And pause...

No scribbling for a while, since I'm moving to start a new job at the other end of the country, and there are more important things. Like not being homeless and stuff.

Here's to new ideas

There have been so many false promises of Tory revival over the years that it seems hard to believe that this could be the real thing. Every time, voters and the press have been inclined to give Labour another chance. But this time it looks like being different.

It’s not just that Brown’s team has gone from being The Clunking Fists to The Knuckleheads overnight, as evidenced by Andy Burnham’s apparent vision of light at the bottom of the hole that they’ve been digging. As anyone capable of reading a newspaper could have told him, if you’re in trouble for stealing policies and passing them off as your own, the last thing you want to do is go out and nick another one. It starts to look less like a mistake, and more like a sickness. Political kleptomania, in fact.

But the really cheering thing is that it’s now the Tories who are dictating the political weather, and, as Michael Brown of the Independent points out, who have the chance to start arguing for a different vision of Britain.

There are just a few people left who still think that more money is what’ll transform public services, that McKinsey would make an excellent and cost-effective replacement for the Civil Service, or that directives from the Desk of the Supreme Leader are a good substitute for people having minds of their own, and permission to use them. For the last ten years, the Tories have felt obliged to go along with this vision. No longer.

This is a rare vacuum in politics. It is not often that a movement has the chance to exhaust its own programme, to push its beliefs as far as it can, and for everyone to see the result. The neo-conservative movement in the States had an unusually free hand to try its great experiment, and as it failed, it destroyed the power of its own ideas. What amounts to an ideology for new Labour – throw money and confiscate power – has been running for a decade. We know the results.

Would you pay three times as much for the health service of 2007 than for the service of 1997? Tough. You are. Have schools been transformed? Nope. Do people have more disposable income? Do we feel freer? More fulfilled? Happier? More secure? More content?

There is no possibility that the government can blame anyone else for its failures. It has had whopping majorities, gushing streams of our cash, a benign global economy, and lots of goodwill. For most of its time it barely had an opposition. Its failure is entirely due to the bankruptcy of its own ideas.

The great public services will never work properly until they’re once again a part of civil society, not the welfare state. The degradation of life in inner cities will not be solved by state youth clubs, state nurseries, or smart-arsed tax systems that no one can understand. The government needs to realise the limits to its own competence, and the potential in other people’s.

For the first time since the 1980s, the Tories have a chance to make the case for their own solutions. There is disaffection with the current, exhausted ways of doing things, and perhaps an appetite for new ideas. No longer will the economically illiterate, but highly damaging slurs stick – the claims that a loose-change £5bn tax cut will cause interest rates to rocket, or that every penny taken in tax goes straight to dedicated, saucer-eyed nurses and teachers. Record spending has been followed by indifferent results, and everyone knows it.

Inheritance tax succeeded in hurting Labour, but the wounds that Brown sustained weren’t without an upside. Painful as it was to draw the Tory teeth, inheritance tax won’t be the great dividing line at the next election. There will need to be a new icon of the difference between the two, one that highlights the gulf between Brown and what Cameron.

For the Tories, the tax credits system is the obvious candidate. When 40% of those eligible don’t claim, when sheer government incompetence sends bailiffs to the doors of the very poor, and when report after report damns the system as the cretinously useless shambles that it is, it’s the one policy that stands up and begs to be shot.

If the Tories want a morally sound and hugely popular tax policy, they should scrap the whole thing and instead cut the taxes of the very poorest. As far as I’m concerned, it’s nothing short of obscene that workers on the minimum wage pay income tax at all, and then have to beg pitifully to be allowed some of it back – assuming they’re eligible, that they can understand the forms, and that they can get over the worry that an incompetent state machinery will pay them too much, and then send the bailiffs round.

Tax credits make their recipients suffer the highest marginal tax rates of any group in society. They show what happens when a man with no imagination and too much faith in his own intellect is allowed to design a policy. Most importantly, as far as the Tories go, they are a policy that has sticky Brown fingerprints all over them, and one that Labour could never disown.

The replacement should be a non-traditional tax cut, aimed squarely at those at the bottom of the workforce. If the Tories scrap the £15bn that tax credits cost, and can fire a further £35bn worth of Gordo’s army of useless numpties, they could afford to raise the personal income tax allowance to a whopping £15,000. If you're concerned that vital services would be devastated, just remember that no one really noticed when they were all hired, so it would be surprising if anyone noticed when they get fired. This cut would free those working a 48-hour week on the minimum wage – or up to £6 per hour – from paying any income tax at all.

Nothing could be more powerful, or more attractive. It would be the great symbol of the new Toryism. It would be a slap in the face for Labour’s pretence to be the party that looks after the poor. Every piece of syrup-brained interfering middle-class leftism of the last half-century, from inhuman council estates to ‘progressive’ schooling, has hit the poor hardest. It could be the start of the roll-back - if Cameron has more bottle than Brown.

Sing-a-long

I'd like to come up with a serious and well thought-out response to Brown's, erm, new view of the election. But instead, here's a plageurised little ditty. To the tune of Sir Robin's minstrel in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

Brave Sir Gordon ran away/ ("No!")
Bravely ran away, away/ ("I didn't!")
When in the polls his lead did shred/
He bravely turned his tail and fled/ ("No!")
Yes, brave Sir Gordon turned about/ ("I didn't!")
And gallantly he chickened out/
Bravely taking to his feet/
He beat a very brave retreat/ ("All lies!")
Bravest of the brave, brave Sir Gordon!

Personally, I'm imagining Ed Balls as the minstrel, but you can amuse yourselves as you like.

Per-capita is the new voucher...

And, tucked away in the middle of Cameron's speech today, was a little nugget of gold.

"So we will say to churches, to voluntary bodies, to private companies, to private schools come into the state sector, find the parents and the children who have a simple regulatory regime, per capita funding and we can have those new schools so we can really drive up standards"

Per-capita funding. That vital old policy, under a much less scary-sounding new name. Clever boy.

The beauty of independence

One of the best things that the splurging of money on education in recent years has done is that it has blown away any pretence that the system’s faults are due to a lack of money.

After a decade of increasing budgets, educating a child to the age of sixteen costs the state £45,000. More than a fifth of them leave school illiterate. No one would voluntarily spend that kind of money on an education so grotesquely useless that it could not even teach a child to read and write. No one, except the Department of Education.

Those who pretend that this is the best that can possibly be expected for this sort of outlay are a mixture of hardened ideologues and professional apologists. There are those who are too narrow-minded to accept any model other than the council-run comprehensive, and those whose fingers wouldn’t be able to pull so much out of any other kind of pie.

Around the comprehensive model, a whole apparatus has grown. Teaching unions, academic educationalists, LEAs and education journalists all rely on this form of state education. They rely on taxes funding council quangos hiring teachers trained by idiots and all reported on by journalists who really ought to be doing something more useful. None of these are necessary to provide a good education.

All of them blame every imaginable devil in the works, every saboteur that they can invent, for the dismal performance of the system they prop up. They blame a handful of public schools for shattering the theoretical perfection of comps. They continue to rail against grammar schools. And inevitably, they call for yet more money.

Let’s take a classroom of twenty-five pupils for an example of why they are so spectacularly wrong. Most comprehensives can only dream of such small classes, and many of their apologists blame thirty-plus classes for the system’s woeful performance.

A class of twenty-five pupils costs the taxpayer about £4,100 each, or more than £100,000 for the class. If you had to arrange an education for this class, and you were given the £100,000 it costs, what sort of education could you afford? You could hire a first-rate teacher for £50,000 a year. Hiring or building space in which to set up a classroom? If you get a mortgage to cover the cost of a small, £4m new school, it works out at about £20,000 per annum per classroom. Put aside a generous sum - say, £10,000 - to cover overheads, admin and nonsense. That leaves £20,000 spare, every year, for books, travel, food, sports, or whatever the school fancies.

You could buy each child a new MacBook in the first year alone. Or you could pay for free lunches every day: not, perhaps, of caviar, but not of catering slop either. I could cook a damn good lunch for thee quid a head. Or you could buy them an instant library of twenty thousand books from your local Barnardo’s bookshops.

Keener on sports? Buy them each a lightweight, all-aluminium Cannondale mountain bike, perhaps. Or you could buy enough professional gym equipment to easily work the flab off twenty-five schoolchildren. Fancy a small fleet of sailing dinghies? A year’s ‘extras’ budget will get you five. Or you could abandon the fripperies, and instead cut each class to twenty pupils.

There is no desperate shortage of money. With only the sum already spent on education, this country could afford schools run according to this kind of budget. A very well-paid teacher in front of a fairly small class, with some money left over for extras. If you put twenty children through a class like this for eleven years, I bet you wouldn’t end up with four or five of them illiterate.

It might sound like some Utopian dream, to run the nations schools on these sorts of lines. But there’s absolutely no reason why it should be. We already spend this kind of money on education. All that’s needed is to devise a system in which money is spent by competent people who have an interest in creating great schools. That means getting the state out of the way.

Declare each school to be an independent trust, and fund them on a straight per-pupil basis. That funding should be fully transferable, able to be spent at any registered school, and it should all go direct to that school. You decide to send your child to Bogsville Academy, and his four grand goes straight into their account. And if anyone thinks they can do better, they should – subject to a few obvious checks – be allowed to set up and register their own.

Nationalising schools was about as good for education as British Leyland was for motoring. Government – any government - has a special talent for reverse alchemy; the art of turning fabulous raw materials into worthless dross. It beggars belief that one could spend upwards of four thousand pounds a year on education, for at least eleven years, and still have a one-in-five chance of being illiterate at the end of it. To create a system that does so routinely takes a truly spectacular talent for uselessness.

Schools need to be accountable to those who care most about getting a great education out of them. The government doesn’t care in the slightest if little Johnny is being bullied to death, if his teacher is incompetent, or if his school is so chaotic that he doesn’t stand a chance of learning anything. All it cares about is looking good enough to win reelection, and since the easiest way to do that is to boast about the amount spent and to then rig the statistics, little Johnny’s education is expendable.

