Nick Cohen: Writing from London

Jews get the blame in every great crisis, and it was inevitable that conspiracy theorists would blame them for the foreign policy crisis of the early 21st century.

What distinguishes our time, however, is that elements within western liberalism now adopt the position once associated with European reaction. I noticed that there was much grumbling in Standpoint’s letters column after the editor pointed out that the supposedly leftist and supposedly serious London Review of Books had been promoting anti-Semitism rather than say the Spectator or Mail as one would have expected in the 1930s. However loudly readers complained, they could not deny that the LRB had been the first to offer its “enlightened” readers the conspiracy theory of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that the “Israel Lobby” had taken America into the second Iraq War. “For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel,” the authors intoned. “Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical.”

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When PR men want to sell journalists a line, their favourite opening gambit is gross sycophancy. “Hey, I lurve your work,” they smarm. “It’s great to meet ya, you’ve been doing wonderful stuff.” Reporters know they are lying. We suspect they have never read a damn word we have written. But we remain in danger of being flattered by their shameless eagerness to please into turning off our bullshit detectors.

Never forget the only job David Cameron had outside politics was as a PR man buttering-up contacts on behalf of the TV station Carlton, whose disappearance raised the quality of British television overnight. “In my experience, he never gave a straight answer when dissemblance was a plausible alternative,” said the Telegraph’s veteran business reporter Jeff Randall, who dealt with him regularly. “I wouldn’t trust him with my daughter’s pocket money.”

Under Cameron the Foreign Office has become the marketing department of Great Britain Inc. He has decided that Simon Fraser, permanent secretary at the Department for Business, should be the next head of the diplomatic service and run it on commercial lines. He envisages a future when corporate hotshots and CBI bureaucrats can become Her Britannic Majesty’s ambassadors to far-flung lands the better to cut deals with the natives. Labour’s ethical dimension to foreign policy, such as it was, is history. Cameron tours the world not as statesman or democratic leader but as Britain’s head of PR, whose job is to suck up to potential customers until they buy a nuclear reactor or Hawk jet. If alert listeners catch a direct falsehood in his sales patter, aides are on hand to explain that he “misspoke” or was misunderstood.
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The leaked Afghan war documents show that the trouble with the Net is that every liberating feature its boosters claim as a virtue is also a vice. In the pre-computer age, a mole could not have got 90,000 documents out a military base and to a journalist without being arrested. Nor for that matter could a disaffected worker in Parliament copy all the receipts of all the expense claims of 650 MPs and deliver them to the Telegraph. He would need to spend the best part of a morning loading them into a removal van, rather than slipping a couple of computer discs into his pocket, and the odds are security guards would realise a crime was going down long before he had heaved in the last box.
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My paper the Observer has now got stuck in with a debate between Boyd Hilton, who argues that British TV has no problems, and Euan Ferguson, who says the Brits are years behind. Boyd supports his argument by saying that the BBC made The Office

I’ve met many an American TV producer/writer/actor who talks in the same misty-eyed manner about Gervais and Merchant as we do about the creators of The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and Mad Men. And even though The Office is a comedy rather than a brooding, intense drama, if the question is “have we produced anything of similar quality?”, rather than “have we produced anything similar of similar quality?” I think you’ll find most American TV types would point to The Office (the final two episodes of which were pretty much comedy-drama anyway).

This is to miss the point,as Boyd half acknowledges.
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From the Observer. “And the Lord said unto Cain: “Where is Abel thy brother?” And he said: “I know not. Am I my brother’s keeper?” And he said: “What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.” Like David and Ed Miliband, I come from a left-wing family. Red diaper babies were not taught to “do” God by our parents, only to do him in. The Miliband boys will not have learned that the first story in Genesis after the Fall is of brother murdering brother, and the book goes on to describe how Jacob tricked his older brother Esau into selling his birthright for a “mess of potage”.

You have to look hard to find family values upheld in the Bible, or indeed in most families. Miliband v Miliband was meant to be a clean contest. Mutual politeness would hide the primal spectacle of brother fighting brother as they struggled for the leadership of a centre-left party, which satirically claims to be committed to the ideals of fraternity and the brotherhood of man. “David is my best friend in the world. I love him dearly,” said a suspiciously syrupy Ed. “Are you saying that annoys me? It doesn’t annoy me at all,” said a frankly unconvincing David about Ed’s candidature. Labour’s justification for fratricidal strife was that it had suffered from not getting its old disputes in the open. Because Gordon Brown did not run against Tony Blair, he was able to inflict a decade of envious sulking on the party while he nursed the myth that he was somehow the rightful heir who had been robbed of his inheritance. Because no one stood against him, Gordon Brown was crowned rather than elected prime minister with disastrous consequences for party and country.

