop of race hate and you have the uneducated working-class vote in the bag. Like the socialist parties, they can capitalise on what many people now see as there being no difference between the Conservatives and Labour. Indeed, in their insipid literature, they frequently refer to the 'Lib-Lab-Con' parties as one entity, with themselves as a revolutionary element representing true democracy.

All this presents a very serious challenge to both the Labour and Conservative parties in Barnsley. For Labour the lesson is clear - don't take your electorate for granted. Decades of guaranteed victory has made the party arrogant and distant from their voters. For the Conservatives, a more confidant, open and implicit approach to policy needs to be taken, specifically targeting and countering BNP campaigns. The nationalists thrive, unlike most parties, from targeting voters on both sides in their campaigns. The insidiousness of this multi-faced Medusa must be fought vigorously and in concert by all those who oppose prejudice and ignorance for it to be vanquished. For Labour and the Conservatives, this will entail putting aside their differences and working together in defence of our common values.

Oh, Pooh...

2009-02-24T12:12:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking lately that this little archive of practice rants and digitised scribblings needs to change dramatically from now on in light of the highly unlikely, but nonetheless disconcerting possibility that there's anyone out there actually bored enough to actually read any of it. If you are indeed out there and not, in fact, a fevered figment of my imagination then I salute you. For your patience and, of course, for your muffled giggles. Because let's face it, if you are out there, you deserve better.

And as you, this possibly fictional reader will no doubt have noticed in some perhaps Schrödingerean assessment, too many of these articles resemble essays and suffer greatly from a very academic tone. This, of course, makes me very popular with examiners but just doesn't cut the proverbial mustard in the world of witty, on-the-pulse column journalism. They are also few and far-between if I were, for a moment, to be extraordinarily understating. There's simply no rhythm to them. No voom to their vocabulary, no rich sensory soliloquies with off-the-cuff and serendipitous similes.

Okay that's a bit much, but you get the gist. Of course, recent reading of Boris Johnson's hack compendium Lend Me Your Ears has influenced this seemingly sudden revelation, but then so has your author's simultaneous delve into the Complete Collection of A. A. Milne's one and only Winnie-the-Pooh...

Yes, it's true. It's taken not one but two blond, honey-craven and slightly overweight ursidæ to bring home the bitter fruits of my neglect of English literature over the last few years. Don't judge me too harshly. Peering meekly over an enormous in-tray of academic textbooks and historiographical tomes your plucky narrator felt he had no other recourse than to tell prose 'to bollocks' in the face of such an apparently superior truckload of factual and utilitarian knowledge.

Well no more I say! This blog shall be fluid, it shall be frequently updated and what's more it shall be readable & read! It shall also, for some reason, vaguely resemble Fisher Price packaging in its appearance. Perhaps the sharp, restrained lines and points of Times New Roman were too indicative of the old blog's failings for your author to merit retention and are, in any case, clearly not as groovey as a font once used by Pulp...

I shall leave you then with my, to date, most favourite passage of Pooh by that Wodehosian giant of children's literature, A. A. Milne. It comprises, funnily enough, the very first words of the very first stanza of the very first volume of the very first Pooh, first published (for the very first time) way back in 1926.

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn't. Anyhow, here he is at the bottom, and ready to be introduced to you. Winnie-the-Pooh.

Keep that dream alive Pooh.

The Glenrothes Axis

2008-11-01T19:06:00.000-07:00

The coming by-election in the Scottish borough of Glenrothes is one that is already looking to be a very close call between Labour and the SNP. It is also perhaps the most glaring example of how outmoded the traditional 'Left-Right' political axis is as regards politics within the United Kingdom.

As there is sadly, no Conservative presence in Glenrothes (as everywhere in Scotland) the two parties contesting the election are the immediately 'Right wing' nationalists and what one would presumably regard as their opposite, the self-described socialist and decidedly 'Left wing' Labour.

Yet in an election that cannot help but be defined overwhelmingly by the current state of the economy, there is actually very little to distinguish between the two parties' policies. Both are traditionally protectionist, interventionist, and in favour of State ownership. Both have been forced to climb down a peg or two in this post-Thatcherite political arena, but to be sure, only a couple.

For example, although Alex Salmond has paid lip service in the recent past on freeing up the Scottish economy for foreign investment, since becoming First Minister he has also sent Scottish State expenditure and benefit payments through the roof - a combination that would, to anyone with a reasonable grasp of economics seem utterly contradictory. But alas, it is exactly this kind of behaviour by Gordon Brown over the last decade that has landed us in the dire economic straits we're now in. Even worse, it appears that in his efforts to take a revised approach, the Prime Minister has got it the wrong way round - jettisoning the former while accelerating the latter.

In effect, by ditching the free-market rhetoric of Blairism from Labour policy, Gordon Brown has given the equally reactionary First Minister the green light to do the same. After all, it hardly opens the doors for a Tory take-over of Scotland. What it does do however is expose very plainly that on economic matters these two populist parties are completely out of their depth - meaning that in a crisis they invariably grasp for the same old tired straws of State intervention.

This shouldn't come as much of a surprise. There is a long precedent in Europe of seemingly opposite political parties of the 'Left' and 'Right' at each others' throats simply because their policies are so resoundingly similar. Indeed, the Nazis and Communists of inter-war Germany never ceased to tire beating each other senseless, but afforded very little attention towards the liberal and conservative groups. The Social Democrats too, had a rivalry with the Communists approaching that of which both had with the Nazis because all three were in competition for the same minds armed with broadly similar economic programmes. As economic disaster was the key to most of their electoral success, the conflict between them was bitter.

Unsurprisingly then, all three parties were fond of using the giant crimson proletarian superman on their posters - usually seen smashing through his chains and/or stomping upon the petrified faces of capitalists and priests. Nonetheless, this does seem to contradict the notion held by most of us that the ideologies behind these parties presented radically different visions on what the future of Germany should be. Indeed, the Third Reich and East Germany are both very real and chilling testaments to how the latter two would realise these differing but equally terrifying ideals.

Growing up with the idea that Nazism and Communism are as different as back and white, one may overlook the fact that the practical applications of their ideologies were not all that different. It is worth posturing that in domestic policy at least, the Third Reich and East Germany changed day-today life very little for ordinary Germans - even, to an extent - if you were Jewish. It is principally because all three had such a thin grasp on the study of economics itself that their policies were so resoundingly similar. As frequently put by the economist Milton Friedman - there can be no political liberty without economic liberty.

It is certainly no moot point that Hitler, a man who viewed economics as supremely unimportant in his grand scheme of things, should immediately jump to State ownership and direction as policy once his chief economist Schacht had stopped telling him what he wanted to hear on rearmament. Indeed Enoch Powell, a man many would wrongly associate with the nationalist 'Right' argued this precise point - observing that there was so little to distinguish the economic policies of successive Labour governments from the Fascist and Communist regimes of Europe simply because "they are all at heart totalitarian". Certainly in this light it can come as no coincidence that the celebrated fascists Oswald Mosley and Benito Mussolini were dedicated members of Labour and the Socialists respectively, before beginning their own political movements.

The point to be made here is this: when the crux of your policy falls on essentially one issue - be it the welfare of the toiling masses, national independence, the environment, religion or race - economic concerns inevitably take a back seat, more often than not as merely a tool used towards an end. Consequently it is always poorly understood, always misused and always abused. The consequence being, naturally, that it always ends in tears.

Conversely, the only surviving party in the United Kingdom that has ever viewed prudent maintenance of the economy and wealth creation as ends in themselves are the Conservatives. The United States has thus far been blessed by this trait in both the leading parties throughout its history. However, the Bush administration has been attacked for seemingly putting fiscal conservatism to one side in favour of pursuing an ideological foreign policy - namely, the neocon 'Towards an American Century' project. Obama too, seems set to repeat this folly with socialistic federal expenditure aimed at one slice of American society. This more European mould of politics is increasingly in danger of infiltrating the Anglo-Saxon community of nations as more and more political parties emerge with ulterior motives aimed at ever smaller sections of our society.

More than ever before then, conservatives in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia must stand strong with a One Nation base of support against this increasingly sectarian trend. We have a rich history to draw on. From the days of Tory paternalism against the Liberal 'millocracy' in the nineteenth century to the tides of Thatcherism against the undemocratic power of the trade unions; the Conservatives have been the only party in the United Kingdom to consistently unite these islands' inhabitants through an over-riding commitment to the cohesion of the Union itself. Who else has so successfully united agricultural and industrial workers with the landed aristocracy? The skilled working classes with a rising set of entrepreneurial of businessmen?

