POLITICS | by scott

A Temporary Peace

2009-11-07T14:03:00.007Z

One of the lessons of Empire is that, for a time, Great Power intervention can perform a pacifying role, dampen down regional security dilemmas and stabilise otherwise unruly regions but that - unless underlying tensions are resolved - old enmities quickly resurface once the intervening power retreats. The historical record is littered with examples. The rise of a particularly grizzly form of ethno-nationalism in the Balkans after the retreat of Soviet power is only the most recent, and the pattern may be about to repeat itself in Afghanistan. For all the talk about al-Qaeda, a stable and enduring peace can only emerge once Afghanistan is closed down as a theatre of strategic competition between India and Pakistan. And this can only be achieved when the issues that motivate and sustain that competition are resolved.

Many of the problems we are encountering in Afghanistan are a direct result of our failure to fully comprehend the local contexts in which Islamic militancy emerges. In the initial phase of operations, between 2001 and 2005, policy dealt in abstractions. The tendency was to abstract the country from its surroundings, gloss over the wider strategic aspect and treat the security and development challenge in isolation from the regional context. Wrenched out of its historical setting, the Afghanistan of our pre-2005 imagination was de-contextualised, isolated and abstract. Conceived solely as a battlefield in the War on Terror and given over wholly to the generals, for whom the imperative is battlefield success, rather than any wider diplomatic settlement or regional solution, any trace of nuance was obliterated from the analysis, the threat was framed in terms of a great explosion of irrationalism and revolutionary nihilism bent on the destruction of the West, and the possibility of a comprehensive solution quickly receded.

In the second phase, from 2005 to the present, this has been remedied somewhat by a new, enlarged strategic concept in which attention is paid to the Pakistan dimension of the conflict. The articulation of the new concept reached its highest pitch of technical sophistication around the time of the election of the new administration, when then Secretary-Designate Clinton first introduced the concept of Smart Power into the debate. A product of work at Harvard in the 1990s by former Assistant Secretary of Defence for International Security Affairs Joseph S. Nye Jr., the new concept was intended to put right some of the most glaring failures of the old diplomacy, in particular the balance between hard and soft power. As I have argued elsewhere, the aim was to move away from what the new administration regarded as President Bush's lopsided reliance upon hard power and achieve a more subtle blend of elements, to bring all the aspects of American power into the mix and restore some measure of balance to American diplomacy.

The problem is that the attempt to transition out of the War on Terror frame, to fully disaggregate the threat and arrive at a more balanced strategic concept simply did not go far enough and we are still not fully engaged with the core strategic issues. In South Asia, what is still treated largely in isolation and abstraction by the West sits at the centre of a web of interlocking and overlapping security dynamics. Situated at the intersection of four great historical civilisations, the AfPak theatre’s strategic location as a land bridge between South East Asia, the Middle East, the Subcontinent and Russia adds a layer of complexity not always fully appreciated in the popular imagination or, indeed, in the policy debate.

Properly understood, what we are facing in Afghanistan - and throughout the Greater Middle East - is a set of discrete challenges, for the most part rooted in longstanding disputes over territory and resources, and only loosely - if at all - connected to any wider narrative. Groups such as Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood have had some success in weaving the disparate strands of the resistance movement together by Islamising the traditional discourse of anti-imperialism and developing an ideology around what they regard as ‘apostate’ regimes, but the larger truth remains: Islamic militancy in South Asia is wholly unrelated to the Levant, or to wider Middle East issues. It is a discrete phenomenon, local in origin, driven by Indo-Pakistan strategic competition, and if we want to construct a stable and enduring peace, it is to this dimension of the conflict that we must look.

This means developing what Richard North has called an ‘Indo-AfPak’ strategy or what - stripped of the jargon - is simply a comprehensive South Asia strategy. It means acknowledging that, though the primary challenge in Afghanistan and Pakistan is a development one, encompassing processes of politics and economy and long term, large-scale processes of nation-building, you cannot begin to address the development challenge without moderating the security competition between India and Pakistan. Pakistan’s entire regional policy is driven by the security competition with India. Its cultivation of a pan-Islamic identity, its hedging strategy, its reluctance to confront radicalism or dismantle the madrassas - each element of its regional policy can be traced back to its strategic competition with its great rival to the South. It is because security is scarce along this, the primary axis of confrontation in the region, that resources in Pakistan are directed away from social welfare programmes such as education towards the military, the madrassas and the intelligence services, resulting in an overly-militarised civic culture that sustains the conflict and makes any transition out of the security competition that much more difficult.

So how to resolve it? Well, at a minimum, Pakistan will have to stop stoking separatist sentiment among India’s restive Muslim population. For its part, India must undertake to respect the integrity of the Pakistani state and end its policy of interference in the tribal areas. Beyond this, a mix of security guarantees, non-aggression pacts, and some resolution of Kashmir will obviously have to feature in any settlement, but ultimately, and quite apart from the development challenge, Pakistan must simply be persuaded to abandon its futile attempt to gain strategic parity with India and to accept its natural place in the emerging regional order. The challenge is as simple, and complicated, as that. As the dominant regional power, the most natural solution is for the string of states along India’s northern frontier to accept Indian leadership in return for a mix of security guarantees, non-interference and non-aggression pacts. In effect, for India to exercise a benign regional hegemony. Bangladesh and Nepal seem happy with, or at the least reconciled to, this sort of arrangement, each acquiescing in what most analysts regard as the natural regional order. Similarly the states along the Southern rim - Sri Lanka and The Maldives - are not challenging for regional status. The high politics of the region remain narrowly bipolar, with only Pakistan standing apart from the developing regional consensus.

This has to end. Pakistan has indulged this fantasy for too long. Encouraged by both China and the West during the Cold War to aim for strategic balance with India, primed by deadly infusions of military aid, Pakistan has striven for a relationship with India that is, in reality, beyond it. And it is time it was bought to this realisation by its patrons in Washington and Beijing. Islamabad prides itself on its ability to sustain the conflict, fancying itself as something of a practitioner of the art of realpolitik. It needs to understand that aiming for strategic parity with India is not realpolitik, it is fantasy politics and the only antidote to it is a heavy dose of realism. Without it, without some semblance of a comprehensive regional strategy, without mechanisms to moderate the security competition between India and Pakistan, without a resolution of Kashmir, at most we are busy constructing a temporary peace in Afghanistan.

Further Reading:

As usual, Richard North is way out in front on this issue, having developed the argument for a comprehensive South Asia strategy in a series of posts over the last month, each of which include links to more material on the wider strategic dimension. You can read him here.

flawed concept, failed state

2009-10-11T17:58:00.008+01:00

The more one learns of Pakistan, the stronger the conviction that, like the British before them, in the tribal areas of that troubled country the Americans are fast approaching the limits of their power. The British struggled for three quarters of a century to subdue the tribes of the North West Frontier without any great success, finally settling on a policy of non-interference. Islamabad has decided on a similar policy. The reasons are both historical and pragmatic. The three provinces that make up the outer rim originally federated with the Punjab on the understanding that they would enjoy a large measure of autonomy and in the ensuing half-century, every attempt by the centre to extend its control over the periphery has met with fierce and oftentimes bloody resistance. The result is that something of an uneasy standoff has developed with a delicate constitutional balance allowing for substantial self-government in the provinces.

This fragile equilibrium prevents the desire for autonomy in the regions from developing into a full-blown argument for secession. At the same time, in the conflicting loyalties and fierce independence of the frontier tribes, both New Delhi and Kabul have seen an opening for their diplomacy. Both powers have encouraged a militant particularism in the provinces. This has fed Islamabad’s chronic insecurity, with disastrous results for wider regional stability. What Islamabad fears most is a replay of 1971, when the rise of Bengali nationalism resulted in a loss to Pakistan of 56 per cent of its population and half of its territory. Islamabad’s nightmare scenario is a similar process in the tribal areas resulting in a further round of secession, robbing the state of precious strategic depth and further weakening it vis-à-vis India. In an effort to counter this, Pakistan has traditionally sought to extend its strategic reach into Afghanistan. Denying India influence there undercuts New Delhi’s ability to project power into the tribal areas and so Islamabad has considered it a strategic priority to ensure a friendly government in Kabul.

To achieve this, Pakistan has sought to cultivate a pan-Islamic identity, reaching out beyond Afghanistan to Iran, the Central Asian republics and restive Muslim minorities throughout the region. The problem with this strategy, quite apart from the threat it poses to regional stability, is that religion is an insufficient basis for a movement of national unity. As a resource to be mined for purposes of nation building, the value of Islam consists primarily in its emotional resonance, its symbolic and lyrical quality, rather than its more secular, programmatic aspects. Whenever Islamabad has tried to give the concept political content, it has simply revived all the old antagonisms.

We see a similar dynamic at work in the Middle East. Iran made the same appeal to pan-Islamism in an attempt to break out of its isolation. The flaw in the design, of course, was that Shiism is a minority sect, with limited appeal in the region. This meant glossing over the long running confessional fault-lines between Sunni and Shiite and appealing instead to the traditional discourse of anti-imperialism, drawing upon anti-Western rhetoric and symbols. Anti-Americanism then becomes the great glue that binds the disparate strands of the resistance movement together. And so you get this curious hybrid, a strange kind of syncretism, a wholly alien and synthetic construct, with a transparent geopolitical dimension, stripped of any recognisable theological content.

Similarly, pan-Arabism: the idea that Arab unity is a romantic idea shared by all Arabs is true only in the abstract. Once you try to give it political content, disagreement soon emerges. Arab unity, translated into a working political concept carries with it the prospect of domination of the diverse peoples of the Middle East by a single power, historically Egypt or Iraq. Similarly, pan-Islamism has usually meant domination by one sect, be it the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia or the Shiite of Iran. That is why the great universalising projects, these great ideological constructs, have failed to take root, because of the salience of ethnicity. Put simply, there is a more ancient and enduring basis of legitimacy, that is, an ontological basis of group identity and allegiance that is missing in any purely ideological construct. And so, although they have great romantic appeal, these great universalising projects quickly run into objective limits in the shape of ethnic and tribal localisms.

The key for American policy is not to make moves that upset this delicate balance, which is what I worry about most as AfPak policy moves into its decisive phase. In a move that threatens to overthrow Pakistan’s fragile equilibrium, American policy has now aligned itself with the centre against the periphery in an effort to deny Al Qaeda its mountain sanctuary. This is a high-risk departure from the historical pattern by the United States and even more so by Islamabad, because in the event that this stokes latent separatist sentiment, the consequences for wider regional stability could be disastrous. If the beleaguered Pakistani state is plunged into a further crisis by rebellion in the outer rim the very real danger is that the country could simply unravel, reducing Pakistan to a rump Punjabi state and so the administrations in Washington and Islamabad are playing for high stakes - Washington certainly, but Islamabad even more so. Washington’s dilemmas are merely strategic, where Pakistan’s are existential. Of course, from the narrow perspective of the counterinsurgency operation in Afghanistan, the new policy makes perfect sense. If we want to break the back of this insurgency, we have to target its strongholds. This does not mean isolated outposts in Helmand, but rather its sanctuaries in Waziristan. That is why the upcoming offensive by Pakistani forces is so significant. My worry is that policy has been designed without sufficient attention to this longstanding historical dynamic.

Its success will depend on the extent to which the Pakistanis are able to target the insurgency without reviving all the old antagonisms. The danger is that the tribes will see in it yet another of the centre’s periodic attempts to overthrow the constitutional settlement and extend its rule into the periphery. To forestall this possibility, the Pakistanis need to embark upon an urgent round of public diplomacy to convince tribal leaders that foreign elements are the real threat, and that Islamabad has no designs on the tribal areas. Whether they can cut through the layers of mistrust and establish their bona fides on this issue is an open question. One hopes that they are capable of this kind of nuance because without it, one fears the worst.

Further Reading:

For more on the Pakistan dimension of the conflict, this April 2009 CATO Institute Paper really brings out some of the complexity of the situation. Alternatively, President of the Council on Foreign Relations Richard Haas' recent Washington Post piece is worth a read. For an insight into what the Pakistani forces can expect when they launch their offensive, see this Telegraph piece and finally, Richard North has another good post on the developing situation over at Defence of The Realm

Thinking Strategically About the Middle East

2009-09-24T08:03:00.022+01:00

Except at the most general level, thinking strategically about the Greater Middle East is a thankless task. On the basics, everyone is agreed. The challenge is a millennial one - how to transition the Middle East out of its ruinous security competition, away from the old antagonisms and towards some version, however minimal, of the Kantian peace. Agreement at this level of abstraction is not difficult. The problems emerge when you attempt to translate this into a working policy. The problem is that the elements for such a peace are simply not in place. Next to a patchwork of small, independent sheikdoms there are the two giants - Iran and Iraq – hostile, predatory, seething with resentment and fortified by a historical sense of injustice. Massively more powerful, the two great Leviathans eye the enormous oil wealth of the tiny Gulf states with a mixture of envy and avarice. This is no recipe for a stable and enduring equilibrium. In any test of strength the Gulf states would quickly be overrun by their larger, more powerful neighbours.

When imbalances are structural in this way, peace depends above all upon the major powers deciding upon a policy of restraint. In the absence of a sense of restraint, and under conditions of structural imbalance, all that is left is to demonstrate the futility of conquest – to substitute a physical equilibrium for a moral one. And that is essentially the core of US foreign policy in the Gulf – to preserve the independence of the Gulf states. That the imbalances are structural gives the policy an air of permanence. This should not confuse us into thinking that we have somehow departed from balance of power politics. US forces are still arrayed against the stronger power in classic balance of power style. We are used to the shifting alignments of the European state system and this element of stability in the Middle East confuses us into thinking that we have moved beyond balance of power diplomacy, but policy in the Middle East does not meet even the most minimal requirements of hegemony. US policy in the Middle East has been much less ambitious. It has not attempted anything like the transformations we have seen elsewhere in America’s extended sphere of influence. In the Middle East, America has sought to manipulate the balance, not transcend it.

The problem with this strategy is that, although the interests of the key players in the region are broadly congruent, at the same time there are a whole set of conflicting geopolitical imperatives at play. This leaves policy lacking all coherence. Both Pakistan and Iran share an interest in a stable and secure Afghanistan and yet, for different reasons, design policy to secure short-term tactical advantage. Iran alone has pledged $660 million for Afghanistan’s reconstruction, making it one of the lead donors and, like America, has no desire to see the Taliban reconstitute itself. At the same time, there is a desire to deny America a clear-cut victory and so we find Iranian elements supporting the insurgency. A similar dynamic is at work in Pakistan. Nervous of America’s emerging strategic partnership with India and fearful of a sharp reversal in American policy, they too have followed a hedging strategy; outwardly supporting the coalition while allowing elements in the ISI to continue support for the insurgency. We see this ambivalence running right through the multinational effort, with key regional players either unwilling to commit or worse, actively working against the mission. The only way to cut through this and refocus the Iranian and Pakistani effort away from strategic competition with each other and onto the shared long-range objective is for us to reaffirm our commitment. I see no other way to dampen down strategic competition and build trust between the key players. Any ambiguity or reticence on our part will simply convince hard line elements in Iran that they can inflict a strategic defeat on America. Too tantalising a prospect for them to resist, this will likely override their commitment to the reconstruction and stabilisation effort.

Similarly the Pakistanis: they are unlikely to be reassured of America’s ongoing support without a substantial commitment of American men and material. Convince them that the American commitment is a lasting one, however, and the incentive for them to ally with the insurgency diminishes significantly. That is why the hysteria surrounding much of the debate is so frustrating. The Indian ambassador to the US signalled as much last week, arguing that the key to stability in the region is "sustained US commitment” and calling for America to “stay the course”. What does this all mean for our evolving AfPak strategy? Well, it certainly does not mean drawing down our forces and retreating to an 'over-the-horizon' posture - in Afghanistan, or elsewhere. The persistent call for America to adopt an offshore balancing strategy, to retreat to the safety of the carriers and fight a version of George Will's absurd robot war - The Attack of the Drones - is just preposterous. It is foreign policy as Hollywood movie. It could be safely ignored had the leading advocates of the policy not managed to insert themselves into positions of such influence. As it is, they are not merely absurd, but dangerous.

As recent events in Kunduz province demonstrate, as counterinsurgency strategy this is just about as wrong as it gets - and the quickest way to strategic defeat in Afghanistan. No, as I have argued elsewhere, it is time to end this adolescent fixation with with simplifying narratives and settle down to the hard slog of diplomacy, deterrence, containment and alliance building. A big part of our effort has to be about recapturing some of the early diplomatic momentum that managed to secure donations in excess of $8bn from upwards of 30 countries in the spring of 2004. That means rebuilding trust between America and the key regional players. It means renewing the effort to build outward from areas of common interest, particularly with Iran - an important opportunity squandered by the Bush administration – and bringing the big regional players back into the process. Effectively, it means turning the clock back to mid-2001 and pressing the restart button with the Iranians as well as the Russians.

