27.11.06

People often argue which is the true British national sport. Today, I want to settle that debate. It’s not football, cricket or even darts. It is ‘America Bashing’, ridiculing the latest absurd policy of the Bush Administration. America Bashing is an easy sport, often entertaining, and one that the least athletic among us can enjoy.

In contrast, Tony ‘Yo’ Blair, as we know, is a great fan of Bush’s America. I am not convinced that he has spent the time there necessary to make that judgment, but there is a curious aspect of Blair and his government when it comes to the British national sport: While the majority of British people may lambast a particular American fault, the response of most British politicians is to copy only those aspects of American culture that are most open to criticism -- the worst aspects of America.

I speak as someone with both a British and an American passport, and it irks me that British politicians rarely emulate the positive aspects of the great experiment that is the United States.

The bad ideas that are being imported across the Atlantic are legion. Take the introduction of tuition fees at universities. After 26 years in the U.S., I have seen that future and it does not work. Student loans turn into golden handcuffs for young Americans – law school graduates must pay off more than $100,000 in loans, which pretty much precludes them from taking a job helping those in need. When I graduated from law school in New York more than 20 years ago, a dozen of my friends sadly confessed that they had to sign up to a corporate law firm to pay off their loans rather than fulfill their dream of delivering justice and saving lives. They promised to return to their dream as soon as they could; none ever did. What a tragic loss of their talent.

Yet now, promoted by a Labour government, the idea of tuition fees has seeped across the Atlantic. Anyone who believes that the fees will not grow and grow is simply delusional.

Another incredibly bad idea is Labour’s effort to privatise aspects of the NHS, all in the name of market efficiency. Only someone who has never suffered the American medical system could want to forsake the NHS. Being pretty decrepit in my dotage, I get rather more experience of the NHS than I would wish, and the quality of the service outstrips the U.S. by a mile. Also, it is generally delivered on the principle of concern for the patient, rather than concern for the hospital’s bottom line.

While many of Mr. Blair’s cabinet ministers are guilty of copying that which they should most condemn, the Home Office is the worst offender. Here, there are simply too many examples. There is the Scarlet Letter law in many U.S. states where a range of sex offenders are named and shamed on a public website, and required to send postcards around the neighborhood advertising the fact that they have moved in. In my old hometown, New Orleans, we have such a law. Vilifying those who seek re-integration into society is an idea that should be left where it belongs -- in the Seventeenth Century. The U.S. experience teaches us that the law drives sex offenders underground, and further endangers their potential victims. Nonetheless, last summer John Reid wasted our tax money sending a subordinate to the U.S. with a view to copying this nightmare.

Recently, the Queen’s Speech setting out the Labour agenda for 2007 was choc-a-bloc with unwise ideas about criminal justice. Reid spoke about ‘rebalancing’ the system with the populist rhetoric of victims’ rights, borrowed directly from America. He argued in favour of limiting judicial review of criminal convictions, copying the Bush Administration’s assault on habeas corpus. As these terrible ideas spewed out onto the pages of the nation’s newspapers, one could only wonder why Reid wanted to emulate the extraordinary levels of incarceration in America.

Two weeks ago, I was visiting some of my clients on Louisiana’s Death Row. One was James Baldwin, who has been awaiting execution for twelve years. Instead of copying America’s mistakes, I asked him whether he thought there was anything positive that Britain could learn from the U.S.

“This is a country that has put me on death row because they say I’m not fit to share this earth with them,” James said to me. “It’s easier to say what I hate than what I like, but whining all the time is pretty pointless." He then went on to describe the attributes of America that still make him proud.

British politicians should listen to James. It is a modest idea, but perhaps it might make sense for this country to copy the best aspects of the United States, rather than the worst.

So I canvassed James and other American friends for suggestions that they might make to Tony Blair and his cabinet: How Britain could be improved, rather than reduced, by copying America.

In many ways, America is a remarkable country, with political institutions that were carefully planned, much better designed than the hodgepodge of British evolution. I should emphasise two things: One, that any system is only as good as the people who run it. I don’t advocate offering a place in the British cabinet to Donald Rumsfeld now that he’s out of a job. Sometimes Britain reaches a more sensible, gentler result in spite of our political process, rather than because of it. But there are plenty of improvements still to be made.

