What looked likely to become a proto-civil war between the Iraq Government (supported by its Western allies) and the Mahdi Army was undoubtedly the big regional story this past week. Certainly bigger than the non-event in Damascus, the Arab League Summit.

This was not because of the fire fight in Basra (30,000 Iraqis with air support against 6,000 ‘criminal elements’, leaving nearly 100 dead and 300 wounded by the weekend), but because of the way the conflict spread quite rapidly into other areas of Iraq.

The isolation of the initial targets as ‘lawless gangs’ broke down, both in fact and in rhetoric, as regular Mahdi Army units supported these alleged ‘criminals’.

The political dimension behind Al-Maliki’s attack (seen as an attempt to seize full control of the revenues of the Southern oilfields on behalf of a rival Shia faction) also threatened to overwhelm the official line - notably in a hard-hitting Financial Times editorial.

Militias seized control of Nasiriya. Heavy fighting was seen in Kut, Diwaniya, Amara, Hilla and Sadr City (Baghdad). There were sustained mortar attacks Hamas-style on the Green Zone. The total death toll is guessed at around 240.

The Iraqi Defence Minister had obviously not been well trained in ‘spin’. He admitted that “we supposed this operation would be a normal operation, but we were surprised by this resistance and have been obliged to change our plans and tactics”.

Analysts were soon admitting that the situation was ‘very serious’. Everyone was getting very confused about whether Al-Maliki was just taking on the criminal gangs - maybe this was a wider coup against more mainstream Sadrists in the South?

The potential grew by the hour for a direct armed confrontation between the seriously important Sadrist movement and pro-Western forces, which might now include many armed-to-the-teeth ‘converted’ Sunnis as well as middle class urban Shia with an eye to the main chance.

Our own unpopular theory (detailed only in our private client reports) was that Al-Sadr was complicit in a sin of omission rather than commission in the original limited action operation but that Al-Maliki profoundly misjudged the situation within the movement in the south.

Al-Sadr is actively seeking to transform a militant armed movement into the most significant constitutional participant in the democratic process. This is the classic reform/revolution dichotomy that will appears in all mass movements operating within fluid or anarchic political situations.

Our analysis seemed to be borne out by his actions in the last day or so. He asked his movement not to fight Iraqi Government forces although not at the expense of handing over its weaponry – at least not just yet.

The Mahdi Army and Iraq may have been pulled back from the brink but only because the former is led by a charismatic leader, a man with a plan. This intervention by Al-Sadr, if it holds, should save face all round. 

Because the Mahdi elements, criminal or not, have insisted that their actions have always been ‘defensive’, the initiative implies that Al-Maliki must back down on his core demand that weapons be handed over - or battle will commence again.

The blunt truth, well appreciated by Westerners caught up in the storm, is that the Mahdi Army were more than holding out, it was winning in pockets. It also punctured the myth of a safe Baghdad within a day or so of the conflict breaking out.

And it has now withdrawn before it could be tested, Fallujah-style, against the full might of the Allies.

For be in no doubt, Allied firepower could raze Sadr City to the ground if it so chose. It is just that a Republican would probably not be high in the polls afterwards and the faltering Peace Process would sink once again into the desert sands.

The West and the Iraqi Government were already ‘spinning’ victory this morning ('Al-Sadr gives way') but this situation is a lot more complex than that. There is no outright win for anyone in this extended chess game.

If there are any winners, it lies in those committed to the steady movement towards an effective constitutionalism (assuming that the bulk of the Mahdi Army obey Al-Sadr) within Iraq which is most everyone except the extremists. This is good.

However, there is another winner - this is the political authority of the Mahdi Army as prime representative of the Iraqi Shia poor. The probability is that we have a strongly anti-Western sub-Hezbollah in the making, one that will limit options for the West inside Iraq much as its counterpart does in Lebanon.

On balance, it is ‘Iraq’ that may have won, assuming that the Sadr command holds. Iraq is lurching in stages towards full sovereign status but, in the battle between the West (including Saudi Arabia), Iran and the ‘nationalists’, it is the West that has had to take a step backwards.

This has been another mishandled conflict to add to the list. It has exposed Western weaknesses outside the arena of naked force and it has reminded Iraqis that they are occupied with a quasi-puppet government existing in part on the availability of Allied fire power.

The plans to hold a permanent military presence on bases inside Iraq - much as they exist in the UK and Germany - are vulnerable to an elected Government that represents popular Islamic nationalism. The Mahdi Army contains the seeds of such a determination.

The effects on the West of the worsening situation are dire. The UK Government has already had to abandon plans to cut troop numbers in Iraq to 2,500 this year.

The reduction of mortar attacks on Basra base had fallen by 90% since an ‘alleged secret deal’ between the British and the Mahdi Army. Now this 'alleged secret deal' is distinctly wobbly. If war starts up again, the chances are high that the British may be drawn into the conflict.

The US, on the other hand, did get dragged into the ‘war’, not only with air strikes (somehow airpower is presented as if it was not intervention at all) but obliged to send reinforcements to help Iraqi security forces in the South. 

The President raised the heat by calling the Iraqi Government’s action a ‘defining moment’ which only meant that the US was not about to let Al-Maliki fail. It will seize, reasonably enough, on this crisis as a step towards acceptance of democracy.

