Boris Coup: Day 19

Nineteen days into the Boris coup. It struck me that this was the time for a tribute to that seminal experience that made BoJo the man he is today. Him and one of his successor, David Cameron.

Boris ‘The Law's for You’ Johnson and 
David ‘It's not my fault’ Cameron

I speak, of course, of the Bullingdon Club in Oxford. This, for anyone not familiar with that fine institution, is a club for the wealthiest students of the university. They engage in activities as charming as they are entertaining, such as trashing the rooms of new members, booking whole restaurants where they get uproariously drunk over an expensive meal and then wreck everything, or throwing potted plants through the windows of an Indian restaurant on their way home.

Ah, boys will be boys, won’t they? Of course, if their parents didn’t rally round and settle all the damages, if indeed they were from deprived backgrounds, respectable Tory voters would be up in arms. 

“To jail with them, and throw away the key,” they’d say.

But when it’s the sons of the wealthy causing criminal damage, Tories don’t want them chucked in jail, they want them to lead their Party. And, indeed, become Prime Minister. Which both Cameron and Johnson have done.

You have to have some sympathy with the poor lads. Well, poor rich lads. With that kind of background, how could they possibly be anything other than what they are? Taught from the earliest age that they are entitled to anything they want, and then having it proved to them by being given it, how can they possibly think themselves subject to the same standards as the rest of us?

David Cameron has been giving interviews to try to boost the sales of his newly published memoirs, which by all accounts they badly need. He’s happy to denounce Boris and his sidekick Michael Gove for the lying campaign they ran for the referendum, and the way they’re trashing the UK Constitution and undermining its democracy today.

But what is beyond him is to admit that he was in any way responsible for this mess. And yet there was no need to call the referendum. Once called, an intelligent cross-party campaign could have been run to prevent a vote for Brexit. He, instead, called it to try to mollify his far right (and look how that’s worked out for him) and then ran a dismal campaign, which was defeated.

According to him, none of that is his fault. How could it be? He lives in a world in which you can trash a restaurant and not be held to account for it. Taking responsibility for things that go wrong just isn’t something he’s been trained to do.

BoJo’s gone still further. He knows that the law simply doesn’t apply to him.

He started his coup by flouting convention and suspending Parliament for an inordinately long time, so that he wouldn’t be subject to any kind of scrutiny or opposition as he prepared for a hard Brexit. We’re now into that period of suspension when he’s working in the shadows where we can’t see him.

Anyone who’s been a parent will remember calling to kids they couldn’t see, “whatever you’re up to, stop it”.

That would be the thing to say to BoJo right now. Except that he’d ignore us. We’re in the extraordinary position of having to ask whether the Prime Minister will obey the law. This may seem odd, since he’s promising us a new law and order initiative in the near future. It seems that’s law and order for us, but not for him.

Look at where we stand these days. Just before it was suspended, Parliament passed legislation obliging the Prime Minister to extend the Brexit process if he didn’t have a deal in place by 19 October, and couldn’t get Parliamentary support for a hard Brexit.

He’s repeatedly said he won’t ask for an extension.

So is he going to break the law?

No one knows. All that we know is that, as another unfortunate whose life was blighted by the Bullingdon Club, all his training tells him that he’s above all that kind of thing. Breaking the law? He makes it, he doesn’t have to follow it. He knows what’s best, and if that means acting illegally, so be it. That makes him a champion of the people, not a common criminal.

After all, at Oxford no one held him to account for failing to respect the law. Why should he now?

So sad. Poor Cameron and Johnson. Ruined by their upbringing. Although, it won’t be them that pays the price, it’ll be us.

Just as in the Bullingdon Club, someone else always pays.

A little humour, a little much-needed bloody-mindedness

Many years ago, I enjoyed watching the French film Ridicule, which focuses on how the court of Louis XVI – yes, the one who ended up losing his head on the guillotine – had made a cult of wit, deemed to be fiendishly clever though it was often also fiendishly cruel. 

The film contrasted such wit with a more British quality, which it called  ‘humour’, and clearly viewed as greatly superior.

At one point, the protagonist, a celebrated wit, meets the King who asks him to say something funny, there, immediately, on the spur of the moment.

“Be witty this minute!”

But on what subject could he be spontaneously witty? The King has a suggestion.

“Use me, for example.”

The wit has the perfect answer.

“Sire, the king is not a subject.”

I thought that was brilliant, but I suppose you could argue that it is perhaps spoiled by a deferential quality verging on the obsequious.

The contrast is emphasised at the end of the film by a French aristocrat, by then in exile in England while the revolution is running wild in his country, walking along a cliff path above a breath-taking seascape. A gust of wind takes his hat. He cries out.

“My hat! I’ve lost it.”

“Better than your head,” his English companion replies.

“Humour!” replies the Frenchman, “it’s marvellous!”

Ridicule: A hat is lost, but a head is spared

To me, that is as witty as the first rejoinder. But there is indeed a difference: it doesn’t establish any kind of hierarchy between the speakers, it shows neither deference to the other person or superiority over him, but merely shares a smile between equals. If that’s humour rather than wit then, yes, I too prefer it.

Sadly, in the last two or three years that famous British sense of humour has been a little scarce in public discourse. The leadership of both the Labour and Conservative parties take themselves far too seriously to allow of any smiles. So it was good to see something of the spirit reappear a little, even though it was  on the Tory side at the expense of Labour, and it felt more like wit than humour: the comments were designed to belittle opponents.

It seems that Environment Minister Michael Gove, even though he’s generally someone to laugh at rather than with, showed some elegance when he described MPs who hope Theresa May can get a better Brexit deal than she has so far, as swingers in their fifties hoping that Scarlett Johansson would show up at one of their parties. Quite amusing though I was glad to read that Amber Rudd, speaking up for the female side, suggested “or Pierce Brosnan”.

