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Working-class heroes

All of a sudden the taxi driver has been overcome by a fit of the giggles. Is it the fare? We’ve barely moved in about 20 minutes and the meter has nudged its way up from ridiculously cheap to merely cheap. It is not the fare.

“London, Hong Kong, it’s the same,” he says finally, pointing over at the massed divisions of demonstrators snaking along Hennessey Road in the opposite direction to us. “People don’t like government, make protest. It’s same.”

Okay. Yeah, I nod. Protest. Government. London. But wait – London? Nobody’s smashing windows or setting about police vans. In fact, it’s all rather peaceable. I mean, whoever heard of an angry mob carrying parasols? Maybe the anarchists are late. No trouble, I say. No violence. Unfortunately for our conversation, no understand. Well it was fun while it lasted.

But still, I’m right. This march – they’ve been held every year on July 1 since the British split for home in 1997 – appears to stir up all the animus of a Hare Krishna rally. The government has been trying to do away with by-elections and so this is the biggest turnout since 2004. But still, not even the chanting’s aggressive. And what do they want? Well, universal suffrage would be a start. “One person, one vote” is the shibboleth. In May, incidentally, the Brits were asked whether in future they wanted two votes in general elections, or something to that effect, and declined. Instead they’ve been out marching against cuts in government spending that so far don’t appear to be cuts at all, the erosion of middle class entitlements and suchlike.

I’d seen groups of protestors gathering earlier on. Hawkers sold t-shirts emblazoned with pro-democracy slogans and – the very latest in radical chic – Guy Fawkes masks; volunteers handed out pamphlets and placards and John Lennon’s Working Class Hero blared from a loudspeaker. And it struck me that if the self-pitying jeremiads of a dead hippy were to be the democratic movement’s rallying call, then the Chinese Communist Party needn’t worry all that much.

It is often claimed, indeed, that there will be no great clamour for democracy on mainland China whilst the government is delivering nine per cent growth year on year. Growth, however, may not necessarily preclude anti-government sentiment if it is accompanied by a widening of the gap between the rich and the rest. And this, probably more than the desire for greater democracy, is what explains the 218,000 turnout in Hong Kong last week. As much as they have compounded the miseries of the poor, rising rents and living costs are squeezing the middle classes. The rentier class rules. The picture is not, in fact, so very different from that of London after all.

Later on, there were also a few arrests: 228 to be exact. But one shouldn’t jump to conclusions. The offending parties were, for the most part, demonstrators who refused to go home. There is so little in the way of crime in Hong Kong that its bobbies occasionally feel the need of something to do.


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Cameron vs Flashman

This article appeared in The Herald

The following is an extract from a circular email which was forwarded to me last week. Its author, one Tom Brown, was presumed to have died some time ago. Suffice to say he is well retired from public life and suffers from senility, but his observations on matters political may be of interest:

“Dear chums […] Those of you who still have faculties, nay a pulse, in working order, may well have noticed things are not as they were in our time. Those Eton chaps seem to have the whole business sown up, for starters. I mean to say, I can’t think of an Old Rugbeian in the Cabinet.

“You may well conceive of my surprise, then, on hearing the name ‘Harry Flashman’ come spitting out of the wireless on The World At One. By Jupiter, says I to myself, hasn’t old Flashy had enough misadventure? But then I remembered Flashy didn’t make it through the Great War – some say he died falling from the Mata Hari’s bedroom window – and as I listened on I was somewhat relieved to grasp that the late Brigadier was not in fact Her Majesty’s Prime Minister and had only been likened to him; or rather, vice versa.

“As I comprehend the facts, the leader of something called the Labour Party thinks itquite the barb to call the PM Flashman instead of Cameron, which is his proper name, although some people insist on calling him ‘Dave’. Well, I was intrigued to find out more about this Dave fellow, and it seems that not only is he frightfully young, mutatis mutandum he’s really nothing like our old tormentor at all. In fact, Flashy would have shrank from the comparison as though it were double Latin.

“Now, some of you may recall that Flashy and I had our differences, and in all honesty he made my schooldays deuced unpleasant. But as the saying goes a roasting maketh a full man, or something, and, well, Empire demanded men like Flashy. That men like Flashy lost the Empire is beside the point – old Harry never picked a fight with a tyrant unless he dashed well had to and he certainly didn’t gad about the world telling people we were responsible for its problems, not unless he was about to be killed.”

The email goes on to compare Cameron’s ability as a “swordsman” unfavourably with Flashman’s, but we’re keeping that bit to ourselves for legal reasons.