The Sunni (excepting what remains of Al-Qaeda) must be minded to wait and watch on events so the more mainstream Sadrist and non-aligned Shia forces would have had some hard thinking to do about how far to assist their radical and poorer class comrades if things had got much worse.

It also seems as if Al-Maliki did not consult very many people before acting – the President may have been kept in the dark, certainly the full Cabinet and even more certainly Parliament.

And if the Allies themselves seemed non-plussed at times on details on implementation, it may be because not everyone who should have been told was told about what was planned, by whom and when.

Evidence from last week’s Times does suggest, however, that Iraqi police officers in Basra knew about the assault a couple of weeks ahead of time, enough to allow some to abscond with their guns to the other side and to pre-prepare the militants for the assault.

This is either intelligence failure or another example of one part of the western effort not speaking with another - either way, it reproduces a pattern of incompetence that seems to be par for the course within Western political operations in zones of conflict.

But something really stinks here, as if people have been positively misled. It is as if Plan A (the assertion of Government sovereign authority in a limited way and with political bases at home squared) had been used as cover for a poorly considered Plan B (a political assault on a rival Shia faction on the assumption that allied firepower would always back up the incumbent government if things went wrong).

If so, a police action with probable senior Sadrist acceptance of the inevitable could easily have degenerated into a civil war in which not only the full force of the Mahdi Army may have been engaged but also an edgy Sunni militia, barely kept on their leash by bribery and guns.

We were already back in the world of civilian deaths from air strikes (the bane of any acceptance of the West as liberating force from Baghdad to Kabul) and of curfews in the capital city.

It was a reminder to many wishing to forget it that – whatever the definition of Western Governments of what an occupation is or the fact of ‘elections’ – Iraq remains, to many Iraqis, as occupied as Germany was in 1946. If only (think the Americans) the Mahdi Army were as small-scale and as easily defeated as the Werwolves of that time.

The US could probably ‘win’ a ground war with Sunni and SCIRI allies in the long run, but Mahdists are not going to go down without a fight.

We would see dreadful scenes of violence by both sides, high casualty rates, a further deterioration in US standing, opportunities for intervention by third parties, possible destabilization of some Gulf states and, worst of all, if the matter deteriorated into a ‘Vietnam situation’, probable direct confrontation with Iran - with appalling consequences to regional political stability and global economic prospects. Grim stuff!

The only good news before Al-Sadr's announcement was that crude flows were restored through the Southern pipeline system quicker than expected, pushing prices back down from $108 to $105.

And yet rebels now know that their threat in itself represents a couple of dollars on the global price of crude while the actuality of sabotage can add another $2 for as long as a pipeline is closed. Imagine what a general conflagration could do … 

However, amidst all the ‘spin’ from every side, there were two abiding messages to take away. 

The first was of deep American and British unease at the actions of the sovereign state they supported. The second was of the grim and enthusiastic blood-and-soil determination of youthful militants who were beginning to welcome the relief from the tension of inaction.

As usual, it was the non-aligned civilians who were caught up in a mess that increasingly looked like a miscalculation. Let us hope that Al-Sadr continues to command the allegiance of his movement ...

www.tppr.co.uk

We like to remain as contemporary as possible in our comments so, before looking at what Mr. Cameron, leader of the British Conservative Party, is doing, let us see where we are in this uncomfortable economic crisis.

Bailing Out Duff Bankers?

The current problem seems to be distrust between banks. Those banks with cash are hoarding it for themselves and for their customers. They are refusing to lend to other banks.

Logically, this should increase the chances of runs from perceived weak to perceived strong banks (hence the recent hysteria over HBOS in the UK) and further serious threats to the system.

No doubt 'things' are happening behind the scenes to reduce the chances of this happening but special interests always come to the fore at times like this.

The bankers see government intervention as necessary to (in effect) guarantee interbank lending, but this of course represents (to taxpayer interests) responsibility without power.

Should the State use 'our money' (actually 'its' money) to bail out some pretty greedy and less-than-competent people to save a system on which we all depend? This raises serious questions about whether this is the right 'system' at all. After all, we hire these twits to protect us!

The economic anxiety lies in the fact that even the recent unprecedented Federal Reserve intervention has failed to stem the rise in interbank borrowing costs. US figures are also showing collapsing consumer confidence and have showed a record slide in house prices in January.

Responses

The Bank of England’s response is to ‘hint’ at future interest rate cuts and the availability of more liquidity. As always, much of this must be interpreted as the sending of signals into a market that is looking for ‘signs and wonders’.

The sign here is that the Bank is taking the crisis in credit availability seriously enough that it is placing it ahead of its other major concern – inflation – at least for the moment.

And yet, three major mortgage lenders yesterday reduced loans supply and raised rates so that higher bank loan rates for the public are moving in the opposite direction to Bank of England interest rates! Perhaps this is the wonder!

Whatever banks may want by way of intervention, the authorities in Washington/New York and London are clearly moving towards a different and tougher regime on bank supervision.

The conflict of interest between banks (who just want to be bailed out for business as usual), regulators (who just want the system to work without lurches and crises) and politicians (who want something for the money that is not going on roads, schools and hospitals) will soon come out into the open.

