Down, But Not Out, In London And Paris

Murder is sinful in Islam. There is a very long and ongoing tradition of Muslims serving in the British Armed Forces. Suicide is sinful in Catholicism. A high proportion of Catholic traditionalists is of what used to be called Not The Marrying Kind. Make of those facts what you will. But they are the facts, whatever we make of them.

The French Far Right has always been very split between the reactionary Catholics (who see themselves as simply de Tradition, but who in fact are not), and the Odinists and the like, such as Dominique Venner. Perhaps this is the point at which they can no longer stand each other, when one side raises a man to the status of a hero and a martyr for having committed suicide on the High Altar of Notre Dame? All sorts of things would then follow. It has been a long time coming.

There Cannot Be A British Dominique Venner

Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons are a pair of silly stooges, while the EDL is just a bunch of thugs. Why are there no Far Right intellectuals in Britain? Is that a ridiculous question? Not at all.

There are Front National intellectuals in France, one of whom has just gone out with a bang. There are intellectuals in the Austrian Third Lager. There are intellectuals on the Far Right in Italy and in the Iberian world. But you will search the British scene in vain for The Thinking Man’s Fascist, his effusions worthy or even capable of serious engagement.

Neo-Paganism never really took off even in Nazi Germany; attempts to redefine culture in its terms, with the Winter Solstice replacing Christmas and what have you, were spectacularly unsuccessful. Alain de Benoist or Dominique Venner would have no more success in Britain.

Here, the whole thing would stand even less of a chance than it did in Germany. We have a more highly developed sense of the absurd, which is good, and a tendency to see all manifestations of folk-culture in those terms, which is very bad, since we were rich in it to the point of extravagance at least until the Reformation.

We do have a Liberal Protestant movement such as, in its rootlessness and lack of specific doctrinal content, proved such easy prey to the Nazis. But ours, by something not less than a miracle, instead maintained close ties to the opposition that was figures such as Barth, perhaps because it saw in neo-orthodoxy its own fondness for retaining at least the vocabulary of historic formulations, however dangerously that vocabulary might be redefined.

However, the heresy of intégrisme, so fundamental to the Fascism of the Latin world, is almost unknown to any of our Catholic subcultures. I doubt that we had any more before Vatican II than we have now, although intégrisme is so pernicious precisely because it looks like, and very forcefully believes itself to be, traditional Catholicism.

Whereas the intégriste Fascist in that tendency’s French heartland can present himself, accurately or otherwise, as the true heir of the legitimate state overthrown in 1789 and of the very long-lasting tradition of mass resistance to that overthrow, no one here can really say that, accurately or otherwise, about 1688, and extremely few would wish to.

Much more perniciously, since they are vastly more numerous, we do have people who resemble those Bavarian Catholics who were active in the early Nazi Party in Munich. Looking back to Döllinger, they defined themselves as Catholics in the sense of belonging to a community of faith across the world and throughout the ages rather than in terms of perfect submission to the Petrine See as that See requires.

They strongly affirmed the purported autonomy of the German Church, including the control of Her affairs by the activist laity on the basis of their financial contributions (in Germany, the church tax system) and by means of quasi-parliamentary institutions. Does any of this sound familiar?

Those of such mind were key to the emergence of Nazism until it was kicked out of Bavaria following the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch. After that, it became a movement and a party with its base in staunchly Protestant areas of Germany and within the fiercely anticlerical Third Lager in Austria.

This country retains a monarchy, commanding the very intense loyalty of the lower middle class that is any Fascist movement’s base, as it is certainly the BNP’s and the EDL’s. Fascists do not like monarchies, and in fact the BNP wishes to abolish Britain’s. But they draw equally on the absolutism of the bourgeois republic created paradigmatically in France, and on the princely absolutism developed out of pre-Revolutionary sources, especially Jean Bodin, in reaction against the Revolution and its many imitations.

It combines and focuses them both in a Leader figure who is neither a prince, nor drawn from and answerable to republican institutions (in the broader sense of a res publica) such as a strong Parliament. He characteristically bypasses such institutions by means of the referendum. And he performs the ceremonial functions that would have been performed by the abolished monarchy or local nobility, squirarchy or whatever.

Had there still been all those kings, princes, grand dukes and the rest doing their stuff in their apparently funny uniforms across German-speaking Europe or the Italian Peninsula, then there would have been no gap for Hitler or Mussolini to fill. There is no such gap in Britain.

As with the monarchy, so with the War. Griffin had a photograph of Churchill next to him on his Party Election Broadcast. He is welcome to Churchill, but that is another story. Ridiculously, a party drawn from this country’s tiny little world of Hitler-loving weirdoes and misfits has to electioneer by posing as the heir of the struggle of those whom Hitler blockaded and Blitzed.

Griffin cannot say, even were he capable of doing so, that they should never have been put in that position, nor bemoan the collapse of morality during the War, since his supporters warmly endorse that collapse and its consequences throughout (yes, throughout) the post-War period.

Nor can Griffin bemoan, even if he were capable of doing so, the loss of British power in the world, or the loosening of ties with former Empire countries, since the West Indians, in particular, came here on British passports from countries most of which retain the Queen as Head of State to this day and several of which remain British by choice.

Whereas the Republic of South Africa was proclaimed as an act of anti-British revenge, while its Rhodesian satrapy was born in treason against the Queen. Just as there is no equivalent of the pro-Vichy tradition on which a BNP or EDL intellectual might draw, so there is no equivalent of the pro-OAS tradition, either. The pieds-noirs wanted to stay French. Ian Smith wanted to stop being British.

All in all, it is no wonder that there is no British publication comparable to Éléments. Never mind to Rivarol. There is no British Dominique Venner. Mercifully, there cannot be.

The Common Sense Path

Evidently the Voice of Middle Britain, the Morning Star editorialises:

A government guided by common sense would respond to news that publicly owned Royal Mail has increased profits to £403 million by scrapping plans to flog off the service. Not so the conservative coalition, which remains determined to sell it to the highest bidder come what may. The fact that Royal Mail has turned a healthy profit - cash that goes straight into the state's coffers - is down in no small part to the increasing workloads and "rationalisation" foisted on postal workers. 

They, and all of us through higher stamp prices, have picked up the tab for the EU's enforced market. The bloc's apparatchiks justify this by claiming it will drive innovation in the "electronic age." What it means in practice is private investors cherry-picking the juiciest business and ignoring the expensive bits. Royal Mail - and its shrinking, hard-pressed workforce - does the heavy lifting by actually delivering the privateers' letters and maintaining the costly universal service.

The bluster and hoo-hah from Tories over the European Union in recent weeks cannot mask their shared belief in handing to City slickers everything that moves, no matter the logic. That agenda is precisely the big business-allied European Commission's view, as enshrined in a raft of directives enforcing competition and encouraging privatisation. Isn't it funny that not a peep of protest emerges from the Conservatives about this undemocratic imposition drawn up behind closed doors by a small cabal? 

