Author: Alexander Boot

Why do the same medical procedures often cost three times as much in America as in British private hospitals? The answer is, malpractice litigation, much of it spurred on by lawyers’ contingency fees, ‘no win, no fee’ in common parlance.

I remember once complaining to a lawyer at a New York party that one of my numerous medical problems had at first been misdiagnosed. ‘Sue!’ he half-shouted, as New Yorkers do. ‘But I’m not sure it was their fault…’ I objected meekly. ‘Whaddaya, a lawyer?!?’ He added a few decibels. ‘It’s not YOUR job to decide whose fault it is! That’s what we’ve got JUDGES for! And JURIES!! YOUR job is to sue everyone you know when something goes WRONG!!!’

Such division of labour between ambulance chasers and those in the ambulances has effectively destroyed, or at least greatly compromised, what used to be a most effective system of medical care. Worse still, it gave President Obama an opening to indulge his socialist instincts by reviving the late Teddy Kennedy’s pet project: socialised medicine.

Obama is obviously inspired by the resounding success of our dear NHS, whose champions nowadays defend it by saying that on balance it helps more people than it kills. But it’s a two-way street: Americans learn socialism from us; we learn ambulance chasing from them.

Apparently £15.7 billion, one seventh of the NHS budget, is set aside for settling malpractice claims, many of them brought up on a no win, no fee basis. Last year the number of negligence claims went up by 30 percent on the year before, with about £1 billion paid out in settlements and God knows how many more billions outstanding. Many of these billions are a direct result of Lord Justice Jackson’s 2010 endorsement of contingency fees in Britain.

The concept has a different meaning in Britain, compared to the USA. There lawyers are allowed to receive a cut of the settlement, often as high as 60 percent. Here this practice is still banned, but no win, no fee lawyers are allowed to charge much higher fees if they win than they would do normally. The American system encourages tort lawyers to press for the highest possible award; ours encourages them to draw out the litigation as much as possible. Both are iniquitous.

Obviously victims of gross negligence, especially of the kind that leads to loss of income, ought to be entitled to compensation, and their ability to seek it shouldn’t depend on their wealth. There should exist a network of public-spirited advocates to handle such claims for small fees provided by either Legal Aid or the claimant, and much of this is already in place. Effectively, however, this means that the system is biased towards those who are either rich enough to afford legal fees or poor enough to qualify for Legal Aid.

Empirical evidence suggests that those in the second category are much more likely to sue for malpractice than those in the first. And they can do so at no risk to themselves: even if their claim is patently frivolous and they lose as a result, they bear no costs. The winners are those lawyers who are paid by Legal Aid; the losers are tax payers. You and me.

The thin-end-of-the-wedge argument doesn’t always work, but it does in this case. I’m certain that the culture of litigation will spread like brushfire here, just as it did in America decades ago. For example, it’s a foregone conclusion that sooner or later our tobacco industry, just like its American counterpart, will have to pay out billions in claim settlements — as if smokers had been unaware of the link between smoking and lung diseases.

Before long we’ll be reading about cases like the one I remember in New York, where a woman once claimed that, as a result of a bus jerking to a stop, she had become frigid. She, or rather her lawyers, estimated the monetary equivalent of that trauma at a million dollars. Given the aesthetic and legal problems involved in obtaining forensic evidence against the claimant, the City of New York settled out of court for $50,000, which was serious money back in the 1970s.

High as the amusement value of such accounts may be, I doubt many of us would like to pay for this type of entertainment out of our own pockets. But this is precisely what we do now, and will be doing on a higher scale soon, unless someone puts an end to that madness.

That will never happen, for such an action would undermine the real purpose of today’s public spending: pumping money out of private purses into those belonging to the administrative, legal and ‘help’ personnel in and around the government, with the state taking its cut off the top. This is a crying shame, and it’ll be people like you and me who’ll do the crying.

Fast food of dubious provenance. Baseball caps worn backwards. Verbs made out of nouns. And now ambulance chasing. Why is it that we borrow only bad things from Americans and never the good things, such as their industry, enterprise and good-natured equanimity towards others’ success? Admittedly those fine qualities are diminishing even in their native habitat, but that’s no reason not to learn from them.

So why do we only follow the rotten examples? Must be human nature, I suppose. And also a society that no longer suppresses the bad part of human nature, nor encourages the good.

 

 

 

 

Russia’s veto of the UN resolution on Syria is much in the news, with most commentators (of whom Ian Birrell is perhaps the most incisive) highlighting the nature of the relationship between the two countries as the explanation for this apparently subversive action.

They are right: Syria is, and for the last 60 years has been, Russia’s client state. Strategically, the Russians feel about Syria the way Americans feel about Israel: it’s their most reliable ally in the region. Moreover, it’s home to their only military base outside the erstwhile borders of the Soviet Union.

Economically, Syria is the major purchaser of Russian arms, from infantry weapons to missile systems, from sophisticated fighter-bombers to tanks. That gives the Russians a vested interest in warfare there, civil or otherwise: the more materiel is used up, the more the Syrians will buy.

And it’s not just weapons: as Russia has invested billions in the exploration, production and processing of Syria’s hydrocarbons, it’s only natural that it should want to protect its investment. After all, if Assad’s government is replaced, it’ll probably be by a revolutionary Islamist regime (I’ll let American neocons fantasise about the likelihood of Jeffersonian democracy there), and those have been known to be rather fickle in their commitment to existing treaties and contracts. Moreover, in Syria’s case, a revolutionary regime can only take over with the West’s help, so it’ll be more likely to buy F-16s than SU35s.

