people who transgress politically correct beliefs are seen not just as wrong, to be debated with, but evil, to be condemned, silenced and spurned.

Let’s put Browne’s frightening vision to the test. Here as some of the tenets of political correctness, as posited by Browne:

America, as the world’s most powerful country, can never do any good, even though it is the world’s most powerful liberal democracy, the largest donor of overseas aid, and it defeated both Nazism and Communism.

Golly. So, what happens to people who don’t share this view? They are indeed horribly marginalised in modern Britain. Deprived of any real power, they must content themselves with such menial posts as Prime Minister, Secretary of State for Defence, Leader of the Opposition. Prevented by the PC commissars from taking any meaningful part in public life, they are reduced to taking such decisions as sending British troops to war alongside our American allies and their miserable social lives include such low-key events as hosting international leaders and being lauded by the US president for their contribution to the Anglo-American alliance. The iron fist of the PC dictatorship is strong indeed.

What other views are compulsory under the new terror?

The West, as the world’s most powerful cultural and economic group, can safely be blamed for all the world’s ills, even though it is largely responsible for the worldwide spread of prosperity, democracy and scientific advance.

And the people who don’t agree with this? The Frederick Forsyths, the Melanie Phillipses, the Boris Johnsons? These poor benighted souls are reduced to publishing bestselling novels and hiding their despised views in weekly columns in mass-circulation newspapers, where no-one apart from the entire population can read them. Horrible it must be to be so excluded from public debate.

But it gets worse. Not just politics are affected.

Multinational corporations are condemned as the oppressors of the world’s poor, rather than seen as engines of global economic growth with vast job-creating investments in the world’s poorest countries, pushing up wages and transferring knowledge.

Again, misery awaits those who disagree with this fundamental PC truth. They can aspire to little more than being some of the most affluent and powerful people in the country, in charge of the economy, pushing global trade to levels unseen before in human history and making Britain and the rest of the West rich beyond any precedent. Pity them, pity them indeed.

Browne’s view is chilling in the extreme. If only it were true.

In my previous posting I argued that, personally, I did not think that the West Lothian question was so big an issue that it required further constitutional change. Very many disagreed with me. Some pointed to an English parliament as a workable (if, in my view, hugely expensive, complex and disruptive) option tied to UK-wide federalism.

A totally unworkable solution, one betraying a deep ignorance of and contempt for the British constitution, was the one chosen by the Tory party at the last general election. This is how I described it then:

The Tories’ proposal at the last election was to formally deprive Scottish MPs of the right to vote on English issues. The best adjective for this is bonkers. That it should issue from a party that describes itself as both ‘unionist’ and ‘conservative’ is beyond parody. At a stroke, this measure could make the UK ungovernable.

Say a Labour government were elected with a good UK majority but without a majority in England (as has happened in the past). Under the Tories’ ideas, that government would not be able to implement any of its health, crime, education, etc, proposals, as it would lack the necessary votes. Only Tory proposals could pass. But given that only the government has access to the Civil Service, Parliamentary draughtsmen, etc, this means that none of these areas could be touched. Of course, you could say that this would be a good thing, but it would transform the nature of the way Britain is governed.

If you did want things done, then you would need two separate governments acting in parallel, with two different prime ministers depending on the subject in question (Labour for defence, pensions and welfare payment, Tory for health, education and crime). It would not be a continental-style coalition, but some curious new animal for which I can think of no precedent around the world. Prime Minister’s Questions would be interesting, with the two party leaders having to run from one side of the dispatch box to the other depending on what the subject matter was.

And if you could solve it in parliament, what about executive decisions? Who would be the bona fide health minister, a Labour or Tory politician? Most laws give sweeping powers to the ‘Secretary of State’. The Secretary of State is appointed by the Prime Minister (in turn appointed by the Queen), ie, Labour in my scenario, or would it be Tory, or both or… It just gets too ludicrous once you start going down that path.

I had rather thought that, once the election was over, the Tories would drop this ridiculous and dangerous proposal having recognised it for the nonsense it so clearly is. But David Davis now seems determined to resurrect it.

Either Davis knows it will not work, which means he is simply being populist in a despicably cynical way, or he thinks it will work, which betrays an ignorance of the way Britain is governed that is frankly staggering in a man wishing to be Prime Minister.

Whichever is the truth, it does precious little to commend David Davis as a future leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition.

This time of the year sees one of my favourite British traditions. Like most traditions, it is highly ritualised and varies remarkably little from year to year. But small changes are allowed, as the British know instinctively that freezing a tradition will inevitably result in its atrophy and decline. For the benefit of any foreign readers to this site, here is how it works.

This tradition goes under the general title of the ‘Turner Prize’, and functions as follows:

Stage 1: Tate Britain, the world’s leading gallery of British art, holds a ‘contest’ (as the rite is known) each year named after the great British artist, Turner. The works of art submitted are always described as being ‘modern’ or ‘conceptual’. A compulsory component each year is the inclusion of animal or human excrement, a faulty bulb and a cow’s stomach entitled ‘Lack of Motherly Affection’. Apart from this, variations are allowed, although tradition dictates that the ‘competitors’, as the participants in this British ritual are called, do not stray too far from the above themes.

