CentreRight

Jeremy Brier: No reasonable person could oppose the Coalition's plan for tuition fees, but the NUS have never been reasonable people

My experience of the National Union of Students was that they were a rather self-indulgent and self-aggrandising bunch who most members of the university despised. They spent most of their time grandstanding about racial and gender equality in a University which had (rightly) bent over backwards to ensure racial and gender equality for decades and they spent the rest of their time trying to boycott Israeli academics (presumably on the basis that there was no point attacking nations which oppress women or lock up gay people when you can vilify ones with pluralistic universities, freedom of speech and the rule of law). I admit they give out lots of condoms in Freshers’ Week which is rather useful, although mine was stapled to a leaflet so kind of pointless too.

Let’s be frank. Student politics is for children. And today’s protest is no exception (although the children in question are now rather violent and inclined towards arson).

So let’s all take a big (adult) vow not to listen to them.

The Coalition’s proposals are eminently sensible on the whole. It’s right and proper, as a matter of principle, that those who will benefit from university education should be the ones who fund it. Why should someone who chooses to go out to work at 16 years old and start a business have to pay for half of his peer group who choose to study for three years? Why should someone who will reap the financial rewards of being a lawyer or a doctor not shoulder some responsibility for their costs and training? Generous bursary provision and a culture of philanthropy where ex-students contribute to their alma mater is a likely consequence of all this – just look across the Pond at the excellent schemes in place in America. But even without these protections, the scheme itself contains a number of safeguards, such as the following:

1. The student repays the loan over 25 years and according to their ability to pay.

2. Graduates earning below £21,000pa would not pay any real interest on loans. 

3. Outstanding tuition fee debt that cannot be paid will be written-off after 25 years.

It also means, undoubtedly, that our universities will be better funded, will produce better research and will turn out better graduates. 

So - even if CCHQ gets a bit of a battering today - the Coalition should stick to their guns in the knowledge that they are doing the right thing. 

Ken Livingstone flouts Labour Party Rules - but Ed Miliband is too weak to act

In the Tower Hamlets Mayoral Election, Ken Livingstone has been out campaigning - for an independent candidate, Lutfur Rahman, previously deselected by Labour for “serious allegations” being made against him.

According to the London Labour Party (no less), these allegations concern “both the eligibility of participating voters and the conduct of Lutfur Rahman." Or to put it more bluntly: they were apparently grave allegations concerning vote fraud and election expenses irregularities.

Ken’s conduct is unsurprising. He is clearly attempting to ingratiate himself with the Hard Left but anti-Labour electorate in Tower Hamlets that he hopes will deliver him the Mayoralty, in the same way that they delivered the Bethnal Green & Bow constituency to George Galloway in 2005. Ken loves to show to London that he isn’t a Party Man.

However, this undoubtedly raises a major question of judgment for Ed Miliband. Can he condone this disloyalty in his official candidate for the London Mayoralty, actively campaigning against a Labour candidate?

Not according to Chapter 2, Rule A(4)(b) of the Labour Party Rules which state the following:

“A member of the party who joins and/or supports a political organisation other than an official Labour group or other unit of the party, or supports any candidate who stands against an official Labour candidate, or publicly declares their intent to stand against a Labour candidate, shall automatically be ineligible to be or remain a party member….” 

So that's pretty clear then.

But my guess is that, in an early test of strength as Party Leader, Ed Miliband will be too weak, too frightened of the Left and too indebted to the Unions to ensure the proper action is taken.

Judge Bathurst-Norman is reprimanded for grotesque anti-Israel rant to jury which got off seven "activists"

Remember His Honour Judge Bathurst-Norman? He's the one who presided over the acquittal a group of activists who broke into an arms factory in Brighton, causing £187,000 worth of damage to equipment they believed was bound for Israel. The jury acquitted the men following the Judge's extraordinary summing-up which was, in effect, just a lengthy expression of the Judge's own aggressively anti-Israel views and his undisguised sympathies for anyone attacking anything to do with Israel. 

For a full analysis of Bathurst-Norman's grotesque judgment, I can do no better than direct you to this excellent piece: "The Judge Who Thought He Was Defence Counsel". 

