MY PLAN for PEACE

In the October presidential debates, very little was said by either the thoughtful, progressive candidate or the opportunist, reactionary candidate about the world. The great majority of the arguments they framed referred wholly to the internal politics of the United States. For sure, there were passing references to foreign affairs and to the various kinds of tumult and change in Libya, Syria and other lands; to demonstrate the width if not the depth of his homework, Mitt Romney even name-checked Mali. But these references were not in any important way statesmanlike. What they foregrounded was what is considered the ne plus ultra of political dialogue in the US: the American interest.

Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, America has proudly proclaimed itself the world’s only ‘superpower’. If this is a matter of pride in power, why are successive US administrations so insecure in their super status? Why do they behave as the schoolyard bully, cuffing the uppity kids, taking the collectables off the milquetoasts and insisting on going straight to the head of the line when the tuck shop opens? In a manner no different from that of the despised George W Bush, Barack Obama tells his ‘fellow Americans’ and indeed the rest of the world that he puts American interests above everything else.

Obama – street-fighting man?

Wouldn’t it be more useful, more democratic, more libertarian, more confident, more Christian to be the gentle giant, putting the interests of the whole planet above everything else? Isn’t it actually in the American interest for the whole planet to be peaceful and prosperous? Obama began his first term by sounding a relatively conciliatory note towards Iran, whose regime he and most other western leaders believe is bent on developing nuclear weapons. But Obama never followed up on this tone. Economic sanctions have caused and continue to cause great hardship among the populace of Iran. But if American diplomats have ever sat down with their Iranian equivalents to talk out some settlement of this mutual suspicion and hostility, no such talks have been made public.

Now the US grows daily more suspicious of China. Romney and the Republicans – and not only people on the right – urge Obama to “stand up to” the Chinese. What does it mean? It suits everyone not to spell it out. And it means they don’t have to invest long hours in subtle, intricate diplomacy. But I expect the Chinese would like to live in peace and prosperity just as much as the Americans would. What seems to me to be obvious (though it is never said by politicians) is that the advantage of one nation does not automatically exclude some advantage for another. There are alternatives to ruthless competition just as there are alternatives to mutually assured destruction.

Cameron – pugilist?

Not that every other nation is any different. In his fractious dealings with both his own MPs and his opposite numbers in the European governments, David Cameron speaks of very little other than “the British interest”. Across the EU, the Germans, Greeks, French, Italians and Spanish are locked in mutual distrust that one or all of the others will seek to smuggle past them a deal that is not in their own interest. In the early days of the Common Market, there was a notion that all nations would work together and for their mutual benefit, summed up in the term communautaire. It’s not a word many use now.

And if the leaders cannot confidently and openly talk to each other and to their electorates about economics, they certainly can’t communicate any better about warfare. In an age of instant communication of non-negotiable positions, diplomacy starts on the back foot and on no foot at all if any parties are saying that they “will not talk to” any other parties. Politicians fear that they will seem weak unless they express certainty about the results of their actions and intransigent resolution towards the ‘aggressor’ or the ‘terrorist’. So the ‘defeat’ of your enemy becomes a yardstick by which your actions are to be judged, as if the sentiments that nurtured your enemy will mysteriously melt away when a few hot-headed guerrillas have been pushed back on the ground.

A shrewd judge of affairs in the Middle East, Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan, likes to quote this saying: “the gentle art of saving face may yet destroy the human race”. Indeed, because politicians fear that subtlety and light and shade will read as weakness, hostages to fortune are offered in their declarations of intent. Which outbreak of hostilities over the last 50 years, one wonders, has concluded with a clear-cut situation, to which the self-styled good guys can point and say “look, everyone: the loss of life, the destruction of communities and the alienation of hitherto apolitical people was well worth it, completely justified by our handsome victory”?

Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan – elegant

Perhaps the least comprehensible aspect of the response that the world’s flashpoints produces from the secure, wealthy regimes of the north and west is the utter lack of imagination those regimes display towards relatively poor and deprived communities.

I have a modest proposal. We must give the United Nations actual power and that of course means power greater than that of any one member. The UN charter, still almost exactly as written in 1945, needs substantial revision. The permanent members of the Security Council must agree to surrender their veto, the prerogative of the bully over the powerless. No member can be allowed exemption.

The veto means that the UN has no muscle to flex against the US or China or the other elite nations. Which of them will volunteer to forego a veto? It would need a visionary party leader or presidential candidate to carry the case with his own electorate, so as to take a mandate to the other Security Council members; a diplomat of rare persuasive power, who implicitly understands the global gain of a truly powerful UN, to convert even one of the holders of the veto. But someone needs to attempt it. What is political power for if not to change the world? Meanwhile, the remit of the UN’s International Court of Justice needs to be widened so as not to depend on the consent of those states that are party to a dispute, another tough sell.

The UN should assume the power to order the immediate cessation of hostilities between member states. Waging war must be against the UN’s bedrock principles. Any member visiting warfare on another should be suspended forthwith from UN membership. In practice this must mean that all other member states, including those sympathetic to the miscreant’s cause, suspend all trade and other dealings with the suspended member. A blanket economic freeze would soon encourage a government to halt hostilities.

The UN must then have sufficient manpower and materiel to put immediate boots on the ground in overwhelming numbers in any and every land where hostilities break out, in order to impose and hold the peace. How can this be achieved? Simply by requiring every member nation to supply troops, weapons and supplies of an equal value to that which it spends on what it is pleased to call defence. Thus the US defence budget – $711bn in 2011 – would have to be precisely matched by its contribution to the UN’s peace-keeping budget. I suggest that it would not be long before nations saw that they got what we might call satisfyingly less bang for their buck if they cut their own defence budgets.

