16/12/05
When immigration police in body armour broke down the door of the Vucaj family in Drumchapel on 13th September 2005, they didn't realise they were trampling all over the delicate constitutional conventions that are supposed to ease relations between Holyrood and Westminster. But they were.
The expulsion of the Kosovan asylum seekers provoked one of the most serious confrontations between the Scottish Office and Whitehall since 1999. For many it summed up the inadequacy of a devolution settlement which allows the Scottish Parliament to voice its unanimous condemnation of dawn raids, but also allows the UK government to disregard it.
In the briefing war that followed, the Home Office made little attempt to placate Scottish sentiment. Instead it bluntly contradicted the right of the Scottish Executive to interfere in the handling of such repatriations in future. The First Minister, Jack McConnell was given a severe kick up the protocols.
Dawn raids had become a highly charged emotional issue in Scotland. The Vucaj eviction was only the latest in a succession of increasingly brutal repatriations, including the removal of the Ay family in earlier in the year. It was all part of the UK government’s “robust” solution to the asylum problem. But the Children's Commissioner for Scotland, Margaret Marshall, said that dawn raids amounted to the "terrorising of children" and were “a clear breach of human rights”.
The Scottish Communities Minister, Malcolm Chisholm, agreed and stated publicly that they were: "over the top, unnecessary and should end". Pupils at Drumchapel High School mounted a highly effective campaign against dawn raids, and had - they believed - been assured that the First Minister would demand a protocol to abolish them. Girls from the school even won an award at the Scottish Politician of the Year awards.
So, there can be no excuse that the Home Office didn’t appreciate the strength of Scottish feeling on the issue. There is not the same political heat over immigration here and Scottish civic sentiment had been appalled at the handling of asylum seekers and their children in places like Dungavel detention centre in 2004.
Then, Jack McConnell had tried to insist that Dungavel was not the responsibility of the Scottish Executive. That immigration and asylum were UK responsibilities and that the Scottish Parliament had no locus. He was constitutionally correct. But if the Scottish Executive wasn’t responsible for the welfare of children in Scottish detention centres, critics asked, who was?
This time, Jack McConnell did not plead, a la Dungavel, that the Vucaj incident was nothing to do with him. He decided, instead, to express clearly and forcible the views of the Scottish parliament as expressed in the motion on passed on 22nd September which expressed “widespread concerns about practices such as so-called “dawn raids”, handcuffing of children, and the removal of children by large groups of officers in uniform and body armour.” Parliament was told that that Scottish ministers had had an "open and uninhibited" dialogue with their Home Office counterparts.
So when the Home Office delivered its rebuff to McConnell it was hitting him right in the credentials. The sequence of events has become confused in the retelling. But essentially what happened was this: In November, officials for the immigration minister, Tony McNulty, told the Scottish press prior to a ministerial visit to Scotland that there was "no question" of dawn raids being ended.
This happened to be in the very week that Jack McConnell had assured MSPs that he had indeed secured a new "protocol" governing such actions in future. That they would be humane, conform to UN conventions on care of children and involve social work services from an early stage. The First Minister used the P word several times. Everyone took it to mean that he had secured an agreement that dawn raids such as that on the Vucaj family would no longer be allowed in Scotland. Everyone was wrong.
McConnell took a lot of stick over his non-existent Protocol, and was accused both of misleading parliament and failing to honour his promises. Perhaps he should have avoided using the term since, “protocol” has a precise diplomatic meaning and refer to conventions regulating relations between sovereign states. Scotland is not a sovereign state. However, protocols have been used before to describe relations between the Scottish Executive and Whitehall departments. So this wasn't just a case of Jack getting carried away with his own rhetoric and making promises he couldn't keep.
There is evidence that McConnell was led up the garden path by the Home Office, who told him what he wanted to hear in private, but wouldn’t keep to the script in public. Tony Blair, with his eyes on the Sun and the Daily Mail, was not prepared to countenance any regime which might appear soft on asylum seekers. And that applied in Scotland as well as England.
The First Minister could scarcely disguise his fury at the way his modest proposals for making compulsory repatriation more humane were stamped upon by McNulty. "Cack-handed" was how one of McConnell's aides described the behaviour of the Home Office briefing machine. And while McConnell received a belated acceptance that in future social work services would be involved at an earlier stagein forcible repatriations, he secured no promise that the character of the raids would change. The matter is to be reviewed in Spring when it will become clear whether or not McConnell has got a 'result' or a brush off.
But the Drumchapel pupils were in no doubt. McConnell had been all mouth, they said, and had not behaved honourably. The opposition parties in parliament lambasted McConnell for his feebleness and his mendacity. Many Labour MSPs were privately appalled and LibDem ministers in the coalition were privately contemptuous. However, it should be recalled that the matter was negotiated by the deputy minister for Education, Robert Brown, who is a Liberal Democrat, and that it was he who said the HOme Office had been told dawn raids were history.
Even Tory MSPs like Bill Aitken were heard complaining - on BBC TV - that the Scottish Parliament had been "humiliated" and that Jack McConnell should have stood his ground against Westminster. That would have been almost inconceivable only a few years ago, when it would have been regarded as proto-nationalism to have demanded a separate immigration regime in Scotland. The asylum issue became part of the general debate in Scotland in 2005 about new powers for the Scottish Parliament. The Tories have now joined that debate, leaving Labour as the only party standing unequivocally for the for the status quo.
But for how much longer? The Vucaj episode drove a deep wedge between the Scottish Executive and Scottish Labour MPs in Westminster who made no attempt to hide their contempt for the First Minister's handling of the affair. Scottish Labour MPs like, Tom Harris and John Robertson, lined up to praise the system of dawn raids. Robertson, the MP for Drumchapel, said on BBC Scotland's Politics Scotland that handcuffing of teenage girls in their night clothes was necessary "for their own safety".
For those not actually pickled in the culture of West of Scotland Labour, this was must have seemed incomprehensible. Surely, elected representatives of the same political party are expected to agree in public, even when they don't in private. Perhaps Labour in Westminster have yet to come to terms with the reality of devolution. Perhaps it is resentment at the coverage which the Scottish Parliament has received in the Scottish, or maybe it's just that personal.
Whatever, this lack of respect for the views and sentiments of the Scottish Parliament, and its first minister, is nothing new. It goes back to the row about the #23 million allowances rebate in 2001 after the Scottish Parliament introduced free personal care for the elderly. Then there was Jack McConnell’s Fresh Talent initiative The First Minister’s plans to meet Scotland's population deficit by allowing more immigrants to come here to work were summarily squashed but the Home Secretary Charles Clarke.
To give him his due, McConnell has not taken this lying down. He managed to secure a concession that foreign students should be allowed to remain in Scotland for two years after graduation. This was seen as crumbs from the table at the time, but it has been a nice little earner for Scottish Universities. In fact, so lucrative has it become for our institutions of higher learning, that English Universities are now demanding that it is introduced in England. .
Times change. In 2001, Jack McConnell was a fresh face in Bute House and easily patronised by Labour MPs in Westminster. But many senior Scottish Labour figures have moved on - George Foulkes, Brian Wilson, Lewis Moonie - leaving relatively new and inexperienced MPs in their wake. Meanwhile, Jack McConnell has visibly gained in confidence in the past year. He is no longer prepared to be dismissed as a pretendy leader of Scotland. The Scottish Executive and the Scottish Parliament are becoming more confident and more experienced in the ways of government.
The dawn raids affair will remain as one of the key moments in the post devolution era. The First Minister, faced with a choice between a UK ministerial edict and the views of the Scottish Parliament, chose the latter. No longer is the constitutional division of powers immutable. Increasingly, the Scottish Parliament is starting to speak with its own voice and expecting the UK to listen.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Pylons are Beautiful
Herald 13/12/05
It wasn’t exactly a stand up row - environmentalists don’t do that kind of thing. But there was certainly a free and frank exchange of view at the Friends of the Earth Christmas reception between an officer of the Ramblers Association and a senior figure in Friends of the Earth. The bone of contention? Highlands against pylons.
Essentially, Friends of the Earth think pylons are, well, friends of the earth because they allow the transmission of renewable energy from places like the Isle of Lewis wind farm, the biggest in Europe, to urban centres. Renewable energy tends to be in the remoter places where there is a lot of wind and tide and high water.
But ramblers and bird watchers take a rather different view. They don’t see why saving the planet should have to involve the destruction of some of the most precious wild land in the world. Nor do the birdies and bobbles see it as a fair environmental trade to destroy habitats and endanger species like Golden Eagle, just so we can go on being profligate with our central heating thermostats.
At first, the anti-pylon protesters were dismissed as nimbys and what the West Highland Free Press called “nouveau highlanders”. However, the pylonophobes are not going away. 12,000 people have signed a petition against upgrading the 137 pylon line between Beauly near Inverness and Denny in Stirlingshire. The Presiding Office rof the the Scottish Parliament no less, George Reid, has declared his opposition.
There is talk of bird “genocide” as a result of onshore windfarms - there will be another 55 of them if Scotland is to meet its 20% renewable target by 2010. That means thousands of pylons marching across Scotland. The very least we should do, say well-heeled activists like Lord Love, is to bury the cables under ground or in the sea.
There are other potent factors in the pylon mix. Cover the Highlands with 65-foot tall steel leviathans and you can wave goodbye to the tourist industry. High tension electricity cables are implicated in in a range of health problems from leukemia to chronic depression. Then there is the small matter of house prices.
Pylons revive ancient enmities between highland and lowland Scotland. But it’s not just in the Scottish glens that the sound of battle is being heard. Pylons are causing divisions in the conservation movement from the Romney Marshes to the Minches. And unlike nuclear power - which all environmental groups are united against - the transmission issue represent a real philosophical schism between techies and animal-lovers. Between those who think mankind has a right, not only to consume natural resources, but to promote economic welfare at the expense of animal kind and wilderness. And those who don’t.
The nuclear power industry doesn’t have a dog in this fight. However, its lobbyists are watching the pylon wars very carefully. Discord over the environmental impact of wind farms can’t do any harm to their claim to be the only truly “green” energy source.
I’m no conspiracy theorist, but it has struck many as curious that the largest wind farm in Europe - 234 turbines - had to be built on a peatland Special Protection Area which is the last redoubt of the White Tailed Sea Eagle and other rare species. It has also struck many as curious that this project should be run jointly by AMEC, Britain’s largest private nuclear services company, and British Energy, which owns and operates Britain’s nuclear power stations.
Now, I’m sure their search for renewable alternatives to nuclear power generation is wholly sincere . However, the row over Highlands against Pylons conveniently diverts attention from the problems with nuclear. It also sends a message to government that so-called “alternatives” aren’t so alternative after all - just at the moment when Tony Blair is contemplating a new generation of nuclear stations.
The Lewis wind farm has also been criticised by some environmentalists, not just because of the habitats, but because it disturbs a peatland which is a “carbon sink” - a bog which locks greenhouse gas under the soil. Planting three hundred wind turbines each five hundred feet high, causes massive disturbance which releases the very gas, CO2, which we are trying to remove from the atmosphere.
But, hey, there is no free lunch. Every solution to climate change has its drawbacks. You have to weigh up the consequences and try to find the least damaging alternative to the present cycle of climatic self-destruction.
Everyone has to make their own decisions, but I personally will not be marching against the pylon menace. Nor do I intend to chain myself to the wind mills of Soutra Hill. Pylons are ugly and unpleasant, and I wouldn’t want one in my back yard, but they do have a number of advantages.
Putting power cables underground is hugely expensive - about twelve times the cost - and burial poses its own serious environmental and health problems. An undersea power line to Dounreay or the North of England is a theoretical possibility which shouldn’t be ruled out, but is also prohibitively expensive.
The great advantage of pylons is that they are essentially temporary structures which do not fundamentally alter the landscape they cover. Eyesores they may be, but we already have a lot of them, and the plan to upgrade the Beauly to Denny line will actually lead to fewer pylons, albeit taller ones. Opponents have every right to protest and campaign for their early removal. But for the time being they will remain a visible reminder that our extravagant use of energy has a cost.
In time another technology will emerge which will allow the pylons to be dismantled - and the sooner the better. But time is short, and the temperature is rising. It is almost impossible to envisage significant exploitation of wind, wave and tidal energy in the short term without an overland means of transmission.
Scotland has 25% of Europe’s wind and tidal energy potential; Lewis alone will generate 1% of the UK’s energy needs. There’s no getting away from it: if we are serious about meeting CO2 targets, we are going to have pylons.
However, it doesn’t end there. We urbanites cannot just walk away from the environmental consequences. There needs to be a new deal struck between the city and the countryside; between highland and lowland Scotland.
First of all, we need to generate as much power as possible in our own back-yards. Every house could become a micro-power generator by exploiting the central heating boilers; by using roof-top windmills and solar panels and - most important of all - by conserving energy through insulation. It is quite possible to build houses today that actually contribute energy to the national grid rather than draw power from it.
And a final thought. The Firth of Forth is one of the windiest estuaries in Scotland, as every resident of Edinburgh knows. Why not a bank of offshore windmills there? Wind turbines look much better in an urban context where they can look almost beautiful. What better way to show the Highlands that we don’t regard their environment as expendable? If Scotland’s capital city were to embrace the windmill, it would be a lot easier to ask highlanders to embrace the pylon.
It wasn’t exactly a stand up row - environmentalists don’t do that kind of thing. But there was certainly a free and frank exchange of view at the Friends of the Earth Christmas reception between an officer of the Ramblers Association and a senior figure in Friends of the Earth. The bone of contention? Highlands against pylons.
Essentially, Friends of the Earth think pylons are, well, friends of the earth because they allow the transmission of renewable energy from places like the Isle of Lewis wind farm, the biggest in Europe, to urban centres. Renewable energy tends to be in the remoter places where there is a lot of wind and tide and high water.
But ramblers and bird watchers take a rather different view. They don’t see why saving the planet should have to involve the destruction of some of the most precious wild land in the world. Nor do the birdies and bobbles see it as a fair environmental trade to destroy habitats and endanger species like Golden Eagle, just so we can go on being profligate with our central heating thermostats.
At first, the anti-pylon protesters were dismissed as nimbys and what the West Highland Free Press called “nouveau highlanders”. However, the pylonophobes are not going away. 12,000 people have signed a petition against upgrading the 137 pylon line between Beauly near Inverness and Denny in Stirlingshire. The Presiding Office rof the the Scottish Parliament no less, George Reid, has declared his opposition.
There is talk of bird “genocide” as a result of onshore windfarms - there will be another 55 of them if Scotland is to meet its 20% renewable target by 2010. That means thousands of pylons marching across Scotland. The very least we should do, say well-heeled activists like Lord Love, is to bury the cables under ground or in the sea.
There are other potent factors in the pylon mix. Cover the Highlands with 65-foot tall steel leviathans and you can wave goodbye to the tourist industry. High tension electricity cables are implicated in in a range of health problems from leukemia to chronic depression. Then there is the small matter of house prices.
Pylons revive ancient enmities between highland and lowland Scotland. But it’s not just in the Scottish glens that the sound of battle is being heard. Pylons are causing divisions in the conservation movement from the Romney Marshes to the Minches. And unlike nuclear power - which all environmental groups are united against - the transmission issue represent a real philosophical schism between techies and animal-lovers. Between those who think mankind has a right, not only to consume natural resources, but to promote economic welfare at the expense of animal kind and wilderness. And those who don’t.
The nuclear power industry doesn’t have a dog in this fight. However, its lobbyists are watching the pylon wars very carefully. Discord over the environmental impact of wind farms can’t do any harm to their claim to be the only truly “green” energy source.
I’m no conspiracy theorist, but it has struck many as curious that the largest wind farm in Europe - 234 turbines - had to be built on a peatland Special Protection Area which is the last redoubt of the White Tailed Sea Eagle and other rare species. It has also struck many as curious that this project should be run jointly by AMEC, Britain’s largest private nuclear services company, and British Energy, which owns and operates Britain’s nuclear power stations.
Now, I’m sure their search for renewable alternatives to nuclear power generation is wholly sincere . However, the row over Highlands against Pylons conveniently diverts attention from the problems with nuclear. It also sends a message to government that so-called “alternatives” aren’t so alternative after all - just at the moment when Tony Blair is contemplating a new generation of nuclear stations.
The Lewis wind farm has also been criticised by some environmentalists, not just because of the habitats, but because it disturbs a peatland which is a “carbon sink” - a bog which locks greenhouse gas under the soil. Planting three hundred wind turbines each five hundred feet high, causes massive disturbance which releases the very gas, CO2, which we are trying to remove from the atmosphere.
But, hey, there is no free lunch. Every solution to climate change has its drawbacks. You have to weigh up the consequences and try to find the least damaging alternative to the present cycle of climatic self-destruction.
Everyone has to make their own decisions, but I personally will not be marching against the pylon menace. Nor do I intend to chain myself to the wind mills of Soutra Hill. Pylons are ugly and unpleasant, and I wouldn’t want one in my back yard, but they do have a number of advantages.
Putting power cables underground is hugely expensive - about twelve times the cost - and burial poses its own serious environmental and health problems. An undersea power line to Dounreay or the North of England is a theoretical possibility which shouldn’t be ruled out, but is also prohibitively expensive.
The great advantage of pylons is that they are essentially temporary structures which do not fundamentally alter the landscape they cover. Eyesores they may be, but we already have a lot of them, and the plan to upgrade the Beauly to Denny line will actually lead to fewer pylons, albeit taller ones. Opponents have every right to protest and campaign for their early removal. But for the time being they will remain a visible reminder that our extravagant use of energy has a cost.
In time another technology will emerge which will allow the pylons to be dismantled - and the sooner the better. But time is short, and the temperature is rising. It is almost impossible to envisage significant exploitation of wind, wave and tidal energy in the short term without an overland means of transmission.
Scotland has 25% of Europe’s wind and tidal energy potential; Lewis alone will generate 1% of the UK’s energy needs. There’s no getting away from it: if we are serious about meeting CO2 targets, we are going to have pylons.
However, it doesn’t end there. We urbanites cannot just walk away from the environmental consequences. There needs to be a new deal struck between the city and the countryside; between highland and lowland Scotland.