Stage 2: Once the works of art are on display and hordes of British subjects, young and old, flock to see them (another compulsory part of the tradition), it’s time for the next stage. This involves articles appearing in newspapers and, more recently, on the Internet denouncing the Turner Prize as yet another sure sign that the Liberal Elite is succeeding in destroying British Civilisation As We Know It. Again, the exact content of these articles is allowed to vary, but tradition stipulates that each must include at least one of the following phrases: ‘it’s not really art’, ‘Emperor’s new clothes’ and ‘my six-year old could have done it’. The last one is particularly popular.

Foreign visitors unaware of the intricacies of this great tradition may be alarmed at these confident predictions by eminent writers of the imminent demise of British civilisation. But there is no need for concern. It’s all just part of the tradition. Predicting the end of British Civilisation As We Know It at the hands of the Liberal Elite is in itself a great British tradition going back at least three centuries. British children are taught at an early age not to be frightened by it. It is a wonderful and cheering example of the British sense of humour, about which you have no doubt seen much written.

Stage 3: This is actually a new stage that has only emerged over the past few years, and shows the British genius at adapting old traditions to the demands of the modern age. We have all read much about the ‘victim culture’ that seems to run through contemporary society. Well, the British have, with a sense of irony surely unequalled by any other nation, incorporated the victim culture into the tradition of the Turner Prize. Who are the victims? Those who do not like the Turner Prize (shame on them, for scorning such a cornerstone of British life). The scene of their victimhood? That agent of terror, the dinner party. In most countries, a dinner party is a venue for friends to get together over good food and wine. I must admit that such dinner parties do occur in Britain. But they are complemented by truly terrifying dinner parties where uttering a throw-away derisory opinion about the Turner Prize can end careers and destroy marriages. How to recognise such a dinner party? Not an easy task. The British do it instinctively, usually by detecting the presence of the word ‘Islington’, ‘Hampstead’ or, increasingly often, ‘Clapham’ or ‘Shoreditch’ in the invitation. Never, ever attend a dinner party in one of these areas during Turner Prize season. Or you too could become a victim of this vicious aspect of an otherwise benign tradition. Although perhaps you shouldn’t be too scared – most victims survive to tell the tale quite lucratively in the columns of the Sunday newspapers.

Stage 4: Sometime early in December the ‘winner’ of the prize is announced. Tradition dictates two possible responses. You may express pride that British art leads the world (although this may mark you out as being a candidate for the Liberal Elite). Or you may express horror at the absolute decline in standards and bemoan the fact that nobody paints like Rembrandt any more (but beware the aforementioned dinner parties). Both responses are quite acceptable according to the demands of tradition. The latter is far, far more common, so, just to be a bit more individual, I would recommend adopting the former.

Stage 5: Crucially, once it’s all over, you must forget, or pretend to forget that it ever happened. This way you can feign astonishment when the whole thing starts again next year. For, like all great traditions, start again it most certainly will.

Also posted at Third Avenue.

And who frames this debate? Who to a large extent drives it, shapes it, boosts it? The blogs. Blogging in the US is huge. To take one example, the Daily Kos, one of the leading liberal blogs, gets a daily readership of nearly 850,000. Well over three quarters of a million. Adjusting for population, a UK blog would need to get a daily readership of around 200,000 to compete. And yet how many British blogs get even one percent of that figure? Even half of one percent? Precious few.

What is the matter with us British bloggers? Where are we going wrong? Is it that:

• we are just not as clever as the Americans?

• we are stymied by the Official Secret Acts?

• we spend too much time trashing each other or writing posts on the lines of: ‘X wrote this in a newspaper today, X is an idiot, hurrah’?

• the British mainstream media does a better job than its US counterpart, thus reducing the need for blogs?

Or is there some other, deeper national malaise that we need to crack?

Answers please.

We now laugh in the face of the infections that only a few generations ago would have carried us off to an early grave. More and more people are surviving, and surviving for many years, the types of cancer that even a decade or two back would have proved fatal. We are pushing death ever further away, and are likely to continue doing so. But death still claims all of us in the end, even if our manner of approaching it, fighting it or welcoming it is increasingly the subject of painful debate.

A right to die?

The British House of Lords is currently considering a bill that would allow doctors to help some terminally-ill people to die. The bill is often referred to, mistakenly in my view, as giving the ‘right to die’. But such a right has existed in Britain at least since the early 1960s when suicide was decriminalised. What we are talking about here is not really about ‘rights’, it is about imposing on doctors a new obligation: the obligation of terminating someone’s life (for without such an obligation, talking of a patient’s ‘right to die’ is meaningless).

