Listening to this exchange, I couldn’t help but turn this hypothetical on its head: if Michael Gove had been a member of the Labour party, would Diane Abbott have voted for him as leader? The honourable member for Surrey Heath is often talked about as a future leader of the Conservative party. But in many ways he’d make a better leader of the Labour party.

For one thing, he seems to have a more extensive knowledge of Marxist political theory than Ed Miliband, which is saying something when you consider who Miliband’s father was. A picture of Lenin greets visitors to Gove’s office in the Department for Education and he is fond of quoting Antonio Gramsci to wrongfoot his critics. In particular, he has grasped Gramsci’s point about victory depending on a long march through the institutions. To change a country, argued Gramsci, it’s not enough to control the government. The true revolutionary needs to capture all the ‘neutral’ organs of the state as well. And this is precisely what Gove has done.

Since his arrival at the Department, Chairman Gove has purged three of his top four officials, including the permanent secretary. Heads have also rolled at Ofsted, Ofqual and the National College for -Teaching and Leadership, with the bosses of all three being replaced by Gove appointees.

He likes to joke about overseeing a ‘permanent revolution’, but for defenders of the status quo in what Gove refers to as ‘the Blob’ (the educational establishment), the scale and pace of his reforms is no laughing matter. He urged David Cameron to push through an education bill (prepared in secret before the election) in his first 90 days as Prime Minister, just as Blair had done, thereby denying the teaching unions an opportunity to organise. It was done in 77 days. That Act of Parliament enabled a majority of England’s state secondary schools to convert to ‘academy’ status, making them operationally independent and free from local authority control. It’s a change so far-reaching that the political opponents of academies are still reeling in shock and awe.

The same sense of almost Trotskyite urgency underpins his other reforms, with a completely rewritten National Curriculum to be taught in schools next year and new GCSEs and A-Levels coming on stream in 2015. Even when he suffers a setback, as he did when his attempt to introduce a single exam board in core academic subjects ran afoul of EU procurement rules, he quickly regroups and attacks the problem from another angle. Most ministers, even the radicals, would have trouble getting the government machine to move so quickly. Gove is helped by having the most able special advisers in the government.

Then there are free schools. They’re perceived to be such a success within the Westminster village that virtually every centre-right think tank claims to have come up with the idea. But the truth is that no legislation was required to usher in free schools because they’re just a subset of the sponsored academies that were brought in by the previous government. As Andrew Adonis says, Labour should be claiming credit for them, rather than attacking them at every opportunity, as Ed Balls did last week. But Gove has managed to convince the Labour leadership that free schools — and academies in general — are a Conservative innovation.

It’s as if Gove has taken a leaf out of Blair’s book — or, rather, his memoirs, which the Education Secretary is fond of quoting — and simply stolen his predecessor’s best ideas. Incredibly, Labour don’t even want credit for the fact that about 20 private schools have now become academies. They could, if they chose, say that these schools had been ‘nationalised’ and boast about how pupils from poor families now have access to schools that, not so long ago, only the rich could afford. John Reid, a former communist, used to say that extending choice to poor families was socialism at its most radical. Thanks to Gove, it is now seen as a Conservative policy.

Another aspect in which Gove is more like a Labour politician is the passion with which he argues his case. Most Conservatives are reluctant to claim the moral high ground, falling back on arguments designed to appeal to voters’ heads rather than their hearts. Not Gove. There are moments during his endless round of television and radio debates when he seems to catch fire, harnessing an Old Testament rage that is more reminiscent of Labour firebrands like Nye Bevan and Michael Foot than a Tory grandee.

This occurred during his last appearance on BBC Question Time when he was accused by Emily Thornberry, the shadow attorney-general, of judging schools according to how many children they sent to Russell Group universities. Suddenly, a dark cloud seemed to pass across his brow and the thunder and lightning were unleashed. His anger was so palpable, and his counterattack so ferocious, you almost felt sorry for Thornberry.

Gove’s sense of moral purpose is rooted in his own experience of growing up in a lower-middle-class household in Aberdeen. After initially attending state schools, he won a scholarship to Robert Gordon’s College and it was the rigorous academic education he received there that enabled this adopted son of a fishmonger to get into Oxford. He knows that for children like him, whose parents don’t have friends in high places, a good school can make all the difference. That’s where his proselytising zeal comes from — the absolute conviction that his education reforms will create a more level playing field between the children of the rich and the poor.

And it is this, above all, that would make him such an effective leader of the Labour party. Gove seems to possess a genuine affinity for the underdog — a sense of what it’s like not to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth — that Labour’s two Eds lack. How else to explain their bizarre decision to attack the Education Secretary’s attempts to restore rigour and discipline to state schools and, instead, side with the producer interest? In the looking-glass world of contemporary politics, the person doing the most for children from low-income families is a Conservative, while the leaders of the Labour party are willing to die in a ditch to defend a system that preserves privilege and entrenches poverty. No wonder Diane Abbott, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants who got into Cambridge after attending Harrow County Grammar School for Girls, has come out as a Goveite.

Of course, Michael Gove would never see himself as being on the left, even if he has borrowed some of their tactics. In his Keith Joseph lecture at the Centre for Policy Studies last month, he placed himself (and the Prime Minister) in the same radical tradition as Benjamin Disraeli and Margaret Thatcher. It’s one of the shibboleths of the modernising project, of which Gove is an architect, that it’s possible to have compassion for the most vulnerable members of our society and still be a Conservative.

But the reason he’s becoming an increasingly attractive figure to Labour MPs is because his education policy is so clearly in keeping with the best traditions of their party. Not so long ago, the Labour movement put great emphasis on the acquisition of knowledge, with left-wing intellectuals like R.H. Tawney believing all children should be introduced to the best that’s been thought and said, regardless of background. How that philosophy came to be embraced by a Conservative, with Labour politicians defending the idea that working-class children should study the words of Simon Cowell rather than Shakespeare, is one of the great mysteries of the age.

