No Newsnight

I am still getting over last night's Newsnight.

Two worthy pieces, on Russian Eurasianism and on the Turkish AKP's questioning of the Treaty of Lausanne, were run on the same night.

Followed by a feature on Danish cinnamon buns, and then by a discussion of staffing issues at the Globe Theatre.

Yesterday, the man who in May was the governing party's candidate for Mayor of London resigned both from that party and from the House of Commons.

He will contest the consequent by-election as an Independent, in opposition to what is by far the Government's biggest policy of any kind.

But you would never have known any of that from the BBC's flagship news and current affairs programme.

The Chagos Test

The Chagossians had their day in the House of Commons again this afternoon.

Theirs is one of the truly good causes, and Jeremy Corbyn has been active in it for decades.

Although it has never been partisan.

All three governing parties of the last 50 years are at least complicit in the mistreatment of the Chagossians, while their supporters have come from all parties, and continue to do so.

Still, Corbyn is the first Leader of any party to be drawn from among those supporters.

There is a Chagos Test to be applied to noisy supporters of the Falkland Islanders, whose eviction no one has ever suggested, not even when Margaret Thatcher was preparing to sell very sovereignty over those Islands to the highest bidder.

If they do not also support the Chagossians, whose cause is active and whose case is pressing, then they deserve to be disregarded with contempt.

This broadly applies to loud invocations of "self-determination" in general.

Take Back Control

For many Labour supporters in the Deep South or in the deep countryside, and for many Conservative supporters in very urban areas or in the old heartlands of heavy industry, a Member of the European Parliament is the only person whom their vote has ever elected.

Some will say that the solution is Proportional Representation for the House of Commons.

But the preposterously enormous constituency boundaries proposed for Scotland illustrate why many of us have never quite come round to that one. It could only be made to work in those very urban areas.

That, though, is an aside.

The main point is that the matter is finally about to come to a head, after at least 40 years, that we can have our national sovereignty, or we can have the House of Lords, but we cannot have both.

Tony Benn always said that the Lords would never permit withdrawal from what he always understood was really the European Union, and that was always his principal reason for wishing to abolish the Lords.

He is about to be proved right. Indeed, he is already being proved right.

“Brexit means Brexit,” says the Prime Minister. The democratic will must be respected, says the Leader of the Opposition.

They need to confront the mounting anger about the ballooning size of the unelected House of Parliament while the elected House is being cut, and that despite the growing population.

The powers of the House of Lords could be transferred to a new Senate, the members of which would be remunerated in the same way as MPs were.

Ministers would not be drawn from the Senate, but they would appear before it. Even the Prime Minister might.

The Senate’s term of office would be six years.

Each of the nine English regions would elect 30 Senators, namely six Conservatives, six Labour, six Liberal Democrats (which party would in return be banned from contesting elections to the Commons), six from other registered political parties that did not contest Commons elections, and six Independents to sit as Crossbenchers.

In the first three cases, any member of the relevant party who was a parliamentary elector within the region would be eligible to stand.

As electors, each of us would vote for one candidate, with the top six elected at the end. Casual vacancies would be filled by co-opting the next candidate down who was willing and able to serve.

The fourth category would use party lists, again requiring candidates to be from within the region. The fifth would replicate the first three, but for Independents.

Scotland and Wales would each elect 30 Senators.

Five each from the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the SNP in Scotland or Plaid Cymru in Wales, other registered political parties that did not contest Commons elections, and Independents to sit as Crossbenchers.

Like the Liberal Democrats, the SNP and Plaid Cymru would in return be banned from contesting Commons elections.

Northern Ireland would elect 30 Senators.

Three each from the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Ulster Unionist Party, the Democratic Unionist Party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, Sinn Féin, the Alliance Party, other parties that did not contest Commons elections, and Independents to sit as Crossbenchers.

The Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the UUP, the SDLP and the Alliance Party would be banned from contesting Commons elections.

The SDLP has three seats in the Commons and no real chance of any more, while such a figure is beyond the wildest dreams of any of the others.

Although of course, in Northern Ireland as anywhere else, parties that did not contest Senate elections would be free to stand for the Commons, as would Independents.

This would give 360 Senators, representing a very broad range of political opinion.

UKIP, or whatever came after it, would happily exchange the off-chance of one Commons seat for the effective guarantee of 11 Senators and the serious possibility of 12.

The same would be true of the three Green Parties in different parts of the United Kingdom.

The Liberal Democrats would always have 79 Senators.

And practically every elector would be able to point to at least one Senator for whom he or she had voted.

I, Patrick Cockburn

The Great Man writes:

I was in Iran in early 2011 when there were reports from opposition sources in exile saying that protests were sweeping the country.

There was some substance in this.

There had been a demonstration of 30,000 protesters in north Tehran on 14 February – recalling the mass protests against the allegedly fixed presidential election of 2009 – that had caught the authorities by surprise.

There was hopeful commentary from Western pundits suggesting that the Arab Spring uprisings might be spreading to Iran.

