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Even the New Statesman has admitted it. Brown has emerged unscathed from the floods in a way that Blair would never have.
As they say in this week's editorial, " One can imagine the approbrium that would have been heaped upon Tony Blair had the floods occurred on his watch".
Just goes to show how different the acceptability of a Labour Prime Minister can be if he's simply given a fair crack of the whip. But I suppose fairness does not come into it when the knives are out for him.
The Tory spin machine was in overdrive last week. According to party chair Caroline Spelman, the defeats in Sedgefield and Ealing were quite encouraging for the Tories. The Tories never expected to win either seat and what really matters say CCHQ is that under David Cameron the Conservative party is, generally, heading in the right direction. To a certain extent the final part of the previous sentence is true. Why? Because the results will almost certainly mean that Cameron will end up being forced (like Hague, IDS and Howard before him) to retreat to the right. He will be told that he needs to embrace more 'traditional' core Tory issues like Europe, crime and the family. So yet again a newly elected Tory leader starts by saying his aim to recapture the centre ground of British politics but is forced (by his own reactionary right wing) to move to the right in an attempt to hang on to the Tory core vote.
The two by-election results have made one thing abundantly clear; David Cameron's superficial and simplistic strategy to drag his party to the centre ground of British politics is not working. The truth is that Cameron’s imposition of a candidate for Ealing Southall who was all style and no substance - someone who became a Tory out of convenience, not conviction - totally backfired. Tory campaigners hailed Mr Lit as the ‘perfect’ candidate, his good looks, charm and a high local profile encouraged them to believe that he could secure a massive coup by routing Labour from one of the its safest seats in the capital. But only days later it emerged that, just a week prior to his selection, Lit had donated £4,800 to the Labour Party and attended a Labour fundraising dinner. The Tory frontbench will rally to Cameron's defence but they know that the humiliation and embarrassment of the past few weeks are very much of Cameron’s own making. Cameron views himself as the politician of the digital age, a bold and fearless leader who is unafraid to take risks. Well he certainly took a risk in Ealing Southall and the outcome is that his leadership as well as his judgement are now seriously in question, particularly amongst the ordinary, rank and file members of his party.
Cameron visited Ealing himself on no less that six separate occasions – including a ‘Cocktails with Cameron’ event (obviously good old fashioned door knocking is too tiresome for the new brand of Tory activist). Cameron's team were supremely confident that the adoption of a vigorous and well funded ‘marketing’ campaign in Ealing Southall would win the day, that style and image would triumph over hard graft and a more traditional approach to political campaigning. How wrong they were.
The by-election results clearly indicate that the new Labour tent that Blair and Brown helped to create is still firmly erected on the campsite of the middle ground. Clear differences between Brown and Cameron, in both style and emphasis, are now emerging and these results will help accentuate these differences even further. David Cameron’s support for a 'celebrity' style candidate in Ealing offers a real insight to the workings of today's Tory party. Cameron's Conservatives are made up of the ‘right kind of people’, his people – privately educated and from a background of immense wealth and privilege. Under Cameron the Tories still believe that the role of government is to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of those who embrace their political, their economic, and their social views. Increasingly Cameron reminds me of the man who, on seeing the mob racing down the street in protest calls out to the crowd "where are you going? I need to know because I want to lead you."
Today the words of former Tory MP Quentin Davies take on a new resonance. In his letter to Cameron outlining his reasons for his decision to leave the Conservative party and join Labour he wrote 'Under your leadership the Conservative party appears to me to have ceased collectively to believe in anything, or to stand for anything. It has no bedrock. It exists on shifting sands. A sense of mission has been replaced by a PR agenda.' Cameron's PR agenda has failed miserably, how long before he is forced to retreat towards having to peddle past Tory agendas?
David Cameron was the future once, didn't last long did it!
So Jacqui Smith inhaled and, in the tired political formulation, did "not particularly" enjoy it. Tony McNulty, her affable Junior Minister, has backed his boss to the hilt on this one, admitting his previous experiences with the evil weed.
More entertainingly, this reopens the file on David Cameron's own youthful misdemeanours. While I personally agree that his "this is a private matter" defence is a fair one, and that witch-hunts like this are not particularly conducive to mature political discourse, it also raises one interesting party political issue which could genuinely hurt the Tory leader's strategy of "chavving down" his privileged upbringing.
