Oliver Kamm

Those Liberal Democrat predictions

Worries over the funding of a costly and prolonged war could very easily precipitate a collapse of external and internal confidence in the US economy.

Vincent Cable MP, Liberal Democrat Trade and Industry spokesman (now Treasury spokesman), lecture at the LSE on the economic consequences of the Iraq war, January 2003

The economy roared ahead in the third quarter, growing at its fastest pace in nearly 20 years, fueled by greater business and consumer spending. Business spending, which has dogged the economy, turned in its best showing since early 2000, while consumer spending registered its fastest pace since early 1988. Gross-domestic product, a measure of all the goods and services produced in the U.S., rose at a sizzling 7.2% annual rate, more than double the 3.3% rate in the second quarter, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.

GDP Soars at a 7.2% Rate, Fastest in Nearly 20 Years, Wall Street Journal, 30 October 2003

... gone

Johann Hari, political columnist for The Independent, rightly welcomes (on Harry Hatchet's blog) the expulsion of Saddam apologist George Galloway MP from the Labour Party, and also gives the right reason:

He should not have been expelled for calling on Arab tyrannies to protect their fellow tyrant in Iraq by force though (despicable though that was). He should have been expelled because he is a defender of Joseph Stalin (like his friend Saddam), and this places him beyond the boundaries of decent democratic discourse.

The allusion is (I think) to an interview that Galloway gave to The Guardian last year where he said this:

If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union, yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life. If there was a Soviet Union today, we would not be having this conversation about plunging into a new war in the Middle East, and the US would not be rampaging around the globe.

Astonishing, isn't it? What took a democratic party so long to expel a man who declares himself to be a supporter of murderous tyranny, and who thereby is unfit to sit at table in civilised company let alone hold public office?

Unfortunately, the question doesn't appear to have occurred to a Liberal Democrat member of the Welsh Assembly called Peter Black, who is I believe the second serving politician in that party to start a blog. He expostulates:

The expulsion of George Galloway from the Labour Party for expressing his opinions about the Iraq war and his Party Leader is another example of over-the-top control freakery by that party. Is it now the case that dissent of any kind is not to be tolerated by New Labour? Have they not learnt their lessons from disasters in the past? It seems not. New Labour now appears more Stalinist than Old Labour and that is saying something.

I will put this in simple terms because Mr Black is clearly a simple man. When a political party takes disciplinary action against a man who expresses support for Communist totalitarianism, there is something foul as well as incurably frivolous in levelling the term 'Stalinism' against anyone except the defender of Stalin's monstrous legacy. I have no confidence that Mr Black will see this point, but let me at least try on him an analogy that is loosely based in modern political history.

In 1978 the Labour Party was severely embarrassed after a by-election had been called in a Birmingham constituency (from memory, I think it was Birmingham Ladywood, the constituency that Clare Short now represents), for it turned out that its election agent - a man called Peter Marriner - was a leading member of a violent neo-Nazi organisation called the British Movement. Marriner of course was an infiltrator who proudly announced at various far-Right rallies for a few months afterwards that he had penetrated the top of the Labour Party (as of course he hadn't). Let us suppose that Marriner had refused to leave the Labour Party voluntarily and that Labour's National Executive had been forced to expel him for his political affiliations. And let us suppose further that an obscure Liberal politician then decided to denounce the Labour Party's decision as 'Himmler tactics'.

This is perhaps a fanciful example (though the story up to and including Marriner's departure from the Labour Party is historical fact), for I assume any public figure considering making such foolish remarks in defence of a bigot would realise beforehand the damage he would thereby do to whatever reputation he had. Yet Peter Black evidently considers the moral equivalent of such a remark - for Stalin, recall, was responsible for far more deaths than Himmler - to be fair and reasonable comment. What sort of people do the Liberal Democrats put up for office these days?

I can supplement this only by noting that Black's blog opens with the following description of itself:

It is intended to be mildly humourous and irreverent ...

It turns out that Peter Black AM is - really - the Welsh Liberal Democrat spokesman on Education.

And that's not funy at all.

Going, going...

I don't know if any Conservative MP reads this blog, and as I have never voted Conservative in a general or local election there is no reason he should pay attention to my views if he does. But I hope that Iain Duncan Smith ceases to be leader after the party's confidence vote later today. His continuation in office would mark a futile sentimentality about a man who is manifestly not a plausible candidate for prime minister. It would also be an abdication of responsibility comparable to the abandonment by the Labour Party of any claim to be taken seriously as an alternative government when it elected Michael Foot as leader in preference to Denis Healey in 1980.

I care about this – more than I had thought I might – because I want a revitalised Conservative Party to be a serious contender for public office. Here's why I believe non-Tories should be concerned.

In the 1980s the Liberal-SDP Alliance, later known as the Democrats and more recently as the Liberal Democrats, argued a plausible but profoundly misguided case that the quality of British government had been harmed by continual ideologically-driven fluctuations in public policy. In reality the only example Roy Jenkins (who had argued this case in his influential Dimbleby Lecture in 1979) could come up with when pressed was the nationalisation and denationalisation of the steel industry.

In fact Britain's poor post-war relative economic performance had much less to do with ideological swings between Left and Right than with bad administration by both main parties. With certain serious lapses (exchange rate management in the early 1990s; fiscal profligacy by Gordon Brown more recently, after his excellent early record), economic management and industrial relations policy have been broadly successful under both parties since the early 1980s. The much-mocked Norman Lamont, who ought to have resigned over the ERM debacle in 1992, nonetheless put in place of that failed policy a system of economic management – the central feature of which was the Bank of England’s inflation reporting - that was well-designed and effective. Gordon Brown's subsequent granting of operational independence to the Bank of England in setting interest rates stands as the best thing that Labour has ever done in domestic policy.

