Paul Anderson, Tribune column, July 29 2005
First it was George Galloway and the Socialist Workers Party. Then came Robin Cook and Chatham House, then a leak from the Joint Terrorist Analysis Centre — and this week even John Major joined the club.
Yes, they’ve all come to the conclusion that 7/7 was “linked to” the war in Iraq, something the government has spent the past three weeks vigorously denying.
And it seems that most Brits agree with them. A Populus poll for The Times published on Tuesday showed that nearly two-thirds of voters think that Tony Blair’s decision to take Britain to war in Iraq has “increased the risk of terrorist attacks like the ones this month in London”.
All of which has got the cretino-leftist tendency in the anti-war camp very excited. “The stoicism that was largely a media-political construct is already turning into frustration,” wrote John Kampfner, editor of the New Statesman, in the Guardian this week. “Watch it turn into anger as Blair refuses to acknowledge a link between Iraq and terrorism on our streets.”
Well, maybe — but I suspect it won’t work out as Kampfner and others like him expect and want. “Linked to” is one thing; “caused by” quite another. There’s a massive difference between believing the war in Iraq “increased the risks of terrorist attack” and believing it was the main reason the bombers did what they did. And most Brits (some 80 per cent according to a YouGov poll) don’t reckon it was the main reason.
I think they are right. There is no evidence of any direct connection between Iraq and the perpetrators of either 7/7 or the attempted repeat performance a fortnight later.
None of them, as far as we know, ever lived there or had family or friends killed or wounded in the war. As far as we know, the Iraq war could have been a factor in their actions only insofar as they were opposed to or angry about it.
And a decision to commit indiscriminate murder of civilians on the streets of a city does not flow easily (let alone automatically) from this — even if you see the war as an assault by infidels on your religion and your co-religionists.
Millions of people, both Muslims and non-Muslims, were or are angry about Iraq and have never even considered setting off bombs on public transport. (I am one of them.)
Something else is at least as important here as anger at the war, at minimum a belief that random terrorist murder is justifiable in certain circumstances. This could in theory be simply a matter of the bombers adopting a brutal utilitarian calculus related solely to Iraq — “If we let off bombs in London we will kill innocent people but will hasten withdrawal of the west from Iraq, which will result in fewer deaths in the long run” — but somehow I doubt it was as rational as that.
All the evidence suggests that the bombers were fanatical Islamist jihadists, committed to unremitting war by any means possible to secure a worldwide totalitarian Islamist state and convinced that their self-immolation would guarantee them the highest possible status in the afterlife. If we’re looking for the causes of or reasons for the London outrages, we can’t ignore or explain away this vile, narcissistic, fascist ideology.
The rise of jihadist Islamism long predates the Iraq war. And although jihadism has undoubtedly fed upon popular antipathy among Muslims towards what they see as US and British imperialism in league with (or indeed controlled by) the forces of Zionism, it is much more than a response to particular, in principle reversible, western policies.
The jihadists are not just sworn enemies of western intervention in Iraq or Afghanistan or elsewhere. They are also sworn enemies of tolerance, democracy and freedom to act autonomously in every area of everyday life, all of which they consider anti-Islamic.
They want to eliminate secularism, political pluralism and intellectual and sexual freedoms not just in historically Islamic societies but throughout the world. They think they have a God-given right to use any means to achieve their goal and they glory in dying for the cause.
It is wishful thinking to believe they would simply leave us alone if we got out of Iraq and disowned Ariel Sharon. We would still be targets.
So how do we deal with them? There is a superficially simple answer: we should relentlessly expose their ideology for what it is and oppose them wherever we find them, with force if necessary.
The problem is putting this into practice. No one really knows who they are or where they are.
Jihadism is not run by an Islamintern that could be disabled or at least significantly damaged by pin-point military strikes on some HQ in north-west Pakistan. As we have seen in the past three weeks, even in Britain, with its long experience of IRA terrorism, the domestic security state finds it hard to keep tabs on the jihadists. Even the bombers’ families were unaware of their plans.
This means that rooting out jihadism will be a long, slow, frustrating policing process with plenty of setbacks. But there really isn’t anyfeasible alternative.
27 July 2005
16 July 2005
7/7 - 3
Ian Buruma has a characteristically insightful piece in the FT magazine today, taking on leftist attempts to pin the blame for the London bombings on Tony Blair and George Bush:
It would be foolish to deny that western powers have done many bad things, but the arrogant assumption that almost all the world’s ills, from African hunger to mass murder on the London Underground, can be laid at the door of western politicians is not only stupid, but deeply harmful to those who live outside the western world. It lets their own rulers, however murderous, off the hook, and prevents people from taking responsibility for their own societies. After all, if everything is the fault of Blair or Bush, or “neo-colonialism”, or “globalisation”, why bother?Read it all here.