Put simply, the Home Secretary has today revealed what many of us know to be true - that weed (and pills) are the drugs of choice for normal, working people. Labour people. By contrast, the Tories, with their inherited wealth and Bullington Club decadence, are clearly representative of society's cocaine users. And posher drugs besides - it would not be too surprising to unearth a photo of some minor shadow minister in his university days, resplendent in velvet smoking jacket, reclining on his antique sofa while idly puffing away on an elegant ivory opium pipe. I’m sure that there’s a stash of laudanum, passed down from generation to generation, taped somewhere under the opposition benches in the Commons for when those tedious debates on poverty, housing or free health care require one to take a ‘stiffener’ before trying to catch the Speaker’s eye.
In narcotics as in everything else, this non-story reinforces the message that we know to be true: Labour is the party of the people, while the Tories are the party of wealth and privilege.
Jacqui Smith, on the Today programme this morning admitted to smoking Cannabis at Oxford. You know it must have been commonplace when even the most strait-laced of politicians admit to having done it.
It's clearly no coincidence that she has come out with this a day after Gordon Brown, announced yet another review of the reclassification of cannabis in 2002, from class B to class C. Although it is right that the government should listen to public concern on such issues, ultimately, the government should face down calls to reclassify the drug back up.
Some reasons why:
Recorded cannabis use is falling.
Smith and others have a bee in their bonnet about 'new', stronger varieties of skunk, which are linked to mental illness in heavy users. But the government knew about skunk in 2004 when the first change took place, and again in 2006, when it was once more decided to leave things as they are.
Lastly, while, on average, cannabis leaf has been getting gradually stronger over time, seizures of very strong cannabis have been stable since the 1970s - it is just the indoor grown stuff that is getting gradually stronger (thanks to the excellent Ben Goldacre in the Guardian for that one).
The BBC is currently engaged in frenzied soul-searching about whether it deceives its audience, as part of the fall-out from the trail which wrongly suggested the Queen had stormed out of a photo-shoot. The problem is that you don't have to look very far for deception in TV - it is inevitable, necessary, and right that producers should invoke 'the magic of television' to make programmes watchable. Let me give you an example. Probably 99% of the interviews you see in reports on TV were shot on one camera. The reporter and/or producer pitch up in the interviewee's office, and set up their camera locked-off on the interviewee's face. There is no camera pointed at the interviewer. At the end of the interview, the reporter/producer will shoot some cutaways - that is, the reporter nodding sagely, the interviewee's hands moving expressively, or something else which catches the eye in the office. This will allow them to edit the clip - that is, butt together the two best things the interviewee says, rather than taking a very long chunk; they can use the cutaway to cover the edit, so it doesn't show. If they haven't got decent cutaways, they may use a 'flash edit' or some such, but that will give the game away that the clip has been edited, and distract the viewer.Of course the cutaway is meant to give the impression that the reporter was nodding contemporaneously with the interviewee's words, when that isn't actually what happened.
Quite a lot of people know that this is what happens, and I suspect 99.9% of the rest wouldn't mind if they did know about it; it's perfectly innocent, and doesn't misrepresent in any significant way. If viewers want broadcasters to send two camera crews rather than one to every shoot, so they can get contemporaneous cutaways, they're going to need to pay a great deal more for their TV; it doesn't seem like the smartest way to waste the licence fee. But today's Daily Mail makes the scandalous charge that in an edition of 'Flog it!', a lady was seen bidding in an auction apparently bidding for an item which her husband complained she hadn't bid for. I'm quite sure the husband was right - but isn't this getting a bit silly? Does it really matter? So the cutaway of the audience at the auction wasn't contemporaneous with the auctioneer's words; does it really matter? Presumably they didn't have enough cameras. We should focus only on misrepresentations that do matter - the Queen didn't storm out of the photoshoot, so she was definitely traduced; if an audience cutaway during a politician's speech showed people yawning or heckling when they weren't, that would be wrong. But producers know that, and they take trouble not to be unfair to people in this way - not least because they wouldn't have a leg to stand on when the complaint or the libel suit came in.
Here's an adaptation of The Red Flag that the cut- and-run brigade might like to sing at their next gathering;
" Though heroes flinch and the trustworthy sneer, we'll keep the white flag flying here."
My attention has just been drawn to the latest Conservative Future bulletin which disheartens its readers with the “disappointing news that the Working Life Conference has had to be cancelled due to lack of interest”. Intrigued, I decided to find out what this Conference was all about. Apparently:
“CF Working Life is geared toward the young professionals in the Party, those activists who are starting out and building their careers. The Working Life Conference is a part of the key CF objective to improve the appeal of the Party to this demographic.” “The conference is designed to offer training, debate, and networking for the Working Life part of CF.”
