The Joy of Six 1238

Anna Tarrant praises Ed Davey's celebration of fatherhood and says we are all better off when men do more of the caring.

"Looking back to that December morning in 2019 I don't think any of us could have imagined that it would come to this. That picture of Boris Johnson, arms aloft celebrating victory, was a painful one for those of us on the opposition benches. Five years later his ejection from the scene has not saved the party whose reputation he did so much to damage, and the divisions he encouraged threaten to engulf them." Christine Jardine asks if the Tories are facing the equivalent of the Liberal party’s 1922 election disaster.

"A decade ago, the Islamic State swept through northern Iraq and declared a ‘caliphate’ and soon after launched a genocidal assault on Iraq’s Yezidi minority, murdering Yezidi men and capturing woman and girls as sex slaves. Now, six years after IS was defeated, accountability for those horrific crimes is in doubt." Deb Amos on the failure of the international community to hold anyone to account for the Yezidi genocide.

Richard Carr reviews a new book on cross-party politics in Britain since the second world war - Clegg, Cameron and all.

Meth-Addict Fish, Aggro Starlings - not heavy-metal bands but the result of pharmaceutical compounds polluting the ecosphere. Patrick Greenfield reports on a worrying trend.

Philip Cowley and Matthew Bailey offer a history of fringe parliamentary candidates: "At the Crosby by-election in 1981 [Lt Commander Bill] Boaks shared the ballot paper with Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lim-bus-stop-F'tang-F'tang-Olé-Biscuitbarrel, although the returning officer took the understandable decision to shorten it to Tarquin Biscuitbarrel. Tarquin (original name: John Desmond Dougrez-Lewis) had his origins in a Monty Python spoof on election night coverage."

Tony Benn: Nigel Farage's John the Baptist?

#OTD 1975. Cabinet Ministers Roy Jenkins and Tony Benn debate leaving the EEC on TV.

Jenkins argues that Britain will have no say over how trade rules are made.

Benn argues that the country would get the trade deal it wanted “because we are their very best customer”. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/lfhSYxYV5q

— Tides of History (@labour_history) June 2, 2024

This video was posted on Twitter earlier today, and it's uncanny how close Tony Benn's arguments against Britain remaining in what was then the European Economic Community are to those used by Leave in the 2016 referendum.

He comes over as Nigel Farage's John the Baptist, while the slightly amused reference to Italy wanting to sell its wine is pure Boris Johnson. 

You may say that Benn's wish to leave room for protectionism is a world away from the economic beliefs of Brexit's most powerful backers, but many Brexit voters thought they were voting for protectionism.

But then I have taken the odd potshot at the myth of St Tony over the years.

In 2009 I devoted a my Liberal Democrat News column House Points to the hobby, pointing out that the pirate radio ships of the Sixties had gone from being a threat to the British way of life to the subject of warm nostalgia:

You would not know it from Richard Curtis’s recent film, but the minister who sank the pirate ships was Tony Benn - or Anthony Wedgwood Benn, as he then called himself.

Getting into high gear, I continued:

Do the sweet young things who hang upon his words about global warming know that when a minister in the 1970s he forced through the construction of the coal-burning Drax power station?

Or take his party piece. There are five questions we should ask politicians: “What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you?”

That is not what he said when he met Saddam Hussein in 2003: 

"I have 10 grandchildren and in my family there is English, Scottish, American, French, Irish, Jewish, Indian, Muslim blood, and for me politics is about their future, their survival. And I wonder whether you could say something yourself directly through this interview to the peace movement of the world that might help to advance the cause they have in mind?"

But it has to be admitted that Benn is good at getting his points across. Roy Jenkins does not say much in this clip, so it may be unfair to judge him on it, but there are two problems with what he does say.

The first is that accent. As Nye Bevan is supposed to have said when it was suggested to him that Jenkins was lazy:

"Lazy? Lazy? How can a boy from Abersychan who acquired an accent like that be lazy?"

The second is something that is endemic on the left: too much abstraction. I'm sure the average voter could quickly be brought to understand the concept of "pooled sovereignty", but I'm not convinced they will understand it without explanation. So maybe Jenkins needed to find simpler language in the first place.

I'm reminded of the time, at the height of the campaign for a second referendum, when someone decided that having Stephen Fry discoursing on "forced perspective" was the way to convert Leavers to our cause.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as they say in the European Union.

Mika: Grace Kelly

Why does Britain do so badly in Eurovision these days? The Iraq War? Brexit? Or is it because we pick weak songs and give them to performers who lack experience? My money's on the last of these.

I chose Grace Kelly for reasons of trivia: a number of sources suggest that the little girl sitting on the piano is Mae Muller, who grew up to finish last but one in this year's contest.

But then I got to wondering why we can't have a Eurovision entry as good as this song. The singer was even part of the presenting team when it was held in Italy last year.

Mika - real name Michael Holbrook Penniman Jr - has a cosmopolitan background, but he lived in London as a teenager and attended Westminster School. He also sang as a boy with the Royal Opera at Covent Garden.

An expensive private education new seems a prerequisite of a career in music. Those who - rightly - are concerned about this point to the decline of music teaching in schools.

But one thing I notice from the biographies of the stars of the Sixties is how many of them had sung in church choirs as boys and got their musical education doing so.

Another common influence was that many of them had fathers who played in jazz bands, which meant they grew up with Black American music and understood the blues, which became the basis of British music in that golden age.

But now most of the church choirs and jazz bands have gone, which may be another reason why we do so badly in Eurovision these days.

