Nik Darlington 2.15pm
The Times (£) has a brilliant range of comment pieces published today, worth venturing behind the paywall to read. Opinion genuinely is one of the newspaper’s USPs, along with its beautiful and accessible multi-platform digital interface.
Tuesdays typically mean Rachel Sylvester’s unmissable column, and today she plays on a favourite theme, ‘the Master’. Often enough she has commented how Conservative party modernisers afford Tony Blair deified status, his autobiography a fixture of Tory bedside tables and playbook for the contemporary political scene. This week, however, it’s all about how everyone’s wrongly reading the Blairite tea leaves, including Ed Miliband.
The truth is that Mr Blair was authentically of the centre in a way that neither Mr Cameron nor Mr Miliband is. He was an entryist who had taken control of his party, whereas the current Tory and Labour leaders are both, in background and beliefs, far more of their tribes. The success of new Labour was based on turning this reality into a political strategy that was pursued with ruthless efficiency and consistency. Everything that Mr Blair did and said - to begin with at least - was dedicated to demonstrating that he was more at home on the middle ground than in the Labour comfort zone…
Mr Blair took office promising new Labour would be the “servants of the people”. He lost power when the perception took hold that he wanted to be a Master of the Universe and his MPs turned on him. Neither Mr Cameron nor Mr Miliband have yet shown whether they are the servants of the people or their parties.
Rough reading for both leaders, who feel the weight of the former prime minister on their shoulders in more ways than one. And a reminder, yesterday, of Mr Blair’s uncommon talents.
Meanwhile, Lord Baker, an honorary life member of the TRG, writes about “a new wave of university technical colleges”. The Government is nearly doubling the number of these colleges, which supported by universities provide technical training to pupils between 14 and 19-years-old. Britain’s school leavers need more technical nous to compete in a challenging global marketplace.
We had a few technical schools at the end of the war but these were killed off by English snobbery. Everyone wanted to go the grammar school on the hill, not the one in the town with dirty jobs and oily rags. Germany didn’t make the same mistake: they adopted and still have the 1944 English education system and it is one of the reasons why Angela Merkel is ruling the roost. These colleges are our chance to rectify that mistake.
Under the Labour government Lord Baker, a former Education Secretary himself, convinced Andrew Adonis to trial two of these UTCs. Their expansion was supported by the Conservative party at the last general election, a pledge that has been wholeheartedly fulfilled by the coalition government.
The outgoing Director-General of the National Trust, Dame Fiona Reynolds, eulogises on the centenary of Octavia Hill’s death. With a theme that I also used in an article earlier this year for the Richmond Magazine, Dame Fiona writes that the protection of open green spaces is a battle still being waged, and one still very much worth waging.
When [Octavia Hill] died in 1912, the National Trust had 713 members. We now have four million. While she would no doubt be impressed, she would not be surprised, and she would certainly not be complacent. She believed, as we do, that beauty, nature and heritage are fundamental to the human condition. She spoke of everlasting delight. If she were here now, she would describe the past hundred years of the Trust and what we stand for as one of enduring relevance; a cause which we must never cease to pursue.
Finally, the experienced barrister and chairman of the Howard League for Penal Reform, Sir Louis Blom-Cooper QC, writes that Britain should give in to the European Court’s ruling to award the vote to prisoners.
Far from being harmless, giving prisoners the unqualified right to vote has positive values. How better to promote peaceful coexistence in society than to remove any sense in prisoners of second-class citizenship. It is precisely what the Government is preaching in its recent legislation on sentencing reform - namely, greater efforts to make the rehabilitation of prisoners more vigorous in penal institutions.
The right of every citizen to vote is acknowledged to be a constitutional right. It is in truth not a human right but it certainly is a civil liberty guaranteed by Article 3 of Protocol No 1 to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedom, which the UK ratified as long ago as 1952.
Egremont has long been favourable to the Government’s principled and correct stance on penal reform, and last year we published an excellent article by the Howard League’s Sophie Willett. The ‘bang them up and lock away the key’ school of justice is outmoded and discredited; Britain’s prisons are at bursting point. That much is true.
