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Oppose America and you are at war with yourself
My heart was with the hundreds of thousands of people marching for peace on Saturday. War is terrible and the Iraqis have suffered horribly already. The heart does protest at the misery that more bombing will bring down on them.
Besides, there are any number of powerful political arguments against war on Iraq.
It hardly matters that many of these arguments are expounded by unreasonable people with bad or mixed motives.
The imagination lurches from an illiterate and impoverished Arab, whose anger has been cynically turned against the West, to a self-indulgent, anti-American lounge lizard in Paris or Berlin. But let's not be nasty to the Germans or the French. A good argument is a good argument, regardless of who makes it, and besides, many of those opposed to the war are both good and reasonable people.
Their arguments for peace are legion. Nobody, they say, can hope to predict the wider consequences of crushing Iraq. Far from deterring Muslim terrorists and the states who support them, it might inflame them to still worse atrocities. It might even, by some miracle, actually unite Islam against the West. War in Iraq might provoke the apocalyptic Muslim-Christian conflict that we all fear so much. And if not the war, then the defeat. History suggests that America is not good at dealing with the aftermath of war:
Pulling out and leaving behind ruins and resentment will only make things worse.
Think of Afghanistan, both after the Soviet war and now. The rise of Osama Bin Laden and Saudi-born terrorists is a fearful reminder of how poor the United States' foreign policy judgment has sometimes been.
The world might well be better off without Saddam Hussein, the doves would argue, but would it be better off with the United States and hangers-on as self-appointed neocolonial enforcers of a Pax Americana? Iraq may indeed be full of rockets and poisons and nuclear components, but there doesn't seem to be any incontrovertible evidence so far, even after the weapons inspectors' report to the United Nations on Friday. Surely containment would be just as effective as war and much less risky.
Saddam's connections with Al-Qaeda are tenuous, at best. Besides, after Alastair Campbell's absurd "intelligence dossier" fiasco, cribbed off the internet, the public are deeply sceptical about any claims made by either George Bush or Tony Blair.
Our trust has been persistently abused with spin, news manipulation, exaggeration and mission creep; we are too cynical now to respond to any supposedly moral appeal that the government might make. We even thought the tanks at Heathrow last week were probably window-dressing.
Throughout the run-up to this war it has seemed that what is most important is probably what we are not being told. If so, how can we support anything so terrible as war in good conscience? And so on. To say all this is to make only a few of the most obvious arguments for peace - or, rather, for doing nothing.
Yet despite all this, and although my heart is for peace, my head is not. I mean my considered response. After months of opposing the war, I've finally and reluctantly, after many bitter arguments, come to support it, if it comes to that.
There does seem to me to be a clear way to be hacked through the thick undergrowth of morality, hypocrisy and ignorance. The only real question is whose side you should be on. This is, or ought to be, easy. Westerners who are not on the side of the United States are somehow ignoring the values upon which our civilisation is based.
Forget gratitude. Forget what America has already done for Europe, for the Third World, for science. (Incidentally, President Bush has just promised $ 15billion to fight Aids in Africa, yet another example of American generosity which anti Americans prefer to ignore.) And forget contempt. Forget Donald Duck and gas-guzzling obesity.
The fact is that the United States is the greatest power in the history of the world and, to our astonishing good fortune, it is - warts and all - a benevolent and civilised power. It is wholly committed to universal values that all civilised people think, in the end, are worth dying for. That is not true of any Muslim state in the Middle East. By any standards we respect they are not really civilised; their governments are mostly repressive, backward, totalitarian and horribly corrupt. Religion shows its most shameful, unenlightened face in the Middle East.
So whose side are you on?
What's more, we are entirely dependent on the United States to protect both us and our values. Whether we want to be on their side or not, we have to be.
All the wishful thinking about our special relationship is irrelevant. They don't really need us, but we really need them. Only vaingloriousness or silliness can have tempted the French and the Germans to ignore that brutally obvious fact. The Americans don't really need the UN either - that bunch of kleptocrats, bandits and murderers. The Americans can stand alone and if they must they will.
Personally, I am proud to be on the side of the Americans, however little difference it may make to them. My father was American and he met my English mother in England during the second world war, when the Americans were over here to defend us. I've always felt great affection and respect for the United States.
They have been and are the defenders - right or wrong - of everything that matters to me, of everything that Europe has struggled over centuries to create, of freedom, justice, tolerance and invention.
