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It's about much more than warrants

How do you fix a leak? Since he was arrested last Thursday, political talk in Britain has been dominated by the plight of Damian Green, the Tory immigration spokesman held and questioned on suspicion of conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office; and today, Parliament's opening has been dominated by the Speaker's statement about the conduct of his staff in allowing the police to search Green's Commons office without a warrant. It's a great pity that's what MPs are concerned about, because the question of warrants is a small, marginal one. Some commentators on this are as obsessed with warrants as Trouble-all in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair. Here he is in Act 4, Scene 3:

Trouble-all    Have you any warrant for this, Gentlemen?

Quarlous,      Ha!
Winwife

Trouble-all    There must be a warrant had, beleeue it.

Winwife        For what?

Trouble-all    For whatsoeuer it is, any thing indeede, no matter what.

The police didn't need a warrant to carry out the search; they simply needed consent, which they were rightly given. Parliamentary privilege does not prevent arrests for crimes, and it would be quite wrong not to admit the police to exercise their lawful powers. I'm distinctly unimpressed by the Speaker's statement about this today, as are Iain Dale, Guido Fawkes and Fraser Nelson. Speaker Martin clearly didn't think a search warrant was necessary last week - why should he have? - but now that all this has blown up he is trying to put the Serjeant-at-Arms in the frame. Weak, pathetic and deeply unimpressive, this: if there were any sense in this idea that a warrant should be insisted on (there's not: it's merely a procedural hurdle that's being put forward now, as a sop) then he should have insisted on one last week, rather than bringing it up after the fact, as a way of blaming his staff. Jill Pay, the Serjeant-at-Arms, has done nothing wrong, and should not resign. If anyone in Parliament has failed, it is the Speaker personally.

Politicians sink in the eyes of the public every time they appear to want special, different treatment from the rest of us; and there's a nasty tendency of politicians, especially those in office, to want to protect politicians themselves from legal sanctions while being quite content to see officials like Christopher Galley (the Conservative supporter who fed information to Damian Green) and Jill Pay carry a very big can. When this matter is debated in the House next Monday, I hope MPs see past the narrow issue of what procedures the police should undertake in order to search their Parliamentary offices, and focus on the bigger issue about the law and leaks. Whether or not it does so will show us whether it's a place to be taken seriously by the public as acting for them; or whether it's more interested in itself.

Let me be clear about my views on leaks: I don't approve of them, or think civil servants should indulge in them except in extreme circumstances. By that, I mean that a civil servant should consider leaking only non-security-related information, and only where he or she feels that leaking is necessary in the public interest. I used to be a civil servant myself, and thought it was important to reflect on all this: that's the position I reached. Of course the official position is that one should never leak, in any circumstances - but I think a civil servant who can't readily imagine circumstances that show the inadequacy of the official approach is a civil servant without imagination, and possibly unfit for the job. If you knew ministers and permanent secretaries were conspiring to murder the Queen and MPs in a modern gunpowder plot, you'd have a positive duty to leak. Unlikely, I know, but that's not the point.

The important question in this case is not "should a civil servant leak?" - Christopher Galley obviously believes he was right to, and if charged he may be able to put his argument to a jury. The important question is, what should happen to a civil servant who does leak? - I think losing his or her job, and finding it difficult to get a new one because of the hidebound disapproval of potential employers for anyone who's displeased a previous one is a sufficient sanction - unless the leak risked real harm to the country. It may be wrong for a civil servant to leak information which he’s contractually bound to keep private, but to see it as criminal reflects the attitude I thought and hoped (and many of those who voted Labour in 1997 thought and hoped) we were slowly moving away from in the UK: the attitude that all government information, no matter how unharmful its disclosure, is a state secret and must be kept from the public by the most authoritarian methods. To give a man a criminal record simply for embarrassing ministers is authoritarianism itself. Ministers do not own government, their political embarrassment is not per se contrary to national security or the public interest, and it is scandalous for them to look on with approving unconcern at these arrests, when they themselves leak like torn paper sieves for their own party political or personal advantage all the time - and without the risk of any sanction whatever.

I think this affair shows the need for legislation abolishing the common-law offence of misconduct in public office, if it’s going to be abused in this intimidating way both by ministers - on whose instructions David Normington, the Home Office permanent secretary or else Gus O'Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary must have called in the police - and by the police, who made an awful judgment in thinking arrests were appropriate. The fact that our law enables the executive and law enforcers to treat leaks which cause the mere embarrassment of government as arrestable is a national scandal. They should never be allowed to do so again.

