And another thing…

IT’S AT times like this that I’m glad I cancelled my New Statesman subscription.

James Macintyre just posted a piece entitled “The hypocrisy of Eric Joyce”, which basically claims that if you supported the invasion of Iraq (which both Eric and I did), you therefore have no right to suggest that the public’s patience might be running out with the argument that British efforts in Afghanistan are aimed at preventing terrorism in Britain.

And Macintyre (who isn’t nearly as funny as his brother Michael, by the way) resurrects that old, dishonest, craven and blindingly stupid argument that the war in Iraq “actually brought Islamist terror to Britain’s streets for the first time.” In Macintyre’s mind, Islamist terrorism never existed before 7/7/05, despite the oft-repeated mantra that we now live in a globalised world, and despite the fact that Islamists have been murdering their political and religious opponents in cold blood and in great numbers for decades. But until 2005, not in Britain, so that’s okay.

Isn’t it wonderful how some on the Left try to pin the blame for terrorism on the British government, and not on the murdering psychopaths who actually set off the explosives on London’s transport system?

As it happens, I don’t agree with Eric’s reasons for resigning; the war in Afghanistan is sadly necessary and the public’s impatience with the mission’s progress can have no bearing on the rights or wrongs of our presence there.

But hypocrite he is not.

MY FRIEND and colleague, Eric Joyce MP, has tonight resigned as parliamentary private secretary (PPS) to the Defence Secretary, Bob Ainsworth.

I wonder if he’d like to write another guest post on this blog?

My guest post today, from Eric Joyce, the MP for Falkirk, tackles a subject which I know is close to the heart of many of my readers and commenters: the so-called “nanny state”, or as Eric more approriately calls it, “the new paternalism”. Enjoy. In fact, why not have a fag and a pint while you’re reading it?

—————————————————————–

I’m the latest politician Tom’s asked to take some time out from being hated to pen a guest column for his legendary blog. I thought I’d take the opportunity to write about ‘the new paternalism’ and “prohibition-lite”. What? Well, it goes like this.

From September, tourist shops in Scotland won’t sell whisky miniatures any longer, on account of they’d have to get a liquor licence and that really won’t be worth their while. The same new licensing law (passed by Labour/Lib Dem, now actioned by the SNP) will ban the sale of alcohol from your local petrol filling station. Oh, and it’ll be unlawful to display wine at the fish counter at your local supermarket. This is all being done in the name of The War Against Alcohol Abuse (WAAA).

But wait! I checked the gifts counter at The Falkirk Wheel today – no sign at all of alcoholics queuing up with dolphin-embossed writing pads to ‘mask’ their purchase of 20 whisky miniatures, ready for consumption along the canal towpath. I also popped into Asda and couldn’t see a single shopper frothing at the mouth for a drink while perusing the evening’s fish options. And I have a hunch that there’s a reason cops sit outside pubs, not filling stations, at closing time. So what on earth is this risible cross-party legislation all about?

The answer, I think, lies in the imposition of prohibition-lite as part of the unchecked growth of a new professional-class paternalism every bit as socially unhealthy as smoking a roll-up while necking a bottle of cheap hooch is physically unhealthy. And the driving force is not politicians – of all parties – it’s the powerful professional lobbies and the influence they have on public opinion.

A significant point in the rise of the new paternalism came, I think, with the banning of smoking in adapted rooms in private clubs. That is, clubs aren’t allowed a room where people can smoke and clear their own glasses and where no-one but fellow smokers need go. This aspect of the otherwise sensible smoking legislation crossed a significant line – it banned an activity not because of the effect on others, but because it wasn’t healthy for the people who enjoyed it themselves. Here, the health argument took on an unmistakably moral tone. The new paternalists wanted to save people from themselves where they deemed ‘risk’ morally unacceptable. And they knew exactly who they were targeting. Now, once replete with that legal (yet counter-productive) victory, they’ve moved on to alcohol.

