Ironic Politics

When two inciteful commentators say something, its worth thinking about it. That happened this week when both the Observer's Andrew Rawnsley and the Economist's Bagehot column devoted themselves to examining the influence of Tony Blair on his successor's government. Both argued that Gordon Brown is not merely unable to escape the legacy of Blair, he is significantly unwilling to escape it. The former Prime Minister's policy prescriptions were inevitable for someone who accepted his analysis of the way that Britain and the Labour Party had to move. In particular both articles suggested that Blairism- a devotion to the principle of mixed provision of public services- was a policy that Brown as well as Blair and even Cameron and Clegg would have to follow given what they had said. I think that both Rawnsley and Bagehot are entirely right- and it opens up what is the really major question about Gordon Brown and the reason that his Premiership has yet to inspire many.

The problem is that it is difficult to provide any account of what has changed since Tony Blair left office. The deckchairs round the cabinet table have been switched- some figures have left politics and newer men and women have been promoted (often it has to be said as in the switch of Jacqui Smith for John Reid to the detriment of the cabinet's ability to make a public impact) but little of substance has actually changed. Partly that is because the current Prime Minister was of course Chancellor before his elevation- everything done from 1997 to now has his paws all over it and he can't really deny that. Despite the fact that of the leading members of his cabinet only Jack Straw and Alistair Darling can claim as long service in cabinet, its hard to avoid the impression that to row back say on the independence of the Bank of England or the structure of the welfare system would cause the Prime Minister personal embarassment.

But there is also another factor and that's that the animating spirit of the government has not really changed. New Labour was an effort to marry Tory efficiency to Labour compassion- and avoid the moral complacency of the conservatives whilst adopting their judgemental approach to crime. It was a fusion of concepts- derived from the experience of the battles of the 1970s and 1980s which left the Labour party pulverised. Politicians like the young Blair and Brown saw that the Tories would win election after election unless Labour changed. They also appreciated that not all of the Tory reforms were awful- that the Tories won for a reason and that Labour had to behave differently in government to how it had behaved before. Those attitudes worked for a while and set Labour up for its three election victories- 1997, 2001 and 2005 but the magic began to wear off. In part because of Iraq: if Britain learnt anything from Iraq it was that we fell out of love collectively with Tony Blair. But more crucially the underlying source of discontent lay in the public sector: with the management of the great public monopolies of health and education. The hope was money plus reform would bring improvement: to be honest we haven't yet seen the timescales neccessary (more money into training doctors means more doctors not today but in seven years time for example, reforms take time to bed in and for people to become accustomed to them and start altering behaviour).

All of those prescriptions sound solid but two things lead me to suspect that they are not going to provide Labour with the reassurance of majorities in the future. Firstly the economic situation is getting worse globally and locally within the UK. All forecasters and professional economists seem to agree that the US could slip into recession, it might already be there, and that the UK may follow. This happens at a time when the Governor of the Bank of England is worried about inflation and consequently may be reluctant to cut interest rates further. Secondly the problem is that we have now heard everything we can hear about modernisation from Gordon Brown and his team: the public are losing faith in Labour's ability to modernise and are willing to give Cameron a try. If politics is just management, then why not change the managers and see how the Tories do for a while. What is important here is that the government doesn't really have a new vision, a new way of seeing the problems or a new way of explaining them to us the people. They seem, to paraphrase Disreali, to ressemble a series of exhausted volcanoes not a lively group of people filled with fresh ideas- and in part that comes back to the Prime Minister.

Its not that the Prime Minister should go: but that increasingly his term feels like the end of a government not the beggining. In part that isn't his fault- he was always more likely to be Blair 2 than to be a new kind of Prime Minister. He has the same ideological background, the same mentors- indeed he was basically Blair's political twin from the moment they met. Its no surprise therefore that his administration looks so much like that of his predecessor's. The only thing that distinguished them was that Blair had the job he wanted: the problem for Brown is that he may have got it when the moment for this kind of politics, for New Labour, had ebbed away. We shall see what the next couple of years bring- but at the moment the Labour party looks tired- its hard to see any ideological alternative from the right or the left emerging (Cameron's Tories don't seem to offer much than more extreme Blairism) but that may be the question for another day. The situation at the moment seems filled with a kind of tragic irony- one that both Bagehot and Rawnsley with typical acuteness have understood.

Rowan Williams should not resign

There are calls coming in from various places for Rowan Williams to resign over yesterday's comments. I don't think he should resign at all.

Firstly what Williams has done is fly a kite about a particular issue- he has mused in public. He has got it wrong and yes he has been naive: but the speech is intelligent and thoughtful and furthermore it is part of a real debate (not a politician's debate which means a debate with only one answer). I think if more public thinkers actually made some speeches reflecting actual ideas even unpopular ones in public that would be better for everyone. I don't agree with Williams's view- but I don't think its a resignation matter and I think if it was made such it would reflect a lamentable real decline in the way that free speech is practised in the UK. The Archbishop of Canterbury's job is partly to think about religion- that means he will get it wrong sometimes- but he should be allowed to as should his bishops: if we demand they are sacked everytime they get it wrong, we won't have public discussion, merely public discussion as governed by the Daily Mail! (Incidentally I'm particularly disappointed by the reaction on the right- normally rightwingers are so fond of free speech- but in this case they seem to think that people ought to lose their jobs if they disagree with a particular line which doesn't have any relevance for their job (Williams isn't in charge of any courts).)

