Private Frazier?

Jeff Gedmin, former head of the New Atlantic Intitiative at the American Enterprise Institute and now head of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, says of NATO, The Alliance Is Doomed. This is an important article, whose conclusions will come as a shock to many still mired in the Cold War:

It's true the U.S.-EU relationship is one of convergence -- in commerce and trade. Economic interdependence is on the rise. But in the military-strategic realm, the divergence that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall continues at breakneck speed. NATO is now becoming an OSCE (the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) with side-arms. Perhaps that's even okay. It can still play an important political role in Europe.

But the old alliance holds little promise of figuring prominently in U.S. global strategic thinking. That's why the administration's tactical doctrine, namely for the mission to define the coalition, makes sense. Sure, we still need allies for the long haul. The Eastern Europeans like us. The Turks and Israelis grasp the threat and spend for defense. The Brits do too -- and can help enormously if they guard their independence from Brussels in years to come. If the old alliance is gone, it's time to start building something new.

Quite right. Indeed, I wonder if the Britanno-American sponsoring of Russia into NATO's structure, if not membership, was implicit recognition of the new reality. NATO's second division members might get left behind as the Pournelle-esque Codominion of the US, UK and Russia takes over. If so, then British thinking is increasingly schizophrenic, unless Blair thinks he can keep one foot in each of the economic and defense camps. The recent flurry regarding the timing of the Euro referendum becomes clearer, but also more indicative of how deeply confused Blair is.

Per mare, per terram, per spinum

This Telegraph leader has it exactly right on the PR disaster that accompanied the Royal Marines' actions in Afghanistan. Churchill would never have got into such a mess, which just shows that spinning in wartime is different from spinning in peace.

Hannanglosphere

Dan Hannan sees the point on the Anglosphere:

Mr Patten thinks he has the answer. "You can already feel the stirrings [of pro-European patriotism], perhaps, in the shared indignation at US steel protection," he writes. "You can feel it at the Ryder Cup, too." It is significant that the only two examples he can come up with are based on anti-Americanism. From his point of view, this may make tactical sense. Nations do indeed cohere when they perceive an external enemy. And there is a certain market for anti-Americanism even in this country. But I wonder whether long exile is beginning to distort Mr Patten's view of the British.

When truly important matters are at stake, we tend to sympathise most with the community of free English-speaking nations, the countries which have stuck by us in most conflicts from the First World War onwards.

No number of Ryder Cups can compete with the reality of cultural affinity, based on common legal and political traditions and, above all, on a shared language. Mr Patten shrewdly understands that a common EU identity will be facilitated by a sense of "them" and "us". But I suspect he will be disappointed by how the British define "us".

And for those in the Blogosphere who despise Chris Petain, err, Patten, here is some good news:

I see Mr Patten in Brussels from time to time, mooching around disconsolately. He seems somehow greyer and paunchier than when he arrived, and the bags under his eyes have spread. Not long ago, it was reported that he was "counting the hours" until the end of his term. I put it down to disillusionment. To a man like Mr Patten, a principled and idealistic European, the reality of the Brussels system must be hard to bear. Instead of finding himself among pioneers, working to transcend war and bring a new political order to the continent, he has found himself among some of the most stubborn and self-serving officials in Europe. Even his thoroughly uncontentious plans to make the EU's overseas aid programme less corrupt ran up against vested interests in the bureaucracy.

And yet he will still blame himself and the British, and the Americans, rather than face up to reality. He's not so much carrying a torch for Europe as an entire Nuremburg Rally.

Race for the cure

BBC Online has a major survey on Race in Britain. Some interesting results. A majority of whites think Britain is a racist society, but they also think immigration in the past 50 years has damaged Britain. I think the reverse is true in both cases. My suggestion is that the lack of any decent debate on multiculturalism and its effects has simply made white Brits believe that there is something wrong with them, and they are resentful of immigrants because of that. There's a psychological term for that, but I wish I could remember it. Whatever it is, it ain't healthy.

Left behind?

Tim Hames takes a cold hard look at two ideas of Peter Mandelson's -- that Labour must work closely with the Liberals because otherwise the Left is divided, and that the Euro is vitally necessary for Labour's success. Both ideas are hogwash, says Timbo, and in doing so he points out that the combination of the two is historically a road to ruin:

In every case [where a Leftish British government has split], it has been a foreign policy dispute (often ones with serious economic implications) that has torpedoed the Left in power. While the euro might bind parts of Labour and the Liberal Democrats closer, it would do so at the price of Labour’s own unity. The real lesson of political history is that it is not the division between the parties of the Left but division within the major party of the Left that is fundamental.

As I've mentioned many times before, I can see Labour splitting, and it will almost certainly be over a foreign policy issue (Iraq or the Euro). Those of us who think Labour's massive majority is one of the most dangerous things for Britain might therefore welcome Mr Mandelson's ideas...

Bennett on local government

Jim Bennett takes up the theme of English local government:

A more reasonable approach to decentralizing England would be to restore the traditional county boundaries and return more power to them. Although Britain never had a federal nature, much of the aggrandizement of central power and diminution of city and country authority happened only in the 20th century, and fairly late in that.

Americans tend to think of counties as small units, but in fact England's traditional counties would be considered large enough for self-government anywhere else in the Anglosphere. All but four of England's counties and independent cities are larger in population than the state of Wyoming; the Australian state of Tasmania is smaller than England's third-smallest county, Cumbria, and Canada's Prince Edward Island, a well-run province, is smaller than any English county.

Why don't England's conservatives just counter with a proposal that any traditional county could, by petition, hold a referendum to establish a local assembly with the same powers as Scotland's recently established legislature? If people felt the need for stronger local government, they could establish it without becoming part of a synthetic region such as "South-East England." Simple, well-understood and effective.

Quite right. Jim's comments fit right alongside Mark Steyn's in the latest Spectator. Mark makes a point that Tories should leap on as a new idea that has the virtue of being traditional:

At some conference a couple of years back, I suggested to an affable Tory quango baroness that the Conservatives should become the party of decentralisation. She thought this was ridiculous, but then she seemed to have a difficult time getting a handle on US federalism in general — she kept talking about ‘the American police’ and ‘the American education system’, neither of which exists in any meaningful sense. In America, power is vested in ‘We, the People’ and leased upwards, through town, county, state and federal government, in ever more limited doses. By the time you get to the organs of embryo world government like the International Criminal Court, Americans are inclined to feel that’s leasing it a little too far.

The trouble is that the Tories had to turn their back on decentralization and local power in order to fix the disfunctional British state in the 80s (provoked by people who "nationalized" local democracy, using local powers to fight national battles). As I've said before here, I think that was essential, but it should have been fixed. Local democracy should have been restored once the entryist foe was defeated. It wasn't, and that was the single biggest mistake of the Major years. If the Tories can recognize this, then they can help save England.

Well, they could take a print of two of my fingers...

An Italian-based correspondent e-mails this...

The Corriere della Sera today (15/5/02, pages 1 and 14) interviewed Berlusconi's Minister of the Interior (rough equivalent of Home Secretary) Signor Claudio Scajola, at the G8 summit in Canada. He said, "We must get to the point in Europe of bringing in a single passport, and we are nearly there. Also finger-prints on ID documents. The new identity card which we are planning together with Germany will have a space for finger prints." Question: "So, will everybody's finger-prints soon be taken?" Scajola: "In Berlin, with the German Interior Minister Otto Schily, we have created a working group which is planning a new identity card. A document which
amongst other characteristics will also a space for fingerprints, which must be taken from everyone, including the Italians [and presumably all EU inhabitants, - the British too?!]. But in the new ID card which we have already presented in Italy [presumably as a bill in the Italian Parliament] there is a chip embedded to store bio-metric data." [He goes on to say that this is to stop terrorists and illegal immigrants etc.]

Note: Can you imagine everybody queuing up at the police stations to have their finger-tips inked and pressed onto their cards... think of all the little old ladies smarting with indignation at being thus treated like criminals... what a vote-winner!!! :-o

Doubtless British EU-philes will say, "This will never happen, it is just the Italians and Germans talking, nothing has been officially presented, etc etc so go back to sleep." However, I would note that this is a case of two major EU governments, one of them centre-left, and the other centre-right, or more properly, far-right, which both see eye to eye on this issue. Somebody in Parliament ought to ask the British government if they agree with this, or if not, will they veto it if it is ever presented to the Council of Ministers? [Tories! Wakey waaakey!! there is a LOT of work to do. Just TELL the British people about these things.]

He goes on...

Question: At this G8 you talked a lot about controls on Internet: will the levels of control on the Net be raised? Scajola: "We must tackle the problem with the managers [service providers] of the Net because copies [of communciations] must remain within the system. either we insert the possibility of a certain control, with all due safeguards, or we will not be able to defeat major criminals and international terrorism. [And then there is a bit about setting up an international databank on child pornography.]

NOTE The Italian constitution does have a clause safeguarding the secrecy of correspondence (which jurisprudence has extended to telephone calls, which may not be tapped except on judicial order). This was not discussed in the paper however.

MUSSOLINI PROMOTED ON ITALIAN TV

The same issue of the Corriere della Sera, today, reports (p.11) that the Director of RAI, the Italian state TV company, apologised for allowing a right-wing magazine to advertise itself on the network with a commercial exalting Benito Mussolini as a "great statesman". What is really sinister to my mind is that evidently the magazine editor thinks that by spending money on broadcasting these messages he will increase his sales. In fact the news-stands are full of magazines and video-cassettes all about the life and times of Mussolini. He is evidently back in fashion. This comes a couple of months after Italy's vice-premier, Gianfranco Fini, on being
appointed as official government representative for the EU convention which will write the "European Constitution" which they will then all want us to live under, said "Yes I know that when I was last in the government in 1994 I said that Mussolini was the world's greatest statesman, but I couldn't *say* that now..."

JEWISH LEADER IN ROME FACES CRIMINAL TRIAL FOR "DEFAMING" AN EXTREME FAR-RIGHT GROUP

This appeared in Corriere della Sera last Thursday. Signor Paserman, chairman of the Rome Jewish community, some of whose relatives had been deported to extermination camps during the war, published an article in a major Italian paper saying that "Forza Nuova",(a group that is to the right of La Fiamma, a group that split away (to the right) from Fini's Alleanza Nazionale), was "pro-Nazi" and "advocated violence", as it undoubtedly does. One of its sympathisers was convicted for setting off a bomb in a left-wing newspaper office a couple of years ago.

ANGLO-AMERICANS TO BE PROSECUTED FOR "WAR CRIMES" IN ITALY

The Mayor of Foggia, a town in the Italian South, who is a member of the government party Alleanza Nazionale, has asked the Prosecutor's Office to open criminal proceedings for war crimes against those responsible for the bombing of Foggia in 1943.

If by the time this gets taken up, the EU arrest warrant is in place, war-time RAF officers, who are still alive, had better look out! And those who were in the USAF had better avoid holidaying in the EU.

This comes after a public statement by Italian cabinet minister Mirko Tremaglia a couple of months ago, visiting El Alamein battle-site in North Africa, who said "It would have been much better if we [Germans and Italians] had won the battle, and the war!" Presumably this is the policy of Signor Berlusconi's government, since no couner-statement was forthcoming from his office on this matter.

Now where are all the Guardian editorials about the return of the Far Right when they're really needed?

Sniff...

This made me cry...

Assimilation problems

Another thoughtful Telegraph leader on what the success of the LPF in Holland means. It doesn't explicitly say it, but the undercurrent is that immigration is good if assimilation takes place. So far so good.

But assimilation into what? I've been reading Theodore Dalrymple's Life at the Bottom lately, a collection of his essays from the City Journal (if you read his Second Opinion column in the Speccie, you'll know what to expect). Dalrymple repeatedly makes the point that English culture today is so debased that it is no wonder that minorities refuse to assimilate. The gyrations David Blunkett went through when he realized that assimilation was important, but didn't know what he should advance as an example of British values, is an important illustration here (he eventually came up with 'tolerance").

Which brings me back to a recurring theme of this blog: education, education, education. The British need to teach their children about their island's history, and the values that drove the main acheivements of that history. Religion will be an important element in this history, but generations of Catholics were taught about Protestantism's role in acheiving Parliamentary democracy without any proselytization involved. Hindus and Muslims need have no worry on that score.

Second, we need to sweep away the bourgeois values that have been foisted on the working class since the 60s and strengthen local communities by bolstering families and reinvigorating local democracy. Immigrants who worry about their daughters being exploited by feckless males (or about their sons turning into said feckless males) will have less to worry about if the British realize the anthropological value of moral rules about sexual behavior. I am confident that we can accomodate homosexuality without needing to throw out all rules that strengthen family (there's some interesting polling data on current attitudes here in Roger Mortimore's latest MORI Commentary column).

Third, we need to involve all sections of the community more in that improved democracy. The Tories desperately need to find more minority candidates, for instance, but it's no use people like Lord Taylor moaning about it all the time. that's a failure of leadership. Minorities themselves have to form the British equivalents of the Center for New Black Leadership, for instance.

Assimilation is one of the worthiest goals I can think of, but it's not a simple question of one side being in the wrong. Ending multiculturalism also means ending aculturalism, if that's a word, and that will be the hardest job of all.

Citizens' Charter

Brendan O'Neill has unwittingly offended another blogger, whose reaction, I should stress, was rude and unwarrented in my opinion. I therefore think I should outline my Charter (to use a Major-era buzzword) for communications from readers of this blog.

1. I welcome all polite e-mail, although I cannot guarantee to respond to it. Disagreements are as welcome as agreements.
2. I shall not delete any comments from the comments boxes unless they are obviously beyond the pale (again, courtesy is the key here). Nor shall I ban people from commenting unless they are, in usenet parlance, flamers or trolls.
3. I shall consider any e-mail, unless otherwise marked, to contained the author's implied consent for publication.
4. I am happy to consider extending posting privileges to any regular correspondent who asks for them. There are two others who currently have posting privileges, although neither have used them yet.

More power to Brendan, by the way, who is rapidly replacing Steven Den Beste as king of the long form, in my eyes.

