STUDY in DEBT

My own university studies, taken up in the late 1960s, were not wholly a gift from the nation. My generation received student grants but these were means-tested and my father, being relatively comfortable, was obliged to contribute financially to the cost of my further education. Bless him, he never troubled me with knowing at what level he continued to subsidise me even as, for a while, it ominously appeared that I might be turning into what was known as “an eternal student”.

Another tag that attached itself to our generation was that we were “the children of Robbins”. The 1963 report delivered to the government by the committee chaired by Lord Robbins recommended an extensive expansion of higher education and enunciated the principal that university places “should be available to all who were qualified for them by ability and attainment”. The then government embraced the Robbins Report in its entirety. This was, incidentally, a Tory government; Sir Alec Douglas-Home became Prime Minister just a week before the incumbent Education Secretary, whose services Home had retained, accepted Robbins. He was Sir Edward Boyle, by a wide margin the most liberal education minister the Tories have ever fielded.

Lionel Robbins: our Daddy

Another quotation evokes the climate in which my baby boomer generation grew up, a most delicate and fastidious line that appeared frequently on notices in shops: “Please do not ask for credit as a refusal often offends”. There were no credit cards in those days and only the most disreputable elements in society asked for anything “on terms” or, in the vernacular, “on tick”. To buy furniture and other large items by hire purchase – in other words, on an instalment plan – was thought to betray a low class mentality. Respectable people “paid their way”.

Sir Edward Boyle, more liberal than Vince Cable

The arrival of the Diners’ Club card, then American Express, then Visa and Access and Mastercard transformed all that. Nowadays you’re thought a fool to pay in cash, chequebooks are being phased out and people think nothing of causing a queue to build up at the checkout because they’re waiting for the PIN to go through to pay for a carton of milk on credit.

The mindset that believes that the only way higher education can be financed is on tick and that students should be happy to graduate with substantial burdens of debt built into their futures – futures in which the housing ladder will anyway be out of reach for decades and no pension schemes will take care of them before they are at least 80 – is utterly alien to my generation. “Live now, pay later” was a dreadful warning for us when we were young. “Study now, pay later” is an obligation to any present school pupil hoping to pursue her studies.

You might imagine that the political generation who have lived with the recession that began in 2008 – which originated, you recall, in the sub-prime mortgage fiasco that caused the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the States – would be scrupulously cautious about resorting to credit as a tool of governmental policy. As always, lessons are only learnt when it suits. Universities are expensive and need to be paid for. What better way than to load the cost onto those who, in the crudest terms, benefit most? This is not a party political question. Labour introduced tuition fees. Politicians of all colours are mired in this mess.

The point is made that, for the sake of argument, a welder should not be obliged to stump up for some middle class kiddie sitting on his arse for three years pretending to read media studies. Put like that – in that highly reductive manner – it sounds like a bloody outrage. But we all pay for stuff that does not obviously benefit us. I have no children but I finance general education from nursery to present graduation level. I don’t drive a car, but I pay for roads and – you could say that roads benefit me, though a non-driver, in myriad ways, but you’d be hard put to argue that I derive much benefit from this provision – parking lots. I don’t support – indeed I vehemently oppose – the UK breaching the sovereignty of other nations, but I am still obliged to finance the Afghan War, as I was to pay for the invasion of Iraq. I don’t especially relish funding bankers’ bonuses, Trident, the Olympics, Trooping the Colour or Strictly Come Dancing, but I am not invited to vote on specific disbursements of public funds.

Nick Clegg in his subsidised Ziggy Stardust phase

Moreover, it is extremely narrow to propose that degrees in objective and scientific disciplines are the only ones to bring benefit to the whole of society. I am as disdainful as you are about some of the modern study areas that seem – on the face of it and without our troubling to go into it – indulgent and unprofitable. But whichever way you cut it, the more educated the populace – the electorate – the better.

In broad terms, an extension of general educational attainment benefits the whole of society. To fix such educational attainment in public philosophy as a privilege that must be paid for far into the future by its agents is a destructive and reductive argument. You want your doctor, your solicitor, your children’s teacher, your accountant, your chief constable, your MP, your poet, your philosopher and the maker of your television programmes to be competent and to deliver the goods. So you benefit if they are fully educated. That’s not a bad investment for society to make on your behalf.

The government argues that the deficit requires all to make sacrifices. It’s a seductive but also a reductive argument. Government is a process of choice. Economic policy is not shaped by what is affordable but by what is chosen. I would argue that foreign wars are not affordable. I maintain that everyone knows that the Taliban will take over in Afghanistan within six months at the most of NATO’s withdrawal and therefore that every day further spent in a country that, as history shows, will not yield to foreign invasion is a day – and the lives sacrificed on that day – wasted. But this government, like its predecessors, professes to imagine that building up resentment against ourselves across the Muslim world somehow guarantees the safety of our own streets. So the government chooses to spend money on waging futile war rather than on college provision or any other pressing matter at home. As I put it, they prefer to destroy livelihoods at home so that they can continue to destroy lives abroad.

Vince Cable as a student Macbeth: "Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious,/Loyal and neutral in a moment? No man"

And then there is the Lib Dem dilemma. The argument is advanced that the Liberal Democrats have to be "realistic" over tuition fees because they are partaking in a coalition government. I would rather propose that, in making their solemn pledge over tuition fees during the election campaign, the Lib Dems were then being far from realistic. In what circumstance did they anticipate forming a government other than within a coalition? How far – if at all – did they plan for an accommodation in practice with either Labour or the Tories? They sprinkled undertakings like confetti because they did not imagine that they would ever be called upon them. Now, in the harsh glare of administration, the chickens have begun to come home to roost.

So I suggest that the cynicism demonstrated by Nick Clegg and his team resides not so much in the stance on tuition fees that they have taken in government but in the stance that they adopted in opposition. There is a warning here for Ed Miliband and he has shown some realism in resisting the temptation to pledge that a Labour government will repeal the government's measures. It probably won’t do him any immediate electoral good because people are, even now, susceptible to the promises of politicians. But it’s a shrewd move.

Nick Clegg well cast as a supremely arrogant student

There can be little doubt that the Lib Dems will, in the fullness of time, be punished at the ballot box for their antics on this issue. By a quirk of governmental dispensation, it fell to Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, to execute the government’s policy on tuition fees. Cable’s own humming and hahing this last week about how he might vote has made him look a fool. Nick Clegg as deputy PM and Lib Dem leader has been the lightning rod for the students’ righteous anger. Both of them have been badly wounded by this episode. It’s hard to find much sympathy. We all recall Cable’s lethal thrust, when acting Lib Dem leader, against Gordon Brown at PMQ’s when he noted “the remarkable transformation of the Prime Minister from Stalin to Mr Bean”. This is not yet the moment, but I have readied a letter to The Guardian noting the remarkable transformation of the Business Secretary – whom David Cameron introduced to his new department as “an absolute star” – “from absolute star-turn to Mr Has-Been”.