The Joy of Six 1122

 Alexandra Hall Hall finds the Iraq war and Brexit share a thread of hubris: "It’s taken Americans 20 years to fully come to terms with the consequences of Iraq. I hope it does not take that long for Britain to truly realise the consequences of Brexit."

The Hunger Games bidding system, which saw councils competing against one another for Levelling Up cash, led to councils across the country paying millions to consultants. That's the finding a Daily Mirror investigation.

Are we building more prisons because of a projected rise in the prison population, or building prisons and then making sure they are filled? Faith Spear asks an important question.

Rachel Hammersley went to a conference marking the 50th anniversary of Christopher Hill's study of radical politics during the English Civil War and Commonwealth: "As one obituary of him noted, ... works like The World Turned Upside Down spoke not just to academics, but also to ordinary people. Moreover ... Hill also reached out in many different ways to a wider public through his involvement with organisations such as the Workers' Educational Association, the Open University, and the BBC."

Forgotten Television Drama posts a chronology of Dickens adaptations on British television between 1948 and 2023. A remarkable number survive and have been issued on DVD.

"RNAS Longside was active from 1916 to 1920. 1500 personnel were based at the station and the site boasted a swimming pool, a theatre, shops, a church and gas works. All of those buildings are long gone, but some things remain." Ailish Sinclair looks for the remains of a Royal Naval Air Station in Lenabo Woods, Aberdeenshire.

Foreign affairs reporting at its finest

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A letter in Private Eye complains that Lord Gnome's organ began a report on restrictions imposed by the Iranian government with the words:

The Iraqi government imposed widespread internet blackouts to try to contain the unrest that followed the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini...

This reminds me of the story about the subeditor working a freelance shift on a newspaper who called out: "What's your house style? 'Iran' or 'Iraq'?"

17 May in Liberal England history

I enjoyed doing this for 18 April - whether my readers enjoyed it as much is another question - so here is a survey of what has concerned this blog down the years on 17 May.

2019

Hard times in the Shropshire hills. Stiperstones primary school was to close and Bishop's Castle residents were planning to block the road in a protest against bus cuts.


2018

I previewed A Very British Scandal as the first episode was about to be shown.



2017

"Boris Johnson moos 'like a cow' and devours cakes on bakery visit" ran my Headline of the Day.

You can't say we weren't warned.


2016

Talking of Boris Johnson, I blogged about his failure when mayor to publish a report on air pollution near London' schools.


2015

Included in a Six of the Best, Down at Third Man was worrying about the future of English cricket:

"The players coming in during the next few years come from a generation deprived of free to air cricket. This generation will have come in on the echoes. Soon it will be a privileged generation: in the main sons/daughters of club cricketers and sons of parents able to afford a very expensive education, or sons able to win scholarships to such institutions."

2014

I went to Woodhouse Eaves, which had once been a sort of health resort in Leicestershire's Charnwood Forest:

Today, the first hot day of the year, the countryside was alive with hikers and Scouts, giving it something of the atmosphere of its 1930s heyday.

2013

UKIP supporters, I suggested, were not that keen on the UK. They were English Nationalists.


2012

I quoted Christopher Hitchens and his praise for Karl Popper's insistence on the importance of argument:

It is very seldom, as he noticed, that in debate any one of two evenly matched antagonists will succeed in actually convincing or "converting" the other. But it is equally seldom that in a properly conducted argument either antagonist will end upholding exactly the same position as that with which he began.

2011

Lord Bonkers reacted to the headline "Fox blasts British overseas aid plan":

It was clearly set out in the Coalition agreement. Now clear off down the garden and leave our dustbins alone.

2010

I quoted something I had written for the Guardian website back in 2006 (when it paid much better than it does today):

When [Charles] Kennedy stood for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats in 1999, the West Highland Free Press - a radical newspaper published in his own constituency - remarked that people in London were beginning to ask what it had been asking for 15 years: what exactly does Charles Kennedy stand for? 

Though he won that contest and went on to lead the party for nearly seven years, we never really found out.

2009

Those were the days. I wrote seven posts on 17 May 2009 and most of them were about politics.

In one of them I argued that:

the causes of the anger over MPs' expenses go beyond indignation at what has been done with our money. That anger is so great because this affair has laid bare what an unequal society we now live in.

2008

Michael Gove wanted to tell teachers what they should wear:

No doubt this is meant to appeal to Tory voters who like tradition, but in reality there is little tradition of teachers dressing smartly. The traditional dress for teachers was the academic gown, which was designed precisely to distance education from the world where a good business suit matters. 

Less grand teachers wore a tweed jacket with leather patches and a worried expression.

2007

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I asked why people could not forgive Ming Campbell for being old:

If a comedian or journalist had made similar reference to the fact that a politician was a woman or was gay or was Black, it would have finished that comedian or journalist's career. Yet in our society it is perfectly acceptable to make fun of people for being old.

2006

The idea that the state should decide the speed at which people walk their dogs is ridiculous.

I still hold that view today.

2005

I discussed Siôn Simon Syndrome:

there is a law that people accuse others of the faults they most fear in themselves, much as those who make most fuss about homosexuality are supposed to be repressed homosexuals themselves.

2004

Iraq Body Count estimated the number of civilian deaths in the country since the start of the invasion at somewhere between 9,148 and 11,005

GUEST POST With Valour and Distinction: The 2nd Battalion Leicestershire Regiment in the First World War

Nigel Atter introduces his new book on the campaigns of the 2nd Battalion Leicestershire Regiment between 1914 and 1918.

