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Say it again, this time in English
Global Sex by Dennis Altman
Chicago UP, £15.50, 216 pp £14.50 (99p p&p) 0870 155 7222
A good writer ought to be able to avoid jargon, whether academic or pseudo-academic, especially in a book aimed at a popular market. Otherwise the book, whatever its merits, will be a waste of precious reading time.
Global Sex deals with a very important and interesting subject. The process of globalisation may very well have changed our attitudes about sex, perhaps very greatly, and it is important to consider how, and, if so, whether it matters. Yet from the beginning, this book is a hard and unrewarding read; before it reaches any conclusions it has long since lost the reader.
As far as I can understand it, the author - who is professor of politics, sociology and anthropology at La Trobe University in Australia - is searching for a "global sexual politics" which would restrain the painful inequalities and social dislocations brought about by globalisation. But Professor Altman's language is inelegant, peppered with confusing jargon and constantly interrupted with quotations that are often even worse.
What, for instance can be the point of quoting with agreement, as he does, someone who writes like this: "What is new about the modern global system is the chronic intensification of patterns of interconnectness mediated by such phenomena as the modern communications industry and new information technology and the spread of globalisation in and through new dimensions of interconnectedness: technological, organizational, administrative and legal, among others, each with their own logic and dynamic of change"?
Why couldn't he say it more simply himself? This astonishing verbosity serves only to obscure what is blindingly obvious, and to infuriate the reader.
It might hardly seem worthwhile for a reviewer to devote space to a book only to attack it. But I would like to register a protest against this idiom. It seems to have become acceptable in the academic world to write, and in publishing to print, general books on major subjects which are almost incomprehensible to the educated reader. This is partly because lazy, undisciplined writing has, with the fall in general standards of literacy, become acceptable; partly because many of the ideas now current in the academy, as they say, are often extremely tendentious, and the language in which they are expressed is unclear for that reason.
It is a fair bet that the reader is in for obfuscation when someone uses the word "hegemonic". There's not all that much wrong with the word itself, but it became politicised years ago, and is now a useful marker for muddled thinking. "Hegemonic masculinity" is a central idea in this book and in the introduction the author gratefully pays tribute to the writer who defined this phrase as "the con figuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women".
I defy anyone to translate this into plain English. Yet this is the way politicised academics talk these days, and with the globalisation of English, it is probably all too hegemonic.
There are other words which are often markers for this kind of writing. The neologism "gendered", much used here, is one and is equally confusing. What is the general reader to make of the statement, made in passing in this book, that religious "fundamentalism is gendered"? If it has any real meaning, surely it can only be either trivial or extremely complex. Either way the phrase is only comprehensible if you already know what it means, if you are already familiar with the particular jargon of political activism.
There is nothing wrong with having a particular political attitude, and Professor Altman describes his own as neo-Marxist. What's wrong is that an important opportunity to discuss an important subject has been wasted. What's wrong is that there are scores of books like this. People are encouraged to write theses like this. The standard of general debate is gradually lowered. People turn more and more away, frustrated, from verbiage, where they might have found enlightenment. Hardly anyone protests.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, May 27, 2001 | Comments (0)
Gardening (like politics) is the art of the possible
Since this has been the week of the Chelsea Flower Show, and since this has been such a very depressing week in politics, I have decided to cultivate my garden, like Candide.
What else can one do? It certainly has needed cultivating. Until recently - perhaps there are portents here for the political future - my garden has been ugly, unsuccessful and much argued over, until a sudden triumphantly brutal apotheosis, a radical, elegantly simple change of direction.
I am now, suddenly, almost proud of my garden, and could almost have entered it at Chelsea, had it not been for the resistance there to anything truly contemporary. As in the political parties.
Enough of politics. Gardening is supposed to be a consolation and a distraction. My garden is small, shady and not well proportioned. It is not much more than a small weathered brick patio at the back of a Victorian terrace house, surrounded by flower beds on all four sides.
Its great beauty is that it leads out on to a mature communal garden. However, in this big garden and just outside our gate is a very large and lovely weeping cherry tree, which casts dappled and uneven shade all across our little garden, and makes it entirely gardener-proof.
I have ignored this obvious fact for years. I have planted all the wrong things and watched them bolt, wilt or blanch. Some have grown leggy, others have died. Others still have stifled their more delicate neighbours.
This has infuriated me, because I know quite a bit about plants, learnt from my mother. But I have been quite unable to accept the real constraints of my garden - politics again - and have insisted, against all the evidence and against nature, on elaborate romantic schemes that were completely unworkable and worse than useless.
I have not been alone in my folly. In despair I have consulted all sorts of garden designers, some of them rather grand. There is a particularly charming sub-species of the breed roaming our area - the amateur gentleman gardener, often an Old Etonian, who dreams up, at astonishing expense, nostalgic schemes, reminiscent of some long-forgotten herbaceous border in some probably imaginary country seat - and wholly unsuitable for a small city garden. They have been even more unrealistic than me.
