Winston Churchill on the Alternative Vote (1931)

Wonderful post by Harry Phibbs on ConHome:

The plan that they have adopted is the worst of all possible plans. It is the stupidest, the least scientific and the most unreal that the Government have embodied in their [Representation of the People] Bill. The decision of 100 or more constituencies, perhaps 200, is to be determined by the most worthless votes given for the most worthless candidates.

There may well be a multiplicity of weak and fictitious candidates in order to make sure that the differences between No. 1 and No. 2 shall be settled, not by the second votes of No. 3, but by the second votes of No. 4 or No. 5, who may, presumably give a more favourable turn to the party concerned. This method is surely the child of folly, and will become the parent of fraud. Neither the voters nor the candidates will be dealing with realities. An element of blind chance and accident will enter far more largely into our electoral decisions than even before, and respect for Parliament and Parliamentary processes will decline [even] lower than it is at present.

. . . when I see this Bill and know, as I do perfectly well, all the forces, all the misunderstanding, all the stupidity, all the cunning, all the desperation, which have brought it about, it is impossible not to feel profoundly anxious.

Fatty Clarke to go?

"Ken Must Go" says the Sun. "He is a bumbling liability who seems keener to rock the boat than safeguard the streets. He is out of tune with the public and out of step with his own party".

The Mail was less strident but the sidebar to the main story about shysters is equally deadly about Clarke:

One Government source described the stance of Mr Clarke, Attorney General Dominic Grieve and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg on the issue as ‘limper than an elderly lettuce’. David Cameron will next week allow Tory MPs a free vote – ensuring Parliament will resoundingly reject the idea of giving votes to prisoners. That will pave the way for a defining showdown between Britain and the European Court of Human Rights. But yesterday Mr Clarke warned MPs against voting down a change in the law, insisting ministers must abide by the verdict from Strasbourg.

"MPs must assert British democracy on prisoner votes", says the Express.

"What happens if we defy Europe? Nothing", says the Telegraph.

"Get rid of the lazy bastard", say I.

It's "Care in the Community" again

In future the drug addicts and mentally dysfunctional people that crowd our prisons will not be put away but will be offered "voluntary treatment" in hospitals. So says Fatty Clarke on the heels of announcing the closure of six prisons to meet the cost-cutting target he irresponsibly agreed after taking over at Justice.

The most shameful episode during the Thatcher regime was its cynical adoption of community care for the mentally ill as a pure cost-cutting exercise. They emptied the asylums that - as their name implied - were supposed to be refuges for those mentally unable to cope with independent living, but did not transfer the funding without which "care in the community" was a loathsome euphemism for abandonment.

So Clarke's latest wheeze is Tory "cleverness" at work, once more. They seize on "progressive" criticism of an existing programme to justify closing it down, and put nothing in its place. With a self-righteous smirk.

In terms of party politics, the smirk appears to be justified. In 1998 Blair's Health Secretary, Frank Dobson, denounced Tory "care in the community" as a totally failed initiative; but his party did nothing to change it.

Let's hear it for a society where the abandonment of the most wretched and helpless is good politics.

Key Tory conference speeches

David Young on Elf  'n' Safety.

When I last spoke at our Conference, unemployment was on its way down, strikes were at their lowest for fifty years and we were paying off the national debt. Yet ten years before we were a country dominated by the Unions and racked by strikes, the sick man of Europe with record unemployment and, guess what, we had run out of money. A typical Labour legacy.

Eric Pickles on the grandiosity of the Labour regime:

It was a great honour to be invited by the Prime Minister to become the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government particularly as this was once part of John Prescott's great empire. On the way to the department, I wondered what memorabilia I might find from Prezza's era. I was a bit embarrassed to ask directly so I hit on the idea of asking for a quick tour of the most wasteful items in the building. First item was a beautiful red Parisian sofa costing £5,000.

"Wow that IS expensive".

"Glad you like it - we've got £130,000 worth of them".

"Did Prezza order them?"

"No - it's part of Hazel Blears' efficiency drive".

Next stop was the serene green peace pods, a two storey up market port-a-cabin designed to bring tranquillity and the better bits of Zen to civil servants.

"How much did that cost?

"£83,000."

"Prezza's?"

"No, Hattie Harman ordered it."

Cameron interview with Schama

Good to be reminded by this in-depth FT interview that Simon Schama, an insufferable presence on TV, remains a fine, properly donnish wordsmith. His views are still made-for-Bitchy Boys Club, but he does bring some historical perspective to a political discourse normally dominated by intellectual mayflies. Key extracts:

Cameron is hard to take against: easy in his own skin; unstuffy, intellectually curious, and, unlike so many Conservative leaders – from Pitt (both father and son) to Peel, from Churchill to Thatcher – conspicuously untroubled by inner demons.

. . . that Schama was able to identify - or does he mean, simply, that Cameron lacks a cutting edge?

Just as he seems to be casting himself as the heir to Churchill’s reforming Liberalism and Macmillan’s One Nation pragmatism, Cameron lets slip a comment of breathtaking lordliness. Of course he is concerned that the poor don’t fall below the safety net, but it should be understood that "if we don’t make cuts it will be the poorest who will be hardest hit by the failure of the economy … too much of [Labour’s attempts] was about redistributing money through the tax credit scheme, rather than trying to tackle the causes of poverty".