When people consider the First World War they may think about the losses on the first day of the battle of the Somme or the atrocious conditions at Passchendaele. Few, I believe, would turn their attention to Mesopotamia, now modern day Iraq.

And yet thousands of men fought against the Ottomans in the blistering heat, plagued by flies and disease. My new book With Distinction and Valour: The actions of the 2nd Battalion Leicestershire Regiment 1914-1918 details the military operations on the Western Front, Mesopotamia and also Palestine.

There are many striking features in this volume. Notwithstanding the high quality maps and superb photographs (many never published before), there’s the  bravery of men such as Private William Buckingham who won a Victoria Cross at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in March 1915.

What is also of note is the high standard of education the officers received before joining the regiment, many of them attended Eton and other public schools. Their particular loss was a costly sacrifice for the nation that was so difficult to replace.

The conditions in Mesopotamia were truly horrendous, on a biblical scale. Not only did the troops have to contend with a skilled, fierce, battle-hardened and determined enemy the forces of nature were also against them.

The bitter winds and torrential rain turned the battlefield into a torturous quagmire, yet the blistering heat: flies, mosquitos and sandflies tormented undernourished men with inadequate access to clean water or medical treatment.

On the Basra Memorial (just one of many) are etched 40,604 names of fallen men who have no known grave.  These figures dwarf the numbers on the famous Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing in Belgium.

Things improved once the 2nd Leicesters arrived in Palestine during the summer of 1918. The formidable Turkish soldier there had been undermined by poor strategic decisions, lack of discipline and decent food.

The gallant Leicesters played their part in the advance to victory in the Middle East. This volume also documents the lives of a good number of officers and men, the single incidence of a shot at dawn, and there is a roll of honour.

You can follow Nigel Atter on Twitter. DM him to buy a signed, discounted copy of With Valour and Distinction. 

The Sun says Lib Dems are set to oust Emily Thornberry

Image from #Islington

From the Sun:

[Emily] Thornberry is trailing behind the Lib Dems in her north London seat of Islington South and Finsbury.

A senior Labour source said local internal polling conducted by the party found that Mr Corbyn’s chaotic Brexit policy has led the constituency's voters to switch to the Lib Dems due to their unequivocal pledge to reverse the 2016 referendum result.

This may sound fanciful, given that Thornberry had a majority of more than 20,000 over the Conservatives, with the Liberal Democrats further back in third place. But in 2005 we came within 500 votes of winning this seat.

Then it was the Iraq war that separated many Labour voters from their traditional loyalties.

It looks as though the party's failure to oppose Brexit has done the same thing.

Poll suggests Liberal Democrats will regain Cambridge

Cambridge Westminster voting intention:

LDEM: 39% (+10)
LAB: 30% (-22)
GRN: 12% (+10)
CON: 10% (-6)
BREX: 7% (+7)

via @Survation, 16 - 17 Oct
Chgs. w/ 2017 result

— Britain Elects (@britainelects) October 29, 2019

With a general election before Christmas on the cards, it's time to boost the morale of my fellow Liberal Democrats.

So take a look at this constituency poll for Cambridge, a seat we held between 2005 and 2015.

Labour's support for the Iraq war lost them the seat in 2005, so it's not so fanciful to suggest their luke-warm opposition to Brexit could cost them again in 2019.

Six of the Best 844

Geoffrey Evans and Florian Schaffner find that "Brexit has quickly and dramatically replaced the traditional party allegiances of Conservative and Labour in the hearts and minds of voters".

"I am struck by the reluctance to debate the failure of our policy in Libya during the Coalition. Although not the same as Iraq, the parallels are striking. We actually repeated the same fundamental mistake in not preparing for the aftermath of regime change – this we previously criticised Blair for – and we hardly talk about it." Geoffrey Payne on the damage done by Francis Fukuyama's The End of History.

Martha Gill hopes Prince Philip’s crash will lead the media to re-examine its servile approach to the Royal Family.

"Through content in the magazine, on leaflets and even on beer mats, we are essentially instructed to propagandise for a policy that promises to make our livelihoods more precarious." Richard Penderel on working for Tim Martin and Wetherspoons.

Joanna Turner travels to Stratford-upon-Avon in search of Marie Corelli, the town's second most famous literary figure.

Eoghan Lyng chooses the ten best tracks by The Jam.

Norman Baker on the strange death of David Kelly

Norman Baker was my favourite Liberal Democrat MP of the party's glory years. He was a powerful campaigner, friendly and with enough quirkiness to be a true Liberal. And he had a talent for getting up the noses of all the right people.

Looking back on the death of David Kelly in 2003, it does remarkable that no inquest was held into his death. Instead, it was bundled up with Lord Hutton's inquiry into "the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Kelly".

Those circumstances where expanded to include the intelligence reports the Blair government used to justify war in Iraq and the BBC's reporting of them. Poor Dr Kelly faded into the background.

In 2007 Norman Baker published his book The Strange Death of David Kelly. The talk in this video was recorded two years later.

If you watch it you will find that Norman's conclusion is that David Kelly was murdered. Not by the British deep state, as some like to imagine, but by the Iraqis.

Given what we now know about Russian operations in Britain, this is not far fetched. 

We should be worrying that the British authorities still seem remarkably relaxed about the number of people who have crossed Putin who keel over and die on our shores.

