Oliver Kamm

The Passion, the Churches and the Jews

Of course I can't seriously comment on Mel Gibson's new film without seeing it, and I'm not sure that I want to do that. It has seemed to me somewhat missing the point to accuse Gibson of not taking account of the position of the Second Vatican Council in his depiction of the Passion. Gibson is fairly clearly the type of traditionalist who would instinctively distrust Vatican II, and generally not be favourable to the pontificate of John XXIII (who showed his intentions earlier still by removing reference to 'perfidious Jews' from the Good Friday liturgy), and there's no artistic reason to criticise a director for not reflecting the position of his Church. I'm taken aback, however, by the force of Leon Wieseltier's scathing observations in The New Republic:

The only cinematic achievement of The Passion of the Christ is that it breaks new ground in the verisimilitude of filmed violence. The notion that there is something spiritually exalting about the viewing of it is quite horrifying. The viewing of The Passion of the Christ is a profoundly brutalizing experience. Children must be protected from it. (If I were a Christian, I would not raise a Christian child on this.) Torture has been depicted in film many times before, but almost always in a spirit of protest. This film makes no quarrel with the pain that it excitedly inflicts. It is a repulsive masochistic fantasy, a sacred snuff film, and it leaves you with the feeling that the man who made it hates life.

On the particular point of the film's alleged antisemitism, Wieseltier says this:

In its representation of its Jewish characters, The Passion of the Christ is without any doubt an anti-Semitic movie, and anybody who says otherwise knows nothing, or chooses to know nothing, about the visual history of anti-Semitism, in art and in film. What is so shocking about Gibson's Jews is how unreconstructed they are in their stereotypical appearances and actions. These are not merely anti-Semitic images; these are classically anti-Semitic images. In this regard, Gibson is most certainly a traditionalist.

This does strike me as worrying, and worrying especially at this time, because the stock images of Jewry that have been passed in Christian tradition from at least St John Chrysostom's Orations Against the Jews are far from extinguished (as there was reason to hope they might have been in the decades after the Holocaust), and extend a good deal further than antediluvian traditionalist Catholicism. It's customary - and of course, as the statement stands, true - to distinguish criticism of the modern state of Israel from traditional antisemitism, but as Melanie Phillips remarked in The Spectator a couple of years ago:

Criticism of Israel’s behaviour is perfectly legitimate. But a number of prominent Christians agree that a line is being crossed into anti-Jewish hatred. This is manifested by ascribing to every Israeli action malevolent motives while dismissing Palestinian terrorism and anti-Jewish diatribes; the belief that Jews should be denied the right to self-determination and their state dismantled; the conflation of Zionism and a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ of vested interests; and the disproportionate venom of the attacks.

That she is right in this can be verified almost weekly by examining Church statements - and the most egregious generally come from liberal Protestantism. Here, for example, is a statement released by the World Council of Churches last week, condemning the construction of what it preposterously terms Israel's annexation of Palestinian territory:

The WCC Executive Committee, meeting in Geneva from 17-20 February, 2004 guided by the teachings and Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility and by his death and resurrection has promised one new humanity on the foundation of faithful witnesses for people of every race; having received an updated report on Israel’s construction of the wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and in and around East Jerusalem, since April 2002, which is in departure of the Armistice Line of 1949 ( Green Line) and is in contradiction to relevant provisions of international law is;

Gravely concerned about the fundamental violations of human rights of the Palestinian people, the confiscation and destruction of their land and resources, the disruption of the lives of thousands of protected civilians and the de facto annexation of large areas of territory and in particular its devastating humanitarian consequences on the life and dignity of innocent Palestinians....

You wouldn't think from this statement that Israel has any particular pressing need to construct a barrier (most of which is not a 'wall' but a barbed-wire fence) to shield its civilians from terrorist attack. The statement has the further indecency to draw an analogy between attacks on civilians and attempts by a sovereign and democratic state to prevent those attacks; the WCC:

Calls on the Israeli Government and its defence forces and as well as all Palestinian armed groups to give up their strategy of mutual killings and terror, in order to achieve lasting peace....

I suppose some sort of riposte to this inflammatory nonsense would be to note the WCC's own political predilections, in the form of the £43,000 grant it made, under the auspices of its 'Programme to Cambat Racism', in 1978 to the party of Robert Mugabe. But that might give the impression that the WCC is an extreme and unrepresentative body; I wish it were so, but in fact the WCC's premises are widespread, as will be obvious if you consider counterexamples.

