Conservative Commentary
"the blogger whose youthful effusions have won him bookmarks all over Whitehall ... horribly compelling" - The Guardian
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Conservative Commentary "the blogger whose youthful effusions have won him bookmarks all over Whitehall ... horribly compelling" - The Guardian |
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Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Not one for the memoirs, Tony
Speaking of our Prime Minister, his much trumpeted appearance on The Simpsons seems to be rather less than it was cracked up to be if today's Guardian report on the episode is anything to go by. What starts with Smithers finally persuading Mr Burns to withdraw his own money from an ATM machine rather than borrow it from him soon draws in Grandpa's D-Day love affair with Edwina (played by Jane Leeves from Frasier), JK Rowling and Sir Ian McKellen, both playing themselves. As does Mr Blair. They gave Brett 'Hitman' Hart a better cameo than that. There must be a lesson in all this somewhere about the limits of how far even being probably the second-most powerful man on the planet can take you. UPDATE: It seems (see comments) that the scene is actually considerably longer and funnier than the Guardian claims. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |
Thoughts on Tony Blair
Waking up last week and feeling like writing, I scanned the press and decided to write a piece on the Prime Minister's domestic agenda. Specifically, I was to say that if he lost the vote on Foundation Hospitals, then there was little point in him going on. But I soon found that Stephen Pollard had already said it all so well in the Independent. New Labour owes its political success to the hope it offered that it would transform public services. Sage words, certainly. But now that we know the margins of 'victory' - seventeen votes - one wonders if they are really an accurate diagnosis. Certainly an outright defeat of the Foundation Hospitals Bill would have had exactly the symbolic significance Mr Pollard describes. But given the feebleness of the bill and the narrowness of the victory, one wonders how meaningful it is that this did not occur. Yes, it could have been worse, but how can things now get better? If this most enfeebled, most marginal effort to reform properly the National Health Service could have been overturned by just nine Labour backbenchers voting the other way, then what use is it as symbolism? The seventeen vote margin, won by yet another pledge to try a fox hunting ban, will not be a permanent majority existing to support Blairite reforms. It was the absolute maximum support New Labour could manage for the absolute minimum of reform. So how can anything more radical ever hope to pass? If Blair could only get a majority of seventeen in favour of the first step on the road to reform, then how does he propose to carry his party with him on the rest of the journey? I just can't see it happening, even if Labour's 400+ MPs were there for a decade, which of course they are not, a fair few soon to be voted out in favour of opposition members as reliably hostile to Labour as any of the party's own awkward squad. I think Oliver Letwin was basically right when he declared last year his suspicions that Tony Blair secretly envied the Tories their radical new policies. Blair probably recognises that Conservative policies on the state sector are the only way Britain's public services will ever perform satisfactorily, but knows of course that his party will do all it can to reject the destruction of the last reason it has for existing: the belief that government and the state can more effectively and more equitably ensure people care and education than those people can themselves. So he is forced into a feebly slow, piecemeal approach to an issue where boldness above all is required. But now with even that piecemeal approach looking like it has reached the limits of what Labour backbenchers will accept, he can do nought but sit back and watch the schools deteriorate and the health service collapse as he waits to feel the full force of public anger. I have said it before and I will say it again. Tony Blair is emphatically not going to go down in history as a great Prime Minister or as a great Labour leader. He has now been in office for the majority of the thirteen years since Margaret Thatcher left Downing Street, and has with his two landslide victories undoubtedly been the dominant figure of the post-Thatcher era. But what has he to show for any of this? What great effect has he had on British society? By this stage of the Thatcher government - late 1985 or so - inflation had been cut, the unions tamed, the miners smashed, cruise missiles planted, privatisation pushed through, rioters clubbed and income tax slashed. Even if one disagrees with these measures, no one contends that Thatcherism had anything but an enormous impact on British society. Blairism, by contrast, has nothing. A few foreign wars, a couple of toy parliaments, Bank of England independence ... and that's it. It's now far too late for anyone to claim Tony Blair as a radical, reformist Prime Minister with a domestic agenda that will revolutionise Britain. Even the most patient must now acknowledge that if he hasn't done these things in seven years, he never will. Assuming Blair's historic legacy to the British people is not total government from Brussels, then I think it is safe now to conclude that five years after leaving office, Blair will have no recognisable legacy of any kind, any more than Harold Wilson did by 1981. There will by then be no Blairites, no swarms on left or right harking back to a golden Blairite age, and no one believing he had some great contribution left to make to Britain had he only been in office a little longer. Yes, he'll have won three wars. Yes, he'll have pushed through the odd constitutional reform. Yes, he'll have taken Labour from opposition to unprecedented electoral triumph. But as hard as it might be to imagine now, in terms of Tony Blair's impact on Britain and the legacy that will exist half a decade after he departs from Downing Street, it will scarcely be different than if he had never been born. Just wait and see. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Monday, November 24, 2003
Thoughts on Michael Howard
Pondering Mr Howard's first couple of weeks as Conservative leader, it struck me that his ascent to the position confirmed one well-told tale about politics, and refuted another. What Michael Howard's leadership confirms is the long history of the Conservatives choosing as their chief someone who, even a short time before, very few would have predicted would be holding the position. The last time anyone fulfilled most expectations in becoming Tory leader must be Anthony Eden in 1955. In recent decades, everyone who has held the position would have seemed a far out possibility just a couple of years before. Who would have guessed in 1973 that unpopular Education Secretary Margaret Thatcher would soon be Conservative Leader, and would take the party into the 1990s? The only person who predicted John Major's ascent in advance was Norman Tebbit in 1987, an endorsement withdrawn not long afterwards. Certainly few in 1988 were predicting the heights the Treasury Chief Secretary soon reached. William Hague in 1995? He was only just getting used to being Welsh Secretary. Iain Duncan Smith in 1999? Iain Duncan Who? And finally Michael Howard in 2001. Howard's promotion even to Shadow Chancellor was seen as a backwards step. No one realistically imagined he would be Leader of the Opposition in a matter of months. But once again expectations were confounded. In the uncertain business that politics is, it seems as firm a rule as one can find that Tory leaders emerge suddenly, and from nowhere. Don't be at all surprised if Michael Howard's successor is someone who currently is barely a household name in his own household. What Howard's ascent refutes is the cynical claim that in modern politics the House of Commons matters not a jot. Discussing the leadership last month at a meeting with John O'Sullivan (former National Review editor and special advisor to Mrs Thatcher) and some other bloggers, it was noted how well Michael Howard had performed in the House. This was swiftly dismissed as not mattering at all. O'Sullivan and I interjected in unison that it mattered very much to MPs. And so it turned out. Michael Howard's position and reputation today are built to an enormous degree on the skill and power of his performances at the despatch box against Gordon Brown. It was this factor above all which turned him from a voice of the past to the man Tory MPs were able to back unanimously as their new leader. The House of Commons may rarely play a major part in the lives of ordinary Britons, but in cases like this - as with Lord Howe's resignation speech - its effects can be extremely decisive. Finally, it is significant that the fury expected from Tory activists denied a say on the leadership has not surfaced, nor even shown any real signs of existing at all. I predicted this the day after IDS was deposed. All indications so far are that Michael Howard will be the only contender, ensuring that MPs can 'crown' him leader that very day. Some say members across the country will be angered to have been denied a say in who should lead next. I do not believe this. My experience of the Conservative Party grassroots is overwhelming one of exasperation at the infighting at the top and the harm done to the Tory cause in every local constituency and borough by constant press reports of infighting. If we can have even a full leadership contest without any of this then I think the members will by a huge majority be relieved. They won't denounce Tory MPs for removing their right to put an 'X' in a box: they will recognise instead a whiff of that determination for unity that ensured the Conservatives were the natural party of government in this country for such a large chunk of recent history. What better testament to this could there be than the wonderful news of 6,000 people who have joined or rejoined the party in the short time since Mr Howard took over? This is a leadership that is succeeding and a Conservative Party that is going places again. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Saturday, November 22, 2003
