As always, the devil is in the details. Should everyone be eligible for a reduced sentence? Sensing a possible outcry, Justice Minister Clemente Mastella stipulated that paedophiles and terrorists would not walk free as a result of his proposals. There was to be no amnesty for folk devils, in other words, only for ordinary decent criminals – like the man who was released midway through a sentence for attempting to kill his wife, and who promptly went home and attacked the poor woman again. (He’s now serving a fresh sentence.) But was that it? Were there no other ‘special’ categories of criminal in Italian prisons (or in remand pending re-trial in Italian appeal courts)? What about corrupt politicians, convicted of taking bribes? What about corrupt business leaders, convicted of offering bribes? Shouldn’t those people serve their sentences in full – if only to encourage the others?

Mastella thought not. Di Pietro, on the other hand… but rewind. Think back to 1997, to start with: remember the wave of public revulsion against the extremism, corruption and cluelessness of the Tories; think how any Labour Party promising moderation, competence and integrity could have walked that election. And think of the Blair/Mandelson leadership, and their conviction that Labour would never get elected unless they appealed to the patriotic conservatism of Middle England. There’s a similar tension at work within Romano Prodi’s centre-left coalition. As I wrote back in May, there are three great touchstone issues in contemporary Italian politics. There’s the choice between left/right alternation and the permanent occupation of government by a single party, with a revolving cast of partners. The latter is the old Christian Democrat model, but it’s a model Berlusconi still hopes to revive – and not only Berlusconi. Then there’s the question of Communism, systematically denied political legitimacy for most of the ‘First Republic’ (1948-93). Most actual Italian Communists ended up as ‘Left Democrats’, who are unimpeachably moderate these days – but they’re haunted by the extremist spectres of two minor parties, ‘Italian Communists’ and ‘Communist Refoundation’. Thirdly, and uniquely to Italy (for now), there’s the question of corruption, the question being not “did it happen?” but “does it matter?”. No one seriously denies that the main parties of the First Republic bought and sold seats in Parliament, directorships of state companies and votes by the bagful. On some parts of the Italian political spectrum, this history is regarded as a genuine scandal, which should never happen again and for which more heads should roll. Some parts; not all.

Prodi’s coalition stands for left/right alternation, inclusion of the former Communists and prosecution of political corruption; in these respects it stands in direct opposition to Berlusconi’s coalition. Or rather, parts of Prodi’s coalition stand for left/right alternation, inclusion of the former Communists and prosecution of political corruption. Prodi himself stands for all three policies, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm; most of the parties within his coalition are enthusiasts for one of the three, or two at most. The party with the strongest anti-corruption agenda is ‘Principled Italy’, led by Antonio di Pietro – formerly a magistrate with a leading role in the Tangentopoli investigations which brought down the First Republic. Di Pietro’s role in the current government is Minister for Infrastructure and Transport; the Justice Minister, as we’ve seen, is Clemente Mastella. Mastella is not only a former Christian Democrat but a former ally of Berlusconi; his tiny ‘Union of European Democrats’ has never shown much enthusiasm for any of the three touchstone policies – or for anything much, apart from the career of Clemente Mastella.

Putting Mastella rather than di Pietro in charge of Justice, and thus in a position to frame the indulto proposal, guaranteed a period of open warfare between him and di Pietro (not a Mastella fan at the best of times). At one point di Pietro even announced that he had temporarily resigned from the government, the better to campaign for an anti-corruption amendment; this earned him a rebuke from the Italian President (the highly respectable ex-Communist Giorgio Napolitano), who effectively told him not to be so silly. But it also guaranteed that the indulto would get enough support in Parliament to pass, and that Mastella would stay in the government rather than defecting back to Berlusconi – which, if di Pietro had been given the Justice brief, would have been a real possibility.

And this brings us to the great hidden theme of Second Republic Italian politics: the Christian Democrats. The party ceased to exist over ten years ago, but its forty-year occupation of the ‘centre’ ground lives on in many people’s memories. (The Italian ‘centre’ was oddly named, as it excluded large swathes of uncontroversial left-wing politics but included everyone on the Right who wasn’t actually a neo-Fascist. Nevertheless, many Christian Democrats sincerely believed themselves to be squatting firmly in the centre, stoutly defending Italian democracy against two opposed extremisms – for four solid decades.) Like the Americans and Russians divvying up Nazi rocket scientists, Prodi and Berlusconi each have ‘their’ Christian Democrats: the Right has the optimistically-named ‘Christian Democrats United’, the Left has the bizarrely-named ‘Democracy Is Freedom’ (a.k.a. ‘the Daisy’), plus Mastella.

Prodi and Berlusconi don’t have a great deal in common, to put it mildly. Last summer Prodi was caught by the press driving off on holiday, with his wife in the passenger seat and a few good books and a couple of jars of pasta sauce in the back; it’s hard to imagine Berlusconi replicating a single detail of that picture. What they do share is a pair of nightmares: the nightmare of ‘their’ Christian Democrats defecting to the other side; still worse, the nightmare of both sets of Christian Democrats abandoning their coalitions and rebuilding the ‘centre’. A reunited Christian Democratic party would reverse the Left’s stand on all three touchstone issues. Ironically, it would be no more welcome to Berlusconi, whom it would accept as a junior partner if at all – and without his disreputable right-wing allies.

Both Prodi and Berlusconi talk of forming a single party, welding shut the doors of the coalition and forcing their Christian Democrats to stay in line. Unsurprisingly, neither single-party project is making much progress. The next best outcome (for both leaders) would be for the other side’s Christian Democrats to come over to them; a good third-best would be for the other side’s Christian Democrats to defect and try to rebuild the ‘centre’ unaided, damaging their old partners but doing little harm to their former opponents.

In this game Prodi is faring conspicuously better than Berlusconi. The leftish ex-Christian Democrats of ‘the Daisy’ are resigned, if not positively committed, to an eventual merger with the ‘Left Democrats'; by contrast, Pierferdinando Casini of ‘Christian Democrats United’ periodically makes pointed comments about having his own electorate to represent and not wanting to be a follower of Berlusconi all his life. The dream of rebuilding the centre also seems more likely to damage Berlusconi than Prodi. One ‘centre’ splinter has already flaked off from Casini’s party: Marco Follini, Casini’s predecessor as party leader, now leads a tiny new party called ‘Middle Italy’. The chances are that Follini’s going nowhere, but his defection hasn’t helped Berlusconi.

There’s a certain kind of political operator whose sheer skill compels admiration, even if you aren’t entirely sure whose interests they’re ultimately serving (other than their own). There are an awful lot of operators in Italy – the hothouse factionalism endemic to Italian party politics is a forcing-ground for them. Prodi (who began his political career as a Christian Democrat) is one of the best. His commitment to the anti-corruption touchstone is genuine – he recently named tax evasion as a major problem to be addressed by government, a bold statement for any Italian Prime Minister. But commitments are one thing and strategy is another – and strategy requires the fragmentation of the former Christian Democrats to be maintained (or, if possible, exacerbated). So Mastella needs to be kept inside the tent; so di Pietro’s crusading zeal needs to be left to run into the sand; so bribe-takers and bribe-givers need to be allowed to benefit from the indulto, walking free alongside the ordinary decent thieves and murderers.

It’s frustrating to watch; as with Labour in 1997, you can’t help feeling that there’s so much more the Prodi government could do. But, unlike Labour in 1997, Prodi is walking a tightrope, having been elected by a margin of something like 0.1% of the vote – and it’s worth remembering that unchallenged left/right alternation in government is still little more than a pious aspiration in Italy. The Prodi government needs to be challenged and held to account; the coalition’s priorities are decided through a shifting balance of power and influence among its constituent parts, so there is no shortage of points where external pressure can be applied. But there are reasons for putting at least a critical trust in the Prodi project. Apart from anything else, if it succeeds, Berlusconi will have failed.

Well, quite a few of us could, but that’s by the way. Cameron’s youth, eloquence and vacuity will carry him a long way, unfortunately – and the greatest of these is youth. Watching Ming Campbell on stage at the Lib Dem conference, I was more than ever mystified by the operation that put him at the head of the party – surely the weirdest and most counter-productive leadership change since the inexplicable ascent of Iain Duncan Chance. Cynical, traitorous and inept I could understand, but putting up an OAP against Brown and Cameron just looks stupid.

Or is this, as Peter Preston suggested in today’s Graun, a British hangup? Or rather – more interestingly – a British political hangup? Have a look at the following list:

Silvio Berlusconi
Gordon Brown
George W. Bush
George Bush senior
Ming Campbell
Jacques Chirac
Joan Collins
Clint Eastwood
Des Lynam
Angela Merkel
Nicholas Parsons
Romano Prodi

Now, without googling, fill in the blank:

Ming Campbell is the ____th oldest person in this list

The answer is….