Michael Gove will never leave the Conservative party, any more than he’d switch allegiance from his beloved Queen’s Park Rangers. But Labour backbenchers can be forgiven for looking wistfully across the aisle and wondering what might have been.

The post The best leader Labour never had appeared first on The Spectator.

always of somewhere else (tacked to kitchen walls
a Swedish lake, a mountain range in Switzerland).
See us crouch in living rooms as daylight palls,

an old draught trespassing beneath the door, the trick
of day too quickly turning night, the radio’s
relentless classic serial, that Sunday evening tick

of now becoming then. Hear us planning new
retreats, rephrasing sentences it takes
a lifetime to pronounce — How nice to meet you

in Hungarian, or I’m from Hull in faulty Greek —
curtains drawn against the rain, against
the pale countrymen to whom we rarely speak

The post The Reluctant Natives appeared first on The Spectator.

Only now is the full cost of that failure becoming clear. In an age when ‘work’ is increasingly something done with the head rather than the hands, education standards determine the wealth of nations. There is now enough data to draw a direct relationship between the two and put a price on it. Smarter nations are richer nations. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford University academic, has pioneered a way of quantifying this and was commissioned by the OECD. His findings suggest that any politician looking for economic growth should start in the classroom.

Hanushek recently hit headlines by demonstrating how much richer America would be if its schools were at the top of the international league tables rather than languishing — with Britain’s — in the middle. ‘Relatively small improvements in students’ educational performance can have extraordinary impacts on a nation’s future economic well-being,’ he found. At the request of The Spectator, he has made similar calculations for Britain.

Professor Hanushek was struck by how Britain is now outclassed by so many of her former colonies, many of whom spend significantly less on education. He wanted to see how much wealthier we would be if our schools hadn’t fallen so far behind. His calculations, made together with Professor Ludger Woessmann from the University of Munich, imagine that catching up with Australia would add 0.4 points to our economic growth rate every year — far more than has been purchased by the debt-fuelled stimulus. It works out at £3.96 trillion over the lifetime of a child born today.

And this is, relatively speaking, the easy option. To reach Australian levels would require improving schools by no more than Poland managed in just six years. A more ambitious target would be Canada, which ranks fifth in the OECD league tables. Educating British children to Canadian standards, according to Hanushek and Woessmann, would mean economic growth of an extra 0.64 per cent each year. More importantly, the average worker could be paid 17 per cent more, because the economy would be far more productive.

And if Britain were to have school attainment as good as that of Hong Kong? Under the Hanushek/Woessmann tables, this would give us the fastest economic growth in the West and make the average pay packet 34 per cent larger. It sounds incredible — until you consider that Hong Kong, an island with no natural resources apart from the inventiveness of its people, is already richer than America on a per-capita basis.

If it were possible to buy better education, it would be the best investment that a government could make. But Professor Hanushek’s research shows that spending makes strikingly little difference. American school standards have been stagnant for 40 years in spite of more money and smaller classes. Recent research in Britain shows something similar: a recent study commissioned by the Department for Education found that there was no relationship between the wildly varying amounts of spending per pupil in state schools and the actual results.

What matters, according to Professor Hanushek’s research, is great teachers. ‘A good teacher can get 1.5 years of learning growth; a bad teacher gets half a year of learning growth.’ The difference between a good and bad teacher is one year of learning, every year. Having four consecutive years of high-quality teaching, he says, can eliminate any trace of economic disadvantage. ‘Family is not destiny’: studies show that, 20 years after leaving school, the pupils of great teachers are still doing markedly better in life.

The converse is also true. According to the research, poor teachers hinder the life chances of their pupils and inflict a wider cost on society. Teachers who are half as good as the average don’t cost half as much as the average — which is why education defies the laws of crude economics. Pumping money into the system is not, in itself, a solution. To start taking America’s schools to the top of the league table, Professor Hanushek says, the trick is to sack the least-effective 10 per cent of teachers and replace them with average teachers. Then the huge economic benefits he outlines would start to accrue. It’s an idea that could never be implemented in England. Some things are still too radical — even for a revolutionary like Michael Gove.

The post Teacher power appeared first on The Spectator.

Its old resident, Robert John, died in 1894. His inscription is still there, on the back of the headstone. His remains are there, too, if they haven’t disappeared into the soil.

John’s grave is among 700 or so that have been re-used, or ‘shared’, in the City of London Cemetery and Crematorium in east London. They are all at least 75 years old. Any remains that are found are put in a hessian sack and reburied. A chatty porter admits it’s ‘a bit controversial’. ‘Not everyone is happy with it,’ he says.

The re-use of a grave is extremely rare in Britain. It is allowed in London, but not generally elsewhere. The Ministry of Justice won’t approve it. But the people who run them believe it’s the only way they can safeguard their cemeteries’ future.

And it’s slowly becoming more common. The London borough of Enfield has recently started the practice. Southwark and Westminster are considering it.

Gary Burks, the superintendent in charge of the cemetery, run by the City of London Corporation, is giving me a tour. He is burly and shaven-headed and a bit East End. He claims that over the past ten years people have become more accepting of re-use. ‘We spell out the choices to everyone. There are no secrets.’ Some families, he says, even go ‘shopping for themselves’, selecting the grave they will be buried in.

Burks knows the place quite well. He’s worked here for 28 years. He used to dig the graves and mow the lawn. Before that, his father was a gravedigger here, and his family lived on site — he moved into the cemetery when he was seven. ‘I don’t tend to get lost,’ he says.

As we drive round, he rattles off statistics. There are 25,000 roses. Seven miles of roads; 150,000 burials. It opened in 1856 and is beautiful, with huge tree-lined driveways.

Before the cemetery re-uses any of its graves, it has to announce that it is doing so, with public notices in the cemetery and adverts in papers. It tries to contact the families of those buried there, who have the right to veto any re-use for a generation. Recently, the cemetery claimed 200 graves for re-use. Only one family wrote back saying they did not want the grave disturbed.