This record refutes the claim of the Liberal Democrats, under their various names, that adversarial politics and a first-past-the-post electoral system are inimical to good government. In fact, it is more often proportional representation that is the enemy of good government (at least in a mature democracy: I can imagine circumstances, where the management of communal strife among different nationalities is a pressing political aim, in which PR might be the least bad system available). By entrenching in office a set of politicians who appeal to the electorate's highest common factor but whom few electors voluntarily choose, it encourages cynicism about government.

The minimal requirement of an effective polity is that a government that is plainly failing can be removed cleanly and decisively, as happened with the Conservatives in 1997. A secondary requirement is, however, that the principal political parties observe certain informal conventions of a healthy democracy, the main one being not to flatter the opinions and single-minded partisanship of party activists. I have met many active members of the main political parties who are public-spirited and decent, but I have met few who will acknowledge the value of having a tolerant and rational opposing political party with whom public office can legitimately alternate. Yet one has only to look at recent history to see the point. I stand on the moderate Left, and I believe a Labour government led by Healey in the 1980s – such as I worked for at the time – might have arrived at the sensible and urgent economic reforms that Mrs Thatcher introduced while avoiding her stridency of tone. But I'm glad nonetheless that Mrs Thatcher did these and other things (such as supporting Nato's deployment of Cruise missiles) when they were needed. I'm also aware that if Labour had won the 1979 general election, a Michael Foot premiership would have been probable a year or two later, with damaging consequences for the country and our standing in the world.

I stress that such a catholic approach is fundamentally different from the traditional Liberal (and now Liberal Democrat) complaint about adversarial politics. I welcome adversarial politics; I just want the main parties to be reasonably well-matched political adversaries, as they are not under the present Conservative leadership. The Liberal Democrats affect to transcend such distinctions, but in reality theirs is the most partisan and destructive form of party politics: the notion that they embody rationality and sense in contrast to their ideologically-driven opponents. They have never shaken off - indeed they've increasingly grown into - the caricature described by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe in their standard history of the SDP:

Many outsiders viewed the new party [in 1981] with moral and even aesthetic disdain. The SDP's public image struck its opponents as a sickly over-sweet mixture of Little Lord Fauntleroy, Mary Poppins and the sanctimonious George Washington with his cherry tree.

I want the Tories at least to have a serious politician as leader so that they do not become an atavistic sect comparable - in importance if not ideology - to the declining French Communist Party. If they do not, then they risk ceding the role of official Opposition to the Liberal Democrats, whose absurdity and extremism I have dealt with on this blog at some length. Triggering a confidence vote on a failing and flailing leader is the first sign for a long time that the Conservative Party understands the gravity of its situation. It isn't merely that the Party lacks an articulate and presentable leadership: more damaging still is the descent into an incoherent populism of pacifying interest groups. It is laughable - or it would be if it weren't so dismal a reflection on a once great party of state - that Iain Duncan Smith can proclaim (in today's Times) among the virtues of his leadership:

[P]erhaps most importantly of all, we have policies on pensions, law and order and the public services that are popular, genuinely Conservative and which will make a real difference to people’s lives.

He's alluding to commitments to state-funded entitlements (linking pensions to growth in average earnings, abolition of tuition fees) that will subsidise the better-off. We know this is true, because these policies have all been done before. Take university tuition fees. Australia abolished them in the early 1970s (only to reintroduce them later), and over the next 20 years recorded large absolute and relative increases in university entry rates on the part of the top third of the income scale (from Alison Wolf, Does Education Matter?).

Changing the leadership is a prerequisite of restoring the Tories' fortunes but nothing more than that. It is extraordinary that the most qualified candidate for leader, Michael Portillo - whose combination of political weight, economic and social liberalism, and seriousness on defence makes him an attractive candidate for prime minister - is unelectable within the modern Conservative Party, and that in itself indicates how unsuitable a method of election the party has. But nothing good will come - for the Tories specifically, but for the rest of us too - of failing to recognise the weakness and intellectual flaccidity at the centre.

Iraq and the record of French diplomacy

The Telegraph states of the car-bombings in Iraq:

[I]t can reasonably be argued that the attacks are the final convulsions of a Ba'athist remnant aided by foreign jihadis. The problem for the coalition is the negative impression which those convulsions give to foreigners who could help Iraq back on to its feet.

This, I'm afraid, is far too sanguine. As Andrew Sullivan notes, the Coalition’s enemies in Iraq don't need to win, they merely need to disrupt in order to hamper the emergence of a stable and successful Iraqi democracy.

If they can keep this up, the chances of a peaceful reconstruction in Iraq look more remote than they did last week. Why? Not because this was that sophisticated an attack, but because it was relatively unsophisticated. Not so much because the Baathists can win, but because they don't have to. All they have to do is prevent the coalition from winning, which keeps Iraq in limbo, and tilts American public opinion against the war.

Moreover, it is frivolous to suppose that what keeps the community of states from aiding Iraq is the incidence of terrorist attacks. The squabbling at the Madrid donors' conference was not primarily about Iraq: it was about Europe's relations with the United States. What motivates certain European governments is a plain wish for Anglo-American administration in Iraq to fail. Witness the fatuous observation made yesterday by the most venal of European agents:

France, a leading anti-war campaigner, also condemned the attacks but emphasised the importance of restoring sovereignty to Iraqis as a means of stopping the bloodshed.