However, the right to vote is not God-given, as Sir Louis agrees. Nor should it be beholden on any sovereign government to afford certain constitutional rights to individuals who transgress this country’s laws and bring harm to fellow citizens.
Reform the nature of a criminal’s penance, certainly; but that penance must still be served.
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Henry Hopwood-Phillips 12.06pm
The Left has a distinguished history of pucturing the crusty authorities of the status quo ante. Thanks to Hobsbawm et al, the language of ‘debunking’ sits firmly in the lexicon of your average socialist. However, most of them are less fond of plucking the multiple motes from their own eyes. One of the biggest myths is the belief that the Left is tolerant.
A quick trawl of Google suggests otherwise. George Monbiot, using the thinnest of ‘scientific’ evidence, declares, “the other side is, on average, more stupid than our own.” Charlie Brooker, characteristically less restrained, urges that the Daily Mail comment section is “dumbogeddon…a chimp’s tea party of the damned.”
Even the more mundane pieces regularly classify dissenters as stupid unbelievers. Off the page ostracism of the transgressor is routine procedure. Police have been enabled to enforce truths on people who “offend” socialist shibboleths. All views are declared equal but some it seems are more equal than others.
A bitter and ironic pill for the Left’s opponents to swallow is that most censorship now operates under the moniker of “diversity”. The language once used to protect free speech from those who would try to close it off to others is now used to close it off in toto. The paradox of enforcing conformity to a “diverse” outlook is being lost. Like Rousseau’s minions, we shall oxymoronically be “forced” to be free.
“Truth”, along with its handmaiden “language”, is the real loser. “Diversity” is being divested of any meaning. It should involve toleration of a broad spectrum, not merely the swallowing of an entirely establishment narrative. The Left claims to be relativist but in reality “right and wrong” now masquerade as “appropriate” and “inappropriate”, or other slippery terms. Those people who do not share in the Left’s maxims, such as “show intolerance to the intolerant”, try to articulate in the vain the fact that the Left’s own narrative is ultimately arbitrary.
This self-referential Leftism is not without moral quirks. It routinely displays moral cowardice in its avoiding confrontation with the more extremist aspects of Islam, for instance. Common-sense morality barely registers on its scale of justice. And worst of all, it enforces a retrospective form of justice that begins with moral postulates such as all men being created equal - “if everyone isn’t succeeding equally, it can’t be because they made some bad decisions or have unequal abilities. It’s because we didn’t do enough”, according to Gavin McInnes.
Much of this goes unnoticed by people on the Left who still anachronistically perceive themselves to be heirs to the hippies who almost beat nuclear armaments on a diet of flowers and goodwill. Yet just as goths, in their subsitute uniformity, represent an alternative sartorial orthodoxy rather than a truly heterodox alternative, so does the Left. Their orthodoxies dominate the kulturkampf. It’s about time it was challenged.
Alexander Pannett 11.20am
Yesterday, Michael Gove announced that “progressive” teaching had eroded social mobility in the UK.
This coincides with Nick Clegg’s claiming that income inequality does not determine social mobility and redistributive policies will not be a panacea for creating a more equal society.
At a time when a West End play, Posh, again raises the spotlight on the privileged, it seems that the eternal British fascination with class is as healthy as ever.
Class, privilege, equality, fairness. The lexicon is familiar to us all but conjures up a multitude of differing emotional responses.
I cannot help but feel that the concepts behind these words are rather empty. Their “truth” is less of what they rationally can be determined to refer to and more of their use as tools in pursuing a policy of subjugation and intimidation against any individuals or cultures that certain people feel entitled to misunderstand.
Whenever an individual is accused of being “posh”, has the accuser really sat down and analysed that person’s life to determine whether he or she has indeed had a life of comfort? Have they impartially evaluated whether all their achievements have been handed to that person on a “silver spoon”, without any effort on their part? Of course they haven’t.
When an individual is accused of being “posh” or “privileged”, they are having their identity removed from them. They are being categorised not by their own consciousness but by another’s subjective interpretation of the world. Such behavior is bigotry in the most cowardly fashion.