The fact that Labour ministers and their supporters defend what's happened is disappointingly old-fashioned - it’s the kind of stance Tories, policemen and senior civil servants traditionally take, and the fact that they now do so too simply shows why many people think Labour has been too long in government. Labour supporters should not let their re-reaction to the Conservative reaction to this affair to spill over into outright support for the worst sort of traditionalist Yes, Minister Whitehallism.

keerthi/CreativeCommons

We're all shocked by the overnight news from India, that terrorists have attacked a number of places in Bombay - the Taj Palace and Oberoi hotels and the famous VT railway station, hospitals and other busy places - with machine guns and grenades. As I write at lunchtime, two of the terrorists are said still to be in the Oberoi and Indian security forces still seem to be trying to take control of the Taj Palace, right by the Gate of India. Over a hundred have been killed, with blood on the platforms of VT station. A truly outrageous planned carnage, for which people calling themselves the Deccan Mujahideen have claimed responsibility.

To me, these attacks show several things. First, that politicians like Tony Blair were right to argue that Al Qaeda-inspired terrorist are a risk to every western country, regardless of its involvement in Iraq or Afghanistan. Yes, Islamists may have beefs with India over Kashmir, but whatever happens about things like that, Islamists will imagine grievances over homosexuality or especially about equality for women, if they have nothing else to complain about, because their entire world-view depends on anger and confrontation. The fact that they attacked a Jewish centre speaks voumes about them: Islamists hate Jews and if nothing else incurs their wrath they'll be hostile to places they see as "Jew-ridden", just as Hitler was. Second, I think it shows that terrorists like these will direct their attacks where they can, just as the IRA did in its last ten years when it seemed less able to target London than it had been in the seventies and eighties. I reckon international Islamism has more difficulties in recruitment than we sometimes fear and that it is significantly constrained by western intelligence and security. It now attacks where it can find the men and the opportunity. Finally, it may show, depending on how we can make sense of last night's events, that Islamism is no longer so dependent on suicide attackers for its attacks, but may adopt these guerilla tactics if it can: if that's right, the move may strengthen Islamist terrorism in some ways, but it will weaken it in others.

The aim was clearly not just to frighten the Indian public - which the attacks on stations and hospitals certainly will have done - but through the attacks on hotels to deter business travellers, tourists and non-resident Indians from going to Bombay. Let's hope that fails: if I weren't trying to scratch an impoversished living together I'd be tempted to book a flight so I could walk down green University Road again, and take a whisky and soda outside the Gaylord.

Labour's emergency budget

Downing Street/CreativeCommons

This was much more than an autumn statement; more, even, than an ordinary budget. What Alistair Darling set out in the Commons today was effectively a master-budget for the next seven years, spelling out the government's plans to combat the recession we're already in, to bring government accounts back into balance over the next Parliament, and to shift the burden on to the better off to bring that deficit down. It's by far the most left-wing and the most daring budget by Labour since they came into government in 1997.

Alistair Darling predictably heaped blame on "America" for the country's troubles, and that line may be credible to some extent since the credit crunch did start in the United States. I doubt it's good enough to deflect blame entirely though, for where we find ourselves now. Gordon Brown has presided over boom and bubble in excelsis since 1997 and has piled up public debt massively while allowing private debt to do the same. I don't say spending should have been less - I think the country needed the huge injeciton of money into the NHS that the government has made, the rise in education spending and the redistribution towards pensioners and the worse off. But it would have been wiser to tax more, earlier, and to take steps to cool the housing market rather than bask in the illusory feelgood it gave off for so long. George Osborne is right to attack Gordon Brown for having talked so often and confidently of having ended boom and bust.

But what of today's measures? Brown and Darling have clearly decided they need to do something to soften the impact of the recession, and to attempt to bring recovery on more quickly. I agree that a fiscal stimulus is a good idea now - worth trying even with public borrowing already so high - and this is without doubt the risk-taking I urged on the government two months ago. A few months ago, conventional wisdom was that Gordon Brown was doomed, and I thought perhaps he should stand down. But he's finally showing some of the decisiveness and political energy he needs to have any chance of keeping Labour in power beyond 2010.

