Recycled politics

How many of the Conservative policies that Labour abolished are they now bringing back?

1. The Governments Education Bill is effectively the Conservatives 1987 Grant Maintained Schools scheme.

2. The Government banned the Conservative internal market reforms in the NHS, massively increased spending on something else and then decided they were wrong to ban the Tory policies in the first place. Now they are pushing forward with internal market reforms to the NHS.

3. And finally we have a new scheme that is similiar in principle to the Conservatives assisted places scheme.

Here's the Adam Smith Institue Blog report on the new scheme:

'Telegraph education correspondent Julie Henry reports that up to 2,000 children in local-authority care in Britain could be offered places in private boarding schools.

Despite the £2.5bn a year that is spent looking after some 60,000 children in care, only 6% of them end up gaining five or more good GCSEs – the standard target in secondary schools. More than a third of them get no GCSE exams at all. They are also three times more likely to get involved in crime than other children. So access to private education could be a great boon for them.

Trials of the idea could start next year. There is, of course, a bit of self-interest for the local councils too. To keep a child in a children’s home costs four times the fees in posh schools like Eton or Winchester.

But what struck me as remarkable is that here we are – eight years later – bringing back a version of the ‘assisted places’ scheme that Tony Blair’s government abolished as soon as it came into office. The scheme offended Old Labour backbenchers, who wanted to make life as difficult as possible for the private schools. So despite the fact that it had given thousands of poor but bright kids access to the very best schooling in the country, it had to go.

So let us hope that this new idea takes root and grows. But why stop at 2,000? Why not give all children state-paid access to the school of their choice? The state does not have to provide an entire service – education, health, food, footwear, clothes – to make sure that everyone has access to it. All it has to do is pay – specifically, for those who could not otherwise afford these things. That gives equal access of the kind Old Labour wants: but without the nationalized industry provision that we all know is a disaster.'

Who knows maybe this is an example of Labour Ideology being best served by Conservative policies. If that's the case it would appear the Government has wasted a lot of money and effort over the last nine years. (Incidently, no book quite defines the right as Marx's Communist manifesto does the left but I reckon Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' and its theory of the Market's 'invisible hand'comes closest).

Christian children sold as slaves by Islamist leader

Reunited: boys saved from slavers
The Sunday Times
May 21, 2006

A SENIOR member of an Islamic organisation linked to Al-Qaeda is funding his activities through the kidnapping of Christian children who are sold into slavery in Pakistan. The Sunday Times has established that Gul Khan, a wealthy militant who uses the base of Jamaat-ud Daawa (JUD) near Lahore, is behind a cruel trade in boys aged six to 12. They are abducted from remote Christian villages in the Punjab and fetch nearly £1,000 each from buyers who consign them to a life of misery in domestic servitude or in the sex trade.

Khan was exposed in a sting organised by American and Pakistani missionaries who decided to save 20 such boys and return them to their homes. ... The undercover missionaries have demanded the prosecution of Khan and an investigation into his work for the JUD, which claims to have created a “pure Islamic environment” at Muridke.

Hafez Muhamed Sayeed, [JUD's] leader, was accused of inciting riots in Pakistan this year with speeches denouncing western “depravity” after a Danish newspaper published cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.

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The rescue in detail:

Rescued – the Pakistan children seized by Islamist slave traders
The Sunday Times
May 21, 2006

Chavez and the foolishness of the Left - Buruma

Thank you, my foolish friends in the West
The Sunday Times
May 14, 2006
Ian Buruma

Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is only the latest dictator-in-waiting to bask in adulation from western 'progressives', says Ian Buruma

When the Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas managed to escape to the US in 1980, after years of persecution by the Cuban government for being openly homosexual and a dissident, he said: “The difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream. And I came here to scream.”

One of the most vexing things for artists and intellectuals who live under the compulsion to applaud dictators is the spectacle of colleagues from more open societies applauding of their own free will. It adds a peculiarly nasty insult to injury. Stalin was applauded by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Mao was visited by a constant stream of worshippers from the West, some of whose names can still produce winces of disgust in China. Castro has basked for years in the adulation of such literary stars as Jose Saramago and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Even Pol Pot found favour among several well-known journalists and academics.

Last year a number of journalists, writers and showbiz figures, including Harold Pinter, Nadine Gordimer, Harry Belafonte and Tariq Ali, signed a letter claiming that in Cuba “there has not been a single case of disappearance, torture or extra-judicial execution since 1959 . . .”

Arenas was arrested in 1973 for “ideological deviation”. He was tortured and locked up in prison cells filled with floodwater and excrement, and threatened with death if he didn’t renounce his own writing. Imagine what it must be like to be treated like this and then read about your fellow writers in the West standing up for your oppressors.

...

Worse causes have been served by western enthusiasts than the Bolivarist revolution, and worse leaders have been applauded than Chavez. One only needs recall the abject audiences at the court of Saddam Hussein by George Galloway, among others, who flattered the murderous dictator while claiming to represent “the voice of the voiceless”. Even now, such publications as the New Left Review advocate support for a global anti-imperialist movement that would include North Korea, surely the most oppressive regime on earth.

The common element of radical Third Worldism is an obsession with American power, as though the US were so intrinsically evil that any enemy of the US must be our friend, from Mao to Kim Jong-il, from Fidel Castro to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And if our “friends” shower us with flattery, asking us to attend conferences and sit on advisory boards, so much the better.

Criticism of American policies and economic practices are necessary and often just, but why do leftists continue to discredit their critical stance by applauding strongmen who oppress and murder their own critics? Is it simply a reverse application of that famous American cold war dictum: “He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard”? Or is it the fatal attraction to power often felt by writers and artists who feel marginal and impotent in capitalist democracies? The danger of Chavism is not a revival of communism, even though Castro is among its main boosters. Nor should anti-Americanism be our main concern. The US can take care of itself. What needs to be resisted, not just in Latin America, is the new form of populist authoritarianism.

That Chavez is applauded by many people, especially the poor, is not necessarily a sign of democracy; many revolutionary leaders are popular, at least in the beginning of their rule, before their promises have ended in misery and bloodshed.

The left has a proud tradition of defending political freedoms, at home and abroad. But this tradition is in danger of being lost when western intellectuals indulge in power worship. Applause for autocrats undermines the morale of people who insist on fighting for their freedoms Leftists were largely sympathetic, and rightly so, to critics of Berlusconi and Thaksin, even though neither was a dictator. Both did, of course, support American foreign policy. But when democracy is endangered, the left should be equally hard on rulers who oppose the US. Failure to do so encourages authoritarianism everywhere, including in the West itself, where the frivolous behaviour of a dogmatic left has already allowed neoconservatives to steal all the best lines.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali leaves Europe to live in the USA

Europe loses a powerful & important voice in the debate on Islam:

Hirsi Ali to leave Netherlands for job with US think tank

Holland's shameful treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali