As an update to my last piece in Ephems with some new material that reinforces my earlier view of the matter, I have posted the following ‘comment’ on Tim Worstall’s sensible and balanced post about the affair of Our Ken, the Evening Standard and the Board of Deputies of British Jews:
Just want to register complete agreement about the utterly unacceptable and ill-judged ‘decision’ to suspend our capital city’s elected mayor. I have set out my views at greater length at http://tinyurl.com/z4hh8 and shan’t repeat them here, except to mention that the full text of the decision of the Adjudication Panel for England is available (pdf) at http://tinyurl.com/l262y, and a very sad and unconvincing read it is. The tribunal makes unsupported assertions about the supposed offensiveness and insensitivity of Ken Livingstone’s remarks to the Evening Standard reporter, without any sign of recognising or allowing for the circumstances of the encounter; priggishly rebukes the Mayor for setting out his legal arguments at length and for refusing to apologise for offending the reporter; accepts that the case should never have got as far as the Panel (thus implicitly acknowledging the essential triviality of the whole affair); but blames Livingstone for having let it do so, and proceeds to impose a swingeing penalty out of all proportion to the significance of the supposed offence as assessed by the Tribunal itself.
The tone of the whole document is that of an exceptionally prim housemaster at a minor public school. The Tribunal notes that the government has accepted that the paragraph of the Code of Conduct under which they have ‘convicted’ the mayor is unsatisfactory and that it needs to be amended in such a way as to remove from its scope the kind of conduct that has led to the complaint against the Mayor — meaning that if the proposed amendment had been made, there would have been no case for the Mayor to answer — but they clearly ignore the implication of that in deciding on the severity of the penalty they impose. If the High Court doesn’t allow the Mayor’s probable appeal on the grounds that the complaint against him was vexatious and frivolous, or at the worst substitute a token penalty such as the ‘reprimand’ recommended by the referring Standards Board, I shall really have to consider emigrating. That will show ‘em!
Brian
An obscure panel of unelected functionaries has ‘sentenced’ London’s elected Labour Mayor, the controversial but affectionately regarded Ken Livingstone, to a 4-week suspension from office for being rude to an insistent reporter (from a newspaper which has long given Livingstone a hard time), and in particular for his refusal to apologise. As Mark Lawson neatly puts it in Saturday’s Guardian, –
…the clearly stated wish of voters to have Ken Livingstone running London during March 2006 has been reversed by an unelected panel comprising a pensions guru, a statistics expert and a retired Northern bureaucrat. Messrs Laverick, Stephenson and Norris should pray that the leader-free period they have created does not bring a transport, terrorist or bird-flu crisis to the capital. A political mandate is all or nothing: leaders should be backed until the ballot box gets them or, in extreme cases of constitutional violation, sacked.
Lawson’s reference to ‘Norris’ as one of the hanging judges doesn’t refer to Steve Norris, former MP and unsuccessful Conservative candidate for London mayor, who indeed appeared on the BBC television programme Newsnight the same evening to express outrage at the denial of democracy implicit in the affair, despite his political differences with Livingstone.
The complaint against Livingstone was not brought by the allegedly insulted reporter, who might be thought the only conceivable person with any locus standi for doing so, but by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, of all the unlikely bodies. The reporter harassing the mayor after an office party was compared by Red Ken to a concentration camp guard — i.e. acting in an 
unprincipled manner, not out of personal lack of principle but because paid to do so by his employer. The comparison was certainly over the top, but it made a palpable point. However, the reporter turned out to be Jewish (and indeed so informed the mayor with some asperity). Livingstone’s enemies, who are many and from all points of the political compass, seized on this laughably trivial episode and represented it as evidence of the mayor’s anti-semitism, about as improbable a charge as can be imagined, Livingstone having been an enthusiastic foe of all kinds of racism throughout his career. But the Board of Deputies of British Jews, characteristically taking on itself the self-imposed duty to spring uninvited to the defence of British Jewry (which coincidentally includes the present blogger), went into battle with the accusation that Ken’s remarks had brought the office of mayor into disrepute and that the matter should accordingly be taken up by the gloriously named ‘Adjudication Panel for England‘, an ‘independent judicial tribunal’ established in 2000 "to hear and adjudicate on matters concerning the conduct of local authority members". The Panel "considers references made to it by an Ethical Standards Officer of the Standards Board for England", another body of unparalleled and well deserved obscurity.