The Justice Secretary, David Gauke, went one further and described the official Labour Brexit position as hoping for Johansson to show up on a unicorn. Cruel but hardly unfair: Jeremy Corbyn keeps suggesting that if elected, he will somehow bring home a hugely preferable deal to May’s, with absolutely no evidence to suggest that he could do any such thing.

At least the comments were worth a smile, not something that marks British politics much these days.

But there’s another quality my compatriots regard as quintessentially British. It’s a certain cussedness, if not downright bloody-mindedness, which refuses to allow power to do just what it likes. “Over my dead body,” it seems to say, or even “over your dead body” – after all, we cut off our King’s head nearly a century and a half before the French more famously did the same to theirs.

It’s particularly welcome to see that spirit stirring again.

Twice in 24 hours, the May government has been defeated in the House of Commons by MPs across parties working to prevent a cliff-edge, no-deal Brexit. It is heartening, in this parliamentary democracy, to see parliamentarians asserting their right to resist the government.

What’s more, the initiatives came from the backbenches, not the party leaderships. Yvette Cooper, leadership candidate defeated by Corbyn led one attack. Dominic Grieve, ex-Tory Minister, guided the other. The leaders merely opposed, in the case of May who was defending her deal, or followed, in the case of Corbyn who is, well, Jeremy Corbyn.

The government was particularly angry over the second defeat, with the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, who allowed the vote to take place. Precedent was against him, and it was a decision that seriously threatened the government’s usual prerogative to decide what gets discussed and what gets voted on. But what it showed was a Speaker intent on seeing all parliamentarians able to decide national policy, and not just the minority of them that form the government.

A refreshing notion.

The Speaker, though originally a Conservative himself,
getting right up Tory noses by asserting the authority of Parliament

And there’s a delicious irony to it, too. Brexiters keep saying that the aim of leaving the EU was to ‘take back control’. I don’t think this is what they had in mind, but I’m revelling in the spectacle of Parliament reasserting its authority over the Executive, which had been allowed to erode away far too far.

Now, that’s the kind of control I’m only too glad to see us taking back.

Especially as it’s so cussed. And gives us a lot to smile about.

Bregretfully yours

It would be wise to be deeply suspicious of anyone who claims to speak for the will of the people.

It’s curious how many Bregretters I’m meeting these days. That’s people who voted for Britain to leave the EU but are regretting their choice these days.

‘We were duped by Farage,’ one told me. ‘All that rubbish about extra money for the NHS – it was all lies.’

Well, yes. Farage, then leader of UKIP, and leading Conservatives such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, and even a few Labourites, went to the country with a false prospectus about Brexit. And sadly a wafer thin majority fell for their snake oil. Today, they’re beginning to realise that no outcome to the Brexit process can possibly leave Britain anything but worse off, and probably a lot worse off. And when I say Britain, I mean the British people, especially those outside the wealthiest elite.

‘Another referendum,’ my friend went on, ‘would give a landslide against Brexit.’

Well, I’m not that confident. But it does seem likely Brexit would be defeated in a new referendum. The arithmetic just suggests as much: I know of no Remainers who have switched to Brexit, but quite a few Brexiters who’ve switched to Remain. I would expect the Remain vote to win by a margin at least as good as it lost by in 2016, and probably a few points better.

Which makes it ironic that the people who are most opposed to a second referendum claim they’re respecting the will of the people. The people spoke, they assure us, on 23 June 2016 and voted to leave the EU. That decision has to be carried through.

In other words, they’re not concerned with the will of the people. Only with the will of the people as it was then. Not as it’s struggling to make itself known now.

Sadly, since one of the main opponents of another referendum is Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, I can only conclude that they’re arguing from a position of dishonesty. They know as well as I do, as well as any commentator of the state of opinions in the UK, that today views have swung decidedly against Brexit. And yet they refuse to allow expression to those views.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that both Theresa May, Tory leader and current Prime Minister, and Jeremy Corbyn actually favour a Brexit though they won’t come out openly to say so. Their talk of respecting the people’s decision is just cover for the position they won’t avow. The last thing they want is the people’s voice to be heard, as it would mean changing attitude and abandoning their secret wish.

Just at a time when the electorate is moving decisively against Brexit, it is faced with a miserable pair of alternatives. Both main parties are led by people who refuse to be guided by a democratic choice of the people they claim to represent, whose voice they insist they respect. Or even to offer the people the right to make such a choice.

A dire alternative: two deeply unpopular, rightly distrusted leaders
Neither Corbyn nor May will admit their position on Brexit
or speak out for the people  who will pay the price

It’s no surprise that both leaders are in the pits of public approval. Corbyn is currently just behind May, on a minus 24 approval rating to May’s minus 21, but that could switch around in a matter of days. The point is that both are overwhelmingly disliked and distrusted.

Given their position on the central question of the day, they deserve to be.

It means that at the next general election, whenever it is, voters will have to pick between two candidates without courage or honesty and inseparable on the biggest question that faces Britain today. With clothes pegs on our noses, we shall have to choose the lesser of two evils. We shall elect a Prime Minister in whom no one other than a small band of true believers has any confidence.

Oscar Wilde defined a pessimist as one who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both. I suppose we shall be spared that grim fate. Though it’s hardly a healthy state for our democracy. Especially if our leaders’ ambiguities have left Britain out in the cold after a hard Brexit, without even a trading agreement with the EU, as seems likely at the moment. A tough world and an untrusted leader – that’s probably not the outcome most Brexiters were hoping for.

I fear that Bregret is set to get a lot worse yet.

A first glimmer of hope in the Brexit tunnel

Since the morning of 23 June 2016, when the British electorate demonstrated to the world that a referendum is a poor way of reaching good sense in politics, I’ve never felt so encouraged about Brexit as today.

