ID cards, an idea whose time has come.

And, hopefully, gone.

(1)

Clive Davis muses on Channel Five's current poster campaign:

Who says nothing good ever came out of America?

The awful thing is there are people who really think like that. I suppose this is where I do my Life of Brian impression. What have the Americans ever done for us? Let's leave it at sending its young men to fight in Europe to save us from the Third Reich. And, today, sending its finest to Iraq and Afghanistan to fight for democracy.

(7)

First of all, I think it's important to say that Jack Straw has every right to say what he has about the veil, and I think he has every right to ask women who visit his surgery to remove theirs. He asks, remember; he does not demand that they do.

There is not a word of his, in print or in broadcast interviews, with which I disagree. I find the veil not just a sign of separation but somehow frightening, so deeply does it clash with the norms of Western behaviour. Maybe it's a subconscious association with criminals who cover their heads.

(BTW, people have asked why Mr Straw should have raised such an issue. Remember that he has a track record of saying things which might seem odd at the time but which, in the long term, turn out to have been prescient. There are few politicians better able than Jack Straw to spot a change in wind and position himself to take advantage.

Back in 1993, when John Smith was Labour leader and the word 'modernisation' was banned, Straw caused an enormous row within the party by publishing a detailed pamphlet arguing that Clause IV should be abolished. Smith went berserk. In his view the way to power was to say and do as little as possible. Quite rightly, that strategy was labelled 'sleepwalking to oblivion' by Nick Raynsford. But as I remember well from my own time at the Fabian Society then, Smith and his rather ineffectual henchman David Ward did everything in their power to stop people rocking the boat with anything so bold as an idea.

Straw did himself immense short-tern harm by upsetting Smith's do-nothing applecart and calling for the end of Clause IV.

But he took the long-term view, however, and when Blair took over the following year his reputation as a solid plodder had been left behind and he was regarded as an on-side A-list strategist by the inner New Labour core.

More recently, he deftly switched from being regarded as a Blair loyalist to being seen as a solid Brownite.)

In the early 1990s I used sometimes to sit in for my then boss, Peter Shore, when he was away or ill, and take his surgery in Tower Hamlets. His constituency included the East London Mosque, and many of the visitors to his surgery were Muslims, some of whom had their faces covered by a veil. I agree with Mr Straw that it was very difficult to interact with them, especially as a number had very basic English.

But.

Mr Straw has emphatically not called for a ban; he has simply raised some of the issues around the veil. Where I start to part company with some people who have commented on Mr Straw's remarks is over the question of the legitimacy of the veil per se.

Melanie Phillips, who is a brave and far sighted writer on the issue of the threat from militant Islam, is I think wrong in this instance:

But more significantly – and Straw did not say this – this type of veil is itself a direct threat to liberty. Clearly, it is a matter of debate within the Islamic world whether it – or, indeed, any type of veil – is necessary to satisfy the injunction upon women to preserve their modesty. What is beyond doubt is that the blackout veil is associated with most extreme interpretation of Islam, which holds that Islamic values must supersede all other values, including those of the secular state. Wearing this veil is thus a political statement of cultural and religious hostility to the British state. Objecting to it, therefore, is not an example of intolerance or religious discrimination. Religious garb should certainly be tolerated, even if it is outlandish; what people wear is their own affair. But this veil is not their own affair. It affects the rest of us because it is inherently aggressive and intimidatory. That is why it is unacceptable.

I simply do not see that the veil is "inherently aggressive and intimidatory". Surely that is a better description for proscribing certain codes of dress. The fact that I do not like to see women in them, that I find it slightly frightening, is my problem, not theirs. What matters is not how people dress, but how they act. If their actions are aggressive and intimidatory that is a wholly different thing.

Yes, many Muslims have spoken up in support of Mr Straw and said they dislike the veil, too. But so what? They choose not to wear one. Good for them. I feel uncomfortable when I see my fellow Jews in full Hasidic garb. I do not think I have anything in common with them. But would I want to tell them to dress 'normally'. Of course not. How dare I. That is how they choose to dress, in accordance with their beliefs.

