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Prince Charles should be seen, but not heard
The Crown long ago exchanged power for survival. That was the bargain it struck with the forces of populism, meritocracy and democracy
ON MAY 17 this year, for the first time in my life, I was overcome by a moment of republican feeling. It was the day when the Prince of Wales broadcast his Royal View of the Reith lectures on sustainable development, and attacked biotechnology, genetically modified crops and the amoral forces of what he called scientific rationalism.
It wasn't simply that I disagreed passionately with his views, though I did. It wasn't that most distinguished scientists strongly disagreed with them, though they did. It was that he aired them at all. It seemed to me quite improper for him, whatever his views, to enter this debate, in which there are so many powerful and conflicting public interests; it seemed even worse for him to take a position on agricultural development which is entirely at odds with the policy of Her Majesty's government. It struck me as unconstitutional, or if not unconstitutional exactly, then alarmingly insensitive to the subtle agreement between Crown and people.
The Crown has survived in this country because it long ago accepted a purely symbolic, ceremonial role. It exchanged power for survival, but also retained considerable discreet influence. That was the bargain it struck with the forces of populism, meritocracy and democracy. It was a very good bargain from the point of view of the country, though no doubt it must have been very frustrating from the point of view of the Royal Family. Still, they were mindful that worse things happened elsewhere; in the early 20th century, they were so alarmed by what was happening to the Romanovs, and by how catching it might be, that they were unwilling to allow them refuge here. The whole thing is very odd, but it has worked.
The Queen has honoured the bargain in a wholly admirable way. There can hardly be a republican in the country who does not admit that, and admire her for her devotion to duty and for her discretion. The silly and spiteful suggestion of Mo Mowlam that the Queen ought to leave Buckingham Palace for something smaller and more modern was so much at odds with what most people feel that the Prime Minister had to slap her down - Mo Mowlam, I mean, though one does sometimes wonder what the iconoclastic Tony Blair truly wants.
However, it struck me very forcibly, on the evening of May 17, that the Prince may not really understand the bargain; perhaps he simply doesn't accept it. Either way that would be bad news for the Royal Family. What he chose to say on this very important subject was immensely controversial, intellectually, financially and politically, and it will probably have very considerable influence; I found myself, to my own astonishment, asking by what right he was saying anything at all. He has no claim, apart from his position as the Heir Apparent, on our attention, and that very position obliges him, surely, not to claim our attention on contentious matters like this. This has nothing to do with his rightness or wrongness, his merit or lack of it, or his knowledge of the subject or how passionately he may feel about something. All that is irrelevant. It seems to me a great pity that he does not seem to see this; it undermines the many excellent things he has achieved, and I suspect in the end it might undermine the future of the Royal Family.
Prince Charles was not alone in this particular indiscretion. The Duke of Edinburgh and the Princess Royal soon followed him into the fray, but on the opposite side, making strongly worded public statements in favour of GM crops, and - at the same time - making a painful spectacle of family disunity. It seems that they don't quite realise how delicate their situation is. If the Royal Family doesn't always know how to be royal, how can the public always be royalist?
My suspicion is that many people, and especially young people, are less and less royalist at heart. For one thing, they are less and less interested, either way. The editors of The Sun and of the Daily Express have suggested that the greatest threat to the Royal Family is indifference; pictures of pop and sport celebrities are better movers of newspapers than Royal photographs, even of Prince William. Mo Mowlam's mean-spirited attack, from the heights of her residence in Admiralty Arch, was clearly too republican for most people - or the Prime Minister would not have intervened - but there are many people, and conservatives too, who no longer have particularly positive feelings about the Royal Family. And, apart from one's feelings, the intellectual arguments for royalism, though good, are rather depressingly negative.
The Daily Telegraph is probably not a paper in which one needs to rehearse them. They have to do with respect for tradition, and for a tradition which has served the country well, however odd a hereditary monarchy might seem to meritocrats and egalitarians in a contemporary democracy. They have to do with a fear of overturning tradition with nothing better in mind; indeed, the alternatives to monarchy are all worse. They have to do with fear of unnecessary, unthinking change, and the laws of unintended consequences; with the need for something that endures, when so much changes. But none of this amounts to much of a rallying cry, not in a country where the Prime Minister's wife refused pointedly to curtsy to the Queen in public. The idea of the monarchy is hard to defend, as was the House of Lords, though I do wish to defend it.
