Lomborg on Climate Hysteria

Excellent review of what the IPCC report actually said by Bjorn Lomborg on Comment is Free. While it does highlight that mankind is contributing to global warming this was already understood. The main changes are, as Lomborg describes, the following:

"The report did, however, contain two surprising facts. Both went unmentioned in most reports. First, the world's scientists have re-jigged their estimates about how much sea levels will rise. In the 1980s, America's Environmental Protection Agency expected oceans to rise by several metres by 2100. By the 1990s, the IPCC was expecting a 67-centimetre rise. Six years ago, it anticipated ocean levels would be 48.5 centimeters higher than they are currently. In this year's report, the estimated rise is 38.5 centimeters on average.

[...]

The report also revealed the improbability of another Gore scenario: that global warming could make the Gulf Stream shut down, turning Europe into a new Siberia. The IPCC simply and tersely tells us that this scenario - also vividly depicted in the Hollywood movie The Day After Tomorrow - is considered "very unlikely". Moreover, even if the Gulf Stream were to weaken over the century, this would be good, as there would be less net warming over land areas.

[...]

A 38.5cm rise in the ocean's levels is a problem, but by no means will it bring down civilisation. Last century sea levels rose by half that amount without most of us even noticing."

Read the full article.

Sometimes environmentalists make me want to scream...

The Conservatives are now apparently taking a stand against genetically modified crops. This time it is about their "contamination" of regular crops eroding consumer choice but this is vaguely ridiculous. If they can contaminate that implies they are still genetically similar enough to interbreed which suggests to me that any genetic modification has been more akin to other human interventions in the natural world. These concerns are never raised about selective breeding which is a less efficient version of the same process.

Every time I've seen genetically modified crops discussed it usually transpires that the only reason the green movement is really wound up about 'frankenstein crops' is that it thinks increases in yields are so utterly pointless they cannot justify any risk no matter how negligible. They attack these companies for wanting to make profit, as if that's a problem, and then opine that we have enough food. This is what really gets to me:

The same green movement which now unfortunately includes the Conservative party can combine earnest worrying about Stern's report which identifies the biggest cost of global warming as lost agricultural production can regard agricultural productivity as vaguely disreputable. To regard technologies which might provide increased yields as a grubby drive for profits at the same time as forecasting disaster thanks to declines in global agricultural production is rather disingenous. That some of those who worry most about global warming and the harm it will do to humanity are willing to join the Slow Food movement whose entire purpose seems to be to celebrate low yield agriculture makes me want to scream.

All that the green lobby can offer in response to climate change are attempts by Britain and Europe to tackle global warming through emissions curbs without the involvement of other countries such as the US, India or particularly China and a blind hope that these countries will, at some point, see the light. By contrast, the skeptics focussed on adaptation can offer DDT spraying to fight infectious disease, economic reform to create nations better able to protect themselves against flooding and other natural disasters and another vast increase in agricultural productivity. Minor concerns with these and other solutions, nuclear power is the same phenomenon on a bigger scale, are blown wildly out of proportion until the only plausible responses involve grand interventions in the econmy.

I don't like to attack the motives of those whose ideas I oppose. As seen in the furore over the AEI paying people to write articles, as if the normal practice in journalism and politics is for authors to write from the dole, these accusations are often rather cheap. With this caveat, it looks to me that any response to global warming which doesn't involve in some way assaulting the capitalist economy just isn't good enough for the green movement. They are rather too attached to the idea that the only possible response to climate change is action to curb emissions because that provides not just an excuse for government intervention but also a raison d'etre for institutions of global governance which boosts the tranzi cause. If my suspicions are correct, and I think they might be, how has the Conservative party allowed itself to become a part of such a con designed to justify the great ideological threats to the liberal economic and democratic order?

Identity Cards or Border Police? A fine reason to Vote Conservative

There is a lot of talk around the media about the convergence of the parties in their rush for the middleground. There is still more than enough difference to make voting Conservative worth the trip to the polls. The campaign against ID cards is one example of that difference.

Firstly, this is one of those issues that slipped through the net because of the disastrous state of the Tories at the time:

"ID cards won't prevent human trafficking: ID cards are no substitute for a border police force and proper checks on people entering and leaving the country. In 1998, the Government abolished border controls, but its replacement, a computer-based e-borders scheme will not be fully installed until 2014."

Conservatives now are right to make a huge stink about it. Losing control of our borders is a failure by this Labour government in one of its most important duties, to protect the nation.

This is a fine, conservative, account of how to use the money earmarked for the ID cards to genuinely make a difference to some of the problems it is purported to solve:

"More prison places, more prisoner drug rehab & a border police are good ideas

A Conservative Government will scrap the ID cards scheme. We will use some of the savings to build more prison places, provide more drug rehab in prisons and create a new border police force.

More prison places: Our prisons are desperately overcrowded, meaning serious criminals are escaping prison sentences and prisoners are not being rehabilitated. Instead of wasting billions of pounds on ID cards, shouldn't we use some of the savings to build more prison spaces?

More drug rehab in prisons: Drug addiction is a major cause of crime in society, but there isn't enough effective drug rehab in prisons to help get criminals off drugs for good. Instead of wasting billions of pounds on ID cards, shouldn't we use some of the savings to provide more drug rehabilitation to help prisoners kick the habit?

A Border Police Force: At present, many different agencies are responsible for aspects of policing our borders. Instead of wasting billions of pounds on ID cards, shouldn't we use some of the savings to create a new UK border police force to prevent and detect illegal immigration and to stop terrorists and suspected terrorists from entering the country?"

This is the kind of sensible position that Conservatives should be taking. Putting resources into the frontline services which keep crime at bay and help criminals reform rather than vast new schemes which will wind up causing huge amounts of trouble to the law abiding and involve vast cost without representing a serious obstacle to the criminal.

The Boundary Commission Report and 18 Doughty Street

"That makes David Cameron's task next time only a little easier. A swing of 1.6% could remove Labour's majority but to win a majority he would need an unlikely 6.9%. This is not quite as unfair as it sounds. Some of the distortion comes from the fact that only 55,640 electors are needed to justify a constituency in Wales, against 69,934 in England (this should be changed). Some is a consequence of low turnout in strong Labour areas, which means the party is able to win its seats with fewer votes."

It sounds like a majority will be a stretch but achievable. However, what I want to know is why exactly what is supposed to be a comprehensive review has left us with such inequity. What will be presented as an inherent flaw in our system is actually a result of the system whose first duty is supposed to be ensuring an equality between voters failing to do so. The inequality between English and Welsh voters, in particular, will further strain English patience with the Union.

This video from 18 Doughty Street gives some suggestion of what might happen with the Conservatives winning the popular vote by 6%. A Labour lead of one MP, the Liberal Democrats the kingmakers. Cameron and Campbell co-operating on some good policy but an inherently weak coalition. Horrifying.

What it doesn't note is that a Brown-Campbell pact on the condition of proportional representation would be far more horrifying than any policy shocks that Cameron-Campbell might produce. Say goodbye to proper accountability and strong government. Say hello to politics in the Italian style.

We need to work out how the Conservatives can get the 8% lead necessary for a decent majority. While the mountain is formidable that kind of result is achievable, particularly if our policy groups give us a real programme for government which the British people might endorse and we can restrain the desire to bicker internally.

In Defence of John Major

It is nice to see a defence of John Major by Edward Pearce at Comment is Free. John Major led the country in a dignified and effective manner. We were the most economically competitive nation, the rewards have been spent and largely wasted by Gordon Brown. A War with Iraq was conducted with a precise mission and was quickly won despite, or perhaps because of, our expecting the worst. Britain's recovery from the long period of relative economic decline which characterised the first three quarters of the twentieth century stopped being the battle it had been under Thatcher and became a more gentle progress.

I don't buy his line on the ERM as I do not think we had the freedom to devalue which Pearce believes we did or that fixed exchange rates were a good idea anyway. Given that the Euro is causing just as much economic difficulty as the ERM did I don't think our particular circumstances were the problem. The Euro is certainly not prospering. However, he is right to note that it cannot be entirely laid at Major's door. Virtually ever pre-Major government pursued some form of strong pound policy, it was always taken as an indicator of national success, and the major long term effect of the ERM debacle was inuring us to this obsession.