Forced back on my own resources, I have welcomed any plants and climbers that have thrived. Hydrangea petiolaris, honeysuckle, Confederate jasmine and the rampant, scented Clematis Armandii have provided us with profuse screens from our neighbours. At one time, I used to grow hardy old fashioned roses over this thicket of climbers.
Nothing else much thrived for long, except uninvited and very welcome weeds, cascades of blue and yellow, and forgotten mint all summer long. I take the view that a weed is merely a plant in an unexpected place, and might well be a good thing. Like the entrepreneur, the weed creates unexpected added value, if not ruthlessly and immediately destroyed by those whose plan does not include it.
To me, this encroaching wildness seemed beautiful, but I understand that others saw it as a mess. In particular, my husband found it unacceptable; hence years of argument. I have come to the view that men are slashers and burners at heart. Where a woman welcomes a new shoot, a man feels an urgent need to cut things back. A man has only to see a tendril of a creeper hanging below the level he had in mind to snip ferociously; nothing must soften the lines of a brick border, or entwine itself somewhere without previous planning permission.
That is why the vandals who call themselves arboriculturalists go about hacking and lopping away, quite unnecessarily, at the form and beauty of trees. Snick snack snorum, high cockalorum, as we used to say as children. Confronted with greenery, a man is not a man, apparently, without a strong pair of secateurs or a chain saw.
Contemporary man is not only an instinctive slasher and burner; he is also aesthetically repressive. A post-modern garden cannot be a pleasant muddle; it must be exclusive, disciplined, thematic. This is hard enough in full sun, but in semi-shade it is a recipe for divorce.
Suddenly, however, all this chaos and confrontation has come to an end. Recently I consulted an Australian gardener, who listened kindly while I listed all the plants that won't grow in mixed shade, and all those that will that I don't like. Finally he asked me what actually does grow there. "Ferns," I replied, grumpily. "Well," he said, "why don't you grow ferns, then?" "Have a fern garden, you mean?" I asked. So we did.
This is about as good as it gets in making a virtue out of necessity; like politics, gardening is the art of the possible. Apart from our screens of clematis, jasmine and hydrangea, we have rooted everything out. No lingering mistakes from the past, no dead weight or dead wood. A new beginning, with what actually works.
Every flowerbed is now full of beautiful ferns. And only ferns; some are our old weeds, others are chosen, and many of them evergreen. We also have three very tall tree ferns, in large metal containers, with delicate 4ft fronds arching in all directions; at this time of year their huge new shoots unfurl themselves exotically. The small ferns below are growing lush new leaves in sharp acid greens, and spilling over into the cracks in the brick work to meet the bright Alchemilla mollis, which has drifted in from somewhere else.
The general impression is a modest, Pooterish echo of Andrew Marvell's great poem about a garden, "annihilating all that's made/ To a green thought in a green shade". Even politics.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, May 26, 2001 | Comments (0)
Bogus friends of asylum seekers
The subject of race, like sex, makes people lose their heads. It makes them emotional and irrational; for that reason it is surrounded with taboos and myths, which make everyone yet more emotional and irrational.
The same applies to political asylum, which has become (for all the wrong reasons) a subset of the subject of race in this country. So we get rage and resentment on all sides, and some rather sanctimonious assumptions. This has made political debate on asylum seekers nasty enough even to arouse people from their election apathy.
I am convinced that the left has been much nastier than the right. The accusations of racism constantly heaped on the right are truly unforgivable. The assumption that, in addressing asylum seeking, William Hague is playing the redneck race card, is libellous. He may be wrong in his policies and he has been embarrassed by a couple of his supporters. But he is no racist, nor is racism any part of Conservatism, institutional or otherwise. I've come to suspect that the explanation for this undue nastiness is that the left feels much more guilt and confusion about asylum than the right.
Whether or not that's so, there is a great deal of confusion around. Take the idea of the genuine asylum seeker. There are endless arguments about who might be bogus, or whether the word should be breathed at all. But most people seem to agree that all genuine asylum seekers ought to be granted a safe haven here. That at least, in all the political muddle, is not problematic - all genuine asylum seekers have the right to stay.
Unfortunately it is nonsense. It would be quite impossible. The world is awash with people in desperate need of political asylum; there are millions of people who suffer prison, torture, violation and civil war, and millions in mortal fear of them. All they lack is transport; if they had it, they would be here on our doorstep and unmistakably genuine.
And if we really wanted asylum seekers, we know where to find them; we could go for a start to the vast refugee camps and gather them up in hundreds of thousands. Of course we don't, partly because we couldn't take them all, and partly - surely - because we don't want them.
There is nothing new about this. We tell ourselves, and in particular the left is given to saying, that this country has a proud tradition of accepting asylum seekers. Well, up to a point. We may have taken a few Kosovans, after a lot of soul searching, but Britain's doors were closed to the Hong Kong Chinese, just as they were to some of the Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism.
There is a lot of hypocrisy in all this, and I think it is a hypocrisy which troubles the internationalist left much more than the nationalist right - I mean the genuine left, as opposed to the bogus New Labour left.
