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So writes Michael Portillo.
Well, you can certainly tell that he does not intend to stand for election again. This blog is not generally a fan club for politicians, but even here one must admit that when a former Secretary of State for Defence and Shadow Chancellor writes –
It raises questions about the stamina of our nation and the resolve of our political class. It is an uncomfortable conclusion that Britain, with nuclear weapons, cruise missiles, aircraft carriers and the latest generation of fighter-bombers, is incapable of securing a medium-size conurbation. Making Basra safe was an essential part of the overall strategy; having committed ourselves to our allies we let them down.
The extent of Britain’s fiasco has been masked by the media’s relief that we are at last leaving Iraq. Those who have been urging Britain to quit are not in a strong position to criticise the government’s lack of staying power. Reporting of Basra has mainly focused on British casualties and the prospect for withdrawal. The British media and public have shown scant regard for our failure to protect Iraqis, so the British nation, not just its government, has attracted distrust. We should reflect on what sort of country we have become. We may enjoy patronising Americans but they demonstrate a fibre that we now lack.
– it carries more weight than the same sentiments coming from most other sources.
Is it true? Broadly speaking, of course it is. I agree with those commenters to the Times who placed blame on the “carping, self-loathing left wing commentariat”, or made the parallel with the media in the Vietnam War, or with MGG of Auckland, who wrote
Fortunately Britain’s Armed Forces have not so far ‘lost the stomach for a fight’. But faced with this continuing lack of moral fibre in the civil population bred by the ‘Nanny State’ policies of New Labour it won’t be long before they give up too – in disgust!
As I wrote in a post about the New Cowardice in the emergency services called ‘Loss of Nerve’, “Poisoned soil does not long give forth good fruit.”
That said, I suspect that when viewed from the distance of thirty years, the sharp outline of defeat in Basra (and what is worse, a defeat that followed from a disgraceful accommodation with the enemy on the part of commanders too fond of their own cleverness) will be blurred by other, better parts of the picture.
Mr Portillo has shown an admirable willingness to make himself unpopular: he praised George W Bush, rightly, for the latter’s contempt of public and educated opinion. Mr Bush (contrary to popular opinion, which is one reason he has such contempt for it) has studied history and will certainly have paused over this quotation from Lincoln, written in August 1864:
This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President-elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such grounds that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.”
That is why I say that the difference between the United States and Britain in this story is not so large as all that. After all, in this war the Americans voted in the favoured candidate of the Copperheads, a President-elect who did indeed secure his election on such grounds that it would have been impossible for him to win the war after his inauguration, though he will be glad enough to take the victory that was won by other hands before it.
I think I know best, too, of course. But what I know best is that the world is too complicated for me or anyone else to rule. Other people are generally better placed than I am to decide what is good for them. Even when they are not, nothing gives me in particular the right to impose my ideas.
Gordon Brown is one of the elect (not just the elected) who knows no such restraint.
The Prime Minister: The first point of recapitalisation was to save banks that would otherwise have collapsed. We not only saved the world— [Laughter . ]—saved the banks and led the way— [ Interruption. ] We not only saved the banks— [ Interruption. ]
Mr. Speaker: Order.
The Prime Minister: Not only did we work with other countries to save the world’s banking— [ Interruption. ] Not only did we work with other countries to save the world’s banking system, but not one depositor actually lost any money in Britain.* That is the first thing.
Having contented himself that he only saved world banking, Mr Brown has now set out to work on the rest of the job. He has started on a mission to create peace between Pakistan and India – two countries that have not had a war since 1971. Such is his supreme diplomatic tact that his approach after the Mumbai massacre is to visit the region in order to announce that “Three quarters of the most serious plots investigated by the British authorities have links to al-Qaeda in Pakistan.” A claim that is both occult (full in equal measure of secret authority and meaninglessness), and calculated to make people in India more hostile to Pakistan.
Maybe this is not a record breaking sprint to megalomania for a British Prime Minister. Perhaps it is that Mr Brown’s nostalgia for the 1970s knows no bounds. Having destroyed the British economy in order to become its saviour, he is trying the same trick on the global village.
*[This is a lie: I know personally several depositors who between them lost many millions in Britain when Mr Brown decided to expropriate the Icelandic banks. Even those among them whom the Treasury has made a vague promise to compensate have yet to see a penny, and have had the huge cost, which is unlikely to be refunded, of arranging indefinite bridging finance in near-impossible borrowing conditions.]
Germany’s finance minister has gone on the record as saying that Britain’s rush into ever greater debt to try to halt a recession is foolish, even “depressing”.
