Keep these people locked up until they pay up

With very few exceptions (railway electrification; gay marriage), the present government has so far done very little good, and a lot of harm.

Home Secretaries, meanwhile, of whatever political hue, rarely do anything but harm. You have to go back nearly 50 years for the only exception I can think of, Roy Jenkins.

It therefore comes as quite a surprise to find myself welcoming a proposal made by Home Secterary Theresa May.

According to the London Evening Standard, Ms May is going to introduce default sentences for convicted crime bosses who fail to pay back their illicit profits. Furthermore:

New legal agreements and closer cooperation will be sought with Spain and the United Arab Emirates — two countries in which £200 million of British criminal assets are estimated to be held. There will be similar deals with West African governments and other nations such as Pakistan.

It is years ago now that I was outraged to discover that professional criminals have often been able to stash away the loot from their crimes and gain access to it once they are out of jail.

As I wrote nearly five years ago in Let Ronald Biggs die in jail,

My proposal is that professional gangsters should never be let out of jail until they have paid back everything they stole. They should certainly remain locked up until they have said where the loot is stashed and allowed the authorities to recoup it.

There ought to be a new kind of sentence, such as "20 years (say) or until the amount stolen is fully paid back, whichever is the longer". Ms May's new proposal does not appear to go quite that far, but it is a step in the right direction.

What, I hear you ask, is a woolly old lefty liberal like me doing supporting heavier penalties, a stance generally regarded as "right-wing"?

The answer is that I draw a sharp distinction between professional criminals -- organised gangsters -- and the general run of casual or petty offenders who make up so much of the prison population. As the various prison reform groups having been pointing out for decades, many of these people are more inadequate than evil, and often simply mentally deficient. Arguably, little purpose is served by locking them up.

And, as I wrote in my earlier piece,

If society had its moral compass right, [hardcore professional criminals] would be more vilified even than paedophiles, rapists and random killers. Many of the latter, it can be argued, are sick. There is something wrong with them: they are psychopaths, or their brains don't work properly; they are mentally ill, whether temporarily or permanently. 

No such defence is available to the professional criminal, who is perfectly sane, knows exactly what he is doing, and is motivated by sheer greed.

I don't entertain much hope that these people can ever be reformed. They simply need locking away for as long as possible, and above all must not be permitted to benefit from their evil activities.

NCCL, Harman, Hewitt, PIE, and the 1970s

I hold no brief at all for Harriet Harman or Patricia Hewitt as Labour politicians. Indeed, as it happens they both featured in a list of the 15 most irritating women on the planet that I wrote nearly six years ago.

Nevertheless, in the light of the present fuss arising out of the Daily Mail's nasty smear campaign, the following needs to be said about the NCCL all those decades ago.

At the time in question (1970s), I was part of the leadership of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE), an organisation which, like PIE, was affiliated to the NCCL. I attended many NCCL conferences in those years.

For an organisation to be affiliated to the NCCL is not at all the same thing as the NCCL being affiliated to the said organisation. The NCCL was not an affiliate of PIE. PIE was an affiliate of the NCCL. It was a one-directional transaction. Much of the press coverage in the last couple of days has been quite misleading on this point.

One paid one's membership fee and received papers and publications, and the right to attend the NCCL annual conference and table resolutions. I don't recall that it gave any kind of direct line into NCCL policymaking. If you wanted to shape NCCL policy you had to make your case on a resolution at the annual conference and get it passed on a vote of those present. Even then, it was quite likely that the few overworked staff would not get round to acting on it.

Hundreds of bodies were affiliated to NCCL and it would have been unreasonable to expect the half-dozen or so office staff to "vet" every organisation applying for affiliation to check whether its policy was in line with that of the NCCL. There was never any such expectation. That just was not how the system worked.

The idea that PIE successfully "infiltrated" NCCL and used NCCL staff like P. Hewitt and H. Harman as mouthpieces for its ideas is therefore wrong. Contrary to what the Mail has tried to insinuate by selective quoting from certain documents, NCCL policy -- on, for example, the age of consent -- did not reflect PIE's aims. For a long time the NCCL argued for an age of consent of 14, much higher than what PIE was agitating for (ten, or zero, depending on whose account you read, but either way a completely unacceptable idea to everyone else).

True, nowadays an age of consent of 14 would itself be seen as unacceptable to most. But that was the NCCL's carefully argued policy at the time, nothing to do with PIE, and I remember Patricia Hewitt speaking in favour of it. I don't know if Harriet Harman ever did -- she came rather later. If the Mail and its ilk want to attack anyone on this score, it should be Hewitt rather than Harman. But Hewitt is no longer an MP so of course that wouldn't serve the Mail's purpose, which is to smear the current Labour leadership.

I'm sure that, if pressed on the PIE question at the time, NCCL people would have said, in the phrase usually attributed to Voltaire, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". In other words, for NCCL it would have been essentially a question of freedom of speech, the principal aim of the organisation since its founding in the 1930s.

Since those days, freedom of speech has become much less fashionable. But fashions come and go, and one cannot reasonably judge the past according to the fashions of today.