Traditionally the left has felt responsible for the wretched of the Earth, at least in theory. In practice there is no big idea, no sense of what to do, no coherent policy. Those on the left ought to feel angry with New Labour, but seem to find it easier to rant at the Tories.
What we have, meanwhile, is an asylum system which is without any doubt badly abused and badly run. Fewer than one in five of the people who claim asylum here are found to be genuine. The rest can, and do, appeal through the courts for years, at huge public expense, but without success, even though British judges have the loosest definition in Europe of "fear of persecution".
In practice they stay anyway. Very few of those denied asylum are ever deported, and many of them - about 300,000 - have disappeared into the shadowy world of the illegals, discrediting the others. It is a waste and a shame.
Economic migrants are in need too, I admit. They are fleeing misery and deprivation too and, according to Refugee Council figures, published in the Guardian on Monday, many of them are highly employable and highly qualified - rather embarrassingly more so than the British; perhaps that's why they're so good at figuring out the system. And who can really blame them for trying to beat it? But it is grossly unfair to others in much more urgent need. Why should it be so disgraceful and racist to say so?
There is a lot of angry confusion about detention centres too. The Conservatives' new election proposal to build lots more may be un workably expensive, but denunciations about locking up women and children are silly. There's nothing punitive about it; it would protect the genuine applicants.
No genuine asylum seeker would object to it. If you were fleeing from execution or prison or torture, a safe centre, with food, medicine, legal aid and the company of fellow sufferers and perhaps your family, would without a doubt be acceptable, if acceptably run.
It would actually be preferable to being shipped out to a lonely tower block in a grey Midlands town. In fact the willingness to spend a period in a detention centre (and even gratefully) seems to me to be an obvious marker for a genuine political refugee.
The Guardian | Tuesday, May 22, 2001 | Comments (0)
We're angry because things are so awful and no one listens
Those of us with conservative convictions have to take comfort these days from contemplating the bigger picture, the broader view; the immediate prospect is too depressing to think about. So I was enjoying the distraction of a discussion about American conservatism last week, at a conservative think-tank lunch.
Suddenly, to my astonishment, some of my British fellow guests began to predict widespread civil unrest in this country. Civil unrest? Alternative action? The barricades? Violence? That is not the kind of thing the British go in for. Surely our preferred form of protest is apathy, about which we've all been hearing so much. I felt that some of us had got rather carried away: people do, after a good lunch, or during a bad election.
As if to prove me wrong, the very next day - Thursday - was Labour's dies horribilis. Civil unrest was precisely what we saw all over the television news. The so-called gentle Welsh giant, Craig Evans, was driven by fury at the fate of the countryside to throw an egg at John Prescott.
Sharron Storer railed at the Prime Minister about the miseries of the NHS, only to stomp off aggressively without allowing him to speak, making a point of her angry contempt. The Home Secretary was insolently barracked by the Police Federation. How unthinkable that in particular would have been, not long ago. How suddenly it has all emerged.
I don't think it was just the excitement of electioneering, nor did it seem party political. There is a new kind of feeling about all this: I began to suspect that my fellow guests might be right. In retrospect, there has been a growing surge of anger for at least two years. In retrospect, the way in which the WI chose to humiliate the Prime Minister was a clear sign of it. The WI is firmly non-political, and bound more than most organisations by the restraint of good manners. For these women to slow handclap their invited guest was the equivalent of throwing baskets of rotten eggs at the Establishment.
The petrol strike and the Countryside March were even clearer signs of growing resentment; what makes this resentment all the more striking is its incoherence. It is not organised; it is not party political, or class-bound, or tribal; it is not single-interest. All kinds of people with different interests, and indeed with opposing interests, came together, in genuine civil unrest. They were angry and anti in different ways; what they have in common is deep, long-standing frustration and a growing conviction that nothing can be done and that no one can be held to account. Beware the anger of a patient man, as the Bible says.
It is very odd that this feeling should so clearly emerge at a time when the Government is, according to the polls, so immensely popular. It's also very odd that it didn't emerge long ago. It is a mystery why the British have been patient for so long; schools and hospitals and state childcare and prisons and transport and crime have been inexcusably bad for years.
The Conservatives must accept a large share of blame for that. For all their real achievements, they failed to take on the state sector mentality - the old-fashioned, statist mentality that has fought against every reform in public services and that continues to undermine standards everywhere to this day. The Tories couldn't do it, and Tony Blair can't do it either - that's what he meant when he complained of scars on his back.
It is the state sector, largely politician-proof, that controls much of our lives; it is the state sector, and its orthodoxy, that actually dispenses the tax take and the personal services we get. We may think that there has been a revolution in political understanding, and that many services have been taken out of the state sector, but in fact the Thatcher revolution has proved to be quite shallow and quite narrow.