The Politics of All This

The electoral timetable is an important issue here – any regulation of capitalism that is required as a matter of urgency enters the US political process just as the two main parties compete for the Presidency (and Obama, if selected, is quite capable of introducing populist themes at the expense of unregulated bankers and of McCain's more establishment backing).

A troubled New Labour Government will probably have to go to the country in 2009 so it needs the crisis sorted and forgotten – with itself as heroes for averting meltdown and restoring stability – between the expected poor local election results on 5 May and the following Spring.

Cameron (for the Tory Pary), after some delay, has now entered into the economic debate (as have the Scots Nationalists from their perspective) by emphasizing economic stability over tax cuts.

This puts his Thatcherite irreconcilables on notice that they will not be allowed to come between him and his capture of the centre ground in British politics, sweetening the insult by targeting a European initiative – the EU Social Chapter – as a major error of judgement by the Blair-Brown government.

The European Dimension

Cameron is almost certainly correct in his critique of the Social Chapter in view both of the nature of the British economy, very different in structure from the corporatist cultures of Europe with their in-built small town sclerosis, and of national competitiveness requirements.

This refers back, possibly unintentionally, to Sarkozy’s lavish praise for the British economic system (which seems slightly odd to many natives at this time).

His call is for the UK to help move Europe towards a more liberal-conservative free market model by engaging in the EU as partner to France and Germany's conservative 'reforming' governments.

Sarkozy and (we suppose) Merkel are offering us a liberalized Europe that will be led by ‘soft’ Thatcherite reforms, close to the Blair-Brown model of ‘capitalism with a human face’. 

This is the Third Way, full of Germanic-style rights and duties - essentially liberal and free market in orientation and with more social and less economic regulation. It is equally New Democrat in inspiration.

But Sarkozy has not been well briefed. This appeals to the trades unions and big business but not to entrepreneurial capital, small traders, non-unionised workers or – and this is the new battleground – ‘victims’ of economic instability in the run-up to the next election.

It works when it works - that is, the middle ground supports it not for ideological reasons but because it is getting richer and more secure. Now, its internal logic has created a crisis of debt and global market correction ...

Cameron, meanwhile, is refusing to be seduced by Gallic charm and internationalism.  He is not that much different from New Labour but he offers a more national-capitalistic model in which ‘freedom’ (a core English national value) includes the freedom to trade as piratically as required to survive in the nation of Drake and Hawkins.

He wants us to trade out of crisis by reducing regulation that affects the mid-sized business and small trader (and the individual through taxation levels which it is his long term aim to reduce) but which often gives, in practice, competitive advantage to very large scale business.

The difference in regulatory structures is important - one seeks to reduce regulation in itself, the other seeks to change the regulation regime from when in which special interests are protected (historically jobs and national champion profits) to one in which economic interests are provided with social obligations but are otherwise free to follow the market.

The question is - is the second model necessarily left wing in practice? and is the first model necessarily right wing if social problems are resolved without the necessity for regulation at all?

Government Gets Into A Fix

The Government has behaved quite oddly in current economic circumstances. It has seemed indecisive on national macro-regulation and seems to be over-prepared to use taxpayer money to subsidise a system which it seems imperfectly to understand.

In the eyes of some, it seems to be ‘selling out’ British interests to a global economic policing model within which it is a very moot point that the British national interest is best served.

And it has undertaken token left-wing fixes (leading to the non-dom fiasco and increased corporate taxation, easily evaded at the top level of business) in order to try and persuade the Left that it ‘feels its pain’ when all it has really done is bring forward corporatist ‘reforms’ that were intended in any case.

These 'reforms' are designed to create general rules for the capitalist system, often driven by the OECD and so, ultimately, the US Treasury and Administration.

The EU often gets the blame for these changes but, in fact, the changes are designed to create the right EU, so let us not put cart before the horse. Multilateral institutions are, of course, part of the current Western mantra.

A Confused Left

The Left is confused. It welcomes the ‘fixes’ to transfer funds from the wealthy to the poor (although it really was fairly minimal stuff) as a step in the right direction, but it senses that something is going very wrong at the macro-level. 

This is not only about loss of power in itself because of a miscalculation about the British (or rather English) people, but a more profound unease that an entire model of capitalism is floundering, that the Clinton-Blair ‘third way’ has implicated them in it and that authoritarian solutions to crises in capitalism are corporatist rather than democratic.

There is also tension between the trades union interest and the conviction Leftist. These two wings of the British centre-left have often squabbled – most noticeably over ideological Marxism – but they have always seen themselves as safer together than separate: better to hang together than be hanged together.

Unfortunately, their interests really are diverging now. Conviction Leftists have difficulty coping with this because they are politically the weaker party. They know that they have no significant independent electoral or financial power base.

As a result, they are steadily being dragged into complicity with a corporatist system that (with its EU Social Chapter) makes them uncomfortable on democratic and libertarian grounds – and it is doing nothing substantive about the growing poverty levels in ‘out’ groups, lone parent families, pensioners, the non-unionised.

It is, in effect, a system designed for social stability by and amongst the elite (including trades unions) and for a model of economic growth in which ‘trickle down’ into the unrepresented community, through taxation and subsequent redistribution, is expected to be sufficient to cure social ills.

