Samizdata

In a recent Spiked article, Dr Helene Guldberg quotes Liz Kendal talking about a recent IPPR report about child rearing which she co-authored:

Any government serious about giving children an equal start in life cannot overlook the significance of the parenting role… The lack of practical, social and emotional support for most parents undermines other attempts by government to reduce childhood inequalities.

I think this quote throws an interesting light on the mania to regulate that now sweeps across the world. There is nothing like an impossible task to enable the regulatory process first to begin, and then, once begun, to go on for ever.

Consider. According to Liz Kendal, who emitted the above quote, the government should be “serious about giving children an equal start in life”. Yet think about this. It is impossible. It simply cannot be done. People are different. They think differently and they live in different circumstances. They rear their children differently. How could it possibly be otherwise? It cannot. Yet if this possibility is seriously pursued, as Liz Kendal thinks that it should be, there is no logical end to the process. → Continue reading: The micro-management of parenthood – and of everything

Politicians do love their Olympic Games. They make them feel so important. There are people to be expelled from their home, blameless businesses to be relocated into bankruptcy, photogenic new sports stadia and shiny new transport links to be constructed, opening ceremonies and firework displays to be arranged, all at vast public expense, and involving vast opportunities for grandiose displays of political self-importance, to say nothing of more private sorts of gain.

Nevertheless, the following story about the mutual impact of the Olympics and politics takes this natural affinity to a whole new depth of creepiness. I am rather surprised that David Carr has not beat me to noticing it. I guess (see immediately below) he has other worries on his mind:

London’s mayor, Ken Livingstone, today called for his term in office to be extended if the capital succeeds in its Olympic bid.

Mr Livingstone was speaking after an intense hour-long grilling by Conservative London delegates at the Tory party conference in Bournemouth.

Speaking of his hopes for a successful Olympic bid following forceful lobbying by a team spearheaded by the Olympic gold medallist and ex-Tory MP Sebastian Coe, Mr Livingstone said that if London won, the mayoral term would need to be extended by a year to ensure that preparations for the games were not disrupted.

I know that it is not received opinion here to be any sort of admirer of democracy, but I actually do rather admire it, basically because it is so vastly preferable to civil war as a method of swabbing out one bucketload of politicians who have become frightful beyond all redemption, and squirting in another lot who are not yet quite so terminally disgusting. And I believe that it has other benefits, many of them quite subtle, and unexpectedly non-collectivist, despite the fact that at the heart of democracy lies the brutal and morally repulsive idea of majorities – more precisely their elected representatives – being able to do whatever they please.

See for instance this New York Times article, which argues that democracy, far from depending on economic development, is actually the way to get economic development. For reasons I hope Real Soon Now to be writing about here, I am greatly attracted by this hypothesis, despite the fact that, in terms of the stark principles involved, democracy is just the latest of many negations of the idea of individual liberty.

But if democratic politics is to work, even by its own crude standards, one of the most basic rules is that the rule for when the next election is to be held must be stuck to. Postponing an election, for whatever reason, is a step down a very slippery slope indeed, at the bottom of which lies naked tyranny.

Has any elected politician in modern Britain ever made a suggestion like this before? Except during a major war? If any has, I missed it.

Some may find the following comments to be unserious, in poor taste and reflecting the laddish tendencies of some Samizdata contributors. If you do reach such a conclusion, you will of course be dead right.

The great Tory MP, Spectator editor, game show contestant and budding novelist (does this man have no limitations?) Boris Johnson, has contributed greatly to the gaiety of national life through such jolly japes as hiring sacked BBC journalists like Andrew Gilligan or driving cars on Top Gear.

But surely among his greatest achievements was the identification of what in retrospect was obvious to all but which struck like a thunderclap at the time. In the mid 1990s, when “New Labour” was on the rise, our Boris, then a humble scribe for the Daily Telegraph, created what he called the Tottymeter. The Tottymeter aims to reflect the representation of attractive young women – preferably unnattached – in a political party. Blondes, redheads, brunettes – it does not matter. If your political party has a fair showing of the Fair Sex, then chances are that your party is headed for power rather than for Skid Row. Women, so he argued, are attracted to successful men. (Success rather than looks, given that the average political male is not exactly Sean Connery).

