The Sinking Flagships

And that is before  the IMF has to step in.

This Government is incompetent. Completely and utterly incompetent. This Chancellor above all.

It simply has to go. He simply has to go.

Hero, Not Zero

According to Kevin Maguire in the New Statesman, Andy Burnham, scourge of the dismantlement of the NHS in England, is also sticking to his guns that Labour must outlaw zero hours contracts.

The spirit of John Smith lives on.

Liam Carr was on to something about Burnham. Don't take your eye off him.

Broad

It comes as no surprise that UKIP has lined up with Labour and the Lib Dems, backed less officially but no less effectively by Greens and Independents, in order to deprive the Conservatives of the Leadership of Norfolk County Council and give that position to the Leader of the Labour Group.

UKIP people may not like the Labour Party, although they probably know very little about it. They would be fiercer on the subject of the Lib Dems. But their only real hatred is of the Conservative Party

The hatred that can only be felt, not even by a scorned lover or by an abandoned child, but by an utterly deluded yet utterly sincere person who believes someone totally impossible to have so scorned him or to have so abandoned him.

Taking The Mickey

Why does no one listen to what Michael Gove is telling them? He obviously missed the passage in Leo Strauss about the importance of lying to the common herd, so he is completely honest.

None of Gove's curriculum changes applies to the schools that he favours in every possible way, namely the academies and the "free" schools. They will not, for example, be required to teach his new History syllabus. Nor is there the slightest possibility that they will do so.

As to the schools that will be so obliged, we may only hope that History will not therefore be deprived of most of its curriculum time on account of having been so utterly dumbed down. If it is not, then teachers will be able to carry on teaching it regardless, and will simply not tell the pupils how little of what they were being taught they would need for an examination which awarded a mark for the name of each of the wives of Henry VIII plus a seventh mark for having listed them in the right order.

But remember, like everything else that Gove is doing, it will only apply to the schools that in any case he thinks are for losers. Nowhere that, to his mind, matters will have to teach any part of it. Or will do so.

More broadly, there is Gove's attempt to present himself as the Great White Hope of social conservatism. He voted in favour of same-sex "marriage", as of course he had always made it perfectly clear that he intended to do. He has been advocating that measure since back in the days when Jack Straw, as Justice Secretary, was specifically ruling it out on behalf of the then Labour Government.

But such details never make any difference to his devotees. They have a similar view of Nigel Farage, who is still on record in favour of that change, just as he is in favour of the legalisation of drugs and prostitution. Gove, too, like Boris Johnson, last expressed any view on drugs by expressing himself in favour of legalisation.

Such is "the West" that Gove wishes not merely to defend, but to expand across the whole wide earth by means of the force of arms. That does at least make him a consistent neoconservative. Melanie Phillips, for example, wants such an expansion of things that she despises in her own country, and strongly supports Israel for holding (as, in any case, it barely does these days, and less so all the time) to features and values against which she rails in Britain.

But Gove wants an extremely liberal Britain at the forefront of the forcible military creation of an extremely liberal world. He has been saying this for nearly 20 years, and giving it practical policy effect for as long as he has been in any position to do so. Why does no one ever believe him?

True Submission

How depressing to hear Abdul Haqq Baker, the Chairman of the Brixton Mosque, explain on the Today programme that he had found in Islam things that he failed to find in his Catholic upbringing, such as fasting and daily prayer.

The answer to Islam is our own tradition of structured daily prayer, the setting aside of one day in seven, fasting, almsgiving, pilgrimage, the global community of faith as the primary focus of personal allegiance and locus of personal identity, the lesser outward and the greater inward struggle, the need for a comprehensive and coherent critique both of capitalism and of Marxism, the coherence between faith and reason, and a consequent integrated view of art and science.

The answer to the challenge of the Sunna is Sacred Tradition. The answer to the challenge of the Imamate is the Petrine Office. The answer to the challenge of Sufism is our own tradition of mysticism and monasticism. 

Liberal Catholics will be the last to see the point.

Restricting The Preachers of Hate

Not before time.

And including no shortage of Islamists. Such as the black-shirted pimp and heroin-trafficker Hashim Thaçi, who is somehow also both a Wahhabi and a Maoist – he really is what the more hysterical Tea Party attendees imagine President Obama to be.

Such as the terrorist Akhmed Zakayev, whom this country currently harbours. Such as the war criminal Ejup Ganić. Such as those who hold fast to the late terrorist Abdulmalik Rigi. And such as those who adhere to Thaçi, Zakeyev and Ganić. Among other Islamist preachers of hate.

 

Themselves among numerous others besides. Ecclesiastics who have expressed racist views about Africans and others who do not share their liberal sexual morality. Those whose disparagement of Blessed John Paul the Great’s Polishness echo the authentic voice of the age-old Teutonic racism against the Slavs, who only gets away with it because he is Swiss.

Supporters of Avigdor Lieberman. Cheerleaders for the EDL-supporting leaders of the Tea Party. Partisans of Geert Wilders, the heir of Pim Fortuyn and of his definition of Western civilisation as sex between men and boys. Advocates of sex between men and boys. Admirers of the American neoconservatives. Campaigners for Hindutva or for Khalistan. Rupert Murdoch.

Nor does the list end there. It has hardly even begun.

Searchlight

Although Holocaust denial is neither a doctrinal error nor a schismatic act, and is therefore not in or of itself grounds either for excommunication or for a refusal to lift any such censure, the wonder of the impending neo-Nazi takeover of the Society of Saint Pius X is that it has taken so long to present itself. We must be clear exactly what Lefebvrism is, and is not.

It is certainly not "just traditional Catholicism", or even just Catholicism as widely practised during the Pianische Monolothismus. Rather, it makes sense only in certain very specific terms peculiar to France. Terms that, for very French reasons, it assumes to be universal when they are not.

Lefevbrist devotional and disciplinary practice is an obvious expression of, if not direct Jansenist influence, though probably so, then at least the strain in the French character that made it receptive to Jansenism. Likewise, Lefebvrist theory and organisational practice are no less obviously expressions of Gallicanism, and sometimes of very advanced Gallicanism indeed.

For example, rule of the SSPX is by a General Chapter in which not only do bishops and simple presbyters have equal status, but it is considered an aberration that the Superior-General is at present a bishop, rather than being a simple presbyter to whom the Society's bishops would be, and in the past have been, subject. Shades of the extreme Gallican attempts to prove a Dominical institution of the office of parish priest.

And shades of the structural arrangements of Anglo-Catholic traditionalism over the last two decades and before, echoing the extent to which that movement has always tapped into the same English and Welsh organisational traits that made Congregationalism so popular (and many of the same English and Welsh devotional traits that made Methodism so popular) just as Lefebvrism has tapped into the same French traits that had previously manifested themselves as Gallicanism (and Jansenism).

Although I should have to investigate any specifically Spanish reason why this has come to be so, such trends become even more pronounced in the structure of Opus Dei.

Sanctification through work, the living of a contemplative life in the middle of the world, Christian freedom correctly defined, and the recognition of divine filiation: these are the principles calling all Catholics to rediscover and renew, ever-more-deeply, our beginning the day by offering it to God, our frequent Communion, our daily examination of conscience, our Eucharistic Adoration, our ejaculatory prayer, our use of holy water, and our devotion to the Mother of God, to the Angels and to the Saints. And, yes, our practice of corporal mortification.

But Opus Dei's domination by the laity, yet in an organisation of which clergy are members, effectively turning priests into little more than transubstantiation and absolution machines a great deal of the time, seems more appropriate to the more advanced forms of Congregationalism, to the Baptist movement, and to expressions of Methodism such as the Primitive Methodists, the still-existing Independent Connexion (with its partly Quaker roots) in the North of England, and the Bible Christians of the West Country.