But, by the time I got to Tehran a few days later, nothing much appeared to be going on, though there were plenty of bored looking riot police standing around in the rain doing nothing.

It looked as if the protests had dwindled away, but when I checked the internet I found this was not so. Opposition spokesmen were claiming that protests were taking place every week not just in north Tehran but in other Iranian cities.

This account appeared to be confirmed by videos running online showing protesters resisting baton-wielding riot police and militiamen.

I met some friendly Iranian correspondents working for the foreign media and asked why I was failing to find any demonstrations.

The reporters were well informed, but could not work because their press credentials had been suspended by the Iranian authorities.

They laughed when I described my vain pursuit of the anti-government protests, explaining that I was failing to find them because they had ceased earlier in the month.

One journalist usually sympathetic to the opposition said that “the problem is that the picture of what is happening in Iran these days comes largely from exiled Iranians and is often a product of wishful thinking or propaganda.” I asked about the videos online and he said that these were mostly concocted by the opposition using film of real demonstrations that had taken place in the past.

He pointed to one video, supposedly filmed in the middle of winter, in which trees covered in leaves were clearly visible in the far background.

I asked the journalists if this was not the fault of the Iranian government which, by suspending the credentials of local reporters who were credible eyewitnesses, had created a vacuum of information which was swiftly filled by opposition propagandists.

The stringers agreed that to some extent this was so, but added gloomily that, even if they were free to report, their Western editors “would not believe us because the exiles and their news outlets have convinced them that there are big protests here. If we deny this, our bosses will simply believe that we have been intimidated or bought up by the government.”

It is a salutary story because later the same year in Libya and Syria opposition activists were able to gain control of the media narrative and exclude all other interpretations of what was happening.

In Libya, Gaddafi was demonised as the sole cause of all his country’s ills while his opponents were lauded as valiant freedom fighters whose victory would bring liberal democracy to the Libyan people.

Instead, as was fairly predictable, the overthrow of Gaddafi rapidly reduced Libya to a violent and criminalised anarchy with little likelihood of recovery. In present day Syria and Iraq one can see much the same process at work.

In both countries, two large Sunni Arab urban centres – East Aleppo in Syria and Mosul in Iraq – are being besieged by pro-government forces strongly supported by foreign airpower.

In East Aleppo, some 250,000 civilians and 8,000 insurgents, are under attack by the Syrian Army allied to Shia paramilitaries from Iran, Iraq and Lebanon and supported by the Russian and Syrian air forces.

The bombing of East Aleppo has rightly caused worldwide revulsion and condemnation.

But look at how differently the international media is treating a similar situation in Mosul, 300 miles east of Aleppo, where one million people and an estimated 5,000 Isis fighters are being encircled by the Iraqi army fighting alongside Kurdish Peshmerga and Shia and Sunni paramilitaries and with massive support from a US-led air campaign.

In the case of Mosul, unlike Aleppo, the defenders are to blame for endangering civilians by using them as human shields and preventing them leaving.

In East Aleppo, fortunately, there are no human shields – though the UN says that half the civilian population wants to depart – but simply innocent victims of Russian savagery.

Destruction in Aleppo by Russian air strikes is compared to the destruction of Grozny in Chechnya sixteen years ago, but, curiously, no analogy is made with Ramadi, a city of 350,000 on the Euphrates in Iraq, that was 80 per cent destroyed by US-led air strikes in 2015.

Parallels go further: civilians trapped in East Aleppo are understandably terrified of what the Syrian Mukhabara secret police would do to them if they leave and try to pass through Syrian government checkpoints.

But I talked earlier this year to some truck drivers from Ramadi whom I found sleeping under a bridge in Kirkuk who explained that they could not even go back to the ruins of their homes because checkpoints on the road to the city were manned by a particularly violent Shia militia.

They would certainly have to pay a large bribe and stood a good chance of being detained, tortured or murdered.

The advance on Mosul is being led by the elite Special Forces of the Iraqi counter-terrorism units and Shia militias are not supposed to enter the city, almost all of whose current inhabitants are Sunni Arabs.

But in the last few days these same special forces entered the town of Bartella on the main road twelve miles from Mosul in their black Humvees which were reportedly decorated with Shia religious banners.

Kurdish troops asked them to remove the banners and they refused.

An Iraqi soldier named Ali Saad was quoted as saying: “(T)hey asked if we were militias. We said we’re not militias, we are Iraqi forces and these are our beliefs.”

It may be that Isis will not fight for Mosul, but the probability is that they will, in which case the outlook will not be good for the civilian population.

Isis did not fight to the last man in Fallujah west of Baghdad so much of the city is intact, but they did fight for Khalidiya, a nearby town of 30,000, where today only four buildings are still standing according to the Americans.

The extreme bias shown in foreign media coverage of similar events in Iraq and Syria will be a rewarding subject for PhDs students looking at the uses and abuses of propaganda down the ages.

