Oliver Kamm

For once nanny is right

This article appears in The Times tomorrow.

WHEN, ON the Radio 4 Today programme, David Hockney squared up to Julie Morgan, a Labour MP, he proved an invigorating denouncer of the nanny state. Against Ms Morgan’s arguments for a ban on smoking in public places, Hockney fulminated: “I think you are too bossy, chum. You are dreary.”

New Labour’s least appealing characteristic is its puritanism. Even where it expands private choice — lowering the age of consent for homosexuals — its arguments are exhortatory rather than libertarian. More usually, as on foxhunting, the Government’s instincts are to ban rather than regulate, and to regulate rather than allow people to arrive at private agreements.

Yet in this case the sanctimonious MP merits support. The bluff artist lambasting the Bossy Tendency is wrong. A smoking ban in public places is workable, as the Irish precedent shows, and principled.

Hockney speaks for the smokers’ rights group, Forest. For the group’s chairman, Lord Harris of High Cross, choice on tobacco is a lineal descendant of the “dogged persistence of economic liberals in a century-long struggle against often well-meaning collectivists in all parties”. Yet liberals recognise the problem of what economists call “externalities”: costs or benefits that accrue to someone other than the person responsible for creating them.

Pollution is an externality. Liberals often argue that property rights are a better way of coping with it than regulation. If a factory pollutes an adjoining river, then its owner will have a greater incentive to conserve resources if he has to compensate someone with a property claim to that stretch of river.

If Forest were arguing a consistent libertarian case, it would come up with a comparable scheme for compensating those who suffer from pollution caused by cigarette smoke. Forest has not done that, because it cannot. Private property rights are no solution, because it is impossibly complex to identify all who suffer the inconvenience and discomfort of a smoky atmosphere, and to draw up contracts with them to buy the right to pollute the air.

The right to pollute is not an axiom of a free society like the right to speak, worship or associate. It is the claim of a lobby group portentously appropriating high principle for self-interested ends. To adapt G. K. Chesterton’s advice to another public worthy: chuck it, Hockney.

Labour's disgrace; Blair's apology

The news from the Labour Party Conference has been dominated by the forcible ejection from the Conference Hall yesterday of an 82 year-old Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, Walter Wolfgang, who had heckled the Foreign Secretary's defence of the Iraq War. Today, Wolfgang returned to the Conference in triumph, and received an apology from the Prime Minister.

This episode is certainly disturbing, and merited an apology from Tony Blair. By good fortune, I have obtained the full text of the Prime Minister's statement, and reproduce it here:

The expulsion of Walter Wolfgang from the Conference ought never to have happened, and I sincerely regret it. After all, Mr Wolfgang ought never to have been in the Conference in the first place, let alone allowed back in today. That he has been a party member for almost half a century is a sobering reflection on the party I have led for 11 years, and I must take responsibility for this oversight. I apologise to Labour supporters for having allowed it to persist.

Mr Wolfgang, I should explain, has a characteristic not mentioned by his new-found admirers in the Conservative press. His peace campaigning has centred not only on Labour CND but also on an organisation called Labour Action for Peace (LAP). LAP for decades operated with a nominally non-Communist leadership but invariably took the Soviet side of every international dispute over foreign policy and nuclear arms. Its reliably pro-Soviet position dates back as far as the 1950s, when Frank Allaun, MP for Salford East from 1955-83, did his utmost to persuade the Labour Party to accept back into membership - and as a parliamentary candidate - the Communist fellow-traveller Konni Zilliacus, an outspoken supporter of the crushing of democracy in Czechoslovakia in 1948. I regret to say that Allaun's efforts were successful. My predecessor Clement Attlee knew the score with these people, and expelled Zilliacus along with other MPs, such as John Platts-Mills, whose support for the ideals of parliamentary democracy was very remote indeed. LAP has remained a forum for the most gullible shills for totalitarianism. Take Stan Newens, former MP for Harlow and then an MEP. He edited a pamphlet entitled Talking with Nicolae Ceausescu, in which it was seriously maintained that the mass murderer believed in "respect for the rights of all peoples to self-determination".