We go back to Burks’s office and I ask him what the alternative to re-use would be. He looks slightly angry. ‘It depends how much damage I do to the heritage value of the site,’ he says. To cram in more graves he would have to ‘rip up the trees or the shrubbery or the planted areas’. One cemetery nearby, he explains, ‘dug up all its roads’. He is appalled. ‘It undermines everything that a cemetery is about.’

On the other hand, if the City of London cemetery stopped burying people, its income would be cut by a third, and ‘maintenance standards would fall very suddenly’, says Burks. (Much of its income is from its two crematoria.)

Every cemetery in Britain faces the same dilemma, if not now then in three or ten or possibly 30 years’ time. They are all filling up; in central London they are full already.  The industry body, the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management, has been pressing governments for years to allow re-use of graves older than 100 years. In 2007 Labour approved the idea in principle. It forgot about it, though, as the election neared. The coalition has since ignored the problem. Tim Morris, the institute’s chief executive, is exasperated. ‘We were almost there with Labour,’ he says.

The thing is, most cemeteries in England can re-use some of their graves. If part of the ground is consecrated, they can bypass the government and just make a deal with their Anglican diocese. But they don’t.

‘It’s a bit worrying,’ says Morris. It’s partly because of paperwork, he says, and partly ‘waiting to see how the pioneers are getting on’.

All the institute wants, Morris says, is a system like that in Australia, New Zealand and Europe. In Germany, for instance, graves are re-used after only 20 years.

He blames Britain’s approach on the Victorians. Before the 1850s, small churchyards always re-used their oldest graves. But then London stopped being able to cope with its dead. Bodies were crammed into churchyards that were already full. Recent burials were pulled out of the ground to make way for new ones. Horror at these conditions led to the Burial Acts, one of which, passed in 1857, forbade graves being exhumed for re-use.

That law has remained unchanged for 150 years. But in the end it might be irrelevant. The Church of England, says Morris, has drafted legislation to allow re-use of graves throughout the country. And for graves in consecrated ground, it has full power — so no need to gain approval from the government.

The trouble is, Morris argues, we can’t just build more cemeteries. Keeping them up would become more expensive, while the income — the number of people dying — stays the same. And the private sector is no use either, apparently. Businesses, says Morris, are only interested in crematoria, which are very profitable. Cemeteries just get bigger and more expensive to run.

Ian Dungavell, chief executive of Highgate Cemetery in north London, is in favour of re-use even though his cemetery relies on money from visitors, not burials. He says cemeteries are ‘animated by grief and loss’. They rely on a connection with the neighbourhood. ‘The more they get separated from the local community the more irrelevant they become,’ he says. A cemetery that is no longer functioning is just ‘a park with stones in it’. Re-use would allow a cemetery to function indefinitely, he says. (Otherwise, Highgate will run out of burial space in ten years or so.)

Burks, too, sees his cemetery as enduring for many generations. In his 28 years there he may have got older, he says, but the site hasn’t changed. ‘I’ll be moving along before anything is done differently,’ he says. ‘I grew up here, but I’m still just passing through.’

The post Losing the plot appeared first on The Spectator.

Future intellectual historians will look back with wonder at the strange phenomenon of seemingly intelligent secularists in the 21st century believing that if they could show that the first chapters of Genesis are not literally true, that the universe is more than 6,000 years old and there might be other explanations for rainbows than as a sign of God’s covenant after the flood, the whole of humanity’s religious beliefs would come tumbling down like a house of cards and we would be left with a serene world of rational non-believers getting on famously with one another.

Whatever happened to the intellectual depth of the serious atheists, the forcefulness of Hobbes, the passion of Spinoza, the wit of Voltaire, the world-shattering profundity of Nietzsche? Where is there the remotest sense that they have grappled with the real issues, which have nothing to do with science and the literal meaning of scripture and everything to do with the meaningfulness or otherwise of human life, the existence or non-existence of an objective moral order, the truth or falsity of the idea of human freedom, and the ability or inability of society to survive without the rituals, narratives and shared practices that create and sustain the social bond?

A significant area of intellectual discourse — the human condition sub specie aeternitatis — has been dumbed down to the level of a school debating society. Does it matter? Should we not simply accept that just as there are some people who are tone deaf and others who have no sense of humour, so there are some who simply do not understand what is going on in the Book of Psalms, who lack a sense of transcendence or the miracle of being, who fail to understand what it might be to see human life as a drama of love and forgiveness or be moved to pray in penitence or thanksgiving? Some people get religion; others don’t. Why not leave it at that?

Fair enough, perhaps. But not, I submit, for readers of The Spectator, because religion has social, cultural and political consequences, and you cannot expect the foundations of western civilisation to crumble and leave the rest of the building intact. That is what the greatest of all atheists, Nietzsche, understood with terrifying clarity and what his -latter-day successors fail to grasp at all.

Time and again in his later writings he tells us that losing Christian faith will mean abandoning Christian morality. No more ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’; instead the will to power. No more ‘Thou shalt not’; instead people would live by the law of nature, the strong dominating or eliminating the weak. ‘An act of injury, violence, exploitation or destruction cannot be “unjust” as such, because life functions essentially in an injurious, violent, exploitative and destructive manner.’ Nietzsche was not an anti-Semite, but there are passages in his writing that come close to justifying a Holocaust.

This had nothing to do with him personally and everything to do with the logic of Europe losing its Christian ethic. Already in 1843, a year before Nietzsche was born, Heinrich Heine wrote, ‘A drama will be enacted in Germany compared to which the French Revolution will seem like a harmless idyll. Christianity restrained the martial ardour of the Germans for a time but it did not destroy it; once the restraining talisman is shattered, savagery will rise again…  the mad fury of the berserk, of which Nordic poets sing and speak.’ Nietzsche and Heine were making the same point. Lose the Judeo-Christian sanctity of life and there will be nothing to contain the evil men do when given the chance and the provocation.