The Mail also produced a document signed by Ms Harman in 1978 on a different topic -- the possession of child pornography. People have forgotten that at that time the mere possession of such material was not yet an offence. There was a proposal to make it one, and as I understand it the Harman paper was NCCL's attempt to influence the wording of the legislation, agreeing with the idea of making possession illegal but trying to prevent such cases as people being prosecuted for taking pictures of their own children in the bath (unsuccessfully, it would appear, since there have subsequently been such cases).

For a refreshingly fair and level-headed take on this whole story, see this piece today by the Conservative commentator Iain Dale.

Ten reasons why I am different from most people

1. I do not have a smartphone.

2. I do not have a Facebook account.

3. I do not like beer or tea.

4. I loathe the whole British pub culture thing. Why does everyone have to crowd round the bar? Why should the tallest people with the most "presence" get served first? In what way is the continental cafe system, with its waiters, not obviously more efficient, fairer, and less stressful? And the system of "buying rounds" is sheer lunacy.

5. I think the entire popular culture sucks, and has done for at least 3 decades. Why has nobody written a decent tune since about 1975? What makes people think Andrew Lloyd Webber and Elton John have any talent?

6. I have never once done drugs, whether hard or soft. Not making a moral point, just a factual one.

7. I really enjoy not having a motorcar. I liberated myself from its tyranny in 1981. (By the way, the motorcar has come close to destroying our civilisation.)

8. I hate shopping.

9. I can do spelling, punctuation, grammar and syntax. I seem to be about the last remaining person in the whole English-speaking world who understands about hyphens.

10. I check my e-mail only twice a day max.

Eight questions about the BBC crisis

1. Q. Can the BBC recover from this crisis?

A. Yes, probably, but that doesn't alter the fact that the quality of its journalism is declining, and has been for some time, in my view. That is probably due at least in part to budget cuts. Quality journalism costs money. They have clearly got rid of too many experienced journalists for comfort. They maybe ought to have ring-fenced the news and current affairs budget and instead made bigger cuts in the excessive layers of management bureaucracy, which have obviously burgeoned over the years, as happens in all large organisations (see Parkinson's Law). There are too many bean-counters and, as in most aspects of life today, the bean-counters have too much say. David Dimbleby was good on this point this morning in his interview with John Humphrys on the Today programme, as also on the subject of ridiculous management mumbo-jumbo. Private Eye has been banging on about that practically every fortnight for many years (see "Birtspeak 2.0"). Unfortunately, though it produces some good satirical programmes from time to time, the BBC is immune to satire about itself.

2. Q. How is morale at the BBC?

A. A statement just out from the NUJ says: "Morale is already at an all-time low". Ha ha ha ha! Every BBC person I have ever met has told me that morale was at an all-time low -- starting with my cousin in 1962, when he showed me round Bush House, where he was working as what was then called a Technical Operator. That's half a century ago. Morale is *always* at an all-time low.

3. Q. What went wrong at Newsnight?

A. My guesses:
(a) Budget cuts (see above).
(b) Experienced people too hastily "recused" because of the Savile affair.
(c) Inexperienced hacks too young to know that the incorrect McAlpine story has been around for many years and had already been gone into several times by different people and found to be completely without foundation, based as it was on mistaken identity. (It was a different McAlpine -- see this piece co-written by the excellent Bob Woffinden even though it appeared in the generally dreadful Mail On Sunday.) It was, indeed, a quite unforgivable lapse and to me an astonishing one.
(d) Clambering aboard the child-sex-abuse hysteria bandwagon in a panic, without paying enough attention to checking the details.

4. Q. What about the Jimmy Savile business?

A. I think it has all been rather overblown. Clearly the man was a nasty piece of work, but we ought to be sceptical about the individual allegations in the absence of detailed proof. As the McAlpine case neatly illustrates, you cannot just take the word of abuse victims as gospel. You have to investigate each case carefully. Some of them are mistaken or confused, some are deliberately lying, etc. In fact I am seriously worried about the extent to which many people seem to be in denial about the rather obvious fact that, even with the best will in the world, it is very easy to misremember things that happened (or didn't happen) decades ago.

5. Q. Yes, but what about the BBC's responsibility in the Savile case?

A. It seems to me preposterous to be trying in 2012 to apportion blame for alleged goings-on in the Top of the Pops studio in 1964. Was the general culture too permissive in those days? Maybe, but certainly not only at the BBC. Can anything be done about it now? No, of course not. What matters is that all sorts of procedures are nowadays in place (and I think have been for some time) to stop it happening again.

6. Q. Should the Director-General have resigned?

A. Perhaps not -- although I remain gobsmacked that he did not glance at the front pages of the serious national broadsheets every morning. I thought all important people did that in all spheres of life. Anyway, he's gone now and we are where we are.

7. Q. Should Chris Patten also resign?

A. Certainly not.

8. Q. What should politicians now be doing about all this?

A. They should all shut up and leave some space for the BBC leadership to sort things out. The same goes for the rest of the media, several of whom have an obvious vested interest in making trouble for the BBC and whose coverage of the affair is therefore highly suspect.

Aaronovitch: Beware a modern Salem over child abuse

The following piece from two days ago by David Aaronovitch is too important to hide behind a firewall:

Beware a modern Salem over child abuse - Pursuing witch hunts is as dangerous as ignoring victims. Don't launch inquiries on the back of lurid claims

This is a difficult column to write, because a lot of people won't want to hear what it's going to say and some will accuse it of saying what it doesn't. And because it's provisional. It is based on a fraction of the research that would be needed to be completely sure of the case I'm going to make anyway — which is that we are in danger right now of passing from one kind of injustice to another.

