The Patriot Game

As we glide towards the next full-blown campaign for US President, we can expect the partisanship to drift westwards across the Atlantic. Once the no-hopers start to drop out, British pundits will start to pick their favourites and snarl it out at one another - almost as if Clinton, Obama and Giuliani were fighting for votes in the West Midlands, rather than the Mid-West.

The Right gets particularly excited about this. For many, America has become an icon of all that is good in the world, the last bastion of civilised values in Christendom. Most pick their favoured candidates on the basis of they think what America needs, whether it’s a more eloquent figurehead, a slashing of the pork-laden federal government, a new drive for educational reform or a refocusing of the battle against Islamism.

The problem is that the ideologues engage in the presidential race from the wrong shore of the Atlantic. British right-wingers pick from the menu of Republican candidates according to which they think would be the best for America. Few would think any differently about Presidential politics if they weren’t a British subject at all, but loyal to the Stars and Stripes.

George Orwell once noted how an ideologues will often transfer his nationalism to a foreign symbol of his beliefs. In Orwell's day, intellectuals played at being African or Russian patriots, showing off their anti-imperialism or their solidarity with the workers’ state. Throughout the Cold War, many Soviet sympathisers here became outright Russophiles, and even now, with Russia governed by gangster capitalism, the old fellow-travellers still argue for Putin and Mother Russia as fervently as they did thirty years ago.

Now, the ideologues of the Right feel much the same way about their champion that the hard Left felt about theirs. “The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organisation, fills him with uneasiness which he can only relieve by making some sharp retort” wrote Orwell. ‘Anti-American’ being the customary one today.

The modern Right forgets that we are not American, and what is good for one country is not necessarily good for its allies. The history of the last few years is enough to show that.

For a proper anti-America leftie, there has been no better advert for the cause than George Bush. Under his watch, America has become so associated with stupidity, arrogance and incompetence that a distaste for our Stateside cousins has become de rigeur in the circles that consider themselves polite. As Bush enters the closing straights, everyone is edging away from the 43rd President of the United States like from a mad, rambling bore at a party.

As far as the US is concerned, it has had few stauncher allies than Tony Blair. From the days after September 11th when NATO, under pressure from the UK, invoked its mutual-defence obligations for the first time, through six years of solidarity over Afghanistan and Iraq, Britain and America were barely separable. In all the areas that Washington foreign policy makers care about, Blair was keen to hitch Britain to the American position, occasionally pulling in a particular direction, but otherwise happy to roll alongside its ally.

Thing is, even though Tony Blair became the preferred choice of even the most right-wing Republicans, none of his friends in Washington would ever have wanted him to have power in their country. A man who supports higher taxes, gay marriage, nationalised medicine…? In a Presidential race he’d have been a comedy act in the first stage, someone to briefly raise the hopes of liberal Democrats, and to soon drop out.

But of course, those friends of Tony’s understood that all that is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how ideologically pure your allies are, or how they’d get along with your party rank-and-file. What matters, if you value an alliance, is to find presidents and prime ministers who strengthen and enhance that alliance.

Over here, the pro-American Right should think carefully about this. If its columnists and pundits want to do a little good, they should be figuring out which of the candidates would help the alliance recover from the humiliation of the Bush years.

Atlanticists on this side of the pond don’t need another Republican he-man like Rudy Giuliani. Whatever his merits might be for America, and however civilizing it will be for the Republicans to be led into battle by a man who once lived with two gay men and a Chihuahua, a President Giuliani would look like more of the same.

We Atlanticists need an alliance that’s again a source of pride, not of embarrassment. A president who can remind us that America is the offspring of Enlightenment Europe, not simply a weird backwater, filled with dim hicks and tub-thumping religious nutters. We need a president who’s recognisably one of us, not some kind of semi-alien being from a very definitely foreign country.

We need a President Obama. Regardless of whether you’d vote for him yourself, he is the one candidate who can refresh the way the US looks and sounds. Right now, that’s what the true friends of America need.

Solving climate change, right after we solve human nature...

A lot of very earnest people have been taking advantage of the silly season this year, filling up a field next to Heathrow, and those gaps in the news schedules usually occupied by missing-cat stories. Dozens of organisations who make up the Camp for Climate Action, ranging from the fanatics to the fuddy-duddies, are united by the battle against aircraft. It’s no surprise to find there a type of earnest youth who’s always been able to find something evil to make a stand against, and some cretinously simple-minded way of ‘solving’ it.

What is surprising is that they’ve been joined by the kind of establishment figures they’d normally hope to hurl abuse at. The Church of England now believes that flying is a sin, which presumably makes it the one sin that they still believe in. Even the National Trust has come in to bat for the sons-of-Swampy. Everyone is now keen to be seen denying themselves the fruits of civilisation, and Ryanair too.

Environmentalism is the last moral code that Western civilisation truly believes in, and questioning the morally certain is always tough. The respect that environmentalists are given is rather like that given to a preacher in a God-fearing society - we might not agree with him, but we can at least be sure that his heart is righteous. It has become difficult to ask questions, even ones that cut to the core of what the green movement aims to do.

