The People's Republic of Mancunia

My NHS and me

2012-02-13T14:50:00.000Z

I was born in the Manchester Royal Infirmary, and spent my childhood in the shadow of its massive chimney. My mum, nana and aunties all worked there, and long hours sitting in Main Reception with a bottle of Oasis or hiding under the ward clerks’ desks in ante-natal fill the memories of my childhood. When I got mud in my eye at school, when I split my head open at work, when I got jumped on Hathersage Road, it patched me up again and sent me on my way, grumbling but no worse.

When the people you most care about work in the same place, and when that’s the place that makes you better, it stays with you. It has also, perhaps, given me a bias towards the back-office staff, and a scepticism towards the holiness of doctors (too many stories about discarded latex in the tea-room). But at the heart of it is the basic tenet of the National Health Service. Whether you’re royalty, or a lad from Longsight, you come here and we make you better. My mum, nana, the desks, the computers, that massive chimney that dominated the skyline of my childhood, it was all there to make people, any people, better.

The time before that idea is swiftly becoming history, but people still have a feeling from parents, grand-parents, even great-grandparents. A time when help when you were hurting was not a right, but a privilege, to be doled out in return for money, or in little bits as charity. As a child I could never grasp that there was a time when you couldn’t just go and get better. As an adult, I can’t grasp why some people would want to take that away.

The 2010 Commonwealth survey shows I’m not alone. Despite ranking in the bottom two in both spending per capita and spending as a percentage of GDP, UK citizens are the most confident of any of the eleven nations surveyed that they will get the “most-effective treatment, including drugs and diagnostic tests”. They’re also the most confident they’ll be able to afford care, have the lowest out of pocket expenses, are the least likely to skip a prescription because of costs, and are the least likely group to judge care to be inefficient. To be blunt, the NHS spends the least, covers the people other healthcare systems scare away with up-front fees, and its users still have more confidence in it than any other country’s citizens do in their health system.

Now, perhaps we’re all suffering from a collective hallucination. Maybe Americans, Germans and Norwegians have higher standards, or are more cynical, or just more likely to complain. Yet the NHS bears the depression rates of Scandinavia, the alcohol consumption of central Europe and the obesity statistics of the United States with less money than any of them. It is a daily marvel that the entire thing keeps going, a testament to hundreds of thousands of people who go above and beyond the call of duty when no-one’s watching.

The NHS is the great testament to the underlying goodness of people of this country, and our precious inheritance. The elderly people on geriatric wards bequeath it to the babies in maternity. It is ours, not the government’s, and not Mr Lansley’s. He meddles at his peril.

I get knocked down...

2012-01-18T14:35:00.000Z

There’s a wingman trick for picking up girls. Your mate goes over and hits on the woman you like, preferably acting in the most drunken, clumsy and annoying way possible. At the critical moment, you ride to the rescue with cries of, “Is this man bothering you miss?”. If you’re really good, your mate can fake swing at you, allowing you to knock him down. Instant Prince Charming.

For over twenty years now, this has been the relationship between the Trade Union movement and the Labour Party. In order to woo that special class of swing voters in marginal seats, the Labour Party has orchestrated a series of fights with the Unions, as choreographed as the WWE. Whether this was on keeping Thatcher’s anti-union legislation, Clause 4 or privatisation, again and again the Union movement has allowed itself to be hit on the nudge-nudge, wink-wink understanding that it was necessary for our mate to get the girl. This week, we took another hit.

"I don't seek a fight within my own party but I do stand up for what's right and if people don't like it, I'm afraid that's tough because I'm going to take the responsible path, the right path and the path which will show to the public that Labour is serious about the economic reality we will face, if we come into government after the next general election."

Ed is playing the same old game, hitting his friends because we have nowhere else to go. The message is the same one the Coalition gives to the working people of this country, “Sit down, shut up and pay the bills.” In both cases, those paying had nothing to do with racking up the debt.

From the Blairite squeals one wouldn’t think they’d wielded absolute power for 13 years. Still sulking about failing to get ~~Lawrence Wainwright~~ David Miliband elected they’ve spent much of the last year and a bit declaring it’s all over. That because the party for a moment doubts their leadership (which never got us as many votes as Major in 1992) we are delusional. Now many good things were done during Labour’s time in office, from the Human Rights Act, to Freedom of Information to equalities legislation which helped some of the most marginalised people in our society. But if the discussion is economics, then who got us into this state? I don’t recall ‘the brothers’ demanding we spend a decade in government with Nigel Lawson’s tax bands in place. I can’t remember general secretaries being consulted when Tony decided to pour out £20 billion in the deserts of Iraq and the steppes of Afghanistan. I’ve read my history, but I can’t recall any Trade Union charter declaring its “destiny” to save the global banking system. Odd how money can be found to save Fred Goodwin’s pension, but not that of a teacher. Indeed, when one is pressed to think of what policies New Labour adopted from this mythical Union playbook, they all seem to be strangely popular. Minimum wage, the 50p tax rate, Surestart, so secure the Tories find it politically impossible to get rid of them.

If you don’t care about the working people of this country, at least beyond a patronising paternalism, there is a party for you. If you don’t want to actually help people, but want to pretend you do to ease your middle-class guilt, you have a party for that as well. Sam Adams put it better than I could.

"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."