The stimulus obviously comes from cutting VAT to 15% from next Monday. Business may whine about the costs of changing labels - it seems to me that handwritten ones will be good enough for consumers, as long as price reductions are passed on - but at least this measure has the virtue of being immediate in terms of any real economic effect, and of being immediate in terms of confidence. An awful lot depends on this small lowering of costs, and the hope that it will boost consumer spending - it may or may not. Of course very soon we may realise that prices in the shops are not the problem - if deflation begins to take hold, this VAT cut will be overwhelmed and obscured by the effect of naturally tumbling prices. The cut also stores up some political trouble, because it lasts until end of 2009: the government is bound to come under pressure to extend the cut in the last few months before an election. Perhaps they think they can turn this to advantage by accusing the Tories of threatening to restore the full rate of VAT at that time. 

There were a few more measures aimed at putting cash in pockets, though. Darling announced a permanent extension to the increase to personal allowances for basic rate payers that was originally a temporary way of compensating for withdrawal of the 10p rate. He's also softened the new car tax regime to make increases less steep on most polluting cars, and brought forward to next spring his planned increase to Child Benefit. He's also threatening to use statutory powers to cap gas and electricity bills if need be.

To help small business, he's spreading the period over which they can pay tax, allowing them to offset more losses against tax and deferring the 1% increase in corporation tax he plans for them. Plus, he's creating a temporary credit scheme for small businesses on flexible terms . On top of this, he's bringing forward capital spending on roads, housing, school infrastructure and energy efficiency.

Will all this make much difference? I'd like to think so, and if it does, Brown and Darling will deserve the votes they hope to win by this strategy. But I wonder whether the Treasury's growth forecasts are realistic, even after the biggest downward adjustment ever: they forecast -1.25% to -0.75% growth next year, which may be optimistic and 1.5% positive growth in 2010, which strikes me as Polyannaish. But I admire the chutzpah of this: it's a gamble that may mark the end of monetarism. That doctrine hit British politics in Jim Callaghan's famous speech to the 1976 Labour conference in which, in words written for him by Peter Jay, the new Prime Minister said

We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.

Thirty years later, Brown and Darling hope they can prove Callaghan wrong - at least in a time when deflation, not inflation, is the present danger. I applaud them for trying.

Just as important politically is the government's long-term plan for coming back into fiscal discipline. Darling projected a deficit for the whole of the next Parliament, and debt will peak in the middle of the next Parliament in 2013 at a dizzying 57% of GDP. 

So, from April 2011 150,000, those earning over £150,000 will pay a new higher 45% rate of income tax, affecting the top 1% of incomes, Darling says. I say: good as far as it goes. But this measure will not bring more than a few billion back into the Treasury, the very highest paid continue to pay relatively low taxes, and rates now are much less than they were during the vast majority of Margaret Thatcher's time in office. I'd have welcomed a 50% rate on earnings over £100,000, and and even higher rate - say, 60% - on earnings over £200,000. I think this is extremely tentative redistribution and that the public would have welcomed more of it. 

To be fair to him, from 2010 those earning between £100-£140,000 will see the value of their personal allowances reduced, and above that, personal allowances will go altogether. That must be right.

More problematically, from 2011, national insurance contributions will rise by 0.5%, clawing back the biggest share of Darling's deficit. He will raise the lower earnings limit to protect the less-well paid, but the rise will still act as a tax on jobs through employers' contributions. He's increasing fuel tax to offset the VAT cut; and he's planning to cut waste from government spending to the tune of £5 billion.

The credibility of this matters a lot: we'll see what happens to sterling. But what matters most of all is how people feel during 2009, which will be the longest and most critical year in politics for a long time. There's a good chance the VAT increase will have little real or confidence-building effect, that people will experience only gloom, and that 2009 will see voting intentions shift decisively against the government. I'd be surprised if growth and borrowing figures turn out as good as darling projects, and I doubt he's achieve the savings from waste that he mentioned. But Brown and Darling are gambling everything, hoping people will notice some effect, and give them the credit for their activism through the recession. And that no further crises are going to send public debt beyond any semblance of control.

The next election is now warming up to be a major strategic and ideological battle between a neo-Keynesian redistributive Labour, highly activist and believing in state power, and monetarist or at least traditionalist sound-money Toryism, aspiring to tax cuts and spending cuts possibly before that. I expect the turnout at the next election to go up, and applaud Gordon Brown's boldness and decision. He's put on his big red wig.