As for EU fanboy Nick Clegg, he agrees with Cameron. Not since the nationalisation of banking debts to bail out the City, while leaving profits in private hands, has there been a more blatant example of the ideological bankruptcy of the snake oil salesmen who hold the reins of power nationally and internationally. The shysters behind this flaky deal reckon they'll raise around £3 billion by selling Royal Mail. At the current rate of profit that's about the same as holding on to it for seven years. We'll get something out of it, of course - the taxpayer will be left holding the pensions liabilities. Thanks a bunch.

Owners chasing short-term profits in water, gas, electricity and rail privatisation, among other sectors, have created a financial disaster for ordinary people while funding the extravagant lifestyles of a gilded few in the City. The state is being driven to bankruptcy while privateers have stockpiled £750 billion in cash. 

Despite relentless right-wing propaganda the public mood has shifted. People are sick of this rip-off. Today trade unions spoke with one voice to reject the quick-buck mentality that drives plans to flog off our postal service. From tomorrow workers on the ground will add their voice to the debate as CWU ballots its members on proposals to boycott private mail firms' deliveries and oppose privatisation. 

Labour now has an opportunity to show its mettle by drawing a line in the sand on post, and seeking the return to public ownership of other key parts of the economy. That would mean rejecting the outright lie that private equals efficient, public equals inefficient. It means being bold and cocking a snook at the greedy financier types and their EU bedfellows feathering their nests at the taxpayers' expense. Cut them out of the loop and not only do our coffers get a boost, but we regain control over our common resources.

Do that and we have the strategic levers to generate an economic revival. The common-sense path really couldn't be clearer.

Founded On The Common Interest

Tom Gill writes:

French President Francois Hollande wants us to believe that further European integration would fix the crisis. This is a bad strategy, for there’s no social dimension to Europe, just neo-liberalism. In a translation from the original [without the accents, for some reason; but never mind], Eric and Guillaume Etievant Coquerel of the Left Party say France must stand up to Germany to change the future direction of the Old Continent. 

Francois Hollande has revived the old idea of ​​an economic government of the euro area, spearheading political union. This government “would meet every month around a real president appointed for a long period” The strategy of the president is clear: while the French people suffer from his neoliberal policies, he tries to compensate by assigning to more European integration the role of miracle cure. This process is not new. During the 1980s, Jacques Delors explained that Europe had to become political, in order to then become social. The same process occurred during the debates on the Maastricht Treaty: a single currency would accelerate the construction of a political Europe, which would then, finally, become social.

The whole history of European integration demonstrates the ineffectiveness of this method. The social objective is in a state of nothingness, while European integration progresses at the growing expense of popular sovereignty and for the benefit of the financial system and the markets. The failure of the social democratic strategy is clear. This strategy can be summarized as follows: accelerating the construction of the container and then establish a relationship of forces able to change the content. We see the result: it is social democracy that has changed, poisoned by neo-liberalism, and now interchangeable with the parties of the European right.

Hollande continues this apparently schizophrenic strategy of accumulating neo-liberal reforms while claiming to build a social Europe. And he is well acquainted with neo-liberal reforms. It is in fact the only policy area in which he is effective. He even proudly affirms his superiority over the Right in terms of competitiveness, the reduction of public spending and the reform of the labour market. If the mobilisation and political balance of power on the Left had not prevented it, Francois Hollande would be seeking to apply in year 2 of his Presidency the neoliberal policies that have already plunged the country into recession by the end of his first year at the Elysee.

So what remains of his social aspiration depends entirely on Europe. This is probably the worst aspect of his plan, because Angela Merkel will no doubt jump at the opportunity to accelerate political union and put in place a eurozone President. This would bring, in the wake of Maastricht, a new disaster. The principle is in fact the same: starting from a just demand – an international currency strong enough to offset the dollar and thus US power – France accepted  German terms for the single currency. This was to create an overvalued euro, too strong for the economies of most other European countries, and without the social and fiscal harmonisation to limit its effects. The system is, furthermore, locked in by the guardian of the monetarist temple: the European Central Bank, independent of political power, but not the financial system.

The results have been tragic: the European economies unable to cope with the crisis of 2008 have been plunged into recession and financial instability. The dominance of the United States remains unchanged. And one more step is to be taken in this direction with the transatlantic market. It will soon be in place, and establish the US rule of law, after a process of fifteen years of obscure negotiations between the European Commission and the U.S. Department of Commerce.

If Germany agrees to strengthen political governance in Europe, we will face an increased transfer of sovereignty, concentrating more power in Brussels and Frankfurt at the service of neo-liberal orthodoxy. Merkel offers, for example, plans to elect the President of the European Commission by universal suffrage, who would enjoy an incomparable power without, however, actually having to be accountable to 560 million European voters and national parliaments, condemned to a folkloric role.

This Orwellian vision of democracy will not lead to an upwards harmonisation in standards. Just to hear a few seconds of any ectoplasmic neo-liberal speech by Herman Van Rompuy, President of the European Council, and José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, and Merkel herself, is enough to be convinced of this.

If Hollande really wanted that tide that lifts all boats, he would make radically different choices. To transform the construction of Europe, he must first be convinced of the need for it to be founded on the common interest. And that Europe is not an end in itself, but a means to pursue human progress. Once this axiom is asserted, the fear of the crisis is swept away, and the brutal solutions to the crisis too.

Very Safe Now

Ariel Zirulnik writes:

In a home in a Shiite neighborhood in southern Beirut, images of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah share mantel and wall space with the Virgin Mary. The face of the revered Shiite militant leader appears on posters, a calendar, and in several photographs nestled amid those of Christian homeowner Randa Gholam's family members. Mr. Nasrallah is, Ms. Gholam asserts amid a string of superlatives, “a gift from God.”

Lebanon’s sectarian divides are legendary, and the residents of the historically Christian neighborhood of Harat Hreik, now a Hezbollah stronghold, remember well the civil war that set Beirut on fire. They were literally caught in the middle of some of the most vicious fighting, with factions firing shots off at one another from either side of their apartment buildings.

But in the intervening years, as Hezbollah cemented its control over the suburb of Dahiyeh, which includes Harat Hreik, the militant group has been an unexpected source of stability and even protection for the few remaining Christian families. Just a few blocks away from Nasrallah’s compound is St. Joseph’s Church, a vibrant church that Maronite Christians from across Beirut flock to every Sunday. “I feel honored to be here. They are honest. They are not extremists. It’s not like everyone describes,” Gholam says. “I can speak on behalf of all my Christian friends. They would say the same thing.”

The Christians living in Harat Hreik are a bit of an anomaly, to be sure. Christians represent a sizable population in Lebanon, though no census has been held in decades. And while Beirut’s neighborhoods are gradually becoming more integrated, they still divide largely along religious lines. The fragile peace is under deep strain as regional tensions swirl because of the conflict next door in Syria.

“In Hezbollah's early days, its creed was virulent,” and in the past, it may have been responsible for fanning some of those flames. But as Hezbollah gained power and joined the political system, that changed, says Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Endowment Middle East Center. “It doesn’t carry with it an anti-Christian strain anymore,” he says. “That’s almost entirely gone. It’s not in their rhetoric, it’s not in their creed.”

