Politics

Howard woos TalkSport…

Over on the Boris blog, the exciting debate continues on the comments section.

Someone calling themself ‘Monkey’ commented that:

Howard has made several intelligent manouvres in the past few days. Appearing on Talk Sport (the UK’s most popular radio station, (with a major demographic of working class men) was a great idea. He’ll be back again next week on the ‘james whale show’ (contreversial, populist right wing shock jock), which should be interesting. All of the Talk sport pundits are now rooting for the tories. Not a bad days work eh?

Errrr…. Intelligent move? As I responded:

Have you ever listened to Talk Sport? They’re the biggest bunch of swivel-eyed crypto-fascists on the airwaves. The Tories are attracting votes from the BNP. Woo-hoo!

This article by Steven Wells (a writer I’ve always loved since I first started reading him in The NME) in The Guardian sums them up nicely:

Back in March, I went to the Millwall-West Ham game. I didn’t see many black people down the New Den. But neither did I hear any racist chanting. Not a sausage. Not a dicky bird. Not a single solitary Sieg Heil. They’re very touchy about racism down the New Den. When some of the visiting West Ham fans – 4-1 down and ringed with riot plod – tore down a Kick Racism Out Of Football banner in frustration, it seemed as if every Millwall fan in the ground turned to the press enclosure and pointed at the naughty East Londoners. Some of them were frantically scribbling in imaginary notebooks. Others were pointing theatrically and miming – Them! It’s them! Not us! Get it right!

It was good to see. Not just the prominence the club hierarchy gives the anti-racist campaign – but also just how keen some Millwall fans are to distance themselves from their racist reputation. I very much doubt that racism has been eradicated at Millwall. But it has been made unacceptable. Even better, it is now considered embarrassing. And I think that’s brilliant. I think Kick It Out is brilliant. We all do – don’t we?

So why is it then, that when the UK’s most popular commercial sports radio station (with a claimed listenership of over eight million, nearly all of them football fans) gives a platform to nationalist bigots, quasi-fascists and racists of every strain, nobody blinks an eye?

When the Hutton report was published, TalkSport had a bit of a dilemma. For the two institutions TalkSport hates most are the Blair government and the BBC. What to do!? What to do!? The station’s single brain-cell hive-mind was nearing meltdown. The knee was primed and all set to jerk. But in whose bollocks? The crypto-communist BBC? Or the grinning Stalinist jackanapes, Tony Blair?

But one elderly female caller was in no such a quandary. She cut through all the silly shilly-shallying by pointing out that the BBC pursued an agenda of – wait for it – “internationalism, multi-culturalism and political correctness”.

“Internationalism” – as you probably know – is one of the code words Nazis use for Jews. Or Jewishness. Or, more usually, the international Jewish conspiracy (see also “cosmopolitanism”).

The woman then went on to say that the BBC pursued this agenda “despite the fact that the majority of people in this country aren’t multi-cultural”. Now this was a new one on me – the use of the word multi-cultural to mean non-white. As in “I’ve got nothing against your multi-culturals, I just wouldn’t want one marrying my daughter. Or living next door. Or reading the news. If you catch my drift.”

Now TalkSport’s presenters – as fanatically anti-union, savagely pro-Tony Martin and hysterically xenophobic as they are – are not Nazis. They make this clear whenever a Nazi caller makes a Nazi point. Which happens quite often. Because TalkSport might not like the Nazis – but the Nazis love TalkSport.

This is evident from even a casual trawl through the UK’s far-right websites. Debates about immigration on TalkSport are flagged in advance and later, Nazi callers boast about their performance in chat rooms.

But how could the Nazis not love a station that debates (seriously) whether the word “paki” is more offensive than the word “brit”? Where a presenter can claim that regional accents are disappearing because of “too many immigrants”. And that a boat full of asylum seekers “should be sunk”. And where, on the 12th of September 2001, the question was asked, “I wonder how all those politically-correct people are feeling this morning?”

And where one presenter – the unlovely Mike Dickin – has banned trade unionists from his programme.

Our only hope is that some day the sports fanatics who run the relatively sane part of TalkSport – the sports bit – will get together with the right-wing morons who run the utterly insane part and say – hang on, these footballers, tennis players, golfers, boxers and track athletes we keep banging on about? You do realise that a lot of them are, well, black, don’t you?