World Economic Forum/CreativeCommons

I mentioned yesterday that Dmitri Medvedev's reaction to Barack Obama's election was stupid: how he can think a sensible policy is to threaten America by stationing missiles near the Polish border, I have no idea. Obviously the Russians want the US to abandon missile defence, or at least to site it somewhere other than eastern Europe; they want American support for Georgia to be reduced and for NATO expansion to be slowed or halted. But this isn't the way to achieve any of that. Can't Medvedev see that his move is strongly reminiscent of the Cuban missile crisis in the early sixties? Obama makes many Americans think of Kennedy, and has encouraged the comparison by his staged speech in Berlin earlier this year - and now Medvedev has cemented the parallel. By doing so, he makes it politically impossible for Obama to be as moderate as he might have hoped to be: he's considered dangerously doveish by enough Americans already, and dare not be seen as less willing to stand up to Russia than Kennedy was. Medvedev, therefore, has trapped Obama in just the position Moscow would like Washington to abandon. A masterstoke of silliness.

How much shrewder it would have been to welcome Obama's election fulsomely, to look forward to a breathrough in bilateral relations and to express hope of early change from the rigid positions of the past - perhaps mentioning Iraq and missile defence specifically - in this way not only inviting and permitting Obama to back off, but actually making it difficult for him to maintain current positions without seeming to go back on his own promise of change in American foreign policy. I think Medvedev needs new advisers.

Barack Obama/CreativeCommons

Barack Obama is President-Elect of the United States, as everyone now knows. I want to say how I think he achieved it; what this election means in terms of American history; and something about what his Presidency might mean for the world.

Obama won this election not this autumn, in my view, but before Easter, when Obamamania at its height put him clearly ahead of Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. He chose to stand for hope rather than fear, for change and something new, and for transcending the American past; she made the mistake, at that time, of seeming to argue for a return to something, for retreat to a non-existent experience, and for winning the culture wars of the nineties. It was that strategic victory that I think was decisive because in my view, Hillary would have beaten John McCain last night just as clearly as Obama did. In fact by the end the financial crisis would have played well to her working-class, blue collar appeal. She would have divided Americans more than Obama promises to do, but I think the economy would have won it for her - which is why I say the primary campaign was so critical. It was not so much Obamamania that triumphed yesterday, as a traditional cry for fairness and for change.

Obama's election is historic of course in a country in which, when it was founded, he could have been a slave, without rights. For a clear majority of Americans to have chosen him shows how much things have changed there since the sixties, and that white racists and ultra-conservatives no longer have a political veto over there. His nominaiton and election show too, though, how much the civil rights movement and black America have the,selves changed: he could never have been elected had he occupied the traditional welfarist position of figures like Jesse Jackson - to win the White House, Obama needed to transcend, at least to some extent. I don't think we will ever again see a serious black candidate for office in America standing on a predictable or traditional platform; I think may may well see a proliferation of Mitt Romneys, Condy Rices, Bobby Jindals, and candidates of all backgrounds now standing on all kinds of ground. Obama's achievement is to have broken the familiar mould. A lot, though, will depend on how he governs and on how many of those new candidates break through. If his administration ends in abject failure he may be remembered only for the fact of his election - which may prove not to have been the massive step forward it seems now.

Finally, the world. Dmitri Medvedev has already made a stupid intervention recalling the Cuban missile crisis and making it more difficult, not easier, for President Obama to take a moderate line with Russia next year. I doubt Russia will find that US policy changes, much. I'm sure they will leave Iraq more quickly - Obama will disappoint millions if they do not. I fear Obama may not redouble American efforts in Afghanistan, but hope he will. I think we will see some more positive engagement over Iran, but I hope for no dramatic change in policy towards Israel, though support for moderate elements in Israel itself would be welcome. I have no fear of a new protectionism, unlike Rupert Murdoch: I think this new President will put relations with Europe, Canada and Africa ahead of that.

The biggest change will be on climate, energy, Kyoto and all that: to have a US President who's actually committed to action in the same way as European governments and others is really a revolution. I'd like to see him now insist on action now, not just distant targets; and that others do not retreat now that economic times are tough.

Sunday's election reveals a political culture in deep trouble

pressefoto.creativecommons

Who's the dashingly suave fellow in the cheesy, Jason King-like seventies pose? This is Jörg Haider, the leader of the populist right-wing BZÖ party, and the only Austrian politician many foreigners have heard of. He's also one of the big winners in Austria's general election held last Sunday. 