The only sense I can make of this is that the French seriously believe the terrorists in Iraq are demanding popular sovereignty. They're not: popular sovereignty is what the terrorists oppose. Their aims are heterogeneous but allied: the restoration of brutal dictatorship, whether in the form of Baathist terror or a revived Caliphate. There is no political solution available to the liberal West in dealing with these forces; all that is open to us is to defeat them militarily. It is no exaggeration that the most important task for liberals in the world order today is to give unreserved support to British and American troops in that aim.

I have often wondered what motivates French diplomacy and whether such bad ideas are sincerely held. I'm increasingly of the view that they are merely a malevolent fiction manufactured to disguise an underlying insecurity. French foreign policy has been a consistent failure since at least the death of Talleyrand. This has far less to do with the rise of the United States as a world power than with monumental French incompetence.

Napoleon III was responsible for the disastrous outcome of the Franco-Prussian War. Alsace-Lorraine reverted to France after 1918, but only at enormous material cost and with a shattered military capability. Diplomacy between the wars combined appeasement (the Hoare-Laval Pact) and irrelevance (the Little Entente with the powers of Central Europe, whom France in any case betrayed at Munich). The story of Vichy is well-known everywhere except in the French education system. The collective amnesia within France resulted in the perverse outcome in the 1980s and early 1990s noted today by the Wall Street Journal (link requires subscription):

[President] Mitterrand's reluctance to come clean on his wartime past mirrors France's own struggle with the history of the Vichy regime. Starting in 1942, Mr. Mitterrand worked for Vichy, receiving the Francisque decoration from Marshal Petain, although he went on to fight with the resistance. Damaging revelations, including word that Mr. Mitterrand placed a wreath on Petain's tomb each year, emerged in the early 1990s. The French president could have asked France to acknowledge its own mixed wartime record. But instead he implausibly asserted that France "had nothing to do with the crimes of Vichy."

After the War, France managed only a single principal achievement in foreign affairs, and that was the negative one of extricating herself from Algeria. Elsewhere she exercised treacherous and sometimes brutal conduct in attempting to shore up colonialism in Indochina, and North and West Africa. Her malign and amoral international dealings were exemplified in assisting Iraq to build a nuclear reactor (which, fortunately for all of us, Israel destroyed before it could be used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons). Her declining fortunes were sealed by the reunification of Germany, which thereby prevented France's becoming the acknowledged diplomatic leader of continental Europe.

This is a story of fecklessness and almost unalloyed failure. France is a loser among nations. Her attempted counterpoint to the power of the United States is merely chauvinism with an inferiority complex. The war in Iraq might have been avoided if France had insisted on the integrity of international law and on upholding the requirement for Iraqi disarmament. President Chirac is a corrupt and unprincipled political leader whose cultivation of Saddam Hussein stands as one of the vilest alignments even in France’s inglorious diplomatic record in the past century. It is a terrible thing to say, but he is the President France deserves - and the national leader the rest of the democratic world should most scrupulously ignore.

Taking from the poor and giving to the rich

Speaking of aircraft, I found the most revealing insight into Concorde's retirement in the BBC's account of the plane's final flight on Friday:

On disembarking, actress Joan Collins said there were "cheers and tears" among the passengers when the plane landed.

Yes, there would be cheers and tears from Joan Collins and her friends, because they never paid for their tickets. Concorde's revenues covered its operating costs for the first time only in 1983, more than 20 years after the project was conceived. The development costs in the meantime rendered Concorde an investment of immense economic irrationality. Even at its peak, the only people who benefited from it were those whose time was so valuable or self-importance so inflated that they could justify paying a multiple of sometimes seven or eight times the more conventional carriers. Yet while they paid a lot they didn't pay the economic cost of their tickets, which ought to have taken account of the development as well as the operating costs. Concorde was a subsidy from British and French taxpayers to the rich and powerful.

Among the politicians responsible for this fiasco there's plenty of blame to go round. None is more deserving of it, however, than the Minister of Technology in the late 1960s, Tony Benn. The man who would later insist on the inclusion in Labour's programme of a commitment to a 'fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power to working people and their families' was responsible for precisely the opposite effect in government. It's worth recalling this, because amid the sentimental Concorde retrospectives this minor aspect of British political history has been struggling for attention. The BBC published an interview with Benn last week in which the scheme's begetter at least made a passing, defensive and oddly passive acknowledgement that not all had been well:

When you are building it and a quarter of a million jobs depend on it you don't cancel it - it was ludicrous to [temporarily] cancel it in 1974 before it went into service.

You can argue whether it should ever have started - that's an entirely different argument and governments do do things for prestige.

That's not quite the philosophical tone he adopted at the time. According to Benn's diary entry for 4 May 1970:

Ronnie Melville, my Aviation Permanent Secretary, has been indicating his anxieties in little minutes to me which I have begun to suspect are for the record.

Then he broke in to say, 'Well, Minister, I must tell you that my advice is that we cancel Concorde. I have come to the view we must cancel. It is not an economic aircraft' (of course it never had been), 'and unless there is some overwhelming national or prestige reason for us to keep it we should cancel.' He said that I was not to believe the figures that were coming from his officials. They always went up, and so on and so on - he really lost control.

