Why UNICEF are wowzers

Sorry for not posting earlier as Femme-de-Resistance had promised. The UNICEF report (pdf) helpfully presents its raw data in a format that I couldn't just paste into Excel, so I had to do a lot of typing to understand what was going on.

The first point to make is that trying to produce a "league table" by combining indicators as disparate as relative income poverty and smoking rates is an inherently absurd exercise. Precisely what percentage of average household income is it worth not to smoke? The report tries a sensible approach (normalising every indicator to have the same mean and standard deviation) but still has to decide which indicators are most important.

The report weasels this by saying

Equal weighting is the standard approach used in the absence of any compelling reason to apply different weightings and is not intended to imply that all elements used are considered of equal significance.

which is rubbish. If the overall indicator is a measure of how well a country treats its children, then the weighting of the various elements reflects how important a certain indicator is to measuring this. In any case, the report doesn't weight each indicator equally. It rather arbitrarily divides the indicators into six dimensions, and three components within each dimension. Each component then gets equal weighting. This allows the report to (among other wierdnesses) give a three times higher weight to relative poverty (which gets its own component) than absolute poverty (which is merely one of three indicators of "reported deprivation"), thereby "proving" that children in Greece are better off economically than children in the UK.

So lets look at the six dimensions.

We start, reasonably enough given that poverty prevents children from reaching their potential, by considering poverty. The "component" system exaggerates the weight of a relative poverty measure that the report admits is close to meaningless, because it uses 50% of national median household income as a poverty line. The standard reasons given for why relative poverty matters, given that Bill Gates does not in fact make me any poorer, are

1. Not being able to afford the same brand of trainers as their peers means children get picked on.
2. Seeing images of incredible affluence in the mass media makes children envious and therefore unhappy.

Number 1 suggests that local rather than national incomes should be used to define the poverty line, whereas number 2 implies that international standards should be used (which makes relative and absolute poverty look remarkably like the same thing). Both of these changes would benefit the UK's position - a lot of income inequality in the UK is due to a north-south divide, with incomes being more equal within regions.

Next up is "Health and Safety". Here the UK does badly mainly because of a low rate of childhood immunization due to the MMR scare. However, patriotic Britons need not worry - British children are actually healthier and safer than foreigners, with a death rate 41% below the OECD average. Based on weighting vaccinations equally with not dying, the UK places 12th out of 21.

Then on to "Education". English children do better than the OECD average in native-language literacy, maths and science. But the UK nevertheless places 17th out of 21, because the "component" trick is used to give participation in further education (with no quality measure included) twice the weight given to the quality of primary and secondary education. "Achievement" is only one component, whereas participation in FE counts under both "Beyond basics" (where it gets a whole component to itself) and "Transition to employment" (where it reduces the number of 15-19 year olds not in employment, education, or training). FE in the UK is a national scandal, but it isn't 50% more important than getting the basics right. The last indicator in this dimension shows another unhealthy pattern in the report - it treats a value judgement by the authors as an objective measure of well-being. Countries are marked down if not enough children aspire to highly skilled work. Given that not everyone will get a highly skilled-job, this raises the question of whether aspirations which may well be unrealistic are an unalloyed good thing.

The dimension of "Relationships" is where the report starts getting silly. One of the indicators (heavily weighted, getting a whole component to itself) is "percentage of 11,13 and 15 year olds finding their peers kind and helpful". This is a completely subjective measure, and belongs in the dimension on "subjective well-being". The other two indicators both reflect value judgements - that children are best brought up by two biological parents, and that families should eat together. While I agree with these judgements, plenty of people dont, or don't think that these things are important.

Next comes "Behaviours and risks", on which the UK comes bottom by a country mile. Equal weighting has some interesting consequences here - using cannabis even once is considered as bad for a child's well-being as getting addicted to tobacco, or getting seriously drunk twice. My favourite value judgement is taking off points for 15-year olds having sex. When I was 15, sex would probably have improved my well-being. I imagine that is true of most 15-year olds, just as it is true of almost all adults. Apart from laughing at this point, I can't argue with the overall conclusion - that British children are more likely than foreigners to do the kind of things their mothers tell them not to do.

Last is "Subjective well-being". Wowze wowze wowze. Seriously, there is a whole field of happiness economics which starts with the assumption that asking people "How happy are you?" generates useful information, and goes downhill from there. As the linked article points out, individual answers to this question tell you more about who has a sunny and optimistic disposition than who has a good quality of life. The wowzer claims that when you do large-sample comparisons between countries then disposition should cancel out, but this assumes that there are no differences between national cultures. Since the English are notoriously a nation of grumblers, it is unsurprising that we come out bottom. I don't see what this says about how well our children are treated. My favourite riposte to the happiness wowzers is figure 5 of this report which shows subjective well-being being completely flat throughout the economic collapse of the 70's, the social collapse of the 80's, the unemployment and reposessions of the early 90's, and the recovery from all the above under Major and Blair. Perhaps it just isn't a very useful indicator.