Of course, it is going to be difficult to secure full cooperation from Iran all the while we are pursuing a confrontational policy on their nuclear ambitions and so Afghanistan policy needs to be part of a larger design, encompassing all interested players. Obama realises this, which is why we are seeing a rejection of the Bush administration strategy in favour of renewed American engagement on both the nuclear issue and Israel-Palestine. Ultimately, we need to find a role for Iran commensurate with its size and historical importance. It is inevitable that a country as important as Iran will assume something like its full height as a regional power and so the key for strategists therefore is to align policy with long-term secular trends. Policy that rubs too hard against the grain of these developments condemns itself to increasing irrelevance. But these are considerations for the long term. Our priority is obviously to design a policy for the next eighteen months, rather than the next half-century. In the short-term, policy should cohere around a series of confidence-building measures. This means disavowing any attempt at regime change and holding out the prospect of strategic partnership with Iran, but only on the basis of full compliance with its obligations under the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT). If you are looking to build consensus around a more assertive diplomacy on non-proliferation you have to place the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) front and centre. You have to multilateralise the effort, make the IAEA the lead agency and design policy around its monitoring and compliance processes. The idea that America’s strategic position will be strengthened by another assault on the institutions of global governance is absurd.

Any effort to unilateralise policy in this area will further erode support for American leadership, both in the region and beyond. So, policy should first acknowledge Iran’s rights under the NPT, but couple this with an insistence that these rights carry with them responsibilities - foremost among them the obligation to cooperate with the IAEA. This really should be the focus of the diplomatic effort - a push for full compliance, but done in a way that is much more visible, and public. Despite all Obama’s talk of multilateralising the effort, there still appears to be very little room in America’s public diplomacy or her national conversation for developments at the IAEA. The lead UN agency on counter-proliferation is barely reported by the mainstream press and we are no closer to resolving America’s ambivalent relationship with the UN and its agencies. This has to change. We need to see a much more vigorous round of public diplomacy. The alternative is to let the increasingly hysterical Israeli Right shape perceptions on the issue with all that implies for America's international position.

Wolfowitz and his critics: why he is right and they are wrong

2009-09-02T13:52:00.014+01:00

A familiar debate surfaced on the pages of Foreign Policy Magazine this week - the ongoing one between neoconservatism and its critics. The subject of controversy is Paul Wolfowitz’s latest intervention. In it, Wolfowitz lays out the basis of his position, draws a sharp contrast between his outlook and that of self-styled 'realists', and considers whether the new administration can in any meaningful sense be called realist. Using a distinction between realism as foreign policy doctrine and a more flexible approach to policy based on the consideration of consequences, he concludes that Obama is a pragmatist, rather than any kind of realist. Four foreign policy specialists - Steve Clemons, Stephen M. Walt, Daniel D. Drezner and David J. Rothkopf - are then invited to respond. The exchange is a useful primer for anybody interested in the byzantine complexities of the American foreign policy debate, throwing into sharp relief some of its most enduring faultlines, and it is worth reading in full. Of all the respondents, for me Steve Clemons makes the killer distinction - which effectively puts him on the same side of the argument as Wolfowitz - between what he calls the 'pure' realism of John Mearsheimer and his followers on the one hand, and 'policy realists' on the other. That is, between mainstream realists in the foreign policy establishment and their ideological counterparts in the academy. Daniel D. Drezner makes the point by way of a simple stylistic device, reserving the lower case ‘r’ for the pragmatic, policy oriented strain of realism and the upper case ‘R’ for the grand theory.

The distinction is not in any way controversial. Each of the four respondees uses some variation of it. On 25 August, in answer to a question from Theory Talks, for exampe, we find the following from Stephen Walt:

"I’m reasonably sure that Obama has never read Mearsheimer, Waltz, Krasner or Morgenthau, and he probably wouldn’t describe himself in those terms, but I do think he is a realist in the sense that he is essentially a pragmatist – he’s not wedded to a powerful ideological agenda"

So everyone is agreeed. Obama is no dogmatic realist. Although Walt is in agreement with the basic point, his use of language leaves a lot to be desired. The problem with his formulation is that, by not fully differentiating between pragmatism and realism, it ends up conflating them. The whole point about today's realists - and it is a point that appears to elude Walt altogether - is that they are wedded to a powerful ideological agenda. The sort of pragmatism he associates with Obama is a million miles away from the realism of the academy, and he just does not make the point forcefully enough. He is clearly using Daniel Drezner's lower case 'r', but by calling Obama a realist he simply shows up the limitations of framing the distinction in this way. For precision, it is much better to follow Wolfowitz and reserve the 'r' word for the grand theory.

However we frame it, the distinction is real and of central importance. Contra Walt, who then goes on to accuse Wolfowitz of erecting a straw man, the version of realism Wolfowitz describes is not “artificial and contrived”. It is neither “caricature” nor figment of his imagination. It is alive and well in the academy. As I have written elsewhere, it is backed up by a voluminous literature, supported by a sophisticated theoretical edifice and powered by passionate advocacy. At the same time, it is a fundamentally flawed doctrine. At the centre of it is a picture of the world that simply no longer exists. The sort of diplomacy it calls for assumes a world of fixed territorial units and conventional forces - the old Westphalian model of secure borders and unitary states. The world we are confronted with is an altogether different beast. Threats no longer appear as concentrations of conventional military power that can be offset by countervailing coalitions, but rather in an altogether more diffuse form. Gangsterism, warlordism, shadowy transnational terrorist networks - these are the principal threats to American interests in the region and so the idea that America can go around the world simply arranging balancing coalitions in some grand eighteenth-century European style is just absurd. The new strategic environment calls for an altogether more nuanced and subtle diplomacy, a different blend of elements, and a different set of capabilities. Quite simple one would think, elementary even, and yet American realism seems institutionally incapable of grasping it.

The major theoretical statement of this sort of realism, of course, is Mearsheimer’s Tragedy of Great Power Politics. I once wrote a review of Tragedy entitled A Tale of Two Mearsheimers. The basic premise was that, although at his best Mearsheimer is a formidable intellect, a profoundly insightful author and theorist of the first rank - at his worst, he is combative, uncompromising and something of an ideologue. I now realise that the argument was mistaken. There really is only one Mearsheimer and he was always an ideologue. It would have been better to have told the tale of two Walts, because in Walt we really do see something of a transformation. The early Walt is someone with whom I remain in substantial agreement. His most telling contribution was The Origins of Alliances, a wonderful book in which he elaborated what he called ‘balance of threat’ theory. Essentially an amendment to classical balance of power theory, the argument of the book was that states do not balance simply against power, but rather against threats and that, when calculating these, they take into consideration factors such as geographic proximity, offensive capabilities and perceived intentions. It was an important concession to the mainstream and placed him squarely in the pragmatic, policy-oriented tradition.

But he now appears, under the influence of Mearsheimer, to have moved away from that nuanced position to some kind of rigid structural determinism. Any suggestion that regime type matters is completely missing from his analysis. The more time Walt spends with Mearsheimer the more strident his position becomes and the effect of his years of friendship and co-authorship with Mearsheimer is now really quite pronounced. I now find myself in sharp disagreement with him on nearly every point of logic, theory, policy and fact. It is a remarkable journey that Walt has made - from sophisticated realist to strident ideologue. And it is not a transtion that produces nuanced policy analysis. Take his opening shot against Wolfowitz:

"On the most significant foreign policy decision since the end of the Cold War - the ill-fated invasion of Iraq in 2003 - the realists who opposed it were right and Wolfowitz and the other architects of the war were dead wrong"

This is an astonishing claim. It is not at all clear that the realists were right and Wolfowitz wrong. In fact, there are good reasons for thinking the opposite. The first thing to understand about the realist argument against the war in Iraq is that it is part of a wider argument in favour of an alternative grand strategy. Effectively realists want America out of the hegemony business. The aim is to unpick the system of Cold War alliances, scale back America’s overseas commitments and concentrate on the defence of what they regards as 'core' interests. Although this choice has the benefit of aligning policy with long-term historical trends, in that it anticipates the coming multipolar order, the way they push the argument one might think that it was a new concept - that the idea was somehow untested. Take Christopher Layne, Robert M. Gates Professor of Intelligence and National security at the Bush School of Government, author of The Peace of Illusions, and an increasingly prominent advocate of offshore balancing, for example. His basic premise is that since 1940, America has pursued a strategy of preponderance, and that this has weakened her strategic position, rather than strengthen it.

The problem is that the analogy between the European states system and the Middle East, which forms the core of his argument, with the US in the role of would-be hegemon, just does not stand up. America has conducted a balance-of-power diplomacy in the Middle East – not a strategy of preponderance - throwing her weight into the mix first against Egypt under Nasser, then Iraq under Saddam and now Iran under the Mullahs. The overriding imperative at all times has been to maintain a balance of power, not upset it – to preserve the independence of states, not overthrow them. America is a status quo power in the region, not any kind of revolutionary power intent on overthrowing the existing order. Seemingly oblivious to this, Layne goes on to observe that

"by being ... ‘offshore’ and non-threatening, an insular great power can deflect the focus of other states’ security policies away from itself. Simply put, if an offshore power stands on the sidelines, other great powers will compete against each other, not against it .... to capitalise on this dynamic, an insular great power must adopt a non-threatening posture, and not pursue hegemonic ambitions”

This is exactly the pattern we have observed in the Middle East. Jordan and Saudi Arabia ally with the US for this very reason: they fear their neighbours more than they do America. America’s allies in the region know they are not at risk of attack by the US. The only states at risk of attack by the US are those that have posed a threat to the equilibrium – Nasser’s Egypt, Saddam’s Iraq and now revolutionary Iran. The truth of the matter is that challenges to the equilibrium in the Middle East largely come from within the region, not without, and so the reading of the diplomatic history at the centre of Layne’s argument, it seems to me, is just plain wrong.

The same is true of Walt and Mearsheimer. They co-authored an article in the January 2003 issue of Foreign Policy called An Unnecessary War. In it, like Layne - who glibly asserts that the “policy of containment and deterrence worked in 1990 – and was still working in 2003” – they argue that Saddam was “eminently deterrable”. The fact of the matter is that these claims are simply false, and demonstrably so. Saddam set his mind to undermining the containment policy from the start and by the end of the Clinton presidency, the policy was in deep trouble. The Iraqi leader waged an effective propaganda campaign to discredit both the sanctions regime and the UN. Pictures of starving children and reports of up to 100,000 civilian deaths from disease and malnutrition were enough to tip the balance of world opinion against the policy. On top of this, the presence of US forces in Saudi Arabia – a key element of the containment policy – was steadily inflaming anti-American sentiment among Islamic radicals, enraged at what they considered the desecration of Islam’s holiest sites.

At the same time, pressure from France, Russia and China for an end to the policy was steadily eroding our position at the UN and undermining the effectiveness of the inspections regime. Similarly Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, all under pressure from their publics, were each lobbying for an end to the policy. So the policy was just not sustainable over the long term. Far from being “eminently deterrable”, Saddam was on the verge of defeating the policy. The truth of the matter is that containment was effectively dead. The measures necessary to contain Saddam were causing deep resentment throughout the region and beyond, straining alliances to the point where our entire strategic position was in danger of unravelling. The crucial point to remember here, for our wider argument, is that none of these measures were part of any grand hegemonic design. They were part of our effort to contain Saddam and so Layne’s argument that it was our departure from sound balance of power principles that produced what he calls ‘the backlash’ is simply false. It is the balancing strategy that led to the backlash because it required us - across six decades - to build up dictators, to support repressive regimes, to tilt first one way, then another – casting us in the role of defender of tyrants against the freedoms of ordinary Arabs and earning for us a reputation for duplicity and double-dealing. And so the lesson we take from the history is not that we need to return to a balance of power diplomacy, but rather the opposite: that we need to go beyond it. We need to go beyond seeking to uphold a precarious balance and find a way to get beyond the destructive rivalries of the past. That is what we attempted with the Iraq war, and that is the reason Wolfowitz is right and his critics are wrong.

Holbrooke heightens concern over Afghanistan...

2009-08-13T07:56:00.034+01:00

US Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke’s breezy suggestion that we will know what success in Afghanistan is “when we see it” caused something of a stir in the blogsopshere today. The remarks were made at a Centre for American Progress (CFAP) event in Washington yesterday in response to a question from the floor. The event was conceived as an opportunity for Ambassador Holbrooke and his Interagency Team to settle the nerves of a sceptical foreign policy community by laying out the principles underlying their new ‘whole of government’ approach. In view of what has unfolded, the effort now looks to have been largely counterproductive. To be fair to Holbrooke, America was already turning sour on the mission in Afghanistan. The debate has become increasingly fractious over the last month, with the most persistent questions centring upon the need for an exit strategy. And that mood was widely reflected in the questions from the floor. Rather than allay people’s fears, however, his comments appear to have compounded them, with commentators seizing on the remark as further evidence that the policy is in trouble. Mark Lynch, Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations at Harvard University Stephen M. Walt and Katherine Tiedemann over at foreignpolicy.com and Ian Leslie at the excellent Marbury blog between them pretty much capture the mood, each suggesting that the mission lacks strategic focus and warning of the danger of mission creep, with Walt and Lynch in particular striking an increasingly sceptical note.

Alongside this flurry of criticism, we find the more considered objections of committed sceptics Michael Cohen at Democracy Arsenal and Richard North at Defence of the Realm. I am a great admirer of Richard North. He does important work documenting equipment shortages and failures in procurement policy. Where I have problems is when he tries to draw wider strategic conclusions from it. He has amassed a considerable body of evidence pointing to a devastating catalogue of failure and mismanagement at the heart of the British mission in Iraq and his work is vital reading for that reason alone. It does not, however, pose any serious strategic questions. Fundamentally, his observations are confined to the tactical level and part of the normal ‘lessons learned’ post-conflict debate. Nothing in his work supports his wider argument that we have suffered a strategic defeat in Iraq, or that we are likely to in Afghanistan. I simply do not see evidence for that kind of assessment. Similarly Michael Cohen: I consider his never less than excellent analysis essential reading and yet nothing in his work really addresses the core strategic dilemmas.

To get a grip on these we need to turn back to the arguments of Stephen Walt. Walt comes out of the grand tradition of American realism. Centred around the work of theorists such as Morgenthau, Niebuhr and Waltz - although more latterly John Mearsheimer - the tradition of American realism is a venerable one, of long standing. It is supported by a voluminous literature, backed up by a sophisticated theoretical edifice and powered by passionate advocacy, and yet it is a fundamentally flawed doctrine. It regards as axiomatic the idea that the internal characteristics of states do not affect their outward behaviour. From this perspective, behaviour is structurally determined and so it is not to the internal make up of states that policymakers should look when formulating strategy, but rather to structural factors such as the balance of power.

As a major premise, this was always dubious. In the first decade of the 21st century, it is positively reckless. Anywhere we look in what we might call the ‘Greater Middle East’ - that great arc of instability stretching from the Horn of Africa up to the Central Asian Muslim Republics (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan) - we see the same pattern. Alongside a toxic mix of ethnic, tribal and confessional hatreds we find a horribly dysfunctional state system. Wherever we look, politics is played out against the backdrop of a colossal failure of governance. The threats in the region – be it the threat of balkanisation along tribal, ethnic and confessional lines, of gangsterism and warlordism, or the threat from supranational identities like revolutionary Islam and Arab nationalism – all of them emerge out of the millennial failure of the state. And no amount of elegant structural theorising is going to change that.

What does this mean for US grand strategy? Above all, it means that the old diplomacy is no longer enough. We need to go beyond power balancing. In the Middle East it means undercutting the appeal of regional identities like revolutionary Islam and secular Arab nationalism in favour of the nation state without unleashing forces like ethnic and tribal rivalries that threaten to outstrip the pace of reform and engulf it. It is a delicate balance to strike and a high-risk strategy. Of course, it assumes that Western policy is capable of that kind of nuance and means avoiding clumsy interventions like those undertaken in the past in places such as Suez and Iran. Does it mean turning the region into a "high GDP nirvana" and bringing "free wireless" to the entire world as Mark Lynch facetiously put it? No. There is no universal template that can be applied and even if there were, it would not look like that. The AfPak phase of the mission is scheduled to wind down when Afghanistan crosses the threshold into something approximating self-sustaining growth, when the government in Kabul is able to effectively police its own borders, and when movement across the Durand Line no longer poses a threat to the integrity of the Pakistani state.

