The Green Ribbon

Lib Dems reactions to the EU summit

2011-12-09T20:52:41+00:00

MPs

Nick Clegg - “Clearly there is potentially an increased risk of a two-speed Europe in which Britain’s position becomes more marginalised, and in the long run that would be bad for growth and jobs in this country.” Telegraph

Menzies Campbell - “If the attitude of the French was as, for example, exemplified by the statement made by President Sarkozy, then I do not think David Cameron had any alternative," Telegraph

Lords

Lord Ashdown - “After long years of anti-European prejudice, the eurosceptic wing of the Conservative party and its newspaper backers have pushed the rest of Europe, and especially Paris, into anti-British prejudice. Britain will pay a very high price.” FT.com

Lord Oakeshott - "a black day for Britain and Europe". Independent

MEPs

Sarah Ludford - Those were reasonable demands, so I think President Sarkozy has not been helpful, but I think David Cameron, as I say, has been saddled with the deeply unhelpful weight of the europhobes. Lib Dem Voice

Chris Davies (Chief Whip) - "David Cameron has today relegated Britain to the second division of Europe." Public Service Europe

Edward McMillan-Scott - The Conservative party is now a nationalist party but is not acting in the national interest, but in the interest of a privileged minority from which Cameron and Johnson are drawn. That this personal rivalry should now imperil the survival of the euro and the single market is outrageous." theparliament.com

Sharon Bowles

Lib Dems reactions to the EU summit

2011-12-09T20:52:41+00:00

MPs

Vince Cable - "We will see that over the next few days. The key national interest we are trying to protect here is the single market which very large numbers of jobs depend on it. We have a critical interest in protecting the single market, keeping it open and enlarging it. That is what the argument is about." Guardian

Menzies Campbell - “If the attitude of the French was as, for example, exemplified by the statement made by President Sarkozy, then I do not think David Cameron had any alternative," Telegraph

Matin Horwood - blamed Tory Euroscepticism for leaving the UK facing a "worst-case scenario" of isolation in Europe. Evening Standard.

Lords

Lord Oakeshott - "a black day for Britain and Europe". Independent

MEPs

Chris Davies (Chief Whip) - "David Cameron has today relegated Britain to the second division of Europe." Public Service Europe

Sharon Bowles - lambasted Prime Minister David Cameron for isolating the UK from its European partners, saying he played a "dangerous game and lost". GFSNews

The Islamophobe International: Vigilant Freedom and the English Defence League

2011-09-05T09:32:58+01:00

My latest SpinWatch post:

In the wake of the Utoeya massacre in Norway, it is no longer possible to ignore the dangers of the growth in far right, Islamophobic counterjihad ideology. So a new report published by the Center for American Progress is particularly timely.

Fear, Inc.The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America demonstrates that a remarkably small core group of people are responsible for spreading Islamophobia in the US:

A small group of foundations and wealthy donors are the lifeblood of the Islamophobia network in America, providing critical funding to a clutch of right-wing think tanks that peddle hate and fear of Muslims and Islam—in the form of books, reports, websites, blogs, and carefully crafted talking points that anti-Islam grassroots organizations and some right-wing religious groups use as propaganda for their constituency.

The report comes as recriminations over the Norway massacre may now be exposing some of the Islamophobia network's links in Europe. In particular, a bitter dispute between the leadership of the English Defence League (EDL) and counterjihad activist Paul Ray is shedding new light on the EDL's origins.

David Cameron must remember the lessons of Bloody Sunday

2011-08-13T10:33:00+01:00

My latest OurKingdom piece:

I learned of the London riots last week when I got back from a night out in Belfast only to be greeted by scenes of riot police and burning buses in Tottenham on the TV news. It felt like an uncanny vantage point from which to be watching part of my hometown in flames.

The sense of cognitive dissonance only grew the following evening on my return to a London that was witnessing calls for plastic bullets, troops on the streets and other measures whose disastrous consequences I had spent the previous week learning about.

This August marks the 40th anniversary of the introduction of internment without trial in Northern Ireland, perhaps the most draconian attempt to suppress civil unrest by a British government in modern times.The Féile an Phobail festival in West Belfast last week witnessed testimony from internees and the families of civilians killed during the period. The picture that emerged was one of a disastrous policy that exacerbated the Troubles for decades.

In a new departure, the Féile also heard from two ex-soldiers visiting West Belfast for the first time since the early 1970s as part of a delegation organised by the Tim Parry - Johnathan Ball Peace Centre in Warrington.

Read the rest over at OK.

When conniving is not collusion: The Murder of Rosemary Nelson

2011-05-26T11:18:00+01:00

A recent OurKingdom piece:

Was there state collusion in the killing of Rosemary Nelson, the solicitor who was blown up by loyalists at her home in Lurgan in 1999?

Two very different answers to that question were put forward in the Commons this week, following the report of the inquiry into her death.

For Northern Ireland Secretary Owen Paterson, the report was fundamentally reassuring:

it is clear that just as Lord Saville found no evidence of a conspiracy by the British state, and just as Lord MacLean found no evidence of state collusion in the murder of Billy Wright, so this panel finds no evidence of any act by the state which directly facilitated Rosemary Nelson’s murder.

In contrast, Paterson's shadow (and predecessor) Sean Woodward, regarded the report as damning:

The question that the Secretary of State must address is whether those acts of omission, negligence, failure and prejudice and a mechanistic Northern Ireland Office mean that we are in a very different position from the conclusion of the Wright inquiry, contrary to his statement today. I urge him to examine Justice Cory’s original proposals for the inquiries. Collusion is not just a matter of commission; it may also be an issue of omission. This does not prove collusion, but today the Secretary of State has been too hasty in his dismissal.

Canadian judge Peter Cory was appointed in 2002 to look at six cases in which collusion by either British or Irish state forces was suspected. His report was published in 2004, only after a delay which led Cory to notify some of the families involved directly that he had recommended inquiries.

Read the rest at OK

Open Source Political Economy: an e-reader

2011-05-15T13:11:45+01:00

I have been doing a lot of reading lately about the potential of networked information technology to empower ordinary people, partly inspired by Guy Aitchison and Aaron John Peters' essay in the Fight Back! reader on the student protests.

There is a wealth of good writing on the subject, much of which is rooted in the open source movement, and is accordingly freely available online. I have compiled a list of relevant ebooks and articles partly for my own reference, and partly for those like me who are just getting into this area. I would particularly recommend Benkler' s Wealth of Networks as a starting point. I would welcome suggestions in the comments.

Graham Seaman, The two economies, or why the washing machine question is the wrong question, 2002.

McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto, 2004

Lawrence Lessig, Code: Version 2.0, 2005

Michel Bauwens, The Political Economy of Peer Production, 2005.

Michel Bauwens, P2P and Human Evolution: Peer to Peer as the Premise of a new mode of civilisation, 2005

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 2006.

Lawrence Lessig, Remix, Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, 2008.

Kevin A. Carson, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, A Low Overhead Manifesto, 2010.

Kevin A. Carson, Open Source Government, 2011.

Guy Aitchison and Aaron John Peters, The Open-Sourcing of Political Activism: How the internet and Networks help build resistance, 2011.

Notes on Cameron's Commons persona

2011-04-27T16:18:58+01:00

Does Cameron have a problem with his manner at Prime Minister's Questions? Here's a look back over some of the evidence:

5 June 2008

In opposition, Cameron's facility for insulting his opponents won him some plaudits:

David Cameron is able to hit Brown with any number of insults: “Can he give us another of his trade-mark U-turns?…once again dodgy statistics from the Prime Minister…If a company director got up and read out a statement like that the authorities would be after him…I don’t know why they’re [Labour backbenchers] all shouting at me. It’s the Prime Minister who’s given them the lowest poll rating since Michael Foot…What on earth is green about taxing someone who bought a Ford Mondeo five years ago?…What’s this man still doing in the Government?”

This last remark actually referred to a lowly parliamentary private secretary, Rob Marris (Wolverhampton South-West), who had ventured to criticise the new car taxes which will come in next April. (Telegraph)

24 November 2010

In Government, son began to employ similar rhetoric from the dispatch box towards Ed Miliband:

Cameron scorned Miliband's previous role in the Treasury – where he was a special adviser to Gordon Brown – "when they didn't regulate banks properly, when they set up the tripartite system failed, when we had the biggest boom and the biggest bust."