Crikey. It makes me wonder whether Germany, mindful of what happened in the hyper-inflation of the 1920s, is worried that sooner or later, the vast amounts of money being hurled at the economies in the West, such as in Britain, will produce a sharp rise in inflation and that ever-higher borrowing will only prolong, but not halt, the current pain.
Anyway, this is bound to be seized upon by the Tories. It will be interesting to see if they do so.
Tim Worstall justifiably gets angry about this plan to force owners of coastal properties to allow the public to have access to the properties, and without compensation. I weighed in with the comments on the board and deciding not to let the discussion go to waste, I wanted to quote a character called Kay, who comes up with what I might call the “brute utilitarian” argument one hears for compulsory purchase/eminent domain laws here and in other nations:
Allowing veto rights to every landowner and shareholder results in complete deadlock. That ridiculous stance may be taken by some who posted here, but the rest of us would rather live in an advanced civilisation with electricity, railways, roads, public limited companies, etc.
I sense that this argument is nonsense, but there may be something in it. It is interesting that the commenter mentions limited liability corporations – we have been over that issue before at this blog. But is it really the case that say, electricity could not be easily conveyed across the UK without coercing landowners into letting this occur? I assume, of course, that if many landowners refused point blank to do this, that the situation would result in lots of very small, easy-to-move electricity generators being built. But in practice, the vast majority of landowners want easy access to electricity, water and roads like everyone else, and with a bit of inducement – shares in revenues from tolls, rental payments for pipes and pylons – would agree to things being built on their land. There may be “extreme cases”, where landlords hold so much sway that they try to strangle beneficial technologies across a vast tract of land, and I suppose this is possible, but it strikes me as not very likely. I’d be interested to know, for example, whether the 18th century canal-builders required a lot of compulsory purchase laws to get their way. If memory serves from reading history, what happened was a lot of haggling and the odd bit of special legislation passed in the House of Commons.
I think the problem with the “brute utilitarian” argument is not simply its undertone of “We want – we take”. It is also its deafness to the fact that most people, most of the time, have sufficient rational self interest to act in ways that benefit not just themselves but most of the rest of us. The trouble is that once the enthusiasm for seizure takes hold, it is often hard for its proponents to even think about how things can be ordered differently. I have heard people express admiration for the Continental, Roman Law-based system which supposedly is so much less messy and fuddy-duddy than the Common Law one in this respect. When people start to invoke “efficiency” and so forth, guard your wallet and front door.
Meanwhile, for a good discussion on the tricky issue of how property claims can be arrived at justly in the first place, this book is worth a read. One thing that bugs me about discussions about property is when some character will argue that “X or Y stole the land from poor benighted natives in the Year xxxx BC so all property since is tainted”, as if that somehow justifies looting now. It does not.
As an aside, it is also worth noting that compulsory purchase laws, particularly when used to turf people off their property to create other, supposedly more valuable economic outcomes, is a vehicle for corruption.
Update and side-observation: it is only fair to say that some – in my view misguided – libertarians have tried to argue that land, because it was not created by Man, should be taxed more heavily than income or other things, and for some people, this sort of tax is a sort of “rectification” of any previous injustices inflicted by the acquisition of property. The name of 19th Century writer Henry George occasionally comes up. I was once quite taken with the idea but there are weaknesses to it. For a start, a person who makes more use of land than was the case before because of his entrepreneurial vigour should not, in my view, be penalised for thereby raising the value of that land, which is what a land-tax, if based on land values, would do. There remains this view, widely shared, that land should not be ultimately owned by any individual because land and minerals, or indeed the sea, is “just there”, an inert set of substances that we can manipulate, but not create new value from. That seems to undermine the very notion of wealth creation per se, in my view.
Oh, and here is an item from the Ludwig von Mises Institute on eminent domain.
Another update: Devil’s Kitchen shares my opinion but does so in a more, ahem, salty way. Check out the comments, where Samizdata regular Ian B takes on Kay Tie. In boxing terms, the judge would have had to stop the fight to protect Kay from serious injury.
As Brian Micklethwait noted the other day, the UK news satire quiz show, Have I Got News For You, is sometimes a quite accurate barometer of how opinion is trending among what I might call the self-consciously trendy chattering classes. The latest episode was compered by some comedian I vaguely recognised who looks like a slightly supercilious upper sixth former. Understandably, a lot of the quiz was taken up with taking the piss out of the disgusting Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, over his recent shambolic performance over the Damian Green affair. Like Brian, I am now going to recall the following bit of dialogue. There will be some words missing but here is the gist of it:
Ian Hislop: It is amazing, isn’t it, that they were were able to get 20 or so policemen to raid Mr Green’s offices and search his house. Where are all these guys when you need to catch a burglar or something?
