The Daily Star
Monday, December 16, 2019
By Michael Glackin
Last time I visited The Daily Star’s comment pages, I predicted that Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party would win the U.K. general election comfortably. Well, to be fair, Johnson had been ahead in the polls so it wasn’t a hard call. However, the huge parliamentary majority he achieved Thursday was not anticipated.
Johnson’s populist electioneering - U.S. President Donald Trump dubbed him “Britain’s Trump” - has handed the Conservative Party its largest majority since 1987 and the days of Margaret Thatcher. It is also the biggest majority for any prime minister since Tony Blair in 2001.
For all that though, it’s clear the U.K. remains divided, both between the nations that comprise it - the election saw a sharp rise in the number of separatist Scottish nationalist parliamentarians - and, despite Johnson’s overwhelming victory, between Brexiteers and those who wish to remain in the EU.
However, this election has now ended the Brexit argument. There will not be a second referendum on European Union membership, something promised by the opposition Labour Party. Meanwhile, the one party that promised to scrap Brexit, the minority Liberal Democrats, barely won enough seats to make up a football team.
Johnson’s huge parliamentary majority will ensure Brexit will now formally take place at the end of January, ending three years of deadlock. A 12-month-long transition period will then follow in which the U.K. and EU will attempt to hammer out a trade deal.
Much has been made of Johnson’s ability to appeal to working class (blue collar) voters, millions of whom abandoned their traditional party, Labour, for the Conservatives, traditionally seen as the party of the bosses.
Labour won its fewest seats since 1935 as its traditional supporters, those in the so-called Labour left-behind heartlands in the north of England, deserted it for Johnson’s populism.
But this was an election of populists. Johnson has promised to spend billions of pounds of largely borrowed money in Labour’s heartlands on infrastructure and across the country on the U.K.’s state-run National Health Service. Not to be outdone, the Labour Party committed itself to even bigger public spending programs, again based on borrowing, and promised to nationalise key industries, including energy, the train network, and even broadband services.
However, what Labour forgot, was that this election was about identity, first and foremost. Jeremy Corbyn, the far-left leader of the Labour Party, was seen by many of its traditional working class voters, as anti-British and what most people perceive to be British values.
Corbyn was better known in the U.K. for his long-standing links to Hamas and Hezbollah, and his support for nasty dictatorships in Iran and Venezuela. He is largely anti-Israel and anti-American, and even blamed NATO for Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. He has also been accused of presiding over a culture of antisemitism within his party since he became leader.
At the same time as Johnson promised to sharply increase government spending and deliver the people’s 2016 vote on Brexit, he also promised to tighten immigration controls - the most significant factor in the Brexit vote - and be tougher on fundamentalist Islamist terrorism in the U.K.
Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics at Rutherford College, Kent University, succinctly summed up why Johnson’s populism beat Corbyn’s: “It is easier for the right to move left on the economy than it is for the left to move right on identity.”
So, what will this new populist Johnson government stand for in international affairs?
Well, Brexit has so diminished the U.K.’s standing internationally, no one seems to care all that much what the new government’s foreign policy priorities will be. This is perhaps just as well because Johnson doesn’t seem to have any beyond “getting Brexit done” and securing an increasingly unlikely, and certainly unfavourable, free trade deal with Donald Trump’s America.
And herein lies the rub. Whatever reputation the U.K. enjoyed, to borrow a phrase from Bismarck, as an “honest broker” in the middle east - straddling the largely pro-Israeli America and the largely pro-Palestinian European Union - has been in tatters since the Brexit vote. Post-Brexit, Johnson, like his predecessor Theresa May, is desperate to court the White House to secure that illusive free trade deal that will compensate for exiting the world’s largest trading bloc.
To that end, the Conservative Party manifesto for this election maintained its support for a “two-state solution” in the Middle East, and that was pretty much it. There was no mention of its policies toward Syria, Yemen or Saudi Arabia. Nor did it put forward a view on the merits or otherwise of the Iran nuclear deal, an agreement the White House despises.
Interestingly, Corbyn had pledged to ban arms sales to Saudi Arabia, in protest at the kingdom’s war in Yemen. Labour also planned stop exporting arms “used in violation of the human rights of Palestinian civilians” to Israel. It was also committed to “immediately” recognize a Palestinian state.
More importantly, Johnson’s foreign policy looks set to be tailored to suit the U.K.’s trading needs, first and foremost. He has already announced plans to merge the U.K.’s Department for International Trade with the government’s business department to better facilitate potential trade deals with the U.S., Japan, and Australia. He also intends to merge the hitherto all-powerful Foreign Office with the Department for International Development to help” co-ordinate” the U.K.’s aid budget with the government’s foreign policy goals.
At any rate, the most immediate foreign policy problem facing Johnson will be the continuing trade negotiations with the EU that will begin once Brexit happens in January. If Johnson fails to broker a trade deal between the U.K. and the EU during the 12-month transition period, the U.K. could end up trading with the EU on World Trade Organization terms.
Moreover, regardless of the terms of the U.K.’s exit from the trading bloc, against the backdrop of a slowing global economy, Johnson will find it hard to deliver on all the public spending promises he made on the hustings. The U.K. economy isn’t pulling up any trees. GDP growth is expected to hit an 11-year low of 1 percent next year.
Small wonder then that immediately after his victory Johnson thanked those who, in his words, “lent us your vote.”
What this election has proved beyond doubt is that you can sell anything, regardless of whether you can deliver it. This has led to a worrying shift in our politics, to entrenched polar extremes. It remains to be seen whether Johnson is truly capable of reversing that shift and deliver more than just Brexit. Heraclitus famously said: “character is destiny.” The popularity contest is over. It is now time for him to govern.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of The Daily Star. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on Monday, December 16, 2019, on page 4.
Monday 16 December 2019
Monday 2 December 2019
Terror attack raises heat in U.K. vote
The Daily Star
Monday, December 2, 2019
By Michael Glackin
Beirut - Terror came to the streets of London again last week. Not for the first time, the murderer was known to police and the U.K.’s security services. British-born Usman Khan, who killed a man and a woman and wounded three others in a knife rampage last Friday, had been released from jail in 2018, less than seven years into a 16-year prison sentence.
The atrocity has raised the temperature in an already fractious election in the U.K., with both the main political parties blaming each other for allowing a convicted terrorist back onto the streets to commit murder.
Khan was originally sentenced to serve an indeterminate sentence - where no date is set for when the person will be released - in 2012 for an Al-Qaeda-inspired plot to bomb both the London Stock Exchange and the U.S. Embassy, as well as murder current Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was then the mayor of London.
However, in 2013 the Court of Appeal quashed that judgment, and replaced it with a determinate custodial sentence of 16 years. Khan was released just eight years into his sentence, but, because he was on what amounts to parole, had to wear an electronic monitoring device.
Clearly, no one appeared to be monitoring him all that closely.
Thus, last Friday, Khan, wearing a hoax suicide belt, showed up as an invited guest at a Cambridge University conference on prisoner rehabilitation being held in the City of London, at the historic Fishmongers’ Hall.
Once there he stabbed several people before being chased by members of the public, including a Polish chef who worked at Fishmongers’ Hall and who attacked Khan with a 1.5-meter-long tusk of a narwhal, which had previously been used to decorate a wall inside the hall. Khan was then shot by police. Video footage of his last moments show police dragging the last of the members of the public who intervened off Khan’s prostrate body before an armed officer fired several shots into him.
The stabbings happened near the site of the 2017 terrorist attack by Daesh (ISIS) supporters on London Bridge, in which eight people were killed.
There are two key issues here. One, why did this happen? Secondly, what impact will it have on this month’s general election in the U.K.?
In terms of the first, questions will be asked of the U.K.’s security agencies. A string of failings by MI5 and MI6 in the way both agencies monitor known terror suspects have been highlighted over the last decade. In 2015 I wrote that the U.K.’s intelligence and security services appeared incapable of stopping not just British nationals going to join groups in Syria and Iraq, but even known terror suspects. The Daesh executioner known as “Jihadi John,” Londoner Mohammed Emwazi, was able to escape to Syria in 2012 despite being on an MI5 terror watch list which prohibited him from leaving the U.K. In fact, Emwazi was so well-known to intelligence services and detained so often by MI5 that he actually filed a formal complaint against them with the Police Complaints Commission in 2010.