Stripping away all sentiment, what confronts America is a very unstable, very angry part of the world which produces rogue regimes, terrorists and oil. It is also a miserable place for most of its inhabitants - they might come to welcome American intervention if it made some of their lives better, as Americans are well aware.
What centrally concerns the United States (and its hangers-on) is to try to get control and keep control of this region, as far as possible - and, starting with Iraq, to pre-empt serious conflict in the future. This is a matter of survival.
I wish people wouldn't talk so sanctimoniously about oil - "It's all about oil". Of course oil is a factor.
The West is heavily dependent on it. However, shortages and blackmail are unlikely to be serious; oil producers have to sell their oil and are heavily dependent on western buyers and their dollars.
It seems to me that what all this is really about is nuclear proliferation, and its threat to our basic values. The bottom line is that the rogue states of the Middle East (and elsewhere) cannot be allowed to go nuclear or to equip nuclear terrorists. America must pre-empt that, starting now, and maybe at unthinkable cost. Maybe Iraq is the wrong place to start, for the wrong reasons, but it is a start to the right war.
All the other concerns and arguments are a side-show. And this makes everything very simple. Which side would you like to have nuclear weapons; which states would you trust with them - the United States or the rogue states? Whose side are you on? It is easy in the end.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, February 16, 2003 | Comments (0)
Diary
If diaries are all about name-dropping and indiscretion, and they usually are, perhaps I should say that I had lunch on Tuesday with the Prime Minister at No. 10. This is the sort of thing that no diarist could bear to suppress. On the other hand, the unwritten rules of journalism dictate that I can't say anything about it. So does my editor at the Sunday Times. What a miserable dilemma. And in the very week when The Spectator asked me to write this diary. I suppose I can at least reveal that we had lamb stew followed by fruit salad; both were simple but good. Presumably the purpose of such meetings, among other things, is to subject us journalists to the Prime Minister's formidable charm. This is the way the British establishment has traditionally succeeded in unmanning, or unwomanning, the awkward squad; it is also difficult to resist the seduction of smart invitations and the hope of more. It's almost as bad as the corruption of friendship.
I do feel slightly unwomanned, just for the moment, but, like the woman in the song, I will survive.
My other excitement of the week was a local Notting Hill charity quiz dinner for Response International, which helps with medicine and mine-clearing in places like Angola and Chechnya, in the aftermath of war, 'after the cameras have left'. First prize was the Howitzer Cup, actually a 25mm mortar presented by a brave woman volunteer, who is a colonel in the Territorial Army. Large amounts of shepherd's pie were cooked by other women volunteers - all very English, somehow. I am pleased and proud to say our table won, beating the powerful Sebastian Faulks team, mainly because we had an unknown champion in David Neuberger, old friend, polymath and judge. Feelings run very high in these charity quizzes, and I am afraid contestants are not always very sporting. After all, one's intellectual prowess is at stake. One year at the River Cafe quiz, an event always studded with stars of the left-liberal intelligentsia, it quickly emerged, after the first few rounds, that an all-male team was winning easily. To our amazement an angry cry rose up from the assembled New Labour luvvies. 'Cheating, cheating!' they shouted.
'It's not fair! They haven't got any women.'
I often think there is something very unfair and cheating about obituaries, which I read keenly every week. I know it's very aging to be interested in obituaries; I wish I weren't. I still have a schoolboy son at home, so I like to think that youth has not yet quite fled the house, but the truth is that, as time has worn on, obituaries have begun to interest me more than announcements of births and marriages. The end of the story is so very much more fascinating than the beginning, especially with famous people. But the trouble is that obituarists so often seem to get things wrong. Usually they're much too nice and uncritical - de mortuis nil nisi bonum. But how absurd. The only sensible time to kick a man is when he's not only down but dead. The obituarists were grovellingly, sickeningly nice about Roy Jenkins and Alan Clark, two of the nastiest men I ever met. It made me furious. Even journalists felt obliged to suck up to them post-mortem with laddish anecdotes and lunchtime reminiscences.
Well, as the saying goes, if you haven't got anything nice to say, say it now.