To add yet more piquancy to this solemn farce, the Board of Deputies of British Jews has issued the following statement, remarkable for its sententiousness even by the standards of this self-regarding and paranoid institution:
The Board of Deputies of British Jews regrets that the Mayor’s intransigence over his hurtful comments last February outside City Hall and his subsequent failure to apologise has led to a finding that the Office of the Mayor has been brought into disrepute. Had the Mayor simply recognised the upset his comments had caused, this sorry episode could have been avoided. He has been the architect of his own misfortune. The Board of Deputies has at no stage passed judgement on the motivation for the Mayor’s comments, nor have we sought anything other than an expression of regret and an acknowledgement that the words used were wholly inappropriate for the elected representative of Londoners of all faiths and beliefs. We hope that all those involved can now move on from this episode.
Those who have been licking their lips at the chance of humiliating the twice elected mayor of our capital city already seem to be having second thoughts. The Board of Deputies hastens in its statement to deny ever having accused the mayor of anti-semitism (in which case what on earth did the dispute have to do with them?), and shrinks even from condemning Livingstone’s remarks to the reporter, merely noting that they were ‘inappropriate’ and ‘hurtful’. The mayor’s offence is now re-defined, with unseemly haste, as his refusal to apologise — with the implication that having given offence to someone, legally and intentionally, and even though he continues to regard his words as fully justified in the circumstances, he has some kind of obligation nonetheless to apologise for them. Well, the Church of England has recently apologised for slavery, the New Zealand government has apologised to the country’s Chinese population for charging an expensive entry tax, begun in the 19th century and lasting until 1930, which imposed hardship on Chinese immigrants, and a certain Warren Perrin is campaigning for an apology by the Queen for the expulsion of Acadians from Nova Scotia in 1755. So by these lofty standards Our Ken could afford to issue an apology to the hurt reporter without the slightest implication of any personal guilt or remorse. To such meaningless nonsense has the concept of apology been reduced.
We need to bear in mind a few relevant truths in all this. London’s mayor has committed no criminal offence, broken no conceivable law. He has not been corrupt. There is no law against offending someone with whom one gets into a dispute. No-one has any legal or moral right to be protected from being offended. Making a statement that some regard as being in poor taste is not defined by any law or regulation as a bar to holding public office (we would be chronically short of public servants if it was). There is no evidence that Ken was the worse for wear for liquor at the time, and even if he had been, it is no bar to holding public office to have a few drinks at an office party: this too is not exactly unknown among the political or chattering classes. By no stretch of the most fevered imagination can Livingstone’s remarks to the reporter be construed as racist. He exchanged some angry words with a reporter who was harassing him but there was no physical violence and the whole things was over in seconds.
Above all, Mr Livingstone has twice been elected mayor of London with decisive majorities of the votes cast, making him the most senior politician in the land to have been directly elected to his position by popular vote. Until last Friday, no-one had ever heard of Messrs Laverick, Stephenson and Norris, still less voted for them. Their folly in seeking to rob London of its elected leader for a month will be greeted with derision for themselves, and a wave of support for the embattled mayor. If he decides to appeal to a recognisable court against this buffoonery, let’s hope that his appeal will succeed, if only to spare us the embarrassing mockery that this whole affair will otherwise bring down on the heads of Londoners. It’s the last thing we need.
Brian
According to the enormous coverage throughout the UK media of what the Prince of Wales wrote in his diary about his trip to Hong Kong for the handover of the former British colony to China (against the wishes of most of its inhabitants for whose freedom and welfare we had until then been responsible, but that’s another issue for another day), –
“SUCH IS THE end of empire”, sighed the Prince of Wales, upon
discovering that instead of the first class legroom he was used to on
long-haul flights, he would have to squeeze into a mere club class
seat. “It puzzled me as to why the seat seemed so uncomfortable.” One
can only imagine the puzzlement of the royal bottom on its first
encounter with second-class airline seating. [Ben MacIntyre, the Times, 24 Feb 06]
The prince’s discomfort, and discomfiture, were aggravated, according to the diary, by the realisation that while he and his staff were roughing it in the upstairs cabin of the Boeing, belatedly revealed to HRH as the location of the aircraft’s Club Class, the British politicians and the departing Governor were directly underneath in First Class.
A much likelier explanation of the seating arrangements, though, is that the upstairs cabin, usually indeed allocated to Club Class passengers, had been reconfigured and reserved in its entirety for the Prince of Wales and his staff, in order to provide them with privacy — and to relieve them of any obligation to make polite or even rude conversation with the politicians and 
officials down below. Older readers may remember the time when the whole of the upper cabin of the old two-storey Boeings used to be the ‘First Class lounge’ for First Class passengers, who could wander upstairs for a respite from all that ‘free’ caviare and champagne to enjoy a quiet read and a proper drink in the upper lounge, with its copious bar, miniature library of books and magazines, comfortable leather arm-chairs and easy tables, and easy access to the pilots in their cockpit, enabling the flying gentry to imagine, as they dozed off with a large Scotch and their feet up, that they were back in their gentlemen’s clubs in St James’s (although where the First Class ladies imagined themselves to be, I can’t imagine: in the University Women’s Club, perhaps). Was the heir to the throne really condemned to an ‘uncomfortable’ club class seat in a series of rows barely more roomy than the serried ranks of battery-hen humans back below in Economy, lunch trays pressed agonisingly into abdomens or knees pressed agonisingly into chests? I rather doubt it.
