O'SULLIVAN ELECTION DIARY 3
by John O'Sullivan
Benador News
April 15, 2005

My first opinion piece for the Evening Standard appeared this morning. It's
an attempt to give an overview of the election campaign--and the broad
political environment which is shaping it. Once again, with the permission
of the Evening Standard's editor, to whom I am grateful, I reprint it
below. It has one or two minor amendments, explaining things to non-British
audience, but it is otherwise unchanged:

Henry Kissinger was once asked why academic disputes were so bitter and
famously replied: "Because the rewards are so small." The narcissism of
small differences in this election campaign is even more extreme. All three
parties struggle over very modest differences in public spending and public
service reform
with the unpersuasive bloodthirstiness of professional wrestlers. Large
and real differences of interest and opinion yawn in front of them. Yet,
somehow or other, these go unnoticed in public debate.
An exile returning to Britain after years abroad in Canada and the US--even
years punctuated by regular visits--perhaps notices this oddity with
fresher eyes. In particular he observes that there are two Britains--No,
not the rich and poor, nor the Anglo and the "ethnic," nor even the
native-born and the immigrant,, but the unavoidable division between Market
Britain and Official Britain.
Market Britain he knows well enough from abroad. It is is the Britain that
makes things, provides services, competes in markets at home and abroad,
and pays taxes. That Britain did not always enjoy a favorable reputation.
Forty years ago it was synonymous with strikes, go-slows, poor quality,
late delivery, zero spare parts, and unreliability. Today it is the fourth
largest economy in the world with a reputation for capitalist efficiency.
That is why innocent tourists arrive at Heathrow expecting to find a
country as well-run as Claridges, Conrans, Tesco and Switzerland.
Official Britain is what they actually find. This is the Britain of
Whitehall, the public sector, the immigration service, the police, the
universities, the National Health Service, the courts; local government,
and various supervisory quangos such as the Commission for Racial Equality,
These bodies all provide "public services" of one kind or another
(including the provision of stern moral criticism.) They are monopolies
funded mainly by taxation and unstimulated by competition. And, by and
large, they are bad at what they do.
Police don't catch criminals; the immigration service admits terrorists;
schools send out illiterates after years of compulsory "education"; the
courts free dangerous criminals; welfare agencies station orphans with
child abusers; hospitals keep patients in pain waiting for months (the
plural of an NHS patient seems to be patience); and so on.
This poor performance, demonstrated in every second headline, ought to be
the main election issue. Instead, the main election issue seems to be how
much Official Britain should grow. How come?
In its halcyon New Labour years, Official Britain became highly skilled at
sedating opposition and manufacturing support. Gordon's Brown's "stealth
taxes" that silently financed an expansion of the public sector were the
bedrock strategy. But they were accompanied by constant small gestures of
cultural sympathy for Middle Britain (which is Market Britain in its
non-working hours) from Blair and the Blairites.
Labour's latest manifesto is a treasure trove of such lollipops from "zero
tolerance" for classroom disruption to "harder A-level questions." Bill
Clinton pioneered this retail social conservatism in the 1996 presidential
election to win over the soccer moms. While the sun shines, it works.
At the same time, Official Britain was evolving its own ideology of soft
therapeutic statism that Blair cited on Wednesday as the "progressive
consensus." This it gradually imposed across the public sector even on very
traditional institutions such as the army, the police, the courts and even
museums. Thus, the police became more concerned about discouraging
(non-criminal) racial and social prejudices than about stopping crimes; the
BBC became an uncritical cheeleader for anti-war sentiment; the
universities were instructed to subordinate merit to social engineering;
the schools replaced British history with multiculturalism; and museums
were asked to ensure that their patrons represented the right ethnic and
gender mix; etc., etc..
That kind of thing great;ly irritates people, but while the sun shines,
not enough to stir them to any resistance beyond grumbling. .
But will the sun continue to shine? Official Britain has an inherent
tendency to grow--to spend more, to interfere more, and to preach more--if
not constantly checked and harrassed. Brown's expansion of the public
sector has already been costly in both spending and regulation. According
to the British Chamber of Commerce (quoted in "The Economist"), the
cumulative bill from new regulations between 1998 and 2003 comes to £39
billion (approximately $75 billion.). And the extent of the government's
over-spending was dramatically under-scored earlier in the week by the
International Monetary Fund's unexpected intervention. It spoiled Labur's
manifesto party by forecasting an early budgetary crisis that would lead
either to major spending cuts or major tax hikes. The sun is at least
beginning to set on Official Britain.
None of this causes the slightest anxiety to the Liberal Democrats. They
are now the unambiguous advocate of Official Britain and unrestrained
imbibers of the progressive consensus. Their manifesto outbids Labour on
the Left, on the war, on spending, and on raising taxes. If Mr. Gladstone
were to return to earth, with his old-fashioned ideas of "money fructifying
in the pockets of the people" and help for "small nations rightly
struggling to be free," the Lib-Dems would be the very last party he would
join.
Labour is more hesitant. Blair would like to reconcile Market and Official
Britain. His acceptance of the Thatcher reforms was one expression of this.
He realizes that the public services like health and education need choice
and variety in provision. His manifesto speech was an attempt to commit
Brown and the Labour party to such market reforms after his departure. But
the brute fact is that he has consistently lacked the administrative
stamina of a Thatcher to push them through against the obstruction of the
Chancellor and the resistance of most Labour MPs. He is unlikely to succeed
when his power is waning and his resignation announced in advance.
As the natural party of Market Britain, the Tories might be expected to
urge both retrenchment and reform on Official Britain in the light of
worsening public finances. But a party needs to make its case for such
painful courses well in advance. And while the sun was shining, the Tories
invested very little intellectual capital in challenging the Brown-Blairite
expansion of the public sector or the superior virtue of state provision .
Today, therefore, they can promise only to rein in spending modestly and to
cut taxes hardly at all.
In the light of that past failure, their campaigning instead on populist
issues such as crime and immigration is necessary. It also makes good sense
in its own right. Official Britain is clearly failing on such matters--as
was conclusively demonstrated here by Thursday's conviction of an illegal
immigrant, Kamel Bourgass, who had escaped deportation twice before
murdering a policeman--and public opinion is largely on the Tories' side.
Even on such issues, however, they are handicapped by their failure to
expose and demystify the progressive consensus. "More police" was a better
slogan when the police caught criminals rather than filling in forms.
In short the Tories have to challenge and demystify all the soothing myths
of Official Britain in defense of the common sense and economic realities
of Market Britain. They may not win this election by doing so--the hour is
late. But reality always defeats fantasy in the end.
And if the Tories don't become the champions of Market Britain, whether
they win or lose won't really matter.


