America suffers from the pathology of the anointed

My previous post, criticising Israel’s claim to the land promised by God to his chosen people (on the basis that there is no God, therefore no promise and no chosen people), applies just as much to every other nation or group who have regarded themselves as chosen by God or otherwise destined for greatness. It’s a very common idea. The founding myths of the USA were established by deeply religious migrants from Europe, including many Puritans from England, and others who saw themselves as divinely chosen; many in the Bible Belt of today still do, and not just small cults like the Branch Davidians of Waco. Puritans believed that a few people were the elect, destined to go to Heaven; confidence in their righteousness was at the root of their intolerance and zealotry. The writers of the US constitution were idealists, with their self-evident truths and list of rights. Many imperial nations have told themselves that they were doing humanity a favour by imposing their rule on others; and these ideas are almost always supported by an appeal to God and a belief in the innate superiority of the imperial masters. Who but God could make one race or culture innately superior to all others, or give moral cover to imperialism? Hence Kipling’s belief that British colonialism had a divinely authorised mission (the “white man’s burden”) of civilising the world’s non-white savages; those he called “sullen peoples, half devil and half child”.

I’m sure a lot of religious people are motivated to do good, at least as they see it. But a lot of them are motivated to conquest or destruction. Religious people often celebrate their martyrs, who died for their faith. They are less quick to celebrate the other side of the coin; those who killed for their faith. For every martyr who was willing to be burned at the stake over some obscure point of doctrine, there were others, just as pious, who tied them up and lit the fire.

It’s not only the Christians and Jews which have a God who was rather more active and involved in ancient history but has since become more retiring. Muslims believe that the Koran was the final revelation to mankind, and no further prophets are needed – hence their absence. Indeed, any religion at all which posits a God who was active in the origin and early days of the world, has the problem of explaining his absence from it today, except in the imaginations of those who believe. It creates a narrative that the modern world is different to the world described in those sacred texts; that things are different now. This is God’s plan for the world; a plan of finite duration, which will end somehow – Armageddon, Judgement day, the kingdom of God, the last trump, the rapture, the second coming, whatever.

There’s a parallel here with some of the founding myths of Western nations. As historian Robert Jensen put it, there is danger in the claim that the “greatest nation” has a direct connection to God; he calls it “the pathology of the anointed”. The myth the US still holds to, he says, is that “other nations through history have acted out of greed and self-interest, seeking territory, wealth and power… Then came the US, touched by God, a shining city on the hill….  Unlike the rest of the world, we act out of a cause nobler than greed; we are.. a model of peace, freedom and democracy”. It is a myth which can only be swallowed by those who refuse to look at the reality of US actions in the world. It is a myth which would take some selling in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, or Somalia; among black Americans or first nations people; or in any other country exploited, manipulated and controlled by the US.

The myth of a benevolent USA requires one to believe that its wonderful virtues arose somehow during, or just after, the years of the conquest and colonisation of the Americas by Europeans; the almost complete genocide of the indigenous peoples; and the centuries of slavery. It’s like Christian belief in God; the Old Testament is full of stories of God’s murderous activities, the floods, plagues and divine wrath. But, by the time Jesus comes along, it’s all about turning the other cheek and loving your neighbour. The divine U-turn is never quite explained.

Truly, though, the benevolent and noble ideal USA has never existed. From its foundation – expressed in a document assigning equality and rights to all, but which was signed by slave owners, and in which the indigenous people of America are referred to as “merciless Indian savages”; through its expansion across the continent, justified as “manifest destiny”; and on to the wars of my own lifetime, direct and by proxy, which continue today in Ukraine and Gaza. Always the claim of moral justification is deployed. Legends of national heroism are built on the example of the war against fascist Germany and Japan; but the fact that the opponents in that war were so obviously monstrous themselves, doesn’t mean that the West was morally whiter than white.

Today, though, we bend over backwards to justify the West’s wars and drive for dominance, by pretending to uphold the rule of law, justice, self-determination and so on. The enemies in these wars are portrayed as power-hungry brutes whose willingness to kill is condemned; our own power is excused as being a tool for the good, and our own willingness to kill (as seen at Wounded Knee, Hiroshima, in Cambodia, through sanctions against poor countries, or by bombing Gaza) is excused as a necessary consequence of our higher purposes.

The current, ongoing destruction of Gaza is perhaps the most extreme example; apologists for it have to dig pretty deep to come up with a way to justify the deaths of so many women and children, the flattening of waterworks and hospitals, the displacement of 2m people, and the engineered famine which threatens to extend the death toll into 6 figures. But, they do. Within Israel itself, the Palestinians are painted as sullen peoples, half devil and half child, and condemned as merciless savages: the exact words of Israeli President Herzog were “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved”. Other Israeli leaders have described the Palestinians as animals. Always, the enemy must be demonised, dehumanised and othered, to make it more acceptable to kill them. There is also the pathology of the anointed; the religious justification for taking exclusive possession of all the land from the river to the sea.

They realise that this narrative doesn’t fly outside Israel. Here, the relentless line is that Israel is justified in doing whatever they see fit to do, by right of self defence. It’s noteworthy that the ICJ in its interim judgement recently, refused to affirm that what Israel is currently doing in Gaza can be classed as defence. In the only judicial process in which the arguments have yet been heard, all of Israel’s arguments and justifications were lost. Not that you’d know it from reading the mainstream press in the West; they loyally buried the story under the dead-cat distraction of the de-funding of UNRWA by the US and UK following unsupported allegations made by Israel against a few of its staff. But it’s important that the court didn’t buy the “defence” line, which relies on the notion that nothing before 7^th October is relevant, and the campaign in Gaza is a response to that. Israel must, above all, deny that the rampage of bloodshed by Hamas in October might itself have been a response to something. Nor did the court buy into the line that Israel, founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust, cannot be accused of genocide – that Israelis are always the victims, by definition. Nor the suggestion that killing only 27,000 out of the 2.2m Palestinians in the Gaza strip (just 1.2%) is insufficient to qualify as genocide; of course, no number is ever provided which would cross that threshold.

A further attempt to demonise the Palestinians was the classic “beheaded babies” story. Within hours of the 7^th October attacks, stories were spread around the world that up to 40 Israeli babies had been beheaded. The western press made headlines out of it (as usual, printing any old bollocks without asking for evidence) and President Biden even said that he’d been shown “confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children”. It was a cynical lie for which he has not, as far as I know, apologised. There were no beheaded babies. The accusation of child-killing is one of the classic forms of propaganda used to create hatred; British propaganda in 1914 used similar fictitious atrocities to stir up anti-German feelings. But, in classic fashion, the lie has gone round the world before the truth has got its boots on; it has served its purpose of justifying the subsequent campaign.

Since WW2, the holocaust has been held up as the greatest crime, and because it was based on antisemitism, antisemitism has been one of the worst things you could accuse people of. Israel has used this for decades, by conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. For too long, this has served to give Israel a free pass for what they do to the Palestinians. Now, it seems, it no longer works. The current campaign is making Israel so toxic to the people of the wider world, that the old slur of antisemitism has lost its power. The reflex of the establishment to hurl this accusation at critics and shut them up, isn’t working any more. Now, in something of a panic, they are resorting to criminalising dissent, passing new laws against protest. Automatic support for Israel, once the sign of political respectability, so often used to exclude anyone with truly radical views, is fading fast, and I see a time coming when it will no longer disfigure our politics.

Polling evidence shows that even in the US, most ordinary people don’t agree with their Government’s unconditional support for Israel. A huge majority of people in the US and Europe want to see the onslaught stop. It doesn’t wash to equate this attitude with support for Hamas or with anti-Semitism. People know a double standard when they see it. Despite the manipulation of the news media, people know that the Palestinians have a just cause and have suffered extreme violence for far too long. Our leaders now need to take this on board. Not only because (like Starmer’s Labour party) they risk losing electoral support by unreservedly backing Israel; but because, in law, there is personal, criminal liability for providing active support for war crimes and genocide. One day, just possibly, there may come a reckoning. Don’t hold your breath, but things may not always be like this.

Israel has always been the more powerful force in terms of military firepower, but, like the old white government of South Africa, its use of that force only served to undermine its position. Israel has spent six months proving that it cannot run itself as a civilised nation, respecting the laws of humanity. With every child it kills, every death from starvation or bombing, every time a Palestinian dies because there are no longer hospitals or medicines, and with every murder by a settler in the West Bank, Israel harms itself the more. The killings last week of 7 aid workers, picked off with such deliberate aim, may prove to be a turning point. Finally, a UN resolution has been passed calling for a ceasefire, and even the USA didn’t veto it. Of course, despite this, the US and UK are still supplying arms to Israel, but are slowly realising that unquestioning support for Israel is possibly an extinction-level event for the Western-dominated world order. For so long, the rest of the world has had to tolerate all our proxy wars, sponsored revolutions, direct military adventures, and regime changes, weakly justified by the claim that we are fighting for the rules-based order, freedom, democracy and capitalism. Even now we still hear excuses for Israel’s behaviour, and our leaders pretend that, if we allow the situation to play out, Israel will eventually allow in food and medicines; that there will be a ceasefire; that there will be a two-state solution. But the hypocrisy is becoming too much to sustain. There is no going back to the status quo of last September, in Israel or anywhere else.

Tragedy in Gaza

I’ve commented before that the theological claim to the land of Israel is hard to argue with, but I don’t shy away from hard stuff, so here goes. It amounts to saying, “this is my land because my invisible friend says so”. In fact, more tenuous than that, it’s “this is my land because the sky fairy promised it to Abraham 4000 years ago and I have inherited that promise”. Obviously there are many ways in which one could take issue with this, but the principal one, for me, is that I don’t believe in the sky fairy – either that specific one, or any other. From that perspective, the book of Genesis (and Exodus, which contains God’s instruction to drive out the people who already live in the land), was clearly written quite deliberately to fabricate a false claim to the land and a false justification for driving out the indigenous people. That was bad enough, 4000 years ago, but it is extraordinary that such beliefs linger on today and provide the founding myth of a modern, nuclear-armed country.

As an atheist, I am convinced that most people are wrong (in the sense of “incorrect”). If you hold deeply cherished spiritual beliefs and are offended because I’ve said this, understand that I’m not saying it for gratuitous effect. It just seems to be the only defensible view.

I don’t mind if you believe the Earth is flat and the moon is made of cheese. You are wrong, but otherwise your life, experience and opinions are as valid as mine. You don’t have to be an atheist to have my respect, nor support my football team or like my kind of music. I am not right about everything. My ignorance is vast. But, there are no Gods.