No one, to my knowledge, has pointed out that if the usual cause and remedy for climate change are correct, it will not just require us to trim our energy use. If global warming is indeed caused by the release of the carbon dioxide that was trapped, millions of years ago, as fossil fuels, it would seem to follow that it is not enough simply to burn coal, oil and gas at a much slower rate. It should not matter how long the release takes - the previously trapped gas ends up in the atmosphere permanently. Burning all the fossil fuels we have, regardless of whether we do so in a big splurge or in a long dribble, will have the same effect on the planet.

Ultimately, then, the solution to global warming is for the world to agree to leave vast reserves of fossil fuels buried underground, permanently. If the climate-change thesis is correct, and if we don’t leave this fuel unused, we’re in trouble.

But the problem here is obvious. This vast feat of self-denial will require a saintliness that man has never yet achieved. It requires everyone, everywhere, to forget about the kind of lifestyle that burning fossil fuels allows. Under the soil lies the greatest source of free power that mankind has ever found. It’s so vital to the way we live that even a wind turbine, that icon of environmentalism, requires great dollops of fossil fuels to build. If we had to build the whole thing - from extracting and refining the aluminium to hauling the finished turbine across country to its site - without the use of coal, oil, and gas, we might not think the power it generates worthwhile.

With our reserves locked in the ground, with the wellheads blocked and the mines blown up, mankind faces the kind of temptation that it’s never been able to resist. Denied the use of coal, oil or gas, mankind is reduced to using manpower, animal power, and whatever renewable sources it’s worth building, given the valuable energy that goes into building them, and the power they generate. It’ll be a tough lifestyle, made all the more painful by the knowledge that if we just opened up one of those mine shafts, there’d be all that power right on tap…

Still, everyone must resist, or the deal crumbles. Every people, every government, in every corner of the world, must resist the temptation to start using again, or no one else will. And if persuading peoples to renounce fossil fuels is tough, just try asking states to chuck away their own defences - ‘for the sake of the planet’.

For more than a century, a nation’s military power has ridden on the back of its industrial power. It is not so much its stomach that a modern army marches on, but its fuel tanks. Building and maintaining mechanized armies - to say nothing of air forces and navies - takes huge amounts of energy, most of which can only come from fossil fuels. Coal, oil and gas are the spinach on which nations grow strong. But if the deal’s going to work, states must abandon the instincts that they’ve shown since the dawn of time. They must all slash their militaries, relying only on carbon-free technologies to power their defences, and trust that every other country will keep the bargain.

Which country would be willing to scrap every warship that wasn’t solar-powered? Every tank that didn’t run on biodiesel, and that couldn’t be maintained by a wainwright’s shop? Every fighter aircraft that isn’t powered by rubber bands? Would all countries agree to disarm itself of every military invention of the last century-and-a-half, and go back to defending themselves with horse-drawn cannon, foot-soldiers and square-rigged men o’ war? And would they trust that no country would hang onto a few jet fighters and a guided-missile destroyer or two, and suddenly be able to rout any of its neighbours?

It is impossible to imagine. Anyone who thinks that the nations and peoples of the world would come together and agree in confidence to put the world’s great energy supplies beyond use is delusional. Two little stories from recent weeks illustrate just how crazy the idea is.

Not long before the Camp for Climate Action ambled into the fields of Heathrow, a Russian submarine planted a flag on the seabed at the North Pole, igniting a frantic rush to lay claim to the Arctic, the source of untapped riches of oil and gas. The rush isn’t to see who can best secure the oil against the ravages of mankind, but a race to get the stuff out and shipped off to their refineries.

It was not just Russia that wants that oil. Those well-known anti-ecological bastards, the Danes, started jumping up and down demanding a chunk. As did the renowned planet-destroying psychopaths, the Canadians. These are nations who profess to be at the heart of efforts to stem climate change. Given the opportunity, they chase oil as thirstily as anyone. And this really should have told the green movement what it’s up against.

Last week, protesters in Burma went onto the streets to denounce a 100% rise in the price of fuel. That’s a mere 100% rise, not, as we seem to need, a complete ban on burning the stuff. Protesters far more courageous, and certainly more desperate than the crusties at Heathrow, were willing to face the murderous security forces of one of the world’s worst tyrannies in an attempt to get fuel at a reasonable cost. That is how much people want to burn fossil fuels. That is the attitude of 99% of the planet. That is what the Monbiotites are facing.

Short of a worldwide green totalitarianism, there is precisely zero chance of humanity leaving the rest of the oil where it is. And even then, it’s pretty doubtful. We're all willing to make sacrifices that give us a righteous glow, so long as they don’t intrude too much on our basic lifestyle. Rich, urban liberals might be willing to have an electric car as part of their fleet, just to use for popping down to the supermarket. Suggest that they do what the planet apparantly needs from us all, to refuse any form of transport that isn’t powered by, built, or maintained with the aid of fossil fuels, and you’ll find few takers.