Walter Wolfgang's political activism has been in the same disreputable cause of apologetics for the totalitarian enemies of democratic socialism. Unlike the Conservative press, I do not consider allegiances such as these to be personal idiosyncrasies: they are a moral abomination. The party that I lead played a noble role in establishing the post-war institutions and alliances that preserved collective security and eventually liberated Eastern Europe from tyranny. I am proud of the tradition of militant anti-Communism that my party has, at its best, embodied. That position is a prerequisite for a democratic party of the Left, in the same way, and for the same reason, that militant anti-fascism is. Walter Wolfgang has dedicated his political life to another cause. His ejection from the Labour Conference yesterday was a belated recognition of the party's failure to eject him from membership at any time in the previous five decades. For that failure, I apologise once more.

Jazz and the anti-Jew

One of my regular correspondents, David Adler in New York, is a writer on jazz. In the October edition of JazzTimes magazine, he has a thoughtful piece – which may be read here - on the curious case of the jazz saxophonist Gilad Atzmon.

Though born in Israel and a former IDF reservist, Atzmon holds unmistakably antisemitic views, which David nicely summarises in his article (as well as referring graciously to my own efforts to expose Atzmon’s bigotry for what it is). Atzmon explicitly maintains that the notorious Czarist forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion accurately depicts the state of modern America. Why this is worth raising in a periodical about music is an issue that David addresses:

Writing recently in Slate about Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lee Siegel drew a useful distinction between political and “politicized” art. The former, he argued, tends to highlight the ambiguous and the unresolved, while the latter “invokes political categories [and] stays imprisoned within them….”

Atzmon’s work is nothing if not politicized, and that is his right. But critics also have a right to respond as they see fit. On that score, one would hope for a bit more tough-minded skepticism.

I will defend strongly the independence of aesthetic criteria from political ones, but Atzmon invites us to judge him according to the latter. That’s part of the act. As a Socialist Workers’ Party reviewer wrote in the organisation’s monthly journal, Socialist Review, last April:

Atzmon proudly describes himself as a political artist, and he leaves you in no doubt where his sympathies lie. Born in 1963 and raised as a secular Jew, he left his native Israel in disgust at the repression of the Palestinian people. He concludes his sleevenotes on Musik by declaring, 'Sooner or later musik will free itself and so will the Palestinian people,' and he closed the set of his recent London dates with a poignant ballad entitled 'Jenin'. Elsewhere he and his band, the Orient House Ensemble, mesmerise the crowd with a beautiful track entitled 'Liberating the American People'. Another song is dedicated to Ken Livingstone who he describes, wrongly but understandably, as 'the only brave man in western politics.' Meanwhile the world's most powerful politician and his beloved sidekick are satirised as 'two old hookers', Georgina and Antonella, who have presumably prostituted themselves to the major multinational powers.

Indeed, Atzmon leaves you in no doubt where his sympathies lie: they are with the racist Right. For example, he proudly parades his association with, and admiration for, Israel Shamir, who praises the neo-Nazi National Alliance as an ally in the struggle against Zionism. David Adler does a public service in making these connections better-known among jazz aficionados, who have thus far apparently been willing to accept Atzmon as nothing more a dissenting political voice.

Not being a follower of jazz myself, I’ll concentrate on the political aspects of Atzmon’s following. It is no surprise that the Socialist Workers’ Party (the controlling organisation behind the Respect ‘coalition’) should find Atzmon so powerful a moral witness. The theoretical grounds for the party’s embrace of the racist Right were laid out with commendable frankness by party ideologue Sabby Sagall three years ago in Socialist Review. Affecting to demonstrate that to be anti-Zionist was not to be antisemitic, Sagall (by his lights) accomplished that task by the simple expedient of defining antisemitism out of existence. Consider this masterpiece of semantic legerdemain (emphasis added):

Today anti-Semitism in the Arab countries must be distinguished from its western European counterpart. Insofar as the Israeli leadership claims to speak for all Jews, and the majority unfortunately accept the claim, anti-Zionism tends to appear as anti-Semitism. Only when a majority of Jews speak out against Israel will that 'anti-Semitism' be defeated. In western Europe, however, there is a resurgence of the genuine article, associated with the rise of fascist parties across Europe.

In short, only explicitly fascist organisations can be considered anti-Jewish. In the Arab world the same phenomenon requires scare quotes around it, for it merely “tends to appears as” antisemitism rather than being the genuine article. Similarly the antisemite Gilad Atzmon, if he is guilty of anything, merely exhibits a lack of clarity in the dissemination of his ideas. See this repulsive apologia the SWP issued when it found itself criticised for inviting Atzmon to speak, for the second year running, at its annual Marxism event. The strongest criticism the party can come up with is the weaselly evasion that “some of the formulations on [Atzmon’s] website might encourage his readers to feel that he is blurring the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti Zionism” – in other words, the fault lies with the reader’s misapprehension of what the SWP lauds as ‘fearless tirades against Zionism’.

