David Lindsay

Nothing Useful To Contribute

2012-02-03T01:07:00.004Z

As is evident from this:

Good old David Miliband. He looks like a cute little chimp. With his chimpy little face. He doesn’t really have the aura of a great statesman. And yet many in the Labour Party see him as the man they should have elected leader. The better one. The great ‘lost leader’. The carrier of the Blairite torch. So his intervention in the debate regarding the future direction of the Labour Party was always going to matter.

And it does, in so far as what he has to say will generate lots of interest. It is a shame that his politics are so frightfully tedious, and his policy prescriptions more Blairite than Blair himself. David is supposed to be an intellectual titan. I’ve always found him deeply unimpressive.

His rather long essay on the future of the Labour Party has just appeared on the New Statesman website, and you can read it here. In between the banalities and policy-wonk speak you can just about work out what he is saying, but usefully the NS has also run a summary article that you can read here. I’m guessing that they knew some of us would find the original piece rather trying.

I’ll sum up the actual arguments beneath the fluff and pseudo-profound platitudes and deal with each in turn:

1. He warns against falling into the trap of “Reassurance Labour”, a term he has just invented. He proposes instead ‘restless rethinking’. By “Reassurance Labour” he means the current leadership moving slightly leftwards on a few questions, to put it bluntly. It’s a very curious inversion of language by the former foreign secretary. It is when Labour move left that they are stepping out of their comfort zone, not the other way around. They are taking on the Tory media who will try and tear lumps off them. They are challenging the right-wing ideas of many of the electorate. The cop-out is in hugging the Tories close and getting an easy ride in the papers. It is the great deceit of the Labour right that they are the radicals, they are the ones challenging the consensus and the vested interests with ‘new’ ideas. The reverse is true. Accommodating to ‘reality’ is an idea as old as the Labour Party. Indeed it is David Miliband who is seeking reassurance in the long-dead mantras of New Labour.

2. He wants to move on from Labour’s focus on the state as the main agent of activity. Again this seems well-meaning and mushy but we need to examine what he is really saying. Firstly, I don’t detect any mass hostility amongst the British people to the state delivering public services. It is a myth propagated by the Tories and their allies in New Labour to justify introducing the market into as many areas of public life as possible. Secondly, if not the state, what? What is the alternative? Miliband is never honest to say what he really means: the market. That is the alternative to state provision. There is no mythical lovely third way. It is a choice.

3. He believes that Labour should focus on decentralising power, not reducing inequality. What a surprise. Replace something concrete, i.e. taxation of the well-off and the redistribution of the proceeds, with something completely woolly, ‘decentralizing’ power. It really doesn’t mean anything. Whenever New Labour devolved powers (and it was only very occasionally) it was entirely on their terms. Blair and Miliband would have been terrified of any alternative centres of political power emerging to their own and were in fact ruthless centralizers, whether in national politics or the Labour Party itself. It was always just hollow rhetoric. ‘Localization’ and ‘decentralization’ are just glib buzzwords, and are concepts that are occasionally useful if central government wants to pass the buck.

4. Growth is as important, if not more so, than redistribution. Pure New Labour orthodoxy, and its highly amusing that David tries to present this as radical ‘new thinking’. Of course economic growth is important but how it is distributed is more important. The British economy could contract significantly and we would still have enough resources to build a decent society where no one went hungry or suffered abject poverty. It is a political choice. And it is politically and electorally expedient to not mention that choice. Once again David Miliband is dressing up base political calculation as a matter of high principle. It is nauseating. Why can’t he just be honest? Or does he really believe it?

5. Labour Party should be ‘modernised’. I can only presume this was added to the essay to tick a box. I’m sure this sounds cynical but by ‘modernise’ Miliband simply means dilute the politics of the party further. If open primaries, which I presume is what he is getting at, ended up selecting leftwing candidates, then he would want that particular innovation knocked on the head quickly. But then maybe I’m being cynical. If the French Socialist primaries for the presidential election have inspired greater engagement it is for two reasons, firstly that the left is stronger (you know David, those dinosaurs that believe in the state acting to ameliorate the worst excesses of the free market) and secondly because the candidates standing have some different ideas from each other, rather than Miliband’s usual preference for a choice consisting of multiple shades of Blairite beige. Interestingly, right now he is in favour of reducing role of ordinary trade union members in Labour’s decision making process. I presume when he says opening up the process he doesn’t have the organised working class in mind. Daily Mail readers are so much more worthy of our attention, aren’t they……….

6. The record of Labour between 1997 and 2010 needs to be defended passionately. You have to admire the man really. He is a true believer, unconcerned by reality or the fact that his shitty politics are the reason he lost the leadership contest. He has stuck to his guns in a way that would make the Reverend Ian Paisley proud. He clearly thinks that he has nothing to apologise for. Of course when he says that the reputation of the New Labour years needs to be salvaged, what he means is his own reputation. Things did improve in some respects, but Iraq, the growth of private sector involvement in public services, the outrageous clampdown on civil liberties and the role the party played in doing nothing to prevent the financial crisis heavily outweigh the positive things that the Labour Party achieved during those years. If David Miliband can’t see that then he should retire from politics.

7. The policy changes introduced after Blair won in 1994 were actually more authentically ‘Labour’ than what preceded them. This is an absolute belter. I’ll quote the great man’s essay directly:

“After 1994, we did not say that it was a great pity we had to compromise our principles to meet the electorate halfway; we said that it was vital to reform the statement of our principles to reflect what we believed. The same was true in a range of policy areas, including health, education and crime. We changed our policy better to fulfil our values, not abandon them.

That is what we have to do again – not because we have changed but because the world has changed. Rethinking, not reassuring.”

So the policy changes that Kinnock and Blair introduced had nothing to do with short term electoral calculation? And when Blair and his allies said time and again that dropping social democratic principles would be the only way to get elected they were lying? That appeasing The Sun and Daily Mail never entered anyone’s calculations? That the vision of Britain in the 1997 Labour manifesto was absolutely what Labour thought things should be like in an ideal world?

This is a quite breathtaking re-writing of modern political history. One of the things most apparent in the article is that David is desperate to dress abject political capitulation and Blairite ‘triangulation’ up as some kind of statement of profound and deeply held social democratic principle. He wants to believe that his political philosophy is more authentically social democratic than the Labour left. It is patently ludicrous. But then again, maybe he believes it……..

As usual he trots out the usual vapid clichés about avoiding the ‘trap’ of moving leftwards and electoral viability. It is so dreary and unoriginal it is almost sleep-inducing. One would have hoped that the financial crisis would have sounded the death knell for the ‘More Of The Same’ Tendency. Apparently not though.

They just can’t accept they have lost the argument and are instead determined to wring Labour dry of any last remaining drops of red blood. Their obsession with the narrow interests of a few Middle England voters is the path to electoral oblivion. Theirs is the path to the mass disengagement with politics that we have right now and the reason why turnouts at elections are so miserably low. If David Miliband can’t see that, despite supposedly being a great thinker, then he should just stick to sitting on the board of Sunderland Football Club and should just walk away from politics. He has nothing useful to contribute.

How Revolutions Start

2012-02-01T18:44:00.002Z

Someone called John Terry has had his criminal trial postponed until July.

So that he can compete in something called Euro 2012.

Shocking. Very few things are these days. But this is. Absolutely shocking.

David Miliband Blah Blah Blah

2012-02-01T18:34:00.000Z

He’s dead, isn’t he?

Actually, he is something to do with Sunderland Football Club, when not emulating Blair by being paid obscene amounts of money merely to put his name on letterheads and websites.

Would have been attending Cabinet if he had become Leader of the “Opposition”. Thinks that the only problem with the cuts is that they don’t go far enough, making him worse even than Ed Balls. Wants us already to be at war with Iran, for no better reason that the Israeli Far Right says so. Deeply creepy relationship with Hillary Clinton. Most unlikely to contest the 2015 Election. Good riddance.

The Other Side of The World

2012-02-01T16:48:00.001Z

It is a bit too long to post in full here, but Bill Mitchell has the terrifying measure of Austerity Britain.

Not Islam, But Islamabad

2012-02-01T16:39:00.004Z

Not to say Kabul, or at any rate everywhere in Afghanistan outside Kabul.

The "Taliban" are being directed by the ISI, which means the Pakistani generals, who are the real, permanent government of Pakistan, where politicians are not even allowed the nuclear codes.

The "Taliban" are for all practical purposes indistinguishable from the Pakistani Army at large, and are utterly indistinguishable from the Afghan Army. "Taliban" Greater Pakistan is coming to be, the last hope of Jinnah's upper-class eccentric theory of a distinct Muslim nation on the Subcontinent.

"Who knew?" Who the hell didn't?

The Worst of British Snobbery

2012-02-01T16:24:00.002Z

Sarah Ditum writes:

"You've got a fairly low-ability intake. Your kids aren't all very smart, posh, upper-class, whatever." The way John Humphrys trailed off as he made this statement to a headmaster on the Today programme suggests that he knew it was coming out a bit wrong, but it was too late to change. He'd already said that brains and social status were the same thing.

A shabby sort of equivalence to draw, but one that's in keeping with much of the discussion about vocational education. Snobbery explains a lot about how we got to the sorry state we're currently in, and which Professor Alison Wolf's review attempted to address – it also explains why we're not very likely to see the sort of changes that will ultimately benefit young people.

Want to get an easy laugh today? Just try reeling out a list of some of the vocational qualifications that will no longer be considered equivalent to GCSEs. Humphrys sounded like he was close to popping with contempt at the idea that "hair services and horse care" could be compared in any way to the academic rigours of dead languages. When it comes to education in the UK, we can't help ourselves: if it sounds a bit common, then it's not a proper subject.

Never mind that caring for a horse or cutting a fringe involve genuine skills – just the idea of them being taken seriously is worth a snicker. (Whether anyone would be laughing if they saw me approaching the chair with a pair of scissors in one hand and my humanities degree in the other is something else entirely.)

But then snobbery has been part of the self-inflicted damage done to the vocational sector too. The idea that taking these qualifications in a school setting rather than a work one will make them more legitimate seems to me to indicate exactly where the UK goes wrong with vocational training. By trying to fit it to the academic template, we create courses that end up serving neither academic nor employment needs very well.

It's a problem that was highlighted by the games industry a couple of years ago: while games development courses proliferated, few of them actually offered the necessary skills to become a developer. What were employers actually looking for? In this case, pure sciences, arts degrees – and people who were able to come in at the lowest levels of the business and advance as they learned. But to make workplace training widely available requires support.

In an interview with the FT last year, Wolf stressed that successful vocational training needed investment: "You want more apprenticeships? Pay for them. You want more workplace skills? Pay for them." That part of the argument seems entirely lost today, with the emphasis instead on protecting "proper" subjects from being diluted by the vocational ones, and making sure that working-class accomplishments can't be counted with middle-class ones. Economic background has a clear connection to both educational outcome and career aspirations, but that's not the same thing as raw intellect being a feature of social status. The readiness to scoff at blue-collar professionalism (or even worse, to patronise it with flaky qualifications) is the worst of British snobbery.

English Water

2012-02-01T16:18:00.002Z

Over on Comment is Free, Neil Clark writes:

Here we go again. In the past 12 months, we've had significant hikes in our gas and electricity bills (not reversed by recent cuts due to a fall in wholesale prices) and above-inflation increases in train fares – which are already the highest in Europe. Now it's time for the water companies to put the boot in.

Ofwat has announced that average household water and sewerage bills in England and Wales are to increase by an average of 5.7% from April. As in the case with the rail fares, we're told that the reason that prices are rising is to enable more "investment" by the water companies. But a closer inspection is highly revealing. While English water companies are hiking charges by as much as 8.2%, Glas Cymru, the owner of Welsh Water is only raising prices by 3.8%. In Scotland, there's going to be no price rise at all.

The discrepancies can be explained by the different ownership structure of the water companies in England, Wales and Scotland. While England's water industry was sold off to the private sector by the Conservative government in 1989, Scotland's stayed in full public ownership. Scottish Water, with no pressure to provide dividends to shareholders or reward wealthy investors, not only charges lower prices to its users than English companies, it has also recently announced that its price freeze, introduced in 2009, will continue for a fourth successive year. In Wales, Glas Cymru is a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee, set up after the collapse of the privately owned Hyder in 2001. Average household water bills in Wales in the six months to September 2010 were £4 lower than a year before.

Despite the obvious benefits to consumers in Scotland and Wales from these ownership models, pro-privatisation zealots are keen to see the whole of the UK's water industry in private hands. While acknowledging that "undoubtedly, efficiency has improved at Scottish Water"; and that "Glas Cymru has performed well", the Adam Smith Institute, in its paper "Privatisation – Reviving the Momentum", has called for both the Scottish and Welsh water industries to be privatised. On Glas Cymru, the ASI states: "There remains scope for further improvements, which the discipline of private-sector ownership are best placed to deliver".

Today's news surely shows that it's England which should be copying the Scottish and Welsh models and not the other way round. Water privatisation was arguably the most ideologically extreme of all the Conservative sell-offs of the 80s and 90s. Selling off water would have been regarded as a completely barmy idea by the One Nation, middle-of-the-road postwar Tories like Harold Macmillan, but it became Conservative party policy under Margaret Thatcher. So thanks to the Conservatives, we in England now have our water provided by companies such as Thames Water, whose parent company Kemble Water is a subsidiary of Kemble Water Holdings Limited, which is owned by the Macquarie Group, an Australian global investment banking conglomerate. Thames Water is raising its prices by 6.7%.

Southern Water meanwhile, which is increasing charges by 8.2%, is owned by Southern Water Capital Ltd, which in 2007 was bought by a consortium led by JP Morgan Chase. JP Morgan's Chase announced profits of $4.26bn last October – something for those about to fill their kettles in Brighton or Eastbourne, to reflect on.

Bringing water back into public ownership in England – which could be done by the government simply nationalising the existing companies and establishing a new publicly owned body named "English Water", would not only lead to lower prices, but would be a move of great significance. For a key hallmark of the neoliberal era, which kicked off in Britain on 3 May 1979, has been "commodification" – i.e. the turning of things never before seen as goods into commodities, to be bought and sold.

Water, which falls out of the sky for free and which everyone needs, was obscenely commodified by the Thatcherites. You don't even have to be a Marxist to agree that there is something fundamentally wrong about water being sold off in order for global conglomerates to make even more profits from hard-pressed ordinary people. Action to end England's great water rip-off urgently needs to be taken.

Quis Separabit?

2012-02-01T16:10:00.008Z

Daniel Hannan writes:

Like most British people, I love Ireland. It’s a separate country, but it’s not really foreign. The Irish talk as we talk, dress as we dress, eat as we eat (and, tragically, drink as we drink). We watch the same television programmes, follow the same football teams, shop at the same chains. We share that half-humorous, half-cynical mode of conversation that sets us apart even from other Anglosphere nations.

In fact, Britain and Ireland are joined by pretty much everything except politics: history and geography, habit and outlook, commerce and settlement, blood and speech. It’s significant that you usually hear Irish words in the context of some state office or government function: while our people have carried on their custom of intermarriage and intermixture, the two governments have remained stubbornly apart.

Perhaps it was inevitable, at least at first. The early Irish leaders were, if not always anti-British, at least determined to flaunt their separateness by distancing themselves from whatever Britain was doing (though, during the Second World War, many Irish citizens felt differently, and rushed to enlist in the British Army, winning 780 decorations including seven Victoria Crosses). I don’t think it’s going too far to say that Irish politicians were initially attracted to the EU partly because the Brits disliked it – though it wasn’t long before, like all politicians, they also acquired a personal stake in the system.

Yet, almost overnight, the old antagonisms have been wiped away. The euro crisis pushed the two kindred nations together, and the Queen’s visit sealed their alliance. At dinner in Dublin at the weekend, most of the people I spoke to started from the premise that the EU was a disaster, and that Britain and Ireland should forge a closer relationship within the Anglosphere. One questioner asked about joining sterling, another about forging a joint foreign policy. A man who described himself as a lifelong republican wondered whether, if Alex Salmond succeeded in securing a ‘devo max’ settlement, it might not become the basis of a confederation throughout the British Isles.

True, it wasn’t a representative audience, being largely made up of libertarians and conservatives. But the changed attitude can be felt everywhere. When Mark Reckless, the Tory grandson of a Fianna Fáil TD, commissioned an opinion poll in the Republic, he found that 43 per cent of Sinn Féin voters wanted to swap the euro for the pound. Almost every day brings some new rapprochement. While I was in Dublin, the government announced its plans to rehabilitate the 5,000 men who had deserted the Irish armed forces in order to fight for Britain in the Second World War.

Whenever I read the history of Britain’s relations with Ireland, I want to weep at the missed opportunities. Almost any of the Liberal Home Rule Bills could have averted partition, and the horrors that followed. Even as late as 1916, the blood-dimmed tide might have been stopped up. Had the government not responded with such unconscionable brutality, the Easter Rising might now be remembered as a slightly opéra bouffe episode, backed only by a few fanatics: more Southern Irish Catholics died in British uniform on the first day of the Somme offensive than participated in it. I don’t think it’s fanciful to imagine Ireland having evolved into a self-governing Dominion in the way that, say, New Zealand did.

‘Was it needless death after all?’ asked Yeats. Probably. But how last-century it all now seems. Ireland has become Britain's closest ally in the EU. All changed, changed utterly.

Let this stand as a warning to the Scots. The EU - the making of Scottish Nationalism, when you compare where it was 40 years ago with where it is today - will let you have all the trappings of statehood. Provided that you are prepared to have your Budget debated on the floor of the Bundestag before your own Cabinet has been made aware of its contents. You have more self-government now that you could possibly dream of as a small member of the EU. You had before devolution.

And then there is the matter of the Scottish Regiments. The Irish did not keep the Irish Regiments. Nor have Irishmen - Southern, Catholic Irishmen - ever stopped joining them because they were still part of the British Army. On the contrary, they carried the Queen Mother's coffin, and last year they were the first to greet their newly married Colonel in his red coat.

The Stupid Party

2012-02-01T16:05:00.003Z

Peter Hitchens writes:

As this is the one thousandth posting here since this modest forum began, I thought I would choose as its subject the most important problem before us – the need to reform our dead and damaging major political parties. It won’t interest the cannabis lobby (nothing interests them except the Freedom to Fry) or the anti-theist faction, (who somehow think they are cleverer than Albert Einstein) but they have had quite enough red meat lately.

As I write, I have half an eye on Prime Minister’s Questions, and so far have seen no sign of anything resembling politics in these tedious and futile exchanges. Minor technical disagreements about benefits and health, and populist anti-banker stage rage are all we get, plus pathetic planted questions from government backbenchers who want jobs.

Yet several matters of enormous importance need to be discussed. The first, of course, is the Prime Minister’s wholly predictable capitulation to the European Union. There is supposed to be a large ‘Eurosceptic’ faction among Tory MPs. The Prime Minister is not just their opponent, but their enemy, and he has just proved it quite spectacularly, an act made all the worse because he pretended to be one of them. Why are they silent? Why, when the subject came up for debate on Tuesday, did they hang back from full-blooded wrath, leaving all the Parliamentary sketchwriters to say –rightly - that Mr Cameron got away with it?

What are they for? Why, having been so completely misled, will they not now rebel? If not now, when. It is all very well acting pleased and credulous when mr Cameron stages his fake triumph. That could be explained tactically – though it seemed to me that the ‘Eurosceptics’ looked all too genuinely taken in at the time. They were shamed by Dennis Skinner, a proper Labour MP recently childishly mocked by Mr Cameron. As a ‘dinosaur’. I do not agree with Mr Skinner about anything, but he has the sense to know that EU rule means that his voice and vote will count for nothing, as everything important will be decided elsewhere.

He also knows where to stick the rhetorical razor-blade in the rhetorical potato, saying: ‘There’s a word for it, it’s called appeasement, and if this meeting had been held in Munich you would have been coming back waving a piece of paper.’ As I noted in a posting here on 17th December, there are parallels between Mr Chamberlain’s ridiculous welcome on his return from Munich, and the true nature of the supposed ‘veto’. But if the Tory Party were any use, they would have been making them.

