First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

In this week’s web-exclusives, the director of Civitas, David G Green, explores the evidence in favour of education vouchers and argues that they offer the government a way of combining its egalitarian ideals with pragmatism. And Jean-Pierre Filiu, professor at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, explains why the cry “back to the caliphate” has gained momentum in the Muslim world—and why organisations like Hizb ut-Tahrir are deluded in thinking it is anything other than a wishful exercise in anachronism.

Also, as controversy over immigration statistics continues to resound throughout the national press, Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot’s special report in Prospect’s current issue—which describes how immigration statistics are put together by the ONS—is looking increasingly salient. Did you know that inward migration to Scotland in 2004 was estimated from about 100 contacts? Or that the sample of those questioned in order to calculate UK immigration constitutes only around 0.2 per cent of total border traffic, only around 1 per cent of whom—1 in 50,000—are migrants?

As Blastland and Dilnot point out, problems with the numbers are almost always a matter of difficulty rather than conspiracy. But just trying telling that to politicians with the scent of blood in their nostrils…

News that Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has become the first woman to be elected president in Argentina’s elections may come as little surprise to those who have been following the campaign closely over the last few months.

The sassily dressed Kirchner, whose glamourous appearance earned her the nickname ‘Queen Cristina’ and parallels with Eva Peron, stormed ahead in the polls with 45% of the vote. Fashioning her election in something of “a Hillary” - although not, fashionistas would stress, in a couture sense - Kirchner campaigned alongside her husband, Nestor, the outgoing president and the man credited for seeing Argentina out of its worst economic crisis in 2001, when it defaulted on $80 billion in loans. Indeed, Señora Kirchner is one part of the all-too familiar phenomenon on the international political stage; the powerhouse couple.

Nestor stood firmly by his wife’s side as she celebrated her success, however amidst the celebrations Cristina defiantly asserted that she saw her victory as an “immense responsibility for my gender.” Yet unlike her Chilean counterpart, Michelle Bachelet, the single-mother who was sworn in as Chile’s president last year, Cristina’s inauguration doesn’t mark the rise of a female power surge across South America (a continent known for its machismo).

Kirchner’s principal rival, the left-centrist Elisa Carrió - a chain-smoking, mother of four, ‘fondly’ known as ‘La Gorda’ - had fallen behind the first-lady in the polls in recent months. Carrió’s election platform rested on an anti-corruption campaign, and accusations of “systemic theft” of ballots that have emerged in the hours since Kirchner’s victory, will do little to quell the notions that the incoming president is more about style than substance. Whilst the Argentine election has been fought mainly between the two women, Kirchner’s victory is more of a spousal gift than a feminist triumph. The Clinton’s, doubtless, know all about this type of ‘Giving.’

If you want to visit Zimbabwe from the UK, it’s now Air Zimbabwe or nothing. As this report in today’s Times notes, less than ten years ago it was possible to fly to Harare with any of 18 foreign airlines. Yesterday, the last carrier maintaining long-haul flights into and out of the country—British Airways—brought these to a close, citing economic reasons.

It’s an astonishing example of globalization in reverse: the dismantling of the kind of access we tend to assume is hard-wired into the fabric of our world. Zimbabwe, of course, is an extreme and infamous example of economic collapse. But events there are an important reminder that the global freedoms of movement, trade and information many of us enjoy are underpinned by nothing more reliable than profits—and that, if these vanish, so do all the privileges of purchase that go with them.

As we point out in the new issue of Prospect, Commentary—favoured read of the neocon intellectual—has appointed John Podhoretz as editor. This is just the latest example of US neoconservatism’s curious tendency towards nepotism—John is the son of Norman, Commentary’s last-but-one editor, a regular contributor and, according to some reports, still the real power at the journal. The Podhoretzes are thus granted seats at the high table of America’s neocon dynasties, along with the Kagans (Robert, Frederick and their father Donald) and the Kristols (Irving and Bill). Meanwhile, with Hillary looking an increasingly good bet for the US presidency, the prospect of a White House inhabited by either a Bush or a Clinton for a staggering 36 years—if you include Bush Snr’s eight years as vice-president—looks to be a real possibility. Still, dynasties have long been a feature of US politics, as Hendrik Hertzberg points out in the New Yorker—and given the continued fascination with and admiration for our royal family in the US, perhaps we should consider this imitation a form of flattery.