Even those, in fact, were or are not quite like that. There is something positively Quaker, at least historically, about the maintenance of autonomous male and female branches. But most of all, the whole thing looks like lay rule through Royal Gallicanism and its local implications all the way down to parochial level, while also recalling the power wielded in the Jansenist subculture by the Abbesses of Port-Royal and their subjects. Again, there is more than a whiff of Anglo-Catholicism in all of this, or of all of this in Anglo-Catholicism.

Lefebvrism gives perhaps the first ever formal institutional shape to the situation created by the seventeenth century, which began with three competing parties in the French Church, but which ended with two, the Gallicans and the Jansenists having effectively merged against the Ultramontanes due to the deployment of Gallican ecclesiological arguments against the Papal condemnations of Jansenist soteriological ones.

By the wayside had fallen such features as Jansenist belief, with the sole if notable exception of Pascal, in the infallibility of Papal definitions ex cathedra, and Gallican use of belief in Our Lady's Immaculate Conception as a mark of party identity due to its having been defined by the Council of Basel.

The popular attraction of the Lefebvrist clergy in terms of the old Latin Mass and traditional or "traditional" devotions echoes that of the Gallican clergy in terms of the old diocesan Missals and Breviaries and a sympathy for the entrenched local devotional practices reviled, like those entrenched local liturgical forms, by the Ultramontanes.

The French Church, or an idea of the French Church, is assumed to be fundamentally autonomous, so that the incompatibility of Dignitatis Humanae with a very specifically French Counter-Revolutionary theory of the relationship between Church and State means that it is the Conciliar Declaration that must yield. This is simply taken to be self-evident.

In reality, such a position is as schismatic and as heretical as John Courtney Murray's attempt to conform Dignitatis Humanae to the American republican tradition's reading of the First Amendment as taught to high school students, an approach comprehensible only within Manifest Destiny and all that.

That has therefore ended up, for now, in George Weigel's signature to the Project for the New American Century, and in the public support for the Iraq War on the part of the late Richard John Neuhaus, known to George W Bush as "Father Richard".

American "conservative" Catholicism sees the American Church as autonomous as surely as does American "liberal" Catholicism, and freely disregards Catholic Teaching on social justice and on peace as surely as the other side freely disregards Catholic Teaching on bioethical and sexual issues.

As a result, both alike are blind to the Magisterium's brilliant and unique global witness to the inseparability of all of these concerns. In both the French and the American cases, there is a strange inability to recognise that what one was taught at 13 or 14 might not always be the last word on any given subject.

Still, even Richard Williamson (I cannot call him a bishop, since, until such time as the Holy Father tells me otherwise, I cannot see how he could possibly have been ordained as such in a direct act of disobedience to Petrine authority) has a potential use.

It needs to be brought home to our people, among others, to whose legislative will we are now subject via the EU. Let there be a European Senate to which each of the Europarties, currently 11 in number including a Far Right one, would nominate one Senator from each member-state at the same time as the elections to the European Parliament. That would give a total of 297, or 308 once Croatia has had the bad taste to join up.

Just imagine if at least the more politically aware people in this country were confronted with the figure of David Irving, or of someone who held equally noxious views about the gulags, the Holodomor and the Cultural Revolution. Imagine those potted newspaper profiles of our 11 new European Senators.

The European Senate would have the power to propose amendments which the European Parliament would then be obliged to consider, and before the final text went on to the Council of Ministers the Senate would have the power to require unanimity there rather than Qualified Majority Voting. On that second point, it might even do some good.

Why not give the EU some Lords Spiritual? Let each member-state nominate two permanent offices the occupants of which would always be European Senators, one representing the country's religious and spiritual sources of moral sense and cultural identity, and the other representing the country's secular and humanist sources of moral sense and cultural identity. All very Blessed John Paul the Great.

Furthermore, let each of the Europarties nominate a further two such Senators, at the same time as its other appointees on whom see above, one representing the secular and humanist basis of its philosophy, policies and support, and the other representing the religious and spiritual basis of its philosophy, policies and support. Quite an eye-opener.

Not least in view of quite how many of those figures might very well be British, and especially based in the city where the global coup within the SSPX is to be staged, at Earlsfield Library Hall, 276 Magdalen Road, Earlsfield London SW18, between from 9am and 5pm over the 1st and 2nd of June. And not least in view of quite who those Britons would be.

There would be a neoconservative thinker and the dissident vicar or (although he or she would be lucky to find one) the rabbi of his or her choice. Such are the present times, that alongside a Stalinist or Trotskyist historian or philosopher as the secular voice, might be nominated an Islamist leader who would be overwhelmingly likely to be British and London-based.

While the ostensibly opposite extreme would manage two people who might even live in the same house. One would be David Irving. The other would be Richard Williamson.

Germany Calling

Philip Oltermann writes:

The poet, playwright, novelist, philosopher and amateur morphologist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe didn’t have many moments of self-doubt, but he was easily impressed by the English.

“As young and 17-year-old as they may be when they turn up here,” he wrote to his friend Johann Eckermann in 1828, “they still never seem foreign or bashful in these German lands; on the contrary, their conduct and demeanour in our society is so full of confidence . . . it is as if they were in charge everywhere and owned every corner of the globe.”

Germany has always been more anglophile than the British dare to imagine, mainly because the British Isles have played an important role in every single one of Germany’s foundation myths. Goethe and Schiller’s “Germany of the mind”, the nation of thinkers and poets? Every child knows that without Shakespeare, it wouldn’t have happened (“Schakespär”, wrote Herder, was destined to “create us Germans”).

Germany the football nation? Hard to imagine without the Fußball-Mutterland. Germany the industrial engine room of Europe? If you look closely enough, you’ll find that each of Germany’s three “economic miracles” carries a discreet British trademark.

In the 19th century, Carl Wilhelm Siemens and Alfried Krupp were eager students of Manchester-Kapitalismus before they became industrial pioneers (both men enthusiastically anglicised their names, to Charles William and Alfred). In the 1940s it was the British occupying forces who repaired the machines at Wolfsburg and opened the way for the rise of Volkswagen.

Even if you believe those, like Angela Merkel, who argue that the country’s current success is mainly down to the supplyside reforms of Gerhard Schröder’s Agenda 2010 reforms, it is hard to ignore how many German politicians who now rail against the excess of “Anglo-Saxon banking” were ten years earlier calling for the need to emulate Britain’s liberal economy.

One curious feature of Anglo-German relations is how seldom that same attitude is mirrored in Britain. Usually every 20 years or so, there is a phase when British politicians and businessmen start whispering conspiratorially about “the German model” – but they tend to be just that: phases.

Margaret Thatcher’s Centre for Policy Studies was founded in 1974 with the stated aim of looking at lessons that could be drawn from the success of the German economy, but ended up somewhere more Austrian. And at the TUC conference in September 1978 a motion was put forward to “adopt the German approach to industrial relations”; the defeat was so resounding that no one even bothered to count the votes.

Today, with British enthusiasm for the German social market model growing on the left, it’s relatively easy to eulogise the Mittelstand, rave about cheap renting in Berlin or rail against German austerity-mania. However, few have the patience to get their head around Germany’s complicated network of craft-based guilds, federal transfers and regional banks.

Yet many of the features that make Germany so successful were, in effect, installed by the British after the Second World War – be they the mandatory representation of workers on management panels, which has helped the country hold on to its industry during labour-market reforms, or the ponderous federal structure of government, which encourages long-term policy strategies over short-term fixes and has arguably made the country a more egalitarian (and happier) place than London-centric Britain. The sociologist Wolfgang Streeck calls these “constructive restraints”: paradoxically, they make Germany more dynamic by making it less flexible.

So the irony may be that the British managed to build a much better political economy from scratch abroad than they were able to grow over centuries in their own backyard – but then turned their back on the country and forgot all about it.

