The British Constitution Without Tears

By Brendan Clifford

Tony Blair is in political trouble because he delegated the decision to launch his second war — or was it his third? — to what is called the democracy of the state: the House of Commons.

Simultaneously with this concession of Executive power to the legislature in the most serious business in which a state ever engages — the waging of war on another state and its people — Blair abolished the office of Lord Chancellor in the name of a supposed principle of separation of powers in the British Constitution. He separated the judiciary from the Executive while merging the Executive in the Legislature.

It must be concluded from this that he became Prime Minister without understanding the workings of the state which he governs. It is as if he came from outer space and took a crash course in Constitutional theory from a ‘political scientist’.

The British Constitution is not based on the principle of the separation of powers. It is, if anything, based on the principle that the different functions of the state are combined in the Executive.

The American Constitution operates through separated powers, Congress has its own business to do in the running of the state. It conducts its own affairs as a Legislature. Since Legislature and Executive are elected separately and have distinct functions, there is a theoretical possibility that conflict between them might cause the breakdown of the state. The working relationship between them rests on the fact that they are both elected by the same electorate.

In the British system, what is called the Legislature is essentially a rubber stamp used by the Executive. It does not have its own business to transact, as Congress does. It acts in the name of the Executive, under the guidance of the Executive, and largely at the discretion of the Executive.

In Britain the Executive, the Government, is not elected by the populace. Its authority formally derives from the Crown. And in practice the Crown prerogative under which the Executive acts is much more than a piece of make-believe.

The British Constitution is what a handful of influential writers have described it as being. Bagehot said that the Commons was a kind of electoral college which appointed an Executive — and from which an Executive was recruited. And Erskine May said that the party system was the life-blood of the Constitution. And this combination — an electoral college (in Russian a soviet) moulded by a two-party system whose origin is lost in the mists of time brought about a situation in which Parliament is something much less than a Legislature. While the Executive is recruited from it, it is only one of the instruments by which the Executive governs.

When Blair broke the precedent of more than three centuries by requiring the Commons to decide about war on Iraq he required it to do something which the practice of all those centuries unfitted it for doing. And, in order to get it to do what he wanted, he had to present it with a debased argument. He acted unconstitutionally by requiring the Commons to decide an important matter of foreign policy instead of taking that decision himself in his capacity as the Executive agent of the Crown. He deceived Parliament in order to get it to decide what he had privately decided much earlier.

Parliament was given the right of Executive decision for the first time in centuries, but is now complaining that in the making of that decision it was manipulated by Executive deception. But these complaints only bring out its unfitness for making important Executive decisions.

It is frequently said that Parliament should be more actively and independently involved in the business of government. And that kind of statement is approved of as a worthy sentiment But the deceptions by means of which the Labour backbenches were deceived into deciding to make war on Iraq were so incredible that the awareness of having been deceived which has now been forced on them should lead them to retire to private life on the ground of incapacity.

A socialist pamphlet published more than 60 years ago made this observation about democracy and foreign policy:

“Whether the man in the street lives in a Democracy or a Dictatorship makes no real difference. To suggest that the British Citizen, through the medium of his vote, actually controls our foreign policy would be a bad joke. He does not even know what it is. Sometimes he feebly tries to follow its elusive windings, but finds that a crossword puzzle is easier.” (Peace and Power by Meyrick Booth, Commonwealth Press, /937).

There is no such thing as a democratic foreign policy — as a foreign policy whose content is democratic. What foreign policy expresses is the interest of a state in its relations with other states. Each government finds itself in an already existing network of states and finds that its interest with relation to those states is determined by factors which have nothing to do with the political character of those states.

Pakistan is a military dictatorship and Saudi Arabia is a kind of tribal I feudal theocracy. But these states have been amongst Britain’s staunchest allies in recent times. And Clare Short, who wears her democratic heart on her sleeve, was moved to say, during the war on Afghanistan, that the military dictatorship in Pakistan was preferable to the “corrupt democracy” that preceded it (Her more judicious Government colleagues of course agreed with her, but did not think it was advisable to blurt it out straight.)

Yemen was a democracy in 1990. It was the only Arab State with a formal democracy. It had a seat on the UN Security Council at the time, and it voted against making war on Iraq over Kuwait, giving expression to the prevailing sentiment of Yemeni democracy. And because it conducted a democratic foreign policy — a foreign policy reflecting the will of the democracy of the state — it was heavily punished by the leader of the democratic world.

What “the West” — essentially the Ameranglian combination — requires in the Middle East is compliant, authoritarian Governments which are capable of stifling the will of the populace. And that is certainly one of the major reasons why the Middle East has the kinds of Governments it has.

