The Debatable Land

"Socialism in one clause"?

Peter Hoskin is right to be suspicious of the government's latest ploy: mandating that all public bodies have a statutory duty to narrow the gap between rich and poor. As you might expect Polly Toynbee is tickled a deepish shade of red by the notion. Nonetheless, consider this snippet from her column today:

Poor children might need to have much more spent on their education per head than the better-off do. Sure Start toddlers might need more funds than older children. It might mean local lotteries to see that all children get equal access to the best schools.

It's a myth, of course, that simply ploughing more money into schools necessarily improves them and I suspect that Toynbee envisions some centralised system whereby bureaucrats allocate funds based on some incomprehensible and inflexible formula. Still, it wouldn't have to be that way: giving head-teachers greater license to spend their school budget as they see fit (and thus freeing them from LEAs) would be a good start. If that means they want to spend more on salaries to attract better teachers then fine.

More significantly, Toynbee seems to be endorsing greater school choice. That's a good thing. The current system of "slection by house price" is inequitable for sure. But the best way to organise "local lotteries" for access to the best schools is to permit all parents to choose the school they want their kids to attend. Parents should decide what is the best school for their kids, not civil servants. A lottery would only be necessary if and when a school is over-subscribed. If I recall correctly, New Zealand's school choice system results in more than 75% of parents getting their kids into their preferred school. There's no great reason to suppose some similarly happy outcome could be achieved in Britain. School choice incentivises parents to be more involved with their kids' education and, as we know, parental involvement is one of the most important factors in determining educational success.

This Britain. Again.

We're getting used - alas - to the idea that smokers will not be allowed to adopt children (abuse!) but, as always, that proves to be but the beginning, not the end of this sort of thing. To wit, a couple in Leeds have had their application to adopt denied on the grounds that the husband is, wait for it, too fat. Leeds Council writes:

I am writing to confirm that we are unable to progress an application from you at this time.

This is due to the concerns that the medical advisers have expressed regarding Mr Hall's weight.

I have discussed this with our medical adviser... who considers that it is important to alter lifestyle, diet and exercise in a sustainable way so that any weight reduction can be maintained in the long term.

I understand that you would like to begin the assessment as soon as possible and while appreciating your reasons for this, I consider it would be more appropriate to begin the assessment once Mr Hall's BMI is below 40.

At 24 stone Mr Hall may indeed be carrying more weight than might be considered ideal (though in photographs and this BBC interview he doesn't seem monstrously lardy) but that's not the point is it? This is grotesque: the behaviour of a capricious bureaucracy that revels in increasing human misery. Tellingly, the child's interests cannot be factored into the adoption equation. That would be to make it a sane, sensible, humane system. Instead there's the needless infliction of suffering simply because said suffering can be inflicted at next to no cost to the petty, tinpot sadists who enjoy messing with people like this. They do it because they can; the more troubling question is why we permit them to.

[Via, Adam Smith Institute]

The Way We Were

Mickey Kaus digs up an NYT article ($ needed for full access) from 1981 comparing the manufacturing of Ford Escorts at plants in Germany and at Halewood on Merseyside. It is, as you might expect, exceedingly grisly stuff:

This [German] plant produces some 1,200 cars a day, more than the 1,015 that Ford planners had anticipated, and requires 7,762 workers. Its counterpart at Halewood, with virtually identical equipment and production targets, has averaged only about 800 cars a day this year, and 10,040 workers have been needed to achieve even that production level.

 ''Our standards say it should take something like 20 man-hours of labor in both the body and assembly plants to make an Escort,'' said Bill Hayden, vice president of manufacturing for Ford Europe Inc., in an interview. ''At Saarlouis, they do it with 21 hours. At Halewood it takes 40 hours.'' ...

Aside from statistics, subjective differences between the two factories become evident. Halewood seems to overflow with workers - some of them reading or eating, others kicking a soccer ball - while Saarlouis seems almost depopulated and nearly every worker in evidence is hard at his job. At Saarlouis, workers dash to open doors for visitors touring in electric carts, while at Halewood, one worker greeted a news photographer by exposing himself....

