Tim Collard

First Preview - The Millennial Divine Comedy

2011-01-03T20:44:00.000-08:00

Nel mezzo del cammin. Dante meant that he was thirty-five when he started his great journey. But what about these days? When Dante said it he was thinking of the Book of Genesis, which said that in the ideal world (of the Book of Genesis) a man should normally make threescore and ten. But how many of them did in Dante’s time, or in the time of the Book of Genesis for that matter? Even poor Signor Alighieri only had twenty-one years to go after his mezzo.

I’m not over-optimistic. My father got caught cold by cancer in his early fifties, and I remember passing a dull train journey, shortly after his death, by making pointless calculations. I came up with a start, however, on working out that, if I were to live as long as he had, I was already two weeks into the second half of my life. I was twenty-six.

But now I had reached an unarguable mezzo, in the form of a half-century, however unimpressively nudged and nurdled. True, I had no great prospect of the ton; drink, diabetes and divorce had considerably lengthened the odds. But, I thought, these days my chances are as good as Dante’s: I might just match his twenty-one.

It was in the faint hope of shortening those odds that I donned woolly jumper and (ludicrously virginal) walking boots and yomped off through the Oxfordshire countryside with my trusty Ordnance Survey map. For some time I’d had my eye on the village of Sutton Courtenay, with its inviting PH promising two-pennorth of wassail which, five miles in, I could just about do with.

But before reaching the PH, my attention was arrested by the village church. It takes a lot to divert my attention from a PH, but a proper church with a proper churchyard will do it. And so I entered, and did my bit of looking around the tombstones, calculating ages, and who was related to whom, and how the power relationships might have worked in the village, and so on and so on (as in Coming Up For Air by George Orwell).

I was just about to leave and slake the noble thirst which had been so piously whetted, when I tripped. My usage of my gleaming walking boots had been too sparing to walk them in properly, and it was hardly surprising that I lost my footing on a tussock. Down I went, putting out both arms to break my fall, in stupid defiance of experience, which has provided me with four broken bones in this way. However, this time I was lucky, if you can call it that given what followed. I fell into unresisting earth, and kept on falling. And lost the plot for a while.

I awoke to find myself covered in mud. Which was fine, I reflected, as far as my hitherto pristine walking boots were concerned. But once I realised how far north the infestation had stretched, I was less chuffed. However, my attention was swiftly diverted by the clench of a bony hand on my shoulder.

“Aaaaarrrgghhh!!!”, I shouted, being related by blood or marriage to several people who watched horror films. My apprehensions were swiftly dispelled by the reply “Get up, you silly sod”. I swivelled round on the more functional of my elbows.

No, it wasn’t a skeleton. But almost. The figure was enormous, or at least looked so from my recumbent position. There was still some flesh on the bones. And the grip on my shoulder seemed strangely ill-coordinated. The spectre was obviously no real physical threat. Relaxing somewhat, I remembered my obvious lines: “Wh-wh-who are y-y-you?”

“You know damn well who I am,” said the towering figure. “Who the fuck did you expect to meet in a graveyard in Sutton bleeding Courtenay? Sorry, that should be ‘whom’. Except that it shouldn’t, because ‘whom’ would sound barbarous. Unless you’re some kind of linguistic pedant? ” And here the figure took on a frightening aspect for the first time.

“No,” I said tremulously. “I mean would you prefer to be Mr. Blair or Mr. Orwell?”

“George will do,” he replied. “It took me long enough to get used to it, after all. And I understand that the name Blair has…a bit of an overtone, these days.”

“Well, what do you think?” I said. “A pint or two at the George & Dragon?”

“We’ll deal with the dragons first, if you don’t mind. Besides, I found it difficult enough to cope with ordinary working people in pubs back in the day, what with being an Etonian and all. How I’d cope with the sort of people in there these days I can’t begin to imagine.”

“So what do you suggest?”

“Let’s get straight down there,” he said. “You need to see what’s what.” He produced, from within some interstice in his decayed graveclothes, a pouch of tobacco, and rolled himself a cigarette. “If we’d gone to the pub, you’d soon have found out what’s what,” I said to myself.

“Down where?”

“You know damn well where,” he said. “Just need to sort out the transport.”

I indicated, by a gesture of abandonment and impotence, that I was in his hands.

“And so we’re off to Hell,” said he, “by transethereal steamer!”

“The baddest guys these days,” I told him, “get there in a Beamer.”

“And, just to warn you, George,” I said, “I can’t do terza rima!”

“That’s because your generation is thick as mince,” he said. “I never got an Oxford First, but I’d still read two-thirds of English Literature by the time I was eight. And I may not have read anything they told me to at Eton, but I sure read a hell of a lot of other stuff. Terza rima? Cyril Connolly and I used to do that as a displacement activity.”

“Touché,” I conceded.

Ford Open Prison: the blithering idiocy of the jack-in-office

2011-01-01T14:02:00.000-08:00

I have never met a British prison officer. The loss is, no doubt, mine: I should greatly enjoy a conversation about my fellow-jailbird Dostoyevsky’s “From the House of the Dead” with someone who knew the system from the inside. But I somehow suspect that prison officers here do not really belong to the Dostoyevsky-reading classes. I rather fear that, like policemen and social workers, they combine mediocre education with a rather horrifying level of power over their fellow-citizens.

And it’s not that I don’t sympathise with their working conditions. We aspire to be more of a free-booting, vibrant, devil-take-the-hindmost American-style society, while forgetting that the US imprisons (per capita) five times as many of its citizens as we do. And we won’t build the prisons for that, so the ones we have are all heaving. And money must be saved, which inevitably means staffing reductions. We hear that last night, at Ford Open Prison, there were only two prison officers and four support staff on duty.

Was that enough? Well, it was clearly enough to prevent a large-scale prison break-out, which is the bare minimum the public requires from prison management. But was anyone surprised to hear that, in a very lightly policed “open” prison, the inmates managed to smuggle in a certain amount of booze for a pennyworth of wassail on New Year’s Eve?

Now, it’s quite clear to me why alcohol has to be banned in prisons; so much crime is connected to it. The same goes for illegal drugs, with which most British prisons are reputed to be awash. After all, powders, leaves and resins are far easier to smuggle in, if only by reason of volume. But, you might have expected someone in authority to think, is it really so bad if the prisoners stage a bit of a New Year piss-up? The governor would have had every right to say to the powers that be “Look, if you cut our staffing that badly, we’ll still perform the basic duty to keep the cons locked up, but we’ll just have to turn a blind eye to the odd bit of smuggling. It’s only once a year, and no real harm was done.”

But no. Somebody decided that a hard line must be taken. The problem with people of moderate intelligence is that they tend to fall back on rule-books rather than using a bit of nous. And so a full inquiry was ordered. Everyone who might conceivably have been involved in the breach of regulations must be breathalysed. Result: dozens of cons chased around the place by screws with breathalyser kits, refusing to cooperate; the screws wouldn’t back off, and so a riot broke out. Even Ronnie Barker couldn’t make that up. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of damage done, and hundreds of prisoners now having to be moved to other prisons which are already bulging at the seams.

All because “Mr Mackay” didn’t have the sense of his near namesake, my late schoolmaster Richard McCall. After an extended – and totally illegal – post-exam celebration, Mr McCall came over to me at the morning meal and said “Collard, I strongly suspect you of being the first boy I have ever seen drunk at breakfast. But don’t worry, I shan’t pursue the matter.” But I fear that such men do not become prison officers.

To hell with middle-class self-pity. Let's hear it for the real coping classes

2010-10-16T19:11:00.000-07:00

Oh those poor old middle classes. Day after day after weary day, our favourite paper bewails their woes. “Coping classes at breaking point”; “middle class hit by something or other (probably Socialist mortar bombs)”; it never rains but it pours for these poor people. They go under many names; the “coping classes” are what the last government called the “hard-working families”. To Ed Miliband they are the “squeezed middle”. I don’t like that; it reminds me too strongly of the process of putting my trousers on in the morning. To me they are the “poor sods who got conned into voting for a cabal of millionaires singing ‘We’re all in this together’”. Perhaps one should seek a neutral description: the Sober Married Unsubsidised Gentlefolk, for instance. At least it would provide a snappy acronym.

But let’s not sink into Schadenfreude. The idea of families at breaking point is not one that should be sneered at. There are lots of them up here in the North-West, for whom the recent glorious Indian summer was overshadowed by the looming seasonal debate: proper winter clothes for the kids or heating the house properly? But I somehow suspect these aren’t exactly the people referred to. Surely, many of our readers will say, that’s in the North! They’ve been like that for twenty-five years; surely they’ve got used to it by now. Now we, on the other hand....

They have a point. The jobs which consisted of spending all day in the factory or oop t’mill have indeed gone, with a little help from a certain lady; many of the jobs involving sitting in the office all day, looking out of the window and dreaming of house prices, have lasted a good deal longer. So it could be said that the coping classes have had an extra quarter of a century to put aside sheaves of corn for the lean years. And have they? ‘Ave they ‘eckers. They’ve borrowed themselves silly, admittedly following the Government’s example, and now the bills are coming in. A sense that a lot of these people have misjudged their real economic interests steals over me.

Politics is not, at bottom, about ideas and principles; much of that is froth on the surface. It’s about living and working conditions, and that comes down very simply to relative wealth. Margaret Thatcher united the rich and the middle classes, got some of the poor on board too, and won three elections. Tony Blair united the poor and the middle classes, got some of the rich on board too, and achieved the same. The Coalition stands or falls by persuading the “coping classes” to identify their interests with the “millionaires’ Cabinet”. That is why they have taken the risk of allowing the pain caused by reforms to pensions and child benefit to reach as far down as the £45,000 bracket; they need to keep convincing them that “we’re all in this together”.

I have got a bit sick of middle-class self-pity. Earning a living and paying one’s taxes makes one a decent citizen; it doesn’t make one a hero, saint and martyr. The real heroes and martyrs, if not necessarily saints, are simultaneously the real coping classes; those who are managing to hold things together, amid collapsing social services, a long way short of the top tax bracket. This is where a lot of the real entrepreneurial talent is emerging; this class don’t expect secure jobs and nice regular incomes any more. Yes, there’s some ducking and diving; the wheels of the downmarket coping strategy are occasionally greased with a bit of benefit-fiddling, as those of upmarket enterprise are sometimes greased by a bit of tax-dodging. But it’s really those of us on four- or five-figure incomes who are “all in this together”, and Mr Cameron must not be allowed to forget it.

Kyrgyzstan - even the neighbours don't care

2010-06-17T04:38:00.001-07:00

Does anyone care what is happening in Kyrgyzstan? Well, obviously we don’t much, as it’s a jolly long way away and ethnic conflicts rarely make much sense. But what about the countries rather closer to the action, like Russia and China? All three countries are members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which, consisting of four little ‘stans plus the Big Two, looks at first glance like one of those “Fox & Chickens Co-Partnership Agreements”. In reality, of course, the foxes are the governments, all of them, and the chickens are their peoples.

While horrible things happen to the Uzbeks of Osh, the mighty neighbours are showing considerable restraint. Russia has so far shown no sign of responding to the new interim Kyrgyz Government’s invitation to Russia to send troops in to keep the peace. Does it matter that they asked Russia rather than China? Well, Russia has a military base in Kyrgyzstan already, and makes no secret of regarding the Central Asian ‘stans as part of its extensive backyard. Also I can imagine the Russians having rather a tough time working out who the goodies and baddies are from that point of view: this is no longer a sound post-Soviet government against CIA-backed rebels, as both the post-Soviet government and its replacement have now been overthrown. And the government of Uzbekistan, a sound post-Soviet government if ever there was one, is showing little sympathy for its persecuted brothers across the border, which it has closed to Uzbek refugees.

Unlike Russia, China actually has a border with Kyrgyzstan. But all they have done is organise a fairly efficient airlift to extract their own citizens from the killing zone. Intervention outside the borders is something China just does not do, at least not since having its butt kicked by the Vietnamese in 1979. On the surface Russia and China are both firm adherents of the absolute-sovereignty-no-interference-in-internal-affairs brigade. But Russia is inclined to make exceptions for the countries of the former Soviet Union, which it would secretly like to reincorporate. China, on the other hand, is not interested in direct control, which implies responsibility, at all; China just wants to make sure the natural resources are flowing in the right direction, which is east. Not that Kyrgyzstan has much in the way of natural resources (apart from a certain amount of gold); but that whole region is pipeline country, and thus will bear watching. And, of course, if any unrest were to spill over into Xinjiang, that would be an entirely different matter; one more reason for getting Chinese nationals, who are mostly Muslim businessmen from Xinjiang, out of Kyrgyzstan sharpish.

So poor old Kyrgyzstan is going to have to sort out its own problems – I don’t think there’s much chance of their getting the UN peacekeepers they’re hoping for. And they’ll have to make sure they sort them out in a way that doesn’t annoy anybody important. Not an easy proposition for a new and wobbly government.

BP dispute: Bend over and assume the position, Mr Cameron

2010-06-13T23:53:00.000-07:00

So the Prime Minister is going to Washington on July 20th, at which time it is safe to assume that the sub-oceanic gusher is still gushing away and that one will still be able to fill up one’s Buick from the Gulf of Mexico. It’s not often I can drum up real sympathy for my former FCO colleagues, but I do feel just a bit for the poor chaps and chapesses in Washington and King Charles Street currently (and I do mean currently, this being Sunday lunchtime) working on the visit preparation.
As a diplomatic imbroglio, this one might have defeated Talleyrand. How to maintain and restore the worn fabric of the “special relationship” while causing justice to be seen to be done for the misdoings of a US/UK company with a British-derived name? No-one can blame the American people for being angry. But managing that anger seems as difficult as capping the oil leak. Thank heaven we didn’t exacerbate it by winning the footy.

Americans are always keen, where possible, to reduce any issue to one they can chant “USA! USA!” about. And the problem is that, though BP is an international company owned by shareholders all over the world (with US and UK holdings almost equivalent), everybody knows what the “B” originally stood for. The USA doesn’t have that much history, but what it has focuses understandably on the nation’s genesis and resisting King George’s redcoats. It’s an easy button to press. President Obama assures us he is not anti-British and has no wish to lay the blame on Britain: but his frequent references to the company’s former name are a bit disingenuous. Over here we recognise the sound of a dog-whistle when we hear one.

Furthermore, the President has also lapsed into the kind of down-home language everyone likes to hear, by talking about “kicking ass”. The trouble with that is the usual trouble with politicians’ promises: pretty soon people are going to be asking for evidence of ass duly kicked. Saying that he would have sacked Tony Hayward if Hayward had worked for him won’t do: a hypothetical ass-kicking is not enough. Not only can Obama do nothing meaningful about BP: he wouldn’t even want to. As Cameron has been rightly pointing out to him, serious damage to BP would be serious damage to both UK and US economies.

Threats to prevent the payment of dividends would also be an own goal (or a “Robert Green” as they are now known). There are as many pensioners over there who would be affected as over here. A ban on any BP employee being paid more than $100,000 this year would be a far better symbolic gesture, but it ain’t going to happen. In any case, Americans believe the sky would fall in if “executives” were not “compensated” according to their “status”.

This means that the circle will have to be squared diplomatically. If ass is going to be kicked without lousing up economic recovery, a sop will have to be thrown to the spirit of George Washington. The Southern States will not forgive Obama for missing such a fine opportunity to apply the shoe-leather. Somehow the impression has to be given that the limeys have got what was coming to them. I hope that the FCO furnishes the Prime Minister with a couple of nice thick files to insert in his trousers.

Farmer Yang's wheelbarrow cannon shows that the spirit of freedom is not dead in China

2010-06-09T14:46:00.000-07:00

There’s always something new and surprising coming out of China. Yesterday the Telegraph related the tale of a farmer whose land is located on the edge of the rapidly expanding city of Wuhan. On being told, as farmers on the edge of Chinese cities frequently are, that his land was being requisitioned by local government for development, Mr Yang Youde did not simply submit. He mounted a metal pipe on a wheelbarrow and, using explosives extracted from China’s ubiquitous fireworks, improvised a cannon capable of firing a rocket more than 100 yards. He claims that he has fought off two attempts to evict him and move the bulldozers in.

There are two ways to look at this. On one hand, it’s an example of the lengths to which people can be pushed by an oppressive state apparatus which takes scant notice of the individual rights of its citizens. We know this happens in China, and sometimes we rather admire it. Think of the speed with which the Olympic stadia and their supporting infrastructure were prepared; half a dozen new underground lines, thirty or forty miles long and going right through the centre of Beijing (eat your heart out, Boris Johnson); the fact that, as people in Hamburg were always complaining to me, a new Chinese container port can be operative within 18 months of groundbreaking, whereas no-one in Europe can do it in less than ten years.
And we know there is a human cost to this, just as there is to the population control policy. Planning permission is not subject to delays or appeals. For the last twenty years people have been receiving instructions from the local authority to be out of their homes by a week on Friday. Resistance is futile.

But of course it is not always a question of major infrastructure projects of which everybody sees the point. In Mr Yang’s case, he was told by the local authority that the land was required for government buildings. Mr Yang is not so sure. By his calculations the market value of his land is about five times what the authorities are offering him. He suspects that, once he has been evicted, something rather more lucrative than government buildings will go up on his land, and that the local authority has been handsomely bribed to use its coercive powers to ensure that the developers acquire the land for a fraction of its real value. That is why he is putting up such spirited resistance.

Another view might be to admire the way in which the old buccaneering spirit of the Wild West is re-emerging in this otherwise strictly regimented country. The developers (assuming the argument of my last paragraph is correct, and I do) are behaving like old-style robber barons. As for Farmer Yang, what a splendid example of active citizenship. Just imagine if anyone tried to resist compulsory purchase in such a way in the UK. You’d be monstered, not only by the Old Bill but by Elf ‘n’ Safety too. You wouldn’t last two hours. Let us hope that Mr Yang avoids the slammer (the fact that this story was carried in the local media suggests some sympathy for him in high places) and that his spirit proliferates in China.

Bertie at the Bilderberg

2010-06-06T16:12:00.000-07:00

Spring was doing its thing, the snail on the wing, the lark on the thorn, and morning was about quarter past eleven, as I trickled into the old Bilderberg for a snifter. But all was not as of old. Jeeves had warned me, on sending me forth into the wide world with my whangee and my yellowest shoes, that the old security had been stepped up a smidgeon. So I was about two-thirds prepared for the chappie who stopped his bullet-proof limo alongside me and invited me to hop in. “You can’t be too careful, Mr Wooster”, he said.

Now, I’m as aware as the next man that a certain amount of pre-prandial bread gets bunged about at the Bilderberg, especially when Catsmeat Potter-Putin is in attendance. But I could hardly credit that it was necessary to employ the horny-handed to protect the Wooster bonce from the odd ballistic baguette. “But no,” said my charioteer, “it is the oiks below who are feared by the gentlemen of your esteemed society.”

Well, if that’s the case, then your humble narrator asks no further questions. Indeed, when I entered the club, nothing seemed to be amiss. Oofy Prosser sat in his usual corner, his pimples flashing angrily at anyone who looked likely to try to touch him for a couple of billion. Conky Kissinger was holding forth at his usual table, with Boko Bush, Barmy Berlusconi, Sheepface Sarkozy, and the usual crowd hanging on every word. By the window an old fossil called Rockmetteller sat in a leather chair in an attitude I swear hadn’t altered one iota since the 1973 world oil crisis.

I ordered myself a convivial whisky-and-splash, and sat down with “Fruity” Cholmondeley-Friedman.

“Skin off your nose, Fruity, old robber baron,” I said.

“Mud in your eye, old fleecer of the widow and orphan,” he replied.

“So what’s all the jolly old manning-of-the-ramparts and battening-down-the-hatches about?”

“Why, Bertie, where have you been for the last few aeons?”

“Oh, you know, Cheltenham, Aintree, Epsom, whatever...”

“Well, these days the great unwashed have got the idea that we’re running some kind of alternative World Government up here. All nonsense, of course; who on earth could be bothered with all that effort? No money in that sort of thing, anyway. Mind you, it’s true that some of the younger members find it rather a lark to be thought of as movers and shakers and Men of the Future; the only future the rest of us are interested in is when they’re going to buy their bally rounds. And the old jossers are just delighted that they can find someone who’s still prepared to take them seriously.”

“Well, that’s a relief. I’d hate to have anyone thinking that good old B. Wooster was important enough to warrant bumping off.”

“My dear chap, when have you ever heard of any of this lot being prepared to take responsibility for anything?”

“My dear old bean, you haven’t half taken a weight of my mind. Have another?”

China's Three Gorges Dam: a disaster takes shape

2010-06-06T16:10:00.000-07:00

In China, cracks are appearing – in the neighbourhood of the massive Three Gorges Dam, the country’s great prestige project, and also in the Great Firewall of China, enabling the ominous news to leak out. Three years ago stories were already emerging in the Chinese media about landslides, ecological deterioration and accumulation of algae further down the river. And less and less effort seems to be made to plug the leaks. A Sunday Times report tells of a series of landslips, minor earthquakes and cracks appearing in roads and buildings along the central section of the Yangtse, between the dam and the city of Chongqing. Almost 10,000 “dangerous sites” have been identified, but many of the people living near them cannot be relocated for lack of money. Two years ago thousands of children died in Sichuan Province because their schools were not resistant to the earthquake which hit the area; in the town of Badong near Chongqing children are attending school in buildings which have been recognised as far more vulnerable. What else can they do? The local authorities can’t afford a new one.

Like many such megaprojects, the Three Gorges was always driven as much by politics as by economics. Its rationale covered irrigation and flood control in the lower Yangtse plain, hydroelectric power generation, which sounds sensible: but objections were bulldozed in the tense political atmosphere of the late 1980s, when the final decisions were made.The dam was the pet project of then prime minister Li Peng, who was involved in the party split which led to the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, in which he was the triumphant prime mover. In this context he was not going to back down on the dam, and the debate was closed down.

So the construction was forced through without even what passes in China for proper debate. The number of local people who had to be relocated came to 1.4 million – equivalent to the obliteration of Birmingham. Now it looks like another 300,000 will have to be shifted – add Coventry to that. This, in China, means getting a few weeks’ notice to quit and putting up with wherever the authorities see fit to put you. On top of that a large number of historic sites from one of the most ancient cradles of Chinese civilisation had to go. Yes, China has vast numbers of people to feed and cannot afford sentimentality, but perhaps a bit more care might have been taken to ensure that the costs and benefits had been properly calculated.

But even three years ago, with Li Peng and his family safely out of the way, official Chinese sources were admitting that things had gone horribly wrong. In the official media references were made to landslides, ecological deterioration and accumulation of algae. The Chinese aren’t unworldly and irresponsible greenies. When they point things like this out it’s because it’s causing real damage. Of course the authorities are careful not to promote mass panic, but so far the incidents are far enough apart to prevent collective protest; local complaints can still be suppressed without too much trouble.

Meanwhile, at the centre, it would appear that there is no great enthusiasm to see this all hushed up. The current supremo Hu Jintao has always taken care not to associate himself with the project. Hu’s faction of the Communist Party is broadly opposed by the “princelings’ faction” – i.e. the rich-kid offspring of the post-Mao leadership – and appears disinclined to pull Li Peng’s chestnuts out of the fire.

German President resigns: when are the Germans going to grow up?

2010-06-02T07:38:00.000-07:00

President Horst Köhler, the generally well-respected German head of state, has felt compelled to resign, only a year into his second term. In a refreshing contrast to our own shenanigans, it had nothing to do with any dubious personal enrichment strategies, on which the Germans are much tougher than we are. It was a genuine political issue. What Dr Köhler appears to have said was that Germany’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan is motivated by a wish for economic as well as physical security; the security of supply lines, trade routes etc.

Well, derr. How could such a statement of the obvious have caused such a furore? Only in Germany. It’s something you’re not allowed to say, see, unless you’re a lefty activist denouncing warmongering capitalism, in which case you say it all the time. But you can’t say it if you’re the state President. You have to keep parroting the line that NATO is protecting the German people from Afghan-trained terrorists, and is there FOR NO OTHER REASON. Protecting economic interests means that you’re working solely in the interests of the rich (who, as we know, are the only people who need an economy).

But the fact that this sort of issue cannot be discussed in public without causing resignations just shows how infantile the level of debate frequently is in Germany. If they outdo us in personal financial rectitude, they knock spots off us when it comes to political correctness. A chap I knew slightly – the new partner of an old friend – once expressed incredulity when informed that I, a fellow leftie, owned some shares. How could I support capitalism in such a way? Investing in capitalist companies just enabled them to rationalise their operations, which always led to downsizing and people losing their jobs. I admitted that this might happen, but surely it was equally likely that the companies might use the investment to expand their operations and create jobs. He hadn’t thought of that. This was a man around 40 with a university degree and a job of commensurate status.

And when it comes to war the reactions are equal and opposite to what they were in 1939. It’s just bad. It sucks. Which of course is true, but grown-up nations recognise that one does have to prepare for it happening occasionally. All right, you may feel that Afghanistan is one war which doesn’t need fighting; but it can hardly be denied that it began with a clear act of aggression on 11th September 2001. And Germany is a democratic country, with a perfectly good army, bound into a military alliance: surely in principle they ought to be able to fight a war on a reasonably logical basis.

But no. Yes, we will send troops to Afghanistan, they say; but you must put them in a part of Afghanistan where they won’t get shot at, and you mustn’t expect them to kill anyone either. Any involvement of the Bundeswehr in actions in which someone dies, and the Germans hit the roof. On a previous visit to Germany I found the nation caught up in a very ugly media witch-hunt against a senior German officer who had been working with UK/US special forces and got involved in some rather messy stuff.

Yes, the Germans have a better excuse than most for all this. But their position is hopelessly illogical. Either you declare yourselves institutionally pacifist, do a Costa Rica and abolish the armed forces altogether, and rely on others to defend you; or you take your share of defence responsibilities, build an army and try to use it as sensibly as possible. But you have to acknowledge that if war does prove inevitable, people are going to kill and get killed. And that wars are always going to have an economic rationale as well as a political one.

I think you’re well out of that job, Dr. Köhler. You can’t lead people who aren’t prepared to think, and will lynch you if you try to.

China’s missing babies re-emerge: is this the beginning of the end for the one-child policy?

2010-06-02T04:39:00.000-07:00

Chinese demographer Liang Zhongtang has recently revealed that something like 3 million Chinese babies a year may be unregistered at their birth, as a means of circumventing the country’s one-child family policy. The evidence seems fairly compelling: census returns record 23 million births in 1990 and 26 million ten-year-olds in 2000, figures which don’t really allow of any other conclusion. So is the one-child policy fraying at the edges, and could another Chinese population explosion be on the horizon?

First, a couple of words of caution regarding the stats. They relate to births in 1990, which by my arithmetic is twenty years ago. By then the universal one-child policy had only been in operation for ten years, and was still being fairly rigidly enforced, at least in the cities. This has since changed. For one thing, the state no longer has all the enforcement methods at its disposal that it had in 1990. Then, your job, your housing, and your access to healthcare and education were all provided by state entities; people who didn’t conform could be deprived of any or all of them. Now that the state has withdrawn from so many of these areas it doesn’t have the leverage; provided you can pay for these things yourself – and you probably have to do so anyway – you don’t need to worry about official regulations so much, though people are generally careful not to flout them too openly. Party spies have disappeared, but nosy and mean-spirited neighbours haven’t.