Yet millions still support this appalling useless party. People still write to me moaning about how awful the government is and, when I ask them how they voted last May, they drone, like hypnotised beings, ‘I voted Tory – we had to get Gordon Brown out’. Well, as it happens –and as I point out to these ridiculous, easily-led ninnies - they now have Gordon Brown with an Etonian accent. And while Mr Brown and Ed Balls can truly claim to have saved the Pound from Anthony Blair’s plan to join the Euro, who can be sure that Mr Cameron would have done the same, or can be trusted with the currency now? I might add that Mr Brown would never have dared to devastate the armed forces as Mr Cameron’s government has done. Our military decline under this supposed patriot is as bad as the days when the Dutch sailed up the Medway. It is not just that the defence cuts are huge. It is that they have been wielded carelessly and without thought.

I also do get the occasional letter from people (some of them at the notorious Bruges Group meeting at the October 2009 Tory conference, where supposed ‘right-wingers’ received my ‘Don’t Vote Tory’ message with chilly scorn) who now regret having saved the Tory party when they could have destroyed it. Most of these had apparently persuaded themselves that Mr Cameron had a secret agenda which he would reveal once he had won. What a silly, almost childish notion. Its present-day equivalent is the fantasy that Mr Cameron is being prevented from acting as he wishes by Nicholas Clegg. Many of the same people also believe the alternative legend, in which Mr Clegg is the cringing servant of a bullying Mr Cameron.

Neither of these nursery fantasies is true. Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg grew up in similar worlds and have similar attitudes towards almost everything important. The differences between them are superficial and far less significant than the deep similarities. Mr Cameron may like to use Mr Clegg as an excuse for doing what he wants to do anyway, as there will always be people stupid enough to believe this in his own party, who are thereby pacified. And Mr Clegg may like to claim that he has forced a wayward, reactionary Tory Party to come to its senses, as there will always be people stupid enough to believe it in his own party, who are thereby pacified.

This sterile arrangement, by which one party pretends to be two (and at times three) means that serious, bruising, educational and adversarial debate on the national plight never takes place in Parliament, and is increasingly excluded from media which must depend to some extent on the state of Parliament, if they are to have any influence. So not only the EU, but the real crisis of welfare and marriage, the real crisis of education, the real problems of drugs, and the true nature of the Middle East, particularly the ‘Arab Spring’, the rise of Turkey, the Libyan failure and the coming crisis in Syria, remain undiscussed, or discussed so ignorantly that it would have been better to keep quiet.

I failed completely to achieve any change with my ‘Don’t Vote Tory’ campaign. There is now a great danger that the dead parties will be nationalised and made permanent through state funding, a terrible thought for anyone concerned with free debate. How are we to obtain reform of the parties, and to get parties that actually care about what the people care about?

Hardly Bloodless

2012-01-31T23:29:00.003Z

Nothing is beneath Newt Gingrich.

Although isn't Florida a closed primary state? I only ask, but how many Jews are registered Republicans?

No Price On Justice

2012-01-31T23:27:00.001Z

We certainly do need to repeal the provision for “no win, no fee” litigation. While at the same time protecting, restoring and extending Legal Aid. And restoring powerful trade unions. Labour Peers, over to you.

Certifiable

2012-01-31T23:24:00.003Z

Who would want their qualification to be equated to Thatcher's wretched GCSE, anyway?

More broadly, technical qualifications ought not to be compared with academic qualifications, or vice versa. The Honours Degree system is no good at teaching the skill trades, and nor are schools. Why should they be?

We need world class apprenticeships, world class technical colleges, and a return to uncompromising academic excellence in schools and universities.

British Caribbean

2012-01-31T23:19:00.003Z

That is the name of Lord Ashcroft's bank on the Turks and Caicos Islands.

In return for the stamping out of all provision for the Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories to function as tax havens, students from those Dependencies and Territories should be recognised as home students.

There is also the wider need for a political force which demands advocates on behalf of the people of those Dependencies and Territories, especially in demanding the building of the airport on Saint Helena, justice for Ascension Island and for the Chagos Islands, and no compromise whatever, whether on the sovereignty of Gibraltar, or on either the sovereignty or the oil revenue of the Falkland Islands.

Oh, and the return of the scandalously discontinued BBC English for the Caribbean Service.

No Stability, No Coordination, No Governance

2012-01-30T19:06:00.006Z

But what else did you expect?

No one outside the media ever did fall for any of this. The following Thursday, Labour won the Feltham and Heston by-election with an 8.5 per cent swing from the Conservatives.

Believing oneself born to rule is not the same thing as being any good at it. Cameron cannot begin to cope with people who cannot even distinguish, still less are they intimidated by, an Etonian accent.

Upfront

2012-01-30T19:04:00.000Z

You, or your parents, will still be allowed to pay nine thousand pounds upfront to a university at the start of each academic year. That is a lot less than the fees for the grandest schools. And it would, on the basis of parental wealth, avoid the above-inflation, profiteering interest payable by those who will have to wait until after they themselves have graduated and established themselves in careers.

Controlling Interest

2012-01-30T15:24:00.002Z

So what if the RBS share price has gone down today? It was never going to be sold, anyway. Like that stake in HBOS, the controlling interest in RBS is in public ownership forever. Perhaps now someone will state this obvious fact out loud.

The Language of Priorities

2012-01-30T15:19:00.004Z

The great Bevan also ridiculed the first parliamentary Welsh Day on the grounds that “Welsh coal is the same as English coal and Welsh sheep are the same as English sheep”.

In the 1970s, Labour MPs successfully opposed Scottish and Welsh devolution not least because of its ruinous effects on the North of England. Labour activists in the Scottish Highlands, Islands and Borders, and in North, Mid and West Wales, accurately predicted that their areas would be balefully neglected under devolution.

Eric Heffer in England, Tam Dalyell and the Buchans (Norman and Janey) in Scotland, and Leo Abse and Neil Kinnock in Wales, were prescient as to the Balkanisation of Britain by means of devolution and the separatism that it was designed to appease, and as to devolution’s weakening of trade union negotiating power.

Abse, in particular, was prescient as to the rise of a Welsh-speaking oligarchy based in English-speaking areas, which would use devolution to dominate Welsh affairs against the interests of Welsh workers South and North, industrial and agricultural, English-speaking and Welsh-speaking. Heffer’s political base was in Liverpool, at once very much like the West of Scotland and with close ties to Welsh-speaking North Wales.

There is a strong feeling among English, Scottish and Welsh ethnic minorities and Catholics that we no more want to go down the road of who is or is not “really” English, Scottish or Welsh than Ulster Protestants want to go down the road of who is or is not “really” Irish.

The Scotland Office Select Committee is chaired by Ian Davidson, a Co-operative Party stalwart and Janey Buchan protégé who is therefore a hammer both of Scottish separatism and of European federalism.

There is no West Lothian Question, since the Parliament of the United Kingdom reserves the right to legislate supremely in any policy area for any part of the country, the devolution legislation presupposes that it will do so as a matter of course, and anyone who does not like that ought to have voted No to devolution.

The Welfare State, workers’ rights, full employment, a strong Parliament, trade unions, co-operatives, credit unions, mutual guarantee societies, mutual building societies, and nationalised industries (often with the word “British” in their names) were historically successful in creating communities of interest among the several parts of the United Kingdom, thus safeguarding and strengthening the Union. The public stakes in the Bank of Scotland and the Royal Bank of Scotland are such permanent, non-negotiable safeguards of the Union.

The Union can only be defended in these terms and within this tradition. Ed Miliband has made a good start today.

Mind How You Go

2012-01-30T15:08:00.002Z

The proposed cut in police pay would be a breach of the arrangement whereby they voluntarily forgo their civil right to strike. The police should not call the rest of us "civilians". They, too, are civilians, whom we pay to do what, should the need arise, we could and would all do for free. That is why, for example, they should have the right to strike. Or their long-established pay deal in lieu.

That is why that bastion of old-school trade unionism, the Police Federation, is absolutely correct in defending the entitlement of the whole community to that for which the whole community pays, namely the police protection of each and every one of the whole community's members. All of Her Majesty's subjects are, as such, equal citizens, equally entitled to the services of Her Majesty's Constabulary.

As so often, the Crown guarantees in principle the equality defended in practice by the trade union movement.

Occasion'd By The Lyes And Scandals

2012-01-30T15:05:00.001Z

Today is the anniversary of the execution of Charles I. In sillier circles, this imposition of the greatest tyranny in English (never mind Irish) history is termed “the English Revolution”.

In fact, of course, it long preceded the emergence of any industrial proletariat and is wholly inexplicable in Marxist terms, just as is the very existence of any Marxist movement in, say, the Russia of 1917, or Albania, or China at least until very recent years, or Korea, or Vietnam, or Nepal, or Bengal, or Sri Lanka, or Ethiopia, or Zimbabwe, or Uganda, or Rwanda, or South Africa, or Cuba, or Peru, or Bolivia, or … well, make your own list. At their respective heights of Communism, certainly Spain, and arguably also Italy and even France, were standing contradictions of the whole theory.

If there is any truth at all in the Marxist analysis of history, then these things simply cannot be. I think that we all know what follows from the fact that these things are.

But didn’t Charles I believe in the Divine Right of Kings? No, he did not. Or at least he certainly expressed no such view at his grotesque “trial” pursuant to a Bill of Attainder, and before 80 of his carefully selected parliamentary and military enemies under a second-rate lawyer, John Bradshaw, created “Lord President” because all the proper judges had fled London rather than have anything to do with the wretched proceedings.

There, Charles declared repeatedly that, by denying the authority of the “court” to try him, he was simply upholding the law as it then existed, including the liberties of the English people and the parliamentary institutions of the English State. No law permitted the trial of the monarch, he argued. On the contrary, the law of treason then in force provided for exactly the opposite, namely that any attack on the monarch’s person was itself an offence. Simply as a matter of fact, he was right.

And the subsequent behaviour of the Cromwellian regime fully vindicated him.

Talking To "The Taliban"

2012-01-29T16:20:00.007Z

There are no "Taliban" apart from the Pashtun in general, and they have no ambitions beyond Pakistan and Afghanistan, or even only the Pashtun areas of those countries, where they did at least stamp out the opium trade and the endemic pederasty. Unlike us. We brought them both back.

Who do you think is going to leave Afghanistan first? NATO? Or "the Taliban"? Which of them will ever leave Afghanistan? Which of them has anywhere else to go? Don't take my word for any of this. As of today, just ask Hamid Karzai.

What he cannot tell you, however, is what any of it was all for from our own point of view. May we now expect an apology from those who have given us 10 years of war for nothing?

Twelfth Class Citizens

2012-01-29T16:16:00.005Z

That is what the inhabitants of the region with the lowest benefits cap would be. Likewise, those of the region with the lowest minimum wage.

And likewise, those of the region with the lowest public sector pay. Not only public employees. Everyone, since the recruitment of the right calibre of such staff would be absolutely impossible, with all the effects of that impossibility on the delivery of public services.

The Labour Party simply has to go. Doesn't it? If not, why not? And if so, then what are you doing about it, considering who I know that some of you are?

Bank Balance

2012-01-29T16:13:00.002Z

The paper fiction of UKFI must be discontinued. As UKFI itself has said, pretty much in so many words, no one is ever going to want to buy the nationalised banks, so they are going to be in public ownership forever.

Marriage Guidance

2012-01-29T16:04:00.002Z

Like most of the Anglicans in the world, Dr John Sentamu is a product of Anglo-Catholic or Evangelical missionary activity (in his case, it looks as if it might have been both), rather than of anything out of The Vicar of Dibley or even Rev. Moreover, his presence as of right within the parliamentary process bears witness, as so very many other things do, to the fundamentally Christian nature and basis of this State, as such.

With the nature of marriage up for debate, we should seize the opportunity and the initiative. The extension to relatives of the right to contract civil partnerships. The entitlement of each divorcing spouse to one per cent of the other's estate for each year of marriage, up to 50 per cent, and the disentitlement of the petitioning spouse unless fault be proved, thereby restoring the situation whereby, by recognising adultery and desertion as faults in divorce cases, society declared in law its disapproval of them even though they were not in themselves criminal offences.

The entitlement of any marrying couple to register their marriage as bound by the law prior to 1969 as regards grounds and procedures for divorce, and to enable any religious organisation to specify that any marriage which it conducts shall be so bound, requiring it to counsel couples accordingly. And the statutory specification that the Church of England be such a body unless the General Synod specifically resolve the contrary by a two-thirds majority in all three Houses, with something similar for the Methodist and United Reformed Churches, which also exist pursuant to Acts of Parliament, as well as by amendment to the legislation relating to the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy.

That would be a start, anyway. Dr Sentamu, Member of Parliament that you are, over to you.

Why They Hate Belarus

2012-01-29T15:54:00.004Z

Here:

The Republic of Belarus regrets the introduction by the European Union of large-scale economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, says a statement of the press service of the Foreign Ministry of Belarus, BelTA has learnt.

“Our country has always believed that any unilateral sanctions are counterproductive and insisted on international diplomatic efforts, first of all, within the framework of the United Nations Organization. Economic pressure and coercion are absolutely unacceptable in the international policy and can only foment more tensions in the relations between sovereign states and on the international arena,” the Foreign Ministry believes.

The Foreign Ministry noted that the introduction of unilateral sanctions against Iran can escalate the situation in the strategic region of the Middle East and lead to unpredictable consequences for the entire world.

“The economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran have nothing to do with nuclear non-proliferation, but will only deliver a blow to the national economy and ordinary people,” the Foreign Ministry emphasized.

Is it just the spectacle of their own past lives in the Brezhnev-era kitsch of the Lukashenko Government? Or in the spotty, unelectable adolescents who comprise the "opposition", admittedly a lot better, since merely harmless, than the neighbouring giant's Stalinists, National Bolsheviks, Islamist terrorists, and anti-urban, anti-industrial, anti-scientific fantasists who are all cheered on simultaneously by the New Cold Warriors?

The Holy See identifies as a bridge between Eastern and Western Christendom the last nation in Europe west of the Russian border to identify entirely in terms other than those of rootless neoliberal stupefaction, promiscuity, usury and warmongering. Was the Papacy notable for its close relationship with the Soviet regime, such that it would wish to maintain such ties with that regime's last vestige in Europe?

As Neil Clark puts it today, "It’s a bit of a no brainer to work out why the neocons and ‘Israel-firsters’ hate Belarus so much and pump out so much negative propaganda about the country. The great crime of President Lukashenko is not that he’s a "dictator"- he’s not- but that he doesn’t have the ‘right’ foreign policy, particularly in relation to Iran."

Britain In The Caucasus

2012-01-29T15:48:00.004Z

Daniel Larison writes:

Thomas de Waal describes Georgia ahead of Saakashvili’s meeting with Obama next week:

Saakashvili’s Georgia could be described as a mix of non-Russia and anti-Russia. “Non-Russia” refers to the country’s public service reforms, its recent law on the tolerance of religious minorities and its persistent tradition of pluralism. “Anti-Russia” means behavior that, in its extreme defiance of Vladimir Putin and his rule, frequently ends up mirroring them [bold mine-DL]. Such behavior includes inflammatory rhetoric toward Russia (Saakashvili last year described Georgia as “civilization” and Russia as “barbarism”) and a worrying concentration of power in a few hands.

Present-day Georgia, as with Russia, is basically a one-party state in which a small group of elites control the executive, parliament, all regional authorities and the three national television channels. The judiciary is less than free. The dark side of Georgia’s campaign against corruption and criminality is that it has empowered a large and unaccountable police force. The country’s prisons are bursting with many inmates who should not be there; in 2011, Georgia ranked fourth in the world in the number of prisoners per capita.

While some Americans are becoming more aware of this, many of the country’s American supporters keep trying to perpetuate the myth of Georgia as an example of successful democratization. They feel compelled to do this because the current U.S.-Georgian relationship is justified mostly on ideological grounds. It has had to be that way when the U.S. has no great interest in cultivating a poor client state in the Caucasus.

The opposition politician Irakli Alasania has elaborated elsewhere on the extent of one-party rule:

Just as we face threats from beyond our borders, though, there is another challenge from within that is stifling our natural love of freedom today. That threat is the unyielding monopoly on power that Saakashvili and his political party exercise in all aspects of Georgian public life. More than 80 percent of the current parliament is controlled by his party [discounting the ludicrous fiction that the three politically identical organisations are in any meaningful way still distinct parties, this fully applies to Britain]. All television stations with national reach broadcast a pro-governmental message [likewise]. The top-down order Saakashvili has created often shows itself in ugly ways. Earlier this month, 15 youngsters were beaten at a public concert for saying the name of an alternative political leader. In its annual report this year, Human Rights Watch included Georgia among the 90 countries in the world requiring special scrutiny and called out the current government for its lack of accountability on multiple fronts.

Should Saakashvili move to the newly-empowered post of prime minister after his presidential term ends, as some fear that he will, that should put an end to whatever remains of the illusion in the West that he has much interest in political liberalization. De Waal explains the attitude of Georgia’s elite towards democracy:

Georgia’s elite are modernizers, not democrats. They occasionally say that they cannot afford to allow more democracy in their country because that would “stop reforms,” opposition politicians would gain power and Georgia would slide backward.

Happy Holocaust Day

2012-01-27T19:53:00.002Z

If you find the title of this post offensive, then so you should. But what else is one supposed to say? The whole thing is as ridiculous as it is revolting. For one thing, why is it on 27th January, the day Auschwitz exchanged mass-murdering Nazi tyranny for mass-murdering Soviet tyranny? Why not 15th April, the day Belsen really was liberated, and that by the British? In some years, that would even coincide usefully with Easter.

That we are prepared to have it today points to the extent to which the anti-British sectarian Left has taken over our public life, and the extent to which it has made peace with its old adversaries, also massively influential, on the anti-British sectarian Right. That we insist on having it all points to the extent to which it is so much easier, and even to which it is so much more fun, to concentrate on the wrongdoing of others rather than on the wrongdoing of ourselves.

Down As Well As Up

2012-01-27T19:51:00.001Z

What are Stephen Hester's shares really worth? There is no serious intention of ever returning RBS to the private sector, and it is high time that that was said out loud.

More than three hundred years after the creation of the Royal Mail, Margaret Thatcher insisted that it could never be privatised, "because it's Royal".

Three hundred years hence, people will be saying the same thing about the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Break The Chains

2012-01-27T19:47:00.004Z

Directly elected mayors are wholly at variance with our parliamentary, rather than presidential, res publica.

Eric Pickles is already permitting councils to return to the old committee system. He ought to require that they do so. And abolish directly elected mayors.

An ideal opportunity might present itself if Boris Johnson is re-elected, since the safe seat of Reigate has been lined up for him, meaning that he has absolutely no intention of serving a full term.

On The Rates

2012-01-27T19:12:00.002Z

The Italians are pushing particularly hard for a European rating agency, to counter the flagrant American bias of the existing ones.

That includes any recent expression of the unremarkable fact that they are Wall Street Republicans who want Romney.

But when can we have a British one? Or better still, stop listening to them at all. They were the people who said that subprime mortgages were fine and dandy. Away with them.

Nulli Expugnabilis Hosti

2012-01-27T18:59:00.003Z

And certainly not by Tony Blair.

The Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party was founded out of the trade union movement, and specifically out of the T&G, in order to secure for the British workers of Gibraltar the same pay and conditions enjoyed by other British workers.

Under Joe Bossano, first elected for the Integration With Britain Party, it won the 1992 Election with 72 per cent of the vote under the slogan, “Give Spain No Hope”, which was not at all what the Major Government wanted to hear.

The Full Fruits

2012-01-27T18:54:00.002Z

Margaret Thatcher's official biographer, Charles Moore, writes:

As the Labour party wrestles with self-definition in hard times, I wonder if it was wise to ditch Clause 4. In 1994-95, it was important for Tony Blair to win a symbolic victory over the left. This undoubtedly helped get him into Downing Street. Clause 4 of the party’s constitution was considered a doctrinaire text of nationalisation. But the key contentious words do not have to bear that interpretation. The clause promises ‘to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service’.

Today, in the era of the credit crunch, the question of the ownership of wealth has returned to the centre of debate, and rightly so, because the many — to adapt a Blairite phrase — have had to pay for the rescue of the few. The great question in the debate between capitalism and socialism about how people can best obtain ‘the full fruits of their industry’ is unresolved. Labour would surely be in a stronger position if it were able to stand on the ground of common ownership and then modernise it in the least state-oriented way possible (a new look at cooperatives, wider share ownership, workers’ equity etc). The Blairites were right about the need to modernise, but their dreadfully vague talk about ‘values’ has disabled Labour from having alternative answers to the key question of who actually owns, and therefore controls, the wealth of nations.