For their part, the workers at Halewood maintained in recent interviews that shop conditions at Saarlouis were unsafe. ''If that was in England, I'd stop the job immediately,'' said Stephen Broadhead, the ''convenor'' at the body plant, who has visited the German plant twice. ''It was such a violation of our health and safety regulations we couldn't live with it.'' Nonetheless, the Saarlouis plant has the lowest injury record in Ford's entire Europe subsidiary...

Such differences are found to pervade the two plants. In May, the workers at Halewood went on strike for 11 days because they contended that four men could not produce 60.2 transaxle assemblies an hour, as the company and the German experience suggested they could. Five months later, the four men are still assembling about 55 an hour. ...

Granted, this was a Liverpudlian factory but it's still a fine example of the way we were: Basket-Case Britain. Times have changed and largely for the better - even if Nissan has just announced job losses at its Sunderland plant.. Admittedly, a cynic might say that we solved some of these problems by essentially getting rid of our manufacturing sector. But something had to be done...

The Envy of the World

Further proof that the British economy remains better placed than any other to weather this turbulent, tempest-ridden economic sea: the Bank of England cuts interest rates to 1.5%, the lowest rate in more than 300 years. Obviously that's a tribute to the government. Meanwhile, the government prepares to print some more money. This too demonstrates the extent to which the government has everything in hand.

I don't think you need to be an economist to sense that this mob - Brown and Darling, that is - are making it up as they go along.

Back on the "Special Relationship" Merry-go-round

Sure as eggs is eggs, the arrival of a new American president heralds fresh fretting in the British press over the precise state of the so-called "Special Relationship". Today's text comes courtesy of Rachel Sylvester, writing in the Times. It's worth considering in some detail:

The inauguration of a president who is adored by the British public could ironically spell the end of the special relationship between the UK and the US. Just as the voters in this country decide that it is time to get up close and personal with America, so the Yanks are losing their passion for the Brits. Just as the Prime Minister decides it is time to stand shoulder to shoulder with the US president, so he may find the cold shoulder turned on him.

This is partly but not entirely about Mr Obama. Certainly, the President-elect will be the least Anglophile American leader in living memory. Unlike Bill Clinton, who was educated at Oxford, or George Bush, who kept a bust of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office, Mr Obama has no innate affection for this country - in fact, his grandfather was imprisoned and tortured by British colonialists in Kenya.

This isn't quite true. Or rather, it's a rewriting of history. Clinton may have been a Rhodes Scholar but he didn't hugely enjoy his time in Oxford. More to the point, when he came to power there was much talk in Washington about Germany replacing Britain as Washington's Best Pal in Europe. (The fact that the Major government had, foolishly, acceded to the Bush campaign's request for any dirt from Bill's time in Oxford didn't help.) More pertinently, with the exception of Kennedy (who got on well with Macmillan) Democratic presidents have tended, initially at least, to be less enamoured of the specialness of the "Special Relationship" than have Republicans (Nixon excepted).

Indeed, if memory serves, there's a passage in George Stephanopoulus's memoir of the Clinton White House when, prior to Clinton's first meeting with Major, his aides reminded him of the importance (to the British) of mentioning the magic phrase. "Ah yes" Clinton chuckled, "the Special Relationship". Well, he said the right words and everyone went home happy.

“The UK is part of the Bush baggage because of Iraq,” says a senior Foreign Office source. “Obama is not going to be emotional about the transatlantic alliance. He's a free-thinking politician, driven by science and facts. The UK and Europe look less significant than Asia and Latin America and even over here Europe seems a better focus than the UK.”

Well, yes. The post-Cold War era necessarily brings with it a decline in the central importance of the Atlantic Alliance. Equally, Obama doubtless appreciates that there's a limit to how much more Britain can do in, say, Afghanistan. No wonder he may ask for more from other European countries. Still, we swam in these waters in 1992 too and, as Macmillan put it, "events, dear boy, events" helped ensure matters turned out rather differently.