Maybe someone at TalkSport – maybe even Mr Kelvin MacKenzie himself – will make the connection between his station’s consistent stream of hateful refugee propaganda and the attacks that take place on asylum seekers (and other randomly selected “foreigners”) whenever anti-immigrant hysteria in the media reaches one its increasingly frequent crescendos.

And maybe, in the mean time, all those soccer clubs – and other sporting institutions – who so proudly boast of their anti-racist credentials, could boycott TalkSport. Until it cleans its act up. Until it stops giving sustenance and succour to racists who would destroy our sports if they ever achieved power.

Because TalkSport – as it operates at present – is an obscenity.

Boris Gagged

According to the Boris Blog, Mr Johnson’s regular column has been dropped from today’s Torygraph in favour of a rather dull piece by Michael Howard trying to justify his dodgy immigration policy, reproduced here in all its swivel-eyed glory because of the Torygraph’s stinky registration requirements (itself an appalling encroachment on the rights of browsers…):

Migration needs to benefit all Britons
By Michael Howard
(Filed: 27/01/2005)

The first responsibility of Government is to control the nation’s borders. But this Government has comprehensively failed in its duty to police entry to our country.

For all those of us who believe that Britain benefits from immigration, the Government’s failure is a particular tragedy.

Modern Britain is immeasurably better off as a result of the new Britons who have made their homes here over the last century. We all benefit from the social diversity, economic vibrancy and cultural richness which immigration has brought.

But, if those benefits are to continue to flow, we need to ensure that immigration is effectively managed, in the interests of all Britons, old and new.

If we are to maintain good community relations, then the number of new citizens we welcome has to be controlled. As the Government’s own Community Cohesion panel has pointed out, when it comes to securing public assent for new migration: “The pace of change is simply too great at present.”

If we are to maintain support for immigration, people have to be reassured that the numbers coming here are publicly known, widely accepted and efficiently managed.

The current system doesn’t provide that reassurance. The numbers have risen, without the public, or Parliament, being asked, from less than 50,000 a year in 1997 to more than 150,000 people a year. The Government has admitted that it doesn’t know precisely who is entering the country. And David Blunkett has conceded that the Government sees “no obvious upper limit to legal immigration”.

The result of this chaos is additional pressure on overstretched public services, with the poorest paying the highest price. As the Community Cohesion panel also pointed out: “The pressure on resources in those (disadvantaged) areas is often intense and local services are often insufficient to meet the need of the existing community, let alone newcomers.”

The failure to control our borders also poses a threat to national security, with the system potentially open to abuse by terrorists or organised criminals.

Indeed the role of organised crime in our immigration system is one of the most tragic aspects of this whole scandal. Because of this Government’s failure to have an efficient and transparent system, an opening has been created for people traffickers who exploit migrants and force them into the underground economy.

The principal route for economic migrants should be the work permits system. But under this Government that system has fallen apart, as the British consul in Bucharest pointed out, only to be disciplined for telling the truth. The Government insisted that 90 per cent of applications be decided within 24 hours. But that makes serious checks of the kind a Government serious about immigration would insist on all but impossible.

To object to this mess isn’t racist. It’s plain common sense. No Government could possibly be proud of a system which breeds fear, encourages illegality, stokes prejudice, allocates resources irrationally and undermines our national security.

In 1997 the Government’s immigration budget was £200 million. Now it’s nearly £2 billion. In Australia, they spend just £286 million policing their immigration system. Even through they process three quarter of a million more applications than we do.

How can the Government defend its inefficiency when a better system is there, ready to adopt?

We will set an upper limit on the number of people we take, which Parliament will debate and the public can accept. Within that limit there will be a quota for asylum seekers. We will ensure that those we take are those in most need rather than those whom organised criminals smuggle to our shores.

We will continue to ensure our economy benefits from new skills and diversity by having a rational, point-based system of work permits based on the contribution each new migrant can make.

And we will safeguard our security by having a 24-hour watch kept on our ports.

These proposals won’t bring the current chaos under control overnight. The scale of the problem is too big. But they will allow us to restore order to our immigration system, as Australia has done.