Secondly I actually do admire Williams as a person. I think he is an exceptionally clever and intelligent person. He was appointed because he was a semi-academic who understands theology perhaps better than any other senior cleric of our day. Furthermore he says interesting things, provocative, yes but interesting. In that sense he is a pastor to the nation because he actually talks about our concerns- and though he may not do it in the perfect way he does do it. This can't be undervalued- the other archbishop I've known was George Carey whose ponderous pomposity was a very different kind of rule from Williams's intelligent questioning.

Yes Williams was wrong, yes Williams should probably not have said what he said- but there is no case for resignation here.

Civil and Religious Law in England: Contra Canterbury!

I have heard Rowan Williams speak and unlike some am fairly well disposed to him- he gave a fascinating talk on art and philosophy at Cambridge in 2005. I suppose that makes me a perfect advocate of the argument that today the Archbishop has made a complete idiot of himself. Partly he has made an idiot of himself through the fact that whatever Rowan Williams does understand, the media isn’t one of the things that he gets. Partly though he has made an idiot of himself because he has advocated a concept of law which I think is dangerous and creates a special privilege for established Churches in this country which they should not have.

Williams’s speech has usefully been put up on the Guardian website. Reading it one notices a couple of things. Williams is not really talking about Sharia- the discussion of Sharia is just a bridge into a much more important theoretical issue which is the attitude of the law to the citizens who live under it. What Williams wants the law to do is to distinguish between citizens based on what they believe: he tells us that

there is a risk of assuming that ‘mainstream’ jurisprudence should routinely and unquestioningly bypass the variety of ways in which actions are as a matter of fact understood by agents in the light of the diverse sorts of communal belonging they are involved in.

Williams of course over emphasizes the communal (and Matt Sinclair has criticised the Archbishop adequately on those grounds here): but he also mistakes what the law is about.

The law is the instrument by which we maintain peace and mark out civil goods and bads: it delineates that which the country considers private and inoffensive and that which the country considers public and dangerous. The law insofar as it does that cannot respect the will of the particular agents who operate under it, even if they have a sense of ‘communal belonging’ which say excuses murder: the question before lawyers is what did they do and what is the punishment. In some situations the law also arbitrates and here you could argue that the intentions of the agents matter- but that is only in the sense that the law intends to respect both of the agents. The sense of the agents is not what governs the process of arbitration but its a factor in it. For example, say I am someone who believes that animals are equivalent to children: the fact that I believe that is a factor in the decisions the court might make, but it does not govern those decisions. Williams is right that the law should not be blind to the intentions of agents as factors in any decision, but it should not be governed by those intentions (and he knows it shouldn’t- at one key moment he qualifies his own position to exclude the religious courts ever destroying someone’s rights- quite how he would do that when almost all law concerns questions of right is a different and interesting matter). Ultimately the standerd to which the law aspires is not Muslim, Christian or Jewish justice or Mormon or Scientologist justice but its justice as defined by statute and precedent within Parliament- justice as it applies to everyone who is any of those five religions and to anyone who isn’t from the Sikh to the Satanist, from the atheist to the polytheist.

The problem with Rowan Williams is in part that he is deceived by his own subtlety- go and read the lecture it is an example of encasing yourself in sentences like a mummy in wallpaper and then trying to walk through a crowded tube platform. But its more than that. As a theologian Williams wants us to think about revelation all the time: but revelation doesn’t have that much to do with politics. In a democratic secular state, revelation is a factor in any decision but it doesn’t govern what the government should or shouldn’t do. Ultimately people who believe owe just as much as people who don’t to the state because the state is not a religious formation- it is on its Western model a secular foundation which exists to perpetuate the well being of its members. The point isn’t that religious people can’t be religious, or can’t be members of society, but that the state isn’t interested in their religion. They can use religious justifications for their political actions if they like- but those justifications will only appeal to those that share the same religion and will irritate those that don’t- they will produce communities struggling against each other. The state is a minimalistic project in the sense that it talks a minimalistic language of politics- the problem with Dr Williams is that for him that just isn’t enough.

Its a common problem that you can see here and across the Atlantic- the current Pope is another person guilty of demanding accomodation on his own terms alone. But what people need to realise is that as soon as you create a legally privileged religion or argue that all argument has to take place in religious terms: you do abandon the whole idea of a secular state- a meeting place between people of different religions and none which does not proscribe any faith but tolerates almost all. There is a lot of modern work been done on these questions- Mark Lilla has just published an interesting book I mean to write about here in the future on the philosophy of this area. But ultimately it all comes down to the reasoning of the earliest modern philosopher of secularism, Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes had a dark vision of where arguments like the Archbishop’s could lead us: towards a hell of civil strife and communal violence, towards religious tyranny and massive unhappiness.

Despite my admiration for Rowan Williams, who is a very intelligent and thoughtful person, this time I’m with Thomas Hobbes.

Crossposted at Liberal Conspiracy.