Yet when back in government (as Secretary of State for Industry), Benn - on his own account knowing that Concorde had no economic rationale - wrote, in his diary entry for 31 July 1974:

[Foreign Secretary] Jim Callaghan was making his statement on Cyprus and I followed with my statement on Concorde. I got some hostile questions, some friendly ones, and the Bristol MPs spoke. It was really exciting: I have saved Concorde and that is now off my chest.

This Pooterish boast illustrates an infrequently-remarked characteristic of recent British political history. Whatever else may be said of Tony Benn, he stands as perhaps the least competent and most reactionary minister in a generation.

Going Green

Der Spiegel reports on a planned trip to Brazil by two Green members of the government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in Germany.

Renate Kuenast and Juergen Trittin had intended to visit various ecological projects in the Amazon region. These are some fairly remote areas, so naturally Kuenast and Trittin requisitioned an air force Challenger jet. The return trip from Cologne to Sao Paolo and back again, not counting the flights within Brazil, would have covered 20,000 kilometres, cost the taxpayer 250,000 euros - and expended 20 tonnes of Kerosin into the atmosphere. I'm sorry to report that, on learning of the media interest in their proposed means of transport, the ministers suddenly changed their minds (link via German blogger David Kaspar).

As so often, however, Chancellor Schroeder's government is merely following another's lead. Earlier this year it was revealed that a member of the Irish parliament owned shares amounting to around $70,000 in six oil companies. Nothing wrong, still less illegal, in that; except that the politician, Ciaran Cuffe, was at the time Environment spokesman for the Green Party. The Irish broadcaster RTE reported:

Party leader Trevor Sargent, accepting Deputy Cuffe's offer to stand aside, said it was important to note that at all times Deputy Cuffe had been in full compliance with the law and all relevant regulations.

He described the incident as 'a lesson to all of us in the Green Party'.

Not all Greens were quite so understanding, but they were forgiving. The County Clare branch of the party choked back its disappointment and displayed a noble stoicism:

This controversy was surely the most devastating blow ever to the moral [sic] of party members. Some (including this writer) felt that stronger disciplinary action should have been taken against Mr. Cuffe. It will now be up to him to undertake the difficult task of redeeming himself and the party’s image. He has already proposed a national conference in ethical investment to be held in the autumn. That will be an opportunity for the general public to learn more about this issue and to apply it to their own financial investments.

This story of Cuffe's impolitic maternal legacy received some coverage among blogs, but I am not aware that its coda has received similar attention. Last month RTE reported that Cuffe, having sold his oil shares, had encountered a further difficulty in his search for an investment vehicle appropriate to his sensibilities:

The Green TD, Ciaran Cuffe, has said he has 'no problem' with investing in a condom manufacturing company, and has demanded an apology from the Evening Herald for claiming he was linked to a pornographic website.

It would be a harsh judge who doubted Deputy Cuffe's good faith on this point. The problem seems to be that the condom manufacturer in question (whose name is 'Condomi') is interested in more than just condoms:

Deputy Cuffe said he had no problem with investing in condoms, but not in pornography, and acknowledged that there were links from the Condomi website to 'rather unusual toys'.

And in a denouement worthy of the finest traditions of the Carry On films:

He said he would consult his investment manager to look at all the products involved.

Sometimes 'Schadenfreude' won't do it. Hilarity is the only proper response.

Krugman's pathology

Paul Krugman is an important figure in international economics, especially trade theory. He has no expertise in international politics. Unfortunately his regular New York Times column habitually elides the distinction between those disciplines.

Krugman used to employ imaginative simple models in his journalism in order to popularise complex economic ideas. He now specialises in extravagant denunciations of the Bush administration on any issue at any time. The mark of the effective critic is that he never claims more than the evidence will permit. Krugman is a critic for whom the administration's villainy is a given regardless of the evidence, and he is notably unselective in his choice of source – as in this notorious example in the summer:

As The Associated Press put it: "The implication from Bush on down was that Saddam supported Osama bin Laden's network. Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks frequently were mentioned in the same sentence, even though officials have no good evidence of such a link." Not only was there no good evidence: according to The New York Times, captured leaders of Al Qaeda explicitly told the C.I.A. that they had not been working with Saddam.

Well, that settles it then. Presumably Krugman also believes Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with the destruction of the World Trade Centre: after all, didn't the man explicitly deny responsibility?

This type of thing isn’t political commentary in any recognisable sense, but pathology. It has only one actor. Nobody matters but President Bush, and what goes wrong is – by omission or commission – the President’s fault.

Consider Krugman's column today, in which he discusses the antisemitic remarks made last week by the Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad. To anyone of civilised sentiments, Mahathir's speech was repugnant demagoguery; to Krugman, the villain was – no, really – President Bush:

Not long ago Washington was talking about Malaysia as an important partner in the war on terror. Now Mr. Mahathir thinks that to cover his domestic flank, he must insert hateful words into a speech mainly about Muslim reform. That tells you, more accurately than any poll, just how strong the rising tide of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism among Muslims in Southeast Asia has become. Thanks to its war in Iraq and its unconditional support for Ariel Sharon, Washington has squandered post-9/11 sympathy and brought relations with the Muslim world to a new low.

There are many things wrong with this passage. Most obvious is the rank colonialist assumption that a Third World political leader can't be considered a responsible moral agent who should be held to account for his own actions and attitudes. But more important still, Krugman is so determined to attack his real – his only – target, President Bush, that he relocates a hoary Jewish conspiracy theory to the realm of mere realpolitik necessitated by obdurate and aggressive American foreign policy. This is a rhetorical sleight as ignorant as it is offensive.

