Tuesday, 19th January 2010
Iraq War Inquiry Derangement Syndrome (ctd)
1:34am
As Iraq War Derangement is ramped up daily to fresh pitches of irrationality and hysteria in the media coverage of the Chilcot inquiry, Nick Cohen’s article in the Observer is a must read. His conclusion, watching the latest attempt to nail Tony Blair for the crime of ‘taking us to war on a lie’ of which the appeasement crowd have known for a certainty that he is guilty since before Saddam’s Baghdad statue fell and that Blair, not Saddam, is the real war criminal, is spot on:
...The fifth disappointment in a row will drive them closer to the edge. Sir Oliver Miles, former ambassador to Libya, has already predicted that the inquiry will be open to accusations of ‘whitewash’ because two members of the Chilcot panel are Jews. He's not alone. I have had an allegedly left-wing journalist
Monday, 18th January 2010
Another IPCC claim evaporates
3:03pm
Yet another piece of research that has been endorsed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and has underpinned man-made global warming theory has been revealed to be a work of fiction which has misled the world. The Sunday Times reported yesterday that its prediction that the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035 will probably be retracted. This is because it has been revealed that it was based on nothing more than a news story in the New Scientist eight years previously – and that report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist, who has admitted that the claim was ‘speculation’ and was not supported by any formal research. Despite the fact that this claim surfaced in a campaigning report rather than...
January 18, 2010 The Labour wolf in middle-class clothing Daily Mail, 18 January 2010 There’s been nothing like it since the wolf dressed up as grandma in order to turn Little Red Riding Hood into pot-roast. Gordon Brown now claims to be a champion of the middle classes. Apparently, only he can be trusted to look after their interests. And there were millions of us thinking that he was, in fact, the unreconstructed arch-enemy of the middle classes and of everything they hold dear. For sheer unadulterated brazen gall, his pretence surely takes the latest of many mouldy digestive biscuits. Of course, we can all see the reason for this play-acting. After the recent failed coup against Brown, Lord Mandelson won his strategic battle to fight the election campaign on New Labour’s territory of aspiration rather than as another front in Old Labour’s failed class war. In the circumstances, Brown had no alternative but to agree. Yet this is the man whose entire political persona rests upon constraining, punishing and extorting from the middle classes. Even as Brown proclaims he is their true and only friend, his chief lieutenants are currently putting forward one proposal after another to do them down. In a speech, Brown told the Fabian Society that he was brought up to believe in the middle-class ethic that hard work, effort and responsibility were what you needed to make your way in the world. True enough; but he systematically undermines that ethic by treating poverty and disadvantage as if these are solely the responsibility of the better-off, and that the ‘have-nots’ can make progress only if ‘privileges’ are taken away from the ‘haves’. He’s at it again today as the Government will unveil plans to pressure the professions to discriminate against entrants from independent schools. So once again, his government will be punishing middle-class people for the hard work, effort and responsibility that he claims to endorse. This has been, in fact, the most conspicuous hallmark of Gordon Brown’s policy making even during the Blair years. It is the middle classes who have borne the brunt of Brown’s punitive stealth taxes. It is the middle classes who, deprived of the grammar schools, were forced to beggar themselves by sending their children to independent schools to ensure a decent education. And then those students from fee-paying and other middle- class schools, who achieve academic excellence through merit and hard work, find themselves discriminated against by universities which have been pressured by Brown’s government to allocate places on the basis of social disadvantage. Brown’s key ally, the Schools Secretary Ed Balls, has consistently abused his office to use education to ramp up the war on the middle classes. Recently, he brazenly claimed he was ‘totally against a class war strategy’. But it seems he is merely playing with words by redefining ‘class’ to mean not social background but money — thus enabling him to bash anyone who is better-off. Similarly, the Government seems to have redefined ‘middle income’ to mean people on very modest means who aren’t actually on the breadline — while the actual middle classes have been rebranded as the ‘ privileged’, who can therefore be clobbered. Meanwhile, Labour’s answer to Madame Mao, Harriet Harman, is engaged in a permanent culture war against the middle classes and their values. Her monstrously unjust Equalities Bill will force public bodies, from Whitehall to parish councils, to skew their funding to help ‘deprived’ people and thus discriminate against the better-off. She has suggested that bus services should be targeted at poorer areas and away from middle-class suburbs where people can afford cars; and she has instructed her department to stop Londoners