Revolt in the desert

“They were weak in material resources, and even after success would be, since their world was agricultural and pastoral, without minerals, and could never be strong in modern armaments.  Were it otherwise, we should have had to pause before evoking in the strategic centre of the Middle East new national movements of such abounding vigour.” — T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1922

There’s only so long any self-respecting blogger can ignore writing about the news when there’s only one story in town.  I’ve watched transfixed this evening as Colonel Gaddafi has appeared as a sort of reactionary situationist, appropriately enough in what looked like a Trabant, under an umbrella, mumbling a few words of defiance.  With this surreal performance he seems to have stolen the spirit of Plastic People of the Universe and turned it on its head, offering the world a slice of performance art while dropping heavy ordnance on his citizens.

Anyway, here’s my dinar’s worth on the revolutions there, in Egypt, and across the Maghreb and the Levant.  It seems to me that, if you can’t buy your people off with a decent standard of living (as the Gulf states have), then brute force on its own is rather shaky.  Regimes that have explicitly co-opted hardline Islam into their rationales for power look like they’re on safer ground.  In Egypt and Tunisia, Facebook-friendly teens in jeans have made common cause with conservative Muslims to bring down secular, military dictators: neither had any stake in the status quo ante.  In Iran and Saudi, though, the regimes have ruled by division, giving the hardcore peasantry the sort of hardcore religious rule most of them still apparently want.  Now the mullahs and the al-Sauds are all that stand between their pious populations and the abyss of Western modernity and liberalism (and, having had a night out on the Reeperbahn, I can’t really blame them).

In Egypt, then, the very supportive Western media have downplayed the potential of the Muslim Brotherhood, and up-played the legit gripes of hip, godless youngsters who only want nuff respec’ from the olds.  I don’t see any reason not to go along with this analysis, but I don’t think we know enough about what goes on behind Gaddafi’s iron veil to say with any certainty that the same applies in Libya.  (I also don’t blame the Israelis for being nervous, but I would remind them that democracies that trade with each other never go to war with each other.  I would also remind them, as a critical well wisher, that they do themselves very few favours by continuing to build on occupied Palestinian land.)

Either way, for a while I’ve said that history was stuck with Islamism after the failures of socialism and Arab nationalism.  If it turns out that democracy as we understand it has more appeal than Islamism after all, then I will happily find something new to say.

Here, then, is my first go at cod historiography.  No doubt Wikileaks and Twitter will take the credit, but these revolutions, like revolutions generally, are about unemployed young men unhappy with rising food and commodity prices.  For this, perhaps, they have the BICs’ (I refuse to include Russia) entry into world wealth to thank; perhaps the Arabs are just slightly ahead of us in realising that economic globalisation really does sort the men from the boys.  It may be, then, that when the dust settles, those who predicted that the rise of China’s middle class would bring a fourth wave of democracy to hundreds of millions of people will be proved half right: they were just wrong about it happening in China.

“Our race will have a cripple’s temper till it has found its feet.” — King Faisal I of Iraq, quoted in Seven Pillars of Wisdom

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Amazing disgrace

Regular readers will be pleased to learn I wasn’t executed for bringing drugs, or pirate DVDs, into Singapore.  I spent a couple of weeks in the weirdo socialist-consumerist city-state; and a few days in Malaysia, which boasts the world’s most laid-back Muslims, where we took a very rickety sleeper train through jungle highlands to reach the beautiful, secluded Perhentian Islands; a couple of days among the spectacular ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia; and a few days in Thailand, which is always one of the world’s most welcoming countries and, happily for us, refuses to involve foreigners in its domestic squabbles.  In other news, I’ve also been working on and off at the House of Lords, which is usually pretty soporific, but something newsworthy happens every 400 or so years.

Anyway, you’ll be relieved I’m back home just in time to share my thoughts on the forthcoming European Parliament elections.  As on various other issues, I am broadly Eurosceptic more for practical than ideological reasons.  The MPs’ expenses revelations which have provided so much entertainment lately are small bier compared to the high-speed Brussels gravy express.  The EU’s farming and fisheries policies (which take up the bulk of its budget) are well-documented catastrophes.  Almost everyone wants free trade with Europe, and almost everyone is glad we were able to offer former Soviet Bloc countries aid and trade in return for democracy and human rights, but almost no-one wants the political and legal superstructure that has come with it.  Amid the torrent of articles reminding us just how bad the 1970s were, and insisting there was no alternative to Thatcherism, bear in mind what a fraudulent failure her European policy was.  The rebate demand was a shoddy diversion from the evaporation of sovereignty, the acquiescence into ever greater union, which she did nothing to stop.

