Forsyth's Tax Reform Commission

Combine this BBC story and this Daily Mail story and we can get a decent idea of what most of the headline measures in the Tax Reform Commission's study will add up to:

£19-21bn of tax cuts

This is around a 3% cut in the total quantity of tax which is large enough to be significant but not large enough to require drastic cuts in anything. I'm actually impressed at how much they've managed to get for their, roughly, twenty billion.

Basic rate of income tax cut from 22 to 20%

This is as close to a default, general purpose, tax cut as it gets. More money in the pockets of individuals and families. One of the more sensible tax cuts in this package politically because a lot of people can directly link it to their own income and interests.

Increase the earnings threshold from £5,035 to £7,185

This is a good one for making it clear that tax cuts are not all about returning money to the middle and upper classes. This will significantly help a lot of very poor working families.

Abolishing inheritance tax and replacing it with a "capital gains tax on death"

The idea is that this will remove family homes from having to pay inheritance tax. I'll be interested in reading the details of how this measure works; the term capital gains tax on death suggests the possibility that this change is more profound than the BBC report describes.

A big question, from a right wing political perspective, is whether this might be missing the opportunity, with a broad swathe of opinion lining up against inheritance tax, to scrap it completely.

Cutting corporation tax from 30 to 25%

This tax cut is economically easily the most important measure here. It is a significant change and will help to ensure that our competitive position does not further decline. If an economic rightwinger wants a reason to vote Conservative this could well be enough of itself. I hope it is adopted by the leadership.

Politically it is more suspect; the relationship between business taxation and the interests of the 'man on the street' is not as obvious as we would like. However, I think there is a growing public perception that we are getting left behind by business tax changes abroad and this may negate some of the political logic against cutting business taxation.

Green Taxation

How all this relates into the Blue-Green agenda has to be a crucial question. Will these measures be pure tax cuts or will they be compensated for, as the Liberal Democrat plans are, by plans for green taxation? Once green tax proposals are included will they pay for additional tax cuts or will they mean that much of this report's conclusions will be used to construct a revenue neutral shift rather than a tax cut?

I have no problem with shifting tax towards green tax in place of other forms of taxation but I wouldn't want it to take the place of genuine tax cutting.

Conclusions

This report is a plan for significant and welcome tax cuts. Its defining feature is that it has chosen to reduce or adjust the thresholds on a number of different taxes rather than focussing on big changes in any one tax. There are two big questions that will have to be answered before we know what it means for Conservative policy:

1) How much of a priority will tax cuts be? If we have to choose between these measures and other priorities will we be willing to sacrifice spending pledges for tax cut pledges?

2) Will green taxes be used to pay for these measures, or spending, or further cuts in general taxation? I.e. will our position be aiming at a shift like the one the Lib Dems are proposing or a tax cut as this report is setting out when considered alone?

Alex Deane on liberalising TV news

Deane is spot on in his 100 policies piece arguing for the lifting of impartiality requirements for broadcasters. I've supported such a move for a while. I think the BBC would need to remain regulated or be privatised to avoid subsidising one viewpoint and it wouldn't solve the problem all at once as journalism would remain a left wing profession. However, freeing commercial broadcasters would allow them to achieve the far more balanced position of our print media.

The UKIP on Immigration

DK, has a BBC interview with Nigel Farage on his blog which he appears to be reconciling with his libertarianism by citing economic and integration problems.

Economic migrants are, and pretty much every sensible study confirms this, of huge benefit to our economy. Those who come here are not benefits scroungers (put yourself in their shoes... you'd go to Sweden) but those who want to work hard and make a success of themselves. They often arrive here already schooled and leave when they're going to take a pension, the two periods when people are most costly to tax-payers. If too many people arrive serious strains on infrastructure arise but the influxes from previous new entrants have not been that large. Equally, if you have an inflexible labour market, with collosal youth unemployment as in France for example, then you might want to worry but we do not.

In the end, the big problem with immigration comes if there are difficulties with integration. This is inconvenient for the UKIP as immigrants from Europe immigrate quickly and easily. Eastern Europeans are generally poorer and prettier than us but there is no big difference in cultures to integrate. Turkey might change that somewhat but its entry is some way away.

The big problem with integration at the moment is with Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims. As such, if you're worried about integration then the best solution is to support plenty of new EU entrants and impose no restrictions on their labour movement which will make economically plausible an incredibly hard line stance on other immigration. The EU actually allows us to discriminate in immigration towards those who cause us the least cultural difficulty. Whether this, rather than working harder at integration of those coming from outside the EU, is the best solution depends on how hopeful you are that integration is a practical political project but leaving the EU makes it much harder to distinguish between migrants who will prove difficult to integrate and those who will not. If we were outside the EU such discrimination would still be possible of course but would become politically implausible as it would require us to make the kind of hard headed decision, choosing between 'good' and 'bad' immigrant groups, that politics is awful at.

In other words, if you are worried about the growing difficulties with integration and "cultural clashes" then the EU is a part of the solution rather than the problem. There is little reason for Britain to worry about the economic effects of migrants from Eastern Europe. None of this is convenient for Farage which is probably why he's ignoring the contradiction between the supposed libertarian principle of his party and the anti-foreigner bias of many of his members. Unfortunately, this is a problem that the Tories have as well but it is less acute and less troubling for a party which does not claim to be as radical as the UKIP.

Why Nuclear Power is important

British Energy appears to be having some technological problems. Cracks are emerging in important pipes and plants are being shut down. Despite this the new popularity of plans for nuclear power expansion does not appear to have abated. The reason why nuclear power is not going away is that it offers a way for us to get around the crucial dilemma posed by any consideration of energy in economic policy .

Wrigley's thesis on the Industrial Revolution is that it was primarily a move from organic towards inorganic sources of power. Britain could take a certain amount of additional energy from agriculture and forestry. However, this could not nearly match up to the collosal growth in population and secure rising living standards. Fortunately at this point the Industrial Revolution technologies were developed which allowed for a transition from flows of energy to stocks in the form of coal. These stocks meant that we did not have to choose between using agricultural land, essentially the obtaining of energy directly from the sun, for the production of food or to create wood for the production of energy. This changed the calculus and allowed us to avoid the Malthusian trap we may have faced otherwise and support a growing number of people at an improved standard of living.

The world is facing a similar dilemma now. If it is to deal with, not necessarily a rising population, but accustoming a larger segment of the world's population to developed country living standards then we will need to find a lot more energy. We will also need to increase agricultural energy in the form of food to thanks to a world population which has not finished expanding. Finally, there are worries about making further use of stocks of energy whose use may have serious externalities (climate change), divert huge amounts of wealth to unpleasant regimes, as Liam Fox has recently been highlighting in his conference speech and on 18 Doughty Street, and which becomes increasingly costly to extract. These externalities do not exist with flows of energy as even if the mechanism involves burning something it is the release of carbon that was taken out of the atmosphere during the formation of the energy source and they do not require extraction or much by way of geology. The issue of using hydrogen fuel cells for transport is something of a red herring in this debate as their function is to shift the production of energy to a central plant where the hydrogen is produced rather than to produce energy themselves.

Solar, wind and agricultural (such as ethanol from sugar cane in Brazil) energy are all flow stocks and we can expand their use significantly. However, the idea that we can expand land usage, yields and efficiency sufficiently to simultaneously supply an increased population with food, replace our existing fossil fuel capacity and respond to the additional requirements from a Third World getting richer is implausible. We are working with a limited amount of sunlight and our efficiency in using it can only rise so far, so fast. What this implies is that we face a situation similar to that faced by Britain on the eve of the Industrial Revolution and are in need of some form of energy beyond that we can take each year from the sun.

The solution has to be nuclear power. This report suggests that the fears of uranium stocks running out are overblown and we can expect stocks to rise with usage of uranium if more difficult to recover stocks become economical to discover and mine and technology improves. Even if uranium is likely to become scarcer replacing the Middle East with Australia and Canada as the best sources of a crucial but scarce raw material is an unambiguously good thing. Nuclear power is the one source that can provide enough power to make a big difference in the struggle with climate change. It is a great way to produce the power to crack seawater and produce all the hydrogen that hoped for changes in transport fuel will require. This is a much better candidate for a replacement for fossil fuels than expanding renewables.

