The more spittle-hurling of the rabid left sometimes blame the rise of this political wing of the media on the failure of the Opposition to hold the government to account over the last 8 years. Partly, that’s true – the media see the failures on the Opposition benches, and decide to go after the government themselves. Partly, of course, it is a form of subliminal guilt and disappointment being expressed at having elected a supposedly socialist left-wing party that in actual fact is anything but. Gotta keep blaming those Tories… But mainly, it’s an unfair criticism, and particularly now when the government isn’t involved in any way, and the media is still pushing it’s own agenda.

For those who have been out of the country for the last few weeks, here’s a brief summary of what has happened in the Tory leadership race up until now. During the summer, it looked as if David Davis, the council-estate-raised, son-of-a-single-mum, self-made-man, educated at Warwick, was going to breeze through the minor hurdle of a leadership contest virtually unopposed, save for a few deluded souls who believed they alone had what it took to be the leader, despite much evidence to the contrary. David Cameron, the Eton and Oxford educated, son-of-a-stockbroker, part of the Notting Hill set, former member of the Oxford-pub-trashing Bullingdon drinking society, who likes to take lunch in the London gentlemen’s club White’s, was deciding whether to stand purely because someone from the ‘centre-left’ of the party had to do so to push forward Michael Portillo’s old ‘modernising agenda’.

A few months later, party conference sees David Cameron give a solid performance, speaking without notes and verbs in typically Blairite fashion. The media start to sense a story, and immediately get behind the underdog, deciding in advance that Davis has to give the speech of the century, or he’s blown it. Davis, not the world’s best platform speaker, gives a plodding, but reasonable speech that doesn’t set the world on fire, and the press go for him like armed policemen after a Brazilian electrician. Liam Fox, until now, and even still today, dismissed as the ‘right-wing’ candidate, gives an excellent speech covering a wide variety of specific policy issues the next day, and gets virtually no press at all. After all, he’s an extreme right-winger. He can’t be allowed to win.

Fast forward to the last week or two. A story emerges that David Cameron might have been fond of drugs back in his University days (although my guess is he was too smashed with the Bullingdon club on booze to be snorting charlie). The tabloid press, and the Mail in particular, try to make an issue of it, but it largely gets nowhere for lack of any damning evidence, and Cameron repeatedly declines to comment. The only runner in the race who makes an issue of it is Ken Clarke, who initially placed the focus on cocaine by specifically denying that he had ever used that particular drug when asked a generic drugs question at hustings. Davis later writes an editorial for the Evening Standard backing Ian Blair’s crusade against middle-class hard drug users. For this tactical screw-up alone, he should have hung his campaign manager by the testicles from the Tower of London. Aside from the tabloids though, the serious press have been boosting Cameron for weeks, and can’t afford for this issue to derail the narrative, so every single broadsheet paper prints an editorial decrying the ‘right-wing’ of the party for making this contest about smears and non-issues, despite having little evidence that it wasn’t just the media talking to themselves. The media could not support Cameron more clearly if they tried. Consequently, his opinion poll numbers go through the roof, and he will today be all but crowned leader of the party.

Here’s the problem. Read back over the last few paragraphs. At no point in the race have the candidates discussed policy. Nor has the media tried to get them to do so. This race is really about a very nuanced difference of opinion. The ‘right-wing’ candidates believe that we need to modernise the party by applying conservative principles to the issues that real people are concerned about – the poor state of public services, to issues of social justice, and so on – shifting away from economic issues and onto social ones, but in a compassionate way. The ‘left-wing’ candidates believe that we need to modernise the party, but haven’t really stated how. It seems to involve getting more female and ethnic minority MPs, electing a smiley Blair-clone as leader, and hoping the Labour party implode in the next 4 years, but maybe there’s more to it that I just don’t ‘get’. All we have heard is vacuous rubbish, largely from the Cameron camp, about how the leader needs to ‘be the change’, about how Cameron ‘gets it’, and about how we need to ‘modernise’. The media love this shit.

It looks as if the media will have managed to put a man in charge of the Opposition who is, in all probability, entirely unsuited for the job. As a party member, I have to raise a stink about that. That’s our job, for God’s sake.

What should we do about it? Well, as a right-wing free-marketeer, I have to call for more deregulation. In a country where the majority of the population get their news, and therefore opinion, from a monopoly state broadcaster, we can’t have a serious debate. When a few people have the power to change opinion so comprehensively in so short a time, with no real substance behind the change in opinion, we have a problem. We need more media, not less, and we need a wider spread of opinions in the media. And, I hate to agree with the spit-flingers, but we probably need to start looking at the monopoly or oligopoly style ownership structures in the private sector as well. If one politician can meet with one press baron, and decide what the theme for the news will be for the next few months, democracy cannot really flourish. This leadership election has opened my eyes to that problem. At least in the blogosphere, we can write about what we like, but we need to get our voices more into the mainstream, where public opinion can be truly influenced.

The upshot of all of this is that scientists, particularly in the hard physical sciences, tend to get reductionism beaten into them as a matter of course. It is what we do as a profession – try to take things apart and come up with simple rules as to how the components work. If we can describe and predict the behaviour of the components, we can often extrapolate the behaviour of the whole (not always true in practice, but theoretically fairly sound…).

This is why political blogging in particular is incredibly frustrating at times, because all political blogging ends up at the old scientific conundrum, in a metaphorical sense:

What happens when an irresistable force meets with an immovable body?

What I mean by that is that I can state a fundamental viewpoint, argue a rock-solid logical case from that, and come up with something that confirms my worldview, only for the other side of the political fence to start throwing rocks at my axiom. The irresistable force of my argument (and they all are, Andrew fans…) meets with the immovable force of your fundamental beliefs. So how do we ever get anything done? How do we ever decide anything, reach a compromise, agree a consensus, or God help us all, form a coalition?