MESSENGER SHOOTING

On Friday, that nicely assorted pair Jean-Luc Godard and Andy Williams both turned 80. In these straitened times, do you think they combined their celebrations?

On the BBC1 10 o’Clock News on Thursday, the sports editor David Bond posed, by my reckoning, five “big questions” concerning the failed bid to bring the football World Cup to England in 2018. There’s only one question around this matter, in my view, and it’s hardly “big”: why do grown men take this piffling stuff seriously?

Everybody in England seems to believe that FIFA, the governing body of international football, is corrupt from top to toe and that its individual members may be bought for – oh – a designer handbag or some other such trinket. On the other hand, many grumble that some supposed exposé of FIFA corruption, aired on Panorama last Monday (I didn’t see it), hobbled the English bid, even going so far as to accuse the BBC of being “unpatriotic”.

What drivel. If FIFA is corrupt, it should be exposed. Indeed, the FA (the governing body in England) should refuse to have any dealings with it. But they should refuse before World Cup hosting duties are dispensed, not after. After looks like the sour grapes that it undoubtedly is. Had Sepp Blatter and co given the nod to England, we should now be hearing how wise and farsighted FIFA is.

And what possible sense would it make for Panorama to hold over its report until the World Cup was not news? Don’t football people grasp the role of topicality in news and current affairs? They don’t report on matches several weeks afterwards, do they? Putting the programme out later would certainly have smacked of sour grapes.

The assigning of the World Cup 2018 to Russia (and in 2022 to Qatar) was met with various disobligingly racist remarks among vox pops gathered and lovingly transmitted by the BBC. For my taste, anyone involved in professional football, either as player, manager, administrator or commentator, is a Neanderthal twonk, whether they are Russian, Argentinian, Thai, Kenyan, English or Qatari. But I don’t think I’d tell that to a BBC news researcher on camera.

Various suits were dragged onto the news bulletins to essay how many kersquillions of pounds “losing” the World Cup 2018 will have set back the English game. I doubt it. Everyone knows that the bloody Olympics in 2012 are going to leave this country even more poverty-stricken than it is now, save those in a position successfully to leech off such five-ring circuses.

As to whether Vladimir Putin “played a blinder” by staying away from Zurich, I cannot guess. Certainly the embarrassing platitudes being peddled by David Cameron, David Beckham and – if imaginable, even worse – by Prince William cannot have done an iota of good for the supposed “cause”. The idea that the English “love” their football more than any other nationality is plainly false. And keenly wanting something has never been a major qualification for actually receiving it, unless you happen to be a child with a doting parent and your birthday or Yule imminent.

What seems most likely is that Blatter determined that Russia would have the tournament from the very outset of the exercise and that his fellow judges were happy to be guided by him. Russia has never hosted the World Cup before, which cuts off at the knees English bleats about the “long wait” since 1966. Neither has Qatar. The sense of outraged entitlement emanating from the English camp – “there’s never been a World Cup in England in my lifetime” wept Cameron, born three months too late – sits ill beside all those nations that have never been preferred. His predecessor in Downing Street, fifteen years Cameron’s senior, could say the same about his country and his lifetime, because Scotland has never been accorded the privilege. “Sour grapes are coming home” seems to be the main message of this shaming spectacle.

Also getting the English bleat going lately has been that perennial favourite, the weather. I don’t doubt that being stuck for ten hours overnight on a train in Kent is an ordeal one would not seek, but I also think that rather a lot is put on the transport operatives, the local councils and others who are expected to wave some magic wand over deep snow and black ice. The first casualty of such conditions is mobility; lack of mobility is the element that causes the greatest difficulty for the services trying to relieve those stuck or stranded. It’s impossible to grit a road if that road is blocked by jack-knifed juggernauts.

The point has been well made that most countries experiencing the grip of severe weather do so on a regular and predictable basis. But Britain’s weather – especially England’s (there’s a lot less fuss being made in Scotland, where they don’t talk airily and ignorantly of “Arctic conditions”) – is as variable as any in the world. We have not had such severe conditions as early as November – still autumn, after all – for as long as most of us can remember. Now it is predicted to linger into next year: the phrase “cold snap” ought to have been retired from reporters’ language long since.

To have the various services on permanent stand-by all year round against the possibility of extreme conditions – deep snow, excess cold, flash floods, droughts, forest fires – would entail more expense than either governments or voters will stand. Indeed, most of the effort to get the country moving again after a “weather event” is carried out by public sector workers and in winters to come there will be significantly fewer of them available to do that work because of the government cuts.

Meanwhile, the sky has fallen upon the head of Julian Assange, the Australian creator of the WikiLeaks site that has given internet accessibility to hitherto classified material of a wide-ranging kind since 2006. The major disclosure of American and other diplomatic cables over these last few days has provoked a storm of vengeful fury from government and diplomatic spokespeople, some of it clearly designed to put Assange in fear of his liberty if not his life.

Needless to say, a great blast of sanctimonious hot air has blown over this matter. That large tracts of the material was available to as many as three million individuals before it was put into a more obviously public domain has rather reduced the grounds for official complaint. Moreover, there is no evidence that any disclosure by WikiLeaks in the current crop or among its earlier documentation has put a single individual in heightened danger, save for Assange himself. WikiLeaks has invited the American government to cite instances of individuals being put at risk by the disclosures but, not too surprisingly, the State Department refused to play.

I find myself a little divided on this issue. Naturally one laughs when highly touted and expensive security systems are readily shown to be worthless. In practice, the greatest disadvantage the US authorities seem to have suffered can be put no higher than acute embarrassment. The candid opinions of foreign dignitaries held by US ambassadors and others have been aired when they were certainly not intended for conveyance to those thus belittled.

But I can’t help feeling that no human activity can be successfully pursued if one can never feel that one can speak candidly and in confidence in the hearing of those and only those of one’s choosing. I had rather expected that such a feeling might be shared by others at the time of Gordon Brown’s exasperated remarks about the Labour voter Gillian Duffy that were picked up and broadcast by Sky News. But by then there was so little compassion for the hapless Brown anywhere in the media or the political community that he was universally condemned for the remarks and, it seemed, held uniquely responsible for their dissemination because he happened to be wearing the Sky mic. This was most unjust, as I said at the time in my blog and in an unpublished letter to The Guardian. But nobody then wanted to consider that the whistleblower had some responsibility for the impact of the whistle.

The poetic way for those who have “suffered” at the hands of WikiLeaks to get their own back would be to publish all the private stuff they can find on Assange, especially such that he might find personally embarrassing – his school reports, his adolescent love letters, his clap clinic record. I should not wish to peruse them myself but then life is also too short to bother reading what the US ambassador to St James’s thinks about Mervyn King.