Interestingly, when it comes to the arts, Britain has found much easier to sustain an interest in the value of a mutual flow of influences. English Romanticism is an unashamedly cross-cultural collaboration, born out of Wordsworth’s, Coleridge’s and the Shelleys’ travels through German forests. D H Lawrence ran off with a German wife whose “religious attitude to matters of the body” inspired Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

As for musical innovation, Germany came up with Kraftwerk and Can. In the early days of Joy Division the band’s frontman, Ian Curtis, made a ritual of playing Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express” over the PA before taking to the stage. It hints at just the right mix of cosmopolitan curiosity and barefaced jingoism: “That’s interesting. Let’s copy it and make it better.” British politicians may want to take note.

And Maurice Glasman writes:

“The lives of the dead hang like a nightmare on the minds of the living,” wrote Marx. His words apply to the relationship between Margaret Thatcher and the Labour Party. She defeated us in life and her ghost was not laid at her funeral. Thatcher’s inheritance still sets the parameters of political rationality and government policy today.

She argued that Labour spent too much, taxed too much and borrowed too much. In terms of what used to be called “ideology”, she fused a theory of human nature (self-interested, patriotic) and history (an adventurous island people weighed down by taxes and regulation) with a theory of reason (markets distribute goods more efficiently than states).

These added up to a political position that could both explain the causes of decline and give a clear orientation for action in the present. Thatcher had a narrative and a strategy, and she generated energy.

The trajectory of the Labour Party over the past 35 years has been defined by the challenge Thatcher posed. What is the alternative to the market as the exclusive generator of innovation? What is the alternative to managerial prerogative in the pursuit of efficiency?

Part of Labour’s challenge is historical: to show that the durability and comparative strength of Europe’s most successful economy – Germany’s, which has come to be understood exclusively as a function of its monetary discipline –was in fact rooted in a series distinctive, decentralised institutions. The “equalisation of burdens” act of 1952 stipulated that there had to be negotiation between capital and labour both inside firms and in society as a whole.

The coming together of Social and Christian Democracy, the latter characterised by a strong commitment to the dignity of labour espoused in Catholic social thought, led to a system of “co-determination”, rather than nationalisation, in which the workforce had significant representation on management boards; and to a vocational system of labour market entry which was organised by democratically elected institutions and by regional banks not permitted to lend outside their area. Sectoral pension funds were run with an equal representation of capital and labour and were based on current rates of earnings. The irony is that these institutions were built after the war in the British zone of occupation, and were signed off by the then foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin.

Incentives to virtue were built into the German system through institutions that renewed knowledge, good practice and intergenerational solidarity. Neither neo-classical nor Keynesian economic theories can conceive of value being generated by anything other than the individual or the state. Neither has a theory of the firm, or of those mediating institutions that preserve and generate value within the economy. Nor is there a vision of Europe that involves the strengthening of decentralised institutions, cities, universities, vocational colleges, regional banks and community-owned football clubs.

The current economic debate is suspended between austerity, on the one hand, and stimulus, on the other. Neither perspective recognises the centrality of conflict and cooperation between classes or institutions, nor do they seek to strengthen the internal practices of good institutions as a necessary condition for flourishing states and markets. Neither offers incentives to virtue nor establishes a common good between previously estranged interests, as happens in the German model.

What Labour should take from the Germans is a governing ideology that understands human nature as based on self-interest broadly conceived, an ideology in which the well-being of others is a condition of our own flourishing, and in which the preservation of quality through the practices of democratically organised, non-pecuniary institutions is as necessary as fiscal discipline and the upholding of individual rights.

The prevailing paradigms cannot explain why the economy with the highest level of workforce participation in its governance, the greatest degree of regulation of labour market entry through vocational enforcement and the most severe constraints on capital in its banking system should be the most competitive in Europe, as well as its most efficient. However, an explanation of the comparative superiority of the German economy should be central to Labour’s new economic offer. We are all in this together in ways that George Osborne cannot begin to understand.

Such a political position requires the following: a reassertion of the value of labour and the representation of the workforce in corporate governance; a renewed role for vocational institutions in reproducing skill; self-organised universities run by academics on the basis of the internal goods of knowledge rather than the external goods of money or policy objectives; self-governing cities with the power to shape the destiny of their citizens; and the endowment of regional banks that can resist the domination of the “Big Six” in internal investment and enable access to capital in regions where there is no nourishment to be found.

A renewal of solidarity in social security and welfare is also required, one that establishes solidarity, subsidiarity and status as guiding principles. A politics of mutual sacrifice is the necessary complement to that of mutual benefit. That is the meaning of reciprocity.

The domination of internal investment by the banks that had to be bailed out following the crash of autumn 2008 must be challenged by the creation of new financial institutions and the renewal of old ones. These should be funded by using 5 per cent of the bailout money to endow new Banks of England.

This would challenge the centralisation of capital, offer an alternative to payday lenders and offer tangible investment to local businesses. Jon Cruddas, in his “earning and belonging” speech in February this year, told the story of how the Northern Counties Permanent Building Society, which was rooted in the north-east of England, survived four depressions, growing through each, but could not survive its demutualisation as Northern Rock in 1997. In maximising returns, the asset was lost and a trusted local institution was destroyed.

The overwhelming lesson of the German economy is that a balance of interests in corporate governance between capital and labour is as necessary as a more relational and localised banking system. Accountability is too important to be left to accountants. The only group with the expertise and an interest that could hold elites accountable and have an interest in the flourishing of the business is the workforce.

This is double-edged: on the one hand, capital must negotiate with labour and share information about firms and their environments. On the other hand, the workforce must commit itself to good standards of work and to the well-being of funders and consumers. The common good is a demanding category.

This offers a constructive alternative to the current government, which is still working with the same failed banking institutions, refuses to make a connection between apprenticeships and labour-market entry, and cannot conceive of a different form of corporate governance.

A state investment bank combined with a continued reliance on migration for skills, without regional investment institutions and vocational colleges that are aware of local realities, could stimulate short-term excitement but would not offer the framework for long-term relationships that are the basis for innovation and growth.

“One-nation” economics is pro-business and pro-worker, and seeks a balance of power in fostering innovation. A more competitive economy requires shared institutions that generate quality and value. Quality and equality are mutually supportive concepts.

That is what is at stake with “one-nation Labour”: the possibility of a life together that is different and better, of a politics of the common good that is equal to the challenges we face and offers partnership to people. Relationships precede action. We need to rediscover the need for each other.

The founder of German social democracy Eduard Bernstein was right: the movement is everything.

Labour for a Referendum?

It is a good list: Ronnie Campbell, Rosie Cooper, John Cryer, Ian Davidson, Jim Dowd, Natascha Engel, Frank Field, Roger Godsiff, Kate Hoey, Kelvin Hopkins, John McDonnell, Austin Mitchell, Grahame Morris, Graham Stringer, Keith Vaz. Interesting, intelligent, independent-minded politicians from all wings of the party.

Add in figures such as Éoin Clarke, Kevin Meagher, David Drew, Richard Cotton, Owen Jones and, in the chair, the redoubtable John Mills, who was the national agent for the No campaign in 1975. He has been Secretary of the Labour Euro-Safeguards Campaign ever since that year. He was also the largest donor to the Labour Party in the first quarter of this calendar year, giving more than twice as much as Unite.

Faced with all of that, I want to believe, I really do. But what if it went the wrong way, as it did in 1975? What chance would there be that those making the sober, factual case founded in opposition to the EU's neoliberalism and neoconservatism would be permitted any kind of hearing when the comedy characters who merely disliked Abroad, but who had no rational grounds for objecting in the slightest to the EU, made for so much more entertaining television?

And where would be the need, when this could all be achieved simply by primary legislation? Indeed, if not by that last means, then what would we be fighting for? What, in that case, would be the point of Parliament?

