Any other business

The government wants to find ways of helping us to lose weight. It could start by ceasing to shower farmers with subsidies to grow sugar. Remarkably, given the public money that is spent on telling us not to eat fattening foods, the EU gave European sugar producers 819 million euros worth of subsidy last year, either in the form of guaranteed prices, direct subsidies for exports or in other help. Defra, for example, funds a Hertfordshire research centre, Brooms Barn, helping Britain’s 7,000 sugar beet growers to squeeze ever more subsidised sugar out of the East Anglian soil. For this exercise, British consumers have their wallets emptied four times over.

Ronald Reagan fascinated me from the moment he became governor of California in 1966. He was a right-winger who had won office. In those days right-wingers never won anything. Every office-holder or potential office-holder in every democracy — Labour, Tory, Democrat, Republican — seemed to be a liberal or a centrist. All the authorities said that that was the only way democracies could be governed. I had only just become interested in politics, and was bored by the subject already. If no one could do anything differently from anyone else, when would I witness any of the great clashes that I had just started reading about in books? Then came Reagan.

According to the Hollywood film The Day After Tomorrow, the failure of the world to confront global warming is going to result in the royal family being freeze-dried at the breakfast table at Balmoral and our cities drowned in raging tornadoes. Never mind that this scenario — based on the global-warming lobby’s latest hobby-horse, the theoretical displacement of the Gulf Stream — is in direct contradiction to the drought and heatwave which scientists have been predicting for years. And never mind that much of the film’s scenes are physically impossible: to reverse the Gulf Stream, according to some calculations, would involve first having to stop the world rotating.

The sacking of Piers Morgan as editor of the Daily Mirror has been greeted with ululation from media commentators, former and existing editors and several newspapers. Piers, we are told by no less an authority than the legendary Harry Evans, was a great tabloid editor. My esteemed colleague Professor Roy Greenslade can barely be consoled. Mr Morgan’s defenders concede that the pictures he published which showed British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners may have been fakes, but it is claimed that they illustrate a wider truth. The only discordant voice I have heard amid the general wailing and gnashing of teeth is that of Martin Kettle in the Guardian. What does this reaction tell us about the media class?

The European Union’s social chapter has been so successful in suppressing economic growth in Europe that it is no surprise to find the US presidential candidate John Kerry seeking to emulate it. Not that he intends to saddle American businesses with more red tape, mind: he wants to try to strangle the booming Chinese economy through a kind of international social chapter. Kerry says that on taking office he would launch an ‘immediate investigation into China’s repression of workers’ rights’ and increase state funding for the Bureau of International Labor Affairs, a government agency which campaigns ‘to create a more stable and prosperous international economic system in which all workers ...

Ten new members join the European Union on Saturday and thousands of economic migrants are queueing up at the borders, raring to go. I refer, of course, to Western European property investors hoping to make a killing on property markets in the East. While we have heard a lot of grim warnings in the press about Eastern Europeans descending on Dover by the busload to take our jobs, steal our women and eat our children, buy-to-let investors have received nothing but encouragement: last weekend’s property sections were brimming with suggestions as to where to invest, what to buy and how much rent it is possible to screw out of your Estonian tenants. Such is the hypocrisy we show towards free trade.

It is becoming a commonplace that the ‘tabloid wars’ between broadsheet titles are transforming the newspaper market. There is a widespread belief that in producing tabloid editions the Independent and, to a lesser extent, the Times have stolen a brilliant march on their rivals. The Guardian is accused of having fallen asleep on the job, and one excitable commentator has suggested that the paper is doomed. The Daily Telegraph is also thought by many to be fatally missing out on the revolution. As soon as it finds a new buyer, it is suggested, it must unveil the tabloid edition with whose prototype frustrated executives have been tinkering. Such is the general view in what used to be called Fleet Street. In large measure it is what I thought myself until a few weeks ago.

Slaves transported from Africa to the New World in the 18th century had a wretched time, but does the same apply to their distant descendants? It does according to Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, who with seven other descendants of slaves this week filed a lawsuit demanding $1 billion in damages from Lloyd’s of London, FleetBoston and the tobacco company R.J. Reynolds. These companies, claims Ms Farmer-Paellmann, who has had her DNA traced to the Mende tribe of Sierra Leone, ‘have destroyed our national and ethnic identity’. She accuses them of ‘aiding and abetting the commission of genocide’ by financing and insuring slave ships.

New citizens of the United Kingdom may soon have to undergo a citizenship test, pledging their allegiance to the Queen, demonstrating their knowledge of English language and culture and quite possibly promising to cheer on the England cricket team. What they needn’t bother to do, on the other hand, is to take too much notice of the law. The Metropolitan Police Authority has declared that the police stop and search a disproportionate number of people of ethnic minority background, and that they must stop it at once. In 2002, we learn, 34 per cent of people stopped and searched were black; yet blacks make up only eight per cent of the population. One is not, of course, allowed these days to make the point that an awful lot of London’s muggers are black.

At last, some good news for the anti-war lobby. British servicemen will not be forced — in fact will not be allowed — to do America’s dirty work for it. That is my interpretation, at any rate, of Dodd Amendment no. 2660 to the Jumpstart Our Business Strength Act, passed by the US Senate last week by 70 votes to 26. The amendment prohibits companies working on federal and state government contracts to outsource work abroad. The Senate isn’t even bothering to try to dress up its actions as a security issue: this is a shameless piece of protectionism. American unions have cried foul that companies are increasingly cutting costs by outsourcing certain administrative operations, especially to India, and so senators have obliged. From now on, Samuel J.