The Spectator's Notes

Although television coverage of the Israeli attacks on Gaza is extensive, it is uninformative. The BBC, in particular its reporter Jeremy Bowen, seems to be in thrall to the images it can project. But, by its Charter, the BBC has a duty to educate, and what is missing in so much of the coverage is context. What is Hamas? What does it believe? Why is it not reported that the Arab press carries numerous attacks on Hamas for exposing the Palestinian people to suffering? Why is Hamas, despite being a Sunni organisation, close to Shi’ite Iran? What are the politics of the situation on both sides? Why, in short, is what is happening happening?

John Milton is 400 years old this month, and there is justified lamentation that nobody reads him for pleasure. Although Milton is renowned for his learning and complexity, he was also the master of simplicity. Almost my earliest memory of poetry of any kind is singing Milton’s version of Psalm 136 at my kindergarten. ‘Let us with a gladsome mind/ Praise the Lord, for he is kind’, it begins. I liked it, aged four or five, because of its depiction of nature — the ‘golden-tressèd sun’, ‘the hornèd moon that shines by night,/Mid her spangled sisters bright’.

In his speech announcing his Pre-Budget Report, Alistair Darling said that he was going to put up the top rate of income tax to 45 per cent from 2011, because he wanted the burden to be borne by ‘those who have done best out of the growth of the past decade’. In his speech announcing his Pre-Budget Report, Alistair Darling said that he was going to put up the top rate of income tax to 45 per cent from 2011, because he wanted the burden to be borne by ‘those who have done best out of the growth of the past decade’. This was not only, as many have said, an abandonment of a New Labour article of faith about tax rates: it was also an admission that the past ten years have not worked.

It is so important that the first black President is only half-black. The black side of Barack Obama’s heritage is the non-American bit. His black, Kenyan father was absent. His Hawaiian upbringing was white. One day, he recalls in his autobiography, his white grandparents, who were bringing him up, had a row. His grandmother (who died this week, just too soon to see her grandson elected), told her husband that she did not want to take the bus to work the next day. She asked her husband to drive her instead. He refused, and words were exchanged. Barack asked what was going on. His grandfather told him that she had been harassed at the bus-stop for money.

What would happen if you or I or telephoned an old man we did not know and left a message on his answering machine saying that one of us had ‘f—–ed’ his grand-daughter? What would happen if we then left three more messages, joking about her menstruation and imitating his voice as, in our imagination, he said he would kill himself because of the shame? What if our messages pointed out that most grandparents have pictures of their nine-year-old grandchildren by the telephone on a swing and then went on to say that one of us had ‘enjoyed’ his grand-daughter in that position? What would happen if we also shouted into the answering machine ‘I’ll kill you!

Nearly 20 years ago, after the Tiananmen Square massacres, The Spectator campaigned for all Hong Kong people to be given British passports. Part of our argument was that, if they all had the passports, very few of them would want to come here: they would have the confidence to stay. That, in essence, is the same reasoning that the governments of the Western world are using when they prop up the banks. Banks only lend because they can get their money back, yet if they all try to get their money back, they cannot lend. When they are all terrified, therefore, some external agency has to remove the fear. That external agency has to be government, or governments. I do not see anything very ideological in this.

We all know that everything about money comes down to confidence, but normally, because we have that confidence, we do not think about what this means. Now we must. We have learnt that mighty banks are nothing if customers — and other banks — have no confidence in their assets. Panicked, we turn to governments. Only governments, we believe, can ultimately overcome monetary crises, because only they have control of the printing press. If they ‘stand behind’ our banks, our confidence can be restored. That is why Gordon Brown acted as he did on Wednesday morning. But is this necessarily so?

It is a fascinating feature of this great financial disaster that everyone — or at least everyone sensible — is confused. It is a fascinating feature of this great financial disaster that everyone — or at least everyone sensible — is confused. I do not mean the basic, widespread confusion about terms and processes — about what is short-selling or a derivative, what are monolines, HELOCS, etc. I mean confusion about what is good news and what is bad. Has America nationalised its banks, and if it has, is that good or bad? Was it good to allow Lloyds to swallow HBOS, because it saved the latter, or bad, because it overthrew competition requirements and created moral hazard?

We are in a financial crisis which has been going on for more than a year. It is remarkable that, in all that time, no political leader has had anything much to say about it. In the United States, neither John McCain nor Barack Obama appears to have any understanding of what is going on. Over here, Gordon Brown’s supposed gift for economic analysis seems to have deserted him. One hears phrases like ‘the fundamentals are sound’, and trembles. David Cameron, pursuing the favourite strategy of keeping his party away from bad news, acknowledges the gravity of the situation without proposing remedies.

This column and its readers have just won our first battle in our long war. The BBC Trust has announced that it will investigate the way in which the television licence fee is collected. It wants to know, for example, whether the public think that the methods of enforcement are ‘reasonable and appropriate’. This column has been highlighting the predicament of those (including myself, in my London flat) who do not possess a television. We receive unreasonable and inappropriate letters from TV Licensing, often by the dozen, which assume our guilt for evasion without any evidence and threaten us with inspection and a criminal record.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn has been rather belittled on his death. Not knowing any Russian, I cannot judge his prose style, but when people complain that he was unrelentingly serious, they are applying the wrong criteria. Solzhenitsyn was prophetic, and obsessed with truth-telling in a world of lies. His mission led him to believe that no time must be wasted, no compromises made. This made him difficult in some ways, in literature and in life, but what of it? His compassion consisted of what the word really means — a suffering with others — rather than an easy friendliness. No doubt Isaiah and Ezekiel were potentially tricky dinner companions, but then they were not put on this earth to behave like Sydney Smith.

The news that the government is to fund a board of Islamic theologians to try to advance more moderate interpretations of Islam has been attacked as an unprecedented attempt by the state to shape the doctrine of a religion. It may well be a bad idea, but unprecedented it is not. The establishment of the Church of England meant that, until the 1970s, Parliament had the ultimate authority to determine doctrine and worship. It still has a residual role. Parliament empowered the courts in such matters. In 1850, for example, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council supported a clergyman called Gorham after his bishop had refused to institute him because of his heretical views on baptismal regeneration.

John Howard, four times Prime Minister of Australia, is one of the great men of our time — direct, amusing, patriotic, moderate but tough-minded. He finally lost an election this year, which had the good effect of giving him some time in London recently. One of the Howard lessons is that when you get into office for the first time you must have a very nasty budget straightaway. Only at the start will you have the moral authority to tackle the vast public spending you have inherited. Mr Howard has been telling this to our own Conservatives. They know he is right, but they do not altogether like hearing it.