But if the cash is not there (an old theme of ours), there is no trickle-down and 'security concerns' (the cost of maintaining the proto-world government to enable the system to work) are pulling money away from social spending at a time when the pot of money is getting smaller.

Cameron Unnerves the Edges of the Left

Cameron is unnerving this community. It is dividing into the depressed, the stupid (those who just do not get it), the consciously loyal (the backbone of New Labour, often Marxist in origin) who believe that there is no alternative and those now drifting towards the Liberal Democrats on process issues like electoral reform (whose guns will be spiked soon by Jack Straw's reform programme).

But there are those who are thinking the unthinkable, that social policy is safer in the hands of a Tory 'one nation' Government than in an ostensibly left-wing New Labour Government.

You can forget Cameron's attempt to appeal to trades unionists – this is just performance art designed to unnerve the system further. The trades unions are in with New Labour to the end.

What is more threatening to the Labour coalition is Cameron's espousal of social capital theory, his social libertarianism, his clear commitment to the NHS and his recognition that the ordinary family is in crisis under market pressure. 

This makes him personally (if not his party in its raw state) actually more left-wing than the old right of the Labour Party!

Of course, this is partly illusory – the man is not the party and if he was ousted (which is possible if he fails to win an election or loses an election later), the middle class party of little englanders and class sneering lurks unreformed behind him.

Its troops in local government and the constituencies are no less stupid in their analyses and loyalties than those of any other party in which tribalism is more important than free thought.

The new wave of younger MPS are more liberal than those who underpin the party in the country. This does not bode well for a permanent political realignment.

There is also a rather dangerous bloc of Thatcherites, hard-line Atlanticists and unreconstructed terror-warriors lurking in the Party's hinterland which should cause concern to anyone seduced by the thought of a more humane Cameron Tory Government. 

These latter are very dark forces indeed, with their own intelligence and security links, though no worse than their equivalents inside New Labour. Other countries have been manipulating our politics for sixty years on both sides of the fence and are not about to stop now.

Nevertheless, there is already a small drift of left-wingers (all currently doing so privately and with their discretion respected) into the Cameron camp as advisers on practical social policy matters.

Reports are now coming back. They like what they see – they believe that social capital theory is a genuine intellectual effort to re-build one nation thinking and that the man is genuine.

I do not believe that we can dismiss this marginal drift of the Left-leaning persons towards Cameron as trivial or uninteresting.

Will Cameron Win Over The Left?

If it has to be faced that traditional democratic socialism has no purchase whatsoever on British politics through any of the two 'liberal' centre-left parties, then a one nation Tory Party may actually be one way forward.

There have even been brief if unsatisfactory precedents in history for this - Disraeli's famous 'Young England' attacks on the treatment of working people in the liberal-backed industrialisation of the 1840s, his later extension of the franchise to the respectable working classes (his 'angels in marble') and even Tory acceptance of 'one nation' thinking [Butskellism] between the 1940s and 1970s.

Realistically speaking, very few on the Left will actually take the step to ‘cross the floor’ (none in positions of authority) but, silently, many will not be wholly outraged by a Tory victory in 2009 if only to force (as they believe) some sort of re-balancing against the centralized right-wing control of the machine of New Labour.

This idea that New Labour can return to some mythical Golden Age is rather futile for technical reasons related to party organization but it will sustain many depressed party workers who, psychologically, cannot cope with the reality of New Labour and its permanence.

The real choice for democratic socialists seems to be fairly stark - give up on your dreams for a small slice of the New Labour model of regulatory capitalism, cultivate your garden and get out of politics like Candide, neurotically waste your life in sectarian fringe organisations holding the guttering candle alight - or rethink everything wherever it may lead.

One option could have been a new Labour Movement Party operating in the interstices of politics in a reformed system, co-operatively with the Liberal Democrats and the Greens.

This has been blocked off by the refusal of the trades unions to countenance revolt and the tribalism (or, when they do split, the transcendent egoism) of leading Left figures. 

A new Party would also lack of a coherent ideology and a social base, at least ones that do not hark back to an older vision of socialism. 

This is just not what the British people want, wierd abstract language and history lessons that they don't understand, led by unworldly academics and obsessives of, frankly, limited intellect and imagination. 

We are now seeing the slow strangulation of a once powerful movement by its inability to face reality. 

It becomes harder by the day to see the 'real' Left surviving the next century as anything other than an apparatchik element in a machine for running the English State, institutionalised as part of the State and expressing the State's interests, and putting itself up for plebiscites every four or so years.

From this perspective, thinking the unthinkable includes comparing minority status within New Labour and minority status within the Conservative Party - and no longer necessarily assuming that you will get a better hearing or more influence on policy within the former than the latter.

Closing Note - Obama and Cameron

This brings us briefly to Obama. Soundings from both the UK and the US tell us that something very odd is going on. Support for Obama is increasingly looking as if it is generational and not necessarily a matter of Left and Right.

Some liberal Republicans (worried about McCain’s temper tantrums and the legacy of Bush) are following many younger liberals and Leftists into his camp. Many British conservatives are open about their admiration for the man and his platform.

