Mr Toad votes Conservative

As the Tory Party prepares for its annual conference, the big idea appears to have been leaked a week early.  The Government is to consult on increasing the motorway speed limit to 80mph – Transport Secretary Philip Hammond claims that it will be good for business and will earn redress for the victims of the “war against the motorist”.

At almost every level this is a disastrous piece of policy.  Safety campaigners have already pointed out the potential impact on road casualties (especially on roads that have been engineered to be safe at 70mph); but that’s just the start of it.  The impact on business looks like a red herring – yes, most of our freight travels by road and since we simply don’t have the long trips (over 1000km) at which rail freight becomes viable it will stay that way.  But trucks are limited by EU law to 90kph (56mph) using speed governors so this move will make no difference to them – and the representatives of the haulage industry have long argued that what they need is not faster but reliable journey times.

So any time benefits will accrue to private, not commercial vehicles – and even here it looks as if the arguments just don’t stand up.  The main motorway routes in the UK are seriously congested – all that will happen is that cars will move faster between jams, burning far more carbon in the process.  This measure will do nothing to tackle the underlying congestion problems, and is quite likely – by increasing the volatility of flow on the network and crucially by increasing the number of accidents – to make things worse.  And finally the Government argues that most people are breaking the speed limit anyway – so where is the evidence that lifting the limit will make them stop?

And I’ve blogged before about the “war on the motorist” nonsense – the fact is that over many years the real costs of motoring have fallen and the real costs of public transport have risen.  In the next few years we’ll see swingeing fare increases on the railways so that’s not likely to change.

In other words – as with so many other coalition measures – we’ve left the world of evidence behind in the name of cheap populism.  I’m looking forward to seeing the analysis that underpins this one – I guess it will largely be based on time-savings to all users without considering the offsetting costs.  The creative accountancy that appears to afflict the appraisals for HS2 – another project that values speed for the privileged few more highly than the impact on the many – is likely to be deployed in force here.

Underlying all this is one of the defining themes of this Coalition – the flight from evidence and the conduct of government according to prejudice. As I’ve said before, the Coalition appears to want to do politics rather than government, and in this case is pandering to what is, frankly, adolescent prejudice – there is no more flagrant and depressing example of cognitive bias than the motorist assessing his own driving skills, especially when excusing his desire to go faster and break the law.

A disgraceful, dishonest speech to a discredited party

I really shouldn’t watch the Liberal Democrat conference.  There is something repellent in the extreme about a party which once claimed to be radical celebrating its achievements of voting through one Tory measure after another.  Tuition Fees? The lies are now part of British political mythology.  NHS? Liberal Democrats in Parliament continue to vote through a Bill that will allow the effective privatisation of a service that Liberal Democrats swore to protect.  They couldn’t even summon the conference floor votes needed to debate it. Lies, hypocrisy, gutlessness, spin.  Birmingham 2011 has it all.

But nothing quite hit the depths of pure mendacity of the performance by Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone.  It was presented as a rallying-cry for equality – equality throughout the world.

But there was one crucial omission – women in the UK.  Not one word. The multi-millionaire Equalities Minister did not have one word to say about the perfect storm of benefit cuts, cuts in services and cuts in public sector jobs which are estimated to be reducing the real incomes of the poorest women in society – in a society where women already bear the brunt of poverty – by nearly 20%.  Not one word.  Not one word about the benefit cuts – while in the ideological playground of the DWP Ministers are advised by Phillipa Stroud, defeated Tory election candidate who believes that homosexuality can be “cured” by prayer. Not one syllable about the price being paid by women for the Coalition’s neo-liberal experiment.

This was the purest grandstanding – grandstanding by a Minister who has simply failed to live up to her brief.  It can’t be easy being the Equality Minister in this Government – a bit like being the token art teacher in a boys’ public school, in the institution but not of it.  But the outcomes make it clear – this is a Minister who has failed to fight her corner.  She should have come – even to this gathering of the clueless and morally-compromised – to apologise, not to crow.