Just for fun, I tried reanalysing the data in a slightly less wowzerish way. I excluded all the purely subjective indicators, as well as the ones based on controversial value judgements. I also weighted all indicators equally, without dividing them between components. This left three themes: poverty, health (including behaviour indicators like smoking) and education. The UK comes out below average in all three areas (only just in the case of education), but is nowhere near the bottom. You might think that the report was rigged so that the UK did badly.

For the real cynics out there, Peter Preston points out that the report's author, being a Brit involved in campainging on a number of issues that the report deals with, has an incentive to make the UK look as bad as possible because it gives his campaigning more impetus. I'm not that cynical - I just think that the report reflects the subconcious biases of the kind of authoritarian lefties who love to work for the UN and think that individualism is an ilness.

Fraternity and Conservatism

Top Cameroon Danny Kruger has an important article in Prospect magazine (hat tip: Conservative Home). The heart of the piece is an excellent discussion of "fraternity" or "community" and how it realtes to the other core modern values of liberty and equality. This is something that all Liberals (with a small l or a capital one) and Conservatives (likewise) should read and will probably learn from - my criticism should be taken in that context.

To me, the most surprising thing about this article is that Kruger thinks that an emphasis on "fraternity" or "community" in Conservative rhetoric is something new. Though the detail would be different, I find it hard to believe that any of Edmund Burke, Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill, or John Major would have disagreed with it - indeed Kruger cites Burke in his support.

Kruger's big mistake is to assume that the two-party, left-right model of British politics is an useful model for political ideas. He describes politics as a battle between a right that believes in liberty and a left that believes in equality. In fact, the two-party system lasted less than 30 years, from the collapse of the Liberals in Labour's 1945 landslide to the 6 million Liberal votes of 1974. In any case, the Tories of this era accepted Labour's statist "equality is fraternity" ideas that Kruger rightly criticises. Advances in liberty (notably the legalisation of homosexuality and abortion) tended to involve free votes or private members' bills.

In fact, there is a Liberal tradition in British politics that is neither "left" nor "right" except in so far as we have formed tactical alliances from time to time with one side or the other. If the Left owns equality, and the Liberals own liberty, it should come as no surprise that the Conservative tradition owns fraternity. Kruger identifies several institutions which promote fraternity: unions, churches, families, small shops, Army regiments, professional associations, traditional pubs (complete with warm beer), and sports teams. Apart from unions, these are all things which traditional Conservatism sought to defend, and most have been bastions of one-nation Tory voting. Kruger also points out the link between fraternity and the small-c conservative mindset - community institutions depend far more on things like respect for tradition, tolerance of institutional eccentricity, and a sense of duty than either the free market or the welfare state.

So if Cameronism is all about a return to Conservative values of time immemorial, why is it so controversial? The first reason is that it is not Thatcherism. Margaret Thatcher was not, by any means, a small-c conservative. Her rhetoric dealt far more with liberty than fraternity - and by and large her policies reflected this. A young Conservative friend of mine used to talk about three factions in the Conservative party: "wets" (One Nation Tories), "dries" (Thatcherites) and "s**ts" (extreme social conservatives who supported groups like the Monday Club). Thatcher the PM was a dry. Thatcher the legend was a s**t. The natural state of British Conservatism is wet - and Cameron reflects this.

The other reason is the tendency to look to America. The Scotsman, approvingly linked by Conservative Home, criticises Cameron for failing to emulate the "world's two most successful conservative politicians" - George W. Bush and John Howard. The Bush administration is clearly an attractive model to Conservatives - but it is a foreign one. Small-c conservatism is traditionally sceptical of copying foreign ideas wholesale when perfectly good British ones are available. It is also unclear that Bush is particularly successful (he lost the 2000 election, and only won by a whisker in 2004 despite winning a war), or that his approach to politics is a good one. Most of the votes that get Bush to 50.5% come from Southern racists and religious nutcases - i.e. people who don't need to think about liberty, equality and fraternity becuase they want to bring back the ancien regime. Being British doesn't make Cameron's brand of Conservatism any less Conservative.

Returning to Britain, what should our response as Liberals be? Firstly, we should carry on being Liberals. If the Conservative party is downgrading the politics of Thatcher the PM, then there is all the more need for us to be willing to make the case for liberty - because nobody else will. There are plenty of votes to be had in being the party of limited government, and nobody else seems to be after them. Even more importantly, there is a political need for politicians who are willing to challenge the natural tendency of the government to waste our money and tell us what to do.

Secondly, we need to remember the mistake that Thatcher made - namely forgetting about equality and fraternity altogether. Liberalism is about liberty, equality and fraternity (although the preamble calls it "community"). So, at its best, is Conservatism (though it interprets all three in a different way). So, too, is the traditional Labour movement of unions, co-operatives, friendly societies, and a political party to represent their interests. That is not surprising, given that we are all heirs to the values of the French revolution, which are also the values of the American and British revolutions. While I belong to a tradition that places liberty first and Kruger to one that places fraternity first, we all need to remember that unless you cherish all three very bad things can happen.

