Full steam ahead, Captain Brown!

I discovered the other day that the Guardian archives blog posts on its CommentIsFree website. Now as someone who has spent an excessive amount of time bashing the qwerty keyboard on CommentIsFree, arguing the toss with three or four other wastrels, I was curious to revisit Time Wasting: The Early Days to see just how bilious was the colour of my bile way back in 2007. One post caught my eye. It was in response to a Guardian leader in February that year on the spending choices facing Gordon Brown's government, ending thus:

The chancellor can also take comfort from less-reported aspects of yesterday's report, which underlined just how impressive his record has been. The books are in better shape than they were in 1997 - an achievement that stands out for having been delivered in tandem with the extra resources for health, education and alleviating poverty. Mr Brown's credibility has suffered from his bending of the yardsticks by which his performance is measured. But the underlying purpose of these fiscal rules is to avoid things spinning out of control, and he continues to avoid that. Yesterday's report concludes that the track Mr Brown is following can be sustained economically - if not in terms of public services - without tax rates going up.

Yes, in the light of subsequent events it does read rather like an interim report from the Captain of a certain well-known ocean liner, just before the iceberg strikes. I am rather proud of my response, which read as follows:

So "The books are in better shape than they were in 1997" are they? I seem to remember the Tories delivered Brown a fairly hefty public account surplus when he arrived in office (this is actually wrong); and where are we now? A deficit of £35 billion or thereabouts, that's where. Only in cloud cuckoo land are the books in better shape.

"Yesterday's report concludes that the track Mr Brown is following can be sustained economically - if not in terms of public services - without tax rates going up." But public services are the whole point, aren't they? It's a bit like saying "the Titanic is doing fine, except in terms of floating".

We have enjoyed a decade of economic good times built on both government and citizens spending money they did not have. We now learn that the government can't afford its spending plans without either raising taxes or cutting spending, both of which will reduce economic activity and risk recession. We may well find that the trad Keynesian way out of recession is unavailable because the Government borrowed too much during the good times. And let's not forget that current Government provision is looking inadequate in areas other than health and education - the armed forces, prisons and care for the elderly spring to mind.

The Brown Boom will end in tears.

You read it there first, 18 months before the credit crunch.

Or at least three or four of you did.

Coming soon - Serbia

The news of the arrest of Ratko Mladic pushed everything else to the bottom of the news agenda yesterday. Mladic, the Serbian general allegedly responsible from the Srebrenica massacre, has been on the run for the best part of ten years, although like Osama he doesn't actually seem to have been doing much running - complicity of the Serbian authorities seems to have facilitated a quiet life in a rural village. All that changed with the visit of a Brussels commissioner, bearing the news that the failure to apprehend Mladic was having a negative effect on Serbia's campaign to join the EU. Lo and behold, Mladic is caught, and the path to the EU is wide open.

Overshadowed by this was a report into conditions in state-run institutions that made my hair stand on end. Inmates, it appears, were left hungry and thirsty, and sat for hours in pools of their own urine and faeces. Where did these outrages take place? Abu Ghraib? Guantanamo Bay? No. In British hospitals. To be exact, in Alexandra Hospital in Redditch, at Ipswich Hospital, and in the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead. And to be fair, the report, by NHS watchdog the Quality Care Commission, did not mention the bit about urine and faeces. It said, "While the reports document many examples of people being treated with respect and given personalised, attentive care, some tell a bleak story of people not being helped to eat and drink, with their care needs not assessed and their dignity not respected". The faeculent matter came via a Radio 5 phone in on the subject, to which I listened whilst bowing parts for a concert in June. It made chilling listening.

The overall picture is bleak and scandalous. It also accords with a vignette observed whilst in the Homerton Hospital in London nearly fifteen years ago. An elderly patient, perhaps slightly demented, was in the bed opposite me. He had been badgering a nurse in a semi-coherent way about something trivial. She took exception to this, and took away his meal, saying, "And you won't be getting this back till you learn some manners".

No-one did anything. I didn't do anything. I thought, "Well he is a stupid old git". But I was wrong. She took away his food, and didn't bring it back.

I can't help feeling that if British soldiers had done these kind of things abroad, we would all be jumping up and down about it. But if British nurses do it to old people in Britain, it goes way down the news agenda. I searched in vain for mention of it in the Guardian this morning.

