While generally resisting denunciations of George W. Bush, I do wonder what he has to contribute to peace in Northern Ireland. This week, the great reconciler asked David Cameron to intervene with the moderate Ulster Unionist Party, with whom the Tories now have an electoral pact, to get them to vote for the devolution of policing and justice powers to Northern Ireland. Mr Cameron rightly replied that although he supports that devolution, he cannot give orders to his allies. They voted against. But why did Mr Bush get involved in the first place? It is really all to do with our general election. The Northern Ireland Secretary, Shaun Woodward, spends rather little time in the province, and a lot in No. 10 Downing Street with Gordon Brown, working out political tactics. He dislikes the Tories’ attempt to bring mainstream non-sectarian politics to the province, and sees political sense in portraying them as roadblocks to peace. He ropes in the Obama administration, which in turn puts pressure on Mr Bush, who sees no harm in being praised by the left for once. The effect of all this is that, yet again, the respectable parties are marginalised and vilified, and the extreme ones — Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionists — win more favours. Meanwhile, the recrudescence of terrorism continues. How about getting Mr Bush to go to Belfast and stand in front of a banner saying ‘Mission accomplished’?
An imam who originated in Pakistan once told me that, where he came from, they were all brought up to believe that the weirdest thing about the British was that they kept dogs in their houses. When you think about it detachedly, it is quite odd. Here are animals, bred originally to work or hunt and kill, lying about in people’s sitting rooms, playing with their children and running round crowded urban parks. Obviously, quite a lot of people are going to get hurt. Then there is the matter of dirt, faeces and (admittedly a bigger question in hot countries than here) disease. Traditionally, white people have complained about immigrants being dirty, but to those whose cultures see dogs as unclean, we British whites are the filthy ones. Being a fond dog-owner myself, I do not feel the same way as the imam, but the line between dogs being friendly or fierce, sweet or revolting, can be a thin one. In modern Britain, the line is crossed more and more often. Too many owners like having ferocious dogs, and the public, particularly in towns, have to bear the consequences. Now the government’s remedy is that all dogs should be microchipped and all owners should have compulsory insurance policies. This might sound logical, but in fact it is the same mistake as the government makes with terrorism (refusing ‘profiling’, for instance). The threat is real, but the answer does not lie in making life inconvenient for everyone. It is funny that people have forgotten the fate of the dog licence. This began in the late-19th-century, I think, but it got stuck at the rate of seven shillings and sixpence (37.5p), because governments were frightened of unpopularity if they put it up. By the time it was abolished in 1987, it was costing far more to collect than it raised, and most people did not bother with it. If Labour tries to get money out of every dog-owner, it will find that the dog lobby in Britain is as strong as the gun lobby in the United States, and it will lose the election. Target the thousands who cause trouble, not the millions who don’t. And why on earth should central government decree something which has a quite different impact in different districts? This is a cause for the Tories’ new localism to take up.
This column’s theory of British general elections in modern times is simple: all results since the war have been deserved. Labour deserved to win big in 1945 and 1997. The Conservatives deserved their decisive victory in 1979, and their crushing one in 1983. The more ‘nuanced’ results were also deserved. Labour deserved to win in 2005, but only grudgingly, on a low poll. The ‘Who governs Britain?’ election of February 1974 returned exactly the deserved answer to that question, which was, ‘We’re not sure.’ Can this rule turn into a predictor? It seems clear already that Labour deserves to lose this time — for reasons too numerous to mention. But it is not yet clear that the Tories deserve to win, and the opinion polls accurately reflect that doubt. So, at the time of writing, the just result would be a hung parliament. Minds are not made up. For the Tories, this makes the actual campaign more critical than any since February 1974 (which they bungled).
Ringing a friend who is a little over 30 this week, I found the reception poor and asked if I could ring him back on his landline. He said that he didn’t have one. Although he is of fixed abode and in steady employment, he feels he needs only his computer and his mobile, and says that most of his contemporaries feel the same. He adds that people like him are causing trouble for opinion pollsters because they are never reached by telephone polling: the views of an entire generation are therefore going missing.
Despite our ‘human rights culture’, we are curiously intermittent about human rights. The week before last, Ejup Ganic, the former vice-president of Bosnia, was held at Heathrow airport when about to leave the country for home. As I write (there is a further hearing this week), he is still detained in Wandsworth Prison without bail. When he had a court hearing to argue about bail, officials from the prison produced the wrong man, so Mr Ganic was not heard. All this happened because the Serbs, wanting to hit back while their man Radovan Karadjic was being tried for war crimes in The Hague, had demanded that Britain extradite Mr Ganic to face charges in Serbia for an alleged atrocity in Sarajevo in May 1992. A London magistrate signed his extradition warrant, stating that Sarajevo is in Serbia, which it most emphatically is not (much blood has been shed on this subject), and was not, even in May 1992. In 2003, the chief prosecutor at The Hague wrote to the public prosecutor in Serbia saying that she did not believe that Mr Ganic had any case to answer. So our extradition law operates thus: a country which has highly political courts and in which the alleged crime was not committed and for which crime there is no proper evidence can nevertheless make us grab a respectable visitor to Britain, lock him up and order that he be sent to a terrible fate.
What phrase on a news programme promises the greatest boredom? I would say ‘awards ceremony’.
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