Concerned About The Precedent

On the site closest to the Labour Whips' Office, Kevin Meagher writes:

Putting aside the question of whether same sex marriage is a modest extension of equal rights for gay and lesbian couples or the handcart society will be pushed to hell in – and judged purely as an exercise in policy-making – this week has been a disaster.

The refrain that the measure was not in any party’s manifesto at the last election and didn’t even make it into the coalition’s programme for government is no less important given the frequency with which it’s cited as a grievance by opponents of the bill.

Neither, for that matter, was there a green paper to allow proper deliberation; just a rushed public consultation, which saw a significant majority of respondents strongly opposed to the idea.  And as it now stands, the legislation is lopsided with the failure to extend civil partnerships to heterosexual couples.

Moreover, the law of unintended consequences means most religious communities who opposed the encroachment of the state into their affairs are left with threadbare assurances they will be unaffected by the change. Case law will in due course ensure that they are.

The church hall test will see priests and vicars forced to defend a policy of letting heterosexual couples use their premises while barring gays and lesbians. Meanwhile the charitable status of religious organisations who do not readily accept this new definition of equality will be endlessly challenged. The culture war will rage long after this week passes.

But behind this inexorable fallout lies the basic failure to quantify the need for legislation. Why has same sex marriage become such an urgent cause? After all, the numbers of gay and lesbian couples entering into a civil partnership – which accords all the main legal benefits of marriage – has been in decline pretty much since the measure was first put on the statute book.

There were 15,437 civil partnerships in 2006, the first full year that the measure was in place. This dropped to 8,728 in 2007 – a 44% fall in the first year – and the last available figures for 2011 shows it falling still further to just 6,795 – a 56% drop in just five years.

Of course this could be because gay and lesbian couples are boycotting civil partnerships as they don’t feel the measure offers them true equality, but this is not a point campaigners have made.

Same sex marriage is not, in the vernacular, evidence-based policy-making.

Upholding the principle that gay and lesbian relationships are fully equal is a fair enough cause, but is the main purpose of our parliamentary process satisfying the frustrations of campaigners with the existing law, regardless of the scale of the grievance?

If same sex marriage is an issue of general public importance then surely it should be discussed openly during an election campaign, put in a manifesto, voted on and then enacted (assuming majority consent), with the weight of public acceptance put behind it?

None of this has happened and whatever side of this particular issue you come from, it is clear there is a vocal and passionate lobby which holds a diametrically opposite view. There is little public consensus and we are left with one side of public opinion legislating over the heads of another.

This is never an ideal situation, but is usually managed by those who are seeking change, of whatever kind, obtaining a clear electoral mandate to do so (as was the case, for instance, with Labour’s fox-hunting ban).

Indeed, with coalition government possibly becoming the norm, how can voters make sense of who to support when parties not only break their commitments (the Lib Dems and tuition fees springs to mind) but embark on significant legislative change which seems to materialise out of the ether?

The left should be particularly concerned about the precedent set by this week’s manoeuvrings.

What if the next Queen’s speech contains measures to dramatically erode workplace rights, or to curtail environmental protection, or to scrap the minimum wage, none of which are in the Conservative or Lib Dem manifestos?

In such a scenario it is worth bearing in mind that Labour frontbenchers would automatically reach for exactly the same accusation that opponents of the SSM bill did this week: “You have no mandate from the electorate.”

Innocent Face

It could never have been Lord McAlpine, you silly Sally.

It was a Cabinet Minister, which he never was. And it was someone so famous as to be identifiable even by institutionalised children, which he certainly never was.

We have always known who it obviously was not, a list to which almost the entire population of the world could be added.

But who was it?

Or has the Prime Minister of the day, who must have known, taken that secret to the grave?

Stark and Uncompromising

On one side is George Osborne. On the other side are Ed Balls and the IMF:

The International Monetary Fund is not usually known for racy language and dramatic press releases. When IMF chiefs come to national capitals, diplomacy is normally the order of the day.

So no one should be surprised that in London this week there was no public repeat of the IMF's previous comments that George Osborne's policies are "playing with fire". But even with more diplomatic language, the IMF's message was stark and uncompromising. And it echoed the warnings Labour has made over the past three years.

Having originally backed the chancellor's fiscal plans, the IMF has now declared that they are a "drag on growth" and risk permanent damage to our economy. It warned that Britain is "a long way from a strong and sustainable recovery", as confirmed by recent lacklustre growth figures that show we now have the slowest recovery for 100 years. And that is why the IMF followed through on what it has threatened to do for almost two years, by finally demanding "near-term support for the economy" with a £10bn boost to infrastructure investment.

In other words, against a backdrop of a flatlining economy and falling living standards, it called for a temporary rise in borrowing this year to kickstart the economy now and help to create jobs and growth for the future – just as Labour is urging right now as part of a more balanced plan that would get the deficit down in the medium term.

Of course there also need to be sensible spending cuts and tax rises to get the deficit down. But as this chancellor is finding to his cost, an unbalanced plan that chokes off the recovery and leads to rising long-term unemployment won't get the deficit down. This failure on growth and jobs is why the government is now set to borrow £245bn more than it planned – not to invest in creating jobs for the future, but simply to pay for the costs of its economic failure.

With thousands of construction workers out of work and interest rates at record lows, there is a growing consensus that investing now in improving our infrastructure – affordable housing, transport, school buildings – would give an immediate boost to the economy, encourage more private sector investment, and give us a long-term return as we strengthen our economy for the future.

This is what Labour would be doing right now – alongside other reforms, including a compulsory jobs guarantee for the long-term unemployed to get people off benefit and into paid work. We need a proper British investment bank to increase lending to businesses, radical reform of our banks, and a decarbonisation target set now for 2030 that would give energy companies the certainty they need to invest in Britain.

The IMF has set down a clear challenge. The question is how the chancellor will respond. But the signs are not encouraging. Osborne didn't stick around to listen to everything the IMF had to say at Wednesday's press conference in the Treasury. And his aides had already told the newspapers a fortnight ago that, whatever the IMF said, he would ignore it and plough on regardless.

After nearly three years of flatlining, the message from ministers is that any growth is better than no growth at all. Of course that's true. But slow growth is nowhere near good enough. It won't make up the ground we have lost over the past few years as other countries have raced ahead.

Nor will sluggish growth get long-term unemployment down, boost living standards, recoup lost business investment or generate the tax revenues we need to reduce the deficit. That is why the IMF said that if we do continue bumping along the bottom, we risk doing permanent damage to the economy.

Faced by a warning that a strong and sustained recovery is far from secure and that the risks are to the downside, a sensible and economically literate chancellor would heed the IMF's advice. Instead I fear that Osborne will once again put his own political pride before the national economic interest. If he does, it will fall to the next Labour government to pick up the pieces.

Progress

Lord Adonis reviews Progressive Capitalism: How to Achieve Economic Growth, Liberty and Social Justice, by Lord Sainsbury:

This book is equally important for what it says and for who is saying it. The argument that growth, liberty and social justice require a fundamental reform of capitalism is rapidly moving from the left to the mainstream; and nothing symbolises this more than that David Sainsbury, the epitome of the progressive mainstream since his days in the vanguard of David Owen’s SDP in the 1980s, should be making it.

It is a powerful and cogent critique. Sainsbury was an effective science minister under Tony Blair who greatly increased state support for science. However, he writes: “It was only after I left government . . . that I began to question fundamentally the neoliberal political economy which had dominated governments in the western world for the last 35 years.”

Partly this was because of the 2008 crash and a growing conviction that competitiveness required a “race to the top” – not neo - liberalism’s “race to the bottom” – with state support for employment, innovation and skills. But there was also a telling personal dimension: the private equity takeover bid for his family firm, Sainsbury’s, in the summer of 2007.

