Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski is a writer and analyst with a specific focus on globalization, industrial policy, and international conflict. He worked as an analyst in one of the agencies overseeing industrial policy in Poland.
Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski frames his essay via Neo-Con Ghoul Robert Kagan. What better way to assure his readership at The Telegraph that he is part of that cadre!
…
More than twenty years ago, American neocon Robert Kagan wrote in his book Of Paradise and Power that while Europe lives in a Kantian zone of peace, America could not possibly ignore the realities of power. And precisely because Washington wielded power, Europe was able to nurture its illusion that history did not concern it anymore.
While European Union can no longer afford to be a paradise oblivious to the logic of power, it hasn’t become comfortable with it just yet. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, would like to turn the EU into a geopolitical actor. This is evident in the more mercantilist attitude of Brussels, which wants to defend the continent’s interests with a new ‘anti-coercion instrument’.
…
But now trouble is brewing in paradise. Whereas twenty years ago, when Kagan wrote his book, Berlin and Paris, the so-called engine of Europe, formed a united front and opposed the US invasion of Iraq, today they no longer see eye to eye. The French Minister for Europe, Laurence Boone, may argue that the two countries still share the same vision, but the list of contentious issues only grows longer.
prime ministers of Belgium and Spain, Prime Minister of Slovakia, Geert Wilders , Hungary, too, Europe may be on the verge of much greater shifts, while Europe lives in a Kantian zone of peace, Europe was able to nurture its illusion that history did not concern it anymore, European Union, Ursula von der Leyen, Brussels, tariffs and export controls, European Parliament, European Council, Global Gateway project, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, European Commission, Rhodium Group analyst Noah Barkin, that Europe is afraid of geopolitics, twenty years ago, when Kagan wrote his book, The French Minister for Europe, Laurence Boone, Germany has fought vehemently against the inclusion of nuclear energy, Cancellor Scholz is instilling fear in Paris, It is the China question, the Franco-German couple with eventual break-up,
…
There are 297 words before The Reader reaches the final paragraph, that at it’s ultimate sentence, offers this dire prediction/inevitability : ‘Collision seems inevitable’.
That final paragraph:
Many countries in Europe may think that Washington’s attitude towards China is too confrontational. With the ambiguity of European capitals, America may find the temptation of unilateralism irresistible. However, if taken too far, it could trigger a similar attitude to Germany’s in other European states, namely short-sighted egoism at all cost. Above all, the break-up of the Franco-German couple opens up novel political possibilities. For the US, to shape new, more effective coalitions. For Europe, to enter the realm of power politics and leave behind its post-historical illusions.
Consider that Robert Kagan is a notorious Neo-Conservative, married to Victoria Nuland, a utterly notorious War Monger, who heads Biden’s Foreign Policy Technocrats, and participated in the 2014 Uranian Coup. Tyszka-Drozdowski demonstrates the he too is a Neo-Con, or at the least a fellow traveler. Kagan and his his coterie are steeped in Leo Struss’s appropriation of ‘The Noble Lie’:
In the Republic the Noble Lie is supposed to make the citizens of Callipolis care more for their city. Schofield (2009) argues that the guards, having to do philosophy from their youth, may eventually find philosophizing “more attractive than doing their patriotic duty” (115). Philosophy, claims Schofield, provides the guards with knowledge, not with love and devotion for their city. The Noble Lie is supposed to engender in them devotion for their city and instill in them the belief that they should “invest their best energies into promoting what they judge to be the city’s best interests” (113). The preambles to a number of laws in the Laws that are meant to be taken as exhortations to the laws in question and that contain elements of traditional mythology (see 790c3, 812a2, 841c6) may also be taken as “noble lies”.
1. Martin Ivens reviews three books, and mentions a fourth.
THE PARTY’S OVER
The rise and fall of the Conservatives from Thatcher to Sunak 368pp. Verso. Paperback, £11.99.
Phil Burton-Cartledge
THE RIGHT TO RULE
Thirteen years, five prime ministers and the implosion of the Tories 432pp. John Murray. £25.
Ben Riley-Smith
THE CASE FOR THE CENTRE RIGHT
232pp. Polity. Paperback, £15.99.
David Gauke, editor
The Mention :
John Ramsden’s influential study of the Tories, An Appetite for Power (1998)
John Ramsden’s influential study of the Tories, An Appetite for Power (1998), identified the Conservative Party’s ruthless instinct for ditching failing leaders and inconvenient principles as the key to its success. Five prime ministers and five violent changes of direction since 2016 is, however, surely overdoing it.
Opinion polls indicate that one of the democratic world’s most durable political parties is heading towards defeat some time next year, and the only question is over the margin of disaster. The Labour Party, which not long ago looked to be stuck in the permanent doldrums, has become the dull but safe alternative. After an overdose of politics dull but safe is a winning formula.
Phil Burton-Cartledge’s The Party’s Over analyses through the prism of class how the Conservatives survived their “near-death experience” in 1997 to recover power thirteen years later. In his view the party had only “postponed its inevitable demise”. Ben Riley-Smith’s The Right to Rule provides the narrative of Tory decline, fall, rise and fall again, framed by general elections from 2010 onwards. Read together the two books suggest that, in Marxist terms, history does indeed repeat itself: first as farce, second as farce.
…
Big government nativists would prefer to onshore lost manufacturing industries and end “excessive” dependence on foreign labour to fill jobs in the NHS and social care. Their conservative social principles and defence of the nuclear family echo some of the themes of the Christian right in the US, though their concern for the poor seems genuine. The Tory MP Danny Kruger’s Covenant: The new politics of home, neighbourhood and nation (2023) is their new bible.
Reading between the lines of Riley-Smith’s The Right to Rule we see how the party’s crisis is one of competence as much as of class. Recent Tory prime ministers had to reconcile the interests of their dwindling but rightward-shifting party membership with those of the wider electorate. And to do that they had to achieve three goals. First, the economy was to be guided to recovery after the financial crisis of 2008. Second, the party was expected to reduce immigration numbers – or, failing that, ministers had to prove that they were in control of secure borders and explain how mass migration brought compensating economic benefits. From Cameron’s time onwards the Tories made a series of promises on immigration that they couldn’t keep. The stubborn persistence of hundreds of thousands of job vacancies demonstrates that they have also failed to reform the domestic labour market.
…
Under Margaret Thatcher and Major the party could boast that the economy grew faster than its continental equivalents. Today Labour asks voters a variant of the Ronald Reagan campaign question: “After thirteen years of Tory government, do you feel better off?”
…
2.
Pay careful attention to the ‘how’ of Bagehot’s Story Telling approach: an exercise in schadenfreude. Or is he just following the cattiness of Adrian Wooldridge?