The British position has not been helped by Sir Nigel Sheinwald, the Ambassador to Washington, a career diplomat educated at Oxford, whose pin-striped demeanour does not fit easily with the open-necked attitude of the Obama camp. A memo, leaked last year, in which our man in DC described the President-elect as “aloof”, “insensitive” and lacking a track record did not go down well with a politician who already suspected the British of having a superiority complex.

Is this true? The memo was as controversial as a Financial Times profile. That is to say, it was not at all controversial and could have been written by any half-decent UK correspondent in DC. More to the point, in terms of future policy, the British do often seem to have a "superiority complex". We keep banging on - in the press at least - about how much smarter and more sophisticated our approach in Iraq and Afghanistan is than that favoured by those drop-a-cluster-bomb-first-ask-questions-later heavy-handed Yankee cowboys. This rather flatters us and, I suspect, often falsely so. The days of pretending to play Athens to Washington's Rome should be over.

Equally, Gordon Brown's claims to have "saved the world" in the current economic crisis have not been endorsed by actual events and, quite reasonably, have irritated everyone else who might reasonably ask why they should take lectures from the man responsible for leaving Britain less well-placed than any other major power to deal with these frigid economic conditions.

Perhaps most important of all, the military alliance between Britain and America - which has cemented the political alliance since the First World War - is beginning to crack. I am told that a report circulating at the highest level in the Ministry of Defence concludes that there are now serious doubts in Washington about the effectiveness of the British Armed Forces. Senior military figures are said to have been surprised, and shocked, by feedback that arrived in Whitehall last month. Described as “highly sensitive”, it raised questions about the worth of the UK contribution to US-led operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It showed that the Americans don't value us much,” one source told me. “Britain's military ability is no longer rated as highly as we thought it was.”

“The US generals think the Brits need to be taken down a peg or two - that we have not performed well in Basra and Helmand province - and that has trickled up to the Pentagon,” says a Foreign Office insider. “It's not terminal but it's an important warning to us that if we are going to trade on our military partnership we are going to have to raise our game.”

This too seems fair enough. Given the appallingly under-funded, under-equipped nature of the UK armed forces it's entirely reasonable for the Americans to wonder if the advantages of the political cover Britain provides are beginning to be outwieghed by the shortfall in British military capability. Having spent a decade refusing to fund the armed forces properly, this is a situation for which Brown is largely responsible himself.

Then again, to be fair to the former Chancellor, he was only adhering to the long-standing British tradition of trying to do too much with too few resources. Even in times of Great National Effort we have routinely sent the boys into battle with lousy equipment. This is not a new phenomenon: in the Napoleonic Wars many, perhaps even most, of the Royal Navy's best ships were captured French and, especially, Spanish vessels that were better-built than their British counterparts built shoddily and cheaply in dockyards (both Royal and private) in which penny-pinching and corruption were the norm not the exception. So not much has changed.

Mr Obama won power promising change. Mr Brown wants nothing more than to bask in the reflected glory of that. But it looks as if the Anglo-American alliance will be one of the first targets for change. One minister says the “specialness” in the special relationship will be diluted. It may not survive at all.

Well, maybe. I'm all for Obama sticking it to Brown, but it would be nice if the transatlantic relationship weren't quite so humiliating and that we learnt that there's a price to be paid for fealty to American leadership, one, moreover, that is not necessarily in Britain's own national interests. As against that, the nature of things is that, regardless of press speculation, London and Washington are likelier than not to remain closer than Washington and most other capitals around the world if for no other reason than the intelligence and military experience they share is likely to remain a valuable resource for both parties. Nonetheless, on balance, it's a good thing if there's also better relations between Washington and Paris (and Berlin). That necessarily undermines the primacy of the DC-London axis, but that may not be a Bad Thing either.

This Britain

Since coming to power in 1997 Labour has created 3,605 new ways for you to break the law. That's an average of 320 new offences a year or, to put it another way, more than one new offence is created every day Parliament is in session.

Time to dust off an old and favourite proposal: every new offence or law should be accompanied by the repeal of an old one...