The Middle East was Balkanised by imperialist capitalist democracy. And it was Balkanised more deliberately that the Balkans. In the Balkans there is a welter of conflicting nationalities thrown up by what might reasonably be called “history”. But the Middle East was Balkanised by Western policy, chiefly British. Instead of the Arab State which Britain in 1916 undertook to recognise, half a dozen states were set up, none of them based on nationality. They were set up so that Arabia would neutralise itself through manipulated conflict between the regimes of these states. That is the full meaning of the term Balkanisation — a meaning which does not really apply in the actual Balkans.

Oil was of course a large part of the reason for this Balkanisation. A functional Arab State tending to the interests of its own people would not have seen the supplying of cheap oil to the West as a top priority. Arabia was therefore incorporated into the West politically through Balkanisation. The regimes that exist in Arabia are the regimes constructed there by the democratic West for its own purposes.

But oil was not the whole reason. The conquest and Balkanisation of Arabia was undertaken in the first instance by Britain for the purpose of extending and consolidating the British Empire. An authoritative British writer on the subject half a century ago described British Arabia as a “glassis” before the Indian Empire. A glacis is sloping ground before the walls of a Castle up which an attacking force has to clamber — in short, a killing ground. Such was Arabia in the British view when Britain thought big, and when it was still in the habit of saying what it thought.

English Socialism has for a couple of generations lived in a disabling ideology which unfits it for the purposeful use of political power. The usual thing is for aspiring Socialist politicians to talk in shrilly Utopian language while they are cutting their teeth — not knowing it is make-believe — and then, when they gain office, to adapt to the realities of power in a way that demolishes their earlier understanding of things.

The present Government is made up of defunct Socialists, most of whom were Marxists. It is unreasonable to suppose that they are all scoundrels who a generation ago exploited the widespread Marxist I Socialist illusions of those times in order to get their feet on the lower rungs of the ladder of power, knowing that the reality was completely different, and that when they succeeded they could not deliver what they promised. If they had been cynical manipulators from the start, they would have been able to maintain some semblance of integrity when the time came to “sell-out”. Perhaps Jack Straw was like that But could anything less than total collapse of a genuinely-held ideology when the moment came for exercising governmental power have made David Blunkett into the Michael Howard caricature that he has become?

I chanced to hear a Radio 5 interview with George Galloway on the morning after Baghdad was liberated. Nicky Campbell used the occasion to gloat. And he brought on an Iraqi Emigre from away back who has built himself up a fashionable restaurant business in Harringay to join in the gloating. The restaurateur said he was about to pack his bags and transfer his business to Baghdad. (I wonder if he has done so? Or if the BBC has drawn the moral of his not having done so?)

What Campbell said to Galloway was “What price your Marxism now?”

Galloway did not confirm or deny that he was a Marxist What he replied to was the assumption that moral positions were established by use of overwhelming military force. He said they had always been taught that the end did not justify the means, leaving his hearers to understand that he contrived to hold that view despite the “shock and awe” of the American military operation.

I never took Galloway to come from the Marxist left. And his belief that the end does not justify the means does not suggest that that is where he comes from.

The Government, on the other hand, does come from the Marxist left (both Communist Party and Trotskyist), and it does believe that the end justifies the means. (When Blair told his American patrons and groupies that history would absolve him even if he was wrong about some of the essential details in the case he put to the House of Commons to get it to decide to make war on Iraq, he meant that the history of the matter would be written in the service of the state whose military power is equal to that to the rest of the world combined. Jack Straw paved the way for this equation of morality with power last year when he said that the fact that the USA was the strongest power in the world placed one under a moral obligation to support it.)

Galloway does not act like somebody who had ever been a ‘scientific socialist’. The scientific socialism from which so many members of the Government have emerged carries the implication that morality is the hegemonic influence exerted by the dominant power of the era. And the Government acts in accordance with that view. Galloway doesn’t. Neither does he conduct his political affairs as if his understanding of the British state was got from the writings of the academic big-wigs of the Communist Party – Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm.

Galloway, like Tam Dalyell, is a backbench thorn in the flesh of the Government. And that is the proper function of a backbencher who is not waiting a call to the front benches and showing his suitability while he waits.

Parliament cannot govern; it cannot act as a Legislature independent of the Government; and it cannot exert a monitoring or supervising influence over government. It is a kind of hinterland of government In the days before the democratisation of the franchise and the payment of MPs it occasionally took matters into its own hands fleetingly and by way of exception. But even that is scarcely conceivable in the democratic era.

It is now the business of the Prime Minister, as it was once the business of the King, to manage Parliament. What exists in Britain is not Parliamentary government, but government by the Crown in Parliament.

There used to be a hint of the separation of powers in the relationship between Government and Parliament. It used to be the case that an MP had to resign his seat in Parliament when he joined the Government. But since it was also the case that the Government was drawn from Parliament he had to contest the seat in a byelection. (In 1908 Churchill lost his seat in the by-election caused by his entry to the Government, but a safe seat was the found for him.)