The war in Iraq may not have been a sensible move. It probably did galvanise religious extremism. For the record, I was against it. But to claim that we should not have gone to war with Saddam Hussein because it puts us in the firing line of holy warriors seems a bad, and certainly cowardly argument. Britain would have been in their firing line anyway. Contrary to what Faisal Bodi says, jihadis do have an axe to grind with the western world. Long before Iraq was a gleam in Blair’s eyes, the west was in the holy warrior’s “sphere of hate”. Another false argument against action against Middle Eastern despots is that “we put them there”. Even if it is true that, say, Hussein or Osama bin Laden once had the support of Britain or the US, this is hardly a reason not to oppose them now. Should we have turned a blind eye to their crimes just because Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney once did business with them? This smacks of the same perverted logic which holds that an imperial past should prevent Europeans from condemning the bloody dictatorships that followed the independence of former colonies.
12 July 2005
7/7 – 2
If the Metropolitan Police are right, 7/7 was the work of British subjects. The Met says that four rucksack-carrying men, three of them from West Yorkshire, were caught on CCTV at Kings Cross at around 8.30am last Thursday; that their personal effects have been discovered at three of the four murder sites; that all four are British-born; and that material associated with the bombings has been discovered at one of their addresses in West Yorkshire and in a car parked at Luton station.
The cops have been wrong before, and they could be wrong again. But hunch tells me that they are not making this up in desperation, as they did after the IRA’s Guildford and Birmingham bombings 30 years ago. Although the police are at present being studiously vague about the identities of the Yorkshiremen they suspect of murder, everything suggests they were jihadist Muslim suicide bombers. How people respond in the next few days will be critical in determining what sort of society we live in.
The nightmare scenario is a spate of attacks on mosques and on individual Muslims. I hope nothing will happen, I suspect there will be sporadic incidents, I fear it could get very nasty indeed. The fascists of the BNP are stoking up hatred – with a message that echoes in significant ways that of the Stop the War Coalition and Respect, condemning “Blair and his Labour regime which has committed British troops to a war in the Middle East” for the outrages – and there will be plenty of drunk racist bigots leaving pubs tonight and tomorrow and later in the week intent on “doing something”. The police will have to be particularly vigilant to stop them.
But the best way to counter any surge of anti-Muslim viciousness is to demonstrate our calm opposition to terror. Go to the TUC's gathering in Trafalgar Square on Thursday evening, or organise something similar in your own locality.
The cops have been wrong before, and they could be wrong again. But hunch tells me that they are not making this up in desperation, as they did after the IRA’s Guildford and Birmingham bombings 30 years ago. Although the police are at present being studiously vague about the identities of the Yorkshiremen they suspect of murder, everything suggests they were jihadist Muslim suicide bombers. How people respond in the next few days will be critical in determining what sort of society we live in.
The nightmare scenario is a spate of attacks on mosques and on individual Muslims. I hope nothing will happen, I suspect there will be sporadic incidents, I fear it could get very nasty indeed. The fascists of the BNP are stoking up hatred – with a message that echoes in significant ways that of the Stop the War Coalition and Respect, condemning “Blair and his Labour regime which has committed British troops to a war in the Middle East” for the outrages – and there will be plenty of drunk racist bigots leaving pubs tonight and tomorrow and later in the week intent on “doing something”. The police will have to be particularly vigilant to stop them.
But the best way to counter any surge of anti-Muslim viciousness is to demonstrate our calm opposition to terror. Go to the TUC's gathering in Trafalgar Square on Thursday evening, or organise something similar in your own locality.
8 July 2005
7/7 – 1
I spent most of yesterday thinking I’d had a lucky escape. I overslept and missed the 7.21 train from Ipswich to London. If I’d caught it, I’d have arrived at Liverpool Street just as the first bomb exploded there. As it was, my train was stopped at Chelmsford and turned back. It was clear something major was up – and I suspected a terrorist attack even though the BBC’s WAP news service was telling me it was a power surge. Back home late in the morning, I switched on the TV and watched in horror as the full extent of the outrages became clear. For the next few hours I anxiously text-messaged and emailed friends and family to find out how they were and to reassure them I was alive and well.
I discovered when I woke up today that I wouldn’t have been harmed if I'd caught the 7.21. The bomb went off on a Circle Line train travelling into Liverpool Street underground from Aldgate. It wouldn’t have got me even if I’d decided to take the tube rather than my usual bus. And as far as I am aware, no one I know or love was killed or injured in any of the blasts, though five or six people had much closer shaves than I did.
I am of course pleased to be alive and relieved that my friends and family are OK. But this in no sense diminishes either my horror at what these evil murderers have done or my solidarity with those who were killed or mutilated or who lost loved ones. “Only” 50 (or maybe a few more) may have died, a death toll that is small by comparison with 9/11 or even Madrid. But precisely because, like millions of others, I know that with just the simplest twist of fate it could have been me or my family, my friends or my colleagues, I empathise completely with everyone whose luck ran out.