But Atzmon makes perfectly clear what his target is: the Jews, especially but not only in the United States, who conspire to control the international order, as described in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. His place in the SWP’s pantheon of progressive thinkers matches that of his friend Israel Shamir in the propaganda of the British National Party. (I won’t give a link for this, but if you consult the BNP web site you will find Shamir’s anti-Jewish writings and speeches promoted in the same way as Atzmon’s antisemitic poison is commended by the SWP.)

Regular readers are entitled to feel irked by tedious repetition of this point, but here it is once more. When I describe the controlling organisation behind the Respect ‘coalition’ in the UK as a fascist, racist and antisemitic organisation I am not using the terms metaphorically, and I do not mean merely that Respect/SWP is ‘as bad as’ the BNP. I mean that ideologically Respect/SWP is the same thing as the BNP.

A hundred minutes of banality

This column appears in The Times today.

IN HIS ESSAY “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell memorably rewrote a verse from Ecclesiastes in a dispiritingly familiar type of modern English. No longer did “time and chance happeneth” to all men; instead, “a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account”.

Suddenly it is no longer funny. A slim volume entitled The 100-Minute Bible was launched this week at Canterbury Cathedral. Intended for those interested in Christianity but lacking the stamina and application to read the Bible, it “picks out the principle [sic] stories of the life and ministry of its central character, Jesus Christ”.

Its author, a retired priest and headmaster, defends his handiwork as a “gateway” to the Bible. On the evidence so far presented, he is wrong. The problem is not that he has abridged the Bible — the very creation of Scripture required the editorial judgment of its redactors — but that he has attenuated it.

The English Bible, in the Authorised Version, is among the noblest expressions of the language. Its power lies in its directness. So far from being couched in archaic and impenetrable language, the King James Bible uses short and unambiguous words. Its poetic quality lies not in ornamentation but in rhythm.

Few of these qualities are left in modern English translations of the Bible, but at least the possibility remains of comparing those versions, verse by verse, with the cadences of the Authorised Version. The 100-Minute Bible lacks that redeeming characteristic of even the most enervating of modern translations.

It is not a translation but an attempt to render Christian doctrine and biblical narrative simply and succinctly. Its failure was almost certain, and is already obvious. The Prodigal Son might be any carouser: “His father arranged a huge party for him on his return.” The Revelation of St John the Divine appears to have been borrowed from Star Wars: “All this was part of a cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil.”

The 100-Minute Bible takes a sacramental language and renders it banal. Christians may squander their scriptural or liturgical inheritance as they wish. But when they demean a work of beauty and dignity that has shaped English history and literature as no other book, they invite retribution.

Prospect's 'Public Intellectuals'

I'm sorry for the dearth of posts over the past fortnight. I really shall be starting up again in earnest from tomorrow. In the meantime, as an idle blogger, I'm reproducing a brief column I wrote for The Times last year about the historian Eric Hobsbawm. The reason for reproducing it is that the magazine Prospect, whose poll of British public intellectuals I was commenting on, has now (in concert with Foreign Policy magazine) extended the exercise, to poll readers on the top five public intellectuals in the world. The list of 100 candidates nominated by the magazines is here; it includes Eric Hobsbawm once more.

THIS week Prospect magazine announced the outcome of a readers’ poll to identify the top five public intellectuals in Britain. In fourth place was the octogenarian historian Eric Hobsbawm. The oddity of this rests in the magazine’s stated criterion for a public intellectual: “We are stressing current contributions — by which we mean the past five to ten years.” Readers thus voted for Professor Hobsbawm not for his scholarly works of 19th-century history, but for his serial attempts in the past decade to exculpate a lifetime’s commitment to the Communist Party of Great Britain.

In his memoir Interesting Times (2002), Hobsbawm writes of his fellow student Communists of the 1930s: “Hardness, indeed ruthlessness, doing what had to be done, before, during and after the revolution was the essence of the Bolshevik.” He means it descriptively rather than approvingly — yet the principle has stayed with him. According to the historian Robert Conquest, Hobsbawm was asked by Michael Ignatieff in a BBC interview in 1994: “What (your view) comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?” He replied: “Yes.”

