The AGE of UNREASON

Despite one hundred and fifty years of post-Darwinian scientific enquiry and discovery, vast numbers of the planet’s citizens are as bewitched as their ancestors ever were by the absurdities, fantasies and mendacities of supernatural superstition. I have argued before that the delusion that its sufferers call “faith” is the source of far greater suffering in the world – suffering through personal guilt and self-hatred, deprivation and oppression, persecution and mutilation, murder and genocide – than all the other abstractions – nationalism, tribalism, politics and ideology – put together. Paradoxically, the dominance of religious bigotry as a force for evil seems to grow ever stronger as the world becomes smaller and liberal education spreads further.

In an editorial of 1941 for Life magazine, the Time-Life publisher Henry Luce described his era as “the American century”. At different points in that time-frame, other candidates for the accolade briefly arose, but hindsight shows that Luce got it right: more than any other global player, the United States shaped the century. How will the present one be known? Already, there seem compelling arguments to dub it “the Muslim century”.

Luce talk

The millennium had barely begun when, “out of a clear blue sky”, the most profoundly world-shaking challenge was made to the confidence of American power, a challenge made specifically in the name of Islam. There are Muslim apologists who fend off the connection between the central tenets of Islam and the 9/11 atrocity, but they are confounded by the words of the Qur’an that I found and have quoted before: “Allah has bought from the believers their selves and their possessions against the gift of Paradise; they fight in the way of Allah; they kill and are killed; that is a promise binding upon Allah in the Torah and the Gospel and the Qur’an” [from Arthur J Arberry’s translation for OUP, though I have changed his own term ‘God’ to ‘Allah’]. It is, of course, no accident that the book of the Qur’an from which this passage comes (which is called, in English, ‘Repentance’) is book number 9 and the verse number is 111.

Islam has been at the centre of the world’s flashpoints in the first 163 months of the present century. A prime mover in the spread of Muslim fundamentalism has been the Deobandi wing of Sunni Islam. Deobandis are devotees of Sharia law, the most proscriptive interpretation of the Qur’an. This wing of Islam is, in every sense, the most aggressive. If it has not already become the dominant force in the Muslim community in Britain, it will do so before you know it. The Taliban are adherents of Deobandi practice. The word “Taliban” means “students”.

Saddam nuisance

Western forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001 in an initially successful attempt to overthrow the Taliban whose activists had dominated the country for five years. The pretext was “to keep the streets of America and Britain safe”, but the notion that the Taliban (rather than al-Qaida) was responsible for terrorist attacks in the west was never remotely credible. In any case, as everyone knows but no politician will acknowledge, the Taliban will again be ruling Afghanistan within a maximum of three months after western troops have finally withdrawn.

The American and British governments muddied the water and overstretched their own resources by adding an irrelevant invasion of Iraq to their military commitments, for no better reason than that George W Bush wanted to complete what he took to be “unfinished business” left over by his father following the Gulf War of 1990-1. Anxious to establish his profile on the world stage, Tony Blair joined this vain exercise.

Assad sack

Ten years on, Iraq is riven by inter-faith strife. This week, there have been more than 250 casualties of car bombs in Baghdad, at least fifty of them fatalities and almost all of them Shias, which means that the bombers were certainly Sunni Muslims. If that sounds a lot, consider that there have been fifty times that number of fatalities in sectarian attacks in Iraq in the past three months. So much for the west’s legacy.

The Shia are also Muslims and they form the government in Iraq, where they make up the largest demographic (the most dominant Shia representation anywhere in the world is in Iran, where about two-fifths of the world’s Shias live). Shia and Sunni Muslims have been in conflict for many centuries. Do not expect reconciliation any time soon.

The renewed struggle between Iraqi Shia and Sunni is wholly a product of the western invasion. Saddam Hussein was a Ba’athist. The Ba’ath Party, though Islamic, is notably liberal – it may be surprising to note – and opposes Muslim fundamentalism and Sharia law. In some ways, Alawite Islam parallels Ba’athist Islam. Bashar al-Assad of Syria is an Alawite. Like Saddam, he has been more exercised by Arab nationalism than by Islamic orthodoxy. If he falls in Syria, there must be a strong possibility that some form of Islamic fundamentalism will succeed him in that benighted country. This is the dilemma that stays the hand of the international community under pressure to intervene in the brutal Syrian civil war. Unthinkably, intervention might produce a result that had worse consequences for the Syrians, for the Arab world and for the wider world even than the reign of Assad.

Gadd-out-of-here

After all, there is the precedent of Libya as well as that of Iraq. Muammar Gaddafi’s regime was again far more concerned with Arab nationalism than with Islam – Gaddafi was raised as a Bedouin Muslim. Islamist factions infiltrated the anti-government forces in Libya as they have done in Syria. The present prime minister of Libya, Ali Zeidan, is a Sunni Muslim.

Many new Islamist factions have appeared in Libya since the war and several of the militias formed to fight Gaddafi have declined to disband. It was an Islamist cadre that attacked the American consulate in Benghazi last September, killing several people including the ambassador. Abdelsalam al-Mosmary, a critic of the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in Libya, was assassinated just this week. Sporadic exchanges of fire and regular car bombs, particularly in Benghazi and Tripoli, continue to imperil the stability of Libya.

A Sunni outlook for Ali Zeidan

Through patient infiltration, al-Qaida has established itself in Pakistan, Kashmir, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan, Mali, Nigeria, Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Turkey. It is al-Qaida that still represents the most effective and most ruthless armed expression of Islamic fundamentalism. President Obama has been assiduous in concentrating on pre-emptive strikes against al-Qaida – controversially, more in Pakistan than anywhere – rather than diluting this effort with speculative engagements elsewhere.

But terrorism, guerrilla warfare and the fomentation of uprisings against secularist regimes are not the only methods by which Islamic fundamentalism exerts its muscle. Sharia rule profoundly circumscribes personal freedoms that citizens of liberal democracies take for granted. The judiciary wholly or largely imposes Sharia law in Afghanistan (even without Taliban rule), Pakistan, Muslim parts of India, Bangladesh, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Gaza and the West Bank, Saudi, Qatar, much of the UAE, Bahrain, Oman, Brunei, the Maldives, Muslim parts of Sri Lanka and Singapore and Indonesia, Sudan, Mauritania and for Muslims in Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Gambia, Djibouti and Comoros.

The late Abdelsalam al-Mosmary

Restrictions imposed by Sharia apply to everyone, including visitors, as unguarded tourists are apt to discover. Visiting a Muslim country is like staying with vegans: they serve you vegan food but, when they visit you, they expect you to serve them vegan food. So Islamists in non-Muslim countries go on demonstrations carrying placards on the theme of “death to the infidel”, but any reciprocal tolerance is unthinkable. How long would you stay alive if you brandished a poster with the legend “Death to Islam” in downtown Khartoum, Riyadh, Mogadishu or Islamabad?

More than any other issue, it is sexuality that brings out the feudal in Sharia law and Islamic fundamentalism. Sharia strictly interprets the Qur’an, so anything in that text that already seems oppressive is made more so by its application. This comes from the section on ‘Women’: “Men are the managers of the affairs of women for that Allah has preferred in bounty one of them over another, and for that they have expended of their property. Righteous women are therefore obedient, guarding the secret for Allah’s guarding. And those you fear may be rebellious admonish; banish them to their couches, and beat them” [book 4 verse 38]. Needless to say, the courts will always favour a man’s testimony over that of his wife.