Despite extensive so-called “intrusive” surveillance by security agencies of Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, both men slipped through the intelligence net and murdered an off-duty soldier, Lee Rigby, in broad daylight on a busy London street in 2013. Adebolajo has even claimed MI5 tried to recruit him prior to the murder.
Further back, the leaders of the July 7, 2005, bombings in London, which killed 52 people, were also on the radar of the intelligence services, but again slipped through the net. After the attack, MI5 insisted two of the bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, were just “petty fraudsters.” However, at least one surveillance transcript of the pair later emerged which contained eight pages detailing plans to train for and take part in terrorist attacks.
Indeed, in 2015, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee revealed a litany of security service failures when dealing with terror groups, but little seems to have changed.
Of course, terrorism does not rely on a great amount of sophistication, or collaboration that security services can monitor. A kitchen knife or a car is pretty much all you need to kill and maim people in busy cities. But it is surely worrying that so many of these so called “lone wolf” terrorists seem able to carry out their murderous attacks despite the fact that they are already on the radar of security agencies.
The attack could have significant impact on this month’s election, which many believe is the U.K.’s most important in living memory. Following the attack, Johnson said he would toughen sentences for people convicted of violent crime and terrorism if he wins the election. Yet it was his government, in the shape of Priti Patel, the combative right-wing pro-Israeli U.K. home secretary, who at the beginning of last month reduced the U.K. terror threat level for the first time in two years.
Meanwhile, a few days prior to the attack, Jeremy Corbyn, the hard-left leader of the opposition Labour Party, refused to say whether he would give the order to “take out” (assassinate) a new Daesh leader if British security forces were in a position to do so. During a car-crash interview on BBC television, Corbyn said: “If it’s possible, and only if it’s possible, then you try to capture that person.” He later added that he would “take the appropriate decisions at that time when I knew the circumstances.” However, his reluctance to give a straight answer may come back to haunt him against the backdrop of Friday’s attack.
If all that wasn’t enough, U.S. President Donald Trump is coming to town later today. Trump disgracefully used the first London Bridge attack in 2017 to publicly criticize London’s Muslim Mayor Sadiq Khan, part of a long-running feud between the two men. Khan refused to meet Trump during his state visit to the U.K. earlier this year.
Trump is also a big fan of Johnson, whom he has dubbed “Britain’s Trump.” In October he went so far as to warn that a Corbyn victory in the election would be “so bad” for the U.K.
However, Johnson is understood to have asked Trump to stop voicing his support publicly, amid fears his endorsement is actually boosting Corbyn due to the widespread antipathy most in the U.K. feel toward the U.S. president.
It may not matter. Johnson’s Conservative Party is ahead in the polls at the moment, and looks to win comfortably and finally implement the U.K.’s exit from the European Union. Either way, whoever wins, the U.K.’s intelligence net is in need of urgent repairs.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of The Daily Star.
A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on December 02, 2019, on page 4.
Monday, December 2, 2019
By Michael Glackin
Beirut - Terror came to the streets of London again last week. Not for the first time, the murderer was known to police and the U.K.’s security services. British-born Usman Khan, who killed a man and a woman and wounded three others in a knife rampage last Friday, had been released from jail in 2018, less than seven years into a 16-year prison sentence.
The atrocity has raised the temperature in an already fractious election in the U.K., with both the main political parties blaming each other for allowing a convicted terrorist back onto the streets to commit murder.
Khan was originally sentenced to serve an indeterminate sentence - where no date is set for when the person will be released - in 2012 for an Al-Qaeda-inspired plot to bomb both the London Stock Exchange and the U.S. Embassy, as well as murder current Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was then the mayor of London.
However, in 2013 the Court of Appeal quashed that judgment, and replaced it with a determinate custodial sentence of 16 years. Khan was released just eight years into his sentence, but, because he was on what amounts to parole, had to wear an electronic monitoring device.
Clearly, no one appeared to be monitoring him all that closely.
Thus, last Friday, Khan, wearing a hoax suicide belt, showed up as an invited guest at a Cambridge University conference on prisoner rehabilitation being held in the City of London, at the historic Fishmongers’ Hall.
Once there he stabbed several people before being chased by members of the public, including a Polish chef who worked at Fishmongers’ Hall and who attacked Khan with a 1.5-meter-long tusk of a narwhal, which had previously been used to decorate a wall inside the hall. Khan was then shot by police. Video footage of his last moments show police dragging the last of the members of the public who intervened off Khan’s prostrate body before an armed officer fired several shots into him.
The stabbings happened near the site of the 2017 terrorist attack by Daesh (ISIS) supporters on London Bridge, in which eight people were killed.
There are two key issues here. One, why did this happen? Secondly, what impact will it have on this month’s general election in the U.K.?
In terms of the first, questions will be asked of the U.K.’s security agencies. A string of failings by MI5 and MI6 in the way both agencies monitor known terror suspects have been highlighted over the last decade. In 2015 I wrote that the U.K.’s intelligence and security services appeared incapable of stopping not just British nationals going to join groups in Syria and Iraq, but even known terror suspects. The Daesh executioner known as “Jihadi John,” Londoner Mohammed Emwazi, was able to escape to Syria in 2012 despite being on an MI5 terror watch list which prohibited him from leaving the U.K. In fact, Emwazi was so well-known to intelligence services and detained so often by MI5 that he actually filed a formal complaint against them with the Police Complaints Commission in 2010.
Despite extensive so-called “intrusive” surveillance by security agencies of Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, both men slipped through the intelligence net and murdered an off-duty soldier, Lee Rigby, in broad daylight on a busy London street in 2013. Adebolajo has even claimed MI5 tried to recruit him prior to the murder.
Further back, the leaders of the July 7, 2005, bombings in London, which killed 52 people, were also on the radar of the intelligence services, but again slipped through the net. After the attack, MI5 insisted two of the bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, were just “petty fraudsters.” However, at least one surveillance transcript of the pair later emerged which contained eight pages detailing plans to train for and take part in terrorist attacks.
Indeed, in 2015, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee revealed a litany of security service failures when dealing with terror groups, but little seems to have changed.
Of course, terrorism does not rely on a great amount of sophistication, or collaboration that security services can monitor. A kitchen knife or a car is pretty much all you need to kill and maim people in busy cities. But it is surely worrying that so many of these so called “lone wolf” terrorists seem able to carry out their murderous attacks despite the fact that they are already on the radar of security agencies.
The attack could have significant impact on this month’s election, which many believe is the U.K.’s most important in living memory. Following the attack, Johnson said he would toughen sentences for people convicted of violent crime and terrorism if he wins the election. Yet it was his government, in the shape of Priti Patel, the combative right-wing pro-Israeli U.K. home secretary, who at the beginning of last month reduced the U.K. terror threat level for the first time in two years.
Meanwhile, a few days prior to the attack, Jeremy Corbyn, the hard-left leader of the opposition Labour Party, refused to say whether he would give the order to “take out” (assassinate) a new Daesh leader if British security forces were in a position to do so. During a car-crash interview on BBC television, Corbyn said: “If it’s possible, and only if it’s possible, then you try to capture that person.” He later added that he would “take the appropriate decisions at that time when I knew the circumstances.” However, his reluctance to give a straight answer may come back to haunt him against the backdrop of Friday’s attack.
If all that wasn’t enough, U.S. President Donald Trump is coming to town later today. Trump disgracefully used the first London Bridge attack in 2017 to publicly criticize London’s Muslim Mayor Sadiq Khan, part of a long-running feud between the two men. Khan refused to meet Trump during his state visit to the U.K. earlier this year.
Trump is also a big fan of Johnson, whom he has dubbed “Britain’s Trump.” In October he went so far as to warn that a Corbyn victory in the election would be “so bad” for the U.K.
However, Johnson is understood to have asked Trump to stop voicing his support publicly, amid fears his endorsement is actually boosting Corbyn due to the widespread antipathy most in the U.K. feel toward the U.S. president.