Compere: Ah, yes, that sounds like the sort of drivel you read in the Daily Mail.
Hislop: So let me get this right – are you saying that is perfectly okay for a bunch of anti-terror policemen to arrest, search and hold an MP for asking annoying questions in the House of Commons?
Compere: I am in all in favour of putting Tory MPs in jail.
Hislop: raised eyebrows, obviously thinking to himself “I cannot believe this fascist prick, how did we get him on the show”?
Like I said, HIGNFY is an interesting temperature gauge on UK current affairs. And my impression was that Hislop regarded the Damian Green affair as an outrage, while a lefty “comedian” regards it is acceptable to crack jokes about locking up MPs just because of their views. These supposedly “edgy” or “cutting edge” comedians are nothing of the sort. They are, now, part of the establishment. I was not laughing, and neither was Mr Hislop.
Anyway, later in the show the poor compere was hopelessly inept at reading out the scores. Hislop made his life hell.
Henry Porter, who to his immense credit has been telling it like it is on the civil liberties issue in Britain for several years, has a strong article in the Guardian on the arrest of Damian Green and the government’s miserable behaviour since.
As he puts it, the arrest of one of their own has finally woken MPs up to what is going on. It is hard not to feel a certain bitterness at MPs’ complacency on these issues for many years, but better late than never. The arrest of an MP in such circumstances must count as the ultimate “canary in the coalmine”.
What a way to mark the State Opening of Parliament. At the time of writing I do not know if the Speaker of the House of Commons has been sacked yet or resigned.
My respect for the EU Referendum blog, one of my daily reads, has just cratered. It argues that because the person leaking immigration details to Damian Green had sought to get a Tory party job, and the leaks of such data were a serious matter, that the authorities were entirely right to treat Mr Green as they did. As far as EUR is concerned, we are all getting het up about nothing and that it is high time that politically motivated civil servants were given a warning. This is nonsense: given the vast number of leaks out of the government that often have direct impacts on things like financial markets, the use of sweeping laws to deal with such matters is bizarre.
What on earth has got into that blog’s authors that they should seek to excuse the use of anti-terror police in dealing with leaks that while embarrassing, posed no danger to UK national security? Had the EU acted in this way, that blog would have gone ballistic.
Update: EUR continues to attack those who are attacking this arrest, arguing that if the cops had suspicions that something was fishy about Mr Green’s activities, they were entitled to act as they did. But again, why the use of anti-terror police when this was plainly not an issue that raises national security issues?
I see that the Devil’s Kitchen blog, which normally has little time for the intrusions of state power, goes into an incoherent rant at MPs’ expense, saying, pretty much, that Members of Parliament have been such poor custodians of our liberties – which is a true fact – that they deserve no sympathy now that the guns are turned on them. Well yes but so what? The point that DK misses is how this story plays, or should play, straight into the hands of civil libertarians anxious to focus attention on how out of control government and its agents now are. As Brian Micklethwait said the other day, this story is great news for civil libertarians, and terrible for the government. Perhaps EU Referendendum and DK are so consumed with hatred for the Tory Party that they are untroubled by the significance of last week’s arrest other than to yell abuse.
The arrest of Damian Green is quite appalling and so ridiculously Orwellian that I am almost tempted to vote Tory. I mean it.
– a commenter here
Last night I watched Have I Got a Bit More News for You?, which is the extended Saturday night version of the BBC’s popular current affairs and comedy quizz show. Something interesting was said, and even more interestingly, not contradicted. HIGN4Y regular Ian Hislop was commenting on the Mini- Pre- Budget that isn’t really a Budget, but really is. He said that the country had got into terrible trouble because of everyone borrowing too much money. And the government’s answer is that the government is going to borrow lots more money. General derision, and no contradictions from anybody. I don’t know what Germaine Greer’s economic policy prejudices are, but going by her other opinions, I thought maybe she might make some attempt to defend the government’s economic policy, if only by quickly changing the subject. No. Nothing like that.
Come to think of it, I have all this on my telly hard disc. Bear with me. Yes, here we go:
Hislop: “It’s a whole package of measures to save us all! We’ve got into terrible trouble for years by excess borrowing, so we’re going to … borrow!!!!!” Derisive hand gesture. Derisive laughter from studio audience. “That’s it, that’s the whole report.”
