Oliver Kamm

A flight of nostalgia

I spoke at an IPPR/Channel 4 fringe meeting at the Labour Party Conference yesterday evening, representing The Times (who are not my employer and never will be, but to which I do contribute - a distinction I didn't feel I could sensibly get around to explaining) on a discussion panel about international policy, and specifically 'Conflict, arms and human rights'. It was, in many ways, illuminating. I'd forgotten - not having been to one for 15 years - that you run into all sorts at a Labour Party meeting.

One questioner prefaced his contribution by saying, "The comments from the gentleman from the Murdoch press are an insult to Labour Party members" - which as the comments in question were a strong endorsement of the policies of the Labour government on Iraq was a mite peculiar. Then there was the elderly lady who asked how we proposed to stop Israel from attacking Syria and Iran, a scenario I thought a little unlikely when Israel had been at some pains to withdraw unilaterally from Lebanon and Gaza. But the most enterprising contributor of all took exception to my comment that we could best assist Sub-Saharan Africa by ensuring its integration into the global economy, specifically by removing trade barriers to its primary products, for I knew of no case where a nation had lifted itself out of poverty by a strategy of import-substitution such as had been common in newly-independent African states. He insisted that it had worked in Tanzania - a country whose per capita income fell on average by 0.3% a year from 1965 to 1986 (by which time President Nyerere's disastrous economic management had run its course), and where direction of labour involved uprooting entire communities and herding their inhabitants into planned villages.

The other members of the panel were Emma Naylor from Oxfam; a Foreign Office minister, Bill Rammell; and a representative of the IPPR, David Mepham, who was strongly anti-Israel but had difficulty adducing a coherent reason for his position that was factually correct. I have had critical things to say about Oxfam and other NGOs on trade policy, but Emma Naylor was good and I was happy to agree with much that she said about the export of arms. (In short - this is my view, not necessarily hers - the problem is not so much the high-tech transfers, but the small arms that are impossible to track and that become widespread in failed states. Solving the arms transfer problem requires putting back together the institutions that make up a state and civil society. If we leave failed states, they will become rogue states, and the humanitarian imperative of removing arbitrary authority in those states will become a strategic necessity for us as well.)

Nearly forgot: there was the inevitable drone who demanded we feel his pain at the illegal invasion of a sovereign state (i.e. Iraq). I can understand why a consistent conservative - say, Malcolm Rifkind or Douglas Hurd, architects of the betrayal of Bosnia - would place such a premium on the sovereignty of even a gangster-regime such as Saddam Hussein's, but I still have trouble getting used to it from people who claim to be progressives and internationalists.

I met a parliamentary candidate afterwards called Kirsty McNeill, who is standing against the Liberal Democrat Simon Hughes in Southwark and Bermondsey. She seemed highly sensible (i.e. she agreed with me), and if I thought it would do her any good she would have this blog's endorsement. I gave her my Simon Hughes anecdote in return: I met him in the London mayoral election campaign as he was standing outside London Bridge station early one morning handing out leaflets to rail commuters. It apparently hadn't occurred to him that, by definition, those of us who travel into London each day do not live in London and thus do not have a vote in London elections.

Blair's noble stance

This comment appears in The Times today.

THE Labour Party rarely forgives a leader for being effective. Its veneration is reserved for the unfulfilled (John Smith), the naïve (George Lansbury) and the incompetent (Michael Foot). That tradition is unlikely to be disturbed in its conference debate on Iraq. Whatever happens to the motion calling for withdrawal of British troops, widespread support for that policy is unmistakable — and astonishing in an internationalist party.

Iraqis desire security; the postwar administration has not provided it. The notion that matters would improve by announcing a date for withdrawing troops is absurd. The jihadists will not wind down their campaign of bombings and beheadings; they will intensify it. The consequences for Iraq of a depletion of coalition forces scarcely bear thinking about. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s barbarism is directed not only at Westerners but also at Iraqi Muslims. He maintains that Shias are “ the most evil of mankind”, hence the campaign to assassinate religious leaders.