Not only were the Judge's views politically facile and misleading, they were also entirely irrelevant to the case in issue which was whether a group of people should have been criminally punished for subjecting a lawful British business to a thuggish attack. As far as I remember from Bar School, there isn't an "Israel exclusion" in the law of criminal damage. 

Well anyway, at last some common sense reigns!

Yesterday, the Office for Judicial Complaints has announced that "His Honour" has been formally reprimanded his unprofessional behaviour.

This is extremely good news for anyone that cares about proper standards of justice, the rights of British businesses to trade lawfully without being subject to attacks on their property and, by the by, correcting the notion that the poisonous demonisation of Israel (and Israel alone) in our state institutions and public discourse is anything other than completely unacceptable.

[Hat tips: AJCD, FH]

Labour's back! (In the Unions' pockets)

“We’ve got our Party back!” proclaimed Lord Kinnock this morning, grinning manically as though he had set Labour off on some kind of hilarious boomerang adventure in April 1992 - swirling through some highly undesirable years of unprecedented electoral success - only to snap right back into his hands this week, as though it had never left. Welcome back, old boy!

Kinnock’s cri de coeur is a real double whammy: it offends the New Labour past (implying that the Party has been rescued from recent caretakers who are somehow alien to the movement; I'm sure they will all be thrilled) and, moreover, it stifles Labour's future (emphasising that the net effect of the leadership election has been to reverse, not to renew). Kinnock’s excitement reflects his characteristic misjudgment of the public, who found Labour most palatable when they weren’t “The Party” but were reaching further beyond. Eighteen years on and he still doesn’t “get it”.

But when you see Kinnock’s explanation for where this phrase comes from, the signs are worse still for Labour:

 "A trade union delegate leaned over and said 'Neil, we've got our party back'. I thought that was so accurate as an instantaneous response to the leader's speech."

The double-meaning appears to be lost on Kinnock. "We've got our party back" was not said by a long-in-the-tooth member warmly welcoming back Old Labour to the views of The Membership. It was said by a trade union delegate and thus appears rather to emphasise the Unions' new possessive rights over the leadership and the Party: "We've got our party back". Back in our pockets.  And well they have. After all, to paraphrase a headline close to Kinnock's heart, it was the Unions Wot Won It.

A true British hero - The man who broke into Auschwitz

Millions of men, women and children must have dreamed of escaping Auschwitz, to be anywhere but there, in the heart of darkness. But one extraordinary British prisoner of war, Denis Avey, dreamed of breaking in; to “know exactly what was happening there”, to record the names of the perpetrators and to save the lives of any that he could. 

The audacity and success of his plan, kept a secret for 65 years and recounted last night to a spellbound audience (including Iain Duncan Smith MP and Michael Gove MP) at the Holocaust Educational Trust Dinner in London, was a reminder that even when humanity was at its bleakest, its capacity for heroism remained boundless.

After a remarkable wartime career with the Desert Rats, surviving a sinking ship full of POWs as well as a year in an Italian prison camp, Avey found himself transferred to the notorious I. G. Farben Industrie factory near Auschwitz (the Buna Chemical Plant), which at its peak used over 80,000 slave labourers (including many prisoners of Auschwitz Concentration Camp) to produce synthetic oil and rubber for the Nazi war effort.

The British POWs who worked at the Plant would be instantly killed if they spoke to the “stripies” (the Jewish prisoners of Auschwitz), but Avey saw their unimaginable horrors on a daily basis: summary executions and mutilations, men who within weeks were reduced through hunger and exhaustion to a slow death, a baby beaten to death with an upturned pistol (“when I saw that, I died inside”). Avey remained stoic and silent as he had to, all the while conspiring with the other POWs to sabotage the chemical processes and metalwork that he was engaged with (“ooh we did them tremendous damage” he says with a twinkle). But on one occasion Avey’s stoic silence cracked as he yelled “untermensch” at an SS guard who he saw commit an unspeakable act of wickedness; for his insolence, he was struck with a pistol across his face and remains blinded in one eye.