Quote of the Day
"Came home and had Arthur Scargill to lunch. Today Derek Ezra, Chairman of the Coal Board, announced the closure of about fifty pits, with 25,000 miners' jobs going. This is what Arthur has been predicting for some time, having been bitterly attacked as a troublemaker by the right-wing members of the NUM. He was tremendously bouncy and cheerful." - Tony Benn, 11 February 1981 I think these few sentences demolish the view to which some still hold that Arthur Scargill's battle was initially one only about his concern to protect miners, not a political campaign. Twenty-five thousand of his own members were to lose their jobs, and Scargill's reaction that day was to be "tremendously bouncy and cheerful" that he has been proved right. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |
Halting the return of the loony left
When section twenty-eight of the 1988 Local Government Act, which forbade local authorities from promoting homosexuality, came up for debate, its opponents were clear that the scrapping of the bill would not be a precursor to a return to the loony leftism of the 1980s. In this time, far-left Labour councils in London and elsewhere were ensuring schools instilled radical homosexual propaganda in schoolchildren. A book aimed at primary pupils told of a young girl being raised by two homosexual men and pictured her getting into bed with them. One video forbade by the clause featured an underage teenage boy encouraging pupils to try sex both of heterosexual and homosexual varieties to see which they preferred. Obviously, parents were less than thrilled by local schools being used to fill their children with sexualised political propaganda, and section twenty-eight was the response introduced. This loony leftism would not happen again were it scrapped, its opponents claimed: all it would do is prevent bullying of homosexual pupils. Of course, the idea that preventing a child from being bullied for something necessarily means promoting that thing falls down on simple logical grounds - if a pupil is bullied for fatness does that mean teachers need to promote obesity to stop the bullying? - and the Chief Inspector of Schools confirmed there was no evidence that the clause prevented teachers from tackling bullying. But scrapped it was, and already we are seeing exactly the sort of weird propaganda we saw in the 1980s, with Edinburgh City Council now giving four to seven year olds lesbian dolls in schools. I really hope that all those who denied this sort of thing would ever happen will now apologise. I hope they will also support Kent County Council in its decision to ensure its own schools do not start promoting homosexuality. I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for it, though. Isn't it extraordinary that the very same people who are usually horrified by the idea that the parents who pay the taxes that keep schools going might be able to choose a religious component to their childrens' education, or at the idea that the moral underpinnings to sexual relationships be related in sex education lessons, are so shameless about promoting their own evaluations of sexuality and their own political ideals to children? God forbid any child should leave primary school taking a traditional or Biblical perspective on sexual love. I can understand why section twenty-eight was offensive to some homosexuals. As Shirley Williams has said, schools shouldn't really be promoting any relationship, except perhaps marriage, so although section twenty-eight was obviously introduced in reaction to some very specific scandals in loony left councils, it was wrong for it to single out homosexual relationships. Genuine educational reform will ensure that when it comes to lessons in sex education and other sensitive areas which infringe on controversial values, parents will have a strong say in what is taught. That will provide a natural brake on radical groups of all stripes who seek to infiltrate schools, removing any need for legislation like section twenty-eight. But until that occurs, it is extremely important that pernicious propaganda is not encouraged in our schools. Homosexual or sexually confused children should be protected from bullying and harrassment, but Christian, Jewish, Muslim and other non-PC children should also not be victimised. Parents should feel free to send their kids to school without them coming home believing they are bad people for holding to their faith because they were told by their school teachers that all forms of sexual behaviour are morally equivalent. Anyone who could deny that this is a legitimate aim simply does not believe in the freedom of thought and diversity of opinion that are intrinsic to a democratic society. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |
You only want stability when the government is getting it right
In my Politics class this week, proportional representation was discussed. I won't bore anyone with the usual litany of arguments for and against, but there was one rather instrumentalist defence of the system proposed without any real opposition (I was put on the pro-PR side) that I think deserves a critique. This case was that PR ensures stability to a country in its economic affairs. Without the great electoral swings you often see under plurality systems of voting, it is easier to think into the future and know there will be a large element of continuity. There will not be very different policies even a decade or two from now, and one can plan ahead on that basis. Well, it is certainly true that PR forces the sort of consensus that ensures economic policies - like others - really stick, changing only slowly and rarely. But this is only a good thing when those policies are themselves beneficial. It's all very well praising a country that has a basically sensible approach to policy for the way in which its political system works to preserve that approach even after quite considerable shifts of public opinion reveal themselves at election time. But what if the policies themselves are wrong and the relative immunity of coalition governments to elections and parliamentary swings ensures that the damaging approach the government is pushing forward is not reversed? Stability when things are going well is a very fine thing. But the other side of that coin is stability when policies mean a stagnating economy that is harming most people. In those circumstances, the last thing a country needs is an electoral system that puts huge obstacles in the way of voters kicking the existing government out of power in the way that they were able to do here in 1979 and 1997. The great difficulty in all proportional voting systems for those without a natural inclination to put their trust in politicians is the way they produce coalition governments that, once solidified, become very difficult to remove. PR virtually inoculates leading politicians against the decisions of the voters. This may seem a good thing when the economy is growing, unemployment is low and there is no great desire to rock the boat. But it is a disaster when things are going badly wrong to have a voting system that makes a straightforward change of government very difficult and a complete reversal of policy near impossible. I would gladly trade a little stability when things are good for the ability to make decisive and necessary changes when things are bad. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |
Chief Gnome on the polls
The always interesting Anthony Wells examines recent opinion polls and judges what they mean for each of the UK's parliamentary parties. The Conservatives have reason to be optimistic, the Labour Party should count its lucky stars things aren't worse for them, and the Lib Dems are back at the bottom, he reports. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Thursday, November 20, 2003
Erroneous?
