Oliver Kamm

A hypocritical snob

Paul Foot, in his column in The Guardian, offers the following criticism of the Shadow Home Secretary’s remarks about education and asylum seekers:

His fatuous speech about schools coincided with his call to dump asylum seekers on a faraway island, he knows not where. Where did he get that idea? It is unlikely that a hypocritical snob such as Mr Letwin has read any Wordsworth, so, in an attempt to bring him down to earth, I offer this valuable advice from Wordsworth's poem on the French Revolution:

"Not in utopia, subterranean fields,
Or some secreted island, heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us - the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all."

I considered Oliver Letwin's Conference comment on schools inept and his policy on asylum seekers illiberal and wrong. I also see a legitimate place for insult in the political lexicon. But when an insult has no external point of reference, when it's simply unfounded abuse, it usually indicates a paucity of reasoning ability on the part of the utterer.

So it is in this case. How does Foot judge that Letwin is a hypocritical snob who is unlikely to have read Wordsworth? Even supposing, as I have no evidence to assume, Letwin is indeed a hypocritical snob, why does that militate against his having read Wordsworth? Never having met Letwin I don't know that he has, but I should think it more likely than not that his academically distinguished parents (his late mother, Shirley Robin Letwin of the LSE, wrote an excellent study of The Gentleman in Trollope) would have taken some trouble to acquaint him with the Romantic poets.

If so, Letwin will be able to see through Foot's affectations without much difficulty. The lines Foot quotes (which are from The Prelude) are not 'on the French Revolution', but on 'The French Revolution - As It Appeared To Enthusiasts At Its Commencement' (emphasis added). The difference is important both poetically and historically. Wordsworth, having been an early supporter of the French Revolution reverted quickly to the Burkean critique of it. He even gives in The Prelude (in the 1850, not the 1805, edition) an urgent and remarkably accurate account of Burke's philosophy of society:

"I see him – old, but vigorous in age,
Stand like an oak
While he forewarns, denounces, launches forth,
Against all systems built on abstract rights,
Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims
Of institutes and Laws, hallowed by time;
Declares the vital power of social ties
Endeared by custom; and with high disdain,
Exploding upstart Theory, insists
Upon the allegiance to which men are born…."

If Foot – the author of a worthless tract on Shelley - knows this, then he's distorting the historical record in his appropriation of Wordsworth's lines for his own ideological ends. If doesn't know it, then he doesn't know Wordsworth - and he thus might aptly be termed a hypocritical snob.

Globalisation and inequality

I cited in the immediately preceding post the sceptical judgement of Vincent Cable, Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, on the claim that globalisation increases inequality. He has his work cut out to correct that misconception. Last Friday, The Guardian's John Vidal gave further currency to the myths:

Some developing countries would have done better to stay out of the globalisation process altogether if they had the interests of their own people in mind, it [a tendentious UN report] hazards.

'Hazards' is a verb that gives an appropriate idea of the analytical rigour that the anti-globalisers exercise, for the empirical research published since Cable made his judgement (in his book Globalisation and Global Governance) strongly supports his thesis. One study I have found illuminating is summarised here, with a link to the full report (available for a fee). Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson, in Does Globalization Make the World More Unequal?, examine data for global income inequality since 1820. They find that no country that reduced its exposure to the global economy between the 1960s and the 1990s managed simultaneously to increase its standard of living.

These data accord with what you would expect on grounds of economic theory. Developing countries need foreign capital to fund the current account deficits that arise when their investment opportunities exceed their domestic savings. By that route, they are able to specialise, improve productivity (and thereby real wages), and raise output growth. As we are seeing in the cases of India and China, poor countries that grow rapidly thereby diminish global inequality. The anti-globalisation campaigners are in effect demanding that poor countries stay poor and that global inequality intensify.

The Liberal Democrats - a party at war with itself

The Telegraph reports:

Charles Kennedy announced a shake-up of his front-bench team yesterday in the first major reshuffle since he assumed leadership of the Liberal Democrats.

One of the main casualties is Matthew Taylor, who cedes the post of Treasury spokesman to Vincent Cable, a former chief economist with Shell who served as an adviser to the Labour leader John Smith when he was a minister in the Callaghan government.

During the Liberal Democrat conference I posted a couple of comments querying why the economically illiterate Matthew Taylor was still in his post and commending Vincent Cable, and it would be churlish of me now to refrain from saying that Charles Kennedy has made a good decision. The decision nonetheless raises an interesting question about the Liberal Democrats' collective identity. As The Times' highly astute political commentator Peter Riddell pointed out during the conference, and as I quoted:

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… Today’s Lib Dems do not feel like the party of Cobden and 19th-century Manchester liberalism.

