Just in case you missed them...

11:21am

Be sure to check out some of the posts made over the weekend:

Fraser Nelson sets out the Coffee House ethos, and also charts Britain’s spiraling drugs problem.

Peter Hoskin suggests that Gordon Brown should shift into “short-term mode” in order to regain credibility.

James Forsyth reflects on how the Tories can seize the political initiative.

And, over at Americano, James also writes on how Barack Obama can shake the charge of being too “liberal”.

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Harriet Harman needs a moral compass

10:24am

Harriet Harman comes out with one of the most disgraceful statements by a government minister in a while, in today’s Independent. Here’s the exchange:

Now, Castro is not some cuddly Marxist but a brutal dictator. Harman’s statement is either an expression of extreme ignorance or of a double standard which sees no evil on the left. 

The Freedom in the World survey gives a few examples of the kind of regime that Castro ran:

All political organizing outside the PCC is illegal.Political dissent, spoken or written, is a punishable offense, and those so punished frequently receive years of imprisonment for seemingly minor infractions.
…
Access to the internet remained tightly controlled. It is illegal for Cubans to connect to the internet in their homes.
…
In 2003, state security forces raided 22 independent libraries and sent 14 librarians to jail with terms of up to 26 years
…
In March 2003, the government initiated a crackdown against the prodemocracy opposition. Seventy-five people, including 27 independent journalists, 14 independent librarians, and more than 40 signature collectors for the Varela Project, were sentenced to an average of 20 years in prison following one-day trials held in April. (At the end of 2004, 61 of the activists who were arrested remained in prison; 14 won conditional release for health-related reasons, and two subsequently left Cuba.)
…
In 2004, 22 independent journalists arrested in March 2003 remained imprisoned in degrading conditions, which included physical and psychological abuse; acts of harassment and intimidation were also directed against their families. In April, two journalists held without trial since March 2002 were finally tried by a court in Ciego de Avila on charges of insulting Castro and the police and creating public disorder; one received a three-year prison sentence and the other a sentence of three and a half years.

For once, demands for an apology do not seem overblown. Her remarks were not worthy of her or her office.

Fidel Castro: hero of the left, or dangerous authoritarian dictator?
David Newton
Edinburgh

Harman: Hero of the left – but time for Cuba to move on.

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The protective cloak

8:52am

After the events of the weekend, all eyes will be on Michael Martin.  Will he buckle under the media's relentless pressure?  Or will he dig in his heels, and continue to stress the legality of his actions?  The way things have gone so far, I'd put money on the latter scenario.

The most worrying feature of this episode is the protective cloak that MPs have drawn around the Speaker.  Most criticism has been dismissed as snobbery, even though the left-wing papers have also taken Martin to task.  And – as Nick Robinson put it on this morning's Today programme – numerous MPs blindly regard the allegations as “nonsense”. 

Tim Hames gets it spot-on in today's Times:

"The real scandal is that the House elevated a man who was manifestly unfit for the role and seven years later it will not press him into overdue retirement."

After Conway, the political class quickly moved to repair its battered reputation.  Now, all that good work could be undone just as swiftly.

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News from the front

11:10pm

Anthony Cordesman, the respected US military expert, has an important piece in the Washington Post today on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As he reports, both conflicts are at a critical moment:

“No one can return from the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, as I recently did, without believing that these are wars that can still be won. They are also clearly wars that can still be lost”.

Cordesman is more optimistic about the situation in Iraq than Afghanistan, but he argues that neither conflict will end anytime soon. 

“What the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan have in common is that it will take a major and consistent U.S. effort throughout the next administration at least to win either war.”

To my mind, this fact is the compelling reason to hope that John McCain wins in November. He is the only presidential candidate who has both grasped this reality and is prepared to make the commitments that will be necessary if the United States and its allies are to give themselves a chance of winning these conflicts.  

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The cost of drugs

5:09pm

To clarify my earlier blog, I certainly did not mean the murdered prostitutes in Suffolk were “victims” of the government’s failed war on drugs. They were born free and chose drugs. My point is how much cheaper and easier it has become in the last ten years to take such a choice. The point of prohibition is to make heroin unaffordable, or very difficult to get hold of. Of course this price collapse started before Labour came to power - the earliest figure I have is £88/gram for July 1995 v £40 now. It was even higher in the 1980s - I have no idea how Zammo afforded it.
 
Perhaps they scrapped Grange Hill because the drug plot-lines would have been overwhelming. In 1994, just 1% of UK schoolchildren reported cocaine use. Now it’s 5%. And Britain - not the Netherlands - is Europe’s capital of ecstasy use – not surprising seeing as the price of a tab has collapsed from £11 in 1999 to £4 in December 2004. Heroin deaths rose fivefold from 1993 to 2006.
 