20/20 Hindsight

I'm a bit mystified by all the fuss over what was and wasn't known about possible hijackings before 9/11, and I'm glad Glenn Reynolds has admitted that nothing really could have been done without advance identification of the individuals concerned. There is, as so often, and Anglosphere angle in this. According to the NY Times story, Foreboding Increased, but No Single Agency Had All the Clues,

the report provided to the president on Aug. 6, which warned him that Mr. bin Laden's followers might hijack airplanes, was based on 1998 intelligence data drawn from a single British source, government officials said today.

That source said Al Qaeda had an interest in hijacking airplanes in order to obtain hostages who could be used as bargaining chips so the terrorist organization could demand the freedom of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a Muslim cleric who was convicted in 1995 for his role in the failed plot to blow up landmarks in the New York area.

This kinda blows the case that officials knew what was being planned out of the water.

The most interesting thing to me about this revelation, however, is the sharing of intelligence between the UK and the US. This is a vital element in American intelligence gathering which will be lost forever if Britain is integrated into a European military and intelligence structure as currently envisaged (see here for a rundown of the issues. Unfortunately, the links to Charles Grant's important papers no longer work; the long version is now here in PDF form). It's yet another reason why America has a vital strategic interest in Britain retaining her sovereignty.

Of course, there may come a time when Britain and America fall out and stop sharing data, but there's no point in forcing that issue artificially.

Postmodernism revisited

Interestingly, Chuck Colson thinks Europe is postmodern but the US modern also.

Lessons from America

Thanks to the Dodgester for bringing this one to my attention. Regular readers will know I'm a fan of the Daily Telegraph's Free Country campaign. The spokesmen of the Libertarian Alliance in the UK aren't, and wrote to a large number of Telegraph journalists (including the football correspondents...) to point this out. Alex at The Liberty Log has a very sensible reaction to this, one that mirrors my thoughts exactly.

I think there are several lessons the British liberal-conservative movement can learn from their much more successful cousins in the US. The first is Reagan's "Eleventh Commandment": thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican. Second, and this is the crime the LA is committing here, you should not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Euroskeptics and British libertarians (with some notable exceptions) are frequently guilty of this. And by their constant quibbling, they provide room for statist and superstatist forces to advance. Result: a fractured movement and more statism and loss of sovereignty. To paraphrase Burke, for the triumph of evil it is only necessary for good men to quarrel. Grow up, chaps.

Prayers needed

Mona Charen is one of my favorite columnists and my organization has worked with her from time to time when she has needed good data. I was therefore distressed to learn that her eldest son is currently in intensive care following a traffic accident. This is truly a nightmare for any parent. My prayers are with her.

Pims all round

According to the ever-reliable Ananova, List Pim Fortuyn has come joint second in the Dutch elections. The Christian Democrats came first with 41 out of the 150 seats up for grabs. LPF got 24, the same as Prime Minister Wim Kok's Socialists and his coalition partners the Liberals. I imagine it's likely that LPF will be asked to join a coalition with the Christian Democrats. We'll see.

Who has Jenkins' Ear?

Once again, Simon Jenkins gets it right on the constitution. Writing on Lords reform, he starts off by rightly rubbishing the argument for Proportional Representation in the new chamber:

Let us begin with one nonsense. There is no justification for what all Westminster now wants, a party-based elected chamber. We have one already, and a pathetic morsel it is. Why have another? If it were to have real power, it would confuse and thwart the democratic will of the Commons. If it has no power, I repeat, what is the point? All proposals for a wholly or partly elected second chamber assume the election would be on a multi-member and/or party list system, if only to be distinct from the Commons. Only thus can the second chamber “reflect the will of the people”. Put another way, only thus can it remain under a degree of party control. Such list systems — as for devolved assembly elections — give all power to party managers. Whether or not the lists are based on wide or narrow geographical constituencies, they are lists.

These lists would be no different from the “lavender lists” that created the present House. I am sure Mr Blair has realised this. He has no intention, any more than do the spokesmen for the existing chambers, Robin Cook and Lord Irvine of Lairg, of letting voters actually choose the membership of the new House. They may choose its party composition, but the selection or deselection of names on the lists will be by party managers. These will not be high-profile, blood-andthunder American senators. They will not be local personalities standing for election under their own banners. They will be “people we know”. Everyone understands that.

A hit! A very palpable hit!

Jenkins goes on to suggest an intriguing scheme for electing and appointing the chamber's members:

I would go for a version of the American senatorial system. Each county and each city would elect its own local figure, who would require a five-year residential qualification and no party allegiance entered on the ballot. The field would be open to any local public figure yet extremely hard for the whips to pollute. Elected members would bring to Westminster a truly local mandate, recreating a feature of the old House of Lords. This was a body with its roots in the territory of provincial Britain, something lost with the advent of life peers.

For appointed members I would adopt the best of the Wakeham Commission proposals. This was for a non-party independent appointments commission, an idea rejected by Downing Street as absurdly hard to control. But I would tie the commission’s hand. It would have to select half the second chamber as representative of groups and occupations far beyond the present judges and bishops. If lawyers and clergymen sit in a second chamber ex officio, why not academics, doctors, engineers, farmers and trade unionists? The more specialised the job of politician becomes, the more valid a second chamber filled with other professions.

A combination of provincial personalities and occupational leaders would add real diversity to the politics of Westminster. It would dynamise Parliament. It would not damage the democratic sovereignty of the Commons, since its power to check the executive would remain limited. Appointed members would serve only one term and the changing kaleidoscope would form a true forum of the nation, not as present of London and Scotland.

I have to say I agree with him on the local representation bit. On the appointed members, I disagree reluctantly, because where does one draw the line? Piano tuners? Wire drawers and kindred workers? I think the appointed benches should remain the Bench of Bishops, as long as the Church of England is Established, and the Law Lords, because a legally-experienced voice is useful in the framing of legislation and the House of Lords' role as "Supreme Court" is an important one.

Actually, one thing I have toyed with is the idea that the House of Commons should be the locally-based chamber and the House of Lords the nationally-based one, charged with looking at wider interests, but that would necessitate the total destruction of the party machines before implementation.

Funny how much more difficult adapting an historic system that has gone off the rails is than designing a whole new one. The Founding Fathers's difficulties in Philadelphia were nothing compared to this...

Immigration and Citizenship

Janet Daley, as an immigrant and daughter of immigrants, has the line on immigration and the duties of both the immigrant and his host country exactly right. As she says, it is not the immigrant that is the problem. It is his children. Immigrants must raise their children to believe that coming to the new country was the right thing to do, while never forgetting the good things that they left behind, and the host country must raise them as their own:

If we were educating our young, of all ethnic origins, to be unabashedly proud of their British identity - instead of denigrating our own history and our own culture in a self-indulgent frenzy of post-colonial guilt - we could be offering the children of immigrants something worth abandoning the alienated racial ghetto for. Then they could go home and explain it to their parents - and hand it on, in turn, to their own children.

This is the only way to proceed.

No relation

I once worked with a senior civil servant called Andrew Murray. He was a nice chap, and seemed sensible. So unless he's taken a knock on the head it can't be this fool writing in The Grauniad. I've recently been trying to sharpen up my op/ed writing skills and to remember always that any assertion should have a fact-checked source behind it. This Murray obviously doesn't know that. For instance, he doesn't think the USA is engaged in a war on terrorism:

It is instead an open-ended war to make the world congenial for the most chauvinistic elements in US public life. Every government in the world they dislike is to be removed, every grudge they have been nursing from the cold war (there can be no other reason for targeting Fidel Castro) is to be exorcised. Military force may be used in some cases; while in others the well-tried methods of destabilisation, sanctions and coup will be deployed.

Where evidence and argument fail, the administration relies on effrontery. The national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, demanded that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez "respect the constitution" on the day he was restored to office, following the failure of the US-backed military coup against the constitution. Bolton, Rice et al seem to regard themselves as masters of the universe, and show every sign of planning to implement their maximum global programme before the US people gets the chance to elect anyone slightly more sensible.

Well, if "the most chauvinistic" Americans were trying to unseat goverments they disliked, they'd probably start with France, then China. Castro is not a relic of the Cold War -- he's a living, breathing Dictator who continues to oppress his people. I happen to think the embargo is a mistake, just as I thought sanctions on South Africa were a mistake (I believe free trade spreads free ideas), but check out this recent Jeff Jacoby column to see how awful the cuddly old teddy bear really is.

Meanwhile, where is there any evidence that the coup against Chavez was American-backed. Even the loony Chavez himself hasn't come up with any evidence other than he saw an American-registered plane on the island he was taken to during his period of confinement. Even the most ardent anti-American would have to admit that it's not too unusual to see American-registered planes in northern South America.

As for the American people desperately wanting to elect someone "more sensible" than the President: current job approval rating c.73% (CBS/New York Times, 4/28-5/01). I'd imagine that at least some of the disapproval comes from people who don't think he's doing enough...

And if this twit knew anything about US politics, he'd know that the instincts of this administration are towards isolationism. Self-defense has prompted the need for military adventures overseas, not some form of capitalist imperialism.

Andrew, you're a disgrace to the clan and the man you're named after. Change your name to Fisk and get thee hence!

No balance, lots of checks

Trenchant editorial in the Telegraph, How Blair tamed his poodle, on the state of Parliamentary democracy:

Since Labour was elected, the Government has abused its enormous Commons majority to mount a sustained assault on Parliament's authority in a way that has grave implications for British liberty. The attack has been on three fronts: managerial, procedural and constitutional.

On the managerial front, Labour has deliberately recruited bland parliamentary candidates, likely to do as they are told. It has then whipped its MPs mercilessly to keep them "on message". It has packed the watchdog committees of the House with its own appointees, keeping likely trouble-makers out.

Procedurally, one of Mr Blair's first acts was to declare that he would answer Prime Minister's Questions only once a week, instead of twice. "Family-friendly" parliamentary hours are being introduced, to send MPs safely home to bed, where they can cause no trouble to the Government. The parliamentary guillotine has been used constantly to silence debate - even on constitutional Bills, which by convention had always been debated in full. Meanwhile, important policies have frequently been announced outside the House. All this, while a weak Speaker watches on.

Constitutionally, Parliament's powers have been sapped by devolution, Europe and a judiciary newly politicised by the Human Rights Act.

The Commons - between elections, the only guardian of the people against the executive - is being emasculated. The Opposition parties must commit themselves to beefing up the watchdog committees of the House and codifying the old conventions that once held the executive in check. They must make firm pledges now - before they, too, are corrupted by power.

Damn right, if you'll pardon my French. Parliament needs to be saved from these party machines. To achieve that, there are two possible solutions. One is the drastic one of separating the Executive from the Legislature by directly electing the office of Prime Minister. I've suggested that before, and think it's the best solution in general. Another means might be to disallow the use of any party label on the ballot paper, or, for that matter, in election communications, broadcasts and posters. Then people couldn't just walk into a polling station and vote for a party candidate. they'd have to know who the candidate was before voting for them, which would presumably strengthen individual candidates against the party machine. Just a suggestion. Any thoughts as to its practicality?

Police 5, well 3 now

Michael Gove says that Enid Blyton could do a better job than most of Britain's polic chiefs, and fingers their unaccountability and bureaucracy as the main problems. He's right.

Likud it or not...

I'm not keen on Emmanuel Goldstein's attempts to dictate the editorial directions of other blogs, so I had not intended to mention the Likud vote on Palestinian statehood at all. As it happens, Kesher Talk says it best.

A Charter for Our Times

Jim Bennett draws attention to a silly mistake in the Clark piece. Clark says

The assumption that has remained central to their world view since the signing of the Atlantic Charter in 1941 - that there exists an unbreakable community of interests and values linking the democracies of Europe to the United States - is being challenged as never before.

Jim replies: "Uh, the central assumption of the Atlantic Charter was that there exists an unbreakable community of interests and values linking the democracies of Britain and the Commonwealth to the United States. At the moment the Charter was signed, the only other democracies in Europe were Sweden, Switzerland, and Ireland, all of which were conspicuously unlinked to the United States."

This inspired me to take a look at The Atlantic Charter. What a splendid document. It should be required reading for all school children, never mind every supposedly democratic politician in Europe. The final clause is particularly relevant to current events:

Eighth, they believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons must come to the abandonment of the use of force. Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential. They will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measure which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments.

What better witnesses than Roosevelt and Churchill to have on your side when presenting the case against Saddam?

The spirit of Lord Bauer lives on

Bad leaders, not lack of aid, cause African poverty might seem to come from the bleeding obvious school of headlines, but so few people seem to realise its truth. This is a great article that sums up the current problem:

Among the most articulate critics of never-ending aid as a solution to Third World poverty was Lord Bauer, the economics professor who died earlier this month. He held that it was the character of a country's institutions and the aptitude of its populace that determined its success. "Where people's abilities, motivations and political institutions are favourable," he wrote, "material progress will occur. Where these basic determinants are unfavourable, development will not occur, even with aid."

In Africa, political mismanagement, corruption and disregard by the authorities for the bulk of the people have prevailed, indeed flourished, in the half century that has followed the first withdrawal of colonial rulers. What African leaders such as Amin, Mobutu, Mengistu, Moi and most recently Mugabe have created in their countries are conditions that are distinctly unfavourable for the development of people's abilities, motivations and political institutions.

They have ruled their countries like medieval fiefdoms, looting their faltering economies and through shocking mismanagement creating hardships and famines for people who do not get the opportunity to vote them out.

And yet the West has continued to pour in the aid, which has almost unerringly found its way into Swiss bank accounts. Today, there is not a single example of an African country in recovery from post colonial chaos.

The author concludes:

As Lord Bauer said, aid goes no way towards righting past colonial wrongs. Only the overthrow of the despots will do that.

If it is incumbent on us to right colonial wrongs, and I'm not sure it is given how many good things were also done during the period, then we must work out how best to do that.

Oh, so that's what civil society is for...