On the subject of letters spurned by The Guardian, that paper ran a three-page tribute to Leslie Nielsen last week. I wrote thus:

Dear Sir,

I enjoyed Leslie Nielsen's performances as much as anyone else did, but I don't rate him as some kind of comic genius. He was an actor who could do a particular kind of traditional comic delivery, deadpan with deadly accuracy. It was the writers who actually created that comedy, but you can bet your boots that, when they go in their turn, they won't be accorded a spread in G2 (November 30) and a selection of their – and I do mean their – "best" lines.

Celebrity culture exactly mirrors the state of western capitalism. We have come to value service industries way above manufacturing. Isn't that putting the cart before the horse?

Yours faithfully,

The paper published a letter from someone else making the narrower point about the specific writers who wrote screenplays that Nielsen spoke. But I liked my parallel between celebrity culture and capitalism and I shall reframe it in a letter on a further subject before too long.

A week or two earlier, The Guardian also passed on my letter in response to a hymn of praise to Simon Callow by Sir David Hare. The paper just doesn’t care for critical letters – and it has championed Callow as a reviewer. Perhaps I shall return to this matter in my next posting, if nothing more compelling presents itself betweentimes.

IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED …

“A majority of the British public believes Prince William would make a better king than the Prince of Wales,” announced The Sunday Times at the weekend. “Most people also think Prince Charles should stand aside for his son”.

Charles' christening during the previous reign: with his mum, grandad and great-grandmama

This is a prime example of what the Irish call “the higher bollix”. Just think of all the questions begged here. What, for starters, is “a better king”? The monarch, after all, is a figurehead, nothing more. We don’t require a king who interferes in the business of state or who expresses opinions that might embarrass any (let alone all) of his subjects. All we want is someone who can read the government’s clunking prose at the State Opening of Parliament without a palpable tone of disdain, get through a garden party without asking someone in a motorised wheelchair if they’ve “come far”, and play host at a state banquet with the head of some god-forsaken state somewhere a long way away without keeling over into the crème brûlée or goosing any of the HOSGFSSALWA’s wives. These are all cogent reasons why neither Russell Brand nor Boris Johnson would be first choice for head of state in a republican UK.

The heir to the throne with an unlikely rival as head of state

Prince Charles is of course in many ways a dismaying testament to in-breeding and private education, but he has gamely survived as Prince of Wales – than which there is no more resonant “number two” designation in the history of the world – for more than half a century, having been handed his title a decade before his formal investiture at Caernarfon Castle in 1969. Princes of Wales have, from time immemorial, behaved as licensed fools and Charles has been accorded an inordinate amount of time in which to do this – on April 21st next year, he will have waited longer than any previous heir apparent, overtaking his great-great-grandfather who eventually became Edward VII.

HM Queen Elizabeth II is not going to abdicate, you can bet your boots, just to give her eldest son a good run at it. If she lives to 105, which seems perfectly feasible, she will have been the longest-reigning queen in the history of the world by more than fifteen years and her successor will be 82 or 83, a good age for a new career. It seems unlikely that Her Majesty will exceed the longest accredited male reign, however. That hard-to-beat record belongs to King Sobhuza II of Swaziland who retired to join his ancestors in 1982, having reigned since the last December of the previous century.

The intended William Waleses

More questions arising: Prince Charles has been a public figure for sixty years and, for good or ill, he has a fairly well-defined public profile. No doubt like anyone else in the public eye, his actual persona is very different in many crucial ways from the public perception. I do not know him personally, so I cannot say. (I stood in for his mother once, but that’s a matter for another day).

Charles has many firm views, not all of them completely batty, and he has had the temerity to express them. I should have thought that on balance his public expression of notions has probably done a bit more good than harm. I am also quite sure that he knows enough to know that, if and when he does ever become king, he will need to keep his views to himself thenceforward.

Prince Charles wears Canadian aboriginal ceremonial robes (as you do)

Prince William, on the contrary, is pretty much a closed book to most of us, I would suggest. Can you think of five adjectives to describe what you perceive to be his character? Neither can I. He seems a somewhat immature boy for 28, the age at which both Tim Buckley and Heath Ledger, who seemed rather older, died. His fiancée, who is a little his senior, might well have a beneficial influence on him. After all, he should still have time to grow into his role, which is doubtless to become our baldest king since the days when they wore wigs as a matter of course.

According to the Sunday Times survey, 44 percent of respondents agreed with the proposition that the Prince of Wales should “make way for William to become king when Elizabeth II dies”. Of course, this was what is known as a prompted response. What we cannot know from the report is the exact wording of the question that prompted the response. It seems to me that there are only two intelligent replies to such a notion: “no” or “it depends”. Does the survey distinguish between Prince Charles “making way” immediately after his mother’s death and his making it clear right now that he renounces his claim on the succession? Obviously not. In any case, his mother would never sanction the latter course.

The Duke & Duchess of Cornwall – always in the market for Goonish gags about knees

And did any of the respondents consider the constitutional mechanics of Prince Charles renouncing his claim? A number of those whom you might expect to find in the line of succession – or at least the first hundred in that line – are excluded from any claim by dint of joining the Roman church or by marrying Catholics. The most senior of these are the children of the Duke and Duchess of Kent, who would be respectively 28th, 29th and 30th in line but that they followed their mother into the Roman church and consequently carry out no royal duties – indeed Lord Nicholas Windsor, the youngest, was married in Vatican City, the first member of a British royal house ever to be so.

But for the heir to the throne himself to step aside would be unprecedented and would undoubtedly spark a controversy around the future of the House of Windsor quite as far-reaching as that of Edward VIII’s abdication. I expect the diligent market researchers carefully explained that when they asked their question.

Wills with not Kate (actually Christina Aguilera)

The trouble is, of course, that most members of the public are what are known formally in the opinion-forming trade as “fuckwits” and their opinions on everything from Michael Gove’s policies for primary schools to the state of their own armpits are not worth having. Points West, the news magazine broadcast on BBC1 in the west country directly after the evening bulletins, ran various vox pop reactions on the day Prince William’s engagement to Miss Middleton was announced. “Oh yus” said a bloke in a cloth cap “I think it’s really good that they’ve got married”. It was probably just as well that they didn’t ask him something harder – like “what is your name?” – but why do such boneheads appear on the screen at all?

Prince Harry early earned a playboy image

Returning to the matter of the succession, Prince William currently ranks second after his father, followed by his brother Prince Henry (known to all as Harry). Third is probably the highest that Harry will ever reach, especially now that William is to marry. But if Prince William and the future Princess Catherine were to produce no children, Harry would be first in line once William became king. And his own children, if he produced any (legitimate ones), would lead the new line.