I guess at some point we just have to state our political axioms – those fundamental self-evident beliefs that you can’t prove from anything else, that you can’t derive from more fundamental principles – and just defend them to the death. After all, there’s nothing worse in the blogosphere than being proven wrong, arrogant lot that we are. So, to get the ball rolling, and to kick off a political reductionism of Hilbertian proportions, I thought I’d declare one of my axioms, and invite commenters to do the same. Maybe we can find some common ground. Here it is:

1. People are basically selfish bastards. They follow a code in a broad hierarchy that goes something like Self > Immediate Family > Neighbouring Community > City > Country > God, although there is flexibility between levels. Any political act that requires a person or group of people to deviate from this code for any serious length of time is doomed to failure.

Who’s up next?

Disclaimer: Any scientific inaccuracy in the above is not ignorance or forgetfulness on my part. Rather, it is an elaborate in-joke, designed to confuse and bewilder you, but which the rest of us are secretly chuckling at you for not getting.

Disclaimer 2: The bit about God above is a ruse, secularist types, designed to provoke you into fits of spluttering rage. Go ahead punks, make my day.

What I’d like to do is to try to avoid a lot of the emotive language that goes with the abortion debate. It would make for an interesting study in politics to examine the words that people use to inject emotion into the debate (pro-life vs. pro-choice, embryo vs. foetus vs. unborn child vs. parasite, etc…), but I don’t think it helps. I’ll try to be scientific where possible, although my biology training stopped at the tender age of 16, so bear with me if I confuse foetuses for embryo’s, and cerebral cortexes (cortices?) for frontal lobes, or something like that.

That said, so that we can get some nice ranty comments going, I’m going to characterise myself as a pro-lifer. I’m not religious; in fact, I am an agnostic bordering on atheist, so please avoid comments about my invisible friend telling me to save the babies, as I’m not biting on that little chestnut. Nonetheless, I believe abortion should be illegal in all forms in Britain, except in truly exceptional circumstances, which I’ll define later. When it comes to commenting, can we please try to keep away from silly ‘if you take that argument to the extreme, you’d be condoning x’, where x is some ludicrous nonsensical proposition, or analogy with the Iraq war/Hitler/etc…, as that’s just plain dull. Still, if you feel the need to compare me to extremist, fundamentalist, Christian, bible-bashing, Texan-cowboy, imperialist, creationism-believing, abortion-clinic-bombing, KKK-supporting whackjobs, go right ahead. I can take it – I have the wikipedia link to Godwin’s law close to hand.

My objections to abortion are these:

Firstly, the science. I believe that the potential for life begins at conception. I hope that isn’t contentious, as it seems to me to be just a statement of fact. All other things being equal, and the world being a kind place, conception leads to birth. At some points in the 9 months, embryo becomes foetus becomes baby, and we can characterise the changes in a variety of ways. The foetus develops rudimentary organs and a brain by 8 weeks, and is able to respond to stimuli at the same point. The brain becomes capable of rational thought somewhere between 8-20 weeks, as far as I can tell – I’m not a biologist, and I’m a pretty lazy researcher. The current UK limit for abortion is at 24 weeks. Birth is somewhere around 38 weeks from fertilisation. The current legal limit for abortion seems arbitrary, and arguments that the foetus is capable of survival outside the womb with sufficient medical care at 24 weeks, albeit at a fairly low (but increasing) probability, would seem to suggest that the limit should at least be cut. That said, it seems likely that at some point between 8-20 weeks
at least, the foetus becomes capable of feeling pain and of some kind of understanding and rationality. Perhaps that implies a case for cutting the limit to 8 weeks? Of course, this is fairly contentious, because many people believe that the rights of the mother are paramount, and that the ‘pain’ or ‘consciousness’ arguments are
spurious. They have a point on the latter, and I’ll come back to the former later. I’d go further. The potential for life, which I identified earlier, is paramount. If you conceive, you should carry the embryo and then foetus to term. To deny the potential for life is, at least in my own opinion, morally equivalent to murder. To stretch
this point somewhat, but not beyond the realm of credibility, it isn’t hard to imagine that medical technology will exist in the (near) future that will allow a fertilised egg to be brought to term outside of the womb. What will the citizens of the future think of our civilisation now, as we so brutally butchered those they would
consider equal in their present?

The second point is more ethereal, and concerns the balance between rights and responsibilities. Some people on the other side of the argument believe that a woman has the right to do whatever she likes with her own body. I wouldn’t really argue with that, except in that it isn’t entirely her own body after she conceives. There is another body inside it, and although it is dependent on her for everything in those first 9 months, it is still a life, and it has rights. We can argue about the extent of those rights, but it has rights, nonetheless. To argue otherwise would create a precedent for a hierarchy of humanity, where different groups have rights according to their group classification. That’s a dangerous idea, and I’ll say no more about it, not wanting to Godwin-ise myself. This is often just summarised using the emotive terms of right-to-life and right-to-choose, but I think it’s more subtle than that. Having an extreme right to choose what you do with your own body, to the exclusion of the rights of others, however diminished those rights may be, seems to me to be a dangerous fundamental principle. To take an excessively emotive and extreme example, should I have the right to have sex with anyone I choose, regardless of how they feel about it? Of course not, but the equivalence is pretty
close, unless you deny that the foetus has any rights at all. Either way, I don’t think that these spurious, invented rights are very helpful. Everyone has a fundamental right to life, liberty and property, foetus included. Other rights either derive from that set, or are invented to prop up a cause celebre du jour (apologies to Orwell’s memory for that abuse of our language). Plus, there’s the practical argument
that if you can’t use contraception properly, abortion shouldn’t be the last line of defence. That’s what contraception is for. Yes, it can go wrong, but there’s risk in everything. If you want to take a
chance, you have to take responsibility for the outcome.