Two, I should also emphasise that while I don’t think our politicians have much of an idea how to run a country, I am no expert either. I am merely an observer who has lived on both sides of the Atlantic, and I only offer a few suggestions for us to mull over.

The first improvement we could consider would involve copying the U.S. system for selecting a cabinet. American cabinet members are not elected politicians, they are appointed by the President subject to a Senate confirmation hearing, and in theory they should be leading experts in the relevant field.

In contrast, I find the design of the British cabinet extraordinary. For the most part, it seems to be filled with politicians who have no qualifications, and very little training for their jobs. Blair bangs on about efficiency and effectiveness in government, yet he does not question placing the most complex and difficult work -- running the country -- in the hands of amateurs who play musical chairs every time one of them has an affair.

Let me focus on my own area, criminal justice – which again involves John Reid and the Home Office. Please, someone tell me, what makes Reid qualified to hold eight different government posts in the space of seven years, running three of the government’s largest departments in just the past two years – Health, then Defence, and now the Home Office?

To be fair, I very much doubt that Reid himself honestly thinks he has any expertise in these three areas. When he became Secretary of State for Health, his reported response was, famously: “Oh f***, not health!” This hardly reflected a belief that this was a post for which he had carefully trained for decades. What he said when he was shuffled over to run Defence for a few short months seems to have gone unrecorded. Most recently, the evidence that Reid is the most qualified person in Britain for the job of Home Secretary must have passed me by. We have sixty million citizens to choose from, and presumably we could select someone with incomparable experience to lead each government department.

So why don’t we? My team, Ipswich Town, may be languishing in fourteenth place in the Championship, but if the Tractor Boys were to fire their coach, they would want someone who knew about football to replace him. The British system requires that Reid be, like many politicians, a dabbler. He might just be getting the hang of the job when he is next moved on.

There may have been a time when Victorian aristocrats could muddle along in cabinet jobs. But now we not only have ministers running departments with no relevant training, but they are amateurs inspired by tabloid headlines and opinion polls, in an era when the stabilising influence of the civil service has been much diminished. It is a recipe for catastrophe.

So what about copying America in how we constitute our cabinet? Gordon Brown recently proposed adopting a portion of the American system: He suggested public hearings, where the Prime Minister might nominate a cabinet official, but the nominee would have to be confirmed by a cross-party parliamentary body with the power to ask probing questions. That’s a good start. It would be a fine idea to question John Reid publicly on his qualifications for the job of Home Secretary. I’d like to hear him defend himself.

But it only goes part of the distance. The American cabinet is recognized to be an executive group – its runs the country; they conduct the business of government within set rules, and they may propose changes, but they do not make the laws.

The British cabinet conflates the role of the executive with the role of the legislature: John Reid is meant to be running the Home Office, but he is really out there trying to get re-elected. He rushes around condemning his predecessors as incompetent, and his staff as dysfunctional, without any obvious sign that he knows what he is doing himself. How dispiriting it must be for the morale of the Home Office to have a leader whose loyalty is to the next election rather than to genuine improvement. Is not the most basic rule of leadership to inspire those working with you?

In the U.S., a true expert, selected by the President and confirmed by the Senate, may serve in the cabinet. The cabinet officer remains accountable, serving at the will of the elected President.

Of course, again the U.S. system, so excellent in principle, sometimes falls down in practice. But choosing experts to run the shop is better than what we do in Britain, and we should not be ashamed to copy it.

For example, were I the Labour PM, I’d nominate David Ramsbotham to run the prisons, someone who has intimate knowledge of the system from all sides, with commonsense, who is willing to stand up against populist government.

Once we have cabinet ministers who know what they are talking about, perhaps they will see their way clear to proposing other positive American ideas that Britain should copy.

There are many of them. Several relate to the U.S. Constitution, an incredible Eighteenth Century document that created a framework for individual rights more advanced than anything Europe has come up with in the 217 years since. The central thesis behind the U.S. Constitution is beautifully simple: the checks and balances between the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of government prevent the passions of the moment from stomping on the weak. They prevent the tyranny of the majority. Recent history has demonstrated this, where the all-powerful President Bush trampled on a few hundred prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, only to have the Supreme Court slap him down, not once, but twice.

