There’s nothing British about the BNP
Tim Montgomerie and James Bethell of ConservativeHome have started an excellent new site: Nothing British About The BNP. Here is a link to their website.
Why go on marches?
I posted a piece at the Guardian CiF about the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Blair Peach and this has prompted some discussion about the parallels with the recent death of Ian Tomlinson. One of the points discussed in the comments is how should both the police and fellow protestors behave towards a ‘hardcore of people who’d turn up just for the ruck?’
I do not have a short answer to that, but it got me thinking about the type of demonstrations that I have gone on down the years and also about what the point of going on a march really is.
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Anti-semitism, the left and human rights
I have been meaning to respond to a couple of an article that David Toube wrote about the left and anti-Semitism in the Guardian for the last couple of months, but pressure of work prevented me. Since then he has written another piece on a similar theme at Harry’s Place and we have been treated to the bizarre spectacle of a holocaust-denier addressing a UN conference of racism – albeit with a lot of heckling and walkouts.
In his original article David made the point: ‘Although opposition to racism is now an article of faith for all mainstream political parties, the left has been the driving force in those organisations that set the antiracist agenda. There is a part of the left that is very comfortable condemning historical racism against Jews, at the hands of Nazis, back in the 1940s. It is, however, ambivalent when it comes to contemporary antisemitism: particularly when it can be “contextualised” within the Israel/Palestine conflict.’ I do not have much to say to that – other than that I agree with it and, while I would never associate with that ‘part of the left’, to which he is referring, I think that it does describe a worrying body of opinion.
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Humanitarian crisis in Sri Lanka
The following statement was issued by the Board of Trustees of the International Crisis Group meeting over the weekend in Washington, DC. Your help in circulating it would be appreciated. I spent part of February and March in Sri Lanka and it is undoubtedly the worst humanitarian crisis anywhere in the world at the moment.
A humanitarian tragedy is unfolding in Sri Lanka involving the possible deaths of tens of thousands of civilians trapped between government and insurgent LTTE (Tamil Tiger) forces in a tiny strip of land not much bigger than Central Park in Manhattan.
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Nick Cohen: Waiting for the Etonians – a review
About 25,000 died in Dresden. About 300,000 were incinerated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The body count from the war-exacerbated Afghan famine will exceed the Dresden total and may be as high as Hiroshima and Nagasaki . . . When those who care about the skeletons which will be found in Afghanistan wonder how it was that America and Britain could begin bombing at the moment when the aid agencies needed to pile food in, the answer will be that the Pentagon expected an easy war.
Nick Cohen The Observer, Sunday 28 October 2001
The Taliban is being beaten on the battlefield, but while losing militarily it may be winning politically with the help of the strangest ally in the history of warfare: health and safety regulations. Anecdotes abound of how fear of breaching the Foreign Office and Department of International Development’s ‘duty of care’ is making reconstruction next to impossible. . . . ‘People like the Pashto find our behaviour craven and despise us for it ‘
Nick Cohen, The Observer, Sunday November 11, 2007
The problem with publishing a book of cut-and-paste newspaper articles is that the ones you choose to leave out are likely to be judged as significant as those you include. Cohen’s critics often accuse him of inconsistency, yet some striking similar themes run through his writing.
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Statement by Afghan civil society groups at the Hague conference
The following statement was presented today by a group of Afghan civil society organisations at the international conference in the Hague today. Your help in circulating it would be appreciated:
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A smear job by the MoD
Why has there been so little outrage about the smears and innuendo directed against Colonel Owen McNally and Rachel Reid in Afghanistan?
I wrote a piece about for CiF yesterday and Rachel Reid also has an article about it today. But yesterday, even the Guardian’s initial coverage seemed to accept the story at face value.
It appears that Colonel McNally was arrested for doing his job – that is giving an on-the-record briefing to a human rights researcher asking completely legitimate questions about civilian casualties from NATO air strikes.
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Capitalism, social democracy and a new internationalism – responding to Compass
Compass, the leading ‘soft-left’ pressure group in the Labour party, have initiated a ‘national debate about how we build a new kind of pro-social economy’ Jon Cruddas MP and Jonathan Rutherford’s opening salvo calls for the government ‘to use its stake in the banks to become an activist investor.’ In essence what they are proposing is a re-vamped version of the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES) of the early 1980s.
Stripped of the rhetoric, the AES was basically a policy of leftist economic nationalism, with the government using its central leverage powers to shape national investment policy to ‘correct’ the deficiencies of the free market. The AES called for nationalisation of certain financial institutions and key industries, exchange controls, tariffs and subsidies to build up ‘strategic’ economic sectors and withdrawal from the European Community (since most of these proposals would breach its rules).
