"I wish to express my disgust..."

A wonderfully self-important open letter of protest to my new friend Charles Kennedy is appearing on the Internet, and I thought I should do my bit to publicise it. It's written by one Nick Dearden, who is something called Campaigns Director for War on Want. Here it is, heavily edited but with no substantive point omitted:

Dear Mr Kennedy

I wish to express my disgust at the dismissal of Jenny Tonge from your front bench. That poverty and desperation caused by years of Israeli aggression - the biggest source of instability in the Middle East - leads people to suicide bombings is obvious. Without trying to understand the conflict in this way, we have no hope of achieving peace in the region. Jenny Tonge's comments on Palestine were not only reasonable but express the feelings of many people in this country, and probably the majority of people across the world.

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Mr Kennedy, you have stated many times that you are a man of principle, that your form of politics centres on truth, on justice, on rising above vested interests. Yet your action of Friday was one of the most cowardly political acts I have ever witnessed. In one act you have made a lie of everything you claim to stand for, and I am sure that many people will be deeply disappointed.

Yours

Nick Dearden

Don't you just love that rhetorical device of asserting that some empirical claim that happens to coincide with the political prejudices of its utterer is 'obvious', thereby obviating any requirement to prove it? Mr Dearden is quite experienced in deploying it, in lieu of any other method of demonstrating what he confidently declares to be 'understanding', as I have recalled. A little while ago - for Mr Dearden is no more of a Liberal Democrat than I am, as you might have inferred from the absence of any reference in his letter to his acquaintance with the party - he popped up as spokesman for a front organisation for the Socialist Workers' Party called 'Globalise Resistance'. In that capacity he was privileged to have a BBC Six O'Clock News Forum devoted to himself a couple of years ago, to publicise May Day protests. The following exchange took place between him and the interviewer, who was reading out listeners' emails:

Interviewer: Let's talk about your interests as a group. Let's move onto the developing world. Oliver Kamm, UK: "A notable beneficiary of globalisation is the Third World. Developing countries need foreign capital in order to fund the current account deficits that arise when a country's investment opportunities exceed domestic savings. How do you feel about your role in campaigning to keep the Third World poor?"....

Dearden: Well all of these economic theories are basically manmade constructs - we've created the world to operate like this and it's in the interest of a few people who've created the world to operate like this that it continues to operate like this. We're part of a global movement, so today there were millions of people in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, also marching with us. We quite often take our lead from those movements and those people are saying - we don't want the freedom to be part of the World Trade Organisation, we don't want the freedom to take World Bank loans, we have enough food, we have enough basics in our country to feed and clothe everybody in our country. It's the economic system that the West has created that forcibly removes those resources from our country in order to make a few people in the West far richer than they actually need to be.

So I would completely dispute the fact that we're taking money out of the Third World. What we are arguing for is a democratic Third World, is a democratic globe where people can decide how the resources that they create are used and we want those resources to be used on making people's lives decent rather than basically making a few corporations very wealthy.

Impressive, eh? At least, I'm sure it would be if I understood it - especially the bit when he started disputing something he then termed a 'fact', on which, bizarrely enough he was correct (countries that run current account deficits are net importers of capital) but plainly hadn't intended to be. Note also his astonishing, horrifying assertion that developing countries can subsist purely on self-sufficiency; it would be ironic if it were not so serious a subject that a man who believes such things should now be operating under the title 'War on Want'.

Still, it's good to know that in his new role Mr Dearden places such a premium 'on truth, on justice, on rising above vested interests'. In 1990 War on Want was found to be insolvent, have submitted misleading accounts for five consecutive years, that a bank balance of £1 million ought to have been stated as an overdraft of £40,000, that money held on trust had been commingled with money needed to run the charity, that debts had been uncollected and that membership records were inaccurate (cited in Dominic Hobson, The National Wealth, 1999). If I were a contributor to War on Want, however enamoured I was of Jenny Tonge, I think I'd want someone there who spent his time on competent administration of revenues and control of costs before I gave Nick Dearden a job, let alone a megaphone.

Comments

[MeTooThen]

Mr. Kamm,

I wish to express my disgust with Mr. Dearden.

No, it is not at all obvious.

Reem Al-Rayashi was not impoverished nor was she desperate. Nor did she commit suicide. She murdered four people by exploding a bomb hidden on her person and in the process she also was killed.

Not at all addressed, but what needs to be, is whether these acts of mass murder are indeed suicide? They are not. People who feel hopeless, helpless, despairing and cut-off from human contact, sadly do take their own lives, but are not compelled to commit mass murder. The conflation of this tactical form of organized terrorist mass murder to personal tragedy, is a sickening and cynical, political ploy.

And when then, if ever, is the aggrieved or desperate among us not sanctioned to commit suicide mass murder? What then are the circumstances that would not justify it? And who would adjudicate this distinction? Mr. Dearden? Me? Who?

No, this is not a slippery slope, it is a cliff over which, Mr. Dearden and his ilk have plummeted.

[Andrew Ian Dodge]

Well said MeTooThen. You made it very clear, well except to those who simply ignore your point in their blind support for Palestinians of all types.

[Peter]

Dearden is just using Dr Tonge and Palestine as a vehicle for standard Socialist Workers Party agit prop.

[Tim Newman]

You may be interested to know that the General Secretary of War on Want between the years of 1983 and 1987 was none other than George Galloway.

[JOhn]

Morons all of you.