Mandelson the Imperialist Communist?

Did Peter Mandelson’s Communist ideology drive businessmen from Tanzania?

Abbreviated biographies of Peter Mandelson say that he went to Tanzania in the early 1970s (I think 1972) for a year. At the time he was a communist, but could a 19-year-old possibly have influenced government policy?

A few days ago I was talking to a businessman in an hotel bar, while I was away working. He was very intelligent, well-educated and widely-experienced. He asked about my work, and he quickly either knew or was able to grasp what I was talking about. He was also well-travelled, having lived in various countries.

This man was born in Tanzania, where he grew up and ran a business. He was well-off and had a good life, with several servants. However he also worked hard and earned his money, contributing to the local economy. Eventually he was forced to leave, sneaking out of the country, afraid even to be seen packing a suitcase in his car, car loaded with boxes of money for bribes, then left abandoned at the border, and he was relieved to get out safely.

He blames Peter Mandelson for the political changes that forced him to flee for his life. He said that Mandelson had gone in and advised the government on communist ideology – already by then thoroughly discredited and linked with tens of millions dead. He said this was widely known in that part of Africa at the time, and that the British High Commission had made him sign to say he would not write about his ordeal before he could receive assistance to leave Africa.

So, a few questions arise.

How true is this, and are there any more details to be found? A cursory internet search does not reveal any, but how widely known is this part of Mandelson’s life?

Why have the press not held Labour to account for this? The Guardian and BBC condemn Conservatives for working with Kaminski, the Polish MEP, for past connections with politicians who later became extremists, yet one of our own senior politicians, who has rather a lot of flaws anyway, was himself an extremist.

Communism has been the scourge of Africa. It destroyed healthy economies and was responsible for widespread famine, for wars and since Soviet support disappeared for failed states. If Lord Mandelson shares even slight blame for this then it should be known, for he has blood on his hands.

Remind You of Anyone?

It kind of reminds me of the New Labour spin machine. Although I always thought of Obama as a US Blair, this bit sounds more like the hyper-sensitivity some of Brown’s lot have shown, and the bullying of McBride, although they might have learnt from Campbell too.

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.

Be Thankful For Bickering Nations

We can only hope that the G20 group will reach no substantive agreement as they argue for different measures, and so will not further damage their economies.

Gordon Brown has argued that nations must keep on overspending. This is the tactic that has failed to work in Britain and the USA, as the economies of France and Germany, which conspicuously did not try to spend their way out of recession, start to recover. Since Britain was best placed to weather the recession according to one G. Brown of Westminster and Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, the massive increase in already bloated public spending cannot have done much good.

A massive splurge of public spending during recession does not work to help recovery. It can create artificial growth (or of slow-down in contraction of the economy) in the same way as spending on your credit card can artificially increase your spending power. It does so at the expense of the future and also at the expense of private-sector growth. In the meantime it damages the free market as government interferes, intervenes and distorts the labour market.

If Britain is ever to recover we need other economies to be successful. Let us hope that other governments do not heed Brown, and continue to reduce their 'stimulus' spending.

If They Were Not In Charge You’d Laugh

If I was Gordon Brown then I would be pretty annoyed with whoever made the Freedom of Information request (update: George Ffoulkes apparently – thanks Goodnight Vienna) about General Dannatt. Sorry, no, I would be steaming. Brown is not known for his cool, even temper. If he had anyone competent to raise from the back benches, he might be tempted to sack Kevan Jones and the unnamed, foul-mouthed minister.

So what has come out of it is a restrained senior officer (popular with his men), spiteful MPs trying to attack that officer and a nice reminder of Labour’s excessive expense claims, with no mention of any other party’s. That is such a bad result, and considering the military have far more sympathy than MPs the best gain that could have been made was tiny. You have to worry about the intelligence of those MPs involved, let alone their judgement, risking so much for so little potential gain.

How has the Labour party allowed such complete idiots, playing student politics, to gain seats, let alone gain office?

How Far is Andy Burnham from Reality?

Andy Burnham has written a ridiculous article called ‘Defending the N in NHS’ for the Guardian. Personally I think we should defend the ‘H’ and the ‘S’ in NHS; screw the ‘N’.