Earlier this week The Daily Times of Pakistan offered this editorial judgement (entitled 'Mahathir's plain-speak') of that speech:

We fail to see why anyone in the West should quibble with what Dr Mohammad has said. Clearly, what has caused the uproar are his remarks about the Jewish ‘control of the world’. And pray, how is he wrong on that count? Is it any secret that there is a very powerful Jewish lobby in the United States that all but controls that country’s political system? Is it a secret that without the unstinting support of the United States, Israel could not have survived and gone from strength to strength? Is it any secret that the Nixon administration resorted to the biggest airlift in Oct 1973 since the crisis over Berlin after the then Israeli premier Golda Meir rushed to Washington in the face of advancing Egyptian armour? Is it any secret that the United States has killed (or compelled members to water down) every single resolution the United Nations Security Council has tried to bring against Israel? Is it any secret that the United States has multiple joint weapons development programmes with Israel? Is it any secret that scores of American politicians have seen their political careers come to an end at the hands of the Jewish lobby and Jewish money? Is it any secret that a sizeable number of Washington’s neo-cons are Jews? Is it also any secret that they pushed the United States into a war with Iraq and the reshaping of the Middle East, an enterprise for which they had prepared a blueprint back in 1995, much before the events of September 11, 2001?

I quote this inflammatory nonsense at length because Krugman doesn't. To read Krugman, you'd think such complaints were the equivalent of, say, Tony Blair calling for higher spending on social services – a genuflection to a domestic political constituency, without real significance.

Yet the catechism I've quoted has nothing to do with the issues Krugman cites. Had the Iraq war never taken place, the editors of the Daily Times would have cited some other imagined instance of nefarious Jewish influence on American policy as the most recent manifestation. Had Ariel Sharon never replaced Ehud Barak as Israeli prime minister, the identical complaints of 'Jewish control of the world' would have been made. They always have been; the authors of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion were not inflamed by Anglo-American diplomacy.

Krugman's rationalising away the antisemitism that Mahathir exploits and encourages is in poor taste, but that isn't what makes him unfit to contribute political commentary to a paper of record. He's just a bad political analyst. To invoke the persistence of the oldest hatred only to blame President Bush for stimulating it is a teleology bordering on monomania. It's trivial stuff written by a man who, like Noam Chomsky, is authoritative in one discipline and incorrigibly silly when he ventures outside it.

Those elusive neoconservatives

James Atlas – the writer who originally suggested there was a cabal within the Bush administration of devotees of the work of Leo Strauss – further exercises his fertile imagination with a brief survey in The New York Times of leftist writers who either supported the liberation of Iraq or at least were sympathetic to it (link via Norman Geras, who also links to a thoughtful critique by Josh Chemiss). Atlas concludes with the leading question:

[H]owever much [these writers'] attitudes toward the war in Iraq differ from those of such contemporary neoconservatives as William Kristol and Robert Kagan, they are heirs of the same intellectual tradition. Given this, can they still be classified as liberals? Or could it be that they've become ... neoconservatives?

It's a strained analogy that won't go away, largely because journalists who wouldn't normally recognise a political idea if it walked up and introduced itself like to think they can identify covert influences in the affairs of state. In reality neoconservatism is, like the Snark, ceaselessly hunted but never truly identified. Moreover, Atlas's adoption of what has now become a cliche does some violence to the sophistication of the authors he deals with: Michael Ignatieff, Michael Walzer, Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman.

Walzer is the exception among this quartet in that he opposed the war, but – unlike any other critic of the war – he did so with an intellectually and morally respectable case, which happened to be entirely impracticable. He argued his case in The New York Review of Books in February by distinguishing between the right way and the wrong way to oppose the war. The wrong way was:

... to deny that the Iraqi regime is particularly ugly, that it lies somewhere outside the range of ordinary states, or to argue that, however ugly it is, it doesn't pose any significant threat to its neighbors or to world peace. Perhaps, despite Saddam's denials, his government is in fact seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. But other governments are doing the same thing, and if or when Iraq succeeds in developing such weapons - so the argument continues - we can deal with that through conventional deterrence, in exactly the same way that the US and the Soviet Union dealt with each other in the cold war years.

You can see where Walzer's distinctiveness among critics of the war lies. The argument he summarises and dismisses is precisely the view of the Stop the War Coalition in the UK. The right way to oppose the war was, according to Walzer:

Defending the embargo, the American overflights, and the UN inspections: this is the right way to oppose, and to avoid, a war. But it invites the counter-argument that a short war, which made it possible to end the embargo, and the weekly bombings, and the inspection regime, would be morally and politically preferable to this "avoidance." A short war, a new regime, a demilitarized Iraq, food and medicine pouring into Iraqi ports: wouldn't that be better than a permanent system of coercion and control? Well, maybe. But who can guarantee that the war would be short and that the consequences in the region and elsewhere will be limited?

Of course nobody could guarantee these things. To require that degree of certainty before invading Iraq was a standard Walzer has never, to my knowledge, insisted on elsewhere. On the contrary, in his celebrated book Just and Unjust Wars, written a quarter of a century ago, he anticipated precisely what would have happened if the US and UK had followed his advice on Iraq:

Unless they create a 'better state of peace', [cease-fires] may simply fix the conditions under which the fighting will be resumed, at a later time and with a new intensity. Or they may confirm a loss of values the avoidance of which was worth a war.