Under the Coalition things have got vastly worse for women, and will get worse still. You have to be on a different planet, or a Liberal Democrat, not to notice that.  The Lib Dems’ regular low single-digit votes in council by-elections is perhaps a sign that reality is about to bite back.

 

Closure

It has been widely reported this week that one Leslie Carter, a former school chaplain, has pleaded guilty to a number of offences of indecency with boys dating back to 1957.   He will be sentenced on 19 October and the judge at Harrow Crown Court warned him to expect a custodial sentence.  It’s a case that has given rise to quite a bit of media interest since it’s one of the oldest abuse cases that has been successfully prosecuted.

I have been following the case with interest as I was a pupil at Quainton Hall School, the North London prep school where Carter taught, during the time he was there.

My clearest memory of that time is that everybody knew that Carter was unsafe around boys – the parents knew it and the boys certainly did.  It’s absolutely inconceivable that what would now be called the Senior Management Team didn’t know what was going on.  Indeed, Carter landed the post at the school after he had had to leave South Africa after incidents with boys there – the school at that stage was entirely in private hands, run by an elderly clergyman who was portrayed as something close to a saint while ruling with unchallenged and arbitrary authority –  and who knows what transpired when Carter was given that job.  Those who rail today about the bureaucracy of CRB checks and the like (not that they would have picked up Carter’s offences) might do well to reflect on the amateurism on display here.  But what does seem clear is that Carter was only able to carry out his activities because the school – at every level – was willing to look the other way.

Moreover, what one remembers from the time was how Carter’s activities permeated the school.  I wouldn’t necessary call it an atmosphere of fear, or even – to use the sort of language that tabloids deploy – of evil; but there was a perpetual underlying unease around Carter, an environment of edginess and caution and perpetual wariness.  This was a school, affiliated with the Shrine of Our Lady in Walsingham, whose ethos was one of a hot sweet Anglo-Catholicism in which the office of priest carried an authority and power that is difficult, forty years on in a secular environment, to describe – except to say that it was wielded in full in a way that did nothing to reduce the unease.  Carter held absolute authority in a school chapel in which a Caucasian wounded Christ glared down at us from a crucifix, and in which a blond, blue-eyed Caucasian Virgin Mary, sexless but with eyes full of pain at the sin of the boys she surveyed, stared out from an alcove.  Against this background Carter told us that the Jews had suffered their legitimate punishment over the centuries for crucifying Christ.  Original sin and the fundamental unworthiness of boys was dunned into us by a man who routinely took his favourites aside and interfered with them.

Looking at the School website, I see nothing but business as usual – a Prep School seeking to set off all the triggers that such schools do to lure parents through the door.  It would get Michael Gove purring with pleasure. The Christian ethos is adjusted to reflect the much greater ethnic diversity of the school – boys from Hindu and Muslim background as well as the many Jewish boys I recall from my time there.  I am sure that the school as it is now would have all the right processes in place to stop anything like this happening in future.  But private schools are masters of spin – never apologise, never explain.  No expression of regret – why should there be? The masters and governors of that time are retired or dead, the boys middle-aged with probably a sprinkling of grandparents among them.

I have thought quite a lot about apology.  I’ve in the past been a bit sceptical about closure and apologies – I’ve been inclined to think that it can be a false gesture.  But I feel in this case that the school should be prepared to apologise, and, yes, closure is needed. In many ways my contempt is far greater for the two headmasters of the time, the staff and the governors who, faced with this disgrace, retreated into silence and inaction, than for Carter himself.  Carter is what he is and should never have been allowed to enjoy the position he did; the headteachers and governors, in my view, put boys in his way through the moral delinquencies of rank-closing and selective ignorance and they bear their share of responsibility, especially if – as I suspect (I have of course no way of knowing) – deals were done within the Anglo-Catholic community to find Carter a safe berth.  Perhaps that’s unfair – and I appreciate I’d probably feel diffrerently had I been one of the victims who had lived for decades with the trauma and shame of what this man did.

But it seems to me that a full apology by the school’s Governors is needed, and now.  It remains to be seen whether an institution which, in the affair of Carter, appeared at the time to use piety to hide their moral compromises, has the courage to respond now.