Daniel Finkelstein writes:

If I have understood correctly, most Muslims feel that the full veil is not a religious requirement and Jack Straw does not insist on its removal. The issue is therefore very different from that of the headscarves ban in France.

Daniel clearly grasps the main point, that Straw is making no demand. But he cites an angle others have also cited: that it is not a religious requirement. What does that have to do with it? Isn't freedom about allowing people to wear a pink bobble on their head or yellow and orange striped jump suits if they want, however disconcerting others might find it? Why does the fact that it is not a religious requirement matter? Let's say the Moonies instructed their members to wear yellow and orange striped jump suits. Why should it being a requirement of being a Moonie make the slightest difference to its acceptability or not as a garment?

As I say, I think Jack Straw is not merely within his rights to say what he has, but deserves praise for raising the issue. And I've not so far read anything attributed to him with which I disagree, since he is simply talking about what he prefers, not what he demands. It's when it moves into the realms of the proscriptive that I think we start to lose sight of what it means to live in a democracy.

(5)

How can you not want to buy from this store?

It's about time someone reported the Liberal Democrats to Trading Standards. When it comes to spouting illiberal bilge, the Lib Dems leave everyone else standing.

Next week, McDonald’s is introducing the “Bigger Big Mac” — a burger that is 40 per cent bigger than the Big Mac. Guess who is leading the charge against it? Steve Webb, the Lib Dem health spokesman, is putting down an early day motion saying that “there is no need for a bigger Big Mac”. Great liberal that he is, Mr Webb thinks his opinion, not ours, should decide what we have available to eat.

There is indeed no “need” for a Bigger Big Mac. As it happens, I can’t stand the taste of Big Macs. But there’s no need for foie gras or whisky, which I love. I could just eat celery and drink water instead.

There is equally no need for Mr Webb or his tawdry party. Politics would be a lot more sensible without them. But for some reason the 30,872 people in Northavon who voted for Mr Webb think differently. It’s called choice — even if there’s no accounting for taste.

Far from criticising McDonald’s, anyone who believes in freedom should salute the fact that, after appearing to wobble in the wake of the health fascists’ onslaught by introducing salads, the burger chain is now standing proud and sticking to its purpose: selling burgers.

They may indeed be unhealthy. So what? If I want to make a pig of myself, who is Mr Webb or anyone else to stop me? The real issue is not the Bigger Big Mac, but that we live in a society where choice comes without responsibility.

Because healthcare is paid for through the State, rather than directly through our own pockets, we can eat and drink ourselves into oblivion and it makes not the least difference to us. Far from having an incentive to eat healthily, through lower premiums or holding on to a larger proportion of a savings account, the NHS engenders a total absence of personal responsibility. Indeed, the healthier we keep ourselves, the worse return we get from paying taxes.

Instead of bans on food choices, we need an arrangement where, as Anna Karenina discovered, choices have consequences. We should all be allowed to eat Bigger Big Macs. But we should have to pay for the consequences if we do so every day.

(14)

It's great when a good and brave man, who has transformed hundreds of thousands of lives for the better, gets acknowledged. Yesterday, Mart Laar, the former Prime Minister of Estonia, was awarded the Milton Friedman Prize. He is in superb company; the two previous winners were Peter Bauer and Hernando de Soto.

Anyone who has met Mart, as I have been privileged to do a number of times, cannot but be wowed by him. His achievement in Estonia is astonishing in its scope and success. As the citation puts it:

Throughout his public life, Laar has embodied the values of liberty and free choice recognized by the prize, and his dedication to these ideals helped him to lead his country to economic prosperity through a radical free market program.

Today, Estonia is hailed as a model for emerging democracies and is cited as an example that ailing Western European economies should follow too. Consistently near the top of the Economic Freedom of the World Index, Estonia is now a member of NATO, the EU and the WTO, with well over 90 percent of its formerly state-run economy privatized.