Anyway, a few years after recording this, Norman became a Home Office minister. It's a funny old world.

Richard Rorty: The thinker who foresaw Trump and Brexit

I have been meaning to write an article for Liberator about Richard Rorty for years, if only because I was attracted by the possible headline ‘RORTY BUT NICE’.

In the last issue of the magazine I finally got round to writing it, but I am not sure it is much good.

I had imagined I would write about the ideas in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, but the quote from Achieving Our Country foreseeing the coming of Trump was too good to ignore and that book rather took over the article.

Having written about it, I wonder if the book’s distinction between the reformist left and the cultural left is ultimately much different from the claim of a thousand dull newspaper columns that the left has abandoned the working class and become too concerned with what they call political correctness.

And when I did get around to Contingency, Irony and Solidarity its arguments were so fragile they fell apart in my hands.

Maybe the moral is that, ultimately, we value thinkers for an approach to the problems of living that they represent rather than the fine detail of their doctrines.

Rorty, for me, stands for a recognition that the institutions of the liberal democratic state are among the most valuable things the human race has devised. But he combines that with a recognition that they are far from perfect and that there is much of our lives that they do not touch.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the article.

The thinker who foresaw Trump and Brexit

The days when we expected philosophers to be prophets are long gone, but the widespread sharing of this quotation after the election of Donald Trump reawakened interest in the work of Richard Rorty:

Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. 

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots….  

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion…. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

What particularly impressed people was that Rorty wrote this back in 1998 when Bill Clinton had been elected for a second term and Tony Blair was enjoying his extraordinarily long honeymoon with Britain’s voters.

Rorty, who died in 2007, is the most interesting liberal philosopher of recent decades. He managed to combine being at the cutting edge of postmodern thought in rejecting the idea that philosophy’s role was to discover ‘The Truth’ or ‘Things as They Really Are’  – so much so that his name carried with it a whiff of brimstone in more traditional academic departments – with a reasoned defence of the institutions of the liberal democratic state and draw for enlightenment upon the Western literary canon.

Beyond that, as the quotation above shows, he stood out among philosophers – particularly postmodern philosophers – for the clarity of his prose and his commitment to carrying the non-specialist reader with him. So much academic work today is written to be published rather than read, and so many philosophers seem determined to dazzle or obfuscate rather than enlighten. To those who doubt this I say two words: Slavoj Žižek.

That quotation comes from Rorty’s Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. In the book Rorty draws a distinction between the reformist left that flourished in America until the 1960s and the cultural left that supplanted it.

The reformist left, he argued, shared “the conviction that the vast inequalities within American society could be corrected by using the institutions of a constitutional democracy – that a cooperative commonwealth could be created by electing the right politicians and passing the right laws.”

This reformist left covered a broad spectrum of opinion from Marxists to moderate Democrats, but they were united by a belief in pragmatic reform. There were no purity tests for membership – some of the reformist left cared little for the rights of American Blacks, others were keen supporters of war in Vietnam – but, says Rorty, they were “feared and hated by the Right because they laid the foundations of the modern welfare state.

Rorty was well aware of this, but in a characteristically wry style, he pointed out that “in democratic countries you get things done by compromising your principles in order to form alliances with groups about whom you have grave doubts.”

It was Vietnam that broke this coalition. It was not just that the war was morally wrong and impossible to win: it was that younger leftists saw it as in indictment of America as a whole. And that meant, argued Rorty, they lost interest in the idea of moderate reform:

For if you turn out to be living in an evil empire (rather than, as you had been told, a democracy fighting an evil empire), then you have no responsibility to your country; you are accountable only to humanity. If what your government and your teachers are saying is all part of the same Orwellian monologue – if the differences between the Harvard faculty and the military-industrial complex, or between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, are negligible – then you have a responsibility to make a revolution.

I thought of this when I heard Harriet Harman interviewed by Peter Hennessy recently and she said had gone into politics wanting to “change everything about society”. Change everything is an expression of personal despair, not a programme for government.

This trend towards cultural leftism accelerated on the British left after Iraq. Tony Blair won three consecutive general elections, but his name is really heard in Labour circles – unless it is part of the insult ‘Blairite’. We Liberal Democrats suffered our own miniature moral catastrophe over the Coalition’s decision to increase tuition fees.

Instead, the left has embraced Jeremy Corbyn, a figure whose appeal lies precisely in the fact that he has never held power and is thus innocent of the compromises it demands. Labour now expends little effort on policy formation as its 2017 general election manifesto, an unconvincing document that escaped proper scrutiny during the election campaign because of the supreme incompetence of the Conservatives. 

A style of argument flourishes on the left, perhaps encouraged by social media and certainly most apparent there. It is summed up in a widely used quotation whose origin is not clear: “The right looks for converts, the left looks for traitors.” Someone’s words – and it is usually words and not actions – are examined until they are found guilty of some departure from the prevalent moral view on the cultural left, whereupon they can be given a pejorative label and their opinion on every subject ignored.

The right has not been idle while this has been going on. Rorty, confirming his uncanny ability to see where politics was leading in 1998, wrote: “While the Left’s back was turned, the bourgeoisification of the white proletariat which began in WWII and continued up through the Vietnam War has been halted, and the process has gone into reverse. America is now proletarianizing its bourgeoisie, and this process is likely to culminate in bottom-up revolt, of the sort [Pat] Buchanan hopes to foment.”

If all this sounds familiar from a thousand comment pieces blaming the left and ‘political correctness’ for the rise of Trump or of Ukip, it is worth emphasising that Rorty came from a left-wing background himself and his sympathies already remained with what he described as the reformist left:

For the Right never thinks that anything much needs to be changed: it thinks the country is basically in good shape, and may well have been in better shape in the past. It sees the Left’s struggle for social justice as mere troublemaking, as utopian foolishness. The Left, by definition, is the party of hope. It insists that our nation remains unachieved.

And even when being critical of the cultural left in the New York Times in 1994, he paid it a generous tribute, saying it was “doing a great deal of good for people who have gotten a raw deal in our society: women, African-Americans, gay men and lesbians. This focus on marginalized groups will, in the long run, help to make our country much more decent, more tolerant and more civilized.”

But he warned in the same article that “A left that refuses to take pride in its country will have no impact on that country’s politics, and will eventually become an object of contempt.”

So it is not such a surprise to find that the opening words of Achieving Our Country are: “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals, a necessary condition for self-improvement.”

If these words seem strange on the left today, Rorty would no doubt have said, it is because the reformist left has been displaced by the cultural left.

For a way out of this impasse we could turn to an earlier (1989) book of Rorty’s: Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. It has many virtues, among them this descripton of it is that we actually argue about politics and other important things

All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes. They are the words in which we tell, sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives. ...  

A small part of a final vocabulary is made up of thin, flexible, and ubiquitous terms such as “true,” “good,” “right,” and “beautiful.” The larger part contains thicker, more rigid, and more parochial terms, for example, “Christ,” “England,” “professional standards,” “decency,” “kindness,” “the Revolution,” “the Church,” “progressive,” “rigorous,” “creative.” The more parochial terms do most of the work.

Rorty also emphasises the importance of being an ‘ironist’. That is, we should recognise that our own beliefs cannot ultimately be grounded on bedrock beyond our own chosen ‘thick’ vocaulary yet still be prepared to act upon them. He approving quotes Joseph Schumpeter: “To realise the relative validity of one's convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.”

These days the idea that studying the great writers can teach us lessons about how to live our lives is deeply unfashionable in English departments with their poststructuralists  (and quite possibly postpoststructuralists too). Yet it is too this rather traditional view of literature that the avant-garde philosopher Rorty turns in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, with chapters on Proust, Nabokov and Orwell.

He suggests that what Orwell did in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four was to give readers an alternative vocabulary with which to understand totalitarianism. 

Postmodern liberal or not, I still want to say that Orwell gave us a picture that is nearer the truth, but however you describe it Orwell’s view of the subject prevailed for many decades. Indeed, while one could have suggested 20 years ago that this view was now of only historical interest, it seems again compelling in the world of 2017.

We liberals like to insist that we are not mere centrists but have a radical view of our own. I see nothing wrong with centrism in as far as it represents a defence of institutions like the National Health Service and public service broadcasting that made Britain a better country to live in.

But if we seek something more exciting, then the postmodern world view, which accepts the breakdown of the great narratives and is tolerant of local difference, is a promising one to explore. And there is not better guide to it than Richard Rorty.

Willie Rennie says backing for Brexit could evaporate like support for the war in Iraq

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Willie Rennie, leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, is giving a speech to the David Hume Institute in Edinburgh this evening.

The Scotsman had advance sight of what he will say:

"We accept the referendum result. But political leaders have got a responsibility to lead. 

"Political leadership is sometimes about persuading people, not just repeating what the last focus group told you. That is followership. 

"In April 2003 people wholeheartedly supported Tony Blair’s government. People and the media would howl at Charles Kennedy. But opinions changed."

Willie is right: the public did change its mind on Iraq.

But it's more worrying than that for the government. As I blogged last October, the public has not just changed its mind: many voters now believe they never supported war in Iraq in the first place.

It's good to be reminded of the courage Charles Kennedy showed in making the case against war, but we should remember that he was rather bounced into taking that position by Liberal Democrat activists.

Welcome back Tony Blair and his leadership on Europe

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I want to be explicit. Yes, the British people voted to leave Europe. And I agree the will of the people should prevail. I accept right now there is no widespread appetite to re-think. 

But the people voted without knowledge of the true terms of Brexit. As these terms become clear, it is their right to change their mind. 

Our mission is to persuade them to do so. 

What was unfortunately only dim in our sight before the referendum is now in plain sight. The road we're going down is not simply Hard Brexit. 

It is Brexit At Any Cost. 

Our challenge is to expose relentlessly what this cost is, to show how the decision was based on imperfect knowledge which will now become informed knowledge, to calculate in ‘easy to understand’ ways how proceeding will cause real damage to our country; and to build support for finding a way out from the present rush over the cliff’s edge. 

I don't know if we can succeed. But I do know we will suffer a rancorous verdict from future generations if we do not try.

You can read the full text of the former prime minister's speech this morning on the rather grandly named Office of Tony Blair website.

This part is good too:

If we were in a rational world, we would all the time, as we approach those decisions, be asking: why are we doing this and as we know more of the costs, is the pain worth the gain? 

Let us examine the pain. 

We will withdraw from the Single Market which is around half of our trade in goods and services. We will also leave the Customs Union, covering trade with countries like Turkey. Then we need to replace over 50 Preferential Trade Agreements we have via our membership of the EU; for instance with Switzerland. So, EU-related trade is actually two thirds of the UK total. This impacts everything from airline travel, to financial services to manufacturing industry, sector by sector. 

We will pay for previous EU obligations but not benefit from future opportunities, with figures as high as £60bn as the cost. 