Thirdly, and finally, I am concerned with the effect that liberalised abortion law has on society. The original intention for the law in the UK was that abortion should be limited to cases where bringing the baby to term would subject the mother to undue physical or mental stress, effectively to neutralise the public health problem created by illegal abortions being carried out (and we can argue over how much of a problem really existed if you like). Legislation allowed for abortion if 2 doctors would agree to it, in cases where the mother’s, or existing children’s, physical or mental health was at risk, the mother’s life was in actual danger, or the child would be born severely handicapped. Current legislation puts a limit of 24 weeks on abortion. In practice, now more than ever before, abortion is available effectively on demand before 24 weeks, as doctors are quite willing to interpret mental or physical health problems in terms of not being able to go on holiday this year. Life’s a bitch. Stats in this section relate to England and Wales. The vast majority of abortions in 2003
(94% – 171,000 abortions) were carried out to protect the mother’s physical or mental health. The spread is remarkably even across age, marital status and race, although singletons tend to abort much more than married women do, and under 30’s more than over 30’s, for obvious reasons. 87% of abortions occur before week 12. Over 181,000 abortions were performed in 2003 (just under 50,000 in 1969, the first full year
after abortion was effectively legalised). As a comparison, just over 621,000 live births happened in 2003 (797,000 in 1969). That means a quarter of all pregnancies now end in abortion (6% in 1969). How can
that, in any way, be healthy for society as a whole, that we treat pregnancy and childbirth with such casual disdain? To compare with what is, in my view, our closest cultural comparative, the Republic of Ireland, which obviously has much stricter laws on abortion: in 2002, there were about 60,000 births, and 6,500 abortions – 1 in 10, much lower than our 1 in 4.

Finally, I don’t want to preclude the possibility of providing help and support for women who find themselves pregnant and don’t want the child. I also think abortion should be available on a limited basis, for cases where the mother’s life is genuinely at risk, or in cases of extreme emotional distress, such as after a rape. But I would go no further than that. We should provide a safety net to cover that, but it shouldn’t involve killing the foetus. People argue that this amounts to turning the woman into a human incubator, a machine, for 9 months. Well, if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. Wear a condom, or a femidom, take the pill, get a coil inserted, have your tubes tied, turn lesbian, but whatever you choose to do, go safely. And thus endeth the lesson. Over to you, commenters.

The British blogosphere is up in arms, some of them quite literally. We’re under attack by nihilistic terrorists, with whom there is no negotiation. Their goals are ludicrous enough that it is almost impossible to countenance considering them, and thus we are at war. Even if it were possible and even moral to withdraw all of our, and all of the the rest of the West’s, troops from the Middle East, a move which would almost certainly destroy any chance of democracy taking root in their soil and which would condemn the people to rule by despots, dictators, and fundamentalist medieval-mindset clerics, we still shouldn’t do it for purely strategic reasons. This post was prompted by this, over at Chicken Yoghurt, where a few of us agreed that we really don’t know much about terrorism, and that the discussion that the British blogosphere is having is missing the point.

As I said over at Justin’s place, I’ve seen the bombings used in the last few weeks as an rallying call for support for mass redistribution of wealth, the closure of faith schools, the importance of increasing the size of the welfare state, massively decreased civil liberties, pulling out of Iraq, redoubling our efforts in Iraq, pulling out of the entire middle East, abandoning Israel to its fate, and I’d guess that Polly Toynbee somehow managed to squeeze Sure Start in there, although I can’t be certain about that last one.

Indeed, Polly did talk about Sure Start a few days later, but didn’t make a connection to the bombings, a small mercy for which I am eternally grateful. All of this talk though seems to me to be trying to fit a new phenomenon into our existing cultural/political framework. Not that terrorism itself is particularly new as such, but this brand of almost goal-less terrorism is certainly novel. It’s what Iain Banks called an Outside Context Problem – something so new, so different, that it shocks the world, that we don’t know how to react to it or deal with it, something that we can only hope is benign. Unfortunately for us, this most definitely is not benign. So our choice is stark – we either give in to their demands, or we carry on with the unhappy and uneasy status quo, accepting that some casualties on both sides are a feature of this war, or we try to win. I am voting for option 3. The problem is that not many people seem to have got past the point of accepting that this is new and different, and that our current toolset is inadequate to deal with the problem. Let’s go back over that list again. Over the last three weeks, I’ve seen people attempt to analyse the root causes of terrorism, and they have come up with the following:

i) ‘despair, poverty, alienation, and rootlessness’
ii) ‘all religion’
iii) ‘Falluja’
iv) ‘capitalism’
v) and of course, ‘multiculturalism’

and so on. Many more have put forward more theories about why we’re under attack, but few, if any, have put forward a coherent set of ideas about what we should do to respond. I suppose the unspoken corollary of the root cause theories listed above is that if only we do something about poverty, alienation, religious intervention in the state, our ‘imperialism’ in the Middle East, and so on, terrorism will just pack it’s bags and head on home, satisfied with a job well done. I don’t find this reasoning compelling, for all sorts of reasons, but chiefly because if we allow terrorism to influence our policy just once, it will become a more legitimate form of political expression. The other big reason is that I don’t think any of these things really cause terrorism, as such. It is certainly more likely to be a combination of factors, but I don’t think analysing it in terms of our own priors and prejudices is going to help. It’s an Outside Context Problem.