It may not matter. Johnson’s Conservative Party is ahead in the polls at the moment, and looks to win comfortably and finally implement the U.K.’s exit from the European Union. Either way, whoever wins, the U.K.’s intelligence net is in need of urgent repairs.
Michael Glackin is former managing editor of The Daily Star.
A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on December 02, 2019, on page 4.
Sunday 20 October 2019
Brexit a bigger humiliation than Suez
The Daily Star
Monday, 21 October 2019
By Michael Glackin
Beirut -- “We’re going in” roared the front page of British tabloid The Daily Sketch, 63 years ago this month. The headline was announcing what would turn out to be Britain’s greatest political humiliation since World War II - the disastrous Anglo-French, and Israeli, invasion of Egypt, the Suez Crisis.
Sunday’s British headlines should have read something along the lines of “We’re going out” after Parliament met Saturday to rubber-stamp the deal agreed late last week by Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the European Union to enable Britain to finally leave the trading bloc on Oct. 31.
Unfortunately, not for the first time, Parliament had other plans, and instead voted to delay Britain’s departure from the EU during a historic showdown in Parliament.
The international humiliation of the seemingly never-ending political impasse being played out in London and Brussels over Brexit is on a par with the ignominy of the Suez Crisis. More of that in a moment.
First, what happened last weekend?
Parliament’s decision means it will not vote on Johnson’s deal until it has examined the legislation in detail, something that could take months.
In the first Saturday sitting of Parliament since the Falklands conflict, when Britain went to war four decades ago, parliamentarians voted by 322 to 306 to withhold support for Johnson’s Brexit deal, forcing the prime minister to write to the European Union and ask for an extension to British membership of the trading bloc - for a third time - until Parliament agrees to leave.
The letter, a legal requirement imposed on the prime minister by the U.K. courts last month, was duly sent to Brussels late Saturday night, but Johnson refused to sign it. He then telephoned EU leaders to ask them to ignore Parliament’s request for more time, sharply increasing the likelihood that Britain will crash out of the EU without a trade deal at the end of this month.
French President Emmanuel Macron appears to agree with Johnson. A statement from Paris Saturday night warned: “A further delay is not in anyone’s interest.” The German government also hinted that if Parliament cannot vote for the latest deal, then Britain should leave the EU without one.
There is nothing left to negotiate. Yet despite the hardening of attitudes in Brussels, it seems unlikely that the EU will refuse to grant a further extension.
Meanwhile, as the politicians debated Brexit, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators demanding a second referendum on the issue took to the streets and protested outside Parliament. You could be forgiven for thinking you woke up in Lebanon, not London, Saturday morning.
Johnson still hopes to get his deal through Parliament later Monday, or in the coming week, thus enabling Britain to stick to its Oct. 31 deadline to leave the EU.
However, later Monday a Scottish court will decide whether the prime minister is breaking the law by seeking to leave the EU without a trade deal.
Confused? You are not the only one.
The government is now effectively powerless. The executive arm has been captured by the legislature. This would normally result in an election. However, the opposition parties fear an election would allow the government to proceed with a no-deal Brexit and consequently refuse to vote for one.
Brexit has become a bigger political humiliation than even the Suez Crisis. It has dealt a severe blow to Britain’s standing in international affairs and even threatens the political unity of the United Kingdom. Support for the secessionist Scottish National Party, which advocates Scottish independence, has increased sharply as the Brexit debacle drags on. Brexit has resulted in the government being dragged through the courts, and all but destroyed the reputation of our parliamentary system.
Indeed, while British people are deeply divided by Brexit, they are united in their contempt for Parliament and politicians for the way they have dealt with the issue over the last three years.
The Brexiteers, who comprise just over half the population based on the 2016 referendum result, are determined to give the EU a bloody nose, even if this means leaving without a trade deal with the countries the U.K. has been freely trading with for almost half a century. The Remainers, almost half the population, are aghast at such folly, and appalled at Parliament’s failure to implement a second public vote on Brexit.
It is supremely ironic that the entire shambles is reaching its coda at the same time of year as the Suez Crisis brought Britain to its knees six decades ago.
Suez marked a critical watershed, not just for the U.K. and Egypt and the rest of the Middle East, but also for what eventually became the European Union.
For Britain it of course fatally exposed the hollowness of its imperialist pretensions in the postwar world. U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, enraged at Britain’s action, effectively ordered then Prime Minister Anthony Eden to abandon the invasion by refusing to allow the International Monetary Fund to provide Britain with $500 million in standby credit, and preventing the U.S. Export-Import Bank from extending a $600 million loan unless it withdrew from Suez.
Britain quickly obliged. After that, while never abandoning what it still insists is its “special relationship” with the United States, Britain turned increasingly toward Europe in its bid to remain a power broker on the world stage.
For France though, the lesson of Suez was clear. Britain could not be trusted if it meant falling out with the U.S. France threw itself wholeheartedly into the project of European integration.
The six-nation European common market, which became the 28-nation European Union, was established the following year with the Treaty of Rome. When Britain tried to join the club in the ’60s, France twice vetoed its application, largely on the grounds that London would be a Trojan Horse for U.S. interests. Britain was not finally admitted until 1973.
Legend has it that at the height of the Suez crisis, on Nov. 6, 1956, French Prime Minister Guy Mollet was in his office hosting German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, discussing European integration. Prime Minister Eden telephoned to abruptly tell Mollet he was abandoning him, and the invasion following Eisenhower’s diktat. There was nothing else to discuss.
When Mollet put the telephone down, the wily old Adenauer told him Britain would always side with the U.S. over European allies. As Mollet surveyed his humiliation, Adenauer said: “We have no time to waste. Europe will be your revenge.” It certainly has been.
Michael Glackin is a former managing editor of The Daily Star. This article was published in THE DAILY STAR newspaper in Beirut on Monday, 21 October, 2019.
Monday, 21 October 2019
By Michael Glackin
Beirut -- “We’re going in” roared the front page of British tabloid The Daily Sketch, 63 years ago this month. The headline was announcing what would turn out to be Britain’s greatest political humiliation since World War II - the disastrous Anglo-French, and Israeli, invasion of Egypt, the Suez Crisis.
Sunday’s British headlines should have read something along the lines of “We’re going out” after Parliament met Saturday to rubber-stamp the deal agreed late last week by Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the European Union to enable Britain to finally leave the trading bloc on Oct. 31.
Unfortunately, not for the first time, Parliament had other plans, and instead voted to delay Britain’s departure from the EU during a historic showdown in Parliament.
The international humiliation of the seemingly never-ending political impasse being played out in London and Brussels over Brexit is on a par with the ignominy of the Suez Crisis. More of that in a moment.
First, what happened last weekend?
Parliament’s decision means it will not vote on Johnson’s deal until it has examined the legislation in detail, something that could take months.
In the first Saturday sitting of Parliament since the Falklands conflict, when Britain went to war four decades ago, parliamentarians voted by 322 to 306 to withhold support for Johnson’s Brexit deal, forcing the prime minister to write to the European Union and ask for an extension to British membership of the trading bloc - for a third time - until Parliament agrees to leave.
The letter, a legal requirement imposed on the prime minister by the U.K. courts last month, was duly sent to Brussels late Saturday night, but Johnson refused to sign it. He then telephoned EU leaders to ask them to ignore Parliament’s request for more time, sharply increasing the likelihood that Britain will crash out of the EU without a trade deal at the end of this month.
French President Emmanuel Macron appears to agree with Johnson. A statement from Paris Saturday night warned: “A further delay is not in anyone’s interest.” The German government also hinted that if Parliament cannot vote for the latest deal, then Britain should leave the EU without one.
There is nothing left to negotiate. Yet despite the hardening of attitudes in Brussels, it seems unlikely that the EU will refuse to grant a further extension.
Meanwhile, as the politicians debated Brexit, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators demanding a second referendum on the issue took to the streets and protested outside Parliament. You could be forgiven for thinking you woke up in Lebanon, not London, Saturday morning.