Maybe it was the £135 cost of the weekend (due for the 21-22 July) which put those young Tory workers off – well it certainly would have been a steep price for the vast majority of workers in the UK. But then it obviously wasn’t aimed at ordinary people with average pay packets - the list of speakers included a private banker in wealth management, a PR guru to Mercedes Benz, a number of senior management consultants and someone in investment management.
I guess when it says that the Tories want to appeal to ‘this demographic’ it means they want to get the lucre-hungry young’uns who are undoubtedly going to want to keep their hard earned cash from the nasty tax man as they grow older. This agenda appears to be confirmed by the inclusion of Matthew Elliott, co-Founder of the Taxpayer’s Alliance, as one of the speakers for the conference. This was the organisation who produced that rather distasteful film on YouTube with the strapline “who knows what they’ll tax next”. The closing frames suggest that men might be taxed for the pleasure of sleazing over busty blondes. (If only!)
Another internet search takes me to Mark Clarke’s blog on 26th June which is titled ‘Working Life Conference – Some spaces left’. All events organisers have stretched the truth at one time or another to big-up attendance figures, but this appears to be taking the biscuit. Clarke has obviously been worrying about this conference for a while. He wrote in April: “A few people I have a lot of time and affection for have put a hell of a lot of work in organising the Conservative Future Working Conference. Therefore, I recommend and urge you all to go.”
Do Conservative Future members have no heart to rally to such a clarion call? Did not even the promise of a conference dinner get them signing up in their droves? Maybe the truth is that the people the conference was aimed at were too busy working for their summer city bonuses…
"We've got to keep young people in education after 16, whether it's part-time or whether it's full-time, whether it's training in work, or in college, or staying on at school." This is what Gordon Brown had to say in support of the proposal by the new schools' secretary Ed Balls that we raise the school leaving age to 18. Brown and Balls are right. A recent study in Canada found that the introduction of tighter provincial restrictions on leaving school between 1920 and 1990 had helped in raising both average attainment and average incomes. The study found that students compelled to attend an extra year of school experienced an average increase in annual income of about 12%. It also found that compulsory schooling is closely associated with significant benefits in terms of other socio-economic outcome measures ranging from bi-lingual abilities, employment and poverty status. The Ontario study, recently cited by Alan Johnson, concluded that the personal costs of dropping out of full time education aged 16 were high. The study estimated that the earnings foregone as a result of leaving school early ranged from about one to two times the average dropout's lifetime peak annual wage or three to six times the earnings forgone by staying in school. In many countries, school attendance is mandatory for all children up to a specific age. Children often then have the choice of staying on at school for further education and possible preparation for university or college entrance, or leaving to pursue a job or professional training. For example in India this is at 14 years of age whilst in the UK and many other countries throughout the world it is 16. What is not in doubt is that the longer a young person stays in education the greater the chance that he/she will acquire additional skills and significantly more opportunities in life as a whole. It has been shown many times that those who have stayed on in education longer often find it easier to find work and that they are much more likely to find that work satisfying. Similarly, the level of education among the population can have a positive effect on the economy as a whole as they can be more efficient workers. As the Ontario study has shown the impact of extra years of education on earnings and economic productivity is also disproportionately heavy at the lower end - that is, two more years at school for a 16 year old will make a much greater percentage difference to their later economic worth than two years of graduate work for a 22 year old.
The raising of what should really be called the "education leaving age" would, in my view, be a positive move that would help to promote greater equality. Currently there is a clear link between leaving full time education at aged 16 and indicators of socio-economic disadvantage, such as low-income jobs or high unemployment. More importantly parents who left school young are more likely to have children who leave school early. Forcing all children to stay in school longer could break this cycle of disadvantage.Increasing the education leaving age is, I believe, crucial to the long-term investment in the talents and abilities of our nation. Doing so will increase the economic potential of the future workforce, and so will bring increased tax revenues in the long term to more than cover any initial costs. For example it is worth noting that in many countries a very large majority of young people voluntarily stay in education beyond the end of compulsory schooling (e.g. France, Germany and Japan). If these countries can already bear the extra cost without economic collapse, it should be possible for nations like our own to cope as well.As a movement Labour really is at its best when at its boldest.