Secondly, with the remarkable economic growth of the past thirty years, the one-child policy has largely institutionalised itself, at least in the cities. The new bourgeois, who have the money to thumb their noses at the State if they wished to, now exercise voluntary restraint. Everyone is busy, nearly all mothers work, larger flats and houses are expensive, the best education costs a fortune; who wants extra kids? Access to abortion (entirely without moral stigma in China) is easy in case of accidents. The economic boomers regard a single child as perfectly natural, not to mention extremely convenient. Nor do the urban middle classes get hung up about gender as their peasant contemporaries do: small wonder, as China really is an equal opportunity society and a girl has every bit as much chance of being successful as a boy (rather more, in my experience).

So it may be that the one-child policy has done its job and had its day. After all, running such a policy for thirty years – one generation – cannot but have a lasting effect on population growth, as the current generation of child-begetters are far less numerous than their predecessors were. The Chinese population problem really arose in the fifties and sixties, when Mao called upon his people to keep cranking them out, in order to give China a better chance of surviving nuclear war than its putative opponents. Now it would seem that vigilance can be relaxed a little; especially as a huge demographic time bomb is going to hit China in about twenty years’ time, when Mao’s mass-produced battery chickens qualify for their non-existent old age pensions, and somebody will need to keep the fires burning….

What if there was a recovery and nobody got a job?

2010-05-26T17:22:00.000-07:00

What’s a job, Daddy? Where do jobs come from, Mum? What am I going to be when I grow up? Apart from disillusioned?

But seriously, why is there so much unemployment? Because the economy’s gone down the Swanee. So if it recovers and comes back up the Swanee again, will it bring lots of jobs with it? Is there any reason on earth why it should? All over Europe there are repeated sightings of “green shoots”, although it usually doesn’t take long for EU corruption and incompetence to pour paraquat all over them. But one thing common to all these mini-recoveries is the absence of a surge in employment. Who needs ya, baby? the 21st-century economy is saying to us all. What can’t be automated can at least be severely rationalised. The extent to which both manufacturing and service industries can be outsourced seems to acknowledge no limits. Even newspapers are increasingly putting themselves together without the aid of journalists.

To a certain extent, work has become just soooo 20th century. One of the last Prime Minister’s strongest convictions was that this tendency must be resisted; that work was good for us all, personally, economically and socially. In the run-up to losing the last election he was repeatedly lambasted for creating thousands and thousands of jobs, or possibly non-jobs, in the public sector. These must go, we are told; they are unnecessary and their holders are all parasites on the private, wealth-producing sector. The fact a lot of these voices ignore is that an enormous part of the private sector is equally upheld by government expenditure whose necessity is equally spurious. The new government, with its cuts programme, is going to have to face up to the fact that large cuts in expenditure means large cuts in jobs.

In my view the biggest disaster of the last administration was PFI. The economics of it never made sense; most of the private-sector bids for government contracts would never have been considered if the rules hadn’t been stretched to favour them. And if (if??) the contractors find they need more money halfway through the job, they have the government over a barrel. But PFI keeps a huge number of consultants and contractors afloat, supporting millions of jobs. (With no detriment to the public sector, as the public servants who would otherwise have done those jobs were retained in any case; so civil servants on modest salaries were not replaced, but actually augmented, by private sector wallahs on two or three times the screw.) This has cost an absolute fortune, with open-ended commitments extending into our grandchildren’s time, but Gordon Brown thought, rightly or wrongly, that this was better than having all those people on the rock ‘n’ roll. (I would guess that the abolition of all unnecessary public and government-supported-private sector jobs might bring unemployment to around fifteen million.)

So was Gordon right? (I am aware that a lot of my readers think that Brown could not be right if he announced that 2+2=4.) But just supposing – I know I could never prove this – that an efficient modern economy could now be run with 10% of the population engaged on serious productive activity, with say 15% in various ancillary functions. What are we to do with the other three-quarters? Redistribute the proceeds of the economy to keep them fed and happy? Or disenfranchise them and leave them to starve? I am not hurling imprecations at those who take the latter view; I am merely asking how much they would enjoy living in gated communities policed like the Baghdad Green Zone. The Molotov cocktail will always get through.

Kindergarten stabbings and now Foxconn suicides: what is causing China's fatal crazes?

2010-05-26T00:26:00.000-07:00

What is happening to set off these fatal crazes in China? First there were those strange incidents in which people ran amok in kindergartens, knifing small children. I blogged on this last month. Now, as my colleague Malcolm Moore reports, there is a worrying chain of suicides by workers at factories in China run by the Taiwanese company Foxconn, a significant technology supplier for Apple; 11 attempts this year so far, with 9 fatalities.

Nine of these incidents took place at Foxconn’s Longhua factory, near Shenzhen on the Hong Kong border. Like the kindergarten stabbings, the incidents have taken the form of a gruesome series of copycat acts: all the suicides happened in the same manner, by jumping off the roof of a high building, and all the victims were under 25. One such incident is clearly acting as a trigger for others; but the trigger can only be primed by a pre-existing condition of despair. But how can this be, given that these large foreign-invested enterprises are providing much-needed employment, driving up wages and powering China’s impressive rate of development?

China’s attractiveness as a manufacturing centre lies not only in low labour costs; in any case, these are rising rapidly in the big coastal cities. It lies also in the virtual absence of regulation regarding treatment of workers – the government will ensure the absence of free trade unions and lend the full force of its repressive apparatus to the company’s management as enforcers. The Chinese are of course used to this – they are the world’s most docile workers, and I’m absolutely certain that some of them are undermining the minimum wage back here. But in Longhua, amazingly, China and the West appear to have combined to create a voluntary Gulag.

Workers flood in from the countryside, attracted by wages they could never have dreamed of at home and convinced that they can endure the harshest of conditions to earn them. They work 80-hour weeks and live in common dormitories, under constant surveillance to maintain “security”. Apple insists on extremely tight secrecy in all its operations; and two of the suicides have been linked to allegations (apparently wildly far-fetched) that workers were smuggling parts out of the factory.

It is clear that China provides a kind of proving ground for the ultimate in hyper-efficient industrial processes, eliminating that pesky human factor as far as possible. Human beings are regarded as parts in the machinery, which can be stressed until a fraction short of breaking point, with a certain casualty rate built into the planning. After all, there are plenty more where those young people came from. Just like the Gulag, and I’m not entirely sure how much difference is made by the undoubted fact that it is all voluntary.

With regards to working conditions, the deal is “If you don’t like the deal, you can eff off back to the paddy-field”. As this would involve the puncturing of a family’s dreams and intolerable loss of face, they stick it out. Until the last straw and the lonely walk off the ninth-floor dormitory roof. Enjoy your new iPad, and let’s hope the person who made it is still alive.

The two faces of Hamburg

2010-05-24T07:31:00.000-07:00

I’m back in my old stomping ground of Hamburg where, not too long ago, I was Her Majesty’s Consul-General. As anyone who has visited knows, this is notoriously a city of two faces. I remember HRH the Duke of York arriving there on a formal visit. Asked whether this was his first visit to Hamburg, the Duke seemed to hesitate a little before replying: “Well, I was here once with the Navy, but we saw a rather different side of town.” Laughter all round.

I am especially well-positioned to appreciate the Janus face of Hamburg. When I visit I see many friends from my time as Consul-General; pillars of society, genial, prosperous but unostentatious (flaunting one’s wealth is not the Hamburg style), intensely Anglophile, all models of respectability. However, I am no longer a diplomat with all conveniences laid on courtesy of the taxpayer, but a freelance hack who has to pay his own way and hasn’t much to pay it with. So, after my coffee with a millionaire or beer with former consular colleagues, where do I retreat to? The zone of absolutely-no-frills hotels, internet cafes, shops from which you can make phone calls (exclusively manned by chaps of the Turkish persuasion) pizza by the slice and late night supermarkets; in short, the Reeperbahn.

There’s nothing glamorous about the Reeperbahn, day or night. At all hours the pavements are full of men of my own kind of age, dressed in shabby leather jackets, frequently sporting ponytails of painfully dyed hair. All clutch bottles of Astra beer and all adjacent surfaces are a mass of empties. It is as if the city employed rafts of character actors to stand around the Kiez (the local name for the red light district, pronounced like the poet Keats, a fact of which anyone who teaches Eng. Lit. in Hamburg ought to be aware) preserving the area’s reputation as a pimps’ paradise for the sake of tourists. But these aren’t actors, and they’re not pimps either – the real pimps are all Albanian and don’t stand around swigging beer in the street. The kindest word to describe them is “wannabes”. They will occasionally address you in passing, usually with something ribald, but there is no threat or hostility involved. In fact the Reeperbahn is one of the world’s safest sleaze zones, thanks to the enormous cop-shop, the Davidwache, slap in the middle of it.

Already by mid-afternoon the ladies of negotiable virtue are emerging; not scantily dressed – Hamburg is almost always far too cold for that – but recognisable by their figure-hugging clothes and by the fact that they alone don’t seem to be going anywhere. It’s an international business these days, of course – I saw one girl who I’d swear was Mongolian – but Latin America seems to be the prevailing trend. As evening proceeds some of the wannabe-pimp-or-madame types morph into touts trying to manhandle you into the go-go bars, which are presumably clip joints although I’ve never dared investigate.

The Reeperbahn is a real temple to the free market: Germany is notorious for draconian shop-opening laws, but you can buy anything, anytime, on the Kiez. There’s a large, well-stocked gun shop not a hundred yards from the Davidwache. I’m too old to stay up late enough to find out what time the shops close, especially the sex shops. I cannot imagine the sort of person who suddenly requires complex rubber appliances at half past three in the morning, but he or she will not be disappointed.

Both sides of Hamburg attract disapproval, but both provide unrivalled people-watching opportunities. And I’m glad to have a foot in both camps.

Wenlock & Mandeville: cheap gimmicks or echoes of a vanished England?

2010-05-24T01:40:00.000-07:00

I suppose that “mascots” of the type that have just been unveiled in the run-up to the 2012 London Olympics are a bit of a soft target. They’re all ridiculous, and there’s not much more to be said. The only crumb of comfort is that those of other countries are normally even worse than our own. I was in China for the Asian Games of 1990, when the twee little panda Pan-Pan must have set the cause of wildlife conservation back by decades, as a whole continent fantasised about panda-shooting. By the 2008 Olympics they had had the sense to diversify the target, producing five little manikins named after the five syllables of “Welcome to Beijing”. I suppose you sorta had to be there.

But I had hopes when I heard the names Wenlock and Mandeville. Soon dashed, of course; Wenlock is named after the Shropshire village whose “games” apparently put the Olympic idea into Baron de Coubertin’s head. (The village put a few ideas into A. E. Housman’s too – must be quite a place.) And Mandeville, the Paralympic mascot, is named after Stoke Mandeville hospital for spinal injuries, a noble but rather prosaic derivation.

But just for a moment I heard the alarums and excursions of a vanished but cherished England. Was it not Sir John Wenlock who fought on so many sides in the Wars of the Roses that the historian Alison Weir dubbed him “Prince of Turncoats”? Wenlock’s ultimate come-uppance was entirely appropriate; ending up on the Lancastrian side at their last hurrah at Tewkesbury in 1471, he was forced to retreat. His fellow Lancastrian general the Duke of Somerset misinterpreted this as yet another convenient change of allegiance, and split Wenlock’s bonce down the middle with a mace. I suspect that in a few months’ time we’ll all be wondering where the Duke of Somerset is when you need him.

Strangely enough Sir Geoffrey Mandeville, 12th century Earl of Essex, was another notorious side-switcher, this time in the Stephen-Matilda fandango. He got his earldom from Stephen for supporting him against Matilda, then went over to Matilda after Stephen’s capture at the Battle of Lincoln, changed sides again on Stephen’s release, and finally abandoned the King after a dispute over some castles in 1143. By now neither side would trust him as far as they could throw him, and he set up on his tod as an outlaw in the Fens around Ely, as Hereward the Wake had done before him. The next year Stephen put an end to the yo-yo act by putting an arrow in him.

Neither really seems an ideal mascot for a great national enterprise; both civil warriors and notorious double-dealers. Or does someone perhaps know something we don’t? Perhaps our javelin throwers will all turn on each other (mascot Mandeville had better watch where he is standing) or we’ll find our athletes defecting to Australia halfway through the 1500 metres. Nothing is impossible in the Olympics, or in English history – last time round, we even won a few medals.

Let’s hear it for Diane Abbott – if it’s audible

2010-05-21T22:57:00.000-07:00

A bit of colour – and I mean this entirely in the metaphorical sense – was brought into the otherwise monochrome Labour leadership contest by the entrance of Ms Diane Abbott into the competitors’ enclosure. She says, absolutely correctly, that the current crop of candidates all look the same. How many smooth, clean-cut male early fortysomethings can we cope with? Surely the opposition to a government led by Ant and Dec should offer some sort of contrast? So I unequivocally welcome Ms Abbott’s candidature.

Besides, I like Diane Abbott. I had lunch with her once, and she was great company. Labour women are often described, fairly or unfairly, as screeching harridans; but Ms Abbott is something far better: a reformed ex-harridan. Round about the time she decided she really must send her son to a selective school, she dropped the class-and-race-warrior bit and adopted a wonderfully self-deprecatory, foot-in-mouth style which is a welcome contrast to so many of her buttoned-up colleagues. Her double-act with Michael Portillo on Andrew Neil’s sofa has been a must-watch in my family for ages.

But there is a serious point behind her candidature: how important is it that Labour gives a clear sign of embracing diversity? It’s not just a question of showing willing by putting a token woman on the short-list; it’s a question of utilising the qualities that diverse sectors of humanity can bring to the table. Now, generalising in public about the differing qualities of men and women is taking your life in your hands, but, what the hell, I’ve got two ex-wives and I can take it. I would say that, on the whole, women possess great single-mindedness but are not so well equipped to deal with nuances, counter-arguments and unintended consequences. I will stick my neck out and say that seeing the issue from the other person’s point of view requires a Y chromosome.

This is no question of superiority or inferiority. Margaret Thatcher, love her or loathe her, was a prime example of a politician who knew what she wanted to do and got it through, scattering objectors like chaff. It’s clear that both approaches, the dialectic and the bulldozer, have their place in politics. What has no place is any sort of tokenism. Diane Abbott is no more “token” than Mrs Thatcher was, but I hope no-one votes for her just because of her gender or colour. As it is, I for one will be observing the performance of Labour MPs selected from “all-women shortlists” fairly closely.

But, inevitably, Ms Abbott’s performance in the leadership election will give some indication of just how important or unimportant “gender” or “diversity” issues really are in Labour politics. I rather suspect that, when push comes to shove, that competence and clarity of vision will prove to be rather more significant factors. Not that I am suggesting that Ms Abbott is deficient in either. But that’s for the party to decide.

I don’t think I’ll be voting for Ms Abbott – she’d be bound to put her foot in it to an extent which would endanger my ageing heart – but I’m glad she’s standing. Give ‘em hell, Diane.

How was your Everybody Draw Mohammed Day?

2010-05-21T22:46:00.000-07:00

Ms Molly Norris, a Seattle cartoonist, called a few weeks ago for May 20th to be declared Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. This was in protest against the self-censorship of Comedy Central, producers of the notoriously iconoclastic South Park series, when they pulled a provocative cartoon of the Prophet PBUH in a bear costume. She has since retracted the call, apologised to Muslims in general and taken down the relevant Facebook page. Why? Well, you can guess.

Now, I enjoy a wind-up as much as the next person, but I did not participate. Largely because I can’t draw to save my life (and perhaps it did save my life). I feel extremely ambivalent about this sort of think, as I expect a lot of people do. When I say I enjoy a wind-up I mean I like winding up the pompous, prissy and cocksure; not that I burn with passion to offend peaceful people who do or wish me no harm. I do not remove my copy of “The Satanic Verses” from the bookshelves when I have Muslim guests; but I do not wave it in their faces. Like most British people, Muslim and Christian alike, I am a determined live-and-let-liver. (I wish more of the atheists were. I am tempted to suggest that next to Rushdie’s magnum opus on my shelves stands a copy of “The Good Writer Philip and the Scoundrel Pullman”.)

But something gnaws at me. Essentially, it is one of those “elephants in the room”; truths which everybody knows but feels compelled to ignore. We have large Muslim communities in Britain, and other Western countries, whom we welcome in the name of liberalism and diversity, provided that they hare here legally. But why are they here? I am no fanatical anti-immigrationist, and I accept that the post-war influx of sub-continentals was a natural concomitant of the end of Empire. But there is no corresponding inrush of Geordies, Scousers or Cockneys to Bangladesh. Now, one must tread carefully here, but is it permissible to mention words like “flush toilets”, “electricity”, “central heating”, “political freedom and stability” etc.?

And where did those come from? No serious historian will deny that the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and the industrial one of the eighteenth derived at least in part from the freedom of thought generated by the Reformation and the Enlightenment; i.e. to put it crudely, the freedom to flout religious taboos. People come to us because our society is better, and it is better because we do things they won’t. And no, it isn’t better just because of our previous imperialist exploitation. To cite just one example, societies which bar women from socio-economic activity out of terror that they might develop a sex life get poor, and get poor quickly. China was the world’s leading civilisation before they started binding women’s feet.

And if they do come here, they shouldn’t be demanding that we become more like the society they left. Britons of Pakistani or Bangladeshi background are here, or at least their parents were, because Britain is not Pakistan or Bangladesh. And, with all respect, we don’t want it to be. Any of it. Is this crass racism? If it is, then shoot me. But I don’t think so.

There's a Con-Dem coalition in Germany, and it's creaking ominously

2010-05-20T16:50:00.000-07:00

Over in Germany for a few days, to see what happens in a land where Con-Dem coalitions are a chronic condition. Helmut Kohl led one for about 15 years, and now Frau Merkel is having a go. But she has reached that tricky mid-term stage where things begin to go pear-shaped, and I thought it might be a good idea to look into the precise form and composition of the pear.

Actually the situation in Berlin appears reasonably stable: the permanent tensions run along different lines to our own, with the Free Democrats imbued with the spirit (or virus) of Thatcherism pitted against the more staid, don’t-frighten-the-horses approach of Frau Merkel’s lot. (Could she be Ted Heath in drag?) But in the country at large, ominous creaks are audible.

We have by-elections to demonstrate how a mid-term Government’s performance is perceived. The federalist Germans, by contrast, have state elections, which are rather more sweeping in their scope. Especially when the state in question is North Rhine/Westphalia (NRW), which covers about a quarter of the German population. Until last week NRW had the same Con-Dem coalition as the Federal Republic; but now the voters, as voters will, have stuck a great clumping foot through the carefully constructive edifice. Not only was the general preference unclear (the Merkelite CDU beat the Labourish SPD by a mere 0.1 per cent), but the arithmetic is such that either of the two main parties will need not one but two coalition partners to form a government. Oh, the joys of PR and five-party politics!

The Free Democrats want to remain true to Frau Angela and the CDU, but that would only work if one of the left-wing parties, the Greens or the Left Party, come in to make up the numbers. And the same would apply if they tried to set up a coalition with the SPD. But the Free Dems, who run more to smooth suits and Friedmanite economics than to beards and sandals, have a big problem with lefties. They cut them dead in the street, and give the impression that they’d rather form a coalition with Al-Qa’eda. The central party in Berlin is trying to make the NRW branch see sense, but trying to talk sense into liberals is rather like trying it with a 15-year-old.

So it would seem that Con-Dem coalitions can be addictive, withdrawal symptoms and all. But what’s the likely result of the NRW hissy-fit? There are two possibilities. One involves the SPD and Greens bringing the Left Party (a sort of independent Old Labour) into a Western state government for the first time, an idea to make German conservatives choke on their Bratwurst. Of course it would not be easy to form a government with two parties with a distinctly ambivalent attitude to governmental responsibility; however, if it worked, it could lay a platform for a revived German Left, strengthened by moving leftwards.

However, that isn’t the sort of thing one bets the ranch on. So NRW may retreat to what in Britain would be unthinkable but what in Germany is the tried and trusted: the “grand” or Con-Lab coalition. This, of course, is a tried and trusted recipe for institutional stagnation, cosy carve-ups and general evasion of responsibility. But, hardly surprising given their recent history, the Germans have no objection to the odd bit of stagnation. They’ve had it for years, and the place still seems to function.

But we’re not Germans, you may say; and we aren’t. But it does seem that Germany provides a glimpse of what political life might become under PR. It should at least induce us to ask the question: is this a price we are prepared to pay just for the sake of being “fair” to Nick Clegg and his band of dozy students?

Labour's future: please, no more hatchet-men or aping the rich and greedy

2010-05-12T22:39:00.000-07:00

Well, there’s going to be an indefinite spell in opposition. When I was blathering just now along the usual lines of “a short interval to regroup and reassess”, a friend replied: “Like 1951 or 1979, you mean?” Touché. But, despite the unprecedented move to fix the date of the next election in 2015, a spread bet on when it will actually happen would be quite interesting.

So Labour has to elect a Leader for opposition, and keep its powder dry in case things in Downing Street go pear-shaped. First, of course, the fairground spectacle of the leadership contest. The sooner the personality-cult stuff is dispensed with the better. It’s only a pity the process takes so long. Young Miliband seems to be taking the initiative; let him have it, for all I care. There’s no especially attractive alternative. So long as he brings Jon Cruddas into the team; I doubt Cruddas has the necessary profile to land the job himself, but he has retained the ability to think for himself (which the Brown inner circle will painstakingly have to reacquire) and he is able, almost uniquely, to locate his constituency without recourse to Google Maps.

Then of course there’s a strategy to develop. Clearly there will be much fun to be extracted from the gyrations of the Cameron-Clegg pantomime horse; but Labour must not be too clever in scheming to create or magnify splits. (Someone sit on Lord Mandelson, please.) Labour can’t allow its approach to the agenda to be too reactive; but it can’t try too hard to set it either. (Macmillan’s “events” will do that.)

More important than either personalities or detailed policies will be the style and tone. In government we were not popular, and not pretty. I believe Gordon Brown was a good man, but to say he lacked the popular touch is somewhat of an understatement. And it wasn’t just his personality; it was the perception, justified or not, of his style of government. We don’t want any more hatchet-men or hatchet faces; people who know where you live and will waylay you in dark alleys if you step out of line. We want MPs who know their constituencies and have channels through which local views, however uncomfortable, can be fed into the centre. The next party leader must be properly prepared for Mrs Gillian Duffy.

We need to face up to the changing face of employment; yes, we can now blame our woes on the Tories and Lib Dems, but we’ll need to argue convincingly that we could do it better. We need trade unions which concentrate on improving their members’ pay and conditions, not on power-broking within the party like the old 1970s barons. In fact we need smaller unions to serve the smaller and more diverse workplaces of today, not the recently emerged megaliths with their six-figure executive salaries.

We need an end to clinging to the coat-tails of the rich and greedy. Even if we’re no longer soaking the rich, we don’t need to ape them. That lay at the heart of the expenses scandal. If we see sound economic reasons for allowing and encouraging the acquisition of great wealth, then we must be absolutely clear that Labour people do not belong in such circles. Nor is there much point in chasing their votes: our own people have hundreds of times as many. If we can get them out, which we almost didn’t this time.

The new Government will face plenty of opportunities to fail the ordinary working people of Britain. They’re bound to take some of them. Labour, under whatever leadership, must make sure that it puts itself in a position to benefit.

Is this a happy ending after all for Cameron and Clegg?

2010-05-11T19:53:00.000-07:00

Whew. Sighs of relief and trebles all round at Collard Towers (aka the Lancaster Lubyanka). For a moment we were almost convincing ourselves that the wild and wacky idea of the Progressive Alliance, or Uncle Tom Cobbleigh coalition, might actually fly. And it seemed that the Tories did too; my, my, weren’t they angry and abusive about the man with whom they’re now going to find themselves working? It’s now clear, as it should have been all along, that Clegg was just firing a shot across Cameron’s bows by flirting so outrageously with Labour. The green-eyed monster was duly roused, and it looks as though jealous Dave will after all be consummating his inter-species marriage with the creature my son calls “the Long-Legged Cleggy-Weggy”.

For it was clear that the “Progressive Alliance” idea was principally of value as an irritant for Tories with a sense of entitlement. (Let me repeat: 306 seats out of 650 does not constitute what the Chinese would call the Mandate of Heaven.) After we discovered, even before the election, that Dave was prepared to buy Ulster Unionist support by promising exemption from spending cuts for Northern Ireland, it was rather nice to be able to come back at them with what would have been similar offers to the Scots and Welsh. But it clearly would not have been a winner in even the medium term; the Tories would have whipped up enormous resentment in England, and one could hardly have blamed them. Such a broad coalition would have been inherently unstable, and even if it had held together it could not but have made itself intensely unpopular.

No – let the Tories and Lib Dems take the strain. No less a personage than Mervyn King pointed out that this election was not a bad one to lose. If the new Government proves a stunning success and pulls us out of economic misery, both parties will receive electoral credit – and they’ll deserve it. But few would bet the ranch on that. Far more likely that it will all end in tears and recriminations. While this may not hurt the Tories too badly – Tories are ineradicable, like weeds – the Lib Dems are on the most terrific hiding to nothing.

In half the country they will be regarded as Tories Mark II. In Scotland and Wales, which are unlikely to do particularly well out of the new dispensation, they will face obliteration, despite their long traditions there. They could be forced back on positioning themselves as the enlightened element of the comfortable English bourgeoisie. And what price their hard-won successes in Burnley or Redcar then?

And we in Labour? Well, as defeated parties always say, we’ll renew ourselves in opposition. It might well be the best place to manage the transition from the Blair/Brown generation to its successors. If this strange coalition works, we’ll accept it gracefully for the sake of the jobs it had better create. If not – well, guess who’ll pick up the pieces?

In defence of Nick Clegg

2010-05-11T12:38:00.000-07:00

I’ve never had much time for the Liberal Democrats. At best they seem like wet Labour supporters who won’t make their minds up, and at worst, ruthless opportunists. But to my surprise I have discovered that the pasting Nick Clegg has received in the last 24 hours from the Right-wing press has engendered strange feelings of sympathy for the man.

To an extent he has only himself to blame. Having tried before the election to talk up the importance of votes cast over seats gained, he can hardly chide the Tories for their current attitude: that their own preponderance in both votes and seats gives them an unassailable status as Only Possible Coalition Partner.

This is politics, it’s not a display of personal holiness. Clegg knows, as pragmatic politicians always have, that in order to put one’s principles into practice one has to get into a position to do so. And he’s perfectly entitled to negotiate with the two larger parties to establish which of them will provide him with a better platform to bring his party’s views into the next government’s plans. Even before the election, Clegg indicated that, in the case of a hung parliament, he felt an obligation to turn first to the holder of most votes and seats. He honourably did so. But that did not constitute an obligation to agree to a deal on Cameron’s terms, whatever they might be. I’m sorry, but if you are negotiating with A, and B comes in with a better offer before you have reached agreement with A, you are perfectly entitled to start talking to B.

But, you might say, it’s supposed to be about political principles, rather than about an ugly squabble for power and office. Well, in what way are the LibDems denying their principles by talking to both sides? Politically they are certainly no nearer to the Tories than to Labour; in fact they fear a coalition with the Tories precisely because it might go down badly with their grass roots. And the principle for which they are best known is that of electoral reform: their current tergiversations are mainly aimed at furthering that principle. We may not like it, but we can’t fault it morally.