Now, I wouldn’t go quite that far. Labour has always been a broad church, and is stronger for it, and we should welcome ideas from all sides.

But if you are the masterful strategists who told us you had abolished boom and bust, that the banks could regulate themselves, that the Iraqis would treat us as liberators, that Afghanistan would be a functioning democracy, that ditching the 10p tax rate wouldn’t be noticed, that the Euro was our future and manufacturing was irrelevant... then a period of silence on your part would be welcome.

Turnaround is fair play

2012-01-17T12:44:00.000Z

Anthony Wells, pollster king, has been defending the decision of YouGov to ask whether Ed Miliband was 'too ugly' to be PM. As the person who handles YouGov's polling for the Sunday Times, it will ultimately have been his decision to run the question. Indeed, he may even have come up with the idea.

Of course, he does have a point that how much we trust someone often is linked to physical attractiveness. And who do we need to have trust in more than pollsters?

Which begs the question, Anthony Wells, hot or not?

“If freedom is to be saved and enlarged, poverty must be ended. There is no other solution.”

2012-01-17T11:53:00.000Z

Some would say quoting Bevan is a cliché. I prefer to think of it as kitsch. Either way, the man nailed the message Labour has forgotten. The welfare state, at its heart, is about freedom. Forget the perks of the barons in Magna Carta, forget the privileges of the London merchant class in the Bill of Rights, it is the creation of the welfare state that stands as the true testimony to British liberty.

Freedom is a concept the Labour Party has too often ceded, allowing a certain faction of the Conservative party to claim it. Not since Orwell called Socialism, “justice and liberty when the nonsense is stripped off” has it properly enunciated its claim to be a protector of the rights of the individual. Yet in handing over this ground Labour has gained nothing, and lost much. It is seen simultaneously as too strong and too weak. Over the New Labour era, the party seemed to take the view that, rather than counter the assertion it was too compassionate (or soft depending on your viewpoint) by arguing for the fundamentals of our social contract, it would do it by a series of bizarre acts of repression. Rendition, detention without trial, the DNA database, ID cards, ASBOs, a whole litany of laws designed to prove it could be harder than the Tories. It was as if any act of social justice had to be balanced in the books with some restriction, to prove the party weren’t a bunch of hippies.

This ‘triangulation’, pioneered by Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party, served Labour well electorally, but it did them great damage ideologically. Trading the allegiance of the liberal-left for the fickle favour of The Sun was bound to become a problem at some point, but the greater issue was to accept the premise that the welfare state is an emotional indulgence. Forgive us the effeminacy of schools and hospitals, we promise to do proper manly stuff like build aircraft-carriers and abolish trial by jury. The problem is that if you allow the welfare state to be justified only as a luxury, justified by compassion, rather than a necessity, justified by freedom and justice, you open the space for its regression and, ultimately, its abolition. For if this is merely a state run charity, why not simply have charity entirely?

This assault upon state provision has been flattered as ‘The Big Society’. Yet it also masks a parallel battle. Recent government actions; Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms, Nick Clegg’s talk of alarm-clock Britain, the notion of withdrawing benefits from those involved in anti-social behaviour, all of these have challenged the old notion of universalism. The language of the debate is not ‘all in this together’, but the notion of the deserving, and the undeserving, poor. It is not enough for Labour to label objectors to what remains of the post-war consensus as the rich and out of touch. If that were so it would be easy. The resentment comes much more from those at the bottom, those who feel they get no benefit from working hard.

As Ed Miliband and others have pointed out, the settlement we now rely upon is born of a wartime economy and the immediate aftermath, where the problem of long-term unemployment, it was believed, had been solved. Everyone would contribute, and so everyone had a right to assistance when they fell on hard times. National Insurance was just that, a state-run insurance policy upon which you claimed, not as a beggar asking for alms, but as an equal party in the contract.

Charity is the opposite of this, and reveals a fundamental, political discordance about who the state should help. If the welfare state is not to be universal, and Labour moved away from this with means-testing, tax credits and other reforms, then we must decide the target. Should the state be giving resources to those who need them, or those who deserve them? And, perhaps more importantly, who gets to make that decision?

Each according to his ability

2012-01-17T11:47:00.002Z

The spirit of capitalism, we are always told, is risk and competition. One man on the stock-market floor betting his own money and wits against the crowd, the steely eyed industrialist willing a factory into life, strong, determined, and risking his own livelihood for reward. The justification for the massive rewards is the massive risk that you lose everything if you make the wrong judgement.

This has never been the case, but the events of the last four years have shown perhaps the most egregious contradiction between the alleged principles of Western capitalism and its practice. Traders and bankers did not risk their own money, but ours; our pension funds, our sovereign wealth, our savings accounts, and lost. And instead of throwing them into prison, we agreed not only to take the losses, but to keep them as filthy rich as they were accustomed. And now the poor need to pay, even if they don’t have the ability.

Beyond this, the crisis has shown just how bad debt is. To be in someone’s debt is to be in their power. Sovereign debt is giving away our democracy to the money markets. However, there is another way, a truly capitalist response. There are many people who have done very well out of the last thirty years. They have been perfectly happy to take the positive results in personal wealth. Let them take the negative in personal debt.