What those of us who supported war could and did say beforehand was that containment had failed and there was no chance of repairing that system. The Russians and the French had blunted the inspections years earlier and assented to the tough new Security Council Resolution 1441 only when the United States, supported by the UK, demonstrated seriousness in pursuing the disarmament of Saddam Hussein, by force if necessary. Our side did not start the war, for Saddam had failed to adhere to the undertakings he had given (the requirements of him were formally expressed in UN Security Council Resolution 687 in March 1991) in the cease-fire agreement terminating hostilities in the first Gulf War. 'Containment' allowed him to persist in those serial violations of UN Resolutions and that bogus cease-fire.

Now, after the war and with conditions in Iraq immeasurably better than under Saddam's tyranny, Walzer has the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that the arguments have moved on. According to Atlas's article:

"The issues that were in dispute last March have been superseded by new issues," [Walzer] said. "Many of us who opposed the war are not prepared to call for the withdrawal of American troops. It's hard to work out a political position opposed to that of the administration. The issues now are not the kinds of issues around which you can have a political mobilization: issues like not enough troops, no unilateralism, no domestic security."

Also cited in the article are a characteristic blast of common sense from Christopher Hitchens, and an equivalent eschewal of moral equivocation - unfortunately expressed in chaotic grammar - by Michael Ignatieff:

"Anybody who wants the people who are shooting American soldiers in the backs at night to win ought to have their heads examined," Mr. Ignatieff said, referring to a recent Gallup poll showing that two-thirds of Baghdad residents believe that the removal of the Iraqi dictator has been worth the hardships. "Do I think I was wrong? No."

Only Paul Berman, though astute on the war itself, proves unequal to the task of reconsidering his political instincts:

Mr. Berman said he supported the American occupation but not the Bush administration. "Before the war I took the position that it was important to overthrow Saddam and that I couldn't stand Bush - the worst president the U.S. has ever had," he said. "My prediction was that we were going to pay for this, and we are paying for it."

Well, I support the American occupation and I am a leftist sympathetic to President Bush. But even if I were a staunch opponent of Bush, and however bitter my hostility was, I still wouldn't entertain so ridiculous a notion as Berman's. Bush is the worst President ever? Worse than Andrew Johnson, who in 1866 vetoed Congress's attempts to protect the rights of former slaves? Worse than Millard Fillimore, who ruthlessly implemented the Fugitive Slave Law requiring Northeners to assist in returning escaped slaves to their Southern masters? How depressing that in attempting to prove his leftist credentials, Berman should resort to foolish, even vicious, partisanship.

The problem, I believe - and it's one that has partially unhinged Berman's judgement - is the increasing popularity of 'neoconservatism' as a catch-all category for those whose political views defy neat categorisation. Atlas exemplifies this intellectual idleness by spraying the term on almost everyone, most prominently Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol. Kristol certainly does identify himself as a neoconservative, and I believe Glazer does as well, but I'm not aware that the same is true of Bell (a brilliant social critic). Bell was unusual among his circle in supporting George McGovern's disastrous Democratic candidature in the 1972 presidential election and is more sympathetic to the Israeli peace movement than most neoconservatives. (Incidentally, Atlas shows his unfamiliarity with Bell's work in claiming Bell was still an identifying socialist in the early stages of his alleged shift to neoconservatism. Atlas is alluding to a much more subtle assertion by Bell, in his 1976 book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, that he was 'a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture'. I used to like citing this as a description of my own position, but eventually concluded that I lacked the sense of humour necessary to continue claiming to be a socialist in economics.)

Characteristically, the New Statesmen has been most eager in the UK to indulge fashionable cliche by identifying as neoconservatives six British political writers who have little in common with each other apart from support for the Iraq war. Stephen Pollard, one of those thus fingered and who does regard himself as a neoconservative, wrote about this baffling piece of detective work here. I believe many of the things Stephen believes, but I don't count myself a neoconservative. I support - among other positions that are not widespread among genuine neoconservatives such as Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol - gay marriage and liberal abortion legislation, and decline to accept that 'supply-side economics' was a testament to the far-sightedness of the Reagan administration.

I have thus resolved to adopt my own term for the position of those of us on the Left who support the policies of President Bush and Tony Blair in defending western civilisation and liberal values. In the Federal Republic of Germany after the war, Left (and this was when the Social Democrats were still a Marxist party) and Right collaborated in building a new political culture that became known as 'militant democracy'. The term denoted the uncompromising determination of the democratic wings of politics to exorcise the spirit of a conservatism that had been xenophobic and nationalistic, and also combat the threat of Communist totalitarianism from the East. In the same spirit, I believe the proper term for the fight against an ostensibly new (but in reality highly traditional) variant of totalitarianism in both its Islamist and Baathist forms ought to be 'militant liberalism', and so I shall describe it.

Tory leadership - right and wrong reasons for regicide

Ferdinand Mount, one-time head of Mrs Thatcher's policy unit in Downing Street, identifies in The Sunday Times the right and the wrong reasons for the Tories to replace Iain Duncan Smith. The allegations concerning the payments to Mrs Duncan Smith are not relevant to the case, for no one seriously regards them as evidence of corrupt conduct. Indeed in deterring Tory MPs from moving against their leader at this time of his post-Conference vulnerability, they buttress IDS's position, temporarily at least.

Likewise, Mount argues:

But it really is absurd to suggest, as some of his critics have done, that Duncan Smith is unfit to go on leading the Conservative party simply because his office may be a bit chaotic or because there exists mutual distrust and loathing between himself and some people in Central Office.