Richard Dawkins, whom I respect, partly understands this. He has said often that Darwinism is a science, not an ethic. Turn natural selection into a code of conduct and you get disaster. But if asked where we get our morality from, if not from science or religion, the new atheists start to stammer. They tend to argue that ethics is obvious, which it isn’t, or natural, which it manifestly isn’t either, and end up vaguely hinting that this isn’t their problem. Let someone else worry about it.

The history of Europe since the 18th century has been the story of successive attempts to find alternatives to God as an object of worship, among them the nation state, race and the Communist Manifesto. After this cost humanity two world wars, a Cold War and a hundred million lives, we have turned to more pacific forms of idolatry, among them the market, the liberal democratic state and the consumer society, all of which are ways of saying that there is no morality beyond personal choice so long as you do no harm to others.

Even so, the costs are beginning to mount up. Levels of trust have plummeted throughout the West as one group after another — bankers, CEOs, media personalities, parliamentarians, the press — has been hit by scandal. Marriage has all but collapsed as an institution, with 40 per cent of children born outside it and 50 per cent of marriages ending in divorce. Rates of depressive illness and stress-related syndromes have rocketed especially among the young. A recent survey showed that the average 18- to 35-year-old has 237 Facebook friends. When asked how many they could rely on in a crisis, the average answer was two. A quarter said one. An eighth said none.

None of this should surprise us. This is what a society built on materialism, individualism and moral relativism looks like. It maximises personal freedom but at a cost. As Michael Walzer puts it: ‘This freedom, energising and exciting as it is, is also profoundly disintegrative, making it very difficult for individuals to find any stable communal support, very difficult for any community to count on the responsible participation of its individual members. It opens solitary men and women to the impact of a lowest common denominator, commercial culture.’

In my time as Chief Rabbi, I have seen two highly significant trends. First, parents are more likely than they were to send their children to faith schools. They want their children exposed to a strong substantive ethic of responsibility and restraint. Second, religious people, Jews especially, are more fearful of the future than they were. Our newly polarised culture is far less tolerant than old, mild Christian Britain.

In one respect the new atheists are right. The threat to western freedom in the 21st century is not from fascism or communism but from a religious fundamentalism combining hatred of the other, the pursuit of power and contempt for human rights. But the idea that this can be defeated by individualism and relativism is naive almost beyond belief. Humanity has been here before. The precursors of today’s scientific atheists were Epicurus in third-century BCE Greece and Lucretius in first-century Rome. These were two great civilisations on the brink of decline. Having lost their faith, they were no match for what Bertrand Russell calls ‘nations less civilised than themselves but not so destitute of social cohesion’. The barbarians win. They always do.

The new barbarians are the fundamentalists who seek to impose a single truth on a plural world. Though many of them claim to be religious, they are actually devotees of the will to power. Defeating them will take the strongest possible defence of freedom, and strong societies are always moral societies. That does not mean that they need be religious. It is just that, in the words of historian Will Durant, ‘There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.’

I have no desire to convert others to my religious beliefs. Jews don’t do that sort of thing. Nor do I believe that you have to be religious to be moral. But Durant’s point is the challenge of our time. I have not yet found a secular ethic capable of sustaining in the long run a society of strong communities and families on the one hand, altruism, virtue, self-restraint, honour, obligation and trust on the other. A century after a civilisation loses its soul it loses its freedom also. That should concern all of us, believers and non-believers alike.

The post Atheism and barbarism appeared first on The Spectator.

Istanbul

By now, everyone has heard of the brutal suppression of protests all over Turkey, which began with a peaceful sit-in in Istanbul to protect a hapless apology for a park from demolition. Right by the city’s unofficial centre, Taksim Square, Gezi Park had been slated to become yet another one of the ruling AKP’s signature Ottoman-cum-Disneyland construction projects. It was hardly much of a park, by London standards, but it was one of the last remaining places in the area with a few trees and a bit of room to stroll around. The protesters found the idea of losing that tiny refuge from Istanbul’s urban chaos unbearable.

The police removed the inoffensive tree-huggers in a surprise dawn raid, using violence so disproportionate and sadistic — and unfortunately for the police, so filmed — as to set off enraged demonstrations around the country. These, in turn, provoked even more psychotic retaliation from the police. Every story you’ve read of the brutality the cops inflicted on peaceful protesters is true, and more. I saw it. I’ve been seeing it with my own eyes for weeks, but by far the worst took place on Tuesday, when the police descended in the early morning to retake Taksim Square, directly after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had lulled the protesters with promises to meet them the next day to listen to their concerns.

The surprise attack began at 7.30 a.m. Black smoke quickly rose over the square, and tear gas enveloped the entire neighbourhood. Then the water cannon arrived, half a dozen, followed by another burst of gas. While at least six cameras from Taksim were feeding this scene live to the entire country, Istanbul Governor Huseyin Avni Mutlu assured the public, on Twitter, that ‘some protestors used materials that release fog and smoke. We should all know that their purpose is making the impression that the police used excessive gas.’ It didn’t occur to him, I suppose, that it is not just fog and smoke that indicates the presence of a lachrymatory agent. He also promised the protesters that only Taksim itself would be ‘cleaned’. The protesters and the park, he swore, would ‘never’ be harmed.

Three hours later, protesters formed a human chain around the park to prevent the police from recapturing it, but the cops shot rubber bullets, beat up journalists, and detained not only countless protesters, but their lawyers — 79 lawyers, according to the Istanbul Bar Association. The government is now dropping hints about an ‘operation’ against ‘provocateurs’ on Twitter — not an idle threat, for many have already been detained for writing ‘misinformation’, which apparently encompasses, among other things, tweeting the phone numbers of physicians on duty. A Turkish journalist reports that prosecutors have obtained warrants to seize any mobile phone they require. I have not yet been able to confirm this, but it wouldn’t in the least surprise me.

