Labour: my old man's party

If we know anything at all about Labour, it is surely that it is the party of the common people, and the staunch opponent of hereditary privilege.

How strange, then, to find Tony Blair’s eldest son Euan apparently being lined up for the ultra-safe Labour seat of Bootle, on the home turf of his mother Cherie.

This follows hard on the heels of Neil Kinnock’s son Stephen being chosen to defend the 11,000 Labour majority in Aberavon, south Wales.

Meanwhile Jack Straw’s son Will has been selected to contest the marginal seat of Rossendale and Darwen, next door to his father’s Blackburn constituency. Dad is retiring at the next election but his successor was inconveniently chosen from an all-women shortlist.

The only real disappointment among the ranks of the Labour elite has been suffered by John Prescott’s son David, who has so far sought two Labour nominations unsuccessfully.

Should any of this surprise us in a party led by a millionaire whose millionaire Marxist father was not a Labour MP himself, but was most certainly a grand panjandrum of the Left; and who secured the leadership in a pitched battle with another millionaire who also happened to be his own brother?

Lest we forget, this is the same party whose shadow cabinet contains twin sisters and whose shadow Chancellor and Home Secretary are married to each other.

All perhaps suggestive of recruitment from a rather narrower gene pool than the old House of Lords, reform of which was surely one of Tony Blair’s few undisputed triumphs, in that at least no one died in the process.

I happen to be acquainted with one of Labour’s few hereditary peers under the old dispensation. He voted enthusiastically for his own abolition. Yet within a year he was back in the House of Lords, having been granted a life peerage because they missed him so much on the Labour benches.

So a really valuable step forward in creating a more equal society there, then.

The pattern of hereditary privilege and connections trumping talent and hard work is by no means confined to politics. Take a look at any of the traditionally left-leaning occupations like broadcasting, journalism and acting, and you will find them teeming with the offspring of parents distinguished in those fields.

It is the most natural thing in the world to want one’s children to follow in one’s footsteps, particularly if one has found a comfortable niche in life. And even, it would seem, if one has not.

Every week brings letters to this paper filled with bile against “Thatcher” because she denied a generation the hereditary privilege of following their fathers into the famously dirty and dangerous job of coal mining.

I do not write this column to make a party political point. The only person I knew quite well at university who has scaled the heights of the Conservative party was himself the son of an MP (and later a life peer).

But then that is what one would expect of the Tories, isn’t it? The hidebound reactionaries who elected a woman their leader in 1975 and made Benjamin Disraeli Prime Minister in 1868, 146 years before Ed Miliband expressed the hope of becoming “Britain’s first Jewish PM.”

(To be fair, Disraeli was only a Jew by birth, not by religious practice; but then up to now Mr Miliband has always presented himself as an atheist.)

Few things in politics turn out as you might expect. Mrs Thatcher shamefully closed or merged more grammar schools than any Labour education secretary; Harold Wilson’s governments closed more coal mines than Mrs Thatcher’s.

All one can say with confidence, on surveying the contemporary political scene, is how true today’s Labour party is to the observations of that great socialist George Orwell in Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

And as we look at the choice before us in this year’s European elections and in the General Election of 2015, we may well feel like this: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

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Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

My cloned son: already let down and never getting better

Have you noticed how the most vehement opponents of the hereditary principle never seem to hesitate about giving their own kids a leg-up in their careers?

I’m thinking of the sort of bien-pensant lefties who line up to sneer at TV programmes like Sunday night’s heartwarming two hours of “Our Queen” on ITV, yet curiously ensure that their favoured professions of acting, broadcasting, journalism and politics are stuffed full of their own sprogs.

The same individuals are usually full of praise for the comprehensive school system, and quick to condemn those who seek to opt out of it. Except in the case of their own children, whose needs must always come first, and who would suffer so terribly if they were sent to the local state school.

I should say right away that I do not condemn their actions, merely the hypocritical disjoint between their words and deeds.

I can also understand how they come to feel that little Tristram is peculiarly suited to following them into a TV studio or the House of Commons if they chance, like me, to have a child who appears to be a perfect clone of themselves.

