Clegg and Foggy; sharing the last of the wine

It’s quite delightful to see Nick Clegg, Corporal Clegg, come under some hard scrutiny by the right-wing press; under scrutiny by The Telegraph, The Mail and The Express. So much has come out since he ‘won’ the first round of the political X Factor; details of his expenses claims, of his past as a professional lobbyist, of his contempt for this country revealed by an article he wrote for The Guardian in 2002.

I always knew that Clegg was a political fraud and that his party is a positive danger to the interests of this country; one only has to read through their manifesto to reach that conclusion. The Guardian piece genuinely took me by surprise. I have no recollection of this making an impact at the time – I was still at school -, though I imagine it was ignored because, well, who then would have cared about such a colourless nonentity?

Surprise was quickly succeeded by anger; anger that this man could so downplay the role of his own country (is it his country?) in defeating the Nazis; anger that he could sing to a Continental gallery, saying that Germany was a vastly more prosperous nation and that “we need to be put back in our place.” I’m not quite sure where Clegg conceives ‘our place’ to be, other than under the heel of his beloved European super state.

It’s impossible to deny, of course, that Germany is a vastly more prosperous country. The reason for that is simple. Germany put all of its effort into rebuilding a shattered economy after the Second World War. Britain, on the other hand, whose economy was exhausted, if not ruined, set about under the socialists on a programme of ruinous welfare spending at the worst possible time. We have gone through a depressing cycle ever since: prosperity bequeathed by the Tories has always been destroyed by Labour profligacy.

I have little doubt that the Liberal Democrats would have been equally profligate if they had come close to power; I have little doubt that the Liberal Democrats will ruin the economy of this country if they do come to power.

Returning to Clegg, the treatment he has received at the hands of the press is frankly disgusting. It’s OK, it’s OK; I’ve not gone completely loopy; that’s the assessment of Peter Mandelson, Lord Rumba of Rio, who has denounced the ‘smear’ campaign against his political colleague…sorry, rival! I was getting confused there.

Gosh, what a hypocrite Rumba is! It was he, along with Alistair Campbell, who might be said to have invented the modern smear campaign, one based on the lowest forms misinformation and character assassination. His attempts to suggest that the Conservative Party was behind the Clegg stories, all based on fact, has been described by Sir Malcolm Rifkind as silly, juvenile and vintage Mandelson. “If Mandelson is your best friend”, he continued, “you’ve got serious problems.”

Rumba certainly sees Nick’s as his new best friend, there can be no mistake about that; he is Clegg’s Foggy. I can just see the two of them pottering around, spinning their own political fantasy world as the bottle rapidly empties, as the wine is all but drunk. They deserve one another; they are two of a kind.

Conservatives are Carnivores

Some of you may have heard of Phillip Blond. For those who have not he is loosely what passes for an intellectual in these debased times. In his capacity as a self-appointed Socrates he is the director of ResPublica, yet another ‘think tank’ or, to put it another way, a refuge for the otherwise unemployable. Thinking is a harmless enough occupation for those who can find no other, but Blond ambition, sad to say, has also been adopted as something of a guru by the Conservative leadership.

The problem is not that he thinks but what he thinks, and what he thinks is arrant nonsense, a belief that one can have conservatism without conservatism; one can have, to use his own expression “Red Toryism”. He’s to be found pontificating in the latest issue of Prospect, urging David Cameron not to lurch to the right in the face of wobbly opinion polls. In this he reacts to Tim Montgomerie, the creator of the excellent ConservativeHome website, who last month called for “more red-meat Toryism” and “less red Tory nonsense”.

Yes, indeed, Blond is a Red Tory. If you really want to know more about that particular oxymoron then you could do no better than have a look at his recently published Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain, though I’m making no recommendation here. Would you like a taste of the Blond style? What about this then;

Given the emergence of such a new ethos, it might well be that at the limit, issues of fair pricing, proper remuneration for work and quality of workmanship could become issues of local rather than central jurisdiction.

You can have three hundred pages of similar Blondisms, as he plods along in an utterly tiresome way in a pilgrim’s progress towards the Red Tory citadel. The whole thing is nonsense; dull, tedious, second-hand ideas, presented in the most laborious fashion possible; an attempt to seek depth in pots of prolix prose, the sort of thing that would have brought George Orwell out in a rage. It really is a case of never use one word when twenty will do.

It’s difficult to believe that Blond could ever have been taken seriously, with his absurd and vacuous borrowings, his confusion over so many issues, particularly in the area of economic and social policy. If the Party fails to win the General Election it will be in part thanks to the hesitancy and lack of clear direction introduced into its programme by Red Toryism. When it comes to Conservatism we should all be carnivores.
:-)

Public Identity

The issue of identity cards, once one of the flagship policies of our present marshmallow government, has rather sunk without trace, there but not there, if you take my meaning. Any sensible politician – and there are few of those in the Labour ranks – would have cast their eyes over the past history of identity cards in Britain; and the past history was anything but good.

Identity cards were introduced in the United Kingdom in September 1939. This was the second such scheme in British history, following a largely unsuccessful experiment during the First World War. Given the long British attachment to civil liberties the scheme was highly unpopular, though accepted in the light of the prevailing national emergency. It's possible to take a small measure of how the national identity scheme was received from remarks by the historian A J P Taylor in his English History, 1914-1945, where he describes the whole thing as an 'indignity' and talks of the Home Guard 'harassing' people for their cards.

After the war the government of Clement Atlee decided to continue the scheme in the face of the Cold War and the perceived Soviet threat, though it grew ever less popular. In the mind of the public it was more and more associated with bureaucratic interference and regulation, reflected, most particularly, in the 1949 Passport to Pimlico, one of the comedy movies made by the Ealing Studios in London.