All these factors have been commented upon, but it’s worth mentioning a few omissions. The most important of them is that Russia has a vested interest in any Middle Eastern turmoil, regardless of the specific parties involved. This interest is again twofold, both economic and strategic, and it’s no longer easy to see where one ends and the other begins.

As far as the Russians are concerned, any Middle Eastern conflict, the more calamitous the better, will drive up the price of oil. While ruinous to the West, this would be like a Christmas present to the Russians: about 40 percent of their revenues come from hydrocarbons. That’s why, for example, Russian scientists have been working for Iran’s nuclear programme from its inception — just imagine what would happen to oil prices if NATO and Israel were to attack Iran or, conversely, Iran were to become a nuclear power equipped with ballistic missiles.

Russia also has a geopolitical or, if you will, geopsychological need to stir up trouble in the Middle East. Great-power aspirations are built into the country’s DNA regardless of its current standing in the world. This has been the case at least since Ivan III (d. 1505) married the daughter of the last Byzantine emperor and declared Russia to be the natural messianic successor to the empire, ‘third Rome’ in the words of the monk Philoteus (‘and there will not be a fourth’).

Though Russia is of course unrecognisable compared not only to the 15th century but even to 100 years ago, this aspiration has remained constant. To fulfil it these days Russia has to oppose — and to be seen to oppose — the West in any conflict brewing anywhere in the world. Whether Russia is run by a totalitarian or merely authoritarian regime (other possibilities are a pie in the sky), this will always be the case.

At times Russia will form ad hoc alliances with the West, as it did during the Second World War. Thus if we were to plot the country’s hostility to the West on a curve, it would have a jagged shape. But, for all the peaks and troughs, the overall direction is as unmistakeable as it is inexorable: up and up.

In today’s Syria, Russia’s economic and geopolitical desiderata converge: Putin and his acolytes don’t want a resolution to the conflict, one way or the other. Given the choice, they’d take Assad over the rebels, but what they really crave is a smouldering conflict, a state of dangerous-looking uncertainty.

This puts the West in an invidious position. Our politicians, backed up by much of the media and academe, feel ideologically duty-bound to be nice to the Russians. The triumphalist outburst in the wake of all those glasnosts and perestroikas is still spreading shock waves, however attenuated. The received opinion is that, certain growth pains notwithstanding, the Russians either are our friends already, or desperately wish to be. 

While a Russia run by the communist party may have been an ‘evil empire’, in Reagan’s phrase, the assumption is that a Russia run by the KGB has found religion. So, for all the friendly, ‘constructive’ criticism in our press, the KGB clique fronted by Col. Putin is having a free run in the West.

Given the history of the passionate affair between the Soviet Union and Western intellectuals, which affair reached its ecstatic stage post-1991, this situation is unlikely to change. But our general ignorance of what Russia stands for shouldn’t mean we can’t assess each situation on its merits.

In the Middle East generally and Syria in particular the situation is crystal-clear. Given the choice between a good war and a even bad peace, the West has not just a vested but a vital interest in the latter. The Russians, on the other hand, will take a bad — and preferably prolonged — war over even a good peace. That’s what they want; that’s what they are working to achieve.

And if China’s decision to go along with Russia’s veto hints at the possibility of a long-term strategic alliance between the two, we have more to fear than a steep rise in the price of oil. Russia’s military and natural resources would dovetail naturally with China’s endless supply of cannon fodder and loose cash. It’s a marriage made in heaven — or, if you are a Westerner, in hell.

 

Miss Warren hasn’t bothered to tell any of her 1,000-odd partners that she started life as a man. ‘There must be a lot of angry men out there,’ she said.

Before my wife’s wrath, in the shape of a frying pan, comes crashing down on my head, I hasten to swear that I never had sex with Miss Warren, either in her present incarnation or when she was still Christopher Snowden. The former isn’t my taste; the latter, my inclination.

It’s just that the other day I wrote a piece on Crystal without an inkling that she used to be Christopher. Had I known it then, I would have written something different, something along these lines:

Free will is one of the seminal doctrines of Christianity, which is to say our civilisation. Without complete freedom to make a choice between good and evil, man would be an automaton, with his buttons pushed by either God, if you believe in Him, or Darwin, if you believe in Richard Dawkins. And automata can’t do what the religion demands: imitatio Christi.

When our civilisation began to be shaped not by Christianity but by market transactions, the doctrine was stolen from its rightful owner, shifted into the secular realm and turned into a consumer’s freedom to choose anything he can (or even, these days, can’t) afford. At first this freedom extended to things like socks, furniture and household appliances.

But eventually, people were encouraged to exercise their free choice to refurnish not just their houses, but also their bodies. And why not? If a man recognises no authority higher than himself, then his sovereignty over his body is absolute. Out comes the scalpel, wielded by surgeons the way sculptors wield chisels. Except that the surgeons’ media aren’t marble — it’s noses and chins, eyelids and lips, breasts and buttocks.

Thousands of men and women have given a whole new meaning to ‘self-made’, redefining their bodies in search of elusive happiness, to which we are all entitled. Sometimes things go awry, as in the current case of faulty breast implants, most of them cosmetically motivated. Soldier’s chances, I’d say — the road to happiness, even when defined in this trivial way, is often thorny.