There are safety concerns but these should not be overstated. Chernobyl was a terrible disaster but look at the ecological disasters elsewhere in the Soviet Empire or China or industrial humanitarian tragedies, in their mining industries for example, and you will quickly gain the correct impression that the problem was a Communist failure of management rather than a general tendency of nuclear power to be dangerous. Terrorist attacks aimed at our nuclear sites are a reason to make sure they are well defended rather than to give up on nuclear power. From the estimates I have seen the results of a terrorist attack would be awful but they are eminently defendable and the consequences are not bad enough to require a 1% doctrine style approach; the plants will not become nuclear bombs and are not sighted in cities. Finally, nuclear waste is less of an issue than it is made out to be; there is an awful lot of room underground to bury it. A major side effect of these security and safety concerns is to create a need for subsidy which, despite the affront to economic liberalism, is worth paying given the wider benefits of a move towards nuclear power.

In conclusion, it is not due to accident or a lack of research that renewables cannot easily replace fossil fuels. They are, in the end, still relying upon the same source of energy in the yearly intake of heat and light from the sun and improvements at the scale and speed we are looking for to satisfy our multiple demands for more energy seem unlikely. Nuclear power is the solution that we are looking for and should be embraced in any attempt at a long term solution to our energy needs.

Why the blogosphere is right wing

When people try to explain why Conservative bloggers are generally better writers, more numerous and more widely read the explanation that I keep hearing from every discussion of the subject is that it is a result of being in opposition. The idea is essentially that it is easier for an amateur to destroy than create and the wilderness of opposition gives people a greater desire for an alternate way to express themselves. This explanation does not fit the facts, however, as the right wing blogosphere is bigger in the US as well where the right is in power; Kos is the exception not the rule.

The more credible explanation for why the blogosphere is right wing is tied up in the reasons why the media is usually a left leaning profession. Left wing media bias is, like the right wing dominance of the blogosphere, something that we like to imagine has arisen in the UK thanks to unique characteristics of our political landscape; particularly the BBC and Ofcom. While these factors may exacerbate the problem they did not create it. Right wingers in the US are just as worried about a left wing media bias as we are. Fox is, again, the exception rather than the rule and less important than right wing Britons like to think.

The left bias in the media arises from the fact that young right wingers who are intelligent, politically committed and can write do not want to be reporters. I worked for the LSE student newspaper and was a very successful student journalist but I was always working in the features section and writing opinion pieces. Whereas the left wing editors and writers for the paper went on to become journalists the right wingers either entered think tanks or went for the limited number of vacancies for instant opinion journalism. The standard career in journalism, based upon starting out as a reporter, seems thankless and dull to most right wingers.

Where does this right wing taste for opinion over facts in their journalism come from?

The most convincing explanation I have heard is that left wingers tend to connect facts directly to solutions whereas right wingers thing more about policies affecting systems whether of incentives or traditions. As such, just knowing that there is, for example, poverty in Africa does not convince a right winger of the case for our providing aid. We would be far more interested, in policy terms, in analysis of the effects of aid than a greater body of facts on the extent of the problems that aid aims to solve.

Of course, this is a generalisation but I think that is is an important one. Right wingers see facts as part of a philosophical and analytical debate about the way forward whereas left wingers see facts as calls to action in themselves. This makes right wingers see opinion as the crux of the issue with reporting a relative sideshow. By comparison, left wingers see reporting as the crux with opinion being the relative sideshow in which we discuss the details of how to respond to the facts reporting turns up. This is why 18DoughtyStreet is opinion television and Fox has more opinion than other channels. It is why the mainstream media is, and will continue to be even if the BBC is privatised, biased towards the left wing. Finally it is the best explanation for why the blogosphere, focussed on opinion thanks to the financial cost of original reporting, is so right wing.

Iraq and the Chain-Store Paradox of Power

A Chain-Store paradox is the game theory result for an incumbent firm has a series of branches in different towns. In each of these towns there is a potential competitor. If this competitor chooses to enter the market the incumbent can either opt to behave cooperatively or behave aggresively, for example by attempting to start a price war with the entrant. The incumbent is best off if the potential competitor does not enter his market but if they do then he will be better off cooperating rather than behaving aggresively.

This scenario can play out only one way if all the parties are behaving rationally. The entrants all, via backwards induction, know that if they enter it will not be in the interests of the incumbent to challenge them. As a result, they will all enter. The only way for the incumbent to win is if he can establish credibly that he is irrational; establish that he will behave aggresively in response to market entry regardless of the result in that particular case. If this can be established then the potential entrants will stay away from his markets and he will be far better off.

Connecting this to the dynamics of geo-political power is easily done through a historical example: The Byzantine Empire faced threats from various Turkish border warlords to its borders who gradually chipped away at its territory. It possessed a powerful Imperial Army which had crushed its enemies in the past but did not deploy it on any significant scale to stop the rot. Each of the individual warlords would advance a little and, given that the Byzantine military power was occupied in other conflicts and a waning force, it would never be rational of the Empire to stop them. In the end it lost its Anatolian breadbasket and, when the conquerors came for Constantinople, was such a depleted force that it could not resist its enemies.

The Iraq war could have been the perfect chance to establish the credibility that we would destroy those who behave as our enemies. While the ten year gap between the major abuses of the Saddam regime and its destruction may have infuriated those who opposed the war they only increased its value as a deterrent as it established that even if you thought you could avoid American retribution in the short term you would always have to fear it as a sword of Damocles waiting to punish you for your temerity. This would have given the most lunatic of dictators pause when considering whether to infringe upon the interests of the US in the future; they usually possess something of an instict for self-preservation. Equally, it should have appeared clear from the frequent newsreports filed while wearing chemical warfare gear that the coalition of the willing was even willing to charge down weapons of mass destruction.

The Iraq War has clearly not had a deterrent effect. If it had Iran and North Korea wouldn't be playing us for fools as they now are. What went wrong?

I do not think that it was actually the most obvious failing, the human cost of chaos and violence in Iraq today, that was most important. It is of great humanitarian interest whether we can make the state of Iraq work but is probably not terribly relevant to our national interest. The idea that we would be loved for our actions in Iraq was never particularly credible; even when Iraqis were dancing on statues of their reviled dictator we were still considered out of line. That the 9/11 bombers were recruited by shocking them with offences committed against Muslims in Bosnia, where the US and Europe fought on their side, should be enough to demonstrate that these sentiments are fickle; whether we are feared is more important than whether we are loved.

Equally, Iraq has not militarily weakened us enough to make future action impossible and those who say that it has are being narrow minded. If we were to want to invade Iran tomorrow we could certainly find the troops, we could even take them from Iraq with the damage being to the people of Iraq rather than ourselves. While Iran might be able to raise hell in Iraq in response to our attack again this would hurt the humanitarian situation in Iraq which could be separated from our own interests if we were hard headed.

I think the greater problem that has emerged from Iraq, and postwar incompetence, is that it exhausted the political will for military action. Michael Gove, one of the most articulate and hawkish voices in contemporary British politics, has admitted that this is true for the UK and for all the bluster about keeping the option of military action on the table I think it is probably true of the US too. The main effect of post war chaos has been to further diminish the political will to act in future crises. I may be proved wrong on Iran, particularly with a new US president without the stink of the troubles in Iraq on his clothing. However, even if we do wind up taking action in that case it must now be clear to everyone, including our enemies, that the West as a whole, and not just Old Europe, has an extremely limited will to defend its interests relative to its military and economic might.

As such, while we might have hoped that Iraq would demonstrate our strength in fact it demonstrated our weakness.

This is unfortunate as Western power is emphatically a good thing for human progress. Those who focus on the misdeeds of the West in deposing Latin American socialists or funding vicious Arabs to fight the Soviet Empire miss the bigger picture of what Western power means. Western power is what defends that body of countries, making up a decent proportion of the worlds population nowadays, who have escaped the cycle of political power as an extension of murderous family politics, established economies which can protect their people from Malthusian crisis and widen their people's horizons with education and pervasive information. Getting rich and stable without the strength of the West to keep order just makes you a better target, the unfortunate fate of Kuwait. That some states get caught in the crossfire of our struggles with our enemies is regrettable but does not make that struggle less worthwhile.

