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It’s getting hard to avoid the question: what is Europe for?
Many of us feel about the future of the European Union like the mythical Irishman who was asked for directions. Like him we’d say: ‘I wouldn’t start from here in the first place.’ But if the Irishman made that comment in today’s Europe, he would be told to go away and not come back until he had changed his mind.
Last week Jean-Claude Juncker, the present holder of the EU presidency, said in a comment which would be pure black comedy if it were not so alarming, that France and the Netherlands should rerun their referendums to obtain the “right” answer if they reject Europe’s constitutional treaty: “The countries that have said no will have to ask themselves the question again.” Such is the mentality at the heart of the EU establishment; such is its artless view of democracy.
Millions of Europeans, new and old, clearly feel that we have arrived in very much the wrong place as far as the ideal of European co-operation goes. But the hysteria about the referendums offers, suddenly, a historic chance to start again and to go in a different direction and rather more slowly. It has become clear that Europe has reached a moment of crisis which — unless it is squandered — could offer a truly inspiring chance of radical rethought and reform.
Perhaps one should not be too optimistic. Since 1985 there have been four big European treaty negotiations, three of them about institutional change. And as Sir Stephen Wall, a former ambassador to the EU and adviser to Tony Blair, said last week: “To an extent all of them have been a proxy for the one negotiation the union has not had: how to define its modern vision, purpose and relevance.”
What is the EU for? That is the simple question which underlies the whole project but is rarely asked and rarely answered. It doesn’t suggest that European union is pointless. It doesn’t suggest that European co-operation is not worth having. It is genuine and deserves a good answer. But if you ask Europhiles what the European project is for, they will respond with incredulity and perhaps even mild contempt. The answer, they feel, should be self-evident to a civilised person.
British Europhiles tend to be evasive because they know that the real grand projet is unacceptable here. The only straight answer I have had from a Europhile was from an Italian, who said disarmingly that his country’s governments were so terrible that anything would be better, especially if there were large sums of public money knocking around.
Is the EU to prevent Europeans massacring each other? That certainly was a central purpose of the founding fathers of the project. Nation states had produced the carnage of two world wars. Nationalism must therefore be checked and subsumed under a greater, wiser, supranational state aiming at ever greater unity. Some people even claim that it has worked. They argue that European unity has kept the peace since the war.
None of that convinces. The post-war peace in greater Europe was kept by the United States. Nationalism may have its risks, but so do superstates, and there are plenty of ways of keeping the peace by other means.
Greater Europe could have a powerful military and diplomatic alliance, rather like Nato, without automatically ceding national sovereignty. This sort of co-operation does not necessarily entail ever closer political integration. Indeed, it would probably work better without — countries would be free to opt out on occasion, as the French opted out of Nato without disastrous effects.
As for keeping alive the European memories of our terrible past, there is little likelihood that we in Britain will forget. Countless films, plays, novels and television programmes revisit the bloodshed and the totalitarianism. It is, quite rightly, impossible to be ignorant of it. If schoolchildren here learn little else, they all have a few lessons on Nazism and the Holocaust.
Equally important to peace are the many personal ties that Europeans have been making with each other since the war — through trade, travel, co-operation between musicians, students, artists, scientists, charities, galleries etc — none of which needs an organisation to make it happen.
Is the EU meant to stand united as a superpower, as a counterbalance to the United States and later to China? That certainly has been uppermost in the minds of the French and one could argue that more international balance would be better.
The problem is that greater Europe is not at all united in this sense, at least for now. It is impossible, for example, to imagine how a Europe united under the control of a single foreign minister — as proposed in the constitutional treaty — could possibly have dealt with the US invasion of Iraq. For senior Eurocrats to try to force Europe into a superpower unity that it does not yet feel, by undemocratic methods, will make more division only more likely.
The British have been traditionally wary of such grand and glorious projects. As a nation of shopkeepers we are more swayed by commercial considerations. But is the EU good for Britain economically? That is highly debatable, although it isn’t much debated.
According to Malcolm Pearson, the Eurosceptic peer, the government has steadfastly refused to carry out any cost-benefit analysis. Of course there would be very obvious commercial advantages to a single market and a single currency, if it were truly a free market, if its monetary arrangements worked and if one ignores the steep political cost. But the economic cost of the present EU may be extremely steep as well, even outside the eurozone.
