Ealing Southall's third-place failure

So the Conservatives came third in Ealing Southall. This is being interpreted as a failure. It is a failure, true, but not as big a one as it feels.

I blame the bloggers. They hyped our chances to an absurdly optimistic level. (If the BBC did too it's only because they were following the bloggers.)

It was obvious from the start we weren't going to win: Sikhs only made up 20ish percent of the electorate. All the defectors were Sikhs. Even if we got 80% of the Sikh vote, which was unlikely, we'd be no-where near winning (or coming second!). And becoming the "Sikh party" is a stupid idea where the Sikhs are a clear minority in a constituency where, after blind Labour loyalty, religion is the next biggest cleavage.

All of the defecting councillors were effectively saying: "Labour didn't favour me so I'm going to go off to the opposition". That was also seemingly Tony Lit's thinking. They didn't care a bit about policy or ideology. And nor do the electorate. To David Cameron's credit, he probably recognised this and thought he'd play to it with focus on personality (not just his, but Mr Lit's).

CCHQ was second-rate in its due diligence. It should have known about the Labour donations, and if it decided they still wanted Mr Lit, wooing him should have been played as a major defection from Labour. That could even have worked to our advantage.

In sum: a disaster all round: for CCHQ, for Mr Lit, Mr Cameron, the councillors, bloggers, the Conservatives' reputation. This was more like a student election than one to Parliament.

We on the right often say that Labour believe their own spin. In this case, we believed our own spin.

We're all going to get sent to Climate Camp...

...if we don't sign up to big new taxes on hard-up manufacturing industry and good old family holidays.

I saw this flyer at the Prince Charles cinema off London's Leicester Square; at first I thought it was a macabre joke:

Looking at the reverse it appears it is a protest against Heathrow expansion:

All these moralistic attacks on flying can't be justified even under the analysis of a 'green' like Stern. As Fraser Nelson noted on the Spectator's CoffeeHouse blog yesterday:

"If anyone is thinking of cancelling a trip to a developing country where livelihoods depend on tourism, can I put into perspective the impact of air travel with some other polluters identified on page 199 of the Stern Review.

World Greenhouse Gas Emissions (from World Resources Institute)

Road transport 9.9%.
Agriculture soils 6.0%
Livestock (ie, bovine flatulence or farting and burping cows) & manure 5.1%
Cement 3.8%
Rail and ship and “other” transport 2.3%
Landfills 2.0%
Air transport 1.6%
Rice cultivation 1.5%
Food & tobacco 1.0%"

Cross-posted from the TaxPayers' Alliance blog.

Badger Warfare

Apologies if everyone saw this last Tuesday but I missed it first time round:

"UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer said: "We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.""

Bloody brilliant. It is, indeed, a crazy world.

Littlejohn

A report I wrote on green jobs in local councils was featured by the Telegraph on Sunday and is the subject of the Littlejohn column today:

"In Tower Hamlets, the poorest borough in London and arguably the most deprived in Britain, 58 employees have job titles which contain the words 'climate change' or 'global warming'. Tower Hamlets still has the worst recycling record in the country, as well as some of the Nottingham has 22 staff dedicated to dealing with 'issues around global warming'. The city also boasts 70 'green champions'. We're not talking Robin Hood and his Merry Men here."

I finally got around to watching Littlejohn's anti-semitism documentary that myself and Mr. Eugenides were defending against Greenstein's lame attacks the other day. It's actually very good. A calm and dignified look at a serious problem.

Also, I do know what Littlejohn means about being asked "are you Jewish" when something anti-semitic angers you. I was asked that question when I sounded off about the UCU boycott proposal. I'm not Jewish but find the idea that I must be to find prejudice like the UCU boycott alarming genuinely disconcerting.

Pakistan slides further towards anarchy

Today the Telegraph reports a growing number of attacks in Pakistan's border regions. This is very worrying. It suggests a growing loss of government control. If this goes too far the attacks will start to spread across the country. It is at that stage, when the government is no longer able to guarantee people's security in the heartland as well as the chaotic border regions, that the threat of an Islamist revolution, promising stability, proving successful becomes very real.

If that happens all hell breaks loose. Pakistanis face the dismal future of a people under Islamist rule. The Christian minority face the prospect of truly horrific abuse. The security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons becomes far less certain. Relations with India take a serious hit. The British-Pakistani community becomes even more radicalised. In short: all hell breaks loose.

The army isn't done yet and things still could turn out alright but there is no doubting that things are currently going very wrong.

Beyond Blunderdome

The TaxPayers' Alliance has published a report looking at public sector capital projects that go over budget. The first general examination of the record of government major projects. The total amount is pretty staggering, £23 billion. This creates massive problems for proper decision making, as the decision to undertake these projects has been made on innaccurate assumptions about the final balance of costs and benefits. It also represents huge amounts of waste. Well worth a look.

Greenstein on Littlejohn

Mr. Eugenides reminds us why we don't need Comment is Free Watch. A brilliant response to the one actual fact in Greenstein's piece, his argument that levels of anti-semitic violence are overstated in Littlejohn's documentary. Mr. Eugenides shows that argument to be false.

The rest of Greenstein's article is even worse. An unappealing mess of pointless ad hominems, suspect assertions and half-arguments:

He seems to suggest one should oppose Israel's existence because 75% of Israelis are ill-disposed towards Arabs. Why exactly do most Israelis feel hatred and fear when they hear Arabic? I'd suggest repeated attempts to wipe out their state has something to do with it. Even if it is pure racism is that a reason to oppose Israel's existence? My guess is that most Saudis would be displeased with the arrival of Jewish neighbours.

Why does America's support for Afghan fighters against the Soviet Union make them responsible for what a small portion of that movement later became? Osama bin Laden is an exception, there were more old Mujahideen in the Northern Alliance than the Taleban. Those morally responsible for the actions of Al Qaeda and the Taleban are Al Qaeda and the Taleban but in terms of outside support for those movements look to the Pakistanis, the Saudis and other Muslim states.

This paragraph is a stunning non-sequitur:

"Muslims are seen as backward and reactionary, rather than as people whose lands have been colonised."

Isn't there a difference between Muslims being colonised and Muslims losing their land thanks to trying to wipe out an immigrant population and then being defeated?

Why have territorial changes following the second world war created all the problems of the Muslim world while similar changes at a similar time in, for example, the Poland and Germany have not had the same effects?

Besides, most states are created by colonisation. How does Mr. Greenstein imagine the Turks wound up in Anatolia? Does his admirable desire to right historical wrongs extending to restoring Greek dominion over that territory?

Lee Rotherham for Mayor

Lee Rotherham's campaign video is really good:



I've nothing particularly against Steven Norris but I never really understood him to stand for anything in his multiple campaigns for mayor.

By contrast, Rotherham has a clear programme and some interesting ideas. Not talking about the congestion charge is a welcome move towards a broader and more interesting London politics.

Unfortunately, his programme is interesting enough to undermine his own case. It quickly becomes clear, watching Rotherham's video, that London mayoral politics could be great. Whereas I only had a sketchy idea of which region Letchworth is in till recently everyone who lives in London knows it. The city is a genuine historical and widely appreciated entity unlike dreamed up, soulless labels like East of England; which should never have been more than a compass direction. That means that if, for example, a conservative offered a really interesting law and order platform we could have a fascinating debate that might do wonderful things for London.

London's politics could start producing Giulianis instead of Livingstones. The case for scrapping that seems weak. Rotherham could be his own downfall.

New TaxPayers' Alliance Website

Today the new TaxPayers' Alliance website has gone live (if you get the old one you can wait for your DNS cache to clear or go here). I've played a pretty large part in its design and am rather proud of it. Please go and take a look. With it the 'Low Tax Coalition' link exchange has launched. It can be seen on the TPA homepage and this site's navigation bar. If you would like to join please e-mail and I'll get you added.

The Blairite Legacy on TCS Daily

An article of mine discussing the political nature of the Blairite legacy and its possible consequences has been posted on TCS Daily :

"The 'Blairite' political movement that Tony Blair has been associated with may need to be renamed but is unlikely to die."

Sinclair's Guide to Bollywood

The average Bollywood film isn't that great. There is a fundamental silliness to most of the genre. Fortunately a huge number of Bollywood films are made, enough that no matter how many standard deviations it takes there will be some gems. Those gems are worth finding.

Unfortunately, it is a difficult genre for the Western film enthusiast to engage with. Tartan Asia, Premier and East Asian cinema labels are very much aimed at a discerning Western audience and select films that will be of interest to the international/arthouse or martial arts markets. The two genres are pretty easy to distinguish by the cover art and title. By contrast, the market Eros and other importers of Bollywood films to the West are trying to capture is the large British Indian population. They are both closer to the average moviegoer, less interested in artistic quality, and often fans of Bollywood's silly side.

