Cheers Boris!

Let us be under no illusions. Boris Johnson’s first act as mayor – to ban both open containers of alcohol and its consumption on all of London’s public transport services – is a disgusting example of gesture politics, designed to please his core vote of the suburban middle-aged, middle-class self-righteous.

To my mind, this ban has all the limitations of the hunting ban, and a fair few more besides.

They are both incredibly difficult to enforce, have no real effect on the practice they seek to prohibit, criminalize otherwise law-abiding people and reek of cynical core vote appeasement. Both were claimed, by their proponents, to be ‘sending a message’ to a group in society.

Over at Spiked!, Brendan O’Neill – a man I rarely agree with – has made an excellent case against Boris’ illiberal ban. In it, he points out the sheer lack of necessity for this measure:

In 2007, there were a whopping 1.6 billion passenger trips on the London Underground, and only 1,806 reported assaults. That is one assault for every 449,690 commuters – what statisticians might refer to as a ‘statistical insignificance’. There is one assault on a member of staff for every 1.64million commuters.

It was reported earlier this year that the London Underground is safer than Perth Railways in Australia – the sunny land Down Under where, ironically, some people who are tired of London (and presumably also tired of life) escape to when they’ve had enough of the capital’s greyness, grime and crime. There were 161 assaults on Perth railways last year – and taking into consideration the fact that there were 35.8million boardings on Perth railways, that means there was one assault for every 222,360 commuters, compared with one assault for every 449,690 commuters on the London Tube. In short, you’re twice as likely to be punched in Perth as you are in London.

Similarly, legislation is not for ‘sending a message’. It is for the creation and maintenance of a just and free society, and to use it otherwise is to malign it, devalue it and undermine the people’s faith in the laws of the land.

Again, as O’Neill points out, there are plenty of existing laws to arrest people who are drunken and disorderly, causing a public nuisance and so forth. Who will this ban affect other than the sensible drinker who is having a Corona on the way to a gig, the average Joe who merely wishes to Irish his coffee, and the homeless, badly-behaved drunk who would be accosted by police anyway?



Added to all this is the fact that the right to consume alcohol is fundamental one, in the sense that belief in it is a real acid test of a person’s liberalism. The right to make mistakes, to indulge in excess and to do things that are pretty bad for you is a hugely important one because without it, society is on the road to docility, austerity and dependency on a nanny state. It becomes devoid of experimentation and risk-taking – the vital ingredients of a dynamic society in which creativity and eccentricity flourish. In debates over this right’s validity, a line is invariably demarcated between the freedom-lovers and the do-gooders; the people who believe the individual knows best, and the people who believe the state does.

So do not be fooled. Though Boris Johnson will most likely prove to be a liberal in his instincts on economic matters, he shows no sign of being similarly liberal on social ones. We have a word for that kind of person in British politics – Thatcherite.



In the spirit of civil disobedience, Londoners from all over the capital are converging on the city’s tube network on the 31st of May to exercise their right to drink on the tube one last time, as the ban comes into effect on the 1st of June. The whole thing should prove to be a relatively orderly and restrained, affair; I, for one, will be donning black tie and raising a toast to subterranean revelry on the Circle Line. Should you wish to partake, there are a number of events being organised on Facebook:

- Last Round On The Underground
- London Underground's Last Ever Party
- The Booze Tube
- Anti-Boris Tube Crawl
- Circle Line Cocktail Party

Plus an official website.

But wherever and whenever you choose to commemorate this event, please do so responsibly and safely. The last thing any of us want is for the Blonde Buffoon to be vindicated in his decision.

Who Do You Think?

As a member of Britain’s third party, I’m usually loathed to swallow a media narrative on any issue, as I’ve seen how egregiously they can get it wrong. Yet I find myself having to do so on the issue of the American Democratic Presidential Primaries. Most reporters are billing Barack Obama as the young, optimistic candidate with little experience but a lot of hope; Hillary Clinton as the older, more seasoned firebrand with few pretty words but plenty of competence and experience, and a mastery of policy detail. The Economist likens it to the difference between poetry and prose, each lacking in the qualities that are the strength of the other.