Also, the denationalisation of British railways was certainly not a mistake. The denationalisation was carried out poorly but even then it managed to result in more trains on the tracks and fewer accidents. I think that were it possible to have another go at privatising the railways it might be preferable to leave the tracks and trains under common ownership; there are other sources of competition such as cars, coaches and planes so monopoly fears are overrated. However, this does not make reprivatisation of a network which the private sector built, the public sector wrecked during the war and then nationalised and never ran well a bad idea.

Finally, not implementing tuition fees or other measures like school or health service choice is not something to credit Major with. Expanding choice in schools or hospitals would have been a fine achievement for the Major years which would have made him a truly great Prime Minister.

Still, it is a welcome defence of Major. He was treated poorly by the media and electorate for much the same reason George H. W. Bush was in the United States in foreign policy terms, he was quietly effective. People hate that, they prefer the noisily, messianicaly useless like Blair. Of course, they eventually wise up but by then they've had years of incompetence and screwed up their country. Major's sensible, moderate government was replaced with Blairite policy by fad.

Trident or Renewable Power?

The article Ian Davis has written for CommentisFree is relatively sane for a Guardian article about climate change but relies upon a few premises which simply cannot stand:

1. That Britain abolishing its nuclear deterrent would make enough of a difference to the global balance of threats, power and instability to cause the other nuclear powers to give up their bombs and the non-nuclear powers to stop their effort to obtain them. This is absurd as the UK is not the US or Russia and not a major player in terms of reducing the big arsenals of weapons and even if all the world's bombs were decommisioned Iran would still want one to offset its massive weakness in conventional arms relative to the States.
2. That the cost of replacing Trident is the same as that of producing the renewable capacity to provide for half of our energy needs. Trident isn't that expensive, the big costs quoted are spread over the years of development, and we already provide substantial subsidy to renewable energy development; much of the low hanging fruit will already have been claimed.
3. That our investment in developing renewable energy technology will pay off. Government has a hideous record in picking technologies and something could well come up which makes wind power an expensive mess, fusion power perhaps. Equally, the skeptics could be proven correct and the demand for global warming friendly technology could dry up in the medium term (when fossil fuels run out different technological priorities might be prevalent).

Macs

Brilliant article in the Guardian by Charlie Brooker about why he hates Macs. I couldn't agree more. This section is particularly acerbic although the rest is also good:

"The ads are adapted from a near-identical American campaign - the only difference is the use of Mitchell and Webb. They are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series Peep Show - probably the best sitcom of the past five years - in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, "PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers." In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.

I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui."

They're for people who want pretty furniture rather than a computer. At least this advertising campaign has finally put the "Macs are great for some work - look at desktop publishing" lie to bed. They're used for desktop publishing because journalists are an image conscious bunch and assume they need Macs to be cool. If Macs were really so good for genuine applications why is Apple advertising them as being for "music and pictures" rather than work. Honestly, who would buy a computer just for music and pictures? Get a stereo and a good photo printer which can talk to your digital camera and save yourself a huge pot of money. Or, better still, buy yourself a PC and do something productive.

Also, I think the "PCs crash all the time" shtick is a bit out of date. I'm not sure that my current PC has ever crashed. Sometimes individual pieces of software, games in particular, lock but that's largely a price you pay for having a greater variety of software at your disposal. The common system crashes were a thing of the earlier versions of Windows but largely died out with XP, an excellent piece of software. I haven't used Vista yet.

Where do our problems integrating Muslims come from?

Cameron has responded to the public discourse surrounding integration and Islam, and particularly the Policy Exchange report, with a call for community cohesion and rejection of multi-culturalism. However, I think that before we look to change specific policies, such as multi-culturalism, we should try to establish the root causes of the failure of integration. Why are we not proving able to integrate Muslim populations as we have previous waves of immigrants?

I believe the problem starts with a hyper-sensitivity on the part of many Muslim communities to perceived attacks from outside the faith. As such, cartoons of Mohammed or Rushdie's novels can constitute fundamental attacks on the faith. Jack Straw's suggestion that the niqab is harmful to integration, without any mention of taking government action to curb its use, is dangerous authoritarianism.

This hyper-sensitivity also extends to foreign policy where the War in Iraq, or any against a Muslim majority state, is a war on Muslims even if the leadership removed in the process itself was the source of awful persecution of the Muslim population it ruled. Of course, questions of competence or capability in executing the war are entirely legitimate but these are not the root of Muslim anger at the war in Iraq. If you are tempted to think that terrorist attacks such as 7/7 are just the illegitimate expression of legitimate grievance emerging from the War in Iraq remember that similar complaints were raised over Afghanistan and the first Gulf War and that 9/11's bombers were recruited with stories from Bosnia. While the failure to properly secure Iraq clearly cannot have helped relations the Islamist critique of Western foreign policy is not, at root, a respectable one and paying it too much heed is not productive.

There is also a widespread belief in conspiracy theories. The chairman of Birmingham Central Mosque argued earlier this week that we are headed towards a Stalinist/Nazi Police State and that this can be seen in the arrests of those accused of plotting to behead a British Muslim soldier. He predicts that they will not be charged and have been arrested to justify Britain's repression of Muslims. Given that there are more examples (21/7, the Manchester plots, the liquid explosive plot) of arrests which lead to charges than those which do not (Forest Gate) the assumption that charges are unlikely to follow is difficult to justify. Also, the idea that arresting then releasing people without charge in high profile raids is an effective strategy to justify anti-terror legislation is hard to defend given the widespread coverage of the failure to charge those arrested at Forest Gate. This is pure paranoia from someone supposed to be a bastion of mainstream, moderate, British Islam.

I think that the hyper-sensitivity to criticism or mockery, the view that any war which involves a Muslim state is a war on Muslims and the conspiracy theories are all part of a common problem. A sort of solidarity which refuses to attribute genuine evil to fellow Muslims and, therefore, looks to either deny its existence via conspiracy theories or explain it away as originating in persecution by others. This solidarity creates a feeling of injustice which, in a minority, feeds into further evil and creates the need for new explanations and persecution. New security measures, such as profiling at airports, are needed to prevent terrorism and these, because they are necessarily targeted at the population from which terrorists are recruited, reinforce this vicious cycle. As such, the root cause of these problems is a solidarity among Muslims which was, perhaps, a source of strength in their expansion but now makes responding to decline in traditional Muslim societies and living in a liberal democratic country deeply difficult for them; Islamism is one response to these problems.

There is no easy way to end this conflict between Muslim group loyaly, solidarity and the liberal British state. The appeasement of Islamism is impossible without giving up on fundamentals such as freedom of speech (the cartoons crisis and Rushdie) or equality before the law (Sharia); these kinds of values are what makes the West unique and have made it successful and should absolutely not be sacrificed. Equally, our foreign policy should not be subject to veto by one community just because they are easily offended as that undermines the internally peaceful compact which makes a stable democracy possible. The best response would seem to be a combination of firm defiance by not giving in to self-censorship, public condemnation of extremists even if they are currently influential within the Muslim community as with the Birmingham Central Mosque and the MCB and, finally, action to curb immigration from outside the EU. We are clearly not currently able to ensure proper integration of new immigrants and it seems likely that the Islamist problem will increase in a more than linear fashion with an increased population to draw from; network effects. It will also be necessary to take steps to reverse multi-culturalism's erosion of the common British identity but believing that having more faith in ourselves is enough to solve this problem seems naive.

While some of the measures necessary to confront radical Islam may not appear moderate in the short term it is very much necessary in the long term that we establish credibly that it is impossible for Islamism to win in Britain. If this can be established we might see fewer Muslims being tempted by its promise to defeat their perceived oppresors and more of them thinking about how to genuinely reconcile their group loyalty with living in a Western state.

Package Bomb goes off in Victoria

A bomb went off near New Scotland Yard on Victoria Street, not far from where I live. According to reports one woman was injured but not too seriously; hopefully she's okay.

Apparently it was sent to a business but I can't think of any particularly controversial businesses at that end of the street. Also, it seems unlikely that a package bomb could be large enough to hit either New Scotland Yard or the DTI via another store.

This suggests to me that it probably isn't Islamist violence or anything so significant, unless it is the terrorist equivalent of a shot across the boughs, but something more random: One of the banks has the account for a fence company whose fences are used at the primate lab in Oxford or something similar.