A readers’ lunch atthe Spectator, the world’s oldest weekly magazine, is not for the faint of heart or light of wallet. It starts with an aperitif of Lanson Le Black Reserve (a reasonable £55 per bottle). Next comes a magnum of Laurent Perrier Grand Siécle Grande Cuvée No. 23 (a less reasonable £400). Round it off with a Graillot & Perez Encinas Bierzo (a mere £26). Those with the means to drop £150 can enjoy a boozy meal in the Spectator’s boardroom, surrounded by the 195-year-old back catalogue of the magazine that counts a few chancellors, many cabinet ministers and a Conservative prime minister among its alumni.
People are willing to pay a premium for a slice of Tory life. A recent struggle over the ownership of the Spectator and its stablemates, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, proved just that. Lloyds, a bank, put the outlets into receivership after a long-running row with the Barclay brothers, hotel magnates and Channel Island overlords who bought the titles in 2004, over a £1.2bn debt.
A consortium led by Jeff Zucker, a former cnn editor, and backed by Gulf royalty, paid off the whole Barclay debt, with a view to taking control via a debt-for-equity swap. Conservative mps, usually cheerleaders of foreign investment, were appalled that a foreign power was putting up the cash. Now the Conservative government has put the deal on hold.
Their interest is understandable. The past, present and future of the Conservative Party runs through the Spectator. More specifically, it runs through the editor’s office. At one end sits the desk of Nigel Lawson, who went on to become Margaret Thatcher’s most influential chancellor. In front of the window, looking onto St James’s Park, stands a chaise longue on which Boris Johnson once enjoyed a post-lunch “erotic reverie”.
This sentence is astonishing coming from the near twin of the Spectator:
The past, present and future of the Conservative Party runs through the Spectator.
Selective quotation
In its way The Economist exercise in schadenfreude, demonstrates the failure of ‘Conservatism’ and its political/monetary base, that has yet to reach The Economist? The Corporatization of the whole of Mass Media, in an American context, is explained by the pioneering work of Ben H. Bagdikian!
Ben H. Bagdikian, Reporter of Broad Range and Conscience, Dies at 96
Selective quotation is a defense against Economist propaganda?
…
The Spectocracy is not only a quirk of history, but a quirk of the present. Its former political editor, James Forsyth, now sits in Downing Street as Rishi Sunak’s political secretary, having left the magazine in late 2022.
…
Forthe Spectator, its influence is incidental. “We’re a cocktail party, not a political party,” in the words of one former editor. It is proudly irresponsible, mixing Westminster coverage with giggling reactionaryism.
…
Instead, the Spectator resembles another deeply English cultural institution. In the 1980s comedy, “Withnail and I”, two out-of-work, booze-soaked English actors find themselves trapped in a falling-down cottage in Penrith.
…
Results vary when a journalistic mindset is applied to government. Good polemics make poor policy. Mr Johnson first floated the idea of an eu referendum in 2003.
…
Eclecticism is positive in a magazine, but not so in a politician. The Spectator swings between liberalism and Conservatism, by turns thoughtful and thuggish. Similar behaviour dogs the government.
…
Even the Spectator’s reticence about its relations with the Conservatives feels familiar. The magazine has an anti-establishment streak, while clearly part of it.
…
The final paragraph of this ‘polemic’, of a kind, has it’s own sub-title, in bold font!
We want the finest wines available to humanity
While the personnel and the politics of the Spectator and the Conservative Party overlap, their fortunes do not. The party is heading for oblivion; the Spectator is in fine health. Circulation is at an all-time high, while the Conservatives—coddled by an uncritical media—are set for their worst performance since at least 1997, unless something dramatic happens. Opposition is a happy state for a magazine, if not a political party. Particularly with plenty of champagne in supply.
This sentence fragment offers? ‘while the Conservatives—coddled by an uncritical media—are set for their worst performance since at least 1997, unless something dramatic happens.’ Why would The Economist complain about the Conservatives, as the Tony Blair stand-in Keir Starmer waits in the wings as the New Labour candidate?
The Reader need only be reminded of The Economist’s notorious 2015 ‘Backwards, comrades’ political propaganda?
1.
Martin Ivens offers critical evaluations worth pursuing!
…
Tim Pitt’s contribution to The Case for the Centre Right, a collection of essays edited by the former treasury minister David Gauke, explains that “on a per capita basis, the UK grew by just seven percent between 2007 and 2022 and labour productivity by just four percent”.
…
Economic growth has slowed since the 1990s and productivity gains were meagre even before the financial crisis. “This slowdown is common among advanced economies”, he adds. (The US seems to be an exception.)
…
Twelve years into Tory rule, Truss became prime minister convinced that this record was a disaster. Research by the economic historian Nick Crafts (1949–2023) and his colleague Terence Mills bears her out.
…
Thatcher’s Big Bang deregulation of the City and the information technology revolution have seemingly run their course. But Truss’s plan to cut taxes while increasing public spending during a period of market volatility – Reaganomics without the safety net of the dollar reserve currency – broke all the rules. Sunak’s remedy is more austerity, eased by a few supply-side reforms. Perhaps AI will ride to the British economy’s rescue. Perhaps not.
…
Although the government could have borrowed at knockdown interest rates, it failed to invest in infrastructure and housing. In his Mais lecture as chancellor last year Sunak owned up to the country’s investment deficit. The right’s remedy is supply-side reform, public expenditure restraint and tax cuts.
…
Demographics, says the author, are against the Conservatives; the young will soon take their revenge. Nonetheless, the author doubts his own wisdom: “No one is getting rich betting against the Tories”. Quite. Note how the US Republicans have defied roughly similar trends.
…
Twelve hours before the European referendum vote I bumped into another of The Case for the Centre Right’s contributors, Andrew Cooper, Cameron’s chief pollster and now a board member of a Blairite think tank, Labour Together. Cooper assured me that Remain would win by a double-digit margin. As Riley-Smith makes clear, the modernizers and their “moderate” predecessors never got Europe right.
Michael Portillo, one of Major’s “bastards” and a contemporary avatar of socially liberal Toryism, argued in the Noughties that the modernizers were mild Eurosceptics, but were always good club men first. That was the class analysis by a state-school-educated boy of his public-school successors.
…
Without a victory to his name Cameron found that his Eurosceptic right wing, along with Ukip, slowly pushed him towards the Brexit door. Cameron’s foreign secretary, the former Conservative leader William Hague, interviewed by Riley-Smith, believes that there would have been no need for an in/out referendum had there been a vote on the EU constitutional treaty negotiated at Lisbon in 2007, saying: “Britain would have voted against the Lisbon treaty, we would have blocked European integration, but we would not then have embarked on trying to leave the EU.
…
…in the midst of the European migrant crisis. Lynton Crosby, the Australian political strategist behind Cameron’s outright victory in 2015, urged him to storm out of the talks. “That’s not me”, replied his boss. “I am a reasonable person.” Thatcher, barred from membership of St James’s clubs by reason of her sex, was not reasonable. She rudely banged the table until she got her billion-pound rebate back from Brussels. Johnson is not a gentleman and the only rule he observes is to break the rules.