There is endless talk of empowerment, devolution and local democracy, but few people really mean it. For example, the protest on all sides against postcode healthcare is highly illogical, if you believe in local decision-making. Different doctors will make different hard choices and local democracy means local inconsistencies and, therefore, inequalities. However, the state sector orthodoxy cannot tolerate that, and centralisation rules in practice.
There is endless talk of enterprise and creativity, but actually we are more and more impotent; we are more and more restrained by centralised standards, targets and perverse incentives, dreamt up, very often, by quangoes, both here and in Brussels. Because of this, nothing is ever anybody's fault. It is the system - the state - that is to blame, and there is no way to hold either to account. That makes people angry. Or rather, it is at long last beginning to.
People sometimes imagine that this can be easily fixed. Over-regulation can be pruned. Political correctness is just language. Mr Blair imagines, for example, that he can harness private medicine to the state sector to prop up the NHS. But it is not so simple; state dirigisme will suffocate private hospitals, as it already suffocates personal-care charities.
This mentality is extraordinarily deep-rooted; it will take an immense and radical struggle to tear it out. That will take enormous energy and courage, more than any political party appears to have today. Meanwhile, perhaps, there will indeed be more civil unrest in this country.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, May 19, 2001 | Comments (0)
The public sector swamp
Struggling up as best he can from the mire of sleaze around him, the prime minister protests that he, and New Labour with him, must be judged by whether he can deliver. That means delivering on what really matters - on schools and hospitals and social services and crime. The simple answer is that he can't. It isn't that he doesn't want to, or doesn't really mean to. It is simply that he can't. The reason is that he hasn't been able and won't be able to stand up to the public-sector mentality.
Tony Blair may have been able to root old socialist orthodoxies out of the Labour party, up to a point, but they remain powerfully embedded in all the public services that matter. The persistence - the astonishing resilience - of the old, discredited socialist mindset in those services is why they are now at the point of collapse, why our schools and hospitals are an international disgrace, why there's more crime in London than in New York and why the police have just announced that they cannot cope.
Tony Blair did, I believe, at one time think he could stand up to this orthodoxy. What he got were scars on his back, as he complained in an unguarded moment last year; however, so powerful is the state-sector orthodoxy that he had to apologise almost immediately.
After all, a huge number of Labour voters work in the Augean stables that is the state sector, and if they don't want any stuck-up Hercules-come-lately telling them what to do, then he'd better stop. They, in fact, are the real forces of conservatism which hold back the public services, which stifle any criticism and undermine all reform; it is their mentality which is the enemy of the people.
Any mentality must be hard to sum up, obviously enough, but I think that this one was very strikingly personified, about this time last year, by a nameless employee of a Walsall jobcentre. He emerged briefly from obscurity to give a glimpse into the insane, Kafkaesque inefficiency of this mentality.
According to news reports, he told a publisher who wanted to advertise for a trainee in the jobcentre that he must not use the words "enthusiastic and hardworking" in his advertisement, because they might be discriminatory under the Disability Discrimination Act. The jobcentre later said the word "reliable" was also unacceptable, for the same reason.
Where does one begin? That is how NOT to deliver jobs. That is how NOT to deliver employees to employers. That is how, abandoning all common sense, to lose sight of the important priority in hand - getting jobs for people - in pursuit of an entirely different agenda; with the best of all possible intentions, and precisely because of those intentions, that is how to fail completely. And that is how the entire state sector works, or rather doesn't work.
In the name of equal opportunities, or ethnic outreach, or gender grievances, or job protection, or union guidelines or promoting social change, well-meaning people lose sight of what they're really supposed to be doing - tending the sick and old, or catching criminals, say. Instead they must learn the language of "empower ment", only to be deeply confused by it, as in Walsall. Instead their time is taken up with ever-increasing mountains of paper work, which, with the inertia of bureaucracy, diverts yet more time and money and people away from the bedside or the blackboard.
Then ever more money and ever more workers become necessary, to deliver ever more assessments of best practice and quality assurance and training in - yes - equal opportunities, ethnic outreach, job protection, anger management and the whole shemozzle. That, of course, is part of the point; the orthodoxy seeks to entrench and perpetuate itself. And those who don't go along with the orthodoxy often feel shamed and silenced by it; there is a strong element of bullying about it, in my experience.
Pursuing something other than your top priority is doomed to failure. In the private sector it could not happen. That's not to say that the private sector, any more than the public sector, ought to be able to get away with unfair discrimination, against the disabled or anybody else. Nor does it. There is plenty of legislation - arguably too much - to prevent it.
But any private-sector employment agency which behaved so counter-productively as the one in Walsall would go bust immediately; it would have no public subsidies to disguise its uselessness. That is largely why private schools and private
medicine are so astonishingly much better, as anyone with any direct knowledge must admit.
I did for a short time think that the appearance of New Labour might mean the end of this mentality. Not so. Ministers propose, but the state sector only disposes if it feels like it; try changing something in social services, and despair. The idea that public services can only be provided by the public sector refuses to die.
Like the Conservatives, Blair has been unable to drive a stake through its bad old undead heart. It is quite the other way round; the state sector, and the state-sector mentality, will drive a stake through his, and probably before very long. He will be judged by this.