The prime minister added: "The honourable gentleman has nothing to say about the deficit. He has nothing to say about the regulation. He is just a nowhere man of British politics." (Guardian)

On this occasion, however, Cameron's approach began to provoke some unease even among right-of-centre commentators:

Cameron is a refreshingly unstuffy individual but appears dangerously careless of the dignity of the office he holds. Getting down and dirty in this way may be good for a laugh, or a groan, but it diminishes him. I’m all for a ready wit but pre-cooked jokes at the expense of others are not a good idea. It simply fuels the suspicion that a Bullingdon bully lurks not far beneath the affable public image.(David Hughes, Telegraph)

8 December 2010

Cameron failed to take Hughes' advice at the height of the tuition fees debate, and came a cropper badly:

Mr Cameron accused the Labour leader of "rank hypocrisy", arguing that Mr Miliband had "absolutely no idea" how to fund England's universities.

He told him: "You are just demonstrating complete political opportunism, total opportunism.

"You are behaving like a student politician and frankly that's all you'll ever be."

Mr Miliband shot back with a reference to Mr Cameron's days in the Bullingdon Club at Oxford.

He said: "I was a student politician. But I was not hanging around with people who were throwing bread rolls and wrecking restaurants." (BBC Democracy Live)

15 December 2010

This episode did not deter Cameron from adopting a similar style next time around:

Miliband said that the PM is good with the airbrush and the broad brush but not so hot on the all important details. Cameron said his opposite number was more like Basil Brush. Boom, boom, shouted Tory MPs (see what they’ve done there?). Childish, but quite funny.

All too flippant from the PM on a day when serious topics were on the agenda? Perhaps, but Cameron has a naturally silly sense of humor. It is one of his strongest and most endearing traits. He can usually be relied upon to go too far with a joke, or to use a mild swear word in the wrong company when telling a funny story over dinner. Nothing wrong with that, it suggests spirit.(Ian Martin, Wall Street Journal)

12 January 2011

Cameron was back on his usual form at the start of the year:

He said Labour had done little to regulate bankers' bonuses - at a time when Ed Miliband was working at the Treasury.

"We've ended up with a shadow chancellor who can't count and a Labour leader who doesn't count," Mr Cameron said.

"He was the nothing man when he was at the Treasury and he is the nothing man now he's trying to run the Labour Party." (BBC)

Once again, Cameron's approach prompted some unease among the sketch-writers:

There’s a good argument to be made that David Cameron’s performance at PMQs is inversely proportional to the number of personal insults he lobs at Ed Miliband. By that measure, the PM had a pretty poor session today...

...Now, there’s nothing wrong with any of this. Mr Cameron is good at insulting people, and delivering a good kicking to your opponent can over spell victory at PMQs. But sometimes, like today, the Flashman act can seem a bit hollow. (James Kirkup, Telegraph)

Ben Brogan was also concerned:

The Prime Minister could scarcely conceal the contempt on his face throughout their exchanges. He laughed and shook his head in that “dearie me can you believe this?” way he has. Ed Miliband? Pah!

Well, Dave needs to lose the sneer and start hitting back more effectively. All the points about Mr Miliband’s failings I set out above remain true. But perception plays a big part in politics and in his outing against the Prime Minister the Leader of the Opposition was combative, punchy, and successfully labelled Dave as the bankers’ mate who has let them keep their bonuses and handed them a tax cut. (Ben Brogan, Telegraph)

30 March 2011

Ed Balls was the target for Cameron this time, in an exchange which promoted criticism from the Spectator's James Forsyth:

This PMQs will be remembered for the Cameron Balls spat. As Cameron was answering a question from a Labour MP, he snapped at Balls who was heckling him, shouting ‘you don’t know the answer, you’re not properly briefed, why don’t you just say you’ll write to her’. A visibly irritated Cameron shot back, ‘I wish the shadow Chancellor would shut up and listen for once’. At this the Labour benches erupted, their aim at PMQs is always to get Cameron to lose his temper and they had succeeded.

Cameron then produced a brilliant comeback, saying that Balls was ‘the most annoying person in British politics’ and ‘I suspect that the leader of the opposition will come to agree with me. ’ But the whole incident was not a good one for him. Prime Ministers shouldn’t lose their temper in the chamber. (James Forsyth, Spectator)

There was also this coda to the performance:

Chris Williamson (Derby North) (Lab): On 24 March last year, six weeks before the general election, theDerby Telegraph reported that the Prime Minister had accused me of distributing inaccurate information about Conservative plans for the winter fuel payment. It turns out that I was right and he was wrong, so, unless he is going to overrule his Chancellor, will he take this opportunity to apologise to the millions of pensioners who rely on the winter fuel allowance and to me for his unfair censure?

The Prime Minister: I cannot believe that I accused the hon. Gentleman of anything because I had absolutely no idea who he was. (Hansard)

27 April 2010

Today, of course, there was this episode:

He claimed Stoate had been defeated at the last election by a Conservative candidate when – as Eagle was pointing out – Stoate had in fact stood down.

Cameron told the Wallasey MP: "Calm down, dear, calm down. Calm down and listen to the doctor."

As the Labour benches erupted, the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, angrily pointed to Eagle and to his wife, Yvette Cooper, apparently demanding to know to whom the PM had been referring. The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, appeared to call for an apology.

But Cameron told them: "I said calm down, calm down, dear. I'll say it to you if you like ... I'm not going to apologise. You do need to calm down."

It's clear that many Tories are uneasy about the Prime Minister's style, fearing that it will establish a Bullingdon bully persona ill-suited to legitimising an austerity programme. Arguably, more liberal commentators have been slower to pick up on this. This may be one aspect of their general over-estimation of the Prime Minister.

Of course, the Commons and Prime Ministers' Questions is a typical oratorical forum in the classical western rhetorical tradition. That tradition emphasises high-stress, emotive, personalised verbal combat. Yet Cameron's approach may have diminishing returns even in these terms, or Tory commentators would not be concerned about it.

The western rhetorical tradition was well-described by the scholar Walter Ong, who noted is that it has been heavily masculine in tone. Indeed, its transmission was a male rite of passage of which English public schools were an expression.

That tradition was not historically open to women in the same way, and there is still a tendency to judge women differently from men when they engage in it. Cameron's jibe today may inadvertently have highlighted that problem.

How to defeat the Coalition

2011-04-10T09:48:00+01:00

From my latest post over at OurKingdom:

For the Orange Bookers, as with their Cameronian counterparts, the coalition provided the opportunity to carry out their plans despite a relatively poor electoral performance. That weak legitimacy has induced urgency rather than caution.

Talks on an agenda for the second phase of the coalition began last autumn between senior Tories and Lib Dems at CentreForum. Progressives need their own plan to ensure that second phase never happens. Any such strategy must embrace a number of key principles.

A shorter version is also over at Liberal Conspiracy as Ten ways to pressure on the coalition and defeat it.

Random thoughts on the new Oriental mode of production

2011-02-13T06:12:00+00:00

Newsnight's Paul Mason is, by common consent, one of the most switched-on commentators on the global wave of social unrest that has emerged in the wake of the financial crisis. His recent blogpost, Twenty reasons why its kicking off everywhere, has deservedly been getting plenty of recommendations on twitter, etc.

I though this point was particularly interesting:

The weakness of organised labour means there's a changed relationship between the radicalized middle class, the poor and the organised workforce. The world looks more like 19th century Paris - heavy predomination of the "progressive" intelligentsia, intermixing with the slum-dwellers at numerous social interfaces (cabarets in the 19C, raves now); huge social fear of the excluded poor but also many rags to riches stories celebrated in the media (Fifty Cent etc); meanwhile the solidaristic culture and respectability of organized labour is still there but, as in Egypt, they find themselves a "stage army" to be marched on and off the scene of history.

Mason's picture of 19th century Paris holds more generally for what might be called the pre-industrial left. Geoff Eley provides a useful description of this heritage in his history of the left, Forging Democracy:

Calls for democracy were linked during the era of the French Revolution to more elaborate visions of the just society, organized around an ideal of independent small property and local self-government. In traditions of popular democracy, this linkage went back to the English Revolution in the seventeenth century and the ideals of the Levellers; in the eighteenth century it reemerged in the plebian radicalism of the American Revolution and related movements in the Low Countries and Britain. During the 1790s,such movements acquired the general name of Jacobinism. Their pursuit of local democracy was greatly inspired by the insurgency of Parisian tradesmen,shopkeepers, and impecunious professionals, reaching its apogee in the militancy of the sans-culottes during 1792–94.

The rise of concentrated industrial capitalism presented a profound challenge to this tradition, as Eley notes:

Artisans increasingly lost control of their trades to the impersonal forces of the capitalist market. They surrendered the autonomy of the workshop to practical forms of dependence on larger-scale business organization,before eventually becoming integrated directly into superordinate social structures of capitalist production, employment, and control. Once that happened, social ideals of small-scale organization, local community, and personal independence became far harder to sustain. That is, under conditions of capitalist industrialization the implications of demanding popular sovereignty became profoundly transformed.