First of all, we need to generate as much power as possible in our own back-yards. Every house could become a micro-power generator by exploiting the central heating boilers; by using roof-top windmills and solar panels and - most important of all - by conserving energy through insulation. It is quite possible to build houses today that actually contribute energy to the national grid rather than draw power from it.
And a final thought. The Firth of Forth is one of the windiest estuaries in Scotland, as every resident of Edinburgh knows. Why not a bank of offshore windmills there? Wind turbines look much better in an urban context where they can look almost beautiful. What better way to show the Highlands that we don’t regard their environment as expendable? If Scotland’s capital city were to embrace the windmill, it would be a lot easier to ask highlanders to embrace the pylon.
Dave Was The Future Once
9/12/05 Sunday Herald
"He was the future once!." Dave's first outing at Prime Minister's Questions was a huge success, and Blair's face was a picture when the newly-elected Tory leader delivered his well-rehearsed sound bite. We all loved it.
But is David Cameron trying too hard? Cycling around town to open-necked photo ops; demanding positive discimrination for women in Tory candidates lists; holding meetings with Friends of the Earth. It's all a little Rory Bremnerish: a Tory toff who takes off his tie and tries to be popular. Like a trendy vicar championing every right-on political cause.
But Cameron does the image thing pretty convincingly, almost as convincingly as Tony Blair. It requires chutzpah, cynicism and a kind of schizophrenic amnesia to reinvent yourself in public. Dave, remember, was the author of the last Tory election campaign which was arguably more rightwing than Thatcher and openly played the race card. He has a fondness for flat taxes too. Yet suddenly, we're suppose to buy Cameron as one of those social-workery types that Mrs Thatcher used to despise for "drooling and drivelling" about social justice.
Right on cue, the 80 year old Baroness was taken into hospital after a health scare. Surely, I thought, this is carrying news management too far! Getting Thatcher to peg it in order to show that Cameron has laid her ghost. I mean the man has no shame.
But the Tory press has already laid her to rest. It has been amusing to watch crusty Thatcherite columnists like Simon Heffer and Bruce Anderson taking off their ties and trying to sound as if they know what is going on in their party. It goes without sayting that the they loathe Cameron's apeing of New Labour - but they've had to come into line because he is the first chance of a Tory election winner - well, since the last one.
Cameron is glib, stylish, telegenic and lacking in any coherent ideology. But that's nothing new. William Hague was a pea out of the same pod. Remember the "fresh future"? Iain Duncan Smith touring Easterhouse? They too were the future once. (Can't think why Tony Blair didn't remind Cameron of that).
As far back as 1998, Michael Portillo, another futurist Tory, urged the party to come to terms with the modern age of gender politics, sexual diversity and the environment. He was destroyed because the Conservative membership couldn't handle his frankness about his gay past and anyway didn't want to be modern.
For me, writing about Cameron induces a feeling of deja vu. I keep thinking that I have written this before - and a quick look at the cuts reveals that I have. Each of the last four Tory leaders tried to push the party to be more inclusive modern and centrist. Each has ended up scuttling to the right in order to shore up the Tory core vote at the general election - the third of the UK which is middle aged, male, white and doesn't like foreigners. This was because, when it comes down to it, no leader can afford to alienate the Conservative 'base'.
Merely looking like and sounding like your opponent doesn't guarantee success and it can just as easily turn off your natural supporter. As for switchers, if Cameron is too like Tony Blair voters might well consider that it is more sensible to stick with the real thing.
So behind the glowing face, is Cameron offering anything different from his failed predecessors? Well, perhaps. He is the first Tory moderniser to have the membership unequivocally behind him. He won the leadership by a massive two to one against David Davies whose Eurosceptic, tax-cutting agenda was much closer to core Tory attitudes.
Cameron prevailed even though he had been exposed as soft on drugs, positive about gays and had talked about feminising the Conservatives. He ran against his own party. It may be that the Conservative movement is now so far gone that it doesn't care any more what kind of leader it has - rather like Labour in 1994. It will support anyone who looks like they have a remote chance of winning.
However, when Tony Blair took over, Labour already had a clear and long-established lead over the Conservatives in the opinion polls. Today Conservatives have been trailing Labour in the national polls, even while the government has been in all manner of difficulties from the TeeBee Gee Bees to the war in Iraq.
Cameron will have to achieve a remarkable and unprecedented turn-around in the opinion polls if he is to stand any chance of winning the next general election. It looks an impossible mountain to climb.
And yet no one dare write off David Cameron. Labour is more openly divided now that at any time since the deputy leadership election in 1981. There is near civil war in the parliamentary party with Labour MPs scuffling in the lobbies during votes on detention without charge.
As this column has noted, Tony Blair depends on the Tories to get much of his legislation through the Commons against the opposition of his own backbenches. The anti-terror legislation, the education reforms, Trident replacement, nuclear power. This could drive a wedge between the Labour leadershop and the party and create a dramatic opening in British politics.
Tony Blair is a lame duck Prime Minister who will not be standing again and holds Labour's fate in his hands. A disorderly succession to Brown could destroy Labour. It's not inconceivable that Blair could become so fed up with his party's resistance to his public service reform agenda, that he decides effecitvely to take the ship - and Gordon Brown - down with him.
But if David Cameron wants to take advantage of this situation, he will have to prove that he not only looks the part, but stands for something. All the guff about social justice and the environment is just that - empty gesture. He will have to own some kind of policy agenda to make himself credible as a Prime Minister. This is going to be difficult.
So far, all we really know is that he wants to opt out of the mainstream Conservative group in the European Parliamnet and sit with people like Robert Kilkroy-Silk. Not very inclusive, that. Nor is the idea of selecting school pupils at eleven. Or the war in Iraq, which he supports.
Cameron has ditched much class-based Tory policy including things like patient passports, which would have subsidised people to get private operations. But he still seems to hanker after tax cuts. He talks about "sharing the increase in wealth equally between tax-payers and public services" - but there isn't going to be a lot of new wealth around in the next few years, now that the economy is struggling. And Gordon Brown has already signalled a very tight public spending regime for later in this parliament. So where do the cuts come?
In the now famous session of Prime Ministers Questions it was striking how much weaker Cameron in his second round of questions to Blair on the environment. He wants to be green but doesn't intend to keep the climate change levy. He sounded as if he didn't quite know what it was.
So, let Dave have his moment of glory - it may not last. Being the "heir to Blair" may not be such a good thing to be. The Tories don't seem to have noticed how unpopular Tony Blair is among the electorate. The polls say moody, workaholic Gordon Brown is much more fashionable in the country. It could be that the Tories have discovered style over substance, just as the voters were getting tired of it
"He was the future once!." Dave's first outing at Prime Minister's Questions was a huge success, and Blair's face was a picture when the newly-elected Tory leader delivered his well-rehearsed sound bite. We all loved it.
But is David Cameron trying too hard? Cycling around town to open-necked photo ops; demanding positive discimrination for women in Tory candidates lists; holding meetings with Friends of the Earth. It's all a little Rory Bremnerish: a Tory toff who takes off his tie and tries to be popular. Like a trendy vicar championing every right-on political cause.
But Cameron does the image thing pretty convincingly, almost as convincingly as Tony Blair. It requires chutzpah, cynicism and a kind of schizophrenic amnesia to reinvent yourself in public. Dave, remember, was the author of the last Tory election campaign which was arguably more rightwing than Thatcher and openly played the race card. He has a fondness for flat taxes too. Yet suddenly, we're suppose to buy Cameron as one of those social-workery types that Mrs Thatcher used to despise for "drooling and drivelling" about social justice.
Right on cue, the 80 year old Baroness was taken into hospital after a health scare. Surely, I thought, this is carrying news management too far! Getting Thatcher to peg it in order to show that Cameron has laid her ghost. I mean the man has no shame.
But the Tory press has already laid her to rest. It has been amusing to watch crusty Thatcherite columnists like Simon Heffer and Bruce Anderson taking off their ties and trying to sound as if they know what is going on in their party. It goes without sayting that the they loathe Cameron's apeing of New Labour - but they've had to come into line because he is the first chance of a Tory election winner - well, since the last one.
Cameron is glib, stylish, telegenic and lacking in any coherent ideology. But that's nothing new. William Hague was a pea out of the same pod. Remember the "fresh future"? Iain Duncan Smith touring Easterhouse? They too were the future once. (Can't think why Tony Blair didn't remind Cameron of that).
As far back as 1998, Michael Portillo, another futurist Tory, urged the party to come to terms with the modern age of gender politics, sexual diversity and the environment. He was destroyed because the Conservative membership couldn't handle his frankness about his gay past and anyway didn't want to be modern.
For me, writing about Cameron induces a feeling of deja vu. I keep thinking that I have written this before - and a quick look at the cuts reveals that I have. Each of the last four Tory leaders tried to push the party to be more inclusive modern and centrist. Each has ended up scuttling to the right in order to shore up the Tory core vote at the general election - the third of the UK which is middle aged, male, white and doesn't like foreigners. This was because, when it comes down to it, no leader can afford to alienate the Conservative 'base'.
Merely looking like and sounding like your opponent doesn't guarantee success and it can just as easily turn off your natural supporter. As for switchers, if Cameron is too like Tony Blair voters might well consider that it is more sensible to stick with the real thing.
So behind the glowing face, is Cameron offering anything different from his failed predecessors? Well, perhaps. He is the first Tory moderniser to have the membership unequivocally behind him. He won the leadership by a massive two to one against David Davies whose Eurosceptic, tax-cutting agenda was much closer to core Tory attitudes.
Cameron prevailed even though he had been exposed as soft on drugs, positive about gays and had talked about feminising the Conservatives. He ran against his own party. It may be that the Conservative movement is now so far gone that it doesn't care any more what kind of leader it has - rather like Labour in 1994. It will support anyone who looks like they have a remote chance of winning.
However, when Tony Blair took over, Labour already had a clear and long-established lead over the Conservatives in the opinion polls. Today Conservatives have been trailing Labour in the national polls, even while the government has been in all manner of difficulties from the TeeBee Gee Bees to the war in Iraq.
Cameron will have to achieve a remarkable and unprecedented turn-around in the opinion polls if he is to stand any chance of winning the next general election. It looks an impossible mountain to climb.
And yet no one dare write off David Cameron. Labour is more openly divided now that at any time since the deputy leadership election in 1981. There is near civil war in the parliamentary party with Labour MPs scuffling in the lobbies during votes on detention without charge.
As this column has noted, Tony Blair depends on the Tories to get much of his legislation through the Commons against the opposition of his own backbenches. The anti-terror legislation, the education reforms, Trident replacement, nuclear power. This could drive a wedge between the Labour leadershop and the party and create a dramatic opening in British politics.
Tony Blair is a lame duck Prime Minister who will not be standing again and holds Labour's fate in his hands. A disorderly succession to Brown could destroy Labour. It's not inconceivable that Blair could become so fed up with his party's resistance to his public service reform agenda, that he decides effecitvely to take the ship - and Gordon Brown - down with him.
But if David Cameron wants to take advantage of this situation, he will have to prove that he not only looks the part, but stands for something. All the guff about social justice and the environment is just that - empty gesture. He will have to own some kind of policy agenda to make himself credible as a Prime Minister. This is going to be difficult.
So far, all we really know is that he wants to opt out of the mainstream Conservative group in the European Parliamnet and sit with people like Robert Kilkroy-Silk. Not very inclusive, that. Nor is the idea of selecting school pupils at eleven. Or the war in Iraq, which he supports.
Cameron has ditched much class-based Tory policy including things like patient passports, which would have subsidised people to get private operations. But he still seems to hanker after tax cuts. He talks about "sharing the increase in wealth equally between tax-payers and public services" - but there isn't going to be a lot of new wealth around in the next few years, now that the economy is struggling. And Gordon Brown has already signalled a very tight public spending regime for later in this parliament. So where do the cuts come?
In the now famous session of Prime Ministers Questions it was striking how much weaker Cameron in his second round of questions to Blair on the environment. He wants to be green but doesn't intend to keep the climate change levy. He sounded as if he didn't quite know what it was.
So, let Dave have his moment of glory - it may not last. Being the "heir to Blair" may not be such a good thing to be. The Tories don't seem to have noticed how unpopular Tony Blair is among the electorate. The polls say moody, workaholic Gordon Brown is much more fashionable in the country. It could be that the Tories have discovered style over substance, just as the voters were getting tired of it
Pensions Are Not Boring
Something remarkable happened last week. A government committee came up with a report which made sensible and workable proposals for dealing with one of the most intractable social problems of the age. Naturally, the government rubbished the Turner Report on the future pensions.
Or at least Gordon Brown did - even though he commissioned it. The Chancellor has form on pensions of course. Remember that 75p pension increase? Lone parent benefit? Now the Chancellor is opting to deny himself credit for a document which is being compared to the Beveridge Report in 1942, which founded the modern welfare state.
Running to nearly five hundred pages, “The Second Report of the Pensions Commission - A New Pension Settlement” is hardly bedtime reading. But its conclusions are relatively simple to understand. Lord Turner called for a gradual restoration of the value of the state pension, an end to means-testing, a very gradual increase in the pension age over thirty years and a state-guaranteed low-cost second pension into which all employees will automatically be enrolled. Simple, really.
Put like that it looks like plain common sense - but that’s what good policy should look like. The simplicity disguises the scale of the task the Turner Commission undertook - and Lord Turner’s courage in refusing to be browbeaten by a Chancellor who had already decided what he wanted hear.
Turner had to wade through the swampland of political rhetoric, scare stories and pleading special interests to locate the real problem - or lack of it. There is no pensions “time bomb”, he discovered. Increasing life-expectancy is not a crisis - it is an epic social and medical achievement which we should celebrate. Having more people able to function productively for longer should be seens as a potent new source of added economic value.
Pensions are, and should be, boring. Securing them should be a practical problem, an administrative exercise in managing public finances and encouraging people to save. In the cliché of the time, it’s not rocket science - it isn’t even domestic science.
There is no political issue here. Everyone accepts that security in old age is one of the defining characteristics of a civilised society. It is just a question of doing it.
Restoring the value of the state pension, and hence the dignity of its recipients, Turner rightly saw as the key to restoring the social contract on retirement. Means testing is not only demeaning, it is counter productive because it constitutes a disincentive to save.
Cutting through the nonsense, Turner showed how the basic state pension could be raised, over time, from #82 to #109 with only a marginal increase in taxation by combining the existing two-tier state pension (who actually knows what SERPS is, or cares?) and by rolling up the Chancellor’s expensive and complex pension credits.
But that isn’t all. We have to honour our side of the pensions bargain by undertaking to contribute to our own future well-being. Again, there is no politics here. Everyone agrees with this. But the main reason people aren’t saving is that they have lost faith in the willingness of government or the pensions industry to protect their savings.
By far the most radical element in Turner package is the National Pensions Saving Scheme. The idea is that everyone in work should be automatically signed up to pay 4% of their income into this “top-up” pension, with the employers paying 3% and the state I%. This would be invested in a wide range of private assets and funds and charges would be kept to only 0.3% of the fund’s value per year.
Again, deceptively simple. But some see this as tantamount to the nationalisation of the pensions industry. The lowest annual charges in private pensions are 1.5% and most charge much, much more. That may not seem much, but over the lifetime of a pension policy it could depress end value by as much as a third.
It’s hardly surprising that the pensions companies like Standard Life Prudential and the rest are up in arms. They say they can’t compete with this state-run scheme; that thousands of jobs will be lost in the financial services industry. But they brought this upon themselves. One of the main reasons no one saves any more is the appalling record of personal pensions. After the stock market crash of 2000, savers discovered the huge amounts in charges and commissions lost on personal pensions over the years. “With profits” turned out to be “without profits” - except for the insurance companies.
The pensions funds insist that they had only been making a reasonable return. But Adair Turner is a former head of the CBI, and he wasn’t buying that one. He has served notice on the entire sector that they will have to become more transparent, efficient and honest if they want to remain in business in future.
The Chancellor doesn’t seem over-enamoured of Turner’s National Pensions Saving Scheme and seems to sympathise with the pensions industry. But perhaps it isn’t too surprising. As this column explained two weeks ago , the Chancellor has himself been guilty of miss-selling on a grand scale by encouraging people on modest incomes to put money into private policies which will simply lose them entitlement to the means-tested minimum income guarantee when they retire.
The Chancellor tried to nobble the Turner Report even before it was published. A leaked letter from Brown warned that the numbers used by Turner were wrong. On the day of publication, the Treasury gave figures to the tabloids claiming that Turner had underestimated the cost of restoring the state pension by #15bn and that that his package would mean a four pence increase in taxation.
It was the politics of “black holes” that we are so used to from Labour election campaigns. The Chancellor is a past master at this kind of fiscal obfuscation. However, Adair Turner has been around the blocks a few times too. Furious about the pre-publication leaks, he resolved to take the Chancellor on over the numbers and turned to the offensive the very next day about the Treasury’s “porkie pies”.
The only way the Chancellor’s figures made sense is if pensions were to be raided in future by the Treasury. Turner’s figures were based on the assumption that the government intended to honour its bargain to pensioners and continue to increase the minimum income guarantee in line with earnings rather than prices beyond 2008. This was a perfectly reasonable assumption. To do otherwise, would be to plunge the poorest pensioners into the abject poverty from which they have only just emerged. Surely Mr Brown didn’t mean that.
Treasury spinners may be pleased at the way the Sun took the bait and attacked Turner as a tax-raiser. But the public reaction was much more favourable. Rarely has a government report won such praise from the opinion forming media and from professionals in the sector. You could almost sense the sighs of relief across the land that, at last, someone had got to grips with this problem in a way that was affordable, fair and above all comprehensible.
All the more foolish then of the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, to opt to remain on the wrong side of the new consensus. Pensions policy has been dogged by short-termism and political expediency - hence the Tories’ disingenuous cutting of the link between pensions and average earnings in 1981, which they sold at the time as a means of ensuring that pensions would be secure in value. Hence too the Chancellor’s cat’s cradle of reliefs and means-tests which may have helped get the very poorest pensioners out of poverty but at the cost of demeaning procedures which have destroyed incentives to safe and increased bureaucracy.