And I mean everyone. Ken Livingstone has been widely praised for his emotional condemnation of the attacks, in which he emphasised that the victims of the bombings were ordinary working-class Londoners going about their everyday business. I’m sure he didn’t mean to imply that the bombings would have been legitimate had the victims been stockbrokers travelling to their clubs in the West End – but I’m not so certain about others who have emphasised the humble origins of the dead and injured. The Socialist Workers Party in particular gives the impression that the main problem with the bombings was that they were directed at proletarian opponents of the war in Iraq rather than the G8 leaders in Gleneagles.
The SWP and the rest of the cretino-left that blames the bombings on the Iraq war – George Galloway, Tariq Ali et cetera – are beneath contempt. Their mealy-mouthed apologias for terrorist murder cannot be taken seriously and their take on the impact of the 7/7 outrages is risible. But they are not alone in failing to grasp what happened yesterday.
The Guardian’s comment pages today include – as well as a rant from Ali – pieces from Robin Cook, Polly Toynbee and Sher Khan arguing, respectively, that poverty is at the root of Islamist terror, that it doesn’t really matter much who was responsible for the outrages – “the minds of those who did it seem too remote to understand, too unknowable” – and that the bombings have nothing to do with Islam as a faith, which roundly condemns murder.
All three articles make valid points, but their common refusal to accept the religious motivation of the jihadists who appear to have been responsible for the bombings is extraordinary. If London is indeed the latest in the series of outrages that includes 9/11, Bali and Madrid – and I accept that it might not be, though like me all three writers assume it is – it is essential to take seriously the professed ideology of the perpetrators rather than dismiss or ignore it.
I have no desire to provoke anti-Muslim hysteria: the overwhelming majority of Muslims are people who would have no truck with the theory or practice of Osama bin Laden and his henchmen. But, as Amir Taheri makes clear in the Times, the unavoidable facts are that the jihadists are Muslims, of a particularly fanatical kind, and that they do what they do because they believe what they do. Their appeal to the dispossessed, the strangeness of their beliefs to everyone else and their antipathy to most Muslims are all important. But liberals and leftists need to grasp that even though Islam is not in itself the enemy, one strain in it very definitely is.
As Christopher Hitchens and others have made clear, there is a civil war going on in the Islamic world, and the jihadists are the enemies of tolerance, of democracy, of decency, of humanity – everything that most Muslims, and indeed most non-Muslims, hold dear. I think, after seeing the heroic efforts of the emergency services and the rock-solid determination of Londoners to carry on in defiance, that most Britons know which side they are on. I have never felt more proud to be British than in the past couple of days. And I'm not at all worried that, if we demonstrated against terror, the show would be hijacked by either the apologists for Islamofascism or by the racist right. We should get out on to the streets – and show the world that we will never surrender our tolerant secular society or our democracy to murderous religious bigots.
I discovered when I woke up today that I wouldn’t have been harmed if I'd caught the 7.21. The bomb went off on a Circle Line train travelling into Liverpool Street underground from Aldgate. It wouldn’t have got me even if I’d decided to take the tube rather than my usual bus. And as far as I am aware, no one I know or love was killed or injured in any of the blasts, though five or six people had much closer shaves than I did.
I am of course pleased to be alive and relieved that my friends and family are OK. But this in no sense diminishes either my horror at what these evil murderers have done or my solidarity with those who were killed or mutilated or who lost loved ones. “Only” 50 (or maybe a few more) may have died, a death toll that is small by comparison with 9/11 or even Madrid. But precisely because, like millions of others, I know that with just the simplest twist of fate it could have been me or my family, my friends or my colleagues, I empathise completely with everyone whose luck ran out.
And I mean everyone. Ken Livingstone has been widely praised for his emotional condemnation of the attacks, in which he emphasised that the victims of the bombings were ordinary working-class Londoners going about their everyday business. I’m sure he didn’t mean to imply that the bombings would have been legitimate had the victims been stockbrokers travelling to their clubs in the West End – but I’m not so certain about others who have emphasised the humble origins of the dead and injured. The Socialist Workers Party in particular gives the impression that the main problem with the bombings was that they were directed at proletarian opponents of the war in Iraq rather than the G8 leaders in Gleneagles.
The SWP and the rest of the cretino-left that blames the bombings on the Iraq war – George Galloway, Tariq Ali et cetera – are beneath contempt. Their mealy-mouthed apologias for terrorist murder cannot be taken seriously and their take on the impact of the 7/7 outrages is risible. But they are not alone in failing to grasp what happened yesterday.
The Guardian’s comment pages today include – as well as a rant from Ali – pieces from Robin Cook, Polly Toynbee and Sher Khan arguing, respectively, that poverty is at the root of Islamist terror, that it doesn’t really matter much who was responsible for the outrages – “the minds of those who did it seem too remote to understand, too unknowable” – and that the bombings have nothing to do with Islam as a faith, which roundly condemns murder.