…
There were other roads not taken. Riley-Smith records that Cameron was advised by Gavin Williamson, his chief parliamentary secretary, and Iain Duncan Smith, a hardline Eurosceptic and former Tory leader, to “do a Harold Wilson”: in 1975 the Labour PM made a show of stepping back from active campaigning in the first referendum on European membership, even though he wanted a “Yes” vote.
…
Cameron’s best brains, Osborne (a Remainer) and Michael Gove (a Leaver) urged him not to hold an in/out referendum.
…
Crosby warned him not to use Project Fear tactics during the campaign, but Osborne publicly threatened an emergency round of cuts and tax hikes in the event of a Leave decision.
…
Nothing succeeds like respectable failure in the British establishment, hence Cameron’s recall as foreign secretary.
…
Martin Ivens insights are worth consideration and engagement, considering the latest replacement for Bagehot, Duncan Robinson ‘Political Editor and Bagehot columnist’ , in his slap-dash, back-handed way seeks through a critique of The Spectator: to produce a political narrative that is not just hobbled by its narrow focus, but is a rhetorical copy of the ‘ Backwards, comrades!’ political propaganda!
What might The Reader make of John B. Judis as thinker/writer? Below is a review of his ‘The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust’
For someone to assert today, as John Judis does in The Paradox of American Democracy, that there actually is a noble American tradition of stewardship of the public interest that can be taken at face value is arresting. Judis has been associated for years with The New Republic, and an earlier book of his, Grand Illusion: Critics and Champions of the American Century (1992), had at its center one of the magazine’s founders, Herbert Croly (also the author of the Progressive Era manifesto The Promise of American Life). In his new book Judis argues for a revival of Croly’s view that a powerful federal government should tame the excess of unbridled capitalism.
In Judis’s retelling of American history, more than a century has passed since we abandoned the idea that we could live in an innocent world without government. The notion of “big government” as a late-twentieth-century development at odds with the American tradition is, he says, a distortion by business and the Republican Party. The truth is that at the end of the nineteenth century, as the United States developed a national industrial economy, and as the previously mighty political parties faded, business corporations and their lobbyists in Washington began to dominate the political system, and the public began to look to government to curb their power. Fortunately, Judis says, a major new element appeared to help counterbalance the power of business: “elite” organizations.
Judis traces the formation, the rise, and the fall from influence of this elite. He has constructed a highly detailed and unfamiliar history of public policy research organizations, such as the Institute of Governmental Research (now the Brookings Institution), the American Association for Labor Legislation, the National Civic Association, the Twentieth Century Fund (now the Century Fund, the underwriter of Skocpol’s book), the Russell Sage Foundation, the Committee for Economic Development, and the Ford Foundation, among others, and discusses the effect they have had on government policies like the Social Security Act, the Wagner Act, and the establishment of the Rural Electrification Administration.
The difficulty with Judis’s schema, and it is considerable, is that his concept of an “elite” does not yield to precise definition. In Judis’s view, the qualities of an elite are public-spiritedness, intellectual honesty, and a commitment to rising above personal interest. In the past, he writes,
The elites and elite policy groups advocated the development of policy based on fact and knowledge. They nourished public trust in government by defending and explaining complex decisions that the ordinary voter did not have time to study. And they have carried forward a tradition of disinterested public service against the venality and corruption that interest groups have often encouraged in public life.
But there is no sure test of whether a person or an organization is a member of this elite. Judis’s definition would seem to be roughly similar to that of what people have been calling, since the late 1950s, “the Establishment,” but that term doesn’t have a precise definition either. If there is such a coherent group, within it there is both more internal disagreement about policy and more personal ambition than Judis allows for.
His account of the history of American elites begins during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the Progressive Era, which came into being substantially because of the elite’s disapproval of the Gilded Age. Although Judis concentrates largely on research organizations, he also sees the hand of the elite in the creation of objective journalism and professional philanthropy, in faith in the truth and power of social science, in the Protestant Social Gospel, and in an internationalist foreign policy. One might say that any time a group of rich or influential people organizes in an effort to move the government in a more socially responsible direction, and presents itself as expert and nonideological, it seems to meet Judis’s defining test for an elite.
Although the elite is impossible to pin down, it is also impossible to present Judis’s argument without using his terminology. He says that every liberal period in the twentieth century has coincided with an elite influence on government. During the Theodore Roosevelt administration, pressure from the elite helped to create the early regulatory agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission. In the Twenties the influence of the elite faded and pure business-lobbying groups like the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce rose in its place, but during the New Deal the elite came back and helped to bring about legislation that created the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Social Security system, and stronger labor unions.
The early harbingers of the decline in the power of the elite, Judis tells us, were the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 and the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947—the former empowering business to challenge government’s regulatory authority, the latter enormously strengthening the hand of employers in their competition with labor—both of which effectively diminished the mediating role that the elite should play. But the elite’s power, according to Judis, didn’t fully break down for a couple of decades. During the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, foreign policy was controlled by patrician “wise men” and in domestic policy the Republicans accepted the major tenets of the New Deal—Judis reminds us that Eisenhower pushed through major increases in the minimum wage and Social Security. John F. Kennedy was the grandson of an ethnic political boss who had been elaborately socialized into the elite. In a speech Kennedy stated one part of the elite’s creed: “The fact of the matter is that most of the problems…that we now face, are technical problems, are administrative problems.” As late as the 1964 presidential election, elite influence was strong enough to generate overwhelming support in the business world for Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaign.
Judis’s admiration for the presence of an elite in political life is conditional on its adhering to his kind of politics—government as a countervailing force to business. Therefore he sees the late Sixties and Seventies as having weakened the elite, because many elite organizations embraced liberal causes that he would consider secondary, such as affirmative action and improving conditions in the inner-city ghettos. He says, for example, that the appointment of Franklin Thomas as head of the Ford Foundation in 1979 meant that “business had won its decade-long struggle to emasculate the Ford Foundation.”
To Judis (perhaps more than to his readers) there is a razor-sharp distinction between elite organizations that seek to influence public policy and business organizations that function in similar ways. In the Seventies, while the former were fading, the latter were rising. The villain of Judis’s book is Irving Kristol, who, he thinks, was responsible more than anyone else for persuading business to adopt the methods of elite organizations, such as publishing serious journals and creating think tanks—but to promote, in the guise of public service, a pure lobbying agenda whose central goals are tax cuts and a reduction in the federal regulation of business. New conservative institutions in Washington like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation gained power, and so did old-fashioned lobbyists. The conservatives successfully purveyed the ahistorical idea that “big government” is antithetical to the American tradition.
