Bagehot's notebook

BACK in London, one final thought from the prime minister’s tour of Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman. As discussed here and in my print column this week, there is no concealing David Cameron’s view that big changes are underway in the Arab world, and that—despite the real risks that come with change—that there are reasons for optimism, from the fact that the Egyptian army refused to use force against that country’s people to the encouragingly moderate, non-religious demands of the opposition protest leaders he met in Cairo.

What does all this prime ministerial enthusiasm and optimism mean for Israel, given Britain’s already slightly strained relations with that country? There, I think the picture is a bit mixed.

Famously, during a visit to Turkey in July 2010, the newly-elected British prime minister stunned some in Israel by saying comparing Gaza to a prison camp.
This week in Egypt and the Gulf, Mr Cameron said and did some things liable to reassure Israel.

On February 23rd, during his question and answer session with students at Qatar University, Mr Cameron offered a robust defence of Israel’s right to a peaceful existence. He responded to a string of sharply-worded questions about Israel by suggesting that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was used as a distraction by Arab autocrats, saying:

In too many countries in the Middle East, some rulers say to their people ‘be angry about [the Israeli-Palestinian conflict], don’t be angry about the fact that you live in a non-open society’

On Iran, Mr Cameron repeatedly signalled his grave concern about the Iranian nuclear programme. British officials briefed that their government had crossed a threshold of impatience when it came to waiting for the 27 members of the European Union to agree tougher sanctions on Iran. From now, on, they said, Britain was willing to work with a smaller group of countries that were willing to act to curb Iran’s access to international financial institutions, shipping lines and the like.

But at the same time Mr Cameron gave voice to an evolving British view that Iran is a country in need of taking down a peg or two, rather than building up into some sort of terrifying regional powerhouse. Iran’s Islamic rulers, he said in Qatar:

are already suffering from international sanctions. Their economy is weak and vulnerable and the regime only survives by cracking down on its political opposition. On its current path Iran is set to become an international pariah state with no friends, no money, nowhere to go

Asked in Cairo about the Iranian request to send two warships through the Suez Canal, Mr Cameron said he did not think that the international community should pay too much attention or “big up” Iran’s attempts to stir up trouble:

I think we should spend a bit more time actually pointing out the many and varied weaknesses in their political system

But as I said at the start, this was not the whole picture. Just a couple of days before Mr Cameron set off for Egypt, Britain had voted for a draft United Nations Security Council resolution, joining France, Germany and 11 other members of the Security Council in backing the resolution, which was vetoed by America.

What was striking about Mr Cameron’s trip to the Arab world was that he was willing to draw attention in public to the fact that Britain disagreed with America on this subject.

Under questioning on this subject at Qatar University, Mr Cameron told the students that although America and Britain were close allies, on this subject he disagreed with America. Israeli settlement-building was a barrier to peace, he said, and a viable peace process needed the "full commitment of the US".

How does this mesh with Mr Cameron’s cautious optimism about the winds of change blowing through Tunisia, Egypt, Libya or Bahrain? I think, at the very least, there is a mood of urgency in the British camp that has yet to find its echo in Israel, amid a sense that a historic opportunity might be emerging in the Arab world.

Will that sense of urgency evolve into impatience with America, should the administration of Barack Obama prove unwilling to put more pressure on Israel over such issues as settlement building? It is too soon to say, and Mr Cameron knows full well how differently the debate over the Middle East is framed in America. But at the very least, Mr Cameron is in no hurry to conceal this difference of opinion.

Earlier on February 23rd, Mr Cameron held a joint press conference with the prime minister of Qatar, in Doha. His Qatari host raised America’s decision to veto the UN Security Council draft resolution on settlements in his opening remarks. Mr Cameron chose to respond to this in his opening remarks, declaring:

Finally, the Middle East peace process, which you spoke about. This dispute continues to fuel hate right across this region and serious, direct and substantive peace talks are needed more urgently than ever. The time for the two-state solution is running short.  Britain supported last week’s resolution in the UN Security Council because settlements are an obstacle to peace and we call today for a renewed effort to achieve long-term security for Israel and justice and statehood for the Palestinians

Britain is never going to be the country that solves the Middle East conflict. But it has traditionally been seen as a country that can build bridges between an emphatically pro-Israel America and European governments that see themselves as mentors and promoters of Palestinian development and statehood. Just now, Britain looks less like a bridge-builder between two static camps, and more like an ally that fears that the American camp is in the wrong place, and needs to move.

IN diplomacy, a surprising number of things are undertaken so that they can have taken place—rather than because they make especial sense at the time.

Today in Doha, David Cameron held a free-ranging question and answer session with students at Qatar University. The prime minister held scores of “Cameron Direct” sessions during the 2010 general election campaign, inspired by the town hall meetings held during American presidential campaigns. Once in Number 10, he started holding “PM Direct” meetings in provincial towns up and down Britain, and today he held his first one overseas. I felt a faint (and geeky) thrill of recognition as we filed into a lecture hall at Qatar University and saw the same sick-green PM Direct banners that I had last spotted at a question and answer session in Manchester. On our advance programmes, it had looked like a pretty good idea: a British prime minister fielding all and any questions from students in a country where unfiltered access to political leaders is not the norm. Now that it has taken place, it still looks like a good idea, mostly because of that signal of openness that it sent.

I wish I could say it was an electric encounter. It was…ok. I hope it is not patronising to say the students were impressive. They asked serious, thoughtful and knowledgeable questions, many of them pushing Mr Cameron to be more robust in defence of international law and human rights. There was a flurry of questions about the bloodshed in Libya, and why the international community was not doing more to stop the Qaddafi regime. What about humanitarian intervention and the precedent set by the Balkans wars of the 1990s, Mr Cameron was asked. He ducked the chance to call for regime change by force, instead inviting students to consider how the west had intervened to stop ethnic cleansing of Muslims in the Balkans, disproving the canard that the west hates Islam. There were questions about a speech he gave in Munich earlier this month on British multiculturalism, about why he did not condemn repression in Saudi Arabia and several about the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. Mr Cameron said he had not condemned Britain’s multiracial society, but merely condemned state policies that had encouraged different communities to live separate lives. He dodged the Saudi question, and on the Palestinian question said a two state solution was the only feasible ending to this tragic conflict.

When it was over, I asked some of the students who had asked questions whether Mr Cameron had changed their views of British foreign policy. Not really, they said. It was good that he had come to answer questions freely, but he was a professional politician, and he had not given much away. Fair enough, and still, it is on balance a good thing that the event took place.

The same is true of the various press conferences that have taken place in vast, marble palaces all along this whistle-stop tour. In the flesh, they were not very exciting. But in at least one case, in Kuwait, it was the first time that the local prime minister had ever faced the press for unscripted questions. The Kuwaiti prime minister must be a quick learner in that case, because on his very first outing he managed to duck and dodge the questions put to him, and instead answer questions that had not been asked at all.

Again in Kuwait, Mr Cameron gave a speech to the parliament which clarified some important elements of his policy towards the Arab world. On paper, it was a revealing speech, that fleshed out Mr Cameron’s worldview in interesting ways. The very fact of giving the speech in one of the Gulf’s more lively and free parliaments was also, in and of itself, a sensible idea, sending a message about Britain’s support for universal suffrage and accountable government. But, sitting in the room, your correspondent could not help noticing empty chairs, a low hubbub of chatter among the Kuwaiti VIPs invited, and the rather louder hubbub of those members of the audience who answered their mobile telephones during the speech to conduct quite long conversations.

More broadly, Mr Cameron’s visit to Kuwait coincided with multiple celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the state’s independence from Britain, the 20th anniversary of Kuwait’s liberation from Iraqi invasion, and the fifth anniversary of the accession of the current emir. To recognise all these anniversaries, we were told that Mr Cameron would be receiving a formal welcome, alongside Britain’s prime minister during the first Gulf War, Sir John Major, and the Kuwaiti prime minister of today.

Our rag-taggle press corps duly headed for the Emir of Kuwait’s official tent in the Bayan Palace complex. We were due to see the three prime ministers past and present review a royal salute from Kuwaiti armed forces, then an honour guard of Grenadier Guards and veterans from the first Gulf War.

On paper, the solemn ceremony was a valuable reminder of the blood ties between these two allies. In reality, the parade ground was a small car park in front of a palace guesthouse that resembled an upmarket Holiday Inn. The Kuwaiti soldiers were not terribly martial. The guardsmen marched out of the guesthouse in their red tunics and bearskins and were technically splendid. There was much impressive shouting from a British warrant officer to make sure each man was in perfect alignment. Mr Cameron gave a short, well-judged speech. But all in all, it still looked like a group of Englishmen in curious uniforms marching around a sun-baked car park far from home. I do not mean to mock. I am quite old-fashioned when it comes to veterans, and nobody put a foot wrong. But stripped of all context, it looked plain odd.

What I thought, standing there squinting in the sun with my notebook, was irrelevant, of course. The ceremony mattered because it mattered, because it was going to take place, and then because it had taken place. In diplomacy, the message often is the message, I realised. What actually happens is merely physical evidence for the sincerity of that message.

