The Debatable Land

Exciting Blog News!

2009-01-19T17:50:10+00:00

As promised, there are some exciting developments in these parts. Well, exciting for me, anyway. As of tomorrow this blog will have a new home as it will be joining The Spectator. Consequently, there's a new URL. There are a few technical details that still need to be sorted out, but everything should be up and running pretty soon. Obviously I hope you'll join me at the Speccie. The game's a lot less fun when you're not playing too. Equally clearly this move wouldn't be happening without the support and encouragement of those of you who read this blog and those of you who have been kind enough to link here. So for that, many thanks.

A reminder: this blog's new home is here. It is, as the man said, a new day.

UPDATE: New RSS feed is here

All's Quiet on the Blogging Front

2009-01-16T18:12:06+00:00

As you may have noticed, there's not been too much blogging in these parts this week. That will continue over the weekend. But early next week -just in time for Barack Obama's inauguration, I hope - there should be some exciting blog developments to report. Stay tuned!

John Mortimer RIP

2009-01-16T13:25:18+00:00

Ach, Sir John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole of the Bailey and leading champagne socialist, has died. Sad. From a piece I wrote about him way back in 2002:

Mortimer belongs, I think, in the vanguard of the supporting cast, a second lieutenant rather than a leader himself. He’s too reticent to play the heroic lead and too aware of life’s absurdities to cast himself as a tragic figure. "I suppose my favourite characters are people like Kent and Horatio - decent, honourable, chaps who don’t make a fuss. I think the stoical person who receives very little praise is still the person you should aspire to emulate. They’re more important than heroes." If you can recognise and respect your limitations, life is likely to be a more comfortable experience...

His greatest regrets are of missed opportunities, but he has perhaps had fewer than many others. The principal problem with old age, he remarks, is that it doesn’t last long enough. But, having confronted and written about his own mortality with a limpid, elegiac elegance, Mortimer has conquered the anxiety that William Dunbar’s poem ‘Timor Mortis Conturbat Me’ with its litany of writers cruelly struck down by the Grim Reaper occasioned in him. Everything, he says, is perfectly fine.

In any case, he half-wheezes, half-chuckles, "Alan Bleasdale tells a story about a novelist friend who was sitting next to a girl who was reading his novel on the tube. He knew that in a few pages there would be a good joke so he sat there all the way to Cockfosters waiting for a laugh which, of course, never came." If he travelled by tube, Sir John would not, it is safe to say, need to wait too long for the laugh to come.

Telegraph obituary here.

The United States and the IRA

2009-01-14T15:36:37+00:00

Responding to Stephen Walt's hypothetical (What if Gaza were full of jews?), Megan McArdle compares the Israel lobby to the Irish-American lobby. Ross Douthat says, OK, but the IRA was still considered a terrorist organisation. Daniel Larison dives into the weeds of US attitudes towards Irish terrorism. He writes:

The IRA was a genuine terrorist group, but it was listed as such by our government most of all because it was a sworn enemy of one of our closest allies. The record seems clear: terrorist groups that are useful to us or harmful to states we officially oppose are given a pass, while those that target us or our allies are condemned in the strongest terms. That’s the nature of things in the real world, I suppose, but it is something that none of the reponses to the counterfactual seems to be taking into account. Had things gone very differently in the last century and London and Washington became enemies once more, it is very easy to imagine that the IRA or similar groups would have been made into anti-British proxies of the U.S. government.

True enough. And of course the State Department did have the IRA on its list of terrorist groups. Nonetheless, the State Department is not quite the same as the US government. And in the 1990s there's no denying that Washington generally shared the (Irish) Republican analysis of the state of play in Ulster. Indeed the Clinton administration viewed itself as a kind of backstop looking after Sinn Fein's interetss and point of view. Crucially, that's how the Republican movement saw the Americans too. They were there to provide support and ballast for the nationalist viewpoint, countering the presumed pro-Unionist bias of the British. That is to say, Dublin and Washington would, together, counter the Brits in Belfast and London. It's peace, of a sort, but it's not a result that was supposed to happen. Nor is it one that many people would have found acceptable back in, say, 1994.