The Turner Report represents a real breakthrough - the possibility that the whole issue could be laid to rest for the next fifty years. Then pensions could become boring again.
Or at least Gordon Brown did - even though he commissioned it. The Chancellor has form on pensions of course. Remember that 75p pension increase? Lone parent benefit? Now the Chancellor is opting to deny himself credit for a document which is being compared to the Beveridge Report in 1942, which founded the modern welfare state.
Running to nearly five hundred pages, “The Second Report of the Pensions Commission - A New Pension Settlement” is hardly bedtime reading. But its conclusions are relatively simple to understand. Lord Turner called for a gradual restoration of the value of the state pension, an end to means-testing, a very gradual increase in the pension age over thirty years and a state-guaranteed low-cost second pension into which all employees will automatically be enrolled. Simple, really.
Put like that it looks like plain common sense - but that’s what good policy should look like. The simplicity disguises the scale of the task the Turner Commission undertook - and Lord Turner’s courage in refusing to be browbeaten by a Chancellor who had already decided what he wanted hear.
Turner had to wade through the swampland of political rhetoric, scare stories and pleading special interests to locate the real problem - or lack of it. There is no pensions “time bomb”, he discovered. Increasing life-expectancy is not a crisis - it is an epic social and medical achievement which we should celebrate. Having more people able to function productively for longer should be seens as a potent new source of added economic value.
Pensions are, and should be, boring. Securing them should be a practical problem, an administrative exercise in managing public finances and encouraging people to save. In the cliché of the time, it’s not rocket science - it isn’t even domestic science.
There is no political issue here. Everyone accepts that security in old age is one of the defining characteristics of a civilised society. It is just a question of doing it.
Restoring the value of the state pension, and hence the dignity of its recipients, Turner rightly saw as the key to restoring the social contract on retirement. Means testing is not only demeaning, it is counter productive because it constitutes a disincentive to save.
Cutting through the nonsense, Turner showed how the basic state pension could be raised, over time, from #82 to #109 with only a marginal increase in taxation by combining the existing two-tier state pension (who actually knows what SERPS is, or cares?) and by rolling up the Chancellor’s expensive and complex pension credits.
But that isn’t all. We have to honour our side of the pensions bargain by undertaking to contribute to our own future well-being. Again, there is no politics here. Everyone agrees with this. But the main reason people aren’t saving is that they have lost faith in the willingness of government or the pensions industry to protect their savings.
By far the most radical element in Turner package is the National Pensions Saving Scheme. The idea is that everyone in work should be automatically signed up to pay 4% of their income into this “top-up” pension, with the employers paying 3% and the state I%. This would be invested in a wide range of private assets and funds and charges would be kept to only 0.3% of the fund’s value per year.
Again, deceptively simple. But some see this as tantamount to the nationalisation of the pensions industry. The lowest annual charges in private pensions are 1.5% and most charge much, much more. That may not seem much, but over the lifetime of a pension policy it could depress end value by as much as a third.
It’s hardly surprising that the pensions companies like Standard Life Prudential and the rest are up in arms. They say they can’t compete with this state-run scheme; that thousands of jobs will be lost in the financial services industry. But they brought this upon themselves. One of the main reasons no one saves any more is the appalling record of personal pensions. After the stock market crash of 2000, savers discovered the huge amounts in charges and commissions lost on personal pensions over the years. “With profits” turned out to be “without profits” - except for the insurance companies.
The pensions funds insist that they had only been making a reasonable return. But Adair Turner is a former head of the CBI, and he wasn’t buying that one. He has served notice on the entire sector that they will have to become more transparent, efficient and honest if they want to remain in business in future.
The Chancellor doesn’t seem over-enamoured of Turner’s National Pensions Saving Scheme and seems to sympathise with the pensions industry. But perhaps it isn’t too surprising. As this column explained two weeks ago , the Chancellor has himself been guilty of miss-selling on a grand scale by encouraging people on modest incomes to put money into private policies which will simply lose them entitlement to the means-tested minimum income guarantee when they retire.
The Chancellor tried to nobble the Turner Report even before it was published. A leaked letter from Brown warned that the numbers used by Turner were wrong. On the day of publication, the Treasury gave figures to the tabloids claiming that Turner had underestimated the cost of restoring the state pension by #15bn and that that his package would mean a four pence increase in taxation.
It was the politics of “black holes” that we are so used to from Labour election campaigns. The Chancellor is a past master at this kind of fiscal obfuscation. However, Adair Turner has been around the blocks a few times too. Furious about the pre-publication leaks, he resolved to take the Chancellor on over the numbers and turned to the offensive the very next day about the Treasury’s “porkie pies”.
The only way the Chancellor’s figures made sense is if pensions were to be raided in future by the Treasury. Turner’s figures were based on the assumption that the government intended to honour its bargain to pensioners and continue to increase the minimum income guarantee in line with earnings rather than prices beyond 2008. This was a perfectly reasonable assumption. To do otherwise, would be to plunge the poorest pensioners into the abject poverty from which they have only just emerged. Surely Mr Brown didn’t mean that.
Treasury spinners may be pleased at the way the Sun took the bait and attacked Turner as a tax-raiser. But the public reaction was much more favourable. Rarely has a government report won such praise from the opinion forming media and from professionals in the sector. You could almost sense the sighs of relief across the land that, at last, someone had got to grips with this problem in a way that was affordable, fair and above all comprehensible.
All the more foolish then of the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, to opt to remain on the wrong side of the new consensus. Pensions policy has been dogged by short-termism and political expediency - hence the Tories’ disingenuous cutting of the link between pensions and average earnings in 1981, which they sold at the time as a means of ensuring that pensions would be secure in value. Hence too the Chancellor’s cat’s cradle of reliefs and means-tests which may have helped get the very poorest pensioners out of poverty but at the cost of demeaning procedures which have destroyed incentives to safe and increased bureaucracy.
The Turner Report represents a real breakthrough - the possibility that the whole issue could be laid to rest for the next fifty years. Then pensions could become boring again.
torture by proxy
“Extraordinary rendition” may sound like an exceptional performance of a concert classic. In fact it is the sinister euphemism for torture-by-proxy, the practice of flying terrorist suspects for interrogation in countries where torture is practised in order to escape human rights legislation.
America stands accused of breaking international law by such rendition, and Scotland is in the dock too. Glasgow and Prestwick airports have become favoured stopovers in this secret air lift. Indeed, as the rest of Europe takes a stand against it, Scotland is emerging as a potential European torture hub.
After refuelling on Scottish soil, CIA detainees from Guantanamo are being flown secretly to Eastern European “black sites” where interrogation can take place in a more robust fashion than would be possible in America or anywhere else in the EU. The 33 known CIA jets do not identify themselves and freely break air-traffic conventions. They fly where they like, when they like, and refuse to give any passenger lists or flight plans.
The CIA has, however, admitted flying suspects to North African states like Egypt and Jordan where torture is routinely used in interrogation. Human rights organisations and the European Parliament are convinced that the US has also constructed a Gulag of secret prisons in Eastern European countries. An all party group of MPs in Westminster will this week press the government to demand full disclosure from the US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice when she visits Brussels in the next few days.
But we can’t leave it to Westminster and the European Parliament. This is a form of human trafficking, and if it is true that Scotland is conniving in it - even passively - then we are all of us traffickers in human misery. The matter has been raised with the law officers in the Scottish Parliament and they have insisted that they have no locus. That is simply not good enough.
We can’t allow constitutional niceties to allow Scotland to become party to prisoner abuse. If it is happening, and the United States has been singularly reluctant to deny it, then it must be stopped. Public opinion needs to be mobilised. If ever there were a case of ‘not in my backyard’ - this is it.
Torture is illegal under the UN Torture Convention. This is not just some empty declaration but part of our own British criminal law, and it is illegal to assist another country to engage in torture. The British government seems unaware of the risk it could be running in allowing this country to become the European hub of this covert operation. Either that, or they don’t care.
But if and when it is confirmed that these “black” destinations exist, there could be profound legal consequences. Tony Blair could even end up sharing the same fate as General Augustus Pinochet, because anyone charged with torture can be tried in any country in the world. The British Prime MInister would not be able to travel to international summits without the risk of his being apprehended and prosecuted.
Complete fantasy, you say. Well, listen up because the rest of Europe has. Germany, Spain, Sweden and Norway have opened criminal investigations into the CIA trafficking. They know the risks and believe they must not only oppose rendition, but be seen to oppose it. It has been reported that Austria even scrambled two airforce jets to intercept secret CIA flights over their airspace.
This is potentially a colossal scandal on our very doorstep. But where is the outrage? Last week, in the column above, I explored how we have become so inured to the atrocities created by the war in Iraq that we have almost lost our capacity to be shocked. Extraordinary rendition is perhaps the most striking illustration of how we have become desensitised in this country to breaches of international law.
There is a mood of fatalism abroad in civil society, as if we have no power any more to alter the course of events. The government is out of control, and neither parliament nor the people can rein it it. But you can be sure that the victims of torture will not forget. In the Muslim world, Britain is already regarded as a country which has perpetrated abuse of detainees in Iraq. Scotland could now be targeted by extremists because of these allegations of torture trafficking.
We are told that we must accept the perverse logic of the increasingly isolated Republican clique in Washington which insists that says “the rules have changed”. That this is a “new kind of war”, waged against a new and sinister foe, al Qaeda. Old conventions of war are obsolete. This is the same logic used by the US Vice President, Dick Cheney, who has promised to veto the anti-torture law moved by the US Republican Senator, John McCain - himself a victim of torture in Vietnam.
But if this war involves abandoning the rule of law and all the rules of civilised conduct between nations then we have already lost it.
This is an issue on which the Scottish Parliament can and must make its views clear. There have been questions in Holyrood - and many MSPs have been doing good work trying to get this issue onto the parliamentary agenda. But the voice of the Scottish Parliament is not being heard. I am sure that every MSP in Holyrood, of whatever party, shares this paper’s revulsion at what has been going on.
Well, it is time for these individuals to come together and find a common voice. To demand a categorical assurance that Scotland will not be used for torture flights. If America cannot give such assurances, then the CIA flights should be blocked.We cannot allow Scotland to become an accessory to torture.
We can’t wash our hands of this one. We can’t shrug our shoulders, suck our teeth and say: ‘Och, the Americans - what can you do?’ The word must go out loud and clear: Not in our name!
America stands accused of breaking international law by such rendition, and Scotland is in the dock too. Glasgow and Prestwick airports have become favoured stopovers in this secret air lift. Indeed, as the rest of Europe takes a stand against it, Scotland is emerging as a potential European torture hub.
After refuelling on Scottish soil, CIA detainees from Guantanamo are being flown secretly to Eastern European “black sites” where interrogation can take place in a more robust fashion than would be possible in America or anywhere else in the EU. The 33 known CIA jets do not identify themselves and freely break air-traffic conventions. They fly where they like, when they like, and refuse to give any passenger lists or flight plans.
The CIA has, however, admitted flying suspects to North African states like Egypt and Jordan where torture is routinely used in interrogation. Human rights organisations and the European Parliament are convinced that the US has also constructed a Gulag of secret prisons in Eastern European countries. An all party group of MPs in Westminster will this week press the government to demand full disclosure from the US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice when she visits Brussels in the next few days.
But we can’t leave it to Westminster and the European Parliament. This is a form of human trafficking, and if it is true that Scotland is conniving in it - even passively - then we are all of us traffickers in human misery. The matter has been raised with the law officers in the Scottish Parliament and they have insisted that they have no locus. That is simply not good enough.
We can’t allow constitutional niceties to allow Scotland to become party to prisoner abuse. If it is happening, and the United States has been singularly reluctant to deny it, then it must be stopped. Public opinion needs to be mobilised. If ever there were a case of ‘not in my backyard’ - this is it.
Torture is illegal under the UN Torture Convention. This is not just some empty declaration but part of our own British criminal law, and it is illegal to assist another country to engage in torture. The British government seems unaware of the risk it could be running in allowing this country to become the European hub of this covert operation. Either that, or they don’t care.
But if and when it is confirmed that these “black” destinations exist, there could be profound legal consequences. Tony Blair could even end up sharing the same fate as General Augustus Pinochet, because anyone charged with torture can be tried in any country in the world. The British Prime MInister would not be able to travel to international summits without the risk of his being apprehended and prosecuted.
Complete fantasy, you say. Well, listen up because the rest of Europe has. Germany, Spain, Sweden and Norway have opened criminal investigations into the CIA trafficking. They know the risks and believe they must not only oppose rendition, but be seen to oppose it. It has been reported that Austria even scrambled two airforce jets to intercept secret CIA flights over their airspace.
This is potentially a colossal scandal on our very doorstep. But where is the outrage? Last week, in the column above, I explored how we have become so inured to the atrocities created by the war in Iraq that we have almost lost our capacity to be shocked. Extraordinary rendition is perhaps the most striking illustration of how we have become desensitised in this country to breaches of international law.
There is a mood of fatalism abroad in civil society, as if we have no power any more to alter the course of events. The government is out of control, and neither parliament nor the people can rein it it. But you can be sure that the victims of torture will not forget. In the Muslim world, Britain is already regarded as a country which has perpetrated abuse of detainees in Iraq. Scotland could now be targeted by extremists because of these allegations of torture trafficking.
We are told that we must accept the perverse logic of the increasingly isolated Republican clique in Washington which insists that says “the rules have changed”. That this is a “new kind of war”, waged against a new and sinister foe, al Qaeda. Old conventions of war are obsolete. This is the same logic used by the US Vice President, Dick Cheney, who has promised to veto the anti-torture law moved by the US Republican Senator, John McCain - himself a victim of torture in Vietnam.
But if this war involves abandoning the rule of law and all the rules of civilised conduct between nations then we have already lost it.
This is an issue on which the Scottish Parliament can and must make its views clear. There have been questions in Holyrood - and many MSPs have been doing good work trying to get this issue onto the parliamentary agenda. But the voice of the Scottish Parliament is not being heard. I am sure that every MSP in Holyrood, of whatever party, shares this paper’s revulsion at what has been going on.
Well, it is time for these individuals to come together and find a common voice. To demand a categorical assurance that Scotland will not be used for torture flights. If America cannot give such assurances, then the CIA flights should be blocked.We cannot allow Scotland to become an accessory to torture.
We can’t wash our hands of this one. We can’t shrug our shoulders, suck our teeth and say: ‘Och, the Americans - what can you do?’ The word must go out loud and clear: Not in our name!
Thursday, February 16, 2006
It's Worse Than Vietnam
Sir Malcolm Rifkind may not have a cat in hell's chance of becoming Tory leader, but he is a hell of a sharp politician. The former Foreign Secretary's claim last week that Iraq was worse than Suez, worse than Vietnam and that Tony Blair should have resigned long ago, was well timed and well informed. It's just the kind of thing Tony Blair might himself would have said at this stage of the Iraq disaster had he been leader of the opposition.
It might seem over the top to say that Iraq is worse than the Vietnam war in the 1960s - until you think about it. At least in Vietnam America knew who the enemy was and had been invited in by a nominally democratic government in Saigon. In Iraq, they - we - blundered in uninvited and found ourselves facing an amorphous and probably unbeatable foe which doesn't stand and fight, like the Vietcong.
Things are so bad in Basra, where the British army trashed a prison complex last week to release two SAS soldiers, that even the Iraqi police force can no longer be trusted. Britain and America face a very similar dilemma to that faced by President Johnson in Vietnam in 1965/66. Do they escalate or come home? The British cannot hope to pacify an area half the size of France with only 8,500 men. But to send more troops would be even greater folly.
Rifkind was absolutely spot on too in expressing astonishment that Tony Blair remains in office. In the Suez crisis in 1956, Britain's last imperial adventure, no British soldiers were killed - though a lot of Egyptians died. Yet Anthony Eden, the Tory Prime Minister, did the decent thing and resigned. In those days, it's what leaders did.
There was no really debate about it, no attempting to shift blame to the BBC or spin out of the crisis. Britain had suffered a massive humiliation, people had died, and Number Ten simply had to take responsibility. If nothing else, it meant that a new regime could come in and pick up the pieces with a new policy. Resignation isn't just some quaint old toff tradition like fair play and cricket. It performs a vitally important political function. No government, no business, no teenage fan club for that matter can continue to function with a leader who has made a complete mess of things. It is essential to bring in a new team to make a fresh start. Otherwise we continue to repeat the mistakes of the past because the author of them remains in denial.
In Britain we are stuck with a busted Prime Minister, who took us into an illegal war, on the basis of distorted intelligence, without the promised UN resolution, after two of the biggest parliamentary rebellions in a hundred years and in the face of widespread opposition in the country. This was the cock up of all cock ups; the mother of all mishaps. Yet he's still there.
We were told that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction which could attack British interests within 45 minutes. This was complete nonsense, as was everything else we were told about Saddam's WMD. Blair should have gone the mnoment it became clear that the war had been based on a false prospectus. But he didn't.
Instead, the war aims were subtly altered to 'defeating terrorism' and 'bringing peace and democracy to the Middle East'. Well, it rapidly became clear that terrorism had been made immeasurably worse by the invasion. Iraq's democracy seems tenuous at best, in a country plunging into anarchy.
As soon as the insurgency began to inflict serious casualties on the British army, Blair should have resigned. It is simply unacceptable for ninety five servicemens' lives to be lost in error.
The government defused the David Kelly affair by a launching disgraceful assault on the integrity of the BBC. Andrew Gilligan's "Today" report about the WMD intelligence being "sexed up" was correct in all essentials. Senior intelligence figures did clearly feel that the intelligence had been massaged by Number Ten, as the subsequent Butler report confirmed. It should have been Tony Blair who resigned to atone for Dr Kelly's death, not the Director General of the BBC.
The next opportunity for dignified exit was when the infamous Downing St memo of December 2002 emerged earlier this year, confirming that the Prime Minister had resolved to go to war fully a year before it was put to parliament. Parliament was deceived.
The final occasion was the London bombings in July. That should have been the moment when any self-respecting leader realised he couldn't go on. Not only was Iraq now in ruins, its terrorism had, like a contagion, been imported to Britain. The people who died in the London Underground were victims of Islamic extremism, but also of British foreign policy.
