No progressive
Sir: David Cameron’s article last week (‘It is not enough for Labour to lose this election’) mentioned the post-bureaucratic age ten times. Mr Cameron loves this phrase because it was coined by a progressive — Al Gore’s former speechwriter Andrei Cherney. And as the April date for Mr Cameron’s proposed £5 billion cuts to welfare, skills and charities draws near, he’s clearly hoping that endless use of nice slogans will keep his progressive credentials in check. The slogans however mask the reality. The Conservatives continue to advocate for unregulated markets in public services when no one is even arguing for them any more in the private sector.
In health, scrapping basic standard guarantees and siding with doctors to restrict access for patients does not yield progressive ends. It yields postcode lotteries, first-class services for the few — the aggressive middle classes — and second-class services for the many. Asking the market to determine which schools stay open in deprived communities rather than intervening in underperforming schools makes education a gamble, with the government sitting idly by as poor schools (or should I say poor kids) wither on the vine. The problem the Conservatives have is that what they really want is a post-government age.
The post-bureaucratic age demands government on people’s side — enabling change and protecting equity. As Cherney told CNN in 2001: ‘You really need an active, progressive government that’s on their side fighting for them on this to give them the ability to make these choices, the same kind of choices the wealthiest and luckiest in this country already get to make for themselves today.’ That is why after ten years of having to rescue public services from the sorry state we inherited from the Conservatives to the sound state they are in today, our next phase of reform — moving power into the hands of citizens and frontline public servants — is gathering pace.
Liam Byrne
Cabinet Office, London SW1
The cost of drink
Sir: I am surprised that both Charles Moore (The Spectator’s Notes, 21 March) and Rod Liddle (Liddle Britain, 21 March) find the term ‘passive drinking’ absurd. Yes, it is a figure of speech, an analogy with passive smoking. What is wrong with that? I have had countless train journeys ruined by drunks roaring at each other and have often felt threatened by them lurching at me in the street. All your readers will pay taxes toward policing the drunks and to fund the NHS treatment of alcohol-related disorders. It is also inaccurate to refer to the proposed minimum pricing as a tax when no revenue would be produced. The retailers and manufacturers would charge more, but sell less. I doubt if many of your readers drink wine at less than £4 a bottle anyway. Only those drinking large amounts of cheap alcohol would be significantly affected.
Dr Richard Watson
Glasgow
The club of bad trades
Sir: Everything Rod Liddle says about how the war against smoking was always going to lead to similar ones against other legitimate pleasures is true. The smoking ban was not the thin end of the wedge, though. The rot set in with crude warnings on tobacco products and the banning of cigarette advertising on television. The political crusade accelerated when traditional socialism became discredited. Getting nowhere attacking Big Business in general, the opponents of global capitalism turned their attention to businesses that could be deemed ‘unethical’.
The drinks industry has been asleep during all this, under the false illusion that smoking and drinking are completely separate issues. The last hope is that all industries smeared as ‘bad’ (fast food, confectionary, bottled water and the like) engage with genuine liberals and libertarians and challenge head on those who despise them and wish them to go bankrupt.
Rupert Fast
Esher, Surrey
No equivalence
Sir: There is more difference between Israelis and Palestinians than Mary Wakefield (‘A postwar tour through Gaza’, 21 March) cares to observe; while children’s TV in Gaza glorifies suicide bombers, Israelis hope to exchange hundreds of convicted Palestinian terrorists, including some murderers, for a single teenage soldier. Reality doesn’t tally with Mary Wakefield’s discovery that ‘Israelis [are willing] to sacrifice their children’ — but why let facts get in the way of anti-Israeli propaganda?
Alexander Massey
London N1
Smear by association
Sir: Melanie Phillips was so anxious to vent her wrath against Revd Stephen Sizer (‘Beware the new axis of evangelicals and Islamists’, 7 March) for his role in persuading the Church of England to divest itself of shares in Caterpillar, the American company which makes the armoured bulldozers used by Israel to flatten Palestinian villagers’ homes and uproot their olive groves, that she presented misinformation about me in order to perpetrate a smear by association against Sizer. The fact that Sizer’s email bulletins sometimes land in my inbox is no basis for suggesting that he and I are of the same mind.
Sizer approaches the plight of Palestine from his position as a Christian who, it seems to me, has an internationalist and non-racialist outlook. I am a religiously agnostic British Nationalist and racialist who recognises that the Palestinians, since 1948, have faced an invasion of their homeland by aliens who have set about expropriating Palestine for themselves. I see similarities between what has happened to the Palestinians since 1948 and what has happened to the indigenous British people over the same period.
The National Front — at least while I was involved with it from 1969 to 1983 — was not ‘neo-Nazi’. It was a nationalist party with a fully democratic constitution at every level. There were self-proclaimed neo-Nazi groups around at that time, but they were formally proscribed by the NF. All this is fully on record, including in various High Court proceedings. Phillips was also wrong to describe me as ‘the former leader’ of the NF. I served as its National Activities Organiser under a number of leaders.
Martin Webster
Via email
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