Identity Cards also became the subject of a celebrated civil liberties case in 1950, when Clarence Henry Willcock, a member of the Liberal Party, refused to produce his after being stopped by the police. During his subsequent trail he argued that identity cards had no place in peace time, a defence rejected by the magistrate’s court. In his subsequent appeal, Willcock vs. Muckle, the judgment of the lower court was upheld, though in summing up Lord Goddard more or less accepted his defence;

This Act was passed for security purposes, and not for the purposes for which, apparently, it is now sought to be used. To use Acts of Parliament, passed for particular purposes during war, in times when the war is past, except that technically a state of war exists, tends to turn law-abiding subjects into lawbreakers, which is a most undesirable state of affairs. Further, in this country we have always prided ourselves on the good feeling that exists between the police and the public and such action tends to make the people resentful of the acts of the police and inclines them to obstruct the police instead of to assist them.

Protest reached Parliament, where the Conservative and Liberal peers voiced their anger over what they saw as 'Socialist card-indexing'. After the defeat of the Labour Government in the General Election of October 1951 the incoming Conservative administration of Winston Churchill was pledged to get rid of the scheme, “to set the people free”, in the words of one minister. This was a popular move, adopted against the wishes of the police and the security services, though the decision to repeal the 1939 legislation was, in significant part, driven by the need for economies. By 1952 national Registration was costing £500,000 per annum, a huge sum for the day, and required 1500 civil servants to administer it. Some things are best left in the dark.

Corporal Clegg

Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, Corporal Clegg, as I like to think of him, is on a charm offensive. Clearly keeping his eye on those wobbly opinion polls, he is praying for a hung parliament; for that is the only way that he will get the scent of power, as king-maker for a day. Hoping to appeal to wavering Tories, he is donning the garb of the German Free Democrats, calling for tax cuts and smaller government. He even says that Margaret Thatcher is an inspiration to him

All I can say is that Corporal Clegg is no inspiration to me, and that I would trust Greeks bearing gifts more than I would trust him bearing blue roses. Keep politics out of politics, that really should be the motto of the Liberal Democrats, who stand for nothing, so far as I am concerned, but the shabbiest and shallowest forms of opportunism. In The Spectator Bruce Anderson quotes from a handbook for party workers: “You can secure support from voters who normally vote Tory by being effectively anti-Labour and similarly in a Tory area secure Labour votes by being anti-Tory.”

Oh, they do stand for one thing, Clegg stands for one thing – Europe. This was the party brought the Europe show to these islands, a melodrama in one-act which will run and run. Clegg himself does not like to bark too loudly about this, because he knows how unpopular it is with the voters, but he is in favour of going the whole way to a federal Europe. I personally find it difficult to imagine anything worse. Europe may be his country; it most certainly is not mine; it will never be mine.

When it comes to Europe, when it came to the question of the Lisbon Treaty the Corporal and his party proved just hypocritical as Labour. In their 2005 Manifesto they made clear their support for the proposed Constitution, with the caveat that ratification must be subject to a referendum. But when Constitution became the Treaty, as treacherous a piece of political chicanery as is possible to conceive, they supported its passage through Parliament, something worth remembering when their canvassers come calling.

I suppose I am the worst person to offer any comment on the Liberal Democrats for the simple reason that I have never made the effort to get beneath the surface of the party. To me it’s all surface and no substance. I hate Labour; I’m indifferent to the Liberal Democrats. It’s not a party; it’s a kind glee club for all sorts of woolly-minded people, neither one thing nor the other; bloodless, insipid, worthless. Sorry, that’s wrong-they are the European Party. That surely counts for something.

Colonel Gaddafi, Cuckoo of Cuckoos

I saw a performance of The Third Man last year, a special sixtieth anniversary screening. It’s a particularly good example of film noir and must count as one of the best British movies ever made. I absolutely loved it; the atmosphere, the tension, the music, the setting, the direction, the screenplay and the acting. Joseph Cotton and Trevor Howard were both excellent but Orson Welles as Harry Lime, he was something else, in a different class altogether! There are lots of memorable lines but the most memorable surely has to be Lime’s observation about Switzerland;

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Well, now the poor old Swiss, despite their promotion of brotherly love, have produced something beyond the cuckoo clock; they have managed to produce outrage in the breast of the great Cuckoo himself; they have managed to upset Colonel Gaddafi, this King of Kings. Yes, that’s one of the titles he has bestowed on himself. Anyway, the King of Kings has called for a holy war against the “obscene, infidel” state of Switzerland. Why? It’s the minarets, of course, the Swiss decision to allow no more to cut into their obscene and infidel horizons;

Those who destroy God’s mosques deserve to be attacked through jihad and if Switzerland was on our borders we would fight it. Jihad against Switzerland, against Zionism, against foreign aggression is not terrorism.

So, now you know!

I’m sure even the Cuckoo of Cuckoos knows that we live in an age where states do not have to share a common border to make war on one another. It’s all just so much hot air and petulant bluster or the Libyan air force would even now be on its way to Zurich. That’s one way of looking at it; another way would be to see this as an invitation to terrorist attacks on Switzerland, the kind of attacks that Libya specialised not so long ago, the kind of thing that led to Lockerbie.

Who, I have to ask myself, in their right mind would do business with this man, so obviously mentally unbalanced and delusional. Well, we do, for one, this Labour government does; Peter Mandelson, Lord Rumbo of Rio, does, having a particularly cosy relationship with the Cuckoo’s son. His government, the government of Mad Gordon Brown, effectively betrayed those who died in the Lockerbie outrage to clear the way to deals over oil and gas, as wretched a piece of appeasement as I can conceive.

