Matthew Harris2013-06-18T20:24:34-04:00Matthew Harrishttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=matthew-harrisCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Matthew HarrisGood old fashioned elbow grease.UK Action on Israel/Palestinetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.11998732012-01-12T19:00:00-05:002012-03-13T05:12:01-04:00Matthew Harrishttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-harris/recent talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in Jordan, with Reuters saying:
The next two weeks may be crucial. Negotiators from the two sides are already holding exploratory talks under the auspices of Jordan's King Abdullah, who will visit US President Barack Obama next week to discuss the latest developments. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will travel to London, Berlin and Moscow - key stops to talk to members of the so-called Quartet of peacemaking powers pressing him to restart negotiations with Israel.
This comes at a time when the UK's Middle East Minister, Alistair Burt, has just visited Israel/Palestine, saying ahead of his visit:
Last week the efforts of King Abdullah of Jordan and Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh saw the welcome return to talks by Israeli and Palestinian negotiators. The UK strongly supports this development. During my visit I will be encouraging both sides to seize this opportunity and make real progress towards a negotiated two-state solution.
In another press release, the FCO is rightly keen to highlight Mr Burt's speech at Israel's Bar Ilan University, in which he made what I think is a good re-statement of where the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition Government stands on Israel/Palestine and the wider Middle East, including Iran. Of particular interest is his saying:
I have to tell you that the absence of progress towards peace, together with the almost weekly announcements of this tender or that planning permission for new building, has a real effect on how the world sees Israel.
There's a lot of talk of delegitimisation in Britain and elsewhere. And it's true that there are some people who are implacably opposed to Israel - to Israel's very existence. There have been since the first days of Zionism, and since Israel's creation in 1948, and I fear there always will be. There are some of my Parliamentary colleagues who will stand up condemn Israel at any opportunity. But these are not the ones you need to worry about.
The ones you need to worry about are the ones in the mainstream, the centre ground. The ones who used to stand up and support Israel, but now stay silent. Or the ones who used to be silent, but are now critical.
Because opinion is shifting - among my colleagues in Parliament, among the British public, and more widely. It's not yet catastrophic, and it's not quick. But it is happening, and you should care, just as I care as someone who has for decades counted himself as an ardent friend of Israel.
We can argue for hours about who is to blame for the failure to make peace. It won't get us very far, and if you go back far enough some of you might say it's the fault of the British anyway.
But stepping aside from the blame game, some 25 years in the British Parliament have made me realise that for as long as there is no progress towards peace, and for as long as Israel continues to build across the Green Line, Israel risks losing friends.
To those in any British political party who, in place of all this diplomatic activity and reasonable attempts at discussion, would rather engage in the emotive politics of one-sided denunciation, I would say: "Shut up, the grown-ups are talking." The grown-ups are indeed making another attempt at constructive British engagement in the Israel/Palestine peace process. It must be hoped that they succeed. ]]>New Wets and Faltering Thatcheritestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9910572011-10-02T00:00:00-04:002011-12-01T05:12:01-05:00Matthew Harrishttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-harris/in the news for suggesting that the Government does not have a "coherent and credible" plan for long-term economic growth. He knows far more about economics than I do, so I shall not debate the details of what he is saying, although I am myself a supporter of what the Coalition is doing. What interests me more is: do his remarks signal the arrival of a new generation of Tory wet? And what do Thatcherites think about the case for tax cuts versus the case for cutting the deficit first?
The wets, under Thatcher in the 1980s, were those Tory MPs who advocated a more expansionary economic growth strategy, in a bid to stem rising unemployment and ease the impact of the recession on the country's poorest people. Their return, as a new breed of quasi-Keynesian Conservative (which Mr Tyrie arguably is not, or least, not really), would be an interesting political development. As a Liberal Democrat, would I have more in common with those wet One Nation Conservatives with whom I most agree on social issues (and maybe also on Europe), or with those decidedly 'dry' economic liberals (note that word) who are most in tune with the Lib Dems' own free-market policies?
Mr Tyrie, of course, does not fall neatly into either camp, which is a reminder of what a very complicated beast the Tory Party always is. His active chairing of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition marks him out as something other a conventional right-winger, but I do not suggest for a moment that he is an 80s-style wet pure and simple. After all, he is not advocating higher public spending or a change to the deficit reduction strategy - he's advocating a boost to economic growth, which is a different thing. Indeed, he's actually calling for some items of public spending to be cut back, which is the opposite of the 80s wets' opposition to Thatcher's cuts (real or alleged) to spending on public services - hence John Redwood's support for what Mr Tyrie is saying.