The old Clause IV did not mention nationalisation, although it certainly allowed for it; it had been framed so that people who already had nationalisation in mind could read that presupposition into it, even though no one could have read that presupposition out of it. But Tony Blair and his fan club thought that it was about nothing else. So, in repudiating it, they repudiated public ownership in order to repudiate everything that public ownership delivered and safeguarded, notably national sovereignty, the Union, and the economic basis of paternal authority.

Likewise, in repudiating trade unionism, they repudiated controlled immigration, and the moderating influence of the wider electorate in the affairs of the Labour Party. Mercifully, that latter, at least, reasserted itself in the victory of Ed Miliband over the Blairite candidate. But it still needs to be reasserted that requiring the production of a union card is no different from requiring the production of a British passport or a work permit, while the closed shop was as important for that as it was for giving the Tory 45 per cent of the industrial working class a moderating influence in the selection of Labour candidates for the safe Labour seats in which they lived.

Hardening The R And Softening The D

2012-01-27T18:23:00.010Z

In "Florida", that is.

Romney is leading both among the Cubans and among the Puerto Ricans. The Puerto Ricans probably wonder why Gingrich thinks that their homeland cannot have statehood but the moon can. But now that there is no longer an American Administration full of people who have never recanted their Trotskyism, President Obama should lift the entire blockade on Cuba, which only attracts sympathy for a regime which does not deserve it, perhaps most notable as the model for Britain's impregnable pseudo-comprehensive schools by means of which the real, but vigorously self-denying, ruling class perpetuates itself from generation to generation.

The Cuban pretend-exiles are in fact economic migrants and free to go back any time they like. Far from being conservative, they merely wish to restore the Cuba that existed before 1959, a giant drug den and brothel for the American super-rich.

Republicans crowing over the apparent loss of Hispanic support for Obama and the Democrats should think on. Obama should consolidate his black base while reaching out to blue-collar whites by rejecting any suggestion that they should merely accept the loss of their jobs, the running down of their wages and working conditions, and the confinement of their children and grandchildren to the bottom of the heap by means of de facto State bilingualism.

And no, these things are not somehow to the good of the Catholic Church. In fact, far from Hispanics' being the great hope of American Catholicism, Latin America has never been a particularly Catholic place, with slight if any Mass-going majorities, huge numbers of the unbaptised, rampant syncretism and surviving paganism, and a very heavy dependence on (historically European, these days usually North American) missionary priests.

No wonder that the strongest opponents of the present levels of immigration, of any amnesty, and of the erosion of English in American life, are themselves traditional Catholics. The GOP obviously doesn't want them. They should try their luck elsewhere.

The Martyr-Priest of Hama

2012-01-27T18:15:00.005Z

John Sanidopoulos writes:

On January 25, 2012 Greek Orthodox Hieromonk Basilios Nassar was shot by an armed terrorist group in Hama, Syria on the second day of heavy fighting there. Fr. Basilios was at the Metropolis when he was informed by a phone call that a parishioner of his was shot and needed assistance. The Patriarchate of Antioch has reported that the 30-year-old priest was shot while giving medical aid to the wounded man who was previously shot. Fr. Basilios was shot in the chest and in the right armpit. Immediately another priest, Fr. Panteleimon Isa, who was with him dragged his bloody body to a nearby building to save him, but the martyr for Christ Father Basilios was dead within 30 minutes from hemorrhaging. His funeral took place today, January 26th, in the Church of Saint George in Hama. The blessed Father Basilios, known in the world as Mazin, was born in 1982 in the village of Kfarmpo in Hama and was a graduate of the Theological School of Balamand. He was also a teacher of Byzantine Music in the school Saint Kosmas the Melodist which he founded in the Metropolis.

Expect hundreds of thousands more if Assad is removed. That is why those who want him removed, want him removed. Thank God for Holy Russia.

Healing An Old Wound

2012-01-26T23:34:00.004Z

David Owen is an ally of Ed Miliband’s, and his role in opposing the abolition of the NHS suggests that an old wound might now be healed at last.

The creation of the SDP was premature. Those who had determined upon it ought to have waited until the new Electoral College had given the Deputy Leadership to Tony Benn, casting their own votes in the MPs’ section to that end. Benn as Deputy Leader would have made it unanswerable that the Labour Party they had joined no longer existed. A new party would have taken with it half or more of Labour MPs, most Labour peers, huge numbers of councillors, great tracts of the activist base, and a good many unions. At least one, and possibly both, of the former Labour Prime Ministers then alive would have joined it. Victory in 1983 would have been quite plausible, and victory in 1987 would have been practically certain. There would have been no need, if there ever really was, of the Alliance with the Liberals. A rapidly Benn-led Labour rump would not have been “split”; it would simply have been replaced.

But instead, although (for want of a better term) the Labour Right’s internal differences over incomes policy and over devolution were, up to a point, carried over into the SDP, its diversity over Europe hardly was. Almost all Keynesian, pro-Commonwealth defenders of national sovereignty remained in the Labour Party, as did almost all of the right-wing Labour MPs who were not easily young enough to start again, or who had any real roots in local government or the unions, or who could not have been certain of making at least as much money if they had lost their seats as if they had kept them. The new party’s character was thus fixed from the start: a very readily identifiable post-War type that was still relatively young in 1981, had few or no roots in wider civil society, and was on the up economically. The 1980s were to be those people’s decade.

Apparently unable to see that the trade unions were where the need for a broad-based, sane opposition to Thatcherism was greatest, the SDP was hysterically hostile to them, and instead made itself dependent on a single donor, later made a Minister by Tony Blair without the rate for the job. It betrayed Gaitskellism over Europe. It betrayed both Christian Socialism and, contrary to what is usually asserted, Gaitskellism over nuclear weapons. It adopted the decadent social libertinism of Roy Jenkins. It adopted the comprehensive schools mania of Shirley Williams. And it carried over her sense of guilt at not having resigned over past Labour attempts to control immigration. Today, both the Conservative and the Liberal Democrat components of the Coalition are replete with its former members, and David Cameron’s court is stuffed full of them as advisors and general hangers-on. But read the Limehouse Declaration, and see if you can spot anything remotely redolent of the Coalition’s programme.

Except that, faced with Bennism and Trotskyism on one side, and with the forces around Margaret Thatcher on the other, that Declaration advocated exactly the wrong thing, “more, not less, radical change in our society”. Alliance with the Liberal Party committed the SDP to constitutional agenda scarcely distinguishable from those of Tony Benn, many of which have now been enacted and most of which are now the policy of all three parties. Yet imagine if the flagship Bennite and Alliance policy of abolishing the House of Lords had been enacted. Who would now be providing the parliamentary defence of the responsibility of the Secretary of State for the provision of healthcare, the responsibility that simply is the NHS? No wonder that Jim Callaghan once threatened to resign as Labour Leader if required to fight a General Election on a policy of abolishing that House as it was constituted in 1980.

Yet the need has never been greater for a party of those whose priorities include the Welfare State, workers’ rights, trade unionism, the co-operative movement and wider mutualism, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation rather than environmentalism, fair taxation, full employment, public ownership, proper local government, a powerful Parliament, the monarchy, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, civil liberties, the Union, the Commonwealth, the countryside, traditional structures and methods of education, traditional moral and social values, economic patriotism, balanced migration, a realist foreign policy, an unhysterical approach to climate change, and a base of real property for every household to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State. A party for those social democrats who were alienated from Labour by the rise within it of forces inimical to Bevan’s eschewal of class conflict in favour of “a platform broad enough for all to stand upon”. People whose views on certain issues have, if anything, returned to the Gaitskellite tradition during the intervening decades.

Where is that party? Roll on electoral reform. And in the meantime, what is Ed Miliband doing to bring David Owen to greater prominence? Or is it time to look elsewhere for a political formation growing from the Labour Movement’s trade union, co-operative, Radical Liberal, Tory populist, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and other non-Marxist roots? The party that the SDP could have been. If it had held on a little while.

Respice Prospice

2012-01-26T23:18:00.005Z

As they at least used to say round Diane Abbott’s way.

Her ordinary, rather than her campaign, website makes clear her sympathy for the 11-plus, for single-sex schools, for Oxbridge as academically elitist, for universities’ flexible approach to entry grades if they see potential in the applicant, for the prevention of social rather than academic elitism by improving the schools attended by the poor, for raising poor pupils’ aspirations so that they actually apply to the top universities, and for reinstating full grants so that they can afford to go.

She has also been consistent in her opposition to European federalism, in her role as a voice of her ethnic community on immigration by people who cannot speak English or who come from countries with no historic ties to Britain, in her support for action against such things as not giving up seats to elderly people on public transport, and in her opposition to the New Labour assault on civil liberties. All in all, no wonder that she hated both Thatcherism and Blairism so much.

But Thatcherism included abortion up to birth, strongly opposed by John Smith, among other Labour MPs. Blairism included the pouring into pointless embryonic stem cell “research” of the money that should have been spent on adult and cord blood stem cell research, which really works. And Blairism included the transformation of this country into a bioethical rogue state, with spare parts babies, with human-animal hybridity (I’ll say that again - human-animal hybridity), and with two women or even two men listed as the parents on birth certificates, another one that is worth repeating until it sinks in.

Abbott’s constituency is the cradle of Blue Labour. A reselection challenge would be in order, followed by an Independent candidacy if she held on.

Astro Newt

2012-01-26T23:10:00.003Z

Newt Gingrich has form. He wants "a mirror system in space [that] could provide the light equivalent of many full moons so that there would be no need for night-time lighting of the highways." Oh, and "a large array of mirrors that could affect the earth's climate", thereby extending the growing season for farmers. And now, he has earned the endorsement, which I would expect to be forthcoming, of Lyndon LaRouche, by advocating the old loony's signature policy of colonising the Moon and then Mars. Yes, that's right. Mars.

Gingrich's historical theories are about as credible as LaRouche's, making it no surprise that he was denied tenure, not in the liberal Northeast that he had fled, but in Georgia, and I mean Georgia as it was then. His moral positions are if anything more liberal than most of LaRouche's, Gingrich having had more wives than children and more affairs than wives. He is also far less of a peacenik, being financially dependent on Sheldon Adelson, and with a history of, for example, calling Reagan "Neville Chamberlain" for daring to meet Gorbachev.

The American Right's Fantasy World

2012-01-26T22:58:00.004Z

And, since it is now almost entirely wannabe American, our own’s.

Michael Lind writes:

One benefit of the prolonged campaign for the Republican presidential nomination has been the revelation that most of the 20 or 30 percent of Americans who describe themselves as conservatives live in a fantasy world. In their imaginations, Barack Obama, a centrist Democrat with roots in Eisenhower Republicanism rather than Rooseveltian liberalism, is a radical figure trying to take America down the path of “European socialism.” The signature healthcare reform of Obama and the Democratic Congress, modeled on Mitt Romney’s insurance-friendly Massachusetts healthcare program and closely resembling a proposal by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, is described as “statist,” “socialist” or “fascist” (as though Hitler came to power with the goal of providing subsidies to private health insurance companies).

How can otherwise sane people believe such lunacy? The answer is that members of the right-wing counterculture are brainwashed — that is the only appropriate term — by the apocalyptic propaganda ground out constantly by the conservative media establishment. A perfect example is a recent essay by Philip Klein, a senior editorial writer of the Washington Examiner, the right-wing newspaper owned by the billionaire Philip Anshutz: “The Welfare State Is Destroying America.”

Klein begins, typically, with the fall from grace of America under the sinister Franklin Roosevelt, who presided over the establishment of Social Security: “But Roosevelt was dead wrong that the program would help the nation avoid deep debt. Social Security and the entitlement programs that followed its legacy of seeking to protect citizens from the ‘hazards and vicissitudes of life,’ turned out to be fiscal disasters.”

In the real world, of course, today’s national debt has nothing to do with Social Security, whose trust fund has a surplus that will last for decades, with the precise date of the trust fund’s exhaustion depending on the rate of general economic growth. True, the federal government has to raise the tax revenue to repay the money it borrowed from the trust fund — but then, the federal government has to repay all of its creditors, domestic and foreign. What’s wrong with that?

As if to concede that there is no Social Security crisis in the near future, Klein engages in three intellectually dishonest maneuvers typical of right-wing propagandists. First, he talks about medium-term and long-term problems as though they were present-day emergencies. Second, he blurs the distinction between Social Security’s long-term fiscal challenges, which are minor, and those caused by rising healthcare costs, in order to make Social Security seem worse off than it is in reality. Third, he implies that “the growing debt burden” of the United States is primarily caused by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, ignoring tax cuts, wars and the effects of a near-depression:

With health care costs rising and the population aging, America’s welfare-state obligations are bringing the country to its financial knees. If left unchecked, the growing debt burden will not only trigger runaway inflation and stifling taxes, but it will also threaten national security.

By now readers of the Washington Examiner must assume that Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson deliberately designed Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to be paid for by federal borrowing. Why shouldn’t Klein’s audience leap to that false conclusion? After all, Klein has not mentioned the funding streams that pay for these programs: payroll taxes (Social Security), payroll taxes and general revenues (Medicare) and general revenues (Medicaid).

If Klein were honest with his readers, he would point out that the main causes of federal deficits in the last generation have been the Reagan and Bush tax cuts, plus the fiscal aftereffects of the Great Recession, in the form of falling tax revenues and increased spending on unemployment insurance and stimulus programs. But that would distract from the false impression that Klein is seeking to convey.

So far in this classic of polemical literature, “The Welfare State Is Destroying America,” Philip Klein has relied solely on rhetoric. In the next few paragraphs he uses a few numbers, all of which have been cherry-picked to paint a picture of imminent national economic collapse, and all of which are misleading.

Here is misleading argument No. 1:

Spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare alone currently account for 46 percent — or nearly half of — federal spending, excluding interest payments. Over the next 25 years, that percentage will explode to 66 percent, or close to two-thirds, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Ooh, scary! These numbers may frighten readers, but they are meaningless. The only number that conceivably would matter would be the overall federal-state-local spending as a share of GDP, which in the U.S. is well below the average for industrial democracies that are just as competitive and prosperous. Saying that the share of federal spending that is devoted to Social Security and healthcare spending will grow over 25 years from 46 to 66 percent does not support Klein’s case that the welfare state will “destroy” America. These are just irrelevant numbers, thrown out to impress the ignorant reader of the Washington Examiner.

Misleading argument No. 2 follows:

Numbers associated with the nation’s debt crisis are almost too staggering to comprehend. Last month, total U.S. debt surpassed $15 trillion. But a recent analysis by Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff found that when long-term entitlement obligations are considered, the true fiscal gap is $211 trillion.

What Klein fails to point out is that Kotlikoff’s calculation for unfunded entitlement obligations is for the period between now and infinity. Even if Kotlikoff and Klein used the briefer time span of, say, 2012-2100, there would be no cause for alarm, because nobody is going to present the federal government with a check for advance payment of all projected entitlement payments in the remainder of the 21st century, due tomorrow. In other words, saying the U.S. has a “fiscal gap” is like saying that you are in danger of bankruptcy from a “personal fiscal gap,” because you could not pay off the entire house or car mortgage today. As long as you can make the installment payments at a reasonable interest rate, you, like the nation, are fine.

The abstract “fiscal gap” arises almost entirely from the minor projected shortfall of payroll tax funding for Social Security and, more important, from the estimated out-of-control growth of healthcare costs in decades to come. Change the variables, by means of new taxes for Social Security, benefit cuts or control of excessive costs in the U.S. medical industry, and the Big Scary Fiscal Gap disappears or shrinks dramatically, depriving right-wing hacks and left-wing deficit hawks of a club used to beat Social Security and Medicare.

Does Klein tell his readers this? Of course not. He’s just throwing out scary-sounding statistics to stampede the yahoos.

On to misleading argument No. 3:

Greece, with an economy 1/50th the size of the U.S., is threatening the economic standing of the rest of Europe because of its growing debt burden, which hit 143 percent of its gross domestic product in 2010.

The U.S. is on pace to match that dubious distinction in under 20 years, according to the CBO, and to soar to 716 percent by 2080. Sustaining such debt would require raising marginal tax rates to as high as 88 percent, the CBO has told The Washington Examiner.

Shame on the CBO for misleading the public in this way. The experts of the CBO know perfectly well that the United States is never going to have a national debt of 716 percent of GDP or marginal tax rates of 88 percent. Long before anything like these absurd numbers were reached, policies would be changed to cut costs in medical spending. Long-term projections like these are just scary stories told to frighten the public into fiscal sobriety, in the same spirit that a parent would tell an overweight child that if she or he kept eating, then according to a straight-line computer projection, by the age of 40 she or he would weigh 23 tons.

As it happens, the CBO’s own rigorous work undercuts the apocalyptic narrative set forth by conservatives like Philip Klein. Here, from a CBO report of a few years back (the long-term projections have not significantly changed), is Box 2, “The Effect of the Aging of the Population on Spending on Medicare and Medicaid.”

This one graph disproves practically everything American conservatives say about the alleged unaffordability of entitlements. Note that the aging of the American population alone would only raise the share of GDP spent on Medicare and Medicaid slightly between now and 2082. The projected increase is almost entirely the result of excess cost growth in America’s dysfunctional medical-industrial sector and has next to nothing to do with aging. Now look at Figure 4, “Projected Spending on Health Care as a Percentage of Gross Domestic Product.”

Observe that the cancerous growth of healthcare costs occurs chiefly in private sector healthcare spending — not in Medicare and Medicaid. In other words, the cost problem is one of the entire U.S. medical industry, private and public alike. It is not a problem caused by “entitlements.”

Debating the solutions would take us too far from the subject, although it should be noted that most other countries control healthcare costs by means of “all-payer regulation” — that is, government-imposed price controls — not by means of market competition, the right’s unrealistic panacea, which no other nation uses, for the reason that simple market economics does not work in the healthcare sector. For the purposes of this discussion, it is sufficient to reproduce a final chart from the CBO report, Figure 5, “Federal Spending for Medicare and Medicaid as a Percentage of Gross Domestic Product Under Different Assumptions About Excess Cost Growth.”

Note that if the excess cost growth problem is solved, then the nightmare scenario never materializes, either in the near future or the distant future. Indeed, in the last few years, partly because of the loss of employer-based healthcare by the unemployed, and partly because of reforms in medical provision, healthcare cost growth in the U.S. has slowed. If that trend continues, then conservatives will no longer be able to claim that healthcare in general (not just Medicare and Medicaid) will eat up half the economy in 2082. The right will have to use other arguments to discredit Social Security and Medicare, like the hoary old claim that these programs are fascist or communist — an argument that has never persuaded the growing number of American voters who depend on Social Security and Medicare for their retirements and for protecting their physical health.

Philip Klein concludes his Op-Ed about how the welfare state is destroying America with further nonsense (you can’t claim he isn’t consistent). Reciting yet another right-wing myth, Klein asserts that because of Social Security and Medicare, the bond markets in general and the Chinese government in particular will stop lending America money and interest rates will skyrocket, destroying the American economy, yadda yadda yadda:

Just this past August, Standard and Poor’s downgraded U.S. debt for the first time in American history. Once bond holders abandon America, the nation will either have to dramatically cut spending, raise taxes steeply, or print money to buy up the debt — which would trigger massive inflation.

Where has he been since last August? Even a senior editorial writer at the Washington Examiner should be aware that the downgrading of America’s credit rating was followed by a rush of money into American bonds, not out of them, in defiance of the predictions of the deficit hawks. Evidently the bond markets think America is the world’s safe haven and are not terribly worried about long-term American entitlement costs.

The growing debt burden is also a national security risk, because it reduces America’s leverage against nations such as China, which owns a substantial amount of U.S. debt. And the fiscal crunch will force devastating cuts to our military — far beyond anything contemplated today.

Somebody should tell Klein that China’s export-oriented growth model depends on keeping its currency undervalued and accumulating dollars, which it then uses to buy dollar-denominated debt like U.S. Treasury bonds. If China revalued its currency, it would stop buying bonds to the detriment of its industries and to the benefit of many American exporters. If this were to happen, the U.S. deficit would shrink and we would need less external financing. Hurrah! In the long run there doubtless will be increases in U.S. interest rates, but they are unlikely to come about for the reasons that Klein and other apocalyptics on the right predict.