Based on my claim that all religions are wrong, and all gods are human inventions, I claim that the Jews are wrong – at least in their religion. Included in this is the theological claim to exclusive title to the land of Israel. It’s not anti-Semitic to say that the Jewish religion is wrong and that its God was invented by people; it just follows from the realisation that all religions are wrong. But, right now, it’s Israel which is bombing the crap out of Gaza for reasons which ultimately stem from their supernatural claim to the land formerly known as Palestine.

It is the basis of the statement, in the original manifesto of Netanyahu’s Likud party, that “The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable” and that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”. Given the fuss made these days about the words “between the river and the sea”, it’s worth remembering that it’s the extremist Israeli government which actually makes that claim and backs it up with deadly force, and has been doing so for years.

The current campaign has cost some 15,000 Palestinian lives, and will no doubt claim many more. Over 6,000 more are missing, presumably buried under rubble. Along with the mass slaughter, the damage done to infrastructure and domestic buildings is making life impossible in Gaza. This is not self-defence; it’s revenge, collective punishment, and forced migration. The increasingly obvious aim of Israel’s campaign is to make the Gaza strip uninhabitable through an engineered famine; slaughter; disease; and demolition. It is also increasingly obvious (from the use of 900kg bombs in densely populated areas, and cutting off the water) that this is not a war against Hamas; it is a war against Palestinians. Hence the ever-louder accusations of genocide.

Why do all our politicians and media support this? Why are pro-Palestinian voices suppressed so forcefully? It seems to me that our leaders are badly out of step with the people. The current campaign, more than any other I remember, is undermining popular Western support for Israel.

This is a problem that Israel should take seriously. They probably realise that the non-Jewish world doesn’t accept the “Promised Land” argument. They can’t really count on the support of God to smite their enemies. But they have leaned very heavily on the USA, and undermining that kind of support is a much bigger deal.

US support is dressed up as concern for the “only democracy in the region”, the “rules-based order” and other flim-flam, but the reality always comes down to power politics. The US needs a reliable partner country in the Middle East. So Israel gets to break all the rules in the rules-based order book with total impunity. But the Americans don’t always get their way. Things didn’t work out for them in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria or Iraq, and are not going well in Ukraine, where, despite outspending Russia many times over, they are losing. The brutal juntas and dictators the US props up – Pinochet, Somoza, Marcos, Zia, Suharto and many others – don’t last forever and their eventual fall leaves chaos and enmity. The US public eventually tires of supporting their most vicious and corrupt clients. America will not be a reliable patron forever. The USA’s “democracy and freedom” values are just cards they play in the great game when it suits them. The rise of China, Russia and the BRICS – with the US proving, time and again, unable to block them – points to a time when US support may not be the last word in any conflict. Predictions of American imperial decline are often made and have always failed, but that doesn’t mean American power will always dominate and that America’s perceived interests will always align with those of the current, extremist Israel.

Israel often claims to have a “right to exist”. But the nation-state is a temporary political construct; they come and go all the time. Did East Germany have a right to exist? Or Yugoslavia? The USSR? White Rhodesia? Should they be brought back? Not even the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland exists as of right. The UK exists because it works for a sufficient number of us, but it is perfectly possible that it will dissolve in the coming decade. There is a possibility that even the USA may split up in the coming years. Nation-states exist while they serve a purpose, then things shift and new states, new borders, new power structures and new allegiances are formed. This is natural and constant. Go on Youtube and look at an animation of the map of Europe over the last 300 or 400 years; nations flicker in and  out of existence faster than you can read their names. Continued national existence is not a right, there is no guarantee. Like the support of God, this is a comforting delusion, but a bogus argument.

The fact that states do not have a right to exist, does not mean they ought not to exist; and certainly not that they should be violently destroyed. There are various possible alternatives to the current arrangement of nation states in the Middle East, including as it does, several countries created by European imperial powers with little regard for any interests but their own – hence all those straight-line borders. Adopting one of these alternatives would not have to mean the physical destruction of any existing land or communities. Most people, including Palestinians, would be OK with the existence of a peaceful Israel which had agreed borders and stuck to them. And the absence of a right to exist, doesn’t mean that the Israelis haven’t a right to defend their country. The real question is, whether what Israel is now doing qualifies as defence, or is revenge killing, ethnic cleansing and collective punishment. By phrasing the question as “does Israel have the right to defend itself”, a question to which, on a literal surface reading, you can only answer “Yes”, one is forced effectively to buy into the assumptions behind the question; to accept the premise that nothing which occurred before 7th October matters, and that what Israel is now doing is defensive. Indeed, the word “defence” carries an implication that “the other side started the fight” which necessarily makes the history relevant; but anyone who speaks publicly about the long term history of Israel and Palestine, is silenced, or accused of anti-Semitism. In the pro-Israeli narrative currently being forced on us, the only historical events which count are the holocaust and the 7^th of October. This rather blatant spin is no longer being widely accepted.

When I was a toddler, the “War Office” was renamed the “Ministry of Defence”. Nothing had changed in its mission; we still start wars, and we invade and bomb other countries which have not attacked us. But, calling it “defence” sounds more reasonable. Hence the apologists for Israel talk of defence, and stress the 7^th October Hamas attack as if it were the first blow to be struck. Nobody is fooled; this conflict has been going on since before I was born, and “who started it” becomes a less and less relevant question over decades. Similarly, the word “hostage” is used, correctly, to describe the people abducted by Hamas on 7^th October, but not to describe the thousands of Palestinians held in “administrative detention” by Israel. No, they are called “prisoners” which, in Britain, usually equates to “criminals”. Thus is the language recruited into the fight.

There is another dispute which has been rumbling on for years with occasional eruptions into violence. This is the dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. For a long time, it seemed the Armenians had the upper hand, however instead of using their advantage to reach a favourable permanent agreement over how to share the territory, they held out for everything, relying on the hope that they would stay on top for good and not have to compromise at all. Now the situation has changed and 200,000 Armenians have been expelled from the territory (an act of ethnic cleansing which went almost un-noticed in the West). The Armenians could have had most of what they wanted, but they held out to keep it all, and have ended up with nothing. There may be a lesson here for Israel; they are also holding out for everything, and have consistently refused to use their superior position to reach an advantageous permanent agreement.

Wars are expensive. The US has reportedly given Israel 12,000 bombs and 57,000 shells, as well as billions in aid, and sent a huge fleet to the region. Coming on top of the Ukraine war, also bankrolled by the Americans, even Uncle Sam’s wallet is being overstretched. The US taxpayers are not half as keen as their leaders to keep paying like this for foreign wars, and as the death toll in Gaza rises, the Israelis may find the support they have counted on for so long is no longer unlimited. Under popular pressure, President Biden is starting to row back just a little on his unqualified support for Netanyahu. This is an asymmetric war – a real David and Goliath situation – and the decisive campaign is not the battlefield of Gaza but the contest for world opinion. Having the most expensive weapons and American warships lurking nearby, doesn’t count in that contest. Israel is spending money and firepower, but may find that the real cost is in perceived legitimacy. Once you lose that perception, it’s very difficult to get it back. Even their nukes are unusable in that campaign (as in the actual fighting).

Netanyahu is unpopular and it is widely believed that he will go as soon as the immediate crisis calms down. That alone is a bad thing; he has an incentive to keep the war going. As ever, he puts his own interests first. Netanyahu has spent his political life working to prevent the set-up of a Palestinian state, through his active promotion of Hamas, and through encouraging the illegal settlements. This has been a disaster for Israel.

He has led his country into a position they will find very difficult to back out of. Even if the current ultra-hawkish government were replaced by agreement-capable moderates, it would be very difficult to get out of the position they have put themselves in. They are, once again, creating a huge number of dispossessed enemies who have seen their families killed and their homes flattened, and who will never forgive. It is a recipe for another 70 years of conflict. This is perhaps the greatest tragedy of the current violence; that it will engender further violence down the years.

As for the world as a whole, the current campaign is a sad demonstration that the West and its clients can do what they want with impunity. If Israel faces no consequences for the blood it is spilling now, the whole concept of international law will lie shattered and bleeding in the rubble of Gaza. The American political scientist Frank Wilhoit said that right-wing politics is based on the principle that there are insiders who the law protects, but does not bind; and outsiders, who the law binds, but does not protect. Israel has enjoyed insider status for decades; but it cannot assume that this will always be the case. The decades-long period in which the Israeli narrative dominated in the Western sphere may, at last, be coming to an end. Politicians continue to support it, but more and more people are not buying this.

Even the Americans are now reported to be telling the Israelis that they need a plan for the day after their bombing campaign; to the extent that the Israelis take any notice, they are probably thinking in terms of how to maintain control and keep Hamas from re-organising once the intense war is over. But that does not constitute winning. By their own account, the Likud party and other hawks define winning as possession of all the land, from the river to the sea, vacated of Palestinians. Perhaps they indulge in a fantasy in which, if they make Gaza uninhabitable and continue their creeping annexation of the West Bank, the Palestinians will somehow melt away into neighbouring countries and cease to be a coherent people. This definition of winning is unobtainable and if that is their goal, Israel will lose. They need a change of mindset in which winning is defined as the achievement of stability and a lasting peace. This requires allowing the Palestinians a life worth living, on a piece of land worth having. How many states are involved, and with what borders, is up for discussion. Outsiders and sponsors should not seek to define the specific outcome, only to insist that one is reached; one which we can then assist with implementing. This will require a US President who acts like the Commander in Chief of the world’s greatest superpower, and sadly, neither Biden nor Trump is up to the job.

The Old Men in charge have failed

A flare-up of bloodshed and horrifyingly cruel violence between Israelis and Palestinians is something which comes round with the sad inevitability of an unloved season. The onlooker who has no dog in this fight is reduced to wondering whether, and how, the cycle can ever stop.

It is not my intention to re-litigate all the old arguments about the creation of Israel, the outcome of its founding war in the late 1940s, or of the wars of the 1960s and 1970s which resulted in the occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. I assume my readers will have some awareness of these issues, and their own points of view, and I do not seek to persuade, because this is a trap. These old arguments about Zionism, the ownership of the land, how it came to be in Israeli hands, the legal status of Palestinians, the continued building of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and so on, go round and round in various echo chambers, and it does no good to rehearse them. You will not persuade either group to change their minds.

The situation in Gaza, today and for many years past, is that this small, crowded ghetto, containing over 2.2m people, resembles an open prison whose occupants live in poverty and squalor behind a guarded wall which puts the old Iron Curtain in the shade.

