Why Tories should actually watch The Wire
I want to focus on something specific about what The Wire achieves amidst those more general assesments. Namely, a sublime exposition of the importance of uncontrolled arbitrariness in life. The Tories would do well to pay attention.
The Wire is unambiguously engaged in the same exploration of issues of arbitrariness and luck in determining socioeconomic distributions, and the attitudes we attach to them. In particular, it brings out beautifully the way in which one’s birth – over which one has no control – determines so much.
Take, for example, the character of D’Angelo in Series 1 and 2. Most viewers probably start out disliking D’Angelo: he is a murder, a drug dealer, and a man who conducts a long-running affair behind the back of the mother of his child. As clear a cut case of a conventional “bad guy” as you could ask for? Not at all. For one of the best aspects of the first two series of The Wire is the manner in which the D’Angelo is gradually humanised to the audience: he turns out to be a man of great integrity, loyalty, intelligence and honour.
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We know Grayling’s Wire argument is ‘piffle’
Since Chris Grayling’s agenda is to get the Tory ‘broken society’ argument back up, somebody might tell David Simon (who wrote The Wire) that the correct British expression for Grayling’s speech is the rather politer piffle, as Boris Johnson previously said of his party’s broken society argument.
So it is certainly to be hoped that the Mayor of London will be pointing out why Grayling’s inaccurate stigmatising of “many parts of Britain’s cities’ is dangerous too.
Grayling’s pose is progressive – “when the Wire comes to Britain, it is the poor who suffer” – but the analysis is not: he has little to say about the causes of social breakdown.
Why are these problems greater in the United States of America? Why, in his view, are we witnesssing “cultural changes going back a generation or more”? David Willetts tells us the Conservatives are now convinced by Richard Wilkinson’s evidence about the importance of inequality in explaining the scale of social problems. There is no sense that Grayling has read it: there is not even a nod in the direction.
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Hannan hates it so much, he’s going there
Daniel Hannan is well known as a notoriously Euro-skeptic MP. So much so, in fact, that he regularly says that up to 84% of our laws come from Europe, even though this claim is rubbish.
Now it turns out that the MEP is planning to move to and live in Brussels. He hates it so much he’s actually planning to move out there. I’m surprised he hasn’t told his blog readers about the good news.
4 million unemployed if Tories win
The Sunday Times reported that one consequence of the Tory welfare plans is that if they win power, unemployment will rise to over 4 million.
Peter Hoskin at the Spectator welcomes this, because it will be achieved (at vast expense to the taxpayer) by moving people from sickness benefits to unemployment benefits which pay them less, and therefore requiring claimants to look for work.
He says, quite rightly, that this is “an ambitious plan, and far outstrips what has so far been achieved with ESA (which has seen IB claimant numbers drop by roughly 150,000 in about 10 months). Whether they’ll be able to achieve it is a different matter, of course.”
Hoskins concludes, “But, when it comes to Tory welfare policy, two words give me some hope: David Freud.”
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Is it ‘unpatriotic’ to diss the NHS?
There is a sentiment being twittered and retwittered about the place that the row over Dan Hannan’s self-publicizing anti-NHS comments on Fox News is a perfect storm for Labour, and that Andy Burnham’s intervention is a big plus.
Perhaps not for Guardian readers, who are a bunch of simpering, effete wet-noses obviously – but this will definitely chalk up some points with the solid English-as-the-White-Cliffs readers of the Daily Mail. Well on this one I’m joining the effete Guardian readers, because damned if I’m not unpatriotic too – and so should you be.
I don’t care whether the issue is Malkin attacking Dunkin Donuts, or Pelosi attacking immigration laws, or Hannan on the NHS or the Home Office declaring that protesting against British troops is considered unpatriotic and grounds for denying people citizenship.
Patriotism is a retarded sentiment which should be left to the fifteen year old kids in AOL and MSN chatrooms who type variations on a theme of “My country can beat your country!!!” as fast as they can, as though this justifies any action and can win any argument.
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Churnalism that helps the Tories
The Guardian’s headline yesterday was about Tory Shadow Chancellor George Osborne attacking City bonuses. This was based on an interview by John Harris. Now, I quite like John Harris – I think he’s a good writer and has a good feel politically for a lot of the audience that he’s writing for.
But I am certain that he knows less than I do (which is very little) about different models of financial regulation and how the Tory proposals for revamping the regulation of the financial sector would enable them to prevent banks from handing out big bonuses.
Harris is also a sucker for any argument about how even the Tories are defying stereotypes and making New Labour look timid and in the pockets of the rich.
The result was a front page headline which was very favourable to the Tories – mission accomplished for the Tory spin machine.
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Why we should take Hannan-ism seriously
Here are three reasons why Hannanism matters rather more than some of its slightly more moderate supporters will want to admit last weekend.
1. The big idea:
Hannan is both the most strident and the most feted contemporary British advocate of what has been the dominant idea in the Anglo-American right for the last thirty years. The idea is: “less state equals more freedom”.