Hobsbawm concedes that greater knowledge of Stalinist Russia would not have dissuaded its partisans, but maintains irrelevantly: “Of course we did not, and could not, envisage the sheer scale of what was being imposed on the Soviet peoples.” Perhaps not the scale, but certainly the character of Stalin’s repression was well known to readers of such esoteric material as the American Saturday Evening Post, which published the memoirs of the Soviet defector and former intelligence officer Walter Krivitsky in 1939. It took an intellectual not to see it.

HOBSBAWM has rarely missed an opportunity even after communism’s demise to obfuscate its record. “One might also claim,” he proffers demurely in The Age of Extremes (1994), “that in the Bolshevik Party constructed by Lenin, orthodoxy and intolerance were to some extent implanted not as values in themselves but for pragmatic reasons.” The notion that Lenin — of whom Bertrand Russell remarked after meeting him, “His guffaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold” — was not merely pragmatically intolerant but congenitally bloodthirsty is too unsophisticated a thesis to merit Hobsbawm’s consideration.

Moving to more recent panegyric, Hobsbawm remarks in On History (1997): “Fragile as the communist systems turned out to be, only a limited, even nominal, use of armed coercion was necessary to maintain them from 1957 until 1989.” He means the 27 Soviet divisions, 6,300 tanks and 400,000 troops sent into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to snuff out political reform.

Though Prospect is interested only in recent work, the seeds of Hobsbawm’s obtuseness lie much farther back. In his memoir he accords a fleeting mention to a pamphlet he wrote at Cambridge with the future literary critic, Raymond Williams, on the Russo-Finnish War. Hobsbawm laments: “Alas, (the pamphlet) has been lost in the alarums and excursions of the century. I have been unable to rediscover a copy.” This is just as well, because the Russo-Finnish War consisted in Stalin’s invasion of Finland two months after his non-aggression pact with Hitler. As loyal Communists, Hobsbawm and Williams supported both the invasion and the pact.

Prospect’s “five intellectuals” are to be accorded dinner with a Cabinet minister and a newspaper editor, with the conversation recorded for the magazine. If Hobsbawm’s interlocutors have any gumption, they will refuse to sit with him.

To the Bush administration, a fine appointment - at last

A few months ago I attended a briefing with a member of the Bush administration, and took the opportunity of citing to him something that Christopher Hitchens had lately written (though I can't now find where he said it). In order to emphasise the lamentable state of the administration's public diplomacy regarding foreign affairs, Hitchens had pointed out just how much trouble the cause of 'regime change' was in if the task of expounding it to a sceptical public were left to people like, well, Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens returned to the point recently in an article in The Weekly Standard:

Yes, it must be admitted that Bush and Blair made a hash of a good case [on Iraq], largely because they preferred to scare people rather than enlighten them or reason with them. Still, the only real strategy of deception has come from those who believe, or pretend, that Saddam Hussein was no problem.

I have a ready answer to those who accuse me of being an agent and tool of the Bush-Cheney administration (which is the nicest thing that my enemies can find to say). Attempting a little levity, I respond that I could stay at home if the authorities could bother to make their own case, but that I meanwhile am a prisoner of what I actually do know about the permanent hell, and the permanent threat, of the Saddam regime.

Nowhere have the administration's efforts at public advocacy been more feeble than in the UK, where the post of ambassador (only recently filled) was left vacant for a year, and where Tony Blair has suffered significant political damage from his closeness to President Bush. I'm delighted that at last the administration has recognised the problem of its standing in European and Asian public opinion, and done something constructive about it. In the past few days it has appointed a longstanding Anglophile as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Diplomacy, in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs. She is Colleen Graffy, a Professor of Law who has lived in London for 20 years and has also lived in Germany.

I have shared a television studio with Colleen, and found her a formidably well-informed and cogent advocate for the 'regime change' cause. Recently she appeared on Any Questions on Radio 4 with George Galloway, where she noted, with complete accuracy and justification, that Galloway's Respect 'Coalition' is in reality an electoral front for the Socialist Workers' Party. So far from being 'anti-war', Respect/SWP is pro-war but on the other side; so far from being a cause of the Left, it is literally and not merely metaphorically a fascist and racist party. My readers, of course, know all this; so now do listeners to Radio 4.

For all who favour a policy of the global expansion of constitutional democracy - that is, for all genuine progressives - Colleen's appointment is excellent news, and I wish her well in her new responsibilities.