The same principle applies throughout the Middle East. The current religious awakening is driven in large part by dissatisfaction with the corruption and impotence of the secular authorities and so again, the optimal course is to weaken the grip of confessional identities, bring some measure of representative government to the region, and reinforce the state system. The principle is being applied in a very direct way in Iraq, of course, the intervention there being a crucial test for the new diplomacy. If the new governance mechanisms do not deliver real benefits on the ground in terms of basic security and services, the population will not embrace them and so this is the real test of success, the real set of benchmarks. If commentators are looking to develop a set of metrics they should look to the civilian effort, rather than solely at the military side of the equation. They would be greatly helped in this endeavour if the top US diplomat in the region could manage to bring just a little more eloquance to his advocacy. "We'll know it when we see it" just isn't good enough.

Beyond ethics: putting the national interest back at the centre of foreign policy

2009-08-05T13:42:00.052+01:00

Regular readers of this site will know that the way the argument for our continued engagement in Afghanistan is framed is something of an obsession of mine. The assumption that we are incapable of grasping strategic concepts except through the prism of ethics is one of the most frustrating aspects of the whole debate. So you can imagine my response when I read the latest offering from Bronwen Maddox in The Times this morning. Chief Foreign Commentator of The Times is a position of considerable influence. Maddox has access to privileged information and an extensive network of contacts. Her position affords her considerable opportunity to shape the debate. It also carries with it a responsibility to ensure that readers are reliably informed about major aspects of policy. That is why this morning’s piece was so disappointing. Instead of setting out the main national interest arguments in support of the mission, she begins with a perfunctory nod to what she calls the 'new realism' before arguing that we should place women's rights at the centre of our approach.

We are given no reasons why. These are left unstated, as though the argument needs no further elaboration, as though the case is so self evident that no further proof is required. Instead, she makes a direct appeal to what she imagines to be our shared ethical intutions. The problem is that this kind of fleeting emotional attachment is no basis on which to build a long-range foreign policy. Emotional commitments of this sort are far too unstable. They dissipate over time and they are always vulnerable to competing claims on our affections and our attention. So we need a much more durable foundation.

The key is to develop an overarching concept of the national interest. Luckily, that is precisely what we have. Secretary of State for International Development Douglas Alexander delivered a speech to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace setting out the main features of the new approach just last week, this following Foreign Secretary David Miliband's recent speech (pdf) at NATO Headquarters in Brussels. Combined with recent announcements by Defense Secretary Bob Ainsworth, this amounts to a concerted effort by the government to sell the new policy. Now, Bronwen Maddox is no foreign policy neophyte. She will have listened to the debate, absorbed the arguments and be fully aware of the strategic significance of the humanitarian and development effort. So why does she not articulate it? Discussion of the national security aspect of policy is entirely missing from her piece. She makes no national interest argument for women’s rights, no attempt to place the effort to educate girls in a wider strategic framework and no attempt to relate the humanitarian effort to higher strategic objectives. There is no acknowledgement of the connecting threads that link what happens to women and girls in Afghanistan to the British national interest, and no attempt to get beyond the moral argument.

Instead, we are treated to an extended discourse on the horrors of life in Afghanistan for women and girls. This is all admirable and worthy stuff, but we are essentially being invited to empathise, not intellectualise, and that is something I find astonishing. Not only does this kind of emotional discourse have an infantilising effect on the public - the assumption being that we are incapable of grasping complex strategic arguments - the failure to develop the argument beyond these basic moral categories is hopelessly counterproductive. At a time of heightened public concern, and considerable confusion about the purpose of the mission, it is important that the strongest possible case is made for our involvement there, and of all the arguments in support of the mission in Afghanistan, the humanitarian one is the weakest. There are a set of solid strategic arguments for our presence in Afghanistan, and they need to be laid out before the public with precision and focus. Maddox simply fails to do this and so one is left wondering just who this article is designed to convince.

It will certainly not carry any weight with foreign policy professionals. Policy professionals do not talk to each other in these terms. Though they acknowledge that there is a moral dimension to policy, for them morality is never the driver of policy. Only when the debate is opened up to the wider public do strategic arguments give way to moral ones. In part, this is an indicator of just how devalued the concept of the national interest has become. There is a real reticence on the part of elites to frame the argument in national interest terms, as though pursuing the national interest is somehow illegitimate. This must be overcome. We need to purge the debate of this sort of moralism, get beyond ethics and place the national interest back at the centre of foreign policy. We are urged always to recognise that other powers have legitimate interests and to consider these when formulating policy. The flipside of this argument, of course, is that the West too has legitimate interests and it is right and proper for it to pursue them. With that in mind, the appropriate response when justifing our presence in Afghanistan is to set out the national interest argument often, with conviction and without apology.

In defence of a mission...

2009-07-30T09:27:00.017+01:00

Swiss Bob over at the excellent Daily Politics references an important piece in the Wall Street Journal today by author and former US Marine Bing West. The article is a timely corrective to the corrosive cynicism on display in much of the British press, a spirited defence of a vital mission and the perfect antidote to the constant drumbeat of despair from writers like Simon Jenkins.

It deserves to be read widely, not least by those determined naysayers on the Op-Ed pages for whom the whole thing was a grisly error from the start and for whom it remains the most monstrous and murderous extravagance. I urge you to read it in full.

Finally, a strategy we can support...

2009-07-27T07:50:00.049+01:00

Robert Fox, Matthew Paris, Simon Jenkins, the Heresiarch - four writers in various states of despair about the prospects for our mission in Afghanistan. Simon Jenkins and Robert Fox are long time sceptics. Matthew Paris and the Heresiarch - along with a growing majority of the public, it seems - are more recent converts. This is worrying, because it suggests that those of us in favour of continued engagement in Afghanistan are losing the argument. Much of the new mood is bound up with the recent spike in casualties, but alongside it is a vein of criticism that addresses fundamental issues of strategy. If this is not dealt with, those numbers could very well harden. The argument is that our effort there lacks strategic focus. This is odd because of all the criticisms one can make of this mission - and there are many - it seems to me that this is the one with least force. Only some years ago, at the outset of the mission, was it fair to say that our effort there suffered for the want of a coherent strategy. It has not really been true for some time, and so the right time to make the argument was then, not now. That we are beginning to question the logic and coherence of the overarching concept at the very moment the elements needed for a focused strategic effort are finally put in place is just one of the many ironies that swirl around this debate .

To see why this is true all we need to do is revisit the history. Although the basic template for state building operations was, by the time of the invasion in 2001/2, fully developed, it was never fully integrated into America’s strategic doctrine because of a desire on the part of the new administration to avoid what they saw as the ‘excesses’ of Clinton-style liberal internationalism. George W. Bush was especially critical of what he called the ‘open-ended deployments and unclear military missions’ of the Clinton era, and promised to be much more careful about sending US forces abroad. Crucially, he called for clear criteria surrounding the use of force, based upon ‘vital national interest’ rather than humanitarian objectives. And so although the UN, NATO/ISAF, and other assorted aid agencies signed up to what they thought was a nation building program, they very quickly found that the focus of the Americans had moved on. The effort in Afghanistan was denied the resources it needed either to stabilise the government in Kabul, or defeat the Taliban.

This left those on the ground in Afghanistan desperately grasping for arguments to justify their continued presence and keen to jump on any sign of success to build support for a faltering mission. That is why, at various times, and with varying degrees of conviction, very different arguments have been put forward to justify our presence there, from the growing numbers of girls now in school, to the amount of poppy crop destroyed. All of this history is well known, and yet, if the current crop of arguments are anything to go by, it appears to have been all but forgotten. The basic truth about the mission in Afghanistan is that a plan was in place from the start. What was missing was not a focused strategic concept, but rather the resources to implement it. The politicians cannot make this argument, of course, because it calls into question their competence to run the war. This is why the publication of the new CSIS report by Anthony Cordesman is so timely, because it reminds us of this basic truth.

What was that concept? The immediate goal is, and has always been, to defeat what we now call the insurgency, or at the very least to confine it to the border region. The medium term goal is for the aid and development effort to build up the capacity of the state. Once the Afghan state crosses the threshold into self-sustaining growth and development the drawdown of Western forces will begin. All of this is in line with established doctrine and all of it quite clear. Quite why people are having trouble grasping it, I do not know. It is a classic state building exercise, and to suggest, as each of these writers does, that this is somehow merely the justification de la semaine, is unfair. Though you can argue that instead of being mutually reinforcing, different aspects of our approach have appeared at times to undermine each other, these are largely disagreements at the tactical level. At the level of strategy, the broad outlines of our approach were in place from the start and they have remained the same throughout.

Where the mission has changed, it has been in response to changed circumstances. But again, this is fully in line with established doctrine and so it is wrong to dismiss the new, enlarged strategic concept as somehow evidence of ‘mission creep’. Upon arriving in theatre, we were not fully clear about the nature of the threat. We were unsure. We groped around somewhat for exactly the right approach and the strategic concept was a little flabby. But this is to be expected. In the list of far away places of which we know little, Afghanistan was at the very top. Invasion was not a contingency we had planned for and there was no strategic concept for operations there. One had to be cobbled together, quickly, in the early autumn of 2001. But, as we have built up our intelligence, and fully assessed the nature of the threat, so our strategic thinking has evolved. The concept has been reworked, stripped of any excess and we are now operating according to a much more rigorous and focused doctrine. There is less talk about turning Afghanistan into a model democracy and more about building up basic institutions and infrastructure.

This new thinking has been accompanied by an intense diplomatic effort to convince the Pakistanis of the need to play their part. And it looks like that effort is beginning to pay off. On top of this, in a speech at NATO Headquarters in Brussels today, UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband announced a ‘civilian surge’ to back up the recent reinforcements of troops. And so the key thing now that we have finally arrived at fully developed strategic concept, now that efforts are being made to commit the necessary level of resources – both civilian and military - is to give the new concept time to work. That means acknowledging that we are embarked upon capacity building and development work of a sort that takes years. It means abandoning the simplified and simplifying narratives of the past. It means resisting the clamour from elements in the press and parliament for withdrawal. It means knuckling down for the long haul. It means acknowledging that this is a generational commitment. If we can achieve all of those things, there is still very real hope for this mission.

*UPDATE: Read this morning's DfID press release outlining details of the new £255m package of development support for Afghanistan here

The devil is in the detail...

2009-07-22T13:46:00.030+01:00

After a decade of foreign policy activism, the first task for the incoming Tory government is to design a diplomacy that acknowledges limits. At the same time it must continue to advance British interests. This is a difficult balance to strike and, with falling budgets, one that will require a finely calibrated sense of the difference between interests that are vital and those that are merely peripheral. Our current strategic posture is unsustainable. This much everyone agrees upon. And so the most pressing need is for clear strategic judgements about where to put Britain’s diminished resources to achieve maximum advantage. When formulating these judgements, the trick is to avoid compromising morally by falling back on a cynical realpolitik, while at the same time avoiding the kind of moral absolutes that lead to strategic overstretch - to retain an expansive definition of Britain’s interests while at the same time acknowledging the very real limits and pressure upon future British capabilities.

In a wide-ranging speech to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) yesterday, Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague just about pulled it off. At the centre of the speech was a reaffirmation of the ‘three circles’ concept, the guiding principle that underpins all post-war British thinking on foreign policy; namely that Britain maximises its influence by being at the centre of three great global networks - the European Union, The Commonwealth, and the Anglosphere. And so there was as much continuity as difference in the speech, but this much was to be expected. No British government is going to jettison these core alliances. What difference there was appeared in the underreported section on leadership by example, or soft power, and in the renewed emphasis given to the Commonwealth. Unfortunately, it is in these two respects that the speech left most to be desired. On the Commonwealth, although the speech recognised the strategic dimension of the argument, in the Q&A the Shadow Foreign Secretary was less than convincing.

When pressed by Bronwen Maddox he continued to frame the argument in moral terms, seemed unsure about the real strategic value of our aid and development effort and failed to articulate a convincing national security argument for our engagement there, reciting instead some rather tired CCHQ talking points about our commitment to the UN Millennium Development Goals. Similarly on the idea of leadership by example, or what we now more commonly refer to as ‘soft’ power. After setting up the argument for a fully strategic concept of soft power by emphasising the national security aspects of good governance and conflict resolution initiatives, he rounded off the section with the very same appeals to our "conscience" and "common humanity".

It is this confusion, this failure to fully separate out and develop the national security dimension of the argument, that we are seeing reflected in the rather tentative proposals around institutional reform. This is why I have argued on this blog for a more radical restructuring of the Whitehall machinery. As they stand, the proposals for a new National Security Council do not fully meet the need for an integrated aid, development and security strategy. It is as though the Tories still have not quite grasped the full significance of aid and development for the new diplomacy. Though all the elements are there, and they are making all the right noises, one is left feeling that they have not quite joined up the dots, that their argument is still missing the one element that will transform it into a focused strategic concept.

For me, that element is a clear vision of the structures needed to support the new diplomacy. Of all the threats identified in the speech, in the recent IPPR report and elsewhere, the biggest threat to Britain comes from failed and failing states. On this everyone is agreed. Talk to anyone in the foreign policy community and they will offer you the same broad analysis: our top priority must be to maintain and, where possible, strengthen the integrity of states. Whether it is Africa or the Middle East, the Balkans or the tribal regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, aid and development - in particular capacity building, civic infrastructure and good governance programmes - are crucial to this effort and need to be much more fully integrated into our strategic concept. The current bifurcated structure, originally designed to deliver New Labour’s ‘ethical’ foreign policy, with DfID and the FCO operating according to two quite separate and distinct concepts, has proved a singular failure in this regard which is why I will continue to press the argument for a more unified structure with clear lines of accountability. Whether anyone is listening or not, only time will tell.

You can read the full text of the speech here
You can watch the speech here
You can watch the question and answer session here

a diplomacy for the next decade....

2009-07-15T12:27:00.005+01:00

Aid and development have been something of a feature of the foreign policy debate this month. First, in an underreported move, DfID launched its new UKAID logo on 6 July. Combined with other initiatives, the rebrand is intended give more strategic focus to Britain's aid policy. Next, U. S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), a move designed to integrate the aid and development functions more fully into the nation's diplomacy. Just two days later, David Cameron launched One World Conservatism, a 64-page International Development green paper outlining the Conservative approach to the very same issues and then, to complete the picture, on 14 July the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on the Kurdistan region of Iraq published its report on the challenges facing British policy there.

All this has left foreign policy commentators somewhat breathless, so if you are wondering why posting has been light, this is why. The flurry of activity around issues of aid and development has left me struggling to catch up. Having finally read the Conservative’s green paper, my first thought is that it is something of a mixed bag. For the past decade, Western diplomacy has been operating according to a flawed strategic doctrine. This much is a given. While this document goes someway towards repairing it, at the same time it too is deeply flawed. It is long on rhetoric, and short on detail. And where there is detail, it does not make either for great reading or coherent strategy.

Of course, as green paper this is only the beginnings of the new diplomacy, but it does address issues of vital strategic concern and so it is important that, between now and the first white paper, key arguments are strengthened, core concepts refined and flaws in some of the underlying thinking ironed out. With those caveats it mind, as a basis for consultation it is to be welcomed, and so what disappointed me most was the reaction from the Tory grass roots. Early reaction was mixed. As the debate developed, however, attitudes appeared to harden, an impression later reinforced by a PoliticsHome poll showing that, of Conservative-minded voters, a full 81% disagree with Cameron on the issue of DfID funding. And make no mistake, this was not disagreement on some minor point of detail. This was vigorous, visceral, ideologically-driven disagreement on a major point of principle. It is as though we have learned nothing from the failed diplomacy of the last 10 years.

At a time when the future of the mission in Afghanistan is in question, for the Tory grass roots to urge a cut in DfID spending is absurd. More than that, it is the height of irresponsibility. Incredibly, while we have spent £2.66bn on defence, DfID spending in Afghanistan totals a pathetically small £166m, and yet at no point in the debate did there seem to be any acknowledgement that the quickest way to defeat in Afghanistan is to reduce the aid and development budget still further. Similarly, the future success of Iraq policy depends wholly on the extent to which trade and investment flows can be increased. This, in turn, hinges upon continued assistance from UKAID in the areas of good governance, capacity building and infrastructure development. These are two concrete examples of how issues around aid and development affect strategy and yet still the clamour from the Tory grass roots is for reductions.