Serious types will sneer, saying I am showing a sexist attitude, suggesting that women do not have a serious reason for joining a party. But I think when looking at success in a field like politics, you can tell a lot from the sort of folk who are joining a party as well as those who are leaving it.

I found Boris Johnson’s thesis convincing. In the mid-1990s when I attended a Labour conference in the course of my job, I was struck by the relatively high number of pretty, and very ambitious young women. (Mind you, when the average young NuLab type opens their mouths, my interest disappears, even if they look like Gwyneth Paltrow).

I think one key contribution of bloggers to modern political reporting should be trying to record this phenomenon and indeed analyse it.

Conservative Party main financial spokesman, Shadow Chancellor Oliver Letwin, is a bright man, as I can attest – as well as being a very pleasant fellow – so he presumably has a valid reason for not spelling out what taxes he would like to cut or scrap, as reported in the Daily Telegraph. But a Tory administration must surely want to cut taxes at some point. Why else vote for them?

I trust and hope that Letwin’s coyness on the issue is not caused by the daft idea that any discussion of tax cuts is supposed to conjour up images of little old grannies left to sleep in the snow, no “schoolsanhospitals” and suchlike. Letwin needs to remember the old rule of not allowing political opponents dictate the terms of the debate. The Tories must break the false idea that tax cuts = End of Civilisation As We Know It. A little boldness can win dividends.

Last week I stated my hope that the UK Conservative Party was showing possible signs of courage, as well as smart political opportunism in voicing support for slashing, if not completely abolishing, inheritance tax. The posting triggered a lot of comments, most of them nice and supportive of my view, and only a few in support of the tax.

One commenter claimed that inheritance taxes were a good thing because they broke up rich dynasties which the commenter thought acted as a brake on economic dynamism.

Is this actually true? In the 19th Century, for instance, Britain was indeed a class-bound society in many ways and the richest families enjoyed a standard of living beyond the wildest dreams of the humblest farm labourer. But Britain was in many respects an astonishingly vibrant and upwardly-mobile society too, often in certain respects even more so than today. Sir Robert Peel, the great Tory Prime Minister of the 1840s, was the grandson of a humble cotton weaver. Richard Cobden, one of the great advocates of free trade, a Member of Parliament and hero of classical liberalism, rose from conditions of great poverty. The list of rags to riches folk in Victorian history is long and makes for wonderful reading (it also puts my generation to shame, frankly.) Rich families, either deriving their wealth from the land or from elsewhere, were simply incapable of hogging the whole economic pie and denying any entry points to others.

As the writer Jenny Uglow pointed out in her marvellous book, The Lunar Men, the brightest and best entrepreneurs circumvented the old ‘Anglican establishment’ entirely on their way to creating the world’s first true industrial nation.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that those who inherit wealth may gain a temporary advantage which appears ‘unfair’, but in an expanding economy with new ideas, opportunities and ventures springing up all the time, it is hard to see how a person who has not inherited such wealth can say he has been denied a chance to make a good life for himself. (This, by the way, is not the same as privileges created by the State to favour select groups over others. That is a different argument).

And of course in reality rich businessmen over the centuries have realised that it was in their own interests to encourage and widen opportunities for the less well off, which is precisely why they endowed so many schools, libraries, musical orchestras, art galleries and the like, as well as political and cultural causes of all kinds. The ‘rich dynasties’ of Britain certainly did not, as far as I can see, act as a serious drag on the country’s economy. If there was a drag factor, it was more to do with the slow rise of collectivist economic doctrine towards the latter stages of the 19th Century, and the rise of State power and influence, which did much of the damage.

A final thought: some folk may imagine that inheritance taxes are okay because the persons affected are dead, so they would not care. Well, quite apart from the contempt this shows for the wealth a person has sought to acquire during a lifetime, it also rather ignores a simple point, which is that many people view their life goals as not simply to make themselves rich and happy, but also to build a better and fuller life for their children and grandchildren. That desire is itself a powerful incentive to work hard and create wealth, and is a spur to growth and the transmission of socially beneficial values.