I am fortunate enough to have some good friends from the sub-continent who are introducing me to the best of Bollywood. I thought that others might benefit from a guide to what's out there. This post contains my impressions of what I've seen so far. All of these are on commercial release in the UK, I got them through LoveFilm.

Dil Chahta Hai

I'm told that this is within the top-end of Bollywood films but we watched it because it starts with the song a friend of mine graduated to. The songs are rare but done well. This is probably the weakest of the Bollywood films I've seen so far.

The plot appears to be lifted from an episode of Hollyoaks. Relationships with older women and faux emotional drama. There's not a lot to it.

Lagaan

Lagaan is actually hysterically funny and I think the comedy is largely intentional. It has more songs than the other films in this list, although pretty much every Bollywood film has musical moments, and they're good ones.

It is a tale of a village unable to pay their tax (lagaan) but being bet by an arrogant British officer that they cannot beat the British at cricket, a game the Indians have never played. If they win they will pay no tax, if they lose it is doubled. All of them, from crippled untouchables to Muslims, Sikhs and an enthusiastic man with a drum are found to have skills to contribute to the new team.

This is a fun film to watch with friends. Laugh and shout "Yeardley!" at each other.

Dor

Dor has an Iranian quality. It's a lot more modest in its visual style than most Bollywood films and I can't remember a single song. A story of two women whose husbands go to Saudi Arabia. One of the husbands dies and the other is falsely accused of his murder. The accused will only be spared if the widow agrees to grant clemency under the Sharia provision for victims justice.

The woman whose husband has died faces the grim and joyless fate of a young widow in India. A life expected to be spent in mourning serving the husband's parents. The other wife befriends her and the emotional climax of the film comes when she begs for mercy. It's an emotionally delicate film which connected me to a situation I really didn't know a lot about before. Well worth watching but not really Bollywood enough to work as an introduction to Indian cinema.

Rang de Basanti

The set-up is pretty innocuous. Young English woman heads out to India to make a film about fearless Indian revolutionaries she read about in her grandfather's journal. This sounds like a conventional anti-Imperialist story along the lines of Lagaan. She has little luck finding suitable actors but makes some good friends and decides that they're eminently suitable to represent the revolutionaries.

Her new friends cannot relate to their characters. They are cynical about India's future and cannot understand the ideological drive and nationalistic self-sacrifice of the revolutionary heroes. However, playing the parts affects them all and they gradually become more and more impassioned to make a difference. This comes to a head when the fiancé of the female member of the group is killed when his plane crashes. The crash is thought to be down to corruption, officials cutting corners and pocketing the cash.

Here the affairs of the young people in modern India begin to mimic the stories of the pre-independence revolutionaries. This is when the story becomes truly astonishing. I'll try not to spoil it for you but suffice to say that after a while I was wondering how it managed to get into cinemas at all. It becomes a direct call for the assassination of government ministers. It does this in the innocuous style of Bollywood which creates an amazingly dissonant experience.

Bombay



This is one of the best films ever made anywhere. It charts the experiences of a, rare enough to be remarkable, interfaith couple who have moved from a small town to Bombay to escape the judgements of small-town gossip and parental feuding. They are an endearing couple and the early years of their life in Bombay are enchanting. Only a Michael Jackson inspired song and dance sequence ruins the atmosphere a little.

However, after a while things start to go wrong. They're caught in the path of the Bombay riots of the early nineties which echoed partition in the Muslim-Hindu division of the city that emerged afterwards and the ferocity of the violence, 900 people died. The depth of the emotion on display is staggering and genuinely affecting. It's a long time since I've felt so desperate for characters in a film to emerge safe and sound from the carnage.

The film ends on a call for a reconciliation and inter-faith national unity. An imagined coming together of the community and rejection of violence. Sadly this appears to be a creation of the film as the riots were followed just a year later by the Bombay Bombings, in which another 250 people were killed. In a way that makes the film even more touching; it keeps on hoping in spite of the horrors it reveals to us.

If you want to see what Bollywood can do at its best, just how affecting the impressionistic form can be, watch Bombay. Utterly brilliant.

Miller & Kanazawa on Human Nature

Some time ago the LSE far-left declared ideological war on Satoshi Kanazawa without reading his work and I came to his defence. Now, a piece in "Psychology Today" provides more examples of his taste for counterintuitive and politically incorrect topics.

If you want to know how evolutionary biology can explain suicide bombings, why monogamy is good for men but polygyny good for women, why having sons reduces the chance of a divorce and the point of the midlife crisis you can find out here.

Inland Empire

Gracchi argues that Inland Empire is a fine showcase of what the symphonic (plotless) form of film-making is capable of. Apparently, among other things:

"Never 'til this film had [Gracchi] seen a prostitute's life in all its tawdry terror displayed so accurately.

[...]

In Inland Empire the tapestry works and in some strange sense you emerge with a sense of wonder at the cinematic craft, horror at the life of the prostitute, and some vague questions about dark continents within the soul- of desire, truth and perception- continents whose baleful power has haunted the imagination of the West- over which the ignorant armies of human perception clash by night!"

My experience of Inland Empire was rather different. I spent at least half the film wishing, in a deeply heart-felt manner, that it would end.

It would seem to me that for a symphonic film to work it has to work far harder than a regular film at engaging you with its emotional substance. It lacks the crutch of a plot that you can be enthralled by or interested in and has to go entirely on emotional impact. With that in mind Inland Empire just didn't seem sufficiently communicative.

Films have, over the years, engaged me with Generals, Mad-Scientists, a time-travellers in conversation with a warped rabbit, giant apes, Mexican gunfighters, gangsters, geishas, ancient heros, Korean slaves turned to warriors, elves, orcs, arms dealers, Mobile Infantrymen, victims of genocide, a grieving father attempting to do the right thing in an infertile world, kings, a man without the ability to form new memories and a host of others. Few of these are exactly close to my own circumstances. The better films have generally been the ones that have best engaged me with the emotional experiences of their characters. In doing so they can provide me with insight into the human condition and provide a more genuine escape than any explosive action-thriller.

I never felt engaged with the inhabitants of Inland Empire (the word character seems ill-fitting). I felt vaguely horrified at times and disgusted throughout the film. Maybe that's what Gracchi is talking about. It seems plausible that the life of a prostitute is horrifying at times and generally disgusting. However, spending three hours in unmitigated contact with that is too much. There have to be other sides to the prostitutes themselves. Certainly there is another side to the life of a Hollywood film star. Engaging with nothing but the dismal results in a dismal film.

Grade and hyper-inflation

This post I wrote for the TaxPayers' Alliance blog makes what is, in my humble opinion, a pretty clever argument. Drawing parallels between solutions to currency hyperinflation and grade inflation.

Business leaders and politics

Chris Dillow asks why business leaders rarely make a successful transition to politics. He offers a few explanations. Firstly, that they just got lucky in their business career. This is counterintuitive and I'm not sure why we should believe it to be true across business although it is clearly credible in financial management. Secondly, that they need an absence of media scrutiny to do their jobs properly. I'm not sure this fits with the realities of modern business where a major position comes with a huge amount of media attention. Finally, the possibility that business success is based upon instincts which cannot be used in politics where you need to be able to explain why a decision is being taken more convincingly. This might be true for smaller businesses where it is more often possible for someone to create success through their will alone but in large corporations a leader will need to bring the staff with them.

I think the real explanation can be seen with another look at the Buffet quote Chris uses:

"When a management team with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."

The economics of the businesses where corporate captains such as Archie Norman succeed are good. They are running organisations well suited to their task, or at least sufficiently well suited to create success. The economics of the big, politically managed state are bad. New leadership won't change things unless that leadership is willing to change the structure. One can question whether business leaders would be willing to change the structure of government in a way that career politicians have not been. However, the question is largely theoretical. Business leaders have never been given an oppotunity to fundamentally change the structure of government.

Happiness and meaning

Ruthie muses:

"I've just realized (out of the blue) that that would no longer be my wish. I'd wish for wisdom. I would wish to know the truth— the absolute truth— about everything I've ever wondered.

Sometimes ignorance is bliss. Truth can hurt.

But it's just occurred to me that I'd rather live meaningfully than happily."