Sweet 16 at the UN

The world knows of the case of Malala Yousafzai, the Sunni Muslim who, at 15, was the object of an assassination attempt by the Pakistani Taliban in the Swat Valley. Malala – her name means “grief-stricken” – had had the audacity to advocate full rights of education for girl pupils, an offence against Islamist views on the subjugation of women. Malala made a remarkable recovery and addressed a convocation of youth delegates at the UN on her sixteenth birthday. She has become a figurehead for women’s rights under Islam and was named by Time magazine in April as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World”.

The brutal, iniquitous and unyielding nature of Sharia law is sufficient cause for opposing the spread of Islam in any of its guises. Hence the European Union’s continuing difficulty with the long-standing application to join made by Turkey, a nation that, while very nearly entirely sited in Asia, occupies a tiny area of southeastern Europe.

Though Turkey’s population is almost wholly Sunni Muslim, it is formally a secular nation. Several days of unrest in Istanbul in May were centred on the perception of encroaching Islamisation by Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government. Informing this perception was an attempt by Erdogan to reduce the power of the army, widely seen as a significant force for secularism (like the army in Egypt). Several other recent government restrictions were read as Islamist.

Erdogan – not best pleased

The wearing of the hijab has been banned for the entirety of Turkey’s modern existence, a lot longer than in France, where the wearing of the burqa was addiitionally made illegal in 2010. France has a rapidly growing problem with Islam, which now counts a tenth of the country’s population among its supporters. It has been estimated that Muslims could be powerful enough to determine the outcome of presidential elections within thirty years.

Wherever you look, even in Europe, there is evidence of the encroachment of Islam on the very different philosophies, cultures and traditions that have survived strife and oppression in the past. It may be that Islam, that most proscriptive and intolerant of dogmas, is stronger than the rest and will eventually hold sway across the world. It won’t be in my lifetime and perhaps not in yours either, but the need to stem the tide is urgent now.

SUBORDINATE LIVES

Thrift and, to a lesser degree, inclination keep us at home while others take their holidays. We are fortunate enough to have a house, land and a general environment that is very conducive to staying put. Even working from home takes no edge off the pleasure.

From a safe distance, we watch others sitting in traffic jams, sweltering in airport lounges, regretting the temporary accommodation into which they have stumbled. Holidays can be a pleasure, of course, and a necessary restoration. They can be much more than that: they can furnish some of the most glorious moments and memories of our lives. And equally they can be a disappointment, even a nightmare. East, west, home’s best.

The key word in that sentiment, though, is “safe”. From an even safer distance, we have looked on aghast in recent times as lives, homes, whole communities have been destroyed by flood, wildfire, earthquake, hurricane, drought, tsunami. Thousands of lives have been snuffed out. Thousands more have been deprived of everything. It’s unimaginable: losing in a few moments one’s family, home, friends, livelihood, land, pets, the tools of one’s trade, possessions, mementoes, livestock, neighbourhood – all of the things that define one’s existence.

All of these disasters are beyond our ability to resist or predict. They are natural events, the accidents of a moving, evolving planet. Or at least, they are up to a point. Many fires that destroy large areas are started carelessly, even deliberately. All of the other catastrophes, it can be argued, are made more prevalent by the degree to which we have exploited and polluted the planet. And the way that we behave brings closer another apocalyptic event, one that may become more common in the near future: pandemic.

But there is still another kind of disaster that can have just as devastating an impact on people’s lives, one that is entirely avoidable: warfare. In some respects, warfare (as well as being gratuitous yet willed) is even more damaging than the natural disaster. The intelligence about victims and casualties becomes caught up in propaganda. The impulse to help those affected, whether directly or by donation, is much weaker than in the face of an unwilled event and much more hampered by the ongoing nature of that event. Moreover, as is claimed to occur in Libya and Syria, those who seek to help may themselves become targets. And the toxic nature of modern weapons can continue to destroy long after the ceasefire, as any resident of Vietnam will tell you.

News organisations always want numbers to attach to disaster reports so that they can convey a sense of the scale of the event. But casualties of war are less diligently counted, harder to determine, more likely to be disputed. War propaganda routinely casts doubt on stories of civilian casualties and fiercely denies reports of atrocities. When evidence of civilian deaths and injuries begins to look harder to refute, the authorities issue a shrug: the term for such eventualities is “collateral damage”. The word collateral means parallel or alongside but it also carries the sense of being subordinate, of being of lesser consequence.

Military deaths are reported one by one, identified, praised and personally recalled. Civilian deaths are often unreported, mostly unrecorded, certainly not identified. The military personnel who receive wounds are rushed to the best available medical attention. The civilians who receive wounds must fend for themselves – crawl to someone who might help, stumble through wrecked streets at the mercy of falling masonry, snipers, bombs. Their hospital may anyway have been razed; if not, it will certainly be desperately short of staff, beds, power, equipment, medicaments, even basic dressings.

And the military don’t have to be there. Becoming a warrior is a career choice, save in those countries that impose conscription: China, Russia, Libya, Syria, Israel and most other middle eastern countries, many South American nations and – which may surprise you, as it does me – Greece, Denmark, Finland, Austria and Switzerland. The military are there out of choice – if not necessarily their own choice, certainly their government’s choice. They are equipped to protect themselves as far as is feasible. At worst, though certainly not eliminated, their risk is contained.

Civilians have no such advantages. They are where they live and, unless they are rich – and war casualties generally are not rich – that is their only option. They have no protection, no defence, nothing with which to retaliate, no basis from which to seek redress, no hope but the hope that the attack will end before their lives do.

In Libya, in Afghanistan as I write, as you read, or not long before or after, civilians are dying by the weapons of invaders, interferers, interlopers: the western powers, NATO, the supposedly civilised world. Lives and those things that make those lives are obliterated without a thought. It’s a price you have to pay, say the politicians and brass hats. It’s unavoidable. And there is the unvoiced subtext: it’s okay, it’s just collateral damage, it’s just ordinary people, they are of no significance.

If a bomber “took out” the family of Obama or Cameron or Sarkozy or Rasmussen or Petraeus, we would never hear the last of it. We would be asked and expected to feel and share that man’s pain. Does any one of them ever look back in the opposite direction at the Afghani man whose wife and children are killed by a misdirected US drone at a wedding, at the Libyan mother whose scared and ill-trained only son, obliged to defend Gaddafi, burns to death in a Libyan tank hit by a British missile more sophisticated than her family can ever hope to be?

The scars of the war in Vietnam will be visible – and present if invisible – for generations as yet unborn. Iraq, home to one of the world’s most ancient and lucid cultures, is a ruined land. So is Afghanistan. So soon will be Libya. Does nobody care about this wanton destruction of people and their civilisation?