I do not know you so I shall label you. And in labeling, I shall bind your individuality to my language. As this language is deemed “progressive”, it is therefore acceptable - even commendable in certain circles. As Rorty said, truth is what people let you get away with. And the truth here is that once an individual has been labeled “privileged” they can be abused at will and their achievements mocked and ignored as if they had been attained fraudulently.
Take David Cameron as a good example. He is now widely acclaimed to be the most privileged Prime Minister in recent decades. He has been accused of a “born to rule” attitude and “chillaxed” approach.
What utter nonsense. David Cameron is a member of the elite because he was bright enough to get a First from Oxford. From there he worked hard to attain the top job in the country, while facing vociferous competition. While in power he encounters the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, simultaneously attempting to manage the first coalition government in modern politics and the most ambitious reform programme in decades.
On top of this, Mr Cameron has had to endure the deaths of his son and father. And yet we begrudge him having some time off at the weekend to “relax” with his young family as everyone else does because he is “posh” and must suffer? How depressing our capricious society has become.
Such socially acceptable bigotry is particularly harmful in that it distracts genuinely progressive instincts from the real causes of social immobility in our country. Foremost amongst these causes is the lack of opportunity available to many due to inadequate education.
This brings me back to Michael Gove’s criticism of “progressive” education. Interestingly, Mr Gove does not call for a return to selective grammar schools, which I know having been to a grammar school myself, do determine an individual’s ability at far too young an age. Instead Mr Gove lambasts the equality-driven approach to teaching that has reduced standards since the 1960s. This has resulted in a two-tier system where the privately educated flourish while everyone else must bury their attributes.
In a globalised world, there is nothing progressive about consigning British students to mediocrity and blaming capitalism when British companies unsurprisingly look abroad for the skills they cannot find at home.
If we are genuinely going to improve social mobility, we should hold our tongue before we criticise another person’s perceived status and concentrate instead on seizing our opportunities. Opportunities that our education system is freed to provide to us and at a standard that we aspire and are encouraged to attain.
Instead of being seduced by the objective “posh” and “privilege”, we should subjectivise “success” and “elite”. Such personal ambition rather than resignation in an external social structure is what is truly progressive for the socially and economically disadvantaged.
Follow Alexander on Twitter @alpannet
The last Prime Minister’s Questions for three weeks before a joint Jubilee and Whitsun recess was a distinctly bizarre scoreless draw.
It didn’t so much resemble the two most senior politicians in the land debating matters of policy, as it did two angry siblings who simply weren’t listening to each other. Oh, and there was an irritating cousin thrown into the mix.
Edward Miliband’s tactic today was divide and rule. It is one we can expect to see more of over the coming months. Seeking to exploit the evident antagonism between the Business Secretary and Adrian Beecroft, author of this week’s controversial report on employment reform, the Leader of the Opposition set about asking where the Prime Minister stood.
This strategy is brazen but flawed, not least because all the front bench Lib Dems were strangely absent, thereby not allowing for television shots of awkward Lib Dems.
However, Mr Cameron avoided fulsomely embracing the report, suggesting that some recommendations would be taken and others would not, before the major exchange descended into an unstructured melee.
Edward tried to score points on, well, just about anything: Hunt, Coulson, growth, tax cuts for millionaires - they were all there, culminating in his claim that “the nasty party is back”. Dave started banging on about the trade unions influence on Labour policy. All of the questions and the answers seem to have been decided quite some time before the session. It was a total damp squib.
The meat of the session actually took place after the Leader of the Opposition had sat down. The Prime Minister was asked about the ECHR’s ruling on voting rights for prisoners. The Prime Minister said he would stand for the sovereignty of Parliament and his belief that going to prison meant you lost certain rights, including the right to vote. This is a story that shall keep on rolling.
However, the headlines were stolen by that irritating cousin, namely Ed Balls. He repeatedly asked the Prime Minister how many glasses of wine he’d had, and needled the Flashman in Dave, as is his desire. Finally, by now having “we’re in recession” chanted at him by Mr Balls, Dave could take no more and Flashman flipped. He described the Shadow Chancellor as a “muttering idiot”, causing uproar in the chamber.