Some of the men and women, however, aren’t just unhappy about their various bits. They are unhappy about being men or women. They want to be what they aren’t, or at least weren’t born to be — and who says there’s anything wrong with this? We all believe in social mobility, so why not the sexual kind?

Since then the medics have found appropriately recondite terms to describe the urge to change one’s sex. Sometimes it’s referred to as ‘gender dysphonia’, at other times it’s described as GID (Gender Identity Disorder).

The second term is contentious: many experts deny that transsexualism is indeed a disorder. It is rather a perfectly valid desire to bring one’s body in line with one’s natural conduct. It’s not our biological sex, they claim, but our social environment that affects our behaviour. And, if a man acts in a feminine manner, then he is more of a woman; for him to be at peace with himself, his body must be altered accordingly.

Now, if professionals disagree on the background to the problem, a rank amateur like me has no chance of sorting it out. But even today’s rankest of amateurs are aware of chromosomes, XY in men, XX in women. This is the sole criterion used by, say, sports authorities to decide an athlete’s qualification to compete in women’s events.

When the chromosome test was first introduced in 1966, many female athletes from communist countries (the Soviets Tamara and Irina Press, Tatiana Shchelkanova, Klavdia Boyarskikh, the Rumanian Iolanda Balàzs, the Pole Ewa Klobukowska and many others) announced their retirement. The test was, and still is, deemed sufficient to determine a person’s sex, regardless of the putative self-perception.

We are also aware of many conclusive tests showing that testosterone is a major factor of aggressiveness in general and sexual aggressiveness in particular. When female mice are injected with large doses of the male hormone, they begin to act like males. And even in our liberated times, when women fight in pubs, any unbiased observer will notice that pugnacity comes more naturally to men. We seldom cross over to the other side of the street when a couple of girls block our path, and it’s men, not women, who tend to start wars.

This may explain Crystal-Christopher’s atypical sexual voracity. Someone born a man has testosterone coursing through his veins, and subsequent hormone treatments probably can’t quite change this.

I’ve known a few ex-men who act in a similar fashion. One chap (let’s call him Nick) converted himself to a woman (let’s call her Alexia). Unlike Crystal-Christopher, Nick, as a man, had never had sex with men. On the contrary, he was an unusually aggressive heterosexual predator, trying to drag women into the lavatory at office parties and so forth. When Nick became Alexia, he/she did take a couple of men out for a trial run, only to find them wanting. Alexia then became a lesbian, pursuing women just as ardently as before, but this time consummating the conquests differently.

Nowt as queer as folk, as they say upcountry, and I really have nothing to add to that simple statement. In fact, there is nothing to add without plunging into the depths of metaphysics, thereby branding oneself as a hopelessly uncool individual.

There is one thing though: I genuinely pity people who are so confused that they are prepared to mutilate themselves. I’m willing to pray for them — but I’m not willing to pay for them. If they wish to act out their odd urges, they ought to pay for the privilege out of their own purse.

I suspect Crystal became Christopher on the NHS. Boys will be girls and all that, but this shouldn’t be allowed. I suspect that even Richard Dawkins will agree.

 

 

The European Parliament has ruled that the football teams playing in this summer’s European Championship must display the European flag on their shirts. Once rubber-stamped by the Commission, the bill will become law, even though the federasts are claiming the decision to display the emblem or not will be left to the national federations’ discretion.

I wonder how our own dear FA is going to handle this hot Euro-potato. One suspects in roughly the same way as it did at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, just before Germany’s previous attempt to unify Europe, when England’s footballers saluted the Führer in the style to which he had become accustomed. Indirectly, they were thereby also saluting such Nazi accomplishments as the antisemitic Nuremberg laws, passed the year before. Well, perhaps ‘saluting’ is a bit harsh. Let’s agree on ‘ indirectly condoning’.

In a parallel development, the EU Parliament stated that ‘the European flag should be flown at major international sports events held on the EU territory’. Now, this is getting really interesting.

I freely admit to not following current affairs as diligently as I should, but I was still under the impression that the word ‘territory’ in this context is associated with a nation state, as in France, Italy, whatever. That impression was obviously wrong, and I apologise for having neglected a major geopolitical development.

I thought that the EU was a union of sovereign states, each with its own territory. It turns out that the EU itself is a sovereign state, and can lay a valid claim to what the 27 members erroneously regard as their own territory. This clarifies matters a lot, and I thank the EU for making them transparent, at last.

What follows is that England, her national territory no longer her own, isn’t entitled to her own national team either. The squad should instead be called EU 4, to reflect former England’s ranking in the European pecking order. Former Spain would be EU1, former Holland EU2, former Germany EU3 and so forth.

Since England will no longer have her own national team, there’s no reason not to reinstate John Terry as captain — of EU4. I’m sure he, along with his fellow players Wayne Rooney (Wazza) and Steven Gerrard (Stevie G), are more than ready to assume their new pan-European identities. Why, their habit of drawing exorbitant pay for little (and, at international level, incompetent) work would by itself qualify them for post-football careers as MEPs. The fans, however, will have a problem.

They’ll have to think up new chants, reflecting the major shift in geopolitical realities. At a pinch, ‘ere we go, ere we go, ere we go’ could become ‘ici, nous allons, nous allons, nous allons’, although somehow it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. But some of the others will need to be rethought altogether.