Unfortunately today’s debate has more to do with Labour’s internal politics than Iraq’s needs. It bears repeating, then, that Tony Blair’s support for the Iraq war was far from being, as Lib Dems claimed last week, the biggest foreign policy blunder since Suez. It was the most strategically far-sighted and noble British stance since the founding of Nato.

Its importance lay — just as Mr Blair said — in weapons of mass destruction: not because Saddam had them, but because he did not have them and wanted them. Removing a barbarous regime without risking regional conflagration was an opportunity rightly taken. It interdicted the obvious route by which theocratic totalitarianism could mount still more horrific attacks than the one on 9/11. The regime had links to terrorism and a demonstrated wish to wage aggressive war.

War was humanitarian: Saddam slaughtered 300,000 Shia after the first Gulf War. To protest that as these massacres were historic, intervention to rescue the survivors was unjustified, recalls the Major Government’s abandonment of the Bosnian Muslims. When new Labour took office, the Foreign Secretary promised a foreign policy with an ethical dimension. How strange that he and others in the Labour Party should now protest at its being carried out.

Apologies...

Posts this week will be a little on the thin side, I fear. Things should be back to normal next week.

I took part in a brief discussion on the Today programme this morning with the conductor of the English National Opera's revival of Don Giovanni, David Parry. Unfortunately we had time only for a soundbite each, but - should anyone be interested - the recording is available here for 24 hours before it vanishes into the obscurity that would be fitting also for this particular operatic production.

Dealing with terrorists

The Times expresses all that usefully can be said about the horrors that the hostage Kenneth Bigley and his family are going through:

It is important that the release of kidnap victims is politically non-negotiable. If not, the number of kidnappings and the outrageousness of demands will inevitably increase. To say this might sound cold to the point of callousness, particularly to the Bigley family. It implies that the only options when faced with the prospect of the murder of a hostage in conditions like these are a highly implausible change in attitude by those holding the captive, an improbable escape or successful rescue mission. Painful as it is to acknowledge, this may be the case.... It is right to attempt to contact the kidnappers but not to bargain. The British and US governments have made clear their positions, and the fumbling in Baghdad is likely to be the inevitable consequence of an inexperienced administration confronting the most tragic of circumstances. It is precisely at moments such as this that unambiguous leadership is demanded.

If someone I loved were held hostage by these demons, I should feel exactly as the Bigley family do. The torment of those whose loved ones are threatened can't, however, determine policy. That isn't callousness: it's disinterest (i.e. between the current and the future victims of terrorism), which is a quality essential to democratic government as it is to a system of justice. My only query about The Times's argument is whether it is in fact right even to attempt to contact the kidnappers, when the only thing we could say to them is that we demand our citizen's release immediately and unconditionally, and that the terrorists' demands will not be met. One authority on terrorism whom I frequently cite, the Irish historian Conor Cruise O'Brien, made this point in a lecture entitled 'Liberty and Terror' in 1977, when he was a Labour Cabinet minister in the Fine Gael-Labour coalition government. O'Brien maintained that, while there were no certain ways of ending terrorism, there were more or less hopeful ways of dealing with it. The more hopeful ways included:

... [c]onvincing the terrorist that he is not going to get his own way (that involves refusing to talk with him, since though he can argue fluently from his own particular premises, he is not accessible to rational argument, based on premises other than his own).

The Times is absolutely right in requiring that unambiguous leadership be demonstrated. How dispiriting it is therefore to have to report on the activities and outrageous charges of a man whom I have discussed before and should cease to be surprised by. The Press Association reports:

An MP has appealed to the Foreign Office to fly him to Iraq to open talks in a bid to secure the release of hostage Kenneth Bigley. Paul Marsden accused the Government of “going through the motions” in its handling of the crisis and said Mr Bigley could pay with his life. The maverick MP, who defected from Labour to the Liberal Democrats in protest over Iraq, suggested his anti-war stance would give him more influence with religious leaders. And he complained that despite faxing Foreign Secretary Jack Straw twice with his offer he only got a response after persistent phone calls and that was in “diplomatic gobbledygook”.

