Thursday, November 1, 2007
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.
Monday, October 15, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
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.
"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.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
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.
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.
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