Image Over Substance

This time it’s Obama, not Blair or Brown. In fact it appears that Brown deserves some rare praise, for disagreeing with Obama over the announcement of an Iranian nuclear facility discovered by French, British and US intelligence.

The story suggests that Obama delayed the announcement in order not to “spoil the image of success” of UN disarmament talks he was chairing. You know, spoil the image of success by admitting abject failure. By actually giving an accurate assessment. By being realistic and facing the truth.

What on Earth is the point of the image of success? Are the people of Israel going to be comforted by being told that there aren’t any nuclear weapons targeted at them, if later someone admits that there are and Obama knew all along? Are they going to be comforted if they have the image of safety as those nuclear weapons fly towards them?

Sarkozy’s comments on Obama’s naivety make a lot more sense now, although I have always considered him both naïve and more interested in perception than reality. I have described him as an American Tony Blair, and that is not a compliment.

Ed Balls Was Right

Stop the presses, I agree with something Ed Balls said, and history is on his side. It is just a pity he said it in 1991, then became a member of the government that did exactly the reverse of what he recommended.

Guido Fawkes always has an excellent quote of the day. The current one from Balls is

“The allure of a minimum wage is deceptive and should be resisted … Fostering a high wage, high skill economy is the only way to reverse Britain’s relative economic decline and to generate the resources to eradicate poverty. But the minimum wage is not the answer. If anything the minimum wage will make it even harder to achieve these ends”

Unfortunately he has proved prescient.

I never trusted Balls because he is not stupid yet is on Brown’s coat tails.

Most of what the Labour government has done in twelve years, and almost everything Brown has done in that time has had the aim of furthering the Labour Party, and in the latter case furthering Brown within the Party. I think Balls knew quite well that much government policy would not have the effect proclaimed, even have the reverse effect. However that would not be obvious in a simplistic reading, by the BBC and the parts of the population the policy was targeted towards.

These policies were intended to give a good impression while making ever more people beholden to the Labour Government. This is government for the purpose of gerrymandering, with no other aim.

The Left Don’t Want to Know

Or ‘Better Left than right’.

Sorry for the hiatus in blogging. Have had a busy week working and visiting family.

However I did catch Glen Reynolds’s link to this clip of a television debate in America about the proposed changes to the healthcare system. In the clip a chap called Paul Krugman, a self-proclaimed ‘liberal’ New York Times blogger, asks the few Canadian members of the audience if they think their government-run health system is terrible, and although the proportion is not given, all or nearly all of them said they thought it was terrible.

What I found really telling was not that this was a great argument against Obama’s plans (which it is of course) but Mr Krugman’s response, which was “Bad move on my part!”.

So what Mr Krugman is saying is that it is more important to win a TV debate than to learn something (that there might be a lot of people who have a bad impression or a bad experience of government-run healthcare) or that the debate comes to the best answer it can. Left-wing ideology seems, by extension, to be more important to Mr Krugman than good healthcare.

Often I get the same impression from the current UK government and the British left in general, on the subject of the NHS but even more on education, where the ideology of ‘equality’ is more important than the actual welfare of young people. Comprehensive education is important enough to ignore its failings, equal access is more important than maintaining the quality of education at our world-class universities, and instead of dumping ideologically-driven teaching methods and curriculums in schools which have damaged state education the universities are told to bias their selection against privately-schooled applicants.

There are more examples, certainly in the welfare system, in defence, on the EU, where winning the argument is more important than finding the best course, but it is more dangerous in education and health, where the results will last for decades or are often fatal.

I also think this theme fits in well with my previous post on the intended consequences of legislation being to keep power; the intentions might also be to keep ideological purity.

Update: Obama and the British Labour Party have the same dislike of the concept of education vouchers (despite Obama saying that he would consider the issue on merit). This looks more like left-wing dogmatism than rational objection with more evidence. Yet more evidence here, but still Ed Balls, Gordon Brown and Barack Obama would rather be Left than right.

Update: It appears that Paul Krugman holds a Nobel Prize for economics. It also appears that he has no desire to get the correct answer to a problem, and that he knows nothing at all about people’s response to incentive (which is core to economics and econometrics), since he fails to understand the limitations of government-run healthcare. Are they giving away Nobel Prizes with Cornflakes now?

Target for Ridicule

Does anyone know an email address for Asif Zardari, President of Pakistan?

I think that bloggers outside Pakistan should be encouraged to email ribald remarks about the President and his ministers. It appears from news reports that he has banned anyone within Pakistan from ‘slander[ing] the political leadership’, on pain of up to 14 years imprisonment. This is in order to stem the tide of jokes to the President’s email. So it falls to the rest of us, living comfortably outside the writ of a Pakistani warrant, to fulfil the vital political purposes of satire.

The article repeats some of the jokes (thus giving them a rather wider audience than they would otherwise have had) and there are a couple of good ones there. Mmmmmmm, that gives me an idea. The email address given by the Guardian (via theyworkforyou.com) for Gordon Brown is birdc@parliament.uk. Anyone see where I am going?

Gordon Brown has No Doubts

Gordon Brown's press conference was very frightening. Truly scary. Brown has no doubt that he is the man to lead the country and to lead the Labour Party.

The most notable thing about the press conference was that there was nothing that anyone could ask him and nothing that could happen to make him even consider that he might be damaging his party, let alone that his weakness might be damaging the country. He lost a minister in the middle of the conference, and all he could do was pull a name out of the air, elevating Glenys Kinnock to the House of Lords. Questions as to whether he should resign or seek a mandate were not considered on their merits, but simply answered by Brown's old mantra that he will continue working for the country.