the difference is that you put your money back into this one!

Here's something interesting. Who knew A4e had a secondary charity it gave money to, that also does public sector work and that also employs Emma Harrison and all her mates? It's like that point in the con where you start setting up another scheme with the money out of the first one. Meanwhile, this has probably done the rounds but it's well worth reading if you haven't already for the sheer twee violence at work.

Also, interesting comment:

A4e stink, charities stink and this coalition stinks

1) and 3) are obvious, but I'm interested in 2. Non-profit capitalism is an interesting concept, a sort of pathological version of a co-operative. And I do think there's an increasing trend towards it. Perhaps NGOs are the new multinationals.

transmission belt

I still can't get over this morning's Cameron press conference. The incredible thing, as I said, was the transition in what was respectable to discuss. The Guardian went the whole hog and brought up the whole ball of police corruption, and Michael Crick of the BBC pressed very hard on the question of the money. Well, you might have expected that from them.

But ITV News's reporter demanded to know whether News International might shred all the evidence, Adam Boulton from Sky News was the first to raise the BSkyB issue, the Times wanted to know about the content of Coulson's "assurances", and the Sun asked if Coulson had betrayed the prime minister. Even if the Sun guy couldn't actually bring himself to say "Andy Coulson", it was quite the showing - about one step from a Nile TV-style on-air apology.

Cameron's response was odd. At one point he said this:

Democracy is government by explanation and we need the media to explain what we're trying to do".

Apparently he believes the mass communications organisations are a transmission belt between the Party and the People. How bizarrely communist.

At one point, he started talking about transparency, government credit cards, and releases of government meetings data. This was frankly surreal; I wasn't expecting him to go all ScraperWiki.

He also went on endlessly about having given Coulson a second chance. So much so that this was evidently a talking-point he'd been intensely coached with. I do wonder what work this was meant to do. Was it just meant to sound patronisingly nice? Surely someone ought to ask if he's soft on crime. After all, while criminals are in prison, you know they aren't spying on the families of the war dead.

The Tory crisis plan seems to be in two parts:

1) Hide behind OFCOM and the police.

2) Counter-attack Miliband's press secretary Tom Baldwin, because he used to work for the Times.

If you take this at face value, it implies that all current or former News International journos are marked men. So, I asked Tim Montgomerie if he would join me in calling for the resignation of Michael Gove, former assistant editor of The Times and current Education Secretary. We need to get a grip, etc. He's not replied yet.

all around the world I've been supporting team blogging proposals

I have mostly been blogging the cuts at Stable & Principled this week. Somebody had to.

How the Government produced a comprehensive spending review without mentioning the monster housing bubble or using the word recession more than once. Smoke and mirrors, and housing benefit cuts. Has Dave from PR got his jets mixed up? Why the Army has quite enough helicopters, thank you, and past statements are no longer operative. Carefully taking no decisions at all on defence. Can the Shirley Porter strategy save the Shower Jobby?

David Cameron...and the MAFIA, but not in the way you think

This Crooked Timber points to a column in the Economist about interns on the Bush campaign carefully hand-writing a range of fake homemade signs, confiscating the ones their positively vetted audience had brought along, and issuing them to the crowd for the media to wow over their rural authenticity. Well, not surprising. And the Economist guy was clearly so shocked he almost said something.

At the moment, however, I can't help but think of this touching scene in terms of signalling and secret communication. The problem is Diego Gambetta's Codes of the Underworld: How criminals communicate, which recently attracted attention because of its section on the vital importance of mediocrity to some Italian academics. I'll do a formal review of it later, either here or at AFOE, but before we do that, let's try putting it in practice.

He argues that much behaviour among criminals is driven by the problems of communicating things like group membership, reputation, and availability of goods or services in an environment where it is both easy to fake it and impossible to signal openly. Therefore, members of the Mafia never use the word "mafia" or indeed any specific term to refer to the organisation - what could be harder than trying to convince your mark that you are part of a mighty criminal society whose name you don't know? - and they operate a sort of web of trust, in which two mafiosi who don't know each other can only meet if one who knows them both mutually vouches for their identity.

A crucial element is the creative use of biological signalling theories, which revolve around the insight that an identifying signal needs to be cheap for a real user to produce, but expensive for a faker, or at least, that a signal needs to represent a real commitment of resources to be credible. In this sense, I think I can see the purpose of those signs - we know, after all, that the canned crowd were willing to be relieved of their own signs and have others thrust into their hands. Would you put up with this treatment?

I suspect if you're reading this, you would probably find both the reality of the censorship, and the aesthetic horror of the fakery, quite offensive. But then, you're also unlikely to want to be part of a canned crowd for George W. Bush....unless you were trying to fake it for some reason. Clearly, one of the effects of this procedure was a form of cost-discriminating signalling - the organisers demanded that their activists signal certain things that fakers would find difficult to mimic. You had to demonstrate that you were willing to abandon your stated opinions and wave ones they gave you instead.

As far as I can see, the qualities this process selected for would be obedience to authority and tolerance of ugly kitsch. Does anyone doubt that these would indeed qualify you to wave a sign behind the former president? This is an example of using costly signalling to communicate with people who score highly on the indices of social authoritarianism; as well as the political implications, it's probably true that staging a preplanned media photocall with a crowd of people selected for their obedience to authority is just easier.

This is something which comes up occasionally in Gambetta; it's possible for communication to evolve independently of intention. Even if our man the Bush '04 intern was trying to stop the rent-a-mob turning up with 666 - TAKE A CLOSER LOOK!!! or OSAMA BIN KERRY signs, the way he did it had the secondary or unconscious effect of selecting the kind of person who would appreciate them most.

Over time, such effects could come to determine the culture of an entire political movement. Obviously, people who go to rallies are likely to be the same people who take part in all the other forms of campaigning, so if this (and other practices with similar effects) are common, it would likely tend to help boil down the base to its stinking, bitter, toxic, sticky residue.

O.K. Enough beating about the Bush. A practical example with David Cameron. The thing to grasp here is that whatever he's apparently saying, or not saying, may be better understood as a way of identifying and communicating with like-minded people on a secure side-channel. Here, he's saying that we don't need to do anything, plus a whole lot of implied ideological justification. The obvious corrolary of not needing to do anything is to suggest that nothing is wrong. But what is the cost investment here?

first mover advantage

If it's possible to get Americans to start a string of minor riots in order not to have at least $80bn worth of national healthcare, surely it must be possible to start a good row about whatever it is the Conservatives have in store for us? We stand to lose at least that and more. I ask in the light of this post at Bickerstaffe Record, which suggests, not stupidly, that making an Aunt Sally of the credit rating agencies might be a good idea for a demo.