All of which is true, but beside the point.
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The Belarus Free Theatre arrived in London last week and seemed to take us from the 2010s to the 1970s. Everything was as it had been in the cold war. Just as Havel and Kundera came to speak for oppressed Czechs, so the actors from Europe’s last dictatorship are the most prominent and bravest critics of Belarus’s rotting Brezhnevian state. Just as Tom Stoppard was a friend to east European dissidents during communism, so he is a friend to Belarussia’s underground artists today. Following tradition once more, Stoppard welcomed them to Britain on behalf of Index on Censorship, which Stephen Spender created in 1972 to speak for persecuted Soviet writers.

Ironic asides, which so many artists deployed to survive and subvert communism, peppered my conversation with Natalia Koliada, the theatre’s founder and a woman with the relaxed courage of a committed democrat who accepts the risk of persecution. She tells the grim story of how the secret police have threatened her husband and forced her company to perform in bars or private houses or in the woods before an audience she must vet to ensure it does not contain informers, and then pulls herself up short. A grin breaks out on her elfin face and she declares: “Our dictator still calls our secret police the KGB. At least he’s honest about that.”
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From the Observer
Britain has just had the most extreme budget in its recent history. It is not hysterical to imagine that we will soon be a miserable and angry country as a result. At a minimum, we are entering a future in which police officers will be fired and criminals left free to proceed unmolested; fire stations will close so the chances of your home going up in smoke will rise; teachers, university and teaching assistants will go, leaving the young more in danger of spending their lives in ignorance than they already are; housing, rail and road projects will be cancelled; regiments disbanded; and the sick, handicapped and old left to suffer. To top it all, everyone’s taxes will rise as well.

Foreigners are looking at the government inflicting the suffering with some amazement. As the New York Times noted on Friday: “No reputable economic theory justifies this bleeding.” By going beyond the already stringent austerity programme Labour had planned “in pursuit of a pointless structural budget surplus”, the Tories and Liberals risk pushing Britain into “years of stagnation”.

Yet the British seem to be enjoying themselves. The sun shines for weeks on end, the pubs and the cafes heave and warm feelings of approval engulf the new administration. George Osborne feared he would become the most hated man in the country. Last week, a Mori poll reported that he was not only popular, but the most popular Conservative chancellor since its records began in the 1970s. Meanwhile, all surveys show that the voters regard David Cameron and Nick Clegg as decent men trying their hardest, rather than dangerous ideologues or blithering idiots.
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No names, but recently I offered my services to a member of the campaign team of one of the Labour leadership candidates. “When the Brownites come for you, when craven lobby correspondents take orders at dictation speed from anonymous briefers and put false rumours about you in supposedly independent papers, let me know and I will help you fight back.”
The young woman looked appalled. I had committed a grave social error. No, no she insisted. This was a clean election. There would be no dirty tricks. Labour politicians were candid friends, fighting each other, yes, but in a courteous and comradely fashion.
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The quid pro quo for Tories accepting the AV system is to wrap it up with a package which will cut the number of Parliamentary constituencies. Nick Clegg was full of wind and self-righteousnes when he commended it to the Commons yesterday.

Every Member of this House was elected knowing that this Parliament must be unlike any other-that we have a unique duty to restore the trust in our political system that has been tested to its limits in recent times-and if anything was clear at the general election it was that more and more people realised that our political system was broken and needs to be fixed. They want us to clean up politics. They want to be able to hold us properly to account. So the Government have set out an ambitious programme for political renewal, transferring power away from the Executive to empower Parliament, and away from Parliament to empower people.

As I explained yesterday, AV is a system no one – including Mr Clegg – believes in because in landslide elections it will mean the winning party’s seat total is even greater than under first-past-the-post, and the chances of powerful governments meeting strong opposition will diminish accordingly. But what about cutting the number of constituencies?
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Next year’s referendum on the alternative vote is meant to be the pivot on which the coalition government will swivel. The thinking runs that if the Liberals lose then they have no reason to continue their cohabitation with the Tories and Labour is back in the game. I doubt this and suspect that if public spending cuts push us back into recession, mass unemployment and penury will bring Labour back. (And conversely, if the Conservatives and Liberals manage to build a prosperous society, then their future is assured.)
Still AV excites the pundits, and yet few are noticing something very strange about this pivotal reform: no one actually wants it.
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