Well, the NATO apologists will say, if the “great powers” had not acted, Gaddafi would have destroyed his own people? Would he? No one can ever know what would have happened had Libya been left to its own devices. What we know for certain is that Libya is wracked by civil war, a war that has been changed daily over five weeks by foreign powers. Everything that happens now in Libya is a product, to some degree, of the presence of sorties from the air by invaders. NATO is engaged and therefore is responsible. It is too easy merely to “blame” Gaddafi for everything. The invaders also have to own their actions.

In the modern world, as in the ancient, war is the option of first, not of last resort. Despots and governments, fundamentalists and rebels, generals and fighters stride into military confrontation with the intention of “winning”. It seems that they learn nothing from precedent. They have no plan B, no sense that the enemy may not fall down at the first puff of wind, no strategy for the unexpected, the long-drawn-out, the endgame. The moment that things stop being as a simple as a playground scrap, they start to tell lies, to seek to save face, to pretend that the end will be what is required, even if it turns out to be unrecognisably different from the stated or implied war aims at the outset.

Meanwhile, people die. The lives of ill-trained front-line troops are sacrificed. Bystanders who barely grasp the great causes at stake are mown down. Small children, whose task is not yet to comprehend the gutter into which they have been born, are orphaned, blinded, deprived of limbs, rendered zombies and mutes and psychopaths. Mean streets, the best that they know, are flattened. The earth is despoiled and will no longer sustain dependable crops.

And of course the damage done to the planet is not readily contained in the theatre of war. We may shit in the next field but the elements and the actions of living things bring the turds back into our own field. We unleash the dogs of war without taking the precaution of training them, directing them, studying their nature.

Humans have thousands of years of philosophy, diplomacy and historical study upon which to draw. How can it be beyond the glorious sophistication of mankind to contrive a mechanism whereby avenues other than taking up arms are comprehensively explored before a stone is thrown in anger? Cannot the UN be so constituted that territorial face-offs, tribal rivalries, disputed elections and perceived despotism are examined and the remedies negotiated before bodies and homes and productive land are destroyed?

Almost 2000 years ago, Tacitus wrote: “They have made a wasteland and called it peace”. In some translations, “wasteland” is rendered as “desert”. Perhaps those generals and politicians who talk airily about “drawing a line in the sand” in Libya – evidently unmindful that a line in the sand is about as easily eradicated a gesture as can be made – will consider, when they are done in that benighted land, whether they have enhanced the desert or merely rendered it unfit for habitation.

LIBYA – RATION the RHETORIC

Yesterday, on the eighth anniversary of the Commons vote in favour of the illegal invasion of Iraq, David Cameron laid before parliament the rationale for the United Nations’ resolution to impose a so-called no-fly zone on Libya. From the moral high ground on which Cameron plants his feet, the issue is so very simple. Gaddafi is a bad man and he must be taught a lesson. Primary schoolchildren could articulate the position just as persuasively. It is what I call The Bogie Man Theory of History, or, as the Americans would call it, The Boogey Man Theory.

Not that there is any significant opposition to this in the House. It has been observed before (though I am unable to verify an attribution) that “when the House is united, it is invariably wrong”. Yesterday confirmed that sentiment. Nick Clegg, whose party opposed the Iraq invasion, sat doing the gravely nodding dog act beside his coalition leader. Ed Miliband rushed to sound as resolute and determinedly courageous as Cameron, as if anybody gives a tuppenny damn what the British Labour Party says about the issue. You cannot expect sense from Labour on matters of British imperialism. I can never forget that, just a fortnight after describing himself as “an inveterate peacemonger”, Michael Foot (of all people) was unconditionally supporting Margaret Thatcher’s adventure in the south Atlantic, an exercise that, by itself, almost certainly kept the Tories in power (and so Labour out of office) for the following fifteen years.

Cameron in the Gulf States last month

Britain cannot stand idly by, is Miliband’s argument, while Gaddafi massacres his own people. Well, I want to ask: why not? What do the ambassadors of, for the sake of argument, Hungary, Barbados, Venezuela, Laos and Gabon have to say about the implied criticism that they are indeed perfectly happy to stand idly by? Why does Britain have to be the one who takes it upon herself to punish the bogie man of the sands? Apart from being the most extensive supplier in history of armaments to the country, Britain has no particular historical links with Libya, certainly none comparable to those of Italy, of which Libya was a colony for most of the first half of last century. Yet Silvio Berlusconi’s input into the no-fly zone argument is not widely recorded. Perhaps he has been too busy entertaining under-age women this week (as every other week).

Gaddafi cultivates the Ruritanian look

Throughout the thrilling people’s revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak earlier this year, we heard daily about how wonderful is the Egyptian army. So why didn’t the UN put pressure on Egypt to send its fabled troops over the border to repel Gaddafi? Other member states of the Arab League – Jordan, Kuwait and Morocco, for instance – have disciplined military strength. It makes considerably more geopolitical sense for Arab nations physically to lead the campaign to bring Gaddafi to heel.

Cameron, basking in evidently widespread approval for having played a supposedly canny hand with both the UN and the US, assures that he is not “grandstanding” on this matter. Of course he is. Cameron veers between invoking the “moral” argument that Miliband articulated and reassuring his political base that it is “in Britain’s interests” to lead the world’s reaction to Gaddafi’s rush towards civil war. These interests begin and end with the international supply and cost of oil. At least when he concedes that much, Cameron is approaching a soupçon of candour.

The argument about morality is bankrupt. When, on the BBC News last night, Nick Robinson asked the PM about his position on Bahrain, Cameron waved it away: different problem, different dynamic, different order of morality. Here’s a significant difference: picking a fight with the Saudi forces now called into the Bahraini kingdom to put down the rebellion is much more challenging than picking a fight with Gaddafi’s raggle-taggle air force of conscripted peasants and Saharan mercenaries. Clearly, the military might of a consortium consisting of Britain, France and – in the second wave perhaps – the USA is not going to have much trouble wiping out Libya’s military might.

Gaddafi visiting Berlusconi in Rome, 2009

Or is it? The invaders of Iraq and Afghanistan figured it would be the work of a few weeks at most. Libya might be as straightforward to quell as Serbia or it might not. Gaddafi has not lasted this long in power without being a wily and tough operator. The ceasefire announced yesterday by his foreign minister, the wonderfully named Mussa Kussa, is certainly a sham. But it has already had the desired effect. It has wrong-footed the west and sent governments into a further huddle. There will be more of this.

So Britain has embarked on another military interference in the internal affairs of another sovereign nation with consequences just as unknowable as they always are. The hubris – of the very interference, of the self-aggrandisement, of the cloak of proclaimed morality, of the certainty of military superiority – is breathtaking.

And then, seeing as no one seems yet to have asked, I ask it: who pays? Simple. We do. Today’s Daily Telegraph, while busy lining up Cameron for canonisation as a war leader, gaily trumpets on its front page that “some families will have £3,500 wiped off their annual incomes next month because of tax increases and cuts to benefits”. Oh good. How much less pain they will feel to know that this loss of income will now be largely spent on an utterly unpredictable big-willy experiment in the North African desert. How can a government that is in the throes of undermining – in some cases fundamentally undermining – every public enterprise in Britain gaily decide to throw money at a totally unnecessary interference in a foreign civil war?