But this was just the beginning. After an afternoon of calm, on a lovely summer evening, some 30,000 people returned in force to Taksim Square — their square, after all, as it has always been. The police responded with an even more vicious strike, blanketing the massive crowd with a cumulonimbus cloud of gas accompanied by sound grenades. Terrified and choking, the crowd — students, street vendors, women in dresses and summer sandals — stampeded into the surrounding streets. Parents were separated from their young children. Someone tweeted frantically that her sister had fallen and the panicked crowds had run right over her. The police shot water cannon at a man in a wheelchair who had been brandishing the Turkish flag.

Writing blood types on their arms, volunteers ferried the injured to a makeshift field hospital. Chanting gangs of extremist opportunists (who bore little resemblance to the peaceful demonstrators in the park) taunted police in the streets leading toward the Golden Horn, drawing tear gas and water cannon through the whole of Istanbul’s old Pera district. International reporters, who have become accustomed of late to police crackdowns, described this as the worst in recent memory.

After a fortnight of clashes, four deaths have so far been confirmed; an untold number have suffered severe brain injuries; and at least ten young people have lost an eye after being shot by plastic bullets. Reports of injuries are coming in fast, but they are hard to confirm. The Turkish Human Rights Foundation is now placing the number at some 5,000, based on hospital reports. But keep in mind that not everyone who is wounded goes to the hospital. A gas grenade to the leg can cause a great deal of injury, but for those who can’t afford medical bills, it’s a hell of a hassle to go to an already overflowing state emergency ward — not least because the cops have been chasing protesters right into those very wards and gassing them there, too.

Moreover, many doctors, presumably under state pressure, don’t record ‘clashes with police’ as the cause of injury, but report instead that the victim has ‘had an accident’. (It is also possible that doctors are trying to protect their patients from subsequently being arrested as ‘rioters’.) I obtained records, however, from the hospitals in my neighbourhood, which is close to Taksim Square. I was stunned by what I read: each hospital listed hundreds of injuries — ‘A 22-year-old male has lost his left eye due to a plastic bullet … a 19-year-old male is being watched closely with a subdural haematoma diagnosis … trauma in the testicle … trauma of the left eye … has lost all eyesight … maxillo-facial trauma … brain haemorrhage … life-threatening condition…’ The reports went on for pages, and the doctors were quite firm that these were not ‘accidents’.

Perhaps the most painful part of the whole thing so far was the glimpse of peace we enjoyed for several days in Taksim Square and Gezi Park in the lull between the attacks. That was when we saw, all too briefly, what this city could be.

Last Friday was peaceful — despite Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s strenuous effort to aggravate the situation by making speeches so unrepentant and inflammatory that the benchmark Istanbul Bourse tumbled with every word that came out of his mouth. One speech, in particular, caused the stock exchange to tank by 7.5 per cent. (I leave it to the mathematicians to calculate the per-word cost of that speech to the nation’s GNP.)

Nonetheless, somehow the command seemed to have come down from above — from where, no one knows — to call off the dogs for the day. Several days earlier, Erdogan, thank God, had scuttled out of the country to attend some exceedingly urgent North African pourparler, leaving his beleaguered underlings to handle the chaos. Within hours of his departure, the police withdrew from Taksim, leaving only their burnt-out vans as mementos. And for a few days, Taksim and Gezi Park became the City of Evet.

Let me explain. In 1978, Jan Morris — to my mind one of the century’s greatest travel writers — visited Istanbul. She wrote a superbly observed essay titled ‘City of Yok’, which would be loosely translated as ‘City of No’, but ‘No’ doesn’t quite capture the entirety of it. ‘I don’t speak Turkish yet,’ she wrote, ‘but yok appears to be a sort of general purpose discouragement, to imply that (for instance) it can’t be done, she isn’t home, the shop’s shut, the train’s left, take it or leave it, you can’t come this way, or there’s no good making a fuss over it.’ The opposite of yok is evet — meaning yes, and it has no analogous counter-associations, which tells you something right there.

But on Friday night, I strolled through Taksim and Gezi Park, and for the first time in the decade I’ve lived in Istanbul, I found myself in the City of Evet. It felt like a free country. I have never seen anything like this before in Turkey. I walk through Taksim all the time, and it is always full of cops, uniformed and plain-clothed. Don’t misunderstand me: they are there for a very good reason. In 2010, I narrowly missed a suicide bomber dispatched to Taksim by the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, a splinter group of the terrorist PKK. The bomb went off at 10.34 in the morning. Were it not for my laziness — I had slept in — my limbs would have joined all the others splattered across the square’s pavement. The PKK and its affiliates have attacked Taksim four times since 1995.

Taksim and Gezi Park, last weekend, were different, and the most obvious difference was the absence of that special gloom imparted by the sight of phalanx upon phalanx of heavily armed coppers giving every passer-by the hairy eyeball. And it was glorious — a huge innocent carnival, filled with improbable (I would have hitherto thought impossible) scenes of nationalist Turks mingling amiably with nationalist Kurds, the latter dancing to some strange ghastly species of techno-Halay, the former pumping their fists in the air and chanting their eternal allegiance to something very nationalist, I’m sure. Balloons lit with candles sailed over the sky; hawkers sold every species of Gezi souvenir, and the only smell of pepper in the air came from the grilled meatballs served in hunks of fresh bread and sprinkled with chilli powder.

Among the protesters’ grievances was the prime minister’s imperious effort to pass restrictive new laws on alcohol sales, so in a gesture of special defiance, entrepreneurial protesters — or maybe just entrepreneurial Turks — sold ice-cold beer from coolers. (I’ve never before seen anyone sell beer from coolers in the streets of Istanbul.)

There were commies and pinkos of every species sharing that beer with right-wing whackjobs of every stripe — groups that in the 1970s fought gun battles here, drenching the streets in blood and leading to the 1980 coup. The communists didn’t seem the sort to worry about — when people complained that the price of beer had risen in response to demand, they shrugged: ‘What can we do? If people want to sell it, we can’t stop them.’