But even if he was, to equate the Prince of Wales’s seating arrangements with the ‘end of empire’ does seem to be over-egging it a little.
Incidentally, this seems to have been no ordinary diary or private journal: more a newsletter, according to the prince’s former private secretary Mark Bolland, quoted by the BBC:
Mr Bolland said the journals were photocopied by a
secretary and sent out to an array of the prince’s acquaintances,
including politicians, "media people", journalists, actors and friends,
as a "bit of fun". The former aide said he would be astonished if a
comprehensive list of the recipients had been kept, but he thought 50
to 75 people would have received journal extracts, which he said were
not treated in the same manner as confidential documents.
But we can all, surely, enjoy the minor witticism in the title given by the prince to his essay on the Hong Kong trip: ‘The Handover of Hong Kong – or The Great Chinese Takeaway’. We may not always agree wholeheartedly with all the often eccentric views of our future king, but I do find an uneasy resonance in his evident distaste for the Great Chinese Takeaway, with its unmistakable whiff of betrayal. He must get it right some of the time.
Brian
Today’s (18 Feb 06) Financial Times has an article (subscription required) headed ‘Burning resentment at smoking ban in Labour’s heartlands’:
If Labour wished to alienate supporters in its traditional heartlands, it is difficult to imagine a more effective way than presiding over a ban on smoking in working men’s clubs. Tony Blair might be well advised to stay away from Trimdon Labour Club [working men's club near his constituency home]. The one-time bedrock of grassroots support in his Sedgefield constituency, its members were outraged by Tuesday night’s vote to ban smoking. They had hoped that membership clubs would be excluded from the ban.
The article quotes a raft of lifelong Labour voters and members of the Northumberland Club and Institute Union as saying that they won’t vote Labour at the next election. The manager of the Trimdon Labour Club, one of those who helped to secure the nomination as parliamentary Labour candidate for the young Tony Blair, says the ban will be a running sore as the election approaches. "The Conservatives can gain advantage here, he warns, by talking about freedom of the individual."
The 2005 Labour Party manifesto (pdf file) said:
We will legislate to ensure that all enclosed public places and workplaces other than licensed premises will be smoke-free.The legislation will ensure that all restaurants will be smoke-free; all pubs and bars preparing and serving food will be smoke-free; and other pubs and bars will be free to choose whether to allow smoking or to be smoke-free. In membership clubs the members will be free to choose whether to allow smoking or to be smoke-free. However, whatever the general status, to protect employees, smoking in the bar area will be prohibited everywhere. [My emphasis]
We all relished the spectacle of the Health Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, most irritatingly patronising of all Blairite ministers, declaring in the morning ‘Today’ radio programme on the day of the 
Commons vote on the smoking ban that she regarded private clubs as more akin to private homes than to pubs, and that she would accordingly vote to exclude them from the ban, as promised in the manifesto and as proposed in her department’s Bill: and then in the afternoon radio programme ‘PM’ we heard Ms Hewitt saying the exact opposite — and voting against her own departmental Bill’s provision to exclude private clubs from the ban. But it begins to look as if this prime example of control freakery and Nanny-statism on the part of a priggish New Labour administration may have more serious consequences for Labour than the mere reduction of the Secretary of State for Health to a laughing-stock.
I haven’t smoked a cigarette or pipe for decades and I detest the stench made by other people smoking around me. But it seems to me fantastic that the question whether to ban smoking in all or just some pubs, and whether to apply the ban to private clubs (including not just the ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ of St James’s but also the working men’s clubs of the north of England) should be decided by MPs at Westminster instead of being settled where it should have been, by local authorities reflecting the differing views and interests of their local communities — and in the case of private clubs, by their own members, whether gentlemen or working men or even both, as promised by the manifesto on which all Labour MPs fought the last election. What on earth is the point of having local licensing authorities if they aren’t allowed to take this kind of decision for themselves? MPs of all parties pay lip service to the need to ‘empower’ local communities by devolving decision-making to them wherever possible. But when it comes to the point, they can’t keep their sticky fingers off every issue that comes up.
And so much for the sanctity of the manifesto!
Up-date (19 Feb 2006): In a comment on this post, Tony Hatfield
argued the case for a ban, and I replied with an alternative view.
Since this exchange widens the discussion usefully, I am transferring
it as a postscript to the original entry.