Citizens are quite capable of deciding what is a good school, and what kind of education we would like to buy. Every day, we prove ourselves capable of choosing everything from baked beans to cars, through experience, word of mouth, and expert advice. Every day, we buy things that are much better than in the days when we could only choose between two or three products of the State. Will it be the Austin Allegro or the Morris Marina for you, Sir?

The simple-minded ask how we’ll ration places at the good schools, and decide who’s relegated to the sinks. Unable to escape the straits of twentieth-century statism, they can barely imagine the mechanism that destroys bad schooling – if only we demand it.

We don’t have some immutable ratio of good and bad schools, any more than there’s a fixed number of ‘good butchers’ and ‘bad butchers’. A butcher who can’t provide what his customers want risks going bankrupt, and if his absence leaves a town wanting more meat, then someone more talented and more responsive will take over his business instead. A particularly successful butcher often takes over his inferior rivals, and run them according to his more successful model.

This pressure and this mechanism, ensures that quality goes up and customers get happier, so long as they demand the best and are willing to go elsewhere – or set up their own – if they don’t get it. So long as parents are willing to exercise this power, it will work just as well for schools.

Getting rid of state control has other advantages. No one goes into teaching at a council comprehensive unless they’re willing to be the servant of a bunch of second-rate wannabe politicians. No other serious profession has to accept this submissive rank, to be under the control of people who by rights should be sitting in a corner of their classroom, sporting a pointy hat. Teachers should belong to free and proud schools, not to councils. It would do wonders for the esteem of the profession.

It’s no coincidence that teaching lost most of its status in the period when the state swept in, and the profession started to be swallowed by local bureaucracy. Clever graduates who wouldn’t dream of being shunted off to some Godforsaken dump to be abused by small teenagers might well be induced to teach at a privately run school, where the job is more about teaching and less about surviving.

It’s clear what needs to be done if we’ve had enough of our embarrassing education system. It is equally clear that there is a strong lobby with interests in maintaining the status quo. Under a fragmented, enterprising system of schooling, no teaching union will have the ear of government again. There will be no directives coming from the Department for Balls, alerting schools to the fact that bullying is not nice. Teacher-training colleges would have to provide training that schools valued, or no one would bother going. An entire apparatus faces extinction, if schools are set free.

In other words, the educational establishment is what stands in the way of better education. Delicious.

Scotland in harness

Politics works like a cart drawn by a number of antagonistic, independent-minded horses. Two or three are usually hitched to our cart of state, each wanting to pull along a different line. The direction the cart goes might be wobbly, but it usually ends up as a rough middle way between the course that each would take if it were hitched up alone.

If you like to whip your metaphors beyond exhaustion, you can have all kinds of fun with this. A one-party state is a cart drawn by one horse, with the rival horses hiding behind hedges and covertly lobbing stones at the beast, trying to upset its progress. Russian politics will soon be a harness of half-a-dozen ponies trotting along neatly, taking orders from the retired carthorse striding alongside. France’s horses are happy to accept extra-large nose bags, in exchange for altering their line a little; perhaps so as not to annoy some small animal en route. Italian politics involves horse’s heads, but only in the non-metaphorical sense.

Here in Scotland, we have our own version. We have two horses, one of which wants to take a particular course, towards its own vision of how the country should be run. Meanwhile, the other horse is sitting down on the tarmac demanding to be hitched to a different cart.

As the physicists amongst you will have noticed, this causes certain problems. For normal politics to work, for politicians to be able to debate commonplace issues like health, education and transport, the constitutional questions must be settled. What the basic framework of a state is, and where its borders lie, matters far more than any policy on schools or hospitals. Until these questions are broadly agreed across the political class, normal politics will take a back seat.

No one can play a game without knowing what the rules are. If the two sides disagree about what the rules should be and try to make it up as they go along, you can be sure that most of their time will be spent arguing about them.

The SNP and Labour are the only two contenders for power, and only one of them wants to work inside the current framework. The other finds little real ideological difference between it and its rival, only its commitment to tear up the current rules. Scottish politics is a carve-up between an unreflective centre-left party that believes in independence and an unthinking centre-left party that believes in unionism.

In post-devolution Scotland, we’ve managed to invert the usual model of politics. Usually, a country is governed by a political system where the rules are fixed, but the policies swing between two visions. Whereas Scotland’s main parties are agreed on their policies, and instead tug the constitution to and fro. It is a ludicrous way of doing things. It is as if UKIP were always the large minority party at Westminster, unable to win independence from the EU, but not interested in much else.

Nothing can be done while the Scottish question remains unsettled. Politics up here is not a left-right battle, nor a Millian tug between progress and reaction. Constitutional matters are the big battleground, and the battles of ideology are reduced to nothing but piddling little disputes over banning airguns and happy hours. The elephant in the room will need to be kicked out before there’s any space for the parties to spread out.

Scotland can’t afford this wrangling and indecision. We have swathes of the country stuck in a rotting world of twentieth-century socialism, unable to move on. Welfarism has turned parts of the country into deserts of opportunity. The Scottish education system used to be something we prided ourselves on. Now, it is only the deluded who think so.

Amongst the political class, there's no desire to think outside the old consensus of soft leftism. There are no new ideas, not even any curiosity about different ways of doing things. We trudge on, obsessed with the constitutional question, trying to solve deep-rooted social problems by passing ever more prohibitions, more directives, more initiatives, and failing to see that the levers of power are clanking freely in mid-air.

There is no appetite in the country for any shift away from the mushy socialism that 80% of the Parliament backs, not while the constitutional question hangs over it all. Scottish politics is stagnant, unwilling to decide firmly whether it wants independence or not, and until it does, unable to move on from it. But the great obstacle is that independence can count on the unyielding support of about 30% of the population, just as it has for decades, which guarantees both that the SNP will remain a major party and that it won’t win a referendum.

Unless we decide, and both sides accept the constitution, there’s no chance of any other kind of progress. The two parties crowd together on policy, sticking close to the populist consensus, so as to save ammunition for the big struggle. It’s an endurance contest, the two sides trying to wear each other down until one gives in. It is a waste of time that we really don’t have.

Scotland produces many talented, clever, interesting people who can do great things, as a quick look around London will tell you. Until we figure out what we want to be as a country, we'll stay squabbling in the middle of the road.

The Patriot Game

As we glide towards the next full-blown campaign for US President, we can expect the partisanship to drift westwards across the Atlantic. Once the no-hopers start to drop out, British pundits will start to pick their favourites and snarl it out at one another - almost as if Clinton, Obama and Giuliani were fighting for votes in the West Midlands, rather than the Mid-West.

The Right gets particularly excited about this. For many, America has become an icon of all that is good in the world, the last bastion of civilised values in Christendom. Most pick their favoured candidates on the basis of they think what America needs, whether it’s a more eloquent figurehead, a slashing of the pork-laden federal government, a new drive for educational reform or a refocusing of the battle against Islamism.

The problem is that the ideologues engage in the presidential race from the wrong shore of the Atlantic. British right-wingers pick from the menu of Republican candidates according to which they think would be the best for America. Few would think any differently about Presidential politics if they weren’t a British subject at all, but loyal to the Stars and Stripes.

George Orwell once noted how an ideologues will often transfer his nationalism to a foreign symbol of his beliefs. In Orwell's day, intellectuals played at being African or Russian patriots, showing off their anti-imperialism or their solidarity with the workers’ state. Throughout the Cold War, many Soviet sympathisers here became outright Russophiles, and even now, with Russia governed by gangster capitalism, the old fellow-travellers still argue for Putin and Mother Russia as fervently as they did thirty years ago.

Now, the ideologues of the Right feel much the same way about their champion that the hard Left felt about theirs. “The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organisation, fills him with uneasiness which he can only relieve by making some sharp retort” wrote Orwell. ‘Anti-American’ being the customary one today.

The modern Right forgets that we are not American, and what is good for one country is not necessarily good for its allies. The history of the last few years is enough to show that.

For a proper anti-America leftie, there has been no better advert for the cause than George Bush. Under his watch, America has become so associated with stupidity, arrogance and incompetence that a distaste for our Stateside cousins has become de rigeur in the circles that consider themselves polite. As Bush enters the closing straights, everyone is edging away from the 43rd President of the United States like from a mad, rambling bore at a party.

As far as the US is concerned, it has had few stauncher allies than Tony Blair. From the days after September 11th when NATO, under pressure from the UK, invoked its mutual-defence obligations for the first time, through six years of solidarity over Afghanistan and Iraq, Britain and America were barely separable. In all the areas that Washington foreign policy makers care about, Blair was keen to hitch Britain to the American position, occasionally pulling in a particular direction, but otherwise happy to roll alongside its ally.

Thing is, even though Tony Blair became the preferred choice of even the most right-wing Republicans, none of his friends in Washington would ever have wanted him to have power in their country. A man who supports higher taxes, gay marriage, nationalised medicine…? In a Presidential race he’d have been a comedy act in the first stage, someone to briefly raise the hopes of liberal Democrats, and to soon drop out.

But of course, those friends of Tony’s understood that all that is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how ideologically pure your allies are, or how they’d get along with your party rank-and-file. What matters, if you value an alliance, is to find presidents and prime ministers who strengthen and enhance that alliance.

Over here, the pro-American Right should think carefully about this. If its columnists and pundits want to do a little good, they should be figuring out which of the candidates would help the alliance recover from the humiliation of the Bush years.

Atlanticists on this side of the pond don’t need another Republican he-man like Rudy Giuliani. Whatever his merits might be for America, and however civilizing it will be for the Republicans to be led into battle by a man who once lived with two gay men and a Chihuahua, a President Giuliani would look like more of the same.

We Atlanticists need an alliance that’s again a source of pride, not of embarrassment. A president who can remind us that America is the offspring of Enlightenment Europe, not simply a weird backwater, filled with dim hicks and tub-thumping religious nutters. We need a president who’s recognisably one of us, not some kind of semi-alien being from a very definitely foreign country.