"At every opportunity opponents of Bush are labelled, explicitly or implicitly, as unthinking bigots. What is striking is just how erroneous a claim it is to caricature opponents of the Bush way in this manner." - Peter Kilfoyle
Thanks to Harry and Samizdata. UPDATE: Reporter David Frum, who attended the march, details just how low these cretins sunk: The organizers of the protest installed a mobile jumbotron at the front of the square. On it, images of the speakers were interspersed with herky-jerky art-school style film clips. Just before the toppling of the effigy - and in order to work up the crowd into a more frenzied mood of rage and hate - the jumbotron broadcast images of George Bush, stepping out of his limousine into Buckingham Palace and standing at attention at the welcome ceremony. Now here's the interesting thing: Whenever Bush appeared, there appeared superimposed upon him crosshairs - like those of a sniper's rifle. I wonder what the organizers meant by that? Eugh. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Tuesday, November 18, 2003
Not a lurch, but a step to the right - and a good thing too
Samizdatista David Carr analyses what new Shadow Home Secretary David Davis' statement of personal support for the death penalty for serial killers indicates. This is quite revolutionary really. For the last decade at least, the Conservatives have been on the run. Having lost every scrap of moral legitimacy to their opponents on the left (even before they were booted out of office in 1997) British Tories lost whatever ability they had to influence the national discourse. In fact, so beleaguered and timid did they become, that no senior Tory could stick his or her head over the parapet of national life without getting promptly chased back into their hidey-holes by a contemptuous and excoriating press. Interestingly enough, the Guardian itself agrees. How else to explain the three following remarkable events of recent days? In the first, Rupert Murdoch announces that he - or "we" as he prefers to put it - might be about to tell his editors to back the Tories rather than Labour. Two days later, David Davis, less than a week into his new job as shadow home secretary, told the Sunday Telegraph that he favoured the death penalty for serial murderers. Then yesterday, only hours before Blair was to address them, the Confederation of British Industry published a survey showing that three-quarters of its top companies believe that the government is less business-friendly than five years ago. Where the two differ is in their view of whether the Conservatives believing fervently and fearlessly in conservatism is a route to or from electoral success. On this issue, I rather incline towards the Samizdata view. Endless comparisons are made between the modern Conservatives and the Labour Party of the 1980s, based mainly or wholly on the huge majorities of the governments they opposed. In the usual media thinking, a "lurch to the right" is seen as being exactly as fatal as a "lurch to the left". According to this view, the political spectrum is exactly symmetrical: most voters are located at the centre and any move away from this ground in either direction is damaging. So the Tories are now simply mirroring what Labour did two decades ago. I think the reality of politics is nothing like as simple. While it is certainly true that moving to the left can scarcely if ever make a party more popular, as capital punishment in particular demonstrates, moving to the right certainly can. On immigration and asylum, on taxation, on crime and punishment, on the EU - on a range of issues - the British public is generally to the right of the political class. By taking a more conservative stance on any of these issues, a centrist party usually gains in popularity. As Rupert Darwall has said, the political spectrum is not symmetrical. Socialism doesn't work; free markets do. Liberalism on criminality fails; toughness works. Going against the grain of human responsibilities and nature's incentives ensures mayhem; going with the grain means order. Ordinary voters are possessive of a lot more common sense than conservatives are often prone to give them credit, and they can see many of these things. That is why just about every time power has changed hands in the last four decades, Labour has entered government by moving to the right, and the Tories have entered government by moving to the ... right. The ambitious, pre-Thatcherite, Selsdon Park promises of the Conservative opposition in the 1960s stood in sharp, enticing contrast to the drab tax-and-tax-and-tax-and-tax-and-spend strategy of the Wilson government, and 1970 was in fact the only time a post-war government with a decisive majority has given way in one election to another government with a decisive majority. We didn't stick to Selsdon, of course, and soon paid the price. But we learned the lesson of 1974 in choosing the following year a new leader with the guts to see a job to its end. The last time the Conservatives were in opposition should be a key reference model for how we should approach the same task today, yet it is scarcely mentioned. What Margaret Thatcher did was employ exactly the confident approach outlined in the above quotes. She took on socialist assumptions, challenged the left-liberal dogmas and ideals of the time and showed immense confidence in what conservatives really believed. In very sharp contrast to the 'wets' of her day and their modern Portillista equivalents, she never sought the approval of the Guardianistas or aimed to appeal to the high priests of liberal opinion. Her strategy was to defeat the left, not to embrace the less unappealing sections of it. We know now how well it worked, and it should be obvious why: when a party moves right of the centre ground, what it is offering is to relinquish government control over large areas where the state is currently dominant, to extend opportunities to many more who aspire to do better. That was Thatcher's appeal, and it took Labour until 1997 before they managed to catch up to what the Tories offered to the aspiring classes, an effort to catch up helped to no small degree by the poverty of ambition of the then-tired Conservative Party. So certainly the left needs to move to the centre-ground if it wants to do well at elections. But the right does not face quite the same dilemma. People vote in Conservative governments when the Tories appeal to their aspirations, when people see a significant different in what they can hope to gain from the parties. When both parties are on the centre-ground, that difference is not obvious, and people may be inclined to vote on other issues. But when the Tories leave a chasm of aspiration between themselves and Labour, the choice is clearer - and the swing voters of Middle England overwhelmingly show themselves willing to jump that chasm whenever we have the courage to offer them greater opportunities. Obviously, there are limits to how radical the Conservatives can be at any one time. We must always be measured in ensuring the amount of clear blue water between the parties. Britons will gladly vote for change, but almost never for revolution. Equally, the shift has to be confined to only a few issues. Moving rightwards on every issue succeeds only in making the party look extreme without giving its spokesmen the chance to defend each move. But on the two or three issues where the party chooses to be radical and ambitious, it can pick up common sense support and spend the months and years that follow arguing and debating in a way that opens minds to new ideas and concepts, shifting public opinion our way and whets voters' appetites for the reforms on offer. So when it comes to issues like crime, surely an issue currently near the top of the public agenda, the Tory strategy need not and must not be one of cowering before the liberal dogma of closing one's mind to argument and eyes to evidence. We can easily pick up more support by tackling head-on the notion that it is preferable that millions of innocents be prisoners in their own homes than that we imprison criminals until they reform or grow too old to terrorise others. It means we should stand up for those who defend their homes from intruders. And it means we can remind the considerable majority of people who favour capital punishment for murderers that their local Conservative candidate is the only one likely to agree with them. Whether or not one takes the view that David Davis got it right on the issue itself, if the statement he made signals a new confidence on the right about conservative principles, it can only be good for the Tories' electoral chances. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |
Jesus wept
In its ruling legalising group marriage today, the Massachussetts Supreme Court made the following statement: Marriage is a vital social institution. The exclusive commitment of three individuals to each other nurtures love and mutual support; it brings stability to our society. For those who choose to marry, and for their children, marriage provides an abundance of legal, financial, and social benefits. In return it imposes weighty legal, financial, and social obligations. The question before us is whether, consistent with the Massachusetts Constitution, the Commonwealth may deny the protections, benefits, and obligations conferred by civil marriage to three individuals who wish to marry. We conclude that it may not. The Massachusetts Constitution affirms the dignity and equality of all individuals. It forbids the creation of second-class citizens. In reaching our conclusion we have given full deference to the arguments made by the Commonwealth. But it has failed to identify any constitutionally adequate reason for denying civil marriage to triples. Well, actually that's not quite what they said. But in their ruling today forcing two-husband or two-wife 'marriages' on a state whose voters have had no say on the matter, the Massachussetts Supreme Court has ensured that there is no logical obstacle remaining in law to just such a ruling a few years down the road. Once marriage is redefined in this way from being society's recognition of the unique role played by the married heterosexual couple in best raising the next generation and of the privileged place to which this paramount relationship is entitled, into a sort of badge of honour due to any sexual relationship that has gained enough social acceptance, then any objective argument against polygamy falls down. If marriage is no longer about providing the structure and support for the relationship that best incubates the next generation, then there is no more reason to deny it to three men than there is to deny it to two. Group weddings, and perhaps one day incestuous weddings between sterile siblings, become a logical end-game of granting any consensual relationship the supreme social status - an objective for which many radical groups are working as fervently as the militant homosexual lobby worked for this first redefinition of marriage. Today's ruling was not primarily about homosexuals, whose legal equality and access to marriage as a bond between a man and a woman was already a fact, but about whether traditional marriage and the 'nuclear' family deserve any special place or recognition in modern society. By answering in the negative, Massachussetts has embarked on a very steep and slippery slope towards the inevitable result of abolition - and abolition is what extending a privilege and recognition until it is universal means - of the institution still loosely holding together the only family structure which has ever been able to sustain civilised society. Everyone, whatever their sexuality, benefitted from marriage because it served this vital purpose. Everyone in Massachussetts, whatever their sexuality, will now suffer because it no longer does. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |
What America is thinking in 2003
Dick Morris, the American Machiavelli and former Clinton spin doctor, has of late become a very informed and interesting columnist on US politics for the Jewish World Review. With the political situation in the states so polarised, his more detached approach offers a more reliable guide than most commentators can offer to how ordinary voters feel. John Hawkins has collected together a series of quotes from his columns over the last year, and they make very revealing reading. For those not firmly of the left, the story they tell is certainly an encouraging one. When it comes to next year's Presidential Elections, the two most striking quotes of the bunch relate to the Bush tax cuts, which - rightly or wrongly - are likely to be credited with the sudden upswing in the US economy that Americans are now enjoying. Passing a tax cut likely draws the active support of 25 to 30 percent of the voters. Canceling one already in place probably gins the number up to the high 40s or low 50s. But opposition to a tax increase, which will be the basis of the Bush campaign, gets your support up into the 70s and 80s. Any Democrat who squirms on the tax-cut issue in the primaries has no chance - zero - to win the nomination. Each will have to take the "pledge" to oppose the Bush tax cuts. Thus, Bush will have succeeded in creating a situation where anyone who can win the nomination can't win the election. Democrats are not about to nominate anyone who backs the tax cut, and Americans are not going to elect anyone who favors a tax increase. Do read them all. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |
Quote of the Day
"A number of times I've attacked the idea of identity cards and people have written me, 'If you haven't done anything wrong, what have you got to fear?'. Just wait until the first time you're stopped on the street by a policeman and you don't have your papers." - Peter Hitchens Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |
The EU: 15 countries, 300 million citizens, but only one view recognised as legitimate
When one considers for a moment that the EU is a political institution with its own flag, its own currency, its own foreign minister and the power to make criminals out of people who sell apples in pounds and ounces, to determine certain tax levels for its members (for example the minimum VAT levels) and to make laws under which hundreds of millions will live, it really seems rather creepy how lacking it is in any internal opposition. There is no sense of the government on one side and on the other an opposition which is internal to the EU's structures but external to its governing powers. By contrast, the EU has quangos and other bodies dedicated precisely to rooting out and delegitimising anyone who disagrees with the particular course it takes, for example declaring opponents of to the euro to be exemplars of "monetary xenophobia". So when a representative of a national government at least speaks out on such matters, most democrats would hope that this obvious lack of any internal and structural opposition would be taken into account by the EU - that disagreement and alternative ideas from this source would be rather welcomed. But once again, the official reaction to Gordon Brown's perfectly sensible and factual Telegraph column on the EU Constitution's implications for British sovereignty, and to his speech warning of the dangers of a drift towards a fully fledged, job-destroying, social democratic Europe, demonstrates perfect continuity of these fundamentally undemocratic traditions. The President of the European