The result was the rise of socialism, which in both its parliamentary/Labourist and revolutionary/Leninist forms, was focused on achieving popular control over these newly-concentrated forms of economic power through the state.

Both these strategies sought take to take advantage of the trend to which they responded by mobilizing the growing working class in a mass party. This was decisive for the emergence of modern democracy.

Yet the trend of proletarianisation never created the homogenous mass of the crudest Marxist extrapolations, and that set definite limits on strategies based on that trend.

1968, has been interpreted, notably by Immanuel Wallerstein as the beginning of a revolt against the traditional strategies of the left. Writing in 2002, he offered some interesting suggestions for strategic goals:

I would suggest that one of the most useful—substantively, politically, psychologically—is the attempt to move towards selective, but ever-widening, decommodification. We are subject today to a barrage of neoliberal attempts to commodify what was previously seldom or never appropriated for private sale—the human body, water, hospitals. We must not only oppose this but move in the other direction. Industries, especially failing industries, should be decommodified. This does not mean they should be ‘nationalized’—for the most part, simply another version of commodification. It means we should create structures, operating in the market, whose objective is performance and survival rather than profit. This can be done, as we know, from the history of universities or hospitals—not all, but the best. Why is such a logic impossible for steel factories threatened with delocalization?

If the emergence of the 'post-industrial' society from the 1960s onwards initially favoured neoliberal commodification, real cause for hope has emerged in the rise of what Yochai Benkler has called commons-based peer production.

As Benkler wrote in The Wealth of Networks (2006):

If the transformation I describe as possible occurs, it will lead to substantial redistribution of power and money from the twentieth-century industrial producers of information, culture, and communications - like Hollywood, the recording industry, and perhaps the broadcasters and some of the telecommunications services giants - to a combination of widely diffuse populations around the globe, and the market actors that will build the tools that make this population better able to produce its own information environment rather than buying it ready-made.

Industrial ideologies: Labourism

The hold of traditional strategies nevertheless remains powerful, even among some of the most thoughtful contributors to the British anti-cuts movement, clearly an outpost of Benkler's 'networked public sphere.'

For example, this post by Owen Jones is a striking example of traditional labourism of a kind well-critiqued by Stuart White here(pdf), (although it has to be said that much of Jones' argument has stood up in the face of events).

A rather cruder Labourism was on display from some of the participants at the recent Netroots conference in London, who attempted to persuade activists to chose Labour party politics over single issue politics. There was no sense they saw the need to embed both in a wider movement politics if real change is to be achieved.

It's worth noting that both Tim Montgomerie on the right and Sunny Hundal on the left have sought to import an American language of conservative/progressive movement politics into Britain. Perhaps there are obvious reasons why hegemony, in both the Gramscian and geopolitical senses of the word, should be better understood in the US?

Industrial ideologies: Leninism

The resonance of Lenin's Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder in further left interpretations of the anti-cuts movement was equally striking. Not least because it contains this passage:

The dictatorship of the proletariat means a most determined and most ruthless war waged by the new class against a more powerful enemy, the bourgeoisie, whose resistance is increased tenfold by their overthrow (even if only in a single country), and whose power lies, not only in the strength of international capital, the strength and durability of their international connections, but also in the force of habit, in the strength of small-scale production.Unfortunately, small-scale production is still widespread in the world, and small-scale production engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a mass scale. All these reasons make the dictatorship of the proletariat necessary, and victory over the bourgeoisie is impossible without a long, stubborn and desperate life-and-death struggle which calls for tenacity, discipline, and a single and inflexible will.

This passage embodies the reversal of left-wing attitudes between the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but could Lenin have written the same thing if he had been able to observe the trends of the early Twenty-First Century?

In the 1980s, it was still possible to argue that the 'post-industrial' economy was a neo-liberal illusion that ignored the continuing importance of peripheral manufacturing production.

Today, however, decommodified production is making significant inroads into the creative industries, and is threatening to have an impact even on manufacturing and energy production.

A new progressive coalition

New economic possibilities have often provided the context for succesful bids for hegemony in the past, the Fordist underpinnings of the New Deal being a classic example.

The rise of peer production presents opportunities and challenges for the left.

For the foreseeable future most people will still depend on market participation for most of their needs. That means the traditional role of the left in defending public services and workers rights will remain central. Indeed, it will acquire a new significance. As the big society debate has underlined, people can only contribute to decommodified labour to the extent that they are freed from commodified labour. Democratic republican arguments about economic freedom may be relevant here.
There is an obvious role for trade unions here, but also an obvious tension. They exist to represent workers within a commodified process, e.g. journalists rather than bloggers. Decommodification is a challenge to their raison d'etre.
Forms of labour organisation pioneered by the pre-industrial artisanal left may become more relevant with the growth of peer production. Mutual and co-operative movements are crucial terrain that should not be conceded to a neoliberal movement which sees them only as a trojan horse against nationalisation.
Another lesson from the pre-industrial left is the importance of defending the commons against enclosure and corporate power. There is an opportunity for political parties to take a pro-active role in reshaping the regulatory environment to favour peer production.

The military response to direct action, General Kitson's manual

2010-12-28T14:08:41+00:00

General Frank Kitson's 1971 counter-insurgency manual Low Intensity Operations has long been of interest to students of the Northern Ireland Troubles. Within months of its publication, its author was commanding 39 Brigade in Belfast where he pioneered the use of the Parachute Regiment as shock troops, and of plain-clothes 'counter-gangs' to combat paramilitary groups.

However, what struck me most when I obtained a copy recently was not the book's obvious significance for such controversial episodes, but its striking relevance to events in Britain in recent weeks.

That's because Kitson gives considerable attention to the question of how a government can combat a campaign of non-violent direct action. He devotes a whole chapter to the subject, despite showing considerable scepticism about the value of direct action as a tactic.

Read more at OurKingdom.

A response to Harry’s Place

2010-12-11T15:00:56+00:00

An anonymous post on Harry's Place has alleged that I am responsible for posting anti-semitic material by Kevin McDonald on the Neocon Europe website. This allegation is false and I demand that Harry's Place retract it.

Harry’s place should already be aware that this was false as it had been made perfectly clear by Spinwatch in July of this year when David Miller wrote:

The quote was removed as soon as the mistake was spotted and an apology made. The person involved is no longer a contributor to our wiki projects.

I remain a contributor to Powerbase and other Spinwatch projects.

I was not aware of the existence of the material on the site until November 2009. After reviewing the material, I took the view, in common with other Neocon Europe contributors, that it was clearly anti-semitic and should not have been posted on the site.

I fully endorsed and indeed helped to draft the apology which was made at the time by David Miller which stated in particular that:

The reason that the quotations by Macdonald were removed is that Macdonald has been repeatedly and rightly (in our view) accused of racism. Moreover, the statements expressed core essentialist anti-semitic/racist ideas. This material should not have been posted and is in no way endorsed by this site. I apologise for, and deeply regret, this error.

I was involved in ensuring the material was removed from the site, and in the subsequent editorial review, which led in part to the incorporation of Neocon Europe into the main SpinWatch Wiki, PowerBase. We took this action because, contrary to Harry's Place's claims, we take anti-semitism seriously and are determined to deal with the issue robustly.

Harry's Place nevertheless writes:

Who was the Kevin MacDonald fan at the University of Strathclyde? I think it may well be Tom Griffin. If I’m wrong, I’m very happy to post his denial.

The manifestly cavalier manner in which Harry's Place makes this extremely serious allegation, for which it cannot present any evidence, tells its own story.

I cannot see any reason for this false speculation, except to allow Harry's Place to make an entirely spurious connection to openDemocracy, an organisation which has no relation to the entire episode whatever.

In the period since Neocon Europe was incorporated into Powerbase, events have only served to confirm our thesis. We argued that neoconservative groups like the Center for Security Policy were building links with the European far right as part of an organised campaign of Islamophobia. The role of these organisations in the Park 51 smear campaign in the US has since been well documented, not least by American Jewish journalists appalled by such vicious sectarianism. The links which we identified between groups like Stop the Islamization of America and the English Defence League have become increasingly brazen.

That the Kevin MacDonald material appeared on the site is a source of lasting regret. I nevertheless remain proud that SpinWatch is prepared to call out those who seek to gain political advantage by scapegoating the Muslim community. We will not be deterred from that work by anonymous smears.