However, it is, to a certain extent, dependent upon a bluff. Comfortable Western societies have the military power and the expertise but they lack the demographic growth and have too much to lose to defend the international order through force of arms alone; they will not lightly sacrifice the comfort of a peace time economy. Convincing our enemies that opposing us is not worth the risk is what allows us to avoid serious guns versus butter questions.

That bluff has now been exposed and is being called by Iran and North Korea. While we have the military power to remove just about any regime on Earth in a month we lack the will to exert that power. Now, thanks to the war in Iraq, everyone knows it.

Sion Simon

Monty flags up an interesting interview with Sion Simon about his 'satire' of webcameron.

He filled this Sky interview with repeated terms like"self evidently" clearly designed to avoid any need to engage his, hardly overworked but unfit for purpose, brain in the challenge of rational thought. Webcameron is quite an expansive, and clearly expensive, web effort and it does not seem remotely "self evident" that it is not a serious attempt to use the medium. When Sion Simon says "self evident" what he actually means is that he has no ability to independently reason but has decided that he dislikes Tories so all they do must, "self evidently", be bad.

It was as if someone had accussed him of being illiterate and he was trying to respond with some big words he found in the dictionary; "egregious". Also, his reaction to the argument that a sketch with his David Cameron-alike pimping his wife was a little distasteful and crude had all the hallmarks of a man who had prepared his stupid answer in advance. He got angry and asked the interviewer to "let [him] finish" repeatedly when she wasn't being remotely overbearing. This anger was supposed to be because he was about to explain his position but, when given the chance, he didn't explain anything but instead just stated his position and then attacked his critics with a lame ad hominem.

The original video is just not funny. Its the cringeworthy effort of a limited imagination.

This man is clearly an utter tit. These people are imposed on the British people by the Labour party in disturbing numbers. What kind of selection procedure could allow such a man, and others like him, through to sit in Parliament?

I suspect he came from student politics. I certainly met enough people of such limited faculties on the student left. Thanks to their majority status at university, where a lot of people first start to think seriously about politics, they can avoid opposing viewpoints and the idiots are never exposed in debate. They never have the trial by fire right wingers face from constantly having to engage with our opponents. This leaves us accustomed to thinking about our beliefs and defending them with more persuasive rhetoric than repeating "self evident" and "egregious" till the person you are talking to gives up.

More thoughts on North Korea: Expanded Deterrence versus Air Strikes

Last night I wrote a lengthy piece about North Korea, how we got where we are and assessing the different possible ways we might respond from Missile Defence to Economic Sanctions. Since then a friend has suggested another possibility, a credible way to live with a North Korean nuke; this is expanded deterrence. In this post I'm going to first discuss why I do not think this will work and then move on to put some detail on how I think airstrikes are likely to play out.

The idea of expanded deterrence, set out in this brilliant American Academy article which also highlights just how plausible nuclear terrorism is, is that we expand our capabilities in nuclear forensics so that we can hold Iran or North Korea to account if they supply weapons to those who then use them against us. The problem I have with this is that I'm inclined to believe that if a terrorist nuked us and we were less than 100% sure it was a North Korean weapon or took longer than a few weeks or months to establish it was North Korean we might well not nuke North Korea.

Forensics would need to be not just good but rock solid. It would also probably need to be instant. Retaliating to incoming enemy missiles in a Cold War style confrontation is credible because it is done in the heat of the moment before the missiles hit or while they are hitting. However, could we decide to blow up every North Korean in the cold light of day without the slightest pretence it would prevent those we lost dying or bring them back? It would be morally monstrous.

That is the essence of deterrence; you need to establish your own irrationality (the acronym MAD was appropriate). That irrationality is credible during the heat of a nuclear war but not so credible some time after a strike. Of course it is entirely plausible we would react but I think there is too much doubt and I don't know how we can remove that doubt and make deterrence credible.

A state which we cannot credibly deter possessing nuclear weapons is as close to an absolutely unnacceptable strategic result as can be imagined. So, if expanded deterrence is not an appropriate policy, along with others like economic sanctions as I set out last night, how will air strikes play out?

I think that the first step would be to set a deadline of something like a month for North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programme and allow some form of international monitoring. I would expect them to refuse this request but the month gives us enough time to move a lot of military power, mainly airpower, to the area. I believe that this power is still available to us, it is troops that we are short of. If they back down, as Daniel Freedman expects them to, then we have a fantastic result and have illustrated our resolve without too much human cost. If they do not then we begin strikes.

I am not sure what their targets should be, this article suggests that we can do significant damage to the nuclear programme, but the targets available to us may well be limited. Other than that priority just hit every military or regime target you can find. You will have a similar result to that in Serbia but without an ongoing massacre of Kosovans. Our casualties will most likely be light and the collateral damage need not be too vast. Eventually, North Korea will have to back down or retaliate.

The big danger is that North Korea retaliates with its stock of about 100 missiles which can hit Japan or artillery and scuds that can hit South Korea. This is what makes this option deeply ugly and a least bad. If North Korea retaliates it can do vast damage and an awful lot of people die in what could become a serious bombing of Seoul and Tokyo or even a second Korean War.

However, it is important to note that there is something to be said for having the USAF on hand if it does come to this. If we try something like economic sanctions there is a smaller chance of North Korea risking war but if they do it will take us time to get significant military power in place to defend the South. If we are striking North Korea then we will have a running start in coming to our ally's aid. Sensible military plans should include preparation for the possibility that the need emerges to reorient our military force very quickly. We would wind up using the South Koreans as a kind of Northern Alliance in a reprise of the strategy which won the war, if not the peace, in Afghanistan.

I think that China's response to military strikes will not amount to much. They will not risk economic sanctions against us as they have far more to lose from such disruption than we do. An economic downturn does not endanger our system of government. Equally, if a war does start then, in order to curtail a flow of refugees, it will be in their interests to see it end quickly. All of the great guerilla wars, Vietnam, Iraq relied upon outside support and I do not expect this to be forthcoming in North Korea.

Finally, the human costs of a military option, and its attendant risk of a full scale war, need to be weighed against both the yearly human cost of the death and suffering in the world's last Stalinist state. The other cost of the status quo is the possibility of a violent collapse without our intervention either in response to outside pressure from economic sanctions or from the regime's own opaque inner workings. The expected deaths or expected misery calculation for the risk of a full blown war needs to be balanced against the costs and risks of the status quo.

In conclusion, I accept that there are huge risks to military strikes but I do not believe we can effectively manage the risk of a nuclear North Korea. Military strikes are the most credible response open to us and can be effective. Unfortunately, as I described last night, I do not expect that anything remotely that forceful is coming. I expect that we'll get some form of mild economic sanction and then a lot more prevarication until North Korea gets a workable nuclear bomb. The world will then become a scarier place.

North Korea

There seems to be quite a lot of discussion in the US about who needs to be blamed for the failure to prevent North Korea gaining nuclear weapons. The conservative response is to call Clinton's Agreed Framework a joke and argue that this was the crucial failure; this essentially consists of posting up this picture as often as they can. By contrast, liberals are describing this as a failure of the Bush administration thanks to its abandonment of the Agreed Framework. To my mind the Bush administration was faced with two unpleasant but plausibly effective options; fighting or appeasing. The first would probably involve massive casualties to all concerned or just to the North Korean civilians if it took the form of economic sanctions but would establish a credible cost to defying us. The second could only delay the bomb as Uranium enrichment was still allowed and went against the natural inclinations of a tough talking President but would probably have meant that we would not have had a test yet.