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Maybe Britain needs a First Amendment, too

This article was published at Spiked

Last week it emerged that the Metropolitan Police are investigating the Spectator magazine following complaints from a Muslim group about comments made on a blog entry on its website by the Daily Mail journalist Melanie Phillips. Writing about the massacre, in the West Bank, of a three-month-old Jewish girl, her two brothers and her parents as they slept in their beds, Phillips referred to the murderers as ‘savages’ and to the ‘moral depravity of the Arabs’.

Phillips is not generally noted for even-handedness when it comes to writing about the Middle East. She is often polemical, some might even say tendentious, in her support of Israel. She is certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, and perhaps you would include yourself in that. Perhaps you feel that she comes too close to smearing all Arabs. Perhaps you even think hers are the sort of views that should be investigated by the police. But then again, perhaps you don’t read her blogs and form your views of the rights and wrongs of faraway bloodshed from other sources. Perhaps you wonder what all the fuss is about.

There are echoes here of the case of another Daily Mail journalist, Jan Moir, who in 2009 upset a lot of people by appearing to attribute the death of the singer Stephen Gately to his lifestyle. Gately was gay. The Crown Prosecution Service eventually decided, about a year ago, not to prosecute Moir, but the whole episode conjured up bizarre images of crown officials poring over words and phrases in a newspaper opinion column for evidence of illegality.

And then there was the case, less well-publicised, involving Douglas Murray, another journalist. He was investigated by the Press Complaints Commission and the police merely for suggesting that the prosecution of an English councillor for telling a joke about an Irishman being a bit dim was ludicrous. And last year, too, a Liberal Democrat councillor was convicted under the 2006 Public Order Act for using ‘threatening, abusive or insulting words, with intent to cause harassment, alarm or distress’. Shirley Brown, who is black, had called a female Asian councillor, Jay Jethwa, a ‘coconut’, a colloquial term used to denote a person who is ‘brown on the outside and white on the inside’ – someone who has, in other words, betrayed his or her cultural roots by pandering to ‘white’ opinion.

But it’s not merely in print and in the debating chamber that solecisms can have repercussions: cyberspace also has its victims. Think of Paul Chambers, who was fined £3,000 and lost his job for tweeting, in jest, words to the effect that he would blow up an airport if its closure due to bad weather disrupted his travel plans. Or of Gareth Compton, the Tory councillor who was arrested in November when – after hearing the Independent’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown argue on a radio programme that the West had no moral authority to condemn the practice of stoning women in the Muslim world – he asked his Twitter followers ‘Can someone please stone [her] to death?’, adding ‘I shan’t tell Amnesty if you don’t. It would be a blessing, really.’

That some users of social media are discovering, to their detriment, that the online environment does not in fact mirror the domain of the private conversation down the pub was perhaps inevitable. But then, as the Sky Sports commentators Andy Gray and Richard Keys – who lost their jobs for making off-colour remarks when they thought they were not being recorded – recently found out, even private conversation is no longer safe from censure.

What is going on? How did we arrive at a situation where giving offence is automatically sackable or worse? Surely the freedom to disagree with a comment or to ignore it is enough. When it is suggested that certain points of view or ways of expressing them might be or should be illegal – or that intolerance should not be tolerated, to purloin the common malapropism – a notion that should chill anyone who holds the principles of liberal democracy dear is given life: the notion of thought crime. Freedom of speech was hard-won in the West; the freedom only to speak inoffensively is no freedom at all.

If UK prime minister David Cameron seemed to grasp this when he spoke of the merits of ‘muscular liberalism’ earlier this year, it is a pity that his government’s Protection of Freedoms Bill – an Act which has been making its way through parliament since last summer and which it is intended will extend freedom of information, turn back the tide of state intrusion into our lives and repeal unnecessary criminal laws – makes no attempt to return free speech to its rightful place at the altar of democracy.

The Lib-Con coalition government may well be less authoritarian than the Labour one that preceded it, but in a way we are still suffering the hangover from New Labour and the ideals it pressed into service when it ditched socialism: diversity, equality, respect. Among the 4,300 new offences put into statute under Labour were those governing ‘hate speech’, or the giving and taking of offence. First came legislation on racial and religious hatred; later, protection was extended to gay, transgender and disabled people. Doubtless heightened sensitivity about Islam in the wake of 9/11 played its part: the Religious Hatred Act of 2006, for instance, extended outdated blasphemy laws to afford people of all faiths, including Jedis, recourse against things they don’t like hearing said or seeing written.

