Of all the arguments that this government has put up to justify their attempted smash-and-grab raid on the natural rights of us all, the most wrong-headed, spurious and downright pernicious is perhaps the claim that “if you’ve done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to fear”.

To someone who has an absolute trusting faith in the state, this is true. Entrusting a perfect state, which both never did anything wrong and also never did anything with their data that a reasonable citizen might wish to disagree with, is one thing.

But this is of course not exactly what’s an offer, what with us living with a state apparatus that not many of us would regard as perfect, and reasonable people taking different views on things.

What is being, slowly, forced on us, is entrusting pretty much all our personal information to someone else. And although the nature of our relationship with the state is rather different to, say, deciding whether we want to give our phone number out to some random person we’ve just met, or allowing someone access to our personal details on Facebook, at root it is the same. Before you give any information about yourself to someone, you ask yourself: do you trust them?

And what I think makes my run a bit cold is that it simply does not occur to most people who utter this phrase – at least some of whom are sensible and relatively alert human beings – that it is only true if one has pure, unquestioning faith in the apparatus of the state. If you put to such people - Ministers, for example - the proposition that the state could do no wrong – well, if it is were in public they would deny that they think such a thing, and if it were in private, they would surely just giggle. It is not a claim that, put in those terms, almost anyone I know would seek to defend.
But yet this phrase is trotted out as some kind of reassurance that if you’re not a criminal – you’re just a normal person – then you have nothing to fear in giving your information to the state.

And this is the second aspect of its use that makes every alarm bell in my body ring. For in the armoury of governments that start off meaning well but end up falling into totalitarianism, in the drawer just next to collecting huge amounts of personal information about their citizens, is dividing off, bit by bit, one section of society from another. This government is already well down this route in exploiting this supremely cynical tactic, in the way it is implementing ID cards. Throwing off casually to one side one of the hardest-won rights of a free society, living under the rule of law, that the law applies to all equally, they are introducing this category by category.

And of course they start by imposing it on all the unpopular groups of people – foreigners, students, people without an effective voice – basically, every group demonised by the Daily Mail. Yes, Prime Minister called this tactic “salami slicing”. Pastor Martin Niemöller made the same point in his famous lines about the way in which German society was picked apart in the 1930s, group by group. I am not, before someone accuses me of it, saying that this government has the same intentions as that regime. But the tactic is absolutely the same: imposing an unpopular view by “dividing and ruling” may be – despite its extreme cynicism – a powerful way of a government achieving its way, and therefore in a way unsurprising. But even leaving aside what it tells us about this government that it is prepared to employ such tactics to achieve its aims – in a democratic society that does not oblige us all simply to roll over and accept it.

If you believe that you are innocent, that you have “done nothing wrong”, and you are completely confident in every respect in your government, then you might feel tempted to accept this argument.

But even if you are, you shouldn’t accept it. Because you should be worried about protecting not only your own rights but those of your fellow-citizens, some of them perhaps with more non-standard or complex lives than you.

The use of this phrase is the very opposite of reassurance that if you are just a normal person then you have nothing to fear – because it can only be said either by someone who has no idea what they’re saying, or by someone who believes that we can never have anything to fear from any one of the millions of individuals who might ever have their fingers on one of the levers of the state.

Even the supremely innocent person - let alone the rest of us - DOES have something to fear from the government taking all their information

I see that Mr Brown has this morning waded in to the debate about banks and mortgages, saying he wants to restrain banks from what seem to many people some of their more extraordinary excesses, such as 100% mortgages, mortgages six times your salary, and banks paying you to live in a house in anticipation of you paying them back when you die (OK, I made the last one up but would you really be surprised to hear that such a product was actually available!).

This exercise looks to me as if it’s about trying to reassure us that he is coming from the same place as those of who thinks all this kind of thing sounds just crazy - rather than a serious attempt to tackle the roots of the problems in consumer financial services. Indeed it doesn’t seem to have many specifics at all, other than simply asking the FSA to look into all this.

And specifically it won’t challenge what seems to me to be one of the main ways that banks have insinuated their ways into our lives, which is this.

Quite simply, thirty or forty years ago it was possible to buy a house without having to involve a bank.

Now, however, for almost everyone it is effectively not possible to buy a house without handing over quite a lot of money to a bank, for a mortgage.