Two other reports were pushed out of the headlines by Mladic yesterday. One suggested that 20% of working graduates are now in non-graduate employment. Another that net immigration to the UK has reached an all-time high, with many Polish workers returning to Britain after finding that things at home aren't so rosy either. Given that a recent Department of Work and Pensions report (19 May) recorded that in the previous 3 months 81% of new jobs went to people born outside the UK, it will be interesting to see whether the government signs up to a similar open-door policy when the Serbs finally get the EU green light. Personally I wouldn't bet against it.

Royal Wedding fever

Continuing its tradition of fearlessly tackling any subject, no matter how weighty, this blog now turns its attention to the Royal Wedding.

On 29th July 1981, the day Charles and Diana married, I was on holiday in Scotland. In the morning I went into Lochinver to send a postcard to a girl I was seeing. Sadly, I can still remember the card: two caricature Scotsmen looking up at a wall-mounted stag's head - "Did you get him in the Trossachs?", says one; "Nooo", the other replies, "right between the eyes".

It may well be that the uncanny ability to remember trivial information of this type was the kind of characteristic which led to her dumping me immediately on my return.

(My successor in the post was one of our lecturers in the Law department of Nottingham University; no doubt I'd have had to report him to the authorities for kiddy-fiddling in our more responsible times, but then I merely satisfied myself with running him out in the next staff-student cricket match. If you're reading, Louise, no hard feelings.)

Marriage was far from my mind then, and while my friends spent the day in the Culag Hotel watching Charles and Diana's big day, I went fishing. I felt a certain sniffy contempt for the Royal family.

Times change. I have now been married for nearly twenty years, and I quite like the monarchy. No doubt this is partly attributable to the rightward-sweeping tide that pulls most middle-aged people with it. My calculation is that Charles is an intelligent and cultured man, that his probable successor looks as if he is shaping up reasonably well, that the monarchy probably brings in at least the cost of the Civil List by way of tourist revenue, and that if we had an elected President instead we would be more likely to get a Ken Livingstone or Boris Johnson applying than a Vaclav Havel or Nelson Mandela. If it's not obviously broken, don't try and fix it.

As for weddings, they are symbolic occasions in which, against all the evidence, two people embark on a journey (oh Lord, how I hoped I would never use that expression), a gamble if you prefer, one with emotional, financial and existential stakes, without any idea of the outcome. Weddings have about them the same atmosphere that must linger at the dockside when someone sets out to sail around the world, or at the airport departure lounge when mountaineers go off to try their hand at Everest: excitement mingled with trepidation.

I find weddings poignant events now. Thoughtful protagonists know that they cannot possibly know what the journey will be like; we observers, battle-scarred veterans of the institution, know that there is a further layer of almost Rumsfeldian ignorance beyond the grasp of the bride and groom. These people are innocents, signing up for something, good and bad, of whose reality they can have almost no conception. A Royal wedding carries the additional charge that the couple will form part of the distant cultural and political backdrop of British lives for decades to come; it pains me to adopt such an egregious cliche, but now I see why journalists write about "history being made".

So good luck to William and Kate. They will need it. My daughters will be glued to the TV tomorrow. I might go fishing.

More red noses

Policy madness has spread from Red Nose Day to the Coalition government. Hot on the heels of Comic Relief's wilful blind-eye turned to the damage done to Kenyan health-care by the country's doctors' exodus abroad - to the UK, amongst other places - comes news that David Cameron has given a couple of hundred million quid to Pakistan for new schools.

The obvious question here is whether the government should be giving money for schools to another country at a time when it is making cutbacks in its own education programme; Cameron would perhaps say that he needed to mend fences after his remarks to the effect that Pakistan has faced both ways when it comes to terrorism (a statement as undiplomatic as it was true); he might also point out that educating young Pakistanis away from the madrassas might lessen the chances of their turning to extremism (although our home-grown terrorists seem to be thriving amidst the further educational opportunities provided by Britain's universities); whatever, I doubt that a cost-benefit analysis has been done.

The other less obvious point relates to my recent Comic Relief post. A Pakistani MP I heard interviewed on the radio defended Cameron's gift, as you might expect. The interviewer, Aasma Mir, pressed the MP on why Pakistan couldn't pay for schools itself - after all it was a country with a lot of very rich people, in which corruption was rife and tax evasion routine; Mir might have added that it was a country which could afford a nuclear weapons programme. The MP blustered. What, Mir, asked, was Pakistan's top rate of tax? Amidst more bluster came the answer: 35%.