Netanyahu – gesture of good will

The UN must then have the resources to assume control of negotiation of a settlement between the disputatious nations. Warfare must be a gambit that is made impracticable because it makes each of the warring nations an international pariah. If both sides are taken out of benefit of UN membership, the issue of ‘blame’ is largely futile. The UN negotiators can then begin with a level playing field.

The UN should also have the power to intervene in a sovereign nation’s internal affairs or where there is civil strife (as currently in Syria) between a government and the population that is attempting to dislodge it. The UN’s remit should be truly global and part of that global interest would be the philosophy that instability in any nation is the concern of all nations. At present, for example, Syria’s neighbours are being obliged to cope with a vast influx of refugees. Matters such as the suppression of a particular tribal or religious grouping within a nation state might be confronted on a case-by-case basis. But the UN could hold sway over issues other than warfare. It could wield its power, no longer fettered by national vetoes, to impose restrictions on the activities that contribute so catastrophically to the destruction of the environment.

The recent hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians could have been brought to a quicker end or indeed pre-empted altogether if Ban Ki-moon had had the authority to land UN troops along the Israel-Gaza border. Instead, Ban toured the region’s seats of government pleading for restraint. Binyamin Netanyahu, to whom restraint is a foreign country, is widely accused of bombing Gaza not to stop Palestinian rockets falling (largely harmlessly) on Israel but to ensure his own re-election next year. Such calculations are only possible because Israel believes it needs to please none but its own people. A truly powerful UN would utterly transform the Middle East.

Ban – you, yes you do the dirty work

Barack Obama has indulged Israel with far less enthusiasm than any of his recent predecessors as president, but even he buys into the old saw that everything Israeli governments do is for the security of their own people. Nor does Obama recognise the State of Palestine as many nations now do. Obama would exercise the US veto if recognition of Palestine came before the Security Council. Of the other permanent Security Council members, China and Russia have recognised Palestine, France has not and the UK has offered conditional recognition.

American presidents traditionally declare their “love of freedom” and their desire to spread democracy throughout the world, but they are frequently less enthusiastic about nations being free to make their own choices, especially through the ballot box. The electorate of Palestine may exercise its democratic right to elect Hamas but democratic regimes do not love democracy and freedom so keenly that they recognize the democratically elected regime. “Don’t do what I do, do what I say” is the prerogative of the bully.

And it is this reinforcement of the planet’s power structure by the way that the UN is constituted that needs most urgently to be addressed. The UN could be a true force for good, the most powerful and constructive enterprise that man has ever devised. To bring that about needs leaders of rare courage and stamina. Where are they?

AH, THOSE REVOLTING STUDENTS

I come belatedly to the matter of the anti-tuition-fee demonstration, having passed a very busy and rather fraught ten days absorbed in other matters. Expressions of common sense, I maintain, know no sell-by date, however. How depressingly familiar was the reaction to the generally rather heartening expression of defiance that was the raison d’être of this march. All the politicians and pundits immediately weighed in with a sustained bleat about “the violence”. What violence? There was some damage but that’s not the same thing as violence.

On a typical Friday or Saturday night in many a British city, as much damage is routinely meted out to blameless town centres by drunks. Football derbies usually spark comparable damage and bloody internecine fights as well. Pop stars and other culturally important figures regularly turn over hotel suites without honourable members getting up on their hind legs and high horses.

You might scorn the language of the modern student, but I have a slide, taken after a 1968 demo, of a slogan spray-painted onto a public monument: "Fuck the Fuzz"

When fisticuffs break out at demos, the police certainly give as good as they get, as may be gauged by respective casualty figures. I would suggest that, over the last (say) half century, more civilians than police have lost their lives during street mêlées in Britain.

“The violence” is a convenient means by which the government can divert attention from what the demonstration was about. The suggestion is made that somehow the cause is rendered null by the “deplorable” behaviour of the marchers. The government found a second line of counter-attack with which to shrug off criticism in its scorn of Labour’s supposed lack of a coherent policy on financing higher education. It’s true that Ed Miliband – still away on paternity leave – has yet to reconcile a variety of views in the shadow cabinet but if there were any placards on the march aimed at Labour’s prevarications and procrastinations, I didn’t see them.

Demonstrators on the Millbank roof, from where the fire extinguisher was thrown

It’s doubly dreary but wholly par for the course that Labour spokespeople should obediently do the government’s work for it by just as loudly deploring “the violence”. If the Labour party sees any merit in identifying itself with the cause of universities that encourage the best brains to enrol and benefit all of society rather than supporting a system that beggars bright kids for years into the future and denies society the opportunity to make the best of its best talent, it should deploy more constructive arguments. Of course no sensible person advocates “violence” – and no legislator or would-be legislator can afford to do so – but the damage done to Tory HQ at Millbank was reparable and has doubtless been repaired by now. The damage that government is doing to the education system will take years to put right and is irreparable for the generations of students directly affected.

A triumphant demonstrator breaches the Tories' Millbank HQ

And what do Labour and the pundits – especially the latter – say to the argument that if a march passes off without incident, it fails to generate what Margaret Thatcher famously called “the oxygen of publicity”? Having a coherent argument, being earnest about it and carrying placards with pithy slogans doesn’t get you onto the television news or into the headlines. Trashing buildings does. It’s always a fine judgment whether breaking windows will achieve more gain in overall publicity for the cause than loss in alienation from the “violence”. What would Labour advise?