Tell No One

This French Thriller from last year is a sophisticated effort and it asks some interesting questions- particularly about the nature of love. A man's wife died in a horrific murder eight years before the action of the film, he has barely been able to recover since from the incident, still traumatised he throws himself into his work, until that is he gets an email from her. There she is standing in the entrance to a building in a foreign country- the film then winds itself round the question of her return and what actually happened in to her and to her murderers in a wood long ago in rural France. Our hero is by turns bemused and confused, he seems to have lacked any real sense or purpose to his life and now he finds one in the returned wife that he thought he had lost. The film's denoument is a little trite- too much is brought together- but that's not the purpose of the film, rather its a study of the effect of loneliness and obsession upon the life of one man.

There are some fantastic sequences here- especially as the hero runs through the motorway traffic at one point. But its the psychological dimensions that are most interesting. The man, Dr Alexandre Peck, is played wonderfully in particular. One gets in his face the image of an unending loneliness- a solitariness that he cannot relieve in the absense of his life. Its particularly well crafted as early on in the film we see him before his wife's murder, sitting together with friends and enjoying a beer on a perfect summer night. By the time we make his acquaintance again he has become haunted and lonely, withered amidst the storms of life and sent sprawling backwards upon his own solitude. When his wife intones to him the words 'Tell No One' on the video she sends him, its an instruction he is almost perfectly capable of fulfilling- there is noone almost that he can tell.

That almost is there as a qualifier becuase he does have two friends. A Lesbian friend of his wife and himself who becomes his confidante. Her relationship too is threatened by the whole unfolding drama and she too is a victim in her own way eventually of the events in the wood. His other friend is a wonderfully played Parisian thug- who assists him in escaping from the police and in avoiding capture. You see by this time the police themselves are beggining to suspect whether Alexandre had anything himself to do with his wife's death or the deaths of others- the corpses do begin to mount up in this drama in the true style of a Hitchcock thriller. What is interesting therefore is the way that the loss of his wife has rendered this man a deeply sad but brilliant man- it drained him of his core and placed him in the position of maintaining a facade of a successful doctor whilst actually being vacant inside.

This is a really interesting thriller- its well worth seeing- its exciting and clever in equal measure and should delight anyone who likes cinema on any level.

Guido vs Gracchi the Counterpunch

I give this article a more confrontational title than I want it to have, because having read Guido's response at Samizdata I have to say that I think he has something right and that some of my critique of him was not as plausibly phrased as it should have been. Lets isolate I think three points- one on which we agree, one on which I think I am going to move a little backwards and one where I think we can also establish a point of contact. This is an interesting debate: it has forced me to be much more positive about the kind of blogging that Guido does.

Guido and I agree that perceived self interest is much more important to politicians than self interest- we agree that politicians have a world view in which they do things and that they operate in their own interests. I am interested in what degree politicians are a different species from the general population in this: I'm still thinking about this one.

Where I concede is that Paul Staines is right: there is a separation between Paul and Guido, between the person and the blog persona. Perhaps because this blog is so much the creation of my personal whim and not of any attempt to create a persona, that means that I underestimated that. I should apologise that criticisms of Guido were meant to address the persona and not the person lying behind that persona. I accept the assurances offered that Paul has a long record of thinking about policy- I am sure that he does- most libertarians afterall get to their position after a lot of thinking. Throughout this post therefore I'm going to be quite precise- when I say Paul, I mean the individual behind the blog, when I say Guido I mean the persona in front of the blog so to speak. I hope that is a distinction that we can all agree on.

Lastly he is possibly right that the 'struggle' so far as it is one is going on on his blog and not this one. For the sake of this one I don't care- were the struggle going on here, I couldn't write so many film posts for a start I'd have to be disciplined and stick to politics. That isn't my style. But the real issue I suppose is dual: firstly its about what Paul says is Guido's anti politics. I can see as a libertarian why anti-politics works- in a sense the libertarian answer to the dilemma is to abolish politics itself. Remove stuff from the politicians and things will be fine- I am personally not so sure, as I have written elsewhere I don't think coercive power is simply the same as state power. Nor do I accept that political power is not exercised in other ways in a libertarian society: the people might be different and wear different hats but underlying my suspicion of politicians (something I share with Guido) is a suspicion of people- and ultimately I'm not sure about an anti-political approach to dealing with that. We need to work out systems for constraining and checking individual power and though libertarianism has a lot to contribute to that, I'm not sure that it has the answers.

The second point is about where the struggle is. Paul is right- I shouldn't care about Guido and I don't really care about millions of other blogs like Guido, but I do care about Guido. Thinking about it, its not Guido that I care about, so much as the fact that a gossip blog sits atop the blogging heirarchy in the UK. Its not envy precisely- I don't want this blog to be at the top of the blogging heirarchy- its a sense that Guido's blog doesn't allow his readers to understand what they should understand about the political world. Simply put I think that Guido should exist, but I wonder about the state of the political landscape if its the biggest in the country. That turns me I suppose to a bigger issue which is what blogs do and why people read them: I often wonder whether people's readership of blogs is simply to get a quick fix and whether we bloggers over analyse our output.Whether what people want is just to go over to Guido or Iain Dale and quickly read the latest on there as they take a break from work.

