Oliver Kamm

Those Liberal Democrat predictions

Is Gordon Brown being honest with the British people? Instead he appears to be in denial, clinging to over optimistic forecasts, unable to accept the new realities.

Matthew Taylor MP, Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, speech to spring Liberal Democrat conference, 15 March 2003

The UK economy grew twice as fast as previously thought in the second quarter of 2003, official figures have shown. The Office for National Statistics said its revised estimate showed that gross domestic product rose by 0.6% between April and June, and was up 2.0% on the year. The figure will come as a boost to Chancellor Gordon Brown, whose recent predictions of growth of between 2.0% and 2.5% for the full year have been widely criticised as being too optimistic.

UK growth surprise boosts Brown, BBC News Online, 30 September 2003

Leadership

I'm travelling for a couple of days, so won't be blogging again till Wednesday. But I can't resist this juxtaposition, for what it tells us about both the prime minister and the profusion of misanthropic deadbeats who've held ministerial office in his government.

The BBC reports:

Asked if there was anything he would have done differently in relation to Iraq, Mr Blair replied: "Nothing. I would have done exactly the same...."

Exactly. The only thing the prime minister did wrong in this whole affair was to make too many concessions to his critics. But it was a practical politician's fault, and it didn't hamper his doing the right thing when the need arose. Much has been made of the non-appearance of weapons of genocide in liberated Iraq, but the problem was never stockpiles: it was the infrastructure to produce such weapons, the credible threat to Iraq's neighbours arising from that capability, and the threat to our own security from the links between Baathist tyranny and sundry varieties of terrorism. One question that was not raised, still less answered, at the Liberal Democrat conference last week was, "Do you believe we have a moral obligation to free the people of a prison-state from an unspeakable dictatorship?" I fail to see how a consistent liberal could give an ambiguous or evasive answer, and given that the brutality of Saddam's regime ensured that domestic opposition was forever fruitless where it was not outright suicidal, there was an overwhelming and unanswerable liberal case for invasion.

Meanwhile, the Telegraph reports on dissent within Labour's ranks:

However, Frank Dobson, the former health secretary, said Labour members were in no mood to forgive Mr Blair. "If they had a vote now among the membership, he'd be lucky to get nominated, let alone elected," he said.

I can't claim this is a cerebral or weighty post, but I have to get an early flight and this might be the place to record my own experience of Frank Dobson.

During the last parliament, when he was once again a backbencher after his humiliating rebuff in the London mayoral election, Dobson announced for no obvious reason to another parliamentarian that he never bothered to respond to constituents' queries, as his central London constituency (Holborn & St Pancras) largely comprised students and an otherwise shifting population. It so happened that I was a constituent of Dobson's, and when the conversation was relayed to me I resolved to find out if his boast was accurate. It was. I wrote to him a dozen times over some 18 months - for I am not given to abandoning an experiment in mid-flight - with the same question (it was about the revelation that a former London Labour MEP, Alf Lomas, had been a declared supporter of East Germany; I sought Dobson's opinion on whether it was appropriate that a democratic party should continue to extend membership to Lomas), and never had it answered.

During the 2001 general election campaign I finally received a telephone call from Dobson's campaign. The lady I am now married to, and who had lately left her native Denmark to move in with me, took the call and was asked to impress upon me Dobson's irritation at my behaviour and a request that I desist from writing to him. Unfortunately Frank Dobson is not a big name in Scandinavia, so my fiancee, with a practical bent that was incredulously-received, asked, 'Who's Frank Dobson?'

In the end this talentless mediocrity was returned again for his safe seat, but with a large swing against him to the Liberal Democrats. Being a fair-minded and impartial enemy of that party, I wrote to Dobson once more to point out that if he behaved with other constituents as he had with me, he was unlikely to be in possession of his parliamentary seat for much longer. He wrote a grudging response, and there we left the matter.

I record this, trivial as the anecdote is, because it suggested to me at the time how lacking in the ethos of public service are many of the older Labour MPs, especially those who have failed to make a mark as ministers. Dobson, Mo Mowlam, Peter Kilfoyle and Glenda Jackson are the obvious names, but there are others. While electoral opinion has turned against the prime minister, it unaccountably doesn't seem to be pressing for his replacement by any of these figures. The Labour Party needs Tony Blair for its credibility, as it will find soon enough once he is no longer there.

Edward Said

Much as I disliked the politics of Edward Said, who has died from leukaemia, he was a gifted literary critic, and I found value also in his essays on music. But there’s no excuse for treating his political record with sentimentality, as the BBC does here:

But the BBC's Justin Webb in Washington says that for the Palestinians - particularly in America where their cause has never been as popular as in other parts of the world - Mr Said was a supremely articulate advocate whose presence will be greatly missed.

Said's advocacy was immensely damaging to the cause of a negotiated territorial compromise between Israel and the Palestinians, and his absence in the politics of the region will be of benefit to the cause of a Palestinian state. He consistently attacked the duplicitous and demagogic Yasser Arafat for being too accommodating towards Israel, while couching his arguments in vitriolic and fantastical accusations wholly unsuited to the task of coming to terms with the moral and historical urgency of the Jewish state. Writing for the far-left Counterpunch site last year he said:

Israel is now waging a war against civilians, pure and simple, although you will never hear it put that way in the US. This is a racist war, and in its strategy and tactics, a colonial one as well. People are being killed and made to suffer disproportionately because they are not Jews. What an irony!