In fact Riddell understates the point. It isn't just Manchester Liberalism that today's Lib Dems oppose, but Keynesianism as well. Keynes's central economic insight was that modern economies, being cyclically unstable, required automatic stabilisers, and that an excess of saving might prevent the effective operation of one of those stabilisers (fiscal policy). The corollary of this view is that the budget should balance over the course of the business cycle, with surpluses being run during an expansion and deficits during a recession.

Contrast that premise with the approach of the Liberal Democrats to date under the Blair Government: Matthew Taylor's predecessor as Treasury spokesman, Malcolm Bruce, used the absurd term 'war chest' to describe the budget surplus in the late 1990s, six years into the post-ERM expansion, and urged the Chancellor to spend this 'windfall of extra funds'. Malcolm Bruce has now been appointed Trade and Industry spokesman in succession to Vincent Cable.

It's hardly been noticed, but Cable has been consistently advocating an approach that is thus alien to his own party's views. On 14 April this year he argued in the House for exactly the (consistent) Keynesian approach I’ve just outlined. Eschewing his party's earlier nonsense about 'war chests' and 'fiscal flagellation', he criticised the Government for not being assiduous enough in creating an independent institutional arrangement, comparable to that established for monetary policy (i.e. central bank independence), for securing budgetary balance over the business cycle:

Absolutely critical to the credibility of the Government's fiscal policy is balancing the budget over the cycle. However, who defines the cycle; who decides when it begins and ends? The answer is, the Chancellor. What is missing—in a sense, the Chancellor himself can remedy this—is some form of independent mechanism of assessment, such as the United States Council of Economic Advisers or our own National Audit Office, to create an independent base for establishing the credibility of forecasts. If such a mechanism is not established, the problem will be not merely the Government looking a little foolish in a year or two's time, but a loss of confidence in the markets.

In international economics too, Cable's views have nothing in common with those of his party. I know this, because a few years ago he wrote an excellent book on Globalisation and Global Governance. In the course of a thoughtful argument for political integration to accompany increasing economic integration, he made some well-judged criticisms of the anti-globalisation campaign:

It is difficult to maintain seriously the view that global economic integration is inexorably creating growing inequality. Those countries in southern Europe and East Asia which have sought most actively to develop through international economic integration have seen their income levels converge with those of the rich world. The largest concentration of global poverty is in India and China, both of which, while now growing rapidly under the stimulus of economic reform, opted for several decades to pursue isolationist economic policies.

In Parliament, instead of making facile and equivocal noises about the benefits of globalisation relative to the drawbacks, he has been refreshingly direct. At the time of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) summit in Doha two years ago, he said:

May I add my welcome for the Secretary of State [for Trade and Industry, Patricia Hewitt]'s timely statement, and take the opportunity to reiterate my belief that an open and liberal trading system, strengthened by this round, is exactly the way to counter the present crisis of confidence in the international economy, and particularly to help developing countries to progress through trade, which, as she rightly says, is the primary objective of the new round? I also ask her to go a little further and condemn some of the weasel words of her fellow Trade Ministers and Commission officials in Europe, who are still resisting the idea that radical trade liberalisation in agriculture and other protected sectors, such as textiles, has to happen, and that those product areas are crucial for all developing countries, not just the least developed. Will she also make it clearer than she did in her statement that although it is right to strive for enhanced environmental and labour standards, there is no economic or moral justification for allowing such barriers to be used as an obstruction to trade with countries that are too poor to afford those standards?

Finally, as the Secretary of State for International Development has joined her on the Front Bench, may I ask the right hon. Lady to emulate her colleague's forthright and occasionally courageous stance against some of the myths of the anti-globalisation movement, which are influential and do great damage? In particular, will she dismiss the fashionable myth that the World Trade Organisation exists to undermine public health and education, when it does nothing of the kind?

This admirably robust statement reflects my own view in every respect. It's worth noting that, contrary to the myths of the anti-globalisers, such views are shared by NGOs, trade unionists and economists in the developing world, as this influential 'Statement Against Linkage [of environmental and labour standards to trade agreements]' signed by more than 100 of them (and drafted by the trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati) makes clear:

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.

Yet Cable's views are contradicted at every turn by his party. Here's a gem from the International Development Policy Review, under the chairmanship of the then International Development spokesman Jenny Tonge MP, presented to the Liberal Democrat Spring Conference in 2002:

WTO rules need to be adapted to ensure that global environmental agreements like the Kyoto Protocol on global warming are compatible with trade rules.