Firmly ticking the box for 'no publicity', as usual

Charlie Hann, aged 3¾, is currently experiencing a severe dose of his first proper childhood illness, all the other major horrors of my own infancy having been more or less eliminated by vaccination. The NHS website helpfully advises that “Chickenpox in children is considered a mild illness, but expect your child to feel pretty miserable and irritable while they have it.”

This could not be more spot on (no pun intended), but Charlie adds to it a quality of existential despair that is surely quite unusual at his age. So every attempt by his mother to dispense some helpful medicine or soothing lotion is rebuffed with a firm assertion that it is not going to work.

Similarly, her repeated assurances that he will soon be well again, like his convalescent younger brother, provoke a shake of the head and the bleak certainty: “Mummy, I’m never going to get better.” 

A statement capped only by his recent sad pronouncement, in response to his mother’s guarantee that she would keep a promise: “The thing is, Mummy, you’ve already let me down.”

In this context as in so many others, my wife assures me that it is spookily like talking to me. Indeed, the only difference she can discern is that Charlie has yet to obtain an encyclopaedic grasp of the major dread diseases, and so does not tack on the words, “It’s cancer, I know it is,” as I am prone to do when contemplating anything from a small spot to a mild cough.

Meanwhile Mrs Hann herself has been ill with an infection that four courses of antibiotics so far this year have failed to shift in the sense of eliminating it, though they have been quite successful in moving it around a bit between her sinuses, throat and chest.

Suggesting that there might be more than a little truth in the Chief Medical Officer’s recent suggestion that we can all stop worrying about terrorism and global warming because the thing that is actually going to kill us is our growing inability to cure infections because of antimicrobial resistance.

Though within a couple of days of that chilling warning a report from the House of Lords, whose members know a thing or two about old age, predicted that half the children born in 2007 would live to be 103. It is hard to avoid the feeling that both these forecasts cannot be correct.

Perhaps, if Charlie defies his own predictions and overcomes his current brush with disease, he will indeed live for a century. But it will be 100 years of acutely argumentative pessimism, in which a red cross will regularly be painted on his front door and an undertaker placed on stand-by.

Unless, that is, I can somehow divert him from my own career path of bumblingly amateur attempts at historical research, public relations and journalism, and persuade him to become a funeral director instead. Because, on the evidence to date, no one since Walmington-on-Sea’s Private Frazer has been better qualified to pronounce “We’re all doomed!”

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Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Here's a truly radical idea: let's value tradition

Amidst all the millenarian gloom arising from last week’s Biblical deluge, it was good to be reminded on Saturday of the helping hand that God extended to Noah, and to the children of Israel at the Red Sea.

The occasion for these reflections was the baptism of my younger son, James. Yes, I know I wrote that I had given up trying to organise this, but I reckoned without the steely determination of my Muslim wife.

Not that Mrs Hann ever demonstrates any of the conventional signs of adherence to Islam, like attending a mosque, reciting the Koran, praying to Allah five times a day, wearing a burka or eschewing pork. But she does have Iranian parents and invariably announces, “I’m terribly sorry, I’m a Muslim,” when the Jehovah’s Witnesses pay us a call.

Suitably fortified by wifely insistence, I somehow managed to arrange a service that stuck rigidly to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, over the twitching corpse of the rector whose church we were borrowing.

“Surely you would prefer the modern service,” he quibbled. “I find there is far too much sin in the BCP.”

So, just as the church now likes to omit the traditional bit about the prevention of fornication in the marriage service, and would no doubt prefer to skirt around anything as downbeat as death during funerals, it strives to avoid the whole point of baptism, which is the mystical washing away of original sin.

And it is not just me. All present agreed that it was a thoroughly uplifting spiritual occasion, replete with “tingle factor” phrases that have echoed down the ages such as “Ask, and ye shall have; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you”; and “Suffer little children to come unto me.” 

What could possibly be better than hearing three godparents solemnly promise to “renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the flesh”?