The idiot who chucked a fire extinguisher from the roof of Millbank onto police below is not the yardstick for measuring the merit of the demonstration. He’s lucky no one below was killed. But there was a highly pertinent letter about him in today’s Guardian: “The masked thug seen dropping a fire extinguisher from a rooftop near police below need not worry – surely, after investigations lasting more than a year, the CPS will go on to rule that there is no realistic prospect of a conviction. Or have I misunderstood the way these things work?”

Michael Gove and David Willetts: the government clearly equates education policy with good looks

Adjacent to this beautifully turned letter is another on a related topic: “So the policeman who injured a woman in a cell wins an appeal. It seems the door was to blame as usual”. This refers to the Melksham station sergeant who dragged a drunken woman across the floor of the station reception area and flung her into the cells. The appeal court judge said that he was satisfied that the cop “did not intend” to throw her into the cell. But the world has seen the incident on CCTV and can doubtless watch it time after time on YouTube; we know for sure that he intended to throw her into the cell. It wasn’t in any way inadvertent.

Tariq Ali was a star of civil disobedience in the days before celebrity culture

That the courts favour the police is not news. But it’s useful to be reminded occasionally that they favour the police so blatantly. I have been pondering the possibility of standing myself for election in one of these police commissioner roles that the government has decreed will come into being and be locally elected. I think I might be a good person to do such a job: I’d be both the force’s and the government’s worst nightmare, relentlessly unforgiving of police malfeasance and the investigation of it by favourable commissions and judges but equally unforgiving of governmental starvation of funds for the policing functions to be effectively carried through. The Melksham police, were I to be elected, would – lord help them – come under my purview. I would want that station sergeant publicly flogged.

Grosvenor Square 1968: they tried to control us with horses then but we came armed with marbles to roll under their hooves

During his recent trip to China. David Cameron revealingly suggested to local students that those of them aspiring to pursue their studies at British universities might find themselves financially penalised not quite as brutally as native students. It was instructive to see that his and his team’s constant wearing of Remembrance Day poppies while visiting a nation whose relationship with opium is, to put it delicately, complex was not the only heedless step that the PM took into a bear trap. Now that Cameron is safely home, the Home Office has revealed that a large part of its crude policy to cut the rate of immigration into Britain will be achieved by hugely stemming the rate of student visas issued to suitably qualified students from overseas. The coalition government is gathering a reputation across the world for speaking with a forked tongue. The young, who are the most concerned with the matters aired here, are the least likely to forgive such foolhardiness.

ABSOLUTELY TYRANNOUS

When I was a boy, the world was full of dictators. Joseph Stalin died in 1953 after having run the Soviet Union under his iron fist for thirty years following Lenin’s stroke in 1922. His successor (after a protracted power struggle) was the comedy character Nikita Khrushchev who was never taken seriously enough by the west to be seen as a dictator, save during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which he ultimately bungled. For the last decade of Stalin’s rule until a dozen years after Khrushchev’s overthrow by Brezhnev and Kosygin on the same day that Harold Wilson first came to power in London in 1964, China was ruled by Chairman Mao. Mao Tse-tung (as we called Mao Zedong in those days) applied the same techniques of control as Stalin and all other traditional despots. He decreed a single-party, militarily-overseen state, he purged all opposition and dissent, he sat back while millions perished through famine and poverty and he surrounded himself with a cult of personality (which is pretty hard to achieve when you are in possession of no detectable personality of your own).

Kindly Uncle Joe

In the 1970s, ignorant of the real condition of life in China, some of us allowed ourselves to believe that Mao might be a force for good in the world, much as an earlier generation had bought into the myths about Russian state Communism. In those days in London, I was friendly with Ella Winter, the widow of the famed “muckraking” journalist Lincoln Steffens. Returning from an assignment in Moscow in 1921, Steffens remarked “I have been over into the future and it works”. It was Ella who rewrote that quote into the more memorable – and indeed oft cited – “I have seen the future and it works”. How progressive and liberal that must have seemed to thoughtful people when he said it, how blinkered and naïve it comes up now.

Chairman Miao the Pussy-Cat

Into the 1970s, there were still dictatorships on continental Europe as well as in the east. Francisco Franco, the bête noir of the left in Britain as well as in Spain for the three years before the outbreak of World War II, held power in Spain until his protracted death in 1975. Franco was the leader of the campaign from 1936 to bring down the left coalition government known as the Popular Front, first by coup d’état then, when that failed, by waging civil war. Many British youngsters volunteered to fight for the Popular Front against the Falangistas (among them, Jack Jones, George Orwell, Stephen Spender, James Robertson Justice and Esmond Romilly) and some lost their lives (mostly famously from Britain, John Cornford and David Guest).

The only man I ever knew who fought in the Spanish Civil War was Bernard Davies. I did a stint as television reviewer for the trade magazine Broadcast in the early ‘80s and Bernard was my long-serving predecessor. I felt it rather a privilege to know someone who had joined one of the most romantic crusades of twentieth-century history. But shortly before he died, it emerged that, to everyone’s acute embarrassment, Bernard had fought not in the International Brigade but for Franco.