The question that I find most interesting is ‘what can we do?’, and I think there are actually some straightforward decisions we can make immediately to start reducing our risk. This is probably more contentious, but I thought I’d suggest a couple of things, then throw the floor open for debate. Maybe the wisdom of crowds here can give us some decent answers. For our less moderate, ‘nuke those towelheads back into the Stone Age’-type readers, please don’t suggest we nuke anything. I’m pretty sure our nuclear deterrent is well past it’s use-by date, anyway.

Firstly, we need to be far less tolerant of extremism within our midst. I’m as close to being a free speech fundamentalist as it’s really possible to be, but on this issue, I think there is some give. We shouldn’t be allowing imams to preach without some form of qualification to do so. Priests and vicars go through a seminary school to become clergy. I’m not aware that imams (or the correct equivalent – I’m not really sure that the terminology is correct – muftis, mullahs?) go through anything similar. If not, they should be doing, and extremism should be rooted out at that point. If that’s impractical, we need to get ruthless about deporting foreign-born clerics who preach intolerance and hatred. The ones who are British born are tougher to deal with, obviously, but certainly they should be under surveillance by the security services at the very least.

On immigration, we have to realise that there is a generation of immigrants that we have failed to integrate successfully, and particularly for Pakistani immigrants into the north of England, we screwed them over pretty badly when the textile industry died out. Their kids have grown up seeing their parents struggle financially, seeing overt racism and segregation, and the decline in our own culture, so they turn to other sources of authority. Simplistic, certainly, but there is at least a grain of truth there. What should we do about it? We need to break up the ghettoisation that has occurred in some of our cities, although as yet I have no idea how to do that (tax breaks for non-Muslims moving into predominantly Muslim postcodes?). We also probably need to limit certain types of immigration, like chain migration, or massive influxes of unskilled labour.

Tied to this, we should be asserting British culture aggressively. By that, I don’t mean going on about fish-and-chips and wet bank holiday weekends, but I do mean that we need to regain some pride in who we are and what we believe in. The political atmosphere of progressiveness and permanent revolution tends, I believe, to enforce the sense that we are progressing from something bad to something more positive. It suggests that what we have is worthless, or at least badly flawed. It isn’t. For all the moaning about Britain I do, especially about our politics, it really is the greatest country in the world, and I wouldn’t live anywhere else by choice. More people need to be saying that, and saying it publicly, and saying it often. We should have citizenship tests, and pledges of allegiance, and all that stuff, but it’s peripheral to the pride in our country that all of that represents. And we should fly the flag on all public buildings.

Finally from me, we should be setting an example of what justice and fairness and tolerance are all about. We need to stand up for our civil liberties when it is so easy to sweep them away. The police don’t need 3 months to question a terror suspect, or we end up with things like this. We should be celebrating our freedoms and our society’s virtues, not throwing them away.

I apologise for not having any silver bullets for this beast. It’s new, it’s different. Our current thinking and mindsets aren’t set up to accommodate its otherness, so there are no easy off-the-shelf solutions. It will take time to solve, and it is going to involve more innocents dying, but the alternatives are far worse. So, the floor is open – what else would you do and why?

Let’s go back a little bit, to those innocent days before the last election. Labour published their pledge card (now with added truth!), with the following 5 pledges:

Your family better off
Your child achieving more
Your children with the best start
Your family treated better and faster
Your community safer
Your country’s borders protected

Huh, I hear you cry. Can’t really argue with that, but my colleague on Once More, Wat Tyler, applied his opposites test to a couple of these, and to a couple of David Davis’ policy pronouncements on his David Davis for Leader blog. Basically, the premise is that if you take a political statement, reverse the meaning to the opposite, and can’t imagine any politician saying the reversed version in polite company, the statement has no meaning. I think it’s a good rule of thumb. What has this got to do with social and family policy? Simple really, the vacuousness of the Labour pledge ‘Your family better off’ is obvious when you reverse it. Can you imagine a Tory running on a pledge of ‘Your family worse off’? The same is true of the constant refrain from New Labour circles of policies for ‘hard-working families’ – can you imagine making positive policy pledges for slackers and deadbeats? Welfare-to-Doss? So I have to be careful in challenging the left that I don’t go down the straw man route of claiming that they are anti-family. No one is anti-family. Even the doyenne of state-nationalised parenting and childcare, Polly Toynbee, has admitted in interviews that the best environment for raising kids is the 2-married different-sex parents set-up that we all know and love.

The question really is one of both focus, and of the unintended consequences of making policy to help the ‘weakest in society’. Note the same problem again – no-one makes policy for the strongest and fittest, do they? The focus on the left is on minority groups and the oppressed. Which set of victims can we empower today? Which of society’s outcasts can we lift up? How can we redistribute wealth to the poorest? All of those things are fine and noble goals, but when the focus is all about the few, rather than the many, the many get overlooked. We Conservatives are often criticised, rightly and wrongly, for being all about the rich. But Labour activists are all about the poor, and the rest are left with a kind of pseudo-independence of action that isn’t totally healthy. I don’t want to claim that either side has a monopoly on morality, but my side is genuinely trying to draft policy that benefits everyone, regardless of status, wealth, sex, colour, creed. That, in many ways, is a huge victory for the left. They’re in danger of being left behind once we get into gear. As much as I want my team to be in power with a whopping majority, I’m not sure how healthy that would be for democracy.

Often with social policy that focuses on the neediest, the next tier of people suffer. The victims are those on the margins. It is probably the basic tenet of economics that incentives are important. Incentives (not just in a financial sense) are what make us get out of bed in the morning. When the government enact policies that gives more than a safety net to the neediest, those on the margins suffer because the incentives that govern them change. Thus, the liberalisation of abortion laws has tended to lead to an increase in abortions. This post from Monjo states that the average UK woman now has 2.2 healthy pregnancies in her lifetime, and gives birth to 1.7 children. 1% of abortions are for reasons of foetal abnormality. Is that really healthy for society that we treat pregnancy and childbirth with such casual disdain?