In the end Paul is right when he says that everyone is free to blog as they like- and then popularity comes. I suppose what I'm more interested in is what blogs tells us about politics and whether the story that they tell helps us understand politics. I'm not sure Guido is helpful there- because I think he makes us think that politics is about scandal only. Ultimately though I wonder whether we are still in the Drudge stage of the political cycle and whether as in America we shall see the slow growth of a wonkosphere eventually alongside the blogosphere. It does strike me that the problem with Guido as a blog is that it presents a naive view of politics- even if its writer doesn't hold that view of politics. That so many people read it says either one of two things- firstly that most people reading blogs read them for entertainment not enlightenment, and secondly that most people don't really understand politics that much and turn to sites like say Chris Dillow's or Matt Sinclair's which explain the thinking behind policy much better. I think its a mixture- my real issue is that its hard to find really good political commentary around about ideas and policy at the moment, you don't get it in the newspapers and you don't get it on many blogs. Its hard I think to know about the world of thinktanks and policy making (that world extends far beyond think tanks into the civil service and the business world as well) unless you are in the midst of it. Policy discussions go on over and above the general population who just get the gossip. In that sense Dale and Guido are just extreme versions of the MSM,

and what Britain needs is a stronger Wonkosphere- someone like Matt Yglesias to appear from somewhere!

The Republican Race

Waking up this morning, the immediate big story is the American Primary. There is an interesting discussion to be had about the Democratic race which pitches different kinds of characters against each other- but ideologically the Republican race is much more fascinating. In 2000 the Republicans decided that John McCain the Arizona senator was too moderate for them: many Republicans still think that that is the case. In that sense many may interperate the result as a massive defeat for conservatism in the Republican party: I think they are right but probably not in the way that those pundits confidently predicting think that they are right.

Apart from in the North East, this hasn't been a crushing McCain victory. A typical result is that in Oklahoma where with 100% of the precincts reporting, McCain got 37%, Huckabee 33% and Romney 25%. Admittedly these are early results- but even so it looks as though McCain has only got above 50% in three primaries, all in the North East. In most other places the results look slightly higher than what he got in Oklahoma but not that much higher. Percentage wise, John McCain has not captured over half the Republican party primary voters: and that's with the fact that he is much more popular with independents than either Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee. And yet despite that there can be no question that McCain seems to have gained the nomination- he has at the moment 487 delegates whilst his nearest challengers Romney and Huckabee both have under 200.

So what went wrong for conservatives tonight? Looking at the numbers, I would argue that it wasn't that they lacked voting strength. Put it this way in the majority of states, the not-McCain candidate won the majority of the votes. The reason why that doesn't come out in the delegate numbers is that the Republican party has a first past the post Primary system- you get past the winning post and you get rewarded. Now the point is that if this was the Democratic primary, which is PR, Romney and Huckabee combined might have equal numbers of delegates to McCain and be plausible challengers. They don't and aren't. The key thing about the conservative primary vote here is not that it didn't exist: but that it split. The Conservatives in the Republican party haven't gone away, they have divided neatly down the middle.

Look at the places where Romney and Huckabee won. Romney took states like Utah- the midwestern states. Huckabee won in the south- Alabama, West Virginia, etc. Most people would suggest that Huckabee won the evangelical vote- as he did earlier in Iowa, whereas Romney won the traditional conservative vote, coming second in California for example. This isn't because the two eliminated each other though: it is because both were deeply unsatisfactory candidates on their own. Look for instance at this Gallup poll, which demonstrates that if Huckabee had dropped out by a vast number his supporters would have gone to John McCain and not to Mitt Romney. Huckabee has been accused of socialism by Romney's supporters and Romney's Mormonism was a real problem for many of Huckabee's guys. The ultimate thing about the conservatives in this primary is that without George Allen or Bill Frist, they simply didn't have a good candidate (or perhaps their only good candidate, Fred Thompson, was fast asleep when the possibility came calling). The weakness for the conservative movement lay not so much in its base and motivating voters as in its leadership.

Part of that is just accident- had Allen not had his Maccaca moment or not faced Jim Webb in Virginia he might be the presumptive Republican nominee now. Whether there is something deeper I'm not sure- it might be that the conservative movement, naturally an oppositionalist movement has found government over the last eight years a fissaporous experience and will find renewed unity in 2012 against say a McCain Presidency or a Democratic Presidency. Or we could be seeing the effect of a quick primary season- given another two or three months the conservatives might have found their guy. The quick Primary season did not leave enough time for Conservatives to unite behind an anti McCain guy having decided which of their men they liked the most. All could be true. But what I think is definitely true is that the conservatives in the US in this election didn't lack for the troops and footsoldiers, they lacked for a plausible general to follow. In the South they marched for Huckabee, everywhere else for Romney and thanks to the East and West General McCain stormed to victory!

Britblog

I apologise for not doing this yesterday- other things drove it out of my mind! Anyway here we are today with a more limited and yet still illustrious list of posts from the UK blogosphere. We cover a whole range of experience here from the 17th to the 20th Century. Anyway to kick off how about reading James Hamilton's views on Capello's managment style- interesting and thoughtful as ever. Capello may be adopting a distant style to his players, but as Dave Cole points out the Tories are adopting a much more nannying style to the country. Freemania suspects though that the Tories themselves may need some nannying: is Cameron really only just about as good as Kinnock? Who cares anyway? From the desk of George Galloway we have the greatest attack on Imperialist scum ever delivered- may they die in their own individual Trotskyite, Zinovievist, Bukharanist, revisionist running dog hells!