Surely this is a reminder of how difficult it is to define Thatcherism? At a time of austerity, is it Thatcherite to cut taxes in a bid to boost growth? Or to put off tax cuts until the bloated deficit is well on the way to elimination? With a third option, of course, being to cut projected spending by more than it is already being cut by, so creating 'spare money' that can come off our taxes. I wonder if it is not that third, very un-wet option that lurks behind the thinking of Mr Redwood and his friends, with the rhetoric of "we need measures to boost growth - oh, and maybe those measures could include tax cuts" being used to sweeten the bitter pill of "we need more spending cuts so that we can cut taxes".
If forced to choose between a well-run economy and a smaller tax bill, I know which I'd choose, although I know that is a false choice when expressed so simplistically. In the economic good times, it is possible to cut taxes without cutting spending, as the tax take can rise despite the actual taxes being lower. But that is not how the public perceives it; if you say you want tax cuts worth £5 billion, then your opponents will ask you where you are going to find the £5 billion, and will accuse you of wanting to rip it from the hard-pressed budget for schools and hospitals - a line of argument that won Labour the General Elections of 2001 and 2005. Plus, these are not yet good times economically, as we continue to recover from a very deep slowdown.
Thatcherite Conservatives are therefore confused not only about how to answer these questions, but about what the questions should be in the first place. Was Harold Macmillan a traditional Tory and Margaret Thatcher a right-wing deviation, or was Macmillan a One Nation deviation from a right-wing conservatism that Thatcher was not inventing, but returning to? As Daniel Finkelstein wrote brilliantly in 2008:
Tories can save money, they can cut taxes, they can reform services, they can reduce government. But to believe that they can do these things all at the same time and all in the first years of a Parliament is like believing that the international banking crisis is sexist.
If Thatcherites want a smaller state, then they surely want a smaller deficit, and the best way to get that could be (as our Thatcherite-inspired Chancellor argues) for taxes to remain uncut. Normally, it would be a cliche to say that tax cuts are holy writ for Tories and especially for Thatcherites. That this is no longer certain is another sign of the devastation that the economic storm has wrought upon the landscape of conventional political thinking.]]>Nick Clegg's new Thinking on Arab Springtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9332232011-08-22T19:00:00-04:002011-10-22T05:12:02-04:00Matthew Harrishttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-harris/speech on the Arab Spring goes further than calling for a democratic outcome across the region. It makes achieving such an outcome a defining aim of UK foreign policy, building on Clegg's previous commitment to "the principle of liberal interventionism...the principle that we have a collective responsibility to support freedom and protect human rights around the world".
"This year has proved that so-called Western values, free speech, the rule of law, pluralism, are the aspirations of people everywhere," says Clegg, in a speech to the British Council on Monday 22 August. "The UK stands by all who strive for them." These words are especially striking given that, in a speech in March, the Deputy Prime Minister said: "Being adherents of the international rule of law does not mean being neutral about the kind of world we want to see and the kind of nations we want to deal with: open, free, democratic societies."
Clegg is here clearly leading the Liberal Democrats away from any notion that the UK could be "neutral" on the relative merits of democracy and other systems. He is saying that democracy works best and that the UK will take practical steps to foster its development across the Middle East and North Africa:
Successful revolutions may change the world overnight. But, in many ways, it's the morning after that the real work begins...(We) will support a range of political projects, from assisting fledgling movements as they turn into organised political parties, to setting up parliamentary procedures for new legislatures, putting in place processes to prevent corruption, staffing projects to engage women and other marginalised groups, giving technical assistance to help replace state media monopolies with a plural press and helping register huge numbers of people who have never voted before...We've committed resources to this - £110m over the next four years with £20m now set aside specifically for Libya...(Don't) ever underestimate this stage of reform. This is when you lock in a revolution. This is when you turn the hopes and dreams of millions of citizens into the institutions and practices of a well-functioning state.
In other words: revolutions that start with hopes of good governance and democracy often end with failed states and despotism. It is in the UK's interest to actively intervene so as to push post-revolutionary countries in the right direction - and we are quite clear what the right direction is, with no hint of moral relativism when it comes to different systems of government. If British people are entitled to democracy in our country, then other people are entitled to it in theirs, so it is right for us to help them to achieve it.
This speech takes the Liberal Democrats another step away from the politics of the Iraq War - which did, after all, happen as long ago as 2003. As I have argued here previously, Liberal Democrats' principled opposition to that war skewed the terms of debate about the party's foreign policy. The mood music of that debate temporarily became the drumbeat of Stop the War and Not in My Name, even though the party has consistently supported the war in Afghanistan and previously led calls for intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Led by Nick Clegg and facing the rigours and responsibilities of government, the Liberal Democrats are now taking a tougher, more nuanced approach to questions of liberal interventionism. As Clegg has previously argued, the war in Iraq was an act of "liberal vigilantism" that went badly wrong, "the lesson of (which) is not that intervention in support of liberal aims is always wrong". After all, Clegg now argues, "had Gaddafi been allowed to massacre protesters in Benghazi, what message would that have sent to protesters in Manama? Sanaa? Damascus?"