This article, in the Torygraph, talks about the perverse financial incentives present in the welfare system. It makes economic sense for a couple on average income to be divorced, because then the female partner would be able to claim increased benefits, presumably for childcare. The result? Increased levels of family break-up, and, equally bad for those of us in the tax-paying community, a bigger bill for welfare. Family break-up is expensive in all kinds of ways though – the higher cost of supporting single parents, the economic cost of them not working, the increase in crime amongst the kids, lower educational achievement, an increase in abuse, poorer levels of health – the list goes on. And this is one example amongst many – name an area of social policy, and I’ll tell you who gets screwed by it.

I am not calling for a draconian removal of people’s current entitlements. We have been discussing welfare reform in some detail over on Once More, and it has to be a slow and steady process, much like weaning an addict off heroin, I guess. As much as we love old-school brutality on the right, putting people on benefit cold turkey isn’t something we want to try. So what’s my point? Just that power necessarily leads to complacency – there is a myopia that sets in after a while where you think you have all the answers, and you have to be doing something to fix the many day-to-day problems that keep jumping up. It isn’t an atmosphere which engenders long-term strategic planning. I think it’s time for the left to take a step back a little and reconsider some of their axioms. The weakest in society need a safety net, sure, but do they need a blanket and a nice, cuddly teddy bear as well? Are we not better off working for everyone in society, rather than minority interests?

Today Gordon Brown announced his plan to save Africa from poverty, which he hopes, in vain, to tie up at the G8 summit in Scotland next month. Well done, Gordon. You’ve triangulated the master of triangulation, Tony Blair, by getting your own name in lights above this one. Political strategy aside, however, I really don’t get this plan. I’m not an economist by trade, and I’m certainly not a political theorist. I’m self-taught in both fields, and proud of it, but it does tend to mean I’m probably more rigid in my own ideas than if I were brought up with them. The well documented phenomenon of people moving to the right as they get older is probably partly to do with people being tribally left through upbringing until they realise that right is, erm, right.

So what’s the deal? Gordon’s plan is threefold:

i) Doubling aid to Africa.
ii) 100% debt relief.
iii) Ending trade subsidies.

I remain skeptical about his ability to pull it off, particularly the third point, which mainly relates to agricultural subsidies. Firstly, the EU has to agree on that, and the CAP isn’t scheduled for shutdown any time soon. With the French voting for protectionism in their recent referendum (or so twas spun), it probably isn’t politically feasible either. Finally, and correct me if I am wrong, there is no veto on agricultural policy in the EU, but there is a convention whereby if a decision is against a country’s ‘vital interests’ it will not be taken. France, of course, claim that CAP reform would be against their vital interests. I’d love to see trade subsidy reform, because I think it is the only economically sensible policy to bring Africa out of poverty. Ending the practice of dumping our overproduction on third world countries, and preventing them from competing freely in our own markets against local producers, would allow the third world to work their way out of absolute poverty in a generation. Plus, we end up with cheaper food. Win-win. Even if the EU won’t shut down the CAP, I assume, and again may be mistaken – this is pure prejudice – that Britain could not unilaterally pull out of EU mandated trade subsidy levels, in the same way that we are no longer able to reduce VAT below a minimum threshold. So point iii) is probably a non-starter.

This leaves us with points i) and ii), or the Geldof gambit, as it will be henceforth known. I have no problem in principle with increasing aid to Africa, as long as it actually goes to help Africans who need aid, not Africans who need a new BMW. I’m not sure that with the types of government that exist over there, that’s entirely likely, but I’m a cynic when it comes to pissing away spending taxpayer’s money. Africa needs many things, but a good proportion of them could be accomplished using a few battalions of US Marines. Of course, we’d have to fight the legions of Guardian reading lunatics who object to freeing people from poverty, oppressive dictatorships, starvation, and all those good things when there might be a bit of collateral damage, or when America is even tangentially involved. Ignoring the problem or, even better, implementing an expensive solution that is doomed to failure, but that makes the implementor feel good, all while giving him/her work for a few years, is a far more refined attitude to hold, it seems.

Then there’s debt relief. Again, on the face of it, it seems like a wonderful idea. All those oppressive dictatorships who racked up expensive debts buying arms to oppress their people with, private jets, missile defense systems, and the like, can spend all the interest payments on healthcare, education, and lesbian outreach workers instead. Just who are we trying to kid here? Plus, there’s the somewhat cold-hearted, but entirely correct, argument that cancelling people’s debts tends to make it more expensive for them to borrow in the future. That’s not a great idea when these countries are going to want to build mobile phone networks and other such bastions of Western civilisation in the near future. Don’t believe me? Try missing your mortgage payments for a year, and buying AK-47s with the money. Don’t worry, Gordon has a Marshall plan for you…

All very cynical, I know, so would some of you compassionate lefties care to explain why Make Poverty History isn’t just economic illiteracy and pie-in-the-sky wooly liberal optimism? That would be much appreciated.

Past

First, though, a description of the current system, and why it doesn’t work. The NHS, I believe, is unique in that it is a state-run system that both pays for and also, critically, provides healthcare services. Most other Western nations that provide some form of healthcare for their citizens just pay for it – they don’t provide it. Historically, the NHS was put together just after the second world war, in 1948. Prior to this, healthcare in the UK was privately provided. There is some dispute over how comprehensive and effective this all was, and it tends to be overplayed and highlighted by champions of the NHS on the left that anyone poor couldn’t get healthcare and was left to die, on the street, of some terrible, but easily cured affliction. People like me point to the large amounts of charity, the fact that consultants often gave their time for free to those who couldn’t afford it, the building of hospitals purely to provide free healthcare to those who couldn’t afford it (like the Royal Free), and so on. As with all political statistickery, the truth is probably somewhere in between. It is probably fair to say that provision was patchy, and that quality varied. That said, you could make the same statement today. Provision is now rationed, rather than patchy, but if you’ve got 3 months to live and you’re at the end of a 6 month waiting list, the difference is almost completely academic.

