Think of the children

LibertyCat has read the full UNICEF child poverty report and was planning to blog about it.

However, as a taster... Femme-de-R notices that of the 6 dimensions used to measure child poverty, material well-being was measured as 'relative' comparative to conditions in that country (the report acknowledges that this is controversial).

It is for this reason that Grauniad is on debatable ground when it claims that:

Today's findings will be a blow to the government, which has set great store by lifting children out of poverty...

In addition, at least two of the dimensions are entirely subjective (family relationships and subjective well-being). Is 'eating a main meal around the table with parents' a good indicator of family bonds? And are the responses of children to a survey asking them about their well-being an adequate indicator of variations in well-being between countries or reflect something else entirely (e.g. culture norms or media messages)?

Hopefully LibertyCat will blog on this further...

What's Left? How Castro-mourning, McDonald's firebombing loopy lefties lost their way (keep the liberals out of it)

Apologies for the lengthy hiatus in blogging; the author has been passing a PhD viva and moving house.

In my absence, the Grauniad has been making a meal of Nick Cohen's book "What's Left? How Liberals lost their way". The Grauniad might be getting excited about Nick Cohen's latest but I don't see why anyone else should given the inherent problem with the book, so perfectly encapsulated within its title. I'm a liberal and I don't feel I've lost my way at all. I belong to a proud ideological and philosophical tradition that has included such greats as John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith and The Anti-Corn Law League.

Nick Cohen doesn't seem to grasp that the people who have lost their way are a small group of "rebels without a clue" who divide their time between incoherently blathering on Comment is Free and forming a intellectually deficient 'rent-a-mob' on yet another march nominally about poverty/climate change/war/top-up fees but in fact about Palestine/ Pacificism/ Palestine / Bush/ Palestine / McDonalds /Palestine / The BNP... /Palestine... It is debatable whether this particular group had a way to lose in the first place.

The Grauniad includes an excerpt from the book which highlights the extraordinary narrowness of its political perspective. It really ignores the diversity and complexity of the contemporary political landscape. I commend Nick Cohen for belatedly realising the things that many political operators have realised all along:

I still remember the sense of dislocation I felt at 13 when my English teacher told me he voted Conservative... I must have understood at some level that real Conservatives lived in Britain - there was a Conservative government at the time.... But it was incredible to learn that my teacher was one of them, when he gave every appearance of being a thoughtful and kind man. To be good you had to be on the left.

Yet for all the loathing of Conservatives I felt, I didn't have to look at modern history to know that it was a fallacy to believe in the superior virtue of the left: my family told me that... He [my father] knew how bad the left could get, but this knowledge did not stop him from remaining very left-wing. He would never have entertained the notion that communism was as bad as fascism. In this, he was typical. Anti-communism was never accepted as the moral equivalent of anti-fascism, not only by my parents but also by the overwhelming majority of liberal-minded people. The left was still morally superior. Even when millions were murdered and tens of millions were enslaved and humiliated, the 'root cause' of crimes beyond the human imagination was the perversion of noble socialist ideals... Every now and again, someone asks why the double standard persists to this day.

In the above paragraph, Nick Cohen finally realises that the left does not have an inherent monopoly on goodness and feels the need to labour this entirely self-evident point. Well, self-evident to a 'liberal' anyway, although not self-evident to 'rent-a-mob'. Many people in politics (and in other spheres such as business) are there because they want to improve society. Political distinctions come from differing belief systems - people clash over what constitutes an improvement and how to achieve it.

I assumed that once the war was over they would back Iraqis trying to build a democracy, while continuing to pursue Bush and Blair to their graves for what they had done. I waited for a majority of the liberal left to off er qualified support for a new Iraq, and I kept on waiting, because it never happened

Possibly because there is no 'new Iraq'. I opposed the war because I saw the lack of commitment that Bush was showing to improving things in Afghanistan (rather than sending more troops there and concentrating funding on infrastructure) and reasoned (correctly) that they would barge into Iraq, blow it to bits and then... erm... erm... If the Bush administration were reading the book "How to organise a p**s-up in a brewery" they'd have been stumped before they got to the contents page.

However, it soon becomes obvious that Nick Cohen isn't aiming his tirade at me. He's not attacking people who were against the war for reasons other than being, erm, someone who wears Che Guevara t-shirts and thinks Fidel Castro is a top bloke (because Cuban healthcare is so good):

Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal left is against come from the liberal left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don?

So we're not talking about the 'liberal-left'. No, we're talking about Marxist academics who used to write long turgid articles interpreting obscure bits of Das Kapital and now write long, jargon-filled opinion pieces about postmodernism (have you ever written an essay about postmodernism? I sympathise with your pain).

Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal left, but not China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, the Congo or North Korea?