Succumbing to goading as such an easy thing to do. It is also easy to wind someone up. However, both these important public figures should not be doing it. Mr Cameron was forced to withdraw his “unparliamenatry” comment. Mr Balls is not subject to sanction. Speaker Bercow, of the pseudo-Headmasterly air, should perhaps get in touch with that instinct now, because these two schoolboys could use some discipline.
Follow Jack on Twitter @BlackburnJA
Nik Darlington 7.55am
When in opposition, the Conservative party was entirely right, politically speaking, to back the Labour Government’s spending plans.
Roles now reversed, the Labour party would be entirely right, politically speaking, to back the coalition government’s spending cuts. Many in the Labour party might believe this to be anathema, much like many in the Conservative party were aghast at George Osborne’s decision to ape, for a time, Gordon Brown’s fiscal diarrhoea.
But they miss the point, in favour of the principle. And on this precise point, principle is a luxury Labour cannot afford. Until the Labour party has a credible answer to questions about what they would cut themselves, for instance, they remain irrelevant to the only debate that will matter in 2015, namely the economy.
The recent upturn in Labour’s fortunes - driven largely by a more relaxed and self-confident Ed Miliband - has seen their building record poll leads, and their leader nudging ahead of the Prime Minister in (un)popularity stakes. The most important sign of Labour’s recovery, however, is that the party is closing the gap on economic competence.
Above all, this is a sign of the voters taking a verdict on the Government’s perceived economic incompetence. It cannot be a verdict on the Labour party’s economic strategy, because that party hasn’t got one.
Yet. Some in the Government have said it is a surprise that the polling has taken this long to get this bad, considering the policies they are having to pursue. That may be true, but people have maintained their trust in the painful but necessary economic path the Government has set out.
But that painful economic path has barely been pursued. Many ‘cuts’ (in reality, cuts in the increase in public spending) have been backloaded to the second half of this Parliament. Could this turn out to be a strategic error of the tallest order?
There are seemingly irreconcilable ideological differences between Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, which could get in the way of Labour crafting a credibly alternative economic strategy. Nevertheless, recent policy appointments, such as Andrew Adonis and John Cruddas, demonstrate a bold intent to craft a policy platform that mixes the traditional and the new in the Labour movement.
If the end result is that Ed Balls has George Osborne running for cover on economic issues, the Government should really start to worry.
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Chris White MP 7.16am
This evening I will be speaking at a Tory Reform Group policy supper in Westminster.
After seeing my Private Member’s Bill – the Public Services (Social Value) Act – pass into law earlier this year, I have been keen to make clear that this has to be part of a wider effort to promote civil society organisations and social enterprise.
If the Act is to be successfully implemented, then organisations on the ground need to feel empowered, to ensure it is used by local authorities and other public bodies.
In order to build a coalition behind the Act and behind using social value in general, we need to ensure that there is support in place and I believe that the Government has the opportunity to put that wider support within this Parliament.
I hope to discuss with TRG members about this, the role the Conservative party can play in articulating that vision and what role social enterprise and civil society has within that.
You can book tickets here http://www.trg.org.uk/events.html
Chris White was elected as the Member of Parliament for Warwick and Leamington at the 2010 General Election.
Nik Darlington 2.22pm
“Hope travels through, nor quits us when we die.” Alexander Pope.
How many people will have to die, needlessly and sadistically, in North Korea before hope is fulfilled?
Few stories permeate the confines of the grotesquely named Democratic People’s Republic, and few that do are as powerful as that of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person to have escaped to the West from a North Korean concentration camp.
Shin’s story, Escape from Camp 14, has been described as a harrowing and extraordinary account of the grim semi-existence endured in the country’s gulags.
And a wonderful interview of Shin is out today on the Spectator’s Coffee House blog, by books editor David Blackburn, which I wholeheartedly urge you to read in full. Here is but a short extract:
Shin is nearly 30. He is short, maybe 5 and a half feet tall. He is immaculate in a well cut suit and sharp black shoes. His hair is neat and he carries himself with dignity. He is slim but there is evident strength in the line of his shoulders and the set of his hips. This is not the protein-shake variety of physique, the kind that takes up too much space on the Tube and develops diabetes. It is the lean, wiry type that can withstand 10 degrees below zero without a coat.