But if they don't it doesn't matter, as they'll start blogging and end up in a legal fight: Mr Eugenides seeks to adjudicate in the latest battle betwixt Tim Ireland and Guido Fawkes. Calm down lads, the real idiocy is about the issues (as I said yesterday), Matt Sinclair's got a bee in his bonnet about the latest paper from the Social Market foundation on climate change- he isn't too impressed. Incidentally happy birthday Matt- for a two year old you are quite articulate. Don Paskini is another articulate lad concerned with issues, this week its sharing the proceeds of growth and how the Tories don't even understand their own policies! And that's good as it means that you don't have to attend SOAS, where the Iranians are putting on conferences funded with our public money- go to Harry's Place and see what you can do about it. Or rather don't, because society is going to pot anyway and its all religion's fault: we've been having the argument over at Liberal Conspiracy, go and start with Kate Belgravia's provocative and well written post on why Jesus Christ should dominate our politics less. Thing is that Kate should calm down, afterall look at what all those Muslims gave us in the Middle Ages: modern science and all- not convinced- well time to bring on the historians!

And here they come, leaping like a herd of wilderbeast through some savannah forest. First up is that classic civil war debate between Pepper and Puddle the two dogs- canine confusion becomes a metaphor for other debates. On a more illustrious subject, the Early Modern Whale circles around the Old Cheapside Cross and finds out what he can about its history. Some of us though are only too depressed by the present, its hard to avoid when you here that the bulbs are coming up even earlier than usual in Kew Gardens. But not everything is depressing- and ending on a high note- just consider the Political Umpire's tale of these two human beings whose bodies are joined together.

So long till next time I host the carnival- sorry for a short one- but I hope there is something there to savour!

Anne Coulter's Endorsement

Anne Coulter, American Conservative extraordinaire, endorses Hillary as the next President of the United States should McCain win the Republican Nomination- she even commits to campaign for her if McCain is the candidate....

Robert Fisk's review of Fisk's biography of Saddam Hussein

You read the title right: here is Robert Fisk's review of his own biography of Saddam Hussein. Well not quite his own. Though Fisk has a biography of Saddam Hussein published in Egypt, it isn't actually by him, its a forgery, published by an enterprising journalist who had heard of Fisk's leftwing reputation and thought he should have written a biography of Saddam Hussein. Fisk's article is hilarious as he traces this man across Cairio but it brings up for me something even more interesting which is this. We often presume on the internet that we have our identities set in stone and the real danger is that people will snoop on what we write from afar and find out that we are secret conservatives or something. I think that's the wrong danger- though it exists- I wonder whether one of the more interesting internet problems over the next couple of years as blogging matures will be identity theft. Tim Ireland has drawn attention to the problem of sock puppetting on the internet- but I think there are more egregious things to come. Take Iain Dale, the reason I advance Iain is because of his electoral ambitions, it would be perfectly possible for someone to fake an identity as Iain Dale on the internet and start commenting on various blogs in his guise giving electorally embarrassing posts- the same goes for any politician blogging from Paul Flynn and Harry Barnes to Nadine Dorries and John Redwood. Trademark theft on the internet is an interesting issue: I'll be fascinated to see how it develops- especially given what Fisk rightly says about the difficulties of enforcing trademarks in various countries.

Guido

I know its a hackneyed subject- but Guido posted his own manifesto for the reasons for his blogging and I thought I'd reply and I have here.

McCain a Democrat?

Not all Republicans are happy with John McCain. Some even compare him to Henry 'Scoop' Jackson, and call him a populist hawk.

Criss Cross

"Everyone is either making love or else predicting rain" Bob Dylan Desolation Row

Criss Cross is a minor film noir, starring Burt Lancaster in one of his early roles. But it is still an interesting film. The device upon which the film hinges is the character that Lancaster plays- a drifter in the American West who keeps drifting back to an old love and a failed marriage in Los Angeles. All we know about Steve (Lancaster's character) is that he drifts from job to job and seems to have no independent life outside his family. His brother an impossibly all American lad is going to get married, his wise old mother is he says an object of devotion but in reality is more of a curse as she sees what he cannot. He wanders into LA and works for a firm specialising in the security of armoured trucks delivering money. His pursuit of Anna his ex wife leads him to her new husband, Slim, who is a gangster. In order to convince Slim that he isn't trying to pursue Anna he tells him he has an idea for a heist on the armoured trucks. The heist goes wrong and Lancaster ends up in hospital before fleeing to Anna, at which point Slim arrives and we see the final denoument.

The point about the film though, as ever with noir, isn't really about the plot. We know the plot will turn out bad from the first frame. More interesting are the characters and particularly the character of Steve. Steve doesn't have much of a life nor does he have a narrative of why he has come back from his wanderings to Los Angeles. Noone believes him when he mentions his feeble reasons: they all think he has come back for Anna. And he spends so much time looking for her, that so very quickly do we. We think that he is looking for Anna and in reality the reason he is looking for her is that his mind wanders back to her without much need for encouragement. There doesn't seem to be much else to distract him: he doesn't have many interests, he turns down opportunities to go to the cinema, to ice skating, to divert himself from Anna. Love for him has become the narrative of his life- like Bob Dylan's characters in Desolation Row he either is making love or else sunk in a slough of despond, predicting rain. The point is that Steve doesn't have a life beyond his quest for this one woman- he even says so at one point in the film and its that lack of any other focus that means that he is dragged into a world that he naturally is not part of.