This is the fourth dispatch from Bagehot's trip around the Middle East with Mr Cameron. The previous post can be found here. The next one is here.

DAVID CAMERON woke this morning in the surreal surroundings of the Bayan Palace complex in Kuwait—a city within a city with its own (heavily guarded) motorway exit, well-irrigated gardens filled with lawns and topiary and vast government guesthouses inside which each corridor leads to yet another drawing room or dining room groaning with a full buffet of food, seemingly waiting for peckish VIPs at any hour of the day and night.

February in Kuwait offers crisp, sunlit mornings. The birds are tweeting and the coffee at the palace is good. Alas, Bagehot (who is travelling with the British prime minister) suspects that Mr Cameron's mood may have been soured by the headlines from London. Several newspapers harrumphed at him for travelling with a business delegation that includes executives from eight defence and aerospace companies. This, it was argued, amounted to shameful hypocrisy given that Mr Cameron has been loudly calling for Arab governments to pay heed to the aspirations of their peoples for "basic rights" including free speech, freedom of association, the rule of law and the right to peaceful protest. The charge is that Mr Cameron cannot reasonably say that governments such as Libya and Bahrain must refrain from violent repression, while seeking to sell Arab governments guns.

This is a pretty silly argument, and Mr Cameron duly gave it a whacking a few moments ago at a press conference with the Kuwaiti prime minister (Kuwait's first ever prime ministerial press conference, we were proudly told). Yes, I have executives from firms such as British Aerospace and Thales with me, he told British and Kuwaiti reporters gathered in the Emir's official tent (size of a submarine pen, oil paintings on the walls, big chandeliers). But are you seriously saying that countries are not allowed to defend themselves, or if they are allowed to, that they may only defend themselves with arms they make themselves? This, Mr Cameron went on, warming to his theme, was a particularly odd argument in a country like Kuwait, a small ally that was invaded by a bullying neighbour just two decades ago, prompting a military liberation which cost the lives of 47 British servicemen, among many other victims.

In general terms, Mr Cameron is surely right, though his appeal to the particular case of Kuwait was also a giveaway. There is a world of difference between selling arms to a responsible ally and empowering a thuggish regime that cannot be trusted not to use them for repression. Even Mr Cameron admits that he has been struggling to find out what is going on in Libya, watching the latest images from Tripoli and Benghazi with horror. If there were confirmed reports of British weapons being used against Libyan civilians, from arms deals signed since Britain took the political decision, under the previous Labour government, to embrace Muammar Qaddafi, well, then Britain would have a political problem on its hands.

And yet. If Mr Cameron's intended message on this Gulf trip is not undermined by the arms makers riding up front in our chartered airliner, that does not mean that his intended message actually makes sense. Mr Cameron is here in the Arab world to set out the latest plank of what he calls his "liberal conservative" view of foreign policy. It is a sort of third way of foreign policy, if you will. It essentially splits the difference between what the prime minister calls the "naive neoconservative view" that democracy can be dropped from an airplane at 40,000 feet (take that George Bush and Tony Blair), and the "calculating" view that "Arabs or Muslims can't do democracy" (take that, generations of Foreign Office Arabists, cosying up to Sandhurst-educated sheikhs and offering to help them sort out their rivals with the help of some tanned Englishmen in Land Rovers with no names and no cap badges).

His formal thesis was set out in a speech to the Kuwaiti parliament. In what seemed to be a direct swipe at the ultra-realists of the Camel Corps (as Foreign Office Arabists are traditionally known), he said it "borders on racism" to say that Arabs or Muslims cannot cope with democracy. He went on:

For decades, some have argued that stability required highly controlling regimes, and that reform and openness would put that stability at risk.  So, the argument went, countries like Britain faced a choice between our interests and our values.  And to be honest, we should acknowledge that sometimes we have made such calculations in the past. But I say that is a false choice. 

As recent events have confirmed, denying people their basic rights does not preserve stability, rather the reverse. Our interests lie in upholding our values – in insisting on the right to peaceful protest, in freedom of speech and the internet, in freedom of assembly and the rule of law. But these are not just our values, but the entitlement of people everywhere; of people in Tahrir Square as much as Trafalgar Square.

So whenever and wherever violence is used against peaceful demonstrators, we must not hesitate to condemn it. The whole world has been shocked in the last few days by the appalling violence which the authorities in Libya have unleashed on their own people.

Violence is not the answer to people’s legitimate aspirations.  Using force cannot resolve grievances, only multiply and deepen them. We condemned the violence in Bahrain, and welcome the fact that the military has now been withdrawn from the streets and His Royal Highness the Crown Prince has embarked on a broad national dialogue.

If people’s hunger for a job and a voice are denied there is a real risk that the frustration and powerlessness people feel and the resulting lack of connection with the way their country is run: can open the way to them being cut off from society or worse drawn to more violent and extremist responses. That’s a problem for the Arab world but it’s a problem for the rest of the world too.  

In a direct swipe at naive neoconservatives, Mr Cameron also said:

...democracy is a process not an event. And important though elections are, participatory government is about much more than the simple act of voting. Democracy is the work of patient craftsmanship it has to be built from the grassroots up. The building blocks have to be laid like the independence of the judiciary, the rights of individuals, free media and association, and a proper place in society for the army. It can’t be done overnight. And if you want evidence of that just look at the history of Britain, a constitutional monarchy which has evolved through time, and where so many of our rights under our laws predate our right to vote by 700 years.  My second belief is this. Political and economic reform is vital but it has to be pursued with Al E’htiram with respect for the different cultures, histories and traditions of each nation. We in the West have no business trying to impose our particular local model

If you want the short version, I think it can be boiled down the prime minister's repeated use of the phrase "false choice". In Egypt yesterday and Kuwait today, he has told us that the supposed trade-off between stability and freedom is a false choice.

And this is where I think his strategy does not quite hang together. My problem is that his thesis is so dependent on events, or rather the events that he chooses to highlight. He told the Kuwaiti audience:

History is sweeping through your neighbourhood. Not as a result of force and violence, but by people seeking their rights, and in the vast majority of cases doing so peacefully and bravely. Across the Arab World, aspirations are stirring which have lain dormant.

They can take inspiration from other peaceful movements for change, such as the Velvet revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, the civil rights struggle in America, or the peaceful transition to democracy in Muslim countries like Indonesia.

It is too early to say how things will turn out.  Too often, in the past, there has been disappointment. But there are some grounds for cautious optimism. Optimism, because it is the people – especially the young people – who are speaking up. It is they who are choosing to write their history – and doing so for the most part peacefully and with dignity. It is they who are showing that there is more to politics in this region than the false choice sometimes presented between repression and extremism

First, this is a pretty selective account of what is going on. There is plenty of force and violence going on in Libya, and it would be making still more of an impact if there were foreign reporters there to see and film it.

Secondly, Mr Cameron is deliberately conflating the articulate young protestors he met from the Tahrir Square movement with the entire range of opposition forces in the Arab world. But even in his own telling, there is a world of difference between Twitter-feeding students in Cairo, and frustrated millions of Arabs angry at problems that are not going to be solved overnight. In his words:

One of the most remarkable things about the historic events we’ve seen in Egypt and Tunisia in these past weeks is that it is not an ideological or extremist movement but rather, a movement of the people – an expression of aspiration predominantly from a new generation hungry for political and economic freedoms. 

A British businessman who had been in the square in Cairo during the demonstrations told me how when the extremists turned up and tried to claim the movement as theirs they were shouted down and disowned.

This movement belongs to the frustrated Tunisian fruit seller who can’t take his product to market. And to the students in Cairo who can’t get a fair start, and the millions of Egyptians who live on $2 a day. In short, it belongs to the people who want to make something of their lives, and to have a voice. It belongs to a new generation for whom technology – the internet and social media – is a powerful tool in the hands of citizens, not a means of repression. It belongs to the people who’ve had enough of corruption, of having to make do with what they’re given, of having to settle for second best.

This is optimism posing as a strategy. There is a difference between saying something being a false choice, and it being a false choice. Mr Cameron's assertion that stability and freedom are not in opposition cannot protect him from the possibility that, depending on events, his government may yet be forced to choose between them.

If stability wobbles, or Islamists loom, Britain will also have to choose between its interests and the values that Mr Cameron says he cherishes. And he cannot give himself an escape route by watering those values down, and defining them so broadly that he can call even a semi-free petro-monarchy like Kuwait a "democracy". His strategy of triangulation is dependent on events working out the way he hopes. To go further, I am not sure Mr Cameron is steering a course mid-way between Camel Corps calculation and naive neo-conservativism. I think Mr Cameron is offering two strategies dressed up as one.

If events go well, and greater freedom continues to be compatible with stability in important countries such as Egypt, then he is actually offering something akin to low-ambition neoconservativism: a belief that slow, patient steps on a journey towards democracy will keep the lid from blowing off the Arab street.

