The Spectator's Notes
CHARLES MOORE Ivas it really an 'own goal' for 10 Downing Street to invite people to petition it on subjects of interest to them, and then find more than a million people saying that they opposed road pricing? It was information worth knowing. Politicians should not be frightened to look at new ways of getting people to participate in democracy. One reason that fewer people vote now is that voting has become, compared with other forms of choice, so 'clunking'. A single decision on who should be your MP for four or five years does not feel very empowering. The Our Say campaign, headed by Saira Khan, advocates a system by which the signatures of two and a half per cent of the national voting population — or the equivalent within a local jurisdiction — could trigger a referendum on their chosen subject. And a pamphlet called Supply Side Politics from the Centre for Policy Studies by Matt Qvortrup (who sounds like the first line of the keyboard but makes more sense) illustrates how well comparable schemes work in Switzerland, 24 of the American states and various other countries. As Europe takes power away from Westminster and focus-group politics narrows differences between the main parties, voters need better means of being heard.
fforts to damage David Cameron over I his 15-year-old experiment with cannabis do not seem to be working. But opponents believe that the class aspect of the story could discredit him the weed may not matter, but the pictures of jeunesse doree and Bullingdon coats do. So let me add my smoking tale of decadent privilege to the pile. Italics mark each class-sensitive word at first mention. A few years ago, we were staying at a castle in Ireland owned by a lord for a shooting party. David and Samantha Cameron were present. Because the castle is historic, it has state-of-the-art smoke detectors. Driven by his love of food to take over from the staff, Cameron cooked breakfast, and burnt the toast. The fire alarms went off and the local fire-brigade swept up, knocking down the security hairier on the drive in their haste. I possess incriminating photographs of Dave standing outside the great hall with half a dozen firemen, our excited children, and an embarrassed expression. Later we went for a walk on the estate. Although it was November, Cameron was prepared to do penance: he stripped to his boxer shorts and plunged into the bum. As with most stories about Cameron, this one is slightly annoying for his critics, because it illustrates the genial toughness which enables him to come out on top.
Despite more than a quarter of a century of moving in Conservative circles, I have never been to the party's Winter Ball, an omission of which I feel quite proud. Now I never shall, because last year it became the Black and White Ball, and moved from hearing aids and dinner jackets with frilly shirts to tieless Cameronian modernity. The first Black and White Ball was reported to be quite a success, but this year's, I gather even from hardened modernisers, was an ordeal. It took place in a perma-tent in Battersea Park. The music was deafening. A gay Tory candidate in a white suit and a Madonnastyle headmike compered as if on daytime TV. Someone dressed like a Russian prostitute sprawled on a bar playing an aluminium guitar (does this make sense?). The tickets cost £275 each. I predict a wave of nostalgia for Laura Ashley, Alice bands and claret-coloured cummerbunds.
ne of the difficulties of modern citizenship is working out which authority is really responsible for some new intrusion in one's life. Rother, our district council in Sussex, has just announced a ban on all dogs on all beaches in the summer months. It will also insist that they must, at all times, in all public places, including footpaths, be kept on leads (not more than a metre long). The council says it must do this under the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005. The Act's explanatory notes, however, say that it is devolving powers from the Secretary of State to councils. I do not know which is true, although I notice that Rother Council has now withdrawn the announcement from its website and has put out a bleating notice about how complicated existing bylaws are. I should have thought complication is, for once, appropriate. The notion that the British public will ever tolerate a blanket instruction to keep our dogs on leads regardless of circumstances could never have occurred to anyone in our history, except to a bureaucrat of the 21st century.
This column should never have pointed out that the driving test is the only remaining exam in which relevant ability and knowledge — and nothing else — are tested. Now, as if conscious that their exam is too old-fashioned in its objectivity, the Driving Standards Authority wants to add questions about `eco-driving'. Candidates will be asked how they, as drivers, can help the environment (does 'Don't drive' count as a good answer?). How long before candidates are asked whether they come from two-car or fuel-inefficient families, and are marked down accordingly? How long before it is pointed out that far fewer girls than boys pass their driving test at 17, thus repeating a 'cycle of disadvantage'? Wouldn't it be fairer to avoid the stress of a single exam, it will be said, and have a modular test in which you drive around for years while teachers continuously assess your progress? Yes, there will be more deaths on the roads, but that is 'a price worth paying' in the fight for equality of access.
My thanks are due to Tom Gross's evervigilant website, normally on Middle Eastern subjects, for unearthing an interesting article published in Newsweek on 28 April 1975. Headlined 'The Cooling World', it reveals that the 'evidence has begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it': world temperatures are falling fast, it says, and a 'little ice age' might well be upon us. They (the meteorologists) are 'almost unanimous' that global cooling will produce a 'drastic decline' in agricultural productivity. In England, the magazine reported, two weeks of the growing season had been lost since 1950. Newsweek did admit that some of the proposed solutions, such as 'melting the Arctic ice-cap by covering it with black soot', `might cause problems far greater than they solve'; but it thundered, 'The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.' How will the Stern report read in 32 years' time?
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