I've written before about the troubles of the Social Democrats, and the desperate tactics of the outgoing Chancellor, Alfred Gusenbauer. Unsurprisingly the SPÖ did badly, achieving less than 30% of the votes although remaining the biggest single party in the Federal Parliament. Here are the results, with figures for the 2006 election for comparison. The other big losers are the mainsream conservative Austrian People's Party or ÖVP, with just a quarter of the votes. It used to be almost a joke that these two parties ran Austria: everyone was aligned with one of the two big parties or the other. But this election has seen them receive fewer votes, taken together, than ever before - and a marked swing to the right. Austria has two populist parties, believe it or not - the "Freedom Party", a formerly more or less liberal party which Haider took over in the 1980s and gave a radical anti-immigration makeover, but which fell out of love with him a few years ago; and Haider's new breakaway BZÖ. Together these two parties gained 29% of the votes: more than the Austrian far right's previous high of 27% back in 1999, when it entered into coalition with the ÖVP, to the distaste of many elsewhere in Europe. The other main party, the Greens, also did badly - down from 11% to under 10%.

There's cause for real concern about all this. Partly because Haider, for whom this result represents a serious comeback, is a deeply questionable figure. He has a history of making provocative remarks and political gestures with strikingly anti-semitic overtones - see what the Anti-Defamation League says about him - and sometimes even implying sympathy with Austria's Nazi past. Reuters are I think far too generous in calling these "gaffes": Haider is an extremely skilled communicator and accomplished dog-whistler who I think knows exactly what he says and does. One of his most notorious maverick stunts was visiting Saddam Hussein in 2002, something that contributed to a decline that made it look as though Haider was finished as a national political figure a few years ago - but no.

Sunday's result is also worrying, though, because Austria is facing a broader crisis of confidence in democracy. Neither of the two main parties is capable of governing alone under Austria's proportional electoral system, and the lack of a popular centrist party - Heide Schmidt's Liberal Forum got less than 2% of the votes and no parliamentary seats, together with the weakness of the Greens, means that neither of the big two can form a coalition except with one of the right-wing parties - or with each other. In 1999, the ÖVP decided to try colation with Haider's party, a controversial venture, but one that led to a declien in support for the radical right and Haider's marginalisation. In 2006, though, the social democrats and conservatives were forced to form a "grand coalition" - a disastrous situation in my view because effectively it deprived Austrians of a real political choice. All governments, in time, lose popularity; and some alternative government is bound to benefit from that. If, in Britain, Labour and the Conservatives were by some weird chain of events to end up working together in a national unity government, undoubtedly the LibDems would grow fat on protest votes and grow into a serious alternative administration. But what if there were no LibDems? Who'd be the natural opposition then? That, in brief, is where Austria has got to. And that's why the populist right is resurgent. Yet the likely new SPÖ Chancellor Werner Faymann's only likely coalition partner is once again the ÖVP, and the two parties are now again discussing a renewed grand coalition. The Greens are hopeful the big two might include them in a so-called "Kenya Coalition" (Kenya's flag being red, black and green - the colours of the three parties) but Faymann sees no point in this. I agree.

Far from bipartisanship and national unity, Austria needs to give the choice of government back to voters. Another grand coalition will merely confirm angry, dissatisfied and cynical voters in the belief that voting changes nothing, as a clearly unpopular government will in effect survive the election anyway, although the faces of ministers may change. Involving the Greens will only damage them, too, and leave the anti-politicians of the far right - the Freedom Party's Heinz-Christian Strache is no more admirable a fgure than Haider - as truly the only alternative.

Faymann should form a minority social democrat government, seeking ad hoc support from conservatives, greens and any right-wingers who will back his measures, and Austria's respectable politicians should work together to build a bipolar politics in which voters in future choose between red-green government on the one hand, and conservative government on the other, even if supported by one or other of the right-wing parties. Just as happened in France at the last election, a clear and reasonable choice between right and left is what's needed to build confidence in politics and weaken the forces of disaffection. Otherwise, I fear the new right will end up running Austria one day, and sooner rather than later if all Europe experiences economic depression in the next few years. The only good news is that the split between Haider and Strache makes them weaker than they ought to be in this situation: something mainstream politicians must take advantage of.