The Podhoretz story was picked up by the New York Observer, which quoted a “longtime contributor” as saying:

The nepotism is shocking. This is a magazine, not a little family business… People who have worked there a long time… would not have been putting in year after year as editors if they knew Norman’s son was going to jump over their heads.

But if this blog post—an extraordinary, almost nonsensical attack on James Fallows, one of the most thoughtful and fair-minded of American journalists, over the Walt/Mearsheimer controversy—by Gabriel Schoenfeld, Commentary’s senior editor, is anything to go by, perhaps the talent pool at the magazine simply isn’t that deep.

In addition to all the goodies from the November 2007 print edition of the magazine, this week Prospect online features Ken Binmore—who designed the 3G telecoms licence auction that raked in £23bn for the British taxpayer in 2000—on “mechanism design,” the theory that won three of its main architects the Nobel economics prize a couple of weeks ago. Mechanism design, argues Binmore, contains important lessons for governments looking to reform public services and regulatory regimes.

Also this week: Willem Marx, who travelled with Benazir Bhutto on her triumphant homecoming from Dubai, explains how the jubilant on-flight atmosphere turned into shock and carnage just hours later when bombs ripped through Bhutto’s motorcade in Karachi. And Bjørn Lomborg replies to Kevin Watkins’s Prospect review of his book Cool It.

I have a confession to make. No matter how ridiculous the latest modern art ‘offering’ is, no matter how dire, I feel socially bludgeoned into saying something positive about it. Pete Doherty’s blood paintings? How subversive! So like Marc Quin’s ‘self’, but so much more, er, numinous and sublime? There seems to be a sort of subliminal pact between art goers to expound poetic verbosities at the drop of a hat; if you don’t have something extremely cerebral to say about the piece of string in the perspex box, then you are clearly a cultural moron, didn’t understand the subtle nuances of the piece, were looking at it the wrong way up, etc…

Now, I have nothing against modern art. I actually rather like it. But there is a lot of chaff amongst the wheat and when it comes to art commentary, honesty tends to take a back seat to ego. The Tate Modern’s new exhibition, ‘The world as a stage’, attempts to dispel some of the post-modern pontificating and reconnect art with its audience (and inject some fun back into the proceedings). Billed as an “intimation of the increasing theatricalisation of everyday life”, the exhibition explores the relationship between visual art and theatre. Large installations allow the gallery viewer to become both spectator and participator.

All good in theory. And in reality, wandering around Jeppe Hein’s mirrored ‘rotating labyrinth’, is actually quite good fun – a bit like being privy to what it would feel like if you were trapped in an old kinematoscope. Mario Ybarra Jr’s ‘sweeney tate’ also fits the bill well; the lurid, comic-book style colours of the mocked up barber shop work well with the spirit of the exhibit. You feel invited to become part of the spectacle, rather than alienated by the work. Which is what good, interactive art should do.

But sadly, much of the exhibition leaves the visitor wanting. Geoffrey Farmer’s do-it-yourself theatre kit of Victor Hugo’s ‘Hunchback of Notre-Dame’ falls short of its promise; props for an actor to become Quasimodo are littered around the space, but the props are separated from the spectator by wooden boundaries. So, unlike Antony Gormley’s work, you never feel fully authorized to interact with the art.

The Tate Modern is a great space for pioneering artistry and uniting people through art. Doris Salcedo’s crack in the turbine hall is truly awesome, and Louise Bourgeois certainly deserves a floor to herself. But ‘the world as a stage’ doesn’t really move away from cheap stunts, such as Roman Ondák’s ‘I’m just acting in it’ (sketches of himself as a spectator in the Tate, drawn by the exhibitions’ curators), and Cezry Bodzianowski’s performances feel a little bit trite too – the time when watching a man slide around a hamster wheel is considered art and demands a glowing response, is surely long gone?