The founding principles of the NHS were that it should be:

i) free at the point of delivery,
ii) funded from general taxation,
iii) available to all, regardless of status (including visitors to the country, incidentally).

and these principles have largely held, although charges were introduced for prescriptions and glasses in the 50’s, the dental service has been de facto privatised, and the provision of optician’s services has been actually privatised, over time. The third principle has also been watered down slightly, and now you have to be a citizen to qualify for free healthcare, or your country of origin has to have a reciprocal agreement with the UK for tourists.

Present

So, what’s wrong with all this? It all sounds great, doesn’t it? Healthcare is free, available to all, and paid for by everyone in society. It’s a kind of social insurance policy. Wonderful. Except that it doesn’t really work that well. Like all things that are ‘free’, healthcare in the UK is heavily in demand, which means that the only sensible thing the provider with a fixed budget can do is to limit supply by rationing. This is achieved in all kinds of ways, but none of them are good for patients – restriction procedures by waiting list, restricting funding for certain procedures, restricting funding for expensive drugs, etc. I don’t particularly want to go through a list of measures for the overall quality of the NHS and give it a good kicking in the post, but feel free to raise them in the comments, and we’ll have a knockabout debate about it. It also isn’t good for the staff who work within it, although this is partly an argument against the strength of the unions in a monopoly provider. Broadly, compensation bears very little relation to actual performance, so there is little incentive to excel beyond that oft-quoted, and rapidly disappearing, phenomenon of public-sector pride and professionalism.

Future

Bizarrely, and somewhat irritatingly to someone of my political persuasion, I think New Labour are making some decent steps on the long road of reform. Introducing, or rather, expanding, the purchasing of healthcare from the private sector, is necessary to introduce competition, to shake up established bureaucracy, and to make the political climate favourable to independent provision. I’m amazed that it is a Labour government who are doing it, but I guess only Nixon could go to China, and only Tony could start to seriously dismantle the NHS. Let’s face it – we can’t afford to pay for universal healthcare for all. We’re all living longer, getting sicker, and getting more demanding in terms of our lifestyles. We have got to the point where Viagra, IVF, and even cosmetic surgery are available on the NHS. This is, frankly, ridiculous.

Where I would like to get to is a system where the state pays for a minimal safety net level of healthcare, which is completely provided by the private sector. The rest should be covered either by direct payment, or by health insurance, but universal safety net coverage would be available to all from general taxation. I think this retains the best intentions of the founding principles of the NHS, while acknowledging the failings of a centralised, bureaucratised system that will run out of funding at some point in the near, but not-so-near, future.

Over to you, commenters – let’s flesh out a healthcare policy. Why, where and how am I wrong?

The week after an election is a strange time. We political junkies start to shiver and shake, craving our next fix of electoral stimulus. We long to test the theories and ideologies of policy against public perception, in the forlorn hope of finding acceptance. It also throws our blog-writing mojo out of whack, it being a particularly dull week in comparison to the months of campaigning that are now over.

Having said that, a few interesting snippets of information and strange moments of candid reflection have cropped up, and of such things, lengthy blog opuses are made. Take my hand, dear reader, and follow me down into the rabbit hole of British politics. It’s a funny old place, where words mean exactly what politicians want them to mean, nothing more, nothing less, and there’s a strange toothy grin with not a Cheshire cat in sight.

I’ve written before about lying in politics, and in particular the weird form of electioneering that Peter Oborne noted in his documentary for Channel 4 during the election campaign, but what I want to write about today isn’t quite lying. It’s more cynicism, a disrespect for the intellect of the electorate, and while most parties are guilty to some extent, New Labour are really breaking some extraordinary ground with it.

As a political addict, my weekly methadone fix involves watching Question Time on BBC1, which for our non-UK readers, is a moderated panel question and answer show which usually involves 1 reasonably prominent politician from each of the three main parties, and 2 other jokers (journalists, comedians, single-issue fanatics, etc.). It lasts for an hour, and it involves the audience posing topical questions to the panel, and trying to generate some form of debate around the issues of the day. I allude to methadone because if you like politics, it just about gets you through the week, but it sure as hell doesn’t give you the same rush that a genuine argument about issues does – an argument where people speak their minds freely, disagree, persuade each other, and generally shed light rather than give off heat. Question Time has become, like many other pieces of political theatre, essentially information free. It’s about presentation, minimising damage rather than maximising understanding. The ultimate Blairite endeavour, it is almost pure style over substance of late. The interest, for me, now comes in watching exactly how a spineless, supine, Blairite, loyalist minister will wriggle their way out of a tight spot.

Political debate in Britain, outside of the blogosphere of course, seems to have become more and more Orwellian in the use of doublespeak and doublethink. Case in point: Harriet Harman on last night’s programme was asked about the furore surrounding the terrible outbreak of hoodies (next week’s Doctor Who episode title, that…) amongst the nation’s youth. A casual listener could easily have been fooled into thinking that the government was going to do something about it, so carefully did she reply. A stupid casual listener could even have gone away thinking that the government intended to ban hoodies and baseball caps completely. In fact, the government’s position is to essentially do nothing about related kinds of, and I hate this phrase but what the hell, ‘anti-social behaviour’. Firstly, it isn’t really a huge problem, being more an issue of perception than actual danger (with a few notable exceptions – the craze for happy slapping being one…). Secondly, the government have probably reached the limits of their ability to dabble in our day to day lives (although I wouldn’t like to put money on that – governments have a habit of becoming more creatively authoritarian as time passes – and this one is quite the expert). Thirdly, there’s no real money to throw at the problem – there are more uniformed pseudo-police on the streets, and they have the power to ASBO at will, but that’s about it. Fourthly, it’s partly their fault that the problem has arisen/worsened anyway, as they’ve steadily cut the funding for youth centres and suchlike.