After all, it's very true that they played a key role in the great crash, and before that in the post-dotcom Enron/telecoms fraudfest. As Eavis & McLean point out in The Smartest Guys in the Room, the rating agencies were in the best possible position to work out just how much debt Enron had hidden down rabbit holes and in other people's wheely bins - because every time Enron pulled another fancy dan financing, they had the ratings agencies rate the bonds that came out of it.

We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it.

And, strategically, this is always going to be a problem, because unlike all other forms of credit risk assessment, the agencies make their money from the party issuing the debt, so it's always in their interest to be optimistic. (Similarities with this little beauty of a deal are entirely appropriate.) When they are dealing with private clients, that is; if it's Argentina or Britain involved, they just go ahead and shoot. John Quiggin has an excellent post on their failure and their role in pushing PFI in Australia.

But I have my doubts that any such action will change their opinion; in fact, it wouldn't be the aim of such an action. The point would be rather to render their opinion less relevant and alter the conditions under which it is formed. However, I have just ordered the domain name standardispoor.com, and I welcome suggestions for what we might do with it.

More broadly, what worries me is that the Tories will pull some horror out of their back pocket in the financial year 2010-2011, and by the time it's passing through the House, we'll just have started getting angry. This is one of the historical lessons of On Roads; if you really want to stop something, you need to start earlier than you think.

This is why, by the way, projects like FreeOurBills are important. If there's no point protesting about a road project after it gets into the national programme, the answer is to shorten the feedback loop and react quicker. This is much more interesting and important - real citizen technology - than Twittering for Iran, DDOSing low value Russian Web sites, or any of the other manifestations of the fake version.

So this is one of the few good features of open primaries I can think of; they provide an opportunity to put together an organisation early in the game, which is roughly how Obama dunnit. In a parliamentary system, though, this is much less important.

Shouldn't we be getting our lists together now, rather than waiting for the Tories? I agree that this implies giving up on the elections, but then, who wouldn't, and who doesn't suspect that a surviving Labour government wouldn't be just as bad?

too many right-wing meetings

OK, so I got no takers for this prediction.

My money’s on the Latvian or the Hungarian to out himself as a buffoon or neo-nazi.

Not surprising, really. But what I didn't expect was that even though the Latvian turned out to be the neo-nazi, the buffoon would turn out to be Timothy Kirkhope MEP, the Tory leader in the European Parliament, who I had always assumed to be an uninspiring but roughly acceptable placeman. But it looks like the Borat Party's Borat is actually its leader. However:

He and the Latvian LNNK denied that it was in any way sympathetic to Nazism. “There was a commemoration of those who had served in the Waffen divisions of the Wehrmacht in the Second World War. The Labour Party has been churning this thing out over and over again,” Mr Kirkhope said.

“The truth of the matter is that attendance of the commemoration service for those who have died in wars is not just by members of LNNK — it is by others attached to the EPP because the Baltic states were taken over and oppressed by the Russians and the situation was that the Germans conscripted a number of people to join the Waffen.”

"The Waffen divisions of the Wehrmacht"? What the fuck is that even supposed to mean? For a start, "Waffen" means "weapon or "armed". Did the German army of the Second World War have any unarmed ones? Of course, it's completely nonsensical as a unit designation. Kirkhope was presumably trying to skate around the phrase "Waffen-SS", which refers to the SS's field units as opposed to its "general purpose" administrative staff.

But even if we straighten out his mangled words, his argument is still ignorant and morally awful, as it rests on the long-discredited idea that all the atrocities of the Eastern Front were the work of the SS, and the regular German army obeyed the laws of war. Further, even if that wasn't wrong, he would still be hopelessly ahistorical, because the various locally recruited units the Germans set up starting in 1942 were administratively attached to the Waffen SS, not the Army. The Army did recruit a lot of foreigners as individual replacements, but it didn't create a foreign legion; the SS did.

And worst of all, the earliest Latvian SS were recruited from a vicious militia which emerged as the Russians pulled out in the early summer of 1941 and immediately started murdering the local Jewish population without even waiting for the Germans to show up. The degree of horror they achieved regularly sickened hardened soldiers and deeply impressed the SS Einsatzkommandos that followed the army; they lost no time in signing them up and using them all over Central and Eastern Europe to do the dirty work, including acting as the guard force at the extermination camps.

As if you needed any confirmation of this, the Times report has a useful photo of a Latvian remembrance day parade, complete with red-and-white flag, swastika, and Adolf Hitler's likeness. A note for the guidance of readers, and Timothy Kirkhope MEP: if you need to know if your allies might be fascists, check if they like to wave flags with Hitler's face on them. This is not an exclusive test, but the false-positive rate is essentially zero.

(Oh, and if anyone's still interested in the bet, I'm taking the Belgian guy or at least his party to place.)

Loonies 2.0

What is the legacy of the so-called "loony left"? The conventional wisdom is clear; it was all their fault, for panicking the swing voters and preventing a sensible, Newish Labour solution emerging earlier. Well, how did that work out?

And it has always seemed disingenuous for the Labour Party establishment to blame local councillors for a period when the party's central institutions were regularly totally out of contact with the public mood and spectacularly incompetent; it certainly serves the interests of the top officials and MPs to push responsibility onto an amorphous and vague stereotype essentially based on hostile newspapers' take on the 1980s. Arguably, believing hostile newspapers' take on itself has been the fundamental mistake of the Left since about 1987; the entire Decent Left phenomenon, after all, was all about demonising anyone who was right about Iraq in identical terms. Does anyone imagine that the Sun in the Kelvin McFuck era wouldn't have savaged and libelled any non-Tory power holders?

In a comment at Dunc's, Paul "Bickerstaffe Record" says:

I want to kick off a bottom up meets top down economic analysis of how Labour /Left leaning local authorities should now be challenging the Thatcherite orthodoxies of cost control/rate capping in a sort of ‘1980s no cuts militant’ meets 2000s grassroots-dictated economic policy. The institutional/legal framework has of course changed out of recognition since 1984, but heh, that’s a challenge rather than an insurmountable problem

He has a point. Consider the position; it's still conceivable that Labour might luck into a hung parliament next year, cue Liberal and Nationalist (of various types) rejoicing, but any realistic planning has to include a high probability of a fairly rabid Tory government in the near future. Further, the financial position is not great - it's nowhere near as bad as Gideon Osborne makes out, as a look at the gilt rates shows, but it's very far from ideal.

