January 2010 Archives

I was pleased to read this story on the Autocar website this evening. I love Saabs. I'm not sure I'd like to own one because of the dreadful depreciation they suffer, but I'd be pleased to run one as my next company car and I was worried I'd not get the chance because of the closure of the company.

Saabs are nice cars for nice people. I do buy into that whole Top Gear thing about them. When I was a boy, the Saab 99 Combi Coupe was one of my favourite cars. There was a bloke who had an early red onesome time in the mid Seventies in Haddington. It was almost as exciting for me as the Rover 3500 SD1 which was parked outside the hairdressers as I walked to school every morning from early in 1978. I adored the early Turbos and lusted after a black one. A black Saab 99 Turbo is one of the coolest cars on the planet. The Saab 9000 was the best of the family of cars which came from the same platform. That wasn't such a big claim, given that the others were the gorgeous Alfa 164, the rather odd Lancia Thema and the truly execrable Fiat Croma. Going back further, there is the image of Erik Carlsson caning twin-stroke 93s through the forests. I remember Will Gollop rally-crossing a 99 which was a lot of fun to watch.

GM completely trashed Saab. They consistently failed to invest in new platforms and products for their Swedish company and instead gave the world a Subaru Impreza with a nosejob and worse, one of their truly hopeless American SUVs. The current 9-5 is a heavily revised 9000 from the early Nineties and the 9-3 worryingly close to a second-generation Vectra. In spite of that, Saabs have retained their charm for many people, especially in Britain.

GM is now trying to do with Cadillac what they really should have done with Saab. They are attempting to turn Cadillac into a competitor to the prestige German marques. The CTS-V has been round the Nurburgring in an unfeasably short time for a four door saloon from any country, never mind the USA. It's a great car but a completely unnecessary one. Cadillac is a great American name but one which still equates in the minds of many Europeans with huge pink or white land yachts. It's a long way from the urbane sophistication or quirky sportiness

It's a miracle that there is any brand equity left in Saab. They were turned into very safe Vauxhalls and Opels with their ignition key on the floor by the gear lever and managed to survive that. Now the Dutch are in charge. Let's hope that the creators of the truly gorgeous Spyker sports cars do a better job than the Americans.

Yesterday Prof David Nutt launched his new Independent Council on Drug Harms. The BBC account of the story is here. The amusingly named Nuttsack Affair did much to lower my esteem of the Home Secretary when he asked for Prof Nutt's resignation late last year. Twitter went a little loopy over it - again - and at the time I thought Alan Johnson handled the whole affair rather poorly. His finger-pointing, aggressive performance on the BBC News were a particular low point.

The trouble is that I'm not at all sure that Prof Nutt handled things much better. He is a man of high moral character who from all accounts took his role as chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs very seriously. His scientific knowledge of the relative harms of different drugs is the basis of the advice he provides to government. I haven't had time yet to read and digest all of the Eve Saville Lecture he gave last year and which was published in a briefing by King's College London's Centre for Crime and Justice Studies in October last year. In it, Prof Nutt states "We [the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs] provide one arm of the policy formulating perspective. In addition, there are a number of other agencies, organisations and individuals who contribute to policy formation." Presumably, and I can't be stating other than the obvious here, some of the others who contribute to the policy formulation process are political advisors in the Home Office, the Department of Health and other interested parties.

Politicians make political decisions. They may take advice from experts such as the ACMD which have been specifically set up to provide such advice but they are not bound to act on it. They then have to justify that decision to the electorate, to the press and to the parties affected by their decisions. At all times, they have to bear in mind the effect that their policy decisions will have on their electoral chances.

Jack of Kent's post on evidence-based policy making is an interesting read here. He correctly states that "the prejudices and assumptions of politicians or indeed voters do not constitute an evidence base." He goes on to say "If a policy is unacceptable to an electorate, then the policy may simply not be sustainable, whatever its other merits." The political judgment is deciding what will and what will not be electorally sustainable.

What Prof Nutt failed to appreciate during Nuttsack was that while he was providing excellent advice, the decision on whether to act on that advice was not his to make. I wish him well with the Independent Council on Drug Harms and hope that the Home Office and other government departments which are responsible for drugs policy seek his advice. A rational person would also hope that the government take his advice. A realistic person sees that sometimes they won't.

I like to think I'm an intelligent man so this article in the Independent depressed me just a little. One of the small joys of being a political junkie is that at election time you get to assess policies for yourself. Political parties being what they are, they deny us even that. The spin doctors have returned from their Christmas hols reinvigorated and as full of bile and cunning as I was of mince pies and port. We have charge and counter-charge and more rebuttals than any sane person can easily cope with and it's only the 5th of January. What's it going to be like by the middle of April?

I'd like to make a small request. It will likely be ignored. May we have an election this year which doesn't treat the electorate as idiots incapable of assessing evidence put in front of us? Some of us can do that. Really we can. I don't want spin. I don't want lies or accusations of lies. I'd like each party to make its own case and not spend any time at all trashing one another. Turnout in the General Election is likely to be low enough as it is without the parties turning off sectors of the electorate by acting like a chimpanzee's tea party. Each party's core voters will continue to vote they way they have whatever happens and they're not going to engage those who don't intend to vote acting like this. The rest of us want to be treated like adults. We can pick out the information from each campaign which is important to us without prestidigitation from the politicoes.

While I'm on the subject, I don't think that the Chancellor of the Exchequer should be giving any attention at all on the Conservatives' election promises. That's not his job. It's his job to sort out the fiscal pickle he's got us all into. He has an entire party machine to take care of the politics for him. Unless, of course, he doesn't trust the Party to get the job done.