Blair's blunder in Iraq has put Britain in the front line. If the cause had been just, the war legitimate, the intelligence accurate and the democratic promises sincere, then bringing terror home might have been a price worth paying. But for people to die as a consequence of a monumental governmental cock up is simply unnacceptable. Someone has to take responsibility.
Rifkind is right. Blair should have gone long since. The longer he clings to power, the more misery will be brought to Iraq, the more British soldiers will die, the more terrorism will spread. There be a more serious bomb in London or another provincial city. As Iraq spirals into civil war, more British soldiers will be leaping in flames from their armoured vehicles. The Middle East will descend into communal violence and religious fanaticism.
The Islamic Shia reactionaries who have taken charge in southern Iraq are forging links with the Ayatollahs in neighbouring Shia Iran - a power with nuclear ambitions. The disintegration of Iraq will destabilise the entire Middle East - just as critics forecast.
We need a new direction in Iraq, not a continuation of failed policies.It is simply impossible to devise a new approach under this discredited and dangerous Prime Minister. We need a leader who can see the Iraq imbroglio for what it is, rather than through the prism of his own narcissistic fantasy. Yet, Tony Blair shows no signs of going, and the Labour cabinet - as supine as ever - shows no sign of standing up to him.
This week, the emasculated Labour Party in Brighton will cheer and support this deluded and autocratic leader. Cabinet ministers will line up to praise him, like North Korean apparatchiks. The Sun will commend him for backing Our Boys. Conference, like parliament, has lost any will to hold this leader to account.
We are left with an immoveable Prime Minister, exercising the residual powers of an absolutist Monarch, who is planning to introduce a raft of illiberal anti-terror laws which will erode civil liberties and free speech. This is no longer a party political matter, but a constitutional one. We need a civic response, a broadly-based campaign to challenge elective dictatorship.
This should, first of all, include the leaders of the opposition parties - Salmond, Kennedy, Clarke (if he wins the Tory leadership). Thereafter, it needs prominent figures from civil society, church leaders, academics, writers and former statesmen like Christ Patten and Roy Hattersley.
This campaing might look something like the Scottish Constitutional Convention in 1988. That body successfully mobilised Scottish civil society against autocratic rule from the Thatcher government. From small beginnings, it brought about the greatest constitutional revolution in these islands in 80 years. We need something similar again.
It just needs a leader. How tragic that the politician best suited to this role, Robin Cook, died just when we needed him most.
It might seem over the top to say that Iraq is worse than the Vietnam war in the 1960s - until you think about it. At least in Vietnam America knew who the enemy was and had been invited in by a nominally democratic government in Saigon. In Iraq, they - we - blundered in uninvited and found ourselves facing an amorphous and probably unbeatable foe which doesn't stand and fight, like the Vietcong.
Things are so bad in Basra, where the British army trashed a prison complex last week to release two SAS soldiers, that even the Iraqi police force can no longer be trusted. Britain and America face a very similar dilemma to that faced by President Johnson in Vietnam in 1965/66. Do they escalate or come home? The British cannot hope to pacify an area half the size of France with only 8,500 men. But to send more troops would be even greater folly.
Rifkind was absolutely spot on too in expressing astonishment that Tony Blair remains in office. In the Suez crisis in 1956, Britain's last imperial adventure, no British soldiers were killed - though a lot of Egyptians died. Yet Anthony Eden, the Tory Prime Minister, did the decent thing and resigned. In those days, it's what leaders did.
There was no really debate about it, no attempting to shift blame to the BBC or spin out of the crisis. Britain had suffered a massive humiliation, people had died, and Number Ten simply had to take responsibility. If nothing else, it meant that a new regime could come in and pick up the pieces with a new policy. Resignation isn't just some quaint old toff tradition like fair play and cricket. It performs a vitally important political function. No government, no business, no teenage fan club for that matter can continue to function with a leader who has made a complete mess of things. It is essential to bring in a new team to make a fresh start. Otherwise we continue to repeat the mistakes of the past because the author of them remains in denial.
In Britain we are stuck with a busted Prime Minister, who took us into an illegal war, on the basis of distorted intelligence, without the promised UN resolution, after two of the biggest parliamentary rebellions in a hundred years and in the face of widespread opposition in the country. This was the cock up of all cock ups; the mother of all mishaps. Yet he's still there.
We were told that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction which could attack British interests within 45 minutes. This was complete nonsense, as was everything else we were told about Saddam's WMD. Blair should have gone the mnoment it became clear that the war had been based on a false prospectus. But he didn't.
Instead, the war aims were subtly altered to 'defeating terrorism' and 'bringing peace and democracy to the Middle East'. Well, it rapidly became clear that terrorism had been made immeasurably worse by the invasion. Iraq's democracy seems tenuous at best, in a country plunging into anarchy.
As soon as the insurgency began to inflict serious casualties on the British army, Blair should have resigned. It is simply unacceptable for ninety five servicemens' lives to be lost in error.
The government defused the David Kelly affair by a launching disgraceful assault on the integrity of the BBC. Andrew Gilligan's "Today" report about the WMD intelligence being "sexed up" was correct in all essentials. Senior intelligence figures did clearly feel that the intelligence had been massaged by Number Ten, as the subsequent Butler report confirmed. It should have been Tony Blair who resigned to atone for Dr Kelly's death, not the Director General of the BBC.
The next opportunity for dignified exit was when the infamous Downing St memo of December 2002 emerged earlier this year, confirming that the Prime Minister had resolved to go to war fully a year before it was put to parliament. Parliament was deceived.
The final occasion was the London bombings in July. That should have been the moment when any self-respecting leader realised he couldn't go on. Not only was Iraq now in ruins, its terrorism had, like a contagion, been imported to Britain. The people who died in the London Underground were victims of Islamic extremism, but also of British foreign policy.
Blair's blunder in Iraq has put Britain in the front line. If the cause had been just, the war legitimate, the intelligence accurate and the democratic promises sincere, then bringing terror home might have been a price worth paying. But for people to die as a consequence of a monumental governmental cock up is simply unnacceptable. Someone has to take responsibility.
Rifkind is right. Blair should have gone long since. The longer he clings to power, the more misery will be brought to Iraq, the more British soldiers will die, the more terrorism will spread. There be a more serious bomb in London or another provincial city. As Iraq spirals into civil war, more British soldiers will be leaping in flames from their armoured vehicles. The Middle East will descend into communal violence and religious fanaticism.
The Islamic Shia reactionaries who have taken charge in southern Iraq are forging links with the Ayatollahs in neighbouring Shia Iran - a power with nuclear ambitions. The disintegration of Iraq will destabilise the entire Middle East - just as critics forecast.
We need a new direction in Iraq, not a continuation of failed policies.It is simply impossible to devise a new approach under this discredited and dangerous Prime Minister. We need a leader who can see the Iraq imbroglio for what it is, rather than through the prism of his own narcissistic fantasy. Yet, Tony Blair shows no signs of going, and the Labour cabinet - as supine as ever - shows no sign of standing up to him.
This week, the emasculated Labour Party in Brighton will cheer and support this deluded and autocratic leader. Cabinet ministers will line up to praise him, like North Korean apparatchiks. The Sun will commend him for backing Our Boys. Conference, like parliament, has lost any will to hold this leader to account.
We are left with an immoveable Prime Minister, exercising the residual powers of an absolutist Monarch, who is planning to introduce a raft of illiberal anti-terror laws which will erode civil liberties and free speech. This is no longer a party political matter, but a constitutional one. We need a civic response, a broadly-based campaign to challenge elective dictatorship.
This should, first of all, include the leaders of the opposition parties - Salmond, Kennedy, Clarke (if he wins the Tory leadership). Thereafter, it needs prominent figures from civil society, church leaders, academics, writers and former statesmen like Christ Patten and Roy Hattersley.
This campaing might look something like the Scottish Constitutional Convention in 1988. That body successfully mobilised Scottish civil society against autocratic rule from the Thatcher government. From small beginnings, it brought about the greatest constitutional revolution in these islands in 80 years. We need something similar again.
It just needs a leader. How tragic that the politician best suited to this role, Robin Cook, died just when we needed him most.
New Orleans: Welcome To Tomorrow's World
3/09/05
As the full scale of the Louisiana inundation, and its chaotic aftermath, sank in last week, commentators contrasted the power of the forces of nature with the weakness of human nature. The ‘thin veneer of civilisation’, we were told, had been scuffed off, showing the basic survival instinct beneath - anarchic, lawless.
But it wasn’t human nature that broke down, but a system of government. The New Orleans was - is - a peculiarly social and political disaster. The thin veneer of democratic citizenship has been ripped off a country deeply divided on class and racial lines; a society which has, for all its wealth and power, lost its sense of community and instinct for self help.
Yes, it was America’s tsunami. The scenes of devastation were uncannily similar to those we saw in places like Sri Lanka and Thailand, as towns were reduced to match wood. Much of the human suffering could have been avoided if flood warnings had been heeded, just as they could have been in the Indian Ocean had there been proper earthquake alerts.
But there is one important difference.
In those supposedly backward and primitive societies of the Indian Ocean we did not see the violence and looting that we have seen so shockingly in New Orleans. Nor were thousands of people left to fend for themselves for fully five days in a stinking concrete coffin. Commentators who witnessed both disasters, like the BBC’s Matt Frei, insisted that the social breakdown in the tsunami towns was not on the same scale as in Mississippi.
People who have less to lose, perhaps have a better sense of values; are more concerned to save lives rather than property. However, this is not just a question of there being more to rob. America is a devil take the hindmost society, in which the poor are segregated, left to their own devices. If New Orleans had been 70% white instead of 70% would the relief operation have failed?
It was overwhelmingly the black lower classes who were left behind by the white exodus. They are now being accused of resorting to lawlessness, but what else could they do. There is no functioning welfare state in modern America. They are used to a daily struggle for survival.
The initial evacuation warnings urged people to get in their cars and leave the city without giving any concern to those who lacked transport or were too sick or weak to get out or had nowhere to go. The poor, mentally ill and destitute were left on the streets, in the prisons, in the hospital to fend for themselves. And when they did start to fend for themselves they became the enemy within.
The US military and the police steamed into New Orleans as if it were Baghdad. Heavily armed, they made clear their first priority was to secure property, rather than help the victims. This was a military operation not a relief effort. The people in t he stricken city were treated like an internal colony which needed to be occupied and pacified, rather than a community which needed to be consoled and helped.
The other New Orleans citizens who ignored the evacuation warnings were, in many cases, survivalists and gun enthusiasts who seek out social disaster to allow them to exercise their particular skills. Others stayed to protect their businesses and property, with all necessary means. It is hardly surprising that gun law breaks out in a society which is saturated with hand weapons - where murder is commonplace and where the first reaction to confrontation is to often to shoot.
Forget the levees, it is the crumbling moral and social infrastructure of modern Republican America which has been exposed by this catastrophic event. It is summed up by the failure of a President to respond for fully five days to one of the greatest disasters ever to hit America. Nw Orleans like the Kobe earthquake in Japan in 1995, the inadequate response to which exposed the failings of the Japanese government.
But there is another sense in which this is a moral disaster for America. It has become a cliché to claim the influence of global warming on every natural disaster. Clearly, hurricanes happen in this part of the world. There was nothing particularly unusual in Katrina except its size and trajectory.
However, scientists are convinced that climate change is happening, that we are responsible for it, and that the consequence is likely to be increasingly unstable and extreme weather patterns. In other words, hurricanes are going to happen a lot more in future.
So it is perhaps fitting that one of these new age storms should hit America, home of irresponsible exploitation of carbon fuels, which produces 25% of the world’s C02 emissions. But the effects will not be confined to America, and we can perhaps see, in the scenes in New Orleans how quickly our own technological society can be plunged back to the stone age.
One of the main reasons for the failure of the relief effort was the loss of mobile phone networks. We don’t know how to function without them, or the computers which increasingly order our lives. We are becoming dangerously dependent on communication systems which are vulnerable to climate instabilities. Like our atomised society which has lost the capacity to unite in adversity.
So, look hard; look long. For this is what we all could face in the not too distant future. Welcome to tomorrow.
As the full scale of the Louisiana inundation, and its chaotic aftermath, sank in last week, commentators contrasted the power of the forces of nature with the weakness of human nature. The ‘thin veneer of civilisation’, we were told, had been scuffed off, showing the basic survival instinct beneath - anarchic, lawless.
But it wasn’t human nature that broke down, but a system of government. The New Orleans was - is - a peculiarly social and political disaster. The thin veneer of democratic citizenship has been ripped off a country deeply divided on class and racial lines; a society which has, for all its wealth and power, lost its sense of community and instinct for self help.
Yes, it was America’s tsunami. The scenes of devastation were uncannily similar to those we saw in places like Sri Lanka and Thailand, as towns were reduced to match wood. Much of the human suffering could have been avoided if flood warnings had been heeded, just as they could have been in the Indian Ocean had there been proper earthquake alerts.
But there is one important difference.
In those supposedly backward and primitive societies of the Indian Ocean we did not see the violence and looting that we have seen so shockingly in New Orleans. Nor were thousands of people left to fend for themselves for fully five days in a stinking concrete coffin. Commentators who witnessed both disasters, like the BBC’s Matt Frei, insisted that the social breakdown in the tsunami towns was not on the same scale as in Mississippi.
People who have less to lose, perhaps have a better sense of values; are more concerned to save lives rather than property. However, this is not just a question of there being more to rob. America is a devil take the hindmost society, in which the poor are segregated, left to their own devices. If New Orleans had been 70% white instead of 70% would the relief operation have failed?
It was overwhelmingly the black lower classes who were left behind by the white exodus. They are now being accused of resorting to lawlessness, but what else could they do. There is no functioning welfare state in modern America. They are used to a daily struggle for survival.
The initial evacuation warnings urged people to get in their cars and leave the city without giving any concern to those who lacked transport or were too sick or weak to get out or had nowhere to go. The poor, mentally ill and destitute were left on the streets, in the prisons, in the hospital to fend for themselves. And when they did start to fend for themselves they became the enemy within.
The US military and the police steamed into New Orleans as if it were Baghdad. Heavily armed, they made clear their first priority was to secure property, rather than help the victims. This was a military operation not a relief effort. The people in t he stricken city were treated like an internal colony which needed to be occupied and pacified, rather than a community which needed to be consoled and helped.
The other New Orleans citizens who ignored the evacuation warnings were, in many cases, survivalists and gun enthusiasts who seek out social disaster to allow them to exercise their particular skills. Others stayed to protect their businesses and property, with all necessary means. It is hardly surprising that gun law breaks out in a society which is saturated with hand weapons - where murder is commonplace and where the first reaction to confrontation is to often to shoot.
Forget the levees, it is the crumbling moral and social infrastructure of modern Republican America which has been exposed by this catastrophic event. It is summed up by the failure of a President to respond for fully five days to one of the greatest disasters ever to hit America. Nw Orleans like the Kobe earthquake in Japan in 1995, the inadequate response to which exposed the failings of the Japanese government.
But there is another sense in which this is a moral disaster for America. It has become a cliché to claim the influence of global warming on every natural disaster. Clearly, hurricanes happen in this part of the world. There was nothing particularly unusual in Katrina except its size and trajectory.
However, scientists are convinced that climate change is happening, that we are responsible for it, and that the consequence is likely to be increasingly unstable and extreme weather patterns. In other words, hurricanes are going to happen a lot more in future.
So it is perhaps fitting that one of these new age storms should hit America, home of irresponsible exploitation of carbon fuels, which produces 25% of the world’s C02 emissions. But the effects will not be confined to America, and we can perhaps see, in the scenes in New Orleans how quickly our own technological society can be plunged back to the stone age.
One of the main reasons for the failure of the relief effort was the loss of mobile phone networks. We don’t know how to function without them, or the computers which increasingly order our lives. We are becoming dangerously dependent on communication systems which are vulnerable to climate instabilities. Like our atomised society which has lost the capacity to unite in adversity.
So, look hard; look long. For this is what we all could face in the not too distant future. Welcome to tomorrow.
Why Can't We Have a Constitution Too?
What about a constitution for Britain? There has been much head-shaking and teeth-sucking over the difficulties the various groups in Iraq have had agreeing on a constitution. But at least they are going to have one. We don’t - at least not a formal written constitution defining and limiting the powers of the government and codifying the rights of citizens.
Instead we have a rag bag of precedents, statutes and bits of international treaties like the European Convention on Human Rights which have been incorporated into British law. But the whole thing is highly provisional and largely irrelevant when it comes to the power of the executive to do what it wants.
And I’m not talking here about the Scottish Executive, which does, actually, have a pretty firm constitutional foundation in the Scotland Act. The real executive branch - the Prime Minister effectively - has very few legal constrains because it exercises the powers, essentially, of a Monarch.
In the past, these absolutist powers have been formal only. Previous Prime Ministers, Margaret Thatcher included, have abided by long-established conventions of British governance that curb the conduct and powers of the Prime Minister. Such as the primacy of Parliament; the rights of ministers in cabinet; the independence of the judiciary. But there’s nothing written down. If a Prime Minister decides to ignore them all, to rule from his sofa without regard to legislature, cabinet or judges, there is nothing whatever to stop him.
Many people - not least the much maligned Law Lords - are worried that our lack of any formal constitution has become a license for the Prime Minister to do what he wants. To run roughshod over human rights; to abandon conventions of cabinet government; to denounce those who defend long-cherished freedoms like habeas corpus; to declare war without proper consultation or proper authority under international law; to depart from inconvenient international treaties like the Geneva Convention; to reinterpret laws based on them, like the Human Rights Act; to invent new constitutional principles, such as the “war on terrorism” being more important than civil liberties.
Constitutions are supposed to set out the principles of government, the distribution of power among the various arms of the state - legislature, executive, administration - and to establish the rules by which a democratic system functions. Most democratic countries have them. Drafting proper constitutions is usually the first act of democratic societies when they emerge from tyranny. Like Germany after the War, Russia after Communism, South Africa after Apartheid. Indeed, many people argue democracy is impossible without strict controls on the powers of governments
But British constitutionalists have long argued that our informal system of checks and balances works well. We are the oldest democracy, and we have constitutional principles. as it were, in our blood. Many have argued that relying on these conventions about ‘how things are done” is preferable to formal written constitutions, which become a charter for lawyers.