For example, ‘If it wasn’t for England, you’d all be krauts’ just wouldn’t work. Perhaps we ought to consider something like, ‘England or no England, you’ll all be krauts.’ No, that’s not quite right either. What about ‘Thanks to the European Union, of which Britain is a proud member, we shall all be Germans’? Much better.

‘Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be’ is already sufficiently multi-culti, no change needed there. But the common chant referring to the referee’s autoerotic tendencies needs to be amended to ‘l’arbitre, c’est un sale con’, even though some mellifluous quality will be lost along the way.

The fans must be instructed not to display emblems and slogans that might be construed as a manifestation of euroscepticism. The Union Jack on their clothing can be easily covered up with EU decals pasted over, no problem there. But ‘two world wars, one world cup, so f… off’ must be replaced altogether. May I suggest, ‘two world wars, one EU, whatever next’ as a suitable alternative?

A word of caution to England’s — pardon me, EU4’s — fans. Switching from lager to pan-European wine or, as a courtesy to the Championship’s co-hosts Poland and Ukraine, vodka will necessitate also switching from pints to glasses or, as the case may be, shots. Otherwise they just might forget what’s what and revert to their English identity. Can’t have that, the EU won’t allow it.

 

 

Alas, poor Eamonn. Every time this jolly TV presenter lets his humanity have the better of his official role, he causes a Twitter storm. Enraged viewers accuse him of crassness and demand punishments of varying severity, usually just short of evisceration.

In the past, he has suggested to a rape victim that perhaps taking a taxi would have been wiser than walking through desolate streets in the middle of the night. He has also called a stupid guest a ‘retard’, thus offending every sufferer from learning difficulties, if that’s the proper term this week. This time around he failed to recognise the seriousness of sex addiction, that pandemic and seemingly incurable disease afflicting millions.

Holmes was talking to a Miss Crystal Warren, who at age 40 realised she had been struck down by this degenerative disorder. That self-diagnosis is based on unimpeachable clinical evidence: Miss Warren has had sex with over 1,000 men, mostly strangers she picks up in pubs and coffee houses, sometimes seven in one day.

Assuming that her 1,000-odd conquests have been evenly spread over a lifetime, one wonders why it took Miss Warren so long to identify the problem. If, say, sleeping with 999 men by age 40 didn’t set off any alarm bells, then what caused the epiphany at Number 1,000? That’s the question I would have asked first, but old Eamonn is much better than me.

‘If you need this five or six times a day, have you ever thought of charging for it?’ he asked. How insensitive can one get? Sex will never, ever become Miss Warren’s profession, even though she claims that sex is the reason she can’t hold down a regular job. ‘What, becoming a prostitute?’ she demanded in a fit of moral indignation. ‘This way I’m enjoying it… I get to choose who I sleep with.’

Now, logic is clearly not one of Miss Warren’s addictions, and neither, by the sound of it, is moral philosophy. For prostitutes, unless they are sex slaves, also get to choose whom they sleep with. Their selection criteria are usually less than stringent, but, on purely arithmetical evidence, neither are Miss Warren’s. After all, it’s hard to explore the depths of emotional attachment with seven strangers a day. Also, from what one hears, some prostitutes actually enjoy their work too.

The morality of it never came up, as it hardly ever does these days, but applying such hopelessly obsolete standards, one struggles to see a clear watershed between doing it on this scale for money or for free. A distinction without a difference.

The subsequent outburst in interactive media was deafening, with doctors providing authoritative backup. Sex, they explained, is like drugs (and presumably rock’n’roll); it causes powerful chemicals to be released in the brain, making it enjoyable and therefore addictive. People can become addicted to pleasure, can’t they? Therefore, Holmes is ‘disgusting’! ‘irresponsible’! ‘crass!’. Anyway, prostitution is ‘illegal’! Actually, prostitution, as distinct from solicitation, isn’t illegal in Britain, but this hardly matters when a popular piety is offended.

What does matter is the staggeringly ignorant and morally corrupt tendency to ascribe all behavioural pathologies to medical problems. In the not-so-distant past someone like Miss Warren would have been described by a spiffy term implying opprobrium (‘value judgment’). Nowadays, she is a ‘patient’. The assumption is that her licentiousness is beyond her control — it’s explicable medically and neutral morally.

There are indeed some, exceedingly rare, physiological conditions that can lead to an increased need for sexual activity. As no evidence of such a disorder has been produced, or even mentioned, in Miss Warren’s case, one has to assume that her problem falls into the domain of counselling, rather than medical treatment. And in that realm people aren’t responsible for their actions — they are driven by some subterranean powers beyond their control.

The same arguments are applied to drug addiction. Those poor people can’t help it; they are ill, not irresponsible. In fact, even those who do believe that affection for, say, opiates is actually an addiction, rather than reckless hedonism, never claim that this ‘disease’ is contracted instantly. Typically, it takes regular and prolonged use before any hint of physiological addiction appears. And then — contrary to the horror stories one hears — withdrawal is as easy as getting over a cold.

I speak from experience, for some six years ago I became a drug addict. My ordeal was iatrogenic, caused by medical treatment. Due to a painful problem I won’t bore you with, I spent a month on an intravenous diamorphine (heroine) drip, and then a couple of months on oxycontin, an opiate that, incidentally, has acquired street cred in areas around King’s Cross.

When I decided my pain was no longer bad enough to warrant such mind-addling remedies, I went cold turkey — only to discover that I had become addicted. Since I had once researched an article on the subject, I recognised the symptoms, similar to the common cold. I then went back on oxycontin and gradually reduced the dose (titrated, in the medical parlance) over the next week. That’s it, no more addiction, no craving for those stupefying chemicals in my brain.