I would call them cretins, but I suspect they know exactly what they are doing

An "independent" lobby group calling itself the Taxpayer Alliance has commissioned a poll with some results which the major media found bizzarely newsworthy.

The Sunday Times headline is typical: "10 million want to quit overtaxed UK." Darell Huff provides some sensible questions to ask a lying statistic, so let's have a look.

Who says so?
The Taxpayer Alliance. Do they sound unbiased to you? We all know how easy it is to skew a one-off poll by asking biased questions. Would an advocay organisation really waste money commissioning an honest opinion poll when they could get better press coverage with a push poll?

How do they know?
By asking people if they have ever considered emigrating, towards the end of a poll in which they rile them up against this country and its political institutions by asking a lot of questions about how awful politicians are. Even if the poll wasn't bad, I fully expect that a lot of people have had idle speculations about leaving the country - I know I have. 6% of the population have plans to leave the country, according to this poll. Excluding immigrants returning home, only about one third of 1% actually will in any given year. (ONS data here, see table 1.3 for outflow by citizenship)

Did someone change the subject?
Yes. 80% of the population think taxes are too high. Thank you Captain Obvious - nobody likes paying taxes, although they will happily hound you out of office if you don't give them the schools, hospitals, roads etc. that these taxes are paying for. And 6% decide to emigrate, then don't. But these facts don't have to be connected, and almost certainly aren't - most emigrants head for similarly overtaxed countries with better weather (and an awful lot of them are retired or semi-retired, so tax is less of an issue).

So the emigration figure is bogus. The other results of the poll aren't exactly newsworthy - people think that politicians are liars (wow!), that Tony Blair is a smarmy git (double wow!), and that the public services need to be more efficient (no - really?).

So why the hell does the Sunday Times consider this front-page news?

More Guardian stupidity

Martin Jacques, a "senior visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore" or, to put it into English, a paid shill for not-a-hereditary-dictator-but-looks-and-quacks-like-one Lee Kwan Yew, has a column in today's Grauniad that demonstrates such an extraordinary degree of self-loathing that charity forces me to assume that he doesn't really believe it.

Europe's contempt for other cultures can't be sustained: A continent that inflicted colonial brutality all over the globe for 200 years has little claim to the superiority of its values.

What we were doing 200 years ago has no relevance to the moral value of what we are doing now. Heck, none of the people now making European policy were alive 200 years ago. In case you haven't noticed, Europe has changed its core values quite dramatically over the last 60 years.

Is the argument over the Danish cartoons really reducible to a matter of free speech? Even if we believe that free speech is a fundamental value, that does not give us carte blanche to say what we like in any context, regardless of consequence or effect. Respect for others, especially in an increasingly interdependent world, is a value of at least equal importance.

If free speech is a fundamental value, then speech is free. That is what "free speech" means, moron. The argument over the Danish cartoons became a matter of free speech when the other side decided to take their anger out on the Danish government for allowing the cartoons to be printed, rather than Jyllands-Posten for printing them. And I won't adopt "respect" as a value until you tell me what it means - after being dragged through the mud by the George Galloway Treason Party and the Jail All Teenagers Party the term has become somewhat debased.

Europe has never had to worry too much about context or effect because for around 200 years it dominated and colonised most of the world. Such was Europe's omnipotence that it never needed to take into account the sensibilities, beliefs and attitudes of those that it colonised, however sacred and sensitive they might have been.

On the contrary, the fact that Europe had large numbers of people on the ground actually governing these countries made it absolutely necessary to take such things into account. Where Europeans did not, the results were pretty unpleasant - see for instance the 1857 Indian Mutiny, provoked by a lack of respect for the dietary taboos of the local religions. There is a monument outside my school with the names of old boys who lost their lives as a result of that screw-up. Damned right we learned the lesson. If we had followed the US model of foreign aggression and dropped bombs from the safety of 30,000 feet we might not have done - the Americans certainly haven't (see Iraq).

On the contrary, European countries imposed their rulers, religion, beliefs, language, racial hierarchy and customs on those to whom they were entirely alien. There is a profound hypocrisy - and deep historical ignorance - when Europeans complain about the problems posed by the ethnic and religious minorities in their midst, for that is exactly what European colonial rule meant for peoples around the world.

This is an example of the tu quoque fallacy. Whether European imperialists undermined African and Asian cultures is irrelevant to the question of whether immigration is undermining European culture. 21st century European culture and the heritage of freedom which underlies it is worth defending, and if Hamza the Hook is a threat to it then we should deal with him, regardless of what happened in Cawnpore in the 19th century.

With one crucial difference, of course: the white minorities ruled the roost, whereas Europe's new ethnic minorities are marginalised, excluded and castigated, as recent events have shown.