There is still every reason to think that this remains the dominant ideological belief in the Conservative Party.
Listen carefully to debates on the right and objections to Hannanism are often matters of strategy and tactics. Many Conservatives disagree with the vehemence with which Hannan expresses his views. But these are usually differences of degree, rather than differences of directionality. Few want to go as far as Hannan in taking arguments to their logical conclusion.
So the content of Hannanism – less state, less tax, less regulation, less Europe – remains the content of most Conservative public advocacy.
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Whining about the NHS
I wrote recently about the right wing debating tactic of whining that lefties were stifling freedom of speech on subjects such as immigration or the family.
This week, a very right wing Tory MEP called Daniel Hannan went on American telly to slag off and lie about the NHS, in order to try to help the Republican Party stop President Obama from improving America’s dysfunctional health care system. In response, the creator of Father Ted and quite a lot of other people, including the leaders of both the Labour and Tory parties, twittered about how they love the NHS, on the topic ‘#welovethenhs’.
Showing the independence of mind and diversity of opinion which conservatives pride themselves on, the response to ‘#welovethenhs’ from people who don’t support the way that the NHS is currently structured has been to, you’ve guessed it, start whining about how their opinions are being silenced: continue reading… »
Why Hannan is wrong about Singapore too
So, in the last couple of days I think we’ve safely established that Daniel Hannan is a complete and utter twat.
That said, the full extent of Hannan’s outright twattery only becomes fully apparent when you examine the background to his assertion that the NHS should be replaced with a Singapore-style system of personal health accounts because…
The Singapore system produces better outcomes than ours for half the price.
Taken at face value on a comparison of key health indicators and taking into account the relative proportion of GDP spent on healthcare in the UK and Singapore that’s perfectly true but it rather ignores a very important and somewhat unusual feature of the Singaporean system, one that makes it very different from healthcare systems in both Britain and the US.
When it comes to providing healthcare to its citizens, both the supply and the price of healthcare in Singapore is actively regulation by the Singaporean government, in both the public and the private sector in order to control costs and avoid the kind of significant inflationary pressures that pretty much every other healthcare system in the world has had to deal with.
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Daniel Hannan is a national disgrace
Only the most cold-hearted of cynics could expess disdain for the many extraordinary achievments made in Britain throughout history. Those who have struggled for freedom and justice have shaped a country safe and civilised, without fear of oppression, tyranny, death or disease in which nearly everyone is represented and enfranchised.
The human right to good health and protection from, and provision for, injury and sickness, are all enshrined in the National Health Service. It is an entity admired the world over, and one that many now could not imagine living without.
(image by Beau Bo D’Or)
So to see a British politician roaming the USA, frequenting the most biased, unreasonable and willfully ignorant news outlets in existence, spouting misinformed drivel to screeching hate puffed lummoxes like Glenn Beck about the imaginary horrors of ’socialized’ health care is almost obscene.
Watching Daniel Hannan speaking as a supposed representative for Britain on Fox News, bleating about how our country has been rendered feral and crippled by the NHS is enough to raise a sudden, unexpected swell of patriotism normally reserved for the success of a British icon on the global stage or spectacular sporting defeats.
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The Tories who want to cripple the NHS
Senior people within the Conservative party and conservative ‘movement’ are stepping up their attacks on the NHS. We know at least where this stems from: Obama is trying to extend healthcare coverage to everyone in the United States (a key promise he campaigned and won the election on!), and wingnut Republicans there are using Tories here to bolster their case.
Yesterday Don Paskini pointed to a US magazine claimed: “People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.”
Hawking hit back saying: “I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS…I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.”
And yet this sort of wing-nuttery has become mainstream within the Conservative party here. Why doesn’t Cameron say anything about it? Why don’t the media hold him to account for his own people’s views?
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The Tories don’t know their Adam Smith
On Sunday morning the Telegraph brazenly declared that “The Conservatives are studying plans to increase VAT to 20 per cent if they win power at the next election as part of an ‘emergency’ package to pull Britain out of the red”.
But within hours this was being denied. Reuters reported a Tory spokeswoman saying: “There are absolutely no plans for such a rise and there’s never been any discussion about it.”
What to make of it all? It could be that the Tories do want to put VAT up to 20%…but want to keep this possible vote-loser quiet ahead of an election. Alternatively, the Tories themselves may be divided: some want a VAT rise, some don’t.
In either case, the Conservatives should be dissuaded from putting up VAT. I’ve written before about why VAT is an undesirable regressive tax. But such arguments are likely to have less traction with those on the political right.
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So what is Tory policy on tax havens?
Left Outside recently wrote a solid deconstruction of the Conservative International Development paper, also cross-posted to LC. The conclusion? One World Conservatism is a well intentioned but fatally flawed scheme.
But I want to go further and ask what the Tory policy on tax havens is.