The idea is elegantly simple, especially through the happy coincidence that the UK’s debt of £900 billion is bang on 10% of what the Office of National Statistics valued its total wealth, £9 trillion. We will put aside for a moment the government’s ludicrous tendency of saying Britain is bankrupt when its assets are ten times its liabilities. Every UK citizen over the age of 18 would take responsibility for a proportion of the national debt according to their personal wealth. No-one under 18 caused this mess. The bottom 2% of households, with negative wealth, did not cause this mess. Indeed, the bottom 50% of this nation own only 9% of the total UK wealth of around 9 trillion. So, of our total debt of around 900 billion, we will claim responsibility for 9% of its debt, around £81 Billion. Take away the 6 million children, and we have an average personal debt of £3375 each. For those of us in the bottom 50%, that is a sizeable sum of money, but that would scale from nothing for those with no assets, to the middle household in the UK, with wealth of £204,000, taking on debt of around £20,000. Again, this is a large amount of money, but remember they don’t have to pay the lump sum up front, just the interest. At an interest rate of, say, 1.5%, that would be an annual payment of £300 a year, far less than Gideon Osborne’s VAT raise cost the average household. Similarly, those older people who have merely had their family home rise in value could spend the rest of their days there, and the amount would simply be deducted from their estate when they pass on.

So what of those at the top? To get into the top 5% of households in Britain means you have assets of £4million, so they pay £400,000 towards deficit reduction or, as I said, the interest of just £6,000 a year, a term’s school fees at St Paul’s. The Duke of Westminster would be on the hook for around 700 million, but considering he made £250 million last year I’m sure he won’t find that too onerous.

This would be a proper distribution of the losses. Those that crashed our economy would have to pay the bill. This might make them less inclined to crash it in the future. More than that however, the £49 billion currently spent on debt interest becomes free to plug the structural deficit. Free of the threats and whims of international financial markets, a truly radical economic reformation of this country could ensue.

It would not be easy. Innovation and hard graft will always be necessary to make the world better for the next generation. Labour creates wealth, and it will always be needed to do so. This paying off of the national debt would be the beginning of a process to use the vast wealth of this country for the benefit of all its people, and to preserve it for future generations. The dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs.

A fisking response to Quentin Letts:

2009-10-07T00:48:00.001+01:00

I, like most without a masochistic streak, avoid the Daily Mail. Hence it was with some concern that I noticed Quentin Letts upon the Cherwell’s pages. Putting aside the writing style of a man desperately trying to be Boris Johnson, and failing, there were certain key points which must be addressed.

Firstly, Mr Letts is not persecuted, and is not akin to the poets in the PRC’s darker days. He makes a fine living as part of the main stream media, both in print and on the state broadcaster, the BBC. He is not Liu Hongbin, seeing his father shot and fleeing into exile. Mao didn’t invite the agents of reaction onto political panel shows.

Secondly, he proves he knows remarkably little about the British character. Proclaiming oneself to be superior is something other nations do. We Brits traditionally take the view that overt displays of personal ability are rather, well, American. Fundamentally what is important is not whether you win, but how you play. Hence why the most famous date in English history is a defeat by the Normans, and national pride is built around the spirit of Dunkirk.

Further, what Mr Letts’ writing reveals is not a thrill for meritocracy, but for an old, nineteenth century class structure, only without all that namby-pamby noblesse oblige. An accent other than ‘received pronunciation’ is called “crass and grotty”. That rules out I suppose Shakespeare (a Nouveau riche Brummie), Cockney-Keats, and Wordsworth (for whom matter and water were full rhymes). Bobbie Burns and Yeats don’t count of course, too Celtic, though Wilde might be allowed as an adopted son.

This should not surprise us. Previous books have had as villains Kenneth Baker, who abolished corporal punishment in schools, and Helen Willets for the crime of “parading her Chester accent”. His Daily Mail columns show what this man is. The forcefulness of Quentin Letts’ recent attack upon the new Speaker, John Bercow, reflects the horror that the (Jewish) son of a North London taxi driver would not only dare to go against an old Etonian, but beat him. I mean if that can happen to an Oxford educated baronet, just about anyone could defeat a tabloid journalist who only went to Haileybury.

We in Oxford are not a besieged citadel of “bog-standard Britain”, fighting the Roundheads on North Parade. We’re university students who worked hard, regardless of our social background. We are here for a variety of reasons, but none of them are to fight some strange fiction of class war. Especially not at the summons of someone who went to Cambridge.

Look but don't touch

2009-09-23T12:58:00.002+01:00

Today's story of Terence Kealey, Vice-Chancellor of the Univertsity of Buckingham, raises some interesting questions. While the comments were not particularly funny, they were most likely meant to be. The overall message is that a relationship between tutors and their pupils is inappropriate. That this message was wrapped up in an assuaging of tutors' egos might be distasteful to some, but it may have a greater effect than simply declaring it 'wrong' or 'forbidden', words which only serve to make such relationships more attractive.

I can sympathise greatly with the standard response given by Liv Bailey. Those who exploit their position of power for sexual gratifiction are very twisted people. As recent events have shown, women are not above this. However, the perpetrators are overwhelmingly men. It is important to make a distinction though. If we are saying that a male lecturer who sees an attractive young woman (or young man just as likely, if he's an Oxbridge don) sitting in the front row smiling at him is a sexual predator, then no-one will give lectures. Enjoying beauty is not wrong. Giving extra attention to someone because you find them attractive is what we all do, that's why we spend more time with our partners than anyone else.