The problem is partly one of framing. Much of the debate around issues of aid and development is given a mawkish, sentimental gloss that obscures the wider strategic and security dimension. And so we need to reframe the debate. We need to move away from the idea of aid as ‘charity'. There need to be strict conditionalities attached and enforced, full transparency, and mechanisms of real accountability right across the aid and development portfolio. Also, and more importantly, there needs to be a clear strategic focus. Much as the Americans are seeking to do with their new QDDR initiative, we need to place strategic and security concerns at the centre of development policy. We need to ensure that, wherever possible, morality and strategy reinforce each other, instead of working on separate tracks.

On the headline question of the DfID budget, however, Cameron is right. He is right for the same reason the new Obama administration is right. We can no longer design a diplomacy around military force. Anyone who thinks the West is going to put another army into the field any time soon has not been paying attention. The whole trend in today’s diplomacy is towards a more subtle blend of elements. The aim being to bring both hard and soft elements of power into the mix. Once you concede that, the focus shifts immediately to other instrumentalities, first among them aid and development. And so the new American administration is busy designing a new diplomacy around these vital functions. With this policy announcement, Tory thinking is aligning itself with this new diplomacy. Underlying it all, of course, is the recognition that, even more than the American, the British war fighting capability has been seriously degraded by more than a decade of foreign policy activism. For the foreseeable future, war fighting is likely to be off the agenda. And so if we want to retain any foreign policy clout, it is going to have to be in the aid and development fields. The alternative is to have no foreign policy at all. And so those who are serious about foreign policy should support this announcement.

That said, the Americans are still way ahead of us on this issue. The biggest failure of Western diplomacy over the last decade was in the area of development policy, this largely a result of the now widely recognised disconnect between diplomacy and development. The American response has been to design a new institutional architecture, with the head of USAID now reporting directly to the Assistant Secretary of State. The Conservative response is much more tentative, the green paper committing them to the much more modest idea of enhancing the Stabilisation Unit so that it can “break through departmental rivalries and jealousies”, and it is in this respect that the document really falls down. The problem is that it leaves the main features of the existing structure in place. The whole, sorry story of the last decade of Western policy is a direct legacy of the institutional changes of the late 1990s. In the United States, the strategic debate was marred by the growth of two separate bureaucracies and two separate appropriations processes. Here in the UK, policy has been similarly afflicted.

The idea of separating out the aid and development functions into DfID was that this would strengthen the voice of the aid and development functions by placing their arguments at the centre of the debate – at the ‘top table’ as it were – well, that conception has proved an utter failure. Whatever way one looks at it, the changes of the 1990s have been found wanting. Throughout the Iraq misadventure, DfID simply failed to make its voice heard. As a stand-alone concept it is in many ways an absurd creature. Lacking strategic focus, it attacks problems at the margins, leaving the core issues of poor governance and underdeveloped civic infrastructure untouched. But of course, this kind of peripheral work, this idea of working on the fringe, is built into the concept from the outset. Once you separate out the functions in this way, by definition aid and development policy do not figure in the strategic mix. Aid and development are relegated to the margins, considered only as an afterthought, an addendum, and you arrive at the absurd situation where DfID spent less in Afghanistan in 2007-8 than it did in Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Tanzania.

This is possible only once development and diplomacy become decoupled in this way, and so, between now and any future white paper, I would like to see much more thought given to the institutional aspect of the problem. We are told on page 58 that the enhanced Stabilisation Unit will report directly to the new National Security Council, but in the absence of any detailed policy discussion of this aspect of the proposal, we are unclear about exactly how, and will therefore have to reserve judgement.* My fear is that we are building strategic confusion into the concept from the start. As things stand, the proposal is for what looks like a kind of halfway house, a sort of semi-autonomous structure, without any real strategic focus or bite. It all seems to me like a recipe for strategic and operational muddle. I would like to see our response echo the American model, with a more streamlined structure and clear lines of accountability. This means undoing the reforms of the late 1990s and collapsing the whole thing into one structure by bringing DfID back under the control of the FCO.

Ultimately, the way to resolve issues around framing, but also the more serious issues around policy and strategy, is to rid ourselves of the kind of compartmentalised thinking that gave us this bifurcated institutional architecture with development and diplomacy operating on completely separate tracks. For all the good work that it does, and it does do good work, on all the big questions DfID has proved the most monstrous and murderous extravagance; a failure of conception, management and implementation. And it needs to be rectified. The Tories go some way towards this in their new green paper, but not nearly far enough. It may be that the proposed National Security Council answers these concerns. We shall have to wait and see. I certainly hope so.

*UPDATE: Mark Phillips, Chief of Staff to the Shadow Security Minister, has confirmed that the Tories expect to publish their green paper on national security at the beginning of September.

Smart power: the key to Obama's grand strategy...

2009-07-10T11:25:00.041+01:00

Interesting figures out this week from worldpublicopinion.org indicating just how far Obama still has to go to repair the damage wrought by the previous administration. FiveThirtyEight.com and PBS do a similar job chewing over the numbers, each drawing out the headline figures showing that, though Obama’s personal popularity is way ahead of that of George W. Bush, America’s numbers are still flat-lining. So, what to make of them. On one level, these figures do not really tell us anything new. What they do is underscore what we already know; contra the claims of the previous administration that “they hate us for our freedom”, the real driver of anti-Americanism is dissatisfaction with American policy, not any deeper ideological or philosophical antipathy. On the extremes, of course, there is very real ideological hostility, but the great mass of people across the world retain a deep sense of affection and admiration both for the American system of government, and for its broader ideals.

The well known Pew Global Attitudes survey, mapping opinion across 54 countries from 2000 to 2008 pointed to much the same set of conclusions. Its key finding, for those that were minded to hear it, was that it was opposition to key elements of George W. Bush’s foreign policy that sent U.S. favourables plummeting, not any implacable opposition to freedom or to the American idea. This was true even of America’s closest allies. Deep levels of dissatisfaction with American policy in Britain, France and Germany did not turn them into enemies overnight. Like much of the rest of the world, Germany, Britain and France remain supportive of American leadership, they simply want a different kind of American leadership. What they want is a less abrasive diplomacy, a more restrained strategic posture, and above all a demilitarised policy.

The background to these disagreements is familiar enough. Throughout the Cold War, the various elements of the policy mix worked in something of a tandem; economic, development, aid and security policy were for the most part mutually supportive elements in a coordinated strategy. Then, somewhere near the end of the Clinton presidency, around the time talk of America’s ‘unipolar’ moment begins to surface and the intellectual groundwork for the Bush presidency is being laid, policy becomes overly militarised. Elements in the mix become dangerously unbalanced. Far too much emphasis is placed on the military aspects of power, the humanitarian and development aspects of policy are derided as ‘social work’, George W. Bush famously claims that “we don’t do nation building”, and a foreign policy consensus spanning forty years and ten administrations is cast aside in favour of a much more muscular and assertive strategy.

In response, around the time of the Iraq war, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., former Assistant Secretary of Defence for International Security Affairs under President Clinton, begins to develop the concept of soft power. Soft power refers to all the non-military aspects of power. On one level, Nye’s distinction is unhelpful. By separating out the international development and aid functions and bundling them together under the umbrella term ‘soft’ power, he invites exactly the kind of sneering, dismissive response one would expect from foreign policy hawks pumped up on American military supremacy. But the concept is sound. The key is not to focus on one element or aspect to the exclusion of the other, but rather to find the right blend of elements, the right policy mix. Smart power is the ability to combine all the different elements of your power - both hard and soft - in support of your strategic objectives. It is a conception of power, and of strategy, that aims to bring all the various elements of American power to bear. Its aim is to add a strategic dimension to the aid and development functions so that they more fully cohere with national security objectives.

Starting out from the central principle of Amercian foreign policy, namely the commitment to the Kantian peace and democracy as a constituent element of it, the broad strategic objective is to move from closed systems to more open ones, to move the developing world towards better governance; to transition out of pre-modern forms of governance towards stable democracies, or at the very least systems that are in some sense representative, recognise basic human rights, and allow for peaceful transitions of power. This for the simple reason that open systems rationalise behaviour, making for more responsible actors on the international stage. Governments that act responsibly at home, act responsibly abroad. The idea that the military is the only instrument capable of nudging these societies along the path towards better governance is, of course, absurd. And yet for eight long years under the failed presidency of George W. Bush, policy focused on this aspect of power to the almost total exclusion of every other facet of our capability.

Thankfully, we are now moving away from that kind of lopsided reliance upon and exaggerated faith in, hard power. The downside of the new approach is that we are no longer talking about the headline-catching stuff. And so support for the strategy will be that much harder to maintain. For a commentariat used to instant results, this will come as a shock. There are no quick fixes, no magic bullets; repairing America’s battered image is no mere cosmetic exercise. This is not foreign policy as usual. This is not foreign policy as the neoconservatives conceive it. It is not foreign policy as show business. It is not Hollywood movie, nor is it bedtime story. There are no simplified or simplifying narratives. This is foreign policy for grown ups, it is the hard slog of diplomacy, containment, international development and aid work; the unfashionable stuff, the messy stuff that doesn’t fit into easily into the news cycle. The only stories this strategy generates are the kind that send news editors on the foreign desks to sleep. It doesn’t sell newspapers and no big money defence contracts hinge on it so there is no support in the media or parliament for it. But it is vital work. It is the nuts and bolts of diplomacy and it is a crucial element in our national security policy. That is why it was so encouraging to hear news this week that Secretary Clinton is to launch a new development initiative.

We will have to await the details of the announcement to more fully assess the likely impact, but slowly, surely, the Obama administration is edging towards a fully integrated aid, development and security policy. This is a welcome development, but also a return to an earlier, more rounded conception of power, and of strategy, that is sorely needed. It is the conception of power that won the Cold War. It is the conception of power and of strategy that has underwritten American security for the best part of sixty years and it is a conception that got lost in the heady triumphalism surrounding the unipolar moment and the devastating confusion and loss of 9/11. Slowly but surely the Obama administration is restoring a measure of balance to American grand strategy. My closing thought is simply this: while they are doing it they deserve not to be shouted down, sniped at and second-guessed, least of all by the architects of the failed Bush policy.

John Bolton gets it wrong, again...

2009-07-05T20:33:00.045+01:00

In this month’s Standpoint, during the course of a long, rambling article John Bolton takes Obama to task for “rejecting American exceptionalism” and ‘sounding like a European’. On one level, this is barely-concealed code for ‘weak’, ‘effeminate’ and 'ineffectual', intended to conjure up images of appeasement and indecision in the face of evil, but at a deeper, philosophical level Bolton is objecting to the grand tradition of American realism, wrongly believing that this places him squarely within the mainstream and Obama somehow at odds with it. Quite how someone with such a flimsy grasp on the history and philosophy of American foreign policy can have risen to such a position of influence is beyond me, although ‘influence’ is perhaps the wrong word. He is certainly indulged by editors of magazines such as Standpoint and his arguments do resonate with large numbers of Americans, but as serious foreign policy analysis his argument is not worth a row of beans. Quite apart from the woeful lack of historical awareness and understanding at its core, at root, it rests on a set of crude dichotomies that simply fail to capture the full subtlety and range of thinking in the American realist tradition. Regular readers of this blog will know that I take a robustly realist line on these questions and so, as a way of pointing up some of the weaknesses in Bolton’s argument, I thought it might be useful just to map some of the main contours of American realism so as to distinguish it sharply from Bolton’s caricature.

If there is a core commitment in the realist tradition of American foreign policy, it is to the idea of the Kantian peace and to democracy as a constituent element of it. This is America's enduring orientation. It is her organising principle, her idée fixe. In truth, it is the cornerstone of all the great American foreign policy traditions, from the most messianic interventionism right the way through to isolationism. The central question thrown up by this core set of beliefs is whether America should be exemplar or crusader - whether it could best ensure its security by promoting its values abroad, that is, by seeking to remake the world in its image, or rather by serving as ’exemplar' - the city upon a hill. This is a question of means, rather than ends. On the core commitment to democracy, all Americans are agreed. The important point for our purposes is that the realist version of this doctrine, in sharp contrast to some of the more messianic formulations, is not predicated on the idea of America as a uniquely virtuous power and does not lapse into the narrow solipsism of the argument from exceptionalism, but rather on an analysis of the international system.

It is a theory of foreign policy behaviour, not a eulogy to the American character. For it, the benefits of democracy are to be measured in terms of its rationalising effect upon state behaviour. Crucially, America's position in the world is due not to providence, but rather to a combination of her capabilities and her geographical isolation. For realists, the singularity of the American experience is grounded in more objective factors and the American story more prosaic than the traditional argument from exceptionalism allows. This more sober analysis allows them to retain their commitment to the democracy agenda whilst avoiding what Henry Kissinger called the kind of ‘freewheeling’ interventionism that has historically led her to assume levels of risk wholly unwarranted by her national interests or by any rational long-term strategic objective. Substituting moral absolutes for strategic judgement, as John Bolton would have us do, is a fast lane to strategic overextension and moral and psychological exhaustion. The historical record is quite clear on this point, but American conservatism seems institutionally incapable of grasping it.

The problem is that we are no longer trained to think geostrategically. The great 20th century ideologies crowded out the kind of sober geopolitical analysis of the 19th century. The great European traditions of realpolitik and raison d’etat having given way to the passions and the furies of the 20th century, to the transformative diplomacies of Wilsonianism and revolutionary communism, we became used to thinking in terms of Manichean struggles between good and evil, accustomed to parsing strategy through the filter of one of the great ideological systems. The most urgent task for American foreign policy is to recover this earlier tradition, transcend the sterile debate about American exceptionalism, eschew the sort of moral, philosophical and religious categories at the centre of Bolton’s analysis in favour of geopolitical ones and view America not as sui generis, but rather as a great power like any other. This is an analysis America’s earliest Presidents and foreign policy thinkers broadly shared. The early Presidents studiously avoided foreign entanglements, preferring to maintain a studied neutrality on the big foreign policy issues of the day and famously warning against going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. And so, far from Obama being the first “post-American president”, in truth he is returning to what is her oldest and most enduring tradition. Bolton, of course, does not want to hear this argument, because it underlines the case for a diplomacy that acknowledges limits. And Bolton is not a man to accept limits. But in this, he is the one that stands outside of the mainstream, not Obama.

why obama is still right on iran...

2009-07-01T13:01:00.018+01:00

I argued last week that Obama’s cautious realism on the Iran issue had been ‘pitch perfect’, suggesting that what we needed above all else was a diplomacy that acknowledged limits. And yet still we find the Henry Jackson Society’s Scoop blog attacking Obama’s ‘weakness’, Melanie Phillips working herself up into regular paroxysms of anger over just about every move Obama makes, and Mark Steyn lampooning him as ‘By-stander in Chief’. Quite apart from the fundamental lack of seriousness on display and the vicious, ad hominem nature of much of the attack, their fundamental mistake is confusing the weakness of our strategic position with the weakness of the man. While this is to be expected of foreign policy neophytes such as Phillips and partisan hacks like Steyn, this inability to think structurally, to look beyond personality to the objective aspect of the problem really is unworthy of the foreign policy sophisticates at the Henry Jackson Society.

That said, arguments of this kind are an enduring feature of the American foreign policy debate. The inability to come to terms with and acknowledge limits was always the weakness of the crusading element in the American foreign policy tradition. During the Cold War it evolved into a global commitment that reduced the flexibility of American diplomacy and imposed intolerable burdens on the American economy, risking strategic overextension and moral and psychological exhaustion. It mandated intervention and engagement in areas of limited strategic significance and led directly to the misadventures in Korea and Vietnam. Not satisifed, the desire to insert America at the centre of every crisis persisted beyond the Cold War and found its most recent expression in the debacle in Iraq.

At this point, one might have expected at the very least a period of reapprasial and reflection, a reassessment of their ideology and agenda, but, like the good ideologues they are, undeterred, they urge America on to even greater exertion and endeavour. I have likened it to a kind of solipsism, one to which a young republic is especially vulnerable, and one that must be overcome; suggesting that the one thing the neoconservatives are determined to do is to make this about America, to place America at the centre of the narrative; their growing impatience with Western inaction a rage against the idea of American impotence, and that the one thing they cannot abide is an America on the periphery. While there is truth in this analysis, it runs much deeper. Fundamentally, it is rooted in a core set of moral and philosophical axioms that are rooted deep in the American experience and bound up with her earliest conception of herself. It is backed up by a voluminous literature, supported by a sophisticated theoretical edifice and powered by passionate advocacy.

