The Leadership Debate That Wasn't

Last week David Cameron and Ed Miliband, one of whom will almost certainly be Prime Minster after the election on May 7th, faced an interview with Jeremy Paxman, who a year after retiring from Newsnight has waded back into the fray to facilitate a "debate" between the leaders of the two main parties. The whole thing was an unmitigated farce from start to finish as they couldn't even agree terms for a head to head debate, so instead had a farcical interview with Paxman  in his best hammed up school master interview style. Thus we got to hear the absurd incoherent mumblings of Miliband and the slimey platitudes of Cameron saying essentially "he started it, Sir" on everything from cutting NHS funding to the ruinous levels of debt we have accumulated. Though both agreed that the main culprit was the banking crisis of 2008 - seven years ago.

It's often said that politics in the the United States is run by big money and lobby groups, and leaders are shielded from the rough and tumble Westminster style debate, but it would be pretty well unthinkable in the US that the electorate would not have a debate between the two main protagonists in a Presidential election. Since 1960 it has been televised, and it was broadcast on the radio before this. It's hard to imagine this sort of shambles taking place across the Atlantic, so why is it acceptable in the United Kingdom?

Well firstly it isn't actually acceptable here. It's a pitiful sideshow to most people in the country who regard pretty much all politicians with contempt and will grudgingly, negatively vote for one or the other in an attempt to keep their least favourite party out.

But it clearly is acceptable to the political establishment, who could have left an empty chair in Cameron's place, and otherwise poured well deserved scorn on his cowardly refusal to engage his opponents. The best explanation I can think as to why this woeful episode has passed off as a blip rather than a scandal is that it helps the entire political establishment hide from the uncomfortable reality that neither "leader" deserves to be taken seriously.

Ed Miliband is literally impossible to make any sense of, as he rambled and muttered his way through the interview, showing what the Daily Mirror called "passion" and what I would call confused anger, so common in socialists (he is) who can't believe that people might not share their bonkers world view that the best way of  making people better off is to make some other people worse off. His face was visibly contorting with anger at points, this quiet, bookish intellectual who can barely string a sentence together, less still make a coherent argument. To cap it all off, when asked if he was tough enough he gave some nonsensical story about how he had "stood up to the leader of the free world" over Syria, and replied with a cringeworthy "Hell yes" he was tough enough. It's the kind of thing Spitting Image would have him say.

At the other end of the scale David Cameron, already Prime Minster for 5 years, strings sentences together with an easy confidence, being only careful to ensure that they mean absolutely nothing. I'm quite sure it's possible to program a decent phone to answer questions in the style of David Cameron. It picks up on certain key words like "immigration" and spews out a load of meaningless statistics in a vain attempt to pretend not to be as inept and dishonest as everyone knows he is. When asked about his promise before the last election to get immigration down to "tens of thousands" before the last election he burbled on about immigration from outside the EU is down 13%. It's the equivalent of searching Google for "Lancia" and finding that there is a town of that name in Nevada. A passing curiosity but of little interest to people who actually care about this problem. He's like a car salesman faced with a blown engine - he can make the right noises and give vague assurances about the warranty, but any fool can tell that he has absolutely no idea what he is talking about and is looking for the cheapest, easiest exit route that won't hit his commission.

None of this is really helped by Paxman, who looked for all the world like a caricature of his former self, coming out of retirement to bolster his pension fund. His no nonsense style of doggedly holding his subject to the point remains effective, but he only seemed interested in employing it to pick over the candidate's records of failure, rather than getting any insight into what, if anything, either of them intended to do during the next parliament, let alone what any of them actually think.

And that of course brings us to the biggest failing of both of these so called leaders and the parties they nominally lead. They don't actually think anything beyond a deeply held belief that they should be Prime Minister. They both firmly believe in the NHS, they both think we need tighter immigration controls, and we need to reform our relationship with the European Union, and all the rest. But they don't have any concrete ideas for any of this, leaving us with the over riding impression that they don't actually believe any of it. They just know that they have to say this to get elected.