The Tories and tax

The Times publishes a letter today from the Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, responding to my column last week criticising his flat-tax proposals. The letter reads in full:

Sir, I welcome Oliver Kamm’s support (Comment, September 8) for my call for a much simpler tax system, but he seems determined to find differences between us where they do not exist. He says: "In vain will you read (my) pronouncements for an acknowledgment that China and India represent an opportunity for sales and investment rather than a threat . . . " Yet in my speech to the Social Market Foundation I went out of my way to talk about the new opportunities that exist in these powerful emerging markets. Indeed, I am visiting Beijing and Shanghai to see them for myself.

He also points out some of the obstacles to introducing a pure flat tax into a mature tax system like the UK’s. I flagged up these obstacles in my speech. That is why I make it clear that I will be asking the Commission on Tax Reform to look at the prospect of simpler and flatter taxes that fall short of a pure flat tax.

However, there is one thing Mr Kamm and I are going to have to disagree on fundamentally. He says that to state that many countries in Europe are reducing taxes is neither true nor relevant. I am sorry, but it is true. Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and Denmark are all reducing their corporate tax rates. That surely is relevant to Britain’s ability to compete.

GEORGE OSBORNE
House of Commons

I should say that Mr Osborne's office sent me this letter in advance of publication, inviting me to comment on it. I thought this was a gracious way for the Shadow Chancellor to conduct a public debate.

I can make a judgement of Mr Osborne's proposals last week only on the basis of what he has said and written. My disagreements with what he has said and written are not minor. Certainly Mr Osborne referred in his speech to the Social Market Foundation to the opportunities presented by economies of China and India, but I stand by my remarks. Anyone can see that these two emerging and populous economies represent potential export markets; Mr Osborne has said nothing to the effect that they are sales and investment opportunities rather than a threat. His speech (which can be found on the Conservative Party web site) counterposed these opportunities to the accompanying "competitive pressures", and his more popular presentation, in an op-ed in The Standard last week, maintained (I don't think this article is on-line, and I am quoting it from memory; but I believe the words are exact) that his tax proposals were necessary "if we are to compete with the likes of India and China". The statement by Mr Osborne on the Today programme that I said was neither true nor relevant was a more expansive claim than the one he gives in his letter, but this is a minor point; his thesis is clear enough, and I would paraphrase it along the following lines.

The global economy is increasingly competitive. The openness of the UK economy and the emerging economic power of China and India present opportunities but also challenges. In order to meet those challenges Britain needs to maintain its competitiveness on global markets. Europe, traditionally thought of as a region of high labour costs, burdensome taxation and bureaucratic regulation, is responding by reducing tax rates and (even in the mature economies of Western Europe) considering flat- or flatter-tax regimes. These moves are "relevant to Britain's ability to compete", because they reduce European companies' cost disadvantage with India and China. The Tories are responding imaginatively by considering ways in which the tax system can restore and bolster that ability to compete.

Having read his speech, I don't believe this is a caricature of the Shadow Chancellor's reasoning. It seems to me a terribly misguided view. You can sensibly talk about losing national competitiveness through an overvalued exchange rate, or an adverse movement in the terms of trade, but these textbook cases have nothing to do with the Tories' tax proposals. In favour of those proposals, the Shadow Chancellor argues that flatter taxes will be simpler and are good for economic performance. I infer from his letter that he also believes a low-tax regime is in the interests of Britain's economic performance (that "ability to compete"). On the first point, as I argued in my column, the complexity of our tax system lies in working out taxable income, not the existence of different marginal tax rates. On the second, I know of no consistent pattern in the OECD economies to support the Shadow Chancellor's view. The case often cited of a low-tax and high-growth economy is the emergence of Ireland as a 'Celtic Tiger', and it may be that low corporate taxes were useful in attracting foreign investment. Other European countries that have prospered over the medium term have included high-tax countries with extensive welfare states, such as Denmark and the Netherlands. There may be grounds for favouring low taxes (or indeed flat taxes), and curbing the size of the public sector. But these are political decisions, which are the proper subject of policy debate between advocates of different ideological premises. They are not iron laws of necessity driven by global economic forces.

It is indeed the politics that I am especially wary of in the Shadow Chancellor's proposals. I had thought Mr Osborne an advocate of a more liberal and outward-looking Conservatism. To my mind, liberals are not committed by their philosophy to any particular view on the proper ratio of public spending to GDP, the size (rather than the functions) of the state, or the right level of taxes. But they (or rather, we) ought to balk at the notion that the responsibility of the Treasury is to back the domestic lobby that presumptuously calls itself 'Britain plc'. The Tories' tax proposals need to be assessed on their merits - which seem to me politically unworkable given a welfare state of the size of ours - rather than be tied to a nationalist rallying-cry that would appeal most of all to a segment of right-wing opinion far removed from where George Osborne and his associates stand.