Which recent events? I seem to remember the people we castigated were the ones holding placards saying "Death to those who insult Islam" and other rather unpleasant things. Part of living in a free society is that people who want to mock your religion can, whether you are marginal or not. While a right-wing paper with a largely Christian conservative readership like Jyllands-Posten does not print cartoons mocking Christianity, there is no shortage of them out there.

If Martin Jacques wanted to talk about the more general problem that European societies have with integrating recent immigrants, he would at least be right. But "poor, and occasionally beaten up by a small number of nutters on the lunatic fringe who then get sent to jail for a long time" doesn't quite have the ring of "marginalised, excluded and castigated".

But it is no longer possible for Europe to ignore the sensibilities of peoples with very different values, cultures and religions. First, western Europe now has sizeable minorities whose origins are very different from the host population and who are connected with their former homelands in diverse ways. If European societies want to live in some kind of domestic peace and harmony - rather than in a state of Balkanisation and repression - then they must find ways of integrating these minorities on rather more equal terms than, for the most part, they have so far achieved.

Looking at the society that has been most successful in integrating immigrants, the United States, it seems that this will involve selling them on our founding values of freedom, tolerance, and respect for the rule of law. To do so we will have to be more, not less, willing to boast about things like free speech.

That must mean, among other things, respect for their values.

Respect for the values of cartoon-banners and embassy-burners is incompatible with upholding our own values. We've been here with Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Quakers and diverse other supersitions already: what works is mutual respect for the shared values of a liberal society, not forced respect for the Flying Spaghetti Monster or other equally silly beliefs that various other people may choose to hold.

Second, it is patently clear that, globally speaking, Europe matters far less than it used to - and in the future will count for less and less.

Only if we want it to. I support the European Union precisely because I believe Europe can and should matter more. I believe that a world in which Europe matters more is a better world precisely becaue the founding values of the European Union are good, whereas the founding values of Bush's America, Red China, and Wahabbi Islam are evil.

We must not only learn to share our homelands with people from very different roots, we must also learn to share the world with diverse peoples in a very different kind of way from what has been the European practice.

And one of the best ways to share the world peacefully is for more nations to adopt the values of 21st century Europe, which have done a surprisingly good job of stopping stupid and pointless wars among a group of nations who used to invade each other every 25 years. If "what has been the European practice" is code for aggressive war and imperialism, then that is no longer the European practice. It is, on the other hand, the American and Red Chinese practice.

Europe has little experience of this, and what experience it has is mainly confined to less than half a century. Old attitudes of superiority and disdain - dressed up in terms of free speech, progress or whatever - are still very powerful.

Sometimes free speech is just about freedom. Actually, all the time free speech is just about freedom. I belong to a political tradition that was against imperialism and in favour of free speech (for much the same reasons as 21st century Europe) back in the 1860's. Don't tell me that my support for free speech is about superiority and disdain, because it isn't. Of course, being a paid shill for the Republic of Singapore, you aren't allowed to know what free speech is.

On the contrary, racial bigotry is on the rise, even in countries that have previously been regarded as tolerant. The Danish government depends for its rule on a racist, far-right party that gained 13% of the seats in the last election.

And this type of far-right party is gaining support precisely because far too few people on the left (or, for that matter, the sane right) are prepared to defend European values against cartoon-banners and embassy-burners. Telling people that their white skin and European heritage makes them morally inferior to the wonderfully anti-imperialist scumbags (read the placards) who are driving the outrage over these cartoons is precisely the way to get them to vote nutter.

The decision of Jyllands-Posten to publish the cartoons - and papers in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere to reprint them - lay not so much in the tradition of free speech but in European contempt for other cultures and religions: it was a deliberate, calculated insult to the beliefs of others, in this case Muslims.

We've been here before. The decision of Jyllands-Posten to comission the cartoons was a response to a specific incident in Denmark, and the decision to republish them (including in a number of lefty papers which have no time for random racism and xenophobia) was a response to an unprecedented global attack on free speech.

This kind of mentality - combining Eurocentrism, old colonial attitudes of supremacism, racism, provincialism and sheer ignorance - will serve our continent ill in the future.

Which kind of mentality? Defence of free speech will not serve us ill in the future, or indeed the present.

Europe must learn to live in and with the world, not to dominate it, nor to assume it is superior or more virtuous.

But where we are more virtuous, we shouldn't be afraid to say so. Democracy and freedom need defending, and are worth defending.

Any continent that has inflicted such brutality on the world over a period of 200 years has not too much to be proud of,

What have the Romans ever done for us? Apart from democracy, modern science, modern medicine, market economics, Shakespeare and international human rights law, I fully agree that Europe has not much to be proud of from history. We can, however, be proud of what we are doing now: we have built a community of 450 million people living together in peace, freedom and prosperity under the rule of law, many of whom had no experience of these things until their countries began the EU accession process.

and much to be modest and humble about

Europe also gave the world facism, communism, and imperialism. Apart from the "People's" "Republic" of China which practices all three from time to time (and which Martin Jacques and his paymasters are awfully sympathetic to), these things have all but vanished. Mostly because of the work Europeans did in getting rid of them.

though this is rarely the way our history is presented in Britain, let alone elsewhere.