Ranky-tanky little Franco

The salubrious Salazar

Besides the Generalissimo, there was António Salazar, absolute ruler of neighbouring Portugal for the thirty-six years to 1968. The party he founded, Estado Novo, held onto power until 1974, four years after Salazar’s death. Meanwhile, in 1967, a military coup in Greece pre-empted parliamentary elections – at which, so the pretext had it, there was a danger of Communists coming to power – and led to seven years of dictatorship by a military junta known as The Colonels. Under this, as under the Spanish and Portuguese tyrannies, there were not the millions of murders that characterised the reigns of Stalin and Mao. But dissenters were tortured and thrown into jail, where many of them died, freedom of the media was curtailed, economic policies were pursued to benefit the security of the regime rather than the people and all the usual police state methods were unleashed on society so that no one ever knew whom to trust.

Beware Greeks bearing arms

Many of the nations of Africa went the same way in the years following independence and, inspired by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economics, regimes across the globe implemented social and political change that required repression in order to achieve what they intended (for a hair-raising account of these events, read Naomi Klein’s brilliant book The Shock Doctrine).

Today we watch at a safe (we hope) distance as regime change (or rather personnel change) begins to be contemplated in the world’s last mid-twentieth-century-style autocracy, North Korea. Recent footage released of the traditional endless military parade in Pyongyang has included one or shots of Kim Jong-un, the third son of the “dear leader”, Kim Jong-il. The boss has also let it be known that this unprepossessing young man is his anointed successor.

Kim III

Kim II

It does rather matter to all of us to have a sense that there is a coherent and encouraging answer to the question: is this man ready to lead a supposedly self-sufficient nuclear nation that, formally, is still in a state of war with its neighbour to the south? Contemplating his likeness, I can only think of what my late father would have remarked: “he looks half sharp”. But then Kim Jong-il is hardly Mr Dynamo radiating intelligence and guile either. His own late father, Kim Il-sung (who had the look of a jolly shopkeeper), was so beloved of his people (officially, at any rate) that he is referred to as the Eternal President. What he or his son have achieved – aside from beggaring millions of his people, extinguishing independent thought and establishing a society and culture of mind-destroying uniformity – is difficult to determine. Perhaps it is just as well that these dictators do not require electoral legitimacy. They might just get booted out of office.

Kim I

*********************************************

It’s common enough that the evening news makes me cry, rare that the emotion engendered is so welcome. The freeing of the miners trapped for two months underground in Chile has been a wondrous story and has provided a rare spectacle of joy in what is usually a picture of a planet galloping to its doom. The images of the Phoenix pod releasing one miner after another into the makeshift camp on the surface will come to invoke this particular year, alongside those of that little boy throwing his arms in the air as he is pulled from the rubble unthinkably many days after the Haitian earthquake.

Two other thoughts on this story: I loved the waiting wife who said of her trapped husband: “He seems to have changed a lot down there. He’s more humble now. I hope it lasts”. And thank heaven the Chilean president, to whom it fell to give his country’s roar, was the urbane and genial Sebastián Piñera (a sort of John Huston without the undertone of menace) and not the cruellest of South American dictators, Margaret Thatcher’s great friend Augusto Pinochet. He would have had the mine sealed so that the world did not know that catastrophes could occur under a dictatorship.

SINO-SHORTSITIS

There is nothing in the contemporary world thicker than the skin of George W Bush. On his way to Beijing to become the first sitting US president ever to attend an Olympic Games staged on foreign soil, Bush stopped off at Bangkok to deliver a lecture over the head of his uncomplaining host, Thai prime minister Samak Sundaravej, to the Chinese president, Hu Jintao.

“America stands in firm opposition to China's detention of political dissidents, human rights advocates and religious activists,” he said, flashing that trademark smirk that evidently betrays no intended irony. “We speak out for a free press, freedom of assembly and labour rights, not to antagonize China's leaders, but because trusting its people with greater freedom is the only way for China to develop its full potential. And we press for openness and justice not to impose our beliefs, but to allow the Chinese people to express theirs”.

Even while Bush was speaking, a military tribunal in the United States was holding a sentencing hearing for Salim Hamdan, who has been incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba for 61 months by the US’s reckoning (though he was apprehended in 2001). This poor shmuck was found guilty earlier in the week of “supporting terrorism”, which crime he perpetrated by being driver to Osama bin Laden. He has been given five years in military custody, including the time he has already served, but the Pentagon have made it clear that they do not intend to release him at the end of his sentence.

As the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, John Wesley Hall, drily observed, “the Pentagon must be very proud of itself today … it convicted a truck driver of being guilty of driving a truck”.

Washington does not pretend that torture is not used at Guantánamo, which, it should be remembered, is the facility that we know about. There are doubtless others operating in secret on American soil and it is known that there are yet more controlled by American authorities dotted around the world, operating under the quasi-judicial aegis of friendly or beholden governments. So Osama bin Laden’s luckless former driver will have been subjected to cruel and unusual punishment over a considerable period before he achieved the distinction of being the first military prisoner from Guantánamo to be brought to what passes for justice in Bush’s America.

Along with a willingness to flout international law governing the use of torture upon political and military prisoners and the terms under which such prisoners can be tried, the Bush administration has also introduced the term “extraordinary rendition” to the language. This is the practice of transferring war prisoners out of formal American jurisdiction to such nations as Syria, Egypt and former Soviet bloc satellites where torture is a way of life. Through CIA contact and control, America’s historic expertise in torture techniques is refined by personnel who have no responsibility to American law.

If the Bush administration has anything to teach the Chinese government about human rights, it will be news to all but the most partisan neocons. But China is an easy target for everyone just now. A couple of callow Brits may unfurl a ‘Free Tibet’ banner on a lamp-post outside the Bird’s Nest Stadium and suffer nothing worse than deportation because their images are available from every news agency in the world for 24 hours. I guess the London authorities will go no harder on, say, a handful of Moslem protesters who stage some trivial event ahead of the Stratford East Olympics in 2012.