One of the greatest Protestant theologians of the last century, Reinhold Niebuhr, saw the issue more clearly than most. He wrote an article in The New Republic, 4 February 1957 (reprinted in A Reinhold Niebuhr Reader edited by Charles Brown), entitled Our Stake in Israel. Niebuhr was no theological obscurantist - he stated bluntly that a biblical right to the territory of Palestine 'evaporated some thousands of years ago' - but founded his argument on straight grounds of Christian obligation:

The simple fact is that all schemes for political appeasement and economic cooperation must fail unless there is an unequivocal voice from us that we will not allow the state [of Israel] to be annihilated and that we will not judge its desperate efforts to gain some strategic security (by holding on to the Gaza Strip and demanding access to the Gulf of Aqaba, for instance) as an illegitimate use of force.

The location of the state of Israel may have been a mistake; though the confluence of historical forces made it unavoidable. The birth and growth of the nation is a glorious spiritual and political achievement. Its continued existence may require detailed economic strategies for the whole region and policies for the resettlement of the Arab refugees. But the primary condition of its existence is our word that we will not allow 'any nation so conceived and so dedicated to perish from the earth.'

Just ask yourself: disregarding the fact that there is no living figure in Christian social thought to compare with Niebuhr's moral and intellectual authority, can you imagine a liberal Protestant leader today speaking in terms like these about this moral cause? Neither can I.

Those political jokers

A local paper in Staffordshire reports on reaction to Congleton MP Ann Winterton's base and crass joke about Chinese cocklers killed at Morecambe bay:

There were renewed calls from the Liberal Democrat party in Congleton for Lady Winterton to resign.

Councillor Paul Jones, the Liberal Democrats['] Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Congleton added: "The fact this is the second time in as many years she has made such an offensive gaffe only confirms her as wholly unsuitable to remain as Congleton's elected representative.

"If she hasn't the good grace and common sense to apologise immediately and unreservedly the only decent thing is for her to resign and fight a by-election, which the Liberal Democrats would fiercely contest, and let the people of Congleton decide whether or not they wish to associate themselves with her remarks."

Interestingly a Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate at the last election, who apparently now works for the party, puts the same joke on his web site; he finds it funny. I shall not finger the culprit, but I trust there will be a consistent reaction on the part of his party.

(I should add, incidentally, that I don't consider there is any subject that is intrinsically off-limits for humour. David Low famously drew a cartoon about the Holocaust, and did it well. It is an understatement, however, to say that Lady Winterton lacks the perspicacity, wisdom and human sympathy to do this type of thing successfully, and the Conservative Party was right to withdraw the whip from her.)

Denying chances to the poor

Here’s what John Kerry had to say yesterday in a populist exchange risibly termed a debate among the contenders for the Democratic nomination:

I will fight for labor and environment standards in our trade agreements, and we'll enforce them. And it's that simple.

An international economist, Paul Krugman at MIT, had pertinent things to say on this matter a few years ago in an article in Slate entitled In Praise of Cheap Labor:

The only reason developing countries have been able to compete with [First World] industries is their ability to offer employers cheap labor. Deny them that ability, and you might well deny them the prospect of continuing industrial growth, even reverse the growth that has been achieved. And since export-oriented growth, for all its injustice, has been a huge boon for the workers in those nations, anything that curtails that growth is very much against their interests…. [A]s long as you have no realistic alternative to industrialization based on low wages, to oppose it means that you are willing to deny desperately poor people the best chance they have of progress for the sake of what amounts to an aesthetic standard...

A polemicist of the same name, Paul Krugman of the New York Times, says this today:

[In a speech this week Kerry] proposed speed bumps, rather than outright barriers to outsourcing: rules requiring notice to employees and government agencies before jobs are shifted overseas, steps to close tax loopholes that encourage offshore operations, more aggressive enforcement of existing trade agreements, and a review of those agreements with an eye toward seeking tougher labor and environmental standards.

I don't see anything there that threatens to unravel the world trading system. If anything, the question is whether it provides enough of a "political safety valve."