When a population, especially one which is so very young, is kettled behind a massive wall, they are bound to be resentful. It is not surprising if some of them turn violent against their oppressors. That doesn’t make it right, but as I say, I’m not here to discuss it in right-and-wrong terms. You already have your views on that. We might compare the situation with Northern Ireland. A few of those in the minority Republican/Catholic community, subjected over many years to restrictions, disempowerment, discrimination, and occasional violence, and with a sense of historical grievance, turned to killing, but the blood they shed does not wash away the respectable arguments for a united Ireland.

The laws of war are based on the concept of uniformed armies lined up against each other, like at the battle of Waterloo. They could kill each other all day long, with hardly any civilian casualties. They could be chivalrous and even gentlemanly to the enemy, and treat prisoners humanely. This model works in a more-or-less even fight, but in an asymmetric conflict between coloniser and colonised, oppressor and oppressed, the underdog cannot compete in that way. Therefore they hide among a background population, carry out sneak attacks and sabotage, using whatever weapons are to hand. Necessarily, they will tend to aim at the softest targets; they lack the capability to attack the well defended ones. It is always the side with the superior force which dictates the terms of the fight and how nasty it gets. The underdog tends to mirror the level of cruelty and atrocity used against them.

When France was occupied by the Germans in 1940, most French decided to keep their heads down and make the best of it. A few organised as the Resistance. When they carried out some action, the typical German response was a mass shooting or similar atrocity; it was quick and simple to carry out – with no requirement to identify the individuals responsible – and collective punishment undermined popular support for the Resistance (who were, of course, referred to by the Germans as terrorists).

Similar dynamics can be found in any asymmetrical conflict, which takes in almost every war of decolonisation (including, to some extent, the conflict in British mandate Palestine with the early founders of Israel, who were, of course, referred to as terrorists). The conflict we call the Indian Mutiny of 1857 (the Indians, of course, see it in a different light) ended with the rebels put down, with many of them executed by being tied across the muzzle of a cannon. The Mau Mau war saw an awful level of savagery and cruelty. In each case, the outcome was not determined by the language used (terrorist/freedom fighter), the level of cruelty and atrocity, or indeed by who was right or wrong. As the saying goes, wars do not determine who is right, only who is left.

Whenever there is a flare-up, the Israeli response tends to be an over-reaction, to ensure that substantially more Palestinians than Israelis die. It is about to happen again; indeed, at the time of writing, more Palestinian children (never mind adults) have already died than the 1400 Israelis killed on 7^th October. Perhaps, in a triumph of hope over experience, the Israelis believe that eventually, the Palestinians will learn that they are always defeated and always suffer greater losses, and give up the struggle. History suggests otherwise. Hamas, on the other hand, are not seeking a negotiated peace or a two-state solution; they want to destroy Israel completely, but lack the ability to do any more than the occasional massacre. Perhaps they aim to provoke a war involving all of Israel’s enemies; Hezbollah and Iran for a start. If so, it’s a monstrous aim.

I’ve never been quite sure what the Israelis actually want, or expect, the Palestinians to do. Go away, perhaps? But where? Into the Sinai desert? As if Egypt wants 2m refugees on its territory. Or are they supposed to just live perpetually in poverty and subjugation? Who would? There is absolutely no pretence, in any of this, that Palestinian lives might be worth as much as Israeli or Anglo-American lives; indeed, many Israelis deny the very concept of a Palestinian people.

The current position taken by Israel (and for many years) seems like that of an abusive husband, beating his wife and then saying “Look what you made me do now!” or “you brought it on yourself!”. They blame the victim and claim victimhood for themselves. They oppress the Palestinians until some of them lash out – whether in a suicide bombing or a mass rocket attack – then call them “animals” and proceed to slaughter them all, like animals. But, of course, they are not animals, but people who live in an unbearable situation.

While Western politicians race to condemn the cruelty and bloodshed of Hamas and to express their support for Israel, in a display of mass virtue-signalling, once again they are behind the people. I’ve not spoken to anyone who doesn’t see this in shades of grey rather than the black-and-white it is shown in Western media; that there is right and wrong on both sides and that eventually the underlying situation has to be fixed in a way everyone can live with.

Israel may assume that, because they have the overwhelming upper hand, they can always stay on top. Israel has nuclear weapons; the Palestinians in the street, sticks and stones. Israel has F16s; Hamas has powered paragliders. Israel has billions in aid from the US and plenty of tanks and artillery; Hamas has whatever it can smuggle in from Iran or Ukraine (yes, that deeply corrupt country into which we have poured weapons with no accountability). But, America spent 20 years and trillions of dollars, in Afghanistan, and still lost to the Taliban. A war doesn’t even determine which side has the most expensive weaponry.

If the West (US and Europe) really wanted peace in the Middle East, we could begin by stopping the flood of weapons into the region. We could take responsibility for our post-colonial mess, undertake to support Gaza, removing it from the clutches of both Israel and Hamas, and give the people who live there a life and a future. If Gaza can be put on a sustainable footing, so could the West Bank. Once the principal sources of long-running grievance are addressed, a new mindset might take hold of the region. Is any of this likely? Sadly, it seems no external powers are particularly interested in peace. The US remains resolutely one-sided in its view.

We now have two regional wars going on which could easily escalate into something bigger. In each case, external powers are pulling the strings and supplying the war materiel. If China sees its chance to grab Taiwan, there will be three wars with the US backing one side in each. They will struggle to fight in three regions, even via proxies; if China takes its chance, the US will have to make a difficult choice as to which war it gives priority. 

The rest of the world now faces a higher risk of escalation to a direct, hot war between nuclear armed powers than at any time since the Cold War. The US backs Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. It was struggling when the fighting was limited to just Ukraine; it would not win if three such wars happened at once. You might think the US would show just a little more interest in promoting peace. The US-led West is supporting Israel; the global south and the rest of the Muslim world is more or less uniformly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Did we really need to deepen this new division of the world?

There is a spectacular effort going on in the US and Europe to manufacture a consensus in favour of Israel, and in favour of an overwhelming and brutal response. From tactics as crude as projecting the Israeli flag onto public buildings at night; to the stampede of politicians to express support for the Israeli side, in terms which effectively green-light any level of bloodshed and revenge the Israelis choose to inflict; to the prohibition of public expressions of support for the Palestinians. These measures go even further than the measures to drum up support for the war in Ukraine. Once again, the Guardian has led its online coverage with a “what we know on day 10” kind of header; as if the conflict between Israel and Hamas only just began, and nothing that happened before 7^th October is relevant. We are being gaslit into thinking that nothing that occurred before this month, matters.

By cutting off vital supplies to Gaza (including water), and kettling the population, while dropping bombs on them, Israel is committing major crimes. This is nothing new; Israel has long enjoyed a free pass from the rules of both war and peace. What is striking is the degree to which the world of politics and the media are so one-sided, while ordinary people show much greater understanding of the situation and the history. Our political leaders appear constrained to follow the pro-Israeli line and no leading figure dares to express the widespread sympathy which exists for the Palestinian predicament. The official narrative equates any such sympathy as support for the violence of Hamas – which is plainly ridiculous – and excuses any kind of revenge by Israel as rightful self-defence, which is equally ridiculous. Some of our politicians cover their backs by suggesting that Israel’s response should be in line with international law, but they know very well that it will not be.

Our public figures line up to urge Israel on when it sends in its army to purge Gaza of Palestinians. Yet, the public are way ahead and do not support a frenzy of mass killing and mass expulsion. It is a timeless situation; ordinary people do not ask for, or want, war, but leaders and the interests they serve, make war anyway. Our government (and ruling class) always claim to act in the national interest, but make no attempt to explain how we benefit from siding exclusively with Israel. Many of us believe our national interests lie in peace, with whatever justice is possible, in the Middle East. Also, we are much too familiar with the consequences of going to war without a long-term plan. If Israel flattens Gaza, what then?

Despite the pretence that the attack by Hamas came out of the blue, people know this isn’t the case. The attack must have been a long time in preparation, but it was immediately preceded by two provocative events. Last month, Netanyahu showed, to a UN General Assembly meeting, a map of the Middle East without Gaza, the West Bank, or East Jerusalem. The impression was clear that Israel’s right-wing government seeks to wipe the concept of Palestine and the Palestinians, literally, off the map. (One can only imagine the reaction if someone were to display such a map without Israel).

Secondly, hundreds of Israeli settlers entered the Al-Aqsa mosque on 5^th October, beating Muslim pilgrims and offering the clearest insult to the Arab and Muslim world, while Israeli police did nothing to restrain them.

Perhaps it was with these events in mind that Hamas launched its planned attack shortly after, with such ferocity and cruelty. I don’t claim to know what they thought, or expected to result. Hamas is no more able to destroy the state of Israel than the IRA could have invaded and conquered Britain. But they have shown an ability to create havoc on the grand scale.

Underlying the Western response is a fundamental dishonesty. Over the decades, various attempts have been made to create a “peace process” leading to a two state solution. The problem is – they never really meant it. No meaningful progress has been made toward a Palestinian state. It is just like the dishonest Minsk agreement which should have settled the issues in Ukraine without war: one side meant it, but the other, did not. The nuclear non-proliferation treaty is based on the idea that nuclear-armed nations will move in good faith toward nuclear disarmament. Of course, they don’t mean it. International diplomacy is based on too much of this kind of dishonesty. Normal, ordinary people would not work this way. We never consciously vote for that kind of thing. We know that, unless there is an honest commitment to resolving the long-standing issues between Israel and the Palestinians, the cycle of bloodshed will only go on and on. Many Israelis recognise that their own long term security depends on addressing this issue and reaching a solution. The 1978 Camp David agreement with Egypt promised self-government in the occupied territories, and the 1993 Oslo accords with the PLO promised resolution (assumed to be a two state solution) of the issues by the end of the last century. These two agreements offer what is still likely to be the only viable basis for peace, but moderates allowed hard-liners (on both sides) to derail the process. That is the role Hamas play on the Palestinian side. On the Israeli side, Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo accords, was murdered and Netanyahu came to power, who never believed in the Oslo process. And so, it failed; and the rest of the world – including the sponsors of both sides – allowed it to fail. We all share some responsibility.

Our politicians should remember, as the public do, where dishonesty leads. We remember the disastrous military adventures which followed 9/11. The Iraq war was the result of the notorious lies about WMD and the false claim that Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11. Our involvement in Syria, Afghanistan, and Libya has been calamitous. People aren’t stupid; we’ve been led by liars into too many wars which only made things worse. But the democracies have a common problem; there is nobody we can vote for who will change anything. Too much of the world is led by a generation of old men. Vladimir Putin (71), Xi Jinping (70), Joe Biden (80), Benjamin Netanyahu (74), Mahmoud Abbas (87), Ayatollah Khamenei (Iran, 84), Narendra Modi (India, 73), Arif Alvi (Pakistani, 74), Recep Erdogan (Turkey, 69). All of them are well past the normal retirement age; none will give up power. It is long past time for the torches to be passed to a younger generation, and perhaps it’s time that one or two women might get a look in? The old men have failed; how long must we wait for them to go?