If I were Eamonn Holmes, I would have suggested a similar course of action to Miss Warren. Titrate, Miss Warren. Gradually reduce your daily intake to four men a day, then three, then two. Before long you could be on one a week and so forth. Why, you never know, in due course you might even discover the attendant joys of sex: human warmth, mutual affection, companionship — all those things that go beyond the friction of organs, even though they often start with it. Give it a go, love, you never know your luck.

But I’m not Eamonn Holmes. Unlike him, I don’t have to fear losing a well-paid job for yet another show of gross insensitivity. Had he suggested something like that, he’d be sending his CVs out even as we speak. If I ran a TV station, I’d hire him. Wouldn’t you?

 

 

Football violence isn’t a wholly alien phenomenon in Britain. But there is a salient difference between our homegrown scum and the Egyptian variety. These days ours have punch-ups outside the Coach & Horses. Theirs kill.

Both sets of football lovers are animalised brutes. But ours operate in a social environment that has been shaped over centuries by respect for the law in general and human life in particular. Theirs live in a country where, according to a recent Pew poll, 82% regard stoning adulterous women as just, 77% approve of chopping off thieves’ hands and 84% favour the death penalty for apostasy from Islam. Our society is rapidly frittering away the capital of institutionalised decency; theirs hasn’t yet begun to acquire it. We may be converging, but as the 74 people killed and hundred maimed in Port Said show, we haven’t converged yet.

In this context the article written a couple of months ago for Foreign Affairs magazine by Elliott Abrams, deputy national security advisor in the Bush administration, strikes me as particularly ill-advised. Mr Abrams, who is one of the flag bearers for neoconservatism, takes issue with those who find anything wrong with Arab Spring revolutions, largely inspired, if not directly abetted, by the US.

“The whole ‘experiment’ seems to some critics to be a foolish, if idealistic project that promises to do nothing but wreak havoc in the Middle East,” he sighs ruefully. As one of those diabolical critics, I agree wholeheartedly. This, however, is the only thing in the article with which I, or any other sane individual, can possibly agree. In fact, the issue wouldn’t even be worth arguing about if Abrams didn’t represent a political movement whose influence on US foreign policy is strong and, if a Republican wins in November, will become dominant.

Abrams begins by proving something that doesn’t need proof: the Middle Eastern regimes swept away by the revolutions were rather unsavoury, “kept in place solely by force”. Point conceded. And the conclusion? “Thus the neocons, democrats, and others who applauded the Arab uprisings were right, for what was the alternative? To applaud continued oppression?”

No, Mr Abrams. The alternative would be to remember the time when US foreign policy was guided by sage statesmen, not by ignorant demagogues. At that time President John Quincy Adams suggested a mindset that alone would be appropriate in the present situation: ‘[America] is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.’

Unlike Irving Kristol, the founder of the neoconservative movement, who was aware of the problematic nature of democracy even in America, never mind in countries with no historical predisposition for it, his ideological heirs have no capacity for nuanced thinking. Shrill sermonising is more up their street.

If it were otherwise, they’d know that the lofty standards of American democracy (which they don’t even understand properly) have questionable utility in most of the world. If, according to Freedom House (a largely neocon think tank), the world had not a single democracy as recently as in 1900 (an assertion that is in itself damning to neocon ideas), then which magic wand must we wave today to execute what George W. Bush described as ‘forward strategy to freedom in the Middle East’?

“The pessimists might yet be proved right,” concedes Abrams. “Any comparison of the Arab lands to Eastern Europe suggests that many positive elements are missing, not least the magnet and model of the European Union.” Yes, if only the Arab lands learned their lessons on democracy from the EU, that notorious champion of elective governments and national sovereignty, they’d be oases of political goodness.

As a result of the recent revolutions, Islamist parties (and ideologies) have become infinitely stronger in the region. In Egypt they won, in a perfectly democratic way, two thirds of the votes. That’s because, according to Abrams, such parties “do better on average in Arab than non-Arab lands.” Not being privy to the mathematical apparatus activated by Abrams to calculate the averages, I’d suggest he study the example of one non-Arab land, Iran.

In 1979 the unquestionably tyrannical rule of the Shah was overthrown with, to put it mildly, American acquiescence. Highlighting Pahlavi’s appalling record on human rights, the US press had been advocating his removal for years, and when the crunch came the Carter administration sat on its thumbs.

The assumption, one that’s clearly shared by today’s neocons, was that tyrants must be removed no matter what. Yet elementary historical knowledge should have suggested that, in some parts of the world, every tyrant is better than his successor. So it proved in Iran when the Americans, and in particular American neocons, got what they wished for.

The Shah may have been a tyrant and a thoroughly corrupt man, but one thing he wasn’t was a Muslim fundamentalist. Moreover, he was just about as pro-West as his environment allowed. What followed… well, you know what followed. What you don’t know, and neither does anyone else, is what’s going to happen next. Suffice it to say that nuclear war is one distinct possibility.

Would Iran be about average, according to Abrams’s learned calculations? Well, if the new Arab regimes are worse than average, then we know what to expect.

All this shows that “idealism”, which Abrams holds up as a virtue, is a wrong navigational tool to guide a country’s policy through the dire straits. Sober thinking, sage understanding and serious learning in history, geopolitics and cultural realities — as exemplified by John Quincy Adams — would fare much better. Abrams’s animadversions manifest none of those, and you won’t find many influential neocons who are any better.