A fine day in Winter. A good moment for a glint of hope on Brexit

Much can still go wrong. Boris Johnson and Michael Gove remain senior ministers in the British government. They were leading figures in an anti-EU campaign that took political mendacity to levels not often achieved in pre-Trump democratic nations. Leaving the EU would free £350m a week for the NHS, they claimed; the reality is that leaving the EU will cost huge sums and the NHS crisis worsens by the day.

Instead of being driven from power as such dishonesty deserves, they continue to exert great authority at the highest level of government. It would be unwise to write them off. They will counterattack and it would be sensible to expect them to be highly effective.

Nevertheless, we can still enjoy, at least for now, an outline agreement between the UK and the EU in which Theresa May in effect conceded that we might not actually leave. In order not to create a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, she accepted the principle that the whole of the UK might remain aligned on regulatory standards with the EU, at least for some aspects of trade.

That means that she has opened the door to the possibility of our staying in the EU Single Market in effect, if not in name. If we can hold off the wild men of Brexit, such as Gove and Johnson, and make sure this happens, we shall at least have limited the damage that Brexit could do to our economy. That’s both in maintaining easy reciprocal access with our major trading partners in Europe, but also in fending a threatened dependency on an arrangement with the US. Such dependency, it has already made clear, would mean our abandoning standards that matter to us.

We would, if all this happens, have limited the worst of the damage to us. We will have maintained values and standards that protect our way of life. What we will have given up is merely the right to have any say in defining those standards: we will no longer have a vote in the deliberations that decide the regulations we adopt.

In other words, we shall have cut off our noses to spite our faces, but at lest we won’t have completely shot our foot off.

For that small mercy, on this fine winter’s days, let’s at least be thankful.

Brexit: trying to tame the monster

George Osborne, former Chancellor of the Exchequer – the quaint British term for Finance Minister – who campaigned for Britain to stay in the EU and was unceremoniously dropped by his boss David Cameron’s successor as soon as she took over – has said that “Brexit won a majority. Hard Brexit did not.”

One of the other figures who disappeared in the wake of the vote was Michael Gove. He’s a real hard case. He betrayed his old friend David Cameron by campaigning for Brexit alongside his new friend Boris Johnson. He then betrayed Johnson by announcing he would stand against him for the Conservative Party leadership, in effect forcing him out of the contest. He then went on to be soundly trounced. By then he had become too toxic even for the Tories, which is pretty remarkable in that company. So he found himself relegated from any kind of office, cast so far into the outer darkness that he can’t even hear the weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Even so, he’s managed to make his voice heard, and even he, unworthy he, has a point worth making:

George Osborne is absolutely right that a hard Brexit has no mandate and would be no answer to the problems Britain faces.

In fact, it would put jobs and livelihoods at risk by erecting new barriers to trade with Europe. As he said, being close to Europe despite the Brexit vote is vital for Britain’s future.

Our economic future depends on membership of the single market, while cooperation with Europe on security is crucial in the fight against terrorism and organised crime.

So even Gove, keen Brexiter though he was, is panicking now that he sees just what benefits Britain would be giving up. His solution is to stay in the single market.

Mike (top) wanted us out, George wanted us in
Now they have to try to stop the runaway train

I’m afraid that might cause some ructions. Because a great many of those who voted for Brexit did vote for a hard Brexit. They want out, and completely out. In particular, a great many of them want to get out of the EU to put an end to what they see as the sheer horror of immigration – they belong to the growing camp of xenophobes who are rounding on people they feel they can scapegoat, but don’t realise that it isn’t they who will gain from attaining their aims.

As I argued before.

Interestingly, even Theresa May, Cameron’s successor, who started off constantly repeating “Brexit means Brexit” (whatever that means) has been softening her tone on the single market recently. It really is possible that we shall see her government come up with an arrangement whereby Britain would remain in the single market despite leaving the EU.

That would be gloriously ironic. Because staying in the single market means accepting continued freedom of movement of people. Norway, which never joined the EU but is in the single market, has long had to accept that EU citizens can freely move there, live there, work there. It also means continuing to pay contributions to the EU budget. As Norway does. Finally, it means accepting EU regulations. As Norway does.

Leaving the EU in these conditions only means giving up any say in making regulations or setting budget levels. Amusingly, the Norwegians used to rely on Britain to speak up for them in EU deliberations. But who now will speak for us?

The Brexit backers who were voting for a hard Brexit won’t be at all happy about that state of affairs. Their dissatisfaction is more than likely to lead to tensions within the Brexit camp.

The statements by Osborne and Gove rather suggest that they’re trying to head them off. Gove and his mates let the Frankenstein monster out. Now they want to prevent his doing the damage they have at last learned to fear.

I don’t think they’ll succeed. Instead we shall simply see another phase in the debate, in which the Brexit camp itself splits, into the hard and soft trends. That only strengthens my conviction that we need another referendum. Not a second referendum on the EU, but a completely new referendum on what the alternative to the EU actually means.

You see, we know what the majority in the first referendum were against: they wanted no further part of the EU. But it didn’t make clear what they were for. And I suspect they won’t be able to agree on being for any one option.

In which case, given no satisfactory alternative to the EU – hey, why not decide to stay in after all?

Brexit: some of the people apparently fooled all of the time. And happy with it

“No one in this world,” H L Mencken claimed, “so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

Mencken wasn’t particularly charitable and the judgement is harsh, but the Brexit vote and its consequences do seem to confirm his point. Or at least Lincoln’s view that you can fool some of the people, all of the time.

The pro-EU campaign was unfortunately led by a number of the weakest politicians we’ve had in Britain for decades: David Cameron and George Osborne for the Tories, Jeremy Corbyn for Labour. The first two came up with dire predictions of what would happen after a Brexit vote, which have naturally not been fulfilled – we’re still in the EU, for Pete’s sake, how could a disaster have happened already? And even when things start to slip, nothing happens that fast in economics. Even the crash of 2007-2008 took pretty much a year to develop fully.