In fact, it’s clear from what Kerry is arguing (he states baldly, “I will fight for the American worker”) that his concern is to counteract what he considers to be unfair advantages accruing to developing countries that wish to export to the US. He says there is no difference between his position on trade and that of his principal challenger, John Edwards – who explicitly believes trade agreements should incorporate minimum wage requirements on the part of America’s trading partners.

We’re all entitled to change our views on issues of public policy, but so far as I’m aware Krugman, who in his academic writings has made important contributions to trade theory, hasn’t changed his view that imposing minimum wages beyond the productivity level of a developing country’s workforce will curtail the demand for labour in that country and thereby prevent poor people from bettering themselves. Other noted trade economists have no trouble stating their position forcefully on the matter: Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University says bluntly in the current edition of Foreign Affairs, “the Democratic candidates are staking out fiercely irresponsible antitrade positions.” Krugman, it appears, prefers these days to emphasise his partisan political prejudices.

The Liberal Democrats: an apology

Since starting this blog last summer I have endeavoured to be a fair-minded commentator on British politics, among other subjects. While I cannot claim necessarily always to have fulfilled this aim, I was till today confident that I had succeeded in it at least so far as one party, the Liberal Democrats, was concerned. While my own view of that party is that consistent liberals ought wherever possible to vote tactically to defeat it, I have never failed to give credit where appropriate to its parliamentary representatives. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in my regard for the intellect and abilities of the party’s Treasury spokesman, Vincent Cable.

I now see that my confidence was misplaced. My judgements on the Liberal Democrats have not been fair-minded at all: they have been far too complimentary. The party’s inadvertent leaking of its own draft manifesto (a party functionary apparently sent it by accident to all Labour members of the Welsh Assembly) discloses a central disconcerting fact: the party’s proposals are uncosted. The BBC notes diffidently:

The proposals include scrapping Labour's New Deal and having more drivers' congestion charges. Cutting the number of spin doctors in Whitehall and having an elected Senate are also in the pre-manifesto, which lays the ground for the Lib Dem general election campaign.

But among the sections listed as missing from the e-mail are plans to simplify the tax system, environmentally-friendly tax proposals and pensions plans.

Well might The Scotsman observe:

Charles Kennedy is facing the prospect of a mauling in the Commons today at the hands of Tony Blair after a draft of the Liberal Democrats’ manifesto was leaked yesterday by accident.

The Prime Minister will be able to seize on the lack of financial costings contained in the document to ratchet up his campaign to discredit Lib Dem spending promises.

But it would be a mistake to regard criticism of the Liberal Democrats’ disinclination to venture estimates of costs as mere partisan politicking. It’s more serious than that.

All advanced industrial economies contend with upward pressure on public spending as a proportion of national income. The reason is that it's difficult to achieve gains in measured productivity in the public sector (and hence prices rise faster than in the rest of the economy – a phenomenon known as the relative price effect). In order to cope with those pressures, and particularly since the experience of high inflation combined with low growth in the 1970s, almost all those economies set themselves some form of budget target (either a ratio, or a rate of change, or occasionally an absolute level) before formulating their budgets.

There is no obviously right level of public spending, debt, revenues or deficits, but there is a strong case that getting value for money in public spending is assisted by having an overall constraint on spending and taxation. Those constraints may not be met – and financial markets may then impose a penalty, in the form of demanding a higher yield (equivalent to a lower price) on government debt – but the very fact that a target or rule is there will increase the transparency of public finances and the pressure on finance ministries to budget responsibly. The Chancellor has been widely accused, for example – not least by Vincent Cable on behalf of the Liberal Democrats - of fudging his ‘Golden Rule’ of budgetary balance over the course of the business cycle, by arbitrarily determining a favourable starting point of the cycle.

It’s apparent from their draft manifesto that the Liberal Democrat approach is different: instead of starting with a set of constraints, the party starts with a list of desirable things to spend taxpayers’ money on. How much these things cost is a second-order question. There are many things that can be said about this procedure, but one that strikes me immediately is that it’s inconsistent with the Liberal Democrats’ wish to join the euro: the Growth and Stability Pact requires a commitment to:

... respect the medium-term budgetary objective of close to balance or in surplus set out in [member-states'] stability or convergence programmes.

It might be objected that the Liberal Democrats are of course not a government but a minor political party. And indeed that is my point. Individual Liberal Democrats are undoubtedly capable and intelligent, but the party collectively does not merit serious consideration in its contributions to public policy debates.