Intimates no more – Sarkozy and Gaddafi in 2007

Well, you may say, what would you do? Just sit back and let Gaddafi massacre his brave populace? I am not a politician, nor about to be one. I don’t have to have a foolproof bill of fare ready to execute tomorrow. Nor do I have to accept the convention of starting from here. I do have a long-term proposal that, had it been put into effect when I first proposed it five years ago, might have avoided the situation that we now face. Here it is.

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?

Tony Blair enjoys a quick two-step with his good pal

The point of this exercise is to create a UN capable of credibly policing the behaviour of all member states. UN peacekeeping forces, made up of recruits from any and every member state, handsomely rewarded by all the members in proportion to their GDP, must be the only troops permitted to move freely across the territories of the disputing nations. And this should apply to internal, tribal and internecine strife as well as that between separate nations. 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.

Libyan rebels on the Benghazi road

The UN’s power to intervene in a sovereign nation’s internal affairs would be a more complex matter than preventing state-to-state confrontation. The UN’s remit should be truly global and therefore probably cannot be automatically parochial. Matters such as the suppression of a particular tribal or religious grouping within a nation state would have to be confronted on a case-by-case basis. But a case like that of Libya or indeed Bahrain is not so complex as to be beyond a newly-constituted UN to resolve. Moreover, 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. But that is a road down which to travel on another occasion.

In the absence of a UN rebuilt along the lines that I propose, we have another potential disaster taking shape in a country that can ill afford to be ravaged by years of war. Today‘s self-satisfied certainties in London and in Paris and, more cautiously, in Washington, may well look rather less confident tomorrow or a week or a month hence. We shall see. But at this particular moment, I feel like invoking an angry cry of just eight years ago: Not In My Name.

PARTY HARMANY

I find it hard to squeeze out many tears for the fate of Phil Woolas. The erstwhile MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth has been barred from elective public office for three years at a court hearing and banished to political outer darkness for rather longer than three years by the Labour leadership.

Woolas has always struck me as a chancer, not someone whom I would admit to my confidence. His offence during the election was, the court found, to have promulgated in his election literature an untruth about the campaign of his nearest rival, Elwyn Watkins, the Liberal Democrat candidate. Given that the Lib Dem was beaten by only 103 votes (there must have been a few recounts), it’s hardly surprising that Watkins should seek to overturn the result by other means.

Phil Woolas: if I pull my right ear, it means I'm fibbing

The complaint is that Woolas accused Watkins of “wooing Islamist extremists” in the constituency. As immigration minister in the outgoing government, Woolas ought to have been able to be relied upon to raise such an issue with authority and sensitivity. He cannot have helped his case at the election court by conceding that the disputed leaflet “sailed very close to the wind”.

What the leaflet (reproduced below) actually says is this: “Extremists are trying to hijack this election. They want you to vote Lib Dem to punish Phil for being strong on immigration. The Lib Dems plan to give hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants the right to stay. It is up to you. Do you want the extremists to win?”

The leaflet that did for Phil

It rather depends on where you are coming from whether you find this archetypally robust knock-about of the kind that occurs in elections or in one way or another unacceptable. The case has certainly raised a number of issues. The first is that of Islamophobia. Two days before the general election, the Lib Dem leader of Oldham Council lodged a complaint before the Equality and Human Rights Commission against the leaflet: “I believe that this type of inflammatory literature is incredibly detrimental to community relations and promoting equality” he wrote.

The Oldham Labour party’s conflation of immigration and extremism was certainly inflammatory and it seemed to yank a perfectly understandable nervousness in the community towards radical Islam into a much less sympathetic pitch – “strong on immigration” – that hardly differs from that of the BNP. But whether that constitutes an offence under the Representation of the People Act seems to me to be highly moot.

It’s perfectly legitimate to debate Islam and its acceptability or otherwise as a force in British society. Political leaders generally have allowed themselves to be persuaded that such discussion is somehow off-limits, both because it might suggest that one might be racist and because the Muslim vote is critical in several constituencies, usually Labour ones. In my view, politicians need to be a bit more grown-up and a bit braver in stating what they think. After all, Muslims living in Britain are considerably freer to pursue their superstitions than are non-Muslims in countries where Islam furnishes the government.

An earlier moment of Woolas fame, when bearded by Joanna Lumley (that look!) over the Gurkhas

Islamophobia – if that is indeed what is involved in this particular matter – does not derive from the same kind of perception as xenophobia. To put it in a nutshell, I would suggest that xenophobia is a response a priori and Islamophobia a posteriori. In the last week, a fanatical Islamist woman has been sentenced to life imprisonment for attempting to knife to death her constituency MP, Stephen Timms, like Woolas a minister in the outgoing government. Her rationale was that Timms had voted for the invasion of Iraq. So did hundreds of other MPs. Many more vote frequently on social and other issues in ways that would put them at odds with radical Islam. There is cause for concern here in a way quite different from generalised xenophobic rantings against an imagined “flood” of immigrants.

At the same time, it was widely commented during the election campaign that all the major parties were running away from immigration as an issue and refusing to debate it. As part of the post mortem discussions in all the parties – and especially in Labour – there was wide acknowledgment that the issue ought to have been addressed more thoroughly. Woolas might not have been actually discussing it in his literature but he certainly wasn’t ignoring it.

The Labour leadership has taken an impulsive and heedless line on Woolas, one that suggests a number of knee-jerk reactions based on fear: fear of being thought Islamophobic; fear of being thought soft on party transgressors; fear of a run of abuse from the media. By the Labour leadership, I mean just now Harriet Harman, who is acting leader in Ed Miliband’s absence on paternity leave (though she will doubtless have cleared her line with him). Her line, in short, is that Woolas has been hung out to dry.

Harriet Harman tells Andrew Marr what a good egg Phil Woolas is (not)

The parliamentary party gave Harman a rough ride at its meeting on Monday night. She was accused of pre-empting the final outcome of the case – Woolas is attempting to appeal the court’s decision and must raise £50,000 to pay his legal fees because Labour will no longer support him – and pandering to supposed public opinion which is probably misinformed. What’s more, beyond the Labour party, thoughtful members on the government benches have publicly wondered what restrictions are now likely to be deemed necessary in election literature and whether this doesn’t set a damagingly restrictive precedent.

As it happens, no party has been more often accused of conducting dirty campaigns than the Liberal Democrats. At the May 6th general election, I decided not to vote for our local Lib Dem candidate because he had made a wholly mendacious and unjustified charge against the Tory candidate and refused to withdraw; instead I cast my vote (vain in this Lib Dem/Tory marginal constituency) for the Labour candidate.

Politicians libel each other all the time; it’s part of the game. But the Woolas case has changed the rules. He is the first MP since 1911 to be barred from the Commons by court order. MPs across the house say that it should be for the electorate, not the courts to decide who sits in parliament. They have a point.

Furthermore, there is a dark suspicion that the Labour leadership feel confident about a by-election in a Labour marginal just now, especially one where the challenger is a Lib Dem. They reckon that aggrieved Mr Watkins will end up as toast, after having had to defend the policy reversals that his party have made since the election against a Labour favourite parachuted in for the occasion. (You may stake folding money on it that Oldham East and Saddleworth Labour Party will not get to select a candidate without firm direction from Central Office).

