IN The First Circle, Alexander Solzhenitsyn has political prisoners in Stalin’s gulag tell a story about Moscow’s hellish Butyrka prison. One day, a young captain takes the emaciated inmates of cell 72 to a version of paradise. Barbers spray them with eau de Cologne, laundresses dress them in silk and chefs provide them with their first decent meal in years. When they go back, they find the authorities have painted their cell in bright colours. Previously forbidden books and packets of cigarettes are scattered around the room. In place of the four-gallon slop bucket is a gleaming toilet.

The prisoners cannot understand their good fortune until the guards usher in a ‘Mrs R’, an American ‘lady of great shrewdness and progressive views’ who is clearly meant to be Eleanor Roosevelt. The governor tells her that they are not dissidents but rapists and murderers the Communist party of the Soviet Union in its magnanimity has decided to rehabilitate rather than execute. She does not ask to inspect any of the other cells and leaves, ‘convinced of the falsehood of the allegations spread by malicious scaremongers in the West’.

As soon as she has gone, the prisoners’ lice-infested rags and four-gallon slop bucket return.

The Communist party of China has beautified Beijing for the Olympics. The Organising Committee for the games has ordered one million cars from the road and told factories to shut down, so foreigners will believe that one of the most polluted cities on earth can hold ‘the green Olympics’.

The president of the Olympic Committee gabbled his appreciation. Jacques Rogge, a sports’ bureaucrat who appears to have learnt nothing from the 20th century, lauded China’s ‘extraordinary’ efforts. The statistics proved the authorities had done everything that ‘was humanely possible’, and the statistics never lie.

Greenpeace, so harsh on democratic countries, was as excessive in its praise. After registering a few reservations, it declared the dictatorship’s work was ‘tremendous’ and ‘positively unique’. Beijing was providing ‘important lessons to other Chinese cities’.

The eyebrows of Jonathan Fenby, who has just published The Penguin History of Modern China, shot up at that. When the games are over, the factories will reopen, he said. The Olympics will have secured a few long-term benefits - more homes and workplaces will burn gas rather than coal - but when set against China’s vast pollution problem these gains will be tiny.

As every serious writer knows, the legitimacy of the dictatorship rests on its ability to deliver ever-rising living standards now that its Marxism is dead. Environmental concerns will always be trumped by the party’s survival instinct. Thus, President Hu Jintao reverses a programme to close coal mines. He has to, an official tells Der Spiegel, because China’s inefficient industries ‘need seven times the resources of Japan, almost six times the resources of the US and almost three times the resources used by India’. Thus, when the leaders of the G8 announce a wish to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, Hu and India’s leaders see a plot by the rich West to handicap Asian rivals and refuse to accept the target.

Because the communism of Stalin and Mao is dead, however, the scale of the catastrophe need not be a secret circulated only in samizdat pamphlets. There are voices within China free to argue that the country is ignoring her own as well as the world’s long-term interests. Pan Yue, minister of the environment, warned in 2005 that the economic miracle ‘will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace’, and he had the evidence to back up his claim.

China has 16 of the world’s 20 filthiest cities. The Gobi desert is expanding at a rate of 1,900 square miles a year because of deforestation and over-farming. Approximately 660 cities have less water than they need and 110 of them suffer severe shortages. The state-run Xinhua news agency reports that pollution is poisoning the aquifers. Eighty per cent of the sewage dumped into the Yangtze is untreated. Effluent, human and industrial, has driven one third of the native species of the Yellow River to extinction. About 190 million Chinese are sick from drinking contaminated water, cancer rates are rising and there are about 1,000 demonstrations a week against the effects of pollution.

The gullible admire dictatorships because they think the great leader and his politburo can cut through objections and force the recalcitrant to obey orders, and we have had no shortage of fantasies about the better China that would come if only the party embraced greenery.

In The River Runs Black, a book every environmentalist needs to read, Elizabeth C Economy points out that the fantasies can never be realised. Even if the centre wanted to change policy, its writ does not run in the provinces. Local officials are in the pocket of or related to factory owners and ignore inconvenient decrees. If the courts, the press or doctors in local hospitals complain, they silence them. Change is impossible without democratic reform - which is as far away as ever.