In America, for example, there is a written constitution overseen by a Supreme Court which some say puts too much power in the hands of judges. That the elected House of Commons, expressing the will of he people, is a far better instrument for holding government to account. However, in Britain neither legislature nor judiciary seems to have any effective constitutional power over the executive.
Tony Blair rarely appears in Parliament, doesn’t consult his cabinet, and treats Law Lords with undisguised contempt. He governs through a court of close confidants and admirers in Downing St.. He picks and chooses from the advice he gets from law officers, like the Attorney General’s on the legality of the Iraq invasion.
Parliament isn’t working. Our unfair electoral system, in which a party with 35% of the popular vote can win an overall majority of 66 seats in the Commons, allows the PM largely to ignore parliament. MPs know that to get on in their careers, they have to vote the way the PM wants them to.
Tony Blair also controls his cabinet through patronage. Only those loyal to the Prime Minister are chosen, and they only remain in their ministerial posts so long as they keep their noses out of the business of running the country. Once in the Cabinet room, even independently-minded politicians, like Clare Short, lose their bottle.
Law Lords, like Lord Hoffman who incurred the wrath of Number Ten last year, may fulminate against the PM’s powers of detention without trial, but ultimately the judges can be ignored. A malleable press and media can be deployed to drown out the caveats and qualifications of the bench. I’m told that there is something like revolt among the senior justiciary at the PM’s recent attempt to tread on their turf. But on things like control orders, detention without trial, deportation to countries with poor human rights and the use of evidence derived from torture, Blair gets his way.
We like to think we have a free press in this country, and formally we do. But it is essentially the freedom of a few wealthy and often non-British proprietors to promote their own views and private interests. People like Rupert Murdoch, an Australian with American citizenship, own large chunks of the British press, in his case including the Sun, Times, Sunday Times. By carefully cultivating such press magnates, and discretely promoting their business interests, Prime Ministers can rely on support when times get tough. A centralised, near monopoly press is a powerful instrument of executive dictatorship.
The BBC has formal independence from government enshrined in its Royal Charter and its Board of Governors. But the PM chooses who sits on the Board, and if the Corporation gets out of hand, it can be brought to heel, as it was after the Hutton Report. The effective sacking of the Director General, Greg Dyke, and the Chairman of the Board of Governors, Gavyn Davies - because one of their journalists made a couple of minor mistakes while exposing how Number Ten manipulated the evidence for WMD in Iraq - has shattered the confidence of the BBC in holding government to account.
In the past, civil society also exerted a check on power. Poltical parties, churches, mass movements like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Greenpeace, etc.. mobilised hundreds of thousands of people. These intermediate bodies still exist, and there is a plethora of think tanks and special interest groups. But throughout society, ordinary people have stopped joining organisations and mass movements.
Occasionally the Stop The War movement or Make Poverty History can get hundreds of thousands onto the streets. But they are one off demonstrations - emotional spasms - rather than organisations which can keep sustained pressure on government. It is the legion of private PR men, commercial lobbyists, corporate affairs executives from big corporations who exercise influence.
Yet, we need civil society today more than ever. We have been taken into a disastrous war in Iraq on a false pretext and on an agenda driven by Republican ideologues. Yet no one can bring the PM to account. There are unprecedented moves to reduce historic freedoms and curb the rights of the citizen. Compulsory identity cards will track our movements; laws on detention without trial are to be extended; there is to be an offence of “justifying or glorifying terrorism”, which could have put Nelson Mandela in jail or the deportation lounge, police powers to hold terrorist suspects could be extended to three months.
Some of the more extreme measures like resorting to Treason laws or setting up secret courts were floated by the government for presentational reasons - to generate headlines suggesting a draconian crackdown after the London bombings. But many profound illiberal measures are likely to end up on the statute books this winter.
Without a written constitution, there is very little to restrain this elective dictatorship. The battle begins next week with the return of the political classes.
Instead we have a rag bag of precedents, statutes and bits of international treaties like the European Convention on Human Rights which have been incorporated into British law. But the whole thing is highly provisional and largely irrelevant when it comes to the power of the executive to do what it wants.
And I’m not talking here about the Scottish Executive, which does, actually, have a pretty firm constitutional foundation in the Scotland Act. The real executive branch - the Prime Minister effectively - has very few legal constrains because it exercises the powers, essentially, of a Monarch.
In the past, these absolutist powers have been formal only. Previous Prime Ministers, Margaret Thatcher included, have abided by long-established conventions of British governance that curb the conduct and powers of the Prime Minister. Such as the primacy of Parliament; the rights of ministers in cabinet; the independence of the judiciary. But there’s nothing written down. If a Prime Minister decides to ignore them all, to rule from his sofa without regard to legislature, cabinet or judges, there is nothing whatever to stop him.
Many people - not least the much maligned Law Lords - are worried that our lack of any formal constitution has become a license for the Prime Minister to do what he wants. To run roughshod over human rights; to abandon conventions of cabinet government; to denounce those who defend long-cherished freedoms like habeas corpus; to declare war without proper consultation or proper authority under international law; to depart from inconvenient international treaties like the Geneva Convention; to reinterpret laws based on them, like the Human Rights Act; to invent new constitutional principles, such as the “war on terrorism” being more important than civil liberties.
Constitutions are supposed to set out the principles of government, the distribution of power among the various arms of the state - legislature, executive, administration - and to establish the rules by which a democratic system functions. Most democratic countries have them. Drafting proper constitutions is usually the first act of democratic societies when they emerge from tyranny. Like Germany after the War, Russia after Communism, South Africa after Apartheid. Indeed, many people argue democracy is impossible without strict controls on the powers of governments
But British constitutionalists have long argued that our informal system of checks and balances works well. We are the oldest democracy, and we have constitutional principles. as it were, in our blood. Many have argued that relying on these conventions about ‘how things are done” is preferable to formal written constitutions, which become a charter for lawyers.
In America, for example, there is a written constitution overseen by a Supreme Court which some say puts too much power in the hands of judges. That the elected House of Commons, expressing the will of he people, is a far better instrument for holding government to account. However, in Britain neither legislature nor judiciary seems to have any effective constitutional power over the executive.
Tony Blair rarely appears in Parliament, doesn’t consult his cabinet, and treats Law Lords with undisguised contempt. He governs through a court of close confidants and admirers in Downing St.. He picks and chooses from the advice he gets from law officers, like the Attorney General’s on the legality of the Iraq invasion.
Parliament isn’t working. Our unfair electoral system, in which a party with 35% of the popular vote can win an overall majority of 66 seats in the Commons, allows the PM largely to ignore parliament. MPs know that to get on in their careers, they have to vote the way the PM wants them to.
Tony Blair also controls his cabinet through patronage. Only those loyal to the Prime Minister are chosen, and they only remain in their ministerial posts so long as they keep their noses out of the business of running the country. Once in the Cabinet room, even independently-minded politicians, like Clare Short, lose their bottle.
Law Lords, like Lord Hoffman who incurred the wrath of Number Ten last year, may fulminate against the PM’s powers of detention without trial, but ultimately the judges can be ignored. A malleable press and media can be deployed to drown out the caveats and qualifications of the bench. I’m told that there is something like revolt among the senior justiciary at the PM’s recent attempt to tread on their turf. But on things like control orders, detention without trial, deportation to countries with poor human rights and the use of evidence derived from torture, Blair gets his way.
We like to think we have a free press in this country, and formally we do. But it is essentially the freedom of a few wealthy and often non-British proprietors to promote their own views and private interests. People like Rupert Murdoch, an Australian with American citizenship, own large chunks of the British press, in his case including the Sun, Times, Sunday Times. By carefully cultivating such press magnates, and discretely promoting their business interests, Prime Ministers can rely on support when times get tough. A centralised, near monopoly press is a powerful instrument of executive dictatorship.
The BBC has formal independence from government enshrined in its Royal Charter and its Board of Governors. But the PM chooses who sits on the Board, and if the Corporation gets out of hand, it can be brought to heel, as it was after the Hutton Report. The effective sacking of the Director General, Greg Dyke, and the Chairman of the Board of Governors, Gavyn Davies - because one of their journalists made a couple of minor mistakes while exposing how Number Ten manipulated the evidence for WMD in Iraq - has shattered the confidence of the BBC in holding government to account.
In the past, civil society also exerted a check on power. Poltical parties, churches, mass movements like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Greenpeace, etc.. mobilised hundreds of thousands of people. These intermediate bodies still exist, and there is a plethora of think tanks and special interest groups. But throughout society, ordinary people have stopped joining organisations and mass movements.
Occasionally the Stop The War movement or Make Poverty History can get hundreds of thousands onto the streets. But they are one off demonstrations - emotional spasms - rather than organisations which can keep sustained pressure on government. It is the legion of private PR men, commercial lobbyists, corporate affairs executives from big corporations who exercise influence.
Yet, we need civil society today more than ever. We have been taken into a disastrous war in Iraq on a false pretext and on an agenda driven by Republican ideologues. Yet no one can bring the PM to account. There are unprecedented moves to reduce historic freedoms and curb the rights of the citizen. Compulsory identity cards will track our movements; laws on detention without trial are to be extended; there is to be an offence of “justifying or glorifying terrorism”, which could have put Nelson Mandela in jail or the deportation lounge, police powers to hold terrorist suspects could be extended to three months.
Some of the more extreme measures like resorting to Treason laws or setting up secret courts were floated by the government for presentational reasons - to generate headlines suggesting a draconian crackdown after the London bombings. But many profound illiberal measures are likely to end up on the statute books this winter.
Without a written constitution, there is very little to restrain this elective dictatorship. The battle begins next week with the return of the political classes.
Restricted View: Glorifying Terror on the Fringe
Ever since “Jerry Springer the Opera” breathed life into that much-derided art form, the musical, producers have been eager to cash in on the fashion for social commentary with songs.
At this Festival we’ve had “Lee Harvey Oswald, the Musical”. “Apocalypse, the Musical”, “Terrorist the Musical”, “Yeehad, the Musical” as well as more serious operatic works like Keith Burstein’s “Manifest Destiny”, an elegy for a suicide bomber, and of course the controversial John Adams opera, “Death of Klinghoffer”, which has been attacked for being anti-semitic.
The one show we haven’t been able to see, however, is “Jerry Springer” itself. This is because the show is, to use the current euphemism, “no longer commercially viable”. Theatres across the country are refusing to stage it fearful that cast and producers could become targets of a kind of Christian fatwa. BBC executives had death threats after it was shown on TV.
The Evangelical Alliance tried to prosecute “Springer” for blasphemy because of its depiction of Christ as gay. The law suit was thrown out by the courts on the grounds that this isn’t 1508. But the God squad won in the end. “Springer” is no more.
But the resourceful director, Richard Thomas and his co-writer, the comedian Stewart Lee, have turned the tale into a show about a show. “How to write an opera” (Assembly) is more a tongue-in-cheek seminar with piano and songs, taking us from the shows impro origins in the Battersea Arts Centre, through the Fringe, National Theatre in London and finally the BBC. It was rags to riches. They thought they had it made. But then it all went wrong..
The director, Richard Thomas, told me ruefully that the collapse of the show has lost him well over a million pounds. However, he and Lee have steadfastly rejected potentially lucrative invitations to bowdlerise “Springer” by cutting the swear words and deodorising the religious content. Fortunately, their integrity has been financially viable even if the show isn’t. The controversy has made their names and they’ve been commissioned for six half hour operas for the BBC.
However, the episode carries a start warning about the state of artistic freedom in Britain. “Springer” was, after all, a morality tale; a condemnation of the commercialisation of human grief and a critique of the medium which preys on it. Yet religious zealots, most of whom never saw the opera, have been allowed effectively to censor an important work.
It’s not the first time. Last year, Sikh protesters forced Birmingham Repertory to close the play “Bezhti” and of course Muslim groups issued a fatwa against the novelist, Salman Rushdie for his “Satanic Verses”. And as if that wasn’t enough, the Blair government is getting in on the censorship act, with its proposed laws on incitement to religious hatred, which could gag works critical of Islam.
The government has also promised laws against “justifying or glorifying terrorism here or abroad”, which could land the producers of “Manifest Destiny” (Assembly St George’s West) in trouble. In this scintillating if flawed opera - with a witty and surprisingly melodic neo-classical score by Keith Burstein - a young Palestinian, Leila, living in “leafy Balham”, decide to avenge her dead father by joining the suicide campaign against the hated Israelis.
Leila (played with mesmeric intensity by Bernadette Lord) is presented as a highly moral and dignified soldier “giving her life for truth”. She regards her own death as a kind of poem. We see her donning her explosive waistcoat almost as an act of religious sacrament. Betrayed by a fellow suicide bomber, Mohammed, who falls in love with her, Leila is tortured by the Americans in Guantanamo Bay and meets her own private calvary.
The politics are sometimes risible, as in the scene where the future President of the USA (Hillary Clinton) is forced by the director of the CIA to order the death of all Arabs “so that we can fill the Middle East with our friends the Israelis”. This is a kind of Wahhabinist view of the politics. The ultimate message, that love can triumph over religion and bring Jew and Muslim together, is trite and unconvincing.
Nevertheless, Manifest Destiny is a considerable piece of work, dealing with important contemporary themes, which demands to be heard. But it won’t be if the thought police get hold of it. For this opera undoubtedly justifies and arguably glorifies terrorism. Nor will the Evangelical Alliance appreciate Christ being equated with a female terrorist (complete with feet-washing).
At the very least, it will incur the wrath of Jewish lobbyists, as did John Adams “The Death of Klinghoffer” (EIF Festival Theatre). This post-minimalist opera about the hijacking of the Achille Lauro in 1985 by the Palestine Liberation Front and the murder of the eponymous Jewish passenger, was premiered to great controversy in Brussels in 1991. It was condemned by a prominent American musicologist for “romanticising terrorism” and labelled “anti-semitic” because it portrayed terrorists as human beings. Its inaugural performance in Los Angeles in 1992 was picketed by Jewish groups and, like “Jerry Springer” the full opera has never been shown in America since.
Scottish Opera’s inventive production is highly-charged, complete with audience participation and startling effects. The performances, on the whole, do justice to a work which has been compared to one of Johan Sebastian Bach’s sacred oratorios. And it doesn’t flinch from the politics either, back-projecting the words of the Palestinian chorus lamenting their expulsion from their homeland by the Israelis in 1948.
However, by no means could this reasonably be called anti-semitic - the dispossessed Jews get their own choral lamentations in too. Nor is it an apology for terrorism. There is no attempt to sanitise the brutal, senseless murder of the wheelchair bound Klinghoffer, the only passenger brave enough (ironically) to take a stand against fanaticism. Klinghoffer’s fate is rather a metaphor for the ultimate futility of the Arab-Israeli conflict and all attempts to resolve political disputes by violence.
The message is even more potent now that terrorism has reached the streets of London. Brian McMaster’s decision to revive Klinghoffer at this Festival was inspired, if only for its timing. This is what art, and Festivals, should be about. However, the way things are going, we may be seeing a lot less of it in future.
At this Festival we’ve had “Lee Harvey Oswald, the Musical”. “Apocalypse, the Musical”, “Terrorist the Musical”, “Yeehad, the Musical” as well as more serious operatic works like Keith Burstein’s “Manifest Destiny”, an elegy for a suicide bomber, and of course the controversial John Adams opera, “Death of Klinghoffer”, which has been attacked for being anti-semitic.
The one show we haven’t been able to see, however, is “Jerry Springer” itself. This is because the show is, to use the current euphemism, “no longer commercially viable”. Theatres across the country are refusing to stage it fearful that cast and producers could become targets of a kind of Christian fatwa. BBC executives had death threats after it was shown on TV.
The Evangelical Alliance tried to prosecute “Springer” for blasphemy because of its depiction of Christ as gay. The law suit was thrown out by the courts on the grounds that this isn’t 1508. But the God squad won in the end. “Springer” is no more.
But the resourceful director, Richard Thomas and his co-writer, the comedian Stewart Lee, have turned the tale into a show about a show. “How to write an opera” (Assembly) is more a tongue-in-cheek seminar with piano and songs, taking us from the shows impro origins in the Battersea Arts Centre, through the Fringe, National Theatre in London and finally the BBC. It was rags to riches. They thought they had it made. But then it all went wrong..
The director, Richard Thomas, told me ruefully that the collapse of the show has lost him well over a million pounds. However, he and Lee have steadfastly rejected potentially lucrative invitations to bowdlerise “Springer” by cutting the swear words and deodorising the religious content. Fortunately, their integrity has been financially viable even if the show isn’t. The controversy has made their names and they’ve been commissioned for six half hour operas for the BBC.
However, the episode carries a start warning about the state of artistic freedom in Britain. “Springer” was, after all, a morality tale; a condemnation of the commercialisation of human grief and a critique of the medium which preys on it. Yet religious zealots, most of whom never saw the opera, have been allowed effectively to censor an important work.
It’s not the first time. Last year, Sikh protesters forced Birmingham Repertory to close the play “Bezhti” and of course Muslim groups issued a fatwa against the novelist, Salman Rushdie for his “Satanic Verses”. And as if that wasn’t enough, the Blair government is getting in on the censorship act, with its proposed laws on incitement to religious hatred, which could gag works critical of Islam.
The government has also promised laws against “justifying or glorifying terrorism here or abroad”, which could land the producers of “Manifest Destiny” (Assembly St George’s West) in trouble. In this scintillating if flawed opera - with a witty and surprisingly melodic neo-classical score by Keith Burstein - a young Palestinian, Leila, living in “leafy Balham”, decide to avenge her dead father by joining the suicide campaign against the hated Israelis.
Leila (played with mesmeric intensity by Bernadette Lord) is presented as a highly moral and dignified soldier “giving her life for truth”. She regards her own death as a kind of poem. We see her donning her explosive waistcoat almost as an act of religious sacrament. Betrayed by a fellow suicide bomber, Mohammed, who falls in love with her, Leila is tortured by the Americans in Guantanamo Bay and meets her own private calvary.