One of the results has been a new culture of fastidious censoriousness in every public body, human-resource department and media organisation in the land. Furthermore, the giving of offence need not be intentional, nor the words (or cartoons) themselves possessed of the propensity to give it in order for it to be taken. Never mind the freedom to speak offensively: people have been invited to believe there is such a thing as the right not to be offended. Never mind that ‘incitement to hatred’ is a grey, disputable thing, and a different thing to incitement to violence, which was already a criminal offence. Never mind that most ideas are capable of giving offence, and that Socrates, Galileo and Darwin were all considered beyond the pale in their time. And never mind that in the marketplace of ideas, ‘hate speech’ can be challenged, debated or ignored. What we now have is moderated free speech at best.

That distinction between incitement to hatred and incitement to violence is a crucial one for Peter Tatchell, one of this country’s most tireless and principled human rights campaigners. When I spoke to him last year he had recently been in the news for defending the rights of Christian preachers hounded by the law over homophobic hate-speech crimes. One American Baptist evangelist, Shawn Holes, was fined £1,000 for telling shoppers in Glasgow city centre that homosexuals were bound for hell; Tatchell, who is gay himself and renowned for his campaigning on behalf of gay rights, called it ‘an attack on free speech and a heavy-handed, excessive response to homophobia’. He had also spoken up for the five Islamists convicted of showering abuse at British soldiers at a ‘homecoming’ march in Luton, but had elsewhere called for sanctions on extremists who incite violence – including Abu Usamah, who was shown in a Channel 4 undercover documentary advocating the killing of gays and Muslims who leave their faith. But there was no contradiction, he insisted. ‘If someone says “I want to encourage people to plant bombs in Princes Street in Edinburgh”, then that’s pretty clear incitement to violence’, he told me. ‘Saying “I sympathise with al-Qaeda” is not, on the other hand.’

While that view may not be likely to find favour with mainstream political opinion, muscular liberal or otherwise, it makes sense from a First Amendment perspective, if you’re talking American. Britain doesn’t have a First Amendment, of course, but it did produce John Stuart Mill, who wrote in 1859 that ‘there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered’. The limits of such liberty should be defined by the ‘harm principle’, he said, not by social offence. In other words, dealing with offence is part of being a grown-up in a grown-up society.

Liberals nowadays seem to have lost the stomach for such principles, however. The word ‘liberal’ itself has come to denote a much narrower set of ideas: vaguely leftish, environmentalist, irreproachably PC, pro-European, pro-Palestine, pro-Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Technology, meanwhile, may have helped to create a more informed and engaged citizenry, but it has also given a leg up to the power of mob rule. Online forums and message boards foster a culture of outrage, indignation and recrimination; they manufacture and mobilise offence.

The Lib-Cons’ Protection of Freedoms Act will flush away ID cards, biometric passports and the ContactPoint database of children in England. It includes provisions to restrict and regulate the use of surveillance powers, CCTV and the storage of internet and email records and it will restore rights to freedom of assembly, non-violent protest and trial by jury. It may prove to be a watershed moment for liberty in Britain. It could have been a much greater one. It is time to weigh again the value, as opposed to the price, of free speech.


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Think well of us, or else

This article appeared in The Herald

In my experience, if a taxi driver wishes to unburden himself of his woes – or, indeed, of some flatulence – you don’t have much choice but to listen. Occasionally there is an ex-wife to berate; more frequently, it is the cooncil. Sometimes, on happier journeys, there may be a ribald joke or a story about a footballer getting legless that you will later relate to friends.

As a matter of personal taste, I’m not much into taking a note of the driver’s badge number and relaying his opinions on Twitter, though. Partly, this is because I hold steadfast to the view that Twitter is moronic; partly, it is because I don’t work for the Stasi.

However, this is precisely what one business customer in Aberdeen very recently did. The Tweet, which told, apparently, of the driver’s less than eulogistic views on Aberdeen City Council, can no longer be traced online. One can only speculate that it was removed, perhaps with the council’s benedictions, the Tweeter having been duly thanked for his or her exemplary display of good citizenship, or something like that.

The driver? Well, he was hauled up, of course, apparently “questioned” and sent on his way with his tail between his legs. This, see, is what councils are about these days. Not content with trying to outdo one another in the number of people they employ with long, tendentious job titles containing the words “diversity”, “equalities” and “community”, they see it as their duty to spend our money getting us to think well of them.

South Lanarkshire Council last month excelled itself by threatening to bring proceedings for defamation against the membership of a community council in the area because its website linked to an article on another site entitled “South Lanarkshire Council and Scottish Coal Hand in Hand at Community LIE-aison Meeting”.

In England, stories abound of councils using anti-terrorism laws to justify spying on people to see if they let their dogs dump on the pavement or don’t separate their rubbish properly, but this monitoring of the web in search of dissent is every bit as execrable. As a demonstration of contempt for democracy, it is beyond parody.

