Two down, one to go

Jacqui Smith, possibly the least competent Home Secretary since Henry Brooke (although there in Blunkett to consider for that title too, and that is pretty tough competition), has already announced that she will not be going ahead with a massive snoop project (although she wants the same functionality provided privately). The cancellation of the id card project is apparently being actively considered, and anyway the Tories have said that they will cancel them. And the Trident replacement may be on the block, along with a number of other large defense projects. This is all good.

It's just a shame we are still stuck with this:

Yes, the grandiose, ultimately useless (or at least currently without a use) and hideously expensive Olympic building projects sail on regardless. Our shameless pandering to the IOC continues. As Simon Jenkins says, while the ­citizens starve, the precious ones are fed. Still, at least some of these cuts are better than none.

What are the armed forces for, exactly?

Yesterday's news from the National Archive that Britain's ability to defend itself against an attack from the Soviet Union was so diminished in the late 1970s that the prime minister exclaimed: "Heaven help us if there is a war!" spurs me to write a post I've been mulling for a while on the armed forces.

The first thing to say is that we should be grateful to those who risk their lives for all our sakes; we should equip them properly; and we should grant them generous rights after their service is complete. The saga of the gurkhas does us no credit at all, for instance: no service person should have to live in penury after a career in the military.

Let us be clear, though, about what the armed forces are for. If necessary, they kill people. Of course we hope that the ability to do it makes actually doing it unnecessary. But sometimes those fond hopes are unjustified. So no one should join without an absolute unquestioning willingness to kill if ordered to do so. That is what the armed forces are for.

All power structures generate their own dynamics, their own justifications. Ones with a long history carry a lot of baggage, too. Thus we have the fiction that the armed forces are commanded by the Queen, when in fact they do the bidding of the government. We have traditions -- many Victorian inventions -- designed to emphasise the importance of the military. Good tourist-attracting heritage though some of these may be, but they also support some convenient myths. Perhaps if we remembered that the military are funded by taxes we might be a little less tolerant of their parades, their lavish messes, their Saville Row tailored uniforms, and their expeditions. State school teachers don't get junkets to the Antarctic: why do the Army?

It is the toys that really bother me though. The boats and the planes, the missiles and (especially) the nukes. Just as Wall Street had a whole industry dedicated to justifying unjustifiable executive compensation, so the `defence' (by which we often of course mean `attack') sector has a whole industry devoted to persuading governments to buy weapon systems they do not need. Admirals like shiny new boats, nukes enhance the virility of defence ministers. So we spend tens of billions without effective scrutiny yet keep universities in poverty, schools with leaky roofs, and nurses on indefensibly low salaries.

We can't afford to go on this way, especially in the present climate. Let's cancel the Trident replacement now. Let's stop spending money on high tech goodies for the top brass, and equip the men on the front line with the armour they need instead.

We also need to eliminate the culture that allowed bullying at Deepcut and Catterick. The armed forces are civil servants too. Let's treat them as what they are: valued public sector workers who are not above scrutiny. A pound spent on subsidising the port in the officer's mess is a pound not spent on education or health. Battle honours dating back hundreds of years are no excuse for a culture that destroys some people today. As Rahm Emanuel says, You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Perhaps with shrinking tax revenues and an end to our presence in Iraq we can try to produce a military that is efficient, appropriately funded, fit for purpose and fit to be part of a modern democracy.

What works replaced by what we believe

The following quote comes from a post on the Guardian website:

What I find most striking about this, as about other items in this government's moralistic agenda, is how opposing arguments simply are not heard. It isn't just closed mindedness, the government and its supporters are in the grip of a kind of exclusivist belief system akin to a fundamentalist religion. Arguments based on individual choice, or the notion of adults making rational decisions, simply "do not compute"; they are here to protect us, like spoilt children, from the bad world out there, and they have our interests at heart, and if you don't agree then clearly you favour exploitation and slavery and oppression.

The two things that strike me about this quote are firstly how accurate it is, and secondly how many things it might be referring to: Europe; Iraq; PFI; Pensions; Trident; Nuclear Power; 42 day detention; the DNA database; ID cards. Pretty much any part of politics that is in any way controversial in fact. Even if you agree with a particular policy, the monological belief system which nourished it is deeply troubling. No government which scorns alternative views and abuses legislative privilege with deeply partisan, ill-thought out and costly nonsense as Brown's does deserves to survive, let alone win re-election.

What works? You wish...

'What matters is what works' Tony Blair once declared. I really believe that is true: sadly Tony doesn't, and I suspect never did. As Ann Clwyd is ejected from her position as Chairperson of the parlimentary labour party thanks to her support for Blair, it is worth highlighting five of the worse examples of Labour's doctrine pursuit of policies despite them obviously not working:

• Iraq. No more need be said than that one word.
• PFI. Wow, wouldn't it be really great to pay more for the same public services and lock the NHS, Transport for London and many other bodies into inflexible, long term contracts? Anyone who claims Gordon Brown is an economic genius should be forced to have 'PFI' branded on their forehead so they never forget the disasterous waste caused by this terrible idea.
• Faith Schools. We want a more tolerant society with higher standards of education. So let's set up schools which exclude some faiths, enhance the sense of being special of others, suck up education resources that could be spent on improving ordinary schools, and give their governance to those verging on monomania.
• Replacing Trident. We do not need to spend £25B on nuclear weapons now, honestly we don't. This is all about Labour appearing tough on defense: it has nothing to with what the country actually needs.
• The Internal Market in the NHS. No one who had actually spent any time trading the financial markets would ever suggest they are efficient allocators of resources so why on earth does the government think the market will magically solve the problems of the NHS?

None of these policies was obviously unworkable at the beginning: foolish or misguided perhaps, but not obviously unworkable. They all subsequently have been proved not to work. Yet still the government sticks with them, demonstrating the dominance of ideology over efficacy in their thinking.