We Must Take Power Away from the Prime Minister

A week really is a long time. That’s all it took for the discredited Deputy Prime Minister, John “croquet” Prescott, to go from zero to hero, after making those unguarded remarks about George W Bush’s “crap” foreign policy. Suddenly he was being feted by antiwar MPs as a blunt, no-nonsense spade-caller. The Independent, announced that “everyone needs a Prezza”.
John Prescott also criticised the American President’s “cowboy” mentality, which was pretty rich coming from a politician only lately in the dock himself for pursuing his own Wild West fantasies at the US ranch of billionaire gambling magnate, Philip Anschutz. Though Prezza at least had the decency to acknowledge this himself.
There will be few who would disagree with the scatological assessment of American policy in the Middle East. Even some US neocons, like the former national security adviser Richard Perle, have begun to disown George W. Bush - though mostly for the wrong reasons. They think he hasn’t been hard enough, resolute enough in prosecuting the war for civilisation in the Middle East.
These are the people who think that the USA is involved in a war of Christian good against Muslim evil, and that only the absolute triumph of Israel over its Arab neighbours is going to make the world safe for America. Somehow, despite the disaster in Iraq, these people still seem to exert an extraordinary influence in the Pentagon and the White House, as America’s support for the abortive Israeli invasion of Lebanon confirmed.
That the policy is crap seems beyond argument. The latest Israeli incursion, supposedly to deal a fatal blow to Hezbollah, has ended with the nearest thing to a defeat that the Israeli Defence Force has experienced since 1948. The pro-Iranian militias of Hassan Nasrallah have lived to fight another day, and launch their rockets at Israel and spread their virulent anti-semitism across the Middle East. To have made heroes of Hezbollah is surely the greatest cock up in the Middle East since, well, the last one.
Where do they go from here? The Republican Right have set the Middle East on fire by the attempt to occupy a Muslim country. They have turned Iraq into a seething cauldron of hate and terrorism, immeasurably increasing the threat to the world. They have alienated young impressionable Muslims in western countries like Britain and turned Islamism, a profoundly reactionary fundamentalist creed, into a global phenomenon. In their present state of self-delusion, it could be that the Republicans may even go for broke and attack Iran for failing to abandon its nuclear programme.
After 9/11, the world was united behind America and its values of liberty, tolerance, freedom of speech and religion. But the actions of the Republican leadership since then, from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay, from Baghdad to Beirut, have shattered faith and trust in the United States a beacon of liberal democracy. The Bush Republicans, by insisting on their right to launch pre-emptive war, abandoning international law and the conventions of war, have made the world a more dangerous place - if only because of the likelihood that other countries will emulate them. This is one hell of a charge sheet.
But here’s a question: if the US policy has been so misguided and Bush such a cowboy, why have we been so prepared to ride shotgun? Why did Prescott not call a halt earlier, lead a cabinet revolt against this policy, mobilise opposition on the Labour backbenches to exercise restraint on Tony Blair? If the PM has been captured by the neocons and deployed as a useful idiot by Bush, why didn’t someone try to rescue him from himself. Why did the Deputy Prime Minister not support a return of parliament a fortnight ago to express Britain’s rejection of the crap policy in Lebanon. In short, why does Labour do nothing as the world burns?
In the wake of the attempted London bombings, and as we await to see the next disastrous turn of events, there really is no bigger question in British politics. And we need to be asking it of Gordon Brown also. The silence from the future leader of the Labour Party has been deafening. Yes, he is on paternity leave - but that doesn’t mean he can’t open his mouth, or let his views be known indirectly.
By his inaction over the years, the Chancellor has made himself complicit in this global train wreck. He has repeatedly failed to disown the disaster wrought by his boss, Tony Blair - presumably in the hope that this will ensure that “orderly transition of power” in Number Ten. But this isn’t just passive acquiescence.
During the last general election campaign, the Chancellor announced that he would have done “exactly the same” as Tony Blair faced with the Iraq WMD crisis. Are we to presume that he would have done ‘exactly the same’, again, over the Israeli invasion of the Lebanon? Well, we need to know.
Of course, some have interpreted Brown’s mega-silences as an indication that he is a closet dissident. I’ve flirted with this argument myself. Deconstructing the Chancellor’s words, it is possible to make the case that, in endorsing the war, he has only been following collective cabinet responsibility - in other words accepting the form but not the content of Tony Blair’s foreign policy. He has not made the policies his own, or indulged in triumphalism.
But that’s really not good enough. Politicians have ways of getting their messages out through unofficial channels, and no one knows this better than Gordon Brown who is a master at media politics. There are any number of ways he could have consciously distanced himself from the Iraq chaos, just as he did over variable tuition fees, foundation hospitals. Yet, he and the rest of the Labour ministerial hierarchy have simply failed to act.
Of course, he has to be careful not to cause a fall our with Blair. But this is not Saddam’s cabinet, where dissent means death, but a democracy in which all ministers are supposedly equal. The Prime Minister, as the cliche goes, is merely the First Among Equals. So where have all these supposedly co-equal Labour ministers been all these years? Why didn’t they act over the dodgy dossier of February 2003 which falsely claimed that Britons could be attacked by WMD in 45 minutes? Why didn’t they revolt in March 2003 when Blair broke his promise of a second United Nations resolution on using force in Iraq? Or over the failure to let the UN weapons inspectors do their job.
And when no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, why the the Labour ministers then not draw a line in the sand? Instead, they allowed the BBC to be emasculated for trying to tell the truth about how intelligence was manipulated by Downing Street to bounce Britain into a war it never wanted. As the insurgency grew in Iraq, through 2004 and 2005, why did British ministers not then again call a halt - after Abu Ghraib? Fallujah? and now Lebanon?
Where were they all? Presumably forming huddles in the liquid dungeons of Westminster, where they wrung their hands and moaned about US military adventurism - as Prescott did last week - hoping that the policy would somehow come right in the end. A lot of good that has done us. Some probably supported Saddam’s removal for humanitarian reasons, at least initially. But they should have seen that this was not what George W. Bush was looking for in Iraq, but a demonstration of US military might in the region.
Others no doubt believed America to be justified in hunting down the killers of 9/11. But if so, they should have called a halt after the invasion Afghanistan in 2001. Everything since has been an unmitigated disaster. But only the late Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, had the courage to stand out against the perversion of British foreign policy in the interests of American neo-imperialism. (And the former Development Secretary Clare Short, who resigned so belatedly it no longer counted). Where stood Harriet Harman, Charles Clarke, Jack Straw?
It is a truism that UK cabinets have become weaker in recent decades, as the power of the Prime Minister and his private office have become immeasurably greater. However, Tony Blair isn’t an absolute monarch, even if he sometimes behaves like one. He hasn’t scrapped the constitution of the United Kingdom. Parliament is still sovereign, and if Labour cabinet ministers - even three of them - had made a stand, then Blair could have been stopped in his tracks. Even the threat of a cabinet revolt might have halted the madness, because Tony Blair would have realised that he faced his own political ruination in sticking by Bush.
But clearly, the existing constitutional arrangements are no longer working. Relying on the conscience and independence of ministers, individually and collectively, is no longer enough. Something has to be done effectively to curb the arbitrary and unaccountable power of the Prime Minister - if only to prevent him being captured again by powerful American interests.
Reading accounts of the origins of the war, what comes over most strongly is the enormous discretion a British Prime Minister seems to exercise. It was Tony Blair, personally, who signed up to the Middle East strategy, not his government, still less Britain. Millions marched in the streets against a war in Iraq. Members of the security services, and weapons analysts like the late Dr David Kelly, warned Number Ten about the strategy. We know from the Butler Report that there was widespread disagreement in British intelligence about the reliability of the sources on which the PM based his assertions that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
The opposition was reflected in parliament. In September 2002 and March 2003, Tony Blair suffered two of the worst rebellions inflicted a British Prime Minister since Irish Home Rule. It did no good, because our system of election confers something close to dictatorial powers on a PM between elections. Labour’s inflated 160 seat majority in the last parliament did not reflect the true minority support for Labour in the country, but it allowed Tony Blair to do more or less what he liked. A messianic politician, who has an unshakeable conviction in his own infallibility, he exploited this to the full.
Now, of course, the British voters had an opportunity to pass their verdict on his conduct in the general election of 2005. Tony Blair was re-elected, which reignited his own faith in himself. However, that election was an unreliable guide to the popularity of Tony Blair himself.
After the opinion poll meltdown in the first week of the 2005 election campaign, Gordon Brown allowed himself to be ‘joined at the hip’ with Tony Blair in order to save the Labour government. So desperate were Labour ministers to retain their own precarious hold on power, they lined up behind their discredited leader and pretended that Iraq was a dead issue. Like royal courtiers, their own fate became inextricably linked to that of their leader. The power of patronage places too much power in the hands of the Prime Minister of the day.
Perhaps Brown was under the impression that Blair intended to hand over power shortly after the election. But if so he was singularly naive - Blair had broken his promises before and Brown had nothing in writing. As things stand today, the PM seems minded to hang on and on until 2009 if he can.
The only way of holding politicians to account is to keep them on a tight democratic rein. The reality is that, while the PM may have theoretical powers, derived from Royal Prerogative, to declare war without a vote by MPs in parliament, in practice, he needs their political support.
We can’t rely on ministers. Only parliament can exert democratic control. It is therefore imperative that there is the introduction of proportional representation in Westminster, to strip the Prime Minister of his powers of elective dictatorship. Party representation in Westminster must reflect votes cast in the country, and not the vanity of the party leader. Under a co-operative system, no PM, however headstrong, could steamroller legislation or bounce the country into war simply because of his thirst for glory. If the House of Commons had been elected on the same electoral system as Holyrood, Britain would never have gone to war in Iraq. And we wouldn’t have been landed in the crap we are in now.

True Lies in Middle East

“There are no facts, only interpretations”, so said the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, the Godfather or relativism. His words echo down the generations and some believe he is at least partly responsible for the mess we are in today. For, truth is in crisis.

Never has it been more important than now to know what we know and why we know it. We live in an age of rampant paranoia, conspiracy theories and mistrust, beautifully parodied by the play “I am Nobody’s Lunch” at the Edinburgh Festival. No one believes what governments say anymore, because they all spout lies crafted by spin-doctors.

We don’t believe scientists because they’re all supposedly in the pay of corporations and want to destroy the planet with frankenstein foods. So we start to believe in anything and everything - from Cosmic Ordering to the Da Vinci code; crystal therapy to Creationism.

We seem to have lost any sense of intellectual discrimination - credulity is rampant and the division between fact and fiction becoming dangerously blurred, not least on the internet, where all ideas are equal, no matter how misconceived. Just look at the websites which claim that 9/11 never happened/was a “Jewish-Christian” plot/ was organised by the CIA.

I’ve been amazed at the Edinburgh Book Festival this year by the number of people who suspect that the latest bomb scare was created to distract attention from Israelis military action in Lebanon. It even crossed my own mind. But journalists an writers are professional sceptics. We face a much more profound conflict of truth about the nature of the alleged conflict between the West and Islam.