There is an authoritarian streak in Scottish public life as rigid as the dominie’s strap. Taxi drivers should not, you may ultimately decide, be left to stand up alone for free speech. But, for now, I say to them only this: “Let rip.”


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On the causes of socialism

This article appeared in The Herald

The term “right-wing” is hardly used in Scotland other than as an insult these days. It is, therefore, hard to quantify what support there is for rightish sentiment, as poor right-wingers are forced to keep quiet about their political leanings. Left-wingers are, generally, much easier to identify. Often they are devil-may-care types, have great taste in music and great sex lives. They are also deeply moved by images of polar bears, see discrimination in a handful of dust and think competitive school sports days are a bad thing.

In polite society, right-wingers have a way of keeping the conversation on an even keel, often to the extent that their lack of concern for polar bears is all that gives them away. They also tend to be less fashionably attired than their left-wing friends, would rather not be pestered into giving money to causes and are appalled by people crying on television.

I was quite sure these distinctions were fundamentally sound, but some academics have thrown a spanner in the works: a new study has revealed that significant numbers of middle-aged people may be left-wing “by mistake”. Having dabbled with radical left-wing views as students, they still define themselves by those views now, even though the business of holding down a job and raising children has actually led them to be rather more conservative.

The implication is that many people hold centre-rightish views but fail to notice that their outlook has shifted, often because they associate only with others of like mind. Marx, who is thought to have been fairly left-wing, was rather taken with the idea of false consciousness, but I do not think this is what he meant. Later, an Italian fellow, Antonio Gramsci, said that for Marxists to win the political war, they would first have to win the cultural war and, at his suggestion, the left set about infiltrating campuses, the arts and the media, ingraining the idea that to be even remotely right-wing was proof of moral deficiency.

It would be uncharitable not to have a degree of sympathy for the faux left-wing middle classes: in renouncing themselves, they would probably have to forego their good taste in music and their great sex lives. Theirs, though, is the generation that spent all the money, thus requiring their children to be altogether more enterprising and self-reliant, if not actually, openly, right-wing.


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An interview with Annabel Goldie

TO listen to the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, Annabel Goldie, is to understand that while Tories, either in Edinburgh or in London, are unlikely to confess as much publicly, painful lessons have been absorbed since Thatcherism left the party a spent force in Scottish politics.

David Cameron, the man who looks ever more likely to be the next Prime Minister of Great Britain, may seem to Scots – the way Thatcher did – as English as clotted cream and country houses; but where the Iron Lady effectively forced her will on Scotland Cameron, Goldie is assured, will respect the mandate of whoever sits at Holyrood and allow the Scottish Tories to dictate their own policy agenda. Devolution, the horse the Tories previously wanted shot at birth, has bolted. Cameron, though, wants devolution to work, and to work better.

In an exclusive interview ahead of the party’s Scottish conference, Goldie praised Cameron’s honesty and courage in “reconfiguring” the Tory Party, and said he had made it clear that if elected he will work with Scottish politicians in a spirit of co-operation.

Having gained leadership of the party in Scotland around about the same time as Cameron was chosen to head up Her Majesty’s Official Opposition, Goldie, who now attends Shadow Cabinet meetings at Westminster, described their relationship as one of mutual respect. “From the word go we got on with each other and that has grown to a very constructive political relationship because David Cameron is a highly intelligent man who is eminently easy to talk to,” she said. “In amongst taking the Conservative Party and making it fit for purpose in the 21st Century he has still found time for Scotland, in which he takes a very keen interest. I literally can phone him any time I want to.

“He and I have discussed at length how to get devolution to dovetail better with Westminster, whether it’s at party level, parliamentary level or government level. It’s interesting that the Labour Party, essentially the architect of devolution, has offered the most lamentable illustration of how to conduct relationships between the two parliaments.

“Holyrood and Westminster should not be in competition – they both have vital and different roles to discharge. David Cameron says ‘if I am elected Prime Minister, I will respect the role of Alex Salmond as First Minister. I may not agree with his policies, I may not agree with his politics, but he’s a democratically constituted First Minister and I must respect that and engage with him.'”

Any incoming government will have to get to grips as best it can with the parlous state of the UK’s public finances and the possibility of a very slow economic recovery, realities which are likely to mitigate against the traditional Tory policy of tax cuts and put an enormous fly in the ointment of welfare reform, a keystone in Cameron’s mission to heal “the broken society.” Save to observe that Cameron is under no illusions about the severity of these challenges, Goldie was light on the specifics of how he will set out about resuscitating either society or the economy, but she did pay tribute to the way in which he has energised and modernised his party.

