Some more things from the media that have struck me recently:
A letter from Bradford in West Yorkshire in Monday's Guardian complained that at Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday concert in London –
"the choir from Soweto was insultingly relegated to backing-up [sic] predominantly white performers, a continuation of cultural imperialism by other means."
This seems to be a prime example of reverse racism – who cares about the skin colour of the performers 'backed up' (or 'backed-up') by the Soweto choir? It also reflects a failure of comprehension of the nature of imperialism – even 'cultural' imperialism, whatever that is. To equate the mixing of black and white performers at a concert with any kind of imperialism is simply silly.
The same letter asserted, to my mind equally fatuously, that –
"the significance of the man [Mandela] was his life of struggle."
This completely misses the point about the 'significance' of Mandela, as well as stretching the meaning of 'struggle' beyond breaking-point. Surely the reason for the world-wide admiration of this great man is his superhuman magnanimity, his extraordinary lack of bitterness or anti-white vengefulness after his 27-year incarceration by an openly racist white régime, and his amazing success in helping South Africans of all races to overcome their past differences in the new multi-racial society of which he is the founding father. Substituting "his life of struggle" for that achievement is just a lazy resort to clapped-out Marxist jargon, and does Mandela no favours.
* * * * *
A recent Guardian article about the resignation of Wendy Alexander from leadership of the Scottish Labour Party in the Scottish parliament attributed her downfall to –
"…Labour's failure to cope with an SNP government and its drive towards self-government [sic]. If it, and she, had demonstrated a more coherent response then she may have survived the donations scandal…." [Emphasis added]
As written this can only mean that the writer was unsure at the time of writing whether Ms Alexander had survived the scandal or not. You'd think that since her resignation was the subject of the article, he'd have spotted a clue to the answer to that question. It's extraordinary how many experienced writers trip up over the difference between 'may' and 'might' in past conditional contexts. Galling for Wendy Alexander, too, to think that "a more coherent response" to the SNP might have saved her. "Can try harder", as my school reports used to say.
* * * * *
In Australia one Ken Henry, the Treasury secretary (its civil service head, or 'permanent secretary' in UK parlance) is being criticised for going away on five weeks' leave, at a time of national economic and financial crisis, to a remote national park in Queensland to help protect the rare northern hairy-nosed wombats, threatened with extinction. '"These guys are on death row," said Henry. "There are 10 times as many giant pandas in the world as there are these guys."' No possible comment can match that. Or are the Aussies having us on? I wouldn't put it past them. In general they have more of a sense of humour than we solemn Brits do.
* * * * *
The Rt Hon Stephen Timms MP has the challenging title of 'Minister of State for Employment and Welfare Reform at the Department for Work and Pensions'. Among his numerous responsibilities the Department's website lists: Labour market and the economy, Labour market statistics, Welfare Reform, Employment programmes including the future of the New Deal, Lone parents, childcare and partners, Adult Disadvantage, Cities Strategy, Skills, Disadvantaged areas and regional issues, Tax Credits (where DWP has an interest), E-Government (PSX(E)) [what that?], Bereavement Benefit, Departmental IT and data security [a serious matter these days, obviously], and Benefit Simplification. (There's plenty more, too much to quote in full.) If you're wondering what the minister does for his day job, the answer is that he is also, rather bewilderingly, the first ever "Labour Party Vice Chair for Faith Groups". Perhaps he's able to use his party responsibility for Faith Groups to help him perform his governmental responsibility for Adult Disadvantage.
* * * * *
In the close vote in the House of Commons on the prime minister's inexplicable proposal to extend the maximum time for which terrorist suspects can be locked up without charge from an already monstrous 28 days to an even more grotesque 42, the gloves were off both metaphorically and, apparently, literally. On his blog the young and highly articulate Tory MP Ed Vaizey reports being informed on BBC Radio 4 by the Labour MP Kitty Ussher that 'Labour MPs were told to tell Tory MPs they would have “blood on their hands” if they voted against.' There's an echo of this noxious threat in a recent Labour Party pamphlet comparing what the Tory leader, David Cameron, says with what he allegedly does:
Cameron does one thing: David Cameron wants to sound tough on crime; but does another: his 'hug a hoodie' approach means voting against Labour's tough anti-crime measures.