I don’t claim to understand exactly how banks have managed to pull this off, but it seems to me a very effective trick by a whole sector - effectively ensuring that you can only get access to one of life’s essentials by paying a lot of money, normally on an ongoing basis over several years, to a private sector. And I really can’t see why anyone would think this is in the public interest. Just compare it to the political debates about other “essentials” of life such as health and education, and the extreme watchfulness and lengths that we as a society go to in order to ensure that no charging regime is able to get between a citizen and these. It seems to me extraordinary that we allow a situation where it is impossible to get access to buying a house without handing over a lot of the money that you ought to be spending actually on the house, or indeed on any of life’s other essentials or desirables, to a financial services institution.

Clearly the point above does not apply to social housing - but unless anyone is actually advocating that private ownership of housing should be abolished, and we should live in social housing, this does not seem to me to answer the point (and unlike health and education where the proportion of the public using the private sector is very small, most of us are in the private housing sector is far higher: I believe the figure is about 70%).

And obviously the comparison between the picture thirty years ago and now is not completely black and white: mortgages did exist then, and certainly some portion of society needed them, and equally there are some still who can afford to buy a house without one now.

But by tying the whole market inextricably into using mortgages, banks have managed to inflate house prices to an extent where the house prices to average earnings ratio is such that for most people, it is now simply not possible to buy a house without a mortgage.

I certainly see that for each individual planning to buy a house, a mortgage can be very helpful in making it more affordable. And certainly banning all mortgages seems somewhat extreme (even leaving aside the not negligible issue that such a move would entail a huge overnight cut in the value of most families’ principal asset!).

But it seems to me that a serious approach to reforming the housing finance sector in the public interest would address this point of why, in stark contrast to health and education, for most people the private sector is able to insist on getting its cut, in order to provide access to housing.

The other day I came across an article making the familiar argument that politicians these days increasingly have no background in anything other than politics. Unlike their forbears, it is claimed, who had wide experience running other organisations, our leaders these days are woefully ill-experienced. The author of this article - George Walden, who ten years ago I regarded as the intelligent face of the Conservative party, but I’m afraid I now tend to see more as just a miserable old man - particularly compared them with Churchill.

This is now a familiar claim. But - aided by an interesting discussion at that excellent institution Liberal Drinks (which I feel strongly we should encourage to happen as widely as possible around the party, incidentally) - it strikes me that although it conforms to our general sense of the decline and convergence of politics, is not actually supported by the evidence.

I offer two main pieces of evidence against this claim.

Firstly, let’s take a look at perhaps the two greatest Prime Ministers that Britain has had (I’m not trying to start a discussion here about who Britain’s two greatest PMs were, but they seem to me a reasonable pair to pick!).

Churchill was obsessed by politics from childhood, aiming to follow his father into government. He first entered Parliament at the age of 25 and was in the Cabinet by the time he was 34. At various points in his life he made some money through writing, and in his early life had a couple of thoroughly Boys Own escapades in the battle of Omdurman and escaping from a prisoner of war camp during the Boer War. They were certainly no routine experiences. But playing soldiers in various parts of the world did not give him much sense of the varied conditions of life in his own country at the time - and it is quite clear that throughout his life his main focus was always politics and government.

Gladstone, similarly, went straight from university into Parliament at the age of 22 (6 years younger than the current youngest member of the House of Commons) after only a Grand Tour that was extremely limited by comparison to today’s gap years, and first became a Minister by the time he was 24. Although he famously had interests in theology and Homer, he never did any job not related to governing the country (or in his case, half the globe too)

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The liberal conscience in me would very much like to think that there will be consequences for the Evening Standard for the way it has behaved over the last few weeks. For the duration of the campaign it has turned itself from a relatively respectable newspaper with some journalistic integrity, with a generally right of centre agenda, into a full-scale campaigning newspaper for Boris Johnson. Its headlines, and perhaps most powerfully of all the billboards it has prominently displayed around London, have carried headlines which would have shamed the writers of the most partisan party campaigning literature for their cheerful disregard for balanced fact.

This matters, of course, because the Evening Standard is the only proper newspaper in London (for those who aren’t familiar with the rather odd newspaper situation in London, there is also one morning paper, and two afternoon ones, all distributed free on the Tube, two of the three of which are lite versions of the Standard itself, and all three of which are broadly speaking rubbish).

Now I don’t have a problem with the right of anyone to run a newspaper and through it promote a particular political agenda – and I certainly don’t think there is a strong case for extending to newspapers, even monopolistic ones like the Standard, the requirements for impartiality which are (rightly) imposed on broadcasters.
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The most depressing thing is that, as soon as I saw the headline on the BBC News page, even though it was unattributed, I knew it was from a Lib Dem MP.