and other Southerners — aka the ‘privileged’ — from ‘lording it’ over the rest of the country. In 2008, she said what mattered most of all in determining whether people were successful or not was ‘where you live, your family background, your wealth and social class’. But this derives from a wholly mistaken Marxist analysis which holds that people are the passive victims of economic circumstances. In fact, this country is full of people who have moved upwards through the class system. With the right incentives from a meritocratic culture — and perhaps most crucially of all, from strong family backgrounds based on monogamous marriage, which has been shown to be the best means of creating resilient, independent-minded individuals — people can and do rise out of disadvantage. But both marriage and a meritocratic education system are the very things this zealot government has been systematically attacking and undermining. Instead, it has tried to impose ‘equality’ — which is actually an attempt to impose identical outcomes by penalising merit and achievement to produce an equality of mediocrity. Perniciously, it regards social mobility as a one-way street. It says it wants to lever the poor upwards — but it promptly hammers them once they have made it into the ranks of the better-off. The result has been that Brown’s government has kept the poor locked in disadvantage — fewer young people from the poorest backgrounds now go to good universities than when Labour came to power — while the middle classes are subjected to systematic bullying, undermining and extortion. In the face of such an onslaught, one might think the Tories would naturally assume the mantle of champions of the aspiring classes. But, in fact, the Cameroons are terrified of doing anything which might paint them as the party of wealthy, Old Etonian toffs. Seeking to neutralise the Guardian and the BBC by signing up to the equality agenda, the Tories are now wandering confusedly around a political no man’s land. They can’t seem to make up their minds over whether they really want to promote marriage or not. Their refusal to undertake to abolish the 50p tax rate means they are similarly equivocal in support of wealth — and have now even been outflanked by Lord Mandelson, who has said the 50p rate should be scrapped as soon as possible. They are also talking of scrapping tax credits for households earning £50,000 or more and child trust funds for all except the poorest third of families and those with disabled children. Of course, the spending spree has to stop. But the crude political fact is that, while vast amounts are poured into unproductive sectors such as welfare or public service non-jobs, the sheer number of middle-class people means they are seen as the cash cow to be milked whenever a government is in trouble. If the Tories cannot unambiguously commit themselves to reversing this politics of spite and envy and becoming the party of aspiration, what is the point of them at all? People’s deepest desire is to better themselves. Politicians who offer this optimistic prospect win people’s trust and votes. Those who offer the stifling of aspiration and enslavement to dependency deserve only contempt. In 1999, Tony Blair told the Labour Party conference: ‘The class war is over.’ Before the 1997 election, John Prescott, then Labour’s deputy leader, said: ‘We are all middle class now.’ Thirteen years of middle-class pain down the road, it’s the same old class war and the same Old Labour lies. .................................................................. Daily Mail, 11 January 2010 Has there ever been a more fraught or agonising process to replace one towering figure by another? (And no, I’m not talking Jonathan Ross or Chris Evans here). What actually happened in last week’s abortive coup to unseat Gordon Brown is still as murky as the Pennines in the recent blizzards. The question remains whether this was a spectacularly botched operation by the coup leaders, Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt — or the first phase of a hard-headed if desperate and messy end-game strategy. It is more than a touch implausible that the pair believed their call for a ballot on Gordon Brown’s leadership would be followed by a stream of ministers flocking to resign and thus forcing him out. Politicians as experienced as Hoon and Hewitt must have known that courage and clear-sightedness are not the most conspicuous characteristics among their erstwhile Cabinet colleagues. So might this have been another strategy altogether –to weaken Brown so badly that sometime before the General Election he will have to be stretchered off the political scene? After all, the sniping against him is far from over. By an amazing coincidence, only yesterday a devastating book by the former General Secretary of the Labour Party, Peter Watt, was serialised in the Mail on Sunday. Watt, who resigned in acrimony over his alleged complicity in a party funding scandal, clearly has scores to settle. But his account of Brown’s serial dysfunctionality, staggering incompetence and frankly downright bizarre behaviour still hammers home just how damaging to the national interest Brown has been for so long. Nevertheless, if the intention really was to weaken the Prime Minister through a process of attrition, Hoon and Hewitt must equally have realised the enormous risks for their party of such a gamble. For they might have ended up