This time last year, I wrote an article saying my main project in 2014 would be to unite the right. That is, I would start a political movement that would bring together Conservative and Ukip activists in a tactical voting alliance. We would select a few dozen battleground constituencies and campaign for whichever candidate was best placed to win in each seat, whether Ukip or Tory. The name for this movement was to be ‘Country Before Party’.

The initial response was encouraging. Hundreds of people emailed me offering their support, including MEPs, members of the House of Lords, ex-MPs, and so on. I set up a website, assembled a steering committee and started drafting detailed plans. I felt like I was really on to something.

The most common reaction among seasoned political observers was to assume I was proposing a full-blown electoral pact and then pour cold water on the idea. But that was missing the point. I was proposing an informal pact between the parties’ supporters, not a formal pact between their leaders. I was adamant that my idea didn’t depend on the blessing of David Cameron and Nigel Farage. It could still fly even in the face of their opposition.

But I was secretly hoping that behind closed doors, the party panjandrums would be more sympathetic. After all, they must recognise that in the absence of some kind of alliance between the two camps, the risk of Ed Miliband becoming the next prime minister is quite high. There is also the fact that we believe in a lot of the same things: national sovereignty, free enterprise, controlled immigration, lower taxes, school choice, freedom of speech, etc. There are shared values here, even if we differ on policy detail.

However, meetings with senior members of both parties soon put paid to that hope. Both camps told me that they would do very well at the next election without any help from the other, thank you very much. They also maintained that any hint of an alliance, however informal, would antagonise huge swaths of their supporters and they’d end up losing more votes than they’d gain.

I pushed back on these points, but there was something else going on that was harder to argue with — a kind of tribal antipathy. Farage and Cameron have a mutual loathing that’s rooted in their identity as members of their respective parties and which is echoed lower down the ranks. They regard each other not as estranged members of the same family, but as bitter enemies. To broker any sort of accommodation between the two camps would require a degree of trust that just isn’t there.

Leaders of both parties are convinced that their opposite numbers are hellbent on their destruction and everything each side says or does is seen through that lens. Indeed, both groups I met with treated me with extreme suspicion, as if I was an agent of the other side trying to lure them into saying something that could then be used against them.

I realised I had bitten off more than I could chew after these meetings. To begin with, any alliance along the lines I was suggesting would be vigorously opposed by both party organisations, even to the extent of threatening to expel any members who campaigned for the other team. That meant building a grass-roots movement would be much harder than I’d anticipated and would probably take longer than the time remaining before the next election.

Then there was the fact that I wasn’t the right person to lead this crusade, given my close identification with the Conservative party. If the proposal was associated with me, it would always be viewed with deep scepticism by most Kippers.

There was another, more fundamental problem. If I pursued this project, given how hostile senior Tories were towards it, I would probably end up falling out with my own party and I didn’t much like the idea of being exiled from my tribe. I value the camaraderie of fellow Tories and I don’t want to lose that. I’ve got so many enemies as it is, I have no wish to throw away my few remaining allies.

So in 2015 I’m going to confine my New Year’s resolutions to drinking less and losing a few pounds. Trying to make a decisive intervention in the next general election is a little too ambitious.

The post This year, I’m keeping my ambitions modest appeared first on The Spectator.

When I first heard the story of Alan Turing in my late teens I made what must be quite a common mistake. I concluded that his conviction in 1952 for committing a homosexual act was indefensible in light of his immense contribution to the war effort. The fact that he was forced to undergo a course of hormonal ‘therapy’ which led to his suicide two years later underlined just how badly he was treated. The British authorities should have been erecting statues to him, not hounding him to his death because he was attracted to other men.

The reason this was a mistake is because I’d made a connection between Turing’s war record and the injustice of persecuting him for being homosexual, when it would have been equally wrong if he’d been a conscientious objector. People’s right to have sex with whomever they choose, provided they’ve reached the age of consent, isn’t contingent on their having done something heroic. By the same token, it’s not a valid argument to say that criminalising homosexual acts is wrong because some homosexuals contribute an enormous amount to our national life. Let’s call all variations of this mistake the Turing Fallacy.

The Imitation Game — the film about Turing starring Benedict Cumberbatch — commits this fallacy, but not in the way you’d expect. It doesn’t romanticise Turing. On the contrary, he’s portrayed as an unfeeling intellectual snob, a person with no friends, no sense of humour — a man who struggles to make any human connection at all. All those who knew Turing have said they don’t recognise this picture and these distortions suggest that the people who’ve made the film aren’t interested in promoting Turing as a gay martyr — a sort of Oscar Wilde figure. Indeed, the filmmakers have invented a subplot in which Turing discovers the identity of a Soviet agent working at Bletchley Park but is blackmailed into keeping quiet. That is, they’ve falsely portrayed him as a traitor and explicitly linked it to his homosexuality. I suppose there might be an argument for gay rights in there somewhere — if homosexual acts weren’t illegal, gays would be less susceptible to blackmail — but it’s pretty well hidden.

No, the filmmakers are guilty of committing the Turing Fallacy in another way. The Imitation Game isn’t a plea for greater tolerance of homosexuals, but of people on the autistic spectrum. Its cause is neurodiversity, not sexual diversity. That’s why Turing is portrayed as someone who struggles with ordinary human interaction. He’s literal-minded to a fault and is incapable of understanding jokes. He’s nothing like the real Alan Turing, who was warm, charming and funny; instead, he’s exactly like the main character in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. To make a point, the filmmakers have invented a largely fictional character — a mathematical genius with Asperger’s syndrome. It’s as if they decided that presenting Turing as a victim of the persecution of homosexuals is old hat. So instead, he’s portrayed as a martyr to another, more fashionable cause. His crime isn’t being gay, but failing to be neurotypical.

Now, I’m all for giving more respect to people on the autistic spectrum — my half-brother Christopher is on the autistic spectrum — but not because they’re ‘special’. The Imitation Game commits a similar error to Rain Man, which seems to argue that Dustin Hoffman’s character should be valued and cherished not because he’s a human being with the same needs as the rest of us but because he’s exceptional with numbers. It’s patronising nonsense, and as an argument for neuro-diversity doesn’t bear scrutiny. It won’t surprise you to learn that Christopher isn’t any good at maths.

If the makers of The Imitation Game had done any research into autism, they’d know that ‘auties’ and ‘aspies’ are no more likely to be mathematical geniuses than the neurotypical. It’s romantic gobbledegook — the Turing Fallacy par excellence. The filmmakers are peddling this myth in order to burnish their liberal credentials, not because they actually want to improve life for people on the spectrum. My brother lives in a residential community that depends on taxpayer subsidy and that will be put at risk if people think he could just as easily be earning a living breaking codes as he could weaving baskets. Far from helping him or any of his fellow sufferers, The Imitation Game is just Hollywood hokum. I’ve no doubt it will win a hatful of Oscars.

The post Autism and the Turing Fallacy appeared first on The Spectator.

David Sedaris is my new hero. Not because he’s such a funny writer, but because he’s obsessed with litter. He told a group of MPs last week that he spends up to five hours a day picking up fast food containers and fag ends around his home in Pulborough, west Sussex. Thanks to his unstinting labours, he’s become a local hero and has had a rubbish lorry named after him.

I’ve some way to go before I qualify for such an honour, but I do my bit. For instance, on Monday I spent an hour clearing the litter from the flowerbed outside the West London Free School in Hammersmith. This was rubbish left by passers-by, not the pupils. Sedaris said what infuriated him the most were crisp packets tied into a knot and stuffed into soft drink cans, but I can trump that. Among the detritus I came across was a fresh pile of human excrement. All I can say is that I’m glad the individual responsible wasn’t squatting in the flowerbed when we had our school open day last October.

According to Sedaris, shoppers at Tesco Metro drop more litter than Waitrose customers, an observation that got him into trouble with the Labour MP Simon Danczuk, who branded him a ‘snob’. But there’s no getting around the fact that the worst offenders are more likely to be at the bottom of the social pyramid than the top. I spend about ten minutes every evening picking up litter in my street in Acton and I’ve never come across an empty Evian bottle or a discarded carton of coconut water. No, it’s cans of Kronenbourg and Red Bull, along with polystyrene food containers. Sedaris complained about picking up more Mayfair cigarette boxes than any other brand in Pulborough, but in west London it’s Superkings. Always packets of ten, never 20.

Among my neighbours, the owner-occupiers behave the best when it comes to sticking to recycling rules. They dutifully separate their household rubbish into four categories — plastic, paper, food and general — and make sure that everything is in the right container. The essential thing is not to include any food waste in the black plastic bin bags you put out at night because the foxes always rip them open. This is the rule least likely to be observed by tenants in the multi-occupancy units and I often find myself outside their houses on rubbish day, scraping takeaway curry off the pavement.

