Bankers 4 Labour...

Michael White, who I normally have quite a good deal of time for, writes an article about the ‘trilemma’ (© Niall Ferguson) facing the Tories which includes, as a cute little throwaway line,

Low-tax theorists don't feel comfortable with the huge monetary and fiscal stimuli which most governments, left and right, have deployed to undo damage done by Conservative-voting bankers.

These would, presumably, be Conservative voting bankers like Tom Hunter, Sir Ronald Cohen, Christopher Ondaatje, and so on and bloody on. The banker that everyone will immediately associate with the financial catastrophe will be Sir Fred Goodwin, mates with and knighted by Gordon “for services to banking. Just like the other architects McKillop, Crosbie and Blank. Rather hard to pin this one on the Tories I’d have thought.

More on Macintyre

The James Macintyre piece I referred to yesterday is kicking up something of a bijou stormette.  Fraser Nelson had a go at a rebuttal, in terms not unsimilar to my own:

The CoffeeHousers who despair at Cameron’s lack of radical policies would do well to read this piece, as it will cheer you up immensely. Cameron has adopted a “state-slashing, neo-Thatcherite agenda. While Cameron claims to be committed to spending increases, he is backing “spending cuts and tax cuts.” Rather than declaring Europe to be a low priority, Cameron “presides over the most anti-European parliamentary party in Tory history”. He has apparently reversed his plan not to expand grammar schools (damn, I missed that story) and, even better, William Hague is now a neoconservative. Result! Macintyre can also reveal Tory plans to “penalise single mothers.” He doesn’t give details. Perhaps he’s saving that for next week.

Well Macintyre has had a go back at Fraser today.  It starts with a frankly bizarre query:

Why is it that attacking the Labour party in print is seen as fair game in the Westminster playground and common practice for “neutral” journalists, but dare to turn your fire on David Cameron's Conservative party and you are dismissed as a mad, foaming-at-the-mouth red under the bed?

For a start, you wrote a political column in the New Statesman devoted entirely to ‘proving’ that Cameron was a barking Thatcherite who wanted to personally punish single mothers.  Each to their own, but it doesn’t really paint a picture of a neutral journalist does it?

Well, I am glad Nelson raises nationalisation because the point I was trying to make was precisely that Cameron has failed in making any major change on a par with either Tony Blair's symbolic abolition of the nationalising “Clause IV”, or for that matter, with Neil Kinnock's spectacular expulsion of Militant in the 1980s.

But that was because, in Clause 4, Labour had a highly visible, highly symbolic example of why they were unelectable – their fundamental lack of economic soundness.  The Tories, which have never, even under Thatcher, been as ideological a party as Labour, didn’t have the luxury of an obsolete totem which they could ostentatiously sacrifice.  (Does one sacrifice totems?)  Macintyre’s claim that Clarke would have ruled out tax cuts (forever?  Until they can be afforded?) is either nonsense or identical to current Tory policy depending on which way you read it.

Nelson also denies that Cameron made a U-turn on grammar schools, despite the fact that his original plan of saying there will be no new ones under a Tory government was reversed, with Cameron appeasing his Tory critics, explicitly stating this was not a “Clause IV” moment and saying “I don't go around picking a fight with my party”. I am surprised Fraser, an assiduous Cameron-watcher, “missed” the U-turn story when it was in covered by the rest of the Tory press.

It wasn’t reversed.  The existing policy – that grammar schools were fine where they were, but that they wouldn’t form the basis of Tory education policy – remained in place throughout that summer.  The Tory press went out on a limb over grammar schools (as I went into ad nauseam at the time), but the policy remained the same.

Nelson also ridicules my claim that Cameron is set to penalise single mothers – perhaps this is one of the “lies” he mysteriously refers to towards the end of his blog. He must, then, have missed the story that Cameron will reward through the tax system married couples, and middle class couples when one of those is wealthy enough to stay at home. These are not, I fancy, policies aimed at the single mother on a council estate in Hull.