This is also a powerful response to those who ask why we have intervened militarily in Libya but not in Syria. Clegg demonstrates here that our prevention of a Libyan massacre in Benghazi was, in and of itself, an intervention in Syria, sending as it did a signal to Assad as to what he could expect were he to engage in wholesale massacres of Syria's people - massacres on a scale that would have dwarfed even the ugly, tragic killings that the Assad regime actually has undertaken.
The outcome in Libya remains deeply uncertain. As Clegg has argued, "we must temper optimism with realism" regarding events across the Middle East and North Africa. "Equally," says Clegg, "We must be wary of those who preach a counsel of despair." Liberal Democrats must surely agree with Clegg that "the momentum for change is breathtaking and, for the cynics who said change wasn't possible, who had written off the Libyan uprising, written off the Arab Spring, clearly, they were wrong. The movement for freedom hasn't been stamped out. It's alive and kicking, and it's here to stay."
Liberal Democrats must be natural members of any such "movement for freedom". They should back their leader in ensuring that "the UK stands shoulder to shoulder with the millions of citizens across the Arab world, who are looking to open up their societies, looking for a better life." This is another defining moment for Liberal Democrat foreign policy.]]>We need more White Oxbridge Malestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8944322011-07-11T08:17:09-04:002011-09-10T05:12:01-04:00Matthew Harrishttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-harris/
Your teachers are encouraging you to study law. They want you to apply for Oxbridge and you're up for this, even though nobody in your family has previously come close to going to university, let alone to Oxford or Cambridge. You start to dream of being a lawyer, imagining that you might one day even become a judge.
And then you read in The Times that: "Radical reform of the selection of judges is needed to break the stranglehold of white Oxbridge males at the top of the judiciary." In other words, Steve, if you do work hard, excel and get into Oxford or Cambridge to read law, then you will become an unfairly privileged White Oxbridge Male, and there are already too many people like you in the judiciary. How is Steve supposed to feel upon reading such a story in The Times? Should he perhaps not apply to Oxbridge after all?
Prior to Labour's introducing tuition fees, one did not pay to study at Oxford or Cambridge; indeed, somebody like Steve wouldn't pay to go there now. His achievement in getting there would have nothing to do with money, and everything to with hard work and academic ability.
It is indeed important to widen access to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, so that they admit the best applicants, not merely the best-schooled applicants. I myself went to Oxford from a comprehensive; it's good that the proportion of state school pupils offered places at Oxford has risen this year to 58.5%, although there is a long way to go.
It is one thing to urgently debate how to get more state school pupils (and more black and minority ethnic pupils) into Oxbridge. It is another thing to turn "Oxbridge" into a synonym for privilege, when it is actually synonomous with hard work and academic excellence. President Obama's being a Harvard Man is surely seen as one of his many accomplishments rather than as evidence of unfair elitism; the same should be true of a degree from Oxford or Cambridge.
If the ablest and hardest-working people often go to Oxbridge, then it is logical that Oxbridge graduates will often be among the ablest and hardest-working people in professions including law. If such people are succeeding in reaching the top and becoming judges, then why does it matter if many of them went to Oxbridge?
Will we next complain that too many leading actors went to RADA? That too many eminent surgeons trained at the great London teaching hospitals? That the England football team draws exclusively on players from Premiership clubs?
If we want to raise the aspirations of thousands of kids like Steve, then we cannot and must not stigmatise success. Fee-paying schools are one thing; the universities of Oxford and Cambridge are another. There is no such thing as "too many White Oxbridge Males". We need more White Oxbridge Males, more Black Oxbridge Females - more hard-working, academically able people of all kinds and from all backgrounds. We need more success.]]>Nick Clegg's new European Languagetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8927832011-07-07T21:10:35-04:002011-09-06T05:12:01-04:00Matthew Harrishttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-harris/
Conservatives have abandoned a huge chunk of the economic liberal territory to which they once laid claim, because such territory lies in a political space called 'Europe'. Here is Nick Clegg calling for a fully functioning digital single market, the provision of venture capital right across the EU and the implementation of the Services Directive.
These things are all government policy, but would Cameron choose to trumpet them in a Continental capital, as Clegg does in this speech? Could Cameron comfortably echo Clegg in saying that he is proud that a British (Tory) European Commissioner, Lord Cockfield, was "the chief architect" of the single market? When Nick Clegg says that the creation of a true single market could add €800 billion to EU GDP, he is talking about future British prosperity - the very prosperity that used to motivate Tories to support the EU, and which ought to motivate them to support it now.