Tony Hatfield wrote: Surely this is a genuine health and
safety issue. It’s not just the stench of tobacco that’s
objectionable — I dislike all kinds of smells — but there can be little
doubt now that breathing in second-hand tobacco fumes is dangerous. Now
there’s nothing to stop the members of the Trimdon WMC from erecting a
building where they can puff all day if they wish, but why should they
create a danger to those who have to serve the booze to them? The
members have no more right to injure their employees by filling their
premises with tobacco carcinogens than authorising the spraying of
asbestos products or installing radio-actice fruit machines!
t
Brian writes:
I entirely agree that the health implications of smoking are an issue,
including the risk to people who work in an environment where others
smoke. But none of this affects the two arguments which point the other way:
(1) It’s not the business of the law to substitute the judgement of any
public authority as to the degree and acceptibility of a given risk
(unless it’s a risk to the entire community in question, which
obviously isn’t the case here) for that of adult
individuals, who are entitled to the privilege of choosing for
themselves whether to work (or drink) among smokers, and to accept such
risks as that might entail. A blanket ban of the kind just enacted
robs us all of that right of choice. If the law or local
regulations permitted certain kinds of pubs to allow smoking, and
others to ban it, barmen and other pub staff would be free to choose
whether to work in smokey pubs or smoke-free ones, just as customers
would be able to choose. If the law permitted private clubs’ members
to choose whether or not to accept the risks of allowing smoking,
similarly the members and their employees would be free to weigh the
risks against the pleasures, and make their own choices. No-one is
forced to work in a pub or club where people smoke, any more than
drinkers are forced to drink in such pubs. It’s sensible to try to
ensure that there’s a real choice available, e.g. by obliging pubs to
make available a minimum given percentage of their total space to smoke-free
zones, or by providing incentives for some pubs to opt to be totally
smoke-free. But in the end, the market will take care of that if there’s freedom of choice: if
enough people choose not to accept the risk of working for a pub where
there’s smoking, or of drinking in such a pub, then their demand will
encourage the appearance of non-smoking pubs. And if enough people
decide that the pleasure (or higher wages) of drinking (or working) in
a smokey pub outweighs the risk to their health, there’ll be enough
smoking pubs to meet that demand, too. Why should ordinary people be
denied that freedom to choose?
(2) Even if the case for a
total ban on smoking in pubs and private clubs were to be overwhelming
(and it seems to me feeble in the extreme, as argued in (1)), what
possible case could there be for instituting the ban indiscriminately
over the whole country, without the slightest regard for local
differences of taste, habit, leisure tradition, attitude to risk, and
above all differences of local public opinion? Once the parliament at
Westminster has passed a total ban into law, there’s effectively
nothing the individual can do about it. If it’s left to local
authorities, or (better still) even lower-level bodies accountable to
local public opinion, to decide whether to impose a ban, and if so
whether it should be total and rigid or partial and flexible, then the
decision can be preceded by meaningful local consultation (via local
newspapers, local Council debates, public meetings, etc.), and if the
resulting decision offends enough local people, they can apply pressure
on the decision-making body to introduce greater local flexibility so
as to preserve the right of choice.
Much of this argument
hinges, it seems to me, on the increasingly risk-averse attitudes of
politicians and the media. It’s always safer to ban an activity which
may be popular with some people but which entails a degree of risk,
than to allow us the freedom to take the risk, in the knowledge that in
some cases harm to innocent people may result. The logical conclusion
of this attitude to risk is to ban not only smoking in public enclosed
places but all smoking everywhere (what about the passive smoking risk to children in private homes?). It means banning alcohol,
fair-grounds, bungee-jumping and trampolining, and children’s play-grounds. It means plastering the
countryside with protective walls and fences. Eventually it means
banning the motor-car and flying. My freedom means, among other things,
my freedom to take risks in order to enjoy benefits which I judge to
outweigh the risks, a judgement only I can make (provided only that my
decision doesn’t inflict unavoidable harm on others’ freedom to make
the same choices). I strongly resent Patricia Hewitt and her
nanny-colleagues making those decisions for me. Given the choice, I
would opt to drink in a smoke-free pub rather than drink among smokers;
and if I fancied a job as a barman, I’d opt to look for a job in a
smoke-free pub or its smoke-free bar. But I don’t have the freedom to
choose differently, because the busy-bodies at Westminster have taken
it away from me, after persuading me (in the case of some of them) to
vote for them on the basis of an explicit promise not to do so.
Brian
Until a day or two ago, few people in Britain were aware of a new Bill before parliament which, if passed, will give Ministers the power to enact new laws, primary legislation, on their own account without the inconvenience of having to get them approved by either House of what used to be our legislature — and they will also enjoy the power under the Bill to amend or even repeal existing legislation. If they get away with this, they will get away with anything. It represents the final stage in the process under which the executive has steadily gained complete control of the legislature. Once again we may have to look to an undemocratic, wholly nominated House of Lords to protect our constitution against the assaults of a rapacious and omnivorous government. It’s true that the Bill imposes certain limits on ministers’ powers to enact new legislation or amend existing laws, and that it requires ministers to lay an explanatory Order before parliament when exercising the proposed new powers: but it remains a wholly unconstitutional and unacceptable piece of work which parliament should throw out with anger and contempt.