I make no claim on the Chinese regime’s behalf. I have never been to Tibet, nor indeed to China. Like other viewers of television news bulletins. I have seen the smuggled footage of the brutal putting down of dissidence. Indeed – and like practically every other nation on the planet – China has a bloody history: at times, it has inflicted dictatorship and privation on its own people and sought and sometimes achieved genocide against the peoples of other nations, tribes and sects.

Britain’s human rights record is hardly blemish-free – if nothing else just now, we are complicit in the illegal use of torture and violation of other nations’ sovereignty practised by the States. It is idle, of course, to imagine that the Olympics could take place in some pure state untainted by the corruption of the world. After all, the modern Games is, as much as anything, a pageant of globalised capitalism. But if the Games becomes an ideological battleground for politicians and protesters, alike drawn by the spotlight already shining on the spectacle, it will be tough on the athletes, for whom the sporting events themselves really are the focus of attention (save, of course, for those participants whose primary focus is on getting away with the illicit enhancement of their performances). I have suggested before that a permanent Olympiad home on a site declared neutral and independent like Vatican City could avoid the difficulties inherent in bestowing the prestige of hosting the event on successive participants in the eternal jockeying between nation states. Nothing that has occurred during the run-up to the Beijing Olympics has altered my view.

BROWN STUDY

The Olympic torch passed through India yesterday, occasioning further protests and ever-elaborating security for this supposed symbol of sportsmanship and global friendship. What an absurd spectacle it is. And what a fistful of conflicting questions it raises.

In the first place, what nation on earth could hold the Games and confidently anticipate no protest? Is there any whose present standing on the matter of human rights or recent record of benevolence towards its fellow regimes would render it acceptable to one and all? Imagine if the 2008 Olympics were due to be held in the USA. There would be massive protests across the globe. I feel sure I would join them. And what about the London Olympics in four years’ time? Will they pass off without a squeak? I doubt it.

My own squeak can barely be heard but I have always been bitterly opposed to the grotesque spectacle coming here at all. Don’t say I didn’t warn you when the whole nation, let alone Londoners, finds itself paying for the Games in one way or another for decades to come. That is even assuming that the event does not turn out to be a Terminal 5-type humiliation. And don’t get me started on capitalism’s plundering of sport, rendering it the happiest of hunting grounds for cheats, asset strippers, druggies, gambling sharks, self-promoters and celebrity leaches. Oh, and politicians.

The obvious resolution of this problem is to establish a permanent home for the Games. History points to Greece but that nation cannot be guaranteed to keep itself uncontroversial (remember The Colonels). Instead a custom-built site might be set up in some newly-created autonomous city-state, comparable to Monaco or the Vatican. Perhaps it might be funded through and its administration be placed under the purview of the UN or a reconstituted UN (but to that matter I will return).

Unrealistic people complain angrily that governments such as Britain’s stand idly by while China oppresses Tibet. Not many people – publicly, at least – advocate nuking Beijing. What else can be done? Gordon Brown, some argue, should denounce the Chinese government. What this would achieve, apart from giving the Prime Minister a self-image as a stern and principled moralist, is hard to imagine. Britain is anyway in a uniquely delicate position in face of China’s unpopularity because she is the next host of the Games. Any trouble we make now can be revisited upon us a hundredfold in 2012. Significantly, Brown “received” the torch in Downing Street the other day but didn’t actually touch it. He’s trying to keep all sides happy. I’ve argued before that he would do best to establish a strong relationship with Beijing and then gradually assume the role of candid friend. Maybe that is what he is indeed trying to do.

Zimbabwe is a very different proposition. It is not a nuclear power, it is not a member of the Security Council, it is not in the running to stage any kind of global event and it holds precious little interest for international capital. It has a long-established leader – whose road to power was eased, if you can remember that far back, as almost her first act when Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street – who has grown arrogant and detached in his ivory tower. Zimbabweans are a peaceful and docile people. They have watched more bemused than angry as their standard of living has slithered back to medieval times. They know that Mugabe’s raggle-taggle army can inflict much misery upon them but they lack the gumption to spawn a resistance. Had he been president of many another country in Africa, Mugabe would have been assassinated long ago. He is hardly the best protected of the world’s leaders.

The Ealing farce of Zimbabwe’s elections ought to have fomented revolution within the country and angry protests beyond at both street and diplomatic level but everyone seems to have been stunned into indifference. The Olympic torch has provoked more pandemonium than the crass illegality practised by Mugabe. The increasingly ineffectual South African President, Thabo Mbeki, pretends that little is amiss. Not until Gordon Brown’s forthright if hardly elegant address to the Security Council on Wednesday has anyone done much more than wring their hands.

The UN is the proper forum to deal with this affront to democracy. UN troops should go into Zimbabwe, arrest Mugabe and put him on trial before the International Court of Justice. But the UN doesn’t do things like that, for all the disapproval of Harare expressed by the new Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon. (Thank goodness Tony Blair didn’t get that job, by the way. It would be a shame for the UN to break the habit of its lifetime and appoint a Secretary-General with a dull name).

The UN is in dire need of an overhaul. I argued in my book Common Sense that “We must give the United Nations actual power and that of course means power greater than that of any one member. The UN charter, still almost exactly as written in 1945, needs substantial revision. The permanent members of the Security Council must agree to surrender their veto, the prerogative of the bully over the powerless. No member can be allowed exemption.