Raising the education-leaving age to 18 would be a progressive, bold and socially just policy. The sooner it happens the better.
When the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee was asked by Progress magazine whether journalism or politics was the more honourable profession, her reply unequivocal – politics by far. ‘We journalists snipe from our comfortable crows nest at the parade of politicians passing our gun sights while they try to get things done as they dodge our bullets.’
Politicians’ press officers have the unenviable task of moving their political masters out of the way of the bullets or, to stretch the metaphor further, persuading (or manipulating) the gun-wielding journalists to hold fire.
In the case of Alistair Campbell, whose diaries were published this week, the perception in some quarters is that he armed himself with an AK47 and went on the offensive, bullying journalists into submission and ruthlessly spinning the government line.
In his Times column today, David Aaronovitch (in a piece that will ensure he remains on the Campbell Christmas card list) implies that that much of the fault lies with lazy journalists who don’t make the effort to dig beyond the spin. ‘If journalists were reasonably robust and did their jobs properly, how could “spin” make any real difference?’, he argues.
Perhaps, though, Aaronovitch underestimates the pressures of life as a lobby correspondent (rather than the relative comfort of an armchair member of the commentariat). Most journalists have little trouble seeing through the gloss put on an announcement by the government and there is never a shortage of Tory counter-attacks acting as a corrective. Instead, it may well be the pressure to break exclusives (most prevalent on the Sunday papers) that has journalists feeding out of the spin doctor’s hand, with their power to control who gets a ‘major announcement’ first. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that a certain amount of cosying up goes on between hacks and flacks and that the resulting stories sometimes have the ring of gratitude about them.
But for every government-manipulated story that appears in the press, there are arguably many more of the bullet-firing kind referred to by Toynbee. While the British like to flatter themselves about the supposed rigour and objectivity of their media, the newspapers that have the most readers and really influence how people vote are hardly stalwarts of the country’s most honourable journalistic traditions. For every David Leigh and Rob Evans, circumventing powerful vested interests to break genuine public interest stories, there are numerous hacks on a deadline, reporting to editors with axes to grind, churning out unsubstantiated stories based on rumour and out of context quotes.
Press officers are not the only ones who practise spin.
Though having only read extracts of Alastair Campbell's diaries, what becomes clear is the machismo swirling around him and No 10. You can smell it can't you, the sort of 'look at me, I am all man, grrrrr, get me, I am sooooo powerful, grrrr' that makes you wonder whether the rumours of rulers at meetings were really true.
Confidence is good, and working in politics you have to be pushy, and determined. Alastair was certainly outwardly confident, and an interesting character. He could be both charming and bullying - which he used to great effect in his job. However, what is grating is the way in which he became a role model for most men, and some women, working for the party in and around media relations. You could see them all wanting to be Alastair - competing to be ruder to staff and journalists, to be more arrogant and scathing than their colleague. Basically, the competition went 'who could be the biggest c**t' as Alastair himself might put it.
And, with the charismatic Alastair as the pied piper, there grew a small army of Labour people behaving badly to each other, as if this was what was expected of them. Gentle persuasion or charm was rarely the tools used, though as they doled out the stick, some of us wondered if the carrot would have been a more successful choice?
The irony is of course that the Labour movement is about fairness, and dignity. It tells people how they can become better citizens, and how we should live in harmony and respect, with rights but also responsibilities to each other. Three cheers for that, but while such warm words are spoken, the daggers are poised behind backs and the bitching and bullying never ceases.
Of course, this is a generalisation and there are many good and decent people who do not behave like playground thugs with a axe to grind. It's just sometimes when you are blinded by the big swaggering bully boys, it's hard to see the goodies ploughing away at making the world a better place with dignity and respect for those around them.
Politics has to change though, and more and more people are beginning to realise that. Soon some of egos will naturally disapear and courtesy and charm may make a welcome return. Or maybe politics will always be full of the bully's, it's just up to the rest of us to report them!
Here are some of my letters that did not make the pages of that outspoken, high-minded magazine of the radical left, the New Statesman.
"Tony Blair's premature departure demonstrated one simple truth. Not even the best and most resilient of leaders can survive the kind of character assassination exemplified by your snide editorial remarks about his Middle East posting (2 July). However I can understand your disappointment since Blair potentially risking his life in the pursuit of peace doesn't really give you the knocking copy that a lucrative lecture tour in the USA would have provided."
