Category: Politics

Reaching agreements …

We’ve seen a positive outcome to the climate change talks, and now an agreement at the UN in the Security Council for a peace plan for Syria. It’s not just the agreements themselves but the willingness to argue and discuss and actually reach agreements that I find encouraging. Both are under the auspices of the UN. And both have come about because of the engagement of all parties. China now fully recognises the urgency of measures to combat rising CO2 emissions, so too the US administration, if not the coalheads behind the American far-right in Congress. And Russia is now fully engaged in the Syria peace process, seen by some in the West a few weeks ago as a backward step, but as an interested party committed to the support of the Assad regime, with a naval base at Tartus in Syria, essential if a peace process was to move forward.

One reason for the failure of Obama’s attempted rapprochement with Putin was the fact that it was one-sided. Putin has now established himself, as he’s wanted all along, as an ‘equal’ partner. 2003 the US and UK tried to call the tune, and that can’t be the way forward anymore. We don’t have a democratic Russia, as we all hoped for after the fall of the Soviet regime, but we do have a government with whom we can deal and – possibly -reach agreement at a global level. We can establish areas of vital common interest and work out from there. Likewise with China: combating climate change has potential for being a major area of cooperation between China and the West. We can’t as yet resolve issues surrounding China’s imperial ambitions in the South China Sea, but working together in one area can only improve the prospects of doing so in others.

And there are serious – fundamental- issues of human rights. We have Saudi Arabia as an ‘ally’, and that’s pretty cynical in the scheme of thing. But we have to work from where we are. And what conflict tells us is that the big stick never works. So if we have to work with the likes of Putin, best to get on with it. Pragmatism is the best ally of idealism.

Another lesson – the importance of bodies such as the UN, above all the UN, under whose auspices the nations of the world can come together, and argue, and find common ground. Doing exactly what it was set up to do.

I’d put the European Community in the same category. What’s remarkable is that countries are working together, at a European – and a global level. War shattered Europe st  twice in the 20th century, and European institutions over the last sixty years have  cemented peace in a quite remarkable way. Walking away from the EU would be lunacy. Putting all our energies into reforming it so that it is and is seen to be an institution working for people at all levels is the only way forward.

And that requires strong leadership. Whether it’s Obama and Kerry, Putin and Sergei Lavrov, Hollande and Fabius, who acted as convenor at the the Paris talks – presidents and foreign ministers, the recognition of the interests of each of the parties involved is essential if common ground is to be established and agreements achieved.

This may be stating the obvious – but it’s why were getting agreements now, and we didn’t before.

A paler shade of green

Are we entering the anthropocene, a new, man-created geological epoch? I don’t like the term: there’s an implicit assumption that we’re in charge. Climate change has a very different message for us.

One Labour MP commented on Hilary Benn’s recent speech in the Syria debate, ‘If only a shadow Foreign Secretary would talk about climate change with such passion.’ Unfair, not least because it’s not his brief. But it is an issue that’s inspired some fine rhetoric in Paris this week. Compared to Copenhagen in 2009, the hard truths of climate change are accepted by almost everyone, right-wing US diehards excepted.

The issue is how we deal with them (the hard truths, that is) – by investing more heavily in green forms of energy and/or looking for technological solutions. The earth as a self-regulating system (in James Lovelock’s terms), effectively an organism in its own right, which we disrespect at our peril, or the earth as servant of mankind, mankind ultimately omnicompetent, pushing back frontiers of knowledge and technology, destined to find answers to everything, well, almost everything.

I go with the former, because it keeps us grounded, keeps us in touch with our lives and our world as it is, and doesn’t posit some technology-driven future which could undermine that sense of connection with the Earth (inadvertently but appropriately capitalised!), and ultimately our very humanity.

But I am, that said, all in favour of investing in technological solutions. If India continues to build up its coal-mining capacity, and burn more and more, how might clean coal technologies make a difference? And carbon capture not just from coal. There’s also ongoing research into making clouds more reflective. And much else.