Finally, it is precisely the relative electoral failure of the LibDems which tend to exonerate them from the charge of unprincipled behaviour. Had they done as well as they had hoped, with 100-150 seats, then they would have felt both entitled and obligated to negotiate matters of principle with the major parties, more or less as equals. With only 57 seats they are a minor party and must take what they can get, trying to extract the highest possible price. That’s hung parliament politics, chaps; no point in getting on a moral high horse about it. The only question is whether we want more of it in the future; for that will follow electoral reform as night follows day.

Gordon Brown's resignation puts the cat among the pigeons: O Dave, where is thy victory?

2010-05-10T19:00:00.000-07:00

Every day another surprise, every day another wild card is played. Firstly the predictions of a nice smooth Lib-Con coalition deal which dominated this morning – and William Hague sounded so optimistic as to be almost human. Then there were clear signs that it had All Gone Wrong, and that the projected marriage would not now take place. So the Lib Dems had to turn to Plan B. Everyone had predicted that this would founder on Mr Clegg’s unwillingness to do a deal which would allow Mr Brown to remain Prime Minister; and so Labour cunningly unlatched the door in advance of Clegg’s battering ram. Gordon came up with a surprisingly gracious promise of resignation, and suddenly all the balls are up in the air again.

Obviously this is to some extent a move by the Lib Dems to pressure the Tories into upping their offer. But it has raised a whole new possibility, of what the Prime Minister called “a progressive coalition”. As a “coalition of losers” aimed purely at propping up a desperate lame-duck Prime Minister, this would have looked unattractive: but an association of the anti-Tory parties, representing almost 60% of the popular vote, is a different matter. I’m not sure it’ll really work, as the arithmetic is a bit stretched and any such government could be held to ransom either by small parties or by a handful of Labour or Lib Dem dissidents, but it’s a good idea to throw into the mix.

And where does this leave Dave and his myrmidons? I have said that Gordon Brown’s resignation statement was gracious, but it wouldn’t have been Gordon if it hadn’t contained a couple of subtle barbs. Brown acknowledged that Labour’s failure to achieve an absolute majority must be seen as a judgement on him: the subtext is that Cameron’s failure to achieve one must be seen in the same way. He may now have to choose between giving in to more Lib Dem demands than he is comfortable with and being left swinging in the wind. In the latter case, his only consolation will be that this may be a good parliament to be in opposition in.

And now whither Labour? The PM has said that his colleagues should refrain from campaigning for the leadership for the time being, and that he himself will not be supporting any candidate. Pinches of salt are being consumed all over the country, in my case with lime and tequila. But in principle that is sensible enough: before choosing a leader the party would prefer to know whether they are electing the all-things-to-all-persons leader of a rainbow coalition or an abrasive opposition street-fighter.

Gordon Brown has not yet resigned: he has merely announced his intention to resign. He won’t be able to go back on that, but the timescale is fairly loose; there won’t be a new Labour leader until September, which means another four months of Gordon as Prime Minister. Unless he plays another wild card, by offering Nick Clegg the job to seal the deal. Sounds unlikely, but we are suddenly in a zone where anything is possible.

Clegg's followers were all students. They spent all day on their computers, then turned up too late to vote

2010-05-09T00:57:00.000-07:00

And so to the detailed autopsy. Blogs and tweets and emails pour in from every side, trying to make sense of what’s happened and what’s coming next. I’ve surprised myself: yesterday I thought I never wished to think of domestic politics for several months, and now here I am psephologising, along with most of my friends.

First of all, my stubbornly Labour soul is gladdened by the fact that the bedrock Labour vote remained firmish. That was the nearest we’ve come to getting pushed into third place (except for 1983), and it didn’t happen and won’t in my lifetime. But there were a few warning signs. The first results of Thursday night, from Sunderland as always, looked really rather ominous for us: there were very large anti-Labour swings in the first two. But they were safe seats; in Sunderland Central, the one we really had to fight, the swing was much smaller. Right across the country horrendous swings were seen in safe Labour seats, with much smaller ones in the marginals. The lesson surely is that we have got away once more with neglecting our traditional core vote, but we won’t be able to do so again. I mean, for Pete’s sake, Lib Dems in Redcar?

And then the great mystery – the Lib Dem surge that wasn’t. Here in Lancaster traffic in most city polling stations was depressingly slow – we in Labour found this rather ominous for us, and we weren’t wrong. But reports from the university campus told of hour-long queues at the polling station, consisting entirely of eager but patient young Liberal Democrats. The conclusion I have come to – doubtless unfair but all’s fair in love and politics – is that Clegg’s following consisted entirely of students, and I shall refer to the LDs henceforth as “the students’ party”. And – again unfairly – I strongly suspect that an awful lot of them spent all day fiddling with their computers and then decided en masse to roll along to the polling stations at ten to ten, with chaotic results. Students are great devotees of the last possible minute.

Not that I have anything against students, as the extremely fond father of two of them. Nor against Lib Dems – anybody who genuinely “agrees with Nick”, or has grasped the gist of their policies and personally endorses them, may vote for them with my blessing. But I suspect that many students vote Lib Dem thinking: “I’m too cool to take sides, so I’ll vote for someone vaguely in the middle. It would spoil my pose to look too enthusiastic for one side or the other.” And students really are the most appalling poseurs, and always were. But there aren’t enough of them to put Clegg in Downing Street, and with upcoming higher education cuts there never will be. Heh-heh.

And one reflection based on freely acknowledged envy: How on earth do the Tories manage to get their vote out so effortlessly? Throughout the campaign I never saw a single Tory poster displayed in the constituency. There were the odd couple of leafleters in town on market days, but no real sign of intensive campaigning on their side. While knocking-up on Thursday in the company of a very experienced senior local councillor, I mentioned this in an attempt to raise our spirits. “It doesn’t matter,” she said wearily. “The Tories always come out.” Campaigning by osmosis, it would seem. We must try to steal the secret: ours is bloody hard work.

The Monstrous Regiment marches on

2010-04-18T23:56:00.000-07:00

Following last week’s dramatic events (link to previous blogpost) I am now free to apply myself to the campaign trail. As I keep pointing out, I am not campaigning for New Labour or Lord Mandelson or even the much-maligned Prime Minister; I am campaigning for our local candidate. He is not a sitting MP and therefore untainted by scandal, local, hard-working, honest, decent, intelligent – and male.

Does the last element matter? I’m afraid it does. Not that I have any objection to female candidates; it’s the All-Women Shortlist issue. As well as barring able men from some of the most winnable seats, it will tend to deter women from applying to those seats with open selection. They will consider their chances will be much better in an AWS seat, and male rivals might be heard to grumble “Why can’t she run for one of ‘their’ seats and leave this one to us?” I would be interested to know how many female candidates have been chosen from mixed-gender short-lists.

One would imagine, therefore, that in the Parliamentary Labour Party shortly to be elected the majority of the women MPs will have been chosen from all-women shortlists. They will not be able to escape the charge of tokenism, however unjustified. All this will be forgotten if some stellar performers arise from their ranks, but the experience of the Blair Babes of 1997 hardly predisposes one to optimism. Debarring the majority of party members from running in a constituency is hardly the recipe for ending up with the best candidates. The whole point of All-Women Shortlists is to get candidates elected who would not have got in under an open selection policy.

I was delirious with joy when I read last year that the Cameroons were considering imposing All-Women Shortlists on their own constituency associations. The Tory vote decimated at one fell swoop, and Gordon to go on and on and….you get my drift. A shame that Dave re-engaged his brain at the last moment. A disastrous policy, both for the party and for the cause of more equal political representation; women MPs will look more, not less, like second-class representatives, however unfair that may be. But, as you can imagine, my view is somewhat easier to put over in a blog on the Daily Telegraph than in a Labour Party committee room. As Orwell almost said: both genders are equal, but one is more equal than the other.

Assault: Vindicated. Possession of a Y chromosome: Guilty as charged, m'lud

2010-04-18T22:35:00.000-07:00

Apologies for recent absence from the blogosphere, but I think I have a decent excuse. (It’s been quite a week for excuses: on Thursday I had to e-mail a Brazilian friend that I would not be able to meet her at the weekend because a volcano had erupted in Iceland, quite a tall order to put into Portuguese if one doesn’t really speak it.)

I mentioned a couple of months ago that I was undergoing a period of homelessness, without giving details. These can now be provided: just before Christmas my wife decided to end the marriage in spectacular fashion. I shouldn’t perhaps be giving people ideas, but it is well for my male readers to be warned; if a dissatisfied female partner can contrive a vaguely plausible accusation of assault, you are in big trouble.

The Old Bill were called, and duly put the cuffs on me for a nineteen-hour sojourn in the cells. This was the first night of the ferocious weather conditions which we all remember from last Christmas, and the cell was far too cold to permit sleep. Next day, in a state of zombification, I was interviewed, charged, and told I would need to find a bail address because I would not be allowed home for the foreseeable future. This being 20th December, I was more or less compelled to fall back on my mother, with whom I spent a perfectly pleasant Christmas.

But a man pushing fifty cannot really be expected to set up home in his mother’s spare bedroom. Besides, my mother lives 160 miles away. I don’t actually have a job requiring daily attendance, but I’d love to know what happens to those who do when the Old Bill bar them from their homes. As I blogged in early February, I spent the early part of 2010 lurching from pillar to post in a somewhat battered Saab. My wife, had she really been living in terror of me, had a married sister living in the same town; but of course she, as the innocent party, could not be expected to inconvenience herself by moving out of the house.

“As the innocent party”? When the case finally came to trial, last Wednesday, it was decided by a court of law that the innocent party was in fact myself. The prosecution case imploded spectacularly. It did not seem to have occurred to the lady that it might be a good idea to play the poor, oppressed innocent abroad, and to save the Medusa impression for another occasion. When the magistrates retired to consider their verdict, the prosecuting counsel was called into their chamber and emerged looking as if he had been given six of the best. I rather fear he had been given a royal dressing-down for bringing such a shambolic case into court.

Let’s face it: the real charge against me was possession of a Y chromosome. I could be locked up for nineteen hours and barred from my home for two months, having committed no crime, purely on account of my gender. When the police summary of the case was read out in court, I noticed that I had been referred to by my surname only; my wife, who has a different surname, was given a respectful “Ms.” They clearly “knew” who was the guilty man.

The excuse for this is “compensation” for the tendency of the police of an earlier era to ignore “domestics”, thus leaving women without protection from husbands’ or lovers’ violence. I understand, but fail to see why I should be made to pay that compensation. I entirely agree that male violence against women is a serious and despicable crime; but let’s save our anger for those who have actually committed it, eh? We don’t yet acknowledge crimes so serious that they are exempt from the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”. I am afraid that the restoration of gender equality will require a bit of a backlash. I will be returning to this theme in the next few days.

Yes, I was entirely vindicated in court, but that is not enough. Can I now sue for the return of four months of my life? Anyway, now to the divorce courts. Heigh-ho. They’re always fair, aren’t they?

Contemporary China: the downside

2009-12-17T00:04:00.000-08:00

Many of the characteristics of a free society are now in place in China; but there is as yet nothing approaching a real culture of freedom. As I have pointed out before, the numbers directly affected by state oppression are mercifully small. But, as the latest show-trial of veteran dissident Liu Xiaobo demonstrates, the State can still be very nasty when it wants. And the Chinese are well aware of the function of these examples of tyranny; they quote the ancient phrase “killing the monkey to frighten the chickens”. There remains a pervasive culture of fear. They don’t understand our Western confidence that, so long as we keep within clearly defined laws, we can do as we like without fear. The Chinese are permanently haunted by the fear of offending someone important. If they come up against problems in the workplace, they are most reluctant to to raise them with colleagues or management, for fear that someone might mark them down for rocking the boat.

Freedom of speech is vitiated not so much by actual oppression as by private paranoia. When blogging about China, I will often try out ideas on my wife, but I no longer show her my posts before submitting them. I got sick of “Are you sure you ought to say that?” and “They’ll never give you a visa again, you know”. Ultra-cautious is the default setting; no thought is given to the real probability of getting into trouble.

A painful example of this occurred last week. On 9 December I posted a piece about resurgent prostitution in Beijing. I was given the idea by a girl who worked as a waitress in a notorious haunt of the demi-monde. When I told her I was planning to write an article based on our conversation, she was thrilled. As a courtesy, I showed her the text before posting, just in case she was worried. Again, she was very pleased and flattered. So I sent her the URL so she could read it. But when she saw it in cold print, so to speak, on an international website, she panicked. Suddenly it occurred to her that it could cause all sorts of trouble, and she spent two hours berating me by phone and text message. (Well, as a long-serving heterosexual, I’m well aware that any dealings with what is oddly called the “gentler sex” are likely to lead to a handbagging somewhere down the line.) In vain I tried to convince her that the content was perfectly harmless, that my readership among the cadres of the Beijing Public Security Bureau is statistically insignificant, that the Chinese authorities are far too preoccupied with their own people to care what foreigners write in foreign languages on foreign websites. It cut no ice. I do hope that the Chinese will grow out of this paranoia.

Contemporary China: the upside

2009-12-15T21:36:00.000-08:00

So, farewell then, Beijing. It’s been fun as usual, but it’s beginning to take on the wearily familiar characteristics of a great economic metropolis: rising prices, overburdened transport infrastructure, and everyone too busy to enjoy life. Might as well have stayed in London, you may think.

The enterprise society, certainly, continues to burgeon, within the tight constraints of a corrupt and sclerotic political system. Maybe one shouldn’t be so surprised. It’s just occurred to me that the rigidity of the political structure here has perhaps contributed more than we think to China’s irrepressible growth. If you grow up in a system where nothing works and nothing can be formally changed, but you still need to get things done, you develop an innovative, and sometimes an unscrupulous, approach to ways and means. China is a society in which one is constantly coming up against the mantra “nothing can be done” – “mei ban fa” is the virtual state motto – but where almost everything can be worked with patience and imagination. There are some lovely stories of unofficial enterprises springing up on the very margins of the law in the seventies, before Deng Xiaoping came along with his black and white cats and conferred official blessing.

And this sclerosis may well be the real foundation of China’s coming economic triumphs. My dear friend Katy, who, despite being quite well-connected, has never bothered with a conventional “job” in her life, and who has just taken seven years out following the birth of her son, is now doing the groundwork for her seventh or eighth business start-up, and she is considerably younger than I am. When one compares that to my contemporaries in the UK, whose idea of the way to prosperity has been to land a “job” in someone else’s organisation, and then spend 40 years sitting around wearing suits, one sees why China is looking like a winner. Maybe the “ghastly old waxworks” (©HRH The Prince of Wales) of the Politburo are China’s best bet for continued economic expansion. Of course, 20 years down the road, when the leaders of society all belong to the spoilt, privileged and over-educated single-child generation, it may all be very different.

China: the demi-monde flourishes

2009-12-09T11:55:00.000-08:00

I got talking the other day to a young lady who spoke the most admirably fluent English. I normally insist on speaking Chinese to people here in Beijing – if only to show off – but she insisted harder. She assured me that she was entirely self-taught.

Somehow she seemed reluctant to mention what she did for a living. She began with a long spiel about hailing from a small village in Shanxi province, an unprepossessing dustbowl in what might be called the Chinese mid-West. She had already obtained a degree or diploma in sociology, her chief interest, and now, aged 23, was saving up for further study in business or economics, as people from poor families have to sacrifice their interests to their futures. In the meantime she had to make some money, so…

No, not quite what you’re thinking. She works as a waitress in Beijing’s best-known knocking-shop, a set-up that has existed at one location or another for 20 years. (A very pretty girl, she is not herself for sale.) This place presumably has a watertight arrangement with Jingcha Plod, or more likely his bosses. It’s not strictly a brothel, as nothing happens on the premises, but girls are allowed to come there (subject to permission from the plods on the door, who don’t stop any males) to tout for business. There’s a bar, and a dance floor, and goodish music, and it’s perfectly possibly to spend an enjoyable and innocent evening there, if you like a slightly sleazy backdrop. (And I do.)

The Beijing demi-monde, like everything else here, changes its form constantly. Right now the Mongolians are back in town. For a few years now, Beijing has been a lucrative target for the enterprising and broad-minded beauties of Ulan Bator. The Mongolian ethnic type is well suited to the business, with Oriental looks on generous quasi-Russian figures.

But last time I was here there were none in sight; the visa tap had been turned off. Now it is dripping again; the girls can have two-week visas, whereas it used to be three months. (Trying to curtail prostitution is the world’s second oldest profession, and one is reminded of the little Dutch boy sticking his finger in the dyke.) The stories are all the same; no work, large families, fatherless babies, feckless male relatives.

Whether or not one regards the work itself as unpleasant, the attendant circumstances certainly have been. The girls are foreigners working illegally, and thus have no rights. A Mongolian girl I knew a few years back told me that she had known four colleagues who died in Beijing; two drunken accidents, one murdered by a client, one picked up in a police round-up and made to stand in waist-deep cold water for hours, from which she picked up a fatal infection.

“May I ask you a personal question?” my young friend asked as we finished our caramel lattes. “What do you think of the business that goes on in our bar?” I told her what I think and always have; that this is something that has always gone on and always will; that, if the poor are to be always with us, then so will prostitution. I am glad to say that she agreed wholeheartedly.

BBC newsreader Susan Osman will do well in China as a token 'big-nose'

2009-12-07T12:15:00.000-08:00

I was interested to hear that Susan Osman, a newsreader with the BBC, has got fed up with Britain’s incorrigible ageism and is now planning to seek a new career in China. As a chap of a certain age who is also “between careers”, I wish her well. But I wonder whether her hopes may not be misplaced. She may indeed do well here; it’s quite a land of opportunity these days. But if so, she is quite likely to owe part of her success to the tokenism so heartily disapproved of in the West. Not as a token oldie, of course; the Politburo are on telly all the time and they make Gordon Brown look like a carefree teenager. Nor as a token woman; I think it could be maintained that, politics apart, China leads the world on equal opportunities in the workplace. No – she’ll always be in demand as a token big-nose. (I wish to make it clear that I have never knowingly seen Ms Osman and intend no comment on her personal appearance – that’s just what the Chinese call us in their less polite moods.)

She may indeed find China less ageist than Britain, though I’m not sure. Aside from the Party, civil society is very youthful. The over-fifties grew up entirely under the great Chairman, and few of them have found themselves able to adjust to the incredibly swift changes which followed his demise. The old receive respect and an outward show of deference, but they’re not running the show any more. Most of my friends in their thirties and forties are running their parents’ lives as well as their own.

And, ageist or not, they’re certainly lookist. Remember the little girl who sang at the Olympic opening ceremony? Her voice was beautiful, but it was decided that her teeth were a mess (hardly surprising at age seven), so she had to sing off-stage while a more conventionally pretty girl lip-synched. This elicited outrage in the West, which my wife failed to understand; in China, she said, this was perfectly normal behaviour. Maybe this won’t be a problem for Ms Osman. In any case Chinese are notoriously incapable of guessing the ages of Westerners. For genetic reasons my hair went white in my early thirties; but even I was not prepared for an old josser in the far north-east estimating my age at 75 when in fact it was just under half that. And in any case tokenism will come to Ms Osman’s rescue; foreigners are known to be a law unto themselves, and nothing we do surprises the Chinese.

I wish Ms Osman every success, but she mustn’t complain if she finds herself rather short of colleagues of her own age. In China, as in Britain, public employees (which most of the media are) retire five years earlier than everyone else. The normal retirement age is 60 for men and 55 for women. Therefore, in the public sector, women usually retire at 50 (Ms Osman is 51). As one who retired with great glee at 46, I think this is splendid. Others may find it a touch, well, ageist.

So if Ms Osman finds herself treated with great deference, her every word treasured as a gem of immemorial wisdom, but is always politely circumvented when executive decisions are being made, I hope she won’t be offended.

The atrocious taxi-drivers of Beijing. 'Tiananmen Square? Never 'eard of it, guv'

2009-12-03T14:50:00.000-08:00

I normally like taxi drivers. Some of my best friends, etc. But Beijing is a new and terrible world.

Driving a taxi here has never enjoyed a lot of cachet. Back in the 1980s, driving was itself considered an honourable profession; there was no such thing as a private car, and thus the only driving licences belonged to those who did it for a living. Driving taxis was what you did when you had more or less fallen through the cracks of the official system, just as many civilian aircraft were piloted by Air Force throwouts, with predictable results. The cars were not exactly of the highest quality; the cheapest and most popular were cuboid yellow vans, built out of the waste material at the Harbin No 1 Aircraft Factory, and known as “bread wagons”. These were driven by grizzled, chain-smoking provincials, dispensing the usual cabbies’ salty wisdom in impenetrable accents.

Qualifications have never been hard to obtain. Ten years ago – I don’t know how much has changed since, but I suspect not a lot – the Chinese driving test consisted of driving to and fro across a piece of waste ground, usually in groups of eight or ten, so one didn’t have a lot of personal scope to disqualify oneself. The alternative method of obtaining a licence was a small brown envelope, possibly accompanied by a bottle of Black Label, handed to the director of the driving school. Either way, not exactly a recipe for high standards. And there is certainly no established procedure for would-be cab-drivers comparable to our “doing the knowledge”. In fact, I’ve always fantasised about Beijing drivers sitting an exam called “doing the ignorance:

“Do you know the way to Tiananmen Square?”

“Never ‘eard of it, guv.”

“Main Railway Station?”

“Isn’t that sort of out West somewhere?” (It isn’t.)

“Forbidden City?”

“Not a clue, guv. Is that one of those new developments that’ve just gone up?”

On Saturday night I had dinner with friends in the far west of town. I left early enough to get the last tube home, as the line closes around 11 p.m. Well, so I thought. The station was a mile or so away, so I took a cab. I was a bit bemused at the way he was taking me, but I thought (why?) he presumably knew what was what. Finally, after ten minutes or so, he stopped the car and told me he hadn’t the faintest idea where the station was, and that I’d better find someone else. (An underground station a mile away from his rank!) I didn’t have a clue where I was either, except that it seemed a distinctly unprepossessing place to pick up taxis: what I did know what that I had now indisputably missed the last tube.

And there are no greater experts on missing the right exit, suddenly finding they can’t turn left when intended, getting the one-way system wrong, etc etc. They will also make a bee-line for any Gordian traffic snarl-up (this isn’t hard) and embroil you in it for hours. Take a good book, because you won’t be going ahywhere any time soon. But don’t get too engrossed, because you’ll have to be alert when the traffic clears to ensure you don’t end up in Mongolia. If there is one area in which a great big Maoist purge is called for…

The Chinese are betting on infrastructure as Beijing switches to the 'Shanghai model'

2009-12-02T23:39:00.000-08:00

There may be nine million bicycles in Beijing, as the song assures us; personally, I think the lady is working with out-of-date figures, as the old velocipede is nowhere near as ubiquitous as formerly. What is certainly true is that there are now four million cars, which presents rather more of a problem.

The road-building programme has been quite impressive – six concentric ring roads as against three in 1989 – but it is nowhere near keeping pace with the growth in traffic volumes. Accordingly, the eight-lane boulevards criss-crossing the city resemble faintly undulating car parks during the two-hour morning rush hour, the three-hour afternoon rush hour, and most of the weekend. I rather suspect that many people are driving their cars as a status symbol – bicycles are so Third World, and public transport so proletarian – rather than because the car gets them to their destination more quickly, because it almost certainly doesn’t.

Fortunately, the city fathers have got something right. Stimulated by the approach of last year’s Olympics, they put in place a huge extension programme for the Beijing Underground. Ten years ago there were only two lines, which meant that for most parts of the city the tube wasn’t much help. Now there are half a dozen, giving pretty decent coverage all over the city and out to the burgeoning suburbs. And it’s a delight to use, if you can stand the crowding; lovely clean stations with working escalators, trains running like clockwork at proper intervals, no breakdowns, functioning doors and ticket machines – all the advantages of a system which is two or three years old instead of 150. And a ticket to anywhere on the system costs 18p. Public transport looks like coming into its own just before the roads seize up altogether.

The Chinese are betting heavily on infrastructure as the foundation for long-term economic growth. This follows an intense debate within the post-Mao leadership about the way forward. The father of reform, Deng Xiaoping, set up the “Guangdong model”, based on the special economic zones on the border with Hong Kong. Broadly speaking, it consisted of removing government interference and government controls, giving the private sector its head, and letting infrastructure look after itself – if private industry needed it, private industry could buy it. Deng’s death left the leadership to Jiang Zemin and his friends, most of whom hailed from around Shanghai. The “Shanghai model” was different; much more government-influenced, much more planned and controlled, grounded on the provision of an infrastructure on which industry could thrive. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the backing for the development of this region came from Singapore.

Now Beijing, which as the political capital was always more staid than swashbuckling Shanghai, has gone for an extreme version of the Shanghai model. It will be interesting to see how well it prospers. It couldn’t, of course, be more different to the principles by which the USA operates; as the two giants of the 21st century face up to one another, we will see how the two systems compare.

Banks are fuelling a massive property boom in Beijing, the city the credit crunch forgot

2009-12-02T09:20:00.000-08:00

Back in Beijing. The swish new airport: the traditional small idiosyncrasies. As well as filling out a landing card, you also have to sign a declaration that you have no infectious diseases, and hand it to an official who is wearing a face mask, just in case you are lying. Then the usual pig’s breakfast at baggage reclaim; this isn’t specific to China, it’s just that these days a two-stage flight gives you a greater than 50 per cent chance of having your baggage mislaid.

I park myself in a part of town where 20 years ago there was nothing but a socking great power station, but where they are now building the latest spiffy new business and shopping area. The new mall is full of Prada, Gucci, Ferragamo, the whole nine yards. Not many actual customers yet, though; just a lot of young female window shoppers, and the only place doing business is Starbucks. But it’s presumed that they will come. There’s a new Marriott and a new Ritz-Carlton too, although I have no information as to occupancy rates.

This city is awash on a tsunami of government money. I don’t think J M Keynes ever envisaged anything on this scale. China is the land the credit crunch forgot. The banks have gone along with the Zeitgeist and are fuelling, with easy lending, the most humungous property boom. I had guessed that the property market would keep rising until the Olympics and then run out of steam. Shows how much I know. Speculators have been making 600-800 per cent profits in the last 5-7 years. Prices are not quite Central London, but they’re certainly the better parts of Zone 2.

However, at the micro level things are not quite keeping up. Arriving at my (perfectly nice) hotel, I find the door-key doesn’t work, and they come back with four or five new ones, preventing me from having a much-needed shower and kip, and it takes an hour and a half to sort it out. Always the smiles, the unfailing politeness; always the complete inability to spot what needs to be done and to Do It.

One sign of modernisation, though: as well as the usual minibar stuff, the minibar offers condoms, both normal and vibrating (no, don’t ask me) and performance-enhancing oils and creams for men and women respectively. (This was a double room; I’ve no idea if the same is on offer in a single.) But it’s interesting that they’ve been forced to admit that sex actually exists, and that a billion and a half people weren’t found under gooseberry bushes. A step forward – or possibly not?

Let's face it: Russia is dying

2009-11-23T16:08:00.000-08:00

The BBC reports that Mr Bill Browder, head of a company called Hermitage Capital and once the largest foreign investor in Russia, has now described that large and empty country as “essentially a criminal state”. One’s first reaction is that Mr Browder, who has had far better opportunities for observation than most of us, has taken rather a long time to realise this. But then none of us has been particularly quick off the mark in grasping what has been right in front of our noses for years. Their representatives are still polluting the G8, the Council of Europe and other supposedly civilised institutions. We still pretend politely to take Mr Vladimir Putin seriously.