In today’s Spectator Coffeehouse David Blackburn writes a well-considered attack on Andy Burnham’s Guardian article. I would go far further than Mr Blackburn. I think that the piece shows Andy Burnham is deluded or dishonest at best, seriously detached from reality at worst. He writes,

“…the Tories would scrap Labour's three flagship waiting targets: 18 weeks, four-hour A&E and the two-week cancer target. Removal of these … would inevitably see a loss of public accountability and a return to postcode variation”

Forget that waiting four hours in A&E is not really acceptable, and read the letters page in today’s Telegraph. From Mr William Standish of Ormskirk,

“… referred by my GP to be investigated for possible prostate cancer … the earliest date available being five weeks later. I then went on holiday to France.

…

When we arrived home there were three letters. The first cancelled my June appointment. The second gave a July appointment. The third cancelled the July appointment. Three weeks later, I received a fourth letter saying I had to apply all over again to get an appointment”

So I suspect that Mr Standish, for one, is unlikely to be concerned about the removal of the two-week target. It does not appear to have done him any good. Public accountability seems to be conspicuous by its absence, and unless patients in all areas have to wait over two months for an appointment (rather defeating the object of a two-week target) the postcode variation never quite went away.

Of course a single case does not show a universal standard, but it does show that nothing else can be a universal standard. The only point to Mr Burnham’s great concentration on the ‘N’, apart from socialist dogma, is to get consistent standards for everyone. So this one case does show that Mr Burnham is deluded or dishonest.

Iain Dale pointed out on Friday that Andy Burnham was claiming the NHS had no waiting lists. Mr Dale also pointed out that this delusion was a bigger story than anything Daniel Hannan could say. Unfortunately the press never quite got the hang of treating Labour as the government, or holding them to even the same standards as the Conservatives.

Politics of Envy

A good piece by Janet Daley in the Telegraph blogs today had me thinking about the politics of envy, what it means and why it is generally applied to the left, when envy is pretty much universal in humans (and even many animals).

The piece points out that in Labour before New Labour, and in society before Margaret Thatcher, “… self-determination and individual aspiration had to be seen as the exclusive province of the petit bourgeois middle classes”. Libertarianism was, in effect, incompatible with British society before Mrs Thatcher. Since she was voted in on my sixth birthday it is hard for me to have a clear impression, but from what I know I can quite believe it.

So now consider envy. It is, as I have said, a human emotion, not specific to any class or political group. However I can think of three rational responses to envy.

• Work hard to achieve more of what inspires envy
• Demand that you deserve what inspires envy, and it should be given to you
• Prevent the people who are envied from having their enviable benefits

The first is of course one of the driving forces of capitalism. In his book The Armchair Economist (a fascinating book, by the way) Stephen Landsburg suggests quite convincingly that the reason top executives are well paid is not to make them work hard, but to make the rest of the management work hard. Envy of his salary makes people want to achieve his position.

The second and third are both embraced by socialism.

If you are a driver on an underground train your work is not terribly specialised; most people could be trained to do it. Therefore the natural salary is not high. A driver who envies others’ high salaries could work lots of overtime, or work to improve his qualifications and find another job. The socialist worker goes on strike for higher pay. The socialist government takes the benefits from the envied and gives them to the envious.

Finally we come to the connection with my quote from Mrs Daley. If “self-determination and individual aspiration [are] seen as the exclusive province of the petit bourgeois middle classes” then the only way to cope with envy is to prevent self determination, and thwart aspiration. Hence the left-wing attacks on education, the very engine of aspiration, and hence the strong connection between socialism and authoritarianism.

Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, to give him what little he is due, understood that individual aspiration is not exclusive, and Thatcher at least understood that self-determination not class underlies aspiration.

In that way Tony Blair could justify to a limited degree his silly claim to be the heir to Thatcherism. It is in delivery that they part, she largely succeeding, he seeming to mistrust self determination and being prevented by his out-of-date party (as even he acknowledged; the “forces of conservatism'” did not have a capital ‘C’) from actually making anything of this revelation.

That is why the Thatcher years were remarkable for social mobility, and New Labour years for the return of social stagnation. It is in the response to the politics of envy.

So what will Hazel Blears Do?

Hazel Blears has had her car smashed up in her constituency, suffering the crime that the rest of us all suffer. Will she make a claim on her insurance, like the rest of us, and accept the increased premiums? Will she claim that she was on constituency business, or that it was her government role that left her vulnerable, and get us to pay? Will she point out she was campaigning, and get Labour to pay?