The Savile affair was just the latest form to be taken by a phenomenon that sometimes seems to have been endemic to postwar British society. It was in the Catholic Church (here and abroad). It was taking place in boarding schools. It was happening in care homes. On mattresses above kebab shops. In BBC dressing rooms. In people's own homes. (Above all there, actually.) Children were being abused sexually or physically, or both. When the abuse was discovered we realised that many of the victims were either too ashamed or frightened to complain, or else had their complaints dismissed by agencies and authorities who did not want to listen.

The misery of abuse was compounded by the misery of disbelief. I remember watching the Channel 4 film Chosen a couple of years back, and tears of shame — though what had I to do with a posh little prep school back in the Sixties? — ran down my face. And something of a revolution in our attitudes towards this abuse and its victims took place in the 1980s, after which it became as possible to pretend that there wasn't a problem as it was to deny that smoking was a health hazard.

But. But it seems we have had to pay an unnecessary price for our new understanding. In Cleveland in the late 1980s, alongside real abusers, completely innocent people were deprived of their children on the basis of the beliefs and a faulty diagnosis of a paediatrician and social worker. Not long afterwards there was panic on Orkney and in cities such as Rochdale and Nottingham, amid claims that there were networks of abusers using satanic rituals as a pretext for acts of abuse, including infanticide and cannibalism. Books were written, front pages were splashed, serious conferences convened, in which dark caverns and human sacrifice were earnestly discussed.

When it all collapsed, as it had to, what was left was the continuous problem of the zealous imposing new histories on the impressionable. The care workers — sometimes the police — had implanted and rewarded the telling of fantasies. It wasn't exactly a new thing. "I saw Goody Osburn with the devil," says a child in Arthur Miller's The Crucible. When the Newcastle nursery workers Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie won their libel case against an official inquiry team that had accused them of scores of acts of child abuse on the flimsiest of evidence, what emerged was a modern Salem of one accusation breeding the next.

The unattractive (because complicating) truth is that sometimes people do lie about being abused. Sometimes it's for money, sometimes for attention, sometimes because that's what they infer their listeners want to hear. Or they're genuinely mistaken. Or fantasy has become solidified as fact, the dream as daylight. Now there are elaborate protocols to make sure that the testimony of children is uncontaminated by the prior judgment of adults. But for someone who may have created their story years ago, no such safeguard can exist.

So we must not dismiss allegations, but they can never be taken or repeated with anything other than the most tedious sobriety. And that, if you like, is a generic rule applying to all situations. This week's specific horror concerns child abuse in care homes in North Wales. For this, there is a second thing that needs saying. One fairly persistent modern meme in conspiracy theories is the idea of the paedophile network of powerful men. I say this not because such an accusation must always be false, but just to point out that the idea is somehow attractive. It unties some knots for us. And I know of no case where it has turned out to be true.

On Tuesday night, the Channel 4 News anchor Cathy Newman asked a Conservative MP about the accusation that there had been a hidden political dimension to child abuse in the 1970s and 80s. This had been claimed by Steven Messham on Newsnight days earlier and raised at a Prime Minister's Questions last month by the Labour MP Tom Watson. Was there, she asked, "danger for the Conservative Party that these allegations may not concern isolated figures in the party?" A paedo network, in other words.

That morning I'd spoken to a senior journalist at the BBC who'd covered the North Wales care home abuse story in the early 1990s. He had heard the Messham allegations several times over the past 20 years, was deeply sceptical about them and could not see what had suddenly impelled Newsnight to put them on air. Or rather, he thought he could see: Savile.

Nevertheless, based, as far as I can see, solely on Mr Messham's appearance, the Government on Tuesday announced what was, in effect, a re-inquiry into the exhaustive Waterhouse Inquiry into abuse in North Wales care homes, which had reported in 2000. The announcement repeated Mr Messham's solicitor's line that Waterhouse had had too limited a remit to inquire properly into the idea of an abuse network.

I have to say that having read chapter 52 of the report I find it quite hard to accept that claim. I also note that John Jillings, who chaired the first local inquiry, in the early 1990s, into abuse in North Wales, had no recollection of Mr Messham claiming that a senior political figure was one of the abusers. Mr Messham has claimed abuse at the hands of many, many people.

A second inquiry will look into previous police investigations into child sexual abuse — which may be more appropriate but seems to have been dreamt up on the hoof. Meanwhile the net buzzes with speculation fed by the Messham and Watson appearances as to who these evil Tories may be. Some of these sites are lurid and preposterous. But then, in Parliament on Tuesday Mr Watson, having made claims about paedophile links to No 10 and in government, suddenly raised the bar to refer to child "rape and torture" in Whitehall.

This was worrying. But more worrying still was a line in a letter Mr Watson sent to Mr Cameron before the inquiries were announced. "Your advisers will tell you to be wary of 'opening the floodgates'," he wrote. "They are wrong. Their decorous caution is the friend of the paedophile."

That's what you become if you don't join in the clamour, but ask first for the evidence — "the friend of the paedophile". I saw Goody Aaronovitch with the devil.