It is amazing how dramatically American attitudes about government and business have changed in a generation. In one poll result Judis quotes, 76 percent of Americans in 1964 said they could “trust the government in Washington to do what is right,” while in 1992 only 29 percent did. The percentage of Americans who agreed with the statement “the best government is the government that governs least” went from 32 in 1974 to 59 in 1981. The percentage of college freshmen who said that being “very well-off financially” was one of their highest goals went from 41 in 1968 to 76 in 1987. Judis, who is particularly interested in the struggle between business lobbyists and elite organizations in Washington, implies that much of the national turn to the right can be attributed to the efforts of Washington lobbyists for business and of their Op-Ed and think-tank allies. Surely it isn’t that simple, and there was some element of public opinion moving in a more conservative direction on its own, without manipulation by business. Judis exaggerates the extent to which “K Street,” Washington’s rue des lobbyistes, runs the country.
It may be useful to regard Judis’s notion of the elite less as a way of explaining the course of American history and more as a description of the self-consciousness of some Washington liberals and of their political style. Liberal elite politics entails stating an overall commitment—no doubt sincerely felt—to the public good, which is defined as something apart from ideology or self-interest, and then pursuing specific goals privately, in the company of other experts. Judis’s history shows how, over the past hundred years, some people with these convictions have, indeed, often had an effect on federal policies—for just one of many possible examples, the role Paul Hoffman of the Committee on Economic Development played in the passage of the liberal Employment Act of 1946. But it is a big leap from there to the position Judis implies at the end, that a liberal resurgence now would require a newly empowered elite. The group is too diffuse and it lacks independent power, and anyway, there is no guarantee that it would take the positions Judis would like it to.
…
Reader, I have repeated the paragraphs of the above long quotation of Nicholas Lemann review, my apologies! I’ll repeat that first paragraph:
…
For someone to assert today, as John Judis does in The Paradox of American Democracy, that there actually is a noble American tradition of stewardship of the public interest that can be taken at face value is arresting. Judis has been associated for years with The New Republic, and an earlier book of his, Grand Illusion: Critics and Champions of the American Century (1992), had at its center one of the magazine’s founders, Herbert Croly (also the author of the Progressive Era manifesto The Promise of American Life). In his new book Judis argues for a revival of Croly’s view that a powerful federal government should tame the excess of unbridled capitalism
…
Perhaps Mr. Judas, at age 82 , considers himself a part of an ‘elite of the present’? enough so that he feels that this is an acceptable introduction, to his latest intervention/corrective!
As still another war rages between Hamas in Gaza and Israel, a debate has revived between critics and defenders of Israel about whether Israel is a “settler-colonial state” created by émigrés over the objection of the native inhabitants. The debate has implications for the way people view Hamas’s October 7 attacks against Israelis, but it is also relevant to understanding what the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is really about and how it should or can be resolved.
Those who describe Israel as a settler-colonial state contend that Jews are interlopers in what was Ottoman and British Palestine; they think the Hamas attack and Israeli reprisals have to be understood in that “context.” As a long-term solution to the conflict, they advocate the “decolonization” of Israel. At the extreme, this could mean a Palestinian-dominated or even Islamic state (buttressed by the right of all refugees to return). But most Americans who voice the slogan “free Palestine from the river to the sea,” including Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, advocate a secular democratic or binational state, in which Jews and Palestinians would have equal rights. In either case, Israel would no longer be “the nation state of the Jewish people,” as Israel’s Knesset decreed in 2018.
The opposing position, which is commonly held by many pro-Israel organizations, including AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee, and the Anti-Defamation League, as well as by many liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, is that Israel is definitely not a settler-colonial state but is instead the reincarnation of the ancient home of the Jewish people. The pro-Israel groups insist that Israel’s Jews are entitled to live in a Jewish state by virtue of their heritage and of the antisemitic violence they endured in Europe, culminating in the Holocaust. At one extreme, Israel’s revisionist and national religious parties, and some sympathetic Republicans in the United States, contend that this state should stretch from “the river to the sea.” But most American liberals, while vehemently rejecting decolonization, favor a “two-state” solution in which a Palestinian state, composed of the West Bank, would adjoin Israel.
My contention is that both sides of this debate, which pit, roughly speaking, anti-Zionists against pro-Zionists, are wrong. The opposing stances obscure the nature of the conflict and the possibility of its resolution. My argument, based on the research I conducted in writing my 2014 book, Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, is that Israel was founded as a settler-colonial state but that this indisputable fact about its origin doesn’t justify either particular terrorist attacks or what is called “decolonization.” The ideal solution to the conflict would be two adjoining states, but for the foreseeable future, no solution of this kind is in sight.
That ‘elite of the present’ can only chatter in the patois of self-congratulation, framed in the ersatz knowledge of the technocrat!
Philosophical Apprentice approaches with doubt and caution!
The first four paragraph’s of Rachman’s essay are a bit overwrought, indeed bordering on the melodramatic. It hasn’t occurred to this self-imagined Political Technocrat, that the World is changing/evolving, at such a speed that ‘it’ has left him, and his newspaper behind?
How many international conflicts can one superpower handle at the same time? The Biden administration is currently trying to deal with wars in the Middle East and Europe, while preparing for a surge in tensions between China and Taiwan.
All this is taking place under the lengthening shadow of Donald Trump. His possible return to the White House poses profound questions about the future of US democracy and the country’s role in the world.
The combination of all these events is creating a palpable sense of tension and foreboding in government offices in Washington. It is not just the sheer number of crises coming at the Biden administration, but the fact that many are heading in the wrong direction — the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, for example. And the polls look bad for Biden.
The foreign crises could come to a head quite fast. “The next three months could determine the next few years,” is how one senior US official puts it. A prominent Democrat worries that “by January, we could be talking about how Joe Biden lost Ukraine”.
The long blind quote, attributed to ‘one senior US official’ rehearses a worn-out journalistic feint. The next three paragraphs are devoted the War in Ukraine, that appears to be lost to the experts, not employed by Corporate Newspapers, Think Tank Careerists, Network Television/Internet Hybrid employees.
New funding for the Ukrainian military and its civilian institutions is stuck in Congress…
The War in The Middle East, Rachman lacks the moral honesty to call this not War, but Genocide!
The precariousness of Ukraine’s situation is getting less attention than it should because of the Middle East. The Biden administration is paying a heavy political price, at home and abroad, for its support for Israel. The US is now putting public pressure on Israel to change its military tactics in Gaza and to kill fewer Palestinian civilians…
Four more paragraphs devoted to ‘The Middle East’:
But American concerns extend well beyond Gaza….
For consideration next, is the China/Taiwan…
The current expectation in Washington is that the Taiwanese presidential election on January 13 will be won by Lai Ching-te, who is regarded in Beijing as a dangerous separatist…
The two final paragraphs of this ‘essay’ offers an recapitulation of what has come before, that reifies the perceived ‘impression of US weakness and decline’. TheRachman essay ends in a vexing quandary, the self-serving position of a Political Thinker, who demonstrates his pretense of modesty/fallibility ?
