Splintered Sunrise

Big Ian triumphant as the OUP crumbles in a pincer movement and the Cream Bun is toast

Hold onto your hats, because we’re going to be covering the North’s federal election in three parts. First, we’ll look at the unionist result; second, at the nationalist/republican result; finally, we’ll number-crunch the republican and left votes to get some sense of where an opposition might come from.

Why do I call this the Old Firm election? Well, if you’re a kid in Glasgow, you’re hardly going to support Partick Thistle, are you? Likewise, it had already been determined in advance that there were only two main parties, and since the preferred outcome was a DUP-PSF coalition – the idiot savant in Downing Street having divined that this was the best chance of stability – there was a mighty incentive to the electorate to confirm recent trends and put those two parties in the driving seat. Which they duly did.

In broad terms, the DUP beat the OUP by better than two to one in votes (30.1% to 14.9%) and exactly two to one in seats (36 to 18). Take your eyes off the 27.5% swing in Jeffrey Boy’s Lagan Valley fiefdom – rather look at plummeting OUP votes in East Derry, South Antrim, Strangford and East Antrim among many sometime party strongholds. OUP candidates who used to breeze in on the first count, notably Sir Reg himself, were left waiting on transfers. It seems too, vide the Alliance revival exemplified by Naomi Long’s barnstorming performance in East Belfast, that the OUP is caught in a pincer movement. Not only has its right wing decamped en masse to Papa Doc, but the moderates (natural Alliance supporters in other words) who had previously lent their votes to the OUP on the grounds that it was pro-agreement, have been less than impressed by Empey’s strategy of trying to out-Paisley Paisley.

The OUP will survive in the medium term, as a home for those who don’t like the DUP’s bible-bashing and find Alliance just a bit too Awfully Awfully, and also because it retains a few people like Danny Kennedy who have a profile as decent public representatives. But having lost its raison d’être as the leading unionist party, it’s difficult to see a way out.

The dissident unionists likewise found out that you can’t out-Paisley Paisley. Bob “Cream Bun” McCartney, whose egocentric bid to win six seats had provided rare entertainment, ended up losing out in North Down to veteran councillor Brian Wilson, an Alliance man manqué who fell out with his party years ago, kept on being elected as an independent, and now represents the Greens. Paul “Sports Massage” Berry only held a quarter of his vote and is now bowing out of politics; amiable Strangford DUP MLA George Ennis, who had defected to the Bobite heresy, not only lost his seat but suffered the humiliation of polling less than the Provos in a constituency which is something of a unionist Heart of Darkness. No, the only potential opposition the Big Man has to worry about is that in his own party.

So unionism has effectively united behind Big Ian, but without losing its contradictions. It isn’t entirely accurate to say that the Donaldsonites have gone from being the right wing of the OUP to the left wing of the DUP, but nor is it totally inaccurate. People like Arlene Foster, Jimmy Spratt, Peter Weir and Jeffrey Boy himself would be unimaginable in the DUP of ten years ago. However, the party cadre – more so than its voting base – retains many people of the Singing Willie variety who will slap the Lundy name on Big Ian as soon as he oversteps the line. The major division is between those Duppies who don’t want to share power at all on theological grounds, and those who will try and hold out for some kind of modified majority rule.

This could be seen in Paisley’s own reaction to the result, once you stripped away the biblical efflorescence. “I want two things,” arsa an Dochtúir Mór. “I want a big massive financial package from Gordo, and I want an ejector seat so I can kick the Shinners out of the Executive whenever I damn well feel like it.” The ejector seat is necessary to placate the base, even if the Big Man is willing to deal. The trouble is that the baseline Catholic demand in the North is for equality, and even those unionists willing to share power don’t want to do it on the basis of equality. Polling evidence tends to show that the DUP is pretty representative of Protestant opinion on this issue. The question is, how far will the Provos bend to meet them?

Rud eile: One notable thing about the Alliance performance was the election of Anna Lo in South Belfast, providing some much-needed representation for the beleaguered Chinese community. Anna thus becomes the first ethnic minority person ever to be elected in the North, and the first Chinese person to be elected to a parliamentary assembly in these islands. That aside, it was dead smart of Alliance to build on South Belfast’s existing liberal vote by appealing to the large Chinese population in the area. If Gerry McGeough had been cuter, maybe he could have linked up with the League of Polish Families.