Working with an endless stream of inteligent, young people is what keep many academics in their career. To deny that the physical attributes of their students have anything to do with it is to deny reality and basic human drives. Terence Kealey phrased his comments in an insensitive and incompetent way, and should apologise, but to deny that this is the state of affairs is to go to an impossible, and in my view undesirable extreme. If trust is abused punish, if grades are unfairly obtained punished, and if anyone is harmed punish. But I know my eye is drawn to the pretty young thing across the room now, and I certainly hope it always will be.

The Republic of Mancunia

2009-09-22T22:43:00.003+01:00

With the consultation on whether to have an elected mayor for Manchester closing today, I thought I'd reproduce the article I did for the current issue of the Mule newspaper. Enjoy.

“Manchester has a Harvey Nicholls!” The shock on the face of my Londoner friend was clear. I felt like assuring him that we had running water too, and had finally gotten the hang of this new-fangled electricity. It was the Labour conference of 2008 that brought the London media elite north, with many it seems expecting to still see the bomb craters of the Luftwaffe amongst the cobbles. The incomprehension of many that civilisation did not stop at the Watford gap was comical, yet profoundly tragic. The attitudes of this country, the view of ‘the provinces’, has not changed since Orwell’s day. The M6 is just the road to Wigan Pier.

Perception is important, and there can be little doubt that the 2008 conference, and the shift of the BBC to Greater Manchester, has a great deal to do with the government’s decision to delegate more powers to a city region. Economically the case is already proven. The City Region of Greater Manchester already accounts for a fifth of the North’s economy, adding £47 billion to the UK accounts. This is more than Wales, which has its own Assembly, on both a raw numbers and per capita basis. With 3.2 million people after this year’s structural changes, it has a greater population than 5 of the EU member states. It has the largest airport outside of the South East, the largest media centre outside London and a powerful University presence worth £670 million.

Yet since 1986, with the dissolution of the Metropolitan Counties, the city has been punching far below its weight. Victories, such as acquiring the Commonwealth games in 2002, have been few a far between. The siphoning off of £500 million designated for improvement of the Metrolink system to in effect prop up London’s Jubilee Line in 2004 ensured that many voted against the congestion charge this year, sceptical that money would be forthcoming. The revoking of Manchester’s right to open a super-casino after a fair contest, meant that the city spent £2 million in good faith on a bid that could not be won. While Manchester is paralysed by the effect of deregulation, Transport for London remains a public concern. When politicians and civil servants keep public transport in public hands where they live and work, one must conclude that they consider it to be the most reliable system. Which begs the question why, and by what right, they subject the rest of the country to chaos. That such a progressive city as ours pours millions into the pockets of Stagecoach boss Brian Souter, an anti-gay, anti-union fundamentalist, rather than back into the local economy via a public service is a travesty.

With all this in mind, it is important that pressure is applied to our political leaders for greater devolution of powers. The current pilot scheme is unclear. As the motley crew of different councils and local authorities make a grab for funds, there is a danger it will remain so. That is why political reform must come before economic reform. The Manchester City Region needs its own authority to match its own identity. It needs a council drawn from each of the fifteen districts, and most importantly it needs a mayor. We can then strip away the bureaucracy of the North West regional assembly, and confusing muddle of the county councils. Each district can elect a local council for local issues, and a representative for the City Council. The entire region would also vote for a mayor, who would chair this council, and determine its agenda.

With the political infrastructure in place, this city would have a voice on the national stage, while its citizens would still have a direct link with their representatives. Under the current arrangement, impotent and anonymous local councils take decisions which people then ascribe to national government, and complain to their MPs about. This is harmful to all. Constituents do not get their problems addressed, councils are not scrutinised, and MPs divert time from holding the government to account to being social workers. A devolved assembly would bring transparency to the system. In addition, a Greater Manchester Assembly would also have the clout to actively pursue those who flout the law. The bully boy antics of Tesco against Stockport Council in 2005-06 over Tesco’s violation of planning regulations were committed because the company assumed, rightly, that the council would lack the will or resources to fight them. The police would likewise become democratically accountable to a single body across the city, removing the “us and them” divide that has dogged Manchester since the Moss Side riots, if not since Peterloo.

The strength and determination with which this old, industrial giant has renewed itself is something every citizen should be proud of. It has survived the decimation of its industry, the machinations of Margaret Thatcher and the devastation of the IRA, and it has come back stronger. Though I like the weather, I am not a North-Westerner. Though I like the history I am not a Lancastrian. I am a Mancunian, and my city deserves a voice: as one city, united.

Education, education, education...

2009-09-03T22:27:00.001+01:00

Melissa Benn's condemnation of the 11-plus, as always, comes with the best of intentions. With fox-hunting gone, there are few issues remaining that have the totemic power to flare the passions between Left and Right. However, she, Fiona Millar and Comprehensive Future make three crucial mistakes.

The first is that they have won the argument politically. While none of the three main parties are committed to selection on academic ability, selection upon the grounds of parental wealth, geography, religious faith and interview technique continues. All of these are surely less equitable than testing upon ability. Surely, if selection is to be ended, Comprehensive Future would be better using its energies against these discrepancies, rather than a smattering of remaining grammars?

