Wow

Forget all this coverage of Tony Blair's departure. It's only a secondary story when put alongside the most amazing story of the day.

Oliver Kamm has had an email from Konni Zilliacus' grand-daughter.

Wow. I mean: wow.

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Better off Home

It's typical. You wait ten years for an event like today and what happens? You get stuck in Brussels. Would you like to know how much coverage there's been here in the 'capital' of the EU. Nada. Zilch. I've zapped my remote through every non-English TV channel to find any mention of Blair's departure and haven't found even a whisper.

So this morning I asked a few people at the event I was at - Commission types, MEPs, that sort - what they thought about today. And they were, without exception, uninterested.

So what, seemed to be the general view. He's been impotent for years anyway.
It's always interesting to get a foreign impression of domestic events. Usually I like having a slightly different take. But today I just want to be at home, submerged in the wall-to-wall coverage.

So I've jumped on the Eurostar and am typing this on the train. I've set my SkyPlus remotely to record Sky News. Isn't modern technology grand?!

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We need him now

Ronald Reagan - one of the truly great political figures of the twentieth century - remains ridiculously underrated by chattering class opinion. More fool them. This post by Brian Mickelthwait has a terrific quote from John O'Sullivan's new book, The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister (which I am looking forward to reading). The quote is from Reagan talking to Richard Allen (soon to become his foreign policy adviser) in 1977:

At the end of the meeting, as Allen got up to leave, Reagan said something that, as Allen wrote later, “literally changed my life”.  Reagan offered Allen his theory of the Cold War.  He acknowledged that many people thought his views simplistic but said, “My theory of the Cold War is that we win and they lose."

Oh for a leader of Reagan's clarity, vision and leadership today, at a time when we face another battle, for the survival of Western civilisation. The nearest we have lives on the other side of the world.

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Wolfowitz must stay

The Wall Street Journal has a splendid editorial on the Wolfowitz affair, and takes a welcome opportunity to give a kicking to one of his leading adversaries, Mark Malloch Brown - Kofi Annan's former deputy at the UN and a  man who is everything that is wrong with such inter-governmental bodies made flesh:

  Mr. Malloch Brown warned on Monday that, if Mr. Wolfowitz stayed as president, European countries might withhold funding from the next financing round for the bank's International Development Association. We hope he's right, though we know few European finance ministers who aren't eager to throw good money after bad. Still, it's a remarkable bit of chutzpah for the man who downplayed corruption at the U.N. to seek the  ouster of the man who has fought to reduce corruption at the World Bank.

[T]his flap is a political hit based on highly selective leaks to a willfully gullible press corps... The only way this fiasco could get any worse would be for Mr. Wolfowitz to resign in the teeth of so much dishonesty and cravenness. We're glad the Bush Administration isn't falling for this Euro-bureaucracy-media putsch. Mr. Wolfowitz has apologized for any mistakes he's made, though we're not sure why. He's the one who deserves an apology.

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Liberty's prize

 
For anyone reading who writes about markets and liberty, the Bastiat Prize is a fantastic opportunity to win $15,000. Full details are here.

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Triggered

I like this picture of Sophia Loren.

      Now I know why. My reward centre has been triggered.

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Not even funny

I've never 'got' Peregrine Worsthorne. He's revered by a lot of good people, but I've never finished a piece of his and been grateful that I started it.

This fatuous piece today is typical:

 

Not enough people, apparently, are trying to climb up the social ladder; far fewer, sad to say, than in the bad old days. In the name of social justice, they all intone, 'something must be done about it'.

What none of these pundits ever consider is the possibility that a lack of social mobility might be a healthy development; a sign that most people nowadays - apart from the underclass - are content with where they are and do not want to elbow themselves up a rung or two of the social ladder.

To my mind that should be regarded as progress rather than retrogression, since the whole point of the welfare state, I would have thought, was to make life agreeable in Britain at all levels, not just at the top: to do away, that is, with the old necessity for social climbing.