Solzhenitsyn’s Mrs R was incapable of believing the worst and preferred to live in a daydream. Stalin’s goons did not need to fool her because she had already fooled herself. Today it is just about possible to imagine rich, post-industrial societies switching to renewable energy and nuclear power, although optimists should note the Republicans’ success in using Obama’s refusal to allow offshore oil drilling against him. But it is inconceivable that the emerging powers of China and India will abandon fossil fuels when there are no cheap options.

Rather than despair, not only the International Olympic Committee and Greenpeace but also Western governments and the European Union pretend that the Potemkin Olympic village in Beijing heralds a new China, and miss the blackened rivers and skies beyond.

As the planet warms, I’m damned if I can see an alternative to despair, but I do know that wishful thinking isn’t it.

Anti-discrimination legislation once aimed to ensure that society treated citizens equally. By removing irrelevant criteria, the law allowed the victims of prejudice to receive the same rights as everyone else.

When the Commission for Racial Equality investigated racism in the building industry, it said that a man’s skin colour was irrelevant to whether he would make a good worker. A black bricklayer should have the same opportunities as a white bricklayer. Today’s supporters of homosexual adoption say that the sexuality of a couple is irrelevant. If they can show they would make good parents, they should have the same rights to adopt as everyone else. The argument among economists about the gender pay gap is, at root, an argument about relevance as well. Are women paid less because they take time off to have children or because of misogynist employers’ irrelevant prejudices?

Now politicians, judges and the godly are trying to turn religion into an equal opportunities cause. The language sounds the same as in the 20th century, but the consequences could not be more different. Instead of fighting for equality, they are demanding special treatment and the social fragmentation that goes with it.

Last week, Mr Justice Silber ruled that Aberdare Girls’ School in South Wales had been guilty of racial discrimination when it excluded Sarika Watkins-Singh for insisting on wearing a religious bracelet. It was a trivial case, which made you wonder about the dogmatism of both sides and the quality of their lawyers. The school could have given way - the bracelet was little more than a slim band. Watkins-Singh’s parents could have accepted that they had a duty to uphold the authority of the teachers. Still, for all the pettiness, Mr Justice Silber’s judgment was remarkable for his inability to recognise that a just society should treat people equally. He didn’t rule that all the girls at Aberdare had the right to wear bracelets, just Watkins-Singh, because she was its only Sikh pupil.

So imbued with discriminatory thinking have politicians and judges become that they are shocked when citizens ask for equality before the law. When the hapless Ed Balls was at the Treasury, the Plymouth Brethren told him that they and their more fundamentalist offshoot - the Exclusive Brethren - were the victims of religious prejudice at the hands of that unlikely source of bigotry, the tax authorities.

Both sects believed that God decides when you died. To their members, compliance with the state’s requirement to take out an annuity at 75 forced them to second-guess God by blasphemously betting on the date of their deaths.

The obliging Balls created an alternative pension scheme and then spluttered when pensioners of all faiths and none saw his generous loophole and shifted large sums of money through it. He seemed to think he could legislate for one group without the law applying equally to everyone.

If he did not have the strength of principle to stand up for equality, he ought to have had the wit to realise that the Plymouth Brethren may not have been as devout as they appeared. If you sincerely believe that an omnipotent God controls every aspect of your life, you place your fate in his hands. You do not ask accountants to lobby ministers for tax-efficient changes to pension law.

The same lack of seriousness applies to others who shout that they are the victims of religious discrimination. Watkins-Singh was not a perfect example because the law treats Sikhs and Jews as racial as well as religious groups. But before her, Lillian Ladele persuaded an employment tribunal that it was discriminatory for Islington Council to require her to perform her duties in a register office. She objected to organising gay civil partnerships solely on the religious grounds that she was an evangelical Christian who regarded homosexuality as a sin. When the tribunal found for her, it not only endorsed homophobia and ruled that religion took priority in a register office - where gay and straight couples go to escape religion - but failed to see a glaring inconsistency.

If Ms Ladele thought homosexuality sinful, she should not have wanted to work for an institution that organised ‘gay weddings’. The same objection applied to the Muslim checkout staff at Sainsbury’s who refused to scan alcohol. If the sale of alcohol was as offensive to their religious principles as they claimed, they would no more want to work for a company that sold wine than a pacifist would want to join the SAS.

The old questions about equality and relevance come back with a vengeance in these cases. The courts offer no protection to workers who have no religious reasons for their homophobia. Employers are still free to fire them just as teachers in South Wales are still free to send home girls who want to wear bracelets because they look pretty. However, the law is intervening to stop employers taking the same action against religious workers even though they are unwilling to do their jobs properly.