With the US presidential election less than a year away, all these international crises feed into American politics. Trump will take every opportunity to accuse Biden of presiding over an era of weakness and retreat, citing Afghanistan, Ukraine, Gaza and the Taiwan Strait.
A chaotic and divisive US election — with Trump as the central figure — will contribute powerfully to that impression of US weakness and decline. China, Russia and Iran will relish asking how America can promise to defend democracies overseas, when its own democracy is in so much trouble at home. Unfortunately, it is a good question.
It doesn’t quite occur to Mr. Ganesh that his argued commonalities, between European and American ‘Populism’ might be the product of an utterly failed Neo-Liberal Model, that ruled the West from Thatcher/Reagan era, to its tattered remains in the political present? Or perhaps that is the point of Ganesh intervention, in sum misdirection.
At the next general election, British voters will return either a centre-right government or a centre-left one. For comparison, the spread of plausible outcomes in the US includes a second term of Donald Trump. In France? A Rassemblement National president. The Netherlands? After last week’s election, power for the hardline Geert Wilders. As for the Italian far right, power is theirs already, while the German equivalents threaten to break through in the federal elections of 2025.
The first paragraph is alive with Historical Re-Writes, in the disguise of predictions, speculations, possibilities. The first paragraph is awash in political mendacity, as Ganesh is a ‘stylist’ , not a political thinker! Centre-right and centre left are political fictions of the political moment, not the reflection of a British Politics, but about the surrender of both Parties to the Neo-Liberal Toxin. Not to speak of an utterly bankrupt political class, composed of the afore mentioned Centre-right and centre left. Ganesh’s opening paragraph informs the reader of the European territory of his essay. If Mr. Ganesh were an honest political thinker, writer he might have resorted to Philipp Ther’s revelatory history : Europe since 1989: A History?
Chapter 4 : Getting on the Neo-Liberal Band Wagon: 77
Milestones of the Transformation 49
The Bumpy Road of Reforms in Eastern Europe 79
Neo-Liberalism’s Inherent Problems 95
A Topology of Reform Outcomes 102
Chapter 5 : Second -Wave Neo-Liberalism 112
Neo-Liberalism at Full Speed 112
Flat Tax Systems and Populism 115
Human Capital 120
New Wealth 126
Rich Cities, Poor Regions 132
The EU’s Marshall Plan for the East 144
Chapter 7
The Great Recession : 2000-9 and its Consequences 209
The End of of Economic Convergence? 209
Variation of Crises 217
Predatory Lending in Central and Eastern Europe 221
Political Reactions : Between Neo-Liberalism and Authoritarianism 226
The title and sub-title of the Ganesh essay presents a non-issue to his readership, as if it were telling, the first instance of his attempt at mis-direction?
These two paragraphs in Ganesh essay identifies his possible dissenters to be ‘some liberals’ and the fact that Britain is ‘a relative haven from populism’ . In the Neo-Liberal Mythology isn’t ‘Brexit’ the unpardonable sin against its Free Market Collectivism, as it evolved from its roots, in the Coal and Steel Cartel of Jean Monnet?
And so, as difficult as this is for some liberals to hear, Britain is now a relative haven from populism. Brexit set that cause back by allowing voters to release much of their pent-up anger, and by flopping badly enough to put them off another rightwing experiment. When enough time has passed, even some Remainers might decide that the hit to national output was worth the period of domestic civic peace. As bad as Britain is at high-speed rail and IPOs, I’d rather take my chances here than in many western democracies over the coming years, thanks.
Another thing about the UK: it is a good place from which to compare American and European populism. So often conflated with each other, it is the differences between them that stand out ever more to an observer in this in-between place.
……
On American Populism:
In contrast, we still don’t know what American populism amounts to without the elemental personal force of Trump. Mike Pence and Ron DeSantis are among those who have tried to offer Republican voters at least the gist of Trumpism. Both have flopped. Vivek Ramaswamy, who is well to the right of the 45th president, doesn’t have people swooning in the prairies. For a sense of how person- rather than idea-centred US populism has become, ask yourself: if Trump proposed a truce with China, or embraced green taxes, or even softened his line on immigration somewhat, how much of his core support would he lose?
Mr. Ganesh cultivated ignorance of the Americas Populist Tradition, is inexcusable! Ganesh’s view is myopic, a-historical, self-serving: the ready to hand of Republican specimens, of that current expression of Tea Party hysterics, winnowed by political time, are useful props. Actual History has intrinsic value, as a check on mere newspaper opinionating!
STATE AND CORPORATION IN AMERICAN POPULIST POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1877–1902
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2020
Abstract
This article examines the political theory of the late nineteenth-century American Populist movement, with a particular focus on its theories of state and corporation. Recent scholarship on populism has tended to present the phenomenon as a variant of direct democracy intrinsically opposed to intermediary bodies, a feature consistently traced back to American Populism as well. In this account, American Populists opposed new discourses of corporate personhood and free incorporation in the late nineteenth century owing to their tendency to distort natural bonds between peoples and leaders and to disperse the popular will. This article questions the tenability of this opposition through a close contextual engagement with original Populist texts. As the first self-declared ‘populist’ movement in modern history, Populists theorized about the usage of corporate personality for their own co-operatives and put forward ambitious visions of American statecraft, breaking with the proprietary individualism that characterized Jeffersonian agrarianism before. The article focuses on two particular genres of Populist thinking: first, their advocacy of the corporate form for their co-operative farm organizing and, secondly, a specifically statutory vision of state reform. It concludes with reflections on how these findings destabilize assumptions governing the current populism debate in political theory and American historiography.
Ganesh Opines:‘European populism is much less of a personality cult.’ he names the culprits: Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie, Jordan Bardella, Giorgia Meloni, Silvio Berlusconi, Wilders.
Ganesh Opines : In contrast, we still don’t know what American populism amounts to without the elemental personal force of Trump. Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy,
The patient Reader will note that there are 344 words remaining of the essay, interpretation, speculation, tinctured in self-serving free imaginative variation, masquerading as a series vital questions. The point of arrival of the essay is not a reward for the Reader!
In which half of the west is liberalism more vulnerable: the US or Europe? Well, the raw individual clout of Trump unites and fuels America’s hard right. What serves the equivalent role in Europe is a sense of demographic and cultural siege. The difference is that Trump will one day be gone.
Philosophical Apprentice evaluates a Neo-Conservative’s fictional persona.
Headline: The Left Is Dooming Any Hope for a Palestinian State
The Reader confronts Stephen’s History Made to Measure :
Do the people chanting “Free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” have any idea of the irreparable harm they’re doing to any hope of Palestinian sovereignty?
For decades, the question of a Palestinian state has come down to two dates: 1948 and 1967. Most Western supporters of Palestinian statehood have argued that the key date is the Six-Day War of June 1967, when Israel, faced with open threats of annihilation, took possession of the Golan Heights, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula.