I am perplexed at resistance in Britain to a bill of rights, or the European Convention on Human Rights, that protects the puny individual against the might of the government. Britain should embrace the idea of empowering the powerless.

The first constitutional principle I’d like to discuss was recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in Baker v. Carr– the notion that any legislative body must be elected with a political process where each citizen gets an equal vote.

The House of Lords is just such a legislative body. I find myself bemused by the back and forth over the proposals for restructuring it. Obviously, the fact that there are hereditary peers is a relic of feudalism, but to make a legislative body a bunch of appointed Tony’s cronies is not much better. I can’t even subscribe to Tony Benn’s recent suggestion that only twenty percent of the Lords should be hand-picked by the politicians.

None of these ideas would pass the laugh test in the United States -- and they shouldn’t. The principle of one-person one-vote is crucial to the legitimacy of any legislative process. Any legislative body must be elected. That is the nature of a representative democracy.

Again, American democracy is far from perfect. I was glad to see that Fidel Castro has maintained his sense of humour: In 2000, while Bush was taking over the White House with half a million fewer votes than Al Gore, Castro suggested that he send election observers to Florida.

2000 was actually the third time a presidential candidate had won with fewer than half the votes. But nothing the Americans do is as incomprehensible as the British system: Labour won 66 percent of the seats in 1997 with just 42 percent of the votes; in 1951 the Tories won the more seats than Labour, with 1.3 million fewer votes. And now the ‘proposal for change’ in the House of Lords includes appointing legislators.

No matter what system the Labour Party may gerrymander, I would very much like to be a part of the team that challenges it through to the European Court, to see whether we cannot establish a true democracy for Britain. The mother of Western Democracy cannot be allowed to lag behind in Democracy’s development.

Another constitutional principle that Britain would do well to copy is Freedom of Speech, enshrined in the U.S. Bill of Rights, in the First Amendment.

Efforts to suppress free speech in Britain are troublingly routine, and almost always end in tears. There are no winners when it comes to censorship.

The notion that the Guardian and BBC’s World in Action might have faced enormous legal costs in a defamation suit by Jonathan Aitken is hard to fathom in an open society. Who can forget Aitken’s words in 1995, when he pretended he had been telling the truth:

"If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play, so be it. I am ready for the fight. The fight against falsehood and those who peddle it. My fight begins today.”

The Guardian was courageous that time and fought back, eventually winning. But every time I deal with British lawyers on media issues, I am horrified by their conservative attitude, dictated by Britain’s libel laws; the media should be the guardians of free speech, not its censors.

Then there are the racists who are prosecuted for their hateful messages. Nick Griffin, leader of that band of BNP bigots, described Islam as a "wicked, vicious faith" and said Muslims were turning Britain into a "multi-racial hell hole". As you know, he faced two trials in Leeds Crown Court, and was recently acquitted. Predictably, he received enormous publicity for his obnoxious views. Predictably, he boasted that BNP membership and donations soared as a result of the case.

So what was Gordon Brown’s response? That we should consider changing the laws, to ensure Griffin’s conviction next time. I despise Griffin’s revolting views, but to prosecute him for speaking merely makes him a martyr. Prosecuting him for ugly speech is not just wrong, it’s stupid.

There are struggles that are taking place in Britain today, with far too little debate: a vaguely defined sense of privacy battles it out with freedom of the press; and, those who would criminalize ‘hate speech’ compete against those who would protect free speech. Meanwhile, far more censorship and self-censorship takes place in Britain than could happen in America.

I believe that Britain has the balance wrong. The American slogan is an excellent one: “The only answer to bad ideas is better ideas.” Not censorship, and not imprisonment.

Another element of America’s First Amendment is Freedom of Religion. There are plenty of religious extremists in the U.S. and there is plenty of Islamophobia -- often, of course, levelled at Sikhs because they wear those confusing turbans. But if a U.S. politician pressured a Muslim woman not to wear a veil in his presence, he would find himself on the wrong end of a lawsuit. Although I respect Jack Straw personally and think he has generally been one of the more sensible members of the cabinet, his recent comments seemed to me to be profoundly unwise.