Search me, Mr Cohen. Nothing to do with me, guv. Although I would switch China for somewhere like Belarus.

Further down the page, Nick Cohen continues broad brushing the entirety of two major philosophical traditions into the dustpan occupied by an unholy alliance of the SWP, The Grauniad and Marxist theorists:

liberals and leftists are far more likely than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements, with the exception of their native far-right parties.

On average, maybe, but is an unquantifiable 'on average' enough to write a book about? Are we talking about a politically relevant and influential group? Or are we talking about the sort of people who express solidarity with the working class by eschewing soap and are interested in international development because assisting the British poor might mean they had to deal with pensioners and people wearing Burberry?

Nick Cohen answers this question. It's the latter:

Socialism, which provided the definition of what it meant to be on the left from the 1880s to the 1980s, is gone.

Not socialism, Mr Cohen, communism. Social democracy remains an entirely useable proposition for government.

Disgraced by the communists' atrocities and floored by the success of market-based economies, it no longer exists as a coherent programme for government. Even the modest and humane social democratic systems of Europe are under strain and look dreadfully vulnerable. It is not novel to say that socialism is dead. My argument is that its failure has brought a dark liberation to people who consider themselves to be on the liberal left. It has freed them to go along with any movement however far to the right it may be, as long as it is against the status quo in general and, specifically, America. I hate to repeat the overused quote that 'when a man stops believing in God he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes anything', but there is no escaping it. Because it is very hard to imagine a radical
leftwing alternative, or even mildly radical alternative, intellectuals in particular are ready to excuse the movements of the far right as long as they are anti-Western.

So the crux of Nick Cohen's book is that communists are having problems finding something to believe in now the argument that Stalin, Mao, etc. resulted from the misimplementation of Marx's ideas has got a bit stale. Instead of supporting a really bad idea promoted by secular authoritarian genocidal maniacs, communists have started supporting a really bad idea promoted by religious authoritarian genocidal maniacs instead. Nick Cohen is wrong - communists are not believing in 'anything', they're believing in a different flavour of exactly the same thing. This is a dog bites man story... No fundamental change there.

Get those proles out of my shopping street

Apparently the mayor of Paris is upset that the Champs-Elysees is turning into something downmarket like Oxford Street, and that he has taken steps to stop this happening by keeping shops like H&M out. On the other hand, the fool is even more upset that French citizens are no longer using the Champs-Elysees and it is being taken over by tourists. So he is desperately trying to keep cinemas open in a piece of real estate that cinemas can't afford.

Nobody has to worry about Londoners deserting Oxford Street. Oxford Street is full of shops like H&M and TopShop that Londoners can afford to shop at. But shops that ordinary Parisians can afford to shop at are too declasse for a man like Bertrand Delanoe, the thouroughly upscale mayor of the city so upscale that even the dustmen look down on you with a supercilious sneer.

There is a reason why the businesses able to pay the highest rents for the prime sites on the Champs-Elysees (or Oxford Street) are chains that ordinary people shop at. That is because the middle class collectively have far more money than the kind of people who shop at Louis Vuitton, because there are not very many people who can afford to shop at Louis Vuitton. Shopping streets that real people can shop on are a crucial part of a great, living city. Paris should embrace them.

If Parisians can't afford to shop on Paris's main shopping street and just walk along it to gawk at the designer stores on their way to the cinema, they aren't really doing anything that a tourist couldn't.

Of course, if Bertrand Delanoe wants Paris to be a museum to the French "art of living" rather than somewhere French people live, then he is right to throw the middle class off the Champs Elysees. But then why is he sneering at the tourists?

What's in a name...

Article in the Grauniad about 'women keeping their name after marriage'. I remarked upon this yesterday when addressing a thank you letter to my aunt as Mrs [husband's initial] [husband's surname]. Since when did she become 'Ramon' anyway, poor soul?

This is as much generational as being ' statement about who you are and how you regard yourself within a marriage'. I have a seriously dubious surname and my mother took on more than a guy when she married. She would have loved to register me on my birth certificate with her maiden name. But in those days (sometime during the Late Jurassic) this would have looked bad both for her AND my dad, suggesting that I was a b*****d in the literal sense. I would have had as many problems from my perceived illegitimacy as my surname. So addressing to 'Mr and Mrs Smith' is as much about traditional morality norms as it is about Mrs Moorhead being chained to a sink, since these norms applied to both genders.

One issue she doesn't mention is the 'Miss' and 'Mrs' issue, which I've always regarded as more of a biggie than the whole naming thing. I've always hated being 'Miss' since it suggests I either have a short skirt and bunches or I'm a 70-year old spinster with all related connotations. At senior school, I made the decision to call myself 'Ms' after a female history teacher. She started using 'Ms' after a somewhat messy divorce and loathed men as a result. I still remember studying the execution of Anne Boleyn and her remarking 'typical man'. I've been a 'Ms' (or a 'mess' as my mum mispronounces it) ever since.