So, although the Conservative position on Europe might seem reasonable now, their record isn’t exactly trustworthy.  I certainly can’t vote in an EU election for any party so duplicitous (Labour) or dogmatic (the Lib Dems) as to oppose a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.  Neither am I sold on the Europhile SNP, who would have us quit sterling and join a currency run by a manufacturing giant with a completely different business cycle.  We would no longer have the option of inflating ourselves out of debt, of devaluing our currency to boost exports, or of realigning interest rates to boost demand or cool inflation.  Even if you take the nationalist view that these rules are dictated by London anyway, they are at least dictated for the needs of an economic cycle to which Scotland is inextricably attached.  This wouldn’t be the case in the Euro: how could Scotland, with low interest rates set by the EU, have avoided an Irish-style housing bubble and subsequent crash?  I’m not a doommonger about Scotland’s independent economic prospects generally (alternative energy has magically replaced oil overnight as our future source of great riches, but the case is much more convincing when applied to Scotland than to Britain as a whole), but on the currency question I’ve yet to be convinced.  In fact I’ve only very rarely heard anyone from the SNP defend the pro-Euro policy, so perhaps it’s something they’d rather not talk about.  Salmond was asked about it at a talk I went to recently, and replied that he had always favoured more monetary and fiscal stability.  But surely any stability would be greatly at the expense of flexibility.  Is there any debate on this within the SNP?  Is there a wing of the party which supports pegging to the pound, or having our own currency altogether?  If any SNP fans are reading, please educate me.

I’m slipping off topic: the Euro’s not on the agenda in this election.   Giving Labour a final boot in the balls before their crucifixion on the Appian Way out of Downing St next year is on the agenda, so the myriad smaller parties – UKIP, the Greens, No2EU – look like good protest votes to suit the new anti-politics mood.

The BNP aren’t a good protest vote: they’re the only party left that are even worse than New Labour.  Their constitution specifically prohibits anyone other than “indigenous Caucasians” from joining.  That they haven’t removed this clause, to break through as a mainstream anti-immigration party, shows what they really stand for.  As Nick Griffin said, “I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that 6 million Jews were gassed and cremated or turned into lamp shades.  Orthodox opinion also once held that the earth is flat.  I have reached the conclusion that the ‘extermination’ tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie and latter witch-hysteria.”  He should really team up with the Islamic fundamentalists.  And what would his electorate make of him trashing the creation myths of WWII?  I’m all for free speech, but I’m more offended by crimes against history than I am by their censorship: so in the case of denying something as undeniable as the Holocaust, I’m inclined towards the (modern) German position.

Anyway, I can’t think of anything more irrational or inhuman than discriminating against individuals or groups on racial grounds, whether the old-fashioned way or by affirmative action.  It shouldn’t be a crime to judge people on the basis of their beliefs, such as that Muhammad ascended to Heaven with the archangel Gabriel from the Dome of the Rock on the back of a winged mare, or that man coexisted with dinosaurs in 4004 BC, or that gays and adulterers should be stoned to death, or that women should be neither seen nor heard, or that the Holocaust didn’t happen.  You can nail your colours to the mast, but not to your skin, as it were.  So voting for the BNP – and giving these knuckle-dragging thugs a seat in the European Parliament – will do nothing but strengthen the state-sponsored industry that exists to exaggerate the BNP’s threat.  See Peter Hitchens for fine expositions of why even right-wing little Englanders should reject the BNP.

Ideally I would like to vote for a party that combined Green views on the environment with UKIP views on immigration.  The two are perfectly related: I no more want to live on a concrete island of 70 million people than I do on a boiling world of 9 billion.  Liberal democratic capitalism can’t continue to grow much beyond the level of resource depletion we’ve now reached without destroying the planet, and human civilisation with it.  This century we’ll either have to reduce the scale on which our existing system operates or invent some new one.  Either way, population control globally and nationally seems a sensible place to start.  Unfortunately most on the right seem convinced that because lefties noticed global warming first the whole thing must be a lefty plot.  It isn’t, but a lot of right-wing commentators are doing their best to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The ‘green left’, meanwhile, don’t believe in things like national borders or cultural differences.  This is a pity, because their insistence (with the full support of the pro-business right) on mass immigration and cultural segregation has created, in Britain and Europe, a huge and growing section of society with archaic, extreme and in many cases medievally conservative views.  (I don’t know how many British Muslims they asked in this survey, but it’s telling that none of them thought homosexuality was morally acceptable.)  This probably wasn’t what they had in mind, wracked with postcolonial guilt forty years ago, but the road to Helmand is paved with good intentions.