Yet the party leadership indignantly denies that New Labour's endless assaults on our ancient (and modern) civil liberties in the name of the 'wars' on terrorism and crime are mainly designed to wrong-foot the Tories: if they oppose these illiberal and disproportionate measures on grounds of principle, they lay themselves open to the charge of being "soft on terrorism and crime". The evidence doesn't seem to support the denials. The government should leave this kind of puerility to the Daily Mail. Apart from anything else, it's an insult to the many long-standing supporters of the Labour Party (such as me) who regard New Labour's obsession with chipping away at our human rights and freedoms as a sad betrayal of everything that Labour used to stand for, and still should.
* * * * *
A report in the Guardian on 27 June said that –
Higher fuel costs would not be felt until after 2010 and the main increases would come from 2015 onwards, according to the government's renewable energy consultation paper. "In 2020, as a result of the new incentives, domestic consumer bills are expected to increase 10-13% in electricity and 18-37% for gas bills," it says.
This strikes me as odd. Only last week, in mid-June 2008, my monthly payments for both gas and electricity were peremptorily increased by just over 90 per cent. So I view the prospect of maximum increases of 13 per cent for electricity and 37 per cent for gas in the year 2020, when I shall turn 86, with a fair amount of equanimity.
Brian
Derek Partridge, CMG, a friend and former diplomatic service colleague, has authorised me to put on 
my website the text of a letter he has sent to Stephen Timms, the Minister of State for Employment and Welfare Reform at the Department for Work and Pensions in the British government (right –>). Derek told me on 23 June 2008 that he “had thought of holding off putting the letter on your website at least until I received a reply from Stephen Timms. I have changed my mind on seeing the report in The Independent this morning that Jacqui Smith has said that gay and lesbian asylum-seekers can be safely deported to Iran so long as they live their lives ‘discreetly’. I am now willing for you to put it on your website with a note saying that I have agreed to your doing so because of my anger at the Home Secretary’s statement.”
Derek’s experience and qualifications for writing about immigration policy are described in his letter. You can read the full text of it here.
If anyone has any comments on Derek Partridge’s letter, whether positive or negative, please write them below this post in the space provided and I shall ensure that Derek sees them. Alternatively by all means send me a private message using the Contact facility of this website (see top of page) and I will pass it on to him.
Brian
BBC Newsnight's blog has invited answers to the question:
If there was just one thing that Mr [Gordon] Brown could do to help restore his public standing, what would it be?
Most replies so far have suggested his immediate resignation and elections. Here's my offering, lightly edited:
NOT resign and NOT call a general election now, which would condemn us to at least five years of Tory misrule and probably 10. Instead, use the time remaining to him to do at least one of the following things (preferably all of them, but we're only allowed one):
1. Abandon 42 days detention without charge, admitting that there is no sufficiently widespread agreement to it: and repeal the Control Orders legislation.
2. Increase (a) the threshold for income tax enough to take 5 million people out of tax, and (b) marginal income tax rates on all incomes over £100,000 a year, increasing steeply thereafter to penalise all outlandish salary increases and bonuses above the rate of inflation; impose a windfall tax on the oil companies and other bodies which have made huge profits from increased world commodity prices without lifting a finger to earn them; promise that public sector pay will keep pace with inflation and that tax policy will ensure that the private sector bears its share of the burden of pay restraint.
3. Pull our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan by Christmas.
4. Abandon ID cards and the monster data-base that goes with them.
5. Reduce the prison population by at least two-thirds by removing all those who ought never to have been sent there and substituting various forms of community service combined with treatment; change sentencing policy to ensure that no more than a third of those currently jailed are imprisoned in future; remove the power of magistrates to send offenders to prison; abolish prison sentences shorter than three years; abolish indeterminate sentences; return privatised prisons to the public sector.
6. Cancel the renewal of Trident and the order for aircraft carriers.
7. Announce a 20-year programme for full devolution of all internal affairs to Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England, with a full parliament and executive for each, the Westminster parliament and government becoming federal institutions responsible mainly for foreign affairs and defence, on the Australian, US and German models.
8. Declare that British troops will never again be involved in military action overseas unless Britain is attacked or an attack on Britain is imminent, or else with the explicit authority of the UN Security Council.
9. Abandon the party list system for elections to the European parliament and substitute a Single Transferable Vote system.
