Phillips on Barack Obama

I notice a lot of people are visiting this site by searching for information about Barack Obama. You might therefore be interested in a piece in the Spectator by Melanie Phillips entitled Princess Obama. Here are the central paragraphs:

Welcome to Planet Diana. It was only with the death of the People’s Princess that the extent of Britain’s transformation from a country of reason, intelligence, stoicism, self-restraint and responsibility into a land of credulousness, emotional incontinence, sentimentality, irresponsibility and self-obsession became shatteringly apparent. Princess Diana was an icon of the new Britain because she embodied precisely those latter characteristics.

It became clear that politicians could score remarkable short-term success if they too got in touch with their inner trauma and felt everyone else’s pain. Bill Clinton (hideous irony for Hillary) was the first to realise this and made it his political signature. Tony Blair, whose lip periodically quivered with precision timing, had it in spades. David Cameron has it; so too does Obama.

The effect is electric, but short-lived. That is because Dianafication is essentially empty, amoral, untruthful and manipulative; eventually voters see through it and realise they have been played for suckers. But while it lasts -- and it creates presidents and prime ministers -- reason doesn’t get a look in. Warm fuzzy feelings win hands down because they anaesthetise reality and blank out altogether those difficult issues which require difficult decisions. Obama appears to be on the wrong side of just about every important issue going; indeed, were he to be elected president he would be a danger to the free world. But hey – the guy makes people feel good about themselves; he stands for hope, love, reconciliation, youthfulness and fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Spelman In The Hot Seat

Those of you who submitted questions for us to ask Caroline Spelman will be pleased to know that the Conservative Party Chairman's responses to our "hot potatoes" can now be found in the new issue of The Difference. Questions include:

• President Bush has warned those who wish to pull troops out of Iraq that we risk creating another Vietnam. Is he right?
• In a multicultural society, should bishops be sitting in the House of Lords?
• Do you think potential victims of crime should have the right to use force to defend themselves and their property?
• Is pornography too easily available?

Here is how Caroline responded to a couple of the questions you suggested online:

Have the Conservatives gone lukewarm on the EU Referendum?

"Not at all, and recent interviews with David Cameron, and the numerous interviews that William Hague has given, are a clear demonstration that this is something we feel very strongly about, that Brown has broken the manifesto pledge to hold a referendum on the European constitution and there needs to be a debate in parliament. If the government won’t give up its own time to debate this, then we certainly will."

How can the Conservatives stay in the news headlines in the run-up to an election?

"With a lot of hard work and planning! There has to be substance, which means we have to do a lot of research. We have to think through the consequences of any announcements and then follow through. You can’t have piecemeal, gimmicky announcements, that don’t hang together as a coherent whole.

"Something we learned through the last election is the importance of being consistent in our language and message: the importance attached to trying to heal the brokenness in our society and trying to help people understand the concept of social responsibility, which means that the problems we see around us are not somebody else’s problems but that we’re all in it together."

See also Caroline's views on Michael Ancram's "simple political creed"

Is Pakistan Really Democratic?

If you are lucky enough to see any real news today (i.e. anything besides Gordon Brown's decision not to give us a general election), you might chance upon report from Pakistan that President Pervez Musharraf has won a controversial presidential vote — controversial because the country's Supreme Court has yet to decide whether the General was able to stand while still serving as the head of the army.

Although Musharraf has again given an "offer of reconciliation to all political parties," Pakistani Christians are now saying that the election commission rejected the nomination of their presidential candidate, Joseph Francis, the leader of the Pakistan Christian National Party, citing article 42 Pakistan's constitution, which bars non-Muslim candidates from running for president. At a time of heightened religious tensions, with violent attacks against churches and some Christians being threatened to convert to Islam, if the president is serious about wanting to create stability in the country and "to eliminate terrorists and eradicate extremism," he will need to work not just with his political rivals but also with the country's religious minorities. Given that Musharraf is one of the West's strongest regional allies in the New Great Game (aka what used to be called the "fight against terrorism"), one can but hope that quiet diplomatic pressure will be exerted to persuade the one-time coupe leader to include all Pakistani citizens in his "National Reconciliation Plan."