Awareness is everything. Having won the argument over climate change – it is for real, we have to face those who argue that current wind and solar technologies are too inefficient or too expensive, and use that to make a case for reducing or withdrawing funding now.  (The UK government being a case in point.) Their argument in one sentence: put funding, and it could be vast funding, into new technologies, and some will work, and some will not, but trust in technology and we will find an answer.

As a strategy it’s high risk. It’s dangerous to trust in hypothetical futures. There are current strategies which may be inefficient, and still small scale, but they have impact, and will in time – as, for example, solar cells become much more efficient and energy storage is improved – put subsidy behind them, and be fully commercial. We can’t risk losing the momentum we have.

I can’t get into carbon taxes and cap-and-trade here (expertise I haven’t got!), but they are of course another strand of the argument.

In the meantime we rely on imported gas, nuclear (handing over to the French for expertise and the Chinese for finance, high risk, given the importance of energy security), and fracking (also, high risk, this time in terms of local environments). How we strike a balance is not something this blog can address.

There’s a letter in a recent edition of The Times arguing for the potential, in the longer term, for turning CO2 into fuel – ‘artificial hydrocarbon fuels’. (CCU – carbon capture and utilisation.) It’s a process that requires vast amounts of energy, but as the writers say, ‘it is no use burning hydrocarbons to make hydrocarbons’. We’d need to use renewable energy sources, and that, they argue, should include nuclear power, with the ‘ultimate solution’ being to use solar power.

That struck a chord with me, not least because it sums up the dilemmas we face.

UK air strikes in Syria – the vote

Relief at the vote in parliament. 297 to 223 in favour. Mightily impressed by Hilary Benn, making a powerful moral case for intervention. A reminder of Labour’s tradition of internationalism, opposition to fascism, support for human rights.

But…. I’m aware of how hugely divisive this is, and how family, friends and commentators who normally agree are polarised on this issue.

Cameron’s disgraceful comment that his opponents are ‘terrorist sympathisers’ requires an apology that hasn’t been forthcoming.

Likewise the following statement in the literature of the Stop the War Coalition, also totally untrue: ‘In reality, it is not conscience at all that animates pro-war Labour MPs. It is either inveterate support for all British war-mongering, or a desire to destroy the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, or both…’

Leaving aside comments on Corbyn’s leadership, as someone who has thought long and hard on the issues involved, and come down on the side of engagement, it’s in effect an attack on me as well.

Trading insults is massively counter-productive.  It’s a debate where there’s been too much heat. It’s wound me up, as it has many others. We have to be much cooler in our arguments, and listen better to the other side.

Democracy – a bloody miracle

Democracy is a fragile institution. Not, to paraphrase Churchill, the least-worst form of government, but a bloody miracle. Against the tendency humanity has shown throughout history to tear itself apart we have fashioned a form of government which works – where we listen, argue, campaign, vote, and accept that vote. After legislation in the last parliament, for a five year period.

And in practice?  Governments and oppositions have to abide as far as they can by the manifestos on which they’re elected. But MPs also have to make their own judgements. Trust in an individual has to be one of the criterion the electorate use in voting someone into parliament. Ultimately MPs are mandated by the electorate, and not by conferences which may support policies which weren’t in an election manifesto. 

Party loyalty, and especially the three-line whip, is necessary part of the parliamentary process, but there will be issues where MPs take principled positions against party policy (‘conscience’ is a poor term), as Jeremy Corbin often did in the past, and as others would have done had there been a three-line whip in the Syria debate. There’s been much talk recently of the duty of an opposition to oppose,  and the failure to impose a three-line whip in the Syria debate is seen as weakness by some. But when a party is divided, with both sides arguing from principle, a three-line whip serves no purpose. It only exacerbates division. 

Nor am I a fan of referenda which can be influenced by short-term considerations, or media hype. But with the Europe referendum coming up, that’s an issue for another time.

There’s a centre ground of British politics, where parties are broad churches, encompassing right and left wings, representing interest and arguments across the political spectrum. It’s as near as we have to a political duty to make certain the system continues to function and flourish.

History has yet to suggest that there is any better form of government than parliamentary and party democracy, with all the check and balances of tradition (the UK) or a constitution (the USA, above all others) built in. I think it’s one of mankind’s greatest achievements, flawed in its execution, but our first and last best hope.