8. Brown and Merkel are in their fifties; Dubya is 60 and Des 64. But Berlusconi, Prodi and Chirac are all older than Campbell, as indeed are Joan Collins and Clint Eastwood. The oldest person on the list is Nicholas Parsons – at 83, he’s a year older than Bush senior.

Of course, it could be argued that you wouldn’t actually want Nicholas Parsons running the country (or, indeed, Clint Eastwood). But the contrast between politics and showbusiness is telling: Des Lynam is practically Ming’s contemporary, but he looks twenty years younger. British politicians seem to have got the worst of both worlds: not only has the tyranny of youth and beauty has deprived us of ordinary-looking middle-aged hacks like Wilson or Callaghan; older politicians aren’t allowed to fake it by pretending they’ve kept their looks or even to grow old gracefully (what’s known as the Blake Carrington Get-Out). If you’re over 60 you’re old, and if you’re old you’re ridiculous.

It would be nice to think that our next Prime Minister would disprove all of this; perhaps we could have a spud-faced middle-aged bloke, 60 or pushing 60, grey-haired or bald, with no regard for glamour and not much for grooming. Just as long as it’s not this one.

A more radical approach, and one which New Labour is particularly fond of, is the un-definition or anti-definition. I first saw the power of the anti-definition several years ago, when I was (briefly) a union rep. Negotiations over job descriptions repeatedly ground to a halt over management reluctance to take anything out. (I’m sure management would have another version, centring on trade union obduracy, but this is my story and I’ll tell it how I saw it.) But what about this clause?, we asked on more than one occasion. If it stays in our members could be forced to do this, this and this! (I can be less specific.) No, no no, we were assured, there’s no question of people being forced to do that (let alone that and that). OK, fine, we said, if you aren’t going to use that clause it can come out, right? But of course, it wasn’t OK – if that clause came out there’d be no flexibility, people could insist on sticking to the wording of their job descriptions… You mean you wouldn’t be able to force people to do this, this and this? No, no no, we were assured… and off we went again.

An anti-definition, in other words, is a definition framed broadly enough to allow the actual definition applied at any one time to be, well, whatever you need it to be. A classic example is ‘anti-social behaviour’, which is defined in law as

behaviour by a person which causes or is likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more other persons not of the same household as the person

(Emphasis added.)

Another concept which has been anti-defined under New Labour is ‘terrorism’. The definition given in the 2000 Terrorism Act is lengthy; the briefest summary I can come up with is “carrying out or threatening to carry out politically-motivated personal violence, property damage or social disruption, either using firearms or without firearms but with the intention of intimidating members of the public or influencing the government”. (Yes, the bit about how the intention doesn’t matter if you’re using guns is strange. I didn’t write it.) While the wording of the Act is restricted slightly by a scattering of ‘serious’s and ‘seriously’s, what this essentially means is that any violent act, any act of property damage and any act with the potential to endanger public safety – for example, a sit-down protest which stops the traffic, and hence could stop the emergency services getting through – any of these things, if done for political reasons, is an act of terrorism. Not only that, but threatening to do any of these things is a terrorist act in its own right. Or rather – and here’s the beauty of the anti-description – any of these things can be an act of terrorism. In practice ‘terrorism’ means something rather narrower and more specific – although precisely what it means isn’t defined and doesn’t have to be.

There has been an odd series of incidents recently involving hate mail sent to Labour activists and other people unlikely to be on the BNP’s Christmas card list (leftists, gay and lesbian groups, a synagogue). The tactics have escalated from simple nastygrams, through letters containing white powder (not anthrax) to an actual letter-bomb, although one which thankfully didn’t go off. What struck me in the Grauniad story was a reassuring comment made by the police officer investigating the letter-bomb incident:

He stressed that officers are not linking the incident to any terrorist activity.

Call me a naive literalist, but it strikes me that posting explosive devices to your political enemies is terrorist activity: it qualifies under a common-sense definition, and (more importantly) it falls well within the ample embrace of the Terrorism Act definition. But apparently these were ordinary decent criminals using an ordinary decent letter-bomb; it certainly wasn’t a terrorist letter-bomb.

Because, of course, when we say ‘terrorism’ in 2006 what we really mean is something a bit more specific. (There is, after all, a war on.) And it’s not too much of an imaginative leap to suppose that, in a couple of years’ time, the effective definition of terrorism will be different again, as police priorities turn to different kinds of contentious political activity. The wording of the Terrorism Act is an anti-definitional sweep net, allowing different effective definitions to be used and discarded without any changes to the law, and hence without any political involvement or public debate.

Like the job descriptions I argued against (unsuccessfully), anti-definitions can always be justified on grounds of flexibility and managerial efficiency. The question is who benefits from these gains in efficiency, and who pays. Anti-definition asks us to put our trust in managerial arbitrariness and exception-making: no, no no, there’s no question of that… But the law stands, by definition, against exceptions and arbitrary decisions: an anti-defined law is a dangerous and corrosive paradox. The ultimate outcome of this approach to law-making is a state with only one law: Everything Is Forbidden (Unless We Say Otherwise).

To understand Berlusconi’s current position you need to understand his coalition – and to understand that you need to go back to 1948. (Sorry, but that’s the way it is. We’ll get back up to the 1990s quickly enough.) It was in 1948 that the Christian Democrats became Italy’s ruling party, consigning the Communists and Socialists to opposition. For the next forty years the Christian Democrats stayed in power, with a shifting line-up of collaborpartners – including the Socialists from the mid-1960s onwards. The Communists stayed in opposition, although from the mid-1970s on they built up a presence in local government and state-owned industry. (It doesn’t make much sense in the British context to talk about a political party having a presence in state-owned industry. To understand the Italian context, think networking; think interview panels; ultimately, think brown envelopes.) Right out in the cold were the extreme Left (which in Italy meant ‘anyone to the left of the Communists’) and the extreme Right (which in Italy meant exactly what you’d expect).

Then came Tangentopoli – Bribe City, a nickname which was coined for Milan when investigators first revealed how big the problem was, but was applied more widely when they discovered how big it really was. The problem for Italy’s governing elite was that Italian investigating magistrates are duty-bound to investigate all allegations of criminal activity which are brought to them. Once they started pulling at the loose threads of Tangentopoli, the entire political system began to unravel. The Christian Democrats split, then the fragments split again; the Socialist Party went up in smoke. The Communists – now trading as the Democratic Left – tried to capitalise on their rivals’ downfall without going too big on the whole ethical crusader thing; Communist politicians hadn’t been at the centre of the investigations, but they hadn’t been entirely untouched either. The only ones with uncontestably clean hands were those who had never been allowed anywhere near the money-tree: the extreme Left, the extreme Right and the regionalist Lega Nord. Still, the Left Democrats looked set fair to survive the storm.

And cue Berlusconi. He’s an outspoken, headline-seeking right-wing populist with a huge personal following; he’s Italy’s biggest media entrepreneur; he runs a party which perpetuates the worst traditions of the Christian Democrats and Socialists – including their belief that they have a right to occupy the state and exclude the Communists. Imagine if Robert Maxwell owned ITV, had the personality of Kilroy-Silk and led the Continuity Conservative Party – he’s that scary. Ever since the launch of Forza Italia, the great theme of Italian politics has been coalition-building: could Berlusconi build a sustainable coalition of the Right? could the Left build a coalition capable of defeating him? A year or so it looked as if Berlusconi had finally cracked it; there was talk of merging the major parties of the Right into a single party, to be led (of course) by Berlusconi. What the election result tells us is that the Left has solved the problem as well – and that Berlusconi’s solution has a shorter shelf-life than we thought.

Berlusconi’s main allies are the post-Christian Democrat UDC and the post-Fascist Alleanza Nazionale; Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord is still in the picture, but tends not to be let out in public these days. If we go from Right to Left, we’ll have to start with the Lega: a bizarrely, almost insanely horrible party, held together by a flourishing leader-cult and the reassuring warm throb of hatred. The Lega were never typical regionalists; they stood for a well-off and culturally conservative electorate, in opposition to another region (Southerners, feckless spongers in hock to the Mafia) as well as the centre (Rome, corrupt bureaucrats in hock to the South). They’ve broadened their range of hate-figures as time has gone on; it now includes Communists, immigrants, the Catholic Church, the Masons, the EU and China. The Lega’s vote never gets into double figures these days, and most of the other 90+% roundly detest them. For all that, Bossi is Berlusconi’s staunchest ally, and vice versa. Berlusconi has likened himself to Jesus, and he seems to see Bossi as John the Baptist – his precursor, blazing a trail on the populist Right. If Bossi says No to something – and he says No to most things – the chances are that Berlusconi will fall into line.