Healthy, bright-eyed and slim

Police sirens in the night, and the collapse of civilisation

Like most people, I have been shocked by the events of recent days in London and other cities. Shocked, and profoundly disturbed.

To look at the matter first from a selfish point of view, it has suddenly become apparent that one is not safe in one's home. There simply are not enough police for them to cover everywhere at once. The trouble has largely stopped in the last few nights, but that is only with extra police drafted in from elsewhere, all leave and rest days cancelled, 12-hour shifts, and police moved to this task from almost all other inquiries and responsibilities. Quite obviously, they cannot keep this up for very long. Once police dispositions revert to normal, the whole trouble could start again.

And while the looting of shops has taken centre stage in the TV coverage, it has been less widely reported that in some places ordinary houses and blocks of flats have been torched by gangs, apparently just for the hell of it. Some completely innocent people have lost their homes, as the police either stood idly by or were nowhere to be seen. This seems to me a good deal more serious and worrying than a few thousand people stealing shoes and telephones from chain stores, utterly disgraceful though that is: it is quite simply an outrage.

It has often been said that the first duty of any government is to protect the population. In this respect, the powers-that-be have plainly failed.

For the first time since moving back to London from abroad five years ago, the boyf and I have wondered if we did the wrong thing.

Looking at the wider social issues, there has been a torrent of analysis in the posh prints over the past week. The most persuasive articles are those pointing out that many of the likely underlying causes are not new, and that the matter is multifaceted and complex, defying simplistic solutions. Thus, the situation obviously cannot be attributed primarily to government spending cuts; but equally obviously they are not going to help, especially those aimed at youth clubs, playing fields, and other relatively cheap ways of keeping young people occupied.

Another thing that clearly doesn't help is large-scale youth unemployment, a continuing blight not only here but across most of Europe.

But these essentially "economic" and "political" arguments do not really do it for me. I am more interested in the "cultural" explanations, involving arguments about long-term moral decline, the collapse of respect for authority, the disintegration of the idea of society as something to which we all belong (pace Mrs Thatcher), and the eclipsing of notions of solidarity and fairness by those of greed, selfishness and materialism -- and an ever-coarsening popular culture, obsessed with "bling" and "celebrities", that endlessly encourages people to think that they should be judged by the objects they possess.

In short, civilisation is falling apart. This cannot fairly be blamed on the present government, or the previous one -- it is clearly a longer-term phenomenon than that -- so party-political point-scoring is pretty irrelevant at the present time. The media have a lot to answer for, in my view, for where else does the "popular culture" come from?

But politicians cannot escape all blame, and the same goes for many of the other "important people" in society, of whom greedy bankers and City fatcats are only the most obvious examples. Peter Oborne is very persuasive in The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom when he points out that

"the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society. The last two decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite. It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat. An almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up."

Oborne goes on to describe the Financial Times's glossy weekend magazine How To Spend It as "repellent", something I have always felt myself, but I never imagined I would see a commentator from the Right echo my thoughts. He goes on to lambast tax-avoiding millionaires like Richard Branson and Philip Green, as well as senior parliamentarians such as Francis Maude and Gerald Kaufman who made extravagant expenses claims and have escaped unscathed.

Of the Prime Minister, Oborne writes:

"The tragic truth is that Mr Cameron is himself guilty of failing this test. It is scarcely six weeks since he jauntily turned up at the News International summer party, even though the media group was at the time subject to not one but two police investigations. Even more notoriously, he awarded a senior Downing Street job to the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, even though he knew at the time that Coulson had resigned after criminal acts were committed under his editorship. The Prime Minister excused his wretched judgment by proclaiming that 'everybody deserves a second chance'. It was very telling yesterday that he did not talk of second chances as he pledged exemplary punishment for the rioters and looters."

And finally:

"Let's bear in mind that many of the youths in our inner cities have never been trained in decent values. All they have ever known is barbarism. Our politicians and bankers, in sharp contrast, tend to have been to good schools and universities and to have been given every opportunity in life."

Britain, he concludes, "needs a moral reformation". I cannot but agree -- but where will it come from, and how will better values be instilled in the populace? I wish I could see a means to that end.

Let Ronald Biggs die in jail

I have never held Jack Straw in very high regard, but I'm with him on this one.

The way that the popular culture tends to venerate hardcore professional criminals has always sickened me. If society had its moral compass right, such people would be more vilified even than paedophiles, rapists and passion killers. Many of the latter, it can always be argued, are sick. There is something wrong with them: they are psychopaths, or their brains don't work properly; they are mentally ill, whether temporarily or permanently.

No such defence is available to the professional criminal, who is perfectly sane, knows exactly what he is doing, and is motivated by sheer greed.

I remember that, at the time of the Great Train Robbery, at least part of the gutter press evinced a sort of grudging admiration for its perpetrators. It was as if stealing vast sums of money was somehow an activity in which anyone might like to engage, if only they thought they could "get away with it". This mood changed only slightly when it was pointed out that, in this particular operation, the train driver had been physically attacked and injured.

We have seen the same kind of nauseating attitude in the case of several other such ruthless scum. I have seen grovelling, laudatory interviews in the media with such people as "Mad Frankie" Fraser, as if "going straight" for a period of time, and writing a book about it, somehow wiped out the bad things they had done in the past. Even the monstrously evil Kray twins, in the east end of London at least, continued to be worshipped by some.