Castle Rising

As mentioned earlier a mate and I took a trip to Castle Rising today. Here are some pictures:





Here is an account of the insanity. I categorically deny that my driving is a hazard to human health.

The Future and Economics of Blogging

An article of mine discussing political blogs is the Sunday Feature over at the Birmingham University Conservative Forum blog. Read it; it's good.

Fainting Goats

If this doesn't make you chuckle you're officially dead inside.



Actually, if that fails try this.

Apologies for slow posting...

I've been at the Inner Temple IV and then on a quick trip to Castle Rising (more on this later). Normal service should now resume.

Poor old socialists...

Mr. Eugenides highlights a truly amazing piece by Richard Gott celebrating the suspension of democracy in Venezuela. Despite the illiberalism of Gott's article I find it hard to get upset. It is difficult to get angry at the old fashioned socialists these days. They must know that when all of your political hopes are resting on Latin America the end of the line isn't far away. The Tranzis have major international institutions behind them, a sheen of respectability and a sense of optimism that lures dreamy idealists. Islamism has a limited appeal but can genuinely threaten the west and has demographic trends on its side. By contrast the old fashioned socialists have the pot of oil money Chavez has laid his grubby little hands on and a couple of other dingy South American republics. They're not exactly threatening, just a little sad.

The IRA, Islamists and Moral Sacrifice

Tony Blair is defending the RUC against criticism for possible collusion. A report by the Northern Ireland police ombudsman has alleged that members of the RUC special branch protected informers from criminal investigations for charges as serious as murder. I think there are two reasons this particular report might be less significant than it is being made out to be and that the more important debate is over the lessons this holds for what it takes to defeat political violence.

Firstly, the police officers accused of complicity have described the criticism as unfounded and challenged the writer of the report, Nuala O'Loan, to bring forward any evidence. While there seems no reason to assume that she is making this up it might turn out the scale or extent of the police involvement is over exaggerated. Until formal charges are brought these accusations should be considered somewhat suspect.

Secondly, it isn't quite as revelatory as is made out. Matthew Teague's article from early last year for the Atlantic highlighted the security services turning a blind eye to Republican informers. Unfortunately the article is only available to Atlantic subscribers which is a shame as the entire thing is utterly brilliant, however, this section should serve to illustrate the point I'm making:

"Fulton knew the voice, and its owner: Scap, one of the IRA's most feared interrogators. Fulton had once helped prepare safe houses for such interrogations, and knew that sometimes Scap's subjects survived.
Sometimes not.

Colleagues called both men "hard bastards"—true IRA boys, mothered by terrorism. They killed for the cause, time and again. But British spies had infiltrated the IRA, spreading deceit and rumors of deceit. The IRA had turned against itself. Scap couldn't say for sure who fought on his side.

The interrogation dragged on for hours. Fulton remained outwardly calm, and denied everything. Inwardly, though, he felt sick. He'd been spying on the IRA for a decade and a half, and he knew that if Scap broke him—if he admitted anything—he'd be a dead man—own a hole," in IRA slang.

So throughout the interrogation, Fulton sat stone-faced, blindfolded, and facing the wall. Double blind. He held tight to his secret: yes, he was a British spy.

But then, so was his interrogator."

That article created a huge stir and involves a very similar 'turning a blind eye' by the security services but did not have the same impact in British politics. I guess its story of IRA moles was a little too embarrassing for the Sinn Fein to make a stink about.

We are responding to these revelations in a similar manner to the way we responded to Republican claims of a shoot-to-kill policy. When people call themselves an army at war with your state, blow up innocent members of your citizenry and run a steady guerrilla war against the soldiers you send in to keep the peace shooting at them with the intention of killing is an entirely legitimate response. Holding the security services to the same standard that is applied to those working in peacetime is to deny them the capacity they need to fight what is somewhere between regular police work and a war and is a recipe for losing. However, we were never willing to defend the SAS and other organisations accused of shooting to kill and accepted Sinn Fein's standard of how a counter-insurgency should be fought. We were, and apparently are, unwilling to accept that it might take moral sacrifices to beat terrorists.

An analogy would seem to be with what is known as turning state's evidence in the United States. A strategy used by every Western country when dealing with organised crime is to give reduced sentences or even immunity from prosecution to those who are willing and able to prove exceptionally useful to more important or more numerous criminal investigations than that they are subject to. Take the example of James "Dick" Liddil who was a bank robber and murderer but was given immunity from prosecution. Turning a blind eye to the crimes of informers is an almost identical sacrifice of justice to giving people reduced sentences for turning state's evidence which is accepted with regular organised crime, far less lethal than the IRA.

It is necessary for the simple reason that crime, and even killing, is what gives credibility in these organisations. Those who are not criminals have no status and, hence, don't have much to tell the intelligence services. For that reason fighting terrorism will require us to deal with criminals and if we do not we are likely to wind up denying justice to far more victims as we prove unable to gather evidence against the rest of the organisation.

This was hugely effective. Teague highlights how the IRA wound up riddled with informers and it was this combined with other security measures which brought them to the negotiating table. The final settlement was not substantially different to that on offer throughout the troubles and the main British cave during negotiations was to release prisoners who would not have been in jail but for the armed struggle. Equally, the idea that Adams and McGuinness are independently reformed characters stretches plausibility. British security services defeated the IRA and, as a result, we are all safer and Northern Ireland has a chance at a better future. It is worth paying quite a price for such a result.

Justice is served because those who inform the security services pay a huge personal price. Teague's article is, in part, the story of the massive risk of torture and death the IRA informants took. In return for helping the police they face a lifelong threat of a violent death at the hands of the Republicans and exile from their community. They have not gotten off lightly.

The debate over whether we are willing to accept sacrifices in justice in order to fight terrorism is important because we are facing a new terrorist threat and may need to make the kind of utilitarian calculations with justice that were made with respect to the IRA again. The Times coverage of the plot to behead a Muslim soldier correctly focussed on how similar this is to the IRA strategy of enforcing community loyalty. New plots are being discovered with such regularity that it appears the problem of Islamist violence will get worse before it gets better. At the moment it is still a rather informal movement of isolated lunatics but this is not necessarily the way it will stay. Particularly if the movement becomes more organised we might find it necessary to make sacrifices in our values, possibly different ones to those required in the struggle against the IRA, in order to protect security and ensure justice is, more broadly, done.

More is at stake as the IRA could, at most, have caused more deaths and us to abandon the Unionists to their fate. While this would have been a tragedy the Islamists have the will to cause, as demonstrated by 9/11 and 7/7, near unlimited destruction and, through crimes like the murder of Theo van Gogh or the threat to Salman Rushdie, attack our most precious values such as freedom of expression. They pose an existential threat to the West as a civilisation. While we should not sacrifice who we are we have to be prepared to do what is necessary to beat them. Balancing these priorities is a key challenge for twenty-first century Britain but striking that balance will require a more honest appraisal of what is, and has been, necessary to defeat terror.

Tranzis, the EU and More History

One of the most important ideas in conservatism today is the identification of transnational progressives as the new challenge to liberal democracy's preeminence as a universal philosophy; the next stage of history which refutes Fukuyama's prediction that there might be no new universal challenge. It's an idea which has been gaining speed for some time but is now becoming increasingly important as an identification of the internal threat to the Western community. It is the key socialist response to the failure of Communism and the challenge globalisation poses to European Social Democracy.

A few articles to read on the subject. Cosh Colby from Report Newsmagazine in October 2002 (I can't find an online version) has this description:

""Tranzi": it's the hottest new term of abuse since "nerd." If you ever had the uneasy feeling than UN officials, humanrights commissions, ecunemical groups, Amnesty International and Liberal cabinet ministers were reading from the same hidden songsheet, John Fonte's influential new paper, "The Ideological War Within the West" (written for the foreign affairs journal Orbis, but much-distributed online), is for you. He argues that liberal democracy has spawned an "alternative ideology" within the western world which he calls "transnational progessivism." The handy nickname appears to be the brainchild of English commentator David Carr.

To sum up a complicated portrait, a Tranzi basically thinks like this: the basic building blocks of society are not individual citizens or families, but ethnic and gender groups. In the name of "fairness," all such groups should be represented in all professions in proportion to their percentage of the populace. "Diversity" is the imperative for a Tranzi: institutions must reflect and act on the "world views" of minority groups, and the populace itself may be reshaped through immigration, to enhance diversity.