"Israel Shamir" again

I wrote recently about the curious case of a Chatham House Associate Fellow, Mrs Rime Allaf, who quotes approvingly the judgements of a notorious antisemite whose nom de plume is Israel Shamir.

I'm most grateful to Karl Pfeifer, a redoubtable anti-racist campaigner in Austria and a contributor to the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, for writing to me with further details of Shamir, and of those who are susceptible to his message. Mr Pfeifer recently published (in German) a detailed review of Shamir's work, which is available here. He points out that an Austrian left-wing publisher, ProMedia, recently published a book by Shamir entitled Blumen aus Galiläa (Flowers of Galilee). The book is edited by Fritz Edlinger, who is General Secretary of the Austro-Arab Friendship Society and the former representative of the Austrian Social Democrats on the Socialist International’s Middle East Committee. One of the chapters in the book is called ZOG (a term in common use among neo-Nazis to describe the government the United States: it stands for 'Zionist-Occupation Government'); a longer version of the paper, was according to Shamir's web site, "translated into German for Deutsches Kolleg". This is led by Horst Mahler, a founder of the German Red Army Fraction and now a leading figure on the German neo-Nazi Right. In this chapter and another entitled "eine juedische Medine" Shamir advances his claims that the US is ruled by the Jews. In his foreword to the book, Edlinger describes Shamir as "a leftist and a radical democrat".

An additional point that Mr Pfeifer raises is a highly favourable review given to this blatantly antisemitic book in the German weekly Freitag. The reviewer is a German journalist, Ludwig Watzal, whom I have come across before in his advocacy of the work of Noam Chomsky (Watzal interviews Chomsky here on the subject of Israel, in 1997). His latest cause, on this evidence, is to praise a virulent antisemite, Israel Shamir.

Shamir and his associate Gilad Atzmon, the jazz musician and antisemitic polemicist, have been the subject of comments on this site and Harry's Place before (Atzmon in particular, because of the invitations extended to him, and praise lavished upon him, by the Socialist Workers' Party in the UK). Let us therefore turn from such unpleasant characters, and the racist organisations that favour them, to a group of anti-Zionist activists who by their own declarations abjure any such contacts. This declaration of opposition to antisemitism is signed by 142 "individuals who are active in the search for justice and peace between Israelis and Palestinians [and who] state our opposition to the anti-Semitic ideologies that are being articulated within our movement". Among the signatories are Sue Blackwell of Birmingham University, who proposed to the Association of University Teachers the original motion (since rescinded) to boycott certain Israeli universities. And - oh, yes - Ludwig Watzal, who believes that Israel Shamir, the man who exposes Jewish control of the United States, is a writer of moral character who provides a candid depiction of Israel and its politics.

Time for the anti-Zionist movement to police its boundaries, I would suggest - and to do it properly this time.

Will the Osborne proposal fall flat?

This column appears in The Times today.

IF BEING LEADER of the Opposition is the most difficult task in politics, being Shadow Chancellor to Gordon Brown is scarcely less challenging. George Osborne has been quietly bolstering his reputation for intelligence and political weight in the role. This makes all the more noteworthy his advocacy this week of a flatter tax system.

The most obvious course for a politician tipped for greatness, yet hampered by a cherubic countenance and a light voice, would be to gain a reputation for solidity. Mr Osborne instead is courting controversy. In a well-trailed speech yesterday he floated the idea of a flat rate of income tax. He has appointed a commission to investigate its feasibility. He argues that even if a pure flat tax is unattainable, “we may be able to move towards simpler and flatter taxes”.

Mr Osborne is responding to a perceived need among sympathisers or potential supporters for a defining idea of modern Conservatism. In a paper published last month by the Centre for Policy Studies, the political commentator Stephen Pollard argued: “Advocacy of a flat tax presses all the right buttons. It is good for the economy. It is good for the poor. It is good for business. And it is easy to grasp.” Matthew d’Ancona, the Telegraph columnist, enthuses: “In fastening on the global flat tax revolution, Mr Osborne has given his party an invaluable navigational tool.”

The praise is premature. The proposals that Mr Osborne is investigating are being oversold. The marketing smacks of another poll tax. A flat tax — the application of a single marginal rate to all taxable income — is different from a poll tax, where everyone pays the same amount. But the proposals have one potentially lethal common characteristic: a serviceable intellectual case can be made for them, without any acknowledgement of the political costs.