“There was not the slightest pretence of trying to improve the performance of the company,” he claims. The bidders proposed “to sell off all the properties and replace them with massive debts. Then they would put the company back on the market . . . and walk away with £1bn of profit.”

The City was wildly keen, salivating at the £100m in fees the investment banks stood to earn: “a perfect example of wealth appropriation as opposed to wealth creation”.

The policy prospectus set out in the second half of the book is a must-read for anyone seeking to make sense of that new catchphrase “active industrial policy”.

Sainsbury recommends far-reaching reform of equity markets to foster the creation and expansion of companies rather than their destruction and foreign takeover; a “national system of innovation” with the state as a key player; and a revolution in technical and vocational education that emulates German strength in these areas, although he warns against copying Germany glibly.

On equity markets, he favours a big cut in the fees paid to investment managers and a new “Shareholders’ Advisory Board” to promote “an understanding of the fundamental value of the companies in which [the City] invest[s]” rather than their short-term trading value.

Investment managers should also get far more involved in the governance of the companies they own, including the appointment of directors and holding them to account, and constrain the boardroom pay explosion which shows little sign of abating. A wildly overpaid City breeds a wildly overpaid corporate sector.

Sainsbury is especially bold on takeovers. He proposes higher “hurdles” in shareholder support required from within the target company, and restrictions on those who can vote to those who have held shares in the target company for “a certain number of years”. This goes way beyond the 2012 Kay review of equity markets and long-term decision-making.

On innovation, Sainsbury supports the coalition’s establishment of Catapult Centres – national technology and innovation hubs in key industrial sectors, starting with highvalue manufacturing – but he favours more support for new technologies.

Government departments should have “embedded units” to promote technology and innovation on a strategic long-term basis; and regional development agencies – abolished by the coalition in 2010 – should be restored “in parts of the country which need them”.

A dramatic increase in the supply of technicians, especially with engineering skills, is Sainsbury’s goal for a revamped education and training system. Kenneth Baker’s new breed of university technical colleges for 14- to-19-year-olds should be expanded and local industry integrated in the management of further education.

Some would go further and seek to introduce an English equivalent of Germany’s “dual system”, whereby employers and local authorities take joint responsibility for a system of mass apprenticeships with highquality vocational training alongside.

But Sainsbury does not think this feasible because of the weakness of Britain’s chambers of commerce, trade associations and trade unions in comparison with Germany.

Sainsbury would pioneer reform through an “enabling state”, rather than through a return to “command and control”. But an enabling state is not a smaller state. “A first task of progressive politicians is to persuade people of the importance of competent and active government, standing above sectional interests,” he writes.

This, conceptually, is a return to mainstream social democracy after its partial abandonment in recent decades. It cannot be achieved without a transformation in the capabilities of government, including a new national economic council and a much more purposeful civil service.

Sainsbury also puts in a heartfelt personal plea, from a public-spirited party donor caught up in party funding controversies, for state funding of parties so that governments of both parties are better able “to stand up to the financial power of interest groups”, be they trade unions or investment managers and bankers.

A decade ago, this prospectus would have seen its author branded “Red Sainsbury”. Now it is pretty sensible and mainstream. A new centre ground is being forged.

Trust De Gaulle

Scott McConnell writes: 

Arrived in Paris Tuesday with few intentions beyond watching some tennis (French Open qualifying, the inexpensive and crowd-free formula for spectating a high level of the sport), eating well, and hanging out with my wife after her several hectic weeks of preparing our daughter’s wedding.

But it was soon clear that the European civilizational crisis (cf. Death of the West) while often easy to ignore, is very much with us. In a suburb of Stockholm, some immigrant youths have fought the police four successive nights (“youths acting youthy,” summarized Steve Sailer, sardonically), while in London yesterday two African Islamists hacked a soldier to death with a machete. In Paris on Tuesday afternoon a 78-year-old far-right activist and historian, Dominique Venner, entered the sanctuary at Notre Dame, deposited a suicide note at the altar, and shot himself in the mouth.

Venner was a serious figure in France’s extrême-droite, a phrase with different and far richer connotations than “extreme-right” in America. A major current of French intellectuals opposed the Revolution, quite understandably, and kept at it, rhetorically, throughout the 19th century. A French Right standing for traditional authority, order, aristocracy, the nation (and skeptical about fraternity, equality, and the various French republics) has been a constant and serious force, able sometimes to speak for nearly half the country.

The far right hasn’t been violent since the early sixties—when right-wing officers of the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète tried to spark a coup against De Gaulle for letting go of Algeria—but as a current in French political life, it is always there. Today its main concern is immigration, particularly Muslim immigration, and in its current political incarnation, the Front National, led by Marine Le Pen, has jettisoned the party’s submerged but never absent anti-Semitism for a militant pro-Zionist and anti-Muslim line.

Le Pen garnered 18 percent of the vote in last year’s presidential election, and the FN is a fairly serious minor party, receiving 13 percent of the first-round votes in the legislative elections and holding quite a few local offices. Hostility to immigration is a “populist” cause, and many of the FN’s voters used to vote communist; nevertheless there is an aristocratic and intellectual aura to the far right dating to the Revolution, and not entirely absent from today’s FN. It is this of which Dominique Venner was a part.

The goals of the suicide are easy enough to imagine. Part is surely vanity—Venner’s blog, I’m sure, has received more attention in the past two days than its entire previous existence, and every intellectual wants to be read. He was old and recently diagnosed with a grave unspecified illness. His concrete goal was to pull together two disparate groups of disaffected conservatives, the opponents of gay marriage (as in the U.S. a sizeable, somewhat shell-shocked minority) and the opponents of immigration. In his suicide note he tries to connect the two causes:

I protest against poisons of the soul and the desires of invasive individuals to destroy the anchors of our identity, including the family, the intimate basis of our multi-millennial civilization. While I defend the identity of all peoples in their homes, I also rebel against the crime of the replacement of our people.

In any case, no one in Paris is treating Venner as some kind of lone nut. He has fought for his beliefs, long after they were no longer fashionable. In 1954, you could not find a single major French politician supporting Algerian independence, and De Gaulle had to maneuver against the entire political system to bring France to accept it. Venner was one of several who never would, who believed that Algeria was eternally part of France and was willing to fight for it, even so far as plotting against his head of state.

Like many high-ranking French officers, he plotted and lost and spent time in prison. Upon release he then carved out a career as an activist theoretician and, later in life, as a serious historian. Marine Le Pen, the third ranking French presidential candidate, honored him after his death.

I am not entirely without sympathy—there is part of the French Right which has a certain  appeal. But it has a knack for making very bad choices at critical moments, for being unable to recognize when to fight, when to retreat to more sensible ground.

Charles De Gaulle, in my view probably the  greatest man of the 20th century, was able to incarnate much of the right’s virtues and sensibilities, but with a much sounder sense of  blending these virtues into the politics of a modern democratic republic. De Gaulle, often accused of being a fascist (in many cases ignorantly, by Americans) opposed Hitler in 1940 and understood that Algerian independence was inevitable in 1958. (I would be curious if Venner ever reflected upon what the effect of keeping Algeria would have been on the current demography of France.)

I too would oppose what Venner called “the replacement of our people,” but I suspect the reality is something different. Throughout Paris you can see groups of French lycéeans, flirting, smoking cigarettes, having their coffee in their cafes, huddling on their motorbikes. They now come in all colors. To some extent then, the demographic of old France is not being replaced so much as supplemented. It’s of course a question of balance and of numbers.

I would trust De Gaulle to chart the right course, but sadly there is little evidence he has any true heirs in France’s political class.

Down, But Not Out, In London And Paris

Murder is sinful in Islam. There is a very long and ongoing tradition of Muslims serving in the British Armed Forces. Suicide is sinful in Catholicism. A high proportion of Catholic traditionalists is of what used to be called Not The Marrying Kind. Make of those facts what you will. But they are the facts, whatever we make of them.