Unsurprisingly then, the Conservatives are also the only party with the accumulated knowledge and experience on economic and social matters to actually achieve this. They may be blamed for many things in the industrial heartlands of England, but it should be cited in their defence that the nationalisation of industry by Labour was the original sin. For ten years it must have seemed to the people of this country that Labour had finally 'got it' with the economy. Indeed, perhaps the most consistent complaint of recent years has been that, given Tony Blair's tough approach to law and order, there has been very little to choose from between the main parties.

Of course in hindsight we know that this really was too good to be true. The maintenance of the economy for the benefit of everyone was never, as it turns out, an end in itself for 'new' Labour - simply a change in tactics. The goal remains, as it was, the same. Socialism. Or, to put it in a few more words - handing all the proceeds of accelerated growth to the working (or more often, not-working) classes through damaging and massively inflated benefits and services while leaving nothing for a rainy day which your ideology has in any case expressly ruled out as a possibility; then, when everything goes tits-up, proceeding to blame it on the very people who raised you all that revenue in the first place before taxing and regulating them out of the country.

It doesn't take a political genius to see that in this way Labour has consistently been a divisive and counterproductive force in the running of British politics, because it has and always will represent the interests of only one section of society - one that happens to be disproportionately dominated by the trades unions who are once again forming the bulk of party funding.

This blinkered and interest-driven view towards policy will always be the downfall of Labour when it comes to economic matters. It nearly cost them their very existence as a mainstream political party in 1983. By 1997 Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had managed to successfully 'decontaminate the brand' so to speak, and make Labour appear electable again - for a short while even invincible. They had managed to convince us that after fifty years of wrecking the economy they'd finally gained some competence on the subject. This is no small feat, and they deserve some recognition for this.

But Gordon Brown has demolished this illusion as just that. It was a very fancy illusion, and darned convincing, but an illusion nonetheless. It is now not such a stretch to conclude that what Labour inherited in 1997 was in fact a Tory upswing in the economy - a Tory mistake fixed by the Tories - proceeding to hollow it out over the next ten years with a spendthrift attitude to public borrowing/spending prompted by an ideological assertion that there would never again be another economic collapse in Britain. "No more boom and bust" indeed! The very idea, that one can completely rule out this entirely natural outcome of the economic cycle and proceed to stick ones head in the sand, refusing even to prepare for the merest possibility of this eventuality shows an enormous degree of ignorance and arrogance on the part of Labour that is usually reserved only for the most feckless and stupid of individuals.

I put it therefore that Labour is unfit to govern. I put it that they have never been fit to govern and their trail of destruction in British industry and society since 1945 leaves very little to defend their claim to power. Furthermore, due to the deep-rooted socialist assumptions and instincts within the party, I do not believe they will ever conclusively prove themselves to be so. Attlee failed, Wilson failed, and now Brown has failed. It's a sloppy record.

This really ought to be the end of the road for Labour in Scotland, but without a fresh and renewed Tory presence there (perhaps by cutting the Scottish Tories loose again in the guise of a resurrected Unionist party?) all we can really expect to see is the replacement of one populist, spendthrift and economically ignorant party with another. The danger is that if the Tories fail to produce a real alternative to this socialist/nationalist economic axis, we may end up in a situation where it's no longer our problem.

Totalitarianism in Town Hall

2008-10-24T16:10:00.000-07:00

written as a local piece concerning the 'Art for the State' exhibition held at the Council-run Cooper Gallery in Barnsley, South Yorkshire

I like eastern art. I especially enjoy traditional Japanese prints and painting, so you can probably imagine the abrupt about-turn I made while passing our very own Cooper Gallery this week. Upon entering, my first surprise came when I discovered that these weren’t in fact Japanese works at all, they were Korean. North Korean in fact. Hmm...that’s quite an exotic curiosity for Barnsley I thought. Better read on.

The info pane told me that this was an exhibition of work from the Matsudae Art Studio – the largest State-run studio in North Korea. ‘As [North] Korea opens up to the West this will have an effect on work produced in the future’ it said. Yep, okay fair enough. ‘This could be a last chance to see artwork in its purest state from this country’. Hmm ... as a former art student I felt a little uneasy about this line, given how strictly controlled art is in North Korea, but thought that as a curiosity this could be a quite fascinating exhibition and it’s certainly doing no harm.

My attitude to that last point changed sharply when I read to the bottom and discovered that the exhibition was being held as part of the ‘All Barnsley Diversity Festival 2008’.

Excuse me? Diversity? North Korea?

I carried on reading. The festival’s purpose is to ‘celebrate the communities and individual cultures that make Barnsley their home’. Oh this is just too much. I’m all in favour of exploring other cultures - in fact I would actively encourage it – but I find it profoundly disturbing that anyone, least of all a democratic body like Barnsley Council and a cultural organisation like the Diversity Festival could tolerate the kind of puerile State-dictated drivel of North Korea’s totalitarian regime as an ‘individual culture’. The very idea of it must surely be offensive to all cultured people of the world, and presumably to all the democratic values we are supposed to hold dear in this country. And don't think I missed the suspiciously Soviet-sounding 'All Barnsley' reference either.

North Korea is a one-party dictatorship. Its government controls the people’s lives right down to the smallest detail. Freedom in any sense of the term simply does not exist. ‘Communities’ and ‘individual cultures’ are not tolerated unless they have been explicitly approved or created by the government. What you see in the Cooper is not an expression of a people or of a rich, diverse culture, you see a collection of images used by the totalitarian regime in Pyongyang to perpetuate itself – simply because nothing else outside of brute military force will.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m perfectly willing to accept this exhibition as a curiosity, in fact some of the traditional ink landscapes featured by artists such as Song U Yong (‘Shopsun Peak of Mt. Kumganag’) and Ri Chang (‘Echo of Waterfall’) are indeed truly breathtaking as pieces of art in their own right. They stand as a testament to the rich cultural history of Korea as a united nation prior to the misery of war and ideology that tore it apart in the 1950s. In fact these magnificent works are only devalued by their proximity to the close-minded, sinister, fascistic rubbish that fills the rest of the exhibition. The very idea of this material being featured as part of a diversity festival is simply unacceptable and utterly offensive.

An example of the more malignant nature of the exhibition is the work of Kim Song Min. Beautifully painted, these works nonetheless betray the invisible hand of the State guiding Kim’s brush. One such piece shows a very nationalistic portrait of a triumphant North Korean wrestler waving his national flag in jubilation while his crestfallen Japanese opponent, kneeling, looks on. The situation displayed here is particularly telling, as North Korea and Japan have had a very troubled relationship in recent decades, due in no small part to the North Korean policy of kidnapping Japanese scientists and technicians and forcing them to work on projects and developments in North Korea for decades. The title of the piece is very appropriately named ‘In the Spirit of Chosum’ – Chosum being North Korea’s peculiar policy of complete national and economic self-reliance, meaning no trade and very little contact with the outside world. Predictably this policy has led to an almost constant state of famine within the country, which makes Kim Song Min’s other featured piece all the more tragically ridiculous.

Called simply ‘The Harvest’, it features five North Korean women delightfully tossing bales of grain in the air, all furnished with that disturbingly forced smile that seems to appear in all totalitarian art – the kind you only pull knowing you’re going to die if you don’t. Ironically what you’re looking at in this painting is probably the entire North Korean harvest for that year, as the supposedly self-reliant ‘Spirit of Chosum’ has done nothing but force the North Korean people to rely on international aid packages simply to stay alive. Untold numbers have starved to death because of the economic and agricultural ignorance of North Korea’s dictatorship, and its refusal to open the country to international trade – precisely what has made South Korea one of the richest nations in the world.

The propaganda posters featured in the exhibition are predictably militaristic and xenophobic – ironically going against what I gather are the core principles of the All Barnsley Diversity Festival. One such poster features a gigantic fist clenching then- prime minister Koizumi of Japan, who his defiantly waving his national flag.

I imagine that the only reason this disgraceful display of militarism and thinly veiled xenophobia has been deemed acceptable in a ‘diversity’ exhibition is because North Korea still retains the superficial pretence of being a socialist country, and that this is something that makes the lefties in Town Hall, the Cooper, and Barnsley’s Labour party positively salivate at the thought. This, and this alone, appears to have raised the exhibition above that of say, celebrating the ‘communities and individual cultures’ of similar regimes such as Apartheid South Africa or perhaps Nazi Germany even – despite all three being thoroughly culturally and ideologically repugnant regimes, each with its own massive death toll to answer for.