But I think we can accept Mr Browder’s solidly grounded appraisal as the definitive word on Russia. On the world stage it is the equivalent of the shaven-headed and tattooed drunk who waylays you in incomprehensibly threatening terms in the centre of Wigan at two on a Saturday morning. It constitutes a permanent threat to its neighbours. Its rampant gangsterism is actually worse than totalitarianism: whereas China’s oppression of the minorities in its border areas is at least motivated by trying to preserve order, Russia prefers to allow gangster enclaves to proliferate all around its borders (Uzbekistan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, Transdnistria, arguably Kaliningrad). The Soviet Union used to be described, most aptly, as “Upper Volta with rockets”. Progress of a sort has been made, and modern Russia might best be described as Moss Side with rockets.

And then they come over here, buying up nice parts of London and football clubs. Yes, they bring lots of money in, but we try not to think too hard about how some of that money was obtained. (To be fair, as Mr Browder has now ascertained, it is difficult to make money honestly in Russia, even with the best will in the world.)

But can one simply give up on such a large and powerful country? The answer is that we may have to. It’s dying. The population is falling steadily; male life expectancy is already well below 60 (and considerably lower than that for anyone getting on the wrong side of the regime). The place is even more sodden with vodka than a British town centre on a Saturday morning. The strategic balance which existed during the Cold War will soon be restored by the rise of China (which will have annexed Siberia by 2050). I mentioned once that my children looked at me blankly when I mentioned a country called East Germany: their grandchildren may be equally fogged by the mention of Russia.

OK, some will find this “offensive”, but don’t be too quick to start throwing the word “racist” around. It’s nothing to do with race. It’s simply that what happened there between 1917 and 1991 has poisoned an entire nation to death, as if with polonium-210. Regard for human life and dignity was permanently destroyed by Stalin et al. For a while it looked like the old traditions of Russia, notably those of the Orthodox Church, might provide a focus for a genuine revival. But the wound is clearly too deep; the Church, which was always that way inclined, has largely thrown in its lot with thuggish nationalism.

It’s sad. Dostoyevsky will always be among my top half-dozen writers; Solzhenitsyn and Shostakovich made admirable efforts to keep the flag flying through the 20th. But it’s gone. No point in denial. A terminal case. Let’s just hope its demise isn’t too painful for the rest of us.

End of free banking? What is WRONG with these people?

2009-11-23T09:48:00.000-08:00

So we’re now told, by the Sunday Express, no less, that the banks are planning to charge us all for taking our own money out of cashpoints. (Yes, I know, I just happened to pass it in the supermarket.) Apparently the FSA are about to rule on the legitimacy of the arbitrary charges hitherto levied by the banks. The banks presumably thought they’d get their threat in first, to warn the FSA against doing the right thing.

Where do these people think they get off, saying that if the courts rule one rip-off illegal then they’ll have to introduce another one to make up the shortfall? The answer can only be that they are living on a very distant planet indeed. Which of course they are; they keep telling us that if they are forced by taxes or regulation to live on the same planet as the rest of us they will take their ball and go off to Dubai or the Caymans or somewhere.

And don’t tell me they’ve got some absolute duty to keep their profits sky-high. I don’t believe bank profits are ever wholly legitimate. All the money they deal with is other people’s, and far too much of it is sticking to their fingers already. All through the crisis of the last two years they have behaved with the smug assurance of those who know they have the rest of us over a barrel.

It is a fundamental principle in a free market society that you only pay for what you freely choose. If someone is asked to pay for a good or a service they must have the option of refusing to do so and going without. And banking is not optional. It is certainly compulsory for every employed person. During an earlier acute phase of my bankophobia I wrote a formal memo to the payroll office at my place of work asking for my salary to be paid to me in cash in a brown envelope. This was purely in order to demonstrate that they would never allow this; I can’t say that I was ever really enthused by the idea of yomping round to electricity, water and phone companies with a fistful of tenners. Therefore government must ensure that there is at least one bank where they don’t charge you to get your hands on your own money. (It already owns a couple – where’s the problem? Or it could be based on a revitalised Post Office.)

Meanwhile, what are we going to do about a financial ruling caste who just don’t “get it”, and to an extent far beyond that of our much-reviled MPs? We seem to have exhausted all possibilities of moral suasion and all legal and regulatory avenues of restraint. It may be getting towards the time for direct action. Perhaps we should think of November 2009 as November 1788. Where I live in agricultural Lancashire there are plenty of old farm carts which would make excellent tumbrils, and I have always intended to learn to knit.

Obama in China: his hosts are still grateful for the snub to the Dalai Lama

2009-11-15T09:26:00.000-08:00

So President Obama is in China for the first time. (First time as President that is – no idea whether he may have spent time gallivanting around there in his youth.) In the international fixture calendar, this ought to be the Big One: the Liverpool-Manchester United of summitry. But I think it’s unlikely that we’ll need to hold the front page this time.

That’s partly for good reasons. There do not appear to be any major conflicts threatening to boil over. Nowhere in the world are the giants of the 20th and 21st centuries respectively facing each other down like boxers at the weigh-in. China does not feel the need, as Russia often does, to act all truculent so as not to be ignored. They know no one’s going to ignore them.

Of course the Chinese never lose the opportunity to score a point. The opening Foreign Ministry communiqué (issued by Mr Qin Gang, an old mate of mine and probably the only government spokesman in the world who has also umpired at Wimbledon) focussed, on, of all things, Obama’s much-appreciated refusal to meet the Dalai Lama prior to visiting China. As a black president, said Mr Qin, Obama was in a better position than his predecessors to appreciate the fight against slavery, which is what the Chinese were conducting when they overran Tibet in the fifties. (Can’t you just see the Dalai bestriding the old plantation with his assortment of whips?) Obama was also reminded of Abraham Lincoln, whose concern for the unity of his country is now matched by that of President Hu Jintao. So there we have it: main item of concern a minor squabble in which the US has already made the necessary concession. Advantage People’s Republic of China.

This is not to say that the meeting room in the Zhongnanhai Party Complex does not contain the odd large grey pachyderm. As I mentioned in my post of 3rd August, the economic issues between the two giants are deep-seated, and they constitute a total stand-off: the Chinese are not going to take the risk of freely floating their currency just to please Uncle Barack, and the US still owes China two trillion big ones and isn’t going to be wiping out the debt any time soon. And if there is a real prospect of agreement between the two major climate change players in advance of the Copenhagen summit, they’ve certainly done a good job of preserving secrecy on the matter.

It’ll certainly do Obama no harm to get a handle on how China works, and to ensure that the mood music is good (which is what he does best). But I imagine they’ll have been scraping the barrel for anything of substance to put in the final communiqué. Still, better jaw-jaw than war-war, as the man said.

How the Civil Service sabotages the campaign against forced marriages

2009-11-13T07:26:00.000-08:00

I heard something astonishing the other day. I’m not easily astonished, and still less by the vagaries and abysmal stupidities of the Civil Service in which I spent 20 years of my life. But this one fair took my breath away. I’m assured it’s true, and my knowledge of the bovine inflexibility of the bureaucratic mind does not incline me to doubt it.

As we know, there is a problem in this country regarding forced marriages. Some families, generally originating from the Indian subcontinent, attempt to remove their children, usually daughters, from the UK in order to marry them off to someone from their country of origin. Our government, laudably, takes this problem seriously, and has established a unit in the Home Office dedicated to rescuing these unfortunate girls and bringing them back to the UK.

The sensational news I heard was that these girls are expected to pay for their own flights home. And, if they do not have the money, they can be given a loan to buy their ticket, but they must surrender their passports until it is repaid in full, thus preventing them from leaving the country in which they are in danger. This demand is made in the name of consistency, as all other Brits needing help with repatriation are treated the same way.

Now, I have no quarrel with the principle of self-funded repatriation. If you get into trouble in a foreign country, you should not expect HMG to pick up the tab for bailing you out. Embassies and consulates are not made of money, and, besides, it creates a moral hazard if cock-ups are allowed to be cost-free.

But can’t these people see that forced marriages are an entirely different case from the tourist who had his ticket nicked when he was plastered? The moral hazard argument falls away, because the girls did not choose to put themselves in such a position. And the demand for money creates far more difficulties for these girls than it would for tourists. Most tourists can drum up money from somewhere, whereas if you are going to kidnap your daughter and marry her off abroad, the first thing you do is make sure she doesn’t have access to the price of an air ticket home. And, if the tourist has no money and needs to borrow some, who is usually the first port of call? His family. Get the point?

The reality, in most cases, is that the girl will have no one to turn to for money; even friends from outside the family may let her down for cultural reasons. So, with no way out in sight, she may see no alternative to going back to the family and submitting to their wishes. What sort of concrete-headed zombie can’t see this?

There remains the argument, mentioned above, that the Government is not made of money. But let’s look at the figures involved: the Forced Marriages Unit repatriates about 300 young girls per year. These days you can fly almost anywhere in the world for £500. So the government stands to save £150,000 (probably rather less) by this measure. The total cost of the Forced Marriages Unit, with its overseas network, must run into several millions, money well spent in my view. But talk about spoiling the ship for a ha’porth of tar!

I once got carpeted for calling one section of the Foreign Office, in writing, “a bunch of brainless jobsworths”. I took my lumps and made my apologies with good grace, as no useful purpose can be served by addressing colleagues in that way. But does anyone really believe that the Civil Service is not full of brainless jobsworths? Where do they get them from? And don’t get me started on the MoD’s decision to take legal action to reclaim compensation from two seriously injured soldiers, undoubtedly at a cost greater than the sum being reclaimed…

Impunity, not formal state oppression, is the real human rights problem in China

2009-11-13T00:19:00.000-08:00

When Westerners complain about human rights abuses in China, the Chinese are apt to bridle. Partly this is out of sheer patriotic fervour, but a lot of it is rooted in the belief that the Westerner is just parroting recycled material from 30 years ago, and has not grasped how much things have improved for the ordinary citizen since Deng Xiaoping took power. Not just in economic terms, but in terms of simple personal freedoms.

My marriage is one example. Up to about 1984 my wife could have gone to prison for the crime of “li tong wai guo” – foreign connections. Now nobody minds who you talk to, meet or marry. Freedom of speech for the individual is almost total; there are no beady-eyed informers sitting around in bars and restaurants. Except, that is, if you are on some sort of black list, which you only really get on by attempting to organise dissidence. Freedom of association is still a bridge too far.

It’s also true that the State devotes huge resources to policing the Internet. I am sure the Party realises that this attempt is ultimately doomed, both for technological reasons and because economic development demands fairly open access to information. But, for the time being, they are prepared to make the effort in order to stifle organised opposition, and, crucially, to maintain the orthodoxy of the national discourse, not allowing certain ideas even to be contemplated.

And so, a bit of perspective is needed on human rights in China: the things we Westerners worry about most are nowhere near as bad as some of us seem to think. The formal state apparatus of tyranny oppresses a few people badly, but it is a fairly small number, and, many Chinese would argue, it only affects those who have deliberately stuck their heads above the parapet.

The most serious problems in this field lie elsewhere. They were pointed up by a recent Human Rights Watch report picked up by the Independent. The report tells of hundreds of people, mainly from the provinces, who claim to have been maltreated by local officials, and, despairing of getting justice from the tight-knit local government mafias, have come to the capital to seek justice from central government, as Chinese have always done since the high Imperial days. In the capital, of course, they are just a bloody nuisance, and are subject to two main dangers: (a) their local governments sending thugs after them to bring them back, and (b) arbitrary arrest and incarceration by unofficial quasi-police thugs in Beijing. HRW mentions the existence of “black jails” in the capital, into which people are thrown without any due process or any records kept, by goons accountable to no-one who beat and even rape their prisoners.

The government denies categorically that such jails exist, but no other Chinese will deny it. The activities of hooligans who derive their impunity from being generally on the side of government, but who remain both unaccountable and deniable, are as much a fact in China as in Zimbabwe. And the worst of it is that these brutal round-ups tend to coincide with great State occasions – such as the imminent visit of President Obama. They want the riff-raff off the streets for the motorcades and the TV cameras. Some of this might not be happening but for the visit of St Barack.

Impunity is the common factor in all aspects of this problem – the petty local officials who can mess you around and extort money from you with no comeback, the higher local officials who invariably back them up, making it necessary to go and petition central government in the first place, and then the “black jail” system that hits you (all too literally) when you get there, are all part of the same phenomenon. It’s this that represents the real human rights problem in China, not gulags or secret policemen or arrests of active dissidents.

It filters through into the mindset. My wife often sits beside me when I am writing these pieces, her heart a-flutter. “Surely you can’t write that – you’ll get into trouble!” I give the usual spiel about an Englishman, provided that he is not breaking publicly proclaimed laws, being able to do what he likes in perfect serenity. “But they won’t give you a visa next time you want to go to China.” We shall see. Tomorrow I am off to the Consulate in Manchester to apply for one. I’ll let you know if I get the elbow.

Time for a new nickname for the Conservatives. Don't let in the LTV

2009-11-12T00:48:00.000-08:00

Given the animosity which has crept into the current election campaign (much of it among readers of this blog – but I do not complain, I remember how I felt in 1996) isn’t it time for a new generation of political nicknames?

My commentators, stung not so much by my expressed views as by my declared allegiance to Labour, have come up with such gems as “the Sewer Party”, “Liebour”, “ZANULab” and the impressively agglomerative “ZaNuLieBore”. But none of these have really stuck, though I accept that the distortion of the previous Prime Minister’s name into “Bliar” has.

In Germany, the parties are generally known by their colours. Social Democrats are Red (though “very pale pink” might be more appropriate these days), Christian Democrats are Black (from their historical clerical-Catholic antecedents) and the Greens speak for themselves. When, after the 2005 elections, a Christian Democrat-Free Democrat-Green coalition was briefly considered, it was called the “Jamaica coalition”, after the colours – black, yellow and green – of the Jamaican flag. But you couldn’t do that in Britain – talking about the Reds or the Blues would only mark you out as a football fan.

No really effective nickname has stuck to my own party. Some of my Tory friends refer to us as the “Trots”, but there are far too many Trot groups around for one’s meaning to be clear, especially as some of those are actually Stalinists.

The Conservatives at least have an old-style red-blooded nickname: “Tory” was a name used for barbarous Irish bandits in the 17th century. Their opponents, the Whigs, derived their name from Scottish rebels, and in the eyes of such as Dr Johnson their name was an insult in itself. Speaking of a contemporary poet at dinner, the great Sam said: “Mason’s a Whig.” Affecting to have misheard, the lady next to him asked: “A Prig, Sir?” “Worse than that, a Whig!” the great man continued. “But he is both!” But there are no more Whigs, and the term “Tory” has become totally innocuous, used neutrally by friend and foe alike.

I have long wished to popularise my own name for Her Majesty’s current Opposition. Not only is it modern and snappy, but it also honours one of Labour’s heroes, Aneurin Bevan. I would like more people to understand me when I speak of the evils and inadequacies of the LTV. Many will remember one of Bevan’s most trenchant comments on his political opponents, a three-word phrase which I have reduced to its initials.

All right, some of my younger readers may require an explanation. Nye Bevan once memorably referred to the Tories as “lower than vermin”. I have nothing to add to that, though happy to reduce it to a set of initials.

Don’t let in the LTV. You know how long it can take to get rid of them.

Ashcroft vindicated - or maybe not

2009-11-11T16:50:00.000-08:00

So Lord Ashcroft and the Tories are off the hook at last. All doubts have been removed about the residence status of the Tory Party’s vice-chairman and major donor.
Or so you might think if you saw William Hague on the Andrew Marr programme on Sunday. And even more so if you read the Independent’s write-up next day (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tories-finally-come-clean-on-ashcroft-tax-status-1817257.html). Andrew Grice, the Indy’s political editor, writes “Tories finally come clean on Ashcroft’s tax status”, and goes on to say that they have “confirmed that he is paying tax in Britain”. Job done.
Well, call me a pedantic old socialist cynic, but I’m not sure it has been. Look at what Mr Hague actually said. "My conclusion, having asked him, is that he fulfilled the obligations that were imposed on him at the time that he became a peer." He added: "I imagine that [paying taxes in the UK] was the obligation that was imposed on him." How nice that Mr Hague should be so trusting, and that he should possess such a vivid imagination!
Mr Hague’s motives are obvious, and perfectly respectable: he wants to get the Ashcroft issue off the table before the election campaign begins in earnest. It is rather strange that Central Office should have chosen the Independent to put out their version of the story: but spin, like the Almighty, moves in mysterious ways its wonders to perform. What is even stranger is that the political editor of a centre-Left paper should swallow the Central Office version hook, line and sinker.
I’m not impugning Mr Hague’s veracity: he strikes me as an honest man, as well as far too intelligent to think he can get away with telling porkies on TV. But a moment’s thought should reveal to us that what has been said is some way short of a firm statement that Lord Ashcroft is paying UK tax. And further pondering made it clear to me that Lord Ashcroft might never have paid a penny of UK tax, and Mr Hague’s statement would still not have been a lie.
Supposing (just supposing) that Lord Ashcroft had, in good faith, interpreted the obligations laid on him as falling short of an absolute requirement that he take up full UK residency for tax purposes. Then he would have been able to give Mr Hague the assurances requested. Meanwhile, Mr Hague’s imagination might always have led him astray, as imagination will. He does not state as a fact that Lord Ashcroft committed himself to full UK residence.
As far as I am concerned, the question has still not been answered. It will not be answered without an unequivocal statement in the form “Lord Ashcroft assures me that he has been a UK resident and a UK taxpayer since financial year X-Y”. I hope Labour have not been discouraged from asking it by the Independent’s trusting assurances. It still has the makings of a potential major embarrassment for the Conservatives.

The former East Germany got a raw deal out of reunification

2009-11-09T13:01:00.000-08:00

Between 1978 and 2006 I spent a total of about six years living, working and travelling in Germany, so was well acquainted with it both with and without the Wall. As is the way of walls, it seemed pretty permanent while it was there, and as if it had never been when it wasn’t. In 1993, with a friend, I spent an afternoon walking the length of its former course before it all got built over. (While all the East Germans were streaming into the West to look for jobs, my friend and thousands of his fellow Bohemians had hopped the other way to find cheap and deliciously retro flats.) Later on the Wall came up in a conversation with one of my sons. It didn’t ring a bell. Come on, I wanted to say, you were sitting with me when we saw it happening on TV. And then I remembered that he’d been nine months old at the time.

The speed at which it happened caught everyone cold, particularly in the West. Suddenly they had got what they’d always wanted, and how on earth were they going to cope with it? Firstly, the question of unification – yes or no? The Chancellor at the time was Helmut Kohl, for whom reunification was the ruling passion of his life. Nothing must be allowed to stand in the way of his dream (and Margaret Thatcher’s nightmare). Pleas for caution were disregarded in a tidal wave of national sentiment. When the first free elections were held in the East, they brought the Eastern version of Kohl’s party to power, which included Angela Merkel. Unification was now unstoppable.

Economic integration presented more intractable problems, but these were simply steamrollered by Kohl; though he must have known that setting the exchange rate for eastern and western marks at 1:1 would be disastrous, it was simply something that had to be done.

The result of this rush to unity was that the former East Germany, once one of the more successful of the Warsaw Pact states, is now the only one that has been unable to recover under capitalism. The economically active sector of the population high-tailed it to the West to find work. The East has been done up a treat, it’s true: beautifully renovated historic towns are ten a penny, but virtually nothing is going on in them. German unemployment is much higher than ours, and that is almost entirely down to the East; this is partly due to the fact that both men and women expected to be employed in the East, whereas in the West millions of housewives are happy to stay out of the statistics. It is virtually certain that an East Germany allowed to preserve its statehood, cheap labour and attractive exchange rates for a bit longer would have been in a better condition now; but there was no saying that in 1990.

The Social Democrat opposing Kohl in the unification election of 1990 was Oskar Lafontaine: he said exactly that, got thrashed, and is now a leader of the Left Party, ironically the only real “unification” party, with its main power base in the East. Another group with its main power base in the East is, sadly, the many-headed neo-Nazi movement, which feeds on unemployment, economic malaise, and lack of sense of purpose.

Yes, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a great and unforgettable moment; but it is a pity that those who were supposed to be the main beneficiaries got so little out of it.

Does China care what happens in Afghanistan?

2009-11-07T11:08:00.000-08:00

One more recent summit that passed under the radar of most people without Olympian boredom thresholds was last month’s Beijing meeting of Heads of Government of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Come again? Well, it’s a strategic cooperation arrangement between China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, focussing on Central Asia. OK, you can go back to sleep now.

But one event might make you perk up a bit: the Summiteers received an exploratory letter from an entity calling itself the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (the Taliban to you, me and HM Armed Forces). They were, of course, seeking support from their Asian brothers in driving the imperialists from the region, amid heart-rending expositions of their suffering. “Our parent (sic) are not able to send their children to schools with a peace of mind, fearing they might be killed”. This clearly refers only to male children: parents of female children daren’t send their children to school because they might be killed by the Taliban. Farmers and traders are not able to go about their normal business because the Brits and Yanks might kill them. No Afghan farmer or trader ever got killed by the Tallies, after all. Anyway, they wrote to the leaders of the SCO asking for support. Any chance that they’ll get it?

Well, given that the Uzbeks are inclined to boil Taliban types alive, I imagine they’ll have one adverse vote. But what about the Chinese? They have maintained a studied neutrality in that part of the world. But do they have a dog in the fight? What stake do they have in Afghanistan, apart from the fact that it is a neighbour state thanks to about fourteen miles of border?

Quite a big one, actually. A recent Economist report pointed out that at Aynak, just south of Kabul, there is a huge copper mine, one of the biggest sources of copper in the world, and two years ago the Chinese invested more than $3 billion in it. After all, the SCO is really all about natural resources – if they don’t cooperate, the water wars of the later 21st century will be something to behold. And the Chinese know damn well that the Americans are a better bet to keep their investment safe than the Taliban. So I assume the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan got a dusty answer, if it got one at all.

But it’s amazing what the Chinese get away with in terms of poncing, mooching and bludging. The Afghan police force guarding the mine is funded by the Japanese. Security in the wider area is provided by the US Army. The Chinese don’t pay a single yuan, and retain the right to get all sniffy about “Western imperialism” in public. Still, at least they’re clear about which side their bread is ultimately buttered on.

In defence of the 'endearritating' Stephen Fry

2009-11-05T23:45:00.000-08:00

My colleague Damian Thompson has just laid in to Stephen Fry with a vengeance. Here’s the case for the defence, written a few weeks ago after the row over Fry’s Twitter comments:

I see that Stephen Fry is in trouble again, temporarily driven from Twitter by a revolt among his vast army of followers following his intervention in the Daily Mail-Stephen Gately affair. Though no Twitterer myself, I am conscious through more traditional channels of a recent rise in anti-Fry sentiment. And not just in the press, where he is now routinely mangled. He has, I think, over-exposed himself, to coin a Fryesque double entendre. And he shouldn’t have called Jan Moir a “repulsive nobody”, if only because it lays him open to suggestions that he thinks her views invalid because she is not as big a celeb as he is, which I’m sure was not his intention. (With his contention that the Daily Mail is “a paper no decent person would be seen dead with” I have no problem.)

So did he have it coming to him? I don’t think so. Not just because Stephen Fry is very clever, very witty, and widely admired for his humane and liberal views (though I know some see him as the very model of a kickable bien-pensant). The main point about him is that he is transparently a good man. The late Auberon Waugh, whose memory I revere, maintained that the only real distinction between human beings is that between the nice and the nasty. Not all the twitterers and bloggers in the world can pin the label “nasty” on Fry. There is no malice in him, or if there is he has hidden it very well.

Yes, I know he can be maddening. Fry at his archest can make even my loyalty wobble. The American humorist P J O’Rourke coined the term “endearritating”, actually for Dr Ruth Westheimer, but it fits Fry like a glove. But I don’t think venom ought to be directed towards anybody so fundamentally benevolent. Let’s do what we can to support nice people. There isn’t exactly a superfluity of them around.

Message for Guy Fawkes' Night - blow up the Government if you want - but don't expect it to change anything

2009-11-05T21:15:00.000-08:00

“Build a bonfire, build a bonfire,
EU Directives on the top,
Health and Safety in the middle,
And burn the bloody lot.”

I’m sure there’ll be millions of us singing something like the above this Guy Fawkes Night. But we might as well save our breath to cool our hot buttered rum.

I’ll tell you what worried me most, as a Labour man. I feared a real libertarian Tory campaign promising bonfires of regulations, bureaucracy and paperwork, with details all worked out. It would have been perfectly possible to attach a research team to each front-bencher, identifying individual areas where everyone’s money and time was being wasted in the department the spokesperson was shadowing. Directly and openly identifying police paperwork surplus to requirements. Compiling a coherent action plan from the literally millions of ridiculous elf ‘n’ safety stories that have emerged over the years. Diversity surveys and compliance monitoring to be challenged to justify their existence in a balloon debate with schools, hospitals and pensions. Inviting citizens to write in with examples and suggestions – a “Bullsh*tWatch” campaign. They’d have swept the country.

Phew! I needn’t have worried. Yes, these things will occasionally be picked up as a stick to beat the Government with; but it’s not as if there were any real prospect of a new Government changing anything. If anything were likely to be done, Mr Cameron would surely have told us by now. What he did was to stand up at the Tory Conference and say, in the vaguest terms, that he will cut the cost of the Civil Service.

But we all know how well that will work. After his first Cabinet meeting, the Ministers go back to their departments with their instructions: “Sir Humphrey, the Prime Minister has told me to cut X, Y and Z.” The rest is television history. Whitehall will deal with this as easily as John Terry with a speculative long ball into the box.

Do I believe we could do with a 25 per cent Whitehall and local government headcount cut? Yes, with knobs on. Could it happen? No, there is no conceivable enforcement mechanism, and too many livelihoods and careers depend on this overstaffing. And they all have existences to justify.

Many critics of the present government blame over-regulation on the authoritarian tendencies of the Labour Party. But those tendencies are endemic to politicians, and are in any case not the key factor. Do you really believe that a down-to-earth bloke like Alan Johnson speaks up in Cabinet to say “We really must act against the scandal of parents looking after each other’s children, and giving them lifts to Brownies?” No – there are just too many people justifying their salaries by extending the scope of legislation, monitoring compliance, closing loopholes etc., and forcing this rubbish on the Minister, as did Sir Humphrey. If only civil servants were as lazy as is sometimes rumoured, we’d all be better off. Paying them to lounge around doing nothing would save almost as much as sacking them altogether.

So elect a new government if you must. But don’t expect it to make any difference. Not without more of the sort of plain speaking which no one these days feels able to get away with.

As an ex-diplomat, I volunteer to join an EU diplomatic service and sit around doing nothing

2009-11-04T14:09:00.000-08:00

I may be Labour, but that doesn’t mean I have to like the Lisbon Treaty much. Any more than I liked Nice. Or Maastricht. It is increasingly clear that European institutions have turned into a huge juggernaut, built and set in motion by European nations, but over which they now have no vestige of control. As for the democratic deficit, it is now reaching black hole proportions.

Not that I’m dead against a degree of European integration: it makes obvious sense in the age of globalisation. But it should have been bottom up, not top down. Above all, we should have stopped and redesigned the whole bang shoot from scratch when the picture changed so radically in 1989. But by then the wheels of the juggernaut were already unstoppable. So now here we are and here we stay, no matter who wins the 2010 election.