As for Corbyn, he said practically nothing throughout the entire campaign, which at least has the merit of making him immune from being disproved by events.

On the other side of the fence, there were Labour figures such as Gisela Stuart MP, campaigning with the anti-immigrant lobby though she’s German-born herself, renegade Labourites like David Owen who split Labour in the eighties, the hard right like Nigel Farage of UKIP or nearly-as-hard right of the Conservative Party, such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove (the latter so disloyal, to rebels and loyalists alike, that not even the Tories can stomach him in government any longer).

As the devil has the best songs, so the Brexiters had the best campaign. They travelled up and down the country in a battle bus emblazoned with slogans pledging that Brexit would save “£350 million a week” that could be used for the NHS.

Economical with the truth, effective for the campaign
The battle bus with the £350m claim

The figure was a lie and plenty of people pointed it out. But the lie took hold and many voters believed it and passed it on. Fool me once, they say, shame on you. The Leave campaigners certainly fooled enough people once to feel that shame, but clearly don’t: in fact, lying served them so well that they’re using the tactic again.

The campaign has morphed into “Change Britain” but the usual suspects are back: Gove, Johnson, Stuart and Owen are heading the organisation once more. What are they saying about that £350 million pledge?

It’s brilliant! They’re saying absolutely nothing at all. Dead silence. To admit it was a con trick would be out of the question and I didn’t expect it. But simply to pretend it never happened is pure George Orwell.

Instead they’re now offering to fund agriculture, poorer regions of the UK, scientific research and the universities out of savings generated by Brexit. In other words, to replace the funding that the EU currently provides and which we’d continue to receive if we didn’t leave.

There can be only one judgement of that pledge: it’s worth exactly the same as the one they made before. There’s zero chance of its ever being honoured. That’s not a problem, though: these are promises not intended to be fulfilled. They’re only intended to suck in the gullible again. And just watch: the gullible will lap them up.

Fool me twice, they say, shame on me. Plenty should feel that shame but just like the con artists themselves, they’ll know no shame. Because they don’t even know they’re being fooled.

Some of the people, you see. All of the time.

Vote Brexit and get progressive Tories! It's brilliant.

Shock. Horror. Amazement.

One day I hear John Whittingdale, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in the British government, carefully explaining to the BBC that leaving the European Union – which would save, he assured us, £350 million a week – would allow us to invest far more in the National Health Service.

Now, that would be wonderful news. I really have only two minor cavils about it.

Firstly, and I don’t want to sound too sceptical or anything, but doesn’t that £350m a week figure fail to take into account the rebate negotiated by none other than Whittingdale’s great mentor, Margaret Thatcher? Doesn’t it also leave out of account the grants the EU makes to Britain? Wouldn’t those two effects reduce the net figure to something more like £160m a week?

Just asking.

Secondly, aren’t NHS finances being rather squeezed by the very government to which Whittingdale belongs? Aren’t we looking, right now, at a position where two out of three English acute hospitals ended last year in deficit? That in total the deficit is £2.45bn, the highest figure on record, and nearly three times higher than the figure for the year before? 

I’m only quoting the Daily Mail, a newspaper generally well enough disposed to Whittingdale’s party and government.

Is the EU the only thing stopping the government sorting this whole mess out?

Then, the next day, I read the words of a still more senior member of the same government. Michael Gove, Secretary State for Justice, tells the Observer:

The EU works for big banks, multinationals and the undeserving rich. They spend millions lobbying bureaucrats in Brussels to rig the rules in their favour. It is clearly in their interests that we remain. Leaving the EU would liberate us to invest in public services and support struggling communities. We could also supercharge support for education and science. Outside the EU we could more easily fulfil our shared ambition to have progressive, one-nation policies.

Call me naïve, but I’ve always had the impression that Gove’s government was perfectly relaxed about the undeserving rich. They’ve cut their taxes, after all, while heaping burdens on the poor and reducing any benefits they might otherwise receive. Meanwhile, again, given the falling finance for the NHS, local councils, schools and police, it’s not obvious to me that this government’s all that enthusiastic about spending more on public services.

The dastardly EU: all that stands between the Tories
and their natural progressive instincts

Of course, I may be wrong. I’m not at all joyful about the prospect of Brexit – which, it has to be said, seems seriously on the cards, if I believe what I’m hearing from people rather than the polls (and does anyone believe polls?) Still, it would be a huge comfort to know that it only took freeing ourselves from the deathlike grip of the EU for this government to set out – as Gove promises – in pursuit of “progressive, one-nation policies.”

Was the EU all that held them back? Underneath it all, were they champing at the bit to be progressives? To build a single nation and heal all divisions?

Sorry if I’ve maligned them in the past. But, in my defence, I have to say that if these were their true inclinations all along, they’ve been hiding them pretty well.

David Cameron: aiming high in the indolent politician stakes

On being told of US President Calvin Coolidge’s death, Dorothy Parker famously said, “how do they know?”

Coolidge was known as “Silent Cal.” A young woman who sat next to him at dinner one evening is said to have told him that she’d taken a bet that she would get more than two words out of him. “You lose,” he replied, and never addressed another word to her.

Silent Cal
Cameron sadly seems as little inclined to rise to challenges
Even more sadly, he can't emulate him in keeping quiet about it

To be fair, Coolidge was probably not quite as awful as his successor, Herbert Hoover, who presided brainlessly over the great crash of 1929. He concentrated on balancing the budget, and left the economy in free fall. It could only be rescued once he’d been voted out of office and replaced by Franklyn Roosevelt.

Interestingly, David Cameron is nothing like Coolidge in that he keeps on talking. But like him, in all other ways, he seems hopelessly unable to make a good judgement. And, like Hoover, he’s so fixated on balancing the budget, that he can’t see what he’s destroying on the way to doing it.

