I’m dropping my Tuesday series: Bulletpoints for a Conservative Government.

The reason is, I’ve had a few communications saying my ideas are too ambitious and impractical for real politicians in the real world.

Hello! Has anyone noticed what’s going on out there? The old methods and certainties have all blown away in the political equivalent of Hurricane Katrina.

Sitting on the sidelines, as I am, I’m constantly excercised by the lack of ambition of many politicians. Policy is designed around presentation rather than substance. How will it play in the Daily Mail is the criterion for success. If you’re looking out for logs you might trip over, you’ll eventually walk into a wall.

As for Gordon Brown, if you took him for a stroll through Sherwood Forest and asked him his opinion of it, he’d probably reply: “What forest? I only saw a lot of trees.”

So, big, bold ideas for big, bold times.

Would any party actually leave all those international institutions? Actually, I’d be satisfied with just an exit from the European Union. I’m a simple soul.

Let’s hope David Cameron is a true reformer. If he is, he won’t need my battering-ram ideas.

John Evans

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Foreign Secretary David Miliband was on the Andrew Marr programme this morning and in subdued mood. The only memorable thing I recall is: “We have to inject demand into the economy.”

Does he know what “demand” actually is? And can it be injected?

The Keynesian left often uses mechanical words and phrases to describe nebulous processes. The aim in this case is to increase spending in the real economy to boost employment and lower social security payouts. There are many ways of doing this, mostly they don’t work.

For example, if civil servants went to a typical High Street to hand out briefcases full of banknotes, what would happen?

Two years ago most recipients might head for the nearest celebrity chef restaurant and drink the menu. On the way home they might pop into a jewellery shop to buy a bauble for the missus. That would push money into the real economy and boost employment. But it wasn’t needed two years ago.

Today, by contrast, a hollow-cheeked citizen would probably open the case and exclaim, “Now I can pay off the mortgage arrears, pay down the credit card, and put the rest into a savings account.”

Since all that money will end up back in financial institutions, it’s not going to affect unemployment at all. And since banks are hoarding cash while asset prices are falling, it’s not going to improve credit either.

Typically, Keynesians call this “priming the pump”. When was the last time you used a pump?

Demand is not a mechanism that can be turned on and off, it’s a psychological idea and depends on many unknown unknowns. Even then, is it actually “demand” we’re discussing here?

Do we walk into a supermarket and say, “I demand you sell me these eggs!” Or a car dealer’s forecourt: “I demand to own that car”. Of course not, demand is not involved at all, unless we’re robbing the place.

Our “needs” will generally be met in a downturn because we can tailor them to our resources, and we don’t actually need very much.

In a modern economy, it’s our “wants” that add the froth and pump up economic activity. By engaging in “demand management”, the government is really making us spend on inconsequentials, fripperies and other luxuries we can well do without. It’s trying to create “disposable income” which we can dispose of without a qualm.

Moreover, our wants are viewed from a different perspective when times are hard. The puritan side of our nature re-emerges and we scorn our previous spendthrift activities. We become rational again.

Odd, isn’t it, that our elected representatives prefer us to be irrational, and use our own money to bribe us into exuberant expenditure. How are they different from the pushy credit card companies at the height of the boom?

But it’s still not Demand, is it? Wrong word. Let’s use Wishful Spending instead.

I know it’s not as impressive or managerial as Demand, but at least it means what it says, and we would know what the authorities were trying to make us do.

Wishful spending management: the infantilization of the population completed. Mission accomplished!

Politicians have their own terminology of praise, faint or otherwise. One favourite is: “He has bottom”. Strange, it’s never used about a woman.

Does Gordon have bottom?

Well, you could do worse than glance at Gerald Scarfe’s wicked cartoon in today’s Sunday Times. Brown is depicted as demonstrating quantitative easing to members of the G20.

I’ll leave you to imagine the scenario … or pay the £2 price of the paper.

The roasting of Gordon Brown proceeds apace this weekend.

Yesterday it was Matthew Parris’s turn to take aim and fire. In The Times (London) he eviscerated, excoriated, then practically excommunicated the man from all polite society west of Margate and south of Dunfermline.