So there you have it. Britain, a country with a marginal tax rate of 50%, presently cutting its education programme, is funding schools in Pakistan, a country with a marginal rate of 35%.

Just as it might be better for the UK to train its own doctors and encourage Kenyans to practice medicine at home, perhaps it might be better for the UK to show Pakistan how to set up a functioning tax system.

AV - 2nd past the post?

And so the juggernaut gets under way. On 5 May Britain will vote whether to adopt AV for Westminster elections. As ever, a certain drowsy numbness pains my sense (Keats? Can't bother to look it up, I'm afraid) when confronted with the need to master this kind of issue. How much time d'you have to put in before you can justify making the trek to the polling station? How is it the intellectual faculties required can still be demanded of the middle-aged, faculties last given a gallop at the towering fence marked "quadratic equations", and ever since then immured in a darkened stable?

OK. I confess. I actually have thought about AV a bit, and here is my gift to the No campaign.

If AV means anything, it means that the candidate with the second largest number of 1st preference votes can win. This happens because if the "winner" gets less than 50%, 2nd preference votes are taken into account as well. And they are given the same weight as 1st preferences.

Why does this matter? Because the likelihood is that people will have put a cross by their 1st preference candidate with a great deal more enthusiasm than for their 2nd preference candidate. To put it another way, why should my vote for the candidate I really wanted to win count for no more than your vote for the candidate you could just about tolerate?

In some cases 3rd, 4th and 5th preferences will be taken into account too. Here it's even worse. Here my 4th preference vote for a candidate I wouldn't touch with a bargepole counts just as much as yours for the candidate you really wanted.

There are a number of other arguments against AV. The counting arrangements will be more expensive. The results will be more susceptible to delay. The Lib Dems will probably do better and a hung parliament will be more likely. Of these, the possibility of not liking the result seems to be the weakest. But the strongest is the sheer unfairness of the process set out above.

Enthusiasts for AV say that the public is crying out for electoral change, and that it's necessary for rejuvenating faith in the political process. Really? Seems to me that what destroys faith in politics is politicians relying on spin, refusing to give straight answers, fiddling their expenses, saying one thing in opposition and doing another in office, preferring lies the public will swallow to hard truths, and putting short term electoral gain ahead of long term benefit to the UK. These are the things destroying faith in politics, not the electoral system.

Still confused? OK. Here's a much easier test. Which side are the Luvvies on? You can save yourself a lot of effort in these situations by simply voting against the people with most Luvvies on board. Because they are almost certainly wrong.

The No to AV campaign have a mixture of politicians from Right and Left, but no one beautiful.

But the Yes campaign! John Cleese, Joanna Lumley, Eddie Izzard and Stephen Fry! And Helena Bonham Carter! And Colin Firth!

That clinches it. AV = 2nd past the post. You read it here first.

Steve Coogan and the Mexicans

"Court bans man with low IQ from having sex", read the headline on the Torygraph's website.

Afraid of what this might portend for my marriage, I clicked instead on a story about the Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond, who had uttered the following on a recent show: "Mexican cars", said the Hamster, "are just going to be lazy, feckless, flatulent, overweight, leaning against a fence asleep looking at a cactus, with a blanket with a hole in the middle on as a coat".

This laboured piece of invective has provoked an angry reaction from, amongst others, the comedian Steve Coogan. Writing in the Observer, Coogan laid into this "casual racism" and lambasted the BBC as "pitiful" for defending it.

Lacking the required interest in cars, I am not a Top Gear fan; but there is something wrong here and it is not necessarily Richard Hammond.

Firstly, is it racist to say what he did about Mexicans? The overwhelming majority of people in Britain - and in particular those who inhabit media-land - have long got over the idea that a person with a certain skin colour or width of nose is going to have certain behavioural characteristics (penchant for ponchos, perhaps). So it seems unlikely to me that Hammond was making a racial point; I'd be willing to bet that some of his best friends are black. Much more likely that Hammond was making a cultural one; and it doesn't seem to me wrong to criticise or lampoon someone else's culture. In parts of Muslim North Africa, for example, forced clitirodectomy of young girls is compulsory. If we are free to deplore this choice cultural practice, surely we should be free to criticise any other?

In his Observer article Steve Coogan unwittingly acknowledges this. He cites the BBC apology to the Mexican ambassador, which compared Hammond's remarks with "the more benign rivalry that exists between European nations (ah, those arrogant French, over-organised Germans)", and deplores it for "neatly sidestepp(ing) one hugely important fact – ethnicity. All the examples it uses to legitimise this hateful rubbish are relatively prosperous countries full of white people."