And if events go badly? Well, his speech was full of references to trade and economic interests, and included this bit, which is as weasel-like as anything penned by the most shimmeringly-smooth Foreign Office realist:

It is not for me, or for governments outside the region, to pontificate about how each country meets the aspirations of its people. It is not for us to tell you how to do it, or precisely what shape your future should take. There is no single formula for success, and there are many ways to ensure greater, popular participation in Government

In short, I think if things go badly and Britain has to choose between interests and values, Mr Cameron is a man with a pretty clear sense of Britain's national interests.

A new foreign policy vision? No. A fair-weather, watered-down version of neoconservativism? More or less. Do I think that is inherently foolish as a starting point? I don't think I do. But I do think it is a bet on events, rather than a strategy.

This post is the second in a series covering Mr Cameron's trip to the Middle East. You can read the first post, from Egypt, here. The third post, from Qatar, is here.

THE current debate about British voting systems and the structure of Parliament has a habit of drifting into the realm of dry theory. In a bid to plumb the real-world consequences of one big change on the table—the redrawing of almost every parliamentary constituency in Britain—Bagehot took himself off to the Isle of Wight for this week's print column. This small island off the south coast of England won a surprising victory on February 15th, fighting off attempts to split the island into one and a half seats, with the half seat added to a chunk of territory on the mainland.

Speaking to campaigners from the One Wight campaign (a cross-party outfit which lobbied for the right to keep the island as a single constituency), I was struck by their talk of the strong bonds between their community and their member of parliament. These were not party activists: indeed more than one said that their sense of connection with the "island MP" regardless of party. Some praised both the sitting MP and his predecessors, naming island MPs going back four or five decades, and recalling specific bits of legislation that they had promoted.

The same thing came up talking to journalists at Isle of Wight radio, who kindly arranged introductions to some local politicians. It was further confirmed when I started pestering members of the public trying to get on with their shopping in the largest town, Newport. In an unscientific straw poll, I stopped and asked a whole string of passers-by their views of the One Wight campaign, of the local MP and—in a final piece of cheek—asked them if they could name their MP (Andrew Turner, a Conservative). With one exception (a teenage mother wrangling with toddlers at a bus stop) every single islander I stopped named Mr Turner without hesitation. That would not be true in every seat in Britain.

People take their politics seriously round here, I was told several times. The island controversy of the moment involves plans to close nine of eleven public libraries as part of a general austerity drive. Public meetings held to discuss these closures have been so well-attended that they have had to move to larger halls. After expressing involuntary surprise that an island of 140,000 people had 11 public libraries, I followed up with some sincere admiration at this display of civic activism.

Several people offered explanations: life on the island is slower-paced; everyone knows each other; this is an old-fashioned sort of community; the public sector (a hospital, a large prison, the council) is the biggest employer; and so on. Doubtless these are all good points. But a couple of people mentioned something else that caught my attention. A typical commute from work is considered long if it lasts longer than 10 minutes. (The radio station has given up describing its morning and early evening slots as "drive time", because there is no rush hour. For most listeners the hours of seven to nine in the morning, and four to seven in the evening are thinking-about-setting-off time, or got-back-home time, I was told.)

David Cameron's Big Society drive to increase civic activism and localism is often dismissed as a wheeze most suitable for affluent communities, such as his own constituency in Oxfordshire. Yet the Isle of Wight is not especially affluent: local wages are below mainland levels, though the island does have a fair number of wealthy retirees or sailing-enthusiasts with second homes. What does set it apart is a lifestyle that offers unusual amounts of time (only 15% of islanders commute by ferry to the mainland for work). I suspect that explains quite a lot. Localism works, when everything really is local.

Here is the column:

IN THE summer of 1488 some 440 men from the Isle of Wight—a small island off England’s south coast—decided to declare war on France. Conceived by an ambitious local overlord, the plan went awry. Legend has it that a lone survivor straggled home, accusing the islanders’ allies—a bunch of rebel Bretons—of abandoning them in battle near Rennes. A memorial plaque to this fiasco, hailing the gallantry of those involved, hangs in Carisbrooke Castle, just below the room where local bigwigs locked Charles I after the civil war. (The king was on the run, and peeved islanders with further escape attempts, one of which left him wedged in his bedroom window.) When it comes to defying higher authority, in short, the Isle of Wight has form.

Now the island has done it again. On February 15th the government was forced to drop plans to split the Isle of Wight into one and a half parliamentary seats. The half-seat was to be joined to a chunk of the English mainland, creating a constituency divided by several miles of sea. Victory honours go to Lord Fowler, a former Conservative Party chairman and longtime island resident. Fully 196 peers, among them seven former Tory cabinet ministers, backed his House of Lords amendment that makes the Isle of Wight an exception to a government plan to redraw almost all British constituencies to fit a quota of 76,000 voters, with only small variations allowed. The Isle of Wight constituency (Britain’s biggest) currently boasts 110,000 electors.

Desperate to pass a wider package of electoral changes by a self-imposed deadline of February 17th, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition blinked, adding the Isle of Wight to a list of only two other exceptions, both of them sparsely populated Scottish seats. Unexpectedly, the government also said it would chop the island into two constituencies of 55,000 or so voters apiece (a local, cross-party campaign to preserve the island’s electoral integrity had offered to stick with just one MP, even though this would leave islanders under-represented). Cynics note this generosity suits the coalition, as the Isle of Wight is Tory territory with Lib Dem pockets.

Political scientists talk of a tension between the “mathematical” model, in which an MP represents a set of people, and an “organic” model, in which members represent communities. The Isle of Wight knows where it stands. “They are an island people, this is their bit of the country,” explains Lord Fowler. Andrew Turner, the sitting Conservative MP, talks of “a feeling of us-ness”. In Newport, the largest town, islanders say a mainland MP could never understand their home: a handsome backwater of green hills, chalk cliffs, beaches and yacht harbours, where the state is the largest employer. The islanders have duly defended an organic vision of politics, but—looking at the national picture—theirs is a lonely victory.

Not gerrymandering, but…

Governments have been fiddling with constituencies since 1832, when reformers swept away “rotten” boroughs with handfuls of voters, and enfranchised new industrial cities. Each time, their motives have blended principle and partisan calculation. The latest plans follow that tradition: coalition leaders point to disparities in the size of today’s seats—with the average Welsh seat, for example, boasting 56,500 voters, compared with 72,000 in England—and thunder about “the broken scales of our democracy”. In private, Tories gloat that the process may take perhaps 20 seats off Labour—and all in the name of fairness. There is nothing new about that, either: most constituency redistributions in modern times have been perilous for Labour, thanks to long-term population movements away from the party’s inner-city strongholds to more Tory-friendly suburbs.

But this time is also different. By insisting that almost all seats contain almost exactly the same number of voters, the government has made it impossible for constituencies to remain neatly inside county boundaries, as most do today (London is an outlier, with seats spreading across borough lines). Talk of a seat straddling Cornwall and Devon already has campaigners in the south-west incensed. Many more county borders (and rows) will follow. David Cameron and his coalition wax romantic about the pent-up power of organic, living communities. But in their plans for Westminster’s constituencies they look more like coldly rational Roundheads, sweeping aside ancient boundaries to create a parliament of pure, mathematical equality.

The mathematical camp does have a point. Its hero is Edmund Burke, the philosopher and MP who (rather bravely) informed his 18th-century constituents that he was not an agent for their narrow interests, but merely their elected representative in a national, deliberative assembly. And some Isle of Wight voters can sound pretty parochial. An MP shared with the mainland would “never be here,” says a woman shivering at a bus stop in the rain, “and if they did come, it would be at the convenience of the ferries.” Another talks of the island’s unique “needs”, mostly involving public cash.

But the government’s radical approach involves dangers. First, says one thoughtful Tory, most of his colleagues have yet to wake up to how sitting MPs will have to fight each other as safe seats shift or vanish (the House of Commons is set to shrink from 650 to 600 seats). A “disaster”, he mutters. More importantly, Britain has largely escaped the curse of outright gerrymandering: parliamentary boundaries are drawn by neutral civil servants, even if partisan appeals by party officials are common. The coalition’s plans still leave civil servants in charge. But by ignoring the historic boundaries of lots of tight-knit communities, they will further fray the ties between electors and the elected. With trust in short supply, it is an odd time to start alienating voters.

TIMBER! So shouted the wags on the opposition benches of the House of Commons yesterday, as David Cameron said he was not happy with how his government's plan to privatise English forests was going. Labour hecklers might also have been referring to the career of the cabinet minister in charge of forests, Caroline Spelman, which now resembles a tree freshly struck by lightning: still upright and covered with leaves, but stone-dead beetle-food at the core.

Late last night, more formal word came: a public consultation on selling hundreds of thousands of hectares of state-owned woodland is to be cancelled, and instead a panel of experts will meet to discuss woodland biodiversity and public access. In plain English, an about-face for the government.

Much has been said about the government's ineptitude in selling this policy, some of it by me. When I visited a woodland the other day for a print column, I also came away with the distinct impression that—especially in the wake of the credit crunch—the public is wary of the idea that the profit motive can co-exist with altruism. That is a big problem for Mr Cameron's Big Society, which does not really add up if it does not include a hefty role for the private sector.