Recently, when the Shiite holiday of Ashura was approaching, the streets were choked with residents shopping and passing out sweets and blanketed with black banners commemorating the martyrdom of Hussein Ali. But Christians live openly here, and they describe Hezbollah as a tolerant group that has steadfastly supported their presence, even sending Christmas cards to Christian neighbors like Gholam. 

Gholam, who throws a party every year in honor of Nasrallah’s birthday and places a photo of him in her Christmas tree, is certainly an anomaly. But other Christian families also speak approvingly of their life under Hezbollah, especially when compared to its predecessor, Amal, which they say forced many Christian residents to sell their homes. In contrast, Hezbollah extended financial support to the Christian families when Dahiyeh needed rebuilding after the civil war and the 2006 war with Israel. 

Rony Khoury, a Maronite Christian who was born in Harat Hreik and still lives in the same apartment, says he feels comfortable drinking alcohol on his front porch, in full view of members of Hezbollah, and his wife feels no pressure to don a head scarf or follow other rules governing Muslim women’s attire. They have property in a predominantly Christian area of Beirut, but have no desire to move. “After Hezbollah came, we didn’t have any worries,” Mr. Khoury says, citing safe streets. “The security is No. 1 in the world. I leave my car open, I forget something outside…. It's very safe now, under Hezbollah.”

Only between 10 and 20 of the pre-civil war Christian families remain, out of the thousands who lived there before the fighting. While the numbers are low, Khoury insists that many would come back, if only they could afford it. But property values have climbed, and many of those who left can’t afford to move back. Of course, there are calculations behind Hezbollah's magnanimity. Hezbollah’s political alliance with the Lebanese Christian political party, the Free Patriotic Movement, is important to the group, and it “bends over backward to keep those relations comfortable,” Mr. Salem says.

It might also be a way to one-up Sunnis in Lebanon, with whom Shiites are constantly vying for dominance. “They pride themselves on saying they’re more tolerant, more open than Sunnis. In Lebanon, it’s a point of pride,” Salem says. Both Khoury and Gholam, as well as neighborhood Shiites who dropped by their homes, said there are far more issues with Sunnis. “Shiite extremists like Hezbollah, they come to our church” as a show of support, says Khoury. “But Sunni extremists, like Salafis, they kill me, they kill you.”

Ultimately, it is Hezbollah’s foreign backers dictating the mood in Harat Hreik. If it became politically expedient for Hezbollah to abandon its acceptance of Christian neighbors, Hezbollah would be compelled to make life difficult for them. “For Iran and Syria, their main backers, Hezbollah is mainly a strategic force against Israel. That’s the point – not creating an Islamic state or fighting a sectarian war,” Salem says. “Hezbollah is a very top-down organization. If Iran decrees something else, something else will happen.”

But that’s not something Gholam can fathom. “I will never even think about Hezbollah giving anyone a hard time. I can’t even think about answering that question,” she says.

The Left vs. The Liberal Media

In The American Conservative, Neil Clark writes:

It all started in July 2001 when two men, concerned about bias in the corporate news media in the UK, began to send out “media alerts” to a small number of family and friends. Twelve years on and Media Lens—the brainchild of writer David Edwards, a former manager in sales and marketing, and David Cromwell, a physicist by background—has established itself as the UK’s media watchdog. There’s no doubting the impact they have made. “Without their meticulous and humane analysis, the full gravity of the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan might have been consigned to bad journalism’s first draft of bad history,” is the verdict of veteran reporter and filmmaker John Pilger.

It’s been an eventful twelve years. In addition to the “debacles” of Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve had the (ongoing) menacing of Iran on account of an unproven nuclear-weapons program and Israeli military assaults on Lebanon in 2006 and on Gaza in 2008 and again in 2012. Add in the global financial crash of 2008, and there’s been plenty to keep the two Davids occupied.

David Cromwell’s new book, Why Are We The Good Guys?, discusses these events and the work that he and Edwards have done to counter the “elite-friendly value assumptions and judgements” that characterize their coverage in Britain. Although he is clearly a man of the left—his working-class childhood was an “interesting mix of Catholic and Communist” influences—Cromwell’s not one to be deceived by labels, an important skill to possess in an age when wars are sold as “humanitarian interventions” to gain support from liberals.

Media Lens has been outspoken, when the need arises, in its critique of so-called liberal-left media. Many on the British center-left give the BBC a free pass because they have swallowed the line that the organization is somehow “left-wing.” Yet Cromwell and Edwards have shown that when it comes to propagandizing for illegal wars and peddling establishment views, the BBC has at least as bad a record as commercial news networks.

When I caught up with David to talk to him about his new book, the BBC was in the middle of what has been described by some as the biggest crisis in its 90-year history: the resignation of its Director-General and other bigwigs after the fallout from a “Newsnight” program on child abuse. But while heads rolled over the state-owned broadcaster getting allegations wrong on just one program, Cromwell points out that the BBC was never held accountable for the role it played in the lead up to the Iraq War.

“There was no such pressure for senior BBC staff to go over the broadcaster’s systemic failure to challenge US-UK propaganda over Iraq’s non-existent WMD. This media failure paved the way towards war in Iraq and the subsequent brutal and bloody occupation. Instead of responsible public-service journalism, BBC News provides a reliable conduit for government propaganda, most notably the state’s supposedly benign intentions in foreign wars and international relations. That is the daily news diet we are all spoon-fed.”

No such presumption of good faith applies when journalists discuss the actions of countries that don’t toe the Washington line. “It is, of course, fine for journalists in the West to point to the crimes of official enemies and to mock them for their transparent propaganda efforts. Thus, the BBC’s Emily Maitlis was able to introduce the flagship television program ‘Newsnight’ with a touch of sardonic wit: ‘Hello, good evening. The Russians are calling it a “peace enforcement operation.” It’s the kind of Newspeak that would make George Orwell proud.’

“Maitlis was referring to the invasion of Russian forces into the Georgian province of South Ossetia in August 2008. By contrast, imagine a BBC presenter referring skeptically to the government’s claim of a ‘peace enforcement operation’ for the West’s invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya and describing such language as ‘the kind of newspeak that would make George Orwell proud.’ It just would not happen.”

I ask Cromwell how he would respond to those who say that Media Lens should devote all its energies on attacking neocon über-hawks rather than criticizing the liberal media, which might agree with the group’s standpoints, say, 70 percent of the time. “Media Lens has indeed spent more time analyzing the liberal media than right-wing outlets. Why? Because the liberal media is often regarded as the outlets where the most progressive and the most challenging views can be seen and heard. If you like, it’s one end of the acceptable spectrum of news and views. But if even here there are severe limits on permissible challenges to state-corporate power, what does that say about society generally? It’s like a litmus test for dissent.”

Cromwell believes that the role of the media in promoting the doctrine of “liberal interventionism” has been absolutely crucial. “If the public was better informed, and not so often misled by those in power, there would likely be a stronger rein on the governing elite. But it’s not happening. A major reason for this is that the corporate media acts as an echo chamber and amplifier of government propaganda. Even when challenged, senior journalists say that their role is to report what those in power say and do—even what they ‘think.’