Clearly if Jenny Tonge had thought about Cable's warning of 'countries that are too poor to afford those standards', then it did not trouble her. If you asked 56 Liberal Democrat MPs and the entire party membership whether they believed that trade rules needed to be 'adapted' to meet global environmental standards, I predict you would find a 'yes' response of something approaching 100 per cent, excepting only Cable and his deputy David Laws.

The Liberal Democrats' new Treasury team is thus in a comparable position to, though of course on a smaller scale and with much lower stakes than, that of Denis Healey and his Cabinet colleagues Edmund Dell and Joel Barnett in the Callaghan Government of 1976-9. They are well-qualified for their posts and advocate sensible positions – in a party that is entirely unready to face up to those economic realities.

No issue contributed more powerfully to Labour's disastrous 1980s foray into extremism and powerlessness than the split engendered by a responsible economic stance in Government and the revulsion it caused within the wider party. I have a shrewd suspicion that at what they believe to be this moment of triumph, the Liberal Democrats are set for similar ructions.

UPDATE: It's started already. The Guardian reports:

Lord Greaves, the Liberal Democrat environment spokesman in the Lords, described MPs Mark Oaten [new Home Affairs spokesman], Vince Cable and David Laws as "pseudo-Blairites with little following in the wider party" as the party reeled from their promotion and the sacking of the shadow chancellor, Matthew Taylor, and sidelining of the home affairs spokesman, Simon Hughes, in the weekend's reshuffle.

'Pseudo-Blairites' is, of course, intended to be derogatory - a more technically accurate term would be 'consistent Keynesians' - but I have no doubt at all that Lord Greaves is right to say Vincent Cable's ideas have little following among Liberal Democrats.

Here, by the way, is a picture of Lord Greaves.

The Tories and pensions

A correspondent asks me to justify my remark in the immediately preceding post that the Tory policy of restoring the link between the basic state pension and growth in average earnings is a state-funded entitlement to the better-off.

I was alluding to the debates on this very policy when it was proposed by the late Barbara Castle at the Labour Party conference in 2000. The policy was carried (though of course there was no chance that the Government would implement it), but the arguments against it were compellingly laid out by the then pensions minister Jeff Rooker. In 1979, when the Conservatives had broken the link, 40 per cent of pensioners had been entitled to means-tested benefits and the ratio of the incomes of the richest quintile of pensioners relative to those of the poorest had been 2.5 to 1. Rooker said that now the equivalent figures were 28 per cent, and (owing to the growth in occupational pensions) a ratio of almost 4 to 1.

Restoring the link, and thereby giving an equal amount of increase to all pensioners, would recycle taxpayers' money to very many who are well off, and would thereby reinforce this growing inequality. Hence it is accurate to describe the Conservatives under IDS as economic populists who advocate state-funded entitlements for the better-off. The new Tory policy establishes the link for four years: however, the political nature of state entitlements, which by definition involve a concentrated benefit (and hence an interested constituency) and a dispersed cost, makes it difficult to remove such entitlements at a later date. The Thatcher Government was right to anticipate the growing costs of the link and to break it 24 years ago. I cannot see that a Duncan Smith Government, supposing there were ever such a thing, would be similarly willing to confront a special interest that provides the Conservative Party with a significant proportion of its electoral support.

My account of Rooker's speech is taken from Nicholas Timmins's book The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State. Timmins gives interesting background to this subject in a generally reliable and readable survey. Beware, though, of his astonishing blunder in attributing to Jeff Rooker the original policy, enacted in the 1974-9 Labour Government, of establishing the link between the state pension and growth in average earnings (or growth in prices, whichever was the higher). What Timmins is alluding to is the famous Rooker-Wise amendment to the 1977 Finance Act. The amendment was nothing to do with the pensions-earnings link: it was about indexing personal allowances to inflation. (Timmins gets the date wrong as well, making it a year earlier than it was.)

For an intensely satisfying put-down on this point by Rooker of a Socialist Alliance supporter, see here. For the hapless idiot's feeble response to Rooker, see here: a splendid example of advertising your difficulties to a national audience once you've dug a large enough hole for yourself.

That IDS speech

Shortly after I had started this blog, Stephen Pollard kindly provided the first link to this site (or rather to the location it then had). Having read my views, one of his readers then sent me a message asking if I was, in fact, Stephen Pollard. The answer is no, but I frequently find Stephen has already expressed in demotic language what's on my mind. So it is with his assessment of Iain Duncan Smith's speech at the Conservative Party Conference:

He was even worse this year. Last year was an OK speech. This was awful. Truly, awful. It did a job for the Tories in the hall. But watched by anyone it TV it looked like a bank manager auditioning for the lead role in Terminator 4, with a script written by a ten year old trying to copy Richard Littlejohn.