It would be more impressive if Miliband said that he thought we should put more money into the NHS, and we should tax people earning over £X to pay for this, or if Cameron said that we should actually charge a fee for visiting a GP. Offer voters a genuine choice of two different ideas which are actually based in reality and see which one they prefer.

The fantasy that this programme of tax cuts and spending increases, along with reducing our absurd levels of borrowing, can all be achieved by reducing waste in the public sector and clamping down on benefit scroungers is utter fantasy. Every government in my lifetime has promised the same thing, and as far as I can tell we have more of both than ever.

The "leadership debates" failed to live up to their name on both counts - there was no debate, simply a faux tough interview, and there was no leadership in terms of the figureheads of the two main parties offering any sort of vision or coherent programme for running the country. Instead it was simply more of the same impotent mewling that has replaced political discourse with a absurd auction of tax and spending moves that ultimately cancel each other out and produce an ever growing state sector, fueled by debt and perpetually underfunded, doing too much, badly and voting itself more money.

In Other News - Iceland

A little side story on the BBC News website mentions that Iceland has dropped it's bid to become a member of the European Union. I seem to remember their panicky and wrong headed application to join at the height of the financial crisis received a lot more attention. And what's more, the European Union don't even seem to have decided to blockade their ports or invade the island nation.

So what does Iceland, with a population roughly the same as Northumberland and little to export besides fish, have that the 64 million strong UK with the 6th largest economy in the world doesn't have, that makes us too small to survive outside of the failure that is the EU?

Je Suis A Pencil Sharpener

Amidst the chorus of righteous indignation and pithy cartoons which poured scorn in a fairly safe way on the attacks in Paris last week, this simple yet quite powerful image by the French artist Lucille Clerc (and not by Banksy, as many originally thought.)

The painfully obvious message is that you can't shoot freedom of expression, and we will come back stronger. The less obvious point, perhaps made inadvertently is that between the tragic breaking of the pencil last week and the coming back stronger someone has actually made a conscious decision to get a pencil sharpener out and sharpen the broken end. They haven't put an eraser on it, or forbidden that pencil ever be used to mock Islam, or even included guidelines on cultural understanding. They have sharpened the broken part so that the resulting two pencils can draw twice as much of whatever it was that offended in the first place. This is not so much a message of passive resilience to violent attack as it is a message of an aggressive and active response to an assault on our way of life.

So what should that pencil sharpener be? It's hard to imagine the sorry morass of faux "defiance" offered by most of the world's media, or retweeting "Je Suis Charlie" to a bunch of keyboard warriors is much help. This sort of weakness has been a defining feature of our supposed war on terror at home, and it has failed miserably. 

Terrorist spokesman Anjem Choudary, improbably writing for USA Today, made it very clear why the pencils are being broken: because the French government "allowed" the cartoonists to insult his prophet. This passage in particular leaves the reader in no doubt whatsoever that Choudary is on the side of the shooters:

Muslims consider the honor of the Prophet Muhammad to be dearer to them than that of their parents or even themselves. To defend it is considered to be an obligation upon them. The strict punishment if found guilty of this crime under sharia (Islamic law) is capital punishment implementable by an Islamic State. This is because the Messenger Muhammad said, "Whoever insults a Prophet kill him."

Muslims, according to Choudary are obligated to defend Muhammad, and the punishment for mocking him is death. 

This view is, needless to say, simply incompatible with life in a liberal western democracy. There's no compromise to be reached and no qualifications needed. If you believe that, then you are placing yourself firmly on the side of terrorism. 

The idea that it is prosperous and stable western democracies who ought to change our way of life and centuries old political traditions to accommodate the views of maniacs like Choudary is absurd. These views are widely held in Nigeria and Afghanistan, in Somalia and Syria and they bring misery, poverty and violence to each of these places, on a scale which thankfully remains extremely rare in the western world. But not rare enough.