Under Thatcher, the Tories adopted the language of economic liberalism, although Thatcher herself, for all her rhetoric, was really a monopoly capitalist (and a believer in centralised government). Now it is not a Tory but the Liberal Democrat Leader, in government, who talks of the benefits of lower trade barriers, and of the need to open up new markets for our businesses.
For too many years, the UK's stale debate on Europe has revolved around EU institutional reform and the single currency. This speech talks instead about the things that EU countries can simply do together, both to tackle short-term crises and to create long-term prosperity. It acknowledges that common aims can be achieved by different means in different EU countries. Without ducking the problems faced by the euro (which the UK is clearly not about to join), the speech looks at the wider opportunities beyond the eurozone's current crisis.
The UK is stronger inside the world's largest trading bloc than it would be outside it, and this government is pursuing a liberalising agenda within the EU. The only response, as Mrs Thatcher put it in a rather different context, is to rejoice, rejoice, rejoice!]]>Time For A Lib Dem Foreign Policy Orange Book?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8898562011-07-04T14:40:25-04:002011-09-03T05:12:02-04:00Matthew Harrishttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-harris/the Orange Book re-defined aspects of its economic thinking. The Orange Book is often seen as a rightward shift, so in what direction is Lib Dem foreign policy now moving?
The conflicts in Afghanistan and Libya have kept foreign affairs at the heart of UK politics, at a time when the Government is also conducting a major review of its defence spending - and this only a few years after opposition to the Iraq War became a defining issue (if not the defining issue) for many Liberal Democrats.
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg sits (with fellow Lib Dems Chris Huhne and Danny Alexander) on the UK's year-old, American-inspired National Security Council, proving that foreign and security policy is very much a joint coalition concern - hardly a surprise, given that the Coalition Agreement itself includes a page on Foreign Affairs.
Clegg was with the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary at the key foreign-policy meeting with President Obama when the latter was in London. David Cameron's comments (including on the possible need for a joint EU line on a possible Palestinian declaration of independence at the UN in September) at his joint press conference with Obama arguably reflect Clegg's publicly articulated thinking on a number of key issues.
Lib Dem ministers include Jeremy Browne at the Foreign Office and Nick Harvey at Defence, while Clegg himself made a major foreign policy speech as recently as March.
That speech, delivered in Mexico and entitled "An axis of openness: renewing multilateralism for the 21st century", offers many insights into where Clegg and his party might be going in foreign policy terms, offering as it does a qualified defence of "the principle of liberal interventionism...the principle that we have a collective responsibility to support freedom and protect human rights around the world".
In contrasting "law-abiding" liberal intervention in Libya with the "liberal vigilantism" of Iraq, Clegg seeks to move on from Iraq, "the lesson of (which) is not that intervention in support of liberal aims is always wrong". He is making a liberal intervention to rescue the very principle of liberal intervention from those Lib Dems who might attack it most.
In doing this, he is shifting the party back towards the thinking of Paddy Ashdown, the former Lib
Dem leader who wrote a whole book about liberal interventionism and who, it must never be forgotten, was a hawkish (and influential) advocate of British intervention in the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.
The Lib Dems' opposition to the Iraq War temporarily overshadowed all other aspects of the party's foreign policy thinking, including its consistent support for the war in Afghanistan. Some Lib Dems' presence in the ranks of the "Not in my name!" stop the war brigade became a distorting prism, affecting both how the party viewed foreign affairs and how the party itself was viewed by itself and others.
Anyone who has spoken even briefly to Nick Clegg knows that he is a deeply nuanced thinker on questions of foreign policy. An emotion-led approach to such questions was never likely to satisfy him, however much it might occasionally have appealed to some of the party's hairier grassroots activists and even the occasional backbench Parliamentarian.
Clegg is able to build on a base of Lib Dem foreign-policy thinking that is surprisingly deep for a third party that was long in opposition. The academic and journalistic foreign-policy establishment includes more Lib Dems than one might expect, with many London-based diplomats privately conceding that the party punches above its weight on these matters.
Such foreign-policy experts are very much on the grown-up wing of the party, which is ever more in charge, especially now that the Lib Dems face the responsibilities of government. Many of the foreign-policy challenges which might have appeared easy in opposition are now, not surprisingly, turning out not to be so easy after all, hence the party's taking an increasingly measured, realistic approach to some very complicated problems.
If this adds to a growing tendency for the party to think maturely and dispassionately about foreign policy, then so much the better. Liberal Democrats are at their best when they apply cold reason and intellect to difficult issues, and foreign policy is no exception to that.
Nick Clegg's Mexico speech must be a call to arms for those who want Lib Dem foreign policy to be based on the liberal principles that the speech articulates. Just as the Orange Book drew together some of the best of the party's new thinkers on economics and public services, so it is now time for a similar exercise on foreign policy.