According to this line of thinking, the way to peace rested on Arab diplomatic recognition of Israel in exchange for the return of these so-called occupied territories. That’s what happened between Egypt and Israel at Camp David in 1978, and what might have happened at Camp David in 2000 if Yasir Arafat had only accepted the offer of full statehood made to him by Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel.
Yet there has always been a second narrative, which dates “the occupation” not to 1967 but to 1948, when Israel came into being as a sovereign state. By this argument, it isn’t just East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights that are occupied by Israel: It’s Haifa, Tel Aviv, Eilat and West Jerusalem, too. For Palestine to be “liberated,” Israel itself must end.
Starting in the 1970s, the 1948ers were known as the rejectionist front. More recently, they have become the axis of resistance. Membership includes Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Assad regime in Syria and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — a who’s who of designated terrorist groups and their state sponsors.
On October 7, The Zionist State was attacked by ‘the axis of resistance’ that used the most primitive equipment: the American supplied sophisticated armaments, were only used after the fact, to pummel Gaza into rubble, and to commit Genocide. Stephens as Neo-Con avoids at all costs the actual costs of battle and murder on an unprecedented scale committed by Israel. Stephens is after the real culprits:
But just as often they have done so wittingly. When Mohamed Khairullah, the mayor of Prospect Park, N.J., said “75 years of occupation is too long” at an October rally, he was embracing the 1948 narrative. When Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan congresswoman, posted that “75 years later, the Nakba continues to this day” and declined to accept Israel as a Jewish state, she was embracing it. When Judith Butler, the Berkeley professor, told an interviewer that “the roots of the problem are in a state formation that depended on expulsions and land theft to establish its own ‘legitimacy’” and supported a binational state, she was embracing it. When the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter responded to the Oct. 7 massacres with a Facebook post claiming, “When a people have been subject to decades of apartheid and unimaginable violence, their resistance must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense,” it was embracing it. When the BBC Arabic service repeatedly described ordinary Israelisas “settlers,” it was embracing it.
Mr. Stephens finds it politically convenient to post this from Susie Linfield in Quillette :
“A left that, rightly, demands absolute condemnation of white-nationalist supremacy refuses to disassociate itself from Islamist supremacy,” “A left that, rightly, demands absolute condemnation of white-nationalist supremacy refuses to disassociate itself from Islamist supremacy,” Susie Linfield, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., wrote in an important recent essay in the online journal Quillette. “A left that lauds intersectionality hasn’t noticed that Hamas’s axis of support consists of Iran, famous most recently for killing hundreds of protesters demanding women’s freedom.”, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., wrote in an important recent essay in the online journal Quillette. “A left that lauds intersectionality hasn’t noticed that Hamas’s axis of support consists of Iran, famous most recently for killing hundreds of protesters demanding women’s freedom.”
…
When the left embraces the zero-sum politics of Palestinian resistance, it merely encourages the zero-sum politics of hard-core Israeli settlers and their supporters.
…
A third consequence is that it abandons the Palestinian people to their worst leaders.
…
It’s fine for Israel’s harshest critics to ask hard questions of Israel’s leaders. But when those same critics stop asking equally hard questions of Palestinian leaders, they are not advocating a cause. They are merely submitting to a regime.
…
Bret Stephens as The Voice of Reason :
The world, including Israel, has a common interest in an eventual Palestinian state that cares more about building itself up than tearing its neighbors down; that invests its energy in future prosperity, not past glory; that accepts compromise and rejects fanaticism. Since Oct. 7, the loudest professed champions of the Palestinian cause have advocated the precise opposite. It may be a recipe for smug self-satisfaction, but it’s also how to kill a Palestinian state.
Bret Stephens is a former employee of The Jerusalem Post and a Neo-Conservative.
A Zionist newspaper’s role As a voice emanating from Zion, the Post has inspired Jews and non-Jews alike across the globe, connecting them to Israel however distant they might be
Look at what my brief absence from the Political Scene has wrought, to speak in terms that echo’s, in its way, Mr. Ganesh’s self-regard:
One victim of the Covid-19 pandemic had died 500 years earlier. Raphael (1483-1520) was due to get the quincentennial treatment from some august museums. Then the doors shut. When at last his moment came, the shows were drowned out in the hubbub of a reopening world. And so a big chance was lost to arrest two centuries of reputational drift for the artist. Raphael will continue to be seen as the bronze medallist of the High Renaissance, some distance beneath Michelangelo and Leonardo, whatever his technical perfection, whatever his former standing as their equal or better.
How did his star drop? For one thing, the modern mind finds it hard to believe that so uncomplicated a lad could be so total a genius. The Raphael who comes down to us in the records is cheerful and well-adjusted, an obliging courtier, a delegator, with manners as smooth as his face and, despite being orphaned at 11, few of those Florentine neuroses. “One couldn’t write a bestseller about Rah-file,” drawled the art historian Kenneth Clark, in a dig not at the painter, but at our own demand for inner torment and outer conflict in our heroes.
Call these opening paragraphs a way of reminding the ordinary reader that his Oxbridger Education has not gone to waste? that frames his commentary on Elon Musk: The paragraphs feature Ganesh’s breezy commentaries on ‘geniuses’ that exploit his penchant for the telling observations, adapted to breakfast table reading, as a complement to morning coffee or tea. This, the kind of newspaper writing of a more sedate age of the bourgeoise press? And the leisurely breakfast of past ages? Aren’t all those strivers of the etiolated neo-liberal age already at their desks? Have I wasted The Readers Time? Here is the Ganesh ‘diagnosis’ of Musk as ‘no general-purpose sage’. Even with all it’s rhetorical embroidery.
We know that not all temperamental people are geniuses. But the idea persists that all geniuses are temperamental. And this isn’t just an academic mistake. It leads to the indulgence of bad behaviour: to the excusing of it as something world-historical individuals can’t help. Elon Musk is the ultimate living case in point. His followers, at best, brush off his odder doings and retweets as the waste products of a great mind. Worse, I think more than a few read genius into them. Had he the outward blandness of, say, Richard Branson, he’d be taken for what he is: a brilliant man in his core domains, but no general-purpose sage and quite often banal in his obiter dicta.
Mr. Ganesh’s argument, if that is what it purports to be, begins to meander as his essay begins to loose it’s argumentative velocity, yet he is most capable at writing beautiful sentences, that evolve into paragraphs. He is an accomplished rhetorical stylist, some quotation from his essay:
…
Granted, the conflation of genius with unpleasantness does work in theory. To conceive of something original again and again, never mind to execute it against steep odds or social pressure, a person has to have strange patterns of thought. What are the chances that such cognitive peculiarities will generate only benign results? If you want the Pietà, put up with Michelangelo the loner and miser.
…
A short list of Ganesh’s rhetorical snapshots:
Raphael, Franklin Roosevelt, Einstein, Newtonian vehemence, Shakespeare, a creative writing workshop at Dartmouth, Mozart liked a scatological joke, Steve Hilton, Dominic Cummings, Raphael, The Romantics, Freud.