There's a respectable argument that Israel is insufficiently discriminating between combatants and civilians when she attacks terrorists. And though I don't generally agree with it, I take it seriously when it's accompanied by a recognition of Israel’s awesome problem of protecting her citizens from suicide-murder while they go about the most mundane of everyday tasks, such as travelling on a bus or eating in a restaurant. But to suggest that Israel is deliberately targeting civilians is malevolent, evil nonsense. Said's views were those of an embittered, extremist crank.

Why would Israel have voluntarily put her soldiers' lives at risk at Jenin 18 months ago by fighting terrorists from house-to-house, with heavy loss of life to Israeli troops, rather than obliterate the place from the air? Why would the President of Israel have criticised one Israeli counter-attack that genuinely did exercise insufficient discrimination – the assassination of Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh in July 2002 while he was in a block of flats – if the killing of civilians were Israel's conscious strategy, 'pure and simple'?

Said's academic reputation was made by his 1978 study of Orientalism, in which he argued that this eclectic and apparently scholarly field was a vehicle for political subjugation exercised by the imperial powers. Yet the book is polemical, partial and consistently unreliable. It excludes an enormous bulk of the subject matter of Orientalism (now transformed and politically radicalised as 'Middle Eastern studies') by omitting the work of all German scholars in the field. This is more than a detail: German scholars defined the field in the 19th century. The omission would be equivalent to discussing political economy from the 18th to the 20th century without reference to British scholarship (including an especially influential Scot). Moreover, as the historian Keith Windschuttle has observed, the historical knowledge that Said deployed in the book was consistently maladroit, even on the subject of Islam:

[Said] claims that, by the end of the seventeenth century, Britain and France dominated the eastern Mediterranean, whereas in reality the Levant was still controlled for the next hundred years by the Ottomans, and British and French merchants could only land with the permission of the Sultan. Said describes Egypt as a “colony” of Britain, whereas the legal status of British occupation of Egypt was never more than that of a protectorate. This is not merely a semantic difference because a real colony, like Australia or Algeria, was a place where large numbers of Europeans settled, which never happened in Egypt. Even on Islamic history, Said is unreliable. He claims that Muslim armies conquered Turkey before they took over North Africa. The facts are that the Arabs invaded North Africa in the seventh century, but what is now Turkey remained part of the Eastern Roman Empire and was a Christian country until conquered by the Seljuk Turks late in the eleventh century. The fact that these howlers have been preserved in the 1995 edition of the book suggests that Said lacks friends, admirers, or advisers with expertise in history who might have sent him a list of corrections.

That academic courses on the novels of Jane Austen habitually now career down the cul-de-sac of considering the role of slavery in Mansfield Park is a net liability to our understanding of literature and is entirely attributable to Said’s book Culture and Imperialism. That type of question was answered many years ago in a famous essay by L.C.Knights about Shakespeare. It had the ironic title How Many Children had Lady Macbeth? The point was that a reader has to make sense of the book in its own terms, and not by applying extra-aesthetic, still less naturalistic criteria.

I suspect, though cannot prove, that had Said been less exercised by his political celebrity he would have been a more careful scholar, concentrating in the fields he genuinely knew about and within those fields avoiding the desire to shock.

"We stand for subsidies for the rich" - Lib Dem Treasury spokesman

The Times reports a sensible observation by the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman David Laws:

Mr Laws said: "We need to carefully consider whether scarce financial resources are really best used in scrapping all user charges, even if that leaves us providing precisely the same services, while reducing the burdens on many of those who can already afford to pay."

So what does his party do, according to the same report?

Charles Kennedy faced being bounced into a £900 million health pledge yesterday after his conference voted to scrap charges for National Health Service prescriptions and dental treatment.

For the record, Liberal Democrats have been seriously discussing in Brighton this week their prospects of forming a government after the next two general elections. Their programme for government is, apparently, to say what individual items they wish to spend tax receipts on and then to add them all up.

I've mentioned once or twice in this blog the party's principal Treasury spokesman (or 'Shadow Chancellor', as he calls himself these days), Matthew Taylor. I knew Matthew quite well at Oxford. He has had the disadvantage of never having held a real job since we graduated: he was president of the Students' Union for a year, and then served as baggage carrier for the extrovert Liberal MP and professional Cornishman David Penhaligon. When Penhaligon was tragically killed in a road accident, Matthew was elected, at the age of 24, to succeed him, and has sat continuously as MP for Truro since then.

On one occasion at Oxford I was going into a restaurant as Matthew was coming out, and we stopped for a chat. Once I was inside, the waitress told me that my friend had left without settling the bill - so I ran out after him and caught up. Of course Matthew wasn't being dishonest (and he returned immediately with me): he'd simply forgotten to pay. During his tenure as Liberal Democrat 'Shadow Chancellor' I've occasionally thought of this incident as a metaphor for his pronouncements on fiscal policy.

It is the last refuge of a party that hasn't been near the Treasury in 70 years to believe spending commitments will be self-financing owing to efficiency savings. That's what the Liberal Democrats assert, however:

Dr [Evan] Harris [Liberal Democrat Health spokesman] told The Times that abolishing NHS prescription charges would cost £430 million and ending payments for dental checks and treatment a further £470 million, but said there would be savings from scrapping inefficient collection costs.

The concept Harris appears to be grasping for is what economists know as deadweight losses associated with the levying of taxes. But payments for services aren't taxes: among other things, they're a method (less inefficient than the alternative of queuing) of rationing demand by connecting the cost of a service with its provision to those well able to pay. This procedure by which the Liberal Democrats decide through a majority vote at conference to spend nearly £1,000,000,000 of taxpayers' money raises one or two questions.