The problem is that it is grounded in an idea of the singularity not just of the American experience, but also of the American character. When inverted it leads to obsessive, coruscating periods of introspection, to an auto-critique which lends America’s foreign policy debate a unique and destabilising volatility. Failures and reverses in American foreign policy are not understood in terms of the limits of American power, but routinely ascribed to flaws in the American character. This led both to the searing agonies of the Vietnam era debate and to the ongoing controversy surrounding the Bush presidency, and it is now resurfacing around the issue of Obama's Iran policy. The task for a mature American foreign policy is to purge the debate of this sort of moralism, eschew moral, philosophical and religious categories in favour of geopolitical ones and view America not as sui generis, but rather as a great power like any other. This means acknowledging limits. It means dropping our obsession with quick fixes and instant solutions, abandoning this conception of foreign policy as something for the Twitter generation - fully of nice, tidy, easily-digestible, bite-sized chunks - in favour of the hard slog of diplomacy, alliance building, deterrence and containment.

The problem with foreign policy as the neoconservatives conceive it is that there is no room for anything messy, no space for untidy, real-world narratives, nothing that can not be shoehorned into their simple formulas. It is time to get past this adolescent fixation with simple narratives, time to end foreign policy as Hollywood movie. It is time for foreign policy for grown ups. It is time for complicated, nuanced, uneven, and yes - sometimes unedifying - diplomacy. It is time for a dose of realism. That is what Obama was elected for, and it is what he is delivering.

Labour attack fails to hit home...

2009-06-30T08:41:00.021+01:00

From the start, Labour’s attack on second jobs was a spiteful bit of gutter politics, a gratuitous assault on the personal financial arrangements of Conservative members, completely unrelated to the real issues thrown up by the expenses scandal and wholly of a piece with the grubby, contemptible way this government goes about its business. At the same time, albeit unwittingly, it did ask the right questions of the Tories, effectively inviting them to demonstrate their appetite for power. Had the conservatives been at all unserious about power, this argument would have found them out. Between them the shadow Cabinet are sacrificing hundreds of thousands of pounds in outside earnings. The slightest doubt on their part about the prospect of winning the election and this sacrifice does not get made.

A party that thinks it is destined for opposition toughs this one out, or at the very least makes much more of a fist of it. And so Labour were hoping for more resistance from the Tories, hoping to drag this out, but Cameron simply refused to play ball. At a stroke, he identified the weakness and neutralised it, turning it into the positives of firm leadership and seriousness of purpose by declaring in his press conference yesterday morning that all shadow cabinet members are to give up outside interests by December. This really was textbook stuff from the young Tory leader, leaving Labour nowhere left to go on the issue. When the most memorable phrase of the day was Cameron’s riff about a ‘dishonest thread running through this government’, you know the Tories have had another good day. Though the issue did have the potential to play badly for the conservatives, throwing up unwelcome headlines about lucrative outside interests at a time when the connection between money and politics is the most toxic issue out there, I am not sure the issue resonated that deeply. For me, it is interesting primarily for what it says about Labour’s mindset. What it reveals is a party with no sense of higher purpose, no elevating mission, just the old antagonisms, the bitter, vicious old tribal hatreds.

Above all, they have failed to learn the lesson of the Crewe and Nantwich by-election campaign, when the risible ‘Tory Toffs’ motif completely failed to resonate with voters and left labour looking for all the world a party without an argument, fundamentally unserious, engaging in the worst kind of juvenilia. Labour have been trying to paint Cameron as a 'toff' since the early days of his leadership, seemingly oblivious to the fact that, outside a few trusty Northern redoubts, it just does not play. People do not care. All it does is show up Labour’s worst prejudices, and it is a pretty unedifying sight. It is dismal, desperate stuff from a Labour Party with nothing left to say, no positive program, just stunts, slurs and smears.

It has been clear for some time that Labour has been following a core vote strategy. These sorts of signals play disastrously to the markets, the business community and the commentariat and for Labour to have so unapologetically – defiantly, even – signalled its abandonment of this constituency marks one of the real turning points in the life of this government. To suggest that Labour no longer cares if the business community, the markets and elite opinion more generally turns against them, as one unnamed minister did in the Sunday Times this weekend, marks the real end point of New Labour. The earliest phase of the New Labour project, from 1994-1997, was all about reassuring the business community, the markets and the financial press that Labour could be trusted on the economy. Well, with this series of announcements Labour has fully regressed to its pre-1997 psychology. None of this is designed to appeal to the aspirational classes. This is designed solely to spread fear among those reliant on Labour largesse. It is the mirror image of the Tories’ failed 2001 and 2005 campaigns, and an echo of Labour’s pre-1997 past.

So expect no more glad, confident mornings at Number 10 or Labour Party HQ. This is no longer the outward looking, aspirational, election-winning party of Tony Blair. This is the Labour Party of the Celtic fringe, the embittered, bewildered Party of the Northern enclaves. The angry party that repels Southern voters. And so we are back to dividing lines. Gordon Brown and Ed Balls love dividing lines. Unfortunately for them, of all the big contrasts, the one that resonates most is not one that plays to Labour’s advantage. The big dividing line in British politics is the developing one between a Tory Party looking beyond its natural constituencies, wrestling with the thorny issues around its troubled relationship with the North and working overtime to repair damage and rebuild trust, and a Labour party retreating into its heartlands, pointing up all the old divides, clinging to all the old antagonisms, indulging the worst instincts of its base and signalling its contempt for the opinions of the business and financial elites while embarked on a ruinous program of borrowing and spending. The long and the short of it is that Labour is fast turning back into the party the country rejected in 1979, 1983, 1987 and again in 1992. Despite Tom Harris' valiant attempt to plant the seeds of doubt in Tory minds, it is a psychology and a strategy that failed Labour prior to 1997 and it will fail them again in 2010.

cameron on civil liberties..

2009-06-25T08:22:00.033+01:00

One of the most shaming aspects of Labour's record in office is its vicious decade-long assault on our freedom. In response, David Cameron will today make a speech outlining the Conservative Party’s thinking on the issue. Details are sketchy, but some of it, at least, we are already familiar with. The centrepiece is the proposed Bill of Rights. Opinion is divided on the issue of whether or not a Bill of Rights is the appropriate mechanism. My view is that we need an instrument that embeds our freedoms in a wider constitutional framework. Whatever the precise mechanism, it is clear that the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty alone is no longer up to the job. The old constitutional settlement has simply become too unstable. Elements in the mix have become dangerously unbalanced, with far too much power concentrated in the executive. The most supine parliament in living memory has proved incapable of holding the executive to account, resulting in a raft of poorly drafted, ill-conceived legislation.

In part, the problem has been a succession of truly awful Home Secretaries. Lacking all historical awareness and understanding, oblivious to the delicate balance of freedoms and responsibilities that hold our system together, they have indulged the worst instincts of the Home Office. Between them, they have showed complete disregard for constitutional niceties, and in what amounted to a constitutional outrage allowed calculations of narrow party advantage to ride roughshod over longstanding constitutional and parliamentary protocols. None of this would have been possible, however, had these protocols been more clearly specified, the workings of our constitution been fully elaborated, and the limits to executive power more clearly spelled out. And so the conservatives need to give real thought to a wider package of constitutional reform.

Alongside proposals for a Bill of Rights, of course, there is also the commitment to abandon the costly and unnecessary ID card scheme, itself an important symbolic move, emblematic as it is of Labour’s wrongheaded approach to issues of security, but beyond this and vague noises about the repeal of some of the worst excesses of Labour’s anti-terror legislation, Tory proposals remain underspecified. Indeed, it is the Liberal Democrats who have made much of the running on civil liberties. Chris Huhne’s Freedom Bill remains the most conspicuous statement of intent by any of the main parties on the issue.

In view of Huhne’s contemptible support for the ban on Geert Wilders, however, there remain very real questions about the depth of the Liberal Democrats’ commitment to some aspects of the civil liberties agenda, in particular to the principle of free speech. Given the very real erosion of this fundamental right, there is no longer room for equivocation or ambivalence on this issue. I would like to see much more robust protection for free speech included in the bill, in particular real consideration given to repeal of the legislation outlawing incitement to religious hatred. That said, Huhne’s set of proposals is very nearly there. An excellent start, and the closest any of the parties has yet come to elaborating a set of proposals that genuinely reflect the concerns of civil liberties advocates.

This has left Chris Grayling struggling to catch up. Given the centrality of the Home Office to much of what Cameron will want to achieve in his first term, this situation cannot continue. There is a clear conservative case for constitutional renewal and reform. It is different from the one being made in the liberal press and it needs to be laid before the British people with vigour and energy. The Conservatives have a tireless advocate for civil liberties in David Davis, it is a pity Cameron cannot find his way to restoring Davis to the front bench.

Personality aside, it is crucial that the argument for civil liberties is not lost sight of in the lead up to the election. Issues around the economy and public spending have a tendency to crowd out arguments around civil liberties, especially in a downturn, relegating them to mere marginalia. Today's speech is a clear statement of intent from David Cameron that the Tories remain committed to rolling back Labour's ugly assault on our freedom. The defining feature of the New Labour landscape is a culture of petty cruelty and vindictiveness. A decade of it has left the public sphere horribly coarsened and disfigured. Cameron's speech today will go some way towards unwinding Labour's assault on our values and restoring some integrity to our constitutional settlement. It is also a reminder that there is more than one dividing line in this upcoming election. Quite apart from the distinction between a Conservative Party prepared to tell you the hard truth about public spending and a Labour Party determined to cover it up, the other big contrast is between a Labour Party pursuing an ugly authoritarian agenda and a Conservative Party committed to freedom. For me, Labour is simply on the wrong side of the argument on all of the big issues. Cameron's speech today is another emphatic demonstration of that.

*UPDATE: ConservativeHome has key passages from the speech here
**UPDATE: Full text here

why cameron should hold his nerve...

2009-06-23T23:18:00.020+01:00

The Tories are taking a terrible pounding over their decision to leave the centre-right grouping in the European parliament and there is evidence that the criticism has rattled the leadership. In interviews, Hague and Cameron have appeared at turns defensive, anxious and unsure of the line. Sensing blood, Labour’s attack machine has pounced. Though determined to paint the Tories as isolated and without influence on Europe and busy linking them with all manner of crackpots, loons and fringe elements, the argument is not really about Europe at all. Confident that it plays to their ‘Same Old Tories’ and ‘nasty party’ memes, Labour strategists have seized on the issue as part of their wider attempt to deconstruct Cameron’s modernising agenda and re-contaminate the Tory brand.

Worried that the Labour attack will resonate, fearful that it plays into all the old stereotypes, the Tories are keen to close down the argument. But need they be? I am not so sure. Guardian readers are no doubt appalled. In their minds, this confirms all their worst prejudices. But this is exactly what is wrong with the strategy. Like Brown’s ‘Tory cuts!’ jibe and the ‘Mr. 10%’ riff, this is small tent stuff. Shoring up the Euro-fanatic vote with scare stories about Ukrainian SS members, holocaust deniers and homophobes is not political outreach. While this stuff plays well in The Guardian and The Independent, outside the echo chamber of the liberal press I am not so sure. Though we have no way of gauging the impact on the opinion polls, just as the country is in the mood for spending reductions, it is in the mood for a more critical approach to European policy, and so the Tories should not be afraid of the argument. Brown’s last attempt at this sort of transparent political positioning backfired spectacularly, leaving the Labour leader looking slippery and dishonest. So the Tories might yet turn this to their advantage.

They will only turn this to their advantage, though, if they are prepared to confront the issue head on. That means making this move part of a wider reform argument. The Tories can do this in the knowledge that they are on the right side of that argument. The whole trend in today's politics is towards increased accountability and transparency. Arguments around localism, democratic renewal and reform resonate deeply with a public desirous of change. Of course, any argument that challenges the establishment view on Europe will meet with a robust response and that is just what we are seeing. The combined assault on the Tory position from Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the big liberal blogs and the BBC is evidence of just how widespread and ingrained the consensus on Europe has become. Just yesterday, Ed Davey, Liberal Democrat Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, accused the Tories of throwing away influence on Europe in favour of “ideological isolationism”.

Davey’s use of the term ‘ideological’ is a simple yet effective rhetorical device, conjuring images of wide-eyed, frothing-at-the-mouth types. Notice how, by using the term pejoratively, he seeks to draw the ideological sting from the establishment view and present the federalist argument as a matter of simple common sense. These rhetorical sleights of hand are everywhere used instead of argument. The pro-European argument never gets beyond vague noises about the need to combat climate change and warnings that jobs and trade will suffer. Quite how and why all of this requires a bloated federal superstructure is never fully explained. It operates rather as something of a null hypothesis - a default position - assumed to be true as a matter of simple common sense and thereby rendered ideologically neutral. This insidious framing shapes discourse across the media. The assumptions underlying the conventional or establishment view are everywhere presented as unthreatening, non-ideological, safe.

This is a subtle and insidious form of indoctrination. The establishment view is no less ‘ideological’ than the Tory position and it needs to be confronted - and confronted with conviction. The Tories have to stop being so defensive on the issue. Despite the force of the attack on the Tory position, there are signs that the argument is moving their way. Just last week Nick Clegg moderated his tone on Europe greatly, sounding much less slavish than usual, and the more thoughtful Liberal Democrats are aware that they need to develop a much more critical pro-Europeanism than they have yet shown us. So it would be a great irony and a very great betrayal if, at the very moment the stifling consensus on Europe begins to fracture, the Tories failed to put themselves at the centre of the argument for fear of upsetting the pro-European press.

and so it goes on...

2009-06-22T07:58:00.012+01:00

We wondered how Mousavi and the demonstrators would react to Khamenei’s provocation. We now have our answer. Mousavi remains uncowed, at the head of the protests. The uneasy stand off having given way to extremes of violence and brutality, the regime is now facing a deep crisis of legitimacy. Any semblance of a wider purpose has long since dissipated. All that remains is the authoritarian instinct, the reflexive illiberalism, the ugly philosophy of unfreedom. And Iranians are rejecting it.

As this crisis unfolds on Youtube, in our email boxes and our twitter feeds, the pressure to tilt policy in favour of the protesters grows. The clamour on the neoconservative right for a stronger line grows louder and more intense by the day. Obama has so far rightly resisted it. The best course of action was always to maintain a studied neutrality and that remains the case. So far Obama’s cautious realism has been pitch perfect; his call on the Iranian government to “stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people” managing to signal coded support for the protestors, while maintaining enough studied ambiguity to prevent accusations of meddling. And it must continue.

Predictably, the siren voices urging intervention - so far confined to the outer reaches of the neoconservative fringe - are in danger of breaking out and infecting the wider discourse. Just last night, our very own Iain Dale joined the chorus, urging a much more robust line on the government. Inchoate and lacking definition, these calls reflect a heartfelt desire to do something, anything, in the face of vicious brutality and injustice. On that very human level, they are understandable – admirable, even - but they make for bad foreign policy. Contra the ideologues on the neoconservative fringe, it is the job of those tasked with steering America through this crisis to eschew universalising, moralising rhetoric in favour of the cold calculation of interests.

And that is just what Obama and his team are doing. Watching, waiting, viewing this through the prism of enduring American interests, not allowing policy to get caught up in the swirl of events. One thing the neoconservatives are determined to do is to make this about America, to place America at the centre of the narrative; their growing impatience with Western inaction a rage against the idea of American impotence. One thing they cannot abide is an America on the periphery. This is a familiar kind of solipsism, one to which a young republic is especially vulnerable, and it must be overcome. The desire to insert ourselves at the centre of every crisis must be resisted. In its place there needs to be a much more disciplined and focused response. We need a diplomacy that comes to terms with and acknowledges limits. Thankfully, mercifully, after the excesses of the Bush years, that is exactly what we are getting.

all eyes on Mousavi...

2009-06-19T20:44:00.013+01:00

Pity Mr. Mousavi. With the Supreme Leader’s speech this morning, the crisis in Iran has now entered its most critical phase. Until now, opposition forces have stopped short of challenging the legitimacy of the Islamic regime. By declaring for Ahmadinejad, however, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei effectively upped the ante this morning, placing both his leadership and the authority of the Islamic Republic on the line. The question now is just how far the opposition, and Mr. Mousavi in particular, are prepared to go. He and they have a choice; accept Mr. Ahmadinejad as President or plunge into the unknown. It boils down to a simple test of nerves. This was a calculated provocation by the regime and the pressure on Mr. Mousavi now is immense. How he will respond is unclear.

What is clear is that a proud people, an ancient people, a magical civilisation, beaten by this brutal regime into submission, aching for an end to the indignities visited upon them, have finally said ‘Enough!’. And so the siren call at the centre of Ayatollah Khamenei’s speech must be resisted. The turn away from politics to spirituality, towards the consolations of irrationality, unreason, faith, is the very opposite of what the Iranian people need. They have sought comfort in the false certainties of religion for too long. They of all people know that, of all the great pathologies that swirl around the Middle East, this is the most disabling, the most wretched; the most deceitful and wicked of all the great lies. What they want and need now more than ever, above all else, is for their politics to work.