In the case of Ronald Biggs, we have long been invited to admire the fact that he managed to escape from jail and live a life of luxury in South America, as though it were all just a harmless game. Good old Ronnie, he succeeded in hoodwinking the authorities, what fun. Well, he hasn't yet served his time. And how much has he repaid of what he stole?

The reason why such people should be locked away is a different reason from why we lock up murderers, rapists and perverts. These latter need to be locked up to protect society from any further such activities on their part. In the case of the professional criminal, the main reason for locking them up, in my view, is to send a message that being a gangster and stealing other people's money is not a morally acceptable profession and that society will punish it severely.

My proposal is that professional gangsters should never be let out of jail until they have paid back everything they stole. They should certainly remain locked up until they have said where the loot is stashed and allowed the authorities to recoup it. It makes me sick to hear of criminals who are let out after a few years and who can then access the hidden money.

I feel, too, that films and TV have a lot to answer for. It may all just be fiction, but there is a fantastic amount of it every evening and the relentless message it sends out is that crime is a normal activity, that the battle between criminals and the police and justice system is a sort of morally neutral cat-and-mouse game. It is no wonder that so many people seem to have a laid-back attitude towards stealing. We need to get back to the realisation that stealing, and greed, are morally evil.

Heathrow: Is there still hope?

I have been depressed and outraged in equal measure by the announcement that the third runway at Heathrow is to go ahead. I'd earlier been resigned to this as the most likely outcome, given all governments' unerring instinct for taking the wrong decision about anything to do with transport.

But more recently Christian Wolmar, among others, revealed that the Cabinet was deeply split on this issue, with the Millibands and Hilary Benn thought to be strongly against. Indeed, Benn went further than Cabinet ministers are normally supposed to go in openly questioning whether the third runway was compatible with Britain's air pollution commitments. (And in my view he should now resign; but people don't seem to resign on principle any more.)

This news of splits at the top level of government gave short-lived hope that Brown and Hoon might just do the sensible thing after all. But it was not to be.

The environmental and social reasons why the third runway is such a catastrophically bad idea have been gone into at length by so many others that there is no point in rehearsing the arguments again here, except to note that the village of Sipson is an extremely minor aspect of the case and not, as some affect to believe, the main point. I don't mean to say that I have no sympathy with the people who live there, only that the many arguments of principle against expanding the airport would still be just as powerful even if it could be done without destroying homes and communities.

The political arguments are a whole other thing, and were well put by Polly Toynbee in This craven airport decision hands Cameron a green halo, in which she describes the decision as "a crass error" purely from Labour's own narrow party point of view, quite aside from any other consideration. In one fell swoop the government has thrown away what green credentials it had, when, as Ms Toynbee points out, there was absolutely no reason why this decision had to be made before the election:

By 2015, when the first sod is cut on the runway, Gordon Brown will be no more than a pub quiz question. Plunging towards depression with air travel slumping, what was the rush?

"In order to be seen to be decisive", is her answer, and that just sums up the whole superficial approach that has always characterised New Labour -- all short-term deviousness and tactical calculation, no long-term strategy or overarching vision, still less anything resembling principled leadership.

All this is depressing enough, but what made me feel ill was that Ms Toynbee also pours cold water on any idea that the incoming Tory government will cancel the thing, despite their present rhetoric against it:

But how green is Cameron really? Only this week he opposed the compulsory switchover to new light bulbs. Few think that once in power the Conservatives will cancel the runway ...

I just hope she is wrong about that. Would a Tory government really take refuge behind a claim that it was now too late to stop it, having been so vocal against the idea? I have been quite surprised by how vehement Theresa Villiers has been on this subject from the Opposition front bench, even while we keep being told that a lot of decidedly non-green Tory backbenchers are secretly appalled at their party's public stance. We should note also that in London itself, Conservative activists, councillors and MPs form a significant part of the almost universal local campaign of opposition, as suggested by the event reported in this post by the Tory Troll.

There are of course those who have all along said that the runway isn't going to get built in any case, whoever is in power in the future. One of them is Vince Cable, as I have noted before. The Plane Stupid campaign also takes this line.

And finally, so does Christian Wolmar:

Either the proposal will be thrown out by the Tories or, by concerted opposition or, when serious money finally needs to be invested in it, the rationale will have disappeared. As one of my correspondents put it, no runway decision has ever survived a general election. This one will be no exception.

The interesting question is why does Labour do this? Why is it so in hock to business? My theory from talking to ministers is that they have no understanding of the private sector, only a fear that it will turn against them. So they feel compelled to give into them at any turn.

I hope these commentators are right, I really do. This is just such a hugely totemic issue for the future shape of our society.

UPDATE: The Campaign for Better Transport says in its February newsletter, "A final decision about Heathrow expansion is many years away". This is very reassuring, if true.

Will the USA become more civilised?

Here is some very good news, if it is true: The Tide Shifts Against the Death Penalty, says TIME Magazine.

It seems DNA evidence is the main reason for a recent fall in US executions. Apparently, various cases in which suspects were able to prove their innocence beyond doubt by means of DNA have made people realise that there really is such a thing as the conviction of the innocent.