Just a few haphazard thoughts on the election, and on last weekend’s PSF Ard Fheis. Firstly, and I’ll get onto the southern situation in due course, was the Ard Fheis pledge on coalition – which may or may not be academic according to the Leinster House arithmetic. There are of course a lot of yahoos running around the Irish left screaming “No Coalition” as if these magic words will cover up a dearth of ideas, but Grizzly faces a bit of a problem here. The PSF leadership would dearly love to be in government in both states, but much of the southern cadre suffers an allergic reaction to the very concept of coalition with Fianna Fáil. Thusly the Ard Fheis pronounced itself against the idea of coalition with… the Desocrats! As if!

I am also slightly bemused by the euro. Not the currency per se, but if I recall correctly the Provos opposed the Free State’s adoption of the euro, on the quite sensible grounds that the Maastricht convergence criteria would rule out radical economic policies. Yet now we hear the call for an all-Ireland currency, as if the punt still existed. Is this a radical policy of the same ilk as the call for an all-Ireland 12% corporation tax, or an all-Ireland police force – made radical by placing the formula “all-Ireland” before it?

Now, the Stormont election. The counts on tomorrow and Friday will give us some idea of how things will pan out, so I won’t even hazard a prediction. But I do want to have a brief look at the two groups posing as an alternative, the republicans and the left.

The letter from 500 ex-prisoners that appeared in yesterday’s Irish News calling for a vote for independent republican candidates had a couple of interesting features. I noticed that the largest lot of signatories came from Derry, with significant numbers from Armagh and Tyrone but not many from Belfast. Besides, most of the Belfast people I recognised on the list were not Provos but Irps, who you wouldn’t expect to be onside anyway. Another weakness was that the unity of the letter was achieved purely on the basis of opposing the RUC/PSNI, with no signs of a positive alternative. Nonetheless, and although the instigators seem to have been the usual suspects, I draw some comfort from the scale, showing that there are a relatively significant number of republicans who believe we need a republican movement and that the Provos aren’t it. Given the almost total lack of support for a return to armed struggle, there is obviously some kind of an audience for political alternatives.

But, as it happens, I didn’t vote republican and didn’t argue with anybody else to do so. The republican candidates, of course, fall into three categories. There is Gerry McGeough, whose brand of Maria Duce politics is a bit rich for my taste. There are folks like Davy Hyland and Paul McGlinchey, who have only been out of the Provos five minutes and, whatever lines in the sand they may have drawn over policing, haven’t yet shown much sign of being a real opposition. Then you have RSF, who actually are an opposition and have a positive programme of their own. The trouble with RSF is that, despite being good principled republicans, they are also rigid doctrinaires (though Ruairí is much more flexible than he’s given credit for) and a tactical sensibility that I would describe as erratic and a less charitable soul as bonkers.

Nonetheless, although I don’t expect the republican opposition to get many votes, it might not be a bad thing if they did. If they started to look like a credible opposition, then there would be some pressure on them to behave like one.

This does not apply to the far left. I have little confidence in the ability of the left to recognise the real world, never mind reflect and draw serious conclusions. Any votes for these bozos will only encourage them. It is likely, for instance, that the Socialist Party’s campaigning around water charges will bring them some extra votes (their tiny vote base couldn’t possibly shrink further). So, if Tommy Black can raise his vote from 130 to something like 300, which is entirely possible, although that doesn’t amount to a hill of beans the SP will claim it as a vindication of their politics and a sign that things are moving in their direction. And the least said about the SWP’s Ali G politics, the better.

In reviewing the West Belfast election addresses, I left out Diane Dodds of the DUP, on the grounds that I hadn’t seen hers. This is a stroke of good luck, because in fact Diane has had two addresses out. The one, for the Shankill Road whence nearly all of her first preferences come, is the usual stentorian Paisleyism. But Diane has also issued a separate and different address geared towards the nationalist areas that make up the bulk of the West Belfast constituency.

This makes some sense. Remember that last time out, Diane only won her seat with a margin of 97 votes over PSF’s Sue Ramsey. Therefore a few lower preferences, adding up to fractions of votes in the later stages of the PR count, could make all the difference.

So, how is Diane appealing to her Catholic constituents? By pitching herself as the family values candidate. Notably, she makes a big deal of being the only West Belfast MLA to vote against gay equality. This is the DUP’s idea of cross-community politics – appealing to the Gerry McGeough vote. At least it shows that Big Ian’s lot have no problem in principle with reactionary Catholic ultras.