The green movement believes that it is possible for mankind to renounce the world’s best source of energy, and that out of the six million of us, not one will cheat, not one government will turn a blind eye, not one oil-rich area will secede, and stick two fingers to the ban. It believes that humans are capable of making unimaginable sacrifices in their standards of living, for the good of the planet, and that our species laughs in the face of temptation. It believes that human nature is intrinsically good and rational, and able to free itself from its greedy passions. It is wrong, in the most spectacular and ignorant fashion imaginable.

So long as we can dig up energy out of the ground, someone will use it. We will do so until we find something better, something that moves us around, keeps us warm, and helps us make all those goodies that we want. All the slideshows in the world won’t change that crucial basic fact.

This is the problem that the green movement is refusing to face. There is no way that humans will renounce the stuff that makes their lives easier and more comfortable, nor their governments what makes them more powerful. Our two chances are 1) to hope that the greens are wrong, or at least exaggerating, or 2) to discover a new source of energy that is at least as powerful and convenient as fossil fuels, that would let us abandon the oil fields without temptation.

Who knows if we’ll succeed? But whatever happens, the green movement will be an irrelevance. It will be inventors, not art-school greens on a moralistic ego trip, who find the next great source of power, if there is one. Trying to stop climate change by recycling, or banning standby buttons, is like a fat man trying to lose weight by cutting his toenails. It’s all or nothing. And since ‘all’ is impossible, that makes our current preoccupations with ‘green living’ look rather fatuous.

Could we build a new New Town?

For the first time in decades, housing policy is shooting up the political agenda. Gordon Brown is planning ‘eco-towns’ - or Broon’s Toons, as they’d doubtless be known if the thought wasn’t so utterly depressing - with 100,000 new houses on surplus government land, and 250,000 more on top of the 2.75m target of houses to be built by 2020.

Brown’s announcement concentrated entirely on raw numbers. All that matters, in this great new push for development, this creation of entire new towns and huge new estates, is the number of units that can be thrown up, and the number of people - or sub-units, as they’re probably known - that can be inserted into them.

There is little mention of density, communications, and the practicalities of building ever more in the South East, let alone any kind of vision for how urban living to will evolve in the decades to come. 100,000 houses will be built, simply because housing’s expensive, it was something Tony didn’t do much about, and because it’s a nice round number that’ll sound good in the soundbites.

The Philistinism is astonishing. Yet another giant scheme of housing will be thrown up, with no consideration for anything except sheltering another clump of workers, as efficiently as possible. Each of these estates and towns will be a permanent fixture on the landscape, since unlike the ghastly council tower blocks that are currently being exploded up and down the country, there’s no single landlord that can get rid of the things.

One might be surprised that the country would is happy to cloak itself with architecture that is dreary at best, soul-destroying at worst, and entirely irremovable. We are no longer a nation that is happy shopping at C&A. We now buy more BMW 3-series than we do Ford Mondeos. We love cheap clothing, but it has to be stylish, cheap clothing. Even staid old Marks & Spencer was only truly revived when Myleene Klass didn’t look out of place bouncing around in its adverts.

Design is everything to Britain in the 21st century. Yet the man who wears nothing less than Hugo Boss and loves his Audi TT is quite happy to drive home to a house than could have been stamped out on a British Housing production line. Property is the one great exception to our design obsession.

What on earth could make us so willing to accept second best, in the one purchase that matters most? Why do we not even question the grotesquely utilitarian plans of housing ministers, given that the state has proved it can commission and build delicious buildings - though admittedly, only when they’re for the use of MPs or officials.

Partly, there’s a lingering fear that contemporary architecture is inevitably cold, unliveable, and inhuman; built according to the Le Corbusier fantasy that if one designs an inhumanly rational, planned city, one can expect their inhabitants to turn into Homo Rationalius, content to follow the architect’s plan for how they should live their lives. Some architects revelled in this Godlike position, but citizens bristle at being managed in this way. We might like to worship designers, but we’d rather have a say in the matter.

But mainly, I suspect, because we have grown used to the idea that modern building is inevitably boring and derivative, and that anyone who values style will either commission and build their own design, or buy something that was built a century or two ago. After a century that built houses of ever-increasing blandness, we haven’t the guts to reject a freshly built housing estate of brand-new wynds and lanes, a plague of modern suburban boxes built onto a streetscape from the Middle Ages. We no longer believe that we still can build something great if we want to.

Individual buildings we can do fine. It’s the art of designing cities, or districts at least, that we’ve lost. This is the hangover from those disastrous attempts of the Sixties and Seventies to invent bold new ways of living, rather than designing cities to suit the way people like to live.

Under the current system of planning, development has become the preserve of a handful of professional developers, who are the only ones with the muscle to confront the planning system and win. A virtual cartel of firms who build much the same kind of houses is not going to experiment, given that suburban boxes sell easily and profitably, and that they care about little else. The problem is that we have a planning system where no one can build on a large scale except these developers, and given the fluctuations of the market, these developers want the safest product they can build. In cities, development is a duopoly of councils and corporate developers.