The AES was gradually abandoned as Labour began to embrace ‘globalisation’ from the late 1980s. Bryan Gould, who stood against John Smith in the election that followed Labour’s defeat in 1992, was probably the last significant figure to champion its basic concepts. With the wholesale adoption of neo-liberalism by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, it assumed the status of a quaint historical relic.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and perhaps the old AES is now fit for purpose, but I have some serious reservations about what is currently being proposed.
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Spectator sports and practical solidarity
I have posted a letter from an Afghan woman on this site and also asked for other bloggers to post links to it. I think that it is important for people to hear and understand what Afghans think about their own country – and Orzala’s views are representative of what I have heard hundreds of times from ordinary Afghans.
I also happen to agree with her. For the last seven years I have been reading articles by western politicians and pundits about Afghanistan’s ‘liberation’ and all of the benefits that this has brought for women and for human rights.
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A letter from an Afghan feminist
I received this letter from a friend, Orzala, at the weekend. I will be writing a separate piece about it, but would appreciate it if as many bloggers as possible could post links to it as I think what Orzala says should be widely read
An Open Letter to Barack Obama
I witnessed a historical moment in Washington when I first learnt of Obama’s victory. I joined the crowed of victorious young and old on the streets of America’s capital that night, somehow with confusing feelings. I say confused because I felt so proud to be in America when it happened, but I was unsure whether I should also be happy with what he would do in Afghanistan. I had just – that same day – seen the shocking pictures of women and children injured by a US coalition-forces bombardment in Shah Wali Kot district of Kandahar province.
Would Obama be able to stop such atrocities? Would he be able to fight the war against terrorism with the social and economic means to oppose the military means?
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Does John McCain read Liberal Conspiracy?
Probably not, but he did make the same point about subsidizing US ethanol production in last night’s presidential debate that I made in my piece here yesterday. He also said “I support buying the ethanol from Brazil made from sugar-cane” which has hugely excited the Brazilian media – which is fairly staunchly pro-Obama in all other respects.
Without wanting to belabour my point from yesterday, Obama’s position on this is part of the sloppy thinking on the left which often results in them getting foreign policy so wrong. There is a knee-jerk hostility to free trade on much of the left and, time and again, it leads them to take positions, such as trying to insert “human rights clauses” into trade agreements, which can actually do enormous harm to the people that they are trying to help.
I will leave the last word on US-subsidized ethanol to Paul Krugman. “Bad for the economy, bad for consumers, bad for the planet — what’s not to love?”
Trade and poverty
I did an interview with Foreign Policy magazine yesterday for the launch of my book on humanitarian interventions which will be published next week.
The interviewer asked me a series of hypothetical questions like “what should be done about Darfur, Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo”, etc. which I suppose I am going to have to get used to answering in the next few weeks. The problem with this whole “are you for or against humanitarian interventions?” question is it rather misses the point. Of course everyone should be in favour of an intervention where it is the only practical way of saving people’s lives and can do more good than harm. This seems to me to be so obvious as to almost go without saying (although having read the woeful level of debate on this subject amongst the British left, I now know that this is not the case). It just does not seem to take the debate very far forward in the real world.
So I said to the interviewer, if Barack Obama and Joe Biden actually want to do something about such conflicts they should not be proposing to claw-back US foreign aid, they should be cutting ethanol subsidies and ripping up the whole system of subsidies and protectionism for US agro-business. The same, obviously, also goes for Europe. No matter how many times I read the statistic, I am still shocked by the fact that rich countries spend ten times more subsidising their own farmers than they give to the poorest countries in aid and that an EU cow receives more financial support than half the world’s population struggles to live on. You don’t need to be Paul Kruggman to see there is a relationship between trade and poverty and poverty and conflict. continue reading… »
Labour’s sadomasochistic narcissists
Reading John Spellar in the Guardian yesterday I got a real sense of déjà vu for the early 1980s. “There has always been a self-indulgent tendency in the Labour party made up of those who prefer the luxury of opposition to the hard choices and grind of government. For them, internal party gossip and politicking is more fun than detailed work to steadily improve the country and the conditions of our people” he said.
The previous day Jackie Ashley wrote the latest update to her “I Brutus” column in which she concluded “The Labour party could be on the verge of destruction as a major force in British politics. I wish I thought that was hyperbole.”
Err, well, it is. Viewed from outside Britain, Labour’s electoral misfortunes seem fairly straightforward.
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Economic crises and independent banks
Oliver Kamm has an interesting take on Bryan Gould’s argument against independence for the Bank of England.
Living in Brazil gives me quite a different perspective on a number of issues facing the British left. Inflation here hit 45% a month in 1994 and our first directly elected President, Fernando Collor, froze everyone’s bank accounts in an attempt to tackle the problem five years before that. He was subsequently indicted for corruption and one of the reasons why most Brazilians support an independent central bank is that we simply don’t trust our politicians with responsibility for such an important decision.