He behaves like a man who doesn’t want to have to read his briefing documents.

On coming to office, he oversaw the bold decision to slash spending on flood defences by £125m a year, from Labour’s spendthrift level of £665m. No doubt he felt this bolstered the macho image he was cultivating, of a Prime Minister with the guts to take the tough decisions to balance the books.

Then there was serious flooding in 2012. And – lo and behold – he found £120m to plough back in, all but restoring the cut, to relaunch delayed projects.

You could be forgiven for wondering whether he hadn't thought through the consequences of his actions.

This is just one of a series of half-baked decisions over which he’s presided. He dropped Labour’s plans for a new generation of planes to fly from aircraft carriers, preferring a different model. But there were problems with that model. So he had to revert to the Labour approach.

That bright fellow, Michael Gove, then Cameron’s Education Secretary came up with a smart idea. The GCSE, a state exam taken by most school pupils at 16, would be replaced by something far better. Except that it turns out it wasn’t – the boards that oversee exam qualifications, most educational experts and even the Tories on the parliamentary select committee on Education, pointed out all sorts of flaws in the plan, and five months later it was dropped.

David Cameron
And when you think he's half asleep, he's really half awake

It seems Cameron is starting his second term exactly how he started his first: with wild, ill-thought through proposals. And, curiously, Gove’s involved again, on the latest and most egregious of them. He’s now Justice Minister and therefore closely bound up in the Cameron wheeze to repeal the Human Rights Act.

Cameron was at it again in the parliament this afternoon: “Be in no doubt: we will be introducing legislation and legislating on this issue because I want these decisions made by British judges in British courts, not in Strasbourg.”

It seems that once more he hasn’t completely mastered his brief. Britain is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights. As a result, British citizens can bring human rights cases to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Incidentally, this is not an institution of the European Union, but of the Council of Europe, a much bigger but looser grouping of countries. Britain’s leaving the EU would not take it out of the Council.

The idea of the Human Rights Act was to incorporate the legislation into British law, so that citizens wouldn’t have to appeal to Strasbourg, but could instead have their cases heard in Britain. In other words, to have “decisions made by British judges in British courts.”

It’s hard not to conclude that Cameron really hasn’t done his homework. Again.

Fortunately, though, he seems to have woken up to his mistakes slightly more quickly this time than he has on previous blunders. The Queen’s Speech today, where the government announced its legislative programme, contained no reference to repealing the Human Rights Act, just a vague reference to bringing in “proposals for a British Bill of Rights.”

It’s just as well. Even Conservative MP Dominic Grieve told Sky News that “I am wholly unpersuaded that the benefit outweighs the really substantial costs that will come with this.”

As for Labour, the former Justice Minister Lord Falconer was firm: “It increasingly looks like the Tories are making it up as they go along. What is clear is that if they suggest completely scrapping people’s human rights protections, Labour will oppose them all the way.”

Making it up as he goes along. Sounds like Cameron. Sounds like any lazy man.

He may not be as silent as Coolidge, but Cameron’s seems to be rivalling his inertia. As well as Hoover’s ineptitude.

British values: hasn't the government forgotten the one that matters most?

The talk here in England has recently been all about “British values”.

This follows an alleged attempt  by fundamentalist Muslims to take over some schools in Birmingham. Nicknamed “Trojan Horse”, this plot may or may not have been happening. It’s quite hard to tell. All I know is that Ofsted, the body charged with inspecting schools, went in and found nothing, even handing out a couple of “outstanding” ratings; got told there were some nasty Islamists at work; went back in – and found just that.

Park View: officially "outstanding" last time,
"inadequate" now

Meanwhile, Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, responsible for schools, fell out with Theresa May, Home Secretary, responsible for security and combating terrorism. They took to bickering with each other in public about which of them had failed to expose the evildoing or to act against it adequately. They only stopped when David Cameron, Prime Minister which makes him their boss and the man whose job each of them covets, knocked their heads together and told them to behave.

If nothing else, the whole story confirms that there’s nothing like supreme professionalism and competence. And what this sorry crew displayed was nothing like either of them.

Now this A-team has come up with the appropriate response to the unsavoury individuals behind the plot. They’ve decreed that henceforth all English schools should promote British values. 

Inevitably, those cynics who run the press asked the party-pooper question: just what are British values? And equally inevitably we were quickly into a discussion in which fish and chips loomed large (a virtual amendment to the unwritten British constitution prescribes that the right of citizens to consume any desired quantity of fish and chips shall not be infringed).

Helpfully, Gove has now spelled out British values for us today. They are respect for the law, democracy, equality and tolerance of different faiths and religious and other beliefs.

It’s wonderful to be run by people who think these values are specifically British. Respect for the law? It occurs to me that one or two other nations may have thought of that one.

It’s also good to know the government believes such high standards are ingrained in the British psyche. Take democracy, for instance. Universal manhood suffrage, coupled with votes for women at 35, is still less than a century old; equal voting rights between the sexes came only ten years later.

Then there’s equality. This government has been slashing benefits and tax credits for the poor – and taxes for the wealthiest. The top 1% of the population from the point of view of takings, between them collect 15% of national income – in other words, 15 times the national average. That shows a commitment to equality in much the same way as Vladimir Putin shows enthusiasm for open political debate.

And finally we have tolerance of other faiths and beliefs. Non-Anglican Protestants could run for Parliament in Britain only from 1828, Catholics from 1829, Jews from 1858. Homosexuality has been legal in Britain since 1967, gay marriage has been possible for just a couple of months.

Meanwhile, 2.7% of the British population is black; 14.6% of police stop and searches are on black people; 8% of arrests; and 13.7% of the prison population.

Anyone who thinks that these figures reflect the greater inclination of black people to commit crime is simply part of the problem.

