Gossip columnists long ago supplanted the literary editors in media hierarchies, and a writer must be grateful if the press greets the publication of his or her book with anything so quaint as a discussion of its literary merit. When Martin Amis released The Pregnant Widow in February, he discovered that the big issue for journalists was not how he expressed his ideas but whether he had upset Anna Ford. The former newsreader proved she is not at her best when the autocue is off by accusing him of smoking in the hospital room where her husband was dying in 1988 – he didn’t, apparently – and of being a neglectful godfather to her daughter, a charge that even if true had nothing to do with his book.

After this, Ian McEwan must be grateful that Angela Rippon is not greeting the publication of Solar by announcing that he stood her up on a date in 1976, or that Fiona Bruce is not telling the papers he snubbed her at a dinner party during Blair’s first term.

The “story” about McEwan nevertheless remains as irrelevant to his fiction as the babbling about whether the atheist Amis was a good godfather. Inspired by the Sunday Times, the pack has decided that McEwan is satirising a voyage in which he accompanied Rachel Whiteread, Antony Gormley and other enlightened artists to see the effect of global warming in the Arctic.

McEwan does indeed acknowledge his debt to the Cape Farewell expedition, and includes a scene in which the cynical hero contrasts the idealistic conversation of his progressive companions when they are together at dinner with the naked selfishness with which they steal each other’s gloves, scarves and helmets in the ship’s boot room. “Four days ago the room had started out in orderly condition, with all gear hanging on or stowed below the numbered pegs,” says Michael Beard. “Finite resources, equally shared, in the golden age of not so long ago. Now it was a ruin… How were they to save the Earth when it was so much larger than the boot room?”

As scoops go, however, the hacks’ effort was five years late..

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From the Observer

A culture that prefers fast food to home-cooked meals and Twenty20 cricket to five-day Tests cannot endure the long haul of political struggle. Boredom sets in. Fickle eyes flick away. “Been there, done that,” we say, a crass cliche at the best of times that turns delusional when we apply it to a political world in which very few causes are done within a decade, let alone a news cycle.

For those who like their gratification instant, no story appeared more satisfying than the campaign to give Gurkha soldiers the right to settle in Britain. The plot was so pat Richard Curtis could have directed it. A legal action, initiated by London solicitors Howe & Co, to compel the government to grant residency rights to some of the 36,000 soldiers who had retired before 1997 provided the backstory. The audience joined the action in April last year, when Nick Clegg demanded that Parliament do what the judges could not. He thundered at Gordon Brown: “If someone is prepared to die for this country, surely they deserve to live in this country?” David Cameron said the same, but Brown failed to listen or understand the public mood.

Even voters who denounced immigration were on the Gurkhas‘ side, reasoning that if Britain let in people who hated it, the government should not bar those who had fought for it. In Joanna Lumley, the Gurkhas had a formidable champion. The daughter of Major James Lumley of the 6th Gurkha Rifles served her family’s regiment well by confronting Phil Woolas, Labour’s immigration minister, at the BBC. She was glamorous and filled with righteous anger. She looked down on Woolas, a careworn and equivocating politician in an ill-fitting suit, and wiped the floor with him.

Her commanding performance was too much…

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NICK COHEN
Standpoint
March 2010

Illustration by Miles Cole

THERE ARE NO frontier posts on the Left of politics, no pale to go beyond. You can move further and further away from the centre, move so far, in fact, that you turn the circle and join the fascists and it still doesn’t matter. Whatever you do, your “leftist” credentials will protect you from criticism, as surely as a Foreign Office passport protected British colonists in the age of empire.