Attention was first drawn to this extraordinary development in a couple of short blog items on 7 February, followed by a longer and more analytical piece in Owen’s Musings the following day. It was a full week later, on 15 February 2006, that the alarm was sounded for the first time (as far as I can discover) in the national media by Daniel Finkelstein, in his Times column of that day. The following day the Times carried an anxious letter about the Bill from six distinguished Cambridge law professors: we may hope that the debate and protests will now take off and that the government will be forced to think again.
I have sent the following message to Daniel Finkelstein to congratulate him on his pioneering role in this affair and to note the interesting time-lag between the blogosphere and the national media:
Dear Daniel Finkelstein,
Congratulations on breaking the news at national level of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill scandal in your Times article of 15 February. The letter in today’s Times
from the six Cambridge law professors amply justifies your concerns and
should help to raise awareness of what is about to happen to our
constitution.This is just to draw your attention to a piece about the Bill
published on 8 February in a blog (my son’s, as it happens!) which
attracted some bloggers’ attention — see the comments following Owen
Barder’s original post. In fact the alarm had been raised on the
previous day in another blog, and one more again, as the links in Owen’s piece confirm. Yet another blog suggests a different angle on the issue.This seems to me an interesting example of the time-lag between an
issue being broken and aired in the blogosphere and its appearance
rather later in the national media. I wonder to what extent the
political commentators such as yourself monitor the blogosphere, or at
any rate the livelier and more alert political blogs (such as Owen Barder’s and my own!) for leads to news of fresh horrors emerging from Whitehall and Westminster?I am putting a copy of this message on my own blog, partly to make the
useful links in it more widely available and partly as a tribute to
you for getting this out into the open. As you said in your own
article, why on earth has this not been all over the front pages for
weeks?Yours appreciatively,
Brian Barder
16 Feb 06
http://www.barder.com/ephems/
As a minor tail-piece: we should savour and store away this latest misuse of the word ‘reform’ in the title of the Bill (the "Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill"), as if this attack on democratic parliamentary process can properly be described as a ‘reform’. In the same way, the assault on the comprehensive principle in education is described as ‘educational reform’ and the proposal to change the electoral system so as to give the Liberal Democrats the permanent power to decide whether the prime minister shall be the Tory or Labour leader is described, even more widely, as ‘electoral reform’. There’s something Orwellian about this.
Brian
Last week I wrote a letter to The Times. They didn’t publish it, so I will (if putting it in Ephems can be said to be publishing it). I copied it to a senior Opposition MP, a former senior minister, who replied that my proposals were quite startling and that he was not instantly persuaded (the exclamation mark after this had been added by his own hand). If my proposals are too startling to be persuasive with the new look Cameroonian Tories, a fortiori they are surely far too revolutionary for New Labour. So perhaps The Times was right not to waste its space on them. But I’m sufficiently big-headed to claim that they make a good deal of sense:
Sir, David Cameron’s initiative to review the workings of the royal prerogative (Tories would abolish PM’s power to declare war, February 6) is welcome and deserves all-party participation. But it’s surely a pity that he is excluding from examination the monarch’s few remaining personal powers, not exercised on the advice of ministers, to agree, or refuse, to grant a dissolution of parliament and to decide whom to call on to try to form a government in the event of a hung parliament (by no means inconceivable next time). It is grossly unfair to the monarch to burden him or her with such heavy and politically charged responsibilities and no available guidance on which officials or politicians he or she may properly consult, or even on the circumstances in which the powers should properly be exercised. It is cowardly to exclude these matters from review just for fear of being misrepresented by the tabloids as seeking to ‘strip the Queen of her powers’, when in reality any sensible monarch should be glad to be relieved of them by their transfer to a suitably impartial and transparent panel, guided in exercising them by principles laid down by statute.
Similarly, any worthwhile constitutional review needs to recognise the need for the UK, now messily half-way into an unsatisfactory semi-federal system with actual or embryo legislatures and governments in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London, to complete that process and evolve into a fully-fledged federation, in which the Westminster government and parliament become the federal government and legislature, with limited and defined powers for the whole of the United Kingdom, all other residual powers either devolved to the regional governments and parliaments or shared between them and the federal centre. No other solution to the West Lothian Question, such as preventing Scottish MPs from voting on certain kinds of Bills, is going to be worth tuppence or last more than a year or two. It’s time for our political leaders of all parties to show some courage by starting a serious national debate on the merits and implications of federalism and how best to adapt it to British circumstances.
