A giant American database, which is being used by the Tories to root out swing voters, is being hailed by Michael Howard as the party's secret "tool" which could transform next year's general election.

Senior Tories told the Guardian that the Voter Vault system, which identifies 400 social characteristics, is proving a great success in identifying voters who have abandoned the party in the past decade.

The Tory high command believes it is on the verge of finally identifying its own "Mondeo Man" or "Worcester Woman", the sort of upwardly mobile voters who flocked to New Labour in the mid-90s.

"We have a new tool," one senior Tory said proudly. "It is something we have borrowed from the US. The notion is that if you know what people's social characteristics are, it is not too difficult to identify how they will vote."

Voter Vault, which is being used by the Bush campaign, looks at people's shopping, eating and lifestyle habits. This is based on the Mosaic system which is used by supermarkets to work out which products to target at shoppers.

The new system "vaults" this commercial information to predict how people will vote. That in turn allows party workers to focus their efforts most efficiently on those individuals most likely to respond to canvassing.

An example of a key finding in the US is that Volvo drivers rarely vote Republican.

At the heart of Voter Vault is a graph that places the tendency of people to vote against their tendency to vote Conservative. The Tories identify potential voters by taking a list of people who vote - this is publicly available - and setting this against certain pieces of information about them from the national census. They then identify Tory voters by examining the characteristics of 20,000 of their party members to work out what sort of people vote Tory.

The two groups are then placed together to identify swing voters - people who vote and who have Tory tendencies. In one study of 340,000 people the Tories achieved an 82% success rate in predicting who would vote for them.

Liam Fox, the Tory co-chairman who imported the system, said yesterday: "This is potentially very significant. In the 2002 mid-term elections in the US, Voter Vault helped the Republicans increase their vote by 4%. This is politics of the margins but this is where elections are won."

Dr Fox added that Voter Vault gave the Tories a useful advantage over Labour, which was using outdated systems to identify voters by areas. "Politics is now becoming very fragmented. The days when you could say this is a Labour street or this is a Tory street have gone. You can't even say this is a Tory or a Labour house. Voter Vault allows us to get round that and do 'virtual' canvassing of constituencies."

Next month's US presidential election will pit the Republicans' Voter Vault technology against the Democrats' equivalent, DataMart, in the first duel between the rival databases. The Republicans have a head start. They used Voter Vault to devastating effect in congressional elections two years ago, focusing their time and resources on voters who were most likely to be persuaded to vote for them.

Before 2002, candidates would purchase databases state by state and district by district from a specialist company called Aristotle. Voter Vault was the first true national voter database.

It was built by Seattle-based Advanced Custom Software, which - according to PC World magazine - contracted much of the work out to Compulink Systems of Maharashtra in India, leading to questions over whether the data could be stolen while being shipped around the world, and inevitable accusations of "outsourcing". The Republicans say all the work on Voter Vault since 2002 has been done in the US.

For the 2002 elections, the database sucked in state voter information, census data and membership information from scores of clubs and interest groups. It allowed the Republicans to shape their message to reflect the leanings and concerns of each voter, and to fly President Bush to areas where he would be most effective.

"In the old days people walked and knocked on every door," said Michael Cornfield, at the Pew Internet and American Life Project in Washington. "Now they just knock on the doors where they have reason to believe they'll get a favourable response."

Partly as a result of their advantage in getting their supporters to the polls, the Republicans won back control of the Senate in 2002 and consolidated their hold on the House of Representatives.

Rattled, the Democratic party scrambled to catch up, and has since built up its version of the technology, DataMart, into a list of 166 million voters, just 2 million smaller than Voter Vault. The party has a second electronic contacts book known as Demzilla, of donors and activists. But unlike Voter Vault, neither system has been road tested.

At first blush surprising, the worry about jeopardizing Israeli residency turns out to be widespread among the Palestinians in Israel. When given a choice of living under Zionist or Palestinian rule, they decidedly prefer the former. More than that, there is a body of pro-Israel sentiments from which to draw. No opinion surveys cover this delicate subject, but a substantial record of statements and actions suggest that, despite their anti-Zionist swagger, Israel's most fervid enemies do perceive its political virtues. Even Palestinian leaders, between their fulminations, sometimes let down their guard and acknowledge Israel's virtues. This undercurrent of Palestinian love of Zion has hopeful and potentially significant implications.

One individual willing publicly to oppose Arafat was Zohair Hamdan of Sur Bahir, a village in the south of metropolitan Jerusalem; he organized a petition of Jerusalem Arabs demanding that a referendum be held before Israel lets the Palestinian Authority take power in Jerusalem. "For 33 years, we have been part of the State of Israel. But now our rights have been forgotten." Over a year and a half, he collected more than 12,000 signatures (out of an estimated Jerusalem Arab population of 200,000). "We won't accept a situation where we are led like sheep to the slaughterhouse." Hamdan also expressed a personal preference that Sur Bahir remain part of Israel and estimated that the majority of Palestinians reject "Arafat's corrupt and tyrannical rule. Look what he's done in Lebanon, Jordan, and now in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He has brought one disaster after another on his people."