Guh.  Nor are they aimed at the British Olympic cycling team – are they being penalised as well?  Tax breaks that affect one section of society do not automatically penalise every other section of society.  In other words, when trying to prove that the Tories want to penalise single mothers, it is not enough to demonstrate that they want to help married couples.  I suspect, however, that this cognitive dissonance will rumble on throughout the campaign and beyond.

I’m sure there’ll be more of this nonsense to come – it’s starting to feel a bit like election season again…

Easy rider

It has become almost an article of faith among the left that the Tories in general, and David Cameron in particular, has received an astonishingly easy ride from the media, and have yet to be challenged on their actual policies.  These policies are then derided as either unreconstructed Thatcherite red meat, or as shallow and vacuous presentationalism – sometimes, confusingly, both at once.

There is, of course, some truth in this.  The Tories do face less severe questioning from the media – just as all oppositions do.  Oppositions have the luxury of pencilling in positions, and have the benefit of deniability, which Governments simply don’t have.  That tooth-grindingly awful Sion Simon interview this morning was a classic case in point.  Oppositions can criticise the current problems, and can get away without proposing specific solutions.  Ministers can’t.  It’s also a good general rule that unpopular Governments stop catching the breaks.  The dog days of Major’s administration was coloured by repeated complaints that the press were letting Blair get away with murder.

But in this case, how true is that Cameron’s party are unusually policy-lite?  There’s an article in Alastair Campbell’s super soaraway New Statesman that rehearses pretty much all the standard complaints, although there’s something a little odd about a rash of media articles criticising the, um, media for their lack of scrutiny of the Tories.

There’s the usual degree of disingenuousness in it, for example on education – which is the one area where pretty much everyone agrees that the Tories have a policy that is both radical and settled.

In May 2007, Cameron pledged that no new grammar schools would be created under the Tories. But, under fire from the right, he backtracked and left the possibility open. By this February, he was saying that “we’ve got to bust open the state monopoly on education” and talking of the need to increase “competition”.

At the risk of getting into all that grammar school stuff all over again, I would point out that the grammar school position never changed – it was always the case that grammar schools where they exist won’t be closed, but that there are no plans to extend them across the country.  Equally the last sentence here, about increasing competition beyond a monopolistic state provider, has nothing to do with grammar schools at all.

Had Kenneth Clarke, who also stood for the leadership in 2005, been elected, he would have made ridding the party of its ideological commitment to tax cuts the Tories’ own “Clause Four” moment. But George Osborne, the shadow chancellor whom Cameron will never sack, has always insisted that they do not need any such moment. In fact, on Osborne’s advice, Cameron abandoned the Tories’ commitment to government spending plans in November. So, far from resisting calls for tax and spending cuts, they are backing them just when these are least needed. 

I’d be astonished – in fact, utterly incredulous – if Ken Clarke had ‘rid the party of its ideological commitment to tax cuts’.  Unless you assume that the current levels of taxation are either ideal or too low, there will always be space for cutting taxes.  Spending cuts too are now inevitable – as the Government has acknowledged by announcing, um, spending cuts.  If the argument is that Cameron has been calling for instant, unfunded tax cuts now now now – well, I’d like James MacIntyre to point me to them.  I’d been under the impression that the Tories deliberately hadn’t been doing this.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives remain the party of the very rich, proposing to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £2m. They failed to condemn the practice of short-selling shares last September and the party’s opposition to bankers’ lavish bonuses has been a last-minute conversion.

Inheritance tax as it stands is paid by, what, 7% of estates, as opponents of cuts delight in telling us.  However, the important statistic is that as it stands, some 37% of estates would be liable for IHT.  In other words, IHT encourages an enormous amount of behavioural change to avoid becoming liable for it.  As such it is extremely inefficient and falls, not on the ‘very rich’ who can afford accountants to help them avoid it altogether, but on the middle class who can’t.  My preferred option has always been to exempt primary dwellings from IHT (though hey!  Another few years and this won’t be a problem any more anyway) but to characterise the IHT move as only for the very rich is to miss the point.