We need a President Obama. Regardless of whether you’d vote for him yourself, he is the one candidate who can refresh the way the US looks and sounds. Right now, that’s what the true friends of America need.

Solving climate change, right after we solve human nature...

A lot of very earnest people have been taking advantage of the silly season this year, filling up a field next to Heathrow, and those gaps in the news schedules usually occupied by missing-cat stories. Dozens of organisations who make up the Camp for Climate Action, ranging from the fanatics to the fuddy-duddies, are united by the battle against aircraft. It’s no surprise to find there a type of earnest youth who’s always been able to find something evil to make a stand against, and some cretinously simple-minded way of ‘solving’ it.

What is surprising is that they’ve been joined by the kind of establishment figures they’d normally hope to hurl abuse at. The Church of England now believes that flying is a sin, which presumably makes it the one sin that they still believe in. Even the National Trust has come in to bat for the sons-of-Swampy. Everyone is now keen to be seen denying themselves the fruits of civilisation, and Ryanair too.

Environmentalism is the last moral code that Western civilisation truly believes in, and questioning the morally certain is always tough. The respect that environmentalists are given is rather like that given to a preacher in a God-fearing society - we might not agree with him, but we can at least be sure that his heart is righteous. It has become difficult to ask questions, even ones that cut to the core of what the green movement aims to do.

No one, to my knowledge, has pointed out that if the usual cause and remedy for climate change are correct, it will not just require us to trim our energy use. If global warming is indeed caused by the release of the carbon dioxide that was trapped, millions of years ago, as fossil fuels, it would seem to follow that it is not enough simply to burn coal, oil and gas at a much slower rate. It should not matter how long the release takes - the previously trapped gas ends up in the atmosphere permanently. Burning all the fossil fuels we have, regardless of whether we do so in a big splurge or in a long dribble, will have the same effect on the planet.

Ultimately, then, the solution to global warming is for the world to agree to leave vast reserves of fossil fuels buried underground, permanently. If the climate-change thesis is correct, and if we don’t leave this fuel unused, we’re in trouble.

But the problem here is obvious. This vast feat of self-denial will require a saintliness that man has never yet achieved. It requires everyone, everywhere, to forget about the kind of lifestyle that burning fossil fuels allows. Under the soil lies the greatest source of free power that mankind has ever found. It’s so vital to the way we live that even a wind turbine, that icon of environmentalism, requires great dollops of fossil fuels to build. If we had to build the whole thing - from extracting and refining the aluminium to hauling the finished turbine across country to its site - without the use of coal, oil, and gas, we might not think the power it generates worthwhile.

With our reserves locked in the ground, with the wellheads blocked and the mines blown up, mankind faces the kind of temptation that it’s never been able to resist. Denied the use of coal, oil or gas, mankind is reduced to using manpower, animal power, and whatever renewable sources it’s worth building, given the valuable energy that goes into building them, and the power they generate. It’ll be a tough lifestyle, made all the more painful by the knowledge that if we just opened up one of those mine shafts, there’d be all that power right on tap…

Still, everyone must resist, or the deal crumbles. Every people, every government, in every corner of the world, must resist the temptation to start using again, or no one else will. And if persuading peoples to renounce fossil fuels is tough, just try asking states to chuck away their own defences - ‘for the sake of the planet’.

For more than a century, a nation’s military power has ridden on the back of its industrial power. It is not so much its stomach that a modern army marches on, but its fuel tanks. Building and maintaining mechanized armies - to say nothing of air forces and navies - takes huge amounts of energy, most of which can only come from fossil fuels. Coal, oil and gas are the spinach on which nations grow strong. But if the deal’s going to work, states must abandon the instincts that they’ve shown since the dawn of time. They must all slash their militaries, relying only on carbon-free technologies to power their defences, and trust that every other country will keep the bargain.

Which country would be willing to scrap every warship that wasn’t solar-powered? Every tank that didn’t run on biodiesel, and that couldn’t be maintained by a wainwright’s shop? Every fighter aircraft that isn’t powered by rubber bands? Would all countries agree to disarm itself of every military invention of the last century-and-a-half, and go back to defending themselves with horse-drawn cannon, foot-soldiers and square-rigged men o’ war? And would they trust that no country would hang onto a few jet fighters and a guided-missile destroyer or two, and suddenly be able to rout any of its neighbours?

It is impossible to imagine. Anyone who thinks that the nations and peoples of the world would come together and agree in confidence to put the world’s great energy supplies beyond use is delusional. Two little stories from recent weeks illustrate just how crazy the idea is.

Not long before the Camp for Climate Action ambled into the fields of Heathrow, a Russian submarine planted a flag on the seabed at the North Pole, igniting a frantic rush to lay claim to the Arctic, the source of untapped riches of oil and gas. The rush isn’t to see who can best secure the oil against the ravages of mankind, but a race to get the stuff out and shipped off to their refineries.

It was not just Russia that wants that oil. Those well-known anti-ecological bastards, the Danes, started jumping up and down demanding a chunk. As did the renowned planet-destroying psychopaths, the Canadians. These are nations who profess to be at the heart of efforts to stem climate change. Given the opportunity, they chase oil as thirstily as anyone. And this really should have told the green movement what it’s up against.

Last week, protesters in Burma went onto the streets to denounce a 100% rise in the price of fuel. That’s a mere 100% rise, not, as we seem to need, a complete ban on burning the stuff. Protesters far more courageous, and certainly more desperate than the crusties at Heathrow, were willing to face the murderous security forces of one of the world’s worst tyrannies in an attempt to get fuel at a reasonable cost. That is how much people want to burn fossil fuels. That is the attitude of 99% of the planet. That is what the Monbiotites are facing.

Short of a worldwide green totalitarianism, there is precisely zero chance of humanity leaving the rest of the oil where it is. And even then, it’s pretty doubtful. We're all willing to make sacrifices that give us a righteous glow, so long as they don’t intrude too much on our basic lifestyle. Rich, urban liberals might be willing to have an electric car as part of their fleet, just to use for popping down to the supermarket. Suggest that they do what the planet apparantly needs from us all, to refuse any form of transport that isn’t powered by, built, or maintained with the aid of fossil fuels, and you’ll find few takers.

The green movement believes that it is possible for mankind to renounce the world’s best source of energy, and that out of the six million of us, not one will cheat, not one government will turn a blind eye, not one oil-rich area will secede, and stick two fingers to the ban. It believes that humans are capable of making unimaginable sacrifices in their standards of living, for the good of the planet, and that our species laughs in the face of temptation. It believes that human nature is intrinsically good and rational, and able to free itself from its greedy passions. It is wrong, in the most spectacular and ignorant fashion imaginable.

So long as we can dig up energy out of the ground, someone will use it. We will do so until we find something better, something that moves us around, keeps us warm, and helps us make all those goodies that we want. All the slideshows in the world won’t change that crucial basic fact.

This is the problem that the green movement is refusing to face. There is no way that humans will renounce the stuff that makes their lives easier and more comfortable, nor their governments what makes them more powerful. Our two chances are 1) to hope that the greens are wrong, or at least exaggerating, or 2) to discover a new source of energy that is at least as powerful and convenient as fossil fuels, that would let us abandon the oil fields without temptation.

Who knows if we’ll succeed? But whatever happens, the green movement will be an irrelevance. It will be inventors, not art-school greens on a moralistic ego trip, who find the next great source of power, if there is one. Trying to stop climate change by recycling, or banning standby buttons, is like a fat man trying to lose weight by cutting his toenails. It’s all or nothing. And since ‘all’ is impossible, that makes our current preoccupations with ‘green living’ look rather fatuous.

Could we build a new New Town?

For the first time in decades, housing policy is shooting up the political agenda. Gordon Brown is planning ‘eco-towns’ - or Broon’s Toons, as they’d doubtless be known if the thought wasn’t so utterly depressing - with 100,000 new houses on surplus government land, and 250,000 more on top of the 2.75m target of houses to be built by 2020.

Brown’s announcement concentrated entirely on raw numbers. All that matters, in this great new push for development, this creation of entire new towns and huge new estates, is the number of units that can be thrown up, and the number of people - or sub-units, as they’re probably known - that can be inserted into them.

There is little mention of density, communications, and the practicalities of building ever more in the South East, let alone any kind of vision for how urban living to will evolve in the decades to come. 100,000 houses will be built, simply because housing’s expensive, it was something Tony didn’t do much about, and because it’s a nice round number that’ll sound good in the soundbites.

The Philistinism is astonishing. Yet another giant scheme of housing will be thrown up, with no consideration for anything except sheltering another clump of workers, as efficiently as possible. Each of these estates and towns will be a permanent fixture on the landscape, since unlike the ghastly council tower blocks that are currently being exploded up and down the country, there’s no single landlord that can get rid of the things.

One might be surprised that the country would is happy to cloak itself with architecture that is dreary at best, soul-destroying at worst, and entirely irremovable. We are no longer a nation that is happy shopping at C&A. We now buy more BMW 3-series than we do Ford Mondeos. We love cheap clothing, but it has to be stylish, cheap clothing. Even staid old Marks & Spencer was only truly revived when Myleene Klass didn’t look out of place bouncing around in its adverts.

Design is everything to Britain in the 21st century. Yet the man who wears nothing less than Hugo Boss and loves his Audi TT is quite happy to drive home to a house than could have been stamped out on a British Housing production line. Property is the one great exception to our design obsession.

What on earth could make us so willing to accept second best, in the one purchase that matters most? Why do we not even question the grotesquely utilitarian plans of housing ministers, given that the state has proved it can commission and build delicious buildings - though admittedly, only when they’re for the use of MPs or officials.

Partly, there’s a lingering fear that contemporary architecture is inevitably cold, unliveable, and inhuman; built according to the Le Corbusier fantasy that if one designs an inhumanly rational, planned city, one can expect their inhabitants to turn into Homo Rationalius, content to follow the architect’s plan for how they should live their lives. Some architects revelled in this Godlike position, but citizens bristle at being managed in this way. We might like to worship designers, but we’d rather have a say in the matter.