The common denominator between Leftist and high conservative interest in Obama is the sense of a need for a change (but not a revolution) away from a generation of politicians that has failed, that has disappointed. 

Think socialist in 1997 Britain and conservative in 2000 America and you can see the scale of the disappointment and why attitudes are converging.

Cameron is not Obama and Obama may prove a man of straw. The convergence of a mildly communitarian conservative critique and a liberal and even democratic socialist critique of the current system will not cause spectacular headlines. It may not be very solid.

However, the arrival of both at the same time may change the Anglo-Saxon world in the next decade through the electoral process and affect the centralising and authoritarian project of late capitalism in unexpected ways - in favour of national sovereign rights, democracy, anti-imperialism and social equality ...

But if the generational challenge fails because the 'good old boys' cheat them of victory through some manipulation of the system they command, then change may come more explosively later, as disappointment and crisis turns to a more inchoate rage that democracy cannot assuage.

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This Easter has seen unprecedented British headline coverage about the opinions of some of our unelected leaders – the clergy.

Moral Interventions Over Easter

The Archbishop of Canterbury warned against international greed for oil, power and territory and he gave a doom-laden indication of the collapse of civilization.

The evangelical Bishop of Rochester plugged into the economic mood by attacking greedy bankers.

These two moralistic interventions paled into insignificance next to an unprecedented direct attack by the Catholic Church in Scotland on controversial embryo research legislation.

Blairite support for the Catholic Church has always been a function of its appeal to the rightwing Irish-origin Catholic English and Scots working class.

The link became obvious over the weekend as we saw what could only be interpreted as a pre-emptive strike by known Blairites in support of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor.

Rumours of a major Cabinet reshuffle designed to dispose of some troublesome Blair ‘leftovers’ made have had something to do with this but such mundane concerns would not have been uppermost in the Cardinal’s mind. 

His position, like that of his Anglican colleagues, was one of principle and it resulted in some very irritated scientists accusing Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor of failing to understand the science of embryo research.

Trying to Reverse History

All this palaver shows a new confidence in the Churches.  They now operate within a political climate that encourages faith interventions because cultural issues have been re-introduced into wider discourse ahead of traditional economic interests. Tony Blair opened this door and they have stepped through.

This return of traditional culture to the debate could become a dead end. If anything, it might fuel the argument of the BNP that culture is the political issue. We could point to fringe Wodenist web sites that would add a fiery racial paganism to the national political mix (although the vast majority of English pagans are assiduously a-political).

But, even in the mainstream, there is ever-increasing nonsense coming from all sides in discussions of ‘Britishness’, ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘identity’. 

The proposed oath of allegiance to the Crown received a particularly negative reaction and not just from Republicans: it was seen as presumptuous that any true-born Briton should be asked to prove his inner duty with an oath.

Britons know where their allegiance lies in a rather blood-and-soil way that despises intellectual analysis.

We now have Government commitments to flag-flying, to soldiers wearing their uniform in the street (not a popular idea with some base commanders trying to keep their squaddies out of trouble on a Saturday night in Biggleswick-under-water), a 'Dad's Army' for national security and (today) a rather nice but odd tribute to the Bevin Boys.

The common theme in all this is a Government looking backwards to a mythic 1940s. It is giving up on the early Blair attempt to create a new and 'modern' national identity. It thinks, perhaps, that it can inspire us to wartime spirit over the fate of 'our boys' in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Government seems angered by a perceived lack of a patriotism. But loyalty to this Government is not comparable with the true Churchillian message of 1940. 

Churchill got loyalty from the people because his loyalty was to the people, Conservative and Labour alike, when the country needed to be unified against a real threat after the class struggles of the 1920s and 1930s.

This is important. In the 1940s, the Crown stayed in the country and did not scuttle. A Government of national unity united the classes. Churchill spoke for the country in the House of Commons in 1940 and mounted a national interest coup within his own Party.

The New Labour Government is, unfortunately, closer to the Chamberlain Government - in office but no longer in power and having misjudged both the international and the economic situation.

The Cynical View & The Golden Age

To be cynical, however, much of this nonsense, which is the butt of humour throughout the land, is also about the Labour pensioner vote in the run-up to the May local elections. 

By reminding over-65s of the values of the 1940s (even if they could have been no more than toddlers), the Government perhaps thinks that it will hold on to old Labour loyalties and just swing it for Labour if the disenchanted and bored younger generations decide to stay at home.

These interventions tell us that the traditional British identity that sustained the war effort in the 1940s, and which the much-despised Enoch Powell saw collapsing in the 1970s, is now terminally ill. This attempted resuscitation is of a corpse.

Whether used cynically as a last shot at the tag end of Labour's vote or as an honest attempt to recreate some mythic golden age - from the Dick Van Dyke school of British history - it is an attempt to plug into a tradition that has gone.

British 'pluck' would return quickly enough if jackboots really did threaten to land beneath the White Cliffs of Dover but the nearest jackboots are those of American lawyers extraditing British businessmen and European policemen (soon) chasing some Kosovar gangster.

As we saw in the last posting, no-one believes that the country is at risk from external forces - even terrorism has been downgraded to a level below that of a bad dose of the 'flu. 