Some of us knew this 40 or more years ago. Still, better late than never.

Baby P and local vs. national

Here is an important philosophical issue that keeps arising in politics, but never seems to get any nearer to being resolved: the tension between local decision-making and central government control.

I am among those who have argued in the past for a large dose of decentralisation from Whitehall and Westminster on those issues that can better be decided locally. This used to be long-standing Liberal Party policy. In more recent times, the Tories have also used the rhetoric of decentralisation (although in reality Mrs Thatcher was a great centraliser, the abolition of the GLC and the metropolitan authorities being only the most egregious example).

The Labour Party, by contrast, has tended (with some exceptions) towards a centralist view, both on the old left and among social democrats. I remember this being eloquently expressed by Neil Kinnock when he was fiercely opposing Welsh devolution in the 1970s.

The public (led by the gutter press) seems to be completely at sixes and sevens on this question. On the one hand, they seem to like the idea that "the man in Whitehall" does NOT know best. A good example of where I agree with them is the recent grotesque micro-management by the Department of Transport of local railway services all over England (though not Scotland and Wales), even down to how many carriages a particular train should have. Some of the railway franchises have been absurdly tightly specified.

On the other hand, when some local autonomy is granted, leading inevitably to different outcomes in different places, a huge clamour goes up against the "postcode lottery". That very phrase implies an expectation that everything ought to be identical everywhere -- the complete opposite of the local accountability that people say they want.

In theory, the trick is supposed to be to locate each sphere of decision-making at the most appropriate level for the function in question. This is what the EU calls "subsidiarity". The trouble is, when it comes down to it, how do you reach any consensus about what that level is?

Steve Richards ponders this question in relation to the dreadful events in Haringey:

In the abstract, the political fashion is for localism, especially in the Conservative Party. It is a common theme of the Tories: let a thousand flowers bloom! Central government should keep out of local matters even if things go wrong!

I have heard shadow cabinet members argue that, when in government, if things go wrong locally, they must declare that the crisis is not their responsibility. Yet look what happens when a single local story makes the national front pages. Cameron leapt in and demanded that the government acted. Within hours the government did act. The only issue was whether it should have done so earlier. No one was arguing that this was a matter for Haringey council and that it was up to the voters to kick out the ruling administration at the next local election.

As Steve Richards points out, giving the London Borough of Haringey the local autonomy to decide its own affairs has also meant that that same council was free to make calamitous mistakes. Most mistakes by local authorities do not get as much publicity as this one, but any reader of Private Eye's  "Rotten Boroughs" column knows that there is no shortage of examples of gross mismanagement, even -- or perhaps especially -- by big councils with their hugely overpaid, self-important chief executives.

And yet we do not, I think, want to abolish local government: on the contrary. One step forward might be to improve local accountability by electing local authorities by STV, so that there would not be such a tendency for some of them to be a permanent one-party state, as Haringey is for Labour.

Then again, can it seriously be claimed that the quality of decision-making at national government level is all that much better, when we consider all the monumental cocks-up that have been made in recent times?

A new national anthem?

I have always loathed God Save the Queen, partly because I feel no loyalty to either God or the monarchy, but also because it is such a dreary, depressing dirge.

Now Peter Tatchell has launched an appeal for a new national anthem on the grounds that the existing one is "all about slavish deference and idolatry -- the veneration of aristocratic privilege, inherited status and monarchical rule. It promotes jingoism, war, imperial conquest and the British people's subservience to god and royalty."

He is right, of course, but what to put in its place? Blake's Jerusalem has a splendid uplifting tune by Hubert Parry, and can be read as a call for a better society, which is no doubt why it was the Labour Party's theme song in the 1945 Attlee landslide election. But the words are pretty weird and mystical ("And was the holy Lamb of God On England’s pleasant pastures seen?") and, according to Wikipedia, nobody can really decide what Blake meant by them.

Then there is I Vow to Thee, My Country, which has the advantage of not referring to any specific country by name, which at least gets over the England/Britain problem. Gustav Holst's tune is kind of OK, though it doesn't come to a lump-in-the-throat climax at the end, which I feel a national anthem ought to do. The words (by Cecil Spring-Rice) are more or less all right if you leave out the jingoistic middle verse, as people usually do. But they don't seem to be saying anything much of value.

Far and away the best from a purely musical point of view, surely, is Land of Hope and Glory. You could not hope for a better or more inspiring tune than Edward Elgar's masterpiece. A.C. Benson's lyrics are a bit unsuitable, especially the imperialistic line about "wider still and wider". Why not adapt the words for modern use, replacing the God-and-Empire stuff with something that better fits a secular and multicultural society?

While almost anything would be better than God Save the Queen, I am not at all sure I want somebody to write a new song altogether. It would almost certainly be dreadful. They'd probably get talent-free "celebrities" like Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice to write some nasty, banal, tuneless horror. Let us stick with Elgar!

Comments round-up, part I

Thanks to various readers who have kindly taken the trouble to comment on some of my posts, a selection of which follows:

-- Tim Roll-Pickering criticised several items in my piece about electoral systems, 14 reasons why only STV will do. I think he is mistaken, but did not immediately have time to respond to his points. Since it calls for a fair bit of anorak-ish detail, I will come back to this issue later in a new post.