OK, so I have no evidence to suggest either of the last two options, but I have become cynical. Not due to the expense row (although that has not helped) but due to things like Blunkett having us pay for his lover’s train ticket and Gorbals Mick (Labour to the core, despite his role) charging us to defend his ‘good name’. The Labour government treat the treasury as a personal dipping pot.

Furious. Livid. Disgusted.

The labour government and the apparatus of power that they have corrupted to filth beyond recognition of twelve years ago are utterly, totally without redeeming features. I quite literally cannot express my revulsion at what has come out from a court case, and a simple accusation speaks for itself, so this will be brief.

A dead soldier’s mother had talked to the media about the lack of protection for her late son from a snatch Landrover. The MoD sent someone to see her, she thought to comfort and assist her. That representative, and MoD press officer is now suing the MoD for being put in the position he was. He was not sent to comfort; his instruction was to “shut that woman up”.

I am ex-mil. I was Navy, but worked with the Army and my brother is ex-Army. I am not sure that matters though. I suspect that all those of you who have eyes open to the real world will feel as I do.

Mrs Smith, I feel deeply for you, for the loss of your son. I hope you feel he died as the soldiers I knew lived, doing the job they loved and feeling as they did that they were doing good. The British squadies I knew were good men, if rough, and you should be proud of him. My best wishes to you.

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?

More Unintended Consequences

Or at least I assume so. Maybe I am naïve, and should be even more cynical. I give Labour very little credit, but even I don’t think that when they said that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act was intended to be used to counter terrorism they saw it being used to spy on those who had been hurt fighting terrorism. It is fairly obvious that the law was going to be used for surveillance with no connection to terrorism, otherwise the rules would have been more tightly written.

Politically, however, this is far worse than councils watching bins. The government’s relationship with the military has been bad since May 1997 but is terrible now, and continuing the meme of “nothing to hide, nothing to fear”, as the MoD does in this case, is not going down well in public.

As I have said before and I am sure I will say again, parliament needs to scrutinise legislation better. Ideally after more time has been taken to draft it. This government is all about panic reaction and guillotined debates.

How Dare They?

This government is utterly without any sense of shame or propriety. How do they dare to use our money purely to further their own ends, against our interest?

Today in the Times Martin Sixsmith writes about his three-year quest to find out what actually happened when he, as a civil servant, was attacked and driven out by the lies and smears of the Labour Party trying to blame their own sins on Mr Sixsmith. Members of the government ignored the rules they themselves made, ignored the commission they had set up, harassed their own appointed chairman into breaking the procedures they had set up and considered criminal acts against laws they had made. They also spent hundreds of thousands of pounds of our money to try and avoid their misdeeds being detailed in public.

Labour are so arrogant and self-righteous that they probably fail to see how utterly wrong this is. Since 1997 the Labour Party has been utterly corrupting the whole apparatus of government in order to run and promote the Labour Party. They are like a Communist Party, thinking that the Party is the country, Party interests are national interests. They disgust me.

The Unintended Consequences of the Law

or The Law of Unintended Consequences.

The legislatures of both the United Kingdom and the United States are currently being pressured into making new laws, or amending existing laws, with little debate, and even less understanding of the results of that legislation. The British Parliament is sitting for shorter times than ever, more debates are held with time limits than under any previous government. In the USA the new President’s administration is pushing new legislation with gay abandon, either in a fit of panic or, at the risk of sounding paranoid, in an attempt to push through the hard-left agenda he denied during campaigning.

We might laugh at the United States House of Representatives reaching the farcical level that those voting on the bill are not expected to read it (in fact the House Majority leader laughed at the idea that many would read it, and said that if only members who had pledged to read it first voted they “…would have very few votes”). Unfortunately in the UK our own House of Commons did not simply vote on passing control of 17% of the economy without having read the legislation. We ceded our entire constitution, ultimate control of every government decision and therefore of our lives through a treaty that was deliberately written to be unreadable.

There will be unintended consequences to this. New Labour has introduced unprecedented change. This includes creating criminal offences at an astonishing, rate, in a way that is utterly unfathomable. At times the rate of creation of new offences has been greater than one a day, the total topped 3000 long ago. Obviously this must criminalise some behaviour unnecessarily, because there was no huge clamour for these laws, there were not 3000 burning problems that needed solving. Worse than that, with so much legislation introduced with so little scrutiny some of the results of that legislation will be not as those voting for it intended.

