Features

Saturday

Matthew Parris

The Blanket Repeal Bill

How can a new government undo Labour’s mistakes? It should simply repeal everything, says Matthew Parris And finally, we shall in our first Queen’s Speech be introducing a measure whose like has never been seen among the manifesto commitments of an incoming government. It will be known as the Blanket Repeal of Legislation (Failure of New Labour, 1997-2010) Bill. The effect of the Act will be to repeal en masse and at a stroke all new legislation brought in since the fall of the Conservative government in 1997. The only exceptions will be those measures which, by affirmative resolution of both Houses, parliament votes to rescue.

Frank Field

How to defuse the pensions timebomb

Frank Field argues that a radical reform of Britain’s pensions policy could enrich both pensioners and the exchequer Ten years of austerity must deliver the country a radicalism that ten years of abundance has failed to achieve. The Prime Minister’s economic war council must decree that the necessary budgetary strategy also forges a radical agenda. Every secretary of state should be instructed to bring forward one major reform which, while cutting the size of a departmental budget, also begins to transform the political landscape. Combining these individual initiatives would lay the basis for a five-year reform programme, comparable to the models of 1906 and 1945.

Matthew Sinclair

The unelected bodies that just won’t die

Unruly, bizarre and hungry for your money, Britain’s quangos must be stopped, says Matthew Sinclair They are our longest-running political horror story. And, under Labour, they have been ever more unruly, increasingly dangerous and always ready to suck the blood of taxpayer’s wealth. For several decades politicians have been discussing cutting the number of Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisations (quangos). Back in 1991, even Gordon Brown was talking about it. But it seems Britain’s vampire quangos cannot be killed. The most recent TaxPayers’ Alliance survey found that there are now 1,148 national quangos and other arm’s-length bodies in the UK, spending over £90 billion of taxpayers’ money and delivering huge areas of policy.

Julian Glover

And in the event of a hung parliament…

David Cameron may have to rely on Nick Clegg to form a majority. But Julian Glover says that a deal should be simple – if they focus on areas where they already agree In late 2007 two fresh-faced, privately educated party leaders gave speeches setting out their philosophies. ‘We’ve always been motivated by a strong and instinctive scepticism about the capacity of bureaucratic systems to deliver progress,’ said one. I want ‘a politics of people, not systems, of communities, not bureaucracies; of individual innovation, not administrative intervention,’ said the other. ‘The days of big government solutions – of “the man in Whitehall knows best” – are now coming to an end,’ they could have chorused together.

Fraser Nelson

Can Nick Clegg sing the blues?

Nick Clegg’s office already has a Downing Street feel to it. Since becoming leader of the Liberal Democrats, he has had it redecorated so that portraits of old party leaders hang on the staircase up to his room, as portraits of former prime minsters do in No. 10. It starts plausibly enough, with portraits of Palmerston, Gladstone and Asquith. The gravitas is somewhat lost when we get to Charles Kennedy and Ming Campbell. But neither came as close to power as Mr Clegg is now. If the polls are right, then he might be just weeks away from government. The idea of a Lib-Con coalition is not one any Conservative relishes. But there is a limit to how long even the most optimistic Tory can keep ignoring opinion polls.

Bruce Anderson

Nick Clegg’s only true allegiance is to his belief in a federal Europe

When Nick Clegg assures us that he is a man of principle, he is telling the truth. He does have one deeply held principle: the ground of his political being. He believes in a federal Europe. Europe is not only his continent. It is his country. But there is a problem. Such views are not widely popular with the electorate. They are not even popular with Mr Clegg’s own MPs, who would like to hold on to their seats. This is why Nick Clegg often seems anaemic and insipid. To be obliged to remain silent on the one subject which could transmute platitudes into eloquence; there could be no greater handicap for a politician.  At times, it can be a grovelling and humiliating silence. In 2005, the Liberals were prepared to sound courageous on the proposed EU constitution.

Samuel Brittan

Don’t panic — a hung parliament might be good

Although I have been a reader of The Spectator almost since I have been in short trousers I have rarely been as irritated by an article as I was by last week’s cover story, ‘Britain must be saved from the financial abyss’. Its author, Allister Heath, is by no means a lone voice: he speaks for a considerable number of vocal, if unrepresentative people in the City who believe a hung parliament would mean weak government and fiscal peril. This view is profoundly mistaken. The implication of this argument is that, even to Conservative voters, a Labour victory would be preferable to a House of Commons where neither of the two main parties has an overall majority.