Mr Marsden, who got involved after being informed that Mr Bigley had a connection with his Shrewsbury and Atcham constituency, told PA News: “What I offered was to travel to Iraq if need be to facilitate the discussions about the whole situation. I think I have far more credibility because of my background opposing the war. I found the prevarication astonishing; they appear to be in disarray. They appear to be killing time waiting for him to be executed if he has not been already...."

During the Iraq war Marsden mocked Coalition troops' military capability and drew an analogy between their campaign and that of the Axis powers in World War II. Shortly after the overthrow of the Taliban, Marsden claimed that under the rule of those who murdered at least 2000 Shi'ah Hazaras in Mazar-i-Sharif, "the people of Afghanistan had lived in peace". I had not expected him to go lower than this, and the kindest word I can find for his latest intervention is hubris. Knowing that he would lose his seat if he fought it again, Marsden will be standing down at the next election; the imminence of his departure is no excuse for the Liberal Democrats' retaining him in the parliamentary party, let alone on the front bench.

"We do not have to spin lies [but don't expect us to tell the truth]..."

A few weeks ago I noted the admirable commitment of a Respect activist to ensuring that the public domain received full and accurate information about his party:

[The media] can attempt to fool the British public with their lies and ignorance. We do not have to spin lies to make ourselves seem better than we really are.

It was, in the circumstances, unfortunate that the Socialist Workers' Party, for which the Respect 'Coalition' is a front, should have then described Respect's performance in the Leicester South by-election as "the best ever by-election vote in England for a party outside the three major parties" - conveniently overlooking Common Wealth, the Democratic Labour Party and the odious Martin Webster of the National Front.

One of my regular correspondents has drawn my attention to the obverse, as it were, of Respect's direct "attempt to fool the British public": disinformation by omission of relevant material. Here, on the Respect web site, is a stirring headline proclaiming "Respect comes third in Glossop". And indeed, if you check the figures, you see that it is literally true that the party came in third place, after Labour and the Tories, in a by-election for the Howard Town ward of High Peak Borough Council last Thursday - a comfortable four votes ahead of something called the Glossopdale Independent Party. (In fifth and last place was the Liberal Democrat candidate, whose name was Beard - but this is one open goal I'm resolved to walk away from.)

If, however, you check this result in the by-election coverage of the Press Association, you see that this was one of two by-elections for the same authority on the same day. As well as Howard Town ward, Simmondley ward of High Peak Borough Council was electing a councillor. The results for Simmondley ward were as follows:

High Peak Borough Simmondley: Lib Dem 382, C 244, Lab 196, Ind 96, Respect 32.

You can search and search on Respect's web site; you will find no reference to this result, or any accompanying headline "Respect comes fifth out of five in Glossop".

As the man said: "We do not have to spin lies to make ourselves seem better than we really are." And I'm Prince Frederick of Denmark.

Liberal Democrats state their principles

I fear that I may have inadvertently given the impression of being biased in favour of the Liberal Democrats. Last week I wrote of the ideological incoherence of certain popular ideas in British party politics:

Compassionate conservatism is as insubstantial a notion as the Third Way — a circumlocution to avoid having to choose among conflicting values and competing claims to scarce resources.

While criticising the philosophical labels that are - or at least, once were - popular in, respectively, the two main parties, I had nothing to say about the comparable philosophical vacuity of the Liberal Democrats. Fortunately the Liberal Democrat chairman, Matthew Taylor, has since done the job for me, providing in an article in The Guardian the following illustration of my point:

Liberal Democrats refuse to be pigeonholed into left or right. We believe that the 20th-century division into left and right failed because society needs both freedom and fairness. As LT Hobhouse and the New Liberals said a hundred years ago, "the struggle for liberty... is the struggle for equality". Basically, people can't be free if they don't have the chance of decent education, health, and freedom from the fear of poverty in sickness or old age. Today we'd add that there isn't much freedom in a decaying environment either.