Tranzis praise democracy, but have a markedly new definition of it: to them, "democracy" is not majority rule but balanced power-sharing among minority groups. The nationstate is the Tranzi's great enemy: he is not afraid to alter the teaching of history, "deconstructing" national narratives, nor does he have much use for the concept of citizenship. In the Tranzi utopia, "global governance" will supplant the nation-state. Tranzis habitually talk of the United States as an illegitimate and thuggish regime; not coincidentally, it is the main obstacle to their ultimate goals."

This article from John Fonte is the original identification of the movement which Cosh refers to. It is a truly brilliant article and worth printing out and reading if you can make time. Here's his conclusion:

"Scholars, publicists, and many others in the Western world-and especially in the United States, original home of constitutional democracy-have for the past several decades been arguing furiously over the most fundamental political ideas. Talk of a “culture war,” however, is somewhat misleading, because the arguments over transnational vs. national citizenship, multiculturalism vs. assimilation, and global governance vs. national sovereignty are not simply cultural, but ideological and philosophical, in that they pose such Aristotelian questions as “What kind of government is best?” and “What is citizenship?” In America, there is an elemental argument about whether to preserve, improve, and transmit the American regime to future generations or to transform it into a new and different type of polity. In the terms of contemporary political science we are arguing about “regime maintenance” vs. “regime transformation.”

In the final analysis, the challenge from transnational progressivism to traditional
American concepts of citizenship, patriotism, assimilation, and at the most basic level, to the meaning of democracy itself, is fundamental. It is a challenge to American liberal democracy. If our system is based not on individual rights, but on group consciousness; not on equality of citizenship, but on group preferences for non-citizens (including illegal immigrants) and for certain categories of citizens; not on majority rule within constitutional limits, but on powersharing by different ethnic, racial, gender, and linguistic groups; not on constitutional law, but on transnational law; not on immigrants becoming Americans, but on migrants linked between transnational communities; then the regime will cease to be “constitutional,” “liberal,” “democratic,” and “American,” in the understood sense of those terms, but will become in reality a new hybrid system that is “post-constitutional,” “post-liberal,” “post-democratic,” and “post- American.”

This intracivilizational Western conflict between liberal democracy and transnational progressivism began in the mid to late twentieth century; it accelerated after the Cold War and should continue well into the twenty-first century. Indeed, from the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 until the attacks on the heart of the American republic on September 11, 2001, the transnational progressives were on the offensive.

Since September 11, however, the forces supporting the liberal-democratic nation state have rallied. Clearly, in the post-Sept. 11 milieu there is a window of opportunity for those who favor a reaffirmation of the traditional norms of liberal-democratic patriotism. The political will to seize this opportunity is unclear. Key areas to watch include official government policy statements for the use of force and the conduct of war; the use and non-use of international law; assimilation-immigration policy; border control; civic education in the public schools; and thestate of the patriotic narrative in popular culture."

John O'Sullivan's Gulliver's Travails from New Criterion in 2004 describes US relations with the transnational progressive institutions. This section is a good one:

"All that unilateralism amounted to in reality was the assertion that the United States would defend its vital interests in the last resort by force if it could not win the approval of the U.N. Security Council for doing so. That assertion rests on a combination of national sovereignty and the right of self-defense under the U.N. Charter. It would be endorsed by most U.N. member-states. And its modest logic was established in a BBC radio debate between Richard Perle, the foremost neoconservative strategist, and Baroness Shirley Williams, a moderate social democratic peer. Perle argued that the liberation of Iraq was either right or wrong. If Baroness Williams thought it was wrong, she should oppose it. If she thought it was right, why would she subordinate her opinion to a Chinese, Russian, or French veto in the Security Council? The only riposte to Perle’s question is that a statesman might subordinate one aim to gain a larger one. But that cannot be a reason for subordinating one’s national interest to a Chinese or Russian veto in principle. Of course, for the Tranzis such subordination is the point. They see it as the central principle of global governance and treat the mildest resistance to it as “unilateralism.”"

This section indicts the EU's role in pushing this postnational, postdemocratic vision of the future:

"In large measure the E.U. is a Tranzi project—though one still hobbled by scattered resistance from the voters and national governments. It has a missionary desire to export its distinctive postnational ideology to the rest of the world. It is increasingly driven by an ideological hostility to the United States as the classical liberal democratic alternative to its own post-democracy. And in particular it believes itself superior to the United States in dealing with premodern states and Islamist terrorism—preferring diplomacy to the war on terror and deferring to international bodies in principle."

Then this highlights why our continued membership is the best reason for hope and our staying out will not protect us from the rot. After highlighting that the Islamist threat to Europe will concentrate minds and hurt the transational progressive consensus in Europe he describes how the US might change the EU and what might happen if that fails:

"If that is to be accomplished conclusively, however, then the United States must also encourage those powers that share its distrust of postmodern structures—plainly Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, and less plainly the Baltic states and some East European countries—to seek more liberal constitutional arrangements within the E.U. Until now, it has consistently discouraged any such resistance to whatever was described by Brussels as “integration.” Even a modest version of such reforms in the E.U. would be a major setback for the Tranzis—their Grenada—and have knock-on effects on their other projects such as the International Criminal Court. And, of course, the mere fact that the E.U. and the U.S. were fighting the war on terror on more American terms would tend, as after September 11, to reduce Tranzi power and influence throughout Acronymia—just as the current Iraqi troubles have helped them. Gulliver would give some Yahoo energy to the overrefined Houyhnhnms of Europe—and maybe get some patience and subtlety in return. That in turn would speed the defeat of the Islamists.

If, however, Mr. Steyn is right in his pessimism—and that’s the way to bet—then the United States will face a difficult future as a military superpower continually frustrated in middling matters by the resistance of international bodies. Europe and America will divide into two separate civilizations—the Anglosphere (minus England, plus India) and the Holy Secular Empire—uncomfortably housing a growing Muslim minority. Even in America, liberal democracy will be gradually transformed into a politically correct judicial oligarchy on Tranzi lines. The political atmosphere of both sides of the Atlantic will obstruct and delay the inevitable defeat of Islamist terrorism. And Gulliver, undefeated and undefeatable, will nonetheless apply for entry into the new euthanasia program brought in following a Supreme Court decision that cited judicial opinions from the International Human Rights Court in Harare."

Here's a new reason not to leave the EU. We need to be the liberal democratic sword in Europe once again and fight to reform the EU into a democratic institution otherwise, eventually, the tranzis will come for us.

History and Nation, Continued

Gracchi and I's debate on the merits of historical nationalism continues. The question has separated into whether historical national pride can be justified and whether, if historical nationalism is a lie, it is a noble one.

Firstly, Gracchi argues that the "shared endeavour" which I suggested we were all a part of by virtue of our Englishness/Britishness (that I keep writing English then going to rewrite it says something about the weakness of British identity at the moment) does not exist. He points out that the objectives for and understanding of Britain would have been desperately different between Canute, Cromwell and Churchill and that they can hardly be described as labouring at a single, coherent project. This is obviously the case and "shared endeavour" was a somewhat unfortunate choice of words as it suggests a common purpose. However, while people might have had different ideas of what the purpose of England, or Britain as a successor state, might be there clearly has been a sense of being a part of the English 'team' since around the time of the Tudors when English identity first developed. As such, while I might think that Cromwell's vision for our nation is a poor one that does not mean that we are not both a part of that nation for exactly the same reason that Gordon Brown's different vision of Britain to mine does not mean we cannot both be British.

That nationalism provides a link between people with so little else in common illustrates its strength. This is why it can create common feeling which prevents those with irreconcilable political differences tearing each other apart. This is why it can provide a common identity for those from different ethnic backgrounds to unite around. I have almost nothing in common with Cromwell but that we are both English. That this matters to me, would have mattered to him and a majority of the rest of the population (leaving aside the question of the minority nationalisms) illustrates just how real it is. This common nationalistic myth connects me to those in other historical eras and that connection, in turn, allows me to be inspired and proud of their achievements; as well as wincing at their mistakes.

For Canute the case is somewhat more problematic as he is from a period before England was a nation in the modern sense but I still think that he has something of a stakeholder interest in the country as one of those who made a contribution, however minor, to its formation. I don't think this is the same as those, post the advent of English nationalism, who actually understood themselves as English/British but it is still a very real connection and makes him a part of the story of England and, therefore, a part of my historical inheritance.