How do you answer those one third of young British Muslims - according to a recent NOP survey - who believe the London bombings were justified because of British foreign policy? Who believe that there is a systematic attempt by the West to crush Islam?

We know that this is untrue - that the British- American invasion of Iraq, however misguided and malevolent, was not part of a Christian-Jewish crusade against the Muslim world. But just try proving it.

After all, Islamists will say, there is a pattern to history. The Western powers have been meddling in the Middle East since the end of the First World War, when the victorious powers redrew the map of the Arab world, creating first Iraq and Lebanon then, later, Israel.

Doesn’t America use Israel as a base from which to attack Muslims? Aren’t American weapons used by the IDF to crush Hezbollah? Why has the West turned a blind eye to Israeli breaches of UN resolutions in the West Bank and Gaza?

No use saying that in 1948 the American government was actually rather cool about the creation of Israel, or that the main pro-Zionist backer at the time was Soviet Russia. Or that Israel would fight even if America abandoned it. Or that it’s the only real democracy in the Middle East.

Nor does it cut much Islamic ice to say that Western forces defended the Muslims of Kosovo against Serbia in 1999, or that America financed the Afghan Mujihadeen in 1980’s against Russia. Or indeed, that in Iraq today, the vast majority of Muslim deaths are caused by other Muslims.

No, to many, it looks as if there has been a long campaign of Western double standards from Chechnya to Kashmir, where Islamic people always comes off worst. It can’t be accidental, they say. Look at the recent invasions of Afghanistan, and Iraq? Iraq had nothing to do with al Qaeda and 9/11. Don’t these confirm that the West is trying to occupy the Arab world, seize its natural resources, subjugate its people and destroy its religion? You don’t see the West invading Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, Communist Korea or any other non-muslim dictatorships.

Around fifty thousand Muslims in Britain, we are told, think along these lines. This paranoia isn’t helped by the intemperate remarks of Western leaders, such as George W. Bush, about the “war against Islamic fascism”. Or the Home Secretary, John Reid, that we are fighting the greatest threat since the Second World War. Who exactly are the enemy, the new axis powers? It’s easy to misread all this as a generalised declaration of war on the Muslim world as a whole.

Apocalyptic theories about the “Clash of Civilisations”, as the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington called it, feed suspicion. Moreover, if we really don't want to be misunderstood, perhaps the West could stop invading so many Muslim nations.

The danger is that paranoia could become the intellectual default for many young British-born Muslim men. It is going to be exceptionally hard to eradicate this, not least because Islam - in its more radical forms - is a religion which doesn’t really go in for doubt and argument. God’s law is there, in black and white, in the Qu’ran, and all the true believer is required to do is accept it. This inclines more suggestible young people to accept what they are told by self-styled Islamic authorities, like Abu Hamza and Hizb ut Tahrir. For some Islamists, scientific argument is itself suspect, as is democracy, women and gay rights, freedom of speech.

We have a duty to oppose obscurantism, whether from Christian fundamentalists or Islamists. In fact, these modes of thought drive from the same Abrahamist religious origins in the Bible- which means, theologically speaking, that muslims are descendants of the Jews - which is an irony lost on the Islamists.

Some on the political Right argue that the intelligentsia in the West are partly to blame for the situation, that it is a symptom of the West’s own intellectual decadence and Nietzschean defeatism. The Tory MP Michael Gove, in his book “Fahrenheit 7/7” attacks our “culture of relativism” which he sees as: “a failure to display moral clarity, a corruption of thought on both right and left, as well as a strain of Western self-hatred, that combine to weaken, compromise and confuse our national response to a direct totalitarian challenge”.

So are philosophers to blame? Is multiculturalism to blame? Should we be enforcing Western modes of thought on Muslim communities in Britain? Well, we certainly shouldn’t do the converse. Earlier this week, British Muslim leaders called for the introduction of Sharia law as far as family matters is concerned. Is that acceptable?

Well no, it isn’t - if it means women being treated as second class citizens. But it is important to say why. We have to engage intellectually with the proposition that women are inferior to men, or that adulterers should be punished. We need to affirm that all humans are equal and that the freedom to form relationships is a basic human right. Assertion won’t do.

We need a more robust approach to intellectual debate. The philosophers have to come down from their concrete towers and engage in public affairs. Politicians have to start thinking beyond the next press release. We have to curb the spin, distortion and sensationalism which corrodes any sense of objectivity and truth.

Above all, in schools, where we learn how to think, it is time to start teaching the art of reason. And that’s a fact.

We Do Get It Mr Reid

12/8/06

If we are indeed “at war with Islamic fascists”, as George W. Bush claimed last week, then it’s not going too well right now. The mighty Israeli army has been halted in the Lebanon by a handful of Shi’ite militia. America has effectively lost the war in Iraq, sacrificing as many servicemen’s lives as civilians who died in the 9/11 to create a dysfunctional state heavily influenced by Shi-ite Iran. The same Iran has defied America by continuing to declare its intention to build nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, the British in Afghanistan have been stunned by the fighting capacity of Islamic militants who were supposed to have been defeated four years ago. In Helmand, we are told, British soldiers have been involved in their most sustained military engagement since the Korean war half a century ago. And now, of course, the civil air services of the west are paralysed after the bottle bomb plot. The shadow of al Qaeda is again darkening the skies nearly five years after Bush promised to get him “dead or alive”.
People often wonder why Islamic extremists continue to target civil airliners, when the security is now so tight that it must be almost impossible to succeed. Why not softer targets, like nuclear power stations, shopping centres. The answer is that air-terror is a no-lose option for the terrorists. If they get through, then there is a “spectacular” which will dominate the attention of the world, and likely provoke America and Britain into ill-judged and counterproductive retaliation. But equally, if they fail, they still dominate the world’s media, spreading anxiety among the civilian population and blocking the arteries of global capitalism.
Terrorists measure their success, not in body count, but column inches. Unable to mount a conventional war, they rely on the media to magnify minor acts of violence into national emergencies, and targeting air travel is the surest way to do this. Striking at the height of the holiday season ensures maximum media attention. Politicians overreact by declaring world war three, thus elevating a cowardly mass murder into an act of war.
Such atrocities also leave a wake of conspiracy theories. Look on the web and you’ll find no shortage claims that the latest plot was an invention. We’ve been here before, they say, with anthrax, Ricin, Menezes, Forest Gate, those tanks at Heathrow. Some Islamic websites seem convinced that the scare is merely the latest attempt by the “Jewish American” world conspiracy - aided by Pakistan - to justify new anti-terror laws and a crack down on anyone with brown face and a beard.
Well, of course, I don’t know whether last week’s plot was genuine or not - though all the evidence suggests that there was indeed a conspiracy to blow up several civil airliners. We know from the London bombings that there are many young British muslims prepared to martyr themselves by killing civilians, and we know they have the means. Britain is a prime target because of Tony Blair’s involvement in the Iraq in vasion and his support for Israel’s assault in Lebanon. It all fits. There’s no need to make it up.
But there is one other semi-plausible conspiracy theory. That America instructed British intelligence to move against a network they had been monitoring for over a year in order to distract world attention from the bloody Israeli action in Lebanon. They needed a breathing space so that the IDF could establish those “facts on the ground” prior to a UN-brokered ceasefire. It also serves as a justification for Israel’s actions. ‘See - Hezbollah types are trying to blow us up too’. It’s all part of one big war against terror and we should be grateful to the Israelis for taking them on.
Well, I’m as parnoid as the next man , but I still don’t buy the conspiracy . The pretence would have been too hard to sustain, and the consequences of being found out too great. Moreover, I don’t believe that, after the Forest Gate debacle and the accidental death of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Metropolitan Police would play along with such a ludicrous deception.
No, in my view, this near miss simply confirms that the proper answer to terrorism is good policing and intelligence work - not launching wars against countries you don’t like in the Middle East. However, thewave of suspicion that followed last week's abortive bombing confirms the gulf of trust that is opening between the government and he people - especially Muslim people. It is therefore imperative that we learn exactly what those twenty four individuals have been arrested for, and that proper charges are levelled against them. No doubt the White House would like the would-be plane bombers to be sent post-haste to Guantanamo Bay - but this must be resisted, if only to prevent the paranoid conspiracy theories from gaining traction.
The British press, of course, has already condemned them. Individuals like Don Stewart-Whyte, aka Abdul Waheed, the first double-barrelled terrorist, who, we learn, came from a suburban Tory-voting family. He had drifted into a world of drugs and drink until he discovered Islam. Within six months he had grown a beard and become a terrorist. Allegedly.
But for the sake of good relations with the two million British Muslims, Stewart-Whyte’s trial must be handled fairly, or else his place will be taken by ten misguided young men deluded into thinking that they are at war with the West.
Trouble is, our political leaders are as guilty of the Muslim fanatics of promoting war fever. When Tony Blair talks of the “arc of extremism” and a “war against civilisation”. When his Home Secretary, John Reid - who seems to have replaced John Prescott as Deputy Prime Minister - says the current threat is the “worst since World War 11” and compares bin Laden to Hitler. When George Bush declares “war” against “Islamic Fascism which will stop at nothing”, they are simply following the terrorist script. Bin Laden is laughing all the way to the West Bank.
Terrorism is a localised problem, which causes great inconvenience, but relatively little loss of life. Even the deaths in 9/11 - appalling thought that atrocity was - do not compare with the losses in a real war, which are counted in millions. Adolf Hitler commanded the greatest mechanised army in history, a force capable of seizing mainland Europe in a matter of months. He was only halted by the combined power of America and Russia and after the deaths of twenty million people on the Eastern Front alone. To compare Osama Bin Laden to Hitler is not only ludicrous, it flatters a relatively isolated fanatic who happened to own a building firm with access to explosives.
This overreaction is the mirror image of the Islamic websites and bookshops which claim there is a “Jewish-Christian crusade against Islam” and show images of women and children killed in the Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kashmir. There has been much comment in the press and in TV programmes like Channell 4 “Dispatches” documentary about how these websites distort and misrepresent the situation in the Middle East. How they pollute young minds with hate. Use emotive images to convey simplistic messages. They surely do that.
But while the messages are distorted, the images are not. We have indeed killed tens of thousands of innocent women and children in Iraq and in Lebanon and we have seen some of the pictures of the Lebanese dead recently in the last few days. We have not seen similar images of the tens of thousands dead from our invasion of Iraq because the press was so tightly controlled, and the British press “embedded” with the occupying forces.
Hardly surprising, then, if lost young men, looking for a meaning in life, are seduced by the recruiting sergeants of Jihad, the Mullahs who greet them as they leave the Mosque. “Your faith needs you” - they cry, “Defend Muslim women and children. Death on the infidel”. These are were sentiments that converted London bombers like Shehzad Tanwer and Sidique Khan to extremism. According to British security sources, there are now at least 1,000 home-grown Muslims prepared to die in order to kill
Of course, America is not to blame for Islamic extremism. The fundamentalists were around before 9/11 and Bin Laden was hatching his plots long before the invasion of Iraq. But what Britain and America stand accused of is monumental incompetence and irresponsibility in their response to it. The ill-judged occupation of Iraq, the suspension of human rights in Guantanamo Bay, the abuse in Abu Ghraib. And now, the apparent willingness to endorse any action taken by Israel in Gaza or Lebanon, were exactly what Bin Laden and his crew wanted. A disproportionate response, preparing the ground for a regional war and a possible clash of civilisations.
By playing into Bin Laden’s hands, we have now turned thousands of British Muslims into converts to the cause of martyrdom. Even those moderate Muslims, like the ultra-loyal Labour MP for Govan Mohammed Sarwar, have been forced to criticise British foreign policy in the wake of this latest crisis."US foreign policy”, he said last week, supported by Tony Blair has weakened moderate, enlightened and liberal Muslims and has strengthened extremists". An NOP Poll for the Dispatches programme “What Muslims Want” suggests that 23% felt the London bombings were justified because ofBritish support for the US war on terror, and he figure rose to 31% among under-25’s. How many were privately cheering the plane bombers last week?
There are signs that the Labour Party in Scotland is beginning to get the message. Jim Sheridan’s resignation from his post as parliamentary private secretary to the Defence Secretary, Des Browne, suggests there is life on the Labour backbenches. There is even a suggestion that the MP for Paisley had the tacit endorsement of his boss. The Scottish Secretary, Douglas Alexander, had already made a stand against Prestwick being used as a stopover in munitions flights.
This belated dissent is to be welcomed, but it has come far too late. Britain has been dragged into the front-line of an unnecessary conflict by leaders who seem unable or unwilling to understand the magnitude of their failure. The invasion and occupation of a Muslim nation, under the bogus pretext of defusing weapons of mass destruction, as seen by many in the Muslim world as a war crime. The chaos in Iraq and the daily death toll testifies to the folly of the policy, as does the continuing threat from terrorist bombing in the West which the invasion of Iraq was supposed to eradicate. And still, in their uncritical support of Israel, Tony Blair and George W. Bush are alienating the entire Muslim world, from Birmingham to Baghdad.
We are led by fools, global agents provocateur who exploited our fears of terrorism to justify a show of force in the Middle East that has only demonstrated their weakness. Who pretend they are Churchills and Rooseveldts defending western civilisation, but who have, by their own stupidity and ignorance of history, undermined the very foundation of that civilisation by flouting international law and the human rights conventions established by the victors of WW11. Who lecture the world on liberty and freedom while dismantling civil liberties at home.
And now, after the abortive bottle bombs, comes another raft of security measures from a hard-man Home Secretary, John Reid, who is clearly revelling in this “super critical” terror alert. A Spinal Tap statesman turning his level up to eleven. Who says that”traditional concepts of individual rights and freedom are outmoded in the face of the 21st century terror threat”, insulting the memory of the millions who died in the last century to defend those rights and freedoms.
Oh yes, Mr Reid. We get it all right. Your “war” is possibly the greatest policy disaster ever perpetrated by democratically elected leaders. And it was lost even before it began.