I wonder how far the judiciary and the government are prepared to go before they realise the absurdity of their actions. The Exclusive Brethren tells its members not to watch television. If the BBC refused to hire one of their number on the reasonable grounds that he had never seen a TV programme, would it be guilty of religious discrimination? Believers in some versions of Orthodox Judaism hold that women can’t be witnesses in religious cases.

Muslim believers in sharia say that the testimony of a Muslim woman or non-Muslim man is worth only half as much as evidence from a Muslim man. If Orthodox Jewish and Wahhabi Muslims stand by these principles in an interview, would the law officers be guilty of religious discrimination if they said they were unfit to be judges in an English court?

The way out of the mess is for the state to commit itself to secularism; to offer full religious freedom, while striving to keep religion out of the public sphere. Leaving all considerations of principle aside, secularism is the only ideology that can make a multifaith society work. The alternative is a future of competitive religious grievance and unremitting vexatious litigation.

Review in Standpoint magazine

IF YOU search on the net for ‘Jon Stewart’, ‘finance reform’ and ‘Obama’, you will find one of the most unintentionally funny sketches the US Comedy Central network has broadcast. Stewart dissects Barack Obama’s hypocrisy with his usual goggle-eyed relish. He shows that the Democrat had been all for the public funding of presidential candidates until he realised that his privately raised campaign donations would allow him to outspend John McCain.

Stewart’s audience makes a far better spectacle than the comedian on the stage, however. They had roared when he mocked Bush, Clinton and McCain, but when he ridiculed Obama, a few tittered nervously and most sunk into a shocked silence. Ordinary political satire had become a kind of blasphemy.

‘You are allowed to laugh at him,’ Stewart said. Hardly anyone wanted to.

Like other US comedians, Stewart wonders if the public is frightened of seeming racist. I do not underestimate the significance of America rising above its original sin of slavery by electing a black President, but anti-racism cannot explain soft questions and kid gloves. Black politicians who have not conformed to liberal expectations have found that anti-racism counts for little and the veneer of politically correct manners can vanish faster than breath off a windowpane.

Gary Trudeau had Bush addressing Condoleezza Rice as ‘brown sugar’ in his Doonesbury strip. Ted Rall decided she was Bush’s ‘house nigga’ and sent her to a ‘racial re-education camp’ to learn the error of her conservative views. Jeff Danziger drew her as Prissy, Scarlett O’Hara’s slave in Gone With the Wind. All three white men had reached for the dirtiest racial insults they could imagine when confronted with a black woman who disagreed with their politics.

German has the useful word Tantenverführer: ‘A young man of excessively good manners you suspect of devious motives [literally, an aunt-seducer].’ The sight of 200,000 turning out to hear Obama in Berlin showed the personable young American had wooed and wowed old Europe. If you watched them, the reverence with which liberal sympathisers and journalists treat him might have seemed no mystery. Ignore the imperatives of anti-racism and remember that to a generation raised on The West Wing Obama is the perfect candidate: hip, handsome, commanding, charismatic.

Jon Stewart tried to take on Obama’s glamour, too, and got his sidekicks to play American political correspondents covering the world tour. They giggled and gawped like love-struck teenagers and cried: ‘He gives me a boner. He should be called Barack O’Boner.’

Crude maybe, but so close to the reality of the US media’s coverage it barely qualified as satire. The Nation, once regarded as a serious, left-wing magazine, declared last week that Obama is the new ‘Frank Sinatra, so cool he’s hot’, a centrifugal force that can make ‘legions of little girls jump out of their panties’. Michelle was as much of a sex symbol, it continued. She gave him ‘hot, married love’, while the Republicans were stuck with the ’stiff, asexual, erratic McCain and his zombie-fied former drug addict wife’.

But like the colour of his skin, Obama’s good looks cannot fully explain the adulation. Few handsome men and fewer beautiful women claw their way to the top of politics. A panting BBC presenter interrupts the rolling news to tell the nation that Obama’s flight has actually touched down at Heathrow, not because of the senator’s race or charm, but because Obama is riding the crest of the global wave of relief that Bush is leaving. A wave that is about to break. It doesn’t know it, but the liberal-left in Europe and North America has been lucky to have Bush.