When Laar took the reins of power of the newly independent country in 1992, he was only 32 years old, and Estonia was struggling to heal from the wounds of Soviet occupation. Laar believed that the way to ensure success for Estonia was to cultivate freedom and self-determination. In only two years in office, he negotiated the withdrawal of Russian troops from Estonian soil and introduced the kroon, one of Eastern Europe's most stable currencies. He also instituted a flat tax rate, a move, which has been widely copied . even in Russia. Under Laar, Estonia removed price controls, discounted useless regulations, and saw the largest real per capita income of any of the former Communist states.

But as Laar, who served two terms as prime minister, has pointed out, he is not an economist: "I had read only one book on economics . Milton Friedman's Free to Choose. I was so ignorant at the time that I thought that what Friedman wrote about the benefits of privatization, the flat tax and the abolition of all customs rights, was the result of economic reforms that had been put into practice in the West. It seemed common sense to me and, as I thought it had already been done everywhere, I simply introduced it in Estonia, despite warnings from Estonian economists that it could not be done. They said it was as impossible as walking on water. We did it: we just walked on the water because we did not know that it was impossible."

Truly, a well-deserved honour for a great man.

(2)

I think this comes under the category 'glorious':

The League Against Cruel Sports recently embarked on a fund-raising drive. It wants money to buy video cameras to film people hunting.

In 2003 the League had a deficit of more than £230,000 so little wonder it is desperate to raise funds. It sent out begging letters imploring people to send cheques to a freepost address. The thought that people would send money to the League but be worried about the cost of postage for their cheques was baffling.

But the hunters spotted a perhaps fatal chink. The postage of any letters sent to the freepost address must be paid by the League. Not entirely surprising then that the Pros - gleeful in the knowledge that the League will have to pay - have sent them van-loads of telephone directories, back copies of Horse & Hound and tons of unwanted junk mail.

Marvelous.l Bankrupt the bloody lot of them.

(This is a slightly longer version of a piece which appears in today's Sunday Times.)

Last Tuesday, around 200 assorted neoconservatives gathered in the Jubilee Room of the House of Commons to toast their ascendancy over wine and canapés, and to plot the next stage of American global dominion.

Paying no heed to the traditional niceties of politics, they came from across the party divide, but with one thing in common: a secret aspiration to impose America rule on hitherto free peoples.

I was there. I am one of those very neoconservatives. And today I expose the truth behind the plot to change the world.

The gathering was the London launch of the Henry Jackson Society, an organisation – at this stage little more than a website and a group of supporters – named after the great Democrat senator and anti-communist campaigner, Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson.

Jackson was a traditional New Deal liberal, a trade unionist who believed in nationalisation and price controls, and a civil rights campaigner. But his real impact, and his legacy, lay not in domestic but international politics. He was an implacable opponent of the received foreign policy wisdom of détente with the Soviet Union. As the Henry Jackson Society’s founding statement puts it: “He believed that this was an unprincipled accommodation, which abandoned the wider cause of human rights, as well as compromising security. Jackson’s core belief was that democratic governments should consider the internal character of foreign states when dealing with them.”

Jackson’s message – the relevance of which is as great today as then – was that the supposedly ‘realistic’ approach of the likes of Henry Kissinger, which accepted that the Soviet Union was here to stay and sought to reach an accommodation with it which would lessen its threat to the West, was misguided both strategically and morally.

The parallels with today are striking. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Tuesday’s gathering was that it was genuinely all-party. The event was hosted by two MPs, Michael Gove, a Conservative, and Gisela Stuart, a former minister under Blair. Denis MacShane, Europe Minister until June, is a signatory of society’s statement of principles.