That arrangement was done away with in 1918 when the electoral franchise was democratised. It was never a thing of much consequence. But it was at least a mark of distinction between Legislature and Executive, and the Legislator who joined the Executive did at least take a very slight risk of losing both offices.

The so-called Legislature is in practice a hinterland of the Executive, and part of the business of the Executive is to manage it.

This is well understood in the political culture of the Tory Party, and the new Tory MP comes into Parliament with realistic assumptions about how government is conducted. New Labour MPs tend to arrive with very unrealistic historical assumptions about the nature of the state. They may even be dismissive of history as being of no account as against the free ‘radical’ energy of the present moment. That was certainly the case with the Blairite hordes of 1997 and 2002. History then proceeds to break them in — which often involves simply breaking them.

Tories, because of their realistic understanding of how the state functions, often find useful things to do as backbenchers. This was certainly the case before the destructive democratisation of the Party by Thatcher. They had the mentality of a ruling class, and understood that ruling is not confined to governing.

Harold Wilson proclaimed that Labour had become “the natural party of power”. And he did his best to consolidate the working classes into a ruling class in the 1970s when it was the strongest social force. But the Labour Party never acquired the mentality of a ruling class party. It went for `radicalism’ instead. And in the life of a functional state radicalism can only be a protest movement which occasionally gives the system a shake.

The empty socialistic radicalism of the 1970s frustrated Wilson’s (and Barbara Castle’s) efforts to consolidate the powerful organised working class into a ruling class. Neil Kinnock led the Parliamentary opposition to the Royal Commission (Bullock) proposal to establish a system of workers’ control in industry, and Ken Coates used the Institute for Workers Control as an instrument for ensuring that an actual system of workers’ control did not pre-empt the revolution. And the rest is history-which is Thatcherism and Blairism.

The defeat of the Workers’ Control project reduced the Labour Party to the status of a protest movement. And then its protest was so misconceived that it had to stop protesting if it was ever to be elected again.

Blair won his landslide because he remade Labour in Thatcher’s image, and because of a widespread feeling that five Tory victories in a row would be excessive. He launched New Labour on a deluge of vacuous ‘radical’ verbiage. His backbenches were a wilderness of empty heads. And then he relinquished the Crown prerogative in the making of war to these backbenches, and fed them deceptions to help them towards their decision.

Tam Dalyell and George Galloway have kept alive the useful activity of relevant protest on the New Labour backbenches. They are not failed front-benchers. Their role is protest.

They have been joined on the backbenches by a large number of sacked Ministers and by a couple who resigned somewhat late in the day. But there is only one front-bencher on the backbenches who displayed something of the ruling class mentality that used to be the mainstay of Toryism. That is Peter Kilfoyle, who was largely responsible for breaking the power of the Militant Tendency in Liverpool, and who resigned from Blair’s Government early in the first term, not on some narrow issue of policy, but on the general grounds that the Blair mode of government was bad for the Party and bad for the country.

What is known as Parliamentary government is in fact less Parliamentary and more under Executive control today than was the case in the century before last, when the Crown itself still played some part in the actual conduct of government. The democratisation of the franchise and the simultaneous tightening up and generalising of the party system as the only possible form of governing political activity enhanced the power over Parliament of the Ministry acting in the name of the Crown and under its extensive discretionary authority.

Parliament can neither assemble itself nor decide its business when assembled. The Government – the Crown in Parliament – decides these things. There is an annual ritual of locking out the emissary of the Crown from Parliament – a piece of nonsense having to do with the supposed establishment of Parliamentary government in the 1640s. But the Crown is now always inside Parliament – always has been since the collapse of Parliamentary government in 1660. What is locked out is a mirage or a make-believe. Parliament is now inconceivable without the Crown on the inside.

Blair, as the existing form of the Crown in actual government, referred the decision to make war on Iraq to the backbenches. Parliament, as counterposed with the Crown, only means the backbenches these days. In olden times, when it was frankly accepted that MPs should represent substantial interests in the country, Parliament might have discussed a thing like that realistically and on the basis of information got through a commonsense understanding of the world. But in the Blairite era the backbenches had to go to vote on the basis of deceptions supplied by the Executive.

This has now led to a shambles. But Parliament, which was accorded the right of decision to make war, is prevented form reviewing the consequences of that decision, or the deceptions by which it was induced to make it, because it is unable to assemble itself. It can only be assembled by Blair in his capacity as the Crown. And Blair thinks its best that Parliament should remain dispersed for three months, as is usual at this time of year.

This fact in itself demonstrates the absurdity of having Parliament, (the backbenches), take Executive decisions, particularly in the matter of war and peace.

The Parliamentary Committees are not competent to act in place of Parliament in these matters, since a competent Executive will be able to control their activity.