By building him up into a great Satan, the oil man who invades countries to seize their reserves and the Christian who orders bloody crusades, they have hidden the totalitarian threats of our age from themselves and anyone who listens to them. Bush allowed them to explain away radical Islam as an understandable, even legitimate, response to the hypocrisies and iniquities of American policy. Even those in the European elites who do not buy the full ‘America has it coming’ package believe that Bush is a cowboy who doesn’t understand that the postmodern way to end conflict is to compromise rather than fight.

In January, Bush will be history, leaving liberals all alone in a frightening world. Little else will change. Radical Islam will still authorise murder without limit, Iran will still want the bomb and the autocracies of China and Russia will still be growing in wealth and confidence. All those who argued that the ‘root cause’ of the Bush administration lay behind the terror will find that the terror still flourishes when the root cause has retired.

In their book, After Bush, professors Timothy J Lynch and Robert S Singh highlight the obvious truth that the West is in a new Cold War. Whatever his disagreements with Bush on detail, the new President will have to stop radical Islamist movements and regimes gaining nuclear, chemical or biological weapons because he will know, as we already know, when we are honest with ourselves, that they will use them. Even if we have a President Obama, the continuities in American foreign policy will be more striking than the contrasts.

Obama made their point for them in his Berlin speech. Repeatedly, he emphasised that the resolve that had won the Cold War had to be applied to the war against terror. ‘Partnership and co-operation among nations is not a choice; it is the one way, the only way, to protect our common security and advance our common humanity,’ he declared.

Not all Europeans will want co-operation. A minority will never escape from the slogans and attitudes of the Bush years and Obama and his wife must expect the same treatment as Condoleezza Rice. However, now that the majority of liberals seems likely to get the American President of their dreams, they will have to offer him their support, won’t they?

I’ve a posting on the British left and the Muslim Brotherhood at Harry’s Place here

WHEN a governing party’s time is up, no one cares about the failings of the opposition. Ministers in John Major’s Tory administration used to bemoan the easy ride the media gave New Labour. Now it is Labour ministers’ turn to stare with disbelieving eyes at the free pass we give the Conservatives.

Scandals which would once have led the news - the Tory energy spokesman’s links to Vitol, an oil company which cut deals with Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic; the Conservative peers who still talk about ‘niggers in the woodpile’ - are passed over with an embarrassed cough. I know from the experience of writing critical pieces about the Blairites in 1997 that when the national mood swings, few readers want to hear about the faults of the government in waiting.

Like Tony Blair, David Cameron has ‘decontaminated’ his brand and turned the once burning hatred of the Conservative party into desultory emotion - more of a habit rather than a passion. The first aim of the British centre-left is no longer to stop the Tories at any cost.

But in one area Cameron has been more than happy to keep his brand toxic. When he enters Downing Street, Britain will be alone in the world, with few friends and fewer allies. It is only a touch hyperbolic to say that in two years’ time we won’t have a foreign policy.

In the second half of the 20th century, talk of Tory isolationism would have sounded ridiculous. The Conservatives took Britain into Europe and were the party of the American alliance. We’ll discuss the coming breakdown in our relations with Europe later, but first the notion that the Conservatives will be able to stay on good terms with Washington needs to be humanely dispatched.

It is worth recalling a vignette from the Bosnian crisis of the early Nineties because it shows that Tories can be as anti-American as leftists. Douglas Hurd and Malcolm Rifkind used every stratagem not only to stop British troops but troops from any other country intervening to protect the Bosnian Muslims. The then Republican senators John McCain and Bob Dole insisted that an EU which boasted that ‘never again’ would Europe return to the horrors of Nazism had to mean what it said.

In Unfinest Hour, his history of the war, Cambridge historian Brendan Simms quotes the Tory response. Aides to Dole and McCain told him that Rifkind, whose experience of combat was limited to the backstabbing of the Scottish Conservative party, cried: ‘You Americans know nothing about the horrors of war.’ Dole, who had been blown up by a Nazi shell in the Second World War, walked out. McCain, who had been tortured for five years in a communist PoW camp, was so enraged by Rifkind that ‘a member of his staff feared he was about to hit him’.

This story is, incidentally, the best reason I know for preferring McCain to Obama, but every time a journalist repeats it, they receive a furious denial from Rifkind. Maybe it has grown in the telling, but no one can doubt what John Fox, of the US State Department, described as the ‘vigour and desperation’ of Tory ministers. They were ‘not just indifferent to American plans, but actively hostile to steps that could prevent ethnic cleansing’.

