The Return Of Barking Cat Syndrome

Well, I suppose it would be fair to say that this is not strictly a ‘return’ of Barking Cat Syndrome since the condition never really went away in the first place. However, it has most definitely re-manifested itself in the form of Libertas.

In 1973, Milton Friedman wrote a column in the American magazine Newsweek entitled, Barking Cats, which attacked the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its bureaucratic control of pharmaceutical drugs, and acted as a follow-up to previous works that he had co-written with his wife calling for the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration.

In his column, Friedman addressed his critics who had argued that the FDA should not be abolished but that instead its powers should be changed in various different ways. Friedman wrote:

What would you think of someone who said, ‘I would like to have a cat, provided it barked’? Yet your statement that you favor an FDA provided it behaves as you believe desirable is precisely equivalent. The biological laws that specify the characteristics of cats are no more rigid than the political laws that specify the behavior of governmental agencies once they are established. The way the FDA now behaves, and the adverse consequences are not an accident, not a result of some easily corrected human mistake, but a consequence of its constitution in precisely the same way that a meow is related to the constitution of a cat.

In his memoirs fifteen years later, Milton Friedman remarked that the column was one of the best he’d ever authored, both in substance and form. Furthermore, such an argument directly relates to the proposed aims of Declan Ganley’s new trans-European political party, Libertas.

Ever since his involvement in the Irish No Vote to the Lisbon Treaty back in June last year, Mr Ganley has consistently stressed that he is in favour of the European Union – it’s just that he wants it to reform and become more democratic. Ganley said:

It sends a very clear message to those unelected elites and bureaucrats, who seek to daily interfere in our lives more closely, that this cannot go on without proper accountability. The EU needs to change. Libertas believes in a strong Europe but also believes unless democracy is at the heart of that we’ll never be able to deliver.

Yet, like a cat that cannot bark, the European Union cannot be democratic because that is not the way it was designed to be. At its heart the EU’s institutions were deliberately created with the intention of being able to make decisions without public approval.

Thus, the EU is democratically unreformable and as such you are left with only two choices: either remain in it and submit yourself to being undemocratically run by it, or leave and forge your own destiny. There is no in between.

A Matter Of Faith

The Telegraph reports on the Government’s latest attack today on independent faith schools by the creepily titled Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls.

Since the 1960s, when Labour’s Roy Jenkins and Tony Crosland first decided on the importance of controlling society through culture rather than just the economy, the political Left have ideologically pursued a comprehensive state education system whose aim has been ‘equality’ rather than to give children a good and rigorous education.

It should also be said that much of the Left have not actually changed their views or indeed their end goals in any conceivable way. What they have done is simply changed the way in which they have gone about achieving those goals, through culture and social engineering rather than economic means.

What is more, unsurprisingly for a party (the Conservatives) who tend to measure their success in office by how many years they have occupied 10 Downing Street, rather than what they have actually achieved in that time, then they have been completely outmanoeuvred by this fundamental shift in attention by the Left.

In fact, in an effort to remain in office, rather than in power, the Conservatives have consistently accepted and adopted the Left’s proposals on education – especially regarding comprehensive schooling and the reintroduction of academic selection – along with many other issues, as can now be seen once again under the leadership of David Cameron.

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Bristol North West

On Saturday I was in the constituency of Bristol North West with a few friends helping to deliver a new glossy magazine-style leaflet for the local Conservative candidate, Charlotte Leslie.

Bristol North West is among the most marginal constituencies in the country. It is seventeenth on the Conservatives’ list of target seats, and due to boundary changes the Labour candidate, who is not the incumbent MP, only has a provisional majority of approximately a thousand votes.

During the ‘Blast Day’, a group of sixty or so Conservatives managed to deliver close to thirty thousand of these magazines, which was very impressive. Those in attendance included Chris Skidmore, the Conservative candidate in the nearby constituency of Kingswood, and Nick Webb who was formerly the Chairman of Bristol and Gloucester Conservative Future.

I was also actually rather impressed by was the quality of the ‘Bristol Living’ magazine we were posting through people’s letter boxes. In the past the Conservative party has perhaps been guilty of presentational neglect in its leaflets. Talking down to the electorate is never a good idea, and obvious party political literature tends to go straight in the bin without being read.

Bristol Living is a variation of a similarly-styled magazine which the Conservative party is delivering across the country. The difference between these new magazine leaflets and older-style black and white literature is that they are in a format that people are used to reading. As a result copies are more likely to appear on coffee tables up and down the land rather than in a green recycling box outside the door through which they were posted.

Clearly though, presentation is not the only thing that matters. Substance is very important too – and this is currently where the Conservatives are often extremely lacking. While the magazine was good at introducing the candidate, in this case Charlotte, to the electorate, along with the causes she has been fighting for, including pub and post office closures, the party has not yet developed a detailed plan of what they aim to do in Government.

Royal Mail Privatisation

According to BBC News, Lord Mandelson has said that the only way to ‘save’ the Post Office from unprofitability and its huge burden of pension debt is through partial privatisation.

Similarly, Gordon Brown said in a speech in Bristol yesterday that private investment in Royal Mail was imperative in being able to guarantee its £25bn pension fund and maintain a universal postal service.

The strength of feeling on this issue in the Labour party is clearly quite strong. I was in the Lords Gallery on Wednesday when the Labour peer Lord Clarke of Hampstead, who is a former postman, shouted ‘shame on you’ as Lord Mandelson brought the Bill to the House of Lords for a first reading. In the House of Commons well over one hundred Labour MPs have signed an early day motion criticising the Government’s plans to sell a stake in Royal Mail.

Furthermore, in opposition to Gordon Brown and Lord Mandelson, Billy Hayes, General Secretary of the Communication Workers Union, told BBC News that the privatisation plan was ‘baffling’ and just didn’t make any sense. He also said to Sky News:

I don’t want to see Mrs Thatcher’s ideas, Conservative ideas, being introduced by a Labour government. Let’s be clear: 25%, 30%, Peter Mandelson has talked about 49% owned by a foreign company.

That’s not what people in the Labour Party want, that’s not what people in the country want – they want to see a modern Royal Mail.

Yet, despite so much anger and bitter opposition from many of their key supporters, the Labour Government has ploughed on regardless with the privatisation of Royal Mail.

There has been much discussion in the media and in political circles about why Mr Brown and Lord Mandelson would risk the ire of the Unions and a backbench rebellion when the Labour party is in a weak position in the opinion polls. Unsurprisingly most of this speculation has been far wide of the mark.

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