Transatlantic Differences

There are times when it's good to be away from the hurly-burly of American politics. Doubly so when the subject of gay marriage comes up. Here, for instance, is a story it is hard to imagine happening in the United States: Nick Herbert, the Conservative party's Shadow Justice secretary has apparently become the second member of David Cameron's Shadow Cabinet, to enter into a civil partnership. It's hard to imagine too many senior gay Republicans feeling comfortable doing this, let alone doing so with the blessing of the party's leader and their constituency assosciation.

Then again, gay marriage in Britain has, generally speaking, been decoupled from religion. (Of course, some would say that everything else in Britain has been, so why not marriage too). Now maybe American conservatives (of one degree of religiosity or another) are correct that this sort of thing heralds the end of everything, but if so it's striking how relaxed their British counterparts, for the most part, are about this imminent descent to Sodom.

Best bits? The story of Herbert's marriage was broken by the Sunday Telegraph's diary column. That is to say it's gossip, not news. Better still? Herbert worked for the British Field Sports Society (ie, the fox-hunting and grouse-shooting lobby) for six years before entering parliament. Culturally at least, that organisation is to the Tory party rather what the the National Rifle Association is to the GOP.

On one level this is trivial stuff, but it's a reminder that the Republican party is increasingly out of step with its sister conservative parties around the world. That's not, in itself, necessarily a terrible thing but it ought to be borne in mind next time someone suggests that there are wholly applicable lessons to be drawn from Britain/Canada/Australia/Wherever. (You mean, pieces like this one? Er, yeah.) The fun lies in the differences, not the similarities - even if pundits are necessarily drawn to finding the latter and smoothing over the former.

Paying Tribute to the New Emperor

One of the odder characteristics of a certain strain of British right-wing thinking is the terror that British Prime Ministers might ever disagree with the American president. It's almost as if there's a fear that if Britain takes an different view then Washington will chuck us overboard and find a new european friend with whom to play. (Sometimes that's the Germans, though at the moment the French might be thought the more likely rivals). Such fears are, I suspect, overdone. Still, here's Con Coughlin today:

But the quid pro quo for a bigger American military commitment to Afghanistan is that Washington's European allies - which includes Britain - step up to the plate and commit more resources of their own. But although Britain currently makes the most important contribution in terms of fighting the Taliban, Mr Brown seems strangely reluctant to support the proposed American surge, which could immediately put him on a collision course with the new American president.

It is very much in Britain's national interest to have a good relationship with the White House, and Mr Brown will sacrifice a lot of important political capital if he does not soon come up with a workable strategy for the future deployment of British forces in Afghanistan. 

Indeed, a good relationship with the White House is important, but is it everything? Coughlin's last paragraph has a whiff of antiquity about it: you can imagine such calculations being made by one of Rome's allied (ie, vassal) states or tribes, desperate to remain on good terms with the new emperor and, consequently, reviewing battleplans to impress the man in Rome with the zeal with which you're prepared to send your sons into battle alongside or on behalf of the Empire's own legions... Above all, a "collision course" with the new Emperor must be avoided at any cost...

This is in response to a Times piece claiming that the Americans are disatissfied with British military performance in Helmand province. Perhaps they are. And perhaps the public is increasingly of the view that if the Americans want Helmand province, they can bleedin' well have it...

Economic Policy Trust Test: Labour or the Germans?

A good old-fashoned rumpus is developing. Seems as though the Germans, fed up with being sneered at by Godron Brown and irritated by the Prime Minister's pretensions to have "saved the world" have decided to poke the PM in the eye. As Peer Steinbruck, the SPD Finance Minister told Newsweek:

We have a bidding war where everyone in politics believes they have to top up every spending program that's been put to discussion. I say we should be honest to our citizens. Policies can take some of the sharpness out of it, but no matter how much any government does, the recession we are in now is unavoidable. When I look at the chaotic and volatile debate right now, both in Germany and around the world, my impression and concern is that the daily barrage of proposals and political statements is making markets and consumers even more nervous.