“David Cameron has taken decisive and courageous decisions as leader of his party, both on party issues and policy, and that is the character of the man that will be demonstrated as Prime Minster of this country,” she said. “The Conservative party of all parties is not an easy entity to reconfigure, and yet he effectively said to it, ‘go and think about yourselves and the issues that are going to confront your children and your grandchildren, and understand that time moves on and that there are new issues emerging that are just as significant as the ones we considered were of paramount political importance 25 and 30 years ago.’ When he talked about green issues and the environment and society being broken in the context of broken families and social breakdown, I think people thought the Conservative Party saw itself as slightly remote from all that. But David Cameron has made the party face up to these things.”

According to Goldie, those who portray Cameron as being out of touch with the average Joe deliberately misconstrue him. “It’s easy for sections of the media to parody him as a toff and an Old Etonian and so that’s what they do, but at the end of the day he’s a husband and a father and I believe he is, genuinely, in touch with the lives of ordinary people,” she said. “He and George Osborne are saying there are tough decisions and they are being fair and square with the electorate on that. We are stepping into a situation in which the British economy is in hock up to its oxters and to that extent is burdening not just the current tax-paying population but the next generation and arguably a generation beyond that.

“David Cameron is very clear that there is no silver bullet to all of this – he is not going to go into the election claiming it will all be wonderful under a Conservative government. What he will say is that we face a very challenging situation that will require leadership and courage and that he is prepared to provide both.”

Part of this interview appeared in the Sunday Herald


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Review: Stranger to History, by Aatish Taseer

This article appeared in The Herald

Aatish Taseer, raised by his Sikh mother and grandparents in Delhi and educated at a Christian boarding school in southern India and in the US, knew when he set out on his travels through Islam’s heartlands that he had a limited grasp of what it means to be a Muslim. Not being extensively versed in Koranic tradition, his own faith was threadbare; rather, indeed, like that of his Pakistani father, Salman, who shortly after Aatish’s birth in 1980, abandoned his new Indian family to return to his wife in Lahore.

In adulthood the younger man has sought to mend that broken relationship, but the pair’s disestrangement, complicated from the first by Salman’s attitudes towards India and the West, was set back in 2005 when Aatish wrote an article about British Pakistanis and Islamic extremism to which abba took vehement umbrage.

Taseer fils, puzzled that his forebear – politician, businessman and avowed disbeliever – should put such store in calling himself a Muslim, wanted to better understand the ‘civilisation of faith’ of which he had heard spoken both in Pakistan and Britain. And so, armed with his own lightly-worn Sufism, he decided to travel once more to Pakistan, this time from Turkey via the Arab world, in search of what this supra-national Islamic identity means. If the fact of his being a Muslim at all is his passport on the road, however, it should also be recorded that it gives him licence to be honest about the religion he encounters to a degree western writers tend to shrink from. For this is a book that asks awkward questions of Islam and comes up with unsettling answers.

Part travelogue, part essay, part personal odyssey, Taseer’s narrative is probing, exhilarating and shot through with pinpoint observations of people, places and situations, from the menace of Tehran to the ecstasy of religious experience and the commercialism of Mecca. His is an attempt to understand those societies from which Islam takes nourishment.

In Leeds just after 7/7, Taseer had observed a generational divide between older British Muslims, who remembered with some pride their hard-earned economic migration from Pakistan, and their offspring, who lacked their parents’ instinctive humour and openness and hated the West. To younger Muslims, whose religion seemed the more rigid and forbidding, faith came with an amorphous sense of grievance. Bored and rootless, they found in political Islam a grand narrative not readily proffered by the secular West.

In Istanbul and Damascus he meets many others who feel the same way, who see the West as stopping Muslims from thinking “as the early Muslims thought.” The notion of the great Islamic past is everywhere sounded, historical fact skewered to support a narrative of aggression and attack from the Christian West. The message, that the Islamic world is now divided because of the West and the influence of its ideas, is one in which ‘cultural Muslims’ like Taseer’s father can believe, as it has “more to do with the loss of political power than divine injunction.”

To his dismay, the solution the author finds gaining ground is a sort of retreat from the world, the re-emergence of Wahhabism and its insistence on adherence to letter of the Book, effecting new levels of intellectual incuriosity and cultural homogeneity. All of this is anathema to Taseer, who has a special feeling for the religious plurality of India but, ironically, it is in Iran that he finds reason to believe the ‘civilisation of faith’ will, not before time, come up against its own illogicality and absurdity. In a country where women are beaten for the merest transgression and young people are criminalised “by a tyranny of trifles”, he finds a growing culture of private and public dissent and widespread hatred of the Revolution.