But Coogan has driven coach and horses through his own argument. If he can accept that remarks about white people might have been legitimate comments on a country's culture, why does he automatically assume that similar comments about the inhabitants of Mexico must be racist? Would it have been OK to poke fun at the food and clothing of white Mexicans? And if so, what difference does skin colour make? It begins to look as if it is Coogan who is making race matter here, not Hammond or the BBC.

To be clear, I'm sure Hammond's remarks were offensive. And? There is no right not to be offended. Moreover, in a properly functioning democratic society, the freedom to criticise or make fun of someone else's habits, is not just desirable but essential. That's how we stop, say, forced clitirodectomy happening here. On this occasion Top Gear's biggest crime was just not being very funny.

Sure, the programme is often crass and pleased with itself, but for every Top Gear there are hundreds of TV shows which are so bland that, far from holding the ring fairly between competing opinions, they actively promote a PC view of the world which is of itself an opinion. In this context Top Gear strikes a rare note of authenticity and freedom. That's why so many people like it.

A final note about Steve Coogan. Mexico is mired in corruption, lawlessness and violence because of the activities of the drug cartels. These cartels thrive and prosper because Mexico is the main conduit for illegal drugs into the USA over the border to the North. No doubt many imported drugs are taken by deadbeats, seeking to inject some excitement into their mean existence. But many are also taken by celebrities like Mr Coogan, seeking to inject some excitement into, er, their pampered and self-indulgent lives.

I said like Mr Coogan, but actually I meant including Mr Coogan. For if you google "Steve Coogan cocaine" you will find a variety of news stories (including some on his own website) detailing the great man's use of the drug. These range from hotel room sessions with lapdancers to binges with Hollywood actor Owen Wilson. Even Courtney Love, veteran of a relationship with Kurt Cobain (found dead with grammes of heroin to hand) feels moved to tell a magazine, "I tried to warn Owen (about Coogan). I tried to warn his friends. I hope from the bottom of my heart that Owen stays the hell away from that guy".

In doing his bit to ensure there's plenty of demand for the drug cartels' wares, Coogan is in no position to pontificate about doing right by Mexicans. Comically unaware of the abyss of hypocrisy yawning beneath him, he writes in the Observer, "I can tell you from my own experience, living in the US, Mexicans work themselves to the bone doing all the dirty thankless jobs that the white middle-class natives won't do." Like polishing the glass tables after you've been snorting off them, Steve?

"Court bans man with low IQ from having sex", read the Telegraph headline. If I were Coogan I'd be looking over my shoulder.

lucky Miriam O'Reilly

So Miriam O'Reilly won her case against the BBC for age discrimination. Good for her. Obviously it's wrong for people in her sort of job to be sacked for being too old.

But was that really why she was sacked? I found myself thinking this morning about good old Robin Day. The bow-tied curmudgeon got into a lot of hot water once for suggesting that Anna Ford, pulchritudinous 70s newsreader, had only got her job because men wanted to sleep with her. The spirit of the age was against Day, and he was duly shouted down, but I suspect that he was right.

That's not to say that Ms Ford was incompetent; far from it. But perhaps she got the job because, of all the outstanding candidates for it, she was the sexiest. And this is TV after all. Perish the thought, it might even be the case that one of the other applicants - someone else a bit less heavenly looking - could have done it better.

What's this got to do with Miriam O'Reilly? I have never watched Countryfile (although my wife, an insomniac, tells me that she was a dreary and hectoring presenter on Farming Today), but judging from the pictures in the paper this morning, she must once have been a bit of a looker. And the thought did cross my mind that perhaps a few years ago Ms O'Reilly got the job rather than anyone else because she was nice-looking; and that complaining about losing it when she was no longer quite so nice-looking might be a bit rich.

This morning Ms O'Reilly will be coasting downhill with the wind of bien-pensant opinion in her sails and a few extra quid in the bank; but I think she lived by the sword and died by it. Lucky Ms O'Reilly.

myth-busting # 3

Although posting twice in two days risks giving the impression that I don't have enough work to do, I can't resist debunking an argument heard a few times recently, and that I suspect we're going to hear a lot more of as the cuts bite.