****************************************************************************

I ran into an old friend and former colleague in the parliamentary press
gallery at a dinner party last night. Andrew Alexander was a very fine
parliamentary sketchwriter in the seventies. But he left parliamentary
reporting to become a successful financial editor of the Daily Mail. Today
he writes a weekly column for the Mail where he mixes dry wit with ice-cold
conservative reasoning to make an excellent opinion cocktail.
Andrew arrived having just written his column. So we got an entertaining
preview.
The Tory tax cuts (see above), he had calculated, would be equal to a mere
two per cent of government spending. They would come into effect a year
after the election. They would be the full extent of Tory tax-cutting for
that parliament. (They seem to have boxed themselves in here in order to
completely refute the Labor charge of a "hidden Tory agenda.") And if you
take expected inflation into account, the end-result would be less than one
penny in the Pound (or one cent in the dollar) off the income tax rate.
Andrew felt it hardly seemed worth an election. And his view probably
reflects the views of many of the Tory party's middle class supporters. Not
all, of course, since others are mainly concerned with the improvement of
the public health and education services. In order to please the latter,
the Tories have both matched (or exceeded) Labor's spending on these
services and proposed only the most minor reforms in them. Not only has
that meant trivial proposals to cut tax, but it has also left the Tories
unable to benefit politically from the continued failure of these services.
They will be equally hard-pressed to gain political kudos from the fiscal
crisis predicted by the NHS when it eventually arrives. No crisis can
confirm predictions that were never made.
Whatever the result of this election, the Tories simply have to be bolder.


*********************************************************************

The Kamel Bourgass trial has been an interesting test of attitudes to the
immigration question. Broadly speaking, in Britain and in the U.S., support
for high levels of immigration is an almost dislodgeable elite prejudice,
while polls suggest that three-quarters of the voters favor lower numbers
and more effective controls.
Bourgass was an illegal immigrant. He was part of a terrorist cell that may
or may not have been linked to Al Qaeda. He was planning to extract the
poison, ricin, from various everyday groceries and spread it by rather
primitive methods around the area where he lived. (Ricin destroys the
immune system and usually causes death within days.) When the police went
to arrest him (on a distinctly botched operation), he stabbed and killed a
young detective.
This sequence of events is damaging to the government in general--and
helpful to the Conservatives in particular. Bourgass was twice arrested
and, as an illegal immigrant, ought to have been deported. Two
opportunities to deport him arose--neither was acted on. In one, the
immigration service was told of his status when he was arrested for
shoplifting, but no official turned up in court on the day of his trial.
As a result a decent man is now dead. Since the Tories have focussed on
exactly this kind of outrage and made illegal immigration a main plank in
their campaign, they are entitled to claim vindication.
But this "chattering classes" are deeply reluctant to grant it. They have
been wittering on for weeks about how the Tory stress on immigration is
shameful, indecent, squalid, etc., etc. and also counterproductive. They
want to persuade the Tories that they will lose votes over the issue and so
should abandon it. That is nonsense, of course. The Tories may well lose
this election, but not because of the one topic on which they enjoy a
commanding lead over Labor in public opinion.
How different newspapers deal with the Bourgass story, however, has been
very revealing of social attitudes and of journalistic honesty. The tabloid
newspapers--which cater to Middle England--are all over this story. They
give clear, detailed and accurate accounts of what happened and of the
failures of the immigration system that made it possible. Ditto the Daily
Telegraph which gives the story a dramatic page one headline. Ditto the
Daily Mail which has a very fine step-by-step report of the way in which
Bourgass avoided deportation.
But the Times--which has been sucking up to New Labor in general and
denouncing the Tories's low exploitation of immigration--exiled the story
to page six where it became the scandal of the Tories attempting to exploit
the crime for political gain! Image the horror of it--an opposition party
exploiting a scandal of government inaction that led to a murder! And doing
so for political gain!
It must be said, however, that BBC News outdid even the Times. In its
extensive report of the Bourgass trial, it somehow failed to mention that
he was an illegal immigrant at all. In a defensive statement later the Beeb
acknowledged that its news report should have included a line about
Bourgass's illegal status but that it had "tried to focus on the wider
terrorist threats to Europe . . . rather than going into detail on the
asylum issue."
This must be the first time that terrorism has been used as a cover.

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