Today, Matthew d’Ancona of the Telegraph squeezed him dry till the pips squeaked: “The spandex-clad superhero has lost his aura of power. Mervyn King has cancelled his credit card.”

Peter Oborne also weighed in on Saturday with more thudding blows to an already bruised body. Following Daniel Hannan’s surprise rapier attack on European soil, the commentariat is piling in for the kill.

It’s not surprising. The world is expecting its Saviour-in-Chief to pull a giant rabbit from a small hat on Thursday. The G20 has been massively over-promised, thanks to Brown.

The decline is over, only the fall is left. Will he walk away now from the defeat that’s coming? Or will he limit the pain by calling a June General Election?

He’s no William Wallace.

The enigma at the heart of the hysterical response to supposed man-made global warming, is that paradoxically, its goals are so limited.

If carbon is indeed the problem, why keep trimming away at the edges? Why not ditch carbon completely?

At present, every human activity results in the production of carbon. Every morsel of energy we use, for light, heat, propulsion, manufacturing and servicing, somewhere down the line involves the burning of long dead trees.

It’s an astonishingly primitive process for a so-called advanced technological society. If we explained to a Stone Age caveman where our abundance of energy comes from, he’d remark drily, “We do that too. You’re not so clever after all.”

Where is the new motive power source for a truly innovative age that doesn’t depend on combustion of some sort? Wind and solar power require large areas of land to serve a small population, land that will be needed to grow food on in the future.

Greens want to chip away at the usage of carbon burning sources while the human population is doubling every century or so. It doesn’t add up.

All effort and investment should be directed at eliminating the combustion phase in the production of energy, not spending vast sums shoring up defences against future events which may never happen. If all the resources devoted to “green” alternatives were switched to that one objective, do you suppose it would fail?

Why pauperize whole economies in a futile attempt to empty the sea with a bucket?

Niall Ferguson’s thoughtful lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies (Get pdf here) on the trilemma of modern politics, prompts a lot of questions. Here’s one of them:

What halted the Doha international trade agreement was India’s veto. They were worried about the possibility of mass suicides among Indian farmers helpless against huge surges of imports into their country. Once again it was a clash between local sensibilities and a theoretical set of principles set out by the world’s power brokers. Local versus global.

The notion of “one world” is valid only on a spiritual level. As a philosophical Idealist, I certainly hold that view. However, on a practical level, it’s not true at all. Go and talk to those Indian farmers to find out why.

C.G. Jung’s description of a Collective Unconscious tells a complicated story. Many of the “archetypes” found there deal with self-preservation and can be terrifying to behold. He warned Westerners in particular not to lose themselves in this psychic realm because, as rationalists, they have no defence against the symbolic nature of it.

The nearest we have to a world mind is the internet. Jung would have been fascinated by it. However, his warnings ring true when some people get so caught up in the web of social media sites that they become unhinged and separated from reality. All those teenage suicides in the small town of Bridgend gives us an inkling.

People need feet of clay to be contented in this world. A satisfactory local environment is needed for mental harmony. It’s not speculative. It has actuality.

Our minds are not constructed to deal with planetary affairs, however much half-deranged politicians like Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson may insist the contrary.

One World is forever an aspiration, never a finished construct. Only swamis in caves in the Himalayas can contemplate the cosmos as a unity.

For the rest of us, it’s business as usual, right here, right now. The G20 will produce only sporadic results papering over many cracks.

It’s the cracks we should be celebrating, not the glue. They are the real thing. The stuff of freedom. Wabi sabi, as the Japanese say.

When the world can live with its cracks and fissures, then a kind of unity is possible.

John Evans

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A view frequently expressed by internet entrepreneurs and commentators is: “Local is good”. To put it bluntly, it means that there’s more money to be made by serving a local community with advertising than by offering global coverage.

Three years ago that was not true. Even when the dollar was low and the pound high, a British website could make more from U.S. ads than British ones. I know, I tried both.

Here I’m more concerned with very local conditions: individual towns and counties. And, in particular, that “river of gold”, classified advertising.

Small Ads, as most people call them, are deserting local newspapers in a mad stampede and migrating online. Big ticket categories like cars, properties and jobs are piling into specialized websites where you can upload pictures and text, then sit back and wait for the response.

