A night at the theatre

And so, our man Aaro comes down on the side of Kamm[1] and MacShane rather than Pollard, over the question of Michael Kaminski, is he a bastard or not. I confess to neither having done nor planning to do the research to work out who's right (as far as I can tell, he's not very good on second world war atrocities, but in favour of bombing Gaza, hence the cognitive dissonance), but here you go.

Notable for me in that one way of summarising the difference between Aaro and your average Decent (by which I mean Nick Cohen) is that Aaro goes to see a play and writes about how he was influenced by the play, and Nick goes to see a play and fulminates about how the play should have been influenced by him. Etc etc.

And apparently if David Cameron went to see a play about Poland, he'd realise … something about the European Parliament and John Redwood, apparently. Strikes me there's a bit of faux-naivete here - Aaro knows that the Tory Party is massively divided on Europe and knows that Cameron's plan is to paper over the cracks in the belief that British voters don't really care about the European Parliament (proof: they don't vote for it). So why's he pretending that there's some dilemma or issue here?

It does strike me that a cruel man might summarise this piece as Dave warning Dave that Nazism is all too often the first step on the road to Euroscepticism.

"For if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time" - De Quincey.

Update Unorphaning footnote [1], I note that Oliver K is still trying to pretend that Martin Bell's candidacy in the 1997 Tatton election was more independent than it was. The Spiked! reviewer is correct to say that "In doing so, [Bell] helped, along with his friends in the liberal media, to reframe politics in terms of sleaze, elevating the non-political issue of personal conduct over politics proper". While it's impossible to read Bell's mind as to his own particular motivations, he consulted with Alastair Campbell and William LeBreton before deciding to stand (and probably would not have done so if those two functionaries hadn't been able to deliver their local parties), and was provided with significant help by Labour Party worker Alan Olive. And the reason why this help was provided was that Labour and the LibDems wanted to keep the "sleaze" issue high profile during the 1997 election campaign. Oliver was of course quite famously involved in his uncle's campaign, which is why he tries to pretend that it wasn't a stunt, or that it wasn't a piece of Labour Party press strategy. But it was; in many ways a laudable one because it got rid of Neil Hamilton, but I have always found OK's attempts to rewrite the record on this one a bit irksome.

(Spiked! is also something of a thorn in the flesh of the Decent campaign against Mr Justice Eady, as its existence might prick a few consciences - spiked! was formed by the staff of Living Marxism, a quite odious RCP publication which was deservedly sued into bankruptcy by Ed Vulliamy, over issues relating to Bosnia. Few Decents of the tendence Nick Cohen like to be reminded of this entirely sensible use of the libel laws to silence etc etc).

Quiet around here ...

Sorry for the prolonged silence readers. This is due to a number of factors, chief among them busyness, but also the marked decline and fall of Decency in the Obama era - it is much more difficult to prioritise the starting of big arguments with the Decent Left when one doesn't think that they're remotely capable of pushing the world any closer to war.

This isn't to say that Watching Aaro is wholly without point and I hope to have a few bits and pieces up over the next week in a more philosophical Aarological vein. But in general, expect posting to be significantly lighter in the immediate future.

By way of light relief, check this out. What is it with Ed Husain, and well-intentioned political adventures that always seem to end up with him suddenly realising that all of his new mates are a bunch of wild-eyed ideologues? Is he collecting material for a sequel to The Islamist? Either way, there's a sort of Zelig-like situation comedy in this.

Beaten by Littlejohn

As noted by our ever vigilant commenter Organic Cheeseboard, our man David Aaronovitch (along with Johann Hari) was beaten by Richard Littlejohn in the Comment Awards.

Now, I'm no fan of our Dave, but all I can say is - what an excellent way to pre-emptively flush any credibility said awards may have earned in future. Must have been given for services to knee-jerk, smug, insular reaction. You're better off without it, Dave.

Singh Wins Right To Appeal

We discuss Nick's views on libel here so the story Simon Singh Wins Leave To Appeal In Bca Libel Case seems moot. This was all over Twitter this morning, but Google News throws up only the Index on Censorship post.

In a scathing rebuttal of Mr Justice Eady’s previous judgement in the case, Lord Justice Laws said Eady had risked swinging the balance of rights too far in favour of the right to reputation and against the right to free expression. Mr Justice Laws described Eady’s judgement, centred on Singh’s use of the word “bogus” in an article published by the Guardian newspaper, as “legally erroneous”.

We will hear more on this very soon, probably in the Observer on Sunday. I am not a lawyer, so readers can speculate away on their own.

Paul Farrelly MP

Paul Farrelly is a mate of Nick Cohen (and Martin Bright) from their days working at the Observer, isn't he? I merely ask.

Duly Noted

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean that they're not out to get you

old saying

Yes.

I did think of knocking out a post in solidarity (pah!) with Dave Osler, but Jonathan's comment (link above) in reply to Richard Harris a bit earlier does need to be noted here.

Shorter me: although I now find Nick Cohen incoherent and emotional all the time, and although he's prone to ruin his credibility with feats of mind reading[1], this doesn't mean that he's necessarily wrong all the time. He was right about New Labour fairly early and he may well be right about Mr Justice Eady.

Anyway, good luck to Dave Osler. And kudos to Iain Dale (also IMO hard to like, but like Nick, in the right occasionally).

[1] See for example his Roman Polanski piece: [t]he magazine's dazed New York lawyers...