With Duncan Smith’s guidance, Cameron has developed his “broken Britain” theme, and promises to reward married couples with tax breaks, thus satisfying the old Tory urge to penalise single mothers.

I’ve never been convinced by this line of argument.  Do benefits for the disabled ‘penalise’ the fit?  Does child benefit ‘penalise’ the childless?  It’s just not an argument that works.

Other than their relative youth, however, Barack Obama and David Cameron share little: they are diametrically opposed on every issue, from Europe to the Middle East, to the need for fiscal intervention. It is not surprising, as we reported last year, that Obama is said to have described Cameron as a “lightweight”.

Every issue?  Really?  Hmm.  And for God’s sake, this ridiculous unsourced ‘lightweight’ thing – you’re saying that you said that someone said that Obama said…  What is this?  A playground game of Chinese whispers?

If my aunt had balls...

She’d be my uncle.  There’s an article in the Guardian today where they have canvassed cabinet Ministers as to Labour’s prospects in the next election.  A sort of ‘view from the bunker’ if you will.  Surprise, surprise they are upbeat and optimistic – at least for the benefit of the press.  The cause of their optimism is perhaps a little delusional though.

Ministers were buoyed by the Guardian/ICM poll finding that if the economy picks up in advance of an election - a mighty if - the Labour vote could increase by as much as eight points. The finding confirmed the volatility of the electorate.

It is indeed a mighty if – there’s no sign of the economy picking up in time for an election in 2010, and even if it did the visible indicators would inevitably be lagging behind.  It’s also a pretty hefty could.

It also plays (again) on this polling volatility that Labour are pinning their hopes on.  It isn’t true though.  The polls have followed a pretty sure pattern since October 2007 – Labour have fluctuated between the middle twenties and the low thirties.  The Tories have fluctuated between the low forties and the upper forties.  That’s a solid pattern and not a wild swing.  There’s a lot less hope out there than they like.

Cheap shot...

It’s reassuring to see that even the most extreme of political upheavals don’t have to derail your career options.

When the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989 I was 17-years-old and my career under communism was already mapped out; I was preparing to work as a journalist for a state-run newspaper.

Twenty years later I find myself working for the BBC...

The more things change eh?

Useless, fraudulent incompetents?

I sort of sympathise with David Aaronovitch here.  He’s arguing, basically, two things.  The first is that a liberal democracy is better than an authoritarian dictatorship (well, duh…) and arguments that the increasingly intrusive powers assumed by the state would be positively dangerous in the hands of an authoritarian Government are meaningless.  If an authoritarian dictatorship were to take power, it would ignore the existing laws altogether, or make new ones, or do what the hell it wanted.

It’s a good point.  The famously liberal Soviet constitution of 1936 didn’t matter a damn.  Hitler came to power legally, and then changed the law utterly.  I think it’s worth protesting against the spread of the surveillance society on its own merits, but that’s a separate argument. 

Aaronovitch’s second argument is that we are too quick to dismiss all politicians as useless fraudulent incompetents.  What about, he says, the things that went right?

The new schools. The defeat of bullying. The new hospitals. The waiting list reductions. The expansion of nursery education and of parental rights. The city regeneration. The Right to Roam. The many public sector IT projects that - quietly - worked. Northern Ireland. Were these all done by the wrong people and despite the broken system? So, in a messy adult democracy you get achievements and you get stupid errors.

I agree with the sentiment here, but most of these examples are a bit specious.  The defeat of bullying?  What does that mean?  The expansion of parental rights?  To what?  What public sector IT project?  If we’re left with the Right to Roam as the prime defence of the British system of government it’s a pretty shocking state of affairs.