The borders of politics’ right flank are better policed. When David Cameron allied himself with nativist Polish and Latvian parties which were not fascist but possessors of Eastern Europe’s traditional difficulties with Jews, liberal journalists, your correspondent included, pounded him. If he had gone further and spoken at a conference that featured prominent neo-Nazis, we would have destroyed him. Honourable critics would not say that Cameron was a neo-Nazi. We would allege instead that he was indifferent to racial conspiracy theories, misogyny and homophobia and the damage they wrought — a self-interested, small-minded politician who could not see that some ideologies were so poisonous that society must confront and quarantine them. Think what you will about Cameron, but he is never going to go that far. One of the most cheering developments in British politics has been the emergence of conservative anti-fascism in Britain led by Nothing British about the BNP and the Centre for Social Cohesion. Conservatives and liberals alike police the pale of right-wing politics while the Left remains an unguarded land wide open to invasion.

The Conservatives’ main complaint about the borderless Left used to be that it allowed huge double standards. Polite society embraced ex- or actual communists and Trotskyists and treated them with a consideration they would have never extended to ex- or actual Nazis. (The Mosleys are the one exception I can think of to this rule. Mainly for snobbish reasons forelock-tugging biographers and television producers hailed Sir Oswald as a Keynesian avant la lettre and Lady Diana as a brilliant star in that ever-twinkling constellation of Mitford sisters.) The old hypocrisy about left-wing totalitarianism irritates many but no longer matters, because communism died in the 1980s. The refusal of 21st-century left-wing and liberal opinion to separate itself from radical Islam is, however, a living disgrace with disastrous consequences for Europe.

You can see them everywhere if you are willing to look. In January, for instance, Harriet Harman and Ed Miliband attended a “Progressive London” conference packed with the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, which believes in the establishment of a totalitarian theocracy. George Galloway, who saluted the courage of Saddam Hussein, was there too, inevitably, as was Tariq Ramadan, the shifty academic who thinks there should only be a “moratorium” on the stoning to death of adulterous women rather than an outright ban. Imagine the fuss if, say, William Hague and Michael Gove had gone to a conference on the future of right-wing politics in London and joined members of the BNP, a far-right politician who had saluted the courage of Augusto Pinochet and an academic who argued for a “moratorium” on black immigration to Britain. The BBC would have exploded. It, along with everyone else, kept quiet, of course, about Harman and Miliband because they were from the Left and therefore could never be beyond the pale.

Nominally left-wing politicians’ appeasement of religious reactionaries is so routine that it takes a convulsive event to reveal the extent of liberal perfidy. The reaction of University College London to the news that its alumnus Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had tried to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day should have provided the shock therapy. The connection between British-bred extremism and mass murder was there for all to see, except that the authorities did not want to look.

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If some supreme being could give British leftists of my generation the power to go back and stop one historical event, I have no doubt that we would rewind the tape and wipe out the Falklands war. Before General Galtieri’s fascistic junta invaded the islands Margaret Thatcher had no “-ism” after her name. She seemed a doomed prime minister surrounded by enemies, whose party was third in the polls behind the SDP, a political force I suspect many young readers have never heard of. After Britain’s victory, nothing could stop her and by the time she had finished, British socialism was dead, and the prospects for British social democracy did not seem much healthier.

To the revolted minority who watched her brag that she had made Britain great again, the war was a bloody PR exercise that allowed her to surf a wave of jingoism. Victory in the South Atlantic bought off voters, who should have been worrying about mass unemployment and mass factory closures, with homecoming parades and tales of gallantry under fire. The Falklands were not worth dying for, we insisted. Britain and Argentina were “two bald men fighting over a comb”, snapped Gabriel García Márquez. “Falklanders who wish to remain inviolate and British citizens are on a hiding to nowhere. They are too few. They are too far away,” declared the Marxist historian EP Thompson in the Times, which in the hysterical atmosphere of 1982 provoked Tories to denounce him and the editor of the Times as virtual traitors.