The speed at which proposals are put together under pressure that don't even pass an economic test is breathtaking and depressing. Our British friends are now cutting their value-added tax. We have no idea how much of that stores will pass on to customers. Are you really going to buy a DVD player because it now costs £39.10 instead of £39.90? All this will do is raise Britain's debt to a level that will take a whole generation to work off. The same people who would never touch deficit spending are now tossing around billions. The switch from decades of supply-side politics all the way to a crass Keynesianism is breathtaking. When I ask about the origins of the crisis, economists I respect tell me it is the credit-financed growth of recent years and decades. Isn't this the same mistake everyone is suddenly making again, under all the public pressure?

It's the yearning for the Great Rescue Plan. It doesn't exist. It doesn't exist! Dealing with an unprecedented crisis is a puzzle, a trial-and-error. Honestly, I don't know. I tend to be skeptical because it is human nature to see the crisis as even worse than it is. I don't want to downplay anything; 2009 looks like it will be a very difficult year. But we are not about to collapse.

This is very troubling stuff since it's more or less where my own  - blind - hunch lies. Of course I know very little about economics and have to hope that the German finance minister has a better grip on these matters.

Noteworthy too that Herr Steinbruck is a man of the left. As the BBC's Nick Robinson points out, despite Labour's attempts to spin this as a matter of German domestic politics, it's more probable that the Germans are saying this because they think Britain is trying to lead everyone off a cliff. Let's have a look at today's news: not only has the government run up more debt than was needed to fight and win the First World War, we don't have any money to go abroad either. With the pound approaching parity with the euro, all holidays are now to be taken in Britain.

The next step? Something called "Quantative Easing" which, as best I can tell, is just a fancy term for printing more money. That sounds encouraging, doesn't it?

Tales from Modern Britain

When the spooks think matters have got out of hand then, you know, they've probably gotten out of hand.

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) was passed in 2000 to regulate the way that public bodies such as the police and the security services carry out surveillance. Originally only a handful of authorities were able to use RIPA but its scope has been expanded enormously and now there are at least 792 organisations using it, including hundreds of local councils.

This has generated dozens of complaints about anti-terrorism legislation being used to spy on, for example, a nursery suspected of selling pot plants unlawfully, a family suspected of lying about living in a school catchment area, and paperboys suspected of not having the right paperwork.

Now those campaigning against the abuse of RIPA have got a new ally – Lady Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5. In a speech in the House of Lords yesterday, she said she was "astonished" when she found out how many organisations were getting access to RIPA powers.

Well, yes. Quite so. And yet there you have it. In addition to this public service, Baroness B-M did us a service by clarifying the accepted pronunciation of RIPA:

When RIPA was introduced—those of us in the intelligence community call it “Ripper”, as in “Jack the”, and not “Reaper”, as in “the Grim”; there is no correct pronunciation, but I always call it “Ripper” and so do my former colleagues.

[Hat-tip: Chicken Yoghurt.]

Not just a soggy old cloth cat...

You know you're getting old when the people who made the TV programmes you liked as a kid start dying. So, farewell, Oliver Postgate, creator of Ivor the Engine and, of course, the immortal Bagpuss. I suppose those of us born in the mid-1970s (post-Clangers then) were the last for whom Postgate's work was a central part of their childhood TV experience.I assume today's kids would be entraced by the subtle, wry joys of Bagpuss but I'm not sure I'd want to test that thesis. From the Telegraph's obituary:

The worlds constructed by Postgate and his long-time collaborator Peter Firmin were the products of a kindlier age, informed by Postgate's own utopian longings and encapsulated in his mild, avuncular narration.

His programmes were simple and uncluttered, yet stimulating and not unsophisticated. They eschewed the frenetic matiness of later generations of children's television, winning the trust of their audience instead by old-fashioned reliance on plot and characterisation and by an appeal to a child's instinctive belief in magic. In short, they did not treat television as a special art but as a three-dimensional extension of the story book...

Postgate's last great success was Bagpuss (1973) – in the words of its introduction, "just a saggy old cloth cat, but Emily loved him". This was the story of a toyshop whose inhabitants – among them the mice on the mouse-organ – mended broken toys with songs. Bagpuss himself, down to his yawn, was evidently a retired Indian Army cat, a piece of whimsy that watching parents could appreciate.