So that's ok then. It's a good thing that people born into poverty stay in poverty because anything else is 'social climbing'. And most people don't want any better standard of living and comfort than welfare provides because they find life 'agreeable' as it is. Tee hee.

Does anyone actually believe this sort of bilge? Does Sir Peregrine actually believe it?

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The Manchester of europe

Apologies for the lack of posts today. I've been on the train to Brussels, where...guess what? It's raining. Brussels is the Manchester of the continent. Rain, rain, rain. More later.

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The problem is he means it

Oliver Letwin is a nice man, and a very bright one. But, my word, he can spout garbage:

Cameron Conservatism, so far from being merely a set of attitudes, has a specific theoretical agenda. It aims to achieve two significant paradigm-shifts.

First, a shift from an econocentric paradigm to a sociocentric paradigm. Secondly, a shift in the theory of the State from a provision-based paradigm to a framework-based paradigm.

OK, it's easy to take the mickey out of such ugly prose. But that's not what I mean. I mean, of course, that his content is garbage:

If the free market is a matter of consensus, the debate must change its nature. Instead of arguing about systems of economic management, we have to discuss how to make better lives out of the prosperity that the free market generates.

Er, no. If the free market is a matter of consensus then there's little left for government to do beyond ensure competition exists, lock up criminals and defend the country. Plus whatever else the electorate in its infinite wisdom decides it wants government to do. It's not the job of government - any government - to decide for me how to make my life better. I'll decide how to do that, matey. 

I thought these were arguments we were supposed to have with nanny-state lefties. Isn't the point of the Conservative Party (at least since Heath) to let us get on with our own lives and to let the economy get on with being efficient?

Oliver Letwin writes that "Cameron Conservatism, so far from being merely a set of attitudes, has a specific theoretical agenda". Quite. That's the whole problem. If it was just a set of PR stunts then we could console ourselves that, in government, they'd behave like a Conservative government and stop taking ever greater sums from us to throw down a public services money pit, or send crimimals to prison instead of giving them a cuddle. The depressing fact appears to be that the Cameron PR stunts do actually mean something, and he is the quasi-socialist he seems to be, and really does think that, as Douglas Jay put it in the 1930s, "the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves".

(In fact if you take the usually omitted part of that quotation, it is even more aposite to Cameron: "in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves". Remember his attack on Chocolate Oranges?)

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Thought crimes

I suppose I need to make clear at the top of this post that I regard the BNP as contemptible; that I consider its members to be despicable; that I despise its leaders as criminal (it's not that I regard its leaders as criminal, it is that they are criminals); and that, for all the 'explanations' offered for the behaviour of supposedly decent people in voting for them, I can think of no justification in any circumstance, ever, for voting for the BNP.

However. In a democracy we are surely entitled to vote for legally constituted parties we support, however disgusting they may be. Not, however, if we are policemen and women:

 

One of Britain's biggest police forces is investigating allegations that it has British National party members among its frontline officers, the Guardian has learned.

...The force says it has seized CCTV footage and its detectives will scour it frame by frame for evidence. The force vowed that any officer found to be a BNP member could be sacked. But the BNP claimed it has members among the force's ranks.

...Police officers are not allowed to be members of the BNP, which is widely seen as being racist and which has members with convictions for violence. The policy was passed by police chiefs three years ago. They say membership of the party is incompatible with officers' duties under race equality laws.

If this isn't a thought crime, what is? Being banned not for what you do or say, but what you believe. I'm sure there are people in organisations I deal with who have foul beliefs. I am sure that I deal with antisemites. But what matters is whether they act on those beliefs. If they treat me as they would anyone else then, much as I might find their views despicable,  I can have no cause for complaint about those private beliefs.

If a policeman behaves as a racist then he or she should, of course, be drummed out of the force. But if he behaves with total propriety in his duties, how can it be right to ban him or her for sending a cheque once a year to an - and this is the critical point - entirely legal organisation?

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