Much has also been written about the slightly puzzling maths of this privatisation, notably when it turned out that an impact assessment conducted by Mrs Spelman's own department predicted that it would not save very much money. There is also the fact that the Forestry Commission rather efficiently cross-subsidises its stewardship of nice pretty woods and forests by flogging timber from the dark, ugly conifer plantations with which it disfigured the landscape in the post-war decades.

Defenders of the policy have also pointed out, correctly, that opponents of the privatisation have been spreading all manner of ludicrous scare-stories, implying that ancient woodlands like the Forest of Dean could soon be ringed with barbed-wire fences, while new private owners raze the trees within to build golf courses and holiday villages. Other opponents seem upset by the thought of anyone making money from cutting down trees at all, which is akin to weeping when a farmer harvests a field of wheat. Timber, after all, is also a crop.

I think one more aspect of this sorry tale needs wider circulation. This was not a bad idea because it was a privatisation. It was a mess because it was on its way to being seen as a rushed and bungled privatisation. And even the flintiest free-marketeer knows to beware botched sell-offs of state assets: few things are as deadly to public acceptance of an economy based on competition.

I spoke to the Environment Secretary for my column, and she admitted up front that the scheme was "not principally about revenue-raising." Instead, the plan emerged from the incoming government's decision to review all arms of the state and its associated agencies, bodies and quangos, and examine which of them made sense. When Mrs Spelman took office, she discovered that her sprawling department of the environment, food and rural affairs funded 92 arms-length bodies. Various tests were applied to each of them. The most important principle was this: that the state should only do what only the state can do.

In Mrs Spelman's view, the Forestry Commission—a regulator that was also the seller of 70% of the timber entering the British market—failed this classic test that has triggered countless privatisations over the years. "The Forestry Commission is selling Christmas trees, for goodness sake. What is the state doing selling Christmas trees?" she asked me.

And here is the thing. The principle that the state should only do what only the state can do is a pretty sound starting point for policy-making. It is just that—with the benefit of hindsight—the Forestry Commission does not pass this test in a clean-cut way. At least, not in a way that is so cut-and-dried that a simple public case can be made for it.

If the commission only owned commercial timber plantations, it would be easy to know what to say: sell them. If instead the commission only owned a few "heritage woods", it should not have been beyond the wit of Whitehall to transfer their management into the hands of willing charities like the National Trust, with suitable guarantees about back-up funding. But the problem is that the commission is neither fish nor fowl. It owns ugly, profitable woods; it owns ancient and famous forests; and it also owns a whole host of small and medium-sized woods that are used for a mix of commercial forestry and recreation; it employs scientists who track diseases and pests that threaten British trees; it is also a regulator. It once had a terrible record of planting conifers in straight lines all over the country, but in recent years has become much more concerned about restoring ancient broadleaf trees, so it is also an environmental protection agency.

Quite probably a privatisation was still the right way forward, with a better minister to sell it and more willingness to spend political capital and defend from first principles the shrinking of non-essential bits of the state. But why was the Forestry Commission so high on the government's agenda, in its first year in office, given that it is a small, cheap and relatively efficient bit of the state?

Thinking back to Mrs Spelman, dutifully scanning her 92 arms-length bodies, I recall waves of press stories about the new government's plans for a "Bonfire of the Quangos" (I also recall how most of the stories focussed on the pay and pensions of those agencies' bosses, a populist angle much encouraged by government spin-doctors). It would be pretty depressing if the forests were added for the sake of bulking up that pyre and attracting a few quick headlines, rather than because they were prime candidates for a well-crafted sale.

IN THIS week's print column, I look at the fuss—still rumbling on—caused by David Cameron when he gave a speech on multiculturalism and British Islam at the Munich Security Conference on February 5th. The column argues that the speech is not as ferocious as either its critics or cheerleaders seem to think. From the left, the prime minister stands accused of "writing propaganda" for the far right. Voices on the right claimed Mr Cameron had declared the end of multiculturalism, full stop, with the Daily Telegraph headlining its report: "Muslims must embrace British values".

The bad news is, I think the speech was seriously muddled and as a result unconvincing, for reasons set out below.

I also think something else, though, which did not fit in the print column. I think that Mr Cameron, a man of strikingly good manners most of the time, forgot his natural courtesy. For starters, I agree with critics who say it was clumsy to give what was essentially a domestic speech about Muslims in Britain at an international security conference, as if implying that the presence of Muslims on British soil was essentially a question of national security and counter-terrorism.

Speaking to one MP last night, he suggested that Mr Cameron was trying rather crudely to position himself as an ally of the German chancellor Angela Merkel (who was at the Munich conference) and the French president Nicolas Sarkozy, both of whom have come out swinging against multiculturalism in recent months. I think there is a lot to that. Indeed, in a sort of inter-governmental relay race, on Thursday evening Mr Sarkozy told French television he agreed with Mr Cameron that multiculturalism had "failed".

Read in full, Mr Cameron's speech was actually more subtle than the rather crude rhetoric of either Mrs Merkel or Mr Sarkozy. He was at pains to say that piety and extremism were two separate things, and that to talk about the idea of an inclusive British national identity open to all.

At one point on TF1 last night, Mr Sarkozy seemed to suggest that French Muslims questioned the idea of young girls going to school, as if they were the Taliban. Not for the first time, he also echoed complaints first made by the far-right National Front, in this case the idea that it is un-French to pray in the street. Marine Le Pen, the new leader of the National Front (who also opportunistically praised Mr Cameron's speech this week, to Downing Street's dismay) recently compared Muslims praying in French streets with German occupiers. Mr Sarkozy avoided that degree of bone-headed bad taste, but did say: "We don't want people praying ostentatiously in the street in France," though mosques, he conceded were a "normal" part of life.

The problem for Mr Cameron is that very few people read speeches in full, as he well knows. And this is where his manners failed him. Because lots and lots of people who read only the media reports of his speech came away with the impression that he had said multiculturalism had failed. In fact he was more careful/tricksy than that, talking about the "failed policies of the past" at one point, and at another point talking about the problems with what he mysteriously called "the doctrine of state multiculturalism".

And among the people who came away with that impression were some of the moderate Muslims working in Britain to try to promote the good thing that they consider to be multiculturalism: meaning, simply, a mutual respect between different cultures.

Researching the column, I came across a fascinating 2010 report on preventing extremism by the all-party House of Commons select committee on communities and local government, which took evidence from a huge number of different people (it is 300 pages long, but I recommend a look). My curiosity was piqued by one of the witnesses, a Birmingham historian, Jahan Mahmood, who works with young Muslims, especially those in trouble with the law. Mr Mahmood's passion is the remarkable and largely-forgotten history of the Indian troops who volunteered to fight for the British in the second world war, many of them with extraordinary courage. There was no conscription in India, though it was part of the British Empire. More than 600,000 Muslims volunteered to serve. Many of them were from tribal regions of modern-day Pakistan: areas which had supplied warriors to empires and dynasties for centuries, and many of their descendants now live in Britain. Given that Mr Cameron's main complaint was that young Muslims felt rootless and unable to connect with any form of British identity, this project sounded like just the sort of thing of which Downing Street might approve.

So I telephoned Mr Mahmood, to ask about his project, and his own reaction to the Munich speech. Now, this is only one anecdote, but with that health warning given, here is what he said.

In Birmingham, he told me, whites and young Muslims too often feel that very little connects them. Describing his work with young offenders, he gave the example of some young Muslim men from Sparkbrook, "getting into all sorts of madness", and who—he discovered—had downloaded videos of a British hostage being beheaded in Iraq on their mobile telephones. "I said, why have you got these downloads, and they said: Britain hates us, Britain hates all Muslims, so we hate them," he told me.

While trying to persuade them that they were wrong, Mr Mahmood told them about his own uncle, a Pakistani who fought with the British in Burma. One of the young men later asked his own grandfather about this, and found out the old man had a Burma Star campaign medal at home: it was a link that had never been discussed before.

Mr Mahmood's presentation, which he has given many times at community centres, describes the gallantry of these Indian Army units, the medals they won, and how some of the youngest soldiers in the war were 15 year old volunteers from the sub-continent. Does it work? Well, Mr Mahmood makes no wild claims for his project. It makes a difference for some, he says: he is proud of having brought together Muslim and white youths, and showing them how their grandfathers had fought and died together. Others respond less well, he concedes, angrily telling him that he is just describing colonial exploitation.

But the point is, Mr Mahmood is surely the kind of community volunteer that Mr Cameron would like to encourage: his work is precisely aimed at showing Muslims how they have been proud actors in British history for a long time. And yet, Mr Mahmood was discouraged by reports of the prime minister's speech.

"This country is built on multiculturalism. It means appreciating and respecting other people's traditions," he said. He cited stories about British servicemen defending Afro-Caribbean comrades in British pubs during the war, when American soldiers refused to drink alongside them. "There were punch-ups between the Americans and the British over it," noted Mr Mahmood. He agrees with Mr Cameron that Britain had not done enough to ensure its different communities met and knew each other. "I wouldn't have started my work if there weren't a gap," he said.

