As for David Cameron’s speech itself, I actually thought it was very good, meaty and well-judged. For once it gave some specific commitments so that we could begin to see what a Cameron administration would actually do. Many of these things struck chords with me, particularly in the areas of family, education, human rights, immigration, the EU and banning Hizb ut Tahrir. I was particularly cheered to read this on education:

I don’t think they’ve ever got to grips with the educational establishment, some of whom still think it’s wrong to say children have got something wrong, because you’ll brand them as failures, who still seem to think that all must win prizes, who still seem to think we have to treat all children the same. So we need to be courageous and strong on standards to insist that children are taught using synthetic phonics and they learn to read properly. To be clear that a GNVQ is a great exam but it’s not worth four GCSEs. To be absolutely clear that in reforming the exam bodies it is fine to make the QCA independent. It is fine to make the QCA independent but that won’t help unless the exam bodies are really put under the one group of people that want to make our exam system rigorous and tough and believable for the long term and that’s the customers. That means business, it means the universities, it means the colleges, they want our exam system to be robust for the long term and so do I.

Sentiments, indeed, that could have come from my own book, All Must Have Prizes. The reason no government has yet got to grips with our British education catastrophe — indeed, the Labour government has hugely accelerated it — is that ministers have refused to address the dysfunctional ideology, which long ago became educational orthodoxy, that no child should fail, that everyone should achieve equal outcomes and that education was not about knowledge but what children themselves brought to the party. Cameron is the first politician to allude to this key fact, to voice the heretical but obvious truth that vocational and academic qualifications do not have the same value as each other, and to suggest that the examination system should be removed from political control. Good stuff.

The speech went a long way to meeting the concerns of all those like myself who have been so horrified by the Tories’ rebranding on the left in order to ‘decontaminate’ the party in the public mind. In fact, this strategy succeeded merely in irritating the public and led many to conclude that Cameron was simply a PR flake. Ironically, it is Gordon Brown himself who has unwittingly acted as the Tories’ most effective decontamination unit. When he cast himself as the heir to Lady Thatcher and made bullish noises about crime, immigration, gambling and drugs, he made it possible for the Conservative party to step back onto its traditional ground. After all, it becomes much more difficult to accuse the Tories of lurching back to the right if a Labour Prime Minister has planted himself firmly on just such territory.

But as ever, the devil always lies in the detail. We have yet to see how all these interesting Tory policy commitments pan out in practice. And there is still a fundamental incoherence at the very heart of Cameron’s platform. He cannot promise on the one hand to empower consumers and free professionals from the dead hand of the state, while at the same time continuing to fund at their current level top-down public services such as health and education.

The Tories have come through their nightmare ‘meltdown’ week not only unscathed but much strengthened. Now they wait to see whether they have actually achieved what they set out to do — to move the polls in their favour sufficiently to stop Brown from calling the general election next month, which we have been told by the media’s finest is a 99.9% dead cert. I note with interest, however, that my excellent Mail colleague Ben Brogan is once again predicting on his blog that Brown will not call an election. One of the reasons, his people are apparently suggesting, is that they are convinced that the Tories’ tax-cutting proposals have given them ammunition for a protracted demolition campaign. Well if that’s the case, why not demolish them today? If the election really is now off, the real reason is surely likely to be that Brown fears that the Tories have scored some palpable hits and the public mood has turned against him — not least, although he might not grasp this, because of the enormous damage he did himself by his appalling conference speech, Stalinist spin operation and disgustingly cynical trip to Iraq.

What we now have, in truth, is two spin operations lined up against each other (as I suggested here in this little jeu d’esprit). Each will attempt to show that the other’s platform is an illusion spun to conceal untold horrors for the electorate. It is quite possible that both will succeed. Whoever manages, however, to persuade the voters that ‘what you see is what you get’ and that he is accordingly rock solid and dependable, will win.

You read it here first: Britain’s relationship with the US is no longer so special, and France and Germany are filling the gap. The Telegraph reports:

The White House no longer views Britain as its most loyal ally in Europe since Gordon Brown took office and is instead increasingly turning towards France and Germany, according to Bush administration sources. ‘There’s concern about Brown,’ a senior White House foreign policy official told The Daily Telegraph. ‘But this is compensated by the fact that Paris and Berlin are much less of a headache. The need to hinge everything on London as the guarantor of European security has gone’.