The most complete enthusiast for happiness in modern politics is Lord Layard. He works from the assumption of a utilitarianism particularly focussed on the sensory experience of satisfaction as revealed by "happiness surveys" (that he puts far too much faith in). There are massive flaws with his political agenda even if one does wish to maximise happiness which I won't go into here. Instead, let's consider the more fundamental question of whether if we knew how to make everyone happy, perhaps because a genie offered to make it that way, we would be right to do so.

It is a struggle to name a more obviously important novel than A Brave New World, although Rasselas is a candidate. It has to be the start of a critique of the strong-form utilitarianism that Layard espouses.

The book isn't a direct intellectual case against utilitarianism. It paints a picture of the utilitarian society at its most successful: Everyone is happy with their place. Intoxication and license provide sensory pleasure. The deeper feeling that can drive us to a mellow distraction has been minimised and eliminated where possible. Under the kind of analysis that Layard employs it would have to be seen as a triumph. In any comparison of happiness surveys the London of A Brave New World would undoubtedly emerge triumphant as its inhabitants enjoy what Christopher Hitchens has described as "a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus."

However, it is a deeply pointless society. Happiness is a superficial emotion. It is generally a satisfaction with the condition a person finds themselves in which can either be created by good conditions or low expectations. Layard focusses primarily on combatting inequality such that high expectations, which most will be unable to meet, are not created. It is the case for not wanting anything that you do not have, and may not be able to achieve.

This is intrinsically a manifesto for pointlessness. If you take Layard's logic properly to its conclusions not just inequalities in wealth would need to be tackled. All status competition creates pressures and unhappinesses in the vast majority who never reach a given pinnacle. After all, I do not wish to be Damon Buffini, for all the private equity magnate's wealth. I have other standards to which I hold myself. Money is a fine thing to have but my dreams are rarely of fabulous wealth. There are people who have inspired me and set an awe-inspiring standard for my behaviour and achievements. Others who, in my less noble moments, I envy. When I compare my lot to theirs I rarely think of their wealth but of other achievements. A much deeper and sadder equality than a uniformity of wealth would need to be created for us to see the end of the stresses of status competition.

It is easy for Layard to attack the impulse to emulate those of greater material wealth; he can appeal to old prejudices that seeking wealth is a grubby and disreputable practice. However, one of my aspirations is to fight great political battles. I am envious of those who have lived and triumphed in momentous days. I hope to emulate them one day. This will undoubtedly mean that I work harder, have less of the leisure time Layard is so keen for people to maintain (what free time I have will often be spent doing more political things such as blogging) and am more stressed and discontented from time to time than if I had no such driving objective. Would a happiness with my place make me a better person, would it be better if I were that way? I don't think so and I don't think I'm alone in taking that conclusion. Having a reach within your grasp is a sad fate.

My challenge to Ruthie would have to be: Does she really want to know everything? Couldn't perfect knowledge rob her life of meaning, particularly as a journalist, just as surely as perfect happiness?

I think enlightenment is the moment you rub a lamp, discover a genie and are offered wishes but then turn them down entirely without regret. Not because your life is one of idle contentment but because you both accept and love your struggle.

That enlightenment would seem to lead to a deeper happiness than the satisfaction that utilitarians seek. It is a spiritual rather than a material condition. It is not somewhere that others can take us but an ideal we have to find in ourselves.

Des Browne's new job

This, from WebCameron, is a very good point about Des Browne and his new position:

"First, how can the PM make the Defence secretary carry out the responsibilities of Scottish Secretary as well? We have troops in action in Iraq and Afghanistan and a vital need to deal with welfare issues for forces families and tackle overstretch. If ever there was a need for a totally committed cabinet minister, this is it. After the Iran hostages shambles, it is not clear that Des Browne is up to one job, let alone two."

The existence of the Scottish parliament does make the Scottish Secretary's job a lot smaller. There is a case for combining it with another brief so that it can justify remaining in the Cabinet. However, that is the case for combining it with another small portfolio like the Duchy of Lancaster. An imaginative PM could combine it with the post of Welsh Secretary to create a sort of "Celtic Fringe Affairs" or "Devolved Assemblies Liaison" ministry.

However, Defence clearly needs a huge amount of work in terms of fighting waste (more bureaucrats than troops), doing some new thinking about procurement and ensuring that our forces are properly equipped and prepared for the huge strains they are under. It is just about the last job you would want to see diluted through combination with another portfolio.

The TaxPayers' Alliance Guide to the New Cabinet

The TaxPayers' Alliance Guide to the New Cabinet has been released this morning. A decade spent attempting to improve public services with huge amounts of new spending instead of genuine reform has left dismal failures on the record of every one of them.

The New Cabinet

The announcement of the Cabinet today hardly lived up to it's government of all talents billing did it? Maybe I'm just blinkered but they look like Brownite old hands of rather dubious quality to me. Two points:

1) Jacqui Smith and David Miliband are now responsible for our security. They are the ones who are supposed to stop our enemies killing us and defend our interests abroad. If I were Osama bin Laden or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad I think there are Finnish Eurovision entries that would scare me more than our new foreign and domestic security team. I mean, listen to David Miliband:

"He pledged a "diplomacy that is patient as well as purposeful, which listens as well as leads"."

I'm not saying that when I heard Gordon Brown call for a government of all talents I was thinking "Genghis Khan would strike fear into our enemies". However, both Home and Foreign Secretaries should have at least a mild ruthless streak. It's a credibility thing.

2) The best way to progress in modern government is to secure a post in which the objectives are fuzzy and imprecise. David Miliband did well out of a DEFRA brief where if you screwed up it wouldn’t be too obvious. Mistakes like the EU Emissions Trading scheme which operates as a subsidy from our industries and hospitals to the industries of less ‘green’ nations are the kind of errors that the public don’t get worked up about. You can be high-minded and 'principled' without too much risk of the crummy state of public services becoming apparent and making a mess of your career plans.

By contrast, the Home Office is the worst department to be assigned. Underperforming schools produce students without the literacy required to complain. The victims of a lethal healthcare service are quiet as the grave. By the time the rest of us notice you can move, Johnson-like, on to another brief. In contrast, criminals who are let out of jail too early thanks to a perennial failure to build enough new prisons make their presence uncomfortably obvious with new criminal sprees.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office is a fine brief for a Conservative but an awful one for a Labour MP. The reason for this is simple: Conservatives tend to think that British power is a benign influence on the world so they respect those who exercise it. By contrast, Labourites usually see Western and British power as deeply malign and are, at best, suspicious of whoever is asked to be its human face.

That's why, unlike most commentators I think the person who did best out of this reshuffle was Hillary Benn. He has spent some time in International Development which is close to the perfect place for building a reputation as caring and thoughtful. Now, in the Environment brief, he can set himself up as a green messiah. In fact, if I were a betting man I would, tomorrow, go and lay a bet on Hillary Benn being the next Labour leader.

Jacqui Smith, by contrast, is evidently expendable. Another bet I might be tempted to make is that she resigns within twenty-four months. Miliband would be unlucky to do that badly, however, there are now a host of ways his prospects of becoming Prime Minister could be irreparably damaged.

The American Scene Returns

The American Scene used to be, in my opinion, the best US blog. It has now returned without Ross Douthat but with about half a dozen new writers to replace him and make it a proper hyperactive group blog. Well worth keeping an eye on.

Analysis and Facts

Gracchi's article on facts and analysis makes a simple but possibly important point. That reporting without sufficient analysis can be just as troubling as analysis without good grounds. I worry that he makes exactly the mistake, of noting a fact but not analysing what it means, that he cautions against:

"[More] Palestinians than Israelis have been killed over the last five years. [That fact doesn't] excuse but [does] help explain what has happened and why a peace process is necessary-"

The relevance of that fact isn't explained. Gracchi, a very careful and usually comprehensive thinker, has felt it appropriate to trust that fact's importance, and its contribution to the case for a peace process, is self-explanatory.

The old logic used to be that might was right. This was rationalised in all manner of ways. In the Arthurian sense, the logic that God strengthened the arm of the just. However, it seems plausible that logic was never really 'bought' by civilised peoples and it has certainly been left behind as rather subtler forms of morality have come to the fore. Now the idea that right being on one's side will make victory easier is a statement of hope for an already justified cause rather than a justification in itself.

However, an assumption in the other direction, that losing makes ones cause more just, is just as toxic. Gracchi has left behind the idea that might makes right and instead made a statement that sees weakness making right. Because the Palestinians have suffered they will need to have that hurt compensated for in some way with a compromise. He may think that being weaker makes them more worthy. They are the 'oppressed' or a plucky underdog; this is a common fallacy of the Left although not one I would expect Gracchi to hold to. Another possibility is that he simply thinks that we need to accept that, rightly or wrongly, the deaths do aggrieve the Palestinians and that will mean they need some form of 'compensation' in order to achieve peace.