To the left of the Lega are the post-Fascists. Under Gianfranco Fini’s leadership, AN have officially denounced the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s regime (both Mussolini’s regimes, to be pedantic about it); Fini has repeatedly clashed with Bossi over the latter’s racism, and criticised Berlusconi’s lapses into Mussonostalgia. There’s a tendency, particularly outside Italy, to greet all this with scepticism – sure, they say they’ve changed… The trouble with this argument is that it’s difficult to see what would be different about AN if they had actually ceased to be a Fascist party. They are fairly ghastly clash-of-cultures conservatives, with the predictable set of weird ideas on subjects like homosexuality (they’re agin it) and drugs (they’re agin them too) – but Fascist? I don’t see it. They regularly get around 12% of the vote, which is considerably more than they did in the old days of proper neo-Fascism.

The UDC are AN’s chief rival for the votes of Italy’s Catholic conservatives. The UDC’s former leader, Marco Follini, was purged last year for speaking out too loudly against Berlusconi’s ‘single party of the Right’ project. The UDC seem to get on quite well with the former Christian Democrats who are now in the centre-left coalition – rather too well for Berlusconi’s liking. The demotion of Follini signalled that Christian Democrats Reunited wasn’t on the cards any time soon; what it didn’t and couldn’t do was whip UDC permanently into line. It would be far too flattering to say that UDC represents the ethical element of the Christian Democrats and Forza Italia the corrupt part; apart from anything else, UDC’s willingness to line up behind Berlusconi in the first place suggests that a break with the years of corruption wasn’t at the top of their agenda. But there is a certain solidity and consistency to UDC’s politics, which is a lot more than you can say for Forza Italia.

And Forza Italia? Paradoxically, the newest Italian political party is the one most strongly redolent of the old regime. And ‘regime’ is the operative word. In Italian ‘regime’ is roughly synonymous with ‘one-party state'; it generally appears in the phrase ‘the left wants to establish a regime’. But a regime in this sense is precisely what the Christian Democrats ran for forty years. Regime thinking lives on in Forza Italia, in the assumption that ‘our people’ can only be represented by one party; in the assumption that one party has a right to remain in power; and in the utter refusal to treat other parties as legitimate rivals. Berlusconi’s repeated objections to the election result follow precisely this pattern: the Right cannot be excluded from power, because the Right represents half the country, and only the Right can be trusted to represent those people. If the election result was not overturned, Berlusconi promised that Forza Italia would challenge it themselves; if that failed, then the Right should be offered a veto over the election of the President (whose term, coincidentally, expired earlier this month); if they didn’t have a veto, then they wouldn’t agree on a compromise candidate and the Left would have to elect a President on its own; if the Left did this, after having won the parliamentary election outright, then a left-wing ‘regime’ would clearly be in place, and the Right would oppose it at every step and encourage its supporters to do likewise. There was even some talk of encouraging a tax strike, although even Forza Italia’s spokesperson edged away from this one fairly rapidly. Faced with oppposition on this scale, the Left regime could only fall, and Forza Italia would be back in power, where it ought to be. Who’s with me?

The problem for Berlusconi is that his allies are not following the script. The UDC’s tone is increasingly critical of Berlusconi and increasingly conciliatory towards the new government: they’ll fight them, you understand, but it won’t be all-out war over every little thing, where would be the sense in that? The longer-term project is to woo the ex-Christian Democrats of La Margherita away from Romano Prodi’s centre-left coalition and rebuild the Christian Democrats, perhaps no longer as a dominant party but as a centrist hub whose support neither Left nor Right could do without. I suspect that Prodi is well aware of the danger: like Berlusconi, he’s started talking about merging some or all of his coalition into a single party. Prodi is an extraordinary operator, even by Italian standards, but I suspect this may be beyond him. As for AN, they’re firmly ensconced on the Right, and would like nothing better than a ‘normal’ system of political alternation, in which a large party of the Left and a large party of the Right compete for power – just as long as they were a significant part of the Right party. The goal for AN, in other words, is to come in from the cold. Berlusconi’s project for a single party suits them well enough – Fini has already put his coat on the Deputy Leader’s chair, with a view to ultimately succeeding Berlusconi – but his reluctance to consider political alternation, or to spend any time in opposition, doesn’t fit their plans. That only leaves the Lega, and even they aren’t consistent: part of the time the Lega is more royalist than the King, egging Berlusconi on to face down the evil Communists; part of the time they’re a fulminating, Father Jack-like presence, denouncing Berlusconi along with everyone else in sight.

The national-list system under which the election was conducted needs to be changed – before the election, the Lega member who drafted the system described it as a porcata (‘pile of crap’, roughly) and said that he’d designed it to make the major parties look bad. But the election results are what they are, and everyone, including Berlusconi, now accepts them. The centre-left won by a narrow margin, but they did win. The new President – old Communist right-winger Giorgio Napolitano – was elected without the official support of the Right, but he was elected. The government represents all the people of Italy, including the 49.7% who voted for another coalition – and Prodi’s democratic legitimacy, based on 49.8% of an 84% turnout, is considerably stronger than that of Bush or Blair. The Left is in power; the President is a Communist; and the Right is slowly but surely breaking up. Perhaps, by voting out Berlusconi, Italy has finally achieved what eluded it for forty years after the war: regime change.

Now, Uzbekistan is ruled by a vile tyrant, but he’s our tyrant (shades of Reagan-era Latin America…). And about here the logic gets extremely strange. We know that Uzbeks are being tortured by their government’s secret police – sometimes because they’re suspected of Islamic militancy, sometimes because they’re suspected of opposing Karimov, and sometimes for no reason except that they’ve been unlucky enough to get picked up by the secret police. And we know that the UN Convention Against Torture bars governments from inflicting torture (‘severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental’), and specifically states that ‘no exceptional circumstances whatsoever’ justify it. But we also know that Karimov is an ally of the West (meaning, essentially, the US) in the War on Terror (meaning increasingly unclear) – and that his government is supplying our spooks with information.

One way to deal with these facts would be to drop the Karimov government like a hot brick, and its ‘information’ with it. That was precisely what Murray recommended. MI6 weren’t keen: their reaction could be summed up as But, but… what about our information? It’s good information! Schematically:

• Karimov’s giving us the information we want, so
• we treat him as an ally, so
• his government can (regrettably) carry on torturing people

To Murray – who was a great deal closer to the ground than the spooks in question (i.e. he was actually in Uzbekistan) – it was immediately apparent that Karimov could run the same chain of reasoning backwards:

• we want to carry on torturing people, so
• we need them to treat us as an ally, so
• we’ll tell them what they want to hear

Matthew Kydd’s comment, to Murray, that the intelligence services found some of the material very useful indeed with a direct bearing on the war on terror suggests that this possibility hadn’t occurred to the spooks – which in turn suggests a rather alarming lack of imagination on their part.

But it’s worse than that. The information whose supposed usefulness justified turning a blind eye to torture was actually produced by torture. It’s a closed loop, in other words: the Uzbek government can only justify the use of torture by producing a continuing supply of information with a direct bearing on the war on terror, but it can only produce that information by using torture.

Finding loopholes in the UN’s prohibition of torture is a growth industry at the moment – from Condoleezza Rice to Charles Clarke, and on to the insultingly flimsy argument that if we don’t know who was tortured, we don’t know that anybody was (see below). But the loopholes only matter because they’re used – all those ‘ticking bomb’ thought-experiments about torture are harmless, because the situation they describe is untypical (to put it mildly). By contrast, the argument that the torture of Uzbek detainees can sometimes be justified, because it sometimes produces useful information, directly promotes the continuing torture of many other Uzbek detainees – most of whom have nothing ‘useful’ to say to any spook, and all of whom will say anything to make the torture stop.

And perhaps that’s what the argument is meant for. Look at it this way: Murray’s argument that the information produced by the Uzbek torturers is ‘dross’ is logically compelling and founded on first- and second-person experience (i.e. he’d talked to torture victims). If MI6 genuinely believe that the information is ‘useful’, either they have better information than Murray (which seems unlikely – MI6 have no operative within a thousand miles of me) or they’re extraordinarily dim. If we dismiss both possibilities, we must assume that they know as well as Murray that the information’s no good – and that information isn’t what all this is about. Perhaps the fundamental, non-negotiable starting-point isn’t the War on Terror but the Uzbek government itself, and its alliance with the US and Britain. Perhaps the logic really does run backwards:

• Karimov’s government are torturing people, but
• we need to treat them as an ally, so
• we’ll get them to tell us what we want to hear

This would be an extraordinarily cynical approach, but as far as I can see it’s that or extreme stupidity in the upper echelons of MI6. Cynicism or stupidity, or perhaps sheer, unbridled sadism. (Or the shape-shifting reptilian thing, obviously.) Of the three (or four) of them, I think I like cynicism the best.