While conservatives everywhere find it hard to wish for Obama’s victory, perhaps in this case we ought to suppress our visceral feelings. For should, say, Romney become President, the likes of Abrams won’t be writing articles about US foreign policy. They’ll be running it.

 

 

 

 

Poor Dave. All he did was put his name on a piece of paper, and now he is under a coordinated attack from every direction.

From the left, Ed the Red accuses him of inconsistency: a veto to Dave, he says, isn’t for life; it’s for Christmas. A hard-working line, that, and it would work even harder if Ed vouchsafed to us his alternative strategy vis-à-vis Europe.

Would he have signed the same document? Signed up to the FC (a more polite acronym than FU, but one that too could be deciphered in various ways)? Joined the euro? Left the EU? Restyled himself as gauleiter? What?

A word of avuncular advice to Ed: when in opposition, it isn’t enough to take cheap shots at the government. You have to offer a coherent alternative: don’t just say what you hate; say what you love.

Otherwise, look at what happened to Dave and his party when in opposition. Gnawing at the little bits of Labour policies, without devouring their eminently devourable main body, left the Tories with a severe political indigestion. Heir to Blair, yes, sure — just what grass-roots conservatives wanted to hear.

By way of reflux, the Tories lost any moral justification and, more important to them, credibility to come up with something completely different when in government. So they had to get into bed with something completely similar and call it a coalition, leaving us all at the receiving end of the ensuing action.

Who’ll be your coalition partners, Ed? The UKIP? Or are you counting on Nick to two-time Dave with you? Something to ponder there.

Just a thought, Ed: I’m not suggesting you should become a statesman overnight or, God forbid, a political thinker. You either got it or you ain’t, as Americans say. But becoming a competent practising politician shouldn’t be beyond you, anyone can do it. Talk to your speechwriters, organise a few focus groups — well, you don’t need me to tell you what to do, bright lad like you. But do something other than commissioning cute little lines.

Alas, it’s not just the left who want a piece of Dave — Ian Duncan-Smith and his 70 jolly friends in Parliament are screaming betrayal and inconsistency.

And on what grounds? That Dave vetoed that little piece of paper first because it didn’t contain any ‘safeguards for Britain’ and then, a month later, signed exactly the same document, even though no safeguards were on offer that time around either? Didn’t he tell you, in January, he wasn’t committing Britain to anything? So what’s your objection? Then why, considering the deal hadn’t changed since December, did he whip out his veto then? And you call that inconsistency?

I — and no doubt Dave, with his sherry-fuelled education — call it Hegelian dialectics. This is how it works, from Dave’s perspective.

Thesis: in December, let’s throw a small bone to Ian and his 70 jolly friends to keep them quiet for once. Antithesis: in January, let’s toss a bigger bone, with some marrow inside and meat outside, to Nick and his mates. Synthesis: I just might hang on to power beyond the next election.

Why, Dave’s the most consistent politician out there. He knows what’s important in life and goes after it. Have you got the same single-mindedness of purpose? I know I haven’t.

Like a father who spanks his little son savagely, saying it’s all for the boy’s benefit and ‘it hurts me more than it hurts you’, Dave claims he does it all for Britain. Of course he does — but again dialectically. Except that here a different syllogism is at work. Thesis: Dave is British. Antithesis: this rocking up and down on the political seesaw is good for Dave. Synthesis: it’s good for Britain. Who could possible take issue with this iron logic?

Well, the Iron Lady, otherwise known as Meryl Streep, might. But no one is going to ask her. And I’ve got news for you: no one is going to ask you either.

 

 

 

Before I say nasty things about the French on the road, I must say nice things about their off-road behaviour. At the risk of sounding unpatriotic, it compares favourably to the British equivalent.

It would of course be spurious to compare the mores of central London, where I spend half the year, to those of rural Burgundy where I spend the other half. People in large cities everywhere take shortcuts through the maze of daily civilities one takes for granted in the country. A Yorkshire girl I know, who moved to London some 15 years ago, says it took her a year to stop saying hello to strangers — and people who move from Tula to Moscow or from Charleston to New York can tell you similar stories galore.

But, comparing like with like, a friend of mine, a Cambridgeshire man born and bred, retired some three years ago to a village near Cambridge, where he had spent his working life. So far he still hasn’t exchanged two words with any of his neighbours, and he is a gregarious chap. The locals clearly perceive him as an undesirable foreigner, which is understandable, considering that he grew up at least three miles away. Another friend has had a house in Norfolk for 30 years, and he claims it took the locals 10 years to start reciprocating his greetings, and another 10 to agree to a taciturn dialogue of some 30 seconds.

Well, my experience in France is different — and we really are foreigners there. When we moved into our house 11 years ago, many neighbours immediately rang our doorbell, introduced themselves and told us to knock on their door, day or night, if we needed anything — and they were as good as their word. In the first couple of months in France I made more friends than I did in 15 years in America, and I haven’t changed all that much.

In short, I think that the traditional British stereotypes of the French as rude, haughty and xenophobic are way off the mark even in Paris, let alone rural France. Comparatively speaking, the French are affable, forthcoming and well-mannered. But all that changes the moment one hits the road.

The British these days are much less civil than the French when they are on foot — and much more so behind the wheel of a car. In broad strokes, the French would rather stay French than alive.