Until now, society has been able to take a more pragmatic view of this issue. As the Guardian reports, some 20% of deaths in the UK even today may well be the ‘side-effect’ of the alleviation of pain – and it probably has been thus for generations (George V’s death being a famous case in point). There have also been numerous cases where parents or spouses have helped loved ones to die: the courts have generally taken a lenient view. My preferred solution would be to have this pragmatic approach continue. Doctors, patients and families could discuss options privately, and the police and the courts could use their discretion. But modern society, alas, demands that such things be formalised in law. In a post-Shipman world, we need everything in black and white. This is understandable, but making it explicit in an Act of Parliament that patients have a right to demand that doctors take active measures to end their life is a step too far for me.

I realise that I stand open to the accusation of moral inconsistency: that I am happy to see the justice system turn a blind, or at least a lenient eye, to actual instances of euthanasia, while objecting to its explicit legalisation. Guilty as charged. Legislation is not necessarily the best place to codify the grey areas of human morality. There is a big moral difference between the actions of a wife who helps her terminally-ill husband take an overdose and those of a wife who poisons her husband so she can take his money and run off with the next-door neighbour. But that does not mean that the first wife’s actions should be made explicitly legal.

A right to refuse treatment?

I am firmly against an explicit legal right to euthanasia, much though I understand the pain of those who argue in its favour. A fundamentally different question, however, is the right not to receive or continue to receive medical treatment: and it was this that was at the heart of the Terri Schiavo case here in the States earlier this year (although the issue was muddied by a deeply distressing family dispute). There is no question in my mind that a competent patient, or their competent next of kin, should be able to decide whether to accept treatment, even if its refusal would have a terminal outcome. The alternative, indeed, fills me with dread. For the law to oblige me or my loved ones to accept continued treatment, however horrible, however painful, however much against my or their express wishes, is to open up a new and disturbing view of the relationship between the individual and the state.

A right to be given treatment?

But what about the other side of the debate? Do patients have the right to demand treatment even if doctors consider it inappropriate?

Few legal cases are as painful as that involving Charlotte Wyatt, a baby girl born with a serious lung condition. Doctors took the decision that, were her condition to deteriorate, further attempts to resuscitate her would not be in her best interests. Her parents took the case to court to demand that such attempts be made. They lost. As far as I am aware, Charlotte is still alive.

A court is one of the last places one would want such as matter discussed, so cruel an instrument is the law: the emotional power of the parents’ arguments is overwhelming, and yet the law must be dispassionate, and, however unfeeling this may sound, the judge’s decision seems to me the right one (remember, the judge had to decide on the principle behind the case). No health service, however well funded, could survive if patients could demand all and every life-prolonging treatment, however clinically unfounded, however much it was against the views of the doctors, however much suffering it would bring. As technology advances, cases such as Charlotte’s are likely to become more common. Patients should always be consulted and their views given all due weight, but, in the imperfect world that we have, doctors must inevitably be given the final say. It is quite possible to argue that the medical decision in Charlotte’s case was wrong. The legal decision, though, seems to me completely sound.

It is tempting to see cases such as Charlotte’s as being some modern phenomenon whereby life is being slowly devalued. Quite the opposite is true, in my view. Until recently, Charlotte’s case would have never come to the public attention because she would have died naturally, probably immediately after her birth. It is the very advances in medical technology, and our increasing demands that extraordinary measures be taken to preserve life, that bring cases such as hers to the fore. And even if such technology had existed in the past, the overwhelming sway of deference, now long abandoned, the absolute certainty that the doctors always knew best, would have made a legal challenge to the prevailing medical opinion virtually unthinkable.

The Lord taketh away (but not if modern medicine has any say in the matter)

The advance in medical technology is one of the great good-news stories of the past century. That said, I have little doubt that previous, more religious, generations would have found something almost blasphemous in the way modern medicine, with its emphasis on hospitals, tubes and chemicals, is used to prolong life, in defiance, as many would have seen it, of God’s will. We are quite likely not that far away from being able to remove a brain from a shattered body and keeping it alive in a chemical solution indefinitely. Few, I think, would argue that life is so precious as to make such a step a welcome development.

Death comes to us all. Putting a legal obligation on others to hasten it for us is wrong. But neither should we make such a fetish of life that we make death not merely the end, but the ultimate moral failing.

Mounting expectations

This was not the queue for people looking for tickets. No, those sad souls were soon put right as to the hopelessness of their cause. It was not the queue for people wanting to pick up their already-reserved tickets from the box office. That queue had its own, separate path. The queue that brought in mind Soviet food shortages from the early 1990s was merely the queue of ticket-holders waiting to get into the hall.

A rather desperate-looking young woman was offering $100 for two tickets (face value – $12). Leaflet-wielders made their rounds up and down the queue. Did I know that 9/11 was a conspiracy cooked up by the US government? That the workers should rise up and overthrow the evil cabal of Washington? That Galloway, the ‘toad of Damascus’, was a tool of vile dictators? Pavement debates about the merits of the war, the failures of Bush, and the anticipated entertainment, sprang up all around.