“The veto means that the UN has no muscle to flex against the US or China or the other elite nations. Which of them will volunteer to forego a veto? It would need a visionary party leader or presidential candidate to carry the case with his own electorate, so as to take a mandate to the other Security Council members; a diplomat of rare persuasive power, who implicitly understands the global gain of a truly powerful UN, to convert even one of the holders of the veto. But someone needs to attempt it. What is political power for if not to change the world? Meanwhile, the remit of the UN’s International Court of Justice needs to be widened so as not to depend on the consent of those states that are party to a dispute, another tough sell.

“The UN should assume the power to order the immediate cessation of hostilities between member states. Waging war must be against the UN’s bedrock principles. Any member visiting warfare on another should be suspended forthwith from UN membership. In practice this must mean that all other member states, including those sympathetic to the miscreant’s cause, suspend all trade and other dealings with the suspended member. A blanket economic freeze would soon encourage a government to halt hostilities. The UN must then have the resources to assume control of negotiation of a settlement between the disputatious nations. Warfare must be a gambit that is made impracticable because it makes each of the warring nations an international pariah. If both sides are taken out of benefit of UN membership, the issue of ‘blame’ is largely futile. The UN negotiators can then begin with a level playing field.

“Whether the UN should have the power to intervene in a sovereign nation’s internal affairs is a more complex matter. The UN’s remit should be truly global and therefore probably cannot be parochial. Matters such as the suppression of a particular tribal or religious grouping within a nation state might be confronted on a case-by-case basis. But the UN could hold sway over issues other than warfare. It could wield its power, no longer fettered by national vetoes, to impose restrictions on the activities that contribute so catastrophically to the destruction of the environment” [see link in right hand column].

I stand by this analysis. But I would add a further recommendation to the UN’s new powers. It should have the authority, guaranteed unanimously by all member states, to monitor and if necessary oversee and even take charge of every member nation’s national elections. This would apply just as urgently to the US, France, Italy and Australia (to name recently voting nations where democracy is supposed to be transparent) as to Zimbabwe, Russia, Pakistan and everywhere else where political corruption is endemic. No nation is immune. Vote-rigging has occurred in Britain, don’t forget.

But Gordon Brown is clearly not the visionary to cajole the other veto nations into advocating a reconstituted UN. I doubt that Hilary Clinton or John McCain is either. Maybe Barack Obama is our best hope for such bold thinking. Brown is fundamentally a systems man rather than a visionary (I argue in a letter that The Guardian may publish later today that he puts me in mind of John Birt at the BBC, which may be the unkindest thing said about him in the present round of Brown-bashing, unkinder even than Vincent Cable’s devastating remark last autumn about Stalin metamorphosing into Mr Bean).

I had thought that Tony Blair was the worst prime minister in my lifetime, the first to induce me to abandon my adulthood habit of voting Labour in 2001 and again in 2005. But I fear Brown may be yet worse. At least Blair had the imagination to take on board some of what the voters yearned for. Brown seems perfectly oblivious to anyone but his trusted advisors who, like Robert Mugabe’s, tell him what he wants to hear. Nothing about his demeanour suggests that he has the capacity to learn and change. It doesn’t matter a tuppenny damn if he was upstaged by the Pope in the US this week – whatever the hell “upstaged” means when the star of the Holy See visits one of the most supernaturally-inclined nations on earth for the first time. Nobody scoffing at Brown’s lack of a rapturous reception is living in the real world. But in the real world, the policy on the 10p tax rate may well ensure that Brown is upstaged by David Cameron in a year or two’s time. And then it will be the Old Etonian Blairalike who gets to play guest of honour at the 2012 Olympics.

HOMING IN ON MOBILES

There is, to be sure, a sufficiency of candidates for the title Most Baleful Development of the Last Half Century: the marketing culture; the revival of religious fanaticism; the death of modesty, kindness and respect for oneself and others; the worship of convenience; the spread of noise and light pollution; television advertising; the decline of literary culture; the despoiling of the countryside; the power of celebrity; global tourism; the rise of the supermarket and the retail chain; climate change; and that which promotes and underpins all those horrors: the triumph of capitalism.

If I cite the ubiquity of the mobile phone as an especial bête noire of mine, it is in no way to discount or downgrade the egregiousness of the other candidates. But the mobile is in so many ways the type of what is so unhealthy in modern society. Far from bringing people together more easily, it in practice drives them further apart. From the vanishingly few occasions when I have talked into a mobile while, say, walking along the street or sitting on a bus, I know that one is immediately cocooned in a virtually impenetrable void. One’s awareness of the world beyond one’s nose and inner ear declines almost to nothing. People yakking on mobiles bump into each other, step off the curb in front of traffic, fall down open manholes and generally are as cut off from their immediate surroundings as if they were sealed in a time machine.

When you consider that we have been using telephones for more than a century, it seems extraordinary that people generally still find them mysterious. We have all undergone the experience of having someone else in the room trying to talk to us while we are on the telephone. They – and we too when we in turn do it ourselves – seem incapable of remembering that it is physically impossible simultaneously to attune one ear to a voice coming down an optic fibre and the other ear to a voice in the wholly different aural ambience of a room. Yet there is probably more domestic unpleasantness deriving from just such insensitivity than, say, arguments over child rearing and housework combined.