In its attitude to its liturgy, the Church resembles a stately home owner who feels so embarrassed by his riches that he is moved to store all the Old Masters in a basement, whitewash the walls and put up some polystyrene tiles to hide the frescoes on the ceiling.

We might as well ban Shakespeare from the theatre, because the words of Eminem or Frankie Boyle would be more accessible.

It is the same possibly well-intentioned but ultimately vandalistic spirit that motivates Nick Clegg (who would make a perfect modern vicar if only he were prepared to undergo a sex change) when he seeks to destroy another institution that has worked perfectly well for hundreds of years, the House of Lords. 

No one disputes that the current mode of entry to the Lords is a touch eccentric, but it has produced a revising chamber that combines unparalleled specialist expertise with robust common sense.

It could once be argued that it suffered from inbuilt bias, but even when it was stuffed with Conservative hereditary peers, it defeated Mrs Thatcher’s government on more than 170 occasions, while the Commons did so only four times.

When discussing Tony Blair’s attempts to reform the constitution, I recycled Evelyn Waugh’s aphorism about it being like seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee. With Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems, it is more like being trapped in a small room with a troop of howler monkeys and a live hand grenade.

What sort of nonentity is going to stand for election to the reformed Lords? Oh yes, the many Lib Dem MPs who will be made redundant come the next election.

We should treasure and rejoice in the great riches we have in our language, culture and institutions. And amongst these, there can surely be none greater than the King James Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and the dear old House of Lords. Please just let them be. Amen.

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Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Elected mayors? I'd rather be represented by a duke

How entirely typical that our beloved political elite should mark England’s national day by publishing proposals to screw up one of the few bits of our system of government that is both decorative and decorous, functional and inexpensive.

I have got into hot water before for defending the House of Lords. Clearing out some old newspapers at the weekend, I came across an impassioned reader’s letter of October 2009. Its author positively reeled in disbelief that anyone could hold to the “absurd” notion that there was a place in the “modern British constitution” for the hereditary peer.

But frankly I would much rather be represented in Parliament by a duke than almost any of our current crop of MPs. Apart from anything else, a man who has inherited a castle or two seems rather less likely to fiddle his expenses than someone who has clawed their way up the obsessives’ greasy pole of political research and special adviserships.

The Duke of Wellington: my kind of Prime Minister

While there may be some life peers whose curricula vitae leave a little to be desired, it also seems ironic that proposals to clear out the current House of Lords should be published on the very day that the papers carried obituaries of exactly the sort of member that the old system of nomination delivered so well: that doughty campaigner for the disabled, Lord Ashley.

However, I am prepared to forgive all this for the sheer delight of hearing Nick Clegg on the BBC on Sunday dismissing the need for a referendum on Lords reform in these words: “Why is it that we should spend a great deal of money, millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, asking the British people a question which frankly most people don’t worry about very much?”

In such marked contrast to, say, the great AV referendum of 2011, on which the great British public could scarcely contain their excitement. Or the current fatuous votes on “directly elected mayors”, for which we have clearly all been crying out since we saw such brilliant examples as Ken and Boris, the man in the monkey suit in Hartlepool and that English Democrat in Doncaster.

Hangus, Mayor of Hartlepool - almost making Ken look credible

If the people of Newcastle are daft enough to vote for this, we are told that the egotist who gains the position will have (undefined) “greater powers” and could take a leadership role across the whole of the “city region”. Including, presumably, the rural backwater in Northumberland that I call home.

In which case it seems pretty unfair that I am not also being given an opportunity to cast a vote against the idea. Government isn’t “Britain’s Got Talent”. We don’t need more star personalities. We need decent, principled and disinterested people prepared to undertake a necessary but thankless job.

Like most of the current members of the House of Lords, to pick an example entirely at random.

The Government wastes not millions, but billions of pounds of our money every single day. It makes me furious every time I contemplate it. Yet suggest a referendum on something about which a significant number of us clearly do care, like our continuing membership of the European Union, and there is never any shortage of reasons why it would be unconstitutional and unnecessary.

No wonder politicians are held in such minimal respect.