A fragment of the final paragraph:
In our own century, the emergence of inner trauma as almost the mark of a civilised person. It all adds up to a mistrust of and even disdain for the cloudless temperament, the natural social being. If we fail to see genius where it exists, that’s merely sad. If we see it where it isn’t, we invite trouble.
Philosophical Apprentice
November 29, 2023:
Mr. Musk’s anodyne comments on the Genocide against the Palestinians, perpetrated by Netanyahu, betray his toxic egoism: in the guise of his status of ‘a person who matters’ as the owner/operator of twitter, who controls one of the the internets most important communication tools, worldwide. He might be judged, to speak in the patois of American Film History, as the Charles Foster Caine of the internet? Mr. Musk gets lost in the murky highfalutin framing of Mr. Ganesh, perhaps this is the point of his intervention?
The Reader need only look at the third paragraph of this, what to name it?
On November 4th The Economist was invited by the idf to accompany troops to the front line. Over the course of several hours no civilians were seen. Officers and soldiers said they had sighted only a handful since entering Gaza city on October 27th. Around three-quarters of the 1m-strong civilian population is estimated to have heeded the idf’s warnings and fled south, away from the part of the city which Israeli troops are now encircling.
Immediately following the above paragraph is this :
But for the generals preparing the battle plans, the diplomatic clock is ticking. In horrific scenes over 10,000 Palestinians have already been killed, according to the Gaza health ministry, which is controlled by Hamas. More than 11% of Gaza’s buildings have been damaged or destroyed.
Should this sentence fragment surprise the critical reader about the ‘journalistic integrity’ exercised by this ‘news’-magazine’ : ‘ according to the Gaza health ministry, which is controlled by Hamas’.
Next to appear in this melodrama masquerading as journalism, is Antony Blinken:
Where is The Reader ? This News-Magazine’s Household God is Walter Bagehot, that reflects the political/colonial romanticism of this ‘newsmagazine’. The critical reader’s strategy does not just suggest itself, but presents itself as a paragraph by paragraph evaluation, which attempts to separates the proffered reportage from the propaganda.?
Paragraph 6
Israeli generals still talk about waging a long campaign that will last up to a year. On November 7th Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told abc News that Israel would be in charge of Gaza’s security for an “indefinite period”. In practice, though, what Israeli officers call their “window of legitimacy” is probably far shorter. How fast that window closes will depend largely on America, which is supplying Israel with munitions, diplomatic support and an aid package worth perhaps $14bn. If Joe Biden wants the war to end, Israel will be hard-pressed to ignore him.
Paragraph 7.
Israeli generals still talk about waging a long campaign that will last up to a year. On November 7th Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told abc News that Israel would be in charge of Gaza’s security for an “indefinite period”. In practice, though, what Israeli officers call their “window of legitimacy” is probably far shorter. How fast that window closes will depend largely on America, which is supplying Israel with munitions, diplomatic support and an aid package worth perhaps $14bn. If Joe Biden wants the war to end, Israel will be hard-pressed to ignore him.
Paragraph 8.
Note: that this paragraph is devoted to ‘speculation’ not reportage.
So far, he does not. Although he now supports “humanitarian pauses” to allow more aid to enter Gaza, Mr Biden has rejected calls for an outright ceasefire. But administration officials have made clear, in a series of leaks, that they doubt Israel has a coherent exit strategy in Gaza. They complain that Mr Netanyahu is barely willing to discuss the topic, and say they want to put their concerns on the record now lest the war end badly.
Paragraph 9.
Note: This paragraph is an admixture of Reportage and Propaganda :
They also have concerns about Israeli tactics. Asked about the idf’s efforts to minimise civilian deaths, John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, practically tied himself in knots: “We have seen some indications that there are efforts being applied in certain scenarios to try to minimise [them],” he said. To think a war risks becoming a devastating quagmire but to support it nonetheless is an untenable position—especially when many American voters agree.
Paragraph 10.
Note: taking the temperature, and national political mood of Americans is not exactly propaganda, but the final sentence framed by ‘sources in Washington think’ , is its shadow.
An Associated Press poll found that 58% of Democrats think Israel’s response has gone too far and 44% think America is too supportive of it. A Quinnipiac survey of registered voters found that 51% of independents and 66% of people aged 18-34 disapprove of Mr Biden’s policy. His ratings have plummeted among Arab-American voters, which could hurt him next year in crucial swing states like Michigan. Sources in Washington think it will still be several more weeks before Mr Biden pivots to talk of a truce—but do not doubt that he will make such a shift.
Paragraph 11.
Note: more speculation about what if’s: a multi-front war, were acute in the days after Hamas’s massacre, the group’s leader, signalled in a speech,…
Arab states certainly hope so. Fears of a multi-front war, which were acute in the days after Hamas’s massacre, have eased. Hizbullah, a Lebanese Shia militia, is still firing rockets daily at Israel, but Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s leader, signalled in a speech on November 3rd that he was not yet keen on all-out war. The Houthis, a Shia militant group in Yemen, have lobbed drones and missiles at Israel but are too far away to pose a strategic threat.
Paragraph 12.
Note: Speculation is now The Economist mode of argument, of a kind!
Many regional autocrats would be happy to see Israel smash Hamas. But they are also nervous that the war will mobilise their subjects, many of whom are already restive about awful economic conditions. This adds to pressure on both America, which has heard their fears for weeks now, and Israel, which is keen to preserve its recent diplomatic gains in the Arab world.
The Reader needn’t trouble herself with too much effort, to find the reason that put Cameron, into the category of ‘damaged political goods’, as The Financial Times of April 16, 2021 provides answers.
Headline: The David Cameron scandal: just how sleazy is British politics?
Sub-headline: While the UK’s record on corruption is good, many recent abuses have been hiding in plain sight
“We all know how it works. The lunches, the hospitality, the quiet word in your ear, the ex-ministers and ex-advisers for hire, helping big business find the right way to get its way.” So said David Cameron in 2010, in a speech on lobbying shortly before he became prime minister.
A decade on it has become painfully clear that the former leader did indeed know how it worked. In recent weeks Cameron has seen his reputation savaged amid details of his lobbying efforts on behalf of the financier Lex Greensill. Each day has brought new revelations about the relationship between the government and Greensill Capital, the supply chain finance company which collapsed last month.
As premier, Cameron allowed Greensill to work from Downing Street — where he styled himself a senior adviser — on a scheme of no clear value to government. Then, after leaving politics, he joined Greensill as a paid adviser and in that role lobbied ministers for the now collapsed business.
His private texts to the chancellor Rishi Sunak would have been worse had Treasury officials not ultimately rejected the appeals. Former officials have been stunned to hear that a senior civil servant in charge of government procurement was allowed to work for Greensill while still in Whitehall. Facing mounting pressure, the government said this week it would launch an inquiry into the affair.