Tax havens – or as they are more accurately termed, secrecy jurisdictions – facilitate mass capital flight from developing nations. Capital flight is the number one reason developing nations cannot grow their economies and develop out of poverty.
It is, in turn, seconded and worsened by corruption (which tax havens also facilitate) and its effects exacerbated by a lack of secure, constant and domestically-accessible tax revenue (ditto).
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Tories: you can’t have localism without postcode lotteries
If David Cameron’ were serious about localism and an enormous decentralisation of power being his big idea, then he would surely tell his frontbenchers never to throw around the phrase ‘postcode lottery’.
On the other hand, if Conservatives are serious about ending postcode lotteries and ensuring equity of provision across different places, they should admit that this would place significant limits on how far local choices can be allowed to result in any differences on anything that matters.
That latter anti-local variation and pro-equity view appears to be the view of Tory frontbencher Grant Shapps, who is energetically touring the broadcast studios to promote his report on the postcode lottery in IVF treatment.
IVF is just too important an issue for different provision.
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The Tory approach to International Development is a farce
by Left Outside
9.2 million children die before the age of five each year. Two million die on the day they are born – and 500,000 women die at childbirth. A third of children in Africa suffer brain damage as a result of malnutrition. 72 million children are missing out on an education. Every day 30,000 children die from easily-preventable diseases. That’s 21 children every minute. 33 million people are infected with HIV/AIDS. There are 11 million AIDS orphans in Africa. Every hour, 300 people become infected with HIV and 225 people die from AIDS…and 25 of these are children.
These bald facts are an insult to our humanity. Every life is precious. Everyone has unique talents and abilities. Every time the candle of life is snuffed out by disease, we all suffer. Every time ignorance triumphs over enlightenment, we are all injured. Every time a child is born into a cycle of poverty, we are all made poorer.
So opens the Conservative Party new Green Paper on International Development, One World Conservatism.
These two paragraphs read like an accusation. They are contrasted with the Millennium Development Goals set out by the UN. With the 2015 deadline looming they seem wildly ambitious contrasted with such continued suffering.
The Conservatives pledge a new approach to International Development should they win the next election. As this looks almost inevitable, it is important to examine what they propose as it will affect millions of lives. In this blog post I highlight some of the main points of the report and explain why it’s fundamentally a ‘failure’.
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Welcoming industrial militancy
Britain ‘could return to crippling 1970s strikes’, according to a headline in Britain’s biggest-selling rightwing broadsheet on Saturday. And note how the Daily Telegraph says that like it’s a bad thing.
My first response is not to get my hopes up too high. Newspaper commentators have been predicting an imminent rerun of the Winter of Discontent every year for at least the last two decades, and have somehow managed to get it wrong every single sodding time.
Even today, the mere mention of trade unionism can still evoke Dirty Harry-style responses from the Heir to Blair, who only days ago told one interviewer:
Mr Cameron added: “My message to union leaders who think they can take me on is simple: don’t do it.
Force the Tories into a sexism debate
I see that John Prescott has criticised Harriet Harman’s comments on women being needed at the top of Labour leadership. But if he had any political sense he’d support the opening up of the debate because it will inevitably put Tories on the back foot.
David Cameron, as we all know, is very anxious to promote women within the Conservative Party. He needs to, as part of his re-branding efforts. For that reason CCHQ has adopted unprecedented powers over candidate shortlists. That power was then exercised in the candidate selection process in Dudley North, leading to some internal fighting.
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The Chloe-ification of the Conservative party
David Cameron will win the next election, but the result will not be a Conservative government. That’s the proposition Simon Heffer advances in the Daily Telegraph this morning. And note how he says that like it’s a bad thing.
What he is actually trying to argue is that a Cameron administration would not be a Thatcherite administration. He’s probably right, but that’s a different matter altogether.
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What is the Tory vision for foreign policy?
On paper at least, William Hague seems like he could be a qualified & competent Foreign Secretary. Ideological differences aside, the former Tory leader is regarded as one of the smartest men in his party, is a keen debater and someone who apparently possesses a strong interest in, and grasp of, British history. These qualities (particularly the last) are all important in a top diplomat, and I think it’s safe to say they have not been present in every one of Labour’s foreign ministers.
Likewise, the vision Hague recently articulated for the future of British foreign policy is – again, on paper – a positive start, and one which does well to reflect both the global economic realities of the present and the breadth of challenges our government will face in the future.
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Why does the right keep believing in grammar schools?
Why do so many people think grammar schools are a way of improving social mobility? It’s not because the social research says they are. I suspect instead that plain error is involved.
One such error is the availability heuristic, mixed with survivorship bias. The handful of working class people for whom grammar schools were a means of upward mobility have high profiles, make lots of noise and get lots of attention. It’s easy, therefore, to over-estimate their numbers.
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» How bad is the feline obesity crisis?
» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civic cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
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» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
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» In defence of these fraternal nominations
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