As a morality play therefore about the consequences of abandoning all to love, this film works. It undermines that idea- playing with the suggestion that the man who abandons everything for love is actually a man with little to abandon. Interestingly Anna the other principal in the film is shown as much more calculating, she has genuine affection for Steve (definitely physical attraction) and yet she is much more determined to save herself. She would abandon him for her own chance of happiness. Anna is, we are constantly shown, more intelligent than Steve: she understands unlike him that mere affection only carries you so far, that love is no shield against bullets. She is weak though and dragged into situations: with her a lack of resolve leads her to her doom. But what she demonstrates is that passion can coexist with other emotions, can be present but dominated by other concerns, prudential ones in her case. Steve doesn't get that. He can't get it which is why in the end he is led to his doom. For Steve there is only making love or else predicting rain- and he'd rather be dead than a meteorologist!

The Elephant Man

The Elephant Man's real name was Joseph Merrick, his picture is above. Merrick was born in 1862 in Leicester. His mother died when he was eleven and he spent time in and out of the workhouse in the city. His disease which caused the deformities in the picture above began to make its appearance at the age of five- he was unable to find work either as a cigar roller (because his right arm was too large to manipulate the cigars) or as a hawker of goods (because his appearance terrified people). He eventually ended up being used by a series of fairground entrepreuneurs as an attraction, a freak that the general public would gaze at. He was an unsuccessful freak in that he was almost too freakish, he terrified most of the people that he came across. In an attempted continental tour, Merrick found little success and was abandoned and robbed by his then manager. At that point he made his way back from Brussels to Liverpool St station and fainted when he reached the station handing over the card of a London doctor Frederick Treves to the station staff. Treves once summoned arrived and recalled inspecting Merrick years before when a junior surgeon, he took pity on the Elephant Man and got him put up in the London Hospital in his own set of rooms. Merrick became a society curiosity- the Princess of Wales was only the most noble of a succession of famous guests- he attended the theatre and stayed in the country. This idyllic lifestyle ended when Merrick died aged 27 in 1890. He couldn't sleep lying down and Treves believed that in a final effort to do so, the weight of Merrick's head either broke his own neck or that his head fell forward and he suffocated himself in his own trunk.

The story may sound horrible and whatever Merrick's disease- the most modern guess is Proteus syndrome and possibly a disease of the nerves named neurofibromatosis type 1- he suffered hugely from it. His body as you can see in the photograph above was horribly deformed- with the exception of his genitals and his left arm, his entire shape was twisted and stunted. He limped. He could barely speak comprehensibly, though after much practise others might learn how to hear the words amidst his curious tones. He had continual health problems mainly bronchial but others as well- he had to have a huge overgrowing trunk sawn off in his teenage years. He was completely isolated. Most of his notions of people came from the books he read which were his only consolation. Fascinatingly he saw the normal world not as the world he saw but as the world of a Jane Austen novel- Emma was one of his favourite books. He was not mentally retarded and was perfectly aware of his own condition. He had an incredibly romantic attitude to women- seeing them as perfect and placing on a pedestal- sublimating sexual desire into a reverence for the angelic female. He was cruelly treated, and yet himself very kind, almost saintlike. Its likely that at times in his life- with his mother as a young child, with his early showmen managers and later with Treves that he found real compassion from others but it was only later on that he was able communicate.

His life is an incredible story. It does reveal a lot about the nineteenth century and attitudes to entertainment. We often think of the Victorian era as a censorious one- but in reality the story of Merrick makes us I hope realise that it was merely differently morally orientated. Laughing at Merrick would be seen as immoral today, in the early Victorian fairground it was a way of making money. The story also reveals the limited choices out there for someone like Merrick in the Victorian world: he was incredibly lucky to be found firstly by the showmen and then by Treves but he could have languished in a workhouse for years and years and almost did. The one bitterness that he constantly displayed was about his time in the workhouse and the horrible conditions in which he lived- endless bullying and endless drudgery. He was denied a lot of what we consider to be the attributes of normal life: Merrick had few friends until his later days, was almost childlike in his attitude to the world because his world was merely his own mind, he had so little engagement with other people, he had no relations with the other sex (women ran screaming from him normally: something that caused him great sadness) and though he read voraciously he had little education. But somehow despite that he was almost devoid of bitterness and hatred: the fascinating thing about Merrick is that he was gentle and kind and thoughtful, in a childish way, yet still a genuine way. He managed to overcome his difficulties according to those close to him with a real fortitude of personality.

His tale is interesting and so distinct from the rest of human experience that its hard to read lessons from it, I think what is fascinating about it is the difference that it reveals between Victorian London and our own day and also the ways that this deep interiority was actually a deep resource for Merrick. Cast upon his own mind, he found there the willpower to be a good person. Despite his terrible affliction, and his terrible life, he succeeded in ways that people richer and more powerful than him did not. Furthermore we should also remember that he was lucky: there were no doubt hundreds like him or even thousands who perished, abandoned to the meagre resources of the early welfare state.

Jaw-Jaw

Andrew Stuttaford is entirely right here when he discusses why its a good idea to talk to Iran. The point is that you might not gain anything, in which case if the talks are done at a low level you haven't lost anything. You might though gain something in which case you have a success. Talking is a bad idea if it gives the other side a propaganda coup- I remember Blair going to Damascus and being attacked by Bashar Assad but if done properly at low levels what is the problem with it. Furthermore if its done properly with a proper arrangement in place, it can even work at higher levels. The point is that negotiations don't lose you anything, they may even gain you advantages.