Now there is a persistent question over Prince Harry’s paternity. It arises because his physical resemblance to the Windsors is much less notable than is his brother’s and because his mother was thought to have taken lovers by the time of his conception. If Harry’s natural father were indeed one of Princess Diana’s men friends, a line wholly lacking a drop of blood royal would have leapfrogged to the top of the succession. This could be readily determined by a DNA test and perhaps such a test has already been applied. But consider the implications. It would all be very fine were such a test to confirm the paternity of Prince Charles. But what if it proved that Charles had no paternal link to Harry? Could Buckingham Palace contrive a credible scenario for severing Harry’s claim? Wouldn’t the real reason get disclosed or be widely guessed at? And what would Harry be told? And how would he react?

James Hewitt and Prince Harry or perhaps vice versa

Would it not perhaps be better for all concerned to ignore the whole issue and let nature take its course? It probably would. But it would only need Harry’s Uncle Andrew, perhaps the most notorious royal philanderer since Edward VII, to notice that his own line would rise to the top if Harry were excluded. The Duke of York – whose title Prince Harry would be certain to take upon Andrew’s death – might well insist that Harry’s paternity be put beyond question.

Stranger things have happened. Who knows, perhaps the next monarch but two will turn out to be Queen Beatrice.

AH, THOSE REVOLTING STUDENTS

I come belatedly to the matter of the anti-tuition-fee demonstration, having passed a very busy and rather fraught ten days absorbed in other matters. Expressions of common sense, I maintain, know no sell-by date, however. How depressingly familiar was the reaction to the generally rather heartening expression of defiance that was the raison d’être of this march. All the politicians and pundits immediately weighed in with a sustained bleat about “the violence”. What violence? There was some damage but that’s not the same thing as violence.

On a typical Friday or Saturday night in many a British city, as much damage is routinely meted out to blameless town centres by drunks. Football derbies usually spark comparable damage and bloody internecine fights as well. Pop stars and other culturally important figures regularly turn over hotel suites without honourable members getting up on their hind legs and high horses.

You might scorn the language of the modern student, but I have a slide, taken after a 1968 demo, of a slogan spray-painted onto a public monument: "Fuck the Fuzz"

When fisticuffs break out at demos, the police certainly give as good as they get, as may be gauged by respective casualty figures. I would suggest that, over the last (say) half century, more civilians than police have lost their lives during street mêlées in Britain.

“The violence” is a convenient means by which the government can divert attention from what the demonstration was about. The suggestion is made that somehow the cause is rendered null by the “deplorable” behaviour of the marchers. The government found a second line of counter-attack with which to shrug off criticism in its scorn of Labour’s supposed lack of a coherent policy on financing higher education. It’s true that Ed Miliband – still away on paternity leave – has yet to reconcile a variety of views in the shadow cabinet but if there were any placards on the march aimed at Labour’s prevarications and procrastinations, I didn’t see them.

Demonstrators on the Millbank roof, from where the fire extinguisher was thrown

It’s doubly dreary but wholly par for the course that Labour spokespeople should obediently do the government’s work for it by just as loudly deploring “the violence”. If the Labour party sees any merit in identifying itself with the cause of universities that encourage the best brains to enrol and benefit all of society rather than supporting a system that beggars bright kids for years into the future and denies society the opportunity to make the best of its best talent, it should deploy more constructive arguments. Of course no sensible person advocates “violence” – and no legislator or would-be legislator can afford to do so – but the damage done to Tory HQ at Millbank was reparable and has doubtless been repaired by now. The damage that government is doing to the education system will take years to put right and is irreparable for the generations of students directly affected.

A triumphant demonstrator breaches the Tories' Millbank HQ

And what do Labour and the pundits – especially the latter – say to the argument that if a march passes off without incident, it fails to generate what Margaret Thatcher famously called “the oxygen of publicity”? Having a coherent argument, being earnest about it and carrying placards with pithy slogans doesn’t get you onto the television news or into the headlines. Trashing buildings does. It’s always a fine judgment whether breaking windows will achieve more gain in overall publicity for the cause than loss in alienation from the “violence”. What would Labour advise?

The idiot who chucked a fire extinguisher from the roof of Millbank onto police below is not the yardstick for measuring the merit of the demonstration. He’s lucky no one below was killed. But there was a highly pertinent letter about him in today’s Guardian: “The masked thug seen dropping a fire extinguisher from a rooftop near police below need not worry – surely, after investigations lasting more than a year, the CPS will go on to rule that there is no realistic prospect of a conviction. Or have I misunderstood the way these things work?”

Michael Gove and David Willetts: the government clearly equates education policy with good looks

Adjacent to this beautifully turned letter is another on a related topic: “So the policeman who injured a woman in a cell wins an appeal. It seems the door was to blame as usual”. This refers to the Melksham station sergeant who dragged a drunken woman across the floor of the station reception area and flung her into the cells. The appeal court judge said that he was satisfied that the cop “did not intend” to throw her into the cell. But the world has seen the incident on CCTV and can doubtless watch it time after time on YouTube; we know for sure that he intended to throw her into the cell. It wasn’t in any way inadvertent.

Tariq Ali was a star of civil disobedience in the days before celebrity culture

That the courts favour the police is not news. But it’s useful to be reminded occasionally that they favour the police so blatantly. I have been pondering the possibility of standing myself for election in one of these police commissioner roles that the government has decreed will come into being and be locally elected. I think I might be a good person to do such a job: I’d be both the force’s and the government’s worst nightmare, relentlessly unforgiving of police malfeasance and the investigation of it by favourable commissions and judges but equally unforgiving of governmental starvation of funds for the policing functions to be effectively carried through. The Melksham police, were I to be elected, would – lord help them – come under my purview. I would want that station sergeant publicly flogged.

Grosvenor Square 1968: they tried to control us with horses then but we came armed with marbles to roll under their hooves

During his recent trip to China. David Cameron revealingly suggested to local students that those of them aspiring to pursue their studies at British universities might find themselves financially penalised not quite as brutally as native students. It was instructive to see that his and his team’s constant wearing of Remembrance Day poppies while visiting a nation whose relationship with opium is, to put it delicately, complex was not the only heedless step that the PM took into a bear trap. Now that Cameron is safely home, the Home Office has revealed that a large part of its crude policy to cut the rate of immigration into Britain will be achieved by hugely stemming the rate of student visas issued to suitably qualified students from overseas. The coalition government is gathering a reputation across the world for speaking with a forked tongue. The young, who are the most concerned with the matters aired here, are the least likely to forgive such foolhardiness.

PARTY HARMANY

I find it hard to squeeze out many tears for the fate of Phil Woolas. The erstwhile MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth has been barred from elective public office for three years at a court hearing and banished to political outer darkness for rather longer than three years by the Labour leadership.

Woolas has always struck me as a chancer, not someone whom I would admit to my confidence. His offence during the election was, the court found, to have promulgated in his election literature an untruth about the campaign of his nearest rival, Elwyn Watkins, the Liberal Democrat candidate. Given that the Lib Dem was beaten by only 103 votes (there must have been a few recounts), it’s hardly surprising that Watkins should seek to overturn the result by other means.