Sure, Clinton made plenty of phone calls and a visit or two. But when push came to shove he refused to put additional pressure on Sinn Fein and the IRA. Consequently the Good Friday Agreement was signed despite there being a crippling ambiguity on the question of decommissioning terrorist arms. The failure to resolve that problem would cripple the peae "settlement" for years, helping to hollow-out the centre of Northern Irish politics, leading us to the present happy state of play: government by bigots and murderers.

This wasn't, obviously, all Clinton's fault. Nontheless one reason Tony Blair lost faith in the american president was Clinton's habit of promising to lean on the Republican movement and then signally failing to follow his promises with, like, actual action. The State Department may have been hostile to the IRA -it opposed giving Gerry Adams visas to enter the US - but the rest of the US government, including the likes of Tony Lake at the National Security Council was entirely sympathetic to the "cause" of Irish Republicanism.

Daniel says:

Were it not for our very close postwar relations with London, it is hard to imagine that modern U.S. policy would have been all that different from the tolerance for Stateside Fenian and IRB organizers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the rapturous welcome accorded to the republican extremist De Valera when he visited the United States. Popular opinion in the U.S. was very much behind the Irish nationalist cause and it spread far beyond the Irish immigrant community. For a country nursed on Anglophobia, Irish republicanism appeared as a sister movement to our own fight for independence.

True enough. However, as I say, I think that there was, despite all the public pronouncements to the contrary, a kind of sotto voce enthusiasm for the IRA and its aims if not always its methods!) that persisted, despite the powerful inducements to give the British the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, it's probably not entirely coincidental that Washington became more interested in the Irish problem once a) a Democrat was back in the White House and b) the Cold War had ended, lessening British influence in Washington and the importance of assuaging British concerns. (Also, of course, Reagan was not likely to look too favourably upon the people who tried to murder his great friend Margaret.) Still, when the "peace process" got underway it didn't come as much surprise to discover that the US was in the green corner. No suprise there and it might be, too, that this was necessary. But let's not pretend that Washington was a neutral player.

Campaign Books

2009-01-13T17:35:53+00:00

The first book-length accounts of the campaign will be out shortly. Ian Leslie's book To Be President arrived this morning and my friend Mike Crowley's "graphic diary" (drawings by Dan Goldman) of the campaign is also published this month. It will, I'm sure, be entertaining even if, unaccountably, I haven't received a copy yet...

"Socialism in one clause"?

2009-01-13T16:20:45+00:00

Peter Hoskin is right to be suspicious of the government's latest ploy: mandating that all public bodies have a statutory duty to narrow the gap between rich and poor. As you might expect Polly Toynbee is tickled a deepish shade of red by the notion. Nonetheless, consider this snippet from her column today:

Poor children might need to have much more spent on their education per head than the better-off do. Sure Start toddlers might need more funds than older children. It might mean local lotteries to see that all children get equal access to the best schools.

It's a myth, of course, that simply ploughing more money into schools necessarily improves them and I suspect that Toynbee envisions some centralised system whereby bureaucrats allocate funds based on some incomprehensible and inflexible formula. Still, it wouldn't have to be that way: giving head-teachers greater license to spend their school budget as they see fit (and thus freeing them from LEAs) would be a good start. If that means they want to spend more on salaries to attract better teachers then fine.

More significantly, Toynbee seems to be endorsing greater school choice. That's a good thing. The current system of "slection by house price" is inequitable for sure. But the best way to organise "local lotteries" for access to the best schools is to permit all parents to choose the school they want their kids to attend. Parents should decide what is the best school for their kids, not civil servants. A lottery would only be necessary if and when a school is over-subscribed. If I recall correctly, New Zealand's school choice system results in more than 75% of parents getting their kids into their preferred school. There's no great reason to suppose some similarly happy outcome could be achieved in Britain. School choice incentivises parents to be more involved with their kids' education and, as we know, parental involvement is one of the most important factors in determining educational success.