“Some people became immune to it all,” said Avey, “but I just became angry”. His story thereafter is so incredible as to defy précis. Determined to witness the full horrors for himself, Avey hatched a meticulous plan to swap identities with a Dutch prisoner of Auschwitz. They swapped articles of clothing over many weeks, Avey shaved his hair off with a blunt razor, he carefully studied and copied the slouched bearing of the prisoners, and – somehow – he sneaked into Auschwitz on three occasions. "Conjecture is not a word in my vocabulary," says Avey, "I had to know. I wanted names".

Avey witnessed the inhumanity of the “selections” at Auschwitz Railway Station where people were parted from their loved ones and children, sent to gas chambers or to work with the pointing of a guard’s finger; he slept on the freezing wooden bunks with men and women howling and praying for deliverance; and, by the by, he slipped some cigarettes to a prisoner he befriended (Ernst Lobethal), invaluable tokens of exchange that he hoped would enable Ernst to survive on the cruel death marches across frozen central Europe.

Avey himself eventually escaped from a death march and he managed to survive and return to England. He sought out a lieutenant to explain what he had seen and learnt but he says the man’s eyes “glazed over” and, distressed that no one would believe his travails, Avey decided never to speak of it again.

It is our tremendous privilege that Avey finally began to recount his experiences seven years ago when invited to appear on BBC Derby to talk about war pensions. “It was cathartic really,” he says. The hosts were so taken aback at the tales they were hearing, Avey tells me that they cancelled the next two shows to allow him to carry on; now his life is to be recorded in a book called The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz. 

It was only once the BBC began to produce a documentary about Avey’s story that it was discovered that Ernst, the young Jewish prisoner whom Avey had befriended, had survived the death marches, having traded the Players cigarettes given to him by Avey to have his shoes re-soled. Ernst lived until 77years old in New York and before his death in 2002, he recorded the story of how a British POW he knew only as “Ginger” had saved his. When the BBC showed Avey the footage of Ernst - a "message from beyond the grave" - Avey just shook his head in silent disbelief before choking back the tears to say with characteristic understatement: “well, that’s bloody marvellous”.

Avey says he is embarrassed to be considered a hero and poignantly reflects on how he only acted on the ideals he had grown up with in rural Northern England. At 92 years old, he still travels around schools in deprived areas to teach children about his experiences and about the virtues of never turning a blind eye to acts of cruelty. We can only hope that the experience of meeting a man like Denis will inspire future generations to behave with similar courage and dignity. 

Preferential voting in all its glory Down Under

Those advocates of preferential voting for UK General Elections should take note of what is going on Down Under in the previously safe Tasmanian Labor seat of Denison.

It's a simple point: the independent candidate Andrew Wilkie who came THIRD in terms of share of the vote, actually looks likely to WIN the seat based on the counting-up of the second preferences from the fourth and fifth candidates which propels him into second place - and then the counting-up of the second preferences of the previously-second (Liberal) candidate.

There is a succinct analysis from Antony Green here.

Or, to put it another way, is the best way to reinvigorate our "Broken Politics" to ensure that the winning MP is the "least disliked" option? It seems just a touch uninspiring to me.

[Hat Tip: MS]

There would be no blockade if the people of Gaza had set about building a peaceful and prosperous land (rather than electing brutal lawless Islamist terrorists)

Lord Mandelson’s recent reflection on Blair’s refusal to condemn Israel during its war against Hizbollah makes poignant reading this week:

“[Tony] really needed friends and it would have been easier for him to play to the gallery - but he chose not to. It speaks volumes for Tony Blair. He was not at that time prepared to make concessions to Israel's enemies. He was not prepared to let Hizbollah off the hook by simply joining the criticism of Israel."

David Cameron could do worse than take heed of this remark following his speech in Turkey. Playing to the gallery of the liberal media (or is it the Liberal Democrats?) is too dangerous when it simultaneously plays into the hands of the lawless, Islamist terrorists who run Gaza.

As it happens, Gaza isn’t a “prison camp”. Tom Gross has comprehensively documented why here and it is so rich in impeccably-sourced research that I cannot add to it, save for urging you to read the whole thing.