10. Complete reform of the House of Lords by making it a wholly elected chamber with limited powers (as now) elected on a different timetable from the Commons by a form of Proportional Representation, in preparation for its eventual conversion into a federal Senate.
And a bonus, not-too-serious proposal: 11. Issue an invitation now to Senator Obama (only) to make a State Visit to Britain within three months of taking up office next January as President.
Of course we also need urgent action on the environment and global warming, on alleviating world poverty and global inequality, on housing and immigration and the treatment of asylum seekers and reform of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy and discouraging the rebirth of American protectionism and resistance to siren voices demanding cuts in oil and petrol prices (while compensating those least able to afford them) and massive cutbacks on the money being squandered on the London Olympics and stopping private companies and government bodies ripping us off by making us pay through the nose to telephone them on 0845 and 0844 lines about their own failures and defaults, and the retirement from public life of Messrs. Straw and Hoon and Ms Blears, and a few other things that I have temporarily forgotten. But we can't have everything, I suppose.
I'm not unduly optimistic, though.
Brian
On reining in the private sector to make the hyper-rich, very rich and quite rich take their share of the burden of avoiding an incomes-price spiral, and not making the less well-off employees in public sector take all the strain, I can't see any objection to some steeply graduated income super-tax rates rising from 50 to 95 per cent on all incomes from, say, £100,000 to anything over £5m a year so that any increases through salary increases, bonuses, cashing in of share options, etc., in excess of the rate of inflation would be negated by moving the taxpayer concerned into an even higher tax bracket. Tack on a windfall tax on the oil companies and any others profiting from higher international commodity prices unrelated to their own performance, and you have the beginnings of a case in equity for appealing to ordinary working people for wage restraint.
You'll probably say that all this is an Old Labour nightmare and that all our best and most entrepreneurial businessmen and financiers would up sticks and emigrate, presumably to Abu Dhabi, which might get a bit crowded. I doubt if they will fancy their chances with President Obama, anyway.
Some Euro-commentators and leaders are arguing that the rest of the EU should go ahead and ratify the Lisbon treaty, despite its rejection in the Irish referendum, in the hope that evidence of Ireland's isolation in rejecting ratification might shame the Irish electorate into voting for the treaty in a re-run of the referendum. This seems to be based on a crucial misperception of the state of public opinion in Europe.
Even if the rest of the EU does ratify the Lisbon treaty, it seems unlikely so to impress the Irish electorate that it would persuade enough of them to change their minds and vote for ratification in a second referendum on the same treaty (and if the treaty itself is changed, all 27 member states will have to start the process all over again, not an attractive prospect). The Irish would doubtless say, probably correctly, that since not a single other EU member state will have held a referendum before ratifying it, there's no evidence that the people of the EU are willing to support the treaty: if other countries had risked holding referendums, it seems highly likely that it would have been rejected in several of them, almost certainly including the UK.
If the mostly desirable elements of the Lisbon treaty are ever going to be implemented — a virtually indispensable condition of the EU playing its full part in tackling huge current global problems such as climate change, terrorism, world poverty and inequality, and the international control of the resort to violence in international affairs — it's vital to try to analyse why the Irish voted No, and why so many other EU citizens would probably have voted No if they had been given the opportunity; and then to consider what, if anything, can be done to alleviate these concerns and remove these objections.
In the case of Ireland, several specifically Irish issues seem to have influenced the referendum, including several that are totally irrelevant to the Lisbon treaty: fear that a reformed EU would force Ireland to legalise abortion; disillusionment with several Irish political leaders and unfamiliarity with the new Taoiseach; failure of the Irish government and other pro-treaty elements to make the case for the treaty convincingly and intelligibly; the fantastic obscurity of the text of the treaty itself, so that many voters felt they were being asked to vote for something whose implications it was impossible to understand; anger at the prospect that under the treaty's provisions, Ireland would lose its EU Commissioner; and (perhaps most potently?) anger and alarm at the economic downturn, itself the product of the steep rise in international commodity prices (especially oil and food), the collapse of the boom in house prices, and the international credit crunch following the US sub-prime mortgage disaster: the blame for all these woes, however unfairly, being laid at the door of Ireland's own politicians. If the politicians were urging a vote for ratification, the Irish were damned if they were going meekly to obey the bastards.