After Britain helped author a peace treaty which suited Milosevic very nicely, NatWest paid for Hurd and Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, a former Foreign Office civil servant who had been responsible for Bosnia, to fly to Belgrade and sell a privatisation package to Milosevic.

Despite Cameron’s decision to appoint Dame Pauline as Tory foreign affairs spokeswoman, the Conservatives say the tantrums of the Nineties are behind them. They can now ally with America because George Osborne has good contacts with the neoconservative wing of the Republican party. But it looks as if there will be a Democrat in the White House when the Conservatives reach Downing Street and I don’t think that neocons will have Obama’s ear.

In any case, the Tory idea that Britain can choose the US over Europe makes little sense because Americans from all parties want Europe to unite against the challenge of the newly invigorated autocracy of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a demand that Cameron is constitutionally incapable of accepting.

John Major’s government at least tried to maintain good relations with our European allies. Cameron makes no effort. I cannot find one Conservative statement since he became leader praising the EU, however grudgingly.

Anti-conservatism may no longer stir the left, but opposition to Europe burns as brightly as ever on the right. The Tories are committed to pulling out of the European political bloc which includes Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right parties, ordinarily Cameron’s natural allies, and heading off with the chauvinist parties of Russia and eastern Europe.

Far from standing up to Putin, the Conservatives tried to help a Putin stooge take over the Council of Europe, which oversees the European Court of Human Rights, of all things. Mainstream European conservatives were as loud in their condemnations of Cameron as mainstream socialists. Caroline Jackson, one of the few Conservative members of the European Parliament who wants to work with Britain’s allies, wrote in the Financial Times that her Tory colleagues ‘now have a bad reputation [rapidly getting worse] for crass and offensive behaviour’.

Denis MacShane, the former Labour Foreign Office Minister, was not overstating his case when he said that ‘never before has a potential party of government adopted such a hostile public approach to working with allies and partners’.

Look again at the current scandals. Alan Duncan’s links with Vitol bring back the worst memories of Hurd, Rifkind and Neville-Jones, while the Conservatives who go on about ‘niggers’ and ‘wops’ are not likely to be at ease with foreigners, to put the case against them at its mildest.

A Cameron government will tear up the complex web of alliances and understandings through which Britain exercises her influence. It is about time journalists asked him what he intends to put in their place.

I’ve written many times about how England’s libel laws are the last resort of the scoundrel. It’s not simply that the judiciary allowed Jonathan Aitken, Jeffrey Archer, Robert Maxwell and George Galloway to collect damages, but that they have opened the doors of their court to Saudi billionaires and Ukranian oligharchs wishing to suppress criticism. Moneyed men facing legitimate investigation from all over the world love the English law because it places the burden of proof on the defendant and imposes enormous costs which push publishers into retracting. Now Harry’s Place, which readers ought to know has done more to expose the Islamist far right in Britain, is being sued by a front for Hamas. You may think it can’t claim for defamation because an organisation which repeats the conspiracy theories of Adolf Hitler has no reputation to lose. If you do, you don’t know the English judiciary.
Our litigious friends are also running the Islam Expo, which is in reality not a celebration of British Islam but a rally for the Muslim Brotherhood. They asked me to go along to be ritually denounced and I refused. Martin Bright has now pulled out. But extraordinarily Stephen Timms, a Labour minister, and Demos, a supposedly soft left think tank, still plan to attend. Whenever I point out that the left is going along with the ideas and movements of ultra reaction, establishment figures protest that only the far left is guilty of appeasement. The presence of Timms and Demos at this rally argues against their complacency.
If you have any clout to use, give them a call.

Channel 4 News’s anchorman has to disguise his political bias as neutrality, a pretence that is both insidious and unmanly

More here

St Matthew’s warning that ‘unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away’ is the biblical quote least likely to stir the Labour soul.

That the rich get richer and the poor will get poorer is not a policy prescription that appeals to the left. With the best of intentions, however, Labour is imposing the Gospel according to St Matthew on England’s universities and is providing a parable on the state of the nation in the process.

Few dispute that academia needs reforming. Britain has a university system in which the last measure the government uses to judge the quality of academics is their ability to teach. Instead, tortuous bureaucracies assess the merits of the research produced by every department in all the 200 universities. On their ruling rests the disposal of £5bn of public money.

The 2008 fight for loot is under way. Luckless workers at a Bristol warehouse are sending 200,000 scholarly books and papers to the 1,000 or so professors who adjudicate on 70 panels like the judges of beauty contests.