Equality and tolerance? We’re a long way from them yet.

And that’s the point about most of these values. They’re not specifically British, and Britain doesn’t practice them all that well. Many of us would like to see the country aspire towards them, but given the huge increase in poverty under the present government, it’s hard to believe that Ministers share that view.

In any case, Michael Gove’s demand that schools teach British values is self-defeating. Because there’s one value that he’s forgotten about completely and, though it’s not exclusively British, it’s certainly deeply rooted in our culture.

We don’t want government telling us what we should believe.

Now there’s a value Gove would do well to re-learn. Funnily enough, it’s something Conservatives always claim to believe in deeply. But perhaps they don’t mind so much if it’s them doing the telling. 

Naughty tale. And an unlikely moral ending

We all know the scene from the worst kind of school novel.

The little boy, bitter, embarrassed, furious is standing on the square of carpet in front of the headmaster’s desk. To one side is the teacher he cheeked.

“Well, Gove Minor,” thunders the headmaster. “What have you to say for yourself?”

“I’m terribly sorry, Mrs May,” mumbles Gove, staring at the floor in front of him, and refusing to look the teacher in her eyes.

“Yes, well, that’ll have to do. Now bend over.”

“Yes, Mr Cameron,” says Mrs May, for it is she who is about to receive the caning, not Gove at all.

In the corner, ignored by the main actors, is Professor Wilshaw, School Inspector-in-Chief, observing the scene and noting “Outstanding approach to discipline.” Unknown to anyone else, and indeed unknown to him, in two weeks time he will review that judgement and replace it by “Inadequate understanding of justice or the purpose of punishment.”

The book has no sympathetic characters and fails, in consequence, to engage readers. After selling poorly for five years, it is remaindered in May 2015 and unsold copies pulped soon after.

We’re living through that story in England now.

An anonymous letter, now widely believed to have been a hoax, announced some months ago that schools in Birmingham were being taken over by a conspiracy of Muslim fundamentalists intent on turning them into hotbeds of extremism or even terrorism. Some of the schools were inspected by the Schools Inspectorate, Ofsted, headed by Sir Michael Wilshaw, gave them a clean bill of health, occasionally even handing out the highest grade, “outstanding”.

When the allegations, now known as the “Trojan Horse”, surfaced, Ofsted visited 21 schools. We’ve now had their report. Two schools previously found to be outstanding were downgraded to “inadequate”, the lowest possible grading. No evidence was found of Islamic extremism, though there was evidence of a climate of fear and an increasing emphasis on Islam in the schools, some of which have a Muslim intake of over 90%.

Meanwhile, Michael Gove, Secretary for Education, had let it be known that he considered Theresa May, the Home Secretary and therefore Minister in charge of counter-terrorism, responsible for the shortcomings. In response, the Home Office put on-line, at midnight, a letter from May to Gove in which she pointed out that he had known about the Trojan Horse allegations and demanded to be told why he had taken no action in response.

As the spat intensified between May and Gove, both leading contenders to replace David Cameron at the head of the Conservative Party when he loses office, he called them in and dressed them down. Gove was forced to apologise publicly to May, but May took the more serious punishment: she had to fire one of her favourite special advisers.

Uneasy neighbours on the government front bench

Isn’t it lovely to see the Education Minister behaving like an unruly pupil in one of the schools he oversees, and being reprimanded in much the same way?

No-one emerges from this story with any credit. Not the Muslims who are trying to convert secular, state schools, funded by the taxpayer, into centres of Islamic faith. Not the writer of the Trojan Horse letter who clearly massively overstated the problem. Not May and Gove doing their pot and kettle act. Not Cameron trying to re-establish his authority over a government that seems completely out of his control. And finally, not Ofsted or Wilshaw who seem to completely elastic in their assessment of schools, shifting their evaluations from one extreme of the scale to the other in response to scandal.

And the worst of it all? None of this would even be contentious if these schools were faith schools – of which we have 6000 in England.

Yes, state, taxpayer-funded confessional schools.

Gove may be upset about the Islamic takeover of schools in Birmingham. But he’s very much in favour of faith schools generally and would like to see a great many more of them.

I don’t like schools becoming centres of Islamic indoctrination. But I don’t like acting as centres of Christian or Jewish indoctrination either. That’s what we have Churches, Mosques or Synagogues for. Very few people go to them, but that’s their choice. I see no reason why the power of the State and the money we provide it should be used to make up for their indolence in religious practice, by teaching their kids at our expense what they refuse to study themselves.

They want faith schools? Let them found, and fund, their own. That’s what the French do: private schools can be faith-based, but the public sector is strictly secular.

A secular state school system? Now that would be a response to the Trojan Horse allegations we could be proud of.

Not likely to happen any time soon, though.

Privatisation: good in principle, we're told. And great for child protection

We always like our politicians to be principled. Though sometimes we forget that principles are abstract, and reality can be worth taking into account too. Detaching ourselves from reality exposes us to the danger inherent in pure principles, which is that they can be the skeleton on which ideologies hang. 

“...ideological thinking,” wrote Hannah Arendt, “becomes emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on a ‘truer’ reality concealed behind all perceptible things...”

Emancipation from reality. That’s the hallmark of ideology. Things must be this way, because that’s the principle we live by, and anything else must therefore be untrue.

Parties of the Left suffered from ideological thinking for decades. For instance, the British Labour Party became so obsessed with common ownership of the means of production that it became simply the party of nationalisation – though that meant ignoring the reality that the way the railways or gas distribution were run as nationalised industries was far from ideal, something that was obvious to their customers. The principle, nationalise the “commanding heights” of industry, trumped the reality of bureaucratic ineptitude and poorly delivered services.

Today, though, it’s the Right rather than the Left that is dominated by ideology.