Et in Arcadia ego; I, too, once had lunch with that Roy Jenkins, at a glittering party in a private house. My delight at being placed next to the great man was soon crushed by the experience. He was so insufferably pompous and patronising that if we had been in a restaurant I would have walked out. Our conversation turned to the discrimination against private-school children at some Oxford and Cambridge colleges - now universally acknowledged and even recommended by our government. 'It doesn't happen, ' he told me flatly. I told him, politely I think, that I was convinced, both by talking to dons and by many individual accounts, that it did. 'Nonsense, ' he said, really rudely. I persisted, whereupon he said, with magisterial disdain, 'You do REALISE I am CHANCELLOR of Oxford University? I know all about it. I can't help it if some of your friends' children didn't get into Oxford; they probably weren't as clever as they thought they were.' Vulgar, condescending ignorance! Later I worked out which character of fiction he reminded me of: it was Lady Catherine De Bourgh.
I wonder what my patron saint Jane Austen would have made of my encounter with Alan Clark. I met him at a political party in a private house not so long ago, for dinner and serious discussion. My motto has always been that any attention is better than none, so I didn't mind, at first, that he started flirting, though, since I was not an admirer, I did not flirt back. His style was certainly distinctive.
After the usual overtures, he told me, staring into my face, that my eyes were absolutely dazzling, mesmerising. Then he said he couldn't work out whether that was because my eyes are too close together or whether it was because I have a squint. Despite this handicap, he pressed me more and more persistently to have dinner with him. I refused, very clearly, ever to have dinner or anything else with him. But he meant then and there.
To leave the party at once. Apparently he thought saying no is a form of flirting; he pressed and pressed me, literally, as we queued to go into our hosts' dining-room.
When at last he came to believe I was impervious to his charms, and would not rush off with him into the night, he turned to me with a peculiarly vicious look. And this is what this self-styled gentleman, this ladies' man, this intellectual, this flower of our civilisation then said: 'Well, fuck you, then. Fuck off. I'm not talking to you any more.' And he didn't, I'm glad to say.
In thinking about death and the dead, I find the tough and truthful approach much more comforting than conventional pleasantries. I particularly loved the lines the artist Lincoln Seligman included on the service sheet at the memorial service of his father, Madron Seligman: 'We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.'
The Spectator | Saturday, February 15, 2003 | Comments (0)
In Franz Kafka's NHS, your wildest fantasies come true
Columnists are always hurling wild accusations against the powers that be. We have only ourselves to blame if, when we really need it, we run out of hyperbole. Words, therefore, really fail me after this most depressing week.
All I can say is that the institutional incompetence and folly of our government and of our public servants is shocking. What is still worse is that it no longer shocks us.
Take the prime minister's television performance on Thursday with Jeremy Paxman in support of his Iraq policy. Despite some weaselling on how the UN inspectors left Iraq in 1998, he nonetheless made a perfectly adequate defence of his stance on war. However he laid heavy emphasis on evidence provided by British intelligence, much praised by Colin Powell for its "exquisite detail", of just what Saddam Hussein is really up to.
But lo and behold, on Friday morning it emerged that the dossier of "evidence" is not important new revelations from British intelligence at all. It is old hat, published long ago by others on the internet, and shamelessly plagiarised. By public servants, apparently, experts presumably.
Worse, it emerged yesterday that this smoking dossier was in fact cobbled together by minions of Blair's communications chief Alastair Campbell, including his secretary. In my view this jaw-dropping absurdity does not affect Blair's argument, but it is a hostage to critics, doves and terrorists everywhere. Our prime minister and Colin Powell have been made to look desperately silly and incompetent by a bunch of amateurs. They and their policies have been senselessly discredited. The worst of it is that the monkeys who advised them - those sultans of spin, those armies of apparatchiks - are not even paid peanuts. Many of them have protected public sector pensions, at our expense.
Then there was the unseemly nonsense in the Commons all week about the House of Lords. All that happened was we were reminded that the upper chamber was irresponsibly torn apart without the slightest idea of what next. Despite all his earlier protestations and election manifestos, the prime minister now seems to favour an all-appointed chamber of Tony's cronies, egged on by his preposterous arch-crony Derry Irvine. Perhaps - incredibly - Blair really means it.
On the other hand, perhaps he was taking that line to make sure that a lot of his angry backbenchers could feel good and insubordinate and let off steam, while the whole problem could be kicked into the so-called long grass. It's astonishing.
And let's not even think about Lord Irvine's on-off pay increase of Pounds 23,000 a year.
As bad as any of this, perhaps, was what happened to an incisive, carefully researched report on the National Health Service by Dr Maurice Slevin, a top cancer consultant. Endorsed by 15 other NHS specialists, Slevin's pamphlet for the Centre for Policy Studies argued eloquently that the NHS is in collapse and that the government's extra billions will not be able to resuscitate it.