“For example, when the BBC’s Nick Robinson was the ITN political editor, he wrote of the war in Iraq:

In the run-up to the conflict, I and many of my colleagues, were bombarded with complaints that we were acting as mouthpieces for Mr Blair. Why, the complainants demanded to know, did we report without question his warning that Saddam was a threat? Hadn’t we read what Scott Ritter had said or Hans Blix? I always replied in the same way. It was my job to report what those in power were doing or thinking… . That is all someone in my sort of job can do.

“Robinson performs the same compliant role today as political editor for the BBC,” Cromwell says.

In the ’90s we saw an informal alliance formed between neoconservatives and progressives united behind their support for “liberal intervention.” I ask Cromwell if he thinks that a similar alliance can be formed between the antiwar left and the antiwar right. “I’d be wary of an overt alliance with anyone, right-wing or otherwise, who espouses other views that I might find distasteful. But certainly traditional conservatives should be—and often are—vehemently opposed to what goes by the benign-sounding term ‘neo-liberalism,’ which I unpack in the book.”

One of the most riveting chapters in Cromwell’s book is called “Beyond Indifference,” in which he talks about his philosophical influences. He concludes—rather like Aldous Huxley—that if we do want to “free ourselves” and live better lives, it all starts with undertaking “small acts of kindness for others.” And in contrast, he writes,

Violence feeds on violence, as wise people have known for thousands of years. For example, if brutal state repression is met by violence from some elements of society, it provides an excuse for state forces to ramp up fire-power and crush dissent with even more brutal and widespread violence. The current state of Permanent War can only be ended by people coming together peacefully to overcome state power.

Cromwell certainly thinks that in challenging elite state propaganda we’re in a better position now than we were when Media Lens began in 2001. “One positive thing I’ve noticed is that more people are challenging the media, at least judging by the messages posted on our board and Facebook page, the emails we get and the tweets we receive. Often, even before we’ve worked up a media alert, we’ve been beaten to it by our readers—although, to be fair to ourselves, we do typically wait a few days or longer to see how an event is being played out in the media. Ideally, I would hope that in five years’ time there would be less need for Media Lens to be on the internet ‘haranguing’ and ‘vilifying’ journalists, as skeptics and opponents sometimes say! And surely by ten years from now I can be happily retired and pottering about in a garden shed. Preferably my own and not some random neighbor’s.”

Happy Saint Helena Day

God Save The Queen.

Human Life, Human Rights and Human Dignity

Madeleine Teahan writes:

When Chen Guangcheng entered the Grand Committee Room in the House of Commons last night, the whole room rose to its feet and applauded. He was there to receive the Westminster Award for the Promotion of Human Life, Human Rights and Human Dignity. But first he told his story through his interpreter.

Chen, the blind Chinese human rights activist who escaped house arrest last year, said that those lucky enough to live in a liberal democracy were residing in a kind of flower house where they gradually take for granted the beautiful aroma. But for the oppressed people of China, “the state can rob you of your life and your body,” he told us.

Most Catholics know that Chen has been instrumental in exposing the brutal implementation of the one-child policy in China, which has resulted in coercive abortions and forced sterilisation. But his first-hand testimony really illuminated the reality of the authorities’ barbarism – so much so, that I saw tears in the eyes of grown men who listened in horror.

Chen’s interpreter struggled through tears to translate Chen’s story of a woman who was arrested and pleaded on her knees to be allowed to go and feed her three-year-old child before she was detained. Her request was ignored and the toddler, despite attempts to break through the doors and windows of her house, leaving tiny footprints of blood, eventually collapsed from exhaustion and lay starving to death. She was found 21 days later when the neighbours noticed the rotting stench coming from the nearby house.

Chen said that in his city alone in one year some 120,000 to 130,000 forced abortions and sterilisations have occurred. Some of these abortions took place when the mother was at term. Many of the family members of the women involved were then tortured and intimidated by the Chinese authorities. Chen was quick to emphasise that these abortions were not voluntary. Chen is not just champion of the unborn child; he is also a fierce champion of women’s rights and dignity.

Thank God, the moment it emerged that sex-selective abortions were taking place here in Britain prominent feminists angrily denounced the practice. They appeared on Radio 4, criticising the coercion which some pregnant women must feel if they resort to aborting their baby just because she’s a girl. They were delighted that the Health Secretary launched an investigation into these alleged practices.

At least I am sure deep down they were. Their deafening silence was probably just stunned horror.

The Party As A Whole

Len McCluskey writes:

You report that Peter Mandelson is accusing my union, Unite, of "manipulating selection procedures" in the Labour party, which "stores up danger for a future Labour government" (Labour warned on selection panel procedures, 13 May).

This does no service to Labour democracy or the facts. I have no axe to grind with Lord Mandelson. His second stint at the business department under the Labour government was marked by fresh thinking about industrial policy, which I wish he had had the opportunity to develop; and he seems more willing than some to acknowledge that the pre-2008 economic model was flawed.

But now he appears rattled that Blairite true believers are not winning every Labour nomination. Your report does not have him alleging any breach of party rules or procedural abuses, perhaps because there are none. Unite's aim is simple – to recruit members to the party (welcome, I would have thought) and then encourage them to endorse union-supported candidates in one member-one vote selections. A sinister construction is put on this – "selections are being run by a cabal of union members", according to your report. This is, to say the least, an irony. Many serving Labour MPs were parachuted into constituencies at the request of leading members of the last Labour cabinet, including Mandelson himself.

Dishing out seats on the basis of personal connections bears a closer resemblance to the rotten borough system before 1832 than it does to modern democratic procedures, and it also helps keep politics as the preserve of a socially restricted elite. Mandelson also appears untroubled that Lord Sainsbury's vast wealth, channelled through the Progress organisation, has been used to give particular candidates, invariably on the right [but I'm in it now...], an advantage in Labour selections.

Mandelson argues, correctly, that it is "wrong to conflate trade unionists and the working classes", although the overlap is hard to miss. I don't conceal that I want to see more Labour MPs supporting the sort of policies developed by Unite and other trade unions, regardless of their personal backgrounds. But Labour MPs look less and less like the people they seek to represent. The big strides made in securing more women Labour MPs have also, unfortunately, been paralleled by a decline in those from working-class backgrounds. Mandelson has no proposals to address this.

This is really an argument about politics, not procedure. Mandelson is probably intensely relaxed about cutting democratic corners if it means more "New Labour" special advisers and the like on the green benches, but utterly opposed to the normal workings of Labour democracy if it means leftwing or trade union candidates being chosen.

Let's have the political debate instead. I am confident that most potential Labour voters want to see both a more diverse Labour party in parliament, and also a Labour government radically different from the last one.

Finally, I object strongly to his insinuation that union-backed MPs might be loyal not "to the party as a whole", but "a section of it". Trade unionists have always been Labour loyalists. Rightwing MPs, not unions, split Labour in 1931 and 1981, just as it was New Labour parliamentarians who fuelled the debilitating Blair-Brown factionalism that so weakened the most recent Labour government, as Mandelson surely knows.

