Political fatheads

Three items of recent news typify the inane incoherence of current political thinking (or what passes for it).

First, elections: Having squandered much treasure and many young lives on fruitlessly endeavouring to ensure that the Afghan people were given the chance to vote “honestly”, the Americans and British are now wringing their hands about “corruption” and a “failed state”. They are fine ones to talk! If they looked nearer home, they would find both in their own back yard. Does anyone honestly think that George W. Bush, with his hanging chads, the stopped Florida recount, and the wafer-thin award by the Supreme Court, was really the legitimately elected president of the USA in 2000? And can a British government with an overall majority based upon just over 35 per cent. of the votes cast at the 2005 election (on a 60 per cent. total poll) credibly lecture Afghans or anybody else about the virtues of democracy? Phooey!

Next, politicians versus experts: While it was quite funny to see the normally laid-back Alan Johnson going ballistic because one of his scientific advisers had had the temerity to question the logic of his refusal to accept advice to downgrade the classification of cannabis – presumably because that wouldn’t have gone down well with Sun and Daily Mail journalists (some of whom, it’s a pretty safe bet, are personally familiar with more arcane illegal substances), the logic of his “scientists are all very well, but ultimately these are political decisions” stance rang pretty thin. The usual clap-trap was then pumped out about ‘having scientists on tap but not on top’. He was promptly backed up by the Prime Minister, whose message amounted to “our minds are made up – don’t confuse us with the facts”. Obviously, Postman Pat has no intention of going down into history as Postman Pot.

Finally: David Cameron’s abject wriggle out of his ‘cast-iron’ promise that the Tories would hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. There’s no point, he says, because it’s too late now. And – needless to say – it’s all the government’s fault. The way in which all the mainstream parties duck and weave to ignore the obvious desire of the British people to have a direct say about our continuing membership of the European Union is contemptible. Even more contemptible is their failure to initiate, less alone to sustain, an informed debate about the pros and cons for the UK of belonging or not belonging to the EU. Such a debate is long overdue.

Fit for purpose?

The question is being widely asked: ‘Is Tony Blair fit to be President of Europe?’ An even more pertinent question is, was Tony Blair fit to be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom?

Judging from revelations by his old chum and former mentor “Derry” Irvine - head of the barristers’ chambers of which both Tony Blair and his wife Cherie Booth were members and first met each other, and once known as ‘Tony’s chief crony’ - the answer is an unequivocal “No”.

Lord Irvine of Lairg was the last holder of the historic office of Lord Chancellor until its abolition in 2003, and his recently released paper to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution’s Cabinet Office Inquiry reveals that he was unceremoniously bundled out of office without any prior consultation concerning this major constitutional change even though it affected him personally.

When Bonnie Prince Charlie landed at Moidart to ignite the ‘Forty-Five’ and summoned his loyal clan chiefs to join him, one of the foremost, Cameron of Lochiel, endeavoured to dissuade him, being convinced that the expedition was sheer folly, whereupon the Prince won him over by saying that he was determined to proceed, and that “Lochiel, whom my father esteemed the best friend of our family, may remain at home, and learn his Prince’s fate from the newspapers”. Poor Lord Irvine fared even worse: he learnt his own fate from the newspapers.

Having maintained a dignified silence for six years, Lord Irvine has now broken cover because of evidence given to the Select Committee by Lord Turnbull, who was Cabinet Secretary at the time. Lord Turnbull, when asked whether the incumbent Lord Chancellor was consulted about the government’s decision to abolish his office, replied: “The Lord Chancellor was consulted. The trouble was that he disagreed with it”. The conventional route of consultation could not be followed because Lord Irvine was unwilling to act as the advocate of change and was not prepared to lead the consultation, Lord Turnbull alleged. “On the day it was a complete mess up.”