So whoever is in charge will be looking for cuts, and it is a reliable principle of Whitehall politics that one of the best ways to get a policy implemented that you want for your own ideological aims is to attach it to a supposed saving. Only the special relationship and the police-media complex can beat this principle as all-purpose justifiers.

The possibility space includes a Labour government in coalition or under a toleration agreement with the Liberals, which is likely to still be strongly influenced by the Blairite stay-behind agents, a Conservative government heavily influenced by products of 80s Tory culture (the mirror image of the London Labour party in the same period), and some sort of grand-coalition slugthing. It is clear that the balance of risks is towards an effort to legitimise a lot of ugly hard-right baggage through an appeal to cuts.

The Tories are planning to make all spending departments justify their budgets at line item level to none other than William "Annington Homes" Hague; it's certainly a first in British history that the Foreign Secretary will control the public spending settlement, if of course he finds the time to show up.

Therefore, even though there is a need to steer the public finances back towards balance once the recession is clearly looking over, there is a strategic imperative to push back and push back hard against the agendas the cross-party Right will try to smuggle through. After all, the nonsense industry is already cranking up.

Which brings me back to the importance of being loonies, and a bit of politics by walking around. One thing that strikes me about North London is how much stuff in the way of public services here was visibly built in the late 70s and the 1980s; there is a reason why Ken Livingstone hopped right back into the Mayor's office. Despite all their best efforts, the Thatcherites were never quite able to shake the core welfare state; was it, in part, because down on the front line people were still pushing out its frontiers and changing its quality?

A lot of ideas (service-user activism, notably, environmentalism, a renewed concern for architecture and urbanism, and the whole identity-politics package) that were considered highly loony back then are now entirely orthodox and are likely to stay that way, especially given the main parties' obsession with putting taxpayer funds into the "third sector".

I fully expect that anyone who talks a good game about making black schoolboys click their heels in front of teacher - you know the stuff they like - will be able to secure reliable venture capital funding in the million class from a Cameron government, just as they have been able to from Boris Johnson's City Hall, with remarkably little monitoring. William Hague will be snarky. Let him. Nobody cares what the Foreign Secretary has to say.

This creates both opportunities for action - perhaps someone should prepare a Creative Commons or GPL toolkit for citizen-initiated delivery quangos and thinktanks - and also targets for ruthless mockery, when the Tories' preferred third sector entities fuck up. We've already had some very fine examples of this courtesy of Boris Johnson. Clearly, the only rational response to the times is to go mad.

Sauce!

Philip Hammond is whining.

One year ago, Philip Hammond thought the economy was OK, that the crisis was made up, and that everything would be even more wonderful if he got a tax break on his own property interests. In fact, Hammond was arguing frantically for the government to encourage people to buy property into the crash, around about the same time as he forgot to mention three million quid in dividends from his own property interests.

Three million quid, made from dealings with the public sector, too.

the latent content of this airport, however...

This really is getting strange. The Tories look worryingly convinced of the wisdom of a plan to build a gigantic airport in the North Sea, split between two separate islands, because you never need to change the runway a plane is going to depart from...right? At the same time, the Government is considering a gigantic tidal power scheme in the Bristol Channel. It's like French engineering civil servants seized control in a bloodless coup.

In fact it's not; they would at least think they were being rational, but surely not even the promoters of this weird rush to create Big Dumb Objects all over the shop can believe this.

On the one hand, you've got the Tories, who are trying to convince themselves that they can find £40 billion, before inevitable cost overruns, to create a operationally crippled airport 53 miles from central London and only 101 miles from the nearest point of Dutch territory, dependent for land transport on spare capacity on the CTRL and on the 6 (I think) Crossrail and 2 LTS train paths an hour slated for the Southend/Shoeburyness route, and for road access on pure handwaving.

BorisWatch deserves some kind of medal for their reporting here; they successfully derived the actual location of the project by following Boris's boat trip in real time on ShipAIS, a ship-tracking ham radio site, and then prepared a handy Google Map, which is where I got the measurements from.


View Larger Map

How often, I wonder, would Borisport be fogged in? Even with CATIIIA/B autoland it's a serious constraint, and enough of it will stop ground operations even if you can still get in. And then there's all those heat-seeking gulls to worry about; they hunt in packs! The air traffic control issues are pretty gnarly, too - departures conflicting with arrivals into LHR, LCY and LGW.

Further, they want to be seen as "green" whilst also creating another Heathrow-and-a-half. But why? What is it with this obsession with airports in the Thames estuary? As always, the key to the present lies in the past. Here's the Hansard transcript of the debate on the Maplin Development Bill back in 1973. Three things come to mind - first of all, weren't MPs great back then? Of course, there is the usual parish pumpery, Bufton Tuftonism and tiresome faff, but there's also a lot of well-informed intelligent debate, and in the end the government lost!

Second, all the problems are still the same. This is because they are mostly what the Soviet general staff called the permanently-operating factors - terrain, human terrain, infrastructure. Third, there's a fascinating bit of the social history of ideas here. We join the debate with Douglas Jay MP on his feet, following up an excellent showing (or shoeing) from Tony Crosland...

Mr. Jay: What was the pressure exerted on the Roskill Commission to omit Stansted from its short list? The Times told us on 4th March 1969 that its inclusion would have been "emotive". At the same date the Financial Times said that its omission was "diplomatic". The British Airports Authority and the Board of Trade assumed that it was bound to be on the short list. The British Airports Authority was even told that it need not ask the commission to put it on because it was certain to be included. Yet it was omitted, and the commission's work was handicapped from the start. 700 Thus handicapped, in my opinion the Roskill Commission did its very best. Faced with the resulting choice between Foulness and a South Midlands site for which there is a good deal to be said, it came down decisively against Foulness and in favour of Cublington.

Then we had another curious alliance between landed interests in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire opposed to Cublington and commercial interests anxious to develop Foulness—

Mr. Norman Tebbit (Epping): Before the right hon. Gentleman leaves the point about Stansted, in fairness to my predecessor in this House I ought to say that he was one of those opposed to the Stansted project. I would never think of him as being in the pockets of wealthy landowners or any set of that kind. It happens that I disagree with him on this issue as on many others, but it is right to be fair to him. Incidentally, I have a house on the approach to Stansted too.