This past wee while has been extraordinarily boring as far as the Norn Iron election is concerned, but as polling day is only two days off I feel it is incumbent on the Sunrise to return to the story. I won’t be making any predictions – that’s a mug’s game. Although many of the results are indeed predictable at this point, there are a few constituencies up in the air – South Belfast for one, and North Down is of course a law unto itself. So it makes more sense to wait for the results of the PR count and do an analysis of the small print.

So we shall take a run through the manifestos. I have in front of me most of the election addresses dropped in West Belfast. I am missing the DUP and the South Down and Londonderry Party, which is no great loss – those interested can find the Big Doc’s detailed manifesto here [pdf] and the Stoops’ printed Mogadon here [pdf]. And for some psychedelic fun, check out Rainbow George’s Make Politicians History site.

But on to the literature at hand. One of the things one notices is that “delivery” is the big word amongst the parties. The SDLP want to “deliver real progress”; the Provos claim “others promise, we deliver”. So the Provos’ leaflet – which, by the way, features no less than four pictures of Grizzly (the other candidates, Fra McCann, Paul Maskey, Jennifer McCann and Shell Dockley, are clustered around him like Santa’s little helpers) – is divid up into three sections. Under “Delivering in the Peace Process”, we have bullet points about a “strategy for Irish Unity and Independence” (by administering Stormont), a “new beginning to policing” (well, we’ll see about that) and northern representation in the Free State Assembly, which Bertie has talked about but can hardly be claimed as an accomplishment just yet. Under “Delivering in the Executive”, we do not have any reference to Provo ministers’ addiction to PFI. What we have is their one genuine achievement – Marty’s abolition of the 11+ – alongside claims to bear the entire credit for the peace dividend and various stances the Provos have taken – anti-racism and opposition to water charges – that hardly relate to anything their ministers did. The third part, “Delivering Locally”, is strictly West Belfast parish pump stuff – again, there are worthy causes there, but the actual Provo strategy of “Gissa Grant” would not be apparent to the casual reader.

We turn now to Dan McGuinness of the Alliance Party. Although I am pleased to see Dan going to the trouble of directing messages in Polish and Chinese to the electorate, this is unlikely to help his chances. Aside from introducing the candidate, the substance of the leaflet is given over to the usual Alliance encomia about “partnership” and “sharing” and other apple-pie virtues that Alliance stands for. Dan promises to offer an alternative to tribal politics, although he’s not the only one.

Also claiming to be that alternative is the eternally optimistic John Lowry of the Workers Party. John also witters on about tribal politics, and argues the working class should really stop living in a fool’s paradise and focus on the really important issues of water charges, PFI and the house price bubble. I fully agree with him that these are important issues, though John seems to forget that the sole point of the election is to restore Stormont. Actually he doesn’t – he does call at the end of his address for the restoration of the Assembly and Executive, but how the Assembly is supposed to do all these wonderful progressive things is left unclear. The WP also make a big deal, somewhat incongruously, of opposing imperialism – in Iraq!

Ah dear, what can we say about young Seán Mitchell of the SWP – sorry, People Before Profit? Don’t pay water charges; No to imperialism (in Iraq); Don’t diss the yoof… as usual with the SWP, a liberal sprinkling of exclamation marks and Yos would more accurately capture the tone. Most striking is Seán’s contribution to the policing debate which goes under the rubric of “Poverty is the Issue Not Policing”. The debate around whether or not to endorse the New RUC is hereby reduced to a question of insufficient community development. Bread and youth clubs, one might say. I would love to vote for this, if it wasn’t totally disconnected from what the issues are for the working class, as opposed to what the far left would like the working class to be concerned with.

Next we turn to the address from Geraldine Taylor of Republican Sinn Féin. I am disappointed to see that Geraldine is running on the identikit RSF manifesto adopted by all six of their candidates – as a disciplined party, that is only to be expected, but they could have made some concession to the peculiarities of West Belfast. It appears that RSF are only interested in appealing to people who are already hardline republicans – and even in that constituency, a manifesto based on appeals to the 1916 Proclamation and Éire Nua is only going to have limited purchase. RSF, in many ways the most substantial of the “dissident” formations, seem to have serious trouble behaving as anything other than an introverted sect. I might have expected different from Geraldine, based on the work she has been doing on the issue of anti-social behaviour around Poleglass for many years. To put it bluntly, her appeal would be greatly enhanced if the entirely necessary slogan of “Smash Stormont” was coupled with “Smash the Hoods”.