There were trade unionists and doctors and ordinary yuppies and, mostly, college kids; there were gays, Alevis, Sufis and yogis; there were impromptu skits — all making fun of the government, and some of them very funny but untranslatable both linguistically and culturally; there was impromptu dancing (innocent and sexless by western standards), barkers enjoining the crowd to jump up and down for the liberation of the park (and everyone did), a stall that advertised itself as the park’s new free lending library, and vast crowds of people smiling in a silly, carefree way that grave Istanbullus, serious people, people who dress in dark colours and worry terribly about what the neighbours will think, rarely do.

Imagine Glastonbury, perhaps, without so much as a whiff of weed. I know that’s an oxymoron, but it’s the best I can do. These (mostly) kids were nothing like the Occupy Wall Street crowd; they had no idea what they were doing, politically — no leaflets, none of that creepy human microphone stuff, no idea who Saul Alinsky is, no one using the streets as a urinal. Everyone was happy. Everyone was doing precisely as they pleased. For once, I could see what Turkey would be like if it could only get its damned omnipresent, omni-meddling, always-watching, always-listening state off its back.

But by Tuesday night, the City of Evet was long gone. Scores of those silly, innocent tree-huggers have been hospitalised, and the casualty count is appalling.

The worst of it is that no one has any idea why this happened. Erdogan has doubled-down on his insistence that the protests represent a complex conspiracy against his person, cooked up by foreigners and terrorists and what he has termed ‘financial institutions, the interest-rate lobby and media groups’. (I leave it to the reader to ponder and parse the historical significance of these references to conspirators who control the banks and the media.) Officials in his own party are publicly asking him if he’s trying to start a civil war.

On Wednesday morning there was an uneasy calm in Taksim Square, but there was and will be no return of the City of Evet. Istanbul is once again the City of Yok.

The post Turkey’s agony appeared first on The Spectator.

Although the Emperor was violently seasick on his journey there in 1815, the seas were very calm for mine. Indeed, the calmness was almost eerie; for nearly a week we saw no planes in the sky, no other ships, nothing in the sea except some dolphins and flying fish on the last day, and no birds except two white-throated petrels. It was just sky and sea bisected by a totally flat horizon, for day after day after day.

St Helenans are called ‘Saints’, and they amused themselves on the journey playing deck quoits — a game that combines the skill of darts with the viciousness of croquet — and taking part in hard-fought general knowledge quizzes. I was a bit concerned when the ship’s doctor confidently asserted that the heart had two valves, rather than the generally accepted number of four, but otherwise the standard was pretty high. Sailing into the only harbour on the island, Jamestown, presented an incredibly imposing spectacle. Mists cleared to reveal dark red lava cliffs 600 feet high rising out of the sea on either side of the ship. Small wonder that Napoleon’s first response was: ‘It is not an attractive place. I should have done better to have stayed in Egypt.’ He must have known the moment he saw those massive rocks, the cannon defending them, and the Royal Navy frigates on 24-hour guard, that he was going to die on that tiny, 47 square miles of volcanic rock, which then as now only had around 4,000 inhabitants.

I’ll probably be the last biographer of Napoleon who’ll ever have to approach Jamestown by the sea route that he took, as in 2016 an airport is due to open there, which will cut the six-day journey down to a few hours. The British taxpayer — you, good Speccie reader — is spending a staggering £250 million to build what the veteran Times journalist Michael Binyon — who has fallen in love with the island — calls ‘one of the costliest, most challenging and most remote airports anywhere in the world’. The RMS St Helena will be discontinued after it opens, so there’ll be no way for future Bonaparte biographers to experience the same majesty and sense of despondent foreboding that those cliffs exerted so powerfully on the Emperor.

The airport represents something of a financial gamble, but as the island, a British Overseas Territory, is presently costing the taxpayer £30 million a year, it’s a justifiable one. The plan is for 30,000 eco-tourists to come every year, eventually allowing the island to pay for itself. The habitat is a weird combination of moonscape rocks with the occasional bit of cacti, but then lush vegetation in the very next valley. The diving and hiking are said to be great, but I wasn’t sold on the plans to turn the island into one of the world’s greatest bamboo exporters. And before any of the 30,000 tourists turn up, they are going to have to extend the total of hotel bedrooms available (presently standing at an impressive 18).

Saints have rather a schizoid attitude towards Napoleon; he is the only reason most people have heard of their island, yet it equates it in the public imagination with remoteness, exile and death. Many of the population are descended from slaves, and they complain that their ancestors weren’t consulted about him being sent there by the colonialist government in London. If they had been consulted though, I bet they’d have voted to take Napoleon, and enjoy their 15 minutes of world fame. They certainly wouldn’t otherwise have been able to sell little bars of soap in the shape of Napoleon’s head, such as the one that Michael Binyon kindly gave me (perhaps as a hint?).

Napoleon’s house at Longwood in the Deadwood Plain is kept up superbly, despite the fact that, as the curator and French honorary consul Michel Dancoisne-Martineau points out, just as in Napoleon’s day it’s enveloped in cloud for 330 days of the year, with all the problems of damp that that implies. It needs to be repainted every year due to the wind and rain, and it also suffers from the same infestations of rats, cockroaches, midges, termites and mosquitoes that plagued the Emperor. Monsieur Martineau deserves the Legion d’Honneur for the 28 years of love and attention he has dedicated to Longwood, which now looks exactly the same as it did on 5 May 1821, the day of Napoleon’s death.

One of the madder theories about how Napoleon died was that he somehow ingested arsenic through the wallpaper, although my commitment to my research wasn’t about to extend to my licking those bits of it that they’ve preserved from his day. I did lie down on the campaign bed in the room where Napoleon died, however, and looked through the spyhole he had cut into the shutters through which to watch the British sentries at the bottom of his garden. These reminded me that I’m exactly the same height as him, and this year I become the same age at which he died too. Since I’ve now been researching this book for as long as Napoleon spent on St Helena and Elba put together, my trip also reminded me to get on and actually write the book.

The post Letter from St Helena appeared first on The Spectator.