Hanging them high

Some of the straw-clutching I referred to yesterday is on display from Steve Richards in today’s Independent.  We have a reference to Cameron and Osborne being yet to seal the deal with the electorate and the idea that the polls are overstating the Tories and that Labour can be the largest party in a hung Parliament.

In these circumstances, Richards believes, and refers to unnamed senior Lib Dems as being in negotiations with Labour ministers for a re-run of the Lib-Lab pact.  This sort of talk is pure electoral poison for the Lib Dems.  The 1992 election was dominated by the Tory talking point of ‘vote Lib Dem, get Labour’ – it will be even more damaging if it’s actually true.  The Lib Dems have no option but to continue their tight-rope act between the two parties, and should in fact concentrate more of their fire on an unpopular Government sinking in the polls than a resurgent Opposition.

Incidentally, there’s a rather lovely piece of timing in this article.  Seeking to illustrate the Tories inherent puerility, Richards seizes on Cameron’s rather well-received speech on Friday.

With David Cameron and George Osborne still playing student-like games, taking time last week to discuss whether it would be clever of them to make an "apology", it is not surprising they have yet to seal the deal with the electorate.

What’s the main story of the morning?

Was that an apology? Brown admits he could have done more to prevent economic crisis.

Tch.  Bloody students.

Bullshit baffles brains

In an article bemoaning the inability of British politicians to express themselves clearly in understandable English, Catherine Bennett gives Harriet Harman a partial pass for her feats of clarity over the draft Coroner Reform Bill, although she then goes on to criticise her for this less than clear expostulation on the efficacy of quantitative easing:

"In respect of quantitative easing, the monetary policy committee has introduced up to £75bn extra that will be put in the economy"

Catherine Bennett is unhappy with this:

Given Harriet's commitment to simple speech, as well as the airy way in which she made this incomprehensible announcement, it's possible she thinks quantitative easing is so commonplace an expression that any explanation would be an insult to the intelligence of ordinary people. Unlike the legal language in her coroners bill, whose translation, unfortunately, almost no ordinary people ever appreciated because the bill was all about tinkering with the legal system and therefore of interest only to lawyers.

I have a rather simpler explanation.  For all that it becomes ever harder to believe, Harriet Harman was a solicitor – that is a qualified legal professional.  The rather peculiar nature of legal language is something she jolly well ought to understand – and even know how to translate for the laity.  She is not, however, an economist.  Her failure to explain quantitative easing in simple language stems from her failure to understand quantitative easing.  Jargon is almost always used as a shield to prevent the listener from realising that you’re talking rubbish.  Nowhere is this more true than among politicians.

Scargill was right?

An argument you see a lot at the moment is that the current recession represents the ‘failure’ of capitalism and that therefore Scargill was right all along, and socialism as an economic theory has been vindicated.  Really?  When the economic crises of the 1970s destroyed Bretton Woods, did that mean that the old economic systems of protectionism and mercantilism were vindicated?  When the Russia economy collapsed in 1998 did that mean that the communist economic system was right all along?

This reasoning, that capitalism is flawed, therefore socialism works, is a neat little illustration of the false dilemma fallacy.  I’m particularly disappointed that Seumas Milne (tribune of the people that he is) doesn’t appear to have learned much from the philosophy he was taught at our old alma mater.

Gallup polls, and other misleading arguments

There’s a superficially convincing argument doing the round, particularly amongst those supporters of the Government that have reached the whole clutching at straws stage, that the Tories are far from nailed-on certainties to win the next election.  The argument stands on the following assumptions:

The polling, though good, is nowhere near where it needs to be.

This argument – evidenced today in the Telegraph – notes that the solid Conservative polling lead of 10-12% is nothing like the 20-30% leads that Labour enjoyed in the run-up to the 1997 election.  As a result, the Tories have failed to insulate themselves from the inevitable ‘swing-back’ to the governing party that always happens before elections.  Rod Crosby is a tireless proponent of this point of view over at political betting.  However, this approach fails to take into account the revolution in polling that has taken place over the last decade – see political betting for Mike Smithson’s repeated postings on this point, or see Anthony Wells.  The only polling company that is remotely comparable is ICM – and in March 1996, the relevant comparative date, ICM were showing polling shares of Con: 31; Lab: 45.  The eventual result?  Con: 31; Labour 43.