I used to know Matthew quite well; I should be cordially astonished if he has ever read a book by L.T. Hobhouse, for whom the struggle for liberty took some distinctly idiosyncratic turns. In his 1911 volume of lectures at Columbia University, Social Evolution and Political Theory, Hobhouse makes a quite startling proposal for public policy on a matter that clearly vexes him (p. 179, emphasis added):

The determined idler must not be allowed to prey upon society, he must not go cadging about for odds and ends of useless jobs or for bits of charity; he must not be allowed to keep his wife and children in rags, ill-housed and underfed. The children must be cared for; the mother, if she is doing her duty by them, is doing one woman's work and may fairly claim public maintenance with no possible question of a return. As to the man, he is a fit subject for discipline and restraint. For him a labour colony must be provided, where he must learn to work and gain his discharge as soon as he can prove himself efficient enough in mind and body to stand the stress of industrial competition.

The labour colony - the point is worth emphasising - is not even intended to deal with crime or disorder; it is Hobhouse's proposed means of remedying mere indolence.

Unlike Matthew, I don't wish to claim a direct descent of the Liberal Democrats' beliefs from Hobhouse's often ferociously illiberal ideas. Citing Hobhouse in 21st-century political debate is an anachronism; his assumptions and teleology are not ours. But I do think there is an error common to both sets of ideas, which is their expansive definition of liberty. Liberty is liberty; it is not equality, and it is not environmental protection.

Some time ago Professor Norman Geras invited me to contribute to his series of bloggers' profiles, and one of the questions that he posed was what piece of political wisdom I held most valuable. The one I chose was this observation by Isaiah Berlin, from 'Two Concepts of Liberty':

Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience.

Unlike Norman, I am no specialist in political philosophy and wouldn't presume to set myself up as an interpreter of Berlin's work. But it's clear that by this observation Berlin did not mean to advance - and I do not hold to - the classical liberal scheme of minimising coercion by maximising 'negative' liberty. We have no grounds for doing this, because we have no agreed procedure for weighing negative liberty in the balance against other social goals. The point is, rather, that the things we value - liberty, justice, fairness, and many others - cannot all be realised and made compatible with each other. Berlin returned to this point in his last essay, 'My Intellectual Path' (published, along with his first story, in a posthumous volume The First and the Last, 1998, p.77):

Liberty and equality, spontaneity and security, happiness and knowledge, mercy and justice - all these are ultimate human values, sought for themselves alone; yet when they are incompatible, they cannot all be attained, choices must be made, sometimes tragic losses accepted in the pursuit of some preferred ultimate end. But if, as I believe, this is not merely empirically but conceptually true - that is, derives from the very conception of these values - then the very idea of the perfect world in which all good things are realised is incomprehensible, is in fact conceptually incoherent. And if this is so, and I cannot see how it could be otherwise, then the very notion of the ideal world, for which no sacrifice can be too great, vanishes from view.

We have to choose. When we choose more of one desirable thing we may suffer loss in another. The Liberal Democrats' gaseous invocation of the New Liberalism is equivalent to 'compassionate conservatism' and 'the Third Way': it is a rhetorical expedient to avoid having to make choices. As such, it impoverishes political debate.

The ENO vanishes back down the pan

This article appears in The Times today.

THIS MONTH the English National Opera begins a revival of one of the stupidest productions of modern times. It is Mozart’s Don Giovanni as interpreted by the Catalan director Calixto Bieito. When it was first staged at the Coliseum, in 2001, it generated copious news coverage on account of its depictions of drugtaking and oral sex. The ENO followed it a few months later with a Bieito version of Verdi's Masked Ball that opened with a scene of 14 men defacating. Bieito has since directed a Hamlet who rapes Ophelia in the nunnery, and a Macbeth that includes necrophilia and, inevitably, more oral sex.