As a general rule, I avoid chastising people and try to lead by example, but the other day I lost the plot with one of my neighbours. After filling a bin liner with food waste, I deposited it on their doorstep and pinned a strongly worded note to their door. I thought it would be cowardly to do it anonymously so I included my name and address — not the most sensible thing I’ve ever done.

A few days later, I received an email from the person in question, who turned out to be a highly respectable lady in her late seventies who’d been a resident of the street for 35 years. ‘I have just returned from a trip abroad to find your very insulting note stuck to my front door,’ she wrote. ‘While I do not feel I have to explain anything to you, I would explain to my less high-handed neighbours that while I was away my cleaner placed two black bins near the front of my house instead of putting them outside the back door. A mistake I feel does not warrant a torrent of recriminations.’

Absolutely right, of course, and she got her revenge by copying the email to everyone in the local residents’ association. It confirmed my reputation as the street’s self-appointed litter monitor, a curtain twitcher with a bin bag.

Sedaris thinks the best answer to this scourge of modern Britain — that’s the litter, not the busybodies who complain about it — is to set up roadblocks and fine any motorists with clean cars. The theory is that if there’s no rubbish in the footwell or stuffed into the glove compartment, they must have thrown it out the window. Not a bad plan, but a tad draconian.

I prefer a Big Society solution whereby people such as Sedaris and I organise little platoons which patrol the streets every evening, picking up litter and frowning at anyone who drops it. With a bit of luck, we’d shame people into having more respect for the public realm. If nothing else, at least we’d have the consolation of feeling morally superior. That’s what keeps me going.

The post Litter is a class issue appeared first on The Spectator.

‘I for one would be sorry to see them go,’ wrote George Orwell. ‘They are a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against virtue.’

He was writing about the seaside postcards of Donald McGill in 1941, but his defence of them and their ‘enthusiastic indecency’ could equally well apply to Page 3. Orwell’s argument was that McGill’s caricatures of women, ‘with breasts or buttocks grossly over-emphasised’, gave expression to ‘the Sancho Panza view of life’. There’s a fat little squire in all of us, he thought, although few of us are brave enough to admit it. ‘He is the unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul,’ he wrote. ‘His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with voluptuous figures.’

Orwell believed that the art of Donald McGill served as a release valve in a society that was otherwise virtuous and repressed. For the most part, we choose the soul over the body, but a culture in which all manifestations of our animal instincts was expunged would be unbearable. Just occasionally, when we hear ‘sermons against gambling’ and ‘the solidarity songs … of left-wing political parties’, we want to let out a tremendous raspberry, and in Orwell’s view we should be allowed to do so. That included, in his day, being able to buy postcards that vegetarian feminists would consider ‘vulgar’ and ‘obscene’.

OK, Orwell didn’t use the phrase ‘vegetarian feminists’, but he did point out that one of the stock comic figures in McGill’s postcards was ‘the Suffragette’, who always appeared as a ‘feminist lecturer’ or a ‘temperance fanatic’. There’s a link here between feminism and puritanism that I’ll come back to, but first I want to deal with the main objection to the ‘safety valve’ defence, namely, that pictures of naked women are not harmless.

Since it emerged that the Sun has done away with Page 3, plenty of feminists have popped up to claim that there’s a direct link between the ‘objectification’ of the female form and violent assaults against women, including rape. But there’s no evidence of this. I don’t think anyone would dispute that British men’s exposure to pornography has increased since the mid-1990s, what with lads’ mags, satellite television and the increasing availability of the internet. Yet between 1997 and 2009 incidents of domestic violence — that is, assaults on women by men in the home — fell by 64 per cent in England and Wales. The idea that we’re in the midst of a rape epidemic somehow caused by ‘everyday sexism’ is a myth. According to the Office of National Statistics, the number of victims of sexual assault decreased between 2005 and 2009 and ‘has shown no statistically significant change’ between then and 2012.

I’m perplexed when otherwise intelligent women assert that there’s a causal connection between things like Page 3 and actual physical harm done to women, because there’s almost no research to back up such claims. On the contrary, the regions of the world in which women are most at risk of physical harm — places like northern Iraq, where Yazidi women are raped, tortured and sold into sexual slavery, or parts of rural India, where suttee is still practised — are those places where pornography is strictly forbidden. As a general rule, the more sexually repressed a society is, the more likely women are to be abused. That suggests Orwell was on to something when he argued that seaside postcards and the like were an integral part of a civilised society, not a threat.

So what’s really going on when Stella Creasy and her pals rail against the evils of Page 3? I suspect it has little to do with protecting women from harm, because if they were really concerned about that they’d campaign against the actual causes of abuse, such as the grooming of underage girls by Pakistani gangs in Labour’s rotten boroughs. No, it’s an expression of their essential puritanism, their compressed-lipped disapproval of men who take pleasure in gazing at the naked female form.

They are the direct descendants of the bluestocking temperance campaigners who took a similarly dim view of gin and beer — the sandal-wearing scolds who tried to stamp out all traces of vulgarity from the public square. Orwell thought they’d never succeed because the common people would always greet their efforts to improve them with a chorus of raspberries. But they have succeeded, and our society is a duller — and more dangerous — place as a result.

The post Je suis Page 3 appeared first on The Spectator.

For a brief moment earlier this week, I thought education might become an issue in the general election campaign. The Commons Education Select Committee’s lukewarm report on the government’s academy and free school programmes was leaked to the Guardian on Monday and the accompanying story claimed that Labour hoped to open a ‘second front’ following the ‘success’ of its attacks over the NHS.

‘It is undeniable that the last Labour government dramatically improved school standards in secondary education,’ said Tristram Hunt, the shadow education secretary. ‘But the progress that we made… is being undone by a government that is obsessed with market ideology in education.’

Now, I would welcome this, obviously, and not just because it would mean Michael Gove playing a more prominent role in the Conservative campaign. The main reason is because I think the government should be proud of its record in education.

Hunt’s claims are laughable. The public education system that Gove and his team inherited from Labour was a basket case. Under the last government, spending per pupil doubled but English children slipped further down the international league tables. Between 2000 and 2009, we went from eighth to 27th in maths, seventh to 25th in reading and fourth to 16th in science. At least a fifth of children were leaving school unable to read, write or add up, and more children from a single school — Westminster — got into Oxford and Cambridge in 2010 than from all the kids on free school meals.

Under this government, by contrast, huge strides have been made. The number of English children being educated in failing schools has fallen by 250,000, the national curriculum has been rewritten with more emphasis on knowledge, rigour will shortly be restored to GCSEs and A-levels, and headteachers have the powers they need to enforce discipline.

As for the academy and free school programmes, as Dennis Sewell writes on p. 18, they are big successes. In 13 years, Labour set up 203 academies. There are now 3,304. The Education Committee takes the government to task, not because children aren’t doing better in these schools, but because Labour’s sponsored academies improved faster than the converter academies that have sprung up in the past five years. But the first wave began as failing schools, whereas the second were mostly good or outstanding to start with. If they’ve improved less quickly, it’s because they haven’t had as far to go.

Free schools are often seized upon by left-wing critics as the weakest of Gove’s education reforms, but there, too, the government has a good story to tell. To date, 251 have opened, with a further 110 in the pipeline. Once full, these schools will provide nearly 200,000 new places and, contrary to the propaganda spewed out by the teaching unions, the vast majority are in areas where there’s an acute shortage of places. Meeting that need by setting up free schools, which cost less than half as much as new local authority schools, has saved the taxpayer a great deal of money.

The BBC’s unrelenting focus on ‘failing’ free schools, although just two have been shut down so far, obscures the fact that almost three-quarters of those inspected by Ofsted have been ranked good or outstanding, well above the national average. And a handful are genuinely world-beating. For instance, Ark Conway in Acton, one of the first 24 free schools to open in 2011, has just posted the best Key Stage 1 results in the country. Not just better than every other state primary, but better than every fee-paying pre-prep as well. Stick that in your pipe, Mr Hunt.

I would dearly love Labour to open a ‘second front’ on education, but it’s unlikely to happen. Ed Miliband has no interest in education policy, as was clear from the fact that he didn’t devote a single line to it in his 2013 conference speech. He also knows that, unlike the NHS, it’s not an area where Labour consistently outpolls the Conservatives. According to the latest ComRes/ITV News poll, more people said they trusted the Tories when it came to improving our education system than Labour.

If I was Tristram Hunt, I’d keep my head down and hope for a more promising shadow cabinet post when Labour has lost, Miliband has gone and Yvette Cooper is in charge.

The post The proof is in the league tables, Mr Hunt appeared first on The Spectator.

I can’t say I’m surprised by the departure of Harry Redknapp. Since I started supporting Queens Park Rangers in 2008 we’ve gone through seven managers — 13 if you count the caretakers. Indeed, it’s a miracle he’s lasted this long. The club was relegated during his first term in charge and we only returned to the Premier League thanks to a last-minute goal by Bobby Zamora in the play-off final against Derby at the end of last season. I was at that match and Derby were easily the better side.