Well, British history as taught in schools is entirely about Hitler and the brave British soldiers (not forgetting the women who built the bombs) who defeated him. I don't know whether that counts as presenting "Europe" as good or evil.

It is worth remembering that while parts of Europe have had free speech (and democracy) for many decades, its colonies were granted neither. But when it comes to our "noble values", our colonial record is always written out of the script.

And if I wasn't already aware of this, the fact that you can't turn around nowadays without someone like Martin Jacques or Robert Mugabe lecturing you about the evils of European imperialism would make sure I was. The noble values of the Enlightenment are still noble even if the Europe of the 19th and early 20th century honoured them more in the breach than the observance. They won't be honoured at all going forward if Jacques (and Mugabe, and indeed Lee Kwan Yew) are successful in blaming the dishonourable acts of imperialism on them.

This attitude of disdain, of assumed superiority, will be increasingly difficult to sustain. We are moving into a world in which the west will no longer be able to call the tune as it once did. China and India will become major global players alongside the US, the EU and Japan. For the first time in modern history the west will no longer be overwhelmingly dominant. By the end of this century Europe is likely to pale into insignificance alongside China and India. In such a world, Europe will be forced to observe and respect the sensibilities of others.

India is developing an information-age economy precisely because it has adopted the (originally European, now universal) values of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. If India was still a society that took sacred cows seriously enough to demand that we respect them, it wouldn't be a threat. China is an economy based on sweatshops building Barbie dolls - they bought Rover for its "advanced technology" even though it was fifteen years behind the best Western car companies. Even if they do become a major world power, there is no need to respect their values any more than we respected Soviet communism (and we shouldn't).

Few in Europe understand or recognise these trends. A small example is the bitter resistance displayed on the continent to the proposed takeover of Arcelor by Mittal Steel: at root the opposition is based on thinly disguised racism.

Or, more obviously, a general distaste for foreign ownership of "strategic" industries. The Chinese don't let foreign companies own steelworks in China either. The German government tried to stop Vodafone buying Manessman - was that motivated by thinly disguised contempt for beef-eating and discussing the weather?

But Europe had better get used to such a phenomenon: takeovers by Indian and Chinese firms are going to become as common as American ones.

Both are and will be welcomed by liberals and opposed by nationalists and socialists. The race of the acquirer doesn't come into it. We occasionally need to watch out for Chinese companies which are front organisatiosn for a communist dictatorship, of course. But the people opposing the Mittal-Arcelor deal don't like the Americans either.

A profound parochialism grips our continent

And the other five (Antarctica is an exception). Europe, with its tradition of intellectual and economic freedom, is more open to foreign ideas than the Chinese or Islamic cultures which Jacques is so fond of. That people have a deeper understanding of and sympathy for their own culture than for others is part of the human condition.

When Europe called the global tune it did not matter, because what happened in Europe translated itself into a global trend and a global power. No more: now it is simply provincialism.

I don't actually see this provincialism. Europe at both the community level and its individual member states puts huge amounts of effort into engaging with other cultures. Quite often, we learn enough to know that the culture in question is barbaric and does not deserve our respect. Subjugating women, persecuting gays, and parading through the streets with placards saying "Freedom Go to Hell" are all bad signs on this front.

When Europe dominated, there were no or few feedback loops. Or, to put it another way, there were few, if any, consequences for its behaviour towards the non-western world: relations were simply too unequal. Now - and increasingly in the future - it will be very different. And the subject of these feedback loops, or consequences, will concern not just present but also past behaviour.

Something that we are well aware of, which is why Europe does not, as a whole, support stupid and pointless wars of aggression in the way that the United States does. Since we can't change our past behaviour, there is no point in agonising about it.

For 200 years the dominant powers have also been the colonial powers: the European countries, the US and Japan. They have never been required to pay their dues for what they did to those whom they possessed and treated with contempt. Europeans have treated this chapter in their history by choosing to forget.

Actually, we saw the consequences of imperialism quite plainly - imperial rivalry was one of the main things that led Europe into a disasterous century of blood-letting and nuclear terror from which we are only just emerging. We treated this chapter in our history by building a set of institutions which ensure that it will never happen again, of which the European Union is the most successful.

So has Japan, except that in its case its neighbours have not only refused to forget but are also increasingly powerful. As a consequence, Japan's present and future is constantly stalked by its history. This future could also lie in wait for Europe.

What future? Civilised countries such as South Korea respond to Koizumi's war-criminal-worshipping shrine-tomfoolery with mild tut-tutting, because it isn't in their interest to upset the system of peace and free trade that binds all civilised countries. Uncivilised countries like China and North Korea respond with abusive tut-tutting because that is all they are capable of. Neither is a threat to Europe, as long as we remain confident of our own values.