Scatological, violent and sexually obsessive theatre is nothing new. The squalor and ugliness of the plays of Jean Genet are an obvious precedent. Rarely, however, can these characteristics have been deployed with such remorseless irrelevance and by a director of greater technical incompetence. Of the initial staging of Don Giovanni, the critic Michael Billington — who, on this evidence, will believe anything — marvelled that “however controversial Bieito’s version may prove, no one can deny that it’s based on close attention to the music and a clear-sighted view of character”. So close, indeed, that when the disguised Don Giovanni disperses by subterfuge his potential assailants, he does so by singing Meta di voi qua vanado (”Half of you go over there”) with nobody on the stage apart from himself. Perhaps it is Bieito’s way of conveying the Don’s anomie; it is impossible to tell.

It is not my purpose to advise Times readers to avoid this production, though I should sooner poke my eyes out and sell my children into slavery than sit through it again. I draw attention merely to the reasoning that the ENO deploys in its stated justification for reviving Bieito's work: “We cannot dispute that opera is interpreted as boring, 19th-century and out of date. Controversy happens in other art forms, why not the opera? It should be given a platform. Film and theatre reflect what is happening in the 21st century. It is violent, it is controversial, but it’s modern and will appeal to first-time attenders.”

The unmistakable defensiveness might be taken for cynicism, for however critically reviled, Bieito’s productions sell. Sex usually does. Yet the populist clichés of relevance and accessibility are ingrained in British public life. A year after new Labour came to office, John Tusa, the managing director of the Barbican, wrote in this newspaper: “I’m worried about the Prime Minister because he is signalling that Oasis is as important to Britain as opera; that chat shows are as important as novels; that soap operas are more valuable than live theatre . . .” What Mr Tusa omitted to mention, and perhaps could not believe, was that philistinism in political office has its counterpart among his fellow promoters of the arts.

In 2002, not long after the two Bieito spectaculars and a Marriage of Figaro that with pleasing symmetry was literally as well as metaphorically a load of rubbish (it was set on a scrapheap), the ENO’s artistic director, Nicholas Payne, resigned. Ructions ensued. Senior figures in the performing arts wrote a huffy letter to this newspaper proclaiming him a martyr for the cause of transforming opera from a “middle-class trophy art form”.

The strategy appears to be that audiences whose interest in being seen exceeds their desire for spiritual enrichment will be deterred if arts professionals vandalise the message in retaliation for the shooting of the messenger. What patronising nonsense. The arts are enjoyed predominantly by the middle class, but that does not make the arts middle-class. Social reformers from William Morris to Arnold Wesker have brought the arts to workers and trade unionists without belittling their audience in the manner of an “appeal to first-time attenders”.

There is nothing illegitimate in modern stagings of classic works. Opera-goers who complain that directors ignore the composer’s intentions commit the “intentional fallacy”: we do not know the composer’s intentions when we listen to music, or the author’s intentions when we read a novel, other than through the work itself. Even if we have an account of the artist’s own interpretation, it remains only an interpretation; an artist is no more a definitive interpreter of his work than he is a definitive judge of its quality.

What is wrong with so many modern productions is not that they are radical interpretations, but that they are not interpretations at all: they are accounts of the director’s own psychological states. In the case of Calixto Bieito, you know that whatever opera or play he is staging, it will come down sooner rather than later to sadomasochism and lavatories. Unfortunately, Bieito is merely an extreme, not an exceptional, case of what the arts establishment has wrought; Nicholas Payne’s supporters need not have worried at the loss of their champion. The ENO describes Bieito’s Don Giovanni as “uncomfortably up-to-date and in-your-face”. The message is equivalent to Classic FM’s issuing compilation CDs with titles such as Time to Relax: the power of a piece of classical music lies in its immediate emotional impact on the listener, rather than in its development of an argument.

The ENO’s defence of the artistically controversial is, in all senses, artless. Whether in the form of a director’s vapid bombast or a commercial radio station’s bonbons, classical music is increasingly marketed as popular music. Popular music is not controversial at all: it is ubiquitous. Objective standards of aesthetic excellence, on the other hand, do require a platform. Unfortunately those entrusted with the public service of advancing them, and funds with which to do it, show scant interest in the task, and even less aptitude.

Spinning and preening

In his arrogant, sentimental and atrociously-written book Inside Story, Greg Dyke offers his considered judgement:

I suspect Blair's legacy will be summed up in two words: "Iraq" and "spin".