Donald Anderson, a tried and trusted Blairite of long-standing, diverted the Foreign Affairs Committee from the issue of whether Parliament was deceived by the Executive, to the trivial issue of whether the BBC behaved unfairly towards Alistair Campbell i n reporting a claim from within the Ministry of Defence that he had inserted the 45 minute clause in the war dossier.

When the BBC’s source was outed by the Government itself, and sent to the Foreign Affairs Committee (“the High Court of Parliament” as Andrew McKinley grandiosely put it) and tried to pull the house down by killing himself, a judicial inquiry was set up by the Crown in Parliament, which happened to be in Korea at the time. Parliament was not even consulted. And the judge chosen for this delicate task was brought in from outside the jurisdiction, from the region of the UK which the Crown governs without Parliament. Hutton is a Unionist politician, who acted as barrister for the Crown in defence of the practice of torture when the matter came before the European Court (of Human Rights), and who was made a Northern Ireland judge. He was judge in a jurisdiction where there was no Parliamentary government.

Another figure from Northern Ireland played a part in bringing about the shambles. Tom Kelly chief political correspondent of BBC Northern Ireland in the 1980s, was brought into the Whitehall apparatus to mastermind the propaganda operation by means of which the Unionist electorate in the Six Counties was manipulated and bamboozled into voting for the Good Friday Agreement in the referendum and giving a bare majority a few weeks later to Trimble’s Unionist Party, which was pressurised — one might even say intimidated — into pretending to support it. Kelly’s blueprint for the operation was leaked to the Unionist Opposition. It was a thorough piece of work of the Gleichschaltung kind practiced by Dr. Goebbels.

Tom Kelly conducted the outing of David Kelly in Downing Street.

There was nothing perverse about Torn Kelly’s transference from the BBC to the governing apparatus. The BBC is an integral part of the apparatus of state. It was set up by the direct use of the Crown authority of the Executive without reference to Parliament. Some care was taken in Britain to make it appear to be something other than an apparatus of state but that appearance was never achieved in its Northern Ireland region. And the appearance was blown away in Britain in the mid-1980s over a decision to broadcast in Britain an interview with Marlin McGuinness as a family man.

The Director-General of the time (Milne) upheld the decision to broadcast the interview in the face of Thatcher’s express opposition. Vincent Hanna, the Jeremy Paxman of the time, declared that the BBC was a kind of independent guild of broadcasters, and he led a broadcasters’ strike in support of the declaration of independence. And Kinnock ‘s “modernising” Labour Party supported the BBC. But Thatcher persuaded the Board of Governors to over-rule the Director General and take effective operational control of broadcasting.

Blair might in this regard be described as an incompetent Thatcherite. She enforced her will on the BBC in a matter of days, whereas all Blair had succeeded in doing over a period of months is working up a feud with it.

There was undoubtedly an anti-Thatcher bias in the BBC in the early 1980s. This was largely because of the collapse of Labour as an effective opposition under Michael Foot. The reverse of that situation applies today. The BBC has been functioning in place of a Tory Opposition. Thatcher curbed the bias of the BBC in 1985 even though the BBC was supported by Labour. Blair has been unable to curb the bias of the BBC today even though the BBC is not supported by the Tories, and some Tories are leading the attack on it, even though it is conducted by his own nominees.

The BBC is the propaganda apparatus of the state. That is what it was set up to be. Radio broadcasting was made a state monopoly in the 1920s and then television was included under the provisions of radio broadcasting. Its brief is to inform and entertain the populace in ways that serve the purposes of the state. The effective meaning of “inform” is make propaganda, and the entertainment must subserve the propaganda.

Independence is specifically ruled out in the terms of the Royal Charter which established the BBC. And it is obliged to be impartial. The concepts are not clear-cut. Objectivity may seem to be a precondition of impartiality, and independence of viewpoint to be a precondition of objectivity. But the requirement of the BBC to be impartial is a requirement that it should operate within the party-system of the state. That is essentially a two-party system in which one party is currently in office and the other is waiting to take office. The BBC must service that system, operating entirely within it. It functions within the parameters of the perpetual debate between Government and Opposition, carrying that debate throughout the country and elaborating on it.

But what began as a reflection and elaboration of Parliamentary debate has itself largely taken the place of Parliamentary debate. Parliamentary Question Time has become a knockabout farce and Parliamentary debates have become a disconnected succession of trite monologues. What used to happen in Parliament now happens chiefly on television and radio. Question Time in Parliament is on the level of throwing custard pies, but on radio and television Ministers are sometimes cornered into answering questions. What used to be Parliamentary skill has now become a skill of the television and radio interviewer.