I find it hard to defend, to myself, sometimes. Possibly because I am half American, I find the hereditary principle rather awkward. It does not worry me personally in the very least that some people inherit great wealth or, in the past, a seat in the House of Lords; on the contrary, I find hypocritical envy, of the sort betrayed by the Labour Cabinet, as they wallow in their new-found privileges - one has only to say Lord Irvine's wallpaper - wholly contemptible, and completely pointless. What's more, I feel that the Lords and the Royal Family have held the country, and its sense of itself, together in far more powerful, subliminal ways than one can easily express. But I do feel that those who inherit their position, like the Prince of Wales, are different from the rest of us, and must respect that difference. The Royal Family and the Prince of Wales have great privileges as well as their duties. Most people have to compete for wealth, land, status and the company of the most interesting people in the country; Prince Charles has acquired all those things by birth. He cannot expect to have the privileges of a commoner as well, including the greatest of all, which is free speech; that way lies meritocracy, and that way lies republicanism.
The Daily Telegraph | Friday, June 30, 2000 | Comments (0)
We must put the world back into perspective
Things that are unimportant are treated with just as much shock, horror and airtime as things that really do matter
O NE of the consolations of maturity, supposedly, is a sense of perspective. The woods apparently begin to sort themselves out from the trees. Things that really matter in life start to stand out in sharp focus in the foreground, things that matter less fade into softer focus in the middle distance, while the things that are not really important at all disappear towards vanishing point.
That is the idea, at least. That is what the grown-up view is supposed to be - the ability to prioritise, in management speak. Yet what strikes me constantly, as I glumly try to follow the news, is how little sense of perspective there seems to be. Things that are relatively unimportant are treated with just as much shock, horror, sanctimonious indignation and airtime as things that really do matter, if not more. I don't mean particularly to attack the Government, though it is always a pleasure as well as a duty to do so; I think this strange lack of perspective is very widespread, and has little to do with party politics.
Examples are legion. Perhaps the most striking one this week has been the Government's Body Image jamboree. Leaving aside both the glaring question of what business women's body images could possibly be of any government, and the low-level dowdiness of the whole debate anyway, there are so very many more important matters for ministers and apparatchiks to deal with. The whole "summit" - smoked salmon and croissants and all - was a scandalous waste of their time and of our money. There are so very many burning and expensive problems to deal with in the NHS alone that it seems to me almost wicked so frivolously to waste national resources on a such contentious and intractable subject - one, incidentally, which has been ceaselessly, exhaustively discussed for years, without the need for any prompting from the New Labour thought police.
On the same day, an official document was leaked about a decision to stop prescribing beta interferon for people suffering from multiple sclerosis, partly because it is so expensive. The NHS is crying out for money for sick people, yet the Government, in a blaze of smug publicity, feeds fatty croissants to women worried about their weight. Tessa Jowell, the minister for women, is actually making the Broadcasting Standards Commission count the number of thin and fat women on television.
One cannot exactly blame the Government for this idiotic lack of perspective; it simply reflects and panders to it, and would not have had this daft hoolie unless it had felt confident that public opinion was with it.
There's exactly the same lack of proper priorities in public attitudes to hunting. It may be that most people do not really care much about hunting one way or another, but I'm afraid there are probably enough very vociferous activists around to bully people out of their benign apathy. The Government, that weathervane of the winds of silly orthodoxies, is about to have another go at hunting with hounds, so yet more time, indignation and money will be wasted on this relatively unimportant subject.
For it is unimportant, except to those who hunt. The brief agony of a few foxes is nothing, in the great scheme of things, compared with the extended misery of children in violent families or in council care, or of children prostituting themselves on the streets or leaving school as illiterate, self-destructive thugs.