Freedom of expression. ‘Adnan Khatib, owner and editor of Al-Umma, a Jerusalem weekly whose printing plant was burned down by PA police in 1995, bemoaned the troubles he'd had since the Palestinian Authority's heavy-handed leaders got power over him: "The measures they are taking against the Palestinian media, including the arrest of journalists and the closure of newspapers, are much worse than those taken by the Israelis against the Palestinian press." In an ironic turn of events, Na‘im Salama, a lawyer living in Gaza, was arrested by the PA on charges he slandered it by writing that Palestinians should adopt Israeli standards of democracy. Specifically, he referred to charges of fraud and breach of trust against then-prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Salama noted how the system in Israel allowed police to investigate a sitting prime minister and wondered when the same might apply to the PA chieftain. For this audacity, he spent time in jail. Hanan Ashrawi, an obsessive anti-Israel critic, acknowledged (reluctantly) that the Jewish state has something to teach the nascent Palestinian polity: "freedom would have to be mentioned although it has only been implemented in a selective way, for example, the freedom of speech." ‘Iyad as-Sarraj, a prominent psychiatrist and director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, confesses that "during the Israeli occupation, I was 100 times freer [than under the Palestinian Authority]."

Tolerance of homosexuals. In the West Bank and Gaza, conviction for sodomy brings a three- to ten-year jail term, and gay men tell of being tortured by the PA police. Some of them head for Israel where one estimate finds 300 mostly male gay Palestinians living. Donatella Rovera of Amnesty International comments, "Going to Israel is a one-way ticket, and once there their biggest problem is possibly being sent back."

So, what's to explain this remarkable case of reverse boosterism? In part, it's industrial-policy envy. No one's in charge in the Phoenix area. There's no unifying vision, distinguishing feature or dominant industry. Instead, the Valley is the sum of the choices its individuals and families make to provide for themselves and better their lives. Truly, the Invisible Hand at work.

A development last week suggests that market advocates could be on the verge of another victory in Michigan — this time in Detroit, the state’s largest city. Faced with big revenue shortfalls, Democratic Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has proposed government-sector layoffs and pay cuts in America’s tenth most populous city. His budget also suggests ending taxpayer subsidies to the Detroit Zoo and other cultural centers, a move that could lead to privatization — a theme of our 1990 book and other work by the Mackinac Center and Chicago’s Heartland Institute.

Relations between the White House and Britain’s Tories are not good*. Much of this reflects the unacceptable behaviour of a small number of anti-war 'Michael Moore conservatives'.

Instead of worrying about high-profile reviews in the media mainstream—"I’ve had God knows how many books published by now, and maybe three reviews in the New York Times Book Review," laughs Collier—Encounter sells books by getting its authors discussed on the Internet and interviewed on talk radio, Fox News, and C-Span’s ideologically neutral Book TV.

"We must become a free society of free people," he said.

Putin said he aims to do that by strengthening the state, boosting the rule of law and continuing to implement economic reforms.

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Inquiry into claims that BBC encouraged hecklers at Howard meeting

Michael White
Monday April 25, 2005
The Guardian

The BBC yesterday promised an internal inquiry into the circumstances which led a documentary film crew to encourage hecklers to shout slogans during one of Michael Howard's election campaign meetings - apparently to help illustrate a programme called A History of Heckling.

Faced with an attack on the corporation from Guy Black, the Tory director of communications, the BBC denied it had been engaged in "a deliberate attempt to generate a false news story and dramatise coverage". It insisted the hecklers were not under BBC staff's control.

Claiming that cries such as "You can't trust the Tories" and "Michael Howard is a liar" did not disrupt Mr Howard's meeting - and that film of the incident will play only a small part in the programme - the BBC stressed that it "observes hecklers at other parties' campaign meetings and not just the Conservatives'".

None the less it provided no supporting evidence and reports that the BBC had provided lapel microphones for hecklers to improve the recording quality of their cries left the corporation on the back foot. It has largely avoided abusive attacks by either Labour or the Tories in the 2005 campaign and even Jeremy Paxman's Newsnight interviews with party leaders elicited cries of pain chiefly from the Liberal Democrats.

The Tories discovered what was going on only because the hecklers' microphones interfered with the party leader's own mike at the meeting in Horwich, near Bolton, last Wednesday. Mr Black's letter claimed that at least one "heckler" was spotted with the BBC crew in Stockton-on-Tees.

Citing "a clear and serious breach of recognised BBC producer guidelines and accordingly a breach of section 5.3(b)1 of the BBC charter agreement", Mr Black, a former secretary of the Press Complaints Commission, argued that the BBC team's recording of hecklers and Tory supporters in the Horwich crowd "would amount to 'surreptitious recording' under those guidelines".