Here's a correspondent in the paper, one Lynne Alderson, pointing to research from France showing that that the 2009 Picasso exhibition in Aix-en-Provence "earned 62m euros of additional income for the town" against a measly investment of only 6m. So the government "should look to the long-term financial benefits of spending in the arts".

I'm as well-disposed to arts funding as the next person, but this just won't do. For starters, what would have happened to that 62m if it hadn't been spent in Aix? Would it have been kept under the mattresses of hundreds of middle-class culture-loving households the length and breadth of France? Would the bien-pensant have said to themselves, "We were going to spend this money, but because that Picasso exhibition didn't go ahead, we're now going to keep it stashed away"? Of course not. They'd have stuck it in the bank, invested it, or spent it somewhere else. So the money might not have gone to Aix, but it would have gone somewhere and someone would have made use of it.

But there's more. What if instead of spending the money on a Picasso exhibition the French government had spent it instead on, oh I don't know, something like tax breaks for Research and Development in industry? Now that wouldn't just have sucked in money from French consumers, it would ultimately have brought in money from overseas via exports.

So whilst Paris not spending 6m Euros at all would probably still have brought a 62m Euro benefit to the economy, spending 6m on something not related to the arts might have brought in a still greater benefit.

Those of us with an artistic interest to declare are not famously good with numbers: "bean-counters", we sneer at the accountants, satisfied that if they know the price of everything, we alone know its true value. Yet all the above is flippin' obvious to anyone bright enough to tie their own shoelaces, and its truly depressing to see that there are still people reliant on slip-ons and velcro amongst both the Guardian's readership and the people that edit the paper.

myth-busting # 2

Continuing my credit-crunch guide.

2. The best way to shrink a deficit is to have people in work paying taxes.

I found this gem in an article by Jonathan Freedland in this morning's Grauniad.

It sounds plausible until you think about it. If Freedland is right and HMG spends a million on wages, the taxes it recovers and the benefits it saves will come to more than a million. So the Government should be increasing public spending rather than cutting it.

According to Freedland's logic, the more people the Government employs, the less money it will need to spend.

If only Governments the world over could grasp this simple principle, no economy need fall into recession ever again, and no Government would ever have to run a deficit.

A poster on CiF destroyed Freedland's position more pithily than I could. He wrote, "Not if their salaries are being paid from money the government has borrowed".

breakfast surprise

I nearly choked on my cornflakes this morning when I read this (try and guess the author):

"There is nothing progressive about a government who (sic) consistently spend more than they can raise in taxation, and certainly nothing progressive that endows generations to come with the liabilities incurred by the current generation. There will need to be significant cuts in public expenditure, but there is considerable waste in public expenditure."

Any ideas? Some Tory hawk? Lord Tebbit? Roger Scruton?

Er, no. It's Lord Myners, former Labour minister. The quote concludes - " I have seen that (waste) in my own experience as a minister".

Remember him saying anything like that when he was in office?

No, I don't either.

myth-busting # 1

Credit crunch myths - a guide for the Left.

1. "It was all the bankers' fault".

Because after all, no-one could have possibly predicted that when left to their own devices bankers would go for short-term gain and self-enrichment ahead of economic stability, could they? What next? Bears defecating in the woods? And the Government had no idea whatsoever that the City was parcelling up mortgage obligations and selling them on the open market; it had no idea that high-street lenders were offering 125% loan-to-value on houses, or that with so-called Lie To Buy (oh OK, Self-Certification) mortgages you could write any income you liked on the application form and no one would ever check whether it was true or not.

I'm wearied by my own irony - of course HMG knew about all these things; and did nothing about them. Why? Because the going was good, that's why. The City was booming, the High Street was thronged with shoppers, unemployment was low, house prices were buoyant (removed by one G Brown from the measure used by the Bank of England to target inflation), tax revenues were flooding into the Treasury coffers and then out again into the public sector. What was not to like? After all, the Chancellor told us he had put an end to Tory boom and bust. Where could bust possibly come from?

The Government rode the wave of debt like a surfer who can't believe there are rocks ahead. But rocks there were, and when the economy hit them Brown discovered a new variant on Keynes - borrow when the good times are rolling, and when the bad times come, borrow even more. And so the debt piles up, or at least it does as long as the gilt markets will carry on lending to us.

All the bankers fault. Yeah right.

Thierry Henry and Climate Change

Climate change deniers the world over will have been delighted by the mass hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. What a can of worms they reveal.