The cost to Britain could be the equivalent of the UK economy remaining stagnant for eight years, according to Philip Booth of the Institute of Economic Affairs. The IEA has just put out a book by Patrick Minford of Cardiff Business School (and others) which suggests that the total annual cost of EU membership to the UK could rise to 20% of GDP if the EU continues with its current economic policies, a tendency likely to be reinforced by the proposed constitution.
Most Britons accept that the common agricultural policy is a disaster. Quite apart from being unjust, particularly to developing countries, corrupt, absurd and thoroughly discredited, it roughly doubles food prices here. What is less well known, Minford argues, is that EU protectionism raises manufacturing prices by a similar amount. He argues in great detail that the economic costs of membership immensely outweigh the benefits.
One does not need to be an economist to understand what clearly must be commercially bad for Britain about the EU’s protectionist, statist mentality. The working time directive is a perfect paradigm. Britain’s opt-out from the EU restriction of the working week to a maximum of 48 hours is now under threat. MEPs recently voted against it and Blair will have to struggle to save it. If he fails, the cost to employers, employees and the economy will be very great.
Superficially it might seem that 48 hours is a long working week and nobody wants to condone sweated labour. However, the facts suggest something different. British workers have plenty of workplace rights and a minimum wage. Many workers need and want to work longer hours — there is good research evidence from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development that three-quarters of those in Britain who work more than the EU maximum do so out of choice. And two-thirds of those who put in very long hours are professionals or managers, not the poor huddled masses, and their high reward work is much less stressful than McJobs.
Besides, if there is exploitation here that is unacceptable here, our government can deal with it locally in its own way — by putting up the minimum wage, for instance. Why should the EU intervene at all? Why do Eurocrats talk of subsidiarity, devolution and diversity when what they mean is micromanagement, centralism, protectionism and a deep fear of free markets and globalisation? This raises the real question about European union. Can Europe forget its fear of the wider world and the future and become a wider, freer, looser new Europe? If not, European union is doomed.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, May 29, 2005 | Comments (0)
Biography: Mary Archer by Margaret Crick
MARY ARCHER: For Richer for Poorer
by Margaret Crick - Simon & Schuster £17.99 pp344
Reviewed by Minette Marrin
Unremarkable though she might seem, Mary Archer is, in her prissy way, a truly exceptional person. When she was a girl it must have looked certain that she would go on to be exceptional in her own right; as a precocious chemistry scholar at Oxford in the early 1960s she was considered outstandingly intelligent, good-looking, hard-working and self-disciplined. In the event, she has become most remarkable by association with a notorious wide boy, fabulist, adulterer and convicted criminal, her husband Jeffrey Archer.
Forty years on, the question most asked about her is not what she has achieved with all her gifts — her achievements hardly seem to match her early promise, although she has succeeded, inadvertently, in changing the meaning of the word fragrance — but why she has stayed with her indefensible husband for so long, and why she has defended him at the cost of her own reputation. That is a curious fate, especially for a girl who was so churchy, so respectable and so ambitious from a very early age. Mary Archer is a surprisingly good subject for a biography.
She has, apparently, done what she could to obstruct this one. The author, Margaret Crick, claims that the formidable Mary has stooped to bullying, bad-mouthing, lawyers’ letters and even to visiting the president of the book’s publishers in New York, and she has at other times been ruthless with people who defy her; that may in part explain the book’s cautious tone in places, and the author’s reluctance to speculate or pass judgment as much as the reader (and perhaps the writer) might like. For the most part, she leaves readers to judge for themselves the evidence that she puts forward.
She has the advantage of having done research for her former husband’s excellent biography, Jeffrey Archer: Stranger than Fiction, and presumably knows a great deal more than she can say; after all, it is quite possible, even now, that someone whose relationship with truth is as unusual as Jeffrey Archer’s might brave the libel courts again — a chilling thought for a biographer and even for a book reviewer. Nonetheless, there are plenty of details in this brisk journalistic biography to satisfy most people’s goût de concierge, and more than enough to infuriate Lady Archer.
The portrait of her that emerges from this account becomes less and less attractive with every page. Does she have fragrance, as a judge once so memorably asked in court? Crick quotes Vanessa Feltz’s immortal line: “There’s only one fragrance in the Archer household and that’s the smell of money”, and there’s little in this book to undermine that judgment, though I would add the sweet smell of success. The long-standing public image of a brilliant and high-minded woman shackled to a rotter by her own virtue is transmogrified into a picture of something rather different — a cold, vain, tough, controlling, insensitive, patronising attention-seeker, a self-confessed cabaret-star wannabe who demands privacy yet has courted publicity and exploited it, one of the great and the good and a pious choirmistress whose evidence in her husband’s perjury trial was publicly called into question by a judge. Some of her follies are almost worthy of her husband.