Phil Woolas: if I pull my right ear, it means I'm fibbing

The complaint is that Woolas accused Watkins of “wooing Islamist extremists” in the constituency. As immigration minister in the outgoing government, Woolas ought to have been able to be relied upon to raise such an issue with authority and sensitivity. He cannot have helped his case at the election court by conceding that the disputed leaflet “sailed very close to the wind”.

What the leaflet (reproduced below) actually says is this: “Extremists are trying to hijack this election. They want you to vote Lib Dem to punish Phil for being strong on immigration. The Lib Dems plan to give hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants the right to stay. It is up to you. Do you want the extremists to win?”

The leaflet that did for Phil

It rather depends on where you are coming from whether you find this archetypally robust knock-about of the kind that occurs in elections or in one way or another unacceptable. The case has certainly raised a number of issues. The first is that of Islamophobia. Two days before the general election, the Lib Dem leader of Oldham Council lodged a complaint before the Equality and Human Rights Commission against the leaflet: “I believe that this type of inflammatory literature is incredibly detrimental to community relations and promoting equality” he wrote.

The Oldham Labour party’s conflation of immigration and extremism was certainly inflammatory and it seemed to yank a perfectly understandable nervousness in the community towards radical Islam into a much less sympathetic pitch – “strong on immigration” – that hardly differs from that of the BNP. But whether that constitutes an offence under the Representation of the People Act seems to me to be highly moot.

It’s perfectly legitimate to debate Islam and its acceptability or otherwise as a force in British society. Political leaders generally have allowed themselves to be persuaded that such discussion is somehow off-limits, both because it might suggest that one might be racist and because the Muslim vote is critical in several constituencies, usually Labour ones. In my view, politicians need to be a bit more grown-up and a bit braver in stating what they think. After all, Muslims living in Britain are considerably freer to pursue their superstitions than are non-Muslims in countries where Islam furnishes the government.

An earlier moment of Woolas fame, when bearded by Joanna Lumley (that look!) over the Gurkhas

Islamophobia – if that is indeed what is involved in this particular matter – does not derive from the same kind of perception as xenophobia. To put it in a nutshell, I would suggest that xenophobia is a response a priori and Islamophobia a posteriori. In the last week, a fanatical Islamist woman has been sentenced to life imprisonment for attempting to knife to death her constituency MP, Stephen Timms, like Woolas a minister in the outgoing government. Her rationale was that Timms had voted for the invasion of Iraq. So did hundreds of other MPs. Many more vote frequently on social and other issues in ways that would put them at odds with radical Islam. There is cause for concern here in a way quite different from generalised xenophobic rantings against an imagined “flood” of immigrants.

At the same time, it was widely commented during the election campaign that all the major parties were running away from immigration as an issue and refusing to debate it. As part of the post mortem discussions in all the parties – and especially in Labour – there was wide acknowledgment that the issue ought to have been addressed more thoroughly. Woolas might not have been actually discussing it in his literature but he certainly wasn’t ignoring it.

The Labour leadership has taken an impulsive and heedless line on Woolas, one that suggests a number of knee-jerk reactions based on fear: fear of being thought Islamophobic; fear of being thought soft on party transgressors; fear of a run of abuse from the media. By the Labour leadership, I mean just now Harriet Harman, who is acting leader in Ed Miliband’s absence on paternity leave (though she will doubtless have cleared her line with him). Her line, in short, is that Woolas has been hung out to dry.

Harriet Harman tells Andrew Marr what a good egg Phil Woolas is (not)

The parliamentary party gave Harman a rough ride at its meeting on Monday night. She was accused of pre-empting the final outcome of the case – Woolas is attempting to appeal the court’s decision and must raise £50,000 to pay his legal fees because Labour will no longer support him – and pandering to supposed public opinion which is probably misinformed. What’s more, beyond the Labour party, thoughtful members on the government benches have publicly wondered what restrictions are now likely to be deemed necessary in election literature and whether this doesn’t set a damagingly restrictive precedent.

As it happens, no party has been more often accused of conducting dirty campaigns than the Liberal Democrats. At the May 6th general election, I decided not to vote for our local Lib Dem candidate because he had made a wholly mendacious and unjustified charge against the Tory candidate and refused to withdraw; instead I cast my vote (vain in this Lib Dem/Tory marginal constituency) for the Labour candidate.

Politicians libel each other all the time; it’s part of the game. But the Woolas case has changed the rules. He is the first MP since 1911 to be barred from the Commons by court order. MPs across the house say that it should be for the electorate, not the courts to decide who sits in parliament. They have a point.

Furthermore, there is a dark suspicion that the Labour leadership feel confident about a by-election in a Labour marginal just now, especially one where the challenger is a Lib Dem. They reckon that aggrieved Mr Watkins will end up as toast, after having had to defend the policy reversals that his party have made since the election against a Labour favourite parachuted in for the occasion. (You may stake folding money on it that Oldham East and Saddleworth Labour Party will not get to select a candidate without firm direction from Central Office).

La Lumley reflects sadly on her little friend's fate in her own special way

The Lib Dems have certainly handed Labour a good case, what with comprehensively reneging on their highly trumpeted pledge to oppose any rise in university tuition fees and their broad support for a manifestly unfair assault on the unemployed and those claiming sickness benefit. What is the point of Lib Dems being in the coalition if they cannot effect as rigorous a squeeze on the tax-shy as their Tory partners are applying to the alleged “work-shy”?

The other ingredient in Harman’s position reiterates the spineless stance that all the parties have continually taken over the matter of MPs’ expenses. There is little doubt that the rules were confused and poorly enforced. MPs clearly ought to have sought to uphold the spirit as well as the letter of the regulations.

But the media embraces many much larger snouts that are forever in the trough and ministers and shadow ministers ought to have had the gumption to point this out. Fiddling exes and taking backhanders is no less egregious just because it occurs in the private rather than the public sector. On the contrary, successive Tory and Labour leaderships have bent over backwards and forwards to do the bidding of billionaire media owners, Rupert Murdoch in particular. Harman probably feared that The Times, The Sun and the Daily Mail would have kept up a daily barrage, had she waited to see whether Woolas won his court case. Well, sometimes leadership means stiffening your resolve against the daily slings and arrows in pursuit of the more just cause, even if the upshot takes time. The Woolas case, unattractive though its protagonist might be, is one of those occasions.

NOT EVERYONE STAYED for TEA

“America can rise up and surmount [its] problems,” cried Rand Paul, newly elected Senator for Kentucky, “if we just get government out of our way”. And there you have the battle lines of American politics – and indeed of British politics – in a nutshell.

Rand Paul is the son of Ron Paul who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. Don’t discount Paul Jr – who, I imagine, was named for Ayn Rand – doing the same in 2016 if not 2012. He thinks he’s good. What’s more, so does the Tea Party.