The politics are sometimes risible, as in the scene where the future President of the USA (Hillary Clinton) is forced by the director of the CIA to order the death of all Arabs “so that we can fill the Middle East with our friends the Israelis”. This is a kind of Wahhabinist view of the politics. The ultimate message, that love can triumph over religion and bring Jew and Muslim together, is trite and unconvincing.
Nevertheless, Manifest Destiny is a considerable piece of work, dealing with important contemporary themes, which demands to be heard. But it won’t be if the thought police get hold of it. For this opera undoubtedly justifies and arguably glorifies terrorism. Nor will the Evangelical Alliance appreciate Christ being equated with a female terrorist (complete with feet-washing).
At the very least, it will incur the wrath of Jewish lobbyists, as did John Adams “The Death of Klinghoffer” (EIF Festival Theatre). This post-minimalist opera about the hijacking of the Achille Lauro in 1985 by the Palestine Liberation Front and the murder of the eponymous Jewish passenger, was premiered to great controversy in Brussels in 1991. It was condemned by a prominent American musicologist for “romanticising terrorism” and labelled “anti-semitic” because it portrayed terrorists as human beings. Its inaugural performance in Los Angeles in 1992 was picketed by Jewish groups and, like “Jerry Springer” the full opera has never been shown in America since.
Scottish Opera’s inventive production is highly-charged, complete with audience participation and startling effects. The performances, on the whole, do justice to a work which has been compared to one of Johan Sebastian Bach’s sacred oratorios. And it doesn’t flinch from the politics either, back-projecting the words of the Palestinian chorus lamenting their expulsion from their homeland by the Israelis in 1948.
However, by no means could this reasonably be called anti-semitic - the dispossessed Jews get their own choral lamentations in too. Nor is it an apology for terrorism. There is no attempt to sanitise the brutal, senseless murder of the wheelchair bound Klinghoffer, the only passenger brave enough (ironically) to take a stand against fanaticism. Klinghoffer’s fate is rather a metaphor for the ultimate futility of the Arab-Israeli conflict and all attempts to resolve political disputes by violence.
The message is even more potent now that terrorism has reached the streets of London. Brian McMaster’s decision to revive Klinghoffer at this Festival was inspired, if only for its timing. This is what art, and Festivals, should be about. However, the way things are going, we may be seeing a lot less of it in future.
Beacon of Democracy
“Mr President, what did my son die for?” That was the question put by bereaved mother Cindy Sheehan, during her vigil outside George W. Bush’s ranch. Well, now we know.
Casey Sheehan, and 1,850 American soldiers died so that Islamic fundamentalists, who loathe the West and all it stands for, could turn Iraq (or most of it) into a theocratic state based on an almost Medieval reading of the Qu’ran.
Leaked extracts from the draft constitution say that “it is not permitted to legislate anything which conflicts with the principles and rules of Islam”. In other words, women will not be allowed to divorce, give evidence in court, hold investments or expose their heads in public. Homosexuality can be punished by death. Thieves can have their hands removed. That’s Sharia law.
Well, I suppose that’s their choice. It’s not for us to dictate how other peoples lead their lives or run their legal systems. However, I suspect the folks back home thought they were in the business of creating something a little more noble, more in tune with the values of what we used to call the West. A “beacon of democracy” was what the President promised. The draft constitution does refer to “democracy and human rights”, but it will be the human rights of Iran or Saudi Arabia rather than Britain or the USA.
And even if this constitution is finally ratified in time for tomorrow’s third deadline, it will resolve nothing. Iraq’s three ethnic groups - Kurd, Shia, Sunni - have agreed to disagree on all the key areas: the role of Islam, the share of oil, provincial boundaries and the possession of armed forces. Iraq will be left with a highly unstable asymmetrical federation, destined for disintegration.
Meanwhile killing American soldiers has become a mass spectator sport in Iraq. Instant replays of attacks are available on extremist web sites within hours as. America’s humiliation has become an international media event. Vietnam was never like this. American parents have every right to be very,very angry.
And what of Rose Gentle, Scotland’s Cindy Sheehan, who has been attempting to take the UK government to court for mounting an illegal war in Iraq which killed some 89 British soldiers? What would Tony Blair say to her, and indeed to the relatives of the fifty seven people killed in the London bombings? Was Britain was made a prime target for Islamic terrorism in order to create a republic of fear? Is that what we paid the “blood price” for?
The international terrorist cadres should be immensely grateful to Britain. We’ve done their job for them. By destroying Saddam’s secular dictatorship and then handing power over to the Mullahs we have aided the creation of the second Islamic state in the Middle East. A beacon of hate for terrorists throughout the Islamic world. Job well done!
British casualties have largely ceased in our area of operations around Basra. But this is not because we have won the hearts and minds of the people. As the New York Times journalist Steven Vincent revealed before he was murdered last month, British troops in Basra have been handing over power to Shia religious groups, including followers of Moqtada al Sadr, the militant cleric. It’s a kind of multiculturalism in reverse. We respect their ethnic and religious extremists, and they tell us to get out. Understandable really, since we should never have been there in the first place.
But our departure won’t mean an end to bloodshed. Indeed, the constitution looks more like a recipe for civil war than the foundation of a stable democratic state. The Kurds in the north want nothing of the Shias in the south, and are demanding the return of the oil rich region of Kirkuk. They are prepared to sign a compromise document, but only if they can keep their own army, autonomy and freedom from religious tyranny.
One of the Sunni leaders actually managed to crack a joke about the constitution, which he said had been the work of the “foundering fathers”. Not bad from religious hard liners not renowned for their stand up skills. But what they are threatening isn’t so funny. The Sunni areas in the heart of Iraq have been the epicentre of the insurgency and large areas are already under the control of Abu Musa bal Zarqawi’s mujahideen. The Sunni Muslims hate the Shia Muslims almost as much as they loathe Christians, and are promising civil war.
Perhaps this was inevitable. Perhaps Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship was all that was holding Iraq together. But it makes a mockery of the coalition war aims. Why did we blunder our way into this country, killing at least 25,000 civilians and destroying most of the economy, only to end up with a Frankenstein stitched together out of ethnic body parts which cannot and will not cohere?
This is not just another Suez. That inglorious episode was a short-term humiliation for a post-colonial power. The invasion of Iraq has inflamed the entire Islam world, from Leeds to Kabul. America has lost the support and respect of the world, Islamic and non-Islamic, and is desperately looking for a way out. The Middle East has been destabilised, and thousands of suicide bombers recruited to the cause of jihad.
We know who is responsible for this. Yet there seems nothing that can be done to hold our leaders to account. The sense of rage among the British voters is almost palpable. At this week’s Edinburgh Book Festival session with Clare Short, the audience were queuing up to condemn Tony Blair and express their rage about Iraq. These are middle-aged, middle-class book-loving Scots, not young Muslims. Yet they were literally fighting over the microphone.
Later, a former member of British intelligence, who had taken part in a debate I chaired on Iraq in 2003, took me aside in a corner of Charlotte Square. “I just wanted to tell you that I was wrong, wrong, wrong”, he said. “It was all lies. The war should never have happened. I am appalled at the way the intelligence was manipulated. It is a disgrace that John Scarlett (head of joint intelligence committee) should have been rewarded by becoming head of Mi6”.
Clare Short, who resigned over Iraq, argued that we need to remove the Prime Minister’s power to wage war, derived from Royal Prerogative. That is long overdue. However, it was parliament which endorsed the action, in two Commons votes - in one of which, Ms Short voted with the government, even as Robin Cook resigned on principle.
My question is this. Why did the rest of the cabinet not do something? Where were Brown, Clarke, Hewitt, Prescott, all those left wingers who campaigned against Vietnam in the 60s and criticised British conduct in Northern Ireland. why have they not done something about this disaster in Iraq? Why, even after a general election in which Blair was so unpopular he had to be joined at the hip with Gordon Brown, are they meekly settling down to another four years under this leader?
Iraq has been an affront to democracy. Too many people have died. This must not stand.
Casey Sheehan, and 1,850 American soldiers died so that Islamic fundamentalists, who loathe the West and all it stands for, could turn Iraq (or most of it) into a theocratic state based on an almost Medieval reading of the Qu’ran.
Leaked extracts from the draft constitution say that “it is not permitted to legislate anything which conflicts with the principles and rules of Islam”. In other words, women will not be allowed to divorce, give evidence in court, hold investments or expose their heads in public. Homosexuality can be punished by death. Thieves can have their hands removed. That’s Sharia law.
Well, I suppose that’s their choice. It’s not for us to dictate how other peoples lead their lives or run their legal systems. However, I suspect the folks back home thought they were in the business of creating something a little more noble, more in tune with the values of what we used to call the West. A “beacon of democracy” was what the President promised. The draft constitution does refer to “democracy and human rights”, but it will be the human rights of Iran or Saudi Arabia rather than Britain or the USA.
And even if this constitution is finally ratified in time for tomorrow’s third deadline, it will resolve nothing. Iraq’s three ethnic groups - Kurd, Shia, Sunni - have agreed to disagree on all the key areas: the role of Islam, the share of oil, provincial boundaries and the possession of armed forces. Iraq will be left with a highly unstable asymmetrical federation, destined for disintegration.
Meanwhile killing American soldiers has become a mass spectator sport in Iraq. Instant replays of attacks are available on extremist web sites within hours as. America’s humiliation has become an international media event. Vietnam was never like this. American parents have every right to be very,very angry.
And what of Rose Gentle, Scotland’s Cindy Sheehan, who has been attempting to take the UK government to court for mounting an illegal war in Iraq which killed some 89 British soldiers? What would Tony Blair say to her, and indeed to the relatives of the fifty seven people killed in the London bombings? Was Britain was made a prime target for Islamic terrorism in order to create a republic of fear? Is that what we paid the “blood price” for?
The international terrorist cadres should be immensely grateful to Britain. We’ve done their job for them. By destroying Saddam’s secular dictatorship and then handing power over to the Mullahs we have aided the creation of the second Islamic state in the Middle East. A beacon of hate for terrorists throughout the Islamic world. Job well done!
British casualties have largely ceased in our area of operations around Basra. But this is not because we have won the hearts and minds of the people. As the New York Times journalist Steven Vincent revealed before he was murdered last month, British troops in Basra have been handing over power to Shia religious groups, including followers of Moqtada al Sadr, the militant cleric. It’s a kind of multiculturalism in reverse. We respect their ethnic and religious extremists, and they tell us to get out. Understandable really, since we should never have been there in the first place.
But our departure won’t mean an end to bloodshed. Indeed, the constitution looks more like a recipe for civil war than the foundation of a stable democratic state. The Kurds in the north want nothing of the Shias in the south, and are demanding the return of the oil rich region of Kirkuk. They are prepared to sign a compromise document, but only if they can keep their own army, autonomy and freedom from religious tyranny.
One of the Sunni leaders actually managed to crack a joke about the constitution, which he said had been the work of the “foundering fathers”. Not bad from religious hard liners not renowned for their stand up skills. But what they are threatening isn’t so funny. The Sunni areas in the heart of Iraq have been the epicentre of the insurgency and large areas are already under the control of Abu Musa bal Zarqawi’s mujahideen. The Sunni Muslims hate the Shia Muslims almost as much as they loathe Christians, and are promising civil war.
Perhaps this was inevitable. Perhaps Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship was all that was holding Iraq together. But it makes a mockery of the coalition war aims. Why did we blunder our way into this country, killing at least 25,000 civilians and destroying most of the economy, only to end up with a Frankenstein stitched together out of ethnic body parts which cannot and will not cohere?
This is not just another Suez. That inglorious episode was a short-term humiliation for a post-colonial power. The invasion of Iraq has inflamed the entire Islam world, from Leeds to Kabul. America has lost the support and respect of the world, Islamic and non-Islamic, and is desperately looking for a way out. The Middle East has been destabilised, and thousands of suicide bombers recruited to the cause of jihad.
We know who is responsible for this. Yet there seems nothing that can be done to hold our leaders to account. The sense of rage among the British voters is almost palpable. At this week’s Edinburgh Book Festival session with Clare Short, the audience were queuing up to condemn Tony Blair and express their rage about Iraq. These are middle-aged, middle-class book-loving Scots, not young Muslims. Yet they were literally fighting over the microphone.
Later, a former member of British intelligence, who had taken part in a debate I chaired on Iraq in 2003, took me aside in a corner of Charlotte Square. “I just wanted to tell you that I was wrong, wrong, wrong”, he said. “It was all lies. The war should never have happened. I am appalled at the way the intelligence was manipulated. It is a disgrace that John Scarlett (head of joint intelligence committee) should have been rewarded by becoming head of Mi6”.
Clare Short, who resigned over Iraq, argued that we need to remove the Prime Minister’s power to wage war, derived from Royal Prerogative. That is long overdue. However, it was parliament which endorsed the action, in two Commons votes - in one of which, Ms Short voted with the government, even as Robin Cook resigned on principle.
My question is this. Why did the rest of the cabinet not do something? Where were Brown, Clarke, Hewitt, Prescott, all those left wingers who campaigned against Vietnam in the 60s and criticised British conduct in Northern Ireland. why have they not done something about this disaster in Iraq? Why, even after a general election in which Blair was so unpopular he had to be joined at the hip with Gordon Brown, are they meekly settling down to another four years under this leader?
Iraq has been an affront to democracy. Too many people have died. This must not stand.
Cindy's War
20/8/05
The amazing thing is that it has taken this long. More than 1,800 American soldiers have died since the Iraq war began and ten thousand have been left with terrible wounds. Yet only now is a significant anti-war movement getting off the ground in the US, with Cindy Sheehan’s highly publicised vigil outside President Bush’s Texas ranch on behalf of her dead soldier son, Casey.
Some sixty thousand anti-war activists have registered support for Ms Sheehan. That may not seem a lot - after all, hundreds of thousands of Americans marched against the war before the invasion of Baghdad. But in USA it is seen as deeply unpatriotic to question a war while American soldiers are still fighting it. However, Sheehan's heartfelt call for Bush to explain what her son died for has captured the imagination of the nation's media.
Comparisons are inevitably being drawn with Vietnam., not least because President Bush’s popularity ratings have sunk to levels unseen since the days of Lyndon Johnson. One difference is that the anti war movement in the sixties was driven, not by service moms, but by young men who didn’t want to be drafted. There is no prospect of a return to the draft in Iraq, even though the military is finding it extremely hard to recruit soldiers. It is unprecedented for a war fought by professional soldiers to arouse such vocal public opposition.
As the death toll climbs inexorably toward 2,000 there are now serious doubts about whether America has the stomach for a protracted occupation lasting six to ten years, which is what military planners have been talking about. That could mean another 6,000 bereaved mothers taking their grief to the President’s doorstep.
It seems incredible now, but Americans were told that there would be no casualties at all in Iraq. This was to be a new kind of war, where smart weapons and overwhelming military strength would make resistance futile. This was why America deployed so few troops and gave little thought to how the run Iraq after it was ‘liberated’. On May 1st 2003, George W Bush declared that all major combat operations had ceased, in what must rank as the most premature declaration of victory in the history of human conflict.
But this is a war no one wants to fight any more, not even the military. Pentagon chiefs have already said that they hope to bring 30,000 home next spring. Britain is planning to cut troop strength in Iraq from 9,000 to 3,500 in the next year. It looks like a withdrawal and has led some to speculate that the coalition intends to ‘cut and run’.
Chance would be a fine thing. There seems little prospect of any early disengagement, even if the Iraqi ethnic groups agree a new constitution tomorrow when the second deadline expires. America was clearly hoping that the Middle East would turn the corner this summer. The withdrawal of Israeli troops from occupied Gaza was carefully choreographed to coincide with the new constitution in Iraq.
With progress over Palestine (not that the Palestinians in the still Israeli-occupied West Bank would recognise it as such) and a democratic constitution in place for Iraq, the Americans could have returned claiming some sort of victory and announced the job done.
However, right now, a withdrawal from Iraq would look like a victory for the insurgents. The lightly-armed militias have proved terrifyingly effective in keeping up the pressure with suicide bombs and, increasingly, with more sophisticated remotely-controlled detonations. The mujahideen are better organised and trained than they were last year, and unlike America, there seems no shortage of recruits to the cause of Jihad.
But it isn’t just the insurgency that could keep America in this quagmire for years. If America pulled out tomorrow, there would very likely be civil war. The Kurds in the North are determined to have an autonomous Kurdistan, and have demanded that the oil-rich region of Kirkuk should be part of it.
Unlike the Sunni Muslims in the centre of Iraq and the Shia in the south, the Kurds are intensely pro-American and want nothing of the Islamic theocracy that is likely to emerge in most of the country. It’s a little like Ulster in the 1920s after the creation of the Irish Free State. Like the Ulstermen, the Kurds are also determined to keep their Peshmerga armed forces.
If American troops withdrew tomorrow, the insecurity on both sides would be difficult to contain, especially since most of the country remains shattered and filled with armed Islamic fundamentalists. The suicide bombers who have been targeting the Americans would likely turn to the secular Kurds. The Sunnis and the Shia, meanwhile, would no doubt pursue their own theological dispute on the streets in the traditional bloody manner.
There is no escaping the obvious. The invasion of Iraq was a massive miscalculation by right wing ideologues in the Republican Party who believed that America had to assert its military hegemony. They were intoxicated by the sales talk of the arms industry which told them that it was possible now to win wars without casualties and that Iraq would instantly become a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Wrong on both counts.
Whatever government finally emerges, it’s clear that most of the country will become an introverted Islamic Republic, closer to Iran than America. In Basra, fundamentalism already has a power base. What will the service moms say when they discover their boys sacrificed their lives to create another Islamic dictatorship which loathes America and everything it stands for? Which treats women as second-class citizens and persecutes non believers? Which regards Christianity as evil?
The Project for a New American Century is in ruins. The neo-conservatives, who dreamed up the new American imperialism, and inspired Bush on his reckless military adventures, have achieve precisely the reverse of what they intended. Instead of America assuming the role of invincible world policeman, the greatest military power on the planet has been shown to be extremely vulnerable. A handful of mujahideen have been able to nail America down, just as they nailed down the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. America is looking isolated, unable to look to support from its traditional allies in Europe (Blair excepted), and now faced with defeatism at home.