To state, as Mr Osborne did on the Today programme yesterday, that “the rest of the world, including many countries in Europe, are reducing taxes” is neither true nor relevant. There has been a widespread move to flat taxes in the economies of Central and Eastern Europe. The recent history of the flat tax proposal outside those economies is more chequered.

The idea of a flat tax, in its current form, came from two American economists, Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka, in their book The Flat Tax, in 1985. In Congress, the proposal has gained some politically influential supporters, but has never quite shaken off its fringe status from having been a centrepiece of two quixotic presidential campaigns: those of the Democrat Jerry Brown in 1992, and the Republican Steve Forbes in 1996. Brown’ s eccentricity as Governor of California earned him the nickname Governor Moonbeam, while the billionaire Forbes’s radical economic ideas were seen to coincide seamlessly with his own material betterment.

In practical politics, the flat tax was the touchstone issue that fatally weakened the Labour Government in New Zealand in 1987-88. Roger Douglas, the Finance Minister, was a reforming economic liberal who had radically overhauled one of the most closed and sclerotic economies in the free world. For some reason, he proposed a flat rate that made a fiscal shortfall inevitable. His weak Prime Minister, David Lange, latched on to the issue as a populist move to reassert his political authority, but Lange’s critique of the consequences of the flat tax proposal was not wrong. Beyond those cases, the examples of states with a flat rate of income tax comprise either microstates (Mauritius, Hong Kong) or oil-rich states with a flat rate of zero.

None of these offers an auspicious precedent or any clear parallel for introducing a flat tax to a mature economy. The New Zealand controversy, on the contrary, illustrates one of the main potential hazards. Mr Osborne claims that a flat tax might enhance incentives to work while improving the position of the worst-off. But those claimed benefits would materialise only if the tax rate were set low enough and personal allowances set high enough. The Labour Party’s script almost writes itself: a Conservative Government would mean a burgeoning fiscal deficit, or a huge tax break for the rich, or a hidden agenda of massive cuts in public spending.

Mr Osborne is mounting an unnecessarily complicated argument for the idea of simplicity. A flat tax simplifies the tax system not because it imposes a uniform rate but because it ends exemptions. The complicated part of a tax calculation is to assess taxable income — once you have that figure, it is a simple calculation to deduct one, two or several marginal tax rates. If the Tories stuck to the criticism that new Labour has needlessly complicated the tax system through elaborate interventionism, they would make a good point with political resonance. As it is, they present a silver bullet for a non-existent problem, and here lies the potential for political damage.

Mr Osborne believes that flatter taxes are a way of dealing with the supposed competitive threat from India and China. In vain will you read his pronouncements for an acknowledgment that China and India represent an opportunity for sales and investment rather than a threat – consider Airbus.

While the Prime Minister is arguing the case in India for greater international trade and investment, the Tories insinuate that we have an economic problem in the outside world. The prospects for a liberal and modern form of Conservatism are opaque enough without one of its principal advocates, the Shadow Chancellor, abandoning the cause.

The A-bomb again

I quoted last week a letter in The Times by the veteran anti-nuclear campaigner Bruce Kent, criticising my article in the newspaper about CND's campaigning on the 60th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One of my readers, an academic historian, has paid Mr Kent the compliment of taking his argument sufficiently seriously to refute it in detail and send me the results. I'm grateful both for the email and for permission to post it here:

(1) Kent cites an excerpt from Admiral William Leahy's memoir, which gives the reader the impression that the Admiral opposed the use of the A-bomb on ethical grounds. In fact, 'I Was There' (written in 1950) is an unreliable source, tainted by hindsight and as partial as many a politician or decision-maker's recollections can be. Leahy's position on atomic weapons was affected by the fact that he simply did not believe that the bomb would work (an opinion discredited by the first test in New Mexico in July 1945). As far as Eisenhower and Montgomery were concerned, both men had fought in North Africa and Europe against the Germans and Italians. Their experiences, and those of the troops they commanded, were radically different from those of the US Army and Marines in the Pacific Island campaigns, or of 14th Army in Burma.