Greg Mulholland, Lib Dem MP for Leeds North West, is apparently to propose an amendment to weights and measures legislation, to make bars and pubs sell wine in smaller glasses.

Now, the reasons for doing this are pretty straightforward - to encourage people to drink less. And of course the health of anyone who visits a pub reasonably often would indeed benefit from drinking less alcohol.

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I read a report in the Observer over the weekend that a new grouping called the Alcohol Health Alliance will launch this week, calling for a 10% rise in taxation on booze, and a ban on advertising it on TV before 9pm - and I see that they have today launched their campaign. The Observer went further, going on to quote a Professor Sir Michael Marmot from University College London, as saying that that doesn’t go nearly far enough, and that alcohol prices should be doubled, to discourage people from drinking - indeed this is highlighted in the article’s headline “Call for price of bring to double to cut bingeing”. Their piece generally runs through all the evils of drinking, and why the government is concerned about this.

Now, I don’t seek to dispute for a moment the medical and other evidence that alcohol is quite clearly bad for your health. This is particularly true in relation to young people, a focus for this article and these calls.

But what I find extraordinary is the Observer’s - and indeed even the BBC’s - apparently unquestioning acceptance that the government should obviously therefore be looking into further restricting access to it. While they do both briefly quote a spokesman from the British Beer and Pub Association pointing out that doing any of this would ‘further restrict personal freedoms’, it is quite clear that they are only really interested in the case for doing some of this. (I see here that the drinks industry has launched its own salvo in reply to this initiative, but a self-interested response from the industry with a direct financial interest hardly qualifies as a response on the principle).

This incredibly authoritarian and nanny-ish government does actually seem to have brainwashed us all that it is acceptable to prevent people taking decisions about their own lives. Read the rest of this entry »

Blair’s speech raised a vitally important debate - and he was more right than many of those who have attacked him.

I’ve been trying to work out what I think about Blair’s speech about the media this week. Fundamentally I think a lot of what he says is right - the relationship between politicians and the media is really quite unhelpful, and certainly doesn’t help the British public by allowing intelligent debate about public issues. Bluntly, the media’s approach promotes the image of politicians as charlatans and chancers, when in fact pretty much every single politician, of any party, went into politics because they wanted to contribute to the public debate and improve Britain. This is a travesty (and apart from anything else politics in fact offers very thin pickings for a charlatan or a chancer!).

So this is an important debate. Much of what he said needs to be said and as Steve Richards says, most politicians are for understandable reasons too scared of upsetting the media to say it.

Blair is obviously right that the media world is constantly changing, and that this isn’t necessarily how we expected it would change - for example the role of blogs and “citizen journalism”. But we knew that. In fact one of the fairer criticisms I have heard of the speech was that didn’t contain very much that was new.

Much of the rest of the criticism of it, I found very depressing. It simply confirmed so much of what he had said. Political opponents and the press all leaped in, to argue that Blair had no right to say any of that, because he himself bore a lot of responsibility for corroding the relationship. Blair had of course of acknowledged this in the speech, but made a decent effort to get beyond allocating blame (the media and other politicians are not blameless either) and reflect on some of the broader issues. Other politicians, predictably, attacked him for it because they knew, and Blair explained in his speech, that that’s what they have to do to get covered. Quod erat demonstrandum.

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I spent half my childhood and early adulthood in cathedrals so I do have some idea of the challenges of running one, and also how common it is for people to smoke in them (not very). So I was sorry to see that English cathedrals seem to have allowed themselves to be used as ammunition in the attack on the government’s nanny statism. This won’t do the perception of cathedrals or churches as modern places of worship where normal people might want to go, any good at all, which I think is regrettable.

The row has arisen because of the introduction of the smoking ban in public places on 1 July, which require them to put up a sign saying that it is against the law to smoke in cathedrals or churches. You can certainly make the case that this is unnecessary, but the idea that it is a real problem, or in the words of the Bishop of Fulham “stark staring mad”, seems to me to be nonsense. Every public entrance to a church or cathedral has a noticeboard, which could very easily accommodate a sign no larger than a piece of A4 paper - without taking such prominence as to dominate the entrance of the monarch to Westminster Abbey during the next coronation service, as was raised during the Today programme this morning (again by the Bishop of Fulham, I think).

The irony is, of course, that it’s quite right that this government is entirely nanny-statist, and when the church sometimes attacks them for that then I think that can be very helpful - but there really are some rather more important examples of this than churches being required to put a piece of A4 paper on their noticeboards. I do think it’s regrettable that churches and cathedrals have given their name to this rather silly story.