Update: Harry's Place has retracted its allegations against me, although they still seem determined to ignore David Miller's clear statement that: "The person involved is no longer a contributor to our wiki projects."

Tuition fees rebellion sparks coalition crisis

2010-12-03T09:39:40+00:00

Out of idle curiosity as much as anything I have been taking a look at how individual Lib Dem MPs are likely to vote on tuition fees next Thursday. A full list follows at the end of this post. The best source on this is the blog of Tim Starkey, a Lib Dem councillor who is co-ordinating the rebels.

Starkey wrote yesterday:

Be in no doubt - the lobbying efforts are working. Over the next week it is vital that students, parents and all those who care about widening access to university education write to their MPs and let their feelings be known. As I’ve said before, don’t just target Lib Dems. There are 4 Tories on the government benches who signed the pledge too ( Bob Blackman - Harrow East, Stephen Mosley - City of Chester, Lee Scott - Ilford South, Ben Wallace - Wye and Preston).

If one takes Michael Crick's narrowest definition of '26 plain backbenchers', more than half of Lib Dem backbenchers have already said they will vote against the Government. It is still almost half if one includes spokesmen and 'party whips' who are not members of the Government. This in itself would be a major blow to the legitimacy of the tuition fees hike.

As things stand, it would need something of the order of 42 Lib Dems to vote against the Government to defeat it, roughly the entire Lib Dem backbench, plus PPS's. That number could be lower if Lib Dem Ministers or Conservatives vote against the bill.

The most likely scenario at this stage is the one outlined by Peter Oborne:

After six months in office, far sooner than anyone could have expected, the Coalition is in crisis – and the crisis will reach a climax next Thursday, when Parliament votes on tuition fees.

While it remains highly likely that the Coalition will get its business through, victory will come at the cost of permanent ill-feeling. Many Lib Dems feel unable to go back on their very public pre-election pledge to abolish tuition fees. Last night there was talk of a ministerial resignation, with Home Office minister Lynne Featherstone favourite to quit.

Yet there are signs that the Government sees a real danger of an outright defeat. It is this that has put paid to the prospect that the Lib Dems would collectively abstain, as the FT reported yesterday:

The desire for consensus also has to be married with the realities of getting the vote through parliament. The party has been warned by the whips that giving backbenchers too much leeway could make the vote perilously tight, particularly if there was a loss of confidence among a handful of Tory MPs.

“If a lot of Lib Dems vote against, some will have to vote for to ensure it goes through,” the senior Lib Dem said.

Another sign may be the date of the vote itself, as the Times Higher Education Supplement reports:

Some observers believe that by holding the vote on a Thursday, when many Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland MPs will have left for their constituencies, the government may reduce its chances of a defeat.

Given this consideration, it may be worth constiruents lobbying the DUP, SNP, Plaid Cymru, SDLP, Alliance and Lady Sylvia Hermon (perhaps via WritetoThem).

A substantial number of Lib Dem MPs have yet to declare their hand. They maybe planning to quietly support the government, but they include some MPs who have already rebelled in the current parliament. Below is a list of Lib Dem MPs with the best indication I have been able to find of how they are likely to vote. Where no other source is mentioned, I have relied on Tim Starkey.

Likely rebels

1 Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale)

2 Charles Kennedy (Ross, Skye and Lochaber) "told the Commons he could not ‘go along with this particular direction of travel’." (4 Nov)

3 Menzies Campbell (North East Fife) - "having signed this campaign pledge, then I feel obliged to keep to it." (6 Nov)

4 Mike Hancock (Portsmouth South) " 'It's a big step in the right direction but the government hasn't done enough to make me vote for it and I won't. " (5 Nov)

5 Bob Russell (Colchester) "pledged to vote against" (28 Nov)

6 Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West) - said ‘an increase in fees’ is ‘something that I cannot and will not accept’. (4 Nov)

7 John Pugh (Southport) - "I will vote against any rise in tuition fees, unless a rabbit is pulled out of the hat – and there is no sign of that." (4 Nov)

8 Mark Williams (Ceredigion)

9 Roger Williams - (Brecon and Radnorshir)

10 Julian Huppert (Cambridge) - "I made a promise to the students that I would never support a rise in tuition fees and I have reaffirmed that promise today. " (13 Oct)

11 John Leech (Manchester Withington) - "I again publicly state that I will vote against an increase in tuition fees." (2 Dec)

12 Ian Swales (Redcar) - "I can't support raising the fee cap up to £9,000 per year. (25 November)

13 Simon Wright (Norwich South)

Waverers

Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) "Mr Horwood said he would not support the bill but was weighing up the consequences of voting 'no'." (1 Dec) However, as Gareth Epps notes below, Horwood may miss the vote as he is attending the Cancún Climate summit.

Jenny Willott (Cardiff Central) "“I will not support a rise in tuition fees. I will decide whether I am going to vote against or abstain on the final vote, depending on what is in the motion." (3 Dec)

Lorely Burt (Solihull) - "told activists in Solihull yesterday that she would not vote in favour of the rise." (21 Nov) "has said she will probably abstain" (5 Dec)

Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset and Poole North) - "told the Politics Show South that she will either vote against or abstain." (28 Nov)

Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) "He is expected to make a decision after the a meeting of the Lib Dem Parliamentary Party on Tuesday" (3 Dec)

Stephen Williams (Bristol West) ""I will either not vote - abstain - or I will vote against the government. I have not decided yet." (3 Dec)

Malcolm Bruce (Gordon) "It is fair enough to criticise our policy, with which many of us are not entirely comfortable." (30 Nov)

Lynne Featherstone (Hornsey and Wood Green) - "Last night there was talk of a ministerial resignation, with Home Office minister Lynne Featherstone favourite to quit." (2 Dec)

Norman Baker (Lewes) ""Or voting against. There are three options and, to be honest with you, I genuinely haven't decided." (6 Dec)

Gordon Birtwistle (Burnley) - Defended policy in meeting with students but added "I haven’t made my mind up about the vote." (26 Nov)

Tessa Munt (Wells) - "I know that I couldn't vote for the Browne recommendations; what remains to be seen is the detail of what is actually proposed by the Government and to listen to the debate." (29 Nov)

Don Foster (Bath) "told the Guardian he had not yet made up his mind how he would vote on the fees issue" (16 Nov)

Alan Reid (Argyll and Bute) - "would assess the position once he had seen all the government proposals - a view echoed by Alan Reid" (28 Nov)

Robert Smith (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) "would assess the position once he had seen all the government proposals - a view echoed by Alan Reid and by Robert Smith" (28 Nov)

Stephen Lloyd (Eastbourne and Willingdon) "is also staying firmly on the fence" (28 Nov)

Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) "Deliberating whether to abstain; no consideration of voting against." (5 Dec)

Mike Crockhart (Edinburgh West) - "He definitely won't be voting in favour. But he is not going to decide whether to abstain or whether to vote against (which would involve resigning as a parliamentary aide to Michael Moore, the Scottish secretary) until he has had further conversations with his colleagues later this week." (6 Dec)

Note that its possible that some of those considering abstention may only do so if there is a party-wide deal.

No stated position

Stephen Gilbert (St Austell & Newquay)

Alan Beith (Berwick on Tweed)

Andrew George (St Ives)

Dan Rogerson (North Cornwall)

Adrian Sanders (Torbay)

John Thurso (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross)

Likely Government supporters

John Hemming (Birmingham Yardley) - "I believe we have not only delivered on our pledge of a fairer system, but also delivered substantially on scrapping student tuition fees." (7 Nov)

Norman Lamb (North Norfolk) - "This is a completely different system, it's a fair system." (25 Nov)

David Laws (Yeovil) - "We really need to get it out of the way ASAP.‬ The sooner this is over the better!!!." (15 Nov)

David Ward (Bradford East) "“It would become a graduated level where the better off will make bigger contributions which is not the case now or in the past and that should be welcomed.” (13 Oct)

The payroll vote

Ministers

Nick Clegg (Sheffield Hallam) - 'I''d like everyone to vote for this. We're no good in coalition if rancour, bitterness, division creep into our ranks." (5 Dec)

Danny Alexander (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) - "I hope, and I would certainly very much prefer, to vote for it. I have worked very hard on this policy." (3 Dec)

Norman Baker (Lewes) see Waverers

Jeremy Browne (Taunton Deane)

Paul Burstow (Sutton and Cheam)

Vince Cable (Twickenham) - “Obviously I have a duty as a minister to vote for my own policy - and that is what will happen" (3 Dec)

Ed Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) - "said he could only hold his hands up." (10 Nov)

Lynne Featherstone - see Waverers

David Heath (Somerton and Frome)