For instance, during the Lloyds insurance scandal, when many members were painfully ruined and Mary was in charge of the Lloyds hardship committee, she appeared at a lavish Lloyds council dinner very sexily dressed and proceeded to sing in the cabaret — something she loves to do. She chose a rendition of the song “Who Wants to be a Millionaire — I do” with new words: “Who wants to be a member of Lloyds — I don’t.” Such lack of sensitivity is hard to fathom; according to some observers quoted by Crick, she seems to be missing a dimension. Only that would explain the ludicrous way she has talked about distributing largesse; she has spoken of “our charitable giving habit” and of offering “masses and masses” of donations to “people who seemed in some small way deserving”. That such a woman should speak in such a way of the idea of being deserving, during her husband’s perjury trial, is truly astonishing. “At this point,” Crick writes drily, “some members of the jury began to snigger.”
Such an exotic subject is worthy of real literary talent; perhaps only the best fiction could do justice to Mary and Jeffrey Archer, stranger than fiction as they both are. This book lacks that elegance and that wider perspective, but it is entertaining journalism nonetheless.
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £14.39 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
The Sunday Times | | Comments (0)
Kylie shows we need a dose of privacy
Every so often, and increasingly often these days, I feel a deep revulsion at British news coverage. Last week’s coverage of Kylie Minogue’s diagnosis of breast cancer seemed to me profoundly shocking. Of course it is extremely sad that she has breast cancer; of course it is true that everyone who really loves her is extremely upset; and it is to be hoped that she will recover fully and fast. But it is not news.
At least it is not a major news sensation, though that is the way it was treated. It is not a story that merits front-page photo splashes in most newspapers, or many minutes of prime air time. Nor is it the kind of news that justifies, in any newsworthy sense, pages and pages of analysis in broadsheets and tabloids alike, with endless gossip and reconstruction of the drama, about where Minogue was when she received the terrible news, how rock-like her boyfriend is being, whether she’ll still be able to have babies, and above all with endless wittering about how everybody and anybody might be feeling about it.
Equally depressingly there has been a flurry of anguished personal accounts by other women who have had breast cancer, going into the most intimate details of the experience and discussing how their cases are like, or unlike, Minogue’s and what we can all learn from it. Most of this fuss feeds on idle curiosity — although it’s odd that we call curiosity idle. Curiosity is, in fact, ceaselessly busy — and very profitable, too.
Most of this shameless voyeurism and exhibitionism justifies itself under the banner of “heightened awareness”. What humbug. It is prurience masquerading as public service.
For one thing, we simply do not need any more heightened awareness of breast cancer. People are very aware of it; indeed it is quite impossible to be unaware of it. The country is awash with information; the media discuss it obsessively.
Health pages and health programmes have had the most extraordinary boom in the past two decades and breast cancer is a staple item; it is regularly featured in an intensely educational way on worthy television and radio soap operas.
As a result of this consciousness raising, almost every young woman in the country is terrified of getting breast cancer; and given the trouble most of us have in these innumerate times in understanding statistics and risk, most of these poor women are much more scared than they should be. The Breast Cancer Care helpline said last week that younger women tend to overestimate the risk — which is stating it too mildly.
Then there is the awkward fact that quite a lot of the awareness is just misguided, or worse. For instance, the constant suggestion that people are courageously “battling” with cancer, not merely suffering from it, might be kindly meant but it is depressing and offensive to courageous people who are “losing” the “battle”; it suggests that they are somehow to blame.
Then again, conventional wisdom insists that talking openly about cancer is best; that is highly debatable. People have their own ways of dealing with cancer and some would prefer privacy and stoicism, regardless of conventional pieties. No — heightening awareness will not do as an excuse for all the fuss about Minogue’s cancer: what we actually need is lowered awareness.
It is rather mysterious that we have come so quickly to a point where it seems normal to most people to have such an excessive outpouring about a woman’s illness. Not so long ago, as with sex, it would have been quite impossible to talk about the personal details of any serious illness; people who did so were looked down on or laughed at. It was considered a breach of manners and a breach of privacy — a crossing of boundaries.