Details are all over the web, but in summary they destroy the credibility of a leading climate change Cassandra, Professor Phil Jones. They reveal him in turn to be conspiring to suppress papers by climate change sceptics ("Kevin and I will keep them out somehow", he writes), conspiring to marginalise a journal which had published papers by sceptics ("I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor"), trying to downplay the extent of the Mediaeval Warm Period on the basis of a "gut feeling, no science", threatening to resist Freedom of Information requests to reveal data even to the extent of destroying it, and proposing a "trick" to substitute one set of data for another in a publication. More extraordinary still they show him corresponding with a colleague baffled at absence of recent warming ("The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't... ").

So should we stop worrying? Probably not. The people revealed by these leaks to be manipulative anti-scientists are not the only ones working in the field. They are merely some of the most influential. I do realise that the plural of anecdote is not data, but I was in the Alps in the summer and I saw with my own eyes how the glaciers were retreating.

But hasn't the climate always changed? Didn't we have glaciers in Scotland at the end of the 19th Century? Hasn't humanity has always managed to adapt, hating change at the same time as being really good at dealing with it? And though the science is persuasive, can we really be sure that humanity is actually responsible for global warming? What if it's just nature? And shouldn't we be worrying about the next ice age instead?

On the whole I, like Professor Jones, would rather keep the Climate Change gravy train going. Not because my department's funding and my reputation depends on it, but because it offers the best hope of getting out of the ludicrous cycle of consumption and over-population which besets Western society, wrecking natural habitats and turning us all into mall-zombies.

But when that arch clown George Monbiot apologises in the Guardian today for misleading his readers, revealing himself unexpectedly to be a bigger man by far than Thierry Henry, the handball cheat whose manual assist got France into the World Cup finals and kept the Irish out, you know that something truly extraordinary has happened.

The BNP on Question Time redux

Apologies for revisiting a story that already feels like stale buns.

As predicted, Nick Griffin was less than impressive on Question Time. He isn't a bright bloke, but I suppose it shouldn't come as any surprise that a party of meat-heads can't find anyone better. You would have thought however that in the absence of brains, the BNP could at least come up with someone with a bit of charisma. Think of Wodehouse's Roderick Spode, leader of the Black Shorts: now there was a man to make the average arts graduate quail.

What garment should Griffin endorse? There is something of a fascist John Major about him, and I favour a variant on the underwear theme. The Black Y-Fronts has a certain ring to it.

After the show was broadcast Griffin made a complaint against the BBC, saying he felt as if he had been attacked by a lynch mob. Since he's admitted to having shared a platform with a Ku Klux Klan leader, this might not have been the most tactful way of expressing himself. Although I suppose intimates of the Klan ought to know if anyone does what a lynch mob is like.

I found it heartening the other day to hear Rio Ferdinand telling all and sundry that Griffin had the right to be heard. You can tell the depths of folly the liberal no-platform lobby has plumbed when a fading Manchester United central defender has a better grasp of the issues than Oxbridge-educated Guardianistas.

The BNP on Question Time

OK. Disclaimer time. I am not a BNP supporter and I would never vote for them.

Now that's out of the way, what to make of the furore surrounding Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time tonight?

Well, first I have been absolutely baffled by the people who say he shouldn't be given the platform. Really? Don't they understand what democracy's about? It isn't a spectator sport. It's something everyone can have a go at; otherwise it's not democracy at all. Mrs Thatcher made a similar mistake when she banned the IRA from the airwaves. So hats off to the BBC for giving Griffin an appearance - a refreshing display of moral courage from Mark Thompson.

I believe Griffin will be condemned out of his own mouth. I once heard him interviewed on Radio 5, and for a Cambridge graduate he was woefully ineffectual. I find his assertion that you can't be black and British repellent, but also perplexing. I really don't understand how you can say that someone born and raised here can't be British just because they have a brown skin. I am a bit old school on this - for me Kevin Pietersen shouldn't be playing cricket for England: living here for a few years doesn't count. On the other hand Monty Panesar is as English as buttered toast, and it's irrelevant that he's a Sikh. He's a Luton boy through and through.

The Guardian has been full of hand-wringing nonsense about Griffin in recent weeks. Its leader writers settled for opposition to his Question Time appearance, illustrating that one of the seductive tendencies of extremism is to make otherwise reasonable people into idiots. Gary Younge, writing in today's paper, urges that the solution to racism might be, er, anti-racism. I'm afraid I have no idea at all what this means.