Nick Harvey (North Devon) - "Given these difficult economic circumstances, the Government's proposals represent the best solution - and reflect a real Liberal Democrat influence." (11 Nov)

Chris Huhne (Eastleigh) - As Gareth Epps notes below, Huhne may miss the vote as he is attending the Cancún climate summit. However, the Independent reports: "He is due to return from the climate change talks in Cancun, Mexico, for Thursday's vote but one Liberal Democrat source admitted: "He is maintaining radio silence."" (6 Dec)

Michael Moore (Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk)

Andrew Stunell (Hazel Grove)

Sarah Teather (Brent Central)

Steve Webb (Thornbury and Yate) - "unlikely to rebel since he is piloting landmark legislation." (4 Nov)

Government whips

Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) - "trying to thrash out a deal which will see backbench Lib Dems abstain and ministers vote in favour of the reforms." (4 Nov)

Mark Hunter (Cheadle)

Parliamentary Private Secretaries

Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire) - "We have improved the situation for part-time students, poorer students and poorer graduates. That’s a fairer system." (3 Nov)

Jenny Willott - see Waverers

Mike Crockart - see Waverers

Gordon Birtwistle - see Waverers

Duncan Hames (Chippenham) - "Hames was invited to attend the protests but declined to attend as he is in Parliament today." (30 Nov)

Potential Tory rebels

David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) - "I am going to vote against this proposal." (6 Dec)

Philip Davies (Shipley) - "the latest to confirm they will vote no." (7 Dec)

Julian Lewis (New Forest East) " the latest to confirm they will vote no." (7 Dec)

Lee Scott (Ilford South) - Signed NUS pledge. "Lee Scott's office confirmed the Ilford North MP would not support the fee rise in Thursday's vote." (7 Dec)

Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) - "confirmed that he would not support the fees hike, but had yet to decide whether to abstain or vote against it." (7 Dec)

Stephen Mosley (City of Chester) - Signed NUS pledge. "Seems to have gone back on his pledge" (28 Nov)

Bob Blackman (Harrow East) - Signed NUS pledge. " still undecided over whether to vote with the Government or abstain." (7 Dec)

Ben Wallace (Wye and Preston) - Signed NUS pledge - "already U-turned on the issue" (28 Nov)

How the MOD played the Knocking Game after Bloody Sunday

2010-10-30T00:48:55+01:00

Lord Saville's Report into Bloody Sunday will be debated in the House of Commons on Wednesday. No doubt the length and cost of the inquiry will feature prominently in the debate.

The process might arguably have been less protracted had it not had to overcome a Ministry of Defence campaign to obscure the truth. Central to this campaign was 'The Knocking Game' an army document produced within three months of the 1972 massacre, which claimed that the victims were 'amateur gunmen'.

Former army information officer Colin Wallace testified to the inquiry that this document was used to brief the press. In contrast, the former head of the Information Policy Unit at Headquarters Northern Ireland, Colonel Maurice Tugwell, claimed that the document was intended for circulation solely within the army.

Faced with these conflicting accounts, Lord Saville concluded that there was no "evidence that anyone involved in military information disseminated to the public anything about Bloody Sunday, knowing or believing that information to be untrue."

However, evidence found by SpinWatch, but apparently withheld from the inquiry, shows that 'The Knocking Game' was intended for unattributable briefings, and was shown to at least one journalist, confirming Wallace's version of events.

The central claim of the The Knocking Game, produced by the Information Policy Unit in April 1972, was that criticisms of the Parachute Regiment were inspired by a sustained republican propaganda campaign. The regiment's role in Bloody Sunday was interpreted in this light by the document, which stated:

“Perhaps the most disgusting aspect of the Londonderry propaganda campaign is the manner in which the ‘Derry Martyrs’ have been deprived of all credit for what were, by any standards, brave and determined attempts by some of them to defend the Bogside against a parachute battalion. It was foolhardy for amateur gunmen to take on some of the best trained regular soldiers in Europe. Nevertheless they seized whatever weapons were to hand and died in the attempt. Only the most corrupt and cynical organisation would deliberately set out to deny them a proper measure of respect for their sacrifice.”

In his statement to the inquiry, Colin Wallace said the document was "prepared by Colonel Tugwell and demonstrates the Psy Ops approach to allegations about the Parachute Regiment." In his oral testimony, Wallace said the document was one of two instances he was aware of, in which the army put out misleading material about Bloody Sunday. He described it's purpose as follows:

It was given to journalists, particularly visiting journalists who perhaps had only covered one event, and what Colonel Tugwell I think was trying to demonstrate was that there had been a prolonged campaign against the Parachute Regiment of allegations of misbehaviour over a period of time, and also trying to show that some of the allegations had no foundation or were false.

Colonel Tugwell contradicted this in his own statement to the inquiry, saying:

The hand-out called The Knocking Game' was put together by Information Policy at HQNI with input from the press officers of I and 2 PARA. This appears as Document 25 to this statement. My recollection is that it was issued to all units in Northern Ireland and, I imagine, to staff branches there and in MOD. I cannot remember the scale of issue, but the idea was that lots of officers and soldiers serving In Northern Ireland should read it, that the nature of the specific anti-para campaign should be recognised, and that the broader subject of propaganda as a key component in revolutionary warfare might be better understood. As far as I can remember, it was not offered to media people, although it may have been picked up by some Journalists in the course of their usual work. lt describes the anti-para campaign waged at many levels including Messrs Winchester and Hoggart. The campaign lost some of its steam when on 14 January 1972, the Daily Telegraph's defence correspondent, Richard Cox, published the story within a story, that is the efforts to generate anti-para sentiment rather than the propaganda message itself.

Tugwell's claim that 'The Knocking Game' "was not offered to media people", is contradicted by evidence found by SpinWatch in the National Archives. The key document is a cable to the Information Policy Unit from the Ministry of Defence dated 24 April 1972. The relevant section reads:

2. The Knocking Game. We have no objection to circulating this on the lines you suggest and will attach it to our next monthly report. However, it is not what is wanted for public use and we intend offering it to IRD for their advice. We hope they may be able to adapt into suitable form for use in Ireland. We see Uttley made good use of this material.

The IRD, or Information Research Department, was a section of the Foreign Office largely devoted to unattributable press briefings. There would have been no reason to share the 'The Knocking Game' with the IRD if it was intended purely for internal circulation.

'Uttley' was a reference to the Sunday Telegraph correspondent T.E. Utley. In March 1972, the Ministry of Defence and the IRD had agreed that Tugwell and Wallace would brief Utley for a planned book on the Widgery Inquiry into Bloody Sunday.

On 23 April 1972, Utley wrote an article in the Sunday Telegraph, "That Bloody Sunday and After: Prospect of 'No-Go' showdown", which criticised Widgery for leaving the legitimacy of the Paras actions open to doubt:

..He has established, (perhaps showing undue charity in the process) the fallibility of soldiers, however impeccable their intentions, operating in the heat of a riot.

Any such action, like almost any action in a civil war, is likely to lead to the killing or injuring of non-combatants, though in this case, many of the "non-combatants" concerned were themselves fulfilling an essential role in the tactics of the enemy, a role which, in practical certainty, may be said to have been deliberately designed for them.

If it is never legitimate for the State to inflict such casualties in such circumstances, it is not legitimate for it to suppress rebellion at all.

The main thrust of Utley's article was to repeated the Knocking Game's central charge of a propaganda campaign against the Paras. In places, the two accounts are interchangeable, with a number of points being repeated almost word for word. The following examples will illustrate this:

Cox Article

The Knocking Game: The September outburst died away and it was not until 14th January 1972 that an article by Richard Cox in the Daily Telegraph warned that the paras were once again in the sights of the IRA propaganda snipers...

Utley: ...He reported that Irish journalists were seeking to entrap officers of other regiments into admitting that the use of the paras in Ulster had been disastrously counterproductive. Cox's article seems effectively to have scotched this allegation for a while.

Hoggart article

The Knocking Game: Evidently disturbed, the Guardian on the Tuesday following the incident printed an article attributed to Simon Hoggart in Belfast. Headed dramatically, "Army call bar to paratroops", it quoted various statements allegedly made by officers from other units. "The paratroops undid in 10 minutes the community relations it had taken four weeks to build up"

Utley: However, the Guardian reported on Tuesday the 25th (no doubt in good faith) the alleged opinion of a number of army officers in Belfast that "the paratroops undid in ten minutes the community relations it had taken four weeks to build up."