However, to the extent that there are hardships and restrictions in Gaza, to choose to blame Israel for them (and to blame Israel alone) has the effect of squarely letting Hamas, the organisation committed by its Charter to the genocide of all Jews and international Jihad, off the hook.

You don't need me to tell you what a despicable regime Hamas run. 

But let’s be clear about another thing: when Israel withdrew from Gaza, the people of Gaza could have set about building a peaceful and prosperous land, no doubt facilitated by the extraordinary international aid and goodwill that the Palestinian people enjoy. They didn’t: they voted in terrorists, their chosen regime was Islamist and lawless and Gaza swiftly became Iran’s rocket-launching pad.

So who bears the blame for a blockade? When a criminal is incarcerated to protect the innocent, doesn’t one blame the criminal rather than the jailor? Any adversity suffered by Gazans is, bluntly, the price they are paying for the elections they have made and the avowed aggressive intent of their leaders.

To put it another way: if Wales voted in Hamas and started firing rockets at England, do you suppose we would think it was England’s fault that the people of Wales no longer enjoyed a liberal border policy?

José María Aznar rallies support for Israel - for the sake of the West

In today's Times, José María Aznar, Prime Minister of Spain between 1996 and 2004, has written a brave and important article about the future of the West, entitled "If Israel goes down, we all go down". 

I understand that the online Times is now subscription-only but the following should give you the gist: 

"For far too long now it has been unfashionable in Europe to speak up for Israel. In the wake of the recent incident on board a ship full of anti-Israeli activists in the Mediterranean, it is hard to think of a more unpopular cause to champion...

... For years, the focus of Western attention has understandably been on the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. But if Israel is in danger today and the whole region is slipping towards a worryingly problematic future, it is not due to the lack of understanding between the parties on how to solve this conflict. ...

The real threats to regional stability, however, are to be found in the rise of a radical Islamism which sees Israel’s destruction as the fulfilment of its religious destiny and, simultaneously in the case of Iran, as an expression of its ambitions for regional hegemony. Both phenomena are threats that affect not only Israel, but also the wider West and the world at large."

He concludes by saying:

"The West is going through a period of confusion over the shape of the world’s future. To a great extent, this confusion is caused by a kind of masochistic self-doubt over our own identity; by the rule of political correctness; by a multiculturalism that forces us to our knees before others; and by a secularism which, irony of ironies, blinds us even when we are confronted by jihadis promoting the most fanatical incarnation of their faith. To abandon Israel to its fate, at this moment of all moments, would merely serve to illustrate how far we have sunk and how inexorable our decline now appears."

Read it in full if you can get a copy...

Update: The World Jewish Congress have a full transcription of the article on their website.

What's the point of Andy Burnham (and other burning issues)?

For those of you that had a prior engagement watching some Dulux undercoat set on a large brick wall, you might have missed last night’s New Statesman Labour Leadership Contest - which James McIntyre thinks “sets fire”. To what? Some of us have long been calling for a Socialist Bonfire of the Vanities, but communal arson was most unexpected. 

Anyway, that's not the burning issue. Because I'm confused about Andy Burnham. 

The David Miliband / Ed Balls axis kind of has a familiar political logic to it: David the nerdy Blairite who can appeal to the parts of Primrose Hill that other Socialists can’t reach; Ed Balls the Brownite who looks as proficient as his mentor at chucking his stapler around the bunker; and Ed Miliband who’s somewhere in the middle of the Venn diagram, both Milliband and Ed, Blair and Brown, save the climate and keep the change.

And now of course there’s Diane Abbott, the voice of the Left, the fizz, the fun, the TV personality, the underdog. Against private schools as a politician but in favour of them “as a mother”. (Note: I’m against big tax rebates for lawyers “as a politician” but in favour of them “as a barrister”).

But none of this explains Andy Burnham. Apparently, McIntyre tells us: 

“Andy Burnham set the tone for his pitch by saying "I can give people something the Tories can't -- a leader whose background is similar to people.""