The party claims that abolishing these health charges will be self-financing. At the same time it proposes an increase in the marginal rate of personal tax above £100,000 from 40% to 50% and the replacement of council tax by a 3.5% local income tax, and bases its spending projections on the assumed extra revenues. So it implicitly assumes that removing health charges will dispose of a 'dead-weight loss' associated with collection, while increasing tax rates - and therefore collecting the extra revenues - will not impose a 'dead-weight loss'. Its assumptions are, in short, flagrantly inconsistent. Its sums don't add up.

Math abuse is hardly surprising when you get fiscal policy decided by individual party spokesmen without being subject to a central budgetary discipline. That's why public spending in government is set by the Treasury and not by the aggregate of spending ministers. But of course the Liberal Democrats are different, because ... well, because they're a party not of government but of populist alliance with sectional interests such as the health and teaching unions. In a party of government the Treasury spokesman would insist on control of spending decisions.

So what on earth is Matthew Taylor doing ceding such responsibilities to his nominally more junior colleagues? What's he doing in his post at all? At least his abject failure and culpable incompetence will allow his party leader to sack him and appoint a 'Shadow Chancellor' who understands economics.

Well, not exactly. Here's how The Guardian summarises the position:

Talk of a major reshuffle of Mr Kennedy's frontbench team, now grandly dubbed a shadow cabinet, are being played down in Brighton. Matthew Taylor, the treasury spokesman now engaged in an old-fashioned left-right tussle with the neo-liberal banker MP, David Laws, is not being fired, as predicted.

What an entertaining party the Liberal Democrats are.

Those Liberal Democrat predictions

President Saddam Hussein of Iraq may have another weapon of mass destruction in his armoury - the economic effects of war. Changes in oil prices and the cost of conflict might just produce regime change in Saudi Arabia and recession for us all.

Vincent Cable MP, Liberal Democrat trade spokesman, The economic consequences of war, The Observer, 2 February 2003

In a forecast prepared for its annual meeting in Dubai on Sept. 23-24, the International Monetary Fund predicts that world economic growth will accelerate to 4.1 percent next year from 3.2 percent this year and 3 percent in 2002. Much of that, of course, is due to stronger demand in the U.S. Some economists now see growth of close to 6 percent in the third quarter, thanks to tax cuts, a boost from defense spending, and stepped-up capital investment.

The global upswing, though, is not only a made-in-the-USA affair. Japan, the world’s second-largest economy, is picking up and starting to generate homegrown growth, rather than just relying on exports for a boost. Emerging economic powerhouse China has shaken off the SARS scare and is on a tear, with sales of everything from autos to construction materials booming. Even in Europe, where the economy all but stalled in the first half, there are signs of life, with business confidence starting to perk up. “We are not out of the woods, but we are clearly in a better situation than earlier this year,” IMF Managing Director Horst Kohler said on Sept. 12.

Building toward worldwide recovery, BusinessWeek Online, 22 September 2003

It's only fair to add - and I always strive for fairness and balance in my discussions of the Liberal Democrats - that Vincent Cable really is a first-rate economist, and has one of the best intellects in the Commons (which is, I suppose, a bit like saying someone is the finest poet in Wotton-under-Edge). He made a good speech at his party's conference calling for an overdue application of economic liberalism to the postal service; both the worth of the proposal and the problem with its coming from that party are neatly summarised by Peter Riddell in The Times:

The most striking example of a fresh approach has been the speech by Vincent Cable, the Trade and Industry spokesman. It was not just his proposals, the privatisation of Royal Mail and the replacement of the present Department of Trade by a department of the consumer, as his tone. He rejected not only socialism, but also corporatism, "the begging-bowl culture of an industrial, or agricultural, welfare state"; and what he described as "the cronyism and sycophancy" of new Labour towards the rich and powerful.

That all sounds fine, but Dr Cable's free market and free trade message clashes with the instincts of many Lib Dem delegates, and MPs. They often call for government help when a local business is in trouble. That was evident from the speeches in yesterday's debate, even though the vocal minority lost the vote. Today’s Lib Dems do not feel like the party of Cobden and 19th-century Manchester liberalism.

Or, indeed, the party of Keynes, whose brilliant economic originality lay in his discovery that there could be such a thing as an excess of savings, not - as apparently and bizarrely believed by one delegate who spoke in the conference debate - in a belief in a 'mixed economy'.

All credit, then, to Vincent Cable. Why he is not the Liberal Democrats' Treasury spokesman is beyond my analytical powers.

"Political prisoners under tyranny? Stuff 'em: I want a drink" - Lib Dem MPs

On Wednesday evening (today) at the Liberal Democrat conference in Brighton a 'Havana Club rum reception for Cuba' will be held at the Hilton Metropole hotel on the seafront. Those billed to speak include a representative of the Cuban embassy, one Oscar de los Reyes; a representative of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, which is the host for the reception, Stephen Wilkinson; and two Liberal Democrat MPs, Richard Allan and Alistair Carmichael.

The Cuba Solidarity Campaign has one animating philosophical premise. To the extent that it may be taken seriously at all as a statement of principle rather than as transparently self-serving propaganda, it is hokum:

We believe that the people of Cuba, like any other nation, must be free to decide their own internal affairs without outside interference.

