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| Conservative Commentary Back to regular posting on 1 June |
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Sunday, May 23, 2004
Delayed return
I said I would begin posting again on 1 June, but I am now very involved in campaigning for Nirj Deva, and will probably be busy with that right up to the election on 10 June. So hopefully I shall now return to regular posting by the middle of next month.
In place of new content, I'll link again to a few of my older pieces that I have uploaded to the essays section of this site.
The last Conservative leader ... and the next
Not a lurch, but a step to the right - and a good thing too
Thoughts on Michael Howard
Thoughts on Tony Blair
Thoughts on Charles Kennedy
Self-control is not state control
An unknown liberal's manifesto for Britain in 2002, written in the early sixties
An issue to be determined in local elections, not by referenda
In defence of outsourcing
Who really committed the SOHAM murders?
Let's see what the Guardian forumers have to say:
UPDATE: It seems some discussions are too wacky even for the Guardian forums. The thread has now been deleted.
Quote of the Day
Fantastic
Diary: Adam Smith Institute Thatcher 25th Anniversary Event
 Thanks to Alex Singleton for the above picture of both the blogosphere's Tory-supporting Peters. In the packed Oxford and Cambridge Club, I was obviously perspiring more than I realised. I was pleased to be able to take some photographs of my own of the star guests. I first entered shortly after the event began at 6.30pm, and saw one man who looked vaguely familiar as we both hung up our coats. I later discovered that this was Patrick Jenkin, one of Thatcher's Social Security Secretaries, father to the present Shadow Defence Secretary, and by one account one of the first Tories to note publicly how much the lessons of sociobiology are conservative lessons.
 The main speeches started between about 7.00pm and 7.30pm, each speaker limited to three minutes. Norman Tebbit - variously her Employment Secretary and later Party Chairman - was first, and focused on the economic and industrial policies Thatcher pushed through, and the enormous changes made. Charles Powell, then the Prime Minister's Foreign Affairs Adviser, spoke on foreign policy and the difference made by Thatcher in Europe, America and the wider world. He won particular cheers recalling her successful fight for Britain's rebate from Brussels, and for praising the Thatcher-Reagan Alliance and its effectiveness in winning the Cold War.
 Cecil Parkinson - the Trade & Industry and Transport Secretary who resigned from the cabinet for personal reasons in 1983, preventing him becoming Foreign Secretary - focused on the battles Thatcher won against the civil service, as well as her own ministers. He began by describing a conversation he had had in opposition with Enoch Powell (the mention of whose name won hearty 'hear-hear's), and being warned of the inertia of office - of the immediate desire once a government is established to go with the tide and avoid any real reform. Parkinson noted that the usual practice was for Tory governments to be elected, and then within two years to perform a U-turn and reverse all that they had been intending to do. At this moment I scanned the room in the hope of seeing Ted Heath scowling, in the unlikely event that he had turned up to a pro-Thatcher event.
 Parkinson went on: Thatcher, of course, was able to break this dreadful pattern and put in place the changes needed. When the crunch came two years into her premiership, with feinthearts around her refusing to support what she was doing, Thatcher changed not the policy but the cabinet! This juxtaposition won roars of approval. By fighting the inertia of government and putting into effect desperately necessary changes, Thatcher had made Britain a far better place. Later, I managed to see and photograph the two cabinet speakers up close, taking what I thought was a particularly good picture of Norman Tebbit.
 As I saw him engaged in conversation, he was being asked his view of European enlargement, and he was unambiguously in favour - apparently because it would ensure further immigration! He gave the statistics of the squadrons that fought on the right side in the Battle of Britain, and noted how numerous were the Poles in that conflict. Without them, we might not have won at all, he explained, and then said how well he thought Poles integrated into British society - adding that he had just hired one to look after his wife. His objection was to immigrants who didn't integrate. Retirement has obviously not dimmed his energy, and for a very long time he spoke happily to everyone who approached him. At one point a young woman asked him somewhat immodestly if he would mind posing for a photograph with two lovely blondes - herself and a friend. Tebbit threw up his hands and looked up at the heavens in mock exasperation before agreeing. Cecil Parkinson was also keen to converse with the guests, and when chatting to the Dissident Frogman expressed his hope that the French would find a Thatcher of their own. Chirac at one stage had looked promising, he noted, then left it at that, his expectations so obviously dashed that saying so would be superfluous. He then asked about Nicolas Sarkozy. There were ambiguous murmurs, and I pointed out: "Sarkozy believes in positive discrimination: not sound".