One Tory MP publicly described Cameron’s behavior as “a tasteless, slapdash and unbecoming episode for any former prime minister”.
…
The next paragraph is instructive, and in its way places Sunak’s political judgement in the present, not just in peril? Or is Cameron an expendable political actor, like Braverman?
Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition, seeing a chance to tie Boris Johnson to the misconduct of his predecessor, said the scandal is “just the tip of the iceberg”. He added: “Dodgy contracts, privileged access, jobs for their mates, this is the return of Tory sleaze.”
Former Conservative prime minister David Cameron has been named foreign secretary in a shock appointment as part of the Rishi Sunak’s cabinet reshuffle.
A No 10 source said Mr Sunak had asked Ms Braverman “to leave government and she has accepted”, with Mr Cleverly moving from the Foreign Office to the Home Office.
The Conservatives said Mr Sunak is carrying out a wider reshuffle which “strengthens his team in government to deliver long-term decisions for a brighter future”.
Labour said the surprise return of Mr Cameron – who has criticised Mr Sunak the decision to scrap HS2 – made the Tory leader’s claim to be the change candidate “laughable”.
Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle expressed his frustration at Mr Cameron’s appointment – saying it was “especially important” that MPs were able to “scrutinise” the work of the Foreign Office during current international crises.
Sir Lindsay said he “looks forward” to hearing from the Sunak government how Lord Cameron – handed a life peerage – will be “properly accountable to this House”.
Lord Cameron would be able to face questions from elected MPs only when he appears before select committees. Sir Lindsay said he had asked the clerks about possible options for “enhancing scrutiny” of Lord Cameron.
Keir Starmer’s national campaign co-ordinator Pat McFadden said: “A few weeks ago Rishi Sunak said David Cameron was part of a failed status quo – now he’s bringing him back as his life raft.”
…
There is so much more…
Political Cynic
Even The Economist , in the guise of the Ghost of Bagehot, finds the David Cameron’s political rehabilitation anathema.
David Cameron always looked the part. Even the most powerful man on Earth was taken aback by the ease with which the jacketless, tieless British prime minister behaved. Barack Obama, a former American president, noted that Mr Cameron “possessed an impressive command of the issues, a facility with language and the easy confidence of someone who’d never been pressed too hard by life”. Mr Cameron had the attributes to be an excellent prime minister: intelligence, diligence, a quick wit and a smooth manner. Instead, he managed to be one of the worst.
Seven years after Mr Cameron left office in 2016, in the wake of losing the Brexit referendum, the former prime minister has returned to front-line politics as foreign secretary. The decision of Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, to fire Suella Braverman, a hard-line home secretary, cleared the way. James Cleverly, a barrel-chested former reservist, was shunted to take Ms Braverman’s spot, leaving a vacancy as the country’s top diplomat. And so, on the morning of November 13th, the familiar figure of Mr Cameron wandered through the door of 10 Downing Street once again.
…
Old allies have praised Mr Cameron’s sense of duty in returning to government. But he did not have to disappear from public life in the wake of Brexit. Mr Cameron once chided a prospective mp for cheekily asking whether he might be made a minister. “You will find that being a backbench Member of Parliament is the greatest honour you can have in life,” said Mr Cameron. “When I cease to be prime minister I will return with great pride to the backbenches as Member of Parliament for Witney, for the rest of my life.” In reality, Mr Cameron served for eight weeks on the backbenches before leaving. When he would have been most useful, during the years of screeching over Brexit between 2016 and 2019, Mr Cameron deserted his post. Now he is bored of private life, he has returned
Manners maketh the manderine
After the clownshow of Mr Johnson’s tenure as prime minister, Westminster wallahs project a dignified air onto Mr Cameron. Yet he embarrassed himself out of office. Practically every senior British politician attempts to fill their boots once they have left Parliament, but most do so quietly and effectively. In contrast Mr Cameron lobbied on behalf of Greensill Capital, a failed supply-chain payments company, in simpering text messages to cabinet ministers that have been made public (“I know you are manically busy—and doing a great job, by the way”).
This kind of record is clearly no obstacle to high office. Mr Cameron has returned largely because Mr Sunak is desperate. He may reassure some wavering southern Conservative voters, who provided the former prime minister’s narrow base. Mercifully, he will do less damage as foreign secretary than he did as prime minister. But the fact is that Mr Cameron maintains a good reputation in certain quarters because of how he comes across rather than what he actually did. It still helps to look the part.
Political Observer attempts to ‘read’ Gideon Rachman’s Propaganda?
Mr. Rachman begins his ‘essay’ with a Pop Song. Looking at Rachman’s bloated Cast of Characters, is more than a possible explanation, for his attempt to mimic Trollope in miniature ? A quick review is instructive? Yet like the Neo-Con, Mr. Rachman relies on the exhaustion of the both the patience, and critical faculties of his Reader, via his attempted pastiche of a Master?
fall of the Berlin wall, soundtrack for a decade, eastern Europe, Northern Ireland, Oslo accords, Israel-Palestine conflict, the age favoured peacemakers, , democrats internationalists, nationalists, warmongers, conspiracy theorists, Russia, war, Ukraine, Middle East, the Abraham peace accords, Israel, Arab states, Hamas attacks, Israeli invasion of Gaza, Middle Eastern war, a reinvigorated peace process, US, Joe Biden’s presidency, Donald Trump, the presidency in 2024, swing states, a darkening global political mood, The Gaza war, Ukraine, competition for munitions, desperately short of shells, Air defence systems, Ukraine and Israel, The west’s already weak ability, “Global South”, Russia is committing war crimes, charges of double standards, the Ukrainian war effort, The Kyiv government’s, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Russia, Russian forces, Ukrainian cities, A battered Ukraine, Kyiv’s western backers, Russian war machine, US Congress, Trump-supporting Republicans, Vladimir Putin, abandon Ukraine to its fate, A Trump victory, progressives and Arab-Americans, stay at home or vote for fringe candidates, if pro-Palestinian sentiment, But history abounds with absurdities, The intense global spotlight on Israel and Gaza, mass deportations…announced in Pakistan, Sudan and Nagorno-Karabakh, Other urgent problems are also in danger of being left to fester….Climate change…COP28 summit…world leaders distracted by Gaza…With America overstretched overseas and unstable at home…China may sniff an opportunity… that China is intent on displacing the US as the dominant power in the Pacific, and perhaps the world…The main focus of Xi Jinping’s ambitions is Taiwan…Biden has repeatedly pledged to defend Taiwan…security crisis in east Asia to the ones gripping Europe and the Middle East.
The end point of this ‘essay’ is that Pop Song, yet all Rachman offers is a counterfeit, of a Master of political melodrama, of another age? Have I engaged in the hyperbolic? Mr. Rachman set what passed for a ‘standard’!
StephenKMackSD's Blog 