T he battle over the evaded referendum on the Lisbon treaty
seems to be following the pattern of all European arguments in this country. The pro-integrationists have used the favourite tactic of claiming that it is all a fuss about nothing. The treaty, they say, is technical, too boring to be worth discussing (although also, mysteriously, essential to pass), let alone asking the people to vote on. This has encouraged large parts of the media to ignore it. At the time of writing, it looks as if, in terms of parliamentary arithmetic, the tactic has worked, with the added bonus of making the new Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, appear foolish. But the Eurosceptics have won the battle of public opinion. By organising local referendums with a surprisingly high degree of public participation, they have placed themselves on the side of democracy. Now the Bill goes to the Lords and one hopes that they will feel free to place themselves on that side too. The Salisbury Convention which insists that peers do not block manifesto commitments should surely be made to apply in reverse: peers should punish governments that go back on those commitments.
It was painful to pay £1.53 for a loaf of brown bread in our local shop last week. But the interesting thing about the huge price increases is how little attention they are getting. In past ages, a 50 per cent rise in the price of wheat in a year would have produced riots in the streets, even, in some countries, revolution. It shows what a rich society we have become if we no longer regard bread as a staple, and therefore do not protest. Perhaps there will be a gradual shift of perception by which bread will be regarded as a luxury. Instead of serving it ‘free’ to accompany other food, restaurants will make it into a special, swanky course, like dishes cooked with white truffles. People will assume that the bread and wine Jesus offered up at the Last Supper were symbols of kingly luxury rather than the basics of life. And the ‘breadwinner’ of the household will be not the daily earner, but the lottery-winner, the person who struck it rich. Yet I cannot help thinking that the end of the era which environmentalists like Prince Charles disparage as ‘our obsession with cheap food’ will quite soon stir up public anger. Green prohibitions on GM crops will come to seem as oppressive as the Corn Laws.
John Dunford is the general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association. In the week when parents learn which secondary school their children have got into, this is what he says: ‘The more you talk about choice in school admissions, the more people will want that choice, and therefore the more people will be disappointed’. So Mr Dunford admits that parents do want choice, but concludes that the best solution is to deny them any. Which is really all you need to know about the attitudes of those who dominate our state education.
In his biography of Bill Deedes which appears later this month, Stephen Robinson alludes to the fact that housemasters at Harrow in Deedes’s era before the war ran their houses as independent businesses from which they could profit. The same was true of Eton. I wonder if the current attack on the charitable status of public schools could revive this more entrepreneurial way of doing things. Could the ‘core function’ of educating poor scholars (which is how schools like Eton, Winchester and Westminster began, and is still maintained in all three cases) continue under charitable protection, and the education of all the rest be bought as a commercial transaction with individual masters and mistresses? It would have the advantage for the customer that houses would start to compete with one another, turning themselves into better and better hotels in order to attract the pupils.
The Conservatives got into a muddle last week about spending on the National Health Service. Their health spokesman, Andrew Lansley, appeared to commit them to spending higher even than that of Labour. They had to unscramble it by saying that all Mr Lansley was doing was pointing to the demographic imperative which would push health costs up more than most other costs. Actually, the Tories are wise not to promise specific spending totals lower than Labour’s, since these will only make them the target of interest groups which fear cuts, but they must not make the mistake of presenting spending as good in itself. Tony Blair did this when he suddenly announced on television that British health spending would be raised to reach the European average of percentage of GDP, as if that would achieve anything. It is like what happens when you go to an estate agent. His first question is ‘How much do you want to spend?’ The answer is highly interesting to the estate agent (it tells him his percentage), but a trap for the prospective purchaser. He does not want to spend anything: he is looking for a house, and hopes to get the best for the least. Similarly, it is perfectly possible — in fact, it is likely — that government spending can rise without any benefit to the taxpayer. The Tories need to be committed to some programmes which cost a lot of money, but it is not because they cost a lot of money that they need to be committed to them. Value for money — that concept should be dragged back into political debate.
Ihave commented elsewhere on Channel 4 News’s extraordinary vicious treatment of Prince Harry’s tour of duty in Afghanistan when the news broke last Thursday. The next day, the programme was still suffering from such righteous anger that, anti-tabloid though it is, it went into alliance with Max Clifford, the publicist. It gave Clifford pride of place to attack the prince’s ten-week visit for being ‘a very, very calculated public relations exercise’ — which, you would have thought, coming from a man whose job is public relations, would be high praise. Clifford then complained that the prince had never been ‘in real danger’, and said that because ‘he’s been shown firing a gun at Muslims’ he had become a ‘big target’. ‘Harry likes to go to pubs and clubs,’ he went on. ‘Does that make them targets?’ The only thread in Clifford’s thoughts seemed to be an unreasoning hatred of the prince, and a longing that he should die and/or be blamed for the death of others. Republicanism can be a perfectly respectable opinion, but there is often something pathological in attacks on the royal family.
Afriend tells me of two parties which were running on the same evening in the City last week. One, held by Slaughter and May, was to ‘celebrate’ the ‘TPO’ (Temporary Public Ownership) of Northern Rock. The other, thrown by Alliance & Leicester, was a ‘themed casino evening’ at the Loose Cannon Club. For some reason, the idea of this combination fills me with gloom.
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