The big problem was that they chose a third option that could never be effective. Talk tough but do nothing. This was a result of other priorities following 9/11, the fact no one would offer a course of action they could claim would be anything but a least bad (there was no 'send a small army and be greeted with flowers' plan) and uncertainty regarding how to balance confronting North Korea with keeping South Korea on side. This is a similar problem to that in Iran but, for better or worse, without European nations who aren't too proud to talk. The line in the New York Sun blog that having them negotiate with Iran was a favour to the European nations is demonstrated as ridiculous if you think about whether allowing Australia to take the North Korean issue would be a favour as well.

However, there is only a limited function to discussing how we got here. A more important question is what we do next. Frum, in a much better article than the one I discussed earlier, gives a three point plan:

1) Speed up the work on missile defence: Alykhan tells me that with layers of different missile defence solutions this can be effective but I'm yet to be convinced. Brecher has a good sceptical view of the state of missile defence. Either way, I think the North Koreans can be confident that we are infinitely less likely to invade if they're threatening to nuke Tokyo so our missile defence, while it could be important for our defence, doesn't mitigate the effects on the region of a nuclear armed North Korea.

2) End economic aid to North Korea: a major reservation I have is over how effective it is likely to be with a regime that we know has starved hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of its people to death before and has neither collapsed nor apparently been sobered by that experience. Also, how important is Western aid? I'm led to believe that most of the aid to the DPRK comes from China. Finally, there is something deeply immoral about economic sanctions; they are the modern form of WWII strategic bombing, designed to hurt your enemies civilians until their leadership surrenders from the heartbreak of it all, and have roughly the same record of failure.

3) Bring East Asian countries into NATO: this sounds like a good idea to make our involvement in any war they initiate in the future assured and thereby make deterrence more credible. However, I doubt it would have the effect Frum argues it would in effectively punishing China. They are opposing North Korea's nuclear programme, the problem is that they are dragging their feet, and are likely to see us taking action to square off with them as unjustified and provocative; this will most likely make them less rather than more co-operative.

One possibility is that the test was either a fake or failed. There are varied accounts of the size of the blast from seismic data and Alykhan sees the rationale to faking it from the perspective of scientists wanting to please the Dear Leader. Regardless of this the nuclear weapon is still some distance from being usable. Most of the Manhattan project, after all, was not about producing a bomb but producing one which could be deployed as a bomb. This makes some form of military action more plausible.

Simon Jenkins is arguing for air strikes as an effective and less destructive response than economic sanctions with a populace that will starve so quickly. I have found his articles strikingly bad recently but his argument here is remarkably cogent when it sticks to North Korea. A big question is whether we can do anything to his missile and nuclear production sites, there has been a lot of study of the feasibility of air strikes against Iran but I know of no such study on North Korea. There is also a possibility Simon Jenkins does not discuss in his article, that North Korea might respond by attacking the South. However, it remains the most credible response which might prevent North Korea becoming a nuclear power and make Iran think twice.

So, at the end of this quick survey of what has happened, is happening and could happen in North Korea I think the most plausible response left is that of airstrikes. However, I do not expect this, or much else, to happen. The failures in the postwar management of Iraq have left further military entanglements politically unfeasible. I expect that both North Korea and Iran will both wind up with nuclear weapons and the West will, in the end, prevaricate and do nothing.

A theme I will develop in a big post at some point is that the chain store paradox of power, deterrence, could have been well served by invading Iraq and demonstrating that we would not stand for those who defy our will and pursue courses of action which threaten the international order. However, our obvious failure in the postwar period has given our populations the false impression that foreign interventions must be Vietnam and made wars impossible at least until there is a new US President who can separate himself from the perception of incompetence hanging over this one. Iran and North Korea understand this and it underlies the rationale behind their nuclear weapons programmes.

To conclude, this crisis came about thanks to a failure to face up to the situation despite loud proclamations of its gravity. The best solution is to end that prevarication and demonstrate that the West is no paper tiger. However, I do not expect this to happen.

David Frum being shallow

- Tax cuts? No.

Announcing tax cuts now while in opposition years from an election? No.

- More public money for government-monopoly health care? Yes.

While I'm not sure about Cameron's policy on the NHS this is a total mischaracterisation. He has said he will fund it properly but has never said anything about the amount of Conservative spending compared to Labour plans.

- Same-sex marriage? Enthusiastically yes.

Sure. Welcome to the 20th century.

- Big supermarkets? Offenders against the environment.

This is an example of a key plank of Cameron's policy prescription?

- Kyoto Accord. Absolutely.
- Terrorism? Close Guantanamo.

Following the line of that noted Communist McCain.

- Illegal immigration? Don't talk about it.

Absolutely. This is something to deal with when forming policy but at the moment Cameron is setting the philosophical direction of his leadership rather than the actual plans. With many years till the next election this is entirely sensible.

- Israel's response to Hezbollah's rocket attacks? Disproportionate.

Okay.

- George W. Bush? No friend of ours.

That's just not true. Cameron has said that Britain needs to be supportive not slavish in the special relationship. Nothing he has said has suggested Britain should not be a friend of the US.

Sure there are some policies I'm not sure of in this list but it just isn't a picture of the priorities Cameron is setting out for the Conservative party. Instead of setting up a strawman of Leftie Cameron Frum could have addressed the meat of Cameron's speeches over the conference or since his leadership. He could have discussed whether the personal responsibility agenda was an plausible one, I wonder why he didn't?

"David Cameron's stress on social justice...is not, as unsophisticated critics imagine, a leftwards shift from liberty to equality. Cameron is not proposing an extension of state power. He is proposing an extension of social power, a move in favour of the voluntary institutions--the 'social enterprises'--that exist in neighbourhoods themselves."

What does this mean? Who knows. Its incomprehensibility is its point."

Oh, because he can't understand a fairly simple sentence. What is so complex about a move towards voluntary organisations and other social efforts in place of state power as solutions to problems the British public wants to hear their political parties address?

18 Doughty Street's First Night

I was out debating North Korea and then drinking last night but I have since managed to 'Stream Again' the evening's programming and am very impressed.

The first programme was a little faltering. I wasn't quite convinced that the two speakers really had much to offer on the subjects at hand. Also, I agree with whoever e-mailed in that the palms were a little intrusive; a little pruning might be needed. Still it was nice to see the first evidence of an interview technique which was based on listening to the interviewee rather than showcasing the interviewer's cynicism.

The foreign policy section was excellent. Oliver Kamm proved as brilliant on TV as he always is in writing and the other guests all had something to contribute. I was a little dissapointed that the speaker against neo-conservatism couldn't do a better job explaining the conservative challenge but given the quality of neo-con thought on display he was facing a hard task.

Vox Politix was also good. It wasn't as high minded as the foreign affairs piece or the John Howard interview but still interesting. The one change I would hope for in future is that it feature a little more disagreement. At times it seemed that they would move on, out of some sense of politeness, when they hit issues they seriously disagreed on and Iain would have done well to encourage them to debate.

The interview with John Howard was brilliant. The set up with two speakers commenting after his discussion gave interesting perspectives. It felt like a love-in at first accustomed, as I think we all are now, to the Paxman style but it was informative, made the most of the opportunity of the interview and gave us a great insight into his views. It trusted to a grown up audience to decide what they disagree with for themselves.

The final programme was a nice, informal end to the programming. They remarked that it had been a right wing evening; I hope they don't panic at the right wing balance of this first night. There is nothing wrong with being balanced towards the right wing so long as you remain open minded and engage across the ideological spectrum.

I think it was a hugely promising first night and, if some of the rough edges can be ironed out, points to a great future for the channel.

Are the Conservatives a party? Yes.

Damn your principles! Stick to your party - Benjamin Disraeli

Samizdata has an article by Paul Marks, which I came across through the Kitchen, attempting to describe how the Conservative Party is not really a party at all thanks to its lack of principle. He has two central themes:

1. Parties are creatures of principle.
2. The Conservatives are not Eurosceptic and, as such, have no principles.

The first point is misconceived. Parties must have some common ground, some principle, to form themselves around, however, they are clearly not the model one would choose were we interested primarily in maintaining our principles. Only independents can be principled. Anyone who joins a party must necessarily moderate their views if they are to form a common platform.