McA-Levels

Dave Osler I think is wrong to rebuke the government at Liberal Conspiracy over its latest wheeze to allow major companies to train their workers and receive qualifications worth as much as A-Levels: he fears a polytechnisation of the new qualifications- I can see where he is coming from but disagree. The degrees and A-Levels could work as described here- as effectively qualifications in management. There is nothing wrong with such a qualification- indeed if done well it could lead to jobs in the future- there are management schools afterall now and I can't really see why this wouldn't be a build up to one of those schools.

Where I think the government are wrong is in giving this to the companies to run. Not because there is anything wrong with company run training, but because the reputation of any courses will rest on the reputation of the companies concerned. The real issue here is that what you need is something you see in other branches of the economy. I'm thinking in particular of law and accountancy. In those two proffessions outside bodies regulate professional qualifications and they are well respected, whatever happens to the companies involved. I think that's a much better way of proceeding and it avoids another criticism that people might just be trained in company specific knowledge. What you really need is an association of catering management that say the big catering companies funded and was independent of government but respected by them all: so MacDonalds, Wetherspoons or even just those who had received the degree contributed. I do see that as being a way forward in the way that I don't see these present proposals being a perfect way forward.

I think though Dave underrates the importance of lifelong training here. The Leitch report on Skills revealed a lot about the nature of skills in the UK population: I'm not sure about some of the bolder predictions and the bases for them but I can see that this kind of skills training isn't a bad thing. Particularly because not everyone can succeed at school- for many people 16 or 17 isn't the right age to succeed, they aren't ready for it or interested in it and its only later in their twenties that they can succeed. That's particularly true for kids with learning difficulties: I know someone who is a chef at a Wetherspoons because he dropped out of school because of dyslexia, he would be perfect for one of these programs. He has the ability but lacks the confidence and its precisely that person that the government scheme with these companies is intended to attract. I would tweak it so as to make it run independently of the companies- but I do think in principle this is a good idea particularly for those who don't have a good experience of the education system and consequently don't fancy facing an educative institution again, be it a school, night school or the Open University.

Done well this could be a real success- done badly and with too much government control it could fail- but I think it could work particularly if these courses separate themselves eventually from the companies and become courses say at the Institute of Catering Management which companies invite people to apply for. I think it could work and if it did it would be great for many people who the education system fails but who have as much talent as those for whom the education system works. There will always be people, because of the key fact that we don't all grow in the same way at the same times, nor as we find out who we are do we all find relating to authority easy, who get left behind and feel very sceptical about education. This seems to me to be a very good move to get those people back on some kind of education wagon: and done well could be a real boon.

Mervyn King

Mervyn King has received another term as Governor of the Bank of England, thanks in part to his reputation for a sensible inflation policy and partly due to the fact that the recent Treasury Select Committee Report on Northern Rock condemned the FSA and not the Bank of England. I have no quarrel with the decision: I am no expert in who should be Governor of the Bank of England and given the relative consensus about the reappointment see no reason to be disquieted about King's return to the top post. But there is something interesting I think we should reflect on and its this. Increasingly posts like the Governor of the Bank of England or should it become independent the Head of the Health Service and other jobs are getting more and more powerful: at the moment they are appointed by ministers without much consideration by anyone else until after the event, should that be true?

I don't think it should. Ultimately the UK government is beggining to gather and use instruments within the leglislature to check and scrutinise central government. Whether it be the Public Accounts Committee using the National Audit Office to scrutinise government spending or the Select Committee for the Treasury examining the events at Northern Rock almost all of the select committees have had their moment in the sun. Perhaps though its time to expand their role even further and adopt the US model of confirmation hearings- making these senior and responsible appointments subject to public examination. Often the US system doesn't work and there are problems with it: but on the other hand there are merits to any nominee for a senior position like the governorship of the Bank with large discretionary powers in facing Parliament. It would not be appropriate for a civil servant whose responsibility is to ennact ministerial policy: but for someone whose responsibility is to define what policy is, Parliament should be able to hear what their intentions are, what their philosophy of monetary policy (in the case of the Bank) is and how they would behave. The public are also entitled to hear from them: unlike a civil servant for whose decisions the minister is ultimately responsible, the Governor of the Bank, the Auditor General and other officials are not presided over by a minister. The public ought to know who they are, what they want to do and what their responsibilities are. Confirmation hearings can but help.

And we have the appropriate places for those hearings to take place: the Select Committees. The function would strengthen the role of those select Committees politically too- it would raise their exposure and hopefully demonstrate to MPs that there is a career beyond being an executive minister, that there is a career in scrutinising policy as well.

The Bank of England

Andrew Lillicoe is entirely right on Conservative Home to draw attention to the fact that the Chancellor needs to explain the way that the Bank of England is and should be interpreting his inflation target. One of the strengths of the model of independence used for the Bank of England is that whilst the Bank is accountable for the operation of monetary policy, the Chancellor is accountable for its ends. The Chancellor sets the rate of inflation he would like to see- and the Bank finds a way to bring that rate or an approximation to that rate into being. That system means though that the Chancellor needs to take control of the issuing of that rate: he is the democratically elected politician and no matter how technically proficient the economists are at Threadneedle Street, it is for the Chancellor not them to decide the ends of UK monetary policy. That means that the Chancellor needs to exercise that power and not be intimidated- there is a worrying trend in British public life for politicians to devolve power to experts. Its not worrying if the experts implement the instructions of the politician, it is if as it seems in this case from Mr Lillicoe's reporting, the politicians forget that they should demand answers if the experts don't produce the conclusions that they have asked for.