There is something about Shin, probably the knowledge of his past, that, I am ashamed to admit, makes me shift uncomfortably in my very comfortable seat. There is nothing quite like being confronted by one’s own indifference.
Dan Trombly 10.23am
The pressure has increased for more forceful intervention in Syria. Despite the presence of international observers, the Assad regime refuses to adhere to a ceasefire demanded by the UN.
Whether it involves arming the rebels or a repeat of the NATO intervention in Bosnia in 1995, the ongoing strife in the country calls for further action, and US Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry recently urged consideration of both options. Yet despite the frustration of diplomatic efforts, military options seem bleak.
Those who argue that past success in Bosnia could be replicated in Syria both ignore the history of the Bosnian war and its differences with the current conflict. The UN’s attempts to create “safe zones” resulted in the horrific massacres of Srebrenica and elsewhere. The Bosnian war was ultimately won when the numerically superior combined force of Croatian and Bosnian troops launched ground offensives, not when NATO began air strikes.
Similar attempts to implement “safe zones” in Iraq following the first Gulf War required the threat of ground assault in the south of the country, and the tactic failed frequently in the north, such as at Irbil in 1996. Even after the Desert Fox bombing campaign, forces withdrew once a Baghdad supporting faction secured that area. Notably, Saddam Hussein’s rule was not ended until troops fought their way to the capital in 2003, despite “safe zones” having been declared alongside frequent US air patrols and strikes.
In Syria, as in Bosnia and Iraq, neither protection of civilians nor regime change can be assured without superiority on the ground. Even air strikes would require a bombing campaign larger than in Iraq in 2003.
And enormous obstacles stand in the way of arming the Syrian rebels. In Bosnia, for instance, it was Croatia’s invasion that brought about a Serb defeat, not Bosnian forces. In Syria, without a ground invasion of tens (or hundreds) of thousands of troops - from Turkey, the Arab states, or the West - Syria’s rebels will remain woefully outmatched in conventional capabilities. Indeed, Turkey rarely conducts cross-border raids against PKK terrorists without several thousand soldiers.
The Syrian rebels need artillery batteries, armour and air support, not just man-portable anti-tank or anti-aircraft weaponry.
Even with Western air support, the rebels would likely continue to use the guerilla tactics befitting the outmatched force that they are, avoiding pitched battles and ceding territory to draw out hostile forces. While these might be effective tactics in a long-term insurgency, they are unlikely to result in regime change or effective protection of civilians in the short-term. Even the maintenance of a safe haven for rebel forces would need to be done outside Syrian territory, rather than in “safe zones”.
Simply arming rebel forces is more likely to cause a protracted civil war than a quick victory. The United States and others learned this is Nicaragua, Angola and Afghanistan during the Cold War. But in those cases, there was thought to be some value in attrition, and supporters of proxy groups were relatively indifferent to civilian casualties and the collateral damage of prolonged conflict. In Syria, such outcomes are unjustifiable on humanitarian grounds, nor on strategic aims (seeing Assad depart quickly).
Moreover, an influx of arms leaves lasting consequences. The behaviour of Libyan militias is a case in point.
An authoritarian regime such as Assad’s can hold on until hostile armoured columns roll on Damascus. Therefore the only strategically feasible option for a quick victory in Syria is a full-scale invasion. Yet no Western state is willing to undertake such a mission and a Turkish or Arab effort seems very unlikely.
Ultimately, Syria’s civil war will drag on. In the meantime, Western powers must work with Syria’s neighbours to prevent WMDs and other arms from leaving the country; they must provide aid to refugees that manage to escape Syria; and continue to exercise diplomatic options to the best of their ability.
Unless Western policymakers can convince their own populations and their Middle Eastern allies that an invasion is justifiable, providing military aid or half-hearted intervention can only worsen the consequences of Syria’s conflict - for both that country’s neighbours, and the interests of the West.
Dan Trombly is a student of International Affairs at George Washington University. He blogs at Slouching Towards Columbia.