And although socialist regimes have hardly fared any better when it comes to freedom and death counts, eager lefties should not be fooled by North Korea’s Marxist imagery – Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il long ago abandoned the ideal of international socialism, preferring instead to pursue more of a national socialism – cutting North Korea off from the rest of the world and forcing its citizens to observe a complete subservience to Party and State above anything else, while pursuing total economic self-reliance and a tendency towards militarism, extreme nationalism, and xenophobia. In fact come to think of it I can think of no better definition for fascism as imagined by Mussolini himself. Oh yes and did I mention that Nazi is short for National Socialist?

How on earth we are supposed to celebrate cultural diversity with fascism is absolutely beyond me. It is a perfect demonstration of the sickness inherent in obsessive anti-capitalism and how far its tentacles have spread through our local institutions. As far as I know, there aren’t even any North Koreans living in Barnsley. I may be wrong about this. But I firmly believe I am right in saying that if there were, they would certainly not wish to ‘celebrate’ the poverty-stricken Orwellian nightmare dictatorship that they came here to escape in the first place.

Children's Crusade

2008-07-17T04:05:00.000-07:00

I recently happened to stumble across the 1990 film Robocop 2 on the wonder that is digital freeview television. I have to say it had been an awfully long time since I'd seen the film in question, and I was quite probably below the BBFC's age classification when I did. Predictably, the film had a much more different impact on me then it did the first time round - what was once a child's awe over a cool ultra-violent cyborg police officer is now a more skeptical and critical digest of the film's core themes. Indeed, one aspect of the nightmare future presented that struck me very deeply, despite being a fairly minor aspect, is of foul-mouthed vandal children causing trouble while adults are all but helpless to stop them. The remarkable thing about this is that in 1990 it was intended to be shocking - to be about as far removed from reality as the main character's bionic technology. Eighteen years later however, this aspect of the film has lost almost all of its shock value - indeed, it perhaps takes the context of films such as this to reveal to us how dire a mess we have gotten ourselves into in the upbringing of our children.

That said, although my chance encounter with Robocop 2 provided an excellent opener to this article, the film itself is perhaps not ideally suited to illustrate my point. As anyone familiar with the film will know, the main cause given of such nightmarish social and urban decay in Robocop's Detroit, Michigan is essentially unrestrained free market capitalism. In typical '80s style, the Reaganomics ideal of small government is misinterpreted as weak government, with malevolent corporations filling in the ensuing power vacuum. Under the guise of serving the community, the corporation then uses its power and influence to pursue its own interests while 'stepping on the little man' to maximise its profits. And in case the message wasn't getting through to you, they even use flags and banners shamelessly reminscent of the Nazis [1] (incidentally the anti-capitalism of the National Socialist German Worker's Party and its repugnance for the Anglo-Saxon 'commercial' mindset is something we shall just have to ignore here).

Sadly, the Robocop franchise seems to have had no small impact on my generation, many of whom like me, will have grown up watching it. Indeed I have known many, many young people who share the vague, half-baked opinions contained within its hypothesis - a very tired hypothesis, that time and time again has proved to be very much that of fantasy, quite often based on the twin evils of ignorance and prejudice. Its foundations rest on the assumption that the two pillars of our free society - freedom of the press and an independent judiciary - can be easily bought off and/or intimidated. In making such assumptions its followers give little credit to the mettle and sincere conviction coursing through these long established professions. For only somebody with either no faith or no understanding of these civic institutions and the wider rule of law could arrive at such assumptions.

Funnily enough this brings us to our culprit. Bitter experience has proven many times over in this country that, far from free market capitalism being at fault, it is government that is responsible for social decay. In Britain it has taken less than twenty years for us to realise some of the things that must have seemed unimaginable in 1990. Unlike Robocop however, in the real world it was not OCP wot done it - it was (dah-dah) the Labour Party. It is precisely their Fabian predilection for tampering with the delicate fabric of our society - to 'remould it nearer to the hearts desire' [2] that has set in motion a sequence of unforseen consequences that have grotesquely perverted the course and nature of our society.

The dangers manifest in pursuing such goals are not often given enough credit. We are, for example, informed by those on both sides of the political fence and by experts of varied persuasions that genetically modified crops will reap a dangerous and uncertain dividend because we are meddling with systems far too complex for us to ever fully comprehend, much less envisage all the conceivable outcomes and variables [3]. GM farming does not have many friends among the general public, much less socialists, but for some reason we continue to delude ourselves into thinking that we can succeed in applying this same principle to the practically unfathomable complexity of society. Let us put this into perspective for a moment. What we are talking about here are the infinite personal, social, and professional interactions of almost 59 million people, to say nothing of the elusive and intricate workings of the individual human mind. By legislating on vague notions of secular morality and abstract 'progressive' ideology rather than the common sense inherent in time-tested norms and values of the people, Labour - as ever - comes into conflict with the interests of the very people it claims to represent.

In the most frightening aspect of this conundrum, Labour has managed to dismantle those core norms and values governing our most important citizens - our children. As a very happy child of the '80s (I was 12 in 1997) - I can honestly say I would not like to be a child growing up today. A top-down ideological approach to 'protecting' our children has succeeded in making every adult a suspect of child abuse. My own parents have recently left their Roman Catholic parish in disgust and protest at being asked to fill in a background check simply because they participate in the Eucharistic Ministry (that's giving out the bread and wine to you and me) and as such come into the smallest public contact with children. It has rendered teachers, parents, and members of the community feeling either powerless or fearful of disciplining children. Indeed, since the completely pointless and unenforceable law on smacking in 2004, many parents are under the impression that physically disciplining their children in any way is illegal.

There is widespread confusion over the matter. Anyone attempting to find out will quickly realise that it is still difficult to find the correct interpretation of what is meant by 'leaving a mark'. When confronted with unruly behaviour in public, many parents - sensing real or imaginary judging eyes around them - simply do not take the risk. I have been sickened to the core by the amount of times I have personally heard parents negotiating with their young children and resorting to asking them nicely if they would 'please' behave. Only last week in the shopping mall in which I work I had the displeasure of witnessing a child who could have been no older than six attempt to strike his father repeatedly in a rage while he did nothing but half-heartedly shrug him off. In the end the child, enraged, actually spat at his father. Though what really shook to the bone - as if this wasn't enough - was the expression on the child's face. It was something that left me with a quite stiffening sense of disbelief, as I had only previously associated such contortions of violence and hatred with that of adults.

When you're confronted with this sort of thing on a regular basis in your neighbourhood and place of work, it becomes very difficult to not take on a somewhat Orwellian sense of foreboding on the situation. That is, that the government - intentionally or otherwise - is turning our children against us. It is a most chilling premise, but I fear, if one takes a few steps back, not altogether far from the truth. Children, being the rapacious little learners they are, quickly discover that they are protected by the law in almost anything they do, and that there is very little anybody can do to stop them. To varying degrees parents and teachers (much less members of the community) fear even laying a finger on them, making any verbal discipline utterly toothless. The results, to be generous, are disturbing.

A recent survey of the police services has revealed such horrors as a four-year-old held over a drugs offence, two-seven-year olds reported for driving carelessly while drunk, and a six-year-old who was believed to have carried out a burglary. Statistics recently released under the Freedom of Information Act testify to a total of 1,825 crimes committed by under-tens across Britain in 2007-08, though the true scale of the phenomenon is believed to be much higher, owing to the fact that our already paperwork-swamped police forces are not actually required to log crimes committed by those under the age of criminal responsibility.

The policies and legislation that has made this grim situation possible has, as with most socialist policy, sprung from the assumption that children (and humans generally) are essentially good, that their better natures will prevail in the absence of such liberally undesirable discipline. This ignores what any sensible parent will already know - that our children are only, and can only be what we make them. Indeed the bedrock, even origin of our whole system of liberal democracy and free market capitalism - the two achievements of our civilisation that have changed and benefitted the world more than anything else - stems from the principle that humans, like animals, are naturally lazy, ignorant and selfish - that only the virtues of discipline, hard work, and personal responsibility can ultimately save us from these characteristics.