The problem is systemic ("institutional" in new Labour speak): most of these huge sums will be wasted on more and more bureaucracy. The money does not, will not, cannot reach the patient or the nurse's pay packet. "In the NHS," Slevin argues, "the vast numbers of managers are there to stop things happening. In the private sector, the small numbers of managers are there to make things happen."
Anyone who has serious knowledge of both must agree with him. The suffocating burden of bureaucracy in the NHS is scarcely credible. It is Kafkaesque. Slevin points out that in a private hospital there are just under two managers for every 10 nurses. In the NHS there are eight managers for every 10 nurses - nearly as many NHS managers or administrators as nursing staff. Despite or because of this, NHS inefficiency is legendary.
Radical institutional change is necessary. Cutting managerial staff by half would produce huge and much-needed salary increases for nurses. Vouchers would empower the patient and revolutionise the NHS culture. This view is all the more telling because it comes from distinguished doctors who are devoted to the NHS ideal of free treatment for all.
But what happens? Almost nothing. There is nothing like silence to silence argument. If that fails, there are weasel words. The chief executive of the NHS went public to cast doubt on Slevin's figure, claiming that managers make up only 3% of the NHS. Yet that was extremely weaselly. In truth if you add all management and administrative staff, high and low, they account for 25.7% of the NHS workforce.
"What's alarming," said Slevin on Friday, "is the way in which public figures have tried to distort and confuse my analysis."
Indeed it is. That is not what we used to expect from public servants.
It is difficult to describe to people who don't know about it the extraordinary culture of public service management generally, and in the NHS in particular. Only people with personal experience of it - and that seems to exclude the Labour top brass - know about it and the shock seems to wear off surprisingly soon. Others, like politicians, persuade themselves that all that's needed is more funding and yet more centralised management.
It reminds me powerfully, in my own direct experience, of some of the more despairing 19th-century Russian novels in which depressed bureaucrats cling to entirely futile clerical jobs in ministries. They don't even expect to have a function, merely an income - and indeed a protected pension, just like Britain's public sector workers.
In Britain these jobs are not merely makework. Worse still, they are makewaste and they grow upon themselves, increasing at a frightening rate.
I've often written about the many thousands of extraordinary advertisements for this sort of job in The Guardian. You simply couldn't make them up. No fantasy is too absurd. The heroic Richard Littlejohn pointed out in The Sun last week that the Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Trust is advertising locally for "three outreach sessional workers for men who have sex with men".
Their task will be to "undertake awareness workshops and outreach sessions in many varied environments, for example educational establishment/gay scene and public sex environments". In Sherwood Forest, presumably.
And I thought my fantasy in this column last week about a campaign for heterosexual cottaging rights in public lavatories was a little extreme.
What more dazzling example could there be of management folly and waste in the NHS? What self-respecting middle manager could seriously get up one day and persuade himself that this is a good use of scarce NHS money? What respectable senior manager would allow it?
I don't mean to single out silly sex outreach projects particularly; there are hundreds of thousands of equally futile jobs in the NHS alone. Yet for this, Gordon Brown will demand more and more taxes from you. This is the sacred state sector cow that he won't allow anyone to touch.
What more can I say?
The Sunday Times | Sunday, February 09, 2003 | Comments (0)
This is the public lavatory sex act that Britain needs
At last - a terrible wrong has been righted and a long-denied liberty has finally been granted. After all this time we are going to be set free, under proposals in the home secretary's new Sexual Offences Bill, to have sex in public lavatories. Cottaging will no longer be a crime. What a glorious, knee-trembling blow for freedom.
Admittedly, we will be able to copulate only in the cubicles and with the door shut. But Rome wasn't built in a day. We must be grateful for this important step in the right direction and keep on campaigning.
One thing does trouble me, however. In practice this freedom is really available only to gay men and women. Since public lavatories are single-sex it will be difficult (and indeed illegal) for heterosexuals to take up their cottaging rights. This is horribly unjust.
Why should same-sexers be able to satisfy their lusts in public lavatories, but not heterosexuals? Why should some people be able to ramble our parks and high streets secure in the knowledge that they can relieve themselves in any way they fancy, free of charge, in any lavatory if the mood suddenly takes them, while others - heterosexuals - are forced to find other outlets at expense and inconvenience?
This is an equal rights issue, obviously, a gender issue and a human rights issue. I am about to start fundraising for a campaign for unisex public conveniences. That should sort the problem out. If only we could go unisex, we would all be able to copulate with anyone in any public lavatory.
