Leading article

Professor Hamid Ghodse, president of the UN’s International Narcotics Control Board, is not the first to observe that Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham have acquired ‘no-go’ areas of ‘fractured communities’ ruled by gangs. But if he were brave enough to venture just a little bit closer to the frontline of Britain’s drug problem he would realise that much of the rest of his analysis, delivered with the board’s annual report this week, is bunk. Making a case for a shift towards treatment and rehabilitation programmes, he claims that Britain offers proof that ‘it is no good to have only law enforcement, which always shows it does not succeed’.

Britain is in the middle of the deepest slump in our modern history. What can be done? The best idea we seem to have is one which Danny Alexander drew up on the back of an envelope. When advising Nick Clegg, the now Chief Secretary to the Treasury came up with the idea that no one paid below £10,000 a year should pay income tax. His short-lived predecessor, David Laws, reprised the idea this week, calling for the policy to be financed by cutting higher-rate tax relief on pensions. The Liberal Democrats are rightly exploiting one of the more worrying gaps in British politics: the vacuum where a Tory growth agenda ought to be. George Osborne performs many roles in the government. He is the chief strategist and the arch-fixer.

In the same week that Sun journalists were subjected to dawn raids at home, the British justice system released one of the leading ideologues of al-Qa’eda to walk the streets. The fact that Abu Qatada should never have been here in the first place, having arrived in 1993 on a forged passport, is not a minor point. He has cost this country much in expense and security. He is said to be connected to terrorist jihadist groups in the UK, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Tunisia, Iraq, Indonesia, Italy, Belgium, Morocco, Libya, France, Afghanistan and Sweden — in 2007, the Special Immigration and Appeals Commission described his influence as ‘formidable, even incalculable.

The weather conditions of the past week could not have been better conceived to show up the inadequacies of Britain’s — and the rest of Europe’s — energy policy. A vast anticyclone extending from Siberia to eastern England has brought snow as far south as Rome and temperatures of minus 40˚C to Eastern Europe. With North Sea gas production in sharp decline, never has Europe’s position on the end of a long gas pipeline originating in Russia been so exposed. As that country’s demand for energy has spiked, so the quantity of gas which it is prepared to export to the rest of Europe — also gagging for extra energy — has slumped. The wholesale price of gas has soared by more than a third in a week.

When George Osborne became Chancellor, he took charge of a very large zombie bank with a medium-sized government attached to it. The Royal Bank of Scotland was nationalised in 2008 with assets of £2.2 trillion, almost four times state annual spending. The difference between RBS being run well or run badly could be counted in billions. The man who would make that difference was Stephen Hester, a top-flight banker who in a moment of madness had accepted the contract from Alistair Darling’s Treasury and got to work. He would not have known how his new ­masters would turn on him, demanding that he refuse his bonus of nearly £1 million. Hester’s bonus was almost twice as large last year — but then, fewer people cared.

It is often claimed that the Lords, unencumbered by the rivalries and ambitions of the Commons, have a greater affinity with ordinary people than MPs. Certainly, this is the spin which opponents of the Welfare Reform Bill would like to put on its rocky passage through the upper house, where the government narrowly avoided a fourth defeat this week. But there is an alternative interpretation: that their lordships are suffering from a form of noblesse oblige which prevents them from seeing that the welfare system has become a racket, incubating the poverty it was set up to eradicate. This week’s near-defeat, on the subject of the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) — which is paid to 3.

It was a reasonable guess that, once the government had appointed a group of the great and good to investigate the summer riots, somehow we would all have to share the blame. It is a central tenet of liberal Britain that while criminals may share some of the blame for the acts which they perpetrate, they are invariably driven to committing them through the negligence and callousness of the rest of us. Meanwhile, the real problems — those created by an unreformed welfare system — are ignored. The Riots, Communities and Victims Panel has certainly not let us down on this score. Among the factors it blames for the riots in its interim report published this week is ‘conspicuous consumption’.

Just a few weeks ago, calling someone a ‘technocrat’ was a soft insult. The word meant, in effect, an efficient dullard. Now, technocrats appear to be inheriting the earth. They represent a new global elite, and they have recently added Greece and Italy to their empire. When Egypt’s military faced riots on the streets this week, it sought to assuage the crowds by replacing the government with a cabinet of technocrats. The Libyan rebels are doing the same. We have seen two very different types of regime change this year. The Arab Spring is driven by popular uprising; Europe has pioneered the reverse: an uprising of an unelected European elite deposing democratically elected governments. In both, technocrats seem to triumph.

One can’t help but admire the Greeks. To be sure, they lied and cheated their way into the euro, and even the threat of a referendum on the bailout may yet tip the eurozone into a financial abyss. But there is something to be said for actually consulting the people about their future. Greece faces a choice: a decade (or more) of Frankfurt-enforced austerity, or bringing back the drachma and defaulting on their loans. Neither option is attractive. But this is about sovereignty, not just about money. This needs to be seen as a choice of the Greek people, not a deal imposed from outside and aimed primarily at saving eurozone banks. No wonder that George Papandreou, Greece’s American-born prime minister, gave Brussels no prior notice of his decision.

Given the hold that Goethe had over the German elite in the 1920s, it is impossible that the Weimar Republic’s leaders could have been ignorant about what happens when desperate politicians start printing money. In Part II of Faust, the devil suggests to an emperor that he solves his fiscal crisis by mass-producing banknotes. He does so — and, for a brief period, all seems well. The public sector salaries are paid, debts are settled, courtiers run off to feast on food and wine. Later it is revealed that these were ‘bogus riches’ and the empire ‘collapsed in anarchy’. This, more or less, is what happened in Weimar Germany. For George Osborne, the story is different.

The massacre this week of Coptic Christians in Cairo stands as a bloody corrective to the idea that the ‘Arab Spring’ was a wonderful uprising of the masses against dictators. Revolutions are not, in themselves, causes for celebration if they create a vacuum that can be filled by evil. The deliberate mowing down of dozens of peaceful demonstrators by armoured vehicles (hundreds of others were shot at point-blank range by Egyptian soldiers) is the starkest indication yet that the land of the Pharaohs is fast becoming a fundamentalist Islamic state, with the blessing of its powerful military establishment.