Despite this, in the name of compassion and understanding, we have taken the opposing view that all men are born morally pure and untouchable. In doing so we have removed said virtues from the upbringing of our children. The necessary shift in the law, and hence values, of this country has been implemented by a party who in the pursuit of abstract ideals and thinly veiled ideology has cut itself off from the core values of the honest working people it claims to represent. In its ivory tower of State morality and ideological purity, it has legislated against their interests while at the same time nurturing the 'it's not my fault' culture in its place, further weakening working communities and furthering their dependence on the state. Indeed, it is the very fact that this approach is so intrinsically intwined with Labour Party thinking that they will most certainly lose the next general election. As a party that is itself all too often ready to blame the media for every election defeat they suffer [3], they will most certainly have their work cut out for them when this twisted outlook on life is finally and decisively rejected by the long-suffering people of Great Britain.

Was the 1945 Conservative Manifesto a blueprint for Thatcherism?

2008-01-05T12:11:00.000-08:00

It is customary at this time of year (though I plead guilty to being a little late) to look back on the year just passed and reflect upon some of the more outstanding events it witnessed. To many, of course, the Government's monumental train of failures and descent into PR hell shortly after Gordon Brown took the reins is going to be up there with the best of them. But whatever your opinion on the matter, all the kerfuffle about Lady Thatcher's visit to the prime minister late last year confirmed in stone what a lot of us have suspected for a long time [1] - namely, that a new consensus has come to pass in British politics. However, with the last real remnant of the old one celebrating its 60th anniversary this year (the NHS, to those not in the know), it seems an appropriate junction to look back and ask ourselves: why did it take so long? Perhaps more importantly: could we have avoided the wasted thirty years between Attlee and Callaghan?
It is to my mind that sadly, the answer is yes, we could.

I have in the past touched on the idea that, to get technical, Thatcherism was not so much a philosophy in itself (and much less an ideology, as many mistakenly claim), but a mission that came into being for the sole purpose of 'fixing' Britain. The fact that increasing divisions within the party and Margaret Thatcher's own inner circle seemed to be index-linked to their own success certainly lends credence to this view. But there is further supporting evidence in that the circumstances surrounding the Conservatives' 1979 election victory are not so dissimilar to those surrounding the writing of the 1945 Conservative Manifesto. The task ahead of both Labour and the Tories at the time was to develop ideas on how best to reconstruct an economically and, in many cases, physically destroyed Britain. It was a plan of action, an operation - a mission, so to speak. And it needed to be - financially, the nation was on its knees. From being the world's banker, Britain had emerged victorious from the war bankrupt and at the tender mercies of our American creditors (this debt was only fully paid off in 2006). Cut to 1975, and Britain was once more staring at the abyss financially - indeed it was to be only another year before we were again to be bailed out by an outside party (this time, the IMF). But that is not the only parallel to be made here - most striking is the actual content of the thing. It sounds a hell of a lot like Thatcherism.

Can this be? The nation's 'Greatest Briton' and its 'most unpopular prime minister since records began' proposing the same thing? The thought may not come as any great surprise to many on the right, but to the chequered mosaic of proud Britons that all claim Churchill as their own, it may appear somewhat alarming. Not least, I am sure, to the 'One Nation' Tories who served under Churchill and his protégés after the war, and subsequently fought Lady Thatcher's policies nail and tooth throughout the 1980s. But I challenge anyone giving the time of day to actually read the document in question [2] to deny its almost identical nature to said policies. It contained a now very familiar cocktail of liberal economics, a focus on the wealth-creating importance of entrepreneurs, individual responsibility and low taxation - all imbued with a strong emphasis on the vitality of family values, fierce patriotism, and a firm sense of Britain's historical role in the world at large. Indeed, as Lady Thatcher later proved, the 1945 Manifesto correctly identified that 'Only a Britain that is strong and ready to fight in defence of Freedom will count in the high councils of the world'. It was to be Britain's intolerance of Argentine aggression, her swift and merciless dealing of Islamic terrorism, and her resolve in confronting Communism on a worldwide scale under the Thatcher premiership that renewed our place in these 'high councils'.

Yet despite the many similarities in their beliefs and policies (more of which will be addressed below), there remains a huge divergence in the reputations of Sir Winston and Lady Thatcher. Indeed it would be difficult, certainly in many areas of Britain, for them to be further apart. The reason for this rather peculiar state of affairs lies in two fundamental differences in circumstance - and they speak volumes about how public opinion is formed this country. First, as we well know, Churchill was never able to implement his vision of British revival. In the evening of his years, and in respect to the wishes of a people that had endured so much, Churchill and his party chose not to reverse the Attlee reforms once they returned to office in 1951 - seeking instead to make the best of the new consensus that had almost annihilated them at the last election. Second, though almost identical to the Thatcher years in both policy and ethos, the 1945 Manifesto was a mission to rebuild. And this is the clincher - the Thatcher government did not have this luxury. In Oliver Hirschbiegel's seminal film Downfall, Adolf Hitler muses to his chief architect Albert Speer that the Allied destruction of Berlin had come as a blessing. It would be far easier, he said, to clear away the scattered rubble of Berlin for the new Welthaupstadt (World Capital) Germania than to tear it down first. Yet this is exactly what Margaret Thatcher had to do. From her first round as 'Milk Snatcher' in the early seventies to the closure of loss-making pits and the muzzling of union power a decade later, she bore the unenviable burden of being someone who was seen as taking things away. The idea that a prime minister can, for this reason, be so overwhelmingly unpopular yet simultaneously so successful may appear strange, but then nobody who signs into rehab is going to be under any illusions regarding its pleasantness.

To Churchill, Britain's greatness had been 'built on character and daring, not on docility to a state machine' - and this is very much how he intended it to continue. This 'spirit of independence' which we are now still struggling to re-introduce was something that Churchill sought to preserve 'at all costs'. Like Margaret Thatcher sometime later, Churchill saw as 'first essentials' a strong 'confidence in sound government - mutual co-operation between industry and the State rather than control by the State'. There was an instinctive affinity, reminiscent now of Thatcherism, with 'the small man' in business - Churchill recognised, as Lady Thatcher always saw in her father - that in pursuing his dreams, the entrepreneur 'adventures all he has...his independence of spirit is one of the essential elements that make up the life of a free society'. The Manifesto sought to drive home the legitimate concern that after the war 'other men may have jobs to go back to, but the businesses of some of these men are gone, or hanging by a thread'. There is even an early recognition of the inefficiency inherent in Britain's coal industry - a worrying reality that disappeared under the veil of denial manifest in Labour's nationalisation. Though for the next thirty years the industry’s perpetual decline was frequently cited as a result of under-investment, the 1945 Manifesto correctly identified state-owned coal as 'a wasting asset'. Citing the Reid report, the Conservatives observed how the industry had 'fallen behind some its competitors overseas' and that 'Adequate supplies, as cheap as possible, must be available to our homes [and] to our factories'. Margaret Thatcher's entire policy regarding taxation as well her own deeply-held suspicion of state power too, finds a very clear voice within the 1945 Manifesto. It identifies the state as having

...no resources of its own. It can only spend what it takes from the people in taxes...Britain is now a nation of taxpayers...[this] drastically restricts the ability of the ordinary citizen to satisfy his personal desires. It is discouraging to his enterprise and his efforts to better himself by doing a bit extra

In addition to this, the Conservatives naturally pledged to 'preserve the incentives of free enterprise and safeguard...industry from the dead hand of State ownership or political interference in day-to-day management'. Somewhat ironically, there are also many things proposed in the Manifesto that have, in subsequent realpolitik only been possible relatively recently under New Labour. These include, within the Conservatives' plans for a 'comprehensive health service' pledges to protect 'the patient's free choice of doctor' as well as voluntary trust hospitals that have 'led the way in the development of hospital technique'. In education, too, the Conservatives promised that 'parents will be able to choose the school they like and to play their part with the educational authorities in the physical and spiritual well-being of their children' - a policy begun under the Thatcher government and carried on under Labour. There were familiar calls, seen later in the sale of council houses and the extinguishing of inflation, to 'see property widely spread...we rejoice that the savings movement, which must go on, has now made almost everyone a property-owner'.