-- Yaffle commented on my post Irritating women, suggesting that it looked as if I was irritated by women who held opinions, in which case it probably said more about me than about the women mentioned, in Yaffle's view.

I countered this by naming several women with opinions whom I do NOT find irritating.

-- Neil Harding commented on my post Roads vs. trains, in which I drew attention to Christian Wolmar's question, Why are roads favoured by the right and trains by socialists? Neil thinks that public transport is, by its nature, too egalitarian for the Right to swallow, and also they don't like it because it is one "product" which is not made more efficient by competition (I agree that is certainly true of local transport, less so of long-distance travel perhaps). He also noted the massive lobbying power of the car and oil industries, who have a huge vested interest in promoting private transport at the expense of public.

All very true, but the fact remains that, as Christian Wolmar suggested, we should be much more aggressive in highlighting the Right's lack of intellectual inconsistency in supporting public expenditure on roadbuilding while generally tending to be hostile towards government spending on railways or any other form of public transport. At the least, we should be demanding a "level playing field". If railways are expected to "pay their way" without subsidy, so should roads -- which means some form of charging for road use.

One could add that all hidden subsidies for air travel should stop, too, such as the fact that airlines pay no tax on their fuel.

-- John Band commented on my 8 reasons why the government must go. He said I was wrong to say that the government was building roads. I referred him to the Campaign for Better Transport, which shows how the current regime is pressing ahead with a massive roadbuilding programme, in complete contradiction to Gordon Brown's claimed environmental objectives.

-- In response to my post Gridlock and Road Rage, Lola defended the motorcar as the right answer for personal transport. He or she claimed that "The car enables everyone who has access to or owns one to make extremely flexible choices about their lives without waiting on the whim of a bureaucrat or other gauleiter - which is of course exactly why the left loonies hate them so much."

I pointed out in reply that, if you are going to insist on everyone hurtling around in their own personal tin box on wheels, you will have to abolish the whole concept of cities as we know them in Europe, which are the whole basis of our civilisation. (I suspect Lola might be an American.)

London, for instance, simply could not function but for the fact that the great majority of people travelling into its centre are NOT using their own individual vehicles.

To be continued .......

We're Driving Toward Disaster

A Washington Post piece by James Howard Kunstler, though primarily about America, is of wider interest.

It's not that we are running out of oil, he notes, but that we are running out of cheap fuel of any sort, and this has much wider implications than people have so far realised. It will require some major changes in behaviour, quite irrespective of the arguments about climate change:

No combination of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French-fry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway system — or even a fraction of these things — in the future. We have to make other arrangements.

It is, Kunstler suggests, going to be much more than just a question of trying to make slightly fewer car journeys, or producing cars that use a bit less fuel. The "everyday activities of American life" will have to be dramatically reorganised, he says, involving major changes in the structure of agriculture and retailing, the restoration of local economic networks, and big changes in attitudes to land-use planning and urban design.

He has some interesting comments about rail transport:

Fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system is probably the one project we could undertake right away that would have the greatest impact on the country's oil consumption. The fact that we’re not talking about it — especially in the presidential campaign — shows how confused we are. The airline industry is disintegrating under the enormous pressure of fuel costs. (.....) At least five small airlines have filed for bankruptcy protection in the past two months. If we don't get the passenger trains running again, Americans will be going nowhere five years from now.

Here in Europe we are lucky that our far higher population density prevented us from being able to adopt quite the same lunatic dependency on the motorcar in the past 40 years as the USA.

Nevertheless, the lessons apply here too: apart from anything else, an "Is your journey really necessary?" frame of mind seems more and more indicated, something which as a "light green" I had always hoped we could avoid.

"The car has become the new political frontline"

35 years ago, in his seminal essay The Social Ideology of the Motorcar, André Gorz pointed out that motorcars worked fine as long as most people didn't possess one:

The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea: luxury goods invented for the exclusive pleasure of a very rich minority, and which in conception and nature were never intended for the people. Unlike the vacuum cleaner, the radio, or the bicycle, which retain their use value when everyone has one, the car, like a villa by the sea, is only desirable and useful insofar as the masses don't have one. That is how in both conception and original purpose the car is a luxury good. And the essence of luxury is that it cannot be democratised. If everyone can have luxury, no one gets any advantages from it.

Martin Jacques -- not somebody I always find myself in agreement with -- comes back to this theme in an interesting Grauniad piece today. He suggests that the motorcar in today's society is not so much an occasionally useful piece of machinery as a fashion item, a piece of showing-off bling, and a political weapon:

The streets around here are crawling with SUVs, usually driven by women, often with a mobile glued to their ear, whose attitude towards other roadusers can best be described as f*ck you. The size, high centre of gravity, and frontal attachments of their SUVs represent a serious threat to cars, cyclists and pedestrians alike. That is why they are popular. They represent a new kind of middle-class aggression, a form of urban warfare in an era when the rich have become unashamedly richer and desperately anxious to flaunt the fact.

Echoing André Gorz, he goes on to note:

Where once cars were a symbol of mobility and freedom, now they are – except in the surreal world of car advertising – a passport to traffic jams and congestion. When cars were for the minority, they could enjoy the freedom of the roads, but when they became the mode of transport for a large majority, there was simply not enough road space to go around and they increasingly became a form of confinement.

