In praise of Derek Draper

When Derek Draper started Labourlist it was hopeless as a blog but hugely entertaining, largely because Draper picked unnecessary fights in order to promote the blog and. I suppose, himself. It was inevitable that he would come unstuck and so it proved.

Since then I have had occasion to read some of the blog and I have been generally impressed by the thoughtful contributions of a number of its contributors. Plainly they are concerned about the hi-jacking of what they thought was their party by a bunch of mountebanks and charlatans. They are Labour's grass roots, which the party has never much heeded.

But credit where credit is due, Draper did start up this enterprise and it is still there and it appears to be working as a blog. There are people out there who are very adept at starting new enterprises but lack the skills to sustain them.

Perhaps Derek Draper is one suc

Yes minister

Daniel Finkelstein makes the case in the Times today for Special Advisors. He may have a point but why do we always in this country develop complicated and probably unsatisfactory solutions instead of going to the heart of the problem.

The problem surely is that the executive heads of government departments are permanent secretaries - a wonderful idea in its time when continuity of management was desirable, but outmoded in a fast-changing world.

The answer is to change the executive head when a new government or minister comes in. There are hundreds of competent, experienced men and women out there who could fill that civil service role and who could also be chosen as someone who was in tune with the Minister's thinking. Thus change would have a fairer chance of being properly implemented as opposed to the present chaotic situation where Ministers battle with (and often lose to) their Sir Humphreys. We would more likely avoid half-baked schemes if the executive arm of government departments were committed to proper implementation.

And no need for the Damien McBrides either.

Profiles in courage

The evidence has been piling up over the years and after this week it is indisputable that Gordon Brown is a "fraidy cat". There are times in political life when you have to face the music and the freeing of the Lockerbie Bomber is certainly one of them, but again Brown is unequal to the occasion. In Scotland both McCaskill and Salmond have stood up to public questioning to make their case. Fair enough! But here the PM has even had to forgo the reflected glory of the Ashes victory because he was too afraid of Lockerbie questions.

Yesterday he made a compulsory public appearance because of the visit of Netenyahu and lamely insisted that this was a quasi-judicial matter for Scotland only. To my eyes he looked haggard and unrested even after 6 weeks of absence.

No Prime Minister in my seven decades has been so afraid to stand up to public scrutiny. They may at times have been fearful, but they all had the courage to face their critics. Brown's predecessor may well have concluded the same murky deal for the same murky reasons but he at least would have stood by the decision and earned some respect.

Gordon Brown is truly a most inadequate man.

The Scotification of the UK

Devolution of government is a good thing. I have long been an adherent to the "small is beautiful" philosophy of life. Government in this country has become too centralized and this is a large factor in explaining why nothing works.

However. . . .

But ...

There are some things states should not devolve - and foreign policy is most certainly at the top of that list. You could not conceive of a situation where the German Federal Government would allow Saxony to run its foreign policy nor would the US government cede its foreign policy to the government of North Dakota. What is our mindless goverenment up to.

If we allow the argument currently emanating from Downing Street that freeing the Lockerbie prisoner was entirely a matter for Scottish Justice (and I doubt whether anyone believes that) then we are in effect ceding foreign policy and international trade policy to a junior government in Edinburgh. Scotland may want to be a sovereign state but they are not there yet.

The whole affair should rouse the deepest cynicism in everyone. This has nothing to do with compassion or justice and everything to do with cutting a lucrative deal with the Libyan Government and at one level we can shrug our shoulders and be part of the real world. But once again we have Gordon Brown being too clever, too lacking in courage and too bound up in his own head to understand public concerns.

One suspect that Blair might have found a better way to finesse this one. The result may have been no different but he would not have created a situation where in trying to stick it to the SNP he would cede rights over foreign policy.

Undone by the Bank of Scotland

Why does being right make me uncomfortable? At the time of Lloyds TSB being persuaded to take over HBOS, I suspected, without any specialist financial knowledge, that it would go sour - and said so. This judgement was purely intuitive and largely based on my assessment that Brown was only interested in short term political advantage with no interest in a larger strategic vision.

And so it has proved. I don't feel good about it. A friend of mine, who has worked for Lloyds for the whole of her career and who took share options each year, saw her savings decimated by the takeover. And there will be countless like her. Ordinary people, not high flyers, who invested cautiously for their retirement, only to discover that a single buccaneering move by the self-serving Gordon Brown.

And who really cares for these people? Not the parliamentarians who have been absorbed in various expenses scams, not the BBC journalists who - likewise, and not any of the political journalists and bloggers who seem only interested in fine political point-scoring.

Harmania

We have been accustomed to pygmy politicians with pigmy brains - and I should apologize to pigmies at this point - so it is with a certain weariness that i listen to the reports of Haeeiet Harman's self-inflating comments over the past few days. You could always respect, even if you didn't agree with, the assertions of a Germaine Greer or Betty Friedan, because there was an intellectual force behind their thoughts and writings.

Sadly, Harman doesn't even come close.

It would be an advance in our belief system if we acknowledged that just as individuals exercise different preferences, so do people from different cultures, so do people of different gender. We accept that North American born athletes are more likely to end up playing baseball or basketball, and that European athletes express a preference for soccer and Indian athletes re more likely to play hockey or cricket. I don't recall any move by the politically correct to campaign for quotas for American kids who might otherwise be denied the opportunity to play cricket.

And while we are on the subject of cricket, how about gender equality in this country. Is it not scandalous that women are not selected to plau against the Aussies? And if we are to aspire to true equality should we not expect each side to be made up by 5 1/2 men and 5 1/2 women.

Harriet Harman is like Don Quixote tilting at windmills. The battles have been fought long ago and largely won. Women have achieved high positions in areas where they choose to compete. But I would bet, for example, that you are more likely to find a woman as CEO of a successful company manufacturing lingerie than carburettors.

Politics is an arena where there are no good measures for competence. Arguments can always be made that it is someone else's fault and that one's mediocrity had no bearing on a disastrous outcome. So it is possible, for example, for people like John Prescott and Harriet Harman (was the office of Deputy Labour leader made for them?) to carry on for years without achieving anything or managing anything with competence.

Harman failed as a minister and was sacked by Blair. She then contrived to get a number of jobs which did not require any special accountability or competence. We can see a similar pattern with Prescott. He was given a significant ministry at the start of the Blair government. He screwed up and was thereafter given various non-jobs with important-sounding titles and the opportunity to play croquet at Dorneywood.

One wonders why these pople ar listened to at all.