Mr. Jay: I never suggested that. I was recalling what happened. According to The Times of 5th April 1971, the group resisting Cublington spent £50,000 "to persuade the Roskill Commission that the airport should be built at Foulness and not at Cublington"—" not just that it should not be built at Cublington but that it should be built at Foulness.

After the Roskill Commission's report, this group spent a great deal more, and the same article in The Times said that the pro-Foulness propaganda groups together spent "at least £700,000" to convince the public and Parliament that Foulness was the right solution.

At this point Sir John Howard enters the argument. According to the article in The Times that I have quoted, he was head of a civil engineering firm and, incidentally, a former chairman of the National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations, though no doubt that is irrelevant. He happened to live near Thurleigh in Bedfordshire and he founded the Thames Estuary Development Company to promote the Maplin project. The Times says that Sir John "first lighted on Foulness during the fight against Stansted, in which he was closely involved."

He "lighted" on Foulness as it were by chance. His consortium, backed also by RTZ, John Mowlem and Shell, spent more than £500,000 in supporting the Foulness case. Much of the driving force in all this thus came not from people impressed with the merits of Foulness but from those who wanted to keep the airport away from other sites.

Here I return to the speech of the hon. Member for Southend, East. What was the opinion of more than 150,000 people living in the Southend area about this? That is for them and their representatives to say, and I am sure that we shall hear the hon. Member for Essex, South-East (Sir Bernard Braine)—

Sir Bernard Braine: I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will be accurate. There are 310,000 people living in the three constituencies bounded by the Thames and the Crouch who are affected by this proposal.

Mr. Jay: I always believe in understatements because they strengthen one's case. The hon. Gentleman has strengthened my case further. What were the opinions of those 300,000 persons—far more than live within 20 miles round Stansted, perhaps three times as many? I am sure that the hon. Member for Southend, East will not question this as a fact. But I understand that with the support of the leader of the Southend Corporation the corporation took a share in Sir John Howard's consortium, and the town clerk of Southend, according to The Times, became a director of it. Whether that was the best way of handling these matters, I have no doubt that all those concerned thought that they were acting in the best interests of Southend.

Sir S. McAdden: The right hon. Gentleman asked what were the opinions of the people of Southend. They were never consulted. This was a decision of the council to invest £100,000 of the ratepayers' money in Tedco. The council thought that it would make £6 million. Instead, it has lost the lot.

Mr. Jay: It is what I have always suspected to be the truth. I stated it rather diffidently, but the hon Member for Southend, East has confirmed it. From the point of view of this House, the opinion of the Roskill Commission on Maplin is worth a good deal more than 702 that of this consortium formed in the way that I have described.

I am afraid that what emerges from the story is that both the selection of Maplin and the omission of Stansted have been influenced far too much by the money spent on the commercial publicity and far too little by serious consideration of the public interest.

I see Tebbit was already as much of an arse as he later became, too. Permanently operating factors in the human terrain.

More seriously, I'm fascinated by the fact that the whole idea of Maplin/Foulness/Sheppey/Marinair/Borisport pushed by three different Conservative administrations originates with a gaggle of Tory squires trying to win a planning row in some completely different bit of the country. I wonder if Sir John Howard ever seriously meant it? Or did it just get out of hand? The Tories always will be the party of the Landed Interest, just as when their first response to the great crash of 2008 was to look for handouts to their property-shark contingent; another permanently operating factor.

Meanwhile, over the wall, the Government has aimed squarely for a soggy compromise. My own views on Heathrow expansion are heterodox and unpopular. Here goes: I don't particularly mind if aviation makes up 29% of the 2050 CO2 target, so long as we get there. Nobody sets out to emit CO2 - it's waste, and when did you last hear of someone saying "Thank God our widget production line produces so many widget flakes we have to dispose of"? Converting stuff into more valuable stuff is what it's all about, and any production of valueless stuff makes us poorer.

I'm with James Hansen on this one - it's the coal-fired power stations, stupid, and the buildings. If we can't fix the cars and buildings and power generation, it doesn't matter a fucking jot what we do about aviation. Because, after all, buildings are easy, power and cars are getting easier, aeroplanes are hard. We're not far now; look at this hub-drive electric motor project at Michelin. Solar and wind are now the leading sources of new electrical power.

And, if there must be expansion, it ought to be at an existing airport because of the ATC issues. And if we're going to be expanding an existing airport, well, it may as well be the one the airlines want to use. Further, it's good to maintain the various conventions that limit activity at Heathrow - I was surprised to see that mixed-mode operation accounted for almost a third of the expected capacity increase. And yes, I did hold this view when I lived there.

And if we're doing this, we ought also to do other things, like building a north-south high-speed rail route and better public transport in general - saving oil and CO2 emissions for things that we can't yet substitute. Like insisting on change to the European ATC system, which could save 10% or more of the air fuel requirement without pouring concrete or sacrificing anything at all. Like air-source heat pumps and insulation, or...well, enter your favourite project here.

Unfortunately, the government has no credibility on this. Neither does it have any credibility on the eventual target for movements at LHR anyway - they always burst the target, which isn't included in an act of parliament and therefore is pretty meaningless. And their efforts to balance the Heathrow decisions are crap - a high speed rail "hub" at LHR? On a line from where to where? Great Western electrification is good, but this sounds like a piece of recreational investment that might seriously harm the prospects of building a proper LGV network.

And the responsible minister is Geoff. Fucking. Hoon. Of all people. Aren't you in jail? Aren't you dead yet? (I suppose that does not die which can eternal lie.) And so, I conclude, I'd better oppose it anyway. It's the only way to be safe.

Meanwhile, across the way, the Tories want to "examine" high speed rail. Woo. More talk. And, ah, build a forty billion quid airport in the sea, whilst keeping Heathrow open as well (good luck with the 70-odd mile transfer!). As someone said:

Our government is pitiful, whoever you vote for.

They surely can't mean this; back in 1969, the Foulness scheme was a political manoeuvre, a Straussian statement. I suspect its resurrection is something similar.

What are they trying to hide? Is this an effort to kibosh offshore wind development? Are Dave from PR, Gideon and Boris climate change deniers? Or what?

Attack Of The Camorset

Cameron today outlined his plans for economic responsibility to replace "irresponsible capitalism and irresponsible government" under Labour. He began his attack by accusing the prime minister of basing his financial decisions on "false assumptions" that he said had left the economy in ruins.

Among them were the ideas that a successful economy could be built on a "narrow base of housing, public spending and financial services" and "that you could abolish boom and bust, and that the good times would last forever".