But mainly, I suspect, because we have grown used to the idea that modern building is inevitably boring and derivative, and that anyone who values style will either commission and build their own design, or buy something that was built a century or two ago. After a century that built houses of ever-increasing blandness, we haven’t the guts to reject a freshly built housing estate of brand-new wynds and lanes, a plague of modern suburban boxes built onto a streetscape from the Middle Ages. We no longer believe that we still can build something great if we want to.

Individual buildings we can do fine. It’s the art of designing cities, or districts at least, that we’ve lost. This is the hangover from those disastrous attempts of the Sixties and Seventies to invent bold new ways of living, rather than designing cities to suit the way people like to live.

Under the current system of planning, development has become the preserve of a handful of professional developers, who are the only ones with the muscle to confront the planning system and win. A virtual cartel of firms who build much the same kind of houses is not going to experiment, given that suburban boxes sell easily and profitably, and that they care about little else. The problem is that we have a planning system where no one can build on a large scale except these developers, and given the fluctuations of the market, these developers want the safest product they can build. In cities, development is a duopoly of councils and corporate developers.

We can’t and shouldn’t expect the state to step in, to attempt to raise the standard and the beauty of housing by developing themselves, since their record in this field - Millennium Dome, anyone? - is abysmal. Even if they were capable of it, the political incentives simply aren’t there. No one votes for housing unless they desperately need some, and if their need is that desperate, their priority will be for quantity, not beauty.

But there is another model to consider, a Third Way if you like. More than two centuries ago, the nation’s most beautiful housing estate started to go up, on a disused heath to the north of medieval Edinburgh. A young architect, James Craig, drew up the grand plan for the New Town, a geometrical grid of fine squares and broad streets, on the instructions of the town authority. Permission was granted to anyone who wanted to build a house or houses there, so long as they conformed to the overall plan and the new style.

Where necessary, the authorities offered a reward - the first, lonely house to be built on the far side of Edinburgh’s stinking loch earned a £20 bonus. Planning permission - the great headache of modern urban development - was not a problem, since the city itself had drawn up the plans. All a builder had to do was acquire a plot, a builder, and formal permission to build his house there, in accordance with the plan.

A modern version of this scheme could demolish the stranglehold that timid architecture has on this nation. Instead of restricting development to professional developers, a city wanting to build on wasteland or over the rubble of a decrepit estate could bulldoze their site, and invite submissions for a new plan, covering both the layout and the style of housing.

An open competition is an old device for commissioning architecture, and it would be an ideal way for a city to decide on a plan. And since those wanting to build to this plan would get their planning permission automatically, thus cutting out a hazardous and expensive part of building, the standards demanded in the scheme can afford to be high.

It is then up to individuals, developers, and housing associations to acquire a plot and design a house or a block that fits the grand design, to coin a phrase. By breaking the need for full, start-to-finish planning permission, you break the power of the developers, and allow individuals and groups to build their own houses again.

A district designed on these lines could afford to be adventurous and exciting. It has the chance to be a development that adds to the beauty and character of a city, rather than, as so many do, dragging it down further to suburban mediocrity. Unlike most developments, the city could afford to demand the kind of quality and beauty that few individuals would be able to build on their own. Instead of town and cities competing to have new housing dumped elsewhere, we can dream about a day when towns compete to build grander, more innovative, and more beautiful districts than the next town.

All it takes is the belief that we can still do things like this, and that it’s worth doing. The days when we could build mere housing that was stunning enough to stand as a monument to our civilisation doesn’t need to have died, quite yet.

Why Broon's Doomed

Gordon Brown’s first week in power seems to have been received well. He and his new Home Secretary have managed to sound responsible and dignified in the face of the world’s most comically useless terrorist attacks. Labour partisans in the commentariat are overjoyed to witness Brown’s ability to move next door and not tread on any banana skins en route. The opposition is being civilised, partly out of the sense of statesmanship necessary in weeks like this, and partly to keep their powder dry.

But despite his good week, the prospects for Brown’s premiership are not good. Even before his frankly rather pathetic debut at PMQs, it was plain that Brown would be the first new Prime Minister for a long time whose opponents would greet him not with venom, but with contempt. Most incoming PMs are met with a healthy mixture of cheers and loathing. On either side there is both hope and anger, but always there’s passion. If a new leader can’t inspire even some sincere hatred, they’re in trouble.

This kind of quiet, indifferent contempt is rare, reserved for those new boys whom the voters already know all about, and don’t think much of. It is the worst of receptions. Matthew Parris, the exceptionally shrewd columnist for The Times, has written of his desire to join those who are accused of underestimating Gordon Brown, and who think that his talents have been wildly oversold. Brilliant at sums, but with no imagination and less courage, goes the Parris line.

For the past decade, Gordon Brown has been portrayed as the grim but brainy force behind the glossy charm of Tony Blair. Allies boast of the great man’s intellectual power, his grasp of detail and his vast reading. We are reminded that Brown is the first truly intellectual Prime Minister since Balfour. No doubt that is true, as far as it goes. But succeeding at the top of politics is not just a matter of IQ, and two factors have already doomed Brown’s spell at the top.

In a modern, media-driven democracy, top politicians are overexposed. Being an active, thrusting politician is synonymous with ‘being on TV all the time’. A politician who’s made it to the top has usually gone through several years of obscurity to all except Westminster-watchers, followed by a period of rising stardom, in which their public profile slowly grows, after which the they break through to the top stratum of politics.

Once they reach this point, politicians are ceaselessly in the public eye. Unlike politicians of previous generations, Westminster’s modern top dogs have a limited lifespan. Constantly gossiped about, analysed and featured in the press, and trailed by camera crews as they visit schools, clean up graffiti and do the other textbook stunts, we can only take so much of them. If the Victorian public had had to watch Gladstone cleaning up dog mess with a cheery grin on his face, he wouldn’t have still been at No. 10 in his eighties.

The life expectancy of a modern top politician is no more than ten to fifteen years, before we are utterly sick of the sight of him. At this point, the nation generally likes to kick them out, despise their memory for a few years, before their slow rehabilitation into loveable old curmudgeons, in the mould of Lord ‘Tub of Lard’ Hattersley.

Even before reaching No. 10, Gordon Brown had used up most of his political lifespan. He has loomed over the political landscape for a decade, a constant presence in the nation’s life. While he’s been much less obviously a media presence than Blair, and his public appearances have been mainly limited to formal events and a few stiff photocalls, his presence in the nation’s consciousness has been no less real.

He has dictated much of domestic policy since 1997. He has steered the government in the direction of a more wide-ranging state, one that looks after and helps raise small children, as well as try to educate them when they’re older. The domestic policies that the government’s most wholeheartedly committed itself to - like tax credits - are Gordon’s. He has loudly taken the credit for virtually everything that’s gone well in this country since 1997. And his sullen, under-the-table bickering with Tony Blair has kept the national’s political journalists amused for just as long.

It is absurd to think that he comes to No. 10 as a fresh talent. He has at most, one full Parliament left before his time is exhausted. No one could, hand on heart, say that they can visualise Gordon Brown still being Prime Minister in ten years’ time. He is already on the way out, whatever he tries to do. His only struggle now is to make it a slow exit.

The second problem for him is that his decade of sulking has already marked him out as a second-rate PM. If you think of the great Prime Ministers, they were all people who took chances when offered, made the most of them, and forced their own success upon the system. Propelling yourself to the top through your own political skill and courage earns respect of the most Machiavellian kind, the kind that gives you the power to mould politics to your agenda.

Whereas those leaders who inherit the job without a fight, perhaps as a reward for long service, as the nominee of a more powerful figure, or because no one could think of anyone better, are always going to make mediocre leaders. They are people like Jim Callaghan, Anthony Eden, and John Major. David Davis, if he had won the Tory race, would have been one.

Inheriting power without a fight, they start at an inevitable disadvantage. They haven’t earned that brutal, wolf-pack sense of respect for a leader who’s proved him or herself to be the strongest, sharpest and most ruthless. Westminster politics is not cuddly. Blair used all the Machiavellian tricks that exist - other than the one about leaving the body of his unpopular lieutenant in two pieces in the piazza - to keep power from slipping away from him. It gives a leader a sense of invincibility, quite necessary if he or she is going to keep dozens of the most ambition and cunning people in the country from besting him.

For all his superficial fluffiness, Cameron did prove himself in his leadership fight, coming from behind and beating the favourite hands-down. Brown, in contrast, was outmanoeuvred in 1994, sold a deal at Granita that proved worthless, and never managed to fight back. He waited nearly ten years, sulking and briefing in the background, until Blair was terminally weakened. Then, last September, he struck, with a timid, half-hearted attempt at a coup. Its success can be measured by the fact that even against a weakened Blair, Brown was forced to wait yet another year to gain his prize.

Brown starts his premiership with his time running out, and weakened by his own timidity. For ten years he has been the prime minister-in-waiting, and he has excelled only at the waiting. His chance to be a great PM evaporated ten years ago, when he rolled over and let Blair win without a fight. In the dog-eat-dog world of Westminster, it’s too late to recover. Only natural, therefore, that even Brown’s enemies should greet him with a contemptuous shrug.

A Silver Lining in Gaza?

Violence is never far from the surface of Palestinian society, but it’s rarely so plainly self-destructive as the emerging civil war between Hamas and Fatah. The murderous struggle for power that has divided Gaza and the West Bank into Hamastan and Fatahland looks like the last nail in the coffin of any chance of two states, at least any time soon.

But it’s rarely acknowledged that, even before the factions started dropping their opponents’ chefs off tall buildings, the Palestinian territories were nowhere near ready for statehood. It’s common to assume that there is some kind of wilful refusal on the part of the West to allow the recognition of the two-state solution, a stubborn, spiteful reluctance to do what’s right. It is no such thing.

New states need time and effort to help them stand alone, to be able to enforce their authority, to defend themselves and fit into the international system. In the years following independence, Israel needed the military support of France and Britain, and to be propped up financially by West Germany. East Timor, the last state to gain its independence, needed the midwifery skills of both the Australian military and the UN, and it stills needs their assistance, five years on.