Has the penny finally dropped? A Telegraph editorial points out that party political machines might not be as useful as local groups:

Which leads on to the delicate question of how the Conservative Party should slot into the anti-euro coalition. On the one hand, only Iain Duncan Smith can bring to the table a campaigning machine with a presence in all 658 constituencies. On the other, there is nothing Tony Blair would like more than to present the referendum as "another chance to kick the Tories".

In the Scottish and Welsh devolution referendums, the Conservatives contrived to get the worst of both worlds: they were just high-profile enough to attract plenty of flak, but did very little to mobilise their supporters on the ground. It does not need to be that way.

In Kent, the Conservatives have mounted a brilliant campaign in defence of selective education, but have done so by taking their place quietly within a non-partisan organisation, "Support Kent Schools". A similar way must be worked out to recruit the Tories to the "no" campaign as individuals or in groups.

In the US, local groups are incredibly strong and central groups, such as the political parties, are very weak by comparison with their European cousins. Abortion rights campaigns are not run by the Democratic Party, but by local pro-choice groups. Gun rights campaigns are not run by the Republican Party, but by local gun rights groups such as local NRA chapters. There will be some funding from NARAL or Planned Parenthood or the NRA, but strategy is decided locally. This is civil society in action, with local people deciding their own direction. Enforcing "singing from the same hymn sheet" around the nation would be suicide.

If the Tory party is beginning to realize the importance of this idea, so much the better. A drastic slimming-down of Conservative Central Office and the setting-up or expansion of regional offices might be a jolly good idea.

Postmodern Politics

Britain's bridge across the Atlantic is fated to collapse, says a former Foreign office adviser (thanks to Peter Briffa for the link). Why? Because America is a modern country, while Britain and Europe are postmodern, and if we're going to have any sort of progressive experience for the world, Britain has to throw in its lot with Europe. Ye gods. This is a tawdry explanation. It's anti-Americanism dressed up in the language of artistic expression.

Be honest, Clark. You have an outdated ideology that thinks it's progressive when all its effects on the working class have been regressive. Certainly it's done well for the bourgeois middle class, who now have fat incomes guaranteed by the State by purloining the funds of wealth-creaters and artisans alike (a redistribution of wealth, indeed), but so-called progressive policies have wrecked communities by destroying their social order, introducing them to crime, drugs and depravity on a scale undreamed of only 50 years ago.

Thinking this is a good thing is certainly postmodern, rejecting modern ideas like democracy, liberalism and personal responsibility. Only by consciously mixing your "new" ideas with pre-modern ideas like tyranny and the premise that the working class cannot think for itself can you get your philosophy to work. Your progressive Utopia will be a Dinotopia ("terrible place"). In the meantime, those of us who are trying to build a shining city on a hill will happily ignore you.

UPDATE: An influential correspondent writes to question Mr Clark's assertion that "many" are suggesting that the "forlorn" Colin Powell will leave the administration soon: "Regarding this assertion by David Clark - who claims to be a "former Foreign Office special adviser" (i.e. a spin-doctor, paid by the EU perhaps?) - can anyone tell me who are these mysterious "many" predicting our "forlorn" Secretary of State's "imminent departure"? This would be an amazing scoop if true, as no one in the US press seems to have twigged yet. This Clark fellow must be seriously connected in Washington to enjoy such insider knowledge."

Recommended

I hadn't realised he was British until I took a look today. Daddy Warblogs has a very 1940s feel to it, but the commentary on British and European approaches to the crisis is bang up-to-date and spot on, for that matter.

Mallick aforethought

Continuing on the "so-called socialist" theme, this is the most contemptible article I have ever seen. I never thought I'd say this, but she actually deserves hate mail...

And in the Church of the Nativity...

Some of my correspondents have claimed the Church was not desecrated. Well, it had to be reconsecrated today.

Meanwhile, the Catholic News Service confirms that the Palestinians acted against the agreements they had given the Christians, and that the Armenian shrine was looted. The Palestinians claim to have given the material back, but the Catholic priests cannot confirm that, hem hem.

And the Israelis were the villains here? Give me a break...

America's interest

The idiotic negotiations over Gibraltar are just another example of the Defense Department good, Foreign Affairs Department bad split all over the world. As this Telegraph editorial makes clear, the British MOD is very worried about the Foreign Office plans to share sovereignty with Spain. The American DOD should be worried too:

Moreover, [British Defence Secretary] Mr Hoon has brought a new factor into play by arguing that British strategic interests would be threatened by joint sovereignty. His letter reflects serious concern in both the British and the American armed forces about the relinquishing of sole British control over Gibraltar's naval base and military airfield.

The Spanish foreign ministry has now confirmed that it will insist on "joint use" of the facilities: "The base is part of Gibraltar." The Foreign Office plan would grant Madrid a veto over any future use of the base by American or British nuclear warships, or by forces engaged in operations of which the Spanish disapproved.

I hope Don Rumsfeld had a word with Mr Hoon. If not, someone tell him about this quickly.

News from the Holy Land

Just a few tidbits....

Palestinians Say Last Week's Suicide Bombing Conducted By Israeli Criminals. The New York Times (5/13, Chivers) reports, "The head of the Palestinian Authority's intelligence service said today that a suicide bombing last week in Israel did not appear to be the work of Palestinian terrorists, but rather seemed to have been conducted by Israeli criminals against an illegal gambling club." The bombing on Tuesday "killed 15 Israeli civilians and wounded scores more, and the remarks today, by Amin al-Hendi, who is among those in the Palestinian Authority responsible for arresting terrorists, drew a strong reaction from Israel, which said the remarks were irresponsible and without foundation." Israel "has said the bombing was conducted by Hamas, the radical Islamic group. It reasserted that position today."

Bethlehem Residents Say 13 Exiled Militants Formed Criminal Gang, Terrorized Christians. The Washington Times (5/13, Anwar) reports, "Residents of this biblical city," Bethlehem, "are expressing relief at the exile to Cyprus last week of 13 hard-core Palestinian militants, who they said had imposed a two-year reign of terror that included rape, extortion and executions. The 13 sent to Cyprus, as well as 26 others sent to the Gaza Strip, had taken shelter in the Church of the Nativity, triggering a 39-day siege that ended Friday." Palestinians who live near the church "described the group as a criminal gang that preyed especially on Palestinian Christians, demanding 'protection money' from the main businesses, which make and sell religious artifacts." The Times adds, "According to Bethlehem residents, one of the group's top leaders, Jihad Ja'ara, 29, traveled around town with an M-16 rifle, terrorizing the community."

And, for those who say that the Israelis are conducting an official campaign of terror...

Israel Says It Foiled Terror Plot By Jewish Settlers. The Los Angeles Times (5/13, Maharaj) reports, "Israeli security forces, already battling attacks by Palestinian militants on Jewish civilians, said over the weekend that they foiled an attempt by radical Jewish settlers to detonate a powerful bomb at a school for Arab girls in East Jerusalem. Investigators were said to be questioning four suspects to determine whether they were responsible for any recent attacks against Palestinians, including a bombing in March at another school in East Jerusalem." Authorities "fear that attacks on Palestinians by Jewish extremists could lead to reprisals -- and a never-ending cycle of violence. ... Police arrested the men two weeks ago, but details of their arrest and alleged plot were revealed to Israeli media only over the weekend." The bomb "was rigged to explode when the 1,500 students in the At Tur neighborhood gathered for morning assembly in the school's courtyard, authorities said. The device was composed of two barrels of gasoline and two gas balloons."

Econopolitics

A leaked memo from Blairite pollsters has revealed the sham of the stance that Britain's entry in the the Euro is a purely economic matter. This Telegraph editorial revals the scope of Labour's cynicism, while the news article shows just how manipulative the party wants to be of public opinion.

Scapegoat search

Rail bosses 'warned' about Potters Bar, reports the Beeb. So the essentially re-nationalized Railtrack was warned, and did nothing? How are they going to blame privatization for this one? Watch Patrick Crozier's blog for updates. I'm sure he'll tell us.

Ian -- good name, good chap

There's a terrific quote from Ian Hislop over at Libertarian Samizdata. If socialism is to mean anything, it must be centered on the working class. Funny how few "socialists" realize that.

Ruud boyz

Jim Bennett's latest column looks at the anglospheric nature of Ducth society. Britain and the Netherlands have a long history together. Much of Cromwell's East Anglia was populated by Dutch immigrants, and the Gloriuos Revolution could fairly be described as a Dutch conquest of England (although not a lasting one). When England get knocked out of football tournaments, I normally transfer my allegiance to the Dutch. I wonder how common that is?

TCS Column Up

After what seems like an age (thanks to Howard for filling in while I've been busy on other things, I have another TCS column up. Is Breast Best for Tests? looks at the claims made for breastfeeding increasing the baby's IQ. I'm all for breastfeeding, but this ain't why.

A rose by any other name...

Mark Steyn is on fire today. A few excerpts from his imaginary discussion in the BBC newsroom on the rise of the "right":

"But how many kinds of Right-wingers are there?"

"Well, we're adding new categories every week. But, for the purposes of headline updates, just stick with this easy precis." The floor manager slid the BBC's At-a-Glance Guide to Who's Right on to the desk: " 'Far Right' equals old-time Right-winger; 'extreme Right' equals bald Right-winger; 'hard Right' equals bald, gay Right-winger; and 'incendiary Right' equals divisive Right-wing corpse who unduly provoked vegan peace activists."

And...

President Chirac was absolutely right to insist that we cannot enter into dialogue with these people. To do so would only legitimise them and we need to send a clear signal that these hard-Right bigots have no place in our democracy."

"You mean by shooting them?"

"Er, well, no, not that. No matter what feelings political figures arouse, the ballot box is the place to express them."

"You mean by electing a bloke in a monkey suit like they did up north?"

"Er, well, no, obviously, that calls into question the whole business of direct elections. We may be better returning to a system whereby we simply."

"Appoint Chris Patten to the post?"

"Exactly," said Tony. "Chris can't get elected to anything, but it seems to have worked out pretty well for him. And the advantage of appointing a reasonable moderate European democrat like Chris is that."

Poor Chris. Wait, what am I saying? More...

"If Pim's successor, Joao Varela, becomes prime minister, [Queen Beatrix is] planning to refuse to take tea with him because his party are Right-wing racists."

"Good for Her Majesty!" I said. "It's great to see someone who won't have any truck with white bigots who hate immigrants."

"Well, actually, this Varela feller's a black guy from Cape Verde. But for Holland to elect the first black immigrant prime minister in Europe would send a frightening message that virulent racist nationalism is once again on the rise."

And finally, Cyril...

"Then we'll cross to Denmark to talk to the new hardline conservatives."

"Whoa, hold on," Ron interrupted. " 'Hardline conservatives' is a term we reserve for unreconstructed marxists on the North Korean politburo, plus Don Rumsfeld."

"Sorry," I said, "it's a lot to take in. 'Racist Right' equals black immigrant Right-wingers. 'Conservatives' equal communists. Hey, here's one for you. How about 'moderate conservatives'?"

Ron guffawed. " 'Moderate conservatives'? There's no such thing, not in this news department. Oh, wait a minute." He flipped through the BBC guide. "You're right. Page 47. 'Moderate conservative', a term strictly reserved for reformist ayatollahs."

Actually, I'm not sure that this was imaginary...

Alas

Andrew Sullivan has been, to all intents and purposes, sacked by the New York times. Churls.

States, counties and provinces

I've put up an Excel spreadsheet of the relative sizes of the main administrative subdivisions of the US, UK, Australia and Canada here. It's pretty illuminating. Not a single English county is smaller than Prince Edward Island, and an awful lot of them are bigger than Wyoming. The case for strong counties needs to be made in the political arena. Jim Bennett comments that "the Tory response to the regional assembly proposal should be the simple one of offering to let each county vote on becoming a "charter shire" -- one with the same automomy as Scotland. (maybe not the optimum example, but one which everybody can understand immediately)." I think I agree, although something needs to be done about the metropolitan county/ unitary authority fiasco Walker and Gummer foisted on us. Include, for example, West Midlands in Warwickshire and Greater Manchester in Lancashire and you should solve the problem, though.

Note: I haven't subdivided Scotland or Wales because their administartive subdivisions have been comprehensively mucked up by many previous administrations. I haven't touched Ireland or Northern Ireland either.

Simon says...

Simon Jenkins gets the line exactly right on regional government:

Democratic geography should always reflect a sense of political identity. American states, big and small, are axiomatic to American democracy. It is through them that Americans define themselves. Ever since the Thatcher Government, cities and counties have been stripped of power. But travelling round England, I meet nobody who feels allegiance switched to something called a region. Gloucestershire does not feel obliged to throw its lot in with Cornwall, let alone vice versa.

Above their town or district people recognise their county, and above that, London. The division of England outside the big cities into districts and counties has worked well for more than a century. It overlapped not just with history but with political, social and cultural networks. It was undermined not by some overriding necessity. County-sized units are autonomous and efficient in America, Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe.

Devolution is nothing to do with size or economies of scale. Modern public administration can be as small-scale as anyone chooses, provided that fiscal power is linked to the ballot and provided central government trusts local people. If Luxembourg can tax itself, why not Essex? If Belgium why not Yorkshire? The answer lies in power-hungry London ministers and officials. That trend should be reversed, not appeased by the cosmetic of regional devolution.

Jenkins points out that it was Ted Heath's government that started the rot by re-organizing the counties in 1974. Mrs Thatcher's worst minister, John Gummer, helped the process along. Conservatives should be ashamed at their association with the destruction of ancient, and viable, administrative units.

It is interesting that the areas that want regional government are actually ancient entities that were subdivided. Yorkshire wants to reclaim its unity, while Northumbria and Durham, together with the metropolitan boroughs of Tyne & Wear, essentially want to reform the ancient kingdom of Bernicia, subdivided by the Normans after William the Bastard laid waste to it. Old memes die hard...

A plot to destroy England?

Richard Littlejohn looks at the silly scheme for regional parliaments and theorizes that it's an EU plot to destroy England. Wouldn't put it past them. The word England doesn't appear on many EU maps. The UK itself , however, has failed to give England a distinctive voice. The regional parliament that is most needed is an English Parliament. (Thanks to Peter Briffa for the link).