The sharpening of pencils needed is to stamp such behaviour out entirely and decisively. There is no room for compromise on this. Freedom of expression must be non-negotiable, leaving the only logical course of action for Choudary to move to a country where he is comfortable with the laws. Any yielding, any restraint or compromise of this principle is as good as a total surrender. It will simply make them stronger and more determined.

Choudary, like most of his ilk has been arrested on several occasions and given the usual meaningless fines and discharges, and carried on with his mission of trying to stir up a religious war in the west. In France last week they basically succeeded, briefly. In huge swathes of Africa and Asia they have succeeded already and the result is horrific. Consider that "in other news" last week some 2,000 people were feared dead in the town of Baga in northern Nigeria at the hands of Boko Haram. We absolutely can not and should not tolerate it happening here on any scale.

When people are prosecuted for terrorist offences they must be viewed not simply as misguided fools who have gone off the rails but as enemy combatants who are a very real and immediate threat to the peace and freedom of the western world. Releasing them to continue in their holy war is utter madness and will only reinforce the notion that we lack the moral courage to stand for the beliefs and laws which have served us so well. 

Our pencil sharpener must shave away the vague and pathetic notions of tolerance, and the limp wristed folly that dictates that we ought to respect people's religious beliefs, however absurd and violent they are, down to a fine and focused tip unashamedly highlighting the superiority of an open and uninhibited society over the orgy of violence and destruction which fundamentalist Islam seeks to replace it with. 

The Religion of Peace Strikes Again

In Paris this time, with a savage attack on a satirical newspaper, killing 12 and leaving 4 more fighting for their lives. This was a very different attack from the shambolic siege in Sydney last month. A very organised and apparently professional assault on a specific target that was known to lampoon Islam.

The similarity is that once again a western government could have prevented this earlier if only they would take the threat of Islamic militants seriously at home before they start running around the world trying to solve problems they have no control over.

The gunmen have now been identified as Said Kouachi, born in 1980, Cherif Kouachi, born in 1982, both from Paris, and Hamyd Mourad, born in 1996. All French nationals, the younger man Hamyd Mourad has handed himself in to police in northern France. The brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi are still on the run, presumably armed and in no hurry to help police with their enquiries.

Already at this early stage it's known that Cherif was arrested in 2005 and imprisoned in 2008 for recruiting French nationals to go to Iraq and join the holy war against the Americans from his mosque in Paris, and was apprehended on route to Iraq to join them. He was arrested and charged again in 2010 in connection with a plot to break Algerian Islamist Smain Ait Ali Belkacem out of prison, where he is held for an earlier attack on a Paris commuter station.

Much less is known about the elder brother Said, except that he was living with Cherif at the time of his arrest, so at the very least can be presumed to have known about his brother's activities. What appaers to be his Facebook page here doesn't really paint him in a favourable light. And since this will inevitably disappear in the next few days, here is a screenshot

Remember that France has had two incidents in the last month of Islamist lunatics attacking the public, so you would think that they would be on their guard a bit.

So how on earth were these two allowed to drive into central Paris with assault rifles and carry out this awful attack? If I can find this information out in just an hour or so on Google how on earth can one of the world's most advanced nations with a formidable military and intelligence service and a history of Islamic terrorism that pre-dates the "war on terror" by some decades, be so utterly inept? And being this inept while the French military is busily engaged across Africa and the Middle East in conflicts that have little if anything to do with France is unforgivable. 

To be very clear about this, the blame lies only with those who perpetrated this atrocity, but the responsibility of the French government to protect it's citizens and maintain the peace was woefully neglected. 

