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It is difficult to find the right word to describe the current practice of our national government. Grand announcements of virtuous intentions fall far short of expectations or are just not carried out. Much saying and promising one thing and doing another. Google’s definition of duplicity: “the belying of one’s true intentions by deceptive words or actions” fits best. Here are just two examples of our duplicitous government at work.
When David Cameron was Prime Minister, he made a commitment in 2013, a time of austerity, to annual spending of 0.7% of GDI (Gross Domestic Income) on International Development. Aid which enhanced Britain’s position in the world and brought vital help to the poorest. In November 2020 Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak reneged on that promise reducing spending “temporarily” to 0.5% of GDI. Now, within the amalgamated Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office presided over by the same David Cameron, now a peer, more than a third of that reduced international aid budget is spent inside the UK. In 2022-2023, Britain spent £3.6 billion on asylum seekers, 29% of the international aid budget, mainly the cost of hotel accommodation – currently running at £8 million a day. And, of course, there is the estimated £600 million earmarked for the crowd-pleasing plan to send some 300 people who arrived here in small boats to Rwanda. “We have seen a shocking increase in disruption and criminality...the world's most successful multi-ethnic multi-faith democracy is being deliberately undermined”. Anyone listening to Rishi Sunak’s 1st March podium address to the nation might have imagined the Prime Minister was reacting to something comparable to the devastating terrorist attacks of 2017. But no. Sunak was alarmed by the largely peaceful demonstrations in support of a ceasefire in Gaza and the rise in antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents since October 7th. Of course they should be taken seriously. Terrorist threats have risen. But Britain remains at the ‘substantial’ (likely) rather than severe (very likely) threat level determined by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) and MI5. On 14 March Communities Secretary, Michael Gove, appeared in Parliament in the improbable role of an Old Testament prophet preaching healing of divisions in society and warning against ‘Islamism’ as a ‘totalitarian ideology’. He offered a new definition of extremism: “the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance” which aimed to “negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others” or “undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights” and to “intentionally create a permissive environment” for others to achieve the above aims. Gove went on to suggest a short-list of organisations of concern which would henceforth be shunned by the Home Office and receive no public funding. Organisations can change over time. Gove’s list will require regular reassessment. None on his present list had ever received public funds from Government and all had been shunned by the Home Office for many years. A brazen performance. Business as usual dressed up as change, inaction sounding like a dramatic demarche. Except that we have a new definition of extremism which Church leaders and others worry could disproportionately affect Muslims and curtail freedom of speech. Whilst ‘Islamism’ was named as a threatening ideology Gove made do with Neo-Nazi for his example of right-wing extremism. So let us pass over the inconvenient thought that some of the less poisonous though more influential right-wing extremism has emerged from within the Tory Party. Just as ISIS was reaching the height of its power in 2014-2015, and we were learning about the horrors of Jihadi John and his team of executioners, I was working on the dynamics of religious extremism. Shamima Begum, aged only 15, running away with her two school friends to join the self-declared Caliphate, embodied a far greater and more mystifying threat to society than today’s largely political divisions. What on earth did these children think they were doing? What were the psychological and ideological causes? And how do you change a permissive environment which allows perverse ideas to inspire irrevocable action? In the case of the girls leading to marriage to jihadists and some degree of complicity in their brutality? Safeguarding vulnerable people, challenging the ideas behind, and countering, terrorism, reversing radicalisation are the aims of the national Prevent programme initiated some twenty years ago. The behaviour to be combatted was then defined as “vocal or active opposition to British fundamental values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”. The seven dead of the 2017 London Bridge attack and the 26 who died at the hands of a suicide bomber in the Manchester Arena the same year, showed how such a mindset could – not inevitably would- trigger actual murderous jihadist violence and underlined the importance of Prevent. Prevent issues, and updates, extensive guidelines intended to help public bodies, Local Authorities, teachers and parents understand their statutory duty to be