The Perils of Punditry

2009-01-13T14:45:37+00:00

Thinking about recent posts on the Republican party's problems prompted this mildly disconcerting thought:

So, isn't it just a little too convenient that the Republican party might be able to solve some of its problems if only it were inclined to view matters in much the same way you do? That is if it were, shall we say, more "relaxed" about gay marriage and more open to some kind of comprehensive immigration settlement? That's an audacious claim, ain't it? The problem with the party is that it panders to all these other people rather than to people like you. What gives you - a foreigner to boot - the right to be quite so presumptious?

It's a fair question, guv. No doubt about that. And one that I'd suggest all commentators (on any political subject) ought to ask themselves from time to time. Clearly, there's no guarantee that a more centrist, sensitive, nuanced conservatism would prevail even though I do think the GOP needs to rethink its approach as well as some of its policies.

However, you can also make a case for arguing that the GOP has not, despite being in the ascendancy, been quite as successful as is often imagined. True the party has held the White House for 20 of the past 28 years, but it's also the case that since 1988 the Republican nominee has only once (and even then narrowly) prevailed in the popular vote.

Perhaps, you might say, that's cherry-picking a stat and you might well be correct. Nonetheless, the only GOP victory (in the popular vote) in the last 20 years came in a) a quasi-khaki election and against b) a hapless doofus of a Democratic candidate. Beating John Kerry doesn't prove much. The United States may well be a centre-right nation in relation to other countries, but recently it hasn't been voting as a centre-right nation in American terms. And of course for most of the past half century, the Democrats have also controlled the House of Representatives. Sure, Bush scored a draw with Gore in 2000, but he did so by outperforming expectations and, absent Lewinsky and Gore's own foolishness*, would surely have been defeated.

Just as the purest liberalism is a minority taste, so too is whiter than white conservatism. And at the moment the longer-term demographic trends offer scant encouragement to a party that is increasingly perceived, not altogether inaccurately, as being white, male, elderly and religious. Of course, you need to look after your base but you also need to realise that the base is not enough. Unless it can improve its performance amongst "minority" voters then the GOP will need to do better and better amongst white voters even as those voters constitute an ever shrinking percentage of the electorate. In the long run that seems an unsustainable position. Yes, there may be some victories along the way but, as matters stand (they could change!), they're unlikely to be much more than exceptions to a general trend...

Obviously the GOP doesn't need to build a policy platform just to please me (that might also be electoral suicide!) but, again as matters stand, it's running against the grain not with it. That's a tough and dangerous spot for any political party.

*Another peril of punditry: assuming that the vanquished party was, and was always going to be, useless. Still, the list of defeated Democrats in recent years (Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry) is hardly impressive. In fact, the defeated Republicans (Bush Sr, Dole, McCain) is, I'd hazard, more impressive than the list of losing Democrats. This might suggest that Democrats can't win when they choose a poor candidate but that even a decent, more or less aceeptable Republican can't be guaranteed victory. Or it might suggest something else. Or nothing!

This Britain. Again.

2009-01-13T13:23:37+00:00

We're getting used - alas - to the idea that smokers will not be allowed to adopt children (abuse!) but, as always, that proves to be but the beginning, not the end of this sort of thing. To wit, a couple in Leeds have had their application to adopt denied on the grounds that the husband is, wait for it, too fat. Leeds Council writes:

I am writing to confirm that we are unable to progress an application from you at this time.

This is due to the concerns that the medical advisers have expressed regarding Mr Hall's weight.

I have discussed this with our medical adviser... who considers that it is important to alter lifestyle, diet and exercise in a sustainable way so that any weight reduction can be maintained in the long term.