Ernest Maples and Grand Scale Corruption

If you have taken any interest at all in British transport policy in recent years then there's a good chance you will know of Dr Beeching, and his infamous cuts which amputated thousands of miles of track and over 2,000 stations from Britain's railway system. Even today the name is synonymous with the decline and destruction of our railway network. However if you haven't studied it closely, or are not old enough to remember it, then there's a good chance you have not heard Ernest Maples, the Minister of Transport at the time.

Beeching was a physicist by training with a PhD, appointed as an advisor to the British Transport Commission. A worthy technocrat to improve a failing system but not the man to make judgements about the social and wider economic impacts of his proposals. That should have been the role of the Minister of Transport. Beeching however was an ideal scapegoat.

Marples was an altogether different animal. An ambitious, not to say ruthless man he rose very quickly in both his political and business careers. The son of a Manchester Labour campaigner and himself already active in the Labour movement by the age of 14 he had numerous jobs before joining the army in 1941. He became a Conservative MP immediately after the war and was also a Director of Kirk & Kirk, a major construction company. Here he met Reginald Ridgeway and the two went into partnership, taking over one of their former employers contracts. The company continued to do well largely out of government contracts for power stations, roads and other infrastructure projects.

He cut a dash in the stuffy Conservative party of the 1950s with his blue suits and orange shoes, and a flamboyant showmanship that was out of character for the time.

Despite this he became a junior minister in Harold MacMillan's Department of Housing & Local Government in 1951 and was instrumental in helping that government meet it's ambitious housing targets. MacMillan would later credit this as instrumental in making him Prime Minister following the departure of Anthony Eden.

MacMillan repaid this in 1957 by making Marples Postmaster General. Marples busily set about introducing postcodes, STD dialing codes and Premium Bonds. He was then Minister of Transport from 1959 until the Conservative party lost the 1964 general election and was even more active with such wonderful innovations as parking meters and traffic wardens, and of course an extensive road building programme from which the company he now owned 80% of profited handsomely.

This didn't go unnoticed and as early as 1951 he resigned as Managing Director of Marples Ridgeway but retained an 80% shareholding. In 1959 when he took over the transport role he undertook to sell the shares, but constructed the deal in such a way as to be able to buy them back later at preferential rates. This was blocked by the Attorney General, but somehow he managed to sell them to his wife.

At the same time he skirted the edge of the Profumo affair in a rather brazen fashion - knowing that Lord Denning had set a cut off dat, when called to the enquiry and introduced to one of the working girls, he greeted her as an old friend and remarked "Why it must he ten years since I've seen you!" While it's hard to imagine anyone was truly fooled by this it served to keep him out of the final report and in the government.

Throughout this time he built a strong property portfolio and amassed considerable wealth in a web of holding companies in Britain, France and Liechtenstein.

He remained an MP until 1974 when he became Baron Marples. In early 1975 he fled the UK, leaving a huge tax bill, alleged law suits with former employees and tenants and a mess of his home in Belgravia. Following this he split his time between Monaco and a chateau in the Beaujolais region of France, owned by a holding company of his.

Richard Stott tracked him down here shortly before his death in 1975 for a fractious interview which Stott would later describe as being characterised by "charm, aggression and a great deal of wine" and during which Marples told Stott he was the worst journalist and the most aggressive person he had ever met.

There's no doubt that Marples was an energetic and productive individual but reading the bald facts 50 years later it's hard to see that his actions were anything other than the sort of blatant corruption you'd normally associate with Africa or Latin America than with Britain in the 1950s and 60s.

And while his behaviour is probably less shocking now the relative ease with which he was able to behave in this way shows something innocent and indeed naïve about the time in which he did it. Blinded by it's love of big government,  post war Britain forgot to ask the basic questions which should always be asked of those in positions of power, and especially the power to spend huge sums of our money - what's in it for them?