Parties are, rather, an agent for moderation. Their function is to form people into coalitions of those who are willing to put their similarities ahead of their differences. A fine example is David Davis who is now emphatically supporting the Cameron changes in the Conservative party. This is not because he is some grubby chaser of votes but because his differences with Cameron, over the timeline to the announcement of tax cuts for example, matter less to him than the similarities. This moderation is essential with the need to build popular will behind a legislative programme which will not, and should not, give anyone all of what they want.

Here we move on to the second point. The similarities which keep Davis on board are old Conservative themes: an emphasis on personal responsibility, an assertive, Atlanticist foreign policy, a distrust of state spending as a panacea for social problems, valuing the family and pride in Britain's role in the world. They are the same sorts of common values which also mean that I, having voted for Cameron, would have remained a loyal Conservative had Davis or Fox won the leadership.

All of these themes were a part of Cameron's keynote speech and the Conservative conference. By contrast, there is no reason to see policy towards the EU as so crucial. There is no way that the Conservatives are necessarily against the notion of engaging internationally; we began as an imperial party. Of course, the style of our engagement has changed but this would seem more a result of the world changing than the party. The EU is far from the only treaty we are signed up to and most of the serious treaties involve some compromise of sovereignty. There are obviously problems with the EU but there are also areas where Cameron has pledged to emphasise British rather than European solutions; moving towards a UK bill of rights to replace the Human Rights Act for example.

I have discussed before how those in favour of EU independence need to acknowledge that it is an issue on which reasonable people can differ. It is important to note that the fairly radical plan I outlined in a post over the weekend for changing Britain's policy could be implemented without leaving the EU; the EU does not dominate our decision making to the extent its opponents alledge. Equally, the line that Britain cannot change the EU for the better as it has been trying since it joined and has failed is unconvincing. It entered in a weak position being a latecomer to a club whose central partnership had already been established. Recently it has done significantly better with the accession of new members constituting not just a nation building success but a boost to the idea of Europe as a looser kind of union.

The ability of the Conservatives to adjust their political approach, as Cameron is, without endangering their coalition is a testament to a strong set of central beliefs in the party not its weakness. We have never proven wrong on matters of principle in the way that the Labour left were in the 1980s over nationalisation. The Conservatives are certainly a party and a great one.

Good old Salman Rushdie

"Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there's not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted wearing the veil.

I think the battle against the veil has been a long and continuing battle against the limitation of women, so in that sense I'm completely on [Straw's] side.

He was expressing an important opinion, which is that veils suck, which they do. I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women."

The Guardian reports that Omar Bakri Muhammad has "said Rushdie was an apostate whose life was still in danger."

Despite knowing as well as anyone the danger he could place himself in by speaking against the taboos Islamists enshrine through threats of violence, Salman Rushdie just won't stop speaking out.

I've never read the Satanic Verses, its content doesn't seem important to the debate over whether it is legitimate that the views contained be expressed and I always have a busy reading list, but I think I will now. It seems like a fine time to send a little royalty money Rushdie's way. Also, why has the distasteful Sir Iqbal 'death would be too good' Sacranie been given a knighthood and Rushdie not been similarly honoured? Standing up for your right to free speech when so many others have folded or kept quiet has huge positive externalities and deserves recognition.

Of course, as far as Rushdie himself goes there probably isn't any real need for my strange form of donation or official recognition. Salman Rushdie seems happy despite the risk he faces, the picture the Evening Standard chose to accompany the article gives centre stage to his stunning wife and he is, I believe, quite wealthy. Well deserved.

The Campaign ad too strong for the Republicans

Considering the ads that its candidates have run when an ad is too strong for the Republican party you know it is going to be special. This, via the New York Sun blog, is truly special:

Windsorstan

The term Londonistan has become something of a cliché which is misleading to anyone trying to understand the geographical extent of the problem. While London is the prime target the 7/7 bombers came from Leeds and the most recent plot was uncovered in Manchester. The confrontation between our intelligence services and the police and violent Islamic extremists is taking place across the UK.

The less violent version of this clash between mainstream British society and Islamic radicals is also found both in London, with the protests at speeches by the Pope or refusals by police officers to guard the Israeli embassy, and, increasingly, in the rest of the country. What is interesting, and new as far as I know, is that this clash is becoming a serious issue even in bastions of Middle England such as Windsor. From this, fairly small, town there are a couple of big recent cases:

1) Soldiers of the Household Cavalry, returning from Afghanistan, have had bricks thrown through their windows and angry messages written on their property. They also received phone death threats. In the end Army leadership advised them to move elsewhere to avoid causing trouble so near the Windsor Castle home of the Queen. This was quite a big story which reached the national news and the Sun report describes it well.

2) This Sceptered Isle highlights riots between gangs of white and Asian youths in Windsor. The Ascot, Windsor & Eton Express reports that the disturbance began with growing local frustration at the Dairy's use, and clogging, of a residential road. The dispute grew with an application to use part of the venue as an "Islamic education and community centre". Locals do not like the idea as it would further congest a residential area but apparently it has already been converted to that use before the application has gone through.

It turned ugly with reports that the "security guards from the dairy are aggressive and abusive to mums collecting their kids from school. They won't let anyone down Shirley avenue because they say it's their land." Another woman alledges that she was beaten with a lead pipe by men from the Islamic centre and her car smashed up while going to check on her son during disturbances in the area as white and Asian gangs squared off.

There has since been a petrol bombing of the dairy and arrests for public order offences and possession of offensive weapons. Now the police have been given the ability to put dispersal orders in place under anti-social behaviour legislation.

There is a symbolic importance to Windsor. As Britons we are all subjects of the House of Windsor; any confrontation there has tones of Stalingrad. However, it is more important as a sign that the confrontation over the British Muslim community's proper relationship with the rest of Britain is not going to be confined to the Northern Cities and the poorer parts of London.

While the confrontation was taking place there it was closeted away from the middle classes who are most populous in the Home Counties and dominate the British political discourse. Like the case of the taxi driver who would not take a guide dog because it was 'unclean' but got unlucky and had picked a legal officer for the Royal National Institute for the Blind these stories in Windsor make the failure in integration increasingly relevant to the politically important.

There is a growing fear in Britain that 'no-go areas' are developing which the Muslim community claims as its own and can segregate off from the rest of the country. This could probably have worked well for those who want to cut British Muslims off from their fellow citizens had it been limited to the traditional areas in which the British have always benignly neglected immigrant communities such as the East End of London. The problem may have been ignored for some time until it eventually became apparent that the process of steady assimilation was not going as well as it has for previous waves of migrants.

However, tangle with the British middle class on their home ground and there will be a reaction far more quickly. The shape of that reaction has yet to be decided. Hopefully, it won't be internment but there is an increasing chance it will be something stronger than we might have expected a year or so ago.

We're all victims now

Mr. Eugenides points to the Times report of a Civitas study on the number of people who are a part of some kind of victim group (female, gay, ethnic, disabled, elderly). Apparently it is now up to 73%.

I am a part of no victim group. As a part of the white, male, able-boded and straight community I am beginning to feel a little left out. I'm sure someone is discrimating against us.

Actually, how many white, male, able-bodied, straight people do you see working in your average theatre? Disgusting.

There is a Simpsons quote which seems relevant:

"I'm a white male, age 18 to 49. Everyone listens to me, no matter how dumb my suggestions are."

UKIP and 'train set politics'

The UKIP are in something of an internal mess thanks to, as I have noted before, their party containing far too many of those who are not quite up to making it in mainstream politics. A first past the post system is always going to give a major advantage to the biggest parties and this should ensure that compromise happens within the major parties before an election rather than through averaging out the view of voters in negotiation afterwards as is done with messy consequences in countries such as Germany.

If the UKIP's logic that EU membership is an absolute wrong as a violation of our sovereignty is correct, I do not share this view as I'm not sure it is qualitatively different to the UN in this regard, then compromise with a Tory party which does not agree to leave the EU right now is impossible. This would make the UKIP a good idea as a point of principle.

However, as a mechanism to influence the mainstream political balance it is likely to do more harm than good in euronihilist terms. It weakens the relatively eurosceptic position by splitting the vote. It isn't even likely to successfully threaten the Tories into going more eurosceptic as that will be more than balanced out by distancing a large number of those most enthusiastic for leaving the EU from the internal debate within the party.