Government Ministers are questioned from the standpoint of the opposition under the impartiality rule. But what happens when there is a virtual collapse of the Opposition? Well, the system based on the effective conflict of Government and Opposition carries on as if that conflict actually existed. Edmund Burke said that since the functioning of the state requires its rulers to be virtuous there must be a presumption that they are virtuous even if it happens that they are not. And so it is with the BBC. It carries the system on which it was founded during periods when the system itself scarcely operates. And this sometimes leads it to act in place of an Opposition which has become ineffectual, or has even ceased to oppose.

In the present instance the official Opposition abdicated its function. It was unconditionally for war and didn’t give a damn about the pedantry of justification. There was to be a war, which was always a good thing. And America was to be the ally, which put its goodness beyond all possibility of question. (Only once in the entire history of the British state did the Opposition oblige the Government to pull out of a war that it had launched. That was almost 300 years ago. It is now hard to imagine that the Opposition that stopped the war was Tory).

The Blair / Duncan Smith unanimity would have required the BBC, under its impartiality terms, to be a simple-minded warmonger (giving the state a totalitarian aspect) but for the rift in the Labour Party and the unprecedented scale of the anti-war demonstrations.

Blair maximised opposition to the war by the way he went about it (as Eden did in 1956). If he had gone to war under Crown prerogative last autumn, it is unlikely that his Government would now be a shambles. He was undone by hubris. He insisted in dragging things out, confident that he could hustle everybody into line. He obliged the populace to think about war for six months before he launched it, and the more they thought about it the madder it seemed. And he just knew that he could deliver the United Nations because the French have a conditioned reflex of bowing to the will of Britain at the eleventh hour. But they didn’t bow this time — perhaps because he acted before the eleventh hour.

He maximised opposition to the war and then complained that the BBC had an anti-war agenda because it allowed some expression to the strong anti-war sentiment that had arisen in the country, and the substantial anti-war sentiment that was expressed in Parliament despite the best efforts of the Opposition to prevent it.

Reference of the war decision to Parliament was at variance with the character of the state, which is monarchical, with the Minister of the Crown acting in place of the monarch. Parliamentary government (which in present circumstances means government by the Commons) is republican. It was tried in England between the 1620s and 1650s and it failed.

Insofar as ‘radical’ socialism in Britain has had any historical orientation, it is oriented towards that failed republicanism of 1649-1660 — the New Model Army, Cromwell, the Levellers. Tony Benn is the last apostle of that English Republican fiasco. But from the 1960s to the 1980s it was the general ideological reference point of the socialist movement in Britain, and was a major influence in bringing about the collapse of socialism as a practical force in the political life of the state, in the hands of Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock.

The obvious lesson of “the English Revolution” of the mid-17th century is that a republic is not a functional form of state in English political culture, The Parliamentary republic was not overthrown. No force within the country or abroad was capable of overthrowing it. And it was not betrayed in any meaningful sense. It abolished itself out of a sense of its own incompetence. General Monk did no more that put it out of its misery when he invited the King to come home and govern. Somebody had to do it. John Milton, Cromwell’s Secretary of State raged theocratically against the Restorationists. But it was Cromwell most of all who aborted the republic, by acting authoritatively to preserve the gentry and make them the ideal form of English life. An English republic might have been possible as an egalitarian theocracy. That is what was at the heart of Puritanism. But Cromwell, as Lord Protector of the republic, found in his moment of truth that he was above all else a gentleman, and that the English gentry were the salt of the earth, and he acted to preserve the Common Law , as the medium of existence of the gentry, when Parliament voted to establish a new system of codified law based on the Mosaic law. That happened, I think, in 1653. It was the effective end of the republican development of the English state.

A century and a half later Tom Paine argued that there were republican institutions within the English state. Being a rationalist he did not see why the monarchical superstructure could not be shrugged off. But his rationalism was delusionary. The monarchical form of the state was the practical precondition of such popular institutions as existed within it. And so it remains.

The monarchical state, in the form given to it after 1688, has the inertia of three centuries of evolutionary development behind it. Without the intervention of some catastrophe, it is unlikely to become a republic. The features of it which Tony Benn finds so objectionable are essential to its functioning and will continue.

A socialist movement which is naturally republican in tendency, which must overcome a certain repugnance when complying with the forms of admission to the ante-chamber of political power, and which must serve a Parliamentary apprenticeship before taking government office, undergoes a process of disillusionment which reduces its effectiveness in office (compared with Tories who begin with more realistic conceptions of things.)

The great exception to this is Ernest Bevin, who was a Cabinet Minister before he was an MP, who was a power in the country before he became a power in the Government, and who handled Parliament as he had been accustomed to handle trade union meetings.