Drink Driving and Lesser Crimes

There is a curious logic applied to drink driving as compared with other crimes. It's a logic that has been spectacularly successful at making the practice both legally very risky and socially unacceptable over recent decades,  and it's the generally effective "broken windows" strategy of clamping down hard on even minor offenders to make it not worth the risk. With a 12 month ban, hefty fines and an extended driving test the standard sanction for even a mild case, along with the very real prospect of losing your job, years of higher insurance premiums and a considerable social stigma. If there is an accident, regardless of fault, or a previous conviction for drink driving then you will be lucky to escape prison. Only a fool would even contemplate driving home after more than a small drink with a meal, and many like myself wouldn't even take the small drink as the pleasure is not worth the risk.

Interestingly this has been achieved without going to the lengths some other countries have gone to in things like road blocks randomly testing every passing car, and with a relatively high limit compared with other countries.

So far so good then - effective policing and strong legislation have made a dangerous practice much less common without inconveniencing law abiding members of the public.

The curious thing is that this logic so rigorously and effectively applied to driving a car while inebriated is almost universally dismissed as outdated, ineffective and even counterproductive when applied to almost every other act of criminal behaviour. It is a well hackneyed piece of liberal dogma that prisons make people more likely to offend, and that there is no correlation between stiffer sentences and a reduction in crime, yet in the case of drink driving this has been completely at odds with our experience.

If a 21 year old man (the demographic most likely to offend) were to be caught driving home from the pub with a blood alcohol level that was "double the limit" - which can be achieved with a relatively modest amount of alcohol - then most people would say he deserved his punishment,  the 12 or more months of bus travel, the hefty fine, even the loss of his livelihood, because he did an irresponsible thing which he knew to have severe negative consequences and was caught. And count himself lucky he didn't kill someone.

However if you were to suggest a similar sanction against a 21 year old man who was caught shoplifting,  brawling in a nightclub or in possession of illegal drugs you would be derided as a cruel and reactionary conservative. A hang 'em and flog 'em right winger too blinkered to see that this course of action would increase the chances of recidivism by labelling him a criminal and hampering his chances of productive employment. Instead these offenders are given cautions,  ASBOs and meaningless slaps on the wrist time after time until their offending leads to more serious harm.

Why should this be? Why would something that has been effective for one criminal act not even be attempted with others? Why has a raft of snooping powers and intrusive legislation been brought in to prevent and punish related activities and so undermine the liberties of the whole population, when no serious attempt has been made to actually punish "petty" crime so that it doesn't become commonplace and acceptable in the way that driving home from the pub used to be but isn't now?

Following the money usually casts an interesting light on such mysteries, and one feature of drink drivers, like speeding motorists, is that they typically have something to lose, and the ability to pay the fines. Something that many people convicted of other crimes often do not. With over 50,000 people convicted in the UK annually and fines regularly over £1000 there certainly is money to be had. True it's a drop in the vast wasteful ocean of our government but enough for some mini empires to be built.

Of course the fact that most potential drink drivers have more to lose points us to question whether people who commit other crimes won't respond rationally to the disincentive of losing their liberty, or they don't believe they face this sanction.

The former is an impossible proposition for a justice system. The only possible answer to someone with that outlook is to remove from them the opportunity to cause harm.

If, as seems much more probable,  they simply don't believe our justice system will ever hand down a meaningful sanction for their behaviour then the answer to seriously reducing crime is staring us in the face: robust and meaningful penalties consistently applied to make an example of the hardcore who will offend regardless and make sure that those who do take a rational approach to such decisions are never tempted to think it's worth the risk.

2014

It's always hard to pick what historians will talk about years hence when you're immersed in the noise and chatter of what seems important to us here and now, but New Year seems like a good time to attempt this while reflecting on 2014 and looking forward to the new year.

There's no stand out event like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the attacks on the World Trade Centre to mark 2014, instead it seems like a sort of building year where complacency and inertia continue to drag us blindly along the road to the next catastrophe which will seem inevitable to those reading about this in centuries to come.