Tale of Two Parties

8/8/06

There’s been a lot of earnest sucking of teeth and shaking of heads about how the Tommy Sheridan trial has damaged the image of devolution. How could we have given a platform to that rabble of immature malcontents? Who will take the Scottish Parliament seriously, when it’s most recognisable member (no pun intended) is Tommy Sheridan ? Surely any system that gives the oxygen of publicity to toy town trots is doing a disservice to democracy?
And so on and so forth. However, I think the political grey-hairs have got this completely wrong. On the contrary, the tale of Tommy and the Witches - apart from being better than anything on at the Edinburgh Festival this year - has been a vindication, not only of Scottish home rule, but of the proportional electoral system. The SSP have been found out. That’s surely what democracy is supposed to do.
The affair has exposed the sordid reality of ultra-left politics: the vanity, self-delusion, paranoia. Ranting about integrity, honour, truth; accusing each other of lying, betrayal, sexual misconduct. I particularly liked Carolyn Leckie’s description of Tommy Sheridan this week as “a cross between “Goebbels, Walter Mitty and Benny Hill” Benny Hill!. That hurt.
Though not as much as Sheridan’s rejoinder that the United Left Faction (or whatever they’re called today) are “scabs” in the pay of Rupert Murdoch and international capital - as if Tommy Sheridan’s sex life was an industrial relations issue. Mind you, how many people under the age of forty know that scabs are strike breakers. rather than congealed blood platelets? In the good old days, the Tommy problem would have been resolved by the traditional means of an ice pick in the back of the head. Not any more, they now use the legal system. The muppet Marxists seem determined to pursue their poisonous vendetta through the courts. The SSP wimmin are now promising to sue Tommy for 2 million pounds for impugning their integrity.
All this in the vainglorious pretence that they are representing the working class, the poor, the bombed children of the Lebanon. “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your libel briefs!” “Solidarity with the Palestinian Dispossessed in the Court of Session”.
The point is that no one will take the SSP seriously again, in or out of parliament - though Tommy Sheridan could still translate his celebrity into a massive personal votes. This is a democratic experiment which has run its course. The six SSP MSPs rode to Holyrood on the back of the popular rebellion of the Scottish electorate against the established parties which took place at the Scottish elections of May 2003.
Sick of sleaze, officegate, and MSPs who could barely utter a coherent sentence, Scots voters used the additional member system imaginatively to lever in Greens, Reds, greys and also independents like Denis Canavan and Margo MacDonald, who had been ostracised by their parties for daring to show independence of mind. It was an inspiring exercise in participatory democracy and a tribute to the sophistication of the Scottish electorate.
The voters wanted to upset the applecart; introduce new ideas, diversity, and a bit of character into the faceless parliament that the late Donald Dewar bequeathed. So, the Scottish Socialists returned with six seats, the first time the far left has ever entered parliament under its own name. The Scottish Greens did even better, returning seven. It was an amazing departure from the staid and colourless tradition of British parliamentary politics. .
While less experienced than the disciplined Marxist activists of the SSP, the Green MSPs soon found their feet. They thrived in an atmosphere of intellectual debate, worked constructively on parliamentary committees, entered into tactical relations with rival parties, made contributions to legislation, promoted single issue causes, like asylum and civil partnerships, and generally tried to win respect as legislators.
The result is that after the next Scottish parliamentary elections in May, the Scottish Greens could, just conceivably, be participating in government. If Jack McConnell loses as badly as some Labour MSPs believe they could, then there is an opening for a Liberal-SNP Coalition, in which the Scottish Greens might hold the balance of power. Especially if, as seems likely, the Greens inherit many of the SSP votes.
So, it’s a tale of two parties: the Greens have grown the reds have withered. Unable to manage the transition from the politics of protest and gesture, the Scottish Socialist Party indulged instead in the fratricidal divisions that have so often afflicted the ultra left. Blinded by their own rhetoric and unable to cope with Tommy Sheridan’s commanding personality, the SSP parliamentary group fragmented almost as soon as it was elected.
Much of the antagonism arose because of Sheridan’s apparent willingness to ‘play the game’, become a real politicians, use his media skills to get the party taken seriously.Sheridan accepted that, in a real parliament, you have to win arguments and conduct debates, play by the rules, do your homework on committees and generate initiatives and policies. He made attempts at legislation, with his bill on warrant sales, his campaign for free school meals. His speeches on asylum, Iraq and poverty were powerful and resonated beyond the wiggly walls of Holyrood. They certainly made erstwhile left-wingers on the Labour benches distinctly uncomfortable. The other SSP MSPs seemed more interested in staging student occupations and walkouts - as if anyone cared whether they were in our out of the place.
What it confirms is that parties like the SSP can really only function on the outside of politics as extra-parliamentary organisations. The far left thrives on exclusion from the centres of power. Unburdened by any legislative responsibility, the SSP could devote its time to surfing the alienation of the housing estates of Scotland, backing ethnic minorities and attracting the cameras with their elaborate gestures of nuclear defiance at Faslane. Tommy Sheridan was never happier than when he was in the arms of the police, being carried to the paddy wagon, pursued the nation’s press and TV.
Contrast again, with the Greens, who have largely made the transition from extra parliamentary politics, and have largely abandoned stunts. They still make themselves heard though, with a hyper-eneretic press operation, run by the ubiquitous George Baxter, and produce copious background briefings and policy initiatives. The Greens remain inexperienced have been accused of political naiveté in their dealings with the Scottish Executive over sustainability and the “green thread” that was supposed to run through Scottish Executive policy. They have no public figures of the calibre of Tommy Sheridan and some of their MSPs still seem a little bewildered at their own prominence. However, they are clearly on their way.
The Scottish Parliament has done British democracy a service by drafting in the irregulars of British politics, and explosing them to the harsh scrutiny of a real legislature. The SSP couldn’t take the heat It’s a ruthless business, parliament, but effective. And in the end, like John West, it’s the politicians they reject that ensures Holyrood will, in the end, get the best.

Sheridan verdict

5/8/06

The SSP may be facing oblivion, and Tommy Sheridan may never fully live down the lurid publicity, but the real losers are the press. The Tommy Sheridan case is more than a salutary lesson for the sensation-seeking News of the Screws - it is a condemnation of an entire industry.
Consider: a mighty news organisation, News International, lines up witness after witness to testify to Tommy Sheridan’s sexual hypocrisy. These range from party members, alleged sexual partners and people who claim to have seen Tommy swinging. The judge instructs the jury that if only one of them is telling the truth, and Sheridan is a hypocrite, then the News of the World is vindicated.
And what happens? The jury discuss it for a couple of hours, dismiss five weeks of testimony and award the largest defamation damages in Scottish legal history to Tommy Sheridan. It was hard not to smile at Tommy’s triumph, even if this case could have serious implications for journalistic freedom.
It was indeed an incredible verdict, though not - as the News of the Screws said - a perverse one. It was a rebuke to an industry which preys on human misery and disclosure; which uses chequebook journalism, spin, sensation, distortion. This has been a long time coming. The public has long disbelieved what newspapers say in print - now they refuse to believe what newspapers say in court, or indeed what witnesses say in court in their defence.
Forget the facts of the case. The jury, in the end, were faced with a moral choice: Did they side with this eccentric, but intensely principled man, Tommy Sheridan, his insanely voted wife and loyal family. Or did they side with people who admitted playing fast and loose with the truth in order to sell newspapers. With so-called journalists who trade in salacious gossip and kiss-and-tell. With fractious and spiteful SSP activists who couldn’t get their story straight about the transactions of their own executive?
Well, surprise surprise, they decided in favour Tommy Sheridan, whatever may or may not have happened in his private life. We will never know what the jury thought about the lurid tales of Tommy's exploits, but I suspect they just didn’t care, so long as Gail didn’t. Their verdict was a vote for family life, honour, personal dignity, privacy and accurate journalism.
The reaction among some in the press has been of amazement and hurt. How could a court dismiss such compelling evidence? How can journalists hope to win cases in future if juries are going to demand such high standards of proof? The insurance companies who ultimately pay the costs of such defamation rulings will look anew at the content of papers - sensing that nothing is safe.
So, this historic ruling could have implications for the freedom of the press, in privacy cases at least. The News of the World and its stablemates are going to have to clean up their act, or face future defamation damages of increasing magnitude. Being able to establish what lawyers call “veritas” - ie having substantial evidence to back up a story - is no longer enough.
Most journalists and lawyers that I spoke to believed that Sheridan would lose the case simply because the News of the World had so many witnesses. But witnesses are no longer enough, it seems. It may seem implausible that all of them lied - but the jury didn’t see why it should believe any of them. Anyone connected with the press is suspect in their eyes.
The Sheridan represents an inversion of the traditional defamation doctrine that you cannot defame someone who has no reputation to defend. That if you blacken a public figure’s image sufficiently, they will not be able to win substantial damages in court. Now, every time a newspaper enters court in any future sex case it is going to have to prove its own reputation, its own integrity. Well, maybe that’s no bad thing.

Walter's World

5/8/06

Oh to be a fly on the wall at Labour’s National Executive Committee meeting, when Tony Blair greets the arrival of it’s n newest member, Walter Wolfgang. The octogenarian left-winger was roughly ejected from last year’s Labour Party conference for heckling the Foreign Secretary, and was detained by police under one of the PM’s Prevention of Terrorism Acts. His election last week by Labour’s constituency parties is an eloquent snub to the authority of Tony Blair.
That these two figures are expected to coexist on what is supposedly Labour’s ruling body tells us a lot about the current state of the Labour Party. Walter Wolfgang is the very model of unreconstructed old Labour - as principled as he is uncompromising; as tenacious as he is sometimes tedious. Blair loathes everything he stands for, and the feeling is mutual.
I moderated a debate on Iraq during one of Wolfgang’s recent speaking tours - but you don’t moderate Walter, he doesn’t really attempt to engage with different points of view. In Walter’s World everything done in the name of Israel, America or Britain is evil and to be condemned, while the actions of its enemies are invariably excusable and more often than not the result of past infamy by the West.
Okay - he’s probably right on most counts. And as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, he can neither be accused of being anti-semitic in his hostility to Israeli “imperialism”, nor naive about the nature of dictatorship in his opposition to the toppling of Saddam. But while Walter Wolfgang is an independent spirit, and represents signs of life in Labour, there also is a troubling naiveté his brand of anti-American conviction politics. It is the Manichean mirror image of Tony Blair's. In a strange way, they were made for each other.
The Prime Minister dismisses complexity and misrepresents the reality of politics in the Middle East. He wants a clear cut case of good versus bad, and wants very clearly to be seen in the former camp. The bad guys are clearly those Islamic extremists, with bombs and beards, their penchant for martyrdom and their “lack of concern for human life”. Simplistic analysis invites simplistic solutions - of which the most simple-minded is to place an unjustified faith in military action. The Prime Minister’s apparently uncritical support of Israeli foreign policy has alienated much of the world and most of the Labour cabinet.
I say “apparent” because, of course, Tony Blair is not wholly uncritical of Israel’s attitude to the dispossessed Palestinians. He said again, last week, that Anglo-American objectives in the Middle East would be lost if there wasn’t movement on the creation of a Palestinian homeland. Unfortunately, this did not stop him endorsing the Israeli military action in southern Lebanon, which in its indiscriminate ferocity amounted to state-sanctioned terrorism if not actual war crime. Indeed, Israel’s apparent determination to clear hundreds of thousands of Shia Muslims from their homes in Southern Lebanon could be seen as a kind of ethnic cleansing.
It emerged last week, that Tony Blair knew in advance of Israel's plans to bomb Lebanon back to the stone age, and that he did little if anything to try to stop it. He clearly believes - despite all evidence to the contrary - that massive military retaliation is a legitimate and effective way of winning the hearts and minds of the Middle East to those Western values he is so enthusiastic about. Lebanon may have to be destroyed so that it can be liberated from “extremism”. And if they don’t want to be liberated, well, they’ll just be destroyed.
But military supremacy is not enough, it is never enough, otherwise he Arab-Israeli dispute would have ended after the Six Day War in 1967. It may well be that the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrullah, is an anti-semitic ogre. But killing 900 Lebanese and destroying the country’s infrastructure is hardly going to endear us to the people on the ground.
In Iraq, the Lebanon and the West Bank, we have blundered around, supposedly spreading democracy and freedom, but actually killing tens of thousands of civilians and destroying the homes and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands more. Hard to appreciate the moral superiority of the liberal democratic West when bunker busting bombs and fragmentation grenades are being lobbed at you by your liberators.
In Iraq. as the leaked memo from the former British Ambassador to Baghdad, William Patey confirmed last week, the country is fragmenting and falling into civil war - just as critics forecast. The invasions of Iraq and Lebanon have immeasurably strengthened the very terrorist and fundamentalist groups which the invasion was supposed to eradicate. We have destroyed what unity the nation of Iraq possessed by a vainglorious display of military firepower and botched nation-building.
As for security - well, British soldiers are dying once more in Afghanistan, four years after the dispatch of the Taleban. Hezbollah rockets are killing civilians deep into northern Israel. Pro-Western Arab states are speechless with fear, while demagogues like Iran’s Ahmedinijad and Hezbollah’s Nasurrah (?) are becoming popular heroes of Muslims across the region. The terrorist threat has receded for now from Europe and America, for the time being. But the bombers will be back - many home grown. The Muslim communities in Britain are alienated as never before - as was made clear by condemnation of British policy by the moderate Muslim Labour MP Mohammed Sarwar.
Rarely in history has a foreign policy proved to be such a comprehensive failure as the Bush/Blair doctrine on the Middle East. We have allowed ourselves to be portrayed as the aggressors by being, well, the aggressors. We invaded Iraq on a false pretext about weapons of mass destruction, then claimed that it was Saddams’ infamy, and now belatedly rationalise the exercise on the grounds it was necessary to to spread Western values. We have indeed “changed reality” in the Middle East, but it is the reverse of what was intended. Instead of creating a democratic domino effect, spreading liberal values across the Arab world, we have united much of the Arab world against democracy.
We have given credence to the fundamentalist claim that the West is on a religious crusade against Islam. Well, that’s what it looks like on the ground. The worrying thing is that Mr Blair seems positively to relish the fight against what he now calls the “arc of extremism”. He sees a dark conspiracy of Islamic fundamentalists, a kind of Muslim Mafia, behind ever suicide bomber every insurgent, be they Ba’athist, Hezbollah, Palestinian, Taleban, Chechen. Forget the aching religious and communal differences in the Muslim worlds. Forget that Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden loathed each other; that the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect was born in pro-American Saudi Arabia.
Forget also that Hezbollah and Hamas have been playing the very democratic game in Lebanon and Gaza which we are supposed to be fighting for. Hezbollah is part of the elected government in Lebanon and Hamas was freely elected by Palestinians. What clearer testimony to failure than that the people we say we are fighting for should vote for the terrorists?
You would think that this might raise some question in the back of the PM’s mind about the wisdom of pursuing Israeli-American military adventures. But this is one Prime Minister whose conviction in his own correctness is an of article fo faith. He never asks questions, and when they are put to him, he invariably responds that the wisdom of whatever he has embarked upon is self-evident. It is simply “the right thing to do”.
This is Messianic nonsense, and deeply worrying. It’s often said that Tony Blair, too long in office, has succumbed to Thatcher disease - an inability to see past your own rhetoric. However, Margaret Thatcher was never as bad as this. At her best, the former Tory Prime Minister was an intelligent woman who confronted a very real nuclear threat to civilisation posed by a decadent Soviet Imperialism. No need to invent weapons of mass destruction then.
Now, I don’t want to indulge in Thatcher romanticism - she was in many ways a blinkered class warrior. However, Thatcher didn’t go around starting wars for the sake of it and she had the wisdom to realise that the emergence of the reforming Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachov represented a real opportunity to achieve international reconciliation. Would Tony Blair have seen half as astute?
There was indeed a clash of civilisations during the Cold War, a nuclear threat to democracy by the Soviet Union, and many on the British Left have failed to come fully to terms with the extent to which they ignored or diminished that threat. I suspect Walter Wolfgang would find little to applaud in Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy, even with the passage of time. But Tony Blair has gone to the other extreme - he has gone out of his way to seek a generalised clash with the Muslim world. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and he is the prophet.
“We are fighting a war, not just against terrorism”, the PM said in Los Angeles last week, “but about how the world should govern itself in the 21st Century”. It is all about “values”. At the court of Sun proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, in San Francisco, the PM insisted that it was a battle between “modernity and tradition”.
So, what would the MP regard as victory in this battle of values? Presumably, a pro-Western Christian Lebanon with a subordinated Shia minority. Acceptance by the Palestinians of a Gaza ghetto. Pro-American governments in Iraq and Iran and a commitment to liberal capitalism throughout the Middle East? He is getting precisely the reverse - a headlong flight by moderate Arab opinion into the arms of militants. Even a majority of Christians in Lebanon are now supporting Hezbollah. As in the London Blitz, the Israeli bombs have united Lebanon - against Western values.
Back home, the Labour Party is preparing for what will be its most difficult party conference since the dark and divisive days of the 1970s, when the party was split between Bennite socialists and moderate social democrats. In many ways the situation is worse today. The membership has dwindled, the trades unions are a shadow of their former selves, and Labour is bankrupt. The police are investigating charges of corruption over the sale of honours. Labour MPs openly condemn their leader over a range of issues from health service reforms to detention without trial.
The party is not so much divided amongst itself , as united against its leadership - at least as far as the Middle East is concerned. The fact that opportunists like Jack Straw have stood out against Blair, by calling for the ceasefire which their leader didn’t, are a sign of the PM’s collapsing prestige and authority in Labour. So is the election of Walter Wolfgang to the NEC.
Labour people are no longer afraid of Tony Blair, and even the most supine and biddable cabinet in post war British history seems belatedly to be getting off its knees. All it needs is a leader. Unfortunately, Gordon Brown has retreated, as so often over Iraq, into one of his deafening silences. The Chancellor has given formal backing to the Prime Minister’s war on terror, even remarking during the election campaign that he would have acted exactly same over Iraq as his leader.
It’s one of those intriguing “what ifs” of modern political history. Should Gordon Brown have seized the moment and delivered the coup de grace to stricken Blair? A broader question: could Brown, by acting earlier, have prevented this disaster in the Middle East? And will he have stored up trouble for himself when he takes over?
What we do know is that whatever Gordon Brown thinks of the Bush/Blair approach, he has never lifted a finger actively to oppose it. Even now, when the party is crying out for leadership against the Chancellor remains in the shadows, hoping still for that “orderly transition of power”, which Tony Blair is hinting might now be delayed for another year. I don’t think the Labour Party can wait that long.
If Tony Blair delivers his usual “I’m-going-on-and-I’ve-only-one-gear” speech in Manchester next month, the party could be plunged into turmoil. The divisions may become so deep, they simply cannot be healed. By his own inaction, Gordon Brown risks inheriting, not just ruins in the Middle East, but the ruin of his own party.