On the second question of whether or not historical nationalism is a good idea I think Gracchi's notion of being nationalistic when it is necessary but recognising its irrationality to keep us from getting too enthusiastic the rest of the time is a little unrealistic. Nationalism competes with many other group loyalties, ethnicity, family, ideology, class and more, and it is a key part of running a successful state that you ensure that it can compete with these other loyalties. If national loyalty is outcompeted by ethnic loyalty you get racial bigotry, if by family you get nepotism, if by ideology you get political violence and if by class you make industrial compromise impossible. Loyalty to nation encourages people to compromise the interests of the other groups they are loyal to in the interests of the common national good. Of course, the counterpoint to this which, I expect, Gracchi will raise is that nationalism encourages international division but I would argue divided nations have, historically, been more dangerous to the international order than overly united ones. Even classic examples of nationalism gone mad are unconvincing as cases that excess national unity is dangerous, Fritz Stern in Einstein's German World discusses how Germany chose militarism and then fascism in response to a failure to establish a national unity.

However, note that peoples united around their nation are historically rare. If nationalism were such an easy thing to establish that it could be turned on and off like a light in the manner Gracchi describes that might be wonderful but it seems more plausible that, when we turn to people's national loyalty to encourage sacrifice and get us through hard times we will find it absent and that subgroups are out for themselves.

It would seem to me that giving people examples of where people from their nation have achieved in the past would strengthen their desire to identify with that nation. In that regard an understanding of Britain's historical achievements might contribute to nationalism winning out over less uniting group loyalties. This does not have to and should not be the exclusive purpose of history but teaching some history to this end seems deeply worthwhile.

Building a cohesive nation is one of the great challenges for any state and building pride in the nation is the way to do this. There is plenty to be proud of in British history and giving young Britons examples of things worth taking pride in is a fine thing to do in citizenship lessons. British achievements throughout history might inspire and unite a people who can fracture like so many others have.

In Defence of Richard Dawkins

Many conservatives in the States, and some over here, have a caricature of 'militant' atheists on the warpath which rouses the faithful but bears very little relationship to reality. This piece from Colby Cosh in the Canadian National Post is an excellent defence of atheism and Dawkins in particular.

"If it’s true that some form of religious faith is positively required for a satisfactory human life, then there is no need to oppose Richard Dawkins at all; any minute now, the professor is bound to see through the miserable shallowness of being a bestselling author, holding a chair at the world’s greatest university, and enjoying marital bliss with a beautiful television actress. In the meantime we are confronted with the spectacle of Dawkins and thousands of other unabashed atheists going about their business without becoming deranged by existential nausea. On the evidence, they seem to become more common, not less, as one ascends the ladders of income, education, or cognitive ability. Nothing much visibly distinguishes their behaviour or fate except a notable tendency toward smugness.

[...]

We also still encounter controversies like the one now going on in several Ontario municipalities, where secular groups have quarrelled continually with religious conservatives over the right to commence council meetings with public prayer. If prayer works, there should be no reason elected Christians cannot ask God’s blessing on their work in private. Evidently they’re not fighting for the right to pray, which no one proposes to deny them, but for the right to make a collective gesture of exclusion — to seek public sanction for the supremacy of religious faith and, by implication, the supremacy of believers. What has Richard Dawkins ever said or done that is uglier or more dangerous to social peace than this?"

The only real problem is his definition of atheist as anyone who doesn't require God to understand the world around them. He uses this to argue that many agnostics are, in fact, atheists but I'm not sure this actually accords with common usage of the two terms.

A World Civilisation or a Clash of Civilisations? Video of the Debate

A friend who used to blog but has too many important things to do these days pointed me towards this debate held recently by Ken Livingstone. The press chose not to give it much notice as it didn't quite turn out the way Livingstone hoped. Livingstone and Yaqoob got utterly owned. Douglas Murray, in particular, I've never seen before on this kind of form; incredibly impressive. It'll take you an hour and twenty minutes to watch it all but it is well worth the time. If you don't have time skip ahead to Murray's speech.

Ken Livingstone Part 1



The rest of the videos are after the jump to ensure that this doesn't slow the homepage too much.



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Ken Livingstone Part 2



Daniel Pipes Part 1



Daniel Pipes Part 2



Salma Yaqoob



Douglas Murray



Q & A Part 1



Q & A Part 2

Testing Splitting Posts

I'm just testing my ability to split posts up. Find out why after the jump...



Read More

...because I want to embed all eight YouTube videos which make up the Livingstone/Pipes/Yaqoob/Murray debate.

18 Doughty Street and the Taxpayers Alliance take on Tax

The first of 18 Doughty Street's new political adverts is online. The production values are good, it is reasonably amusing and it makes a solid attempt to confront the rapid expansion in the variety as well as quantity of tax. Its main value isn't really going to be in changing people's mind but in breaking the public consensus around a shift to a high tax economy. Tim did a good job of defending it on Newsnight.

What worries me is that, thanks to broadcast regulation, these adverts can only be distributed via the Internet and might not reach the mainstream audience which isn't decided on these issues; that the Internet may not have yet sufficiently matured as a mass political communication medium. I think we should be asking the question of why, exactly, this advert can't be placed on television. Issue driven television adverts might play a massive part in reenergising politics outside of the parties. While television is more expensive it is still the crucial medium in connecting with a broader public and I'm sure funding to place this advert could be found.

The one criticism I would make of this particular advert is that it doesn't bring out a serious argument at the end. A relatively lightweight, comedic presentation like this could use a statistic (perhaps one comparing changes in our tax levels to other countries) or two to make those who think the increases in tax we are seeing are moderate or unavoidable think again.

How important is the row over an exemption for Catholic adoption agencies?

I'm not sure this issue is quite as important as it is being made out to be. This is not really "the death of religious freedom in Britain".

There are many other areas in which we do not accept that religious freedom entails a right to discriminate in who you offer a public service to. This is similar to the case of the Muslim taxi-driver who refused to take a blind woman as a passenger because of her guide dog. Conservative anger at this case was based upon the idea that excluding someone from a public service on the basis of your religious convictions is to treat a fellow citizen unfairly.

Suppose a Muslim doctor did not want to treat a woman patient because he considered such contact unclean; it seems unlikely they would be allowed such an opt-out. Why is the freedom of Catholics to discriminate against gays in offering the public service of an adoption agency a more worthy cause?

The best argument against this would seem to be that adoption isn't really a public service but a private one. As adoption relies upon making judgements about the suitability of people to parent it must exclude vast swathes of the public. As this kind of decision making is central to running an adoption agency this is a service which must, by its very nature, discriminate between different prospective parents on some ground or another and it is right that Catholics are able to run an agency which discriminates on grounds which they think are proper. There is no serious argument that Catholic agencies are really harming the children they are charged with getting adopted and there are other agencies out there which take a different view of gays as parents.

However, note that this problem with the legislation now hinges on the rather thorny question of whether this is a public service or not. I think that makes it an excellent candidate for a free vote and that is what Cameron has given the parliamentary party.

Another reason I don't think that this issue is quite as important as it is made out is that it seems twinning with a secular agency would allow Catholics to continue to avoid working with prospective gay adopters. Is referring gays to your sister organisation which might then allow them to adopt really such a violation of Catholic principle?

I do think this legislation needs rethinking, however, I do not think that it is the death of or even a serious infringement upon religious freedom.

Victory!

I have won PragueTory's poll for the best young Conservative blogger. Huzzah!

Hard luck to the other, excellent, blogs nominated. A big thank you to those who voted for me; it is nice to win.

History and Nation

Gracchi has an excellent response to my piece on liberal guilt and history. He is a superb blogger, probably the best of the left wing blogosphere at the moment, and puts the case for cynicism of historical nationalism well but I shall, nevertheless, attempt to defend my hopeless, romantic pride and its transmission to new generations. Essentially, he argues that my vision of history giving modern Britons a sense of identity both underestimates and overestimates the role that the studying of history can play in our lives. Underestimating its capacity because I do not ask that history provides a subtle picture of the flawed characters who make up its central players. Overestimating its ability to provide a source of national identity.

We are, to a certain extent, arguing at crossed purposes as I do not seek that the national identity building history of Britain that I am calling for should act as a substitute to the broader study of history. Indeed one of the topics that I chose to study most during my degree was twentieth century economic history of the United Kingdom, hardly the proudest of periods. However, I do think that the study of important, formative, periods in British history can have a particular function in giving people a sense of where they come from and of pride in their nation particularly if combined with a broader study of history.