Finally, for the student of political exotica we have Louis West. Louis is the Official Unionist candidate for West Belfast, in comparison to which Steve McClaren looks like he was born under a lucky star. Strangely, Louis also seems to be rather down on tribal politics, enjoining us to vote for a moderate Assembly on the grounds that “Normal politics will be better than a constant them-and-us battle over ancient squabbles”. If you think this is a rather odd appeal from the representative of Official Unionism, you have hit the target, rung the bell and may collect a cigar or cocoa-nut according to taste. Louis proclaims that the key issues for him are the rates revaluation, water charges and affordable social housing. One is surely entitled to ask, what then divides the OUP from the Stickies and People Before Profit? Or, to put it another way, how are the representatives of the left more radical than those of Trimble Unionism?

The judgement of the International Court of Justice in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina vs. Serbia and Montenegro is interesting in a number of respects, not least in how it knocks holes in the arguments of the cruise missile left and puts question marks over the approved history of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. It also dents the increasing tendency for the activist school of law to get mixed up in international affairs.

The case, alleging that the Serbian government of the late Slobodan Milošević was responsible for waging a campaign of genocide against non-Serbs, was brought by the Izetbegović government in Sarajevo in the early stages of the Bosnian war. This, it should be noted, was long before the Srebrenica massacre, which was added to the case later. Thus, the ICJ has thrown out the original case – except for a few riders relating to Srebrenica – and implicitly recognised that the very real atrocities which took place in Bosnia, although definitely war crimes deserving of punishment, were not the replay of the Holocaust alleged by the media coverage of the time; and that the myth of the evil genius in Belgrade directing everything was just that.

The Srebrenica riders are there, of course. These represent the basic legal genuflection necessary to the ICTY (the US-NATO Inquisition in The Hague, no relation to the ICJ down the road). Although the ICTY is of dubious legal standing and has a tendency to make up the rules as it goes along, the ICJ was not asked to review its operations. The riders flow from the conviction of General Radislav Krstić on charges of genocide for his role in the Srebrenica massacre. This verdict falls within the letter of the Genocide Convention, and I will say no more about it except that the ICTY is adopting a rather broad definition of genocide which could lead to all sorts of other atrocities being considered genocide – I prefer a narrow definition, on the grounds that throwing around concepts like “genocide” or “fascism” promiscuously removes their power.

Under the ICTY system, the Krstić verdict is the bottom layer of a house of cards. The charge of genocide is extended to Ratko Mladić, on the assumption that Krstić must have been acting under orders; likewise to then Republika Srpska president Karadžić, according to the doctrine of “command responsibility” which the ICTY applies only to crimes committed by Serbs; and an unsuccessful attempt was made to pin it on Milošević, on the general principle that the leader of the officially designated Evil Nation must have been responsible. Thus the ICJ condemns Belgrade for failing to use its influence to prevent Srebrenica (although that is itself a notable retraction from the assumption that Belgrade had direct control over the Republika Srpska army) and for failing to hand over Mladić to the ICTY (assuming Mladić is in Serbia, and not say Bosnia or Montenegro). But this is thin gruel for the Milošević = Hitler school of thought.

There are a lot of people for whom this verdict will be unwelcome. The neocon-Wahhabi alliance who were the main outside protagonists will be annoyed, but they have other fish to fry now and will go on their merry way. More severely put out will be the Bosnian Muslim leadership, who had hoped to get an official designation of Serbian collective guilt and impose a Versailles-style settlement that would have propped up their failed statelet with reparations imposed on Serbia’s already ruined economy. But then, they don’t run Bosnia anyway.

What is interesting in this is the effect the verdict has on the liberal hawks, whether the hardcore neocons of the soi-disant Decent Left or the more woolly Guardian tendency. For both Bosnia has a huge significance – either justifying Iraq in the former case, or in the latter by contrasting the Iraqi disaster with the Good Intervention led by the Holy Clintons. It is also worth noting, as Conor Foley points out, that the liberal hawks like to ignore the UN Charter, Nuremberg judgements and the entire corpus of international law according to which “humanitarian intervention” is extremely illegal. Rather, they prefer to give imaginative interpretations of the Genocide Convention and extrapolate from that a “duty to protect” the citizens of enemy states from their own governments, whether or not those citizens actually want to be invaded.