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In the Wildersness

I’m not sure there’s much to say about the Home Office’s refusal to allow Dutch MP Geert Wilders into Britain to show his film Fitna at the House of Lords.  After spurious laws on incitement to religious hatred, and the myriad attempts to criminalise everyone – from the humiliation of airport shoe removal to the sinister new exit visa interviews – to disguise the real issue, we shouldn’t be surprised that it is now, de facto, illegal to challenge the multicultural orthodoxy.  The government knows how flimsy their case is.  They rightly conclude they would lose a debate on the state of free speech and civil liberties, and on the role of Islam in our modern British polity, so prevent the debate taking place.  Labour politicians must realise the contradiction of palling around with the most reactionary section of British society, but are far too reliant on their votes to stop now.

Fellow commentator Mr Teal put it nicely: “The only way I can see his arrival in Britain endangering public safety is if Islamic extremists decide to blow him up.  In doing this they’re basically agreeing with him that Islam incites terrorism.”  The government position – that Wilders is the mirror image of the Islamic fascists he critiques – is not credible, however crude his critique may be.  His film (if we can call it that – it’s more a snippet of agitprop for the YouTube age) shows passages from the Koran alongside images of Islamist violence.  He has singled out the worst passages, but he hasn’t made them up.  Drawing attention to them is very different from calling for violence against Muslims: if he was actually doing that, I would agree he would be a threat to public safety and should be censored.

It was no surprise that Keith Vaz was wheeled out to defend the indefensible on Newsnight: Britain’s most pompous MP has excellent form in this field, having led the protests that culminated in mass burnings of The Satanic Verses twenty years ago.  After admitting he hadn’t seen the film (of course) he told Maajid Nawaaz, the impressive spokesman from the Quilliam Foundation – who wanted the objectionable Wilders let into the country so as to beat him in argument – that all he had to do to debate him was “go to Heathrow and get on a plane to Holland”.

This was all to be expected, but shame on the Tories and Lib Dems for lamely going along with it.  Feeble new shadow home secretary Chris Grayling said: “We have consistently called on the Government to tackle extremists.  If Geert Wilders has expressed views that represent a threat to public security, then we support the ban.  But people like Ibrahim Moussawi, a spokesman for the terrorist organisation Hizbollah, have not been banned.  The Government must apply the criteria governing entry into the UK consistently.”  So he equates a possibly offensive critique of Islamic terrorism with Islamic terrorism itself.  If the mainstream centre-right buries its head in the sand of relativism, no-one should be very surprised if the far right fights the worse fight in their place.

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Mr Beancounter

I think this is about the only thing that could save Brown now.  Vince Cable is much more popular than any other frontbencher of any party, by all accounts saw the credit crunch coming and has steered the Lib Dems to what seems a very appealing combination of lower but more progressive taxation.  And it would only be marginally stranger than the resuscitation of Peter Mandelson.

A quick word about Ian Blair’s overdue defenestration.  I have been rather suspicious of him ever since, shortly before 7/7, he uttered the immortal line: “there is nothing wrong with being an Islamic fundamentalist.”  I don’t think we can mourn the copper who smeared one innocent man his force had killed and tried to do the same to two more, and who tried to turn us all into criminals by supporting ID cards and 42-day detention without trial.

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Veiled threat

A word about Osama Saeed.  He seemed pretty mild-mannered when we were fellow Politics tutorial students some years ago – in fact I hardly remember him saying a word – but is quite the firebrand today (and clearly more of a political success than any of his classmates).  Osama is the SNP’s candidate for Glasgow Central at the next election, and Labour and the Lib Dems have recently called for an inquiry into why Alex Salmond gave £400,000 of taxpayers’ money to his new outfit the Scottish Islamic Foundation – an endorsement of their plans for separate state-funded Muslim schools.  As well as his rapid rise in the SNP, Osama made his name as Scottish spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, widely seen as the British wing of the Hamas-supporting, gay-bashing, woman-stoning, caliphate-restoring Muslim Brotherhood.  Osama told Muslims in Dundee not to cooperate with the police and has dismissed the very idea of Islamic extremism in Scotland, while the SNP nicely killed two birds with one stone by criticising British Transport Police for its stop and search policies.  It seems the SNP are doing a pretty good job of emulating what Labour originally did in northern England – coopting the Muslim ‘community’ into patronage and block votes in return for favourable policies such as heavy restrictions on free speech in Britain, and now faith schools in Scotland.  Make of this trend what you will – I imagine you can guess my views about it.

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Darwin, we’re leaving

You have to laugh.

I’m impressed by the 8% of Muslims though.

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