If Harry had been sensible, he would have announced his retirement after that game and gone out on a high. But what Enoch Powell said of politicians is also true of football managers: their careers always end in failure. QPR have been dismal this season, in spite of the £36.5 million Harry spent on new players over the summer. We’ve lost our last 12 away games, a Premier League record, and are languishing second from bottom. Avoiding relegation will take a miracle.

Harry has a reputation for being a wizard in the transfer market — part of his second-hand car salesman persona — but his wheeling and dealing has done little for QPR. His big-name signing over the summer was Rio Ferdinand, the former Manchester United player who was supposed to be the linchpin of a new 3-5-2 system that Harry put great faith in. That system was abandoned within two weeks and Ferdinand was dropped to the bench.

I’m trying to control my feelings about Harry, but the timing of his departure makes it difficult. His official reason for leaving is because he needs a knee operation, but why did that only become apparent the day after the transfer window closed? If he was going to go, it would have been better to leave at the beginning of January, thereby giving his successor an opportunity to bring in some new players. Few decent managers will want to come in now, with no chance of strengthening the squad before the end of the season.

Among traditionalists, he’s praised for being a throwback to a more romantic era — a manager from the old school who relies on gut instinct rather than data and analysis. In this respect he reminds me of the baseball scouts at Oakland Athletics who greeted the arrival of Billy Beane, and his nerdy interest in numbers, with such scepticism. That conflict is recorded in Moneyball, Michael Lewis’s great book about Beane.

Within five years of his becoming general manager, the Athletics became the first team in the history of American league baseball to win 20 games in succession. In football, as in baseball, it’s all about the numbers these days.

During his tenure at QPR, Harry never looked more exposed than when going head to head with one of the new breed of European managers, with their mastery of the technical side of the game. A case in point was our match against Mauricio Pochettino’s Tottenham earlier this season. We got spanked 4-0.

Harry may be a lovable rogue, but he’s a tactical imbecile. Imagine Arthur Daley taking on Garry Kasparov at chess and you’ll have some idea of what it’s been like watching QPR this season.

To be fair, Harry does seem to have a way with the players. QPR’s lack of results this season isn’t for want of effort. Midway through most games, when they’ve invariably gone 1-0 down, the players have abandoned anything resembling a system and started tearing around after the ball like a bunch of kids in a playground. Just occasionally, this harum-scarum approach has overwhelmed the opposition, particularly when the home crowd has turned up the volume. I suppose Harry deserves some credit for that.

He’s expressed a desire to return to management when he’s fixed his medical problems, but that seems unlikely. The owners of football clubs will hesitate before hiring a manager whose most notable triumph was steering Portsmouth to victory in the 2008 FA Cup. Harry left shortly afterwards and a year later the club went into administration.

In a few months’ time I’ll probably feel more sanguine about Harry. I may even miss his post-match interviews, which were great opportunities for playing cliché bingo: ‘Great little player… put in a shift… no easy games… hard place to come… I never complain about referees, but… etc.’ But right now I just feel angry.

The post Why I won’t cry for Harry appeared first on The Spectator.

I suppose we should be thankful that Nicola Sturgeon has acknowledged there’s a problem with Scotland’s public education system, even if she’s hit upon the wrong solution. Earlier this week, the First Minister announced that the Scottish -government would be trying out its version of ‘the London challenge’, a programme carried out by the last government, to address the chronic underachievement of Scotland’s most deprived children.

In the past, the SNP has deflected criticisms of its education record by pointing out that Scottish 15-year-olds did marginally better than their English counterparts in the 2012 Pisa tests. But the difference between the two groups is minuscule and both have declined dramatically since Pisa first started testing in 2000. More recently, the Scottish government has been embarrassed by the error-strewn roll-out of the Curriculum for Excellence. The Highers linked to the new curriculum were supposed to be introduced last year, but half of Scotland’s local authorities still haven’t managed it.

It’s not surprising that Sturgeon has alighted on ‘the London challenge’ as the model for improving Scotland’s schools, since it involves giving local authorities more money, rather than schools more autonomy. As a general rule, increasing expenditure on education is an ineffective way of boosting attainment, as the last government discovered. Spending per pupil more than doubled in real terms under Labour, but Britain’s schoolchildren continued their steady decline in the international league tables. Indeed, Andreas Schleicher, the man in charge of the Pisa tests, recently identified ‘It’s all about money’ as one of the ‘myths’ about high-performing schools. He pointed out that students in the Slovak Republic perform at about the same level as students in America, even though America spends more than twice as much per pupil.

But is ‘the London challenge’ an exception? Until recently, most people thought so, and on the left it became Exhibit A in the case for not reducing the role of bureaucrats in England’s public education system. Introduced in 2003 by Estelle Morris, it placed huge budgets in the hands of national and local officials, who spent them on ‘training programmes’ for ‘school leaders’, i.e. residential courses for London-based teachers who agreed to be lectured by Marxist professors in return for free food and wine.

Ten years later, Chris Cook wrote an article in the FT in which he marvelled at what he called ‘the London effect’. Cook drew attention to the fact that London had gone from being one of the poorest-performing regions in England to one of the best. Children living in London’s most deprived neighbourhoods could now expect to do better than the average pupil living outside the capital. Even though ‘the London challenge’ was shelved in 2010, most of the experts quoted in Cook’s article claimed it was the cause of this dramatic improvement.

It didn’t take long for the myth to be debunked. Last October, the Centre for Market and Public Organisation at Bristol University published a research paper by Simon Burgess arguing that the higher progress made by pupils in London’s schools compared with the rest of England could be entirely accounted for by immigration. ‘Ethnic minority pupils have greater ambition, aspiration, and work harder in school,’ wrote Burgess. ‘London has more of these pupils and so has a higher average GCSE score than the rest of the country.’

To test this, Burgess compared the progress of white British pupils in London’s schools with the same demographic group in the rest of the country. If the various ‘interventions’ put in place by Estelle Morris’s crack team of bureaucrats were responsible for ‘the London effect’, you’d expect to see all pupils in London’s schools outperforming their counterparts in the provinces. In fact, white British pupils fare just as badly in London as they do elsewhere. Once you control for the ethnic composition of London’s schools, the ‘London effect’ vanishes altogether. Put simply, the reason poor children in London are likely to get better GCSEs than children in the rest of England is that they’re less likely to be white.

I can confidently predict that Sturgeon’s plan to pour more money into Scotland’s local education authorities — no doubt funded by the English taxpayer — will have zero impact on the attainment of Scotland’s poorest pupils. If she wants to see Scotland climb the international school league tables, she’d be better off encouraging more Indians, Chinese and Africans to settle in Glasgow. Unfortunately, with the collapse of global oil prices, she’s unlikely to have much luck.

The post The myth of the ‘London effect’ appeared first on The Spectator.

On the face of it, the moral case against tax avoidance seems pretty straightforward. If you’re a UK taxpayer and benefit from public goods and services, then you should pay your fair share of tax. If you’re paying less than that, then you’re a free rider. You’re breaking the social contract.

But what do we mean by ‘fair share’? The standard defence of tax avoidance is that it’s perfectly legal — if it wasn’t, it would be tax evasion — and the social contract only obliges people to obey the law, not to pay more tax than they have to. To maintain that people are morally obliged to pay an additional amount of tax, over and above what they’re legally required to pay, is a tricky position to defend.

For one thing, it means we’re all guilty of tax avoidance. I’m not just thinking of people who buy whisky in duty free or take out an Isa. If the ‘fair’ rate of tax is higher than the actual rate, and anyone not paying the ‘fair’ rate is ‘dodgy’, then everyone who fails to make a voluntary donation to HMRC on top of their annual tax bill is at fault.

More fundamentally, where does this obligation come from? A common argument made by those who think rich people should pay more tax than the legal minimum is that they benefit disproportionally from things like the rule of law, particularly when it comes to the protection of their property. But if you calculate that benefit, it’s likely that Britain’s multi-millionaires are paying more than their fair share. After all, the top 1 per cent of income earners pay roughly 25 per cent of the total income tax take but don’t consume a quarter of public services. You could argue that the super-rich benefit in so many intangible ways — the roads, schools and hospitals used by their employees, for instance — that the total value is incalculable. But if that’s true, it doesn’t follow that they’re paying too little. They could be paying too much. We just don’t know. That’s what ‘incalculable’ means.

More sophisticated critics of tax avoidance stop short of saying people should pay more than the law requires, but distinguish between the spirit and letter of the law. Many forms of avoidance, such as filling up with petrol the day before a rise in fuel duty, are fine because they are in keeping with the spirit of the law. But avoidance that involves paying expensive accountants to exploit loopholes is wrong. Even though you’re complying with the letter of the law, you’re flouting the intentions of those who passed the law. The sin here consists in not complying with the will of our democratically elected representatives when it comes to tax, rather than not paying your ‘fair’ share, although the two arguments are often run together.