I view Charles Kennedy with contenpt. But IDS' reference to his drinking was beneath contempt, and - I'm certain of this - will be viewed as that by most voters.

He looked truly inept. Like a man doing his best to do something different for the sake of doing something different.

IDS was a goner last year, but because his party is so congenitally useless now, they can't even plot properly. Only the Tories could batter a leader to within an inch of his political life and then put him on a life support machine.

What a rabble. What a once great party, reduced to farce.

Leaders' speeches tend to bring out the worst in politicians. I admire Tony Blair, but - excepting this year's - I have found his own Conference speeches generally vapid and ephemeral (does anyone now recall 'The Giving Age'?), and on one occasion disgraceful (the 'Forces of Conservatism' speech, which in effect attributed to conservatism responsibility for the assassination of Martin Luther King). Iain Duncan Smith is, however, a case apart. I do not believe there can be a single person outside the ranks of Conservative Party activists who regards him as a plausible candidate for prime minister. In that respect he is comparable to Neil Kinnock.

But Kinnock as Leader of the Opposition had strengths nonetheless. Most obvious, he was a formidable platform orator (though admittedly his excitability in this capacity famously damaged Labour's public standing at the televised Sheffield rally in the 1992 general election campaign). Iain Duncan Smith is by some margin the worst public speaker I've seen in British politics. The only comparable examples I can think of for wooden and pedestrian delivery are Edward Heath and David Owen, but those politicians at least knew their oratorical limitations (and Owen was, conversely, a lucid speaker in broadcast interviews). IDS is uniquely bad, for he is a bland and unimaginative man attempting to compensate for his deficiencies by being aggressive. It is hardly adequate to the spectacle to call it embarrassing.

Kinnock also had one important strength as a Labour leader. Having initially, on being elected after Labour's catastrophic election defeat in 1983, been uncomprehending of the role of Labour's programme in the party's malaise, he eventually realised that the party had to get rid of its commitments to nuclear pacifism and dirigiste economics. Eventually. It was a painful process, and much nonsense was uttered by Kinnock in the meantime (a salutary account of this period, and indeed of the rest of Labour's history, is to be found in a study by the late Edmund Dell, himself a former Labour minister, A Strange Eventful History). But it happened, and was an essential feature of Labour's return to office in 1997.

IDS, by contrast, is a leader who flatters his party rather than insists that it reform itself. The parallels are not exact, for Labour was a party with an extremist and unelectable programme in the 1980s, whereas the Tories' unelectability is not directly related to their policies. But there is a common characteristic in that the Tories are talking to themselves rather than presenting a responsible and coherent political force to the electorate. A political party ought to embody some philosophical identity. My own problem with Tony Blair has generally been that he lacks this philosophical base and instead wishes Labour to become an all-encompassing coalition. It's one thing to seek support across the political spectrum, but it's another altogether to act - as Blair did when he attacked the 'forces of conservatism' in so tendentious a manner - as if there exists no legitimate opposing political grouping with whom public office may legitimately alternate. (That lethal premise is, incidentally, one reason I am hostile to the Liberal Democrats.)

Yet Blair seems to have shifted a long way, is willing to define his positions much more closely than he used to, and is far the most impressive political leader not only in the UK but also in the rest of Europe. Were he faced - under, most obviously, Michael Portillo - by a Conservative Party that had a coherent philosophy of economic liberalism, social tolerance and a democratic internationalist foreign policy, the health of British politics would be much advanced. The Conservative Party today is, unfortunately, nothing like that. Its attacks on the Prime Minister's reasoning in overthrowing Saddam Hussein are ill-considered and astonishingly personal. IDS's accusation that the PM is a liar is both factually wrong and demeaning to himself. The Tories are now, most culpably, a party not of economic liberalism but of economic populism, as evidenced by their stands on tuition fees and restoration of the link between state pensions and growth in average earnings. They are thus now the party of state-funded entitlements to the better-off.

I share Stephen's judgement that the allusion to Charles Kennedy's alleged drinking habits was beneath contempt. There can be few people less impressed with Charles Kennedy as a politician than I, but in all the comments I have made on this blog or anywhere else about his party, I have never cited that accusation, nor would I do so. First, I don't know if it's true, and secondly if it is true then it's hardly a bar to political effectiveness or wisdom. Churchill was famously partial to a drink or several, whereas the best-known abstainer in the House of Commons in recent years - a man who if asked to pour a finger of whisky wouldn't know whether to do it with the finger pointing upright or lengthways - was Tony Benn.