Hague on Mugabe's Knighthood

"Zimbabwe stands as a monument to the truth that while the power of a good government to do good is not infinite, the power of a bad government to do bad knows no limits."

Repeating calls he made in yesterday's Human Rights Commission fringe meeting, William Hague has not only echoed calls for tougher sanctions against Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe, but has just told the conference the dictator "Still enjoys an honorary knighthood from Britain. It is time it was stripped from him."

To much applause, he has also pledged that the next Conservative government will enact legislation that will require all future governments to submit any proposal for passing more powers to Europe to a national referendum.

If all these policy commitments prove sufficient to motivate those who would traditionally be inclined to support the Conservative Party to get out and vote, then Gordon Brown might find a closer fight on his hands - when he does pluck up the courage to announce a general election - than the opinion polls might presently suggest.

The Shadow Foreign Secretary has endorsed The Difference campaign, saying:

"I fully support The Difference magazine's campaign urging greater international action on Zimbabwe.

Robert Mugabe is a repulsive dictator who has brought devastation to his country for twenty-seven years and it is time for the international community to take firm and concerted measures against his regime. The European Union should apply additional European sanctions to Zimbabwe without delay: widening the scope of the EU asset freeze and travel ban to include all relatives and business associates of members of Mugabe's ZANU-PF party, and subjecting the Governor of Zimbabwe's Reserve Bank to similar sanctions would be a clear signal of our intent. Beyond the EU, Zimbabwe's neighbouring countries, in particular South Africa, must also join the rest of the international community in pursuing a clear strategy to resolve the crisis.

The Zimbabwean people deserve our full support and their misery must not be allowed to continue."

Conference Diary - Sunday

Well, I finally made it to the sunny delights of Blackpool ... after spending 3 1/2 hours broken down on the M6 (not my car)! Like others, I applied for my conference pass back in July. Also like others, I have been phoning Fingerprint Events every day for the past week in order to find out why I still hadn't been accredited. Eventually, yesterday, somebody decided they ought to let me in after all and I didn't even have to queue for more than a couple of minutes today before being able to collect my pass, so there's no turning back now.

Before leaving home this morning, I did catch some of David Cameron's interview with Andrew Marr. Coming in as they were discussing the Conservatives' dramatic loss of strength in all the opinion polls over the past year, with Marr saying something about needing "to have an analysis of what you need to change and therefore what went wrong" in order to bring about change, I thought he was about to pick up the conference theme and ask Cameron whether it was "time for change" in the direction or even, if Marr was really unsympathetic, in the leadership of the Party. However, he let Cameron plough on to talk about crime and the breakdown in responsibility in evidence across the country.

Cameron went on to assert that "We have a real opportunity after last week where there was a long list of pledges but no explanation. No explanation of how we get there." As I noted yesterday, whether in three days' time we will have seen sufficient breadth and depth of policy announcements and whether they hold together as a coherent expression of the Party's vision to heal our broken society could determine whether Gordon Brown has the courage to opt for an early election and could determine what kind of Government this country has for the next five years: another five years of "nanny knows best," top-down, big state interference, or the chance to build a new society in which families and communities are empowered to take control of their our lives. The challenge is indeed huge. Let us all hope he rises to it, or we will all be the worse off for it.

Brain Scans Predict Voting Behaviour

Thought you might find this New Scientist report interesting:

Political affiliation could be all in the brain

A brain scan might one day predict your voting patterns. That is the implication of a study that found different brain activity among liberals and conservatives asked to carry out a simple button-pushing test. The study implies that our political diversity may be the result of neurological differences.

Researchers have long known that conservatives and liberals score differently in psychological profiling tests. Now they are beginning to gather evidence about why this might be...

Brain recordings taken using electroencephalogram (EEG) technology showed that liberals had twice as much activity in a deep region called the anterior cingulate cortex. This area of the brain is thought to act as a mental brake by helping the mind recognize "no-go" situations where it must refrain from the usual course of action.

The new findings are "interesting and provocative" because they could perhaps help enable researchers to predict a person's voting behaviour based on brain scans.