If anyone has a better solution to the West Lothian Question, I have yet to hear it. Setting up a complicated rule-book to prevent MPs from various parts of the kingdom from voting on certain kinds of legislation affecting other parts of the kingdom can only end in farce, chaos, and extensive examples of the Law of Unintended Consequences (isn’t it the case, for example, that Labour has no majority of MPs representing English constituencies?). And if the next election produces no overall majority for any single party, with the LibDems likely to have the power to decide whether to put the then Labour Party leader or the then Conservative Party leader into No. 10 as prime minister, the Queen’s responsibility for deciding — without any obligation to seek ministerial advice, or, if she receives it, to act on it — whom to invite first to try to form a governmment will become an issue that we might regret having failed to tackle before it became a hot potato in the real political stewpot. The Queen might regret it even more. (And how interesting, no?, that David Cameron’s radical ideas about a constitutional review should explicitly exclude from discussion the most tricky, controversial and potentially dangerous of all the royal prerogative powers! Will a Gordon Brown government be any braver? Don’t bet the farm on it.)
As for the Federal Republic (oops) of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, it will no doubt be argued that there’s absolutely no interest in England in devolution to an archipelago of English Regions with their own legislatures and governments. But such an interest might grow quite rapidly if it became clear that the Regions, including Wales and Northern Ireland, would have at least as many powers over such subjects as education, health, crime and taxation as Scotland now enjoys, with the parliament and government at Westminster strictly limited in their own powers other than those for foreign affairs and defence. Politicans of all parties are currently preaching ‘empowerment’ of local communities (while in the same breath voting overwhelmingly to deprive local communities of even the power to decide which of the local pubs should be able to allow smoking): let them put their money where their mouths are and strike out for full-blooded federation. Whatever happened to leadership? Ask a voter in Texas, Queensland or Bavaria whether she would favour handing over the powers of her State or Land to Washington DC, Canberra or Berlin, and see what sort of an answer you will get!
Hat-tip: to the splendid Professor Peter Hennessy who urged long ago, in vain, that the monarch’s personal prerogative powers should be rationalised and codified before the need to exercise them becomes a serious agenda item of huge potential embarrassment to whoever occupies the throne at the time, as well as perhaps triggering a major constitutional crisis with wholly unpredictable consequences.
Peter Hennessy >
Brian
Update, 1730 GMT Wed 15 Feb 06: This seems to be working again!
I have been receiving huge numbers of bogus messages sent from the ‘Contact’ facility of this website, despite the filters in it. A few have been commercial spam; many others have contained a single line of gibberish. (It’s hard to know what kind of warped mind goes in for this kind of thing.) Anyway, further attempt to stem the tide of spam and other meaningless stuff have resulted in all messages being blocked. However it now seems to have been magically restored, and there have been no bogus messages for a couple of days…
Brian
From the Financial Times, 11-12 February 2006:
Bush puts stress on defence
President George W Bush outlined a $2,770bn (£1,592bn) annual budget calling for a 6.9 per cent increase in defence spending and a 3.3 per cent increase for homeland security. The administration is seeking cuts in healthcare spending to keep plans to cut the fiscal deficit on track.
Citizens for Tax Justice, June 2002:
A new study released today by Citizens for Tax Justice and the Children’s Defense Fund reveals for the first time who stands to benefit from the 2001-enacted Bush tax cuts in each year from 2001 through 2010. Among the key findings:
* Over the ten-year period, the richest Americans—the best-off one percent—are slated to receive tax cuts totaling almost half a trillion dollars. The $477 billion in tax breaks the Bush administration has targeted to this elite group will average $342,000 each over the decade.
* By 2010, when (and if) the Bush tax reductions are fully in place, an astonishing 52 percent of the total tax cuts will go to the richest one percent—whose average 2010 income will be $1.5 million. Their tax-cut windfall in that year alone will average $85,000 each. Put another way, of the estimated $234 billion in tax cuts scheduled for the year 2010, $121 billion will go just 1.4 million taxpayers.
* Although the rich have already received a hefty down payment on their Bush tax cuts—averaging just under $12,000 each this year—80 percent of their windfall is scheduled to come from tax changes that won’t take effect until after this year, mostly from items that phase in after 2005.
* In contrast, the vast majority of taxpayers have already received most of their tax cuts from the 2001 legislation.
Financial Times, 10 February 2006 :
US trade deficit balloons to record $726bn
By Christopher Swann in Washington
Published: February 10 2006 13:46The US trade deficit ballooned to a record $726bn in 2005, inflated by surging imports from China and soaring energy prices. In December the US imported $65.7bn more than it exported, up from $64.7bn in November. … [W]ith imports now almost 60 per cent larger than exports, American companies would have had to sell 3 per cent more abroad just to prevent the deficit from rising. Over 2005, the deficit totalled 5.8 per cent of American national income. The current account deficit – a more inclusive measure that includes other income flows – was 6.5 per cent of national income.