There were undoubtedly more Arabs killed in their full-scale wars with Israel than Israelis. Does that mean they were in the right?

Clearly not. They lost more people because they did not fight as well. They were attempting to drive a legitimate state into abject surrender or into the sea. While those who died may have simply been following orders their nation had no right to feel aggrieved over their deaths. Any anger that the families of those who died felt should have been directed towards their leaders. The Arab states were defeated in wars in which they were the injust side.

If Gracchi were making the more practical argument that addressing a grievance is worthwhile whether that grievance is legitimate or not his logic is equally troubling:

The Germans clearly felt very aggrieved in the period before the Second World War. They clearly had suffered hugely in the First World War and with the economic instability that followed it. However, that does not mean that a compromise should have been forced on other European states. The Germans were still in the wrong when demanding territorial sacrifices from other nations. They needed to be confronted instead of being appeased. Anything else implied forcing an injustice on another European state and rewarding intransigence, such rewards usually feed rather than sate an appetite for more 'compensation'.

I do not think that Hamas, or Fatah in its extremist moments, has a legitimate cause. Israel is a state with a right to exist. Hamas are attempting to destroy them, do not wish for peace and show no desire to properly run the quasi-state that they have. Israel has honestly sought peace in the past and been utterly rebuffed by the Palestinian leadership, Arafat, simply so that he might appear credible at a meeting of Arab leaders.

Hamas gunmen may die attacking Israeli soldiers but that is the responsibility of Hamas. Hamas bear complete responsibility for innocent Israelis killed by suicide bombs targetted directly at civilians. Israel does not bear the same responsibility for innocent Palestinians caught in the crossfire of strikes that do all they can to avoid civilians but cannot do so entirely when fighting an enemy that hides among the population. Palestinian militants, just like Hizbollah in the Lebanon, use civilians as a shield to protect themselves and the resulting deaths as a propaganda tool. Their strategy is based around maximising casualties in Palestine as well as Israel. Israel is under no obligation to make some penance for the self-destructive actions of the Palestinians who choose leaders like Hamas.

Casualties do not create a just cause. Unless you think, for some other reason, that their cause is just deaths within a people do not strengthen the case that people deserve better treatment. Suffering and dying thanks to their own injust policies should not be seen as cause to give them favourable treatment. What this means, in turn, is that their sense of grievance against Israel is misguided, their sufferings are the fault of their own leaders, and should be disputed instead of being indulged.

American Constitutional Law manages to get even more bizarre...

Blockquoting from a blog as popular as Instapundit seems bizarre but still. This is hilarious:

"IMPEACH CHENEY IF YOU WANT, but do bear in mind that he'll preside over his own impeachment trial.

No, really. The Senate has the sole power to try impeachments. The Vice President is the President of the Senate. He presides. The Constitution provides for only one exception in cases of impeachment: "When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside." That's because of the obvious conflict-of-interest of having the VP preside when the President is tried. But there's no similar provision for having someone else preside if the Vice President is impeached."

Americans get crazier by the day.

Being British constitutional law confuses me at the best of times. The very idea of courts telling politicians what do. I know we have that here but it is still rare enough to feel vaguely unnatural.

Man of Hats seeks new Hat

Dave Cole is a friend of mine from LSE. Very bright guy with an only slightly alarming attachment to his hat collection. There is a small but non-negligible chance he'll wind up ruling us like a king. His hats are sufficiently important to have claimed a special place in his blog's very fancy design. Each time you load unoriginalname38 (Dave's blog) you are shown a different hat in the top-right of the page.

Now Dave is looking to buy a new hat from the very fancy Lock and Company of St. James. Unfortunately he is rather spoilt for choice and, in a display of democratic spirit, calls upon the blogosphere to help him choose. Have your say, vote in the "Which Hat?" poll.

Jim Manzi on Global Warming

Jim Manzi's article for the National Review is one of the most intelligent descriptions I've seen of a plausible conservative response to global warming. The National Review isn't readily available in the United Kingdom but if you are at university or otherwise have access to LexisNexis it is available over that service. The article was in the issue of June 25 and is titled "Game Plan - What conservatives should do about global warming".

The first thing Jim Manzi does is correctly identify the stage of the argument that it is most productive for conservatives to address: what we do about global warming rather than whether it exists.

This is clearly the right position to take. There is room for doubt over global warming and the question of how much warming there will be remains deeply uncertain. However, the political debate has moved on and most non-scientists more interested in the political debate can engage far more effectively on the question of what to do about global warming, a question rooted in politics and economics, than they can in the scientific debate. There are exceptions, Tim Worstall's questions about the economic assumptions used by the IPCC spring to mind, but in general prioritising the "what next" debate over the "what's happening" debate is a good idea.

If we accept that the following proposition is probably true but there is scientific uncertainty then we can have the argument about what to do next properly: There is some warming, a significant proportion of that warming is caused by humans, there is a tiny possibility that something catastrophic will happen.

We do need to make it clear that this threat is not worth wrecking the global economy over. The chances of a catastrophic change are very low and a Precautionary Principle based approach cannot function in a world with a variety of catastrophic possibilities, from asteroids to nuclear war. We could spend every resource we have chasing our own demons. The challenge is to form policy which will enable us to respond to global warming in a cost effective and proportionate manner. Keeping wealthy isn't just a good thing in itself but also makes adapting to climate change far easier, as Manzi says "wealth and technology are raw materials for options".

He next argues for efforts to improve our ability to predict the climate. This is a rather uncontroversial idea but Manzi's notion of focussing the effort on getting more data and, in particular, some kind of system to get warning of an impending catastrophic event is distinctive. A similar idea is the proposed tsunami warning system that might have given important notice of the storm headed for South East Asia.

He argues for putting technology at the centre of any efforts to curb fossil fuel use. I worry that sometimes when people hear conservatives arguing for technological solutions they think we're trying to avoid taking climate change seriously. The reality is that at the moment there are too few good substitutes for fossil fuels. What this means is that any taxes will fail to achieve environmental objectives as the elasticities in demand for fossil fuels are, in most cases, way too low. This makes green taxes one more revenue raising tax that hurts industry and commerce. Conservatives are rightly sceptical of taxes that will do more to send emitting industries abroad than actually cut the amount of carbon dioxide emitted. Manzi's approach to creating incentives for technological development is the use of prizes. Branson's $25 million prize for the development of a 'carbon scrubber' is taken as a template. This approach has the advantage of getting the private sector involved and being remarkably cheap compared to other emissions curbing policies under consideration. The idea of keeping the prizes small enough that the incentives for interest groups to politically manipulate the system aren't too strong is a good one.

As Manzi says, "adaptation should take center stage". His recommendations for this are pretty thin. I set out a programme for an adaptive response to climate change in an article for ConservativeHome, "A Sceptics' Response to Climate Change".

The final section of the article sets out, essentially, why conservatives should have hope that they can defeat eco-socialist demands for radical changes to the economic order. He describes a bid-ask spread: $225 per month to implement Kyoto (which still doesn't come close to solving global warming) against $21 that the median US family would be willing to pay to "solve global warming".

Some time ago I set out, in a post on the politics of climate change, just why the Right has been losing the debate over climate change. We relied too much upon arguing either that there was scientific uncertainty, which could not be sustained by a scientific minority, or that the measures proposed were likely to be ineffective. As the costs of taking action to curb emissions had not yet hit home for people the response was simply that we "had to do something".

Now that people are starting to see the costs they're going to be asked to pay they are going to hold green policies to far higher standards of efficacy. The time is ripe for conservatives to be making the case against eco-socialism, particularly if we can offer alternative policies of the sort the Manzi and others are proposing.

Update: The man himself provides a link to a copy of the article. Well worth reading.

Fred Thompson at Policy Exchange

I was at Policy Exchange for this speech from Presidential candidate Fred Thompson yesterday, video via BritainandAmerica, and it was very interesting:



I thought he was extremely solid. Not the most dynamic or inspirational of speakers but he had the diamond combination I was looking for, and wasn't sure he'd display, of:

a) Recognising that in order to temper the exuberance of neo-conservativism we need a new dose of realism.

and,

b) Recognising the problems in Iraq and discussing them frankly.

while,

c) Still arguing for a muscular foreign policy.

Article on ConservativeHome

I have an article on ConservativeHome's Platform responding to Andrew Lansley's proposals for reforming the NHS. It discusses how rising demand for education and healthcare will cause the state to grow massively if conservatives cannot successfully challenge the principle of funding those services exclusively through general taxation.