Propaganda themes

The Knocking Game: Eamonn McCann's booklet "What Happened in Derry" published in England by the International Socialists, sets out the revised theme in detail. Far from the shooting being indiscriminate and undisciplined it arose from the accurate and cold blooded execution of a plan to draw the IRA into action and then shoot "all men of military age who tried to cross these lines."

Utley: By Sunday, February 6 a new and more sophisticated version was being promulgated in detail by two Dublin newspapers, the Sunday Press and the Sunday Independent. The theory was that far from British troops having run amok they had been used as the instruments of a callous enterprise designed to enable the army to flush out the IRA from the bogside and the Creggan Estate and to achieve a decisive and bloody victory over them.

Sunday Independent article

The Knocking Game: The quintessence of this version came in the Sunday Independent of 6th February. The tactic of shooting "any male of military age within the vicinity of a shooting incident", readers were told, had been successfully applied in Belfast and was used for the first time in Londonderry on 30th January.

Utley: This was supplemented in the case of the Sunday Independent, by the suggestion that it was a settled part of British policy to kill Irish civilian males of military age.

Irish News article

The Knocking Game: On 24th February the Irish News published a statement written by the New Lodge Republican Club: "a 10-year old boy was spread-eagled on the stairs while soldiers trod on him and religious objects were thrown into the garden, and articles used by a blind woman in the Workshops for the Blind in the Belfast were destroyed during a two-hour search by the Parachute Regiment."...

Utley: ...The Army received a letter from the father whose house had been searched denying that there was any truth in the account and saying he had also written to the Irish News in similar terms. the Irish News did not publish this letter.

2nd Irish News article:

The Knocking Game: The whole nature of IRA propaganda is best summed up by a Belfast housewife whose house was searched by 2nd Para without causing any offence. The Irish News printed a story that soldiers had first broken the toilet and then urinated on the womans's son...

Utley ...Next day she came to collect some articles which had been taken for examination during the search. The Company Commander drew her attention to the news story and, after agreeing that it was without foundation, the woman commented cheerfully, "oh never mind, that's just our propaganda!"

Utley's article was clearly based on 'The Knocking Game', as the MOD's 1972 cable assumes. Had that cable appeared in evidence to the inquiry, Tugwell's account of the British Army's information operations after Bloody Sunday would have been unsustainable.

A number of other cables from the same series were put to Colonel Tugwell during the inquiry. Yet the cable of 24 April did not come to light until it was found by SpinWatch at the National Archives. Significantly, it did not appear in the files of the Ministry of Defence but those of the Northern Ireland Office, presumably because it had been copied to Stormont in 1972.

As a result the Saville Inquiry was denied the evidence that would have shown that Wallace's version of events was the true one. The Information Policy Unit described the victims of Bloody Sunday as 'amateur gunmen' with every intention that impression would be conveyed to the press, and 'The Knocking Game' formed the basis for at least one article which libelled the dead as "fulfilling an essential role in the tactics of the enemy."

The Hatfield House Mystery - Is a pan-unionist alliance on the cards?

2010-01-28T00:04:48+00:00

A cross post which originally appeared on OurKingdom on 23 January 2010.

It has been a strange month in the politics of Northern Ireland, and last week was no exception. On Monday, there was optimism that a breakthrough on the devolution of policing and justice was in the offing. A few days later, talks had collapsed amid recriminations between Gerry Adams and Peter Robinson. UUP leader Reg Empey was predicting an assembly election would be called by the end of the coming week, a good indicator of the likely timeframe before a definitive breakthrough or breakdown.

Over-shadowing the week's events was a remarkable scoop from Slugger O'Toole's Eamonn Mallie, the veteran journalist who first revealed the British Government's talks with the IRA in the early 1990s. He reported that last Sunday, the DUP and Ulster Unionist leadership took part in secret talks in England with Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary Owen Paterson aimed at "unionist unity and copper fastening maximum unionist support for a future Conservative government, should there be a hung parliament."

The Conservatives denied that any discussion of a hung parliament had taken place, stating:

What this was, was the shadow Secretary of State as somebody who could potentially be the actual Secretary of State in a matter of weeks, holding private talks with representatives of the two main unionist parties to explore how we might overcome some of the political instabilities at Stormont, and to avoid a situation in which we might potentially, should we win the election, inherit a collapsed Assembly and direct rule.

On the face of it, this makes sense, particularly as the DUP would want political cover from the Tories' Ulster Unionist allies in the event of a deal with Sinn Féin. However, a series of intriguing stories undermined this picture. The Belfast Telegraph reported that the DUP was considering giving the Ulster Unionists a free run in two nationalist-held Westminster seats. RTE reported that Robinson was considering an outright alliance between the two parties, and the BBC reported that three Consevative parliamentary candidates had resigned.

The BBC's Mark Devenport summed up the situation at the end of the week:

When questioned about the prospect of Sinn Fein becoming Stormont's largest party, neither unionist leader would rule out their respective parties merging into one bloc. Although the Conservatives claimed there was no discussion of a hung Westminster parliament during the secret talks in England last Sunday, senior DUP sources are talking up the significance a single unionist force could have for the parliamentary arithmetic at Westminster. They are pointing out that 12 pro-Conservative seats equals 24 in a balanced parliament...of course that presumes both North Down and Fermanagh South Tyrone could be counted in such a bloc which is a big assumption. Nevertheless it gives a sense of the kind of calculations now being made.

The location of the talks may be significant: Hatfield House, the ancestral seat of Lord Salisbury, who as Viscount Cranborne was the key ally of Ulster Unionism in John Major's cabinet. His home has hosted a unionist unity conference once before. The UUP and DUP were both represented at this gathering which took place a few months after the election of Tony Blair in 1997. It was ostensibly organised at the initiative of Sean O'Callaghan, a former Provisional IRA member who became an advisor to David Trimble. Another member of Trimble's inner circle, the journalist Eoghan Harris, declined to attend because, in the words of Dean Godson, the event "had too much of the air of 1912-style resistance to Home Rule, with Unionists coalescing with what he saw as reactionary elements on the mainland."

Those words found something of an echo this week from SDLP Deputy Leader Alasdair McDonnell, whose South Belfast constituency is the most vulnerable to a pan-unionist alliance. He accused David Cameron of orchestrating "a cynical attempt by the Tories to grab a few orange votes ahead of the forthcoming Westminster election”.

There may in fact be a case for a unionist realignment if it unites pro-agreement forces against the Traditional Unionist Voice. If however, it emboldens the DUP to risk the collapse of power-sharing, it will only serve the TUV's agenda. That would attract an extremely negative reaction from nationalists of all shades. It would also raise profound questions for all strands of unionism.

The DUP has spent forty years building at the expense of traditional 'big house unionism.' How will its electorate take to becoming pawns on a chessboard at the home of a Tory grandee?

The Ulster Unionists and the Conservatives have spent months talking up their alliance as the beginning of a new non-sectarian unionism that can attract Catholic voters. If even their own candidates no longer have confidence in that agenda, why should anyone else?

David Cameron believes he is on the verge of winning broad support from the British people as the responsible choice to lead the next Government. So why is he engaging in what looks uncomfortably like an opportunist manoeuvre for a dozen or so seats?

The Neocons, the BNP and the Islamophobia Network

2009-09-17T06:40:31+01:00

Events in London in recent weeks have highlighted the growing collusion between American neoconservatives and the European far right in stirring up hatred of Muslims.

Richard Bartholomew has details of a meeting at the George Restaurant in east London in August attended by Jihad Watch's Robert Spencer and Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion at the invitation of the Christian Action Network. Also invited were the English Defence League, the group responsible for a number of recent violent anti-Muslim protests.

Robert Spencer says on his blog that he and Murray refused to meet with the EDL, and cites Adrian Morgan as a witness to this version of events. But the presence of Morgan, who did meet the EDL, is itself evidence of the emerging relationship between the neocons and the far-right.

Morgan is a contributing editor to Family Security Matters, which has been described as a front for the Center for Security Policy, a Washington think-tank run by the ultra-neoconservative Frank Gaffney.

He is also the author of Western Resistance, a defunct blog on which he laid out his view of the BNP:

I am slightly ambivalent about the British National Party, on account of its racist past. Nowadays, under the leadership of Nick Griffin, a skilled politician, the racist agenda has become replaced by an agenda which is highly focused against Islam. With this aspect of its policies, I am in agreement. Islam poses a more serious threat to every aspect of British democracy than anything previously encountered. (via the Internet Archive)

Ambivalent or not, Morgan's interest in the BNP is reciprocated, according to Searchlight Magazine, which reported in 2007 on the efforts of BNP idealogue Alan Goodacre to tap support from right wing bloggers:

Goodacre also stated his intention to try and gain the help of Adrian Morgan who writes regularly for the Western Resistance website and has previously contributed to The Guardian and New Scientist and was once a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society. Morgan also contributes to the “Islam Watch” website – “Islam under scrutiny by ex-Muslims” – which would explain Goodacre’s interest in him.

