Monday, 19th January 2009
The mild-mannered British desire for the annihilation of Israel
1:28am
The British sociologist Frank Furedi reports what he has heard from Britain’s educated classes since the Gaza crisis began:
I am standing in a queue waiting to buy a train ticket from London to Canterbury. A well-dressed lady standing behind me informs her friend that she ‘can’t wait till Israel disappears off the face of the earth.’ What struck me was not her intense hostility to Israel but the mild-mannered, matter-of-fact tone with which she announced her wish for the annihilation of a nation. It seems that it is okay to condemn and demonize Israel. All of a sudden Israel has become an all-purpose target for a variety of disparate and confused causes. When I ask a group of Pakistani waiters sitting around a table in their restaurant why they ‘hate’ Israel, they casually tell me that...
Wisdom -- or insanity?
1:07am
We will not know for some time whether the tactical considerations behind Israel’s cease-fire in Gaza are shrewd or insane. I have to say that it seems to me crazy to leave Hamas still in control in Gaza, but I hear the counter-arguments. There is a tendency in the west – and indeed in some parts of Israeli society too – to view through a western and thus distorting prism matters in the Middle East which are driven by a very different cultural dynamic. Accordingly, I suggest that while deciding how to assess what's happened, it’s worth bearing in mind the following:
January 19, 2009 Big beasts return to a fading landscape Daily Mail, 19 January 2009 Stop, I feel dizzy! British politics is bouncing up and down like a yo-yo. Only five minutes ago, it seems, Gordon Brown was hailed as the saviour of not just the British economy but the planet. Around the world, his prescription for dealing with the financial crisis was being talked up as the most life-enhancing development since the invention of penicillin. In Britain, opinion polls suggested the public agreed he was the best person to steer the country through this crisis. The charge that he had actually helped create and even exacerbate it through astronomically reckless levels of borrowing fell, apparently, on deaf ears. Accordingly, the Prime Minister’s previously dire political situation changed virtually overnight. The Tories, who appeared able only to criticise his fiscal stimulus package without producing an alternative, left themselves wide open to Brown’s lethal taunt that they were the ‘do-nothing’ party. The credit crunch had saved him from political oblivion. Brown up, Tories down. Now, however, two opinion polls have suggested that Brown’s strategy has flopped. One gave the Tories a 13-point lead, a seven-point jump from last month, with six out of ten saying Brown was doing badly as Prime Minister. Another gave them a nine-point lead, with a majority saying they trusted the Tories more than Labour to improve their standard of living. Undoubtedly, many people no longer believe Brown can save Britain’s economy, let alone the planet. As redundancies rise, they observe the mounting evidence not merely that his approach hasn’t worked, but that the economy is still in freefall. Now the Government is apparently to announce yet another desperate measure to get things under control. Taxpayers will take on the ‘toxic’ debts of High Street banks, in an insurance scheme that would see liabilities of up to £200 billion potentially kept on the public books for years. This shows that last autumn’s £37 billion bank bail-out has failed. Taxpayers are to shoulder an even greater financial burden in yet another attempt to unblock Britain’s paralysed financial system, but with no greater certainty that this will work either. People can see that the Government is throwing eye-watering amounts of public money at the problem — but with no sign that any of these measures is having the slightest effect. The distressing impression that the Government hasn’t got the faintest idea what it is doing was reinforced by the business minister Lady Vadera, who confided that she was seeing ‘a few green shoots’ of recovery — this on the day that 3,000 jobs were axed and the FTSE fell by more than 200 points. Displaying similarly magical qualities of vision denied to lesser mortals, the housing minister Margaret Beckett has claimed there are signs of an ‘upturn’ in the property market — despite official figures showing house prices plummeting at an unprecedented rate. It can also hardly have helped endear the Prime Minister to the public that the more catastrophic the state in which the economy was shown to be in, the more he appeared to gain a spring in his step. Nor does it help that in other areas the Government appears to want to punish productive members of the public rather than help them cope with difficult times. While the economy totters from ruin to catastrophe, the return of ‘class war’ as the Government’s big idea, not to mention the ruinous absurdity of reducing carbon emissions to curb global warming when the climate is actually cooling, suggests a government which has chosen to locate itself firmly on Planet Make-Believe. With Brown thus down, there is nevertheless no full-throated public enthusiasm for the Conservative Party’s position — as David Cameron himself understands. While the public may have decided to vote against Gordon Brown, they are not yet prepared in large enough numbers to vote forDavid Cameron. If last night’s political briefings were correct, today’s Shadow Cabinet reshuffle will reflect the Tory leader’s concern that his team is regarded as too shallow and lightweight to be trusted with such intractable problems as the economy — a perception heightened by the unfortunate episode of George Osborne’s dalliance last summer with Oleg Deripaska on board the oligarch’s yacht in Corfu. Hence his decision to expand the role and importance of the formidable William Hague and even bring back Ken Clarke, the ultimate ‘big beast’ of Tory politics, into the Shadow Cabinet jungle. This would be a high risk move, indeed, given Clarke’s pro-EU views and his incorrigible tendency to act as a loose cannon. But Cameron is undoubtedly right to see the need for some weighty big hitters around him. One of yesterday’s polls also revealed that half of all respondents thought the Tories were ‘not yet ready for government’ — up four points from last September — while almost four in ten thought it was right to describe them as the ‘do nothing’ party. In particular, Cameron needs a very big beast indeed to take on the Business Secretary, Lord Mandelson — whose position has become one of the most extraordinary features of this weirdly discombobulated political landscape. Mandelson was brought back into government as a desperate measure to save the Labour Party from all-but certain annihilation under Brown at the next election. Since then, the reported love-in between these two former mortal enemies has become one of the wonders of the world. But the unforeseen consequence has been that Mandelson’s presence has actually made Brown seem a much diminished figure. Mandelson exudes confidence, makes (whether or not you agree with him) a masterful presentation of his case and seems in command of every situation. Brown, by contrast, whose role appears to consist of making comments the interpretation of which defy the ingenuity of the human mind while he struts the world’s stage, looks more and more like the front man for the real Prime Minister, the lordly Mandelson. Whether he’s selling off the Royal Mail, reading the Riot Act over getting credit moving to cash-strapped businesses or pushing the third runway at Heathrow, it is Mandelson who appears to be running Britain - yet he hasn’t even been elected to Parliament. Is it not extraordinary, though, that both parties are shoring up their own weaknesses by bringing back re-treads who have left the political front-line on account of their failure, mendacity, treachery, ideological incompatibility or sleaze? Both Government and Opposition appear to be marching together under the same slogan: ‘Forward to the past.’ Ultimately, however, such re-arrangement of the political furniture is unlikely to make much difference. For the public are terminally disenchanted with the entire political scene. Totally bemused by the financial meltdown, they perceive that no politician appears to have a clue either. MPs themselves hardly exude any more confidence in themselves. With their woeful attendance records, long holidays and shorter hours, and with ministers making announcements anywhere but in the Commons chamber, there is a palpable sense that power has moved elsewhere. Almost certainly, an electoral tipping point was reached some time ago when people decided that it was ‘time for a change’. If so, there’s virtually nothing Labour can do to avert defeat. But far deeper and much more dangerous is that the entire political process is simply becoming irrelevant to people’s lives. |
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