…Privately, White House aides accept that Mr Brown would not support military action against Iran. There is also disquiet about what US officials view as double dealing by special advisers briefing an anti-White House message in London and a more favourable one in Washington. ‘That sort of manoeuvring is not appreciated,’ said one diplomatic source.

Indeed; and it is not appreciated by the British electorate, either, which if it really believes that Gordon Brown has drawn a line under the era of manipulation and spin is in for a very rude shock indeed. Brown’s spinning makes Tony Blair look like a rank amateur, because Brown does sincerity so much better. However, scales fell off eyes only yesterday with the Prime Minister’s cynical stunt in Iraq, which committed the unforgiveable crime of using British troops in a theatre of war as mere election fodder – and also betrayed his promise to tell Parliament before anyone else about troop dispositions in Iraq.

Such cavalier disregard of the most critical issue of our time is all of a piece with Britain’s precipitate withdrawal from Basra, at the very time that the US is battling its own domestic quisling tendency in order to stay the course and win in Iraq, even if this takes many years (which it will). The consequences of America shouldering this burden without Britain will be very grave indeed — for Britain. In his deeply irresponsible attempt to buy off the baying British mob, incited by its media and intelligentsia to an unprecedented pitch of hysteria, prejudice and irrationality over Iraq, Gordon Brown is acting against British interests—as well as taking a shameful position on the most fateful issue facing the free world.

If Britain stands aside over Iran, leaving America to take alone the decision to use military force — surely inevitable, as John Bolton said in Blackpool this week, given the conspicuous failure of the vacuous diplomatic approach pursued by Britain and Europe which has only strengthened Iran and weakened the west — the consequences for Britain will be immeasurable. It will be marked for all time as having turned away from what needed to be done to defend the west; by its spinelessness it will have betrayed its own history and signalled the inescapable reality of its own cultural and moral decline; and it will achieve the lasting resentment of America, with an end to any British influence over its activities and the possible eclipse of Britain on the world stage.

There are many import insights in this report on the annual International Conference on Counter-Terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Centre in Herzliya. Amongst them is this from the renowned Steve Emerson, Director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, about the extraordinary transference of victim status that has taken place in America, just like in Britain:

The irony, he revealed, is that ‘there are 10 times more hate crimes in the US against Jews than against Muslims. Nevertheless in terms of news coverage, there are 100 times more articles and news reports about hate crimes against Muslims. And what constitutes a hate crime by these human rights groups? Look at their list. It includes the arrest of a prominent Hamas operative with suspected links to terrorism.’

One reason for this factual and moral inversion is the group-think of the left which assumes that people from the third world are by definition victims and therefore cannot do any wrong. The iconic global hero of this world-view is Nelson Mandela, and not a whisper of criticism is heard in the west against the African National Congress on account of its struggle against the illegitimate apartheid regime. But in the real world beyond the cartoon manicheanism of the left, the people who struggle against a villainous regime may themselves be villainous. As Hussein Solomon, a Muslim professor at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and director of his university’s Centre for International Political Studies told the Herzliya conference, the ANC is in bed with jihadi and anti-Jewish terror:

‘I have received seven death threats to date,’ he revealed to Metro. ‘What was my big crime? Being invited by the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) in Johannesburg to share a platform with Jews to discuss the Israel/Palestine issue! That I am against the occupation in the West Bank was irrelevant. The mere fact that I had accepted a public invitation by the ‘Zionists’ was in the eyes of the local Muslim community an act of treason. The next thing a rumor had been circulated that the SAZF only invites Mossad agents; therefore I must be an agent. Soon the rumor had become accepted as fact and I had become a legitimate target to be bumped off.’

Solomon takes issue with a naïve world that ‘is still locked into the “miracle” of 1994 South Africa, when Nelson Mandela became president. They have this image of a country, frozen in time, bathed in the light of eternal morality. My country has moved on, and yes, while much has been achieved, there are also serious faults, ethically and morally disturbing. Sadly, South Africa has become a breeding ground for Jihadi activity.’ He makes no bones that al-Qaida and Hamas have established cells in South Africa. While the Muslim community represent only 1.5-2 percent of the total South African population, it would be a mistake, according to Solomon, to believe it poses no threat. ‘You must understand that the Jihadi activists today are not bound by the model of the nation state. Their aspirations are global and they see themselves as warriors for world domination. South Africa is merely a stepping stone for these guys towards the creation of the Caliphate.’