In light of this information I can but apologise to my readers. There has been too little material on this site that has been critical of the Liberal Democrats, and I undertake now to rectify that deficiency.

That proposed constitutional amendment

Andrew Sullivan, whose advocacy of gay marriage, Virtually Normal, is one of the few books on politics in the last few years that has immediately and completely altered my view on a particular issue, writes forcefully and poignantly:

The religious fanatics of 9/11 despise the American Constitution exactly because it guarantees equality under the law, freedom of conscience and separation of church and state. The war I have supported is a war, ultimately, in defense of that Constitution. And that is why I am so committed to it.

So you can see, perhaps, why the bid to write anti-gay discrimination into this very Constitution provokes such a strong response from me - and so many other people, gay and straight, and their families. It robs us of something no one in this country should be robbed of - equality and inclusion in the founding document itself. When people tell me that, in weighing the political choices, the war on terror should trump the sanctity of the Constitution, my response is therefore a simple one. The sanctity of the Constitution is what we are fighting for. We're not fighting just to defend ourselves. We are fighting to defend a way of life: pluralism, freedom, equality under the law. You cannot defend the Constitution abroad while undermining it at home. It's a contradiction. And it's a deeply divisive contradiction in a time of great peril.

Unlike Andrew, I didn’t favour Bush in 2000, but I do now, and I share Andrew’s horror and incredulity at the suggestion of a constitutional amendment against gay marriage. I had no expectation that Bush would favour such a measure (and more fool me, for I wrote recently that there was literally no reason for a consistent liberal to wish for the defeat of the President). The issue has for some time been a talisman for conservative activists in much the same way as abortion is: on both issues, the notion that a serious and weighty President (which is what he is) would translate activist sentiments to national policy never occurred to me.

There are many things grievously wrong with the President’s stance, but one stands out. The Constitution disinterestedly embodies principles that apply to the Republic’s citizens; the proposed amendment is not disinterested, but singles out a particular group of citizens under the guise of codifying marriage law. That’s what makes it pernicious: to invoke a term once widely-abused and then widely-mocked, and that ought to be reclaimed, it’s un-American. America is a culturally heterogeneous country with a genius for political settlement provided that judicial fiat does not intervene. A workable settlement of the issue of gay marriage ought to be left to states. In that case, I would be confident that this admirable reform would steadily become entrenched without needlessly inflaming opposition and offending the sensibilities of those who hold strong religious or other objections to same-sex marriage. That seems to me, in the best sense, a conservative policy on same-sex marriage, and one that it would be possible and desirable for the President to espouse.

I am not a conservative but a liberal, and would go further. To be able to marry the person one loves and is loved by seems to me so essential to what it is to live a worthwhile life, that I regard it as a defining issue of liberal principle to press for that right. The best that I can say about President Bush’s sentiments is that they will surely not be acted upon in a second term. But in the meantime they impoverish American public life in a way that is as demeaning as it is mean-spirited.

'Shame on them'

Liberal Washington Post columnist David Ignatius urges that American politicians state candidly that in the global economy there is ‘no easy escape from global competition’. The usual caveat applies: Ignatius is right if you look at the individual firm, but positively misleading if he’s suggesting that economic relations between states are characterised by competition. Nonetheless, he says apt things about current American political debate:

This anti-trade talk [from the contenders for the Democratic nomination] is dangerous nonsense, and the Democrats should be embarrassed by it. It suggests to U.S. workers that there is an alternative to change and adaptation -- to getting the skills that are necessary to compete in an increasingly competitive world. That's wrong, most of all because it misleads people about their real options. Rather than helping workers build a bridge to the future, as Clinton tried to do, these Democrats talk as if they want to build a roadblock. Shame on them.

Shame on the Republicans, too, for disowning the administration's chief economist, Gregory Mankiw. He made the "gaffe" (a Washington term for stating something that is true but politically embarrassing) of saying that "outsourcing" jobs abroad can be beneficial, by lowering costs and improving efficiency.
In economic terms, Mankiw's statement was utterly noncontroversial (unless you imagine that it's good for workers if companies have high costs and go out of business).

If I were American I would be a registered Democrat, and I say with some feeling that the views of that party’s senior figures on trade are worse than dangerous nonsense and far worse than bad economics (though they are both of those things). More fundamental, they’re a betrayal of liberal internationalist principle, which the Democratic Party once represented in contrast to the isolationism of Republicans such as Robert Taft and Thomas Dewey.