See what you make of it all, anyway. Here are the Murray documents:

Letter #1
Confidential
FM Tashkent
TO FCO, Cabinet Office, DFID, MODUK, OSCE Posts, Security Council Posts
16 September 02
SUBJECT: US/Uzbekistan: Promoting Terrorism
SUMMARY
US plays down human rights situation in Uzbekistan. A dangerous policy: increasing repression combined with poverty will promote Islamic terrorism. Support to Karimov regime a bankrupt and cynical policy.
DETAIL
The Economist of 7 September states: “Uzbekistan, in particular, has jailed many thousands of moderate Islamists, an excellent way of converting their families and friends to extremism.” The Economist also spoke of “the growing despotism of Mr Karimov” and judged that “the past year has seen a further deterioration of an already grim human rights record”. I agree.
Between 7,000 and 10,000 political and religious prisoners are currently detained, many after trials before kangaroo courts with no representation. Terrible torture is commonplace: the EU is currently considering a demarche over the terrible case of two Muslims tortured to death in jail apparently with boiling water. Two leading dissidents, Elena Urlaeva and Larissa Vdovna, were two weeks ago committed to a lunatic asylum, where they are being drugged, for demonstrating on human rights. Opposition political parties remain banned. There is no doubt that September 11 gave the pretext to crack down still harder on dissent under the guise of counter-terrorism.
Yet on 8 September the US State Department certified that Uzbekistan was improving in both human rights and democracy, thus fulfilling a constitutional requirement and allowing the continuing disbursement of $140 million of US aid to Uzbekistan this year. Human Rights Watch immediately published a commendably sober and balanced rebuttal of the State Department claim.
Again we are back in the area of the US accepting sham reform [a reference to my previous telegram on the economy]. In August media censorship was abolished, and theoretically there are independent media outlets, but in practice there is absolutely no criticism of President Karimov or the central government in any Uzbek media. State Department call this self-censorship: I am not sure that is a fair way to describe an unwillingness to experience the brutal methods of the security services.
Similarly, following US pressure when Karimov visited Washington, a human rights NGO has been permitted to register. This is an advance, but they have little impact given that no media are prepared to cover any of their activities or carry any of their statements.
The final improvement State quote is that in one case of murder of a prisoner the police involved have been prosecuted. That is an improvement, but again related to the Karimov visit and does not appear to presage a general change of policy. On the latest cases of torture deaths the Uzbeks have given the OSCE an incredible explanation, given the nature of the injuries, that the victims died in a fight between prisoners.
But allowing a single NGO, a token prosecution of police officers and a fake press freedom cannot possibly outweigh the huge scale of detentions, the torture and the secret executions. President Karimov has admitted to 100 executions a year but human rights groups believe there are more. Added to this, all opposition parties remain banned (the President got a 98% vote) and the Internet is strictly controlled. All Internet providers must go through a single government server and access is barred to many sites including all dissident and opposition sites and much international media (including, ironically, waronterrorism.com). This is in essence still a totalitarian state: there is far less freedom than still prevails, for example, in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. A Movement for Democratic Change or any judicial independence would be impossible here.
Karimov is a dictator who is committed to neither political nor economic reform. The purpose of his regime is not the development of his country but the diversion of economic rent to his oligarchic supporters through government controls. As a senior Uzbek academic told me privately, there is more repression here now than in Brezhnev’s time. The US are trying to prop up Karimov economically and to justify this support they need to claim that a process of economic and political reform is underway. That they do so claim is either cynicism or self-delusion.
This policy is doomed to failure. Karimov is driving this resource-rich country towards economic ruin like an Abacha. And the policy of increasing repression aimed indiscriminately at pious Muslims, combined with a deepening poverty, is the most certain way to ensure continuing support for the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. They have certainly been decimated and disorganised in Afghanistan, and Karimov’s repression may keep the lid on for years – but pressure is building and could ultimately explode.
I quite understand the interest of the US in strategic airbases and why they back Karimov, but I believe US policy is misconceived. In the short term it may help fight terrorism but in the medium term it will promote it, as the Economist points out. And it can never be right to lower our standards on human rights. There is a complex situation in Central Asia and it is wrong to look at it only through a prism picked up on September 12. Worst of all is what appears to be the philosophy underlying the current US view of Uzbekistan: that September 11 divided the World into two camps in the “War against Terrorism” and that Karimov is on “our” side.
If Karimov is on “our” side, then this war cannot be simply between the forces of good and evil. It must be about more complex things, like securing the long-term US military presence in Uzbekistan. I silently wept at the 11 September commemoration here. The right words on New York have all been said. But last week was also another anniversary – the US-led overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile. The subsequent dictatorship killed, dare I say it, rather more people than died on September 11. Should we not remember then also, and learn from that too? I fear that we are heading down the same path of US-sponsored dictatorship here. It is ironic that the beneficiary is perhaps the most unreformed of the World’s old communist leaders.
We need to think much more deeply about Central Asia. It is easy to place Uzbekistan in the “too difficult” tray and let the US run with it, but I think they are running in the wrong direction. We should tell them of the dangers we see. Our policy is theoretically one of engagement, but in practice this has not meant much. Engagement makes sense, but it must mean grappling with the problems, not mute collaboration. We need to start actively to state a distinctive position on democracy and human rights, and press for a realistic view to be taken in the IMF. We should continue to resist pressures to start a bilateral DFID programme, unless channelled non-governmentally, and not restore ECGD cover despite the constant lobbying. We should not invite Karimov to the UK. We should step up our public diplomacy effort, stressing democratic values, including more resources from the British Council. We should increase support to human rights activists, and strive for contact with non-official Islamic groups.
Above all we need to care about the 22 million Uzbek people, suffering from poverty and lack of freedom. They are not just pawns in the new Great Game.
MURRAY
——————————————————————————–
Letter #2
Confidential
Fm Tashkent
To FCO
18 March 2003
SUBJECT: US FOREIGN POLICY
SUMMARY
1. As seen from Tashkent, US policy is not much focussed on democracy or freedom. It is about oil, gas and hegemony. In Uzbekistan the US pursues those ends through supporting a ruthless dictatorship. We must not close our eyes to uncomfortable truth.
DETAIL
2. Last year the US gave half a billion dollars in aid to Uzbekistan, about a quarter of it military aid. Bush and Powell repeatedly hail Karimov as a friend and ally. Yet this regime has at least seven thousand prisoners of conscience; it is a one party state without freedom of speech, without freedom of media, without freedom of movement, without freedom of assembly, without freedom of religion. It practices, systematically, the most hideous tortures on thousands. Most of the population live in conditions precisely analogous with medieval serfdom.
3. Uzbekistan’s geo-strategic position is crucial. It has half the population of the whole of Central Asia. It alone borders all the other states in a region which is important to future Western oil and gas supplies. It is the regional military power. That is why the US is here, and here to stay. Contractors at the US military bases are extending the design life of the buildings from ten to twenty five years.
4. Democracy and human rights are, despite their protestations to the contrary, in practice a long way down the US agenda here. Aid this year will be slightly less, but there is no intention to introduce any meaningful conditionality. Nobody can believe this level of aid – more than US aid to all of West Africa – is related to comparative developmental need as opposed to political support for Karimov. While the US makes token and low-level references to human rights to appease domestic opinion, they view Karimov’s vicious regime as a bastion against fundamentalism. He – and they – are in fact creating fundamentalism. When the US gives this much support to a regime that tortures people to death for having a beard or praying five times a day, is it any surprise that Muslims come to hate the West?
5. I was stunned to hear that the US had pressured the EU to withdraw a motion on Human Rights in Uzbekistan which the EU was tabling at the UN Commission for Human Rights in Geneva. I was most unhappy to find that we are helping the US in what I can only call this cover-up. I am saddened when the US constantly quote fake improvements in human rights in Uzbekistan, such as the abolition of censorship and Internet freedom, which quite simply have not happened (I see these are quoted in the draft EBRD strategy for Uzbekistan, again I understand at American urging).
6. From Tashkent it is difficult to agree that we and the US are activated by shared values. Here we have a brutal US sponsored dictatorship reminiscent of Central and South American policy under previous US Republican administrations. I watched George Bush talk today of Iraq and “dismantling the apparatus of terror… removing the torture chambers and the rape rooms”. Yet when it comes to the Karimov regime, systematic torture and rape appear to be treated as peccadilloes, not to affect the relationship and to be downplayed in international fora. Double standards? Yes.
7. I hope that once the present crisis is over we will make plain to the US, at senior level, our serious concern over their policy in Uzbekistan.
MURRAY
——————————————————————————–
Letter #3
CONFIDENTIAL
FM TASHKENT
TO IMMEDIATE FCO
TELNO 63
OF 220939 JULY 04
INFO IMMEDIATE DFID, ISLAMIC POSTS, MOD, OSCE POSTS UKDEL EBRD LONDON, UKMIS GENEVA, UKMIS MEW YORK
SUBJECT: RECEIPT OF INTELLIGENCE OBTAINED UNDER TORTURE
SUMMARY
1. We receive intelligence obtained under torture from the Uzbek intelligence services, via the US. We should stop. It is bad information anyway. Tortured dupes are forced to sign up to confessions showing what the Uzbek government wants the US and UK to believe, that they and we are fighting the same war against terror.
2. I gather a recent London interdepartmental meeting considered the question and decided to continue to receive the material. This is morally, legally and practically wrong. It exposes as hypocritical our post Abu Ghraib pronouncements and fatally undermines our moral standing. It obviates my efforts to get the Uzbek government to stop torture they are fully aware our intelligence community laps up the results.
3. We should cease all co-operation with the Uzbek Security Services they are beyond the pale. We indeed need to establish an SIS presence here, but not as in a friendly state.
DETAIL
4. In the period December 2002 to March 2003 I raised several times the issue of intelligence material from the Uzbek security services which was obtained under torture and passed to us via the CIA. I queried the legality, efficacy and morality of the practice.
5. I was summoned to the UK for a meeting on 8 March 2003. Michael Wood gave his legal opinion that it was not illegal to obtain and to use intelligence acquired by torture. He said the only legal limitation on its use was that it could not be used in legal proceedings, under Article 15 of the UN Convention on Torture.
6. On behalf of the intelligence services, Matthew Kydd said that they found some of the material very useful indeed with a direct bearing on the war on terror. Linda Duffield said that she had been asked to assure me that my qualms of conscience were respected and understood.
7. Sir Michael Jay’s circular of 26 May stated that there was a reporting obligation on us to report torture by allies (and I have been instructed to refer to Uzbekistan as such in the context of the war on terror). You, Sir, have made a number of striking, and I believe heartfelt, condemnations of torture in the last few weeks. I had in the light of this decided to return to this question and to highlight an apparent contradiction in our policy. I had intimated as much to the Head of Eastern Department.
8. I was therefore somewhat surprised to hear that without informing me of the meeting, or since informing me of the result of the meeting, a meeting was convened in the FCO at the level of Heads of Department and above, precisely to consider the question of the receipt of Uzbek intelligence material obtained under torture. As the office knew, I was in London at the time and perfectly able to attend the meeting. I still have only gleaned that it happened.
9. I understand that the meeting decided to continue to obtain the Uzbek torture material. I understand that the principal argument deployed was that the intelligence material disguises the precise source, ie it does not ordinarily reveal the name of the individual who is tortured. Indeed this is true – the material is marked with a euphemism such as “From detainee debriefing.” The argument runs that if the individual is not named, we cannot prove that he was tortured.
10. I will not attempt to hide my utter contempt for such casuistry, nor my shame that I work in and organisation where colleagues would resort to it to justify torture. I have dealt with hundreds of individual cases of political or religious prisoners in Uzbekistan, and I have met with very few where torture, as defined in the UN convention, was not employed. When my then DHM raised the question with the CIA head of station 15 months ago, he readily acknowledged torture was deployed in obtaining intelligence. I do not think there is any doubt as to the fact
11. The torture record of the Uzbek security services could hardly be more widely known. Plainly there are, at the very least, reasonable grounds for believing the material is obtained under torture. There is helpful guidance at Article 3 of the UN Convention;
“The competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the state concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.”
While this article forbids extradition or deportation to Uzbekistan, it is the right test for the present
question also.
12. On the usefulness of the material obtained, this is irrelevant. Article 2 of the Convention, to which we are a party, could not be plainer:
“No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”
13. Nonetheless, I repeat that this material is useless – we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful. It is designed to give the message the Uzbeks want the West to hear. It exaggerates the role, size, organisation and activity of the IMU and its links with Al Qaida. The aim is to convince the West that the Uzbeks are a vital cog against a common foe, that they should keep the assistance, especially military assistance, coming, and that they should mute the international criticism on human rights and economic reform.
14. I was taken aback when Matthew Kydd said this stuff was valuable. Sixteen months ago it was difficult to argue with SIS in the area of intelligence assessment. But post Butler we know, not only that they can get it wrong on even the most vital and high profile issues, but that they have a particular yen for highly coloured material which exaggerates the threat. That is precisely what the Uzbeks give them. Furthermore MI6 have no operative within a thousand miles of me and certainly no expertise that can come close to my own in making this assessment.
15. At the Khuderbegainov trial I met an old man from Andizhan. Two of his children had been tortured in front of him until he signed a confession on the family’s links with Bin Laden. Tears were streaming down his face. I have no doubt they had as much connection with Bin Laden as I do. This is the standard of the Uzbek intelligence services.
16. I have been considering Michael Wood’s legal view, which he kindly gave in writing. I cannot understand why Michael concentrated only on Article 15 of the Convention. This certainly bans the use of material obtained under torture as evidence in proceedings, but it does not state that this is the sole exclusion of the use of such material.
17. The relevant article seems to me Article 4, which talks of complicity in torture. Knowingly to receive its results appears to be at least arguable as complicity. It does not appear that being in a different country to the actual torture would preclude complicity. I talked this over in a hypothetical sense with my old friend Prof Francois Hampson, I believe an acknowledged World authority on the Convention, who said that the complicity argument and the spirit of the Convention would be likely to be winning points. I should be grateful to hear Michael’s views on this.
18. It seems to me that there are degrees of complicity and guilt, but being at one or two removes does not make us blameless. There are other factors. Plainly it was a breach of Article 3 of the Convention for the coalition to deport detainees back here from Baghram, but it has been done. That seems plainly complicit.
19. This is a difficult and dangerous part of the World. Dire and increasing poverty and harsh repression are undoubtedly turning young people here towards radical Islam. The Uzbek government are thus creating this threat, and perceived US support for Karimov strengthens anti-Western feeling. SIS ought to establish a presence here, but not as partners of the Uzbek Security Services, whose sheer brutality puts them beyond the pale.
MURRAY