But there are problems with this position too. How are people supposed to know what the intentions of legislators are when it comes to taxes other than by examining the laws they pass? This was a point made by Lord Hoffman, a senior British judge, in a lecture on tax avoidance in 2005. ‘The only way in which Parliament can express an intention to impose a tax is by a statute that means that such a tax is to be imposed,’ he said. In other words, when it comes to tax there is no distinction between the spirit and letter of the law. They’re one and the same.

No doubt opponents of avoidance would dispute this and claim that it’s usually perfectly obvious when a tax loophole is contrary to the spirit of the law. However, even supposing that to be true, it’s a bit of a leap to argue that taxpayers have a moral obligation to look beyond the tax code and do their best to honour the intentions of the lawmakers who created it. Ultimately, it comes down to where you think the onus of responsibility lies. Is it the duty of the taxpayer to hand over more than the letter of the law requires if the law in question fails to capture the intentions of the lawmakers? Or is it the duty of the legislature to draft the law properly in the first place?

I’m framing that question in a way that favours the libertarian point of view, but the truth is I haven’t completely made up my mind. Like most people, I instinctively want to condemn aggressive tax avoidance as immoral. But I can’t come up with a good argument for doing so.

The post How do you define tax avoidance? appeared first on The Spectator.

Last year, I had an exchange with Hugo Rifkind on Twitter in which I bet him dinner at Clarke’s that his father would stand down before the next election. My reasoning was that, at the age of 68, his dad wouldn’t want to serve another five years in the Commons and would be happier in the Lords. I hadn’t anticipated he would depart as a result of a cash-for-access scandal.

I’ve always rather fancied running in Kensington myself. Rifkind has a majority of 8,616, which makes it a safe seat, and it’s only a 15-minute cycle ride from my house. But I’m not going to throw my hat into the ring because I still have numerous responsibilities in connection with the three schools I’ve helped set up. Indeed, my group is consulting about setting up a fourth in Kensington. I don’t think I’d be able to discharge those responsibilities and do a good job as a Member of Parliament.

I also find that the current censoriousness over MPs earning a bit of extra money is off-putting. Ed Miliband has already said that he intends to ban them from taking second jobs if Labour wins in May, and he may well succeed in bouncing David Cameron into making a similar commitment. It’s all very well for them to get up on their high horses — as leader of the opposition, Miliband is paid £132,387, while Cameron’s salary is £142,500 — but what about those poor backbenchers earning £67,060?

Rifkind expressed this badly when he said that, as a professional, he was ‘entitled’ to a standard of living that an MP’s basic salary couldn’t provide, but I agree with his point. If we expect men of Rifkind’s calibre to serve in the House of Commons it’s unrealistic to insist that they earn no more than £67,000. If Rifkind had eschewed the opportunity to run for Parliament in 1974 and pursued a full-time career in the law, he’d be earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. He’d also have a much fatter pension. The truth is, he’s sacrificed a great deal in order to be an MP, even with the odd consultancy or two.

I know plenty of good MPs who are planning to stand down, either in May or at the end of the next Parliament, because they’re worried about not being able to earn enough money to support themselves and their families in the degree of comfort they’d like. And that’s with the current rules in place. If we make it harder for MPs to supplement their incomes, we’ll see an exodus in 2020. Politics will once again become a rich man’s game, as it was before MPs first started to be paid in 1911.

Defenders of tightening up the rules argue that it will be a good thing if adventurers interested in earning more than £67,000 are put off, because people should want to be MPs out of a sense of public duty. But do we really want to be represented by a bunch of self-denying prigs? The best MPs tend to be motivated by a mixture of things — a lust for glory as well as a sense of patriotism, a yearning for recognition and a desire to serve. Think of Winston Churchill. Would he have remained an MP long enough to save western civilisation if he’d been told from the outset that he couldn’t write any books or newspaper articles? Doubtful.

The other danger of imposing an outright ban on MPs’ extracurricular activities is that they’ll figure out dishonest ways of earning money. According to World Audit, the not-for-profit that carries out an annual corruption survey of 150 nation states, Britain is the 12th least corrupt country in the world. I wonder how long that would remain true if we made it illegal for MPs to take second jobs? Some will argue that plenty of MPs are already up to their necks in it and they’ll point to Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw as examples. But if you think what they’ve been doing is sleazy, take a look at France’s politicians. Next to them, Rifkind and Straw are choirboys.

As I said earlier, all this sanctimony would be acceptable if it were to be accompanied by a proposal to double MPs’ wages, but it isn’t and nor is it likely to be. The public just wouldn’t wear it. So let’s just leave things as they are. Even with cash for access, we’re still the 12th least corrupt country in the world and that’s good enough.

The post £67,000 is not enough for the brightest and the best appeared first on The Spectator.

I was invited on Question Time this week, which gave me a few sleepless nights. Natalie Bennett’s disastrous interview on LBC was a reminder that appearing on a current affairs programme in this febrile pre-election environment can be a bit of a minefield. Admittedly, I’m not the leader of a political party but that’s no guarantee I won’t make a fool of myself — a moment that will be preserved for ever on YouTube. There are no opportunities for glory on Question Time, but plenty for embarrassment. The most you can hope for is to get through the experience in one piece. By now you may well have seen what happened — but I am writing this on Tuesday evening, full of nerves.

My biggest fear is that someone might ask a ‘funny’ question. The second time I appeared on the programme in 2005 the final question of the evening was, ‘If the party leaders were animals, what animals would they be?’ David Dimbleby immediately turned to me and said, ‘Toby, you’re a witty fellow, how would you answer that one?’ I was completely stumped. Couldn’t think of anything remotely funny. I experienced what the leader of the Greens called ‘brain fade’. It was four years before I was asked back.

This will be my fifth appearance and, as before, I’ve done a fair amount of mugging up. It’s a bit like revising for an exam. You have no way of knowing exactly what questions will come up — the audience submit them on the night and the producers don’t give you any warning — but if you’ve been watching the news you can predict with some accuracy.

I’m reasonably sure someone will ask a question about the child sex abuse scandals in Rotherham and Oxfordshire and the Prime Minister’s proposals to make it a criminal offence for those in authority to wilfully neglect those at risk. I also think it’s likely that the issue of the radicalisation of young Muslims will come up, possibly in the form of a question about whether hate preachers should be banned from speaking at British universities.

One tip that veterans of the show have given me in the past is to familiarise yourself with the local issues. This particular edition of Question Time is being broadcast from Glasgow and I’m the only non-Scot on the panel, so at least half the questions are likely to be about Scotland. My guess is that we’ll get asked about at least one of the following three issues: the impact the coalition’s deficit-reduction programme has had on the Scottish economy, the possibility of a post-election pact between Labour and the SNP, and the desirability or otherwise of renewing Trident.

I’ve often heard conservatives complain that the BBC packs the audience with lefties so they’ll jeer and hiss whenever the Tory on the panel uses a stock phrase like ‘long-term economic plan’. Not true. The makers of the programme bend over backwards to try to ensure the audience contains a broad cross-section of political views. By definition, a majority of them won’t be Conservative voters, so in all likelihood I’ll be given a hard time. But that’s the country’s anti-Tory bias, not the BBC’s.

It will be interesting to see how well represented ‘Yes’ voters are in the audience and what formula the BBC uses when deciding how many to admit. Fifty-three per cent of Glaswegians voted in favour of independence last year, but since most of them are intending to vote SNP in the forthcoming election, it wouldn’t be fair on the other parties if they made up the majority.

Having said that, lots of SNP activists are deeply suspicious of what they perceive to be the BBC’s anti-independence bias, so they may well use subterfuge to smuggle their way in. On Monday a Twitter account calling itself ‘Scotland for independence’ tweeted a link to the website inviting people to sign up to be in the audience, accompanied by the following advice: ‘I recommend pretending you’re a red, blue or yellow Tory so you can be hand-picked by the British Biased Corporation.’

I’m probably overthinking this. I’m one of six panellists and if you allow for the fact that about a quarter of the time will be taken up by David Dimbleby interacting with members of the audience (usually the best bits), that leaves each panellist with seven and a half minutes of air time. It’s an awfully long way to go and an awful lot of preparation for just seven and a half minutes. But I’m too vain to say no. I just hope I don’t step on a landmine.

The post The nailbiting run-up to Question Time appeared first on The Spectator.

My son Charlie was scouted by QPR last week. I say ‘scouted’, but that’s not quite accurate since he’s only six. Rather, a man claiming to be a member of the club’s coaching staff suggested I bring him along to the QPR pre-academy in Willesden.