If we are to restore order, however, we need to ensure that policy is decided in accordance with the needs of the British people – something Labour refuses to do.

The Prime Minister will not withdraw from the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees even though he has conceded that “It was drawn up for a vastly different world in which people did not routinely travel huge distances across multiple borders.”

And he cannot set a limit on the number of asylum seekers Britain should accept, because his Government has ceded control of huge swaths of immigration policy to Brussels. Despite the Prime Minister’s claim in the House of Commons that he has not given up the power to set our asylum laws, he has signed up to every directive on immigration that has come from the European Commission. He has surrendered the powers necessary to police our borders. A Conservative government would take back these powers and say no to the further loss of control which the European Constitution would bring.

We have a detailed, costed timetable for action that addresses work permits, asylum, immigration loopholes, national security and our international obligations. It is rooted in the experience of other nations, and underpinned by our belief in fair play for all. Above all, it is designed to make immigration once again an efficient, successful and tightly managed process so that the chaos we face today becomes a thing of the past for ever.

  • Boris Johnson returns next week

For shame! let’s just hope that Boris does return!

Why Politicians Need Weblogs

Interesting page on the use of blogs by MPs:

A lot of the people that you reach via a weblog will post comments on a weblog of their own and link to you in the process. Some weblogs have an audience counting in the dozens, others into the hundred or thousands. Portals that watch or monitor such link activity have audiences reaching more towards hundreds of thousands. Good stuff – important stuff – reaches many, many people almost immediately in this way.

This publishing frequency (presented in the correct format) has a very positive effect not only on people, but also on the search engines that are using them increasingly to decide what is the most important, relevant and fresh result for any given search query.

A valid weblog will have a pronounced effect on the two top search databases on the planet – Google and Yahoo. People seeking information relating to issues you think to be important will invariably find your site among the top results.

End result?

You show the people who vote for you how hard you’re working, and attract the majority of those interested in issues you care about. You may even learn an important thing or two from us in the process.

It’s wonderfully organic, and it works. And you need it.

And if the MPs won’t do it themselves? How To Run a Weblog on Behalf of Your MP

There is certainly a huge role that could be filled by politicians blogging. It presents a means by which:

  • Politicians can cut out the middle-man of the traditional media and get their message across their way
  • They can become more accessible to their constituents through a more informal communication channcel and present a more human face
  • Through comments and email they can get feedback on policy ideas for more quickly (and cheaply!) than through focus groups etc
  • They can increase their recognition and popularity amongst a predominantly youngish, technology-savvy audience – who might not otherwise be engaged in politics
  • A blog provides an outlet for a politician’s ideas that might not get a public airing otherwise

Of course, the normal rules of blogging apply. Just like anyone else’s, a politician’s blog must be regularly updated, offer content that’s genuinely different from what is available elsewhere, offer a unique voice and link helpfully and regularly.

After Blair…

This looks like it would be an interesting read, and a very good review. I’ve emphasised one important part for me.

Do the right thing
For once, here is some advice that Conservatives might find useful. David Cameron on Kieron O’Hara’s analysis of conservative ideology, After Blair

After Blair: Conservatism Beyond Thatcher
by Kieron O’Hara
320pp, Icon, £12.99

The Conservative party is rarely short of advice. But too much of it sounds like orders shouted by an angry football coach: “Move right … Head for the centre … Create space.”

The strength of this book is that it draws on philosophy and history, rather than discussing strategy and tactics. Indeed Kieron O’Hara begins his quest for an ideological answer to the Conservatives’ difficulties by heading back to ancient Greece. He labours, with some success, to find a golden thread linking Socrates, Sextus Empiricus, Montaigne, Burke, Hume and the modern Conservative party. The core of his message is that Conservatives need to rediscover the importance of scepticism in thought and pragmatism in action. It is a compelling, and often persuasive, read and provides at least part of the road map for a sustained conservative recovery in modern Britain.

O’Hara neatly knocks on the head any idea that Conservative philosophy lacks relevance in today’s fast-changing world. Indeed, because it is about recognising how little we know – “it is a claim about knowledge and about human frailty” – conservatism has even greater relevance in the uncertain world which we inhabit. The author takes a prolonged “Rawlsian turn”, trying to do to conservatism what John Rawls’s Theory of Justice did for liberalism: to show that the ideology appeals to public reason rather than mere self interest. In New Labour speak, to show that it is for the many, and not the few.