 On Thatcher, Parkinson interestingly noted that she was a woman, but she got things done. He then mentioned that at no point during Tuesday evening's Conservative Way Forward celebration had a speaker described her as the first woman Prime Minister - so successful was she that it was one of the least important things about her reign. I asked if she had spoken, and Parkinson confirmed that she did, with all the authority and passion of old. He elaborated further on the inertia of government that she had successfully fought. When they had come into office, he explained, they wanted to scrap the Prices and Incomes Board and the civil servants refused! Reduce its powers, leave it in place and ready, they had urged: 'You'll need it later'. Of course, this consensual nonsense was not accepted, and thank goodness for that. Some critics of Thatcher write as if all the leading achievements of her era were a sure thing whoever was in government. This is a Blairite fantasy sustainable only through an ignorance of just what happened in those years. We did not arrive at the present post-socialist era through the common sense of Britain's governing class. If we had relied on that we wouldn't have had a hope. We arrived where we are today because a few brave visionaries - Margaret Thatcher above all - were keen enough to get things done that they spent years crawling across broken glass in the form of fierce and variously violent or hysterical opposition from Labour, the unions, the liberal establishment and foreign foes fascist and communist. It was not Thatcherism that was almost inevitable, but Britain's decline. We must never forget the courage and achievement of those who were able to arrest this decline. Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link | |Monday, May 03, 2004
Back on 1 June
No regular posts until next month, I'm afraid, while I work on my exams. I may post the occasional photograph from political events this month, but I'll not return to normal posting until 1st June.
A day that shook the world
UPDATE: The coverage just ended and immediately restarted as David Dimbleby asked the viewer to return following their programme poking fun at politicians. The programme was not shown this time, although it might have been interesting. One of the most striking details I have read of the pre-Thatcher period described how the Rory Bremners of the day would all get big laughs impersonating the trade union leaders. That such a thing would now be quite unthinkable is of course not entirely unrelated to the result of this election.
UPDATE II: Clips from the 1959 and 1964 Election coverage are being shown now, as then. In the first, Jeremy Thorpe said he was quite certain he would see a Liberal government in his lifetime, that his party was breathing down the necks of Labour and the Tories. The chasm between these claims and the political history of the last forty-five years may be worth bearing in mind when we hear identical statements from that same party's modern-day representatives.
Well, I took a long break from updates, but I'll continue now...
UPDATE III: When Bob McKenzie noted that Thatcher was the first woman leader of a great democracy, Dimbleby asked if he was leaving out Israel's Golda Meir. "A minor Middle Eastern democracy - a very fine one," McKenzie answered. Who can imagine the BBC saying that now?!
UPDATE IV: To add to the strangeness of the occasion, the weather forecast showed that it was actually snowing that night in Mrs Thatcher's native Lincolnshire ... in May.
UPDATE V: A long interview with the thoroughly nasty union barons who did so much to wreck Britain in the preceding year. Their arrogance and indifference to the expressed will of the voters seems almost forgivable when you realise that they utterly buy into the delusion that they are speaking for millions of people.
UPDATE VI (Wed, 5 May): Interesting to see Ivor Crewe appear on the coverage and explain what the Essex University election survey had suggested were the reasons for the result. It was also odd, given how much that coverage seemed part of another era, to see him again yesterday - albeit twenty-five years older - at a Politics Seminar at this university.
How the other half lives
I've written a short post at England's Sword on Islamic life in the Palestinian Authority, Britain and Canada. Thanks to Marcus for the Canada link.
Quote of the Day
Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds
Happy eighteenth birthday to Paul Harris, who has reached voting age and now can, in his words, "tell them where to stick the European Constitution".