Kaiyo Maru, a 499-ton trawler, is hunting for beds of methane hydrate, a cold, white, sherbet-like substance found off coastlines in Japan and much of the rest of the world. The United States Geological Survey estimates that as much as 2.8 trillion cubic metres of this mixture of frozen water and natural gas may exist. Although only part of this vast deposit is accessible, methane hydrate — ‘ice that burns’ — may be the Earth’s single biggest fossil-fuel source. (Natural gas consists primarily of the colourless, odourless gas methane — the two terms are almost interchangeable.)

Canada, China, Germany, India, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Taiwan and the United States have also been investigating this combustible slush. But Japan’s $700 million programme, which began in 1996, is the most advanced and extensive. In March, Tokyo completed its first production test, in another deposit 80 kilometres off the coast of eastern Japan. Jubilant, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry announced plans to commercialise ‘ice that burns’ by fiscal 2018.

The announcement roiled the energy industry, which was already shaken by the discovery of huge amounts of ‘unconventional’ petroleum — oil and gas from non-traditional sources, such as shale oil, tar sands and, especially, ‘fracked’ natural gas — in North America. US petroleum output has risen so much that the International Energy Agency predicted in November that the nation could surpass Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil producer by 2017. No longer will Washington pay billions of dollars every year to Opec’s petrostates, energy analyst Philip Verleger argued in January. And that, in turn, will lead to an American ‘economic renaissance’.

Even as North America profits from the fracking-led oil and gas boom, Europe and Asia are being bypassed. Europe is thought to have big unconventional reservoirs in France, Germany and the Balkans (Britain has shale-gas deposits in Lancashire). The incentive to explore them is strong; EU nations pay twice as much as the US for natural gas, much of it from Russia, which has regularly used it as a political weapon, threatening to withhold supplies. Nonetheless, Europe has been slow to develop unconventional oil and gas, largely because of political resistance. Although Britain dropped its ban on fracking in December, it continues to be blocked in France, the Netherlands, much of Germany, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and, effectively, Austria (environmental regulations there make fracking impractical).

Opposition is less intense in Asia, but geologists there see fewer accessible deposits; Japan, which produces less than 1 per cent of the oil and gas it consumes, has almost none. China has shale petroleum, but according to the IEA will still import more than 80 per cent of its oil by 2030 — a huge and continuing economic burden. India may import more still. For all these nations, methane hydrate represents a potential escape from Opec’s stranglehold.

At the same time, a methane hydrate rush would be a game-changer for oil producers, notes UCLA political scientist Michael Ross, author of The Oil Curse. Most oil nations are autocracies with economies that depend almost wholly on petroleum. Vladimir Putin, the late Hugo Chavez, the Saudi royal family, the mullahs of Iran — all have floated their rule on petroleum revenues. If Japan, China, Europe and the Americas stopped importing their oil, Ross says, leaders like these ‘would have few alternatives’. Unrest would rise. Meanwhile, energy-independent America will be less willing to intervene to stop disorder in oil states.

More important still, the supply of methane hydrate is so large that it could impede efforts to fight potentially disastrous climate change. Because natural gas produces roughly half the carbon dioxide of coal, many environmentalists have embraced it as a ‘transition fuel’ — a ‘bridge to a low-carbon future’, in the phrase of US energy secretary Ernest Moniz — which can be used until the price of solar and wind power falls to competitive levels. But if a vast flood of natural gas emerges from coastlines around the world, the switch to renewables becomes more difficult, and the prospect of mitigating climate change dimmer.

None of this may occur. Methane hydrate is still an expensive pilot project. Years of engineering are still needed to see if the price can be brought down. Still, ‘shale gas was considered technologically difficult to extract but is now produced on a large scale,’ argued Japan trade minister Toshimitsu Motegi in March. ‘By tackling these challenges one by one, we could soon start tapping the resources that surround Japan.’ The results, methane-hydrate project director Koji Yamamoto says, could be ‘interesting’ — and not just for Japan.

The post Energy: A song of ice and fire appeared first on The Spectator.

The amendment’s defeat is a setback for environmentalists, who had campaigned for it aggressively, but not for Britain’s two and a half million unemployed. ‘Green jobs’ are an utter farce. More expensive sources of energy will destroy more employment than they create.

That is not to say that no one has a green job. Tim Yeo has several and in the latest parliamentary scandal he appeared to be pitching aggressively for another one. In the past year he has earned tens of thousands of pounds working for green energy firms. And there are plenty of others working hard to turn renewable energy subsidies into more renewable energy subsidies.

Beyond the lucrative jobs for green lobbyists, it is true that there is more legitimate work making and installing the solar panels and wind turbines that earn those subsidies. Britain needs 374 million megawatt hours of electricity each year and it takes more capital and more labour to generate a megawatt hour of renewable energy than it does to generate a megawatt hour of conventional energy.

And what must be remembered is the jobs not created because people are spending their money on paying higher bills rather than other things; not created because tens of billions of pounds are invested in the energy sector rather than other businesses; and not created because industrial energy costs are too high here in Britain relative to other potential locations.

According to a recent Liberum Capital report, more than £160 billion needs to be invested in our energy sector by 2020 if the current policies remain in place. Another £215 billion will then be needed by 2030. Without government policy only £71 billion would be needed this decade and less than £80 billion in the following decade.

Paying for all of that unproductive investment will require higher profits for the energy companies and higher prices for residential and industrial consumers. Even compared to today’s high prices, that would mean total power costs rising by nearly a third above inflation by 2020 and doubling by 2030.

Does the government really think families can pay all that extra money on their utility bills, cope with the higher taxes that have been imposed in the hope of closing the deficit and not cut back on their spending, squeezing British retail?

Higher energy costs also hurt businesses. Even service industries from pubs to data centres are struggling to cope with ever higher bills. But the energy intensive industries are the hardest hit. The Lynemouth aluminium smelter in Northumberland closed in 2011, for example. The owners reported that it was ‘no longer a sustainable business because its energy costs are increasing significantly, due largely to emerging legislation’.

The 515 jobs lost at the plant will only have been a small part of the impact. All of the plant’s contractors, customers and suppliers will be in trouble.