Now we seem to be losing our sense of boundaries between all kinds of things — in Minogue’s case between what is news and what is merely titillating infotainment, between sympathy and medical voyeurism, between normal interest in an appealing pop star and a stalker-like mass obsession with her, between a mild interest in a stranger’s illness and a prurient invasion of her hospital bedroom, between what is emotionally real and what is celebrity-fuelled fantasy.
Most obviously we seem to have lost a sense of the proper boundary between what ought to be private and what ought to be public. The examples are legion. There was a very intrusive article last week about Peaches Geldof, the 16-year-old daughter of Bob. Peaches is becoming famous with her own column and television appearances, and a self-styled friend of the family wrote a long piece warning of the dangers of teenage celebrity and at the same time betraying several minor confidences about Peaches, her father and stepmother. I cannot imagine what the point of the article was, but it showed a complete lack of what is due to the confidences of the kitchen, to privacy.
So, too, did an article of Bel Mooney’s about herself. Now separated from Jonathan Dimbleby, her husband of many years, and embarked on a new life, she wrote last week about the kind of things you would only tell a close friend. It might be very interesting for the rest of us to read about her moments of despair and her daughter’s disabilities and I fully understand the temptation to tell — all writers do — but I couldn’t help feeling that she was at times betraying both her family’s privacy and her own, in public.
Privacy is a precious thing. Yet in our society we have less and less sense of it, with more and more people flashing their private lives and their supposedly private parts in public, in pursuit of a little celebrity. But as Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, once wrote: “Private and public are two essentially different worlds and respect for that difference is the indispensable condition for a man to live free . . . When it becomes the custom and the rule to divulge another person ’s private life, we are entering a time when the highest stake is the survival or the disappearance of the individual.”
Kundera was writing in another context, about being spied on in private by a police state. But the point holds in a society where privacy faces different threats, as in ours. And the greatest threat to our privacy is our loss of interest in it. If we don’t defend it, we may sooner or later discover what celebrities already know and what Kundera warned of: without privacy there can be no freedom.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, May 22, 2005 | Comments (0)
Tony should take a hint from the hoodies
The prime minister unveiled an exciting new initiative on Thursday, announcing that he is determined to make “respect towards other people . . . a central part of our agenda”. Respect. That’s the very latest thing, the new must-have, all-purpose new Labour panacea, which will bring order to our disorderly schools and streets.
Like Simon Jenkins, my distinguished new colleague above, I am astonished by this vacuous effrontery. And I am afraid it is going to be uphill work for Tony Five Shags as far as I am concerned. However ferocious his agenda, he will never extract respect from me.
The belief that government can or should interfere in such a crude way with our attitudes, or that the state can “build” or “rebuild” communities, is not merely wrong. It is part of the problem. New Labour seems to have learnt nothing. The only people who can instil respect in people, and create community among people — if at all — are people themselves. Contrariwise, all government seems able to do is to destroy. Butskellite governments since the war, for all their good intentions, have managed to undermine respect and destroy communities by nationalising everything right down to family responsibility and charity.
The curious thing about respect is that it’s so highly valued by the very people — like the rude boys in hoodies who so frightened poor John Two Jags Prescott in a motorway cafe recently — who feel it least. Respect is what young gangstas and wannabe gangstas demand; dissing them is what they cannot bear, it fuels the anger that drives them to crime and violence. They feel disrespected in our society, because they are.
Far be it from me to think like a liberal, but it has always seemed obvious that just as those who have never been loved cannot easily love others, so those who have never been respected cannot easily respect others. The only way to get lost and delinquent young people to show some respect is to teach them self-respect, which involves showing some respect to them.
Pronouncing that parents are to blame for the yobs on our streets, as Blair did last week, may be true, but it doesn’t help. It’s about as useful as banning hoodies. The parents of yobs are all too often part of a cycle of deprivation and may never have learnt anything about self-respect. Young people long for respect to be shown to them and demanded from them. They are dissed and patronised all the time, from cradle to antisocial behaviour orders.
I live in the heart of Asbo territory in the north end of Kensington and Chelsea, a borough that has some of the most deprived areas in the UK. Most youth workers say there are more guns and knives now in North Kensington than ever. Despite the best efforts of an exceptionally efficient council, all the indicators of social breakdown are hugely above the national average.