WTF is "lordly" about that? Even the Labour pukes now admit that they screwed the pooch on welfare dependancy. Of course Schama is a 60s lefty, but even so he really should not have written this:

Whether ["the Big Society"] is actually anything more than neo-Victorian cant about the citizenry (them what can afford it, that is) getting stuck in for the local good, I’m not at all sure. But he makes a spirited attempt to invest it with some human reality, even claiming it had always been part of the Conservative tradition to invite people to ask “What do I put back into society?” rather than just have them fork over taxes and let the elected decide.

That crack about the Victorians is so day before yesterday, as is the patronising bit of bad grammar that follows it. The Victorians built well - Britain still stands on the foundations they laid down, from railways to sewers to parks to schools and other public buildings. Lytton Strachey was a bitch, and his prissy sniggering still infects the leftism of people like Schama.  

But what can a good Conservative do about this sorry state, save hand-wringing and a call to voluntarism? I point out the difficulty for any government legislating behavioural modification. But the prime minister persists with his call to civic awakening for the common good.

Having just emerged from thirteen years of more "legislating behavioural modification" than in all previous governments put together, that little comment is remarkable not only for its hypocrisy but also because it completely misses the point. Such legislation is not "difficult" - it has been proved to be demoralisingly counter-productive. Greater voluntarism can only arise from the abolition of such legislation, not from new laws.

Schama just doesn't get it. Like most of his generation of leftist intellectuals, he refuses to accept what even the Labour party has conceded - Thatcher was right to say "There Is No Alternative" about the economy. Possibly Schama is right and British society is too far gone to bounce back as the economy did, but the international evidence is that nations recover quite rapidly once governments admit they are in a hole and stop digging.

It is said that on first encountering a screw in a baulk of wood, a primitive man would know no better than to apply ever-greater force to pull it out. By that standard Schama and the like are very primitive people indeed.

Why openness in government?

If there is one thing Cameron and Co. must have thought about a lot in opposition - there being little evidence that they thought about anything else in any depth - it will have been how to handle the avalanche of leaks with which the state bureaucracy would certainly try to undermine a new Conservative administration.

Witness today's leak of a private letter from Defence Secretary Fox to Prime Minister Cameron in the Telegraph.

Bingo! said some bright young thing. Let's make a virtue of necessity and preach openness. After all, secrecy overwhelmingly favours the bureaucratic oligarchy that actually runs the country, because it permits officials to use judicious leaks to pick off ministers who threaten to change the status quo.

The press? Can't find its arse with both hands on matters of policy. Pre-empt leaks from Whitehall and the journopukes will have to concentrate entirely on bicycle seat sniffing, which is what they do best anyway.

The electorate? Even the bare majority that is functionally literate doesn't care enough to understand how the country is run. Take away the thrill of "revelations" and they will slip into the comfort zone of reading/viewing people who reassure them that what they already believe is correct and that there is no need to think.

It's called "hiding in plain sight" - nine times out of ten if you go about your business openly and with an air of confidence, nobody pays any attention. I cannot see any other way the Coalition government can avoid being leaked to death by the labourite majority infesting the state sector.

Nor, evidently, does Cameron - witness his words to Benedict Brogan on today's leak.

Charles Moore - soothscribe of the month

A pleasant surprise - I have had Moore pegged as a prematurely aged bore and generally do not pay much attention to what he writes because I expect it to the the same old same old. This one is so cogent and on the money that I will pay more attention in future.

There is a lot to be said for more modest, low-key government. We do not need to hear from our leaders every day of our lives. We are all sick of things being said, rather than done. But, in one respect, Tony Blair was right. If you do not proclaim your message, the space is filled, not by respectful silence, but by your opponents.

He might have added that silence permits your opponents to make fools of themselves, which they certainly have been doing. But it's also true that the chattering classes need to - well - chatter, and that after the frenzied determination of the Blair-Brown regime to dominate the news cycle, the advent of low key government has had an effect on the journopukes akin to junkies losing their dealer.

The complaint is not that the Coalition is wasting time, but that it is not explaining itself. This is to do with the personality of David Cameron. He is an exceptionally clear public speaker. But, being a rational, civilised and slightly reserved person, rather than a missionary or an actor, he makes the mistake of thinking that, once you've said something in politics, you do not need to say it again (and again, and again).

Again, I can see this is the case from a journopuke's perspective; but if you're looking to make fundamental changes to the substance of government, a fundamental change of style seems a good place to start. Journopukes have a 24-hour horizon, and one of the most impressive things about the Cameron-Clegg duo is that they are playing their hand long.

The same people who worry about Coalition weakness worry about "fairness". They say it is a word which always involves a financial demand: it spells trouble, so leave it alone. But I say that "fairness" – unlike the word "equality", which is fraught with danger both for conservatives and liberals – is a fundamental British concept that cannot be ceded to opponents.