From a British point of view the three sources from which this disaster may eventually come, all different but all linked, in no particular order are: The ongoing dirty war between Islam and the west, the potentially nasty spat between Russia and the the European Union, and the idiotic piling up of debt by western governments.

The so called war on terror is almost too ridiculous to analyse except to say that attempting to fight organisations like IS with a military that was never designed for such a task is about as ludicrous an endeavour as we could possibly embark upon. While the media and politicians would have us believe the Hollywood friendly narrative of a shadowy organisation headed by malevolent masterminds who hate the west and seek to turn the whole world to fundamentalist Islam, I am increasingly convinced that it's little more than a loose confederation of lone nut cases like Man Haron Monis whose bizarre seige of a café in Sydney could not have been prevented by all the smart missiles in the world other than by a random chance; and of localised militias in areas like western Iraq - troubled and desolate places where years of neglect and oppression have fermented into extremism. While certain targets may warrant very carefully selected military action this is hardly going to lead to a lasting solution, and since the last two military adventures in Iraq have only succeeded in making things worse you would have to put a lot of faith in the "third time lucky" maxim to try again.

This is a moral and intellectual war where are strong arm will be needed, but must also be used intelligently. I am convinced that future students of our time will view our impotent bombing cow sheds and warehouses in a region that is already tearing itself apart without us, while simultaneously allowing our own caliphates to develop in British cities is about as far from this as you can hope to be.

If in 2015 we can change trajectory more towards getting our own house in order and less towards the vain attempt at being a world power then we will be happier and safer for it.

Nearly as insane would be attempting to provoke a conflict with Russia. Which is exactly what "we" in the European Union are busily engaged in. Having got a reaction in Crimea we now seem determined to push this even further, and with the Russian economy going badly wrong and Putin emboldened by the wave of nationalism that was inevitable with sanctions we may well get another reaction in 2015. However our spat with Russia plays out it is hard to imagine history will be kind to the western leaders who provoked this conflict through their interference in the Ukraine.

Peter Hitchens has written extensively and well on this topic, and it suffices to say here that Britain has nothing to gain by involving ourselves in an age old continental spat between Russia and Germany.

If the 2015 general election produces the strongly anti EU result I am hoping for then my hope is that this will disengage us somewhat from continental politics which can only harm our interests.

However the prize for the greatest stupidity of all must go to the policy of running up debts with no real end in sight. Despite all the rhetoric about fiscal responsibility and tough decisions to make cuts, the British government have failed to get anywhere near a balanced budget during their term in office and few western countries have. With the aging population problem already starting to bite and likely to become ever more acute over the next 20 years, this is exactly the time that we should be paying down debts and getting our economy prepared as best we can for a situation where over half the population is not actually productive. Instead we are continuing to pour money in to idiotic schemes like HS2 and pretend that this problem isn't happening. It certainly is happening, unlike the expensive and implausible phantom of global warming - it's easy to avert something that isn't happening anyway - and it will be only a few short years before the tax payers of the next decade or so are looking back at today with the sort of scorn we now hold for the trade unions of the 1970s and their wanton destruction of British industry.

Foolish as each of these policies are in isolation attempting them at the same time is more foolish still. If the future holds a determined and genuine Islamic attack, or a new cold war with Russia then the last thing we need is to be struggling with an existing debt burden that is wholly unnecessary and born entirely of political vanity. Even if the future is less dramatic and only holds what we can easily foresee, having these levels of debt helps us not one bit and can hinder us a great deal.

In May 2015 Britain will go to the polls notionally to choose it's government. In reality it will be more likely to reject it's current government without being especially enthusiastic about any of the alternatives. As analysts pick through the results and engage in the great guessing game of deciphering what the public actually thinks, there will be the usual loud and shrill voices calling for more spending, more tackling of global warming and all the usual din of day to day politics. Let us make sure that sensible people also get our voices heard to give ourselves the best possible chance of dealing successfully with whatever the next few years hold.