At first, I was suspicious. The man in question teaches football at the local leisure centre and I was worried that this ‘pre-academy’ would turn out to be an expensive, fee-paying affair with no official links to QPR.

When the man first introduced the idea, I had to ask if he’d got the right boy. Charlie’s quite small for his age and not exactly lion-hearted. His method of winning the ball is to go in for the tackle, fall over, accuse the other player of committing a foul and then demand a penalty, no matter where the ‘foul’ has occurred. He then positions the ball inches from the goal, takes a massive run-up and, as often as not, falls over when he makes contact. To my untrained eye, he doesn’t look like a future star of the Premier League.

The ‘scout’ insisted that he’d got the right child and assured me no money would change hands. All I had to do was turn up to the pre–academy on Monday, let the coaches take a look at him and, if they liked what they saw, bring him back for an hour’s training every week.

Once I’d established that the whole thing was genuine, I began to fantasise about the possibilities. If Charlie is earning £100,000 a week by the time he’s 18, he might buy his dear old dad a Bentley -Continental for Christmas. Better yet, I could become his agent and take a hefty slice of all his earnings and transfer fees. Charlie could become the family’s cash cow.

It fell to Caroline to strike a note of caution. She pointed out that the chances of Charlie ending up as a professional footballer, even if he got into the proper academy, were extremely slim. She’d heard too many stories of teenage boys who’d devoted their early years to Premier League academies, only to be let go at 16. Did we really want to expose him to such soul-destroying disappointment?

And what about the commitment it would require of us? If Charlie progressed any further, one night a week would turn into four, with weekends sacrificed entirely to football. The way she laid it out, it -sounded about as sensible as becoming a gold prospector at the end of the 19th century.

I was still weighing up the pros and cons last Sunday, when Charlie played in his weekly fixture for the Chiswick Youth Under-Sixes. This is a team that requires no talent to get into. If you turn up and fork out £175 for the season, your child can play. They were facing their arch west -London rivals, the Holland Park branch of Little Foxes, who’d beaten them in every previous meeting. As the referee blew his starting whistle, I looked over at the Little Foxes’ parents and suddenly came over all left-wing. It was the sans-culottes versus the 1 per cent.

Then, something miraculous happened. Charlie started playing properly. He managed to win tackles and then keep the ball. For the first time ever, he made some mazy little runs, skipping past defenders and getting off some decent shots.

It was as if the interest shown in him by the QPR scout had boosted his confidence. The critical moment came in the dying seconds when Charlie won a penalty. His team were trailing 2-3, so it was all down to him. I was so tense I could barely look, knowing how ashamed he’d be if he let his teammates down. As he placed the ball on the spot, his face was white with fear.

He took his usual lengthy run-up, but this time he didn’t fall over. Instead, he blasted the ball into the top left-hand corner. Before he even knew what he’d done, the referee had blown the final whistle and his teammates had piled on top of him. It was Roy of the Rovers stuff.

I took him over to the QPR pre-academy on Monday and, after assessing him for an hour, the coaches asked me to bring him back next week. When you see Charlie score the winning goal against Germany in the final of the 2026 World Cup, I hope you’ll remember where you first read about this wunderkind.

The post Charlie Young, football star appeared first on The Spectator.

Civitas has just published an interesting book called The Ins and Outs of Selective Secondary Schools. Edited by Anastasia de Waal, it’s a collection of essays by the usual suspects in the never-ending argument about grammar schools.

De Waal points out that the two sides have more in common than you’d think. In particular, they share a common goal, which is to sever the link between a child’s socio-economic status and attainment. In 2009, according to the OECD, the variance in the scores of British children in the Pisa international tests in maths, reading and science that could be explained by their backgrounds was 13.8 per cent. By this measure, the best-performing region in the world is Macau (2 per cent) and the worst is Peru (27.5 per cent). Britain is close to the OECD average of 14 per cent.

As you’d expect, those who believe in school selection, such as the Conservative MP Graham Brady, argue that clever children from poor families are likely to do better at grammars than comprehensives. Exhibit A in the case for the defence is the dominance of the professions by the products of independent schools, something that wasn’t true before Tony Crosland set out ‘to destroy every fucking grammar school in England’. In response, Fiona Millar and others point out that the number of working-class children at grammars rarely climbed above the 15 per cent mark, even in their heyday, and that the proportion of children on free school meals in the 164 that remain is just 2 per cent. Today, the main beneficiaries of selective education are still the middle classes.

It’s easy to rebut this argument. A majority Conservative government could make it a condition of allowing an existing grammar to expand — or a new one to be set up — that it set aside some places for children on free school meals. Millar also argues that the 11-plus isn’t a true intelligence test — private tutors etc., etc. — and that intelligence isn’t fixed at 11, but continues to develop in adolescence. It is easy to deal with these objections. Design a better test and allow for more movement in and out of selective schools as children mature.

A stronger argument against grammars is that the gains made by the children who benefit in a two-tier system are offset by the losses inflicted on the ones left behind. Failing the 11-plus can leave you with a lifelong inferiority complex, as John Prescott can testify, and children at secondary moderns gets poorer GCSE results on average than children at comprehensives. Against this, defenders point out that it’s not just the recipients of a selective education who benefit. Sir Paul Nurse, the Nobel Prize-winning president of the Royal Society, has made a succession of discoveries that may lead to a cure for cancer. Would he have gone down the same path if he hadn’t attended Harrow County Grammar School? The more deeply I delve into this discussion, the harder I find it to take sides. But the argument that troubles me most is one that applies to both camps. Suppose we invent a new type of school that meets the objective of nearly everyone in this debate, namely, it severs the link between background and achievement? If we succeed in neutralising all the environmental factors that go hand-in-hand with socio-economic status — postcode, diet, parental engagement etc — what are we left with? The answer is a meritocratic school in which achievement is solely the product of IQ and effort.

The trouble is that IQ and an aptitude for hard work are largely inherited characteristics. Why is a school in which success is dictated by a child’s genes fairer than one in which it’s dictated by socio-economic status? More importantly, there’s quite a lot of evidence that children of intelligent, hardworking parents are likely to be smart and industrious, a correlation that’s becoming stronger as university graduates engage in ‘assortative mating’. (People with similar genotypes pairing up with each other.) This was the shortcoming of meritocratic societies that my father drew attention to in his book on the subject — once assortative mating kicks in, social mobility grinds to a halt. All meritocracy succeeds in doing is replacing one hereditary elite with another. Why, then, is it desirable?

Instinctively, I like the idea of this new type of school and I’ve spent the past six years trying to invent it. But I still haven’t answered the question posed by my father.

The post Will the perfect school always be a pipe dream? appeared first on The Spectator.

A strange ritual takes place on Twitter most evenings at around 10.30 p.m. Hundreds of political anoraks start tweeting the results of the YouGov daily tracker poll due to be published in the following day’s Sun. Some of them are neutrals, but the majority are politically aligned and will only tweet those results that show their party in front.

I often wonder what the point of this is, even though I’m guilty of it myself. It’s not as if anyone is going to see the tweet and say, ‘Ooh, I wasn’t going to vote Conservative, but now that YouGov has them two points ahead I’ve changed my mind.’ I can think of only two sensible reasons for doing this, both quite weak.

The first is it has a mildly demoralising effect on your opponents. Occasionally, I get replies from enraged lefties saying, ‘Well, what do you expect from a Murdoch rag?’ That counts as a successful bit of trolling in my book. The second is it steadies the nerves of the people on your side. For both Labour and the Conservatives, discipline during the election period is essential, and there’s no better backbone-stiffener than a four-point lead, even if it only lasts 24 hours.

But anyone giving these reasons for crowing about good polls is engaging in post-hoc rationalisation. What they’re really doing, I think, is trying to defend their belief that their team is going to win, not just to other people, but also to themselves. Publicising favourable opinion polls isn’t intended to make the result they want more likely. Rather, they’re producing ‘proof’ that the result they’ve already foretold is going to happen.

In other words, it’s a form of confirmation bias, which psychologists describe as the tendency to seize on evidence that supports your point of view, while ignoring or rejecting any evidence that contradicts it. I’m sure this is a feature of all general election campaigns, but it’s particularly apparent in this one with the polls flip-flopping from one day to the next.

As a Conservative supporter, I’ve developed dozens of copper-bottomed arguments for dismissing polls that show our opponents doing well. If Labour has gone up three points and the Conservatives down two, the unwelcome shift is ‘within the margin of error’. If Labour has suddenly surged to a five-point lead, then the poll is an ‘outlier’. Or if the poll shows Ukip doing unexpectedly well, it’s because the respondents were ‘prompted’.