What if there isn't a solution to the Middle East?

What if there isn’t a solution to what is politely called the “Arab Israeli dispute”, as if it were some dignified difference of opinion between sovereign nations. What if there is no two state solution, no one state solution, no road map, no basis for a lasting peace? What if the parties are so dedicated to destroying each other, that there is no prospect of a diplomatic solution brokered by the EU, America or anyone else?.
If a war is to end, then at least one side needs to want to stop fighting. There is every sign now that Hezbollah and the Israeli military are determined to continue this fight to the end. That’s what even Labour MPs in the Israeli Knessett were calling for yesterday: “no stalemate, no compromise - an end to Hezbollah”. Doves are in very short supply in Tel Aviv these days.
For its part, Hezbollah is equally resolved to fight a holy war against the Jewish state. The Islamic militants will not rest until Israel is driven into the sea - or until every Hezbollah martyr has won his place in paradise and Lebanon has been reduced a waste land.
There’s no real basis for negotiation here. No common ground, unifying principles, negotiating positions, honest brokers or give and take. Getting round a table in Geneva or anywhere else isn’t going to stop these people killing each other. Perhaps we have to come to terms to this ugly reality before the “West”, whatever that is, can be of any use in the region.
Of course, it offends our liberal principles to look at a conflict this way. Creatures of the Enlightenment, we like to believe there is always a rational solution to conflict. Has to be. War is madness, isn’t it? There is always a better way. Jaw Jaw and all that...
But you could equally have said this about Europe in the last century. Enlightenment didn’t do us much good then. Around a hundred million people lost their lives in two world wars, communist and fascist genocides, plus countless civil wars in Spain, Greece, former Yugoslavia etc. etc.. When we criticise Hezbollah for targeting Israeli civilians we forget that pattern bombing of Dresden, the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So, we’re in no position to lecture people on stopping wars. Especially since we, Europe and America, were intimately involved in the creation of the very states - Lebanon, Israel, Iran, Iraq - which are now proving so fractious. We repeatedly rearranged the map of the Middle East to suit our economic and strategic designs - still are today in Iraq.
But the game has changed. They are fighting their own wars now within these artificial states - and we no longer call the shots. Increasingly, they do. Four British soldiers have died in the last few days. America is bogged down in Iraq and in no place to tell anyone what to do.
Yet, while I was in France on holiday last week, I kept hearing about how America and Europe should step in and stop the fighting in the Lebanon, “like a parent stops squabbling children”. Not only is this patronising, it is quite unrealistic and unhistorical. We just don’t have the power to do that kind of thing any more - and even if we did, we’d probably make it worse.
These aren’t our children and neither side seems concerned about “world opinion”. Israel thumbed its nose at the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, extending its military action when it was supposed to be observing a pause following the massacre of Lebanese children on Sunday. It is as naive to believe that America could stop Israel’s aggression as to believe that the Lebanese government could halt Hezbollah. Even if the US cut off military aid to Israel, about a billion and a half a year, the Israelis would fight on, financed by Jewish defence groups across the world.
For its part, Hezbollah may not actually have used human shields at Qana, but is quite prepared to do so. A force which routinely uses suicide bombing against civilians has no use for UN conventions on the conduct of war. Hezbollah looks for inspiration to the Mujihadeen who defeated the Russians in Afghanistan, to the insurgents in Iraq, and to Hamas in Gaza.
This is not to exonerate Israel for the bombing in Qana - a terrible act which is legitimately being compared to a war crime. But the point is that taking sides here is very difficult. There are no good guys left in the Middle East.
Israel thinks it is in a similar state of war against an implacable enemy. That it is fighting a new anti-semitic force dedicated to the extinction of their country. And the terrible thing is, it is probably right.
Hezbollah is, in part, Israel’s own creation - it was born under the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. The barbarity of the Hezbollah militants is a reflection of the barbarity of the Israeli massacres of Palestinians in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Chatilla in 1982.
But Hezbollah is not like the PLO in Lebanon in the 1980s: a relatively small “state within a state”, composed of dispossessed Palestinians living in refugee camps. Hezbollah IS the state in most of southern Lebanon. It runs much of the civil administration, schools, hospitals and of course the military - there’s no way the other communities in Lebanon can curb its activities or its rockets.
So, if they aren’t going to stop fighting in the Middle East, what is there left for us to do apart from wring our hands and count the dead? Well, that’s not an insignificant role. The dead need to be remembered and war-crimes need to be recorded so that the perpetrators - on both sides - can be held to account. International law may not mean much right now in Lebanon, but it will in future when the fighting is finally over.
Humanitarian missions must continue, to minimise the civilian deaths in the Lebanon, and this will require the resolve of the international community. There has to be a curb on the sale of arms to the region - not that it will stop either side getting them. Channels of communication need to be kept open on both sides and all diplomatic avenues explored.
Above all, this war in Lebanon must be contained and not allowed to develop into what Tony Blair seems to be talking about - which is a generalised war against the Islamic world. He has made clear what side he’s on., and it isn't the same as the Foreign Office. The Labour Party must restore his sense of proportion.
But let’s not have any illusions about sending in the blue helmets to keep the peace. There is no peace in the Lebanon and there won’t be until there is a resolution to the broader contradictions in the Middle East. And that isn’t in our gift
This is a terrible, terrible war - and it has a way to go yet.

Bring me the head of John Prescott.

The sad thing about the "Deputy Dawg" affair is that hanging around with rich men is probably what John Prescott thought he ought to be doing. After all , hasn't his boss made a point of going on holiday chez dodgy billionaires like Silvio Berlusconi? Poor old Pressa probably thought he'd earn a stack of New Labour brownie points by accepting holidays - sorry fact finding missions - to the Colorado ranch of Philip Anschutz.

Fact that he was wanting to turn the Millennium Dome into a supercasino would only enhance Prescott's prestige among the cynical special advisers of Number Ten. New Labour "loves millionaires" - as Peter Mandelson once fatuously put it. If they are willing to take the wretched Dome off the government's hands, so much the better.

Has John Prescott done anything wrong? Well I'm tempted to say that if he didn't know, there's not much point in telling him. Was it a breach of the ministerial code? I doubt it, or else the PM and most of the cabinet would be in the dock for similar indiscretions. There may be some questions for Sir Phlip Mawer, the standards commissioner to consider about whether Prescot, whose department oversees planning issues, was too close to the contractual negotiations over the Dome to be accepting gifts in kind from one of the commercial interests. However, I doubt if this is going to be a resignation issue. Prescott doesn't have a department any more.

Anyway there's so much else for "Butch Calamity" to resign over, you hardly need a standards scandal. He is simply a huge, lumbering, incoherent embarrassment - not just to his party but to the country. How could a man who cannot utter a coherent sentence become Deputy Prime Minister? Party chairman, perhaps, but not a heart-beat away from leading the nation.

New Labour has lost all sense of propriety after nine years in office and become a liablityto itself. In the same week as Prescott's High Noon, we had confirmation that David Mills, the lawyer husband of the culture Secretary Tessa Jowell - another casino enthusiast who wined with Mr Anschutz - is to stand trial for embezzlement and tax fraud in his dealings with Silvio Berlusconi. You couldn't make it up. This really is turning into a spaghetti western. A fistful of fivers, and a few fivers more, perhaps.

Mr Mills had been providing legal services for the former Italian Prime Minister and had received a mysterious gift of some three hundred and fifty thousand pound from the "b" people. He may be totally innocent of any charge and deserves a fair trial. But it all contributes to the sense of a government which has become far too fond of wealth for its own good.

This is the Labour Party, after all, the party, supposedly,of the dispossessed. Why are they all so obsessed with money and status? Remember, it was a loan from a businessman, Geoffrey Robinson, that led to Peter Mandelson's first resignation. He needed the money to buy a posh London flat to impress his friends and there was no way he was going to do that on a mere junior minister's salary.

But why should the trappings of wealth become so attractive to certain left-wing politicians? They surely weren't attracted to Labour politics because they thought it would lead to financial gain. If that was their game they'd have joined the Conservatives, who not only value wealth for its own sake but were very good at converting public office into liquid assets.
Why is Tony Blair so fond of flash and glam? Designer clothes and champagne? Why buy that awful, tasteless house in London for 3.6 million - money neither he nor Cherie possess?

Being the PM's wife has turned Mrs Blair from being a spiky human rights lawyer into a grasping celeb who charges extravagant sums for delivering charity lectures and required the Labour Party to pay her 7 grand hairdressing bill during the last general election campaign.

Those were expensive haircuts alright. I wonder how many Labour activists tore up their party cards in disgust when they learned that they'd been paying their dues so that Cherie could employ her own Mr Teasy
Weasy.

How many more will throw their memberships down the toilet at the thought of John Prescott, supposedly the guardian of Labour's socialist soul, playing the high-roller with casino owners. Or Tessa Jowell ingratiating herself with the same Mr Anschutz in order to secure Britain's' first 'supercasino'? Who wants one anyway?

Or Tony Blair's soliciting of nearly fourteen million pounds in secret loans from rich business men, many of whom , by happy coincidence, found themselves on the honours list. The cash=for=peerages affair has been largely forgotten during the ho ha over the World Cup - which is exactly what the government hoped would happen. However, it is the great financial scandal of this administration. It will continue to haunt Tony Blair so long as he remains in office.

The police are still conducting their inquiries into an apparent breach of the 1925 abuse of honours act. Lord Levy - Mr Blair's fundraiser - invited plutocrats to convert political donations into loans so that they would not have to be registered. For me, the guilt lies in the secrecy of this operation. Not even the treasurer of the Labour Party, Jack 'the hat' Dromey was informed.

I think here we can begin to see where Labour's relations with wealth started to go wrong. In the mid 1990s Labour launched its "high value" donor programme, which was designed to free the party from financial dependency on the trades unions. They were following

American practice here. The Democrat President Bill Clinton's success was largely based on his ability to attract very large sums from private individuals and therefore to free himself from the US labour unions. New Labour thought they could do the same.

But the embrace of money became a bear hug. Staging lavish dinners and glitzy receptions became a great deal of what senior Labour politicians did. Many began rather to enjoyit. Who wouldn't? So nice to attend those private lunches with Lord Levy's glamorous friends. So pleasant, and so - well - 'modern' to have rich men fawning over Labour politicians for a change.

But rich men don't fawn for nothing. Nor do they hand over millions of pounds to a political party because they like their policies. Labour ministers were flattered to have these 'masters of the universe' hanging on to their every word. But they were only hanging on so that they could hang in long enough to win some advantage.