Will Brexit have a Russell Brand moment?

In the last couple of weeks, Russell Brand has been accused of flashing, sexual assault, and rape, by a number of women, via the Times and on Channel 4. So far, he has not actually been charged with anything, let alone convicted, so it’s necessary to say that these are unproven allegations and that he denies them. However, in the court of public opinion, it seems the jury is back already, and has found him guilty. Why is this? We’ve waited years for these allegations to be made in public; couldn’t we wait a little longer until a formal and fair process had been completed?

But the aforementioned court of public opinion does not do fair trials in which the prosecution and the defence get equal time and the evidence has its tyres kicked. We come to this with a good deal of prejudice; anyone familiar with Brand’s output and public image at the height of his fame (a decade starting around 20 years ago) will be well aware that he regarded, and treated, women as sex objects both in person and in his standup routines. The Sun named him “Shagger of the Year” four times (this was during the Page 3 years) which confirmed his carefully created image. He was showered with attention and money, confirming the old double standard that promiscuous men are seen as studs, while women who enjoy sex are slut-shamed as whores, slags, tramps and worse. The court of public opinion doesn’t only do prosecutions; you can go up as well as down. Often, it elevates people to pedestals before pulling them down again, and Brand clearly enjoyed his turn on that pedestal.

Misogyny ran through his act; his sexual exploits were mined for material and jokes, in which women were the butt of the humour, leading up to the notorious 2008 Radio 2 show in which he bragged about sleeping with Andrew Sachs’ grand-daughter. At that point there was a sudden reaction. A penny dropped about the toxicity of the lad-culture which applauded this, fawned over him, and found it funny, and there was a lot of pearl-clutching because the BBC was enabling all this. Brand thrived because that lad-culture needed such a figure to put on its pedestal. But lad-culture is fading. We’re not exactly perfect today, but his shtick doesn’t go down so well any more. Magazines like “Nuts” and “Zoo” have folded; the Sun gave up printing topless girls on Page 3; it doesn’t give Shagger awards any more, and MeToo has brought the scale of sexual abuse in the entertainment industry to our attention. Weinstein, Epstein, and Prince Andrew are not accorded Shagger status, but are despised as creepy abusers. So, we are primed and ready to believe the allegations made this week. Indeed, Brand’s response is not so much a denial that these things happened, but a claim that it was all consensual. Legally, he will rely on the difficulty any woman faces in proving that, despite going out with a man, she didn’t consent to whatever kind of sex he demanded, whenever he demanded it. In the court of public opinion, though, what he admits is bad enough, and whether or not it was actually illegal is hardly relevant. We, the massed jury of that court, are not obliged to treat anyone as innocent until proved guilty; the legal system has to follow that principle, but not us. We don’t, after all, have the power to imprison him. Knowing, as we do, that the legal system is very seldom effective in sexual cases, with most rapists never being charged let alone convicted, the court of public opinion is probably the only one Brand will actually face.

What interests me is the fact that public opinion can be capricious, and can turn suddenly. Personally I wasn’t a fan of Brand’s act back when he was all over the TV, but you couldn’t easily miss him, or the fact of his wide popularity. At the time, I didn’t have a detailed feminist critique of his act, I just didn’t find it funny. In the same way, I knew, even as a six year old, I knew there was something not quite OK about the Black and White Minstrel Show with its 20 million strong audience, but couldn’t have given a detailed critique of it in the terms it is described with today.

I’m not saying this in the sense of “See, I was right all along”, because I wasn’t. I have to admit to joining in with toxic lad-culture on occasions, when the desire to be part of a laddish group overcame the feeling that it wasn’t really OK. It’s far too late to apologise now, so all I can do is learn from it and be less of a dickhead in future.

So, I’m not a paragon of virtue, and nor are the rest of the public. Nor do we have to be consistent; we can, collectively, excuse someone’s behaviour one day, and condemn it another day. It’s happened to Brand and to others; he was far from being the only comedian with sexist jokes or rape-humour. And it’s the same in politics: we can support a policy one day and turn against it another day, changing our minds on a sixpence while the supertanker of national politics turns far more slowly. We (collectively) tolerated Boris Johnson’s misbehaviour – until suddenly, we didn’t. There were plenty of possible reasons for the switch, and it was unpredictable that it should be the lockdown parties which proved to be the catalyst for that. Once again, I wasn’t a fan of Johnson’s shtick in the first place, but public opinion is always a majority verdict. 17 million people voted for the ill-defined concept of leaving the EU, but there’s been a sea-change against it now that the consequences are there in plain sight. Our political class change differently; if some of the prominent Leavers have quietly changed their minds in the face of reality, they cannot say so, because you can’t admit to being wrong on something so crucial. You can’t say, “I was wrong about the biggest decision of my lifetime and have done irreversible harm to our country. But I’m over it now, so please vote for me again”. Those who took a public position on Brexit are stuck with it; there’s no going back. This is why they tend to blame the implementation rather than the basic concept, like old communists. But ordinary people are less invested. We can say, “I voted Leave, but look at the mess it’s become, and where’s all that money they promised for the NHS? It’s a disaster”. And so, public opinion can make a complete U-turn without any embarrassment. The secret ballot is a wonderful thing; you don’t even have to admit that you voted for Brexit, or Johnson, or whatever. Most people are not obsessed with politics and regard it as a spectator sport which they aren’t watching most of the time. We have our own things to do and bills to pay. It cuts both ways; millions of people who can see our country falling apart and know perfectly well who has been in charge for the last 13 years, will still go out and vote Tory at the next election. It’s maddening, but it’s human nature and nobody said it was perfect.

This is why the Brexiters are not getting traction with their narrative of victimhood and betrayal. We don’t hear much about the “will of the people” any more, because that will (such an intangible and slippery thing) has clearly changed. Constant complaints that any softening of Brexit is a betrayal, just don’t cut through. The public never took an oath of loyalty to Brexit, however defined. We are required to be loyal to our country, whether by fighting its wars, paying its taxes, or obeying its laws. Spying for other countries is betrayal; but changing your mind about a policy? Spare me. I never wanted Brexit, I voted against it, and I’ll go on arguing against it until we dump it as the failed, stupid load of bollocks it always was. That’s not a betrayal of anything. And, while the public as a collective body are becoming increasingly disillusioned with Brexit, the parties, stuck with their old positions, find it hard to play catch-up. They are afraid of telling Leave voters that they were wrong; but many Leave voters already know this and will not be offended. It is not the former Leave voters who now feel buyers’ remorse who are in the wrong; only those who are pig-headedly clinging to Brexit despite everything; we should not allow this shrinking band to hold the country to its greatest error.

The older demographic which largely supported Brexit, are dying off and are relentlessly being replaced by the younger demographic who are pro-European and pro-realism. But, will there be a Russell Brand moment? Will there be a sudden, unpredictable turning point at which a penny drops and we stop indulging the ravings of the Brexit fanatics? I’d like to think so, as it would save time.

Keir Starmer has refused to frame the next election as a re-run of the Brexit argument, precisely because the Tories would love nothing more than to keep fighting an old battle which is already won. Labour is looking forward, not talking about everything in terms of the dead issue of Leave/Remain. Like it or not, we’ve left. Remaining is a dead concept and re-joining is a very slow burning one, something which certainly could not be accomplished in the next Parliament – so why pretend that it could?

The only sensible approach is to move on from 2016 and start rolling the pitch for the move back to sanity. Many decisions have yet to be made, and will have a big impact. For example, the Tories have delayed (for years) applying import controls on goods coming here from the EU, because it will further deaden trade and increase prices. However, they can’t simply state that we will never implement them; the pretence has to be kept up, partly for political appearances, but mostly because the moment you say this, businesses will realise that making anything in the UK will put them at a permanent disadvantage. Goods made here will face controls on entry into the EU, and therefore costs; while goods made in the EU could be sold in the EU or the UK without such costs. They would be forced to relocate operations into the EU. The only way out of this is a customs union; the logic is ironclad. But only Labour can say that, and eventually, they will. Only Labour can conduct relations with Europe on a normal basis, the basis on which we relate to any other friendly countries. The De-Brexiting of our relationship with the EU is something only Labour can do, and is a precondition for any further progress. That is enough for Labour to say before the election.

The public are tired of hearing about Brexit. They know it isn’t “done” in any sense, but they know that an irrevocable step has been taken and the debate around it is over. The words Leave and Remain, both now dead concepts, must be dropped. The realisation that it was a disaster is the starting point for closer relations with our neighbours, and some kind of association which amounts to a customs union. The eventual path to rejoin, if we ultimately do that, will be a long one, and will probably require significant constitutional reform. At the least, one party of government will need to adopt it as policy and have it endorsed in a general election (please, no more referendums!). The EU will have to be convinced that if we rejoin, we will be back to stay. That probably means both parties of government coming round to it. As I say, it will be a long road.

Structural Failures

Two avoidable problems have occurred in the last couple of weeks, one slow burning and the other fast. The slow burning issue is the use of RAAC in public buildings (so far, mostly schools). Nobody has explained why a material known to have a useful life as short as 30 years was used in any building; presumably it was so cheap that people thought it would be OK to have to rebuild every 30 years. Only, of course, that didn’t happen. The problem has been known about for a long time, with increasingly strident warnings being given, but needless to say, our government had other priorities (building new “free” schools, for example).

The other problem, the more acute one, was the failure of the National Air Traffic Service (NATS) two weeks ago. NATS has produced a report https://publicapps.caa.co.uk/docs/33/NERL%20Major%20Incident%20Investigation%20Preliminary%20Report.pdf

on the failure which caused such huge disruption on August Bank Holiday and left airlines and passengers with substantial extra costs. It turns out that the IT systems got hung up on one particular flight plan, submitted from another country, describing the route to be followed by an aircraft passing through UK airspace. Air routes are described in terms of waypoints, and there are very many such waypoints around the world. A few of them have the same names. The problem arose because the route of this particular aircraft included two such waypoints, which the system could not process, and it responded by shutting itself down.