Johnson still hopes to get his deal through Parliament later Monday, or in the coming week, thus enabling Britain to stick to its Oct. 31 deadline to leave the EU.
However, later Monday a Scottish court will decide whether the prime minister is breaking the law by seeking to leave the EU without a trade deal.
Confused? You are not the only one.
The government is now effectively powerless. The executive arm has been captured by the legislature. This would normally result in an election. However, the opposition parties fear an election would allow the government to proceed with a no-deal Brexit and consequently refuse to vote for one.
Brexit has become a bigger political humiliation than even the Suez Crisis. It has dealt a severe blow to Britain’s standing in international affairs and even threatens the political unity of the United Kingdom. Support for the secessionist Scottish National Party, which advocates Scottish independence, has increased sharply as the Brexit debacle drags on. Brexit has resulted in the government being dragged through the courts, and all but destroyed the reputation of our parliamentary system.
Indeed, while British people are deeply divided by Brexit, they are united in their contempt for Parliament and politicians for the way they have dealt with the issue over the last three years.
The Brexiteers, who comprise just over half the population based on the 2016 referendum result, are determined to give the EU a bloody nose, even if this means leaving without a trade deal with the countries the U.K. has been freely trading with for almost half a century. The Remainers, almost half the population, are aghast at such folly, and appalled at Parliament’s failure to implement a second public vote on Brexit.
It is supremely ironic that the entire shambles is reaching its coda at the same time of year as the Suez Crisis brought Britain to its knees six decades ago.
Suez marked a critical watershed, not just for the U.K. and Egypt and the rest of the Middle East, but also for what eventually became the European Union.
For Britain it of course fatally exposed the hollowness of its imperialist pretensions in the postwar world. U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, enraged at Britain’s action, effectively ordered then Prime Minister Anthony Eden to abandon the invasion by refusing to allow the International Monetary Fund to provide Britain with $500 million in standby credit, and preventing the U.S. Export-Import Bank from extending a $600 million loan unless it withdrew from Suez.
Britain quickly obliged. After that, while never abandoning what it still insists is its “special relationship” with the United States, Britain turned increasingly toward Europe in its bid to remain a power broker on the world stage.
For France though, the lesson of Suez was clear. Britain could not be trusted if it meant falling out with the U.S. France threw itself wholeheartedly into the project of European integration.
The six-nation European common market, which became the 28-nation European Union, was established the following year with the Treaty of Rome. When Britain tried to join the club in the ’60s, France twice vetoed its application, largely on the grounds that London would be a Trojan Horse for U.S. interests. Britain was not finally admitted until 1973.
Legend has it that at the height of the Suez crisis, on Nov. 6, 1956, French Prime Minister Guy Mollet was in his office hosting German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, discussing European integration. Prime Minister Eden telephoned to abruptly tell Mollet he was abandoning him, and the invasion following Eisenhower’s diktat. There was nothing else to discuss.
When Mollet put the telephone down, the wily old Adenauer told him Britain would always side with the U.S. over European allies. As Mollet surveyed his humiliation, Adenauer said: “We have no time to waste. Europe will be your revenge.” It certainly has been.
Michael Glackin is a former managing editor of The Daily Star. This article was published in THE DAILY STAR newspaper in Beirut on Monday, 21 October, 2019.
Thursday 25 July 2019
One giant leap in the dark for mankind
The Daily Star
Thursday, 25 July 2019
BY MICHAEL GLACKIN
Chairman Mao was once asked what he thought would have happened if Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had been assassinated in 1963, rather than U.S. President John F Kennedy. He replied: “I do not think Mr. Onassis would have married Mrs. Khrushchev.”
Similarly, some have wondered what would have happened if the U.K. government had not been distracted by a long running campaign to elect a new prime minister when Iran’s Revolutionary Guard decided to seize a U.K. registered oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz last Saturday.
Well, I doubt it would have made any difference, because huge government cuts to the Royal Navy mean the U.K. doesn’t have enough warships to properly patrol the Strait.
In 1982 when the U.K. retook the Falklands, the Royal Navy had more than 80 warfighting vessels. Today, excluding submarines, it has just 20, and almost half of those are in long term maintenance. Britannia no longer rules the waves. More of that in a moment. First, the U.K. finally elected its prime minister Tuesday. The former foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, comfortably beat his opponent, the current foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt to the job, ending a turgid seven week campaign to replace Theresa May.
The fact that the runoff was between the two worst foreign secretaries in modern British history speaks volumes for the state of U.K. politics right now.
Britain’s 55th prime minister did not need to face a general election, merely win enough support from his party’s parliamentarians and its 120,000, largely white middle-aged and elderly members. A rather strange paradox as Johnson is considered a populist politician along the lines of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Indeed, Trump was quick to welcome Johnson’s election. He said: “Boris is good. They call him Britain Trump.” Warming to
his theme, and with all the oratory we have come to expect, he added: “They like me over there. That’s what they wanted. That’s what they need. He’ll get it done. Boris is good. He’s gonna do a good job.”
Private Eye, a satirical magazine was more succinct. Its front page greeted Johnson’s victory with a picture of him entering No. 10 Downing Street and the headline: “Loon Landing. One small step for a man … one giant leap in the dark for mankind.”
Private Eye’s joke sums up the fears surrounding a Johnson premiership. A man who has been sacked twice in his career for lying, compared Muslim women who wear the burqa to letterboxes or bank robbers, and once compared the European Union to the Third Reich. Oh, and last month, the police were called to a latenight screaming argument at his girlfriend’s apartment when neighbors heard her shouting at him to “get off me” amid the sound of plates smashing.
It is fair to say no one knows what Johnson’s premiership will herald, or what will be left broken in his wake.
Top of the pile in Johnson’s in tray is of course delivering Brexit.
Johnson has insisted the U.K. must leave the European Union on Oct. 31, with or without a trade deal. He has brushed aside dire warnings from businesses and the Bank of England of the damage a so-called “no-deal” Brexit will do to the economy and insisted the U.K. needs to be “more optimistic.” Such optimism was clearly in short supply at the International Monetary Fund this week. It warned that a no deal Brexit is as big a threat to the global economy as the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China.
Political insiders believe the EU, largely due to German prompting, is prepared to amend the current Brexit deal to enable the U.K. to leave with a trade agreement. The deal is unlikely to be markedly different in substance from the one negotiated by Johnson’s ill-fated predecessor, Theresa May, which Parliament rejected three times. But any small concession by the EU could just be enough to enable Johnson, who has more elan with his party’s hardline right-wing Brexiteers than May, to push the deal through Parliament.
If that fails, Johnson has threatened to suspend Parliament in order to ensure the U.K. leaves the EU in October without further delay. Politicians have reacted by voting to block any attempt to suspend parliament. Sometimes you have to pinch yourself to remember you’re still living in the U.K. and not some banana republic.
The likely result of all this is another general election in the coming months – the third in the U.K. in four years – to allow Johnson to seek a mandate from the public for a no deal Brexit.
In the event of an election it’s extremely unlikely that any one party could win a majority to form a government, opening the door to further political paralysis.
With this in mind, the issue of the U.K.’s rapidly deteriorating relationship with Iran will not be all that high on Johnson’s agenda. The seizure of the Stena Impero was headline news the day after it happened. Since then it has hardly been mentioned in the U.K. media. The 23 man crew aren’t U.K. nationals – most are Indian, Filipino, Russian and Latvian – a factor that will ease the pressure on Johnson to act at a time when there is an increasingly worrying upswell of white nationalists in the U.K. and whose discontent the new prime minister has unashamedly tapped into.
Hunt, who may no longer be foreign secretary by the time you read this, is seeking to broker a Europe-led maritime operation to safeguard shipping in the Strait. But many are wondering why Hunt failed to put extra-protection in place sooner, especially after the U.K. seized an Iranian tanker suspected of carrying oil to Syria near Gibraltar on July 4.
The nearest Royal Navy frigate to the Stena Impero, HMS Montrose, haplessly tried to prevent the Iranians from seizing the tanker with a series of radio warnings, but only arrived on the scene an hour after the vessel had been forced into Iranian waters.
