For years, I kept Labour’s shortest version of its 1997 ‘pledge card’.
For years, I kept Labour’s shortest version of its 1997 ‘pledge card’. On one side, in red, were the party’s key pledges and a photograph of Tony Blair beside which it said, ‘strong’ (Daily Telegraph). The other side was blue, stated the main shortcomings of the Tories and carried a picture of John Major beside which it said ‘weak’ (Daily Telegraph). Sadly, I have now lost the card, and have forgotten what the famous pledges were. A colleague recently asked me if the Conservatives, now approaching New Labour’s winning position in 1997, were to produce their own pledge card at their conference next week, what it would say. I could not think of any answers at all. Is this because of a disgraceful evasion by a party which lays claim to government? Or is it an entirely reasonable refusal to be tied to silly promises which circumstances could nullify?
Last week, I bumped into Malcolm Turnbull, who is now the leader of the Liberal (i.e. Tory) party in Australia, and was in London to see David Cameron. I first met Mr Turnbull about 25 years ago, when I found him sitting in my office in The Spectator (I was then the editor). He had come to tell me that his boss, Kerry Packer, was about to buy the paper. ‘Kerry’s not only motivated by greed,’ was how he explained it to me. Luckily, the bid did not come off, and Mr Turnbull went on to higher things — fighting the Thatcher government over the Spycatcher case, trying to turn Australia into a republic. He is a brilliant and amusing man, and has become more kindly than the aggressive young lawyer I remembered. His task as leader of the opposition is not easy, because his party, when in office, left the public finances in such good shape that the present Australian Labor government can debauch them for years before the damage is visible. Say what you like about Gordon Brown, you cannot accuse him of that political error. Malcolm Turnbull says that, for all the similarities between the two main parties nowadays, a key difference remains. The left really does think that taxes belong to those who exact them, not those who pay them. Conservatives see it the other way round. He will build on this difference. David Cameron should pledge to do the same.
The Australian parliament, Mr Turnbull reminded me, sits for only 18 weeks of the year. Can it honestly be said that the place is worse governed because its MPs have a lot of time off? Thanks to Mr Brown, the expenses scandal has had the terrible effect of squeezing out second jobs for MPs here, so now they will become even more dependent on the public payroll, and therefore even more corrupt than before. The solution lies the other way. If it is argued that it is somehow unfair for some MPs to have second jobs while others ‘work full-time’, surely the answer is to make second jobs compulsory. Rather as students nowadays need gap-year achievements, work experience and charitable endeavours to put on their CVs, backbench MPs should have to hold down another job for an average of two days a week in order to qualify for their parliamentary salaries. If they cannot manage to get jobs as doctors, lawyers, writers, businessmen, farmers, charity workers, car mechanics and so on, how can we expect them to be up to legislating?
Mr Turnbull has the traditional Australian suspicion of the European Union. ‘Why is it,’ he asked me, ‘when geographical proximity matters less than ever before in history, that Britain thinks it so important to join up with its continental neighbours?’
While I was out for the day on Saturday, TV Licensing’s enforcement officer came to our door to inquire why I was refusing to pay my television licence. He was politely asked to go away and come back when I was there, and he politely agreed. I have explained many times to the BBC authorities and in print that I am refusing to pay because the BBC has not sacked Jonathan Ross and, by failing to do so, is in breach of its Charter’s obligations. But although BBC Radio intones ‘We believe in listening’, whenever you turn it on, TV Licensing is ordered to be deaf, and the wheels of its inquiries grind slowly onward. It is interesting how the amount of money paid to Ross and to senior BBC executives becomes ever more salient in public debate. The BBC says that its top stars and top brass are ‘worth it’ and that the payments to them are ‘competitive’. But people increasingly realise that these claims are not only untrue (where is the competition which could pay Ross £6 million per year, or even £2 million?), but a wrong way for a corporation like the BBC to be looking at the matter. How can it be right for any organisation paid for out of compulsory taxation to set salaries and pay contracts which 99.999 per cent of those paying the tax will never receive, for posts which a similar percentage do not regard as essential to the wellbeing of our civilisation? The more I think about it, the more I realise that the short-term solution to the problem of the BBC is not to institute some clever and elaborate set of reforms, but simply to let them have much, much less money. If the licence fee was, say, halved, then they would have to decide what really is a public service, and what isn’t.
It can be irritating when people lionise a foreign country, particularly a poor foreign country, for having a deeper understanding of life than one’s own. Not because one’s own country is perfect, of course, but because one suspects that snobbery is coming into play. It is generally remote places, and ones which shun mass tourism, which are thought to contain the secrets of the universe. The Prince of Wales, for example, tends to sing the praises of Bhutan, a country with lots of romantic mountains, folkloric costumes, strong border controls and limited democracy. So I was maliciously pleased at a dance the other night when a charming woman I was sitting next to told me that she had just been climbing mountains in Bhutan and their guides had been horribly lecherous. There is a Bhutanese rule, she said, that a man may have one wife in a low-lying town, and one in a hill-town. In between, there are places he can go where women must go to bed with him if he wants it, no questions asked. My dinner companion was kept up at night by the noise of her guides claiming this privilege from the locals. She said she never wants to go back.
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