And so what the Iranian people must understand above everything is that this speech was a deeply hostile act - at once a defiant, menacing, thuggish, brutal and yet ultimately self-defeating piece of political positioning, effectively setting regime and people on a collision course. If they understand that, the way forward will become clear. As the regime gathers its forces and the opposition draws breath, the world watches and waits, not knowing which way events will turn. My fervent hope is that the Iranian people will reject the false certainties and failed dogmas of the past, stand up, and assume something like their full height as a people.

a lament...

2009-06-18T14:29:00.019+01:00

Some interesting contrasts between the American and British blogospheres have emerged over the course of the last week. In particular on the issue of the disputed Iranian elections. With the fall out from the expenses scandal and the developing argument over public expenditure dominating the conversation on this side of the Atlantic, developments in Iran have generated almost no comment. The American blogosphere, by way of contrast, has seized upon the issue and taken up the cause of the protesters with some relish. Andrew Sullivan has excelled yet again, standing head and shoulders above any other blog or mainstream news source, his grasp of the complexities and ambiguities around the issue a constant source of fresh insight and inspiration. But alongside him, the other big American blogs – Instapundit, Talking Points Memo, The Daily Kos - have all weighed in, contributing to a spirited dialogue.

In contrast, the issue just has not seized the imagination of the British blogosphere in the same way. The big political blogs in Britain have had almost nothing to say on the issue. The always insightful Heresiarch has chipped in here, but he remains something of a lone voice. And so what struck me is just how insular and self-absorbed the British blogosphere has become when compared with the American. Of course, the two countries are at very different points in the electoral cycle: the American response shaped by a newly confident, outward-looking administration, keen to make its mark – ours by a beleaguered, bewildered government, looking for all the world a demoralised and discredited rabble.

But the different reaction also reflects the widely different interests of the two countries. Iran is very much a live foreign policy issue in America and one of the most intractable foreign policy problems for American planners, whereas the Foreign Office is much diminished these days. Though still counted among the three great offices of state, the truth, of course, is that Britain no longer has a foreign policy worthy of the name. There is very little room for manoeuvre or creative thinking in the sphere of foreign policy. Despite our pretensions, the days when Britain conducted a global policy are long gone - the last great gasp of foreign policy activism in Iraq having dampened any residual desire on the part of Britain’s elites to put ourselves at the centre of the world's trouble spots. And so the different reactions to this story in America and Britain are something of an indicator both of how deeply engaged the Americans remain globally and how, at the same time, our interests - and perhaps our horizons - have narrowed; the different treatment of this issue by the respective blogospheres playing very much to the Americans’ credit and our shame, leaving the Americans looking every inch the worldly sophisticates and Britain the insular, parochial cousin.

the proper role of the speaker...

2009-06-17T15:46:00.008+01:00

It says something about modern politics when one is forced to defend liberalism against liberals. I blogged yesterday about how refreshing it was to hear a mainstream party leader make the case for old fashioned English liberalism. Well, it seems elements of Nick Clegg’s party are not quite on the same page. On the very same day, we find Liberal Democrat activist Kasch Wilder writing on Liberal Democrat Voice that “it is important, now more than ever, for Parliament to send a strong message that the diversity of our culture is the backbone of our society”. He makes this rather extraordinary claim during the course of an argument for the election of Labour MP Parmjit Dhanda as Speaker and it is evidence of some really rather muddled thinking. Issues around identity and the BNP are entirely separate from the much narrower issue of parliamentary reform. And yet somehow both he and Mr. Dhanda manage to conflate the two.

Reading Mr. Dhanda’s blog, it is clear that he simply hasn’t thought beyond New Labour’s failed identity politics and only really turns to the issue of accountability as an afterthought. In the main, he seems concerned with the absurd idea of uprooting Parliament and embarking on a tour of the regions. Alongside this, his proposals are for more of the failed identity politics that resulted in the election of two BNP MEPs. He bases his appeal around the conviction that “we need to change our personnel to reflect modern Britain”. So far, so much standard New Left fare, but we soon encounter something much more alarming. Later in the same paragraph we find the following:

“Parliament will not be representative of its racial, gender or class mix at any time in the next 100 years. The Speaker must actively encourage political parties to make changes, through law, to catalyse these changes over one or two terms, not 100 years.”

Quite astonishing. This is a form of radical identity politics that polarises opinion not just in the House, but across the country. It will politicise the Office of Speaker to an unprecedented and wholly unacceptable degree. This alone should disqualify him. It is clear that he has absolutely no conception of the proper role and function of the Speaker of the House. Quite apart from the obvious constitutional impropriety of pursuing such a radical agenda from the Chair, what Messrs Dhanda and Wilder do not seem to understand is that it is precisely this commitment to diversity above almost every other social policy goal that is at the root of so much of the current crisis. Strong societies are those centred around a set of shared values. Societies that cannot achieve agreement on basic values slide into conflict and worse, and so it is not diversity - ethnic, confessional, or ideological – that is the backbone of our society, but rather its opposite; a stable and enduring consensus around basic values.

Those values are best expressed in the centuries old tradition of English liberty: a robust liberalism, a jealous regard for freedom, a healthy scepticism, and a deep and abiding suspicion of the state. So the most important message our Parliament could send out now is that the backbone of our society is liberty, not diversity. Through all the waves of immigration, the dominant culture has remained robustly liberal. Immigrants have contributed many great things, much energy and entrepreneurship, but the one thing they have not improved upon is our basic cultural settlement, the basic framework of rights and freedoms, the basic set of principles at the centre of our tradition of liberty. Not a single, solitary contribution has improved upon that basic framework. And as if to underline the point, sections of the new immigrant populations are now actively seeking to undermine it. And they are helped in that agenda by just this kind of wrongheaded, ill-considered argument. The basic point that Mr. Dhanda has still not grasped is that It is precisely while he was busy playing identity politics that his constituents turned their backs on him and voted for the BNP. I would invite both Mr. Dhanda and Mr. Wilder to reflect on that. The last thing we need is some ghastly new symbolism. This is not a cosmetic exercise. We need a champion of liberty; a Speaker determined to hold the executive to account; a Speaker committed to the basic values that underpin our constitutional settlement - not another poster boy for New Labour’s diversity agenda.

a man on a mission?

2009-06-16T01:08:00.032+01:00

I stumbled upon this video yesterday of Polly Toynbee interviewing Nick Clegg. In view of Clegg's increasingly impressive performance over the last few weeks, it got me thinking about the prospects for his newly energised leadership. Following Charles Kennedy and Menzies Campbell was always going to be a tough ask for a young MP with very little name recognition - and so it has proved. Much of the criticism that has swirled around Nick Clegg's leadership, though, is unfair. He was unfortunate to ascend to the leadership at a time when David Cameron was busy articulating a renewed liberal Toryism. The flurry of interest around the new Tory leader had a significant destabilising effect on Clegg's leadership and overshadowed what to many observers is now clear - that of the three most recent Liberal Democrat leaders, he is easily the most impressive figure.

In an age when people crave authenticity above all else, the Liberal Democrat leader seems a genuinely engaged and committed personality. Nick Clegg is a man who speaks with real passion and eloquence on a great many things, but above all on issues around civil liberties and freedom. Deeply schooled in political philosophy, one senses that this is a man guided by a clear set of principles. And the glaring distinction between a Liberal Democrat leader who is open, articulate and engaged and a Labour leader holed up in his bunker, paranoid, aloof and only ever appearing in front of hand-picked audiences, is one of the great contrasts in Westminster politics.

At a time when a clear statement of the argument for classical liberalism is sorely needed, he makes the case with great insight, passion and flair. His core philosophy fits seamlessly with much of the new Tory thinking around issues of localism and the renewal of democracy and so there is much for Conservatives to admire in Nick Clegg. When a liberal leader openly proclaims his anti-statism as well as his belief in localism and democratic renewal - all longstanding Tory themes - what is left of the old policy of equidistance? Clegg would doubtless reject the premise of the question, arguing instead, in an echo of the old refrain ‘neither right nor left, but out in front’, that the old categories have outlived their usefulness.

But on any objective measure, Clegg is closer to the Tories than he is Labour. In place of the vague, leftish social democracy of Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy we find a considered, coherent, classical English liberalism at the core of Clegg’s philosophy. His instincts tend always towards decentralisation, rebalancing the constitution and devolving power away from the centre. So Nick Clegg is a man with whom Conservatives can do business. To Westminster insiders this is no great secret. There is broad agreement between the two front benches on many aspects of policy. Don’t expect the Liberal Democrat leader to shout about it too loudly though. Edge too close to Toryism and you frighten off disaffected Labour voters. But the prospect of Nick Clegg propping up a minority Labour administration is remote. It is inconceivable that the Liberal Democrats under Nick Clegg will be able to work with a minority Labour government for any length of time. The areas of disagreement are simply too great.

For him to maintain any sort of working relationship with the Tories, though, he will need to develop a more critical pro-Europeanism than he has yet showed us. He will be aware of the glaring contradiction between his avowal of transparency and accountability in the Westminster context on the one hand, and his party’s rather slavish devotion to all things European on the other. Exactly how he proposes to square his liberalism with the democratic deficit at the heart of EU decision making is not yet clear. But he will have to moderate his pro-Europeanism. Remember, the ramifications of the Westminster expenses scandal have not yet played themselves out. As the clamour for transparency and accountability works its way through our politics, the Liberal Democrats will find that they are simply on the wrong side of the argument on Europe. Pressure is growing for real reform and he will need to position himself carefully on the issue or suffer electorally. So expect a much more nuanced and considered approach to Europe Policy in the coming year than we have seen thus far. The upshot of all this is that if Clegg negotiates the next year successfully and all this plays out as I expect, we could be faced with the very real prospect of a historic realignment on the right, and that means Conservatives have less reason to fear a hung parliament than they think.

at last the tories come out fighting...

2009-06-15T11:25:00.008+01:00

This blog has consistently argued that a Conservative Party prepared to tell you the hard truth about public spending versus a Labour Party determined to cover up the truth about inefficiency and waste in the public sector is a contrast that will really resonate. And boy does that argument look good today. Labour has got itself into a terrible bind on the spending issue. There really are only two ways out of this argument for them. One is to admit the lie, the other to double down and push the line even harder. Either option plays directly into the developing meme of Tory truth versus Labour lies. By embracing the argument of this blog and others that they should frame the debate in the terms of honesty versus dishonesty, rather than investment versus cuts, the Tories have laid a massive elephant trap for Labour.

Of course, the first isn’t a real option at all. Admit the lie? Cannot be done. So they are going to have to tough it out. The damage this will do to Labour credibility on the spending issue is incalculable. Gordon Brown and Ed Balls, supposedly the two ‘towering intellects’* of this administration, are in danger of throwing away what little credibility on the economy Labour has left.

The problem Labour have is that the lie just doesn’t play. It doesn’t play in the blogosphere, it doesn’t play on TV, it doesn’t play in the mainstream newspapers or in the Dog and Duck. It doesn’t even play in The Guardian, consistently the most hawkish advocate of public spending of all the main papers. If Labour cannot find a way to make their argument on spending play, it is all over for them. Sitting here today, I simply cannot see how they do it. The sums just do not add up. If the Tories are prepared to push it hard enough, this will prove a very, very profitable line of attack for them indeed.

The next trick for the Tories is to use this developing meme to break through the stifling orthodoxy on public spending and build a base of support for their wider agenda. The Tories have to look beyond winning the election and start building a base of support for what are going to be some tough spending rounds. Otherwise, what support they have could erode very quickly indeed. Cuts in the abstract are one thing, real cuts working their way through into the real economy are a different proposition altogether. More on this developing argument later, for now let me just say that today is a very good day to be a Tory - a very good day indeed.

*Copyright © Polly Toynbee, circa 2007

new labour, old nationalism

2009-06-14T17:32:00.028+01:00

Issues around Englishness, identity and the BNP continue to reverberate. For my part, a meditation on root causes. Melanie Phillips has written often and at length about what she calls the ‘cultural cringe’, by which she means an instinctive, reflex aversion on the part of our cultural elites to anything that smacks of an assertive English identity. I thought it might be useful to unpack the concept a little bit, because it points to some of the root causes of voter alienation and disengagement from mainstream politics, which in turn feed directly into support for ultra nationalist parties such as the BNP. 'Cultural cringe' is something we are all familiar with. Its most visible outward sign is the way metropolitan elites maintain an air of lofty disdain for St. George’s day and the England football team.

Boisterous affirmations of identity will always offend middle class sensibilities, of course, but this is about more than simple class prejudice. And it is about more than football. To fully understand it we need to familiarise ourselves with the byzantine complexities of post-war left politics because the roots of this crisis are to be found in the philosophy and progressive politics of what used to be called the ‘New Left’. Simplifying massively, the new activism that emerged on campuses in the 1960s abandoned old style labourism in favour of gender and identity based politics. Based in part on an analysis of the role of the industrial working class in the war, the advocates of the new politics came to view the working class as a reactionary force. And so they identified instead with what they regarded as the true revolutionary-progressive forces in world politics; the independence movements, the anti-imperialists and the feminists.

This gave rise to a form of identity politics that is at the very centre of this storm. Underlying it is a set of assumptions about our history, the history of empire and our relationships with the wider world. In this new politics our national story is systematically deconstructed and in its place is put a story of grievous exploitation, cruel and wanton destruction, murderous enslavement and injustice. Such an overtly anti-Western set of ideas could never form the basis of an appeal to the electorate and so it had to be covered with a nationalist gloss. The trick was to appropriate the symbols and iconography of British or English nationalism while pursuing a radically different agenda. This meant replacing the old nationalism with the new.

So a new nationalism was needed in contrast to the old; inclusive, all embracing, unthreatening. Played out against a background of breathless renewal - a giddy, intoxicating mix of Euro ’96, Britpop and Cool Britannia - the new nationalism needed to be colourful, boisterous and celebratory to match the new mood but above all – and this is crucial – apolitical. The idea was not to take the nationalism out of politics, but the politics out of nationalism. Of course, the search for a new nationalism did not begin with New Labour. The search for a modern English identity begins with the end of Empire. Some formulations of English identity were laughably twee. But behind the risible invocations of merry old England, morris dancing and warm beer was a long-forgotten English identity struggling to express itself; unsure, anxious, at times defensive, but also scrupulously fair, aggressive in the defence of liberty, open and tolerant. But this vision was never given full expression. Buried under a mountain of Tory sleaze, John Major’s wistful invocations went the way of the cones hotline. And so it gave way to New Labour’s ghastly formulation: a carefully contrived concoction, a curious kind of pastiche, something artificial and forced, synthetic, with a transparent commercial dimension that lent the whole thing an air of superficiality and unreality - a kind of grim metaphor for the whole New Labour project. And, crucially, a cover for a new kind of radical identity politics.

This radical new identity politics was based on the most cruel and cynical calculation; that the poor had nowhere else to go. As a direct consequence, in New Labour’s shiny new meritocratic society, the working classes find themselves systematically excluded from the professions, all but barred from the most prestigious schools, disenfranchised, lacking representation and taken utterly for granted. Social mobility has declined, incomes have stagnated and jobs gone overseas. They have even had their party taken away from them - John Prescott, for a decade the token working class presence in a cabinet of shiny Oxbridge suits, held up to ridicule and contempt for his infelicities with the language; his garbled syntax and mangled grammar the occasion for endless middle-class mirth. Even their favourite sport was repackaged and sold to an aspirational middle class audience. The working class feel themselves marginalised, despised by the elites, shut out of their own traditional pastimes. All of this feeds into a palpable sense of grievance. This is a working class that feels under attack, mocked at every turn, despised and unwelcome, ridiculed in the media and wider culture, and ignored by the political class.

All this in contrast to the old nationalism. And let us be clear, the nationalism of Nick Griffin and the BNP is the old nationalism - dark, sinister and foreboding with a grizzly political undercurrent. The happy, shiny new English nationalism, repackaged for mums, grannies and nice middle class families, depoliticised and unthreatening, is entirely a creation of New Labour and it always sat uneasily with a working class that craves authenticity above everything else. In the first, heady days of New Labour, the old nationalism was very much on the retreat, but as the economy turns and in response to New Labour's failed identity politics, the old nationalism is now defiantly reasserting itself. Of course, ultimately neither is a solution to the search for a new English identity and so there is a very real need to get beyond them both. What we need is an authentic nationalism, a properly liberal nationalism, a nationalism that places the fight for democratic freedoms back at the centre of our national story.

keeping up the pressure...