Bearing that in mind, it is almost entirely pointless to argue that since the Tories aren’t polling as well as Blair did, they aren’t on course to win the election.

2.  Despite their lead in overall votes, the Tories will get stuffed on tactical voting.
Well, they were in the four elections of 1992-2005 – surely this is a perennial feature of the British electoral landscape?  As Andrew Pierce says:

Labour gets in because the opposition vote is split between the Conservatives and Lib Dems, while the Conservatives normally don't get in because their opponents vote tactically for the party best placed to stop them.

The entire point of the first two years of David Cameron’s leadership was to detoxify the brand.  There do appear to be signs that this working – apart from the increased Tory polling shares.  Mike Smithson highlights the fact here that Lib Dem voters now prefer David Cameron to Gordon Brown.  These suggest that the old “get rid of the Tory” campaigns may be unravelling.  As an illustration of this, lets look at Crewe & Nantwich.  As everyone knows, the Tories took the seat, with a 17.6% swing from Labour.  The Labour vote collapsed, and the switchers were direct from Labour to Tory.  In the old days of unpopular Labour Governments, by-election victories in Dunfermline and Brent East went to the Liberal Democrats, as voters wanted to give the Government a kicking, but didn’t want to hand the vote to the Conservatives.  There’s no hard evidence, and won’t be until the election, but I think that the old anti-Tory vote is unwinding.  More bad news for Labour (and the Lib Dems); more good news for the Tories.

3.  Cameron hasn’t ‘sealed the deal’ with the public, and as a result Tory support is ‘soft’.
Politics Home did a pretty good number on the second half of this – Conservative supporters are the most enthusiastic of all.  And as for those ‘soft’ leads, the Tories have maintained a double digit polling lead since January, and were last, very briefly, behind in January 2008.  Their support hasn’t dipped below 40 this year, and has been overwhelmingly in the 40-44 range since October 2007, with occasional flourishes into the upper 40s.  Despite the constant references to volatile polls, the truth is that these are solid, consistent numbers.

As for Cameron ‘sealing the deal’ with the public, well of course he hasn’t – and can’t unless and until he is elected as Prime Minister.  It’s a daft benchmark to set.  What he has done, however, is attracted and maintained the stated preference of more than 40% of the public in opinion polls, and he’s don it consistently for the last 18 months.  Which, frankly, is as close as you’re going to get to sealing the deal before an election.

Labour and Labour-supporting pundits will continue to push these points as hard as they can – bless them, they need something to keep their spirits up – but I’m far from convinced that there’s much merit in them.

Perfect neutrality

We hear a lot about political impartiality from the media these days – especially about how any suggestion that there is a bias against the Tories is nonsense.  Bearing that in mind, I’ve found a perfect example of this fabled even-handedness in today’s Guardian.

Who is right about the miners' strike - Kinnock or Scargill?

Wait – you mean there’s a third option?

Great minds...

Sunday Telegraph 15 March 2009

The credit crunch was not unforeseeable, nor was it an act of God. It was caused by US sub-prime mortgages only in the sense that the First World War was caused by the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand: these events were the trigger, not the cause. The underlying cause of the credit crunch is unsuccessful speculation by large banks in wholesale money markets.

Conservative Party Reptile 15 December 2008

There have been two distinct phases of the current recession, related but distinct.  The first was the rapid and dramatic contraction in financial liquidity.  Everyone knows this happened because of sub-prime.  Which is true, in the same way that the First World War happened because of Gavrilo Princip.  What ‘sub-prime’ is used to mean is a short-hand for the popping of the US housing bubble.  Every country has always had dodgy mortgage loans.  So long as house prices are going up, these don’t matter.  Or at least can be said not to matter.  What was different this time was that the international financial sector had discovered a way to commodify financial products in a way that hadn’t been thought of before.