Eh? A Tory complaining that the economy is too dependent on housing and financial services? Yes.

"We've got to broaden our economic base to include more science, more hi-tech services, more green technologies, more engineering and more high-value manufacturing, drawing upon a much wider range of industries, markets, people, towns and cities."

Did he just say that? Did Dave from PR just announce a medium-term industrial strategy? This is, by any measure, a political moment of the first order; the Tories, the people who decided UK plc should be a huge investment bank based in London, ran a high interest rate and strong pound policy that killed off most of engineering and high-value manufacturing, and whose pet thinktank apparently believes the North should be evacuated...they said that?

Perhaps they've realised that yes, Virginia, the UK is no longer an oil exporter because they pissed it all up the wall in the 80s and 90s, and that turn-London-into-a-huge-investment-bank thing ain't looking so clever any more. Perhaps they've found one of Michael Heseltine's old memos from his shakeout'n'invest period in the files. OK, then, where do I sign?

But what is this?

He dismissed critics who believed that "permanent state intervention" was the only way to avoid a repeat of the problems. Those who believed the change the country needed was a "turn to the left" were wrong, he said, as he promised to inject greater responsibility into the economy through a centre-right platform of measures

Responsible us back the DNA-sequencer activities of Amersham International plc, willya? Could you perhaps responsible up a wave power industry while you're there? Anyway, before we slide into bitterness...there's also this.

He promised a new debt responsibility mechanism, with the Bank of England required to write regularly to the Financial Services Authority about sustainability of the level of debt in the economy. "If the level of debt is growing unsustainably, the bank will instruct the FSA to ensure banks either slow their lending or put aside more capital."

So no permanent state intervention....except for the bit where you take powers to intervene in the management of the entire banking sector, including the bits that are still independent of the state. Also, direct government controls on lending? Isn't that the Sovietisation of Britain or something? What next, exchange control stamps in your passport?

But that's apparently it. Cameron is planning to regenerate the entire industrial base (and "high tech services", which I think means BT Global Services 'cos we don't have any other firms like that since Leo Computers in the 1960s), and he intends to do this simply by running a smaller budget deficit, and imposing a bank lending corset. He's not even promising any tax cut ponies.

There is one actual measure in there, though. Apparently he wants to change the insolvency laws to protect "sound but struggling businesses" (and again, there's a sick laugh from the 80s for you...). But how is this going to interrelate with the Cameron Corset proposal? Camorset for short, which sounds nicely like the sort of southwest-central shire where the buggers come from. If it's harder to cut off credit to those "sound but struggling" businesses, but the banks have to reduce their loan books 'cos Dave says so, where do they cut? Doesn't that imply they'll have to bear down on everyone else even more? Why should a sound business that's not struggling quite enough to be protected take the punishment? (Why don't any Tories seem to understand marginal economics at all?)

The grass is several shades of blue; every MP trips over you...

So, the Tories are currently making hay on the economy, while the black clouds are overhead. Unfortunately it's all drivel, and specifically, it's drivel because the current economic crisis is entirely the result of the Tory economic settlement. The promise of infinite free money from property was the core Thatcherite proposition, and its costs (specifically, high interest rates and a high pound) were traditionally covered by North Sea oil. Of course, rising house prices aren't actually money, just a way of borrowing from your kids, with the special feature that they don't get any schools or railways for the borrowing. But the Tory achievement was to get an economy specialised in property speculation accepted by both major parties. And, as we have seen, they have very good personal reasons to pretend that the government could just stick the bubble back together if it wanted.

All oppositions pretend something like this, of course; but it's incumbent on them to have some idea of the difference between bullshit and government. Just look at the Tories' performance over Northern Rock. To recap, they thought the Bank of England's money was taxpayers' money in August but not in January; they thought the Bank of England was an independent agency in August but under ministerial line management in January; they imagined the Bank of England had vastly more money that it does throughout. Thank God for the civil service.

And even if you grant them a huge pass on administrative reality, their stated positions are wildly incoherent. In the pastel corner, there's Huggy Dave's quality of life reports. In the phlegm-spatter corner, there's Mad Jack Redwood's report on how the economy can be revived by letting private "care homes" pack in more codgers per square foot. What an invention - the battery granny farm. Will the staff get Dave from PR's improved work-life balance? Bollocks they will. However, Greasy Phil Hammond's specialist NHS property development firm, Castlemead Developments Ltd, would presumably find investments in this field rather tastier. More seriously, what the hell does Mad Jack think our problems are? Aren't they more about the tradable sector, and what happens to the balance of payments with an energy import bill and tanking City volumes?

None of this should be any surprise. Look at the chief economist of chouchou snackthinkers Policy Exchange. What has he discovered? Well, his tube train was late, and so he's written "England: An Obituary on a Great Country". Seriously. And he apparently thinks "Britain" supplies IKEA goods and services, rather than a huge Swedish multinational. This used to be the quality of a middling to poor Tory newspaper columnist. Now it's their intellectual foundation.

Hammond's Sauce Works Band

Recently, our dear duckspeaker Philip Hammond MP had his local talking points cache refreshed. He's now constantly saying that the Government is causing "uncertainty" in the housing market because they haven't decided whether or not to cut stamp duty, and that this is a problem. Both statements are of course completely vacuous at best, and actively misleading at worst. For a start, the housing market is tanking. We're in the worst property crash since 1983, says the Halifax; that's another way of saying that the Halifax started computing an index of real estate prices in 1983. It's not impossible that it's the worst since the Great Depression. The price of property is dropping with the almost supernatural swiftness of an economic imbalance that finally clears; at the moment, anyone who wants to buy a house would be literally insane to do so, as it is as certain as anything in economics ever is that it will be much cheaper in a year's time.

Of course, this only matters if you can raise the money. At the moment, the banks have practically stopped lending, so whatever happens to stamp duty is risibly irrelevant. Further, all these statements go double the smaller the deal; nobody who owns a house is ever likely to struggle to raise mortgage money if they want to buy another, but without new entrants, who can they sell to? What mortgage lending is going on is actually very good business for the banks, because it's practically all to people with lots of existing equity, and at higher interest rates too.

Supposedly, according to Hammond and the real-estate lobby, reducing stamp duty would help people raise a deposit in order to pass the new and more astringent lending criteria. But this is obviously drivel. The large majority of new entrants are either zero-rated or in the first, 1% band, so their stamp duty bill will be at the very most a couple of grand. If they have to raise a 20% deposit, well. It's not going to work. If you've got £18,000 to plunk down as a deposit, and the stamp duty at 1% is a dealbreaker, shouldn't you either be waiting a few months, looking for somewhere cheaper, or getting a better mortgage broker?