We can’t and shouldn’t expect the state to step in, to attempt to raise the standard and the beauty of housing by developing themselves, since their record in this field - Millennium Dome, anyone? - is abysmal. Even if they were capable of it, the political incentives simply aren’t there. No one votes for housing unless they desperately need some, and if their need is that desperate, their priority will be for quantity, not beauty.

But there is another model to consider, a Third Way if you like. More than two centuries ago, the nation’s most beautiful housing estate started to go up, on a disused heath to the north of medieval Edinburgh. A young architect, James Craig, drew up the grand plan for the New Town, a geometrical grid of fine squares and broad streets, on the instructions of the town authority. Permission was granted to anyone who wanted to build a house or houses there, so long as they conformed to the overall plan and the new style.

Where necessary, the authorities offered a reward - the first, lonely house to be built on the far side of Edinburgh’s stinking loch earned a £20 bonus. Planning permission - the great headache of modern urban development - was not a problem, since the city itself had drawn up the plans. All a builder had to do was acquire a plot, a builder, and formal permission to build his house there, in accordance with the plan.

A modern version of this scheme could demolish the stranglehold that timid architecture has on this nation. Instead of restricting development to professional developers, a city wanting to build on wasteland or over the rubble of a decrepit estate could bulldoze their site, and invite submissions for a new plan, covering both the layout and the style of housing.

An open competition is an old device for commissioning architecture, and it would be an ideal way for a city to decide on a plan. And since those wanting to build to this plan would get their planning permission automatically, thus cutting out a hazardous and expensive part of building, the standards demanded in the scheme can afford to be high.

It is then up to individuals, developers, and housing associations to acquire a plot and design a house or a block that fits the grand design, to coin a phrase. By breaking the need for full, start-to-finish planning permission, you break the power of the developers, and allow individuals and groups to build their own houses again.

A district designed on these lines could afford to be adventurous and exciting. It has the chance to be a development that adds to the beauty and character of a city, rather than, as so many do, dragging it down further to suburban mediocrity. Unlike most developments, the city could afford to demand the kind of quality and beauty that few individuals would be able to build on their own. Instead of town and cities competing to have new housing dumped elsewhere, we can dream about a day when towns compete to build grander, more innovative, and more beautiful districts than the next town.

All it takes is the belief that we can still do things like this, and that it’s worth doing. The days when we could build mere housing that was stunning enough to stand as a monument to our civilisation doesn’t need to have died, quite yet.

Why Broon's Doomed

Gordon Brown’s first week in power seems to have been received well. He and his new Home Secretary have managed to sound responsible and dignified in the face of the world’s most comically useless terrorist attacks. Labour partisans in the commentariat are overjoyed to witness Brown’s ability to move next door and not tread on any banana skins en route. The opposition is being civilised, partly out of the sense of statesmanship necessary in weeks like this, and partly to keep their powder dry.

But despite his good week, the prospects for Brown’s premiership are not good. Even before his frankly rather pathetic debut at PMQs, it was plain that Brown would be the first new Prime Minister for a long time whose opponents would greet him not with venom, but with contempt. Most incoming PMs are met with a healthy mixture of cheers and loathing. On either side there is both hope and anger, but always there’s passion. If a new leader can’t inspire even some sincere hatred, they’re in trouble.

This kind of quiet, indifferent contempt is rare, reserved for those new boys whom the voters already know all about, and don’t think much of. It is the worst of receptions. Matthew Parris, the exceptionally shrewd columnist for The Times, has written of his desire to join those who are accused of underestimating Gordon Brown, and who think that his talents have been wildly oversold. Brilliant at sums, but with no imagination and less courage, goes the Parris line.

For the past decade, Gordon Brown has been portrayed as the grim but brainy force behind the glossy charm of Tony Blair. Allies boast of the great man’s intellectual power, his grasp of detail and his vast reading. We are reminded that Brown is the first truly intellectual Prime Minister since Balfour. No doubt that is true, as far as it goes. But succeeding at the top of politics is not just a matter of IQ, and two factors have already doomed Brown’s spell at the top.

In a modern, media-driven democracy, top politicians are overexposed. Being an active, thrusting politician is synonymous with ‘being on TV all the time’. A politician who’s made it to the top has usually gone through several years of obscurity to all except Westminster-watchers, followed by a period of rising stardom, in which their public profile slowly grows, after which the they break through to the top stratum of politics.

Once they reach this point, politicians are ceaselessly in the public eye. Unlike politicians of previous generations, Westminster’s modern top dogs have a limited lifespan. Constantly gossiped about, analysed and featured in the press, and trailed by camera crews as they visit schools, clean up graffiti and do the other textbook stunts, we can only take so much of them. If the Victorian public had had to watch Gladstone cleaning up dog mess with a cheery grin on his face, he wouldn’t have still been at No. 10 in his eighties.

The life expectancy of a modern top politician is no more than ten to fifteen years, before we are utterly sick of the sight of him. At this point, the nation generally likes to kick them out, despise their memory for a few years, before their slow rehabilitation into loveable old curmudgeons, in the mould of Lord ‘Tub of Lard’ Hattersley.