State intervention has made little difference; many things are getting worse. The best hope of re-creating some sense of community lies in the power of men and women to get together to try to do something in their own backyard.
This is happening where I live. There is a charity in a handsome new building a couple of streets away from me. Its name is the Rugby Portobello Trust — it’s an amalgamation of other charities, including one set up by Rugby school in the late 19th century. It’s there to serve local young people between eight and 25 years old, who might otherwise be pushed by neglect and peer pressure into the worst of inner-city problems, straight into the Asbo set.
It offers all kinds of things — a club that is a safe place to be (unlike many clubs) with a gym and a cafe, computer training, professional recording equipment and training, driving and cooking lessons (for future employment), a chance of trips to the country and even a small private school for children doing badly in the state system.
It already provides housing for homeless young people (often straight out of care) and help from some inspired youth outreach workers. One of them is Michael Kelsick, a charismatic young black man who spent several years in jail before redirecting his life. Now he spends a lot of time trying to help young people understand the risks of drugs, crime and teenage parenthood, and the rewards of the many things they could achieve. The trust’s plan is to train some young people to run a small existing charity themselves. They will then be able to see themselves as leaders and contributors, rather than as losers and receivers. Respect, as they say.
A little further north on the notorious, high-crime Mozart estate is another neighbourhood scheme called Real Action, largely run by local people — 50% of the workers are unpaid volunteers — and rather touchingly under the “protection” of the roughest elements in the community, who even send some of their children there. It’s a literacy project — the brainchild of Katie Ivens, a pioneer of the Campaign for Real Education — with a drop-in centre and some small classrooms to teach schoolchildren and adults to learn to read quickly and easily.
They use the Butterfly phonics method, which is extremely simple for both teacher and student. State-sector educationalists might sneer at strict whole-class teaching and synthetic phonics, but Real Action’s results are sensational and people are justly proud of it. Just 30 hours of Real Action teaching lifts a person’s reading age, on average, by 13 months. The comparison with the abysmal state school results is startling.
Both these projects offer much of what deprived children lack and need — an extended surrogate family, a safe place to be, interesting things to do, useful things to learn, good adult role models who can offer serious advice, a sense of belonging, hope for the future and an atmosphere of mutual respect. Such projects can’t help everyone; some children are already damaged beyond help. But it can help most. If the state sector were providing all this, these charities would not be needed and nobody would give them any money. But they are desperately needed.
If we are talking about respect, the government should show it to such charities and such charismatic people by leaving them alone to get on with their work in their own way, as far as possible.
My view is that statists don’t respect charity at all. When it works they just take it over and regulate it out of all recognition. But that’s a different column.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, May 15, 2005 | Comments (2)
Used and abused by Mr Five Times Nightly
Once again the heavy burden of high office has been laid upon Tony Blair, and even those of us who did not vote for him must fervently hope that he is up to the job, if only from a physical point of view. Running the country is tiring. As Blair himself once rather quaintly remarked to Yasser Arafat, it is very ageing being prime minister.
A new Labour grandee remarked to me at the BBC’s election night party that everyone knows that Tony gets tired. Everyone knows that he needs eight hours’ sleep. This is very worrying. We all know what happened to poor Charles Kennedy when he didn’t get enough sleep; he forgot his economic policy.
So I am particularly perturbed by Blair’s revelations in The Sun last Wednesday about his nocturnal habits. He claimed, cuddling his unusual wife under some romantic pink cherry blossom, and discussing their passionate intimacy with some journalists and a photographer, that he is a five-times-a-night man.
“At least,” he said, having affectionately warned his wife to keep her hands to herself. “I can do it more, depending how I feel.” This was corroborated by Cherie Blair; when he was asked whether he was up to it, she said firmly, “He always is.”
Five times a night! Are you thinking what I’m thinking? It’s hardly surprising that our prime minister feels tired all the time and needs his eight hours’ “sleep” if he’s going at it all night like a jack rabbit and has been in the grip of this habit for fully quarter of a century.
What right has he to wear himself out in this statistically most surprising way when he has a country to run, Africa to rescue and democracy to bring to the world? Sleep walking is no way to achieve all that. If you ask me, he is putting his sex life before his duty to the planet. Perhaps he is not to blame: he may be a sex addict. He may need help.