As it turned out, anti-war protesters were on “a hiding to nowhere”.
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“Blair is like Margaret Thatcher now — a politician for whom the broadcasters can never have a good word. In Mo, Channel 4’s otherwise excellent drama-documentary on the last years of Mo Mowlam, Blair appeared as a despicable and vain figure who plotted to take the credit for Mowlam’s hard work. Channel 4 could not say the British Prime Minister had to get involved in the peace process because the Irish Taoiseach and the American President were already involved. It ignored the realities of international diplomacy and dismissed Blair’s achievements because, I suspect, the climate in broadcasting is such that to declare that he was not all bad is like announcing that you have seen the sweet side of a serial killer or possess sympathy for the Devil.

One day, probably about 30 years from now, a cultural historian will go through the political television of our time and wonder why, if Blair was such a palpably evil man, he managed to win so many elections.”
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The personal relates to the political very closely in Gordon Brown’s case because his bullying is not a manifestation of his dynamism and determination but of his childish inability to admit error and acknowledge the need for change. Nowhere are the weaknesses of his character more obvious than in his aides treatment of Alistair Darling during at the start of the economic crisis. Darling had told my Guardian colleague Decca Aitkenhead that we were facing the worst recession in 60 years. If Darling was guilty of anything, it was understatement. But Brown could not tolerate his clear-headed assessment, because it revealed that his supposed economic miracle was an illusion and implied that his failures to regulate the banks and balance the budget would have catastrophic consequences. So out went his attack dogs to undermine the chancellor at the very moment when he needed the Prime Minister’s support.

I heard Charlie Whelan, Brown’s prolier-than-thou public school boy, denounce the Chancellor outside a Soho pub. It says much for Whelan’s certainty that the political press would obey orders that he did not go off the record but conducted his black propaganda operation in a public place where anyone might have overheard him.
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From the Observer
We swap democracy for dictatorship when we go from home to work. Air grievances about politicians as a citizen and you risk nothing. Speak out against managers as an employee and you risk your livelihood. In normal times, biting your tongue is not too shameful a tactic. Not all managers are monsters and, in any case, if workers broadcast their failings, the most obvious beneficiaries are their company’s business rivals, which may profit and grow, and drive the workers’ firm under. The ignored lesson of the Great Crash of 2008, however, is that when normal times end, the dictatorship of the manageriat can ruin companies and the rest of society.
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Imagine an evil corporation; let us call it Megagreed plc. A worker with a fine and principled record speaks out about its directors associating with men who propagate a criminal ideology that has led to the denial of rights to millions in poor countries. Far from listening to her wise objections, Megagreed’s bosses suspend her for exercising her right to free speech on matters of public importance; it is a very evil corporation as I said. Our brave whistleblower tours the streets looking for a human rights lawyer to represent her. But none will because they are all so frightened of incurring the wrath of Megagreed plc they would rather allow an injustice to pass than run the risk of taking up her cause.

Once men and women suffering at the hands of evil corporations like Megagreed could have turned to Amensty International for help. Our heroine has been punished for speaking out, she is being denied the basic right to legal representation, surely Amnesty will act as a court of final appeal and give her a hearing? But our heroine can’t turn to Amnesty because in this instance Amnesty International IS the evil corporation.

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Torture is wrong because… The holding of prisoners of conscience is wrong because… The oppression of women is wrong because… If you finish these sentences with anything other than …because it violates universal human rights, you leave yourself wide open to attack by your opponents.

Although I am sure that Britain is a happier country than Saudi Arabia and that a sensible person would rather live in France than Cuba, the case for basing societies on liberties is not a utilitarian one. Listen to the current debate on rights, however, and you will find that virtually everyone involved pretends that we can enjoy them without paying a price; that a cost-benefit analysis will always show gain without pain.

On the face of it, the Court of Appeal upheld universal human rights when it decided to release a summary of US intelligence that showed American interrogators had shackled Binyam Mohamed, a suspected supporter of the Taliban, and subjected him to sleep deprivation. But a closer examination shows that the judges did not say that Mohamed was entitled to evidence that supported his allegation that MI5 was complicit in his mistreatment, regardless of the consequences for the relationship between the British and US intelligence services.
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