Secondly, they allow ideology to trump good practice. If an LEA wishes to continue with a selective system, then to dictate from Westminster that it may not do so, regardless of the views of local people, seems to go against the progressive spirit. We see the apotheosis of this in Northern Ireland. There a reticent community is being forced, by a woman who educates her own children in Eire, to renege upon a system that consistently delivers the best GCSE, A-level, and Oxbridge entry rates in the UK. Why this system is to be torn down few can say, especially given that Ulster's secondary moderns outperform Britain's comprehensives, thwarting the argument that little value is added.

Lastly, they do not consider what the effects of their actions are. Rather it seems, they consider only what they would wish them to be. The effect of comprehensive education has not been to make every school a grammar, it has been to make every school a secondary modern. The result has been to push the best grammars not into state control, but into the private sector, the opposite of the progressive aim. Far from bringing about a classless society, the comprehensive system has entrenched class status, and protected the middle class children of journalists who eulogise it from the clever poor. The rich pay the fees for private school, the middle classes move to a good catchment area. Only the poor are condemned.

I do not doubt the author's zeal, nor that of her compatriots. I merely invoke the law of unforseen circumstances. It is often the cry of these groups that we must care about the education of the many, not the few. I concur. Fix the comprehensive system, and then we may debate about Kent and Trafford.

“Merely privilege extended”

2009-08-07T23:02:00.001+01:00

Harriet Harman claims she wants parliament to be representative. An interesting proposal certainly. Her analysis of the financial crisis is that a small, out of touch elite at the top gambled and lost with people’s futures, and that politicians cut from the same cloth let them get away with it. This, she argues, has to be addressed by root and branch reform.

Now this may very well be the case, and had it been couched in such terms Ms Harman would have rallied many to her. However, she did not. Rather, Labour’s Deputy leader launched the argument that the problem wasn’t the fact that those at the top are almost exclusively the children of the gentry, but merely that they were the sons rather than the daughters.

As the privately educated daughter of two London professionals, with an Earl for uncle and a Lady for a cousin, Harman’s social credentials are little different to those of David Cameron. Now one can’t choose family, but it does make the cries of revolution seem rather hollow. If the aspiration of certain strands of the Labour party is to replace a grammar school boy with a public school girl, at the expense of a postman, then fine but you don’t get to feel progressive while you do it.

This is the critical issue of fairness that pressure group politics does not address. The point isn’t gender, or race or orientation. Of course all these things may play a part. The issue is that society profits when its leaders have a plethora of experiences. That is the argument against Cameron’s Old Etonian cabinet. Not that they’re rich, or should be punished because of where their parents sent them to school. The background doesn’t and shouldn’t disqualify you from any office. But when a group which seeks to lead the country has a set of formative experiences at once almost uniform among themselves, yet radically different from the bulk of the population, one is allowed to question their make-up.

Filling parliament with the daughters of London’s bourgeoisie is not a step towards social justice, any more than packing Oxford with the children of Indian millionaires and the Chinese politburo would be a step towards diversity. The aim of those of us on what used to be called the Left is to help those in need. There are millions who still are, and who need protection from exploitation, poverty, ignorance and violence. It is not misogynistic for me to say that the boy from Burnage might need more of a hand up than the girl from Withington. Harriet Harman does not need special protection, nor Labour’s leadership rules gerrymandered. Bringing your own group into the fold, while failing to tackle the underlying reasons for the political class and social inequality, is not justice. Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.

In Vino Veritas, In Cervesio Felicitas

2009-03-16T15:53:00.003Z

The advice of the chief medical officer to set minimum prices for alcohol addresses an important problem in exactly the wrong way. Britons drink more than anyone else in Europe, yet in attitude you'd think we'd only just discovered the stuff. The stereotype of French kids sipping wine at a family dinner, German teenagers knocking back a few social half-litres, and British youths marauding on White Lightning is extreme, yet the number of alcohol related incidents that tax NHS and police resources in Britain tell us there's something to it.

And it seems, we've always been this way. Samuel Johnson saw it as the great escape, Byron as an end in itself. Ambrose Bierce even credited it for the creation of an Empire, and the triumph of the Christian over the "abstentious Mohammedans" of India. This idea, that conquerors get drunk, work hard play hard, continues to permate our society. Why shouldn't we have a drink after work? Why, after spending all week bored at work and sat in traffic, can't we let our hair down at the weekend? This goes to the heart of the issue. When we work the longest hours in Europe, and are the most likely to live alone, is it any wonder the bottle seems a decent option?

The mixed messages from the government don't help. The issue time and again is that what works in other countries just doesn't work here. We all know that alcohol is far cheaper on the Continent, and more widely available, so that can't be the problem. Yet governments continue to participate in a sort of double-think. "Cafe culture" wouldn't work over here, because of existing issues with British society, so we're going to enact laws which restrict consumption, without dealing with the social concerns that make it a problem. It's cyclical. We won't have a more healthy relationship with alcohol until we approach it as adults, yet we can't do that while constantly being treated like naughty children whenever we pick up a bottle. Denial leads to excess, just look at 'abstinence only' sex education.