There are two striking things about this combination of negative issues. First, they don't reflect any widespread anti-European sentiment in Ireland, which indeed has prospered mightily as a direct result of its EU membership. Secondly, most of the sentiments, worries and concerns contributing to the No vote in the referendum are widely shared in many other EU countries; few are unique to Ireland, and those that are probably have similar counterparts elsewhere in the EU. The people of some EU countries differ from the Irish in exhibiting a high level of antipathy to the whole European project: the UK is certainly one of these, and some of the new eastern and central European countries (and/or their leaders) are others. Even those who are generally pro-European are often critical of the lack of transparency of many of the processes of the EU, of the centripetal tendencies of the Commission, of the failure to clean up the Union's finances, of what is rather vaguely referred to as the democratic deficit. All such tendencies will tend to predispose a goodly number of individual European voters to vote No in a referendum on almost any proposition recommended to them by their political leaders, however intrinsically innocuous.
Much the most serious of the issues setting electorates against their political masters must be the prospect of economic slow-down, perhaps lurching into full-scale recession, in the next several years. Many (although not all) Europeans have got used to years of continuing boom, with low inflation, high employment, low interest rates, and a steadily rising standard of living. The illusion has been created that our political, economic and financial systems and those who operate them have finally gained control of the world economy, and that boom no longer infallibly leads to bust. The quite sudden bursting of that illusory balloon has caused a general antipathy to politicians and a deep scepticism about their ability to protect us all against the miseries of inflation, strikes and general industrial unrest (especially in the public services), a rise in the cost of borrowing, including on credit cards and mortgages, and increased dangers of eviction from one's home as a result of negative equity. The huge rise in the cost of petrol, gas and electricity, and many basic foods, has come as a terrible shock. Someone must be to blame.
One casualty of these developments is certain to be a collapse in support for absolutely essential measures to deal with climate change on a global scale, many of them inevitably entailing cuts in living standards, not only in developing countries struggling to escape from extreme poverty, but also in the rich west. Neither of the present contenders for the US presidency seems to be brave enough to say publicly that the days of cheap gasoline are over, that high gas (petrol) prices are actually beneficial and to be welcomed because they will encourage more economic use of carbon fuels that damage the atmosphere and contribute to global warming, or that only costly gasoline is going to stimulate the search for alternative, eco-friendly energy sources (although Senator Obama has come creditably close to making these points). The pressure from ordinary Americans on their political leaders in a presidential election year to do something quickly to get gas prices down and keep them down is so intense as to be almost irresistible.
Here in Britain popular resentment of the government in the context of the downturn and the return of inflation and, soon, of higher unemployment seems likely to lead to more strikes and disruptions of public services resulting from pay and other disputes. The government has an unanswerable case for arguing that if pay increases are allowed to keep up with (or, worse, jump ahead of) inflation, when the causes of the inflation are international and beyond any single government's control, everyone will suffer from the resulting inflationary spiral, with the value of each pay rise immediately negated by the consequent inflation of prices. But the government seems at the moment intent on placing the entire burden of pay policy restraint, meaning inevitable reductions in living standards for millions of individual families and individuals, on the public sector. There is no sign of willingness to use the tax system to curb excessive bonuses and salary increases in many parts of the private sector, nor to restrain the indiscriminate distribution of enormous profits, especially those made as a result of unprecedentedly high energy prices which benefit an already rich few at the expense of everyone else. The nurse, teacher, or junior civil servant can hardly be blamed for complaining of the rank injustice of having his or her standard of living reduced by pay awards below the level of inflation — in other words, pay cuts — when all around the wealthy are continuing to award themselves and each other real increases in already astronomical salaries and bonuses; and when even the moderately well off are not apparently being required to make any corresponding sacrifice. Mere appeals by ministers for pay and salary restraint in the private sector will cut no ice at all.
The free marketeers inevitably moan about the distortions of the market caused by compulsory pay policies imposed on the whole of the economy, with its echoes of the centrally controlled economies of the bad old days before the collapse of European communism. Ministers are deeply reluctant to seem to be returning to the unpopular policies and attitudes of Old Labour. But in an increasingly challenging economic situation, here is one manifest injustice that is capable of being remedied in a way that might help to restore confidence in the capacity of our political leaders to control inflation and protect even the most vulnerable members of society against the worst of its malign effects. People might even become more willing to listen to the politicians' arguments for reforming the procedures and institutions of the European Union to equip it to make its voice heard in the global debates on the issues that threaten the long-term future, not just of this or that ailing industry, but of the human race and the tiny planet on which it lives.