Not so, Lord Irvine now declares. It was HE who was not consulted. “In early June 2003 there were press rumours that the office of Lord Chancellor was to be abolished. I had no intimation of this, but when the TIMES and the TELEGRAPH carried the rumour I determined to see the Prime Minister.” He did so on 5^th June. “I asked him directly if there was any truth in the press rumour that the office of Lord Chancellor was to be abolished and transferred to a new Secretary of State in the Commons. He hesitated and then said it was being considered, but nothing had as yet been decided. I asked him how a decision of this magnitude could be made without prior consultation with me…within government, with the judiciary, with the authorities of the House of Lords which would lose its Speaker and with the Palace. The Prime Minister APPEARED MYSTIFIED [Anticant’s emphasis] and said that these machinery of government changes always had to be carried into effect in a way that precluded much discussion because of the risk of leaks.”

Lord Irvine left the meeting “surprised (a) that the Prime Minister thought the abolition of the office of Lord Chancellor was of the same order as any [other] machinery of government changes…and (b) that the Prime Minister had no appreciation that the abolition of this Office of State, with a critical role in our unwritten constitution affecting a House of Parliament, the judiciary, of which the Lord Chancellor was by statute Head and by constitutional convention guarantor of its independence, required extensive consultation, most careful preparation and primary legislation.”

Lord Irvine saw Blair again on 9^th June, when the Prime Minister lamely said that it had been impossible to discuss the proposals with the Lord Chancellor in advance – even though they concerned the abolition of his own office! – because such discussions “would leak all over the press”. Lord Irvine comments: “It then strongly bore in on me that the Prime Minister had not received any or any proper advice and was completely unaware that complex primary legislation was required.”

Further discussion convinced Lord Irvine that the whole project was botched, and missed an opportunity to make properly considered constitutional and administrative changes. “We left off on the basis, as the Prime Minister was always wont to say, that that no final decision had been taken, but I felt that in reality the die was cast…”

Next day Lord Irvine handed the Prime Minister a note pointing out that there were about 5,000 statutory references to the Lord Chancellor in primary and secondary legislation, and without a proper amending Statute redefining his existing functions administrative chaos would be unavoidable. Constitutionally, the Lord Chancellor was regarded as the guarantor of judicial independence. To proceed without any consultation with the judiciary, or with the House of Lords authorities about the Chancellor’s role as Speaker, would be high-handed and insensitive. “Since the political decision is to close down a great Office of State with broad constitutional implications, then it should be done in a seemly, measured and balanced way instead of the incoherent, unworked up and piecemeal approach currently likely to be adopted.” He followed this up with a more formal memorandum outlining the steps he thought should be followed. But the next day – June 12^th – this was rejected by the Cabinet, and “that afternoon I returned the Great Seal to Her Majesty and ceased to be a member of the government.”

Lord Irvine has obviously written and published his paper under the stress of considerable indignation. Leaving his personal feelings aside, what does it tell us about Blair’s prime ministerial performance? Coming hot on the heels of his ‘sofa government’ approach to the Iraq war via sexed up dodgy dossiers and broken promises about a second UN resolution, the Irvine episode may seem something of a storm in a teacup. But it isn’t – it vividly confirms and illustrates – as many New Labour ministerial memoirs still to come seem likely to do – the insouciant, at times almost wacky, atmosphere at No. 10 during the reign of King Tony.

Tony in Never-Never Land? Or, maybe, Turnbull in a China Shop? Either way, is this weird and intellectually frivolous man really European Presidential material? I don’t think so. The only deep thing about him is his incorrigible shallowness.

Women in politics - a Victorian view

Harriet Harman has probably never heard of Alfred Austin. He was Queen Victoria’s last Poet Laureate, appointed by Lord Salisbury some years after the death of the previous Laureate, Lord Tennyson, and relentlessly lampooned in Punch and elsewhere as “Alfred the Little”, both because he was small in stature and not least because of the ineffably banal quality of his verse.

The most famous example is his poem about the severe illness of the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), which contains the unforgettable lines

Across the wires the electric message came:

‘He is no better, he is much the same’.

Austin’s appointment unfortunately coincided with the dubiously legal Jameson Raid which was a precursor of the Boer War. An arch-Jingo, he leaped into the fray with a defiant poem beginning

Wrong! Is it wrong? Well, may be

But I’m going, boys, all the same…

There are girls in the gold reef city,

There are mothers and children too!