IDS is a weak man at the head of a party whose enduring decline is not in the interests of good government or a healthy democracy - in much the same way that Labour's irrelevance in the 1980s made possible some particularly inept policies (the poll tax) by a Tory government that had otherwise brought in some important reforms (notably trade union legislation) and done other worthwhile things (facing down the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and going ahead with the deployment of euromissiles). He is a loser to his fingertips; were he a weightier figure to start with, his would be a personal tragedy.

John Pilger defines antisemitism

The Guardian carries a letter from John Pilger depicting Egypt as a wronged party in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. There's a time and a place for everything, and Pilger's eccentric historical interpretations are not the subject of this post. But one of the statements within the letter makes a curious juxtaposition with a story elsewhere in the same edition of the paper. Pilger writes:

According to [Jonathan] Freedland, the present Israeli regime is merely "a clumsy prizefighter driven to fury by a fly buzzing around its ears". His description of the entire Palestinian resistance as buzzing flies would be shocking if it did not accurately reflect Israeli racism, itself a virulent form of anti-semitism.

You read that last clause right: Pilger is making an accusation not only of Israeli racism - a standard trope of the extreme Left - but also of Israeli anti-semitism. It's not a misprint: it's a libel he fully intends.

The reasoning behind Pilger's bizarre accusation is pure sophistry. It is common on the extreme Left, and it runs like this. Israelis complain about the prejudiced character of parts of the popular culture of the Arab world (for example, a television drama assuming the truth of the notorious Tsarist forgery the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion; Palestinian textbooks retailing venerable anti-Jewish libels). They are, according to the anti-Israel campaigners, being disingenuous however in levelling accusations of anti-semitism, because the Arabs themselves are a semitic people. How then could it possibly be true to describe the Palestinian Authority and other Arab groups as guilty of anti-semitism, when they are themselves semites? (This is presented as a rhetorical question and conversation-stopper, but it's generally followed, as in Pilger's letter, by accusations of Israeli racism, colonialism and manifold other sins of commission and omission.)

I'm no fan of Pilger's, but I think this calumny is the most egregious remark I've come across even from that source. What's wrong with it is that it reduces the suffering of the Jewish people - most obviously the attempt in the last century to kill every Jew in Europe, but a Judaeophobia that has lasted literally millennia - by means of semantic trickery. It is a historical accident that the term 'anti-semitism' exists at all, let alone is the common term for anti-Jewish prejudice. The term was coined only in the second half of the nineteenth century by a German anti-Jewish polemicist, Wilhelm Marr. Marr argued that western civilisation had been infiltrated by a pernicious Jewish influence, and he established his own Anti-Semitic League in 1871 to further his anti-Jewish demagoguery.

Ironically Marr, an extremist Jew-baiter, thereby invented a term that became standard as a label for anti-Jewish prejudice. Yet it's an intellectually idle and vacuous word as well as a euphemism. There is, after all, no such phenomenon as 'Semitism' to which one can be opposed. The destructive effect of the very term anti-Semitism can be discerned in Pilger's casual insults. If 'anti-semitism' doesn't mean prejudice specifically against Jews, then we have no immediately recognised term for that particular prejudice. Because the language we use about politics is crucial to the clarity of our thinking about a subject (I don't entirely endorse Orwell's views on language and politics, but I do this one), this softening of the specificity of anti-Jewish prejudice serves to anaesthetise our moral defences. It's a process that marked the history of the so-called German Democratic Republic, a prison-state that not only refused to accept any historical guilt for the Holocaust but was also a relentless source of anti-Jewish propaganda and anti-Israel agitation.

We are stuck with the term 'anti-semitism', but it is as well to note its historical lineage and the ease with which it can be manipulated to harm the Jews further. It was for that reason that the philosopher and rabbi Emil Fackenheim, who having escaped Nazi Germany in 1940 studied under Leo Strauss and served many years as Professor of Philosophy at Toronto University, urged that the word 'anti-semitism' be written, without a hyphen, as 'antisemitism'. It may seem a small point, but I hope the example of John Pilger's letter will indicate that Fackenheim's pratice is in fact a means of defence against political obscurantism. I consequently always spell the word as 'antisemitism', and I recommend adopting this practice: it simply makes it marginally more difficult for those who wish deliberately to misapply the term. (An alternative practice is worth noting: the Irish statesman, historian and polymath Conor Cruise O'Brien has suggested, on similar grounds, adopting the term 'anti-Jewism'. Its merit is that no one could possibly fail to miss what it means, and its ugliness is appropriate to the phenomenon it describes.)