But he thought he had heard that Mr Cameron thought multiculturalism had failed, and that hurt. "For him to say what he said, it put me on the backfoot."

Here is this week' print column:

ON FEBRUARY 5th David Cameron gave a speech about Islamism and British values at a conference in Munich. Back home, the rows have not stopped since. Much of the fuss has a distinctly synthetic tang. Absurdly, Sadiq Khan, the Labour shadow justice secretary, accused the prime minister of “writing propaganda” for a far-right group that held a rally on the same day. Conservatives chortled that Mr Cameron had hailed the end of multiculturalism. What he actually said was that a doctrine of “state multiculturalism” had encouraged Britons to live segregated lives. In its stead, he proposed a “muscular liberalism” that confronts extremism and promotes a British identity open to all.

In short, Mr Cameron’s big speech was not as ferocious as his critics charge or some of his fans hope. The bad news is, large parts were an unconvincing muddle.

Much of it was not new. A year after the London bombings of July 2005 Ruth Kelly, then the Labour minister in charge of community policies, asked whether—in its anxiety to avoid imposing a single British identity on diverse communities—multiculturalism had encouraged “separateness”. In December 2006 Tony Blair gave a speech on multiculturalism that reads like a list of Mr Cameron’s talking points. Both prime ministers called for tighter controls on Muslim groups receiving public funds, an entry ban on foreign preachers with sulphurous views, a tougher line on forced marriages and an expectation that all British citizens support common values, from the rule of law to a rejection of discrimination. As for identity, under Mr Blair and his successor Gordon Brown the government was obsessed with “Britishness” (Mr Brown briefly floated plans for an annual “Britain Day”).

Why, then, did Mr Cameron bother to give a speech that was greeted by one weary official with the lament, “here we go again”? Politics, partly. Few prime ministers can resist denouncing what Mr Cameron dubbed the “failed policies of the past”. But mostly, Mr Cameron’s intention was to weigh in on one side of a debate that has gripped Whitehall for a decade: should the government fight terrorism by working with ideological extremists who claim to oppose violent acts in Britain (if not elsewhere)?

In its final counter-terrorist strategy in office, Labour plumped for challenging such “non-violent extremists”. Mr Cameron is intervening because he thinks that decision has not been followed through, says a Whitehall source. The prime minister, says the source, has been persuaded by the “conveyor belt” theory—the belief that non-violent extremism is often a “way point” on the road to lethal radicalism. Mr Cameron thinks multiculturalism has drifted from a tolerance of other cultures towards a tolerance of other value systems, some of them hostile to Britain.

That stress on values raises some daunting problems. First, there is a tension between values and tactics. The most coherent critics of dangerous preachers are often imams who hold “pretty unpleasant views” themselves, argues a senior official. Groups beloved by ministers—such as the Quilliam Foundation, which backs calls for sweeping curbs on radical preachers—have “no credibility” among ordinary Muslims, another official says. Mr Cameron calls it “nonsense” that extremists help keep vulnerable Muslims away from violence. But he cannot wish away the trade-off between liberal values and street credibility.

Next, a lot of people outside the secular British mainstream reject at least some of Mr Cameron’s list of non-negotiable British values: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, the rule of law and equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality. That sits awkwardly with his “Big Society” plans to deliver public services through community bodies, and especially his enthusiasm for faith schools. Many of these are essentially selective state schools in disguise, barely troubling the happy hypocrisies of British live-and-let-live agnosticism. But others offer a sharper challenge: evangelical Christian schools, Hindu academies, Orthodox Jewish schools or private Muslim ones that—quite legally—devote half the day to theology and Koranic studies and shun all arts and humanities subjects apart from religious education. This points up another muddle. For all Mr Cameron’s talk of failed policies, something like state multiculturalism (ie, offering public support while ignoring tricky differences in values) remains the British default response to religions other than Islam, whose angriest fringe has overwhelmed unmuscular liberalism.

Good diagnosis, dodgy prescription

One final muddle. At the Munich conference, Mr Cameron correctly observed that some on the left think Islamist terrorism might be fixed by addressing grievances such as poverty or Western foreign policy. This, he noted, ignores the fact that many terrorists are middle class, and that lots of people loathe Western foreign policy without resorting to violence. He might have added that tackling poverty and changing foreign policy are anyway pleasing prospects to the left. Politicians are always tempted by the idea that something they already favour might be a magic solution to a problem.

But the prime minister then fell into the same trap, suggesting that some young Muslim men find it hard to identify with Britain “because we have allowed the weakening of our collective identity.” That is catnip to Tories who want to teach children patriotic history. But that “because” is a logical stretch. True, young Muslims cannot identify with a vacuum. But filling it with assertive Britishness is no guarantee of winning hearts and minds.

Mr Cameron has committed Britain to a national contest of values with radical Islamism. That would be ambitious even without the muddle that underpins his challenge. Ignore his hysterical critics, and swooning cheerleaders. Mr Cameron has much more persuading to do.

A LOT OF heat, and some light, has been generated by the news that the Liberal Democrat leader and deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, is to thump the table and tell the bosses of British universities to do more for social mobility. Mr Clegg, we are told, will say that universities wishing to charge the highest fees allowed under the forthcoming £9,000 annual cap will have to show a correspondingly high "level of ambition" when it comes to admitting students from poorer backgrounds and state schools.

In a piece of calculated cynicism, aides to Nick Clegg (Westminster School, then Cambridge) have briefed leftish papers like the Guardian that they are concerned by the number of privately educated pupils at Oxford and Cambridge. The Guardian cites a "source close to Clegg" saying:

These statistics demonstrate just how closed many of our universities are to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Universities should be the greatest agent of social mobility that we have in this country, but too often instead they are serving as instruments of social segregation.

Duly rising to the bait, rightish papers like the Daily Telegraph have thundered about the iniquity of obliging Oxbridge to lower its admission standards for state school pupils, predicting a torrent of appeals from parents of privately-educated rejects, and concluding in a leader:

The UK’s top universities have been an island of excellence in a rising tide of mediocrity. We undermine these elite institutions, in pursuit of an egalitarian agenda, at our peril

In the Wall Street Journal, Iain Martin makes the perfectly reasonable point that it would be nice to hear a government with ideas for improving state education overall, rather than crudely jamming its thumb on the scales at the moment when comprehensive pupils try to get into top universities. In his words:

Of course there is a crisis in social mobility. Politics and the professions are becoming much more difficult for the poorest to penetrate. Look at the cabinet featuring Cameron (Eton), Osborne (St. Pauls) and Clegg (Westminster). Britain’s best universities are increasingly dominated, much more than they were in my day, by the products of those and other top schools.

But the answer is not to water down entry requirements to the best universities. Or discriminate in favor of groups of children that government ministers might feel guilty about having let down by failing to supply them with a good enough education in the state system.

The answer is to dramatically improve state education (will this idea ever really catch on?) so that far more children from poor and modest-earning backgrounds get the grades they need to go to a top university.  Previous generations used grammar schools to help boost standards and to achieve this. They unleashed a wave of social mobility. The government is in favor of free schools, but will that reform alone be enough? I can’t see that it will be

Mr Martin also makes the good point that this is yet another example of a coalition leader coming over all bossy and dirigiste, while all the while pledging loyalty to the idea of bodies like universities being freed from central control.

Much of this is right. The gulf between Britain's best and worst schools is indefensible.

But there is also something deeply bogus about this fuss, from the spectacle of Mr Clegg banging his fist on the table and demanding that top universities stop being "closed" to poorer students, to right-wing attacks on dumbing-down entry standards.

Why? Well, because top universities including Oxford and Cambridge already make much lower offers to promising students from poorer backgrounds, difficult family circumstances or state schools where Oxbridge entrance is almost unknown. And what is more, they have been doing it for years. The country's best universities could fill all their places several times over with hard-working, expensively-trained but rather dull private school pupils who would all cruise smoothly to 2:1 degrees. But the thought of that fills dons with horror, and has for decades. Back in the late 1980s, when I applied to university, it was well known that it was harder to get in from private school, and that always seemed perfectly fair. In fresher's week, apart from making bad mugs of instant coffee and asking people about their GAP years, one of the more tragic topics of conversation revolved around what A-level offers people had been given, and what grades they had actually got. It was no secret at all, and nobody made a secret of it, that pupils from tough comprehensives had been made lower offers.

Later, as we all got to know each other, it still seemed fair. Some people were from private schools that sent dozens of pupils to Oxbridge every year. Some told of schools where nobody had been to Oxbridge for years, and where one or two devoted teachers mugged up on old notes from their own university days to prepare their lone candidate for the examinations.

Still later, in the swirl of twenty-something London life, another penny dropped, and it occurred to me that perhaps the biggest advantage of an expensive education does not even lie in examination results, but in something else, between self-confidence and a belief that a top university is an achievable, reasonable goal.