Parliament has now accused the Chancellor of - horror of horrors - "appealing to Eurosceptics"; in other words, of listening to and responding to the concerns and viewpoints of the vast majority of the people of his country. The President goes on to assert that even to make the case against the present direction of the EU's ruling body is to risk "marginalisation" of Britain in Europe. Lest there be any doubt that countries and their representatives must give pro-Brussels views or none at all, he also baldly states that "Britain's case falls on deaf ears with its European colleagues when it is couched in Eurosceptic language". So we have no internal opposition, publicly funded quangos to denounce and delegitimise external opposition, and a warning to any political leaders from member states that should they go as far as to step out of line in a speech or newspaper column, their countries will suffer and their views be ignored unless they match those of the European Commission. This is the body, the institution, the superstate, to which Tony Blair and his closest cronies want to surrender Britain's final rights of self-government over almost every area of policy, from how we educate our children to how we indulge in space exploration. What cynically realistic judgement he shows by refusing us a referendum on this issue of an EU Constitution. How right we are to continue to demand one, and to remain determined to vote 'No'. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Monday, November 17, 2003
Three steps to a safer countryside
As the Telegraph details the extent of rising crime in Britain's largely lawless countryside, where the police seem interested only in the activities of poor old Tony Martin and his fellow desperate householders, the paper offers three simple steps for tipping the balance back in favour of the decent citizen. Of course, these steps would also help enormously to improve quality of life in urban areas of the country. First, citizens must be allowed to defend their property. Tony Martin became a national cause celebre, despite his unappealing character, because homeowners across the countryside sympathised with his predicament. Mr Martin had been repeatedly burgled, and let down by his local constabulary. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Sunday, November 16, 2003
Quote of the Day
"In fact, hard as it may be for some to stomach, Bush has been at the forefront of the fight against the fascism of our age. Those who march against Bush next week should think what message their protests send to those in the frontline of the fight against modern fascism around the world. But they won't. Let's stop kidding ourselves, these protestors who oppose Starbucks but not death squads don't care about fascism anymore and they don't care about international solidarity." - Harry Hatchet Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |
Relative 'poverty'?
Ross, Marcus and Madsen deliver a triple-whammy against those who define poverty as earning below an arbitrary percentage of a moving average income. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Saturday, November 15, 2003
Quote of the Day
"There is no future in trying to find a middle road between folly and common sense." - The secret Conservative Manifesto for the 1978 Election, released today Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Wednesday, November 12, 2003
Quote of the Day
"Saatchi is to reform Conservative Central Office into an election fighting machine, rather than the Augean Stables it currently is." - Telemachus describes the Herculean task facing the new Tory Party Chairman. (Also check out his account of the importance of the message of 'fairness' in promoting the Conservative agenda.) Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |
Israel above all should know better than to reward hostage-taking
As soon as a government shows itself willing to surrender prisoners in exchange for hostage releases, any time a terrorist leader is captured in the future - normally a great moment for any free country - all his supporters need to do is capture some sympathetic civilians and threaten to kill them if their favoured man is not released. And because the precedent has been set, if at any point the state then refuses to release their prisoner to go out and plot further murders, then they can be sure that it will be they who face the blame for what happens to the hostages, having already shown themselves willing to release prisoners in some cases, so why not this? A state which concedes to hostage-taking does not protect its people by showing itself willing to compromise with terrorists. On the contrary, it ensures that terrorists know one proven way to get what they want, and that there will in the future be far more innocent people held hostage and killed. It is enormously depressing that even the Sharon government has shown itself willing to make this mistake, setting the above precedent with all its ill and bloody effects, effects which will be infinitely harder to reverse than they were to bring into being. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Sunday, November 09, 2003
Quote of the Day
"Robert Mugabe has won the Rhodesian elections outright. It's a fantastic victory and I can't remember anything that has given me so much pleasure for a long time. When I think of the systematic distortion by the British press of Mugabe's position, it's an absolute disgrace. The Tories must be furious." - Tony Benn, 4 March 1980 Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Saturday, November 08, 2003
Freedom, not fascism, defeats fascism
The BNP will never be defeated by stooping to totalitarian lengths of the sort that would delight the Socialist Workers' Party's Anti-Nazi League, which calls for the expulsion of all university students who support the racist party. They will be defeated if and when a genuinely free society is willing to refute their obnoxious arguments and pay heed to the concerns about mass immigration that lead people to support them. Free societies are better than this, and that is why our model will always be superior to that proposed by every Nazi incarnation. This sort of undemocratic measure will fail, and deserve to. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |
Some things are worth our boys dying for, but Iraqi human rights aren't among them
"There are now almost 400 people dead who wouldn't be dead if that resolution hadn't been passed and we hadn't gone to war." The short-sightedness and the disregard for the Iraqi victims of Saddam implied by those words are, in my view, anything but liberal. Well, it probably isn't liberal. But such an attitude does show that Howard Dean's heart is in the right place on at least one issue. For anyone aspiring to be US President, the American people must come first. The idea that one can trade American lives for Iraqi human rights is as fanciful as it is cold-blooded. Just like Britain, America had no duty to send its boys out to the Middle East to die for the human rights of the Iraqi people, and if intelligence had indicated that Saddam Hussein posed no real threat to American national interests, her President should absolutely have let him stay in power and saved those four hundred American lives. Who are these people to deem themselves fit to decide who lives and who dies, to be willing to sacrifice their fellow countrymen to their own concerns about human rights in some foreign land? We are not the world's policemen, and we should not stump up the cost in pounds or in lives of attempting to be. If Gene and Harry want to go and fight to free enslaved peoples, I will support their international brigade. But for them to call on national armies - of which they are not members - to support and die for their values, rather than these soldiers' countries, is out of this world. Armed forces are there to defend the national interest. It is not our responsibility to secure the human rights of Iraqis (or Cubans, or Koreans). Unless doing so advances British interests then nobody in Britain should have to die to that end. If Howard Dean can see the relevance of such principles to his own country, he's a lot closer to being a fit President than some who supported the war. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Thursday, November 06, 2003
