But what was Oliver Letwin on about, anyway? Why doesn’t he want more people from Sheffield taking holidays? And why tell Boris Johnson this? ‘We don’t want to see more families in Sheffield being able to afford cheap holidays,’ he apparently told Boris, who told the world.
But what was Oliver Letwin on about, anyway? Why doesn’t he want more people from Sheffield taking holidays? And why tell Boris Johnson this? ‘We don’t want to see more families in Sheffield being able to afford cheap holidays,’ he apparently told Boris, who told the world. But why? The only thing they can possibly have been discussing was airports in the south-east. Where Sheffield isn’t. It’s north-middle somewhere, I think. Isn’t it?
Most probably, Letwin didn’t mean ‘Sheffield’ when he said ‘Sheffield’, but in fact meant ‘the great amorphous mass of the poor’. This would be very bad, obviously, but is not, as it happens, what I’m about to go off on one about. No. Actually, I’m more annoyed by his environmentalism. I mean, honestly, the amount of time I’ve spent insisting to eco-sceptics that, no, environmentalists aren’t inherently lofty, debilitatingly intellectual and, at heart, anti-human. ‘Some of them are even Tories!’ I’ve often said. And now there’s Letwin, the big wizard-faced Dilbert, making them all absolutely right after all.
I can’t begin to explain how much this sort of thing irritates me. It’s like Andrew Lansley. There’s this political rap about his proposed NHS reforms doing the rounds online at the moment. That’s right. A political rap. It’s probably the future. ‘Andrew Lansley, greedy, Andrew Lansley, tosser,’ it starts. Hmm, I thought, when I heard that. Tosser, I can understand. But greedy? Clearly, I though, that’s just your typical ad hominem. It’s lazy (rapping) political theory, assuming that people who think differently must be evil.
It turns out, though, that, actually, Lansley did accept a £21,000 donation to his private office from John Nash, who is the head of Care UK, which is one of the biggest private NHS providers, which will presumably benefit from his reforms. ‘Christ, Lansley,’ you think. ‘You did what?’ Because what you want to say, when shooting down these rapping political theorists who are suddenly everywhere, is, ‘Don’t be absurd! Mr Lansley will not benefit from these reforms one iota! He merely believes them to be the right thing to do!’ Yet what you instead have to say, knowing this, is, ‘Don’t be so absurd! Mr Lansley may benefit personally from these reforms, particularly if he gets another donation, or leaves politics and gets a cushy directorship, but he also believes them to be the right thing to do!’ Which isn’t, you know, much of a rallying cry.
Or Greg Barker. Him, too. He was addressing a US business school the other day, and he told them that the coalition was making cuts that ‘Margaret Thatcher, back in the 1980s, could only have dreamt of’. I mean, look, I know it’s true. I know Alistair Darling once said something pretty similar. Only, you don’t need to sound so damn pleased about it, do you? You don’t need to describe it as fulfilling Thatcher’s wildest dreams, at, of all places, an American business school. You might as well be rubbing your hands, or touching yourself.
Look, here’s the point. I’m a big fan of the theory that people are nice. You can be nice and right, or you can be nice and wrong. So it bothers me, on all kinds of levels, when people come along and say ‘environmentalists are anti-human’ or ‘the Tories are selling the NHS for personal gain’ or ‘the cuts are politically motivated’. I consider all of these accusations an affront to basic humanity. ‘Nonsense!’ I want to say. ‘Angry rapping political theorists miss the point, just like climate sceptics do! Sometimes people just believe challenging things, without them being bad, or self-motivated, or secretly signed up to a wider ideology of which this is just a part!’ Only the more you look for examples, the more they slip through your fingers like sand.
This AV referendum. I think we’re doing it wrong. I had an epiphany the other day, while reading a blog by Norman Tebbit.
Obviously, he was talking nonsense. Everybody who talks or writes about AV is talking nonsense, because nobody knows anything. You can’t look at previous elections and figure out who would have won them, because the second, third, fourth and other votes just didn’t happen. So it’s all hypothetical. Whether people are for or against, everybody is just making it up.
Tebbit, in as far as I could make out, seemed to be suggesting that AV would give us disputed elections like in the Third World, thus risking the UK becoming the Ivory Coast, or something. But he did make one excellent observation, perhaps by accident. He pointed out that if there was an election under AV in the UK, the breakdown would also be able to show us who would have won under first past the post.
So it got me thinking. Why don’t we have one? No referendum yet, just an election next time, where the ballots are all AV-style. Make it still first past the post, in that only the first preferences count, but add up all the others, too, and see what would have happened. Then we can have this whole argument all over again, but with the added bonus that those so furiously bickering on both sides wouldn’t just have to make it all up. Bloody clever, if you ask me. Let’s.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
Comments