The system has been hastily modified so that it can handle duplicate waypoint names. Later, much later, and out of public sight, someone will ask why the system could not handle these in the first place; it does, on the face of it, appear to be a massive design flaw in a suite of safety-critical software, which makes you wonder, what other design flaws are in there? We may hope that the people responsible for these systems don’t imagine that just fixing the duplicate-names issue is an adequate response. We might also ask why the response to the hang-up was for the whole system to grind to a halt, rather than simply rejecting and flagging up the problem flight plan and continuing to process other information normally. This is not fail-safe behaviour, as NATS claim; blocking hundreds of flights is not a low-risk measure. We might further ask why the fallback system was hand-processing of flight plans, with a grossly inadequate capacity to handle traffic.

Beyond that, there is the human response. The head of NATS, on the day of the failure, is quoted as having said that the UK ATC service is “the envy of most of the world”. This fatuous phrase, delivered even as hundreds of flights were being cancelled, echoes Boris Johnson’s favourite expression “world-beating”, as if these things were entries in some kind of competition. It was stupid and insensitive to say this just as the system collapsed.

Secondly, even the report linked above (which is otherwise quite a good, quick response and initial failure analysis), claims that UK airspace was not closed, just that the volume of traffic was reduced. Well, it may not have been closed in the sense of all traffic being stopped, but if your flight was cancelled and you were shelling out inflated prices for a 14 hour bus ride, it probably felt pretty damn closed to you.

Thirdly, the manager of NATS, Martin Rolfe, told the BBC, “This was a one in 15 million chance. We’ve processed 15 million flight plans with this system up until this point and never seen this before”. This is a further ridiculous and self-serving comment which will be offensive to those who had their plans ruined by his incompetence. The implication he makes is that it was a random event comparable to being struck by a meteorite. Another way to look at it is that he had one chance to build a safety-critical piece of vital national infrastructure, and he screwed it up. That’s one failure in one event, not one in 15 million. Enough flight plans, and you are bound to get one which includes duplicated waypoint names. If your system can’t handle that, it’s a 100% failure rate. The “backup” system was a simple duplicate of the primary (running on different hardware) and applied the same faulty logic; it was no backup at all with regard to an error in the software. The automated systems then gave up and controllers relied on manual processing, with about 10% of the required capacity, and it was this which caused the flight cancellations. The real backup system, then, was grotesquely inadequate to the task.

If the managers and politicians in charge of public services spent less energy making excuses and devoted more to getting the job done right, perhaps this stuff wouldn’t happen. And, if the costs of screw-ups didn’t fall on the innocent parties but on the people who failed in their job, there would be sufficient incentive to provide a truly reliable system. Estimates of the costs to airlines are in the area of £100m; this would be sufficient to build a far more reliable system with a backup that had adequate capacity. And, in the event that a flight plan causes a problem, wouldn’t it be better to cancel that flight, rather than all the others?

Could this be a political turning point?

There are many reasons why the Tories have lost support since the last election. Lockdown parties; the failure of Brexit; the sharp rise in interest rates; high inflation; the disgusting Rwanda policy, and so on. However, another potential tectonic shift may be starting in the water industry.

Thames Water, Britain’s biggest water company, is in trouble. Loaded with £14bn of debt, it called on its shareholders to cough up £500m three months ago, but this may not be enough for it to keep going. The government are considering putting it into special administration. Thames Water itself says further equity funding would be needed to support its turnround plans; some analysts suggests it may take £10bn to keep the company going, even before paying interest on its debt (and not counting the smoking crater where a pension fund should be).

Meanwhile, leakage from its pipes is as high as ever, and it routinely dumps raw sewage into rivers.

The failure of the private ownership model is complete. An organisation like Thames Water cannot be allowed to fail, as it provides the most basic necessities of life to millions. The fact that it needs a “turnround” at all means that it has recognised its own failure, but this failure is entirely caused by it being a for-profit company. It has become ridiculously over-geared (too much debt), and paid out eye-watering amounts in dividends to the asset-strippers who owned it, while massively under-investing in infrastructure. Inevitably, customers and taxpayers will be saddled with the failure of this stupid right-wing idea, a concept so thoroughly and obviously failed that no other country has done the same.

CEO Sarah Bentley got a £3m golden hello three years ago and has scraped by on £2m a year since (plus bonuses). She ran away last week after admitting that her turnround plan isn’t working; no doubt she will fail upwards as usual. After she resigned suddenly, Thames is now run jointly by the CFO, together with the regulatory affairs director, Cathryn Ross, who is a former head of Ofwat. Ofwat is, of course, the regulator which should have held Thames accountable long before it got into this position; but the inherent corruption of revolving-door appointments such as this, meant that the regulator was captured by the water companies and has failed in its duty to protect the interests of water users.

The whole rotten structure needs to be swept away. It is as thoroughly proven as anything can be in politics or economics, that an organisation which is the monopoly supplier of something as basic as water and sewage, has to be run in the public interest, not on an extractive, for-profit model.

Thames Water should be nationalised. This does not mean buying it; the company has already failed and its value, counting both its debts and the accumulated obligations of the years of under-investment, is negative. In short, they owe us. It is important that the shareholders are left with nothing; only this will sufficiently discourage future re-privatisation.

The lenders who put in that £14bn should also, at the very least, take a severe haircut, and for the same reasons. The money lent to Thames, as for the water sector as a whole, corresponds uncomfortably closely to the amount extracted by the owners in dividends. The debt is odious and should be repudiated; it would be a whole new wrong for customers and taxpayers to be left holding the bag. Thames Water corporate bonds are already downrated by about half in the markets. If the debt is ever to be honoured, the money can only come from taxpayers and customers, and if that is the case, the £60bn of debt owed by the privatised water companies should be counted as part of the official national debt, and managed as such. The pretence that this was just normal corporate gearing was always a lie.

Once this is realised, the world will see that the public sector is potentially on the hook, not just for this £60bn but for the rest of the privatised companies which have left our infrastructure run down, bust and broken, drowning in debts. All this on top of the neglected infrastructure which is still in the public sector – schools, roads, hospitals etc. The capacity of the British economy to absorb these multi-decade losses will come into question, on top of the £400bn costs of the destructive lockdown policies during Covid. The government will probably try some kind of jiggery-pokery to hide the impending defaults until after the next election, but the markets will not be easily fooled; there will be implications for the bond markets and the pound, until someone who recognises the size of the problem can propose a solution of a corresponding scale. Hint: it’s not Starmer.

The situation bears comparison with 1945, when the country was exhausted from six years of war, the cities were littered with bomb sites, industry was on its knees, and the treasury was empty. The Attlee government worked a miracle to pull off a huge-scale reconstruction plan, create the NHS and the welfare state, build council houses and new towns, and grant independence to India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Burma. All this while hosting the Olympics and developing nuclear technology. Having been strip-mined since 1979, Britain is in a similarly desperate state and will need a government of similar radical ambition and ability; I don’t believe Keir Starmer will provide it.

I think it’s possible that the failure of Thames Water could be the catalyst for a great popular realisation of the sheer depth of the hole dug by successive right-wing governments since 1979 (including, I’m afraid, Blair’s). A realisation that we’ve been going in the wrong direction for so long that we are now up shit creek to the very source, and it will be a long and difficult haul to get back. It’s not just privatisation but the whole raft of policies which enriched the wealthy at the expense of the poor for the last forty years.

Polls and surveys suggest that most people agree with utility nationalisation, but who can we vote for that would end the pillage of privatisation? The Tories still think it can be made to work, and Labour won’t touch it because they are running scared of sounding even slightly radical.

I’m starting to think there may be room for a new party which would drag Labour into radicalism in the same way that UKIP dragged the Tories into Brexit; not by winning elections but by changing the conversation and by taking enough votes to be a threat. Policies might include:

•              Nationalise the natural monopoly utilities without compensation; the lenders to take a haircut. Wind up all PFI schemes on a similar basis. Put in place deep-seated laws to prevent future pillage of this kind

•              Fully fund the NHS to per-capita levels seen in France or Germany, and keep it totally in the public sector

•              Fully fund the education system (by the same definition) and end rejective schools

•              Reduce the “defence” budget to levels sufficient to actually defend UK territory against real threats, and close the nuclear weapons programme completely. No more wars of choice.

•              Institute a financial transactions tax; a land value tax; and change inheritance tax so that the rich actually pay it (these three moves can easily match all the spending policies)

•              Treat climate change as if it really matters; reduce travel, especially by air; insulate the housing stock and set net-zero standards for new build housing; improve public transport, especially outside London; reduce energy consumption, starting with wasteful and non-productive uses. Make recycling work and outlaw planned obsolescence

•              Rejoin the single market and customs union as a necessary precursor to renewed EU membership

•              Institute a PR voting system such that every citizens’ vote counts equally. Repeal all Tory voter-suppression laws and the suppression of the right to protest; embed civil rights and reform policing. End the surveillance state

•              Reform the House of Lords. Abolish all positions which are lifelong, abolish political patronage, abolish hereditary positions and titles, and the reserved seats for bishops. Make it a reasonably sized, democratically legitimate second chamber (as most other countries do)

•              Build genuinely affordable social housing where needed; end council house sales and rebuild the council stock; stop using housing as a “ladder” or an investment vehicle; end homelessness through a homes-first approach, with help for the problems which cause homelessness

•              Imprison far fewer people for non-violent offenses

•              Create safe and legal routes for migrants to enter the country

•              Recognise the abject failure of the prohibition approach to drugs. Legalise and regulate drugs so as to eliminate the illegal trade which supports crime, and address drugs as a public health issue, not a criminal one

•              Rebuild and strengthen the constitution after the right-wing assault of recent years, putting it in writing with a clear change mechanism which is suitably slow and difficult. Use citizens assemblies to define the constitution and abolish outdated bodies such as the Privy Council. Embed transparency in government and eliminate official secrecy except where strictly justified

•              Decentralise political power to the nations and regions.

It is only through the combination of the above policies that Britain will become a modern nation, able to earn its way in the world, with a vigorous private sector economy driven by genuine wealth creation rather than rent-seeking and extractive business models. Many of the policies above could be implemented rapidly by a government with the will and the mandate to do so; there will be quick wins.

Many of these things are a matter of recognising some of the 800lb gorillas in the room. Brexit is the most obvious example. It can’t be made to work. It doesn’t need tweaking or improving. It needs to be dumped as a failed idea, just like privately-owned, for-profit monopoly utilities. The Tories will never do either of these as they still think the ideas are basically sound. Labour shy away from doing these things as they are scared of being too ambitious for change. The difference is, most Labour activists and supporters do recognise the 800lb gorillas and do want to make these changes; it’s the leadership which holds them back.