There is much talk about controlling drink prices – and I bet the dealers are wishing Tesco well in its demands for booze price control as part of its principled campaign against alcoholism, or did I mean independent off licenses. The pricier drink becomes, the more young people will be pushed into the arms of a British narcotics industry that has never had it so good. The pricier drink becomes, the more young people will be pushed into the arms of a British narcotics industry that has never had it so good.

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The right long-term decisions?

12:49pm

Just in case anyone still believed Gordon Brown's "right long-term decisions" claim, then the Observer's interview with Anne Owers – the chief inspector of prisons – should set them straight.  

Owers stresses that the the current prisons crisis is down to past (in)action on the part of the Government:

“You wouldn't start from here if you wanted to create a decent prison system ....  This is a result of decisions taken – or not taken – a long time ago.”

And who – in the past – refused to put up the money for increased prison-building?  That's right – Chancellor Brown.

If he's to regain any credibility, Brown needs to rapidly shift into short-term mode.  The problem – for his party, and for the country – is that he seems pathologically incapable of doing so.  All the more reason, then, for the Tories to be bolder.

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How the Tories can break on through

11:32am

Northern Rock has not fatally wounded this government and Gordon Brown is slowly getting back on the front foot. The government, it appears, will not lose the next election all by itself. So how should the Tories should try and win it? Here, the divide is between the tortoises and the hares—or, the infantry and the light horse as I would put it.

Today, Iain Martin and Tim Montgomerie, the two most eloquent hares, make the case for boldness. Iain makes the crucial point that the election will likely be decided by returning voters drawn to the polls by the fact ‘their vote will matter’ for the first time in a while: turnout in 1992—the  last election where the result was in doubt on polling day—was 77.7 percent, in 2005 it was 61.4 percent. These people are clearly casual participants in politics and the Tories have yet to give them a compelling, one sentence reason to turn out and support them at the next election.

One thing that the public’s reaction to the Northern Rock crisis—with support for Labour’s economic management rising both at the time of the initial run on the bank and when the government finally decided to nationalise it—shows is that Labour really are the natural party of government now: in a crisis the electorate instinctively turns to them. This suggests that voters are unlikely to rally behind the Tories on technocratic grounds: another reason why the Tories should be bold and offer some eye-catching policies.

Many in Project Cameron worry that voters now hold politicians in such low esteem that big promises are no longer believed. Certainly, if the Tories promised to cut the basic rate of income tax by 5p in the pound while still funding public services at the current level the electorate would be sceptical, to say the least. But as Tim points out, one of the big lessons of the US primary campaigns is that voters once more want to believe in something larger than themselves. It is notable that the two candidates who exuded the most technocratic competence—Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton—have been bested by their more idealistic rivals, John McCain and Barack Obama.

The Tories have bold policies on education, welfare and police reform that would transform this country. They should begin to make the case for them in idealistic and passionate tones; they need to set out how a Cameron-led government would leave this country a better place. It is time for the Tories to show the electorate the future that they offer.

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Victims of a failing war on drugs

3:22am

As the Suffolk Stranger was being sentenced, the Home Office slipped out this written answer on the street price of heroin. It’s almost halved from £74 a gram to £40 a gram. The symmetry was chilling: all the murdered women were addicts. As I write in the News of the World today the government is losing its “war on drugs” (price falls reflect softening of availability constraints) – and in Suffolk we had a glimpse of the human cost.

UK Average Drug Prices 1997-2007
£
As at December:	Cocaine (per gram)	Heroin (per gram)
1997	71	74
1998	77	74
1999	75	65
2000	65	70
2001	60	63
2002	56	61
2003	55	62
2004	51	55
2005	49	54
2006	49	50-55
2007	45	40-50

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Speaking of controversy

7:07pm

Michael Martin’s spokesman has resigned for unwittingly misleading a journalist over the recent story about the Speaker’s wife’s £4,000 taxi expenses. The spokesman had said that she had been accompanied by a Commons administrative official when she was actually with her housekeeper. No one in the Speaker's office who knew the truth had prevented him from making the error.

There is more to come on this story in the Sunday papers and even though the departing spokesman has absolved the Speaker of blame, this story is bound to increase the pressure on Martin to stand down. There is, though, no sign that he plans to go gracefully.

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Wil Obama seal the deal on March 4th?

6:58pm

Over on Americano, all the latest from the US elections including reports that Hillary aides are thinking about a dignified exit for her if Ohio and Texas don’t go her way in 10 days time. Plus, thoughts on whose reputation has been damaged most by the New York Times’s story about John McCain’s supposed relationship with a female lobbyist.  

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