After a canter through some important Conservative tenets – sound money, strong defence, the rule of law and the importance of property rights – O’Hara draws up two principles that should form the underlying basis of conservatism. The first is the “change principle”, which states that the concrete benefits of an existing society must be taken more seriously than “potential, abstract benefits that could be gained through applying a social theory”.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t innovate – but that an extra burden of proof should always lie on those proposing change. The second is the “knowledge principle”, which draws on the common-sense observation that “the knowledge required to coordinate and direct a complex, dynamic society” is clearly beyond any individual or bureaucratic machine. Combine the two and you “create an elegant but powerful conservative philosophy”.

These principles certainly help to provide a fairly compelling critique of Labour’s experiment in big government. The vast expansion of central control over public services, the profusion of complex means-tested benefits, and the botched reforms of British institutions, such as the House of Lords, would all fall foul of the two principles, and rightly so. He concludes that: “conservatism can help defend tolerance against prejudice, support pragmatism against dogmatism and provide security in an uncertain and disorienting world”.

Just as philosophy draws useful conclusions for policy, so his interpretation of Conservative history provides beneficial lessons for strategy. The party must combine both “big c” and “small c” conservatives, it should appeal to the mainstream of British politics, and it must be a broad-based coalition, combining (among other things) rural, traditional interests with urban, liberal ones. All of the successful Conservative prime ministers – Disraeli, Salisbury, Baldwin and Thatcher – recognised these facts.

Ironically, for a book about ideology, it also counts lack of ideological fervour as one of the historical strengths of the party: “Many Tories’ self image at least until 1975 was that of a group of sensible and responsible people unconcerned with political ideas, because ideas were the cause of trouble.” While an overstatement, this contains an important grain of truth. For Conservatives, doing the right thing should always be more important than following some doctrine, however persuasive it might seem.

The author’s upbeat, even jaunty, style makes the process of translating the lessons of philosophy and history into policy and approach sound too easy. And in some important respects, with regards to policy, he gets it badly wrong. The essential process of change and renewal in the Conservative party has been difficult. Unlike Labour, which clearly needed to junk policies such as unilateral nuclear disarmament and opposition to trade union reform, there have been few such clear totems for the Tories to discard as an indication of change.

Furthermore, we have faced a Labour party that at least pretends to take up any right-of-centre cause that appears to be gaining ground, whether it is cutting waste in government or granting a referendum on the European constitution.

Partly as a result of these difficulties there has been an excessive focus from some Conservatives on the look and feel of the party – and an unhealthy obsession from others about the need for “clear blue water” between the major parties. Of course modernisation of the party is essential, but it is a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for recovery. Drawing up policies simply because they are different to your opponents’ is not a recipe for success. The two tests for good policy are: does it flow from your values – and will it make life better?

This is where O’Hara goes astray. His emphasis on the importance of communities and a pragmatic support for free markets – on the basis that both fit with the Conservative view of limited government and distrust of centralisation – is spot on. However, his proposal that we should freeze the process of reform in the public sector is way off the mark. The reason Labour’s reforms have not worked is because they do not accord with Conservative principles – they have been top-down, centralising, and have assumed that bureaucrats setting targets and measuring performance have perfect knowledge.

In short, scepticism, however important, is not enough. There are three further essential components for successful modern Conservatism. First, we need to reclaim the full set of values that makes conservatism whole. I joined up because the Conservative party combined a message about aspiration – that everyone should be free to do what they could and be what they could – with compassion for the weak, the vulnerable and those left behind. Second, we must look outwards and forwards, not inwards and backwards. Parties should exist to identify and address the modern challenges that our country faces. Finally, and more prosaically, Conservatism is nothing if it is not practical. We need a relentless focus on the things that people care about in their daily lives: the public services they use, the taxes they pay and their hopes and fears about the future.

Together with O’Hara’s timely reminder about grand designs from Blair or indeed anyone else, these should be the tests of the manifesto that we produce this year – and I am confident that we will meet them.

· David Cameron is head of policy coordination for the Conservatives and MP for Witney

Here’s the cover:

Cover of After Blair

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