There are lots of things in Britain that aren’t working well. School leavers unfit for employment because they are functionally illiterate, the continuing travails of the NHS, overstretched armed forces and a collapsing pensions system, to name but a few. Against such fundamentals, having a Home Secretary who literally does not know which day of the week it is pales into insignificance.

Theresa May (or, in her diary, June). But probably Won't.

So as some people once said on the telly, I agree with Nick. The House of Lords hardly even begins to register on the very long list of things we need to worry about, so why doesn’t our cabinet of chum(p)s just move on and leave it alone?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The mouse and the Hitler moustache

In a week full of surprises, the mouse running out of the restaurant kitchen was only narrowly trumped by the chauffeur sporting an Adolf Hitler-style toothbrush moustache.

He claimed to have done it for a bet – the chauffeur, that is, not the mouse. And, when I told my wife how much he stood to make if he kept ignoring the jibes of angry passers-by until Christmas, she vowed to grow one herself. Now all we need is someone to wager that she cannot do it. I would step up to the plate myself, but that would rather defeat the object of enriching us as a family.

My first surprise came before all that on Monday, when we arrived in north Norfolk for a few days of rest and recuperation. I have long been fond of the area, since in my years working in London something about its remoteness and emptiness evoked memories of my beloved Northumberland.

Now, however, Sleepy Hollow has become the Klondike. The excellent Crown Hotel in Wells-next-the-Sea had commissioned a large extension to its restaurant since I last passed by, and on an out-of-season weekday I anticipated no need to book. But the place was busier than I had ever seen it, with many of the tables occupied by parties of middle-aged males. Had it become the unlikely setting for a greybeard gay encounter group?

Discreet enquiries soon established that this was not the case. The men were pioneers constructing the massive Sheringham Shoal offshore wind farm, to service which a dredger was industriously creating new berths in the quiet harbour. A local property owner told me that all concerned in the project were so awash with cash that they were happily paying double the going rate to rent his house.

I pointed out that this was because they were being drenched in public subsidies to create this ludicrous “saving the planet” PR stunt, an analysis with which he readily agreed. “But it’s like getting a tax rebate,” he said. “You know they’re only giving you some of your own money back, but it’s still nice.”

My own happiest surprise came on Saturday morning, when I surfaced from my Norfolk sickbed after 24 hellish hours sharing it with a winter vomiting bug, and my nine-month-old son nodded at me and distinctly said “Dadda”: his first intelligible utterance. Admittedly he has been rehearsing the sound to himself in his cot for weeks now, but hitherto all invitations to repeat it at an appropriate moment had been greeted with his all-purpose response “Guck”.

The mouse incident occurred during a brief visit to London on Tuesday, when I had lingered over lunch for long enough to be prepared to dismiss it as a Burgundy-induced hallucination, until another rodent appeared by our table to give us a close inspection. The management dismissed it humorously; we were in a very old building, right by the river, so what else did we expect?

Very fair points, though I could not help thinking that if we had been in a commercial establishment rather than the dining room of the House of Lords, Elfin Safety officials from Westminster City Council would have had it closed down and sealed with “scene of crime” tape before you could say “men in tights”. Still, as we know through every story from the smoking ban to the expenses scandal, different rules apply in the Palace of Westminster.

I was just glad that Mrs Hann was not with me, as she would undoubtedly have leapt onto her chair and screamed in the style made famous by the maid in the Tom and Jerry cartoons. In the unlikely event that I am ever invited back after this, I must remember to try to take her so that I can report whether the experience sets her new moustache bristling.

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Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Conservatives Anonymous: I own up

My name is Keith Hann and I am a conservative. I feel better for having got that off my chest.

A conservative is someone who broadly liked things the way they were whenever he or she attained political consciousness, and would have preferred to keep them that way. There is only limited overlap with the party branded with a capital “C”, which in my lifetime has been a force for radical change.

True, I have been a party member and have voted Conservative in every election since the early 1970s, but often with some reluctance, like a lifelong Newcastle United fan renewing his season ticket. David Cameron is my Mike Ashley.