However, a naughty and delicious thought has been germinating. As well as the Blairs and the Milibands and whoever else gets the plum jobs, the Treaty of Lisbon provides for the establishment of an EU diplomatic service.
This is not an entirely new thing, of course; the EU has long maintained separate representation in the world’s major capitals, and there are already large numbers of Brussels-based officials working as diplomats. But I can’t imagine they have a fully staffed diplomatic service ready to roll. They must be drafting new people in from somewhere, presumably transferred or seconded from national diplomatic services for the most part. But maybe, just maybe…

I tried this idea out on my son, who perceptively replied “But you don’t want to go through all that again, surely?” I pointed out that it was not diplomacy which I had disliked, it was work. Contrary to popular prejudice, British diplomats have to work quite hard. The FCO has long-established traditions of high competence and efficiency (there are exceptions, but they are the sort that prove the rule) and there are still plenty of old-style martinets in the higher reaches to enforce them. The idle and the disorganised are soon found out (no predictable jibes please – I lasted 20 years).

But Eurodiplomacy has had no time to establish such traditions. It is all fairly new, and the men in Brussels can have no clear perception of exactly what they can expect from the out-stations. A further obvious point is that the Eurodips will come from a wide variety of cultures, some of which are, shall we say, a good deal less Stakhanovite than others. To put it bluntly, there could be some very cushy little niches out there.

Would it be dishonourable of me? I don’t think so. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Many of us are less than enthralled by modern capitalism; but for now it’s the only game in town, so one has to come to some arrangement with it to earn a living. All work at bottom is either vocation or prostitution. If you’re going to sell out, you may as well get a decent price.

So – FOR HIRE, reconditioned vintage diplomat, one careful owner, still under fifty, 20 years experience, German and Mandarin speaking, will eat and drink anything, adaptable to siesta culture, impenetrable bullsh*t no problem, all offers involving fat pay packet and expense account considered. Apply now to beat the Christmas rush.

Did corruption in Chinese universities cause the suicide of a brilliant young academic?

2009-11-03T12:30:00.000-08:00

The Chinese government is not notable for accountability or responsiveness. And therefore, when the lapidary notice appeared in the official press that the 31 October meeting of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress had announced the replacement of Zhou Ji by Yuan Guiren as Minister of Education, it was hardly surprising that no further comment followed.

The Chinese blogosphere, and the expat academic population, claim to be a great deal better informed. They are absolutely buzzing with news of the recent suicide of a young academic at the prestigious Zhejiang University, just south of Shanghai. Dr Tu Xuxin, who had completed a Master’s degree and then a PhD in geotechnical engineering at Northwestern University in the USA, had returned to China to take up a senior position at Zhejiang. Three months later he jumped head first off the top of one of the university buildings.

The story is that Dr Tu fell foul of endemic corruption in Chinese universities. In his six-page suicide note he claimed that he had been lured back to Zhejiang on the basis that the university, already one of considerable reputation, was offering 100 newly-funded senior academic jobs, of which he had been promised one. When he arrived home, he discovered that the promises he had received were worthless. The salary range he had been encouraged to expect was £20-30,000: he was given £5,000, with no prospect of improvement. Having brought his wife back to China with him, he found her heavily disappointed and blaming it on him. The suicide note spoke of “the reality about the world of academics and research in China: cruelty, treachery, and apathy.”

Sympathy rippled around the Chinese-speaking world: but some of it was tinged with realism. A contributor to the longhoo.net site, while sympathising with the poor man, put it thus:

“Dr Tu had made the mistake of not fully researching how things are done and pursued in the academic scene in China. If anything, he should’ve been better prepared to handle the difference in expectations. Those that have lived, studied, and worked for some time overseas are easily blinded by gushes of patriotism for their home country, and thus wistfully buy into the idea that they can make huge contributions on grounds of their better talents and abilities. However, such wistful thinking is naïve in that they haven’t fully grasped the networks of connections that are the unspoken rules of the academic circle in China. Partition and usage of research funds in Chinese universities lie with the discretion of the privileged few – those with the connections. Dr Tu wasn’t prepared for this: the American system he had worked with was all about fairness and talent.”

At the same time, a story from three years ago is gradually surfacing on the net. In Yongzhou, in Hunan province, video evidence has come to light allegedly showing Zhang Yaoyin, an 11-year-old girl, being beaten to a pulp with an iron bar by her teacher, in front of the class, and then thrown out of a fourth-floor window to her death.

In any case, Education Minister Zhou Ji has resigned, or at least been transferred to an inferior post, and my Chinese friends attribute his resignation to at least one of these affairs. For the honour of China, let’s hope they’re right. China needs proper accountability, not just for sustained economic success, but for full acceptance as part of the civilised world. May Dr Tu Xuxin and Miss Zhang Yaoyin rest in peace.

Are the Chinese racist?

2009-11-02T11:08:00.000-08:00

Yesterday The Observer reported an alarming row over a TV talent contest in Shanghai. One of the leading contestants, a 20-year-old girl named Lou Jing (pronounced Low not Loo), has attracted enormous opprobrium from all over the country. Some of the comments in the Chinese blogosphere are almost unbelievable. Sounds familiar, you might think. But the only allegation levelled at her is that she has dared to appear on television while being of mixed race, her father being a black African who was not married to her mother.

For a start, Lou Jing is extremely lucky to be alive. I thought I’d seen it all in China, but I’ve never seen an African/Chinese mixed race person there. You don’t actually meet all that many people born out of wedlock at all. This is not, as the prissy blogosphere would have it, because of the superior virtue of Chinese maidens. It is because illegitimacy is so socially unacceptable that (at a guess) 99 per cent of such pregnancies are terminated. If the mother suspected that the pregnancy had resulted from an affair with a black man, I would have said until today that that figure was 100 per cent. And this 20 years ago! Lou Jing’s mother is one extremely brave woman.

And so we come to the big question: how racist are the Chinese? The China Daily quotation used in the Observer piece – “anyone who marries a foreigner is deemed a ‘traitor’ to his or her race” – is vastly simplistic. First of all, the modern PC “his or her” is inaccurate. There are sexual as well as racial psychopathologies at work here. I am quite sure that no Chinese family objects to a son bringing home a blonde daughter-in-law. But for some reason the proportion of women to men marrying foreigners has until now been probably north of 100:1.

But even as regards daughters things have changed. (Slowly: as recently as 2004 my Chinese girlfriend, now my wife, had the police knocking on her door on a Sunday morning after some neighbour had grassed about my frequent visits.) To the sexual and racial prejudices has been added a third: economic status. Even if not all white men are rich, they will be assumed to be, and a woman who has travelled and hooked a white guy has automatically raised her status thereby.

I will confess to slightly cold feet the first time I was taken to see my prospective in-laws in Chongqing. I was assured that there would be no problems, but I knew that they were solid conservative Mao-era party stalwarts and I wasn’t so sure. Furthermore, we were met at the airport by my fiancée’s sister, whose small son cowered in terror. Actually, the whole family was extremely kind and welcoming – even the little boy, given a few hours to adjust – and I have never felt a breath of hostility on the grounds of my race or nationality. Later this month they will acquire their second English son-in-law. (The remaining daughter is married to a Canadian. But a Chinese-Canadian isn’t a foreigner at all.)

But I have asked my wife whether she would have been prepared to marry a black man. Emphatic negative. She is not personally prejudiced, and has adjusted happily to multicultural Lancashire – but she would simply not have been able to do it. It is the social conditioning: she would be too fearful of what they would say back in Chongqing. Everyone in China “knows” that all Africans have HIV. And, if a child were to be born, she could never have emulated the self-confidence of Lou Jing’s mother.

The social status of foreigners among the Chinese depends solely on their perceived economic standing. Once I was walking around a market town on the China-Russia border, and noticed that the locals were being a lot less polite than is normally the case. I realised, from some unpleasant expressions being bandied about, that they thought I was Russian – there were plenty of ragged Siberians mooching about. Once I had explained that I was British, attitudes changed noticeably.

So it’s not just racism. But it’s not not racism either. I have posted a few times on Chinese economic activity in Africa. Not that it’s necessarily politically sinister; but the phenomenon worries me. I can foresee a habit arising of expat Chinese entrepreneurs despising and maltreating their African workforce, culminating in a wholesale massacre of Chinese in Africa. Believe me, it could happen.

Legalising cannabis could make things worse

2009-11-02T10:41:00.000-08:00

Another big row about drugs policy – like all the others, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. This one centres around the sacking of Dr David Nutt, an adviser to the Home Secretary, for public disagreement with government policy. Radio phone-ins all day have been full of rants: experts know much more than ministers, the latter should listen to them, Alan Johnson should have been sacked instead, etc. etc. The present government can no more do anything right than could John Major’s in 1996.

But the fact is that expert advisers are solely employed to give expert analysis and recommendations; they are not responsible for the political and social consequences of these, whereas ministers are. If ministers are apt to attach too much importance to possible cheap shots in the tabloids, those are political and social consequences too, and can’t be ignored altogether.

What interested me was that Dr Nutt’s departure followed so closely on Jacqui Smith’s stellar performance on Thursday’s Question Time. Ms Smith was jolly courageous to go on at all; as she must have expected, she appeared to a slightly rougher reception than that recently accorded to Nick Griffin. By the end of the programme she had turned it right round: she was getting full endorsements from Tory MP Cheryl Gillan, Plaid Cymru chief Elfyn Llwyd, and most of the audience. All by fearlessly holding the line on the drug policy argument. Dr Nutt was out next day. If she saves her seat, she will owe it to that programme.

I don’t have any coherent views on all this. All the drug arguments I’ve ever heard make sense for thirty seconds and then evaporate into a vague miasma. I’m very glad I’ve got two children through to adulthood – and in South London, too! – without any drug disasters. I know that I drink more than is good for me, and that this disqualifies me from pontificating. The argument I’ve been most impressed by in thirty years of cogitation was the late Sir Kingsley Amis’s: alcohol has probably preserved society from falling apart under the stresses and strains of modern life, and, more to the point, it is now part of the warp and woof of society, claims which more modern drugs cannot make. But then, you may correctly say, Sir Kingsley was parti pris; parts of his Memoirs are a masterpiece of alcoholic denial.

What I don’t understand is the way the legalisers keep bringing forward the argument that alcohol is a bigger social problem than cannabis, but that this is not properly recognised because alcohol is too popular for its banning to be conceivable. It’s a cogent argument, but doesn’t really support their case. If it is true, maybe it would be better to suppress cannabis, to stop that becoming so widely used that it becomes a huge and insoluble social problem – just like alcohol.

The Wii Fit Plus: a computer game the Government wants you to play

2009-11-01T15:30:00.000-08:00

The first computer game with the explicit endorsement of the Department of Health has just hit the shops. It is called the Wii Fit Plus and is meant to enable you to achieve a sylph-like figure without removing your eyes from the screen. And it comes with the opposite of the Government Health Warning on your fag packet.

I derive this information from my younger son, just short of his twenty-first birthday and possibly the world’s leading expert on these devices. He is very much the target market for the Wii Fit Plus, weighing seventeen stone (but then so do I, and he’s taller). It shows you various exercises to do, and – this is the innovative bit – you wear some sort of attachment on your body, so that the machine knows whether or not you are doing them correctly, and precisely how many calories you are burning off, encouraging you with word and demonstration the while. If this sounds rather reminiscent of Winston Smith and the telescreen in the opening chapter of 1984, do remember that so far it is all entirely voluntary, and you can tell it to sod off just like you do the lady on the satnav.

Let’s not brood too long over what future Harriet Harmans might make of it. It sounds a bit sad, but I can see there is something to be said for it, if one is a fitness fan doomed to live under sodden English skies, or else too grossly fat to risk being seen in public in one’s sports gear.

However, the idea of an endorsement by the Government is rather a new departure. (Though I can’t help fearing that in the current political situation that may be rather a kiss of death.) Let us hope that (pause to look up name) Mr Andy Burnham is seen disporting himself with his Wii on public service advertising in the run-up to Christmas. And the mind boggles at whatever other government departments may jump on the bandwagon. Encourage Pocket-money Prudence with an Alistair Darling Piggy-bank. Or what about a sustainable Christmas tree graced with an angelic Ed Miliband? One thing is certain: any military toys endorsed by the Ministry of Defence will have fallen apart by Boxing Day.

Poor (?) Lord Ashcroft's in trouble again

2009-10-31T18:22:00.000-07:00

Poor Lord Ashcroft, to employ a fantastically inappropriate adjective, seems to be in trouble with the government of Belize again.
Ashcroft – one of the most English names imaginable, reminiscent of woods and agriculture, of the great English countryside. The name could only denote a denizen of a green and pleasant land. I have never been to Belize, but with its tropical location it is surely both green and pleasant too.
It’s not easy for expats. I’m not saying that their loyalties are necessarily divided: it should be perfectly possible to give both parties their due, to be a good resident of one while remaining a good citizen of the other. (Well, unless the two nations are actually playing each other at football.) It’s taxation which presents the difficulty. However dual one’s loyalties, one is inclined to think it a bit much to be expected to pay their taxes twice over. (Some think it a bit much to be expected to pay them even once, but that’s another matter.) Hence the ubiquity of Double Taxation Agreements between countries, ensuring that such a contingency does not arise.
So perhaps the resentment of the Belizean authorities against Lord Ashcroft derives from disappointment. Perhaps the local financial authorities are smarting at having been told that they may not dip into Lord Ashcroft’s capacious coffers, because he has emptied them with a liberal hand into those of Mr Alistair Darling. It surely cannot be otherwise, as he is Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party and is directing large chunks of cash into funding its campaigning in vital marginal seats. And he wouldn’t be doing that if he weren’t a fully paid-up UK taxpayer, would he?
We don’t know. There are, quite rightly, laws protecting confidentiality on matters of personal finance. There are also laws covering political donations. If we can’t enforce the latter without breaching the former, I suppose we just have to throw our hands in the air and leave it all to the judgment of Heaven. Jolly convenient for friend Cameron and his exciting band of Ashcroft-supported A-listers.
But somehow this example of an unanswered and unanswerable question takes me back to the Sixties, which was full of them. I hardly qualify as a flower child, but I was undeniably born in that decade’s inaugural year, and many will think that my unquenchably idealistic left-wingery is qualification enough. So indulge me as I brush the dust from the old guitar:
Where has good Lord Ashcroft gone,
Dear David Cameron?
Where has good Lord Ashcroft gone,
My dear old Dave?
Where has good Lord Ashcroft gone?
Tell me, Mr Cameron.
When will we ever learn,
When will we ever learn?

Has he fled beyond the seas,
Is he here, or in Belize?

Tell us where he pays his tax,
“We’re not telling that to hacks!”

Say where his returns are filed,
“Depends where he’s domiciled!”

He’s given lots of cash to you,
Any to the Treasury too?

“He’s a zillionaire, you see,”
(Says David Cameron)
“Just like my friend George and me.”

“Our kind don’t like paying tax,”
(Says David Cameron)
“That’s only for the little chaps.”

Sorry, children, this year I'm not giving in to Halloween blackmail

2009-10-31T08:34:00.000-07:00

What are the ethics of (a) offering sweets to children not your own and (b) submitting to blackmail? I thought I’d ask because millions of us are going to be faced with the issue today. It’s Halloween, in case you’re living on Mars. Whatever we may think about this ghastly American import (see Damian Thompson’s blog post, to which I say Amen) we’re stuck with it. My wife reminded me to go out and buy a few packets of sweets. We forgot last year, and though our defiance was not punished with a hail of eggs against the frontage of the house, we might not be so lucky this year.

So much for submitting to blackmail. Now the other part. Handing out sweets to children (I’m damned if I’m going to give them money – besides my own two have taken all that) has become an uncomfortable business these days. As all football fans know, there is a certain Premiership manager who is alleged by opposing fans (without the slightest vestige of truth) to make a habit of pursuing children with a packet of sweets and an ingratiating smile. I do not wish to be confronted either with PC Plod or with a huge bloke with a shaven head and lots of tattoos, brandishing a packet of Maltesers and asking me what the hell I was doing offering them to little Tyson. And it’ll be no better in the more upmarket areas of town. Except that there, in addition to PC Ponsonby-Plodde, it’ll be a revolving-eyed harridan barking that little Jocasta has gone down with 57 different allergies and it’s all your fault.

Perhaps it’s better to pull up the drawbridge and to risk the eggs. No concessions to terrorists!

Oh no, house prices are going up again

2009-10-30T20:43:00.000-07:00

I see from today’s papers that there has been a minuscule rise in year-on-year house prices. A fairly minor statistic, you might think – funny how that’s front-page news.

But, of course, in papers of conservative inclination it always is – Private Eye has a running joke about it. In reality, house price fluctuations should only be of interest to those actually on the point of buying or selling, which is quite a small minority. But we know that there are vast swathes of Middle Britain where the state of the housing market is regarded as an indicator of financial, social and moral well-being, if not as a direct correlative to the size of the male Middle British appendage. See daytime television for confirmation of this. Actually, for Pete’s sake, don’t.

And don’t you just want to plank anyone who talks about “properties”? It’s a house, you plonker, it’s a BLOODY HOUSE! It’s for LIVING IN! We’re not playing Monopoly here!

It may be political suicide to diss Middle Britain, but that won’t stop me doing so. These are the “hard-working families” to whom all our parties suck up so fawningly. Well, I’ve always been rather derisive of the term “hard-working families”. It seems to straddle the fine line between bullsh*t and nonsense. I know: I’ve been one.

When I was last a nuclear family, in the early years of the present decade, I was a civil servant: ’nuff said. My wife was self-employed, which is no doddle, but it gave her the freedom to take four months annual holiday. And as regards our teenage sons, the word “hard-working” could only have been used in the context of sledgehammer irony. In fact, like most of the bourgeoisie at that time, our family fortunes depended not on hard work or anything like it, but on the precipitous rise in the value of our house (now, of course, her house).

OK, Gordon Brown has his client base in government offices and quangos: but David Cameron has one too, based on secure salaried jobs, asset price bubbles and an unbreachable sense of entitlement, from which derives Tory policy on inheritance tax and the prospect of a peerage for Kirstie Allsopp.

The Britain of the early Noughties. No real effort, no risks, no enterprise required. But it’s gone, and it’s not coming back. No secure jobs, no mortgages, no free money materialising magically from one’s des. res., and the house price statistics back on page 94 where they belong. A government which really wanted to promote enterprise would strip away virtually all taxes and regulations from small business and tax the big ones and their bloated, flabby salariat to hell and beyond. It’s people getting rich which grows the economy, not people staying rich. And the sooner we see another 50 per cent off house prices, the happier I’ll be.

The East Asia Summit: China, Rio Tinto and the mysterious arrest of a Chinese-Australian

2009-10-29T12:11:00.000-07:00

Did you know there was an East Asia Summit going on? It was supposed to happen a year ago in Bangkok, and then there was a coup, so they moved it to Chiang Mai, then to Phuket, then to the world’s whoring capital Pattaya, and that had to be cancelled too, so now it’s happening in the more sedate resort of Hua Hin. (Memo to brewers: if you want a piss-up organised on your premises, don’t ask the Thais.)

One of the bigger real issues relates to the arrest in China of a man called Stern Hu. Yes, OK, let’s can the “Hu Hee” jokes. Hu is a perfectly normal name in China – the Supreme Leader bears it – and he adopted the name “Stern” after Isaac the great violinist. That’s several steps upmarket from a waiter I once knew who assumed the moniker “Stallone”. Mr Hu is a naturalised Australian, and was until his arrest in July the chief representative of Rio Tinto. He has been charged with bribery and the revelation of state secrets.

Serious stuff, eh? Well, that depends. China is far from being the only part of the world where doing successful business is likely to involve the odd brown envelope; of course it is against the law, but the law, like most Chinese laws, is only selectively applied. (We’re talking about a country where all extra-marital sex is illegal.) As for revelation of state secrets, well, releasing any information which has not been expressly passed for release by the authorities is against the law. It happens all the time, of course – I’m doing it now – but you can be pulled up for it if it’s in the national interest to do so. So Mr Hu is both guilty and not guilty, according to how sane (or, alternatively, bourgeois-liberal-decadent) one is feeling.

Kevin Rudd, the Sinophone Prime Minister of Australia, is at this meeting. Australia is in the tough position of having to pretend it is in Asia, as it would be foully racist not to, while not forgetting that it is the only country for thousands of miles which disapproves of chaps getting flung into the slammer at a whim. What he is up against, as he probably knows as well as I do, is the fact that the Chinese do not believe that a man called Hu can be an Aussie. We’ll see how far Mr Rudd gets.

Of course there is a backstory to this. Hu’s arrest was uncomfortably close in time to Rio Tinto’s refusal to allow the Chinese aluminium giant Chinalco to boost its stake in RT from 9 per cent to 18 per cent. The message was received and understood: China will not be allowed to muscle in on the world’s metals markets. OK, the Chinese said: say goodbye to Mr Hu, then.

Now, let’s try to maintain a little objectivity here. No-one wants to see the commodities markets dominated by China or anyone else. But that isn’t really what we’re looking at. Three firms – Billiton, Rio Tinto and Vale – enjoy a virtual monopoly over the world trade in iron ore. China is where most of the world’s construction is going on, and the world’s economy is grateful for it. That the Chinese should want a stake in this market is hardly unreasonable.

That the Chinese should respond by arresting an Australian on highly dodgy charges is of course unreasonable. But if the Chinese are treated as people who must be shut out of world markets, how do we expect them to behave? The way forward is surely to lock China into world trade, where everybody’s prosperity depends on everyone else being reasonably sensible. The Chinese can grasp that – they’re not Russians, after all. Talk some sense into them all, Mr Rudd.

2009-10-25T17:39:00.000-07:00

Even in Saudi Arabia, men are afraid of nagging wives

2009-10-23T10:35:00.000-07:00

A wife suing her husband for divorce on the grounds that she is listed on his mobile as “Guantanamo” would be good for a chuckle anywhere in the world. But who would have thought it would come from Saudi Arabia, of all places?

Arguably this is the best publicity the Kingdom’s had for years. There we all are, assuming that all Saudi marital disputes are settled by a clip round the ear, a beating by the religious police, or at best by the recitation of forbidding words from the Koran, and now we find that the blokes can feel just as oppressed by the old ball-and-chain as we do. Meanwhile, the Kingdom clearly isn’t short of feisty ladies who take no nonsense from their lords and masters. This one is petitioning for divorce, but has indicated that the prisoner may get away with a large monetary payment to her, in which case she will deign to stay married to him. Sounds like a bit of a double whammy to me.

One sympathises with the poor chap, though one’s main feeling is admiration for the indefatigability of human nature. Even given some of the most misogynistic legislation the world has ever seen, the character of the ferocious old battleaxe cannot be suppressed. Wasn’t it Horace, or possibly Boris Johnson, who once said “You can expel Nature with a pitchfork, but she’ll always come creeping back”?

I’d love to have a drink or two with this guy and compare battle-scars, but I dare say he doesn’t get to go down the pub much.

We may aw well forget about mortgages - and jobs too

2009-10-21T22:35:00.000-07:00

So now the banks (three hearty cheers!) are telling us that they will start to limit the supply of mortgage funding, not only according to the size and regularity of our incomes, but also by the thriftiness of our spending habits. For those on average and below-average incomes, I give the following Irish translation; until now there have been no mortgages available at all, from now there’ll be no mortgages at-all-at-all.

As a freelance, and one of those who used to be on the property ladder until landing on a socking great property snake called a divorce, I know that a house now falls into the same bracket as a Ferrari; something only to be contemplated when filling in one’s lottery numbers. No whingeing; I claim no natural right to a three-bedroom semi. But Lady Thatcher’s property-owning democracy is now surely in its death throes.

In any case the banks’ criteria make no sense. The idea of buying houses on a mortgage was born in the days when the bank could reasonably expect that a chap with a steady job would keep it for life. These days there’s no real reason to discriminate between the chap with a regular job and one on a fluctuating freelance income; the former is no less likely to be on his beam ends next year, and (may I venture) the latter is more likely to be keeping his income up by bobbing and weaving, whereas the other will probably be traumatised into hopelessness.

Ultimately the banks will get onto this too, and will start only lending money to those who are rich enough already, helping them leverage London property from the stratosphere into the ionosphere. The problem with tolerating a swathe of super-rich in our country is that service providers will start to feel that an infinitesimal sliver of the billionaire market is going to be more profitable than any amount of market share among the plebs, who can simply go to hell. Adam Smith (whom I honour greatly) said that it was not the benevolence of the baker, butcher etc. which encouraged him to feed us, but his self-interest. What he didn’t say was that, if the self-interest of the baker, butcher etc. encouraged him to direct all his efforts towards someone else, we’ll bloody well starve.

So where does that leave the rest of us? Well, sort of a bit disenchanted with an economic structure which leaves us out of account altogether. We can’t get mortgages, so maybe we won’t bother with the regular jobs that exist to service them either. We won’t pay stupid prices for accommodation whose only virtue is a location close to a workplace. We’ll live from hand to mouth, but we’ll live free.

The much-bewailed lack of jobs for young graduates (= cushy sinecures) may be a beacon of hope. I have always told my two student sons: don’t get a job, get a skillset. (After several thousand evenings of seeing their father come home from the office in a vile mood, they’re both determined never to set foot in one.) And then, if democracy survives (and that’s a great big Lacedaemonian “if”) we can hold a nice straightforward election: us v. them. You do the math.

How Brown could throw the Tories into disarray: a sudden referendum on Europe

2009-10-19T10:18:00.000-07:00

I heard an audacious proposal to upset David Cameron’s apple cart last night. It came from a Labour MP whom I had better not identify.

Let us assume that the Czech President finally ratifies the Lisbon Treaty, as he now seems certain to do. Now, suppose that the Prime Minister then addresses Parliament, pointing out that the Treaty is now formally in force. However, he adds, he is aware that there is a strong feeling in the country that this step should really be ratified by a referendum of the British people. He therefore proposes to hold one, on the first Thursday of May 2010.

But, he will continue, the Lisbon Treaty is now part of the internal structure of the EU, so that the referendum cannot be on Lisbon alone: the option of an EU without Lisbon no longer exists. The referendum must therefore be on the question of continued UK membership of the European Union. He and his party will be campaigning for a Yes vote. Four weeks after the referendum, a General Election will be held.

That would be quite a coup de maître. At a stroke the Tory campaign is thrown into utter confusion; presumably they would have to make common cause with the government on the referendum campaign while trying to undermine it for General Election purposes, and so will come over like John Kerry on Iraq in 2004. Every little Tory dissension on Europe will come out of the woodwork, clicking like a death-watch beetle, whereas Blairites and Brownites will be singing in perfect harmony for once, with Lord Mandelson on mellifluous lead vocals. Labour will be able to wave its implementation of its manifesto promise triumphantly in everyone’s face, countering the accusation that this is a wholly Machiavellian manoeuvre, even though it is.

The one possible drawback is that people might be so disgusted by all this that the referendum vote is lost. (Yes, I know that if the franchise were limited to Telegraph blog readers it would go down in flames, but sadly that is not the case.) But then the General Election would be too, and then wouldn’t Messrs Cameron and Hague have a fine mess to clear up?

There’s rather an unBritish whiff of scorched earth about all this, and somehow one cannot envisage the current Prime Minister embarking on quite such a white-knuckle strategy. But it’s a nice thought.