As for the Pentagon, the chief threat to the future of the U.S. military is neither the American welfare state nor the Chinese financial authorities, but the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which prefers round after round of tax cuts for the rich to the taxes that would permit the U.S. to fund both an adequate military and an affordable welfare state.

Klein concludes inescapably:

Thus, the conclusion is inescapable that, if America doesn’t end the welfare state as we have known it since 1935, it will end America as we know it today.

It may seem cruel to pick on Philip Klein, who is, after all, simply one of many minor hacks in the right-wing media machine controlled by billionaires like Anshutz and the Koch brothers. But it is worth reading the right’s propaganda now and then, just to find out how it is that so many of our conservative fellow citizens can have been so deceived.

Happy Australia Day

2012-01-26T15:30:00.004Z

God Save The Queen.

And no, I am not late. It is Beijing Time throughout China, regardless of when the sun rises. And it is GMT wherever the Queen is the Queen. It just is. So there.

On a serious note, and related to yesterday's post about the areas that rose, in one case with the Duke of Monmouth, in the other with his exiled cousins, by 2015 what they thought was their party will have condemned them to darkness long into the morning for much of the year, by having imposed Central European Time with the connivance of a Coalition partner which has already collapsed north of the Wash and is ripe for collapse west of the Solent.

But anyway, Happy Australia Day. God Save The Queen.

Sapere Aude

2012-01-26T15:27:00.002Z

As they say in Oldham, where a new Academy is to be staffed entirely by former personnel of the Armed Forces. Leaving aside the arguments around Academies, it was well withing living memory when boys' schools, especially, were staffed entirely or almost entirely by such personnel. This is nothing new. Nor, in itself, is it anything to worry about.

Below A Certain Level

2012-01-26T15:25:00.001Z

The raising of the income tax threshold is a gimmick if it is to be done apart from a wholesale restructuring which, among many other things, guaranteed everyone a tax-free income of at least half national median earnings at the given time.

Routed

2012-01-26T15:20:00.002Z

That's that call centre wallah told. It's only "rowting" in America. It's "rooting" in Britain. There is also a word "rowting", which like "rooting" is also spelled "routing", and there is a word both spelled and pronounced "rooting", but there is no time to go into any of that.

It is striking that the American pronunciation is apparently being used on the Subcontinent these days. Next, they will have adopted American spellings. Those people who said that we could retain a services sector even if we no longer made anything to service, where are you now? Bloody Bangalore, that's where.

Satyameva Jayate

2012-01-26T15:11:00.001Z

In considering the rise of India, we must be mindful that we are not necessarily dealing with India as we have known her.

The Hindu nationalist BJP is now about as likely as the Congress Party to be the principal party of government. Within and allied to the BJP are violently fascistic elements such as the Shiv Sena and those who massacre Christians in Orissa. Leadership is passing to Narendra Modi, who is heavily implicated in Gujarat’s anti-Muslim pogroms in recent years.

But the party centrally is increasingly seeking to join forces with political Islam around such causes as the strong nationalism that has always been expressed by the Darul Uloom Deoband, the conduct of Waqf Boards, and the recognition of Urdu as one of the “authentically” Indian languages to be promoted at the expense of English. However, the BJP has little or no understanding that patriotism must include economic patriotism.

The hope that the Sikhs, prominent in the Indian Army, will remain a bulwark of the old culturally Anglophile, politically pro-American Indian elite is not assisted by the realisation that the staunchly Sikh SAD relies on the BJP to deliver its majority at State level in Punjab, and therefore supports the BJP at Union level.

If there is a third force in India, then it is made up of Far Left parties, it is led by the party that followed Mao when he broke with the Soviet Union, and it includes the successors of Subhas Chandra Bose, who raised an army in support of the Japanese during the Second World War.

All in all, India’s nuclear weapons, like those of Israel and perhaps also those of the United States, should be regarded with no less trepidation than those of Pakistan or North Korea, and with considerably more so than those of China, Russia or, purely hypothetically, Iran.

The Unmaking of Israel

2012-01-26T15:02:00.004Z

Noah Millman writes:

Gershom Gorenberg is an exception to the rule—more than one rule. He’s an Orthodox Jewish Israeli of American origin, a group that generally tilts sharply to the right in an Israeli context. But he’s decidedly on the political left, an advocate of not only freezing settlement construction but of initiating evacuations “without waiting for a signature on a peace agreement,” of negotiating a two-state solution based on the Green Line (the armistice lines of 1949, the de facto borders prior to the 1967 war), of the separation of synagogue and state, and of true civic equality between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel. More than this, he has a realistic understanding of how the Zionist project must have been perceived by the Arab population of the Levant from the beginning: when he talks about the Palestinian Nakba—“catastrophe,” which is how the Palestinian Arabs refer to the events Israeli Jews call the War of Independence—he doesn’t put the word in scare quotes. But though Gorenberg is a man of the left, he also describes himself as a Zionist, rather than a non-, anti-, or post-Zionist. That is to say, he describes himself as a Jewish nationalist.

The State of Israel is also an exception to the rule—more than one rule. Like Greece and Algeria, India and Vietnam, Kenya and Lithuania, and numerous other states today, it is the fruit of a movement for national liberation, of a struggle, in the words of the Israeli national anthem, to be “a free people in our own land.” Unlike any other movement for national liberation, however, Zionism did not seek an independent state for an already existing nation living in a territory but rather to create a nation and a state out of a people scattered across the globe that had lived nearly two millennia in diaspora from its ancestral home. Like the United States and Canada, Brazil and Argentina, Australia and South Africa, Israel is also a settler state, created by a European population that came not merely to rule but to occupy and to substantially displace the indigenous people. Unlike any other settler state, however, the settlers of Israel understood themselves not to be venturing forth but to be coming home—and though individually any Israeli could make a home in any number of places, as could anyone from anywhere, in aggregate there is no other place on earth that they could call home.

This exceptional man has written a book, The Unmaking of Israel, about that exceptional state and its protracted and deepening crisis. And it is, appropriately enough, an exceptional contribution to the genre.

What is exceptional about the book is the frame within which Gorenberg chooses to tell a mostly familiar story—familiar, anyway, to anyone conversant with the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Gorenberg is not the first person to write a book decrying the human consequences of Israel’s settlement enterprise in the West Bank, and indeed, though he does decry them forcefully it is not the purpose of his book either to document them or to persuade anyone who does not already agree that the occupation has had frightful ramifications for the Palestinians. Nor is he the first person to make the “demographic argument” for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—the argument that Israel cannot remain both a democratic state and a Jewish state if it does not retain a substantial and stable Jewish majority, which would not be the case if the West Bank were incorporated into Israel proper. Indeed, this latter point is now part of the Israeli conventional wisdom—every party to the left of Likud formally endorses it, Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nominally accepts it as well, and even the platform of Avigdor Liberman’s far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party depends on the same premise (which is why that platform proposes trading the heavily Arab areas within the Green Line for the Israeli settlement blocs in the West Bank as part of a hypothetical agreement). But this is also not the primary thrust of Gorenberg’s book; he takes it for granted that everyone understands the basic arithmetic.

Rather, the thrust of the book, as the title states, is to demonstrate that the series of decisions made during and after the 1967 War that resulted in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza set in motion a process that has progressively “unmade” the State of Israel. Indeed, the progressive expansion of the settlement enterprise has so eroded the foundations of the signature achievement of political Zionism—Israel as we now know it—that not merely a “Jewish democratic state” but the state as such is now imperiled.

To make that case, Gorenberg begins by taking the reader back to the pre-state period and the early days of the Israeli state. Before independence, the Jewish community in Israel was subject to colonial rule but substantially governed itself through the various institutions of the yishuv and through manifold Zionist political movements and militias. Once national liberation was achieved, with the United Nations vote for partition and victory in the war of independence, Israel needed to get on with the process of state-building.

Israel’s first leader, David Ben-Gurion, pursued this aim in, again, a manner very familiar from other post-colonial states. The party of liberation established organs of the state—or took them over from the colonial power—but did so in such a manner that these organs were bound up, at least initially, with that same party, with the “losing” parties required to dissolve their pre-state institutions, particularly militias. The only “battle” Israel fought to achieve this goal was to sink the Altalena, a ship carrying arms for the Irgun, Menachem Begin’s right-wing militia, when the Irgun refused to hand those arms over to the Israel Defense Forces.

This decision by Ben-Gurion is Gorenberg’s object lesson in what it means to have a state: by using force early and decisively, Ben-Gurion assured that the state would have a monopoly of force, and would therefore be a state. It’s also a decision to which the losing party has never reconciled itself, and Gorenberg recounts how the Israeli right has made a rallying cry of the Altalena over the years. But for all the hand-wringing about Jews firing on other Jews, it’s worth pointing out that Israel made the transition from a revolutionary national movement to a functioning state more successfully than many other decolonizing countries, particularly given the nature of the challenges it faced. (Most notably the need to integrate an enormous wave of mostly poor immigrants that, while sharing a sense of common peoplehood, was divided into wildly different cultural and linguistic groups.)

But with the dramatic victory of 1967, Israel was tempted by the conquered territory to reverse this historical progression and revert to the pre-state condition of being a national movement. Israel captured two different categories of land in 1967. The Sinai and the Golan Heights were recognized by the world generally as the sovereign territory of Egypt and Syria. While Israel planted settlements in both areas—and actually annexed the Golan Heights—the nature of the conflict over these territories is an inter-state manner and will be resolved in the usual way between states. (As indeed it was with Egypt after the Camp David accords.)

The West Bank and Gaza, however, were neither annexed nor administered according to the Geneva Conventions for occupied territory. They were settled without regard to the law, rather in the manner of Jewish settlement in the pre-state period, except with a combination of active and passive state backing: active when the settlements were planned by the Israeli government, passive when they were established by “wildcat” settlers and then retroactively approved, a process that has accelerated during the years since the Oslo accords. The Israeli state broke its own and international law, but more alarmingly from the perspective of the integrity of the state, it encouraged private parties to believe that they were acting patriotically when they broke the law and forced the state’s hand, all in an effort to establish “facts on the ground” that would (those responsible presumably thought) redound to Israel’s benefit—or, more properly, to the benefit of the “Jewish national movement,” since Gorenberg’s contention is that this activity in fact damaged Israel as a state and since it wouldn’t be correct to talk about this or that activity benefiting an entire ethnic or religious group like “the Jews.”

Since 1967, Gorenberg relates, the settlement enterprise has undermined the Israeli state top to bottom. It has fostered secrecy and corruption in government. (There is no proper accounting anywhere of spending on settlements; the figures simply aren’t kept.) It has inspired messianic religious groups that do not recognize the state as the final authority over questions of territory or war and peace and then encouraged these groups to greater and greater influence within the armed forces—because they could be relied upon to serve in the territories without loss of morale—raising the specter of a split in the army should the government ever decide to withdraw from the West Bank. And as relations between Jews and Arabs in the West Bank took on the character of an armed ethnic contest, this dynamic has been imported back into Israel proper, where private groups—frequently with some degree of state support—have engaged in campaigns to “Judaize” predominantly Arab parts of the state.

Again the story is familiar. Less so is the framing. Gorenberg, though he is outraged by the plight of the Palestinians, is not really writing about that plight. Nor is he writing from an anti-Zionist perspective. Rather, he is writing from a deeply Zionist point of view. Zionism, we tend to forget, was not a self-defense movement. It was a nationalist movement. Nationalism tells a people a story about what it means to be free—that being free means being part of a self-conscious, self-governing, sovereign, and independent collective. Losing consciousness of one’s national group, being governed by other groups, failing to achieve independence and sovereignty on par with other nations—these are signs of unfreedom. Of immaturity. The Jews before Zionism were, from the perspective of this narrative, either an exceptionally immature nation or not a nation at all. The goal of Zionism was not simply—or even primarily—to provide for a “safe haven” for Jews fleeing persecution by the Czar or the Nazis. The goal was the spiritual rejuvenation of the Jewish people by molding them into a nation like other nations and achieving independent statehood.

This is a narrative frame that, in broad strokes, Gorenberg accepts, which is why he is properly seen as a Zionist. Indeed, the whole argument of the book is that by holding onto and settling the territories captured in 1967, Israel has reverted to a mode of existence that Zionism was supposed to help the Jews grow out of. By undermining the authority of the state, the settlement enterprise has revived modes of being and of argument that, from Gorenberg’s perspective, the Jewish people should have grown out of when they acquired the power and responsibility of a state. Indeed, that was the whole point, from a moral perspective, of acquiring state power in the first place. The settlement enterprise doesn’t just undermine the moral case for Israel because it’s an injustice (plenty of states have perpetrated injustices—indeed, far worse injustices—without undermining the case for statehood as such) but because it is evidence that Zionism failed in what was arguably its primary objective.

Gorenberg wrote his book primarily for a Jewish audience. Based on what he has said about the reception when he has gone to synagogues and other venues to talk about his book, much of the opposition from within the Jewish community refuses to be confronted with painful facts, determined to shout down and shut out the messenger with the unwelcome message. But I can imagine a more forthright approach for the opposition. Gorenberg is making the case that Israel has encouraged the reversion to a pre-state mode of being; it has revived a situation where Jews are locked in ethnic conflict with their neighbors rather than dominating an independent state with relations (whether conflicted or harmonious) with neighboring states. But why blame Israel for this? How do we know that the pre-state situation ever really ended? Did the Arab states make peace in 1949? No. Have the Palestinians reconciled themselves to the idea of a Jewish state? No. Have the Palestinian citizens of Israel at least reconciled themselves to it? No. So why should Israel effectively disarm themselves and say: we’ve got enough; we’re not going to fight for more—even though you will continue to fight so that we have less. Why should Israel be the sucker?

I don’t think the proper answer to this is to get back into a debate about the facts, or about who is more and who less justified in their specific actions. I think the proper answer is in that famous line of Ben-Gurion’s: “What matters is not what the goyim say, but what the Jews do.” The line is usually quoted as a rejoinder to concerns about “what will the world think” if Israel does such and such. But it is equally a proper rejoinder to justifying Israel’s conduct by reference to the hostility of the Palestinians, or anyone else, to Zionism. Zionism’s goal was a sovereign, independent Jewish state in the historic land of Israel, as a means to the moral and spiritual rebirth of the Jewish nation. If the occupation is destroying Israel’s fundamental character, dismantling the state, and corrupting the people, as Gorenberg contends, then Zionists above all should want to end it, as swiftly and comprehensively as possible, and not try to hold out for the most favorable terms—to say nothing of holding out for the approval and acceptance of those for whom the Jewish state can at best be seen as an unfortunate fact of life.

After all, it was always absurd to think that anyone but the Jewish people would ever truly endorse the aims of Zionism, because Zionism was a specifically Jewish national project. That project is properly judged a success or failure by what kind of nation it built, and how. Which is how Gorenberg judges it. And, to his dismay but not despair, he finds it wanting.

1685, 1715, 1745, 2015

2012-01-25T16:18:00.005Z

The Lib Dems ran an old-fashioned West Country Liberal campaign in 2010, and not without success: the rural Radicalism of class as it expresses itself in agricultural communities, of chapel versus church, and all the rest of it. Not without success. Yet within a week, they found themselves in coalition with the Conservatives. For whom does that obviously still numerous body of opinion vote now?

And what of the rural Radicalism of the North of Scotland, a very similar affair? If the Crofters' Party had lasted another 10 years, then it would have been an integral part of the emergence of the Labour Movement, rather than being subsumed into the Liberals and then caught up in their decline after the First World War.

If Labour cannot clear up after this - in the West Country, there is no either viable option at all - then yet another item will have been added to the ledger headed "Reasons to forget about the Labour Party and start again".

Penny Paying Court

2012-01-25T15:55:00.001Z

In that case, Laurie Penny, make Legal Aid available for libel actions. Or have I missed something?

If the English law of libel is no longer enforceable in America, then why are the American criminalisations of breach of copyright and breach of contract still enforceable through the courts here, in that they continue to order extradition in such cases?

No Small Claim

2012-01-25T13:42:00.002Z

Legislation is urgently necessary to disapply any ruling of the European Court of Human Rights, or of the European Court of Justice, or of the “Supreme Court”, unless and until ratified by a resolution of the House of Commons, the High Court of Parliament, the real Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, itself urgently needing to be elected by a system more representative of public opinion, with the general electorate having the decisive say in the selection of party candidates no less than in choosing among them and others.

The Crossroads of America

2012-01-25T13:39:00.003Z

With a brokered convention looking increasingly likely, the Republicans replied to the State of the Union Address in the person and words of Mitch Daniels.

A grandson of Syrian Christians.

Turning His Baton Rouge

2012-01-25T13:34:00.002Z

Newt Gingrich's PhD was on the Belgian colonial administration in the Congo. It cited numerous sources in French, and was partly based on interviews conducted in Brussels.

More than that, though, one of those states which have Catholic majority populations, which continue to contain strongholds of conservative Democrats at local level, and which these days return one Republican and one fairly conservative Democrat to the Senate, the sort of states that the Republican nominee has to win, not only has a Napoleonic law code, but has French as one of its official languages.

"Fecklessness and Irresponsibility"

2012-01-25T13:18:00.008Z

Quite apart from the fact that being out of step with public opinion is rather reminiscent of Jesus and of the Prophets before Him, whose call was frequently and powerfully for social justice, the sometime News of the World columnist George Carey is an almost completely American figure with hardly any ties to the intellectual life of the Church of England, or of either liberal or orthodox American Episcopalianism rather than those nominal Anglicans who in fact inhabit his own transdenominational subculture. The political consequences of the disestablishment of the Episcopal Church in the South have been vast, and are very much ongoing.

He is a leading light among those figures very much of the present age, liberals with Charismatic backgrounds, who assume their own experience to be theologically normative. He retains a certain gut aversion to the mechanics of male homosexuality, but that is as far as any orthodoxy on his part really goes, and he cheerfully raised to the purple two men who engaged in such acts, both from the constituency at which the Ordinariate is aimed, although neither of them has joined it.

His closest links, of many decades' standing, are to the world of those who, if they read books at all, imagine the writings of Ayn Rand to be, if not the Gospel itself, then fully compatible with it, and who would have thought of George W Bush as a latter-day Saint Louis, if they had ever heard of Saint Louis. Yet, as his buddies across the Atlantic presumably do not know, he campaigned for the Crown Dependencies to adopt the 1967 Abortion Act. It is his much-maligned successor who is totally pro-life. Attempts to present Carey as a bastion of orthodoxy are simply laughable.

The fact that he can come out with this proves that: all that the bishops said, and the House of Lords accepted, was that Child Benefit (which some people seem to think is only paid to the unemployed - yes, they really are as out of touch as that) should not be counted towards the cap, since the procreation of human life is a good in itself. What would you have instead? Abortion? The mass importation of Muslims to fill the vast economic gaps left by underpopulation? What, exactly?

But Carey endeared himself to the ferociously pro-abortion Margaret Thatcher, likewise a person with no discernible political philosophy and dependent on blow-ins to conservatism (as was she), who were able to persuade the half-educated that their position was somehow at least amenable to the political expression of a Christianity to which, unlike Carey, she had in any case retained only a cultural attachment.

Restore The Things That Are Gone To Decay

2012-01-24T21:51:00.007Z

"With this sword do justice, stop the growth of iniquity, protect the holy Church of God, help and defend widows and orphans, restore the things that are gone to decay, maintain the things that are restored, punish and reform what is amiss and confirm what is in good order."

So says the Archbishop of Canterbury as he hands the Sword of State to the monarch.

Shaftesbury and Wilberforce used the full force of the State to stamp out abuses of the poor at home and slavery abroad, both of which are now well on the way back in this secularised age. Victorian Nonconformists used the Liberal Party to fight against opium dens and the compelling of people to work seven-day weeks, both of which have now returned in full. Temperance Methodists built the Labour Party in order to counteract brutal capitalism precisely so as to prevent a Marxist revolution, whereas the coherence of the former with the cultural aspects of the latter now reigns supreme. But not in the House of Lords. Long may it remain.