The French Far Right has always been very split between the reactionary Catholics (who see themselves as simply de Tradition, but who in fact are not), and the Odinists and the like, such as Dominique Venner. Perhaps this is the point at which they can no longer stand each other, when one side raises a man to the status of a hero and a martyr for having committed suicide on the High Altar of Notre Dame? All sorts of things would then follow. It has been a long time coming.

There Cannot Be A British Dominique Venner

Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons are a pair of silly stooges, while the EDL is just a bunch of thugs. Why are there no Far Right intellectuals in Britain? Is that a ridiculous question? Not at all.

There are Front National intellectuals in France, one of whom has just gone out with a bang. There are intellectuals in the Austrian Third Lager. There are intellectuals on the Far Right in Italy and in the Iberian world. But you will search the British scene in vain for The Thinking Man’s Fascist, his effusions worthy or even capable of serious engagement.

Neo-Paganism never really took off even in Nazi Germany; attempts to redefine culture in its terms, with the Winter Solstice replacing Christmas and what have you, were spectacularly unsuccessful. Alain de Benoist or Dominique Venner would have no more success in Britain.

Here, the whole thing would stand even less of a chance than it did in Germany. We have a more highly developed sense of the absurd, which is good, and a tendency to see all manifestations of folk-culture in those terms, which is very bad, since we were rich in it to the point of extravagance at least until the Reformation.

We do have a Liberal Protestant movement such as, in its rootlessness and lack of specific doctrinal content, proved such easy prey to the Nazis. But ours, by something not less than a miracle, instead maintained close ties to the opposition that was figures such as Barth, perhaps because it saw in neo-orthodoxy its own fondness for retaining at least the vocabulary of historic formulations, however dangerously that vocabulary might be redefined.

However, the heresy of intégrisme, so fundamental to the Fascism of the Latin world, is almost unknown to any of our Catholic subcultures. I doubt that we had any more before Vatican II than we have now, although intégrisme is so pernicious precisely because it looks like, and very forcefully believes itself to be, traditional Catholicism.

Whereas the intégriste Fascist in that tendency’s French heartland can present himself, accurately or otherwise, as the true heir of the legitimate state overthrown in 1789 and of the very long-lasting tradition of mass resistance to that overthrow, no one here can really say that, accurately or otherwise, about 1688, and extremely few would wish to.

Much more perniciously, since they are vastly more numerous, we do have people who resemble those Bavarian Catholics who were active in the early Nazi Party in Munich. Looking back to Döllinger, they defined themselves as Catholics in the sense of belonging to a community of faith across the world and throughout the ages rather than in terms of perfect submission to the Petrine See as that See requires.

They strongly affirmed the purported autonomy of the German Church, including the control of Her affairs by the activist laity on the basis of their financial contributions (in Germany, the church tax system) and by means of quasi-parliamentary institutions. Does any of this sound familiar?

Those of such mind were key to the emergence of Nazism until it was kicked out of Bavaria following the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch. After that, it became a movement and a party with its base in staunchly Protestant areas of Germany and within the fiercely anticlerical Third Lager in Austria.

This country retains a monarchy, commanding the very intense loyalty of the lower middle class that is any Fascist movement’s base, as it is certainly the BNP’s and the EDL’s. Fascists do not like monarchies, and in fact the BNP wishes to abolish Britain’s. But they draw equally on the absolutism of the bourgeois republic created paradigmatically in France, and on the princely absolutism developed out of pre-Revolutionary sources, especially Jean Bodin, in reaction against the Revolution and its many imitations.

They combine and focus them both in a Leader figure who is neither a prince, nor drawn from and answerable to republican institutions (in the broader sense of a res publica) such as a strong Parliament. He characteristically bypasses such institutions by means of the referendum. And he performs the ceremonial functions that would have been performed by the abolished monarchy or local nobility, squirarchy or whatever.

Had there still been all those kings, princes, grand dukes and the rest doing their stuff in their apparently funny uniforms across German-speaking Europe or the Italian Peninsula, then there would have been no gap for Hitler or Mussolini to fill. There is no such gap in Britain.

As with the monarchy, so with the War. Griffin had a photograph of Churchill next to him on his Party Election Broadcast. He is welcome to Churchill, but that is another story. Ridiculously, a party drawn from this country’s tiny little world of Hitler-loving weirdoes and misfits has to electioneer by posing as the heir of the struggle of those whom Hitler blockaded and Blitzed.

Griffin cannot say, even were he capable of doing so, that they should never have been put in that position, nor bemoan the collapse of morality during the War, since his supporters warmly endorse that collapse and its consequences throughout (yes, throughout) the post-War period.

Nor can Griffin bemoan, even if he were capable of doing so, the loss of British power in the world, or the loosening of ties with former Empire countries, since the West Indians, in particular, came here on British passports from countries most of which retain the Queen as Head of State to this day and several of which remain British by choice.

Whereas the Republic of South Africa was proclaimed as an act of anti-British revenge, while its Rhodesian satrapy was born in treason against the Queen. Just as there is no equivalent of the pro-Vichy tradition on which a BNP or EDL intellectual might draw, so there is no equivalent of the pro-OAS tradition, either. The pieds-noirs wanted to stay French. Ian Smith wanted to stop being British.

All in all, it is no wonder that there is no British publication comparable to Éléments. Never mind to Rivarol. There is no British Dominique Venner. Mercifully, there cannot be.

The Common Sense Path

Evidently the Voice of Middle Britain, the Morning Star editorialises:

A government guided by common sense would respond to news that publicly owned Royal Mail has increased profits to £403 million by scrapping plans to flog off the service. Not so the conservative coalition, which remains determined to sell it to the highest bidder come what may. The fact that Royal Mail has turned a healthy profit - cash that goes straight into the state's coffers - is down in no small part to the increasing workloads and "rationalisation" foisted on postal workers. 

They, and all of us through higher stamp prices, have picked up the tab for the EU's enforced market. The bloc's apparatchiks justify this by claiming it will drive innovation in the "electronic age." What it means in practice is private investors cherry-picking the juiciest business and ignoring the expensive bits. Royal Mail - and its shrinking, hard-pressed workforce - does the heavy lifting by actually delivering the privateers' letters and maintaining the costly universal service.

The bluster and hoo-hah from Tories over the European Union in recent weeks cannot mask their shared belief in handing to City slickers everything that moves, no matter the logic. That agenda is precisely the big business-allied European Commission's view, as enshrined in a raft of directives enforcing competition and encouraging privatisation. Isn't it funny that not a peep of protest emerges from the Conservatives about this undemocratic imposition drawn up behind closed doors by a small cabal? 

As for EU fanboy Nick Clegg, he agrees with Cameron. Not since the nationalisation of banking debts to bail out the City, while leaving profits in private hands, has there been a more blatant example of the ideological bankruptcy of the snake oil salesmen who hold the reins of power nationally and internationally. The shysters behind this flaky deal reckon they'll raise around £3 billion by selling Royal Mail. At the current rate of profit that's about the same as holding on to it for seven years. We'll get something out of it, of course - the taxpayer will be left holding the pensions liabilities. Thanks a bunch.

Owners chasing short-term profits in water, gas, electricity and rail privatisation, among other sectors, have created a financial disaster for ordinary people while funding the extravagant lifestyles of a gilded few in the City. The state is being driven to bankruptcy while privateers have stockpiled £750 billion in cash. 

Despite relentless right-wing propaganda the public mood has shifted. People are sick of this rip-off. Today trade unions spoke with one voice to reject the quick-buck mentality that drives plans to flog off our postal service. From tomorrow workers on the ground will add their voice to the debate as CWU ballots its members on proposals to boycott private mail firms' deliveries and oppose privatisation. 