I referred to an ironic juxtaposition within The Guardian. It so happens that Pilger's letter appears on the same day as Fackenheim's obituary (three weeks after the death of one of the most important Jewish thinkers of the modern world). The Guardian's treatment of this outstanding intellect is, I'm afraid, snide and knowing. The obituarist states:

In the mid-1960s, Fackenheim coined a 614th commandment, not listed in the Hebrew Bible - "not to despair of God and not to despair of man"; as a corollary, he argued that Jewish survival "denied Hitler a posthumous victory". And only a strong Israel, he continued, could prevent Jews vanishing from history.

Such views attracted plaudits from nationalists, accusations of chauvinism from liberals, disquiet from Jews who feared Holocaust memory alone would displace Judaic values, and disappointment from former students lamenting Fackenheim's apparent retreat from intellectual subtlety.

Indeed, what possible explanation could there be for wishing for a strong and secure Israel other than an absence of intellectual subtlety? For those willing to be thought unsubtle by The Guardian, I would recommend Fackenheim's moving and highly readable exposition of his thinking, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought. Among the most important parts of the book is his address specifically to Christians on the nature and imperative of Jewish nationalism:

For Christians, the first priority may be theological self-understanding. For Jews it is, and after Auschwitz must be, simple safety for their children. In pursuit of this goal, Jews seek - are morally required to seek - independence of other people's charity. They therefore seek safety - are morally required to seek it - through the existence of a Jewish state. Except among the theologically or humanly perverse, Zionism - the commitment to the safety and genuine sovereignty of the State of Israel - is not negotiable.

Even if I held views on theological responsibilities and believed confidently there were such things, I wouldn't have the competence to express them and this blog wouldn't be the place for them. But I do hold that there is a political and human responsibility to support the safety and genuine sovereignty of the State of Israel, on the compelling grounds that what happened in the middle of the last century must not happen again. There are many fronts on which those who attempt to deny Israel's legitimacy mount their campaign; the linguistic is not the least important of them.

Conservatism and the literary detective

Johann Hari, the excellent political commentator for The Independent who has argued forcefully and on the right side with regard to the totalitarian nightmare-states of Baathist Iraq and North Korea, turns his attention to, of all people, Agatha Christie (published in The Independent on Sunday; link via Andrew Sullivan).

It's one of the strangest amalgams of literary criticism and political theory I've ever seen; I wonder if Hari is being serious. I could understand, though not agree with, an argument that Christie is a writer unfairly dismissed by literary critics. But Hari goes further: he maintains that Agatha Christie is 'a radical conservative thinker'. To say he's wrong would be like saying the Beckhams aren't shy of publicity. He vastly overstates Christie's literary merit, he infers a Burkean sub-text in her novels that isn't there, and - irony of ironies - he overlooks a 20th-century detective novelist who was both an outstanding writer of English prose and genuinely a radical conservative thinker.

On the literary question, Hari laments:

The verdict of the late novelist Anthony Burgess accurately summarises the English intelligentsia's view of Christie. "She put people off reading the higher art of detection – from the Moonstone to Gaudy Night – by setting a lower standard and making it somehow canonical," he wrote in the 1980s. "If she was the queen of the whodunit, she used her royal rank to condone flimsy characterisation, plentiful cliché, implausibility, and verbal vacuity… All we have [in her novels] is an abstract puzzle minimally clothed in the garments of upper middle-class morality."

In fact every point Burgess makes is accurate, deadly and definitive, but he understates the case. It isn't just that the books are 'abstract puzzles': they're puzzles that are always cleared up and resolved, with life then continuing in the village or household in exactly the way that it did before, minus one or more characters. Hari's following observation is thus quite bizarre:

[Christie's] work conforms to Burkean conservatism in every respect: justice rarely comes from the state. Rather, it arises from within civil society – a private detective, a clever old spinster. Indeed, what is Miss Marple but the perfect embodiment of Burke’s thought? She has almost infinite wisdom because she has lived so very long (by the later novels, she is barely able to move and, by some calculations, over 100). She has slowly - like parliament and all traditional bodies, according to Burke – accrued "the wisdom of the ages", and this is the key to her success. From her solitary spot in a small English village, she has learned everything about human nature. Wisdom resides, in Christie and Burke’s worlds, in the very old and the very ordinary.

So far from conforming to Burkean conservatism, Christie's world evidences no sense of sin. It's not the the organic whole of Burke, but an anaesthetised experience of the type that Burke dissected in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). At that time religion was being purged of the concept of the supernatural, and the sense of awe and terror was being translated to a purely aesthetic experience in art and on the stage: a 'secure' terror, enjoyed from the point of view of a spectator rather than a participant, and oddly similar to the appeal of Agatha Christie today.