Any new state needs a national identity that gives its people an attachment to its territory, a government that can enforce its authority across the whole of that territory, institutions that work, and, usually, the support of a sponsor. A state that lacks these, is, regardless of who recognises it and however many fine words are said in its support, will fail, in one of the numerous ways that states can collapse, divide, be undermined, or invaded.

The usual concept for a Palestinian state - recognition of a unified nation consisting of Gaza and the West Bank, with the two joined by a corridor of land exchanged with the Israelis, and the whole state governed from the West Bank by a unified government - is a recipe for failure.

The territories are not a proper country, but are an artificial cobbling-together of two unconnected areas of the old mandated Palestine. The West Bank and Gaza’s only connection is that both identify themselves as not being nations in themselves, but as territories full of refugees from their real country. It is as nonsensical as if Wales and Scotland were to form a union, governed from Edinburgh, based solely on their Celtic ethnicity and their hatred for the English.

Only it’s worse than that, since Wales and Scotland have history, institutions and identities that don’t depend on their common enemy. The Palestinians don’t. When Israel was created, many of the Palestinian refugees fled from Israel to what was then Transjordan, now Jordan, and which then controlled the West Bank. Others went north to Lebanon, south to into Egyptian-occupied Gaza, and others scattered further. But those who would come under Israeli occupation in 1967 saw themselves not as nations under occupation, but as exiles facing their expeller.

Unlike the hundreds of thousands of Jews of Arabia who were expelled from their homes at around the same time, the Palestinian Arabs never made a new home in the their new home. Partly this was because the Arab states were, at least until 1973, deadly serious about wiping out Israel as a state; the Palestinians kept as refugees to repopulate an Arab Palestine, and as a handy, if callous, propaganda vehicle for diverting the anger of their restive peoples.

As a consequence, the Palestinians still have very little that is not part of a broader Arab or Islamist identity, or dependent on their status as refugees from Israel. The territory that the West wants to see become their state is not what they see as their real home. In short, there is no nation of Palestine that fits with where the Palestinians live, an identity that binds a people with their soil. Instead, the Palestinian identity is one that’s constantly looking over the border into their past, or looking across the Middle East to what they share with their co-religionists.

It’s fairly obvious that any model of Palestinian statehood will, if it’s to be permanent, need Palestinians to see their nation as the one that’s under their feet, not as the one that’s over the border. For those who like looking for flashes of silver tucked inside the darkest clouds, the separation of the Palestinian territories into two statelets could be the first stage in this process. It could bring about the evolution of two giant refugee camps into proper little countries.

Separated, not just by geography but by different ideologies and different national stories, the two statelets start to look more like nations, rather than just holding camps. Of course, it does not seem much of a step forward to have a statelet controlled by Hamas, one that is drifting closer into the orbit of Iran, that may allow itself to be used as a forward base full of rockets and human shields, and that is in no position to have civilised relations with any other state, but there is at least a glint in that undeniably nasty thundercloud.

For without progressing from the politics of exile, there can be no viable Palestinian state. Without a real sense of nationhood that connects the Palestinians to their homeland, it’ll be virtually impossible to establish them a successful new state. In an area as pressurised as that between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, it’s impossible.

The question is whether the de facto separation of the two statelets can ease of the Palestinians’ transition into a post-refugee nation. My guess is that it has a reasonable chance, if only because that progress was all but impossible under the old, cobbled-together model of statehood, a model that institutionalised the politics of exile. It’s true that any good that may come from this nasty little episode of bloodletting will take years at least, more likely decades, and it’s also true that predicting anything with any certainty in the Middle East - except war, hatred and sandiness - is a mug’s game.

But breaking the link between Palestinians' roots as exiles and their future as self-governing citizens is essential. Actually achieving this is a possibility for the long run, no more. But though Keynes’ famous words of scepticism pointed out that “in the long run we’re all dead”, in Gaza and the West Bank at the moment, that maxim is becoming equally applicable to the short run. Anything that gives a real chance of stability to the region, however remote that chance may be, ought to be taken seriously.

A Self-Indulgent Boycott

So, the Universities and Colleges Union has voted to support a boycott of Israeli universities. With the rather Dave Spartish manner that these fine minds have, it’s nothing so straightforward as a plain call for boycott. Instead, the UCU will circulate a motion to all its branches to discuss calls from Palestinian trade unions for a "comprehensive and consistent international boycott of all Israeli academic institutions". The boycott motion is going to branches for "their information and discussion", which is no doubt something to forward to.

It’s hardly worth discussing why this union wants to boycott Israel for its actions in the occupied territories, but not China for its actions in Tibet, Russia for its actions in Chechnya, India for its actions in Kashmir, Turkey for its actions in Cyprus, or any of the thousand and one other boycotts that would be at least as justifiable as the one they want.

The fact is that Israel, and its policy towards the occupied territories, has become an icon for much of the Left. Quite plainly Israel is not the wickedest country on earth, to be singled out and despised for its deeds; but yet it is an icon of loathing, to be singled out for what it represents.

The membership of the UCU is largely composed of middle-aged radicals, made diverse by a handful of middle-aged ex-radicals. That may be an unfair generalisation, but in any case, it’s much less of a one than describing Israel as an apartheid state. Its campaign priorities are the usual mix of public sector self-interest and tedious leftist sloganeering - no to privatisation, no to ratting on potential terrorists, yes to boycotting Israel.

Like most of the rest of the current Establishment, the academic establishment is the product of the Sixties and Seventies. Back when they were young, Western imperialism was still the great bogeyman of radical politics. Africa was going through a traumatic decolonization, and most of the colonial powers were fighting either to leave with dignity, or to cling onto their colonies as long as possible.

Empire represented all that was bad about the old Britain, with its stuffy Victorian attitudes and its appeal to all those fashionable Marxist clichés of exploitation and ruling classes. It was bound up with the old establishment, and was an emblem of everything that the new wave of politics and culture wanted swept away. Little could be easier or more enjoyable for the new generations than kicking imperialism as it went down.

Those who came of age back then still have an obsession with fighting imperialism. Anything that resembles a proper, old-fashioned Empire - rich, white people having power over poor, brown ones - sends into a frenzy those who have failed to evolve since the 1960s.

The misfortune of Israel is to have created the perfect icon of white imperialism. Their deeds are no worse, and often much better than many other countries involved in territorial disputes. But the ossified old Left couldn’t care less about Chinese imperialism, the squabbles of India and Pakistan, or any other imperial or quasi-imperial conflict. All they care about is bringing down white imperialism, once and for all.

The conflict in the occupied territories pushes all those old buttons. You have a power armed with the latest, most sophisticated weapons available, versus passionate, stone-throwing natives who have no weapons but their bodies and their cunning. It is the rich versus the poor; greedy European settlers versus the honest peasants who’d farmed the land for generations. It plays beautifully to the imperial stereotypes of these rather old, unimaginative people, who remain stuck with the bogeymen of their youth.

It takes little effort to see this conflict through the prism of white imperialism. Swap redcoats for IDF infantry, gunboats for helicopter gunships, and rebelling natives for rebelling natives, and one great bogeyman morphs into the other without effort. For those whose intellect is this shallow, who react rather than think, it makes perfect sense to fight Israel as the new imperial power, the heir of the Raj and the new adventurers.

It’s no coincidence that the two great boycott campaigns of the last half-century have been against the two states that push these buttons. Neither South Africa nor Israel was targeted for being the most monstrous regime around, but for sparking guilt and shame amongst the Empire-hating generations.

Apartheid South Africa was cruel, brutal and racist, but it was a competent government, and by no means the most tyrannical even on its own continent. Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is cruel, brutal, racist and so incompetent that its people are either fleeing or starving in their millions. But as it bears no resemblance to a white imperial power, it faces far less condemnation.

Israel is cavalier in its treatment of the Palestinians, and it is yet to completely kick the old vision of a Greater Israel. It is often heavy-handed and ruthless. But it is a tiny nation on the fringes of the Middle East, still surrounded by nations who want to see it weakened or destroyed. It faces guerrilla warfare, either from Hezbollah, or from Hamas or the other Palestinian Islamists, sponsored by those states that want to grind it down. It wants, reluctantly, to get out of the occupied territories, but not to be forced out, and in doing so it wants to ensure that its borders and resources are secure. Much as any other state would.

It takes a considerable degree of blinkeredness to twist Israeli policy into the charge sheet of a Public Enemy Number One. Even if we limit ourselves to academia, in the week British academics voted to boycott Israel, Iranian academics began being arrested for daring to talk to Western universities. If the UCU wanted to boycott nasty regimes there’s no shortage of choice. Making the choice Israel says much about their real motivations.

This boycott, as with the South African one, has little to do with fighting injustice and everything to do with the gratification of the smug lefties who dominate the UCU. It is self-indulgent to the point of obscenity to do this, to punish a nation for one’s own pleasure, regardless of the effect it has on those who may be suffering. Nations that feel unjustly attacked usually retreat into a bunk mentality. But hey, who cares whether it will do any good for the Palestinians, so long as it’s good for a few Western egos?

Quite aside from the stupidity of this self-righteous, self-indulgent boycott, whose only purpose is to make some decrepit old fools feel brave and daring again, it is a great shame that British academia should have leant its name to such an enterprise. It is only natural that the old elite should be some way behind the times. But it is inexcusable for it to be a full century behind the times.

To be driven by a desire to attack the British Empire is, in 2007, when the great issues concern the Islamic world and the new economic superpowers of the East, as stupid and absurd as it would for someone living in coffee-house Georgian London to be obsessed with fighting the divine right of kings. No one whose mindset is stuck in a previous century can have much to say about today’s world. Intellectually as well as physically, they're on their way to the grave.

Incentives and welfare

More than fifteen years after the USSR was put out of its considerable misery, it’s easy for us to ignore how much Western society still owes to Marxism. China has now abandoned communism for dictatorial capitalism, and soon the only little red books will come from Smythson boutiques. Castro, the seemingly immortal old fool, might have made his last seven-hour speech. And yet our beloved welfare state is still popular, still the sacred cow of British politics, and still runs on the basis of ‘from each according to his means, to each according to his needs’.