We will lose influence in the world’s most significant political union; and have to negotiate on our own on issues like the environment where we presently benefit from Europe’s collective strength. 

There is alarm across sectors as diverse as scientific research and culture as European funding is withdrawn. 

And all this then to do an intricate re-negotiation of the trading arrangements we have just abandoned. 

That negotiation is without precedent in complexity. It is even possible that it fails and we end up trading on WTO rules. 

This is in itself another mine field: we would need to negotiate the removal not just of tariff barriers; but the prevention of non-tariff barriers which today are often the biggest impediments to trade and pile costs on business. 

This could take years. 

Our currency is down around 12% against the Euro and 20% against the dollar, which is the international financial market’s assessment of our future prosperity i.e. we are going to be poorer. The price of imported goods in the supermarkets is up and thus the cost of living. 

Of course Britain can and would survive out of the EU. This is a great country, with resilient and creative people. And yes, no one is going to write us off, nor should they. But making the best of a bad job doesn't alter the fact that it isn't smart to put yourself in that position unless you have to. 

Most extraordinary of all, the two great achievements of British diplomacy of the last decades in Europe, supported by Governments both Labour and Conservative, – namely the Single Market and European Enlargement – are now apparently the two things we most regret and want to rid ourselves of! 

The Single Market has been of enormous benefit to the UK bringing billions of pounds of wealth, hundreds of thousands of jobs, and major investment opportunities; our trade with an enlarged European Union has meant for example that trade with Poland has gone from £3bn in 2004 to £13.5bn in 2016. 

Nations that came out of the Soviet bloc have seen themselves safely within the EU and NATO, so enhancing our own security. 

In addition to all this, the possibility of the break-up of the UK – narrowly avoided by the result of the Scottish referendum – is now back on the table, but this time with a context much more credible for the independence case. 

We are already seeing the destabilising impact of negotiation over border arrangements on the Northern Ireland peace process.

I have quoted at such length because the speech is good - very good indeed - and no one else has made the case against Brexit with such authority.

Because of it, I welcome Tony Blair's welcome to British politics.

And that is from someone who spent 13 years poking fun at the more absurd elements of Blairism. But things are more serious now.

When I tweeted praise for the speech earlier today I immediately received a reply mentioning Iraq.

Those who shout "Iraq" whenever Blair is mentioned may act from a concern for the sufferings of the Iraqi people,

But they may also be using it as a tactic - as a way of labelling Blair that means we need not listen to anything he says.

We Liberal Democrats suffered the cry of "tuition fees" for long enough to understand this.

And many white and well-heeled members of the left are keen to label other white and well-heeled members of the left as racist or insufficiently respectful of the working class as a way of shutting them up.

Things are too serious for Britain now for us to silence a voice we need to hear.

Matthew Engel foresees the strange death of Labour England

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Labour is in many ways clueless, disunited and perhaps in terminal decline. Whatever happens in the by-elections, it faces another crisis in the mayoral elections in May: the Tories are now favourites to win in Birmingham and there are worries even about Corbyn’s former rival Andy Burnham in Manchester.

Last summer I reviewed Engel's England, in which Matthew Engel visited all 39 English counties.

He has been on his travels again, visiting the Labour campaign in Stoke-on-Trent Central for the Financial Times. He found it in an almost comically suspicious of him:

Even before I left home, Chris Lee, the Labour party’s press officer in the Stoke-on-Trent Central constituency, made it clear that the Financial Times would not be allowed to interview their candidate in this month’s by-election. Nor could I accompany their canvassers on the streets. 

On arrival, the restrictions were tightened. I could not talk to any other Labour members either. Asked if it was OK to speak to anyone at all in Stoke-on-Trent, Lee seemed to think it over before concluding that might be a problem.

He need not have worried. The Labour campaign is also inept, so these restrictions soon fell apart.

Engel also offers an interesting analysis of the reasons for this long-term decline, quoting Mark Seddon:

“Within the party the soft middle-class drifted away over Iraq. The hard left stayed and fought their corner,” says Seddon. Thus, a decade later, the left had the numbers in the constituencies to elect Corbyn."

A warning for the Tories: Chasing public opinion can end in tears

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The government thinks it is on to a good thing. Brexit won a majority in the referendum, so if it carries it out then it will be popular with the voters.

Except that public opinion doesn't work like that.

Take the Iraq War.

A Daily Telegraph article in July looked at new polling by YouGov.

It was no surprise to find that there had been a major shift in opinion on Iraq. In 2003 53 per cent of voters thought the war was right. Now only 26 per cent think it was right.

But more significant - and more worrying for the Conservatives - is another figure.

Today, only 37 per cent of voters think they thought the war was right in 2003, while 43 per cent think they thought it was wrong and 20 per cent don't know.

From which I conclude that if Brexit starts to go wrong - and there is every sign that it will - then the voters will decide that they never wanted it in the first place.

Public opinion can be volatile and voters are more likely to blame politicians when things go wrong than blame themselves.

So if MPs - Tories included - think Brexit will harm Britain then they should have the courage to say so and vote accordingly.

In the words of that great Whig Edmund Burke (Conservatives claim him as their own but do not read him):

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

Later. More detail on YouGov's Iraq polling here.

Charles Kennedy, Iraq and the Chilcot Report

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The new issue of Liberator contains this article by me on Iraq and the Chilcot Report. It was written in haste  and owes an indecent amount to Peter Oborne and James Graham, but I wanted to have my say n an event that continues to haunt British politics.