(2) Regarding the collapse of the Japanese army in Manchuria in August 1945. Kent (whose expertise in military history has hitherto not been noted) seems to imply that the manner in which the Soviets overran North-Eastern China demonstrated that Japan's defeat could have been brought about swiftly by conventional military operations. Any veteran of the East Asian war would tell you that this is a simply preposterous supposition. Regarding the Manchurian campaign, the fact was that the Japanese Kwangtung Army was a paper force, with much of its strength drawn away to fight on other fronts in the Pacific. Kent might perhaps want to consult the historical record to see how the Japanese fought (for example) to hold the Marianas, the Philippines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

(3) As for the debates over the number of casualties the Americans would have suffered in any invasion of the Home Islands, these are irrelevant because they are based on counterfactual reasoning. Nonetheless, the experience of war in the Pacific had shown the Americans how savagely the Japanese would fight for comparatively minor objectives. With the conquest of Saipan (June 1944), the battle ended with the defenders committing mass suicide, forcing civilians at bayonet point to jump off the cliffs on the Eastern tip of the island. In the Philippines campaign, the fight to liberate Manila ended in carnage. The Japanese gave no quarter, slaughtered thousands of Filipinos, and leveled the city. Manila had the dubious distinction of being the second most severely damaged allied capital after Warsaw. The Americans could have been forgiven for concluding that if the Japanese had fought with such a contempt for their own lives - let alone those of the enemy and of innocent civilians - in such peripheral campaigns, they were likely to be even more determined and fanatical foes when fighting on their own soil.

(4) Kent maintains that Japan's defeat in August 1945 was only a matter of time. Strictly speaking - with the complete destruction of the Japanese Navy and merchant fleet, and the remorseless firebombing of Japanese cities by the USAAF - it should have been. However, the question here is whether the Japanese military leadership was prepared to accept defeat. Before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this was not the case. States at war - particularly authoritarian-totalitarian ones - can fight on even when a reasonable mind would conclude that defeat was inevitable. After all, the war in Europe did not end until Hitler committed suicide in his bunker, and even in this case military operations only ended a week after his death. From Toyko's distorted perspective, defeat was not inevitable. By mid-August 1945, the Japanese Army still occupied most of Central and Eastern China, French Indochina, Thailand and the Dutch East Indies. American and British planners (the majority of whom were not privy to atomic secrets) presumed that there would be months of hard fighting across the Pacific theatre that would last into the autumn and winter of 1945-1946. The US government therefore had the choice between continuing with conventional operations across Asia (with a butcher's bill of allied servicemen and Asian civilians that one can only guess at) and what Lawrence Freedman and Saki Dockrill have termed the 'strategy of shock', namely the use of nuclear weapons to convince the Japanese that their defeat was inevitable. If we rid ourself of hindsight and our own contemporary mindset, we can see that they had no choice but to opt for the latter.

(5) It is certainly true that Japanese diplomats had made peace overtures via the Soviets before August 1945. However, the 'peace party' in Tokyo did not have the influence needed to persuade Emperor Hirohito to accept defeat. Only after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did proponents of surrender prevail in the imperial court (aided by assurances from Washington that the emperor would continue to have a role in post-war Japan). Even so, on the day that Hirohito broadcast Japan's acceptance of surrender (14th August), hardline military officers attempted a coup to regain power within the court and to force Japan to fight on.

The bottom line is that we cannot comprehend the decision to drop the atom bomb on Japan without considering the eight years of total war that had preceded it. The invasion of China, the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan death march and the pitiless nature of the East Asian war all influenced Truman's decision to use the bomb. In this respect, the last word on this issue should belong to George Macdonald Fraser, a veteran of the war in Burma, whose memoir 'Quartered Safe Out Here' (HarperCollins 1993) is required reading for anyone interested in the Second World War in Asia. I assure you that with this quote I have not done a Chomsky, and the section taken out and replaced with ellipses does not contradict Fraser's expressed views:

'[It] is now widely held (or at least it has been widely stated) that the dropping of atomic bombs was unnecessary because the Japanese were ready to give in . I shall say only that I wish those that hold that view had been present to explain the position to the little bastard who came howling out of the thicket near the Sittang, full of spite and fury, in that first week of August. He was half-starved and near naked, and his only weapon was a bamboo stake, but he was in no mood to surrender'.

Also on the peace campaigners' deus ex machina of the Admiral Leahy memoir, see the comments by D.M. Giangreco (also a historian who has kindly written to me with his comments on this controversy) in this article, about halfway down the page. If any readers are in touch with Bruce Kent (I once wrote to him two or three years ago, but he expressed displeasure on hearing from me, and I wouldn't wish to try his goodwill again), I think they would be doing him a favour by drawing this material to his attention.