Far from Half Baked

Part of the reason I feel so tired all the time is that I regularly stay up late to watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central. It has some inspired moments, and Stewart has the ability to get to the heart of issues while making you laugh. Thanks to Andrew Hofer, I found this transcript on Jim Treacher's blog of an interview he did wherein he asks an American media commentator about European newspapers. Stewart is pretty hard on the Europeans, and the British in particular. Good for him.

With friends like these...

The Guardian is running an online poll on whether Stephen Byers should resign. When you look at the result, bear in mind that these are Guardian readers voting. Just why is Blair sticking with him?

A real liberal

Great piece on anti-semitism by Nat Hentoff in The Village Voice. His point is that free speech should allow people to say dreadful things, but that good judgment should prevent us from doing so in the first place. That's a real, classical liberal argument. I wonder how many Village Voice readers really agree with him.

The NHS is KILLING PEOPLE!!!

That's the slogan I'd use to get health reform in the UK. It's come to a pretty pass when the Deputy Editor of The Independent, of all things, can write this stinging indictment of the National Health Service. He also has good things to say about America, which is unheard of in the current "debate":

Besides, if our system is so wonderfully efficient, where is the clamour from abroad to copy it? Everyone agrees with the myth that we have nothing to learn from America, and it is true that their system is grossly expensive and lacks equality of provision. But the demands of patients, backed by lawyers, ensure more thorough investigations of conditions. In addition, their hospitals are cherished parts of local communities, which take immense pride in their performances and raise funds for them. And their nurses are not only better paid but also occupy a more senior role in hospitals, where they effectively act as champions of their patients.

If this view is "right-wing," then no wonder Pim got called that...

Wanted: One first amendment, needed urgently...

Meanwhile, Peter Hitchens tells an appalling tale of new restrictions on free speech in the UK. What's remarkable is that the story of the old man who was preaching in public when attacked by people who didn't like what he had to say contains an excellent anthropomorphic example of the tensions in British law between the old libeties and the new authoritarianism. Two police constables were called to the scene, one of whom wanted to protect the old man, the other who wanted to arrest him. They ended up testifying on opposite sides in his court case. As Hitchens says,

The quarrel between the two constables neatly sums up the difference between the old law, which was concerned about what people did, and the new one, which is far too interested in what people think and say.

He goes on,

In [the old man's case] case, the Human Rights Act proved as useless in the defence of traditional views as it is useful in advancing radical ones. It may well be the law of England that if your spoken or written beliefs might irritate a passing homosexual, it is illegal to express them.

Imagine the effect that such a law would have. If condemnation of an action is deemed to be insulting to anyone who does that action, then almost all absolute morality is outlawed. Those who write about such issues, as I do, often receive censorious letters claiming that our articles have insulted the writer. No matter that we have never heard of this individual and have made a general statement about unmarried mothers, employment quotas, homosexuality or whatever it is. These sensitive people have all taken it personally. This conveniently means that they do not have to argue their case. It also means that a legitimate opinion about a type of behaviour is magically transmuted into so-called hate-speech, so offensive to certain persons that it is likely to provoke them to fury. The implication is that it ought not to have been said or written. Such attitudes are already in power on most British university campuses, where the sexual-liberation lobby has almost completely silenced its opponents and where student-union officials have been known to unplug the microphones of speakers who transgress their speech codes.

Did you really think that freedom and democracy would be dismantled by people who openly declared that they wanted censorship and tyranny? The new totalitarianism comes robed in righteous outrage, but it still holds a gag in its hand.

As it happens, I disagree with a lot of what Peter Hitchens says about homosexuality, although I do recognize some of his concerns. But is this any way to advance an argument? I don't think Pim Fortuyn would have thought so.

Liberalism, libertarianism and libertinism

Ignore the headline on Melanie Philips' excellentSpectator article. It trivilizes her argument. She puts together a much more complex theory that western liberalism's laudable aims helped create a libertine climate in which liberalism would suffer. Pim Fortuyn, she alleges, was a champion of libertinism more than of liberalism, although she does recognize Fortuyn did have a point in many areas. I'm not quite sure where the libertarianism of many modern Conservatives fits into her argument, although I think she basically equates it with libertinism, which is unfair. Nevertheless, there is a lot of good stuff in there. Her initial conclusions are especially important:

We can defend ourselves only by reasserting true liberal values. This means welcoming immigrants, certainly, but in numbers which mean they can become integrated and enrich our culture rather than undermine and destroy it. It means welcoming Muslims, certainly; but, as with all minorities, it means expecting them to adopt a common civic identity which subscribes to overarching British values, under whose umbrella they can pursue their own culture and traditions — provided that the two do not conflict. Where they do, the host culture wins. Those have always been the rules for immigrants: to preserve both national identity and the rights of minorities.

Above all, we have to reassert liberalism as a moral project which does not pretend to be morally neutral. We have to acknowledge that liberal values are rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and sprang from British culture. We have to defend them by reaffirming the values, history and institutions of Britain using the language of morality, a word which the Left has degraded into an insult and at which much of the Tory party still runs screaming from the room.

I think this is right. Morality is desperately important to the survival of society. It's been said so often it has the air of a cliche, but we must ensure that liberties do not become license.

Sorkin, you have a lot to answer for

Boris Johnson blames The West Wing for the current state of British, and European, politics. He also points out, fairly I might add, the superiority of the lobby system to press conferences. So no surprise that Alistair Campbell is replacing the one with the other.

Nepalling

In case you'd missed it, there's a serious Maoist insurgency going on in Nepal. The government had a major success recently, but yesterday lost a fort and 140 soldiers. Nepal actually has a population of 25 million, so it's not the tiny mountain kingdom most people think it is. The Telegraph editorializes on the severity of the situation in Nepal's fight for life. It is most definitely in Britain's national interest to pay attention to this position (Britain's best line regiment, the Gurkhas, is recruited there), and the drugs connection makes it in America's interest. I wonder how long it will be before the media start paying the situation proper attention.

"There are no Israeli civilians"

Alan Judd explains to Telegraph readers what regular visitors to MEMRI already know. It will be interesting to see if this little slice of reality has any effect on the small-c conservative anti-Israel lobby.

Weakness is strength

John Prescott wants to strengthen local government in England by weakening it. He wants English regions to be governed by devolved Parliaments. So far so good, but as a trade-off, he wants to abolish local councils, including the county councils that have served as the basis of local government for so long. So many decisions will actually be taken by people further away. This is crazy. Simon Jenkins argued eloquently yesterday that Britain is afraid of direct democracy and that it provides a great opportunity to challenge the status quo:

Elected mayors are here to stay. Nothing shows the ineptitude of the Tories so much as their opposition to them. Had they campaigned for them from the start, they could now be ruling half the cities of England.

Local democracy needs to be just that -- local. Spiriting away the powers of your local council to something 50 miles away will just weaken democracy. Prescott, once again, has shown himself to be contemptuous of the common man.

UPDATE: If you want to consider the viability of "small" British local authorities, consider that according to the UK Government's population figures, Yorkshire and the Humber (ie the old pre-1974 county of Yorkshire, give or take a few bits and pieces) would be the 21st largest US state, bigger than Connecticut, Kentucky, Louisiana and Oregon, to take a few examples. That's worth bearing in mind.

Well I never...

I think any father, or high school boy for that matter, could have told them this.

Where's Cleon when you need him?

Zeus! He's over 2,400 years old and he's still going. Check out the thoughts of the original reactionary at the Old Oligarch's Painted Stoa.

Falling Standards

Emily the Hawkgirl (or Shayera Thal as I geekily refer to her) has uploaded a rendition of the New European Flag at Give War A Chance. I'm gobsmacked. Three cheers for the red, white and blue, and green, and orange, and green again, and red and yellow, and red white and blue again, and black and... (exit stage left, pursued by a bureaucrat).

Quis custodiet ipsum Custodem?

Peter Briffa has a great post tearing apart a supposedly philosophical Guardian leader. He hits the nail firmly on the head.

Countering their image as a Hic state?

The Center For Consumer Freedom is a front organization, in the best possible way, for a coalition of restraunt owners and the food and drink industry. It does an invaluable job in letting the public know about idiotic restrictions on the "food entertainment" industry. This one takes the biscuit (or cookie):

Rated R For Alcoholic Content?
Your 17-year-old daughter has just walked across the stage and received her high school diploma. You're proud of her, and to celebrate you decide to treat her and her best friends to a special dinner. You get to a local family restaurant, and, after the familiar "How many?" comes a new question: "Are you the legal guardian of these children?" You have to answer no, so there's no celebratory dinner.

It's Neo-Prohibitionism run wild, it's an excessive and bizarre invasion into your rights -- and it's the law in West Virginia. This is just the latest of many laws designed to decrease and in some cases prohibit even the responsible consumption of adult beverages.

"Residents taking their grandchildren, nieces, nephews or other distant underage relatives to a dinner in one of the city's finer establishments shouldn't bother if liquor is on the menu," The Parkersburg News and Sentinel reports. "Those residents won't be admitted unless they can prove they are the parent or legal guardian of the children."

Alcohol control commissioners have stepped up enforcement of a law requiring all minors under 18 to be accompanied by a parent or guardian while inside any establishment that sells "wines or spirituous or malt liquors" -- even a family restaurant, and even if none of the adults in the party plans to drink. The law even keeps people out of any "theater, museum, or similar place of amusement" that serves alcohol.

"It's just crazy," says one restaurant patron. "If my daughter has a friend over to stay the night, we can't go out to eat at a nice restaurant because it's against the law."

Utterly crazy, indeed.

More on Jenin

Further discussion with my correspondent (MC):

ISM: Priorities come and go, but until societies are willing again to sacrifice their boys for a greater good but remain moralistic in the modern imperialist sense, I think we're stuck with it. America is much more likely to become isolationist than imperialist, however, and so I do think it likely that Americans will prefer to stay at home unless attacked. It's the Blairite view of the world that worries me.

MC: It worries me too. I fear that there is a growing penchant for dispensing violence in the name of 'humanitarian' ends. It's all too easy, as our enormous power enables us to do great destruction in the knowledge that we won't be harmed - and if there is any danger of being harmed, we do all we can to minimise it, even to the cost of the humanitarian mission, which is absurd.

ISM: I'm not sure the penchant is growing. The British abolition of slavery worldwide was achieved mainly by force of arms. Ditto the various "humanitarian" actions in India such as the abolition of thuggee and suttee. So I think it's always been there. Nor do I think the gap in capabilities is particularly larger now than it was in the colonial era.

The difference as I see it is in the lack of willingness to sacrifice anything in the pursuit of interventionist aims. It's a sort of absolutist moralism that in many ways takes away from the achievement. When you lose loved ones in the pursuit of an aim, you value the result more. In a way, we've lowered the benefits as well as the costs. But we still have a desire for a certain level of benefits, so we therefore want to do more. That's not a good thing.

ISM: Probably, but I must ask how you would handle it, given the undoubted truth that there were considerable numbers of bomb-making factories in the camp, which the Arab press lauds as "The City of Bombers," and the also undoubted truth that the Palestinian Authority tacitly approved of this fact? The Palestinians were not going to issue a court order, which would have been ineffective anyway. Israeli police would have been killed. It seems likely that a less heavily-armed incursion to close down the factories might have encountered equally stiff, perhaps stiffer resistance. The Israelis are entitled to ask why they should put up with having more of their soldiers killed in order to close down bomb factories. If the death toll had been 50 on each side, would that have made it more acceptable? If so, then it's a pretty twisted philosophy (I'm not suggesting you think this, but it seems to be the thinking behind quite a few objections I've seen).

MC: I accept your points - if one was going to go into the town to hunt terrorists, a smaller show of force wouldn't have worked. But, the answer to that, it seems to me, is not to accept that force is not the answer. If you can't use minimum force, the solution is not to use maximum force, but not to use force at all. The Israelis have to face up to the inescapable fact that they are occupying somebody else's land by being in the West Bank and Gaza. Until they leave, this will go on and no amount of force will stop it.

ISM: A renunication of the use of force has to be bipartisan, or it will be a suicide note for the Israelis. There is no indication that the Palestinians and their allies would not declare their use of force a success and promptly take the campaign deeper into Israel proper. As long as the Palestinians consider Israel itself to be an occupying, colonialist power (see Ken Bell's posts) then the use of force against them will continue. The Israelis may get moral brownie points, but that's not much conciliation when you see your family blown to bits in a pizza parlour because somebody doesn't accept you have any right to live.

There's an interesting article in the latest Foreign Affairs that says that neither side can afford to give up, so an equitable peace has to be imposed. I think they may be right, but I can't see either side agreeing to the terms they present. Which will lead to a return of the Stern Gang as well as the continuation of Hamas activities.

I honestly don't know how force can be removed from the middle east, short of them all converting to ascetic Buddhism.

ISM: Fair enough. I think the key is if the Israelis themselves are refusing to investigate. Plenty of things like this happen all over the world -- including Northern Ireland -- but the UN does not investigate them, nor should it. The Israelis need to look into allegations this serious. It may be that they are complete fabrications -- in fact, that would be par for the course from the people who stage funerals in order to stir up sympathy from the credulous West -- but I think the Israelis should follow up all such allegations according to the due process that I believe is enshrined in their constitution.

MC: Quite right, but what evidence is there that they a)will, or b)ever have done in the past? Sharon has congratulated his men for what they did. He is not now going to backtrack and investigate them, and if evidence of wrongdoing is found, put the soldiers on trial. I just don't believe the Israeli government would do such a thing. This makes the Israeli government complicit in crime, and under the principle of command responsibility, guilty of the crimes committed by its troops. By contrast, the British police have arrested British soldiers and some of them have been put on trial for murder and other crimes committed in Northern Ireland.

ISM: I don't know enough about internal Israeli politics, but I have been told that there is plenty of judicial activity in this area. I'll ask around. We've agreed before that command responsibility is a dodgy concept, and I don't think the Israelis accept it, but given its existence, you're probably right. I should add, however, that the British government has faced considerable popular disapproval for its actions, often leading to the release of the soldiers it has prosecuted on what seem to me to be political grounds. Does command responsibility apply then?