Rand Paul: perhaps his appeal will pall

As the smoke clears from the US mid-term elections, it seems that the Tea Party didn’t do quite so well as they had hoped and everyone else feared. None of the jackasses whose pictures I included in my posting of September 17th (No Pipe of Peace for the Tea P) actually got elected, though to be sure Sarah Palin, the godmother of the movement, wasn’t standing. It’s bracing to imagine how much influence my little blog must have had on American voting patterns. And it’s curiously comforting to note that California was indifferent to Meg Whitman’s billions, just as New York State shunned Carl Paladino’s threats.

Sharron from an unflattering angle

Neither was it entirely the big night predicted for Palin’s ‘Mama Grizzlies’. All bets were on Sharron Angle unseating the Democrat leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, in Nevada, but the disturbing (and possibly disturbed) Ms Angle, who evidently believes that Hispanics are Muslim, was pretty comfortably seen off. In fact, Harry Reid’s son Rory had dropped his surname from ads in his campaign to become state governor and maybe sufficient of the voters thought this unfilial enough to tip the vote against him.

Harry Reid: not a broken reed after all

Also in the west, Carly Fiorina failed to unseat the long-serving Barbara Boxer from her California Senate berth, giving the Democrats a heartening double-whammy in the state, with the retread Jerry Brown triumphing over Whitman as governor. Fiorina used to be CEO of Hewlett-Packard, in which post she was hailed by the Condé Nast Portfolio website as among “the twenty worst American CEOs of all time”. And of course the plum loco Christine O’Donnell, whom even Republican greybeards warned was unelectable when she defeated a mainstream candidate in nominations for the Delaware Senate seat, proved indeed to be unelectable. We’ve surely heard the last of her.

Carly Fiorina: just one out of twenty

But Republicans took the House and Barack Obama will have to play a canny game with the new hand he is dealt. In my view, he and his party have done themselves no favour by cleaving to the time-honoured Democrat stance of declining to carry the fight to the enemy. The Tea Party have been making the political running long enough that the Democrat strategists have no excuse for failing to put together a telling response. It’s not as if the new force in Washington has been at all subtle or tried to keep the White House guessing. You don’t have to look at Fox News for more than a minute or two to get a purchase on where these people are coming from.

Jerry Brown: running in 1975

The American right has been vocal for a long time and it’s time the left got in on the act. There are two aspects that constrain it from doing so decisively. The first is that thoughtful, liberal people do tend to offer their insights with a certain degree of tentativeness and apology. Even when they’re entertainers at the top of their game, they cannot resist exploring the weaknesses and fallacies of their allies as well as their enemies: see passim Jon Stewart. The second is that, for all the long-standing lies about the “liberal bias” of the media promulgated by Republicans, that media is almost entirely owned by right-wing capitalists. No media outlet and no reporter or columnist therein is allowed to conduct themselves in an equivalent manner to that which Rupert Murdoch has decreed shall be standard on Fox News. The outlandish, unsupported ravings of the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck would never be tolerated if they espoused left-of-centre or even centrist views.

Charles & David Koch: the means to buy power

The same is true in Britain. Simon Heffer, Jeremy Clarkson, Melanie Phillips, Rod Liddle, Richard Littlejohn and the legions of their fellow pub bores may write what they like, no matter whether any of it can be remotely justified. But the very few columnists who may be taken to be of the left – Seamus Milne, say, or George Monbiot – clearly are obliged to step with care. Nothing that isn’t cogently argued and copiously illustrated is allowed to sully their pieces.

So the right gets its rallying cries heard and the resurgent Republicans will pour into Washington determined to force Obama to change course. Their supporters know just what needs to be done. Just get the government out of the way: it sounds so simple and that’s why so many simple people have marched behind that rallying cry. But hey, wasn’t the recession the fault of the banks and the lending houses? And wasn’t it a consensus among all but the anarchist fringe and the supranational squillionaires that the problem with the banks and the lending houses arose because those institutions were under-regulated? Regulation – along with taxes – is just what the post-Tea Party Republicans want to sweep away. They reckon making big bucks is “entrepreneurial”, however illegal the means of making them and however much you keep those bucks to yourself. The Koch brothers who largely fund the Tea Party are among the very richest entrepreneurs in the US. Few enterprises defend more lawsuits than does Koch Industries. The Tea Party followers believe they’re fighting for their own liberty but, much more significantly, they’re in practice fighting for capitalism to be above the law.

Clint Didier: weak argument

Democrats (like the Labour Party in Britain) are more concerned, philosophically and historically, with trying to look after the tired, the poor, the huddled masses of Emma Lazarus’ poem storied on the Statue of Liberty. That means a degree of government action, what many American voters who clearly don’t know the meaning of the term denounce in the Obama administration as “Socialism”. What’s the alternative? Here’s how failed Tea Party candidate for the Republican nomination as Washington state senator Clint Didier framed it: “We’ve got to get rid of this protecting the weak” [his emphasis]. Throw ‘em in the sea, I say.

There will be two more years of Obama before we learn whether he can gain a second term, whether the Republican hierarchy will have held its nose and pitched Sarah Palin against him and if so to what effect. As the Chinese proverb threatens: we are fated to live through interesting times.

“EVERYTHING THAT LIVES is HOLY

… life delights in life” declared William Blake in America. A little more than 200 years after he wrote those words, the only seriously holy item on earth is profit. Dozens of the orders of creature that lived holily on the planet in Blake’s day no longer exist. The dodo was the proverbial extinct bird in my childhood, but by now the dodo is just one of many casualties of the greed of man.

At the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in Nagoya, Japan these last few days, delegates were advised that one fifth of all animal and plant species are now classed as endangered. The CBD decided to adopt some targets. They agreed to halve the rate of loss of habitat, including forest, by 2020. Note that there is no notion of making up the loss already sustained. Halving the rate of loss merely extends the period during which habitat may be destroyed and be assured that the destruction will continue.

Going ... the orangutan ...

The British coalition government, with that cynical sense of timing that has become its habitual method of making announcements, has just now revealed that it will put Britain’s national forests up for sale. Expect Epping Forest – renamed Tesco ‘Every-Little-Helps’ Woods – to be cleared for potato cultivation so that the supermarket chain can grow its “own-brand oven-ready chips” at a knockdown price, thus making the loss of the forest well worthwhile.

... going ... the cheetah ...

Also agreed at Nagoya was that by 2020 “at least 17 percent” of “terrestrial water bodies” and 10 percent of coastal and marine areas will be protected as biodiversity zones, under a measure known as the Aichi Targets. Given the nature of most everything in water – including water itself – to move freely, unaware of zonal restrictions, it’s difficult to see how the protection will be of much use. As soon as a minke whale swims out of protected water, some Japanese profiteer will harpoon it. The only (theoretical) beneficiaries of the protection will be those organisms that are anchored within the zones – coral reefs, for instance – but as such organisms are characteristically destroyed by pollutants and as the drift of pollutants will not be inclined to recognize the parameters of protection zones, it seems doubtful that such decreed protection will actually protect anything for very long.

