The future of Egypt following the departure of President Hosni Mubarak remains opaque. No one can currently predict whether it will end up as a democracy with free elections, a military dictatorship, or an Islamic theocratic tyranny. But the Western Left has known one thing for certain from the very start of the protests: that the tyrannical dictator Mubarak had to go, that the protesters in Tahrir Square were all on the side of freedom and that the convulsions presaged a joyous new dawn of democracy and human rights. This was despite the serious risk of an Islamist takeover in Egypt, with the consequent extinction of human rights for the Egyptians worse than anything under Mubarak’s clearly repressive regime. And it was also despite the fact that opinion polls have suggested that many, if not most Egyptians harbour Islamist, anti-Western and ferociously anti-Jewish ideas. Nevertheless, Western progressives were shouting for regime change. At which point it began to seem that, like Alice, one had somehow been transported through the looking-glass. For during the past seven years, Western liberals have fulminated without remission that George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Tony Blair were criminally out to lunch to pretend that democracy could ever come to Iraq through ousting a dictator. The neo-con article of faith, that the Arab or Islamic world, could or should embrace democracy and human rights, was held up as an example of cultural imperialism, racist bigotry or insanity, or all three. But suddenly everyone in the bien-pensant world has apparently become a neo-con. The US, they now fulminated, had been criminally obtuse in propping up the dictator Mubarak rather than helping turn Egypt into a democracy. So what was the difference? Simple. Saddam Hussein was an enemy of the West; Mubarak was an ally. So progressives claimed that getting rid of the former was a crime against humanity, while not getting rid of the latter was a crime against humanity. Got that? It would doubtless be uncharitable to add that, throughout this supposedly diabolical Mubarak presidency those same liberals saw no problem taking vacations rubber-necking round the Pyramids or steaming up the Nile. No boycott, divestment or sanctions movement there; such censure is never applied by the Left to any of the tyrannies of the Middle East, of course, only against the sole democracy in the region: Israel. Nor do the double standards stop there. When the people of Lebanon made their pitch for democracy against the crushing oppression of Hezbollah, Western bien-pensants were totally indifferent. When the people of Iran made their pitch for democracy against the savage cruelties of the Islamic regime, the bien-pensants were totally indifferent. But when the Egyptians took to the streets, the bien-pensants all but wetted themselves with excitement. What was the difference? If the Lebanese and Iranians had succeeded, the West would have been strengthened. But the risk still remains that the canny Muslim Brotherhood will bide their time before pouncing and coming to power in Egypt, which would of course furnish another major threat for the free world. And this is the most frightening thing of all in this back-to-front universe: the way in which the West has sanitised the Muslim Brothers and even, in the case of the Obama administration, actually tried to push them into power. When it wasn’t flip-flopping over whether Mubarak should stay or go, the White House first said it wouldn’t mind if the Muslim Brothers became part of the Egyptian government. Then it urged the inclusion of ‘important non-secular actors’ — code for the Muslim Brothers — in a ‘more democratic’ Egypt. And then it was revealed that its proposal for the immediate transfer of power called for the transitional government to include the brotherhood. What madness was this? The Muslim Brothers’ goal is to Islamise the world. They are religious fascists. While certainly there are millions of Muslims around the world who do want to live under democracy, the Brothers are totally against any secular rule at all and stand for an extinction of human rights. They are fanatical Jew-haters. In the 1930s they were effectively created as a political force by the Nazi Party, with which they formulated a final solution for Palestine by ridding it of its Jews, an agenda continued today by their offshoot, Hamas. Today, they are no less the mortal enemies of the free world. Their leaders have declared war on America, gloating that the US is ‘experiencing the beginning of its end and is heading towards its demise’, and that ‘resistance is the only solution’. They support al-Qa’ida terrorism ‘against the Americans and the Zionists’. They declared that after Mubarak they would dissolve the peace treaty with Israel. They support Hezbollah, make overtures to Iran, and openly employ a strategy of simulating moderation to gain power though democratic means in order to destroy democracy. If Egypt is eventually taken over by the brotherhood, Jordan will be next, and both will turn into Iran/Gaza in a matter of a few years. Oh, and the Brothers are also busy Islamising Britain and America. Yet on both sides of the pond, significant elements of the political and defence establishment have decided that the Muslim Brothers are basically peace-loving, sensible, pragmatic chaps who are useful allies against the men of violence. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the double standards of the Left result from its deep hatred of the Western society whose basic values they wish to overturn. Whether during the French Revolution or the Stalinist purges, the Left has repeatedly sided with the extinction of human freedom and refused to accept the monstrous evidence of its own credulousness. Among political and defence elites, moreover, the stranglehold of multicultural victim culture, the influence of revisionist ’scholars’ such as John Esposito or Karen Armstrong who sanitise Islam, and the deep desire to take the path of least resistance — plus the reflexive view that the real threat to the world is not the Islamic jihad but the state of Israel — means that the establishment meets the Left on the same side of the looking-glass. Has there ever been a civilisation more bent on collective suicide than the contemporary West? *This is an expanded version of the article that appeared in the Jewish Chronicle on 11th February 2011 Daily Mail, 15 February 2011 So now we all know what the Big Society is. Or do we? After panic in Number Ten that David Cameron’s Big Idea was merely causing irritation because no one knew what on earth it meant, the Prime Minister’s speech yesterday was supposed to spell it out. But are we really any the wiser? The Big Society, said Mr Cameron, was his ‘absolute passion’ and his ‘mission in politics’. Good. It offered a ‘different way of governing’. Very good. Accordingly, he wanted people to