I know this is what most Brits, regardless of their political leanings, believe to be true, and Moore commendably emphasizes what a philosophical chasm divides "fairness" from fundamentally unfair communist "equality". But I suspect that Moore underestimates the success of the Labour pukes in blurring the line between what are mutually incompatible concepts. Spiteful, levelling envy is more of a defining national characteristic than perhaps it is possible for a British patriot to admit.

It's the eloquent conclusion that gets Moore the award. What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed:

It is precisely because our dreadful welfare system has been falsely represented as "fair" for more than half a century that it has resisted reform so successfully. It is not fair that the poor are trapped and the enterprising are penalised. When that is at last understood, the heart (an organ which the Tories are always supposed to lack) will finally go out of socialism.

From his lips to God's ears

"This is a government that will give power back to the people" writes David Cameron in CiF. I not only hopeful but also inclined to believe he is sincere. The question is - do "the people" want that power, and with it a curtailment of their cherished freedom to moan impotently? 

We are going to turn the tide. We will be the first government in a generation* to leave office with much less power in Whitehall than we started with. Why? Because we feel the importance of this in our heads as well as our hearts. There's the efficiency argument – that in huge hierarchies, money gets spent on bureaucracy instead of the frontline. There is the fairness argument – that centralised national blueprints don't allow for local solutions to major social problems. And there is the political argument – that centralisation creates a great distance in our democracy between the government and the governed.

But we feel it in our hearts, too. We are optimists. We believe that when people are given the freedom to take responsibility, they start achieving things on their own and they're possessed with new dynamism. Multiply this transformation by millions of people and you'll get an idea of why we are so passionate about this power shift.

* In a generation? When was the last government that devolved any power?

Edmund Burke on Blair's memoir

When the public man omits to put himself in a situation of doing his duty with effect it is an omission that frustrates the purposes of his trust almost as much as if he had formally betrayed it. It is surely no very rational account of a man's life, that he has always acted right but has taken special care to act in such a manner that his endeavours could not possibly be productive of any consequence.

What does "Conservative" mean?

American usage has hopelessly contaminated the word "liberal" by applying it to social democrats, but it has done the same with "conservative" by making it synonymous with fervent religiosity. An example is this post by Ann Coulter in Human Events, which claims to be "Leading Conservative media since 1944".

Most of it is way OTT, but I like this line: "In the druidical religion of liberalism, not separating your recyclables is a sin, but abortion is just a medical procedure".

Coulter has an impressive polemicist's CV. As well as her widely read column, she features regularly on TV and talk radio, and has published seven best-sellers: High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton (1998); Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (2002); Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (2003); How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter (2004); Godless: The Church of Liberalism (2006);  If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans (2007); and  Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America (2009).

I have not read any of Coulter's publications because book-length polemics bore me. I also think that religion, like sex, is a private matter and find the flaunting of beliefs and genitals equally distasteful. Finally, the minutiae of political factionalism is just as tedious in the States as it is in Britain. Political parties are private associations that compete for the privilege of spending public money. They have far more in common with each other than any of them have with the general population, and anyone who can get excited about their Punch and Judy show is, to my mind, a dupe.

I voted Republican in Houston solely because Ron Paul was my local representative and I completely agreed with his views on US foreign and monetary policy, and admired his consistent voting record against any increase in the power of the Federal government. Although he stood in 1988 as a Libertarian, he is, as far as I am concerned, the only genuine Conservative I have ever had the opportunity to vote for. I voted for The One two years ago mainly because I felt the Republican establishment richly deserved a kick in the crotch. 

I only voted for the British Conservative party once, in 2001, when I had to escort my aged mother to the polling station, and frivolously decided to off-set her vote for "dear Tony". Barring the happy accident of moving into Ron Paul's constituency, I have never voted for any candidate or political faction. I vote against the one I regard as most harmful or personally repugnant - not an easy choice on either side of the Atlantic.

I am an historian, therefore cannot share the faith in human nature that appears to animate those who style themselves Libertarian - although I share their furious rejection of insidious bureaucratic tyranny. The Labour party's "equality" agenda is so transparently communist that anyone who values liberty even a little must vote against it. Yet the LibDems and the Tories are united in their commitment to the totally undemocratic European Union, which, in its own way, is no less an enemy of the historic liberties of the British nation. 

The curse of sloppy modern political terminology is that labels no longer bear any relation to the contents of whatever association they are attached to. When writing Razor's Edge about the Falklands War, I found it necessary to add an appendix to define what the more common ideological terms mean, because they are commonly used so carelessly.

I reproduce those definitions in the next post so that I will be able to link back to it in future.

For this post, however, the definition that matters is that conservatism is a belief that customs and institutions shaped by time embody a profound collective wisdom and therefore rejects attempts to remodel society according to theoretical blueprints. Thus, properly speaking, it is an anti-ideology.

Funnily enough, I think that describes the majority world-view of the British. And, even more funnily enough, I suspect that serendipity has given us a government that sails pretty close to that point of the compass. It is unfortunate that some of the customs and institutions shaped by the last 50-60 years are so dysfunctional, but by removing the more recent ideological accretions and making good husbandry the main priority, the Coalition government is probably being as conservative as it is possible to be.

Hat-tip to Jill