Local papers are losing out across the board in these areas. Many are closing down, most are currently up for sale. A month ago the Daily Mail group sold the prestigious London Evening Standard for £1 to a Russian oligarch who was once a KGB spy. The original Northcliffe must be spinning in his tomb.

The economics are stark: the costs of printing and distributing a newspaper or magazine, to the standards we have grown used to, are now prohibitive. Big websites may not yet be yielding a profit, but their smaller, nippier competitors are, or are about to do just that.

The question of where we will get our local news from is a pertinent one, especially as many councils are using badly-drafted anti-terror legislation to spy on people’s habits and activities. Not only do we get a KGB spymaster owning a major local newspaper, but KGB methodology too.

Clearly we need to be informed in our local patch. While 24-hour news concentrates on mainstream concerns at a national and international level, big TV is generally retreating from small stories in small towns. It’s not at all obvious whether small stations can fill the gap, while radio is blind and full of pop music.

It’s also true that big broadcasting and big print occasionally miss the point big time. The Daniel Hannan moment where a politician’s denunciation of Gordon Brown bypassed the mainstream media completely, but became a worldwide hit on YouTube, is a typical case. The story subsequently reflected back into MSM as an internet phenomenon rather than a political one.

Local information needs a light and deft touch, often absent from the big battalions.

As local newspapers fade away, they will be replaced by cheaply run local websites — a cut above blogs but using the same kind of technology and methods.

Here at Syntagma we are setting up a separate company to move into this space. We will start with a Devon and Cornwall site in May, followed by Somerset, and other counties down the line.

It’s an exciting time to be online in the content business. Costs are low, opportunities wide. But above all, with a whole tier of local news disappearing, including ITV’s variable contributions, it’s all to play for.

Local is not only good, it may well be best.

John Evans

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Yesterday, Wednesday the 25th of March, was a fascinating day in British politics.

1. Harriet Harman finally went down in flames as a potential replacement for Gordon Brown as leader of the Labour party, ably assisted by an in-form William Hague, who seems to have regained his appetite for the battle.

2. Gordon Brown’s mediocre, very pro-EU, speech to the European parliament on Tuesday, was brilliantly shot down by Daniel Hannan, the ablest Tory not in the Shadow Cabinet. The intervention is now a hit on YouTube.

3. The disgraceful treatment of naughty-boy banker Fred Goodwin, allied to the walking-dead half-life of the banking system, woke many up to what I have thought for months, that we’ve missed a golden opportunity to save them.

Let’s deal with each in turn:

At PMQs, the two deputies stood in for the leaders as Gordon Brown engineered another self-congratulatory photoshoot for himself in New York — a June election is looking very possible right now.

William Hague, cool and in total command of the House, repeatedly put Harman on the spot by asking her the simplest of unanswerable questions: “Do you agree with the Governor of the Bank of England that we can’t afford another fiscal stimulus?”

There are endless nuances and potential pitfalls all around this topic, so a Yes or No was never on the cards. Harriet, true to form, blustered and bored her way through a tangle of irrelevant statistics and half-formed ideas, leaving an impression of being comprehensively out of her depth.

Ministers on either side of her, Jacqui Smith and Douglas Alexander, watched appalled, though gamely nodded their heads as fatuity followed fatuity. It was wretched for Labour backbenchers as Tories shouted “More!” each time she spoke.

Hapless Harman is emblematic of the state of the whole party. Directionless, deserted by its leader playing his own game, and totally demoralized. There’s no way back from this.

The second incident, Brown’s tedious speech to the EU parliament was brilliantly dissected by another exceptionally able Conservative, Daniel Hannan — why isn’t this man on the front bench at Westminster instead of languishing in solitary over the water?

Hannan’s fusilade of oratorical denunciation and controlled anger, hit the spot so perfectly, the clip has become a must-see on YouTube. Watch it here.

His quip that Brown is like a “Brezhnev era apparatchik” reflects what Syntagma has been saying for months.

The third occurrence was the attack on the Edinburgh home of Fred the Shred, a former buddy of fairweather Brown, who was scapegoated by him in the recent collapse of both men’s policies.

Since government ministers and civil servants have no idea how to run banks, and the well-meaning figures drafted in to do that simply don’t have the experience to turn them round in the timeframe specified: i.e. yesterday, the only real avenue of escape has been bricked up.