In Tehran he also finds people who make the distinction between the enforced religion of the Islamic Republic, and ‘the real faith’; yet shocked perhaps that people like his father can be so unperturbed by fundamentalism, he asks: “Did it really matter whether the Islam of the Islamic Republic was the ‘real Islam’ or not? Did it matter whether the socialism of Stalin or Mao was the real socialism?” Indeed, among his Pakistani family – supposedly moderate – he encounters hatred of America, Israel and Hindus, as well as a tendency to doubt the Holocaust. “It was too little moderation and in the wrong areas,” as he puts it.

In Pakistan itself, he finds feudalism unchecked, corruption king and bitter division amid relative homogeneity, “where once great diversity had been absorbed.” His warning that extremists “know the country has to be destabilised, the robust society made bleaker” is all too sage in the light of last week’s terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore. Stranger to History is a beautifully-written book, but the ugliness of what it reveals is what lives on after reading.


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Political books of 2008

This article appeared in The Herald

Many of the books on the politics shelves this year have been overtaken by events. As crisis became crash, the realisation that political economy is to politics what money is to banks was a little late in dawning, but there were at least one or two lonely voices who claimed to have seen the whole thing coming in time to dash off guides to where it had all gone wrong.

Robert Shiller’s The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened and What to Do about it (Princeton, £9.95), a short expose of the lax borrowing that led to America becoming the world’s first subprime superpower, falls into that category. Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money (Allen Lane, £25) does too but isn’t just a paean to capitalism’s convulsions: it’s also a thorough-going history of the rise of capital (the foundation, Ferguson believes, of human progress).

For anyone who takes fright at mention of stocks and bonds, securities, bears, bulls and hedge funds, it is essential reading. Ferguson’s lessons are that sooner or later every bubble bursts and that human greed and ignorance, rather than the financial system itself, created the current crisis.

There’s something atavistic about AN Wilson’s Our Times (Hutchinson, £25), an indictment of Britain’s national collapse. Wilson is a cultural conservative, yet there’s nothing rigid or canonical about him: neither the old establishment nor the new, the Britain of aristocratic humbug nor of health and safety tutorials, is spared his vituperation.

Britain’s shared sense of identity and purpose has been undone since the war, he believes, by political elites, mass migration, yoof culture, the demise of organised Christianity and the replacement of trains by cars. He can be contradictory, factually wayward, even scurrilous, but he is always entertaining and always illuminating.

China’s story over the last two decades – thanks to its economic reforms – has been one of rise rather than demise. Philip Pan’s Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of New China (Simon & Schuster, £14.99), challenges utterly, however, the notion that democracy will be the inevitable corollary. In a sobering, saddening study he narrates the stories of men and women, dead or imprisoned, who dared to break rank. Their heroism, obscured and written out of history by the Party, a de facto “mafia”, deserves to be honoured everywhere.

Left-wing commentators lobbed so much mud at Martin Amis this year that even his virtuoso prose style was filed as a charge against him. Too clever, not self-effacing enough, crowed one reviewer, a marginally more coherent remonstrance than the view, expressed by the Marxist academic Terry Eagleton, that one should no more listen to a novelist talking about Islamism than a window cleaner.

The Second Plane (Jonathan Cape, £12.99), a collection of essays and short fiction written in response to 9/11 and all its consequences and bifurcations on the world stage, is a brilliant riposte to that view. Literature, for Amis, is “reason at play”; religions are repositories of “ignorance, reaction and sentimentality.” Islamism (“an ideology superimposed upon a religion – illusion upon illusion”) is a death cult every bit as pernicious as Nazism or Stalinism and the novelist – for whom morality and reason are, in the end, all – has in fact a duty to say something about it.

When confronted by Islamist terror, Amis believes, too many on the liberal left evade the truth: they see not a desolate and implacable ideology but misguided liberators whose cause is fundamentally righteous.

Where Amis’s eloquence is trained on anti-Americanism as an ideology, Simon Schama proffers instead its antidote. His The American Future (Bodley Head, £20) is both a history and a treatise on that most nebulous of constructs, hope. Our television don assumes a triangular perspective – daydreaming about the future as the past looms like a gently stirring branch at the window of the here and now. America’s history of violence is explored in considerable detail: from the obliteration of the Cherokee, to Gettysburg, to Vietnam. The liberty so prized by the early settlers, then, came at a cost to others; on the other hand, the country’s enduring racism and paranoia should be understood as inevitable by-products of being the world’s melting pot.

Convinced of America’s ability to reinvent itself once more in the 21st Century, Schama hoped for an Obama victory, and he got it. In the president-elect he sees a Jeffersonian figure salving the wounds of the bedraggled republic and renewing a sense of “common purpose.” Others tend, similarly, to see what they want to in Obama. One hopes he can be something more than that: his own man.