La Lumley reflects sadly on her little friend's fate in her own special way

The Lib Dems have certainly handed Labour a good case, what with comprehensively reneging on their highly trumpeted pledge to oppose any rise in university tuition fees and their broad support for a manifestly unfair assault on the unemployed and those claiming sickness benefit. What is the point of Lib Dems being in the coalition if they cannot effect as rigorous a squeeze on the tax-shy as their Tory partners are applying to the alleged “work-shy”?

The other ingredient in Harman’s position reiterates the spineless stance that all the parties have continually taken over the matter of MPs’ expenses. There is little doubt that the rules were confused and poorly enforced. MPs clearly ought to have sought to uphold the spirit as well as the letter of the regulations.

But the media embraces many much larger snouts that are forever in the trough and ministers and shadow ministers ought to have had the gumption to point this out. Fiddling exes and taking backhanders is no less egregious just because it occurs in the private rather than the public sector. On the contrary, successive Tory and Labour leaderships have bent over backwards and forwards to do the bidding of billionaire media owners, Rupert Murdoch in particular. Harman probably feared that The Times, The Sun and the Daily Mail would have kept up a daily barrage, had she waited to see whether Woolas won his court case. Well, sometimes leadership means stiffening your resolve against the daily slings and arrows in pursuit of the more just cause, even if the upshot takes time. The Woolas case, unattractive though its protagonist might be, is one of those occasions.

UNEASILY LED

A month tomorrow, we shall learn the result of the ballot for leadership of the Labour Party. The consensus among observers has been and remains that the winner, probably in the first vote, certainly after subsequent rounds when runners-up are progressively eliminated, will be David Miliband. The only rival thought to have a chance of upsetting that coronation is Miliband’s younger brother Ed. I find it hard to depart from this consensus.

Inevitability is not necessarily desirability. Gordon Brown’s elevation to prime minister was inevitable – and indeed formally unopposed – once Tony Blair agreed to step down. Would a contest have benefitted either party or country more? Would Brown’s authority have been reinforced by his having had to fight for his position? In the long run, probably not.

Presumably none of the five current contestants will be seen to have done other, by running, than enhance their respective standing in the party. The public may have different ideas. Those casting votes need first to consider who is most likely to carry sufficient swathes of the public in a general election to restore Labour to power. All else is academic if the party cannot be led into government. Once holding power, having it is worthless unless what is done with it is constructive and lasting. So the tests for each of the candidates are: is this person a credible, electable prime minister? Will this person use power to help make the world a better place for significant numbers of its citizens, both at home and abroad?


Not a prayer

The candidate upon whom the largest lorryload of doubt falls is Diane Abbott. She is the oldest candidate – 57 two days after the vote – and the longest serving in the house – 23 years. She is the only one to have had a real career outside politics but also the only one never to have held office. As a regular broadcaster, she is probably recognisable to a larger number of people than any of the others, possibly than all of the others put together. And of course she is distinguished from the other four in two dramatic ways: she is a woman and she is black. It is largely because of these distinctions – in her own account, indeed – that she is standing at all.

It is not inappropriate to discuss these attributes. Being a woman and being black both carry advantages and disadvantages. It is to be doubted if there is any such thing as “the women’s vote”, though that possibility is often posited. There is precious little evidence that Margaret Thatcher was either elected or re-elected by virtue of dominating the votes of women but not of men.

There may be a more coherent ethnic constituency. Barack Obama clearly did register deeply among non-white voters in America in November 2008. Such hostility as there was towards him within the white vote was nowhere near sufficient to deny him victory. But it is instructive and troubling that racist instincts, though expressed in a round-about manner, have surfaced in the American electorate in recent months. They inform a renewed notion that Obama is a “secret” Moslem and that his birth certificate was doctored to qualify him for office as a US citizen. These are notions redolent of paranoia. They also speak to the infantilism of much of public discourse in the US, a discourse simultaneously far more elevated (at its best) and far less (at its worst) than that in Britain. That a politically illiterate cartoon character like Sarah Palin can be widely seen as preferable to the most intellectually gifted individual to occupy the White House since Jack Kennedy and the most strategically cunning operator to do so since Lyndon Johnson tells a great deal about the power of myth, rumour and the raised voice in American public life.

Diane Abbott, let me quickly aver, is no Sarah Palin. She is clearly smart and experienced and she rarely trims to please anyone. In the house, she has become a genuine star performer, admired and valued on all sides – two years ago, she won the Parliamentary Speech of the Year Award, bestowed by the Tory periodical The Spectator.

But she has alienated people on some important issues. Educating her son privately has caused and continues to cause her a deal of grief, which she has perhaps not ameliorated by her evident inability to find a definitive, consistent and coherent defence of her decision. She also made a foolish error in neglecting to disclose BBC earnings to the parliamentary authorities, earnings made in a very public arena.

All this aside, however, the most damaging perception of her is the least articulated, most nebulous. That is that nobody believes that she could be elected over David Cameron. She is just too idiosyncratic, too unpredictable, too undiplomatic. Could she run a government? What has she done that suggests she could? Perhaps if she wins a seat in the elected shadow cabinet, we might have a better idea of how she might run a big department. I’d love to see her mettle tested by shadowing Teresa May at the Home Office, indeed by being Home Secretary herself.

I doubt, however, that she will be eliminated in the first round of voting. Though she scraped onto the ballot paper by virtue of John McDonnell dropping out, I suspect that MPs will now want to show their enlightenment by keeping her in at least longer than Andy Burnham. The former Secretary of State for Health seems destined to be the fall guy. In many ways, it is a pity. Burnham looks to have fought a brave and determined campaign, articulating positions that make the other male runners seem less populist and even more the policy wonks that in reality they are. Like Abbott, Burnham learned at least some of his politics in the school of hard knocks rather than all at the knees of party frontbenchers. His identification with “ordinary people” is perhaps overworked – there are plenty of Labour members with stronger ties to the working movement – and maybe emphasises the unalterable fact that nobody sees him as a prime minister.


Bambi

Whether Burnham is genuinely a lightweight or just contrives to look like one is maybe too dull a question to pursue. His Bambi-like features certainly tell against him and as he gets older – he’s now 40 – they probably will fail to dwindle into a look that is any more reassuring. In interview, he has an unfortunate habit of hesitating long enough before replying to sow the doubt that he has anything thought-through to say. Ultimately, you picture the moment when the Labour Party next decides to turn in on itself, you picture the house in full cry at PMQ’s, you picture the world stage and you wonder if it’s at all credible to imagine Burnham being PM within it.

Then there’s Ed Balls. He raises another ticklish question or two: does anybody really like Ed Balls? Does anybody really trust Ed Balls? I’m sure he would answer, quick as a flash: “yes – Gordon Brown”. And that, you see, Ed, may be the problem in a nutshell.

I’m sure the nation would get over the embarrassment of having a leader with that name. Ed himself has of course heard every “balls” joke ever invented and has even added one or two of his own. No politician can credibly make a joke of it now. Long, long ago, Michael Heseltine mocked the then shadow chancellor’s latest policy proposal (revealed as a brainwave of his most loyal lieutenant) to a delighted party conference – always Heseltine’s favourite audience – with the line: “Now we know the truth about this policy. It wasn’t Brown’s. It was Balls’.” That deftly killed the necessity ever to josh him for his name again.