The obvious solution at the outset was to summon the bankers to a top level dressing down in Downing Street and present them with an ultimatum:

“You have two options: go to prison for a very long time, or sort out the mess yourselves, whatever it takes. Fail and we will destroy you, succeed and you can retire gracefully. There is no other alternative.”

Very Francis Urquhart, I know, but needs must.

We could now be looking at a very different banking system had that step been taken.

We live in interesting, if frugal, times.

Update: If you would like to comment on Gordon Brown’s tacky plan to butcher the British Constitution by changing the Act of Settlement for electoral advantage, go to our sister site Royal Anecdotes

John Evans

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If we still harbour any doubts about the terminal meltdown of the British Government under Gordon Brown and the Labour party, a new report on the Foreign Office, once Westminster’s jewel in the crown, will dispel them.

New brooms sweep clean — no pressure then?

The report, which has been suppressed by Ministers, presents a picture of the FO as full of incompetents, “cowards” and “clones”. Here’s a snatch of yesterday’s Sunday Times story:

In the report … management consultants mourn the “tragic” descent into mediocrity of a once fine institution, expressing disbelief at the culture that operates in the offices behind closed doors at its imposing Whitehall headquarters. “From the minute one walks into [the] buildings, the office feels second-rate,” it says …

It makes excruciating reading for ministers, saying the once well oiled diplomatic machine is in danger of descending into “stagnation and decay” as it is throttled by “uncertainty, political jockeying and vacillation”.

Every section of the 42-page report, which covers leadership, decision making, communication and the working environment, is critical.

It doesn’t help Labour’s defence that the FO is headed by one of it’s brightest hopes for the future, David Miliband.

The fact is, this is typical of the collapse of government at all levels, and across all departments, in Gordon Brown’s Whitehall. One by one they are declared “not fit for purpose” while Brown slots in yet another party hack to sort it out.

As if David Cameron won’t have enough to do with the grave economic crisis when he arrives at 10 Downing Street, his wider job will be to salvage the entire government machine from the knacker’s yard.

In his darker moments, he must be tempted to throw in the towel and walk away from it. Make no mistake, Whitehall is the British version of Ground Zero.

Sorting out the mess
When a job is too big for mere mortals to handle, the solution is to prune it down into manageable pieces. Cutting and slicing is the only valid response.

In terms of foreign affairs, the answer is to regain control of areas that matter, while withdrawing from those that don’t. Here are our recommendations:

From What if the UK left all international organizations?, March 13, 2009

Resigning our seat on the Security Council, and our place in the General Assembly of the United Nations, would release us from the spider’s web of socialized command and control exercised by “the international community” — a phantom beast that leaves us to pick up the tab, while others ignore the precepts.

Goodbye UNHCR (a factor in the UK’s massive immigration problem), UNESCO, UNICEF, and all other spin-offs that allow totalitarian regimes to lecture us on law and the raising of children. These global quangos reduce us to slaves in our own country.

The G8, G20 and the soon-to-be upon us G200, would not be missed either.

NATO could go too. It’s responsible for the British Army’s underfunded and unsupported agony in Afghanistan. If the Europeans won’t fulfil their obligations, why should we?

Ditching the World Trade Organization (WTO) which, if it were a nation, would be designated a failed State, would place the onus back on us to produce the goods and services others want to buy — genuine free trade.

The IMF and OECD could also be dispensed with, joining European “human” rights conventions and other busybody groupings that have destroyed our once fine legal system.

And finally, the European Union, heir to Louis XIV, Bonaparte and Hitler in its zeal to bring all of Europe under its hegemony. A simple trade agreement is all the UK needs.

The result would be a short period of confusion as our over-remunerated and feather-bedded MPs, and faux lordlings, came to terms with actually running the country, not pretending to be in charge of a mock legislature.

The focus of govenance would be transformed. The Houses of Parliament would receive back the 80 percent of legislation idly handed on a plate to Brussels. Changes for the better would be enormous. Voters would vote again, ensuring the best people were elected to the House that really mattered.

It wouldn’t be paradise or utopia, certainly, but not the current dystopia either. It would save desperately needed money, even if the Security Council seat were regarded as too important to lose.