The truth which I expose today is that the Henry Jackson Society is not a secret cabal designed, as one Guardian columnist put it last week, to create “a new governing consensus of the right” but quite the opposite. It has neoconservative members. But it also has social democrats and traditional conservatives. Socialists would feel comfortable with its aims - “the spread of democracy, using all realistic and available means - not only on idealistic grounds, but also because this is the surest guarantee of…security.” And it is not about American dominion but the very absence of empire. There is indeed a mission to change the world. But it is to rid it of tyranny and to give all people the liberty as we enjoy in the West.

The founding of the society, and the reaction to it, illustrates a fascinating – and potentially dynamic – development. As its broadly based membership shows, it is no longer possible to tell from someone’s political affiliation what their outlook will be on the basic issues of foreign policy.

It might, after all, be thought reasonable to identify democracy, freedom and human rights as key components of a left-wing approach. And yet the reaction to the Iraq war shows that no longer applies. At its most basic, had the Conservatives under Iain Duncan Smith not voted for the war in the House of Commons, Britain would not have been involved; Blair did not have sufficient votes on his own side. Some Labour MPs went along with the war because their Prime Minister asked for the support. But today, very few remain in favour of a war which freed Iraqis from one of the most murderous dictators in history.

Yet on the Conservative benches support from the likes of George Osborne remains steadfast – not just because of the geopolitical importance of Iraq and the war on terror, but specifically because of the merits of liberal intervention. Fighting, in other words, to secure other people’s freedoms – freedoms which opponents of the war such as Respect and many Labour members would rather did not exist.

Party affiliation is no longer an accurate indication of approach. My own realisation of that came in the wake of 9/11. I have always considered myself to be on the Left. After 9/11, I realised that the reaction of many, if not most, of my fellows was a variation on the theme of ‘America had it coming’. That was compounded over Iraq, where the liberal left ended up in bed not only with the traditional ‘realist right’ in opposing a foreign intervention, but also with militant Islam. Instead of fighting to bring freedom, they allied with an ideology which instructs husbands to beat their wives.

The earliest indications of this change came over Bosnia. The Douglas Hurd/Malcolm Rifkind approach, with a long Tory history, was to sit on their hands and oppose being dragged into a nasty foreign mess. What had human rights to do with British foreign policy? That stream of Conservatism has not gone away; both men opposed the Iraq War.

What has changed is that Labour’s own opponents of intervention in favour of human freedom now have the upper hand. After Blair, it is difficult to see from where else the moral lead for intervention will come.

Others, of course, take a very different view. Christopher Montgomery, a historian of the ‘realist’ school, whose book about Conservative leadership elections, The Crisis of Tory Leadership, is published next week, considers that the real divide is between those who “slavishly follow America” and those who stand up for Britain’s national interest. “There is no new divide or emphasis on human rights. In Bosnia, we were simply dragged in because of the dictates of an alliance with America.”

What is undeniable, however, is the intellectual ferment now occurring around these issues, of which the Henry Jackson Society is merely one example. Another is a timely and excellent new book by Oliver Kamm, Anti-Totalitarianism: the left-wing case for a neoconservative foreign policy, which argues that there has been a long left-wing tradition of “militant anti-totalitarianism”, but that there has also been a recurring temptation for progressives, critical of their own societies’ failings, to make excuses for the ideological opponents of Western liberal democracies. Kamm links this with Conservative realism (which he calls “amoral quietism”) and shows how the two very different ideological roots end up in the same place.

The parallels with Israel are far from exact, but Ariel Sharon’s resignation last week from Likud to form his own party, with an explicit purpose of drawing members and support from both Likud and Labour, certainly shows how labels can obscure more than they reveal. Sharon’s recent coalition with a Shimon Peres-led Labour Party was itself the result of the two men coming together over an issue – relations with the Palestinians - which crossed party boundaries.

There is a similar, albeit less obvious, effect in domestic policy. Take immigration. The government’s loosening of the limits on immigrant workers is supported by many Conservatives who, believing in the benefits of free markets, favour a still more open immigration policy than we have today.