Their flat tax policy was an exercise in what I like to call 'train set politics'. It is constructed without much regard to transition or implementation as the UKIP is never going to have to put any of this into practice. You can tell this from the distinctly glib response to the threat of a fiscal imbalance. Planning for a deficit thanks to tax changes at a time when there is a looming challenge to fiscal policy from growing numbers of old people is a distinctly poor idea.

If you are going to do train set politics then do it right. Don't start from current spending priorities and then work out what you can cut. It sounds negative and the word cut in particular sounds unpleasant. Start from zero and play God properly. The rest of this article is my best effort, after about an hour or so's hunting down some figures, at a fiscal policy. As such, if there are errors or miscalculations please forgive me.

Alistair Heath's research into the flat tax isn't exactly designed for my purposes but by my calculation from its numbers we have roughly £507.5bn to work with if we were to implement it this year. This sum may change in the future but the basic gist with respect to the rest of the economy will remain the same in the short run. This means significant tax savings for all income levels but particularly for those on lower incomes combined with a significant number of people being taken out of tax altogether (up to a £9000 income). The dynamic effects of this can be expected to lead to a significant increase in revenue quite quickly as such shifts to a low tax economy tend to but I'm not going to rely on that. You could think about that as around £60bn of tax cuts but it is a lot more fun to think of it as £507.5bn to play with. So, how do we spend just under £510bn?

Divide it the following way:

£60bn - just over double the defence budget so we can have a bigger army, equip it better and will have the military to match our foreign policy ambitions.

£70bn - just over double the public order budget to pay for more prisons, police officers and the resources to properly defend property rights, keep order and protect vulnerable communities from criminality.

£30bn - to cover our debt interest payments... can't be avoided.

£30bn - for a substantial boost to the transport budget which is needed in the short term although should be targetted to fall sharply in the medium term with privatisations of the motorway network and other changes.

£1bn - for democratic institutions.

£20bn - for environmental services (this is currently the housing and environment budget). More research is needed into this item but my guess is it can't be removed.

£30bn - to put into a 'vulnerable people's fund' which could be distributed to those, I would expect a relatively small number in the end, who cannot work and for whom the main benefit below really isn't enough. If that amounts to about 6 million people (10% of the population) they can be allotted around £5,000 (to over double their basic income) each but the true amount would probably be more concentrated (a smaller number of people receiving more). A large part of the initial cost is likely to be pensioners who haven't adjusted to the new system and have not saved at all.

£4441.66 x 60m = £266.5bn to pay £4441.66 to every man, woman and child in the UK. This provides them with a basic income and serves to replace unemployment benefit (under £3200 at the maximum rate), the minimum wage (everyone gets this) and current state spending on services. Living only on the £4441 would not be comfortable as it is not a lot and there will be additional costs such as healthcare which are currently paid by the state which would need to be funded out of that money but being unemployed isn't comfortable in the status quo and is an ugly situation to be in regardless of the material results.

Note that this leaves people paying income tax from a private income of £9000 plus the basic income of £4441; they will pay income tax from a total income of £13441 and up.

You then mandate that people have health insurance of some kind and children have education up to standards set by a regulator. This can be covered for the poor out of their basic income as set out above. If someone is completely unemployed they may be in a slightly tighter spot than they are now after the cost of public services but not by a lot and thanks to the complete absence of a poverty trap (they don't lose benefits when they start earning) any extra money they can earn doing odd jobs can supplement this so fewer will be trapped in complete unemployment by the prospect of losing benefits if they start work.

Such a system would leave the state ensuring that everyone can afford basic services and providing a safety net. It would do as little as possible to weaken incentives to work and increase your income. It would provide the finances to law enforcement and the military to ensure that no one could abuse its citizens and that it could play a full part in ensuring the stability of the wider world. Would be fun wouldn't it?

The UKIP are welcome to copy this and it will serve them better than their current scheme. However, I would suggest to them that the pragmatism and moderation required to engage with the Conservative party, even if they would prefer a stronger ideological flavour than the current leadership, is, perhaps, worth the effort and will allow them to spend their time more productively.

Those Crazy Danes

Dizzy highlights new video which has surfaced of the Danish People's Party's youth wing having a "Draw Mohammed" competition. They may be unpleasant people but at least they're not being cowed into silence like the rest of the us; when even South Park can't show Mohammed there is a problem.

The text from 'Defending Denmark', who posted this clip, is quite funny. A combination of the idea that drawing cartoons of Mohammed automatically means the cartoonists are 'far right' (there are much better grounds to worry about the People's Party) and FREE workshops in constructive communication which sound wrist slittingly bad. The clip Dizzy links to isn't the best so take a look at this one, if you're not too offended by cartoons of Mohammed or the sight of Danes:

The War Nerd on Venezuelan Arms Deals

The War Nerd is arguing here that the arms that Chavez has been buying, chiefly fighter jets, are massively ill suited to fighting a war against the US and are, instead, designed to build up a body of soldiers he considers more loyal. As such, this purchase suggests he fears his own military more than he does ours.

I think this analysis is strong but I think that it underestimates the degree to which Chavez wants fighter jets for no military reason but rather because modern fighter jets are visibly costly and create a clear impression of a man with money to spend. All of the reasons that Brecher cites for fighter jets being impractical strengthen their value as a visible indicator of his wealth and power.

Phew!

Turns out it was a conference season blip...

Straw and the Veil

There is a lot of bluster over Jack Straw's comments on the veil. The claim that this is discrimination is ridiculous: Straw has not disadvantaged anyone for wearing a veil and there is no suggestion he has ever been aggresive in his requests for them to be removed. Equally, the idea that this debate, about whether stopping wearing the veil would be a good move on the part of Muslim women to aid cohesion, can aid the far right doesn't stand up. The far right need integration to be a hopeless cause to justify their desire to keep ethnic groups separate and this is not helped by suggestions of methods by which integration can be advanced.

A simple survey could establish whether Jack Straw is right. Do a survey of non-Muslims and ask if they would feel significantly less comfortable talking to someone wearing a veil. I am almost certain that you would find a massive result in favour of it making them feel less comfortable. We rely on cues in people's facial expression to feel confident that they have understood us. That is why trying to be witty over e-mail is such a risky strategy. Hurting the ability of non-Muslims and Muslims to have a comfortable conversation hurts the everyday interactions which keep a lid on communal distrust. Such distrust plays into the hands of the unpleasant in both Muslim and non-Muslim communities.

Flying Monkey Watch #2

Wicked the Musical is running in Victoria near my flat. I worry about the modern tendency to convince people that children's stories are a legitimate way for adults to spend their time; Harry Potter is for kids and an adult reading it needs to kill their inner child. As such, the idea of this musical frustrated me a little. A friend tells me it is good but I've been skeptical of such claims since people told me Shrek was fun for all ages.

However, I didn't think about the wonderful consequence of a musical set in the Wizard of Oz 'universe'... flying monkeys!

Blogroll

As should be clear I've reformed my blogroll. It is now separated along the lines I set out in my post on blogging. If you want to be added then e-mail me. Also, reciprocal links make me smile.

Conservative Foreign Policy

During the conference William Hague discussed his 'new direction' for foreign policy but unfortunately from his description it didn't sound terribly new.

The discussion of Darfur is starting to sound worryingly like a cliché. Unfortunately, the reality of the situation is that Britain does not have the capacity to take on another major operation at the same time as Afghanistan and Iraq. That is not going to change for some time after the Conservatives take over regardless of whether or not we make improvements to the armed forces. As such, all we can really do is implore the international community to act. What the world is lacking is not a recognition that Darfur is a mess but the political will from nations with the military capacity to put their forces into a situation which could potentially turn ugly with Al Qaeda already threatening any non-AU force.