Surely not a leader whose background is similar to people?! As opposed to the others whose backgrounds are similar to reptilian life forms?

I'm not trying to be unkind, he does seem like an awfully nice chap, but is there anything here beyond a rather vain attempt to package a Cambridge-educated career politician as a man-of-the-people? 

What's it all about? And is there anyone that thinks he can actually win? (Labour Party members seem to think so.)

The Left's linguistic troubles over "anti-Israel" "anti-Semites"

So, veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas retired (about thirty years too late) after telling Jews to "go home to Poland and Germany".

Apparently, say the BBC and The Guardian she has quit over "anti-Israel comments". 

Really?

What did it for Helen Thomas was not her "anti-Israel comments". After all, no one ever has to resign for what they say about Israel. No, what did it for Helen Thomas was that her comments made express reference to "The Jews" and therefore could be pointedly and properly categorised as anti-Semitic. 

It wasn't just Israel that should be liberated or that "Palestine" should be created - it was "The Jews" who should "get the hell out".  

That's why Helen Thomas had to go. Even in this day and age, an expressly anti-Jewish attack in mainstream media is still just enough to force an early retirement and a flood of sympathy from the Guardian. (Unless you're Richard Ingrams and just keep soldiering on).

But here's the irony: it's those very same Leftist institutions - the BBC, The Guardian and suchlike - who most vehemently stress that being anti-Israel is not the same as being anti-Semitic and yet it is they who are the quickest to forget that distinction when it suits them.

On the BBC/Guardian logic, if Helen Thomas's remarks are merely "anti-Israel", thus conflating attacks on Jews with attacks on Israel at a stroke, why is the singling out of Israel for special abuse over and above all other nations - brilliantly chronicled by William Shawcross here - not anti-Jewish?

It may or may not be on a true analysis. But, on any view, the linguistic logic of Israel's most vehement detractors breaks down when they fail to draw the subtle semantic distinctions that they always plead be recognised by everyone else.

- - -

Update: Mark Steyn's take on the situation is here. And as both he and Fraser Nelson have noted recently, there is no better time to re-read the great article by my friend Tom Gross, "The Forgetten Rachels", a seminal piece published in the Spectator in 2005.

- - -

Further update: Mark Steyn links to my article here, in an excellent new piece.

I would also recommend this moving piece from Closet Conservative.

Israel's double-bind as more ships head to Gaza

The Jerusalem Post is reporting that the organisers of the “Gaza aid ships” are sending more ships to Gaza.

Well why wouldn’t they? The battle-ready sailors (and the TV-ready Sayles) have now established (as if it were ever in doubt) that Israel is in a perilous double-bind.

If Israel lets the ships go unchecked and abandons its lawful blockade then it exposes itself to enormous danger. Contrary to the contentions of the meticulously planned “spontaneous protests”, the naval blockade is a critical way by which Israel can ensure that Iranian arms do not flood its neighbour, whilst still allowing genuine humanitarian to reach Gaza. As is now clear, in the case of the five previous “aid ships”, Israel steered the convoy into the port of Ashdod where it was searched and from where aid supplies could be transferred onwards. The ship which was ultimately boarded was offered the same possibility.

On the other hand, if Israel does enforce its blockade and so carries out its obligation as a nation state to protect its own people, the anti-Israel activists know that they will score an enormous international propaganda coup as the Usual Suspects line-up to denigrate Israel without paying any attention to the video evidence (see Matt Sinclair’s earlier post) or to the obvious intuitive point that Israel isn’t just doing this for the hell of it (or to provoke angry facebook updates from “outraged” students determined to boycott all those Jaffa oranges they really should eat more of) but because Israel actually faces an intractable security risk from Gaza, run by an organisation committed by its Charter to the genocide of Jews. 

So, there you have it: Israel loses either way. She must either jeopardise her frightened population or find herself subject to unique popular vitriol by “peace activists” and D-list celebrities who never seem to bat an eyelid about what goes on in (for example) Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea, Burma, Russia - or, ehem, Turkey.

Or have I missed Alexei Sayles’s flotilla of aid to help the Kurds?