Only if he's lucky will Greg Dyke's legacy be summed up in the two words "Roland" and "Rat". You wouldn't learn it from this book, but Dyke presided over and practised a grotesque breach of professional ethics and plain competence in the Gilligan affair. Instead of maintaining a discreet silence appropriate to his position he has published an apologia so full of self-love that the font-size of the title is approximately one-twentieth of that allocated to the author's name, the blurb refers to him as a "much-loved Director-General of the BBC", and the dust-jacket is emblazoned with the Royal Television Society's award citation that Dyke "brought [the BBC] the unaccustomed smell of competitive success" and achieved "personal popularity" within it. The notion that the Director-General's purpose is to provide public-service broadcasting cost-effectively is less prominent, and with good reason, for it wouldn't be easy to discharge that remit and still be "much-loved", at least among BBC staff.

As for Iraq and spin, consider this classic of audacious editorialising: the BBC reports on politicians' reactions to the Liberal Democrats' further grandstanding on the Iraq war:

Conservative defence spokesman Nicholas Soames insisted it was right to topple Saddam and to "liberate" Iraq but he was critical of post-war planning which he branded "chaotic".

The second set of quotations marks, which is reported speech of a political judgement, is apt. The first, however, is breathtaking. Yes, the word "liberate" was the one actually spoken by Soames, but so, presumably, were the words "Iraq" and "Saddam". The BBC genuinely regards it as a contentious point to describe post-Saddam Iraq as liberated. Certainly Iraq is not yet, or at least not in total, a functioning constitutional democracy (though democratic Iraqi Kurdistan, having had the benefit of no-fly zones policed by US and UK - and initially French - pilots for 13 years, is another matter), but that should be no reason for reticence in describing Iraq as a liberated country. Not even the BBC refrains from acknowledging that Europe was liberated in 1945, even though some European countries' liberation from Nazism was succeeded by another form of tyranny. Saddam Hussein explicitly modelled his regime on the precedents set by Hitler and Stalin. Unsurprisingly, those who wished Saddam victory in the Iraq war included sundry European totalitarians and antisemites: Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, Joerg Haider in Austria, and the Socialist Workers' Party in Britain. The best one can say of these elements is that at least they recognised the ideological stakes involved in the overthrow of Baathist tyranny. The BBC, to this day, does not.

On, then, to the Liberal Democrats. At the party's assembly in Bournemouth, Charles Kennedy asked rhetorically, concerning the Iraq war:

Prime minister, why not just, even now, admit you got it wrong? Apologise? Say sorry for the damage you have done, the anguish you have caused, the wrongs that you can never now right?

Has the man no shame? As I have expounded before, no party has been more consistently wrong over the Iraq war - its quantifiable and verifiable consequences, never mind its political impact - than the Liberal Democrats. Most culpable was Kennedy's confident prediction that, "Any war will cause a refugee crisis of huge proportions." Wrong, wrong, wrong - and disgraceful, for not acknowledging the error. Iraqi civilians, knowing that Coalition firepower was directed not against them but against their oppressors, stayed put. Had the US and UK governments followed Liberal Democrat policy, those Iraqi civilians would now be living - if alive at all - under Saddam's regime. Mr Kennedy, why not just, even now, admit you got it wrong? Apologise? Say sorry for the damage you would have done, the anguish you would have caused, the wrongs that you tolerated and that more far-sighted political leaders have put right?

Johann Hari on Catholic reaction

I've been meaning for a while to comment on Johann Hari's column last month in The Independent on 'Catholofascism', by which he means the influence of the Opus Dei organisation:

Anybody who has studied the history of the Vatican knows that it has long harboured totalitarian elements, manifested from the Spanish Inquisition to Pope Pius XII's complicity in the Holocaust. Do we really think those dangerous instincts have vanished from Christianity? Opus Dei emerged from this tradition, and it is growing stronger every day. If we do not discuss this, we risk feeding the Islamophobic idea that Islam is uniquely prone to fanaticism.