Influence, in British politics, is so ridiculously cheap and easy to buy. A few meals, a few holidays and ministers are eating out of your hands. There may be nothing whatever improper or corrupt about these transactions. Though there is compelling prima facia evidence that honours were traded for political donations.

But just having the ear of a minister is hugely valuable to anyone in business. Particularly the ear of a minister who might be awarding a contract in future, or giving clearance to a development, or who might be making a regulatory decision which would affect the trading position of certain firms. Just being in the know - able to lift the phone and speak to a senior politician - is hugely valuable. And all you have to do is throw a bit of hospitality their way, invite them to gawp your ranch, or country house. Or if you are Rupert Murdoch summon them to address your annual company get-together.

It's not just Prescott. They have all been morally corrupted by over-exposure to wealth. Mind you, Pressa's head on a plate would be a start.

Bye Bye BBC Scotland

I'm mad as hell and I'm just not going to take it any more. So cried the suicidal anchor man in the 70s film,'Network News". After nearly thousand live political TV programmes, I was freeling much the same.

Every live presenter has the same fantasy of going berserk on air, even when your audience is a daytime handful of students, hacks and old age pensioners. Not that I have anything against retired people - at least they still vote, read newspapers and have some connection to the old virtues of public debate and political engagement. The viewers I didn't have a lot of time for were the Scottish Labour MPs in Westmnster who spent an inordinate amount of time and tax-payers' money lobbying to have me removed from the screens on the grounds that I was nationalist/anti-war/anti-Labour. None of which I am.

Odd that it was WESTMINSTER Labour MPs which found my face so obnoxious on the box. Since I was presenting, er, Holyrood Live, you might have thought it would be Members of the Scottish Parliament who'd be writing poison pen letters to the Director General. But in seven years of Holyrood coverage, in which I have not been wholly uncritical, there was scarcely a murmur from Holyrood. Or rather there was, but MSPs tended to take matters up with me face to face and up-front. Perhaps they're just too busy in the Scottish Parliament to bother trying to do the BBC's job for it.

You might have expected Westminster Labour MPs to have been targeting my Westminster equivalent, Andrew Neil, who presents (brilliantly) the Daily Politics. After all, Mr Neil is a prominent right wing Conservative, who has repeatedly expressed his views in colums and through the editorials in the Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday, when he was editor in chief and publisher. A greater Labour hate figure would be hard to imagine.

But hey, I'm not bitter. BBC Scotland resisted these malign political representations on the grounds that it was their job to decide who to put on the telly, and that if they had no problems with my professionalism and impartiality, then they were not going to be told otherwise by politicians. In a curious way, the criticisms made my position more secure, because the BBC couldn't be seen to bend to political pressure. So - thanks Tom.

I hung up my microphone in a wholly amicable separation from the BBC last week to pursue what has always been my real interest - writing political commentary. Indeed, I only recount this story because of what it says about the condition of broadcasting in Scotland. There is an obsessive sensitivity, verging on paranoia, in London Labour about what goes on in Queen Margaret Drive.

MPs seem to believe that there is some deep-rooted nationalist conspiracy at the heart of BBC Scotland. There is not - though there may be a Gaelic one (that's a joke, honest). It really isn't a hotbed of separatism. But neurotic attempts to suppress this nationalist phantom are in danger of making it one.

The present state of impoverished dependency to which BBC Scotland is consigned, a kind of cultural house arrest, is the surest way to generate a political resentment. The hostility to the perfectly sensible proposals for a Scottish Six O'clock News have - I believe - ensured that, within a few years, Holyrood will wrest control over broadcasting from Westminster. Not because it wants to, but because it has no alternative.

Consider the absurdity. Up to sixty percent of the main evening news bulletin is now irrelevant to Scotland. Ok, perhaps not irrelevant, but of secondary importance. I'm thinking for example of the recent troubles in the English health service. These deficits and ward closures are a by-product of market reforms which not been introduced in Scotland. Doesn't mean that NHS Scotland is better - just different. However, it means that the Scottish Executive is being blamed for problems which aren't actually happening here. This is because it is not made clear that these health stories are about England.

One need hardly add the lunacy of turning the national UK news into an intoxicated, hyperventilating, cheerleader for the English football team in the World Cup. This indifferent squad was accorded the coverage of heroes, much to Scottish irritation.

And it happens the other way round too. Such is the metropolitan myopia that the Shirley McKie fingerprint affair was given minimal coverage - even though it is the most important single case in the hundred year history of finger print evidence.

The Six misrepresents the priorities of Scottish public life. What Scotland gets instead of a proper service are patronising 'opt outs' from programmes like Newsnight and the Politics Show. More and more local news. Oh, and the programmes I used to present, like Holyrood Live, for which mea culpa.

However, having presented the equivalent BBC network programmes in Westminster before I returned to Scotland in 1999, I was acutely aware of how miserable are Scottish political programme budgets. A tiny fraction of the resources that go into equivalent Westminster programmes. When I asked why, I was often told - ' Scotland has a tenth of the population so we get a tenth of the money".

This is a grotesque argument. If programmes are worth doing, they are worth doing properly. You don't give a Scottish hospital patient one tenth on the care or Scottish schoolchildren one tenth of the books. This patronising centralism is doing the SNP's job for it.

I have great respect for the people who work in BBC Scotland- some of the best journalists in the entire corporation. Producers like John Boothman who have a rare commitment to breaking stories, and correspondents like Glen Campbell, one of the sharpest tools in the BBC box . But they are ground down by relentless, tedious, mindless cuts. The only indigenous political programmes which seem to get proper money spent on them are in Gaelic - like 'Eorpa' because there is political clout behind the language.

What BBC Scotland manages to put on the screen is amazing, given the constraints. But it eats people up, destroys commitment drains creativity. It can't go on. The BBC is in serious danger of destroying what it is trying to protect - the unity of the UK broadcasting culture. It's time for Scottish viewers to get up and say they're mad as hell too.

Crime hits back at Jack

Jack McConnell has made clear his big idea for the Scottish elections next year is law and order . If so, prepare for an SNP-LibDem coalition, for the war on crime is going about as badly right now as Tony Blair’s war on terror.

Crime is down overall, largely due to economic growth, but in the specific areas targeted by the First Minister’s five-year anti-crime drive – youth, drugs, knives, child abuse – the numbers all appear to be going the wrong way.

Just look at last week’s press. Knife crime is up, we are told, and stabbings actually increased during the recent UK-wide amnesty. Drug abuse is at epidemic proportions in Scotland, with one in eight babies being born with illegal drugs in their bloodstream. Scotland’s “drugs tsar”, Tom Wood, the former chief constable of Lothian and Borders Police, declared that the war had been lost.

It also emerged last week that half of all prisoners released from Scottish jails are back inside within two years, and nearly two-thirds of youth criminals re-offend within the same period. The “ned” culture, which Labour promised to end, has flourished. The Children’s Hearing system is being swamped by tens of thousands of referrals.

In desperation, McConnell has taken to attacking the police and local authorities. Last month, he said councils were “doing a disservice” by failing to use Asbos. Last week he said it was “inexcusable” that only four of the country’s eight police forces had used dispersal orders, designed to prevent young people ganging up on the streets. The councils and the police said they weren’t aware of any “correct number” of orders, adding that there was a 60% increase in Asbos in 2005. So, sucks, Jack.

McConnell’s frustration is understandable. There are more police than ever; longer sentences than ever; more people in jail than ever; more anti-drug programmes; more people on paedophile and child abuse registers. The police have Asbos, closure orders, dispersal orders . But despite all McConnell’s efforts, people still think the government isn’t doing enough. Why?

Well, one possible reason is the phenomenon of crime inflation. The FM’s measures may affect real crime, but public perceptions of crime are another matter. Crime sells newspapers and with falling circulations, editors are desperate to keep readers attention. The pages of tabloids are filled day after day with stories of stabbings, beatings, gangs, illegal immigrants; terrorists on the loose; prisoners being let out of jail early; paedophiles at loose in the community and murderers being given derisory sentences by liberal judges.

It’s hardly surprising we’re are in a state of fear. A couple of people are beaten up, allegedly for supporting England in the World Cup, and you’d think that a racial war had broken out in the UK. Society is presented as saturated by lawlessness because it is a way of connecting emotionally with people. Saying crime is down doesn’t sell the evening rag.

I’m not saying all crime is a fiction made up by the media. But “if it bleeds, it leads” is the old newsroom adage. Newspapers don’t do “proportionate”. IT was ever thus.

But what happened in the early years of the new century is that the Left started trying to surf this crime panic. Finding that social justice, economic growth and working-class solidarity were no longer enough to motivate Labour’s traditional vote, the party turned from class politics to street politics. It embraced the law and order postures that used to be so successful for the Tories in working class constituencies such as Cathcart.

Now, there’s no doubt this is what many voters want – politicians testify to the sense of panic on the doorsteps. Crime hits those at the bottom of the social scale in run-down council estates far more harshly than the middle classes in leafy suburbs. Former left-wing Labour MSPs, such as Johann “hammer of the neds” Lamont of Glasgow Pollok, are only reflecting the concerns of electorate.

But while you develop policies for the crime wave, it is very difficult to do anything about the media wave. You can’t lock up editors. They will continue to report, in pornographic detail, every evil and misfortune to hit ordinary people in their areas, and their readers will want something done about it.

Moreover, cracking down on crime is all very well, but there is also the question of justice. The police simply can’t go around slapping dispersal orders on every young person on a city street corner on a Saturday night if they are doing nothing wrong. Yet many local people now regard the very presence of groups of young people as a threat.

And yes, the police could be doing more, by just being there. There’s nothing like a bobby on the beat to make people feel secure. But the police say they are up to their eyes in paperwork, thanks to Executive policies.

Last week, McConnell attacked the police for inundating the Children’s Hearings system with spurious cases. These were not offenders, but children at risk of abuse in the family home. However, this is a result of McConnell’s own campaign to protect children, launched after the death of baby Caleb Ness at the hands of his violent father in 2001. He called for all the agencies to take greater care of children in homes with violent or drug-taking adults. The result was that officials now automatically refer such children.

Those who live by the tabloid, die by the tabloid. The FM is sincere in his concern about crime, but he is fighting a phantom, and the phantom is winning.

Wigs of Mass Destruction

OH dear. Just when Bush and Blair thought the worst was over in Iraq, and suddenly they are fighting on an entirely new front. And this time they’re up against an opponent who is a lot tougher than Saddam’s Republican Guard: the law.
Wigs of mass destruction are raining down on Number 10 and the White House as the courts rule that their conduct, from Guantanamo Bay to Belmarsh, is unlawful.

The US Supreme Court has told George W Bush his treatment of detainees in Cuba is contrary to the Geneva Convention. Meanwhile, in Britain, a judge last week ruled house arrest of terrorist suspects under the Blair government’s control orders is illegal under the Human Rights Act. Which is unfortunate, because it was Tony Blair’s government that introduced the HRA.