It is not Pol Pot chic, exactly. But a recent review in the New York Times, of Philip Short's Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, by William T. Vollmann, makes for a queasy read. Vollmann and Short agree that Pol Pot was a mass murderer. Yet in the context of Cambodian history, Pol Pot's brutalities do not seem singular; and after all, Vollmann notes, America is responsible for My Lai and Abu Ghraib. He concludes: "even now you can find poor people in Cambodia who . . . wish for the return of the Khmer Rouge." Where to start? Perhaps with the fall of man. Since we all feel it, evil appears everywhere, and when it does it necessarily acquires local coloring. But--deep breath--the United States has not murdered 1 million-plus people recently (or, indeed, ever). Pol Pot, ruler of a much tinier country, managed to do that in a very short time. A word almost completely missing from Vollmann's piece is "Communism" (he mentions Marx, only to say that Cambodians did not understand him). Pol Pot was empowered by modern totalitarian doctrine, like Mao, Stalin, and Hitler--and even now, you can find poor thinkers in the New York Times who do not understand the century they just lived through.

George Kennan, arguably the greatest and most discerning diplomat in recent American history, died last week at age 101 -- and one has to wonder if the America that he symbolized has died with him.

He lived quietly in recent years in his beloved Princeton at the New Jersey university he served. He seldom went to Washington anymore, at least not for official appearances. I met him only once, about 10 years ago when he spoke at the Foreign Service Institute. I was tremendously impressed by this slim, handsome, scholarly man's humanity, gravitas and, incongruously, modesty.

Yet I had not known, until I read a fine piece by the accomplished journalist Richard Longworth in the Chicago Tribune this week, that George Kennan had expressed himself on the Iraq war.

In a 2002 interview, noting that he had gone to Iraq in 1944 and hated the place (a not unusual response, believe me), Kennan declared himself against the U.S. occupation of Iraq. His reasons were not only moral, but palpably practical.

"Are we willing to bear this responsibility?" he is quoted as asking. "We are not. Our government is technically incapable of conceiving and promulgating a long-term consistent policy toward areas remote from its own territory. Our actions in the field of foreign affairs are the convulsive reactions of politicians to an internal political life dominated by vocal minorities."

It was not that Kennan did not see danger in the world; just as he noted with such clarity the dangers of Soviet communism in his prescient writings of 1946 and 1947 from his diplomatic perch in Moscow, he early on identified the dangers of religious fanaticism as it played into foreign policy today.

As early as 1987, Longworth recalls, Kennan foresaw Islamic fundamentalism, warning of the "rise in several parts of the world of a fanatical and wildly destructive religious fundamentalism, and ... the terrorism to which that sort of fundamentalism so often resorts."

No question about it, Kennan's policy of "containment" of the Soviet Union -- of winning through gradualism and a combination of readied force and cultural and moral co-option -- won the Cold War. But does his wisdom resonate in American policies toward the world today?

Unfortunately, no. The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz "doctrines" are the exact opposite of Kennan's and of that entire generation's, and that fact tells us a lot about where we are today.

Whereas Kennan believed in and applied long-term policies, using the empowering multiplier effect of close allies, to subvert and wait out the Soviet Union, today's American leaders proclaim immediate and eternal American sovereignty over the world. (In the 1991 Cheney-Wolfowitz memo, they grandly claimed that "the U.S. would seek unchallenged dominance in every region of the world.") That, of course, doesn't build allies.

Whereas Kennan believed in gradualism and patience and in employing every possible political, cultural and military tool to win in the long run, today's policy-makers believe in the application of overwhelming military force to achieve magical ideological transformations.

Whereas Kennan had a honed and intuitive grasp of culture and psychology -- his writings are brilliantly perceptive of the historical Russian psyche, which he instinctively understood -- today's administration scoffs at culture and denies its part and authenticity in the process of change. Instead, it looks at all people as interchangeable parts that can be maneuvered according to its will. In truth, in this the administration is much like the Marxists.

Kennan's world view was consistent with the America he grew up with beginning in 1904. The United States was just starting to lead, but doing so, generally, in a brotherly way. The country believed in allies and "doing good," yet there was a fascination with restructuring the world in an American design; the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations, WTO, etc. all came out of this sense of mission. Kennan and those like him were an elite class of Americans willing to deal with a complicated world on their own terms.

Our new American policy-makers choose to work alone, to eschew the camaraderie of allies, to destroy or seriously diminish the power of international agreements, and to act in the world not in a brotherly way, but in a punishing father's way.

Kennan's generation was burnished Eastern Establishment; this Bush generation is rough-and-tumble frontier America.

It takes a long time for a paradigm of beliefs and behavior to change, whether in foreign policy or anything else -- usually about 20 years. Has our foreign policy paradigm changed forever? Will the present administration's paradigm continue? Does it represent the true feelings of the majority of Americans today?

Those questions can't yet be answered. But what we can say without question is that George Kennan's sophisticated reading of Russia and his patience eventually won the fight, while the new generation is still floundering in the unforgiving deserts of the Near East.