Shipwrecks

In 1912, the Titanic sank with the loss of 1500 lives. It became the most famous shipwreck of all time and a major cultural reference point. Partly this was because it was a luxurious vessel built for the wealthy – the passengers included Guggenheim, Ismay and Astor, super-rich individuals of the time – while also carrying humble migrants in the more basic accommodation. Partly, it was because of the “unsinkable” claim which had, unwisely, been made for the vessel by the White Star Line, and the fact that it had lifeboat capacity for at most half those on board. Partly it was the perceived inequity of the fatality rates: 97% of the female first-class passengers survived, having been given priority in boarding the lifeboats, while just 8% of male, second-class passengers lived. Although this could be very largely accounted for by the women-and-children-first principle, rather than class discrimination, the optics were that it was largely the poorer passengers who died. And partly, it was the tragic drama of the story – the vessel which sank on its maiden voyage, victim of the hubris and stupidity of steaming at full speed into an ice field at night. We make movies about the heroic stories of courage that night, despite the fact that nobody needed to have died at all if the ship had only been driven sensibly; just as Tennyson wrote a poem celebrating the bravery of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, whose suicidal courage would not have been required if only the correct orders had been given.

The same theme echoes around other celebrated events. The deaths of Captain Scott’s team on returning from the South Pole, just a couple of weeks before the Titanic sailed, was another story of courage in facing the fatal consequences of the flawed planning and execution of that expedition. All these were soon overshadowed by the First World War, a similar tragic story, writ very large, with vast numbers of men ordered to make suicidal attacks against heavily defended positions, dying for a combination of misplaced national rivalry and bone-headed tactics.

The apparent loss of a small submarine this week, carrying tourists who had paid $250k to see the wreck of the Titanic, is at risk of being spun in a similar way. A group of millionaires in a poorly designed submarine became the targets of a huge, money-no-object search, while only a week before, a disaster almost on the scale of the actual Titanic sinking itself occurred in the Mediterranean, when a hugely overloaded boat full of poor migrants, sank with the loss of about 650 lives, many of them children. The symmetry and coincidence of these two nautical disasters is pure Greek tragedy; you couldn’t make it up, as they say.

I describe the submarine as poorly designed, because it was flawed in the same sense that the Titanic was poorly designed. If you’ve seen the film (is there anyone who has not seen it?), you will be aware of the Titanic’s design flaws; that the compartmentation only went up to a certain level, and that it didn’t turn well because the rudder was small. The mini submarine has its own obvious flaws; such as the fact that the hatch is a full diameter dome, bolted in place only from the outside, and which can’t be opened without the lifting frame being underneath it (or water would flood in), means that even if it is on the surface, the crew are helpless until that frame is brought to them. More importantly, it shares a flaw with Virgin’s Space Ship 2, which is that it is a novel design built by very clever people. Why is that a flaw? Well, they are so clever that they didn’t believe they needed an external design review, or to go through a normal submarine approval process, in which they would have been assessed against conventional design standards. The designer had said that he believed such regulations and standards only held back innovators like him. The novel composite materials in the pressure hull are very interesting, but not sufficiently well understood in their failure modes to be used in this way. Carbon fibre is very strong under tension and is used in airliners; but it is much less strong under compression. Each descent was a gamble, and now the gamblers appear to have lost. Of course, we don’t know whether the mini-sub is caught on something on the bottom; has undergone power failure, or a fire; or the pressure hull has failed under the stress of repeated loadings up to 6000psi (sea level pressure is just 14psi).

There is less head-scratching required over the loss of the migrants in the Med. Their boat was incredibly overloaded by the traffickers who set it on its way. While that is the immediate cause of the loss, we should also look at the rescue effort which does appear to have been no more than half-hearted, because those drowning were mostly Pakistani migrants. They were seen as a group, with a label, unwelcome at their intended destination, rather than as unique human beings with hopes, fears and a right to life. As with the Titanic, the optics are that it’s the poor that die; and that nobody needed to die if the boat had been operated within sensible limits, or better still, if there were a safe and legal way for people to migrate without the use of unseaworthy craft.

It was the hubris of Ismay and poor seamanship of Captain Smith which drove the Titanic to its doom. Ismay, owner of the White Star line, wanted to set a record for the Atlantic crossing, and dismissed fears of icebergs, recklessly gambling the lives of his passengers and crew. He put pressure on Smith to navigate the ship dangerously fast for commercial reasons. It was also a contempt for sensible standards and conventional wisdom which did for the submarine, leading its designers to gamble with the lives of their paying passengers. And, it is Europe’s fortress-like policy and the rhetoric of “invasion” by migrants who will “swamp” our first-world paradise if we let them in, which drove the overcrowded migrant boat. It is also the right wing politicians and press – here and elsewhere – telling lies and stoking hatred of refugees and asylum seekers. Over 25,000 dirt-poor people have died in the Mediterranean over the last decade because of this, and we have come to see it as normal. It’s only when a few millionaire thrill-seekers are lost at sea that it becomes headline news for several days, and prompts a massive rescue effort. Each of these tragedies is a story of right wing attitudes and business-driven decisions, costing the lives of others.

If the ethics of immigration policy leave us with some profound questions, there are also questions worth asking about the ethics of rich people seeking adventures. This is where it gets personal for me. On the whole, I’m in favour; I used to enjoy skydiving, scuba diving, motorcycling, and other exciting activities, and have done several such things using dodgy, home-made equipment, held together with duct tape and baler twine, which were significantly more hare-brained than Virgin’s space ship or the carbon fibre submarine. So, I’m not casting the first stone in that respect. However, I would point out that I wasn’t selling such activities as a fairground ride, however highly priced, and my adventurous career (now limited to the relatively sedate sport of paragliding) didn’t involve a rich white man flying a balloon over poor countries (a la Branson) or have a carbon footprint the size of Australia (space tourism). I have never left the dead behind (commonly done on Everest) nor assumed that a poor person’s homeland was my playground as of right. I haven’t planted any flags, nor would I speak of “conquering” a mountain if I climbed it. I don’t contrive artificial “records” by adding self-imposed constraints or over-claiming for my accomplishments (common among adventurers seeking sponsors). I don’t leave a Kleenex trail in otherwise pristine areas, nor ask others to risk themselves to haul my stupid fat out of the fire if I screw up. I wouldn’t claim discovery and naming rights to places which were perfectly well known to black or brown people who already lived in the region concerned. I buy insurance to cover the risks and don’t expect taxpayers to subsidise my fun. And, I don’t spend truly astronomical amounts of money just for kicks. I have to admit, I don’t know how much I would spend for kicks if I were a billionaire; but in a world where the super-rich are so very rich and the poor, so very poor, I think it indecent to spend $400k on a space-tourist flight, or $250k to see the Titanic (or, in the case of one of the missing men on the submarine, both). I do feel that self-indulgence should have limits; although, of course, I set that limit somewhere above my own self-indulgence budget – and, yes, I do recognise that this is morally convenient for me.

The wrong definition of Greatness

The crass  “Britain is Great” posters seen at our airports make me cringe. At first, I assumed it was just an innocent promotional campaign for our many visitor attractions, scenic areas and cultural highlights, but the campaign is more than that. There is a pathetic, emotionally needy tone to this campaign; as if we are desperate to big ourselves up by pretending the word “Great” in Great Britain means magnificent, mighty and respected (rather than being a geographical reference to the largest island in the British Isles). It reveals a yearning for a status which we clearly don’t merit, and is based on a definition of greatness founded on nostalgia and vanity, rather like the Brexiters’ “Global Britain” concept (of which we hear very little nowadays).

Anxious to cling on to the outdated concept of Great Power status, despite the lessons of Suez and decolonisation, Britain looked down its nose for too long on the nascent EU, instead of joining early. The Commonwealth, an informal version of the former empire, never had much purpose but to keep Britain’s self-image of global leadership going. It is a second-rate international organisation in the same way that the Commonwealth Games are a second-rate Olympics (“a bit shit” as Usain Bolt said). These are just two ways in which being too far up ourselves has resulted in tying the nation to the past and missing out on the future.

To maintain our delusions of grandeur, we spend too much on military hardware, believing our national myth of military prowess. Just as the US keeps getting its butt kicked by poor countries, Britain has involved itself in various failed military adventures. Forty years ago, we took back the Falkland islands by a whisker, but haven’t had any real military successes since, and two huge failures (which are not yet fully acknowledged as such). There’s no accountability for any of this. Our wildly expensive nuclear missile submarines cruise under the oceans, burning money as they prop up an outdated idea of superpower status, one based on the ability to inflict mass destruction.

Hence our collective vision of what Britain should aspire to be is a backward looking one; just as Trump says “make America great again” (an explicitly backward-looking sentiment), our own conservatives dream about Britain being great again in the way greatness used to be defined – through dominance, muscle, assumed superiority, and a macho, big-dog attitude. The element of empty bragging and deluded self-importance in the “Britain is Great” ad campaign (and its risible “Unicorn Kingdom” strapline) echoes the tired cliché “world beating” of which Johnson was so fond. It is performative patriotism, not the real thing. It is like someone who has inherited the title of baronet, thinking himself to be of high importance and worthy of deference, rather than a historical quirk.

The idea that the British Way is innately superior and makes us “world beating” is lazy thinking. Of course it’s positive when British people and companies succeed and do marvellous things. British inventors and creative artists have generated a terrific body of work; Britain has much to be proud of, and many fine things to show visitors. These successes owe much to a country which enables talented people to do well, through education for example, and a culture which encourages achievement. But it is not because British people are inherently better than others; we are not baronets in a world of peasants. There are too many British people with ability who do not succeed, because they aren’t recognised, encouraged, facilitated and enabled. The job of Government should be to provide the infrastructures which allow everyone to do what they do best, and trust that those with great talent will then shine – but because they are people, not because they are British. People with high potential are born everywhere and all the time; sadly, most do not have the chance to develop fully. The conservative nationalist who talks proudly of this being the country that produced Shakespeare and Austen, but closes libraries and cuts the resources for schools to give children poetry or perform plays; brags that this is the country that produced Banister and Beckham, but flogs off the school playing fields to property developers; who lauds the country of Purcell, Elgar, Lennon and McCartney, but who cuts back music teaching; who puts up posters at airports showing our scenic heritage, but makes a buck out of filling the rivers with sewage; how patriotic are they?

National greatness is not only reliant on the achievements of a few stellar individuals in each generation, but on the progress of millions of people, living ordinary but productive, fulfilling lives as part of a coherent society living up to its values. National greatness is not only measured in World Cups and Nobel Prizes, welcome though such things are. You don’t need a space program and nuclear weapons to be a great country. You do need a measure of equal opportunity and a sense of unity, not a ruthless machine to enrich the wealthy at the expense of the poor; nor a private sector which sees care homes as a cash business with property exposure.