Other stories related to foreign affairs are linked to below:

John Evans

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We are going through a period of profound transition — from one party in power to another, and from boom to long-term bust. The signs are all around us.

When I first moved to Devon, pedestrian signposts had the patina of age and gave distances in yards and fractions of a mile.

Then Labour came in and the posts were changed to metric ones. These were very unpopular and many were defaced or painted over — we have a UKIP MEP down here, Trevor Coleman. I’ll bet you’ve never heard of him.

Today, I noticed that all the signposts have been changed yet again. Miserably, the yardage is still absent, but at least the Napoleonic metres have gone.

In the Exeter area we now measure distances between sites of interest and public conveniences in minutes.

Yes, some Council plodder has been trudging around the City and environs with stopwatch and pencil recording how long it takes to walk from point to point. The job was probably advertised in The Guardian at £100k a year.

I’ll leave you to imagine what comes next. Brussels will surely not take this lying down.

I’ve been waiting for years for a new EU system for measuring time. Euroheures, perhaps.

I watched Lord (Adair) Turner on the Andrew Marr show this morning with incredulity.

He’s a clever chap, no doubt, and he’s had more Government jobs than you can shake a pile of sticks at. In his new dual role as Financial Services chief and compiler of future rules on bank surveillance, he demands to be heard.

So I was both amused and bemused by his implacable and persistent defence of the status quo in banking regulation.

A new Glass-Steagull Act? No, there are occasions when crossovers between retail and investment banking are inevitable. And Lehmans was not a deposit-taker, yet still crashed the system.

Strict limits on capital adequacy? We should be careful because smaller banks will not be big enough to support the economy.

Tighter regulation all round? We’re not facing a repeat of present circumstances for decades, so let’s lob that into the long grass for the foreseeable future.

He is, though, recommending a huge expansion of the FSA and its responsibilities. Presumably that means ratcheting up its present cost of £350m annually closer to a round billion.

Even when reducing its caseload, the public sector seeks to expand its budget.

A blast from the past is never far away in our 24-hour media.

Last week the name of Ayn Rand appeared again in the public prints under the distinguished byline of Gladstonite flag-bearer, Simon Heffer. Ye Gods, I had completely blanked this lady out from memory.

I first read her most famous tome Atlas Shrugged in the late 1980s when Thatcherism was the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, in the City of London where I then worked.

I have to confess, I was underimpressed by the book. Apart from being an immensely long novel about the endeavours of capitalist heroes and their socialist enemies in Depression era America, it was stupifyingly boring.

It also seemed to me to be almost identical in reverse to the Stalinist artworks about the endeavours of socialist heroes in the Soviet Union, where the Depression never ended.

The book is full of cardboard characters, with people representing notions rather than anyone you might know. A lesser version of a Shaw play without the wit and humour.

Interestingly, Rand grew up under Stalin before escaping to America, so understood what Communism was like at first hand. Even allowing for that, her advocacy of capitalism red in tooth and claw, operating like a vast machine, visible across every landscape, was too similar to Stalin’s murderous industrialization policies for my taste. Both philosophies shared the same inhuman and ultimately self-defeating qualities.

As we could be entering Great Depression 2.0, it should have some resonance today. I’m sure the basic idea is sound. Free individuals, subject to creative destruction, allocate scarce resources better than booby bureaucrats, as we know all too well.

But there’s something missing. It’s called Up-To-A-Pointism, and in present circumstances we would do well to remember it.

Rand’s Objectivism would lead us all the way back to where we now find ourselves.

Much fuss over the new, proposed 45 percent tax rate for £150k+ earners. As some commentators have said, it could be another of Gordon Brown’s less than subtle traps of the “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” variety, opening the way to the charge of “Tory cuts!”.

In defensive response, Shadow Chancellor George Osborne signalled that he may not be able to avoid retaining it once in power, given the state of the economy. It may have been more profitable to avoid the subject.

It has to be said, George Osborne attracts a great deal of antipathy from individuals on his own side. There are those of a Tory persuasion who would flay him alive if they thought they could get away with it.

So far, the leadership has adopted the sensible strategy not to give too much away before the election, which could be as late as June next year. History relates that Margaret Thatcher did much the same in 1979.