Now, neither ruling means that the government will be throwing open the doors of Belmarsh and Guantanamo, at least not yet. But this represents a serious double blow to the moral authority of both governments, and the war in Iraq. After all, isn’t the rule of law what we are meant to be fighting for? If we don’t treat prisoners decently and in accordance with international conventions, how can we lecture tin-pot dictators about their maltreatment of their own citizens? You can’t fight a police state by setting up a police state – and that is what many senior legal figures fear is what the government is creating in Britain by default.

This new willingness of the judiciary to hold the US and UK governments to account will have serious implications for the war on terror. Practices like rendition of terrorist suspects for interrogation in countries that practise torture are almost certainly illegal under the Geneva Convention, it only needs someone to test it in court.

Such “torture by proxy” is, anyway, morally indefensible. As is maltreating prisoners in Abu Ghraib, or Guantanamo Bay, or using interrogation techniques such as “waterboarding” – where a detainee is strapped down, dunked under water and made to believe he might be drowned – which the CIA doesn’t define as torture, but every civilised person would.

Last week was the second time that the British government has been in the dock over Belmarsh. The House of Lords ruled last year that detaining terrorism suspects without trial or charge was illegal, and the government had to change the law to get the power to issue house arrest control orders as an alternative to detention. But it hasn’t satisfied m’learned friends.

Tomorrow the pugnacious new Home Secretary, John Reid, will be in court trying to overturn last Wednesday’s ruling by Mr Justice Sullivan on control orders. “Judge” Reid’s made clear he’s no’ huvvin’ it, and that the judges will have to sort themselves out or be sorted out.

Certainly, the ruling could hardly have been more provocative. It was like saying “thanks to the government’s own legislation, we can’t protect the public from terrorists”. It coincided with a call from Conservative Party leader David Cameron to scrap the HRA and replace it with a Bill of Rights.

Now you can be pretty sure that Reid is no enthusiast for the HRA, or at any rate its interpretation, but there’s a lot more going on here than a debate on the finer points of law. There is a suspicion in Labour circles that last week’s judgment was political – a shot across the bows by a judiciary incensed at the way the government has tried to blame it for soft sentences, such as that handed down to paedophile murderer Craig Sweeney.

Reid ruled that sentence “unduly lenient” and ordered a rethink, thus trampling across the supposed separation of powers between the judiciary and the executive. Reid doesn’t like being contradicted. He believes that he is the only man who can make Labour’s hardness on crime more than a slogan.

Tony Blair has, of course, has made no secret of his own contempt for the “legal establishment”. As he sees it, ivory tower lawyers are endangering national security by a punctilious and old-fashioned interpretation of the law. And this time it’s personal: the Human Rights Act was Blair’s policy.

It’s nothing new for the government to see a conspiracy by the legal establishment. This is the way politicians think, in terms of power struggle. There’s no evidence Justice Sullivan was pursuing a vendetta against Labour, or even trying to extend the powers and scope of the HRA. He did not outlaw control orders, but rather the “draconian” way they were being implemented.



Tagging people and then banging them up for 18 hours a day with no human contact is not just a restriction of liberty, it is the negation of it. These people are effectively being punished, just as much as they would be in prison. But they have not committed any known crime and are not subject to any charge likely to be tested in court.

What the judge was saying in effect was: “We realise that certain people have to be under close supervision, and that this may restrict their liberty, but to impose such sanctions on innocent individuals is incompatible with the Human Rights Act, 1998.” You can’t have it both ways – either scrap the HRA or shape up and stop being hypocrites.

The HRA did not invent human rights; nor was it the creation of woolly-minded pacifist lawyers. It simply incorporated into British law the European Convention on Human Rights, which Britain helped to draft, and which was ratified by Winston Churchill in 1951. It allows people to pursue their rights under the convention in a British court, instead of having to go to Strasbourg.

Similarly, the 1949 Geneva Convention, which President Bush has fallen foul of, was a product of the war against fascism. In a real sense these conventions codify the freedoms that won the cold war against the Soviet Union.

This is what is so worrying about these two rulings. The courts shouldn’t have to remind democratic leaders of their responsibilities to guard our fundamental freedoms from arbitrary arrest, punishment without trial, torture and deportation. We are told the individuals under detention are dangerous terrorists, a threat to public safety. If this is so, then let’s put them in a court and hear the evidence – or let a judge hear it in private if the evidence would compromise intelligence sources.

We have seen from the accidental death of Jean Charles de Menezes last year, and from the recent shooting in Forest Gate, that intelligence is far from reliable. The Islamic world is watching with mounting suspicion. Miscarriages of justice can do greater damage than the terrorists themselves.

So, would Scotland really be happier on its own?

“Some of us fervently believe in Scottish independence,” said the Guardian commentator Simon Hoggart, at the height of the World Cup footie wars, “they would be so much happier without us”. Well, would we?
Other small countries in Europe seem to be pretty happy on their own. Take Catalonia, the already devolved Spanish region, which last week voted three to one in favour of a new Statute of Authority which gives it national status, plus extensive powers over taxation, judicial affairs and immigration. No regrets there. At the other end of the economic spectrum, we have Slovakia, which also went to the polls last week and is forming a new left-of-centre coalition government.
Slovakia’s case is fascinating. It was regarded as an economic basket-case at the time of the “Velvet Divorce” from the Czech Republic back in 1993. Rather like Scotland today, it was regarded as ‘provincial’, backward and dependent on the richer, cosmopolitan Czechs. Not any more. Slovakia is now becoming an industrial powerhouse and the EU’s fastest-growing economy. Peugeot’s new plant at Trnava is one of the biggest in the world, and takes over much of the production that used to take place at Ryton in Coventry.
So, it’s not just the “original” small nations of Europe like Norway, Finland, Ireland which are doing well. It is looking increasingly as if Scottish-sized nations of around about five million citizens may have competitive advantage in the European Union. Catalonia and Slovakia have done well out of autonomy, even though the former has one of the highest and the latter one of the lowest wages in the EU. They are very different societies in many ways, and have different histories. But what they demonstrate is that regional independence, far from being a recipe for decline and introversion, can unlock latent economic and cultural dynamism.
Yes, size matters. It’s not just about oil or the possession of other natural resources. Small economies are, in many ways, better suited to the new economic political arrangements in the European Union thant the old, multipurpose nation states. They are nimble enough to adapt to a rapidly-changing global economic environment and don’t have the kind of political, cultural and class divisions that drain the life out of multinational entities like the UK.
In an over-centralised state like Britain, where London dominates the mass media, political decision-making and the allocation of public investment, it is very difficult for a province like Scotland to alter its own circumstances. Scotland has long had a lower growth rate than England, but is unable to rectify this by lowering business taxes or developing its own infrastructure. Or, indeed, formulating its own immigration policies.
In Britain, all roads lead south and that’s where Scottish entrepreneurs, professionals and skilled workers traditionally gravitate. They might still do so after independence, of course, but at least a Scottish government would be able to legislate for tax policies to attract them back.
Or replace them. It is now widely accepted that the UK’s recent economic growth could not have happened without the influx of low paid black and Asian labour. This has now run up against the limits of political acceptability among the white English urban community, so the government has responded by clamping down on immigration. But the Scottish economy is in a different cycle and needs more of it, not less - as the Fresh Talent initiative demonstrated.
So, there really is no doubt that Scotland could survive and thrive as an independent state in Europe, and most economists I speak to agree. Membership of the European Union has eliminated many negatives like separate currencies (except of course in Britain) and barriers to the movement of labour and investment. Guaranteed access to a market of 300 million, plus political representation in the councils of the EU, have removed the fear of being “too small to matter” which used to afflict small countries.
In Scotland autonomy has always been presented as a threat to economic stability. Labour’s 1999 election slogan, “divorce is an expensive business”, pretty much summed up the state of opinion at the time of devolution, and many Scots still believe it. Certainly, an independent Scotland would would have a structural non-oil deficit of several billion pounds if the Barnett formula, which allocates public spending, were to be wound up tomorrow.
However, despite what Lord Barnett says, his formula is already being wound down under the new population formula, according to economists like Strathclyde University’s Dr Karen Turner and Stirling’s Prof David Bell. Convergance is happening. Anyway, budget deficits needn’t be terminal - as America has demonstrated - and can be managed for many years. Britain has historically run budget deficits of around 50 billion without any economic distress. Moreover, with 12 billion a year in oil revenues going south, the Scottish budget deficit is in reality a theoretical one.
So, perhaps Hoggart and co are on to something. The English chattering classes, anyway, show every sign of being fed up with Scotland. "The loss of one-twelfth of our population”, said the former Tory Defence Minister Michael Portillo in the Sunday Times last week, “in a region that drags down our national performance could not harm us”.
The irony is that in other old nation-states like Spain, the talk is all about keeping the country together and avoiding fragmentation. Before the referendum campaign got underway a Madrid general even proposed a military invasion of Catalonia to prevent secession. It’s the same in Italy and France, where central governments are increasingly anxious about the example set by the new small nations.
But the metropolitan media in Britain seems relaxed about Scotland going it alone. The big issue in England right now is multiculturalism and ethnic diversity, which even members of the liberal chattering classes, like the editor of Prospect magazine, David Goodhart, fear might have gone too far.
It is not acceptable to criticise immigrants as dependent, lazy spongers, who are undermining the integrity of the nation, but it is acceptable, apparently, to attack the Scots in this way, and claim that Gordon Brown cannot be Prime Minister because of his nationality. Perhaps what we are seeing here is a displaced ethnic antagonism. If so, the UK is surely doomed.

Brown had to back Trident - but that doesn't make it right

It isn’t independent and it certainly isn't a deterrent. Britain’s fleet of Vanguard class nuclear submarines carry Trident D5 missiles leased from America which cannot be deployed without the agreement of the White House. Far from deterring emerging countries like Iran or North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, the renewal of Trident positively encourages them to do so.

If Britain, as Gordon Brown believes, requires these devices to meet some nameless future threat, and to ensure Britain’s clout in the United Nations Security Council, then every industrialising country will argue the same. Iran is surrounded by nuclear nations - Pakistan, Israel, Russia, India - and has a greater cause for pleading the logic of deterrence than Britain, which faces no immediate threat from anywhere, unless you believe France has a sinister ambition to irradiate Albion.

This quintessentially Eighties weapon system, which Brown promised in last week’s Mansion House speech to renew, was developed under the Cold War doctrine of “Mutual Assured Destruction” (MAD). And mad it certainly is. Trident is designed to obliterate every significant city in the former Soviet Union. Since the Russians are now on our side, this makes the system anachronisitc to say the least.

We will be spending #20 billion on a system which cannot be used against any known enemy. Terrorists like al Qaeda will certainly not be deterred. However, Britain’s dependence on the US for supply and servicing of our nuclear weapons, more or less signs us up to American foreign policy, and to disasters like Iraq. Meanwhile our impoverished conventional forces struggle in Afghanistan with inferior kit.