It is tragic that a hitherto oppressed people, the blacks of south Africa, should identify not with the Jews of Israel who are under existential attack by the Arabs who would deny them their right to self-determination in their one refuge from global historic oppression, but instead with those who would exterminate them and furthermore snuff out the light of freedom everywhere. The ANC does so because it is a revolutionary Marxist movement which ultimately stands for the extinction of freedom — an ideology which fatally warps and trumps its erstwhile noble aim of securing freedom for its own people from oppression. And the grotesque twist is that Israel is currently demonised and delegitimised as an ‘apartheid’ state, a patently absurd calumny perpetrated not merely by the western left but by ANC representatives — who thus engage in what must surely be called ‘apartheid denial’, since such a false comparison not only libels Israel where Israeli Arabs have equal rights (and the Arabs in the disputed territories occupied as a defence against war are not in Israel at all and indeed purport to be citizens of a different country altogether) but also serves to negate the brutal reality of the true South African apartheid regime.

The Treasury’s latest attempt to attack Conservative figures has spectacularly backfired tonight. Alistair Darling claims that only 15,000 non-doms have off-shore incomes over £60,000. This is not a figure the Treasury have ever given before. Indeed, on 30th April 2007 Ed Balls answered a question in Parliament saying the Treasury did not have such information.
‘Estimates of the tax foregone in the UK as a consequence of the use of the remittance basis by those not domiciled in the UK are not routinely made.
Information is not held on overseas income and gains that do not give rise to a tax liability in the UK.’ (Ed Balls MP, Hansard, 30 Apr 2007, Column 1383W)
As Dawn Primarolo said this is because non-doms are not required to disclose this information: “In general, individuals do not have to inform HMRC of their foreign income or gains unless this is relevant to their UK tax liability.” (Dawn Primarolo MP, Hansard, 8 Mar 2007, Column 2220W).

What with this and the fact that, as several commentators have already pointed out, HM Treasury has been used wholly improperly to rubbish the plans of a political party, it looks like the Tories’ inheritance tax coup may not simply be a vote-winner but may also do damage to Gordon Brown’s biggest weapon: his (wholly undeserved) reputation for granite-like integrity.

If the Tories want to convince us that they have realised the error of their ways and have now returned from their memorable excursion to Planet Takenleaveoftheirsenses, they will have to do better than this:

Drug dealers are victims as well as offenders because so many are themselves addicted, the Conservatives’ policy chief said today. Oliver Letwin, chairman of the party’s policy review, warned that ‘enormous numbers’ of Britons remained trapped by multiple disadvantages, suffering from addictions and problems such as poor housing as well as low incomes.
Asked about the extent to which drugs fuelled urban crime, Mr Letwin told the Guardian fringe debate at the Tory conference in Blackpool: ‘A drug [addict] is a victim, not a miscreant, though it may lead to him being a miscreant. The pusher is the person who is the most direct cause [of crime], but many pushers are also victims, because they are parts of pyramids in which they are both users and sellers.’

And as reported in today’s Telegraph:

Efforts to stem the flow of drugs had failed, he said. He argued for a greater focus on reducing the ‘demand side of the equation’ with more rehabilitation as occurs in America, Sweden and Holland. ‘It is absolutely critical to understand that the person who is on what is probably a cocktail of alcohol and cannabis and amphetamines and heroin is the victim not the miscreant,’ he added.

He’s right about one thing: the need to reduce the ‘demand side of the equation’. But the way to do that, as can be seen from Sweden’s far more successful approach, is not by treating drug users as victims but as the criminals that they are. Treating possession and pushing as a crime but users as victims, as English law currently does, is a specious division that lies at the core of our failure to fight drug abuse. The law should transmit an unambiguous moral message: that all drug use is so dangerous to society that it is beyond the pale. English drug law conveys instead a highly ambiguous, indeed incoherent moral message which thus carries no weight.

Drug users break the law. The idea that they are not responsible for their actions is pernicious. They choose to take the stuff in the first place, after all. What next- treating people who commit murder under the influence of drugs or alcohol as ‘victims’? Or treating all criminals as ‘victims’ if they come from abusive backgrounds (the fallacy, indeed, behind the Tories’ much mocked desire to ‘hug a hoodie’ and the criminal justice discourse of the left from which it derives). This is what Letwin should have said: It is absolutely critical to understand that the person who is on what is probably a cocktail of alcohol and cannabis and amphetamines and heroin is the miscreant.