All three articles make valid points, but their common refusal to accept the religious motivation of the jihadists who appear to have been responsible for the bombings is extraordinary. If London is indeed the latest in the series of outrages that includes 9/11, Bali and Madrid – and I accept that it might not be, though like me all three writers assume it is – it is essential to take seriously the professed ideology of the perpetrators rather than dismiss or ignore it.
I have no desire to provoke anti-Muslim hysteria: the overwhelming majority of Muslims are people who would have no truck with the theory or practice of Osama bin Laden and his henchmen. But, as Amir Taheri makes clear in the Times, the unavoidable facts are that the jihadists are Muslims, of a particularly fanatical kind, and that they do what they do because they believe what they do. Their appeal to the dispossessed, the strangeness of their beliefs to everyone else and their antipathy to most Muslims are all important. But liberals and leftists need to grasp that even though Islam is not in itself the enemy, one strain in it very definitely is.
As Christopher Hitchens and others have made clear, there is a civil war going on in the Islamic world, and the jihadists are the enemies of tolerance, of democracy, of decency, of humanity – everything that most Muslims, and indeed most non-Muslims, hold dear. I think, after seeing the heroic efforts of the emergency services and the rock-solid determination of Londoners to carry on in defiance, that most Britons know which side they are on. I have never felt more proud to be British than in the past couple of days. And I'm not at all worried that, if we demonstrated against terror, the show would be hijacked by either the apologists for Islamofascism or by the racist right. We should get out on to the streets – and show the world that we will never surrender our tolerant secular society or our democracy to murderous religious bigots.
7 July 2005
SCUM
The outrages in London are the work of enemies of humanity. There should be massive demonstrations throughout Britain this weekend to show our solidarity against them.
30 June 2005
ID CARDS, ID SCHMARDS
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 1 July 2005
I know columnists are supposed to have trenchant opinions about everything, but I just can’t get myself worked up over identity cards. After weeks of reading all the arguments and chewing them over, I’ve come to an unpalatable conclusion: frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.
An outrageous assault on all the liberties the freeborn Englishman has held dear since Magna Carta, as the civil liberties lobby would have it? Give us a break. We’re already under potentially constant surveillance from the state and from various commercial interests whose records it can access and co-ordinate with ease — and ID cards wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference.
In the past week, I’ve filed my tax return online and been paid by an employer whose records are sent as a matter of course to the Inland Revenue and to whomsoever it is these days that deals with National Insurance and pension contributions. Direct debits have gone out of my bank account to pay my council tax, mortgage, various utility bills and trade union and Labour Party subs. I’ve used a debit card to buy groceries from Sainsbury’s, a carpet from the Co-op, rail tickets, books and CDs, several rounds of drinks and a couple of meals. (And when I ordered online at Sainsbury’s I was reminded what I bought when I shopped there in the last three months.)
I need a swipe card to get into work, though I’ve no idea whether the machine that lets me in records my arrival. The computer in the local library retains the information on my borrowings. And I’m recorded on countless closed-circuit television cameras whenever I leave the house or the office.
OK, I use a firewall on my computer at home and regularly sweep my system for spyware — but it would be a piece of cake for the state to monitor my email and web surfing. The same goes for my mobile phone usage, right down to tracking where I am whenever my phone is on. Next time I go abroad the chances are that my passport details will be logged by some official at some point on the journey. Thank the Lord I’m not a driver burdened with licence records and congestion charge fines . . .
Sometimes, it’s true, I find this all rather intrusive. For Sainsbury’s to remind me that my “usual” includes 20-odd beers and half-a-dozen Italian red wines is, well, sobering. I’m sick of junk mail and spam churned out by companies and campaigns that have my details on their databases. And in my nightmares I worry that if it came to the crunch and the BNP or Respect won state power, it would be all too easy for the bastards to track me down.
But the bastards aren’t in power, and for the most part I’m not that bothered by the fact that my movements and habits are constantly recorded and stored. It’s one of those things about modern life you put up with in return for the convenience of getting goods when you need them and avoiding queues and form-filling.
My real gripe is that the system doesn’t work properly. Three years ago I was the victim of a crude attempt at identity theft. Someone had picked up something addressed to me at a flat (in a shared block) I’d left a couple of years before, and had applied for several credit cards in my name. The credit card companies did not issue the cards and reported the attempted fraud to the police — who did nothing — and to the companies that list people’s credit ratings. They promptly put me on a blacklist. Result: an all-round pain in the butt that took the best part of two years to sort out.
A state ID card would have been a help in all that: it would have made it clear that I was not the person applying for credit cards in my name. I’d be quite happy to spend £93, or even £200, to make sure it didn’t happen again.
But I was unlucky, and no one who has not been the subject of an attempted identity sting can see the insurance value of an ID card. It just looks like a massive waste of money.