In conversation, ferociously ambitious and clever people would talk about how they had never even dreamed of applying to one of the top universities because it was not what people from their school did. Oxbridge, they had believed aged 17 or 18, was for posh people. But now, they would say, they kept meeting posh Oxbridge graduates who were not very clever or impressive and thinking, hang on, if you could get in, I could have too.

It is an inescapable fact that if you go to a school in which half of the sixth form gets into Oxbridge each year, and you are well up in the top half of pupils for your year, applying to Oxbridge is an entirely rational act. It is still stressful and demands lots of hard work. Pupils at such schools will frequently hear conversations about how they will have to do especially well to overcome the handicap of being from a posh background: this is a universal lament already among parents who send their children to the top schools. But, and it is a big but, there will be something exceedingly normal about the whole endeavour. Given that entrance offers are already much more flexible that many commentators admit, this confidence gap must be one of the biggest drivers of social immobility.

What does that mean for policy-makers? Well, I suspect it means that the slow, hard grind of outreach programmes, summer schools, mentoring schemes and the rest are more important than ever. But perhaps it also means that those worried about social mobility and tuition fees need to think carefully about using responsible language.

I am sure Nick Clegg thinks he is on the side of the angels here (as well as trying to pick a fight over social mobility to recover from his public humiliation over tuition fees). But if even one bright 16 year old picks up today's Guardian in the sixth form common room of his or her state school, reads that the top universities are "closed" to people from poor backgrounds, and decides that applying to such a university is a cruel waste of effort, then Mr Clegg has done something rather wicked.

FOR many commentators, Wednesday's prime minister's question time brought final proof that the government is in trouble over its proposal to privatise England's state-owned woods and forests. Many detected a whiff of panic, if not an imminent about-turn, when David Cameron said he was "listening to all the arguments in this case." They further opined that the government's agonies were rooted in the unusual importance of trees and woods to the British psyche. An editorial in the Times this morning declared:

In Britain's conception of itself, as Tory image-makers so recently knew, the myth of the wooded island looms large. William Shakespeare put his fairies in the forests. It was forestry that sheltered Robin Hood from tyranny. Oaks built our navies, which sailed the globe.

I respectfully disagree, twice.

I knew the government was in real trouble on Tuesday, when the Daily Telegraph's revered "Matt" drew a front page pocket cartoon of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet locked out of a privatised Hundred Acre Woods. As a rule of thumb, when the country's most loyally Conservative newspaper accuses a Conservative government of hurting Winnie the Pooh, things are going badly wrong.

It is also untrue that the British are unusually attached to forests. They may think they are—or rather may enjoy reading soppy leaders in the Times telling them that theirs is an ancient nation in touch with its woodland past. In truth, Britain has rather low levels of forest cover, compared to other European countries. And lots of our neighbours are frankly obsessed with forests, wolves and bears: every other French children's book features a wolf, for instance. Instead, for all our fantasies of rural purity, we are a car-loving, suburban nation of assiduous shoppers. It is telling that one of the main attack lines from the anti-privatisation camp concerns a patch of trees called Rigg Wood, which has closed its car park since passing into private ownership. Never mind that footpaths still run into Rigg Wood, if the 21st century British cannot step from their cars to the first trees, they have suffered a grave injustice.

That said, I do agree that the government is in real trouble over its plans to sell off the Forestry Commission's 250,000 hectares of woodland and forests. But why I think this really matters is because it shows, yet again, that the public does not really trust the whole thrust of Mr Cameron's vision for a Big Society, in which a centralised state gives way to a patchwork of local community groups, charities and businesses. Most pertinently, the public is mistrustful of any vision for Britain that blends altruism with the profit motive. And that is a big problem for the Big Society, which just does not add up if it does not include a dose of private enterprise.

For my print column this week, I went to talk to a bunch of volunteers in Buckinghamshire who are already living the Big Society, giving up six hours of their time every month to clear scrub, brambles and saplings from a wood near Wendover. The wood is currently owned by the Forestry Commission, and these volunteers rather liked it that way. They were, above all, hostile to any idea of a private owner. If someone were making a profit from the site, one suggested, they would be much less willing to donate their time for free. That strikes me as a real headache for the government.

Are people more hostile to private enterprise now than in the past? You could legitimately argue that all privatisations are unpopular in Britain, but (with luck) come to be accepted later as services improve. Well, I think something is in the air just now. I was not very surprised, I admit, when one of the volunteers noted that the Forestry Commission costs only £10m a year to run, and mentioned all the money spent bailing out the banks.

Whatever else can be said about banks and bankers, they have done astonishing damage to the cause of free markets in this country. I do not think we have yet plumbed just how much damage, either.

Here is the column:

AS CRITICS of government policy go, Robert Emberson and Giles Knowles are not very ferocious. Mr Emberson, a retired solicitor from the Chilterns—a pretty slice of commuterland to the north of London—says he “can’t see the point” of a government proposal to privatise his local woodland, Wendover Woods. Mr Knowles, a retired teacher, volunteers alongside Mr Emberson at the woods, clearing scrub and brambles twice a month. Mr Knowles is “not very keen” on a sell-off.

Their mild dismay might seem insignificant, beside the nationwide rage provoked by the government’s proposals to sell or lease large tracts of English woodland managed by the Forestry Commission, a public body. A YouGov poll found 75% of respondents opposed the sale of English forests. Hundreds of thousands of people have signed an online petition organised by a leftish campaign group, 38 Degrees, opposing what it claims are plans that could see “our national forests” fenced off, logged or turned into holiday villages. Right-wing commentators have condemned the plans as un-conservative vandalism. Grandees including the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Astronomer Royal and the Poet Laureate signed an open letter denouncing forest sales as “unconscionable”. Still more ominously, seismic rumblings of discontent have been heard from the National Trust, a charitable titan with 3.7m members.

For all that—and though this might sound odd—David Cameron’s coalition government should be just as worried about the quiet anxiety of folk like Mr Emberson and Mr Knowles. They are precisely the sort of people he needs to fulfil his vision of a British society built around voluntarism and civic pride.

The noisiest protesters are a lost cause. At its roots, the forestry plan is a privatisation. In the words of the cabinet minister in charge, Caroline Spelman: “the Forestry Commission sells Christmas trees, for goodness sake. What is the state doing selling Christmas trees?” Privatisations are often unpopular in Britain at first; they prove their worth later, when (with luck) it can be shown they have left the country better off. Most British woodlands are already private and are covered by tough planning rules and strict regulations on tree-cutting. Whatever protesters say, owners cannot build golf courses on a whim. Public footpaths are protected by law (though the rules are weaker when it comes to horse and bicycle access, or maintaining car parks).

But the forestry sell-off also represents something more ambitious: it is supposed to be a flagship example of Mr Cameron’s “Big Society” at work. A government consultation paper on the forestry plans explicitly talks of “shifting the balance of power from ‘Big Government’ to ‘Big Society’”, as the state gives way to a locally responsive patchwork of “civil society, businesses and individuals.” It is here that the real problems start.

Mrs Spelman, who is secretary of state for the environment, food and rural affairs, admits that the government is feeling political pain over forests, but says the “principal reason” is “wild speculation” by the media, such as scare stories suggesting ancient forests are about to become golf courses. She is right, but she needs to stop whining: the government bears much of the blame. Some bright spark has dreamed up an absurdly complex talking point for ministers—that the Forestry Commission has a conflict of interest as a regulator that also sells 70% of timber entering the British market. The rest of the time, they talk about how “heritage” forests such as the New Forest and the Forest of Dean will be given to charities, with public money to cover operating costs. Surely bodies such as the National Trust can do a better job running forests than the Forestry Commission, Mr Cameron told the House of Commons on February 2nd? But this line is a cop-out: the National Trust cannot run every wood in the public estate.

Colin is not the Leviathan

To be blunt, the government is failing wretchedly to sell the Big Society. For help, the prime minister might like to visit Wendover Woods, a 325-hectare slice of greenery near Aylesbury. For a Big Society fan, the woods come all but gift-wrapped with a bow. This close to London, their relative tranquillity is prized by locals. Some 350,000 visitors are drawn each year by foot, cycle and horse trails, a rustic café and “Go Ape!”, a commercial aerial playground. Between car park fees and rents, the woods deliver a small surplus to the Forestry Commission’s coffers. It could be a case study for localism: under local management, all that revenue would stay in Wendover Woods. Since April 2009 volunteers from the Chiltern Society, a local charity, have worked to clear scrub and brambles there, saving a crumbling Iron Age fort.

Yet, on a drizzly morning this week, those same volunteers are wary of a local charity taking over, and actively reject the idea of a commercial buyer. “The Forestry Commission manages this very well,” says Mr Emberson, hacking at a larch sapling. Isn’t the Forestry Commission an impersonal state bureaucracy, Bagehot ventures? “The Forestry Commission is not impersonal, it’s Colin,” says a volunteer, pointing out a young ranger down the slope. Above all, they dislike any idea of a commercial owner. It would be “all about money”, says one. If the woods were run for a profit, “I don’t think we’d be so keen to volunteer,” adds another. Bank bail-outs are mentioned, with a grimace. Mr Knowles likes the Big Society philosophy, but worries it will be exploited by “the people with money”.