Labour now has an opportunity to show its mettle by drawing a line in the sand on post, and seeking the return to public ownership of other key parts of the economy. That would mean rejecting the outright lie that private equals efficient, public equals inefficient. It means being bold and cocking a snook at the greedy financier types and their EU bedfellows feathering their nests at the taxpayers' expense. Cut them out of the loop and not only do our coffers get a boost, but we regain control over our common resources.

Do that and we have the strategic levers to generate an economic revival. The common-sense path really couldn't be clearer.

Founded On The Common Interest

Tom Gill writes:

French President Francois Hollande wants us to believe that further European integration would fix the crisis. This is a bad strategy, for there’s no social dimension to Europe, just neo-liberalism. In a translation from the original [without the accents, for some reason; but never mind], Eric and Guillaume Etievant Coquerel of the Left Party say France must stand up to Germany to change the future direction of the Old Continent. 

Francois Hollande has revived the old idea of ​​an economic government of the euro area, spearheading political union. This government “would meet every month around a real president appointed for a long period” The strategy of the president is clear: while the French people suffer from his neoliberal policies, he tries to compensate by assigning to more European integration the role of miracle cure. This process is not new. During the 1980s, Jacques Delors explained that Europe had to become political, in order to then become social. The same process occurred during the debates on the Maastricht Treaty: a single currency would accelerate the construction of a political Europe, which would then, finally, become social.

The whole history of European integration demonstrates the ineffectiveness of this method. The social objective is in a state of nothingness, while European integration progresses at the growing expense of popular sovereignty and for the benefit of the financial system and the markets. The failure of the social democratic strategy is clear. This strategy can be summarized as follows: accelerating the construction of the container and then establish a relationship of forces able to change the content. We see the result: it is social democracy that has changed, poisoned by neo-liberalism, and now interchangeable with the parties of the European right.

Hollande continues this apparently schizophrenic strategy of accumulating neo-liberal reforms while claiming to build a social Europe. And he is well acquainted with neo-liberal reforms. It is in fact the only policy area in which he is effective. He even proudly affirms his superiority over the Right in terms of competitiveness, the reduction of public spending and the reform of the labour market. If the mobilisation and political balance of power on the Left had not prevented it, Francois Hollande would be seeking to apply in year 2 of his Presidency the neoliberal policies that have already plunged the country into recession by the end of his first year at the Elysee.

So what remains of his social aspiration depends entirely on Europe. This is probably the worst aspect of his plan, because Angela Merkel will no doubt jump at the opportunity to accelerate political union and put in place a eurozone President. This would bring, in the wake of Maastricht, a new disaster. The principle is in fact the same: starting from a just demand – an international currency strong enough to offset the dollar and thus US power – France accepted  German terms for the single currency. This was to create an overvalued euro, too strong for the economies of most other European countries, and without the social and fiscal harmonisation to limit its effects. The system is, furthermore, locked in by the guardian of the monetarist temple: the European Central Bank, independent of political power, but not the financial system.

The results have been tragic: the European economies unable to cope with the crisis of 2008 have been plunged into recession and financial instability. The dominance of the United States remains unchanged. And one more step is to be taken in this direction with the transatlantic market. It will soon be in place, and establish the US rule of law, after a process of fifteen years of obscure negotiations between the European Commission and the U.S. Department of Commerce.

If Germany agrees to strengthen political governance in Europe, we will face an increased transfer of sovereignty, concentrating more power in Brussels and Frankfurt at the service of neo-liberal orthodoxy. Merkel offers, for example, plans to elect the President of the European Commission by universal suffrage, who would enjoy an incomparable power without, however, actually having to be accountable to 560 million European voters and national parliaments, condemned to a folkloric role.

This Orwellian vision of democracy will not lead to an upwards harmonisation in standards. Just to hear a few seconds of any ectoplasmic neo-liberal speech by Herman Van Rompuy, President of the European Council, and José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, and Merkel herself, is enough to be convinced of this.

If Hollande really wanted that tide that lifts all boats, he would make radically different choices. To transform the construction of Europe, he must first be convinced of the need for it to be founded on the common interest. And that Europe is not an end in itself, but a means to pursue human progress. Once this axiom is asserted, the fear of the crisis is swept away, and the brutal solutions to the crisis too.

Very Safe Now

Ariel Zirulnik writes:

In a home in a Shiite neighborhood in southern Beirut, images of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah share mantel and wall space with the Virgin Mary. The face of the revered Shiite militant leader appears on posters, a calendar, and in several photographs nestled amid those of Christian homeowner Randa Gholam's family members. Mr. Nasrallah is, Ms. Gholam asserts amid a string of superlatives, “a gift from God.”

Lebanon’s sectarian divides are legendary, and the residents of the historically Christian neighborhood of Harat Hreik, now a Hezbollah stronghold, remember well the civil war that set Beirut on fire. They were literally caught in the middle of some of the most vicious fighting, with factions firing shots off at one another from either side of their apartment buildings.

But in the intervening years, as Hezbollah cemented its control over the suburb of Dahiyeh, which includes Harat Hreik, the militant group has been an unexpected source of stability and even protection for the few remaining Christian families. Just a few blocks away from Nasrallah’s compound is St. Joseph’s Church, a vibrant church that Maronite Christians from across Beirut flock to every Sunday. “I feel honored to be here. They are honest. They are not extremists. It’s not like everyone describes,” Gholam says. “I can speak on behalf of all my Christian friends. They would say the same thing.”

The Christians living in Harat Hreik are a bit of an anomaly, to be sure. Christians represent a sizable population in Lebanon, though no census has been held in decades. And while Beirut’s neighborhoods are gradually becoming more integrated, they still divide largely along religious lines. The fragile peace is under deep strain as regional tensions swirl because of the conflict next door in Syria.

“In Hezbollah's early days, its creed was virulent,” and in the past, it may have been responsible for fanning some of those flames. But as Hezbollah gained power and joined the political system, that changed, says Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Endowment Middle East Center. “It doesn’t carry with it an anti-Christian strain anymore,” he says. “That’s almost entirely gone. It’s not in their rhetoric, it’s not in their creed.”

Recently, when the Shiite holiday of Ashura was approaching, the streets were choked with residents shopping and passing out sweets and blanketed with black banners commemorating the martyrdom of Hussein Ali. But Christians live openly here, and they describe Hezbollah as a tolerant group that has steadfastly supported their presence, even sending Christmas cards to Christian neighbors like Gholam. 

Gholam, who throws a party every year in honor of Nasrallah’s birthday and places a photo of him in her Christmas tree, is certainly an anomaly. But other Christian families also speak approvingly of their life under Hezbollah, especially when compared to its predecessor, Amal, which they say forced many Christian residents to sell their homes. In contrast, Hezbollah extended financial support to the Christian families when Dahiyeh needed rebuilding after the civil war and the 2006 war with Israel. 

Rony Khoury, a Maronite Christian who was born in Harat Hreik and still lives in the same apartment, says he feels comfortable drinking alcohol on his front porch, in full view of members of Hezbollah, and his wife feels no pressure to don a head scarf or follow other rules governing Muslim women’s attire. They have property in a predominantly Christian area of Beirut, but have no desire to move. “After Hezbollah came, we didn’t have any worries,” Mr. Khoury says, citing safe streets. “The security is No. 1 in the world. I leave my car open, I forget something outside…. It's very safe now, under Hezbollah.”

Only between 10 and 20 of the pre-civil war Christian families remain, out of the thousands who lived there before the fighting. While the numbers are low, Khoury insists that many would come back, if only they could afford it. But property values have climbed, and many of those who left can’t afford to move back. Of course, there are calculations behind Hezbollah's magnanimity. Hezbollah’s political alliance with the Lebanese Christian political party, the Free Patriotic Movement, is important to the group, and it “bends over backward to keep those relations comfortable,” Mr. Salem says.