Economists have long fretted that global investors will eventually become unwilling to finance the US deficit, without a fall in the dollar and a rise in US interest rates. So far, however, there has been no sign of demand for US assets weakening. Last year the dollar rose by 3.5 per cent on a trade weighted basis. But Nigel Gault, the head of US analysis at Global Insight, a consultancy, said the risks were increasing to the US economy as the deficit continued to widen. “An accident has been a possibility for some time and the further we go down this road the greater the chances that it will come to an unhappy end,” he said.
Comment is superfluous.
Brian
Anyone who missed the debate about the Muslim protests over the Danish cartoons and their global implications on Newsnight (the BBC2 nightly television news programme) last Monday evening (6 Feb 06) — and who has broadband — really should listen to and watch it on the BBC Newsnight website [click on 'Watch the debate' under the crescent] while it’s still available there. This was a rare opportunity to hear and watch a number of highly articulate Muslims, men and women, discussing these sensitive issues among themselves as well as the non-Muslims on the 
panel. Unfortunately the first part of the discussion was constantly disrupted by the panel’s representative of Islamic extremism, Anjem Choudary of Al Ghurabaa (formerly UK Organiser for Al Muhajiroun and follower of Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammed), who shouted unstoppably throughout the proceedings and derided the other Muslims as unrepresentative hypocrites, the women because they were not ‘covered’, the man because he had no beard. The other panellists and Jeremy Paxman in the chair handled this with remarkably good grace, Paxman at one point silencing Choudary by saying firmly and memorably, "we’re moving on, matey."
A chilling conclusion from the discussions was that the protest demonstrations and confrontation taking place all over Europe and the Muslim world, now including a number of deaths, no longer have much if anything to do with the Danish cartoons, which were merely the match that ignited a huge waiting bonfire. The targets are no longer just the cartoonists or the editor who published the cartoons but Denmark and the Danes, all other Scandinavians, and increasingly the whole of ‘the west’. The flames are fanned by events in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and especially Palestine, by a fanatically anti-western new President in Iran and the nuclear weapon issue there, by chaos in Lebanon, by feelings of alienation and frustration on the part of thousands of young — and old — Muslims living in predominantly non-Muslim European countries, by the fears of Islamic extremist terrorism following 9/11, 7/7 and other attacks and by the angry resentment aroused by western governments’ responses to them (the ‘war on terror’, easily represented as a war on Islam) – and that is by no means a comprehensive list of Muslim grievances and flash-points.
Paxman concluded the debate, after the merciful departure (voluntary or otherwise) of Anjem Choudary, by asking the remaining participants whether the whole cartoon issue would blow over or whether it had sparked off something so fundamental that it had permanently changed the relationship between the cultures of Islam and the west. Most of the responses indicated a belief that things would never be the same again.
If you haven’t seen this impressive programme, now’s your chance.
My earlier comments on all these issues are on my earlier Ephems pieces here; also see Owen’s comments on his own blog here and here. Some viewers’ comments on the Newsnight debate are here. Civilised discussion of these difficult and sensitive matters is still possible, thank — er, goodness. Three cheers, not for the first time, for the BBC.
Update (12 Feb 06): The myth that Islam forbids, and has always forbidden, pictorial representations of the Prophet is effectively exploded here, among other places.
Brian
The Danes are without doubt the most likeable and civilised of all — or anyway of all continental — Europeans, and that remains the case notwithstanding a certain amount of right-wing drift (by no
means unique to Denmark) in recent times. Now Denmark, our EU and NATO partner and war-time ally, among the bravest of victims of fascist occupation and repression during the war, is under menacing but wholly undeserved pressure in a raft of countries which have no legitimate grounds for their hostility. What should we be doing to help the Danes?
First, it’s a sad fact that we need to re-state and emphasise our right to say and do things that may offend other groups and individuals, provided that we don’t break the law in doing so — obviously there’s no right to incite others to act violently or to break the law in their turn. We apparently need to reaffirm our right to comment on other people’s religion (or our own, if any), including challenging its tenets and practices by argument, mockery, satire or lampoon, even if by doing so we give offence to its adherents. Believers, by the same token, have absolutely no right to be protected by law from being offended, any more than unbelievers or those holding controversial or orthodox political opinions have any such right. All this is well and pungently spelled out in a recent post on Owen’s blog.