The biggest threats to the well-being of any British citizen are probably petty criminals, blind economic forces, the weather and the government itself. We will probably need a Roosevelt, not an ersatz Churchill.

Faith Leaders Fill the Vacuum

The new interest in unelected faith leaders and in the forms and principles of politics rather than its content seems to be intensifying just before that moment in history when (to adapt Brecht) morals will once again be replaced by the demand for bread.

The World Food Programme has already launched an ‘extraordinary emergency appeal’ for $500m to avoid rationing food aid because of spiraling costs. 

The newspapers are full of what would have been accepted as the partial collapse of capitalism in the 1930s but for which there is no longer any public language now that Marxism has been discredited.

The seriousness of the economic situation is only just beginning to sink in. If we wipe away the hysteria, it is probably just a correction in global capitalism, one that is shifting resources from the West to the emerging world. Capitalism is far from dead.

But what do the victims do? The impotence of an earlier generation of victims - in the 1930s for example - could be channelled into collective revolt centred on secular ideologies. 

We had communism and fascism but also the Popular Front, the New Deal and the re-organisation of the British centre-left that led to the welfare state (and was endorsed by a generation of conservatives after the event).

This time around it is different. The parties of the centre-left have colluded in the system that has broken down. Nor is it just a case of a struggle for power within the dominant part of the global system. 

The victims, if the crisis goes too far, could be watching an increase in Arab, Chinese and Russian wealth as they are scrabbling over scraps. There is no precedent for this unless it be the collapse of Arab, Mughal and Chinese dominance before superior Western technology.

What may be dying is not so much capitalism but the asumption of Western dominance within the capitalist model. The belief of social democrats and neo-conservatives alike that a working capitalism requires a ‘pale pink’ liberal democracy to work adequately may be tested and found wanting.

And if the assumption that liberal mass activism in the West on behalf of (say) Sudanese, Tibetan or Burmese victims of state capitalism proves (as we believe will be the case) to be futile, then the bitterness of defeat may have domestic effects of which we can, as yet, know nothing.

Cloud Cuckoo Land

With no domestic secularist redistributionist political strategy of any credibility left within the West, any anger at failures in government is becoming sullen and disengaged - or it is turning ‘spiritual’ which is like saying that it is living in cloud-cuckoo land when it comes to restraining the rapacity of the rich and powerful.

Non-democratic restraint of the powerful is only possible through the sorts of authoritarian cultural intervention that, of course, only make the most rich and powerful more so.

The Dalai Lama's strategy of spiritual persuasion may preserve Tibetan culture and perhaps create the conditions for an accomodation with Communist China - he and his successors can simply out-sit the Central Committee in theory - but it is a strategy that still requires a strong China or its complete collapse from extraneous pressures.

What it is not is a liberation strategy and the major pro-Western religions have developed strongly passive and conservative strategies for protecting their own people, waiting on change (such as the Vatican exploitation of weakness in the Soviet system) rather than developing forward strategies.

The Vatican, for example, moved out of this space in Latin America in its effective condemnation of liberation theology and preference for developmentalist Opus Dei models - both Protestant evangelism (spiritual) and Bolivarism (political-material) filled the space.

Now, it is probable that impatient Tibetan nationalists are making their own history. 'Spiritual' leaders either have to discipline their own radicals or go with their flow. In every such case, a failure of 'auctoritas', the mentality of Augustine or the Inquisition, must lead to schism.

Once secular democracy ceases to constrain within liberal boundaries, spiritual leaders become 'tainted' either by the need to draw blood for their people or adopt a strategy of accommodation with power. The worst case is when secular power is used to destroy the schismatics - a common Catholic trick but not one likely to appeal to the Dalai Lama.

This is the new world that seems to be emerging in the wake of weakening hold of Western liberal democracy over its peoples. Men of faith are having to assert their values because they fear the vacuum created by liberal failures of will and policy.

Faith and Power

There is a political version of natural selection. Faith can combine with secular power and secular power can appropriate faith in this struggle. Faith associated with secular power can soon gain predatory dominance over multi-faith and decentralised democratic or localist alternatives.

The price of Catholic domination of Western culture was an accomodation with that rather dark character (read his life story) the Emperor Constantine, while cuddly old Anglicanism required Henry VIII to exist at all. Luther famously allied himself with the magistrates against Church and peasants.

Faith-based auctoritas is all about reining and destroying competitors for power and not about material redistribution of either economic or political resources.

The secular pitch implicit in auctoritas, as in Augustus the greatest of such figures, is that order does not redistribute power or wealth but it increases, through its stability, total wealth.

'Spirituality' often craves such order precisely because its mission is not material - at the most it wants to open up the space for charity, the free spirit of giving.

Stability means authority. Faith leaders are unelected and are authorities. The tendency towards the politically authoritarian in faith cultures is unmistakable.

But just as Emperors used the language of the Republic and Communists used the language of Democracy, so our frightened authoritarian faith-orientated betters are using the language of Liberalism when they mean something very different. 

Communitarianism and Authoritarianism

Gordon Brown has been bitten hard in his political ankle by Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor. He speaks of his faith (as his predecessor did) and the Cardinal has called his bluff - or rather contrasted one faith (Scots Catholic) with another (Scots Protestant).