If you want to read more, here's an article by Marion Kraske for the German magazine Der Spiegel, and a piece in the Telegraph by Edward Lucas, who agrees with me about the need for political competition rather than cooperation. He's right, too, that Austria's problems bode ill for Germany.

just as Karl Marx once claimed that he probably wasn't a Marxist, so one of the more mysterious things about Gordon Brown is that he hasn't turned out to be a Brownite, and the abiding impression of grim continuity has been underpinned by a depressing political trinity: market-worship, Blair-esque public service reform and a refusal to prise open the forbidden subject of equality.

I can only agree with John Harris, writing at Comment is Free. He, like me, feels a distinct disappointment after yesterday's speech. I think he's right that a mood is crystallising among many people that's actually very welcoming to more radical, traditionally left-wing ideas - like taking the better off more heavily and regulating more firmly to prevent future creidt crunches - and that the hard pity is that Labour's leader can't seize on this. Simon Jenkins, writing in the Guardian, was more positive than Harris or me about the speech, but I think he may be right about Brown's unshiftability.

The Labour leader is a big beast who is not going to go quietly. Blair's constitutional reform ensured that any toppling would be bloody, and probably require a split in the party's upper echelon. This would increase calls for a swift general election, at which the party would be devastated. The only MPs stupid enough to want that are ones whose seats are safe, and there are few of those at present.

I, too, have a feeling he may still make it all the way to 2010. Increasingly, I fear it.

Gordon Brown's speech to Labour conference

Gordon Brown's speech in Manchester this afternoon was good enough to take the pressure off him for a few days; but it changed nothing fundamentally. It was, as Andrew Neil said on telly straight afterwards, Gordon Brown as we'd seen him before. There was nothing really new, and no idea big enough to lift Brown up to the level of the political challenge he faces.

He began the speech smilingly, apparently trying hard to project a more relaxed image than we're used to - but that soon disappeared as he told us there was "a lot to be serious about". The theme he gave the speech was the idea of a "new settlement for our times", and he spoke about building a fair society. Fair enough: he told us repeatedly he's on the side of fairness, "hard-working families" and those on middle and modest incomes. Filling that out, though, was much harder work. There were far too many platitudes in this speech - politically vacuous words about developing the talents of all the people, of aspiring to be the party of the family and of law and order, of putting people first, of markets being the servant of the people, of wanting a "British century". To be fair, there was a fair amount of detail, filling out the well-trodden paths of New Labour government. He said nursery education will be rolled out to two-year-olds, that general health check-ups will be offered to all the over-forties, that "help" of an unspecified kind will be given to those paying for long-term care and that cancer patients will have free prescriptions. All good stuff worth doing, as he said. But some of these detailed ideas were not good. I don't agree for instance with shifting public funding for medical research towards drug development. The pharmaceutical industry is already good at doing that, and needs no subsidy: public funding should be directed at the pure science that offers few obvious short-term financial paybacks to investors but which may just lead to real breakthroughs. Why spend public money helping families with kids get onto the internet? Practically every family that wants to be on it, is, and there are libraries and internet cafes that offer access at quite low prices. That seems to me a useless tranfser of resources. His promise to have offenders doing visible community payback is an old idea warmed up, one that's taken far too long to deliver already and which I doubt will ever happen. The pledge to put into law the commitment to abolish child poverty by 2020 is a pure gimmick: far better to take action to reduce it now than to waste Parliament's time with merely declaratory legislation. Brown won't be proposing to send himself to prison if that target's not met, after all, will he? Nor was I impressed by his talk about more demanding targets for cutting carbon emissions by 2050. The important thing is not the precise level of any targets, but doing something now to meet them - today, tomorrow and every day after that.

The main problem about the speech, though, was simply that it was so detailed. The biggest cheer and applause Brown got was the moment when he thanked NHS workers for serving a great principle, of free treatment for everyone when they need it. What Brown needed, to build on that and make the public think again about him, was a big idea of his own on something like the scale and stature of the NHS idea: one big, simple concept the Conservatives could never copy, that would attract voters and that would show a bold way forward. Difficult, that, I know: there's so little scope for big public investment projects in the new few years that it's almost impossible to propose, say, a national legal service to support victims, witnesses and consumers (Brown promised a victims' commissioner, which is a much smaller idea, unlikely to have much real impact), a properly-funded national insurance scheme for pensions or a massive transformation of public transport. But something like that was needed if he was really to seize the agenda. I've suggested in the past that equality offers a better umbrella under which to collect a themed series of policies, but even that would require a much more powerful programme than Brown offered today. Announcing free long-term care would have been better, on its own, than the big list he offered. There was actually a crescendo passage in the speech in which Brown spoke about Labour being best when it offered big, revolutionary ideas that are now accepted by everyone - and that made me prick up my ears waiting for Brown's revolutionary idea. It never came.