The Guardian | Tuesday, May 15, 2001 | Comments (0)
Voting Labour is a luxury that not everybody can afford
There must be many people thinking of voting Labour who, after the Prime Minister's heart-stoppingly shameless performance under the crucifix at St Saviour's and St Olave's this week, are asking themselves, yet again, whether they really should.
Fresh doubt has been cast. It is my plain duty, though this is an independent Conservative newspaper and I am a convinced conservative, to remind voters that there are indeed many powerful reasons for voting Labour. The imperatives of fair comment and democratic debate have driven me to draw up a list.
If you find social mobility depressing, and want to keep the masses and the middling sort out of the best things in life, vote Labour; Labour tax policies, in penalising the industrious middle classes, but not the rich, will ensure that the "brooks of Vallombrosa" will not be polluted by upwardly aspirational plebs and pooters; they won't be able to afford it.
If you don't care about the suburbanisation of England, or ramblers' rights, because you've got a palazzo in Tuscany (see above), or a Scottish island that ramblers cannot reach, vote Labour.
If you have any old friends from university who are New Labour grandees and who could do you a bit of good, vote Labour. Alternatively, if you've got no New Labour mates, but do have a nice little chateau somewhere (see above), or a smart metropolitan pad, to lend to a few New Labour grandees, vote Labour, and make your good fortune known.
If you have any smart, rich foreign friends in a spot of bother, who need a passport PDQ, vote Labour.
If you want a better chance of getting away with any sailing close to the wind that you might have in mind, vote Labour; the past four years suggest it would be a good bet and Keith Vaz's survival is a hopeful indicator of general Labour standards.
If the thought of European incompetence and corruption do not bother you, because you are getting used to that kind of thing at home, vote Labour.
If you think that Westminster doesn't matter, vote Labour.
If you think that the Queen is getting a bit above herself, vote Labour. If you think, like the Prime Minister's wife, that women shouldn't curtsey to the Queen, and that she should probably be "relocated", as Mo Mowlam suggested, Labour is the party for you.
If you want a chance of getting a few mates without any obvious merit into the Lords, or if you want to get in there yourself, vote Labour. (Note: in this case, there is not much point voting Labour if you genuinely spring from the people; that is not what's wanted.)
If you don't care how bad state schools get, because that will mean less competition from the masses for your privately educated children, vote Labour. If you think that the phrase Excellence for All has a fine, inspirational ring, or indeed any meaning at all, vote Labour; it is Blair's clarion call to state school children, many of whom are still backward and illiterate after four years of Labour rule. Conveniently, that means they won't be offering too much challenge to the life chances of privately educated children such as yours, or Mr Blair's, or Miss Harman's.
If you don't care at all about the collapse of the NHS, because you have plenty of private health insurance, you can afford to vote Labour, especially if you are so rich that you hardly noticed what Labour has actually done to your health insurance.
If you can afford to fly to France or Germany to bypass Britain's state sector queue and get better health treatment, you can afford to vote Labour.
If you have no old or sick or needy friends and family, vote Labour.
Alternatively, if you want a heart-warmingly prestigious post on an NHS hospital trust, vote Labour.
If you cannot understand how private pensions work, or are too rich to care, or to notice how yours has gone down under this Government, vote Labour.
If you don't care about crime, because you live in a rich white ghetto with masses of state-of-the-art security, and are the kind of successful person who excites deference in the police, vote Labour.
If you dislike doctors, vote Labour. Labour gives - and intends to go on giving - them lots of grief.
If you are a recalcitrant state sector union leader, an otherwise unemployable quangocrat, a designer with a special interest in relaunch logos, a local authority placeman, or a lobbyist for ruinously expensive, non-essential EU social services initiatives;
If you think that an obsession with race is a useful smokescreen for incompetence;
If you think that chicken tikka masala is the opiate of the masses;
If you think that government is merely networking by other means;
If you have a bad memory;
Above all, if you're doing well, somewhere up in the top of the tree, and don't mind pulling up the ladder behind you, vote Labour.
It will be seen that voting Labour is a luxury that not everybody will be able to afford. It is a pleasant privilege if you are rich or well connected, combining self-interest with a high moral tone, but it will not suit those of genuine moral principles or delicacy of feeling, or those who feel that hypocrisy and cynicism are best when successfully disguised, those interested in democracy, or anyone in need. Otherwise, a Labour vote is highly recommended.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, May 12, 2001 | Comments (0)
It's painful to be a Tory
Sometimes it's hard to be a Tory. Now that the election is due, gallant Conservative activists are rushing about trying to line up the cavalry against the cannon with all the resolution of despair, but we all know there is very likely going to be a massacre. This may be a very amusing spectacle for Guardian readers, but anyone with Conservative sympathies like me must prepare to bite the bullet.