Like Burnham, Balls has made some canny adjustments to Labour’s positions on several policies since the election. Any new leader will need to do no less. But why would anyone vote for Ed Balls when they could have Ed or David Miliband? Even Yvette Cooper – Mrs Balls, who many regret didn’t herself run – might be hard pressed to offer the conclusive answer to that question.


Shyster lawyer

So, will it be Miliband major or Miliband minor? David has a great many advantages, not just over Ed but over the whole field. He has served three years as Foreign Secretary. He has been a player on the world stage and patently comfortable in that spotlight. Hillary Clinton is weak-kneed with adoration of him. Such profile and such support is not to be discounted. David Cameron has a lot of catching up to do, still.

Miliband D is also clearly a skilful player at politicking. Offering Diane Abbott his own support if it helped her onto the leadership ballot paper reflected on him in good and bad ways – generous, patronising, self-confident, imaginative, tokenistic, embracing, hubristic, sharp-elbowed – but probably more pluses than minuses.

If Burnham looks like a Disney creature and Ed Balls looks like a shyster lawyer, the Millibands are pretty funny-looking too. Sadly, these things count nowadays. Ed Miliband is a disconcerting cross between Ken Dodd and Bernie Winters. It’s not a look this will wear well, especially if (as seems inevitable) he grows jowly. Brother David bears a disconcerting resemblance to Alfred E Newman, but then so did Tony Blair and it seemed to do him little harm. In any case, everybody takes a bad picture or two and those in politics – once dubbed Hollywood for ugly people – are photographed so regularly (and usually when they are speechifying or argufying) that the portfolios are packed with horrors.


Young Ken Dodd

David M is never going to live down those press pictures of him brandishing a banana and looking a dork but such a millstone is preferable to the still unresolved matter of Britain’s implication in the murky business of extraordinary rendition and the question mark over his own candour on the matter. Along with Andy Burnham, he supported the government’s position on all votes concerning the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and he has maintained his support since, though with the important rider that his support was garnered by the belief that Iraq held “weapons of mass destruction”.

Diane Abbott consistently voted against the Iraq strategy. Neither of the Eds was yet in the house in 2003; both now say they opposed the invasion and would have done so as MPs, a claim that not all can find it in themselves to credit.

Ed M may claim an international profile of his own, particularly after last year’s UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. In his policy statements during the leadership campaign, he has made the most intriguing proposals, shifts and commentaries, perhaps mindful that only by positioning himself in a less guarded place than his brother will he be able to prevail. Indeed, the greatest enemy to David Miliband’s chances of succeeding is probably the perception that he is being too conservative in both policies and tactics.

Looking across the field, however, it’s hard not to feel that Labour has a good prospect of emerging from this too drawn-out leadership selection with combative and broadly attractive leadership. Both Milibands are plainly strong and nimble in intellect. Not for nothing are they the sons of Ralph, the Marxist historian and propagandist of the highest order.

Is there a question over their Jewishness? There shouldn’t be, but any “difference” from the proscribed “norm” can be a liability. A century before David and Ed Miliband were born, Benjamin Disraeli was the first and only Jewish prime minister of Great Britain. The only other Jewish party leader in Britain has been Michael Howard, David Cameron’s immediate predecessor. There have been far more Jewish MPs on the Labour benches than on the Tory – and indeed far more women – but oddly it has been the Tory Party that has proved more enlightened in its choice of leaders.


Alfred E Newman

No Briton has ever entered Downing Street denying the supernatural. Either of the Milibands would do so and, to make matters “worse”, Ed would be accompanied by a partner – the mother of his son – to whom he is not married. Would the Labour establishment see a problem with that? Andy Burnham is a member of the Roman church and no such has ever been British prime minister (Tony Blair did not embrace Rome until after stepping down). Ed Balls is safely Anglican. Diane Abbott is unforthcoming about her beliefs but clearly understands that religion is relatively important in her constituency. But Abbott is also a divorcee, which would be another Downing Street first.

I would suggest that the British public is pretty relaxed on such issues. The party hierarchy may be less sanguine. But that may be just as true about policy. And if it were down to policy alone – which in an ideal world it would be – I think my vote, if I had one, would go to Miliband … Ed.

The AUDACITY of HYPE

If, like me, you’re only really familiar with the sophisticated cities of the east and west coasts, you doubtless find that it’s very easy to underestimate the depth of conservatism in the United States. Across great swathes of the mid-west and the deep south, attitudes that to you and me would seem absurdly primitive, grotesquely xenophobic and profoundly ignorant are seemingly the common currency of the day.

Much of this philosophy – if philosophy is not indeed too weighty a term for what is hardly above an animal instinct – must stem from the Puritan ancestry of rural and small-town white folks. Those non-conformist Anglican sects who would have no truck with any accommodation with “popery” – Anabaptists, Unitarians, Quakers, Congregationalists, Calvinists, Ranters, Muggletonians and all – constituted the Pilgrim Fathers who landed at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts in 1620 and began the second successful settlement of the New World, following that at Jamestown, Virginia. These were clearly “enough is enough” people.

The precipitate decline in support for Barack Obama by the end of his first year in office is hard to understand unless you accept that his very election in November 2008 was even harder to fathom. Americans elect Democrat presidents rather less often than they elect Republican ones, and liberal Democrats almost never at all. When the Democrats nominated their previously most liberal candidate since World War II, George McGovern in 1972, he won only two states against Richard Nixon: those havens of the east coast intelligentsia, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. McGovern – evidently hale and hearty at 87 as I write – couldn’t even take his home state of South Dakota. In the electoral college votes, the ones that actually secure the presidency, McGovern won just 17 to Nixon’s 520. In the modern era, only Ronald Reagan twelve years later gained more (525 to the not very liberal Walter Mondale’s 13) but, by a statistical quirk, the popular vote (ballots counted as totals rather than reckoned by distribution) was then very much closer than the electoral college difference suggests.


Presidential authority sealed

Moreover, once elections are done, support for Democrat incumbents usually falls away much more quickly than that for Republicans. Just as Obama has experienced, so support for Bill Clinton and for Jimmy Carter dropped below 50 percent by the end of each man’s first year in office. Obama’s current approval rating is lower than the lowest ever recorded during the administrations of either Dwight D Eisenhower or Franklin D Roosevelt, the latter of whom was elected to as many as four terms of office.

The astounding Senate win ten days ago for the Republicans in the same Massachusetts that voted for McGovern nearly four decades ago has rewritten the balance of power. In the curious Washington system, a party needs not merely a plurality but a twenty-seat majority in the Senate in order to carry its legislation. Below that dominance and the minority is allowed to filibuster – that is to say, to delay, harass and obstruct with impunity – until the administration either offers a compromise that the minority can accept or admits defeat and withdraws the measure. This is now the position on Capitol Hill. The joke is headlined thus: “Republicans win 41-59 majority in Senate”.