Britain is, in fact, a second-rate power on the way to third-rate status, in many ways. We are not respected around the world for very much these days; Brexit delivered a shattering blow to whatever standing we previously had left, and the comically incompetent government still clinging to office seems determined to finish the job, with attention-seeking behaviour and arrogant bluster – continuing with the very qualities embodied by Johnson and Truss. The performative needling of Russia and China is typical but ludicrous. It is not “declinist” or “talking Britain down” to say this: it is realism. The declinists are those causing the decline, not those observing it.

Our dear friends in the EU do not despise or hate us for leaving, as the Brexiters would claim; but they are disappointed, exasperated, and probably surprised at our capacity for self-harm. Even our former imperial possessions and colonies don’t despise or hate modern Britain, despite the history of exploitation and slavery (which is only very slowly coming to be acknowledged in this country). However they probably don’t need any moral lectures or mischief-making military adventures such as Iraq, nor the self-indulgent posturing behind the categorisation of China as a threat and a potential enemy. After Brexit, having got up and left the rooms in which so many decisions are made, it is increasingly laughable for Britain to pretend that we are still at the centre. Acting the big shot doesn’t convince for long when you have withdrawn to the edges.

Britain needs a new vision to strive for. A cultural change is needed. A generation is coming into its prime, not raised on the old national myths of greatness (the empire!), of military prowess (Spitfires!), of always being right, of exceptionalism, genius, effortless (white) superiority, and the idea that London is the hub around which the rest of the world turns. This generation will have to replace the one which is still prone to all that nostalgia and vanity. We must learn some humility. Britain must free itself of the mechanisms which gather economic rent and concentrate the national wealth into ever fewer pockets, before the people can be empowered to do whatever they do, to the best of their ability. We must rebuild our constitution, have fair votes, consensual government, national institutions which embody our values, and services which work. We need an economy based on real production, not profiteering, rent-seeking and money laundering. We need a less confrontational politics, in which you don’t reach power and office by stirring up factional division or provoking culture wars, but by uniting people to work together. There is – just – enough left which still works, that we could build ourselves a new country, one which is at ease with not dominating others; comfortable with partnership and collaboration; which has sufficient specialisms we do well at, that we can earn our way in the world; a generous, welcoming country, with an economic model which is sustainable, non-exploitative, has a flourishing culture, and which offers a healthy and fulfilling life to all its citizens. A country which neither struts with false pride, nor cowers in slavish allegiance to the US, in a pitiable, deluded belief in a special relationship. A country which is confident to recover from many wasted years of bad government and decay. A country which rejects a warlike posture and maintains sufficient forces for genuine defence only. A country in which the rule of law and civil liberties are entrenched.

The Tories – and, sadly, too many leading figures in Labour – share the old vision of a Britain which principally serves business interests, home owners, retirees, the wealthy, and the south east; and a culture which is opposed to the necessary and natural, ethnic and demographic changes which, being necessary, continue with a certain inevitability anyway. The billionaire-owned media promote nativist, intolerant attitudes and stir up backward-looking culture-war nationalism. Labour is timidly trying to articulate a vision only very slightly different to that of the incumbent Tories, and doing a weak job of it. They are afraid of making big spending promises on the lines of “£350m a week for the NHS” because the economy they inherit will not provide for it, and they are afraid of being open about the need for taxation (such as an inheritance tax the rich actually pay, a Land Value tax, and taxing companies like Amazon on equal terms with high street shops) which would easily provide for fully funded public services. Most of all they are scared of reopening the Brexit wound, despite the accumulating harm. This is a pity; the mood of the country is ready for a change, and Labour has nobody with the powerful oratory to offer it. The Brexit wound will not heal over time; it will only be healed when Britain returns to its rightful place in Europe.

Labour’s timidity is becoming a real issue for many of its natural supporters. Take the sewage problem; after years of activism raising the issue, the issue of raw sewage discharges is high on the public agenda. Ordinary people can easily see that this is a direct consequence of privatisation. If the water company prioritises the bottom line, generous dividends, and senior managers’ pay, they will have to minimise investment in pipes, reservoirs and sewage plant. This extractive business model is not compatible with providing the service people want; these obvious facts are simple to explain and are widely understood. The solution is then obvious. However, Labour shrinks from offering it. It is similarly well known that the railways were a privatisation too far; even the Tories have felt the need to take some operations back into public hands. And then there’s the big one; Brexit. People have come to realise what a disaster it’s been, and even leave voters are now turning against it in large numbers. Yet, Labour will not offer the blindingly obvious solution. And if they don’t, eventually, someone else will.

I’m going to use the N word

Since the Tories abandoned almost all their old ideals and values in the process by which the hard right faction not only gained the upper hand, but drove out moderate, decent Tories from the party, it has been less obvious whether they had a coherent ideology to follow going forward. Sure, there were tracts from pamphlet-scribblers in the think tanks; Truss and Kwarteng had co-written a hotch-potch of right wing ideas which they tried, so disastrously, to turn into a program of government. There were frequent calls for low taxes and a small state, which they seem unable to deliver. But was there a clear statement or manifesto, around which they would rally?

We have begun to hear of one. There is something called “National Conservatism” which has published a statement of its principles, and which right wing politicians here and in the US are publicly backing. It is, inevitably, the offspring of American right-wing think tank policy wonks (the Edmund Burke Foundation). Given how much the Tories have imitated from the American Republicans, we should be concerned about this particular US body of thinking.

Firstly, it’s hard to believe that the name “National Conservatism” isn’t a deliberate echo of  “National Socialism”, the politics of the National Socialist German Workers Party, which, being rather a mouthful, was shortened to “Nazi” (in which process the usual meanings of the words “socialist” and “workers” were quietly forgotten). The people who came up with this name are not stupid; they will be aware of the similarity and of the reactions it will arouse; they are doing it deliberately.

The statement (found on https://nationalconservatism.org/national-conservatism-a-statement-of-principles) is couched in some odd language; some of it is archaic in style, some of it rather flowery, much of it repetitive. The opening few paragraphs are an extended throat-clearing which prepares us for some level of self-importance in what follows.

Then you move on to the list of principles itself. There is a firm authoritarian smack in the description of how government should work; they are in favour of federalism and freedom for regions, but quickly qualify that by saying “national government must intervene energetically to restore order” if “immorality and dissolution reign”, and that “unacceptable public disorder should be swiftly put to an end”. When imagining what this might look like, it is difficult not to picture the kind of “energetic intervention” practiced by men in black shirts some 90 years ago. What do they mean by immorality? There’s a clue in the part which says “the Bible has been our surest guide” and “public life should be rooted in Christianity”, although “Jews and other religious minorities” and “adult individuals should be protected from religious or ideological coercion in their private lives and in their homes”. Well, that’s a relief! A few non-Christians can be tolerated if they just do their thing quietly at home; but notice that these Conservatives don’t want to prevent “ideological coercion”, just protect us from it until we venture outside our houses. Similarly there’s a reference to a “lifelong bond between a man and a woman” to foster “congregational life and child raising”, so it’s not very hard to figure out their attitude to anyone who doesn’t fit this heterosexual, pronatalist picture, or anyone who is interested in any kind of “sexual license and experimentation”.

These kind of declarations always involve a combination of saying what you are against, as well as what you are for, so linking words like “but” or “however” come thick and fast. While being in favour of a moon-shot style program of military research, there’s a classic “on the other hand…” clause where they advocate de-funding universities which are insufficiently dedicated to conservative ideas. One paragraph starts by saying that immigration has made immense contributions to the strength and prosperity of Western nations, but ends up calling for a moratorium on immigration. They don’t actually use the words “great replacement”, but it’s hard to read this section without seeing that between the lines. They also believe that a declining birth rate is a “grave threat”. This combination of pronatalism with the emphasis on uniformity – of cultural conformity and political thought, as well as of the “linguistic and religious inheritance” which is so hard to distinguish from ethnicity  – suggests a desire to breed people with (conservatively determined) desirable characteristics – a concept which was also popular about 90 years ago. Why is it a threat if some group of people slow down their birth rate? Is it that their place will be taken by people of lesser value, people who are somehow inferior?

Given that this stuff is written from an expressly Western, Christian, Anglo-American perspective, and talks of “our civilisation” in ways that leave no doubt as to who might be included in the word “our”, that moratorium makes you wonder about their attitude towards people from outside that group. Well, at the end they finally get around to saying something about that: “No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test”, after which they condemn “racialist” oppression and claim that they “respect… minority communities”. We can well imagine that this respect would wear rather thin if those minority communities were to become numerous enough, whether through immigration or through more energetic “child raising”, to assert themselves or to challenge the domination of the Conservatives, rather than trusting in their magnanimous toleration. The reference to “the shape of his features” and the use of the slightly archaic term “racialist” bring to mind (again, surely not by accident) the views and publications of certain, well, racialists, whose ideas were widespread in the, um, 1930s. After all, the only “religious minority” deemed worthy of a specific mention are Jews, not Muslims for example; another, presumably deliberate, echo of that time almost a century ago when Jews (and other minorities) were held to be sources of “weakness and instability”. Why is there this odd reference to discrimination based on the shape of someone’s features? This jarring phrase, stuck in front of “the color of his skin” as if it were the bigger problem, once again directs our attention in a particular direction. Are you starting to suspect that the writers of this document have some kind of thing about Jews?

Nor is there anything specific about the place of women in all this. The fact that they aren’t mentioned, and that the feminine is assumed to be included in the masculine wording, is suggestive, as is the fact that this document is written by men; but the heavy emphasis on child-raising and religion might call to mind the expression, “Kinder, Kirche, Kuche” even if kitchens aren’t actually mentioned.

In terms of world politics, there is a call for independent nation states, heavily armed, competing for their own interests. Collaborative bodies like the UN or the EU seem to have no place. They call for “our civilisation” to maintain its military effort lest the Chinese catch up, and to increase the Western birth rate. Economically, they believe in private property and enterprise, as long as they serve the conservative-defined national interest. In a classic example of the “but” word, they argue for national policy which should “promote free enterprise, but…” and demand that enterprise should bend to the will of the state in its fear of hostile powers. Always disregard everything before the word “but”!

The writers certainly know the power of repetition. There is constant reference to “us”, “we”, and “our”, establishing the idea of a dominant majority group described as “Western”, “traditional”, “Christian”, “Anglo-American”, and sharing a common cultural, constitutional, linguistic and religious inheritance. In short, they use every word they can think of to say “white”, except “white”. Anyone else is described as “other”; defined to be minorities of “diverse communities” who shall not be judged by the color of their skin – perish the thought! – but who are very clearly defined as others, as different; inhabitants of a virtual ghetto, whose best hope is to be protected from coercion by the benign, dominant Anglo-Americans, at least until they have been fully assimilated. This is white supremacy as described by someone with a thesaurus; a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan would have said the same, only in cruder terms. How the dominant culture remains dominant is presumably underwritten by that “energetic intervention” previously mentioned.

