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.

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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As I Was Saying

I have reluctantly returned to occasionally reading ConservativeHome. Despite the fact that it is often uncritical and utterly sycophantic towards the Conservative party, it does, from time to time, throw up the occasional interesting nugget.

Tim Montgomerie, in a piece entitled ‘Ken Clarke: Tories will get more pro-European in office’, has highlighted a few interesting comments made by Mr Clarke at a recent conference:

I think the need to be working with Obama will influence my party on Europe. It is still firmly Eurosceptic but it’s now moderate, harmless Eurosceptism. It’s a bit silly sometimes, like which group do you join in the European parliament, but full-blooded stuff like renegotiating the treaty of accession is as dead as a dodo. We’ve got lots of ideas on European policy on energy, security, relations with Russia, climate change, all that kind of thing [but] somebody like me is far more relaxed about all that [and if the Tories] get into office the pressure of the American alliance will make them more European.

Now, let us be reminded of what Mr Peter Hitchens perceptively observed about euroscepticism:

The word ‘Eurosceptic’ means ‘a person who adopts anti-EU rhetoric in opposition, and then surrenders to the EU in government’. This is inevitable. You cannot be in the EU and not run by it, any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. If you don’t like being run by it, you must leave, as all serious students of the subject long ago realised.

Ken Clarke and Peter Hitchens will be proven right, in time. I also suppose this just confirms what I was saying yesterday really, doesn’t it?

Same Old Same Old

I suppose that there’s a lot that could be said about Ken Clarke’s return to the frontbenches and the Shadow Cabinet – but I would have thought that by now we would know most of it already.

We know well that Mr Clarke is quite stringent in his pro-EU views. (Incidentally, at least they are principled, even if I disagree with them, which is better than can be said of many other MPs and young wannabes that spring to mind). We also know that he took to the stage with Michael Heseltine, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in 1997 to promote the Euro currency, and we know very well that he has been critical of David Cameron during his tenure as Conservative leader.

But, really, does any of this actually matter? Why is so much being made of Mr Clarke’s views on the European Union? What cause for disagreement, beyond rhetoric (which is so often meaningless these days), have Mr Clarke and Mr Cameron had so far? There is only a promise to take Conservative MEPs out the EPP-ED, which mysteriously failed to materialise, and a grudging commitment for a post ratification referendum on the Lisbon Treaty – but only if the General Election is held early, which it won’t be – that stands between them.

In fact, one wonders whether the Conservative party even has a policy on Britain’s relationship with the European Union which Mr Clarke could speak out against and break. I can’t think of one.

So, far from causing in-fighting within the parliamentary party, Ken Clarke’s re-emergence from the cold will simply mark another day of business as usual in the life of Her Majesty’s Official Opposition. Under Cameron’s leadership the anti-EU cause has not been furthered – there’s little chance that it will be.

Euroscepticism doesn’t mean anything anymore anyway – it is simply a phrase used by those in opposition who adopt anti-EU rhetoric, but when in government willingly surrender to the EU. It is inevitable. But then sadly I think we knew that already.