It might also be explained by Morgan's membership of the 910 Group, an offshoot of the Center for Vigilant Freedom (CVF), which ran the CounterJihad Europa conference in October 2007. Among those speaking alongside Robert Spencer at this Brussels event were representatives of European far-right parties such as Filip Dewinter of the Vlaams Belang and Ted Ekeroth of the Sweden Democrats.

The CVF's Christine Brim suggested in November 2007 that the strategy of embracing such parties could be extended to Jean-Marie Le Pen and the BNP:

We suggest looking for the possible movement of Le Pen’s political party Front National towards the center-right, as they may change their platform to pro-active support to improve the situations of European Jews and Israel. The same trend is happening in Austria, and with the BNP in the UK (also not invited and did not attend the conference). If such parties specifically state pro-Israel positions, and take real actions opposing anti-semitism and disavowing previous positions - and reach out to Jewish constituents and encourage Jewish participation in party positions - these are real actions to observe, and to approve. They have not done this yet - but are starting. (via the Internet Archive)

Indeed they were. Alan Goodacre had written to the Jewish Chronicle in 2006 (much to the bemusement of its readers):

We hope that our future behaviour may in time bring you to understand that our repudiation of antisemitism is genuine. We are the only party in Britain that is truly serious about fighting the Islamofascist threat.

Morgan, Brim and Goodacre have each employed the same sleight of hand, attempting to present the embrace of Islamophobia as some kind of atonement for anti-semitism, rather than another manifestation of the same underlying racism. If this strategy seems crude, it may yet take neo-fascist Gianfranco Fini to the Italian premiership.

Time Magazine describes the process:

To fulfill his big ambitions, Fini understood in the early 1990s that he had to distance himself from his past. Eventually, he came to believe that the shortest path from marginal Mussolini nostalgic to mainstream political power was unwavering support for the state of Israel. The decisive moment came when Fini traveled to Israel in November 2003, declaring his affection for the Jewish state and his "shame" for Italy's racial laws under fascism. The following year, Silvio Berlusconi made him foreign minister, where the longtime leader of the National Alliance party stood out amongst his European partners for his pro-Israel policy.

This conversion even impressed some on the 'Decent Left'. Harry's Place wrote of Fini:

He is pro-European Union and pro-US - neither of which fit easy with the claim that he is still a fascist. After September 11, AN posters across Italy declared ‘Solidarity with the United States’ - Italian fascists despise the US for obvious historical reasons.

He is also explicitly in favour of capitalism and the free market. Again this is a break not only with old style Italian corporatist fascism but also the later post-war concept of the ’social right’ which believed in large scale state ownership and nationalisation etc.

AN also supported the liberation of Iraq, a position that I am not aware of any of Europe’s genuine fascists taking.

As Time noted "having "Israel" stamped in your passport and publicly condemning anti-Semitism cannot alone remove lingering doubts about extremist tendencies." Yet the attempt to prove otherwise has some influential backers.

In addition to being a key player in the CVF, and secretary of another counter-jihad outfit, the International Free Press Society, Christine Brim is a senior vice-president at Frank Gaffney's Washington think-tank, the Center for Security Policy (CSP), and director of its Victory Coalition Fund, an incubator for anti-Islamist projects.

The CSP is open about its involvement in political warfare and even has a vice-president for information operations who blogs on the subject. Its General Counsel David Yerushalmi heads up the Society of Americans for National Existence, whose material found its way into last year's Policy Exchange briefing against the Global Peace and Unity event in London.

Gaffney's sister Devon Cross, a member of the CSP advisory council, heads up the Policy Forum on International Security Affairs, a neoconservative briefing operation for European journalists which was run for some time out of Annabel's nightclub in Mayfair.

The CSP and the Policy Forum have been endorsed by some of America's wealthiest conservative foundations. The Philanthropy Roundtable recommended both organisations in its 2006 publication, The Struggle Against Radical Islam: A Donor's Guide (pdf) which criticised the US Government for failing to develop political warfare and public diplomacy programmes modelled on those of the Cold War, and called on private sector donors to fill the gap.

Neoconservatives had repeatedly come up against resistance in attempting to run political warfare programmes through their powerbase at the Pentagon during the Bush administration. One such proposal was leaked to the New York Times in 2004:

Pentagon and military officials directly involved in the debate say that such a secret propaganda program, for example, could include planting news stories in the foreign press or creating false documents and Web sites translated into Arabic as an effort to discredit and undermine the influence of mosques and religious schools that preach anti-American principles.
Some of those are in the Middle Eastern and South Asian countries like Pakistan, still considered a haven for operatives of Al Qaeda. But such a campaign could reach even to allied countries like Germany, for example, where some mosques have become crucibles for Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism.

A private sector version of that strategy is clearly visible in the smears and secret briefings directed at British mosques, a campaign which has now taken a step further with the recent wave of street protests by provocateurs like the BNP-connected English Defence League and the Counter-Jihad Europa affiliate Stop the Islamisation of Europe.

Communities Minister John Denham last week announced plans to address issues alienating white, working-class people at risk of being exploited by the far-right. If that approach is to succeed, the wealthy right-wing propagandists who are actively trying to set working-class communities against each other must be exposed.

Web 2.0 Warfare from Gaza to Iran

2009-07-07T10:26:35+01:00

Just a quick pointer to to my latest piece for Spinwatch, Web 2.0 Warfare from Gaza to Iran. It's a story I'm slightly ambivalent in one sense, because there has clearly been important information coming out of Iran on Twitter. There have also been a lot of poorly sourced rumours, of which perhaps the most suspicious is the one cited by Robert Fisk, that the Iranian government is using Hamas and Hezbollah operatives to suppress the demonstrators.

If my story comes across as slightly sceptical about social media, I hope that the links to SpinProfiles and Neocon Europe show some of the potential for using the technology in a more considered way. Indeed, I think there is potential for wikis like these to develop a symbiotic relationship with blogs and social networks, providing a more structure long-term memory for the blogosphere.

Speaking of propaganda networks, David Habakkuk's continuing investigations of media manipulation by Russian oligarchs has produced two new pieces documenting an unsavoury power struggle involving Boris Berezovsky and Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili - A falling out of thieves? and How to rescue a rat.

The Democratic Republican Moment: a Blog Reader

2009-06-01T17:48:52+01:00

The current fiasco over expenses at Westminster has created a major opportunity for political reform in Britain. You might not know it from the media's focus on celebrity populism, but there has actually been some useful thinking on the left over the past year which addresses the causes of the crisis quite precisely.

David Marquand's book Britain Since 1918 has started a conversation about democratic republicanism as a British political tradition, perhaps the only tradition that addresses the relationship between parliament and people in a way that is adequate to the current situation.

I've been collating some of that conversation for my own reference, and I thought it was worth sharing it here. Please feel free to suggest any other relevant links in the comments.

Audio David Marquand, Kenneth Morgan, Philip Stephens, The Strange Career of British Democracy, IPPR, 18/09/08

Tom Griffin, The democratic republican moment, OurKingdom, 19/09/08

Richard Reeves, The Dynamics of Power, New Statesman, 25/09/08

Giles Radice, Surveying the Left, Progress, 28/11/08

Anthony Barnett, Gerry Hassan, Britain's Neo-Liberal State, OurKingdom, 29/11/08

Pamphlet Anthony Barnett, Gerry Hassan, Breaking Out of Britain's Neo-Liberal State, Compass, 05/01/09

Sunder Katwala, Uneasy allies? Progressive dilemmas revisited, Liberal Conspiracy, 02/02/09

Sunder Katwala, Progressive dilemmas and the democratic republican tradition, Next Left, 3/02/09

Stuart White, What is democratic republicanism?, Next Left, 03/02/09

Tim Gore, Democratic republicanism... and the EU, Next Left, 07/02/09

Video Paul Lay, Quentin Skinner, Geoffrey Robertson, Melissa Lane, Liberty, Sovereignty and Republicanism, Convention on Modern Liberty, 28/02/09

David Marquand, How Free Are We? Liberty in Britain, History Today, 03/09

Stuart White, 'Progressive Conservatism' or democratic republicanism? Next Left, 03/03/09

Tom Griffin, Modern Liberty: The Levellers' republican legacy, OurKingdom, 04/03/09

Stuart White, Democratic republicanism and the economic crisis, Next Left, 06/03/09

Melissa Lane, Liberty as a Social Value - Lessons from the Levellers, OurKingdom, 11/03/09

Anthony Painter, Coming to Terms with Change, Progress, 31/03/09

Pamphlet Richard Reeves, Philip Collins, The Liberal Republic, Demos, 07/05/09

Stuart White, 'The Liberal Republic': How Liberal? How Republican? Next Left, 07/05/09

Anthony Barnett, Mulgan Says, "Sod em", OurKingdom, 11/05/09

Richard Reeves, A Republican Moment? Demos, 19/05/09

Richard Reeves, Is Cameron a republican liberal? Demos, 26/05/09

Stuart White, Cameron's Agenda: Populism not republicanism?, Next Left, 26/05/09

Breaking Up Britain

2009-05-07T12:55:21+01:00

Today is the tenth anniversary of the creation of the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments. The indefatigable Mark Perryman is marking the occasion with the launch of a new anthology of essays Breaking Up Britain : Four Nations after a Union.