In the inaugural issue of the new magazine Standpoint, Jonathan Bate of Warwick University despairs of the absurdity of the enterprise. He explains that panels filled with professors of foreign languages have been more generous in rating the work of their peers than professors of English. Officially, our universities are now world leaders in the study of French literature but awful at studying English literature. What’s really happened, says Bate, is that while other professors of literature covered each other’s backs and looked after each other’s departments ‘the Eng lit lot couldn’t resist biting each other’s backs’ even if it meant their subject lost money.

Neither he nor the government says this, but a second failing of the system is that it creates conformism in supposedly independent minds. There are many honourable exceptions, but as a herd, academics are the most predictable of beasts. If I sit down with builders, dentists or accountants, I have no way of knowing what their opinions will be. Within seconds of talking to an academic, I guess their views on every major political issue.

Why should I be surprised? To get the academic papers published the judging panels demand, lecturers must engage in the soul-destroying task of sucking up to the editors of learned journals. The funding for their departments and their very livelihoods depend on their ability to please. The government does not ask researchers to produce work of intellectual distinction, however long it takes. They must loyally churn out enough papers to allow their department to claim a slice of the booty.

The government admits this can’t go on. It plans to replace the judging panels with a computer, which will record the number of times an academic’s name is mentioned by his colleagues. The theory is that the best academics receive the greatest number of acknowledgements in footnotes. Let a database identify who these oft-cited professors are and - bingo! - you have found the finest minds of your generation.

Ministers possibly realised that under the present funding arrangements, Cambridge University would have to sack Ludwig Wittgenstein. He might have been a genius, but it took him decades to produce a book. Under their new system, the thousands of academics who quoted his work would provide a true assessment of Wittgenstein’s worth and spare him the dole.

It sounds fair until you remember St Matthew. In 1968, Robert K Merton of Columbia University coined the phrase ‘the Matthew effect’ when he looked at how scientists valued each other. He found that the already eminent got disproportionate credit for their work while unknowns, whose research was often as valuable, struggled for recognition.

The great English geneticist JBS Haldane illustrated Merton’s argument with the story of an Indian student, SK Roy, who had found a way to improve strains of rice. ‘I thought it was a rather ill-planned experiment,’ Haldane admitted, ‘but I let him go ahead on the general principle that I am not omniscient.’ The experiment was a triumph. Haldane said that Roy deserved 95 per cent of the credit, but would never get it. ‘Every effort will be made here to crab his work. He has not got a PhD or even a first-class MSc. So either the research is no good or I did it.’

Beyond the prestige of quoting established names lies the incentive to cheat - academics are already promising that ‘if you cite my research I’ll cite yours’ - and beyond that lies sheer luck. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who glories in the title of professor in the sciences of uncertainty, points out that what leads to one academic being cited rather than another can be a simple fluke. But as soon as he or she is cited in one paper, the odds increase that he or she will be cited in another.

The Matthew effect does not only work in academia. Of the thousands of first novels each year, the few that are reviewed make the literary pages because the author is already well known in another field (prestige), the author is a friend of the literary editor (cheating) or the author’s book was picked at random from a pile on a slow week (luck).

City firms give lavish bonuses because they don’t want to lose staff to rivals (prestige), because they dealt on insider information (cheating) or because they pulled out of the sub-prime market just in time (luck).

You only have to read the financial press to know that the beneficiaries of the property crash won’t be first-time buyers - they are struggling to get mortgages because of the credit crunch. The winners will be the already rich sitting on piles of cash who will snap up assets when their prices hit the floor.

Labour should not be happy with helping those that hath. If it wants to reform education, it should begin by noticing that working-class students are dropping out and middle-class students are paying fees for substandard courses, because the first concern of the universities isn’t teaching. Ministers would do better to redirect public money to make sure that it is.

The best crime writers foresaw the disaster of Whitehall targets by creating heroes unlike any other fictional detectives. It is not the determination of Morse, Tennison, Frost and Rebus that marks them out - Holmes was as purposeful. Nor is the loneliness their obsessive devotion to work brings unusual. Inspector Morse never finds a woman who will stay with him and Inspector Frost only has curries for company at night, but they are not so different from Philip Marlowe. Modern British detectives stand out because they have to deal with managers like no other.