That the Republicans took this particular seat is a measure of how penetratingly the opposition to Obama has got its act together. This was Teddy Kennedy’s old fiefdom, and had been held by Democrats since Jack Kennedy took it from Henry Cabot Lodge Jr in 1952. The new senator, Scott Brown, is no box-checking party creature. He is pro-choice on abortion and even supports universal healthcare (though only for his home state where it is hardly needed), but he will not support Obama’s health insurance reform bill that was within a whisker of being passed into law and now is imperilled. On the other hand, he advocates waterboarding of terrorism suspects and opposes legislation to reduce carbon emissions. (I was sorry that the Democrat lost; although she was reportedly very uninspiring politically, she does apparently possess an encyclopaedic knowledge of Broadway musicals).


Logo of Fox News

Despite at least one headline about the senate result that will have gladdened hearts in Downing Street (“Big Win for Brown”), Barack Obama remains the hope of the whole world beyond the boundaries of the United States. This is a mirror image of the status of his predecessor. George W Bush was considered a bozo from the get-go right across the planet (especially in Europe) but remained hugely popular in the States, certainly until his response to Hurricane Katrina and the devastation it caused in and around New Orleans, a domestic miscalculation that began the erosion of his authority.

For the foreseeable future, Republicans are likely to continue to benefit electorally from any significant level of disenchantment with the Obama administration. But it is certainly not the GOP that has marshalled the opposition. The party is still in disarray and no one can guess which of its several strands will prevail in time to lead the campaign for the mid-term elections in November.


Dissenting version of the logo

Rather, the opposition has been sharpened by vested interests, particularly those in the media. Whatever their particular political inclination, media outlets continue to be fascinated by Sarah Palin and afford her endless free publicity. Palin is at best a semi-detached representative of the Republicans and, were she to begin seriously positioning herself for a presidential run in 2012, you can bet your boots that the Grand Old Party would be looking hard for a rather more mainstream alternative. Meanwhile, she acts as a lightning rod for inarticulate, ill-informed rage (always a potent ingredient in politics).

In another part of the forest, the phenomenon of The Tea Party has galvanised populist reaction – though doubtless quietly funded by vested interests – against the present administration. Naming itself after the legendary revolt against the British tax on exports of tea that broke out in Boston harbour (Massachusetts again) in 1773 and became the pivotal event in the campaign for American independence, the modern Tea Party was launched in 2006, originally as an independent libertarian movement. In the last year, the incidence of Tea Party gatherings has gathered pace, concentrating its attack on what it characterises as the “Socialist” and “big government” policies of Obama.


A billboard rewrites the tagline

The Tea Party is a natural for a media looking for colourful images of disaffection from government. The lately crowned leader of such media outlets is the satellite and cable channel Fox News. Founded as recently as 1996, Fox News has made remarkable advances in influence by rewriting the rulebook of broadcasting’s coverage of news, current affairs and politics. Fox’s owner Rupert Murdoch has noted the popular appeal of radio’s “shock jocks” – Rush Limbaugh and his kind – and gradually unleashed a similar approach on a television station that purports to report the events of the day. (By the by, a measure of the success of such approaches may be that my spellchecker always questions ‘Obama’ but has no problem with ‘Limbaugh’, and that’s not because ‘limbaugh’ has any separate meaning as a noun – the OED does not recognise it).

Traditionally, western media has carefully positioned itself in a non-partisan stance, at least in party terms. (Only utterly blinkered media apologists would suggest that even the most diligent media outlets are wholly agnostic on every issue. One only has to recall the occasion in the polarised 1970s when BBC newsreader Angela Rippon read out the phrase “trade unionists and other extremists”). Republicans and other extremists have always chastised this even-handed stance as “liberal bias” because, to them, straight reporting can only be the kind that reinforces all their prejudices. This is the kind of reporting that Fox News gives them by the bucketload. Straightfaced, the two slogans most used by Fox are “Fair & Balanced” and “We Report. You Decide”. You don’t need to watch much of the Fox output to be able to decide.

Once more the essential conservatism of middle America was dramatically illustrated in a survey of attitudes to news coverage conducted last September by Sacred Heart University of Connecticut (New England yet again). Since the first such research in 2003, Fox News has decisively overtaken CNN as the US’s “most trusted” television news channel, garnering a rating of 30 percent. The context, though, was a “significant decline” of general belief in news reporting to 24.3 percent. One of the survey’s most revealing findings was that 59 percent of respondents reckon to choose their news source for its “objective reporting” against 19 percent because that source reflected the viewer’s own outlook. If ever there was poll evidence that depended on the respondent’s subjective rather than objective view, this was it.


Fox promotes The Tea Party

What should we make of all this? The Sacred Heart survey was conducted by telephone with 800 individuals. The Guardian’s report of the poll (January 28th, but written as if the findings were new) differed in many details from the information that I found on Sacred Heart’s website, including its report of the number of respondents: 1,151, described by the paper, but not by the website, as “registered voters”. Either way, it is a vanishingly minuscule sample in a voting-age population above 231million. How much weight can we possibly give such a poll?

That disenchantment with Obama is widely felt in the States is, however, clear. My gut feeling is that it will pass, that Obama is very shrewd and understands exactly what is at stake and how to play it. At this point in the electoral cycle, it only matters insofar as the Massachusetts aberration shifts the balance of power. But the new balance could well prove to be a bear-trap into which the Republicans easily fall. If the electorate feels that the recession is not ending quickly enough but also sees that the President cannot get his programme through, it may well take out its frustration on the obstructive senators. Obama is playing a long game and he still holds a strong hand. November in the US – even more than May 6th in the UK – is still a long way off.


Another survey of news channels

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Yesterday will surely have been the last occasion on which anyone can have hoped to call Tony Blair to account for throwing in his lot with George W Bush and invading Iraq in 2003. Facing the Chilcot Enquiry, the former Prime Minister and (let’s not forget) barrister was masterly after a tense start; this was clearly a dry run for the definitive account that will furnish the centrepiece of his forthcoming autobiography.

More significantly for the present purpose, he was allowed to be masterly. Even though the enquiry members must be well played in by now, they seemed greatly overawed by this political superstar. On two crucial aspects of his perception of the choices that faced him, they failed to press Blair: the matter of the legality of invading a sovereign state (much explored in previous sessions with Lord Goldsmith and other members of the Blair cabinet) and the notion of a connection between the regime in Baghdad and the operations of al-Qaida.

On the second of those issues, Blair was allowed to get away with the smart retort that “the crucial thing after September 11th was that the calculus of risk changed”. In other words, anyone whom we didn’t trust was capable of committing unimaginable outrages against our citizens (noting that Blair also said “I never regarded September 11th as an attack on America. I regarded it as an attack on us” and his definition of “us” might have been usefully challenged). This begs the question: why did we/do we not invade Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, China, the Yemen and, if regime change is itself a legitimate objective, why exclude Myanmar, Zimbabwe or Kyrgyzstan? While we are at it, Russia is clearly embarked on a systematic elimination of dissident and irritating journalists. As Ronald Reagan once proposed when he thought mics were off, “let’s bomb Russia”. The world, Mr Blair, is your lobster. As it happens, it seems from his testimony that, were he still PM, we would have attacked Iran by now. And you thought you were worse off under Gordon Brown.