The lack of disorderliness in Christie's novels - everything returning to how it was before - renders them not just implausible, as Burgess states, but facile. Yet all Hari can cite in Christie's defence is her popularity:

There seems to be no limit to English academics' haughty contempt for Christie... It would be easy to join in this sneering – but for one problem. How, if Christie wrote such rubbish, can we explain the fact that her works have resonated even at the farthest extremes of geography and history?

Unfortunately Hari noticeably doesn't ask where, of all environments, her novels 'resonate'. The answer is that Agatha Christie is the staple literary diet of hospital patients, especially elderly ones with a sense of their own mortality. The reason lies in this absence of disruption: the novels are, as the literary critic W.W.Robson has said (or 'sneered', if Hari prefers), 'reassuring tragedies'.

This explanation - the appetite for reassurance - is not the one Hari comes up with:

The Christie recorded by history seems likeable, dry and clever: but this cannot account for the fact that she is the best-selling author in human history after the team who complied the Bible. The obvious explanation is her capacity for finding every possible permutation of the conventional detective story twist: indeed, she was so successful in this pursuit that almost nobody tries in the genre any more. To give just a few examples: she created mysteries where the narrator was the murderer (Roger Ackroyd), the entire cast were the murderers (Murder on the Orient Express), nobody was the murderer (it was suicide in Elephants Never Forget), and even where Poirot was the murderer (the extraordinary Curtain, Poirot’s final appearance).

It may be the obvious explanation to Hari, but it's not true. Christie tried very few permutations. Someone will certainly correct me on this, but I cannot think of a single instance where the murderer was one of the innumerable domestic staff that have walk-on parts in her books. I can't think of any such character even with a significant role, let alone the central one. The books are not a coherent expression of conservative instinct, they're just unimaginative - bounded by mediocrity as much as by social and ethnic snobbery.

Yet, for all the implausibility of Hari's thesis, he's not so far wrong in the territory he examines: he's just got the wrong writer. Burkean conservatism is represented not by Miss Marple, but by G.K.Chesterton's fictional detective Father Brown. Whereas Agatha Christie's world is one without sin, Father Brown's ability to solve crimes depends on his insight into the human soul. Nowhere is this more obvious than in 'The Secret Garden', the second story in The Innocence of Father Brown. The murderer is the Chief of Police (so much for Christie's original permutations), Aristide Valentin, whose crime is motivated by philosophical rationalism, the wish to break 'the superstition of the Cross'. Rather than confess to Father Brown, Valentin commits suicide:

A touch and a glance showed [Father Brown] that there was a small box of pills at Valentin's elbow, and that Valentin was dead in his chair; and on the blind face of the suicide was more than the pride of Cato [i.e. it was the pride of Satan].

Throughout his novels, Chesterton has a belief in the wisdom of tradition as a restraining force. In The Napoleon of Notting Hill, he depicts a London organised once again by its ancient boroughs. The attempt to imbue the citizens of these boroughs with a civic patriotism has the disastrous consequence that London then becomes a bear-pit for contending leaders seeking territory and glory. I know of few better parables that stand in judgement of the constitutional tinkering of New Labour. Moreover Chesterton, in contrast to the snobbery that Christie's world exemplifies, was highly partial to a romanticised notion of the wisdom of the common man. The crowd is portrayed with instinctive sympathy in Chesterton, whereas in his contemporaries (Conrad, for example) it is a source of discontent and anarchy.

The parallels between Burke and Chesterton are close, and if the modern Conservative Party were more aware of its antecedents it might do a better job of opposition. The aggrandising tendencies of New Labour would be judged harshly by a Burkean. Burke believed:

A nation is not an idea only of local extent and individual momentary aggregation, but it is an idea of continuity which extends in time as well as in numbers and in space.

A government that can abolish the post of Lord Chancellor by prime ministerial fiat after a couple of weeks' consideration is not going to get things right. It doesn't have this notion of:

... a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

(Both of these quotations are from Burke's Speech on Representation, 1782.)

Consider in this context G.K. Chesterton's invocation (whether conscious or not, and I suspect not) of the same sentiment, but invoking the notion of democracy:

Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition; it seems evident to me that they are the same idea. (Orthodoxy, 1911)

For all his humanity and philosophical insight, Chesterton's social views were usually wrong, and sometimes disastrously so (he was afflicted with the fashionable literary antisemitism of his time, as Hari notes Christie also was). His economic views - he opposed capitalism and favoued Distributism - demonstrated only a woeful inability to understand what a price mechanism was for and what only it could do. But he and his fictional detective were truly exponents of a Burkean conservatism that is an integral and wise part of the political tradition of the English-speaking world.