So the people of South Africa were entitled to decide on their own system of constitutionally-mandated racial segregation for 40 years, were they? Saddam Hussein should have been left free to decide whether to deal with the Iraqi Kurds by quick butchery or enduring persecution? (Bad example, on reflection, because the Cuba Solidarity Campaign probably does believe that one.) General Pinochet was entitled to lock up his opponents and secure their 'disappearance'?

The notion that state sovereignty is an inviolable principle is reactionary and pernicious, for it fails to distinguish between constitutional governments that respect the rule of law and illegitimate regimes that flout it. Robert Mugabe is not a legitimate ruler but a thuggish kleptomaniac; there may be pragmatic reasons for not intervening in the affairs of his benighted and abused country, but there is no argument - at least not for those of us on the progressive wing of politics - against doing so in principle. The gangster Milosevic justified his brutal imperialism with reference to the supposed territorial integrity of Yugoslavia; he should have been stopped much earlier, much more decisively, for many people died terrible deaths owing to our inaction.

The sovereign integrity of independent states is, to a liberal, a compelling principle in the case of governments that respect the rights of their citizens. Cuba by contrast fits the description offered by Isaiah Berlin (in Notes on Prejudice):

[T]he first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.

In July this year Amnesty International reported:

Marcelo López Bañobre, a human rights defender with no past convictions, was sentenced in April to 15 years in prison for, among other activities, "sending information to international organisations like Amnesty International". His conviction was part of a crackdown in mid-March by Cuban security forces who rounded up 75 dissidents over the space of a few days. Most of the leaders of Cuba's dissident movement, people who had been activists for a decade or more, were detained. The government claims that they were foreign agents whose activities endangered Cuban independence and security but the dissidents were not charged with recognizably criminal offences. They were given hasty and unfair trials, and, shortly after being taken into custody, were sentenced to harsh prison terms of up to 28 years. AI considers them all to be prisoners of conscience.

How does the Cuba Solidarity Campaign resolve the tension between state sovereignty and political decency? By siding with the oppressors and blackguarding the persecuted, of course. Here's what Stephen Wilkinson had to say on the matter in a letter to The Guardian:

Cuba's jailed dissidents were not at all "independent thinkers, writers or human rights activists" but rather in the pay of the US and carrying out activities against the Cuban government. They were not tried in a closed court - they all had counsel: 44 of them were defended by their own lawyers. They were convicted on the evidence of 12 of their number who were Cuban agents. They testified that the dissidents had plotted with the head of the US interest section, James Cason, who was given a brief by the Bush administration to create a "unified opposition" in Cuba.

After witnessing the inability of the left in the US and UK to stop a war of aggression that has killed thousands of innocent people in Iraq, Cuba knows that in the end it will have to defend itself.

There are many things that could be said about this disgusting apologetic, but the most fundamental is to note the anthropomorphic fallacy, from which all other horrors flow, of attributing cognitive qualities to an abstraction, viz. 'Cuba'. Cuba doesn't know anything: it's merely the name of a polity located in a certain geographical area. What Wilkinson is referring to is a regime - one that has never put itself forward in 40 years to a genuine popular election, and that is contemptuous of the rights of its subjects and international legal standards.

I know of this meeting at the Liberal Democrat conference merely because I walk home every weekday evening from Brighton railway station and along the seafront, and caught sight of a notice advertising it outside the conference centre. Something is seriously amiss when this type of event - which is not a humanitarian or pragmatic call for an easing of the trade embargo, but an expression of 'solidarity' with a totalitarian state - is found unexceptionable and unremarkable by a party that falsely claims the mantle of liberal politics. The place of consistent liberals is with the political dissidents, not at a drinks party in a four-star hotel celebrating the regime that locked them up.

The MPs who disgrace themselves by their attendance at this event are admittedly hardly household names. Richard Allan is the party's spokesman on IT, and has his own blog. I count myself well-informed on the activities of the Liberal Democrats, yet I know nothing of Alistair Carmichael except that he sits for the northernmost constituency in the United Kingdom. His deepest thoughts on politics are currently confided on his web site. But these men represent a party that is already known - through its participation in the Stop the War Coalition, a front organisation for the Socialist Workers' Party - for its pragmatic alliances with totalitarian causes, and is hardly working assiduously to police the boundaries of democratic politics.

I am at least relieved to note that Allan is standing down as an MP at the next election. Whoever takes his place will have an easy act to follow.

UN on trial

BBC News referred to Kofi Annan yesterday as 'the conscience of the United Nations'. This is like calling the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury 'the conscience of the British government'. Annan is a civil servant, not a moral leader. Where he's tried political interventions, as with his disastrous deal with Saddam Hussein in 1998, the outcome has been to weaken western security in the interests of a false peace. But at least he appears to be learning from his experience, judging by his speech to the General Assembly yesterday:

Mr Annan said that the UN stood "at a fork in the road" and described the present time as "a moment no less decisive than 1945 itself".

"It is not enough to denounce unilateralism unless we also face up squarely to the concerns that make some states feel uniquely vulnerable, since it is those concerns that drive them to take unilateral action," he said.

If the UN is to be a responsible agent in the international order, then it must uphold its own Security Council resolutions. In the case of Iraq, it didn't. In the 1990s the UN inspections regime was progressively enfeebled by the unwillingness of France and Russia, driven by their economic interest in Iraq's oil reserves, to uphold its authority. When Saddam refused to cooperate even with that arrangement, the UN declined to issue him with an ultimatum - hence Annan's undignified shuttle diplomacy. The only reason inspectors returned to Iraq at the end of last year was because the United States threatened to invade. This concentrated minds to the extent of a new UN Security Council Resolution, 1441, which Saddam proceeded to ignore.