Gracchi contends that history's ability to build identity is questionable by posing the question of whether I can relate to Cromwell's crimes as well as his achievements. He quite sensibly points out the problems with my playing the eternal soccer fan crying "we won" when I played no part in the game. However, I think that he is taking a rather unfortunately materialistic view of the nature of nations. If our nation is merely one big nexus of social contracts then can we expect self-sacrifice in its name? Can we expect people to do more than pursue their narrow self interest within such a nation?

Nationalism motivates people to stand by their nation and fellow citizens by appealing to instincts of group loyalty hardwired into our nature. Even if we wished to avoid it we would likely only replace it with other loyalties such as the loyalties to extended family which it is thought impede democratic development in large parts of the Muslim world. There is a famous psychological study which found that, even if separated only by the modern artist they found most appealing, people still displayed significant loyalty to their group. Now, we can either have this national bond be based upon a heroic narrative, the sense of an old and grand project or a new and exciting one as in the States, or we can have it be based on something else; racial differences are a common substitute. It is a central conservative insight that working with the grain of human nature is far more productive than fighting it.

I do not think that, in order for history to contribute to this sense of nation it need be a caricature. Not Saussure is right to note that the Glorious Revolution is, like almost any historical event, divisive. However, some events like the Glorious Revolution are important as formative events and a knowledge of them helps us understand our nation's origin and place in the world. There are other events which might give us pride; there is plenty in the history of a nation as great as ours to celebrate even while acknowledging subtlety. For example, it is right and proper to acknowledge that there was hardship and sometimes cruelty in Britain's making of man's economic fortune in the Industrial Revolution but that does not obscure the importance of Britain's contribution to world prosperity. We do not require saints to inspire us; mighty achievements will do. Although not bound by blood or personality myself, Cromwell, Cnut and Churchill are all part of a great shared historical endeavour. If we can teach British children they are a part of that endeavour too they might show spirit worthy of such a heritage.

FDR was irresponsible wasn't he?

Clinton on Bush from Reuters:

"This was his decision to go to war, [...] we should expect him to extricate our country from this before he leaves office."

She justifies this by arguing that "he went with an ill-conceived plan, an incompetently executed strategy". This may be true but why exactly should wars, even if they are going badly, coincide with presidential terms? That would be a little convenient wouldn't it?

BBC Ban Little Green Footballs

Those looking to defend the blogosphere from censorship might want to refocus their energies from blocking a rumoured voluntary code for bloggers to attacking this example of the BBC shutting down any thread which links to the American blog Little Green Footballs. Go to the Little Green Footballs blog and see for yourself if there is anything which deserves to be banned from BBC news forums. It is discussing Islamism critically but what's wrong with that? Other than being a bit right-wing what has LGF done wrong?

The best explanation I've heard for this, from Dave, is that some of the comments on LGF will have attracted someone's ire and the BBC, as a public service broadcaster has to avoid even a distant association with racist opinions. However, every big blog or website attracts unpleasant comments, the Internet comes with crazies. If linking to them is too much of a risk to the BBCs moderation then it has no business running Internet discussion boards.

This appears to be another example of how free speech is increasingly under threat more from the threat of violence and self-censorship than direct state action.

Revealed Preferences in Venezuela

Experimental economics is usually treated with suspicion by mainstream economists because it relies upon behaviour in the artificial circumstances of the lab or upon survey data where people may not understand the question or how they might actually react in the situation they are asked to imagine.

That's why this statistic is interesting:
"Number of Venezuelans seeking asylum in the United States in 1997, the year before Hugo Chavez came to power? 9

Number of Venezuelans seeking asylum in the United States in 2004 and 2005? More than 2,000."

That's violations of people's liberty in action; that's a revealed preference to avoid the tyranny of Chavez. It's like the old retort to any socialist lunatic enough to argue Cubans have it better off than Americans "yeah, that's why all the Americans are trying to escape across the Gulf of Mexico on a floating door".

A More Plausible Surge

There are several reasons why the increase in troops and resources being committed to Afghanistan might prove more successful than the surge in Iraq.

Firstly, there aren't really any outside nations with an interest in an unstable Afghanistan. Whatever residual loyalty Pakistan might have felt towards the Taliban has to be pretty much gone after a long period of fighting in Pakistan's tribal areas.

Secondly, we know where the resources of the insurgents are coming from, the opium crop, and that makes it possible for us to attack the source of their funding. If we have sufficient resources we should be able to do this without creating too much ill-will. By contrast, in Iraq there is support from outside, Iran in particular, which is hard to stop without escalating the conflict.

Thirdly, the ethnic divisions in Afghanistan, while keenly felt, do not have the murderous anger which characterises those in Iraq. This is thanks to not having had a long period under the rule of one ethnic group as with the Sunni in Iraq. The Taliban were identified with the Pushtun but had not been in power for nearly so long and had built up a smaller legacy of the grievances and hatred that comes with autocratic, monoethnic, rule of a multiethnic state.

What the new plan is predicated on, correctly in my opinion, is that the crucial challenge will be establishing military authority and hurting the credibility of the Taliban by crushing their expected Spring offensive. As such, there is actually a defined mission for surge troops unlike the more general role envisioned for them in Iraq.

All of this suggests that we can make a success of Afghanistan and it would be a colossal achievement. This is a country with a population around the same size, a little larger according to the CIA World Factbook, as Iraq's, one whose population has suffered massively over the years and which provided a major base for international terror. This is no sideshow.

Are Citizenship Classes going to become Lessons in Liberal Guilt?

It sounds good doesn't it? More British History being taught in schools to give people a better idea of our collective history which might contribute to a shared national identity. Unfortunately, from looking at the subjects mentioned in the Guardian article, "the Commonwealth and empire, the slave trade and conflicts such as those in Northern Ireland", I doubt the result will be anything so positive.

Firstly, that list of subjects suggests that they've decided to avoid the challenge of trying to compose a history syllabus that might actually help children understand the broad sweep of British history. If that were the objective surely the Industrial Revolution would take central stage? The Glorious Revolution?

In fact, I would be interested in the results of a survey which attempted to gauge popular knowledge of the Glorious Revolution; I would guess that only a tiny minority have even heard of it. Despite this lack of awareness, I don't think any serious historian would argue it is less important to the British national identity than the conflict in Northern Ireland. The focus in the subjects chosen isn't on those which are important to understanding British national identity but on stories of past ethnic strife.

Bear in mind that the teaching of these events is unlikely to be balanced either. I, and many others, take the view that the practice of slavery was near universal throughout human history until the last two centuries and that Britain was distinctive in making a moral decision to abolish it. Whether or not you agree with this perspective it is unlikely to even be represented in the way the subject is taught in schools which will briefly mention Wilberforce but focus on enshrining slavery as an explanation for problems of the contemporary black community and another example of white evil. A choice of subjects which is biased towards examples of ethnic strife will be further biased by a left-wing teaching profession which sees these events as the result of a general white evil. The history of empire will be even more vulnerable to this bias.

Combine a focus upon periods of ethnic strife with the perspective that these problems are caused by white, Anglo-Saxon, evil and you have a recipe for lessons about how we should accept immigrants because of how awfully we mistreated their ancestors. Instead of trying to teach British national identity they're trying the old strategy of trying to guilt the white British population into playing nice; this is not a novel strategy and doesn't have the most impressive record of success.

An attempt to teach British children where their nation comes from, what it has achieved as well as where it has failed and the events that marked its formation, would be both noble and important. By giving people an understanding of what made Britain you might give them a better idea of a national identity they can unite around. However, how can national harmony be promoted by focussing unduly upon events characterised by ethnic conflict? Who would want to unite around a Britain whose achievements are the conflict in Northern Ireland, slavery and oppressing colonial peoples?

I expect it will take a Conservative government to recognise that it is a better knowledge of our achievements as well as our travails that can bind us together as a nation.

US Troops authorised to kill Iranian Operatives in Iraq

"In Iraq, U.S. troops now have the authority to target any member of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, as well as officers of its intelligence services believed to be working with Iraqi militias. The policy does not extend to Iranian civilians or diplomats. Though U.S. forces are not known to have used lethal force against any Iranian to date, Bush administration officials have been urging top military commanders to exercise the authority."