As in most European countries, and as in anywhere having the British monarch at the Head, our State is in and of itself an institutional expression of Christianity, whether or not there is an Established Church. Therefore, our Welfare State and other social democratic measures, as in those other countries, are in and of themselves expression of Christian charity and of the Biblical, Patristic, Medieval, Catholic and classically Protestant understandings of society as an organic whole.

American critics of the Welfare State as secular and secularising are not only rather ahistorical in their own terms and somewhat out of touch with the profound Christianity of rural, working-class and black America. They are also captive to the theory of the constitutional separation of Church and State, which has nothing to do with Britain any more than with, say, Germany with her church taxes and her Kirchentag, or Italy with her Crucifixes in the courtroom and the classroom. The solution is not to remove the expressions of Christian charity and of the Christian concepts of organic society from the American civic order, but to remove the American civic order's formal repudiation of their basis.

What we have seen in today's nominally conservative and Tory media has been what we also saw when the neoconservative wars were most enthusiastically promoted by media moguls who, far from being conservative figures, were somehow all and yet none of Australian, American and British, or somehow all and yet none of Canadian, American and British. Those media have been the prime movers in turning first New Labour, and then also its imitators who have taken over the Conservative Party, into what most of Britain’s supposedly conservative and Tory newspapers have long been: more loyal to the United States and to the State of Israel than to the United Kingdom.

A position as unconservative and as far removed from Labourism as it is possible to imagine, and without parallel in any comparable country, if in any country at all. In short, wannabe Americanism, and an abstract America at that, not the really existing country. The sort of thing that the Founding Fathers had in mind, "free" from Christendom and therefore from the principles that begat social democracy in the industrial and post-industrial age.

The bishops did not persuade the House of Lords that there should be no cap whatever on a household's benefit entitlement, but only that it should not include Child Benefit. The universal payment of Child Benefit to mothers is a very strong argument for the restoration of the tax allowance for fathers, and with it for the whole series of measures necessary for the State to do its Christian duty of securing paternal authority, including the economic basis of that authority in high-wage, high-skilled, high-status employment.

And Child Benefit is one of the means whereby the State acknowledges that the procreation of human life is a good in and of itself, in obedience to the first commandment of God to Man in Scripture. Our civilisation, including its social democracy, was built and can only be sustained on that very high, Biblical view of human demographic, economic and cultural expansion and development. We must understand climate change in that light: over thousands of years, our species has demonstrated its God-given capacity to meet environmental challenges and to overcome environmental obstacles. We have to retain our full confidence in that capacity. One small way of doing so is by retaining universal Child Benefit while not counting it towards any - in itself, necessary - cap on entitlement.

Unite and Fight

2012-01-24T21:48:00.002Z

Merger between Unite and the PCS? But the PCS is not affiliated, they say.

Well, NALGO was never affiliated. When it merged with NUPE and COHSE, which were, then Unison set up both the General Political Fund and the Affiliated Political Fund.

In very different circumstances from today's...

Dereliction of Duty

2012-01-24T20:03:00.002Z

Ever going to war with Iraq in the first place.

Today, the funding sources of global Wahhabism have decreed that the Christians of Syria must get what the Christians of Iraq have been given.

Next on the hit list, the Assyrians, Armenians, Zoroastrians, Jews, highly educated women, and internationally acclaimed film-makers of Iran.

Multiple Failures

2012-01-24T19:55:00.002Z

We are finally going to stop paying out through the benefits system for "polygamous partners" legally acquired in countries where that is possible.

Plenty of people seem to agree with us. At Bani Walid, they have risen in revolt against the (entirely unelected) new Libyan government. The first action of which was to legalise polygamy.

Things Fall Apart

2012-01-24T18:31:00.003Z

A trillion pounds of national debt, 64 per cent of GDP.

The "Work" "Programme" has been exposed as a veritable Baroque palace of incompetence and fraud.

The collapse of a foreign company is about to deprive London and the South East of 20 per cent of their fuel.

It's like Tony Blair never went away. Then again, has he, really?

A Beacon In The North

2012-01-24T18:20:00.009Z

Pace Alex Salmond, Scotland is already a beacon. But that is precisely because in Scotland, as in Wales and Northern Ireland, they still get to live somewhere that it is recognisably Britain. Whereas in England, we are the guinea pigs in the never-ending crazy experiments of the think tank schoolboys.

Free prescriptions, free eye and dental treatment, free hospital parking, free undergraduate tuition (although that is meaningless without the payment of living costs, which is why Scotland still has a lower rate of working-class participation than any other part of the United Kingdom), free long term care in old age: these all point to Herbert Morrison's principle that all parts of the United Kingdom must benefit equally from social democracy, and to the fiercely Unionist Aneurin Bevan's famous "platform broad enough for all to stand upon".

Only the institutions of the United Kingdom can deliver them throughout what is currently the United Kingdom. If there were a proper Labour Party in this Parliament, then that would be a key plank of its platform. Beginning with the withdrawal or defeat of the appalling, thoroughly unpatriotic Blairite nightmare that is the Health and Social Care Bill. One for the bishops? I don't see anyone else.

Return of the Nutters

2012-01-24T18:16:00.000Z

You probably know someone who has a glass of wine or a pint of beer every night, and who has been doing so for many years. Imagine if they had been skinning up instead. There you are, then. Point made.

I am not denying that alcohol does damage. But the doing of that damage is not its only possible recreational use, as is the case with those drugs which are rightly proscribed under the criminal law.

We need a single class of illegal drug, with a crackdown on the possession of drugs, including a mandatory sentence of three months for a second offence, six months for a third offence, one year for a fourth offence, and so on. Within a context in which each offence carries a minimum sentence of one third of its maximum sentence, or of 15 years for life.

Work is resuming in the right circles on an old idea to do a David Nutt and set up our own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. It will be exactly as "politically neutral" as his. Or anyone else's. Inevitably. Watch this space.

The Nutter Generation has done enormous damage under its puppet Governments since 1997, with only a brief interlude under Gordon Brown. In my day at school and university, it was very definitely abnormal to take illegal drugs, thank goodness. It went on, but even so. Whereas now, it is well on the way to being mainstream again. Just as the likes of David Nutt have always wanted.

Degeneration

2012-01-24T18:09:00.003Z

Poor Jim Naughtie was beside himself that the use of embryonic stem cells had allegedly caused an improvement in two cases of macular degeneration. And poor Professor Daniel Brison of Manchester had to tell him to calm down and that - read this over until it sinks in - the improvements had been in the untreated eyes.

The term "stem cell research" is persistently used to mean scientifically worthless but morally abhorrent playing about with embryonic stem cells, together with the viciously cruel justification of this by reference to an ever-longer list of medical conditions.

The real stem cell research involves adult and cord blood stem cells, is ethically unproblematic, and has already yielded real results. But it struggles to secure funding, because it is of no interest to those who cannot forgive the Catholic Church either for having educated them or for having educated the wrong sort.

Hard Times Again

2012-01-24T17:48:00.005Z

Theodore Dalrymple writes:

We live in hard times, and all the indications are that they may get much, even very much, harder. No one, at any rate, would take a bet that they won’t.

The number of children in America claiming subsidized meals in school has shot up; the homeless are increasing by the hour; the formerly prosperous are laid off without so much as a thank you; the young struggle to find any work at all; beggars are making a comeback on the streets of cities as if they had been hiding all these years, waiting for the right moment to emerge from their subterranean lairs into the world above.

The February bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, then, could hardly come at a more appropriate moment in economic history, for Dickens was the revealer, the scourge, the prose poet, of urban destitution—a destitution that, in our waking nightmares, we fear may yet return.

Dickens knew whereof he wrote. It was his habit to walk miles through the streets of London, and no man—except perhaps Henry Mayhew—was more observant than he. Often accused by his detractors of exaggerating reality, he claimed in the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit that he merely saw what others did not see, or chose not to see, and put it into plain words. What was caricature to some was to him no more than the unvarnished truth. He held up a mirror to his age.

The adjective “Dickensian” is more laden with connotation than the adjective that pertains to any other writer: Jamesian, for example, or Joycean, even Shakespearian. We think of workhouses, of shabby tenements with bedding of rags, of schools where sadistic and exploitative schoolmasters beat absurdities into the heads of hungry children, of heartless proponents of the cold charity, of crooked lawyers spinning out their cases in dusty, clerk-ridden chambers. We think of Oliver Twist asking for more, of Wackford Squeers exclaiming, “Here’s richness for you!”, as he tastes the thin slops his school doles out to his unfortunate pupils, of Mrs. Gamp looking at her patient and saying, “He’d make a lovely corpse!”

If he had been only a social commentator, though, Dickens would have been forgotten by all except specialist historians of his age. But he is not forgotten; he survives the notorious defects of his books—their sometimes grotesque sentimentality, their sprawling lack of construction, their frequent implausibility—to achieve whatever immortality literature can confer. Over and over again, in passage after passage, the sheer genius of his writing shines from the page and is the despair of all prose writers after him.

When Dickens called himself “the Inimitable,” he was speaking no more than the truth; he was the greatest comic writer in his, or perhaps in any other, language. And the comedy runs deep: it is not trivial, for while it depicts absurdity, pomposity, and even cruelty, it has the curious effect of reconciling us to life even as it lays human weaknesses out for our inspection.

Sairey Gamp, for example, the drunken, slatternly nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit, is as undesirable a creature as it is possible to be. Who would want to be nursed by her? She is, in effect, the exemplar of the need for the reform of an entire profession. Yet by a peculiar kind of alchemy Dickens makes us glad that there is a world in which a Mrs. Gamp can exist. A world without characters such as she would be the poorer for their absence.

When, gloriously, she says of the gin in the teapot, “Don’t ask me to take none, but put it on the chimbley piece, and let me put my lips to it when I feel so dispoged,” our hearts leap with an indefinable joy. The verbal genius of the simple replacement of the s in disposed by the g delights us. (Though no doubt Dickens would have told us that he actually had heard such a transposition rather than invented it, so that his genius was in noticing and remembering, not in inventing, which is a reproach to our own lack of observation.) The slattern’s ridiculous pretension to gentility and refinement, while maintaining her slovenliness, incites us to reflect upon our own pretensions—pretense being the permanent condition of mankind.

And while our love of Mrs. Gamp, tinged as it no doubt is by guilt that we can feel any affection for so disgraceful a being, does not prevent us from recognizing the obvious need for nursing to be placed on a more respectable footing, it also performs the function of restraining our wish for soulless perfection. A perfect world, or rather an attempted perfect world, in which there were no Dickensian characters would be a living hell.

I think this is what a student of English at the North Korean Foreign Languages Institute was driving at when he sidled up to me in Pyongyang and said, quickly and sotto voce (for unscripted communication with foreigners was dangerous for North Koreans), “Reading Shakespeare and Dickens is the greatest, the only, joy of my life.” I was, of course, in great admiration of the feat of his having learned English of such proficiency that he could appreciate the two authors while never having left his hermetic native hell and communicate his enthusiasm for them so elegantly. No doubt Dickens had been taught to him as a means of demonstrating the diabolical nature of capitalist society; but the lesson he had drawn from Dickens was quite otherwise, that Mrs. Gamp (for example), impoverished and degraded as she was, at least spoke in what was unmistakably her own voice and not that compelled by any political master. She was free as no North Korean was free.
• • •
As we live in hard times, it is worth considering Dickens’s novel of that title, especially as political economy is one of its most important themes. Has this book, published more than a century and a half ago, anything to say to us about our present predicament, beyond young Tom Gradgrind’s exclamation, “For God’s sake, don’t talk about bankers”?

Dickens is often reproached for his absence of firm and unequivocal moral, political, and philosophical outlook. He veers crazily between the ferociously reactionary and the mushily liberal. He lampoons the disinterested philanthropy of Mrs. Jellyby (in Bleak House) with the same gusto or ferocity as he excoriates the egotism of Mr. Veneering (in Our Mutual Friend). He suggests that businessmen are heartless swine (Bounderby in Hard Times) or disinterestedly charitable (the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby). He satirizes temperance (in The Pickwick Papers) as much as he derides drunkenness (in Martin Chuzzlewit). The evil Jew (in Oliver Twist) is matched by the saintly Jew (in Our Mutual Friend). As Stephen Blackpool, the working-class hero of Hard Times says, “it’s aw a muddle.”

George Orwell, in his famous essay on Dickens, saw in this philosophical and moral muddle not a weakness but a strength, a generosity of spirit, an openness to the irreducible complexity of mankind’s moral situation, an immunity to what he called “the smelly little orthodoxies that are now contending for our souls.” And indeed, the principal target of Hard Times is such an orthodoxy, namely a hard-nosed utilitarianism combined with an unbending liberalism. (Liberal in the economic, not cultural, sense.)

The principal bearers of the doctrine are Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby. Gradgrind is a teacher whose statement of pedagogical philosophy is surely one of the greatest opening passages of any novel ever written:

Now what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!

By the end of the novel, Gradgrind has learned the insufficiency of facts for the conduct of human life, as he might have done merely by a little self-examination or reflection on the nature of moral and aesthetic judgment. It cannot be said that Gradgrind is a caricature, a character so exaggerated that he never did or could exist: passage after passage in Hard Times parallels almost exactly the account of John Stuart Mill’s education in his Autobiography, published 19 years after the novel. Furthermore, “the minds of reasoning animals” exactly captures the flavor of much recent scientistic writing about the human condition. Like hope in the human breast, scientism springs eternal in the human mind.

Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, the mill owner, claims to have come up in the world the hard way:

My mother left me to my grandmother, and, according to the best of my remembrance, my grandmother was the wickedest and the worst old woman that ever lived. If I got a little pair of shoes by any chance, she would take ’em off and sell ’em for drink… . She kept me in an egg-box. As soon as I was big enough to run away, of course I ran away. Then I became a young vagabond; and instead of one old woman knocking me about and starving me, everybody of all ages knocked me about and starved me.

This turns out to be quite untrue. In fact, his parents made sacrifices on his behalf, but the lie justifies his philosophy, that workers who ask for higher pay want turtle soup to be fed them from a golden spoon, that the slightest regulation of child labor will drive employers into bankruptcy and force them to abandon their factories, that the smoke belching from the mills not only cannot be reduced but is actually healthful for the lungs, that any form of collective action by the “hands” is the first stage of violent revolution, that any form of charity is the encouragement of idleness. In short: “What you couldn’t show to be purchasable in the cheapest market and salable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.”

Again, this is scarcely caricature. During the Irish famine, liberals like Charles Trevelyan—at the time to the left of the political spectrum—argued that to provide any form of relief to the starving was to encourage the very habits and practices, to say nothing of the overpopulation, that caused the famine in the first place. An abstract truth, as they believed it to be, overrode all considerations of humanity. True compassion consisted of letting events take their course.

One might have supposed, then, that Dickens would be much in favor of the unions; but in fact his depiction of the union leader, Slackbridge, in Hard Times is very unfavorable. He realized that demagogic leaders were perfectly capable of ensnaring good men en masse:

Slackbridge was not so honest, he was not so manly, he was not so good-humored [as his audience]; he substituted cunning for their simplicity, and passion for their safe solid sense… . Strange as it always is to consider any assembly in submissively resigning itself to the dreariness of any complacent person … it was even particularly affecting to see this crowd of honest faces, whose honesty in the main no competent observer free from bias could possibly doubt, agitated by such a leader.

Under the impact of today’s economic crisis, the shrillness of opposing camps, of diagnosers, prognosticators, and curers, has increased. Even the same financial page of the same newspaper may have articles proposing diametrically opposed solutions, the only thing in common between them being the certainty with which they are offered. Each has a single simple principle, Gradgrindian or not, that is the supposed key to happiness, prosperity, economic growth. But now more than ever it is necessary to suppress our inherent tendency to seek the key to all questions, and reading Dickens may help us to do it.

In The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961, Fr Ian Ker identifies Charles Dickens (1906) both as Chesterton’s best work and as the key to understanding his Catholicism. “It is a typically Chestertonian paradox that while Dickens was nothing if not ignorant of and prejudiced against Catholicism as well as the Middle Ages, it is his unconsciously Catholic and Mediaeval ethos that is the heart of Chesterton’s critical study.”

First, Chesterton’s Dickens celebrated the ordinary, and rejoiced in sheer living and even sheer being. He was originally a “higher optimist” whose “joy is in inverse proportion to the grounds for so rejoicing,” because he simply “falls in love with” the universe, and “those love her with most intensity who love her with least cause.” Hence the exaggeration of Dickens’s caricatures, expressing both the heights of the highs and the depths of the lows in the life of one who looks at the world in this way.

For, secondly, Dickens created “holy fools”: Toots in Dombey and Son, Miss Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend, the Misses Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit, to name but a few. Dickens also “created a personal devil in every one of his books,” figures with the “atrocious hilarity” of gargoyles. In either case, since the everyday world is so utterly extraordinary and extraordinary things so much a part of the everyday, so the absurd is utterly real and the real is utterly absurd. Postmodern, or what? Read Dickens, then read Chesterton on Dickens, and then re-read Dickens: who needs wilful French obscurantism in the name of ‘irony’?

And thirdly, then, Dickens was the true successor of Merry England, unlike his “pallid” contemporaries, the Pre-Raphaelites and “Gothicists”, whose “subtlety and sadness” was in fact “the spirit of the present day” after all. It was Dickens who “had the things of Chaucer”: “the love of large jokes and long stories and brown ale and all the white roads of England”; “story within story, every man telling a tale"; and "something openly comic in men’s motley trades”.

Dickens’s defence of Christmas was therefore a fight “for the old European festival, Pagan and Christian”, i.e., for “that trinity of eating, drinking and praying that to moderns appears irreverent”, unused as the modern mind is to “the holy day which is really a holiday.” Dickens’s defence of Christmas was therefore a fight “for the old European festival, Pagan and Christian”, i.e., for “that trinity of eating, drinking and praying that to moderns appears irreverent”, unused as the modern mind is to “the holy day which is really a holiday.”

Fr Ker traces these themes in Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. The former presents Catholicism, in profoundly Dickensian terms, as “that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar which Christendom has rightly termed romance”, which meets the need “so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome.” Yet so to view the world is precisely to realise “that there is something the matter”, which is why pagans have always been “conscious of the Fall if they were conscious of nothing else”, since (and this is obviously much more controversial) Original Sin “in the only part of Christian theology which can be proved,” so that “the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition”, but rather “the normal itself is an abnormality.” Once again, this is like Postmodernism, only older, wiser, better.

Better not least because, for Chesterton, it was this view of the world’s flawed goodness that made Dickens a social reformer, since he recognised people’s degraded dignity. One is made by Christianity “fond of this world, even in order to change it”, in contrast to simple (one might say, Whig or Marxist) optimism or simple pessimism (such as that of much of the political Right), each of which discourages reform. We have to “hate [the world] enough to want to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing”, for it is “at once an ogre’s castle, to be stormed, and yet our own cottage, to which we can return at evening.”

Such was the view of Dickens and of Chesterton; and such is the Christian view, uniquely, as all of Christianity’s critics unwittingly concede by simultaneously accusing it both of excessive optimism and of excessive pessimism. Chesterton presciently predicted that an age of unbelief would be an age of conservatism (in the worst sense), whereas for the orthodox “in the hearts of men, God has been put under the feet of Satan, so that there can always be a revolution; for a revolution is a restoration.” Furthermore, “A strict rule is not only necessary for ruling; it is also necessary for rebelling”, since “a fixed and familiar ideal is necessary to any sort of revolution.”

Praise The Lords

2012-01-23T22:57:00.001Z

The root of the problem is the sale of council housing. That policy compelled the State to make gifts of significant capital assets to people who were thus enabled to enter the property market ahead of private tenants who had saved for their deposits. And, as part of Thatcher’s invention of mass benefit dependency, it created the Housing Benefit racket, which is vastly more expensive than the maintenance of a stock of council housing.

It was as wrong to silence the voice of the aristocratic social conscience by abolishing hereditary barons as to silence the voice of organised labour by abolishing trade union barons. One way or another, both of those voices must be heard again. The principle of male primogeniture in the hereditary peerage, and in the monarchy, does in fact point to the importance of the male line, and thus to the paternal authority of which the State has a duty to guarantee the economic basis.