At best, Trident is a military virility symbol, at worst a threat to world peace. Gordon Brown knows all this - he has been an opponent of nuclear weapons for most of his life and, I am convinced, remains one at heart. He knows also that the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons - the so called Reliable Replacement Weapon being developed at Britain’s nuclear laboratory at Aldermaston - is a breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. That requires countries to work actively towards disarming existing nuclear weapons instead of developing new ones.

The Chancellor claims to be an internationalist, dedicated to eradicating poverty and promoting world peace. He spoke at Robin Cook’s funeral about this agenda. So, why did the future PM announce, out of the blue, that Britain is going to keep the very system that defines big power hypocrisy. That says to developing nations: ‘Just remember - there’s one law for us; another for you lot’ ?

The short answer, of course, is political expediency. It’s all to do with Brown’s obsession with ensuring that ‘orderly succession of power’. He believes he has to persuade Middle Britain that the future Prime Minister is not a man of the Left..
Like wrapping himself in the flag, and supporting England in the World Cup, Brown is appealing to the Daily Mail constituency, who believe nuclear weapons are a source of national pride and national security.

The Chancellor’s aides were tickled that Clare “It’s the end” Short, the former Development Secretary, disowned Brown last week declaring him to be beyond the pale. That’s exactly where the Chancellor’s aides want him to be - at least in the eyes of those mainly English Labour voters who suspect that Gordon’s true colours are not red white and blue, but plain red.

This column forecast, wearily, that Gordon Brown would make just such a public affirmation of his intention to maintain nuclear deterrent the weapons system, if only because it was in Labour’s election manifesto. His justification is that the future Prime Minister has to reassure Britain’s allies and the UN Security Council, that he does not intend to pull Britain out of its international treaty obligations.

To have made a declaration of unilateral intent now would have spooked America and created an unbridgeable gulf between himself and Tony Blair. This could have destroyed Labour as a governing party. Just imagine if Tony Blair, Labour’s most successful leader ever, were to disown his successor on the grounds that, to use Nye Bevan’s old phrase, he would “leave Britain naked in the conference chamber”?

Neil Kinnock, a hugely influential figure, might also have criticised Brown for endangering Labour’s electability and reopening the wounds of the 1980s. Needless to say, the tabloid newspapers and the mainstream press would have condemned Brown as a figure from Labour’s past - an unreconstructed Left-winger who is out of tune with public opinion and unsuited to the disciplines of office.


Put this way, Gordon Brown had little option but to make a statement affirming his support for Labour’s settled policy on our oxymoronic nuclear deterrent. However, I am not trying to apologise for this decision. It may be understandable but that doesn’t make it morally justifiable. It certainly doesn’t justify the nuclear chauvinism of his aides who spun the Chancellor’s bald announcement last week into a declaration of war on unilateralists and CND.

In private briefings to journalists, Number 11 spinners portrayed Brown as a kind of Dr Strangelove who had learned to love the bomb and was eager to show that he was signed up to MAD. Brown authorised these briefings and the Chancellor should be ashamed of them. He should look back on this moment, as with his defence of the PM’s conduct of the Iraq war, with a deeply troubled conscience.

He knows that the only way to justify the maintenance Trident is if it is used as a means of reducing the international arms race. The only utility of a system which, if it were used, could destroy a quarter of the planet is to employ it as a means to decommission other nuclear weapons. I may be naive, but I suspect Brown will try to do something about this when he becomes Prime Minister.

Britain’s nuclear deterrent is already “stood down” and only a token force actually takes to the seas. Trident missiles are targeted, not on any cities, but on the South Atlantic. It is questionable whether they could be used in earnest without a great deal of work being done on the fleet to make it fully operational.

And may they rust in peace. It is possible that Brown may use the renewal of the nuclear deterrent as an opportunity to downsize Trident, to make it compatible with the NNPT. There’s some evidence that the chiefs of staff would not be unhappy at the prospect of saving the 4% of the military budget that goes on Trident and using it to buy something more useful - like decent boots and rifles.

It may be wishful thinking, but I suspect Brown might try to use the nuclear system, constructively, as a form of bargaining with so-called rogue nations, to persuade them to put their own arsenals ‘beyond use’. To mothball all nuclear weapons, under a form of international supervision, is the only plausible way, ultimately, to create a climate of disarmament. Brown is an internationalist. In the age of climate change and global warming the last thing the world needs is further proliferation of nuclear weapons. But the reality is that, if things go on as they are, many more countries will join the nuclear club in the next two decades.

There is no way of stopping this race by running faster than the rest. Someone has to call a halt to the nuclear madness - we can only hope against hope that, in his pursuit of power, Gordon Brown keeps his sanity in reserve.

Give it a break Gordon - we know that you’re backing Britain. You don’t have to name your next child Wayne Rooney Brown.

In 1996, in a rather desperate bid to head off Scottish home rule, the then Tory Scottish Secretary, Michael Forsyth, decided to return the Stone of Destiny. Seemed like a good idea at the time. What better way to symbolise the permanence of the United Kingdom than for England to hand back this relic of Scotland’s ancient monarchy after eight hundred years of captivity in Westminster Abbey. The fact that was probably a fake hardly mattered.

As the wee magic stane trundled over the border, followed by a pipe band and Forsyth in a kilt, everyone but the Scottish Secretary could see that the move was comically counterproductive. The gesture was as tawdry as it was transparent. If anything, the stunt served only to remind Scots of their country’s historic independence. A year later, Scotland voted three to one in favour of restoring the Scottish Parliament.

Could a similar fate await Gordon Brown’s decision to mint a #2 coin to mark the three hundredth anniversary of the Act of Union ? The intention is clearly to remind Scotland that it has benefited hugely from the union with England and that Scotland’s flowering, intellectually and economically, dates from the extirpation of its national parliament. But the danger is that, like Forsyth and the Stone, the Chancellor’s coin will invite Scots to reflect on their historic subordination to England.

It would be ironic indeed if the 2007 Scottish elections turned out to be the beginning of the end of the Treaty which the coin commemorates. I don’t know if Gordon Brown has looked at the arithmetic recently, but Labour are on course for a pretty severe drubbing at the Scottish elections in May 2007. The Dunfermline by election showed that Scottish voters are not happy with Labour right now, even in the Chancellor’s own home constituency.

Of course, people don’t vote on things like commemorative coins, and we can be pretty sure that the Union of the Parliaments is unlikely to be a big issue on the doorsteps. However, small things do matter. To many Scots the coin affair looks like yet another contrived gesture by a Chancellor so apologetic about his nationality that he has to insist, not only that he supports England in the World Cup, but that his greatest sporting moment was Paul Gascoigne’s goal against Scotland in the 1996 Euros. It’s not wrong, it’s just naff.

There was, of course, much wry amusement in nationalist circles at yet more evidence that Brown is “morphing into an Englishman” as Alex Salmond recently put it. The new coin was denounced by the SNP leader as the: "Brownie - full of brass, not very popular, soon to be devalued". But it should surely be called the “Roguie” after Robert Burn’s commentary on the union: “Bought and sold for English gold; Such a parcel o rogues in a Nation”. Now you can put it in your pocket.

The Union was massively unpopular in Scotland in 1707 and seen by most Scots as a sell out - that’s what it says on the BBC’s own website so it must be true. Burns' "parcel o rogues" were, of course, the Scottish nobility - this was long before universal suffrage - who valued their own wealth rather higher than their nation’s independence. A chest of coin amounting to #20,000 sent to Scotland for distribution by the Earl of Glasgow. Cheap at the price.

Some Scots believed that what they were signing up to was a reversible treaty rather than an incorporating union - shades of Maastricht here. But Queen Anne and the English Whigs were in no doubt about what was happening: Scotland was ceasing to exist politically in order to ensure a Protestant succession in England. The elimination of the Scottish Parliament represented a fundamental and irreversible shift of power from Edinburgh to London.

Now, I don’t want to get involved in the “what if” questions about how Scotland might have fared outside the Union. There is no doubt that the repeal of the Alien Act allowed Scotland to participate in the British empire, and enrich itself through everything from colonial administration to the slave trade. It’s hard to argue that Scotland would have done better on her own. Would those great Scottish philosophers - Hume, Fergusson, Smith - have been able to extend the boundaries of human enlightenment had they been confined to a backward peasant land? Probably not.

However, the Chancellor may find that provoking a debate on the consequences of union with England at this time, doesn’t go entirely his own way. Especially since so many English commentators, the latest being the Guardian’s Simon Hoggart on Saturday, are calling for a dissolution of the United Kingdom. As this column noted last week, the World Cup has provoked an extraordinary level of latent hostility to the Scots among people who should know better. Hoggart regards the ironic support of Trinidad and Tobago by many Scots as an offence which should be punished by a red card and an early constitutional bath. The sports commentator Alan Green agreed.

I still can’t see why people get so worked up about this. The “Soca Warriors” of Trinidad and Tobago were a noble if hopeless cause, in the best Scottish tradition. No one seriously expected T and T to win the tournament, or even beat England. Indeed, in supporting such no-hopers, Scots were expressing that very quality of sportsmanship that used to be so highly valued by the English amateur tradition. It’s not the winning that counts but how you play. And how they played! A team of enthusiastic unknowns with more passion in their boots than skill, held off the mighty English football machine for 83 minutes, and only lost after a bit of shameless hair-pulling by Crouch in their penalty box.

Look, football’s only a game, of course, and let’s keep it that way. But it was the Chancellor who chose to make it more than that by turning the World Cup into an opportunity to broadcast his Britishness. Trouble is, there’s no British team in Germany, so when Brown arrives in Cologne next week to cheer Beckham’s boys in their Group One final against Sweden, it may look to many Scots as if the Chancellor is simply supporting England.

Brown thinks he is making himself more acceptable to English voters, and heading off those London newspapers who say he cannot become Prime Minister because of his nationality. But flirting with English nationalism won’t make them like him any more and he seriously risks alienating his own back yard. It’s all so transparent and cynical. Like Michael Forsyth’s inept attempts to embrace Scottishness in the 1990s, it is unlikely to persuade anyone and by trying too hard conveys a kind of desperation. To this day the Tories are regarded as the “English party” by many Scottish voters.

Of course, the Union was a hugely important event in British history, and should be remembered - and I personaly am all for that. However, the coin will inevitably provoke a debate about Scotland's part in the union, past and present. Schools will be teaching how Scotland mislaid its parliament for three hundred years because of the venality of its ruling classes. The SNP will make the most of it, which they are absolutely entitled to do. And no doubt, all this will be interpreted by people in England as further evidence that the Scots are at best ambivalent about the UK and at worse positively
resentful of England's dominance of it.

Well, bring it on, I suppose. But perhaps Gordon Brown would have been better advised to avoid gesture politics, when the gestures can be so easily misinterpreted.