Community or Commons?

Janet Daley is back on form. This week she points out the idiocy of tinkering with the welfare system as a solution to anti-social behavior. What's being suggested isn't welfare reform in the American sense. If only it was. Instead, it's an issue of Government acting for the "community" where once the commons would have acted itself:

That is what happens when the power of the community is replaced by the power of the state. Neighbours from hell, as the tabloids call them, used to be dealt with by ostracism or condemnation by their own peers (or occasionally threats, when all else failed). Back in the days when working-class communities really were communities, and not socially engineered dumping grounds, the effect of collective disapproval on standards of behaviour was a serious force.

But that was before we (or somebody on our behalf) decided that shaming and judging were less forgiveable sins than smashing your neighbours' windows and terrorising the elderly. It was also before a whole class of people had been created whom no amount of social pressure or disapproval could touch, because their basic economic needs are all provided for, as of right.

Welfare reform, if it is to have any meaning, needs to destroy this concept of entitlement. The key to that is, of course, expectations. If you expect the poor to drown if left to themselves, then you'll never do it. You're also a snob. But if you expect the poor to work for themselves, pull themselves up and join with other in the process, thereby creating a real community, then you'll embrace welfare reform as the only viable option.

Blame Espana

People looking for someone to blame for the President's decision to repudiate the treaty on the International Criminal Court -- an act widely applauded in the blogosphere -- should look beyond the White House. The Telegraph points the finger at Jack Straw, for his disgraceful decision to allow extradition procedings against General Pinochet.

In fact, as the Telegraph points out, real "blame" should go to the politicized prosecuting magistrates of the Napoleonic countries, such as the infamous Baltasar Garzon. I had not heard this one:

As if to underscore the point, Judge Garzon recently popped up again. Last month, he asked the British authorities for permission to question Henry Kissinger, while he was visiting London, over American involvement with the Chilean junta in the 1970s. Permission was denied, as was a similar request from a French magistrate. But there are plenty of persistent lawyers out there with a political axe to grind who would relish the prospect of dragging the mighty United States through the courts. The Americans can hardly be blamed for seeking to deny them the opportunity.

Hear,hear. Well done, Baltasar. You've saved America...

Blairite Corruption

I'm unafraid to use those words. The current Labour government has corrupted Britain's Parliament. The last convention remaining related to honour amongst Her Majesty's Ministers has now gone. The central principle was that a Minister who misled* the House of Commons should be required to resign. Stephen Byers has admitted he did so. But he remains in office. As the Telegraph points out in So he is a liar, Byers' crime went further in that he acted to ruin a man's career unjustly, but that, while the action of a cad, is not necessarily a resignation matter. After all, now this taboo has fallen, there would seem to be no matter worthy of resignation.

I'm not able to check Erskine May, but I believe Britain's laws on impeachment were never abolished, they just fell into disuse. Is it time to impeach Stephen Byers?

*Euphemism for "lied to".

VitalStats

The April edition of the VitalSTATS newsletter is finally available at the STATS website.

This month, Howard and I debunk all sorts of bad studies and faulty numbers:

- The media cries Armageddon at a CDC study linking cancers to nuclear weapons fallout
- A new study linking TV watching to violence is not up to snuff
- Race is a controversial issue. But the Institute of Medicine did not help any by crying racism.
- Paint fumes may make you dizzy, but will they give you cancer?
- How hot is it really in Antarctica?
- How many beer cans can teenage alcoholics drop on the side of the road?

Jenin Genie

As far as the Europeans are concerned, it seems like the main issue still corked in the bottle in Jenin is that of alleged war crimes. I sent a copy of the Washington Post op/ed A Hard Look at Jenin to a friend of mine who lectures in international conflict and who has been a Captain in two armies. He is no bleeding heart leftie, but he is deeply worried about abuses of the rules of war that have been seen in Kosovo and, he thinks, Israel. Here is what he said on the piece, and my replies.

Street fighting is notoriously intense, destructive and bloody. It also isn't anything new. The majority of fighting in WW2 on the Eastern Front, for instance, actually took place in towns, despite the efforts of generals to avoid them. But of itself that doesn't
necessarily justify what happened in Jenin. Perhaps the key ethical issue is that Mr. Sinnreich poses late in his piece - 'how will we
balance dead American soldiers against dead enemy civilians?'. Is it really justified to obliterate a town with your artillery, like his
father, just to avoid risk for your soldiers? After all, what is the point of fighting if not to protect civilian life? It is a soldier's duty to put his own life before that of others. I dislike the whole 'force protection' thing - it suggests that protecting your own men is more important than protecting the innocent. But if that's the case, wouldn't it be easier just to stay at home?

ISM: Couldn't agree with you more on the force protection point. However, I can see why it is applied, even if I disgree with its application. A society always has several goals, some of which are contradictory. If one of its goals is foreign intervention to secure certain outcomes, but another is the minimization of home casualties, force protection is the logical outcome. Priorities come and go, but until societies are willing again to sacrifice their boys for a greater good while remaining moralistic in the modern imperialist sense, I think we're stuck with it. America is much more likely to become isolationist than imperialist, however, and so I do think it likely that Americans will prefer to stay at home unless attacked. It's the Blairite view of the world that worries me.

Israel is, of course, as always a more difficult issue.

More specific to the Israeli case, there is a clear distinction between war fighting, as in WWII, and counter-terrorist operations. The British Army has never said, 'West Belfast is a hot-bed of terrorism. We will go through it house by house, bulldozing the homes of suspected terrorist sympathisers, and abducting all males of fighting age when we find them'. It wouldn't be right if we did it, so I don't know why it is right for the Israelis. In fact, it is surely even less right for them, as Belfast is at least British territory, whereas Jenin isn't Israeli territory.

ISM: Good points, but as I've said before, Palestinian terrorism is a very different beast from Northern Irish terrorism. It kills far more people, and is partly motivated by a quite simply racist belief that the Jews do not even have a right to live. Their terrorists are more ruthless, and so I don't find it surprising that the Israelis have a more ruthless approach in return. The question is therefore not whether it's right for the Israelis to do something we haven't done, but what we would do in similar circumstances. I don't know the answer to that now, but historically the British have been utterly ruthless when faced with similar circumstances.

I remain confused by the various rights and responsibilities claimed by the various parties in the West Bank, or Samaria and Judea as the Israelis call it...

The idea that if there are terrorists in a town, you have to march in with all your tanks and APCs and treat the problem as if you were in the middle of WWII is surely fallacious.

ISM: Probably, but I must ask how you would handle it, given the undoubted truth that there were considerable numbers of bomb-making factories in the camp, which the Arab press lauds as "The City of Bombers," and the also undoubted truth that the Palestinian Authority tacitly approved of this fact? The Palestinians were not going to issue a court order, which would have been ineffective anyway. Israeli police would have been killed. It seems likely that a less heavily-armed incursion to close down the factories might have encountered equally stiff, perhaps stiffer resistance. The Israelis are entitled to ask why they should put up with having more of their soldiers killed in order to close down bomb factories. If the death toll had been 50 on each side, would that have made it more acceptable? If so, then it's a pretty twisted philosophy (I'm not suggesting you think this, but it seems to be the thinking behind quite a few objections I've seen).

Second, as far as I understand it, the accusations against the Israeli troops made by most sensible observers are not that they massacred Palestinians (hardly anybody suggests that any more), nor that they blasted the town with artillery, aircraft etc, which they obviously didn't. Rather the more serious accusations refer to specific breaches of the rules of law by Israeli troops. These include a) using Palestinian civilians as human shields when approaching/entering houses, b) shooting on unarmed civilians & c) shooting a number of captured personnel without good cause (e.g. one Palestinian had a bad back and some back strap to support him - on seeing he had something under his shirt, the Israelis just shot him even though he was unarmed, just in case he was a suicide bomber).

There appears to be sufficient evidence to justify a proper investigation into these accusations. If true, they are definitely crimes, and cannot be justified by anything Sinnreich says in his article. By refusing to investigate or to permit others to do so, the Israeli authorities are colluding in what may be criminal behaviour. For this reason, I think that the article is really beside the point as far as Jenin is concerned.

ISM: Fair enough. I think the key is if the Israelis themselves are refusing to investigate. Plenty of things like this happen all over the world -- including Northern Ireland -- but the UN does not investigate them, nor should it. The Israelis need to look into allegations this serious. It may be that they are complete fabrications -- in fact, that would be par for the course from the people who stage funerals in order to stir up sympathy from the credulous West -- but I think the Israelis should follow up all such allegations according to the due process that I believe is enshrined in their constitution.

Parallels

Lots of great stuff about Pim Fortuyn over at AndrewSullivan.com. Andrew is taking the matter personally, as can only be expected. The assassination of contrarians is a very worrying development. Is this the price we pay for honesty in politics?

The right label

BBC News Online asks "Fortuyn killing: A political watershed?" and it's interesting to see that virtually all the views expressed by Dutch correspondents express surprise that the rest of the world labeled him "right-wing". The Dutch elections next week will be very interesting. Meanwhile, the latest we've heard from the police on the killer is that environmental literature was removed from his dwelling. I'm not jumping to conclusions, as it could be The Skeptical Environmentalist for all we know, but rumors are flying that he was an enviromental activist.

Chelary

First lady is a semi-official position in US public life. Hilary Clinton therefore had some justification for her political adventures while First Lady. There is no equivalent in the British system, where the Prime Minister derives his powers from being primus inter pares in the House of Commons. It is therefore disturbing to see Cherie Blair carving out a powerful position for herself. Read Cherie's summits take her into the public domain and you'll see what I mean.

Fortuyn: a brave man, unfavored

The Telegraph has a considered piece on what Pim Fortuyn's murder means. Michael Gove covers the same ground with his usual excellence. His questions deserve answers from Europe's elite:

Why is it the most horrific acts of politically motivated violence committed against the West have come from Muslims, in the grip of a twisted fundamentalist version of their faith, who have enjoyed the freedoms, welfare benefits, educational opportunities and wealth Europe has to offer? And why do Western establishments temporise in the face of fundamentalist violence, from the EU’s funding of the infrastructure of terror in the Palestinian Authority to the lack of prosecutions against those who preach hate and recruit for jihads? A failure by European elites to tackle these questions allows both extremes, the far Right and Islamic terror, to flourish. Where do extremes now meet? In the house that Jacques built.

Jacques is Jacques Delors, by the way.

It is interesting, though, that the two most recent political assassinations in Europe -- of Fortuyn and of Solvio Berlusconi's employment adviser -- seem to have been orchestrated by Leftist forces. There could be no clearer indication that they are losing the battle of ideas. And if they have turned to assassination, then it does seem reasonable to assume that they may have had a hand in the other unpleasant feature of current European politics -- the stirring up of latent anti-Semitism. I have no evidence for this, beyond the specious claims, tendetentious theories and outright lies that appear in the pages of such publications as the Guardian and the New Statesman all the time. It may be that history will judge that, in these times, it was the Left that adopted the tactics of the 1930s.

Patten of Failure

This should be a link to Andrew Sullivan's excellent comments on Chris Patten's latest apologia. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work, so here's what Andrew said in full:

CHRIS PATTEN'S BLATHER: There are few more condescending, Eurocratic, arrogant fools among European elites than one Chris Patten. A former Tory, he now clings to the Conservative Party as a way to win further unelected office in the Brussels bureaucracy. His piece today in the Washington Post, designed to answer George Will's recent column bemoaning the rise of European anti-Semitism, is chock full of prejudices. There's the sad attempt to argue that America was soft on Nazism because Joe Kennedy once was. And there's the belittling of anti-Semitic violence in Europe by the canard that it is balanced by anti-Islamic agitation. He also has the gall to associate himself with a democratic Europe, while he represents the least democratic institution on the continent, the European Commission, and is in the vanguard of further stripping democracy from the elected governments of EU member states. He seems appalled by the idea that the same Europe that gave us the Holocaust should now be seen as anti-Zionist or in some way hostile to Israel. Who does he think he's kidding? Visceral loathing for Israel permeates the entire European establishment of which he is an integral part. He brings up the issue of private American financial support for the IRA. He's right that such support is vile. But the American government never sent millions of dollars direct to the IRA to foment terrorism against Britain. Yet the EU funnels vast sums to Yassir Arafat's terrorist organizations, with no checks, no standards, no accountability. That money is used to kill Jews. And Chris Patten helps dispense it. And that's largely all you need to know.

Yea, verily.

St. Brendan's Webvoyage

Brendan O'Neill of spiked now has a website using the blog format (he has some reasons for not calling it a weblog, which are better than NRO's IMHO). Brendan's got a gift for vocalizing the nagging doubt, so I recommend this as a regular destination.

Arafat and the IRA

Iain Dale surprised me a few days ago by declaring the Israelis guilty of state terrorism. Shortly afterwards, I got embrolied in a long e-mail debate with a selection of otherwise sound British conservatives who took the same view (or worse, in some cases), which is part of the reason why I haven't mentioned the subject much here. Andrew Dodge reacted with incandescent fury, but Iain repeated his charges. Now, thankfully, Joe Katzman over at Winds of Change has dissected Iain's statements and drawn a important parallel between the activities of the Palestinians and the IRA. An excellent read.

Tolerance and Intolerance

Dutch far-right leader 'shot dead' reports the BBC. "Far-right" is a bit of misnomer, given that the basis of his anti-immigration policy was the traditional Dutch liberty to be gay, which he thought was under threat from Muslim intolerance. I'll be very interested to see who claims repsonsibility for this.

RIP

Lord Bauer has died. The Emeritus Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, no less, was a great voice for common sense in the international arena. The Times obituary linked to above gives you the details of his life. The Telegraph, however, gives you his ideas:

"Where peoples' abilities, motivations and social and political institutions are favourable," he wrote in 1972, "material progress will occur. Where these basic determinants are unfavourable, development will not occur, even with aid."