Sadly of course, this movement died a quick death under the welfare state for those it served most - the working class. With the self-reliance that saving fostered replaced now only by a vulnerability to creditors and debt, there is good ground to argue that it was the Attlee welfare state and not Margaret Thatcher's premiership that has effectively made 'the poor poorer'. It robbed them of the need for friendly societies, the need to plan ahead financially, and experience in the rewards that hard work and thrift can bring. It robbed them of the thing most precious and sacred to every human being - their very independence. Resistance to Thatcherite policies culminating in the 1984/85 miners’ strike may have given the illusion of traditional working class solidarity at work, but this had effectively been destroyed years earlier by the state reliance Butskellite consensus fostered. Take away the nationalised industries that allowed this reliance and the veil was lifted. Traditional working class values forged through blood, sweat and tears in the sweltering forge of nineteenth century life – thrift, saving, financial solidarity, family values – all gone within a generation. Nationalisation and distorted trade union power had steadily eroded these values by eliminating risk and flexibility from the workplace. The two became irrevocably tied, and so effectively perished together.

To my mind, out of the many failings of the post-war consensus, this has to be the most remorseful waste of all. Thirty years of precarious financial management (estimated at around £40 billion in 1982 from capital write-offs and grants alone - not to mention wasted productivity) was readily, if not painfully remedied by fiscal squeezes, tax reform, and privatisation - London is, after all, once again the banking capital of the world and leaders of the Labour Party now speak enthusiastically about globalisation and private enterprise. But the underlying tragedy, not so easy to correct, is in the human cost of those wasted years. By making the wrong decision in 1945, by taking the easy road, and - as even Keith Joseph confessed to doing - kidding ourselves that there were 'short cuts to utopia' only to realise the error of our ways at barely the eleventh hour, we have left behind us dire social consequences that have become deeply rooted in the national psyche. With broken homes, teenage pregnancies, benefit dependency, massive debt, and undisciplined children now endemic in this country, there is more than a touch of irony in having rejected a manifesto so strongly identifying Britain as 'a country built on family life [and] the love of home' - a 'precious asset to be defended at all costs'.

The now almost alien tone of this sentiment in the context of political vocabulary is why I will continue to support David Cameron’s policy encouraging marriage as an institution and an ideal. It stands always as the essential foundation from which everything else is built - financially, emotionally, and educationally. As we’re still clearing up the mess left behind by the post-war consensus, with many of the things that were taken for granted when the 1945 Manifesto were written now gone, sound economics are simply not enough. Cameron’s Conservatives are right to tackle the social agenda, and it by no means indicates that they are shifting to the centre ground - far from it. What it means is that like all good Conservatives, they are being pragmatic. Solid social values regarding family, citizenship, discipline and respect are essential to the functioning of a healthy free-market liberal democracy and this is why Labour, with its vast army of bleeding heart lefties, will never be the party to tackle it. We can say in all confidence that the economic war is won. Liberalism is triumphant across the floor. But if the values that Churchill identified as the source of Britain’s greatness are not re-introduced one way or another - if the social war is not now won - then we shall be facing some very deep water indeed.

Why Maggie met Gordo

2007-09-18T10:06:00.000-07:00

Beneath all the in-fighting, mud-slinging, and speculation concerning Baroness Thatcher's visit to No. 10 last week, there lies an important milestone in British political and economic history that is far more symbolic and simple than any of the dailies seemed to have noticed. Amid questions raised over the perceived party 'morality' of the visit, the Rt. Hon. Lady's mental faculties and Rob Wilson, MP's incomprehensible accusation of 'exploitation' on the part of the prime minister, there lies three simple facts.

1. Gordon Brown invited Lady Thatcher after a series of letters between them
2. It would have been unthinkable for her to decline
3. She has visited each one of her successors at Downing Street since leaving in 1990

Though these facts have been very confused, they nonetheless do not make the event unremarkable. The prime minister and Baroness Thatcher emerged from No. 10 in noticeably higher spirits than they entered, and one may speculate they had a lot to talk about, standing on some firm common ground. The peppering of mutual compliments and the prime minister's 'conviction politicians' praise appears to confirm this. Minor details have, however, been characteristically blown out of proportion - one column even going so far as to highlight Lady Thatcher's choice of 'Labour' red frock (it was in fact bright fuchsia). Such speculations are of course pure nonsense, and completely beside the point. This is not a party issue. This is a former prime minister, and the founder of today's established order, visiting the incumbent. There should in fact be much less controversy surrounding this aspect owing to the fact that Lady Thatcher and her premiership has been all but disowned by the current leader of her party, David Cameron at a time when Labour has found itself confident enough to praise it. What is significant about this whole event is that in a purely symbolic way it concretely closes a circle in British politics that began its circumference on 3 May 1979 when the nation went to the polls to decide Britain's future. It is significant because the Labour Party, who passionately fought the Conservatives' policies nail and tooth throughout Lady Thatcher's premiership, is now led by a man who openly praises the reforms of the 1980s, and indeed the much-hated woman who enacted them, as the foundation of the current political order and the basis of Britain's subsequent prosperity.

This should not be as shocking as some make it out to be. Parties change with the times in order to survive, primarily because they are not entities unto themselves but are composed of people. People who are diverse, pragmatic, and open to a change of opinion. Few would now believe that in the nineteenth century, the Lib Dems in their previous incarnation as the Liberals were a hard-line free market capitalism party. Similarly, few in the nineteenth century could have imagined the Conservatives so enthusiastically embracing the post-war socialism that dominated British politics up until the late seventies (and for them, until 11 February 1975, when Margaret Thatcher was grudgingly elected leader). It should not really be all that strange that Labour have employed Lady Thatcher's preferred advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi either. They are after all a competitive company who can work for whoever they like, and their credentials certainly make them desirable for any party. It does however, given the timing, have a startling symbolic effect.

It is nonetheless entirely symbolic and in no way surprising. Most people have been well aware for some time that Tony Blair deliberately forged Labour to be the natural successor of the Thatcherite Conservative Party - it was just too early to say it out loud. Ten years is a long time - what was taboo in 1997 has evolved into a gradual acceptance to the point that what was unspeakable then can today be blatantly proclaimed on the steps of 10 Downing Street itself. And it need not be seen as an abandonment of principle either. Being called Labour does not explicitly require you to be a socialist party - Labour have arguably served workers in this country since 1997 far better than any socialists could. Indeed, in The Constitution of Liberty - a Thatcherite Bible of sorts - F. A. Hayek makes the point that protectionism, wage controls, and strong unions – vanquished by Lady Thatcher in the 1980s - actually reduce real wages over time and cause widespread unemployment (incidentally, Labour's record since 1997 in this respect seems to have been lost on most socialists).

The trouble with the Conservative Party over the next decade was that they hadn't realised this. Their ten-year identity crisis occurred because - as one of Lady Thatcher's advisers put it to John Ranelagh in 1990 - 'the Tory Party is not a Thatcherite Party, that's the tragedy'. And it never was - the hierarchy tolerated her because she won elections but never much cared for her policies, many openly despising her. They wasted no time in 'stabbing her in the back' once she began to be perceived as an electoral liability and was henceforth removed in the most back-handed way. The classical liberalism espoused by her (small) wing of the party since 1975 has always been much closer to the that of the nineteenth century Liberal Party or Whigs than the Tories. The lady herself actually confirmed this at Conference in 1983 by stating 'I would not mind betting that if Mr. Gladstone [four-time Liberal prime minister 1868-94] were alive today he would apply to join the Conservative Party'. Lord Harris, too, has described Thatcherism as 'more or less common ground between Conservatives and Liberals in the nineteenth century'.

Hence, if the Conservatives appear to have found their feet since their election of David Cameron in 2005, it is precisely because said leader has been busy scrubbing Lady Thatcher from his party's history - explicitly refusing even to appear in the same photograph as her. The image then, of Gordon Brown at the door of No. 10 with Lady Thatcher on the very same day John Gummer announced the Blueprint for a Green Economy with the words 'I am a Tory' has an irony that hardly needs pointing out. Further, it is now obvious that, despite her deeply-held loyalty in the past, Lady Thatcher's very membership of the Conservative Party was one of political necessity rather than any real fealty. Throughout her political career before being elected leader in 1975 she was a member, and later, minister of a party whose policies she abhorred. Indeed, The Constitution of Liberty, a book Lady Thatcher once slammed on a table with the words 'This is what we believe' holds such a vindication of her actions in this respect. Hayek wrote that

At a time when most movements that are thought to be progressive advocate further encroachments on individual liberty, those who cherish freedom...generally have little choice but to support the conservative parties

Hayek wrote those words in 1959. The situation has changed considerably since then, though arguably only within the last few years. With Labour embracing monetarism and the free market, Independence on the rise, and even - saints alive - the Lib Dems embracing personal responsibility and market mechanisms, Cameron's Conservatives have been released of the burden of being the sole 'neoliberal' party in Britain. This has allowed them to return to being just that - conservative. Thatcherism was less a philosophy than a mission, and once that mission had been completed, namely (in the words of John Ranelagh) to establish 'a series of hard, practical achievements that would stand the test of time and...become common ground for political debate' it was defunct. This is why, after twenty years of preaching to the opposition, William Hague, Ian Duncan Smith, and Michael Howard found it so difficult to present a coherent set of policies for their party. It was, put simply, because everything the party had campaigned for since 1975 became common ground by 1997 and thus, taken for granted.