Such views should alarm the government. Their vision for a flourishing society blends localism with the charity sector and business. Alas, just now Britons seem reluctant to accept that the profit motive can co-exist with altruism. That is the real lesson of the row over forests: if the coalition is serious about building a less statist Britain, it cannot dodge that crisis of trust forever.

THE CRISIS in Egypt is keeping British newspapers busy this morning, with several tabloids sending reporters to Cairo to report the drama from the ground.

This is how the main stories from Britain's best-selling dailies begin. Keen-eyed media studies graduates may detect a pattern:

The Daily Mail (average daily circulation last month 2,030,968): "British tourists..."

The Sun (average circulation 2,717,013): "Thirty thousand Brits..."

The Daily Mirror (average circulation 1,133,440): "Britons were urged to flee..."

The Daily Express (average circulation 623,689): "Up to 30,000 Britons..."

It is not just the opening lines. The Daily Mail's 28 paragraph story devotes 18 paragraphs to the "terrifying ordeal" endured by British tourists (not one of whom has been harmed to date), including the "mayhem" some had witnessed at Cairo airport, and an interview with a man whose flight was delayed for seven hours.

Encouragingly, most of the front page of the Daily Star (average circulation 713,602) is devoted to a huge story headlined "Jordan 999 Dash Mystery". Alas, on closer inspection, it does not concern the Hashemite kingdom that is perhaps Britain's closest ally in the Arab world.

Instead, it reports that an ambulance (summoned in Britain with a call to the 999 emergency telephone number) was seen visiting a house in Surrey owned by a model called Katie Price who uses Jordan as a stage name, though at the time Ms Price was believed to be undergoing beauty treatments elsewhere. Hence, its visit was a bit of a mystery.

SMALL rays of light can illuminate surprisingly large areas of darkness. The fuss continues to rumble on about the decision by Michael Gove, the education secretary, to publish revised school league tables showing how many pupils achieved a reasonable pass in five core subjects: English, maths, a foreign language, a science subject and either history or geography (a cluster of subjects that he is calling the English baccalaureate). This marked a sudden switch away from a system in which schools reported how many pupils gained a reasonable pass (an A, B or C grade) in any five subjects including English and maths.

As my colleagues in the Britain section reported earlier this month, this transparency ambush has already achieved one desired and desirable effect: to expose how many schools were boosting their scores by pushing pupils into soft, often vocational subjects which counted for as much as a pass in chemistry, French or history.

But it is now clear that the switch has achieved another win for transparency: exposing just how many British state school teachers and politicians of the left are guilty of the “soft bigotry of low expectations”, to borrow a phrase from American educational politics.

I recently heard a BBC panel discussion in which a Labour MP from a north London constituency (I fear I was driving, so missed her name) who complained bitterly that this rigidly “academic” choice of core subjects was wholly inappropriate to her voters and would stigmatise as failures pupils who might be dyslexic, or whose strengths might lie in creative subjects like dance.

A week later, a BBC Radio 4 phone-in programme, Any Answers, featured a pair of state school teachers, both with 30 years of experience, again pouring scorn on the dangerously “academic” bent of the English baccalaureate, and Mr Gove’s related desire to see a more rigorous syllabus in history, involving such things as learning a framework of important dates and events to give children a sense of the essential chronology of British and world history.

Such history is never going to be relevant to many pupils, one of the teachers said. What do you mean by relevant, asked the radio presenter. Well, they are from the Gameboy and computer game generations, they have short attention spans, she replied. You cannot just tell them things, you have to change the format every seven minutes or so—a discussion, then a bit of role play, and so on.

It was then that I heard something that really made my hair stand on end. Arguing that it is just not reasonable to teach all pupils "academic" subjects like the maths and English GSCE examinations, a veteran teacher said: It’s like running a four minute mile. You could give me all the coaching in the world from [the former champion athlete] Linford Christie, and I would not be able to do it." For good measure, she said that all league tables are useless, as the only thing they capture is the socio-economic status of parents.

But here is the thing. Mr Gove is not proposing that all children read mathematics at Cambridge. He is not even asking teachers to cram the beginnings of Euclidian geometry down their throats. What we are really talking about is a decent level of numeracy.

A C-grade pass or above in GSCE mathematics is, as it happens, a formal target used by officials working on adult numeracy in Britain. Applied to the real world, it implies an ability to work out a household budget or compare two products to see which one is the better buy.

And in 2010, despite more than two decades of ever-improving GSCE grades, some two fifths of the nation’s 16 year olds failed to make that maths target.

It is the same with a C-grade pass or above in English. It signals a decent if basic level of literacy, not a four minute mile.

The idea that these are impossible goals has real-world consequences. In a recent survey by the Confederation of British Industry, an employers’ group, 18% of firms reported having to provide remedial numeracy training to school leavers.

Some caveats. League tables have their flaws, and teachers will no doubt start teaching to these new measures of success, just as they gamed the old system. There will be some pupils who will struggle with some of these subjects, and there is every point to making sure that they are not branded failures if they have (for example) a mental block when it comes to learning languages or have decided that they “cannot get” maths. But remember that this is not about branding children failures if they fail to pass these GSCEs, it is about helping parents compare the performance of schools in a slightly more rigorous way. And these new league tables are only reproducing the same bias towards "harder" subjects shown by employers and universities. Children encouraged to take "easy" GCSEs are being tricked: most of the benefit accrued to their schools in the old league table system, and very little to them. 

Britain has a particular problem with maths teaching, as it happens. Lots of primary school teachers “lack confidence” when it comes to teaching maths, according to a chilling 2010 report by the Royal Society, which promotes science in Britain. Just 2% of teachers at English primary schools have a maths degree or specialist maths background.

Teachers are placed under intense pressure by national maths tests for 11 year olds that are used to rank primary schools on league tables. The result, too often, is maths lessons in which required “facts” are drummed into pupils’ heads. When children move on to secondary school, their inadequate understanding of some vital mathematical concepts is cruelly exposed, and they are “switched off” the subject for life. As a long term solution, the Royal Society dreams of tripling the number of specialist science and maths teachers in primary schools.

But let us be clear about what is being proposed here: telling parents whether their local school equips children with basic levels of literacy and numeracy. If British teachers think that unrealistic, because basic numeracy or literacy is beyond children from less affluent households, then I would humbly suggest they switch profession before they wreck any more young lives.

FRENCH railway crossings bear an elegant warning sign: "Un train peut en cacher un autre", or "One train can conceal another." Today in the Westminster village, it is resignations that are thundering from left and right, with the resignation last night of Alan Johnson as Labour's shadow chancellor of the exchequer, followed today by Andy Coulson's (long overdue) departure as Downing Street head of communications.

At the level of simple news management, the railway crossing analogy explains what is going on. It is a Friday, always a good day to smuggle out bad news (people have other things on their mind at the weekend). Mr Johnson's resignation was already competing for headline space with a fresh appearance by Tony Blair before Sir John Chilcot's Iraq war inquiry, this morning.

The daily papers have a lot to say about Mr Johnson's replacement as shadow chancellor by Ed Balls, a former right hand man to Gordon Brown and a ferocious political street fighter. What is more, there has been an arrest in a murder case gripping the tabloids. All in all, a good day to bury bad news, to borrow a phrase from a Blair-era spin-doctor.

What does it all mean? Perhaps, less and more than you might think. Less, because David Cameron should have let Mr Coulson go long ago and his departure started to feel inevitable after the prime minister sounded pretty half-hearted in his spokesman's defence a few days ago on BBC Radio 4. The last few months have seen a drip, drip of damaging revelations about sordid goings-on at the sordid tabloid newspaper that Mr Coulson once edited, the News of the World. I wrote a while back that hiring Mr Coulson brought the din of tabloid debate too close to the heart of government decision-making, suggesting that tabloids:

tempt governments into policymaking by headline, a method that prizes speed, simplicity and emotional satisfaction over sober analysis of costs and benefits. Tabloid-wooing helps explain the authoritarian streak of the last Labour government (and much besides). A desire for positive headlines helps to account for several of the current coalition government’s dubious policies, from a pledge to cap net inward migration, to the decision to shield the National Health Service from public-spending cuts. Years of hostile headlines about the European Union have made sensible public debate of Britain’s EU interests almost impossible: instead successive governments talk tough at home while pursuing pragmatism in Brussels.

Yet for all that, a flight to elitism, even if it could be arranged, would surely be a terrible solution. Glance across the English Channel, and several European countries—such as France, the Netherlands, Belgium or Italy—enjoy overwhelmingly sober, polite newspapers. In the same places nastily populist or xenophobic parties wield hefty electoral clout, or prop up governing coalitions. It cannot be irrelevant that voters furious about immigration, the European Union or globalisation seldom see their rage expressed in the press. That leaves a gap for extremists on the left and right, peddling dead-end solutions.

Small, extremist or protest parties do much worse in Britain. The electoral system is one reason. But arguably a raucous press obliges and allows mainstream parties to engage with issues that make many voters cross, such as immigration. If noisy tabloids make Britain’s politics worse, perhaps their din makes its democracy stronger. If that is so, good governments should do two things: engage with the tabloid din, but keep it at a distance to allow reflective policymaking. By appointing Mr Coulson to his inner circle, Mr Cameron has done one, but not the other.