But after passing my doctorate, I'm completely 'degendered'. A nice side-effect of doing a PhD. I'm doctor 'X' - the perfect synthesis of sounding like an expert and having no apparent gender. I associate myself by nomensclature with such greats as Dr No and Dr Evil. The only problem is that people now think I know how to treat pustulescent boils or contagious illness. Or when a group of well-oiled guys decided to sit around me on the train back from my PhD viva:

'So where have you been then? Shopping?'

'No, I've been attending my PhD viva'

'What's that then?'

'I've done my doctorate. It means I've learnt something original about a subject for several years and then wrote about it'

'So what can you do with that now then?'

'Well, I can become a university lecturer and I get to call myself 'doctor''

'Oh, you're a doctor. My friend needs a doctor to examine him. I think he's an alcoholic'

'I'd love to help, but only if you buried him in snow first'

More Guardian stupidity

Martin Jacques, a "senior visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore" or, to put it into English, a paid shill for not-a-hereditary-dictator-but-looks-and-quacks-like-one Lee Kwan Yew, has a column in today's Grauniad that demonstrates such an extraordinary degree of self-loathing that charity forces me to assume that he doesn't really believe it.

Europe's contempt for other cultures can't be sustained: A continent that inflicted colonial brutality all over the globe for 200 years has little claim to the superiority of its values.

What we were doing 200 years ago has no relevance to the moral value of what we are doing now. Heck, none of the people now making European policy were alive 200 years ago. In case you haven't noticed, Europe has changed its core values quite dramatically over the last 60 years.

Is the argument over the Danish cartoons really reducible to a matter of free speech? Even if we believe that free speech is a fundamental value, that does not give us carte blanche to say what we like in any context, regardless of consequence or effect. Respect for others, especially in an increasingly interdependent world, is a value of at least equal importance.

If free speech is a fundamental value, then speech is free. That is what "free speech" means, moron. The argument over the Danish cartoons became a matter of free speech when the other side decided to take their anger out on the Danish government for allowing the cartoons to be printed, rather than Jyllands-Posten for printing them. And I won't adopt "respect" as a value until you tell me what it means - after being dragged through the mud by the George Galloway Treason Party and the Jail All Teenagers Party the term has become somewhat debased.

Europe has never had to worry too much about context or effect because for around 200 years it dominated and colonised most of the world. Such was Europe's omnipotence that it never needed to take into account the sensibilities, beliefs and attitudes of those that it colonised, however sacred and sensitive they might have been.

On the contrary, the fact that Europe had large numbers of people on the ground actually governing these countries made it absolutely necessary to take such things into account. Where Europeans did not, the results were pretty unpleasant - see for instance the 1857 Indian Mutiny, provoked by a lack of respect for the dietary taboos of the local religions. There is a monument outside my school with the names of old boys who lost their lives as a result of that screw-up. Damned right we learned the lesson. If we had followed the US model of foreign aggression and dropped bombs from the safety of 30,000 feet we might not have done - the Americans certainly haven't (see Iraq).

On the contrary, European countries imposed their rulers, religion, beliefs, language, racial hierarchy and customs on those to whom they were entirely alien. There is a profound hypocrisy - and deep historical ignorance - when Europeans complain about the problems posed by the ethnic and religious minorities in their midst, for that is exactly what European colonial rule meant for peoples around the world.

This is an example of the tu quoque fallacy. Whether European imperialists undermined African and Asian cultures is irrelevant to the question of whether immigration is undermining European culture. 21st century European culture and the heritage of freedom which underlies it is worth defending, and if Hamza the Hook is a threat to it then we should deal with him, regardless of what happened in Cawnpore in the 19th century.

With one crucial difference, of course: the white minorities ruled the roost, whereas Europe's new ethnic minorities are marginalised, excluded and castigated, as recent events have shown.

Which recent events? I seem to remember the people we castigated were the ones holding placards saying "Death to those who insult Islam" and other rather unpleasant things. Part of living in a free society is that people who want to mock your religion can, whether you are marginal or not. While a right-wing paper with a largely Christian conservative readership like Jyllands-Posten does not print cartoons mocking Christianity, there is no shortage of them out there.

If Martin Jacques wanted to talk about the more general problem that European societies have with integrating recent immigrants, he would at least be right. But "poor, and occasionally beaten up by a small number of nutters on the lunatic fringe who then get sent to jail for a long time" doesn't quite have the ring of "marginalised, excluded and castigated".