Even those of us who opposed the war from the start cannot but feel worried about the consequences of America’s imminent humiliation. It could mean a return to US isolationism. Who in future is going to challenge Serbian Fascists, North Korean expansionists, African dictators? America’s stumble could make us all fall on our faces.
Which is why America needs to act now. It should go to the United Nations and invite the international community to organise a phased withdrawal from Iraq. Only the united forces of Europe, Asia and most importantly the Islamic world, can help America out of this mess now.
Unless an exit strategy is found, George W. Bush faces a rapid descent into chaos followed by a military rout and an epoch-making defeat of the Republican Party at the Presidential elections in 2008. Condoleezza Rice, who is emerging as the most likely to succeed Bush, has little chance of becoming the first black woman in the White House unless she finds a way to withdraw with dignity.
If Tony Blair wasn’t so deeply implicated in this fiasco, he might have been the one to help America out of the hole of its own making. The PM promised that, with America’s help, he could rid the world of tyrants, failed states, facist regimes. Instead, the world’s dictators are sleeping more easily in their beds. And angry mothers are shouting at Bush’s bedroom window.
The amazing thing is that it has taken this long. More than 1,800 American soldiers have died since the Iraq war began and ten thousand have been left with terrible wounds. Yet only now is a significant anti-war movement getting off the ground in the US, with Cindy Sheehan’s highly publicised vigil outside President Bush’s Texas ranch on behalf of her dead soldier son, Casey.
Some sixty thousand anti-war activists have registered support for Ms Sheehan. That may not seem a lot - after all, hundreds of thousands of Americans marched against the war before the invasion of Baghdad. But in USA it is seen as deeply unpatriotic to question a war while American soldiers are still fighting it. However, Sheehan's heartfelt call for Bush to explain what her son died for has captured the imagination of the nation's media.
Comparisons are inevitably being drawn with Vietnam., not least because President Bush’s popularity ratings have sunk to levels unseen since the days of Lyndon Johnson. One difference is that the anti war movement in the sixties was driven, not by service moms, but by young men who didn’t want to be drafted. There is no prospect of a return to the draft in Iraq, even though the military is finding it extremely hard to recruit soldiers. It is unprecedented for a war fought by professional soldiers to arouse such vocal public opposition.
As the death toll climbs inexorably toward 2,000 there are now serious doubts about whether America has the stomach for a protracted occupation lasting six to ten years, which is what military planners have been talking about. That could mean another 6,000 bereaved mothers taking their grief to the President’s doorstep.
It seems incredible now, but Americans were told that there would be no casualties at all in Iraq. This was to be a new kind of war, where smart weapons and overwhelming military strength would make resistance futile. This was why America deployed so few troops and gave little thought to how the run Iraq after it was ‘liberated’. On May 1st 2003, George W Bush declared that all major combat operations had ceased, in what must rank as the most premature declaration of victory in the history of human conflict.
But this is a war no one wants to fight any more, not even the military. Pentagon chiefs have already said that they hope to bring 30,000 home next spring. Britain is planning to cut troop strength in Iraq from 9,000 to 3,500 in the next year. It looks like a withdrawal and has led some to speculate that the coalition intends to ‘cut and run’.
Chance would be a fine thing. There seems little prospect of any early disengagement, even if the Iraqi ethnic groups agree a new constitution tomorrow when the second deadline expires. America was clearly hoping that the Middle East would turn the corner this summer. The withdrawal of Israeli troops from occupied Gaza was carefully choreographed to coincide with the new constitution in Iraq.
With progress over Palestine (not that the Palestinians in the still Israeli-occupied West Bank would recognise it as such) and a democratic constitution in place for Iraq, the Americans could have returned claiming some sort of victory and announced the job done.
However, right now, a withdrawal from Iraq would look like a victory for the insurgents. The lightly-armed militias have proved terrifyingly effective in keeping up the pressure with suicide bombs and, increasingly, with more sophisticated remotely-controlled detonations. The mujahideen are better organised and trained than they were last year, and unlike America, there seems no shortage of recruits to the cause of Jihad.
But it isn’t just the insurgency that could keep America in this quagmire for years. If America pulled out tomorrow, there would very likely be civil war. The Kurds in the North are determined to have an autonomous Kurdistan, and have demanded that the oil-rich region of Kirkuk should be part of it.
Unlike the Sunni Muslims in the centre of Iraq and the Shia in the south, the Kurds are intensely pro-American and want nothing of the Islamic theocracy that is likely to emerge in most of the country. It’s a little like Ulster in the 1920s after the creation of the Irish Free State. Like the Ulstermen, the Kurds are also determined to keep their Peshmerga armed forces.
If American troops withdrew tomorrow, the insecurity on both sides would be difficult to contain, especially since most of the country remains shattered and filled with armed Islamic fundamentalists. The suicide bombers who have been targeting the Americans would likely turn to the secular Kurds. The Sunnis and the Shia, meanwhile, would no doubt pursue their own theological dispute on the streets in the traditional bloody manner.
There is no escaping the obvious. The invasion of Iraq was a massive miscalculation by right wing ideologues in the Republican Party who believed that America had to assert its military hegemony. They were intoxicated by the sales talk of the arms industry which told them that it was possible now to win wars without casualties and that Iraq would instantly become a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Wrong on both counts.
Whatever government finally emerges, it’s clear that most of the country will become an introverted Islamic Republic, closer to Iran than America. In Basra, fundamentalism already has a power base. What will the service moms say when they discover their boys sacrificed their lives to create another Islamic dictatorship which loathes America and everything it stands for? Which treats women as second-class citizens and persecutes non believers? Which regards Christianity as evil?
The Project for a New American Century is in ruins. The neo-conservatives, who dreamed up the new American imperialism, and inspired Bush on his reckless military adventures, have achieve precisely the reverse of what they intended. Instead of America assuming the role of invincible world policeman, the greatest military power on the planet has been shown to be extremely vulnerable. A handful of mujahideen have been able to nail America down, just as they nailed down the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. America is looking isolated, unable to look to support from its traditional allies in Europe (Blair excepted), and now faced with defeatism at home.
Even those of us who opposed the war from the start cannot but feel worried about the consequences of America’s imminent humiliation. It could mean a return to US isolationism. Who in future is going to challenge Serbian Fascists, North Korean expansionists, African dictators? America’s stumble could make us all fall on our faces.
Which is why America needs to act now. It should go to the United Nations and invite the international community to organise a phased withdrawal from Iraq. Only the united forces of Europe, Asia and most importantly the Islamic world, can help America out of this mess now.
Unless an exit strategy is found, George W. Bush faces a rapid descent into chaos followed by a military rout and an epoch-making defeat of the Republican Party at the Presidential elections in 2008. Condoleezza Rice, who is emerging as the most likely to succeed Bush, has little chance of becoming the first black woman in the White House unless she finds a way to withdraw with dignity.
If Tony Blair wasn’t so deeply implicated in this fiasco, he might have been the one to help America out of the hole of its own making. The PM promised that, with America’s help, he could rid the world of tyrants, failed states, facist regimes. Instead, the world’s dictators are sleeping more easily in their beds. And angry mothers are shouting at Bush’s bedroom window.
A Whif Of Weimar
I sometimes wonder if this is what the Weimar Republic felt like. In 1920s Germany, a weak democracy led by politicians who had lost public trust and respect was overwhelmed by extremism of left and right. The streets echoed to terrorist bombs and communal violence. The result was the strong state and a descent into madness.
Of course, things aren’t that bad in Britain. For a start, we don’t have the hyper-inflation and economic collapse that shattered post-Versailles Germany. Fascism and Communism are in the bin - at least in their 20th Century forms.
But while history doesn’t repeat itself, it does have a habit of rhyming with itself. There are disturbing echoes of the past in the political climate post the London bombings. There has been a lurch toward intolerance, mistrust, unreason and authoritarianism, which can and should be worrying to anyone with a sense of history.
Somewhere between the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the increasingly authoritarian instincts of New Labour - the modern war party - we are in danger of losing our capacity for civilised and tolerant debate. Suddenly, everyone is shouting at each other, and waiting for the next bombs to go off.
There is a climate of thinly-disguised racialism in the popular press. Every picture of a Muslim cleric or detainee depicts a sneering, leering bearded fanatic - a kind of comic book villain straight out of John Buchan. There is a striking resemblance between these contemporary depictions of Muslims and the images of Jews circulated by anti-semitic journals in Weimar Germany.
Consider the Iraq war, the misuse of intelligence, and how the Director General of the BBC and the Chairman of the Board of Governors were sacked for allowing journalists to expose the truth about the how Britain was bounced into this invasion. More than a whiff of Weimar there.
Democratic politics isn’t a given - it has to be remade by each generation. Right now it is under threat from new religious extremisms and from a political class which has lost its sense of history.
On the one hand there is an assault on essential democratic freedoms - the right to a fair trial, freedom of speech - from a government which seems unable to understand how important these ancient freedoms are and is contemptuous of Law Lords who try to defend them.
On the other, there is a the descent into anger and extremism among among young Muslims, seduced by an obscurantist and monolithic Islam which rejects science and democracy and seeks to establish a theocratic dictatorship.
These gloomy musings were prompted by chairing a debate last night at the Edinburgh Book Festival on multiculturalism. The panel was composed of leading black and Asian intellectuals who, in their different ways want nothing more of it, multiculturalism that is, and are full of apocalyptic warnings about the alienation of Britain's immigrant communities. .
Now, multiculturalism is a kind of barometer of how rapidly things have deteriorated, how quickly attitudes have hardened. It used to be seen as an enlightened and liberal measure; a celebration of diversity. It was a way of respecting peoples’ differences. We were letting people live their lives according to their own faiths. Or so we thought. No one though that it was the creation of a new form of apartheid. Yet that is increasingly how multiculturalism is being regarded on both sides of the ethnic divide.
The Right believes that immigrant communities are becoming racial beach-heads for an increasingly separatist Islamic ‘country within a country’. That may seem to be paranoid nonsense. But it is a delusion that finds a willing echo among a number of Muslims who seem willing to accept a form of defacto apartheid as a way of defending their religion and their communities from what they believe is an attack from Anglo Saxon Christians.
Multiculturalism, instead of bringing communities closer, is now being used as a lever to drive them apart. It is a measure of how far down the road to unreason we have travelled, that it is becoming almost impossible now to make the case for racial integration in Britain without being accused of being an Islamophobic or an Anglo Saxon racial supremacist.
Now, I’m heartily fed up with paranoid rantings from latter-day Powellites about how this was exactly what Enoch meant by the rivers of blood and how we have to impose the “British way of life” on immigrants. No one knows what the British way of life is anyway. But I’m also fed up with self-appointed guardians of Islam who accuse me of Paki-bashing because I don’t share their faith. In particular the attitudes to homosexuals, women and non-Islamic religious beliefs expressed by many Muslim clerics.
Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t want a politics which is defined by religion, race, ethnicity or inside leg measurement for that matter. I wish the religious zealots on both sides would disappear into a desert for forty years and sort themselves out in the traditional manner. Britain has been a secular state - give or take the Anglican Establishment - for three hundred years. Keep God out of politics.
But according to the Muslim writer, Ziaddin Sardar, there is “a rampant sense among British Muslims of injustice and anger, as well as shock revulsion and fear”. The proximate reason for this is British policy in the Middle East coupled with the banning of groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir and the deportation of radical clerics like Omar Bakri Mohammed.
Now, I agree that the government shares a lot of the blame for the rapidly deteriorating climate of race relations in Britain. Tony Blair’s “send them home” speech a fortnight ago, in which he promised to expel religious extremists and lashed out at civil libertarians and Law Lords for not supporting detention, deportation and limits to free speech, has been a political disaster. Not least because he did the extremists job for them. The war in Iraq - the most misguided military action in modern history - has contributed massively to the problem, not just of international terrorism, but of domestic racial alienation.
However, for all those errors, I do not believe that Tony Blair is racist. Or that his government is determined to stamp out Islam. It is pressing ahead with Muslim faith schools and outlawing incitement to racial hatred - much against the better judgement of many in the race relations sector, who fear that faith schools will institutionalise racial and religious divisions, and that it will become illegal for the BBC to make programmes about Islamic extremism.
We need to find a way or re-starting sensible discourse on race relations. Multiculturalism, for all its faults, is where we have to start. If only because, the alternative - mono-culturalism - is too awful to contemplate.
Of course, things aren’t that bad in Britain. For a start, we don’t have the hyper-inflation and economic collapse that shattered post-Versailles Germany. Fascism and Communism are in the bin - at least in their 20th Century forms.
But while history doesn’t repeat itself, it does have a habit of rhyming with itself. There are disturbing echoes of the past in the political climate post the London bombings. There has been a lurch toward intolerance, mistrust, unreason and authoritarianism, which can and should be worrying to anyone with a sense of history.
Somewhere between the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the increasingly authoritarian instincts of New Labour - the modern war party - we are in danger of losing our capacity for civilised and tolerant debate. Suddenly, everyone is shouting at each other, and waiting for the next bombs to go off.
There is a climate of thinly-disguised racialism in the popular press. Every picture of a Muslim cleric or detainee depicts a sneering, leering bearded fanatic - a kind of comic book villain straight out of John Buchan. There is a striking resemblance between these contemporary depictions of Muslims and the images of Jews circulated by anti-semitic journals in Weimar Germany.
Consider the Iraq war, the misuse of intelligence, and how the Director General of the BBC and the Chairman of the Board of Governors were sacked for allowing journalists to expose the truth about the how Britain was bounced into this invasion. More than a whiff of Weimar there.
Democratic politics isn’t a given - it has to be remade by each generation. Right now it is under threat from new religious extremisms and from a political class which has lost its sense of history.
On the one hand there is an assault on essential democratic freedoms - the right to a fair trial, freedom of speech - from a government which seems unable to understand how important these ancient freedoms are and is contemptuous of Law Lords who try to defend them.
On the other, there is a the descent into anger and extremism among among young Muslims, seduced by an obscurantist and monolithic Islam which rejects science and democracy and seeks to establish a theocratic dictatorship.
These gloomy musings were prompted by chairing a debate last night at the Edinburgh Book Festival on multiculturalism. The panel was composed of leading black and Asian intellectuals who, in their different ways want nothing more of it, multiculturalism that is, and are full of apocalyptic warnings about the alienation of Britain's immigrant communities. .
Now, multiculturalism is a kind of barometer of how rapidly things have deteriorated, how quickly attitudes have hardened. It used to be seen as an enlightened and liberal measure; a celebration of diversity. It was a way of respecting peoples’ differences. We were letting people live their lives according to their own faiths. Or so we thought. No one though that it was the creation of a new form of apartheid. Yet that is increasingly how multiculturalism is being regarded on both sides of the ethnic divide.
The Right believes that immigrant communities are becoming racial beach-heads for an increasingly separatist Islamic ‘country within a country’. That may seem to be paranoid nonsense. But it is a delusion that finds a willing echo among a number of Muslims who seem willing to accept a form of defacto apartheid as a way of defending their religion and their communities from what they believe is an attack from Anglo Saxon Christians.
Multiculturalism, instead of bringing communities closer, is now being used as a lever to drive them apart. It is a measure of how far down the road to unreason we have travelled, that it is becoming almost impossible now to make the case for racial integration in Britain without being accused of being an Islamophobic or an Anglo Saxon racial supremacist.
Now, I’m heartily fed up with paranoid rantings from latter-day Powellites about how this was exactly what Enoch meant by the rivers of blood and how we have to impose the “British way of life” on immigrants. No one knows what the British way of life is anyway. But I’m also fed up with self-appointed guardians of Islam who accuse me of Paki-bashing because I don’t share their faith. In particular the attitudes to homosexuals, women and non-Islamic religious beliefs expressed by many Muslim clerics.
Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t want a politics which is defined by religion, race, ethnicity or inside leg measurement for that matter. I wish the religious zealots on both sides would disappear into a desert for forty years and sort themselves out in the traditional manner. Britain has been a secular state - give or take the Anglican Establishment - for three hundred years. Keep God out of politics.
But according to the Muslim writer, Ziaddin Sardar, there is “a rampant sense among British Muslims of injustice and anger, as well as shock revulsion and fear”. The proximate reason for this is British policy in the Middle East coupled with the banning of groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir and the deportation of radical clerics like Omar Bakri Mohammed.
Now, I agree that the government shares a lot of the blame for the rapidly deteriorating climate of race relations in Britain. Tony Blair’s “send them home” speech a fortnight ago, in which he promised to expel religious extremists and lashed out at civil libertarians and Law Lords for not supporting detention, deportation and limits to free speech, has been a political disaster. Not least because he did the extremists job for them. The war in Iraq - the most misguided military action in modern history - has contributed massively to the problem, not just of international terrorism, but of domestic racial alienation.
However, for all those errors, I do not believe that Tony Blair is racist. Or that his government is determined to stamp out Islam. It is pressing ahead with Muslim faith schools and outlawing incitement to racial hatred - much against the better judgement of many in the race relations sector, who fear that faith schools will institutionalise racial and religious divisions, and that it will become illegal for the BBC to make programmes about Islamic extremism.
We need to find a way or re-starting sensible discourse on race relations. Multiculturalism, for all its faults, is where we have to start. If only because, the alternative - mono-culturalism - is too awful to contemplate.
Let's Bomb Iran!
Let’s just recap. We have condemned Iran’s decision to restart its civil nuclear power programme, which involves technology which could be used to make bombs. We abhor this attempt to get round the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, (NPT) even though Iran has not broken any of its terms.
But we have. Britain has already started preparatory work on a new generation of nuclear weapons, even though the Prime Minister has made no formal announcement about replacing Britain’s Trident missile system.
America has meanwhile launched a programme to develop a new generation of bunker-busting tactical nuclear weapons. These drive a coach and horses through the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. Yet we demand that Iran should halt a programme which doesn’t.
This is the kind of grand imperial hypocrisy which done so much to damage the West in the eyes of the Muslim world. It rests on an unspoken assumption of moral superiority. We can be trusted to use these nuclear arsenals purely for peaceful purposes, whereas the dodgy Arabs will only use them, well, to kill people.