China and Russia are back together again

2009-10-15T22:51:00.000-07:00

The Sino-Russian “strategic partnership” would appear to be on a roll again. Following the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic comes the 60th anniversary of Sino-Russian diplomatic relations, as Stalin was naturally the first to recognise the regime of his fellow-psychopath Mao. What more natural than that not-really-Supreme-Leader Putin should come over to demonstrate the enduring strength of the relationship?
The usual impressive announcements were made. “Views were exchanged” on mutual energy cooperation.

Cooperation is also going smoothly on the construction of a gas pipeline from Siberia, although one hears from other sources that they are bickering about prices. Banking cooperation deals have been signed with a value of $1 billion, presumably involving lines of credit that will be used if and when the bickering stops. The total figure for all these deals is an impressive $4 billion.

I remember these communiqués well from my time as a diplomat. You have to have a big headline figure, which generally represents an aspiration rather than an actuality. It’s there to cover the fact that there’s no substance to these “big visits” at all. On the Chinese side it’s the prelude to a “Russia Year”, which of course is just a goodwill gesture. Apart from the need for certain Russian natural resources, which the Chinese know they’ll get anyway as the Russians can’t afford to brass them off, there’s nothing in this relationship.

That’s not to say that it doesn’t come in useful to both sides in worrying the West; the combination of the UN’s two principal dictator-protectors (known to me as “Tyranny International”) always makes us shiver a bit. And the Chinese may well be a bit miffed that St Barack has given Russia a free pass on human rights in exchange for a bit of help over Iran; still, it may encourage them to be a bit more helpful in the international arena.

Still, we should watch the progress of China’s “Russia Year” with considerable interest, using matchsticks to prop our eyes open if necessary. Perhaps by the end of it they’ll be the only ones left prepared to take Macho Man Putin with any seriousness at all. And that’s just out of politeness.

England's World Cup qualifier - the decline of televised sport

2009-10-11T01:34:00.000-07:00

It’s been a crap week for televised sport in this country. Once the ICC Champions Trophy was finished there wasn’t any more cricket, and it was a week without footie because of the internationals at the weekend, and then we couldn’t watch Ukraine-England either. The “rights” to televise it had been bought by a Mickey Mouse Irish company which had gone bust, and so in true dog-in-the-manger style no-one could televise it at all. You can’t even watch it in the pub.

But wait, the powers-that-be said, do not repine – you can get it on your computer for only £11.95. Yeah, we all thought, great: sit down with your mates huddled around a 15-inch laptop and watch the whole thing in dodgy picture quality with a crate of Albanian lager. The shape of things to come.

All this “rights” stuff is a perversion of the “choice” it’s meant to represent: it’s governed by the great imperative of Revenue Protection. This, for the uninitiated, means quite simply that the service provider thinks it is a million times more important to stop people who haven’t paid from receiving the service than to ensure that those who are entitled to receive it can. All national major sporting events should be on the BBC. End of story.

All right, it wasn’t a great game. We lost 1-0, and evidence that there is anything more to Rio Ferdinand than a face like a duck was not forthcoming. And yes, I’m sure more money is made the way they do it now. But football needs more money like…oh, I don’t know, fill in your own cheesy simile. All I can say is that this stinks.

The Jewish names missing from a Guardian list of Nobel Prize winners

2009-10-09T17:52:00.000-07:00

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama has unsurprisingly drawn a barrage of diverse comment in today’s press. For me the most interesting reaction came from Simon Rogers on the Guardian website. Not in anything he said about Obama, though. He published a list of all Peace Prize winners since 1901, under the perfectly reasonable question “How does Obama compare?”

Close examination of this revealed a few slips. In 1978, for instance, the laureate was named as President Anwar Sadat of Egypt. Half accurate. Some of us may remember that Sadat shared the prize that year with another statesman, one Menachem Begin by name. But Begin’s name was conspicuous by its absence. Further down, the award in 1994 to Yasser Arafat was noted. But had he received the prize alone? I rather thought that Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres had shared it with him. You wouldn’t have discovered that from Mr Rogers’s list.

I owe this fascinating discovery to the blog forum Harry’s Place. Within 40 minutes of posting, the no doubt vermilion-faced Rogers added his own comment. “Hi, I’m afraid rather than conspiracy, we’re also just capable of making a mistake in complicated data entry (which affected a number where there were two or more winners). This has been rectified [it has].” (He’s also capable of making a mistake in his grammar, eh?)

Data entry? OK, but no one has yet found any other mistakes in recording the many occasions on which multiple awards were made. I am not implying in any way that the Guardian or Simon Rogers are guilty of deliberate falsification. It was an oversight, no doubt under deadline pressure. Even so, what an odd business.

Our poverty attracts the pity of the Chinese

2009-10-08T16:42:00.000-07:00

I know our economy has been taking a bit of a bashing recently, but I was a bit taken aback at something my wife said yesterday. Apparently two Chinese friends, independently and on separate occasions in the last week, told her of their surprise at how poor everyone seems to be here.

Both ladies were too polite to amplify, but both had been our guests at a recent party, and no doubt the modest circumstances chez Collard had contributed something to this observation. Still, even I didn’t realise I qualified for the Third World’s pity just yet.

It needs of course to be placed in context. Many of the Chinese living here, especially in the academic world, come from very wealthy families; they’d have to be, to pay full-cost fees for post-graduate as well as undergraduate degrees. So they’re hardly directly comparable to the struggling middle classes of a standard English town. But there are other factors involved.

Only ten or fifteen years ago China’s opening to the outside world had shown the Chinese just how wealthy the Western world was. Going to the West, insofar as that was possible, was like a voyage to Eldorado; one expected untold wealth and luxury, and for the first generation of escapees that was what one got. For those who stayed back home, imagination had to suffice. People would ask, brazenly, how much one earned, translate it into renminbi, and their eyes would start to revolve, thinking how much that would buy in 1990s China.

Which was of course the snag. With so much of the population living on or around the breadline, China has had to keep the basic cost of living very low indeed. Housing, transport, clothing, food, all had to be accessible to those who had remained on Communist-era wages. Thus when middle-class incomes started to shoot up like rocketing pheasants, that income was virtually all disposable. When Chinese come to Britain, therefore, they are not prepared for the fact that most of our monthly incomes, even the higher ones, are swallowed up in fixed costs before they’ve had time to settle in our bank accounts. Somewhere inside them the expectation still remains that we ought to be a lot richer; we’re Westerners, after all. But the reality is that middle-class jobs in Beijing or Shanghai pay hardly less than in the UK, so they have far more cash to buy bling and make whoopee than we do.

So, when you see statistics for the average income in China (£1,275 per annum in 2006) take them with a pinch of monosodium glutamate. There are a billion peasants on far less than that, and several million in the cities with a hell of a lot more. At least they’re becoming sensitive to the plight of us poor sods over here.

President Blair - a steal at £3.5 million. Unbeatable value for money

2009-10-05T22:30:00.000-07:00

The papers are all full of the exciting news that Tony Blair, if he follows his manifest destiny and is inaugurated shortly as the first President of Europe, will earn about £3.5 million during his 30-month tenure of office. I wonder how this stately figure was arrived at.

The prevailing post-Thatcherite wisdom is that rewards are equivalent to one’s value in the open market. I’m sure it’s not only we socialists who feel a smidgen of doubt in this particular case. For all Mr Blair’s gifts and abilities, does the EU not think it could have had a perfectly serviceable President for rather less than three and a half mil? And I can’t imagine the salary was fixed to attract the right candidate. £3.5m is surely small change to Tony and Cherie these days, and it’s not exactly a secret that Blair wants this job so badly that he’d be quite happy to do it for nothing. After all, I’m pretty sure that he won’t have to put his hand in his own pocket at any time during those 30 months. Except for holidays, of course – whoops, I forgot, the Blairs tend not to pay for those either. So why the need to set the Presidential screw at this level?

It’s obviously a matter of status. One has to at least pretend to keep up with the Berlusconis. Like our former Deputy Prime Minister, one wants to be let it be known that one has one’s own personal Jag as well as the official one. Important people like to be rich, and vice versa. And, after all, that the EU likes to scatter other people’s money with a lavish hand is not exactly news.

What is clear, though, is that this sort of thing has nothing to do with market values. And it’s not confined to the public sector, either, though in the private sector it’s shareholders’ money rather than taxpayers’. Beyond a certain level, probably not unadjacent to the Government’s arbitrarily chosen £150,000, the connection between salary and market value becomes so exiguous as to be nugatory. That’s why I don’t care how highly they are taxed. And the next person to tell me that high salaries are justified by the market value of the services provided, rather than a mere badge of self-defined status, will get my pint upended over their head.

Marek Edelman: death of a great man

2009-10-05T01:26:00.000-07:00

I was just about to take the Telegraph’s obituarist to task for a failure to mention the death of Marek Edelman, when I discovered that he or she was in fact quicker off the mark than me. I thus have no need to recount the life story of the last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but I do think that an extraordinary human being deserves a eulogy as well as an obituary.

The month-long fight of the doomed Jewish community against overwhelming force was a great act of resistance, even though the chances of survival were no greater than for those who went to the camps. Edelman was one of very few survivors of the ghetto’s total destruction, and had to hide underground for the remaining two years of the war, quite an achievement in itself. After the war he became a cardiologist of high standing, though this did not save him from further anti-Semitic persecution under the Gomulka regime. Once more he bounced back, as a Solidarity activist from the very beginning of the movement. One senses that he came out of his dreadful wartime experiences with an intense commitment to human freedom and dignity.

Edelman was never a Zionist; before the war he had been a leader of the Bund, the Jewish Socialist organisation, and he remained firmly Polish. In old age, he was not afraid to speak up for the Palestinians when he felt that the Jewish self-defence for which he had fought was in danger of crossing the line into oppression. He was thus a controversial figure in Israel; but whether or not one agreed with his views, it cannot be denied that he had earned the right to express them.

Marek Edelman, zikhrono livrakha!

What would we do without Tracey Emin, who doesn't like paying tax?

2009-10-04T23:18:00.000-07:00

Hung be the heav’ns with black, yield day to night! Ms Tracey Emin, that modern equivalent of Constable, Gainsborough and Turner, has proclaimed that she is thinking of leaving Britain, saying that she “is simply not willing to pay tax at 50 per cent,” and that the UK doesn’t have enough tax breaks and other freebies for artists. What on earth will we do without her? Mr Cameron, Mr Osborne, this is surely the clinching argument!

An extra ten percent on whatever Ms Emin makes out of her, well, let’s call it “art” for the sake of politeness, over and above £150,000 a year doesn’t sound like sufficient cause to make one abjure the realm unless one had other reasons for doing so. And what exactly is her leverage? Even socialists have always understood that if large-scale industries are driven away by excessive tax rates then working people will lose their jobs. It may be blackmail, but we have no choice. I hardly think this argument applies to the world of celebrity art (motto: It’s art because it’s ME!) So what we are left with is a hissy fit, hardly front-page news in either the “art” or the art world.

Let me remind Ms Emin and other cry-babies that, in Mrs Thatcher’s first two terms, when according to one narrative the foundations of recovery were laid, the top tax rate held firm at 60 per cent. Only in 1988, by which time even many Tories agreed she was losing the plot, was the bold step of reduction to 40 per cent taken, and it led immediately to a consumer boom, 15 per cent interest rates to damp that down, and a boom-bust cycle in housing from which we still haven’t recovered. Yes, many profited hugely, but an awful lot more didn’t, which in a democracy may not be entirely without effect. Up here in the North-West you don’t meet many people who have reason to sympathise with Tracey Emin, and I imagine it’s similar in her home town of Margate. It’s often said that there are only two unavoidables in life: death and taxes. It’s considered undignified to whinge endlessly about the former; what’s so different about the latter?

So to everyone who’s stomping around making similar threats: it’s your decision, and please close the door quietly behind you. And don’t come back. The rest of us will manage somehow; I think you’ll find we’re intensely relaxed about people getting a little less filthy rich.

Books? In a library? Are you kidding?

2009-10-02T18:21:00.000-07:00

I was looking forward to the re-opening of the local library. It’s been closed for refurbishment since May, and been doing business out of the small junior library, which has space for only a small selection of books. But the main one has now re-opened, and I went in for a browse.

I am working on a history book of less than wholly serious import, and the history section of the public library here has furnished me with loads of anecdotal material, which is the only kind I’m interested in. But when I went into the redesigned library, the history section was peculiarly hard to find, as was virtually everything else. As usual, the redesign has taken the normal minimalist form; the old shelves against the walls have disappeared, and all that can be seen is a few smallish banks of shelves on wheels, for easy removal in case anyone is embarrassed by the presence of books in a library. You know, like those house makeover shows my wife likes to watch on TV: if you want to sell a house, they tell you, make sure all the walls are nice and bare, not a vestige of a book to be seen anywhere.

I found my beloved history section in the end: there were twelve shelves altogether. Nine of them were devoted to the two World Wars of the 20th century, and three to all the rest of history. That, of course, only leaves room for the most general stuff, and so I found.

I went to ask the librarian what had happened. She said “We wanted to create a more flexible space, for events and so on.” I pointed out that, flexible or not (we’d need Stephen Hawking to sort out that one) there was certainly a lot more space than there’d been before. What there was clearly a lot less of was, er, so to speak, not to put too fine a point on it, books. Yes, she agreed, the book count had been reduced by something like 30 per cent. Ah, I thought but didn’t say, well, so long as that makes more space for illiterate gorillas to do the hokey-cokey, that’s fine. I told her that I had probably better start looking for my history books in the local second-hand shops, and she did not demur.

One hears of this sort of thing everywhere. Is it the crying shame and bloody disgrace that I feel it is, or is it just that I’m pushing fifty? And can one, should one, fight back? In a democracy, should one not just accept that libraries must divest themselves of books because people are fonder of DVDs, schools must not bother with education because kids prefer video games, and the Reithian ideals of the BBC must prostrate themselves before the potty mouth of Jonathan Ross?

I’m inclined to try the road of resistance. And much good may it do me.

China's 60th anniversary parade marches into my living room

2009-10-01T21:22:00.000-07:00

My lady wife has been behaving strangely. Yesterday she announced she was going to bed at 7 p.m. Why was this? Because she wanted to be up at 2 a.m. to watch the 60th anniversary parade live from Beijing. Of course it didn’t quite work out – she couldn’t sleep, because she was hungry, so she came down and ate half my dinner and tried to change the channel 10 minutes before the end of Man United-Wolfsburg, but that’s par for the course. However, at 2 o’clock, there she was.

I was content to watch the replay at a more civilised time. After all, it’s not exactly an unpredictable cliff-hanger. It’s just a huge number of people marching up and down and singing, waving sheets of coloured card to make precisely coordinated pictures. Somewhat daringly, I asked her how she’d got herself up in the middle of the night to watch all 146 balls-aching minutes of this orgy of leader-worship. She said I’d have enjoyed it too if I’d got up early enough to see the military parade at the beginning. I replied that I did not enjoy the sight of tanks trundling down Chang’an, for reasons which she well knew. But our weapons are peaceful, she said; we don’t go round invading other countries like certain people. I said I was well aware that Chinese weapons are only used against their own people, and the “clash of civilisations” argument took its predictable course. Sometimes it leads to me breaking into Queen’s “We Are The Champions”, but not today, or I’d probably have got a chopstick up my jacksie.

The thing is that my wife is neither a convinced Communist nor a raving nationalist. It was just nostalgia and a bit of homesickness. This is what she grew up with; she was singing along to the songs of her childhood, just as I might to the Beatles or Led Zep. And I had to admit that there was nothing offensive in what I saw, having missed the military tosh: yes, there was a richly decorated float for each province, and yes, that included Taiwan, which isn’t part of the PRC just yet: but the commentary was peaceful and only referred to improved commercial and cultural links across the Taiwan Straits.

Obviously the problem for us is the sight of more than 100,000 people, most of them children, marching in tight regimentation. I had to explain about Triumph of the Will. But then, what are our young people doing instead? Lovers of freedom would have to say they’d rather their kids were slobbing in bed and playing video games than goose-stepping through the streets, but sensible ones will hesitate just a little. And the kids can be corralled like this, not because they’re used to endless Maoist regimentation as my wife was in the Seventies, but because they’re used to doing four or five hours of homework a night under the loving but firm pressure of their parents. Snap judgments on China are out of place: the first ever Communist country to actually function economically demands more careful attention.

Comeback Kid Mandelson points the way to China. The Tories don't even know where it is

2009-09-30T17:01:00.000-07:00

Say what you like about Peter Mandelson, but he’s certainly played a blinder this week. First, a Conference speech in which he just about realised the impossible dream of winning the love of the Labour Party. Using his own comeback(s) as an inspiration for the desired comeback of his Party was a piece of unbelievable chutzpah; in this form he leaves Derren Brown standing as an illusionist.

And now a full-dress piece on China in today’s Telegraph. The impression (however misleading) is that the great man has found time amid the hurly-burly of a crucial Conference to regale us with words of well-matured wisdom.

It’s hardly an original observation that China will be a key economic player for the foreseeable future. But Lord M is reminding us of two things: firstly, that we have not done as much as we might have to realise those opportunities; and secondly, more subtly, that one racks one’s brains for the slightest scrap of evidence that Messrs Cameron and Osborne even know where China is. (Note for Tory conference organisers: it’s up in the top right hand corner, usually coloured yellow.)

It’s an uphill struggle. The Chinese – and who can blame them – are determined that if there’s money to be made out of their modernisation, it should be made by Chinese people. In the early days of China’s opening to the world economy, it used to be horribly difficult to repatriate one’s profits even if one made any. The example Mandelson gave of a successful British project was the Pilkington glass plant in Shanghai. Nothing wrong with that. But this project began in the 1980s, and I imagine returns in the early days were not high. You need to hunker down for the long term, as many Germans, Americans etc. have done. An atmosphere in which you have to deliver shareholder value in six months max or you can forget it doesn’t help.

But it’s no good telling us today what we should have been doing 25 years ago. What should we be doing today? All I can think of is being prepared to punt some money, and to get down and dirty. Don’t waste time schmoozing leaders – or does government create wealth all of a sudden? By all means be polite enough to them to ensure they don’t do you down, but remember that they’re just politicians – and ones without the chastening restraints of a free press, to boot. Don’t just stick around Beijing and Shanghai; they’ve been done to death, and costs are rocketing. Get out of the comfort zone. Find a sharp young English-speaking local fixer, and head out to the monoglot boonies. There are provinces you’ve never heard of with populations equal to Britain plus France. Your favourite restaurant will still be there when you get back; in the meantime, get those wobbly bits down you. Learn a bit of the lingo (hint: single people will work out how best to do this). Ten years of this, and you may have dysentery, cirrhosis and knackered lungs; you may also be suffering from morbid obesity of the wallet. And remember, Lord Mandelson is right behind you.

German elections: a quick guide to what's really going on

2009-09-28T15:20:00.000-07:00

The more one looks at the German election result, the more one wonders. On the one hand, it is a clear majority (well, 48.4%, but who’s counting?) for a coalition with a clear ideological direction; on the other, a colourful spectrum of intriguing possibilities. The Social Democrats put in their worst performance in the history of the Bundesrepublik; but then so did Merkel’s CDU/CSU, on a record low of 33.8%. In a system where a 5% hurdle was built in to keep out the nutters, Germany has now entered the age of five-party politics: this would still be the case had the hurdle been 10%. How different from the old days, when there was Left and Right and a little liberal party in the middle holding the balance, ensuring that Hans-Dietrich Genscher retained the Foreign Minister slot with the dogged unshiftability of the Vicar of Bray.

But the real attention will of course be on the new government, which will probably take two or three weeks to fit its disparate parts together. Yes, they’re all singing from the same hymn-sheet as regards capitalist conservatism of a faintly Cameroonish tinge: but there are considerable differences which will need bridging. Even Merkel’s own party is actually two parties, linking the solid but open-minded Protestant work ethic, from which the Chancellor herself hails, to the stuffier do-as-you’re-damn-well-told types from what might be called the Ratzinger country. Add in the bouncy, terribly progressive, turbocapitalists of the FDP – hedge funders meet the Stop the War Coalition – and you’ve got quite a rich mixture. The FDP want to slash taxes – Merkel, who happily endorsed a raising of the top rate in her outgoing government, does not appear to see that as a panacea. The FDP want to run down participation in the “war on terror” to a point just short of open revolt against the US; Merkel remains a solid Atlanticist. This might be even more exciting than the three-party squabble over the future of the Left on the other side of the house.

We shall see. But I would bet that, amid the sound and fury, German politics will trundle along its well-worn paths with the same dour predictability with which their monumentally unexciting football team keeps bloody well winning things.

University term begins again, and the Chinese are back

2009-09-28T07:54:00.000-07:00

I was in Sainsbury’s yesterday afternoon. (Don’t you just hate columns, blogs etc which begin like that? But I crave indulgence.) Fortunately our local Sainsbo’s doesn’t assault its customers’ ears with Muzak, so mine were lulled with the ubiquitous sound of a familiar language. Mandarin Chinese. Looking around me I might have been in Guangzhou Tesco. The occasional foreigner (as they will insist on calling us, even in our own country), but otherwise wall-to-wall the sons and daughters of the Middle Kingdom. And then I remembered; it is the end of September, and I live in a small university town.

Yes, around this time of year we go Chinese. I merely observe; I have no racist reactions, and nor does anyone else. Firstly, this is the era of globalisation; virtually a quarter of the world’s population is Chinese, and why shouldn’t that be the case here? Secondly, these are all bright and valuable undergraduate and postgraduate students; they’re not on the dole, and if you get beaten up late at night it won’t be one of them who does it. No doubt they keep our university afloat with the fees they pay. (Economists often complain about the high Chinese savings rate; I wonder if they realise what a large proportion of those savings go to British and American universities, to educate the savers’ grandchildren.)

The strange thing is that Chinese universities are riding high in the world rankings. Only the very best UK/US places of learning can compete with the best of Beijing and Shanghai. So why are so many Chinese parents so keen to send their kids to our universities?

Partly, of course, because the top universities in Beijing and Shanghai are not so easy to get into. The word is that it doesn’t exactly depend on school results. Natives of those cities enjoy a built-in advantage, and good connections also help. Chinese who don’t enjoy these advantages feel better off sending their kids to Western universities than second-rate Chinese ones. Western education, you see, still carries a certain innate cachet. In a society where “face” is everything, it’s interesting to see that our products are seen as automatically superior, however debased we may sometimes feel it is. The Chinese theoretically believe their culture is superior to all others; but they are voting with their feet, or at least their children’s and grandchildren’s feet – and long may it remain so.

German elections: meet the new boss - same as the old boss

2009-09-27T17:36:00.000-07:00

Well, it looks as though the German Right has got what it wanted in their election. Of course an election based on PR is never likely to attract the sort of excitement that a first-past-the-post election brings; alternatively, perhaps it’s just that no-one believes a German election is ever going to change anything much. Both of these rather flippant statements are entirely true.

No-one ever doubted that the babetastic Frau Angela Merkel was going to continue in her role as Chancellor. The only issue was whether she would be able to ditch her current coalition partners (the Social Democrats, i.e. liberal capitalism with trade unions) for a more Right-wing lot (the Free Democrats, i.e. liberal capitalism without trade unions). This she seems to have achieved. Those (somewhat numerous) Germans who are trying to cast the good lady in the role of a Frau Thatcher are, however, doomed to disappointment: nothing changes in Germany, and it isn’t going to start now. While we argue over the 48-hour week, the Germans are still holding the line in the 37-38 region. It won’t get any easier to get any sense out of anyone on a Friday afternoon. I love the place.

Unemployment won’t come down very far in a country where you have to have the exactly appropriate qualifications to apply for any sort of job. In the unlikely event that Frau Merkel tries to change any of this, she will be reminded in no uncertain terms that that was not what she was voted in for.

Meanwhile, the Left will now be off the leash; the Social Democrats, roughly equivalent to New Labour, are out of government and able to position themselves to benefit from any disillusionment. In competition, of course, with the Greens and the Left Party, who got not far off 25 per cent of the vote between them. All that Frau Merkel can really congratulate herself on is still being there: it doesn’t seem that her position has improved much.

What the hell is the point of the United Nations?

2009-09-26T22:45:00.000-07:00

So the circus has come to town again. The unspeakable Gaddafi is given a reasonable 15 minutes to speak, and goes on for an hour and three quarters of clowning, tearing up the UN charter and talking complete nonsense about swine flu. Well, you might say, that’s what Gaddafi does. But why do they let him? OK, manhandling him from the room might have been a bit much to expect, but they could at least have switched his mike off. But naturally everyone simply submitted to having their schedule thrown out and their time wasted. And then, naturally, Mugabe with more of the same. Why can this organisation not impose its own agreed rules?

Because “national leaders” are just too important, like two-year-olds taken at their own self-estimation (“Look at me!”). Every meeting starts unconscionably late, because in some parts of the world one demonstrates one’s importance by keeping other people waiting. (Rather like inviting women on dates: her punctuality will be in inverse proportion to her desirability.)

On two occasions during my diplomatic career I was offered a job at the UK representation in New York. This was quite a prestigious posting, but I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole; I know what goes on there. You spend all morning and all afternoon in meetings where no-one has a sense of the value of time; and then at 5 p.m. you go back to the mission and the real working day starts. I had small children whom I wanted to see from time to time. A no-brainer.

No doubt some people will be thinking that all this sounds a bit racist, imperialist, etc. Where do I get off, despising representatives of poor Third World countries? Well, if they were real representatives I wouldn’t despise them. Of course the people of Libya have a right to be represented in the counsels of the mighty; I just don’t think their interests are served in any way by highly paid and busy people having to listen to Gaddafi. Leaders of democracies have to identify themselves to a fair extent with the needs of their peoples because they want to get re-elected; all dictators are interested in is staying in power for ever and ever, and forming alliances with other dictators to that end.

Yes, of course we have to be realistic, and there have always been countries with sub-optimal political arrangements with whom we have to deal. And there are countries which may not be tremendously significant in political or economic terms which do genuinely represent a people whose voice deserves to be heard. But there are plenty of “leaders” who should simply be told: “You’re not representative, and you don’t matter. Go away.”

America owes China two trillion dollars. But what does that mean?

2009-09-24T09:19:00.000-07:00

There are one or two issues of major global importance which get too little attention, simply because they are so complex. One of them is the uncomfortable economic stand-off between China and America, about which learned articles have rumbled on for months in the stiffer journals, read by few and understood by even fewer. Now they are snapping at each other about little bits of protectionism, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

We are all familiar with the aphorism which goes: “If you owe someone a thousand pounds, you’ve got a problem. If you owe someone a million pounds, he’s got a problem.” Now, the US owes China two trillion dollars. Who’s got the problem?

In an earlier blogpost I flippantly suggested that if the US’s debt to China got any bigger China would in effect “own” the USA. Of course this is nonsense, because China has no way of staking its claim. Should the US default on a payment, they can hardly send the bailiffs round to repossess California. Every now and then the Chinese mutter about the possibility of doing down the dollar by changing some of their reserves into yen or euros, but they don’t mean it: they don’t want to undermine the dollar while they’re still owed so many of them.

Meanwhile, the Americans grumble endlessly that the Chinese are keeping the value of their currency artificially low. It is a logical nonsense that one of the world economy’s biggest players still has a currency which is not freely convertible and allowed to find its own level on the markets. But it’s not exactly hard to see why the Chinese are not yet prepared to venture forth on the choppy waters of untrammelled currency speculation. Their current policy originated as a defence against the worst of the Asian financial crisis in the late 90s, and its wisdom wasn’t exactly shaken by more recent events.