One positive was that Brown was much better when attacking the Tories: he needs to do a lot more of that if he has any future. There were mistakes, too, though, like the mawkishly-delivered anecdotes about "dads who can now afford birthday parties for their kids" and so on, which made me think of Brown in the role of Scrooge. I thought a long passage near the beginning gave an important clue to what's wrong with Brown, though: he spoke about a new "global age", surveying the world scene like an LSE guest lecturer, or like an ex-Prime Minister speaking to a big conference in the States. It's as though Brown's long service as a G8 finance minister has turned him into the sort of wiseacre statesman who sits on investment bank boards, who can talk reasonably fairly convincingly about the supposed new challenges of the supposedly new global age of supposedly ever more rapid changes, but who's no longer in real touch with people. Whose political edge has been blunted. Talk about "believing in Britain" and its successes is no good to a government in the state ours is now, but we got a lot of that, about how "nothing has ever broken Britain" and how great volunteers are. That, though, is losing talk, reminiscent of the way Michael Heseltine used to talk about British firms exporting pizza to Italy. Look how much good that did him.

A disappointing speech, then: if this was the speech of Brown's life, then there can't be much life left in the old slugger. On a day that needed surprise and imagination, it was a speech of unimaginative, unsurprising platitudes fleshed out with decent but unexciting detail - and lacking a compelling idea or programme that would really constitute something that could be called a vision. I now doubt Brown will ever be capable of rising to the challenge he and his party face - this was his one chance to prove the doubters wrong, and he failed. He may have quietened the critics for a few days, but he's done no more than that, and with his oratorical bolt now shot I think Brown will be weaker next month than he is now. The only thing that might keep him labouring away until the election is the lack of a credible, purposeful alternative leader - and a collective decision by the cabinet that power now is doomed, and that it's better to go down with the captain in 2010 and fight for future prizes.

Barbara Castle should have been Labour's – and Britain's – first female prime minister. What a role model she would have been: passionate, fiery and absolutely committed to social justice. She was a brilliant orator. In her diaries, she writes about "playing" with the audience – teasing them, driving them to anger, to laughter and back again. And there was no one better at getting Labour conference on her side. In an age of tub-thumping, political rhetoric, before television put a premium on conversational styles, Barbara found a way of speaking that was strong, commanding but never macho.

This is an interesting little tributary of the Labour leadership debate: Patricia Hewitt doesn't say so explicitly in her piece at Comment is Free, but I suspect she agrees with me that what's needed now is for Gordon Brown

to put on a big red wig and become Barbara Castle for the next eighteen months: not everyone would like it, but then by trying hard to be liked by everyone so far Brown has brought himself and his government to the brink. A stiff dose of passion and purpose would be risky, but risk-taking is what's now needed.

She's clearly trying to persuade people to the left of her that holding apparently "unthinkable" attitudes and being opposed to union demands does not mean you're not committed to progress. I think it's interesting, though, how in the post-Blair/Brown world, the lines that used to divide the centre and soft left from the old hard right and the modernisers are all getting a bit blurred.

With Hitchcock, everybody talks about their favourite sequences, not their favourite lines; and this is as it should be. The art of cinema, he would insist again and again, did not consist of taking “photographs of people talking”, and the director’s cardinal sin, when plotting a film, was to say: “It’s all right – we can cover that with a line of dialogue.” Hitchcock started working, after all, in the silent era, and it’s the grammar and vocabulary of silent cinema that really underpins his work. In other words, Hitchcock’s films, viewed today, take us back to the very roots of cinema, and that is what makes them perennially modern.

Jonathan Coe's one of my fave novelists - I'll be reviewing his latest, The Rain Before it Falls, soon - and anyone who's read What a Carve Up! will know how obsessed he is by old films. I think he's dead right about Hitchcock, whatever Norman Geras says: Hitchcock's works are very visual and for what it's worth, aural. Sound and vision - the use of green in Vertigo, for instance, and of Bernard Herrmann's music and soundscape in The Birds - are at least as important as plot and dialogue. It's for this reason probably more than any other that his best films have serious artistic credibility and are not merely commercial thrillers.