That basis is intimately bound up both with public ownership (which is also a key safeguard of national sovereignty and of the Union) and with trade unionism, as well with the pursuit, in which the unions are again significant, of the peace that protects children from being deprived of their fathers, who are thus able to exercise their familial and wider social responsibilities precisely as fathers, assisted as ever by the State. Another such sign is the presence in Parliament of bishops, as such, who are addressed as “Fathers in God”, and who therefore are and must remain male. In similar vein, the silencing both of the aristocratic social conscience and of organised labour has been in no small part the silencing of Catholicism.

Thank goodness that there is still some part of our parliamentary system from which it remains possible to speak from outside the nasty but inevitable union between, on the one hand, what has always been the anti-parliamentary New Left and, on the other hand, the sociologically indistinguishable New Right’s arrival at hatred of Parliament as the natural conclusion of its hatred of the State. From that union, together with the SDP’s misguided Alliance with the Liberals around their practically Bennite constitutional agenda, derives the Political Class’s desire to abolish the House of Lords.

For those who keep such scores, the House of Lords has a higher proportion of women, a higher proportion of people from ethnic minorities, a broader range of ethnic minorities, and far more people from working-class backgrounds generally and the trade union movement in particular, than can be found down the corridor. More significantly, and despite the very hard efforts of successive governments, it also retains a broader range of political opinion, more reflective of the country at large.

But that is under grave threat, both from the party machines and from the way of all flesh. The future composition of the House would be secured, at least in part, by providing for each current life peer, at least who attends very or fairly regularly, to name an heir, by no means necessarily or even ordinarily a relative, but rather a political and a wider intellectual soul mate. That heir would become a peer upon his or her nominator’s death, and would thus acquire the same right of nomination.

Equity

2012-01-23T20:34:00.003Z

The voting rights of shareholders should be made conditional, by statute, on having held the shares in question for at least 12 months.

Mean

2012-01-23T20:32:00.001Z

I was just about able to believe that £26,000 was the mean, certainly not the median, gross income. But net? So that the gross figure is around £35,000? Pull the other one.

Chinese New Year, Chinese New Century

2012-01-23T14:14:00.001Z

China still makes things, builds things and mines things, putting the jobs, heat and light of her people first. She is emerging from the gangster capitalism that always follows Communism by returning to her own culture, which is firmly centred on the family and the local community, reveres tradition and ritual, upholds government by moral rather than physical force, affirms the Golden Rule, is Agrarian and Distributist, has barely started an external war in five thousand years, and is especially open to completion by, in, through and as classical Christianity. She takes Africa seriously, even going there to secure the food supply necessary for her to give up the extremely anti-Confucian one child policy.

The correct response to the rise of China is therefore a return to making things, building things and mining things. To prioritising jobs, heat and light. To the family and the local community. To tradition and ritual. To moral rather than physical force. To the Golden Rule. To Agrarianism and Distributism. To a pronounced aversion to war. To the classical Christianity that completes and transcends Confucianism, in no way destroying it. To a very Classical and Patristic openness to, and interest in, Africa. And to the glorious celebration of the fact that the very last thing wrong with the world is that it has people in it.

Hostility to China, like hostility to Russia, is frequently nothing more than the student Trotskyism of those who manifest it, and they ought to have grown out of that a long time ago.

Setting Our Cap

2012-01-23T14:07:00.003Z

There should be a single form of payment, called and providing Social Security, and fixed permanently at half median earnings, however much that happened to be from financial year to financial year. It would cost next to nothing to administer. Like, for example, free public transport. Or free prescriptions, free eye and dental treatment, and free hospital parking.

IDS, over to you. And to the Lords Spiritual, successors of the upper and upper-middle-class people who joined the early Labour Party precisely because their backgrounds and involvement in the Church of England made them familiar with the importance of State action against social evils, and they used their new party as a platform from which to defend Establishment against Liberal assaults.

Apart from a certain numbers of individuals who keep the Red Benches the right shade of red, notably Lord Glasman and Lord Stoddart, the Bench of Bishops looks like the best-organised presence of what this Parliament desperately needs, a party of return to the trade union, co-operative, Radical Liberal, Tory populist, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and other non-Marxist roots from which once sprang the Labour Movement. IDS is not without his Tory populist and Social Catholic sides, either. He needs to ask himself what he is doing in this mess.

Pain In The Balkans

2012-01-22T23:46:00.003Z

Just how bad must life be in Croatia, if they sincerely feel that they would be better off in the EU?

Going With The Wind

2012-01-22T23:42:00.003Z

For at least 20 years, the intellectual heavyweights among American Calvinists, Confessional Lutherans, and more conservative heirs of the Wesleys, have been warning that the Evangelical popular culture was in crisis.

Behind the razzmatazz, they cautioned, it merely baptised the presuppositions of a certain confluence of ethnic, regional, generational and class factors. The theological foundation and framework were nonexistent at best, and even that best was far from the norm.

If that subculture has now rallied to Newt Gingrich, then those scholars' point has been proved even more than it was in the Dubya years. But who will give them a suitably prominent place in the conversation? They accrue to bodies such as, most obviously, the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

Newtered

2012-01-22T16:54:00.005Z

The Republican contest will now drone on for months before Mitt Romney is nominated anyway. Oh, what fun. But also a grave abrogation of responsibility. For all practical purposes, America at federal level is now a one-party state, since the other party has made itself unworthy of serious attention. Already the party of utopian global war without end, at astronomical expense and at whatever cost to the liberties of American citizens, it formally ceased to be the party of family values when a hall full of its activists cheered Newt Gingrich to the echo for his adultery and for his desire to institutionalise it with his second ex-wife.

Socially and culturally traditional Republicans ought to be proud inheritors of the economic and political legacy of Progressivism and of the Nonpartisan League. Socially and culturally conservative Democrats ought to be proud inheritors of the economic and political legacy of Populism and of the Farmer-Labor Parties. Independents ought to be proud inheritors of the Republican and Democratic, traditional and conservative, Progressive and Populist, Nonpartisan and Farmer-Labor legacy of international nonintervention. Liberal, environmentalist, fiscally conservative, and libertarian interests are not illegitimate. But neoconservatism and the New Left are beyond the bounds of acceptable debate. And priority belongs to progressive traditionalism and to conservative populism.

The Southern tradition is in reality the tradition of everything that now unites the two sides of America’s Scots-Irish family, black and white: blue-collar job protection, immigration control, English as the national language, abortion reduction, marriage as only ever the union of one man and one woman, a strong defence capability used strictly for its proper defensive purpose, and the very considerable use of government action, federal as well as state and local, to secure public goods as economically populist as they are socially and culturally conservative, and on both counts rooted in activist, anything but liberal, Christianity. That true Southern tradition also includes opposition to the waging of aggressive wars by the federal government, wars that harvest the black and the blue-collar white alike.

On every point, the Southern tradition corresponds closely, both to the Northern tradition of Catholic Encyclicism, and to the Western tradition exemplified by the (Democratic-rooted) Farmer-Labor Parties and by the (Republican-rooted) Nonpartisan League, as well as to the whole African-American tradition with which it is so intimately bound up. Each of those either closely resembles, or is related to, the activist political traditions both of Orthodox and of Classical Reform Judaism. And each of them closely resembles, or is related to, the witness of the Latter-day Saints on a number of contentious issues, from abortion and the definition of marriage to poverty and nuclear weapons.

At every level and from every state, such candidates urgently need to be nominated and elected, whether as Republicans, or as Democrats, or as members of other parties, or as Independents. Roll on 2016.

Straight

2012-01-22T16:47:00.002Z

Nick Cohen’s Observer column today is an outpouring of praise to mark this week’s sixtieth birthday of Peter Tatchell. My London Progressive Journal colleague though he now is, Tatchell would lower the age of consent to 14 and thus legalise almost every act of which any Catholic priest has ever been so much as accused. Furthermore, in The Guardian on 26th June 1997, Tatchell wrote:

“The positive nature of some child-adult relations is not confined to non-Western cultures. Several of my friends – gay and straight, male and female – had sex with adults from the ages of 9 to 13. None feel they were abused. All say it was their conscious choice and gave them great joy. While it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful.”

In 1981, Michael Foot refused to endorse Tatchell as a candidate for the House of Commons. In 2010, David Cameron offered Tatchell a seat in the House of Lords.

Well into the 1990s, the word “straight” had no colloquial meaning beyond “honest”, except perhaps in homosexual subcultures, so that what is now its almost equally familiar use might then have been known to Tatchell and to Simon Hughes, but would not have been known to the general electorate of Bermondsey or anywhere else.

A Tory At The Telegraph

2012-01-21T17:02:00.002Z

How did that happen? But the splendid Peter Oborne told a rapturous Any Questions audience in Essex that the top staff of the bailed out banks should now be on public sector pay, since they were now civil servants. Quite so.

What Now For Yemen?

2012-01-21T17:01:00.000Z

It depends who the demonstrators are. Are they the unreconstructed Stalinists? Or are they the ones who wanted the place to be run by Anwar al-Awlaki? They must be one or the other. So, which one are they are? I only ask. Why doesn't anyone else, ever?

Chinese Water Feature

2012-01-21T10:24:00.003Z

Nine per cent of Thames Water is once again state-owned.

The state in question is China.

George Osborne is delighted.

Pick'n'Mix

2012-01-21T10:16:00.006Z

Good old USDAW.

Now the largest union in the private sector and existing hardly, if at all, anywhere else, it successfully organised against Thatcher’s and Major’s attempts to destroy the special character of Sunday and of Christmas Day, delivering the only Commons defeat of Thatcher’s Premiership. Long may it continue to deliver victories such as that, and such as this latest for the former employees of Woolworths. But why it still wastes its money on Ed Balls and his TCP (Third Conservative Party), I have no idea.

When it comes to fighting for workers, their families and their communities precisely by supporting agriculture, small business, and a large and thriving private sector such as can only exist by means of extensive central and local government action, all in the spirit of the trade union banners depicting Biblical scenes and characters in order to hold out against forced working on Sundays and on Christmas Day, there is, at least potentially, a whole world elsewhere for the fully integrated union between policy work and campaigning work.

Open Development, Creative Work

2012-01-21T10:10:00.002Z

There were few good things about the Euston Manifesto. But it did at least call for absolute submission to the facts of the historical record. However, it is we who are in a position to give effect to that call, since we have no past or present support for any of Nazism or Fascism, Stalinism or Maoism, neoconservatism or Islamism, the terrorism of the Far Left or the terror inflicted by regimes of the Far Right.

And it did at least call for an end to, and the reversal of, any patenting of genes, algorithms or facts of nature, and any retrospective extension of intellectual property laws in the interests of corporate copyright holders, instead affirming the open development of software and other creative works. Once again, that faction having been massively discredited and largely dissolved, it is now for us openly to develop that creative work.

Special Offer

2012-01-21T10:07:00.003Z

If you won't advertise abortion, then don't allow abortion.

To cite only one among many possible examples, will these adverts mention Marie Stopes's extravagant, versified love letters to Hitler? Or that she disowned her own son because he married a woman who wore glasses? Or her campaign for the compulsory sterilisation of "the C3 population", of "half-castes" and of "revolutionaries", among numerous others?

Or the dozens of clinics that she opened in working-class areas to reduce the number of "undesirables" by persuasion if force were politically impossible? After all, those clinics are the very thing being advertised. They still carry her name. Our televisions already carry their adverts, now to be joined by those for other facilities of much the same kind and firmly within the same highly organised and lavishly, publicly funded lobby. Our 50p stamps recently carried her image. And we all carry the shame.

Stretching

2012-01-21T10:02:00.003Z

A new educational charity should elect to Associateship those pupils in all schools who, on leaving the Sixth Form at 18, had attained since beginning Year 10 examination results at or above the average in the remaining state grammar schools, both in terms of the marks themselves, and in terms of the range of subjects studied. It should also elect to Fellowship those teachers whose pupils attained such results over 10 consecutive years.

Associateship would be automatic, so that hostile schools or whoever else would not be able to deny it to anyone. The most prestigious universities would be contacted in order to make the Associateship an admission requirement. And this charity would be called after a Labour politician who fought to defend the grammar schools as the ladder of working-class advancement. There are plenty to choose from: Ellen Wilkinson, George Tomlinson, Sidney Webb, R H Tawney, Eric Hammond, to name but a few.

Dope, Inc.

2012-01-21T09:54:00.007Z

"Paid for by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee, PO Box 6157, Leesburg, VA." (which keeps a very close eye on this and several similar or allied websites):

The Scottish National Party, which won a majority in Scotland's parliament last year, has set the fall of 2014 for a referendum on declaring independence from Britain. The response from London, so far, has been fear and loathing. Prime Minister David Cameron declared that Scotland has no legal right to set a referendum on independence without London's approval, which Cameron said, he would give only under conditions that he dictates, that is, the vote has to be sooner rather than later, and it has to be on "in" or "out" of the union, only, with no other options. Alex Salmond, Scotland's First Minister, responded by saying that Scotland would be making its own decisions, and he accused Cameron of trying to "trample over Scotland with his size 10 boots."

According to the Associated Press, Salmond made clear that London's interference would not be tolerated, promising "a referendum organized in Scotland, built in Scotland for the Scottish people, discussed with civic Scotland and brought to the people in 2014 for a historic decision on the future of this nation." Polls currently show independence only having the support of about 30-35% of the voters which is why Cameron wants the referendum quickly, before the SNP can build up further support for it. The SNP also wants a third option, maximum devolution, under which Scotland would be autonomous in all of its affair except foreign relations and defense.

The Scottish nationalists appear to be headed towards some kind of confrontation with London over Scotland's future in their drive for independence. The AP story names two issues that London will surely dispute with the Scots which are the control of the North Sea oil fields, which Salmond says Scotland is entitled to 90% of, and who is liable for Britain's national debt, which Salmond says Scotland is only responsible for 8% of. The British response is to warn the Scots that there's no way Scotland could survive economically on its own. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne warned Jan. 12 that "the people of Scotland would lose out in terms of the Scottish economy" if they left the U.K.

Another matter that the British are sure to fight over is the fate of the Royal Navy's four Trident ballistic missile submarines which are based in Faslane, Scotland. The Scotsman reported, last week, that SNP policy is to have the base closed and the submarines moved out of Scotland if Scottish voters go for independence. This prompted one leading U.K. defense expert to warn that the SNP policy would "amount to a promise to shut down the U.K.'s nuclear deterrent and enforce its disarmament." This would require that either they compromise with London on keeping Faslane open, or "leave the U.K. without a nuclear shield."

Connections between these two enemies of the allegedly still-existing British Empire are far from unknown...

Frauds and Fools

2012-01-21T09:33:00.000Z

Paul Krugman writes:

Steve Benen notes that by normal standards, Mitt Romney is a terrible candidate — but just not as bad as his rivals. He adds, “I often wonder what the race for the Republican nomination would look like this year if Romney had just one credible opponent.” But that wasn’t going to happen! The weakness of the GOP field is not an accident.

I view the primary race through the lens of the FOF theory — that’s for “fools and frauds”. It goes as follows: to be a good Republican right now, you have to affirm your belief in things that any halfway intelligent politician can see are plainly false. This leaves room for only two kinds of candidates: those who just aren’t smart and/or rational enough to understand the problem, and those who are completely cynical, willing to say anything to get ahead.

What sort of things am I talking about? They range from the belief that Obama is a socialist who will destroy America with his dastardly Heritage Foundation devised health care plan, to the belief that unemployment is high because lazy people prefer their unemployment insurance checks. On budget matters, you have to claim to believe that we can cut taxes sharply, maintain high military spending, and eliminate the deficit — all without upsetting those Republican-voting Medicare recipients. Notice that in the end, when it came to budget claims, even the supposedly hard-headed types — (cough) Paul Ryan (cough) — ended up relying on gigantic magic asterisks.

So what you have are fairly dim types like Perry, on the one side, and the utterly cynical Romney, on the other. (Gingrich manages to be both a fool and a fraud). Maybe, just maybe, the GOP could have found someone able to achieve Romney-level cynicism while coming across as sincere; but political talent on that level is quite rare. I mean, the various non-crazy-non-Romneys who were supposed to have a shot all turned out to be duds, e.g. Pawlenty.

The weakness of the GOP field is, in short, structural. Without the still-terrible economy, they wouldn’t have a chance.

What News

2012-01-21T09:29:00.002Z

Afshin Rattansi writes:

For the first time, British government censors have banned a 24-hour news channel from British viewers. As of the afternoon, UK-time, 20th January 2012, viewers of Press TV, an avowedly anti-imperialist TV channel headquartered in Tehran and featuring many of the voices found in CounterPunch, saw the words “Channel Unavailable” when tapping their clicker. And so the war on Iran by Britain, Israel and the U.S. continues using propaganda, proxy militants and asymmetric warfare.

Unlike the U.S., whose authorities have so often had to get around the first amendment to ban media from Americans, the UK has no law against the abridging of freedom of speech or against “infringing on the freedom of the press”. The decision was made by Ed Richards, previously Senior Policy Advisor to Tony Blair and a Controller of Corporate Strategy at the BBC. He now runs OFCOM, a regulatory agency charged with judging what news Britons are able to view.

One of the broadcast regulator’s central arguments about Press TV is that it is not convinced that editorial control is based in Britain. I’ve worked for numerous foreign channels that are allowed to broadcast in the UK, so I know this discrepancy will come as a surprise to my former employers at the London offices of CNN International, Bloomberg and Al Jazeera, all of which ultimately answer, editorially, to bosses in Atlanta, New York and Doha.

Press TV Ltd., a UK-based production company making programmes for Press TV has also been fined $155,000. This was because the channel in Tehran, broadcast an interview with Maziar Bahari of Newsweek whilst he was in prison. Bahari, who I have appeared with on discussion panels about the situation in Iran, is on the record as saying he wants Press TV banned and, basically, war on Iran. His views on banning TV stations are shared by the British government. We know this thanks to Wikileaks which released a secret cable from 2010 detailing the views of Jaime (sic) Turner, “Deputy Head of Multi-lateral affairs at the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office”:

Her Majesty’s Government is looking at other ways to address the issue. Her Majesty’s Government is exploring ways to limit the operations of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting’s PRESS TV service..However, UK law sets a very high standard for denying licenses to broadcasters. Licenses can only be denied in cases where national security is threatened, or if granting a license would be contrary to Britain’s obligations under international law. Currently, neither of these standards can be met with respect to PRESS TV, but if further sanctions are imposed on Iran in the coming months, a case may be able to be made on the second criterion.

While it is obviously a badge of honour for journalists to provoke such paranoia in a government – how is Press TV threatening UK national security?! – the cable also revealed Britain to be begging for U.S. intervention vis a vis France:

5. (S) In the immediate term, Her Majesty’s Government plans to lobby the French government to approach Eutelsat and press it to drop Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting’s broadcasts from the Hotbird satellite. Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting broadcasts several channels from the satellite, both domestically (even most terrestrial TV channels in Iran are dependent on a satellite and repeaters) and internationally, so it is an important source of income for Eutelsat. While it would be unlikely for the company to agree to drop the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting broadcasts spontaneously, Turner believes it would be susceptible to an approach by the French government because of the cover it would gain from complying with an official government request. Her Majesty’s Government would appreciate U.S. Government engagement with the government of France on this issue.

Nothing happened as regards London lobbying Paris to push the channel off the Eutelsat satellite but over here, I have witnessed bizarre examples of British journalists wishing to crush press freedom. Only in the past week, the UK Sunday Times’ Eleanor Mills wrote that Press TV “..has been fined £100,000…by the TV regulator OFCOM; many may think a more fitting punishment would see the station taken off air.” Such is the insouciant hackery of some British journalists when it comes to issues of free speech.

Those who have watched Press TV (it is, of course, available on the internet let alone nearly twenty free-to-air satellites) will know that its coverage of international events does not conform to the neoliberal news and current affairs brainwashing paradigm in mainstream newsrooms. It is one of the only TV stations in the world that genuinely gives international news, on a daily basis, covering all continents.

As CounterPunch readers know, there is already a war on Iran and this British decision is another front. Let’s hope that at least some of OFCOM’s board – you know who you are, Colette Bowe, Lord Blackwell, Dame Lynne Brindley, Tim Gardam, Dame Patricia Hodgson, Stuart McIntosh, Mike McTighe and Jill Ainscough – will realise that the purpose of the regulator was not to infringe on press freedom. In the meantime, still legal channels such as Russia Today are so far tolerated and give British viewers a view of the world different to the sanitised Orwellian fictions available on terrestrial television in the United Kingdom. And soon, as British viewers continue to switch off their television sets and boot up their computers, UK governments may realise that it is powerless to ban information getting to the masses.