Fortunately two world leaders, Bush and Blair, took the UN's responsibilities more seriously than the UN itself did. Annan is wrong to present our side's response as that of states who feel uniquely vulnerable. The Islamist terrorists are opposed not only to the US and Great Britain, still less just to our foreign policies, but to infidels everywhere, without distinction. The Bali bombing was directed not against anyone in military uniform, but against holidaymakers and backpackers. The Anglo-American intervention against a gangster-regime whose remnants even now commit terrorist atrocities alongside Islamist fanatics was made on behalf of the world order and not ourselves alone. It was a noble and humanitarian, as well as strategically necessary, act done in lieu of the UN's own responsibilities.

Typically the BBC charges that President Bush's speech to the General Assembly yesterday was a failure:

The BBC's Rob Watson, in New York, says there was little applause for Mr Bush's words, with the speech falling decidedly flat.

It was no failure: it was a carefully understated speech that subtly challenged the UN to be true to its own calling. If the members of the General Assembly, and still more those of the Security Council, have any sense they'll put a stop to self-indulgent grandstanding and do something useful for the people of Iraq - for a change.

Language and Empire

I didn't manage to see John Pilger's anti-war television polemic last night. I was at a lecture by Tariq Ali. Really. Ali was delivering the annual Max Sebald lecture on the Art of Literary Translation, at the South Bank in London. (I was there because the lecture accompanies the Times Literary Supplement's annual awards for literary translation from European languages, and my mother had won the German prize.)

It wasn't so bad. It was certainly better than if John Pilger had been lecturing on the art of literary translation. When Ali was talking about the politically-contentious role of language in the Indian sub-continent, and the cadences of poetry in Urdu, he made an interesting case well and lucidly. Unfortunately, though, everything was leading to his single-minded conclusion that the spread of language is a function of politics, and that the rise of a global language – English – is a function of Empire: military adventurism and commercial demands of American capitalism.

It's certainly true that the spread of English is related to the geo-political influence over the past 250 years of successively the British Empire and the United States. But that doesn't explain the extent to which English has become a lingua franca since the 1960s. It's only in my lifetime that English has genuinely become a world language and not merely a widely-spoken one.

If anything the most immediate reason is the opposite of Ali's claim of imperialism. In the 1960s the great wave of decolonisation created many new independent states. New states required unifying characteristics, of which a common language was among the most important. In some cases (Algeria most obviously, and some parts of Africa), that language was French; in most it was English. In only one case of a newly-independent state that I can think of was English de-emphasised (Tanzania, which initially made English and Swahili its two common languages, but reverted to Swahili alone after 1967). In short, the increasing dominance of English was a function of the needs of independent states, not of Empire.

English has become still more of a world language owing to the spread of new technologies. To that extent, the spread of English has been fortuitous, reflecting merely where computer technology has developed. The architecture and the software languages have of course been of an attenuated English, but their linguistic patterns have been assimilated across the world.

Unfortunately Ali left 20 minutes for questions, which merely encouraged him to launch into a diatribe on the iniquities of US intervention in Iraq. Much as he enjoyed himself, it ought not to be the role of the intellectual to flatter his audience's prejudices. When he declared himself an anti-American and proclaimed the vitality of Marxist theory, the winner of the TLS French translation prize, a former literary editor of the New Yorker, squirmed in ecstasy in front of me. I'd trust my cat's opinions on such matters before I'd seek those of translators, novelists and literary agents.

Ryan in Manchester: an update

This post is a waste of everyone's time. It is an incestuous 'blogger-dispute' post on the interpretation of historical matters. It is necessarily - because I'm quoting someone - lengthy. I urge you not to read it. But I am fulfilling my word to the subject of this post.

Some weeks ago a blogger called Ryan in Manchester posted sympathetic remarks about the now-disbanded Red Army Fraction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, which was active in Germany in the 1970s. I was less than impressed with Ryan's post, and said so. I coined a sobriquet for Ryan that I don't especially regret, but that did have the unfortunate side-effect of encouraging him to keep picking at that subject despite the refutation of all the empirical claims that he had imagined exculpated the objects of his 'empathy'.

These empirical claims were not of Ryan's devising. He had taken them from a blogger called Paul Dunne. Given that my criticism of Ryan was that he had romanticised a neo-Nazi terror gang, his choice of defence witness was a tad unfortunate. Dunne is not only almost entirely ignorant of post-war German politics but is also an apologist for Nazi Germany and a supporter of IRA terrorism – causes that historically have been closely linked, as I'll discuss sometime in another post. Ryan could thus hardly have selected a more damning indictment of his own case. To add obloquy to blunder, he has carried on citing Dunne liberally: he has linked to this very page of Dunne's blog, which discusses the murderers of Lord Mountbatten in 1979 under the unspeakable heading Their Finest Hour.

The same edition of Dunne's blog, incidentally, also carries an admiring letter from a middle-aged German lady on the subject of the Red Army Fraction, whom she revealingly refers to as 'so-called terrorists'. She goes on to conclude - on a web site that believes the Axis powers were the victims of US aggression in the Second World War - that I have a disturbed mind.