But the Conservative position in its election posters was a traditional right wing message that "It's not racist to want to control immigration”. It is not, however, just Conservatives who are expressing their objections to immigration. Last month Polly Toynbee, the high priestess of the Guardian, wrote that “It is shocking that 30,000 of the 70,000 workers being employed to start work on transport infrastructure for the Olympics are to be east Europeans, not impoverished Londoners” – a theme which could have come straight out of the BNP’s mouth. Her concern, of course, is very different from the BNP’s, if equally economically illiterate: “It is impossible to know what level wages might be at or how many unemployed might have been tugged into jobs at higher pay rates had Britain kept its doors shut to new EU citizens until their countries had caught up economically.” A more subtle anxiety has been expressed by David Goodhart, the editor of Prospect, who has written about the cultural impact of mass immigration.

So the far right’s hatred of foreigners has been joined by the more nuanced worries of liberals. But whatever their intellectual roots, both amount to the same thing: there are too many of them here.

Foreign policy, the more interesting area, has not been an election decider in Britain for many years, and the once trendy prediction that the splits over Europe would lead to a political realignment has not been borne out. Jackson remained a registered Democrat throughout his life. But although his approach had once been relatively mainstream within the Democratic Party, the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the rise of George McGovern and the peaceniks and the moral relativism which gripped the Left in the 1960s and 1970s all symbolised how traditional party positions and alignments were shattering.
On the one hand stood the peaceniks – the McGovernites and their European equivalents in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament - who did not merely tolerate the Soviet Union but opposed any real attempt to threaten it as illegitimate interference in the sovereign rights of another (and, in some minds, finer) nation.

Just as Conservative realists and Labour opponents of intervention end up in the same place today, so the Nixon and Kissinger policy of détente had the same effect as the McGovernites – not toppling the Soviet Union but entrenching it. Détente was the high water mark of so-called realism, which buttressed a regime which enslaved and murdered millions and which sought to impose its tyranny across the planet.

But there were others - led by Jackson - who were repelled by this alliance of cynicism, which both ignored the victims of the Soviet Union and bought short-term peace at the cost of long-term defeat.

The emergence of Ronald Reagan, who was as hostile to his Republican predecessor Nixon as he was to his immediate and ineffectual Democrat predecessor Jimmy Carter – who claimed to put human rights at the centre of policy but who lacked the fibre to follow through – transformed politics.

Many of Jackson’s supporters (such as Richard Perle, who became a key player under Reagan) saw that it was the Reagan Republican party which stood for what was once the natural preserve of progressives and the Democratic Party: real progress in human rights and liberty. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s first US Ambassador to the United Nations, remained a registered Democrat throughout her time in Reagan’s Cabinet.

Could we see such realignments here? “Yes”, thinks Kamm, “as part of a more general realignment between the forces of openness and those of reaction. Among the first group are advocates of, for example, greater economic integration and trade, and among the second are those who stress a narrow conception of national interest in the name of realism. At the extreme in the second camp, you find the alliance of far-Left and theocratic reactionaries.”

Far from it being the Left which placed the ending of tyranny at the centre of foreign policy, it was Reagan who memorably, and accurately, described the Soviet Union as an evil empire. And it was Reagan who stood at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987 and urged Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”.

The Soviet Union did not collapse because of the liberal left consensus – which the media would implicitly contrast against the insane cold war warriors. Reagan and Baroness Thatcher, his soul mate, were portrayed as dangerous, militaristic right wingers as the mainstream left protested in Europe against the incendiary deployment of Cruise missiles.

Had the mainstream had its way, the Soviet Union would remain in place today, propped up by détente. And there would be nothing former about the now former members of the Warsaw Pact.

That there are contemporary supra-party alliances over foreign policy is clear. What we do not yet know is whether - as over Europe - existing party politics will nonetheless remain in tact, or whether there will indeed be a realignment between the forces of openness and those of reaction.