The reality is that the BNP is thriving because it is the only political party which opposes immigration. Its leadership and supporters may well be racist, but I suspect most of the people who vote for it aren't. There is a case to be made against immigration on grounds of economics, the environment and cultural cohesion, and yet public discussion of the issue has been as thoroughly vetoed by today's polite society as discussion of prostitution was vetoed in the Victorian drawing room. There's an interesting article here (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/6400553/Cowardice-on-immigration-has-allowed-the-BNP-to-flourish.html) by Frank Field and Nicholas Soames of the Parliamentary cross-party Balanced Migration group which makes exactly this point.

Incidentally the BBC reported the Office for National Statistics' quite extraordinary prediction yesterday of a population increase to 70 million in the near future as largely attributable to "migration". I suppose we should be grateful the prediction was reported at all, but it's precisely because of this kind of mealy-mouthed attempt to avoid drawing attention to the consequences of unrestricted immigration that the BNP are on Question Time tonight.

In and Out of the Loop

We went to see Armando Ianucci's In The Loop over the weekend.  

Despite the film's anti-war premise, and despite being someone who thought invading Iraq might turn out to be marginally better than leaving Saddam in place, I laughed till my face ached.

But it wasn't just the antics of uber-angry Malcolm Tucker (right) that were funny.  There were two other things about the film which made me smile.

Firstly, the alleged sexing up of the WMD intelligence, on which the film turns, overlooked the crucial point that almost no-one believed Alastair Campbell's dodgy dossier at the time.  Sure, there are left-wing Labour MPs who claim that they wouldn't have voted for the war if it hadn't been for Campbell's gilding the lily; but they have short memories.  Not long after it was produced, the dossier was widely ridiculed when a PhD student pointed out that some of it came from his work published on the internet. Then, as now, public credulity was in short supply.

But although the direct evidence was small, we knew Saddam had had WMD; we knew he had used gas on Kurdish villages; we knew he was doing everything he could to thwart Hans Blix and his colleagues; we knew that in Iraq's police state, where torture of dissidents and their families was routine, it would be very difficult to recruit informers, and hence the lack of direct evidence was not surprising.

Thus the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming, and not surprisingly everyone I spoke to (and this was a period in which bruising rows with my friends who opposed the war were routine) believed Saddam had WMD. Without exception.  The idea that the UK's parliament, the US government and the UN Security Council were swayed into war by a bad-tempered Scottish spin-doctor is itself a piece of spin.  Because, unappealing though the British government's manoevres may have been, they made no difference to the outcome.  As a public, we believed Saddam had the weapons anyway.

Of course Mr Ianucci would say, "It's a satire; a fictionalised account.  It's not meant to be a historical reconstruction".  Well OK up to a point.  But when real opponents of the war argue that we were led into it by a foul-mouthed Scottish spin doctor who sexed up the intelligence, and - lo and behold! - that's exactly what happens in Ianucci's film, it's a claim that will only run so far.

The second thing that struck me was, where was Saddam in all this? Nowhere. In Ianucci's film the war was to take place in abstract. That it would have the effect of removing from power one of the twentieth century's most ghastly dictators was airbrushed from sight.  

Why should this make me smile?  Because it confirms my thesis that if there's one thing the anti-war brigade don't want to hear about it's talk of Saddam. How inconvenient to be reminded of how things were under his regime!  As for what things would have carried on being like (after Saddam, his sons, then some other Ba'ath Party strongman), these are things opponents of the war cannot even begin to contemplate.  For them, success would have meant vast and peaceful rallies in London and Washington, followed by a climb-down by Bush and Blair.  

And for them, Iraq would have continued to be "a faraway country", to borrow from Neville Chamberlain, "of which we know nothing".

hypocrisy central

The Guardian has had its knickers in a twist in the last few weeks over corporate tax avoidance, running a series of self-righteous articles under the heading Tax Gap.  In its most recent scoop, it published details of transactions undertaken by Barclays to minimise its tax exposure, which the Bank promptly got an injunction to suppress.

But now what's this?  The current issue of Private Eye suggests that the Guardian's owners have been doing a little avoidance of their own.  Last year, it says, they bought Emap, a magazine publisher, via a parent company in Luxembourg and a string of offshore subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands.  The aim?  According to the Eye, to avoid paying stamp duty on the purchase of Emap shares.

Pass the sick bag. 

Yes, I was in favour of the war!