Politics permeates every large organisation, unsurprisingly including political parties. Though a large amount of money, some £150,000, has been spent on pay-offs to Conservative functionaries who have been unable to work under IDS, it's not necessarily been wasted if it injects greater coherence to the party's operations. Moreover IDS's famed rudeness is not in the same league as weightier politicians of the previous generation: Mount cites Edward Heath, but the rudest of them all was Denis Healey, whose ranting and obscene denunciations of his parliamentary colleagues in the 1974-9 Labour Government almost certainly prevented him from being elected leader in 1980.

The real and obvious reason for removing IDS as leader is simpler. He's no good. Healey's rudeness was at worst a distraction from a political talent and outstanding intellect, and on occasion, as in his merciless persecution of Geoffrey Howe, an effective weapon. IDS is not talented; if he is bright, it isn't evident in anything he says or does. His abrasiveness, intended to project decisiveness, screams weakness. His attempted quips - the threat to shoot Tony Blair, the prediction that the men in grey suits delegated to depose him would leave without their suits - are always witless and sometimes surreal. His attacks on his political opponents are mean-spirited and small-minded. He is inarticulate and intellectually incurious. His party's programme appeases interest groups - motorists, university students and their parents, pensioners - and expands the role of government.

Yet Tory MPs do not act to depose him. In their vacillation - for surely none, literally none, believes IDS to be an election-winner - they indicate a discomforting truth about the nature of political parties. The franchise for Tory leadership elections is a wide one. Were it confined to MPs alone the necessary deed would probably be done quickly, to the benefit of the Conservative Party and the quality of national politics. The quandary is that the more democratic this system has become, so it has become less representative. It's the old distinction noted by James Madison between direct and deliberative democracy.

The same is true of the Labour Party. In the early 1980s the hard Left of the Party (led by the CLPD, an abbreviation popularly known to those of us who opposed them as the Campaign for Limiting Party Democracy but in fact standing for the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy) succeeded in changing the method of electing the leader, replacing a franchise in which the electorate comprised only MPs with an electoral college in which 40% of the votes were allocated to trade unions, 30% to constituency parties and 30% to MPs. This disgraceful contrivance was eventually replaced with a better but still bad arrangement, and not before it had almost destroyed the Labour Party as a credible force: Tony Benn came within 1% of being elected Deputy Leader at the 1981 Conference after the largest affiliated trade union ignored its members' wishes and supported Benn against Denis Healey.

It is right, necessary and inevitable that political parties be intermediaries between the people and parliament. A legislature of Independents would be a place not of disinterested judgement but of bargaining among interest groups at the expense of the public good. Yet the decision within political parties of whom to appoint as leader is a decision of a particular kind: it ought to rest with, and only with, those who will be directly responsible for winning public support and enacting a party's programme. In short, only MPs should have a vote. Mistakes would still be made under such a system (Michael Foot and John Major are obvious and excruciating cases), but they would probably be fewer over the long run, and would be much easier to reverse than under the current arrangements. Sometimes in order to enhance democracy you have to reduce the number of people taking part.

The merits of G.K. Chesterton

A friend, Hilary Wade, has posted a terrific comment disagreeing with my comments about conservatism and the literary detective. She says:

Well, it looks like nobody else is going to say it, so I guess it's up to me. Despite the best efforts of yourself and Martin Gardner, I have to tell you that there is not, repeat not, going to be a mass G.K. Chesterton revival. It isn't going to happen. And the reason for this is that Chesterton is not, in fact, an outstanding prose writer. First-rate thinker, yes, okay, but absolutely not a first-rate writer. His style may be compared, as indeed I think it has been by Max Beerbohm, to "death by a thousand blows, not one of which quite hits the nail on the head." It's intrusive, didactic and overwritten. Consider if you will the following passage from "the Blue Cross":

"The glory of heaven deepened and darkened around the sublime vulgarity of man; and standing on the slope and looking out across the valley, Valentin behold the thing which he sought."

Martin Gardner thinks this sentence is "arresting" and "beautifully worded." Well, Mr Gardner is a terrific maths writer, but before passing judgments like this he really ought to check out Chesterton's exact contemporary Saki, whose treatment of a parallel scene shows up Chesterton's shortcomings for exactly what they are:

"A dwindling rim of red sun showed still on the skyline, and the next turning must bring him in view of the ill-assorted couple he was pursuing. Then the colour went suddenly out of things, and a grey light settled itself with a quick shiver over the landscape. Van Cheele heard a shrill wail of fear, and stopped running."
(Gabriel-Ernest)

Chesterton's schtick was to take Wildean paradox and level it at the lazy moralisers of his day - which is why his essay on Job is so sympathetic - and it's a great technique, works well on the Jehovah's Witnesses, but it's not quite the same thing as literature.

Another thing you've done is to accuse Agatha Christie of snobbery, as if this was somehow a literary defect. I'd say that actually a measure of snobbery in one form or another is more or less a prerequisite for writing good dialogue. Look at Alan Bennett. Well, look at Jane Austen, for that matter. Chesterton wasn't a snob, ergo he can't write dialogue. There's no nuance there, no insecurity. His characters don't converse, they lurch violently from one declamatory attitude to another. A typical piece of Chesterton business would go something like (I extemporise) '"But don't you see," cried out Father Brown in a sudden burst of desperate exultation,"it's all wrong."' The cumulative effect of this kind of thing is to leave the casual reader with the feeling that Father Brown's more excitable conversations are conducted in a series of hysterical shrieks.