Please, make it stop

Christ.  I’m getting tired with asking what the fuck is wrong with The Telegraph.  A pat answer is that they’ve fired all the journalists that were any good and retained those that aren’t.  Today is a case in point – a glorious encomium to the wonder and marvel that is Gordon Brown’s leadership.  Some of this drivel from Mary Riddell is almost amusing:

The speech lacked the Prime Minister's usual statistical and literary flourishes.

Jesus, as bad as that?

His interest in the bond between Lincoln and Burns was, none the less, reflected in the speech. As two of the most respected world figures, the president and the poet shared a humble upbringing, a sense of destiny and a quest for social equality. The PM's assertion that "our first responsibility is to help the powerless" suggested that he saw this synergy replicated in an Obama/Brown partnership of like-minded pioneers.

Is this suggesting that Gordon Brown is one of the most respected world figures?  If so, I’m not sure who is more deluded, Riddell or Brown.

Whatever his culpability over City freeloading and lax regulation, he has produced as coherent and impassioned an exit strategy from recession as any world leader.

What is it?  Where is it?  He hasn’t got a clue what to do, which is understandable, and if Riddell is describing the ‘headless chicken’ approach that has been derided by virtually one and all as ‘coherent’ she’s operating to a very different definition to the one I have.

No leader has spent more time on the phone to Premier Wen Jiabao and other international statesmen.

That’s it?  He’s been on the phone?  Oh well then, panic over…

Critics wonder whether they can bear another 15 months of Brown. They should ask just how well they would fare without him. Voters will, soon enough, have their say on his fate. But if he had been ousted last year, or Mr Cameron had already been parachuted into No 10, it seems unlikely that a "novice" would have navigated disaster so surely.

Look, you can’t just keep repeating that Brown has handled this crisis surely when it’s so apparent that he hasn’t.  His Government have lurched from crisis to crisis, usually following whatever policy looks most likely to damage the short-term interests of the Conservative Party.  That’s not leadership.

It’s actually rather hard to dissect this piece, as the author seems to have spent the last six months with her fingers jammed into her ears going ‘la la la’.  Can we just say that Labour’s policies, on the economy as on so much else, are a combination of ineffectual and malign.  That virtually anyone could do a better job than the Labour Party.  And that the Telegraph seems to have entered a spiral from which only change of leadership can rescue it.

Shorter classes in journalism

Yup, this more or less explains most of the journalism I’ve read on Israel/Palestine…

Cameron Derangement Syndrome

One of the odd things about David Cameron’s position at the moment (riding high in the polls, high personal approval ratings, a united party etc) is just how little support he receives from the ‘Tory’ press.  Simon Heffer’s issues are well-known and long-standing (diminished only slightly by the fact that he is clearly a fictional character), but it’s not just him getting irrational and absurd.  Jan Moir wrote a peculiar piece a few weeks ago entitled “God how I hate Cameron’s legs” that included the following rather creepy image:

There is something about the Tory leader's hideous orbs of compressed, calfy muscle  -  testament to a cycling habit that keeps him in favour with the eco-nuts  -  that makes me want to beat them black and blue with a bicycle pump.

As James Forsyth says, Cameron appears to have Blair’s knack of driving his opponents literally insane.  Which knack is on display again in the Mail today from A.N. Wilson.  It is noticeable that these three columnists are all from the Telegraph/Mail stable – people who ought to be Tory supporters.  Wilson’s piece is a reaction to those pictures of Cameron wearing casual clothes at a film premiere.  Shock horror and all that.  Brace yourselves: this is going to be ugly…

The dark corduroy shirt, not tucked into the jeans. The truly awful camouflage trainers and the bright-green laces flopping any-old-how. This is a 42-year-old man disguised as a teenager out on a Friday night.