A few years ago the Progressive Policy Institute, a moderate think-tank within the party, published with the Brookings Institute one of the best non-technical expositions of the merits of open trade that I have seen. Expertly written and attractively presented, with plenty of data and charts to substantiate the authors’ compelling arguments, it apparently had zero impact in winning the Democratic Party to a responsible and reputable position on the issue. (The report’s main arguments and policy recommendations are summarised here; they remain, so far as I can see, unanswerable.) How sad and shocking it is to see the tradition of American liberalism come to a juddering halt in the persons of John Kerry and John Edwards; we liberal internationalists have no dog in that fight, and no obvious Democratic candidate for the future either.

A thing of beauty...

This looks an exhibit well worth visiting if you happen to be in New York, and I shall certainly try to get there. Some areas of the decorative arts – textiles, principally – strike me as excruciating in their worthy dullness, but silver is different. Simon Pantin, whose work is pictured, was one of the French Huguenot craftsmen who settled in London after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, the instrument by which the Huguenot Protestants had gained religious liberty. I find the picture a thing of beauty: perfect proportion and clean straight lines, till the table legs have just enough decoration without degenerating into the swirling Rococo scrolls that became altogether too exuberant later in the 18th century.

Other Huguenot silversmiths – Pierre Platel, Paul Crespin, Paul de Lamarie – produced similarly fine work that only became publicly accessible in London when the Gilbert Collection opened in Somerset House a few years ago. Before visiting it for the first time I was greatly impressed by the scathing judgement of Brian Sewell in The Standard, who bemoaned the ostentation and vulgarity of the exhibits. Surely if this professional snob and aesthete – who incidentally (and it is incidental, for political judgements have no bearing on aesthetic criteria) lionised the traitor Anthony Blunt and loudly damns a certain embattled democracy in the Middle East – had been so offended by the Collection, then I would be enthused by it. And so it proved. The Huguenot silver of 18th century London is a testament to enduring qualities of form and beauty, and also – when you consider the history of these objects and their creators – to religious toleration and the welcoming of immigrants.

Do-It-Yourself Economics

Continuing an occasional series in which public figures make dogmatic economic assertions that, while enduring and popular, are otherwise inexplicable. The term was coined by David Henderson in his 1985 Reith Lectures, Innocence and Design.

The Times’ ‘Money’ section remarks:

Contrary to popular myth, professional gamblers do not swagger into a casino and risk all on a high-stakes wager. Most aim for a steady return by making a series of small bets. The ordinary investor can emulate this strategy for success by drip-feeding their [sic] cash into an investment fund, rather than making one lump-sum investment.

The best that can be said of this patronisingly absurd claim is that at least it demonstrates the author’s intimate acquaintance with popular myth. In one form or another it appears in almost every newspaper with a financial column, almost every week. Yet ‘drip-feeding cash’ (popularly known as pound-cost averaging) in preference to lump-sum investing is not the opposite, but the equivalent, of risking all on a high-stakes wager.

Consider this for an analogy (which I’ve taken from the economist Steven Landsburg). Suppose you’re in a casino that has ten roulette wheels, and you have $55,000 to bet with. One way of dividing your stake would be to place $1,000 on the first wheel, $2,000 on the second, and so on up to $10,000 on the tenth wheel (these bets on ten wheels would sum to $55,000). That would clearly be an irrational strategy: you’d be placing half your entire stake on the spin of just the last three wheels. Yet that’s what ‘drip-feeding’ cash into financial markets involves: you progressively increase the sum you have at stake in the market, as your investment time-horizon contracts (even personal-finance journalists retire and draw their pensions sometime, though it rarely seems like soon enough to this reader), till you’re betting everything on just a brief period at the end of that time-horizon.

In short, it would be difficult to construct a less rational strategy if you tried. What The Times presents as a risk-averse course in contrast to lump-sum investing isn’t one at all: it’s merely a series of small lump-sum investments with ever-decreasing investment time-horizons. Yet the volatility of investment returns typically contracts as your holding period lengthens. The rational investor can ride out periodic bouts of market volatility on the assumption that over the long term he’ll still end up ahead (and if the rational investor doesn’t expect that to happen, then he wouldn’t be putting money into the market in the first place).