Morse’s Chief Superintendent Strange and Frost’s Superintendent Mullett are not corrupt like so many police chiefs in American and Continental thrillers. They are good men by their own lights who would never take a bribe. Nor are they always plodders who rely on the brilliance of a Holmes or Poirot. When they need to curry favour, they reveal themselves as skilled office politicians.

But in pleasing their superiors they infuriate subordinates. In Winter Frost, RD Wingfield describes Mullett as a man who ‘makes a great show of pushing the pile of papers to one side’ when speaking to a colleague. He puts on his ‘tired, overworked, but my staff come first expression’ and parrots the latest management-speak to Liz, a new recruit.

‘”Teamwork, Inspector. That’s the key word. No cowboys, no Indians, no generals, no privates - all one big team.” These were the words the chief constable had used at yesterday’s meeting at which Mullett had nodded his fawning agreement. He was surprised that Liz didn’t seem to be doing the same.’

Frost and Liz must always watch their backs. From the chief superintendent to the chief constable, they can’t trust their managers to support them or help the victims of crime.

Inspector Frosts are all over the public sector and not only in the police. Paul Gregg, an economist at Bristol University, and his colleagues looked at who in the workforce was prepared to forgo their own self-interest by working unpaid overtime. They found the ‘public service ethos’ was not just propaganda from union leaders when the annual pay negotiations began. Among the teachers, doctors and nurses they studied, altruism and devotion to duty were far stronger in the public than the private sector.

They weren’t all saints. Many happily fiddled the incentive schemes Labour invented in the naive belief that they could micro-manage local services. But so many were prepared to work for nothing that Bristol University estimated the Treasury would need to pay for another 60,000 staff to cover for them if they decided to leave at the end of their shifts.

Despite the increases in taxation and national debt, Britain has not benefited from their selflessness. Labour sabotaged their altruism by overwhelming the public sector with legions of Mulletts.

Last week, Harriet Sergeant of Civitas described a police service which was close to incapable of doing its job. In a think-tank pamphlet, she delivered a devastating condemnation of an enclosed and self-referential bureaucracy which operated without regard to the wishes of the people who paid for it.

We now spend proportionately more than any other developed country on policing, she pointed out. The Home Office used targets to run it and delivered funding and bonuses to chief constables who filled its ’sanction detention’ arrest quotas.

The first perverse consequence was that although the public expected the police to keep the peace, an officer who successfully stopped trouble was not rewarded because no trouble meant no arrests. More seriously, the police played the Home Office game by going for trivial offenders rather than serious criminals. Solving the case of a child who steals a Mars bar earned as many points as solving a murder. It made more sense to arrest rowdy children for ‘harassing a tree’ than to begin the hard work of tackling a potentially homicidal teenage gang.

Chris Dillow, author of New Labour and the Folly of Managerialism, describes Brown’s Mullettry as a marriage between Old Labour’s Fabian belief in the centralised state and Thatcherites’ worship of management consultants. Between them, they have spawned a bureaucracy which despises democratic accountability and, worse, does not and cannot work.

Fabianism, with its loathing for the masses - ‘We must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit in,’ declared George Bernard Shaw at the turn of the 20th century - is not the only Labour tradition. The Co-op and guild socialist movements were at ease with democracy as was radical liberalism. Last week, Phil Collins, an occasional speechwriter for James Purnell, suggested to the Brownites that Labour could find a way out of its crisis by listening to the Fabians’ liberal opponents. He cited a warning of Leonard Hobhouse, the early 20th-century liberal intellectual, that the ‘mechanical socialism’ of the Fabians ‘applauded the running of the machine merely because it is a machine and is being run’. Hobhouse might have delivered it yesterday.

Brown invited Collins to Downing Street to talk over his ideas. Maybe he is grasping the near-universal public dissatisfaction with what Labour has done in its name and with its money. If so, it’s too late.

‘Right,’ cries Frost to his officers as Mullett approaches. ‘Super’s going to say a few words. Try and look as if you’re paying attention.’

Within days of the Civitas pamphlet, the chief constables of Surrey, Staffordshire, Leicestershire and West Midlands showed they no longer even had to pretend to pay attention to Labour. They announced they were breaking with the Home Office and everything it stood for.

‘Quite simply, local people’s safety, confidence in police and their satisfaction when they call us for help are more important than misleading targets,’ explained the acting chief constable of Surrey. He would never have said that when Labour ministers were in the ascendancy. But he’s not frightened now because he knows that it’s over and the electorate’s target is to throw them out.