So…. Shirt not tucked-in, jeans and trainers.  Shameful huh?  But then, what should he have worn at a casual event?  Perhaps A.N. Wilson can offer some guidance.

Surely a man like David Cameron should wear a pair of well-polished shoes made in Northampton rather than those idiotic smelly trainers? Maybe he did not need to wear a tie when going to see a cartoon film, but what is the objection to tucking his shirt into his trousers?

I love the maybe there.  Personally I found those pictures of Gordon Brown on holiday wearing a sports jacket and slacks far more peculiar than Cameron wearing jeans and trainers.  And as for the objection to tucking your shirt into your jeans I have two words for him: Jeremy Clarkson.

Everything before the but...

There’s a very old saying, used here for example, that “everything before the but is bullshit”.  It’s a handy way of remembering that the ritual ‘I’m not a racist but…’ lines can be safely ignored.  Bearing that in mind, lets have a look at the comments to Jonathon Freedland’s article, which says that it is important not to allow legitimate criticism of Israel to spill over into a general anti-Semitism.

“Firstly let me say I completely and utterly condemn all anti-semitism.  But…”

“Who couldn't agree with the sentiment, but…”

“There is some truth in what Mr Freedland has to say but…”

“Of course anti-semitic attacks of the kind JF describes are unacceptable, and if anyone is deliberately stoking this extremist fringe into such acts, they need to think again.  But…”

“I deplore any instances of anti-Semitic abuse, violence or intimidation, wherever they come from and for whatever reason.  But…”

“You make valid points. Anti-semitism should not darken world history, along with all the other race-isms: Never Again.  But…”

“There's no excuse for anti-semitism, but…”

“All anti-semitism, like all racism, is vile and should be condemned outright. More often than not, its perpetrators are wilfully ignorant or insecure.  So I agree wholeheartedly with this article.  But…”

“We all know that the British Jewish community are not directly responsible for the massacre in Gaza, but…”

Comments have only been open for an hour or so…

By George he's got it?

I was forced to do a quick double-take this morning reading George Monbiot:

For the first time in my life I resent paying my taxes. Until now I have seen this annual amputation as a civic duty - like giving blood - necessary to sustain the life of a fair society. Suddenly I see it as an imposition. Its purpose has reverted to that of the middle ages: subsidising the excesses of a parasitic class.

Has he finally seen the light?  I’ve been feeling this way for years – so much tax paid, and so much of it going to pay the wages of bureaucrats and out-reach officers.  So much pissed up the wall of low productivity and gold-plated pensions: George, welcome to the right side!

Sadly it turned out he was talking about Government bail-outs of the banking sector.  Right sentiments, wrong target.

Gone to the dogs

What in the name of buggery hell has happened to the Telegraph? It has fired half its writers, the good half naturally, and appears to have surrendered its opinion pages to Brownite true believers and Simon Heffer (who’s fictional anyway). Just look at the ridiculous Mary Riddell today, even the headline is absurd.

Gordon Brown should try harder to inspire us in these hopeless times.

Inspire us? Seriously, what is she smoking? And the next line made me snort coffee through my nose.

He needn't dazzle us with words, he can actually do something to improve our lot, says Mary Riddell.

Dazzle us with words? Brown? It is to laugh.

No politician has produced a better idea of how to save the economy, least of all David Cameron, whose attempts to talk down confidence are shabbily reckless.

In the same edition of the Telegraph is a piece by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who at least has some economic credibility. In it he says the following:

Britain has foreign reserves of under $61bn dollars (£43.7bn), less than Malaysia or Thailand. The foreign liabilities of the UK banks are $4.4 trillion – or twice annual GDP – according to the Bank of England. The mismatch is perilous.

It is why sterling has crashed 10 cents from $1.49 to $1.39 against the dollar in two days. The markets have given their verdict on Gordon Brown's latest effort to "save the world".