Net Present Value, Indeed

Michael Burke writes:

There are now 403 million reasons why Royal Mail should not be privatised. Financial results for Royal Mail just announced show that operating profits in the latest 52 weeks jumped to £403m, from £105m in the previous year. The government has signalled it intends to press ahead with a deeply unpopular privatisation even though Royal Mail achieved this return to profitability while remaining in the public sector.

All sides are agreed that the company will need to invest. Royal Mail faces the threat of a declining market as various forms of electronic messaging replace old-fashioned letters. But it also faces an opportunity in the form of a fast-growing parcels business, driven by the rise in internet retailing and home delivery. Investment is needed to manage the efficient decline of the letters business while using its unrivalled network to offer a market-leading parcels business.

Against all logic, the government insists that the capital required for investment must come from the private sector, and that this means Royal Mail must be sold off. But economists, from Adam Smith onwards, have recognised that the government can borrow more cheaply than private companies. The same is true today. Interest rates charged to government are about half of those charged even on highly rated company debt. Of course, in the private sector Royal Mail would also have to pay out dividends to shareholders. This has the effect of both increasing the costs of funds for and reducing the amount available for investment.

Royal Mail could also borrow on its own account at very low interest rates because it is implicitly guaranteed by the state, something which would not be available after privatisation. State sector companies all across Europe are allowed to borrow very cheaply because of their links to government, including banks, railways, health care providers and, yes, postal services.

The government argument that privatisation is necessary because its borrowing is needed to fund spending on services such as the NHS is false. Royal Mail could borrow more cheaply, more efficiently, on its own account if it remains in the public sector. Far from being a drain on scarce resources, Royal Mail could make a contribution to boosting growth and improving government finances.

Any company producing operating profits of over £400m can easily generate its own funds for investment and borrow for expansion. Not a penny of government borrowing would be required. It is the fall in investment which accounts for the slump in the British economy and Royal Mail could make its own contribution to rectifying that. In addition, although the government tries very hard to disguise this fact, investment by the public sector can also generate returns, just as it can in the private sector.

Ministers talk about selling it off – for £2bn to £3bn. In reality, a business generating profits on this scale is worth vastly more to government than that. Taxpayers, who supported Royal Mail through difficult times with subsidies, would be doubly ripped off.

Financial market operators can calculate the real value of Royal Mail using net present value. NPV is the current value of all future cashflows. For a publicly owned body, the calculation is straightforward. At current long-term interest rates, how much would the government have to borrow to yield £400m a year? With interest rates at 2% to 2.5% the answer is between £16bn and £20bn.

The proposed sell-off of Royal Mail has nothing to do with greater efficiency or boosting investment. Privatisation would crimp investment and the higher costs of borrowing would be extremely inefficient. Instead, it offers the opportunity to make a killing by the private sector that motivates this government, along with George Osborne's fiddles and schemes to pretend the deficit is falling.

Royal Mail is growing and investing while it remains in the public sector. Let it stay that way.

Bin The Bill

Like the privatisation of the Royal Mail, it will never pass the House of Lords, which might (probably won't, but might) refuse it a Second Reading altogether. Like the privatisation of the Royal Mail, no one will weep when it doesn't. Unlike the privatisation of the Royal Mail, even this Government would never invoke the Parliament Act in order to force it through.

But even so. After a day of some of the most farcical machinations in recent memory, perhaps most notable for the alliance that the present Labour front bench and Whips' Office were seriously and publicly considering with people such as Sir Gerald Howarth against people such as Margot James, it is time to face the fact that Third Reading is not a vote on a principle. It is a vote strictly on a text.

The text of this Bill is no better now than it was at Second Reading. Those who abstained while known to be opposed, and in some cases (Stephen Timms) after having said so forcefully in the debate, now have no option but to vote against. Think of Roger Godsiff, Gavin Shuker and others.

The same goes for the goodly number, especially on the Labour benches, of those who abstained, or even voted in favour of Second Reading, in the hope of bringing related issues to the floor of the House, or that the final Bill would be a better-constructed piece of legislation, the view of David Blunkett.

Several people, especially Lib Dems and including that party's Deputy Leader and its President, voted yesterday for unsuccessful amendments without which the Bill proceeds to Third Reading later today. How can they vote for Third Reading with those amendments not incorporated into the Bill?

Dog's Breakfast Bills relating to the composition of the House of Lords and to the boundaries for elections to the House of Commons have, mercifully, been withdrawn. But the Government is determined to push this one. There is only one thing to do.

A Full Review of Civil Partnerships

Not a moment before time.

Never having needed to be consummated, they ought not to be confined to unrelated same-sex couples, or even to unrelated couples generally.

Meanwhile, there is the anarcho-capitalist hostility to marriage in full view. By the time that what was once the New Right is finished, then, if we let it happen, there will be nothing but civil partnership as a legal arrangement, and marriage will be gone.

They have wanted this, entirely openly, for 40 years. And they now have one party which really is founded purely on those principles, plus another which has managed to convince itself that it is, thereby amounting to the same thing.

Remember, Labour never attempted to do any of this, and has never threatened for one second to impose the Whip when anyone else did. It should, however, whip the uncoupling of civil partnerships from homosexuality-without-sex.

Stockton Stock Down

When James Wharton stages his Canute-like attempt to prevent Labour from taking back Stockton South, then that party ought to put down an amendment declining to give the Daft Bill a Second Reading in view of its eschatological timetable (except that the eschaton might come at any moment, and will certainly come at some moment), leading to its entire failure to address immediately pressing concerns such as:

- The total failure of any "Social Europe" ever to save a single job, service, benefit or amenity;

- The EU's imposition of economic austerity;

- The long, and increasingly accelerated, creation of a militarised EU waging global wars of "liberal intervention" while sustaining a vast military-industrial complex selling arms to all and sundry;

- The refusal of the Council of Ministers to legislate in public and to publish an Official Report akin to Hansard;

- The presence in the Council of Ministers and in the European Parliament of all manner of extremist and politically undesirable legislators;

- The Common Agricultural Policy;

- The Common Fisheries Policy;

- EU control of industrial and regional policy;

- The moves towards a "free trade" agreement between the EU and the United States, to the ruination of jobs, workers' rights, consumer protection and environmental responsibility on two continents inhabited by many hundreds of millions of people;

- Social dumping;

- The drastic restrictions of civil liberties necessary in order to make possible the borderless Europe that has always been a stated aim of the EU;
- The centrality of EU law to the proposed privatisation of the Royal Mail;

- The illegality under EU law of any renationalisation of the utilities or of the railways once they have been privatised, although there is no obligation to privatise them in the first place, with the preposterous and pernicious consequence that British railways and utilities can be and are State-owned, just so long as the State in question is not the British State, while the least subsidised railway line in Great Britain has to be returned to the private sector from which it has already had to be rescued twice;
- The impossibility under EU law of using State aid to support two domestic sources of energy, so that it is impossible for this country both to have a nuclear power industry and to exploit our vast resources of coal;
- The abject incompetence of David Cameron in failing to deliver a real terms reduction in the United Kingdom's contribution to the EU Budget at this time of austerity, as explicitly required by a resolution of the House of Commons; and

- The role of EU competition law in the ongoing dismantlement of the National Health Service in England.