This action will not do one thing to limit the abuse of alcohol by anyone. If it takes an extra tenner a month out of a drunk's pocket, that's a tenner less he'll spend after alcohol. Another regressive tax from the party of the people. Alcohol in moderation is fairly benign, and a pint is probably doing you less damage than the pork scratchings you have with it. Taken to excess, drink is a route to oblivion, same as any other. And people who want to escape reality will do so, regardless of the cost. Someone who realises the risks to their health and wellbeing from getting trashed, and does it anyway, will not be discouraged by an extra quid from their pocket.

No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power. -P.J. O'Rourke

Sometimes we do learn from history

2009-03-12T03:09:00.000Z

The success of the rallies by UNITE in opposition to the shootings of two British soldiers and a police constable demonstrate that the people of the six counties are tired of bloodshed, whatever their community. There will be no loyalist retaliation, there will be no slide back to civil war. The Real IRA are on the wrong side of history. The utter abhorrence and contempt with which these killings have been met across the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic shows that the civilian support which sustained Sinn Fein-IRA for so long has gone, and is not coming back.

This has been top of the news for a week, and many have wondered why. The cynical have pointed out that these men were about to fly off to Afghanistan. Had they done so, and died on the Asian steppes instead of on an Ulster army base, they would scarcely have registered in the press. Yet I think the media attantion is more than justified. It is necessary to show these murderers what the world, even the people they claim to fight for, think of them. For murderers is the term. They are not warriors, they are not soldiers, they are hnot even terrorists. They are criminals, and when caught will be treated as such. That is the progress we have made, and it cannot be hidden by a balaclava, nor killed with a kalashnikov.

Gordon in Oxford

2009-03-01T03:06:00.000Z

It seems somehow fitting that the first post on my now ressurected blog should come with the visit of a Labour Prime Minister to Oxford. Addressing a packed Sheldonian theatre, the PM was witty, charming, entirely different from the image we so often see on television. He referenced Gladstone, Disraeli, and of course the left's new icon of protection, Barack Obama. Indeed, the peculiar way the Vice-Chancellor introduced the PM put me instantly in mind of the inauguration. "We have had many Prime Ministers give this lecture; past, present and future." Now, perhaps I am just a suspicious sort of chap, but I think this may have been a reference to David Cameron who presented the lecture previously. Talk about calling it early! The Vice Chancellor probably objects to a non-Oxonian as PM, they don't go down too well.

Gordon's point though, about Britain needing more scientists, more engineers, more inventors was sound in many ways. Yet it's an old cry. The fact is that even during Britain's industrial heyday, the mills were just there to buy you a title. The giants of industry might have made their fortunes as Northern innovators, but they died as squires in the Home Counties. It seem we all want to read Greats. Even in the midst of a recession Teach First, one of the surest jobs around, can't get enough science teachers. The shift has to be cultural. We don't think an engineer is as good as a barrister. We'd like to be the boss, but actual employers? As my politics teacher once said, none of us want to be Mike Baldwin. And this in a way has led us to the financial mess. We want jobs where we don't get our hands dirty. We're a great nation for ideas, and a great nation when it comes to owning the fruits of those ideas. Yet the middle bit, the grimy bit, where the idea is made real with dirt and sweat and steel, that we don't like. We're above it. Or at least we think we are.

Yet that's the crucial step that gives you a manufacturing base, that provides the high tech jobs Gordon's always talking about. And it's why you should never count out the United States, who still have a passion for it. For you see, still in Britain, it's not how much money you make. It's whether that stain on your fingers is ink or oil, whether your uniform is a black gown or a blue boiler suit. We remain the most class-bound society on earth. We shuffle money. And we're damn good at it. But there's only so long you can trade on the Imperial reputation. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to get our hands dirty.

I thought Eton Rifles was by the Jam?

2008-01-12T04:06:00.000Z

It seems David "call me Dave" Cameron has decided the best way to the hearts of us Northern folk is to say he likes the music. A swift endorsement of the Smiths and the economic and social evisceration of the country north of Watford will be forgotten. Now far be it from me to imply that this is a cynical move in the Conservative leader's ongoing attempts to prove that one is an ordinary chap. He may very well like the song. Morrissey is after all one of the few people with a comparable ego to a Tory MP, and many of them share the view that a rush and a push and the land that we stand on is ours. However if he wants to win (and not have the Manchester ringroad become the new Scottish border) Cameron knows he has to start getting seats in Northern cities. His old pal Boris hasn't exactly made that easy with his comments about Liverpool, and a single yellow swallow does not make a summer. So expect plenty more state visits, and never a mention of the dark times, of the ashes from which some have risen, and in which some still languish. Like 1997, the Tories seem to hope that if they ignore the past it will go away. I wonder if Dave remembers this track...

"Top ten idol, king of your age
Who do you turn to when you're backstage ?
Don't you remember you once knew a girl
You loved her more than the world..."

The bigger they are...

2008-01-04T18:09:00.000Z

In American politics, money talks. If that's true then silence is golden. In the Iowa caucus yesterday Barack Obama triumphed over the Clintonian machine. Even more intruiging however, so did John Edwards, the man outspent 6:1 and the only major candidate to have signed up for federally limited funding. His powerful and moving speech in Iowa last night spoke of a man determined to break the cosy consensus between Washington and corporate America. Cynics will point out that we've heard it all before. Further, signing up for federal funding was a political masterstroke for a candidate who was never going to attract the big money, principles aside. All true, but as Iowans reject the woman who voted for the war and is the biggest recipient of health insurance company kickbacks, we perhaps see a taster of the two biggest issues of this election.