Marshall Aid had been effective after the Second World War, Bauer suggested, because the peoples of Europe had the attitudes, motivations and institutions favourable to development; thus it had encouraged private initiative.

Similarly, many poor countries, such as Malaysia and countries in Latin America, had transformed themselves without the need for aid. But where these factors were absent - in many parts of Africa and Asia, for example - Western aid often had a counterproductive effect, leading to the "politicisation of economic life".

Of course, such a view did not go down well and despite his eminence, you rarely saw him interviewed on the telly. When he was, he treated the facile arguments of his interlocutors with disdain, which was why I lobbied hard for him to be invited to an Oxford Union debate on the subject of aid, a debate he dominated. He was one of the truly great academics of the modern ear and the world is the poorer for his passing.

Burma Road to Democracy

Aung Suu Kyi has been released ... again. This isn't the first time she's been freed, but from what the UN Envoy says in this report, it sounds like the "Myanmar" government might actually be willing to compromise this time. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

The last word on France

Jolly good summary of where France is following yesterday's election by Daniel Johnson in The Telegraph: France is still in denial over the threat posed by Le Pen. Read the whole thing.

There is no room for complacency. One in every five Frenchmen who voted voted for Le Pen. The majority decry his politics, but one in every five is a large number, however you look at it. The strategies the French establishment are adopting can only cause this number to grow. If Chirac doesn't realize this, then he will assuredly preside over the last years of the Fifth Republic.

UPDATE: Tim Hames has a great column here, which also assesses what's happening in Germany. I'm less optimistic than he is about the Free Democrats, but he has some interesting observations.

Join the Club

Emmanuel Goldstein realizes that the Tories have to appeal to the working class. See here for my take on the issue, written just after the Hagueite disaster a year ago.

I should add that Emmanuel's suggestion that the BNP winning three council seats should be treated seriously because "It's small breakthroughs like this that got the Lib Dems started" is breathtakingly untrue. The Liberals have been going since time immemorial...

Far right? How decidedly un-British!

Popping my head up from the weekend baricades to recommend Jim Bennett's latest column, Non-barking English dogs. He contrasts the relative performances of the Far Right in the French national and British local elections, and comes up with important answers as to why the British nazis always perform so badly.

Given what is happening on the European Continent, one would think that the makers of opinion in Britain would thank their lucky stars that they have avoided the birth of a significant neo-fascist movement. They should have realized that it is a testament to the temperament of the British people, and a triumph of its democratic institutions that an important element of the national political spectrum so closely expresses the opinions of a substantial part (probably a majority, in fact) of the people. But of course many would prefer to try to tar the Euroskeptic Tories with the Le Penist brush, whether of out self-righteous ignorance, political opportunism, or both.

One might even venture to say that Continentals upset about the increasing percentage of their compatriots voting for Le Pen and his even less attractive counterparts might consider trying to offer their voters an electoral alternative that addresses valid concerns about European centralization, crime, failures of assimilation and other grave problems in a non-hysterical, non-exploitive manner. But I won't hold my breath waiting for that.

Good stuff. I've always said that Tories should attack Nazis for being un-British and therefore un-patriotic. A good assault on these lines by IDS, following up his sacking of Ann Wintertom for making a racist joke at a private occasion, should lay the "Tory fascist" ghost for good.

Column out

My latest UPI Commentary column, Recent research suggests ..., is up on the UPI site.

Immigration myths

It's been a point I've been laboring for some time now that immigrants rarely want to stay permanently in their "new" country, which is why sojourner provisions such as the ones Jim Bennett suggests are too important to get lost in the hysteria surrounding immigration since 9/11. Now there's some academic backing for my point Bidding goodbye to borders: migration in the new Europe is about Europe, but I'd imagine the experience is pretty similar in the US (Europe has a far larger alien population trying to get into it, along an even longer and less secure border). Here are some of the myths the research explodes:

Migration does not just involve permanent relocation. Most migrants move on to new destinations, or return to their home countries.

Migrants who go home with savings, or those who send money home in regular remittances, do not simply boost consumer spending in their home countries. Rather, they stimulate investment, often by setting up their own businesses, and returning migrants boost productivity.

There is no difference between the motives of legal and illegal immigrants.

Far from 'swamping' their host countries' labour markets, migrants are fulfilling a vital need. As the report puts it: 'In Western Europe, the past half century has been a period of labour shortage and net immigration which has spread gradually across all EU member states such that all are now net importers of labour. Future projections show that the decline in fertility and ageing of the population is likely to reduce the effective labour forces in the EU by 5.5 per cent by 2020'

We need to rethink immigration. Neither the "Rome for the Romans" nor the Wall Street Journal "Immigration Now!" ideas are ideal. This research, which recommends a free market in work permits, looks like a good start. Jim's suggestions are another.

Local elections truly local?

If that's the case, it's a good thing. BBC political correspondent Nick Robinson thinks so.

For Pete's sake...

It is part of learning that you make mistakes. Britain is experimenting with the issue of directly electing Mayors. True to form, the voters of Hartlepool elected a man in a monkey suit. So Labour apparatchiks and the Lib Dims are saying they're going to have to "think again" about the whole issue. Give me a break. If this guy screws up royally, then the voters of Hartlepool will know to elect someone serious next time. It may therefore be a really good thing for local democracy. And who knows, a genuine independent might be a good thing for the town. No doubt Messrs Clarke and Hughes would have suggested rescinding Minnesota's status as a State after Jesse Ventura's election...

Priorities

Iain Dale (direct link doesn't seem to be working) has an interesting observation: 1,000 people protested May 1 in central London about capitalism and made national headlines. 20,000 people gathered to greet the Queen in Portsmouth and made no news whatsoever. There are two reasons for this. First is the obvious one that many newsmen are raving Marcusian anti-monarchists.

Subtler, however, is the refusal of newsmen -- of all political persuasions -- to accept that anything happens in Britain outside London (unless it's something bad, like the far right BNP winning council seats in Burnley). Britain used to be a country where thriving provincial metropolises made waves across the world. The last century, however, saw a process whereby almost everything drifted to London.

Can this last? A friend of mine, a partner at KPMG and therefore not short of a bob or two, recently returned to London from the US and cannot afford to buy a house there. Sooner or later economics will win out and people will just refuse to move there, preferring to telecommute. London will continue to be a major international city, with major firms paying the high prices for their workers, but in terms of Britain, other cities may become more important again. It will be interesting to see how the British news organizations react to this. It may be that they cease covering British news entirely, in a bizarre reversal of the situation in the US. Part of the story of this century may be the de facto secession of London from the UK. I'm not sure that would be a bad thing.

On Liberty

Just in case anyone thought I had turned to authoritarianism in my last post, I should stress that the sort of authority I'm talking about is of a very specific, local kind. Not, emphatically, state control. Here's the reason, contained in Tom Stoppard's address to the Telegraph's freedom conference yesterday:

The foundational question: "Why should anyone obey anyone else?" has a foundational answer: "Because human beings are social animals." This is not merely to say that "society" would be chaotic and unworkable without some common beliefs, customs, values, rules and so on. It is, rather, that this is what society means: it entails a common subscription to the whole.

Between the birth of democracy in a city small enough to equate political freedom with personal direct participation in the government, and where the value-system of the citizen and of the city was indivisible not just in fact but in conception - between all that and the idea of the individual as a kind of tiny country of his own, with his own flag, with his own borders to which recognition is due - between the one idea and the other, there is only one fundamental mutation.

Park keepers are given authority by our common subscription to the idea that, in modern cities, we want nice places where we can relax without having to rely on the super-rich to provide them. If we decide we don't want these, then we have no need for park keepers.

And, of course, this is a fundamental objection to multiculturalism. Multiculturalism kills freedom. I'm sorry, but it's an inevitable conclusion.

Up to a point, Boris

You read it here first: fining parents is a good idea, says Boris Johnson. Yes, if they have parents. But, as Boris himself acknowledges, many of the young yobs he describes have no parents or simply a welfare-dependent single mother who probably can't control her hulking children whatever happens. For the most part, the problem is one of social decay. We need to restore authority to the family and local figures. Until very recently, trains had what were still called Guards. It wouldn't take too much to resurrect the office and imbue them with quasi-legal authority derived from the powers of the British Transport Police.

Interestingly, I've now read the article in the Spectator Boris refers too. The author agrees with me, up to a point:

But why are we all so scared of children? Forty years ago the situation was reversed. There were authority figures everywhere: park-keepers, train guards, men in uniform who looked as though they could handle themselves better than a fortysomething writer, and who could speak to rowdy kids with a firmness they knew would be backed up by the other men on the train. Would I want that world back? I don’t think so. The dark side of all that authority was battered wives and, yes, battered children, too. But I think that I’d like a little bit of it back; the feeling that if we do dare to say something, then others would back us up. That’s what’s missing. And that’s why so many look the other way, or leave the problem on someone else’s platform.

I think he's being a little silly here. We did not have battered wives because we had park keepers with authority. Battering was in many ways a function of the divorce laws -- there's far less now because women can walk away without worry. A far better concern would be the phenomenon of the tinpot little Hitler. That's a management issue. All in all, I'm pretty certain that we could put in place a system of authority today that would have fewer of the downsides of the past. The UK desperately needs it.

Umkhonto we Sizwe loses another spear

Steve Tshwete has died. I always had a soft spot for this old terrorist, because of what he did to ease South Africa's return to the international sporting arena. That was a big deal in the non-American anglosphere. He also was a surprisingly effective justice minister. Mbeki's government will be the poorer for having lost him.

America's Europe Problem

Interesting exploration of emerging American disatisfaction, nay distaste, towards European attitudes in The Times. It's worth reading all of it. The issue has managed to unite the entire Senate, hardly the most right-wing, and possibly, member-for-member, the best-informed representative body in the world. Europe's obsession with the Israel issue is in danger of completely marginalizing its views from consideration by the world's only superpower. Which only goes to show that, if Britain wants to retain global influence, it must disassociate itself from European idiocies. I think Tony Blair has enough gumption to realize this, and it has been interesting how the PMOS has been dismissing European apparatchiks like Patten and Prodi in recent briefings. If Europe is being ignored, it is Europe's own fault.

The Lobby Shuffle

The UK's local elections are tomorrow. Electoral rules forbid the Government abusing its power for party political benefit by making announcements that affect local issues. Well, David Blunkett announced a major initiative against street crime, erm, today. In his Lobby Briefing, the Prime Minister's spinner-in-chief, Alistair Campbell, dealt with the propriety issue by leading a merry dance "in the round":

Asked whether David Blunkett should be making this announcement on the day before the Local Elections, the PMOS pointed out that it was part of the Government's overall anti-crime strategy. It was not party political. It was focussing on the issue in the round.

Asked why the announcement could not have waited until next week in order to avoid any appearance of the Government trying to influence the Local Elections, the PMOS said that particular crime issues had been highlighted in recent days in large parts of the media. It was therefore right for the Government to continue with its coherent strategy and point out how it was tackling the issue and targeting the money. Overall crime had fallen by 21%.

However, we recognised that there were particular street crime and persistent offender issues which had to be dealt with. Consequently, it was right for us to continue to underline our commitment to deal with the problem, and explain how we were doing so.

Put to him that today's funding announcement was an 'election bribe', the PMOS said that he would disagree in the strongest terms. Money was being targeted at particular issues which were important for us to address, including stepping up police operations, fast-tracking court cases, breaking the link between drugs and crime, dealing with offenders on remand, providing effective measures to tackle persistent juvenile offending, as well as a number of measures to counter terrorist activity.

Put to him that Tessa Jowell had put off making an announcement on Wembley until after the Local Elections and that that should have been done in this case too, the PMOS said that Wembley was a different matter because it related to a particular locality.

Put to him that Wembley was about a National Stadium, the PMOS pointed out that Wembley had particular reference to Brent and other areas involved in the bidding process, such as Birmingham.

Challenged that the money going towards fighting crime was being targeted at specific areas too, the PMOS said that we had talked in the past about the importance of recognising that there were problems in particular Metropolitan areas. That was precisely why we were focussing the anti-street crime measures on those parts of the country. However, today's announcement was not just about street crime. It was part of overall package which also dealt with persistent offenders and terrorism measures.

Asked to explain how an announcement could fall foul of Purdah, the PMOS said that that would happen if it was aimed exclusively at a particular area. Today's announcement was focussing on the issue of crime in the round. Questioned as to whether Mr Blunkett's announcement would have been cleared with the Electoral Commission, the PMOS said that the process would have been conducted within the guidelines.

Pontius Pilate's "what is truth?" must be the PMOS's motto.

Nanny knows best

Some interesting language from Chris Patten quoted in this Times article. Britain should be "ashamed" and America should be "apologetic". This is the language of the school teacher and the nanny, the Repressive Parent in Freudian terms. Please excuse this exercise in Transactional Analysis, but I'd be surprised if you found American diplomacy couched in anything except the language of the Rational Adult (well, perhaps the odd bit of Free Child from the President, and the occasional bit of Nurturing Parent towards Israel, but that mainly at EU insistence).

Diplomacy is not about parent-child relationships, but about individual states pursuing their interests rationally. Irrational acts are by definition undiplomatic. Moreover, most of Europe has never been in the position of a parent to the US. Britain, and to an extent Ireland, has been, and she's the one nation that doesn't talk down to the US.

The EU is identifying itself fairly and squarely as a bunch of busy-body interfering Aunts. That's not a particularly edifying spectacle...

Immigration's way forward

Michael Gove sets out a workable British immigration policy. I like his ideas, which have applicability in the States too, I think. Most important, however, is the kicker:

Other policies need to be implemented if immigration is to be managed successfully. The most important is maintaining the cultural identity which makes the host nation an attractive destination in the first place. That requires a stronger affirmation of collective British identity through the nurturing of inherited institutions, the teaching of national history, an insistence on the acquisition of English language skills and the transparent allocation of public resources on a colour-blind basis.

As Jim Bennett says, "democracy, immigration, multiculturalism -- pick any two".