The Conservative Party have not, thankfully, taken the unfortunate road of asking what is in the Atlantic alliance for us. All decent nations have a common interest in the security which the US is working to uphold; the question is whether we wish to be a free rider. Choosing to cop out in that manner would be immoral and dishonourable and has, rightly, not been seriously considered by the Conservatives. As there is still a rough consensus within the party that the US is fighting a good fight against Islamic extremism, if sometimes fighting it poorly, our foreign policy will, and should, remain deeply Atlanticist. I'll make the case for the factors which should determine US-UK foreign policy in a post soon but for the purposes of this post it is just necessary to accept that there will be wars in the future and the Conservatives will, ceteris paribus, probably be supporting the United States.

What that leaves us with is the pledge to be a friend, but not an uncritical one, of the US; the pledge to be a liberal conservative. However, this in itself is a tantrum not a policy. Clearly no Conservative government worth the name would start fights with the US for the sake of it. When people talk about Love Actually moments or Michael Howard discusses distancing us from the US what the public heard was that we were planning on doing just that and they were not impressed. Starting fights with the most powerful nation in the world, the strongest nation on the right side of the War on Terror and a long standing ally is no sign of principle. The question which needs to be answered is clearly when, in which circumstances, a Conservative government would be a critical friend of America.

The rhetoric on torture and other infringements of rights was the main hint at an answer here but I'm not so sure that is likely to be effective. In matter of how we go to war and how we execute that war Britain, as the key US ally with its own troops going in, has a reasonable amount of sway. If anyone tells you that we don't point them quickly to the attempt to get a second UN resolution which was at Blair's insistence. However, questions of torture and indefinite detainment are seen by the US, I believe, as essentially their own business. In war and peace-keeping there are Britons making enormous sacrifices which give weight to our opinion; our thoughts on Guantanamo do not have such emphasis.

Attempting to get a second UN resolution was well meaning but misguided. It forced us to have the debate over going to war in a setting where any one of Russia, China and France had the same influence as the US. It meant that the debate over the legitimacy of the war was settled by them and the other members of the security council at that time. The seeking of a second resolution looking like an admission that we should not go to war without French approval rather than an attempt to bring others on board. That and the over reliance on the existence of NCB weapons as the justification for war made a mess of attempts to sell this action to the public and international community.

The attempt at a second resolution was the major British influence on the US and it did involve a spending of credibility we had as a reliable ally. Once we were responsible for the mess of an attempt to go back to the UN our council on other matters was weakened by the question this raised over our judgement. A better case for the way Britain should have used its influence is in the execution of the Iraq war.

This is both where the war has gone wrong, the chaos afterwards, and the reason for public dissaproval. I don't think opinions of the war were contingent upon the finding of weapons of mass destruction as they reached their highest point at the immediate end of the war when WMD had not been found but we did seem to have done something genuinely worthwhile for Iraq and had gotten rid of a genuinely unpleasant and destabilising dictator. The situation soured as it proved difficult to reestablish order following the war and popular opinion followed this deterioration. The reasons for this happening seem best summed up to me in the rules for running a successful peacekeeping force from Paddy Ashdowne that Niall Ferguson quotes in Colossus:

1. [To have] a good plan and stick to it. This plan needs to be drawn up, not as an after-thought, but well in advance, as an integral part of the planning for the military campaign.
2. [To] establish the rule of law - and do so as quickly as possible... It is much more important to establish the rule of law quickly than to establish democracy quickly. Because without the former, the latter is soon undermined.
3. To start as quickly as possible on the major structural reforms - from putting in place a customs service or reliable tax base, to reforming the police and the civil service, to restructuring and screening the judiciary, to transforming the armed forces.
4. [To ensure] that the international community organizes itself in [the] theatre in a manner that can work and take decisions.
5. [To establish] an exceptionally close relationship between the military and civilian aspects of peace implementation.
6. [To] avoid setting deadlines, and settle in for the long haul... installing the software of a free and open society is a slow business. It cannot be done... in a year or so... Peace-keeping needs to be measured not in months but decades. What we need here... is "sticktoitiveness"... the political will, the unity of purpose, and the sheer stamina as an international community to see the job through to lasting success. That means staying on, and sticking at it, long after the CNN effect has passed.

Clearly a worrying number of these lessons were ignored in Iraq. The excessive US confidence that they were liberating an Iraqi people immediately ready for freedom led them to seem too eager to leave which incentivised a struggle for post-US power, to not take security seriously enough near the beginning and to allow a shortage of manpower.

The Conservatives are right to be thinking about the Atlantic alliance and the extent to which it should be critical as well as supportive but I would suggest that we are better placed to influence American conduct in its interventions abroad than its idealistic purity at home. Conservative criticisms of Blair should centre upon his wasting of our important influence on the totem of the UN instead of making sure that the war and peace were fought in the right way.

Policing who you want to Police

It may sound understandable that a policeman of Lebanese origin did not want to police the Israeli embassy while they were at war with his countrymen. War is a rather emotional thing. He felt ill disposed towards Israeli's, made that clear to his superiors and they moved him off the case. As a result of this no one got hurt and there were plenty of other officers to watch over the embassy.

The reason it is utterly unnacceptable is that if he is admitting that the biases emerging from his being anything other than a British policeman and citizen will affect his ability to protect people then how can we be sure this will not feed into his other work? If he sees a Jewish person being verbally or physically abused will he respond as we would expect?

This kind of question undermines the police force as a body of neutral enforcers of the law and turns them into a series of interested groups policing for their communities. Such an outcome will lead to more distrust of everyday policing as an officer's personal biases in every crime are questioned by every criminal and victim. It also strikes at the notion of an equality of justice. This police officer should be told that he is not in the right career.

Gurkhas in Afghanistan

With the Taliban closer than 50 yards, Rifleman Nabin Rai, 20, manning a heavy machinegun on the roof, had several rounds ricochet off his weapon before a bullet went through the gunsight and hit him in the face.

"His commander called for him to be medi-vacced out, but he refused to come down from the roof," said Major Rex. "Later he was again hit, this time in the helmet. He sat down and had a cigarette, then went back to his position."

Makes you feel a bit soft, doesn't it?

Flying Monkey Watch

A team from all over the UK are applying for a license to create a 99% human, 1% rabbit embryo. It will be quickly destroyed but does break down some old taboos in creating a frankenbunny. I find it hard to take these stories as seriously as perhaps they should be. I am willing to accept any research that brings this a little closer:

Chinese Execution Buses

I'm actually more positive than many conservatives on China and am hopeful that we can avoid a confrontation with them that would be enormously destructive. I'll write a broader post about China soon. However, every so often you get reminders that the Chinese Communist Party is capable of being really, disgustingly, awful.

Cameron's Second Speech

The response elsewhere to this speech has already been positive. There were two things I disliked:

1) The Minimum Wage

The Conservative Party should be highlighting new ways of helping those on low pay which act as a subsidy on their employment and lower its cost rather than a price floor which raises their cost to employers. That way we can spread the responsibility for keeping those in work living comfortably more widely through society instead of punishing employers who employ the poor.

2) The NHS

The principle Cameron set out for why we have the NHS, making it that people do not have to fear the financial cost of illness, was a noble one but is it really only the NHS which can provide this? Are the French, with an insurance based system, excluding more people?

I hope the campaign he is launching to stop NHS cuts is somewhat more imaginative.

Lots of stuff I liked:

1) Foreign policy

Still nothing much that was new but his rhetoric was much closer to the, very convincing, Fox than to the less impressive Hague. Correctly identified that this is not Northern Ireland and these are not people to negotiate with.

2) Crime

Very, very good. Highlighted the right causes of crime, social breakdown, and the right responses to crime once it had happened in making sentences count among other things. I like the Bill of Rights idea and look forward to seeing what the bill they come up with looks like.

3) Civil Partnerships

Highlighted that these should be seen as a celebration of the benefits of marriage rather than as an attack on it as an institution.

4) Tax

Hit the same notes as Osborne.

5) Restoring cabinet government

Very good. A presidential style is a thing to be careful of with the term Cameron's Conservatives being used so often.

Christianity vs. Islam

Good times.