As for the other supposed benefits — security against international terrorists, benefit fraudsters, health service tourists and illegal workers — I just don’t buy them. Al-Qaida could handle ID cards, no problem. The only impact on illegal immigrants would be to depress their wages. And I don’t believe the Daily Mail on the level of health service tourism and benefit fraud.
So this is one where I cop out, lacking all conviction. ID cards are not worth a fight one way or the other. They are neither a key political priority nor the enemy of all we hold dear. The government has all sorts of other things it should be getting on with — and civil libertarians who want to pick a fight with it should be concentrating their efforts on its outrageous plans to ban smoking in pubs.
I know columnists are supposed to have trenchant opinions about everything, but I just can’t get myself worked up over identity cards. After weeks of reading all the arguments and chewing them over, I’ve come to an unpalatable conclusion: frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.
An outrageous assault on all the liberties the freeborn Englishman has held dear since Magna Carta, as the civil liberties lobby would have it? Give us a break. We’re already under potentially constant surveillance from the state and from various commercial interests whose records it can access and co-ordinate with ease — and ID cards wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference.
In the past week, I’ve filed my tax return online and been paid by an employer whose records are sent as a matter of course to the Inland Revenue and to whomsoever it is these days that deals with National Insurance and pension contributions. Direct debits have gone out of my bank account to pay my council tax, mortgage, various utility bills and trade union and Labour Party subs. I’ve used a debit card to buy groceries from Sainsbury’s, a carpet from the Co-op, rail tickets, books and CDs, several rounds of drinks and a couple of meals. (And when I ordered online at Sainsbury’s I was reminded what I bought when I shopped there in the last three months.)
I need a swipe card to get into work, though I’ve no idea whether the machine that lets me in records my arrival. The computer in the local library retains the information on my borrowings. And I’m recorded on countless closed-circuit television cameras whenever I leave the house or the office.
OK, I use a firewall on my computer at home and regularly sweep my system for spyware — but it would be a piece of cake for the state to monitor my email and web surfing. The same goes for my mobile phone usage, right down to tracking where I am whenever my phone is on. Next time I go abroad the chances are that my passport details will be logged by some official at some point on the journey. Thank the Lord I’m not a driver burdened with licence records and congestion charge fines . . .
Sometimes, it’s true, I find this all rather intrusive. For Sainsbury’s to remind me that my “usual” includes 20-odd beers and half-a-dozen Italian red wines is, well, sobering. I’m sick of junk mail and spam churned out by companies and campaigns that have my details on their databases. And in my nightmares I worry that if it came to the crunch and the BNP or Respect won state power, it would be all too easy for the bastards to track me down.
But the bastards aren’t in power, and for the most part I’m not that bothered by the fact that my movements and habits are constantly recorded and stored. It’s one of those things about modern life you put up with in return for the convenience of getting goods when you need them and avoiding queues and form-filling.
My real gripe is that the system doesn’t work properly. Three years ago I was the victim of a crude attempt at identity theft. Someone had picked up something addressed to me at a flat (in a shared block) I’d left a couple of years before, and had applied for several credit cards in my name. The credit card companies did not issue the cards and reported the attempted fraud to the police — who did nothing — and to the companies that list people’s credit ratings. They promptly put me on a blacklist. Result: an all-round pain in the butt that took the best part of two years to sort out.
A state ID card would have been a help in all that: it would have made it clear that I was not the person applying for credit cards in my name. I’d be quite happy to spend £93, or even £200, to make sure it didn’t happen again.
But I was unlucky, and no one who has not been the subject of an attempted identity sting can see the insurance value of an ID card. It just looks like a massive waste of money.
As for the other supposed benefits — security against international terrorists, benefit fraudsters, health service tourists and illegal workers — I just don’t buy them. Al-Qaida could handle ID cards, no problem. The only impact on illegal immigrants would be to depress their wages. And I don’t believe the Daily Mail on the level of health service tourism and benefit fraud.
So this is one where I cop out, lacking all conviction. ID cards are not worth a fight one way or the other. They are neither a key political priority nor the enemy of all we hold dear. The government has all sorts of other things it should be getting on with — and civil libertarians who want to pick a fight with it should be concentrating their efforts on its outrageous plans to ban smoking in pubs.
9 June 2005
5 June 2005
MAKE PROTECTIONISM HISTORY
Has anyone come up yet with any position better than (genuine, aka no CAP or textile or steel protectionism) free trade? I only ask.
2 June 2005
THE BATTLE FOR EUROPE - 8
I wouldn't quite endorse everything that Timothy Garton Ash has to say in the Guardian today, (read it here), but it's close to the truth:
Visions are invoked of Blair and Britain riding to the rescue of the European project, during our presidency of the union in the second half of this year, with a galvanising insistence that what Europe needs now, more than ever, is British-style economic and social reform. Only thus can we face up to the dragons of globalisation. The hour of London has come. Cry God for England, Tony and St George!