There are more. But those ought to be enough to be getting on with. A Second Reading Amendment must not be too long. In this case, though, it all too easily could be.

However, would the media pay even so much as the tiniest attention to it? Even if it were passed? Ed Miliband ought to make it clear that if this were not passed, then Labour would vote in both Lobbies on the unamended Second Reading motion, while the Whip would be withdrawn from anyone who voted in only one of them.

Or would the media just carry on giving coverage to Nigel and Nadine for a laugh? Dare we hope that Nigel and Nadine might be asked what it was about the EU to which they could possibly object? A polite way of asking whether or not they knew even so much as the first thing about politics. Or, indeed, whether or not the media did.

There is only one way to find out.

Postliberalism's Other

Perhaps the American spellings, and the pricing in dollars, account for this:

For more than three decades, Melanie Phillips has served as Britain’s political conscience. Followed by members of the Royal Family as well as by homemakers, ubiquitous on radio and television as well as in the print media, Melanie Phillips is widely regarded as an indispensable force for good in the battle to restore western civilization.

Melanie Phillips’s relationship with her millions of followers has always been conducted through traditional media outlets, such as the BBC, the Daily Mail and the Guardian. Now, she is reaching out beyond broadcasting and the world of print to connect directly with her many supporters.

Asked why she had launched her own media company, Melanie Phillips said: “Speaking truth to power, standing up for the little guy and giving voice to those on the decent, commonsense, middle ground who find themselves marginalized by the gatekeepers of public discourse. That’s the mission of my new venture.”

No, no, Melanie, don’t you sell yourself short with English reticence.

However, her book list looks rather good, and I might very well buy some of the titles on it. Frederic Raphael’s J. Robert Oppenheimer, For Example: The Drama of the Eternal Outsider looks utterly fascinating. Nor custom stale his infinite variety.

Phillips is an important voice on issues such as drugs and education, and even I, in the most profound disagreement with her about the neoconservative war agenda and its assault on civil liberties at home, have long detected a certain misogyny and anti-Semitism in the sheer ferocity of the abuse to which she is subjected. Gentile men who are just as wrong on those issues rarely receive anything comparable. Sometimes. But rarely.

Several other commentators could usefully branch out in this way. Owen Jones, perhaps. Richard Littlejohn. Nick Cohen, Polly Toynbee. Simon Heffer. Peter Hitchens. Rod Liddle. Katie Price. Seriously. I have seen her column a couple of times, and it is no wonder that she was brought in to replace Toby Young, as we were splendidly reminded by the running order on last week’s This Week. I still wish that Maurice Glasman had taken the column before it was offered to Young, though. Imagine his book list, each with an introduction by him.

As for the comical merchandise, what might that of certain other bastions of nominally British neoconservatism look like, and why? That of Oliver Kamm, say? Or of Douglas Murray? Or of David Aaronovitch? Or of Con Coughlin? Or, indeed, of Toby Young? In the case of Damian Thompson, it goes without saying that there would have to be cupcakes.

Private Eye is already advertising a Melanie Phillips sat nav. It cannot make left turns, and it does not recognise Palestine. But one wonders what the American purchasers of Melanie Phillips umbrellas, T-shirts and coffee (note, not tea) mugs would make of some of the unretracted views of their heroine. She is in principle in favour of a Palestinian State, and although she maintains that they are within their rights, she disapproves of the Israeli settlers on the West Bank. She decries the evisceration of civil society during the 1980s.

But in view of the Messianic language above, and following Phillips’s identification of any and everything on the neoconservative hate list as an expression of anti-Semitism, perhaps we shall see the conversion of neoconservatives to some sort of Judaism, identifying the philosophical, theological and ethical resources of Judaism as providing the necessary weapons against such things. Those who declared themselves Jews in order to provide a spiritual or ritual framework for their neoconservatism would be most unlikely to trouble the Orthodox.

Yet they and the average Reform rabbi or congregant would hardly be each other’s obvious best fits, either; on the contrary, although it still struggles to be heard, there is at present a quiet revival of Reform Judaism’s classical definition of Jews as a religious community rather than as an ethnic group, and of its classical rejection of any return to Palestine as surely as of any restoration of animal sacrifice. Orthodox Judaism’s classical position is that Zionism is a blasphemous pre-emption of the Messiah.

So, without necessarily involving the lady personally, will we be seeing new, Phillipsian synagogues springing up? We are about due some fresh expressions of the entrepreneurial popular religious revival that is very much a recurring theme in our history. Might this be one of them? Then again, though, if at all, then only in America?

Syria Has No Reason To Use Chemical Weapons

Patrick Cockburn writes:

'I am not afraid of anything except for God and poison gas," said an Iraqi officer who had fought in the Iran-Iraq war. "It's like a ghost. You have no defence against it." Though not a target of poison gas as a member of the army using it, he knew what it did to its victims.

Poison gas is a terrifying weapon. People are still dying in Iran from the effects of ingesting it a quarter of a century ago. It is one of the few weapons to be banned with partial success between its first use on a mass scale in the First World War and again by Saddam Hussein with even greater intensity against Iranians and Kurds in the 1980s.

It is right, therefore, that the alleged attack by the Syrian armed forces using chemical weapons against Saraqeb, a rebel-held town south-west of Aleppo on 29 April, should be carefully investigated. Doctors told the BBC's Ian Pannell that after an artillery bombardment they treated eight people with breathing problems, some of whom were vomiting and others who had constricted pupils.

One woman named Maryam Khatib later died. Her son Mohammed said: "It was a horrible, suffocating smell. You couldn't breathe at all. You'd feel like you were dead. I couldn't see anything for three or four days." Videos taken by local people show a helicopter dropping an object which appears to leave a trail of white vapour.

My experience of trying to report allegations of the deployment or use of such weapons over the years makes me cautious. Local people, including local doctors, are often sincerely convinced that some exotic weapon has been used against them, but they may not have past experience of either conventional or chemical attack.

For instance, doctors in Fallujah west of Baghdad suspect that non-conventional weapons must have been used against the city when it was stormed by US forces in November 2004. This might explain why so many malformed babies have been born since. It is impossible not to sympathise or suppress a feeling of rage over the sufferings of these people.

But, in blaming non-conventional weapons, people may underestimate what conventional munitions can do. In two weeks' fighting in Fallujah in 2004, US marine artillery units fired an average of 379 high-explosive 155mm shells a day into this small city. In addition, American jets flying overhead dropped 318 bombs and, together with helicopters, fired 391 rockets and missiles.

At the time, the Iraqi government of Iyad Allawi made the unlikely claim that just 200 buildings in Fallujah had been destroyed or damaged. A recently published book, The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq from George W Bush to Barack Obama by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, from which the above figures are taken, reveals that the US marines "estimated that out of about 50,000 residences in the city, their operations had destroyed between 7,000 and 10,000, as well as 60 mosques". Perhaps this vastly excessive use of firepower is sufficient explanation for the appalling birth defects.

Allegations about the use of poison gas in Syria are made under the shadow of the notoriously false claims about Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction made to justify the Iraq war. Not surprisingly, this has made the public everywhere in the world dubious about stories about the possession or use of WMD being used to hoodwink them into supporting another war.