Apologies for slow posting

Apologies for the lack of blogging since Sunday. Work means that I can't blog during the day like I used to and sometimes my evenings get busy. It should never be more than a couple of days between posts and I do plan on having new content up tomorrow.

The compensation, I hope, is that the quality is improving as my job exposes me to new perspectives and information and the time restriction forces me to only use my best ideas. My impression is that the frequency with which my posts get picked up and linked to by other blogs has increased since I've started work which does imply that my writing is becoming more interesting. I hope you're all happy with the quality for quantity trade-off.

Sir Salman Rushdie

Last October Salman Rushdie spoke out in the veil debate. His ongoing willingness to defy the vile threats he is under from militant Islamists is hugely impressive.

At the time I argued that for 'Sir' Iqbal Sacranie, who famously stated that death was "too good" for Rushdie during the initial furore over his book, to have a knighthood and Salman Rushdie not was a pretty ugly state of affairs. Now that wrong is to be righted. Also, it has infuriated the Iranians whose regime issued the original fatwa against Rushdie which is a welcome bonus.

Good news.

Social Standards

Chris Dillow has a post up arguing that the choice of a criminal lifestyle is not necessarily irrational; it is possible to understand someone choosing the particular spectrum of risks and rewards that comes with a life of crime.

His post reminded me of something that happened about six months ago. I was travelling back into London from my family home in Hertfordshire. In Kings Cross I ran into someone I had known at school. He had always been a somewhat strange and creepy kid and had dropped out of school after GCSEs. I had thought little about him since.

I said hello and we exchanged the obligatory "what have you been up to?"

I reported that I had just finished my Master's at the LSE and was now looking for work. His story was more extreme. While writing this post I've realised it may have been untrue but that wasn't the impression I got and isn't important to my point.

He had set up a pornographic website. This had been quite successful and he had sold it for a fair amount of money. He was now living on that money somewhere in Chelsea.

In terms of material conditions he clearly had me beat. While I was lucky enough to be emerging from university without any debt I was, at that stage, not working and living on the end of my mother's patience. I lived in the same flat I occupy now, a comfortable Westminster two-bedroom that is affordable thanks to being near the Victoria Coach Station. My employment prospects were quite reasonable and I have, of course, since found work. However, a political career is unlikely to involve retiring early in Chelsea money.

Now, why, despite the vastly better material rewards that he had obtained, probably for far less effort, did I never feel jealous?

It could be a moral decision. Certainly I do, in moral terms, think that my career is a superior choice. However, were it purely a moral decision presumably I would feel that I was making a sacrifice. I didn't, and don't, have the feeling that I'm really paying a net price for the decision to follow what I think is a morally preferable career.

The compensation I get is social standing. While I didn't nearly have the income I had far more social status. I had finished an advanced university degree at a fine university while he had hardly managed GCSEs. Education has almost entirely replaced ancestry as an indicator of class these days. Equally, while the average person connects the word politician with something like bubonic plague there is still a respectability in the job "Policy Analyst" that there isn't in "pornographer".

While criminals and pornographers do form their own communities that attempt to make up for their shunning by respectable types they will always be aware that they are somehow outside the community proper. The only way this changes is if, for example, the career of a pornographer becomes more socially acceptable. A successful community won't let this happen for a criminal lifestyle.

Now, maintaining this social standing is important to people. It is particularly important to white, middle class people. That is deeply important to our success. One of Chris Dillow's reasons why people choose a criminal lifestyle illustrates how that has broken down in troubled communities:

"4. Non-pecuniary advantages. Success in music or crime brings you some mix of fame, respect or affection. It gets you the girls. Modest professional success doesn't. Quite the opposite. Roland Fryer shows (pdf) that blacks who do well at school have fewer same-race friends. Conventional "success" therefore, gives you isolation."

That is a very clear failure to socially reward useful behaviour.

That I not only choose to accept far lower material standards of living but do so without a moment's hesitation is the power of social standards. No law or subsidy can push people towards socially useful pursuits as effectively. Breaking those social standards down, as far too many left-wing movements have, is therefore extremely dangerous. The breakdown in standards leads, rapidly, to a wider social breakdown as choosing a civilised way of life is then not the rational choice for far too large a body of people. That is why, for all the repressive effects that social mores can have, I respect their vital importance. It is this insight, more than anything, that causes me to describe myself as a conservative these days.

Dershowitz and Julius on the Boycott

This article on Times Online from Wednesday, addressing an issue I discussed on Thursday, is brilliant. It is the full-length version of a piece that appeared in the print version.

I'm not sure what else can be said in the intellectual case against the boycott. All that remains, as Daniel Finkelstein correctly points out, is to work out what we can do about it. My inclination is that some kind of protest would be a good idea. The UCU's Brittania Street headquarters looks like the right target.

Hamas and Fatah, Gaza and the West Bank

It would seem the best way to understand what's going on among the Palestinians right now is to combine Amir Taheri's piece for the Times and Con Coughlin's for the Telegraph.

First, the problem isn't that the Israeli, European and US cut in aid to Palestine has prevented Hamas properly governing the terroritories. As Coughlin notes there hasn't been a decline in donations to the Palestinians but there has been a redistribution of that income under Hamas:

"Hamas, on the other hand, sees economic deprivation as a form of political oppression. The World Bank reported that donors contributed about £375 million to the Palestinian territories in 2006, twice the amount they received in 2005. But since taking power, Hamas ensures any funds are spent on Islamic causes and its 6,000-strong militia, leaving the majority to fend for themselves."

Of course, the reason why Hamas have no interest in running the territories well is that they see them as a military base, as a staging post in the fight to destroy Israel. Few military bases are a pleasant place for a civilian to live. Taheri describes the problem:

"The constitution of Hamas, however, commits it to the creation of a single state. Gaza and the West Bank are regarded as bases from which the struggle for the liberation of the entire mandate of Palestine, that is to say the elimination of Israel, is pursued for as long as necessary."

Civilian suffering can even be an advantage if it provides helpful propaganda to assist the Hamas war machine, Coughlin:

"The bonus for Hamas is that, by forcing the majority of Palestinians to exist in dire poverty, it succeeds in attracting widespread sympathy from international do-gooders who do not understand the sadistic economic manipulation that is taking place."

Hamas is attempting to impose a Taliban-like state on areas under its control. From Taheri's article:

"Having won the general election 18 months ago, Hamas launched a drive to “Islamicise” Gaza, forcing women to wear the hijab and men to grow beards. It burnt down the last beer factory in Gaza and banned the sale of alcoholic drinks. Bands of youths calling themselves “Brigades of Enforcing the Good and Combating Evil” raid homes in search of alcohol, Western music and videos, unIslamic T-shirts and other “sinful items”. Young men and women found together in public, or even in private cars, are stopped and interrogated to make sure unmarried couples do not violate Sharia rules."

Hamas are far less interested in a struggle for a Palestinian state than they are in a general struggle for Islamist victory. This makes a stable two-state solution implausible as Hamas are unlikely to be satisfied with a Palestinian state. In fact, even if they were to achieve the destruction of Israel they are unlikely to be satisfied. Their interest is in the Muslim Brotherhood, an organisation of which they are a member, dream of worldwide domination.

What the West is going to have to realise, those that haven't already, is that the suffering of the Palestinians is emphatically not a result of Israeli policy. There have been numerous opportunities, most recently at Camp David, for the Palestinians to have a state within which they could work at building a better life for themselves. These were rejected. Now the Palestinian political leadership, elected freely and fairly by ordinary Palestinians, are setting out to ruin their people's chance at a better life preferring a struggle for the destruction of Israel. The suffering of the Palestinians, cause of so much self-righteous indignation in the corridors of the United Nations and the offices of the Guardian, is a consequence of choices they have made.

Israel's policy in the face of this has to be to look to its own defences. The logic behind the wall is looking stronger and stronger. The targetted application of military force can keep its enemies on the back foot. Western policy should be to do what we can to assist Israel in this task. In the longer term some kind of unilateral settlement with the Palestinians living in the non-state they've created for themselves and the Israelis doing their best to keep its affairs and theirs' separate might be the best outcome possible.

Discounting for Adaptation

Sir Nicholas Stern’s report on the economics of climate change has been, politically, hugely important. It is regularly cited by politicians justifying stringent steps to curb emissions thanks to its headline estimate that the harms from climate change could cost 5-20% of global GDP “now and forever”.