This analysis is both completely right and absolutely wrong. It's completely right to say that more reform is the only way the more developed countries in Europe will prevent jobs continuing to leach away, both to central and east European countries with cheap skilled labour and, on a larger scale, to Asia. With all its faults, Blairism - more accurately, Blair-Brown-ism - is the closest any European country has come to combining American-style enterprise with European-style solidarity . . .
At the same time, the analysis is absolutely wrong. For the surest way to ensure that Europe does not adopt this necessary programme is for the British prime minister to advocate it, in missionary mode, at this particular juncture. The French, and now also the Dutch, have just delivered a resounding no, both to the treaty and to what they see as a British Europe. The perfect moment, then, for a British prime minister to say: "So, mes amis, you have spoken, and I conclude that what you really need is a British Europe!"
BEAT THIS . . .
Bob Woodward tells loads we didn't know about the Watergate story – the greatest scoop of the past century – in the Washington Post here.
1 June 2005
THE BATTLE FOR EUROPE - 7
The Dutch have voted "no" too, which makes it pretty much inconceivable that the Brits will hold a referendum, which means that the European constitutional treaty is dead. Cue sighs of relief all round for Tony Blair and his government, crowing from Eurosceptic chumps et cetera – but what now for Europe's institutional arrangements?
It's clear that the French and Dutch referendum results were rejections of the institutional status quo as well as of the treaty's proposals (even if they were also about other things). And the key point that everyone sensible in the "no" camp was making was that the EU was insufficiently democratic and open.
So something needs to be done soon – if not tomorrow – to establish the EU's democratic legitimacy. Part of that must include opening up its workings more to the scrutiny of national parliaments. But in the end I can't see any solution other than increasing the credibility of the European Parliament. And that means massively augmenting its powers over the Commission and the Council of Ministers as well as clamping down ruthlessly on expenses scams.
In other words, the French and Dutch votes make the case for a democratic federal European polity stronger not weaker.
It's clear that the French and Dutch referendum results were rejections of the institutional status quo as well as of the treaty's proposals (even if they were also about other things). And the key point that everyone sensible in the "no" camp was making was that the EU was insufficiently democratic and open.
So something needs to be done soon – if not tomorrow – to establish the EU's democratic legitimacy. Part of that must include opening up its workings more to the scrutiny of national parliaments. But in the end I can't see any solution other than increasing the credibility of the European Parliament. And that means massively augmenting its powers over the Commission and the Council of Ministers as well as clamping down ruthlessly on expenses scams.
In other words, the French and Dutch votes make the case for a democratic federal European polity stronger not weaker.
30 May 2005
THE BATTLE FOR EUROPE – 6
And another thing . . . The French “no” shows that self-indulgence remains a powerful force on the left in France.
In 2002, left protest-voting for hopeless fringe-left candidates against Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin in the first round of the presidential election ensured that he came third behind the obnoxious fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen and was eliminated, leaving Jacques Chirac to walk the second round.
Yesterday, left voters convinced that “Another Europe is possible” joined Le Pen and the far right to vote “no”. The French Communist Party, the Trots and Laurent Fabius – the Mitterrand-era Socialist prime minister who revived his political career by coming out against the treaty – are congratulating themselves on a grand victory. But who will benefit? Not Chirac, whose star is now definitely on the wane. But not the left either. The crass opportunism of the left “no” camp severely damages the chances that the left will be able to find a candidate at the next presidential election who commands widespread support. Idiots utiles.
In 2002, left protest-voting for hopeless fringe-left candidates against Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin in the first round of the presidential election ensured that he came third behind the obnoxious fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen and was eliminated, leaving Jacques Chirac to walk the second round.
Yesterday, left voters convinced that “Another Europe is possible” joined Le Pen and the far right to vote “no”. The French Communist Party, the Trots and Laurent Fabius – the Mitterrand-era Socialist prime minister who revived his political career by coming out against the treaty – are congratulating themselves on a grand victory. But who will benefit? Not Chirac, whose star is now definitely on the wane. But not the left either. The crass opportunism of the left “no” camp severely damages the chances that the left will be able to find a candidate at the next presidential election who commands widespread support. Idiots utiles.
THE BATTLE FOR EUROPE – 5
The “no” victory in the French referendum on the EU constitution cannot have come as much of a surprise to anyone, although the margin was rather bigger than I expected because I thought there would be a last-minute swing to “yes” that did not happen.
It’s hardly the end of civilisation as we know it, but it is depressing. The constitutional treaty is a long way short of perfect: it is for the most part aimed at making the existing intergovernmentalist EU structures work more efficiently and contains little to address the union’s democratic deficit. But if implemented it would create an institutional settlement that could be improved over time.
Now, however, it looks as if it won’t be implemented: it is difficult to see how the treaty can survive the French “no”, and it will be dead and buried if the Dutch reject it too.