Once Blair and Brown had introduced the language of rights and duties and of communitarianism, they were on a slippy slope towards accepting 'auctoritas' as a legitimate basis for politics in opposition to the 'demos'. 

Duties imply something external or essential to the individual. This, in turn, philosophically, implies that essentialism must have an interpreter beyond the relative and the contingent - an authority who one accepts on the basis of faith.

The recent proposal for compulsory voting is typical of the new stealth authoritarianism from an anxious elite. Instead of changing political forms to engage the public in the system by transforming it, the public are to be forced into a duty of engagement. 

This too is a culture of faith where 'oughts' are to govern what is. We ought to owe allegiance to the State or vote and so we must be made to demonstrate that we have fulfilled our duty.

This mentality has not existed in British politics since working people managed to shake off the squire and the parson over a hundred years ago.

The British public has walked away from politics for some very good reasons (including the preachiness of its current leadership) but, like Hitler in the Bunker in 1945, the politicians are blaming the people instead of themselves.

They are now arranging 'reforms' to buttress a busted system rather than thinking through why people are walking away and whether sovereignty truly resides in the people or in the machine.

The universal answer to this within the British elite remains that sovereignty resides in the Crown, but of course this no longer means our attenuated and basically decent Monarchy. 

It means a somewhat busted political class in Parliament, created out of central party lists, whose sole purpose is to supports competing Executives on the orders of their respective Party Whips.

The next stage is that traditional party allegiances themselves will collapse. 

The Tories have already tried to confuse matters by calling on trades unionists to reconsider their allegiance to New Labour, part of a strategy to remind Leftists just how disillusioned they are with a right-wing Labour Party.

This is so much nonsense too. The best that will happen from such tactics is the sullen withdrawal of natural supporters of all three traditional parties until the political class tries to hold back the dam of resentment, not only with 'fixes' like compulsory voting but transfers of funds into their own coffers through state funding.

In the end, voters will be legally bound into forms of behaviour they despise and resent as their taxes subsidise second rate professionals who act as mere liaison officers with the Executive, the real winner from such trickery.

Churches and Liberal Extremists Fill the Gap

Given that some of the more illusory aspects of British democracy have become ever clearer since the mass march of 2003 over Iraq, it is understandable that the Churches can seem no less legitimate than the policians and that they have an opportunity to meet the deficit.

The logic is for political factions to seek alliances with faith leaders. These may jointly demand a more intensive implementation of the new morality of rights and duties that seem to impinge more on the victims than on the creators of the almighty mess that most citizens see looming ahead.

I am not being fair to the Archbishop of Canterbury, I know this, and certainly not to liberal Anglicanism but leaders of other faiths, Jewish, Muslim and Catholic, are now in danger of setting the agenda because of the collapse in trust in secular democratic leadership.

Faith-based politics, and its offshoot which is an aggressive anti-faith politics, are becoming a worldwide phenomenon.

The Dutch are now preparing for the back-lash expected in the Muslim world as right-wing liberal extremist Geert Wilders releases his assertively anti-Islamic film in a direct challenge to implicit Muslim censorship of Western freedoms. This anti-faith intervention is a back-handed compliment to the rise of faith-based politics.

The Dutch Government and others have asked Wilders to desist but he seems adamant that the film will be released, probably on the internet, before the end of March. No-one knows (other than himself) what exactly it contains.

What we do know is that it will accuse Islam and the Koran of representing a fascist ideology. We have to oppose the release of this film simply because we consider it provocative bad manners but we consider both sides – banners and promoters – to be as bad as each other.

Most of the pragmatic establishment on both sides of the fence is rallying around pre-emptive diplomacy to miminise the effects of an 'irresponsible' internet release of a film that is expected to result in at least some deaths – whether of rioters or Dutch troops in Afghanistan.

It is not a case of Wilders being prepared to die for his beliefs but of his being prepared to have others' die for his beliefs - the true sign of the fanatic. The Grand Mufti of Syria (a moderate) has warned the European Parliament of ‘global consequences’ – 100 died in the Muhammed cartoons riots in 2006.

This genie will be let out of the bottle as a reaction to the faith explosion – a few extremists in one tradition will now provoke another tradition and inspire a counter-extremism that will soon bring 'chickens home to roost'.

Folk Memories & History Books

Faith is becoming a player again and faiths tend to have central figures who speak with authority - not Sunni Islam and Judaism perhaps, but certainly the Pope, the Dalai Lama, the Iranian Grand Ayatollah and the Archbishop of Canterbury. None of these were voted into office - nor was the local priest, rabbi or imam.

As democracy falters and congeals, there is an unreported faith-based realignment of political forces in which the Vatican, many Western liberal secularists, Saudi conservatives and Jewish interests are tending to combine against any accommodation with Radical Islam and, implicitly, with the Shi’a and anti-Western Leftism/state nationalism.

The Bin Laden threats against the Papacy (in the context of the Muhammed cartoons), scarcely reported in the UK, are taken much more seriously in Europe, especially Italy, than in the UK. There is a logic to Al-Qaeda resentment of the Papacy. It may seem an absurd logic but it works from their assumptions. 