Of course, Straw is probably correct to suggest that some British people are uncomfortable in the company of a Muslim woman in a niqab because they can only see the woman’s eyes. But that says more about the British experience than it does about the Muslim practice. I certainly don’t find dealing with a woman wearing a veil as alienating as an armed American traffic cop in reflecting sunglasses. And there is an immense danger when those in power turn it upon an unpopular religious minority.

True freedom of religion involves allowing people to make their own free choices, whether they want to wear a Christian cross at a British Airways desk, or a Muslim veil at a politician’s surgery.

The basic recognition in the U.S. Constitution is that government holds overwhelming power, and the individual needs protection from the potential abuse of that power. This is a very important principle and one I was able to put into practice every day in my work defending prisoners on death row in the Deep South. When my black client Sam Johnson was accused of killing a white police officer in Mississippi, we could haul the local sheriff into court and prove that he was racially motivated (his name was ‘Goon Jones’ and, while he swore under oath he no longer called black people ‘niggers,’ I got him to admit that he now called them ‘coloured boys’).

When the Mississippi Supreme Court told prisoners on Death Row that they had no legal right to a legal aid lawyer for their appeals, we could sue the elected justices and threaten to make them explain under oath how a mentally disabled prisoner like Willie Russell was meant to represent himself, without even being given a pencil.

When Georgia locked my client Jim Moseley up for five years for the heinous crime of having consensual oral sex with his wife, we could accuse the prosecuting lawyers of cunning linguistics in their legal arguments, and demand assurances from them that they were not guilty of the same offence. But that is a long story for another time.

In short, in the U.S. the law brings power to the powerless, no matter what a politician thinks the electorate wants to hear. The case of United States v. Nixon established that a lowly lawyer with a subpoena in hand could compel even the president to appear as a witness in court to explain his actions.

Certainly prior to the European Convention on Human Rights, British politicians resisted establishing rights that could override the whims of politicians. Margaret Thatcher abolished the right to remain silent, first for unpopular Irish terrorists, then for everyone. She could not have done this in America – it is protected by the Fifth Amendment. Even today, there are calls to renounce the European Convention. Meanwhile, Tony Blair wants to authorize 90 days’ of detention without charges. He just could not do this in America (at least not on U.S. soil) as the Fourth Amendment prohibits holding any criminal suspect for more than twenty-four hours without charges, a rule with which no politician may meddle.

It is important to remember that looking to the positive aspects of the American experience means more than analyzing how the Americans protect the individual from the state. There is more to life than being free from oppression. Indeed, my most sincere criticism of British politicians is that they are so negative, and so wedded to fear mongering.

In 2001, the Conservative party claimed on its website that Britain was Number One in the Premier League of crime. How can anyone say that with a straight face? I have been held up five times at gunpoint in New Orleans alone. When I lived there, the small city of New Orleans had a murder rate fifty times higher than Britain. The U.S. has crime that clearly puts it in a totally different division to Britain.

Why on earth do politicians make such miserable and false allegations about the country they are meant to govern? How about doing something to inspire British people – perhaps make them want to live, instead of being afraid of going out of doors?

Take the inspiration of charity. Americans bubble with ambition when it comes to solving social problems. America is worlds ahead of Britain when it comes to charity. There are 865,000 charitable organizations in the U.S. and charities raised roughly $212 billion in 2005 from all sources. That is about £115 billion. To set this in perspective, this would be more than the individual GDP’s of 170 of the world’s countries, more than Israel and Egypt combined.

Compare this to Britain, where the total raised by charity last year was just £8.2 billion. Adjusted for population, Americans give more than three times as much to charity as the British.

The figures reveal some surprising misers: The most generous group in Britain are the Scots, of whom more than 60 percent gave to charity last year; the meanest are from London.

The Americans are also better as what I call ‘difficult philanthropy’. Overwhelmingly, British charity goes to popular causes. The top ten areas of giving are: medical research, children, animals, religious organizations, overseas relief, the blind, the disabled, the elderly, education and rescue services (like the RNLI). Even the homeless can’t break into the top ten. In America, people like George Soros have dedicated their philanthropy almost exclusively to unpopular causes – like representing those we tag as criminals.

The U.S. leads the way in government support for voluntary service. Take Americorps and the Peace Corps. Americorps operates inside the U.S., serving the most needy Americans, and was launched by President Clinton in 1993. The government underwrites part of a modest living allowance for volunteers who are eligible for an education award at the end of their service.