So it was predictable that the Grauniad’s long-time Balkan correspondent Ian Traynor should turn in a report headlined “Serbia condemned for Srebrenica despite acquittal on genocide charge” while referring in a subheading to a “damning verdict”. Traynor skates lightly over the bulk of the verdict, while focussing almost entirely on the Srebrenica clauses. He also bellyaches about how ethnic cleansing carried out by Bosnian Serbs in 1992 was not condemned as genocide. (Traynor makes no mention of atrocities carried out against Serbs, which is par for the course for him.) As if to underline that Traynor is no loose cannon, a leader in the same day’s paper alleged that “an entire nation has been held to judicial account for genocide”.

This sort of thing is what might be expected from the Grauniad. Let’s recap what happened in the September 2006 Bosnian elections. In the Republika Srpska the nationalists – Karadžić’s SDS and the Radicals – were heavily defeated by the Independent Social Democrats, under the leadership of Milorad Dodik, long the pet moderate of the “international community”, which is how he got to be prime minister in 1998 when his party only held two seats out of 83 in the People’s Assembly. Dodik’s election platform was to uphold the Dayton Accords and make the governmental structures work. In Croat districts the Tudjmanite HDZ was not defeated by the Social Democrats, but was run relatively close. Meanwhile the Muslim community was divided between mad chauvinists and even madder chauvinists, who competed with each other on a platform of who was most enthusiastic about ripping up the federal Dayton constitution and establishing a Muslim-dominated unitary state – exactly the demand that got them into the 1992-95 war in the first place.

How did Traynor report this election? With an article entitled “Serb move may trigger new war”, based on a remark by Dodik that, if Kosovo was entitled to a referendum on independence, so too was Republika Srpska. For Traynor’s fertile imagination, this signalled that “Serbia may be plotting to annex large tracts of Bosnia”, although Dodik had said no such thing. This is to be explained not by any deliberate dishonesty on Traynor’s part – I can’t read his mind – but by his attempts to make sense of inconvenient facts within a rigid ideological framework. If Traynor regards the anti-nationalist Dodik as a “hardline nationalist”, this is only to be expected from one who regards virtually all Serbs, except for Sonja Biserko and her little clique of Imperial caddies, as “hardline nationalists”.

Turning to the more hawkish wing, I notice this load of gobbledegook from the egregious Oliver Kamm. Our boy huffs and puffs a bit about the Guardian’s coverage; argues that it doesn’t matter that the evidence was not legally sufficient to convict Serbia, because he (Kamm) was convinced by the circumstantial evidence; and maunders about the judgement of history. Generally, one could say that Kamm is not writing about the judgement the ICJ actually delivered, but about the judgement it would have delivered if the panel of judges had included great minds of our time such as Norm Geras, Dave Aaronovitch, Francis Wheen, Marko Attila Hoare, Martin Bell and, er, Oliver Kamm.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of Kamm that he manages to drag this round to a discussion of his bête noire Chomsky, and specifically yet another defence of Emma Brockes’ notorious hoax interview in the Guardian. (At this point, I actually feel really sorry for Emma. With the Grauniad brass who set up the Chomsky hatchet-job having piled all the blame onto her, it will take years for her to live the episode down. Her task is made no easier by Kamm and Cohen offering unsolicited defences of an article she doesn’t defend herself.) In that case, despite both the Readers’ Editor and External Ombudsman giving short shrift to the Francis Kammovitch letter in Brockes’ defence, Kamm blustered about deficiencies in the Graun’s appellate procedures. The chief of these being that Kamm et al were not allowed indefinite appeals until such time as they got the right result. Even Alex Ferguson might look askance at that.

If Kamm’s article doesn’t appear to make much sense, there is a reason for that which, despite Kamm’s style giving this impression, has nothing to do with a lack of intelligence on the part of the reader. Roger Ebert says that the first rule of movie criticism is: A film is not about what it is about, but how it is about it. Applied to literature, the Iliad is not about the Trojan War, but about the wrath of Achilles. Kamm is no Homer, but the same rule applies. When Kamm writes about the Middle East, the Balkans, George Lansbury or Reinhold Niebuhr, these articles are not about what they appear to be about – their real subject is what a clever clogs Oliver Kamm is. This goes in spades for Kamm’s slightly disturbing cyber-stalking of Chomsky, which for some reason puts me in mind of a teenage boy obsessed with his older brother’s penis.