Hunt laughably warned Iran that it would face “serious consequences.” This from a man who when asked whether the “Send her back” chants at the recent Trump rally in North Carolina were racist, responded: “I’m not going to use the ‘R’ word because I do have to be responsible for that relationship between the U.K. and the USA, and I think it would be damaging to that if I used it.”
If Hunt lacks the courage to offer a few words to call out racism he is hardly the type to order a navy gunboat to the port of Bandar Abbas to resolve the issue.
The same is true of Johnson, who earlier this month refused to support Sir Kim Darroch, the then U.K. ambassador to Washington, after he came under fire from Trump over leaked diplomatic communiques in which he was scathingly critical of the President. Darroch resigned the next day.
Both incidents underline the myriad humiliations and ethical compromises that Brexit has pushed the U.K. into. It is desperate to curry favor with Trump in the hope it can secure a free trade deal with the world’s largest economy and offset the economic damage caused by leaving the EU.
With Johnson at the helm, there will doubtless be many more.
Watch this space.
Michael Glackin, a former managing editor of The Daily Star. A version of this article appeared on page 6 of The Daily Star on July 25 2019.
Thursday, 25 July 2019
BY MICHAEL GLACKIN
Chairman Mao was once asked what he thought would have happened if Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had been assassinated in 1963, rather than U.S. President John F Kennedy. He replied: “I do not think Mr. Onassis would have married Mrs. Khrushchev.”
Similarly, some have wondered what would have happened if the U.K. government had not been distracted by a long running campaign to elect a new prime minister when Iran’s Revolutionary Guard decided to seize a U.K. registered oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz last Saturday.
Well, I doubt it would have made any difference, because huge government cuts to the Royal Navy mean the U.K. doesn’t have enough warships to properly patrol the Strait.
In 1982 when the U.K. retook the Falklands, the Royal Navy had more than 80 warfighting vessels. Today, excluding submarines, it has just 20, and almost half of those are in long term maintenance. Britannia no longer rules the waves. More of that in a moment. First, the U.K. finally elected its prime minister Tuesday. The former foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, comfortably beat his opponent, the current foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt to the job, ending a turgid seven week campaign to replace Theresa May.
The fact that the runoff was between the two worst foreign secretaries in modern British history speaks volumes for the state of U.K. politics right now.
Britain’s 55th prime minister did not need to face a general election, merely win enough support from his party’s parliamentarians and its 120,000, largely white middle-aged and elderly members. A rather strange paradox as Johnson is considered a populist politician along the lines of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Indeed, Trump was quick to welcome Johnson’s election. He said: “Boris is good. They call him Britain Trump.” Warming to
his theme, and with all the oratory we have come to expect, he added: “They like me over there. That’s what they wanted. That’s what they need. He’ll get it done. Boris is good. He’s gonna do a good job.”
Private Eye, a satirical magazine was more succinct. Its front page greeted Johnson’s victory with a picture of him entering No. 10 Downing Street and the headline: “Loon Landing. One small step for a man … one giant leap in the dark for mankind.”
Private Eye’s joke sums up the fears surrounding a Johnson premiership. A man who has been sacked twice in his career for lying, compared Muslim women who wear the burqa to letterboxes or bank robbers, and once compared the European Union to the Third Reich. Oh, and last month, the police were called to a latenight screaming argument at his girlfriend’s apartment when neighbors heard her shouting at him to “get off me” amid the sound of plates smashing.
It is fair to say no one knows what Johnson’s premiership will herald, or what will be left broken in his wake.
Top of the pile in Johnson’s in tray is of course delivering Brexit.
Johnson has insisted the U.K. must leave the European Union on Oct. 31, with or without a trade deal. He has brushed aside dire warnings from businesses and the Bank of England of the damage a so-called “no-deal” Brexit will do to the economy and insisted the U.K. needs to be “more optimistic.” Such optimism was clearly in short supply at the International Monetary Fund this week. It warned that a no deal Brexit is as big a threat to the global economy as the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China.
Political insiders believe the EU, largely due to German prompting, is prepared to amend the current Brexit deal to enable the U.K. to leave with a trade agreement. The deal is unlikely to be markedly different in substance from the one negotiated by Johnson’s ill-fated predecessor, Theresa May, which Parliament rejected three times. But any small concession by the EU could just be enough to enable Johnson, who has more elan with his party’s hardline right-wing Brexiteers than May, to push the deal through Parliament.
If that fails, Johnson has threatened to suspend Parliament in order to ensure the U.K. leaves the EU in October without further delay. Politicians have reacted by voting to block any attempt to suspend parliament. Sometimes you have to pinch yourself to remember you’re still living in the U.K. and not some banana republic.
The likely result of all this is another general election in the coming months – the third in the U.K. in four years – to allow Johnson to seek a mandate from the public for a no deal Brexit.
In the event of an election it’s extremely unlikely that any one party could win a majority to form a government, opening the door to further political paralysis.
With this in mind, the issue of the U.K.’s rapidly deteriorating relationship with Iran will not be all that high on Johnson’s agenda. The seizure of the Stena Impero was headline news the day after it happened. Since then it has hardly been mentioned in the U.K. media. The 23 man crew aren’t U.K. nationals – most are Indian, Filipino, Russian and Latvian – a factor that will ease the pressure on Johnson to act at a time when there is an increasingly worrying upswell of white nationalists in the U.K. and whose discontent the new prime minister has unashamedly tapped into.
Hunt, who may no longer be foreign secretary by the time you read this, is seeking to broker a Europe-led maritime operation to safeguard shipping in the Strait. But many are wondering why Hunt failed to put extra-protection in place sooner, especially after the U.K. seized an Iranian tanker suspected of carrying oil to Syria near Gibraltar on July 4.
The nearest Royal Navy frigate to the Stena Impero, HMS Montrose, haplessly tried to prevent the Iranians from seizing the tanker with a series of radio warnings, but only arrived on the scene an hour after the vessel had been forced into Iranian waters.
Hunt laughably warned Iran that it would face “serious consequences.” This from a man who when asked whether the “Send her back” chants at the recent Trump rally in North Carolina were racist, responded: “I’m not going to use the ‘R’ word because I do have to be responsible for that relationship between the U.K. and the USA, and I think it would be damaging to that if I used it.”
If Hunt lacks the courage to offer a few words to call out racism he is hardly the type to order a navy gunboat to the port of Bandar Abbas to resolve the issue.
The same is true of Johnson, who earlier this month refused to support Sir Kim Darroch, the then U.K. ambassador to Washington, after he came under fire from Trump over leaked diplomatic communiques in which he was scathingly critical of the President. Darroch resigned the next day.
Both incidents underline the myriad humiliations and ethical compromises that Brexit has pushed the U.K. into. It is desperate to curry favor with Trump in the hope it can secure a free trade deal with the world’s largest economy and offset the economic damage caused by leaving the EU.
With Johnson at the helm, there will doubtless be many more.
Watch this space.
Michael Glackin, a former managing editor of The Daily Star. A version of this article appeared on page 6 of The Daily Star on July 25 2019.
Monday 3 June 2019
Brexit and languishing leadership
By Michael Glackin
The Daily Star
Tuesday, May 29, 2019
In the end, nothing quite epitomized U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May’s disastrous premiership better than her ignominious departure. It wasn’t that her time in power literally ended in tears, with the prime minister breaking down as she choked on the final sentences of her resignation speech outside No. 10 Downing Street.
No, it was her bizarre decision to evoke the spirit of the late Sir Nicholas Winton. May suggested advice Winton once gave her on “compromise” should be followed by politicians who opposed her handling of the U.K.’s Brexit process.
Winton, who died four years ago at the age of 106, had helped to organize what is known as the Kindertransport that saved 669 mostly Jewish children from certain destruction in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Within hours of May’s speech, Lord Dubs, a U.K. politician who as 6 year old was among those saved by Winton, criticized May, pointing out that she had doggedly refused to help other unaccompanied refugee children from the Middle East and Africa that are languishing in camps in France, Italy and Greece. The criticism was echoed by Winton’s daughter.