Just imagine a meeting between the Cuckoo and Mad Gordon; just imagine them both in a mood; just imagine the effing, blinding and missiles that might be produced; just imagine the jihad. Now that really would be something worth seeing!

“But I don't want to go among mad people," said Alice. "Oh, you can't help that," said the cat. "We're all mad here."

Economists- the real Nowhere Men

I just had to laugh when I read the economists’ letter to the Financial Times in support of Alistair Darling, Chancellor of the Exchequer, saying that this is no time to introduce budget cuts. So, with a deficit now at eye-watering levels these clots are effectively telling the government to spend away; to mortgage your future, to mortgage my future, looking always to the ‘long run’. That reminds me of something. Oh, yes, wasn’t it an economist who once said that in the long run we are all dead?

Is there, I ask myself, anyone who beats economists in the stupidity stakes? OK, there are climate-change scientists, but economists are in a unique category of their own. Gorbachev, of all people, used to tell a joke which featured economists in the punch-line when he was meeting other heads of state or government. It went like this. President Regan has a hundred security advisors. One of them is a spy, but he does not know which. President Mitterrand has a hundred lovers. One of them has Aids but he does not know which. He –Gorbachev- has a hundred economic experts. One of them is intelligent but he does not know which.

Yes, quite. But let Dismal Gordon take temporary comfort from the practitioners of the Dismal Science who came to his aid, all sixty of the clots. Yes, now is not the time to introduce cuts which may endanger a ‘fragile’ recovery; now is the time to chase away investors alarmed by the horrific growth in debt and borrowing. I would honestly say that economists act as a reverse barometer; whatever they say, expect the opposite, do the opposite. Because when they get it wrong they get it spectacularly wrong.

In 1981, when Geoffrey Howe was Chancellor, he was faced with a kind of charge of the dismal brigade, when no less than 364 of them, virtually the whole profession, not a stupid 60, wrote to The Times criticising the Budget, saying that “there was no basis in economic theory or supporting evidence” for the policy the government was pursuing. They did not stop there, no; there were also the Cassandra-like warnings that the Budget threatened Britain’s social and political stability and that an alternative course must be sought.

But the Lady was not for turning; strict fiscal and monetary policy was introduced over the squeals and moans. Alas for them what followed was not judgement day only morning, excellent and fair. No sooner had their miserable missive been published than the economy began to recover. No sooner had it started its recovery than all of the inherited Keynesian orthodoxy looked stupid and outmoded.

No, there was no increased expenditure. Instead the Budget deficit was faced with simple honesty. Taxes were increased and government borrowing brought back on course. Lower government borrowing meant lower interest rates, taking the pressure off business. Investors started to regain confidence in the will-power of the Thatcher government, that it would pursue its declared goals to a conclusion, not collapse into indecision; not be panicked by the advice of the ‘experts’. So, money was freed up as people planned a future on the basis of lower interest rates, lower inflation and lower borrowing. Intelligence, clear thinking and good-sense prevailed. The economists were ignored; so should they always be, because most of them are the captives of yesterday’s idea. Most of them truly are nowhere men. :-)

They’re as blind as they can be,
Just see what they want to see,
Nowhere Men can you see me at all?

Nowhere Men, don't worry,
Take your time, don't hurry,
Leave it all till somebody else
lends you a hand!

One Nation Tory

I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about David Cameron, about the task he has set himself, about what he represents. I’ve seen some of this reflected in comments about his performance. I would like to try to clarify things, as much for myself as for anyone else who cares to read what I have to say. What follows is, if you like, an appreciation in progress.

I should say to begin with that David is not my favourite Conservative politician; that honour belongs to Boris the Menace, the fantastic Mayor of London and sentimental old leftie. Ideally I would prefer to see Boris lead the party, but then realism kicks through the walls of my dream. Everybody I know loves Boris, but we also know that Boris is a treasure and a liability at one and the same time; one would always be waiting for him to stand on a landmine, to fall into some media or public relations trap.

Then there is David, certainly not colourful, just more dependable, more reassuring. The thing is the Conservative Party needed David Cameron in the way that Labour needed Tony Blair; they came at the right point in the respective histories of their parties. He can only really be understood against the background of the civil war that beset the Tories all during the Major premiership, refusing to settle down through the leadership of William Hague, Ian Duncan Smith and Michael Howard. He brought a kind of peace to a party that at last recognises that power is more important in some instances than principle.

I know with a certainty that his style of politics would have been defined as ‘wet’ during the Thatcher years. Indeed, as Peter Oborne has pointed out, he has described himself as a ‘one nation Tory’, the term used by Thatcher’s opponents, harking back to the days of Benjamin Disraeli, another time when the party was in transition. But that’s exactly what the party needed - a reconnection with older, less-bruising traditions. I don’t think Cameron has necessarily ended the divisions- and some of these go deep, particularly over Europe- but he has successfully presided over a highly effective armistice, uniting the likes of William Hague and Kenneth Clarke, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Gove in senior office.

People might argue that Cameron simply walks in the shadow of Blair, as Blair walked in the shadow of Thatcher. He is a pragmatist, that much is certain, but I can see no other comparison with Blair, a man, so far as I am concerned, who immersed himself in the deepest forms of turpitude, who presided over a government that massively increased the power of the state as it weekend our civic culture.

That’s what Cameron’s brand of ‘new old’ Conservatism is about - reversing the damage caused by years of mismanagement, returning responsibility to ordinary people, shoring up the ramparts of society. Cameron as prime minster will mean a return to responsible government, to cabinet government with decisions taken collectively, away from the presidential façade of Blair and the cronyism of Brown. Peter Oborne puts it even better;

He comes into politics out of a sense of personal service and duty. He believes in self-reliance, patriotism and personal independence. He will not, as Tony Blair did, abuse his office for personal enrichment. He will not be intoxicated, as Blair was, by power for its own sake. He will not go weak at the knees when he meets an American president or an international tycoon. He may very well fail, but he is rooted in a clear and purely British set of values. I can think of no leader who stands so squarely in the Tory intellectual, social, moral and political tradition.