I joined the queue at 6.20pm. The event was due to start at 7pm. Such was the pressure for seats, so overwhelmed were the door staff, that the first words were not uttered until it was almost 7.45pm.

The motion: ‘The March 2003 war in Iraq was necessary and just’

The two men entered from opposite sides of the platform. There was enough aggressive testosterone in the room to give Britney Spears chest hair. Amy Goodman, the curiously lacklustre and frustratingly non-interventionist moderator, gave a short introduction, and they were off. Naked mud wresting was never such compelling spectator sport.

Both men spoke with few or no notes. Both men were eloquent. Both men knew how to work an audience. Both men had enough facts at their fingertips to double the size of Wikipedia. Neither man made more than a cursory attempt to illuminate.

Hitchens listed his view of the benefits of the war: Saddam in jail, freedom of speech for Iraqis, Libya’s abandonment of its WMDs, democracy spreading in the Arab world.

Galloway focused on the suffering of the Iraqi people from the war, the 100,000 dead, the increased terrorism the war had fostered, the hatred of the West that was growing across the world.

More heat than light

But mostly, they hurled insults at one another. Insults poured in a vertiginous torrent. There was enough hatred, yes, real hatred, between these two men to keep a small civil war going for several decades.

Hitchens started by accusing Galloway of ‘slobbering’. Slobbering then over Saddam. Now slobbering over Assad of Syria. Slobbering over every loathsome dictator he came across (although, disappointingly, he didn’t accuse him of slobbering over Slobodan..).

For Galloway, Hitchens had performed a feat never before seen in the natural world: he had undergone a ‘metamorphosis from a butterfly back into a slug’ and was now wallowing in his own slime. People like Hitchens, he said, are ready to fight ‘to the last drop of other people’s blood’.

The audience loved it. Or, rather, the audience loved hating the speaker they were opposed to. From where I was sitting, it seemed the audience was reasonably evenly divided, with perhaps a small advantage to Galloway. It frequently got rowdy. It frequently got profane. It frequently was great fun.

Things threatened to turn ugly when Galloway described the attacks of 11 September 2001 as coming from ‘a swamp of hatred created by us’. Shouts of ‘how dare you!’, ‘go home!’ and worse echoed across the hall. When Hitchens replied by evoking the memory of the 9/11 dead in his favour, he was subjected to a similar barrage of audience invective. New Yorkers, it’s quite clear, do not take kindly to having the events of four years ago used to score cheap political points, whichever side they’re on.

What remained unsaid

For the first hour or so, this was all very entertaining. But the searing heat in the hall began to take its toll. Hitchens, whose scruffiness always seems rather deliberate, was sweating profusely. Galloway, in his immaculate and undoubtedly extremely expensive suit, looked more composed, but even he was wiping his brow more and more frequently.

I began to long for some real substance, for both men to be asked to address those thorny parts of their arguments, rather than being allowed simply to grandstand.

To take just two examples:

Hitchens never properly addressed the issue of whether the horror that is today’s Iraq in any way shook his faith in the rightness of the war. He was never asked whether the numerous factual negative consequences of the war could ever have any bearing on his argument, and what, if any, responsibility the US and UK bore for these. Simply denouncing the Lancet’s casualty figures as ‘crazed fabrications’ was really not good enough.

Galloway made much of the illegality of the war. He was never pressed on whether, had the war been given UN approval, he would then have supported it – or whether Western powers ever had in principle the right or the duty to intervene in sovereign states to prevent atrocities.

Both men might well have good answers to these questions. But we were never to know, as adding quotations to the Oxford Dictionary of Insults seemed all too often to be their one and only aim.

The best bits

Where was Hitchens good? He was good in defending his own support for the war, and his change of heart over the last decade. He had the sense to admit that Bush and Blair had done world politics a disservice in selling the war as a way of ridding humanity of the imminent threat of Saddam. And his rhetoric was forceful in both cataloguing the reasons for wanting Saddam gone, and in listing the positive developments that had resulted from his departure.

And Galloway? His best moment was his analysis of previous attempts by Western government to impose order on benighted countries – attempts, he said, that were notable by their ending in failure. He exposed as a fallacy the hope that merely ridding those countries of ‘foreign insurgents’ would solve the problem.

And the winner is?..

I suspect that supporters of either side would claim their man as the winner. I entered the hall with many questions in my head. I left with hardly any of them answered.

I’ll end with this rather enigmatic statement made during the debate, which I scribbled without attribution into my notebook:

This is masochism, but it is being offered to you by a sadist.

Quite.

This post can also be found at Third Avenue.

First, there was Katrina. The whole country, the whole world, has watched in disbelief as a great American city seemed to go the way of Atlantis and the mightiest superpower appeared unable to do anything about it. Federal, state and local authorities were all found to be lacking, and the billions invested into homeland security since September 2001 seemed to have added little to the nation’s ability to cope with a predicatable and predicted disaster.