I want to be arguing in this blog for compassion, aspiration and opportunity. Against the bigotry of some sections of the press, and for a compassionate state. Neither small state or command economy. For a wide and international perspective. Beyond ideology.

But this blog is called zenpolitics – politics, and politics is a rough old game. That said, we have in the UK the finest working democracy in the world. The challenge is to build on that, not to undermine it.

Syria – a just war?

Can I justify supporting military action while writing a ‘zenpolitics’ blog? Can there be such a things as a ‘just war’? When is intervention justified in the affairs of another state? Ultimately the justification has to be humanitarian, and that’s the way I see the situation in Syria. Iraq 2003 was political, with grand ideas of a new world order, and economic, riddled through with self-interest, and with remarkably little thought given to the likely consequences.

Intervention in Syria this time around has to be step by step, where we have a clear end in view but revise our position in the light of circumstances. IS poses an extraordinary threat to lives and values, and requires – demands – an immediate and practical response.

I’m also troubled by my argument that the Assad regime should be included in the alliance against IS. I’m well aware of its brutality. But if the shortest route to ending violence has to involve Assad, and I believe it does, he should be included. The US, Russia, France, the UK, Saudi Arabia, Iran, all working together, bringing together diverse interests but with a common goal, is our best chance.

I’ve argued often that compassion has to come first in all our considerations. How that’s expressed toward the people of Syria, toward people in any war situation, is a mighty challenge. But we cannot sit on the sidelines, we cannot wait for grand strategies to be put in place. And we must avoid cheap accusations of warmongering. We have a war on our hands, not in our backyard, but one with profound implications for all of us. We have to respond.

Syria – Monday 30th November

There’s a vote coming up in the House of Commons on the subject of bombing Syria –  bombing IS, something very different from the vote on bombing Assad’s forces which was lost two year’s ago. (Bombing Assad would have been a disaster, but that’s another subject, for another time.)

What are the arguments? Should we bomb, should we join France, Russia, the USA? Would we making the same mistake as we did in 2003? How valid are comparisons?

The two situations are radically different. IS is a clear and present danger, terrorising, a very literal sense, destroying communities, espousing a brutal ideology, with no spiritual content in the way I’d understand the term. Inaction isn’t a strategy. Bombing cannot win a war, but it can contain, it can limit IS’s expansion beyond its current boundaries, and if sustained break its lines of communication and its oil-based ‘economy’. Removing IS from Raqqa and Mosul is another matter, and will indeed require ground forces, and there is real danger of loss of innocent life and widespread destruction. But concerns over Raqqa and Mosul shouldn’t mean that we don’t act now to restrict IS’s operations, and at the same time break its hold on the imaginations of potential recruits.

Our engagement with the Middle East arguably goes back to the Battle of Lepanto in the 16th century when we first began to turn the tide of Arab and Ottoman dominance. There followed centuries of Ottoman decline and growing British and French interest in the trade and politics of the Levant.  Our Western instinct, that we know better, our instinct to interfere, is deep-rooted. The second Iraq war in 2003, which I strongly opposed, was born of that instinct, and a radical misjudgement. But this isn’t to say that all engagement is wrong, and the situations in Iraq in 2003 and in Syria in 2015 are radically different.

I’m well-aware of the argument that the bombing to date has been ‘ineffective’. Though in what sense? True, IS haven’t been defeated. But how much further might have they have extended their reach had they been (with the exception of the Kurds) unimpeded, without any disruption to their supply lines?

The answer now cannot be to withdraw, or to fail to support allies (and that in itself is a powerful argument) who are very much engaged. I don’t doubt that bombing on a much extended scale, well directed, and with a much broader political support, can be effective.

I don’t buy into the argument, which has been picked up across political spectrum, that we should have a clear end-strategy, and not approve a strategy involving bombing IS without one. What we can guarantee is that whatever that end-strategy might be, it won’t be what happens in the end. We have to proceed  step by step, deal with immediate dangers, and move forward from each new position we achieve. There is common ground at this time between the French, Russians and to a degree the Americans, and we need to take full advantage of this – as of now.