On this side of the Atlantic, it seems like many are plumping for Barack Obama for either or both of what seem – in my opinion – to be two very bad reasons: that he’s black, and that he makes good speeches and talks a lot about hope, change and other mercurial and ambiguous concepts. Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of better reasons to vote for Obama, but I don’t think either of those are anywhere near good enough reasons for wanting someone to be president.

Hillary Clinton was, for a short while, written off as unable to come back after Barack Obama’s campaign overtook her in terms of pledged delegate numbers; it was assumed that his campaign’s momentum had become unstoppable, apparently not least by Obama’s own campaign team. This may yet prove to be a fatal error, for in allowing Barack Obama to slip ahead of her by the relatively small margin of around a hundred delegates, Hillary Clinton could very well have executed one of the smartest political decisions taken by a Democratic politician in quite a while. If it was deliberate, that is.

Now that he is the frontrunner, Barack Obama no longer benefits from that underdog bonus that previously fuelled his campaign to a not insignificant degree. Additionally, hard questions have started to be asked by the American media of him – how would he solve some of the major challenges facing America today? Previously, the bulk of such questions were directed at Hillary, and by and large she handled them relatively well with her considerable substance. Obama’s was always the fragile but beautiful dream, in contrast to Hillary’s solid, unimaginative but reliable substance; he may therefore prove more vulnerable to the more penetrating questions that are now directed at him.

For many, the question that transcends any other in importance is simply “who can beat John McCain?” My politics teacher believes the answer to be Obama alone; I personally think that both could win over McCain, but I admit Obama probably by a greater margin than Clinton. 

To me it seems remarkable that, especially on this side of the Atlantic, people can have such short memories. Only 10 or so years ago the British people – or at least a minority of them – elected Tony Blair as Prime Minister on a tidal wave of optimism, after having watched a Conservative government slowly grind to a halt in a quagmire of sleaze and incompetence. John Major and his party trudged into the 1997 with little credibility or respect, and even then underestimated the extent of public detestation for the Tories.

Everyone knows how the story went from then on – the “new dawn” broke, and then it fell apart, culminating in the disaster that was the Iraq war. Not that that was the Blair government’s sole failure, of course. Its domestic agenda was a consummate failure, and if anything our systems of education and law & order have actually got worse since 1997. In the meantime, unprecedented amounts of public money have been squandered on public services with little quantifiable improvement in them and lavished on vanity projects like the Millennium Dome and the NHS IT system; all this from a government that managed to get elected on a few soundbites and plenty of smiles.

What evidence is there that things will be any better in the United States under Barack Obama? If anything, his campaign has had less substance than Blair’s – something few of us thought possible. Add to that the fact that the United States appears to be heading into a recession, it is more despised abroad than ever before, and its people are riven with social divisions.

To that, some would say “but Obama’s an optimist lacking in partisanship – surely he’s the perfect persons to heal both domestic and international divisions?” It is a mistaken analysis, in my view. To me, Obama seems less of an optimist and more of a populist. His words are vague and vacuous, and his lack of substance indicative of his desire not to offend or alienate any particular group; I see little evidence of principles or convictions.

What America needs now is competence, not fine words. Hillary Clinton may be a divisive figure, but so was Margaret Thatcher; whatever one may say about the latter’s politics or policies, even the most hardened Marxist has to admit that she achieved what she set out to do. I have much more confidence in Hillary than in Obama, because I believe the former will operate as the clunking fist that Gordon Brown was billed as, but has proved too indecisive to be.