Further, there's the marginal issue. The Tories seem to be collectively blind to the existence of marginal effects, as if their love of classical economics had carried them back past Hayek and von Mises and Bohm Bawerk all the way to the 19th century. For example, they want to "encourage marriage" by offering a tax break to the married; but the only extra marriages this will result in are the ones where the spouses wouldn't stay together but for the tax break. And those aren't likely to be gems, are they? Similarly, the only additional house sales a cut in stamp duty will cause are ones where that sum of money is enough to make the difference; not very many, as we've just seen. But we're having an epic financial crisis precisely because the banks lent so much money to people who couldn't pay it back. Do we really want more crappy loans?

So; it's completely ridiculous to suggest that cutting stamp duty will do any good, it's frankly irresponsible, and it's even sillier to imagine that buyers are holding off wondering if they'll have to pay 1 per cent more or less, when they can be certain they will pay 10 per cent less in a few months' time and perhaps 30 per cent less in a year or two. So why is Hammond so obsessed? (And he is. Check out the 14,400 Google results, including a veritable barrage of official Tory press statements.)

The first point is pure clientelism. What stupid Tory giveaways have in common is that although their marginal effects usually defeat the stated point of the exercise, they usually succeed in showering one or other campaign demographic with cash. A tax break for married couples won't actually do any good, but it will provide a payoff for several key voter groups who don't even have to do anything; the money just comes. Similarly, the people who are dealing in houses at the moment by definition have lots of equity and cash; who else can get a mortgage? They would get the tax break as much as anyone else. Kerching! Another group who would benefit either way would be the real estate lobby itself; and the sheer number of property millionaires who have quartered themselves on London since Boris Johnson's election should explain this reasonably well.

The second is Philip Hammond's own personal financial interest. Here's something he added to the register of interests in June, his shareholding in Castlemead Ltd, a company whose main interest is....property development, of houses through its stake in Castlemead Homes Ltd and of NHS primary care centres through Castlemead Developments Ltd. (I reckon the Tory position on PCTs wants watching, no?)

This must be no small holding, either; he managed to forget to declare a £3m dividend from the firm. That's enough to make him the the second richest man in the Shadow Cabinet with net wealth (I refuse to describe it as "worth") of £9m. No wonder he spends so much time howling for the propertied interest. He is talking his own book. But surely even he can't be worrying about the stamp duty on his £1.5m pad in Belgravia? Even at the 4% higher rate?

Perhaps he's dead, I'll just make sure...

Boris Johnston really is turning out to be as bad as it was blindingly obvious he was going to be. There are no shortage of examples, but this one in particular makes me shudder with fear. Yes, it's the desalination plant.

Desalination? Yes. But it's not just that. A desalination plant that will produce about as much water as Thames Water loses in leaks. Seriously. Thames Water, and presumably the Borisphere (and surely none could be more spherical) claim it will be cheaper. Well, this may be true...for values of "true" including "assuming that our massive complicated prestige project won't go over budget" and "assuming the price of natural gas doesn't go up - after all, there's an infinite quantity of it in the North Sea, right?"

But it's worse. The justification for spending a ton of money converting natgas into drinking water and pouring the water into pipes WITH HOLES IN, rather than spending some more money (perhaps) fixing the bloody water pipes already, is that it's "pro-motorist".

Yes, the reason is that repairing the sodding water mains might be inconvenient to the bizarre sect who insist on bringing huge metal objects into central London and spending their day looking for somewhere to put the things so they can get out of them and start walking, when there was a perfectly good parking space back home in the suburbs they could have left it in. Yes, he is proposing to burn vast quantities of scarce fossil fuel imported from Russia so other people can more easily burn vast quantities of scarce fossil fuel imported from Saudi Arabia, when they have no reason to do so at all.

But it's not the specifics that are the worse bit. It's the general principle; policymaking based completely on pandering. I mean, why not go the whole hog and just GIVE people who claim to vote Tory actual cash? At least plain bribery wouldn't do as much damage to London's infrastructure. Unfortunately, this is precisely the spirit of Boris. On one hand, you've got the appalling pork barrel fan service. On the other, you've got the politics of spite and revenge; the deliberate effort to be unpleasant to anything described as feminist or anti-racist, the made-up stories about fabulous wine cellars, the fake audit team. And that, by the way, is a move copied precisely from the made-up "Clinton staffers trashed the White House" bollocks of 2001. You ask Dean Godson and Sooper Don Blaney.

This is, of course, completely inimical to anything that could be described as competent administration. Which is a pity, because there is famously no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage. The point of a mayor is precisely that; waste disposal, policing, space planning, infrastructure, social services.

Part of the good news is just how good the blogs on Boris are. Tory Troll and Boris Watch have forced their way into my RSS aggregator in the last few days. And it's all an effective preview of a future Tory government: pandering, content-free government, and ideological revenge campaigns in the civil service.

one intelligent soldier

Said Sir Michael Rose, speaking at the SAS passing-out parade in 1979: One intelligent soldier can achieve more than a fleet of B-52s. There's some debate as to whether that statement could be applied to Rose himself, but I doubt many would disagree with it.

David Davis apparently agrees. His resignation from Parliament should be understood as an exercise in the struggle for strategic influence, specifically directed at the growing decent/neocon faction in the Conservative Party. I have been a little surprised, and pleased, by how well the Tories have held up on the Counter-Terrorism Bill, ID cards, and related issues; I would have thought the Murdoch influence would be telling by now. And, indeed, there are signs of change within - Boris Johnston's win seems to have hugely strengthened the Policy Exchange/Michael Gove current, while Cameron's annoying press chief Steve Hilton has run off to California. His BlackBerry is unlikely to be enough to compensate for the distance, which must strengthen Andy Coulson's role as Rupert Murdoch's ambassador to the Tories.

But now: cazart! Davies' replacement, Dominic Grieve is even talking about repealing the 28 day provisions. Stick that up your punter - I think not. There's not going to be any cave-in now. It's part of the Westminster traditional language that, to be considered principled, an act must also be ineffective or poorly executed, which is one of the reasons so many people have been at pains to accuse Davis of Machiavellianism or frivolity. People who want something that isn't evil or dishonourable don't get to pull off brilliantly outrageous triple-crosses, do they? Yes, of course it's Machiavellian scheming - this is politics after all, and that's how things get done, and the people who complain are usually the ones who were outschemed.