This may sound like common sense but the problem is that in any escalation of Iraq as a proxy war we stand a good chance of losing. The Iranians have more popular support and no troops directly in harms way. The idea that a few of their operatives getting shot will deter them is absurd but it might cause them to treat it more like a proxy war, at the moment it seems plausible they see their job largely as cementing the Shia advantage for a post-US involvement Iraq, which will make our job pacifying the country far harder.

Excellent Account of a Trip to the DMZ

There is an excellent account by Michael Jennings at Samizdata of his trip to the DMZ. It is a thoughtful and illuminating description of a place where a big military showdown, in the twentieth century style, is still going on.

It also contains a very sensible point about the possible costs of Korean unification:

"But that was it. As we drove back into and through South Korea, the English speaking guide had an informal chat with us, asking why we were in Korea and suggesting things that we might do in Seoul. We asked her about the South Korean attitude to possible reunification, and she told us that South Koreans generally did not want it. "Germany tried it, and they almost sent themselves bankrupt. We do not want that, although obviously we would prefer to have a normal, peaceful country to our north".

Personally, I am not sure that is the right interpretation of the German situation. Certainly, the implementation of German reunification has been disastrous, but I do not believe that this is a problem with reunification per se, as much as the way in which the Germans actually went about it. The advantage that East Germany should have had post-reunification was a cheaper and more flexible labour market than the west, although with lower productivity. By forcing western wages and the western welfare system on the east (and by spending lots of public money on infrastructure, which generally flowed back west because that was where the expertise to built it lay), the Germans created a system that looked generous in the short term (and which was horribly expensive for the west) but which in the long term only led to high unemployment and a business environment that no sane private sector company would choose to invest in. There is no reason whatsoever why Korean reunification would have to make the same mistakes. It would be a shame if the reaction to German mistakes was to swing so far in the opposite direction that entirely different mistakes were made."

The problem wasn't just the welfare state and wages but treating East German currency as of equal value to West German currency when the market exchange rate was massively different. This introduced an artificial Dutch disease in the East and meant, along with the factors Jennings points to, that the region had to be a burden. A better comparison to point the Koreans towards might be the reintegration of Eastern Europe into the European economy where liberal policy arrangements allowed the region to become an enormous success. One country, two systems, perhaps?

Henry Ford Democrats

Comment is Free carries a piece by Neil Clark attacking those who both espouse democracy and take issue with some, democratically elected, leaders. He likens this to Henry Ford's maxim that people could have his cars in any colour, so long as it was black (in reality the system ran batches of one colour for X number of cars).

This kind of democratic absolutism is massively ill-conceived. Imagine if we applied it to developed countries. Should the United States treat Britain and France exactly the same because it believes in democracy and both countries have democratically elected leaders?

The answer is clearly no. We do see it as preferable that people are allowed to elect their own leaders but these elections are choices and certain choices carry consequences. It is right that deciding to elect a party, like Hamas, which does not recognise the right of a neighbour to exist has consequences and it is right that we make those consequences clear.

Apply this to personal decisions. I believe in a person's right to gamble but I'm not going to compensate him for his losses. Protecting nations from the outcomes of their democratic choices takes positive liberty to a bizarre extreme.

Also, under the same "democracy is all" logic we should treat every non-democracy as a complete failure. Should we treat China like Myanmar, Pakistan like North Korea or modern Uganda like Uganda under Idi Amin? Probably not. Again, there are all sorts of things contributing to the question of how a state is good or bad that are not captured in democratic or not democratic and which should affect our policy response.

Democracy is, in principle, better than autocracy as it involves greater accountability, includes more people in decision making giving them a greater say over the conditions in which they live their lives and is less reliant upon the almost random choice of leaders chosen through heredity or through a military competition. However, that does not mean that the only divide between a good and bad country is whether or not it is democratic. As democratic countries can be have good and bad leaders it remains in the interests of ourselves, those democratic countries themselves and the world that we do our best to ensure that the good wins out.

Komodo Dragon > The Virgin Mary

Whereas the Virgin Mary only immaculately conceived once a Komodo Dragon has apparently managed it for quintuplets. Five little Komodo-messiahs are now apparently in rude health in Chester zoo; two more eggs are expected to hatch soon to make seven.

They're going to have to play elimination rock, paper, scissors for son of God then the rest can be disciples. Good times.

What I don't understand is this:

"Flora, who is part of a European breeding programme, was confirmed as a virgin mother-to-be last year when genetic fingerprinting on three of her eggs that collapsed showed she was both the mother and the father. The eggs are not clones, but all their DNA comes from Flora."

Eh?

Who's the greatest young(ish) Conservative blogger of them all?

PragueTory alerts me to a poll he is holding for the best young Conservative blogger. At twenty-three I still fit within this category thanks to the rather generous Tory intepretation of "young" and I am nominated. Go to his site and vote for me; it doesn't take a second and I'm clearly the best. Ha!

6 Weird Things About Me

I've been tagged by Jackart with a meme. It does what it says on the tin. Here goes:

1. Memoirs of a Geisha makes me think about Nietzsche.

2. I get inordinately frustrated by people who do anything but watch quietly during films, whether at the cinema or at home.

3. Every year I celebrate my birthday with close friends at an event called Mattmas which is a combination of a birthday party and Christmas Day held around December 10th (my birthday) but with a Christmas tree, turkey etc. It's sacrilicious.

4. I think Gladiator was a bad film. Really bad. On the other hand I think Kingdom of Heaven was utterly brilliant if, in some ways, flawed.

5. I have my own, real-life, catchphrases which get into the head of friends and then confuse strangers. A longstanding example is referring to everyone as "genius"; it works both affectionately and sarcastically and I can make it amusingly hard to tell the difference. I'd share more examples but they'll sound really strange, in person I can make the whole process somewhat verbally elegant.

6. I miss the Royal Festival Hall and regularly pine for its return despite only having gone there perhaps a dozen times.

I'll pass this one on to Dave Cole, Gracchii and Mr. Eugenides.

The Last King of Scotland

The Last King of Scotland is one of those rare films that isn't really very good but manages to avoid corrupting an absolutely magnificent central performance; this time from Forest Whitaker. Most of the film is a pretty clichéd tale of a young European being at first entranced then horrified by the contradictions of Africa. This story has been done many times before and much more convincingly. Equally, there is nothing terribly impressive about the artistic vision at work.

Equally, it is questionable whether the plot does its best to showcase Amin. It misses some of the more obvious events which might showcase the character; holding a press conference to rebut claims that he was a cannibal and feeding the assembled journalists people without their knowledge, for example. It also should have shown the rescue at Entebbe as the actual raid and Amin's response would have provided the film with important catharsis.

Still, Whitaker exudes such thorough and convincing instability and menace that he must surely be the favourite for the Oscar. He completely fills every room he is in. He actually makes the subservience of those around him credible which would seem the great challenge of playing a truly murderous dictator. I'm going to see Venus to confirm that Peter O'Toole hasn't done something marvellous to stop Whitaker deserving the prize but in any normal year it would clearly be his. Certainly DiCaprio for example, though an excellent actor, isn't in the same league in the role he is nominated for in The Departed.

First they came for the bloggers?

The ThunderDragon is promoting the UK Daily Pundit's e-petition to protect the blogosphere from censorship. I think that perhaps we overestimate our own importance. First, in terms of 'threat to the establishment' I'd think that Private Eye eclipses even Guido by such a distance as to make the blogosphere hardly worth the trouble of particular attention. Second, in a broader sense given that the British system is liberal enough to not "control the free flow of information, ideas and grassroots campaigns" offline why should we expect it to do so online?

Of course, the answer I'll get is that the voluntary code of conduct being proposed by the Press Complaints Commission is the start of a slippery slope towards censorship; "In November of last year the Press Complaints Commission called for a voluntary code of conduct covering blogs. This would undoubtedly be the first in a number of measures". Why exactly?

This is a particularly nebulous slippery slope because the PCC code of conduct has contributed to print journalism avoiding overly censorious government regulation by providing a less draconian means of restraint. The logic behind the argument that any call for restraint leads inexorably to control would seem to imply that the Euston manifesto was the first step towards the imprisonment of any socialist arguing for the appeasement of Islamism.