But for this post I want to concentrate on the second event of the week, one that will have repercussions for decades to come, in all likelihood long after the Gulf Coast has recovered from the ravages of Katrina.

I write of the death of the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice, William Rehnquist, and of the subsequent nomination of John Roberts to be his successor.

Constitution country

Few, if any, Western countries are as devoted to their constitution as the United States. Britain, famously, has never got round to writing its constitution down, while other countries usually wrote theirs after a time of national disaster or crisis.

The United States’ constitution, however, is pretty much unique in having defined the nation at its very outset. One might say that before the constitution there was no USA. Wherever you are on the political spectrum here, from evangelical conservative to West-coast liberal, support for the constitution is likely to be the one thing that unites you.

With one caveat. One major caveat. The lessons the evangelical conservative draws from the document are almost certainly diametrically opposed to the lessons drawn from the self-same text by the West-coast liberal. Hence the importance of the Supreme Court, whose role it is to reveal the ‘true’ meaning of the text.

My self-evident truth is your self-evident nonsense

Truth, however, has turned out to be a slippery animal. The uncontested interpretation of the constitution of a century or so ago would have made it impossible for laws on national employment rights, sexual discrimination or indeed pensions to be passed. The same constitution that once allowed racial segretation was suddenly found to forbid it, despite no change in the constitution’s wording.

As the century progressed, the constitution was found to contain things that had previously remained hidden, such as the right to vote and the right to privacy.

Judges are, of course, political appointees in the US, and over the years Presidents of all colours have sought to build the Court in their own image. And as appointments are for life and judges can and do carry on working into very old age, decisions made now have an influence that stretch into the distant future.

For the last few decades, with increasing Republican dominance of the executive and legislature in Washington, DC, the court has been moving steadily rightwards. The new appointments expected over the coming months to replace Judges Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor, who retired earlier this year, will most likely continue this trend. The implications for American politics could be profound.

The more fundamentalist view of interpreting the constitution is now very much in the ascendancy: the view that we must go back to its original meaning, and not interpret it in the light of current mores (the parallels with the different strands of Christian thinking is striking).

Of course, as the constitution fails to mention things like the Internet, lie detectors and genetic screening, there is a limit to how far this fundamentalist view can be applied.

The States versus the states

Few issues have historically enflamed such passions amongst the political classes here as the arguments about states’ rights. What issues are off-limits to the federal government, and what should be left solely to the individual 50 states? Both sides have fought over this issue. The left wanted to limit the rights of states to decide their own business when the issue was racial segregation. Similarly, many on the right want to deprive states such as Massachussets of the right to legalise gay marriage. The most blatant example over recent months was Washington’s grotesque and disturbing involvement in the Terri Schiavo case – an involvement that was given short shrift by both the Supreme Court and US public opinion.

One of the most vocal proponents of states’ rights is current Justice Clarence Thomas. He has stated publicly on numerous occasions that the constitution is limited in its application to the individual states. Take, for example, the famous first amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion; or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Clear as day, no? Not quite. Justice Thomas argues that the first amendment does not give the right to free speech: it merely prevents congress from passing laws to limit it (which is, after all, what it says). If, say, South Dakota were to pass a law establishing Buddhism as the official religion, closing down newspapers it did not like and banning all public demonstration, this would not necessarily be anti-constitutional, as the constitution only refers to the actions of congress.

Such a view, even amongst right-wing jurists, is still very much marginal and runs counter to the dominant traditions here. But it is growing in influence, and its impact on American life could be profound.

Revisiting old decisions

One of the numerous elephants in the room is, of course, abortion. Abortion has been a constitutional right here for over thirty years, ever since Roe v Wade. The court sees it as being covered by the ‘right to privacy’ I mentioned above. The likely new chief justice, John Roberts, is known to be personally against abortion, and has cast doubt on the existence of the ‘right to privacy’. Is the overturning of Roe v Wade likely? Don’t hold you breath. Roberts has already described Roe v Wade as being ‘the law of the land’ and the court may well, for the time being at least, baulk at the thought of admitting that its most famous ruling over the past half-century was a mistake.

Abortion, in any case, although a huge issue here, is not quite the dominant legal theme that the European media likes to portray it as. The constitutional question that is most exercising the US public at the moment is a recent ruling on the Fifth Amendment.

Pleading the fifth

The Fifth Amendment is possibly the most famous outside the US. It guarantees the right of defendants not to incriminate themselves. Well, that’s what it’s famous for, in any case. But the amendment ends with another crucial line:

nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Recently, the court heard a case brought by residents of the town of New London, Connecticut. The local authority wanted to seize their property in order to demolish their houses and sell the land to a private developer to build plush new condominiums. The ‘public use’? The richer inhabitants of the new housing would pay more taxes. The residents claimed that this was far too loose a definition of ‘public use’. The court, to the surprise of many and the outrage of some, found in favour of the local authority.