So Johann does indeed discuss it at length, concluding:

Given the sect's track record, we can assume that an Opus Dei-picked Pope would take John Paul's social conservatism even further into the political stratosphere, and ditch all the admirable criticisms of extreme capitalism. Catholofascism and Islamofascism resemble each other. At the United Nations Cairo Conference on Population and Development, for example, the Opus Dei-dominated Vatican delegation made an alliance with Islamic fundamentalist representatives to oppose the distribution of contraception and abortion to the world's poorest women. A far-right Vatican is the last thing the developing world needs. The Da Vinci Code is right, at least, about one thing: there are a lot of people out there who should be frightened of Opus Dei.

I am as far removed from the doctrines of Opus Dei as an Enlightenment rationalist can be. I am not a Roman Catholic, or a Christian, or a theist. I consider that the influence of the Roman Catholic Church on matters of population, contraception, and abortion causes much needless suffering in the developing world. I strongly disagree with the present Pope's views on innumerable social issues, from the Iraq war to gay marriage. But Johann's argument is overwrought. The parallel he draws with totalitarian Islamist forces is strained. I fear that he may have been temporarily disoriented by the experience of having been right about the Iraq war, in contradiction to most of his newspaper's readership and contributors, and that he is now seaching for ways to demonstrate that he is a disinterested defender of human rights against theocratic totalitarianism. There is no need for him to try so hard.

First, the term Catholofascism is not accurate. There was in the 1920s a group known as clerico fascisti in Rome and Northern Italy, which aimed at a synthesis between Catholicism and fascism. This movement stressed a renewal of both the spirit and the nation. What Opus Dei stands for is extreme clerical reaction. The difference is comparable to that between the Croat state of the Ustasha and the Catholic authoritarianism of Engelbert Dollfuss in Austria. One is totalitarian and expansionist state-terrorism; the other is bigoted and repressive reaction, but without the connotation of expansionism. This is more than a semantic difference if you're drawing parallels with Islamist totalitarianism. Opus Dei is not clerical-fascist: it comes from the older Catholic tradition of Ultramontanism.

Secondly, while there may be ostensible parallels between Ultramontane Catholicism and Islamism concerning proper authority, they are misleading. Opus Dei and other ultra-orthodox movements (the main ones are the Focolare, founded in 1943, Communion and Liberation, founded in 1954, and the Neocatechumenate, founded in 1964) are in effect secret societies outside the normal diocesan structure of the Roman Catholic Church and thereby giving unmediated allegiance to the papacy. But the papacy is not a political authority (other than in the nominal sense that there is a Vatican state). Allegiance to it and a belief that it is above secular dominion is not at all the same as the Islamist insistence that the faith is both a political and a religious system, whose true expression will be found in a restored Caliphate. Even Opus Dei does not yearn for the return of the papal dominions.

Thirdly, the influence of the Roman Catholic Church over its flock is not quite as firm as Johann believes. If, after the present Pope's death, the Church becomes still more dogmatic in its demands on the social and political allegiances of the faithful, then the faithful will not necessarily follow. Whatever happens in the Roman Catholic Church, the Second Vatican Council has taken place and has had a fundamental impact in the way lay Catholics regard religious authority. Johann declares:

All members [of Opus Dei] must report and fully confess to an Opus Dei official at least once a month. The group prescribes strict hierarchy and unquestioning obedience. Maxim 941 of The Way demands "unreserved obedience to whoever is in charge" of the sect.

Contrast that discipline with what the Church itself says in promulgating its views on birth control. Pope Paul VI's encyclical Gaudium et Spes enjoins:

It is the spouses themselves who ultimately must make this judgement in the sight of God.

And so they do, and will continue to do, despite the clear teaching of the Church.