Usually, doctors or other professional lobbies get the ball rolling by making the rather obvious point  that smoking, drinking too much and/or eating too many pies isn’t good for you. We hardly need doctors to tell us that, and of course once that’s been said they’re no more qualified than anyone to say what we should do about it. And it’s true, too. It is risky if your lifestyle involves any of those things and you should be encouraged to change – especially the smoking bit. Yet it’s equally true that if you climb in the unimaginatively-but-literally named “death zone”, or “solo” without ropes, or risk your spine in the scrum or your skull in a formula one car – basically do anything for fun which requires protective headgear – then your lifestyle is every bit as risky as the bloke who enjoys a port with his cigar after dinner. And the taxpayer picks up the tab, too, if you fall off: crash! Snap!

But the new paternalists aren’t talking about after-dinner port drinkers or climbers, are they?  They’re targeting quite a different demographic. Minimum alcohol pricing, for example, won’t affect those who like a nice malt – it’ll only affect the less well-off who buy blended scotch for less than £11.50. Here, their “prohibition minus” takes the form of trying to price the less well-off out of the market “for their own good”. Indeed, maybe the less well off will reduce their consumption, although I think they’ll just spend more on alcohol or find substitutes. But your guess is as good as mine. Yet elsewhere, such as with fish counters and filling stations and gift shops, and banning the supermarket sale of alcohol to students and soldiers under 21, it’ll have no effect at all – it’s simply a kind of moral statement of the “something must be done” variety.

Actually, it isn’t that simple. Because it’s also a public statement of the desirability of prohibition-lite as an instrument of new paternalism. Its contemporary big brother, of course, is the after-expression of full prohibition still in place in “dry” counties in America. Yet the US experiment with prohibition failed for a reason. This was not at root because the black-market and attendant gangsterism filled the gap, but because it was inherently undemocratic to allow the better-off, who called for and passed the legislation, to use their better resources to consume alcohol legally while leaving the less well-off prosecuted for drinking boot-leg.

I’m not arguing here that there’s no place for morality in political debate. Nor, by the way, am I suggesting the inclusion of speed smoking or drinking in the 2012 Olympics, even if that might well help the UK’s medal tally (albeit the Russians would field a strong team too). But I am saying it’s important to recognise what’s going on with the new paternalists’ moral separation of “good lifestyle risk” and “bad lifestyle risk”, according to whether or not there is some kind of “noble”, “morally sound” physical endeavour involved. All that will lead to is bad and ineffective outcomes.

Ask yourself this; have you ever seen miniature abuse (I’m not talking the harming of smaller people, here)? Or watched someone neck a bottle of wine as they drove off from a filling station? Or gone mental in the aisles having had Pinot Grigio and a nice bit of haddock in the same field of vision? No, you say? How about folk smoking at home in front of the kids because they can’t do it at the bingo or social club now? Or people spending too much on alcohol because those who aren’t price sensitive think it’s a good idea to keep the prices high? Or independent garage owners of impeccable record losing their alcohol licences and possibly their livelihoods?

I went to see the unbelievably brilliant Moscow State Circus the other week. The central point of the entertainment was that the acrobats were often flying 50 ft above the ground without safety ropes or nets. These people were receiving rapturous applause for their inherently risky lifestyle. It seemed to me that a high proportion of the applauders were from precisely the price-sensitive demographic targeted by the new paternalists. Yet it was fairly clear, I think, that they would not have been applauding at all as rapturously had Aldo the Amazing sat down and showed us how quickly he could make rolly-ups out of half an ounce of Golden Virginia; or if Coco the Clown sought to mesmerise us with his ability to drink two litres of fortified wine while maintaining his one-legged balance on a tightrope. Holding an umbrella. That is to say, everyone manages risk in their lives, knows some things aren’t good for them and is open to education and change. It manifestly isn’t just the better-off. Yet the central feature of the new paternalism, virtually by definition, is that it’s patronising. It says some folk aren’t open to change so we’ll target them and make life difficult for them. This seems to me to be the apotheosis of bad legislation.

On the contrary, good legislation balances how people’s lives can be made better with a practical and democratic view of how people actually do live their lives. The new paternalists seek to upset that balance. The result is that they victimise the least well-off and encourage silliness of the variety I describe above.