After a bit it becomes difficult to sustain this scepticism — it’s obvious by now that the two main parties are neck-and-neck. But that doesn’t stop me thinking the blues are going to win. At this point, I produce another set of unassailable arguments. For instance, there’s the ‘shy Tory factor’, a term used by psephologists to describe the reluctance of some Conservative voters to identify themselves to pollsters. This explained why the polls understated support for the Tories in the run-up to the 1992 election. Nearly all of them had the Conservatives just a point ahead the day before polling day, yet we romped home with 41.9 per cent of the popular vote, compared with Labour’s 34.4 per cent.

Then there’s the ‘incumbency factor’, whereby the governing party tends to rally during the final days of the campaign. A political sociologist called Stephen Fisher has built a model that includes historical data on how support for challengers often fades as election day approaches. Based on current opinion polls, Fisher is predicting that Labour will win 32 per cent of the vote and the Tories 34 per cent, enough to make them the largest single party.

Finally, there’s the killer argument that no party led by someone with Ed Miliband’s dire approval ratings has won a general election. I know a lot of Tories who are counting on this, myself included. We are convinced — oh yes — that many people who say they’re not going to vote Tory will ‘blink’ when faced with the prospect of Ed Miliband in No. 10. They will be particularly prone to blinking — their eyelids will flutter and they will almost faint with fright — when they realise that Miliband will be reliant on Alex Salmond to get through any legislation.

One of the curiosities of confirmation bias is that being aware of it doesn’t make you any less likely to be guilty of it. Which is why I’m still convinced Cameron is going to win and will continue to tweet the polls that show the Tories in the lead.

The post Why we lie to ourselves about opinion polls appeared first on The Spectator.

As a Tory, I’ve been thinking a lot about inequality recently. Has it really increased in the past five years? Or is that just scaremongering on the part of the left?

By most measures, there’s not much evidence that the United Kingdom became more unequal in the last parliament. Take the UK’s ‘Gini co-efficient’, which measures income inequality. In 2009/10, it was higher than it was at any point during the subsequent three years. Indeed, in 2011/12 it fell to its lowest level since 1986. Data isn’t available for the last two years, but there’s no reason to think it has exceeded what it was when Labour left office. George Osborne claimed that inequality had fallen in his budget speech and the Institute of Fiscal Studies confirmed this, if you assume everyone has faced the same rate of inflation since he became Chancellor.

The fact that Labour’s track record on tackling income inequality is worse than the coalition’s doesn’t mean present levels are acceptable, of course. The median income of the highest-earning 10 per cent of couples with two children is roughly eight times larger than the median income of their equivalents in the bottom 10 per cent. Is that too high?

Few conservatives would object to income inequality on principle. Rather, it is regarded as the inevitable consequence of the fact that talents are distributed unequally, with some being able to charge more for their labour than others. For the most part, conservatives have the same attitude towards wealth inequality (which has grown over the course of the last parliament, thanks mainly to rising property prices). Like Peter Mandelson, we’re intensely relaxed about the rich.

We might be more troubled by in-equality if it was leading to more crime, but it isn’t. According to the latest Crime Survey for England and Wales, crime has fallen to its lowest level since the surveyors started collecting data in 1981. Violent crimes and sexual offences have increased by a small amount since 2002/3, but that’s due to changes in the way they’re recorded. The murder rate in London has fallen to its lowest since the 1960s.

The big issue for conservatives is not inequality per se, but the condition of the poor — sometimes referred to as ‘the long tail’. Did they suffer more under the coalition than under Labour, as the proliferation of food banks would suggest? In fact, poverty has fallen in the last parliament, provided you define it in relative terms, i.e. those households earning less than 60 per cent of the median income. Again, figures aren’t available for the last two years, but in 2012/13 relative poverty (before housing costs are factored in) was at its lowest point since 1985.

Broadly speaking, relative poverty is declining for the same reasons that income inequality is. The rich are paying more in tax than they were five years ago and the coalition cut tax for 26 million people and took three million out of tax altogether. In addition, almost two million new jobs have been created and the unemployment rate has fallen significantly since Labour left office. To claim that those who’ve found jobs in the last five years are all on zero-hours contracts, as Owen Jones would have us believe, is false. Fewer than 700,000 people are on zero-hours contracts in the labour force, a mere 2.3 per cent of the total.

True, social mobility isn’t what it might be and that’s a real issue for conservatives. But defenders of the last government can point to Michael Gove’s education reforms and the record numbers of children from disadvantaged backgrounds going to university, where ‘disadvantaged’ is defined as those living in households in the bottom income quintile. They comprised 18.3 per cent of the total last year, the highest percentage on record. So much for the argument that the rise in tuition fees would deter children from low-income families from applying to university.

What about the children from disadvantaged families who don’t go to university? The coalition created over two million apprenticeships and the Conservatives have pledged to create an additional three million in the next parliament.

All in all, I don’t think supporters of the last government have too much to be ashamed of when it comes to income inequality and relative poverty — and the Conservatives have the best policy when it comes to tackling wealth inequality, which is extending home ownership. Try to remember that over the next five weeks when angry lefties try to shame you into voting Labour.

Politicians should leave the wealthy alone– they already contribute more than their fair share

Join us on 22 April for a Spectator debate on wealth and politics. Are wealth taxes the answer? Or is it wrong to squeeze the rich? Chaired by Andrew Neil.For the motion: Toby Young, William Cash and Fraser Nelson. Against the motion: Owen Jones, Jack Monroe and Molly Scott Cato MEP. For tickets and further information click here.

The post Lefty myths about inequality appeared first on The Spectator.

I’ve been trying to think of a good football analogy to describe the battle between the two main parties as the general election approaches. One suggestion is the second leg of a Champions League game, with the Conservatives having won the first leg by one goal to nil. If we assume that the Tories are playing at home, that means Labour have to score two goals to win, whereas all the Tories have to do is not concede. Last week’s debate certainly felt like that, with Cameron playing a tight, defensive game and Miliband trying to score at every opportunity. The Conservative leader ended up winning on aggregate because the Labour leader failed to find the back of the net.

But a Champions League match suggests two teams of real quality, which is where the analogy breaks down. The past few weeks have felt more like a game in the bottom half of the Championship, something I’m all too familiar with as a QPR supporter. In these games you rarely see any quality. Rather, the team that wins is the one that makes the fewest unforced errors. Forget about Real Madrid versus Bayern Munich. This is Millwall versus Brighton on a rainy Tuesday night in April.

So far Labour seem to be making more mistakes than the Tories, although I’m biased. After the first televised clash, I was worried that Cameron might have made a tactical blunder in agreeing to the ‘debates’ — generally regarded as the biggest unforced error of the 2010 campaign. But watching Miliband struggling to stand out from the crowd in the seven-way debate was reassuring. That one also produced a marvellous own-goal in the form of Miliband’s revision notes, which he left behind in the green room.

The biggest unforced error to date has been committed by one of the smaller party leaders, and I don’t mean Natalie Bennett’s car-crash interview on LBC. I’m talking about Nicola Sturgeon telling the French ambassador that she didn’t rate Miliband and would prefer Cameron to remain as Prime Minister. That’s assuming she actually said it, of course, which she’s denied. As a Tory who doesn’t want Labour to recover in Scotland, I’d love to believe the memo was some sort of Zinoviev letter but I think it’s probably correct. After all, it’s no secret that it would suit the SNP’s purpose to have a Tory bogeyman in No. 10 rather than Ed Miliband. The likeliest explanation is that Sturgeon was more honest than she should have been with the French ambassador, not realising that the French embassy in London would, as a matter of diplomatic convention, relay the contents of the conversation back to the Foreign Office.

Michael Kinsley, the veteran American political commentator, defined a ‘gaffe’ as ‘when a politician tells the truth — some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say’ and Sturgeon’s mistake falls into that category. So too did Cameron’s admission in a television interview with James Landale that he doesn’t want to remain in office for a third term. That proved to be a distraction from the Conservatives’ main campaign theme, which was unhelpful, but I don’t think the mistake was as grave as some political pundits maintained. Their claim that it ‘fired the starting gun’ in the Conservative leadership battle and licensed them to speculate about Cameron’s successor should be taken with a pinch of salt. Since when did they need an excuse?

It’s hard to know what impact these mistakes will have. Turned out the public thought better of Cameron after his third-term ‘gaffe’ than they did before, and the fact that Miliband was over-prepared for the second debate won’t have registered outside Westminster. In Sturgeon’s case, she and her allies won’t have any trouble convincing the SNP’s supporters that she’s the victim of some fiendish Tory plot, even if the memo actually helps Labour. True, fewer than 20,000 people have to change their minds in fewer than 20 seats for the Conservatives to win an overall majority, but there’s no evidence these key voters are paying any attention. In general, floating voters are less interested in politics than committed partisans.

That’s where my Millwall-Brighton analogy collapses. Yes, both main parties will commit some absolute howlers, but they’ll go largely unnoticed. In the end, the party that wins will be the one that most resembles Manchester United under Alex Ferguson — that is, the team that can grind out a result even when it’s playing badly. My money’s still on the Conservatives.