When one is stuck on a single carriageway, inhaling the black smoke coming out of a 40-year-old Peugeot in front, the natural urge is to overtake, especially if the other car is proceeding at 20 miles below the speed limit. The gap in the incoming lane being large enough, one pulls out and accelerates. That very instant, the Peugeot driver accelerates as well, perhaps to 10 miles over the limit. That leaves two options: either to crank it up to 100 mph in a 55 mph zone, risking a head-on collision, or hitting the brakes and swerving back behind the smoke-belcher. In the latter case, he’d slow down again.

Enlightened self-interest, never mind good manners, are nowhere in evidence. It’s clear that, given the choice between hitting an oncoming vehicle and sideswiping the car on one’s right, any sensible driver would choose the second option. So the French chap I described — and, trust me, he is typical — is endangering his own life. Why? You tell me.

Turning without indicating, coming out of a side street onto the main road without looking, driving heaps that are clearly not roadworthy, the same car unpredictably and unjustifiably going too slow one minute and too fast the next, people prepared to die defending their right of way while impinging on yours — all these are the norm, not exceptions.

And speaking of roadworthiness, in Britain we have the first MOT when the car is three years old, and one every year thereafter. In France, it’s four and two, meaning that, while a six-year-old car in Britain would have had at least three MOTs, a similar car in France could have had just one. The AA has shown, figures in hand, that this is a major factor in road accidents, and yet our federastic government is soon to adopt the French system. We can’t be different from Europeans even in areas where we are better.

And the lorries — don’t get me going on those. Everyone who drives on French motorways knows that their lorry drivers do veritable impersonations of homicidal maniacs, swerving in and out of the slow lane in a haphazard fashion. A recent report in the Figaro explained why, or at least partly why.

Long-distance driving being a tedious business, French lorry drivers have found creative ways of relieving boredom. They keep their offside wheels on the roadside cats’ eyes, counting on the resultant noise to obviate the need to focus on the road. Thus liberated, they watch films on portable TV sets or cook their lunch on battery-powered hotplates in the other seat. It’s not only with nuclear bombs and unmanned drones that modern technology kills.

As a result of all that, the death rate on French roads is more than twice ours — this considering that they have 10 times the number of road miles per car, 2.5 times the territory, and much better road surfaces and markings. Where we are, one can drive for half an hour without encountering a single car going either way — and yet people get killed all the time. Last summer, we saw an abandoned car perched on top of a 6-foot hedge 10 feet away from an absolutely straight and usually empty road. How did it get there? C’est un mystère.

The British are, in my experience, by far the most skillful and courteous drivers in the world. And the French? Well, I much prefer Italian drivers. They may be deranged, but at least their madness is predictable.

 

Sarkozy and I have one thing in common: neither of us will be elected President of France in April. The difference is that I don’t mind this in the least, and he does (his own unelectability, that is, not mine). That’s why Sarko has gone for the last throw of the dice, and he doesn’t even notice that the dice have rolled off the table of elementary common sense.

First, he announced a 1.6 percent increase in France’s VAT, a measure he claims will solve most of the country’s economic ills without increasing the price of goods. I must be a bit daft because I don’t get it.

As someone who spends a great deal of time in France, I buy quite a few things there. Until Sarko’s announcement I paid a 19.6 percent VAT on those things. Now I’ll be paying 21.2 percent, which to me looks like a higher number, though admittedly arithmetic never was my choice of school subjects.

Sarkozy bases his counterintuitive calculation on the example of Germany, where the same measure had the effect he expects to duplicate in France. Alas, he misses the point, the salient difference between Germany and France.

In the former they know how to reduce unit costs by increasing productivity; in the latter they don’t. Britain doesn’t either, not any longer, which is why, according to Sarko, she ‘has no industry’. If he compared the proportion of manufacturing in Britain’s and France’s GDP, he wouldn’t be as hasty to throw stones out of his own glass house, but — I know this from experience — when a Frenchman gets on his high horse about the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, nothing will make him dismount. Anyway, he has a point in absolute, if not in comparative, terms.

That brings me to the next bit of news: France’s decision to introduce the ‘Tobin’ tax unilaterally, which means that from next August every financial transaction in France will be taxed at 0.1%. That doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re talking billions this fraction of one percent may add up to serious money.

If the first bit of news affects me as an occasional resident of France, the second, I fear, may affect me as a subject of Her Majesty, coming as it does on the eve of yet another Save-the-Euro telethon. Dave Cameron’s much-vaunted fortitude to resist the ‘Tobin’ tax at the previous such event will now be severely tested, and — call me a sceptic or a cynic, your choice — I doubt he’ll pass the test.

On the surface of it, Sarko’s decision sounds downright crazy, the cutting off of his proverbial nose to spite his proverbial (and increasingly shifty-looking) face. After all, if France goes it alone, it’s a safe bet that, whenever possible, people will now transact their business elsewhere, making the Bourse (France’s stock exchange) even more marginalised than it is already. That would have detrimental, possibly catastrophic, consequences for the French economy, and even Sarko must realise this. He may be in his political death throes, but he isn’t quite brain-dead yet.

‘We want to set an example for all of Europe to follow,’ he claims, and I have that stinking feeling he means what he says. The ‘Tobin’ tax would hurt every European country, but it wouldn’t penalise France more than the others only if the others followed suit. Sarko must be confident that he and his morganatic wife Angela will be able to browbeat every EU member, including Britain who stands to lose the most, into bending over and submitting to this destructive tax.