She has Thatcher's substance, tenacity and ruthless determination, which one needs from a political leader at a time of great uncertainty and division. Additionally, she seems far more principled and confrontational than Obama, who I fear may – once elected – begin to appease and to take populist positions in order to maintain his appearance of cross-partisanship. She has also made her sex far less of an issue than Obama has his race; true, race is undoubtedly a more divisive issue but she still deserves credit for trying to fight on policies and substance, rather than doing a Harriet Harman.

Of late, the negative campaigning that the Clinton campaign indulged in tested my faith in Hillary. It seemed like she was seriously rattled by Obama and I think it was a strategic error to attack him personally. All the same, pretending that the Presidential race will not involve a considerable degree of negative campaigning is pure fiction. It is a sad but true reality of American political life – I think Hillary may prove more able to weather it.

In conclusion, I’d like to use an over-simplifying metaphor of my own. To me, Obama seems to appeal more to one’s emotions, Hillary more to one’s intellect. I’ve no doubt which candidate i prefer. You can dream all you like, Mr Obama; I prefer reality.

Hands Off The Proms, Margaret

Margaret Hodge, Minister for State at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, is way out of her depth. From her remarks, it seems to me highly probable that she has never been to the Proms in her life. Hopefully she'll get the Archbishop of Canterbury/Sharia Law treatment from the media. 

Indeed, it’s hard to tell which is more disgusting – her comments themselves or the fact that news 

editors think they merit discussion. Though the Last Night of the Proms’ enthusiastic flag-waving and renditions of Land of Hope and Glory, Jerusalem and the National Anthem may not be to my taste, I nevertheless see that, for many people, it marks one of the cultural highlights of the year. To each his or her own.

Clearly, however, Mrs Hodge is of that particular brand of Labour politician that finds the sight of the Union Jack distasteful, views the singing of Jerusalem as offensive to ethnic minorities, and generally believes the festival to be two steps back for ‘community cohesion’. The highly ironic thing for me, though, is that she then went on to extol the merits of Coronation Street, amongst others, for being part of a glorious ‘common culture’, when all it serves up are tales of misery, social breakdown and emptiness of modern British life. Anyway, the implication in her attack is that the Proms is too highbrow, elitist and traditional. I want to look at each of those supposed criticism in turn, and demonstrate why it is none of those things. Firstly, that the Proms is too highbrow.

What’s wrong with high culture? It challenges audiences intellectually, expands one’s outlook, and generally stimulates in a wholly positive way. For Hodge and her ilk, dumbing down high culture to give it more mass appeal seems perfectly justified because it means nobody is left out, alienated, or made to feel unintelligent. There’s a strong undercurrent of anti-intellectualism, inverted snobbery and over-sensitivity to her words, and the fact that she sees the Proms as a threat to ‘community cohesion’ is a testament more to her parochialism than anything else. It is as though she finds the Proms offensive because its audiences are predominantly middle-class and well educated. So what if they are?

Classical music can be evocative, provocative, escapist, emotional, reassuring, life-affirming, powerful or intense. Mahler's Symphony No.5 can provide a welcome escape from the tedium of everyday life, while Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No.1 can remind us of how lucky we are to live in a relatively free liberal democracy like Britain rather than under the oppressive rule of the Soviet Union. It can commemorate historical events, tell an important story, or provide an important cautionary tale; Richard Strauss' Till Eulenspiegel's Lustige Streiche can even make an entire concert hall laugh. The virtues of high culture are rarely extolled in public debate, for fear of being branded elitist. Nothing could be more absurd.

Besides, the Proms specifically looks to hold more inclusive events for people who perhaps don’t know that much about classical music, or haven’t yet developed an ear for Béla Bartók. Last year there was an evening of music from Great British Films, the Proms in the Park, the Blue Peter Proms – aimed specifically at involving young children in the festival – and, of course, the Last Night itself.

This leads me on to the idea of the Proms as elitist. Well, for starters, the Last Night is deliberately designed to be one of the more populist events of the season, with a variety of different composers of varying degrees of popularity to both draw new audiences in and still remain interesting for seasoned concert-goers. Additionally, most concerts are designed to include a more well-known piece or two, and put it alongside a more challenging or obscure work.