But how should David Cameron address Brown’s inevitable taunt of “Tory cuts”?

With real anger. He should turn it back on Brown, branding them “Brown’s Cuts”. As Chancellor, he ran the prosperity-creating parts of the economy ruthlessly into the ground to fund his bloated public domain.

Cameron should repeat the phrase at every possible opportunity to dull the edge of Brown’s claymore in the campaign proper. A taste of his own poison will throw Brown into confusion and drill the message into voters’ heads.

As Corporal Jones used to say, “They don’t like it up ‘em”.

Mr “Green”, Jonathon Porritt, adviser to Prince Charles and Gordon Brown, wants Britain’s population reduced to 30 million. At present it stands at 61m and is expected to rise to 71m in 20 years.

What exactly are we supposed to do with the excess 40m people? Should we drop them into shark-infested waters? Ship them through the channel tunnel and dump them in France? Maybe have regular culls like the Canadians do with baby seals?

How do we know we ourselves won’t be included in the list?

One thing’s for sure, no one will mention that the recent immigrant population is having children at a much faster rate than the natives.

Where was Porritt when Labour’s open-door stealth immigration policy was foisted on a reluctant Britain?

H.G. Wells thought that the optimum world population was two billion. What would he make of the 7bn sardines now living on the planet?

One can’t help thinking that Jonathon Porritt would be regarded as one of humanity’s worst ogres if ever he gets round to formulating a policy to carry out his new, big idea.

Prince Charles should gently guide his old friend to the nearest rest home for oddballs and nutters.

John Evans

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On this morning’s Today Programme there was a good-natured discussion about Confucius. The Master would have been pleased.

It seems the old Sage is enjoying a comeback in his native China, where the Communist ruling elite is considering changing its name to the Confucian Party. Have they actually read his words, I’m tempted to ask?

Here’s a little flavour in the form of a quiz:

1. Which British Prime Minister does this saying suggest?

The Master said, “It is rare, indeed, for a man with cunning words and an ingratiating face to be benevolent.”

Clue: Initials, TB.

2. To which British Prime Minister could this saying be directed?

The Master said, “In guiding a State of a thousand chariots, … be trustworthy in what you say; avoid excesses in expenditure and love your fellow men; employ the labour of the common people only in the right seasons.”

Clue: Initials, GB.

And a lesson for the Labour party when in office:

The Master said, “If you insist on guiding them by edicts, keeping them in line with punishments, the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. On the other hand, if you guide them by virtue, keeping them in line with long-held conventions, they will, besides having a sense of shame, reform themselves.”

Now that’s a good principle for a new Conservative Government — remember the Common Law?

Finally, another ancient Chinese saying that Brussels would be wise to heed:

Create ten thousand regulations and you lose all respect for the law.

Where is the modern Confucius? We could do with him now.

John Evans

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A new feature summarizing policy ideas suggested on this site.

From: DIARY: Education, March 1, 2009.

The State education system in Britain just gets worse and worse. Hyperactive jobsworths are forever coming up with new wheezes that dazzle in the headlines for an hour but have no merit in practice.

The entire structure is probably beyond repair after 12 years of scorched earth policies for everything that promotes a well-stocked mind and an understanding of the principles that stand behind ideas and formulations.

The Conservatives have yet to jettison some of Labour’s most pernicious obsessions, like the refusal to allow selection in academic subjects. I have high hopes they will do so in office.

But what should the basic education system provide?

It should give students the ability to position themselves in time and space, with historical narrative as the time axis, and geography as the space axis. Both subjects have been severely downgraded in primary and secondary schooling.

The curriculum should also be shorn of soft “social” subjects better learnt at home or through experience. All attempts at social engineering should be strictly outlawed.

Psychobabble has become a wordy substitute for a true understanding of human nature, which is not a machine. Allied to that, PC (political so-called correctness) has assumed fascist proportions in attempts to control the thoughts of the population. Schools lead the way as mind-cleansing centres of anything with which the government disagrees.

Why do they do that? Because “they” — and we know who they are — want us all to be just like them.

Sorry, we don’t.

A lost generation of schoolchildren from the Labour years will probably never be redeemed and will haunt the future as they carry the mouldy seed of mediocrity forward.