The Vatican is much concerned with the fate of its brother Christians (especially In Iraq), it has come, with some difficulty, to a final accomodation with the Jewish community after centuries of collusion with anti-semitism, it has a recent historical role in collaboration with the US in destroying the rival ideology of communism (and so may reasonably be considered collusive in any US war with Islam) and, now, the Vatican and the Saudi and Qatari authorities appear to have come to an 'understanding' on opening churches on their respective soils.

A faith in alliance with your secular enemies - to Al-Qaeda, the Vatican is a natural target.

This is a new and still only vaguely defined cold war between those defending settled faiths and those promoting new and expansive faiths, or newly radicalised versions of old faiths that appeal to the politically excluded and perhaps, one day, to the hungry.

The economic infrastructures underpinning these new tensions will become clearer over time but secular authorities are faced with a new difficulty that hungry peasants and workers will not be led by alien communists but by traditionalists. 

In the war on terror, just as you might fight fire with fire, so conservative traditionalists become assets, rise in influence and undermine liberal secularism by demanding equal say on 'moral issues' (which have a tendency to expand in scope with time).

Liberal social democrats are particularly ‘screwed’ by what is happening because liberalism is, for the first time in history, now being protected by traditional conservative interests against ‘fanatical’, as the liberals see things, redistributors of power and resources.

This link, of faith and revolt and of faith and authority, has not been important in the West since the Early Modern peasant revolts and, after these were suppressed, inconvenient tribal insurgencies.

So, the past is not dead at all. Understanding some of these developments in international affairs still comes down to folk memories and to what has been taught in history books for partisan reasons.

We may, for example, think that early sixteenth century resistance to the Ottoman Empire in the European East is irrelevant today, yet it has been a central factor in the forms and content of recent murder and mayhem in the Balkans.

Northern Ireland used to be our native object lesson in the burdens of history but, with the collapse of a two power Cold War system that was keeping histories buried and in check, out they come again – and, in many cases, so they should.

Strange Alliances

All sorts of strange alliances and political positions are now emerging, based less on what we think we want for ourselves (as with traditional interest politics) and more about defending ourselves against what we think others want from us.

Arabs have created a narrative, with some justification, of dispossession, based on the proven conduct of white settlers in the massive white migrations out of Europe in the nineteenth century.

The Russians are rediscovering their Orthodoxy and their role as the Third Rome. Latin Americans reject Marx for Bolivar. Americans seek to extend their constitutional arrangements extraterritorially. 

The list of adaptations of local history to international relations is endless - we are moving backwards in time to an international politics that would be more familiar to diplomats operating before the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 than after it.

Even within the UK, liberal Protestants tend to be much more sympathetic to the general thrust of Muslim sentiment than Jews and Hindus, while minority right-wing Anglicanism tends to have emerging country or radical evangelical aspects.

The struggles around Livingstone's Mayoral candidacy owe a great deal to the melt-down of his rainbow politics as representatives of opposing ethnic groups start tearing into each other.

Not a lot of this is rationally considered - tribes associate or disassociate on 'faith' and the cultures involved are closer to those of football club supporters than reasoned debaters. Where is all this leading? Well, the first thing to say is that economic crises also bring out certain types of spiritual leader.

This will upset some people but Hitler was, for his people, briefly a spiritual leader and, post-war, a small esoteric clique represented by Savitri Devi and Miguel Serrano, and in a far more detached manner, Julius Evola, have sustained that 'spiritual' vision, despite the mainstream blanket ban on letting much wind of it come out into the open.

Communism’s eschatology and iconography were religious in its inspiration and Marxism has always been more powerful as a faith rather than a creature of analytical reason.

There is more of this to come. The radical religious elements in the resistance to colonialism and imperialism have now displaced the tendency towards accommodation and (relative) reasonableness of the first fifty years of struggle because accomodation and reasonableness delivered bugger-all.

Yasser Arafat and George Habash, even the ‘evil’ Saddam, appear ‘pale pink’ next to the ‘blood red’ of Shia and Sunni martyrdoms. If the Left Hand Path is triumphing, it is because the Right Hand Path failed to deliver justice.

Roosting Chickens

As the Reverend Wright said, ‘chickens are coming home to roost’. When the true instincts of the people are better expressed by Archbishops with a 2,000-year apostolic succession than by elected politicians, then there is something going very wrong with Western liberalism.

A recent Prime Minister who wore religion on his sleeve yet declared a bloody war and left office to take large sums from bankers is not the authentic product. We all sense it. A shallow man of straw. The new Prime Minister is a sincere 'son of the manse' but his ethic seems a world away from the sophisticated a-moral liberalism of his English subjects.

Perhaps this is why Barack Obama and, to a lesser extent, John McCain are so interesting – for all their flaws, the public detects that both men have some moral core that is in tune with the Western tradition at its best and that has been sadly lacking in the fanatical egotistical and power-crazed networks of the small people who have ruled the West recently.

If so, the fashion for religious leadership within the West may well pass because it is merely there to fill a vacuum and, when that vacuum is filled with tough competent leaders who are more than 'spin', then we can all get down to secular business again.

But, without being too apocalyptic about the collapse of civilization (pace the Archbishop of Canterbury), it is probably wise to bet on a ‘time of troubles’ ahead while secular democracy gets its house in order.

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