Karl Marx‘s communism was based on the belief that, come the revolution, the factories and infrastructure would be taken over by the proletariat, and everyone would spontaneously work together for the benefit of all in society, capable or incapable, weak or strong. Everyone will put into the common pool of labour what they can, and take only what they need. We could all do whatever our souls dictated, helping society whenever we could, and relying on our comrades when we couldn’t. The communist citizens’ actions, efforts and choices would be based on the needs of society as a whole, rather than the needs of the individual.

A post-revolution utopia is, crudely, what a welfare state tries to replicate. Our taxes are broadly taken on one’s ability to pay. This communal pool of money funds payments to those who meet various tick-box criteria for neediness. Benefits are provided according to how many children one has, whether one has a disability or a job, and how much or how little one earns.

The idea of council housing is that one should be able to have the kind of house that one needs, wherever one needs it. A drawingroom flat in Kensington sounds good to me. NHS hospitals will, in theory, treat you regardless of your wealth or the extent of your culpability in causing your own illness. State schools promise to house as many children as you can produce, if not educate them. And they’ll do so almost regardless of how well or badly they behave.

The welfare state’s help is largely unconditional. If you have three children by the age of eighteen and need assistance, you’ll likely be given a place to stay and a little money. It makes no difference whether you’ve been abandoned, careless, or have picked motherhood as a career, lowly as it is. All that matters is one’s need.

The benefits system does make one key break with pure Marxism, in that it acknowledges the problem of cheating. Marx would never dream that his good, good communists would cheat one another, to take more from and give less to society than their abilities and needs dictated, but even our dimmest, wettest socialists accept that not all people are entirely selfless. Some - perhaps those who won’t accept that there might be any fraudulent incapacity claimants on the welfare rolls - might think that this is only because property hasn’t been abolished yet, but the less said about them the better.

We compel people to pat their taxes, and to take no more than their officially-sanctioned due. We take this seriously enough that we lock up anyone who disobeys. And by doing so we implicitly recognise just why the welfare state fails.

We are not Marx’s perfect, communally-minded proletarians. If offered something unconditionally - like state benefits - we tend to take it without thinking too much about the interests of wider society. Those who control the welfare state are keen to squash those who take money from the system without considering broader society, so long as it’s the illegal kind of social fraud. The legal sort, where people take from the pool out of self-interest alone, is of no concern to them.

It is not particularly in society’s interests, for example, that subsidised child-rearing should result in teenagers picking motherhood as a career, lowly as it is. Those who become single mothers by choice are neither the honest, hard-done-by saints of Guardian mythology, nor the immoral, grasping demons of the Mail. They are often just following their own self-interest, and think it more satisfying, and more secure, than struggling to get and keep a checkout or cleaner’s job.

But the statistics overwhelmingly show that for the rest of us, our subsidies unwittingly promote violence against the mother, the child, and, when the child grows up, against the rest of us too. A child brought up by its mother and her boyfriend is thirty-three times as likely to be abused as one brought up by married parents, and seventy-four times more likely to be killed.

Funding Sure Start, crèches and subsidised babysitters not only makes life easier for hard-pressed, poor parents, but makes the prospect of pregnancy a good deal more attractive. Not only can a not particularly bright young girl choose motherhood as a passport to some degree of security and status, but the more the state provides help and assistance, the less responsibility she has to bear. It becomes a more attractive an option if there is a state institution for her to subcontract the graft of motherhood to; allowing her to carry on the lifestyle she’d have otherwise, and letting the Treasury pick up the tab.

The great failure of left-wing economics is to ignore the power of these incentives. Marxism and welfare statism share a belief that people will not change their behaviour if offered cash for doing x, or given penalties for doing y. We ignore such petty matters, and simply do what is fundamental to our essence, to the core of our being. Or soul, to those who take the opium of the masses.

People will look after their own health even if there’s a free service to rectify it if they don’t. Higher taxes won’t change what people do for a living, or how much of it they do. No one will be put off saving for their retirement, blowing the lot instead while young, just because their state pensions will be means-tested. They wouldn’t, surely, decide to follow their self-interest, have some fun in their youth, and vote to have some of my money instead when they retire? What happened to the communal interest?

Not many socialists really think this out, but just have a vague sense that we are above such petty money-grubbing, that there are more important things in life that a few pence on income tax, a little pensions credit or a meagre few grand in bonuses. And it would indeed be much nicer if we all did what was in our society’s interests, and ignored the consequences for ourselves. The descendents of Marx feel in their bones that the power of society is so much more powerful than crude, capitalistic bribes.

It is true that people won’t sit down to calculate exactly how much extra or less they will make under a new rule, and calibrate their utility-maximising response to the penny. But young people might see the old getting means-tested pensions, and the benefits of their grandparents’ personal saving wiped out, and decide to care rather more about having fun than saving prudently and boringly for the future. Just remember to take it instead from your own, unborn grandchildren. Changes in incentives change the atmosphere that people make decisions in, and if the incentives hit the spot, they change those decisions themselves.

Not even Marx, as it happens, was quite as naïve as our unthinking lefties. He recognised that life under capitalism was a life where egoism and self-interest runs society, in all kinds of ways. His silliness lay in thinking that property was the cause of this, and that revolution and the extermination of the capitalist classes would create Utopia. But Nye Bevin and chums thought that self-interest could be abolished by Act of Parliament, and that once child benefit, unemployment insurance and the NHS were established, the good, socialist citizens would use them only in the communal interest. His intellectual - and I use the word hesitantly - descendants have never questioned, or even thought much about it. As always, it’s easier to fell regimes than the ideas behind them.

The Right's New Toe-hold in Education

It’s a testament to the communications skills of Cameron’s Tories that they have managed to present yesterday’s policy on grammar schools as some kind of radical break with the past. To recap; Cameron promises not to interfere with those grammars that remain, but not to build any more. As political revelations go, this is nearly up there with Tony Benn promising not to privatise the NHS, or Sir Peter Tapsell vowing not to drag the Royal Family down into a cellar and execute them.

No Tory government was going to build more grammar schools. Thatcher did not build any more grammars. Major did not build any more grammars. In 1997 he did promise to build more grammars, because that’s the kind of thing you do when you need to galvanise your few remaining troops for a last-ditch defence. But Cameron was not going to reintroduce the 1944 Education Act any more than he would have reintroduced rationing.

It’s called electoral reality. A promise to siphon off the top one-third of pupils will appeal to those parents who are absolutely confident that their child will go to these fabulous schools. That might be ten percent - the ones who know both that their child is a genius, and that they’re not deluding themselves about it. The other ninety percent either know that their child will go to a bog-standard comprehensive, though one stripped of the brightest and most ambitious, or will be unsure whether their little darling will make the grade and go to this elite school, or be dumped with the skimmed rabble in the other one.

Most of the aspirational parents Cameron wants will be terrified to gamble like this - ‘is little Octavia going to be a rocket scientist or a crack dealer?’ will be the inevitable thought process. Until normal schools are disciplined, safe and civilised, there is no chance of widespread selection.

The only choice for Cameron was whether to make a big deal out of not building any more grammar schools, or to not build any more grammar schools and do it quietly. Being keen to engineer a series of mini-Clause Four moments, the man decided to do the former.

And for once, the old Right took the bait. Grammar schools are something so fundamental to the Hefferite vision of Britain that they bit without thinking. David Willetts’ statement of the bleeding obvious contained nothing that changed policy, just the appearance of what the party wanted. The only choice in British politics is between a New Labour government and a centrist Tory government. If either party swerves off into the ideological wilderness they’ll stay stuck there.

Interestingly, Cameron’s apparent U-turn has almost exactly the same logic as the real Clause Four moment. No one, except the dafter members of the old Left, really thought that an incoming Labour government would nationalise everything down to the corner shop, but Blair managed to connive a small revolution out of his statement of the obvious. As both he and Cameron know, the great trick of democratic politics is to say what people already believe, and make it sound new, interesting and bold. You thus appeal both to people’s aspirations and their vanity.

They know that the real control over politics does not come from politicians, but from the voters' perceptions of politics. Power belongs to those who influence these perceptions, rather than the politicians who obey.

Education policy has long been seen as a left-wing monopoly, partly because the teachers are unionised, and largely lefties themselves. I was once taught about the 1980s famines in Ethiopia, in a class that blamed environmental degradation, cash crops and Western policy in general, but carefully avoided mentioning the fact that the country was a Marxist dictatorship at the time.

But it is also because for a long time, much of the commentariat has managed to ensure that ‘education’ is seen as synonymous with ‘state-run, comprehensive education’, and edged the Right’s views on the matter into a grammar-obsessed corner. And the Right has long been happy to oblige. Most people believe that there’s no alternative to comprehensives, because outside the bastions of the intellectual Right, none are seriously discussed. Politicians cluster around what the masses believe, and the masses believe what a certain class of people tell them is acceptable.

Friedrich Hayek wrote a pamphlet on the subject in the late 1940s, arguing that it was the public intellectuals, the ‘second-hand dealers in ideas’, who were responsible for socialism, not politicians. It was these opinion-formers, the academics, writers, broadcasters, artists, teachers and activists, who control the flow of ideas down to the masses, and decide which are acceptable and which abhorrent. Socialism was originally a movement of the intellectuals, and it took decades to convince the working class to sign up. This is equally true today. Those who control the flow of ideas control the chief moulder of politics.

In a society where all original debate in conducted through the media, those who control how ideas are seen have an immense power. It was difficult to debate the merits of multiculturalism when the mere suggestion would cause TV interviewers to suck in a horrified intake of breath. It was hard to talk about the problems of Islamist politics when the BBC prefaced any mention of the MAB - the UK offshoot of the often-banned Muslim Brotherhood, and first cousin to Hamas - as “the moderate” Muslim Association of Britain.