And they cry ‘Hurry up! for pity!

So what can a brave man do?...

So we forded and galloped forward,

As hard as our beasts could pelt,

First eastward, then trending northward,

Right over the rolling veldt…

This opening blast greatly annoyed Queen Victoria, but because her Prime Minister had rewarded an indefatigable party hack with the accolade there was nothing she could do about it. In reply to her protests Lord Salisbury replied: “It is a pity that this effusion was his first performance. Unluckily it is to the taste of the galleries in the lower class of theatres, and they sing it with vehemence.”

There are many entertaining stories about Austin, whose invincible self-importance was oblivious to the sometimes cruel jibes aimed at him. He once borrowed a flat from a friend, and wrote to him before taking possession asking for an assurance that no dogs would be left on the premises. His host replied that he could rest easy on that score, adding “for my part, I would be glad of an assurance that you will not leave any poems behind”. A judge who enquired whether Austin found writing poetry lucrative was assured by the Laureate that it kept the wolf from the door, whereupon he said “Oh, so do you read your poems to the wolf, Mr Austin?”

But the reason why Ms Harman might be interested in Alfred Austin is that he was an inveterate opponent of women’s’ suffrage, setting out his views in a letter to The Times in 1909:

“I cannot doubt, and have never doubted, that…women are precluded from any but an indirect share in Parliamentary elections… Of all national and Imperial issues that can arise, that of peace or war is the most important; and the preservation of peace, the most precious of all things, consistently with honour and self-protection, is much more likely to be imperilled by indulgence in sentiment than by any other cause. Calm, deliberate judgment, free from all untimely or too generous emotion, is its best protection. Will anyone deny that, in great emergencies, men are, as a rule and collectively, calmer and more submissive to sound judgment than women, whose virtues reside rather in another direction?

“Give women the franchise – and I cannot doubt it is a minority of them who wish to have it, and only the more emotionally combative of that minority who would exercise it – it is conceivable that war might be brought about by women against the effort of men to avert it, and, in that event, it would be men, and men alone, who would have to fight, and, if need were, to die…”

Women, Austin opined, have had “an unmitigatedly mischievous” influence on art. “They have ruined the stage; they have dwarfed painting until it has become little more than the representative of pretty little sentiment – much of it terribly false – and mawkish commonplace domesticities; and they have helped poetry to become, in the hand of Mr Tennyson at least, and of his disciples, the mere handmaid of their own limited interests, susceptibilities, and yearnings…On the stage, adventure, heroic courage, variety of passion – Shakespearianism, in a word – have had to give way to plays in which domestic sentiment and all that is expressed by the phrase ‘the female element’ have predominated.”

So there, Ms Harman, tell that to the Sisters and get off your high horse.

[With acknowledgements to Alfred Austin Victorian by Norton B. Crowell, 1955]

Muscling in on Gay Pride

Beefcake boys with big biceps weren’t the only muscle-men on parade yesterday, when an estimated half a million people took part in London’s Gay Pride March. The ever larger numbers of those taking part in ‘Pride’ each year bear testimony to the progress achieved by sexual minorities since the festival’s modest beginnings in 1972, when 700 bravely ‘out’ souls marched from Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park. Fifty years ago homosexuals were all but universally shunned as abnormal, immoral, sick, frequently criminal, usually invisible, and always undesirable. So it’s wrily amusing, if gratifying, to see today’s political leaders eagerly jumping aboard the gay band-wagon and vying with each other to flaunt their gay-friendly credentials in a bid for the gay vote.

All credit is due to those who, like Peter Tatchell, were pioneers of the Gay Liberation Front whose flamboyant street theatre tactics in the early 1970s served notice on the paternalist politicians such as Lord Arran and Leo Abse – to whom credit is otherwise also due – that those whom they had liberated from the criminal stigma were not prepared to stay, forelock-tugging, in discreet ghettoes but were determined to demand legal and social equality with heterosexual ‘straights’ and, above all, equality of esteem. That the Prime Minister’s wife, Sarah Brown, marched alongside Tatchell yesterday is testimony to the clout the gay community now wields.