But having a right to do something is not to say that it’s always sensible, sensitive or even safe to do it, whatever the circumstances. The Danish editor who published the cartoons of the Prophet and founder of Islam had every right to publish them, but it’s still the case that it was an idiotic thing to do — although at the time neither he nor anyone else could have foreseen the outlandish consequences that were to follow. It’s perhaps also worth remembering that the cartoons, only two of which are remotely controversial, in no way threatened any specific person or group: collectively they constituted a comment on how Islam is widely perceived in the west, including, but by no means confined to, the association in millions of people’s minds between Islam and terrorism, an association which the most pious and peaceloving Muslim can hardly deny. Nor, apparently, is it the case that Islam has always prohibited pictorial representations of the Prophet: and even if it did, Muslims have no more right to impose their prohibition on non-Muslims than they (or orthodox Jews) have any right to prevent the rest of us from eating bacon. Still, at a time when relations between Islam and the west are so strained and controversial, constantly teetering on the brink of explosion, publication of cartoons that were bound to upset and offend Muslims was silly and gratuitous: it was never likely to achieve any positive result to outweigh the potentially negative consequences for inter-communal relations.
But the reaction of very large numbers of Muslims around the world has been out of all proportion to the offence given, and has unquestionably done far more harm to the standing of Muslims in the west than publication of the original cartoons could ever have done. The violence involved and the crude incitements to murder and terrorism are of course criminal acts unacceptable in any civilised society. The whipping up of hostility to the whole Danish people, the attacks on their embassies abroad, the organisation of boycotts of all Danish goods — these are also totally unacceptable, hypocritical, dishonourably motivated, and deserving of utter condemnation. The anti-Danish campaign is demonstrably the work of deliberate agents-provocateurs, among others: a BBC Radio 4 programme broadcast this afternoon (9 Feb 06) carried an interview with one of a group of imams who recently toured the middle east and who admitted in the BBC interview, in English, to having displayed to local middle-eastern Muslims as examples of "what we have to put up with in Denmark" a set of cartoons comprising not only the 12 cartoons published last September by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, but also some other cartoons depicting Mahommed, never published in Denmark or anywhere else, one showing the Prophet with the head of a pig, another being penetrated by an animal, and another with genitals exposed, and so forth. If this isn’t deliberate provocation and incitement to religious hatred and violence, it’s hard to know what is.
How should we respond in turn to these attacks on our rights and freedoms? — for that is what they are: a deliberate and largely successful attempt to foster enmity between Muslims, including Muslims living in western countries, and the predominantly non-Muslim west; and a blatant attempt to deter any public criticism or mockery of Islam by the all too credible threat of violence in retaliation, not only violence against the authors of criticism but against the whole of the society to which they belong. As Timothy Garton Ash says in an excellent commentary in today’s Guardian, —
One way of looking at the self-restraint of the British media over the past week [in not following the example of other European newspapers in re-publishing the offending cartoons] is to say how responsible, pragmatic and sensitively multicultural they all were. Alternatively you might say they were scared of having their offices burned. Was it wisdom with a seasoning of fear, or rather fear packaged as wisdom? Throughout history, violence has often paid off, but the struggle of civilisation against barbarism is to ensure that it doesn’t.
Garton Ash says he was not in favour of the re-publication of the cartoons by some European newspapers, but the point he himself makes about the attempt of the protesters to impose self-censorship on the western media by threatening them with violence if they dare to criticise Islam suggests that there must be a case for the re-publication of the cartoons outside Denmark as an act of solidarity and defiance.
But defiance by re-publication is clearly not enough. Conspicuous and continent-wide solidarity with Denmark against this wholly unwarranted attack ought to be the duty of all other European 
governments. Not only should we all be going out of our way to buy Danish goods — no pain involved in that: almost all are superb in their categories, and a pleasure to buy and consume — as recommended by Owen in his blog (with examples of recommended Danish products): the EU collectively and at the government level should plainly be acting jointly to express their and our strong objections to the actions being taken against Danish interests, e.g. by withdrawing all EU ambassadors from Damascus. As Garton Ash rightly says,
I have also been saddened, though hardly surprised, by the weakness of the EU’s reaction to the criminal attack on the Danish embassy in Syria, which seems to have been permitted, if not actively encouraged, by the Syrian regime. We should have said: when you burn the Danish flag you burn our flag. Why weren’t all EU ambassadors instantly withdrawn from Damascus in protest?
EU governments should also, surely, be making it clear to middle eastern and any other governments which threaten or impose economic sanctions against Denmark that we regard such action against an EU country as action against the whole of the EU, and that the EU won’t hesitate to impose counter-sanctions against any government that behaves in this indefensible manner. Peter Mandelson, let’s set that ball rolling!
Update, 9 Feb 06: There’s an excellent piece about all this on Peter Harvey’s blog, including some pertinent and often amusing illustrations: vaut la visite, as the man said.
Brian