If you needed evidence that the Davis coup is significant, you need look no further than the emergence of an actual Murdoch candidate running against him. Yes, Kelvin McFuck is back, looking to add another name to his litany of post-Sun failures. He is one of very few men to actually fail to make money by underestimating the public's taste - it's not like News Bunny ever made a penny... But, this time, he is clutching a promise of actual financial support from News International, plus close air support from the paper itself. Inevitably, the media establishment is busy writing him off as a joke candidate, which makes as much sense as writing Davis off and is being done for precisely the same reasons.

Whether McFuck realises it or not, in a very serious sense Davis was running against the Sun Party from the word go. What does the Sun actually stand for, politically? Well, now we know - we can read it off McFuck's public statements.

He also told the BBC he would be campaigning on three issues - hostility to the "sense that our country is somehow in the grip of some kind of security vice", demanding that there be "the referendum for Europe", and on more populist issues - like seeking changes to government spending on "things I don't think we care about".

In a BBC Radio 5 interview, he was slightly more specific about point three, saying that he wanted to ban BT from using "automatic voice responders and call centres". You have to wonder whether a man who had just come from a late-night dinner with antisocial binge drinker Rebekah Wade was entirely sober, but there is a clear pattern here - he, and it, stand for authoritarianism, the Special Relationship in the worst sense, and fake populist gut-chafing (this latter, of course, is essentially content-free).

Putting it another way, McFuck's candidacy is an exercise in the promotion of power-worship. It's Schmittian conservatism; the permanent crisis requires an Ausnahmezustand, which demands a strong leader who may incidentally beat up the odd call centre to demonstrate their compassion for the weak, who are very much intended to stay that way. Note that McFuck's not interested in the people who work in the call centre. Only a numskull like Geoff Hoon could think the Government ought to field a candidate - it should be clear enough to everyone else that the Government, in many ways, already is.

In this light, it's clear why Davis is standing and why he deserves your support - it's only contradictory that he believes in both the death penalty and habeus corpus in terms of generalised progressivism or liberalism, which he doesn't believe in (or he wouldn't be a Tory). In terms of classical conservatism, it makes perfect sense to think that the State should have the power to cut your head off, and that its power must be constrained by law as much as humanly possible. (After all, if the State *wants* to kill someone, it's likely to find a way unless someone stops it.)


And, going by the polling data, this is likely to be your chance to help pour the proverbial vast bucket of shit back over McFuck's head. Imagine the scene at the Murdoch summer party - McFuck, red-faced, holding forth, James Murdoch explaining to Rupert, ticking quietly on his death-support system, that there's this thing called the Internet and it's like TV that you read, Wade drooling slightly over Wendi Deng's shoulder but still reasonably coherent, the plates of roast baby stewed in the juice of freshly squeezed minority shareholders well dug into but not quite down to the toying level yet. All seems well with the world...and then, the disruption. Forced to show their hand.

This is also to say that Dan Hardie was right. He's been a Davis fan for some time; I was doubtful, especially after he reacted to the police crime figures going down by suddenly deciding the BCS was right all along. But when the time came...

There's a PledgeBank here; and what's this? Bob Marshall-Andrews and Colonel Tim Collins? And Kings of War. And Peter McGrath. It's like going back to the 2005 general election, maaannnn.

Indecent behaviour at a police station, TPCA 1847

This essay by Ian McEwan in the Guardian Review shows precisely why the Decent influence on British intellectual life is so damn depressing. You may think, and I would say the AaroWatch crew are guilty of this, that they are just a bunch of wankers left behind with their blogs after history moved on. But their unpopularity is not all that important - the whole Decent project is intended to be an elite/intellectual one, based on influence rather than numbers.

On those terms it's succeeding, what with the ramifications it's developed in the Conservative Party...and its effect on the literary establishment is pretty grim, too. McEwan will never be a core-group Decent, even though he wrote a whole book about how terribly civilised, self-controlled surgeons compared to those irresponsible scum protesting in the streets. He's too good for that, and style has a role to play as well - Martin Amis's epic self-dramatising fits in perfectly with a movement as queeny as Decency, but McEwan's literary protestantism doesn't quite fit. But they are having an effect on him.

Consider this essay. It's a good, solid piece of work; a well-researched reflection on the continuity of apocalyptic thought in human societies, and the way it projects the real horror of mortality - that the world goes on without us - onto precisely the society that will always outlive us. But then, but then; you read this:

It was inevitably a transition, the passing of an old age into the new - and who is to say now that Osama bin Laden did not disappoint, whether we mourned at the dawn of the new millennium with the bereaved among the ruins of lower Manhattan, or danced for joy, as some did, in the Gaza Strip.

They didn't, though, did they? The TV image in question turned out to be stock footage shot months before, and no-one remembers the BBC lead of that night from Palestine, Yasser Arafat giving blood for New York. There is something wrong here - after all, why would you want to involve Palestinians at this point? They didn't bloody do it, man. Why not say - in Afghanistan, where the orders for the attack were given? In Saudi Arabia, where the attackers came from and where, in all probability, the money came from? In Hamburg, where the terrorist cell actually prepared the attack? Why give a location at all - someone, after all, will have danced for joy somewhere?

And here we go. McEwan now devotes several hundred words to the revolutionary notion that Wahhabism, Nazism, and Stalinism are undesirable and would be best avoided, something no Guardian Review reader is likely to have thought before him. He cites Christopher Hitchens, raging about John F. Kennedy, but oddly doesn't seem aware that Richard Nixon nearly started a nuclear war in 1973 or Ronald Reagan in 1984 with the ABLE ARCHER crisis, one which was particularly perilous because it happened without any of the diplomatic crisis management Kennedy's cabinet wrapped the Cuban crisis in. There is a message here, no? And it's not about apocalyptic thinking, at least not that kind.

But McEwan, as I said, will never be a real Decent. American Christian Identity types come in for a lot of flak, as does the Israeli settler movement. The fox is struggling to hedgehog up. On the other hand, though, it's there - the creationists get given an explicit pass on the suggestion they don't really believe it, and we've dealt with Palestine further back. This is undoubtedly a Decent document, which is a great pity, because its indecent curves are stunning when shown.

Meanwhile, I was driving away from Windsor Great Park on the day of the Queen's Cup polo match when I saw, over a hedge, the top of a Routemaster! Given the bizarre significance of the things to the PolEx/Godson/Standpoint/CCO/Martin Bright club, I'm tempted to imagine it as the transport for the Decent assassination squad.