Part of the reason for the great affection in which the programmes were held was that they never patronised their audience; and on growing up that audience found them just as well-made as they remembered, and in turn shared them with their own children. To Postgate's delight, Bagpuss was voted the favourite children's television programme of all time...

Postgate had a cottage in Wales, but otherwise lived quietly on the Kent coast. A warm, unambitious man who was a little at the mercy of his fears and emotions, he had a strong sense of moral purpose and a loathing of the absurdities of modern children's programmes. Teletubbies, he considered, were "awful, post-nuclear jelly babies".

Mini-hiatus

Little to no blogging over the next few days, I'm afriad. I'm in East Lothian tonight, speaking at a St Andrews dinner, thence to Hawick to bid farewell to a cousin who is emigrating to Melbourne (an order for Boxing Day Ashes tickets has already, fear not, been placed) and then have a deadline to meet on Sunday. So, talk amongst yourselves peeps: now that counter-terrosim police have taken to arresting opposition politicians for the crime of embarrassing the government, is this government the worst we've endured in more than 50 years or merely one of the worst?

Meanwhile, American readers are invited to speculate upon arguments in favour of, and against, a government bail-out for the Detroit Lions.

Quote for the Day

Chris Dillow - always worth your time - casts a weary eye over a number of government policies and concludes:

What this shows, I think, is that New Labour’s claim to believe in technocratic, evidence-based policy is a sham. They are not technocrats at all, but either priggish moralists or cowardly panderers to mob prejudice.

Quite so. And as he says, we may need a revolution. Lord knows, however, where that might come from.

Should Gordon Go Now?

By which I mean, natch, should El Gordo toddle off to Buckingham Palace and call for a general election next spring rather than hanging on until 2010. Danny Finkelstein says yes he should. I rather agree. Admittedly this agreement is to some extent predicated upon my dislike of Brown and the rest of his miserable, chiselling crew. (Smith, J being but the most alarming example of the breed). Consequently, the sooner the country has a chance to be rid of them, the better.

Nonetheless, putting personal prejudices aside (and the downside of a Tory victory in the spring, of course, is that disappointment will arrive that muh sooner), there's a Labour-centred case for going early too. As Danny says, the prospect of an alarming recession may make voters rather more risk averse and disinclined to change the government than they would be in happier times or, crucially, at the tail-end of a recession. If the Pime Minister hopes to steer the country through troubled economic waters and then be thanked by a grateful nation, he's set to be disappointed. Voters are an ungrateful bunch at the best of times and these, my friends, are not the best of times.

Additionally: what do the Tories want? They seem quite happy to wait until 2010, trusting that the public's reserves of patience - never deep - will have been exhausted by Brown and more than 13 years of Labour government. A snap election in the spring, however, that focused on the economy and nothing else might be Labour's best shot. Of course, it would be a gamble and Labour might well still lose, but it might also, paradoxically, be Brown's best shot at winning a mandate.

There is, mind you, one other consideration and we have, after all, been here before. The more speculation there is about an early election, the more difficult it will be for Brown to walk away from it. Last summer he had filled in his betting slip and was all set to hand it to the attendant only to blink, think again and scurry out the turf accountant's shop, all sweaty-palmed and heaving-breathed thinking that he'd come oh-so-close to losing his shirt. Bottling one election might be unfortunate, bottling two might be seen as carelessness.

An early election, mind you, would require bravery and boldness: two qualities Brown has rarely demonstrated. So the odds must be that he will hang on to 2010 in the hope that something, any-bloody-thing, will turn up. The trouble is, it probably won't. There's a risk that asking voters "Who do you want to navigate our way through this financial storm?" will produce the answer "Anyone but you, mate" but that's the gamble. Elections tend to be won by th ebolder party, the one that seems up for the fight. That's to say, incumbents who are in a defensive crouch, holding on and hoping for the bell to ring soon, rarely do well. Better to choose your own time, make a stand and see what happens.

Sign of the Times

Spotted at Edinburgh airport recently. Just in case, like, you weren't sure how to use a staircase.