Quote of the Day
"Remove advertising, disable a person or firm from preconising its wares and their merits, and the whole of society and of the economy is transformed. The enemies of advertising are enemies of freedom." - Enoch Powell Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Monday, November 03, 2003
Quote of the Day
"And how did you enjoy the show, Mrs Washington? ... Yes, I'm afraid we did enjoy the show, Mrs Washington." So begins and ends Peter Preston's Guardian column today, demonstrating that neither he nor, it would seem, the paper's editor can tell the difference between George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. I look forward to the Guardian report sympathising with the blood on Pat Nixon's dress, and asking whether Jimmy Carter's reputation has fully recovered from Monicagate. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |
Link of the Week
I have plenty to say at the moment, but little time in which to say it until Thursday or so, so posts will be rare until then. In the meantime, do check out Unpersons, the link of the week, which has had some excellent posts of late, on 'fair' trade, communism and university access to name but a few. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Sunday, November 02, 2003
All too typical of what the left is becoming
It is always gratifying when a politician gets a taste of the disastrous consequences of his actions. The words of the despicable Richard Ingrams today. Barely a week goes by without this weird old bigot castigating Israel or demanding that British Jews be forced to identify their ethnicity before their opinions on the Middle East be given a hearing. Now he is even willing to side with terrorist cronies of Saddam and/or Bin Laden against those within democratic societies who disagree with his politics. Ingrams is a man who disgracefully denounced our security forces' undercover elimination of IRA terrorists and politicians, but who is quite willing to countenance Islamofascist rocket attacks on the ministers of democratic governments. Though these positions clearly show a man whose moral compass points 180 degrees the wrong way, his views are not necessary inconsistent: the common thread of both positions is a preference for the means and men of terror as opposed to the forces of law and democracy. Sometimes conservative bloggers are accused of delighting in finding the wackiest lefties and picking on easy targets such as the moonbats on the Democrat Underground or Guardian forums. But Ingrams' column today - published in The Observer no less - shows just how deeply imbedded in the 'respectable' left's thinking is this sort of deranged hate for Bush's America; a hate that permits them to cast aside the most basic human feeling and excuses their allying themselves with some of the world's most evil mass-murderers. The moral equivalence and fanaticism of leftist anti-Americanism is a cancer that may already have spread too far to be removable. For now, the left is led by a Prime Minister obviously close to Washington and obviously unwilling to indulge in such moral equivalence. But when he falls, we may see a resurgence of this suicidal anti-Western spirit in the Labour Party that would rival the influence CND had in the 1980s. Time will tell. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Saturday, November 01, 2003
Where to read the EU Constitution
Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Thursday, October 30, 2003
The last Conservative leader ... and the next
So when IDS moved in a few days from being an outsider to being the favourite, I was relieved. I believed that travelling full steam ahead in the directions proposed either by Clarke or Portillo would be inconsistent with the conservative vision and was likely to be ineffective in winning back lost support. Equally, I was unconvinced that the personalities of either one would be a positive factor in polling stations to any great degree. Like I think most of the membership of the party, then, Iain Duncan Smith was if anything the default choice. The most common expression of this, that he was chosen for not being Clarke and for not being Portillo, was true for me. But given this, the Tories still ended up on 13 September 2001 with a leader with no experience of ministerial office whose days as a Maastricht rebel and Redwood cheerleader were at least as memorable as his time shadowing the Social Security and Defence ministries. I cannot deny that at times in those early days I feared the party had made the wrong choice. Portillo may have been proposing a range of essentially Blairite reforms to the party - as if Thatcherism were no more effective or voter-friendly than Old Labour - but he still seemed less of a leap in the dark. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Quote of the Day
"I think most of us have noticed that something has changed, that we are beginning to move on from the playing of games and the staging of parties, that we are coming to develop a more mature analysis, a better grasp of tactics, an understanding of the need for policy." - George Monbiot explains how far the anti-war movement has progressed from those immature, tactically inept days of playing games by establishing political parties, 28 January 2003 Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |
I am back
Yes, it's true. I am getting back to normal blogging now, having restored my site to its old look. I will be residing here for at least the forseeable future, and am now working on getting some of my old content back. I would appreciate anyone who is still linking to me at http://www.ukconservatism.com/weblog, which now heads nowhere, to link in future to http://www.ukconservatism.com or http://concom.blogspot.com, both of which lead to this page. Given recent events within the Conservative Party, I have decided not to blog the last day of conference. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | Monday, October 27, 2003
Diary - 2003 Conservative Party Conference: Wednesday, 8 October