I was born 55 years ago into an independent country at the heart of a rapidly contracting empire, still basking in the glory of having apparently won the Second World War. The buildings of Newcastle were black with smoke, yellow trolleybuses glided down quiet suburban roads and ancient steam engines hauled long trains of coal wagons from the pits. The countryside was matchlessly beautiful and even the colliery winding gear and waste heaps had their fascination.

Family life centred around the hearth in the one room in the house that was actually heated, where entertainment was provided by a tiny, fuzzy, two channel black and white TV. Electronic communication for the privileged was a black, Bakelite telephone, always installed in the freezing hall.

This was also a homogenous and peaceful society in which parents, teachers and the police were respected, and children could play safely. True, they might come home from school with cane stripes across their backsides, but their parents were not frantic with worry about paedophiles, drug dealers or muggers lurking behind every tree.

That dull, patriarchal, deferential, mono-cultural and materially poorer society is the one that I was accusing Labour of hating, in my column last week. And, yes, the Conservatives have proved almost equally committed to wiping it off the map. But I must confess that I rather liked it.

Absurd though it may seem to Labour Parliamentary candidate Antoine Tinnion, who responded to my column on Friday, I did and do have huge respect for the British constitution as it evolved organically over the centuries. The House of Lords as it existed for the best part of a thousand years worked effectively as a check on the excesses of Conservative as well as Labour administrations, and I always felt myself better represented in Parliament by my local hereditary peers than by my MP, charming and well-intentioned chap though I recognise him to be.

As for Mr Tinnion’s point that Labour cannot be blamed for the bureaucracy visited upon farmers; well, yes, they can, actually, and it was jolly bad luck that his letter was printed bang next to an editorial headlined “Farmers have every right to feel let down.” The CAP is a rotten system, but Labour decided to make it even worse by setting up a uniquely complex system for distributing EU farm subsidies in England, and then failing to deliver them so comprehensively that the result has been officially described as a “masterclass of maladministration”.

But, to be clear, all the mainstream political parties have been guilty of failing to provide any effective voice for those who quite liked their country the way it was. That is why the BNP is proving able to draw support from disaffected Labour supporters and, in apparently even greater numbers, from people who have previously not voted at all.

If there is a significant body of electors in this country who feel that the only person standing up for them is Nick Griffin, then that is, in my view, an uncontestable indictment of the failure of all the main parties to connect with the real desires of the people they claim to represent.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

How hatred really built the BNP

Much has been written lately about the BNP and the politics of hate. Yet I have always seen hatred as rather a speciality of the Labour Party.

They hate the ancient institutions of this country, which is why we have abortions like the “reformed” House of Lords and the swish new Supreme Court, which sprang into life on a whim of Tony Blair’s without even being fleshed out on the traditional fag packet.

They hate the people of the countryside and their ways, hence the crushing burden of bureaucracy on farmers and the huge waste of time to create an unworkable Hunting Act.

They hate “toffs” like David Cameron and George Osborne, but they also hate their own natural supporters getting above themselves. So they snapped the principal ladder by which working class children of my generation achieved social mobility: the grammar schools.

In fact, these days they do not seem to like the British proletariat at all. One of the striking things about Chris Mullin’s diaries, which I praised a few weeks ago, was just how much he seemed to prefer dealing with distressed asylum seekers (polite, educated and grateful) to the mass of his constituents (usually none of the above).

It should come as no surprise, then, to discover from weekend press reports that the floodgates of mass immigration were deliberately opened by Tony Blair and Jack Straw in 2000 to achieve a fundamental and irreversible shift in the make-up of the British population, for their own electoral advantage. The calculation apparently being that industrious and appreciative immigrants were more likely to support Labour than the idle and benefit-addicted denizens of the nation’s council estates.

The true brilliance of the wheeze was this: if anyone dared to suggest that this headlong rush to “multi-culturalism” was a questionable idea, they could be branded as a “racist”, the one thing that instantly puts any politician beyond the pale.

In economic matters, Mrs Thatcher wrenched the centre ground of politics to the right, so that the major parties have spent the last two decades trying to outdo each other with ever more radical schemes of privatisation and in their willingness to pander to the super-rich.