The anti-hunting activists, in their righteous zeal to stop the sport of a few supposed toffs, do not stop to think what is being done to their own sports - to most people's sports. The rate at which school playing fields are being closed and sold off is a far greater scandal than the death of a few wild animals; it is a very great loss to the country's children, and to national sports generally. It is also directly contributing to obesity and teenage crime; young people need violent exercise.
Why don't the activists forget blood sports and put their formidable energies and indignation at the service of children's sports? If they are overwhelmed by the need for physical violence occasionally, why don't they leave hunt followers alone and beat up members of the local education authorities who are responsible for robbing the nation's children?
The brief suffering, such as it may be, of pheasants or grouse is as nothing to the extended, degrading misery of men and women in Britain's more disgraceful prisons; yet we know which arouses more public outrage and genuine personal passion. I have not yet read of organised groups of the righteous going out in vans to attack people who mistreat prisoners, though there are plenty who will risk prison for the sake of a fox or two.
The rearing of game birds, or even - too wicked to contemplate - the deliberate feeding of foxes for the chase, has aroused deep expressions of horror and many headlines recently; yet the factory farming of millions and millions of chickens and pigs, in unspeakable, drawn-out wretchedness seems to be of hardly any interest at all. And those few who do take up the cause of creatures cooped up day and night in battery farm conditions do so not on behalf of human prisoners but on behalf of poultry.
These nonsenses are not simply aspects of the British obsession with animals; they're examples of a much wider lack of perspective, which tends, unerringly, to select the wrong priorities. In universities, for example, a great deal of energy goes into ensuring that people avoid "offensive" language; Stockport College in Manchester has now banned the use of various expressions, including "man in the street", "normal couple" ("how do you define `normal?'," they ask) and "history" - "which some find sexist". Not herstory, presumably.
Clearly preaching is considered a higher priority than teaching. No wonder, with all this pettifogging attention to language, which doesn't matter, university standards of English actually plummet, and more and more remedial courses have to be set up. And we think we must put up with this!
At the same time, the words people actually use become more and more shocking and incoherent; the drive for politically correct language has coincided, in my experience, with a huge rise in offensive language, not least among educated young people. In the same way, endless right-on talk of respect for other people has coincided with a growing disrespect for other people's feelings. The Prime Minister once notoriously said that Britain is a young country; that is nonsense, of course, but such an old country seems, in its many lapses of perspective, to be showing surprising signs not of youth but of immaturity.
The Daily Telegraph | Friday, June 23, 2000 | Comments (0)
Putting Blair's name to a faceless enemy
It was deeply heartening, in this time of dishonest blather about what's happening in Britain, to see 10,000 women refusing to be bamboozled
WHEN William Hague was challenged to name names of members of the liberal elite, which he feels has done so much to damage this country, he replied that he knows one when he sees one, rather as one recognises an elephant when one sees one. Perhaps he should have said dinosaur rather than elephant, but we know what he means. All the same, dreadful though they are, those members of this so-called liberal elite - one thinks, faint with rage, of Margaret Hodge, Lord Irvine, Baroness Blackstone, Alastair Campbell, Baroness Jay, Lord Alli, and their arrogant blindness - they have not been in power for very long; they have been a political elite for a mere three years. Besides, one can hardly call them liberal. They are, on the contrary, most illiberal, insensitive and authoritarian, and in many ways very old-fashioned in their thinly-veiled paternalism.
Somehow, I feel, in his search for an explanation for what has gone wrong in this country, the finger Mr Hague points at this so-called liberal elite, and at liberal elitist individuals within it, is slightly misdirected. Partly, of course, there is a problem with language. The word liberal, despite many years of abuse, is still a good word, meaning, to me at least, generous and tolerant. By some curious transmogrification, it may have come to suggest guilt-ridden, sybaritic statist, or patronising suburbanite posing as metropolitan chic, but it hasn't yet lost its wider, better meaning. The word elite, too, is a good word; we need elites and it is inevitable that they should spring up among the ambitious. The real problem in this country - and it is by no means new or peculiar to the New Labour regime - has not much to do with liberal elites, or individuals at all, but with some very insidious, pervasive ideas, now well-established throughout public service and political culture. These ideas had their roots in liberalism perhaps, but they have mutated into a most illiberal orthodoxy.