Winton, dubbed the “British Schindler,” was about courage and action. May’s premiership was marked by her vacillation and inertia.
It is for this reason that her parliamentary colleagues ousted her. May had one job to do since she became prime minister three years ago: Deliver Brexit. But like her shameful quoting of Winton, her actions never matched her words.
One can argue she faced an impossible task trying to deliver Brexit against the backdrop of a divided country. The vote to leave the European Union in 2016 was just 52 percent versus 48 percent, and Parliament is largely in favor of remaining in the trading bloc. One can argue that such a situation required compromise.
In fact, it demanded leadership. Why? Because we must either remain fully in the EU or exit the trading bloc completely. May instead wasted two years trying to force through a Brexit deal that managed to offend both those who wanted to leave the EU and those who wanted to remain.
May needed to show Winton’s vision and courage. Instead she indulged in cliches and sound bites – “Brexit means Brexit” and “No deal is better than a bad deal” – both of which became increasingly meaningless as Brexit stalled and the U.K. Parliament voted against leaving the EU without a trade deal.
As Sunday’s European Parliament elections showed, the vacuum created by May’s inertia has been filled by dangerous right-wing populists. In the U.K., this means that Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, which didn’t even exist six weeks ago, is now the U.K.’s largest in the European Parliament, winning 28 seats. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally beat President Emmanuel Macron. In Italy the far-right also topped the polls.
The result is the U.K. is essentially back where it was the day after the historic referendum in 2016, still waiting for Brexit to be delivered.
Before that can happen, a leadership
contest to replace May must take place.
The prime minister will stand down on June 7. Replacing her will not involve a general election – something neither the government nor the Labour opposition party desire. May’s successor needs only to be elected by her party’s parliamentarians and its 120,000, largely middle-aged and elderly members.
Typical of the chaos British politics has descended into, there are so far eight declared candidates with another four expected to join the fray. The main favorites are all hard-line Brexiteers, thus the U.K., particularly against the backdrop of Sunday’s election results, looks set to finally leave the EU on Oct. 31, the latest deadline set for its exit by Brussels.
The overwhelming favorite to succeed May is former Foreign Secretary and exMayor of London Boris Johnson. Interestingly, Johnson’s paternal great-grandfather was Circassian-Turkish journalist and politician Ali Kemal, who was lynched by supporters of Ataturk in 1922. Johnson’s grandfather, who was by then living in England, changed the family name. Johnson, an ardent Brexiteer, appeals to the Conservative party’s rank-and-file membership, but is seen by many colleagues as a loose cannon. His appeal says much for the way demagoguery has enveloped U.K. politics since the 2016 Brexit referendum.
He infamously compared Muslim women who wear the burqa to letterboxes or bank robbers last year, and once compared the EU to the Third Reich. When he worked as a journalist he was sacked from one newspaper for making up quotes. During the Brexit campaign, and despite his Turkish heritage, he co-signed a letter stating that “the only way to avoid having common borders with Turkey is to vote Leave [the EU] and take back control.” He was also humiliatingly demoted by his own party for lying about one of his many extramarital affairs.
His main rival for the leadership looks set to be Michael Gove, another Brexiteer but fierce rival of Johnson. Two years ago Gove scuppered Johnson’s attempt to become prime minister by refusing to support him, insisting Johnson was not up to running the country. To say there is no love lost between the two would be an understatement. Another right-wing Brexiteer, Dominic Raab is also in the running though he lacks the high profile of Johnson or Gove. An outside bet is International Development Secretary Rory Stewart.
Stewart, a former diplomat and centrist politician who voted to remain in the EU, is an interesting character. For one thing, Brad Pitt’s production company bought the rights to make a biopic of his life, which definitely sets him apart from his rival leadership candidates.
Following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Stewart was the coalition provisional authority deputy governorate coordinator in Maysan and in Dhi Qar. Before that, between 2000 and 2002 he walked around 9,600 kilometers through Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, staying in villagers’ homes. After his stint in Iraq, he went back to Afghanistan where he helped establish the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, which has restored infrastructure in Kabul and constructed health and educational facilities.
Oddly enough, I once requested an interview with him for The Daily Star to discuss Iraq and Afghanistan. He refused. An initial supporter of both invasions, he has since said they were mistakes.
Unfortunately, against the backdrop of a democracy that is in such disarray, the liberal worldly conservatism of Stewart will be drowned out by those whose primary talent is simply to shout loudest.
In the 1930s, George Orwell wrote: “The thing that strikes me more and more is the extraordinary viciousness of political controversy in our time. Nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters as long as you can score a neat debating point.”
This is where British politics, and indeed much of European politics is right now. And all caused by a refugee crisis that the EU failed to show leadership and deal with.
Europe has spent the last four years grappling with its biggest influx of asylum-seekers since World War II, as people flee conflict-ridden zones in the Middle East and Africa. It is this crisis, even more than the 2008 financial crisis, which has done the most to destabilize the European project, and led to the rise of populist politicians.
The continent now looks set to spend the next four years holding the ring of democracy against increasingly vocal and powerful politicians who care little for its virtues. One hopes our leaders and institutions finally wake up to the task and stop playing to the baying crowd.
Michael Glackin, is former managing editor of THE DAILY STAR. This article was first published in The Daily Star on May 29, 2019.
The Daily Star
Tuesday, May 29, 2019
In the end, nothing quite epitomized U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May’s disastrous premiership better than her ignominious departure. It wasn’t that her time in power literally ended in tears, with the prime minister breaking down as she choked on the final sentences of her resignation speech outside No. 10 Downing Street.
No, it was her bizarre decision to evoke the spirit of the late Sir Nicholas Winton. May suggested advice Winton once gave her on “compromise” should be followed by politicians who opposed her handling of the U.K.’s Brexit process.
Winton, who died four years ago at the age of 106, had helped to organize what is known as the Kindertransport that saved 669 mostly Jewish children from certain destruction in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Within hours of May’s speech, Lord Dubs, a U.K. politician who as 6 year old was among those saved by Winton, criticized May, pointing out that she had doggedly refused to help other unaccompanied refugee children from the Middle East and Africa that are languishing in camps in France, Italy and Greece. The criticism was echoed by Winton’s daughter.
Winton, dubbed the “British Schindler,” was about courage and action. May’s premiership was marked by her vacillation and inertia.
It is for this reason that her parliamentary colleagues ousted her. May had one job to do since she became prime minister three years ago: Deliver Brexit. But like her shameful quoting of Winton, her actions never matched her words.
One can argue she faced an impossible task trying to deliver Brexit against the backdrop of a divided country. The vote to leave the European Union in 2016 was just 52 percent versus 48 percent, and Parliament is largely in favor of remaining in the trading bloc. One can argue that such a situation required compromise.
In fact, it demanded leadership. Why? Because we must either remain fully in the EU or exit the trading bloc completely. May instead wasted two years trying to force through a Brexit deal that managed to offend both those who wanted to leave the EU and those who wanted to remain.
May needed to show Winton’s vision and courage. Instead she indulged in cliches and sound bites – “Brexit means Brexit” and “No deal is better than a bad deal” – both of which became increasingly meaningless as Brexit stalled and the U.K. Parliament voted against leaving the EU without a trade deal.
As Sunday’s European Parliament elections showed, the vacuum created by May’s inertia has been filled by dangerous right-wing populists. In the U.K., this means that Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, which didn’t even exist six weeks ago, is now the U.K.’s largest in the European Parliament, winning 28 seats. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally beat President Emmanuel Macron. In Italy the far-right also topped the polls.
The result is the U.K. is essentially back where it was the day after the historic referendum in 2016, still waiting for Brexit to be delivered.
Before that can happen, a leadership
contest to replace May must take place.
The prime minister will stand down on June 7. Replacing her will not involve a general election – something neither the government nor the Labour opposition party desire. May’s successor needs only to be elected by her party’s parliamentarians and its 120,000, largely middle-aged and elderly members.
Typical of the chaos British politics has descended into, there are so far eight declared candidates with another four expected to join the fray. The main favorites are all hard-line Brexiteers, thus the U.K., particularly against the backdrop of Sunday’s election results, looks set to finally leave the EU on Oct. 31, the latest deadline set for its exit by Brussels.