For example at last year’s festival, Stravinsky’s famous The Rite of Spring was performed alongside Schoenberg, Knussen and the UK premiere of Henze’s Sebastian im Traum, while Elgar’s ever-popular Enigma Variations completed a programme of Richard Strauss and Brahms. The Proms is intricately designed specifically to cater to music-lovers of all tastes, ears and degrees of knowledge.

One of the central traditions of the Proms is the fact that a number of tickets are released on the day of the concert for the Arena and Gallery areas where concert-goers can stand and listen to the music, costing only £4 per person. Compared with the £20+ price of most rock concerts, the Proms is therefore far more accessible to those on low incomes; they certainly aren’t being priced out of the festival. And so Mrs Hodge’s comments seem only to demonstrate her comprehensive lack of knowledge of the festival.

Next, the idea that the Proms are traditional and stuffy, and the audiences all Telegraph-reading crusty old farts. Again - wrong, wrong, wrong. Not only does the festival commission a number of new works from contemporary composers each year, but it also tries to expand the range of works performed beyond the usual tried and tested fare – for instance, though the year before last’s festival may have been a bit of a Mozart-fest, there were also many works by the Soviet, closet-dissident composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Perhaps his music, a powerful evocation of the paranoia and ruthless oppression of the Motherland, is too much for a hardened socialist and cultural-relativist like Mrs Hodge.

Similarly, the festival’s organisers do their best to rescue composers from obscurity, rehabilitate ones that have fallen out of favour with concert audiences for whatever reason, and popularize more contemporary artists. The 20th century American composers Charles Ives and Aaron Copland – rarely seen on concert programmes this side of the Atlantic – both had works performed; the obscure Baroque composers Buxtehude and Scarlatti, and Renaissance composer Striggio were each given a new breath of life; Thomas Adès, John Adams and Magnus Lindberg – all middle-aged, innovative yet relatively popular composers – each had works performed. And yet there’s still a good selection of the usual suspects – Mahler, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Elgar, Brahms, Sibelius and Prokofiev – to listen to. The variety across the programme is mirrored in the contrast within each concert, so that not only is there a superb degree of choice, but one is simultaneously exposed to works one might not otherwise encounter at virtually every concert.

Additionally, the wide variety of orchestras, choruses, consorts, singers, conductors and soloists come from all four corners of the globe. One night will be the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, the next the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Similarly, one will find a Russian Ashkenazi Jew conducting an Austrian orchestra playing music by Hungarian and Romanian composers, and then the renowned Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela conducted by a 27 year-old playing works by an American and Russian composers.

The point is, nationality is largely irrelevant at the Proms; it’s not where your from but how well you play that counts – a more meritocratic message is hard to find. Suggestions from both Gordon Brown and David Cameron that the Proms is some kind of pantheon to Britishness are almost as misguided and ill-informed as Mrs Hodge’s comments. Culture of the kind the Proms celebrates actually transcends borders and geo-political divisions, and that’s one of the festival’s great virtues.

Issues of class, race, nationality and religion all fade into the background as committed agnostic humanists like me can enjoy the emotional power of the work of Orthodox Christian composers like Arvo Pärt and John Tavener; Jews can enjoy the beautiful music of the anti-Semite Richard Wagner; white British audiences can appreciate the beauty of Indian Ragas or the exquisite music of the Silk Road Ensemble led by the Chinese cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

Yes, Proms audiences may be white, middle-aged and middle class, but so what? Why is that, in itself, a bad thing? Ok, so more people from ethnic minorities could come along and enjoy the music but they don’t and that’s entirely their choice. The Proms is just about as open and inclusive as a music festival can be, and I look forward to taking my Indian friend Ahir to several concerts again this season after we saw the premiere of John Adams’ Doctor Atomic Symphony last year.