Postscript (23 June 08): For some reason three comments on this post, all by Peter Harvey with my responses, have disappeared from this particular post when viewed in Internet Explorer: but they are there when it's opened in Firefox. The website addresses of the post and most of the comments have also apparently been corrupted in IE. I am working on this but can't immediately see a solution. Meanwhile apologies to Peter and others. Try Firefox! The comments should be available at:
http://www.barder.com/ephems/799#comment-72364
http://www.barder.com/ephems/799#comment-72482
and
http://www.barder.com/ephems/799#comment-72492
PPS (26 June 08): Problem with those comments now solved, thanks to Owen's eagle-eyed spotting of the fact that I had stripped out the Word tags from the first of Peter's comments but not from the second: and it was these that were blocking access to all of them in Internet Explorer (but not in Firefox). All should now be well in either browser, and any others that anyone might still be using.
Brian
If we needed a reason to applaud the romantic action of the Conservative Shadow Home Secretary, David Davis, in resigning his parliamentary seat in order to fight a by-election on the sole issue of the government's assault on our civil liberties (culminating in the folly 
of extending the maximum period for detaining terrorist suspects without charge to 42 days), the outrage, scorn and insults heaped on him by his own Tory parliamentary colleagues and the apparent dismay of his leader, David Cameron, will do fine. They called him (mostly anonymously, of course) mad, bonkers, a traitor, driven insane by ambition, unhinged, undergoing a mid-life crisis, guilty of a catastrophic misjudgement. Tory horror at Davis's move seems to stem from a belief that it will distract public attention from the mess that Gordon Brown has created by obstinately pursuing his indefensible 42-day detention proposal in the teeth of widespread criticism and scepticism within the parliamentary Labour Party and outright opposition from senior policemen, the director of public prosecutions, the head of MI5, and the former Labour attorney-general, to name but a few who know whereof they speak. The liberal lobby, libertarian pressure groups such as Liberty, the Conservative Party and the LibDems are similarly opposed.
Why, then, do the Tories apparently object to what Davis is doing, if — as seems likely — his by-election campaign in his own former constituency will throw the spotlight once again on the government's folly? Why has Cameron come as close as he dares to disowning Davis and his initiative? And why has the Tory leadership apparently let it be known that Davis, once re-elected, won't be allowed to return to the Conservative front bench but will have to serve out the rest of the parliament as a humble back-bencher?
The explanation seems to lie in the cosmic absence of enthusiasm on the part of many Conservative MPs, perhaps including some of his most senior colleagues, for Davis's civil liberties agenda. The instincts of some of them covertly favour the government's authoritarianism; some would be prepared to accept almost any amount of destruction of our ancient freedoms and civil rights in the name of greater protection against terrorism; others have seen the opinion polls suggesting majority support in the country for 42-day detention without charge, and fear that Davis's eloquent opposition to it is out of kilter with public opinion, which they are afraid will do them no good at the next election. It's generally believed by the media and by other denizens of the Westminster hothouse that the Tory leadership's decision to vote against the 42-days measure last week masked a deep split among Tory MPs, and that it was only Davis's passionate commitment to the defence of civil liberties that forced the party's formal policy of opposition to 42 days down the throats of the unbelievers. If so, the worry is that a highly publicised by-election fought exclusively on this issue might make it impossible to continue to conceal the split, thus damaging the Conservative cause electorally. Some Tories are also complaining that by doing what he has done, David Davis has "let Gordon Brown off the hook".
Much of this seems to me nonsense. The issue of civil liberties generally and 42-day detention in particular cuts across political parties, as last week's vote showed. On 11 June, 36 Labour MPs voted against the government despite a three-line whip and weeks of threats, blandishments and other pressures from the Whips. The maverick Tory MP Ann Widdecombe, a former home office minister, broke ranks and voted with the government. Had it not been for Widdecombe and the nine members of the reactionary Northern Ireland Democratic Unionist Party, including Ian Paisley, who abandoned their usual stance of opposition to the Labour government on all fronts to vote for 42 days, the government would have lost. It has been widely alleged, and is even more widely believed, that the government bought off the DUP with promises, perhaps not explicit but apparently broadly hinted at, of various financial and other concessions to DUP demands for Northern Ireland that have nothing to do with national security or 42 days' detention without charge. The government, naturally, denies this. We shall see.