Young Comedian sitting next to Hislop: “Isn’t it that we’re going to be a trillion pounds in debt, after this?”
Hislop: “Yes.”
Young Comedian: “That is an awful lot … If you bring up your bank balance and it says that, you’ll feel pretty crushed, I think.”
Hislop: “It’s bad, isn’t it?”
Young Comedian: “I don’t know how I’m going to make that back, Ian.”
Hislop: “Well, you’re young enough that you will have to make it back. We’ll all be dead.”
Young Comedian: “I suppose so. I thought no one else looked as worried about it as I was. What was Damien Hirst doing in the middle of that?”
Damien Hirst has been laying off art workers. When the silly price of silly art slumps, you know the economy is tanking. Later, they had a reference to the fact that the bail-out is costing us twice what World War 1 cost us. Paul Merton said that this won’t be over by Christmas either, to general laughter. And, as I say, not a peep out of Germaine G about this catastrophe.
The central point is this. We borrowed far too much – Now the government says we must borrow far too much more thereby making our children and grandchildren into tax serfs – How idiotic is that? This is fast becoming the Grand Narrative here. If so, and given that the Conservatives are saying this too, that Labour melt-down is becoming a real possibility.
As someone who has certainly conspired with Damian Green (and LibDem MPs too) to embarrass the Government and the Home Office. I spent some time Thursday and Friday making provision in case I were to be arrested and my property searched. The reaction from the media and parliamentarians in the Green affair has been so strong that I don’t now think it likely. But it does seem possible. Before Thursday night I would have laughed at someone who suggested things had got so bad.
I was misinformed. Nick Cohen in the Observer picks up a case I should have known about:
Admittedly, when anti-terrorist officers arrested him, it was the first time they had held a suspect for trying to protect national security. But their motive was clear. Green had embarrassed the Home Secretary and made Home Office civil servants look idle fools. He and his source had to pay.
The accusations against Sally Murrer, on the other hand, were incomprehensibly trivial. The state said that Mark Kearney, a police officer and Murrer’s co-defendant, had given her the story that Thames Valley Police did not intend to prosecute the star striker of the MK Dons after a fight in a hotel. It also alleged he had passed on a tip that a man who had been murdered in the town had a conviction for drug dealing.
Journalists in free countries receive similar steers every day. Yet the police bugged her phones, ransacked her home and office, confiscated her computers, interrogated her, humiliated her with a strip search, separated her from her daughters and handicapped son and left her with the threat of a prison sentence hanging over her for 18 months.
As I noted for US readers over on another thread, none of this of course required a judicial warrant. Though the charges were thrown out when a trial finally came, the process is the punishment. And someone searched under these conditions might easily end up being prosecuted for something else, if police find evidence of any other offence in the course of it. After all, a lot of very common conduct is now illegal.
Matthew Parris today:
For me, Thomas Á Becket and Canterbury Cathedral spring to mind. I picture an infuriated Prime Minister bellowing at a flat-screen television: “Will nobody rid me of these troublesome leaks?” Who the four knights were who took it upon themselves to act upon the presumed wishes of a maddened monarch, we may never know, but when Mr Brown insists that he didn’t actually know, it is possible to believe him.
Just what I was thinking. And just like Henry II before him, Gordon Brown will have to carry the can for this, and suffer whatever is now the equivalent of an annual public flogging. Constant references to this from now on in the history books, is my guess. For the point is that although Ministerial and Prime Ministerial protestations of ignorance about this absurd outrage may be true, Ministers and the Prime Minister have spent the last decade creating the atmosphere within which “anti-terrorist” policemen would indeed come to think that such conduct as arresting an opposition politician is some kind of duty.
Coincidentally, and perhaps I’m wrong to defy Godwin’s Law but I’ll do it anyway, I have recently been reading this book (more from me in connection with it here), which concerns the various big decisions taken between 1940 and 1941 by the various war leaders: Britain resists, Roosevelt helps Britain, Stalin decides that Hitler won’t invade Russia, Hitler invades Russia, Japan attacks USA, Hitler declares war on USA, that kind of thing. The final one is: Hitler decides to murder the Jews. And in that horrifically more portentous matter you get the same thing, of Hitler not being personally pinnable down with anything like exact foreknowledge of this or that particular burst of slaughter. Nothing was ever put into writing and signed Adolf Hitler. But he was responsible nevertheless, because he created the atmosphere within which his underlings did their worst. He set the tone.