Of course, ideas are held by people, and if I were challenged to name someone in the grip of this orthodoxy, I would point to the faceless, nameless employee of a Walsall Jobcentre, who talked such well-meaning nonsense in the name of this ideology that it actually hit the national press this week. This person told Jason Pitt, a publisher trying to place an advertisement for a management trainee in the Jobcentre, that he must not use the words "enthusiastic and hardworking" because they might be seen as discriminatory under the Disability Discrimination Act. A spokesman for the Jobcentre later said the word "reliable" was also unacceptable, because it, too, might discriminate against the disabled. When this extraordinary story hit the news, there was a flurry of disclaimers from all concerned, and great harumphings from people who felt insulted.
However, this kind of nonsense is not really very unusual, as the disclaimers tried to suggest. It is merely one of the few glaring examples to come to public attention of a mentality which is rampant in the state sector, and slowly being forced upon the private sector. In the name of disability rights, or equal opportunities, or respect for the underprivileged, or race and gender grievances, or job protection, or job creation, a great mountain of legislation, requirements, guidelines and general bossiness has been thrown up. In its intimidating Kafkaesque shadow, ordinary employees are frightened out of their common sense into following rules they cannot understand, and even, in their anxiety, rushing beyond what is required into the realms of pure nonsense. In their fear of getting some procedure wrong, they lose track of what they're actually trying to do: process supersedes outcome, if I've got the jargon right. Only obeying orders: like the anonymous official in the Walsall Jobcentre. This is the enemy of the people that William Hague should have been pointing at, but it doesn't have a face.
It hardly needs arguing yet again that this is the enemy without an identity that has infiltrated Britain's schools and stopped teachers teaching children how to read, write and behave themselves. This is the faceless enemy, with so many different faces, that has undermined the teaching of history, and dried up this country's folk memory. This same enemy has kept children in need of adoptive parents without a home but in abysmal council care, has intimidated and demoralised the police out of doing their job, and has turned the mentally ill and the mentally handicapped out into a non-existent community, to take their chances when the money runs out, and wants ethnic audits at art galleries. You can see this faceless face everywhere, behind every new loony, expensive unrealistic time-wasting target or outreach or goal. It is the enemy of common sense.
You cannot achieve anything in this country without taking on this monster. Tony Blair knows this perfectly well. That's what he meant, I imagine, when he complained of scars on his back - they were inflicted by this very same mutant - but so powerful is the beast that he had to apologise at once. He can't or won't take it on. I don't think he himself suffers from the liberal guilt on which the monster feeds and grows, but there are too many votes to be lost by fighting it.
So he is left with mouthing platitudes about responsibility and community, as he did at the Women's Institute conference on Wednesday. If Mr Blair doesn't yet realise he can't actually deliver anything beyond empty promises, other people do, starting with those wonderful women. There was something deeply heartening, in this time of sentimental and dishonest blather about what's happening in Britain, in the sight of 10,000 women refusing to be bamboozled, and giving the man a slow handclap. For the first time in my life I felt a very powerful sense of sisterhood. What a day it was.
This was a great political victory. It was not a party political victory; the Women's Institute is very clear in its refusal to have anything to do with party politics. But I think it is the beginning of a shift in power in this country, the beginning of a turning against the cynicism and ineffectuality of this Government, and the last government, in dealing with what matters most to most people - education and health and crime. The People, in the unlikely form of the Women's Institute, are beginning to rise up against empty, populist promises, and the nameless orthodoxy which manages to ensure that they are always empty.
The Daily Telegraph | Friday, June 09, 2000 | Comments (0)
After matron, there's an NHS to save
Alan Milburn apologised for the incompetent timing of his `census'. I don't think he has apologised for the waste of half a million pounds
M Y DEPARTMENT of Health questionnaire seems to have got lost in the post. I mean the one that the Health Secretary has sent out to millions of people, in a so-called national "census", asking what to do about the National Health Service. Mine simply hasn't arrived. I suppose that's hardly surprising: Alan Milburn seems to have been having a lot of trouble with the post on this occasion, imposing a deadline for replies which neither the Post Office's Freepost system nor the 12 million respondents could seriously hope to meet.