alert to and report people showing indications of extremism, and when to make a referral for further investigation which might be followed up by mentoring. Prevent has been overwhelmed by the number of referrals, only a fraction of which go forward. By 2021 more than half of referrals involved extremist right-wing behaviour and attitudes. Views about Prevent are highly politicised; it is caught between fire from both the right and from Muslim communities. In January 2021 the Government commissioned a review of Prevent headed by the former head of the Charity Commission, William Shawcross. The review was boycotted by many Muslim organisations and rejected by Amnesty International on grounds of Shawcross’s alleged bias and remarks he had made which were considered anti-Muslim. Some of the report’s 34 recommendations such as expanding the Prevent duty to immigration and job centres, and questioning the consistency between the treatment of Islamic and right-wing extremist referrals, proved contentious. Islamic values do need to be disentangled from what is called Islamist ideology. But in general, the label Islamism is far too catch-all and left undefined or refers simply to seeking an ‘Islamic state with shari’a law’. So, it can include everything from ISIS executioners to the peaceful and pious Muslim Brotherhood supporters, protesting after General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi's July 2013 coup toppled an elected Egyptian government, gunned down amongst the 900 massacred by police. Is the wish to have a government imbued with Islamic values, even if it is the result of a non-violent, incremental, democratic process, to be labelled Islamism? Currently, in a predominantly secular society, probably the answer is yes. All the recent talk about Islamism, though, was intended to cast Sunak and Gove as statesmen, responsible custodians of law and order, protectors against an extremist threat, unifying the nation, rousing the Red Wall constituencies. But it came across as a carefully contrived contribution to the culture wars. Meanwhile behind the scenes – at least until Mayor Sadiq Khan pointed it out – the Home Office was cutting the annual funding for Prevent in London by two-thirds from £6.1 million in December 2019 to £2 million after April 2025. Words do not trump reality. And what you hear is not what you get. Call it duplicity, call it deceit. It is no way to govern. See TheArticle 18/03/2024
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“Taking preparatory steps to enable placing our societies on a war footing when needed are now not merely desirable but essential”. That was General Sir Patrick Sanders, Chief of General Staff since 2022, speaking at a military conference just a month ago. The British government hastened to deny any intention of introducing conscription. A week before, and only a little less disturbing, the Secretary of State for Defense, Grant Shapps, declared that we had moved “from a post-war world to a pre-war world”.
Societies preparing to put themselves on a war footing need to consider carefully what justifies both going to war (jus ad bellum) and the conduct of war (jus in bello) to limit war’s barbarity, questions addressed for over five millennia, a quest first found in the ancient Sanskrit Mahabharata. General Sanders was educated at the Benedictine school attached to Worth Abbey and is certainly familiar with the evolving Catholic just war tradition dating from St. Augustine of Hippo in the 4th century. Here is the relevant text from the 1992 Catholic catechism: “The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force (sic) require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time: the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain; all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective; there must be serious prospects of success; the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition”. Heavily enough for Pope Francis to abandon the possibility of a just war in favour of Christian non-violence. Within the just war tradition self-defense, restoration of justice and resistance to an invader, are considered legitimate reasons to fight. In addition, war must be declared by a legitimate ruler. And during war, proportionality – the relative degree of harm caused by military intervention particularly, but not exclusively, to innocent civilians being a primary consideration. Correspondingly, without reasonable chance of success, a futile defense, while honourable ,would not traditionally be considered just. Today the principles of jus in bello are expressed within the tradition of humanitarian law and in terms derived from the concept of human rights. The crime of aggression, war crimes, crimes against humanity, the fate of innocent civilian casualties (the notorious ‘collateral damage’ which has immediate consequences for military targeting) all have their origins in the idea of inviolable human rights. Modern warfare has not precluded consideration of just war criteria. If anything, the wars in the 20th century stimulated their development, if not their application. After the Hamas attack of 7 October, the Israeli government appealed - plausibly - to its right to self-defense. (Mention of the