... going ... the white pelican ...

It was the Brazilian delegation, representing one of the most enlightened and progressive governments currently in office, that pressed hardest for this measure. Such crumbs are the best that enlightenment can secure. The convention was told that the goal on biodiversity loss sustainable by this year, agreed at an earlier CBD summit, had not been met by a country mile. On the contrary, biodiversity loss has increased more sharply than all predictions had anticipated. It just fills you with confidence, doesn’t it?

... going ... the black lemur of Madagascar ...

Does it matter if the creatures that innocently share the planet with us die out? You tell me. I would argue that it is not a moral issue. For half a century, I have cleaved to the view – and argued the case whenever I was granted the platform on which to do so – that “moral issues” are really nothing of the kind. A moral argument, I venture, is just an aesthetic response tempered by a judgment concerning practicality. Take abortion for instance. The mountain of morality that is built upon this matter consists largely of a confrontation between those who are repelled by the idea of “a life” being sacrificed (viz the anti-abortion lobby calling itself “Pro-Life”) and those who favour a woman being permitted to control her own destiny. It’s a pretty straightforward confrontation between an assertion concerning what is tasteful in polite (and particularly religious) society and what human beings can – and therefore “should” be able to – determine about their own condition.

... going ... the high brown fritillary of Great Britain.

The supposed morality – as to whether disposing of a foetus is “right” or “wrong” – is, I would contend, wholly beside the point. Anybody of any sort of sensibility might be repelled by a newly pregnant woman determining that, even supported by a wholly responsible and sensitive partner, she cannot, in a phrase, “be bothered” to “go through the hassle” of carrying a child to term – quite how many impregnated woman promulgate such a rationale for abortion I cannot guess. But at the other end of the spectrum there are individuals standing for public office in the US as I write who would not allow the victim of a gang-rape by HIV-positive, drug-addled psychopaths to terminate a resultant pregnancy. Neither of these extremes deserves to be subsumed under any notion so elevated as “morality”.

Gone in the last five years ... the golden toad to the effects of global warming ...

Does it “matter” if the tiger, say, or the mountain gorilla or the honeybee or the seahorse ceases to be? I think it may be argued urgently that it matters terribly if it may be demonstrated persuasively that the loss of such creatures imperils the survival of all of life on earth by skewing the balance of natural forces. The climate change deniers will no doubt argue that, as long as the car industry doesn’t take any kind of hit as a result, the polar bear may happily go the way of the passenger pigeon. But I maintain that, in a perfectly coherent and comprehensible sense, the world and we humans in it are “the poorer” for the loss of those creatures with whom we share the habitat and who depend on our benignity to be permitted to survive.


... gone ... the black-faced honeybird or poo-uli of Hawaii to starvation and disease ...

It may be merely sentimental to fear that succeeding generations – if indeed they are any such – will abominate ours for having the carelessness to allow the black-footed albatross and the sea otter to die out. But what we cannot know – and the tragedy would be to know it when it is too late to retrieve the damage – is the long-term impact of the loss of any species or sub-species. “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil” as the title of Edward Lorenz’ famous paper on chaos theory demanded to know “set off a tornado in Texas?” The demise of the Indian elephant would, I venture, set off a far more far-reaching ripple effect that the flap of a butterfly’s wing.

...gone ... the black rhino of west Africa to poaching and loss of habitat ...

Science will endeavour to preserve the DNA of species so that, if and when (big if, big when) the time is propitious, a lost species might be restored. But the carnage individual by individual is vile, quite as much as the falling of whole orders. I know that creatures in the wild live severely circumscribed existences, even without man’s interventions. Wild creatures do not die of old age. They do not live to suffer the indignities of longevity – heart disease, cancer, dementia, organ failure – as pets do. The great majority of wild creatures, left alone by man, yet perish by starvation, extreme weather or being eaten alive. Man’s baleful additions to these fates embrace hunting, “pest control”, poisoning both deliberate and incidental, habitat destruction, food denial and the inadvertent results of unchecked global warming. If millions of people are killed, maimed, disease-ridden and starved by “natural disasters” – flooding in Pakistan and China, earthquakes in Haiti and China, wildfires in Greece and Australia, drought in East Africa and China – imagine the numberless, unregarded creatures that perish also. No one attempts to rescue any of them.

... gone ... the Madeiran large white to pollution and loss of habitat ...

Capitalism, the home of climate change denial, cares nothing for wildlife as long as there remain the tastier flesh providers and the more satisfying “sport” victims (huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ “bags”). But the indifference to animal catastrophe extends to human disaster too, provided the victims are of no account. The accidents at Chernobyl and Bhopal show that ordinary people unfortunate enough to be affected by industrial or nuclear spillage have little hope of proper recompense. Even in powerful and enlightened countries, authorities are tardy in helping to put back together the lives of those in the path of disaster: consider the insensitivity of Washington towards the city of New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina and the weak reaction of the Hungarian government when tons of toxic sludge poured free of a metals plant at Kolontar earlier this month.

... but not forgotten: the dodo

The media generally finds such diversion as the soap opera of Wayne Rooney more compelling than the fate of the planet. Those who aspire to stay considerably wealthier even than that pudden-headed ball-kicker hope that the day is far off when people with whom they identify and particularly people with powerful lawyers find their lives overwhelmed by the accumulating disasters of global warming. Meanwhile, the mute creatures die out order by order, leaving an increasingly gaping void in the beauty of what was once a natural paradise.

*****************************

When Showtime's Dexter began transmission on FX in Britain, I was intrigued by it but found most of the characters wholly unsympathetic. Some of the habitual aggression has been toned down – Keith Carradine's elegant (and sadly curtailed) participation helped with this – but the compelling imagination of the writing has gradually raised the series to a pretty high level. Michael C Hall's central performance has become infinitely subtle – I always liked his work in Six Feet Under – and perhaps his game has been raised by the quality of the actors called in to play the successive serial killers: Jimmy Smits in the third series, John Lithgow in the fourth just ended here. The sequence in which Lithgow, coolly feigning innocent curiosity, strolled into Miami Police HQ and confirmed Dexter's identity was a masterpiece of controlled cunning in its execution. The resonances rippled in multiple directions and the tension was screwed up wholly psychologically and without any action-movie tricks. Brilliant.