Otherwise this will have to be a matter for Brussels. There is more than one court to which we can appeal for the universal human right to have carnal knowledge in public conveniences with the cubicle door shut. What is convenient for one (or two or three) should be convenient for all.
This brings us directly to the question of cubicles - something the parliamentary draughtsmen have obviously failed to consider in their usual rush to last minute legislation. When in a contemporary cubicle, even those people who do not wish to exercise their cottaging rights must have noticed that it is hardly large enough for any extended sexual activity.
Two people of average build might, at a push, manage but what about the rights of the overweight and the obese? And let's not forget the needs of cottaging wheelchair users. Then there are those who prefer group sex. Clearly the average cubicle cannot possibly accommodate three or more, perhaps of bigger build, and least of all with the door shut.
I see no reason to impose repressive, monocultural Victorian norms upon other people's sexual choices. And I, for one, am sick and tired of the almost universal discrimination against people with weight issues.
It's not what we expect of inclusive new Labour. Clearly we have a human right to much bigger cubicles in public lavatories. Funding should have been included in the new legislation. No doubt the men in the ministry are hoping that they can palm off this responsibility onto the lottery, as usual, but can we really rely on the lottery to prioritise the enlargement of public lavatory cubicle size across the land?
No. This should obviously come from government funding, especially as there are some important health and safety issues. Anyone familiar with the average cubicle will know that, because of chronic local authority underfunding and low self-esteem among lavatory hygiene operatives, the floor is likely to be awash with filthy fluids.
When engaging in energetic sexual activities, therefore, the cubicle user is at great risk of slipping and falling. Serious injury could follow in many cases. There's also the real risk of infection - these cubicles have an enhanced bacterial and viral count as a result of the activities that go on in them.
By making these activities legal now, the state is taking on these considerable risks. It is therefore taking on the real responsibility of making lavatory cubicles safe for sex. We should expect nothing less.
I believe there has already been talk of setting up an important new quango to represent the general public. Its committee will be composed of prominent cottaging activists and liberal sexologists; there will be no room for representatives who have any doubts about this essential reform.
Obviously this quango would monitor progress in health and safety measures, as well as new building. It would distribute appropriate signposting with league table ratings - grade 3 listed safe-for-sex, for instance.
Clearly, signs would have to be designed in at least 10 different languages (with reference to local need and consultation, of course), not forgetting non verbal symbols for vulnerable adults. Equal opportunity monitors would visit all lavatories regularly to combat discrimination of any kind. And there will undoubtedly be a sex and sanitation auditor, already nicknamed the Cottaging Commissar, tasked with delivering the best possible public lavatory sex experiences, given current funding constraints, and strongly supported by a new inspectorate, Oflav.
Am I dreaming? I don't think so. At least not quite. This is the kind of government we have. This is how it carries on. Blair's government is truly absurd, morally intrusive and morally inane, licentious and repressive, priggish and prurient.
This new Sexual Offences Bill is a perfect example of what is wrong with new Labour. It intrudes, obsessively and minutely, into every aspect of our lives where it does not belong and yet does not interfere to protect us where it should.
The home secretary seriously proposes to make having sex in public lavatories legal, but to turn making love in your own garden into a criminal offence. There was no good reason for doing either. It is almost impossible to understand the thinking behind it, although one can see clearly the extreme pressure of gay activists, who say they very much welcome this measure. The gay vote must be more important than I had realised. One is torn between laughter, amazement and deep contempt.
Cottaging is offensive to most people including, I would guess, a great many homosexuals. So would heterosexual cottaging be. Cottaging is, and ought to be, an offence in law. It makes many public lavatories, and the areas around them, unsafe and unusable, the squalid haunts of predatory cruisers and paedophiles.
When my son was small, but too big for the ladies' lavatory, I always had to stand right outside the gents in rough neighbourhoods, putting up with the stares of the men coming out, and that was when cottaging was supposed to be illegal.
Legalising it will certainly encourage it; that will hardly do much to protect vulnerable boys and young men, despite all the government's righteous hysteria about sexual harassment and abuse. Yet canoodling in your own back garden is now to become an offence which could lead to six months in jail.
This absurdity comes upon us at a time of the threat of war and the breakdown of public services. Rome wasn't built in a day, but it might easily burn down in one; meanwhile, the home secretary is fiddling.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, February 02, 2003 | Comments (0)