Bread, circuses and the smell of fear

David Cameron has today delivered a speech on education, at the opening of the Norwich Free School.  It offers an astonishingly reactionary and in many respects deeply ill-informed view of what schools are about.  But it’s just the latest in a line of utterances in which huggie-hooding Dave, a man whom the Telegraph Blogs regarded as not quite one of us, has fallen in line with the ethos and values of the tabloid right.

So what’s happening?

One explanation is that this is the real Cameron emerging.  I think there’s some truth in that – I’m not sure anyone really fell for the “compassionate conservatism” inclusiveness schtick before the election, and here he seems to be reverting to type – the red-faced Bullingdon boy spluttering about feral youth and health and safety destroying the fabric of society.  You can take the boy out of Eton …

But I think there’s something much deeper than that, and I think a comparison with Margaret Thatcher is quite instructive.

Watching Cameron and Co, one’s respect for Thatcher as a political operator increases.  That old Cromwellian quote about the russet-coated captains, who knew what they fought for and loved what they knew, comes strongly to mind.  Thatcher made sure her people were looked after – she tapped into a deep populism through her sales of council houses, her attacks on unions, and so on.  On Maggie’s farm they always fed the pigs – Cameron expects the police to be the front-line against the effects of his policies while cutting jobs and pensions.  Thatcher was supremely shrewd at picking her battles. And she knew how to appeal to her natural support in middle England, even when the actions of her government conflicted with their interests.

Cameron and his cabinet of millionaires cannot seem to manage that.  Middle England is taking a colossal economic hit as a result of his – and more specifically Osborne’s – politics.  We’re seeing double digit increases in domestic fuel prices; the cost of a university education soaring; cuts to libraries and other services that Middle England relies on; house prices are falling;  changes to child benefit are hitting middle-class families hard; older people on fixed incomes, with interest rates close to zero, are being tanked. Of course the poor are being hit far harder – homelessness rose by a staggering 17 per cent last year, and cuts in benefits and services are taking as much as 20 per cent of the poorest’s incomes away – but Conservatives and Liberal Democrats do not care about the poor, except when it comes to making examples of them.

It’s impossible to imagine Thatcher attacking the living standards of her core supporters so hard.  In part there’s a difference in background; whatever one may think of Thatcher, for someone of her gender and her class to become Tory leader – a Tory icon, indeed – required energy, work, sheer guts.  It’s a world away from the monied ease of this cabinet of millionaires.  Thatcher knew something of adversity (despite enjoying huge personal privilege, especially by marrying a very wealthy man); Cameron and his cabinet know nothing of it, and lack the moral and intellectual capacity to deal with it.  Look at Cameron’s red-faced anger in the House of Commons when Labour people attack him; and his treatment of women MPs at PMQs suggests that there’s a rather nasty strand of misoginy behind the shiny mask.

So faced with the obvious fact that economic policy has become a disaster, and is hitting his supporters hard, it seems to me that Cameron has retreated into a world where life is easier. He’s taken up political residence in Daily Mail land, where he can rally his supporters by pandering to the atavistic instincts of his media supporters.  It’s an environment where the nasty tendency of the real world to bite back can be minimised, and where the inconveniences of contrary evidence can be comfortably ignored.  It’s the world where things are simple and that bloke Delingpole has a point.  He’s saying – you may not be able to afford to heat your house this winter, and your children are going to graduate with £50k of debt and no job prospects, but at least we’re articulating your values and standing up against political correctness gone mad.  It’s a world where he and his orchestra of Telegraph bloggers and Daily Mail leader writers can fiddle calmly while the economy crashes, and while the democratic deficit in our society acquires proportions that the economic deficit never possessed.

And it’s not about strength, or realism, or being honest, or any other of the words that Conservatives like to use when they’re indulging in fantasy.  It’s ideological bread and circuses, to distract Middle England from failures that Tories in Government cannot comprehend or begin to deal with.  And it’s a symptom of stark, staring fear.