Even before reaching No. 10, Gordon Brown had used up most of his political lifespan. He has loomed over the political landscape for a decade, a constant presence in the nation’s life. While he’s been much less obviously a media presence than Blair, and his public appearances have been mainly limited to formal events and a few stiff photocalls, his presence in the nation’s consciousness has been no less real.

He has dictated much of domestic policy since 1997. He has steered the government in the direction of a more wide-ranging state, one that looks after and helps raise small children, as well as try to educate them when they’re older. The domestic policies that the government’s most wholeheartedly committed itself to - like tax credits - are Gordon’s. He has loudly taken the credit for virtually everything that’s gone well in this country since 1997. And his sullen, under-the-table bickering with Tony Blair has kept the national’s political journalists amused for just as long.

It is absurd to think that he comes to No. 10 as a fresh talent. He has at most, one full Parliament left before his time is exhausted. No one could, hand on heart, say that they can visualise Gordon Brown still being Prime Minister in ten years’ time. He is already on the way out, whatever he tries to do. His only struggle now is to make it a slow exit.

The second problem for him is that his decade of sulking has already marked him out as a second-rate PM. If you think of the great Prime Ministers, they were all people who took chances when offered, made the most of them, and forced their own success upon the system. Propelling yourself to the top through your own political skill and courage earns respect of the most Machiavellian kind, the kind that gives you the power to mould politics to your agenda.

Whereas those leaders who inherit the job without a fight, perhaps as a reward for long service, as the nominee of a more powerful figure, or because no one could think of anyone better, are always going to make mediocre leaders. They are people like Jim Callaghan, Anthony Eden, and John Major. David Davis, if he had won the Tory race, would have been one.

Inheriting power without a fight, they start at an inevitable disadvantage. They haven’t earned that brutal, wolf-pack sense of respect for a leader who’s proved him or herself to be the strongest, sharpest and most ruthless. Westminster politics is not cuddly. Blair used all the Machiavellian tricks that exist - other than the one about leaving the body of his unpopular lieutenant in two pieces in the piazza - to keep power from slipping away from him. It gives a leader a sense of invincibility, quite necessary if he or she is going to keep dozens of the most ambition and cunning people in the country from besting him.

For all his superficial fluffiness, Cameron did prove himself in his leadership fight, coming from behind and beating the favourite hands-down. Brown, in contrast, was outmanoeuvred in 1994, sold a deal at Granita that proved worthless, and never managed to fight back. He waited nearly ten years, sulking and briefing in the background, until Blair was terminally weakened. Then, last September, he struck, with a timid, half-hearted attempt at a coup. Its success can be measured by the fact that even against a weakened Blair, Brown was forced to wait yet another year to gain his prize.

Brown starts his premiership with his time running out, and weakened by his own timidity. For ten years he has been the prime minister-in-waiting, and he has excelled only at the waiting. His chance to be a great PM evaporated ten years ago, when he rolled over and let Blair win without a fight. In the dog-eat-dog world of Westminster, it’s too late to recover. Only natural, therefore, that even Brown’s enemies should greet him with a contemptuous shrug.

A Silver Lining in Gaza?

Violence is never far from the surface of Palestinian society, but it’s rarely so plainly self-destructive as the emerging civil war between Hamas and Fatah. The murderous struggle for power that has divided Gaza and the West Bank into Hamastan and Fatahland looks like the last nail in the coffin of any chance of two states, at least any time soon.

But it’s rarely acknowledged that, even before the factions started dropping their opponents’ chefs off tall buildings, the Palestinian territories were nowhere near ready for statehood. It’s common to assume that there is some kind of wilful refusal on the part of the West to allow the recognition of the two-state solution, a stubborn, spiteful reluctance to do what’s right. It is no such thing.

New states need time and effort to help them stand alone, to be able to enforce their authority, to defend themselves and fit into the international system. In the years following independence, Israel needed the military support of France and Britain, and to be propped up financially by West Germany. East Timor, the last state to gain its independence, needed the midwifery skills of both the Australian military and the UN, and it stills needs their assistance, five years on.

Any new state needs a national identity that gives its people an attachment to its territory, a government that can enforce its authority across the whole of that territory, institutions that work, and, usually, the support of a sponsor. A state that lacks these, is, regardless of who recognises it and however many fine words are said in its support, will fail, in one of the numerous ways that states can collapse, divide, be undermined, or invaded.

The usual concept for a Palestinian state - recognition of a unified nation consisting of Gaza and the West Bank, with the two joined by a corridor of land exchanged with the Israelis, and the whole state governed from the West Bank by a unified government - is a recipe for failure.

The territories are not a proper country, but are an artificial cobbling-together of two unconnected areas of the old mandated Palestine. The West Bank and Gaza’s only connection is that both identify themselves as not being nations in themselves, but as territories full of refugees from their real country. It is as nonsensical as if Wales and Scotland were to form a union, governed from Edinburgh, based solely on their Celtic ethnicity and their hatred for the English.