Do also read his account of the controversy generated when a neighbouring village had a mobile telephone mast installed in the area. After reading, I can only say that the infamous events of 1690s Salem seem less peculiar. Thumbs up to Orange, and a big thumbs down to the MP who advised local residents to sleep with buckets over their heads to avoid the mast's noxious rays. I think Paul now has a duty to give us the man's name.
Playing to the Totalitarian Left
Reason magazine sums up the Democratic primaries.
Free and open debate will do more for our environment in the long run
This is a good way of beginning the discussion, but only to a point.
One could quite easily ask of George Monbiot: 1. With England more populated than ever, are more people visiting the beaches of the West coast? 2. Does more children visiting these beaches mean more urinating in the Atlantic? 3. Does adding water to more water cause those water levels to rise? Unless you want to part company with science and reality, the answers to these questions also will all be yes.
But the real question that follows from that is whether this human activity is having any significant effect - and whether that effect is negative. Is it a drop in the ocean, or is it something both historically unprecedented and potentially catastrophic? That's the issue sceptical environmentalists are discussing, and the question some of the best scientific minds are asking. The global climate has changed throughout history and prehistory, forces far beyond our control determining temperatures on this island and across the world. As Norman Tebbit noted recently, in Roman times Britons grew grapes right up to the Scottish border, and we were making so much of our own wine that the central Roman authorities complained that we should buy more from them instead. Is the effect of human activity on the climate really so great by comparison to these natural, cyclical forces? If we are heading for trouble, is it really BMWs we have to worry about? Much science suggests not: the effect of human activity has been to increase global temperatures by less in a century than the average variation from one year to the next.
More fundamentally, how do we know that the climate of a century from now will not be better? As Tebbit, again, put it, these reports showing x number of Namibians dying from slightly increased global temperatures never seem to take into account the number of pensioners who survive in Britain or Ireland because the winters are a little warmer. Who are these climate reactionaries like Monbiot to decide that suddenly here and now in April 2004 we must stand before these impersonal forces of history and prehistory and yell 'stop'?
The serious scientific debate on these issues is really only just beginning, and if we want it to continue, then George Monbiot's call for the voices of caution and scepticism to be silenced should not be heeded.
UPDATE: Laban Tall offers a fifth question:
Quotes of the Day
Darwinism and Mickey Mouse
It's exam time again (indeed, my tenth consecutive year of May/June exams), so I am afraid I won't until the end of May have the time I normally do for blogging. I'll try nonetheless to meet a quota of one post per weekday.
Today, I'll just link to a very enjoyable piece by Steve Sailer, a Darwinian analysis of the effects sex differences have on childrens' cartoons. It appears the theory of evolution may even provide answers to such questions as why you so often see "abrupt segues from alarmingly belligerent programs about colossal robots battling for galactic mastery to unspeakably adorable commercials for toys like Polly Pocket's Fairy Wishing World" and why female characters are so secondary in ordinary Disney cartoons but so central to Disney feature films.
I've known a lot of people so thoughtless and closed-minded in their political correctness that they believe it's enough to say that a claim is a stereotype or is sexist to disprove it, irrespective of the facts of the case. One of the many things that make Steve Sailer such a good writer is his choice not to pay even lip service to such dogma, and simply to spell out the truth as he sees it. You can hear the liberal squeals from miles away.
The truth unvarnished
DumbJon has read the vitriolic comments to my post below on the stupidity of one HIV-infected porn star and is sceptical.
Well, exactly. The offence was not to laugh at her catching HIV - I clearly didn't. My crime was to suggest she is responsible for her own actions, and so for the predicament in which they have placed her. I have noted elsewhere that liberal outrage seems exactly proportionate to the demonstrable truth of the opposing case, but I certainly didn't learn that lesson. So help me, God: I said sexually-transmitted diseases are sexually-transmitted.
Quote of the Day
Site content Copyright 2002-2004 Peter Cuthbertson
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I'd like to add my voice to 
Unusually, George Monbiot had