He goes on to say:

The core of countries deemed safe is shrinking by the day to a half dozen. Sadly, Britain is no longer one of them.

David Cameron isn’t talking down confidence, he just isn’t being blindly Pollyanna-ish. We’re completely Mottramed, and its largely Brown’s fault. And no amount of garbled soundbites and unconvincing smirks can disguise that.

Heffer on racial sensitivity...

There are times, I have to admit, when I begin to wonder whether the character of ‘Simon Heffer’ isn’t really an elaborate hoax. He is, after all, so fantastically unlikely. A sort of less plausible (and less enjoyable) Peter Simple. Recently Craig Brown admitted that he had secretly been writing Heffer’s columns all along. But I’m not sure. Brown is a satirist with a delicate touch – a rapier, not a bludgeon. He surely wouldn’t have blundered with a parody as grotesque as this on Saturday?

Did the Beeb need to bowdlerise Buchan?

About once a year I watch television, and this time it was the BBC’s new take on The 39 Steps. My colleague Rowan Pelling has already pointed out that Hannay lived in an Art Deco building, of which there was none in 1914. I was shocked by his wearing a white tie with a dinner jacket, which even a bounder in those days would not have done. But I also noticed how the story had been politically corrected: Buchan’s original disobliging references to “dagoes”, Jews and other foreigners having been eliminated, together with the magnificent moment when Scudder tells him, “You’re a white man!” Viewers could see the programme in low or high definition. Perhaps they could also have a channel where they could see it as the author intended.

Even Simon Heffer would not be able to combine the crashingly pompous and the racially antediluvian with quite such clunking magnificence. You can imagine a team of writers giggling as they wrote it, wondering whether this was the moment they got exposed as a hoax.

Toynbee and economic illiteracy

The Tories’ plans for a tax cut on savings have the benefit of feeling right.  Interest rates have plummeted in an attempt to recover from the costs imposed by excess borrowing – punishing the thrifty to protect the ill-disciplined (and I speak here as a prime representative of the latter category).  It seems only just therefore, that incentives to saving be introduced, both to compensate savers for the collapse of their earnings, and to encourage a more prudent ethos in the future.

What it isn’t, of course, is a panacea to the economic downturn, nor a complete answer to the question “what would you do?”  In fact, at a total cost of only some £5bn or so it’s not enormously significant to the Treasury – though it would be pretty significant for those living of savings income.  That’s a pretty good combination as it happens, though Polly Toynbee is enraged by it.  As so often with la Toynbee it’s not entirely clear how much of her fury is genuine, and how much a sort of tribal reaction.  Lets have a look anyway.

In fact she spends the first half of her article more or less acknowledging the force behind the Tory arguments – the piece is littered with “He is right…”, “On the face of it, Cameron should walk it with constant finger-pointing…”, “Superficially, he has all the best lines…”, “It chimes with commonsense instinct…” and the like.  But she needs to demonstrate that, even though it might sound reasonable and plausible, it is, of course, “part populism, part poison and part snake-oil.”  So she has a go at that, arguing that to make cuts, any cuts, in public spending is “economically illiterate” and runs contrary to the sainted Keynesian economics that were last tested to destruction back in the days when she failed her first-year exams at Oxford.

She focuses her fire (such as it is) on what will be the Government’s main line of attack – any cuts in public spending will affect ‘frontline services’ and will make matters worse for everyone.  The Tories have pledged not to cut health, schools or international development – and this means it will cut business, work and pensions, transport etc.  Disaster, doom, gloom and so on.

But there is one area that the Tories could very profitably examine for spending cuts: quangos.  As has been said repeatedly by the right-wing of the press and the blogosphere, massive amounts of money are spent on rule by quango: £124bn in 2006, and much more now.  Total Government spending for last year was in the region of £557bn.  For Toynbee to state that savings of $5bn cannot be found is the far side of ridiculous – less than 1% of a budget is a rounding error, not a series of unaffordable slashes into the ethos of the public sector.