But although there is now an equal age of consent, and civil partnerships (nearly, but not quite, the equivalent of marriage) have been successfully put in place by Tony Blair’s government, all is not yet plain sailing for LGBT folk, and those in their community – especially its younger members - who assume that all the needful battles have been won could not be more wrong. There is still widespread virulent and vocal homophobia evident in the stance of religious institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church and Islam, and also among many who aren’t primarily religious - just prejudiced. Readers of political blogs will be aware that there is a copious flow of anti-gay vitriolic bile and smutty personal smears towards known and alleged homosexuals in politics and other areas of public life. The old canard that all queers are evil child-molesters at heart is still alive and well. Toleration of the non-heterosexual may nowadays be ‘Politically Correct’ – that in itself is a mixed blessing with the sagging popularity of New Labour’s ‘Nanny Knows Best’ bossiness – but it is often only skin deep.

Those who smugly say, as gay Tory ex-MP Michael Brown did in yesterday’s Independent newspaper, that there’s really no more need to bother any more, because being gay is now accepted as normal, are wide of the mark. The faith-fuelled bigots never let up. Only today, the Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali – a senior spokesman of a new evangelical fellowship within the Anglican Church - is calling on homosexuals to “repent and change”. Even as Gordon Brown was preening himself on his government’s gay-friendly stance (having absented himself from the relevant Commons votes), it is reported that Baroness Scotland, his Attorney-General, who is a ‘prominent Catholic’, is conniving with church groups to water down forthcoming equality legislation so that they can continue peddling and promoting negative attitudes towards gay pupils in their schools and youth clubs without seeming to discriminate. The General Teaching Council, too, has bowed to religious pressure exerted through a mass letter-writing campaign and has watered down its regulations obliging teachers to treat all pupils, including gay ones and those who have unmarried parents, with equal respect and to proactively challenge all discrimination, stereotyping, and bullying. (National Secular Society Newsline, 3 July.)

What Tony Dyson - who was instrumental in forming the Homosexual Law Reform Society in the 1950s - wrote in a 1978 manifesto (‘Towards a Charter of Homosexual Rights’) which he drafted, and which was signed by almost 200 well known people, still remains in large measure true today: “We believe that fear or hatred of homosexuals is a social evil, akin to anti-semitism, racism, slavery, and with the same evil consequences. It harms the victimised individuals and the society which tolerates it….Homosexuals are the ONLY natural minority who are still regarded, by some, as intrinsically evil, and who are still liable to be mocked or persecuted by people claiming to represent ordinary social opinion, or the Christian church….The analogy with anti-semitism and racism seems, here, an exact one.” If this is correct - and I believe it is - there remains a great deal of educational work to be done in schools and throughout society generally if we are to create a truly tolerant society in this respect. Not only ‘out’ LGBT people themselves, but all people of goodwill who desire to live in a civilised and humane society, are needed for the ongoing task.

It therefore strikes me as particularly inept and mean-minded that Gay Pride has been seized upon by some New Labour politicians to claim the exclusive moral high ground and start a petty party squabble, even though David Cameron and other leading Conservatives have been making increasingly forthright pro-gay statements recently. Such statements are welcome, though belated; and to question their sincerity is petty party point-scoring. The unseemly spat sparked off by gay government ministers Ben Bradshaw, Chris Bryant, and Angela Eagle inevitably elicited an angry response from gay shadow cabinet minister Alan Duncan from the other side of the House. If politicians are patronising enough to think that gay rights is the only issue that gay voters care about, and that our votes can be bought en bloc by favours which were long overdue when finally granted, they really are living in cloud cuckoo land.