Yes, for all these reasons and more he deserves our support and encouragement. This is the hour; he is the man.

When I Hear Talk of 'Human Rights' I Reach for my Gun

Now, where did I come across a sentiment like that, or something to that effect? Was it, perhaps, to do with culture? :-))

So, yes, let’s talk of human rights and human wrongs; let’s talk about the progress of absurdity. In 1998 our super Labour government finally incorporated the European Convention on Human rights into English law. I really feel like making some cutting and sardonic remark about Europeans, Continental Europeans, teaching the English anything, anything at all, about human rights, but that would only complicate things.

OK, a question for all who stumble this way: do you feel more secure, do you think this legislation has made your freedoms more secure? No, neither do I.

I don’t suppose too many people have read the Convention upon which this ghastly legislation is based. Let me just say that large parts of it are open to multiple interpretations. In other words it forces our judiciary to make law on the hoof, so to say, on matters that were once the prerogative of our sovereign parliament. Sovereign? Yes, I know; not for some time past. The whole process has become a joke; we are drowning in the absurdity of political correctness, running mad by license of legislation.

Norman Tebbit, that sentimental old leftie, wrote of the 1998 Act;

Our Parliament will be powerless to stop unelected and unsackable judges making the law because the Human Rights Act is so loosely and vaguely worded They will give rights to some people -- sex perverts, illegal immigrants, and criminals are top of the list -- which will rob us of freedoms we have had for centuries.

Yes, it’s true, but so much power has crept away from Parliament as freedom has from us, from ordinary people who have not the least interest in upholding some laughable and bogus principle.

Let’s consider the government’s policy relaunch earlier this year. Clearly running scared of the electoral advance of the BNP, clearly frightened that the sadly neglected ‘strongholds’ of Labour support are starting to crumble, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson, aka Lord Rumba of Rio, say that local authorities should now give serious consideration to allocating housing to those who have waited longest on their lists. In other words, local housing should go to local people or, better expressed, ‘British homes for British workers!’

Yes, this would certainly do much to reduce frustration in Labour’s council ghettos; it may also have the bonus of reducing crime by recreating organic communities, places where parents live close to their children or other family members; places where people actually know who lives next door to them. But they can’t do this, and there are two reasons why they can’t. First, because it goes against the Guardianist current in social policy, the long insistence that housing should be allocated on the basis of need and need alone. So, along comes the first asylum seeker off the lorry and once again Tracy and Kevin, who’ve waited for ten years, move further down the list.

This could be reversed, could it not, this insistence that middle-class home-owning liberals know best when it comes to the allocation of housing and other public services? Ah, but we now move to the second reason why the Labour relaunch is just another fraud, like ‘British jobs for British workers.’ It can’t be altered because such alteration would be a breach of ‘human rights.’ We can’t send asylum seekers back because, well, they might get spanked; we can only house them. Places get worse, people get frustrated, crime increases, the spiral goes ever downwards: Tracy and Kevin go mad; Tracy and Kevin’s parents go mad and along come the BNP!

Now I ask myself another question, perhaps one you would really like to know the answer to: am I against human rights, do I think legislation in this area is a bad thing? No, I am not; no, I do not. But I do think that human rights need to be balanced with human responsibilities. We have a long tradition of expanding and developing rights and duties under the law, from Magna Carta onwards. We had a long tradition, yes, had, of governing ourselves.

We do not need ‘human rights’; we need our rights and we need our history; we need to recover who we are an what we believe in; we need to free ourselves from the nonsense inflicted upon us from across the Channel. Remember this the next time you read of judges pronouncing on the ‘human rights’ of those who have no place in this country and no understanding of our traditions.

Red Toryism

The Conservative Party does not do ideology, at least it shouldn’t, an entirely personal view, I confess. But David Cameron wants to put an intellectual gloss on post-Thatcher Toryism, to give it coherence, a basis and a sense of direction. So, along trundles a new thinking tank, the ResPublica, and along comes Philip Bond, given to promoting something he calls ‘Red Toryism’, as if we had not sickened enough of red over the past twelve years. Now I really am seeing red. :-))

It seems to me that Blond is just another promoter of second-hand and muddle-headed ideas. His ‘fresh, candid thinking’ includes such revolutionary platforms as breaking up large supermarkets, higher charges on supermarket carparks and-wait for it-rules to prevent the building of new supermarkets. So, you see, Mister Blond clearly has a thing about supermarkets. Perhaps he took a tumble from a trolley when he was a baby?

Sorry, I’m being unfair; there is more to ‘Red Toryism’ than this: there is the proposal to give the residents of council estates the ability to control budgets for services as diverse as education, housing and policing. Just how this control is to be exercised is not clear to me. More than that, where is the demand for this form of decentralisation? Do people in council estates really want to be taken away from the delights of day time TV? I don’t know the answer to these questions. Perhaps they do, though I rather suspect not.

What ‘Red Toryism’ reduces to, if I can simplify matters, is an attack on a successful business sector coupled with the belief in forms of community utopianism. What Mister Blond does not like is Thatcherite neo-liberalism, the belief in the power of markets and the power of personal initiative. Yes, there deep and radical thinking is required about the future direction of policy, as David Cameron said at the launching of the good ship ResPublica last week, just not the ‘deep and radical thinking’ of the Blond variety.