2009-06-12T11:02:00.016+01:00

Perhaps it was naive to believe that this Prime Minister would ever deliver real change, but elements of the reform package laid out by Gordon Brown in his statement to parliament on Wednesday were clearly designed to do no more than neutralise the issue of expenses before the election. I argued in an earlier post that what we need is a precise, targeted package of reforms. What we are being presented with is a glut of hurried, ill-conceived, crowd-pleasing measures. Each element carefully selected for pure partisan advantage. Some elements - such as the recall mechanism and proposals around enhanced powers for select committees - are sensible, targeted reforms. Others, such as the proposals on alternative voting systems, are naked political moves designed to put the Tories on the wrong side of the argument.

In the absence of front-page headlines it was always likely that politics would intrude, the momentum for change dissipate, and parliament settle back into the old familiar routines. We are already seeing the consensus around the need for reform fracture along party lines. Without pressure from below, that process will only accelerate. Some elements in the House are deliberately playing a long game in the hope that time and voter apathy will draw the sting from the issue so it is crucial that the public stay actively engaged.

Not so long ago, this would have meant the hard slog of grassroots activism by local communities, associations and other interested groups, including local newspapers. With the advent of the internet, it has never been easier. A range of tools are available to help you monitor parliament and keep tabs on your MP, from the excellent They Work For You, The Public Whip and Parliament sites, through to social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and Myspace. Most MPs keep blogs and actively encourage voter engagement through their websites. So it is a fiction that MPs are untouchable. MPs have never been so accessible. Processes and mechanisms are there to ensure accountability and so there really is no excuse. If we let our MPs off the hook and fail to achieve the renewal and reform we are hoping for, we really will have nobody but ourselves to blame.

a shift in the zeitgeist?

2009-06-11T10:14:00.018+01:00

I blogged yesterday about the transparent dishonesty of Labour's position on spending. Well, it seems the press aren't buying it either. Today's coverage is almost universally negative. A damning editorial in The Sun is matched by equally incredulous comment right across the media. This is seriously bad news for Labour. Without the ability to frame the election around the issue of Tory cuts they really are done for. The lines you will hear repeated most often and with growing desperation in the lead up to the election are the following; ‘The Do Nothing Party’, ‘The Same Old Tories’, and the excruciating one about not ‘walking on by’.

What binds each element of this attack together is the spending argument. If this fails to resonate, their whole election strategy falls apart. Their ability to paint Cameron as public relations gloss masking the same old nasty party rests on public support for more spending. Judging by today’s press, this is a gross miscalculation. It plays to a neuralgic fear of swingeing Tory cuts that is simply no longer there. The public know the state of the finances, they know year-on-year increases cannot continue and are ready to listen to an argument for restraint. The public mood has shifted on this issue. Whatever their internal polling is telling them, cries of ‘Tory Cuts!’ do not play as well as Labour strategists think they do. People just do not buy it. And so the Tories really need to get out in front on this issue. The public are already there. They are braced for spending reductions and want a party that gives it to them straight.

The key for the Tories is to turn this new mood to their advantage. I have argued repeatedly and at length that Tory reticence on this issue is unworthy of a party that aspires to government. I have argued that the Tories should be making the case for sound money much more forcefully. That argument strengthens with each passing day. The stifling consensus on public spending that has sustained Labour’s appeal over the last decade is crumbling before our eyes. What we need now is for the Tories to make the argument for spending restraint often, openly, with conviction and without apology.

UPDATE: Iain Dale makes a similar argument here

politics as usual...

2009-06-10T18:13:00.013+01:00

What a thoroughly dispiriting PMQs. First, from a narrow party perspective, Cameron failed to land the killer blow. Again. I am fast approaching the settled view that PMQs is simply not Cameron's best forum. In interviews and other settings he comes across as personable, articulate and intelligent. Definite leadership material. At PMQs somehow, that just never quite translates. Tory MPs will have left the chamber subdued and ruing a missed opportunity after that. More broadly, and importantly, today’s exchanges on the issue of NHS cuts throw the crisis of our politics into sharp relief.

The transparent dishonesty of what is parliament’s showpiece event is fast becoming a national disgrace and emblematic of everything that is wrong with our way of doing politics. Deceit, deception and fraud are at the very heart of it. On one hand the Tories, frightened of their own shadows, furiously back peddling from Andrew Lansley’s gaff. On the other, Labour - after all that we know, in the face of all the evidence - maintaining the fiction that the budget can be returned to balance without tax rises or spending cuts. The absurdity, the impossibility, the self-serving duplicity of it all, but also the cynicism and the contemptuous disregard for a public that can see through it only too well. This is both the root of the disconnect between parliament and people and the cause of the crisis at the heart of our democracy.

Crucially, though – and this is a point that gets all too easily glossed over - this absurd charade, this ludicrous deception, this blatant fraud depends upon a compliant media to uphold and sustain it. If the media were to break out of their obsession with froth, demonstrate some seriousness of purpose and actually hold our representatives to account, we might get a different politics. Politicians say the things they do because they know they can get away with it. They know the media will not hold them to account for it and so they dissemble. They obfuscate and embellish. And when this inevitably shades into outright lies and untruth, our entire political system is the worse for it. I have blogged about the crisis in journalism often and at length. It is time we started taking the argument seriously.

the fallout continues...

2009-06-10T01:01:00.018+01:00

The left really are all at sea on the BNP issue. In a cynical attempt to implicate the Tories, Labour spin doctors are still busy pushing the line that the fault lies with "the entire political establishment". Helpfully, Gary Younge - writing in The Nation on May 20th - clarifies the situation:

A party with historical roots in the working class that fails to advance the interests of that class will engender cynicism. New Labour's electoral project was based in no small measure on the calculation that the poor had nowhere else to go

These were not Tory voters peeling off to vote for fascists. Disaffected Tories opted for UKIP. These were Labour voters. And not just any Labour voters. We are talking about Labour's core consituencies in the Northern mill towns and industrial heartlands. Working class whites who traditionally look to the labour movement to safeguard their interests. Constituencies that stayed with Labour right the way through the 80s when the rest of the country was busy voting for Margaret Thatcher.

So when you hear Labour politicians tell you that the system is to blame, or that all the main parties have questions to answer, do not believe them for a minute. This is a crisis wholly of the left's making. The Tories have their own issues around race and immigration, to be sure, but Tories do not, as a rule, vote for fascists. Labour supporters do. And if there are any quesitons to be answered, they are primarily for Labour people.

the inquest begins...

2009-06-09T13:53:00.016+01:00

Much self-flagellation on the left today as Labour attempts to come to terms with its part in the rise of the BNP. Voices from across the left - including Jon Cruddas and Nick Lowles in The Guardian - weigh in with varying degrees of insight and penetration. Of all of them, Denis Macshane’s 10 lessons for the left is the most lamentable effort, although Salma Yaqoob’s rote call for a rejection of neo-liberalism just about pips it for all-round incoherence and wrongheadedness. What none of them get close to acknowledging is that the BNP are an inevitable outgrowth of the kind of identity politics the left has devoted itself to. A politics that encourages minorities to self-identify as interest groups and then seek representation on that basis was always going to provoke a backlash from the majority population.

And so the problem is not simply at the level of policy, but a deeper philosophical one. It is their whole attitude and approach to politics that needs to change. The trouble is, this approach cuts to the very core of their philosophy. The foundation of their entire philosophy is the idea that certain groups are at a structural disadvantage in our system; that historical patterns of inclusion and exclusion have led to systemic injustice. Historically this meant the industrial working class, but now more typically immigrant populations. This is not at issue. What is at issue is the politics they have evolved to correct it. It is divisive. It encourages separatism and a zero sum mentality among competing interests groups. Instead of increasing community cohesion, it actively undermines it. It has encouraged the growth of a competitive grievance culture where the legitimising dimension of a cause, agenda or argument is not its own internal logic or coherence, but its capacity to generate liberal guilt. To submit to it is to centre our whole political culture and public policy process around a generalised, abstract sense of moral culpability. It encourages special pleading on behalf of all sorts of crackpots, loons and fringe elements and encourages communities to self-identify as victim groups, claim special status for themselves and declare criticism off limits.

The growth in faith schools, the increased radicalisation of muslim communities, and the general increase in tension and distrust across communities, these are just the outward signs of it. So if they really want to get to grips with the BNP, they will address some of these deeper philsophical issues, because unless and until they move beyond the failed identity politics at the root of this crisis, the BNP will continue to pick up votes in places like Yorkshire, the North West and the Midlands.

UPDATE: Graeme Archer offers a similar analysis on CentreRight

a compromise of sorts...

2009-06-09T00:24:00.021+01:00

Of all the calculations being made by Labour MPs, the easiest to work out are those of the traditional Labour left. Secure in Labour’s heartlands, never reconciled to the New Labour project, these grizzled remnants of the old Bennite wing of the party are beyond the reach of the whips. For these men of the North - and they are, for the most part, men and from the North - personality never enters into it. For them it is all about policy. Their preference is for ideological purity. We are talking about unreconstructed class warriors who would rather go down fighting the good fight than countenance anything as grubby as a compromise with electoral reality. For them, the maths is easy. They will pocket what they can in the way of concessions on policy and then watch as Brown leads the right of the party to defeat at the election. At which point the balance of power in the party will shift decisively in their favour.

For the ultras on the Blairite wing of the party, the logic is very different, though as straightforward. Defeat will be seen as a repudiation of everything they have worked for. For them, the prospect of continuing with Gordon Brown is unthinkable. So we are left with that great swathe of MPs in the middle; the survivors of the 1997 and 2001 intake that make up the bulk of the parliamentary party: pragmatic men and women of the centre, schooled in the art of compromise. Sitting on wafer-thin majorities in marginal constituencies, these are the MPs looking most nervously over their shoulders. And yet somehow, inexplicably, they have thrown their lot in with Mr. Brown. Just what is going on here? How to explain it?

Two theories are currently doing the rounds. The first suggests that this great mass is no more convinced that Brown can win the election than the next man. Convinced that the election is lost whenever it comes, and whoever is in charge, they are simply looking to secure another year’s pension contributions and salary before the inevitable defeat. Doubtless some are so minded, but this is the business end of the party, the place where deals are done, favours traded, and where the whips go to work and so a second theory suggests the great mass of MPs in the centre were still biddable, still willing to be led, but simply lacked direction. This is the calculation the Brownites made and so, in the shadows, Nick Brown and his of gang of cajolers, wheedlers, arm-twisters and thugs went to work, knowing that the support of these MPs was crucial. Lose it and it was all over for Brown.

They appear to have been proven right. They were biddable. Although they have been bought off extremely cheaply. Some were lucky enough to secure themselves a government job. Most settled for much less. A perfunctory mea culpa,vague noises about a less confrontational style and a promise to reconsider some aspects of policy was enough to send them scurrying out in front of the waiting TV cameras, newly energised, waxing lyrical about the prospects for renewal and even victory.

In truth, it was a sorry sight and will have convinced no-one. The whole thing smacks of indecision and, ultimately, of cowardice. My guess is that, had a cabinet member signalled his intention to stand, Brown would not be in the leadership today. Had Alan Johnson dropped the faux modesty for a minute I think the party would have rallied to his call. I think the Labour backbenches were willing – in many cases, desperate - to be led. I think had the cabinet matched word and deed, they could have wrested back control of their fate. But none did. And so, like lemmings, they follow Brown over the edge of the cliff.

they just don't get it...

2009-06-08T08:24:00.017+01:00

While Labour ministers tour the TV studios telling anyone who will listen that the election of two BNP MEPs is the fault of “the entire political establishment” or “all of the main parties”, the truth of the matter is rather different. The stifling orthodoxy around issues of immigration, race and religion is at the root of it. Labour’s traditional supporters feel alienated and disenfranchised. Dismissed as reactionaries – or worse, racists – by a cosy metropolitan consensus around issues of immigration, these communities rightly feel marginaised. And it is no good blaming the Tories.

Labour effectively muzzled the Tories on immigration after Howard’s ‘dog whistle’ campaign in 2005. Tory attempts to open up the debate on immigration have met with the most vile slurs from a Labour attack machine determined to close down the debate and smear as racist anyone who dared challenge the new orthodoxy. And so the election of the BNP is solely the fault of the left, both inside and outside of parliament. Until Labour acknowledge the very real fears in working class communities about the disruptive effects of mass immigration upon jobs, parties such as the BNP will continue to thrive.

UPDATE: Melanie Phillips makes a similar argument here

the challenge that never materialised...

2009-06-07T20:24:00.012+01:00

It is now looking more and more likely that Gordon Brown will survive. His supporters are busy pushing the line that the rebellion is confined to a disaffected Blairite rump. And so far that looks to be just about the truth of it. Despite high profile interventions today from Lord Falconer and Nick Raynsford, what little momentum the rebels managed to generate has clearly stalled, and with prominent left-wingers such as Dianne Abbot and John Cruddas lining up in support of Brown, the widespread support the rebels had hoped for has simply not materialised. It was always the case that this rebellion would go nowhere unless it could draw upon support from across the party and with every passing hour that now looks less likely. In truth, it was never likely that the left would line up in support of a leadership challenge engineered and organised by the right. Far better to wait until the right is at its weakest and its platform comprehensively defeated at the next election than move now and risk another victory for the right of the party. That is the basic calculation the left have made.

Their strategy is to wait until the balance of power shifts decisively to their advantage after defeat for the right at the election thus revealing one of the many unspoken truths of this aborted leadership challenge - that the left of the party are not looking to the coming election battle with the Tories at all, but rather to the post-election fight for the future shape and direction of the party. A common misconception is that the Labour party is united in wanting to win the next election. While the right certainly dread the prospect of losing, the unspoken truth is that many on the left are relishing it.

That is why they have aligned themselves with Brown. Not because of any misguided belief that he can lead them to victory. Nobody believes that - the one thing both wings of the party are united on is the belief that Brown cannot win the election - but rather in the conviction that only after a crushing defeat for the right will they be in a position to shape the party in accordance with their ideas.

the crisis in journalism...

2009-06-07T10:36:00.007+01:00

Andrew Marr is hopelessly out of his depth. Peter Mandelson has just given him the absolute run around on the BBC. If you want to know why there is a crisis of faith in our institutions, look to the abject failure of journalists like Andrew Marr. That is where the rot begins. Obsequious, fawning, hopelessly deferential, he seems to have absolutely no conception of the proper role and function of a political journalist.

What we’ve just watched was a painful illustration of just how far political journalism has fallen on the BBC. This is the BBC’s flagship political programme and it is fronted by a chat show host. Marr should drop the absurd pretense that he is a political journalist and concentrate on the fluff, because nobody interested in serious political analysis will look to him after that performance.

a very British coup...

2009-06-07T00:58:00.009+01:00

So it was a coup after all, or at the very least an attempted one. The Telegraph is now reporting that what appeared to be a series of unconnected, isolated decisions by individual ministers were, in fact, part of a Blairite plot. Hazel Blears, James Purnell, Caroline Flint et al were said to have planned a series of staggered resignations only for the plot to unravel when Lord Mandelson intervened on Brown's behalf. Details are sketchy, but it appears Caroline Flint was the weakest link, holding out for a better job instead of resigning after Hazel Blears as planned. With the carefully choreographed sequence fatally interrupted, James Purnell's dramatic last ditch attempt to regain the momentum proved wholly inadequate as Brown then marshalled his forces and stabilised his position by Friday lunchtime.

At this stage, with Brown badly mauled but fighting a furious rearguard action and all momentum gone, any remaining enthusiasm for the plot appears to have disappeared altogether. And so one is left simply marvelling at the blundering incompetence of it all. Is it any wonder the country is in such parlous state when it is run by such a painfully inadequate bunch?

the democratic deficit at the heart of this administration...

2009-06-06T14:08:00.029+01:00

The stand out feature of a dismal reshuffle was the elevation to cabinet rank of yet more peers. The whole trend in today's politics is towards increased accountability and transparency and yet we find Brown - woefully at odds with the prevailing mood - busily circumventing the normal channels of accountability, appointing unelected ministers and increasing the power of the executive at the expense of parliament. We now find ourselves with seven out of the thirty-two ministers attending Cabinet sitting in the upper chamber - a full twenty-one per cent. The roll call of the unelected - and unelectable – is staggering. It now includes:

• The Prime Minister
• The First Secretary of State
• The Minister of State for Europe
• The Secretary of State for Transport
• The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office
• The Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
• The Attorney General*

Though not yet a full-blown constitutional crisis, it is absurd, in many ways an outrage, an insult to parliament and deeply contemptuous of democracy. It is also simply the latest in a long line of New Labour outrages against the constitution and a further indicator of New Labour’s troubled relationship with democracy. For those minded to see them, the warning signs were there from the start. Tony Blair's very first move upon ascending to the leadership was an attack on Labour's internal party democracy. The shift of policymaking authority from the National Executive Council to the newly created National Policy Forum was a move designed to circumvent normal lines of accountability and concentrate power at the centre. And it set the tone for everything that followed.