The Conservatives can make a start on creating a new wave of educated young people with a better grasp of the fundamentals and of more use to the 21st-century world.

From: Conservatives dream of Silicon Alley, February 27, 2009.

The British happen to be very good at these secondary and tertiary levels of the manufacturing process. One thing holds them back.

The national curriculum and the educational establishment relentlessly discriminate against “abstract thinking”, the basic skill for succeeding in these areas. Universities are encouraged to subvert their course lists in favour of cottonwool subjects like media studies and sports management.

In Britain, you can select students for State schooling only in areas of music, sport, and other physical and dexterity arts. You can’t select for mathematics or disciplines which require abstract thinking, like philosophy, theoretical physics or logic.

Stupidly and destructively, the Labour party has created all manner of taboos against it, raising academic selection almost to criminal status. So far, the Conservatives have gone along with this for a quiet life. They fear the demonizing power of the left, which is far nastier than they are.

That amounts to national suicide, especially for a country that was, within living memory, responsible for 55 percent of the world’s primary inventions and discoveries.

If George Osborne wants to adopt the can-do attitudes of West Coast Silicon Valley and Seattle, let him sort out that problem first. Britain needs to train home-grown developers and software engineers, not import them from India and the Far East. More engineers in general are also urgently needed.

From: Why is Gordon Brown protecting the rest of the world?, January 31, 2009.

Ralph Waldo Emerson had a simple solution to most economic woes:

“If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”

That worthy objective can’t be achieved by government. All it can do is ensure that education is tip-top, support meritocracy and real social mobility, and give up trying to micromanage national life.

Gosh, I think I’m making a case for a Conservative Government.

It would be a new dawn, would it not?

The Conservative Shadow Education spokesman, Michael Gove, will have his work cut out to make instant improvements to a depressingly hopeless State education system. It will take three Parliaments to get the structure right, never mind the quality teachers it needs.

Opposition from the blockheaded educational establishment will be fierce. An alternative approach might be to set up a separate system alongside the State one, allowing parents to migrate across voluntarily. It would be difficult for teachers’ unions to strike against the freely made choices of parents and pupils.

Abolishing the politically contaminated teachers’ training colleges would also be a godsend to good heads and concerned parents.

Liberal-Democrat leader Nick Clegg’s new overgrown-schoolboy hairdo is much too Red Nose Day for inclusion in a serious political website — so I’m writing about it here.

When William Hague first adopted his Mekon cut, I remember thinking he must have lost his marbles along with his tresses. Do you recall his Neanderthal mane at 16? But, over the years, his egghead look has grown on us. At least it allows him to age gracefully.

By contrast, as Cleggie gets older, his haircut will become younger and younger. A bit like the picture of Dorian Gray.

I bet this dyed, bristly, birdsnest soupcon is redesigned before very much longer.

As a natural-born conservative, I’ve always been attracted to Edmund Burke’s idea of the “natural society” — one in which people find their own social levels according to ability and inclination, and are able to speak out freely as they wish.

It seems obvious to me that such an arrangement results in a generally contented population, and therefore a peaceable one.

The Labour government (1997-2009) has destroyed that homely consensus. Early on, it introduced a rigid system of Marxist equality legislation that imported alien doctrines and rigidities into Britain. All manner of inoffensive folk were inexplicably demonized, and often criminalized, for views and actions that would not have been remarked upon during centuries past.

Ideological correctness was the order constantly barked from above. An Orwellian State sprouted up where once civility and civilization stood. Society as a whole became disorganized and sullen, with serious outbreaks of violence on the streets, especially among the young of all classes. Alcoholism is now commonplace, as are hard drug habits, knife and gun crime.

All this recent misery and disorder can be traced back to obsessive social engineering by government ministers we wouldn’t trust to assemble a flat-pack whelk stall.

How we have lost our natural society, and what we can do to retrieve it, is a big topic for another day. For now, let’s speculate on what the founders of psychoanalysis, Freud, Jung and Adler, would have made of New Labour Britain — in my own, surmised, words:

“Equality is a dangerous matter for politicians to touch. They have no idea what complex areas of the mind they are meddling with. Equality before God, the law and the ballot box is as far as a democratic society should go. Any further and it risks wholesale disturbance across the population.