But on social and cultural matters, the entrenched consensus means that anyone who dares to speak up for traditional British (and particularly Christian) values will be shouted down as a bigot.

The new religion of man-made climate change is fast becoming another belief that cannot be challenged, so that anyone who loves the countryside and does not wish to see it industrialised with essentially useless windmills can be presented as wicked and self-centred, prepared to sacrifice the poor people of the Maldives and Bangladesh to protect their own “chocolate box” views.

Add to the mix the European Union, which now makes most of our important decisions for us, and which no mainstream political party dares to oppose effectively, and you end up with a system in which it is hard to put a cigarette paper between the serious contenders for office on most matters of policy, and in which the elite’s values have come seriously adrift from those of the mass of the people.

Most of whom, I would hazard a guess, still take some pride in their country, think it better on the whole than most of the others in the world, and quite liked it the way it was before their leaders decided to give away their sovereignty and completely change the character of their homeland without consulting them.

The predictable backlash, in these circumstances, is extremism of the type represented by the BNP. It is worth remembering that the key to their rise is not the peculiar political genius of Nick Griffin and his colleagues, but the fact that our existing leaders give the impression of, if not actually hating us, at least disliking us quite intensely.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

This is no time to blame the fans

I watched grown men crying at Villa Park on the Sunday evening news, and was surprised to find that I knew exactly how they felt.

This is partly because I have begun to take a mild interest in Newcastle United for the first time in my life, after recently waiving my principles to accept a kind invitation to St James’ Park. Luckily for me I witnessed the thrilling victory against Middlesbrough, and it would take a much stonier heart than mine not to share some of the passion of that amazing crowd.

I have also come to know a thing or two about humiliation and inadequate leadership during 55 years as an often disappointed but still dedicated fan of the United Kingdom.

A typing error in a Google search recently transported me back to 1959, and the Hansard record of a House of Commons debate about the constitution of Malta. It made compelling reading, in a way that Parliamentary speeches no longer do. Politicians of real stature and genuine principles (the terminally ill Nye Bevan was the leading voice of the Labour opposition) were arguing about the policy of what they still called, with a straight face, “the imperial Government”. Both sides clearly shared the conviction that what they said and did actually mattered.

Fifty years on, we have in their place a collection of pygmies who seem chiefly interested in enhancing their personal comfort, and whose debates are ignored because they have so little power to affect anything at all. This is chiefly down to Britain’s transformation from world power into mere province, with most important decisions taken for us in Brussels.

Most of us failed to spot it at the time, but our entry to the then Common Market in 1973 really was, exactly as Hugh Gaitskell had predicted, “the end of Britain as an independent European state … the end of a thousand years of history.”

The good thing about being a Toon supporter at this sorry juncture is knowing that your team can and surely will rise again to the Premiership. The bad thing is that you have little power to influence when and how it will happen; Mike Ashley may have a pretty lousy hand, but he definitely holds the cards.

Thinking nationally, it is hard to resist the conclusion that our relegation from the top flight is permanent; but our many good qualities surely mean that we deserve much better than our present status as a near bankrupt international laughing stock.

Again, the problem is how to effect the necessary change. Virtually the whole of our political team urgently needs replacing, but emphatically not by turning the Commons into a sort of Big Brother house full of past-their-use-by TV presenters and other minor celebrities. What we need are more independently minded, usefully experienced and ideally largely self-financing men and women of principle with a sense of public duty. The sort of people who used to sit in the House of Lords until it was “modernised” by that nice Mr Blair.

Boycotting the elections to the so-called European Parliament next week will do precisely nothing to shame those looking to board a far richer and even less useful gravy train than the one to Westminster. Vote for the people who look least likely to mug us, and give us back some real say in our own affairs.

If the result is a surge in support for the lunatic fringe, grown men may weep about another tragic own goal, and curse the electorate for their stupidity. But in politics as in football, you cannot blame the fans. The real responsibility will lie with the mainstream parties who colluded for so long to conceal the true nature of the European project, and now urgently need to realign their personnel and policies with the wishes of the people.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.