This case has united left and right. The left sees it as a charter for big business to bully local authorities into seizing property (mostly from the poor) for purely business ends. The right sees it as an attack on that most American of values: the right to own property unmolested by the state. The court, on this issue at least, finds itself with few friends.

Outlasting Bush

Over the coming years, the Supreme Court will tackle some of the most crucial issues in America: affirmative action, campaign-finance legislation, environmental regulation. The appointments to the bench over the coming months will continue to decide the nation’s fate long after Bush, his successor and even his successor’s successor have settled into the complacent calm of political retirement.

But what would it be like if we could recreate a lost moral order? How much sweeter would life really be? Let me send a fairy godmother to an average British street. Let her fly down a fictional Acacia Avenue, working her magic to re-establish our lost Golden Age. Let’s observe the results.

A problem of definitions

Of course, our first problem is to tell this fairy godmother what precise Golden Age we are talking about. Its advocates are pretty vague when it comes to specific dates. So let me stick my neck out and say that what I mean here is a time before 1960, before the pill, Lady Chatterley and the Beatles. It is, perhaps, a mixture of the 1950s and the 1930s with a hefty pinch of late Victoriana.

Another major caveat is that I won’t really deal with economic and technological change. These are far from negligible – in his book, The Abolition of Britain, Peter Hitchens argues, rightly, that double-glazing and central heating had an impact on the structure of family life of a similar magnitude to any liberal legislation. So, of course, recreating a past age would require no more foreign holidays, no computer games, no Internet, no television, lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality, higher mortality overall. The list goes on, but for the sake of this posting, I will limit myself purely to changes in attitudes to moral and social issues. I’m not claiming to be exhaustive – the comments box is open for readers to add their own thoughts.

All agreed? Well, let the transformation begin.

Spreading joy..

Our fairy godmother spends her first few minutes with a big smile on her face. She takes down all the burglar alarms, movement-sensitive lights and neighbourhood watch signs. No need for those. She also relieves the inhabitants of Acacia Avenue of that nagging worry that crime is just around the corner, that doors need to be locked against lurking villains and that the walk home from the bus stop will be menaced by ‘hoodies’.

Graffiti disappears from the walls, beer cans no longer roll noisily along the tarmac. At No 42, the fairy godmother is explaining to little John and Sarah Watson that their parents are not, in fact, getting divorced. Family break-up in the Golden Age is a rare occurrence (except, of course, when caused by the far more frequent death of a family member).

The Watson children are also not alone in welcoming the fact that their grandparents now live just round the corner. In Golden Age Britain, extended families are much more likely to live in the same neighbourhoods.

…but joy not unalloyed

Some of those visited by the fairy godmother, however, are a bit more disconcerted by what they hear.

She hands Mrs Smith at No 15 a rather surprising letter. Mrs Smith, you see, is a consultant at the local hospital. The letter, from the local NHS trust, informs her of her immediate dismissal. It explains that, now that the Golden Age has been re-established, there is no place for women in such demanding roles. It is a well known Golden Age fact that women are prone to hysterics and that, once every month, this problem increases. It would be irresponsible of the Trust to keep her in its employ in such a risky area (although she may re-apply as a part-time receptionist). Mrs Smith is not the only one to be a bit miffed. Her patients might also be a bit surprised.

Women up and down Acacia Avenue receive similar letters. Those that aren’t immediately dismissed for being married or being female are told that their wages will be docked. It would be dangerous for society for them to be paid anything like their menfolk.

At No 12, little Jimmy and Susie Henderson are a bit upset that no-one wants to play with them anymore. They are not invited to any birthday parties, they are shunned in the playground and laughed at in the street. The fairy godmother explains to them that it is all for their own good: their mummy and daddy weren’t married when they were born, so, as bastards, they can’t expect society to treat them nicely, now can they?

The Singhs at No 43 are also in for a shock in the form of an eviction notice from their landlord: he simply doesn’t like having non-white tenants. Of course, in the Golden Age, we don’t believe in giving people like the Singhs legal protections.

Over at No 67, the Johnsons and the Pritchards are having dinner together when the fairy godmother arrives. She needs to set them right on a few things. The Johnsons have a daughter, Megan, with Down syndrome, while the Pritchards’ son, Josh, has cerebral palsy. First things first – we don’t like namby-pamby politically correct terms in the morally-superior Golden Age. We call spades spades. Megan is a mongol and Josh is a spastic, okay? Live with it.

And the Johnsons will have to stop these complaints that doctors are not giving Megan the full care she needs. In the Golden Age we believe in deference, not in some new-age ‘patients’ rights’ nonsense. What doctors say goes. Shut up and tug that forelock.

As for the Pritchards – this letter-writing to the council asking for more wheelchair ramps to be set up, for disabled toilet facilities to be expanded, and public transport made more accessible is really beyond the pale. Disabled people, sorry, cripples, have no business seeking to be ‘integrated’ into society. They should stay at home or in institutions, dependent and pitied, where they belong.