“If people are forced to bottle up their natural instincts and inclinations, with no outlets of expression, they develop severe anxiety neuroses and tensions that will increasing boil over into social disorder. People who are discontented most of the time inevitably reach for the bottle and the needle to calm their inner turmoil.

“Enforcing equality of attributes is a minefield best left alone. It is also self-defeating because attributes are, by their very nature, unequally distributed across the human population. Every parent observes that fact in the personalities of their children, which are anything but equal, despite sharing a genetic makeup.

“Nothing, save losing a war on homeground, is as explosively destructive of civilized values than enforced equality of attributes. Karl Marx, like all socialists, never understood human nature. Look where that got him — he nearly destroyed the world.”

Something else for David Cameron’s Conservatives to get rid of then?

Have you tried Sainsbury’s sugar-free dark chocolate? I’m chewing on a lump now and it’s surprisingly good. In fact it tastes just like normal chocolate.

It’s supposed to be beneficial to the old ticker too. Something to do with antioxidants and all that.

Predictably, the killjoys were out in force this week rubbishing claims that the dark brown stuff is good for you. You’ll get fat, they shriek. Obesity is a fate worse than death. Stop before it’s too late!

It’s enough to give you a heart attack, isn’t it?

Why do the current crop of British politicians copy everyone else?

Whenever a new policy is suggested, the accompanying spin alerts us to the supposedly comforting fact that it’s been developed and tried out by Sweden/Australia/America … and other generous countries around the world.

Has the UK lost its ability to create policy ideas pertinent to its history and the specific aspirations of its people?

Let’s be frank, the Labour party is an ideas-free zone, it can no more identify the wider needs of Britons than it can manage the economy for any decent length of time.

Under its diktat, almost every part of the country has been reduced to pathetic shards of failure and dereliction. Observe Labour’s strongholds in Glasgow, where constant Labour local government has bequeathed the inhabitants a life-expectancy lower than sub-Saharan Africa.

Make no mistake, the task of the upcoming Tory Government will be like the Labours of Hercules.

As we gear up for a possible June election, all the old arguments about that hallowed stretch of real estate, the centre ground, are bubbling up again.

This sacred turf is said to be the only place from which a party can win a General Election. Both centre-left and centre-right positions deter a crucial constituency — Middle Britain.

Given that Gordon Brown has boxed himself in electorally by a strange combination of anger and timidity — classic traits of the bully — a June 2009 poll is overwhelmingly his least worst choice. Even Peter Mandelson apparently accepts that view. We must assume it’s a strong possibility.

Will Brown try to regain the centre ground for Labour from the artful Conservatives? And should the Tories attempt to defend it by circling the wagons?

My own view is that the so-called centre ground is a myth. Margaret Thatcher won three elections in a row. Her radical thinking became the norm, the consensual heart of British political discourse. Yet most voters saw her as distinctly right wing. How can that be explained?

What she occupied was not the boring old centre, but the High Centre Ground, that pinnacle from which the entire terrain is visible. As the old song has it: “On a clear day, you can see forever”.

This week, David Cameron’s apology for failing to spot the flaws in the runaway economy plonked him squarely in the High Centre of British politics.

You had your chance, Gordon. You blew it!

Again.

For months I’ve been putting up pieces in Syntagma exploring new policy initiatives for an incoming Conservative Government. (Note the capital G in the spelling; Labour always gets a derisory lower-case for its dismal performance.)

However, these snippets are distributed around the site unmarked and less coherently than they should be. So we’ve decided to start a new weekly feature column: Pointers to a Conservative Government on Tuesdays, in the run up to Dave’s misty-eyed entry into 10 Downing Street.

It will be a new dawn, will it not?

It will also be the beginning of a Trojan effort by the Party to rebuild a truly blasted heath of a country. It will take at least three Parliaments to achieve.

We’ve already covered education, manufacturing, public borrowing and public sector govenance, along with globalization and parts of foreign policy (see yesterday’s Saturday Ramble), but will now put them all under one roof for convenience.

I hope the views of a Burkean Democrat Minimalist Conservative (BDMC — a new species) may prompt an echoing response from within the Party’s leadership.

They will need all the help they can get.

John Evans

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