Hari's discovery of the political philosophy of the grande dame of English crime fiction will meanwhile take its place alongside the unfairly neglected Rawlsian liberalism of Judith Krantz and the logical positivism of Jeffrey Archer.

Blair and the memorial service

A bereaved father claims it would be 'insensitive' for the prime minister to attend the memorial service to be held later this week for British servicemen killed in the Iraq war:

"If it was not for Mr Blair there would be no need for a memorial service," said Mr [Gordon] Evans [whose son was killed in a helicopter crash early in the war], 46, from Llandudno, north Wales. "The Hutton Inquiry and now the report on weapons of mass destruction show that everyone has been covering up or lying about this war.

"It has been more than 150 days and no WMD has been found, yet that was the reason for going to war in the first place. The truth is Saddam Hussein didn't have the capability to attack Britain or even Cyprus.

I can understand that if Mr Evans believes the war was unnecessary then his son's death will be an especially cruel blow. But as the prime minister's office will be constrained from saying anything other than that Mr Blair will of course attend the service, it's worth noting that Mr Evans is talking inflammatory nonsense. The reason for going to war in the first place was that Iraq was in breach of the cease-fire terms of the first Gulf War under UN Security Council Resolution 687, which required that Iraq "unconditionally accept the destruction, removal or rendering harmless" its weapons of mass destruction. Iraq did not do comply. It was thus in breach of the cease-fire agreement. That's not a matter of opinion: it's a judgement enshrined in international law. As Security Council resolution 1441 stated:

Iraq has been and remains in material breach of its obligations under relevant resolutions, including resolution 687 (1991), in particular through Iraq’s failure to cooperate with United Nations inspectors and the IAEA, and to complete the actions required under paragraphs 8 to 13 of resolution 687 (1991)....

To his immense credit, the prime minister insisted that the UN Security Council uphold its own resolutions and thereby the edifice of international law. He rightly perceived the strategic necessity after 11 September of not waiting till an attack was imminent, and the moral import of overthrowing a regime modelled simultaneously on Hitler and Stalin. The Iraq campaign in which Mr Evans's son served and died (in a tragic accident) was a necessary and noble cause; it was not only the prime minister's prerogative but also his duty to prosecute it.

No one could reasonably expect a bereaved parent necessarily to hold fast to Stoic virtues. But accusing the prime minister of displaying 'cheek' for paying his respects and expressing his thanks to British servicemen is something else again. It is not the prime minister who is discredited by it.

Suicide-murder in Haifa

It's chilling to read, and numbing to see pictures, of the latest suicide-murder bombing in Israel, just ahead of Yom Kippur. Again, children are among the victims. And the Prime Minister-designate of the Palestinian Authority has this to say:

The Palestinian Prime Minister-designate Ahmed Qurei condemned what he called "an ugly attack" and is reported to have telephoned Haifa Mayor Yona Yahav to express his sorrow.

He urged Palestinian groups "to fully halt these actions that target civilians and harm our legitimate and just national struggle," his office said in a statement.

Feeble, feckless and fatuous, the representatives of the PA show once again why the vision of the Oslo accords was never realised and came to represent a block on political progress. Yitzhak Rabin rightly judged a decade ago that the national claims of the Palestinians and the security interests of Israel justified taking a chance on the good faith of the PLO. The unspoken assumption was that the PLO/PA would find it easier than Israel had to crack down on the terror groups that continuously menaced Israel's civilians - not just in the West Bank, but in Tel Aviv; not just outside the pre-1967 armistice lines, but at the heart of the Jewish state. In principle that was right; in practice the duplicitous character of Yasser Arafat proved an insuperable obstacle: a man not only unwilling to apprehend terrorists and disable their sponsors, but also complicit in the smuggling of weapons from Iran and guilty of incitement to violence.

Under the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles signed by Rabin and Arafat on the White House lawn on 13 September 1993, the Palestinian Authority is required to combat terrorism and coordinate security with Israel. Under no conceivable reasonable interpretation is that responsibility adequately discharged by 'urging' terrorist groups to desist from planting bombs in restaurants. The vision of Oslo, consistent with that of UN Security Council Resolution 242 carried after the Six-Day War in 1967, was of a peace settlement founded on give-and-take. If that is ever to be realised, then the Palestinian Authority has got to deliver. If it does not, then Israel has no option but to defend her own civilians by going after the terrorists herself.

Busted

Ruth from Texas writes:

You are a right wing hack in the same room as Hitchens. Who do you think you are kidding? I bet your mother doesnt' [sic] believe you either.