All we want is a bank balance

It's no go the yogi man, it's no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.
Louis MacNeice from memory[1]

What to say about Denis MacShane's letter to the Guardian? (Mentioned in the comments to the previous post.) Before laying into it, I should lay out some theories of mischief of worse on the part of the Guardian's letters' editor. The letter as published may have been rewritten in part - why I cannot think beyond the original being in undecipherable manuscript. It may have been extensively edited, and the apparent contradictions may originally have been further apart and so less glaring. Of course, the paper may have received the missive[2] they published. Heads were scratched and various exclamations starting with "What the" tried out before someone declared, "What the hell, he's a chump[3], publish and be damned!"

There's a link above, so I'm not going to quote much. Why does MacShane present his facts in the manner of Mr Tarantino's award-winning opus "Pulp Fiction"? Now we're three weeks ago. Now we're some time before that. Now we're back to this week. Now we're in the perpetual present. What does "street violence is more in evidence in France than Britain" mean? Street violence, as your present correspondent understands it, takes place in the street which is to say, in public. Surely these things are researched, and MPs regularly see at least the abstracts of such research. MacShane wrote to the Guardian, not the Sun, and I think its readers would suspend their disbelief if an academic paper with a long title and a longer subtitle were name-dropped.

I am going to quote some of the letter, because this is where if any editing occurred, the snips came.

His argument that local mayors prevent antisocial behaviour would be laughed at across the Channel. There are good arguments for breaking down centralised Britain, but when Labour offered the north-east regional government it was rejected by a vicious Tory and press campaign.

Local mayors was a Labour policy. Jenkins, as I understand him, wants Labour to have extended local mayors to smaller cities and made councillors more visible (I'll note that this would make the BNP even more obviously useless than they are already). I don't see how north-east regional government would help that. (Am I paranoid, or has New Labour offered regional government only to the poorest areas of the country - in other words reducing Westminster's influence to the good bits?)

The concepts of duty, responsibility, respect, thrift and local solidarity have disappeared. But the liberal-left despise these values, while the right buys itself out of these problems by moving to posher districts or sending their kids to private schools.

The concepts MacShane talks of remind me of Alan Clark's belief that Scotland should have been Tory, because of roughly those virtues. Of course, Scotland defied Clark and sent left-liberal candidates (and a few communists and Independent Socialists) to Westminster to represent most of its constituencies through the 20th century. By left-liberal of course I mean the Labour Party which used to mix both. Perhaps MacShane means that the rot started when Roy Jenkins was Home Secretary: it all went wrong when we legalised homosexuality and abortion and stopped censoring plays. And is it just the right who sent their kids to private schools? Didn't Diane Abbot and Tony Blair (and as K-Tel used to say, many more!) send their kids to public schools? But what is it MacShane is accusing the liberal-left of?

What does he mean by suggesting that respect has disappeared? Didn't he see Kanye at those video awards? MacShane may have a point about thrift: didn't Keynes suggest that money was better spent than hoarded? But, less ideologically, nothing kills thrift more than inflation and MacShane's party allowed a boom in house prices. Oh, that was the liberal-left in the Party of course.

Anyway, we here at 'World of Decency' often make the sophomoric mistake of assuming that all our targets are alike. But MacShane doesn't like the 'liberal-left' (which I understand to mean something like the shared ground between the old Liberal Party - ie centrist - and the left), while possibly preferring the authentic proletarian values only fully articulated by Mao Tse-Tung (or Margaret Thatcher)[4]. While David T of Harry's Place says:

Now, much of our focus on Harry’s Place has been on the extent to which the centre Left has become infected with the fanaticism and insanity of the far Left.

So centre Left (when not fanatical) good, far Left bad. And that's what Harry's Place's focus has been, I thought it was all about the Muslims.

Almost entirely off-topic, I think many readers will enjoy Alex Massie on the (Moon owned) Washington Times' review of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's autobiography. Oh, god, I've just remembered there was a piece on Today about London mayor (see, on-topic) Boris Johnson's appearance on EastEnders and Barbara Windsor (if I have my soap actors right) being proper gobsmacked by his presence which reminds me of the stories about Stalin in 'The Golden Notebook' (see the footnote you should have read earlier, fool).

How could I forget this:

I support Sir Simon's views that we need more, not less elected politicians but given the current hatred of any elected person...

Aaargh! There's one thing I hate more than politicians and that's people who use less for discreet items. Hanging's too good for 'em, I say.

[1] I've forgotten who the poem was supposed to be satirising. I think I liked it at the first reading, before I came to realise that these sort of barbs apply to everyone. I've certainly thought that ever since.

[2] I'm not going to stoop to 'epistle'. I'm not, I'm not.

[3] See Paul Waugh. Yes, he's a Tory, but I really loathe Mandelson, who I think should have been ejected from the Labour Party on April 10, 1992. Anyone who shares my revulsion is at least temporarily on my side.

[4] Not really a footnote, but I've been reading 'The Golden Notebook' and I can't get over how good it is on communists. I can't help thinking that what MacShane and co want is to be pure. Never mind that their ideology is self-contradictory, never mind that their ideas don't seem to work, they're on the right side of history. And because I can't fit it in anywhere else, would I be right in thinking that Orwell's taste for denouncing others (which he certainly had, even if he deprecated the tendency and occasionally even apologised for it) came after he returned from Spain. Did he, in other words, pick up a need for factionalism and ideological purity from fighting Stalinists?