We might think the opium wars are "simply history"; the Chinese (rightly) do not. We might think the Bengal famine belongs in the last century, but Indians do not.

Well, "history" seems to be the obvious term for something that happened 150 years ago between two societies both of which have reformed themselves to the point where the ruling classes that fought the original war (on both sides) no longer exist. If China becomes a civilised society, then it will be about as relevant to Sino-European relations as the Napoleonic wars are to modern Anglo-French relations - i.e. something trotted out for PR purposes when we go through a spat, but no bar to friendship if friendship is in the interest of both sides (as it usually is). If China remains a dictatorship, then the opium war will be used to drum up nationalist fervour when the dictator is unpopular at home. They don't need something that actually happened to do that, lies would work just as well (see the depictions of Jews in any Arab state-owned newspaper).

The Bengal famine is an even better example. It belongs to ancient history precisely because India is now a civilised society. Based on both British and traditional Indian precedents, they have built a set of institutions fully capable of ensuring that nothing like the Bengal famine will ever happen again. (See Amartya Sen's work on famine and democracy for the details.) The computer programmers of Bangalore are unlikely to want to emphasise a past where this was not the case.

Europe is moving into a very different world. How will it react? If something like the attitude of the Danes prevails - a combination of defensiveness, fear, provincialism and arrogance - then one must fear for Europe's ability to learn to live in this new world. There is another way, but the signs are none too hopeful.

Well, actually I can think of two other ways. There is the way Jacques advocates - Europe can sink into a funk of self-hatred, accept its deserved irrelevance, and allow Bush, Bin Laden and Beijing to determine the future of humanity. The right way is to continue with the European project of the second half of the twentieth century.

The values Europe now stands for are universal values. The Muslim population of Turkey are banging on the EU door because they have chosen to adopt freedom, democracy and the rule of law in preference to Shariah, sexism and homophobia. The Chinese students gunned down at Tienamenn Square were part of a tradition that began in Athens and runs via Runymede in 1215, Paris in 1789, and Berlin in 1989. We should defend our values at home, and use our considerable soft power to spread them abroad. The fact that we did the wrong thing in the past is all the more reason to do the right thing now, not a reason to do nothing.

Liberals know this in our bones. The self-interested opposition of the dictators, theocrats and mass murderers of the world make achieving our aims hard enough. The opposition of our own right-wing clowns who think that the West is about whiteness and Christianity, and that brown people and Muslims don't deserve freedom, makes life harder. The misguided opposition of left-wing clowns like Jacques who think that the West shouldn't dare defend freedom out of respect for the cultures which the dictators, theocrats and mass murderers claim to speak for is inexcusable.

If I didn't believe in free speech, Martin Jacques would have been blogged as "Traitor of the Week". Fortunately for both of us, part of living in a civilised society is that the only sanction for sounding off like an idiot is public ridicule. That is why the West should stand up for itself.

Those cartoons - redux

I have so far avoided blogging on the notorious Mohammed cartoons, largely because I haven't been blogging at all for the last week or so. To create some pretence of topicality, I thought I would respond to this uncommonly stupid Guardian column by Jonathan Steele.

It is not often that the left agrees with Tony Blair, let alone George Bush. But the good sense the two leaders have shown in the Danish cartoons affair by siding with leftwing and liberal critics of the offensive drawings' publication is one of the more remarkable aspects of the drama.

Hm. The left agrees with Tony Blair most of the time, actually. He is a Prime Minister leading a centre-left government, whose MP's (who are presumably on the left) regularly vote through his legislation. But the more serious error in Steele's opening sentence is the use of the term "liberal". Liberals believe that free speech is absolute. Being a Liberal Democrat activist, I know quite a lot of liberals. None of them share Blair's view that publishing the cartoons was wrong, in either a legal or a moral sense. (Most of us think that it was stupid or rude, neither of which is grounds for outrage.)

Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, which first printed the unfunny cartoons, says he wanted to break away from Denmark's "self-censorship" in the face of Islam.

No scare quotes needed. The comissioning of the cartoons was provoked by a specific incident of self-censorship - namely that nobody in Denmark was prepared to be named as illustrator of a book about Mohammed because of the risk of violence.

Other European papers that followed suit boasted of courage.

Accurately - we are dealing with people who have burned down embassies in response to these cartoons.

The fact is that on the cartoon issue the great neocon and his ideological advisers were pragmatic and smart enough to see that the drawings were in poor taste, deliberately provocative and grotesquely inaccurate in suggesting that every Muslim is a murderous would-be martyr and, worse still, that the Qur'an advocates suicide bombing.

Neither taste nor theology are appropriate topics for government officials to comment on in their official capacity. Whether or not the Qur'an advocates suicide bombing is a question that is hotly contested both by Muslims and non-Muslims. Steele is entitled to his opinion (although if, as I suspect, he has not read the Qur'an, I don't see why anyone should care what it is) and is free to discuss it in a Guardian column. The British government should not take a position on what is or is not correct Islamic doctrine, and British politicians should not pontificate about the issue (unless they are imams in their spare time).