For example under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 the police have greater power to stop and search in an area designated as a likely target. However the whole of London has been so designated since the law came into force. This is still the case despite criticism of the use of this power, including a report by the Metropolitan Police Authority two years ago.

When police are stopping people under the same Section of the Act for photographing famous buildings in London it looks like farce. However combined with the 2008 Act which appears to make it an offence to photograph a police officer, if the officer so decides, than sinister is perhaps a more apt adjective. If this sort of advice has to be given to the public and to police then the law is ill-written, and should be repealed until it can be remade. The link also describes incidents where the police abuse the Act.

There are far more cases. Anti-corruption legislation with unintended consequences for parish councils; pensions legislation that drove up costs; liquidity rules that drove down the value of pension and insurance holdings; the human rights act giving convicted criminals rights (especially to privacy) that they just should not have.

Of course even legislation that has been discussed at great length has unintended consequences. Anti-hunting bills have famously took up far more parliamentary time than they warrant, yet still the foxes suffer more since the ban than they did before, surely not the intent of the legislation.

There is one thing in common, and that is certainty. Governments that are certain they have right on their side, and that their legislation is well-drafted see no reason to debate at length. Anti-hunting campaigners were certain that they were right, so did not listen when told by the people who actually knew what they were talking about (few anti-hunt campaigners can shoot) that foxes would suffer. Suffer they did, for the arrogance of their advocates. Certainty means either that no debate is allowed (look at climate change) or that those who are certain do not listen to the other side of the debate (look at climate change).

That is why I have My Doubts.

Hat tips to Instapundit and Newsalert for the US House of Representatives story.

Labour Bigotry

Labour front benchers Chris Bryant and Ben Bradshaw have said that gay people should vote Labour, and refuse to vote Conservative.

This is politics, and I am sure they want everyone to vote Labour. However to single out a group (even one that they belong to) and suggest that they should all vote the same way is ridiculous. I could see that if there was a sound reason, such as a vote against a party that made a core issue of attacking that group, then a case could be made. As it is Bryant and Bradshaw are just demanding that gays vote as gays, not as members of society with a variety of needs and different priorities, who will therefore vote for a variety of parties.

Calling for gays to vote against Respect or the BNP might be justified, but calling for all gays to vote against a party with openly gay front-bench MPs is simply bigotry.

Hat tip to Iain Dale, who has a much longer piece.

Just Grow Up!

The Spectator Coffee House has a brief piece discussing a post on Paul Waugh's Evening Standard blog, about Conservative unwillingness to say that health and education budgets will be cut despite the incredible inefficiency in those areas, because political opponents will equate such cuts with reduction in nurses and hospitals. My first thought was "please, people, just grow up!".

Initially that thought was aimed at the politicians, especially Labour and Liberal Democrats who would certainly make those dishonest accusations. Conservatives also need to have courage, and realise that people now listen to them and believe Labour less under Brown than they did under Blair.

However my view quickly developed to wish that editors and journalists would grow up. Yes politicians will twist the words and policies of opponents. They always have and always will, and in a democracy they cannot and should not be restrained. However the role of the media in a healthy democracy is not simply to report but to think as well. It is to present what politicians say in such a way that their readers, listeners and viewers can see both sides, and such distortions become obvious.

More honesty in politics will come when politicians have an incentive, when they realise that the media report more than rewritten press briefings, so their dishonesty becomes a liability. This is a critical matter not of personality but policy. Good policy comes from effective debate, not from a debate won by the best dissembler.

As an aside the Conservatives and Spectator must take back ground from socialists in the terms used in debate. The Coffee House piece said “… no major politician is prepared to risk the inevitable charge of wanting to shut down hospitals, sack nurses etc”. This shows how the focus is entirely wrong, and has been captured by the union movement. The issue is not nurses and teachers or buildings. The issue is patients and children. The government’s aim should be to provide services, not to provide employment.

Incompetence

Not only dishonest, but incorporating that classic, schoolboy error in grammar. If even their best copywriters can't cope with the idea of subject and object in a sentence, and write "whom", how much respect do they really have for education?

They have a few of these, all equally disingenuous, all with the same simple grammatical error.

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.