Justified in terms of the need for effective party management, the Party went along with it because it was desperate for power. The argument was that these were simply the modern tools of party management; that a more streamlined party structure was necessary to prevent the bitter factionalism and infighting of the 1980s. And in the early years, it proved to be a ruthlessly efficient political machine. Unified and on message, it went on to success after success. For those on the inside, however, the reality was very different. Under the fig leaf of effective party management, what we got was naked intimidation and the ruthless enforcement of party discipline. Some would say it was ever thus. The black arts of political spin, briefing and counter-briefing, the whips operation; these are the standard tools of the trade. Politics is by nature a rough business, in many ways deeply unpleasant. Combative and at times brutal it is no place for the faint-hearted.

But there was something more going on here, something more profound, at once deeply sinister and unpleasant. And the truth of it is only now fully revealing itself. The leadership surrounded itself with a tight-knight group of über-loyalists. Grimly reminiscent of Soviet-era apparatchiks, these unelected, deeply political animals set about their mission of ruthlessly enforcing party discipline with a relish. All of this is known. What is not yet fully appreciated is how this approach to party management carried over into government infecting first the whole of the Civil Service and then the wider culture. A decade of it has left civil society and the wider public realm horribly coarsened and disfigured. The result is a deep crisis of faith in our public institutions. And its roots lay in those early internal party moves to insulate the leadership from attack; in that initial assault on Labour's internal party democracy.

Twelve long years into this political cycle and any semblance of a wider purpose has long since dissipated. All that remains is the authoritarian instinct, the reflexive illiberalism, the ugly philosophy of unfreedom and in place of a party a mere hollowed out shell, bereft of any elevating mission, lacking any higher purpose, sustained by nothing more than the retention of power and the privilege that comes with it. And so the project reaches its apotheosis and its denouement: the expenses scandal and a Cabinet aloof, indifferent, and beyond the reach of full democratic accountability.

*you can find a full list of Cabinet members here
UPDATE: Simon Jenkins makes a similar argument here

Beyond Expenses...

2009-06-03T12:15:00.021+01:00

The Dizzy Thinks blog recently highlighted wasteful and excessive spending in the Department of Work and Pensions, including a staggering £32.3 million on furniture, £59.7 million on management conferences and £11 million on printer ink cartridges over the last five years. And yet somehow, maddeningly – absurdly - the merest whiff of an attempt to curb this excess is still met with cries of ‘Tory Cuts!’. In Labour’s through-the-looking-glass world, public spending is only ever a good thing. Irrespective of wider economic conditions, the clamour from the left is always for more spending, more largesse. Faced as we are with unsustainable levels of public debt, it really is time we broke through this stifling consensus and exposed the shocking levels of waste and excess in the public sector. How to do it though, without incurring the wrath of the client state?

The key for me is to link this excess in the public mind with the expenses scandal. The Tories are uniquely placed to benefit from the expenses crisis because of the way it strengthens the argument for elements of their overall approach. Smaller government, increased accountability and transparency - these longstanding Tory themes play to the current clamour for a radical overhaul and renewal of the relationship between government and governed. An argument to the effect that the expenses scandal is symptomatic of a wider culture of largesse fits seamlessly into this wider Tory narrative and should be at the heart of our thinking in the coming weeks. Unfortunately, it is an argument nobody seems prepared to make. It really is time the Tories began to turn this crisis to their advantage. They have been grasping for ways to do it, so far with little success except in narrow opinion poll terms. While this success is of course welcome, they now need to widen the argument to begin building a base of support for their wider agenda.

Constitutional Radicals Must Not be Allowed to Hijack this Debate...

2009-06-01T17:19:00.007+01:00

I argued in an earlier post that the Tories were in danger of missing a trick. And I think events have largely borne this analysis out. We are in danger of losing focus and – it has to be said - less by accident than by design. The waters are being deliberately muddied by proponents of a radical reforming agenda that goes far beyond anything justified by this crisis. It is no coincidence that voices from across the left are lining up in support of Alan Johnson. Vague noises about Lib-Lab coalitions and the slew of approving copy in the liberal press all point to a growing campaign to shape the response to this crisis along left-liberal lines. And it has to be stopped. Not for narrow partisan reasons, but simply because the reform agenda being laid out in front of us by the left – both inside and outside of parliament - is the wrong set of ideas at the wrong time.

What we need is a precise, targeted package of reforms. What we are being presented with is a glut of hurried, ill-conceived, crowd-pleasing measures. Each element carefully selected for pure partisan advantage. It is not the unelected second chamber that is at the root of the disconnect between people and parliament. Nor is it the first past the post voting system, nor is it the monarchy or any of the other targets of Labour’s newfound reforming zeal. It is a governing philosophy, an ideology, a set of ideas about the relationship between the people and their elected representatives. The root cause of this crisis is a deeply illiberal, authoritarian mindset that thumbs its nose at any notion of accountability or transparency. And the expenses scandal is simply an outgrowth of it.

To solve it we need to tackle it at root and the key motivating principle therefore has to be a determination simply to make it as difficult as possible for the government and its agencies to spend taxpayers’ money. Beyond this, any wider program of constitutional reform should reflect core conservative principles and it is therefore crucial that we build momentum towards a carefully targeted response and shape the debate in accordance with those ideas before any consensus crystallises around a radical reforming agenda. Why? Not because of any tribal loyalty, not blind allegiance to one party over another. This is no narrow party agenda. If truth be known, I carry no brief for any party, but rather for a philosophy; a set of enduring ideas.

Conservative principles have the virtue of being the right set of ideas for this crisis. It is Labour ideas that got us into this mess. Only conservative ideas can get us out of it. We need a set of decentralising measures, mechanisms to shift the balance of power away from the centre and the executive towards parliament and the people. This means renewing and revitalising the legislature. It means an end to the reliance on statutory instruments. It means more time for debate. It means a more robust committee system. It does not mean abolishing the monarchy, abolishing the Upper House or any of the other radical reforming mechanisms trotted out by the beleaguered, bewildered rump of this demoralised and discredited government.

Are the Tories Missing a Trick?

2009-05-28T13:18:00.006+01:00

Grasping for narrow party advantage in the midst of this crisis is considered bad form, as though the depth of it makes the usual rules of politics illegitimate. As though it somehow dwarfs petty calculations of party interest and calls for a more elevated attitude. There is a sense in which this is true. But at the same time, if we are to renew our system we have to understand the roots of this crisis. And this means understanding it not simply as a failure of systems and processes, but of ideology. The truth is this crisis cuts to the very core of Labour’s philosophy. At the root of it is a sense of entitlement that has grown up on the back of years of Labour largesse. And it has spread right across the public sphere.

For 10 years now, a consensus has settled around the proposition that public spending is a good thing. That government knows best. That the political class is a better judge of how to spend taxpayers’ money than taxpayers themselves. Supported by the BBC, at the heart of it is a very simply idea - that taxpayers money is the government's to do with as it pleases. That is a fundamentally un-conservative attitude and the expenses scandal is simply an outgrowth of it. In this atmosphere, the argument for sound money, fiscal conservatism and tax cuts has been almost impossible to make. Space is now opening up for us to flip this dynamic on its head. To change it, though, we need bold strokes. So far it has all been very tentative. The Tories have been afraid to make the argument. Well, no more winks and nods, no more coded references. This crisis is creating the room for the argument to be made much more forcefully.

Space is opening up for us to really move the debate about public spending on, to break through Labour’s stifling consensus, get beyond the sterile debate about ‘Tory cuts!’, and reconfigure the debate around notions of accountability and transparency. The way we cash out these notions of accountability and transparency is to make it as difficult as possible for the government and its agencies to spend public money. Every penny accounted for. No more expenditure forced through on a wink and a nod. This is what is needed now. Right across the public sphere. A new dispensation. Full accountability. Full transparency. Serious people know it. The electorate knows it.

The question is, do the Tories?

Lord Hattersley, the expenses scandal and Labour tax-dodgers....

2009-05-28T08:51:00.003+01:00

Lord Hattersley has been touring the TV studios trying to make the argument that, while this sort of behaviour is expected of Tories, Labour holds to a set of more elevated ideals. His argument didn’t work because he failed to fully separate out two very different issues. On the general point about the abuse of expenses the noble Lord is simply wrong. There is nothing conservative about taxpayer-funded largesse. Playing fast and loose with taxpayers money is a fundamentally un-conservative attitude. And to claim otherwise is nothing more than a grubby attempt to gain pure partisan advantage. I suppose on one level, we ought to forgive him. There is a sense in which he cannot help himself. He is a Labour man to his fingertips. A machine politican from the old school. Hell will freeze over before Hattersley stops trying to get one over on the Tories and so we can let that one go.

Where he does have a point is on the specific issue of tax avoidance. But it is not one that works to his, or Labour's, advantage. One would certainly expect any self-respecting conservative to avoid paying tax wherever possible. Indeed, opposed as they are to the idea of unnecessary taxation as a matter of principle, I would think less of any conservative who failed to minimise their tax bill. Conservatives don’t like paying tax. And to their credit, they have never pretended otherwise. It’s what makes them conservatives.

Labour are the ones we expect to piss taxpayers’ money up the wall. That is why Labour governments are put into power – to spend, spend, spend. Spending other people’s money is what Labour politicians live for. It’s what motivates them to enter politics. It is no coincidence that of the twenty highest expense claimants, sixteen are Labour. It’s what gets them out of bed in the morning. To do it, of course, they compel the rest of us on the pain of imprisonment to pay ever higher rates of taxation. And that is why their grubby, contemptible little attempts to minimise their own tax bills really stick in the craw.

Conservative tax-avoiders at least have the merit of consistency. On the back of this crisis, we can now add rank hypocrisy to the long list of Labour’s faults.

More on the choice at election time....

2009-05-27T17:26:00.005+01:00

Sorry, this is all terribly random at the moment. Once the blog settles down I hope to find a more consistent theme. For now, I just wanted to point out that Labour has never been a liberal party and for me, that is - and always will be - a deal breaker. Egalitarianism isn't a philosophy of freedom. It never has been and it never will be. If you give people freedom, that's when natural inequalities emerge and to stamp them out, you have to close down that space. The space where natural inequalities emerge is anathema to leftists. There is no room for it in their philosophy. Their commitment to equality doesn't allow it. The distinction between the private and the public sphere is the first thing to go under Labour governments and we are seeing it all around us.

Simple put, leftism is a philosophy of unfreedom. The minute the party looks like it is beginning to embrace a philosophy of freedom, the left cuts it off at the knees. That's why true liberals - classical liberals - have never truly felt welcome or at home there. Freedom and leftism have always been uneasy bed fellows in the labour party. And after 11 years, it is clear that leftism, not liberalism is back in charge of the party, with all the implications for personal freedom that entails. If you value personal freedom it is imperative that these illiberal, knee-jerk authoritarians and their ugly philosophy of unfreedom are shown the door at the next election.

The choice at election time........

2009-05-27T16:58:00.003+01:00

Well, it seems to me that you either identify with the traditional values of sound money, personal responsibility, freedom, accountability and transparency - or you side with a load of right-on metropolitan liberals, their insufferable feminist mates and a ragtag bunch of islamo-fascists, unreconstructed trots, disaffected old lefties and other assorted lunatics. The choice is yours. One thing I've noticed recently about the left is how unnatural some of the alliances there are. Take the feminists and the islamists for example. Uneasy bedfellows you'd think, but they seem to rub along quite happily in the new labour party. What does that tell you about new labour's principles?

Exactly. They've got none. All they've done is abandon their traditional working class support in favour of a coalition of the marginalised and the dispossessed, knit them together by vague noises about equality and social justice and a generalised loathing of anything resembling Thatcherism, while systematically looting the productive sector of the economy to pay for their massive client state.

Like all labour governments they've now run out of other people's money and, as the client state begins to unravel and the thousands of non-jobs disappear, we're beginning to see just how black and empty the hole at the heart of labour's economic strategy was. It is a fathomless abyss; cold, dark and impenetrable. And we'll be paying for it for a generation.It seems to me that the defining feature of the new labour landscape is a culture of petty cruelty and vindictiveness, all wrapped up in layers of self-regarding secrecy, lies and spin and topped off with a pervasive sense of entitlement that thumbs its nose at any notion of accountability or transparency. All nurtured by Labour’s largesse. And paid for by us. And I am sick to the back teeth of it.

On Accountability......

2009-05-27T16:52:00.002+01:00

The problem, it seems to me, is that the ordinary, average citizen simply isn't able to hold the executive fully to account. Under the party system, the idea that the legislature is in any position to do it is laughable, so we rely on the media. And in my opinion, the failure of the media class to hold this government to account has been the signature feature of the last decade. This goes beyond party. Without a larger sense of civic responsibility on the part of the media class the system malfunctions. it is as simple as that. We look to the media to fulfil this crucial role and what do we get? who's up, who's down, who's in, who's out.

Most of the dead tree press is completely dysfunctional and the BBC is just an extension of the government's press operation from what I can see. Simply witness Toynbee, Ashley, the egregious Andrew Marr, Robert Peston and others' relentless propagandising on behalf of what, to any objective observer, is an utterly discredited regime and you quickly realize that most of what passes for mainstream editorial and opinion isn’t worth a candle.

We are looking at the most devastating set of economic figures for a century, and yet the stand out feature of most journalism is the utter lack of seriousness on display. A decade of this has left civil society and the wider public realm coarsened and disfigured. The result is a deep and devastating crisis of faith in almost every single one of our public institutions,from the government and the police through to the banks, media and our schools. The crisis is so deep and wide-ranging that I'm not sure how we can recover from it. How we begin rebuilding trust in our institutions after the damage wrought by this government is beyond me, it really is. But it has to start with a renewed sense of civic responsibility. Without a renewed sense of purpose and civic responsibility, I fear for the future of our institutions, civil society and the wider public realm because democracy simply cannot function when cynicism is so entrenched, so endemic and so wide-ranging.

People rightly point to the failures of the party system, but in the absence of any alternative, we have to believe that the Tories can do better. We simply have to. And then, on the back of that belief, hold them to account for every lapse, every failure, every departure from basic standards of civic responsibility, accountability and trust. Without that minimal commitment on the part of every single one of us to renew and then uphold the integrity of the public sphere we are in real trouble.

MPs' Expenses.....

2009-05-27T16:35:00.002+01:00

Yes, I know...... boring. But this is important. Much has been written about the expenses scandal with comment focusing in particular on the failures of the party system. As the scandal moves into its third week, I think it is important to get beyond our sense of betrayal and begin to think constructively and - more importantly - dispassionately about the way forward.

In that vein, the first thing I wanted to put on record is simply that I'm not convinced about the need to break out of the party system. Indeed, I haven't even thought beyond the party system, in part because I'm not sure it is possible to. Parties are a natural outgrowth of democratic politics. Winning coalitions form and then naturally solidify into party structures over time and so there is a sense in which they are a fixed and enduring element of our system.

That is not to say, of course, that the current parties are not horribly dysfunctional and in many ways anachronistic, because they are, not least because they are based on the old class divisions and alignments. And they certainly need to find ways to become more responsive, more attuned to the rhythms and tempo of modern society. But enduring coalitions, which is what parties are, are here to stay. They are an integral part of any majoritarian system. So while I take the point about its failures, I think it is more profitable to think about ways of opening up the party system, rather than attempting to move beyond or otherwise dispense with it and that essentially means finding ways to increase transparency and move towards full accountability.

What exactly 'full accountability' and 'transparency' might mean I will leave for a future post.

Useful Foreign Policy Links

2009-05-01T07:50:00.024+01:00

Think Tanks

Henry Jackson Society
Legatum Institute
Council on Foreign Relations
European Council on Foreign Relations
Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Atlantic Council
International Institute for Strategic Studies
Royal United Services Institute
Chatham House

Publications

Foreign Policy
Foreign Affairs

Foreign Policy Commentators

Stephen M. Walt
Daniel W. Drezner
Thomas E. Ricks
Mark Lynch
Steve Clemons

Government

US Department of State
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
Department for International Development

Miscellaneous

Democracy Arsenal
Foreign Policy Watch
Defence of the Realm
Helmand Blog
Charles Crawford
e-IR
Iraq Inquiry
Help for Heroes
Heresy Corner
The Western Experience
Nourishing Obscurity