We’ve been here before. This is the soft soap vision that carried ‘Blue Socialism’ into Downing Street, the pap that once went by the name of a ‘stake holder society’ and-Lord help us-‘communitarianism.’ The reality, of course, was the empowering of a Labour tyranny and the disempowering of people, the disempowering of Parliament. Where there are communities, in other words, let us bring fragmentation, let us bring alienation, let us bring migration. Yes, give more power to people by handing it away, on no authority whatsoever, to Brussels.

Power brings its own demands, its own responsibilities. It’s best to be practical about these matters, not to be caught in a snare of tiresome ideas and empty programmes. Red Toryism is no Toryism. It’s the politics of the circus, the thinking of the second rate. Be pragmatic, be realistic are the two guiding ideas David should take into government. All else will follow.

Exposing the National Health Service

I mentioned in a contribution I made to a discussion on a blog about the British National Health Service, the NHS, that I would like to say a word or two more about this great sacred cow of our national life once I had gathered my thoughts. Well, thy have been suitable corralled and so here I go!

To begin with you might like to know where I am coming from. For most people who read my blogs my politics should be fairly obvious by now: I am Conservative and conservative, right-wing and libertarian, a fully paid up member of the Thatcherite Youth. :-) I have, I have to be honest, almost no experience at all of the National Health Service as a consumer; my parents have private health insurance, in which I am included, which means we have never had to queue, never experienced rationing, never had to negotiate our way around the gatekeepers who hold the keys to state-provided medicine in this country. Does that not disqualify me from passing comment? I don’t believe so. For you see I know how good health care can be. I don’t see why people in general, people who supposedly can’t afford private provision, but still pay huge amounts in tax for public care, should not have access to a far, far better service.

When David Hannan, whom I admire greatly, had the courage to question that the NHS was the best of all possible worlds he was immediately cudgeled from right and left. That fat twit John Prescott, two chins himself, immediately twitted that David Cameron should rebuke him for running down Britain’s ‘most loved’ institution. Others joined in with shallow and egregious points; that Hannan was attacking ‘our hard-working doctors and nurses’ when he had done nothing of the sort. It’s a bit like saying that criticism of the war in Afghanistan is an attack on our service personnel. Hannan’s criticism was leveled at the structure and organisation of the NHS, which, in its fundamentals has remained unreformed for sixty years, yes, sixty years.

Oh, how we delude ourselves when we say that the NHS is the ‘envy of the world’ when it’s the envy of virtually no one, certainly not in the developed world; certainly not, as Hannan has pointed out repeatedly, in places like Singapore. Think about it and ask yourself one core question: what exactly is the NHS? Well, let me tell you exactly how I conceive of it: it’s a holdout, the last survivor of war-time Britain and of the austerity Britain of the post-war years, Old Labour and Hard Labour Britain. It’s about rationing and more rationing; it’s about queues and queuing; it’s not the best you can get- it’s all you can get.

And what can you get? Well, we know from recent reports on some of our filthy hospitals that you can get disease, you can get this super bug or that super virus, brought to the world by our state health system. If one is not all that sick when one goes in to hospital one has a good chance of getting sick before coming out, assuming one comes out at all. I read George Orwell’s essay How the Poor Die not so long ago, and while things are not as bad in the NHS as that extreme it seems to me that there are points where it comes close.

Now for some specifics. Those unfortunate enough to suffer a heart-attack or a stroke, or to develop cancer, have a far lower survival rate in Britain than anywhere else in Western Europe. Provision of care is not universal or uniform because the more expensive treatments become the more invidious and unfair the rationing, medicines allowed in some places and not in others. If you have to get sick try not to get sick in this country; that‘s the reality of our ‘much loved' institution.

I suppose when most people think of the NHS they think of health care professionals, nurses and doctors and so on. I don‘t: I think of bureaucrats and managers; I think of the massive amounts of cash that pour into the organisational black hole they have created, from which no light escapes. This is not a people-based system. Its priorities are elsewhere.

And what solution do I offer? That’s easy: I would dismantle this bloated monster and return power to the people, to the consumers. We can easily have a world class health care system based upon insurance. Those who can pay should pay. Why, most people pay already, and heavily, through taxation, receiving a poor return for their money. And we can still have a fair system, one that provides for all, even the poorest. We don’t have to go down the American road, there are plenty of other ‘opt-out’ systems in the world, systems that have avoided the trap of building health care on the basis of general taxation, the lest efficient method possible. In Singapore people enjoy a higher level of health care while paying less for it, while the state pays for those who can’t. Health is better, tax is less. What is wrong with that?

Sadly we can’t have debate about these issues in this country because any attempt to challenge the efficiency of the NHS is immediately shouted down in an irrational and emotive fashion. Yes, I know, people are frightened of change; even Conservative politicians are frightened of change because they are worried about the electoral consequences of throwing eggs at the juggernaut. I have no hesitation in saying that the NHS needs fundamental reform, that the alternatives should be quietly and rationally explained; that this Bastille of welfarism should be destroyed and the bricks used to build anew.

Boom

Now here’s an interesting little tale, one that took me by surprise because it concerns Nick Clegg, arguably the most boring man in British politics; nice, yes, but boring. Nice and boring, the very qualities that make him an admirable leader of the Liberal Democrats, the nice but boring party.

The odd thing is I have no clear idea what a Liberal Democrat is, never having met one, or at least never having met anyone who confessed to being a Liberal Democrat. I have a perfect image in my head of a Tory and even an image of a Socialist, a sort of urban Neanderthal, but all ‘Liberal Democrat’ conjures up is something fuzzy and unreal; neither this, nor that, nor anything in particular; no passions, no commitment, no energy-just nothing. Oh, that’s not quite right: there is Jenny Tonge, better known to her friends as Baroness Boom or Jihad Jenny. She believes alright, she believes there is something to be said for suicide bombers. My goodness; not so boring after all, though Baroness Boom is not a subject that Nick Clegg likes to dwell upon.