I have never been able to work out why otherwise serious and reputable newspapers give space to astrologers. My best guess is that editors must collectively decide to replicate the respect for science and reason evidenced by their personal-finance columnists.

The debasement of mourning

The BBC summarises a report by the think-tank Civitas. I haven't read the report, but I shall certainly order a copy as its thesis seems to me necessary and apt:

Britons are feeding their own egos by indulging in "recreational grief" for murdered children and dead celebrities they have never met, claims a report.

Think-tank Civitas said wearing charity ribbons, holding silences and joining protest marches all indicated the country was in emotional crisis.

The author said "mourning sickness" was a substitute for religion.

Rather than "piling up damp teddies and rotting flowers" people should go out and do some real good, he urged.

In his report, Conspicuous Compassion, author Patrick West said people were trying to feel better about themselves by taking part in "manufactured emotion".

The 'dead celebrity' that Mr West apparently discusses at length is, understandably, Princess Diana. I have a recollection that shortly after Diana's death the polemicist and former Communist Party member Bea Campbell wrote a piece sensing popular revolt within the public expressions of grief. In fact - as Simon Jenkins rightly pointed out in The Times at the same time - the Left always has an orgasm when it sees a lot of people gather in one place, and it was predictable that the grief would prove as ephemeral and shallow as many of the causes for which the Princess herself worked.

Yet in my view an even more dispiriting thing happened on the death of the Queen Mother. I recall watching the television pictures of her funeral procession and noting that instead of maintaining a dignified and respectful silence, many of those who had gathered by the road-side applauded as the hearse went past. Presumably to them it was a mark of approbation, fitting to the occasion, yet I can't recall a precedent for this and I found it arch and inappropriate.

Let me try to avoid misunderstanding. I am in no sense, other than the cultural, a conservative (and still less am I a Conservative). I am not a member of the established Church, or a Christian of any other denomination, or a theist. I welcome the social changes that have made Britain a more tolerant and liberal place in my lifetime, and in many respects - I favour gay marriage, for example - want them to go further. I am an individualist and a liberal. Yet the replacement of rituals that everyone knew with fashions of convenience is a matter for more than regret. The benefit of ritual is, contrary to the cult of authenticity, that it truly allows us to find our place in the world. It is, for example, astonishing how few people have ever seen a dead body, yet being familiar with death - with those scenes familiar from literature of the deathbed departure among family - is one way of accepting its inevitability with stoicism rather than despair. I could make similar observations about the transformation of other rites of passage (I once went to a church wedding where the music included, of all things, the Pie Jesu from Faure's Requiem, presumably on the grounds that the tune is quite pretty).

One of the wisest books I have read on such matters is a novel I once regarded as insufferable on account of its virtuous heroine: Fanny Price, in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. Some years after I had first read the novel I came across a remarkable essay by the literary critic Lionel Trilling that finally made me see the point. Jane Austen - fatuously criticised by some for omitting to deal with the Condition of England question or the Napoleonic wars, and irrelevantly translated by the BBC into frivolous costume dramas - wrote of the education of the sensibilities. In Chapter 9 of Mansfield Park, the frivolous Mary Crawford decries the notion of family devotion in the great house, whereupon Edmund (who believes he loves her) delivers a riposte that should be not be taken - for this is the point - as an expression of unreason and reaction:

Your lively mind can hardly be serious even on serious subjects. You have given us an amusing sketch, and human nature cannot say it was not so. We must all feel at times the difficulty of fixing our thoughts as we could wish; but if you are supposing it a frequent thing, that is to say, a weakness grown into a habit from neglect, what could be expected from the private devotions of such persons? Do you think the minds which are suffered, which are indulged in wanderings in a chapel, would be more collected in a closet?

The minds which are suffered are most collected when they have a sense of being at home in the world. Religious belief doesn't provide that for me, for I have none; but art, ritual and a sense of history do. Their erosion in public life does seem to me a matter of importance.

Lib Dems and lobbies

To my perplexity and incredulity, I have been accused by various sources of being politically partisan in my criticisms of the Liberal Democrats' policies on tax breaks for film-making. One critic asks rhetorically: 'There are literally hundreds of people that Kamm could have picked on over this issue - so why choose [Liberal Democrat Culture spokesman] Don Foster? Is he really that obsessed with the Lib Dems that he's incapable of seeing the wider picture?'