In short, there’s naked prejudice on display here, plus a lot of very loud dog-whistling going on. If you can read this statement without, at any point, being reminded of the original National Socialists, then I have to assume you can hear the William Tell overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger. The mention of Jews; the bit about government intervening energetically against immorality; the anti-gay and anti-immigrant sentiment; the part which says that the declining (white) birth rate is a grave threat; the old fashioned and self-consciously flowery language directing us back to a more monocultural golden age; the dominant majority who get to define the national interest and common good; the othering of racial and religious minorities; and of course, the name “National Conservatism” with its unfortunate echo, all combine to create what I can only describe as a fascist manifesto. I use this particular f-word in a literal sense, not as a general insult. There’s nothing in it that Enoch Powell would not have agreed with, and I think probably Oswald Moseley would have been able to buy into most of it as well. And our Tory politicians are signing up to this: Suella Braverman, Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Frost have all associated themselves with it by writing articles or attending its conferences.

So, if you hadn’t yet worked out where the Tories’ journey to the political right was leading, it’s pretty clear now. When fascism comes to Britain, it will not be wearing jackboots, but talking about cultural, linguistic and religious inheritance.

It’s a path that has been trodden before, and we all know what lies at the end of it. Really, why does anyone want to go there again?

How historical events hang over us

Wars can have long term consequences which continue to echo long after the issue which started them has been settled. The invasions of Russia launched by Sweden in 1708, Napoleon in 1812, and Hitler in 1941, plus the extreme antagonism of the Cold War years, left Russia with a long-term mindset that they were under threat from the West, and needed buffer territories. The deep scars left by the Nazi invasion, in particular, created a profound sense of insecurity. On the other hand, World war two left Britain and America with a sense of righteousness for having opposed a such a murderous enemy as the Nazis, and we have settled into a long term mindset that we are always right. Although our moral values evolve all the time, we have a moral certainty about ourselves, believing that democracy and capitalism (as implemented by us) are innately superior, to the point that we have a duty to impose them on other countries. Never mind that we were equally certain of our rectitude during the days of empire, colonialism, and economic protectionism; we always wear the white hat.

Another insidious hangover from WW2 is the idea that a righteous war must end with total victory and the surrender and subjugation of the losing side. The huge majority of conflicts end with a negotiated settlement, requiring both sides to compromise, but we have come to disregard that as a reasonable outcome.

Marxists also believed that their system was superior. They believed in the historical inevitability of communism, and like the West, had an urge to impose their system on others. With the end of the Soviet Union, the basis of this global struggle melted away, but old habits and mindsets die hard. NATO, founded to oppose Russia and her buffers/allies during the Cold War, was continued and expanded, rather than being scaled back or stood down. The expansion of NATO and the EU since 1990 has brought into the Western sphere, a raft of countries previously held in the iron grip of the USSR. For many of their people, that has been a good thing; they now enjoy greater personal and economic freedoms, and if the change in their political system took place with a push from the West, many will feel that the end justified the means. But, that doesn’t prove that regime-changing is a good thing to do. It didn’t work in Syria or Libya. Afghanistan has reverted to old ways, and Iraq remains chaotic and violent. The fact is, the military interventions and wars carried out by the US-led West seldom result in a free, stable, happy country with democratic government; the postwar establishment of democratic institutions in West Germany and Japan are the only examples I can think of, although WW2 cannot be characterised as a democratic intervention. More often, Western interventions leave a ruined nation in poverty and chaos.

All the same, the claim is still maintained, that the West is fighting a good fight for Ukraine as a bulwark of democracy, freedom, human rights, and a rules-based order. That the rules are America’s rules, is treated as a coincidence.  So, for example, America maintains a sphere of influence, and seeks to expand it, but does not recognize any other country as having a legitimate reason to do anything similar. Bringing Ukraine into the American sphere of influence serves no particular purpose other than undermining Russia. America had, and has, no genuine interests there; the replacement of the elected president Yanukovich in the 2014 coup which was ginned up, financed and engineered by the US, with a more biddable man, was just old-school geopolitical game-playing.

The Western narrative that Russia’s invasion is unprovoked, revolves around the definition of provocation. Consider my initial point that Russia feels threatened by the countries to its West, while the US, ever convinced that it is in the right, has maintained its Cold War enmity towards Russia and expanded NATO, whose only purpose has ever been to confront Russia, eastward to Russia’s borders.

We have long known that Russia regarded NATO expansion as a threat and a provocation; in that sense, the current war is very much provoked. Not justified – I don’t approve of any country attacking another, or otherwise starting an avoidable war – but provoked. The West merely pretends that NATO expansion was not provocative. If, by our definition, our actions were not provocative, then the Russian attack last year was unprovoked. But in any version of reality I can understand, if NATO forces and bases move ever further east and have an ever increasing border with Russia, the Russians are going to feel less secure. In their shoes, I would; but America has no interest in a European security policy which recognises Russian interests and fears.

Of course, the nations of eastern Europe should be free to align themselves however they see their interests – but that cuts both ways. We can’t meddle in Ukraine’s politics and then pretend to be defending their freedom to choose their own destiny. Also, no country has a right to join NATO on demand. Membership of NATO is a solemn commitment and obligation by the other members to offer defence to the country concerned – the Article 5 commitment – and nobody has a right to make us take on that obligation. It is our choice to decide who we will defend, not theirs. We put our lives on the line for fellow NATO allies. This is a commitment which should not be taken lightly.

Ukraine is being strongly encouraged to aim at retaking all the land inside its pre-2014 borders, including Crimea, which they could only accomplish with massive Western assistance, most likely including direct military intervention, and a blank cheque as to the costs. The US-led West would have to sign up to an escalated war against a nuclear armed opponent which regards this conflict as an existential one. This begs two questions: will (and should) the West give anyone a blank cheque, even if these were times of relative prosperity? And, is it really in our interests to confront Russia in a way which Russia views as an attempt to destroy it as a nation?

And so we have a new war in Europe which will have unintended, long-term consequences.

America’s overarching foreign policy objective is to prevent the emergence of a great Eurasian bloc which would pose a threat to America’s world dominance. To do this, they had no need to turn Ukraine round to face West. They did it, though, out of a desire to undermine Russia and to suppress the growth of closer economic ties between Western Europe and Russia. Hence, for example, the Nordstream false-flag black op, coupled with sanctions intended to curtail the economic relations of other countries with Russia. However, the effect has been to drive Russia and China closer together, in their shared fear and rejection of American world domination.

What is also notable is how much of the rest of the world has heard the Western narrative that this is a war of “democracy vs dictatorship” and don’t buy it. The emergence of the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation has gained momentum because of this war, and the moves by Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia toward closer ties with China, have been given a push. These countries are working to free themselves of reliance on the US dollar, so as to reduce America’s power to dictate to them through economic sanctions. It is understandable in the case of Iran, which has every reason to fear that it is next on the regime change hit list; but particularly interesting in the case of Turkey, a NATO member which might be the first to peel off from the alliance if it sees its future in closer ties with China and, by extension, Russia.

These countries also look at the West’s claim to be defending international law and human rights, and contrast it with the actions of the West when those rights are claimed, for example, by refugees. As for international law, it’s apparently OK for Britain to break it in “specific and limited ways” when it suits us. Annoy the Americans, and they’ll murder you by drone – as they did to Iranian general Suleimani – without the slightest excuse in law. The pre-2022 Ukraine was notoriously corrupt and was in the habit of banning opposition parties and suppressing minority (Russian) language and culture – not a shining example of a democracy. Nobody has even begun to suggest how postwar Ukraine might become a better place in these regards.

Non-aligned nations conclude – and rightly – that we uphold legal principles and a rules-based order only when it suits us. Nowhere is this made clearer than in America’s refusal to back an International tribunal to prosecute national leaders for acts of aggression and other war crimes, as it would open the door to Americans being held to account too. They want a rules-based order only as long as they make the rules, and have a free pass for themselves. What’s going on now seems, from a distance (most of Africa, for example) like the playground bully whining because he got hit and it’s not fair.

Britain and the USA between them, have fought, or fought in; invaded; bombed; conquered; regime-changed; occupied; colonised; engineered revolutions or armed proxy factions in; maintained garrisons in; or otherwise exercised force, in all countries but Andorra, Bhutan and Liechtenstein. So when we complain that it’s against international law for Russia to invade Ukraine, other countries see the pot calling the kettle black. Many of those other countries are former colonies or imperial possessions; more than half of today’s nations have become independent only since 1945 (Britain doesn’t celebrate an Independence Day, but thanks to us, 65 other countries do). They may well feel that what goes around, comes around. Arguments of the “he started it” variety may be valid among 5 year olds but cut little ice in international affairs. America is basically telling Russia, “you can’t interfere in Ukraine; that’s our job”.

Once again, I find it necessary to point out that this does not amount to support for Russia, nor does it justify their war. What Russia is doing is wrong; it’s against international law, and is causing much avoidable bloodshed. But if it’s wrong when the Russians do it, it’s wrong when we do it. Law is meaningless unless it applies equally to all.

So, my conclusion is that the declared reasons for US and British involvement in Ukraine are not genuine. We aren’t there to defend democracy or sovereignty in Ukraine; there is no more hollow a cliché in the whole political vocabulary. We aren’t there to defend international law; we are among the worst offenders in that regard. Return the Chagos islands to their rightful owners, stop supporting Israel’s creeping annexation of the West Bank, and then you can talk to me about international law.

Other countries see this much more clearly than we see it ourselves. There are actually no good reasons for our involvement in Ukraine, only bad ones. The rest of the world sees that we are deliberately prolonging the war in pursuit of neocon strategic goals. The political masters of the West do not truly care about the ordinary Ukrainian people; Ukraine is simply the latest unfortunate battleground country. Much of the rest of the world looks with mounting disgust at the trail of destruction, misery and failed states left across North Africa, the Middle East and into central Asia, by America’s recent wars, and will increasingly react negatively to the Western agenda and methods.

The West is pouring weapons into Ukraine whose sole effect is to prolong the bloodshed. No good outcome will be obtained: the likely eventual negotiated outcome will resemble what was available one year ago and all the sacrifice since then will likely have been a complete waste. Once people realise this, there should be anger, but I fear that our thought-conditioning will prevent that.