This week I bring you a particularly beautiful bunch of blogs, featuring politics, photography, oil paintings, Japan, a lot of maps and more links than you could follow in a week. I took my lead from Shelley Powers’ Burningbird (an excellent blog in itself). Shelley introduced me to an extraordinary blog, which I hereby name as my #1 for this week: Mark Woods’ wood s lot.

Now five years old, wood s lot doesn’t contain many words by Woods himself. Mostly it consists of extracts, with links, from Web pages which have caught Woods’ attention. Which doesn’t sound so remarkable in itself, but listen to some of these voices:

It does no good to ask the weakling’s pointless question, “Is America a fascist state?” We must ask instead, in a major rather than a minor key, “Can we make America the best damned fascist state the world has ever seen?”

Urban exploration is free, fun and hurts no one. It’s a thrilling, mind-expanding hobby that encourages our natural instincts to explore and play in our own environment … So, no disclaimer. Not for your entertainment only. Please do try this at home.

My modest proposal would be that, instead of using intelligent design merely to fill in the gaps and inconsistencies of our most intractable scientific puzzles, we roll back what we’ve already learned about science and plug God into the equation at the outset. Kind of cut out those annoying scientific middlemen.

And art, and poetry, and more, and more. wood s lot is also one of the best-looking things I’ve ever seen on the Web, with some beautiful images and a spare, restful layout. Woods says:

My sense of collegiality with those of similar sensibilities coupled with the voice I find in producing this collage have acted as a great anodyne for megrims, funks and other assorted black dogs of a chemical, temperamental and/or situational variety.

That’s exactly how it feels.

wood s lot led me to

2 Blowhards, a wonderfully-titled blog “in which a group of graying eternal amateurs discuss their passions, interests and obsessions”. (The group numbers four, incidentally.) A particularly striking current entry is a long and respectful study of the work of Pino Daeni, an artist who got his start painting romantic fiction book jackets [illustrated] and now sells sub-Sargent oils of women in nice frocks [illustrated] for twenty grand a throw. Not my thing, as you might imagine, but a fascinating insight into a side of the art world which doesn’t get much exposure. The author promises that this will be the first in a series on “artists who seem to be important in the gallery scene yet tend to be ignored by the Art Establishment for reasons valid or otherwise”; it’ll be interesting to read his take on the talented Mr Vettriano.

From 2 Blowhards I arrived at

Plep. (No, no idea.) Not so much a blog as a linkroll, but it’s a linkroll like few others.

The Vindolanda writing tablets, excavated from the Roman fort at Vindolanda in northern England.

Welcome to the world’s first on-line thrift store art gallery

Every Christmas, my Aunt Joan gives me a Monet calendar. After a couple years the same old paintings became dull. So she started enhancing the master’s works with a variety of stickers.

History and culture of the Perl programming language, by its creator, Larry Wall.

Most of the links relate to history in some sense of the word, apart from the ones you’d file under ‘geography’, ‘art’, ‘science’, ‘culture’… I don’t know who the author of Plep is, but he or she is, essentially, interested in everything.

In Plep‘s imposing blogroll I found

alive in kyoto, the personal blog of a guy from California who once caught 13 largemouth bass in a single day but is now living in Kyoto. This is essentially a photo blog, which makes it quite clear that living in Kyoto is not at all like (say) living in California. One picture is captioned “There are a number of places where you can get made up and dressed up like a maiko, then stagger around in platform okobo sandals and get your picture taken.” Another has the title a different angle on Kiyomizu-dera. It’s an educational experience – and the pictures are beautiful, too.