This has been the pattern of reporting of the wars in Syria and Iraq over the last five years.

Nothing much has changed since 2003 when the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein had persuaded foreign governments and media alike that the invading American and British armies would be greeted with rapture by the Iraqi people.

A year later the invaders were fighting for their lives.

Misled by opposition propagandists and their own wishful thinking, foreign government officials and journalists had wholly misread the local political landscape.

Much the same thing is happening today.

Taking Off

Crawley is a Labour target seat, and rumour has it that Jeremy Corbyn intends to impose the whip for Gatwick.

As for Richmond Park, the decision of the Conservatives not to field a candidate makes a nonsense of Zac Goldsmith's entire gesture.

The Greens are also highly likely to endorse him, effectively making him the joint candidate of what, at that eco-toff level, have always been those two very close connected parties.

Jonathan Bartley is not an aberration. David Cameron's "Vote Blue, Go Green" was not an aberration, either.

Remember his profound scepticism about the nuclear energy that the previous Labour Government had strongly supported.

Samantha Cameron used to vote Green. Perhaps she does again?

Goldsmith's mother's family made their money as ever so Green mineowners in County Durham, but never mind.

He himself ran a squalid campaign, belonging not in the gutter but in the sewer, for Mayor of London. He deserves to lose his seat.

We have yet to see a complete list of candidates.

But, while I remain as suspicious as ever of the Whig tradition, I am already supporting the re-election of all of the Lib Dem (and Independent) members of Durham County Council, because of their support for the Teaching Assistants.

Goldsmith does deserve to lose to someone.

Conviction Politics

David T.C. Davies is so unremarkable a person that he cannot even manage the distinction of being the Member of Parliament whose status as such was the greatest national embarrassment.

That accolade goes to Jess Phillips.

She is at it again today, cantering her hobbyhorse that the acquittal of Ched Evans proves that the law itself is wrong.

Phillips and Evans richly deserve each other. They would make a lovely couple.

Of course sexual history is pertinent to whether or not a person may or may not have consented to sex at all. Never mind consented to exactly the same startling variation on the theme, as was the case here.

If anything, the ban on the admission of such basic testimony under almost all circumstances raises serious questions about a great many convictions in the last 13 years.

Had the whole truth been given in evidence, then how different might the verdicts have been?

But Phillips is backed in this, with truly jaw-dropping shamelessness, by Harriet Harman.

Harman wrote the current law, and she railroaded it through a Parliament as supine on this in 2003 as it was on the Iraq War in the same year.

Of course, what she really wanted, and what she will not rest until she gets, were "trials" without juries. Heard only by "specialist" judges who would be bound to convict, due to having had "the training".

Thus, with a little bit of decoration, mere accusation would become conviction. Especially since the burden of proof would also have been reversed.

Phillips's class war position in this is the same as Harman's.

Phillips grew up between two houses, one of them in France, and her mother ran both the local NHS Trust and an events company that that Trust engaged. That company employed young Jess.

Harman is fairly unlikely to contest the 2020 General Election. But Phillips intends to be in Parliament for 30 or 40 years yet. Her removal at the ballot box is now absolutely imperative.

She owes her elevation to another of Harman's pet projects, the system of all-women shortlists.

Similarly, the application of that device to this constituency is certain to produce one or the other of two kinds of Labour candidate.

Most probably, an upper-middle-class girl out of the typing pool who had never previously set foot here.

Or, as an outside chance, an ageing 1970s feminist caricature who perfectly embodied that most abiding legacy of Thatcherism, the transfer of power to such types from and over working-class men.

Of course, Neil Fleming, who will by then be back from London with his tail between his legs (a work in progress, so to speak), could always declare himself to be a woman for this purpose.

No one would find that remotely difficult to believe. There really ought to be one woman in his relationship, and he is the only credible candidate for the position.

To put matters at their mildest, beating any of those would hold no terrors for me.

Salus Populi Suprema Lex

Hearing John Rees on The Jeremy Vine Show, telling Vanessa Feltz about his forthcoming book on the Levellers, made me realise quite how the election and re-election of Jeremy Corbyn had transformed the debate in this country.

Even Counterfire, even the Stop the War Coalition, and even the People’s Assembly Against Austerity, are now as mainstream as this.

We are talking about Vanessa Feltz. We are talking about The Jeremy Vine Show. We are talking about Radio Two, the most heard radio station in Europe. On the BBC.

The regime that executed Charles I also persecuted the Levellers and the Diggers for their appeals to “the Ancient Constitution” and to “time out of mind”.

That regime anticipated the bourgeois capitalist Revolutions of 1688, 1776 and 1789. Our own Radical tradition does not derive from those Revolutions.

Rather, it predates them, and it opposed them and their consequences, making common cause with Tories for the abolition of slavery (by very specific appeal to the Ancient Constitution), for factory reform, for the extension of the franchise, for action against substance abuse and gambling, and so on.

Something similar presents itself in opposition to the neoconservative war agenda, and through that to the neoliberal economic order.