For those who do not know her Tonge is the former Liberal Democrat MP for Richmond Park. In 2004 she was asked to step down from the Party front bench after she made a speech justifying Palestinian suicide bombers, saying that if she had to live in similar circumstances she might consider becoming one herself. But this did not stop her being elevated to the Lords, where, in January of this year, she took up the Health portfolio.

But it isn’t just health she booms on about; continuing with her hostility to the state of Israel she has embraced some nice old fashioned conspiracy theories, the sort of thing that might be found in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In 2006 she announced that the “…pro-Israeli lobby has got its grips on the Western world, its financial grips. I think they have probably got a certain grip on our party.” I have no idea who has ‘a grip’ of Baroness Boom but commenting on this in the latest issue of Standpoint Douglas Murray writes “The idea that anyone has a grip on the LibDems would certainly surprise its membership.” Are they capable of surprise? I suppose one would have to wake them up first!

Anyway, Clegg was confronted by Murray on Boom’s outbursts after a lecture he gave earlier this year to the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism. He was told that if she said anything like this ‘on his watch’ she would be in serious trouble. Unfortunately for poor old Corporal Clegg she has said worse with him in charge of the rag-tag army.

This year, as Murray reports, she met Khaled Mesha’al, the political leader of Hamas, praising him as “shrewd, plausible and actually very likeable.” Last year she shared a platform with Azzam Tamini, a British Palestinian activist and another enthusiast for suicide bombing. On this occasion she said that the ‘Jewish lobby’ in the United States was responsible for all of the world’s ills. All of them? Really? That’s nice to know; it makes things so simple if one happens to be looking for a final solution for all of the world’s ills.

When Murray brought these inconvenient facts to Clegg’s attention he dodged the issue, pretending that he became leader a year later than he had. Ah well, when the going gets tough a Liberal Democrat leader hides behind a lie. Best if you just go home, Nick, and prepare for government, you and Baroness Boom.

Dancing with the Devil

There is a rather unsettling piece in the November issue of Standpoint by Nick Cohen on the fate of Derek Pasquill, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) mole who exposed that lamentable branch of government’s (whose government, I wonder?) contacts with Islamo-fascists when it was under the control of the Man of Straw. I know the FCO has a long tradition of working against the interests of this country but I would have thought that even it had clear limits, points beyond which it would not go. No, it does not.

The documents released by Pasquill show that the FCO was actively assisting organisations that promoted extreme Islamist views, most notably the Muslim Brotherhood. It was part of a political strategy that was developed in a section headed Engaging with the Islamic World. For Jack Straw and his civil service myrmidons ‘engagement’ clearly meant appeasement of the worst and most extreme sections of Muslim opinion.

It was a betrayal not just of the interests of this country but also of more moderate Muslim opinion throughout the Middle East. You see, the assumption seems to have been that the fanatics in the Muslim Brotherhood were the only alternative to moribund Arab oligarchies. So, the FCO actively promoted and legitimised extremism. It’s difficult to believe, I know, even of them, but it happens to be true.

Pasquill was seconded to the Engaging with the Muslim World unit in 2005, just before the general election of that year, standing in for one Mockbul Ali, a ‘non-political’ civil servant who just happened to be off campaigning for the Labour Party among British Muslims.

Before taking up the post he decided to research the Muslim Brotherhood in the British Library, discovering that it was an organisation set up by admirers of European fascism; that it believed in the subjugation of women as well as in the murder of apostates and homosexuals; that it denied democracy and human rights as an ‘imperialist imposition’, and that it embraced the racist conspiracy theories once put into motion by the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police. The movement, defined by the FCO as ‘moderate’, stood in opposition to every western principle of freedom and liberty.

It was because of this that Pasquill began his campaign, leaking documents to the press. But the revelations received almost no support on the liberal left, already compromised by the same forms of appeasement and muddle-headed thinking that had corrupted the FCO: they had embraced forms of reaction that they barely understand in the name of ‘liberation’. The damage that the FCO was doing to British interests at home and abroad, the damage that it was doing to national security, surely stands comparison with the actions of the Cambridge Spies. The latter were acting under the guidance of a perverse idealism. I can see no understandable motive at all behind the FCO’s policy other than crass stupidity.

Pasquill was eventually exposed as the whistleblower-he deliberately left a trail that could be followed by an elephant-and sacked. By rights he should have been prosecuted for breach of the Official Secrets Act, a path he actively sought, but the case was dropped.

In the course of his article Cohen poses two questions. Who is the traitor and who the patriot in these circumstances: the dissident civil servant or the two-faced government? Who, to be blunt, is more deserving of summary dismissal? I know the answer to these questions; I feel sure most of the people who read this will also know the answer.

In addition to this there are surely serious questions to be raised about the conduct of Jack Straw, that one-time Communist, both in the Foreign Office and the Home Office. In the former he tried to engage with people inimical to the interests of this country; in the latter he seems to have lost all control of mass immigration, either deliberately or because of incompetence and incapacity for high office I can’t say with certainty. I would so like the affairs of this shabby administration to be subject to a major public inquiry once Brown, Straw and Peter Mandelson,aka Lord Rumba of Rio, have been cast on to the rubbish tip of history.

Empty Apologies

I’ve blogged in the past about the fashion, both fatuous and vain, for contemporary politicians to apologise for the tragedies and mistakes of the past; over things that happened well before they were born or over which they had no control (The Joker in a Gay Mood and No Point in Apologising for the Past). I’ve had further thoughts about this, inspired in part by Rod Liddle’s latest column in The Spectator, and in part the leaks from the Iraq Inquiry reported in The Sunday Telegraph.