But can we be trusted? Yesterday’s sabre-rattling at Iran took place on the anniversary of the Nagasaki bomb, dropped by us, which killed 70,000 civilians. No only are we hypocrites, we have no sense of irony.
Now, don’t misunderstand me. I find the thought of Iranian Ayatollahs spreading the word of the Prophet by thermonuclear fission as terrifying as anyone. People who believe passionately in an afterlife tend to be rather casual about prolonging life in the here and now. No doubt there are mad mullahs even now preaching nuclear jihad against Israel. A confrontation which would kill millions of Arabs, but would at least leave an irradiated Middle East safe for Islam, might seem a price worth paying to people who see suicide bombing as morally justified .
But to stop this nightmare we are going to have to do more than throw our weight around in the UN Security Council. Nuclear proliferation is arguably the most serious issue facing humanity after climate change. It’s not just Iran. Pakistan and India have come perilously close to nuclear war over Kashmir. China is a nuclear power with ambitions to retake Taiwan, which America has promised to protect with all necessary force.
Russia is clinging on to its Soviet-era nuclear weapons because it fears a Chinese invasion of its southern borders. North Korea holds a nuclear gun to the South. And of course, Israel has made clear that it reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in the Middle East - nuclear weapons which , as BBC’s Newsnight revealed last week, had been designed with British know-how.
No one wants Iran to join the nuclear club. But proliferation cannot be stopped by diktat from countries which themselves have launched a new and dangerous round of nuclear weapons. We need to set an example. If other countries are to give up nuclear ambitions - real or imagined - there must be something in it for them. We have to show that we are prepared to live up to our own moral pronouncements. Yet we are doing the reverse.
The White House claims that its new tactical weapons are not really weapons at all because they are designed to penetrate deep bunkers within which are stored weapons of mass destruction. This is sophistry of the highest order. A bomb is a bomb is a bomb. You can’t give it a moral makeover by promising that it will only be used to destroy other bombs. Anyway, we invaded Iraq in pursuit of WMD which were non-existent, so we are quite capable of blasting bunkers which don’t contain anything but people.
At Aldermaston Britain is refitting production lines for turning out nuclear warheads for a replacement of the ageing Trident missile system. Parliament hasn’t even had a chance to debate whether it is in our interest to replace a system which could kill half the planet and was originally designed to destroy Russian cities at a range of thousands of miles.
The Russians are supposed to be on our side now, so you’d think this might merit just a little more thought. It would be nice, for example, if Tony Blair could tell us exactly who these new weapons are to be aimed at. No doubt the Iranian Ayatollahs believe they are destined to be part of the Christian crusade against Islam. After all, who else could they be used against?
This is why the present round of arms proliferation is so dangerous. We live in a time when the political balance is shifting. There is a real risk of a clash of nuclear fundamentalisms, Christian bombs and Muslim bombs.
Iran clearly believes that it can gain prestige for its Islamic theocracy by thumbing its nose at the West. One suspects that the newly-elected fundamentalist President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad does not expect to get away with processing weapons-grade uranium at Isfahan. But merely to have incurred the wrath of the West, and threats of action from the Security Council of the UN, will confirm to the Islamic world that, as far as nuclear weapons are concerned, there is one law for the West, another for the Muslim world. It suits the propaganda of the Islamists for America to be threatening to take military action against Iran. How many more suicide bombers will be recruited to the cause by the thought of the West invading the first Islamic Republic?
I can’t believe that even George W. Bush would be stupid enough to invade Iran, but nothing can be ruled out. Britain is a key player here, not just as America's ally, but because we have historic ties to Iran. So here’s a radical thought. Why couldn’t Britain take the initiative and propose a new round of mutual and reciprocal disarmament with Trident on the negotiating table? That after the NPT was supposed to about eliminating nuclear weapons.
Of course, Labour politicians scoff at the idea of unilateral nuclear disarmament, a policy which they believe kept them out of office for 18 years. But far-sighted individuals, like the late Robin Cook, had been arguing cogently that the real value of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent could be to give it up. Not overnight, of course, but as part of a move to revitalise the disarmament process.
This is not idle fancy. Unilateralism has had some real success stories in recent years. South Africa gave up her nuclear weapons after the fall of apartheid, and Ukraine did the same after the fall of Communism. Argentina and Brazil dropped their nuclear programmes after negotiating a non-nuclear pact.
It’s not inconceivable that there could be a similar pact between Russia and China, and between India and Pakistan. But it take someone to get the ball rolling, to show the world that the west really is serious about eliminating nuclear weapons from the world. Even Iraq abandoned its nuclear programme in the early 1990’s - though we didn’t believe it.
In his last days Robin Cook made an appeal to his party to seize this window of opportunity: “Find the courage”, he said, “to let Trident be the end of Britain’s futile and costly obsession with nuclear-weapon status”. What better memorial to Cook than to listen to him now.
But we have. Britain has already started preparatory work on a new generation of nuclear weapons, even though the Prime Minister has made no formal announcement about replacing Britain’s Trident missile system.
America has meanwhile launched a programme to develop a new generation of bunker-busting tactical nuclear weapons. These drive a coach and horses through the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. Yet we demand that Iran should halt a programme which doesn’t.
This is the kind of grand imperial hypocrisy which done so much to damage the West in the eyes of the Muslim world. It rests on an unspoken assumption of moral superiority. We can be trusted to use these nuclear arsenals purely for peaceful purposes, whereas the dodgy Arabs will only use them, well, to kill people.
But can we be trusted? Yesterday’s sabre-rattling at Iran took place on the anniversary of the Nagasaki bomb, dropped by us, which killed 70,000 civilians. No only are we hypocrites, we have no sense of irony.
Now, don’t misunderstand me. I find the thought of Iranian Ayatollahs spreading the word of the Prophet by thermonuclear fission as terrifying as anyone. People who believe passionately in an afterlife tend to be rather casual about prolonging life in the here and now. No doubt there are mad mullahs even now preaching nuclear jihad against Israel. A confrontation which would kill millions of Arabs, but would at least leave an irradiated Middle East safe for Islam, might seem a price worth paying to people who see suicide bombing as morally justified .
But to stop this nightmare we are going to have to do more than throw our weight around in the UN Security Council. Nuclear proliferation is arguably the most serious issue facing humanity after climate change. It’s not just Iran. Pakistan and India have come perilously close to nuclear war over Kashmir. China is a nuclear power with ambitions to retake Taiwan, which America has promised to protect with all necessary force.
Russia is clinging on to its Soviet-era nuclear weapons because it fears a Chinese invasion of its southern borders. North Korea holds a nuclear gun to the South. And of course, Israel has made clear that it reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in the Middle East - nuclear weapons which , as BBC’s Newsnight revealed last week, had been designed with British know-how.
No one wants Iran to join the nuclear club. But proliferation cannot be stopped by diktat from countries which themselves have launched a new and dangerous round of nuclear weapons. We need to set an example. If other countries are to give up nuclear ambitions - real or imagined - there must be something in it for them. We have to show that we are prepared to live up to our own moral pronouncements. Yet we are doing the reverse.
The White House claims that its new tactical weapons are not really weapons at all because they are designed to penetrate deep bunkers within which are stored weapons of mass destruction. This is sophistry of the highest order. A bomb is a bomb is a bomb. You can’t give it a moral makeover by promising that it will only be used to destroy other bombs. Anyway, we invaded Iraq in pursuit of WMD which were non-existent, so we are quite capable of blasting bunkers which don’t contain anything but people.
At Aldermaston Britain is refitting production lines for turning out nuclear warheads for a replacement of the ageing Trident missile system. Parliament hasn’t even had a chance to debate whether it is in our interest to replace a system which could kill half the planet and was originally designed to destroy Russian cities at a range of thousands of miles.
The Russians are supposed to be on our side now, so you’d think this might merit just a little more thought. It would be nice, for example, if Tony Blair could tell us exactly who these new weapons are to be aimed at. No doubt the Iranian Ayatollahs believe they are destined to be part of the Christian crusade against Islam. After all, who else could they be used against?
This is why the present round of arms proliferation is so dangerous. We live in a time when the political balance is shifting. There is a real risk of a clash of nuclear fundamentalisms, Christian bombs and Muslim bombs.
Iran clearly believes that it can gain prestige for its Islamic theocracy by thumbing its nose at the West. One suspects that the newly-elected fundamentalist President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad does not expect to get away with processing weapons-grade uranium at Isfahan. But merely to have incurred the wrath of the West, and threats of action from the Security Council of the UN, will confirm to the Islamic world that, as far as nuclear weapons are concerned, there is one law for the West, another for the Muslim world. It suits the propaganda of the Islamists for America to be threatening to take military action against Iran. How many more suicide bombers will be recruited to the cause by the thought of the West invading the first Islamic Republic?
I can’t believe that even George W. Bush would be stupid enough to invade Iran, but nothing can be ruled out. Britain is a key player here, not just as America's ally, but because we have historic ties to Iran. So here’s a radical thought. Why couldn’t Britain take the initiative and propose a new round of mutual and reciprocal disarmament with Trident on the negotiating table? That after the NPT was supposed to about eliminating nuclear weapons.
Of course, Labour politicians scoff at the idea of unilateral nuclear disarmament, a policy which they believe kept them out of office for 18 years. But far-sighted individuals, like the late Robin Cook, had been arguing cogently that the real value of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent could be to give it up. Not overnight, of course, but as part of a move to revitalise the disarmament process.
This is not idle fancy. Unilateralism has had some real success stories in recent years. South Africa gave up her nuclear weapons after the fall of apartheid, and Ukraine did the same after the fall of Communism. Argentina and Brazil dropped their nuclear programmes after negotiating a non-nuclear pact.
It’s not inconceivable that there could be a similar pact between Russia and China, and between India and Pakistan. But it take someone to get the ball rolling, to show the world that the west really is serious about eliminating nuclear weapons from the world. Even Iraq abandoned its nuclear programme in the early 1990’s - though we didn’t believe it.
In his last days Robin Cook made an appeal to his party to seize this window of opportunity: “Find the courage”, he said, “to let Trident be the end of Britain’s futile and costly obsession with nuclear-weapon status”. What better memorial to Cook than to listen to him now.
Restricted View - Fringe Comedy Bombs
9/8/05
Come back Aaron Barshak, all is forgiven. You may recall the self-styled “comedy terrorist” who bombed (ho ho) at the fringe two years ago after a series of publicity stunts which would probably get him a five bullets in the head today, instead of a volley of bad reviews.
Those were altogether gentler times. We now have genuine terrorists blowing up innocent people in London. Real blood real intestines aren’t just the projectionist’s nightmare; they’re the comedian’s as well. Random slaughter is no laughing matter.
Except of course that it is - humour knows no bounds except the law and good taste, or so it is often said. The Fringe has spend the first week of the Festival trying to find out whether that’s really true.
Like the devices themselves, jokes about suide bombers have to be handled with care, else they blow up in your face. Omar Marzouk, (“War, Terror and Other Fun Stuff, Pleasance) one of several Muslim stand ups on the fringe, had planned to conclude his show by detonating a flour bomb after advising the audience: “Look on the bright side. You may be dead in twenty seconds but at least you’ll die laughing”. But anxious, perhaps, not to be shot by over-zealous police marksmen, he dropped the idea.
I’m afraid almost died anyway, on stage, as he picked his way nervously through this comedy minefield, second-guessing himself and minutely guaging audience reaction. He was particularly on the look out for Americans. At an earlier show, one had taken offence at his criticism of Bush’s Middle East Policy and walked out shouting: “Okay asshole , after Afghanistan and Iraq, you’re next ”. Which would be interesting since Mazrouk, while a Muslim, is actually a Danish citizen. Bush invades Copenhagen!
The brilliant John Oliver and Andy Saltzman (Pleasance) are quintessentially British in their pleasant distracted wit. But like Mazrouk, they weren’t quite sure where to begin. So they made an elaborate joke about not being able to joke about the bombing. This was very much work in progress when I saw it, and it showed.
For a different take on terror I took in Ines Wurth’s one woman show: “I Miss Communism” (Pleasance), which she almost does. Ines is a Croation who went to live for ten years in America and discovered that it isn’t quite the land of opportunity she imagined. (Under Communism, her mother had had to have three jobs to survive; to pay her way through college, Inez found she had to do exactly the same. There was little after it but a failed acting career and penury in Los Angeles). But when she returns to former Yugoslavia she falls into the hands of Serbian militias with unpleasant consequences. This may not sound very funny, and it isn’t really. It is terror, pure and simple. She tries to lighten up with cod Communism and quirky family observations, but this doesn’t prevent her show descending into emotional exhibitionism. You can’t help feeling her pain over her disillusion with the West and the loss of her homeland.
By far the best attempt to come to terms with the world after 7/7 is from the London comedian Rob Newman, (“Apocalypso Now”, Bongo) formerly half of Baddiel and Newman. I came with few expectations. I’d been told he was washed up; that this metropolitian leftist had disappeared up its own dialectic. What I discovered was a genuinely gifted showman, with great stage presence and an extraordinary ability to turn the most unlikely historical material into comedy.
Making jokes about the CIA involvement in the overthrow of the Mossadeq regime in Iran in 1953 is not easy. You have to give your audience a history lesson first. Nor do you do yourself any favours trying to gag up a radical reassessment of the causes of the First World War. (Apparently it was about Germany and Britain competing for Iraq’s oil)
Newman isn’t content just to poke fun at Tony Blair’s accent - though he does as vivid impersonation of the Prime Minister as I’ve heard. Nor is he content with gags about George Bush’s dyslexia. Newman really wants to try to explain what is going on and try to make people think about complex issues like energy depletion, globalisation and the fragility of the financial system. And in this he is largely successful. His warnings about the imminent demise of he petroleum economy, and the geo-political consequences of another energy race were bang up to the minute. And his Arabic version of rock around the clock wasn’t bad either.
But what of the original premise? Is it possible to make fun of suicide bombers. Well, yes, of course it is. Here’s one from the amazing female Muslim comedienne, Shazia Mirza (“Between You and Me” Pleasance). “When male suicide bombers go to paradise they get seventy two virgins; a woman suicide bomber gets a day off”. Boom, Boom.
Come back Aaron Barshak, all is forgiven. You may recall the self-styled “comedy terrorist” who bombed (ho ho) at the fringe two years ago after a series of publicity stunts which would probably get him a five bullets in the head today, instead of a volley of bad reviews.
Those were altogether gentler times. We now have genuine terrorists blowing up innocent people in London. Real blood real intestines aren’t just the projectionist’s nightmare; they’re the comedian’s as well. Random slaughter is no laughing matter.
Except of course that it is - humour knows no bounds except the law and good taste, or so it is often said. The Fringe has spend the first week of the Festival trying to find out whether that’s really true.
Like the devices themselves, jokes about suide bombers have to be handled with care, else they blow up in your face. Omar Marzouk, (“War, Terror and Other Fun Stuff, Pleasance) one of several Muslim stand ups on the fringe, had planned to conclude his show by detonating a flour bomb after advising the audience: “Look on the bright side. You may be dead in twenty seconds but at least you’ll die laughing”. But anxious, perhaps, not to be shot by over-zealous police marksmen, he dropped the idea.
I’m afraid almost died anyway, on stage, as he picked his way nervously through this comedy minefield, second-guessing himself and minutely guaging audience reaction. He was particularly on the look out for Americans. At an earlier show, one had taken offence at his criticism of Bush’s Middle East Policy and walked out shouting: “Okay asshole , after Afghanistan and Iraq, you’re next ”. Which would be interesting since Mazrouk, while a Muslim, is actually a Danish citizen. Bush invades Copenhagen!
The brilliant John Oliver and Andy Saltzman (Pleasance) are quintessentially British in their pleasant distracted wit. But like Mazrouk, they weren’t quite sure where to begin. So they made an elaborate joke about not being able to joke about the bombing. This was very much work in progress when I saw it, and it showed.
For a different take on terror I took in Ines Wurth’s one woman show: “I Miss Communism” (Pleasance), which she almost does. Ines is a Croation who went to live for ten years in America and discovered that it isn’t quite the land of opportunity she imagined. (Under Communism, her mother had had to have three jobs to survive; to pay her way through college, Inez found she had to do exactly the same. There was little after it but a failed acting career and penury in Los Angeles). But when she returns to former Yugoslavia she falls into the hands of Serbian militias with unpleasant consequences. This may not sound very funny, and it isn’t really. It is terror, pure and simple. She tries to lighten up with cod Communism and quirky family observations, but this doesn’t prevent her show descending into emotional exhibitionism. You can’t help feeling her pain over her disillusion with the West and the loss of her homeland.
By far the best attempt to come to terms with the world after 7/7 is from the London comedian Rob Newman, (“Apocalypso Now”, Bongo) formerly half of Baddiel and Newman. I came with few expectations. I’d been told he was washed up; that this metropolitian leftist had disappeared up its own dialectic. What I discovered was a genuinely gifted showman, with great stage presence and an extraordinary ability to turn the most unlikely historical material into comedy.
Making jokes about the CIA involvement in the overthrow of the Mossadeq regime in Iran in 1953 is not easy. You have to give your audience a history lesson first. Nor do you do yourself any favours trying to gag up a radical reassessment of the causes of the First World War. (Apparently it was about Germany and Britain competing for Iraq’s oil)
Newman isn’t content just to poke fun at Tony Blair’s accent - though he does as vivid impersonation of the Prime Minister as I’ve heard. Nor is he content with gags about George Bush’s dyslexia. Newman really wants to try to explain what is going on and try to make people think about complex issues like energy depletion, globalisation and the fragility of the financial system. And in this he is largely successful. His warnings about the imminent demise of he petroleum economy, and the geo-political consequences of another energy race were bang up to the minute. And his Arabic version of rock around the clock wasn’t bad either.
But what of the original premise? Is it possible to make fun of suicide bombers. Well, yes, of course it is. Here’s one from the amazing female Muslim comedienne, Shazia Mirza (“Between You and Me” Pleasance). “When male suicide bombers go to paradise they get seventy two virgins; a woman suicide bomber gets a day off”. Boom, Boom.
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