Leaving alive in kyoto, I entered

The Map Room, a weblog about maps. Does exactly what it says on the tin. Cartography is relevant to a surprisingly broad range of subjects (well, it surprised me). As well as news items about the theft of antique maps and updates on the latest Google Maps mashups, there’s material here on GPS accuracy, Hurricane Katrina, the Pakistan earthquake and the eternal standoff between China and Taiwan over how the latter should be described (quite an important consideration if you’re drawing a map).

The Map Room has a number of map-related links, including

Terkepes egoblog. A Hungarian-language blog might seem an eccentric choice, given that I know rather less Hungarian than I do Chinese (I mean, I’ve never even tried to order a Hungarian meal). However, this is a blog where the visuals do the talking: specifically, maps. And what maps. This blog looks like something by Edward Tufte: it could be a master-class in the presentation of cartographic information. 3D relief maps, population density maps, watershed maps, global currency movement maps, street maps, Google Maps… they’re all here.

The chances of my happening on Terkepes egoblog in the normal run of things are essentially nil. I’m glad to have seen it, though – along with all the other five. Travel by blogroll: I can recommend it.

“The fact these are British-born Muslims changes the paradigm of terror. The crucial issue now is, can we engage with the community so they move from being close to denial about this into a situation in which they really engage with us?” – Ian Blair, 15th July 2005

“I do not think there can be any question that this changes the paradigm, the context of community safety.” – Ian Blair, 6th September 2005

“Since 7/7 it’s a new paradigm – it’s a new world.” – Ian Blair, Any Questions?, 23rd September 2005

When someone like Ian Blair starts talking in polysyllables, two questions suggest themselves. Firstly, what is he talking about?; secondly, how scared should I be? The first question alone is a conundrum of inscrutable potentialities. The paradigm of terror, the context of community safety, a new world – is that three separate paradigms or three different aspects of one big paradigm? If the former, how come they’ve all changed at once? If the latter, what on earth should we call it?

The authority to which Blair is tacitly appealing here is Thomas Kuhn, whose 1962 work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions gave us the concept of “paradigm shift”. A Kuhnian paradigm can be thought of (according to Wikipedia) as “the set of practices that define a scientific discipline during a particular period of time”. Kuhn characterised scientific work undertaken within the framework of assumptions given by the currently dominant paradigm as normal science, which he described as puzzle-solving. The note of disparagement here reflects Kuhn’s belief that genuinely original scientific work was incompatible with adherence to an existing paradigm. Since research projects aim to produce results within predetermined limits (limits ultimately determined by the current paradigm) any evidence which might point towards a new set of theoretical assumptions would be deliberately and systematically ignored – set aside as anomalies or failures. Only when the accumulation of anomalies brings an existing paradigm into crisis, Kuhn argued, does a scientific revolution make it possible to move to a new paradigm: this is a model of punctuated equilibrium rather than gradual progress. The canonical example of this process is the transition from the Ptolemaic geocentric model of the cosmos, based on an unmoving Earth, to the Copernican heliocentric model, in which the Earth is one planet among others.

So, Ian Blair has a paradigm shift in mind – and let’s assume, for simplicity, that we’re dealing with one paradigm rather than two or three. Since he’s not a scientist, presumably what he’s thinking about is a change in the parameters of normal policing: the basic, unchallenged repertoire of assumptions and practices which define police work in England and Wales. It’s a change that has something to do with terrorism, something to do with “community safety” and a lot to do with the nationality of the 7th July bombers.

The first thing to note about Ian Blair’s paradigm shift, before we even think about its content, is that it’s a change that’s already happened: by implication the London bombings were the last anomaly that broke the back of the old paradigm, making it impossible for the police to work with it any longer. We can assume that this is also – like the shift from geocentric to heliocentric models – a change that can be delayed but not halted: these maps may not suit you now, but you’ll all be using them soon. It follows from this, not only that resistance is futile, but that arguing with partisans of the old paradigm is a waste of time: they have nothing to tell us, by definition; any argument they put forward can only attest to their refusal to change. What is needed, at a time like this, is not dialogue but persuasion: the point is not to reach agreement but to induce them to agree with us. Or, in Ian Blair’s own words, we need to engage with the community so they move from being close to denial about this into a situation in which they really engage with us.

While the rhetorical function of Ian Blair’s new paradigm is clear enough, its content is harder to define. The closest I can get to it is to say that, previously, anti-terrorist policing and the maintenance of good relations with the Muslim community could be pursued separately, because it could be assumed that British Muslims were as law-abiding as anyone else and that terror was a foreign phenomenon. Now, however, neither of those assumptions hold, and these two distinct activities need to be combined. On one hand, the police’s best chance of getting leads on the bombers and their suppliers comes from cultivating contacts with responsible Muslim community leaders. On the other, relations with Muslim community leaders need to be set in the context of anti-terrorist policing operations, by letting them know that the definition of a responsible community leader is one who is willing to supply leads to the police. In short, the police should actively pursue a policy of dividing the Muslim community against itself: in one corner, those who are prepared to grass on suspected terrorist sympathisers; in the other, the suspected terrorist sympathisers.

None of this makes very much sense. The idea that home-grown British terrorism was unknown before the 7th of July is idiotic; the idea that we should not now assume that British Muslims are law-abiding is repulsive. The idea that the police – or the government – can end terrorism by marginalising its supporters is demonstrably absurd. But Ian Blair’s new paradigm has one key feature which will probably assure its survival: it gives the police a much larger and more active role in society, turning them from mere keepers of the peace to fighters in the war against terror. Under the old paradigm, the police would be meeting the imam one day and doing anti-terrorist detective work the next. The new paradigm, combining the two, enables them to go out into the Muslim community – pre-emptively defined as a pool of potential terrorist supporters – and actively identify their enemy. Best of all, the enemy can be identified as a terrorist – which effectively gives the police as much leeway as a soldier in the field, if not more. (In due course, I believe we need a document similar to the military rules of engagement but time does not permit its creation at the present time.)

Ian Blair dreams of setting the terms of public debate; he dreams of making new laws and setting aside existing laws; he dreams of ending terrorism by turning everyone who’s not a terrorist into an informer. Most of all, he dreams of giving the police greater powers, more freedom to use them and less accountability.

Most police officers have had that dream, at one time or another. That doesn’t mean that it has to come true.

What happened on Thursday was terror: “personal violence against non-specific targets, with the immediate goal of causing panic and alarm”. That word ‘non-specific’ is important here. Murder fuelled by personal hatred is a sad, grim thing, but it’s always on a human scale; there’s always a story in there somewhere, a sense of an interaction between two people which could have turned out differently. (Murder comes closest to being genuinely tragic – inspiring a kind of horrified awe – when it is most pre-determined: when it seems that, after a certain point, those two people could not avoid that final confrontation.)

Murder fuelled by a blank determination to kill someone is on a different scale altogether. Its particular horror lies, I think, in the way that it resembles death by misadventure and death by natural causes and death by who knows what: it’s like the great crushing wheel of death that rolls through all our lives, in the form of accident and illness and bereavement.

Death says: you, here, now.
And Death says: no, it’s not fair.
And Death says: no, there’s nothing you can do about it.
And Death says: no, there’s no more time.
Death says: you, here, now.

To commit acts of terror is to be like Death – or rather, to usurp other people’s Death. To value life – to value living human beings – is to rebel against death, even if the rebellion is ultimately, inevitably, futile. It’s also to rebel against anyone so shabby and vile as to usurp Death for their own ends, whatever those ends might be.

So, setting aside any consideration of motives and outcomes, it makes perfect sense to oppose terror in the name of humanity. You shouldn’t have done that to us. You shouldn’t do that to anyone.

But this is not the same thing as opposing disorderly political activism. Under the Terrorism Act of 2000, ‘terrorism’ is defined as the commission or threat of serious personal violence, serious violence against property or attacks on ‘electronic system[s]’, when these are carried out (or threatened) for political ends. Under this definition, it is difficult not to apply the label of ‘terrorism’ to political violence of any sort. There doesn’t even need to be a human victim: ‘terrorism’ includes property damage; it includes hack attacks; it even includes threats. At the same time, it becomes extremely difficult to think in terms of ‘terror’ when talking about anything but direct action from below. If ‘terrorism’ is a challenge to the state’s monopoly of violence, the state cannot itself be guilty of terror tactics, more or less by definition. If what we say about ‘terrorism’ has anything to do with a consistent definition of ‘terror’, these distortions need to be resisted.

Nor is opposing terror the same thing as opposing the terrorists. There was a particularly woeful contrast between Blair’s and Ken Livingstone’s statements last Thursday. Obviously only one of the two is a natural speaker: Livingstone delivered a genuinely eloquent speech in effortless, conversational style, while Blair delivered a disjointed stream of verbiage in a style that wasn’t so much animated as animatronic. The contrast between what they actually had to say was more telling. Livingstone stressed the multi-cultural nature of London: this was not an attack on the elite of a ‘Christian’ country, but an attack on “ordinary working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old”.