Donal Blaney: Hypocrite

February 23, 2008:

One of things that I find so frustrating about blogging is dealing with people who are either stupid, venal or willfully choose to misrepresent your views. More often than not, these people post anonymously and decide to tar their opponents with the epithet "racist", "homophobic" or "fascist" in the hope that by using such a description, debate is closed down and they win by default.

O rly?

February 25, 2008:

Moving on from the oh-so powerful list of race-baiters who announced their endorsement of Ken Livingstone, we now see a new list of Livingstone supporters - except that this time it isn't particularly impressive at all.

The idea that this alcohol-dependent divisive figure should be re-elected as Mayor is absurd. He has had his time and it is time for a change. While Boris Johnson may not be perfect, he'd be a damn slight better as Mayor of London than Ken Livingstone.

A few years back I observed that the Tory policy which envisaged an opposition on fundamental principle to the Euro, but only for the life of one parliament, made it possible to objectively estimate the length of a Tory principle at something less than five years. Clearly, exposure to the Leadership Institute has enabled the puissant advocate Blaney to dramatically reduce the half-life; it's like a political linear accelerator that blasts neutrons off anything you place in front of it.

However, given enough power you can transmute lead to gold with a real linac; this version works more in the opposite sense. A reverse Maxwell's Demon; it actually increases entropy by reducing information.

Further, note the interesting fact; the first post has an active comments thread. The second, containing two arguably libellous statements ("race-baiters"? "alcohol-dependent"?) as it does, doesn't. Blaney again:

Such is their intellectual insecurity that they will not engage in honest debate and instead they resort to infantile abuse in an attempt to stifle debate. I cannot help but wonder whether these people would not prefer to live in a police state where only certain views (theirs) are allowed to be held because the venom and vitriol that flows when you dare to stand up to them is quite astonishing. It says a hell of a lot about them and their upbringing.

How right you are, eh.

Regarding his "race-baiters" smear, it's worth stopping for a teachable moment here; this is a classic piece of extreme-right rhetoric. You could call it the phone-in three card monte. First of all, you make a coded attack on some group or other; Where is the BBC White Male Middle-Class Network? Well, it's called Radio 4, as someone pointed out. The basis of all this stuff is that you deny that racism exists; the existing institutions are perfect, so any specific provision for any other group is illegitimate. (Don't miss him getting schooled about the World Service Polish programme, either.) Then, when you get called on it, whine like a whipped dog;

The fact that I do not believe in multiculturalism, cultural apartheid or so-called positive discrimination automatically makes me, in their eyes, a racist - despite the fact that in opposing these beliefs I share the same worldview as the likes of Martin Luther King, Bishop Nazir-Ali and Trevor Phillips.

Finally, you're ready to launch an inversion smear: see comments above.

Now, the messages that are actually transmitted here are as follows: first of all, Look at me! Bashing THOSE PEOPLE! (This one for the benefit of your target audience.) Secondly, to the wider public: I'm a lady libertarian. (This one is an exercise in working the ref; it's necessary camouflage.) Thirdly; RACISTS RACISTS RACISTS!! Nur-nur-nye-nur! (This one is intended to demonstrate your aggression to your target audience; see Josh Marshall's classic statement.)

Blaney: hypocritical, intellectually dishonest, determined to import everything that is most repellent about US politics into Britain. And apparently cool with the idea of shooting Greenpeace protestors.

Three far better things to read than Diddy Dave

So Dave from PR's got a vlog, then. Well, that's only realistically going to be crap, isn't it? It almost amounts to a definition of blogging that, if you issue a press release to the nationals before you start, that's not it.

May I recommend, instead, one of many fine British blogs? Daniel "Dsquared" Davies on the disease of Crap Government IT, managerialism, and statis (it's the new change). The Ministry on John Reid, Tony Blair and the word "radical". Forceful and Moderate on the desperately shit nature of jobcentres - why do they have computers in them that are guaranteed not to have access to the majority of job adverts, and why should you be forced to use them?

Any one of these is certain to beat Dave's efforts, and might even make you think. And if that happens to you, you'll just have to read Chris Dillow.

The West Yorkshire Question

I've never taken the West Lothian question very seriously (how many men have we lost because of it?), and I usually don't engage with it. But there is something I'd like to fork over about the semi-federal nature of Britain. One may recall that, not so long ago, Dave from PR and other Tories were complaining about the hypothetical situation where a Labour government is elected with a working majority UK-wide, but a minority of MPs in England, implying that it depends on Scottish MPs to continue in office. They argued that, as Scotland has self-governing powers on many issues, it would be wrong for the government to legislate on anything purely English unless it had a majority of English MPs (put it another way, unless the Tories said so).

This would, in practice, create an administrative potmess of epic proportions as the government followed its own policies in all-UK matters and those shared with Scotland and Wales, the Tories' policies in England-only matters, and God knows what in cases of doubt.

But that isn't my real beef. The problem is the idea that if one area of the UK elects a lot of MPs of the other party, it's perfectly fine to chop it off so the Conservative Party can hoist a flag on the rest. I propose, then, the West Yorkshire question.

If it is unacceptable for a government with a parliamentary majority in the UK, but not among English MPs alone, to legislate for England, why is it not also unacceptable for a government with a majority of English MPs - but not if a strongly supportive region such as West Yorkshire were excluded - to legislate for the rest of England?

Update: Charlie's comment induces me to restate the problem. The Tory understanding of the WLQ is that, roughly, either there should be a new England-only level of government or that there should be an effective Conservative veto on England-only legislation. But why does this argument not also hold for, say, West Yorkshire? England-only legislation could be passed under such an arrangement by a government with no majority of MPs in Yorkshire, depending on their strength elsewhere. If this is wrong at the UK level, it's very odd to consider it entirely right at the level of England.

My conclusion is that this is purely self-serving. The Tories like West Lothian because it offers the (distant) possibility of gerrymandering a large number of Labour, Liberal and nationalist voters out of much of the parliamentary agenda. They don't draw the further inference because it would deny them the same privilege. For bonus points, consider this. WLQ assumes that the UK is a confederation, in which the centre cannot overrule the members. Devolution assumes that it is a federation, in which powers are divided among levels of government in one entity. Why do the Tories reject the European Constitutional Treaty, which would have created a confederal structure for the EU, on the grounds that it weakens the UK as a national state, whilst arguing for confederalism at home?