Blair has lately become the longest serving Labour Prime Minister, out-stripping Bevin’s Prime Minister, Attlee. But the Attlee Government, of which Bev in was the architect, made structural changes to social conditions which still stand, despite the frantic efforts of Thatcher and Blair to erode them. And it is a certainty that, even if Blair hangs onto office for another six years, he will achieve nothing comparable to what Bevin and Attlee achieved in 1945-50. He will not even succeed in “modernising” or “reforming” their welfare state out of existence. They built to last. He fidgets.

The basis of the post-1945 social reconstruction of Britain was laid between 1940 and 1945 when Bev in had effective command of the internal government of Britain as Minister of Labour in the War Coalition. There was nothing Parliamentary in his style. He browbeat the opposition mercilessly — and the opposition consisted largely of socialist Parliamentarians like Aneurin Bevan.

Bevan was later given the job of constructing the NHS, within the strategic situation brought about by Bevin. But in 1951 he reverted to rhetorical oppositionism in the Parliamentary style, and Labour was out of office for thirteen years.

One might have expected the Labour Party to evolve a political culture from its one outstanding success. Instead of doing so, it deposited Bev in in the rubbish bin of history and formed itself around the empty rhetoric of Bevan.

The only adequate explanation of this perverse development that I could find was that the Jewish influence negated Bev in because he opposed the Zionist project in Palestine when he became Foreign Secretary in 1945. He was branded an anti-Semite and the brand stuck.

Anti-Semitism is a slippery concept. About a hundred years ago, Karl Kautsky, the German Social Democrat, published a book entitled Are The Jews A Race? His answer was a clear “No!”. That was the right answer then. Judaism was a religion, and the suggestion that the Jews were a race or an nation was anti- Semitic. But later it was the wrong answer, and it became anti-Semitic to hold that Judaism was a religion and nothing more.

No evidence has ever been brought forward to show that Bevin ever failed to uphold equality of treatment for Jews along with Catholics etc.

He was one of the pioneers of practical anti – fascism. He began preparing for war in 1934 when the Labour Left was utterly opposed to what was called “rearmament”. He knew that the charge that the Jews were not a religion, but were a race or nation, was central to the fascist anti- Semitism of Germany. In 1945 the state power of anti-Semitism had been broken — and here he was being called upon to accept the Nazi view of the Jews. He refused to do so. And he saw no sense in setting up a religion as a state. And since he was not adept at Parliamentary self-deception by phrases, he saw that the setting up of a Jewish State in Palestine would involve activity of the kind undertaken by the Nazis against East European peoples. And he wouldn’t do it.

What he did was not admirable. He gave way to Jewish terrorism and referred the matter to the UN General Assembly.

Looking at the thing dispassionately, it would have been preferable if he had either deployed overwhelming British military force to suppress the Jewish terrorists (who included future Israeli Ministers) and make the British Mandate functional; or if he had used British power to conduct the ethnic cleansing required to clear the space for a Jewish State, and had set up barriers to further Zionist expansion. At least it would have been a kind of settlement.

But to brand him an anti-Semite because he was not willing to act the part of a Nazi was outrageous. It also involved a kind of suicide for British socialism, because functional social ism was bound up with Bevin.

Richard Crossman, his junior at the Foreign Office, became a fanatical Zionist in 1945, as did Michael Foot, and they branded Bevin an anti-Semite. Jewish influence was hegemonized by Zionism and reinforced the branding.

That is not the whole story of course. There was on the Labour Left a kind of simple-mindedness’. But the manipulation of that simple mindedness by Zionist influence in order to negate the outstanding socialist reformer of the British Labour movement was deadly.

*

For more than a generation the Zionist orientation in British socialism operated in a kind of hazy Utopian fog. Israeli conduct in recent years has blown away most of the fog. The Utopian element has evaporated. Choices have had to be made. And those who opt for pure and simple Zionism are becoming fundamentalists.

It is about time that a false charge of anti- Semitism was put on a par with anti-Semitism. It should be treated like diving in the penalty area and given the red card.

David Aaronovich was given two half-hour programmes by Channel 4 to expound his New Labour views on war and peace. (He and John Lloyd seem to be the only throughgoing Blairites in the media.) In the first he declared that there were only two possible positions on Iraq — either you made war on it or you were a participant in the murderous activities of the Iraqi state.

Weighing up the morality of the situation, he concluded that the case for invasion was slightly stronger that the case for supporting the murderous activities of the Iraqi regime.

This conclusion follows from a rigorous application of democratic imperialist globalism, which is the general position of New Labour and of the elements of the old New Left which were the precursors of New Labour. (Professor Fred Halliday expounded a theory of “ethical universalism” in the mid-1990s. He is Professor at the London School of Economics (LSE), where Mackinder expounded his globalist Geopolitics of British Imperialism a century ago, and where Fabian social-imperialism was elaborated).