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Review: The Thin Blue Line, by Conor Foley

The article appeared in The Herald

There is little denying that most armed conflicts and humanitarian emergencies are messy affairs in which rights and wrongs are often inseparable. There are books on the such topics which avoid becoming equally messy but this is not one of them.

The problem with Conor Foley’s The Thin Blue Line, How Humanitarianism Went to War is that he can’t decide whether to make it a memoir, an essay or a polemic. He dwells for large chunks on the niceties of international law without explaining much more than the fact that it is ambigious, while the huge cast of humanitarian colleagues and UN officials to whom he introduces us seem incidental to his overarching argument. He is at his best when describing specific crises or relating first-hand the difficulties faced by humanitarians in Kosovo or in lawless Afghanistan. Like an Antipodean backpacker determined to see the world in his gap year, however, he hops around far too much to sustain the narrative.

The effect is disorienting, but does not disguise the fact that his basic thesis is neither sustained nor convincing. The book describes the journey over the last 20 years towards ‘humanitarian intervention’ – as a way of holding states accountable for they way treat their own populations – becoming the new norm in international law. Human rights and humanitarian aid organisations have drawn closer together and Foley shows how their neutrality has been compromised as they allow themselves to be manipulated to promote explicitly political objectives.

Perhaps this could have been avoided but Foley does not venture to explain how. In the early 90s the weakness of the international community’s response to genocide and human rights violations in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina was such that there was a clamour for the doctrine of non-intervention in the affairs of autonomous states to be set aside. As Foley acknowledges, UN soldiers were mere bystanders in the Balkans. Elsewhere he supports the argument that most humanitarian activity in Africa is ineffective in terms of reducing poverty, and even damaging.

Aid agencies, wise to this new appetite for intervention, have become adept at influencing public opinion in their parent countries. They know that the best way to raise money and get things done is to stir consciences. Human rights and humanitarian NGOs are often the first to report atrocities and suffering, but this creates a dilemma for them: by calling on governments to protect people, they know that force may be required. Foley sees this as an abandonment of the humanitarian principles of neutrality and impartiality, yet is unable to counter the argument that these are not worthy sacrifices in the interests of preventing bloodshed.

NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, Foley says, made a bad situation worse. He neglects to offer an opinion on whether the west was right to take the fight to the Taliban after 9/11, but much of his discussion of the perceived abuses of humanitarian ideals focuses on operations in Afghanistan. He bemoans the fact aid agencies there have become part of the wider counter-insurgency effort and dismisses political objectives such as rebuilding governance and judicial structures and the “promotion of philosophical convictions associated with western liberal values”, as neo-colonial.

The west, indeed, comes in for no end of criticism – westerners in general for their idealistic partisanship, their short attention spans and “out of sight, out of mind” attitude to many of the most serious crises; America in particular for not supporting UN missions enough in the 1990s then seeing itself as above the law in Iraq and Afghanistan. Foley reserves particular contempt for the Bush administration but, it would seem, more for having ridden roughshod over the international body politic and declared the UN to be ineffectual than anything else.

In his section on the war in Iraq, Foley is incisive in cataloguing Blair’s dishonesties. He doesn’t tell us anything new but the PM’s repackaging of the invasion as a ‘humanitarian intervention’ after the WMD claims were blown sky high, resonates in the context of a book about betrayals.

Foley does draw some fairly sensible conclusions, albeit tangential to his main gripes. In particular he believes Britain should abandon its slavishness to the US, that so-called liberal interventions this decade have shown democracy is unlikely to be imposed from the outside, and that we need to realise the international community cannot conjure peace and prosperity out of total chaos.

One more inconsistency: humanitarian organisations, writes Foley, should not be mobilised in support of particular political agendas or philosophical convictions; yet they have an important role to play in the arguments for “global economic justice”. What could be more political?


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An interview with ‘soixante-huitard’ Daniel Cohn-Bendit

What a singulier month it has been in France: strikes in education and public transport; pupils at school gates branding teachers who work “scabs”; anti-government demonstrations in Paris over public sector job cuts and pension plan reform. The impression is of a nation derailing at the prospect of economic reform, kicking against the sudden pricks of change.

It is no wonder there has been such nostalgia for 40 years ago. This year’s upheavals have taken place against a backdrop of no little soul-searching with regard to the legacy of les evenements of May 1968, when student protests at Nanterre over claims for greater sexual freedom brought about general strikes and sparked a cultural revolution. Symposiums, television specials and some 120 exhibitions have contributed to a blossoming industry already served by more than 100 books on the subject.