Only it’s worse than that, since Wales and Scotland have history, institutions and identities that don’t depend on their common enemy. The Palestinians don’t. When Israel was created, many of the Palestinian refugees fled from Israel to what was then Transjordan, now Jordan, and which then controlled the West Bank. Others went north to Lebanon, south to into Egyptian-occupied Gaza, and others scattered further. But those who would come under Israeli occupation in 1967 saw themselves not as nations under occupation, but as exiles facing their expeller.

Unlike the hundreds of thousands of Jews of Arabia who were expelled from their homes at around the same time, the Palestinian Arabs never made a new home in the their new home. Partly this was because the Arab states were, at least until 1973, deadly serious about wiping out Israel as a state; the Palestinians kept as refugees to repopulate an Arab Palestine, and as a handy, if callous, propaganda vehicle for diverting the anger of their restive peoples.

As a consequence, the Palestinians still have very little that is not part of a broader Arab or Islamist identity, or dependent on their status as refugees from Israel. The territory that the West wants to see become their state is not what they see as their real home. In short, there is no nation of Palestine that fits with where the Palestinians live, an identity that binds a people with their soil. Instead, the Palestinian identity is one that’s constantly looking over the border into their past, or looking across the Middle East to what they share with their co-religionists.

It’s fairly obvious that any model of Palestinian statehood will, if it’s to be permanent, need Palestinians to see their nation as the one that’s under their feet, not as the one that’s over the border. For those who like looking for flashes of silver tucked inside the darkest clouds, the separation of the Palestinian territories into two statelets could be the first stage in this process. It could bring about the evolution of two giant refugee camps into proper little countries.

Separated, not just by geography but by different ideologies and different national stories, the two statelets start to look more like nations, rather than just holding camps. Of course, it does not seem much of a step forward to have a statelet controlled by Hamas, one that is drifting closer into the orbit of Iran, that may allow itself to be used as a forward base full of rockets and human shields, and that is in no position to have civilised relations with any other state, but there is at least a glint in that undeniably nasty thundercloud.

For without progressing from the politics of exile, there can be no viable Palestinian state. Without a real sense of nationhood that connects the Palestinians to their homeland, it’ll be virtually impossible to establish them a successful new state. In an area as pressurised as that between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, it’s impossible.

The question is whether the de facto separation of the two statelets can ease of the Palestinians’ transition into a post-refugee nation. My guess is that it has a reasonable chance, if only because that progress was all but impossible under the old, cobbled-together model of statehood, a model that institutionalised the politics of exile. It’s true that any good that may come from this nasty little episode of bloodletting will take years at least, more likely decades, and it’s also true that predicting anything with any certainty in the Middle East - except war, hatred and sandiness - is a mug’s game.

But breaking the link between Palestinians' roots as exiles and their future as self-governing citizens is essential. Actually achieving this is a possibility for the long run, no more. But though Keynes’ famous words of scepticism pointed out that “in the long run we’re all dead”, in Gaza and the West Bank at the moment, that maxim is becoming equally applicable to the short run. Anything that gives a real chance of stability to the region, however remote that chance may be, ought to be taken seriously.

A Self-Indulgent Boycott

So, the Universities and Colleges Union has voted to support a boycott of Israeli universities. With the rather Dave Spartish manner that these fine minds have, it’s nothing so straightforward as a plain call for boycott. Instead, the UCU will circulate a motion to all its branches to discuss calls from Palestinian trade unions for a "comprehensive and consistent international boycott of all Israeli academic institutions". The boycott motion is going to branches for "their information and discussion", which is no doubt something to forward to.

It’s hardly worth discussing why this union wants to boycott Israel for its actions in the occupied territories, but not China for its actions in Tibet, Russia for its actions in Chechnya, India for its actions in Kashmir, Turkey for its actions in Cyprus, or any of the thousand and one other boycotts that would be at least as justifiable as the one they want.

The fact is that Israel, and its policy towards the occupied territories, has become an icon for much of the Left. Quite plainly Israel is not the wickedest country on earth, to be singled out and despised for its deeds; but yet it is an icon of loathing, to be singled out for what it represents.

The membership of the UCU is largely composed of middle-aged radicals, made diverse by a handful of middle-aged ex-radicals. That may be an unfair generalisation, but in any case, it’s much less of a one than describing Israel as an apartheid state. Its campaign priorities are the usual mix of public sector self-interest and tedious leftist sloganeering - no to privatisation, no to ratting on potential terrorists, yes to boycotting Israel.

Like most of the rest of the current Establishment, the academic establishment is the product of the Sixties and Seventies. Back when they were young, Western imperialism was still the great bogeyman of radical politics. Africa was going through a traumatic decolonization, and most of the colonial powers were fighting either to leave with dignity, or to cling onto their colonies as long as possible.

Empire represented all that was bad about the old Britain, with its stuffy Victorian attitudes and its appeal to all those fashionable Marxist clichés of exploitation and ruling classes. It was bound up with the old establishment, and was an emblem of everything that the new wave of politics and culture wanted swept away. Little could be easier or more enjoyable for the new generations than kicking imperialism as it went down.