Perryman's opening chapter is available online:

Most Observer readers would probably feel a little uncomfortable holding up bits of paper to form a flag of St George at a gig. Kitty Empire, Observer

Billy Bragg opened the second half of his 2008 St George’s Day celebration at London’s Barbican theatre with Jerusalem. And, as Kitty Empire put it in her review, the audience responded ‘coyly’ when Billy invited them to join in by holding above their heads the carefully laid out sheets of red and white paper distributed on the auditorium’s seats to form one huge St George Cross. Hardly an exercise of Leni Riefenstahl proportions, but more than enough, apparently, to get Observer readers searching for any excuse not to join in.(A Jigsaw State (pdf))

In a previous collection of essays, 2008's Imagined Nation, Perryman explored the possibilities for English national identity in the wake of devolution. A session on English nationalism at last year's Compass conference provided the inspiration for the new volume, which broadens the debate to look at the prospects for all of the nations in the UK.

There is plenty of Irish interest with contributions from Arthur Aughey, Gerry Adams, Inez McCormack and Peadar Kirby. Adams' contribution is largely based on his speech to February's Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, but it's interesting to see it set in this context, not least because Sinn Féin has often been wary of drawing parallels with nationalist movements in the various nations of Britain.

Kirby calls for a revival of the civil society activism that shaped modern Ireland, a suggestion that has interesting parellels with the emergence of civil society as a theme in post-credit crunch debates on both the left and the right in Britain.

Like Imagined Nation, Breaking up Britain includes some strong contributions on the implications of debates about national identity for ethnic minorities. Salma Yaqoob argues that the anti-war movement has done more to cement the place of Muslim communities in British society than official narratives of Britishness. Charlotte Williams worries that homogenous Scottish and Welsh nationalisms way simply replicate old problems.

Several contributions reflect on the challenges that the post-devolution UK presents for the democratic collectivism of the labour movement. Guy Lodge and Michael Kenny suggest that engaging with the English question may be an important starting-point for Labour Party renewal. John Harris looks at the prospects for an English realignment in the event of Scottish independence.

The left must engage with the dynamic unleashed by devolution if it is to build the alliances with which to confront the prospect of a resurgent Conservatism at Westminster in the years ahead. This book is an important step in that process.

The Neocons on the Peace Process

2009-04-18T15:33:19+01:00

A new piece based on some of my research for Neocon Europe.

Does the Irish peace process have lessons for the Middle East? Many of the key players in the Good Friday Agreement seem to think so. Tony Blair has cited the precedent as cause for optimism in his role as Quartet Envoy, while Gerry Adams called for inclusive negotiations during his visit to Gaza last week. The analogy isn't universally welcome, however.

Two recent articles reflect the parameters of the debate. In the New Statesman, Blair's former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, argues that the British government's engagement with Irish republicans provides a model for an Israeli approach to Hamas. In Standpoint, Douglas Murray reiterates a longstanding neoconservative critique of such suggestions, arguing that "the claims of the peace process in Northern Ireland itself are unproven - but they are also unhelpful to the point of uselessness."

This dispute is significant given the identity of some of the key actors now emerging on the Middle East stage. US envoy George Mitchell was a key mediator in the Good Friday Agreement, while Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is arguably more closely aligned with American and British neoconservatives than any other major figure in Israeli politics.

More over at OurKingdom.

Propaganda, the internet and the media: from CounterJihad to the Decent Left

2009-03-22T23:56:44+00:00

Over at the Yorkshire Ranter, Alex Harrowell comments on the ongoing story of Glen Jenvey, who featured as an anti-terrorist 'expert' in a Sun story about threats, which it now appears he posted himself, against public figures on a Muslim web forum.

It's a very good question just how many terrorism stories (especially ones that have the "Internet" flag set - it means "stuff I don't understand" to a lot of editors) are the work of these people, whether the upscale, Decent version or Jenvey's Comedy Gladio.

That put me in mind of a quote from former Pentagon Neocon Abram Shulsky:

Soviet front groups might have been more effective, but Stalinist paranoia made impossible the operational autonomy needed to succeed. To the extent that future practitioners of this type of propaganda have learned lessons from the Soviet experience, we may expect that the nonstate groups will be controlled in a more sophisticated manner and their ties to a given state will be less obvious.

New methods of spreading propaganda (such as via Internet web sites of Non-governmental organizations [NGOs], or specialized email lists) allow a deceiver to reach target audiences via multiple channels. Many of these channels may remain relatively invisible to the public at large. (Elements of Strategic Denial and Deception by Abram Shulsky in Strategic Denial and Deception: The Twenty-First Century Challenge, edited by Roy Godson and James J. Wirtz, Transaction books, 2002, p23.)

Shulsky went on to note that "Despite the media's self-image of hardheaded cynicism, it is relatively vulnerable to this type of manipulation." (p24.) The Sun's experience would seem to bear this out.

There are indeed some interesting connections between the kind of right-wing "CounterJihad" networks represented by Jenvey and the so-called "decent left".

For example, Glen Jenvey's ally Paul Ray AKA Lionheart was interviewed by Phyllis Chesler, who also hosted a party in New York for Democratiya editor Alan Johnson.

The notionally left-wing Democratiya recently featured an interview with Andrew Bostom, a member of the CounterJihad Europa network. This extreme right grouping was created with the help of Christine Brim, who also happens to be a senior figure in a Washington neoconservative think-tank, the Center for Security Policy.

The CSP advocates 'political warfare' against Islam, and its head, Frank Gaffney, is at the center of a number of Islamophobic networks in Europe and the US. Most recently, he hosted Geert Wilders during his recent trip to Washington. (Chesler and Bostom were in attendance on the New York leg of Wilders' US tour).

CSP legal counsel David Yerushalmi heads the Society of Americans for National Existence, which produced some of the material which ended up in Policy Exchange's controversial briefing against the Global Peace and Unity event in London.

Frank Gaffney's sister Devon Gaffney Cross runs the Policy Forum on International Security Affairs, a neocon propaganda outfit, partly funded by the Pentagon, which has targeted the European media in recent years.

In 2004, the FT's Christopher Caldwell noted that Cross planned to bring to London, "the widest possible variety of foreign-policy voices, from Bush Republicans (she has invited the under secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, to participate) to Clinton Democrats (such as the former CIA director James Woolsey) to the human-rights activists of the Democratic left (who cluster around the Freedom House Foundation and American organised labour)."

In reality, all the elements of this 'varied coalition' were identifiably neoconservative. According to the Forum's website:

"The response to our efforts, among the media, has been both prompt and enthusiastic. Editors of The Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph, The London Times, The Economist, The Sun and The Spectator have all participated in our discussions."

I wonder whether the Policy Forum had something to do with the occasion at Annabel's recounted by Cristina Odone?

It was here that Thatcher's makeover was plotted; here that, when Paul Wolfowitz asked to meet some of Britain's leading journalists, The Observer's Nick Cohen found himself sitting next to John Lloyd and Charles Moore, drinking champagne.

I raised the same question this week over at the Next Left blog in the context of the Fabians' dispute with Nick Cohen about the best way to engage moderate Muslims. It has also been highlighted by Sunny Hundal at Pickled Politics:

Who was the “pleasant American” lady who invited [Cohen] to meet Paul Wolfowitz at Annabel’s? (Nick Cohen, Evening Standard, 21 June 2005).

Is she by any chance related to the lady who’s been running “cozy, off-the-record briefings by senior Pentagon officials, fellow-neo-cons and fellow members of the Defense Policy Board (DPB) for select British and European reporters in exclusive clubs and cafes in London and Paris”. (http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/?p=176)