Once the chief intellectuals change their minds, the terms of debate change for the rest of us. It is much easier to debate controversial subjects like Islam and multiculturalism once the intellectual class decides that it needs to be discussed. It took the intervention of the rather admirable Trevor Phillips to end the farcical official silence on these matters, and allow Question Time audiences to feel that they could applaud Melanie Phillips without actually being a fascist.

Exactly the same process applies to education, and every other political and social issue. Only when those who control the terms of debate have stopped clinging to the failed model of nationalised schools, unionised teachers and illiterate pupils, will we get the chance to create a decent system of schooling. It took 7/7 to start a sensible debate on multiculturalism. The Right now needs to shame the public intellectuals into acknowledging that state education is an embarrassing, ineffective and hopelessly corrupt mess, for there to be any real debate about how we can move forward. But for the Tories, breaking with its obsession with grammers is an essential start.

New Theatre

Being much too young to remember the Fifties from the first time around, I only discovered Kenneth Tynan, the great theatre critic, when a new collection of his work was published this year. It deserves to be rediscovered, for he wrote shrewdly and beautifully, and because his peak spanned a fascinating time in theatre and society.

Here was a young, intellectual Marxist writing on theatre in the Fifties, a cultured, inquisitive man who reviewed a stage dominated by stale, safe conventionality. He was in the right place on the brink of a revolution, and, through championing this new kind of theatre, one he became bound up with. Like the young playwrights that the era would soon be remembered for, the critic revolted against the twee, archaic ‘Loamshire’ farces - Wodehouse without the wit, character or charm - and pushed the new, young writers whose attitudes and ideas reflected their own, post-war generation.

Tynan, not unreasonably, thought that it wasn’t good enough to produce lame facsimiles of plays from decades ago, that reflect the prejudices and ideals of previous, half-dead generations, rather than their own. He wrote:

“If you seek a tombstone, look about you; survey the peculiar nullity of our drama’s present genre, the Loamshire play. Its setting is a country house in what used to be called Loamshire, but is now, as a heroic tribute to realism, sometimes called Berkshire. Except when someone must sneeze, or be murdered, the sun invariably shines. The inhabitants belong to a social class derived partly from romantic novels and partly from the playwright’s vision of the leisured life he will lead after the play is a success - this being the only effort of imagination he is called on to make. Joys and sorrows are giggles and whimpers: the crash of denunciation dwindles into ‘Oh, stuff, Mummy!’ and ‘Oh, really, Daddy!’ And so grim is the continuity of these things that the foregoing paragraph might have been written at any time during the last thirty years.”

Naturally, these didn’t make up all of what was staged in Fifties London, just what was most depressing and objectionable, and most deserving of a kicking. It must have been deeply irritating to have to go into a new play, know exactly what you are going to see, and know you’re going to hate it. It’s even worse when you know that the audience will be made up of thoughtless people who know nothing about theatre, but know what they like. And so long as it conforms to their template of what ‘a play should be’, they’ll be happy. They’ll keep going back, to see the next copy of this template play, and so long as they do, lazy artistic directors have little reason to change.

We are living through recognisably similar times, particularly for connoisseurs of political theatre. Loamshire is dead, but its spirit of conformity lives on. And sadly, it is Tynan’s generation who are responsible. Starting with the great critic himself, who accepted the chiefdom of the National from Lawrence Olivier - ‘anything to get you off the Observer’ - the angry young men of the Fifties grew older, more established, more influential and more widespread. It is Tynan’s generation, and the ones that dutifully followed, who now run the theatre, and it is their beliefs that any new writing must reflect. Last year, Nicolas Hytner expressed a wish to see a “really good, mischievous right-wing play” at the National. After so long without any, it would seem an utter freak.

Today, any play with a political edge is as predictable, tedious and infuriating as Fifties Loamshire. Substitute little more than ‘an international courtroom’ for ‘a drawing room’, ‘Iraq’ for ‘Berkshire’, and invert the characteristics so that no one smiles and everything is a denunciation, and Tynan’s caustic outline describes perfectly our contemporary theatre.

Go to you any play that touches on the concerns of the ‘68ers, and you can be confident that it will have the subtlety of a hand grenade, the even-handedness of Captain Hook, and all the tedious predictability of a floppy, foot-shaped Christmas present from great aunt Betty. It will denounce capitalism, celebrate the peasant, beatify the Third World, rage against the West, insult Americans, condemn war - except those conducted against the West - and in short, conform to all the prejudices of its audience; who are mostly middle-aged fools who like to think they’ll never grow up. And it has been thus for, ooh, about thirty years.

Theatre like this is not remotely daring. Those playwrights who like to think of themselves as radicals; brave young underdogs fighting a wicked Establishment, are nothing of the sort. Caryl Churchill is a child of the Thirties, and still spouts the half-baked socialism of Parsnip and Pimpernel. Most of the other major playwrights are younger, and spout the half-baked socialism of 1968. They appeal to generations who think nothing of left-wing radicalism, having grown up with and often dabbled in it themselves. Watching a ‘radical’ play is an exercise in nostalgia for our Establishment, not a challenge.

For these generations are now the Establishment, a fact that is both obvious and ignored. Political theatre is no longer speaking truth to power, but tickling the underbelly of the ruling class. They challenge their audience just enough to make them feel good, to feel invigorated and a little rebellious, but not enough to ever make them change their minds. In their own way, they are as unambitious as a Loamshire playwright, trotting out stale clichés and recycling bits of their last play, or their circle’s repertoire, and claiming it as new, dangerous and biting. It is nothing of the sort.

It is not original to stamp out play after play declaring Tony Blair to be a war criminal, a cretin, or a lapdog of the White House. It was worth doing once or twice, for the sake of provocation and debate. But after four years of repetitive, tedious, mind-numbing denunciation, which finds a ready audience in those who dislike having their prejudices challenged, it starts to become obvious that theatre, and culture more broadly, needs to be shaken out of its smug complacency. Just as the comatose, insufferably bad theatre of the Fifties needed a rocket to be placed strategically, and lit.

The stage has long been the place for the stirrings of change. A movement that first begins to surge in the theatre is likely to soon dominate the mainstream. A century after his death, most people consider Oscar Wilde a writer who slots into our image of the Edwardians; more a man of the swinging ‘20s than a stuffy old Victorian. In our minds, he walks far more easily amongst Waugh, Coward and Woolf than with Kipling or Stevenson. But Wilde was a man who had written most of his plays by 1895, and was dead by 1900.

One could argue the Sixties started in 1954, with Osborne’s Look Back In Anger. Yet on the night of its first performance, Churchill was still Prime Minister, theatre was still censored, Suez was yet to kill the Empire and John Lennon was fourteen. When the theatre first started rebelling, it took a full decade for it to become widespread.

The converse of this is also true. When the theatre starts to seem tired and lazy, and in need of a good kicking, the first whiffs of a new mood are on their way. We are now at this point. The cultural cycle will doubtless take a decade or two to swing into a new mode, and no one quite knows what it is coming. But as it stands, the arts establishment is finished, with nothing new to say and no fresh ways of saying it. It is dead on its feet, and just needs a good push for everyone to notice.

Its replacement will not be, as some fogies hope, a retreading of something that’s already been. When the next great cultural movement comes, it will be an avant-garde one, not just a return to the values and manners of the past. Theatre can still be the great, experimental venue for new ideas and styles, even though it is now slumbering. Not all of the new generation is content to adopt the postures of fifty years ago, and some still have the talent and the drive to create something astonishing.

It needs a handful of brilliant people who keep Tynan’s instincts alive, rather than just his politics, to do something new and interesting. It’ll be fascinating to see what they do, but whatever it is, it can’t come too soon.

The Substitution Effect

Perhaps the most overdue, yet bone-headedly obvious statement that David Cameron has yet made was, “There is such a thing as society. It just isn’t the same thing as the state”. And it would have been nice if he meant it. For decades we have lived in an odd dichotomy between two daft concepts of society. On the Left, we have those who think that the state is an infallible, all-powerful miniature of society, and the responsibilities of that society must be delegated to its wise, benevolent functionaries. In the past fifty years, the Right has swung violently between agreeing with the Left, and denying that there is any sort of collective identity beyond the clan, the village and the Dunkirk spirit.

In a strictly practical sense, the Left now accepts that many things can be done well outside the state, and even that some functions of the state are better delegated to private organisations. Yet it instinctively thinks that the state is there to direct society in every way necessary. This causes some schizophrenia in government, when NHS operations, defence research and inner-city schools are outsourced to private contractors, but citizens may not independently make up their minds over whether to hunt, smoke, leave taps running or choose the number of driven wheels on one’s car.

The Right is no better at figuring out the relationship between society and state. It instinctively believes that the only things the state is good for are building grammar schools and holding Fleet reviews, and yet its sense of pragmatism, or intellectual cowardice, has led it to run the state in essentially the same way that the Left would. It has failed to recognise, or at least to argue for, the idea that society exists and that it cannot exist alongside the ‘social’ state.

A state that forcibly takes away people’s property to fund services creates the expectation that these services will materialise, and that in exchange for their cash, citizens will not also have to help provide these services. A state dedicated to passing laws that try to think on behalf of its citizens can hardly complain when those citizens stop thinking for themselves. The ‘partnership’ between the state and citizens, charities, businesses, faiths or whatever, much beloved of politicians, is a fiction. People, quite reasonably, think it rather cheeky for the state to dip into your pocket to provide a service, then expect citizens to do the job themselves. If one's cash and liberties are taken by the state, then responsibility goes with it.

The existence of a civil society relies on there not being state provision to crowd it out. The volunteer fire services in rural Europe and the States survive and prosper because there is no state rival. Who would waste time and risk their lives if they were already being taxed to the same end? Likewise, the RNLI, the last of the great voluntary services, is only able to thrive because the state makes no attempt to muscle in on its territory. If HM Coastguard expanded into lifeboats, and we all had to pay for its new services, why would anyone give again to a superfluous private charity?