Inevitably, parallels have been drawn between ’68 and 2008. President Nicolas Sarkozy is more unpopular now than General de Gaulle ever was then, perhaps for the simple reason that he was not elected by either of the old loyal blocs – Gaullist right, Socialist left – but rather swayed voters from across the spectrum with a political philosophy somewhat akin to Tony Blair’s ‘third way.’

Danny Cohn-Bendit, the anarchist figurehead of ’68 and now co-president of the European Green-European Free Alliance in the European Parliament, has his own views on the differences between then and now, however. “In 1968 we had a feeling to make history,” says the man born in France to German-Jewish parents then expelled from the country as a “seditious alien” for his agitational efforts. “We smelt freedom and we won cultural change. The legacy is the autonomy of the individual, and the idea that collective emancipation must be linked to individual autonomy. There was a revolution in society – at that time a married woman had to have written permission from her husband to open a bank account, education was authoritarian. After this, people became freer.

“The political climate in France today is a strange one, because people who voted for Sarkozy are now upset about him, but it’s not that they are looking towards the alternative. It is a country in between – in between the left and the right, between reform, but nothing will change for the individual.”

His analysis is accurate insofar as those who have taken to the streets of Paris this month are seeking not revolution but stability and the maintenance of the status quo. The kind of revolution they should be fomenting is anyone’s guess. Society – not only in France but throughout the western world – has changed unrecognisably since the 60s. There exists greater equality between men and women, people are allowed paid holidays, gay-bashing is no longer tolerated. But whether such developments are traceable to a generation of baby boomers thumbing their noses at the post-war world in which they had been raised is highly dubious. The enmities of the Cold War have long since vanished. So too the endlessly-splintering radical political groupings of the European left.

And yet, many of those 60s Marxists – including many in the British Labour government over the past decade – are now running things. The Frankfurt School, certainly, is revered in our universities, while in most spheres save from the economic – from immigration and welfare to abortion – the ideas of the left are prevalent. It is tempting to suggest that the aims of the soixante-huitards have all but been achieved. In France, Mr Sarkozy came to power pledging to “liquidate the legacy” of May 1968, a legacy he believes is responsible for soaring divorce rates and more crime, “intellectual and moral relativism” and a breakdown in social cohesion brought on by hedonistic individualism.

Cohn-Bendit, now 64 but still with flecks of red in a full head of hair which once earned him the moniker Danny le Rouge, is having none of it. “It’s madness,” he says. “1968 made people free, there was a revolution in society. Now we have new problems, other problems, but if schools don’t function today it’s not because there was a revolt 40 years ago, it’s because socio-economic reality has made those problems and politics has not been able to find an answer.”

Perhaps Sarkozy has found for his purposes a soft target in the political radicalism of the past, but equally, it is characteristic of the left, in its teleological way, to suppose it can only be the cause of betterment and progress. Perhaps, too, it is an unkindness to bring up the matter which has long been Cohn-Bendit’s greatest gift to his political opponents, yet it seems so inescapably relevant. That gift is a passage in a book he wrote in the 1970s describing the “erotic” nature of his contact with children at an “alternative” kindergarten in Frankfurt. “Certain children opened the flies of my trousers and started to tickle me,” he wrote. “I reacted differently each time, according to the circumstances, but when they insisted on it, I then caressed them.”

When accusations of possible sex abuse were brought against him in 2001 prosecutors decided there was “quite clearly” no case to answer. Most certainly he is not a paedophile, yet given that many intellectual leftists in the 70s were advocating the decriminalisation of sexual relations with children, his phlegmatic insistence that “you have to put it in the time” would suggest Sarkozy’s point about “intellectual and moral relativism” holds true.

Cohn-Bendit is also known to have sheltered the German terrorist Han Joachim Klein, who was involved in the 1975 attack on the Opec meeting in Vienna, in which three people were killed. Gradually, though, he veered towards political respectability: in the 80s he was elected as a Green MEP and became a market-friendly pro-European. Now there are new enemies, new tyrannies to confront. “A lot of things which must be changed in the world we can only do it through Europe,” he states matter-of-factly. “The main problem we have today in the world is to tackle climate change, and we must tackle the socio-ecological effects of globalisation. We have to create a multi-lateral world government to do this, which is one of the main tasks of the European Union.”

Meanwhile, in France, grumbles mount over inflation, rising property prices, static wages and gridlocked job markets. Faced with economic downturn, people want more government intervention; the government says its coffers are empty. A generation of 20-40 somethings are realising they can expect lower standards of living than their parents have enjoyed.

Nostalgia rides high for the month when the babyboomers enjoyed sticking it to authority and having lots of sex. They, it seems, were the lucky ones.