I do hope Sarko’s confidence is misplaced; I fear it may not be. One way or the other, the plot sickens.

What upsets me no end is when he is called a conservative. First, there is no such thing in France — their political spectrum goes from what we’d describe as centrist to what we’d describe as lunatic left. The former finds its mouthpiece in Le Figaro; the latter in La Liberation and a raft of lesser Trotskyist sheets. His rhetoric aside, Sarko falls somewhere between the two, and, as his grasp of economics shows, he is certainly at odds with Figaro readers. Here is a typical letter to the editor (28 January):

‘As head of my own company, I always observe these simple rules: don’t spend more than you earn; borrow only to invest, not to cover current expenses or, even worse, service existing debts; look out for your employees’s benefits before your own. If only our governments could understand such simple principles!’

Yes, if only. That Sarko doesn’t share this philosophy follows from what he does, if not always from what he says. That no other European government, emphatically including ours, doesn’t follow it either is also clear. The question remains: will Dave now go further out on the euro-limb? Hold your breath.

 

The atheist ‘philosopher’ Alain de Botton has undertaken a (literally) monumental project: he wants to create in the City a 150-foot-high temple to ‘new atheism’. This is to distinguish it from old, aggressive atheism, as preached by Richard Dawkins. The two chaps seem to disagree on tactics, for one struggles to find any difference of substance.

‘Why should religious people have the most beautiful buildings in the land?’ Botton asks. ‘It’s time atheists had their own version of the great churches and cathedrals’.

Before I comment on this deranged project, or answer this ignorant question, I must say that some of my closest friends are atheists, and they are among the cleverest people I’ve ever known. In fact, they are so wise that they usually steer clear of matters philosophical, concentrating instead on things like politics, art, law or social commentary.

Perhaps they tacitly agree with me, though they’ll never admit this, that ‘atheist philosopher’ is an oxymoron. One can be either an atheist or a philosopher, not both. For anyone trying to understand the complexity of life at ground level only will inevitably travel a maze of blind alleys, eventually finding himself at an intellectual dead end.

I know you can give me a long list of famous atheist philosophers, making me transgress against logic by stating that I don’t regard them as real philosophers. My argument would be circular and thus rhetorically unsound — until I’ve gone over atheist philosophers one by one, showing where I find them wanting. With some, such an undertaking would have to be of book length (I’ve written one like that, on Tolstoy). But with Alain de Botton, the task is risibly easy.

The Latin inscription on Christopher Wren’s tomb in St Paul’s says, ‘Reader, if you seek his monument, look around.’ I suggest Mr de Botton do the same just about anywhere in the West — he’ll find temples to atheism aplenty. They are the eyesores that disfigure our cities’ skylines, the pickled animals in our art museums, the nasty warrens of our council estates, the gangs of empty-eyed youths harassing our neighbourhoods.

These are the churches in which one can worship the moral and aesthetic achievements of atheist modernity. These are the reminders of the fact, seen as such by anyone not blinded by atheist rage, that the choice of cultures available to the West isn’t Christian or atheist. It’s Christian or none.

Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals are the most beautiful and awe-inspiring buildings in the West, Mr Botton, precisely because they were animated by the most beautiful and awe-inspiring idea. Remove this inspiration, and you can still coast on the original propelling force — provided you gratefully acknowledge its nature. An artist or an architect doesn’t have to be a practising Christian to create a masterpiece — as long as he realises that every Western masterpiece is at least residually Christian.

The choice between beauty and ugliness in aesthetics exactly parallels the one between good and evil in morality. The soulless brutalism of 20th-century architecture parallels the soulless brutality of that century, in which more people were killed than in all other centuries of recorded history combined. The concrete ugliness of the South Bank or Barbican is the aesthetic equivalent of Lubianka cellars and Auschwitz ovens. They are all reminders of the abyss awating those who worship at the altar of secular gods.

All those physical disasters spring from the disastrous metaphysical idea that man sits at the centre of his own universe, rather than at the periphery of God’s. Looking for God only inside himself, man finds only himself there. Usually, he is terrified by what he sees, and this terror colours and distorts everything he creates. Ugly becomes new beautiful, virtual new real, vulgar new profound.

That’s why all my atheist friends I mentioned earlier regret their atheism. They realise that society not held together by the adhesive of a moral ideal infinitely superior to man will fall apart. They know that a drastic departure from Christian culture will create nothing but nothingness. They sense that a generation from now people will look at modern architecture not in awe but in horror.

Alain de Botton doesn’t understand any of this. That’s why his project will be an aesthetic and spiritual failure, even though I’m sure it’ll succeed on its own puny terms. The ‘philosopher’ has already raised half the money needed, and there’s no reason to believe the Corporation of London will deny planning permission: they have form in encouraging architectural perversions.

Construction can begin next year, and the City of London is bracing itself. De Botton thinks this is the appropriate site because the City is where people have lost sight of life’s priorities. Ignoring that someone who inherited £200 million is in a weak position to despise money, one may still wonder what he thinks life’s priorities should be. If it’s not the pleasures and comforts that can be bought with money, then what else, Mr de Botton? It has to be something physical, for, according to you and your putative adversary Dawkins, nothing else exists.

How much easier life would be for de Botton if he followed the example of my atheist friends and stayed away from problems for which there are no materialist answers. He’d then be spared uncomfortable questions coming from the likes of me.