I don't actually belong to the Conservative party, and never have. I am, none the less, a conservative, with a small c if not necessarily a large one, and I have been writing as a libertarian fellow traveller for the Telegraph papers for more than 10 years. A Labour victory will depress me just as much as the most tireless canvasser in the shires.
It will also astonish me. I simply cannot understand why the electorate has not yet seen through the People's Prime Minister, with his adjustable accent, his adjustable features and his adjustable biography. I cannot see why Labour supporters are not now miserably ashamed of him. I cannot imagine why nothing seems to touch Labour's truly astonishing lead. What would it take? The Conservatives at their worst produced nothing to compare with Robinson, Vaz, Ecclestone, Irvine, the Hindujas, Falconer, Mandelson, the Dome, a House of Lords packed (in the name of democratic reform) with Tony's cronies, and the astonishingly cynical rescue of Phoenix the calf, who rose up ludicrously from the dying ashes of Labour government incompetence and of Labour party morality. And this in only four years.
Perhaps voters don't care. Perhaps they assume all politicians are determined to get their trotters into the top trough, and better our politicians than theirs. This is the Clinton effect: pork and porkies don't matter so long as there is plenty of prosperity.
But even so, there have been all kinds of disasters and promises broken that ought by themselves to have slashed the Labour lead. The NHS is a disgrace. So are most schools and most public transport. Most people with any money pay their way out of public services; continental Europeans can hardly believe how bad they are.
Yet taxes have gone up hugely under Labour, along with government intervention and red tape. This has hit the poorest hardest; the gap between rich and poor is now much greater than when Blair and Brown came to power, productivity is down and savings have collapsed.
Why should all this lead to a Labour landslide? The answer is deeply humiliating. It is not that the voters love Labour - Blair is actually more unpopular than Neil Kinnock and Blair's so-called landslide of 1997 got fewer votes than Major's win in 1992. It isn't even that Hague is so desperately unpopular. It must be that people truly loathe the Conservatives. What's more, quite a lot of Conservatives rather loathe themselves or each other; the Left was never right, we feel, but the Right, though right, has often been rather Repulsive, as in 1066 and All That.
This doesn't matter much in itself, I suppose; we can't all expect to like each other, and life seems to be irredeemably tribal. But I think it matters for this country. Conservatism has saved Britain from ruin. Conservatism gave it the prosperity it now enjoys. Even New Labour saw that and tried to steal its clothes, but has unfortunately not known how to wear them, or keep them on. It would be a great pity if an unthinking loathing for Conservatives, based on old-fashioned stereotypes of hatchet-faced bigots from the shires, and heartless tax avoiders in City suits, were to blind people to the real virtues of Conservatism.
Just as most people have been misled by Mr Blair's bogus charm, most people have been misled by Conservatives' bogus beastliness. It's true we do have some people saying very hard things about standing on your own feet, or getting on your own bike, and a few others saying quite unspeakable things about race. And I find it deeply embarrassing to say I support a party in which Ann Widdecombe is such a star, and in my view so deeply un-Conservative. Conservatism all too often manages to be wearing its most unacceptable face, with a perversity that perhaps explains its reputation as the stupid people's party.
In fact, real Conservatism is for the intelligent. It doesn't offer the easy-to-follow feel-good promises of socialism or of New Labour, as in oxymoronic slogans like Excellence For All. It rests on a complex collection of ideas which are not in themselves very inspiring - realism, compromise, scepticism and the pragmatic pursuit of the least worst in government, with as little government intrusion as possible. It stands for freedom, for its own sake and as a defence against the evils of statism. That is Conservatism.Voters may not want it, but it hardly deserves the astonishing humiliation it is receiving.
The Guardian | Tuesday, May 08, 2001 | Comments (0)
A rough rural ride
A Countryside For All: The Future of Rural Britain ed by Michael Sissons
Vintage, pounds 7.99, 188 pp pounds 6.99 (99p p&p) 0870 155 7222
The publication of this book of essays on rural Britain could hardly be timelier: the countryside, as we now seem to have to call it, is in crisis. Villages are dying and traditional country pursuits face many threats. Farmers are being forced off their land, driven to bankruptcy and suicide; perverse subsidies have distorted food production. Because of intensive farming, unhealthy animals are reared in misery; hedge rows and fens and wildlife and wild flowers are disappearing.
The land itself is vanishing at an astonishing rate under a rising tide of suburban concrete; each year an area of green fields as large as Bristol is lost forever to new buildings. Yet at the same time a landowner cannot fell a wood, grow a crop, graze a sheep, move a footpath, catch a trout or dredge a pond, without permission from bureaucracy.
This has been going on for years, but now the national mind has been powerfully concentrated upon the countryside by the mass execution of harmless beasts. Now we have horrifying visions, following earlier images of cows staggering helplessly under BSE, of piles of millions of rotting pigs and cattle, unburied and unburnt, dripping poisons into the soil and scattering the foot and mouth virus to the winds.
The Government dithers between one indecision and another, culminating in the recent moo-turn, as the tabloids contemptuously called its change of heart about mass slaughter. There is great and growing anger on all sides about all these things.