The overwhelming favorite to succeed May is former Foreign Secretary and exMayor of London Boris Johnson. Interestingly, Johnson’s paternal great-grandfather was Circassian-Turkish journalist and politician Ali Kemal, who was lynched by supporters of Ataturk in 1922. Johnson’s grandfather, who was by then living in England, changed the family name. Johnson, an ardent Brexiteer, appeals to the Conservative party’s rank-and-file membership, but is seen by many colleagues as a loose cannon. His appeal says much for the way demagoguery has enveloped U.K. politics since the 2016 Brexit referendum.
He infamously compared Muslim women who wear the burqa to letterboxes or bank robbers last year, and once compared the EU to the Third Reich. When he worked as a journalist he was sacked from one newspaper for making up quotes. During the Brexit campaign, and despite his Turkish heritage, he co-signed a letter stating that “the only way to avoid having common borders with Turkey is to vote Leave [the EU] and take back control.” He was also humiliatingly demoted by his own party for lying about one of his many extramarital affairs.
His main rival for the leadership looks set to be Michael Gove, another Brexiteer but fierce rival of Johnson. Two years ago Gove scuppered Johnson’s attempt to become prime minister by refusing to support him, insisting Johnson was not up to running the country. To say there is no love lost between the two would be an understatement. Another right-wing Brexiteer, Dominic Raab is also in the running though he lacks the high profile of Johnson or Gove. An outside bet is International Development Secretary Rory Stewart.
Stewart, a former diplomat and centrist politician who voted to remain in the EU, is an interesting character. For one thing, Brad Pitt’s production company bought the rights to make a biopic of his life, which definitely sets him apart from his rival leadership candidates.
Following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Stewart was the coalition provisional authority deputy governorate coordinator in Maysan and in Dhi Qar. Before that, between 2000 and 2002 he walked around 9,600 kilometers through Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, staying in villagers’ homes. After his stint in Iraq, he went back to Afghanistan where he helped establish the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, which has restored infrastructure in Kabul and constructed health and educational facilities.
Oddly enough, I once requested an interview with him for The Daily Star to discuss Iraq and Afghanistan. He refused. An initial supporter of both invasions, he has since said they were mistakes.
Unfortunately, against the backdrop of a democracy that is in such disarray, the liberal worldly conservatism of Stewart will be drowned out by those whose primary talent is simply to shout loudest.
In the 1930s, George Orwell wrote: “The thing that strikes me more and more is the extraordinary viciousness of political controversy in our time. Nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters as long as you can score a neat debating point.”
This is where British politics, and indeed much of European politics is right now. And all caused by a refugee crisis that the EU failed to show leadership and deal with.
Europe has spent the last four years grappling with its biggest influx of asylum-seekers since World War II, as people flee conflict-ridden zones in the Middle East and Africa. It is this crisis, even more than the 2008 financial crisis, which has done the most to destabilize the European project, and led to the rise of populist politicians.
The continent now looks set to spend the next four years holding the ring of democracy against increasingly vocal and powerful politicians who care little for its virtues. One hopes our leaders and institutions finally wake up to the task and stop playing to the baying crowd.
Michael Glackin, is former managing editor of THE DAILY STAR. This article was first published in The Daily Star on May 29, 2019.
Monday 25 February 2019
Dustbin of history? The case of Shamima Begum
By Michael Glackin
The Daily Star
Monday, February 25 2019
When the French philosopher Voltaire was asked on his deathbed to renounce Satan, the avowed atheist famously replied: “My good man, this is no time to be making enemies.”
I suspect Shamima Begum, the London born “Daesh [ISIS] bride” who is probably the most famous teenage mother in the world right now, doesn’t read a lot of Voltaire. Her loss. If she was familiar with the great unbeliever she might have followed his example in a tight corner.
Instead, in the first of what turned out to be myriad media interviews after The Times of London reporter Anthony Loyd found her in Al-Hawl refugee camp, Begum admitted to being well aware of the atrocities Daesh carried out during its reign of terror, and wasn’t troubled by them.
“When I saw my first severed head in a bin it didn’t faze me at all. It was from a captured fighter seized on the battlefield, an enemy of Islam,” she told Loyd.
Her failure to condemn Daesh almost certainly led to the decision by the U.K. government to strip her of her U.K. citizenship last week, leaving the 19-year-old stateless. Following the decision, Begum gave another interview in which she said she was “willing to change” and asked the U.K. government to show her “mercy.”
Unfortunately for Begum, mercy appears to be in short supply in the U.K. right now. A recently launched petition demanding a ban on all Daesh members from returning to the U.K. had garnered more than half a million signatures following a surge after Begum’s initial comments. More on that in a moment.
First it’s worth recounting Begum’s personal odyssey. In 2015, Begum, then aged 15, along with two schoolmates, Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana, left her home in London’s East End, telling her parents she was going out for the day. Instead she and her pals caught a plane to Turkey, traveled overland to Syria and into the world’s headlines by joining up with Daesh. Begum lived in Raqqa and married a Dutch convert, by whom she claims to have had two children that died in infancy. She left Raqqa when it fell, and her husband surrendered to Syrian fighters. Sultana appears to have been killed in an air raid in 2016 and the whereabouts of Abase are unknown.
From a legal perspective, the decision to revoke Begum’s citizenship is distinctly dodgy. The case put forward by the government is that Begum is a dual citizen of Bangladesh, her mother’s birthplace, and as such can be legally stripped of her U.K. citizenship because she has an alternative one. Begum is one of more than 100 people to have her citizenship revoked, including Lebanese-born Bilal al-Berjawi, who grew up in London’s St. John’s Wood and was killed in a drone strike in Somalia. Nearly all were born outside the U.K.
The problem here is Begum was born in the U.K. Moreover, the Bangladesh government made it clear last week that Begum is not a citizen and it has no intention of making her one.
Begum’s family in London intend to challenge the U.K. government’s decision in court. They have also asked the government for assistance to bring Begum’s baby boy to London. For what it’s worth, Sajid Javid, the U.K. government Cabinet minister who rescinded Begum’s citizenship, has indicated her son is entitled to U.K. citizenship. “Children should not suffer,” he said. “So if a parent does lose their British citizenship, it does not affect the rights of their child.”
There are countless legal issues involved here, not to mention a raft of polarized views. But amid the inexplicably continuing uncertainty around Brexit and the wider descent of U.K. politics into chaos the U.K. government isn’t concerned about the legality. It is simply desperate to be seen to be decisive and tough. Prime Minister Theresa May has been humiliated by being unable to get parliamentary approval for her painstakingly constructed deal to leave the European Union, with the government’s own parliamentarians voting against her. May, who traveled to Sharm el-Sheikh Sunday to discuss Brexit on the margins of the EU summit with Arab leaders and meet Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, failed to gain any concessions to make her deal more palatable to Parliament.
Political chaos isn’t just confined to the government. Amid May’s woes, the opposition Labour Party has been riven with accusations of anti-Semitism. The accusations have resulted in several Labour parliamentarians resigning to form a new centrist political grouping. The new grouping also includes a smaller number of politicians from the governing Conservative Party who oppose May’s handling of Brexit and accuse her of doing too much to appease right-wing anti-EU politicians in her government.
Against that backdrop Begum is an easy target that enables the government to look strong and tap into the growing xenophobia that is increasingly reverberating around post-Brexit U.K.
The case for showing Begum mercy largely depends on whether you believe she was simply an impressionable schoolgirl when she fled the U.K. to throw in her lot with Daesh.We all did daft things when we were 15, and there is a strong case to be made that Begum was groomed through manipulative online female militants. On the other hand, would grooming really blind her to the reality of life under Daesh?
The group’s penchant for butchering and beheading innocent civilians, for throwing homosexuals off high buildings and setting fire to captives in cages were all well-known before 2015. Begum could not have been unaware of the murderous reality of Daesh when she boarded her flight to Turkey and caught the bus to Syria.
However, I firmly believe the decision to rescind her U.K. nationality is wrong.