Bush's reaction shows that Americans have a better understanding of multiculturalism than most Europeans

Yes, quite. And there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. America is a country whose first response to the September 11th attacks was to declare a "crusade".

E pluribus unum - "unity from many" - as their motto puts it.

Actually, the official motto of the United States is "In God We Trust". "Unity in Diversity" is the motto of the European Union. "E Pluribus Unum" referred to the Union of several States, all of which were run by property-owning white Christian males. When the possibility arose that it might be interpreted to include blacks and women, the Americans carefully changed it.

In Britain we are further back. If there is a tolerance spectrum, with resistance to diversity at one end, acceptance of it in the middle and celebration of it at the other end, Britain lies somewhere near the middle.

Which is as it should be. There are good reasons for not celebrating the fact that some people in the UK believe that women and gays are second-class citizens.

(Some evil right-wing Danish official said) "We have gone to war against the multicultural ideology that says that everything is equally valid."

While this blog disapproves of wars against drugs, terror, multicultural ideology, or anything else that is not an army, the Danes have a point. Water is still wet no matter how strongly the Fuq-Whit tribe of Bongo Bongo Land believe that it is dry. Mass murder is bad, and democracy, free markets and the rule of law are good. We should be prepared to say that these views are more valid than the opposite, whatever culture people belong to.

When the demonstrations started and other papers in Europe printed the cartoons in "solidarity" with Jyllands-Posten, they compounded the initial anti-Muslim error by trying to stir up a continental clash of civilisations

Just to think, I thought that being gratuitously controversial was about selling more papers. Apparently it is part of some grand neocon conspiracy to provoke World War III.

But why should a progressive paper in Britain feel "solidarity" with anti-immigrant Danish editors who made a major error of judgment rather than with British Muslims who universally deplored the cartoons?

Because they are both newspaper editors who feel harried by people taking offense at what they publish? I certainly find it hard to believe that a newspaper editor, progressive or not, could feel solidarity with people who support new laws restricting newspaper editors.

(Snip the obligatory couple of paragraphs condemning embassy-burning)

Even the Saudis only reacted after Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish prime Minister, refused to receive a protest delegation of Danish Islamic leaders and ambassadors from Muslim countries. The Danish government's insensitivity and rudeness were almost as offensive as the cartoons.

Why and earth should the Danish prime minister get into discussions about what a privately-owned newspaper publishes. There is absolutely nothing the Danish prime minister can or should do about rudeness in the papers - that is what having a free press means. If he had met the ambassadors and said "Sorry - it's a free country. Nothing I can do. Please go away" then they would have been just as offended, but the Prime Minister's valuable time would have been wasted.

Several days after the dispute erupted, Bush rang Rasmussen to express support. But he was careful to say he was acting "in light of the violence against Danish and other diplomatic missions", not in solidarity with the phoney free-speech issue.

The free speech issue isn't phoney. If you don't have the right to offend anyone, you don't have free speech. Although given Bush's attitude to speech he finds offensive, I'm not surprised that he got this one wrong.

Muslims are not only an important part of Europe's new diversity. They are diverse among themselves. To suggest that, because almost all of Europe's Muslims felt offended by the cartoons, they all support slogans calling for revenge and beheadings is as inaccurate as it is for people in Muslim countries to claim that every European approved the cartoons' publication. There are liberals, conservatives, modernisers and traditionalists in all communities, just as there are those who know the bounds of good taste and bigots who do not.

Steele is able to state the obvious. Nevertheless, he still manages to mislead. While very few European Muslims support supressing free speech by burning embassies, an awful lot of them do support supressing free speech by passing laws. There is a real and important divide between those who support free speech and those who don't. I stand with Jyllands-Posten on one side of it. Steele, Blair, and the Muslim Council of Britain stand on the other side. With the embassy-burners

Come friendly bombs and fall on Loughborough

Charnwood District Council has decided that new houses can only be built in Loughborough if students aren't allowed to live there. That this is illiberal does not need justification. That it is stupid and that the District Councillors are a bunch of peabrained oafs who probably wouldn't even get into Loughborough College, let along the highly distinguished Loughborough University (11 RAE 5 departments, 3 5*'s, with much award-winning research done by PhD students who the Council is proposing to throw out), might. So here goes.

1) The proposed ban is ludicrously overbroad, covering any student under 27. As a 25 year old PhD student in Cambridge, I am considered a "professional tenant" by my landlord, his freeholder, and their insurance company (all of whom stand to lose money if I trash the place). According to Charnwood District Council's planning committee members (none of whom are spending their own money, or indeed their Council Tax payers' money, on private student accommodation) I am a drunken kebab-eating nuisance.