Mr Coulson's defence of his time at the NotW, that a long, rogue reporter had been paying a private investigator to hack into the voicemail messages of various famous people, was also pretty odd. He was in effect saying he did not know what was going on in his own newsroom or where some big scoops came from, which implied that he was either incompetent or was not telling the whole truth. I don't have much to add to that.

Yet these resignations and reshuffles mean more that you might at first think. Suddenly, there is a stripped-down, rather gladiatorial feel to British politics. There is the leadership clash between Mr Cameron and the Labour leader Ed Miliband. And now perhaps the most interesting confrontation pits Mr Balls, an experienced economist, devoted Keynesian, fiercely tribal Labour loyalist and brilliant opposition politician, directly against George Osborne, a chancellor of the exchequer who has gambled his whole pile of chips on austerity and the rapid reduction of the deficit, and who is also the supreme political strategist of his party.

And that means, rather healthily, that the government and opposition's two star pugilists are set to fight on the most important question of the day, which is the future of the British economy. The future of the economy is usually the most important question of the day, but can be obscured by proxy fights about values, personalities or battles with their roots in the past (eg, the Brown-Blair feuding that so disabled government in recent years).

The clouds hanging over Mr Coulson were all about the past, now they have been swept aside. The Chilcot inquiry, though important, is also about the past and indeed looks something of a sideshow today. To look at things from a narrowly political standpoint, it could be argued that the court of British public opinion has already convicted Mr Blair over the Iraq invasion: it is doubtful that Sir John Chilcot will pass a harsher verdict.

Even Alan Johnson, a decent, popular figure whose departure from high office seems to have been largely triggered by unhappiness in his private life, was in some respects a hangover from the Labour party's recent past, or rather was a ghost from an alternative future that never was. More of a centrist and more of a deficit hawk than either Mr Balls or Mr Miliband, Mr Johnson never took the step of running for the Labour leadership that some hoped to see, and was visibly uncomfortable in his role as shadow chancellor, stumbling over his lack of experience with economic policy. 

So what is left? If I had to guess, the immediate future will see political debate dominated by things like rising youth unemployment, inflation and interest rates, deficit reduction and public sector spending cuts and the role and size of the state (including how best to deliver such vital public services as health and education). The two doughtiest gladiators on the opposing front benches—Mr Balls and Mr Osborne—will be well-informed, serious men, of considerable weight within their own parties, who take radically opposing views of how to fix the economy.

There will, inevitably, also be the usual business of who is up and who is down: the Westminster lobby will be watching for any sign that Ed Balls is overshadowing or challenging Ed Miliband, his former underling in the Brown universe and one-time rival for the Labour leadership. In truth, though, Mr Miliband and Mr Balls are probably (depressingly) close in their thinking on the economy, and united in a core belief that the coalition is cutting too far and too fast, and that the government is guilty of a "great deception" in blaming Labour for a deficit that both men lay at the feet of the credit crunch and global financial crisis.

In short, it seems reasonable to hope that the most interesting arguments in British politics will be about things that matter: how much the state should tax, borrow and spend, how to organise the British economy and welfare system to promote jobs and growth, and how to deliver public services. The dividing lines between the coalition and Labour could not be clearer, and those lines will be defended on both sides by articulate and aggressive champions. Bring it on.

FOR some weeks, Bagehot has been watching critical accolades piling up around "The King's Speech", like presents under a spoiled child's Christmas tree. At a certain moment, after the Guardian, the Daily Mail, Sun, Financial Times and the Daily Telegraph had all praised the film to the skies, I decided it was time to go see what all the fuss was about.

Reader, I fear I was not convinced. Or rather, the film rattled along all right. I admired the way that it played on British ur-myths about hierarchy, class, royalty, history and the rest of it. But I also found myself mouthing: "Oh come off it," several times, as it drifted into sentiment and anachronism.

Anyway, here is my print column, which explores what all this might possibly mean:

DEEP in Britain’s collective unconscious, it is said, a special place is reserved for dreams about the queen dropping round for tea—a fantasy that taps into modern snobberies but also ancient tales of monarchs passing incognito among their subjects, and commoners with secret royal friends. Small wonder, perhaps, that “The King’s Speech”, a film about King George VI, has sparked swooning adulation since opening at British cinemas this month. Towards the end, it hits all three fantasies at once: a humble speech therapist is forced to reveal that the king is his patient and friend, after his wife finds Queen Elizabeth at their dining table in a hat, pouring tea.

Ostensibly, the film’s success is rooted in its depiction of an interesting, little-known true story. There is something to this. Many younger Britons have only sketchy notions of George VI, perhaps knowing he reigned during the second world war and fathered the present monarch, Elizabeth II. The film shows a shy prince overcoming a bad stammer with the help of an unorthodox Australian therapist, Lionel Logue (who did exist), in time to ascend the throne after the abdication of his brother, Edward VIII. It breathes rare life into his wife, Elizabeth, later revered in the role of Queen Mother, a rather doll-like figure loved for smiling, waving, saying little in public and living to 101.

But acclaim for “The King’s Speech” cannot be attributed to narrative interest alone. Once popularity reaches a certain pitch, it cannot be fully explained by examining its object: extreme public enthusiasm is often a form of narcissism. If British cinema-goers have taken this tale of a reluctant king to their hearts, it is because it faithfully reflects their sense of themselves.

At the heart of the film lie two linked themes. One involves Britain’s ideas of hierarchy, the other its wartime heroism and rejection of fascism. First, hierarchy. At a casual glance, the film could pass for subversive. Its least attractive characters believe in grandeur based on birth or rank. They range from snooty members of an English amateur theatrical society (who snigger at Logue, an Australian, auditioning for Shakespeare) to the priggish Archbishop of Canterbury, appalled by Logue’s lack of qualifications. Above all, Edward VIII is shown as unworthy: a bullying playboy, unmanned by dependence on ghastly Wallis Simpson.

In contrast, George VI, his wife and two young daughters are shown fulfilling what the original Bagehot called the English ideal of “a family on the throne”. This leads to some moving scenes, such as when the two princesses first see their father in a king’s dress uniform and—after an instant of uncertainty—curtsy with a mixture of love and faint alarm. At other moments, the film wallows in sentimental anachronism. One preposterous scene has the king shuffling across a nursery floor in white tie and tails, impersonating a penguin for his daughters (in view of a nanny). In another, he celebrates a stammer-free speech by snogging his wife and whirling his children about. Not that much is known of George VI’s private life. But given that he died in 1952 and his daughter the queen seems pretty formal, it seems implausible that he cast protocol to the winds like a proto-Diana in trousers.

Equally, for most of the film, Logue is shown using impertinence as a clinical tool, calling his royal patient “Bertie” or lounging on a throne to provoke the king’s stutter away. In fact Logue’s real-life diaries show a more formal relationship.

What is going on? A clue can be found near the climax. The buttoned-up king calls Logue “my friend”. In return, Logue at last calls him “Your Majesty”. The message is thumpingly clear: only once the king has shown he is Logue’s equal in humanity has he earned the Australian’s reverence. Triumphantly swelling chords give the game away. This is a moment of conservative closure: a celebration of a very British doctrine of meritocratic snobbery—the notion that deference is quite proper, as long as it is deserved.

That grudging doctrine has its uses. Historically, Britain’s insistence on earned respect arguably helped insulate the country from fascism. In much of Europe would-be tyrants spent the 1930s strutting about in black shirts and shiny boots on stages lit by searchlights. In Britain, Oswald Mosley recruited thousands to the fascist cause but—vitally—he was also seen as ludicrous. As one Conservative MP noted acidly: “he is wearing riding breeches and riding boots though I cannot see any horse.” In the film, Edward VIII is a flashy, selfish chap. When he praises Hitler (shown preening and ranting on a newsreel), it is no surprise.

These themes come together in the climactic royal speech of the film’s title, broadcast on the day war broke out. Audiences watch George VI—a man who did not seek the throne, wanting only to raise his family in peace—reminding his subjects that Britain (depicted as a drab, grey little island, albeit one with a large empire) had also sought to live in peace, until forced into war.

Flummery and flattery

This is the stuff of national myth-making: the undemonstrative king and his undemonstrative country provoked to painful duty by foreign tyranny. There are some lessons here for Britain’s present rulers. This is a prickly, conservative and proud nation, in which grandeur must be offset with displays of humanity: David Cameron, a privileged chap who has suffered tragedies in his private life, knows this already. When it comes to the monarchy, it is a confused place, half-imagining that British kings earn their thrones: just ponder the frequent opinion polls suggesting that the Prince of Wales should stand aside and let Prince William, who seems less stuffy, succeed the queen.

Perhaps it is simpler still. “The King’s Speech” is at times uplifting and at other times absurd. But if you are British, or even just an admirer of Britain, it is a deeply flattering film. No wonder that it is proving so roaringly popular.