Keith Joseph once remarked in 1975 that it was only in April of the previous year that he was converted to 'real' Conservatism, professing that 'I had thought I was a Conservative but now I see I was not really one at all'. In fact, he was still wasn't. David Cameron, in steering his party back to old traditions such as suspicion of material progress (We're too rich to be happy - The Times, 14 September 2007) and censorship in areas of entertainment like video games is in fact returning his party to true Conservatism. Joseph's words in 1975 were necessary for their time because he could hardly have called himself a liberal at a time when the Lib Dems were still called the Liberal Party, and he was, at any rate a member of the Conservatives when there was not a chance in hell that either the Liberals nor Labour would ever come close to accepting the Thatcherite policies he devised.

With this in mind it can certainly be no coincidence that Cameron is the first Tory leader since the 14th earl of Home in 1963 to have not risen from lowly beginnings. Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, William Hague, Ian Duncan Smith, and Michael Howard all worked their way up through the grammar school system - 'self-made men' so to speak - whereas Cameron, son of a stock-broker and 5th cousin of Queen Elizabeth II twice removed, attended Eton College. Incidentally it was Heath, elected in 1965, who first attempted to introduce market reforms during his premiership in 1970-74. There is then, no mystery as to why Lady Thatcher appeared so publicly outside No. 10 with Gordon Brown. The plain truth is that Labour now happens to stand more for what she believes in than the Conservatives, and she is no doubt hurt by the latter's recent treatment of her. It also conveniently symbolises the setting in stone of everything she went out to achieve and reveals her premiership in the 1980s for what it was - nothing less than a revolution in its truest sense. A revolution, a turn, a circle right round to the political and economic climate that once made Britain - and then arguably the whole western world - so great. Indeed, it could scarcely be more complete if Labour changed their name to the Liberal Party.

Free Trade vs Live Aid

2007-07-19T12:52:00.000-07:00

I remember quite vividly some five years ago first hearing that the eighties were 'back in'. The seventies garage band look popularised very briefly by the Strokes explosion had passed and eyes had turned elsewhere. This was fine by me of course - the 1980s was perhaps the greatest decade of the twentieth century, and not just because I was born bang in the middle of it. Yet, I couldn't help thinking to myself that only a few years previously the said decade could not be so much as mentioned without the mandatory epithet 'the decade that fashion forgot' - something these days about as memorable as Justin Timberlake's days in N*Sync. Yet suddenly it was okay again to like The Human League and to wear white jeans. Hmm. In a sense Francis Fukuyama may have been right when he mused on the 'end of history' - the eighties had become the height of cool again after only 10 years' absence, and with the new early-nineties craze for rave creeping ever deeper into popular culture, it appears we are now trapped on the ever-spinning wheel of fashion for the foreseeable future. So much so, in fact, that even the Labour Party have jumped the bandwagon.

A notable eighties fashion cynically lambasted throughout the 1990s (along with just about everything else, it seems) were overblown charity concerts. The year 2005 reignited the trend with Live Aid reincarnated as Live 8 on its twentieth anniversary. This summer we've managed to completely outdo ourselves on this score by staging not one, but two utterly pointless events within the space of a week. These days of course, the concerts are very post-modernly about 'awareness' because we've managed to figure out that fiscally they're a drop in the ocean and can't, sadly, save the world. Sad, yes, but you can't blame them for being optimistic - it was the eighties after all. But if Bob Geldof and Bono can't save the world, what hope is there? What to do with all these 'failed states'?

Well so far, half a century of throwing money at the developing world doesn't seem to have yielded any fruit. In fact all it can conceivably have achieved is a minutely lessened death toll, while at the same time giving already hopelessly inept governments even less incentive to face facts. This is rotten fruit. On the flipside, the continuous bleat for inaction due to corrupt dictators extorting any aid for themselves is neither constructive nor relevent. Such an attitude does nothing to help the suffering of millions, and besides - ten years of New Labour in this country has proved that even in the most well-intentioned hands, merely throwing money at a problem solves nothing. I'm thinking state education and health care here Tony. Likewise, the campaign to 'make poverty history' is not only hopelessly naive, but actually bordering on insanity. It is a campaign so economically ignorant and fantastical that it could almost have been devised by the Politburo itself. Poverty is a relative concept and will always be with us so long as some are better off than others. The fact that what we call 'poverty' in this country is such a highly desirable standard of living for most of the rest of the world is a testament to this - as indeed to the merits of liberal democracy and free market capitalism. Now, call me a Thatcherite idealist, but this is where I believe true hope lies.

On October 30 1990, Margaret Thatcher was prompted to defend the United Kingdom's aid commitment to the emerging democracies (and potential competetors) of Europe by the then-member for Oldham Central and Royton - what we would now call a very 'old Labour' MP - James Lamond. The said member - who had clearly been either hiding under a rock or lost in a coma for the duration of the seventies - went on to criticise the Government over their liberalisation of the economy and urged Mrs Thatcher to return Britain to the protectionist policies of the past in the interests of its workers, whom he accused Mrs Thatcher of 'selling down the river' to foreign competition and investment. This was greeted with groans of approval from the honourable member's backbench colleagues, while Mrs Thatcher pointed out that not only would protectionism hurt our workers more than help them, but that concerning the people of the Third World - 'They need trade as much as they need aid'.

That as late as 1990 - with 40 years' experience of what protectionism, corporatism and government intervention brings, and with the economic nightmare of the seventies behind them - this was still the prevailing attitude among the Parliamentary Labour Party in a country as 'developed' as Britain - shows just what we are up against in convincing developing world leaders to abandon their sloppy socialism and open their markets to free trade. Incidentally, the kind of xenophobic language used by backbench Labour MPs of the time on matters concerning foreign investment and competition serves only to reinforce Friedrich von Hayek's identification of 'the socialist roots of Nazism', as well as the intellectual bankruptcy and contradiction inherent in Left internationalists' resistance to globalisation.
But to get back to the point, promoting free trade to the developing world will indeed continue to be a difficult task, not least because of widespread suspicion even among large sections our own societies, exemplified most notably in the rise of 'ethical' trading and fair trade products. But in a sense the figures go a long way towards speaking for themselves - there is a startling correlation between data collected by the Heritage Foundation in their Index of Economic Freedom [1] and Foreign Policy magazine's Failed States Index [2]. Of the 157 countries listed in the Index of Economic Freedom, the top ten are all classed as either 'stable' or 'most stable' in the Failed States Index. According to the Heritage Foundation, the following are the ten most open and unregulated economies in the world

1. Hong Kong
2. Singapore
3. Ireland
4. Luxembourg
5. Iceland
5. United Kingdom
7. Estonia
8. Denmark
9. New Zealand
9. United States
9. Australia

We know these well as prosperous, affluent states with a high overall standard of living. The Republic of Ireland - for so long one of the EU's poorest nations - has experienced such a massive increase in prosperity since abandoning its anti-imperialist hangover that a new term has been coined in the wake of this phenomenon - Celtic Tiger.
In contrast, the bottom ten nations in the Index of Economic Freedom (below) are all classed as 'borderline' in the Failed States Index. This is excepting Venezuela ('In danger'), Myanmar, Zimbabwe, and North Korea (all 'Critical')

148. Turkmenistan
149. Laos
150. Cuba
151. Belarus
152. Venezuela
152. Libya
154. Zimbabwe
155. Burma
156. Iran
157. North Korea

With hard figures in front of us, it is plain to see that the most regulated, protectionist, and openly socialist economies of the world are by no coincidence also the most poverty-stricken and volatile. Other states similarly classed as 'critical' in the Failed States Index also rank very low in the Index of Economic Freedom. Haïti (147), Bangladesh (141), Republic of the Congo (143) and Ethiopia (133) all belong to this category and are infamous the world over for inhumane levels of poverty and degradation among their inhabitants. The typically Left explanation of this phenomenon - also tediously prevalent among otherwise well-educated young people - is that it is the result of European imperialism and racism. This is utter bolderdash, and there are many states around the world that prove this. Hong Kong and Singapore - topping the Heritage Foundation's index and practically isolated in Asia in terms of economic freedom are both former colonies of the British Empire. Both countries possess only a tiny fraction of the population and natural resources available to their much poorer neighbours, and are by far the world's greatest example of the benefits inherant in free trade and a healthy, open economy. Indeed, the contrast in Asia is greater than anywhere else in the world - Hong Kong and Singapore stand out as shining dynamic tigers of freedom and prosperity, while Burma and North Korea languish in the depths of extreme poverty and tyranny. Even their neighbours China and India - though still far from free and prosperous economies - have experienced unprecedented booms since shedding their own socialist pasts, accompanied by a rise in the overall stadard of living. What we see here is that poverty can in no way be pegged to imperialism or natural resources and that furthermore, prosperity can be directly linked to an open and free economy.