I'm astonished. I genuinely thought I had devoted adequate space over several months to the assessment of Liberal Democrat policies, but clearly I was mistaken and ought to write more. The reason I chose Don Foster is that, whereas the Government appears to be removing a policy that was indefensible even when Gordon Brown introduced it, Mr Foster's party believes the original measure did not go far enough. So far from being an unexceptionable call for - as I have advocated in my discussions of various aspects of economic policy - a framework of rules rather than government discretion, Mr Foster's demands have been for the opposite: maintained discretionary intervention in support of the British film 'industry' (from now on I shall call it a business rather than an industry, to make it clear what we're talking about). Ten days ago he stormed (emphasis added):

Last year [Arts Minister] Estelle Morris gave clear support to the tax break system. Now we're witnessing another Government U-turn on an industry in need of real support.

The film business is not an industry, and it's in no more 'need of real support' than any other service business - say, investment banking. If there are genuine considerations about aesthetic standards of excellence - which I consider are a public good that tax revenues ought to susidise directly - then they need to be argued for case by case, with the support coming in the form of a direct cash transfer rather than a tax concession. But in truth, we're not talking about an arts policy at all: the issue is one of a populist venture that politicians ought never to have succumbed to, and that the Liberal Democrats can be almost guaranteed to support regardless of economic considerations.

If you think that's too harsh a judgement, consider what by my reckoning is the most economically extraordinary statement made by any serving politician so far this year. It comes from a Scottish Liberal Democrat MP, John Barrett, who came up with this hair-raising series of assertions last month:

The Film Industry is important both for the UK and world wide economies with earnings from entertainment not only providing jobs and income but also adding a diverse cultural dimension to life.

Some years ago, Michael Winner was asked by a young budding film maker for advice on how to progress in the industry and the answer he gave was to leave the country and go to the United States. There are many individuals and organisations who are doing good work on behalf of the industry but who cry out for a level playing field with other countries to stop films being made elsewhere.

The Film Industry also has a major impact on tourism. Often, advertising budgets from tourism authorities can't provide the profile for an area in the way that can bring financial rewards. However, the publicity generated by a television programme or film is now clear.

The film industry has some of the most dynamic and creative people in the world working in it. The Government must recognise the positive impact the industry makes to the country and in doing so, must provide as much support as possible.

I won't bother with this one point-by-point, other than to note in passing the cliche that perhaps more than any other in recent western economic policy (especially in trade policy) has been responsible for causing avoidable damage - that 'level playing field' again. I merely want to draw attention to that final sentence: the Government 'must provide as much support as possible', apparently.

Astonishing, is it not? Democratic politics concerns trade-offs and the exercise of choice (including the opportunity costs of options not chosen). Economic policy concerns the allocation of scarce resources to competing uses. Yet this MP - who has a vested interest in the matter he speaks of, being a member of the Advisory Board of the Edinburgh International Film Festival - resolves such questions by wishing them away. 'As much support as possible'? Well, there's always the overseas aid budget that could be abolished to make room. What about the health budget too? And while we're at it, why not invent yet another use for those taxpayer receipts the Liberal Democrats dream will be generated by imposing a 50% tax on incomes over £100,000? All of these things are possible: but as the former Chancellor Nigel Lawson once aptly remarked, 'To govern is to choose. To appear to be unable to choose is to appear to be unable to govern.'

I hope this addendum makes my position clear. It gives me no pleasure, and causes me some pain, to have to criticise the Liberal Democrats. But I regretfully conclude that there are few more reliable repositories of bad ideas in British public life than that organisation, and I have a duty of candour to my readers.

I should finally add that I do not agree that where a bad policy is in place its supersession ought to be strung out. This comes back to the point I started with. There is market failure, but there is also government failure. Watch an edition of Question Time on BBC television and you cannot fail to notice the number of times that the participants - almost all of them - conclude that government must act in some respect or another. And so it must, in many: yet government is a self-interested agent like any other, and it may be captured by lobbies and what economists term 'rent-seekers'. Keep a bad policy on the books, even with the intention of allowing its value to depreciate in real terms, and the likelihood is that it will become a focus for the demands of interest groups. A perfect example is the pensioners' £10 Christmas bonus introduced by Edward Heath's Government and - despite one brief attempt at abolition - still with us.