Stern’s report has been politically important despite, or because of, making some rather suspect methodological choices. Many of these choices have since been heavily criticised by researchers. Richard Tol was cited throughout Stern’s report but branded it “alarmist and incompetent”. An example of this alarmism is Stern’s penchant for using “this could mean up to…” statements. In discussing the numbers of people facing flooding thanks to climate change and melting glaciers he describes how up to 200 million people could face homelessness. Applying the same standard to nuclear proliferation it would be easy to justify nearly any action on the grounds that damages could be as high as 100% of GDP lost and 100% of the human population dead. This is quite a common strategy in making a rhetorical argument in politics but has little place in a supposedly rigorous study.

However, no element of Stern’s methodology has been more controversial than the decision to use a near-zero discount rate:

Stern’s call for rapid action to curb emissions is based around treating harms and benefits across generations as equally important regardless of when they occur. The “now and forever” amount is actually a sort of average of harms over hundreds of years. The majority of the harms he bases his analysis of the total cost of climate change on occur after the year 2800. This is such a long time away that with even moderate discounting the estimate of harms would fall drastically. Relying upon such long time horizons has to raise some questions about the Stern report’s reliability. Firstly, there are philosophical questions over whether we should be treating harms to the environment of different eras with very different material conditions as equally important. These have been addressed throughout the literature but particularly by Nordhaus. One example, he describes how under the Rawlsian moral logic the current generation deserves preferable treatment to subsequent generations with the good fortune to be born in what will probably be much wealthier ages. This is the same logic used to justify helping the poor within the current generation. However, there are also less high-minded, more practical reasons to question how seriously harms hundreds of years into the future should be taken.

Nordhaus briefly raises the question of changing preferences. After hundreds of years will those who we are saving from emissions necessarily want the lower levels of carbon dioxide that we have provided for them?

Nordhaus’ gives examples of possible alternate priorities: perhaps people will prefer higher productivity so that they can “develop fiendish new weapons”. There are a host of reasons why our descendants might prefer that we maximise growth instead of making efforts to cut climate change. One more prosaic example could be the possibility that, in around fifty to a hundred years time, we perfect the process of generating power through nuclear fusion. That would allow for massive cuts in carbon dioxide emissions at very little cost. A host of other technological changes could do the same job. That might cause our descendants to wish we had not taken action to curb emissions at a time when it is so expensive as we don’t have efficient alternatives to fossil fuels in place.

There are a host of other known unknowns and unknown unknowns that surround whether our descendants will value any cuts in carbon emissions we make. To illustrate the potential for surprises let’s pose a bizarre counterfactual. Suppose a Stern-like decision had been made during the Industrial Revolution. “We’re using coal at a dangerous rate and if it runs out we will lose a vital economic and strategic asset. To ensure that all generations take equal utility from limited stocks we have to impose taxes or rations on coal usage. Otherwise by the 21st century the UK will be utterly impoverished.” We would probably have a lot more coal right now but would be significantly poorer and history would not have looked kindly on those who made the decision.

Uncertainty over the value of decisions we make now to future generations is probably reason enough to be sceptical of near-zero discount rates. However, can we go beyond uncertainty and make an active case as to why our descendants are unlikely to value action now to curb climate change? I believe we can.

NASA administrator Michael Griffin laid out an important question. Why should we assume that our current level of emissions is the optimum?

“First of all, I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown. And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take.”

It clearly depends upon the timescale one is referring to. In the long-term there probably isn’t much reason to think a little extra warmth and CO2 will be a good thing or a bad thing. Equatorial regions might suffer but it is entirely possible that this will be counterbalanced by areas like Greenland, which might become green again, and Siberia which will be better able to exploit its huge natural resources. However, in the short-term our society is built around a particular temperature. We have cities built in flood plains without proper protection, railways built in Siberia that will collapse if the permafrost melts. This is to be expected. Our society has been built with the context of a particular temperature and there will be costs if we ask it to adjust.

This balance of short and long-term harms highlights the true nature of the challenge of climate change: its transience. This has to be crucially important to any discussion of Stern’s discount rate. If we have no reason to assume that a higher temperature will be much better or much worse for humans apart from the transitional costs that come with social adaptation then the expected future harms from climate change should tend to zero over time. Working out just how long it should take before the change in climate has been adjusted to is a matter for some study but it seems unlikely it would take more than a couple of generations. Certainly the harms that Stern identifies beyond the year 2800 have to be written off as quite likely utterly irrelevant to humans who have learned to live with, or take advantage of, warmer climates.

If we make this adjustment it will make the estimate of the costs to climate change far more realistic. That realism should feed into our policy decisions. It should reinforce the impression that global warming is a change we should work to adapt to rather than a catastrophe worth ruining the world economy to avert.

600 Posts!

That last post on Professor Qvortrup was this blog's six hundredth post. I hope you've enjoyed them.

Evidence

Yesterday I went to a Policy Exchange event with Theresa May and Professor Matt Qvortrop discussing the merits of referendums, or Citizen's Initiatives as he called them, and their capacity to reengage citizens with politics.

He was arguing for, as he described it, a "supply-side democracy". This is the idea that supplies of democracy create their own demand. If involved in decision making more often people will become more engaged in the political process. This seems fairly cogent. However, Qvortrup ruined his case with the methodology behind his paper The Voting Happiness Index which we were all given a copy of before the event.

I took a flick through it before the speech started and was alarmed. The report is filled with charts illustrating a correlation between various 'goods' from happiness to green politics to voter turnout. He used this as evidence that voter turnout led to all these good things.

Now, if you're going to argue that various good things are caused by voter initiatives a correlation is of very limited use. All a correlation suggests is some kind of relationship. It seems just as plausible that high democratic involvement, caused by some factor not in the study such as historical differences, was the driving force behind not just the other good things about Citizen's Initiative states but also the existence of Citizen's Initiatives in the first place. A state with a more democratically active citizenry is, after all, far more likely to be able to justify running referenda. This same taste for civic participation could also be the cause of all the other differences between Citizen's Initiative and non-Citizen's Initiative states. High voter engagement could be caused by any number of factors not included in the study.

In short, Qvortrup's study has no way to tell which factor is cause and which effect. It can do almost nothing to establish whether an increase in the amount, supply of voting makes any difference at all to the success of a democracy.

Also, he used happiness statistics and quoted Layard on how great they are. They aren't. Happiness statistics are shoddy and unreliable.

Finally, his evidence had clearly been cherry-picked. The Citizen's Initiative states may have been greener but I'm willing to put money on them also having been less fiscally disciplined.

I asked Qvortrup about these issues and he smiled genially and said he was just making the case for his side, of course he chose data that would strengthen his case. My heart sank a little. Partly because I was deeply aware that Qvortrup wasn't really doing anything particularly wrong. He hadn't claimed his data should change the world and the methodological weaknesses of his study pale in comparison with some other, far more prestigious, works.

I emerged from the talk neither more or less convinced of the case for making referendums a regular part of our political landscape. Instead, I came away with a renewed sense of how careful you need to be when told "studies show that..."

UCU Boycott of Israel

The boycott that the UCU has endorsed is utterly disgusting. It it an attack on academic values and freedom. It has deeply unpleasant undertones of anti-semitism in singling out a state which is defending itself against gross acts of terrorism and which would not rank among the top hundred states in terms of the volume of human rights abuses but does happen to be Jewish. In this it is rather similar to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. The UCU's behaviour has wider repercussions as it speaks for staff at public institutions, many of whom are not anti-semitic, and tarnishes the reputation of the United Kingdom as an honest broker in the conflict.

In this Channel 4 video you can see Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz tearing apart the Brighton University academic who proposed the motion. Attempts by our man from Brighton to retreat to the idea that all he has done is propose a debate are facile. If you want a debate you don't pass a motion to distribute campaign literature from one side.

There is a fine, if very moderate, Early Day Motion on the issue:

"That this House regrets the motion passed at the congress of the University and College Union (UCU) on 30th May, which promotes a boycott of Israeli universities and a moratorium on research and cultural collaboration with Israel; agrees with Sally Hunt, General Secretary of UCU, who has said previously that `I simply do not believe that the majority of UCU members support an academic boycott of Israel; most want us to retain dialogue with trade unionists on all sides-not just those we agree with'; supports the Government's response to the parliamentary inquiry into anti-semitism which concludes that `calls to boycott contact with academics working in Israel are an assault on academic freedom and intellectual exchange'; believes that boycotting Israeli education institutions and academics is damaging to the UK's reputation worldwide and does nothing to promote a settlement in the Middle East; and urges the UCU to conduct a full ballot of its 120,000 members before adopting the terms of the resolution as policy."

Write or e-mail your MP if they haven't signed it yet. Well worth your time.