longstanding conflictive quest for land, peace and freedom, out of which the atrocities committed against Israeli communities and the Nova music festival, became anathema.) Ukrainians sheltering from drones launched by the Russian invader, or investigating the murder of civilians in Bucha, or watching the destruction of Mariupol with all its people, didn’t feel any need to debate just cause. The legal category of war crimes, endorsed by the Catholic Church, has become highly relevant to the war in Ukraine and to the asymmetric Hamas-Israel war. For example, the starvation and killing of thousands of children in Gaza, the capture and killing of all ages in the Be’eri kibbutz and the youth at the Nova music festival, with civilians over 2/3rds of the total 1,169 killed, brings the wider question of proportionality into sharp focus and raises the question of war crimes. And popular perception of just cause (jus ad bellum) instinctively changes in the face of destruction of whole areas of human occupation and intolerably high numbers of civilian casualties (jus in bello). The problem in applying just war principles, with or without today’s weapons of mass destruction and reliance on air power, is that war of its very nature generates fear, anger and hatred which sweep away all considerations of proportionality. As Pope Benedict XV said presciently in 1915 “Nations do not die; humbled and oppressed, they chafe under the yoke imposed upon them, preparing a renewal of the combat, and passing down from generation to generation a mournful heritage of hatred and revenge.” Nor has the development of ‘precision guided’ weapons meant that, in densely populated areas, civilian lives are spared, least of all when drones hover, missiles rain down and bombs drop day and night for months. The development of advanced technology for killing the enemy and destroying their wherewithal to wage war has not made ‘collateral damage’ a thing of the past. Events in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza call into question whether the application of the principles of the just war has made any major advance since the Second World War. In its culmination, blanket bombing of German and Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Allied air power was deployed with no distinction between critical infrastructure, civilians and soldiers. Today, more than ever, distance protects bomber pilots and those who fire missiles remotely from seeing their victims’ pain and grief. We watch it in our living rooms. In recent conflicts civilians have been the actual targets. I remember in 2017 walking into central Sarajevo long after the war in Bosnia (1992-1995) had ended. I saw the bullet holes made by Serbian snipers shooting from the hills above the Miljacka river, picking off Bosnian women as they went out to buy bread. In July 1995 Serbian troops in Srebrenica massacred non-combatant Bosnian men and boys. In 1994 genocide was repeated in Rwanda. Between 1998-2003 in the eastern Congo millions of civilians were killed and raped. And the continuing slaughter of innocents in war in Syria and Sudan must be added. In a democratic society peaceful protest against war crimes should not be treated as a threat. Years of research into conflict resolution such as that at Bradford University’s Department of Peace Studies, led by Professor Paul Rogers, should not be treated as an ivory-tower academic pastime. International efforts to contain the cruelty of war have met opposition. In 1998, I overheard inside the Foreign Office a conversation between a frantic official and his Head of Department. President Bill Clinton had just phoned Prime Minister Tony Blair to press him not to sign the Rome Stature, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court (ICC). Blair signed and ratified. America and Israel (along with China, Iraq, Yemen and Qatar) were amongst seven countries unwilling to submit their forces to its jurisdiction and to the international legal constraints it sought to impose. If there are to be any constraints on the waging and conduct of war, whatever the weakness of the ICC in practice, legal redress must be tried. Impartial prosecution of war crimes is one answer to the impasse of contending claims to just cause, for example, self-determination and self-defense, the clashing claims in the “two righteous victims” syndrome. The ICC is necessary but seems only able to enforce selective - victors’ - justice. A limited track record but better than nothing. General Sanders may not have just war theory on his mind, but he has much to think about not least national security. Given future threats, he clearly considers our national contribution of $67 billion on military spending as inadequate – against the staggering global expenditure of $2.25 trillion (2022-2023). Our politicians consider £28 billion each year for climate-friendly renewable energy as exorbitant, an economic and electoral hazard. This is frankly a recipe for national insecurity. Climate change is a profound national security threat. Following Biden, it is government investment in renewables as a priority that is “now not merely desirable but essential”. See TheArticle 05/03/2024 |
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