The deadline was supposed to be June 5 - next Monday. Even had everyone been able to meet it, the apparatchiks and spin doctors cannot seriously have intended to digest 12 million proposals between June 5 and June 15, when the findings were supposed to have been presented to the committee preparing the Government's huge, radical, exciting new National Plan for the NHS. And guess how long before the radical new National Plan will be published? About four weeks. In July. No longer 24 hours to save the NHS, as we were told three years ago, but now almost a month, and they are still asking strangers what on earth to do.
No one has been fooled this time. Mr Milburn has had to apologise both for the desperately incompetent timing of his "census", and for its muddled wording. I don't think he has apologised for the waste of half a million pounds of taxpayers' money, but then why should he strain at a gnat? However, despite this lack of apology, and despite my lack of an invitation, I am none the less prepared to offer Mr Milburn my own suggestions, bypassing the postal system.
I am emboldened to do so by the success of my last list of suggestions on this page, about NHS nursing, produced with the help of hundreds of Telegraph readers who know about it, and who also know how to use the post; our central recommendation, to bring back matron (or something like her), now seems to have been adopted; on Wednesday, the DoH confirmed that ministers are considering introducing "modern-day matrons".
So, without apology, here is my own personal list, excluding any more suggestions about nursing:
Abandon an entirely nationalised NHS, free at the point of use. Imitate the French and the Germans, with their mixture of private and public funding and their infinitely better hospitals and happier, healthier patients. All political parties in Britain seem to believe this is politically impossible; however, as a Daily Telegraph leader pointed out yesterday, a recent survey said that 58 per cent of people thought closer collaboration with the private sector would benefit the NHS.
Root out or ignore the resentment within the NHS of the private sector, and make much more use of it for NHS patients. The private sector could hugely relieve the burden on the NHS; even now, if there were no private clinics, NHS waiting lists would immediately double. Bupa estimates that the private sector could take 200,000 more cases a year. Private acute hospitals have 40-50 per cent spare occupancy on any one night. This is semi-privatisation by the back door, and it is already happening. Make more use of it, if denationalisation proper feels too scary.
Closely examine the role of the unions (see resentment, above). It is a reasonable bet that where there are powerful unions, there are major problems. At the same time, do something about the unrealistic, wasteful intransigence of the public sector culture. Start with radically reviewing health care training.
Stop ministers' indignant and illogical posturing about "postcode health care". Postcode variation is an inevitable consequence of devolution. You can have centralised uniformity or devolved local variation, but not both.
Let the best managers manage without undue interference. Labour's natural tendency is to interfere right down to the microlevel - there have been ministerial instructions on ward cleaning. Last week's resignation of top NHS managers is probably the tip of a disastrous iceberg.
At the same time, cut out the management middle man and dump the local health authorities. As with the local education authorities, there is little point in these expensive, time-wasting and unnecessary extra layers of management.
Set up an entirely independent and powerful complaints authority, prepared to discipline and fire incompetent staff.
Despite the enormous cost, bring back tax relief on private health insurance for older people, so unjustly taken away by this Government. This will free many beds in the costliest sector. Give still more tax breaks for private insurance for all age groups.
Make most people pay for their appointments, both with GPs and with hospital consultants. Small sums of pounds 5 or pounds 10 would bring in huge sums. Astonishing numbers currently miss appointments, without warning - though admittedly NHS switchboards are often almost entirely impenetrable. Missed GP appointments waste pounds 151 million a year, missed outpatient appointments cost pounds 140 million, and missed hospital operation appointments cost pounds 300 million.
Copy good practice in getting people to keep appointments, or to call to cancel. Open 24-hour phone lines. Send patients straight from outpatients' consultations to the appropriate surgical ward, to make an appointment in person with nurses.
Train many more doctors and nurses, and pay them all better.
The Daily Telegraph | Friday, June 02, 2000 | Comments (0)
