Kenneth Clarke’s reform of prisons is an example of the target culture which the coalition says it wants to stop.
Kenneth Clarke’s reform of prisons is an example of the target culture which the coalition says it wants to stop. His target is to reduce the prison population by 3,000 by 2015. Since the projected increase in the population (absent the new policy) is somewhere between 2,000 and 7,000, this will be a very hard target to hit. It is therefore almost inevitable that people will be kept out of or released from prison for bad reasons. As soon as the public sense this, they will lose confidence in the policy.
In March 1998, the Deutsch-Britische Gesellschaft, an enlightened body devoted to Anglo-German understanding, paid for me to travel round Germany giving the same lecture each night. Its title was ‘Independent nation states are the best means of preventing war in Europe’, but its main topical thrust was to argue, rather impertinently, that my hosts should not join the euro, which was about to come into being. ‘I am truly astonished that the German nation should be proposing to surrender the sovereign symbol of its successful return to civilisation, prosperity and good government,’ I said. ‘Each time anyone uses a deutschmark he is reminded that its country of origin is rich, and secure and trustworthy… Now this great achievement is to be spun upon the roulette wheel of greater European integration.’ The result of the euro would be that: ‘Resentment at the actions of unelected foreign bankers… will force politicians to transfer huge sums of public money to the aggrieved. This, in turn, requires higher taxes, and a central authority to allocate the money. A European economic policy and a European economic government will be born.’ I found the reaction of my audiences interesting. They almost all regretted the loss of the deutschmark. But they thought it had to happen: it was the price of postwar respectability, their tribute-money to the European Caesar. Today, however, Germany is itself Caesar. All other countries wishing to remain in the euro must do its will. But it has most reluctantly attained supreme power, and cannot work out what its will is.
In February last year, James Sherr, a senior Fellow at Chatham House, addressed a session of the House of Commons Defence Committee. Afterwards, he tells me, a young assistant to a member of the committee approached him. She was Ekaterina Zatuliveter, now alleged to be a Russian spy. Speaking in Russian, Mr Sherr asked her if there was the faintest chance of a British equivalent occupying a role similar to hers in the State Duma. ‘Of course not!’ she replied gaily. Mr Sherr notes two things: one is that any vigilance about Russians here is excoriated as a backward Cold War attitude, which is strange, since the country remains a nuclear power frequently hostile to our interests. The other is that, by being so insouciant about any and all Russians in Britain, we make life more dangerous for the large number of Russians who live here precisely because they wish to escape the bad ones back home.
When we were in Afghanistan in September, guided by Sandy Gall, we met two remarkable Englishmen who kept disappearing and reappearing as our trip progressed. They were John Casson and Jeremy Rata. John is an ex-policeman who now owns a large maritime security business. Jeremy was for many years the manager of the Duke of Devonshire’s hotel company and now directs the Bovey Castle hotel and estate in Devon. On his first visit to Afghanistan, with Sandy two years earlier, John conceived a burning desire to help the country. He roped in Jeremy, who is also a professional photographer, to produce a book to aid Sandy Gall’s Afghanistan Appeal and British charities which help servicemen injured in Afghanistan. When we met them, they were traversing the country in 12 days, taking in Herat, Kabul, Bamiyan and Jalalabad. So the material for their book, now out, took no longer to gather than the average set of holiday snaps. Which makes it particularly astonishing that the book has such an elemental feel. It captures the essence of the often stern and beautiful Afghan people. So classical are the images that it took me a while to realise that some of them depict scenes at which I had actually been present — the treatment of a limbless child, a shepherd and his flock approaching Bamiyan. Because of Islam’s prohibition of the depiction of the human face, Muslim countries have not had their Rembrandts or their Caravaggios. Afghan Faces helps supply the lack, and makes a wonderful Christmas present. It costs £35 (www.johncasson.com). All proceeds to the charities mentioned above.
In the extensive analysis of James Naughtie’s slip on the Today programme, everyone has fastened on the wrong obscenity. The offensive word is contained in the title of Jeremy Hunt, the innocent victim. Mr Hunt is the Secretary of State for C—— , Media and Sport, and it was probably the prospect of having to mouth such filth that got Mr Naughtie into a fluster. Until Tony Blair, it was a proud boast of British politics that C—— was unknown to the constitution. If politicians felt the need to talk about it at all, they used euphemisms like ‘arts and libraries’ or, later, ‘national heritage’. Mr Blair’s continental/totalitarian instincts told him that government should control C—— , and so he appointed a Cabinet minister to do so. The coalition should wash away the stain by abolishing the post.
Walking through the remains of last week’s great snow, I come to a boggy area where the thaw followed by frost has left a curious effect. The snow has melted away from the reeds which it covered, but left a canopy of ice on their tops. It looks delicate. But I am struck by how one’s sense of what is beautiful is affected by one’s expectations. If the reeds had been covered by transparent polythene wrap they would have looked much the same — and then I would have thought how hideous it was that people should drape their litter over nature.
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