Coat of arms of the British government

But the key to Blair’s self-justification lies in his brilliantly simple formula that, I have no doubt, will go down in the lexicon of all-time political sayings: “This is not about a lie or a conspiracy or a deceit or a deception. It’s a decision”. Oh, that’s deathless. That’s worthy of Richard III, Macbeth, Milton’s Satan. With that one bound, he is free. He made a decision. You can of course debate whether it was a correct decision. But whatever you decide, it is intrinsically legitimate. It is what politicians are elected to do. You cannot now impugn his morality. He did his job.

The closing question – as to whether Blair would proffer anyone any kind of apology – seems to me to be fruitless and infantile. In all humanity, I cannot comprehend the grounds upon which the families of service personnel who died imagine they are entitled to some kind of mea culpa. Blair clearly believes with all the fibre of his being that he did the right thing. So did Churchill in leading the nation against Nazi Germany for most of the duration of World War II. So did Thatcher in sending the fleet to the Falklands. That military people lost their lives is what happens in war. At perfectly comprehensible levels of perception, that’s what they’re for. Of course the families of people sent to the front line hope that they will return alive and unmaimed but they can ask for no more succour than that. (Care of invalided service personnel is an altogether separate and historically shaming issue that I have addressed before).

If Blair is content that the invasion of Iraq was morally and politically defensible, he has nothing to apologise for. If any apologising is to be done, I would rather it be offered to the civilians who were injured and the families of those civilians who perished. They had none of the advantages that the invading military took for granted. If Blair has blood on his hands it is that of innocent Iraqis.

CRACKING the SAFE

How many of your rights would you be prepared to forgo in order to assist the attempts of the authorities to foil terrorism? I ask as one who was, for many years, a member of the National Council for Civil Liberties (now known simply as Liberty) and who has always argued that to surrender our freedoms to security forces is no better than to surrender them to supposed enemies of the state.

But let us cleave to the principle that motivates this very blog, that of common sense. Some of the rights that we like to holler after barely deserve the term. So don’t let us mistake a few moments (or even a few hours) of inconvenience and/or indignation for a loss of our precious heritage.

Take the increasing controls and filtering processes being introduced at airports. There are those who argue powerfully that body-scanning devices are intrusive, and that being confined to one’s seat for the hour before touchdown is an imposition. Moreover, some argue that Muslims and others of Arabic origin or appearance are apt to feel that immigration officers and airline officials discriminate against them.

I find myself unsympathetic to these objections. Boarding a plane is not some god-given right. Of course if you are turned away or gravely incommoded, you should be recompensed. But the airlines and the airports have every right to refuse entry to anyone of whom they entertain suspicion. Further, they have a duty to monitor and, where it seems prudent, to exclude any would-be traveller against whom questons are raised. If you don’t like it, go by bike. You don’t have a right but you do have a choice.

Given that searches and restrictions are advertised in advance of check-in, travellers should be responsible for making provision for whatever delays and deprivations they may endure. Anyone who has ever passed through an international airport knows that a propensity for delay is endemic to the process, even on routes that are unlikely ever to attract political trouble.

The restrictions presently applied seem to me to be entirely commensurate with the threat, the perceived level of which has been raised in the UK in the last 48 hours to “severe” – which translates as a situation in which an imminent terrorist attack is thought to be “highly likely”. And why is now an appropriate moment to raise the supposed threat level? Well, it’s pretty obvious: this week, London will host a summit on the future of Afghanistan. President Karzai, Secretary Clinton and several other juicy quarries will be here and the whole event naturally presents itself as a target. If London at least didn’t go on heightened alert, you’d be a bit surprised.

If anything, the conditions that apply to air travel err on the side of laxity. There is no earthly (or mile-high) reason why cigarette lighters should be allowed in hand luggage: what useful purpose could such implements possibly serve on a flight and, if such a purpose can be identified, why cannot cabin crew be furnished with lighters for supervised, temporary loan to passengers who have need of them? Nonetheless, lighters are still permitted at a restriction of one per passenger. Anyone wanting to convey his invaluable collection of rare lighters of the world from one country to another needs to stow them in the hold or make arrangements to have them shipped. Tough. If it were up to me, I would not permit either cigarette lighters or matches in anybody’s hand luggage.

Are Muslims justified in complaining that their rights are compromised if they are seen to be more liable for more comprehensive physical searches and passenger profiling than others? No. It would be an absurd system wherein a retired Anglican vicar and his wife, returning from visiting their daughter and her family in New Zealand to their home in The Wirral, were given the third degree, while a single man in his twenties with a Muslim name and Arabic appearance, stopping over at LHR on a flight from the Yemen to JFK and presenting a passport containing evidence of substantial trips to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, were waved through. Those who target planes are Muslim fundamentalists. Is anyone dissenting from that summary?

I know that it is maddening to feel that one is being tarred with a brush that applies to others who only bear a superficial resemblance to oneself. For years from the early 1980s, I detected an arms’ length treatment from many people – even some who knew me and trusted me, as I thought – because I was a gay man. The suspicion, perhaps only subconscious, that I might somehow be a conduit for Aids undoubtedly lurked in many minds. I hated it but, even at the time, I understood it. Though not HIV+, I duly destroyed my donor card and I did not press kisses and other intimate attentions upon any in whom I sensed some residual reluctance. One has to live in the world as it is and be realistic. It doesn’t help to act in a self-righteous manner.

Detailed and, at times, unexpected security is essential to the safety of every passenger and of others on the ground who are not even aware of any threat from above. We do not want to find ourselves in the position of saying “yes, it’s awful that all those people died when the flight from Mogadishu exploded as it circled over Chicago but thank goodness none of those passengers died feeling that they had been affronted or inconvenienced; and of course the people who died on the ground had no grounds for complaint, so that’s a mercy”.

The problem, as always, is the egregious advantage that the security forces – most especially the police – are inclined to take of our acquiescence in the erosion of our rights. From the shooting dead by Met marksmen of Jean Charles de Menezes on an underground train at Stockwell station to the wounding of Mohammed Abdulkahar in the police raid on the Forest Gate house he shared with his brother, the police have not only exceeded their authority and basic standards of good practice but have sought to absolve themselves of blame and, supported in this aim by the structure of enquiry and internal discipline, protect themselves from any deleterious upshot for the police in general or the officers involved in particular.

Clearly, if the populace are to accept that greater and more intrusive powers are to be ceded to police and other security services, the control of those powers and its own policing must be taken away from parti pris committees and given to genuinely independent bodies with wide and penetrating dispensation. It is not good enough for self-righteous police authorities to exonerate officers and commanders who have clearly exceeded their brief, any more than it is acceptable for the Army to find nothing amiss at Deepcut Barracks.

By the same token, I confess I am not sanguine that the Chilcot Enquiry will achieve any more than the effective exculpation of those who ought to be in jail for their responsibility for the illegal invasion of Iraq. The establishment commonly takes care of its own.

In this unstable world, our rights and freedoms are a bulwark against creeping dictatorship. But we shall enjoy no rights or freedoms at all if we dare not go about our business for fear of suicide bombers breaching a defence that is too light and too scrupulous to risk putting any of us to inconvenience.

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Votes and comments on Irritating and Overrated Public Figures are still welcome: see the immediately previously posting. We are a tad short of the 1,500 responses I had aimed for. It’s up to you …