Furthermore, if the Proms is in some way exclusionary (and I remain to see any evidence whatsoever that it is), it’s probably more the fault of a government that has presided over a widening gap between rich and poor, failed to tackle educational inequalities, and in many ways exacerbated social divisions over the last ten years. 

Mrs Hodge and the government of which she is a part would do well to actually provide some real opportunities for the underprivileged and the poor, and to stop using such populist and inflammatory rhetoric on issues of immigration and security, before criticizing a magnificent and important British institution like Henry Wood’s Promenade Concerts, which has much more to boast about than her or her government do.

The Politics of Climate Change

For those who believe climate change is real, man-made and reversible, it constitutes a huge public policy challenge, and is the greatest challenge facing humanity at present, and for the foreseeable future.

For those who believe either that it is non-existent, or that it is but is not man-made, or that it is but is irreversible, environmentalists are often seen as deluded, self-righteous do-gooders at best, and a threat to order, prosperity and liberty at worst.

The reason that climate change is such an impossible issue is that, unlike poverty in Africa, homelessness in the UK or repressive dictatorships in Zimbabwe and North Korea, its effects are not easily quantified. For example, last year’s floods, hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami have all been variously linked to climate change by a number of scientists, while a number have disputed such links, not to mention ‘Mad Mel’ Philips, who immediately accused the Green lobby of hijacking the weather to further their own political agenda, in her own, inimitable way. The highlight, for me, was “these environmental doom-mongers generate more hot air than is to be found in the upper atmosphere”; yes, Melanie, because doom-mongering and whipping up hysteria really isn’t your style.

I digress. The point is, because of the inherent difficulties involved in establishing a causal link between something so general and global as climate change and something so specific and local as the 2007 floods in the UK, it is difficult to present discernible effects of global warming. The nature of scientific inquire and free dissent means that there will always be at least a scientist here or there who disagrees with the prevailing analysis, if not more than that.

But disagreements within the scientific community over the nature of climate change, and the resultant uncertainty and hesitancy they can create amongst policymakers, are just about surmountable. Now add to that the politicization of the issue, and the way that interpretation of the science falls along broadly partisan lines. In terms of public debate, things are getting very confused. Neither side can really be said to be ‘in the right’ politically or morally, though one must be, scientifically.

The left, in particular the likes of the Green party and all those ‘eco-fanatics’ as Peter Hitchens calls them, do themselves no favours in their presentation of this issue. Just as with Africa, social justice and just about every other issue that has, at one time or another, been one of its many causes célèbres, they have wrapped themselves in it as the far right does with the Union Jack, and now proclaim that only radical and intrusive changes to people’s lives can save us all from the impending apocalypse. Population capping, deliberate recession and a kind of general economic self-mutilation are very much the doctor’s orders.

We should not delude ourselves – such radical environmentalists are nothing more than socialism with a green face, substituting climate change for social injustice as the moral justification for expanding the powers of the state, rendering the economy uncompetitive once more, and so on.

Now if such radical and unpalatable measures are the only option that will properly tackle the problem, and one’s entire political philosophy is based around a resistance to state-intrusion, an unshakable faith in capitalism or distrust of radicalism, of course one is going to deny the science of global warming. If it happens, it happens; it doesn’t matter if we’re proved wrong because the market will provide and society will adapt as it always has. In this way, the libertarian cannot lose from denying climate change; in accepting its scientific basis, they have everything to lose, starting with their private property.

It is inevitable but unfortunate nonetheless that the radical left have hijacked yet another issue and portrayed themselves as the only ones with any answers to this problem. The truth is, reasonable and moderate action on climate change that will nevertheless make an impact on carbon emissions is entirely possible. Common-sense measures, when practiced by all individuals, have a huge impact, and it is hardly an infringement of one’s rights to recycle, turn off lights when in a room, and so on. Furthermore, it seems to me that even without climate change, green taxation is still a much fairer way to tax than income tax is. Additionally, reducing our dependence on foreign sources of energy and on resources that may one day soon run out has significant benefits that even Mad Mel can appreciate. The same is true of using microgeneration, in so far as it saves on energy bills.