Harry Mount

‘I went into the war as a student and came out as an artist’

Ronald Searle, who turned 90 this month, talks to Harry Mount about being captured by the Japanese, chronicling the 1950s and inventing both St Trinian’s and Molesworth High in the mountains of Provence, in a low-ceilinged studio at the top of his teetering tower house, Ronald Searle is showing me the simple child’s pen he uses. As he draws the pen down the page, the ink thickens and swerves; a few sideways strokes, a little cross-hatching, and suddenly the famous Searle line comes to life: part Gothic, part anarchic, part comic. The girls of St Trinian’s, Nigel Molesworth, Adolf Eichmann, thousands of Punch caricatures, the Goya-like pictures of dying prisoners of war... all utterly different, all enclosed by that distinctive Ronald Searle line.

Andrew Gilligan

Why does the BBC air Islamist propaganda?

Down at that self-proclaimed centre of ‘tolerance and harmony’, the East London Mosque, they’ve been holding some pretty tolerant and harmonious meetings lately. On 9 July last year, for instance, there was the half-day conference on ‘social ills’. One of the ‘social ills’ — with an entire session to itself — was ‘music’, described by one of the speakers, Haitham al-Haddad, as a ‘prohibited and fake message of love and peace’. Then there was the talk, on 26 June, by a certain Bilal Philips — named by the US government as an ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Rod Liddle

Let’s not mess with the sparrowhawks

It’s unlikely that birds of prey have anything to do with the decline in garden songbirds, says Rod Liddle, and anyway, what right have we got to play God with wildlife? But oh! The crewel sparrer’hawk E spies im in is snuggery, E sharpens up is bleedin’ claws An rips im aht by thuggery anon, 19th c. There was a fearful commotion outside, in the garden, a screeching and frantic flapping, the sound of water being urgently displaced, of aggression and terror. I rushed to the door and looked through the glass; three feet away from me, in my daughter’s half-collapsed paddling pool — replete with winter snow-melt and rain — a wood pigeon was getting its head kicked in.

Peter Jones

Greek sex, infallible logic and fearless honesty

It is not difficult to see why the greatest Greek scholar of his generation, Sir Kenneth Dover, who died last Sunday, was a man who attracted controversy. His edition of Aristophanes’ comedy Clouds (1968) was the first to go into the same detailed explanation of its sexual jokes as of its textual cruces. Readers were appalled: surely you did not pick up a classical text to read about the relationship between erections and pre-ejaculation fluid? That it was the finest commentary ever produced on every aspect of a comedy featuring the controversial figure of Socrates seemed to pass people by. His Greek Homosexuality (1978) caused even more of a rumpus.

Saturday

Allister Heath

Britain must be saved from the financial abyss

A few months ago, Alistair Darling was asked how long he thought his government could continue to borrow £600 million a day. Might creditors one day refuse? The Chancellor gave an oblique reply. ‘When you walk over ice, you never know it is too thin — until you fall through.’ He said no more, but his message came across. If the bottom falls out of the British economy, it will do so instantly and dramatically. There will be no warning. For some time now, Gordon Brown’s government has been walking on the thinnest of ice. But it has been helped, ironically, by the widespread expectation of its electoral annihilation.

Michael Gove

Let’s set schools free

Our dismal education system means that too often poverty is a life sentence, says Michael Gove. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Schools can be freed from stifling state control I owe Peter Bazalgette an apology. A very big apology. Peter is the man who brought Big Brother to our TV screens. His genius in spotting the potential of the original show has brought him riches and helped Channel 4 fund years of genuinely creative TV. But at a price I used to think far too high. I used to write a regular column in the Times and I took advantage of my platform there to denounce Mr Bazalgette for using his undeniable intelligence to exploit the stupidity, indeed more properly the frailty, of others for his own ends.

Rachel Wolf

Why not start your own school?