Still, what an unexpected joy it was to read all about it. Now there’s a new new Labour nickname to match “Two Jags”, which bedevils John Prescott. It’s Tony “Five Times” Blair. What a pleasure it will be to hound him with it. We must take pleasure where we can in these dismal times.
It is positively thrillingly absurd that in a supposedly civilised country, a supposedly highly educated, supposedly deeply pious prime minister’s wife, who is also a judge and a mother of young children, should in public, in an orchestrated interview, make an unmistakably sexual and giggling suggestion that “size matters”.
But titter ye not, as the great Frankie Howerd might have said. It’s not really funny that we have a prime minister of such astonishing, wince-making vulgarity with a wife who is, if anything, worse. The People’s Premier has always been a reliable cultural weather vane, a sign of the times.
Commentators have been warning for years of the decline of modesty and manners. But even the most outraged of Jeremiahs could never have dreamt of hearing this willing violation of one’s own intimacy, this prostitution of private sexual love for public relations, this Big Brother confessional, boastful, hyper-sexualised slaggy prolespeak in the garden of No 10 on the lips of the prime minister and his wife, the day before a general election.
What a glaring contrast he makes with the man who might just conceivably have been prime minister. Michael Howard is, I am quite certain, absolutely incapable of talking like that in public and so is his wife although they, too, have had a long and happy marriage which they might have exploited like the Blairs. He is just too decent, too discreet and too civilised.
So it seems particularly unfair to feel, as I do, that Howard really should go. He may not be a better politician than Blair, possibly because he is much more honest, but he is a much better, much cleverer man. Still, I think it is a good thing for his party that he has honourably said he will stand down soon. He might have been tempted by his modest successes to stay and fight the next election. But the sad truth is that politically he is a loser; I even half suspect that with the same campaign but a different leader the Conservatives might have done even better.
I like and admire Howard and I don’t think his campaign was particularly opportunistic, although of course opportunism is necessarily part of politics. Personally I very much regret the party’s failure to put forward radical, principled proposals for reforming the public services. But I don’t think the emphasis on immigration was opportunistic, although I think that attacking Blair for lying was something that Howard should have left to the journalists, who were doing it quite enthusiastically anyway.
The real trouble with Howard is that he seems to come across all wrong personally. That ought not to matter. In Britain’s fairly recent political past, in a less sophisticated, yet actually more sophisticated time, the general impression of a politician simply didn’t matter so much — politics had not yet become mass entertainment and low level TV reality show. Boring men in suits could get elected without being any better or worse than politicians today.
Now, as has been true in America for many decades, a leader cannot succeed without powerful touchy-feely charisma, generous amounts of the common touch and preferably a lot of hair.
Howard seems to lack all that. Again and again throughout the election, people kept telling me how ghastly he seemed — how smug, how complacent, how cynical. Again and again I protested that I didn’t believe he is any of those things — rather the opposite.
But finally I began to see that he does look too much like a slick lawyer; he does have a strange smile playing on his face which could seem superior or dishonest; he can’t or won’t change his accent to suit his audience, as Blair does; he doesn’t quite know how to hit the right note with people who aren’t listening carefully, but simply responding emotionally; he’s not good with the uneducated, because he comes across as too clever and over-articulate.
The electorate of today demands a certain kind of leadership package in which the leader’s real qualities (good and bad) are disguised by the populist wrapping. It is deeply depressing. It’s even more depressing, on the principle that a country gets the leader it deserves, that our leader is once again Mr Five Times.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, May 08, 2005 | Comments (0)
Will no one take an axe to this garbology culture?
Watching the prime minister wriggle out of almost any awkward question with the mysterious skill of a fakir’s snake, once so mesmerising, has become boring. However, last Thursday he was for once well and truly pinned down with a forked stick by a member of the public on Question Time.
She was not asking about Iraq; she was merely expressing her fury that GPs will not allow patients to make appointments much in advance. Surgeries will accept them only 48 hours beforehand, to meet the government target that nobody must wait more than two days to see a GP.
Tony Blair’s blue eyes opened in what looked like genuine surprise; at first he couldn’t grasp the problem. Members of the audience angrily explained.
You cannot make an appointment in good time, say a week ahead. Instead, 48 hours before a consultation “you have to sit on the phone for three hours in the morning trying to get an appointment because you are not allowed to ask for the appointment before that because by making it 48 hours beforehand they are meeting the government’s target”. Then when you get through there may be no appointments left.
When this absurdity finally became clear to the prime minister he said with embarrassment that it was news to him and he would do something about it.