Blair, on the other hand, said that most Muslims were perfectly sweet once you got to know them:

We know these people act in the name of Islam but we also know the vast and overwhelming majority of Muslims here and abroad are decent and law-abiding people who abhor this act of terrorism every bit as much as we do.

(Venn diagram challenge: draw sets representing ‘these people’, ‘the vast and overwhelming majority of Muslims here and abroad’, ‘all Muslims’, ‘all British people’ and ‘all British Muslims’. Now draw a set representing ‘us’.)

After that it got worse.

It is through terrorism that the people that have committed this terrible act express their values, and it is right at this moment that we demonstrate ours. … We will show, by our spirit and dignity, and by our quiet but true strength that there is in the British people, that our values will long outlast theirs.

For Livingstone, terror is bad because it’s terror: the constituency you rally against terror need only be defined – and should only be defined – by its resistance to terror. (You shouldn’t have done that to us. You shouldn’t do that to anyone.) Standing up against terror – like becoming a victim of terror – can become part of anyone’s life, at any time. When it’s over, perhaps, we’ll congratulate each other on our stoical British sense of humour and London’s indomitable spirit. (And perhaps we won’t.) But at the time, we’ll resist for no other reason than that we like our lives and want to get on with them. A dreadful, unforgivable attack happens; you name it as dreadful and unforgivable; you mourn the dead and defy the attackers; and then you get on with it. After all, it’s not as if it’s the first time:

The last time a bomb went off there was February 18 1996. … a 21-year-old IRA member called Edward O’Brien, on his way to do who knows what, had accidentally blown himself up. No one else died. It seemed terrible, at the time; it was terrible, just as the Docklands bomb was terrible, and the Harrods bomb before that, and all the other bombs too. Another time, only 18 years ago, the King’s Cross fire, 500 metres up the line from last Thursday’s bomb, killed 31 people and made a great many others feel that they were never going to go on the tube again. They did, though. My point is that not only is this not the first time that the long street that includes Woburn Place has been bombed; it is not even the first time it has been bombed by a terrorist on a bus during the last decade.

(Emphasis added.)

This is all a long way from Blair’s world. For the Prime Minister, terror is not a type of attack but the distinguishing feature of a group of evil people. Those people and their values are the enemy we need to rally against; the constituency to be rallied is defined in terms of ‘us’ and ‘our values’. This argument seems to spring from a certain kind of communitarian thinking, which holds that people can only be mobilised by appealing to the values of their communities – and that the bonds and symbols defining those communities are pre-political, if not pre-rational.

Whatever its roots, the implications of this argument are alarming: presumably those people would still be evil men with evil values (and would still need locking up) if they gave up terrorism. On the other hand, presumably we don’t need to be judged by our actions. The British state may bend a few rules and tread on a few toes along the way, but it’ll never be guilty of terror; on the contrary, it will be in the front line against terrorism, buoyed up by our strong and enduring British values. It’s not far from here to Mary Riddell‘s truly appalling argument in Sunday’s Observer:

No one savaged the legislature more effectively than Lord Hoffman, when the law lords rightly ruled as unlawful government detention of foreign terror suspects without trial. ‘The real threat to the life of the nation comes not from terrorism, but from laws such as these,’ he said. Liberals galvanised by Lord Hoffman’s passion should also have been uneasy. … Ask the commuters with their smoke-filled lungs what they think. Ask the maimed, the terrified, the mourners whose loved ones are lying in a mangled carriage entombed in a tunnel. Ask them whether the bomber or the over-zealous lawmaker more threatens British life. You will find Lord Hoffman’s credo held in scorn.

“Magna Carta? Leave it out – we’ve got terrorists to defeat!” The dangers of this line of argument are obvious.

(Incidentally, thirty seconds with Google found this, slightly more accurate, rendering of Hoffman’s words:

The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these. That is the true measure of what terrorism may achieve. It is for Parliament to decide whether to give the terrorists such a victory.

Hoffman rather specifically didn’t say that terrorism posed no threat, or that bad laws were more likely to kill people than terrorist bombs. He said that the fabric of British society – a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values – can be damaged far more extensively by bad laws than by terrorist bombs. The point is not that the law is more violent than terrorism but that it is more important; ‘Lord Hoffman’s credo’ means ‘never allowing last week’s spirit of survival to fester into hatreds and bad laws’, in the words of Riddell’s own conclusion. Given that Riddell appears to know and understand Hoffman’s argument, her misrepresentation of it is contemptible; as as is her projection of her own half-considered ‘scorn’ onto the victims of the bombing. But enough.)

If we are to condemn terrorism, it should be because we condemn terror, not because we condemn anyone who challenges the state’s monopoly of violence or anyone who opposes Britain. But these distortions of the ‘anti-terrorist’ message tell us something troubling about the message itself. The ethical humanist appeal to resist terror is a statement about how people should and shouldn’t act – whatever social situation they occupy, however much or little power they wield, whatever cause they espouse. It suspends any consideration of motives and outcomes – any consideration of ways in which the social world should change.

As such, the anti-terrorist message is fundamentally not political. It’s true that an act of terror is not like other forms of violence; one of its distinguishing qualities is that of being unforgivable. But it’s also true that, like other forms of violence, acts of terror are always meaningful. The act was committed by a certain group, with its own aims and its own history; certain targets were chosen; the effect of the act was to shift the balance of power in particular ways; some causes were furthered and others hindered. In practice, this means that ‘unforgivable’ is not the end of the story. From London to Madrid to Algiers to Deir Yassin to Fallujah to Srebrenica to the via Fani to Brighton to Omagh to the Milltown Cemetery, we have always to ask (we cannot help asking), unforgivable and… what? Was that particular act unforgivable and irredeemably vile, unforgivable and contemptibly cynical, or unforgivable and horribly mistaken? Might it even, in some circumstances, be unforgivable but tragically constructive?

Opposition to terror and terrorism is an honourable ethical stance – arguably it’s a necessary ethical stance – but it’s not a political position; if anyone offers us anti-terrorism as a political programme, we should be very wary of what we’re getting. If your opposition to terrorism has political implications – to reduce the amount of terror in the world, we should change this and this – the chances are that you’ve brought those conclusions to your stance on terror, not derived them from it. (Apart from anything else, how did you decide which source of terror needed most urgently to be changed?)

Opposing terror is not a political act. Which isn’t to say that it’s not a good thing: death has its due, and the dead should be mourned. All terror is equally unforgivable, and we should say so: to resist terror is to honour its victims. But when we’ve demonstrated our opposition to terror we’ll go our separate ways, and within a month or a week we may well find ourselves on different sides of a political argument.

Which is how it should be: life goes on, which means that politics goes on – and it goes on without the terrorists, just as it did before. We defy terrorists, but there comes a point when the best way to defy them is to forget them.

What carrots are is orange. They’re orange for entirely political reasons: in the sixteenth century, Dutch growers cultivated orange carrots as a tribute to William of Orange, and the colour stuck. A thousand years of yellow, white and purple carrot history, wiped out in a generation.

It could all have been so different.The colour ‘orange’ takes its name, not from the town of Orange (in France), but from the fruit – and ultimately from a Sanskrit word which was pronounced nagaruka or naranga and meant something like ‘fragrant’. The town, on the other hand, takes its name from a Gaulish phrase meaning, approximately, “tract of land in a valley”. (Not the most imaginative namers, your Gauls.)

Not only is the similarity between Orange and ‘orange’ a linguistic coincidence; the fact that William bore the name of Orange is a dynastic fluke. William’s family name was Nassau; Orange came into the family eighteen years before he was born, when his uncle Hendrik married Claudia of Chalon and Orange. If Hendrik had married somebody else – anybody else – William might still have inherited the title and become a hero of the Dutch war of independence, but he would have done so under the name of Nassau. It might not have done much to the history of the Netherlands, but it would have changed the colour of carrots – and of the right-hand stripe of the Irish flag.

The point is – and I’m sure you’re wondering – that decisions taken for immediate political reasons can have long-term effects, even if we’re measuring the long term in centuries. It may be a myth that the EU has regulated the curvature of bananas, but the commercial pressure for standardisation of fruit and vegetables is real. The drivers of standardisation are the major distributors and retailers – the supermarkets, essentially – but this marketplace is, like all marketplaces, a political arena. The pressures are commercial, but political institutions manage how they are expressed and limit how far they can go. And the EU has not distinguished itself in the resistance to commercial standardisation. If anything, it has helped the process along: European norms give suppliers an agreed set of parameters to work with; European subsidies, and their withdrawal, allow non-standard producers to be pushed out of the marketplace. And once it’s gone, it’s gone:

The names of the fallen. Foxwhelp, Sheep’s Snout, Hogshead, Duck’s Bill, Black Wilding, Brown Cockle, Monstrous Pippin, Burr Knot, Broadtail, Hagloe Crab, Eggleton Styre, Peasgood’s Nonesuch, Tom Putt, Bitter-scale, Slack-my-girdle, Bastard Rough Coat, Bloody Turk. The list runs into thousands.