Update: As he mentions in the comments Gracchi has a very good article on this subject over at Bits of News.

Joe Trippi on 'Politics 2.0'

Britain and America's summary of the event yesterday with Joe Trippi, author of Howard Dean's incredible Internet grassroots campaign, is a good one. My impression, though, is that we are a long way from seeing the sort of bottom up politics that the speakers were talking about rising to prominence in the UK.

Trippi's explanation for why the UK was lagging was that the relatively short election campaigns that are the result of flexible election timing, by comparison with the near permanent US campaign, prevent the proper use of the Internet and social networks by politicians and groups who want to influence an election. These networks take time to build and are not given that time by organisations that expect a result within the busy few weeks before an election.

I'd suggest a different explanation. The blogs are obsessed with the parties. Even high-minded blogs will devote at least a quarter of their output to what members of parliament are saying. I think this means that the dialogue can't really stand on its own. It isn't only the blogs that display this way of thinking. Think-tanks are far too prone to judge themselves by the extent that they can influence political parties rather than the extent to which they directly affect the broader public debate. You can see it in the rationale for the UKIP, the logic that if a party doesn't represent your views they are unrepresented. We see parties as almost the be all and end all of politics rather than a particular mechanism for building a majority to govern.

This obsession with parties Daniel Finkelstein, at the event as a sort of discussant, saw emerging out of a need to effectively ration the scarce resource of the media's attention, "shelf space" as he termed it. It seems equally plausible that party loyalty emerged out of a relatively uniform set of political divisions in the post-war period, a particular ideological struggle with the rise of the social democrats clashing with the conservative-liberal tradition. Either way, that the original rationale for party obsession is fading does not necessarily mean that we will automatically turn back to a less party-focussed politics.

If we wish to build a genuine bottom-up politics we will need to see a deeper change than the technological ability to self-publish. There will need to be a change in the British understanding of how politics is conducted.

Communist Monopoly

Given that Monopoly was originally conceived of to demonstrate how rents enrich landlords and impoverish tenants, a critique of capitalism, it was always somewhat ironic that it became such a business. It has to be one of the first examples of capitalism co-opting its enemies. The early twentieth century equivalent of stores selling Ché Guevara t-shirts (although this article explains just how unpleasant hero worship of Guevara is).

Now this, deeply silly, YouTube video goes one step further and asks the question, what would Communist Monopoly look like?

Thatcher on the Falklands

A truly wonderful, inspirational, speech (click "Listen: Lady Thatcher" for the audio stream) from our greatest living Prime Minister.

Europe drifts right...

There appears to be something of a rightward drift in Western politics. The French first elected a right-wing President in an ideologically charged election and now have given the right a landslide victory in parliamentary elections. In Finland the right-wing coalition dominated the last elections. The same happened in Sweden on a more modest scale. In Belgium the right have just won a strong victory. In Britain the Conservatives have had a lead for some time although there has been no electoral test of their revival. The Germans have a right-wing government.

The obvious exceptions are Spain, Italy and the United States. Spain's result was due to an incredible miscalculation by the right-wing Prime Minister. Italy's politics always has a screw loose. In the US the Democrats are doing well but that has taken some pretty massive incompetence on the part of the Republicans. I'm not convinced that the current Democratic strength is the result of a real left-wing drift in American politics.

The trend right could just be a coincidence. Or a transient rejection of centre-left governments that swept to power in the heyday of the Third Way. I think it is something more. A rejection of the supposedly progressive values of the tranzi elite: Treating criminals like victims. Neglecting or showing disdain for the culture, history and values of the Western nations in deference to a self-hating multi-culturalism. Accepting the mass-migration of populations that Western states have proven unable to integrate as an inevitability. Submerging nation-states in unaccountable supranational bodies.

These values and objectives were never really shared by the population but became a kind of political consensus in the absence of a crisis that would remind Western peoples of what they had to lose. The combination of 9/11 and the Cartoons Crisis was a very effective wake-up call. That free-speech might be so endangered by cowardice in the face of a violent minority alarmed people used to taking such values for granted. The right is the major beneficiary because they have always been the most skeptical of the tranzi ideals. This gives right-wing parties, where they can see this trend and latch onto it, a significant advantage.

This zeitgeist will not provide the right with electoral victories on a platter. The right-wing leadership in each state will have to convince people that they can rebuild important values and cultural confidence. However, it appears to me that the opportunity is there for the taking.

Peter Singer hears about Contraction and Convergence over a decade late...

First, why on Earth did this get printed? It's just an unimaginative statement of the Contraction and Convergence policy. The Guardian could have just printed the Wikipedia entry. Isn't Peter Singer, the author, supposed to be an original thinker? Why is he just repeating an idea that has been endlessly repeated for over a decade?

It isn't even a good idea he's restating. The idea of cutting emissions in the developed world both enough to prevent global warming and to equalise emissions with the developing world or face large financial penalties. Now, while the US emits a lot of carbon per person it emits relatively little per unit of GDP. It doesn't have a lot more room to cut emissions without cutting its income. That means emissions reducing to the same level per capita of emissions as in the Chinese economy will do huge damage to US incomes.

What will happen to China's, export-driven, economy if the US economy is collapsed?

Prizes for Innovation

Prizes are a time-honoured method of rewarding inventions when industry associations, governments or other bodies want to encourage useful innovations. The practice was particularly common during the Industrial Revolution era. It works, essentially, by offering cash instead of the monopoly rights that come with a patent. In certain areas, where you know what you're looking for, it can be quite effective. The idea achieved some degree of fame recently with the success of the X-Prize for commercial spaceflight.

Some have argued that the principle should be deployed as a way of getting the private sector involved in creating innovative solutions to climate change. I'm not aware of this happening yet on a large scale but it seems only a matter of time before someone tries prizes as a response to climate change.

In a somewhat sad turn of events Microsoft is now offering a prize for studios to create a global warming video game. Instead of using prizes to address the actual issue they're going to be used to find the most innovative propaganda for eco-socialism. Ars Technica's prediction is "A platformer starring a polar bear being chased by the melting ice caps". My money is a game where you play George W. Bush using a gargantuan magnifying glass to hunt poor people or one where you play Zombé Guevara bombing Exxon plants.

Oceans 13

This film sees the series back on top form. The action takes a while to get into the swing of things as the detail is built up but is absolutely crackling once the film is at full pace. They have returned to the classic Jazz, Las Vegas and luxury themes that made the series great. They've ditched the celebrity cameos that were a somewhat self-indulgent distraction from the narrative. The scope of the scam is superb and some of the skits are inspired.

Ruthie on the constraints of parenthood

This post by Ruthie is a fine example of what makes her blog so great: an emotional openness that allows for some touching stories describing problems that face so many but are rarely articulated so clearly. In particular, this post concerns the challenges single motherhood creates for Ruthie in forming a new relationship. Unfortunately her fanbase is on the wrong side of the Atlantic but I think she'll still do fine...

Cap and Trade

It was only today that I finally really grasped just how dismal an idea the cap and trade, emissions trading, approach to carbon emissions control is. It isn't just that the particular EU scheme constitutes a subsidy of half a billion a year from British organisations to the rest of the EU; there is a more fundamental problem. It was when I saw this Excel file that I really 'got it'. That's every hydrocarbon user in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme and their Annual Allocation of emissions from DEFRA under Phase I. The supposed market solution relies upon bureaucrats coming up with a quota for every plant in the country based on their emissions history and an estimate of how much they can cut.

It's reminiscent of some old Communist five year plan with government telling the private sector what it is capable of and should achieve, why is this considered the capitalist approach?

It relies upon the state being able to properly assess the technological possibilities in a host of industries, both in the present and the future. It is chronically vulnerable to manipulation by skillful or 'generous' businesses that can influence the decision over their quota. The trading system represents a huge great transaction cost for the public sector as NHS Trusts and the like who have no idea how to trade a commodity like an emissions permit make a mess of things. The skilled traders at Shell and BP, by contrast, have made a profit from the Emissions Trading Scheme.

In short: a hideous idea.

Review of Charles Koch's "The Science of Success" in The Business

I have an article in todays The Business magazine about the stunning success of Koch Industries, Inc. and the book Charles Koch has written explaining how the ideas underpinning classical liberal politics and economics made it happen.

Article on ConservativeHome

I have an article responding to Ken Clarke's Democracy Taskforce report up on ConservativeHome's YourPlatform. It sets out how the Democracy Taskforce won't succeed in restoring trust in politics so long as politicians continue to try to do too much, too centrally.

The Global Warming Debate: Over?