Letwin is also right to say that many users become pushers. Indeed, that is another reason why treating pushers as criminals but users as victims has made drug law so incoherent as to be unworkable. The obvious solution is therefore to treat both users and pushers as miscreants. But Letwin want to treat them all as victims instead.

Oh dear. Tory common-sense score: 0/10.

Once upon a time, there was a red king and a blue king. One day, the blue king knocked the red king down. He had such fun that he did it again and again. After a while, the red king decided he had to stop being red. So he put on some jazzy blue and pink clothes which were hand-me downs from his cousins in America, and he started knocking the blue king down over and over again instead.

This made the blue king very cross indeed. He told everyone that the red king was still red under his new blue clothes. But important red people shouted that blue was disgusting and made them feel sick, and everyone was now pink anyway and would never talk to any blue people ever again. So the blue king went out and bought himself some pink clothes. This made blue people very sad, but the blue king thought he looked so nice in his new pink outfit that he stuck out his tongue at them and said he didn’t care.

Then the person who had first had the idea of dressing the red king in his blue and pink clothes went away. So the blue king said that everyone would now see that the red king was really red after all. But the red king then put on blue clothes instead. Lots of blue people thought the red king was now blue and so he was now their king. This made the blue king so cross he rushed out after closing-time to buy blue clothes which he immediately put on, even though they didn’t quite fit because they had been bought in such a hurry. But people could still see the pink clothes underneath, just as they could see that underneath his new blue clothes the red king was still red.

So when they looked one way, they saw a red king who was trying to pretend he wasn’t red by wearing blue clothes; and when they looked the other way, they saw a blue king who was trying to pretend he wasn’t blue by wearing pink clothes but then had put blue clothes on top. And so everyone wondered which of these kings had a colour which wouldn’t run in the wash. And no-one knew the answer.

Brilliant take by Mark Steyn on how Columbia University’s decision to provide a platform for Ahmadinejad, with university president Lee Bollinger providing a ‘challenging’ warm-up act, was an example of the ‘risk-free dissent’ which passes for courage among craven and solipsistic western intellectuals:

And afterwards Mr. Bollinger got raves even from the right for ‘speaking truth to power.’ But so what? It’s like Noel Coward delivering a series of devastating put-downs to Hitler. The Fuhrer’s mad as hell but at the end of the afternoon he goes back to killing and dear Noel goes back to singing ‘The Stately Homes Of England.’ Ahmadinejad goes back to doing — to persecuting, to murdering, to terrorizing, to nuclearizing — and Bollinger cuts out his press clippings and puts them on the fridge.

The other day National Review’s Jay Nordlinger was musing about our habit of referring to some benighted part of the world’s ‘humanitarian needs,’ and wondered when we’d stopped using the term ‘human needs,’ which is, after all, what food, water and shelter are. And his readers wrote in to state the obvious: that ‘humanitarian’ prioritizes not the distant Third World victim but the generous western donor — the ‘humanitarian’ relief effort, the ‘humanitarian’ organizations, the NGOs, the western charities: it’s about us, not them…The pen is not mightier than the sword if your enemy is confident you will never use anything other than your pen. Sometimes it’s not about ‘freedom of speech,’ but about freedom. Ask an Iranian homosexual. If you can find one.

Do read it all.

The head of the the Israel government press office, Danny Seaman, has now issued the first statement by an Israeli official that the killing of Mohammed al Durah (see here, here, here and here) was a staged event (although the Prime Minister’s office appears to have distanced itself from his remarks). Haaretz reports:

Seaman also wrote [to an Israeli law centre] that ‘Israel was accused of murdering a small child after the event by the world press and his image has been burned into the collective Arab memory as a symbol of the brutality of the Zionist state.’ Following a summary of the incident and the events that followed, Seaman wrote, ‘Here began the long path to exposing the truth and to base the facts that are known to us today, that the events of that day were essentially staged by the network’s cameraman in Gaza, Mr. Tilal Abu-Rehama.’

Natan Sharansky, the Israeli politician and former soviet dissident who knows a thing or two about black propaganda, also writes about the scandal in the Wall Street Journal. YNet, however, reports a defiant response from France2:

Charles Enderlin, the France 2 reporter who is still working in Israel, said in response to this report, ‘This is not the first time that Seaman makes such allegations against me – it is nonsense. It is pure slander. The video that we filmed is authentic and I stand behind it. We plan to show the film in court in France, and I am certain it will end the repeated mudslinging,’ the French reporter said.

So why have they not produced it for the past seven years?