Of course, it is much against the interests of the Syrian government to use chemical weapons because this might provoke foreign military intervention. The Syrian army has no need to use it as a terror weapon because artillery, aerial bombardment and death squads are quite enough to frighten people into taking flight. There are already 1.5 million refugees outside the country.

Journalists bear a large measure of responsibility for giving credence to the stories peddled by Iraqi defectors, intelligence services and government about Saddam's WMD. In that case, it should have been self-evident that Iraqi defectors with juicy stories, and the opposition parties that promoted them, wanted to tempt the US into military action against Saddam. When it comes to chemical weapons, the Syrian opposition has similar and wholly understandable motives.

As for the credibility of Western government claims about WMD, it is worth recalling that they tolerated Saddam using poison gas on a mass scale. And they did more than just turn a blind eye. Joost Hiltermann, in his book A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq and the Gassing of Halabja, writes that Western powers "sent repeated signals to Iraq that the regime could continue, and even escalate, chemical weapons use – which it did, with the Halabja attack [when thousands of Kurdish civilians died] as climax".

No Law For The Rich

Nick Cohen writes:

On the edge of Rugeley stands Amazon's largest distribution centre in Britain. Life for the workers who trudge around the 800,000 sq ft warehouse is not as bad as it was for the men who once worked in the pits of the Staffordshire coalfield, but that is not saying much. They must carry satnavs, which direct their movements round the stacks and flash warnings from managers to stop dawdling or chatting with colleagues. Britain being the way it is, they have no job security.

Trade unionists call the Amazon shed a "slave camp". But whatever arguments they have with Amazon's management, one point should be beyond dispute – Rugeley is in Britain. British customers send Amazon their money. British workers package their goods and send them off in vans along roads built and maintained by the British taxpayer.

If workers steal – and before they can go home or visit the canteen, they must walk through airport-style security scanners to prove they have not – Amazon will call on the taxpayer-funded police to arrest them and the taxpayer-funded criminal justice system to prosecute them. Admittedly, Amazon's buyers who supply the stock are based in Slough rather than Rugeley. But the last time I looked Slough was in Britain too.

Amazon.co.uk is a UK company. It has to be. An online retailer cannot relocate offshore. It needs local distribution centres to service local markets, otherwise the costs of moving its stock would be ruinously expensive.

Yet Amazon pays just £3.2m tax on sales of £4.2bn because the Revenue allows it to get away with arguing that it should be taxed in Luxembourg. The same lack of connection between corporate tax status and commercial reality applies to Starbucks, Google, Vodafone, Goldman Sachs and every other company the British state allows to dodge tax.

The traditional defence that companies just take advantage of legal loopholes and you would "do the same in their position" falls apart in a country where the tax regime defies the evidence of our eyes. Leaving all other considerations aside, you will never be "in their position".

If you want to understand any society, look at its tax system. If one man or a clique can tax at will, you can conclude the society is a dictatorship or oligarchy. If you have reasonably progressive and universal taxes, you can assume it is a modern democracy.

Britain has elements of democratic taxation. The same rules on occasion apply to everyone. But other parts of the system resemble the ancien régime of pre-revolutionary France. Only in our case the privileged estates the government exempts from taxation are the corporations rather than the aristocracy and the church.

For a generation, politicians have extended exemptions by selling Britain as a country where big businesses would be lightly taxed. When I put it like this, I make the policy sound too cool and rational. The process was far more emotional than that.

Tycoons enchanted politicians. They convinced them that their interest and the national interest were as one. So deep was the ideological capture of the top of the British state that corporations have not on the whole had to corrupt ministers.

No one has accused Gordon Brown of taking bribes, to quote the most egregious example. But in his abject period as chancellor, Brown ensured that his friends in private equity were taxed at a lower rate than their cleaners. One might have thought that the crash of 2008 would have discredited the notion that all will be well if we let capitalism run riot.

Not a bit of it. George Osborne invites multinationals to advise him on how to tax multinationals. At their behest, he allows companies to move money to tax havens and then deducts the costs of their shady transactions from their British tax liabilities.

The result of two decades of special treatment for vested interests can be summarised in one statistic. Between 1999 and 2011, British companies' profits increased by 58% but revenues from corporation tax increased by just 5%.

To understand the scale of the avoidance, it is not enough to look at the permissive laws, however. Richard Brooks's The Great Tax Robbery is close to being this year's indispensable book because, as a former tax inspector turned Private Eye journalist, he has the material to show how the wealthy are exempt from what few laws apply to them.

"Dear Saddam," ran a spoof letter doing the rounds of the Revenue in the run-up to the Iraq war, "we are trialling a new weapons inspection regime modelled on the Inland Revenue's approach to large corporate taxation. All you have to do is tell us you don't have any and we'll go away."

One inspector said in his bitter farewell speech that he once thought that the Revenue's advertising slogan "tax doesn't have to be taxing" was a bad pun. "Now I realise that for big business it meant what was said on the tin."

British politicians and a series of negligent and doltish managers ordered the Revenue to back away from big business. In his justifiably notorious speech to the Confederation of British Industry in 2005, everyone remembers Gordon Brown promising "light-touch" regulation for a financial services industry that was already careering towards bankruptcy. We forget that he went on to say that he would apply a light touch to "the administration of tax" for big business as well.

The Revenue itself promises corporations that, rather than doing its job and collecting monies owed, it will follow a "customer-focused supportive and enabling approach". Or as Dave Hartnett, the former permanent secretary for tax, who cut sweetheart deals with Vodafone and Goldman Sachs, explained it in 2010, Britain had a "non-confrontational" approach.

I have written before that the willingness of New Labour, the Tories and the Revenue's senior managers to pursue the working and middle classes while exempting powerful corporations would turn the British into Italians. We would start to believe that tax evasion was respectable. We would view a state that hit the ordinary man and woman while sparing big business as immoral and illegitimate. That moment is drawing closer.

The old complaint that there is one law for the rich and another for the rest does not do justice to the debasement of public authority in Britain. When it comes to tax, too often there is no law for the rich whatsoever.

Do The Right Thing

Owen Jones writes:

Eric Schmidt is an ambitious sort of bloke. The chairman of Google says his tax-avoiding company “has always aspired to do the right thing.” Well, I’ve always aspired to go the gym three times a week, learn Spanish and play the guitar. None of these things are going to happen, of course.

This is the scandal that currently happens in modern Britain. While low-paid and disabled people are having their state support shredded – no money left, you see – corporate giants like Google are allowed to get away with paying a pittance.

From 2007 onwards, the company made £11.9bn worth of revenues in Britain, but gave the taxman only around £10m in corporation tax. Here’s their entirely legal scam: their British sales are registered in Ireland, meaning they technically don’t have to cough up here. Clever, eh?

Google aren’t the only company gifted with an infinite supply of smugness courtesy of a slick team of accountants and lawyers. Amazon.co.uk is British: the clue is in the name. Yet because it directs its sales through Luxembourg, it has paid just £2.4m tax on sales worth £4.2bn.