The hospice at the end of the road, caring for the old and the dying? We must shut it down – no room for that sentimental nonsense here (just read Charles Moore in the Telegraph for more). What about the day-care centre for those with learning disabilities (sorry again, I mean retards – I really must stop being so PC)? Well, that will have to go too.

And on it goes

The fairy godmother’s work continues, seeking out those who need to be set straight about the advent of the new Golden Age. Spreading her message of all those wonderful values, bringing undoubted happiness to some, but devastating the lives of others.

So the next time you find yourself hankering after some marvelous Golden Age of the past, just spare a thought for those, some of whom could be amongst your nearest and dearest, who would be left shivering in the cold outside while you pull your comfortable chair closer to the roaring fire of nostalgia.

Some aspects of the past are wonderful and positive. Some aspects of the present are less so. But to describe a bygone era as a Golden Age, while decrying modern society, is to forget the amazing advances that have been made in improving the lives of some of the most vulnerable, some of the most deserving. For me, the benefits of living in the present far, far outweigh the cost of having lost our mythical, wonderful past. I want to build on what we’ve got – not sink back to a former time whose so-called superior values treated so many people with contempt.

But is anti-Americanism really that widespread? And where precisely does legitimate criticism of the USA stray over the line into blatant anti-American sentiment?

Calling a spade a spade

‘All Americans are fat, stupid and ugly, and the US is the source of every evil on the planet.’ Such a statement, quite apart from being self-evidently untrue, can hardly be described as anything other than anti-American. And while one may hear such sentiments from dubious saloon-bar comics, one can hear similarly anti-European screeds from some dodgy wags here in the States (cheese-eating surrender monkeys, anyone?). All Germans are militaristic, all Frenchmen smell of garlic, the list of lazy stereotypes could go on.

But does anti-Americanism seep into more mainstream thinking? And how does one go about defining it?

A diversity of opinion

To be truly anti-American, one must surely instinctively reject ideas, policies and people merely on the basis that they are American, with no regard to their intrinsic value. Thus, to be a true anti-American, one must reject, say, Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky with the same enthusiasm as one does George W Bush or Ronald Reagan. One must despise the proponents of gay marriage in Massachusets just as one criticises the Christian right of Alabama. Unless one takes the view that Moore, Chomsky or gay-rights activists are somehow ‘less American’ than Bush, which would be a rather curious position to adopt. Looked at like this, the number of true anti-Americans in Europe begins to dwindle.

Some supporters of Bush might jump in at this point and say that the sin of anti-Americanism is to dismiss the last 50 years of American foreign policy – policy after all that has the democratic support of the American people, rather than the beliefs of private individuals like Chomsky or Moore. Again, this line of argument takes us down rather dubious paths. British membership of the EU has been the settled policy of all British governments for over 30 years, support for the NHS for over 50, and for the existence of the BBC for more than 80. Is it anti-British to criticise these policies?

Another problem for those complaining of anti-Americanism is that a very large proportion of Americans themselves are, by this estimation, anti-American. The island of Manhattan could easily out-Hampstead Hampstead for its liberal, anti-Bush, anti-war views. Are the Americans of Manhattan less American than their counterparts in Kansas? Is it not just as anti-American to mock the views of the former as it is to criticise the opinions of the latter?

It is a common mistake on the right and the left to reduce America to simplistic stereotypes. But America, and the American people, is as much about gay rights, feminism and envrionmental activism as it is about foreign intervention and aggressive capitalism. American government is not the same as America.

There are, no doubt, true anti-Americans in Europe and elsewhere. They deserve no sympathy. But neither do those who define anti-Americanism as opposition to a rather narrow view of what the US is about, and use this as a weapon to attack those who disagree with them.

One such issue is voting reform, a subject already dealt with in some detail on this site. Another, and one with the potential to put an even more ferocious cat among the pigeons, is the West Lothian question.

Much has been written over the years about it, and a lot of that has had only a nodding acquaintance with actual facts. So, at a risk of sending some to sleep, I want to try to get to grips with what the West Lothian question is, and how, if at all, we should try to answer it. Some of the following posting is taken from articles I have written on my own site over the past few months.

Start by defining the question

It all started in the 1970s when Tam Dalyell, then-MP for the then-constituency of West Lothian in Scotland, formulated his fundamental opposition to the devolution legislation which was at that time going through parliament:

How, asked Dalyell, can it be justified that Scottish MPs have the right to vote on English issues that do not concern their constituents, while English MPs do not have the same right to vote on Scottish issues?

This question has haunted proceedings ever since.

But let’s examine it in more detail. It comes in two parts. Firstly, Scottish MPs having the right to vote on English issues that do not concern their constituents. When did this outrage creep into our constitution? Well, that’s an easy one: the 1707 Act of Union. This gave all UK MPs equal rights over all legislation, whether or not it affected their constituents.