So, to the American plea to level the terms of trade by letting the currency float, the Chinese simply say “Why should we?” Well, because it’s not fair in the context of free trade. But the Chinese have an all-purpose get-out: we may be a major player in absolute terms, but per capita we’re still a poor developing country. So we need these little unfairnesses to help us get on level terms with you. The implication is that China won’t treat the US as an equal until their per capita economies are of similar size, i.e. when China’s economy is five times the size of America’s.

How do we get out of this double bind? We’ll see if any bright ideas come up at the G20. I’m not holding my breath.

A Chinese passport: the mark of Cain?

2009-09-20T19:33:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest drawbacks to being Chinese is holding a passport which is regarded as the equivalent of the medieval leper’s bell and call of “UNCLEAN!” Travelling with my Chinese wife, I dread each encounter with immigration officials, as, impeccable though her papers always are, they still have “People’s Republic of China” on them (the worst problems we encountered were in Hong Kong of all places). Now my quasi-brother-in-law (i.e. the chap who’s going to marry my wife’s sister in November) is finding out all about it.

After an incredibly time-consuming paperchase, he has procured for his fiancée a marriage and settlement visa. Now he is, not unnaturally, trying to arrange a honeymoon. Only problem is, they’d have to spend half their time until the wedding sorting out the visa, and sorting out the wedding is going to take up quite enough of the time, thank you. So, my friend has gone on the Net to find places where Chinese people can go without too many tedious formalities. The results have been instructive.

The problem is, of course, that no nation wants to be seen as a soft touch for Chinese, fearing that they’ll find a billion or so of them on the doorstep. It’s less than twenty years since it really was like that in Beijing: word would soon get around about who had revised their visa policy, and the queues would lead round several blocks first thing next morning.

There are a few places in Africa you can go (Djibouti, Comoros, Ethiopia anyone?). Various islands in the South Pacific. In the Americas you are more or less limited to the Dominican Republic; in Europe to the holiday paradise of Kosovo. There are a few places in Asia, but not so many at the top of most people’s wishlists. Still, they do include Thailand and Sri Lanka. So all is not lost, and my sister-in-law will get a suitably exotic honeymoon.

I’d have settled for the Lake District myself. But I suppose it’s bloody cold up here in December.

Oh dear, Lady Scotland

2009-09-18T10:40:00.001-07:00

It seems that Baroness Scotland, the Attorney-General, has been caught very nastily. As the Government’s chief law officer, she was quite properly responsible for promoting legislation closing loopholes for those who employed non-British citizens whose immigration status prevented them from working. Now she has been found employing a cleaner who was indeed in Britain on a visa which precluded working.

Lady Scotland has denied any culpability in this matter, saying that she had been shown documents which confirmed her cleaner’s right to work. Obviously the courts will have to rule on this, and it is quite right that legal judgment be suspended until they have pronounced.

However, my own interest is sparked by my knowledge that many illegal immigrants are employed for the purpose of undercutting the national minimum wage. Whatever the immigration status of Baroness Scotland’s cleaner, I would be interested to know what the Tongan lady was being paid. If a Labour Attorney-General has employed the wrong person in genuine ignorance, she may survive; if she has not been paying the minimum wage, she will certainly not. Information, please.

Oh dear, Lady Scotland

2009-09-18T10:40:00.000-07:00

Is China serious about renewable energy?

2009-09-17T14:52:00.000-07:00

Hat tip to Geoffrey Lean’s blog for the report that China is about to build the world’s biggest solar power station. It makes sense; they’re building it in Inner Mongolia, where there are hundreds of miles of bugger all in which to do so, and where there’s plenty of sun when the snow isn’t ten feet deep.

Does this mean that the Chinese are taking renewable energy seriously, though? Aren’t they happy just to carry on with blasting the atmosphere full of coal dust and then blaming the West for doing it first? Or perhaps they’ve cottoned on to the idea that there may be a real future in renewables, and that they may be best placed to cash in – it’s not just that they’ve got the millions of acres of bare grassland, but they’re also quick on the draw; if they really decide to build something, it gets built pronto, which gives them a major advantage compared to our horrendous lead times.

It’s a mistake to assume, from their posturing on climate change, that the Chinese don’t care about pollution. True, they’re not terribly green in the Porritt/Monbiot sense. But they’re sensible enough to know that air pollution is making a significant difference to the economy and public health.

And they have the same concerns over energy security and diversity as we have. Coal they still have a-plenty, but gas has largely to come from Russia, and the possibilities of regional tension in the North-East have to be kept in mind. And a really fast expansion of their nuclear network would give some pretty terrifying hostages to fortune, given the local penchant for jerrybuilding and exchanging blind eyes for brown envelopes. So why not try renewables? The idea of the Inner Mongolia project is to make the solar station the nucleus of a huge renewable energy park. There’s no shortage of wind up there either: every spring it takes half the Gobi Desert on an excursion to Beijing. This could be quite exciting; and at least we’ll be able to learn something from it.

Dealing with China: the day I shook hands with the author of the Tiananmen massacre

2009-09-13T13:58:00.000-07:00

I am grateful to Peter Foster’s blog for reminding me of the continued existence of the Chairman Mao cult; not something that one is often reminded of these days. He isn’t mentioned much; the doublethink involved is something most Chinese prefer not to get involved with.

But what about those foreigners who have to get involved on a daily basis with Mao’s successors at the head of the Party – the diplomats? How does it feel to deal with a regime which is the direct descendant of Mao’s, and which still derives its entire legitimacy from his victory in 1949?

On 1st October there will be a huge Olympic-style spectacular to celebrate the 60th anniversary of this regime. This in itself makes me feel queasy; I was in Beijing for the 50th, and refused to have anything to do with it, saying ingratiatingly that China was not 50 years old, but 5,000. And the tank parade down Chang’an Avenue was in execrable taste.

In 1991, to my great shame, I was unable to avoid shaking hands with then Premier Li Peng, the author of the Tiananmen massacre. (Yes, of course I fantasised about syringes and little-known poisons, but….) And I remember my Ambassador, hearing of the release from prison of the last member of the Gang of Four, saying “Grrr! I’ll send a hit-man after him!” (he had been en poste during the Gang’s reign of terror, when diplomatic immunities were not respected). The difference between us and the Chinese is that we keep the past in mind while we’re doing our jobs, and they try not to. (I have never forgotten reading in some demographic study that there is a massive slump in the population’s age graph for the year of my birth, 1960: that was in the middle of the famine caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward, and it is true that I rarely meet exact contemporaries.)

Now, of course, our people are content to follow the Chinese line; it’s all got so much better now, and China is on the right track; there’s nothing to be gained by raking up the past, and China may well be better off as it is than had the regime been messily overthrown in 1989. But those of Judaeo-Christian heritage can’t help feeling that somewhere along the line the past will come and bite China back; it’s only forty years since they were eating each other, and there are an awful lot of ghosts still to be laid.

So, while wishing China well, I stick to the sentiments expressed ten years ago, when two veteran China correspondents and I noisily toasted the day when the big picture of the old bastard is finally torn down from Tiananmen Gate.

Mandelson in China: do the Chinese care about human rights?

2009-09-09T19:42:00.000-07:00

So my Lord Mandelson is in China, making a speech to the Communist Party School on how China needs to get with the programme on human rights. Is this likely to do any good? Is it not just one of those things that both we and the Chinese know we have to do when we go there? Do the Chinese actually care at all? Should they even care at all?

On the face of it the Party School sounds like an unpromising place to start. In fact, as our Embassy will have told Mandelson, it is the designated place where serious thinking is encouraged, albeit under controlled conditions. Mandelson is assured of a genuinely interested audience. But how far up the ladder does that interest percolate?
Unfortunately we have rather led the Chinese to dig in on this point. Many of them think our mindset is too rigid: that we see a red star and automatically think Soviet Eastern Europe. And so on both sides there is sometimes a dialogue of the deaf.

In fact there is no real comparison. Countries like East Germany really did try to pry into every corner of one’s life. China’s secret police don’t give a damn what people think or chat about in cafés. Even twenty years ago I collected a compendium of ribald jokes about the leadership from locals.

It is only the association of large numbers of dissidents that worries them, and then they crack down hard. In Chinese parlance this is called “killing the chicken to frighten the monkeys”. In 1998 a group of activists were jailed for trying to found an independent political party; there is no record of their ever having been released. The fearsome persecution of the Falun Gong religious sect is an extended act of revenge for its achievement, in 1999, of gathering 10,000 demonstrators outside Party headquarters in Beijing without anybody realising in advance.

The key to this occasional severity, in tandem with strict controls on information, is the desire to maintain a unified public opinion. This is a significant element of public policy. Better to create a climate of no dissidence than to persecute dissidents. And it’s fortunate that the Party’s monomania sits so well with the idea inherent in most Asian cultures that collective rights trump individual ones. Anyone who has regular dealings with Chinese know how hard it is to influence their minds away from the state orthodoxy, which is all most of them have ever heard. Thus it is vital to exclude all heretical opinions from the public space, though everyone may know they exist in the shadows.

This is the dilemma: China knows that open access to information is vital for economic success, but does not want to loosen its grip on public opinion. They have genuinely moved on from Big Brother (ob. 9.9.1976, 33 years ago today); they now concede a high degree of individual freedom, but for the foreseeable future there will be lines you can’t cross. It’s easy to justify, after all: the maintenance of a system which ensures that 1.4 billion people get fed is more important than intellectuals mouthing off, isn’t it? The Soviet system was not only more oppressive, but didn’t actually feed its people.

Ultimately the Chinese will realise that freedom is more efficient as well as being, well, freer and more human. I can vouch for the fact that most of them do value the latter qualities. Perhaps Lord Mandelson is just the man to make the point.

Personal injury lawyers be damned. Let's pass a Stuff Happens Act

2009-09-07T00:05:00.000-07:00

As we all know, there will have been a new government elected by this time next year, of one persuasion or another. What piece of legislation ought to be top of the new Parliament’s agenda? (Let’s exclude, just for the purposes of argument, the widespread demand for a series of Nuremberg trials of the outgoing government, with yours truly strung up alongside them for complicity. I take your point: I remember what my own feelings were about the Tories c. 1996.)

Actually my own candidate would probably go down well with the Telegraph fraternity. I’m sure that what we most need is a bonfire of Elf ‘n’ Safety regulations and their preposterous interference in the normal lives of citizens. Children are supposed to grow up with assorted bruises and occasional broken limbs – I’d broken both arms and acquired a hernia before I came of age, not to mention having to confront my father with a golf-ball-size bump on my head which I had no recollection of having sustained (school leaving party).

But there’s a backstory to Elf ‘n’ Safety paranoia. It is, of course, Personal Injury lawyers. Schools and local councils more or less have to apply strong E ‘n’ S rules if they’re risking being sued for millions. This is the root to which the axe needs to be laid. I will greet with a magnum of the good stuff the “Stuff Happens Act 2010”. The thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to can no longer be treated as a ticket in the great Compensation Lottery. If someone has been caused direct financial loss by an accident which was clearly caused by outrageous negligence, then fair enough. But I can’t wait to see the back of the endless adverts for ambulance-chasing law firms offering the chance of big payouts, usually at the taxpayer’s expense one way or another. About a year ago I tripped over a wonky paving stone in the London Borough of Camden and broke two fingers; I still can’t quite clench my right fist. (Fortunately I’m a southpaw.) Every now and then, contemplating the wreck of my finances, I wonder whether I wasn’t a bit stupid not to sue like daytime TV viewers would.

Credit where credit’s due: Mayor Boris, whom I rather admire, is consistently vocal on this topic; indeed he coined the formulation ‘elf ‘n’ safety’. It has frequently occurred to me that consistent campaigning on this issue should sweep Call-Me-Dave to power. So why do we hear so little from him? Labour could make some ground with it too, now that the Prime Minister is no longer a lawyer married to another lawyer. Again, silence. Could it be that there are just too many lawyers in Parliament, on both sides of the house, for common sense to prevail at the expense of their personal incomes?

No doubt we have all sympathised at times with Dick the Butcher in Jack Cade’s rebellion in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 2: “The first thing we’ll do, let’s kill all the lawyers”. Perhaps I’d stop short of that, but I’d still recommend a good look at the backgrounds of next year’s parliamentary candidates, and refuse bluntly to vote any more barristers or solicitors into Parliament. That way the “Stuff Happens Act” might stand a chance.

Winnie-the-Pooh: the unauthorised sequel

2009-09-04T14:40:00.000-07:00

Christopher Robin chucked a crisp packet over the fence surrounding the Hundred Acre Agribusiness Park, noticing that the large sign guarding the entrance had been broken off diagonally to read TRESPASSERS W. “Bloody oiks from the comprehensive”, he said to Piglet, his eyes never drifting for a second from his Nintendo DS.

Rabbit came past at a rapid walk, texting frantically into his Blackberry. “Can’t stop, chaps. Board meeting in ten minutes. Got to marshal all the little friends and relations – sorry, non-executive directors I should say.”

“Where are the rest of the crowd?” asked Piglet eagerly.

“Doubt we’ll see Kanga and Roo today. Roo got caught jumping into the river once too often, and Kanga got a real going over from the Health and Safety Heffalump.”

Along trudged Eeyore, dripping wet from a small raincloud which hovered above him, while the rest of the sky was blue and sunlit. “Crappy English weather hasn’t changed much since 1928,” he murmured.

“Ooh look, it’s Eeyore!” squealed Piglet in joy.

“Hello, little Piglet. Hello, Christopher Robin,” said Eeyore. “Have you heard of this new book they’re bringing out about us?”

“No,” said Christopher Robin, “Do tell.”

“Typical of this Modern Media Age,” said Eeyore. “No privacy. No consideration. Just Money, Money, Money. Still,” he looked up hopefully, “I bet it won’t sell.”

“How exciting!” chirped Piglet.

“You don’t need to worry, little Piglet,” said Eeyore. “You’re not going to be in it. The Muslim Council of Britain have threatened riots unless you’re eliminated.”

“Where’s Pooh, incidentally?”

“Well, I left him in the cupboard under the stairs. Teddy bears are so twentieth century, don’t you think? This new writer chappie is going to have to get with the programme,” he went on, waving the Nintendo on which his fingers had never stopped cavorting. “Besides, Pooh’s all strange these days, ever since he discovered that genetically modified honey.”

“Yes,” said Piglet. “I never thought that second head really suited him.”

“So what’s the book going to be called then, if Pooh isn’t in it?” said Eeyore. “He rather got top billing last time,” he added wistfully, “Despite not being the most memorable character. By A Long Chalk,” he continued sadly.

“Well,” said Christopher Robin. “I rather think that it’s my turn this time. After all, you must admit I got a bum deal out of the last one. Total laughing stock for the rest of my life, everyone whispering “hoppety-hoppety-hoppety-hop” behind my back, and the old man made millions out of it and didn’t leave me a bent penny. All went to the Garrick and Westminster School, for Pete’s sake! It’ll be different this time. How about ‘Christopher Robin Cashes In At Last’? That has a certain ring about it.”

“Ker-ching!” squeaked Piglet.

What's China's Number Two doing in the Bahamas?

2009-09-03T22:36:00.000-07:00

My friend in the Bahamas (how nice it is to be able to start a sentence thus) tells me that they are enjoying the visit of top Chinese mogul (well, President of Parliament actually, but he ranks second in the Politburo) Wu Bangguo. What on earth is he doing there, considering that one can get a decent tan in China this time of year? According to the official communiqué it is about “increasing mutual understanding and enhancing freedom”. Well, if one wants to know how to enhance one’s freedom, the Number Two in the Chinese Communist Politburo is exactly the chap one would turn to, n’est-ce pas?

More importantly (one suspects) the Chinese are currently paying for all the roads in Nassau to be rebuilt, and building the Bahamians a National Stadium. The roads are apparently excellent – this is something we all know the Chinese can do. (Once I took a British Professor of Civil Engineering round some Chinese construction projects and he was horrified, but that was twenty years ago and they’re all still standing.)

My friend wonders what exactly the Chinese are getting out of the deal other than good will, which, he says, they could have had for a smile and a beer. Is the Politburo laying the groundwork for a self-indulgent retirement?

The answer is probably that the Chinese take the UN rhetoric about all countries being equal and equally worthy of respect rather seriously. Of course they tend to confuse countries with their governments, but in a fairly benign environment like the Bahamas that doesn’t do any harm. Behind that, of course, lurks the fact that China needs votes at the UN, and that of the Bahamas is as good as, to take an example entirely at random, Japan’s. And the Taiwanese are active in the area and aren’t short of a bob or two. The amounts China is prepared to spend in order to pre-empt the Taiwanese are quite impressive. Still, I’m glad the Bahamians are getting their new roads and stadium, and I hope to be out there to see them before too long.

The Working Time Directive: sole jewel in the EU's plastic crown

2009-09-01T09:47:00.000-07:00

Normally my views on EU directives are firmly in line with Daily Telegraph orthodoxy: they’re ill thought through, have no democratic mandate, are contrary to the EU principle of subsidiarity, and certain countries (we all know which) don’t obey them. But one which I have always excepted, and which I see as a shining light in the impenetrable fog of Brussels obscurantism, is the Working Time Directive, otherwise known as the 48-hour week.

It’s easy to see why it has to be an EU directive. Personally, I think it’s the sort of law any proper Labour Government should have passed in its first week: but then we’d have heard all the usual wittering about competitiveness. Much better to coordinate it with all our main competitors. (And no, our direct competitors in the field of labour conditions do not include India and China.) You may think what you like about the Franco-German short working weeks: it’s still embarrassing to admit that, while their institutions are arguing about 36 or 38 or 39 hours, ours are still reluctant to concede 48.

It’s not just a piece of socialist legislation; it fits perfectly with elements of the Cameroon programme. Strengthening the family, for instance; how better to achieve that than by at least ensuring that the family can be given top priority after 6 p.m.? And the work of the voluntary sector, community life, Burke’s “little platoons”; in practice it’s always been the middle class that has led this sort of thing, and these elements can never flourish while the middle class is in the office till half past eight. And the effects on gender equality are too obvious to need pointing out.

“Yes, but it’s the compulsion I don’t like.” Fair enough point; but there are times when a law can free people up to do the thing they really want. Take seat belts. When I was young, in the pre-compulsory days, I didn’t drive, but was often a passenger in a friend’s car. In this situation putting on one’s seat belt was regarded as the action of a wimp, and was sometimes even interpreted as an insult. Thank God that, for my children’s generation, it’s just something you have to do.

When workers have the “choice to work as long as they want”, it means that the person who goes home at 5.30 is making a clear statement that their home life is, at least in evenings, more important to them than work. Now of course this is the default position of any sane person, but I can see why one might not want to rub it under one’s boss’s nose. Much better to have everyone going home early as a matter of course. As a middle manager in the Foreign Office, my voice was often heard resounding down the corridors at 5.55: “Come on, haven’t you people got pubs to go to?” (My hero was Douglas Hurd, who firmly refused to accept any papers after 5 pm.)

But what about productivity and getting the job done? Well, it’s already established that we Brits work the longest hours in Europe and our productivity is pretty ropey. In my view that’s because nobody can really work twelve-hour days at full capacity. As for the NHS, who wants to be treated by a doctor who hasn’t slept for three nights?

It’s also generally agreed that most businesses were far less efficient 20-30 years ago because they failed to impose proper controls on costs. We have learnt to manage our resources much better now. The WTD could have the same effect on staff time, also a finite resource. Centuries are wasted every day in our economy because time is not used properly, and it isn’t used properly because everyone treats it as a cost-free good. If every one of your staff was working eight hours a day and not a minute more, you’d make sure that time was used efficiently. I’ve seen too many people mooching around aimlessly in the afternoon and balancing it by spurts of energy at seven-thirty to be at all impressed. (Oh, sorry, I forgot: bosses like to be able to rule by fear, checking what time you go home and uttering snide comments. Having all this arbitrary power is an important part of their motivation. Don’t think it adds much to the bottom line, though.)

I heard, though this may be apocryphal, that in the brave days of the French 35-hour week the relevant Ministry used to send enforcement officers round in vans to look for lights in office buildings after 6 pm and investigate. Se non è vero, è ben trovato. The French get some things right. Haven’t these people got pubs to go to?

We're too wet to deal with illegal immigrants - so we take it out on the legitimate ones

2009-08-30T07:58:00.000-07:00

I’ve discovered who’s to blame for the immigration problem. It’s me. I am solely responsible for bringing into this country an unwarranted foreign body, and those stalwart chaps at the Home Office are quite rightly doing all they can to thwart me. Mea culpa – with millions of no doubt excellent true-blue British women to choose from, I have irresponsibly chosen to marry a Chinese and try to settle her here.

The aim of UK immigration policy is to try to offset the millions of illegal immigrants we are too wet to do anything about by making it as difficult as possible to introduce legitimate ones. When I was in our Embassy in China, I once appealed to a big cheese from London to make it a bit easier for important business people with money to spend to get into the UK. I was told that there was a big illegal immigration problem from China, which I knew, and that we had to man the defences with ever greater vigilance. The fact that the illegals who are brought in on the back of lorries have never seen the inside of a British visa office was considered irrelevant. We had to do our best to keep down the numbers where we had the power to, i.e. among the relatively legitimate visitors, to make up for all the gangsters’ passengers we couldn’t control. Of course, for those who believe in purely numerical constraints on immigrants, this would be fine.

Meanwhile, there is my lady wife, who has been here two years already and now needs to apply for permanent leave to remain. There are three ways to apply: in person, by post, and from another country. In person would obviously be best, but we were told all through August that there were no more appointments left in August. So we waited until August 28th, when we were told that there were no appointments in September either. She has to have her application in by 17th September, and wasn’t allowed to apply until 28 days in advance. So the apply-in-person option didn’t in fact exist. The postal route was a possibility, assuming one can trust the post not to lose things, but the “target” response time for this route is six months, with a target of 95% response within this time. And – the real killer – it’s not just that she has to send her passport into the Home Office limbo for that period, but I have to as well. Now, this isn’t on: like a lot of people, I need to travel. That leaves flying to Beijing. I wouldn’t mind that, but it’s not exactly the cheap option. And can I discuss this with anyone? You’ve guessed it – not a chance. No phone numbers anywhere – I may just have to go to the Borders Agency in Liverpool and try, with little optimism, to rustle someone up.

Immigration formalities are clearly made as impenetrable as possible in the hope that people will give up. You’re made to play the beggar at every turn; if you don’t like that situation, the hint is, you can always eff off. I can’t help thinking that my wife might have done better to claim political asylum on arrival, rather than entering as the wife of a man with 20 years Crown service.

China is losing patience with Burma, its basket-case neighbour

2009-08-29T20:55:00.000-07:00

The Guardian reports that fighting between the army of the Burmese junta and Shan minority forces in the border state of Kokang have caused thousands of Burmese to do a runner into China. Moreover, the Shan separatist media (www.shanland.org) claim that some of the fighting was so close to the border that a People’s Liberation Army soldier copped a fatal Burmese Army bullet. Now, neither of these events, if factual, will be sufficient to trigger real Chinese counter-action; but it must be one more step in the gradual process by which China loses patience with its basket-case neighbour.

Obviously, China approves of the current form of government in Burma, and of its pariah (i.e. Chinese client) status; but it is at least supposed to be a proper tyranny, and keep the peace on China’s borders, keeping stroppy ethnic minorities in order. China has quite enough of its own minorities in Yunnan Province, who are quiet enough for now, but who knows how they might react to a continuing refugee flow, or for that matter to a greatly stepped-up PLA presence on what has hitherto been a fairly porous border?

Incidentally, it so happens that the capital of the Burmese state of Kokang, where all these refugees are supposed to be running away from, is called Laogai. Now that, in Chinese, is the name of the prison camp system, a rough synonym for Gulag. It’d be rather a bitter irony if the poor old Burmese refugees ended up there…

A week in Budapest: well done those Magyars!

2009-08-26T06:43:00.000-07:00

My recent hiatus in transmission was caused by a holiday with my sons in Budapest, one of my favourite cities. For those who don’t know it, it has that elegiac, fin-de-last-siècle-but-one, late-Habsburg atmosphere that Vienna has more or less grown out of. My aim was to fill a bit of a gap in my cultural grasp of south-eastern Europe; this was shared to some extent by son A, a history buff like myself, while son B was delighted to find that opportunities for eating chips and pizza, watching DVDs and Premiership footie and sleeping all day are also not lacking in Budapest.

The best thing about Budapest are the Turkish baths, which really are Turkish; it was only the occupying Ottomans in the 16th and 17th centuries who developed the ubiquitous hot springs, and the baths’ survival in largely original form provoked me to say The more modern baths are all mixed-sex and swimming-costumes; as a stern traditionalist I regarded a single-sex party as essential, which is why I took the sons and left the lady wife at home. In the older baths men sit around in white aprons, sagely and reflectively steaming, some of them even fatter than me. Highly civilised. Best of all is that the baths have remained but Islamic law hasn’t, as after two hours’ steaming one could murder a beer. (I never thought I’d hear this from my own lips, but there may be something to be said for an Islamic conquest and occupation, provided that it doesn’t go on too long.)

A more recent occupation has also been dealt with rather well by the Hungarians. In 1989 they found themselves with a large amount of socialist-realist statuary which had suddenly become surplus to requirements. Instead of breaking it up to build public conveniences, or leaving it to decay and disappear under avian crap, they lugged it all out to a little park some way out of town and re-erected it all, the pretensions of its sculptors and sponsors looking even more ridiculous in this setting than they would anyway, a hyperexample of reach exceeding grasp. Well done, the Magyars.

Lockerbie: Megrahi may have been the victim of a political fix, but don't expect the CIA to set the record straight

2009-08-25T17:25:00.000-07:00

Poor old Gordon is getting pilloried again, this time for finding nothing to say on the release of the Lockerbie bomber. I admit his excuse is thin; the Scottish justice system may be devolved, but it can’t be denied that this case does have a teensy-weensy bit of a foreign policy angle, and that isn’t devolved.

But perhaps that mighty brain has been processing Wittgenstein, who famously ended his Tractatus with the insight: “If something can’t be spoken of, best to shut up about it”. For there is, indeed, nothing to say. Everyone knows, however often it’s denied, that one factor in the public view of this case is that there was something rather iffy about the trial, and that Megrahi may have been the expendable victim of a political fix. This can never be openly admitted. The world and his granny have been firing off more or less convincing theories about what really happened: but no-one knows, or those that do can be counted on one’s fingers. Nobody is ever going to set the record straight, because the CIA is (somehow) involved, and they don’t do that sort of thing. This may be because there are still actual repercussions to be feared; more likely, because the truth will embarrass someone one doesn’t want to embarrass; but possibly because there is a certain amount of macho posturing about secrecy going on. Nobody takes themselves more seriously than the American diplomatic/security establishment.

So we can speculate all we like: we’re never going to know. Gordon might as well maintain his Zen posture. Personally, having close-range experience of what terminal prostate cancer is like, I’m with Kenny MacAskill: no need to pile on the agony. And may Megrahi be forgiven his sins, whatever they were.

The Independent demonstrates the perils faced by a PC paper

2009-08-11T00:55:00.000-07:00

I’ve been waiting for any follow-up to a story in yesterday’s Independent on Sunday, relating the sadly familiar tale of a female domestic servant being kept in slavery and subjected to abuse by a diplomatic family in London. The woman claims that she was beaten and sexually assaulted by a diplomat and his “royal” wife, and has been granted £20,000 in unpaid wages by an employment tribunal, but has no way of obtaining it as the couple has returned home and are hiding behind diplomatic immunity.