Three or four years ago — in a bygone era – I addressed a Bevin Society fringe meeting at the Labour Party Conference on the theme New Labour, New NATO? The meeting was full to overflowing with New Labourites, young and old, eager to propagate their new, but only vaguely discerned, vision of things. I had supported the old NATO, but thought it should have been disbanded following the disbanding of the Warsaw Pact. They had been against the old NATO, but were enthusiastic for the new (post-Warsaw Pact) NATO as an instrument through which Britain might regain independence of action vis-a-vis the United States.

I remarked at one point that I had been driven to the conclusion that imperialism was deeply ingrained in British political culture right across the spectrum. A middle-aged lady, picking on my accent, said I should go back home to Ireland. I said that the thing about imperialism was that it did not recognise homes. It followed you wherever you went.

I also tried to explain that I was using the term `imperialism’ descriptively and objectively, and not as a mere term of abuse. It might be that imperialism was an inevitable and necessary element in human affairs. Douglas Hurd, when Foreign Secretary, had argued that the United Nations could only be functional as a facade on an ongoing imperialism. And he seemed to have a point.

This observation was met with outrage on the part of the Blairites. What had they to do with the likes of Hurd and the Tories? And they were no imperialists. They were democrats out to do good in the world.

That brought home tome the depth of ignorance on which the new radicalism was based.

Imperialism, democracy and social reform were parts of the same movement in British politics a century ago. Cecil Rhodes was a democrat out to do good in the world, just like Blair. And doing good often created a shambles then just as it does now.

It was no use explaining these things to the Blairites. Imperialism was a bad word and they were good people.

If that meeting could be reassembled today it would be interesting to see what sense the events of the intervening years had made in their heads. Their New NATO was taken away from them by the US a few months later. And the word “imperialism” appears to have become more acceptable.

And what has happened to the feelings of resentment over the necessary dependence on the US?

I put it to them that the US had handled its dominant position in the world much better – much less catastrophically — than Britain had done. Britain had caused two world catastrophes in a period of forty years in the first half of the twentieth century. In the chaos following the first catastrophe it had fostered the Nazi development in Germany against Soviet Russia. Then, instead of containing Nazi Germany, keeping it within bounds, it had a sudden rush of blood to the head and made war on it over Danzig. And instead of waging that war in conjunction with the Poles, it allowed the German/Polish war to run its course without firing a shot, and then proceeded to bring about a world war. Britain went over the top twice. The US had not yet done it once.

The Blairites were greatly irritated by this way of looking at things three years ago. I have no insight into their feelings today, but I suspect that their heads are in complete disarray.

*

Having decided that the moral balance weighed slightly in favour of a war to destroy the Iraqi state — somebody with his background must surely have understood what a “regime” is — and having helped to launch that war, David Aaronovich then rallied to the defence of Israel in its hour of need with another Channel 4 programme (Blaming The Jews, June 28).

Israel, the only nuclear power in the Middle East, is also armed to the teeth with conventional weaponry of all sorts. None of the surrounding states has a remotely comparable army — and never had. The Jews in Israel have elected the organiser of the Chatila refugee camp massacre to conduct their affairs, and the international community (i.e. the USA and Britain) have given him the green light to do as he pleases. So why does it need a defender? Because people in Aaronovich’s circle have begun to say unpleasant things about it, and to apply to it the kind of standard that they apply to other states as a matter of course. And it isn’t enough for Aaronovich that Israel — the regional superpower with a very special relationship with the global superpower — may do as it pleases. It must also be pretended that what it pleases to do is not what it actually does. We must also be persuaded that Israel is a kind of underdog threatened by a powerful anti- Semitic conspiracy — an anti-Semitic conspiracy of Semites!

We are told that anti-Semitism is on the increase in Britain. The evidence is that people are not being nice to Israel. The Chief Rabbi has said that criticism of Israel is a form of anti-Semitism. He allows that there is a theoretical possibility that Israel might be criticised in a way that is not anti- Semitic, but says that this abstract possibility cannot be realised in practice because any criticism of Israel fuels anti-Semitism.

The statement that Sharon was elected by the Jews in Israel can be construed as anti-Semitic by this mode of reasoning. But to say that he was elected by Israelis would be less than the truth. The descendants of the Arab remnant that was not driven out by the terror in 1948 are nominal Israeli citizens but they are excluded from actual political life by which the state is governed. The state is a Zionist — a Jewish nationalist — state. And in a situation where a Zionist party rarely gains a clear victory in an election, and Coalitions are the norm, no Jewish party would contemplate forming a coalition with Arab representatives.

The second-class status of the Arabs in Israel was rubbed in recently by a law under the provisions of which Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens cannot acquire citizen status thereby.