The decision diminishes the U.K. To consign Begum to the dustbin of history, stateless, on the basis of a decision she made as a child is shameful. If Begum was radicalized through grooming, she was groomed in the U.K. Either way, she is a U.K. problem, not one that should be outsourced to another country, even if one could be found for her.
The national mood of rage toward the teenager in the face of her initial unrepentance is understandable. But it is also part of a wider anger in the U.K. about just about everything since the Brexit vote. It is worth pointing out that one of the reasons Begum has failed to show sufficient remorse might be because when the cameras and newspapers go home at night, she’s still in a refugee camp surrounded by other Daesh flotsam and jetsam, not all of whom will be regretting their past.
In short, we cannot properly judge her. But our courts and legal system can, and that is why she should be returned to the U.K. and held accountable for her actions. Begum could be jailed for up to 10 years for being a member or supporting Daesh. She could face a life sentence if there is evidence she assisted in atrocities or helped prepare a terrorist attack. More importantly, rehabilitating Begum, or deradicalizing her, would also yield important information on what enticed her and her school pals to join Daesh and provide ways to prevent other young people from becoming radicalized.
When Begum and her schoolmates left London to join Daesh, they became the hip global poster girls for the group and fundamentalist Islam. Returning Begum to the U.K., putting her on trial for whatever crimes she has committed and rehabilitating her would perhaps turn her into the poster girl for the values the U.K. holds dear, and show the true strengths of democracy and liberalism over the death cult she and others embraced.
As Voltaire also remarked: “Love truth, but pardon error.”
Michael Glackin, a former managing editor of THE DAILY STAR, is a writer in the United Kingdom. A version of this article appeared on page 6 of THE DAILY STAR on February 25 2019.
The Daily Star
Monday, February 25 2019
When the French philosopher Voltaire was asked on his deathbed to renounce Satan, the avowed atheist famously replied: “My good man, this is no time to be making enemies.”
I suspect Shamima Begum, the London born “Daesh [ISIS] bride” who is probably the most famous teenage mother in the world right now, doesn’t read a lot of Voltaire. Her loss. If she was familiar with the great unbeliever she might have followed his example in a tight corner.
Instead, in the first of what turned out to be myriad media interviews after The Times of London reporter Anthony Loyd found her in Al-Hawl refugee camp, Begum admitted to being well aware of the atrocities Daesh carried out during its reign of terror, and wasn’t troubled by them.
“When I saw my first severed head in a bin it didn’t faze me at all. It was from a captured fighter seized on the battlefield, an enemy of Islam,” she told Loyd.
Her failure to condemn Daesh almost certainly led to the decision by the U.K. government to strip her of her U.K. citizenship last week, leaving the 19-year-old stateless. Following the decision, Begum gave another interview in which she said she was “willing to change” and asked the U.K. government to show her “mercy.”
Unfortunately for Begum, mercy appears to be in short supply in the U.K. right now. A recently launched petition demanding a ban on all Daesh members from returning to the U.K. had garnered more than half a million signatures following a surge after Begum’s initial comments. More on that in a moment.
First it’s worth recounting Begum’s personal odyssey. In 2015, Begum, then aged 15, along with two schoolmates, Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana, left her home in London’s East End, telling her parents she was going out for the day. Instead she and her pals caught a plane to Turkey, traveled overland to Syria and into the world’s headlines by joining up with Daesh. Begum lived in Raqqa and married a Dutch convert, by whom she claims to have had two children that died in infancy. She left Raqqa when it fell, and her husband surrendered to Syrian fighters. Sultana appears to have been killed in an air raid in 2016 and the whereabouts of Abase are unknown.
From a legal perspective, the decision to revoke Begum’s citizenship is distinctly dodgy. The case put forward by the government is that Begum is a dual citizen of Bangladesh, her mother’s birthplace, and as such can be legally stripped of her U.K. citizenship because she has an alternative one. Begum is one of more than 100 people to have her citizenship revoked, including Lebanese-born Bilal al-Berjawi, who grew up in London’s St. John’s Wood and was killed in a drone strike in Somalia. Nearly all were born outside the U.K.
The problem here is Begum was born in the U.K. Moreover, the Bangladesh government made it clear last week that Begum is not a citizen and it has no intention of making her one.
Begum’s family in London intend to challenge the U.K. government’s decision in court. They have also asked the government for assistance to bring Begum’s baby boy to London. For what it’s worth, Sajid Javid, the U.K. government Cabinet minister who rescinded Begum’s citizenship, has indicated her son is entitled to U.K. citizenship. “Children should not suffer,” he said. “So if a parent does lose their British citizenship, it does not affect the rights of their child.”
There are countless legal issues involved here, not to mention a raft of polarized views. But amid the inexplicably continuing uncertainty around Brexit and the wider descent of U.K. politics into chaos the U.K. government isn’t concerned about the legality. It is simply desperate to be seen to be decisive and tough. Prime Minister Theresa May has been humiliated by being unable to get parliamentary approval for her painstakingly constructed deal to leave the European Union, with the government’s own parliamentarians voting against her. May, who traveled to Sharm el-Sheikh Sunday to discuss Brexit on the margins of the EU summit with Arab leaders and meet Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, failed to gain any concessions to make her deal more palatable to Parliament.
Political chaos isn’t just confined to the government. Amid May’s woes, the opposition Labour Party has been riven with accusations of anti-Semitism. The accusations have resulted in several Labour parliamentarians resigning to form a new centrist political grouping. The new grouping also includes a smaller number of politicians from the governing Conservative Party who oppose May’s handling of Brexit and accuse her of doing too much to appease right-wing anti-EU politicians in her government.
Against that backdrop Begum is an easy target that enables the government to look strong and tap into the growing xenophobia that is increasingly reverberating around post-Brexit U.K.
The case for showing Begum mercy largely depends on whether you believe she was simply an impressionable schoolgirl when she fled the U.K. to throw in her lot with Daesh.We all did daft things when we were 15, and there is a strong case to be made that Begum was groomed through manipulative online female militants. On the other hand, would grooming really blind her to the reality of life under Daesh?
The group’s penchant for butchering and beheading innocent civilians, for throwing homosexuals off high buildings and setting fire to captives in cages were all well-known before 2015. Begum could not have been unaware of the murderous reality of Daesh when she boarded her flight to Turkey and caught the bus to Syria.
However, I firmly believe the decision to rescind her U.K. nationality is wrong.
The decision diminishes the U.K. To consign Begum to the dustbin of history, stateless, on the basis of a decision she made as a child is shameful. If Begum was radicalized through grooming, she was groomed in the U.K. Either way, she is a U.K. problem, not one that should be outsourced to another country, even if one could be found for her.
The national mood of rage toward the teenager in the face of her initial unrepentance is understandable. But it is also part of a wider anger in the U.K. about just about everything since the Brexit vote. It is worth pointing out that one of the reasons Begum has failed to show sufficient remorse might be because when the cameras and newspapers go home at night, she’s still in a refugee camp surrounded by other Daesh flotsam and jetsam, not all of whom will be regretting their past.
In short, we cannot properly judge her. But our courts and legal system can, and that is why she should be returned to the U.K. and held accountable for her actions. Begum could be jailed for up to 10 years for being a member or supporting Daesh. She could face a life sentence if there is evidence she assisted in atrocities or helped prepare a terrorist attack. More importantly, rehabilitating Begum, or deradicalizing her, would also yield important information on what enticed her and her school pals to join Daesh and provide ways to prevent other young people from becoming radicalized.
When Begum and her schoolmates left London to join Daesh, they became the hip global poster girls for the group and fundamentalist Islam. Returning Begum to the U.K., putting her on trial for whatever crimes she has committed and rehabilitating her would perhaps turn her into the poster girl for the values the U.K. holds dear, and show the true strengths of democracy and liberalism over the death cult she and others embraced.
As Voltaire also remarked: “Love truth, but pardon error.”
Michael Glackin, a former managing editor of THE DAILY STAR, is a writer in the United Kingdom. A version of this article appeared on page 6 of THE DAILY STAR on February 25 2019.
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