Every time a politician declares that a social problem is his responsibility, rather than a problem for society to fix, he is undermining the ability of civil society to function, and encouraging his clients to throw their problems at him. The nineteenth-century friendly societies, which provided the working class with social and medical insurance against unemployment and sickness, were killed by the introduction of national insurance in the early twentieth. A few romantic lefties like to lament the fall of these honourable, effective organisations, yet forget the fact that it was the lack of a state rival that enabled them to form in the first place.

This substitution effect has long-term consequences. Once a particular sort of self-reliance has been killed off, it is very difficult to resurrect. If the government agency that replaced the social one fails, the clamour is for the government to do more and better, rather than to retreat. People lose the ability and drive to do things for themselves, and fear the consequences of the government withdrawing.

It is obvious to most people - those who are neither hardened ideologues nor paid lackeys - that state education is failing. I left school only in 2000, and I know perfectly well that the tales of senior history students being blissfully unaware that anything much happened in 1066 are not some sort of reactionary myth. My school - now a decent comprehensive, so far as they exist - was set up a hundred and fifty years ago by an ex-India service officer, who was so impressed with the way children were taught in madrassas that he took the initiative to filch the idea and build a similar school in his home town. A century and a half on, we are far richer and education is, supposedly, one of our top political priorities. And when the government now suggests that we should do a bit more to help set up and run schools, we greet them with hoots of derision, calling it an abdication of responsibility: do-it-yourself IKEA education. ‘Do it for us!’ we wail. ‘That’s what you’re there for!’

On the contrary, it is us who have abdicated responsibility. It is tempting and easy to blame society or the state for one’s own failures. When legions of officials, legislators and commentators line up to take responsibility on behalf of society for someone’s problems or failings, it takes real strength of character to say ‘No. It’s my fault, and I won’t blame anyone else or demand that other people fix it.’

As we rely increasingly on the state to solve people’s problems and provide services for them, we implicitly expect people to fail without help, to be unable to live successfully without state intervention. Is it a coincidence that the standard of parenting has decreased in a period that saw the state increasingly nationalise and subsidise child-rearing? As anyone who has ever been a boss, a teacher, a parent or even a child will tell you, the more someone in authority expects you to screw up, skive off or laze around, the more likely you are to live down to those expectations. Funnily enough, as our expectations of citizens drop, they become increasingly incapable, commit more crime, and behave ever more badly.

In a sense, this is a problem of democracy. If seems acceptable to vote for a promised easy life rather than to achieve it, and for politicians to offer to solve everyone’s problems for them, we will always have a government that tries to take over the responsibilities of society. It is not easy to try to solve problems yourself, and it carries the risk of failing and looking a fool.

Instead, we pay the state to be caring on our behalf. We have done the very modern thing of outsourcing our compassionate duty to a superficially attractive bidder, and not giving too much of a toss whether the resulting service is any good. Handing the job over to the state is appealing. We can always sit back and throw brickbats at them, say how useless they are and how we could all do better, safe in the knowledge that we’ll never be put to the test.

It is appalling that we think this is a ‘caring society’, when we simply sub-contract our compassionate duty to state functionaries. State takeovers leave society unable to function effectively. We end up like Russia is today, desperate for someone to lead us, to do things for us, terrified of what will happen if the state takes away its expensive, destructive benevolence. We do not like being dependent on our bosses, our children, our parents, or anyone else. Why make such a vast, dreadful exception for the state?

The Lib Dems' Hidden Problem

Unless Cameron’s Tories manage to complete their rather creepy retreading of Blair’s ascent to power with a massive swing against an entirely decrepit government, it is quite possible that the next Parliament will be hung. To wipe out Labour’s majority requires a mere nudge at the door, whereas to gain an overall majority would need a decisive swing across the whole of the country, the sort of swing only used for kicking out desperately knackered or bad governments, or for bringing in great new hopes. For all his pizzazz and self-parody modernity, Cameron does not offer the same optimism that Blair did in 1997. We now know perfectly well that a bright, posh, youngish bloke who seems nice will not turn the country into a New Jerusalem. All Cameron can offer is that he is a different, youngish posh bloke who seems nice, and one whom we haven’t learnt how to hate yet.

It is difficult to see how this could inspire the nation into the revolutionary fervour of 1997. Cameron is already having semi-hostile questions asked of him, which Blair didn’t encounter until about 2002. Their best chance is that Labour elects Gordon Brown as their next leader; the prospect of whose grim, Presbyterian sermons for another five years could inspire the nation to turn to Cameron in their droves, if not to hara-kiri. But even this is no guarantee.

There is at least a chance that for the first time since the 1920s, the Liberals will be a serious player in British politics. If Cameron enjoys anything less than a seismic shift in the nation’s political affections, and anything more than a tiny improvement on Howard’s score last time, we will see once more a government reliant on a coalition majority. The intense tribal loathing between the two main parties rules out any grand coalition, and come the next Parliament, the Liberals may well be in a position to dictate who the government will be. If this happens, of the party’s hidden contradictions will fast become apparent.

The Liberal Democrats in Westminster are not a political party in the conventional sense. To call them motley would be gratuitously nasty, but even put kindly, they are a disparate group of characters, who, for one reason or another, find no other place in politics. They stretch from those who want to soak the rich while disliking class warfare, to those who believe in property and markets but can’t abide Tory moralising. The Liberals are themselves a coalition - a coalition of outsiders in the political process.

They have managed to square their contradictions by the clever trick of remaining irrelevant for eighty years. No one particularly cares if the Lib Dems’ Treasury spokesman is out of step with the party’s local activists, for the dispute has all the gravity, meaning and consequence of a primary school’s pretend election. But soon it may matter, and ironically, the same political currents that swept away the old Liberals’ power will be the ones that haunt any future return to government.

The early twentieth century was the era when modern political divisions were born, between proletarian self-interest and intellectual self-pleasuring on one hand, and bourgeois and aristocratic self-protection on the other. One side was represented by the growing Labour Party, and the Conservatives adapted themselves to represent the other. Having failed to become a true voice of class war following the extension of the franchise, the old Liberal Party was squeezed out as a major player, and the modern, home-for-the-homeless Liberals were born.

The Liberals' last gasp of peacetime power, in the early 1920s, was as a divided party, split between those who went into government under Lloyd George with Tory backing, and those who went into opposition with Asquith. Then, as now, the party was divided between those who felt an affinity with conservatism - or at least free trade - and those who inclined towards liberal socialism. Having led the country in the wartime coalition, the Liberals in 1918 split between the followers of Lloyd George, who formed a government with Tory parliamentary support and electoral collusion, and the Asquith Liberals, who went in opposition once the guns fell silent. On the other extreme from those who signed up to Lloyd George’s Tory-backed government, some of the Asquith Liberals were leftist enough to later join Labour - which, in the 1920s, was no moderate social-democratic organisation.

This split is still the natural dividing line in Liberal politics. The party is torn down the middle, between those who sympathise with moderate Conservatism and those who see themselves as the liberal wing of Labour. While a party is irrelevant, this causes no problems. It means that it can fight in different parts of the country almost as different parties, posing as nice Tories in the South West and as nice socialists in the North. But it is impossible to go into government with these splits unresolved, as Lloyd George and Asquith knew only too well.

Of course, the other two parties also have their divisions, whether over Europe, tax, or foreign policy. But in parties that genuinely struggle for power, a potential leader must fight to tame the wings of the party that oppose him. It is critical to understand this. People as different as Clare Short and Alan Milburn could sit together in Cabinet because their leader controlled his party, and would not allow subordinates’ views to override his own position. A split party needs a strong leader. The Liberals’ greatest problem is that they have never needed one, and they never will - until they get a chance of power. At that point, it becomes vital that they have one.

As a nice, kind, party of gentle dissent, all the Liberals have ever needed is a personable leader who can make the faithful feel good about themselves. Kennedy was brilliant at this, but it is not nearly enough if one has ambitions of government. No tough choices or aggressive internal politicking has ever been necessary to lead the Liberals, and the vast differences across their ranks are more usually ignored than faced. Government involves tough decisions and constant struggling to get into and stay in power. Without strong leadership, the pressures of power rip apart divided parties. The Liberals remain a big-tent party without a ringmaster; not nearly disciplined enough to have any role in government.

Can you imagine Simon Hughes or Phil Willis, both of whom are wet Attleeites, propping up a potential right-wing programme of freeing schools from council and union domination? Both think that the only problem with education is that central government has too much influence, and that their own favourite busybodies have too little. But if the leadership signs up to Cameron, they'd have to vote for it. Or the whole system collapses.

Equally, it is quite implausible to think that the liberal Liberals like Nick Clegg or David Laws would comfortably fit into a Brown-led Labour administration, intent on a Presbyterian jihad against fun, freedom, and independence. Whereas the Norman Baker Liberals - who probably fantasise about prowling around London at night, slashing the tyres of extravagant, wasteful cars - would fit in just fine. Defections are possible, trouble-stirring inevitable, if large parts of the party are dissatisfied and weakly led.

Regardless of which way it goes, if the Lib Dems are to go into coalition as a whole, one wing or other must be corralled with ruthlessness not seen in the party for a century. Or the next Parliament will be an unholy, if amusing, mess. Given their utter inexperience in ruthless, power-hungry politics - as the Kennedy debacle showed - the amusing mess seems the more likely. Their Liberals’ activists are overwhelmingly leftist, their talented frontbenchers overwhelmingly of the right. One or other is going to be disappointed, and no one’s really thought about how.

If the next Parliament is hung, the Liberal leadership will be caught between two irreconcilable forces, one in Westminster, the other in the country. Campbell’s advances so far have been towards his constituency neighbour Gordon, but it remains to be seen whether the young Turks who surround him will be willing to prop up an exhausted, failing Prime Minister. Neither is it clear how anyone from the party's right could possibly get elected as leader, if the grassroots thought a Tory tie-up was likely. A Brown-Campbell pact, followed by the desertion of the party's frontbench talent and a divisive squabble, is the likely prospect. The Liberals seem to enjoy righteous, ineffective opposition. They'd better pray they stay there, for power won't be pleasant.