It was a Thatcher/Reagan thing. Anything would be better run by the private sector than by government. And it didn’t matter how or on what basis: just get it outsourced, by hook or by crook, and hang the consequences.

The consequences were often dire. The railways pretty much hit the buffers. Labour had to renationalise part of them to get things back on an even keel – at which point they actually became rather good. Certainly better than I’d ever seen them. Expensive but good enough for me hardly ever to use the car for any trip over an hour and a half.

The railways make a powerful point. The solution we’ve reached fits no ideology. Those committed in principle to nationalisation or to privatisation both lost out: we have private train companies – and one nationalised one – running on nationalised tracks. A messy compromise, but it works. That’s reality. It doesn’t always fit any ideology.

Private train companies running services on public track
Though this private company happens to be publicly owned
Confused? That's how it is with non-ideological compromises.

The Right, however, sticks with its ideological fervour. Privatise anything that moves. Parts of the police service, parts of the prison service, increasingly large parts of the health service. Because it’s bound to be better than running those services publicly.

Except that it hasn’t been, particularly. At best, things seem little different. And at worst, they’re lousy.

• Serco won the contract to provide out-of-hours GP services in Cornwall. That contract is to end 17 months early because the company couldn’t meet its delivery commitments. Besides, some staff were found to have falsified returns to try to make it look as though targets were being hit.
• G4S won the contract to provide security at the London Olympics. It failed to put the service in place, and instead the army – the publicly-managed army – had to be called in instead and did an excellent job.
• G4S also won a contract to tag prisoners on parole. After being found to have systematically overcharged on invoices, it was forced to pay back nearly £109m.
• Now Serco faces charges of not having acted appropriately over allegations of sexual assaults on an inmate at the Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre, which it runs and which contains particularly vulnerable people: immigrants facing deportation.

So there are some worrying concerns about these two giants of the privatisation world, and precious few spectacular successes to allay our fears.

Despite all that, Michael Gove, the Conservative Education Secretary, is proposing to put child protection services out to private tender.

Child protection is about looking after children who are deemed at risk of abuse, physical or sexual. There are few tasks that deserve to be treated more seriously. If the inmates at Yarl’s Wood are vulnerable, surely no one is more so than a child at risk. We’ve seen sickening cases in recent years of children abused and murdered because the Child Protection services failed to intervene in time.

These are the services that Gove wants to put out to tender? To a market place dominated by organisations like Serco and G4S? He feels they should be given this immensely delicate responsibility?

Curiously, one of the few services he does not propose to outsource is adoption. He was adopted himself. Has that played a role in his thinking?

The proposal is a wonderful example of ideological thinking. Privatisation, the Conservative Party has decided, is good. So we’ll privatise anything we can. And the mere reality of poor performance, or even fraud, isn’t going to deflect us from our mission.

That needs resisting. And in case anyone feels that we need to answer the principle of privatisation with another principle, this one should do: child protection is far too precious and far too fragile to allow the pursuit of profit to have any influence over how it’s delivered.

Now there’s a principle I’m prepared to go along with. Because it’s firmly rooted in reality.

Hear the knives sharpening, this Ides of March

2058 years ago today, a shady politician turned up for a meeting whose importance he had probably not yet fully grasped, but soon would. 

He was there despite being warned that it was a bad day for him to do anything. Indeed, as he arrived he caught sight of the man who’d given him the warning. He turned to him and, rather too smugly as it happened, commented:

“The ides of March are come.”

To which the soothsayer replied:

“Ay, Caesar, but not gone.”

It wasn’t many minutes later that Julius Caesar lay dying at the feet of the statue his late rival Pompey. ‘Late’ in great part thanks to Caesar himself. All terribly ironic. Especially since it was men he thought he could count on who turned their knives on him.

Why did they prove the soothsayer right and turn the Ides of March into such a bad day for Caesar? They thought he was about to realise his ambition and establish his personal power in Rome. They made sure that didn’t happen.

15 March. Not a good day for Julius Caesar

Of course, things may not have gone exactly the way I described. I’m only quoting Shakespeare, and I suspect he wasn’t there. I mean, did they even speak English in those days?

Somebody who could no doubt tell us about all of that is the present Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. The man’s a bit of a classicist. He even wrote a book called The Dream of Rome which was a bit glitzy and superficial, but had its merits.

He knows all about powerful men cut down in their prime by their own supporters. So he must have had a bit of wry smile yesterday.

Because being Mayor of London’s only a consolation prize for him. What he’s got his eye on is Downing Street. And with his ‘friend’ David Cameron, the current tenant of number 10, making such a mess of things, he must fancy his chances of getting the Conservative Party leadership after Cameron loses the next election and gets sacked. Then he’d spend a parliament getting ready to mount his own challenge for 2020.

Not all his ‘friends’ are entirely happy about this shady politician realising his ambition, any more than the ‘friends’ of his predecessor were two millennia ago. These days, though, we don’t generally settle these things with knives. So one of Johnson’s ‘friends’ has found a much smarter and sneakier way of doing things.

Boris Johnson
The target?

Michael Gove’s established himself as a special kind of education secretary. For instance, he tells us that he is “a decentraliser. I believe in trusting professionals.” Despite that, he has managed to infuriate pretty much the entire teaching profession, not least by his outspoken defence of the use of unqualified teachers. 

It was also he who sent a bible to every school in the country, which I presume was intended to be some kind of inspirational move. Personally, I have difficulty believing that students are pouring into their libraries for the opportunity to consult their Gove bible lovingly and with rapt attention. 

What has Gove done now?

Something truly surprising. He’s turned his fire on the number of old Etonians in the cabinet – the cabinet in which he serves. That includes his boss, David Cameron. Gove, in an interview with the Financial Times, draws a parallel between the present cabinet and that headed by Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury over a century ago.

“At the beginning of the 20th century, the Conservative cabinet was called Hotel Cecil,” declared Gove, “the phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’ came about and all the rest of it. It is preposterous.”