merely damaging beyond repair in the eyes of the public the leader who will still take Labour into the election; or even provoking such internal strife that the party simply falls apart between now and election day. So was the coup a monumental car-crash after all? Some think that, on the contrary, Brown is now the captive of those in his Cabinet who wrung concessions out of him last week as a condition of their support. For sure, the Prime Minister has been weakened. But the idea that, as the Blairites want, he now really will seek to appeal to middle Britain rather than to Labour’s tribal core vote and will reduce the influence of his chief consigliere, the unreconstructed ‘old Labour’ dinosaur Ed Balls, is surely whistling in the wind. Look at the remarks made by Chancellor Alistair Darling immediately after the attempted coup, which are said to show that Brown now accepts he will have to make the case for deep cuts in public spending rather than pose as the champion of ‘investment’. What Darling actually said, however, was that Labour will have to inflict the toughest spending cuts for 20 years — and that Brown knew that, as far as the Chancellor is concerned, this position was non-negotiable. So what Darling was actually saying was not that Brown had accepted the case for cuts –but that Darling would resign if he did not. This was followed in turn yesterday by Ed Balls defiantly repeating his ‘Labour investment versus Tory cuts’ mantra. So the great internal fight over strategy is not over at all, but is actually intensifying by the day. The attempt to get rid of Brown resembles one of those horror movies in which, however many times the stake is driven through the mummy’s heart, it still staggers to its feet and continues to wreak havoc. It is, though, a mistake to think that Brown alone is responsible for the chaos in the Labour Party. It was the fact that it had already lost its way that caused it to allow Brown to assume power unopposed in the first place. It did so because there was no successor to Blair as a one-man, election-winning phenomenon who had the ability to persuade people to suspend their animosity towards the Labour project. So undoubtedly it is time for a change of government. But alas, the Tory opposition does not present the clear alternative that people so desperately crave. Last week’s abortive coup against Brown obscured the fact that David Cameron was in serious difficulties himself. No sooner had he launched his election campaign than he was knocked off course, appearing to wobble over his commitment to restore tax breaks for married couples. This reinforced the widespread impression that his agenda is incoherent and opportunist - the result of his appearing to face in two opposite directions at once on so many issues. He wants simultaneously to appear both socially liberal and conservative - even though social liberalism, or ‘lifestyle choice’, is the direct enemy of the core values of family and nation which conservatism must defend if it is to mean anything at all. When on his BBC1 show yesterday Andrew Marr asked Cameron whether he was a radical or a defender of the middle ground, the Tory leader’s eyes registered for a split second a flicker of alarm before he replied smoothly that he was a ‘modern compassionate conservative’. The vacuousness of this formulation was revealed a few minutes later when he asked whether he agreed with the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, who argued in a powerful article last week that immigration should be significantly curbed. In reply, Cameron said he wouldn’t have put it in quite the words used by Lord Carey - but he agreed that Britain’s population should not rise to 70 million because of the pressure this would cause on public services. But Lord Carey had gone much further than this relatively uncontroversial concern. He said that Britain must uphold Christianity as the bedrock of Britain’s democratic and liberal traditions, and warned of the inability to hold the line for British culture in the face of mass immigration by people determined to replace it by Islam. Cameron’s delicate side-stepping of this point suggested either that he didn’t agree with Lord Carey or that he was too frightened to do so. Either way, those millions who are desperate for a political party to reverse the loss of belief in this country’s historic traditions and identity — a demoralisation which lies at the root of its problems — will have reinforced their dismal conclusion that they cannot look to today’s Tory party for relief. I have long lost count of those hitherto solid Conservative voters who say they will not vote Tory at the election because they feel abandoned over the core values agenda: Europe, immigration or human rights, where Cameron’s pledges are manifestly vapid or contradictory, or the ambiguities and vacillations over marriage and ‘lifestyle choice’. It is Cameron’s conspicuous failure to ’seal the deal’ with the British public that is driving the Labour plotters. With the Tories still not far enough ahead in the polls, Labour’s would-be regicides think that a new leader might well just tip the balance to make Labour the largest party in a hung parliament. With both of them leading parties that no longer know what they are for, Cameron and Brown are like drowning men wrapped in a fatal embrace. But it is Britain itself that they are in danger of pulling below the waves. |
Posts