And as for any suggestion that the Father Brown plots are varied, pfaugh. I once had an idea for a spoof Father Brown story that encapsulates every single real story in the canon. A horrible murder has been committed. The only four possible suspects are Cardinal Salvador Torturossa, Seamus "Psych" O'Path, Joey "the Shrimp" Gamberetti and the Revered Theophilius Thorogood, rector of Little St Mary's-near-the-Windle. "The answer is obvious," said Father Brown after a brief pause. "It was the Reverend Mr Thorogood. He's the only one who isn't a Catholic."

I agree with Hilary that snobbery (which I accused Agatha Christie of) has no bearing on literary merit, and that Chesterton's paradoxes become wearisome because so obviously contrived. I'd also agree that the Father Brown stories don't work as detective stories. Their resolution, which always involves insight into the human soul, sometimes requires inherently unlikely events (as in The Hammer of God) or, inexcusably in a detective story, information known to Father Brown but not to the reader (The Honour of Israel Gow).

But I disagree that Chesterton is a mediocre writer and a first-rate thinker. It's the other way round. He's a great writer with, in temporal matters at least, absurd ideas.

I know that many Christians, especially Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics, find Chesterton's religious apologetics valuable. They don't convince me, but theology - except where it relates to political issues or culture - isn't a subject for this blog. On politics, economics and social issues, the best that can be said about him is that while he was usually wrong, he was generally not as egregiously so as many other literary figures between the wars.

The late and brilliant Marxist theorist Paul Hirst wrote an illuminating book called Associative Democracy a decade ago that resurrected some little-known parts of English political thought. The book notes that:

Britain in the early twentieth century was particularly rich in attempts to find a 'third way' between the collectivism of state socialism and the unbridled egoism of laissez faire.

Hirst mentions Bertrand Russell's Roads to Freedom (1918), which advocated English Guild Socialism; the Arts and Crafts Movement, which posed co-operative colonies of artisans as an alternative to large-scale industry; A.J. Penty's The Restoration of the Guild System; and Chesterton, Belloc and the Distributists, who:

... argued that the prevention of poverty and the preservation of freedom could be assured only by the most widespread distribution of productive property possible, especially the land.

These neglected predecessors of the elusive Third Way maintained that workers' livelihoods were threatened by both collectivist planning, which would destroy political liberty in the attempt to cure poverty, and modern industry based on specialisation, which by severing the workman from the land deprived him of the means of an independent living. This concern about the threat to small communities is a continual theme of Chesterton's novels (notably The Napoleon of Notting Hill).

It's almost entirely nonsense. An advanced economy that provides its citizens with material advantages is liberating, not stultifying, because it enhances our ability to choose the good for ourselves. Chesterton didn't see the point at all. He was able to dismiss this process of bettering the lot of the people in the extraordinarily glib terms of a man unused to physical drudgery (in What's Wrong With the World):

Certainly we would sacrifice all our wires, wheels systems, specialities, physical science and frenzied finance for one half-hour of happiness such as has often come to us with comrades in a common tavern.

The best case you can make for this type of sentiment is that at least it didn't degenerate, in Chesterton's case, into romanticising 'blood and soil' as certain other literary figures did. There is an absence of the suspicion for the masses, and for democracy, that you frequently find among other Anglo-Catholic or Roman Catholic writers of the time (T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, most obviously).

There is fortunately little in Chesterton about agriculture other than a vague affection. In fact, the novels show a deeper tie to the suburbs. John Carey (The Intellectuals and the Masses) notes the intellectuals' scorn for the suburbs as the home of the mentally impoverished. Yet Chesterton's greatest novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, is set in a suburb, Saffron Park, which Chesterton presents as beautiful - 'as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset'. In it, the poet Gabriel Syme maintains to Lucian Gregory (who suffers from the totalitarian temptation of wishing to 'destroy the world if I could') the poetical qualities of - of all things - the underground railway.

Even then, Chesterton was himself touched by the totalitarian temptation. He visited Mussolini in the 1920s and came back - stupidly, inexcusably - enamoured. He wrote a terrifically silly book entitled The Resurrection of Rome, in which he had kind things to say about Fascist syndicalism, which he preferred to capitalism. Again, the best case you can make is that he was ignorant rather than malign. But he still sits in that repellent tradition of public figures who admired totalitarianism either of the Right, such as Ezra Pound, or of Soviet Communism (H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, and the rest who travelled to the Potemkin Villages and came back with glowing accounts of happy and fulfilled proletarians).

One of the wisest judgements on Chesterton comes from a fine book, now some 30 years old, by John Gross entitled The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. Gross says:

Chesterton's hatred of capitalism and his dread of the monolithic state were the generous responses of a man who saw the sickness of his society far more clearly than the ordinary Liberal and felt it more deeply than the self-confident Fabian social engineers. Unfortunately, though, a sense of outrage often proved as bad a counsellor in his case as it had in Carlyle's. His diatribes against usury and corruption were those of a man on the edge of hysteria; his anti-Semitism was an illness.

Chesterton was, unlike Thomas Carlyle as an old man (who stood at the gates of the Rothschilds estate hurling antisemitic imprecations), a man of generous spirit. But even once you've discounted the dark aspects that Gross mentions, you're left with an economic populism that is culpably naive, ignoring the role of the price mechanism and creating an image of Merrie England that never existed.

There is much that's worth reading in Chesterton. There's little, outside the quality of the prose and the love of literature, that can be learned from him in the realm of ideas.