I understand that you would like to begin the assessment as soon as possible and while appreciating your reasons for this, I consider it would be more appropriate to begin the assessment once Mr Hall's BMI is below 40.

At 24 stone Mr Hall may indeed be carrying more weight than might be considered ideal (though in photographs and this BBC interview he doesn't seem monstrously lardy) but that's not the point is it? This is grotesque: the behaviour of a capricious bureaucracy that revels in increasing human misery. Tellingly, the child's interests cannot be factored into the adoption equation. That would be to make it a sane, sensible, humane system. Instead there's the needless infliction of suffering simply because said suffering can be inflicted at next to no cost to the petty, tinpot sadists who enjoy messing with people like this. They do it because they can; the more troubling question is why we permit them to.

[Via, Adam Smith Institute]

George W Bush and Immigration

2009-01-12T18:34:20+00:00

George W Bush seems to agree with me. This isn't as alarming as it might sound. Here's some of what the President had to say at his final press conference this morning:

I am concerned that, in the wake of the defeat, that the temptation will be to look inward and to say, well, here's a litmus test you must adhere to.

This party will come back. But the party's message has got to be that different points of view are included in the party. And -- take, for example, the immigration debate. That's obviously a highly contentious issue. And the problem with the outcome of the initial round of the debate was that some people said, well, Republicans don't like immigrants. Now, that may be fair or unfair, but that's what -- that's the image that came out.

And, you know, if the image is we don't like immigrants, then there's probably somebody else out there saying, well, if they don't like the immigrants, they probably don't like me, as well. And so my point was, is that our party has got to be compassionate and broad-minded.

Quite so. Now it's true that immigration reform is a tough subject for conservatives. True too, that when it comes to immigration there are some many on the restrictionist wing who consider Bush to be either a) a sentimentalist or b) corporate America's pawn or c) both of the above. Equally, the orthodox Republican position on immigration - border enforcement first, then reform - is not desperately unpopular. But a popular (or at least not unpopular) position is only half of the matter: you have to sell it well too. And on a subject as contentious as immigration, that requires a degree of tact and sophistication that, by and large, seems alien to many Congressional and grass-roots Republicans.

Immigration reform isn't just a matter of courting the hispanic vote either. It's about white votes too, particularly college-educated, middle-class white votes. Pretty much every American under 35 has been educated in a system that is extraordinarily sensitive to racial issues; they are well-attuned to the nuances of language when race is discussed. They understand the code. Republicans too often seem to forget this. When they talk about immigration, they do so in tones that too often seem brutish, narrow and exclusionary. And this costs them support from voters* who might actually agree with the essence of the GOP position, but balk at signing on to it because of the way it is expressed.

So it isn't just that legal Hispanic immigrants might be turned off by the GOP's language on immigration, so too are educated, upscale white voters who don't like the idea of endorsing a party that gives the impression, unwittingly or not, of being hostile to immigration. The GOP's posture on immigration fosters the impression, fairly or not, that they're the "nasty party". As far as political branding goes, that's a toxic position for any party to find itself in.

It's a shame, then, that Bush was never really in a position to make a real push for real immigration reform. That, like so much of his domestic agenda, was another victim of 9/11 and the resulting foreign policy distractions. This in turn persuaded Karl Rove to run negative campaigns in 2002 and 2004 that, by retreating to the base, abandoned any hope the GOP might once have had of expanding its support amongst Hispanic and black voters (though Bush did win 11% of the black vote in 2004, up from 9% in 2000, if I recall correctly). That was a perfectly sensible ploy in the short-term, but it hasn't done the GOP many favours in the longer-term. No surprise then that Bush's verdict on the Clinton years -"So much promise, to so little purpose" - also applies to much of his own Presidency.

*But what about working-class white voters? Ah, yes, that's a different matter entirely, worthy of consideration some other time.

UPDATE: See Weigel for the kind of thinking that will lead has led the GOP to ruin.

[Hat-tips: Dana Goldstein and MPG&S]