Well, that’s diplomats for you, some will say, implying that UK diplomats probably do the same sort of thing. Well, as an ex-diplomat, I can say confidently that our chaps would not be able to get away with anything of the sort. I’m not saying that our lot don’t occasionally park in the wrong place or drive after a tincture or two too many, knowing that the cops won’t touch a car with CD plates, but if they killed someone in the latter capacity they’d get the book thrown at them.

But other nations may not be so squeamish. Some of the commentators in the Indie are just to sweet for words. One recommends contacting the local press of the country involved, saying “the local press of those countries would be more than willing to publish and expose the culprits publicly”. Bless!

We’re talking about a country where diplomats have “royal” wives. Which one? Well, the abused woman doesn’t want to be named. Understandable enough. The Indie doesn’t name the employers either, “because the victim fears reprisals”. Fair enough. She claims they have “power in her country” and have issued death threats to her and her families. Well, which country was it? Nobody is saying. But I guess it isn’t Denmark.

So, then, we’ve got a country which can abuse people with complete impunity on British soil, and which can frighten into silence not only a poor woman and her family in a poor country, but also a leading UK newspaper. Well, if no-one’s saying, we’re at liberty to guess. Where’s your money?

But, interestingly, they couldn’t frighten the Indie enough to spike the story altogether. Well done, Indie, especially the “royal” giveaway. But one can only imagine the editorial conferences there:

“Look, we have to run this story. We’re a feminist newspaper!”

“But we’re a progressive newspaper too, and it may involve people it would be very unprogressive to offend.”

“Never mind that! Women’s lives are at stake! What would Joan Smith say?”

“Well, what would Robert Fisk say? And (mysteriously) it isn’t only Robert Fisk…”

And thus a compromise is hammered out, in which the story is run but no country is mentioned. Like the time they did a feature on honour killings without the slightest reference to which faith communities are involved, as if honour killings are just as likely to occur in gated communities outside Weybridge.

It must be jolly hard work being PC. Thank Heaven we on the penumbra of the Telegraph don’t have to bother…

Chinese princelings – the cover-up gets more difficult

2009-08-10T17:27:00.000-07:00

China-watchers are amused by statistics quoted by Chinese researchers alleging that over 90 per cent of Chinese billionaires are the children of leading Communist Party cadres – and by the Government’s hyper-sensitive refutation of the allegations. This is interesting on several counts. Firstly, these statistics come not from some foreign source, but from official organisations within China, who must have known how sensitive the subject is. Central media control is clearly slipping.

And, while the researchers must have known that the government wouldn’t like it, they will also have known that the revelations would strike a chord among the grassroots. Chinese nationals are usually happy to defend their government against Western criticism; but no one regards these allegations as implausible. Ironically, it is one of the better Chinese qualities which renders the story so credible: almost all Chinese regard promoting the life chances of their children as the highest good, and so it is entirely likely that senior leaders will do the same. (Strangely Mao was an exception; he let his son get killed in Korea like everybody else’s.)

An amusing angle on this comes from one of the Chinese-language papers which circulate among Chinese communities in the UK, which are completely outside PRC control. One article refers to last month’s story about a corruption case in Namibia involving a company managed by Hu Haifeng, son of President Hu Jintao. This has, of course, gone completely unmentioned in the official Chinese media. However, as the paper notes, the Chinese internet community has noticed that web searches on “Namibia” or “Hu Haifeng” have been coming up blank, and are putting two and two together for themselves…

Darius Guppy, full-dress apologist for Iran's thuggish regime

2009-08-08T23:59:00.000-07:00

News trickles out of Iran concerning the fate of a girl named Taraneh, who was disappeared by government security forces in the wake of last month’s post-election protests. Like the murdered woman Neda Agha-Soltan, Taraneh was not actually participating in the demonstrations, but had just stopped to watch on her way to work. However, she was slung into a van with all the others arrested. When the party reached the secret detention centre, Taraneh’s interrogation took much longer than that of all the others. She was also prevented from ringing her family to tell them what had happened, as the others were allowed to do.

Family and friends found out from a local hospital that a girl answering Taraneh’s description had been brought in recently showing symptoms of brutal, multiple rape, but had been taken away soon afterwards. A few days later, following a tip-off, they found her burnt body by a roadside. (Hat tip: iransolidarity.org.uk)

We know that employees of the Islamic Republic of Iran rape women to death – they even did it to a Canadian citizen, Zahra Kazemi, a few years back. All this regime’s representatives, and all its supporters, should be held to account for that dreadful fact.

Which brings us on to a name from the past.

Readers no longer in their first youth will remember Darius Guppy. Eton and Oxford, friend of Boris Johnson, sent to prison for jewellery fraud? You’ve got him.

Guppy has now turned up again as a full-dress apologist for the Iranian regime. In the Independent, a paper which is, shall we say, not choosy, he has written an article telling the (equally undiscriminating) readership how superior the Islamic Republic is to wet, decadent Britain, where, shockingly, women may express opposition to the Government without being raped to death.

Regarding the elections, Guppy claims it is ridiculous to “suggest that two undeniably devout men, Ayatollah Khamenei and Mr Ahmadi-Nejad, should have engaged in such an un-Islamic conspiracy as cheating their own people”. Yeah, right.

And then a plunge into the waters of pure nutterdom: “The planet has been brought to its knees by bourgeois greed. Scientists increasingly consider us to be in the midst of a ‘mass extinction event’, similar to that which gripped the world when a giant meteorite slammed into the Gulf of Mexico and extinguished the dinosaurs.” Get your story straight, Darry. Either we’re being destroyed by bourgeois greed (I wouldn’t entirely disagree). Or we’ll be destroyed by an asteroid strike which cannot possibly have anything to do with human economic activity. Make up your mind.

But the Islamic Republic of Iran, of course, points the way forward. “God willing, she can then become what Huntingdon [sic] refers to as a ‘core state’ around which other nations that cherish freedom can coalesce.” I thought that was happening already: Chavez, Castro, Kim Jong-Il, all those cherishers of freedom are already on side. For heaven’s sake, a “nation” is not the same thing as a government.

When Guppy and people who think like him praise “nations who cherish freedom”, they’re actually lending moral support to “governments whose agents cherish the freedom to rape women to death”. Well, if Guppy’s now Iranian I suggest he stays where he is.

Bank profits and bonuses bounce back? Sorry I can't raise a cheer

2009-08-07T17:57:00.000-07:00

So bank profits are back in the billions, and bonuses abound. The lap-dancing industry and the Colombian export trade can breathe again.

Naturally, the vested-interest brigade is trying to convince us that this is a good thing. No it isn’t. Charging exorbitant fees to proper businesses and gambling with other people’s money is not a respectable way to earn a living. And how do they make quite so much money? Given that banks are largely dealing with other people’s money, how is it that quite so much of it seems to stick to their fingers?

We’re asked why, if banks are trading so successfully as to make large profits, the individuals involved shouldn’t get a fair share of the benefit? But when the banker puts up a massive black and loses billions, he doesn’t get his house and Ferrari repossessed. Maybe not quite “heads I win, tails you lose”, but certainly “heads I win, tails we’ll call it a draw”. It is this imbalance of risk that very recently got us all into serious trouble.

Additionally, if anyone even thinks about raising the levels of tax which most of them don’t even pay, we’re threatened with a “brain drain”. Do they mean the brain drain caused by our best and brightest graduates being attracted into the financial services industry when what we need is doctors, teachers, engineers and actual entrepreneurs? No, they just mean bankers being tempted to send house prices sky-high in New York or Dubai rather than London, and to wreck someone else’s economy. Well, make my day.

And please, no more of this tired stuff about “the politics of envy”. That line has underpinned gross greed for thirty years, but it’s now past its sell-by. Who could be envious of cokeheads working 18-hour days? The politics of equity, more like, which is not the same thing as equality. Even the Telegraph’s Jeff Randall (no socialist he) has pointed out that bankers are not living in the same world as the rest of us, and this cannot be a good thing. In more refined circles, I call my views “the politics of the Magnificat”. Yes, putting down the mighty from their seat and sending the rich empty away have the explicit endorsement of the Blessed Virgin Herself. So there.

God bless Wales and Nye Bevan

2009-08-05T22:53:00.001-07:00

I’ve just driven back from seeing my sister in South Wales. After about seventy-three cancer operations and more drugs than Amy Winehouse, she is looking fantastic (she isn’t yet 40). She lives in an old pit village in the valley of Nye Bevan and Neil Kinnock. The valleys seem remarkably idyllic; “but what do people do?” my wife asked. Well, a lot of them are retired; many are teachers – they have managed to keep most of the village schools open – and there are quite a few people working in Cardiff or Newport. And no doubt there are many working in social services and suchlike. My sister, being severely disabled and deserted by her husband, does call to a certain extent on social services, but far more on centuries-old community solidarity; she is clearly known and loved. Nye, you may have lost the mines; but your spirit lives and walks in the Sirhowy valley.

Despite the insistence of my satnav that I’d be better off sticking to the motorways, I decided to drive all the way up the Welsh border. First up the valley to Tredegar, to pay my respects to Nye, and to sing “The Bells of Rhymney” to myself through many of the places it mentions. Then through the Brecon Beacons – utterly deserving of their National Park status, up to Presteigne, where we had an extended stop because my wife had spotted an antique shop, which, like all antique shops (or so I am told) contained a genuine Ming Dynasty plate.

Then past the field of Mortimer’s Cross, a turning point in the Wars of the Roses, and Oswestry, where King Oswald of Mercia was killed in 642 in a doomed pagan attempt to halt the Christianisation of England. My wife had lost all faith in my navigation by now, largely because I pointed out each time we passed from England into Wales and vice versa (it got into double figures) and because Marcher villages with their stone churches look remarkably similar: “Look, this is the third time we’ve been through here!” “No it isn’t, darling”. But in my book it beat the M5 and M6, with which I am thoroughly bored.

At one point in A. E. Housman country she asked me (she is Chinese, and we are both well-travelled) what my favourite countryside in the world was. A silly time to ask, and of course I was accused of chauvinistic nationalism. You can’t win, can you?

Will China make its currency convertible? Or would it rather own the United States?

2009-08-03T23:55:00.000-07:00

A report in the Times suggests that China is making serious preparations for internationalising its currency. What does this mean? Well, it may surprise some to hear that the currency of the world’s fastest rising economic power is not formally convertible. You can’t get it at Thomas Cook’s. You’re not allowed to take it out of the country. (Don’t grass me up, but I’ve got 106 renminbi in my wallet. Sod all in sterling, though.) A few years ago a Chinese friend entrusted me with a brown envelope containing £15,000 in Hong Kong dollars to give to her sister who was getting married in Clacton-on-Sea – she couldn’t think of any other way to do it.

International trade in the gazillions, and you can’t exchange currencies except at the Bank of China. It seems bizarre, but just possibly China is poised to throw off the shackles and let the renminbi sink or swim. Hong Kong, in particular, hopes to make use of its semi-detached status to establish itself as China’s offshore renminbi trading centre.

But we should hold our horses. Most Chinese I speak to cannot see this happening for a long time. For China to release control of currency exchange rates would probably be a step too far; partly because they don’t like releasing control of anything, and partly because they are conscious that their safety-first approach serves as insulation. China took only a limited hit in the economic convulsions of 2008: the export trade was badly damaged, but the internal market remained buoyant; the big cities are booming and consuming like anything. And they are aware that this was largely thanks to their protection from the wilder excesses of the West’s casino banks.

Yes, the non-convertibility of their own currency does mean they are forced to maintain massive dollar reserves; but they are in no hurry to replace the dollar with the renminbi as a reserve currency. It would look good: but they can live with massive holdings of US Treasuries, warming their hearts with the thought that democratic (small “d”) irresponsibility is fast turning the USA into a wholly owned subsidiary of the PRC.

BA's financial crisis: the axe of fate couldn't have hit a more deserving target

2009-08-02T11:58:00.000-07:00

“Schadenfreude” is a magnificent word for a not very nice sentiment. But sometimes you can’t help feeling that the axe of fate couldn’t have hit a more appropriate target. I refer, of course, to the current severe financial problems at British Airways.

They tell us that their problems are caused by the collapse of “business travel” following recent economic shenanigans; they are more affected by this than other airlines, it seems, because their “business model” has always concentrated predominantly on “front end” travellers, i.e. those in fat-cat and corporate-zombie classes. Too right it has, as anyone who has travelled in their deep-vein-thrombosis class has always known. BA has always been notorious for its utter unconcern for these people, who are generally the only passengers who have paid for their own tickets.

We know who you are and where you live. We remember how you tried to de-British yourselves – no doubt to appease rich American Anglophobes – with the the redesign of the tailfin to replace the red white and blue with some multicoloured primitivism (O for a three-year old with a box of crayons – I’d make a fortune). Don’t come crying to us when it all goes pear-shaped.

But most of all we’ll remember the total contempt for the rank and file. My personal last straw occurred when my 15-year-old son was left stranded at Heathrow after his flight was cancelled, with no information whatsoever available on what would happen next, within an hour of the midnight airport closure. You and I would know that, if we were left flat, we could check into a hotel with a credit card and sort it out in the morning. You can’t do that when you’re 15. In the end we told him to find someone in a uniform and cling to them like a limpet, and eventually they sorted him out. They still lost his luggage, though.

There are better airlines around. Some of them remember that they’re ultimately reliant on the ordinary paying customer.

China is planning to increase tax on alcohol. The workers will not like this at all

2009-08-01T09:21:00.000-07:00

The China Daily, that great wielder of the sword of Truth, has issued a dire warning to the unregenerate. From today the government is increasing the taxation on high-powered alcohol.

I’ve been waiting for them to do something like this for years. Chinese firewater (alcohol content 50 per cent plus) is astonishingly cheap. Yes, all right, the cheap stuff is very horrible indeed, but there can be few cheaper countries for the unfussy to get banjaxed. Beer, likewise, is jolly reasonable when free of bar mark-ups. How come they’ve never tapped this potential source of revenue?

The answer is obvious, given a little thought. The Soviets never dared to mess too much with the price or supply of vodka. China is not much different; like Russians, the Chinese will put up with a lot, provided they have access to misery’s best-known antidote. And the drinks of the Chinese working class are beer and rough grain spirit. They have to be kept accessible. I remember visiting a village in the far north-east circa 1990: I remarked that the village shop’s stock appeared to be 75 per cent booze. “Yes”, they told me. “Up here, we only have four months a year for agriculture, and we work very hard for that time. From September to May it’s too cold to work: we just lock ourselves in and play cards and drink.”

The alcohol taxation system has hitherto been rather peculiar: a low-level flat tax on all spirituous liquors, plus an additional ad valorem tax, i.e. one levied on the price of the drink rather than on its content. This enables the government to raise revenue from the top end of the market while leaving the bottom end more or less alone: impeccable socialism. As it happens, demand elasticity is more or less infinite at the top end, where the most prestigious stuff costs sixty quid a bottle: rich Chinese are happier when things are expensive, as it facilitates showing off.

However, the proposed tax changes relate to the flat tax, not to the ad valorem element, which is clearly working fine. An analyst quoted by the China Daily suggests that the liquor companies’ profits will be squeezed by 15-20 per cent. He hasn’t quite got capitalism, has he? You don’t let a tax increase squeeze your profits, you pass it on to the customer. So, it looks like a price hike, small in absolute terms but quite significant percentage-wise, on the cheap hooch which keeps the workers happy. I wonder how this will play in the rust belt.

What can China do about climate change?

2009-07-30T10:31:00.000-07:00

A Greenpeace report has now revealed, to the surprise of no one, that the awakened industrial giant of China is a colossal creator of carbon emissions. China’s three biggest power firms (Huaneng, Datang and Guodian) allegedly produced more greenhouse gas emissions last year than the whole of Britain.

Greenpeace have warned that inefficient plants and the country’s heavy reliance on coal are hindering efforts to tackle climate change. Well, this can hardly be disputed. The question is what can realistically be done about it.

The “developmental” arguments are well known: China has such an enormous population that per capita emissions are still comparatively low, even if the country as a whole is king of the toxic fumes. And China came late to the party: much of the problem was caused by Western countries who are now enjoying the fruits of the prosperity which brought the pollution, and why should China be responsible for taking out the garbage when she didn’t even get any cream cakes?

It is not the case that China simply doesn’t care. Since 1990 China has been taking environmental issues increasingly seriously. The problem is integrating them with the developmental imperative. When you have 1.5 billion people to feed and keep employed, you can hardly be blamed for making that your first objective. When Greenpeace say that China should introduce green taxes on coal and carbon emissions, they aren’t responsible for the unintended economic consequences. The Chinese are. These things are devilish difficult to predict.

Renewables are everybody’s favourite baby, and on the face of it China should be well positioned; hydroelectric power is already a big thing in the South, and anyone who’s stood in a Beijing street in the spring with half the Gobi Desert blowing into their face will see prospects for wind power. And of course nuclear energy is potentially the biggest renewable of all (there is no political penalty for saying these words in China, unlike, say, in Germany).

Here the problem is that, when Greenpeace talk about inefficient plants, they aren’t joking. And mining accidents claim several thousand lives a year in China. Things are not always done properly, and when a safety inspector calls he is likely to be greeted with a brown envelope and a bottle of Johnnie Walker rather than a proper account of procedures strictly adhered to. Now extrapolate that to an expanding nuclear industry…

Yes, China needs to reduce its dependence on coal. But please, Greenpeace, don’t be too prescriptive on which levers to pull – it won’t do any good. China has excellent economists, who have nobly resisted the temptation to throw their hands up in despair at the extraordinary complex of problems facing the country. They’ll work that out for themselves. The answer to climate change is the same in China as it is anywhere else; technological development, and the structuring of incentives so that prosperity and environmental concerns can be combined. I drive a low-emission car, not because I’m a green hero, but because it saves me money. Take it from there.

China puts a Uighur Christian on trial. Will that keep Al-Qa'eda happy?

2009-07-27T20:17:00.000-07:00

I referred a few days back to the reports that Al-Qaeda and similar groups might be targeting China as a result of the murderous ethnic riots in Xinjiang, and wondering how the Chinese Government might respond. Well, now we know.

A trial begins tomorrow. Predictably, a Uighur stands before the court. His name is Alimujiang Yimiti. Is he accused of running amok and slaughtering Han Chinese in the turmoil earlier this month? No – not even the Chinese can pin that on him. He has been in custody for the last 18 months. And he’s not even a Muslim – he’s a Christian. As usual, his wife and mother have been told by authorities that they will not be allowed to attend.

Although the general assumption is that his crime is bearing Christian witness among the Uighurs, he will be charged with “revealing State secrets”. Well, we are invited to reflect, that’s pretty serious. It’s hardly a sign of tyranny – you get prosecuted for that over here. The problem is that, under Chinese law, any information which has not been specifically released by the government’s information office is a state secret. The great dissident Wei Jingsheng got 15 years in 1979 for revealing that China was fighting a war with Vietnam, although many Chinese families had already found this out the hard way.

Chinese law is useful like that: most of the really severe laws from the Mao era have never been specifically repealed, only selectively applied. Until recently (and I would guess it’s still the case) it was illegal to have sex outside marriage, which has frequently come in useful when persecuting off-message Chinese or blackmailing their lovers.

But back to Mr Yimiti. Heaven knows what he might have revealed – probably that it’s hot in Xinjiang in summer – but the timing of his trial comes in very useful. The Chinese leadership can make it clear that they’re not against Muslims – “honest, Osama, we’re not ” – but just against Uighur troublemakers, who, it is implied, are quite likely to be Christians – and Christians who try to convert Muslims! “Come on, Osama, you can’t blame us for that!”.

Maybe that might keep Al-Qaeda off their backs in North Africa. Either way, it’s nice to be able to sock it to those who oppose the national religion: “There is no god but Mao, and Hu Jintao is his prophet…”

(Hat tip: Christian Solidarity Worldwide)

What to do about North Korea?

2009-07-24T15:21:00.000-07:00

So the US is getting its knickers in a twist about potential nuclear cooperation between North Korea and “Myanmar”, whatever that is. I’m not sure we need to be worrying just yet. The idea of Burma developing an independent nuclear deterrent, whatever help they may get, will remain ludicrous for the foreseeable future. The nation that ought to be worrying is not the USA but China.

The official Chinese position has always been that no country should interfere in the internal affairs of another, and should always deal with the government in power as a genuine representative of the nation. (Taiwan always excepted.) And thus however madly regimes like the North Korean or the Burmese behave, they will always find principled support in Beijing.

But for some time now North Korea has been stretching China’s tolerance to the limit. Their horrible regime causes endless tension on the peninsula and a permanent refugee problem in North-East China; and the nuclear games might at some point release a deeply undesirable genie in the form of Japanese nuclear defence. So far the Burmese dictators have retained Chinese goodwill by standing for stability; but they had better not rock the boat too far. There are plenty of Chinese thinkers who realise that a free Burma and a united Korea are ultimately a better bet in terms of stability, as both would be dependent on good relations with China.

And the future of North Korea is clearly China’s call, if only for geographical reasons. Sooner or later they will have to grasp the nettle: a responsible world power can no longer maintain this “all governments have equal rights” position. They will have to abandon all that and put an end to this ghastly regime, if it doesn’t collapse first on the death of the Dear Leader. And let’s hope that the Rangoon junta comes down with them.

Three rather different anniversaries

2009-07-20T21:07:00.000-07:00

Not unnaturally, the press today has been full of the 40th anniversary of the moon landings. I remember them well; the geeky nine-year-old Collard hoovering up every detail and simply taking over the lesson from the elderly primary teacher when she tried to raise the subject. And then so much disappointment, when all that heroic effort didn’t seem to be leading anywhere except to more and spiffier military technology (though I do remember that non-stick pans came into it somewhere, and I don’t mind those).

Hardly a mention (outside Germany) of the concurrent 65th anniversary of the assassination attempt on Hitler in 1944. Under the circumstances that was hardly less heroic, although it failed. (I don’t normally have much time for suicide bombers: but if Stauffenberg had stayed in the bunker and made sure no one moved his briefcase, he’d have slotted Hitler while only shortening his own life by twelve hours.)

I respect the Germans’ desire to celebrate a Resistance hero whom all can agree upon, though I can’t help reflecting that there were others who didn’t need eleven and a half years to discover that the Führer was a nasty piece of work. As one of Tiberius’ victims in I, Claudius said, “You remind me that mankind needs its sense of smell”. One of my favourite German authors, Jochen Klepper, tried as a loyal German to play along, stay in Germany and sit it out, until he realised that he was not going to succeed in saving his Jewish wife and stepdaughter from the gas chambers: and so all three committed suicide. It is a fatal weakness of conservatism, which is not of course to deny that some on the Left have behaved no better.

And lastly: 75 years since we last beat the Aussies at Lord’s. Now that performance by the injury-ravaged Freddie Flintoff is a piece of heroism we can all identify with.

China in Africa: maybe it's only money

2009-07-18T22:07:00.000-07:00

I was speculating what the Chinese were up to in Africa the other day. It seems like the answer might be quite mundane: filling the pockets of the nomenklatura.

Unfortunately, wicked post-colonialist ideas of press freedom may have tripped them up, as the Namibians have arrested three people over a corruption scam involving a company managed by Hu Haifeng, the son of President Hu Jintao, and it has got all over the local media (as well as The Daily Telegraph). It seems that Chinese government finance for airport security scanners has been diverted to a dodgy company offering “consultancy services”, whose three leading figures, two Namibians and a Chinese, are now in the slammer.

I had assumed that the Chinese could work well in Africa because both sides understand the culture of the well-hidden kickback. It seems not.

President Hu’s son’s role in all this is unclear. We should not necessarily read anything into the widespread belief that many large Chinese companies function as invisible money-funnels for the children of the leadership – the “princelings’ faction” as they are known. But corruption is increasingly a cause of resentment and social unrest within China, and so outsourcing it to Africa might appear a clever idea. So long as you don’t get caught; perhaps Namibia could use some Chinese advice on controlling the press.

The director of Namibia’s Anti-Corruption Commission, Paulus Noah, says he would like to question Nuctech’s management, including Mr Hu – though the latter is “not a suspect at this stage”. I would advise him not to hold his breath.

“I would like to know how they do business in China,” Noah says. Much the same as presidents’ sons do it anywhere else, I would imagine.

Satellite TV is turning cricket from a national sport into a minority interest

2009-07-17T14:08:00.000-07:00

Another Ashes series, and cricket acquires the highest profile it can achieve in this country. No one with the slightest interest in cricket is ignorant of who holds the Ashes. And yet the sport’s profile is worryingly low. Yes, these one-day competitions can raise a momentary thrill, but we’ve forgotten who won them within five minutes.

The decision to sell coverage of home Tests to the highest bidder in 2006 has been predictably disastrous. Yes, Sky coverage and commentary are generally top-notch, but the lack of cricket on terrestrial TV has allowed it to fall out of the national discourse. It simply hasn’t been possible to bring my sons up in the reverent faith with which my father imbued me. And the economics of satellite TV have made things worse. Twenty years ago, wherever one went in a town centre there were little knots of blokes enjoying a brief respite from shopping misery in front of a window-display TV. Now, as I found on a recent visit to London, one can’t find the cricket anywhere. If you’re on your own patch, you might know a pub which shows it. But on your travels, you find that most pubs don’t bother, as the satellite rights are expensive, and cricket no longer figures sufficiently in the national discourse to make it worth acquiring them. No terrestrial coverage leads to no satellite coverage either.

Not really worth a major whinge. Just one more harmless pleasure buggered up. Thank you, 21st century.

China and Islam: this could get ugly

2009-07-17T12:21:00.000-07:00

The internal ructions in Xinjiang, where Han Chinese and Muslim Uighurs have been at each others’ throats, have attracted the attention of the brave boys of Al-Qaeda. For their crimes against Muslims, the cavemen say, China can expect direct retaliation.

A few years ago this wouldn’t have mattered, as China could be pretty confident of keeping its local Muslims under control. No Abu Hamzas there – they wouldn’t last five minutes. But now there are groups of Chinese officials, specialists and workers all over Africa on the aid trail, and Al-Qaeda’s presence in the north of the continent is palpable.

Al-Qaeda, of course, are a bunch of obnoxious blowhards. But there are plenty of dangerous people who might have been given ideas by this new call to arms. And Chinese in Africa are a high-visibility target. This could get ugly. And the people for whom it will get ugliest are the poor old Uighurs of Xinjiang, who will get the blame simply for being the nearest Muslims the PRC can get its hands on.

A Chinese newspaper for Africa

2009-07-16T15:26:00.000-07:00

With the Chinese presence in Africa expanding all the time, it is nice to know that the chaps aren’t short of reading material. Chinese entrepreneur Miles Nan, who has been beavering away in Botswana for ten years, has just started a Chinese newspaper for his exiled compatriots. It is called Chinese Expats’ Weekly, or, in more mellifluous English, the Oriental Post. It ensures that they are kept acquainted with the official view from home, and not flummoxed by confusingly diverse opinions on the issues of the day.

Though the Chinese Embassy deny any involvement on the editorial side, Mr Nan knows which side his bread is buttered: “Concerning Chinese politics, we shouldn’t, and we don’t, publish anything and everything. It’s just like that.” It is indeed.