"Following John Pilger's cover story of April 16, "Iran: we are being led into the most serious crisis in modern history" I have submitted a new verb to the Oxford English Dictionary for consideration. This is "to pilger" which means to grossly distort and exaggerate with a view to creating maximum hatred and alarm."
"Those, like the New Statesman (Leader, 9 October), who claim that the Iraq war has gained recruits for the jihadist cause are saying no more than that the cause of terrorism is resisting it. The answer is therefore quite simple. 'We surrender!'. "
They can dish it out but I'm not so sure about whether they can take it.
Gordon Brown's sudden lifting in the polls, in the head to head numbers, on issues and on personal qualities is all the more striking because it follows months of bad press. Gloomy commentators reported the suicidial depression of unnamed ministers on the prospects of a Brown premiership.
Meanwhile David Cameron spent the first period of his leadership, up to grammar schools, in a kind of flacid, golden haze of good publicity. He must now be cursing his good press, just as Brown must now be delighting in his previous bad write-ups.
The consquence of Cameron's effortless ascendency was to breed a palpable sense of entitlement, and worse a kind of laziness. Tory spokespeople, particuarly George Osborne, started talking about the next Tory government as though it was a racing cert, counting perhaps on the public's well known love of tories who are pleased with themselves. And contrast Cameron's relaxation after his very good local government results this year with Tony Blair as leader. Blair took every piece of good fortune as an opportunity to put further pressure on his party to change. The sense from TeamCameron was that they had already crossed the finish line, that the work of reform the Conservative party was finished.
Meanwhile Brown has benefitted from lowering expectations. Much of the commentary on him fostered the impression that far from being a consumate politician, he was going to wander into No10 dressed in a stained donkey jacket and the proceed to lose Labour every vote south of the Tweed. He has also had the chance to tailor his first moves against the criticism. For example by devolving power and by making an asset out of his less showy style.
This simian is damned if he can draw a lesson from it all. Except too much good press can be too much of a good thing.
I welcome Gordon Brown’s firm position in the House of Commons today. The simple fact is that under a constitutional settlement of devolution, it is a completely wrong to have the debate on the premise of a federation.
Westminster still has a massive baring on the Devolved institutions - there budgets are fundamentally tied and their policies inter relate.
Take the policy of Tuition Fees/Top Up Fees, the UK happens to have three different policies on this but for one reason alone – the changes that were started in the Westminster Parliament. The creation of the graduate endowment in Scotland was a response to the fee introduction for the UK in 1998, the Welsh flexible fee for English Students and the top up fees charged on English Medical Students in Scotland have a direct relationship with what English students have to pay in England. Welsh students will not pay top-up fees – a policy position only needed to be reached after the passing of the 2004 Higher Education Act. The polices might be locally determined but the need to decision-making in the first place was triggered by Westminster legislation.
The best thing a Scottish/Welsh MP could have done to stop the costs being passed on to Scottish students would have been to defeat the Bill in Westminster rather than their MSP/AM voting with their hands tied in Edinburgh or Cardiff.
This may be a difficult argument to make when parading devolution as a great achievement of the government but an important distinction to make. We are not a federal nation, but an devolved one. The history, systems and social mobility make us more interdependent that any other part of Europe and this is seen strongly in the way the House of Commons can set an agenda or at the very least raise questions for the legislatures else where.
I call for “MPs votes of all constituent issues”.
This is a dubious position for the David Cameron’s Conservatives to push - their unionist credentials has well and truly left them. They now seems more like a sister party of Alex Salmons SNP than Trimble’s UUP.
Labour's defending the Union both sides of the boarder!
In the unlikely event that one of the City’s private equity executives took time out of doing multimillion pound deals to chat with their office cleaner, one of the few things they might have to talk about is how little tax each of them pays.
Indeed, Nicholas Ferguson, chairman of SVG Capital, recently said that his colleagues were ‘paying less tax than a cleaning lady’ in a comment hardly likely to boost morale among cleaning staff at the City’s buyout houses.
But while cleaning ladies’ limited contribution to the exchequer is due to the fact that they probably do not earn a great deal, the one thing that even the financially illiterate (or uninterested) know about private equity high-flyers is that they are positively raking in the cash - but still pay very little tax. Apparently it’s something to do with deducting interest from taxable profits….
As an example, take the report today by BBC business editor Robert Peston that Saga and the AA paid almost zero corporation tax at all since falling into the hands of private equity two and a half years ago.