As the proposed code is voluntary it can't be enforced upon those who do not sign it. There is no reason to believe that we are more likely to get draconian control of blogging with it than without it. I might not sign up to the voluntary code but responding to it with petitions claiming free speech is fundamentally under attack is just melodramatic.

Labour let down the Armed Forces

Conservative Home links to a story in the Telegraph that UK defence spending is at its lowest level, as a proportion of national income, since 1930. This is an awesome failure of a Labour government which argues that Britain should remain a "war-fighting power" and which has deployed our military abroad liberally throughout its time in office. Those who give Blair credit for reconciling the Labour party to a robust foreign policy should note that military operations which are conducted without proper financial provision undermine the case for military action in future crises by giving the public the perception that Britain is not up to the task of war-fighting.

It is also an indictment of Brown's strategic vision which should cast doubt upon his suitability to become Prime Minister. That, while the other services have wasted large chunks of their huge influx of cash, the military has been forced to achieve so much without proper resources suggests that Brown was blindly following the Old Labour preference for welfare state services over security rather than attempting a more open-minded analysis which would have suggested that British foreign policy makes a substantial investment in our armed forces an absolute imperative.

Children and the Niqab

Mehrabian's classic study argued that in many common conversations 55% of communication is through body language; facial expression is by far the most important form of body language. Think about how much it would harm someone's interests to excise their vocal chords; wearing the Niqab has a similar effect on someone's ability to conduct social conversation although it is probably less significant in technical discussion. The importance of facial expression is illustrated by the incredible difficulties burn victims who lose the ability to smile face; it is instantly massively harder to set people at their ease or tell anything approaching a good joke and their relationships often suffer tragically.

Now, as adults people have a certain liberty to hurt their own interests in this way. Most of the harm to someone wearing the Niqab will be felt by themselves so there is little public good case to justify state intervention although Jack Straw was right to note that it undoubtedly harms race relations and others were right to argue that it was a very serious abuse of those pressured to wear it. However, the idea that a fourteen year old is able to make this choice is absurd and it is clearly a decision made by her parents. Now, while parental choice and authority is important we do take steps, such as the imposition of formal education, in order to ensure that parents cannot make their children unable to interact in mainstream society.

Iain Dale reported on Saturday that a School in Buckinghamshire is to face a legal challenge to its decision to prevent a student wearing the Niqab to school in contravention of its uniform policy. Iain focussed, in his article, upon the importance to discipline of the school's uniform being maintained but I think that it is, perhaps, more important that we defend this child's chance to grow up able to engage with those around her. While a ban on children wearing the Niqab might be too controversial not allowing it in school seems a fine way of ensuring that the child does at least have experience, and develops confidence, in engaging with those around her without the profound separation of hiding away her smile.

Will Hutton on the Chinese Satellite-Killer

This article is a lot more sensible, no great achievement, than his piece on Mao and focusses its analysis of the effects of the satellite-killer correctly upon the struggle over Taiwan. However, there is a lot of missing or flawed analysis and he sees the satellite-killer in purely military on military terms missing the deterrent effect which I think might be more important.

"China is the second largest military power in the world; it spends more than Britain, Germany and France combined. And the spending is very targeted. China is building up the arsenal it would need to invade Taiwan and hold off an attempt by the Americans and Japanese to relieve it, igniting one of the world's great flash points. No other explanation is possible."

Firstly, that statement about the military budget relative to the European powers is very contentious and based upon a Department of Defense estimate that has been challenged by a RAND study which suggests that Chinese military spending is still lower than that of the United Kingdom alone. In a broader analysis it should be remembered that it is still not even remotely close to US spending.

Secondly, the risks to China of a war are such, a broader war with the exceptionally well armed US and Japan, that the provisions it is making for a war are best understood not as a systematic plan aimed at recovering Taiwan but as contingency planning and deterrence building. It needs to do everything it can to both keep its options open in case of a crisis such as a Taiwanese declaration of independence and make its military threat such that the Taiwanese don't do so.

The next couple of paragraphs are an account of the fact that China these days is more nationalistic than communist and that Taiwan has great symbolic and political importance. All this is entirely sensible.

"But time is running out. Within Taiwan the use of the local Minnan dialect has soared, displacing Mandarin. Only 3 per cent of Taiwanese now support any form of re-unification. Since 2000 the Democratic Progressive party, pledged to a fully-fledged independent Taiwanese state, has won two presidential elections. Beijing is increasingly concerned that the possibility of recovering of Taiwan is slipping away."

The importance of the Minnan dialect reemerging is easy to overstate. Most Chinese regions have their own dialects and it would offer no obstacle to reintegration into a unified state. All it really indicates is a desire, on the part of the Taiwanese, to emphasise their own identity but this is unsurprising with a military threat from the mainland.

"An invasion would be high-risk. There is only operational airspace over Taiwan for 300 fourth-generation fighters; Taiwan has 300. It would take 1,000 landing craft up to a fortnight to move 30 infantry divisions across the Taiwan Strait - all the time exposed to American and Japanese retaliation. But if the US's command and control satellite network could be knocked out, suddenly the risks would be dramatically reduced. On top, the US is increasingly focusing its military effort in the Middle East. All China needs is a fortnight."

This underestimates the military risk China would take with attacking Taiwan. The RAND study which offers the best analysis of how an invasion might play out highlights serious weaknesses in the Chinese plans, in particular a massive deficiency in pilot training, inferiority of its fighter aircraft compared to the USAF and a lack of sufficient landing craft which makes an invasion without complete air superiority close to impossible.

While US satellites being knocked out would cause serious damage to US awareness and communications it would not, I believe, stop them fighting; they still have radar and radios. Equally, the Middle East is a red herring in this discussion because the US only needs a small fraction of its, vastly superior, airforce to make a Chinese invasion close to impossible and the main shortage being created by the Middle Eastern struggle is in infantry.

As such, the satellite killers make a difference but not a critical one in terms of the military struggle. Their most important effect has to be in terms of affecting the US will to fight both by making the military struggle more difficult and threatening significant costs to the US civilian infrastructure in retaliation for any US bombing of the mainland if the Chinese start firing these missiles indiscriminately.

"China says it wants treaties - it claims to want a treaty to prevent the militarisation of space - while pursuing balance-of-power politics. It will block India and Japan winning seats on the UN Security Council, thereby guaranteeing the ongoing dysfunctionality of the UN. China is the rogue state par excellence, all the while claiming it is quite the opposite.

Its unintended ally is George W Bush. China can make its plea for international treaties knowing that the unilateralist US will refuse. Bush then plays Bismarkian politics in Asia, backing Japan - but with dwindling military power. Talk of building a defence mechanism against a Chinese attack on American satellites is for the birds; the expense, given Iraq, and technological complexity make it impossible.

The pass has been sold. China can do what it wants. If there is unrest within, the party will turn increasingly to nationalism and perhaps even war. It shows that every aspect of globalisation, from space to trade, has to be governed by international treaty and the rule of law. The US reaction to last week should not be a star-wars arms race, but to comprehend the new realities and to respond by multilateral engagement. It won't, so it is no longer scaremongering to warn of the small, but growing risk, of a devastating Asian war."

Any description of US military power as "dwindling" should raise alarm bells. The US army may have proved ineffective in post-war management in Iraq but its collosal firepower should not be underestimated and would be the important quality in a defence of Taiwan. What may be dwindling is the US willingness to fight wars in defence of Western interests and the credibility that it will do so.

Of course, satellite defence may well be pie in the sky thinking but given that the Chinese were attacking their own satellite, removing targetting difficulties, the missile might not be perfectly effective. A sensible response might well be just to built greater redudancy into the satellite network. I.e. build more satellites so that if some get knocked out the military capability survives.

The final paragraph is pure boilerplate. Multilateralism with what objective exactly if China is unwaveringly focussed on recovering Taiwan and we do not want to abandon the island to that fate?

This whole casting of the problem as one of careful Bismarkian manoevring seems flawed to me. The CCP, at the moment, is focussed on growth rather than national glory because it can deliver breackneck growth and, while it does, its people will put demands for administrative reform on the back burner. However, the problem comes when this growth slows or stops and when China is tempted to look to nationalistic fervour to ensure its legitimacy. The danger isn't China's leaders imitating Bismark; the danger is that they will imitate Galtieri. The best response appears clear, to make it obvious, in a way it was not to Galtieri, that if Taiwan is attacked the Western alliance will fight.