It is even more difficult, however, to see how a better constitutional treaty can be negotiated, at least in the short term. Of course, it is possible that the European political class responds to the setback with the imagination, dynamism, flexibility and commitment to democratic principle that were so conspicuous by their absence in the horse-trading that created the constitutional treaty. But that’s rather unlikely. All the major players are in weak positions domestically. Jacques Chirac has been seriously damaged by yesterday’s vote. Germany faces a general election in autumn that is likely to lead to a change of government. Tony Blair in Britain has announced he will retire during this term. Silvio Berlusconi in Italy looks to be on the way out.
So the most plausible scenario is that the EU’s institutions muddle through for the next few years, adopting some of the measures in the constitutional treaty but failing to do anything to stem popular criticism of their democratic illegitimacy.
If Peter Mandelson’s take on the French referendum is anything to go by, the Blairites in Britain think that the solution is to change the subject from the EU’s institutional arrangements to economic reform, but my hunch is that this would only make matters worse. The French “no” was at least in part a protest against what many voters perceived as the threat to the welfare state and to working conditions from “Anglo-Saxon” “neo-liberalism” and globalisation – epitomised by French companies relocating in east-central Europe, Polish plumbers coming to work in France, Chinese white goods flooding the shops and so on.
I’ll accept that there is a case for market-oriented reform both of certain EU policies – not least the Common Agricultural Policy – and of certain aspects of the (national) labour-market and welfare-state regimes of “old Europe”. But telling continental Europe that the solution to all its ills is to become more like Britain is idiotic. It’s not only guaranteed to put backs up, it’s also at odds with key facts on the ground. Compare the West Coast main line with the TGV. Remember Germany’s remarkable export performance even with 12 per cent unemployment. And don’t forget Britain’s housing bubble and pensions crisis . . .
The comrades from Socialism in an Age of Waiting have a good post here.
It’s hardly the end of civilisation as we know it, but it is depressing. The constitutional treaty is a long way short of perfect: it is for the most part aimed at making the existing intergovernmentalist EU structures work more efficiently and contains little to address the union’s democratic deficit. But if implemented it would create an institutional settlement that could be improved over time.
Now, however, it looks as if it won’t be implemented: it is difficult to see how the treaty can survive the French “no”, and it will be dead and buried if the Dutch reject it too.
It is even more difficult, however, to see how a better constitutional treaty can be negotiated, at least in the short term. Of course, it is possible that the European political class responds to the setback with the imagination, dynamism, flexibility and commitment to democratic principle that were so conspicuous by their absence in the horse-trading that created the constitutional treaty. But that’s rather unlikely. All the major players are in weak positions domestically. Jacques Chirac has been seriously damaged by yesterday’s vote. Germany faces a general election in autumn that is likely to lead to a change of government. Tony Blair in Britain has announced he will retire during this term. Silvio Berlusconi in Italy looks to be on the way out.
So the most plausible scenario is that the EU’s institutions muddle through for the next few years, adopting some of the measures in the constitutional treaty but failing to do anything to stem popular criticism of their democratic illegitimacy.
If Peter Mandelson’s take on the French referendum is anything to go by, the Blairites in Britain think that the solution is to change the subject from the EU’s institutional arrangements to economic reform, but my hunch is that this would only make matters worse. The French “no” was at least in part a protest against what many voters perceived as the threat to the welfare state and to working conditions from “Anglo-Saxon” “neo-liberalism” and globalisation – epitomised by French companies relocating in east-central Europe, Polish plumbers coming to work in France, Chinese white goods flooding the shops and so on.
I’ll accept that there is a case for market-oriented reform both of certain EU policies – not least the Common Agricultural Policy – and of certain aspects of the (national) labour-market and welfare-state regimes of “old Europe”. But telling continental Europe that the solution to all its ills is to become more like Britain is idiotic. It’s not only guaranteed to put backs up, it’s also at odds with key facts on the ground. Compare the West Coast main line with the TGV. Remember Germany’s remarkable export performance even with 12 per cent unemployment. And don’t forget Britain’s housing bubble and pensions crisis . . .
The comrades from Socialism in an Age of Waiting have a good post here.
STALIN’S PROPAGANDIST
Patrick Cockburn has a fascinating account of MI5’s surveillance of his father Claud in the Independent today, extracted from his memoir of his childhood, The Broken Boy. The extract makes much of the sheer scale of the spooks’ surveillance – but I wonder whether it really is so surprising. As editor of his newsletter The Week and in various roles on the Daily Worker during the 1930s and 1940s, Cockburn senior was the most prominent Stalinist journalist in the Anglophone world and a close associate of Otto Katz, a notorious fixer for the Soviet Union’s international propaganda network. If there was anyone MI5 had a prima facie case for watching, it was Claud Cockburn.
29 May 2005
THE BATTLE FOR EUROPE - 4
Glyn Morgan has an excellent piece in the Independent on Sunday here saying what I thought had become the unsayable: what's wrong with the intergovernmentalist EU settlement on which France is voting today is precisely that it doesn't create a European super-state.
