. . . on the Gurkhas, Gordon Brown’s tin ear, and penalty shoot-outs

I am sorry to rain on Joanna Lumley’s parade, but I have rarely heard such piffle as she and others offered in support of the Gurkhas.

As no MP dared mention, the Gurkhas are mercenaries. They don’t fight “for love of Britain and Her Majesty” (to use a soundbite favoured by their supporters), any more than South African cricket mercenaries play for, say, Leicestershire for love of the county’s fox-hunting denizens and rolling countryside.

The Gurkha regiment was formed two centuries ago when British troops invaded Nepal but found the fighters too much of a handful and therefore paid them to join our army. A 1947 agreement stated that a Gurkha soldier, if he joined the British army (many joined newly independent India’s army instead), “must be recruited as a Nepali citizen . . . serve as a Nepali citizen and [be] resettled as a Nepali citizen”. They were paid less than British-born soldiers – an obvious attraction to the Ministry of Defence – but the money was high by local standards.

None of this excuses Gordon Brown. As everyone knows, he has a tin ear for politics, and is like an orchestra conductor who thinks music consists solely of getting the requisite number of trombones and violins to play the notes in the correct order. He was right about the 75p rise for pensioners in 2000 (entirely consistent with established policy, which concentrated help on the neediest pensioners), right about abolishing the 10p tax band last year (an expensive and inefficient way of helping the poor, which should never have been introduced in the first place), and right about the Gurkhas.

In each case, however, he was wrong politically, because the right policy was hard to explain to the public and the wrong one easily simplified into potent slogans. The British are incurably sentimental, and the Gurkha cause was bound to stir normally anti-immigrant Tory MPs and newspapers, who adore dusky chaps as long as they are taking orders from whites.

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While we are on Gordon Brown, I wish to clear something up about his chancellorship. The Institute for Fiscal Studies said the other day that he ran an unsustainable boom, with output 3 or 4 per cent above the economy’s long-term capacity. So he should have run “a much stronger fiscal position”. This is an academic version of David Cameron’s tiresome mantra that he should have fixed the roof while the sun was shining. But let’s get the metaphor straight. The people who failed to fix the roof were the Tories, who neglected schools, hospitals and other public services while North Sea oil flowed plentifully. Brown, therefore, had to rescue the NHS, education and so on with what his opponents call a spending “splurge”. The error lay not in the spending, but in the failure to raise taxes sufficiently to pay for it, perhaps by introducing a 50p tax on the highest incomes.

The people who stopped him were the same Blairites who now line up with the Tories to criticise Alistair Darling’s belated move to make the rich pay more.

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When I contemplate the teachers’ unions and the Sats for 11-year-olds, I am reminded of Laurel and Hardy. What a fine mess they’ve got themselves into! We now have two unions balloting to boycott the tests and a third union threatening strikes if tests are scrapped (it reckons the teacher assessments that would replace them mean more work for its members). Of the other three unions, two cover secondary schools only and one always opposes industrial action.

Why do teachers need six unions (and that’s just for England and Wales) for a single occupation in a single industry? Most other unions now cover different trades and industries, so that Unite’s two million members, for example, include printers, lorry drivers, plumbers, engineers and many others working in both the public and private sectors.

The teachers’ unions once broadly represented different school types – grammars, secondary moderns, etc – but now seem merely to stand for different temperaments, with one union not liking children much (which, I suppose, is why it wants to keep the tests) and another pretending teachers are university dons. The effect of the unions’ slapstick is that schools are defenceless against a succession of meddling ministers, all of them, like the present Children’s Secretary, Ed Balls, desperate to make a name for themselves.

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The star of the swine flu outbreak has surely been Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s deputy first minister and health secretary. There is something reassuring about that soft Scottish accent – I suppose it has to do with memories of Dr Finlay’s Casebook on television – and one feels that, thanks to her charm, good sense and calm but brisk manner, we shall all be safe from this new terror. Can we put her in charge south of the border as well?

Unfortunately, she belongs to the Scottish National Party but, since outsourcing is in fashion, I see no reason why our health arrangements couldn’t be delegated to the SNP. I would rather trust Sturgeon than
Boots, Tesco, Richard Branson or any of the other figures proposed to run the exciting polyclinics planned by New Labour in place of GPs’ surgeries.

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No sooner had Rugby Union had its first penalty shoot-out on British soil – in a Heineken European Cup semi-final between Leicester and Cardiff – than the websites were full of fans asking if it was possible to have more of them, perhaps to settle drawn league matches. In rugby, as in football, the players hate shoot-outs, but most fans love them because they are simple, dramatic and, like the dolly catch in cricket, rich with possibilities for individual humiliation. There are many other ways of settling a drawn rugby match – by, for example, playing five minutes each way of seven-a-side. But I fear the Rugby Union authorities, a particularly stupid group of people at the best of times, have allowed the masses to taste blood and will not dare deny them the prospect of repeat performances.

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