We also need to recognise that Syria in the short and medium term will comprise several different authorities and spheres of influence. Assad will remain in control of Damascus and considerable territory along the Mediterranean, and to the north. The Free Syria Army will have, I would hope, its own sphere of influence, and Kurdish territory will be well-defined. I wouldn’t expect them to fight side-by-side but their action could nonetheless be coordinated if all the various parties involved, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, work toward that end.

We may have a dream of a Western-style democratic Syria, but it’s one we should put out of our minds for now. The aim has to be an end to violence and reestablishing political authority in whatever form proves most viable. Once that’s in place and security is guaranteed refugees can begin to return home. They have to be the first steps.

The aim for ten years time has be a Syria, or a Syrian territory, at peace, and that peace needs to be a guaranteed peace, ideally with UN involvement. The return of refugees will be well underway if not a complete, and the traditions of civilised life which were well-established, along with religious tolerance and educational opportunities, before 2011, will have a chance to reassert themselves again.

A few other policies we might say goodbye to

Time for a brief, and serious, political digression. We’ve just had the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, focusing on the government’s spending plans. There will, to everyone’s surprise, for now be no cuts to tax credits. And this after all those arguments we’ve heard from sections of the press. Tax credits – a disincentive to full-time work if you’re part-time, or to bettering yourself if you’re in a poorly paid job. The implicit assumption that people on any kind of benefit lack aspiration. Pain is good for you.

Are these arguments suddenly no longer valid?

The New York Review of Books has the text of an intriguing conversation between the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, Marilynne Robinson, and President Obama. Robinson has the following in response to Obama asking her whether politically she’s just ‘in the mix like everyone else’.

Well, if I’m going to be honest, I think that there are some political candidacies that are much more humane in their implications and consequences than others. I mean, if suddenly poles were to be reversed and what I see as humanistic came up on the other side, there I’d be.

Basing myself on that ‘humanistic’ principle, I wondered – if the government can abandon one core policy, how about one or two others?

Free schools, for example, much-loved by middle-class parents who worry about poor performance in existing local schools. Much better to incentivise recruitment in existing local schools, so that the good and great teachers schools need can be more readily recruited.

Junior doctors: if the government has lost their support, they’ve also lost the BMA, and much of the rest of the health service. So let’s have a rethink there too.

Social care: councils will now have the ability to levy an extra 2% to support social care, but while useful this is hardly a joined-up policy to allow the much wider provision of care in the community we need to take pressure off hospitals.

Reductions in housing benefit: Osborne’s announced further cuts in the autumn statement. House prices rise, housing benefit is cut. New flats rise above the old streets of Vauxhall. Hard for old communities to survive. And new communities, new identities can take decades to establish.

And another policy which is closely associated with George Osborne:

Infrastructure: scrap HS2 and invest in a nationwide infrastructure, not just a link which will take a decade to reach Birmingham, longer Manchester, and longer still anywhere else. We need transport links which benefit the whole country, and brought in over a much shorter period. What about the North-East, East Anglia, Cornwall… and Scotland, if the Scots hang around for long enough?

And there are of course a few other policies….

Not quite an ideal world

A recent comment suggested I was writing about an ideal world, and that worried me.

The puzzle and challenge for me is the everyday: how we can better link insights into our human condition to our working lives, to our personal and our social lives, to the national agenda. The insights come from Zen and wider Buddhist ideas and practice, but they connect easily with our own Western traditions. Most of us fully appreciate the benefits of finding peace and calm in our lives, though we protest that we’re too busy to slow down. We regret our ill-temper, bouts of anger, self-serving pleasures. If we show kindness and compassion we’re pleased and rather proud of ourselves. We got it right for once.

But we don’t act on what we know, and I’m arguing that it’s not so difficult. Meditating, mindfulness, walking, even standing still, shutting out 24-hour news and 24-hour noise, setting aside space for ourselves – start small, just get out for a walk, it’s no need to be heavy duty. You don’t need to sit in a triple lotus…

(A fridge magnet I saw today ran as follows: ‘Stress is the confusion created when one’s mind overrides the body’s basic desire to choke the living shit out of some asshole who desperately deserves it.’ I love it – and it’s not quite what I’m arguing.)