A Countryside for All brings together some very distinguished contributors to contend with these questions, including Lord Skidelsky, Professor Roger Scruton, Simon Jenkins and Dr Matt Ridley. The editor, Michael Sissons, has said that the book's tone is "moderately right of centre", but it did not seem to me to have any united voice, or any shared political bias, and certainly not about what should be done.
It does seem very odd that the Social Market Foundation, a Government funded think-tank, which originally commissioned this book, should in the end have decided not to publish it, whereupon Vintage hastily did; perhaps this is a sign of this Government's uneasy ineptitude with anything rural, but equally it may be no more than a storm in a disused cattle trough.
Who does the countryside belong to? What is it for? Who may use it? What does it mean to us? Without answers to these obvious questions there can be no solution to the problems of rural Britain. But the difficulty with this immensely complex subject is that there is almost nothing anyone can say that is not contentious, and almost nothing anyone can suggest that is not statist.
Almost all the proposals put forward in this book involve state intervention of one kind or another, which is why this book does not strike me as conservative in spirit. Most of them appear to support abandoning discredited state subsidies for food production, in favour of state subsidies for good landscape maintenance, and for promoting rural community.
It's true there are two very interesting essays, by Matt Ridley and Mark Pennington, proposing denationalisation and deregulation of the land. They are clearly right in their argument that many of the problems in both country and town have been directly caused by constant state intrusion (covert nationalisation) and excessive regulation. But, equally, much of the destruction of rural Britain - and inner-city Britain too - has been due to a lack of planning restraint.
And the idea that the free market and private landowners, even when freed from perverse incentives, could always be trusted to do what is best for the land seems to me to be so obviously untrue as hardly to need denial. Some could, some couldn't. Besides, both authors go on to propose state rewards for good behaviour, so replacing one kind of intervention with another.
There are many interesting discussions in this collection, including an excellent scholarly piece on foot and mouth disease by Abigail Woods, of the University of Manchester. But the most interesting, because the most pressing, must be those which deal with the central question of how (or whether) to stop the country disappearing. There will be little point in arguing about a countryside which no longer exists.
Simon Jenkins makes an impassioned case for putting an absolute stop to building on green fields altogether. Suburbanisation is not inevitable. He argues, like others here, that it is urban decay that has caused rural decay, in the flight from the city, and only regeneration of the cities can save what little is left of Britain's countryside. There is plenty of room for new housing in cities, as Richard Rogers has powerfully argued in Cities for A Small Country.
Michael Sissons proposes a new Department and Secretary of State for the Countryside. This is a radical and impressively well-informed collection of essays.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, May 06, 2001 | Comments (0)
He who must be obeyed
A History of the Wife by Marilyn Yalom
Pandora, £20, 441 pp £18 (free p&p) 0870 155 7222
The history of women as wives is truly astonishing. From the point of view of a little girl growing up in the richer, freer parts of Europe today, the story of what happened to her female forebears will seem almost incredible.
Until very recently in the Western world, wives had in various degrees been bullied, disposed of, beaten, betrayed, mutilated, infected, impregnated, dispossessed, exploited, ignored, insulted, patronised, denied education, unenfranchised and silenced. None the less, they have never been entirely repressible, and often, even in the worst of times, also loved, desired and respected. It is all truly sensational, and Marilyn Yalom's A History of the Wife makes pleasantly sensational reading.
The author has the journalist's knack of reducing an enormous amount of complex and controversial material to something simple and digestible, and, wherever possible, personal. The book is a pudding bursting with little plums of scandal, confession, atrocity and passion. In this sense it is good.
The writer is spoilt for dramatic choice. There is the passionate sexual and intellectual longing of the brilliant Heloise for her husband, the castrated Abelard - a story which is still powerful even in translation after 900 years; there is the stoicism of the Mormon women, and their love for their sister-wives rather than their husbands; there is the resourcefulness of the semi-literate pioneer woman in 19th-century America who wrote a misspelt letter to her friend about the way to get primitive contraception.
There is the persecution and punishment of brave women who tried to defy their lot throughout the ages. But there is also the recurrent tenderness of married love, for example the passionate respect of the French revolutionary scientist Lavoisier, soon to be guillotined, for his clever and beautiful wife, portrayed in the famous painting by Jacques-Louis David.
However, there are far more plums than there is pudding. Perhaps that is just as well, because (as in her recent history of the female breast) when Marilyn Yalom moves from the plum of exciting detail to the pudding of commentary, she displays her lack of critical perspective. "Simone de Beauvoir," she writes, was "right on the mark . . . in her understanding that gender is almost entirely socially constructed, as she phrased it in the now famous statement, 'One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.' "
Of course anyone is entitled to hold the view that gender is socially constructed despite all the evidence to the contrary, but it is highly controversial; to express this view uncritically, as if the matter had been long since settled, in an ambitious and would-be scholarly work on the history of women as wives, is to beg a central question of that history. It is intellectually shallow, or lazy, or both.