Disgraced in the Desert

“We want you to get up the arse of the White House and stay there.” Tony Blair put it more elegantly when assuring George W. Bush that “I will be with you, whatever,” but this order, given to Christopher Meyer when he became Britain’s ambassador in Washington by Blair’s chief of staff Jonathan Powell, conveyed the essence of the relationship that led to disaster in Iraq.

It was entirely reasonable of Tony Blair to associate himself closely with President Clinton when he first became prime minister. Here was a popular and successful politician with views notably similar to Blair’s own.

But the Blair inner circle’s insistence that Meyer became so unhealthily close to the US had its roots in Labour’s long years in opposition to Margaret Thatcher and John Major. With the Thatcher years dominated by the Cold War and arguments over the British deterrent and the deployment of American weapon systems on British soil, Labour struggled not to be painted as unpatriotic.

Blair overturned all that, and it drove the Conservative Party mad. You can see this in their reaction to Charles Kennedy’s brave speech in the Commons before action in Iraq began. Their outrage was surely a mask for their anger that Labour had usurped their role as America’s staunchest ally. Somewhere there too was the jealously of a younger boy who fears he has lost the friendship of an older, cooler boy because the latter has allowed someone else into their gang.

Ill-suppressed excitement

Blair, the new boy in the gang, certainly saw it that way. In his book DC Confidential, Christopher Meyer records that the new prime minister “pulsed with ill-suppressed excitement” during his first official visit to the US. That excitement continued when George W. Bush was elected, no matter how crass his views and actions.

As Peter Oborne reminds us in his book Not the Chilcot Report, in January 2002 Bush startled his allies by naming Iraq, Iran and North Korea as "an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world":

Iraq, he claimed, had been plotting for more than a decade to develop anthrax, nerve gas and nuclear weapons. As a supporter of "terror", it might well provide these to terrorists. 

In fact, there was no evidence to support this last claim: not only was Saddam Hussein ideologically opposed to al-Qaeda, but he wouldn’t allow it to operate in his territory. 

Regardless, the United States now set about seeking allies for an attack on Iraq. Thus, Bush invited Blair and his family to visit him at his family ranch in Crawford, Texas that April – nearly a full year before the invasion. 

Most unusually, there were no advisers present and no notes were taken. 

Oborne goes on to piece together what he thinks was said at Crawford.

Bush, he argues, told Blair he was committed to regime change in Iraq. Blair expressed strong support for this, but said he would need to find cover under international law by seeking support from the United Nations. Well-placed observers, claims Oborne, also believe that he also made a private pledge to commit Britain to war.

The real Chilcot Report sets out the background to this meeting. On 12 March 2002, just weeks before the Crawford summit, Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser David Manning had a conversation with Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser. The prime minister, Manning told her, “would not budge in [his] support for regime change”.

Five days later, Meyer met the US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. Meyer told him that Britain "backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever and failure was not an option". And on 25 March, just before Blair’s meeting with Bush, the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw sent him a memo.

To provide legal cover and a plausible pretext for war, said Straw, Blair needed to present his objective as the elimination of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, rather than regime change. On this analysis, Hans Blix and his weapons inspectors were dispatched to Iraq in the hope that Saddam would deny them entry and provide a pretext for war.

Oborne concludes that Blair committed himself to regime change – and agreed to support US military action – during that secret meeting at Crompton.

Blair’s response to this widely made charge is strange. On the one hand he maintains that war in Iraq really was caused by fear of Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons, yet whenever he makes the moral case for that war, he does so entirely in terms of regime change. So the end he denies seeking before the war was fought is not the one he uses to justify it.

To listen to Blair now you would imagine that, in those febrile weeks before war began, he argued that we must take action in Iraq to overthrow Saddam’s dictatorship. I love to see tyrants overthrown, their statues torn down and their prisons broken open to public gaze. If you are not a pacifist, such action must sometimes be an option if the tyranny is extreme enough and the prospects of success are strong enough.

But that was not the case Blair made. The first bombs fell on Iraq on 20 March 2003, buy as late as 25 February he told the Commons:

"I detest his regime but even now he can save it by complying with the UN's demand. Even now we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully." 

Blair frequently implies that there was no middle position between doing nothing about Saddam and invasion. The truth is there were many things we could and did do against Saddam before we went to war in 2003. There had been two separate no-fly zones in Iraq since the first war in 1992.

Tony Blair today cuts a tortured, Christ-like figure, albeit one with a peculiar orange hue and multi-million pound annual earnings . It is hard to resist the conclusion of the Guardian journalist Mike Carter:

A colleague just said to me: “if Blair hadn't toppled Saddam, he'd be doing his PR for him now.” Scary thing is, that's probably true 

The war was a disaster for the people of Iraq, not least because the victors had no plans for running the country after it was over beyond disbanding the Iraqi army and civil service.

Imperialist nostalgia

Though British participation was buoyed by imperialist nostalgia – we flattered ourselves that we understood the Arab world in a way the Americans never could – we were not prepared even to count the number of Iraqis who died under our rule. As a result the independent website Iraq Body Count was set up. It now estimates there have been more than 250,000 deaths from the war and the violence that engulfed the country afterwards.

Besides the Iraqi people and Blair’s reputation, progressive politics in Britain have suffered because of the dishonest way the country was led into war in Iraq. Look at the disputes between the Corbynistas and the rest of the Labour Party today. The former use the cry of “Iraq”” as a means of silencing their opponents in the way that previous generations of far-leftists used “Fascist!” So it is that, because of her support for war in Iraq, a mainstream Labour figure like Angela Eagle is branded a “Tory”.