take more responsibility for their own lives. Absolutely splendid. But how was all this to be accomplished? The Number Ten website tells us that the Big Society means a ‘massive transfer of power from Whitehall’ through ‘existing public service reforms and encouraging people to get involved in their communities’. But getting involved by doing what, precisely? Well, taking responsibility. See what I mean? It’s an explanation that seems to chase its own tail. Because it’s all so vague, people think the Big Society is just spin to cover up the cuts in public spending. That particular charge, though, can’t be right: Mr Cameron alighted upon this Big Society idea when he was still in opposition. But the reason he did so hardly offers much reassurance that his ‘mission’ rests on a solid base of thinking. In opposition, Mr Cameron was vulnerable to the charge that he was merely a political opportunist who stood for nothing except gaining power. He had to find a Big Idea to define his vision. But he had a problem. On the one hand, he wanted to reposition the Tories as a party of social conscience. On the other hand, he knew he could not afford to break with the core Conservative belief that state control was a bad thing. So he came up with the idea that big government should be replaced by the Big Society – which detached the idea of a collective social project from the state. The real beauty of this wheeze was that it offered an appeal to both Left and Right at the same time. Conservatives have always supported the insight by the 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke that the health of a free society depends upon the ‘little platoons’. These are all the social institutions that stand between the individual and the state – family, churches, voluntary organisations, mutual aid societies, professional associations. It is these ‘little platoons’, said Burke, which provide the cultural glue that keeps a society together. But in recent years, elements on the political Left have also arrived at a very similar conclusion, believing that the only way to ‘empower’ the most disadvantaged in society is to give them control over public services and their local environment. This necessarily pitted such Left-wing radicals against the very state whose control over people’s lives they had once championed. Education authorities, town hall officials and welfare bureaucracies were seen as meddlesome barriers to making the improvements that poor people actually wanted to their lives. At their best – in places such as Birmingham’s Balsall Heath or London’s Bromley-by-Bow – such initiatives were tremendously moving and inspiring, with people rebuilding shattered communities and emerging out of sullen depression into can-do optimism. This was the milieu in which Mr Cameron’s principal guru and former community activist Steve Hilton had worked. Thus, under his influence, the Big Society was born. At its core is a really good and truly radical idea: the end of an over-mighty state that demoralises people and saps both altruism and personal responsibility. It harks back to the great heyday of British liberalism in Victorian England, which saw an astonishing flowering of philanthropic and voluntary associations. Through these ‘little platoons’ of civil society, people came together to create a better world. As a result, by the turn of the 20th century social problems such as violent crime, mass drunkenness and illegitimacy were all significantly reduced so that Britain became a more civilised and tranquil society. This magnificent civil society, however, was swept away by the arrival of the welfare state. Voluntary giving and personal responsibility were replaced by the culture of rights and entitlement that followed from the belief that the state was more beneficent than the voluntary world. This is Mr Cameron’s first and greatest problem. For the Big Society cannot spring up unless the welfare state is actually dismantled. And for all Mr Cameron’s trumpeting of a ‘massive transfer of power’ from the state to the people, his public service reforms amount to nothing of the kind. The great top-down edifices of health, education or welfare remain in place. Even the charities that Mr Cameron is so heavily promoting have themselves become an arm of the state upon which they so overwhelmingly depend for financial support – as demonstrated by their unedifying wailing about cuts in government funding. The one big change, making police forces accountable to local people, is ironically the one area where power should not be transferred, since one of the few ineradicable responsibilities of the state is surely to safeguard the security of the citizenry. The real point, though, is that people only want to contribute to a society when it binds them together by a cultural glue. It was no accident that in the Victorian era, those great voluntary organisations were overwhelmingly Christian – because people were inspired by nothing less than the goal of saving people’s souls. But today, Christians find themselves under the cosh of political correctness. The Prime Minister’s claim that power is being transferred to the people surely rings particularly hollow for those Christians who find themselves arrested, prosecuted or sued when they dare to challenge the shibboleths of ‘lifestyle choice’ to which Mr Cameron adheres. Not only is this cultural glue dissolving, but so too is the key sense of sharing in a national project. The real point, though, is that people only want to contribute to a society when it binds them together by a cultural glue The heyday of the philanthropic society was when Britain bestrode the world as a great power – and believed in itself as a result. But not only has it now lost its empire, it is also losing its very sovereignty to Europe. Apparently, ministers have only just woken up to the fact that half of the UK’s laws are now made in Brussels or Strasbourg. Well hello boys and welcome to Planet Reality. The fact is that you can’t have a ‘massive transfer of power’ from Whitehall to local communities when Whitehall itself no longer has much power because it has massively transferred it to Europe. All of which is why it is so difficult to find any substance to the Big Society. There is a really good, indeed noble idea buried here. But for it to work, Mr Cameron has to bite various bullets he has so far shown every inclination to dodge. He has to start defending the key cultural bonds of ‘faith, family and flag’ which he currently ignores, scorns or undermines; and he has to conduct a fundamental reform of the welfare state. Unless he does so, his Big Society risks being seen as nothing more than vapid political positioning – and turning into a Big Embarrassment.
Tuesday, 15 February 2011
February 15, 2011
On Egypt, the Left are all neo-cons now*
A noble idea — but in danger of being a Big Flop
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