Yes, we can all be grateful to the progress secured thanks to Tony Blair’s laid back attitude to gay issues (in contrast to Harold Wilson in the 1960s, who did everything he could to distance himself and the Labour Party from the original Sexual Offences Bill while it was passing through parliament with the backstage blessing of that most civilised of 20th century Home Secretaries, Roy Jenkins). But legislation on gay issues – or on any other social reform – has never been a tidy matter of clear-cut party divisions. In the 1960s, vociferous opposition to law reform over both homosexuality and abortion came from some formidable Labour figures, and the Arran/Abse Bill would never have passed the Commons without the steadfast support of around 60 Conservatives (including Margaret Thatcher).

There was, of course, abundant hypocrisy in all parties; and closet doors were by no means all painted blue. It was galling to be working flat out lobbying parliament for reform when the unorthodox sexual proclivities of a good many of the Bill’s most vociferous opponents on all sides of the House, as well as those of some of its braver supporters, were widely known but unmentionable. The tactic of ‘outing’ had not been devised then, and so even the worst hypocrites had to be suffered in silence.

It is true that primitive homophobia was more entrenched in the Conservative party during the 1970s and ‘80s – largely due to what I dubbed the ‘lace curtain’ vote skilfully mobilised by Mary Whitehouse, Lord Longford, and their ‘Moral Majority’ allies (of whom it was rightly said that they were neither moral nor a majority). This holier-than-thou bunch assiduously spread misinformation and drummed up a succession of scares about sex education and mythical hordes of predatory paedophiles prowling every neighbourhood. But the Labour Party was by no means a shining beacon of enlightenment and eager progress - it took patient and persuasive work over many years by all sections of the LGBT community, both radicals and more demure elements, to convince the Blairites that more should be done, and could be done without undue political risk. Unfortunately, when New Labour finally got around to legislating a 21st century overhaul of the United Kingdom’s antiquated sex laws, years of preparatory work and consultations which had held out the prospect of a realistic, modern, liberal framework was swamped at the last lap by a coalition of cautious officialdom and reactionary feminism, with the sad outcome that, in terms of the law, all teenagers and not just gay ones are now in a more perilous position during their experimental adolescent years than they were in the 20th century. But that’s another story.

So by all means let us celebrate Gay Pride - but never complacently, and always remembering that rights won by the efforts of earlier generations can all too easily be lost by the ignorance, complacency, and negligence of their successors, and that the glib utterances of professional politicians should never be swallowed whole.

Religion and politics

Speaking in a mosque in Amman yesterday, Pope Benedict XVI said:

"Some assert that religion is necessarily a cause of division in our world and so they argue that the lesser attention given to religion in the public sphere the better,"

"Certainly, the contradiction of tensions and divisions between the followers of different religious traditions, sadly, cannot be denied.

"However, is it not also the case that often it is the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends, that is the real catalyst for tension and division, and at times even violence in society?"

This is an extraordinarily naïve thing for the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church to say. Throughout its history that Church has been one of the most sophisticated players in the game of politics. Indeed, for many centuries it was a sovereign territorial power, and even today the Vatican City is a sovereign state.

Catholic politics are bloodily enmeshed in the history of Europe. During the Christian era, Catholics have murdered hundreds of thousands of people in the name of 'faith'. No pronouncement which the Pope or any other Catholic priest makes does not have a political subtext. The business of the Catholic Church is to mould society nearer to its concept of a Christian state, even though it doesn’t go to the lengths of Islam in completely fusing religion and government in a pure theocracy.

In Britain, Catholic bishops meddle ceaselessly with key issues such as education and particularly with social policies concerning sexuality: sex education, abortion, divorce, adoption, and tolerance – in their case, lack of - towards homosexuals. They are the enemies of liberalism (anathematised by Pope Pius IX and all his successors, including the present pope, as the spawn of the devil), toleration, diversity, and scientific free thought. Catholicism has always been a conservative, reactionary force.

Protestant churches, too, are inherently political, as is evidenced by the history of the 19^th and early 20^th century battles over the control of education. Islam is an even more fundamentally political religion, and the politics of Israel and of Jewry worldwide are shaped and inspired by Judaism.

There is no such thing as non-political religion. Either the pope is utterly stupid in asserting otherwise, or else he is cynically devious.