But it is no longer possible for Europe to ignore the sensibilities of peoples with very different values, cultures and religions. First, western Europe now has sizeable minorities whose origins are very different from the host population and who are connected with their former homelands in diverse ways. If European societies want to live in some kind of domestic peace and harmony - rather than in a state of Balkanisation and repression - then they must find ways of integrating these minorities on rather more equal terms than, for the most part, they have so far achieved.

Looking at the society that has been most successful in integrating immigrants, the United States, it seems that this will involve selling them on our founding values of freedom, tolerance, and respect for the rule of law. To do so we will have to be more, not less, willing to boast about things like free speech.

That must mean, among other things, respect for their values.

Respect for the values of cartoon-banners and embassy-burners is incompatible with upholding our own values. We've been here with Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Quakers and diverse other supersitions already: what works is mutual respect for the shared values of a liberal society, not forced respect for the Flying Spaghetti Monster or other equally silly beliefs that various other people may choose to hold.

Second, it is patently clear that, globally speaking, Europe matters far less than it used to - and in the future will count for less and less.

Only if we want it to. I support the European Union precisely because I believe Europe can and should matter more. I believe that a world in which Europe matters more is a better world precisely becaue the founding values of the European Union are good, whereas the founding values of Bush's America, Red China, and Wahabbi Islam are evil.

We must not only learn to share our homelands with people from very different roots, we must also learn to share the world with diverse peoples in a very different kind of way from what has been the European practice.

And one of the best ways to share the world peacefully is for more nations to adopt the values of 21st century Europe, which have done a surprisingly good job of stopping stupid and pointless wars among a group of nations who used to invade each other every 25 years. If "what has been the European practice" is code for aggressive war and imperialism, then that is no longer the European practice. It is, on the other hand, the American and Red Chinese practice.

Europe has little experience of this, and what experience it has is mainly confined to less than half a century. Old attitudes of superiority and disdain - dressed up in terms of free speech, progress or whatever - are still very powerful.

Sometimes free speech is just about freedom. Actually, all the time free speech is just about freedom. I belong to a political tradition that was against imperialism and in favour of free speech (for much the same reasons as 21st century Europe) back in the 1860's. Don't tell me that my support for free speech is about superiority and disdain, because it isn't. Of course, being a paid shill for the Republic of Singapore, you aren't allowed to know what free speech is.

On the contrary, racial bigotry is on the rise, even in countries that have previously been regarded as tolerant. The Danish government depends for its rule on a racist, far-right party that gained 13% of the seats in the last election.

And this type of far-right party is gaining support precisely because far too few people on the left (or, for that matter, the sane right) are prepared to defend European values against cartoon-banners and embassy-burners. Telling people that their white skin and European heritage makes them morally inferior to the wonderfully anti-imperialist scumbags (read the placards) who are driving the outrage over these cartoons is precisely the way to get them to vote nutter.

The decision of Jyllands-Posten to publish the cartoons - and papers in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere to reprint them - lay not so much in the tradition of free speech but in European contempt for other cultures and religions: it was a deliberate, calculated insult to the beliefs of others, in this case Muslims.

We've been here before. The decision of Jyllands-Posten to comission the cartoons was a response to a specific incident in Denmark, and the decision to republish them (including in a number of lefty papers which have no time for random racism and xenophobia) was a response to an unprecedented global attack on free speech.

This kind of mentality - combining Eurocentrism, old colonial attitudes of supremacism, racism, provincialism and sheer ignorance - will serve our continent ill in the future.

Which kind of mentality? Defence of free speech will not serve us ill in the future, or indeed the present.

Europe must learn to live in and with the world, not to dominate it, nor to assume it is superior or more virtuous.

But where we are more virtuous, we shouldn't be afraid to say so. Democracy and freedom need defending, and are worth defending.

Any continent that has inflicted such brutality on the world over a period of 200 years has not too much to be proud of,

What have the Romans ever done for us? Apart from democracy, modern science, modern medicine, market economics, Shakespeare and international human rights law, I fully agree that Europe has not much to be proud of from history. We can, however, be proud of what we are doing now: we have built a community of 450 million people living together in peace, freedom and prosperity under the rule of law, many of whom had no experience of these things until their countries began the EU accession process.

and much to be modest and humble about

Europe also gave the world facism, communism, and imperialism. Apart from the "People's" "Republic" of China which practices all three from time to time (and which Martin Jacques and his paymasters are awfully sympathetic to), these things have all but vanished. Mostly because of the work Europeans did in getting rid of them.

though this is rarely the way our history is presented in Britain, let alone elsewhere.

Well, British history as taught in schools is entirely about Hitler and the brave British soldiers (not forgetting the women who built the bombs) who defeated him. I don't know whether that counts as presenting "Europe" as good or evil.