Johann's views on the social influence of the Church are a caricature, with repressive pro-capitalist reaction on one side, enlightened liberation theologians on the other, and in between a Pope whose views on sexual morality are "lethally reactionary" but are counterbalanced by his position on fair trade and poverty. In reality, there is much less controversy within the Church than Johann supposes. Pope John Paul II is extending a papal tradition of social teaching that is highly critical of free markets, and the direction of his criticism is one that Catholic orthodoxy would readily assent to. Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo Anno was so suspicious of market forces that it was mistakenly assumed by some to be a statement of support for the notion of a corporate state (this was shortly after the Vatican's concordat with Mussolini in 1929), whereas in the US it was more widely and accurately interpreted as being consistent with Roosevelt's New Deal. Catholic orthodoxy is exactly as Johann would wish, comprising what he apparently regards as "admirable criticisms of extreme capitalism".

Those criticisms are, in fact, highly questionable, reflecting an illiberal suspicion of the voluntary social co-ordination created by a system of shifting relative prices. They are powerfully presented in the social thought of Jacques Maritain, whose influence on post-war European Christian Democracy marks an early 'Third Way' between capitalism and socialism. More to the point, they are accepted both by Catholic reactionaries and by the heroes of Johann's article, the liberation theologians who have been responsible for a strongly anti-capitalist tone in Latin American Catholicism since the Medellin Bishops' Conference of 1968. If Johann looks again at the writings of these theologians (such as Gustavo Gutierrez, whom he cites) he will find some fairly uncritical assumptions about the supposed scientific character of Marxism and dogmatic assertions such as (from A Theology of Liberation) "the class struggle is a fact and neutrality in this question is not possible". This is not the place for a detailed examination of Liberation Theology, but if, unlike Johann, you believe Marxism has a record of accurate social and economic analysis and offers a plausible political alternative to the social-democratic and liberal Left, than you'll find it appealing. What you won't find in it is a discussion of why proclaimed Marxist regimes have invariably failed to be as free as the constitutional democracies and welfare-capitalist states of the United States and Western Europe.

In short, Johann has presented a picture of modern Catholicism that bears little relation to the facts. The Roman Catholic Church is less monolithic than he supposes. Ironically, the one point on which its various branches are largely consistent in social teaching is the one in which Johann believes there are stark divisions. The extreme reactionary elements that he deplores have a reputation that exaggerates their significance. There is no parallel between the shifting forces within modern Catholicism and the genuine theocratic-totalitarian threats to the western democracies.

Compassion, conservatism, contradiction

This comment appears in The Times today.

ON BECOMING the Conservative leader, Michael Howard promised to expound “the over-arching ideas, the arguments, the principles that will inform everything that we do”.

Ten months after that promise, the one consistent principle the party exemplifies is to buy off interest groups — motorists, pensioners, parents of university students — at public expense.

In the circumstances, a Tory MP who leaves the front bench to argue for change in the party’s philosophical direction has much remedial work to be getting on with. Yet Damian Green, formerly the Conservative transport spokesman, appears intent instead on exacerbating his party’s ideological incoherence: “I want to argue for a form of compassionate Conservatism, the sort of Conservatism that was very effective for George Bush a few years ago,” he told the BBC this week.

President Bush has strengths, but the power of his ideas is not among them. Compassionate conservatism is as insubstantial a notion as the Third Way — a circumlocution to avoid having to choose among conflicting values and competing claims to scarce resources. To talk of a compassionate or caring society is to turn a noble personal virtue into a destructive political affectation.

We feel compassion for those who suffer, without regard to whether their suffering is due to remediable injustice or to life’s unvarying misfortunes (bereavement, accident, unrequited love). A government that legislates compassionately has no sense of the limits of politics. If, say, a religious grouping suffers offence at the publication of a novel that satirises its faith, who is to say that a compassionate society ought not to alleviate that mental anguish by banning the book?

The task of democratic politics is not to assuage emotional pain; it is to set disinterestedly the rules we live by. It is good politics and right in principle for the Conservatives to emphasise their belief in the State’s distributional role in providing public goods and relieving poverty. But that is not compassion: it is equity (enabling people to exercise autonomous choices) and efficiency (providing services where private markets would be inefficient or non-existent).

New Labour has been at its most effective — in monetary and fiscal policy — when it has introduced systems of rules designed to constrain discretionary intervention. How ironic that the Conservatives should meanwhile have become the party of overweening Big Government.