Those who came of age back then still have an obsession with fighting imperialism. Anything that resembles a proper, old-fashioned Empire - rich, white people having power over poor, brown ones - sends into a frenzy those who have failed to evolve since the 1960s.

The misfortune of Israel is to have created the perfect icon of white imperialism. Their deeds are no worse, and often much better than many other countries involved in territorial disputes. But the ossified old Left couldn’t care less about Chinese imperialism, the squabbles of India and Pakistan, or any other imperial or quasi-imperial conflict. All they care about is bringing down white imperialism, once and for all.

The conflict in the occupied territories pushes all those old buttons. You have a power armed with the latest, most sophisticated weapons available, versus passionate, stone-throwing natives who have no weapons but their bodies and their cunning. It is the rich versus the poor; greedy European settlers versus the honest peasants who’d farmed the land for generations. It plays beautifully to the imperial stereotypes of these rather old, unimaginative people, who remain stuck with the bogeymen of their youth.

It takes little effort to see this conflict through the prism of white imperialism. Swap redcoats for IDF infantry, gunboats for helicopter gunships, and rebelling natives for rebelling natives, and one great bogeyman morphs into the other without effort. For those whose intellect is this shallow, who react rather than think, it makes perfect sense to fight Israel as the new imperial power, the heir of the Raj and the new adventurers.

It’s no coincidence that the two great boycott campaigns of the last half-century have been against the two states that push these buttons. Neither South Africa nor Israel was targeted for being the most monstrous regime around, but for sparking guilt and shame amongst the Empire-hating generations.

Apartheid South Africa was cruel, brutal and racist, but it was a competent government, and by no means the most tyrannical even on its own continent. Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is cruel, brutal, racist and so incompetent that its people are either fleeing or starving in their millions. But as it bears no resemblance to a white imperial power, it faces far less condemnation.

Israel is cavalier in its treatment of the Palestinians, and it is yet to completely kick the old vision of a Greater Israel. It is often heavy-handed and ruthless. But it is a tiny nation on the fringes of the Middle East, still surrounded by nations who want to see it weakened or destroyed. It faces guerrilla warfare, either from Hezbollah, or from Hamas or the other Palestinian Islamists, sponsored by those states that want to grind it down. It wants, reluctantly, to get out of the occupied territories, but not to be forced out, and in doing so it wants to ensure that its borders and resources are secure. Much as any other state would.

It takes a considerable degree of blinkeredness to twist Israeli policy into the charge sheet of a Public Enemy Number One. Even if we limit ourselves to academia, in the week British academics voted to boycott Israel, Iranian academics began being arrested for daring to talk to Western universities. If the UCU wanted to boycott nasty regimes there’s no shortage of choice. Making the choice Israel says much about their real motivations.

This boycott, as with the South African one, has little to do with fighting injustice and everything to do with the gratification of the smug lefties who dominate the UCU. It is self-indulgent to the point of obscenity to do this, to punish a nation for one’s own pleasure, regardless of the effect it has on those who may be suffering. Nations that feel unjustly attacked usually retreat into a bunk mentality. But hey, who cares whether it will do any good for the Palestinians, so long as it’s good for a few Western egos?

Quite aside from the stupidity of this self-righteous, self-indulgent boycott, whose only purpose is to make some decrepit old fools feel brave and daring again, it is a great shame that British academia should have leant its name to such an enterprise. It is only natural that the old elite should be some way behind the times. But it is inexcusable for it to be a full century behind the times.

To be driven by a desire to attack the British Empire is, in 2007, when the great issues concern the Islamic world and the new economic superpowers of the East, as stupid and absurd as it would for someone living in coffee-house Georgian London to be obsessed with fighting the divine right of kings. No one whose mindset is stuck in a previous century can have much to say about today’s world. Intellectually as well as physically, they're on their way to the grave.

Incentives and welfare

More than fifteen years after the USSR was put out of its considerable misery, it’s easy for us to ignore how much Western society still owes to Marxism. China has now abandoned communism for dictatorial capitalism, and soon the only little red books will come from Smythson boutiques. Castro, the seemingly immortal old fool, might have made his last seven-hour speech. And yet our beloved welfare state is still popular, still the sacred cow of British politics, and still runs on the basis of ‘from each according to his means, to each according to his needs’.

Karl Marx‘s communism was based on the belief that, come the revolution, the factories and infrastructure would be taken over by the proletariat, and everyone would spontaneously work together for the benefit of all in society, capable or incapable, weak or strong. Everyone will put into the common pool of labour what they can, and take only what they need. We could all do whatever our souls dictated, helping society whenever we could, and relying on our comrades when we couldn’t. The communist citizens’ actions, efforts and choices would be based on the needs of society as a whole, rather than the needs of the individual.