To my surprise, Ryan has continued to protest that there was nothing wrong with his romanticising an abhorrent and evil cause, and to demand an apology from me. Where I left this subject on my old site was to offer to take him through the antisemitic and neo-Nazi characteristics of the RAF, whose founder, Horst Mahler, is now a leading activist in an explicitly Nazi party, the National Democratic Party. I also offered to publish in full and unedited on my blog any statement he cared to send me defending his position and explaining where I had wronged him. (I was particularly conscious of this latter requirement to give Ryan a right of reply, as he'd posted comments to my old site that I'd had to remove as they were either deliberately offensive – asserting there was nothing uncomplimentary in likening something to Nazi Germany – or personally abusive to other contributors, thus breaching my publishing policy.)

The reason for this latest post is that Ryan has indeed asked me to expound the antisemitic character of the German terror-Left under six headings that I listed, and he has sent me a statement of complaint and defence. I shall therefore reproduce his statement, before providing the supporting material he's requested. I should add that his statement included a reference to an earlier assertion of his, which I sought (and obtained) his permission to publish also. So here goes.

Ryan stated:

I think it would be fair to say that I will not be convinced that the essential nature of the German left, or the Baader Meinhof group, was anti-Semitic or fascistic, at least not any time soon. I would be interested to hear of any other arguments by scholars of the group which made such claims, for so far as far as I know, it is you alone who holds this belief. Further, were that to be the case, I would have something to apologise for in omitting stronger criticism of the group.

I asked if that meant that no amount of empirical evidence would cause him to change his mind, for if that were so then it would evidently affect my willingness to provide him with the information he requested, or at least the alacrity with which I would approach the task. He replied as follows, and this – unedited and in full – is his statement of defence.

Christ, how in hell am I supposed to debate with you if you won't even wait for a weekend I while I get in front of a computer to compose a response!? You're impossible.

Anyway, to refer to the email attached below: no, that's not what I'm declaring. Perhaps I was a little vague. I don't believe I will be convinced - and I would be surprised if you did succeed in convincing me - that the essential nature of the RAF and the German revolutionary left was anti-Semitic.
But I am open to being convinced. So if you are going to write that no ammount of empirical evidence could make me change my mind, that would be a false assertion.

You state that "If I were to ask him to list the characteristics that, in aggregate, he would accept as denoting an antisemitic ideology, I expect he would come up with something like the following:

1. Support for the bombing of Jewish premises.
2. Defacement of Jewish memorials.
3. Propaganda aping the language of pre-war Nazism.
4. Objecting to the commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust.
5. Blaming the victims of the Holocaust for representing 'finance-capital' which the German people were right to despise.
6. Active support for the murder of Jews now.

And you know what? Every one of these was a characteristic of the German revolutionary Left grouped around the Red Army Fraction."

Now, even if this is true, what would it prove? It would prove the presence of an anti-Semitic element within the German revolutionary left. It would not prove that the essential charecter of the German revolutionary left was anti-Semitic. To do so would require a thorough analysis of that movement in its entirety, and it would require that analysis to show that anti-Semitism was a prominent feature of that movement.

Horst Mahler was/is anti-Semitic. There were anti-Semitic elements, as well as a more prominent anti-Zionist elsement, within the German revolutionary left. These things you have argued correctly. I am open to your arguments that the entire German revolutionary left was essentially anti-Semitic, but I think it would be very difficult to make that case. I think, rather, that the essential nature of the German revolutionary left was leftist and revolutionary. And German.

It is unclear what you mean by the statement regarding "the German revolutionary Left grouped around the Red Army Fraction". Do you mean to point to an aspect of the German revolutionary left that was grouped around the RAF, or do you mean to assert that the German revolutionary left was, in its entirety, grouped around the RAF? If you mean the latter, I think you are missing the large and diverse nature of the German revolutionary left, of which the RAF was a part. I dispute the assertion that the RAF were the central group which the rest of the German revolutionary left was 'grouped around'.

But all this is a sideshow.

The main point of this whole overblown argument is that you have consistently, damagingly and dishonestly misrepresented me. You have stated that I believe "indiscriminate murder generated by neo-Nazi fanaticism" to be "a fun thing" [this was an allusion to the title of Ryan’s blog; he appears now to have dropped it, unsurprisingly – OK]. You have no grounds for this, which is patently untrue and a stupid insult to throw at someone. You've consistently linked my name to neo-Nazism with statements idicating that I identify with the aims of a neo-Nazi terror group, when in fact I have never indicated support in any way for Nazi aims or for Nazism. As someone who detests every aspect of Nazism, anti-Semitism and all forms of racial hatred, this has caused me distress and it is a disgraceful way for you to act.

My definition of anti-Semitism is not tightly circumscribed, as you write, as when a person performs actions or writes words that are anti-Semitic s/he can properly be described as anti-Semitic. To show that a group, and particularly a large group such as the German revolutionary left, was inherently anti-Semitic, takes a little more work than finding one or two examples of anti-Semitism in its midst. I suggest you either write a book on the issue or back down from this grand and silly assertion.

You can quote the paragraph you mentioned, and this email, if you wish.

I hope that by quoting this in full I will have dealt with the issue satisfactorily in Ryan's eyes. I certainly regard it as a curious protest, however, given that the only point he makes apart from his expressions of incredulity and pique is to insist that the entire German revolutionary Left was not necessarily antisemitic. Initially I thought this was obfuscation, but on reflection I believe the problem is simply that Ryan has unfortunately never been taught grammar properly.

The statement of mine he claims is unclear reads:

Every one of these [antisemitic notions or actions] was a characteristic of the German revolutionary Left grouped around the Red Army Fraction.