The paradox is that the government's nominal victory in the vote last week damaged it far more severely than a defeat would have done. That victory had every appearance of having been bought, at the taxpayers' expense, by fundamentally corrupt means. Victory means that instead of dying on Wednesday to almost universal relief, the 42-days proposal now goes to the House of Lords, where it faces further bitter controversy and almost certain defeat, perhaps by a large margin. Davis's campaign against it at the by-election will add more expensive fuel to the flames. If the government decides to use the Parliament Act to overrule the Lords, it will prolong the agony for at least another year. Even if the measure is eventually forced through onto the statute book, it will certainly be challenged in the courts as incompatible with Britain's treaty obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights and it might well be struck down on that account, if not by the English courts then by the European Court at Strasburg (nothing to do with the EU, by the way). All this will take years — and even if the thing survives all these challenges, it's almost inconceivable that it will ever be used in real life: the government has been forced to 'concede' so many complicated safeguards and cumbersome forms of oversight by parliament as well as the judiciary before it can be activated that the procedure would collapse under its own weight if any government were to be rash enough to try to operate it. Anyway, the Conservatives have promised to repeal it the moment they become the government, which now seems likely in less than two years' time.
All this misery and shame could have been avoided if the government had allowed the measure to suffer the defeat it deserved last week, consequently sinking ingloriously into instant oblivion (the measure, if not also the government).
Both by his principles and as a Conservative MP in opposition to a recklessly illiberal government, David Davis has plainly done a good and courageous thing. The Labour dissident MP Bob Marshall-Andrews has already declared his intention of going to Davis's constituency of Haltemprice and Howden to support him in the by-election. The LibDems, since they agree with Davis's opposition to 42 days and to the government's other attacks on our civil liberties, are not going to put up a candidate against Davis for the by-election, despite having come a fairly close second at the last general election. The Labour Party is in a quandary: any official party candidate standing in the by-election would have to defend the government's illiberal record on civil liberties and the depths to which it stooped to get its 42-days detention project through the Commons; the Labour candidate in the constituency is personally opposed to 42 days detention; Labour's standing in the opinion polls is currently the lowest ever recorded, and even in the better days for Labour of the last general election, in Haltemprice and Howden Labour came a poor third to the Conservative (David Davis) and the LibDem. Many LibDems at the by-election will presumably vote for Davis, since the issue on which he is fighting it is one on which most LibDems agree with him. So a Labour loyalist candidate who campaigns on an anti-civil liberties platform against Davis is likely to be slaughtered at the polls, which can only add to the government's miseries and to Gordon Brown's personal humiliation. Yet if Labour fails to field a candidate at all, the government will be accused, with justice, of a cowardly failure to defend itself on a major issue of policy and principle, for which indeed Bob Marshall-Andrews already condemns it. No wonder Brown has sought to dismiss the Davis ploy as a 'stunt'. But there's no obvious way out of the dilemma. Incurring a charge of cowardice will probably seem the least damaging of the options, so there'll probably be no Labour candidate.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that Davis will lack an adversary in the boxing ring, so that the whole match will fizzle out, an unnoticed fiasco. If there's no Labour candidate standing, Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of the right-wing Murdoch tabloid The Sun and a fierce advocate of locking up terrorist suspects for as long as the police might deem desirable, seems likely to stand on what will amount to a national security, anti-civil liberties platform, and he will be a noisy attention seeker, guaranteed to fill the pages of The Sun and other media outlets both serious and stupid. He will be an embarrassment to Labour as the government's only apparent standard-bearer. A few other assorted loonies and weirdos may also seek their five minutes of fame by standing. Marshall-Andrews may not be the only Labour MP or libertarian from the left to campaign for Davis. It's difficult to imagine any outcome other than a sweeping victory for David Davis. Such a victory will not unreasonably be represented as giving the lie to the assertion that the government has majority public support for its oppressive measures, including especially those targeted by Davis: 42 days, ID cards and their supporting national register, obsessive surveillance by CCTV cameras and intrusive powers to intercept private postal, telephone, fax and e-mail communications, thousands of innocent people permanently tagged on the vast national DNA database, people subjected indefinitely to virtual house arrest under Control Orders on mere suspicion of involvement with terrorism without even the right to know what they are suspected of having done or planned to do.