The voice in one’s ear fundamentally erodes one’s awareness of everything else, even what one sees. Listening to such a voice requires a high level of concentration and focus that, say, listening to the wireless does not emulate. That is certainly why using a mobile while driving, whether hands-free or not, is a truly criminal example of irresponsibility. New penalties for this offence come into force in the spring in Britain. Anyone who causes a fatality while simultaneously driving and using a hand-held mobile will be liable to a jail term of between four and seven years, or between two and five years if they were “briefly distracted”, whatever that may mean. Nothing like enough punishment, of course, and I never understand why anyone who has been responsible for killing or maiming in any circumstance while driving is ever allowed a licence again.

Mobile phones bring out the insensitivity in people. If, in the middle of a conversation with a friend, I suddenly picked up the newspaper and started reading it, my friend would be justly aggrieved. I, though, am expected to countenance as perfectly acceptable behaviour my friend breaking off in mid-sentence to take a mobile phone call. What’s more, my friend will, as like as not, raise her voice considerably above the decibel level at which she had hitherto been addressing me. This is another of the abiding mysteries of the phone, that it seems to require – although it doesn’t really, of course – much greater projection in order that the voice travels the distance, maybe of hundreds of miles, between the speakers.

My partner pointed out this quote, used to recommend a book on Amazon: “You become absorbed in the plot within seconds of opening the book … It will make you think twice before using your mobile phone!!!!” He found this an appalling criterion to apply to the appeal of a book and I would agree if I didn’t already suspect that the use of four exclamation marks indicates a poverty-stricken mind. But the psychological dependence on the mobile that so many have developed is an earnest of the poverty of imagination and character that is eroding the human race. We are certainly breeding a generation of teenagers who cannot sit still or walk along for five minutes without reaching for the mobile and swapping cries of “whatever” with a friend. Being interested in their surroundings or – I am about to employ a blasphemy – reading a book is too daunting a project. So I suppose the anonymous Amazon customer was onto something.

Some train services – First Direct, which serves the west of England, is one such – have understood that the mobile phone is as noisome an intruder as the leaking iPod and have designated one carriage per train as “quiet”, which means that the use of phones is barred. For having the temerity to wish to sit in such a carriage, you are duly punished by being obliged to walk the length of the platform because the quiet carriage is always at the extremity of the train.

This arrangement would, you might think, work tolerably well but it is rare in my experience that such a journey passes without some breach. On the train home from Cheltenham last week, my reading was interrupted by the ringing of a mobile across the aisle. The mousy, mature and respectable-looking woman who took the call was entirely and even somewhat abashedly apologetic afterwards when I pointed out to her (in my customary formula) that the sign forbidding the use of mobiles applied to her as well to everyone else. “I’m afraid I forgot to switch it off,” she said. “I will do now”. I didn’t pursue it but I could reasonably have suggested that she either switch off the mobile directly it rang and determine later who had made the call that she missed or get up off her arse and walk to the next carriage to pursue her conversation. I also didn’t observe drily: “I take it you won’t now object if I smoke just the one cigarette?”

The trouble with these provisions and their abuse is that one is obscurely made to feel in some way in the wrong when one speaks up, as if I’m making a fuss about nothing. As David, who frequently catches a doze on a train, points out, if a ringing phone or a voice raised in conversation has roused you, the damage is already done so you’re then trying to put down a marker for the next time. But as I observe frequently in my book Common Sense (see link in right margin), NOBODY COMPLAINS ENOUGH and it is left to the civic- (if bloody-)minded like me and David to make a stand.

Do not, I beg, misconstrue me. I do indeed own a mobile. So does my partner. When we added a large dog to our household, David pointed out that we ought to be able to call each other if, say, one of us were in our field with this dog that neither of us could lift on his own and the dog – perish the thought – were to collapse.

For that reason and none other we went into Bath one day in 2001 or 2002 to purchase a brace of mobile phones. We chose our moment carefully, timing our quest to coincide with an “important” football match involving the national team. Bath was not exactly deserted but it was striking that all the young men out shopping were paired with wives or girlfriends (or boyfriends). Our plan paid off inasmuch as we were able to have the undivided attention of a mobile phone saleswoman for above an hour. I did have to return my phone quite soon, however. I couldn’t stand it that every time I switched it on I got a display on the screen that read “How are you?” To eliminate this absurdity, I had to settle for an older and less capacious Sim card but that was no great hardship.

We elected to go with a plan that rolled over unused time and charged a monthly fee. I recently changed the arrangement to pay-as-you-go. In practice, my mobile is usually switched off from one month’s end to the next, aside from an occasional switch-on to send or look for a text. David gets more from his mobile but neither of us finds much use for it. The only time I have mine in hand with any frequency is when I am in London where having it avoids the need to look for a phone box. Even then, the mobile is switched off a lot because I spend so much time in cinemas and theatres and I won’t have it switched on if I’m lunching with a friend.

To change the phone plan was not straightforward. I telephoned – always an elaborate business these days, involving punching in numbers in response to options none of which quite fits your case – and finally thought I had secured a change of plan. But the next bill repeated the previous formula so I telephoned again. It emerged that my instructions should have been put in writing (rather undermining the point of an arrangement about a phone) although I had not been told this. I was excused the task (out of compassion, perhaps, for what was perceived as my great age) and assured that the next bill would reflect the new arrangement. That bill arrived today and is indeed lower by some 65 percent. We have been paying through the nose until now.