It is worth remembering that while parts of Europe have had free speech (and democracy) for many decades, its colonies were granted neither. But when it comes to our "noble values", our colonial record is always written out of the script.

And if I wasn't already aware of this, the fact that you can't turn around nowadays without someone like Martin Jacques or Robert Mugabe lecturing you about the evils of European imperialism would make sure I was. The noble values of the Enlightenment are still noble even if the Europe of the 19th and early 20th century honoured them more in the breach than the observance. They won't be honoured at all going forward if Jacques (and Mugabe, and indeed Lee Kwan Yew) are successful in blaming the dishonourable acts of imperialism on them.

This attitude of disdain, of assumed superiority, will be increasingly difficult to sustain. We are moving into a world in which the west will no longer be able to call the tune as it once did. China and India will become major global players alongside the US, the EU and Japan. For the first time in modern history the west will no longer be overwhelmingly dominant. By the end of this century Europe is likely to pale into insignificance alongside China and India. In such a world, Europe will be forced to observe and respect the sensibilities of others.

India is developing an information-age economy precisely because it has adopted the (originally European, now universal) values of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. If India was still a society that took sacred cows seriously enough to demand that we respect them, it wouldn't be a threat. China is an economy based on sweatshops building Barbie dolls - they bought Rover for its "advanced technology" even though it was fifteen years behind the best Western car companies. Even if they do become a major world power, there is no need to respect their values any more than we respected Soviet communism (and we shouldn't).

Few in Europe understand or recognise these trends. A small example is the bitter resistance displayed on the continent to the proposed takeover of Arcelor by Mittal Steel: at root the opposition is based on thinly disguised racism.

Or, more obviously, a general distaste for foreign ownership of "strategic" industries. The Chinese don't let foreign companies own steelworks in China either. The German government tried to stop Vodafone buying Manessman - was that motivated by thinly disguised contempt for beef-eating and discussing the weather?

But Europe had better get used to such a phenomenon: takeovers by Indian and Chinese firms are going to become as common as American ones.

Both are and will be welcomed by liberals and opposed by nationalists and socialists. The race of the acquirer doesn't come into it. We occasionally need to watch out for Chinese companies which are front organisatiosn for a communist dictatorship, of course. But the people opposing the Mittal-Arcelor deal don't like the Americans either.

A profound parochialism grips our continent

And the other five (Antarctica is an exception). Europe, with its tradition of intellectual and economic freedom, is more open to foreign ideas than the Chinese or Islamic cultures which Jacques is so fond of. That people have a deeper understanding of and sympathy for their own culture than for others is part of the human condition.

When Europe called the global tune it did not matter, because what happened in Europe translated itself into a global trend and a global power. No more: now it is simply provincialism.

I don't actually see this provincialism. Europe at both the community level and its individual member states puts huge amounts of effort into engaging with other cultures. Quite often, we learn enough to know that the culture in question is barbaric and does not deserve our respect. Subjugating women, persecuting gays, and parading through the streets with placards saying "Freedom Go to Hell" are all bad signs on this front.

When Europe dominated, there were no or few feedback loops. Or, to put it another way, there were few, if any, consequences for its behaviour towards the non-western world: relations were simply too unequal. Now - and increasingly in the future - it will be very different. And the subject of these feedback loops, or consequences, will concern not just present but also past behaviour.

Something that we are well aware of, which is why Europe does not, as a whole, support stupid and pointless wars of aggression in the way that the United States does. Since we can't change our past behaviour, there is no point in agonising about it.

For 200 years the dominant powers have also been the colonial powers: the European countries, the US and Japan. They have never been required to pay their dues for what they did to those whom they possessed and treated with contempt. Europeans have treated this chapter in their history by choosing to forget.

Actually, we saw the consequences of imperialism quite plainly - imperial rivalry was one of the main things that led Europe into a disasterous century of blood-letting and nuclear terror from which we are only just emerging. We treated this chapter in our history by building a set of institutions which ensure that it will never happen again, of which the European Union is the most successful.

So has Japan, except that in its case its neighbours have not only refused to forget but are also increasingly powerful. As a consequence, Japan's present and future is constantly stalked by its history. This future could also lie in wait for Europe.

What future? Civilised countries such as South Korea respond to Koizumi's war-criminal-worshipping shrine-tomfoolery with mild tut-tutting, because it isn't in their interest to upset the system of peace and free trade that binds all civilised countries. Uncivilised countries like China and North Korea respond with abusive tut-tutting because that is all they are capable of. Neither is a threat to Europe, as long as we remain confident of our own values.

We might think the opium wars are "simply history"; the Chinese (rightly) do not. We might think the Bengal famine belongs in the last century, but Indians do not.