Wednesday morning looked a bit barren of good fringe meeting debates, so I made my selections with difficulty. Euthanasia, like the environment, has never been an issue that interested me, although as with environmentalism, I am against it. But the meeting did have Ann Widdecombe as speaker and could be better than I thought, so there was where I headed. It was better. Widdecombe discussed just how close we may be to legalised euthanasia in this country, with a bill now proposed before the Commons that would effectively license not the denial of medical treatment but of food: euthanasia by starving someone to death. She answered the claim often put about that euthanasia should not be feared because "it works in Holland". In fact, many elderly Dutchmen now fear for their lives so much that they flee their country for Germany, so afraid are they that if the stay in their own country for treatment they will never awaken from it. Widdecombe stressed that she respected the views of those who believed that ending a life was always wrong. But she did herself sympathise with those who felt immense pain in their lives when they wished to end it all, if there was no realistic prospect of anything but death doing so. The reason she opposed any bill to allow euthanasia was the conviction that she did not believe it would ever stay at that stage once permitted. When abortion was legalised in this country in 1967, people were assured that it would be limited to cases of severe disability, where the baby would surely not live in any case and that no one in a medical role would find it an essential part of his job to cooperate with abortion, religious objections being respected. Now none of this is true, and we have effectively abortion on demand and whole professions like consultant gynaecology in which opposition to abortion eliminates almost any real hope of doing the job. It only showed how easily euthanasia could go from a very select set of circumstances to the horrific cases in Holland or worse. Echoing her prediction last year that within ten years of the first bill to allow euthanasia in Britain "no granny would be safe", she said she did not want to see British pensioners fleeing to Germany for treatment in terror of what might happen if they stay here. The next meeting I attended was a few hours later at midday. The Freedom Association's meeting was unrevealingly titled Whither Conservatism?. I have heard a mixture of messages about the FA, but I did know it has a rather good journal, Freedom Today, and thought it was the best of those on at the time to attend. I was rather bemused by what I saw when I got there. I thought the choice to have a town crier complete with horn and booming voice introduce the meeting was very eccentric, and the speech was more than a little extreme. Sir Christopher Gill was good on the threat to British liberties such as habeas corpus posed by the European Constitution. But I thought he made very little sense in arguing that it was illogical to oppose the EU Constitution while wishing for Britain to remain in the European Union. Why? "They [the constitution and union] are two sides of the same coin". That settles that one, then. I soon left to head to the Telegraph/CPS meeting. The Daily Telegraph had gathered a large range of speakers for its joint fringe meeting with the Centre for Policy Studies. Alice Thomson, Janet Daley and another Telegraph journalist were on the panel along with Charles Moore himself who was chairing it. John Redwood represented the Tory party and the CPS had its representative. Most of the messages were very positive. The Conservatives had the right policies: now what was needed was time to get their message across and show people how they could do better under them. Questions varied, John Redwood winning particular and justified applause for his explanation of his visits to Sixth Form colleges around the country. He would enter and ask them if they had any trouble buying their CDs, or whether they thought it would be difficult to book a hotel room in France for the next evening. No hands would rise. Then he would ask what difficulties they might face getting a hospital appointment or operation at a time and place of their choice, or what freedom they have to take or leave it in the education system. Just about every hand would be in the air. What was the connection between all those services which did create problems for their users? They were all run by government. What connected those which did not have such problems? They were all outside the hands of government. And through such simple means he would explain the virtues of capitalism. By the end of such lectures, he would have young people approaching him asking their his autograph, or where they can find out more on this, telling him that they had never heard such a case made by their teachers. It is a very impressive response to hear. A few hundred school visits like that could hopefully make a huge difference. In the main hall, my new MP Bernard Jenkin was good in his defence of the armed forces and the Iraq war. It was during his speech that I also realised who it was he reminded me of: Peter Mandelson. Their voices are uncannily similar. Michael Ancram later performed well, getting a premature standing ovation (a rather debased currency twenty-four hours later, it must be said) for his determined call for the Tories to consign the Blair government to the history books, before he had even finished his speech. Michael Howard made a similarly convincing speech on the harm Labour was doing to the economy, an address helped in no small part by the presentation behind him listing Labour's 60 tax rises and a picture of Tony Blair's expanding nose under his infamous lie that his party had no plans to increase taxes at all. He was soon followed by Tim Yeo, whose most interesting and encouraging pledge was aimed at relieving the burdens the state imposed on businesses. Last March, I wrote a column for the conservative journal Electric Review, allegedly very well-read by those within the party. The site is temporarily down, but the original text of my column can be read here. I proposed a new attitude to policy-making in general, with two specific policy recommendations for the Conservative Party. The first was elections for judges to ensure a criminal justice system more democratic and responsive to the popular will. The second was to scrap government regulations on all businesses with fewer than twenty employees. By Wednesday of conference week, we had been told of Tory proposals for elected sheriffs to increase accountability and responsiveness to the public will in our criminal justice system, and to eliminate regulations for small businesses of under twenty employees. Coincidence? Probably, but you never know. The final fringe meeting I attended that week was a discussion of the BBC. John Redwood (I seem to have spent the week just following him around) hosted the discussion between Shadow Culture Secretary John Whittingdale and Kelvin Mackenzie, probably the best editor in the Sun's history. Interestingly, as I went in, one woman was telling Redwood how sorry she was he failed in his 1995 leadership bid. He defended his actions in a very relaxed fashion: "I was the only member of the cabinet not briefing against [Major] and then I suddenly find out he's resigned and told his critics to put up or shut up. So I did." He laughed: "No one's done it since!". As the meeting began, Whittingdale said he could not justify the BBC's current funding, and thought that at very least it was on its way out. Startlingly, he said he thought BBC bias was not a common feature of the organisation, save for a few well-publicised cases. He is probably too busy to watch it much, but this is still rather an alarming thing for the Tories' Culture, Media and Sport Spokesman to say, equivalent to Oliver Letwin saying there is very little crime in Britain or Michael Howard saying modern tax rates are no particular burden. He examined very critically the expansion of the BBC into all sorts of commercial areas - its magazines and its new CDs now essentially meaning fully-fledged nationalised magazine and compact disc industries in this country, hardly hallmarks of an advanced society. Kelvin Mackenzie was rather less reserved. He hated the BBC, he said, for the way it destroyed any chances of small commercial operators who didn't cost the taxpayer anything. He couldn't stand the lefty-pinko political culture of its news, which he encapsulated in the phrase "racism under every stone", which really was priceless in its accuracy. He didn't believe the taxpayer really loved the BBC. Give people the choice between the licence fee money and all the rest of the revenue that could be made selling it off to the private sector and they would say "Sod your Eastenders! I'll take the 500 quid." Some of the BBC's keenest critics seemed to be present