Nick Cohen: Writing from London

From the Observer
Britain has just had the most extreme budget in its recent history. It is not hysterical to imagine that we will soon be a miserable and angry country as a result. At a minimum, we are entering a future in which police officers will be fired and criminals left free to proceed unmolested; fire stations will close so the chances of your home going up in smoke will rise; teachers, university and teaching assistants will go, leaving the young more in danger of spending their lives in ignorance than they already are; housing, rail and road projects will be cancelled; regiments disbanded; and the sick, handicapped and old left to suffer. To top it all, everyone’s taxes will rise as well.

Foreigners are looking at the government inflicting the suffering with some amazement. As the New York Times noted on Friday: “No reputable economic theory justifies this bleeding.” By going beyond the already stringent austerity programme Labour had planned “in pursuit of a pointless structural budget surplus”, the Tories and Liberals risk pushing Britain into “years of stagnation”.

Yet the British seem to be enjoying themselves. The sun shines for weeks on end, the pubs and the cafes heave and warm feelings of approval engulf the new administration. George Osborne feared he would become the most hated man in the country. Last week, a Mori poll reported that he was not only popular, but the most popular Conservative chancellor since its records began in the 1970s. Meanwhile, all surveys show that the voters regard David Cameron and Nick Clegg as decent men trying their hardest, rather than dangerous ideologues or blithering idiots.
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No names, but recently I offered my services to a member of the campaign team of one of the Labour leadership candidates. “When the Brownites come for you, when craven lobby correspondents take orders at dictation speed from anonymous briefers and put false rumours about you in supposedly independent papers, let me know and I will help you fight back.”
The young woman looked appalled. I had committed a grave social error. No, no she insisted. This was a clean election. There would be no dirty tricks. Labour politicians were candid friends, fighting each other, yes, but in a courteous and comradely fashion.
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The quid pro quo for Tories accepting the AV system is to wrap it up with a package which will cut the number of Parliamentary constituencies. Nick Clegg was full of wind and self-righteousnes when he commended it to the Commons yesterday.

Every Member of this House was elected knowing that this Parliament must be unlike any other-that we have a unique duty to restore the trust in our political system that has been tested to its limits in recent times-and if anything was clear at the general election it was that more and more people realised that our political system was broken and needs to be fixed. They want us to clean up politics. They want to be able to hold us properly to account. So the Government have set out an ambitious programme for political renewal, transferring power away from the Executive to empower Parliament, and away from Parliament to empower people.

As I explained yesterday, AV is a system no one – including Mr Clegg – believes in because in landslide elections it will mean the winning party’s seat total is even greater than under first-past-the-post, and the chances of powerful governments meeting strong opposition will diminish accordingly. But what about cutting the number of constituencies?
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Next year’s referendum on the alternative vote is meant to be the pivot on which the coalition government will swivel. The thinking runs that if the Liberals lose then they have no reason to continue their cohabitation with the Tories and Labour is back in the game. I doubt this and suspect that if public spending cuts push us back into recession, mass unemployment and penury will bring Labour back. (And conversely, if the Conservatives and Liberals manage to build a prosperous society, then their future is assured.)
Still AV excites the pundits, and yet few are noticing something very strange about this pivotal reform: no one actually wants it.
Read on

From the Observer

I have been arguing that the prison system is a malignant failure for so long I can remember denouncing it when Ken Clarke was last home secretary. The case is worth repeating however, because a heatwave brings unusual squalor. The glare of the sunlight reveals the state’s indifference to the men and women under its charge.

If you believe the more excitable conservative papers, we live in a country tyrannised by health and safety fanatics. Yet the supposed jobsworths at the Ministry of Justice treat the rules governing the humane treatment of offenders with contempt as they pack convicts into jails which are already over capacity.
carry on reading

From Standpoint
Radio 4 is so lost in establishment liberalism it does not know how to break out of it. The BBC’s managers accept that they must give a hearing to the currents in public life they habitually ignore. But like a teetotaller on his first binge or a vicar on his first visit to a brothel, they do not experiment cautiously but go wild at the first sniff of a novel experience and hand the airwaves over to the strangest group produced by the Seventies far Left: the Revolutionary Communist Party.
The best way to describe it is as a cult that followed the teachings of its great helmsman, one Frank Furedi. The best way to understand the paranoia of its politics is to add that Furedi spent years working under the assumed name of “Frank Richards” because, like Lenin and Trotsky before him, he wanted a nom de guerre to throw the spies of the imperialist state off his trail.

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The polls for the Sunday Times and Telegraph have the Lib Dems on 16 per cent and Labour and the Tories well up on the election. Meanwhile, over at the Observer we have a poll showing that leftish Lib Dem voters are ready to defect to Labour.

Who cares when there may not be an election for five years, and every sensible person is checking their beer and wine supplies and preparing for the England game rather than thinking about politics.
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From the Observer

If the British were not such a docile nation, the opening of the Masterpiece London for buyers of “to die for” luxuries, would have provoked riots in the streets. The timing could not have been worse. In the week in which George Osborne presented a budget whose punishment of the humble for a recession brought on by the mighty looks nastier by the day, dealers turned the site of the old Chelsea Barracks into a temple of conspicuous consumption. Never has good taste seemed such poor form.

To describe the extravaganza as an art or antiques sale would be to miss its scope. The organisers of Masterpiece have not tried to woo a specific market, but assembled a mishmash of exhibitors, who have little in common beyond their determination to sell extremely expensive items to extraordinarily wealthy customers. If you have to ask the prices of the rare pink diamonds from Asprey, the Fabergé pieces of A La Vieille Russie, the regency bookcases, the 1932 Bugatti, the black walnut billiard table or the De Bethune watches which look so enticing in their gold and platinum cases… you probably can’t afford them. If you catch glimpses of paintings which remind you of Renoir or Constable amid the fine wine, jewellery and furniture, that will be because they are by Renoir or Constable.

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In last Sunday’s Observer I looked at the collapse in standards in British TV drama. Why it is that a generation ago, intelligent Americans desperate for grown-up entertainment would turn to British series on Masterpiece Theatre,and now their British counterparts watch American shows? My explanation was that British television executives did not see themselves as failures. On the contrary, and from their point of view quite fairly, they boasted that they were still worldbeaters at producing successful formulas. Unfortunately their formulaic successes were downmarket quiz shows and talent competitions.
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It’s a Sunday in the 1980s. As an Observer reader, the reign of Margaret Thatcher baffles and depresses you, but you know there is more to life than politics. So you check Clive James’s television column, pour yourself a glass of one of the surprisingly good Australian wines which have just reached the off-licences and turn on a quality drama. Brideshead Revisited, maybe, or Boys From the Blackstuff. Whatever it is, it will be British, for in the 1980s, everyone agreed that British television was “the envy of the world”.

After the loss of empire, the British used to console themselves by saying that pretty much everything was the envy of the world. Foreigners were meant to envy our monarchy, although, as a young republican, I couldn’t help noticing that they were not rushing to replace their elected presidents with spare members of the House of Windsor. Others declared the police, the judiciary, Parliament were beyond compare.

But when the British said their television was a world-beater, they weren’t just bragging.
Carry on reading