All my life I have voted Labour, sometimes with enthusiasm, sometimes as the least objectionable option (although I did once vote for Ken Livingstone when the Labour Party machine had in effect forced him to run as an independent for mayor of London). Now I'm glad that I'm not on the electoral roll in David Davis's constituency of Haltemprice and Howden, trying to think of a decent reason not to vote, for the first time in my life, for a Conservative candidate who, on the issues at stake in this by-election, is on the side of the angels, while the policies being pursued by the government of the party I instinctively support are beyond the pale. The points of Gordon Brown's 'moral compass' have gradually been reversed.
David Davis looks as if he has ingeniously trapped New Labour in a no-win situation. Perhaps it's just as well that the rest of his party doesn't seem to be able to see it. But beware! The savvy Tory blogger Iain Dale has got it in one. Meanwhile, three cheers for David Davis, and four for Bob Marshall-Andrews.
Brian
Four years ago, in 2004, the American operatic soprano and uber-celebrity Deborah Voigt was, um, let go from a Covent Garden production of Ariadne auf Naxos, for which she had been contracted, because the costume designer for the production was determined that his Ariadne should wear a little black dress; and at the time "little" and Ms Voigt were not compatible concepts. In other words, she was too big for it. As this was one of the 
Richard Strauss roles for which Deborah Voigt was and is famous, and one which she has performed amid acclamation throughout the opera houses of the civilised world, this parting of company between the Royal Opera House and the diva caused considerable uproar among those who know about these things (especially, not unnaturally, the Americans).
But tomorrow Deborah Voigt opens as Ariadne once again — at Covent Garden. Using some of the money that the Royal Opera House paid her for that breach of contract in 2004, the sturdily built diva reduced her dress size by one means or another from 30, her one-time maximum, to 14. To mark this triumph over adversity, and very much following up the inspired suggestion of Ms Voigt herself, her PR team in New York, 21C Media Group, produced a gem of a mini-video about the saga, co-starring Deborah Voigt and the Little Black Dress, and put it on YouTube, with the consent of both the Royal Opera House and, of course, Debbie herself, whose idea it had been. You can watch and hear it here. The video has caused almost as big a stir as the unhappy events of 2004, but it has raised many more smiles. The New York Times featured the whole story, including the Little Black Dress and the video, on the front page of its Arts section on 11 June ("Second Date with a Little Black Dress"), illustrated with a still from the video: well worth reading. It is also about to appear on American television and it has already scored over 25,000 hits on YouTube, and counting.
For those who didn't spot the none-too-serious list of credits tucked away at the side of the YouTube video, and in view of the family connection (yes, we are by chance related, rather closely actually), I reproduce it here:
Sean Michael Gross – Executive Producer
Glenn Petry, Albert Imperato – Co-Producers
Matt Veligdan – Director
Sean Michael Gross – Assistant Director
Matt Veligdan – Cinematographer
Louise Barder, Max Lefer, Glenn Petry, Matt Veligdan – Script Editors
Matt Veligdan – Film Editor
Louise Barder – Casting Director
Albert Imperato – Boom Mic Operator
Matt Veligdan – Sound and Music Editor
Sean Michael Gross – Technical Director
Damian Fowler, Albert Imperato, Deborah Voigt – Production Assistants
Emma Nilsson – Props Director
Matt Veligdan – Sound Effects
Sean Michael Gross — Dress Animator
Alison Ames, Jessica Lustig, Michael Lutz, Philip Wilder – Consultants
Sean Michael Gross — Gofer and PA to Little Black Dress
Glenn Petry – Stunts Coordinator
Little Black Dress courtesy of Louise Barder
Catering by Starbucks
www.deborahvoigt.com
www.21cmediagroup.com
Who says that opera divas on the grand scale don't have a sense of humour?
Look out in due course for the genuine original of that now famous Little Black Dress — well, the one in the video, though not the one from the ROH costumes department — on eBay. It's only a matter of time. And if you hurry, you may just be in time to get tickets for Ariadne. Better make sure to win the lottery first, though. Meanwhile you can listen to a brief but glorious clip of Ms Voigt singing Ariadne here (scroll down to Strauss: Ariadne auf Naxos and click the audio sample).
Brian