Foul play cry left wing commentators such as the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee, adopting menacing tones about how ‘it’s time to face them down, call their bluff and regulate their unjust advantage’. The Treasury Select Committee showed signs of heeding Toynbee’s words when some private equity chiefs were hauled before it and received a pretty heavy grilling.
But will Gordon Brown follow suit and 'face them down'? With words such as ‘puritan’ and ‘self-disciplined’ often used to describe the new PM, you might think he would have little time for the extremely wealthy seemingly shirking their responsibility to contribute back to society.
However, Brown’s track record (and some would say achievement) with the City of London hardly suggests he is bracing himself for a dual with some of its most influential and highest-earning players.
When asked during his leadership campaign whether he would raise the top rate of income tax, he pointed out that the richest 10 per cent now paid 52 percent of income tax, up from 40 percent in 1997, implying that he thought they were already doing their bit. At the same time, Brown has hardly been wagging a socialist finger at the so-called non-doms (those with British passports who hold non-domicile status and so pay substantially less tax). As the Spectator’s Fraser Nelson points out, ‘This is hardly the policy of a traditional socialist’.
But if our new PM is to address issues of social justice and equality head on, he will at least need to offer an explanation of why the current system doesn’t need changing.
There is an excellent review of Michael Moore's latest film, 'Sicko', here at the ever-vibrant Harry's Place.
As someone who disagreed strongly with Moore's agit-prop in 'Fahrenheit 9/11', it may be perhaps a little hypocritical to embrace Moore when he salutes the sacred cow of British Labour politics, the NHS. But, for all Moore's faults, there is no doubt that 'Sicko' will ignite a debate that is necessary in US politics. I remember well how effectively Bush savaged Kerry's very moderate plans for health reform in the US at the last Presidential Election by accusing reformers of wanting 'health rationing'. Bush pointed at Europe with its queues for health provision and correctly identified our system of rationing. This rhetoric is hard to counter, and in fact has already been embraced by those who wish the NHS ill in the UK.
It is interesting to note that in debates over the provision of cancer drugs by the independent licensing body NICE, the Daily Mail has used the language first used by Bush of 'rationing', in this case of medicines. I shalln't repeat all the arguments in favour of NICE, which Polly Toynbee does in the Guardian here will aplomb, but I shall repeat the mantra that democratic socialists must learn by rote: "NICE has sanctioned 25 of the 26 cancer drugs it has been asked to review: these cost up to £25,000 per person per year and are free at the point of use on your NHS."
The language of 'rationing' is dangerous because it is true. The NHS does prioritise healthcare and does prioritise which drugs and treatments to use on the basis of cost. This isn't to say it isn't well funded, it is, but we must recognise that our healthcare system has queues as an intrinsic outcome. When the state decides the supply of healthcare, rather than individuals, you will always have queues, especially if it is free at the point of use. Free healthcare means no restrictions on demand: people will demand as much healthcare as possible because humans wish to preserve themselves and their families as best they can. However, this is not to say this method of supply is wrong. When, like the US system, individuals get to decide how much healthcare to purchase, the rich buy far too much rather than too little - hence US healthcare expenditure reaching nearly 14% of GDP, even with a third of the population having no healthcare (compared to around 8-9% in the UK). The neuroses of the rich push up the cost of healthcare for the poor - the rich hog doctors when little Timmy has a cold; the poor can barely afford to send Tanya to the doctor when she has serious breathing difficulties.
When 'Sicko' is released in UK cinemas, there is no doubt the old arguments will be reopened. The Mail, et al., will point to French healthcare and ask why we don't embrace social insurance, some more radical observers may even ask why we don't embrace US style personal insurance with top-ups for the poorest families. 'Sicko' shows effectively how drug companies are becoming increasingly effective sales operations, providing miracle panceas to the neuroses of the middle-classes - at a price - with our healthcare system we ought to avoid the sirens calling for insurance (whether social or private). Unless of course you want the marvellous site, common in France, of doctors discussing prescriptions with drug company reps whilst on the golf course.
According to Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski, the EU is just not strong enough and needs strengthening. In a piece for the Tory grassroots website ConservativeHome Mr Kawczynski argues that the EU:
"needs to become a bicameral institution, with an Assembly with Members appointed in proportion to population size, plus a Senate, with each state granted an equal number of Senators."
In other words the EU constitution should mirror the US constitution. The logical implication of this argument is that we should seek to create a United States of Europe. I wonder what some of Mr Kawczynski's colleagues will think about this?
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