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Divide your enemies, unite your friends
Compare and contrast the following statements:
“The American flag flies again over our embassy in Kabul. Terrorists who once occupied Afghanistan now occupy cells at Guantanamo Bay. (Applause.) Pakistan is now cracking down on terror, and I admire the strong leadership of President Musharraf.(Applause.) States like these [Iraq, Iran and North Korea] and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.” George Bush 29 January 2002
“The guardian of Muslims in Tehran is cooperating with the Americans in occupying Iraq and Afghanistan and recognizes the two hireling governments there.” Ayman al-Zawahri 8 September 2008
In Afghanistan it is clear that the Taliban is receiving support, including arms, from, again, elements of the Iranian regime. They have learnt from elsewhere. They believe that if they inflict enough chaos, enough casualties of Western soldiers we will lose the will. It will become another “mess”. Tony Blair 31 May 2007
Iran and Afghanistan have never been as friendly as they are today. In the past five years Iran has been contributing to Afghanistan’s reconstruction, and in the past five years Afghanistan has been Iran’s very close friend. President Karzai 5 June 2007
Am I the only one wondering about how smart western foreign policy has been over the last few years?
The energy windfall tax arguments don’t stack up
The more I read about the campaign for a windfall tax on the energy companies that Compass is promoting, the less it convinces me.
Neal Lawson notes that “the current spike in the price of oil means these companies are receiving unearned and undeserved windfall profits that are damaging to the rest of society, not least because the unprecedented price rises are fuelling inflation and therefore the cost of borrowing and repaying mortgages.”
Clive Betts says that “there are three simple questions to ask. Are the energy companies making extra and excessive profits? Have they done anything to earn them? Should these profits be retained solely for the benefit of shareholders and company executives?”
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Faith, reason and foreign policy
Someone once defined “faith” as being “a passionate belief in something that you know to be untrue”. Without wishing to offend anyone’s religious sensibilities, it does strike me that “faith-driven politics” has been one of the biggest weaknesses of the British left when it comes to foreign policy.
Putting to one side the Trotskyist fringe, one of the most fanatically driven group of “believers” were the Blairites who remodelled New Labour into what was initially such a successful political machine. What marked out Blairites from old guard Labour right-wingers, and the “soft-left” of the Labour party, from which they emerged, was a genuine belief that they had found a new political ideology.
It is no coincidence that so many of Blair’s lieutenants had Leninist backgrounds. There is a certain mind-set that wants to fit the complexities of the world into a set of rigid dogmas and battles between good and evil (with flinching cowards and sneering traitors thrown in for good measure).
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Labour rediscovers foreign policy
A compare and contrast between David Cameron’s piece on the Georgia crisis on Sunday with David Miliband’s piece yesterday gives some hope that Labour might be rediscovering a foreign policy.
Both correctly identify Russia as the main aggressor, an argument which David Clarke has already explained quite comprehensively here and here. But the differences between what the two propose to do in response are important. Miliband bases his arguments on multilateralism: welcome Russia into the World Trade Organisation, forge greater European unity on issues such as energy supply and reform and enlargement of the G8. He also says that discussions about Georgia and the Ukraine joining NATO and the EU should continue, according to their original timetable. That is right and the Guardian’s argument that NATO should “halt its eastward expansion” in response to the events of the last couple of weeks smack of appeasement.
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Why we should support David Davis
Like most people who opposed 42 day detention I was surprised by David Davis’s resignation. I have mixed feelings about both why he has adopted this tactic and how effective it will be. However, the more relevant question is what position should those who oppose the 42 day detentions should take towards the forthcoming by-election?
It seems likely that Labour will not field a candidate against him and then try to argue that the whole thing is an empty gesture. But, if there is not a Labour or Liberal candidate then there is no reason why members of the Labour and Liberal parties who disagree with the 42 days decision should not throw their support behind Davis.
Whether we like it or not, David Davis is now the most important symbol of opposition to a fundamentally flawed piece of legislation.
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Defining the crime of aggression
Iraq has become the elephant in the room in some discussions of international relations amongst a certain section of liberal-left opinion. David Miliband opened his recent speech about democracy by saying that it had ‘clouded the debate’ about how to promote this, but the main lesson he seemed to draw from it is that future ‘interventions in other countries must be more subtle, better planned, and if possible undertaken with the agreement of multilateral institutions.’
The speech was actually more thoughtful than this extract suggests, but by failing to make it clear the exact circumstances in which the British government would use military force, the Foreign Secretary tied himself to a policy which by every measurable standard has been a complete disaster.
The invasion of Iraq was illegal.
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