Parents who can’t afford to move into the right catchment area, let alone pay expensive fees, are often desperately worried about the local schools. Teachers are worried about schools too: brilliant teachers who have worked in some of the worst classrooms in the country know they can do better. Charities are longing to work where they’re needed most. That’s why in four months we at the New Schools Network have been contacted by hundreds of parents, teachers and charities who all want to set up new state schools. And their first question is: ‘how do we do it?’ The answer isn’t simple. At the moment it’s very difficult to set up a school. Unless there aren’t enough places for the children in the area, it’s rarely possible.

Rod Liddle

The public has every right to fear homicidal nutters

There was a loony on my train the other day. He sat quietly for most of the journey, but when we pulled into a station he began barking like a dog; that’s how I knew he was a loony, the barking bit, not the sitting quietly bit. Every station, his head went back and he began to bark and yowl and you could see little flecks of foam, agitated saliva, at the corners of his mouth. Then, when the train left the station he went back to reading the Daily Mirror in silence, although he would snuffle from time to time. His fellow passengers treated him with wary tolerance, glancing over from time to time but careful not to catch his eye. I smiled at him once, in an uplifting and encouraging manner, but he looked uncomprehendingly beyond me.

Alec Russell

Fellow travellers: South Africa falls for China

Jacob Zuma is in Britain this week, paying lip service to the West. But, says Alec Russell, his vision for South Africa’s future is of ever closer ties with the emerging superpower When Jacob Zuma addressed the banquet at Buckingham Palace on Wednesday night, he will have nodded at his host and saluted the Commonwealth. South Africa’s President is a stickler for traditional protocol. He also has warm memories of his flits through London when he was in exile under apartheid and the UK was a home from home for many in the ‘struggle’. Yet Zuma’s audiences should not be misled by his anecdotal after-dinner repertoire. The one-time herd boy turned freedom-fighter turned president may have a reputation for populism, vacillation and scandal.

Peter Oborne

Cricket’s foreign legion

Last week a ferocious new talent made his debut for the England cricket team. Craig Kieswetter, a wicketkeeper/batsman, is only 22 years old and is thought likely to be a regular in the England team for years to come. Normally this would be a matter for national celebration. But with the arrival of Kieswetter there is also unease, though it has yet to be articulated. The problem is easy to state: Kieswetter is not British. He was born in Johannesburg and grew up in South Africa, playing cricket for Western Province from the age of 13 to 18. It is less than four years since he played for South Africa in the Under-19s World Cup in Sri Lanka. Kieswetter is one of a growing number of white South Africans who have made themselves available for England over the last few years.

Damian Thompson

The public sector at prayer

The government’s fiercely secularist agenda has turned very few Christians into Tory voters. Damian Thompson asks why the Churches have kept faith in New Labour Gordon Brown’s Cabinet is the least Christian in British history. Its members sneer at the Churches’ teachings about sexuality. They bully faith schools with relish, making them talk to primary schoolchildren about sexual intercourse. They are just about to force Catholic schools to advise teenage girls on where to procure an abortion. They want to compel religious institutions to employ people whose beliefs run entirely counter to the values of those institutions. They favour ‘assisted dying’ and are surreptitiously working to enshrine it as a legal right.

Lloyd Evans

Great Scot — a triumph for Vettriano!

Every year the cream of Scotland comes to Boisdale of Belgravia to celebrate Scottish talent and to toast the winner of the Johnnie Walker Blue Label Great Scot award. Boisdale is quietly opulent. The mighty banqueting tables and blood-red walls decorated with country views suggest baronial splendour in a modern key. It’s Balmoral with central heating. Our host, Andrew Neil, began on a note of unapologetic patriotism. ‘Scotland invented the modern world,’ he said, and reeled off a list of his homeland’s greatest contributions to world culture. Tarmac, television and Tennent’s Super didn’t get a mention and instead he focused on ‘the decimal point, the cure for scurvy and the patron saint of Ireland, St Patrick.

Brendan O’Neill

In defence of ‘devil dogs’

The proposed competence test for dog owners is designed to stop hoodies owning pit bulls, says Brendan O’Neill. But are the dogs, or their owners, really that dangerous? Some people call them ‘dangerous dogs’. The tabloids prefer ‘devil dogs’. The police refer to them as ‘status dogs’. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals labels them ‘antisocial dogs’ (which is the most bizarre name of all. Since when were dogs expected to obey social etiquette?). Whatever they’re called, these dogs, monsters, beasts are never out of the news.