Fox's Speech

Brilliant (this downloads a .wmv file). He described the problem with defence policy and spending which does match up to the ambitions of foreign policy. Set out in certain terms that British troops cannot answer to any body but our parliament. Linked the environmental focus on display at conference to the security costs of large funds being sent the way of oil states like Russia and Iran. This speech highlights the kind of approach I would want to see from a Conservative Defence Minister and recognises that this is one issue where the public really do not want us to go soft.

Hague's Second Speech

Hague restated support (this downloads a .wmv file) for Turkish entry to the EU which I liked. The rest of his time spent on the EU was a reiteration of the solid Conservative European policy which has been unchallenged in the party for some time. He was right to note, as I did a few months back, that Europe faces the dilemma of choosing the function it has fulfilled best, encouraging new countries towards liberal economics and sensible politics, or the function it treasures but has proved least productive with, political integration.

However, the rest of his speech, on the more interesting topic of broader foreign policy, was a statement of conventional wisdom. It contained nothing you wouldn't have heard in Gordon Brown's speech a week ago. This is partly a consequence of the broad consensus in mainstream politics around British foreign policy priorities if not detail but Hague needed to do more. His speech did not contain the 'new direction' he claimed it did and he needs to do more.

Osborne's Speech

"To do things and not just to say things" - Osborne (this will download a .wmv file) has an uncomfortable speaking style.

I think he did well to make explicit that stability over tax cuts is a call for fiscal conservatism rather than socialism, as many have bizarrely painted it. In particular the Thatcher quote is clearly aimed at critics who claim to be Thatcherite while finding fiscal discipline passé:

"I am not prepared ever to go on with tax reductions if it means unsound finance"

Sound.

However, the big issue this speech did not deal with to my satisfaction was the philosophy that will guide the ordering of priorities when it comes time to decide the shares of growth going to spending or taxation. Clues on a few of the following would be nice: Would an Osborne treasury view public service quality as largely a function of money spent? How important would it see the medium term revenue returns of tax cuts which are costly in the short term as being?

There were hints in discussions of Ireland's low tax economy but this never translated into answers to questions like these and others which are so crucial to the decisions the Shadow Chancellor will face when finally setting out Conservative economic policy in detail.

Timing is everything...

It would appear that my take on the race for UN Secretary General was quickly made obsolete. Ah well.

BBC journalism at its insightful best

This is actually an article about Cameron's using a dishwasher:

"In the latest instalment, David Cameron talks - above the yelps of his children - about his plans to "clean up" politics, as he loads his dishwasher. Would the famously green Mr Cameron not be doing the environment more of a favour were he to wash up?"

Does anyone care? If the option Cameron had chosen were, like the stories of cars accompanying his bike, significantly less environmentally friendly than some presentation of his had suggested or he was choosing to do something out of the ordinary and environmentally harmful, choking a Panda perhaps, then I can see the public interest but everyone has a dishwasher.

"In environmental circles, it's a lively debate."

Dishwasher energy efficiency? Detergent usage? I'd actually suggest it is an interminably dull debate.

"Some argue dishwashers are greener than hand washing because they use less water, detergent and power per cycle. A dishwasher can cut water consumption by up to 80% compared to hand washing in an average household, according to manufacturer Electrolux.

But others argue that when additional factors, such as the manufacture of the unit, the pollution created during distribution and the energy required to make the detergents used in them, are taken into account, it is questionable what is best."

You know what this debate suggests? That Cameron's choice of whether to handwash or use a dishwasher is utterly irrelevant to everyone but boring enviro-nerds who would be trainspotters if they didn't think their job being about the environment made a passion for dull details progressive and cool. If one is marginally more efficient it won't be enough to make dishwashers an important item in energy efficiency compared to, say, insulation so there really is no reason for the general public to care.

"When buying a dishwasher look for the EST's Energy Efficiency Recommended logo or the EU energy label. Compared to a model bought 10 years ago, a new A-rated energy-efficient dishwasher will save its owner £15 each year, according to Friends of the Earth (FoE)."

£15 a year? Score.

Now, we don't have any evidence but given that the Camerons are a quite well off family the energy efficiency of their dishwasher is almost certainly about how old it is. Given they recently moved in it is probably a modern one. However, it honestly isn't that important. This story is a litany of unimportant facts with no bearing on Cameron's environmentalism. It is a distraction from a serious debate on the environment and a bizarre manifestation of the desire to find false hypocricy in political leaders.

Just remember, this story is only possible thanks to the unique way the BBC is funded.

Hague's Speech

William Hague is a great speaker and his latest effort (this downloads a .wmv file) was no exception. It was genuinely funny, superbly timed and weighted and had some great attacks on the Labour record on important issues combined with funny character assassination.

However, that doesn't make me nostalgic for his days as leader. Hague is an excellent speaker but to be a leader requires political judgement in spades and this is what I don't see in Hague to a sufficient level to make a great leader of the Conservative Party. While it is probably true that no one could have won an election from his position the excessive focus on Europe and immigration of his campaign helped entrench the idea of us as a right wing pressure group rather than future government and this was a real harm to the party's prospects.

I'm also not sure about his stances as Shadow Foreign secretary. I disagree with his stance that the Israeli incursion into Lebanon was disproportionate for reasons highlighted by Krauthammer although I do suspect that it was incompetent. The EPP exit delay I am deeply ambivalent about and don't see the delay as being a breaking of a promise. He hasn't been making the noise about Afghanistan that I think he probably should be. The jury is still out on his performance in such a vital role.

David Davis's Speech

David Davis is not a brilliant orator but his speech (this will download a .wmv file) to conference was great. It was, as is to be expected, as conservative a speech as can be imagined with lots of time spent on old Prime Ministers, celebrating the value of freedom and the qualities of Britain. However, it was also a deeply Cameroon speech which went through the need for the party to change with new circumstances and defend the environment. His speech was the point I was making last night incarnate; it was talking about conservative truths but how they must be applied to the new challenges of a changing society. That Davis made such a speech when he could so easily have got away with faint praise or retreated into sniping since last year was an enormous credit to his character.

The Next UN Secretary General

Alykhan Velshi has an excellent article in the New English Review about the race for UN Secretary General. The current favourite, a South Korean candidate, is the candidate of the UN's venal status quo. The Sunday Times article on Kofi Annan this week was a brilliant summing up of the horrible costs of the status quo's corruption and lack of moral fibre. While it calls for some kind of accountability and change Alykhan's plan of action is clearer. His conclusion is that the US should veto Ban-Ki Moon's nomination as Secretary General. However, this is one situation in which Britain has exactly the same power and influence as the US; we have our own veto. Why don't we use it?

This would be a good way for Cameron to turn his rhetoric on improving the international response to crises such as Darfur and Rwanda, where the current UN bureaucracy have so thoroughly failed, into action. As such, it would be a fine initiative for the Conservatives to push for and a great way for Britain to make a difference on the international stage.

McCain's Speech

"You claim the future and you will see more of it than I will but I am content and inspired, in my late years, to know still, as I have always known, that there will always be a Britain and that the future is in the safe hands of the two great peoples who long ago decided to make history... together. Thank you and God bless."

This is the end of McCain's speech (this links downloads a .wmv file). That, and the rest of the last two minutes or so, was a wonderful expression of what the special relationship really means and why the question of "what's in it for us" so misses the point.

Cameron's Speech

I've just finished watching Cameron's speech (this will download a .wmv file) and I thought it was brilliant.

There was some stuff I disliked. I think that the talk of rap music's evil influence on children is a little out of date. Back in the early Eminem days it was the talk of the town but now I honestly don't think there are huge fears about rap music's hold on young people's imagination. Also, I need to look into the detail but European regulation on the chemicals industry has a history of mixed quality at best so I hope the Conservatives have picked the right regulation to strengthen.

However, his assault on Labour's record was superb. All of the initiatives which have been conceived as a press movement and abandoned as unworkable; other initiatives like ID cards which the Conservatives will and should scrap as illiberal and impractical.

His central theme of responsibility, personal, professional, corporate and civic, is a conservative answer to questions which the Left claims only it can respond to on poverty and social breakdown. These are the questions that the British people rightly want politicans to answer. The Cameron project is not about giving up on conservatism as a set of values but about applying those values to the new challenges of today's society. Today's speech made that clear.