Starbucks use all sort of clever tricks: routing profits through Switzerland, using foreign entities to make it look as if they’re not making any profits in Britain. Ingenious, really. Or, as Margaret Hodges, the crusading chair of the Public Accounts Committee, might put it, “devious” and “unethical”.

The truth is, life becomes a lot cheaper when you are rich. The average taxpayer or small business cannot afford an army of accountants to systematically exploit every possible loophole to divert their profits to Bermuda or Ireland.

And while the 0.7 per cent of social security spending lost to fraud costs the taxpayer £1.2bn, tax justice pioneer and chartered accountant Richard Murphy estimates avoidance is worth £25bn a year. Guess which one the state cracks down on without mercy or hesitation?

Ah – an objector might say – but benefit fraud is illegal, and there is nothing law-breaking about tax avoidance. This is of course the point. The law is rigged in favour of the wealthy: the state is at the service of rich types who don’t fancy paying their taxes.

Accountancy firms like PricewaterhouseCooper and Deloitte get their teams seconded to the Treasury, help draw up tax laws, then go off and give advice to multinational companies on how to get around legislation they’ve helped create. Multimillion-pound lobbyists put pressure on policy makers. No such assistance for the poor, though. Get 50 quid cash in hand when you’re claiming benefits, and it’s game over.

A few years ago, the issue of tax avoidance languished on the fringes: it was something wonks and geeks worried about. Everyone is now talking about it because an inspirational motley crew of activists called UK Uncut started occupying shops and banks who were guilty of scamming the taxpayer.

They stand in Britain’s fine tradition of peaceful civil disobedience, and show it is not just right-wing fronts like the Taxpayers’ Alliance who can create political space – the left can do it, too, with a bit of nous. They helped draw attention to the likes of Richard Murphy, who has drawn up suggested detailed legislation to crack down on the avoiders. Ed Miliband is now pledging an offensive against tax avoidance. Protest works.

This month, UK Uncut’s legal team dragged HMRC to court over a sweetheart deal with Goldman Sachs. It was unlikely they would ever have won – a ruling against HMRC’s legal responsibility for collecting taxes would have been stunning – but the case was damning and revealing.

It was “not a glorious episode in the history of the Revenue”, the judge ruled, because it was shrouded in secrecy and lacked proper legal approval. Dave Hartnett, then the permanent secretary for tax, took the  “potential embarrassment” to George Osborne into account. UK Uncut have helped expose the murky relationship between corporate titans and the British state.

The arrogance of wealth tax avoiders comes from being drunk on three decades of free market triumphalism. “They will all flee if they are taxed properly”, or so the blackmail goes. But research suggests that wealthy individuals do not emigrate en masse when they pay a fairer share. Tax flight “is almost entirely bogus – it’s a myth,” says Jon Shure, the director of state fiscal studies at Washington’s Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

“I don’t hear about many billionaires moving to Moscow,” says former US Federal Reserve economist of low-tax Russia. And it is laughable to think big companies will abandon a lucrative market like Britain if they have to pay taxes: and if the likes of Starbucks do, other taxpaying competitors will fill the vacuum.

Then there is an arrogant attitude of “well, we employ people, don’t we?” Large companies appear to regard themselves as charities, and paying tax is an act of corporate generosity. But large companies are dependent on the state.

As economist Ha-Joon Chang points out, their property rights are defended by the state, capping the downside risk for investors and stopping their ideas and products being ripped off. They depend on government-funded research and development. The internet itself was a public sector creation, invented at taxpayers’ expense: you’d think Google might be a bit more grateful.

There is the infrastructure all companies depend on: like having roads and railways. They need a workforce educated by state-provided schools and universities, and kept healthy by the health  service. The banks they rely on were rescued by the taxpayer.

Because companies are unwilling to pay their workers proper wages, the state steps in to subsidise them through tax credits, housing benefit, and so on. Tax avoiders expect to benefit from corporate welfare but pay nothing in, yet no one calls them “scroungers”.

Perhaps we should take Schmidt’s “aspiration” to do the right thing at face value. But if Mr Schmidt is anything like me, he might need a bit of outside assistance to achieve his aspirations. So, how about we legislate to crack down on all forms of tax avoidance: like passing the General Anti-Tax Avoidance Bill, drawn up by Richard Murphy and introduced by Labour MP Michael Meacher.

It’s for your own good, Mr Schmidt. And who knows. Those undoubted occasional pangs of guilt at benefiting from state largesse and paying so little back may even subside.

"Beg, Steal Or Borrow"?

Sounds like Maurice, all right. Especially the bit about how, "It just came to me suddenly."

But this is not evidence of any plot against Ed Balls. And replace him with whom, exactly? (Likewise, with David Miliband gone, there is no longer any Blairite alternative Leader.)

No, to an extent which can be positively frustrating at times, Maurice is not a plotter. That is just not his style. Why do you think that there are no Blue Labour candidates, as such, for parliamentary selection, or for the National Executive Committee?

Balls is an important voice both on the economy against the Worst Chancellor Ever, and, not unrelatedly, on the EU. But he and Yvette Cooper are still too wedded, so to speak, to the Blairite agenda against civil liberties. They do need to be kept in check.

Maurice is at least as good as anyone to do that. But don't tell him so, or he would stop doing it.

Put Away Childish Things

Back in the days when New Labour was led by Tony Blair and the other lot was led by Michael Howard, deeply disillusioned former Cabinet Ministers from both sides implored me not to write, even in jest, that our most unaccomplished 16-year-olds should be conscripted directly into the Israeli Defence Force, on the grounds that, "if the wrong person reads that, then it will happen." They were not joking. 

But Sir Nick Harvey now proposes to end the practice of recruiting boy soldiers, which for some reason we assume the right to carry on having, just as we assume the right to retain weapons of mass destruction and even to acquire more of them, in both cases wondering why we are not taken seriously on the matter.

Colonel Tim Collins is scornful, including in the following terms: "It is true that our European allies have ceased to recruit under-18s, but they don’t have armies – they have aggressive camping organisations that have no expeditionary capability." That will come as news in Francophone Africa, among other places.

But the French, among other "European allies", not to say the Canadians, were right all along about Iraq. It is no surprise that Colonel Collins cannot forgive them for that. His reputation depends on a disastrous war which  turned out to have been based on an entirely false prospectus and which has made the country in question even worse off than it was before. It is beyond me why anyone would pay him the slightest heed on any subject.

Especially since he is on record as wanting to abolish the Royal Air Force, pursuant to the openly stated aim of his Henry Jackson Society (which is very close to The Commentator and to the Murdoch papers, themselves at least well on the way to staging a coup within amateurish, easy-prey UKIP) to create a single EU defence "capability" under overall American command, but under the day-to-day control either of Germany or of France, depending on which happened to be in favour at the Court of Commentary at the time of writing. We have already flogged off Search and Rescue to a private company based in Texas.

Within that, it would seem that Britain's only role will be to provide boys as cannon fodder. How long before our most unaccomplished 16-year-olds are conscripted directly into the Israeli Defence Force? Or ought I not to write that, lest the wrong person read it and it happen?