Well, now, in this by comparison farcical little episode, Gordon Brown set the tone, and lesser creatures went to work. And I’m very glad it has happened. During my adult lifetime, I have watched politicians get cleverer and cleverer at enacting policies not by announcing them, debating them, and then doing them, but by just doing them, a little bit at a time, slice by slice, with no one slice being big enough to unite the potential opposition, but the resulting dish nevertheless amounting to a huge and often deeply disagreeable change. Think: EU. In such an atmosphere, you actually cheer when, emboldened by the silence that greets the usual and thin kind of slice, they instead make a grab for a much thicker slice. For suddenly it is clear to all what went on, and what has been going on for a decade and more.
What the hell? Why don’t we just arrest the bastard and do him over for a few hours? Who the hell f—ing cares who Damian f—ing Green is? Yeah, go for it. Time these f—ers learned their f—ing lesson.
Yes, comparisons with Hitler are over-dramatic, as are the more common comparisons being made now in all the other pieces like this one being scribbled and blogged by all the other no-name scribblers and bloggers like me, with Robert Mugabe’s hideous misrule of Zimbabwe. Matthew Parris mentions them in his piece, quoted above, noting their oddity yet ubiquity, but not ridiculing them any more than I do. For that is what goes on at the very bottom of the slippery slope we are on here. Those are the comparisons that spring to mind, even as you realise that they are out of all proportion. They go to to kind of deed this was, to its dramatic structure, so to speak, even if the scale and intensity of this particular deed was trivial by comparison.
As far as Damian Green was concerned, this has been wonderful. He is probably now having more fun than he ever has before or ever will again. And yes, it is Damian and not Damien. Who knew? Not me, until today.
I include references to f—ing and f—ers very deliberately. That our rulers now swear a lot more than they used to is all part of that atmosphere, that tone, that they have been so busily creating. It is an atmosphere in which there are now so many laws, and laws which are so sweeping in their scope, that all are now guilty. The law simplifies down to the question: do they like you? If they really really do not like you, look out, they’ll come for, and find or make up the laws they need as they go along. That a front bench politician has been, very publicly, on the receiving end of this parody of the idea of law is cause not for rage and more swearing, but for rejoicing.
The events surrounding the arrest of Damien Green have caused a political storm amongst parliamentarians. From the Labour government we have heard that Ministers had “no prior knowledge” of the arrests, though the permanent secretary of the Home Office instituted the leak investigation, and that the “operational independence” of the police should not be questioned or circumscribed. These lines were agreed quickly by the government’s news management team have held for now.
The police raid was undertaken by twenty counter-terrorist officers on the specious common law grounds that would seem to give them carte blanche to target anyone and everyone. From this base, and with the Speaker’s permission, they seized Damien Green’s constituency material and disenfranchised his electorate. The timing of the raid, at a time when parliamentary privileges are at their weakest and coincidental with the resignation of Sir Ian Blair, speaks volumes.
Whoever know about the raid does not detract from a number of points.
There is no longer a clear distinction between the state and the Labour party after thirteen years in power. The government has extended its powers through legislation and no longer recognises distinct checks and balances, using bureaucracy to institutionalise an illiberal, authoritarian, secretive and arbitrary state. This is an aim of their civil service counterparts, and even if Jacqui Smith did not know, it is clear that she has no capability of combating the authoritarian objectives of the Home Office.
The police have obtained more powers over the last twelve years then in the previous twenty and can use them to harass individuals and political parties, though this depends upon the whims of the local Chief Constable. Traffic Taliban, anyone? Uncontrolled state institutions with wide and undefined powers can run riot as their own agendas spin out and away from their political masters. From the current events, the Metropolitan police requires close scrutiny, as a coterie of Blairite officers (in possible cahoots with the Labour party), may be gunning for the opposition. The anti-terror legislation needs to be repealed.
If the Sunday papers provides fresh evidence that the Labour government had prior knowledge of the arrest or that the police were politically motivated in undertaking this arrest, then the constitutional wreckage of Thursday will be recast in a more sinister light. Then the probability that Gordon Brown will be willing to use the powers of the state on a wider scale to hobble and undermine the opposition is increased, up to using the enabling act. But we can ask if Britain is now an illiberal democracy.
On a positive note, the abuse of power widens the constituency opposed to the arbitrary and frightening tools of surveillance that have been pooled together by this government. What a shame that it takes the Daily Mail rather than the Guardian or the Independent to champion our liberties. Our politics are now so embittered and twisted that left-wing pundits prefer to piss on our liberties rather than forsake their party. They need to be cast out in the cold for more than a generation till they learn that it is not my party: right or wrong.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
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