The other slightly odd way in which this Orwellian nature of political debate has cropped up this week has been in the analyses of the Conservative campaign by the government, and also in some of the victory speeches that were made at the time our Glorious Leader knew his fate. Particularly interesting was the centre-left and the media’s insistence that campaigning on immigration was a terrible evil, pandering to racists and worst (this is partly true, but it’s not the point I’m discussing) before the election, but privately admitting after the election that the Tories were right to focus on the system and that it cost Labour seats. Compare and contrast this:

‘I have listened, and I have… learnt. And I think I have a very clear idea of what the British people now expect from this government. Life is still a real struggle for many people in this country… tomorrow’s pensioners are deeply concerned… I know that Iraq has been a deeply divisive issue in this country; that has been very, very clear.’

with what the Prime Minister and the rest of the Labour campaign team had been saying just 24 hours earlier. Sure, some of it is bravado, campaigning, electioneering and all that, but some of it is deeply disturbing – this ability to quite brazenly say one thing and mean something entirely different.

For our PR fans at The Sharpener, Harriet let loose another example last night. When questioned about the fact that England voted Tory and got Labour, and about the 97 manifesto commitment to look at electoral reform and have a referendum, she batted it away by claiming that PR had already been introduced. In Scotland, London, and for the European elections. If the Westminster voting system were to change, there would be a referendum, but as no change was being proposed, no referendum was needed. A lovely lawyer’s answer for you. This statement:

‘We are committed to a referendum on the voting system for the House of Commons. An independent commission on voting systems will be appointed early to recommend a proportional alternative to the first-past-the-post system’

in the 1997 Labour manifesto clearly didn’t mean what, on the face of it, you would expect it to mean.

This kind of behaviour is becoming endemic to New Labour MPs, and if the Blue Labour tendency in the Tory party get their way, it will become endemic to most of politics. The problem, as Third Avenue expresses so eloquently below, is that all of our political parties are authoritarians of some stripe. They all believe that government has the answer to any particular problem you might have. Once you accept that point, it’s a short step to arguing that government has a moral duty to intervene, and that’s when you have to start locking up kids for wearing clothes that conceal their faces (which, as an aside, is a perfectly rational response to an increasingly surveillance-driven society, guilty or innocent of any crime – there is a good book by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke called The Light of Other Days which explores the theme of privacy in a world with perfect surveillance).

It has been a tough month, all in all, for those of us who value genuine debate, who value the truth, and who place a premium on honesty. We’ve seen politicians of all three main flavours insisting that what was being discussed on the doorsteps was precisely what their campaign was focussing on, and that the other two parties were irrelevant. We’ve seen a barrage of lies and statistics, and a conflation of the two. We’ve seen accusations and insults fly across no-man’s land, and we’ve seen the crass opportunism on all sides as each claims to be above the dirty campaigning, the smears and the rough and tumble.

So what are we supposed to do about it? I’m not really sure, but like a Las Vegas hooker at the end of a long, tiring shift, I’m left with an unpleasant taste in my mouth.

Whatever you do,
Whatever you say,
Yeah I know it’s alright…
Whatever you do,
Whatever you say,
Yeah I know it’s alright.

Our glorious leader triumphed last week, and it was a triumph, even though most of my colleagues at The Sharpener, the British blogosphere, and even, by raw numbers, most of England don’t really want him around any more. So why now have his ungrateful left wing turned on him so ferociously? Didn’t they hear his speech? ‘Some comrades fell in battle, but blah, blah, blah…’ He even spoke their language, which must be odd after 8 years of him trying to speak mine.

Meanwhile, my leader did the honourable, traditional, upstanding, thoroughly Conservative thing, and fell on his sword. Over the weekend, we’ve seen the left wing of my party, the modernists, the children of Portillo, strike the first blow in the leadership fight. Blue Labour have moved early. It is looking like moves to change the voting rules will be made to prevent party members voting on their preferred candidate, who would almost certainly be David Davis. I think that a lurch to the left would be as disastrous for the party as a lurch to the right, and my preferred solution would be a dream ticket partnership of moderniser and right-winger as PM and Chancellor, in either order, but sharing policy duties in a similar manner to Blair-Brown. The way forward for the right, as I’ve argued before, and as Blimpish hinted at in his post, is to build a coalition. All of us are stronger than some of us, or something like that. We do have work to do, it will take time, it won’t be easy, but it is necessary, and it will be good for the party and the country. We don’t have to abandon what makes us conservative in the process of winning power. I’m happy to start the ball rolling on this front, as the party needs some unity in the coming 9 (?) months. I’d love to jump into bed with the modernisers. I’m an old fashioned classical liberal at heart. I believe in low taxes, free markets and economic conservatism. I don’t care what you do in the bedroom, I don’t care what you eat, drink, smoke, inject, sleep with or marry, so on the face of it I should be a Tory moderniser. I would love the party to be what Blimpish called The Liberty Option, because it’s what I passionately believe in, but it shouldn’t become that because I know that a libertarian-strong Tory party, or a Blue Labour soft-left alternative Tory party would be unelectable. I would love us to be that party, but we don’t live in that country. All it takes is for an illegal immigrant to murder a policeman, or a baby to die from MRSA on a crowded, dirty hospital ward, or for just one too many people to lose their job because the economy aint what it used to be, and the two best read dead-tree rags will be begging Blair to come back. The problem with libertarianism is people. They’re perfectly happy with freedom when everything is rosy. When it all goes wrong, they want to know what you’re going to do about it. If we want to take power, we have to take it for a generation. We need to make huge, far-reaching changes, and 4 years between Labour governments isn’t going to allow that. We can keep a lot of what makes us Tories, but we each have to compromise on some ideology and some beliefs. So that’s the state of the Tory party. People who know me well call me a cynic, but really I’m pessimistic about the present and optimistic about the future. When you look at how far we, as people, have come in just a hundred years, it’s hard not to be.