The post Miliband vs Millwall appeared first on The Spectator.

I’m disappointed that Ed Balls’s suggestion that the Office of Budget Responsibility should audit the parties’ manifestos was never taken up, not least because we will never know what Robert Chote thinks of the Green party’s claim that all its proposals are ‘fully costed’. Believe it or not, this includes the commitment to spend £45 billion on loft insulation in the next parliament.

It’s quite something, the Greens’ manifesto. No doubt you’ll have already read about some of their more reasonable measures — such as the ‘complete ban on cages for hens and rabbits’ and the insistence that ‘UK taxpayers’ money is not used for bullfighting’. But the sheer scale of their financial profligacy is breathtaking.

In total, the party estimates its proposals — which include doubling child benefit, jacking up the state pension to £180 a week and an extra £12 billion for the NHS — would increase public expenditure by £177 billion a year by 2020. But don’t be alarmed because, according to Natalie Bennett, a Green government would be raising an additional £198 billion a year in taxes by then. That’s right, the Greens are predicting a budget surplus by the end of the next parliament. They believe that their entire suite of measures can be more than paid for by a few simple tax increases. These are listed in a chapter of the manifesto called ‘It does all add up’.

For instance, they’d impose a 2 per cent annual levy on the net worth of anyone with assets valued at over £3 million, so if you own a house worth £10 million you’d have to hand over £200,000 to HMRC. This ‘wealth tax’ would generate £25 billion a year, apparently. The party also thinks it can raise £6.7 billion from an ‘unhealthy food tax’, £12.5 billion from raising corporation tax and £20 billion from a ‘Robin Hood Tax’ on financial transactions. (Shouldn’t it be called a ‘King John Tax’?)

But that only gets you so far, so the Greens would raise a further £80 billion a year from ‘other’ measures, such as abolishing capital gains tax allowances (£3.3 billion), increasing duty on alcohol and tobacco (£5.7 billion) and — of course — clamping down on tax avoidance and evasion, otherwise known as the Magic Money Tree. That last measure is good for a whopping £30 billion a year.

Far be it from me to predict how a sober-minded economist might react to this ‘costed plan’, but I imagine he or she would ask whether the Greens have factored in the ‘behavioural effect’ these measures would in all likelihood give rise to. For instance, the party estimates that raising the top rate of tax to 60 per cent would generate an additional £2.3 billion a year in revenue. But that seems unlikely, to put it mildly. According to the Treasury’s analysis, Alistair Darling’s decision to raise the top rate from 40 to 50 per cent in his 2010 budget yielded much less than the anticipated amount because of the ‘considerable behavioural response to the rate change’. The Treasury concluded that it was ‘quite possible’ that the overall impact on tax revenues in 2010/11 was ‘negative’.

It’s not hard to imagine the ‘behavioural response’ of high-net-worth individuals to taxing their assets by 2 per cent a year, or of investment banks to a ‘Robin Hood Tax’, or of some businesses to the hike in corporation tax. They’d relocate offshore just as soon as possible, notwithstanding the new Green tariff on air travel (£16 billion). As with Darling’s rate change, the effect of all these taxes could quite easily be ‘negative’.

Of course the reason no serious economist has subjected the Green party’s policies to a forensic analysis is because no one expects Natalie Bennett to be the next Prime Minister. The nearest we got to that was Nick Ferrari’s cross-examination of her on LBC, an interview that produced the now-famous ‘brain fade’ moment in which she was unable to answer a single question abouthow any of her proposals would be funded.

Yet, incredibly, some 5 per cent of the population say they’re going to vote Green on 7 May. Until recently I assumed that these people were complete nutjobs, but I sat next to a level-headed Oxford graduate at a dinner party the other day who told me she was a member of the party. Politics really does make otherwise sensible people behave very oddly. Will she change her mind after reading the Green manifesto? I’d love to think so, but I doubt it.

The post The extraordinary Green manifesto appeared first on The Spectator.

Not a day passes when I don’t look on my father’s record with shock and awe. I’m not talking about his authorship of Labour’s 1945 manifesto, his invention of the word ‘meritocracy’ or his creation of the Open University. I’m talking about the fact that he fathered a child at the age of 80. How on earth did he cope?

My eldest was born when I was 40, with three more following in quick succession, and I already think of myself as an old dad. The problem is, they want to play with me all the time — rough, competitive, physical games — and it’s completely debilitating. The boys, aged six, seven and ten, are particularly demanding. I’m just not up to it. God knows how my father managed to stay alive until he was 86.

Until recently, I was required to play on the trampoline for at least 30 minutes a day. Put aside the issue of just how undignified it is for an overweight 51-year-old male with ‘man boobs’ to bounce up and down. If you’re over 40, dignity goes out the window the moment your first child appears. No, the issue was that my children invented a game called ‘trampoline dodgeball’ — or ‘incoming’ for short — that is almost guaranteed to produce cardiac arrest in anyone above the age of 25. After ten minutes of vigorous play I would be gasping for breath like a trout at the bottom of a bucket.

Salvation appeared in the form of a rag-and-bone man who turned up on my doorstep in January. Did I have any scrap metal I wanted to get rid of? As a matter of fact, I did! I led him down to the bottom of the garden, pointed at the trampoline and told him that if he could dismantle it before the children got home from school he was welcome to it. ‘No problem, squire,’ he said.

I was expecting them to be furious, but no. The three boys took one look at the empty garden and started hopping around with joy. Unbeknownst to me they’d been having a long-running argument with their sister about whether to keep the trampoline and now, it seemed, I’d inadvertently sided with them. ‘That’s brilliant, Dad,’ said six-year-old Charlie. ‘Now we can play football.’

Seconds later I was being dragged into the garden for a game of ‘three-and-in’, which would have been OK if I’d been allowed to be in goal. Instead, I had to compete with Charlie and the seven-year-old to try and get three goals past the ten-year-old. Given that the ‘goal’ consisted of a small cardboard box on its side, this was nigh-on impossible. It didn’t help that we were playing with a ball so small — a squash ball, I think — that I couldn’t see it without my bifocals.

Needless to say, they now insist that I play football with them every evening. I’ve invested in a proper ball and a couple of pop-up goals, but that hasn’t helped much. Instead of ‘three-and-in’ we play ‘two-a-side’ — and, again, I’m not allowed to be in goal. Rather, the boys take it in turns to be on my team, knowing full well that whoever plays with me will lose. Not that it’s a quick death. The standard rule is ‘first to 15’, which can take up to 45 minutes given the goalkeeping athleticism of my sons. The sessions end with me humiliated and drenched in sweat, often nursing a pulled muscle or ligament injury.

Later, when the children have gone to bed, Caroline commiserates with me, but with barely concealed sadistic glee. Her favourite trick after listening to me reel off a list of symptoms — ‘My left arm has gone numb! D’you think I’m having a heart attack?’ — is to suggest we hire a ‘manny’, i.e. a male nanny who could play with the boys without collapsing from exhaustion. She isn’t completely joking, either. One of her friends managed to find a 21-year-old German man on an au pair website who looks like a cross between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Brad Pitt. She flew him over the following day and this Adonis is now installed in the spare bedroom. Her two sons absolutely adore him, while her husband says he feels like an abandoned motor car waiting to be carted off to the junkyard.

I daren’t risk having a ‘manny’ in the house so I’m going to soldier on. I suppose I should be grateful that my children still want to play football with me. But my chances of living until I’m 86 are vanishing-to-zero.

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A couple of weeks ago I returned to my old Oxford college for a ‘gaudy’ — posh, Oxford-speak for a reunion. This one was for those of us who came up to Brasenose in 1983, 1984 and 1985. That group includes the Prime Minister but, not surprisingly, he wasn’t there. I imagine he didn’t want to risk being photographed at a black-tie dinner with a bunch of his Oxford pals in the middle of a general election campaign — or maybe he just finds these occasions a bit of a bore.

When I attended my first gaudy about 15 years ago, I assumed that the only people who’d bother to turn up would be those who’d made a success of their lives and they’d spend the entire time bragging about it. In fact, it was much more random than that. The successful and the unsuccessful were mixed up together and if their different career trajectories were a source of tension, it soon disappeared after the first drink. I was expecting my Oxford contemporaries to have become more status-conscious with age, but it wasn’t apparent on that night. It was as if they were able to shed their personal histories and return to a more innocent period in their lives when they still had everything before them.

It was the same on this occasion. The experiences we’d had since leaving Brasenose 30 years ago seemed to vanish in a puff of smoke and we were transported back in time to the mid-1980s. Looking at all the familiar faces sitting in the dining hall, I felt like I was in an Oxford version of Back to the Future. Except in this case the Hollywood special effects wizards had used their magic to make everyone look 30 years older. When I was talking to the people I’d been closest to, I had to suppress the impulse to grab them and pull the pillows out from under their shirts and wipe the ageing make-up from their faces.