You may have read about a new series: Ladybird books for adults. Already bestsellers. There’s even one on mindfulness. And one on dating. Mindfulness fits my argument slightly better. But if that’s too trendy, then I still like the basic idea. Start simple. (One date at a time.) Don’t over complicate.

Benefits – I hope they’re evident from what I’ve written elsewhere, if they’re not I’ve failed miserably.

I’m not anticipating a brave new dispensation just around the corner. If for some there’s a sense of a new consciousness, a new wisdom, which could yet change the world, then I thought that forty and more years ago, and it didn’t happen. I’m none too optimistic now about it catching on with readers of the Daily Mail, or indeed the billion plus who make up the Han population of China.

Though who knows, give them time.

For now 82 million members of the Communist Party in China have a lockdown on opinion. And mindfulness and the Daily Mail don’t go too well together, though if you’re into mindfulness and an avid reader of the Mail, then I apologise.

But if we can be simply a little slower to judgement, look a little more widely before we leap, then by small increments we can make the world a better place. And who know we might just have a Great Leap Forward.

 

 

After Paris

France, in President Hollande’s words, is now at war with IS. And that’s the way I think most of us in the UK feel as well.

War challenges us, challenges our humanity.

As I’ve often made clear in this blog, I aspire to time for quiet and reflection, for a life made more simple, where there’s time for close observation on the one hand, and time to rest in the sweep of the days and seasons on the other. It could be open country, or Kew Gardens, where we wandered recently amid cacti and orchids, or music …. in the way Autumn Leaves and its gentle melancholy accompanied me along the Camino.

How to combine a more reflective life with a political engagement, and with all the issues of everyday life, that’s the challenge I set myself.

When I returned from the Camino and read up on all the events of the month I’d been away I was grateful for the fact that nothing untoward had happened. Crises continuing, but nothing like the events of last Friday.

That shattered all calm. Anger and grief, and a desire for retribution, took over. But the enemy is elusive. It will take wisdom and detachment to find solutions. And also understanding other points of view – not the IS standpoint, which is beyond ordinary understanding, but the causes that lie behind their rise and their ability to recruit.

How to avoid giving IS a victory and closing national borders?  Remember – they are already in our midst and terrorists will funds ways of circumventing closed borders. IS has recruited readily among local populations in the UK, France, Belgium and elsewhere, where there’s unemployment, a lack of opportunity, alienation, exacerbated by anti-Islamic sentiment. Integrating those populations into wider society has to be a high priority, and it will be achieved by providing opportunities (no mean challenge, I accept), not by further cutting benefits.

Improved security along the EU’s external border is vital, not least shared databases. But closing that border, separating Europe off from the Arab and wider Islamic world – leaving them to fight their own wars – misses the point that they are our wars too. Populations intermix, resources and manufactures are traded and shared, and given our long involvement exploiting and influencing the region we have a moral responsibility too. More than that – the Arab world is not homogeneous – the difference between the before 2010 relatively mild and secular version of Islam practised in Syria and the Wahhabi variant in Saudi Arabia is vast. Iran despite the ayatollahs has a strong secular and western-focused culture, especially among the younger generations, and in the cities. The enmity between Sunni and Shia, between Saudi Arabia and Iran, is another matter: nonetheless populations have lived adjacent to one another in Syria and Iraq since the seventh century.

But when a central authority is taken out, and ideologues and hotheads find space to operate, chaos and civil war ensues, as happened in the Balkans twenty years ago, post Tito, and in Iraq after 2003. Scrapping both army and police in Iraq was a tragic mistake, so too, and more controversially, imagining that a Western-inspired democratic revolution could transform a region with little tradition of genuine democracy.

The law of unintended consequences worked to brutal effect.

I’m also well aware that under the Damascus and Baghdad caliphates, and in medieval Spain, Islam inspired a remarkable civilization, intellectual and artistic – and tolerant, with Muslims, Jews and Christian living side by side for many centuries.