Idiotic

Bearing Liveries is the stupidest argument on the 2nd Amendment I have ever seen. the author is a Professor of Law at the University of Utah, for goodness' sake:

The original meaning of "bearing arms" meant the right to participate in military affairs by carrying or associating with the coat of arms of one's sovereign. I have no problem with a felon carrying around the coat of arms of whatever sovereign he or she may claim allegiance to, nor the power of the Utah Legislature to regulate their use of the coat of arms as opposed to possessing the coat of arms.

I trust that a judge committed to "applying the law and not making the law" will avoid the problem Ms. Hill raises by holding that the Utah Constitution does not protect the right to keep guns, rocket launchers, artillery, grenades, bombs, etc. but will simply hold that the felon has the right to participate in military affairs by joining a military unit if any will have him or her and carrying its banner.

I can only presume he got the date wrong. It's May 1, not April 1.

Even in Britain...

The upper classes in Britain have always had a streak of anti-Semitism in them (there were some interesting articles on this in The Spectator a couple of years ago), but it's disturbing to find it creeping into the new upper class, the chattering types who made New Labour. My friend Stephen Pollard, impeccably New Labour in his credentials, reveals how disturbing it is in this Independent column. It's not the first time he's told this story, but it bears repeating. This isn't pro-Palestinianism or anti-Zionism. It's simple anti-Semitism.

Congratulations

... are due to Dr Frank, who has joined the ranks of inter-Anglosphere marriages. It's a happy state to be in, as many people I know will attest.

The Feudal Times and Reactionary Herald

... has a new contributor in Will Hutton, it seems. Chris Bertram takes down his idiotic attempt to argue that a homogeneous Europe is a nicer place than America because of feudalism over at the insightful Junius (take a lot at his post today on the far right being the real anti-globalizers too).

Babelfish or Franglais?

EUROPE 2020 is obviously a francophone operation, so I am normally prepared to be lenient on their sometimes eccentric translations. This press release, however, is one of the worst I have ever seen:

Communiqué of Europe 2020 : To prevent anti-democratic forces to progress, we need an innovative European democratic project

On Monday June 17th 2002, Europe 2020 will release an important document
entitled: 'Reshaping Europe 2005-2020: Visions and Concrete Proposals for a
democratic, effective enlarged European Union' . It will present a process to re-invent the European Union and build a European common democracy.

This document (50 pages) will integrate all the works conducted by Europe 2020 and its partners during the past 5 years namely through the series of Europe 2020 Anticipation Seminars in the EU and the Europe 2020 Candidate Countries Seminars. It will also integrate the learnings and findings coming out of some major European projects where Europe 2020 was heavily involved such as Newropeans 2000 and Eu-StudentVote.Mixing high level expertise of the EU system with cutting hedge experience of European democratization, this document will also be the first comprehensive vision and set of proposals developed by the European up-coming generations (below 40 years old).

The document 'Reshaping Europe 2005-2020' will be sent out directly to the political top decision makers of the EU such as the European Head of States and Governments, the European and National Parliaments and the Convention on the Future of Europe. Meanwhile an executive summary will be circulated widely through Internet to 1.000.000 citizens and organizations in French, English, German, Spanish and Italian.

At a time when the voices of new generations are not heard into the debate on Europe's future, it seems utterly important to Europe 2020, only European think-tank created and operated by the up-coming generations, to bring a major input coming from those who are going to effectively build tomorrow's Europe.

This is the ONLY way to prevent tomorrow's Europe to be anti-democratic!

All your bases are belong to us!

(Seriously, "cutting hedge"...!?!)

Frogs in trouble

No, this story isn't about Le Pen. My colleague Howard Fienberg takes on the issue of frog defomities at Tech Central Station in "The Story That Croaked?"

Puzzled? Try reading some history!

Thanks to Jonas Cord for clueing me in on this one (you don't want to know why I was incommunicado yesterday). Romano Prodi is puzzled by the US-UK relationship. So the links engendered by a common culture, language, constitutional theory, legal system and attitude to trade and business are more puzzling to him than the links enforced by a common currency that ignores the needs of major participants? That the President of the EU could be so astonishingly obtuse is what puzzles me...

The people must reclaim the justice system

And this made me angry enough to blog it. Tom Utley has some important observations in It's not the golf ball thief who is mugging justice. A chap who retreived lost golf balls at night from a water hazard at a local club, then sold them on, has been sentenced to six months' jail and ordered to pay GBP 400 in compensation (to whom?) Contrast this with the penalties handed out for their previous offenses to the "children" acquitted of the Damilola Taylor murder:

Child A took a car without consent and escaped with a conditional discharge and a six-month disqualification; he assaulted a police officer and suffered no more than an order to pay £50 compensation.

Child B was fined £20 for taking a car; when he did it again he was given a conditional discharge; for a later theft, he was given a 12-month supervision order and a three-month parenting order; for criminal damage he was made to go to an attendance centre for only 18 hours; for assaulting care workers he escaped with a £30 fine and was bound over to keep the peace for 12 months.

Child C: burglary, supervision order; criminal damage, conditional discharge; affray, eight-month detention and training order. Child D: robbery, 12-month supervision order; theft, 12 hours at an attendance centre; assault, supervision order; another assault, another 12 hours at an attendance centre; burglary, released on bail.

Brits sneer at Americans for trying children as adults. In cases like this, I think that's a very good idea...

Space: The unethical frontier

As you know, I don't normally post at the weekend, but I had to blog this. Rand Simberg used his FoxNews column to criticize someone who commented that exploring space was 'unethical', I kid you not. Unbelieveably, Rand received a host of e-mails agreeing, not with him, but with the anthropophobe. The debate continued on Transterrestrial Musings. Read Rand's initial observations, and then check out the astonishingly obtuse comments made by a humanity-hater in the Comments section. Amazing. The viewpoint does seem to be, as one shrewd observer summarised it, that Rocks Have Rights...

Almost perfect

Astoundingly good analysis of the Damilola issue by Jennie Bristow at spiked: Trials and tribulations.

Crazy

Greece has convicted 12 British plane-spotters of spying. Who for? From a simple national interest perspective, it's time to ditch Greece and turn to Turkey as a much better ally.

Cheerio, INS!

Jolly good. The House voted 405-9 to abolish the INS yesterday. The Senate is expected to do the same. Well done, Rep. Sensenbrenner!

Son of France and Steyn

Mark Steyn has a similar analysis of the French predicament to mine, but of course says it far better:

Europe's ruling class has effortlessly refined Voltaire: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death my right not to have to listen to you say it. You might disapprove of what Le Pen says on immigration, but to declare that the subject cannot even be raised is profoundly unhealthy for a democracy. The problem with the old one-party states of Africa and Latin America was that they criminalized dissent: You could no longer criticize the President, you could only kill him. In the two-party one-party states of Europe, a similar process is under way: If the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain topics, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable politicians -- as they're doing in France, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and elsewhere. Le Pen is not an aberration but the logical consequence.

His conclusion, however, goes further than I would dare:

I've said before that September 11th will prove to be like the Archduke's assassination in Sarajevo -- one of those events that shatters the known world. To the list of polities destined to slip down the Eurinal of history, we must add the European Union and France's Fifth Republic. The only question is how messy their disintegration will be.

I think both those ailing entities will stagger on for some time yet. It will be another event that pushes them over the edge. 9/11 just opened more people's eyes to what was happening in Europe (the British Euroskeptics' eyes were already wide open). It did not open the Europeans' eyes, as we should now realize. They need another event; Le Pen getting elected against all predictions to the contrary would be such a happening. More likely, however, will be a series of small events that lead up to people waking up one morning to find that their centuries-old civilization has collapsed overnight.

UPDATE: Josie Appleton has a very sensible analysis, stressing the importance of democratic principles in all this, at spiked.

Justice for Damilola can only come from the people

Long-time readers will know of the Damilola Taylor case. For those who are new to it, this was a ten year old African boy who was stabbed to death in South London. A good student and a likeable boy, the initial theory was that he was killed by youths of Caribbean descent who dislike Africans for various reasons. Having been criticized heavily for not treating the murder of a black youth, Stephen Lawrence, seriously enough, the Met Police pulled out all the stops in the investigation of this crime. But when the case came to trial, it quickly turned to farce. A girl who was the main prosecution witness turned out to be less than reliable and the judge ordered the defendents whose guilt or otherwise turned on her testimony freed. There was considerable confusion over the "logistics" of the crime and a flimsy case advanced that Damilola had died in a bizarre accident. Overall, the jury felt that guilt had not been proven beyond reasonable doubt. Of course, as soon as they were freed the defendents' representatives started talking about suing the police. Richard Littlejohn gives a trenchant account of the case in The Sun today (although he's a bit too credulous about the accident theory).

But the problem is wider than this one case. As The Telegraph spells out in its main leader, Give us back our streets, the problem is one of a society that is rotten:

The acquittal makes the case an even more potent expression of what has gone wrong. It is very likely that there are people on the estate where the murder was committed who know precisely who did it. These have not come forward either because they would regard doing so as "grassing" or else because they are frightened that they would face a campaign of terror from the family or families of the killers. Either way, it is a terrible reflection of the state we have reached. It demonstrates how many members of the public have become alienated and how the police have lost control and credibility.

The people of these communities have to ask themselves whether freedom from these gangs and justice for the dead is more important than resentment of the police and a bizarre kind of dependent independence from the wider community. Justice, at its heart, comes from a desire by the people to see certain principles upheld. If some communities abstract themselves from these principles, the idea collapses. It seems that these people see "grassing" as a bigger sin than murder. Something has gone terribly wrong if that is the case. It may be that these people have lost any sense of ownership of the justice process. If that is the case, that must be addressed without moving the system too far towards vigilanteism. I wonder, however, whether a decent self-defence law might provide some protection for these people from their local tyrants and encourage a stronger sense of civil society. In the end, justice for Damilola can only come from the people itself. A way needs to be found of getting them to understand that.

UPDATE: Phillip Johnston has a policing plan that would help achieve the aims I argue for. His point that the police and local community must be strongly enmeshed (as i ahve argued here before) is so important and so blindingly obvious that I still cannot see why it has been ignored for so long.

Here's a demo to attend

Time for lovers of liberty to get out the placards and banners and take to the streets. Charles Moore of the Daily Telegraph has organized a rally on May Day to blow the whistle on the control freaks. His rationale is simple:

The defenders of freedom therefore have to be prepared to be awkward. They have to try to persuade people not to act in haste and repent at leisure, people who are often very angry. Take the issue of paedophilia. Because people are naturally horrified by child abuse, many of them can be persuaded to support almost any measure which purports to punish or control it. This was why the controversial Brass Eye satire on the subject was so brilliant and why so many of the control freaks wanted it banned. The fact that child abuse is a terrible thing does not automatically mean that someone convicted of it should be deprived of all rights in perpetuity, nor that all accusations of it should be believed.

Indeed. I'd be there if I was in the UK. If any of you make it, please let me have a report.

Attention Sarah Brady

This sort of thing doesn't happen in Germany, of course. Only in America.

UPDATE: According to Agence France Presse, the death toll is now 18. Proportionately, that's equivalent to 61 at an American school.

INS isn't working

Great op/ed by Rep. James Sensenbrenner in today's Washington Times.
Time to split argues for splitting the INS in two. I heartily agree. This is my experience --

A backlog of 5 million unadjudicated petitions for immigration benefits forces aliens trying to play by the rules to wait in limbo for years. Thousands wait in line for hours each day at INS offices with an easy question as to whether their benefit application paperwork is all in, yet they can't receive this simple answer via the INS web site or by phone because the agency is still largely paper-based and lacks this 1990s service. I've seen thousands of these files stacked from floor to ceiling in INS offices.

Meanwhile, the other side is unable to do anything about 300,000 identified illegals. The congressman is right to argue that splitting the agency makes the most sense. That will allow the service side of the agency to do its best for people who want to do things right and the enforcement side to do the worst to the people who do things wrongly. The INS is schizoid at the moment. Let's give it this bit of therapy at least.

Respec' is not due

Here's word from the Washington Times on what's happening inside the Church of the Nativity:

Two Armenian friars who escaped from the church on Tuesday night through a side exit spoke yesterday of extensive looting, including theft and destruction of Christian sacramental objects, from the church.

Having got many European Christians on side by asserting that they had essentially claimed sanctuary, I wonder how many of the areligious major world newspapers will cover this aspect?

Politique as usual

Some interesting commentaries on the Le Pen result, and on European politics in general in the last couple of days. First of all, here is Dan Hannan MEP's take on the Le Pen issue:

One of my friends in the European Parliament is a Belgian - and, believe me, you've never met a Euro-federalist until you've met a Belgian MEP. He has always regarded me, affectionately enough I think, as a madman. He simply cannot understand how any rational adult could oppose the euro, or want national parliaments to remain sovereign, or be worried about the proposed European constitution.

So it was a pleasant surprise when he turned to me on Tuesday and said: "I hate to admit it, but you Conservatives may have been right all along. Too much European integration really is pushing voters into the hands of people like Le Pen".

I don't believe that all or even most of Le Pen's voters support his manifesto. Quite apart from his rejection of the notion that all Frenchmen should be equal before the law, he has made absurd promises to boost spending while slashing taxes, and wants to take France back to an age of tariff walls. Rather than voting for Le Pen, many French people were voting against the complacency of the established parties.

In France, as in many EU countries, the ruling parties have very deliberately created a consensus on all the big issues: immigration, European integration and corporatist economics. Politicians outside this consensus are shunned and vilified, often penalised by rules on party registration or funding. Those within it, by contrast, have become aloof, out-of-touch and in many cases corrupt.

In such a climate, voters turn out of sheer frustration to politicians who portray themselves as being against the whole system. It is rather like the black market. Just as an over-regulated economy drives people to conduct their business outside the law, so a political system that offers no choice will drive them towards the political equivalent of the cowboy trader.

The Guardian and the BBC mischievously describe this process as "the rise of the Right", and try to link racist parties like the French National Front with Euro-sceptic parties in Portugal, Switzerland and Scandinavia -- and so, by implication, with the British Tories. Within hours of Le Pen's election, I was asked to go on air by Newsnight, who were plainly trying to establish a connection in their viewers' minds between Le Pen and the Conservative Party.

