Should George Osborne, the apparently omnishambolic Chancellor, be treated as a hero of the green left? Think about it. He has given us zero growth for the foreseeable future, raising hopes that our depletion of the planet’s resources can be halted. We have more parttime working and less overtime, so we are on the way to a shorter working week, a better work-life balance and a more equitable distribution of employment. Real wages are falling, thus curing us of the modern disease of overconsumption. Investment is down, protecting us from job-destroying automation. Interest rates are only just above zero, bringing us close to abolishing the ancient sin of usury.
Osborne may not have intended these outcomes – but what’s not to like about them? John Stuart Mill wrote: “The end of growth leads to a stationary state . . . a very considerable improvement on our present condition.” Osborne should stop fretting about Britain’s loss of its triple-A credit rating and embrace the positives. “The stationary state”: a big idea for the Tories to take into the next election.
Scandals and scoundrels
Is there something in Lib Dems’ DNA that makes them prone to scandal? Other parties have scandals, it is true. Yet those of the Lib Dems seem weirder and bigger and, for a small party, they have an unusually high number, involving more senior figures.
Pundits suggest that, because the Lib Dems don’t normally have any serious prospect of power, they attract oddballs, some of whom stand for parliament without expecting to win. Neither the party nor its MPs expect to be put under the spotlight and, therefore, they take less care to cover their tracks. This may be true but I am inclined to think that a lack of firm convictions and a vagueness about what exactly they are in politics to achieve make Lib Dems peculiarly prone to erratic behaviour. Perhaps, too, they are upholding a Liberal tradition: David Lloyd George was by far the most scandalous British prime minister of the 20th century, in both the financial and the sexual senses.
In the circumstances, it’s understandable that the Lib Dems have proportionately fewer women MPs than either Labour or the Tories. What woman would want to risk a close association with such strange and dangerous people?
Like coppers or like sour Krauts?
I suppose one should feel sorry for Neil Wallis, the former executive editor of the News of the World who, after 21 months on police bail, was told he wouldn’t be charged. The poor man lost £200,000 in earnings and had to sell his Renault Espace, he laments in the Mail on Sunday. Hard times, indeed. He states that, when he was arrested, it was “like being questioned by the Stasi”.
Really? The Stasi (after they’d largely given up bodily torture in the 1960s) held suspects for months in complete isolation, even from other prisoners. They were not told the charges against them or where they were being detained. They frequently suffered sleep deprivation.
Because it was psychological torture, leaving no tangible effects, Stasi prisoners, on release, found it hard to convey why the experience was so terrifying.
I am sure Wallis’s journalistic skills will be equal to the task when he tells an unsuspecting world about how British bobbies have adopted the techniques of the German Democratic Republic. Perhaps the story will enable him to recover his lost earnings.
Choice cuts
Here is a small, hitherto unreported example of NHS “rationalisation”. For an area covering much of north and east London and parts of Hertfordshire and Essex, bladder and prostate cancer surgery is to be closed at three hos – pitals and kidney cancer surgery at eight. All patients (and their visitors) must travel to hospitals in central London, which seem, between them, to have carved up these and several other services without much involve – ment from NHS commissioners or significant public consultation.
For complex procedures, specialist centres are thought to be more effective than several hospitals carrying out, at most, a few dozen operations a year. However, these proposals affect two million people, some of whom live in villages that have only two buses a day. Whatever happened to patient choice?
Danger – an itching to write
In the late 1990s, John O’Farrell, Labour’s candidate in the Eastleigh by-election, wrote a book called Things Can Only Get Better, in which he described how depressing it was to be a Labour supporter during the Thatcher era. Throughout the Eastleigh campaign, he was pilloried for various passages by the Mail and other right-wing papers as “the sickest man in politics”, even though, being doomed to third place at best, he was – if he won’t mind my saying so – hardly worth noticing.
He wrote: “I settled on the uncomfortable and convoluted position of wanting Great Britain to lose a war [the Falklands] for the sake of Great Britain,” and that, after the IRA’s Brighton bomb in 1984, “I felt a surge of excitement at the nearness of Margaret Thatcher’s demise.” He wasn’t justifying such sentiments; they were examples of the desperate, perverse cast of mind to which many leftists were then reduced. If anybody wants a political career, they had best eschew not only sexual adventure but also irony, reflexivity, paradox and similar literary devices.
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