28 May 2005
THE BATTLE FOR EUROPE - 3
With characteristic clarity, John Palmer puts the left case for a yes vote in the French and Dutch referendums on the European constitution in the Guardian here. And the paper's first leader reinforces the point here:
It defies logic to claim, as many in France have, to be pro-European and argue that a no will produce a better outcome.Quite so.
27 May 2005
NO TO THE ACADEMIC BOYCOTT– 4
The emergency conference of the Association of University Teachers today voted by a large-ish majority – it wasn't a card vote, so no numbers – to reverse the policy of boycotting Israeli universities that its annual council had adopted earlier in the year. I was there throughout as a delegate and voted against the boycott, so I had something to do with the decision. But my attempt to make a telling intervention in the debate was utter crap: I got stage-fright big-time, froze and then gibbered incoherently. Complete panic. I need help.
24 May 2005
DEFINING MOMENTS
Blimey. Ann Clwyd has been narrowly elected chair of the parliamentary Labour Party (click here) – I thought she'd lose. Which goes to show that, er, I was wrong and (beyond that) that, er, anti-war sentiment isn't quite as big in the PLP as I thought, though it's pretty big, maybe? So could this be the point at which it became clear that, er . . . ?
SCHROEDER’S PREDICAMENT
The German Social Democrats’ defeat in the North Rhine-Westphalia Land election on Sunday was not unexpected, but its scale was – and now Germany is gearing up for an early general election after Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder decided that the only way out is to appeal for a new mandate.
Schroeder’s problem is the unpopularity of his liberalising economic reform programme among the SPD’s core supporters, who stayed away from the polls on Sunday in droves. The workers don’t see cutting welfare benefits, reducing workers’ rights at work and championing free trade as the way to reduce German unemployment, currently running at nearly five million (12 per cent of the workforce).
On the other hand, disillusioned working-class former-SPD supporters didn’t on the whole vote for the much-hyped leftist WASG (Electoral Alternative: Work and Social Justice) list. So Schroeder has flung down the gauntlet: it’s either vote for the SPD and get a managed transition to a less-generous welfare state or vote CDU/CSU and have much nastier market medicine forced down your throat.
So we’re going to witness the bizarre spectacle of an SPD campaign fought on hard class-solidarity rhetoric (there will be very little holding hands with the SPD’s Green coalition partners, on which click here) with the key message that it’s better to have your own lot being mean bastards than the conservatives.
But at risk of alienating all my German comrades, I’m afraid Schroeder is right. Martin Kettle’s piece in the Guardian today is seriously flawed in that it seems to claim that the choice between preserving a generous welfare state in western Europe and competing economically with the US and the far east is a zero-sum game. But Kettle's basic point is sound. Germany has to compete economically, and to do that it needs to change.
Schroeder’s problem is the unpopularity of his liberalising economic reform programme among the SPD’s core supporters, who stayed away from the polls on Sunday in droves. The workers don’t see cutting welfare benefits, reducing workers’ rights at work and championing free trade as the way to reduce German unemployment, currently running at nearly five million (12 per cent of the workforce).
On the other hand, disillusioned working-class former-SPD supporters didn’t on the whole vote for the much-hyped leftist WASG (Electoral Alternative: Work and Social Justice) list. So Schroeder has flung down the gauntlet: it’s either vote for the SPD and get a managed transition to a less-generous welfare state or vote CDU/CSU and have much nastier market medicine forced down your throat.
So we’re going to witness the bizarre spectacle of an SPD campaign fought on hard class-solidarity rhetoric (there will be very little holding hands with the SPD’s Green coalition partners, on which click here) with the key message that it’s better to have your own lot being mean bastards than the conservatives.
But at risk of alienating all my German comrades, I’m afraid Schroeder is right. Martin Kettle’s piece in the Guardian today is seriously flawed in that it seems to claim that the choice between preserving a generous welfare state in western Europe and competing economically with the US and the far east is a zero-sum game. But Kettle's basic point is sound. Germany has to compete economically, and to do that it needs to change.
NO TO THE ACADEMIC BOYCOTT – 3
Time has passed since my last post on this (here) but I've not changed my mind, and now I'm going to the university lecturers' special conference as a delegate – not because my colleagues voted enthusiastically for my principled stance but because no one could be bothered too much.
At City University we had a big argument on email – but then came an inquorate Association of University Teachers' meeting, leaving the local AUT committee to decide what to do. Because the existing branch delegates couldn't make the special AUT council and because opinion among members was divided, the branch committee agreed (I think very sensibly) to appoint one pro-boycott delegate and one anti. I'm the anti.
At City University we had a big argument on email – but then came an inquorate Association of University Teachers' meeting, leaving the local AUT committee to decide what to do. Because the existing branch delegates couldn't make the special AUT council and because opinion among members was divided, the branch committee agreed (I think very sensibly) to appoint one pro-boycott delegate and one anti. I'm the anti.
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