President Obama’s victory is the first major victory for incumbency in the West since the credit crunch began. It was to help achieve such a victory that the eurozone leaders listened to Mr Obama and Tim Geithner and postponed their own day of reckoning. All excellent news for the status quo, but possibly not for the rest of us.
This is Living Wage Week, according to someone or other. The Living Wage is a brilliant propaganda idea. It probably owes its intellectual origins to Pope Leo XIII, who argued that ‘wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner’. Now it is not just a principle but a specified amount, reported utterly uncritically by the BBC. The ‘right’ wage has just been increased to £8.55 per hour in London and £7.45 everywhere else. Shamelessly, Boris Johnson backs it. Ed Miliband wants public procurement contracts to go only to Living Wage employers. All Downing Street can say to oppose it is that this might run counter to EU rules. We already have a minimum wage, which is currently set at £6.19 per hour. So any employer offering more than the minimum wage and less than the new, invented ‘Living’ sum can be accused of inhumanity. If the Living Wage is really morally right, the minimum wage is clearly wrong. In fact, both are wrong. They discriminate in favour of big employers, who can better afford them, helping them squeeze out new entrants (which they love doing) and making them seem virtuous as they do so. They destroy or prevent jobs, particularly for young people, particularly at this time of low growth. It is disreputable to apply the same rate to all. Young people with no family responsibilities need far less than young parents, for example. They can afford to earn little — or even nothing — in the short term if by doing so they advance their employability. This is a statement of the obvious, yet it has been suffocated by the pillow of righteousness.
Most of the greatest British boarding schools began as benevolent enterprises to educate the poor. Eton, Winchester, Westminster and many more were colleges for penniless scholars. Despite good intentions, such schools have often strayed from these roots. Next week, a charity is being launched to remedy the problem. Spring Board will pool the money and know-how of dozens of boarding schools, match them with partners such as state schools and local councils, and build up hundreds of bursaries to pay 110 per cent of fees (the extra ten per cent is to cover all incidentals) for disadvantaged children. This is such a good idea, not only because it increases the number of bursaries, but also because it helps deal with the superficially surprising fact that disadvantaged children, though numerous, are hard to find. Those who most need the help are the least likely to come forward. At last, there will be a sort of national dating agency to match right school with right pupil. The medieval ideal will be able to take 21st-century shape.
Our normally assiduous media are not pushing hard enough at the door Michael Gove opened. On Sunday, Iain Duncan Smith joined Mr Gove as a Cabinet minister prepared publicly to imagine life for Britain outside the European Union. Over the next few weeks, anyone interviewing a British Cabinet minister about anything — ash dieback, the army reserve, whatever — should slide in a question about whether that minister agrees with Gove and Duncan Smith. If the minister says no, you have a ‘Cabinet split’ story. If he says yes, you start to accumulate a significant number of people running the country who publicly state that they do not believe the great orthodoxy of the last 40 years. It starts to change everything.
I am worried by the resignation of Denis MacShane, the Labour MP disgraced over his expenses. If there is one thing worse than an MP who cannot be prised out of his seat, it is one who too easily can be. There is always a reason why rivals, or the mighty power of the state, wish to destroy a politician’s career. They should usually be resisted. The voters put MPs in and they alone should put them out. Besides, I have always admired Mr MacShane’s determination, unusual on the modern left, to confront anti-Semitism, whether Islamist or far-right. I was even quite impressed by his preposterous Euro-fanaticism. He is the only person I ever found at EU seminars or conferences who knew the answer to my question, ‘What are the first words of the Lisbon Treaty?’ (The US Constitution begins ‘We, the people…’. The Lisbon Treaty begins ‘His Majesty the King of the Belgians…’.) But I’m afraid my sympathy for him shrivelled when I read his explanation for his conduct. He said he had been under huge strain because of the death of his daughter in a sky-diving accident, the break-up of his marriage and the death of his daughter’s mother, Carol Barnes. These are much too serious things to use as excuses. They might explain getting drunk or having a breakdown, but they cannot explain this, as the Standards and Privileges Committee report puts it: ‘Invoices for arbitrary amounts were generated from Mr MacShane’s computer on a letterhead which gave an entirely false impression of the body from which they purported to come.’ Nothing grief-crazed about the calculation involved in doing that.
Quite my most useful present is the walking stick once given me by my old friend and neighbour, the novelist Alan Judd. Interesting walks in the country almost always involve climbing things, slashing down brambles, crossing streams, discouraging charging bullocks, etc. For all these purposes, a stick is the best thing. Mine is what Victorian novels call ‘a stout ash-plant’. Thanks to dieback, I may be holding an example of its last generation. Perhaps my stick will be a curiosity for my grandchildren, like the bones of a dodo which a friend of ours owns and shows to his.
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