In 1999, Dick Taverne wrote an article for Prospect in which he passionately denounced the “anti-science” of a public culture indifferent to evidence and research, above all in the case of GM foods, which “act as a kind of lightning rod for the public malaise with science.” Eight years later, in our November cover story, he returns to the fray with an extended account of the ways in which public ignorance and a lack of foresight on the part of corporations have meant the proven benefits of GM food are still largely failing to reach those most in need of them.

Taverne’s is not a conciliatory tone, and his message is stark: Britain and Europe have lost the opportunity to lead the world in GM technology, and millions of lives have already been lost for no good scientific reason. In a world that will have to more than double its food production over the next half century, Taverne sees the need for GM crops as indisputable and the cult of “back to nature” as a misguidedly moralistic anachronism. Hard evidence, in other words, is the bottom line, and there is no need to dignify irrational arguments by taking them seriously. Let us know what you think here.

In the latest issue of Prospect, I’ve written a piece comparing two of fiction’s “ageing masters,” Philip Roth and JM Coetzee. The contention of the piece is that, although there are obvious and important differences between them, Roth and Coetzee are alike in lots of ways. I am aware that such compare and contrast exercises can be slightly artificial: if you look hard enough, similarities can probably be found between any pair of writers. (When I mentioned to a journalist friend that I was thinking of writing a comparison between Roth and Coetzee, he said he’d long been intending to write a comparison between Coetzee and Pynchon, so there you go.) Nevertheless, I do think that there are real points of overlap between Roth and Coetzee, which haven’t often been explored before. And then when I read their latest novels, and saw how similar they were, I thought the piece was crying out to be written. If I had to identify one thing that really makes me think of these two writers as similiar, I would say this: hardness. There is something hard and unforgiving about their temperaments, about the way they write, about the way they see the world. Some writers are soft (Updike, Dickens), some are in the middle (George Eliot), and some are rock hard. But if I had to say which out of the two is harder, I’d probably say Coetzee. Any thoughts on Roth, Coetzee or literary hard men (or women) generally would be welcome.

According to most commentators on world power, China is the future, America is the present and Britain is the past. Inside our November issue, however, Walter Russell Mead argues that the history of Britain and America’s “special relationship” suggests something rather different: that immigration, social change and the financial muscles of the City may just be heralding an era of British revival on the world stage.

Mead takes the long perspective, looking across the 230 years since American independence and finding more trends and continuities than British commentators are wont to—including the central fact that, for roughly three centuries, “the English-speaking peoples have been more or less continuously organising, managing, expanding and defending a global system of power, finance, culture and trade.”

In the end, it’s perhaps surprising that the possibilities he raises sound quite so surprising. Then again, national pessimism has become such an engrained part of the British character that it would be almost impossible for us to take such claims seriously if they came in a speech by a British politician. Is it time for a change?

The complexities faced by statisticians attempting to talk about immigration and population are dealt with in a special report in the latest issue of Prospect by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot. And it seems that their warnings couldn’t be timelier, as the ONS have just announced that, if recent trends continue, the UK population is expected to grow to 71m by 2031, something that has made the headlines in most newspapers.

The key phrase here, of course, is “if recent trends continue.” As Blastland and Dilnot point out, British population projections for 1995 made in 1955 and 1965 respectively differed by more than 20m because fertility rates changed so much during that decade. Similarly, the current ONS figures are the first to take into account new data on immigration, and the chance of immigration remaining predictable between now and 2031 seems about the same as 1965 fertility estimates being valid in 2000 (as it turned out, these estimates were well over double the actual figure).

It’s also interesting to note the way in which almost every newspaper report I’ve seen makes no distinction between “predictions” and “projections”—only one of which the ONS is actually producing. Let us know what you think here.