In fact, Le Pen is not particularly Right-wing as we would understand the term in Britain. He believes in economic protectionism and state intervention, and is anti-British and anti-American. He represents a nasty, authoritarian tradition in French politics that has no real equivalent on this side of the Channel: the tradition of Boulanger, of the anti-Dreyfusards, of Charles Maurras and the Action Française, of Vichy and of Poujade. This philosophy has little connection with mainstream Gaullism, and none whatever with the free market conservatism of other European states.

The real significance of Le Pen's victory lies in what it tells us about the state of French democracy. The Fifth Republic, as conceived by de Gaulle, vested immense powers in the Presidency. But European integration has gradually done away with all the things that the General believed in: economic sovereignty, a distinctive French foreign policy, a centralised state and a powerful President. Chirac has nugatory powers at his disposal compared with those enjoyed by the de Gaulle. Voters, sensing this, have ceased to treat his office with the deference they once did. Feeling ignored and powerless, they have sent an angry signal to their rulers.

European federalism is widening the gap between government and governed. If we want to tackle the public's alienation, we must restore the sense that how you vote makes a difference. Until we do, we can expect to see other Le Pens across the continent.

Fair comment, I think. I was discussing this issue with a Europhile friend over dinner last night and he made mostly the same points. The current party system, especially in the context of EU power, is increasingly irrelevant to the voters. Parties that do not promise to return power to the people are increasingly being ignored. Another friend of mine sent me the following analysis of how the traditional French powerhouse parties did in the election:

By the way I checked last night and 3.4% at this election is by far the worst performance of the PCF [French Communist Party] since its foundation in 1920. Its worst pre-war performance was 8.4% in 1932. In more recent years it never dropped below 6-7%. In the sixties and seventies its vote never dropped below 20%, exceeding the combined vote for all the far left parties this time. From 1945-56 its vote was 25%+. I should imagine it will start to fall apart now, if its not doing so already, and its members defect to other groups.

Bayrou's 6.9% is also by far the worst poll by the UDF [Union Democratique Francaise] since it's foundation by Giscard in the 70s. It's also the worst performance by the centre, which used to mainly represented by the Christian Democrat MRP, that I could find since the war. Remember old Raymond Barre? Even he managed 16.5% in 1988. We may see the break up of the UDF as well after this election. 'Quelle dommage!'

My friend also pointed out that St Josse of the Huntin' Shootin' and Fishin' party (actually, Hunting, Fishing, Nature and Traditions Party) is urging his supporters on his website not to vote for Le Pen. That's a bad sign, as it surely means that most of them already are thinking of doing so. Add Chevenment's vote and posit a mass abstention by the Left and suddenly things look a lot, lot closer. I'm pretty certain Chirac will win, but the possibility of a close vote looks a lot bigger to me than a couple of days ago.

Meanwhile, we see in the Netherlands another aspect of European politics. Wim Fortuyn is a liberal anti-immigrant. He himself is gay, and bases his anti-immigration arguments on the principle that the Netherlands is a nice, liberal place and more immigrants will make it less so, subjecting people like himself to increased prejudice and loss of liberties. It's an interesting proposition, and one that seems to be attracting a lot of support.

Finally, the view from outside the EU is admirably summed up by Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic in this WSJ piece by Pete DuPont:

Mr. Klaus believes that in the 1990s Europe became more socialistic. "Regulation is for today's socialists what public ownership of the means of production and central planning were for their fathers and grandfathers," he says, adding that the 1990s saw "a victory of new collectivisms." In the first 10 years after the collapse of communism the dominant European slogan was "Deregulate, liberalize, privatize," but now Mr. Klaus sees a very different set of priorities: "Regulate, adjust to all kinds of standards of the most developed and richest countries, . . . get rid of your sovereignty and put it into the hands of international institutions and organizations." In short, flying one's national flag is becoming politically incorrect.

As long as Europe's states remain democracies, there is a way out of this problem. Increasingly, European voters are turning to people who articulate, however crudely, the central truth that sovereignty resides with the people and cannot simply be given away to supranational institutions. Political parties of all persuasions that ignore this and speak to their needs and those of their cronies will increasingly go the way of the UDF and PCF. If the parties wish to survive they will have to adopt a more, how can I put it, skeptical approach to European integration. After the next round of European elections I expect to see Tony Blair step back from his euro-enthusiasm. I certainly can't see him risking a referendum on the Euro any time soon.

Which makes me ask the following question: has France saved Britain?

New Column

Apologies for no posts yesterday. I hope the extra long one on Tuesday made up for it...

Anyway, I have a new column running on UPI. Recent Research Suggests will look at the stories from the past week centered on research reports, as well as highlighting other studies that didn't make the press for no readily explicable reason. Hope you enjoy it. Which reminds me, I have to write this week's version today...

Le Pen de ma Tante

The Telegraph agrees with me on Le Pen: he is a product of the EU.

The real significance of M Le Pen's success on Sunday lies in what it tells us about the state of the French democracy. The ideals of the Fifth Republic, as conceived by de Gaulle, have been gradually eroded by the EU. The president is no longer sovereign, either in economic affairs or foreign policy, while Euro-regionalism has undermined the unity of the state. No wonder French voters have ceased to take the office seriously. The Fifth Republic has been hollowed out by Brussels. Now, the outer shell is crumbling.

Happy St George's Day

I'm suffering from what seems to be my umpteenth head cold this year, but at least it allows me to read something appropriate for the day. Tony Bourdain is the badass executive chef of Les Halles in New York (don't worry, I'm going somewhere with this) who writes in a style the New York Times compared to a combination of Hunter S. Thompson, Iggy Pop and Jonathan Swift (which should make him a hero to bloggers everywhere). The Food Network is currently broadcasting his amazing series A Cook's Tour, wherein he journies all over the world in search of the perfect meal. This weekend I saw his episode on England. Foolish mortals who believe the stereotypes they hear about British cooking should pause for a momen't reflection on how they have wasted their lives, for Bourdain considers Britain and Australia to be the places where the best is happening in food at the moment. Spurred on by my wife, I therefore read the chapter in the book of the series about England, and came across these marvelous passages, which seem to me to be particularly appropriate for the day. They are about Fergus Henderson, proprietor and chef at what must be the most traditionalist restaurant in England, St John, near Smithfield market:

Years ago, when the prevalining wisdom among foodies directed quaint, tiny, sculpted portions of brightly colored odd bits -- light on the protein and heavy on the veg, Fergus was reveling in pig -- pig fat, pig parts, and pig guts -- his plates rustic-colored palettes of browns, beiges, and earth tones -- maybe the occasional flash of green -- simple, unassuming, unpretentious -- and absolutely and unapologetically English.

While most of his contemporaries, newly empowered by Michelin stars and a suddenly food-crazed public, rushed to the squeeze bottle and the metal ring, to Japanese and French classics for inspiration, Fergus was alone on the hill, running up the Union Jack. He went to a neighborhood where nobody wanted to go, set up shop in an all-white abattoir-looking space down a seemingly univiting alley, and began serving what he refers to as "nose to tail" eating, a menu so astonishingly reactionary for its time, he might well -- in another country -- have been imprisoned for it. Today, while lesser mortals cower around their veggie plates in hemp sandals, cringing at the thought of contamination by animal product, St. John's devotees -- and there are a lot of them -- flock to his plain, undecorated dining room to revel in roasted marrow, rolled spleen, grilled ox heart, braised belly, and fried pig's tails.

It was a very ballsy position to take back in the early nineties -- and it's an even ballsier proposition today, when the Evil Axis [nb this was written before 9/11... ed.] Powers of Health Nazis, Vegetarian Taliban, European Union bureaucrats, antismoking crystal worshipers, PETA fundamentalists, fast-food theme-restaurant moguls, and their sympathizers are consolidating their frearful hold on popular dining habits and practices.

Bourdain rises to his theme...

There are dire times to be a chef who specializes in pork and offal. The EU has its eye on unpasteurized cheese, artisanal cheese, artisanal everything, shellfish, meat, anything that carries the slightest, most infinitesimal possibility of risk - or the slightest potential for pleasure. there is talk of banning unaged cheese, stock bones, soft-boiled or raw eggs. In the States, legislation has been suggested, mandating a written warning when a customer requests eggs over easy or a Caesar salad. ('Warning! Fork - if placed in eye - may cause injury!') A woman in the States won a lawsuit, claiming her coffee was too hot, scalding her as she stomped on the accelerator exiting the McDonald's parking lot. ('Warning! Deep-fried Mars bar - if stuffed down pants - may cause genital scarring!') The result of this unrestrained fear mongering, this mad rush to legislate new extremes of shrink-wrapped germ-free safety? Much like it was after Upton Sinclair's The Jungle scared the hell out of early-twentieth-century meat eaters - the absorption o f small independents into giant factory farms and slaughter domes. Try and eat an American chicken and you will see what looms: bloodless, flavorless, colorless, and riddled with salmonella - a by-product of letting the little guys go under and the big conglomerates run things their way.

You have only to visit an English pub in, say, Bristol or Birmingham - once-proud strongholds of British culinary tradition at its simplest and most unvarnished - to see that the enemy has reached the gates and is pounding on the door. A vegetarian menu! Right there - next to the steak and kidney pie and the bangers and mash! Worse - far worse - is when you look over the bar and see Brits, brewers of some of the finest alcoholic beverages in the world, gorgeous beers, ales, and bitters, once served in that most noble of drinking vessels - the pint glass - sucking Budweisers from long-necked bottles.

It's war. On one side, a growing army of hugely talented young British, Scottish, Irish, and Australian chefs, rediscovering their own enviable indigenous resources and marrying them with either new or brash concepts or old and neglected classics. On the other? A soul-destroying tsunami of bad, fake reproductions of what was already bad, fack New York 'Mexican' food. Gluey, horrible nachos, microwaved, never-fried 'refried' beans, fabric softener margaritas. Limp, soggy, watery, and thoroughly dickless 'enchiladas' and catsupy salsas. Clueless 'Pan-Asian' watering holes where every callow youth with a can of coconut milk and some curry powder thinks he's Ho Chi Minh. (Forget it. Ho could cook.) Sushi is almost nowhere to be found - in spite of the fact that the seafood in the UK is magnificent. You get more heart, soul, and flavor at an East End pie shop than at any of the rotten, fake, dumbed-down 'Italian,' ;Japanese fusion,' or theme purgatories. Even the cod - the basic ingredient of fish and chips - is disappearing. (I raised that subject with a Portuguese cod importer. 'The damned seals eat them,' was his answer. 'Kill more seals,' he suggested."

Fortunately, Fergus and other like-minded souls are on the front lines, and they're unlikely to abandon their positions. Sitting at St. John, I ordered what I think is the best thing I have ever put in my mouth: Gergus's roasted bone marrow with parsley and caper salad, croutons, and sea sold.

Oh God, is it good. How something so simple can be so ... so ... absolutely luxurious. A few Flintstone-sized lenghts of veal shank, a lightly dressed salad ... Lord ... to tunnel into those bones, smear that soft gray-pink-and-white marrow onto a slab of toasted bread, sprinkle with some sel de gris ... take a bite ... Angels sing, celestial trumpets ... six generations of one's ancestors smile down from heaven. It's butter from God.

Bourdain goes on to call St. John a "call to the barricades"...

Because it will not end with the marrow (which already has to be imported from Holland). The enemy wants your cheese. They want you never again to risk the possibility of pleasure with a reeking, unpasteurized Stilton, an artisanal wine, an oyster on the half shell. They have designs on stock. Stock! (Bones, you know -- can't have that.) The backbone of everything good! They want your sausage. Anf your balls, too. In short, they want you to feel that same level of discomfort approaching a plate of food as so many used to feel about sex.

Do I overstate the case? Go to Wisconsin. Spend an hour in an airport or a food court in the Midwest; watch the pale, doughy masses of pasty-faced, Pringle-fattened, mobidly obese teenagers. then tell me I'm worried about. These are the end products of the Masterminds of Safety and Ethics, bulked up on cheese that contains no cheese, chips fried in oil that isn't really oil, overcooked grey disks of what might once upon a time have been meat, a steady diet of Ho-Hos and muffins, butterless popcorn, sugarless soda, flavorless light beer. A docile, uncomprehending herd, led slowly to a dumb, lingering, and joyless slaughter.

Tony Bourdain, the Food Network's Theodore Dalrymple, chef to the Anglosphere, my wife's god, slayer of modern dragons, a true conservative and a true liberal. Read his books and watch his shows. And if you live in London, go to St. John and tell me how good it is.

Collapse of France Watch

So Jean-Marie Le Pen is the second most popular politician in France, eh? Actually, the problem is a direct artifact of the French electoral system. If they had a college or a series of run-offs, then the issue wouldn't be as serious. Le Pen got, I think, about as many votes as he did last time, while the Gaullistes and Socialists lost votes.

In any event, Tim Hames has an interesting analysis in The Times today that seems pretty accurate to me. What would, however, be a political earthquake is if analysis shows that Le Pen has attracted votes by his pro-soveriegnty, anti-European views. We should not forget that France only just voted for the Maastricht Treaty in the early 90s, with Philippe Seguin and Philippe de Villiers (I think they were both Philippes...) leading a very successful anti-establishment campaign that almost pulled off what would have been a real political earthquake. I'm not sure that they would not have won today.

In any event, there seems to be a groundswell in Europe against the "liberal consensus" that has been building the technocratic Europe regardless of the wishes of the people. Unfortunately, the tactic of labeling any decent politician who objects to the process a racist or a xenophobe has meant that the field has been left open to the real racists and xenophobes. Only in Britain and Ireland have decent politicians stood up to this tactic, which is one of the reasons why there is no powerful far-right party in either nation, unlike France, Germany and Italy, to name but three of the sophisticated European nations.

If the current European constitutional convention succeeds in erecting a pan-European government I predict it will crash down in the flames of popular revolt within a few years. The technocrats forget that democratic legitimacy comes from the people alone. Occasionally, a segment of the people points this out...