Nor have the Liberal Democrats escaped the baleful legacy of Iraq. Because the party lacks strong intellectual foundations, often seeming to be shored up by a combination of support for Guardian editorials, leaflet distribution and general benevolence, we find it hard to explain how it is that we differ from moderate Labourites. We have a tendency so seize upon policy questions where we are in the right, such as Iraq or identity cards, and elevate these into insurmountable peaks of principle.

You would never guess from all the praise for Charles Kennedy and his courage in the face of that heckling from the Conservative benches that he had originally been wary of opposing the war in Iraq and was rather bounced into opposition by the wider party.

Writing five years after the event, the Liberal Democrat blogger James Graham recalled the opposition from the party’s big-wigs after a motion he and Susan Kramer took to the Federal Executive, calling on the party to oppose the war and on members to join the Stop the War demonstration, was passed:

Senior figures in the party did everything they could to stop any aspect of this motion from being implemented. They point blank refused to put anything up on the party website … They wouldn’t link to my site. 

Then: with less than a week to go before the demo itself, Kennedy was asked a direct question by David Frost on live television and, bottling it, turned volte face and said he would be “very happy” to go on [the demonstration]. 

Suddenly we got our link on the front page of the party website, publicity in Lib Dem News (which until that point had been relegated to the letters pages) and the full weight of the party’s campaigns and press departments behind us. 

Yet even then Kennedy remained obsessed with having it both ways. Notoriously, his Hyde Park speech argued meekly that he was “not persuaded” of the case for war and demanding that Parliament be allowed a vote (it was; the troops went in). 

In my experience those party big-wigs were never much interested in Liberal Democrat News, but that was how James saw it.

Our finest hour

Charles Kennedy’s opposition to war in Iraq is now established in the popular mind and the party’s own mind, as our finest hour. But we do need to be sure what lessons we draw from that.

We are not a pacifist party, so in what circumstances would we support military actions abroad? Must there be United Nations support for it. Must we be part of a wide international coalition? Must we be sure of success? We need to decide.

And those who oppose such action need to be clear why they do so. I did detect a conscious rerunning of the debate on Iraq by those Lib Dems who opposed what turned out to be near token action against ISIL forces in Syria.

 It is too late for the people of Iraq or for Tony Blair’s reputation, but the rest of us need to learn from the wretched affair and be clear about which lessons we need to learn.

Charles Kennedy speaking against the invasion of Iraq

The publication of the Chilcot report today has caused many people to remember Charles Kennedy's courage in opposing the invasion of Iraq.

The two videos above will show you the speech he made in the Commons on 18 March 2003.

Note the fury coming from the Conservative benches.

The Tories' had been driven mad by Tony Blair's unconditional embrace of the United States. They liked to see themselves as the great advocates of the Atlantic alliance. Suddenly they felt like like a young boy who had lost the friendship of a glamorous older boy.

I tried to convey something of Blair's approach to the US in a column I wrote for Liberal Democrat News the following year.

Future historians will probably have better things to do than discuss the internal politics of the Liberal Democrats, but the truth does matter.

I mean no disrespect to Charles Kennedy's memory when I recall that he was rather bounced into opposing the invasion of Iraq by his own party.

This post by James Graham tells you what went on before this debate and the famous march through London.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Giving Isis one up the snoot

Who would have thought it? The old boy turns out to be a bit of a hawk on Syria

One up the snoot for Isis

In my view defence questions resemble a closely fought by-election: if someone is out to get you then you give them one up the snoot at the earliest opportunity. Thus I was happy to support the idea of lobbing the occasional bomb at ISIS (the Boat Race has deteriorated since my day). Let us remember that they attacked people going to a footer match, out for dinner at a restaurant and listening to the Eagles of Death Metal, who so enlivened a tea dance at Uppingham last summer.

Thank goodness there was no move to invade Syria the way we used to invade countries under Blair. It wasn't the soldiers the Iraqis and Afghanistanis objected to so much as what came after. Health workers to enforce safe drinking guidelines; animal welfare inspectors to measure the camels; social workers from Islington to enforce Jack Straw's National Bedtime.

Just after I had written this the telephone was brought to me; it turned out to be Natalie Bennett, leader of the Green Party, who has called for ‘peace talks’ with ISIS. “What concessions will you demand?” I asked her. “I’m going to ask them to throw homosexuals off slightly lower buildings.”

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• A shadow cabinet maker

Six of the Best 556

Mark Park shows how Stop the War airbrushed a conspiracy theory from its website.

"The long term trend of the decline of membership and support for political parties has, if anything, accelerated, and long standing loyalties to right or left have given way to a far more complicated political reality in which populist or even anti democratic voices are now being increasingly heard." Cicero's Songs on the crisis of conventional political parties.

"What to do with a broken ship full of explosives? That question has been debated off and on for the past seven decades, and the consensus has been to leave it alone, safer right where it is. So there the ship sits at the bottom of the estuary, the area around it cordoned off by buoys." Robkam on the wreck of the SS Richard Montgomery, which lies in the Thames Estuary.

California's third-largest city is a desert ghost town - Laura Bliss explains.

Martyn Barber and Edward Carpenter present some striking aerial photographs that reveal previously unsuspected archaeological sites.

Tiffany Imogen celebrates gifts from the hedgerow.