It doesn’t bother him individually: “It doesn't make me feel personally uncomfortable because I like each of the individuals concerned, but it's ridiculous.”

And he wonders “I don't know where you can find some such similar situation in a developed economy.”

Extraordinary. Here’s Gove decrying his own government. A Conservative-led government. And for being elitist, of all things.

It seems inexplicable until you remember that David Cameron’s not the only Etonian around. Another is the present occupant of City Hall in London. Oh, yes. Boris Johnson’s another graduate of Eton College.

And that gives us the subtext to Gove’s interview, and with Tories, it’s always the subtext that counts. He’s saying we’ve got an Etonian Prime Minister, and that seems ridiculous in this day and age. On the other hand, he’s already there. Leave him in place. But we certainly don’t want another. 

Michael Gove
The dagger?

Boris has been warned. He needs to watch his back, where his so-called friends are standing. And sharpening their knives.

Then again. 2058 years ago today, Caesar was warned too. Perhaps we can still avoid a Johnson premiership.

Who'd be a teacher? At least, in a nation of shopkeepers?

It was Napoleon who said that England was a nation of shopkeepers.

He wasn’t being complimentary. It seems unfair to hardworking shopkeepers, but a nation made up of them? Nah. An idea we’d treat with scorn. 

That even includes many of the English. Which is odd, because when it comes down to it, it isn’t commerce that attracts most contempt from a large part of the English public. It's the public sector.

Take teachers, for instance. Those long holidays – they’re clearly underworked. And at the end of their career, the most valued teachers may be on nearly two and half times median earnings, so they’re clearly overpaid. And they’re all infected with a sad, sixties-hippy radicalism, that somehow contrives to be ineffective but also dangerous – don’t they teach arithmetic by phonetics, and leave all the important battles out of geography?

On the other hand, you can go a long way if you stick to commerce. Consider Tony Hayward. He was Chief Executive of BP and being paid a little over a million a year (only a little over: £45,000 over the million mark, not even two median salaries).

Tony Hayward. Role model of the leader who steps up,
accepts the buck and takes the bullet 

Of course, he couldn’t possibly have got by on that amount, so shares and bonuses eked out his basic to a more comfortable £4 million. It’s not a bad salary; I’m sure teachers would regard it as reasonably generous. 

It’s not just handed out to any old guy, though: you have to be supremely competent and prepared to take responsibility if things go wrong. So when the BP Gulf oil spill took place in 2010, it fell to him to describe the incident as ‘relatively tiny’, an inspired choice of words for what turned out to be the worst ever man-made marine oil disaster.

Faced with a lot of ill-spirited criticism from the States, Hayward followed up with the heartfelt, ‘I want my life back.’ Well, who wouldn’t?

Still, responsibility is a demanding master. Hayward had to give up his job and lower his sights. Like a teacher who has been disciplined, his career was shot. These days, he holds a couple of corporate directorships (Corus Group and Tata Steel), has merged a company into Turkish oil firm Gemel Energy to pursue opportunities in Northern Iraq, and is interim chairman at Glencore International, the world’s twelfth largest company. The rumours have it that the position may become permanent.

You can imagine that he may well be struggling to get his income anywhere seriously into the seven-figure range. What teacher would want to face that fate?

And Hayward isn’t alone in showing how we value most highly those who serve the public most gladly. As long as they do it the world of commerce.

Sam Laidlaw is the Chief Executive of the energy conglomerate Centrica. He takes, or to use the courteous if misleading term, earns, well under £5m a year.

Well, not that far under.

It’s only reasonable to expect some pretty remarkable stuff from the guy, and boy did he deliver this week: 10% increases in energy prices from the old British Gas, now a Centrica subsidiary. That’s just over three times the rate of inflation.

Sam Laidlaw.
Also understands that high rewards come with an obligation to serve

To be able to pull off that kind of stunt and keep a straight face takes the kind of talent you just can’t buy. Well, actually, you can buy it and Centrica have. And it clearly doesn’t come cheap.

You have to remember that Laidlaw achieved this stunning success in a highly competitive environment. Six companies control 98% of the market. Imagine just how difficult it is, with six suppliers, to rig things so as to allow all the companies to make the same excessive price increases and pull in the same obscene levels of profits.

In this nation of shopkeepers, Laidlaw’s is the kind of talent that’s really appreciated.

It’s not the same everywhere. In Finland, for instance, teaching is seen as one of the most desirable professions. Only if your degree is among the top 10% will you be considered for appointment to teaching, and even then you need a minimum of a Master’s degree.

Curiously, pay isn’t all that much higher than in England. At the top of the scale, allowing adjusted for purchasing power, Finland’s only about 4% above England. Sounds like the only really substantial difference is in the public perception of teaching and its prestige.

The impact, however, seems significant. Finland comes top of evaluation after evaluation of educational systems. The OECD, as I mentioned recently, finds that England is right down there among the also-rans when it comes to literacy and numeracy levels. 

England’s answer to this kind of difficulty? Under the current Education Secretary, Michael Gove, it is to launch ‘free schools’, free of irritating constraints like having to use qualified staff as teachers. Finland succeeds and demands a Master’s degree as a minimum; England fails and is pioneering unqualified teaching.

You want to understand our admiration for men like Hayward and Laidlaw, our contempt for the profession of teaching? Perhaps you need look no further than the OECD’s findings. I like the American expression, ‘go figure’, but the OECD found levels of numeracy which suggests that those who most need to do the figuring probably can’t. 

Lack of education feeds the undermining of education. And that perpetuates the forelock-tugging to our elite of high-earning mediocrities.

Too many electors cling to their comfort zone, content to live in a nation of shopkeepers. When what they really need is to build a land of talent. For which it would be a good start to learn a lesson from Finland.