So, what to do? Well, recently sheriffs in Aberdeen and Glasgow have savaged the new licensing legislation. Essentially, it’s in pieces owing to poor drafting and opportunistic political compromises. The Scottish Government will have to choose to let much of it fall or take it back to the Scottish Parliament and seek cross party support (whether or not it actually requires a vote) to pass “regulations” to change it. If you agree with me, write to your MSP and tell them you want your aunt to be able to pick up a bottle of sherry when she’s filling her car; to be able to note interesting wine suggestions at the fish counter; to be allowed to buy a miniature for your granny at the incredible Falkirk Wheel; to not be patronised by the new paternalists; to reject prohibition-lite.

And if you don’t agree with me, you should definitely write to Tom. It’s his blog, after all.

THE INDEPENDENT seems to have caught Iain Dale’s bug for compulsive list compiling. Today they’ve published a list of the Top Ten Most Influential MPs Who Twitter.

Well, to be fair, they’ve published a Top Ten with only nine entries (they seem to have missed out fourth place), but who cares? It means I can promote myself from fifth to fourth place.

It reads like a veritable list of… well, most influential MPs who Twitter, I guess. The full list, based on the number of followers, mentions and outgoing links to stories, is:

1. Kerry McCarthy
2. Tom Watson
3. Sadiq Khan
5. Tom Harris
6. John Prescott
7. Jim Knight
8. Eric Joyce
9. David Lammy
10. Siön Simon

What’s interesting is that the list includes no opposition MPs (I would have expected LibDem Jo Swinson to be in there somewhere). Five of the nine listed are serving ministers; three (me, Tom Watson and John Prescott) are ex-ministers and Eric Joyce has not (yet) served in government. Only two on the list (Kerry and Sadiq) arrived in parliament at the 2005 election; six came in in 2001 (if you include David and Eric, who were elected shortly before that general election) and Prescott, of course, came in just before Disraeli.

And once again, those nuisance Scots are over-represented, with two out of the nine.

Surprisingly and depressingly, there’s only one woman on the list. On the other hand, she topped it.

I’M NOT thin-skinned, but if I’m to be the victim of a lazy hatchet job by a journalist, I think I have the right to expect at least a minimum level of accuracy.

Under the headline “Proof at last… our MPs really are a bunch of prize twits”, the Scottish edition of the Mail on Sunday today ran a critical piece on me and two parliamentary colleagues, Jo Swinson (LibDem, East Dunbartonshire) and Eric Joyce (Labour, Falkirk) for having the brass neck to Twitter from the Commons chamber.

It’s not available online (wiser heads prevailed, I presume), but the gist of the story is that we three have been “caught posting messages on the social networking site during PMQs.”

Caught? Doesn’t that imply a desire to avoid detection? I posted this Tweet last Wednesday in advance of PMQs. It automatically appeared on the front page of this blog — you know, the blog that many reporters read every day. Yet because this particular reporter accepted my open invitation to follow my Twitter feed on PMQs, he felt able to report:

In the middle of robust exchanges between Gordon Brown and David Cameron, Labour MPs Tom Harris and Eric Joyce and LibDem Jo Swinson were actively updating their followers with ‘tweets’ reporting the day’s events.

This is despite the fact that mobile phones, which can be used to post messages on Twitter, are banned from all but a few areas of the House.

Note the careful phrasing of that last line: “banned from all but a few areas of the House.” It’s intended to lead the reader to believe that phones are banned from the chamber itself, even though the reporter doesn’t explicitly say as much. In fact, mobile phones are now allowed in the chamber and I happen to know that the reporter did know that this was the case. How do I know that? Because I told him so when he called me at my constituency office on Friday.

In fact, the entire story is predicated on the assumption that using one’s mobile phone in the chamber is against the rules, otherwise there’s actually no story at all. Hence the deliberately vague wording above.

So, to recap: 

1. Three Scottish MPs were Twittering during PMQs.
2. They were entirely open about their activities. I advertised the fact I would be doing so in advance.
3. Twittering during PMQs does not break any rules (unless you’re Twittering while asking or answering a question which, as far as I’m aware, hasn’t happened. Yet). 

And I will continue to Twitter during PMQs whenever I can, as will Eric and Jo, I hope. If we were remotely worried about the kind of silly criticism we received today from the Mail on Sunday, we probably wouldn’t even be on Twitter at all. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but I think they would agree with me that if MPs can draw others into a political debate about PMQs or anything else using social media, then that is A Good Thing, however the media may wish to over-react or feign indignation.