People say “I don’t know how I managed before I had a mobile” without recalling that once people managed without computers, central heating, television, the motor car, flushing lavatories, reading glasses, credit, separate dwellings, the wheel or even a spoken language. We didn’t have a dishwasher until we moved to our current house less than ten years ago but now that it has broken down I find (as washer-upper to the household) that I cannot imagine we ever did anything else all day but wash up. The dishwasher, though, is a far less destructive intruder than the mobile. Indeed, it makes time for one to do more useful things, rather than filling such time with useless chitchat.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

A word about Gordon Brown in China: the PM has been criticized in some quarters for not attacking his hosts ferociously for their appalling record on human rights. I find this criticism unrealistic. It would be at best uncomfortable to find fault with a regime with which one is seeking to establish at least a rapport. Far better to develop a strong relationship with the Chinese government and then, from the vantage point of being seen as a candid friend, seek to influence the Chinese to do better. At the present stage of relations, such a criticism would merely be discounted in Beijing as posturing for the domestic audience. And not without reason.

TAKE MORE WATER WITH IT

One of the earliest vivid memories I have is of the flood along the east coast of England on the night of January 31st 1953. I was five. We didn’t live there and we were yet to have a television, so the only images in my head must emanate from press coverage on February 2nd or, even more likely, from my imagination. The vividness comes from the fact that Uncle Bob and Auntie Pat were caught up in it. They lived in King’s Lynn with their little daughter and at least one elderly parent. When we learned that people were being drowned in the town (in the end 15 people there lost their lives), we had to cling to hope of good news. At last we learned that they were all alive and in reasonable spirits, given that their home was overwhelmed by the waters. Later that year, they moved to a new place out of town.

Two thousand people in King’s Lynn were made homeless that night and, along the coastline, 32,000 were evacuated. The deaths in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex totalled 304, with a further 177 – two lifeboatmen, 45 fishermen (we had a fishing industry then) and a ferry full of passengers – lost at sea. In the Netherlands, as many as 1,835 drowned. At King’s Lynn, the sea level rose more than eight feet. Sea defences on the east coast were breached in 1,200 places. In 2003, the cost of this disaster at then values was estimated at £5billion [information from Benfield Hazard Research Centre and Flood London websites].

Of course there have been infinitely worse floods in other parts of the world. In August 1931, the Yellow River in China overwhelmed dozens of townships and an estimated 3.7million perished. Half a million drowned in the cyclone-driven floods of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), images of which I still recall 37 years after the event. The same area suffered lesser but still murderous devastation 16 years ago [information from The Hutchinson Factfinder, an indispensable volume].

The floods in the North-East, the Midlands and the West are to such vast calamities as a chimney blaze is to The Great Fire of London, though not of course for the families of those individuals who lost their lives. In Texas and other southern and mid-western states, there has been far worse flooding this week than anywhere in Britain. Nonetheless, to have floodwater accompanied by raw sewage cascading through your home is a vile and heart-breaking blow and the cost of making good the damage will be eye-watering. Happily for us, our household was not affected by this week’s flooding. When there were extensive floods in our area three or four years back, a friend asked if we had been caught up in the deluge. “No” I said. “We’re 600 feet above sea level here”. “Ah,” came back my friend, “that’s what they said in Atlantis”.

It’s true that climate change and global warming mean that those places that have always felt safe from rising water have less cause for complacency. But the Yellow River and Bangladesh floods demonstrate that weather can bite deep without any need of help from the carbon emissions endgame. Even so, projections of threat to low-lying areas (starting with the Maldives and great swathes of the Indian subcontinent and the low countries, moving on to New York and London) are real enough. Those of us now dry will not remain unaffected by such developments then – millions will move to higher ground – just as we are not unaffected now: the costs will hit us all.

There has been widespread criticism of government and local authorities on the ground that we were “not prepared”, that cutbacks have postponed attention to flood defences. This is a how-long-is-a-piece-of-string issue. As with the NHS, even if you throw the whole of the GNP at the target, it will still not be enough. Where are the areas in Britain that you can point to and declare with total conviction: “There will be never be flooding here”? How far up the predicted level of rise in the seas can you plan before the whole enterprise is beyond our ability to contemplate? In addition to the cost of attempting (increasingly Canute-like) to hold back the waves, what expenditure can you calculate to be earmarked in order to deal with millions of refugees?

Well, you may say (as I often do) “expenditure is all down to political will. When a government says ‘we can’t afford this’, what it means is ‘we want to spend the money on something else’. Whatever the calls on public finances, prime ministers who are determined to go to war will always manage to find and spend the vast sums that war consumes, however futile that use of the money might seem to everyone else”. But the colossal cost of making every community in Britain safe against any eventuality of freak weather and against any conceivable result of climate change is way beyond a simple matter of rebalancing the budget, however creative Alistair Darling may turn out to be as Chancellor.

I have one of my modest proposals. Let the Brown government commission the most exhaustive study of Britain’s requirement for flood defences in any credible future scenario. Let the exercise be fully costed. Let the rise in the rate of income tax required to finance the building of these defences be calculated. And then let the House have a free vote on the matter so that the people may see what each member feels is the correct response, regardless of calculations about party advantage, having canvassed her own electorate. The voter could not then argue that the government or local authorities were to blame if his home were awash with foul water because his representative would have reflected his view, constituency by threatened constituency. As well as proving an interesting experiment in determining the degree to which short-termism and self-interest inform the electorate’s thinking, the exercise would also provide an unprecedented overview of Britain’s readiness, both physical and psychological, to face a very uncertain future.

A brief PS to the previous entry: I happened to be required this week to record my postal address on a hitherto unvisited website and, as usual, was obliged to click “United Kingdom” as the country of residence. However, when the information was re-presented to me for confirmation, the nation had been magically altered to “GB”. There is still hope.