Well, "history" seems to be the obvious term for something that happened 150 years ago between two societies both of which have reformed themselves to the point where the ruling classes that fought the original war (on both sides) no longer exist. If China becomes a civilised society, then it will be about as relevant to Sino-European relations as the Napoleonic wars are to modern Anglo-French relations - i.e. something trotted out for PR purposes when we go through a spat, but no bar to friendship if friendship is in the interest of both sides (as it usually is). If China remains a dictatorship, then the opium war will be used to drum up nationalist fervour when the dictator is unpopular at home. They don't need something that actually happened to do that, lies would work just as well (see the depictions of Jews in any Arab state-owned newspaper).

The Bengal famine is an even better example. It belongs to ancient history precisely because India is now a civilised society. Based on both British and traditional Indian precedents, they have built a set of institutions fully capable of ensuring that nothing like the Bengal famine will ever happen again. (See Amartya Sen's work on famine and democracy for the details.) The computer programmers of Bangalore are unlikely to want to emphasise a past where this was not the case.

Europe is moving into a very different world. How will it react? If something like the attitude of the Danes prevails - a combination of defensiveness, fear, provincialism and arrogance - then one must fear for Europe's ability to learn to live in this new world. There is another way, but the signs are none too hopeful.

Well, actually I can think of two other ways. There is the way Jacques advocates - Europe can sink into a funk of self-hatred, accept its deserved irrelevance, and allow Bush, Bin Laden and Beijing to determine the future of humanity. The right way is to continue with the European project of the second half of the twentieth century.

The values Europe now stands for are universal values. The Muslim population of Turkey are banging on the EU door because they have chosen to adopt freedom, democracy and the rule of law in preference to Shariah, sexism and homophobia. The Chinese students gunned down at Tienamenn Square were part of a tradition that began in Athens and runs via Runymede in 1215, Paris in 1789, and Berlin in 1989. We should defend our values at home, and use our considerable soft power to spread them abroad. The fact that we did the wrong thing in the past is all the more reason to do the right thing now, not a reason to do nothing.

Liberals know this in our bones. The self-interested opposition of the dictators, theocrats and mass murderers of the world make achieving our aims hard enough. The opposition of our own right-wing clowns who think that the West is about whiteness and Christianity, and that brown people and Muslims don't deserve freedom, makes life harder. The misguided opposition of left-wing clowns like Jacques who think that the West shouldn't dare defend freedom out of respect for the cultures which the dictators, theocrats and mass murderers claim to speak for is inexcusable.

If I didn't believe in free speech, Martin Jacques would have been blogged as "Traitor of the Week". Fortunately for both of us, part of living in a civilised society is that the only sanction for sounding off like an idiot is public ridicule. That is why the West should stand up for itself.

Those cartoons - redux

I have so far avoided blogging on the notorious Mohammed cartoons, largely because I haven't been blogging at all for the last week or so. To create some pretence of topicality, I thought I would respond to this uncommonly stupid Guardian column by Jonathan Steele.

It is not often that the left agrees with Tony Blair, let alone George Bush. But the good sense the two leaders have shown in the Danish cartoons affair by siding with leftwing and liberal critics of the offensive drawings' publication is one of the more remarkable aspects of the drama.

Hm. The left agrees with Tony Blair most of the time, actually. He is a Prime Minister leading a centre-left government, whose MP's (who are presumably on the left) regularly vote through his legislation. But the more serious error in Steele's opening sentence is the use of the term "liberal". Liberals believe that free speech is absolute. Being a Liberal Democrat activist, I know quite a lot of liberals. None of them share Blair's view that publishing the cartoons was wrong, in either a legal or a moral sense. (Most of us think that it was stupid or rude, neither of which is grounds for outrage.)

Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, which first printed the unfunny cartoons, says he wanted to break away from Denmark's "self-censorship" in the face of Islam.

No scare quotes needed. The comissioning of the cartoons was provoked by a specific incident of self-censorship - namely that nobody in Denmark was prepared to be named as illustrator of a book about Mohammed because of the risk of violence.

Other European papers that followed suit boasted of courage.

Accurately - we are dealing with people who have burned down embassies in response to these cartoons.

The fact is that on the cartoon issue the great neocon and his ideological advisers were pragmatic and smart enough to see that the drawings were in poor taste, deliberately provocative and grotesquely inaccurate in suggesting that every Muslim is a murderous would-be martyr and, worse still, that the Qur'an advocates suicide bombing.

Neither taste nor theology are appropriate topics for government officials to comment on in their official capacity. Whether or not the Qur'an advocates suicide bombing is a question that is hotly contested both by Muslims and non-Muslims. Steele is entitled to his opinion (although if, as I suspect, he has not read the Qur'an, I don't see why anyone should care what it is) and is free to discuss it in a Guardian column. The British government should not take a position on what is or is not correct Islamic doctrine, and British politicians should not pontificate about the issue (unless they are imams in their spare time).