The heyday of the private motorcar, then, has passed; all the more so as its fuel becomes increasingly scarce and expensive. Getting people to acknowledge this fact may take a little longer, especially as long as so much media exposure is given to reactionary nincompoops like Jeremy Clarkson, whom Jacques describes as "the embodiment not just of what is wrong with the car but also of what is wrong with so much in society".

Stable doors and bolting horses

Tories outline rowdy pupils plan, the BBC informs us.

David Cameron proposes to "ban classroom troublemakers and give powers to protect teachers".

Another gimmicky announcement not properly thought through. The general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders [sic] explains, lower down in the BBC piece, why it will just make matters worse.

Anyway, it is much too late to do anything about this. Where obedience and discipline and respect for authority in schools are concerned, the pass was sold at least 25 years ago.

Yes, I'm mostly a lefty but I am a bit right-wing on this issue.

Cleggover and male bonking

I am surprised at the fuss over Nick Clegg's interview in GQ where he says that he has discussed Ugandan affairs with some 30 people in his life so far.

My own figure is probably something of the same order, as far as I can remember after all these years.

Surely this is pretty unexceptional for most men? (Hughie Green, played brilliantly by Trevor Eve in a BBC4 biopic last night, is supposed to have slept with 1,000 women).

According to an article in yesterday's Grauniad, a 2005 survey in Canada found that men reported an average of 31.9 partners.

One expects Anne Widdecombe to be shocked, of course, but she has always been completely out of touch with reality, and barking to boot. Those of us who inhabit the real world must know that Clegg's figure is quite normal, and therefore the shock being professed in some quarters, such as this piece by Amanda Platell, is just hypocrisy.

Thank goodness, then, for Catherine Townsend, who in a piece called Sleeping Around in today's Indie tells us that her own figure is "between 60 and 100", and believes her experiences make her a better partner. She adds:

It seems that the people bleating the loudest about everyone else's morality are either seriously repressed or hiding sexual skeletons.

Whether any politician is wise to answer this sort of question in the first place, whatever the figure might be, is a different question, discussed here by Steve Richards, who finds that other commentators think it was a seriously unwise move.

A grumpy old man writes ....

It's a little disconcerting to find myself agreeing with a Tory blogger on two separate issues within as many days, especially when it is a Tory (Iain Dale) who also says, with every appearance of seriousness, that he agrees with the preposterous Christopher Booker about anything (in this case windmills, on which Booker has lately produced one of his trademark hysterical rants, full of mendacious twaddle).

Issue 1 is the Tory press. Or at least the Murdoch and Mail press (I suppose Dale has to be nice to the Torygraph, since he writes for it). Most of us non-Tories have been fulminating for many decades about the way the right-wing press distorts our so-called democracy. Now Dale is complaining about Murdoch's and Dacre's "bully boy tactics" in trying to alter government policy in their own vested interest. This sort of thing is usually left to the likes of Polly Toynbee to say. It's great to find a Tory admitting up front that the behaviour of the Tory press just will not do.

Issue 2 is the collapse in standards of public behaviour. This is provoked by a Time magazine cover story about British youth, "Unhappy, Unloved and Out of Control". Dale heads his piece Britain: Again the 'Sick Man of Europe'.

Historically, Time's attempts to look across the Atlantic have not always been very convincing. But here they are on to something. The Time article begins:

An epidemic of violent crime, teen pregnancy, heavy drinking and drug abuse fuels fears that British youth is in crisis.

And they produce a load of statistics to back it up, to do with booze and drugs and fights and under-age sex and family breakdown, and not least the UNICEF study that placed Britain bottom of a league table of 21 industrialised countries for child welfare.

As Iain Dale observes, this is not mainly the fault of any politicians in particular, and possibly not much to do with politicians at all:

What we have now is a society in which permissiveness and a lack of willingness on the part of society in general to impose discipline on impressionable minds have caused a fissure between those who obey the norms of society and those who, despite having gone to school, haven't got a clue what those norms are. They don't conform because many of them don't know what they are supposed to conform to.

Mainly, Dale blames feckless parents, and "the complete failure of our liberal education system". He goes on:

I think 40% of children in Britain are born to single parents, many at a very young age. Many single parents to a brilliant job with their children, but others do not - can not. The lack of any form of male role model is to the detriment of any child's upbringing. The inability of parents to say 'no' nowadays is just as bad.

Well, do you know what, I agree with every word of all that.

I don't entirely agree with Dale that none of this is Thatcher's fault. I do think she made matters even worse by deliberately encouraging the idea that selfishness and greed are good, and "there is no such thing as society". But the rot started setting in in the 1970s, in my view.

However, the more interesting point now is what the present-day Tory party thinks about all this. David Cameron has sent mixed signals. On the day of his election as leader, he said "there will be no more whingeing about modern life; I am comfortable with the modern world", or words to that effect, and I thought straight away then, well, he's just chucked away the entire "grumpy old man" vote in one fell swoop. Since then, though, he seems to have changed tack, talking about a "broken society".

I have long been clear that I am completely out of sympathy with many aspects of the modern world, especially as regards what one might broadly call "the popular culture", and I do indeed think we have a broken society. What anybody can do about it now, though, is a question to which nobody seems to have any answers.