The MOST UNKINDEST CUTS of ALL

Now at last we know what the government intends for us and what its philosophy is: we’re all in it together but those already least likely to vote for the coalition are a whole lot deeper in it than the rest. George Osborne’s unleashing of toxic sludge into Britain’s hitherto relatively secure communities has been cunningly contrived. He and his fellow ministers, Tories and Lib Dems alike, have been assiduously softening up the ground by repeatedly attacking supposed benefit scroungers, blaming Labour for “the mess” and trotting out Margaret Thatcher’s trusty TINA mantra (“there is no alternative”). So far, the softening up appears to have achieved the desired effect. Public opinion polls – of which I am ever sceptical – suggest that these spins have been widely believed. Whether a majority will swallow the toxic sludge remains to be seen.

I earlier wrote at length about Osborne’s attack on those who, in his phrase, make “a life-style choice” of living on benefit (‘Lifestyles of the Poor and Infamous’ September 11th below). The Labour blame-game is readily scotched: this has been a global recession (remember?) and. while Gordon Brown was arguably a tad premature in claiming to have “saved the world” (rather than, as he clearly meant, “the pound”), the Labour government led the way in addressing the global recession (oh yes, read the far-seeing American economists Paul Klugman and Joseph Stiglitz, both Nobel laureates).

As for there being no alterative, some excellent analyses lately have put the lie to that: see http://www.redpepper.org.uk/Countering-the-cuts-myths and www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/17/finances-cuts-public-services-welfare
I would add that it’s critical to bear in mind that there are always alternatives, that politics is about what Rab Butler called “the art of the possible” but that possibilities are virtually endless. Economic policy is never about what is baldly affordable and always about what the government intends to do. Economic policy is never about inescapability. It is about free choice. To dress up choice as unavoidable is to tell bare-faced lies.

Another cynical but crafty stroke has been to contrive it that agencies other than the Treasury are obliged to wield the axe and so – in theory, at least – take the blame. The headline on a piece in today’s Guardian puts it admirably succinctly: “Outsourced: town halls must do Osborne’s dirty work”. Local councils across the land have been told they must make spending cuts of 26 percent before the next general election. Those of us who remember living through rate caps, the poll tax and the general decline of local services following Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power in 1979 will know that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. 100,000 jobs in the gift of local authorities – one in ten of the work force – are expected to be lost. Neighbourhood services, already indiscernible in many areas, are to be squeezed further.

The poor rely on local provision proportionately much more heavily than do the comfortably off. The same is true of public transport. Rail fares will rise by 5.8 percent in January but will have risen by fully 30 percent by January 2015. Over the same period, a 20 percent cut in bus fuel subsidy will force up fares well above inflation. London tube fares, partially announced yesterday by Mayor Boris Johnson with a fine disregard for candour, will rise, it emerged today, by as much as 16 percent. Since Tony Blair came to power in 1997, bus and coach fares have risen 24 percent above inflation, whereas overall motoring costs have fallen 14 percent in real terms. Ministers in their chauffeur-driven cars – which they still enjoy despite loose talk of such provision being surrendered shortly after the general election – have no sense of what travelling by bus, tube or even train is like, nor of how punishing those who depend on such transport find the fares and the daily travelling conditions.

In savaging the welfare state, on top of the squeezing of local authorities, public transport, legal aid, police protection and social housing, the government has very deliberately targeted those least able to fight back. Those areas where social deprivation is most widespread are not in Tory-held or even in Lib Dem-held constituencies. There is no recent tradition of the poor and vulnerable marching in protest and even if vast crowds of the disabled and the elderly take to the streets (and I hope they will, if only to enjoy the feeling that they have made their anger clear), the government will grit its teeth through the shaming spectacle. If trade unionists and students march, Cameron will easily shrug it off as “rent-a-crowd trouble-makers”. After all, the Blair government didn’t turn a hair at the rallies against the invasion of Iraq and in favour of fox-hunting.

Meanwhile, it’s striking that those traditionally termed “the Tories’ friends in the City” were broadly supportive of the spending review. Well, of course they were. Their enormous pay packets and even more outrageous bonuses will continue. Osborne’s weasel words on this matter are that he is going to “extract the maximum sustainable tax revenues from financial services”. This is spin-speak for his intention to do nothing that might discourage the spivs and shysters from staying in town. While they can make a fancy living at the expense of everyone else, they will stay. Once the attractions of some other centre where the gap between rich and poor is even more grotesque – Hong Kong, for instance – become irresistible, they will be off. Obviously Osborne would rather lose the 40,000 teachers and the 6,500 currently employed through the Home Office (including police and customs officials) who will shortly be applying for job-seeker’s allowance than any of his dinner table giests.

Osborne’s flourished “bank levy” will raise, by his account, £2.5bn. It sounds a lot but let’s just see it in the larger picture. It’s approximately three percent of the total spending cuts. And it’s less than 0.1 percent of bank profits. So, not too hard a knock, then. There’ll be the odd arbitrageur who will momentarily consider moth-balling the smaller private helicopter (the one the wife uses) but then decide anyway to tough it out till the gloom lifts. Poor sod.

There has been one more aspect of the government’s treacherous manipulation of policy disclosure: the contrivance of sudden switches of tack disguised as panic and/or incompetence and/or supposedly admirable reaction to public opinion but in reality a back-door method of forcing its intention through while people are looking the other way.

A fine example was the outrageous and vindictive eleventh-hour slashing of the BBC's budget by 16 percent. In the cold light of day, this vicious assault should be met by an equally combative response from the Corporation. I propose that it should both follow the logic of the government's philosophy on public provision and neatly reflect the cut's equivalence of the cost of the national radio stations. The BBC should announce that it will withdraw entirely its provision of radio services.

This makes good economic sense. The wireless is provided without charge. It generates negligible income. In the present climate, the BBC needs to maintain those of its enterprises that are capable of making money. And given that the government has reneged on its expressed commitment to avoid top-slicing – it has newly imposed the cost of the World Service and the funding of S4C onto the BBC's budget, but denied the BBC any editorial say in the Welsh service's output – it cannot be doubted that other public service burdens will be off-loaded onto the Corporation in future.

It will be a long time before commercial radio is able to offer any sort of replacement for what the BBC has built up over almost ninety years. Ministers would find themselves contemplating the loss of Today, The World at One and other platforms with dismay. And BBC Radio's constituency is fierce and loyal. It would rise up in fury. This is the kind of issue that decides significant numbers of voting intentions. The government would be forced to reopen negotiations.

It might be objected that the BBC is obliged by its founding charter to provide a full national service of wireless transmissions. In fact, the BBC’s charter is a surprisingly unprescriptive document, its provisions hung about with the reiterated proviso “for the time being”. In any case, ITV was also set up by charter – a much more rigorous set of provisions than those that obtained for the BBC – but it will be noted that the original infrastructure of a federation of locally-based franchises has been entirely overthrown without any executive order, legislative enactment or other kind of government intervention.

The BBC, the Labour Party and everyone else hit by these cuts – in other words, almost everyone aside from the superrich – need to gird up and fight this vindictive, ideological government. There are plenty of alternatives. Even unthinkable ones may come into play.