It is very easy to forget in today's political climate that as little 25 years ago, eastern Europe too relied on aid and debt relief from the west. Their poverty too was caused by economic restriction and mismanagement accompanied by vastly over-reaching governmental power. In her memoirs The Downing Street Years, Mrs Thatcher sheds light on her dilemma in how best to tackle the problem concerning Poland in 1981

If we continued to provide food aid and to proceed with plans for Polish debt relief would this benefit the Polish people or play into the hands of hardliners in Poland who are struggling to survive the consequences of misgovernment?

The new prosperity that eliminated this question entirely was brought about by democratic and economic freedom sweeping through eastern Europe as state by state freed itself from the Soviet yoke and adopted the western model. The eighties closed in a collective sigh of relief as Marx's Communist spectre 'haunting Europe' was finally and permanently put to rest. The developing world then, would do well to learn from this perfect miniature of their own economic history, as well as that of Hong Kong and Singapore's. For, as pointed out by Mrs Thatcher - there is always the danger that continued aid without dedicated political pressure will only perpetuate the kind of economic and political mismanagement that caused all the problems in the first place. With Zimbabwe's rapid disintegration worsening day by day, Mrs Thatcher's words continue to resonate into modern times. They really do need trade as much - if not in fact more - than they need aid.

Is the NHS eroding our civil liberties?

2007-06-07T10:30:00.001-07:00

Tuesday's Times reported on its front page a headline on the proposed 'Crackdown on middle class wine drinkers' that Boris Johnson has since kicked up a storm on his blog, as doctors have been renewing pressure on this already legislation-happy government into imposing higher taxes on alcohol sales and providing more 'safety' warnings on labels. It represents a fundamental shift in Whitehall policy towards drinking, which in the past has focused on underage and anti-social drinkers. It also represents an unwelcome return of that old familiar stench 'the man in Whitehall knows best'. With this change, policy no longer rests on merely enforcing the law and protecting the public from violent individuals - it is taking the very odious decision of protecting the public from themselves. Not content with deciding for responsible adults (and employers) when and where they may smoke, doctors and ministers are now seeking to control how much individuals should drink in their own homes for their own good. A Whitehall source told The Times that they wish now '...to target the older drinkers, those that are maybe drinking one or two bottles of wine at home each evening' before woefully adding that they simply 'do not realise the damage they are doing to their health'!

Now, although this writer is all in favour of shifting income tax onto indirect taxation, we all know this is not going to happen. This pernicious tax would simply add to the public's burden and is nothing short of a naked attack on individualism and personal responsibility - two things that are already sorely lacking in this country. For while the pen-pushers at Whitehall wither over their charts and statistics, the reality is that it is the responsible lower-middle income drinker that will suffer from this ludicrous piece of nanny legislation. It does not even hold the shred of authority that the smoking ban claimed - namely, protecting non-smokers from the passive smoke they do not choose to inhale - and yet the head of science and ethics at the British Medical Association still felt confident in her assertion that 'It is not the nanny state. It is about informed choices'.

But the truth is it is about neither. The root motive of this, and by extension all nanny health legislation, is money. More specifically, the ailing NHS's money. We have to ask ourselves seriously; why else should the man in Whitehall really be so concerned with our health? The Times reported in same said article that 'ministers wish to highlight the increasing burden that drink-related disease is placing on the NHS...estimated to be costing between £1.3 billion and £1.7 billion [a year]'. So there it is. In black and white. It's because it costs them money. Though technically it's our money. So instead of having the individual responsibility of drinking reasonably in order to avoid large personal medical costs, we must be chastised and taxed collectively by the state to make sure we're taking good care of ourselves and aren’t doing the terribly selfish thing of costing our neighbour money.

In this sense the health service stands out as the last socialist holy cow to survive the Thatcherite era. It is the last post-war institution to be maintained despite making zero economic sense, racking up enormous public debts, and by proxy eroding individual responsibility through more and more government legislation. British Gas, British Airways, British Rail, British Waterways etc were all privatised for these very reasons, and although Mrs Thatcher would very much have liked the NHS to follow, realpolitik of the time made this an impossibility far surpassing the 'troubles' of the Poll Tax. However, with Tony Blair's Labour government having 'alleviated' more and more of the health service through the Private Finance Initiative in the last 10 years, perhaps it is time for complete privatisation to be (very gently) put back on the table.

It needs to be addressed that - wonderful an idea as it was, and great things it has nonetheless achieved - the stark reality is that the NHS is unsustainable, that it has become a monster with an insatiable appetite for vast amounts of money that seem to go nowhere. It has proved itself unable to cope with the challenges of an ageing population in the aftermath of the post-war baby boom. While more and more medical care is needed and new treatment becomes more and more expensive, our population and ergo tax revenues decrease. This has placed the health service in a situation of perpetual decline, while the taxpayer is paradoxically forced to cough up more and more of their earnings for a worsening service. In business this would be called a diseconomy of scale. Added to this - as Whitehall are attempting to point out - the responsible drinker ends up paying for the reckless indulgences and misdemeanours of others.

On the other hand, privatising the health service would enable the government to massively slash income tax - giving the public the free choice of where to place their hard earned cash and removing the fiscal motive for Whitehall poking their nose into peoples' decisions. A private firm would in no way be worried about the strain placed on their resources by people who wish to drink more than they should, and the subsequent treatment would in fact be welcomed as good for business. The government would no longer have to worry about taxing the public into good health, nor would it feel the need to emblazon bottles of wine with large ugly health warnings because it would no longer be any of their concern. Such a huge reduction in the scope of government and of nanny statism - which is only ever a few moral panics away from police statism - can only be seen as a victory for liberty.

Of course, it would be a difficult campaign to fight - the health service is somewhat of a Pandora's Box in that when you're seemingly getting something for free, you're not going to want to give it up, even if it is in a terrible mess. Nigel Lawson is said to have called it 'the national religion' [1]. But in the campaign that will no doubt soon need to be fought, it needs to be addressed to the people that the problems the NHS is now causing outweigh its benefits in the modern day, particularly in regard to personal choice and responsibility. No longer should the prosperous, the responsible, the frugal, hard-working and law-abiding citizen be held back by paying for the reckless, the idiotic, the short-sighted, and criminal members of our society. This writer remembers very vividly being taught Aesop's story of the Ant and the Grasshopper at school, yet wonders what on earth is the point in teaching children such an important lesson if the Welfare State is going to be there to work for you just in case you decided to ignore it?

In June 1945 - campaigning against the socialist future of welfare and equality Attlee's Labour Party were proposing - Winston Churchill warned the nation that however benignly such a doctrine was conceived, maintaining it would nonetheless

...gather all power to the supreme party and party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil...nip[ping] opinion in the bud. My friends, I must tell you that a socialist policy is abhorrent to the British ideals of freedom.

Churchill was laughed down at the time - with the utmost respect of course - as an old-fashioned reactionary conjuring up fantasies of totalitarianism to preserve the imperial Britain everyone else was fairly certain was coming to an end. Yet, in a time when the authorities are able to shoot dead an innocent man in a tube station [2], or break into an innocent Muslim’s home during the early hours and shoot him [3] - all for our own good, these words may demand review. The NHS is the last bastion of this socialist future Churchill warned against - it continues to place government in a position of over-reaching responsibility - and thus power - to interfere with peoples' lives for what it believes to be for their own good. As Milton Friedman observed, the worrying thing about this is that 'the power to do good is also the power to do harm...[and] even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will...those who control the power today may not tomorrow'.