Although my experience of having been - reluctantly - in favour of the Iraq war, amidst a class of people who were overwhelmingly against it, is a subject for another time, I was reminded of it this morning by a letter in the Graun about civilian casualty figures.  One Geoff Simons, author of Iraq Endgame: Surge, Suffering and the Politics of Denial, claimed that estimates of the dead topped one million.

Of course, no-one knows how many casualties there were, but it just so happens that the only organisation that has tried to count the actual individuals killed, Iraqbodycount.org, puts the total at slightly less than one tenth of that figure, ie at about 95,000.  Now that is a lot of people, but it is a lot fewer than one million (presumably that's why it was ignored by Mr Simons), and in any event as a marker of whether the war was a bad idea or not is meaningless unless you consider "but for" test.  Ie, but for the war, what would have happened?

Well, it's reasonable to assume that Saddam would have remained in power; that he would have continued to butcher and starve the civilian population as previously; that on his death he would have been succeeded by one or both of his sons; and that on the eventual collapse of the Ba'ath party regime, perhaps a generation into the future, a bloody sectarian power struggle would have ensued, only this time without the Americans to hold the ring and pay for the reconstruction.  In other words, more of Saddam would probably have been deadly too, and to come to a fair assessment you need to set the war casualties against those who would have died if Saddam had been left in place.  Unfortunately, you can't count those people, because no-one knows who they are; neither can you show emotive interviews with their grieving relatives on TV.

It seems to me, contra Mr Simons, that it's those opposed to the invasion who are in denial, because, however dreadful, it was probably no worse than the alternative.  It must be hard for people like him to accept that it's because Bush and Blair ignored their protests that Iraq now has a democratic government.  

A small satisfaction then of the post-invasion period has been the way in which the case against it has unravelled in the slowest of slow motion.

Institutionally rubbish?

A lot of hot air in the paper yesterday marking the 10th anniversary of Stephen Lawrence's death at the hands of racist thugs.  Was the Met Police force still "institutionally racist", as the Macpherson report had it?  

In a former life I used to be a solicitor in East London, working with largely black clients, in and out of its police stations in the early hours of the morning, dealing with mostly white police officers.  Yes, many of them were racist; but that was not because the institution was racist - in fact it had tried strenously at management level to do the right thing - it was because Met police officers tended to come from lower middle or working class backgrounds, often outside London, and thus tended to be from the social class most likely to be overtly racist and to have least personal experience of living and working alongside black people.  Moreover, because the areas in which they worked were largely black, most of the criminals were black too. So it's not hard to see how the black = criminal equation grew up in the minds of these officers.  Not that that's any excuse, mind.

I thought of this today because an independent report has looked into the death of Stuart Lubbock in Michael Barrymore's swimming pool.  And guess what?  It says that the police failed to secure the site and failed to secure crucial items which might have been used to assault Lubbock and which later "disappeared".  In all, six complaints by Lubbock's father were upheld.  

For anyone used to seeing the way the police work from the inside, the real lesson of both these cases is that the police are very often mediocre at what they do.  The Met were probably never institutionally racist, but they were certainly institutionally rubbish.

Freedom of certain kinds of speech?

Two pieces of bad news for lovers of free speech last week.  First, the turning away at Heathrow of the right-wing Dutch MP Geert Wilders and then the hoo-ha over Richard Bean's play England People Very Nice at the National Theatre.  To be clear, I haven't seen either the play, or the film that Mr Wilders proposed to show at Westminster.  But if "free-speech" means anything beyond an inaccurate platitude, it means allowing people to express opinions you don't like.  

Justifying Wilders' ban on the grounds that letting him in might cause a riot, it must have embarrassed David Miliband to discover that Wilders had been over a month previously without any such thing happening.  You should be able to describe the Koran as "fascist", however wrong that might be, without attracting the attention of either the law or the Muslim great and good.  

As for Mr Bean, it disappointed me that so few of the usual suspects lined up against him seemed to realise that the fact that they didn't like his play was absolutely irrelevant in the context of freedom of speech.  I personally believe that racism is stupid as well as wrong, but that's only a matter of opinion, and the fact that it's the PC brigade which is edging towards a state where some opinions are officially OK and some not gives me concern.  Think how easily the jack-boot might be transferred to the other foot.

The fact is that immigration makes a lot of people in Britain extremely uneasy, and the more their voices are marginalised and brushed under the carpet the more likely it is that in the medium-term support for extremists will grow.