It might also be a way to one-up Sunnis in Lebanon, with whom Shiites are constantly vying for dominance. “They pride themselves on saying they’re more tolerant, more open than Sunnis. In Lebanon, it’s a point of pride,” Salem says. Both Khoury and Gholam, as well as neighborhood Shiites who dropped by their homes, said there are far more issues with Sunnis. “Shiite extremists like Hezbollah, they come to our church” as a show of support, says Khoury. “But Sunni extremists, like Salafis, they kill me, they kill you.”

Ultimately, it is Hezbollah’s foreign backers dictating the mood in Harat Hreik. If it became politically expedient for Hezbollah to abandon its acceptance of Christian neighbors, Hezbollah would be compelled to make life difficult for them. “For Iran and Syria, their main backers, Hezbollah is mainly a strategic force against Israel. That’s the point – not creating an Islamic state or fighting a sectarian war,” Salem says. “Hezbollah is a very top-down organization. If Iran decrees something else, something else will happen.”

But that’s not something Gholam can fathom. “I will never even think about Hezbollah giving anyone a hard time. I can’t even think about answering that question,” she says.

The Left vs. The Liberal Media

In The American Conservative, Neil Clark writes:

It all started in July 2001 when two men, concerned about bias in the corporate news media in the UK, began to send out “media alerts” to a small number of family and friends. Twelve years on and Media Lens—the brainchild of writer David Edwards, a former manager in sales and marketing, and David Cromwell, a physicist by background—has established itself as the UK’s media watchdog. There’s no doubting the impact they have made. “Without their meticulous and humane analysis, the full gravity of the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan might have been consigned to bad journalism’s first draft of bad history,” is the verdict of veteran reporter and filmmaker John Pilger.

It’s been an eventful twelve years. In addition to the “debacles” of Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve had the (ongoing) menacing of Iran on account of an unproven nuclear-weapons program and Israeli military assaults on Lebanon in 2006 and on Gaza in 2008 and again in 2012. Add in the global financial crash of 2008, and there’s been plenty to keep the two Davids occupied.

David Cromwell’s new book, Why Are We The Good Guys?, discusses these events and the work that he and Edwards have done to counter the “elite-friendly value assumptions and judgements” that characterize their coverage in Britain. Although he is clearly a man of the left—his working-class childhood was an “interesting mix of Catholic and Communist” influences—Cromwell’s not one to be deceived by labels, an important skill to possess in an age when wars are sold as “humanitarian interventions” to gain support from liberals.

Media Lens has been outspoken, when the need arises, in its critique of so-called liberal-left media. Many on the British center-left give the BBC a free pass because they have swallowed the line that the organization is somehow “left-wing.” Yet Cromwell and Edwards have shown that when it comes to propagandizing for illegal wars and peddling establishment views, the BBC has at least as bad a record as commercial news networks.

When I caught up with David to talk to him about his new book, the BBC was in the middle of what has been described by some as the biggest crisis in its 90-year history: the resignation of its Director-General and other bigwigs after the fallout from a “Newsnight” program on child abuse. But while heads rolled over the state-owned broadcaster getting allegations wrong on just one program, Cromwell points out that the BBC was never held accountable for the role it played in the lead up to the Iraq War.

“There was no such pressure for senior BBC staff to go over the broadcaster’s systemic failure to challenge US-UK propaganda over Iraq’s non-existent WMD. This media failure paved the way towards war in Iraq and the subsequent brutal and bloody occupation. Instead of responsible public-service journalism, BBC News provides a reliable conduit for government propaganda, most notably the state’s supposedly benign intentions in foreign wars and international relations. That is the daily news diet we are all spoon-fed.”

No such presumption of good faith applies when journalists discuss the actions of countries that don’t toe the Washington line. “It is, of course, fine for journalists in the West to point to the crimes of official enemies and to mock them for their transparent propaganda efforts. Thus, the BBC’s Emily Maitlis was able to introduce the flagship television program ‘Newsnight’ with a touch of sardonic wit: ‘Hello, good evening. The Russians are calling it a “peace enforcement operation.” It’s the kind of Newspeak that would make George Orwell proud.’

“Maitlis was referring to the invasion of Russian forces into the Georgian province of South Ossetia in August 2008. By contrast, imagine a BBC presenter referring skeptically to the government’s claim of a ‘peace enforcement operation’ for the West’s invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya and describing such language as ‘the kind of newspeak that would make George Orwell proud.’ It just would not happen.”

I ask Cromwell how he would respond to those who say that Media Lens should devote all its energies on attacking neocon über-hawks rather than criticizing the liberal media, which might agree with the group’s standpoints, say, 70 percent of the time. “Media Lens has indeed spent more time analyzing the liberal media than right-wing outlets. Why? Because the liberal media is often regarded as the outlets where the most progressive and the most challenging views can be seen and heard. If you like, it’s one end of the acceptable spectrum of news and views. But if even here there are severe limits on permissible challenges to state-corporate power, what does that say about society generally? It’s like a litmus test for dissent.”

Cromwell believes that the role of the media in promoting the doctrine of “liberal interventionism” has been absolutely crucial. “If the public was better informed, and not so often misled by those in power, there would likely be a stronger rein on the governing elite. But it’s not happening. A major reason for this is that the corporate media acts as an echo chamber and amplifier of government propaganda. Even when challenged, senior journalists say that their role is to report what those in power say and do—even what they ‘think.’

“For example, when the BBC’s Nick Robinson was the ITN political editor, he wrote of the war in Iraq:

In the run-up to the conflict, I and many of my colleagues, were bombarded with complaints that we were acting as mouthpieces for Mr Blair. Why, the complainants demanded to know, did we report without question his warning that Saddam was a threat? Hadn’t we read what Scott Ritter had said or Hans Blix? I always replied in the same way. It was my job to report what those in power were doing or thinking… . That is all someone in my sort of job can do.

“Robinson performs the same compliant role today as political editor for the BBC,” Cromwell says.

In the ’90s we saw an informal alliance formed between neoconservatives and progressives united behind their support for “liberal intervention.” I ask Cromwell if he thinks that a similar alliance can be formed between the antiwar left and the antiwar right. “I’d be wary of an overt alliance with anyone, right-wing or otherwise, who espouses other views that I might find distasteful. But certainly traditional conservatives should be—and often are—vehemently opposed to what goes by the benign-sounding term ‘neo-liberalism,’ which I unpack in the book.”

One of the most riveting chapters in Cromwell’s book is called “Beyond Indifference,” in which he talks about his philosophical influences. He concludes—rather like Aldous Huxley—that if we do want to “free ourselves” and live better lives, it all starts with undertaking “small acts of kindness for others.” And in contrast, he writes,

Violence feeds on violence, as wise people have known for thousands of years. For example, if brutal state repression is met by violence from some elements of society, it provides an excuse for state forces to ramp up fire-power and crush dissent with even more brutal and widespread violence. The current state of Permanent War can only be ended by people coming together peacefully to overcome state power.

Cromwell certainly thinks that in challenging elite state propaganda we’re in a better position now than we were when Media Lens began in 2001. “One positive thing I’ve noticed is that more people are challenging the media, at least judging by the messages posted on our board and Facebook page, the emails we get and the tweets we receive. Often, even before we’ve worked up a media alert, we’ve been beaten to it by our readers—although, to be fair to ourselves, we do typically wait a few days or longer to see how an event is being played out in the media. Ideally, I would hope that in five years’ time there would be less need for Media Lens to be on the internet ‘haranguing’ and ‘vilifying’ journalists, as skeptics and opponents sometimes say! And surely by ten years from now I can be happily retired and pottering about in a garden shed. Preferably my own and not some random neighbor’s.”