On the Republican side, the Southern Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee, outspent 15:1 by the Romney team, smashed his opponent by a colossal 10 points. In deeply religious territory, where 60% of Republican caucus goers describe themselves as born-again christians, it seems Romney's Mormon heresy was a step too far. The socially libertarian Guilliani didn't even bother, pouring all his energy into Florida.

This is not the end, or even the begininning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning. Huckabee will struggle in those states where Republicans keep Ayn Rand rather than the Gospels on their bedside table, where Guilliani need only present his legacy as major of New York. Senator Clinton has lost that aura of inevitability, but her husband lost both Iowa and New Hampshire and still won the nomination. She remains ahead in the national polls. Obama has scored a massive victory that will doubtless boost his chances, but success also has its downsides. The guns of the GOP reserved for Hilary may now turn on him. And what of Edwards? He seems to have learnt the lesson of the fiery Howard Dean, whose passion got the better of him. If he can walk the line between the giants of Hilary and Obama, he might just slip through the middle, and ride his "tidal wave of change" all the way to the White House.

There is a certain irony, that the most progressive and revolutionary of the democratic front runners is a white man.

Red Dawn

2008-01-01T17:52:00.000Z

Despite the Vichy-esque tendencies of certain Cabinet members past and present, the new year seems to have given Labour a clean break. The latest poll sees the Tory lead collapse to 5 points, and even the Lib-Dems managed to claw a point back. Of course this may have been mere confusion between David Clegg and Nick Cameron, but never look a gift horse in the mouth.

The fact remains though, the vast majority of people in this country have no clue what they actually want, or where their political allegiance lies. Never is this more apparent than in the polls which consistently show two facts, understandable on their own but truly bizarre in conjunction. That people want tougher controls on immigration, and that they want to emigrate. Apparently no-one sees a lack of coherence here. These are presumably the same people who complain about the demise of the high street and shop at Tesco, say the police deserve their pay rise and lambast them for incompetence, and claim they want a referendum on the EU treaty despite having never read it.

Which is why, come election time, the result will be anyone's guess. Because bloggers, pundits and the rest of us political junkies are the minority. We're like professional gamblers. We study form, pedigree, past success and training. And everyone else just picks their favourite colour or the one with the funny name.

To those of you who think I'm being needlessly cynical I say only this...

Boris Johnson has odds of 7/4 to end up Mayor of London

Wrights and responsibilities

2007-11-25T11:48:00.000Z

It seems Ladies and Gentlemen, Oxford has deemed that the best people to talk about free speech, are those who would abolish it. In his often superb blog, my good friend Jonny Wright has totally missed the point. Leaving aside the fact that this is a ticketed event which sold out in hours, OUSU, Unite, the Labour Club, Jsoc and the rest don't want to engage with Griffin and Irving, because there is nothing to be gained from the experience. All of these groups have remained consistent in their view that by engaging you justify. Jonny's military analogy is rather apt. However, in the battleground of ideas, Griffin and Irving are not armies, they are intellectual terrorists. And all the resources and power of rational thought, evidence and humanity cannot defeat blind, visceral hatred, anymore than tanks and jets can beat a few guerrillas with kalashnikovs. But it is not only that the exercise is futile, but what those who have argued for Griffin and Irving to come have repeatedly failed to understand. That by creating a debate you put the ideas on a level of parity. You don't teach creationism alongside evolution, you don't set Aristotle's theory of four elements against the periodic table, and you don't put those who deny one of the mostly highly documented events in world history, on par with real scholarship.

It is overwhelmingly those who have to deal with fascism that have opposed this invitation. Those who are the first to be put to the wall; jews, ethnic minorities, the LGBT community, socialists. The middle classes, who turned a blind eye in Italy, and Germany, and Spain, and Argentina, and Chile, and who know the knock on the door and "well placed boot" will not fall on them, are of course by and large content to let them come. After all,they're not the ones in danger. And now, to add insult to injury, it is the protesters who are lambasted for not arguing in the chamber. Where are all the eloquent defenders of the invitation who called for them to be "crushed in debate"? Could it be that though the Liberals were happy to stand up and lecture those of us who opposed this debacle from the beginning, when it comes to having their pictures on Redwatch they're otherwise engaged?

I'll be out there Monday night. And I pray that those inside all slap each other on the back, stoke their sense of righteousness with how principled they are, and that we awake on Tuesday to the greatest of anti-climaxes. History however, points in another direction, and I worry that in this instance, the BNP will adhere to it meticulously.

Blue Monday

2007-10-04T10:53:00.000+01:00

With all the sneering, upper-class contempt that only the Tories can muster, George Osborne sought on Monday to denigrate the man he never managed to beat in the Commons. I suppose it's easier when there's no-one to argue back. It allows you to make some truly absurd assertions.

Apparently it's stamp duty that has kept first time buyers out of the housing market, despite the fact that the savings gained from its total elimination would be swallowed by the monthly rise in house prices.

We're told it's Gordon's fault that pensions are in a state, and it's true that £5 billion pounds was wiped off by the treasury tax simplification. £250 billion pounds however was wiped off by the stock market fluctuations following the dot com bubble and 9/11.

