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.