2) Loughborough University and College employ 4000 people between them. The experience of mining towns following pit closures is that every job working directly for an outside employer supports two additional jobs within the local economy. This means that 12,000 people, or more than 1/3 of the working age population of Loughborough, owe their jobs to the education sector. The University and College won't survive if their students can't find a place to live.

3) Assuming that Charnwood Council don't want to destroy their economy, they know that students must live either on or off campus. Yet as well as trying to keep students out of off-campus housing, they also refused planning permission for an expansion of on-campus housing. The University is well stuffed, and has responded by curtailing expansion plans. Yes, that's right, the largest employer in Loughborough has cancelled a planned expansion because the aging nimby's on the local council didn't like the idea of young people having fun in their city.

4) Putting covenants in property titles is a long-term project which can make you look very stupid in the eyes of history. There are still houses in America with a covenant in the title that prevents sales to black people. I imagine that the Charnwood Board of Morons will want the students back when their economy starts tanking. Getting anti-student covenants off property titles could prove difficult when that happens.

5) This will have obvious unintended consequences for Loughborough residents in their twenties who want to become mature students.

Charnwood District Council is controlled by a Labour-Lib Dem coalition. While I expect this kind of vile behaviour from the Labour party with it's "Respect" agenda of keeping blacks gypsies students out of people's communities, I expect better from Liberal Democrats. I hope for the sake of the continuing leadership candidates that that Liberal Democrat group in Charnwood are Oaten supporters.

Scarier is the prospect that they are just "local campaigners standing up for local people" who found that "drunken students" figured high on the Focus grumble sheet, and then followed the standard thought process of illiberal numbskull politicians everywhere:

1. Something must be done
2. This is something
3. Therefore we must do it

The party is the "Liberal Democrats" and not "UK FOCUS team" for a reason - because we exist to promote Liberalism. I believe "material disagreement, evidenced by conduct, with the objects of the Party" is an expellable offence. One of the objects of the Party is that people should not be driven out of their homes just because they are the wrong age. Another is promoting access to further and higher education.

The original Guardian article suggests that Leeds and Newcastle (both under Lib Dem majority control) are considering similar policies. I hope LDYS is ready with a large cluebat.

UPDATE 01/02: I have spoken to Leeds Uni Lib Dems and apparently Leeds have only introduced restrictions on purpose-built student housing, not on any housing being let to students. This seems a wholly reasonable application of planning law.

Go away Polly, the leadership contest is members only.

A friend just pointed out this column by former Owenite, now Brownite, and general witch Polly Toynbee. Like most of the Guardian's columnists, Toynbee begins by assuming that the real story is entirely internal to the Labour party, and devotes more than half her space to discussing that. In the middle third of the column, she does deign to talk about the Liberal Democrats. Her advice is more than usually asinine.

This is now the question Lib Dem would-be leaders must answer. It may maximise their vote to dance about saying "neither right nor left", but what is the point of merely existing in nothingness? Labour die-hards call them no more than a franchise - a painfully accurate accusation. Collect up their literature and they face quite different ways according to their local opponent.

We don't dance about anything. "Neither right nor left" is not a piece of tactical postitioning, it is an indictment of the state of British politics. With both Thatcherism and Footism discredited, everyone sane agrees about the big economic issues. The big issues of 2006 are questions about national identity, the management of public services, and how to deal with what used to be called noisy neighbours and is now apparently "anti-social behaviour". On all these issues, the division is between right (i.e. Liberal) and wrong. And yet morons like Toynbee still insist on talking about right and left - no wonder the electorate get turned off.

But times have changed since the SDP. Where once there was a great savannah of available political space, now the air is too thin to breathe between New Labour and Cameron Tories. Both parties have stolen Lib Dem land: all now preach the new localism.

We don't have to be between New Labour and Cameron's Tories. We are liberal, they are illiberal. The Liberal Democrats don't just preach the new localism, we actually do it - try googling for "most improved Council". While the other parties (more specifically, the Monster Raving Loony Party) may have stolen David Owen's political turf, they is still plenty of space for a principled Liberal party.

But there is a need for a party more radical than Labour, a party that says no to war and no to wasting billions on new nuclear weapons or nuclear reactors, that dares to talk of the greed of the rich, of boardroom kleptocracy and the duty of top earners to shoulder a fairer share. Already the Lib Dems alone own civil liberties, and they are the pluralists who would rebuild council and Commons chambers in horseshoe shape under proportional representation, offering the one crucial "choice" that Labour and Tories refuse - the choice to vote for any party in a fair election.

Quite right too. Didn't you just say that we danced with nothingness, and were a franchise and not a party? The issues you just mentioned aren't perpheral. Civil liberties matter - right now people all over the world are being arrested, tortured, and shot for writing columns like yours.

They will never win; that's not their function.

Our function is what we say it is, not what a Labour-supporting Guardian columnist says it is. We say our function is to form a Liberal Democrat government, with Liberal policies and Chris Huhne as a Liberal Prime Minister. You want to see a Labour government, with socialist policies. So we really don't care what you think we should be doing.