If you think that's just an irrelevant bit of fun, check out Tony Blair's Minority Report!

Embrace the Islamists

According to preliminary results in Morocco's parliamentary elections, the conservative Istiqlal (Independence) party appears to have unexpectedly beaten the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD). Many had feared that the PJD would win and will no doubt be relieved by this result. Yet, as an article in Time noted just a week ago, "The PJD is among the most transparent political parties in the country."

We might do well not to assume that all political parties coming out of Islamism are as extreme as Hamas in the Palestinian territories, who have refused to renounce violence. For scholars maintain that just about every other mainstream Islamist party that has participated in democratic elections, including Turkey's AK Party, Jordan's Islamic Action Front and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, has demonstrated a strong commitment to democracy and civil rights. We should heed the lesson of the Algerian debacle when, in 1991, the secular military stepped in after the Islamic Salvation Front won 47% of the vote in the country's first free legislative elections, resulting in a brutal civil war that raged for more than a decade.

In the Middle East and across North Africa, the questions of democracy and of political Islam are inseparable. Therefore, if we wish to see democracy spread, we are going to have to engage with political Islam. Recalling how Abraham Lincoln once said, "The best way to overcome an enemy is to make him your friend," maybe Osama Bin Laden is halfway right when he invites us to "embrace Islam." However, we do not need to convert to his radicalism. Rather, perhaps we need to embrace the Islamist moderates in a democratic hug.

The New Politics

"If he could persuade middle Britain that schools were improving, hospitals were working efficiently inside the public sector, more houses were being built, and that this was being done without more tax rises, then it doesn't matter whether Cameron heads further right or back to sunny-land. Brown would win anyway. But it would be a historic beating, not just an autumn ambush."

So suggests The Guardian on "the new politics" of Gordon Brown, on the day that the prime minister has announced that Conservative MPs Patrick Mercer, former Conservative homeland security spokesman, and John Bercow, former Shadow Secretary of State for International Development, and Lib Dem MP Matthew Taylor are to advise Gordon Brown's government in their areas of expertise.

Now, while I may be in favour of consensual politics, "concentrating on long-term problems" rather than "indulging in tactical games" and relating issues to their "effect on the economy rather than on party position," with education standards falling, hospitals being closed, and repossessions on the rise, all against a backdrop of the highest tax burden in decades, I find it hard to imagine how things can get any better for Brown once his honeymoon begins to wear off, as today's opinion polls appear to indicate may already be happening.

Morning After the Night Before

I think the Norfolk Blogger says it all when he notes: "A party that expects to challenge for power should at the very least have overtaken the Lib Dems in Ealing Southall (which is what [the Conservatives] claimed in their leaflets) and they should have hung on in Sedgefield to keep second place."

Once again, I find myself wondering, are we ready for a snap general election?

Obama, Islam & The West

Religion, as everyone knows, is a big deal in American politics. Which is why Barack Hussein Obama might be just what the world needs as successor to George W Bush.

Described as "a liberal's liberal" and "way to the left of the repositioned Mrs Clinton," the media has understandably latched onto the question of race and asks whether he could become America's first black president. However, the question of faith is equally interesting. For, although he is a committed Christian, as is indicated by his non-Western names, he comes out of a Muslim background. Last October he wrote in a piece called "My Spiritual Journey" in Time magazine: "I was not raised in a religious household ... In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology." So, like the vast majority of the world's Muslims, it may be a nominal Muslim background. Nonetheless, Muslim it is — as is evident from his 1996 biography, Dreams from My Father, which describes how his father was a Muslim, he was raised by a Muslim stepfather, and his first two years education was at a Muslim school. To any orthodox Muslim, that makes him a Muslim — and, as a professing Christian, an apostate Muslim, at that.

Just as Obama is quick to reject any suggestion that his campaign represents "an easy shortcut to racial reconciliation," neither does his candidacy promise any swift solution to the problem of radicalised Islam. However, it does offer him a unique opportunity to reach out to moderate Muslims, who represent the majority within Islam, and invite them to affirm article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that "Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief."