First and foremost now we have to act decisively to take out IS, with the West and Russia combining, not just in military action, but in a solution which will involve huge compromises but can lead, I believe, to an end to hostilities between Assad’s forces and the original western-backed rebel forces. Sykes and Picot drew the original Syrian border in 1916. The USA, Russia, France, the UK, and others, will have to decide how Syria divides and is governed as part of a post-war settlement. There may be multiple authorities, and that may be all that can be achieved in the short and medium term.

The refugee crisis requires safe havens financially supported by all the countries of Europe within the countries of entry, and plans to facilitate and finance repatriation at the earliest opportunity. Some Syrians may want to stay in Germany, but Syria has been and can be – will be – again a remarkable country. So much of our civilisation and our values, our culture and our morality, comes from that part of the world, and their people could one day rise again to the heights their forebears achieved. That has to be their aim – and our aim.

(I’m adding here a quote from Barrack Obama, which I read after I’d uploaded this blog, and with which I wholeheartedly agree: ‘It is very important that we do not close our hearts and start equating the issue of refugees with terrorism.’)

No-one in the West can easily conjure solutions to the enmity between Iran and Saudi Arabia, Shia and Sunni. But take out IS in Syria and Iraq as a warzone, and destroy that sense of invincibility IS have enjoyed, then potential recruits to other battlegrounds in Yemen, Somalia, Egypt and elsewhere may think twice, and local populations left to live again side by side, as they have for centuries.

Likewise if IS is destroyed, its triumphalism punctured, and its followers in France, Britain and other countries of western Europe realise that violence and martyrdom are a fool’s game, then we can focus again on what we’ve failed to deal with over the last thirty and more years – the growing alienation of many young people in the Muslim communities in our midst.

It’s another area where skill and understanding will be required, and where closed minds and bigotry must be opposed at every turn.

We are all one people.

Down river – a week in politics

‘One log cannot support two bears.’ Sergei Shoigu, Putin’s defence minister, would, according to a one-time Kremlin adviser, have been unwise to challenge Putin for the Russian leadership. Be that as it may, it’s the idea of two bears on one log, and what they might be doing there in the first place, that intrigued me.

As for three bears… but I’m getting off the subject.

Who might we not want to share a log with? Boris Johnson, for one. It would be far too unstable. And he’s my villain of the week, for his crass comments on supporters of a trade ban on produce from the Israeli-occupied West Bank. ‘Corduroy-jacketed, snaggle-toothed, lefty academics,’ were his words. They need no comment from me.

Where else has my attention wandered this week? Let’s try Texas.

I’d also be loathe to share a log with anyone from the American gun lobby.  ‘Campus carry’ is a big issue in Texas, the eighth state to adopt legislation allowing guns to be carried on campus. Arkansas apparently permits ’only faculty’’’ to bear arms’ (Quote from the Economist). To universities, faculty and students, anywhere else in the world, this beggars belief. Encourage gun ownership, feign shock when shootings happen, in schools, on campuses, and elsewhere, and use that as a pretext for further gun-carry laws. There’s something not just crazy but evil at the heart of this.

And where would my log end up? With David Cameron on board it would be pulled to the right by unwelcome currents, and there’s a chance we could end up on the wrong shore – wrong for him, as closet European, and for me as an avowed one. Pronouncements that he has no attatchment to the institutions of Europe, on the one hand, and his averred willingness to fight heart and soul to stay in Europe if he gets the reforms he seeks rest uneasily together: it’s a scary log to ride.

One final thought on riding logs. Compare a long path stretching ahead as many times I encoutered on my recent walk. The wind may buffet, and the rain may drench you, but you know where you’re going. The river, especially the big rivers of Russia and Canada, where bears just might ride logs, can sweep all before them, currents can deceive, and you’ve no choice but to follow. The right wing in both the UK and USA want to claw back upriver, to a destination that isn’t there any more. They’ll still of course be swept downstream, but they won’t end up where they want – or expect – to be.

More on Europe another time. I’ve moored my log for now.