How do the other lot look? Oddly enough, they’re mirroring some of my side’s internal struggles. Factions within the party are threatening to run a stalking horse candidate to speed up Blair’s departure. The Blairite faction is what got New Labour elected initially. Blair doesn’t scare the horses – he plays well in middle England, not like those nasty old trade unionists of the past. He’s a pragmatist, and his reign is coming to an end. Just as the Tory party are looking to lurch left onto New Labour territory, so New Labour are looking to drop the New and lurch left onto old Labour territory. I’m not sure that electing Brown will do that, as he’s a clever man and he must be able to count seats and votes. But the Labour left want to do what left wing political movements do – splinter. And that’s about all I know about internal Labour party politics. They have a harder road than we do – they’re in power. They have hard choices to make on pensions provision, on council tax reform, on public service provision, on welfare reform and they’re going to have to do it during an economic downturn. Still, with Big Blunkett running the DWP, it can’t be long before he’s touting house arrest for over 65’s to slow the upcoming pensions crisis.

Meanwhile, quietly in the background, the masters of opportunism repositioning are doing this. One to watch.

L: 36-38
C: 32-33
LD: 21-24

and even the betting exchanges are showing Labour with around 370 seats, the Tories on about 190, and the Libs on about 65, which would give an overall majority around 90 for our glorious leader.

I would argue that with an unpopular government looking for a 3rd term in office, with a massively discredited leader and a slowly crumbling economy, this is not a great result for us on the right. It is rapidly becoming traditional, amongst the Tory faithful, to swiftly knife the leader after polling day to try to banish the memories of what went wrong and why, and although that will probably not happen this time, it will do in a year, and the parliamentary party will have learnt precisely nothing (on aggregate at least – the modernists will claim we should be more centrist, and the paleo-cons will claim we should be more right-wing). Although the electoral process is difficult for the Tories at the moment, it’s a bit rich to blame the system when we had a stake in the Boundary Commission that made it as it is. Plus, we’ve benefitted in the past, so it’s hard to cry foul now – for the same reason, it’s hard for the Tory party to point to the, frankly ridiculous, numbers of claimants of incapacity benefits and insist that they are de facto unemployed, because we invented that little fudge…

In all honesty, this election was there to be won, and we lost it (I’m going to look pretty stupid in the event that we actually don’t lose it…). I think Howard fought a bad campaign, not because of the issues he chose, although there will be all kinds of media comment over the next week about his unrelenting bashing of immigrants, gypsies, Jews(whoops, that’s the Labour party), and other assorted minority scapegoats. I think his campaign was pretty petty minded, in the sense that instead of inspiring people by talking about big visions and big reforms in healthcare, in education, in the economy, and so on, he talked about sweeping floors and sending kids to detention. I also think the media played it’s part, and this isn’t a whiny swipe at the much cliched liberal media that us VRWC bloggers like to write about, because they are looking for a story, and this is an easy one to go for: Nasty party still nasty. Crosby should have figured that out, and moved to neutralise it. I don’t know if leafletting people directly via Voter Vault will have done it, but somehow, I doubt it. Most people, I guess, don’t bother reading electoral mailings. They’d rather trust that nice man on the Beeb, and if he opens his interview by saying, “Good evening Michael Howard. You’re obsessed with immigration, aren’t you? Why are you so negative?” – a bit of that is going to stick.

Even though the boundaries do give Labour something like a 30-40 seat advantage, there was still an option at this election to make gains by selling a positive message about what a Britain ruled by the Conservatives would look like (there’s an opening for my fellow bloggers to make some easy comments…). I’m not really of the opinion that the Tories should move to being a party of classical liberalism, not least because there just isn’t electoral mileage in it, as much as I would like them to be that party. I think Labour’s great success over the last 10 years and more has been in building a useful coalition of people who really aren’t that alike. The Republicans in the US have done something similar, marrying the religious social conservatives to the libertarian right, and getting (generally) the poor to vote for tax cuts for the rich. Simplistic, but at least partially true. The Tories can’t survive by being a centre-right equivalent to New Labour, in the sense that Portillo and the modernisers want, nor can they survive by being UKIP, as the paleo-cons would want. They have to find common ground and sell it to the sceptics. The next year is absolutely crucial in doing that. We need to come out of this election fighting, and definitely not amongst ourselves. I’ll save one good word for Howard at the end – he has partially instilled this in the party. Although we (massively) disagree on the right about social issues, Europe, the size of the state and even foreign policy (God forbid), we don’t let the media know about it, and we’ve been pretty disciplined in that respect. That has to carry forward, but to a much greater extent.

My mission, over the next 4-5 years, is to convince the lefties on the sidebar over there, that the Tory party doesn’t actually have to be that nasty, that a small state is a good thing, and that it’s worth ticking that Conservative box in the next election. If I can get one of them to do it, I’ll have succeeded, and so will this blog. Of course, the converse is true – they may end up getting me to vote for the Green Socialist Party of Communist Britain, or some other such nonsense. Let battle commence.