The obvious thing to do, however, is the one thing he won’t do, and that is to abolish this target and hundreds like it in the National Health Service and across the public services. He won’t and Gordon Brown won’t either when his day comes because they are both statists, particularly Brown.
They simply don’t understand what is wrong with state interference (or in Blair’s case he may have given up trying to change it). They don’t understand that their bossy, statist micromanagement is bound and determined to have perverse consequences.
The man in Whitehall does not always know best. Any doctor or nurse or teacher or police officer will tell you so in despair. This 48-hour appointment nonsense is a perfect example of it.
It is state interference that the election should have been fought over. It is much to the Conservatives’ discredit that they have not done so. In this election if the Conservatives are speaking up for a radical attempt to roll back the state they are talking in an almost inaudible voice — dog whistling at the wrong pitch.
It must be a deliberate failure — they are supremely conscious now of messaging and packaging. It is a failure of nerve and a failure of conviction, due apparently to a belief that the voters won’t buy a truly anti-statist manifesto. Perhaps that is true for now but since the Conservatives’ electoral position has been near to desperate for some time, they could at least have indulged themselves in the luxury of conviction politics.
At one time, when the Conservatives commissioned the James review, I thought they were going to be truly bold. It’s obviously true that any real reform in public services means real cuts — not cuts in medical care or teaching, but deep cuts in the astonishingly, shockingly wasteful culture that has grown up around them.
I don’t mean only cutting target setters, target inspectors, target auditors, target trainers and so on. I mean cutting most of the extra posts created by the state sector ideology to do work that is at best a secondary priority.
There are countless examples of this loss of a sense of priorities. Suffolk county council, for instance, advertised late last year for a garbology officer at £20,000-£23,000 a year.
The successful applicant would “show children in school how to explore their heritage through the study of waste”, “use techniques of archeology to involve communities in an understanding of changing waste patterns”, “work with older people using retrieved objects as a focus for reminiscence” and “organise training programmes and workshops for people from a diverse range of backgrounds”.
Desirable though it might perhaps be in an ideal world to have armies of garbologists skipping blithely across the land, bearing uncalled-for bits of rubbish into old folks’ homes or celebrating ethnic diversity in the slag heap, we live in a world in which old men and women lie unvisited and unwashed and unloved, where delinquent teenagers wander without guidance into harm’s way and where mentally ill people go ignored and unconsoled. As it is, councils and health trusts don ’t have enough money to care for the people who truly need help.
One can only wonder what demented mentality it is that persuades well meaning apparatchiks that despite all this unmet need, taxpayers’ money should go instead to garbologists, or to sex outreach workers for the Irish community, or to advisers to men who want to have sex with men in public.
Cutting most quangos would be excellent, for instance; most are unnecessary or duplicate other bodies. Cutting targets sounds obvious, too, but there would have to be some way of measuring proper standards in public services. The discipline of an open market can do that, up to a point. But there’s the question of how the harshness of market disciplines can be softened for people unable to cope with them.
And there is the problem of hybridisation, when public and private bodies are grafted unnaturally together to produce something with the worst features of both.
The school dinners fiasco in Merton, southwest London, reported last week, is a perfect example of what is wrong with “privlic” hybridisation; the council has locked itself into a contract with a school catering company for 25 years, showing it has missed the point of private sector providers — you can fire them when you’re not pleased with them and try someone else.
Without these cuts public services will go on getting more expensive without getting better. Without cutting out the state sector middleman, the public money available for people in need will go on being whittled away by bureaucrats who simply stand between the needy and what they are entitled to.
Bureaucrats will continue to take it on themselves to decide for the needy what they need and whose needs are most important. This is wrong. Cuts into this bloated state blubber would mean better welfare, better healthcare, better education, better value and, not least, more personal freedom.
To be fair, some Conservatives have been saying this clearly. The unfortunate Howard Flight was one. George Osborne, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, has also spoken of proposed cuts not “as what you might call efficiency savings in the main” but as “a reduction in government activity”.
I realise that the great British public tends to lose its head when anyone says cuts and the opposition and the media can be relied on to misrepresent them. Even so the Conservatives ought to have been insistent about this difficult and essential message — hugely more important than immigration or Blair-bashing.
“For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?” And those who are not properly prepared to the battle will lose it and will deserve to lose.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, May 01, 2005 | Comments (0)