Liddle’s reflections have been brought on by the latest round of apologies, that over the British children sent out to Australia last century, where they often suffered abuse and neglect. Brown has taken it upon himself to say sorry, just as he said sorry over the past persecutions suffered by homosexuals. It is, Liddle says, the quintessential example of the modern apology: a politician who is not remotely contrite apologising for something for which he had not the vaguest responsibility and for which, therefore, he cannot be blamed. A non-apology apology, then-an apology for something someone else did, and what’s more, did in the best of faith.

I suppose it might be of some comfort to someone somewhere that, given this trend, they can expect an apology for present injustices and wrongs, injustices and wrongs committed by the present government, in, say, fifty or a hundred years from now, delivered by politicians as yet unborn, though they will most likely not be around to enjoy the experience. I personally would like our dear Prime Minister to apologise for a more immediate enormity, one from the not too distant past: namely his Party’s close and potentially treasonable ties with the old Soviet Union. I don’t expect that any day soon, though; maybe in fifty or a hundred years. Never mind: what about an apology that would not cause the government too much distress, perhaps over Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries or Edward I’s expulsion of the Jews?

Tony, Not the Euro President, Blair led the way here, apologising for the Irish Potato famine, for slavery, even for the treatment of the Maoris! But let’s look at the thing, the one thing, he really needs to apologise for-the Iraq War. Did you read the report in the Telegraph? Did you read how he lied to Parliament about the planned invasion; how our troops were sent often half-prepared; how there was absolutely no thought given to a post-war strategy? The full human cost of this dreadful tragedy has yet to be quantified, but hundreds of thousands of innocent people died for Blair’s vision, for Blair’s mendacity.

Casting my mind over the past hundred years I cannot think of a similar enormity by a British Prime Minister. Even Anthony Eden’s Suez adventure is nothing in comparison. Yet this man, who, so far as I am concerned, might very well be indicted at The Hague for war crimes, was being considered for the Presidency of Europe. I’m sure the Inquiry will produce a lot more evidence of the enormities that Blair, the peace maker, committed in the Middle East, evidence depicting a situation that positively demands some genuine contrition and a truly meaningful apology. Alas, it’s an apology that will never be made. Never mind; there is always the dissolution of the monasteries, the expulsion of the Jews and on and on.

Candyfloss and Sunshine

Of all the criticisms of the recent Queen’s Speech the most obvious appears to have been missed: the complete failure of imagination. In Gordon Brown’s position I would have been so much more creative. I would have promised, say, candyfloss and sunshine. Yes, everyday would be the first day of spring; every heart would have a new song to sing. It’s too ambitious, I can feel you think. Is it any more ambitious than that ridiculous note Her Majesty was obliged to deliver last week? It wasn’t a statement of intent. No; it was two odd things juxtaposed: a declaration of war and a declaration of incompetence.

Now, let me begin with the declaration of war. This Parliament, the Expenses Parliament, has only a few short months to live. It will have to be dissolved around Easter at the latest. So there is no time for the government’s legislative programme to be implemented, even if the opposition played clever dog. The whole thing is just so threadbare that one would have to be stupid to see it not as a realistic agenda but an attempt trip up David Cameron and the Tories, trip up their resistance to candyfloss and sunshine.

I don’t want to dwell on this dismal programme overmuch. Let me just take the case of free personal care for the elderly. Why, one has to ask, does this come at this late stage, after twelve dismal years of the Noo Labour Reich? Why? That’s easy: because such a measure was dismissed as too impractical and too expensive in the past. A second question immediately arises here. How does this commitment to additional expenditure dovetail with the laughably named Fiscal Responsibility Bill? The simple answer is that it doesn’t. This naturally leads me into the declaration of incompetence.

Here we have a government that after twelve years has discovered the need for fiscal responsibility. The corollary to this is, of course, that what went before was fiscal irresponsibility. Yes, I know that’s the truth but I never expected to hear such an open admission. The best comment on the proposal to legislate against the deficit came, I thought, from Corporal Clegg of the Liberal Democrats. It’s like passing a law promising to get up in the morning, he said. One does not need the guidance of law; one just does it.

Ah, but the real incompetence, the true measure of Brown’s utter stupidity, comes in the obvious thing omitted from the Queen’s Speech: the need to clean up Parliament; the need to act on the Kelly Report. On the one great issue that has dominated Brown’s ministry, the Expenses Scandal, the one issue that demanded to be addressed, he had not a word to say. Sir Christopher Kelly himself expressed his ‘disappointment’ at this decision to ignore the elephant in the room. This and similar criticisms have forced dismal Brown into another humiliating climb-down, something we should be used to by now. Harriet Harperson, in her capacity as Leader of the Commons, has said that the government will add new laws to deal with MPs allowances and pay. Really? On top of the existing agenda? Oh why, oh why, did you not just promise candyfloss and sunshine? :-))

Toxic Gags

Had you ever heard of ‘super injunctions’? I confess I had not until I heard Ian Hislop talk about them on Have I Got News for You. In essence this is a gagging order that even prevents a newspaper saying that it has been gagged or making any kind of reference to the gagging device

The issue arose when a ship belonging to an international oil trading company by the name of Trafigura deliberately dumped toxic waste off the Ivory Coast. Thousands of local people were affected, a number dying in consequence of the resulting pollution. This loathsome company originally claimed that the wastes was non-toxic, knowing full well that it was. After years of stalling and legal threats it eventually agrred to pay compensation to over thirty-one thousand people.