And then, in Toryland, it was the actions of central government that led to Northern Rock, while Osborne eulogised the inherent sense of global markets, and actions taken when millions act in harmony. In reality, Northern Rock was caused precisely by the incompetence of unregulated markets, and the dark side of what happens when many individual decisions are made wrongly. And it was central government that had to step in and save the day.

Whereas Gordon spoke of unity, of Britishness and values, of encouraging the potential of everyone, Osborne made it clear once again exactly who votes for the Tories. The rich. Here, we saw the diarchy, based on the purported New Labour model. A shiny, happy, politically androgynous leader for the voters, and a dyed-in-the-wool chancellor to let the party know its core values will be at the heart of policy. And so it was time to pay the piper. They'd stomached the green taxes that would make them pay a bit more for that fourth annual holiday, they'd gritted their teeth while the grammar schools debacle raged, they'd stifled their disgust when told civil partnerships were on par with marriage. And so, here came their break.

And what a break it was. A promise to abolish that most Liberal of taxes, that on privilege, with the added treat of removing the nuisance of a fee to the exchequer for their extortionate property dealings. And as a garnish, a token admonishment to all those vulgar foreigners who have been driving up the cost of good help in Chelsea.

What the inheritance tax reforms would represent is a direct transferral from the poor to the rich. Only 6% of the population pay inheritance tax. The tax raises around £3.5 billion a year. It affects wealth, not income, and so is no barrier to aspiration. It is in fact despised by many Tories because it is so meritocratic, ensuring little Tamsin and Tarquin have to at least make a token effort to work. These reforms will do nothing to help the 31% of households who do not own the property they live in, nor will they help the vast majority whose assets are less than £300,000. They will rob those most in need, in order to help those who already have the means to help themselves.

Morality, Mugabe and the Mail

2007-09-20T17:53:00.000+01:00

We hear from the BBC today that Gordon Brown has said he will boycott Portugal's upcoming EU-AU summit if Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean leader, is allowed to attend. The decision is indisputably the right one, but is it for the right reasons?

Mugabe has been in power since the rather dubious elections of 1980. In the past 27 years he has pursued murderous campaigns against the Ndebele minority, his rivals Joshua Nkomo and ZAPU, the LGBT population, the White-African farmers, the Black-African poor, the opposition MDC, and now it would seem against anyone outside his own private inner circle. He has been the archetypal example of an African despot, and is picked out only because he's so bloody good at it. He has resisted crisis after crisis, and clung on to power with an awesome tenacity. He has conducted ethnic cleansing not with the clunking, military fist of Hussein or Milosovitch, which draws too much outside attention, but with the subtle weapons of starvation and evacuation. He has made it an easy necessity for the non-Shona to leave. Most crucially of all, he has played the diplomatic game with skill beyond any Western politician, realising that it is his own brethren in the African Union, Thabo Mbeki above all, who he needs to keep onside. Indeed the more the "Imperialist Oppressors" condemn him, the greater his standing seems to become.

So with reference to my last point will this ultimatum, though deserved, do more harm than good? I don't believe so. We are constantly berating our politicians for glad-handing dictators, the haunting picture of Rumsfeld and Saddam springs to mind. If the Prime Minister refused to attend a debate with Nick Griffin, no one would question it, and no sensible person would claim that doing so strengthened the BNP's assertion of a conspiracy against them. The same is true for the international stage. Indeed, this is the view the EU has taken up to now, banning Mugabe from entering the Union.

As to motives, I would be thrilled to think that this was the beginning of a sea-change, of a truly ethical foreign policy, based on soft rather than hard power. Britain has a duty to Zimbabwe, certainly a far greater one than we owe to Iraq or Afghanistan. And that is because Mugabe is a creation of specifically British intervention, of the campaign of political and economic warfare conducted by this country against Rhodesia, after the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965. This makes a pure mockery of any claim, either that soft power doesn't work, or that post-independence a colony should be beyond the scope of interest. The African Union was calling for an invasion of Smith's Rhodesia in 1965 to help the oppressed and disenfranchised, so why is that call not there now? British warships were dispatched to blockade Beira in neighbouring Mozambique, why not now? And massive pressure was put on South Africa to cut off Rhodesia's oil, with eventual success. That the same weapons have not been touched when it comes to Zimbabwe is ludicrous. This appears to be the beginning.

And that's what's made me think. Call me cynical, but I don't think this is anything to do with ethics. I don't think it's to do with the simple disruption Mugabe would cause at the summit. I don't even think it's because Gordon knows the political death that would await if he were tricked, as Jack Straw was, into shaking hands with him.

This isn't for people like me, this is for the Tories, those Mail/Express reading types who yell for recolonisation. Not to get their votes, that'll never happen, but to make them put more pressure on Cameron. This is inviting Thatcher to Downing Street, but on the world stage. The Tories have lost the economy, they've lost law and order, they've lost 'Mummy', and now to top it all Gordon is defender of the Empire.

Speaking up for the weak and oppressed, and hitting the Tories where it hurts at the same time.

Get in there Gordon!

Testing, testing, 1! 2! 3!

2007-09-18T22:58:00.000+01:00

Just a test post to see whether this actually works...