When, then, were English MPs deprived of the right to vote on Scottish issues? Another easy answer. It hasn’t happened. The rights of English MPs to vote on Scottish issues remain now what they always have been. They can vote on any aspect of Scottish legislation.

But what about devolution, I hear you ask? Didn’t that limit English MPs’ rights? Let’s look at the legislation. The 1998 Scotland Act is unequivocal (Section 29(7) if you’re interested): the rights of the Westminster parliament remain completely unaltered by devolution. MPs in London have exactly the same rights as they always had.

What the Scotland Act did was set up a body which, constitutionally, is arguably little more than an elected sub-committee of the Westminster parliament. It votes on Scottish issues only in so far as Westminster tolerates this. It could be sent packing without a by-your-leave today or tomorrow, if Westminster so decided.

At this point, I imagine that some of you West-Lothianites are getting a bit hot under the collar. You will be accusing me of missing the point, and of getting lost in legal niceties while in fact English MPs no longer legislate on devolved issues. Unfortunately, this also is not really true. English MPs legislate on devolved issues with remarkable frequency and alacrity. Since devolution there have been over sixty Sewel motions (the mechanism by which Westminster legislates on devolved issues). Sixty. On average, more than ten in a year- not that much different than the number of actual bills. Perhaps you think that these have been on trivial issues. But, unless you consider the legislation to create a supreme court trivial, or the act that allows gay people to enter civil partnerships, or the reform of gambling legislation, you must concede that Sewel motions have been used, or been proposed for, very serious legislation indeed. Again, legislation on which English MPs are using their unchanged rights to vote on devolved Scottish issues.

So, what’s the fuss about?

Do I think then that the West-Lothianites are simply misguided souls that just need to be shown the error of their ways? Well, not really. It would be idle to deny that the devolution legislation has transformed quite radically the way Scotland is governed. That it has gone relatively smoothly thus far is to a large extent down to the fact that the Executive in Edinburgh and the Government in London are of broadly similar hue. What happens when (or if) the Tories regain power nationally will be quite fascinating.

What I do believe quite strongly, however, is that the West-Lothianites are seriously overstating their case. The way England is governed has changed not one iota. That Scottish MPs should vote on English issues is nothing new – it is one of the fundamental tenets of the way Britain has been governed for 300 years. And it is simply factually incorrect to say that English MPs have been deprived of their right to legislate on Scottish issues. It is true that they do so less frequently than they used to, just as it is true that the number of Scottish MPs at Westminster has been significantly reduced.

New conventions have indeed been set up, and there are some issues (such as Scottish education) on which it would now be politically difficult for Westminster to legislate, but the UK remains the UK, and the Westminster parliament, with all its MPs, remains the sovereign body.

Providing an answer

The Tories’ proposal at the last election was to formally deprive Scottish MPs of the right to vote on English issues. The best adjective for this is bonkers. That it should issue from a party that describes itself as both ‘unionist’ and ‘conservative’ is beyond parody. At a stroke, this measure could make the UK ungovernable.

Say a Labour government were elected with a good UK majority but without a majority in England (as has happened in the past). Under the Tories’ ideas, that government would not be able to implement any of its health, crime, education, etc, proposals, as it would lack the necessary votes. Only Tory proposals could pass. But given that only the government has access to the Civil Service, Parliamentary draughtsmen, etc, this means that none of these areas could be touched. Of course, you could say that this would be a good thing, but it would transform the nature of the way Britain is governed.

If you did want things done, then you would need two separate governments acting in parallel, with two different prime ministers depending on the subject in question (Labour for defence, pensions and welfare payment, Tory for health, education and crime). It would not be a continental-style coalition, but some curious new animal for which I can think of no precedent around the world. Prime Minister’s Questions would be interesting, with the two party leaders having to run from one side of the dispatch box to the other depending on what the subject matter was.

And if you could solve it in parliament, what about executive decisions? Who would be the bona fide health minister, a Labour or Tory politician? Most laws give sweeping powers to the ‘Secretary of State’. The Secretary of State is appointed by the Prime Minister (in turn appointed by the Queen), ie, Labour in my scenario, or would it be Tory, or both or… It just gets too ludicrous once you start going down that path.

Another option would be to set up an English parliament – a huge can of worms in itself, not least because it would require a definitive way of handling both my own homeland, Wales and, wait for it, Northern Ireland.

Or, of course, we could do nothing. Which is my preferred option (another one of my secret conservative tendencies). It is frustrating that Labour ministers seem unable to handle questions on this issue. They should be firm and forthright: Westminster is the parliament that rules all the UK, Westminster MPs have the rights they always had, Westminster is sovereign and must remain so.

I agree that the current post-devolution situation is messy. But one of the hallmarks of the British constitution is its messiness. It is no more messy now that it was in the past.

So let’s celebrate the great British tradition of messiness, and leave West Lothian in peace.