in the audience. Some fiercely denounced the corporation and the way it was funded and existed. One BBC journalist bravely stood up to defend it, pointing to a programme called Blue Earth or something as proof of what coercively funded state broadcasting could do. He waxed lyrical about some David Attenborough types waiting eighteen months in the Arctic to film a whale eat a seal or something, before being interrupted by an unimpressed gentleman asserting how little he cared about such things, and how hostile he was to being forced to pay for it. John Redwood congratulated the BBC journalist for his courage in speaking before such a hostile audience. Whittingdale answered that it was questionable whether a commercial producer really could not have made a Blue Planet style programme. He also asserted one of the great problems with that sort of defence - that every few years BBC produces another undoubtedly great show and then uses that as proof of its need to exist for as long as it takes until the next such programme came along. But most of its output was nothing like that: it was drab, ordinary, commercial style programming with no visible public service value. One questioner spoke of just how damaging the BBC's use of public funds was to rival companies and the ordinary ideas of competition one would see in any other market. For example, a television company could not expect to produce anything with the BBC unless it also took on many of its underling staff, irrespective of their talent or the cost. If they refused, the 'Beeb' just wouldn't co-operate. As the meeting broke up, Redwood told McKenzie he thought he was probably to the left of most of the audience. And the hostility to the BBC was very encouraging, even if the audience was relatively small. It is good to see a fair number of people who really feel passionate in their opposition to such a regressive poll tax that grants one left-wing producer such a monopoly - something unthinkable in any other area of business or government, but somehow still existing in the twenty-first century. At the Imperial later on, much interesting discussion followed. Telemachus, another friend and I got chatting to a very well-informed Tory councillor from Berkshire - one who had read my blog, no less. We discussed marriage and the state's involvement, Telemachus making a very strong case in highlighting the downside of this: that marriage was now the only contract which could be broken at will without it being legally a breach of contract. At least getting government out of marriage would hopefully end this. I still remained unconvinced that allowing a whole range of "lifestyle choices" free and equal legal parity with that relationship which is essential to the production and raising of the next generation would do anything but help destroy an already troubled institution. In times when social mores are particularly weak in inducing people to behave in a less harmful, more responsible way, the force of law is ever more important. This is yet another reason why the theoretical dichotomy beloved of certain people on the left and the right between authoritarianism and social conservatism on the one hand and social liberalism on the other is so mistaken in practice: it is social liberalism that breeds authoritarianism. Social conservatism by contrast stresses internalised restraint, minimising the need for external repression. We also discussed taxation, in particular the way progressive taxation can be so unfair in its various operations. Imagine working for five years straight on a book and getting no income until year six, when you put the book on sale and all the cash starts rolling in as your effort pays off. And then imagine hitting the income tax ceiling very swiftly because it has all come at once. But someone who made just as much money in that same six years, but at a more regular per annum income, would not any face such problems. When I pointed out that in a way regressive taxation (ie. a system where the more you earn the less tax you pay on each extra pound) would be preferable to taxing people more at the margins, I received strong confirmation from the Tory councillor we were talking to. In his other job, he just didn't bother working for three months of every year, because doing so would only push up his income to the 40% bracket. He would go from taking home 78p from every pound he earns to taking home just 60p - a near doubling of marginal tax rates. Such perverse ways of taxing people destroy the incentives to work as hard as one wants, incentives that any sensible government should hope are strongly in place. In general, it was also agreed that ad valorem taxes like VAT were preferable to the direct taxes on income and earnings. The former can at least be avoided when one hits a bad patch by consuming less. But when it comes to direct taxation, there is very little choice in the matter. We then went to a drinks reception run by a mental health charity, where a number of people with histories of depression or schizophrenia lamented the NHS's concentration on those with physical injuries at the neglect of those with equally debilitating mental difficulties. I think this is just a natural consequence of any government run health system. It is almost impossible to define any meaningful cut-off point in this day and age between healthcare and non-healthcare (cosmetic surgery to heal scarring? to heal a mis-shapen nose? psychiatry to handle someone's feeling of life's meaninglessnes? a sex 'change' operation?). So naturally politicised targets and rationing have to be enforced, and it is those with the less obvious problems who suffer. It is unfortunately a problem inherent to the system by which much healthcare is funded in this country. Until a consumer-based, bottom-up service is its replacement, such injustices will continue. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |
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Adolf Hitler once said that the strength of the totalitarian system was that it forced even those who feared it to emulate its methods. In calling for police chiefs to ban all members of a particular political party from joining the force, David Blunkett keenly 
There is one position on the Iraq War I find even less appealing than the general anti-war view. This is the view that irrespective of the threat Saddam Hussein posed to this country, it was worth the deaths of dozens of British troops to remove him from power in Iraq because doing so aids the cause of human rights. This callous view that no amount of spilt British blood is too much if it means we save slightly more Iraqi blood is openly defended over at 
I have been to two eurosceptic meetings recently in which the difficulty of reading the EU Constitution was raised. It costs about £20 to buy a copy, and although it was pointed out that it can be read on the internet, no one could give a link. So I have set up a quick page linking to whichever is the most recent draft. The page - 
Iain Duncan Smith was no Thatcher, no Churchill, no Disraeli. But he certainly deserved better than to be the first Conservative leader since Neville Chamberlain to be forced out of office without even fighting a General Election. I first joined the Tories in 1998, but I let my membership lapse, so I did not have a vote in the last leadership election. Given what appeared would be the choice, I was in no particular hurry to rejoin the party after William Hague resigned. I can remember chatting with a 'wet' friend in June 2001 about what would come next, with us both agreeing it looked as though either Kenneth Clarke or Michael Portillo would soon be leading the party, signifying a move considerably to the left that would satisfy him and concern me.