A post-revolution utopia is, crudely, what a welfare state tries to replicate. Our taxes are broadly taken on one’s ability to pay. This communal pool of money funds payments to those who meet various tick-box criteria for neediness. Benefits are provided according to how many children one has, whether one has a disability or a job, and how much or how little one earns.

The idea of council housing is that one should be able to have the kind of house that one needs, wherever one needs it. A drawingroom flat in Kensington sounds good to me. NHS hospitals will, in theory, treat you regardless of your wealth or the extent of your culpability in causing your own illness. State schools promise to house as many children as you can produce, if not educate them. And they’ll do so almost regardless of how well or badly they behave.

The welfare state’s help is largely unconditional. If you have three children by the age of eighteen and need assistance, you’ll likely be given a place to stay and a little money. It makes no difference whether you’ve been abandoned, careless, or have picked motherhood as a career, lowly as it is. All that matters is one’s need.

The benefits system does make one key break with pure Marxism, in that it acknowledges the problem of cheating. Marx would never dream that his good, good communists would cheat one another, to take more from and give less to society than their abilities and needs dictated, but even our dimmest, wettest socialists accept that not all people are entirely selfless. Some - perhaps those who won’t accept that there might be any fraudulent incapacity claimants on the welfare rolls - might think that this is only because property hasn’t been abolished yet, but the less said about them the better.

We compel people to pat their taxes, and to take no more than their officially-sanctioned due. We take this seriously enough that we lock up anyone who disobeys. And by doing so we implicitly recognise just why the welfare state fails.

We are not Marx’s perfect, communally-minded proletarians. If offered something unconditionally - like state benefits - we tend to take it without thinking too much about the interests of wider society. Those who control the welfare state are keen to squash those who take money from the system without considering broader society, so long as it’s the illegal kind of social fraud. The legal sort, where people take from the pool out of self-interest alone, is of no concern to them.

It is not particularly in society’s interests, for example, that subsidised child-rearing should result in teenagers picking motherhood as a career, lowly as it is. Those who become single mothers by choice are neither the honest, hard-done-by saints of Guardian mythology, nor the immoral, grasping demons of the Mail. They are often just following their own self-interest, and think it more satisfying, and more secure, than struggling to get and keep a checkout or cleaner’s job.

But the statistics overwhelmingly show that for the rest of us, our subsidies unwittingly promote violence against the mother, the child, and, when the child grows up, against the rest of us too. A child brought up by its mother and her boyfriend is thirty-three times as likely to be abused as one brought up by married parents, and seventy-four times more likely to be killed.

Funding Sure Start, crèches and subsidised babysitters not only makes life easier for hard-pressed, poor parents, but makes the prospect of pregnancy a good deal more attractive. Not only can a not particularly bright young girl choose motherhood as a passport to some degree of security and status, but the more the state provides help and assistance, the less responsibility she has to bear. It becomes a more attractive an option if there is a state institution for her to subcontract the graft of motherhood to; allowing her to carry on the lifestyle she’d have otherwise, and letting the Treasury pick up the tab.

The great failure of left-wing economics is to ignore the power of these incentives. Marxism and welfare statism share a belief that people will not change their behaviour if offered cash for doing x, or given penalties for doing y. We ignore such petty matters, and simply do what is fundamental to our essence, to the core of our being. Or soul, to those who take the opium of the masses.

People will look after their own health even if there’s a free service to rectify it if they don’t. Higher taxes won’t change what people do for a living, or how much of it they do. No one will be put off saving for their retirement, blowing the lot instead while young, just because their state pensions will be means-tested. They wouldn’t, surely, decide to follow their self-interest, have some fun in their youth, and vote to have some of my money instead when they retire? What happened to the communal interest?

Not many socialists really think this out, but just have a vague sense that we are above such petty money-grubbing, that there are more important things in life that a few pence on income tax, a little pensions credit or a meagre few grand in bonuses. And it would indeed be much nicer if we all did what was in our society’s interests, and ignored the consequences for ourselves. The descendents of Marx feel in their bones that the power of society is so much more powerful than crude, capitalistic bribes.

It is true that people won’t sit down to calculate exactly how much extra or less they will make under a new rule, and calibrate their utility-maximising response to the penny. But young people might see the old getting means-tested pensions, and the benefits of their grandparents’ personal saving wiped out, and decide to care rather more about having fun than saving prudently and boringly for the future. Just remember to take it instead from your own, unborn grandchildren. Changes in incentives change the atmosphere that people make decisions in, and if the incentives hit the spot, they change those decisions themselves.

Not even Marx, as it happens, was quite as naïve as our unthinking lefties. He recognised that life under capitalism was a life where egoism and self-interest runs society, in all kinds of ways. His silliness lay in thinking that property was the cause of this, and that revolution and the extermination of the capitalist classes would create Utopia. But Nye Bevin and chums thought that self-interest could be abolished by Act of Parliament, and that once child benefit, unemployment insurance and the NHS were established, the good, socialist citizens would use them only in the communal interest. His intellectual - and I use the word hesitantly - descendants have never questioned, or even thought much about it. As always, it’s easier to fell regimes than the ideas behind them.