If you believe climate change is an imminent and important threat to humanity, as I do (because the science of it convinces me, not because I wish to confiscate all your property), then the way to win over partisan opposition that has dug in its heels and stuck its fingers in its ears is to show that certain environment-conserving measures can be good for business, make sound economic and social sense, and have other general positive effects that merit their use, regardless of one’s views on climate change. It is my firm belief that such measures are the only way we will ever achieve significant worldwide action on climate change, as by the time all the sceptics have been persuaded, it will be too late.

For King and Country?

I don't think anyone thought they'd see the day when a party that is ostensibly of the left criticised a right-wing party for being "anti-Royalist". Such a statement is edging us just a little closer to the American-style "if you oppose us then you're unpatriotic" argument-killer. A dangerous thing, surely?

At any rate, this hints at a fascinating, slightly surreal and highly possible future political scenario - one in which the anti-Europe right finds itself denouncing the monarch of the day (King Charles III by this point) for his views. Could the future King find himself friends on the left with his wooly environmentalism and pro-European views? He'll certainly alienate many otherwise raving monarchists on the right.

In short, is Prince Charles potentially the disaster monarch that British republicans have always needed?

Time To Go

That the banal and tedious ramblings of the Archbishop of Canterbury have dominated the news in the past few days is less a sign of his significance and more a sign of a lack of genuinely interesting news. The debate has been tiresomely stale, with politicians and figureheads for various faiths piling in alike to condemn the Archbishop's rather foolish remarks. All we need now is Richard Dawkins to pop up and tell us all why this is a perfect example of why religion is crap.

If one good thing has come out of the whole solecism, it is that various voices have started calling for the disestablishment of the Church of England, which is long overdue. We are not a "Christian nation founded on Christian values", as many social conservatives would have you believe. Indeed it is my firm belief that the institutions and principles which have contributed the most to the preservation order and liberty in this country are those that rose out of the Enlightenment.

I've extolled the virtues of secularism before on this blog, so i won't do so again, but this latest episode is another example of why and how the Church of England no longer speaks for the majority of English people.

A Question of Sanity?

It’s probably just me, but does anyone else think Question Time, ostensibly the BBC’s flagship political discussion programme, is looking more and more like The Jeremy Kyle Show in suits? Try muting it for a minute or two and just watching how everyone behaves – the people on the stage playing to the crowd and filling their dialogue with emotive rhetoric, Dimbledonkey baiting the participants, worked-up audience members hectoring the people at the front, the audience applauding like automatons at everything said.

The arguments are frequently unsubstantiated and often miss the point, the panel unbalanced and generally lightweight, and the government stooge put up every week typically sees it at their mission to kill all debate stone-dead with apologetic-yet-bland statements and a mind-numbing monotone. The programme only seems to live up when the occasional controversial or outspoken panellist is on, by which I mean they must pass the acid test of being at least as unhinged as Melanie “Mad Mel” Philips. Those who have even a smidgen of a chance of being considered for membership of such a prestigious canon include David Starkey, Simon Schama, Douglas Murray, George Galloway, Kelvin Mackenzie, Ian Hislop, Christopher Hitchens and – of course – his charming brother Peter.

In short, people who ignite debate and aren’t afraid to make controversial statements and venture unpopular opinions. Don’t believe me? Just imagine, for a moment, what kind of programme it would be if we had any five of them on. Actually wait – don’t. It’d probably be a lot more like “a human form of bear-baiting” than it already is. Especially if the Hitch was on. But i think i might enjoy watching it more, at any rate.

I suppose the conclusion that i'm inclined to therefore reach is that the programme is being dumbed down, but sanitized at the same time. Tragic, in my opinion.