Revocation Order

2012-01-20T20:52:00.001Z

How and where does one apply to join the apparently essential "Independent Editorial Board" of Fox? Or Sky News? Or the BBC News Channel? Who is on them at the moment?

Last Sigh?

2012-01-20T20:51:00.001Z

Sir Salman Rushdie, as he then wasn't, always openly and virulently hated Britain, the country that he had chosen and which spent a fortune on providing him with ostentatious security of highly questionable necessity.

Rushdie ended up as pretty much the only person in the world keeping up the idea that the fatwa against him was still a genuine threat, regularly doing so live on BBC Two late at night, not to mention about the bars and restaurants favoured by the London literati. Who'd have thought to look for him there, eh?

His antics are more than recalled by the frequent terror scares of the present age. So it comes as no surprise that he is now at the centre of such a scare of his own. We know what all publicity is, don't we, Sir Salman?

A Better Yesterday

2012-01-20T15:30:00.006Z

Stephen Colbert's endorsement of Herman Cain, who is apparently a good enough sport to be appearing with him at some rally in South Carolina, calls to mind the late, great "Break Dancing Jesus" of below the line here.

One of the Greatest Hits of that Greatest District Councillor Whom Lanchester Never Had related to my reference to the concept of the planned economy as having come down to the Attlee Government, via the Liberal Keynes, from "the conservative Colbert".

A man who not long afterwards had at least one regional newspaper announce as a fact that he was going to be the next Labour MP for a seat on which an all-women shortlist was then immediately imposed, thought that this was a reference to Stephen Colbert and The Colbert Report.

Oh, well, at least the latest outburst by Ed Balls means that, like most or all of his colleagues, dear little BDJ is no longer in the unhappy position of only remaining in the Labour Party because it employs him.

For the first time since the bundling out of the Butcher of Basra (probably not a Labour Party member for more than a decade now), BDJ really does agree with what that party stands for, and cheerfully devotes his every waking moment to making it a reality.

Nothing could better illustrate the urgency of the need for something better, in this Parliament.

Who Will Do So Now?

2012-01-20T15:22:00.002Z

Either it is late, or my subscription has lapsed; paperwork is all over the place at the moment, for reasons that will soon enough become clear. Anyway, the following may or may not appear in this week’s New Statesman:

Mehdi Hasan makes his point powerfully, even if much of what he says is really about class rather than about race. However, the real dearth is of a diversity of political affiliation and opinion, not the same thing as each other. Where are the Lib Dems, a party of government? Where are the Greens, with representation in both Houses of Parliament? Where are the supporters of UKIP, with seats in the Lords and now consistently tying with the Lib Dems in the polls?

Many Tories have, to say the least, profound reservations about consumerism, globalisation, American hegemony, Zionism, military-industrial complexes, and wars to make the world anew in accordance with some blueprint devised by New York intellectuals of Trotskyist provenance. But not in the papers. Labour’s electoral base, or what was that base before it was largely alienated into abstention, includes significant strands of patriotism, moral and social conservatism, and resistance to hysteria about climate change. But not in the papers. It is no wonder that Liberals in the country at large oppose a legislative body which meets in secret and publishes no Official Report, oppose the Common Agricultural and Fisheries Policies, and oppose subjugation to the legislative will of those who still defend the Soviet Union and of those who still defend that era’s Far Right regimes in Southern Africa and Latin America. But not in the papers.

Pro-Commonwealth Keynesians have been the most consistent opponents of European federalism for 60 years. But there was a media blackout when they banded together with others, including Liberals, at the last European Elections to point out that EU directives were forcing the privatisation of our public services, that European Court rulings were oppressing trade unions and encouraging social dumping, and that the EU was forcing grossly iniquitous trade deals on developing countries.

One could go on, especially about the lack of voices still speaking from outside London and the South East, and the lack of voices from abroad other than from the United States. Mr Hasan mocks Rod Liddle, but two years ago it looked as if he might have become Editor of The Independent and rectified these outrageous omissions. Who will do so now?

"Dissident Republicans"

2012-01-20T14:11:00.003Z

If they were really any such thing, then they would be dead by now. The PIRA only grew because the OIRA let it, and then the OIRA only survived (which it did) because the PIRA let it.

The failure of the "dissidents", not only to win, but even to contest the West Belfast by-election proved conclusively that Irish Republicanism no longer existed as a serious political force in Northern Ireland, rather than as an annual outlet for the mixture of adolescent levels of testosterone with alcohol and other intoxicants.

The former MP's election in County Louth is only because his party in the South long ago gave up anything more than the merest pretence of attachment to that cause.

Press On

2012-01-20T13:54:00.009Z

If you want news in Britain, then watch Al Jazeera. Or Russia Today. Or, until today, Press TV. There has been a sustained campaign of weeping and wailing in certain quarters about the Establishment figures who have appeared or who do appear on Press TV. Does it occur to the weepers and wailers that those appearances prove the falsehood of their calumnies against that station?

Andrew Gilligan, now their attack dog against Ken Livingstone and, rather amusingly for the man who once exposed the Dodgy Dossier, against the mighty Lutfur Rahman, used to be the highest paid presenter on Press TV. Even Oliver Kamm has appeared on it. As, repeatedly and for payment, has Dr Alan Mendoza, Executive Director of the Henry Jackson Society.

The superb Epilogue ought to have won awards by the bucket load. It has provided a home for Derek Conway, whose son was paid as a part-timer on the lowest point of the lowest quartile, and yet look what happened. Whereas, to cite an example almost at random, Jacqui Smith's husband was paid as a full-timer on the highest point of the highest quartile, despite doing nothing more than keep the constituency house in which she claimed not to live anyway. Yet look what did not happen. She was on This Week again last night.

On 9th November, Press TV reported the student demonstration in London while the BBC and Sky News refused to, instead pretending that it was not happening. But today, Fox "News" and its Sky and Beeb wannabes have got what they wanted through their servants at Ofcom, which acts for all practical purposes as an arm of whichever rogue element in the Foreign Office has secured the appointment of the current Ambassador to Israel, a man who publicly aspires to citizenship of the country to which he has been posted, and who has apologised for the arrest of Tzipi Livni's anti-British terrorist parents.

As confirmed by the resignation of Liam Fox, the Prime Minister and 80 per cent of his ostensible party's MPs are in reality members of Likud, which openly sits in government with a party, that of the Foreign Minister, which wants to denaturalise the Arabs and the ultra-Orthodox Jews. Al Jazeera and Russia Today, watch out.

Apocalypse No More?

2012-01-19T23:53:00.005Z

Len McCluskey is a constituent of Stephen Twigg's, it turns out.

Liverpool West Derby returned no less a figure than Sir David Maxwell Fyfe way back in the never-never. But since 1997, it has distinguished itself as an English seat by always placing the Conservative candidate fourth, with the Lib Dems and the Liberals fighting it out for second.

Steve Radford of the Liberal Party (and of No2EU - Yes to Democracy) came second in 1997 and in 2001, making this the only English constituency so to place a "minor" party. Its history in recent decades also features Eric Ogden and Bob Wareing. And now this.

Len McCluskey as a union-backed anti-Twigg candidate in 2015? Don't yet bet on it. But don't bet against it, either.

Nothing Could Be Finer

2012-01-19T23:43:00.004Z

What is the Democratic Party doing to appeal to those who would have voted for Rick Perry, a supporter of the sanctity of life (except, alas, for those judicially guilty even if not necessarily morally guilty), of traditional marriage, and unabashedly of the public, civic Christianity that the First Amendment was framed to protect in the states against the Deists at the centre? They have little reason to act on Perry's endorsement of Newt Gingrich, and none whatever to vote for the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney.

It is also worth noting the total lack of influence being displayed by the ageing or aged great and good of Evangelicalism in relation to the South Carolina primary. Even in the Deep South, the white Evangelical vote is obviously up for grabs. In his first term, Obama has missed a trick by not giving them the Supreme Court appointment that the Republicans never have and never will.

And speaking of South Carolina, whatever happened to Bob Conley?

Capital

2012-01-19T15:21:00.003Z

In the race for the position of Mayor of London, the lead has been taken by the candidate who tops the poll for the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party and who openly campaigns for anti-Labour candidates of the Far Left.

He is now ahead of the candidate for whom the London Labour Party's paid staff and their courtier media are campaigning, namely the pro-drugs Conservative, an Ottoman aristocrat of very recent extraction who has publicly recited the Shahada in Arabic, who believes that Christianity overthrew a superior civilisation (slavery, pederasty, the games), and who sees the means to putting things right as being a European Union of which the most populous member-state would be Turkey.

Mayor of London? President of the Third World Banana Republic of London, more like it.

Meanwhile, after having ridiculed Ed Miliband for his Conference denunciation of predator capitalism, David Cameron now echoes the sentiment and wants there to be far more co-operatives. Jolly good. Although, of course, there are still those who disagree. I refer, of course, to the tiny Blairite rump within the London Labour "Party" set out above, which monopolises media coverage of Labour affairs, and the standard of which is borne by the execrable Dan Hodges. Read him today, and see if you can work out whether to laugh or to cry.

If I thought that the Co-operative Party, the Fabian Society and the Christian Socialist Movement were actively co-operating with each other and with the unions in order to replace in this Parliament the party of Andy Newman and Dan Hodges, the party of Ken Livingstone and Hilary Perrin, then I might rejoin them. In fact, I would have done it by now. Why aren't they? What are they waiting for?

Workers' Power: A Conservative Cause

2012-01-19T15:15:00.002Z

Martin Vander Weyer opposes the idea of worker representation on remuneration committees, and no wonder that he does. Among the many conservative principles that such representatives would articulate would be the priority of the family and the local community, together with a patriotism which includes economic patriotism, itself including both tight controls on capital movement and tight controls on immigration. Integral to national sovereignty, including to national security, are a strong manufacturing base, control of our own food and fuel supplies, and the ownership of our industries and enterprises by our own citizens. As representatives from the floor would understand.

Such representation is one of several German features that we urgently need to adopt. Others are regional banking with close ties to the agricultural and manufacturing sectors; small and medium-sized family businesses on the Mittelstand model; and vocational as well as general skills training, accorded the same respect as the very high level of academic achievement that Germany has also retained and which we must restore here in the United Kingdom.

A Leader heavily influenced by such thinking has given his party a year-long poll lead. Even after the blip caused by David Cameron’s pretend non-veto, that Leader led that party to its fifth by-election victory in succession, with an 8.5 per cent swing against the Conservatives in exactly the sort of seat the failure to win which cost them an overall majority in 2010. It is sad to see The Spectator joining in the lazy Blairite clamour to remove Ed Miliband and thus close the debate to ideas such as the above. Indeed, to any idea from beyond a “centre ground” the scandalous narrowness of which is matched only by its scandalous origins in the Eurocommunism and Trotskyism of the 1970s and 1980s. Is that really what High Tories want from their magazine?

Romania: The European Spring

2012-01-19T14:47:00.003Z

Over in The Week/The First Post, Neil Clark writes:

One year ago this week, President Ben Ali of Tunisia became the first casualty of the 2011 Arab Spring. Could we now be witnessing in Romania the first shoots of a European Spring? Over the last few days, the republic in south-eastern Europe – a member of the EU for the past five years - has witnessed large-scale public protests against the government‘s harsh austerity programme. On Sunday, more than 10,000 took to the streets in the capital Bucharest. Fifty-nine people were injured in clashes with the authorities. Worse could come with the Romanian police union warning that its members might join the protests because of unpaid wages.

The disturbances are undoubtedly embarrassing for the EU, the IMF and those western leaders for whom the Romanian government has been a staunch ally. The Romanian government - unlike the government of neighbouring Hungary, where there have also been anti-government protests - has done everything that the EU and international lenders have demanded of it. In 2009, the government took out a £16.5bn loan from the IMF, the EU and the World Bank in return for making savage cuts in spending. VAT has been hiked to 24 per cent, while public sector pay has been slashed by 25 per cent.

Romania’s ruling elite is also in the West's good books for its foreign policy. Romania dutifully sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan. It has even been claimed in a Council of Europe report that the Mihail Kogalniceanu international airport was a “black site” involved in the CIA’s extraordinary renditions programme. On his visit to the White House last September, President Basescu, a hard-core Atlanticist, was formally “congratulated” for signing up to the US-Romania Ballistic Missile Defence Agreement and the US-Romania Joint Declaration on Strategic Partnership for the 21st Century. While on a visit to Israel last year, Prime Minister Emil Boc was told by his counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu: “The people of Israel know that we have a great friend in the Romanian government.”

So, Western leaders will be hoping that the Romanian government can survive the current disturbances intact. But it seems that ordinary Romanians, who have seen their living standards plummet, have had enough. The ferocity of the protests - banks have been smashed up and petrol bombs thrown - has clearly shaken the government. Raed Arafat, a popular health official who opposed a bill which would have privatised parts of the health service, has been reinstated. And Prime Minister Boc has been forced to adopt a more conciliatory “I feel your pain” tone.

But the bad news for Boc and his colleagues in the governing Democratic Liberal party is that the disturbances show no sign of abating. “People are now standing up for themselves against the government’s corruption,” one protester, Brianna Caradja, told the BBC. “There are thousands of people demonstrating in over 40 cities - this uprising is bigger than the 1989 Romanian revolution.” If a ‘European Spring’ does kick off in Romania and people power deposes the regime there, it will be interesting to see how the western leaders who cheered on anti-government protestors in Libya and Syria react.

It’s easy to take the moral high ground and condemn Middle Eastern governments for using force against their protesters, but what will the response be if European capitals beyond Athens – where thousands of strikers were on the march yesterday - are taken over by angry protesters, throwing stones and petrol bombs, and making a beeline for the corridors of power?

Romania was not part of the Soviet Bloc. She had a ghastly regime, not least from the point of view of the valiant Byzantine Rite Catholics. But not a Soviet satellite one. In fact, that regime had particularly close ties to Britain. To our shame, but there we are. English and French, rather than Russian, were taught in schools. No Romanian troops participated in putting down the Prague Spring. More than once, the Soviet Union came to the brink of invading Romania. There was absolutely no question of giving back what is now the Romanian-speaking western part of the cut-and-shunt state of Moldova.

Which bring us to the National Salvation Front, overthrowers of Ceausescu, and originators of the present political class in Romania. Their objection to Ceausescu was not that he was pro-Soviet. It was that he was anti-Soviet. They emerged out of the Moscow-backing, because Moscow-backed, faction within the Communist Party. In 1989, the Soviet Union still had two years left to go, and few were those who thought that it would collapse entirely.

When a kangaroo court convicted and executed the Ceausescus for the "genocide" of 34 people and for daring to throw parties at their house on major holidays, it was not just the beginning of dodgy "genocide" convictions: of García Meza Tejada for fully eight people, of Pinochet for under a hundred, of Mengistu in absentia, of his opponents even including aid workers, and of Kambanda without trial, with Milosovic never actually convicted at all. It was also, as it turned out, the last great triumph of the Soviet Union, taking out a man who was vicious and brutal in himself (like García Meza, or Pinochet, or Mengistu), but who was nevertheless a dedicated opponent of Soviet power. Those who took him out have run Romania ever since.

The New Malthusians

2012-01-19T14:42:00.002Z

Michael Hudson writes:

The World Bank is essentially an American instrument, and the United States is a food-surplus nation threatened with loss of foreign markets for farm products as modernization of European agriculture proceeds. For the World Bank to finance such institutional reforms in developing nations as would lead them toward self-sufficiency on food account would run counter to American interests. U.S. farm surpluses would become unmanageable as the overseas market for U.S. farm products dwindled. Hence, the World Bank prefers perpetuation of world poverty to the development of adequate overseas capacity to feed the peoples of developing countries.

There is a yet more subtle point to be considered. Mineral resources represent diminishing assets. It is in the interest of developing peoples to conserve such assets for their own ultimate use in manufacturing industries, as these develop within the borders of nations rich in raw materials but backward in general development. In the short run such domestic use of mineral resources is not possible because of inadequate industrial capital and consumer markets place. The specter is thus raised that in the long run these countries will find themselves depleted of resources as World Bank programs accelerate the exploitation of their mineral deposits for use by other nations.

The long-term prospect is thus for these countries to be unable to earn foreign exchange on export account sufficient to finance their required food imports. The World Bank has foreseen this. Its proposals for population limitation in these countries is a cold-blooded attempt to extort from them their mineral resources, without assuming responsibility for the sustenance of these peoples once the industrialized West has stripped them of their fuel and mineral deposits.

Consider the alternative, that World Bank loans and technical assistance foster agricultural self-sufficiency among these peoples. Assume substantial success in this endeavor in, say, a decade. Thereafter, exportation of fuels and minerals would become a matter of choice by these peoples, not a necessity. Such export might continue at current levels; it might increase, or it might diminish. The decision to conserve or to dissipate exhaustible resources would be autonomous, a matter of choice by these peoples and their governments, not something imposed upon them from outside. The decision about desirable levels of population also would be a local matter, not something demanded among the terms on which capital resources are obtained from foreign suppliers. The peoples now dependent would escape that trap. This is not intended or desired either by the World Bank or by the government of the United States and its client regimes.

It is only a seeming paradox that the World Bank simultaneously fosters the development of resources in impoverished countries while demanding reduction of their population’s rate of increase. What seems to be planned by the West is a reduction in the rate of population growth in these countries sufficient to permit the continued dissipation of their irreplaceable resources while postponing indefinitely their total immiserization. In the estimation of the World Bank, the ideal eventual population for these countries is number of people that can be sustained from their domestic agriculture above the basic poverty level, once the West has taken away the last of their recoverable minerals. The ideal short-run population is the number needed to operate the enterprises whose intent is precisely to exhaust the resources of these countries and, meanwhile, can be sustained by imported foodstuffs paid for by the minerals irretrievably lost by exportation.

The issue therefore is not between a higher rate of growth in population than in resources. It is that populations in impoverished and politically backward countries today, whatever the rate of development of their mineral resources, exceed the number of people that eventually can be fed once these minerals have been exhausted. The logic of the situation, dictated by the callousness of the West, is that populations in these countries must decline in symmetry with the approaching – no matter how gradual – exhaustion of their minerals.

Whether the United States and the World Bank have been led to this objective by their intention to preserve the obsolete and oppressive militaristic class institutions in developing nations, or whether they have been led to the preservation of these institutions in order that the mineral resources of these countries can continue to be stripped from them, may be a matter for conjecture. But the facts remain, whatever the dominant motives at work. Excessive industrialization in the United States, coupled with increasingly wasteful uses of resources on armaments and on personal luxuries that are essentially trivial in terms of human well-being, makes essential the U.S. exploitation of the developing countries, their resources and peoples. The United States is in deficit on raw-materials account, but is unwilling to limit its industrial expansion correspondingly. It is in surplus on farm products account, but is unwilling to limit its agriculture accordingly. The peoples of developing countries therefore are to be turned into the instrument through which the otherwise untenable U.S. economic process is perpetuated.

The customary pro-and-con arguments regarding birth control in these countries are a blind to the realities of the situation. Reduction of population growth might well prove desirable, but not for the reasons advanced by the World Bank and the United States to the impoverished countries. Balanced economic development, with ample sustenance from thriving agriculture, is the prerequisite not only for healthy evolution of these countries but also for postulation of what size of population is desirable for them. It bears repeating that beyond some point above the poverty level, population growth rates tend to diminish as per capita real incomes rise. To assume that this is something peculiar to Western peoples is absurd.

The anti-Malthusian argument, that beyond a point resources tend to increase more rapidly than population, is the universal experience of every developed country. The Malthus doctrine holds true only in conditions where per capita food resources are so low as to leave no surplus of human energy to devote to pursuits above the mere gathering and cultivation of crops. Malthusian advocacy by the World Bank is thus a pronouncement that the Bank intends to leave the economies of impoverished countries in the eventual condition of zero surplus of human energy.