The Peace Corps is equally ambitious, aimed at inspiring Americans to reach out overseas. Americans of all ages can serve – the average is 28 years old, but current volunteers range up to 79. Volunteers have been sent to 138 countries.

In 2007, the two programmes are jointly slated to receive a total of $1.2 billion in government funds, paying for as many as 50,000 Americans who volunteer on behalf of the needy.

I don’t need to tell most people here that President George Bush has a tenuous grasp on the plot: Most of his policies encourage people to be in service to themselves rather than to others, But to give credit where credit is due, he has been strongly supportive of Americorps and the Peace Corps, and has proposed doubling the size of the Peace Corps within five years. (He also wants to launch new Peace Corps programs in Islamic countries. Make of that what you will.)

Of course, Britain has the VSO, which is itself a wonderful organization. I notice they list Jon Snow as an alumnus. But I called VSO last week to compare the level of government support for their programme. They got a DFID grant of £28 million last year. The U.S. government invests roughly thirty times as much in Americorps and Peacecorps, and will help to fund more volunteers next year than the VSO has had in the past 48 years put together. And while the VSO was launched in 1958 as a private charity, the U.S. government was responsible for starting both Americorps and the Peace Corps.

To me it is obvious that government has an enormous role to play in encouraging human decency, and I see no reason why the government shouldn’t fund large swathes of charity and good works. It is paradoxical that we should learn this lesson from an American government that is so dedicated to acquisitive individualism.

The U.S. Declaration of Independence encourages its citizens in the ‘pursuit of happiness’. When British politicians brush their teeth at night, how often do they look in the mirror with a twinge of pride, knowing that they have advanced that pursuit, that they have made people happier? Rather than trying to frighten folk with horror stories about hoodies, how often do they encourage young people to devote their lives to the less fortunate? Rather than pretending that greater personal wealth will lead to greater personal happiness, is it not vastly cheaper, easier and more sensible to inspire young people to covet less and contribute more?

America invests in inspiration. Take space exploration. There are various moments in life that everyone remembers. Some, we might like to forget – the assassination of President Kennedy, or the attack on September 11th. But some memorable moments are inspirational – as with the first time a human being walked on the moon on July 20th, 1969.

Take a look on the internet at the pictures that America’s Hubble telescope is sending back: you will see the wonders of strange things like ‘light echoes’ and amazing pictures of galaxy clusters with slightly unimaginative names like MS0735.6+7421 – which, in case you didn’t know, is located a mere 2.6 billion light-years away in the constellation Camelopardalis.

The Hubble is being overhauled, so it will continue beaming back pictures that open the up the universe to us all. Talk about expanding our horizons: Space exploration makes up look optimistically at the stars, instead of gloomily at our feet.

We should ensure a real debate whether we want British taxes spent on rockets that explore the universe, or on a new generation of deterrent nuclear Trident missiles that will have to go in search of someone to deter.

In trying to suggest positive aspects of America that Britain might want to copy, I know I have only just touched the surface. I probably should have included such incomparable American exports as David Byrne, the New York Review of Books, Pizza (particularly V&T’s, at 113th and Amsterdam), Zabars Deli on Broadway, the Blues and perhaps even Amtrak -- the American passenger railway that remains nationalised to this day.

At the same time, America obviously has its faults, and there are many more positive ideas that both Britain and America should adopt from other countries. The ultimate discussion I hope we hold tonight is a broader one: whether we are not all guilty of focusing on the negative, rather than the positive? Politicians complain all the time -- but so does the media, and so do civil rights advocates.

Yesterday, I was at Addenbrookes hospital in Cambridge, visiting my father, who is desperately unwell. When I was young, he used to use the word ‘enthusiasm’ every second sentence. Yesterday, when I asked him how he was feeling, he said: “Not too bad for someone who is almost dead.”

For a couple of hours, I read him his favorite poems. We got to the poem ‘Abou Ben Adhem’, about a man who was told by the Angel that he was not on the list of those who loved the Lord. Abou replied cheerfully to this bad news, and said: “I pray thee, then, write me as one who loves his fellow men.” My father smiled at that.

It there is one thing he has taught me, it is that life should not be one long complaint; it is about enthusiasm, about inspiring happiness. Let’s have that debate instead.