I tend to avoid commenting on the science of global warming. I keep as up to date with the arguments as I can and am reasonably happy that I've done what I can to understand the state of play. For now, I'm happy to take the 'consensus' view, with a few reservations, and then analyse policy on that basis.

I'm not a scientist and I honestly doubt I can add any value to the scientific debate. Fortunately the intellectual argument over policy will not be settled by scientists but, as usual, by economists. That is a debate I can be a part of. Neither myself, Sir Nicholas Stern or Richard S. J. Tol are scientists, however, the other two are as important as any IPCC physicist to the debate over our policy response to climate change. Tol's assault on Stern's review is a decent introduction to why.

DK isn't so reticent about the science of climate change, has done a lot of reading and is convinced that the mainstream opinion is entirely wrong. He is understandably frustrated that Sunny Hurndall has written the entire debate off as settled, anthropogenic global warming won apparently.

What I found odd about the opinion that Sunny, and Ben Stewart of Greenpeace who started this argument by refusing to debate Dominic Lawson on 18 Doughty Street, advance is that they seem to be calling and end to the debate so quickly.

It seems understandable that Richard Dawkins has gotten somewhat tired of rehearsing arguments for and against evolution that have been much the same since 1859 when the Origin of Species was published. After 148 years it seems quite plausible that most of the interesting arguments have already been deployed. Unless some radical new evidence or theory comes up I'd say it is fair enough to put research and argument testing the basic theory of evolution by natural selection on the back burner. That Dawkins wishes to stop debating those who still want to rehearse the same arguments after well over a century in order to satisfy their own religious imperative seems understandable.

But global warming only became an object of serious debate in the late 1970s. Why should we believe that in that relatively short period of forty years all of the relevant arguments and important studies that will shape the 'final' scientific conclusion have seen the light of day? Surely it is quite plausible that new evidence or logic that might change the debate will emerge?

It worries me a lot that those who lobby for policies to curb emissions are so keen to end the debate early. Presumably they think it strengthens the political case for taking action, perhaps it does, but intellectually it is a shabby and arrogant way to behave.

The Ghost Cabinet on IT Procurement

I'm far from sold on this piece from the Ghost Cabinet 'Technology Ghost'. A few particularly problematic paragraphs stand out:

"No-one is looking at the use of technology across the whole of government."

Utterly untrue. The National Audit Office should do some more work on examining the government's record in delivering major Information Technology programmes but there are definitely organisations looking at the government strategy for IT in the aggregate. There is the Office of Government Commerce and the Cabinet Office's Delivery and Transformation Group (formerly the e-Government Unit) both of whom are responsible, within government, for government IT implementation. Then, in Parliament, there's the Public Accounts Committee which launched a report just yesterday on the lessons from successful projects for government IT procurement. Finally, from the private sector, the consultancy Kable is focussed on public sector IT expenditure.

"This is a historical mess. At some point in the past, each government department went and did their own thing, spending loads of money implementing essentially the same solution multiple times, and now we’re looking at spending loads more either doing it yet again, or joining them all up. No-one was empowered to put their hand up and say, ‘Hang on, does anyone think that a costly, massive database of everyone’s names, addresses and other information might be useful across government?’ And if they did, no-one was made to listen."

This paragraph is the biggest flaw in the piece. The whole problem with the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) is that it attempted to impose a single solution across too large an organisation. Different sections have different legacy systems all of which need to be integrated into the new project or replaced and the data moved. Everyone has different objectives which need to be accounted for and which cause massive creep in the project's scope. Pretty soon you get the over £10 billion (that's a LOT of money) overspend that has marked the NPfIT. Doing this over all of government would take a big risk of facing the problems that have plagued the NPfIT again but on a much larger scale.

A rational, problem-solving, mind will always find centralisation tempting. It is similar to the logic that a major supplier like the NHS can be more efficient than an insurance based system as it can buy in bulk and spread fixed costs across a larger health service. The problem is that the centralisation creates complexities, variety and scale too large to be managed. The impossibility of managing the lumbering behemoths that centralisation has created leads to the inefficiency that characterises today's government departments.

It seems pretty clear that, instead of the centralisation that the 'ghost' is after government IT projects need to be more decentralised, more often It is far easier to manage and control small projects that the stakeholders can be properly kept in touch with.

Energy Security and Global Warming

Quite a few people, Peter Franklin for example, have argued that China will come onboard for CO2 reductions because they don't like being dependent upon foreign oil. The problem is that the Chinese have a solution in mind already for energy security. Lots of coal power stations. Hardly a result for our green friends.

In the US a similar trend is playing out. Attempts to push energy security up the agenda as a handy bonus that comes with addressing global warming are playing into the hands of "Big Coal". Bradford Plumer for the New Republic sets out how this is creating an opportunity for the ludicrously inefficient coal-to-liquid industry. Again, strategies for energy independence are very different to the kinds of strategies imagined to fight global warming.

In Britain the most obvious way of defending energy independence in the long term is probably a move towards nuclear power or some other technology. There isn't a crisis because in the meantime we will be fine so long as the North Sea doesn't wind down too quickly. At the moment we are only narrowly net importers of fossil fuels. The absolute worst policy for energy independence would be to place a windfall tax on profits from the North Sea. Exactly what Gordon Brown has done, the swine.

Those who want to argue for curbing emissions are disingenuous to fall back on illusory peripheral benefits like energy security. Doing so is a sign of intellectual, if not political, desperation.

Benedict Rogers On Pakistan

Over the weekend Benedict Rogers, of Christian Solidarity and the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission wrote a strong piece for ConservativeHome’s Platform arguing that more needs to be done to protect Pakistan’s Christian population. They certainly face very severe abuse and as a minority religious population in an increasingly radicalised Muslim country their position is clearly a risky one. However, I disagree with Rogers on his portrayal of the political realities in wider Pakistan.

He paints the Christian community’s problems as being very much a choice made by Musharraf. In particular he approvingly quotes Zahid Hussain saying “Pakistan’s failure to curb extremism owed less to the difficulty of implementing reforms than to the administration’s own unwillingness.” If the abuse of the Christian community were the only challenge facing the military leadership this might be an accurate description. At the moment Pakistan’s leadership faces a significantly more varied and large scale set of problems.

There is a touch of unreality in covering the troubles in the border provinces purely in terms of the abuse of and threat to the Christian community. Moderate Muslims are facing serious threats of death and actual abuse in what Gideon Rachmann, Chief Foreign Correspondent for the Financial Times, termed the “Talibanisation” of Pakistan. The border regions have always been somewhat lawless and that makes cracking down on radicalisation easier said than done. This isn’t Britain, or even China; the state’s writ has a distinctly limited authority.

Equally, there are direct threats to the regime’s stability in the cities. In Karachi there has been rioting connected to the Chief Justice’s challenge to Musharraf and his nationwide tour publicising that opposition. In Islamabad there has been Islamist rioting centred around the university. For a regime that can’t take its own existence for granted this is a very alarming development.

While I would on no account want to diminish the sufferings Rogers discusses they only involve a handful of people so far, albeit with a threat to many more, and things could get far worse. The one policeman Rogers describes being sent to defend a church under threat of attack from radicals may have been an insult, how can one man defend a church?

However, on the other hand it could be that he’s fulfilling a similar role to that played by US troops in South Korea. Should radicals assault the church he might stand up to them, they might have to kill him and they might face retribution for that infringement from the state. Were Pakistan to collapse in violent revolution that credible threat of sanctions to abusing the Christian minority would disappear. Then the scale of the horrors facing that community might become radically worse.

As such, it is very much in the interests of Pakistan’s Christian community that the military leadership use their limited resources to ensure stability. Pakistan could collapse in revolution if the military gets things wrong, if troops refuse to crackdown on fellow Pakistanis in the event of renewed riots. A Pakistani I’ve spoken to reckons this is unlikely to happen as the military can try the Roman trick of sending troops from different ethnic communities to enforce their will upon the others. However, it is enough of a possibility to be worrying and if things look bad another general could panic and split the military’s support for Musharraf.

Pakistan needs stability in order to make a steady transition towards democracy. Reform through a violent change would lead to a fragile democracy or, worse, the rise of a Khomeini like figure and a radical regime. In the transition the Christian minority might face an awful fate.

Rogers is right to highlight the abuse and danger the Christian community in Pakistan is facing. Pressure should be put on the Pakistani authorities to do more if they can. However, we should understand the very real hazards the Pakistani regime faces and the costs that all would pay in the event of a collapse.

Gore or the Unabomber?

Test your ability to differentiate between the rhetoric of environmental messiah, former Vice-President Al Gore and anti-technology terrorist the Unabomber with this easy quiz.