Bush's reaction shows that Americans have a better understanding of multiculturalism than most Europeans

Yes, quite. And there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. America is a country whose first response to the September 11th attacks was to declare a "crusade".

E pluribus unum - "unity from many" - as their motto puts it.

Actually, the official motto of the United States is "In God We Trust". "Unity in Diversity" is the motto of the European Union. "E Pluribus Unum" referred to the Union of several States, all of which were run by property-owning white Christian males. When the possibility arose that it might be interpreted to include blacks and women, the Americans carefully changed it.

In Britain we are further back. If there is a tolerance spectrum, with resistance to diversity at one end, acceptance of it in the middle and celebration of it at the other end, Britain lies somewhere near the middle.

Which is as it should be. There are good reasons for not celebrating the fact that some people in the UK believe that women and gays are second-class citizens.

(Some evil right-wing Danish official said) "We have gone to war against the multicultural ideology that says that everything is equally valid."

While this blog disapproves of wars against drugs, terror, multicultural ideology, or anything else that is not an army, the Danes have a point. Water is still wet no matter how strongly the Fuq-Whit tribe of Bongo Bongo Land believe that it is dry. Mass murder is bad, and democracy, free markets and the rule of law are good. We should be prepared to say that these views are more valid than the opposite, whatever culture people belong to.

When the demonstrations started and other papers in Europe printed the cartoons in "solidarity" with Jyllands-Posten, they compounded the initial anti-Muslim error by trying to stir up a continental clash of civilisations

Just to think, I thought that being gratuitously controversial was about selling more papers. Apparently it is part of some grand neocon conspiracy to provoke World War III.

But why should a progressive paper in Britain feel "solidarity" with anti-immigrant Danish editors who made a major error of judgment rather than with British Muslims who universally deplored the cartoons?

Because they are both newspaper editors who feel harried by people taking offense at what they publish? I certainly find it hard to believe that a newspaper editor, progressive or not, could feel solidarity with people who support new laws restricting newspaper editors.

(Snip the obligatory couple of paragraphs condemning embassy-burning)

Even the Saudis only reacted after Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish prime Minister, refused to receive a protest delegation of Danish Islamic leaders and ambassadors from Muslim countries. The Danish government's insensitivity and rudeness were almost as offensive as the cartoons.

Why and earth should the Danish prime minister get into discussions about what a privately-owned newspaper publishes. There is absolutely nothing the Danish prime minister can or should do about rudeness in the papers - that is what having a free press means. If he had met the ambassadors and said "Sorry - it's a free country. Nothing I can do. Please go away" then they would have been just as offended, but the Prime Minister's valuable time would have been wasted.

Several days after the dispute erupted, Bush rang Rasmussen to express support. But he was careful to say he was acting "in light of the violence against Danish and other diplomatic missions", not in solidarity with the phoney free-speech issue.

The free speech issue isn't phoney. If you don't have the right to offend anyone, you don't have free speech. Although given Bush's attitude to speech he finds offensive, I'm not surprised that he got this one wrong.

Muslims are not only an important part of Europe's new diversity. They are diverse among themselves. To suggest that, because almost all of Europe's Muslims felt offended by the cartoons, they all support slogans calling for revenge and beheadings is as inaccurate as it is for people in Muslim countries to claim that every European approved the cartoons' publication. There are liberals, conservatives, modernisers and traditionalists in all communities, just as there are those who know the bounds of good taste and bigots who do not.

Steele is able to state the obvious. Nevertheless, he still manages to mislead. While very few European Muslims support supressing free speech by burning embassies, an awful lot of them do support supressing free speech by passing laws. There is a real and important divide between those who support free speech and those who don't. I stand with Jyllands-Posten on one side of it. Steele, Blair, and the Muslim Council of Britain stand on the other side. With the embassy-burners

Go away Polly: Response to comments

My post on Polly Toynbee's Guardian column has attracted an interesting comment from Paul Leake which I thought deserved a response on the main site.

People who aren't members are entitled to a view, and those who as members are entitled to more than a view (ie. a vote) would do well to consider opinion outside the party, even if ultimately rejecting it - at least if you want the Lib Dems to be successful. Of course you can still disagree with her conclusions :)

Non-member supporters are entitled to a view, as are potential supporters. The members would do well to take their views seriously when we cast our votes. Analysts and commentators are entitled to offer advice, although as voting members we should take the advice of people who don't share our values with a pinch of salt. Supporters of other parties can (and should) take views on what the possible result of the leadership election means for them, something that should be only marginally relevant to us.