This through-the-looking-glass feeling was partly due to everyone reverting to type — falling back into the roles and routines that had defined them 30 years ago. Take the after-dinner speech given by Jim Hawkins, now the headmaster of Harrow. Jim had been part of a group of down-to-earth undergraduates who, after a few pints in the college bar, liked nothing more than to take the mickey out of another group of students known as ‘the left caucus’. Needless to say, the privileged status of these left-wing firebrands, many of whom had been to Eton, was often a source of merriment — and so it proved two weeks ago.

‘Life was not all about dining clubs and carousing,’ said Jim. ‘There was political awareness too: anti-Thatcher demos, the Monday Club visit, the “Why assume I’m a heterosexual” campaign. We even had our own left caucus. Some flirted with it — some embraced the cactus wholeheartedly. Incidentally, it has been good to see so many members of the left caucus at Harrow open mornings in recent years…’

That brought the house down and made me think what a shame it was the Prime Minister wasn’t there. He would have enjoyed that joke.

Afterwards, in the bar, I fell into conversation with some of my old friends and, as I learned what they’d been doing in the intervening 30 years, their present-day selves began to eclipse their student selves. The stories they told were almost all tales of woe — career burnout, divorce, the indescribable horrors of teenage children. No doubt this was partly just good manners, with no one wanting to make anyone else feel bad because they’d had a less happy life than them. But it was also because most of them had genuinely messed up their lives. The striking thing was how much nicer they’d become as a result. Their experiences hadn’t left them embittered, but had enlarged and deepened them, made them more human.

Another thing that took me by surprise was how much sentimental attachment I felt to my old college. Not just to the people I’d been there with and the dons who’d taught us 30 years ago, some of whom were still there. But to the bricks and mortar — the old quadrangle and the porters’ lodge. That’s part of the point of these occasions, of course — to get you to donate to the college fund — and, by golly, it works. A few more gaudies like this one and I’ll be redrafting my will, leaving all my goods and chattels to Brasenose. My children better watch out, particularly during their horrible teenage years.

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I appeared on Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago to discuss the age-old question of whether political satire is dead. I don’t think it is, but it has lost a good deal of vitality in recent years and the role of satire in the general election campaign is a case in point. There has been no shortage of ‘satirical’ television programmes, but none of them have cut through. The only sign of life has been the flurry of photoshopped images on Twitter that have followed each misstep of the parties’ campaigns, such as Ed Miliband’s decision to carve Labour’s election pledges on to an eight-foot stone slab. If Stanley Kubrick was still alive he’d be suing people for illegally reproducing images from the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

What accounts for satire’s declining health? I don’t hold with the textbook explanation, which is that standards in public life have sunk so low that nothing a satirist could come up with could be as bad as the reality. This was what Tom Lehrer had in mind when he said political satire died when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973. The trouble is, every generation thinks politics has hit rock bottom, but it just keeps on getting worse. In 2012, the Peace Prize was awarded to the European Union.

A more plausible theory is that political correctness has made satire much more dangerous. There’s no shortage of big fat targets for satirists to take aim at, but most of them are protected by a praetorian guard of professional offence-takers, ready to take to the airwaves at the slightest sign of disrespect and demand the arrest of the miscreant in question. Or if that doesn’t work, they come round to your place of work and shoot you. If Spitting Image was still on, would anyone involved dare to broadcast a sketch called ‘Miss Arab World’ in which the religious leader of Iran had to judge a parade of Muslim women in full burkas? I doubt it.

But I’m not sure you can blame the decline of political satire on these attacks on free speech. After all, some of the most celebrated works of satire have been produced under the most brutal, oppressive regimes. A case in point is Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, an indictment of life in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Admittedly, it wasn’t published until 33 years after Bulgakov’s death, but the fact that satire was considered so subversive by the Soviet authorities gave it a power and importance that it lacks in liberal democracies. Forcing satire underground keeps it alive.

No, I think the reason political satire has lost so much of its bite is because the status of politicians had declined in the past 50 years or so. Back in 1961, when the Establishment first opened its doors, the sight of Peter Cook on stage doing an impression of Harold Macmillan was genuinely shocking because the political class was still looked up to.

Not any more. Today, a satirist expressing a modicum of respect for a politician — Steve Coogan endorsing Ed Miliband, for instance — is front-page news, whereas a comedian showering the Prime Minister with insults goes unnoticed.

In terms of prestige, politicians and satirists have switched places. A successful satirist like Armando Iannucci is respected in a way that no current political leader is. As a result, he enjoys a degree of soft, cultural power that politicians can only dream of. He probably lives in a bigger house, drives a nicer car and earns a higher annual income than most of them, too. Hardly surprising, then, that The Thick of It ran out of steam. What gives a really good satire its seditious power is that it’s an attack of the weak against the strong. The Thick of It, by contrast, was an assault by a clique of rich and powerful satirists on an already beleaguered political class. Not so much slaying giants as tripping dwarves.

Yet I don’t think political satire is dead. I’m sure that it will blossom in the most unlikely of places — Isis-controlled Syria, for instance, or in an American Ivy League university, where any criticism of a protected minority is instant career suicide. The book I’m most looking forward to reading this year is Michel Houellebecq Submission,which is set in a dystopian future in which France has become an Islamic state. Great satire, like great journalism, speaks truth to power, and that means taking on the truly powerful, not mocking an already despised group of white middle-aged men.

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After I failed my O-levels and decided to leave school, my father suggested I go to Israel to work on a kibbutz. I’m not sure why he thought this would cure me of my self-righteous adolescent narcissism, but it worked. I returned to England determined to go back to school and make something of myself.

I very nearly didn’t come back. The first kibbutz I went to was on the Israeli-Lebanese border and about a week after I arrived it was targeted by a group of Palestinian rebels. Katyusha rockets rained down from all sides and the other guest workers and I were ushered into a special air-raid shelter reserved for ‘volunteers’. It was a particularly dank and mouldy affair, with no mod cons save for an ancient, battery-operated radio. As we sat there for hours, waiting for the all-clear, our only comfort was listening to the BBC World Service.

This was in the run-up to the 1982 Lebanon war and over the next few weeks these attacks became a regular occurrence. Take it from me, if you’re squeezed into a hole in the ground, worried about taking a direct hit from a Katyusha missile, there’s something deeply reassuring about hearing ‘Lilli-burlero’, followed by the words ‘This is London.’ It wasn’t just that it was a source of news we could depend on — literally the only source at that time. It was the sense that, in spite of the chaos and savagery all about us, there was still an island of sanity somewhere out there. The World Service was an umbilical cord connecting us with civilisation. In those hours I caught a glimpse of what it must have been like for the citizens of occupied Europe to tune into the BBC Overseas Service.

Ever since then I have always felt an emotional attachment to the BBC. I am not one of those Tories who believes there is something inherently left-of-centre about a public broadcast organisation and the only solution is to abolish the licence fee. Rather, I think of the BBC as a precious piece of our heritage that has been captured by the enemy. The task facing the present Conservative government is how to prise it from their grasp without destroying it at the same time.

It would be an exaggeration to call the people who now run the organisation as ‘Marxists’, obediently following Gramsci’s advice to complete the long march through the institutions. Rather, they are, for the most part, metropolitan liberals who think of their left-of-centre views on issues like Europe and immigration as politically uncontroversial. They don’t regard themselves as biased because they never encounter anyone in their day-to-day lives who doesn’t hold the same opinions. As far as they’re concerned, they’re just expressing the commonsense wisdom that everybody shares, whether left or right.

I could give countless examples of this. There was the BBC’s involvement in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games, accurately described as a £27 million party political broadcast for the Labour party; the fact that members of the far left are regularly employed as ‘comedians’ on Radio 4, while no BBC commissioning editor would ever dream of employing anyone on the far right; and the wholly one-sided coverage the Corporation has given to free schools, something I’m particularly sensitive about. But there’s no need for any examples because those who run it wouldn’t dispute this accusation. As Mark Thompson, the former director-general, told the New Statesman, the BBC suffers from ‘a massive bias to the left’.

So what can John Whittingdale, the new Culture Secretary, do to restore the BBC’s reputation for political impartiality? Everyone agrees that the BBC has grown too big and in many respects is just mimicking a commercial organisation. So separate off the drama and light entertainment, the music and the sport, and invite all those inessential bits to become self-funding entities. That would leave only the news and current affairs division to be financed by the licence fee, which could be much reduced. I would then make the BBC Trust responsible for appointing all the members of the executive board, not just the director-general, and, crucially, I would remove the power to appoint members of the trust from the Prime Minister and transfer it to a politically neutral body, such as the Privy Council or some other institution created for the task.

That should do it. And for the sake of all those beleaguered souls out there, cowering in the dark, it must be done or it will surely perish.

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