Writing "The next president" in the current issue of The Difference, Michael Veitch concluded, "Whichever candidate ultimately ends up in the White House, the sort of relationship they choose to forge with Britain and the rest of the world promises to be a spectacle no less fascinating than the election itself." Taking a personal stand against the kind of rhetoric we have heard preached even this week by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden's deputy, over "apostate" Salman Rushdie's knighthood, may not win Barack Obama the American presidency, and would almost certainly make him the prime target of Al-Qaeda's hatred, but it would go a long way in helping draw a clear distinction between the radical and the moderate sections of the Muslim community.

As this week's Newsweek notes, "From his earliest days as a politician, Obama has made a career out of reconciling opposing sides." Having consistently opposed the Iraq war, he might be uniquely placed to help reconcile Islam and the West.

Are We Ready?

The BBC's Nick Robinson is right when he says it's been a great few days for "Not Blair". Gordon Brown's performance on Sunday AM was exactly what one would expect from a new Conservative Prime Minister — as Andrew Marr put it at one point, "Cleaner hospitals, more city academies, pushing power down. These are all Conservative Party policies." Conservative supporters I have spoken with have been impressed with the humility with which Brown spoke when he first entered Number Ten. One suggested his "substance" will increasingly make David Cameron look flaky.

With Brown's cabinet expected to announce constitutional reforms including a British Bill of Rights and greater powers for MPs over decisions traditionally exercised by the prime minister and with his insistence, echoed by the leader of the Commons, Harriet Harman, that he will brief MPs rather than journalists about the government's business, I can well imagine the odds on a snap election will very soon drop. After all, the former Chancellor knows better than any of us the fragile state of the economy. All he needs is to do what the Conservatives feel unable to do and promise the country a tax cut and Cameron may discover there's nothing he can do to prevent an unprecedented fourth Labour election victory.

Cameron-Clinton Partnership?

The Spectator has a thought-provoking piece arguing that "a centrist Democrat such as Hillary Clinton has more in common with Cameron’s Tories than any Republican" and therefore The Tories should be backing Hillary. It notes:

Both have recently given major foreign policy speeches, and although they opt for different language (Cameron chooses ‘liberal conservatism’, Clinton ‘realistic idealism’) they offer the same principles, prioritised in the same order: first, a reassurance that they are prepared to use military force when appropriate; second, an absolute rejection of the neoconservative project; third, an emphasis on multilateralism in any future endeavours. Gordon Brown is too tied to Iraq to claim anything like the same degree of common ground.

Even in domestic policy, on a whole range of issues — women’s rights, the importance of the family, investing in state education, ending cronyism and the culture of spin in government — Hillary Clinton sounds remarkably like David Cameron. She is a free-marketeer, but one who recognises what Cameron calls ‘our moral obligation to the people and the places left behind by globalisation’.

So, who would like David Cameron to make the Spec's suggested announcement: "Due to the importance of maintaining the Special Relationship whichever parties are in power, the Conservative party will not pick sides or have partisan arrangements with any particular political party in the United States"?

Wot No Exit Poll?

I don't know if anyone else has commented on this but it's been bugging me since 10pm last night and I can't find anything on any of the other likely political blogs (please correct if I'm missing it somewhere): What happened to the customary BBC exit poll? Normally, whenever polls close, the BBC is the first to predict the eventual result based on its exit poll. Did they really not conduct one (if so, why not)? Or was the result so bad for Labour that they decided not to reveal the results and hope that over a 24 hours period of results trickling in, we would all get bored and not notice that the night had been a veritable disaster for Labour and an incredible success for the Conservatives?

Not that the BBC is biased in any way, of course...

Wot No Labour?

Having been up all night at one election count and having just returned from another, I can't but share my satisfaction at having orchestrated a 15.1% swing from Labour to Conservative, doubling the Conservative vote and evicting the sitting councillors of thirty years standing from a very safe Labour ward. Further, our council now has NO Labour representation at all – you should have seen the face of one of the local Labour MPs when he showed up late only to be told that none of his candidates had been successful. LibDems performed miserably too. Now to repeat the result nationally...