Lord Ashdown Viceroy Extraordinary!

Peter Cuthbertson is pleased that the Afghan government turned down the services of Lord Ashdown, former leader of the Liberal Democrats and British peer, as UN special envoy to the troubled democracy. Cuthbertson may be right in the general case: that having failed as a party leader is no qualification to run a country after you leave office. But Ashdown is different and he is different precisely because he is one of those rarities amongst professional politicians: a man who has had real experience outside politics. Ashdown has military experience with British special forces, experience working in the foreign office and even perhaps though he has never confirmed or denied these stories in MI6. He was handled the Balkan role because of his long interest in the region in Parliament- frequently making trips there whilst Liberal Democratic leader. In such a way Ashdown combined real diplomatic, military and intelligence experience with the fact that he had been a party leader in a major democracy and therefore understood the way that politicians and campaigns worked- that unique combination meant that he was well qualified for a role in Bosnia and would have been well qualified having been a success there for a role in Afghanistan.

If politicians have done more in their private life before politics and demonstrated a particular interest and ability in one area, there is no reason that they should not be nominated for office there when their political career is over.

Index of Cinema Posts at Westminster Wisdom

• In the Valley of Elah
• Gaslight
• No Country For Old Men
• Charlie Wilson's War
• Reservoir Dogs
• The Saragossa Manuscript
• Little Dieter Needs to Fly
• Grizzly Man
• The Big Heat
• American Gangster
• Lions for Lambs
• Nightmare Alley
• The Counterfeiters
• L'Argent
  
• Control
• Interview
• Zodiac
• Twelve Angry Men
• Letter from an Unknown Woman
• The Hills Have Eyes II
• Rebecca
• Belle de Jour
• Vivre sa Vie
• The Battle of Algiers
• Thank You For Smoking
• Marie Antoinette
• Scarface
• Double Indemnity
• Rope
• Sunset Boulevard
• L'Enfer
• The Killers
• Winter Light
• Summer with Monica
• The Trial of Joan of Arc
• It's a Wonderful Life
• The Man from Laramie
• Wild Strawberries
• Bonnie and Clyde
• Force of Evil
• Humanity and Paper Balloons
• The City of God
• Casino
• All Quiet on the Western Front
• Sophie Scholl Die Letzen Tage
• All The King's Men
• M
• Memento
• The Devil Wears Prada
• Born to Kill

A UN University?

No longer a fantasy, it seems from Der Speigel's English edition that a UN university is in the process of being set up. There has always been a UN university but until now it has functioned as a kind of UN thinktank. Now they are thinking of taking on students and becoming a more conventional university based in Yokohama. This is one of the most absurd ideas that has ever been put forward- let me just give a couple of reasons why it is absurd for this body to do that- partly the issue is that the UN University could be doing something very useful but instead is engaged on this vanity project. Lets for a moment think about why the UN ought not do these things and then concentrate on why the University is doing these things and then move to what it could more usefully do.

The argument about why it shouldn't do this is pretty simple. There are a number of great national universities out there in the developed world whose work it would be duplicating- why should there be a UN university- it isn't like the world is lacking in Universities. National Governments and private individuals seem willing to endow great institutions from American Universities like Harvard, Yale and Princeton, to European ones like Oxford, Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute. Furthermore most university systems cope fairly well with all levels of ability- academic students go to the Harvards and Yales, people who want to study vocationally go to say Loughborough (in the UK for sports science) or Westminster (for nutrition). The world is filled with universities- the UN don't need to fill this gap.

The only places which don't have many universities are poor countries- but again though it might seem like a good idea to found a UN university- it isn't. All that this will acheive is to attract even more of the brightest students away from idigenous universities- meaning that those third world institutions are deprived of their best resource- the talent of their students and professors and the wealth of the endowments that they might leave. The foundation of a UN university would just add to the already existing brain drain from the developing to the developed world- why do we need to do this?

Bureacratic vanity is the best answer. Always governments and institutions ought to be asking not whether we can do something- but why we ought to do something. Its a fairly good rule that if the market or other institutions can and do provide a service, that you don't need to get involved. It doesn't work in all cases- but there must be a clearly demonstrable public good from something that the government or an international body does. The reason to do something cannot be as it seems to be here the ambition of one or a couple of individuals: government spending needs to be justified and its justification can't merely be that this is something we can do.

The UN University would far better be employed as a group of elderly, even retired, academics who would help governments that don't have university systems set them up. Say providing exam papers that would be respected as a gold standard and hence gain respect for degrees from new universities in developing nations. The UN University could organise for first world academics to go on regular lecturing tours in Africa or in the poorer parts of Asia. It strikes me that this would be a far better use of time and resource than competing with those new universities. The UN University would be far better used as a resource for all the Universities in the world- if its used at all but it should not compete with them.

We don't need it, we shouldn't have it and the only reason we do have it is vanity. This is exactly the kind of thing that gives government a bad reputation and its exactly the kind of thing which ought to be abandoned.