There is, according to the conventions of English sentence construction, only one possible way to interpret this, not two. I am clearly referring to the sub-set 'the German revolutionary Left grouped around the Red Army Fraction', not to the population 'the German revolutionary Left'. In the sentence the words 'grouped around the Red Army Fraction' are what is known as a restrictive relative clause; the clause modifies and identifies the phrase 'German revolutionary Left'. Had I wished to refer to the entire German revolutionary Left, as opposed to that part of it grouped round the Red Army Fraction, I should have put a comma after 'Left', thereby making the succeeding relative clause a non-restrictive one. When I use language, I try to use it carefully; I am always open to suggestions of how to make a piece of prose clearer, but I don't consider I should be held responsible for any particular reader's grammatical idiosyncrasies.

I have searched and searched Ryan's missive for any factual or interpretative point that might be construed as a refutation of my characterisation of the RAF as a neo-Nazi terror gang. I have found none. Nonetheless, as he asks me to substantiate my list of the terror-Left's antisemitic characteristics, I'm happy to do so. My sources are Robert Wistrich, Hitler's Apocalypse, and Wistrich (ed.) The Left Against Zion; Jillian Becker, Hitler's Children, and an article by Mrs Becker in Terrorism: An International Journal.

1. Support for the bombing of Jewish premises. In November 1969, the anarcho-Communist Black Rats issued a statement supporting the bombing of the Jewish communal hall (the Gemeindehaus) in West Berlin on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Its rationale was that Germany needed to throw off its feelings of guilt at the Holocaust, which it condemned as "neurotic, backward-looking anti-Fascism, obsessed as it is by past history, [which] totally disregards the non-justifiability of the State of Israel."

2. Defacement of Jewish memorials. Graffiti such as 'Shalom/Napalm' became a standard way of defacing such memorials as a way of expressing solidarity with the international proletariat and Third World revolution.

3. Propaganda aping the language of pre-war Nazism. Wistrich quotes a slogan of the terror-Left that rhymes in both German and English: Schlagt die Zionisten tot, macht den Nahen Osten rot (Beat the Zionists dead, make the Near East red). He further comments on the distinctly pre-war connotations of this type of slogan; I can't point to any direct equivalent myself, it just has that 'feel' of violent Nazi rhetoric.

4. Objecting to the commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust. See point 1 above, and note the comments of Ulrike Meinhof when she appeared as a witness at the trial of Horst Mahler for conspiracy to commit crimes and with armed robbery in 1972: "Without pronouncing the German people 'not guilty' of fascism – for the people truly did not know what went on in the concentration camps - we cannot mobilise them for our revolutionary struggle." The terror-Left referred to the commemoration of the Jews as Germany's Judencomplex – a term as repellent in German as it is in English.

5. Blaming the victims of the Holocaust for representing 'finance-capital' which the German people were right to despise. Again, Ulrike Meinhof at the same trial: "Auschwitz means that six million Jews were murdered and carted on to the rubbish dumps of Europe for being that which was maintained of them – Money-Jews" (Auschwitz heisst, das sechs Millionen Juden ermordet und auf die Muellkippen Europas gekarrt wurden als das, als was man sie ausgab – als Geldjuden). Jillian Becker comments on this Delphic remark: "If it is not absolutely clear from this that she herself believed [the six million] were 'Money-Jews', what is by now perfectly clear is that their murder as 'Money-Jews' is not to her wrong, as it just might have been if they had been murdered as Jews."

6. Active support for the murder of Jews now. At his trial Horst Mahler read out a polemical statement (later circulated as a pamphlet by the RAF under the title The Action of the Black September in Munich – on the strategy of the anti-imperialist struggle) that supported the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. A leader of the Revolutionary Cells terror group Wilfried Boese, a member of the RAF, carefully selected for slaughter the Jewish passengers from the non-Jews in the Entebbe hijack in 1976 (fortunately Israeli commandos rescued almost all of the passengers and killed the terrorists).

Well might Ryan say in the circumstances:

Now, even if this is true, what would it prove? It would prove the presence of an anti-Semitic element within the German revolutionary left.

That is my point. Of course it proves the presence of an antisemitic element within the German Left: the terror-Left grouped around the Red Army Fraction. That's the group that Ryan has expressed empathy for. That's what I took strong exception to. That's the issue we're discussing. And Ryan hasn't exactly shown moral seriousness in his appreciation of it:

Oliver now charges me with "romanticising an abhorrent and evil cause". There's no need to romanticise the Baader Meinhof group, they're already fucking romantic. They wore leather jackets and carried guns and the kids loved them. The 'wanted' posters all over Germany gave them more support than ever before - they represented youth and sexual equality. They were Germany's equivalent of the Rolling Stones. And you can quote that 'favourable comment' on your weblog.

My final observation – and I hope it is literally the last on this subject in this blog – on this vexed historical issue concerns Ryan's conviction that I am alone in identifying antisemitic and Fascist characteristics in the Red Army Fraction. Well, let's take the view of one of the world's foremost authorities on both terrorism and Fascism, Walter Laqueur, Professor of International Security Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

In his most recent book, No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century, Laqueur states (page 220):

On the German terrorist scene, the attempts to bring about a synthesis between ideas of the far left and the far right date back to the days of Baader-Meinhof. This showed itself in playing the nationalist card. The US forces in Germany were an occupation army; the unique character of Nazism and the Holocaust was played down by arguing that National Socialism had been nothing but a creature of monopoly capitalism. In brief, the motivation, while it expressed itself mainly in a revolutionary phraseology, had been to a considerable extent nationalist. In other words the ultranationalist and neofascist views expressed by Horst Mahler and some other former terrorists of the left at the present time had been there, at least in statu nascendi, even thirty years earlier.