Espousal of Malthusian doctrines, at first in U.S. foreign aid programs and soon afterward by the World Bank, is not surprising. It is in keeping with the evolving purpose of U.S.-centered aid programs. The motive for urging and even demanding population control as the remedy for malnutrition of average citizens in politically backward countries rests on the same grounds as those of Malthus in the time of England’s Poor Law debates: deliberate social retardation of the many to serve the vested interests of the few. In today’s case the few tend to be foreigners and foreign commercial and financial interests, including the U.S. economy’s own minerals-import and food-export requirements. Foreign populations are to supply raw materials and exchange them for U.S. food exports, not grow their own food and consume their fuels and minerals themselves or work them into manufactured goods to compete with U.S. producers.

Beyond this narrow economic interest is the more ancient specter that a large increase in world population may bring into question the balance of international military and political power. Centuries ago, mercantilist theorizing had viewed population growth largely as a military input. A similar view remains today. “Nothing is more menacing to world security,” testified Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau to the Senate in its 1945 hearings on the World Bank, “than to have the less developed countries, comprising more than half the population of the world, ranged in economic battle against the less populous but industrially more advanced nations of the west.” It thus was historically logical that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara should become President of the World Bank upon leaving his position as architect of America’’ war in Southeast Asia.

Jose de Castro, a Brazilian sociologist, demographer, and former president of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), published remarks in SLASC, the monthly organ of the Latin American Christian Workers Confederation, praising the encyclical Human Life as the most progressive the Church had yet published: “The United States imposes birth control, not to help the poor countries – no one believes any more in its ‘disinterested’ aid programs – but because that is its strategic defense policy. We must realize that the pill is North America’s best guarantee of continuing a dominant minority. . . . If ever the Third World achieves normal development, Washington’s ‘Roman Empire’ will disappear.”

This interpretation poses the problem of political morality for liberals in the developed nations. Genuinely concerned over poverty in their own and other lands, they have seized upon regulation of population size as an immediate and automatic solution to the prevalence of malnutrition. They fail to perceive that among the many exploitations in this imperfect world is the exploitation of their very morality, that which in their fiber compels them on the course of liberalism.

The easy kind of liberalism, with its hope for ready-to-hand technocratic solutions to social problems, has led them to support the major way in which liberal institutions among backward peoples can be prevented from evolving. Their support for higher living standards for all has been exploited into de facto support of the oppressive and militarist regimes in backward countries. That indeed has become the purpose of the Malthusianism promoted by the World Bank and the government of the United States. American liberals have been its unwitting allies, and thereby the allies of the world’s most reactionary regimes.

The anti-natal movement is a direct attack on women, on non-white people, on the poor, on the working class, and on the electoral base of the Left. Early Labour activists resisted schemes to abort, contracept and sterilise the working class out of existence.

Enough To Turn Your Stella Creasy

2012-01-18T13:39:00.002Z

I missed PMQs. I was in one meeting and I am now on my way to another one. But I heard part of Woman's Hour. Over and over again, Louise Mensch pointed out that Labour had now accepted each and every one of the cuts. Neither Dr Creasy nor Dame Jenni could answer her. Well, of course not. Paleo-Labour, our time has come.

Where Is There An Esther For Today?

2012-01-18T13:34:00.002Z

Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb (why is Mozart Amadeus rather than Gottlieb?) writes:

Jewish history overflows with tales of sorrow. Are we to endure yet another loss, but this time perpetrated by our own foolish hands? Those who think that bombing Iran serves a defensive purpose should reconsider and remember a forgotten people, the 35,000 Jews of Iran. What will happen to them?

In 2009 I had the honor to co-lead two interfaith peace delegations to Iran under the auspices of The Fellowship of Reconciliation, Shomer Shalom Network for Jewish Nonviolence and The Center for Interfaith Dialogue in Teheran. These two delegations are part of a continuing global effort to cultivate positive relationships between people of faith in areas of potential or existing conflict.

During both visits to Iran, we spent time meeting the Jewish communities in Tehran, Esfahan and Shiraz. I had the opportunity to visit synagogues during prayer services, eat at a kosher restaurant, meet Jewish students at Hebrew school, and enjoy open conversations with Jewish cultural, political and communal leaders in public Jewish institutions and private homes.

Jewish people have lived continuously in Iran for nearly three thousand years. They are guardians of a rite of ancient pilgrimage to the tombs of Esther and Mordecai, the prophet Daniel and the beloved Serach Bat Asher whose stories are well known to the Jews of the Middle East. Iranian Jews possess a 1800 year old Torah in Hamadan and a rich historical memory. They are proud of their religious Persian Jewish identity. The Jewish communities of Iran should be considered a spiritual heritage by people of faith everywhere.

Jews in Israel, the United States, Europe and elsewhere, should speak up now, before it’s too late and demand that war be taken off the table for the sake of this ancient community that does not want Israel to intervene in their country. Are we to end the life of the ancient Jewish community of Iran by causing instability to be unleashed in their midst?

No serious person with experience in the region thinks initiating a war with Iran will bring security to the United States, Israel or the region. There are many other channels of peacemaking to pursue. If you ask the Jews of Iran, or, for that matter the vast majority of citizens of Iran, they will tell you to please allow them the freedom to do the work of social change in their own country.

Outside military intervention will only make matters worse for everyone. We have lost enough of our ancient diaspora. Let us not endanger the only continuous Middle Eastern Jewish community in the world today. Let us stand up to the propaganda and fear mongering pushing us toward another disaster.

A World To Win

2012-01-18T00:29:00.000Z

Plenty of alternative policy and campaigning work would be more than happy to take the money of that minority of trade unions which has ever been affiliated to the Labour Party.

I don't mean the Far Left, either. There is already the RMT for them until they join the Conservative Party and it crows over them while they continue to give their former groupuscules as their parties on their House of Commons passes. Seriously.

I mean alternative policy and campaigning work rooted in the trade union, co-operative and mutual, Radical Liberal, Tory populist, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and other wholly non-Marxist roots of the Labour Movement. Including candidacies for office? Why not?

Flather

2012-01-18T00:26:00.002Z

Verb? Noun? Adjective? See if you can decide, and come up with a definition, in light of the fact that Baroness Flather, an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society, wants to stop all benefits once you have four or more children. Yes, all benefits. You see, a lot of them are Pakistani or Bangladeshi. Nuff said. Isn't it?

A Sick Society

2012-01-17T19:42:00.000Z

It is hard to get Incapacity Benefit or whatever it is now called; it was, by the way, invented by Margaret Thatcher as part of her gigantic expansion of benefit dependency.

And it is almost impossible to get Disability Living Allowance.

The question is not why so many people are making "fraudulent" claims, but why so many people really are that ill.

What has changed in Britain since the 1970s?

Rod Liddle, Paleo-Labour's Mel Bradford

2012-01-17T19:16:00.010Z

Two years on from the failure to secure the appointment of Rod Liddle as Editor of The Independent, and that incident strikes me as a key moment in the emergence, already on course to be very apparent indeed during 2012, of the paleo-Labour fightback against neo-Labour.

Just as Ronald Reagan's withdrawal of the nomination of Mel Bradford for Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, in favour of Podhoretz's and the Kristols' William Bennett (although Bennett went on to campaign alongside the late, great C Dolores Tucker), was a key moment in the emergence of the paleoconservative fightback against neoconservatism. Bradford had expressed views on Abraham Lincoln that were tame compared to those now broadcast by the BBC out of the mouths of black scholars. But of that, another time.

Does the Fourth Estate honour by word and deed the equal citizenship of the many millions who knowingly or unknowingly identify with the alliance of the traditional Right and the traditional Left against the neoconservative war agenda and its assaults on liberty at home, including against any new Cold War with Russia, China, Iran, or anywhere else?

Does the Fourth Estate honour by word and deed the equal citizenship of the many millions who knowingly or unknowingly identify with the socially and culturally conservative, strongly patriotic tendencies within the British Left's traditional electoral base?

Does the Fourth Estate honour by word and deed the equal citizenship of the many millions who do or would recognise that we cannot deliver the welfare provisions and the other public services that our people have rightly come to expect unless we know how many people there are in this country, unless we control immigration properly, and unless we insist that everyone use spoken and written English to the necessary level?

Does the Fourth Estate honour by word and deed the equal citizenship of the many millions who do or would refuse to allow climate change to be used as an excuse to destroy or prevent secure employment, to drive down wages or working conditions, to arrest economic development around the world, to forbid the working classes and non-white people from having children, to inflate the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, or to restrict either travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich?

Does the Fourth Estate give any sort of voice to the North of England, considerably more populous than Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland put together? Never mind to as many different corners of the country as possible: County Durham as well as Newcastle, the Marches as well Birmingham, Dorset as well as Bristol, and so on, including the less fashionable parts of London?

Does the Fourth Estate give us any sort of perspective from as many different countries as possible other than America, not out of anti-Americanism, but only for the sake of a more balanced view?

And where is the political party which does, where are even the individual politicians who do, any of these vitally necessary things? But then, for such is the inversion of the proper relationship, what, if any, hearing could any such party or politician expect?

But in the last two years, we have seen the emergence of Blue Labour, the defeat of David Miliband, and the rallying of the electorate to what it thought was a post-Blairite Labour Party. In the last two days, we have seen the patience of the well-upholstered trade unions reach breaking point with the neoliberal, neoconservative, neo-Labour oligarchy. The treatment of Rod was an important step towards where we are today. And towards where we shall be tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after that.

The Public Good

2012-01-17T15:51:00.005Z

Legislation is urgently necessary to disapply any ruling of the European Court of Justice, or of the European Court of Human Rights, or of the “Supreme Court”, unless and until ratified by a resolution of the House of Commons, the High Court of Parliament, the real Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, itself urgently needing to be elected by a system more representative of public opinion, with the general electorate having the decisive say in the selection of party candidates no less than in choosing among them and others.

By all means exclude “foreign preachers of hate” from this country. Including Abu Qatada. Among other 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 Obama to be. Such as the terrorist Akhmed Zakayev, whom this country currently harbours. Such as the recently apprehended terrorist Abdulmalik Rigi. And such as the even more recently arrested war criminal Ejup Ganic. It is quite a list: Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and now Libya (polygamy legalised as the first act of the unelected government) and Tunisia, with Syria to follow, with Iran next on the list after that, and with Chechnya and Xinjiang always bubbling away in the background. Doesn’t it make you proud?

However, also including those American and other ecclesiastics who have expressed racist views about Africans and others who do not share their liberal sexual morality. Also including Hans Küng, whose disparagement of Blessed John Paul the Great’s Polishness made and make them the authentic voice of the age-old Teutonic racism against the Slavs; Küng only gets away with it because he is Swiss. Also including Avigdor Lieberman, the members of his party, and those who sit in coalition with them. Also including the EDL-supporting leaders of the Tea Party. Also including Geert Wilders, among a whole host of others whose presence most certainly would not be, and periodically is not, conducive to the public good. For example, the signatories to the Project for the New American Century, and the Patrons of the Henry Jackson Society.

How "Conservative" Are The Mormons?

2012-01-17T15:46:00.004Z

Using the conventional, profoundly flawed definition, that is.

Look at Mitt Romney. Look at Jon Huntsman. Look at the electorate in Utah, where Bob Bennett would have been re-elected, and thus returned to considerable prominence in the Republican Caucus, if he had run as an Independent.

Bennett, a former Mormon chaplain in the Army National Guard and married into LDS royalty, was not "conservative" enough for the Tea Party, which has also indicated its intention to go after Orrin Hatch, a Mormon bishop.

Hatch really should run as an Independent if he is dislodged, on the same day as Romney is the Republican nominee for President. Together, Romney's admittedly unsuccessful candidacy, and Hatch's easy victory, should at least go some way to dispelling myths about the Mormons.

The late Governor George Romney of Michigan was a noted Civil Rights supporter within the Republican Party, and a skilled, principled bipartisan operator.

America will soon contain more Mormons than Jews. Hope for moderate Republicans yet?

Unite, Indeed

2012-01-16T23:54:00.002Z

Len McCluskey knows what he has to do.

Individual candidates should be funded based on their public subscription to specific policies, including their record of having supported them where applicable.

And it looks increasingly as if a new party might be required. Perhaps initially in order to act as Labour's conscience. But always containing the possibility of replacing Labour altogether.

Martin Luther King Day

2012-01-16T23:52:00.006Z

I urge you to buy and to read my friend Jack Ross’s Rabbi Outcast, which “places liberal Jewish anti-Zionism (as opposed to that of Orthodox or revolutionary socialist Jews) in historical perspective”. And I urge you to attend to these wise words of his:

Today, of course, is Martin Luther King Day. Even as a kid I can remember finding something very disturbing about the fact that in America we observed something called “King’s Birthday” (that I first heard it referred to as such by a teacher with a very thick southern accent surely didn’t help). Chris Rock undoubtedly had the best attitude in reassuring us white folks way back when he was still on Saturday Night Live: “It’s just one more Monday off. What do you do on Columbus Day, put three ships in the yard?”

I mentioned in one of my more recent blogs the discovery that Straussianism explains perfectly how the American right has come to believe such bizarre things about Martin Luther King. No sooner do we have so perfect an illustration of this as a meditation by Straussian mainstay Peter Wehner on how King was inspired by the classics.

But now comes the spectacle of MLK becoming a symbol of American militarism, via Nathan. In recent days I had seen a number of references to antiwar protesters confronting the heavily military MLK Day Parade in LA, but this really misses the point. So too does the righteous rant by Cornel West I saw the other day on C-SPAN that “the election of Obama is not by itself the fulfillment of Dr. King’s dream.” Much more on point was a black friend in college, who when I asked what they thought of Condoleezza Rice’s infamous statement to a black journalists’ convention that they of all people should oppose the notion that Iraqis were incapable of democracy replied “that she learned to bullshit from the master.”

The problem is not that “the dream” is being betrayed by those who would employ it for the cause of national greatness, it is that the myth of Martin Luther King only exists for the purpose of including African-Americans in the march of progress toward the millennium that can either be called Whig history, court history, Straussian mythmaking, or the NBC school or national greatness liberalism. In years past I have seen shocking reverence displayed toward King at my lefty shul, but I can live with that since, whatever his failings, King was genuine agent of social protest, making his exaltation a far cry from the era when the often-righteous rabbis portrayed in my forthcoming book would typically so exalt the emperors Lincoln and Roosevelt.

There is an interview, which has only ever been published in this rather rare book, with King’s colleague Bayard Rustin in which he is quite frank about King and in my estimation perfectly accounts for all the various conservative bugaboos about him. In short, that King was shallow and not exceptionally bright, that he developed a messiah complex, and this, rather than ideology, was responsible for King’s move into the north and to the left generally. Rustin, to be sure, had his own pathologies, but we’ll leave that for another day.

King’s famous antiwar speech is certainly an admirable one, but it can just as easily be spun into mythmaking as anything claimed by the Straussians or, to take another example, the Jewish establishment. It is simply impossible to know whether King would have become, had he lived, a Nation lefty or a Eustonite, a Democratic Party hack like Jesse Jackson or a Christian conservative notwithstanding his economic agenda. Probably the best way to honor his legacy is to make some undoubtedly vain attempt to take him down from the pedestal.

The unseemly squabble over the corpse of Martin Luther King mirrors that over the corpse of George Orwell. Both are overrated, but that is not for today. Rather, just as the patriotic, socially conservative, anti-Communist British Left is the tradition in which Orwell, at his best, genuinely stood, so at his best, King stood in the same tradition as those black and Hispanic votes reaffirmed traditional marriage in California and Florida on the same days that those states gave their Electoral College votes to Obama, with the black churches playing a pivotal role. The tradition of the late C. Dolores Tucker and of Father Michael Pfleger on decency in the media.

To stand in that tradition would be to make common cause with the Congressional Black Caucus, and with anyone who had a black base, on halting and reversing the national emergency of unrestricted and illegal immigration, and on making English the only official language of the United States. To make common cause with various other people around the fact that the black male is the victim of a triple genocide in the womb, on the streets, and on the battlefield. To make common cause with the regular readers of Philip Giraldi, uniting their vigorous patriotic hostility to Israeli espionage against America with the righteous anger of the victims of the Israel Lobby's sustained campaign against black candidates as such.

More broadly, to stand in that tradition would be to make common cause with the unions on the protection of American jobs. To make common cause with the Congressional Progressive Caucus on fair trade agreements, on repealing much or all of the USA Patriot Act, on ending completely the neoconservative war agenda, on strict campaign finance reform, on a crackdown against corporate influence in general and corporate welfare in particular, and on tax cuts for the poor and the middle class. To make common cause based on practical proposals for energy independence, proposals that would or should appeal to unions and others whose fight is primarily for jobs. To make common cause based on the importance of government action in bringing about and then conserving pro-life, pro-family and patriotic measures against poverty, in defence of traditional marriage, and in support of agriculture, manufacturing, coal, oil, and nuclear energy.

And, yes, to make common cause with the Congressional Asian and Pacific Islander Caucus against the unfair consequences, and therefore the unfair principle, of the “affirmative action” that Colorado voted to end on the same day as it voted for Obama, and against the Ivy League’s and other top universities’ systematic exclusion of whites from poor and middle-income backgrounds, and from small towns and rural areas.

Martin Luther King was a registered Republican, just as Richard Nixon was far more sympathetic towards Civil Rights than was the deeply ambivalent John F. Kennedy. King’s traditional Christian moral values, even if he did not always live up to them, were precisely what made him an opponent of unbridled capitalism and of wars such as that in Vietnam, that double opposition on that basis being the historically conservative position in America, whatever the old Trots of the neoconservative movement may have been astonishingly successful in putting about. But that movement has turned most of his followers into Democrats. Either party could therefore make itself worthy of the best of his legacy. Or both of them could. But as things stand, neither of them is.

Yes, King signed the letter to Paul VI asking him to reconsider Humanae Vitae. But so did the future Father Ricard John Neuhaus. And, as Ronald J. Rychlak writes:

On April 12,1963 -- Good Friday -- Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led a group of about 50 anti-segregation protesters into downtown Birmingham, Alabama. It was a peaceful protest, but they were not naïve: They knew that their message would offend and cause problems. King was not surprised when they were all arrested.

Eight white clergymen from Birmingham, including a Catholic bishop and a rabbi, wrote a letter appealing to the black population to stop such demonstrations. These clergymen were not bigots; they just did not want the kind of confrontations that King had provoked. They wanted to let the courts work toward integration. Their letter was published in the local newspaper under the title, “A Call for Unity.”

King’s response to the clergymen, his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” was one of the finest modern appeals to natural law. In it, he wrote: “I would agree with St. Augustine that, an unjust law is no law at all.” Moreover, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” As such, “One has . . . a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

King’s analysis, of course, raises the question of how to determine whether a law is just. Here, King turned to natural law. He explained: “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.” He then looked to St. Thomas Aquinas: “An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.” Applying that to the case at hand, King explained: “All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.”

Directly responding to the clergymen, King wrote: “In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion?” After providing some examples, he explained his problem with the suggestion that they should wait for the courts to act: "It is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.”

King explained that “oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained.”

King said that a change had come in his way of thinking: “I have tried [in the past] to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.” Thus, the legal system, while “moral” in and of itself, was at that time in history protecting the immoral system of segregation. At the very least, it was moving too slowly to satisfy the yearning for freedom. As King explained: “Past promises have been broken by the politicians and merchants of Birmingham and now is the time to fulfill the natural right of all people to be treated equal.”

King expressed frustration with the inability of many church leaders to grasp these truths while they were hiding behind the “anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.” Even in his frustration, however, he expressed his love: “In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.”

King’s letter certainly struck a chord. Some have called it the turning point of the civil rights movement. It seems also to have had an impact on the Catholic bishop who signed the letter to which King responded. That bishop, Joseph Aloysius Durick, ultimately became known as a strong voice for civil rights. Over local opposition, he put in place the decrees of Vatican II that were intended to eliminate racial divisions and show compassion for the poor and socially marginalized.

These actions drew national attention. Bishop Durick was sometimes boycotted when he made personal appearances, but with support from Pope Paul VI and the truth of natural law, he stood firm and reshaped the hearts of many Catholics in the Deep South. Of course, Martin Luther King Jr., writing from a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama, played a huge role in that process.

ITEMs Of Value Have Been Removed

2012-01-16T19:43:00.003Z

Of course we are back in recession. Did you notice that we had ever left it? No, neither did I. Whereas Ed Balls now agrees with that brilliant economic strategist, George Osborne.

For how much longer will anyone continue to vote for the party of Ed Balls, as growing numbers had been doing up until this development? For how much longer will anything continue to fund that party? Not "any party". That party.