In an attempt at ‘reputation management’ Trafigura employed a firm of London solicitors by the name of Carter-Ruck, specialists in the law of lible. These people immediately started to throw their weight around, going to the high court to get an injunction preventing The Guardian from further reporting on the Ivory Coast story. But this was no ordinary injunction; this was a ‘super-injunction’, the law not being done or seen to be done, but the law in secret preventing reporting of a secret, preventing reporting of itself in action. Lost? Yes, I know; not even Kafka could make this up.

Worse than that, when the Labour MP Paul Farrelly raised a question over super injunctions with Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, the paper was even prevented from reporting that. Private Eye, which Hislop edits, took the bold step of highlighting the issue anyway in cryptic language designed to intrigue. Bloggers caught on and the whole thing exploded, a fantastic own goal by Carter-Ruck, now referred to in the latest issue of the satirical magazine by another name altogether. Can you guess what? :-)) No matter, instead of ‘managing’ their client’s reputation they have exposed a story that might otherwise have escaped scrutiny.

But there is more here. This whole process, the revelation that judges are willing to grant secret injunctions has uncovered a serious threat to not just to press freedom but to the proper operation of parliamentary democracy itself. Secret injunctions take us back to the days of John Wilkes, to the days of ‘Wilkes and Liberty’, when those reporting the business of Parliament could be imprisoned. Looking at it from a historical perspective it may be even worse; for the super injunction might very well be in breach of the 1689 Bill of Rights, one of the great milestones of English constitutional history.

The arrogance of these Carter-Fu.., sorry Carter-Ruck people goes still further: they tried to prevent Parliament itself debating the question of super-injunctions by arguing that it was sub-judice. Jon Bercow, in allowing the debate to go ahead, cited the need to defend freedom of speech in Parliament. The said letter was circulated to all MPs. Paul Farrelly, the man who raised the question in the first place, said;

Carter-Ruck have got a real nerve. Firstly they tried and failed to suppress news that they had obtained a gagging order against the Guardian. Then they tried to ask the Speaker to gag parliament itself. This affair has shown that privileges preventing press freedom are sometimes as only as strong as their assertion. The Speaker and parliament must stand up to people like Carter-Ruck who aggressively encroach on these freedoms.

There were some choice contributions in the debate, including that by Denis MacShane;

In past years, people who sought to gag parliament or were held to have behaved inappropriately in relation to parliament were brought before the Bar of the House and in some cases sent to prison. Do we not need to see Carter-Ruck’s partners before the Bar of the House to apologise publicly for this attempt to suborn parliamentary democracy?

Peter Bottomley, the Tory Mp, said that the order should never have been granted and that he intends to report Carter-Ruck to the Law Society. The Lord Chief Justice himself has turned on super injunctions and the attempt to restrict freedom of expression in Parliament, which he described as a fundamental principle. One can only hope that this will give some of the cowardly judges a little more backbone when faced with such invidious requests in future from the Carter-Rucks of this world.

In response Adam Tudor, a partner in the said firm, issued a press release saying that neither his company nor Trafigura had attempted to stifle or restrict debate in Parliament or the reporting of debate, another lie exposed by Private Eye. Ian Hislop and Liberty!

Balls to the BNP

Last week at the Labour Party conference Ed Balls’, the Schools Secretary, proposed a ban on teachers belonging to the British National Party, the BNP. So far as I am concerned this is a dangerous move, touching on some really fundamental issues, issues of civil liberty and issues of negative discrimination. Beyond that it touches on freedom of conscience.

The proposal itself, which I suspect will come to nothing, was little more than a gimmick, made by New Labour’s uber-geek, the man with the silliest hair-cut in politics, to a desperate and unhappy conference. Personally I have no time for the BNP. But anyone, anyone with the lest degree of political sense, can see that it has flourished under the present regime precisely because the concerns of thousands of working-class voters over issues such as housing and immigration have been ignored, not because the schools are full of ‘racist teachers’.

Yes, racism should be kept out of the classroom, but this is not about racism; it’s an intrusion into private areas of thought and belief. It would give further momentum to the BNP, allowing them to depict themselves as martyrs, victims of political oppression. What we are seeing here is scapegoating of the worst kind. Indeed, the need for scapegoats of one kind or another is something wholly identified with political extremism, or movements pushed to an extreme. This is a symptom of the nadir of New Labour.

Where does such a thing begin and where does it end? Racism, discrimination and negative perceptions take all kinds of shapes. What about Muslim teachers who consider non-believers to be ‘kafirs’? Does that not also carry dangers? What about those who sanction wife-beating and vilify homosexuals? What about those opposed to gay weddings or civil partnerships? What about teachers who embrace Marxist forms of thought, with all of the historical baggage that happens to carry? What about members of the Socialist Workers Party, an organisation that repels me personally far more than the BNP?

Yes, there have been regimes in history that have sacked teachers not for what they said but for what they believed, regimes like Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. Are we to join them? We will if Balls and Chris Keates, the general secretary of NASUWT, the teacher’s union, have their way. Let me make one simple point for these men and all who would follow them into the tactic of the purge: it is quite possible to be a good teacher and-shock! horror!- a member of the BNP at one and the same time. Private political beliefs should be no more than that.

Let me put it this way. Ed Balls is retreating to the failed, inflammatory tactics of legislation and regulation which will only create more resentment amongst the dispossessed, more martyrs among Griffin’s rag-tag army and take Britain closer to a police state. Yes, I agree with that but this is a sentiment that I lifted from a site dedicated to exposing the BNP for what it truly stands for. You will find it here http://www.nothingbritish.com

I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it…unless you happen to be a nationalist, a Muslim, a socialist, a Marxist, a Christian a Jew and on and so on and so on.