Aggressive climate change policies destroy more jobs than they create. Studies in Spain, Italy and Germany have all confirmed that. There is only an overall increase in employment if they secure significant net exports. Those who sell the wind turbines, solar panels and so forth get the jobs, not the mugs who buy them. And basic arithmetic tells you not everyone can win that game. Every country cannot simultaneously sell more than it buys.

I put that point to Greg Barker, minister at the Department of Energy and Climate Change. He told me there was a bright new market I had not considered where even the small-scale renewables that need the most subsidy here are genuinely competitive — rural Africa. That is the government’s plan for growth: sell expensive wind turbines to poor Africans.

Buying lots of copies of Microsoft Office will not make you Bill Gates. Installing lots of expensive offshore wind turbines in Britain will not make us the most competitive location in which to make them. Over time, the jobs will leak to other countries where costs (including energy costs) are lower.

And the jobs lost when energy policy increases prices are at firms that could have stood on their own two feet, but the green jobs gained are subsidy junkies. That means the new jobs are much more vulnerable to changes in policy in the future.

The Humber Estuary Renewable Energy Super Cluster may sound like good news to people in Hull. Sadly it will leave them more dependent on the whims of politicians and the companies who are holding those politicians to ransom for more subsidies. The risk is that they will discover in a few years that it is all built on sand and they have wasted time and effort that could have been devoted to building a more sustainable future for their region’s economy.

While the Treasury is at least trying to limit the costs of all of these policies, it is making limited progress. Indeed it was the Treasury that was responsible for the disastrous carbon floor price that increases energy prices here and actually reduces them for our industrial competitors.

Ministers are mostly settling for protecting specific industries — like the protection announced for ceramics at the Budget — but that is a very limited and arbitrary approach. It might stop some factories from closing, but it does nothing for residential consumers and will not make Britain a competitive location for new investments. Industry saw how these special protections could disappear in a heartbeat when a 75 per cent increase in the Climate Change Levy for energy intensive firms was announced at the Pre-Budget Report in 2009.

MPs should be working to defend families and businesses struggling with high energy prices. Instead too many of them are trying to fool the public. They pretend to be angry at energy companies while promising them fat profits if they invest to meet climate targets. They point to the green jobs created by expensive climate policies and try to brush under the carpet all of the jobs lost by making energy more expensive.

It cannot last. There is an enormous opportunity for the first party which offers consumers a better deal, the party you vote for if you want affordable energy.

The post Energy: The green jobs fallacy appeared first on The Spectator.

Had the FT forgotten, or was it issuing a coded warning? Either way, it provided a reminder that the scale, viability and dangers of the ‘shale gas revolution’ are still surrounded by forests of myth and counter-myth.

That the stuff exists and can be exploited has been triumphantly established in the US, where the development of ‘shale plays’ such as Barnett in Texas and Marcellus in the northeast since 2007 has brought gas prices tumbling and encouraged Americans to think themselves the carbon sheikhs of the 21st century. As for the UK, the combination of the Cheshire find by IGas — much larger than first estimated, and ‘most likely’ to be around 100 trillion cubic feet— with the 200 trillion already claimed by Cuadrilla in Lancashire, could meet the nation’s gas demand for years ahead. But how many years? And at what risks? Here’s a brief guide to the great shale debate that has just kicked off in earnest, now that a Lib Dem-driven 18-month moratorium on fracking has expired.

First, confirmation is awaited from the British Geological Survey as to whether UK reserves really are a lot bigger than previous guesses. Greenpeace is eager to suggest IGas and Cuadrilla might be bluffing — while other sources say offshore shale gas finds may dwarf anything so far claimed. But even if it’s there, we don’t know what proportion can be extracted: between 10 and 30 per cent is the range quoted, while shale gas fields are also subject to rapid natural depletion, so reserves themselves are a shrinking target.

Next, will fracking cause earthquakes (the euphemism is ‘induced seismicity’) as supposedly happened at Blackpool during trial drilling nearby? The answer is maybe, but on an insignificant, knee-tremble scale and no worse than is regularly caused by other industrial activity. And will ‘toxic’ fracking chemicals, or gas itself, seep into the water supply? Not unless your water happens to come from a deep well adjacent to a gas drilling rig, as sometimes happens in Texas: if it comes though pipes from the Lake District, you’re pretty safe. As for the fear of flaming methane jets from kitchen taps, that’s a pure urban myth derived from a discredited anti-fracking documentary called Gaslands.

But is it also true, as gas men claim, that we have nothing to worry about because fracking has been safely used for decades? Not quite, argues Professor Anthony Ingraffea of Cornell University, among others. The first commercial frack, using napalm as the explosive, took place in Kansas in 1947. But today’s fracking is on a vastly bigger scale, at much higher pressures, combining blasting with ‘directional drilling’ (first vertical, then horizontally into the shale beds) and ‘multi-well’ drilling in a way that’s quite new. We don’t yet know what the environmental impact might be, he says, and we’d be wise not to frack until we do.

That’s the position in France so far, but it’s not going to happen here because our own government, however prone to green rhetoric, cannot turn its back on a promise of cheap energy and tens of thousands of jobs. Business minister Michael Fallon was talking last week of tax breaks for drillers and compensating benefits for neighbours of the drilling sites.

The other risk that has not been fully analysed is what shale gas will do to the long-term mix of energy supply. As the US shale sector became the hot place to be, investment began to swing away from conventional gas-field and pipeline development in Russia and elsewhere: so there will be less natural gas available in ten years’ time than there might have been. But in the UK, a new domestic source of gas is another excuse not to build nuclear stations, or to invest in the science needed to make wind and tidal power viable.

Best case? According to a new report from a US government agency, about ten years’ worth of relatively cheap UK supply; others say maybe 15 years’ worth. Worst case? Shale disappoints, no new nuclear, natural gas prices soar, and we’re back where we once feared we might be, at the mercy of Mr Putin and his pipelines. Watch this space.

The post Energy: On gas and hot air appeared first on The Spectator.