The Hagloe Crab and the Monstrous Pippin have gone the way of the purple carrot. The process of standardisation, which has cut the enormous range of English apples down to five or ten varieties, isn’t something anyone voted for, and I doubt it’s something anyone would have wanted (There was a Miller’s Seedling, small, striped green and red, the juiciest, sweetest fruit I’ve ever eaten. “It used to fill the London markets, but today, because it’s small and doesn’t keep, no one’s interested.”) But it’s good for business, and what’s good for business is good for the EU.

Or take ‘market reforms’ in the public sector. A recent Private Eye let that particular cat out of the bag when it noted that the impact of the BBC strike would be strictly limited in several BBC ‘enterprises’, as they had already been sold off to companies like Siemens – which meant that the NUJ didn’t have official recognition. The story has got about that introducing competition into the public sector is all about greater ‘efficiency’. This, as far as I can see, translates roughly as ‘getting the same amount of work done less expensively’ – which in turn means making employees work longer hours for less money, and restricting their ability to resist. Again, I’m not sure that anyone voted for this – I’m pretty sure nobody would have wanted it (not for themselves, at any rate). But it’s good for business, and what’s good for business is good for the EU – which is why the draft EU Constitution contains (or contained) a clause specifically mandating member states to reconcile public services with the workings of the free market.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Apple varieties don’t have to be standardised out of existence; public sector unions don’t have to admit defeat. More specifically, the EU doesn’t have to be like this – after Sunday and Wednesday’s results, it really doesn’t have to be like this. The drive towards European integration on a neo-liberal model has been accompanied, on the Left, by a curious kind of political blackmail:

1. European integration on these terms is currently the only available option
2. as such, it’s supported by the main parties of the Left
3. the main parties of the Left are opposed by the far Right and by sectarian ultra-leftists
4. therefore opposing European integration on the current terms can only favour the far Right and the sectarian ultra-Left

Very similar things were said – in some cases by the same people – about voting Labour in May. It’s a persuasive bluff, but a bluff is all it is. This week it’s been called.

Sorry, Harry, but it has to be said: another Europe is possible, now more than ever.

(Does anyone know the Dutch for Avanti!)

Paul Anderson raves about John Palmer’s presentation of “the left case for a yes vote in the French and Dutch referendums”. I’m not so sure.

Very briefly: the new elements of the constitutional treaty can be grouped under the headings of economic liberalisation, democratisation and institutional consolidation. From the Left’s point of view, moves to entrench the dominance and extend the scope of free-market capitalism in the EU would be – I think John would agree – a Bad Thing, which we would be well advised to oppose. John’s response to this aspect of the treaty consists of denying its existence:

If the constitutional treaty is killed, all the free-market provisions that the no side objects to will still be in force. This is because they are part and parcel of all the other EU treaties that will remain in force.

Really? Does the treaty do nothing to entrench the neo-liberal model or extend its scope, nothing to promote privatisation or assist European corporations? This has not, to say the least, been my impression to date. (Nor is it Victor’s, and he’s got references.)

Secondly, democratisation – of which, I think we can agree once again, the EU currently stands in crying need. John again:

What the new treaty does – for the first time in clear terms – is to balance the imperatives of economic growth and competitiveness with a commitment to a wide range of human rights and social values and standards, and to greater powers for the elected European parliament. This opens the way to the emergence of a democratic European polity where voters will be able to choose between rival European party programmes and candidates for election as president of the commission.

This strikes me, again, as a distinctly partial summary. Wouldn’t meaningful democratisation start by giving the elected European parliament power over the unelected Commission, not by giving the Commission a fig-leaf of democratic legitimacy? To whom would an elected EU president be accountable, and how? What John describes here sounds less like democratisation, more like a continuation of the long-term project of building a new Europe by stealth (“a political project dressed up in technocratic clothing”, in the words of one of the pieces I quoted recently at Actually Existing).

The third aspect of the treaty – and of the Yes campaign – John barely touches on, but I think it’s central. I’m talking about the provisions which make the EU look a bit more like a state, for example by giving it a President and a Foreign Minister. Some commentators are quite excited about the idea of a United (Capitalist) States of Europe emerging to challenge the global hegemony of the USA; a vision something like this is lurking in Habermas’s comments and, perhaps, in John’s peroration:

[rejection of the treaty] will also obstruct the urgent task of creating a genuinely common European foreign, security and defence policy. No wonder the neocons in Washington gloat as they prepare to celebrate.

For me this, in itself, counts neither for nor against the treaty. By which I mean that, in the current situation, it counts very strongly against. Were we talking about a reasonably democratic EU – let alone a social-democratic or socialist EU – institutional consolidation would be much to be desired. Since we’re not, I can’t see any justification for giving the governing elite even more power, or even more swollen heads, than they have already.

Those, I think, are the important questions – the first and second in particular. I’m not saying I’ve got a final answer to any of them. If (as John says) the treaty genuinely democratises the EU while doing nothing to tilt the balance in favour of neo-liberalism, it’s well worth voting for. If, on the other hand, it does little or nothing to bring genuine democracy while extending the reach of neo-liberalism, it’s well worth voting against. I’m leaning towards the second of these positions, but that’s not particularly important; the point is that these are the terms in which the treaty should be judged. That much should be reasonably clear.

If it’s not clear – and it certainly hasn’t been up till now – part of the blame lies with two supplementary arguments, both advanced in John’s piece. Firstly, John points out that we can’t choose our allies:

Perhaps the biggest self-delusion of the anti-treaty left is that it can ignore the link between hostility to the EU and hostility to immigrants and to the further enlargement of the European Union. These links are at the heart of the no campaign in the Netherlands.

This, though, is an appallingly bad argument. If we assume, for the sake of argument, that there is a coherent Left case to be made against the treaty – or even against the EU – the fact that racists and xenophobes are also campaigning against the treaty can’t discourage us. If anything, it should make us work harder, precisely to demonstrate that not all critics of the treaty are racists – and, perhaps, win over some disgruntled democrats who have ended up on the Right because only the Right was prepared to criticise the EU. If there is a coherent Left case against the treaty, we can’t afford to leave the field to Kilroy. (Victor, again, is very good on this.)

Secondly, John argues that the French Left should support the treaty on tactical grounds:

Rejection of the treaty – including its provisions to extend democracy and social rights – will only strengthen the determination of the majority of centre-right and conservative EU governments to weaken its democratic and social content further in any new negotiation.

If there’s a Left “No” and a Right “No”, in other words, it’s only the Right “No” that will be heard. We have been here before, and not very long ago – less than a month, as I write. We were told that we should hold our noses and vote Labour, since any swing away from Labour would only benefit the Tories; we – hundreds of thousands of us – went ahead and voted against Labour, mostly not for the Tories but for the Lib Dems or the Greens or Respect; the swing away from Labour was massive, the swing towards the Tories tiny. Blair reacted exactly as if there had been a swing to the Tories: he’s deaf to appeals to move to the Left, but he can hear appeals to move Right even if they aren’t actually there.

Well, so much the worse. The vote was what it was: all those Labour MPs (and ex-MPs) whose vote crashed know that, even if Blair doesn’t. The vote is our means of communicating with our representatives: to vote according to our judgment of how they’ll react is to compromise ourselves and corrupt the vote. In any case, if it’s hard to tell between a Left “No” and a Right “No”, it’s even harder to identify a Left “Yes”. The referendum is a request for popular endorsement; to vote Yes is to endorse the treaty. C’est tout.

I’m more sympathetic to a third supplementary argument, which John doesn’t touch on. It’s this:

This Constitution has been put together behind our backs, by delegates who may well be representative but were co-opted – in just the same way that Europe has been built by mechanisms whose inexorability leaves us sidelined. … A fog of political and media propaganda, broken all too rarely by attempts at explaining the issues, has ended up promoting the impression that we’re being taken for idiots: yes, the French people will be consulted, but they must not be allowed any alternative to accepting everything.

– Zoe Margarinos-Rey, quoted from Le Monde. The level of discussion of the constitution in Britain, even among its advocates, has been abysmal: it’s generally assumed that this is simply one more obligatory step in the journey towards European integration, whereupon the discussion moves on to the more interesting meta-topics (“will Blair secure the backing of his party?”) and meta-meta-topics (“if Blair fails, how will the Tories exploit it?”). If I were voting in a referendum on the treaty, I’d vote No on this principle alone: if this treaty is as important as it’s cracked up to be, it deserves a period of consultation so prolonged and intensive as to give every citizen the means and the opportunity to express an informed opinion – and have it heard. Anything less, in matters of this importance, really is taking us for idiots.