Marilyn Yalom does not inspire intellectual confidence. For instance she discusses Alfred Kinsey's famous works on sexuality, which, she says, established a baseline for all future sexologists. What she does not say is that there has recently been scholarly criticism of Kinsey's methods and findings which casts some doubt upon them.
But this is, for better and for worse, popular writing. Only a popular writer, in the worse sense of the word, could begin her final chapter with the sentence "It's no secret that the American wife has been radically transformed during the past half century." It reminds me of the dreadful first sentence of her history of the bosom: "I intend to make you think about women's breasts as you never have before."
Popular writing like this is condescending, presumptuous, inelegant and silly. Fortunately it is also ephemeral.
The Sunday Telegraph | | Comments (0)
If we want to hear nightingales, `greenfield' sites must be green
The other night, we were kept awake by nightingales, in a wild place among chestnut trees in western Spain, in the sierras of Aracena. The moon was shining brightly. Otherwise we would have been surrounded not only by wilderness, but also by real darkness.
It made me very homesick for the English countryside, not as it is, but as it used to be in my childhood. Nightingales, wilderness and darkness are vanishing from Britain; in much of England, they have already almost completely disappeared. Our children and grandchildren will have no idea what they were.
Not long ago, I found a black-and-white aerial photograph of the whole of Europe by night. The land mass is black, and all the concentrations of light appear as white points, like stars. To anyone who loves Britain, and particularly the south of England, it is horrifying.
Most of Europe is delicately sprinkled with small white points. Some parts of France and Spain remain almost black. The general effect is rather like a peaceful night sky, or rather, in dermatological terms, a very mild and sparsely dispersed rash. There are a couple of little pustules of white, where Paris, or Berlin, or Rome must be, but otherwise the rash seems benign - except in Britain.
Britain, in startling contrast, looks like a single, concentrated bright white boil on the point of bursting, a great wen: the lights have completely blasted away the dark peace of the night. Anyone looking at this strange photograph cannot possibly deny the obvious truth that this country is desperately over-developed. There is no division between city and country, as elsewhere. It is all bright white city and suburban light.
The horrors of the foot and mouth epidemic, and the crisis in the countryside in general, are forcing even this suburban-spirited Government to think seriously about what the future of rural Britain ought to be. At the same time we have been told that we must have 4.4 million - or is it 3.8 million? - new homes forthwith, and that masses of them will have to be built on greenfield sites, as bureaucrats put it, or - in plain English - on green fields.
But if this happens, the suburbanisation of Britain, already well under way, will be complete in less than 20 years. This may be what most people want. I have a nasty suspicion that it might be. I have a nasty feeling that many people's idea of the countryside, as we now seem to call it, means a bit of greenery next to a detached house, and somewhere picturesquely unkempt to walk the dog. According to a recent survey, nearly half the population - nearly 30 million people - say they would like to live in a rural location, whatever that may mean. Already an area the size of Bristol is concreted over every year.
This is the moment to be bold. This is a moment to be undemocratic, and indeed unconservative. In a country this small, in a country already ablaze with light, something very radical must be done. People talk endlessly of rights, but rights have a nasty way of conflicting with each other. The right to live where one wants comes at a very high price. The right to roam is at odds with the right to ruin the countryside. Even the most aggressive anorak must see that there is little point in having the right to roam when there is nowhere to do it, except past surburban dog toilets.
Everything anyone talks of doing about the country involves tinkering, and tinkering always leads to more tinkering, and more ad infinitum, not to mention the law of unintended consequences. To avoid this as far as possible, the best solutions must always be the simplest.
The only solution is to put an absolute stop to all building on green fields, without exception. There would be no administrative costs, no subsidies and counter-subsidies, no committees, no assessments, consultations, quangos, outreach groups, legal battles or legal aid. There would be no anything. Just green fields.
All new housing must be built in cities. There is plenty of room; cities are full of unused or underdeveloped land and empty properties, as Richard Rogers has argued in his advice to the Government's urban taskforce. If people were simply unable to desert the cities, they would have to make them better. They would force governments to subsidise the regeneration of cities.
At the same time the country, or what's left of it, would be preserved. Since country property prices would go through the roof, which would hardly be fair, it might be wise to tax second homes in the country very heavily. I mean putting such high local taxes on second homes that few people would be able to afford them. Prices would then fall, in the interests of people who live and work in the country.
At the same time, taxes could be radically reduced on country hotels and guesthouses; this would make them cheaper, and so more affordable to more town-dwellers in search of a little temporary greenery. That would, of course, also revive the rural economy and provide an alternative to uneconomic farming to former farmers.
Nobody who has a dream of living in the country wants to give it up, least of all me. But in a small country like Britain, it is an impossible dream. There are such things as positional goods - goods that have value only in so far as they are not widely available - and Britain's countryside is one. It is better to have only a little of it, occasionally, than to destroy it for ever. Scarcity means rationing, and rationing means self-restraint. Perhaps then the nightingales might come back.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, May 05, 2001 | Comments (1)