This writer is not for a moment suggesting that privatising the NHS would somehow magically restore Britons' lost civil liberties or instantly reduce the scope of the state in our lives. Not at all. But it is the cold hard truth that it was this post-war craving for a strong, far-reaching and powerful government to enforce equality that got us into this mess in the first place. In the words of David Bowie's chilling homage to Nineteen Eighty-Four (released as Diamond Dogs in 1974) - a demoralised people wanting 'someone to claim us/someone to follow/someone to shame us - some brave Apollo' ended up with Big Brother. I doubt there are many in this country who wish to live up to that Orwellian nightmare, but they would do well to remember that - as every revolution has taught us - the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions.

The myth of the evil Tory

2007-05-20T15:56:00.000-07:00

As a young person taking an interest in conservatism, you steadily begin to notice a stark contrast in the attitudes that conservatives and those on the left hold in relation to each other. Intellectuals, teachers, socialists, Marxists, social democrats, and practically anyone you will meet in the old industrial north of England are quite content to label Tories as evil [1], amoral, greedy - even sadistic (anyone remember The New Statesman?) individuals hell-bent on 'grinding the faces of the poor', to quote Alan B'Stard. There is a very real and honest hatred for the Conservatives up here and being a former lefty myself, a number of my friendships have felt the strain because of it. Despite this, I - and in my experience conservatives generally - are far more understanding of those who hold a difference of opinion. Not least the New Right of the 1980s, many of whom - Brian Griffiths, John Hoskyns and Bernard Ingham included - had been Labour voters throughout the 1960s. Some, like Alfred Sherman, had even been communists in their youth. Sherman, like so many young men of his generation, fought in the Spanish Civil War for the Republicans as part of the International Brigades. Sir Keith Joseph, principle designer of Thatcherism in the mid-'70s was too, once a 'consensus' (read: socialist) Tory. As he told Listener magazine in June 1975:

All the time I was in favour of short cuts to utopia...I was in favour of Government doing things because I was so impatient for good things to be done, and I didn't realise that the Government generally makes a mess.

These were men who had a strong passion for liberty, freedom and justice. They found this first in the quick-fix state intervention of the left, but as the '60s wore on became steadily more disillusioned with 'consensus' politics. They understood the motives of the left, because they had been there themselves, but were quick to realise that as Milton Friedman frequently expressed - there can be no political freedom without economic freedom.

Of course, this is not to say that this understanding makes the right any less scathing or convicted in their derision of the left - quite the contrary - but there is nonetheless a firm understanding that although the group in question are wrong, damn wrong - their policies, however misguided tend to stem from good intentions. This is something entirely missing from the self-righteousness of many on the left. Lady Thatcher is known to have used the old dictum 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions' in summing up Britain's post-war experiment in socialism. She understood that voters and politicians alike had honestly believed they were building a better world for themselves and their children in 1945. But good intentions were not enough - they did not work. Socialism did not work. She understood that the designers of the post-war welfare state were doing what they thought was best for the people. But as a former advisor to Lady Thatcher told John Ranelagh in 1990: 'She believes in people knowing better how to run their own lives than the State knows'.

This is a position that shows no outward compassion, no sympathy, and certainly no middle-class guilt. Regrettably though, it will always be admirable to believe in equality, welfare and state intervention, while conservatives will always be viewed as nasty for being tough enough to stand up for what works, however insensitive it may seem - for being able to see past sentimentality and defend the rights, responsibilities and dignity of the free man. It is young people in particular, who have no memory of Britain before the 1980s, who are very quick to damn Margaret Thatcher for any problems with the the society they live in - completely unaware of quite how much this country was falling apart by the time she first took office in 1979. Indeed this writer first picked up Thatcher's People by John Ranelagh as a 'know your enemy' exercise. It was only upon reading about the massive and rising inflation, the union stranglehold, the undignified IMF bail-out, the garbage mountains and unburied dead of winter 1978/9, the 3-day week, the 83% top tax rate, and the acceptance of perpetual British decline that my eyes were opened. It was at that point that I started to accept, and feel grateful for the world around me and how very little I had to complain about.

Yet, as these things tend to go Clement Attlee, Harolds Wilson & Macmillan, and even 'What Crisis?' Callaghan will never be blamed for causing and overseeing the slow, almost complete social and economic collapse of the United Kingdom. Their intentions were far too noble. Lady Thatcher on the other hand will almost certainly continue to be hated and reviled by many in this country long after she has gone for the incredible task of saving it.

Boris Yeltsin, 1931-2007

2007-05-18T14:21:00.000-07:00

In the wake of Boris Yeltsin's death on April 23, it is customary in the media to weigh up such a man's achievements and failures during their time in office and form some sort of conclusion on their legacy. For Yeltsin, his achievements appear blindingly obvious - particularly for anyone who had reached political awareness before the close of the 1980s - the Russian nation is no longer under the oppressive yoke of the Communist Party. His most commonly cited failures in the papers and on television have been his equally obvious drunkenness and initiation of the ongoing and seemingly futile Chechen wars.

However, a distinction that does not appear to have made a mark in the press is the unfortunate reality of how close these achievements and failures actually are in the long-run. John Major has been gracing our screens recently on a number of television programmes speaking of Yeltsin's passion for democracy and the market as well as his hatred for the totalitarianism of the USSR. This I do not doubt - I am sure that given the evidence, few do. What sadly makes Yeltsin's greatest achievement ultimately Russia's greatest failure is the method in which he employed it.

The 'shock therapy' of the early 1990s which radically switched Russia from a socialist command economy to free market liberalism almost overnight did not just create the short-term hardships of widespread poverty, unemployment and food shortages. In the long-run it created something far darker, far more permanent, and for Russia far more tragic - the seeds of tyranny. It is unfortunate that, given the Soviet state censorship at the time, Yeltsin would have had little opportunity to read any literature on economic liberalism before embarking on such a daring venture. Had he the opportunity to read The Road to Serfdom by the late, great economist F. A. Hayek; he would surely have come across this foreboding and alarmingly accurate prophecy:

...however one may wish a speedy return to a free economy, this cannot mean the removal at once of the [previous] restrictions. Nothing would discredit the system of free enterprise more than the acute, though probably short-lived, dislocation and instability this would produce.

Indeed, had these words not been written in 1943, one would assume they had been directed at Yeltsin personally. Though Hayek was writing entirely hypothetically in the event of an Allied victory in WWII, this is precisely what has happened in Russia since 1991. In the years spanning 1991-1994 mortality in Russians aged 15-30 years actually rose, and to this day remains excessively high [1]. With reports reaching our screens at an ever-increasing rate on state-sponsored murder of dissidents, persistent press intimidation, economic bullying and steady concentration of power, Hayek's words continue to chillingly ring true:

The one thing modern democracy will not bear without cracking is the...substantial lowering in the standards of living in peace time.

Russia may not yet have returned to totalitarianism, but its young and fragile democracy is most definitely beginning to crack. And those cracks are widening. For Russia particularly, this is a most tragic scenario as it is not the first time a chance at liberty and prosperity has been so closely missed. In November 1917, Russia was scheduled to vote on what was at the time possibly the most liberal constitution in the world; in particular promising universal suffrage. That this was something not practiced even by the great liberal democracies of Britain, America, or France gives us an insight into just how differently Russian history could have panned out. As fate would have it, the Bolsheviks seized power in a coup on October 25, and in an act befitting the tantrum of a troublesome child, shut down the newly-elected Constituent Assembly after only 13 hours sitting due to their party winning less than a quarter of the national vote [2].

In his comprehensive tome Russia and the Russians, Geoffrey Hosking touches upon what has been termed the 'binary nature' of Russian culture, with 'its tendency to seek extreme solutions to problems and lurch from one set of cultural patterns to their diametrical opposite'. This was best exemplified by the acceptance of the Bolsheviks in 1917, and the subsequent scrubbing of their legacy in 1991, despite all the hardships that came with each. At this point in time one can only hope that the Russian people have, against Hayek's predictions, not yet grown impatient with democracy - and are unwilling to accept a lurch back to dictatorship. This will be put to the test if President Putin decides to constitutionally extend his period of office in 2008. A strong president and a far-reaching state may appear to be solving problems for Russians now, but as Europe's experience of the twentieth century has shown; it can reap only the bitter whirlwind of oppression, misery, and stagnation.