That isn't what Toynbee is doing. Her thesis is that a Hughes victory is a good thing for left-wing Labour supporters such as herself because a Hughes-led Lib Dem party will put pressure on Labour from the economic left and force Brown to move further left than he otherwise would when he becomes leader. But she phrases the article as advice to Liberal Democrats. Our political aims are not the same as those of left-wing Brownites (if they were, we would be left-wing Brownites and not Liberal Democrats) and we should not be choosing our leader with the interests of left-wing Brownites in mind.

Since her advice is based on the assumption that we want something which we don't, we should know better than to follow it. She should know better than to offer it too. An article about how a Hughes leadership victory would be a boost for the Brownite left of the Labour party is a useful contribution to the political debate in the UK, but to phrase it as advice to Liberal Democrat members is just rude.

Go away Polly, the leadership contest is members only.

A friend just pointed out this column by former Owenite, now Brownite, and general witch Polly Toynbee. Like most of the Guardian's columnists, Toynbee begins by assuming that the real story is entirely internal to the Labour party, and devotes more than half her space to discussing that. In the middle third of the column, she does deign to talk about the Liberal Democrats. Her advice is more than usually asinine.

This is now the question Lib Dem would-be leaders must answer. It may maximise their vote to dance about saying "neither right nor left", but what is the point of merely existing in nothingness? Labour die-hards call them no more than a franchise - a painfully accurate accusation. Collect up their literature and they face quite different ways according to their local opponent.

We don't dance about anything. "Neither right nor left" is not a piece of tactical postitioning, it is an indictment of the state of British politics. With both Thatcherism and Footism discredited, everyone sane agrees about the big economic issues. The big issues of 2006 are questions about national identity, the management of public services, and how to deal with what used to be called noisy neighbours and is now apparently "anti-social behaviour". On all these issues, the division is between right (i.e. Liberal) and wrong. And yet morons like Toynbee still insist on talking about right and left - no wonder the electorate get turned off.

But times have changed since the SDP. Where once there was a great savannah of available political space, now the air is too thin to breathe between New Labour and Cameron Tories. Both parties have stolen Lib Dem land: all now preach the new localism.

We don't have to be between New Labour and Cameron's Tories. We are liberal, they are illiberal. The Liberal Democrats don't just preach the new localism, we actually do it - try googling for "most improved Council". While the other parties (more specifically, the Monster Raving Loony Party) may have stolen David Owen's political turf, they is still plenty of space for a principled Liberal party.

But there is a need for a party more radical than Labour, a party that says no to war and no to wasting billions on new nuclear weapons or nuclear reactors, that dares to talk of the greed of the rich, of boardroom kleptocracy and the duty of top earners to shoulder a fairer share. Already the Lib Dems alone own civil liberties, and they are the pluralists who would rebuild council and Commons chambers in horseshoe shape under proportional representation, offering the one crucial "choice" that Labour and Tories refuse - the choice to vote for any party in a fair election.

Quite right too. Didn't you just say that we danced with nothingness, and were a franchise and not a party? The issues you just mentioned aren't perpheral. Civil liberties matter - right now people all over the world are being arrested, tortured, and shot for writing columns like yours.

They will never win; that's not their function.

Our function is what we say it is, not what a Labour-supporting Guardian columnist says it is. We say our function is to form a Liberal Democrat government, with Liberal policies and Chris Huhne as a Liberal Prime Minister. You want to see a Labour government, with socialist policies. So we really don't care what you think we should be doing.

Cheap shots at marginal figures

This George Monbiot article points me to Melanie Philips latest screed about global warming.

The politics of both these articles is an attack on decisions made under scientific uncertainty. If the results published in Nature are accurate, then planting trees is not a carbon sink. That does not mean that decisions taken while we thought that planting trees was a carbon sink are evil - it certainly does not expose any kind of ideological conspiracy. It just means we made a mistake.

Melanie Phillips' belief that global warming is not real is not based on an appraisal of the scientific evidence - something her claim that "most of the atmosphere consists of water vapour" demonstrates she is manifestly unqualified to do. It is based on a belief that people who claim to care for the environment are in fact motivated by anti-Americanism. Even if the current scientific consensus on global warming turns out to be wrong, this belief will remain throughly bogus.

Similarly, Monbiot's opposition to allowing carbon sinks under Kyoto was not based on science - he makes it clear in his article that his real problem with them is that it "allows us to carry on polluting" and "buy absolution". The political case for allowing other types of sink (offsetting carbon emissions by investing in energy-saving technology in the third world, for example) is no weaker than it was before, despite Monbiot's loud claims of vindication.

Politicians making decisions under scientific uncertainty should make the best possible decision on the basis of the best available scientific evidence. They shouldn't be expected to try and outguess the scientists on future scientific developments. Blaming the politicians when the scientific consensus changes encourages them to do just that.