On Ryan's own criteria, he thus has:

something to apologise for in omitting stronger [!] criticism of the group.

Let me assure him that, though I find his remarks consistently offensive, no apology or retraction is necessary, and I have never asked for either. But I urge him to consider that elementary decency and his own interests require that he desist from posting anything on this subject ever again.

"Third World development? What for?"

The New Statesman (link would require subscription, but don't bother) gives its editorial verdict on Cancun:

The World Trade Organisation has a deeper flaw. It accepts, as its title suggests, that trade is invariably beneficial. It is driven by money, not by people's rights or need. Its role is to get barriers removed, not to contemplate the possibility that, in some circumstances, they may be a very good thing.

About a dozen years ago the idiosyncratic Marxist theorist Paul Hirst, a good and brilliant man who died this summer, invited me and three or four leftish academics to his office at Birkbeck College one evening to discuss with the then editor of the New Statesman, Stuart Weir, ideas on how to improve the magazine's coverage of economics. It became obvious fairly swiftly that Weir was uninterested in the views of anyone but himself and deeply enamoured of the sound of his own voice, as befitted someone who had played a tangential but still destructive role in the Labour Party's bid for collective self-annihilation in the 1980s. Yet I count Stuart Weir an economic titan and a discerning critic compared with his successor but three, the current editor, Peter Wilby.

For some reason political journalists are highly partial to the notion that their work represents a daring challenge to hidebound orthodoxy, especially when they comment on economic matters. In fact every undergraduate student of economics examines the optimum tariff argument, whereby a country with monopoly or monopsony power may in principle decisively alter the terms of trade in its favour by this means. Outside textbook cases, in the real world, the post-war expansion of global trade under GATT and its successor the WTO has been an important factor in enabling developing countries to lift themselves out of poverty. In 1990, 28% of the world's population was living on less than a dollar a day; by 1998 that figure had fallen to 23% (constant dollars).

There's no mystery about the process. Integration into the global economy enables countries to specialise in their production of goods and provision of services. Openness to foreign direct investment enables developing countries to fund the current account deficits that naturally arise when their profitable investment opportunities exceed their domestic savings. And when a developing country grows, the poor benefit. David Dollar and Aart Kray of the World Bank have demonstrated, using robust statistical techniques that isolate the direction of causation, that a 1% increase in growth in these countries causes a corresponding increase in the living standards of the least wealthy quintile of the population.

The insularity and economic dogmatism of much of the supposed progressive wing of politics in the rich world are the despair of Third World intellectuals, NGOs and trade unionists. Four years ago, ahead of the Seattle summit of the WTO, an important document appeared entitled Third World Intellectuals and NGOs' Statement Against Linkage. The 'linkage' in question is the notion that the expansion of global trade should be made conditional on the incorporation of common global standards on such things as environmental protection and labour standards. The statement, drafted principally by the trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati and with more than hundred signatories (including the secretary of the All-India Trade Union Congress), protested:

It is time to raise our voices and call a spade a spade. The WTO's design must reflect the principle of mutual-gain; it cannot be allowed to become the institution that becomes a prisoner of every developed-country lobby or group that seeks to advance its agenda at the expense of the developing countries. The game of lobbies in the developed countries seeking to advance their own interests through successive enlargement of the issues at the WTO by simply claiming, without any underlying and coherent rationale, that the issue is "trade-related", has gone too far already. It is time for us to say forcefully: Enough is enough.

Judging by Cancun, the anti-globalisation campaigners continue to promote the sectional interests of developed-world lobbies at the expense of the poor. Judging by the New Statesman, the British Left still hasn't grasped where its philosophy ought to place it: inside, and alongside, that most progressive and admirable of movements for social change and economic betterment, the World Trade Organisation.

UPDATE: Tom Watson MP asks for suggestions on what he should ask anti-globalisation campaigner Anita Roddick when he meets her later this week. Here's mine.

Mrs Roddick complains in The Guardian that 'business is imposing virtual slavery in the developing world'. Tom could usefully point her to the empirical research showing the opposite: there is a substantial 'wage premium' associated with multinational corporations that establish plants in developing countries. (A 1996 paper by Ann Harrison of Columbia Business School, Brian Aitken of the IMF and Robert Lipsey of the National Bureau of Economic Research demonstrated this with regard to Venezuela and Mexico.) Those wage rates are still low compared with workers in developed countries; the problem is not one of multinational commerce, however, but poverty. Multinationals generally raise productivity in the host country by transferring advanced technology and training local workers to use it. As productivity rises, so do wages.

This isn't theory: it's how workers in poor countries better themselves and provide for their families. It isn't 'right-wing': it's a basic Keynesian premise that wages are pinned to the marginal product of labour. I've quoted Jagdish Bhagwati in the body of this post. I'd recommend to Mrs Roddick this article by Bhagwati, an expanded version of one he originally contributed to the Financial Times, on the human face of globalisation. (It shouldn't need to be said, but perhaps Mrs Roddick will need encouragement to read it: Professor Bhagwati is far from being a stereotypical free-market economist. Indeed his most famous contribution to trade economics, the theory of Domestic Divergences, demonstrated that free trade was not at all inextricably linked to laissez-faire, and he has cogently argued both for free trade in goods and services and for capital controls.)

More globalisation and foreign direct investment, not less, is what development campaigners should press for. I hope Tom will do his persuasive best to win Anita Roddick round.