The Palestinian demand for a right of return to the homes and lands from which they were driven by the terror of 1948 and subsequently had been declared to be anti-Semitic. The Jerusalem Post says it is a demand for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish State. And of course it is. The large territory awarded to the Jewish minority by the UN General Assembly in 1947 would not have been functional as a Jewish State without the massive ethnic cleansing of 1948, because Jews were a bare majority in that territory. And, if the Palestinian refugees returned, and re-appropriated their expropriated property, the Jewish State would no longer be sustainable.

Aaronovich purported to investigate whether what he called anti-Semitism amongst the Palestinians (who are Semites) was of a kind with Nazi anti-Semitism. He presented samples of this anti-Semitism, supplied to him by the Palestinian Media Watch organisation, and discussed it with an intellectual in Tel Aviv University, Esther Webman, who said: “They even compare Zionism with Nazism. I am not absolutely sure that every one of those who use that fully understand the connotations and the context of the term. And that’s why I have my own debate and I’m trying all the time to assess whether it is anti-Semitic in the way anti-Semitism is known in the West or it is a different kind of anti-Semitism.”

The “different kind of anti-Semitism” was never spelled out It would be remarkable of it had been.

Aaronovich’s question, properly formulated would be: Do the Palestinians hate the Jews because they have been conquered, expropriated and tormented by them over two generations, or are they motivated by some racist antipathy against them which is independent of Jewish conduct towards them? And the first step towards answering that question is to look at the situation as it was before Britain opened up Palestine to massive Jewish immigration and the Jewish nationalist conquest began.

The Palestinian experience of the Jews since 1947 is pretty close to the Jewish experience of the Germans from 1933 to 1940. In fact the Palestinian experience goes beyond the Jewish experience up to 1940. And if it is less than the Jewish experience of 1941-4, the Zionists have not had the opportunity to work in obscurity as the SS had in the hinterland of the war on Russia. But, considering that the Zionists have had to operate in the light, the remarkable thing is that they have been able to do so much.

Thirty years ago I published an account of Zionist origins in Europe, and began a sympathetic account of the Zionist activity after the Balfour Declaration. I abandoned the project when I saw Zionism becoming a mirror image of Nazism.

Aaranovitch shows an Egyptian anti-Semitic cartoon: a Star of David sprouting from a Swastika. This surely is an image which calls for explanation. How does it come about that Egyptian “anti-Semites” bracketed Zionism with Nazism? But Aaranovitch gives no explanation.

Loyalist Belfast has long been flirting with the Swastika, as a symbol of the short way to handle natives. Last year, around the time of the Jenin affair, the Star of David was painted up alongside the Swastika. Was that anti-Semitic? Can an expression of support for Israel be anti-Semitic?

During the days when Jenin was sealed off from the world by the Israeli Army (the Jewish Army of Israel, there being nominal Israeli citizens who are not eligible for military service on the ground of religion or nationality or race—I don’t know which is the correct word, since Zionism has denied the existence of Palestinian nationality), Sharon was asked, before a television camera, if Palestinians were being slaughtered inside. He said: “It’s the blood libel!” I took that to be a watershed in the mythology of the blood libel—the devaluation of a Christian atrocity against Jews to give cover to a Jewish nationalist atrocity against Arabs—comparable to the demonising of the latest chosen enemy of Anglo- America as another Hitler.

Aaranovitch, of course, brings up the Christian blood libel on the Jews, and goes to Lincoln in search of its origin. Then he interviews an Egyptian film producer about a film based on a novel by the Syrian Defence Minister, and comments: “The book is a repetition of the notorious Damascus blood libel of 1840). When 1 began to trace the origins of Zionism thirty years ago, the Damascus pogrom was a standard item one was presented with. I took it at face value as evidence of Arab or Muslim “anti- Semitism”. When ! found that the Muslim world was over the centuries a Jewish refuge from European anti-Semitism I looked a bit closer and found that the Damascus pogrom was whipped up under European influence—the Ottoman state was in process of being eroded and honeycombed by European powers—and was stopped by the Sultan in response to an appeal from an English Jew.

I found Aaranovitch’s programme (Historical Adviser, Professor Robert Wistrich) strongly counter-persuasive because of things like this.

What is called Muslim anti-Semitism (a racial absurdity) appeared in conjunction with the decision of the dominant European imperialist powers to open Palestine to Jewish immigration in order to get rid of their own Jews, and to establish a militaristic Jewish state in defiance of the opposition of every existing state in the Middle East. The hatred of Jewish Semites by other Semites appears to me to have sufficient cause in what the Jews have done to the other Semites.

I have read great quantities of British propaganda about Germans in the First World War. Propagandists were free to invent any evil qualities they pleased and attribute them to Germans. Arousing hatred of Germans was a virtuous activity. And I cannot see that the Germans had done anything at all to the British of the kind that Jews have done to the Palestinians.

From Labour and Trade Union Review, August 2003.  A PDF of the entire magazine is available at https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/ltur-131-august-2003.pdf.