PS. I also notice in the Grauniad a letter from an old mucker of mine, Prof Martin Shaw, taking issue with the ICJ’s “perverse” judgement. Martin’s logic seems to be that Slobo must have been guilty of genocide because he (Martin) has said so in a book, and so have several other people he respects. Well, I’m certainly convinced by that. This is an obvious trick the eminent judges missed in their 10-month deliberations. After all, if the judges had had the benefit of reading Martin Shaw or Branka Magaš, there would be no question of reasonable doubt.

Update 6.3.07: For more on the ICJ judgement and its reception, this typically excellent article by Nebojša Malić is well worth a look.

I don’t know whether Norman Geras or Eve Garrard speak Yiddish. My guess would have to be not, as neither of them has much of a sense of irony. For proof, simply take a look at this document over on Normblog. Norm and Eve, writing in a cod-philosophical style for reasons that escape me, are replying to the recent (and entirely welcome) formation of Independent Jewish Voices.

The article is entitled “Just because you’re Jewish, it doesn’t mean you’re right”, and opens with the statement that “There are people who seem to think that if a certain kind of view is held by a Jew, this gives it special authority… The fact that someone happens to think something as a Jew, or to hold the same opinion as a Jew, is neither here nor there in establishing its cogency.” Are Norm and Eve criticising the attempts by their Engagenik buddies to suppress criticism of Israel, or their assumption that goyim (except for reliable “friends of Israel”) have no moral authority to speak on the Middle East, because criticism of the Israeli state is a sure sign of anti-Semitism? No, they are not. As is par for the course with the Euston crowd, their strictures do not apply to themselves.

What the article seems to be about – and the tautologies and logical leaps don’t make it easy to follow – is that Norm and Eve are worried that the IJV people, because they are Jewish and vocally so, will be taken seriously when they have a dig at Israeli policy. This involves a lot of meandering around hypothetical questions of whether it is possible for a fierce defender of Israel to have a clearer view than a fierce critic (Norm and Eve do not say so, but they strongly imply the fierce Zionist to have a priori a clearer view); the issue of whether critics of Israel are succumbing to goyishe social pressures (although Norm and Eve disclaim the term “self-hating Jew”, here it is in essence); that critics of Israel are obsessed with striking a high moral tone (concern with Jewish morality takes second place to tribal solidarity); and that nobody can legitimately criticise Israel without giving pre-eminence to Israel’s security concerns.

While Norm and Eve put some effort into psychoanalysing the IJVniks, they skirt around the main point. That is, Israel claims to represent the entire Jewish people, and bodies such as the Board of Deputies – a self-perpetuating oligarchy – are usually assumed by the goyim to represent British Jewry in toto, although at least 90% of British Jews couldn’t tell you how the Board of Deputies is elected. It would make sense, then, for Jews who object to Israeli policies to say, “Not in my name”. This is precisely what annoys Norm and Eve, hence their designation of the IJVniks as “Self-Appointed Jews”, their apparent euphemism for “self-hating”.

For a serious look at what Norm and Eve really mean, it is worth returning to the Open Letter to Jews for Justice for Palestinians co-signed by Norm, Eve and Shalom Lappin last August. This is more revealing in that its language is less diplomatic, JFJFP being a less respectable body. The most striking thing is that Norm, Eve and Shalom rip into their antagonists for claiming that Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians violates traditional Jewish values. Of course, it depends which brand of traditional Jewish values you mean. One might expect Norm, for instance, to identify with the universalist humanism of Karl Marx or Rosa Luxemburg.

But no – our scientific materialists, who I am certain rarely darken the doors of a shul, cite as a moral and political authority the fucking Talmud! Specifically, they harp on some dictum of Hillel’s from Pirke Ovos about Jews who “separate themselves from the community”. Vos nokh? Is Norm growing a beard? Is Eve shaving her head and putting on a sheytl? Where do these jokers, who have no serious connection to the religious or cultural life of the Jewish community, get off telling other Jews that they have separated themselves from the community?

The answer of course is the Israeli state, the ersatz religion of many Jews who have abandoned Judaism. According to this standard, by siding with those oppressed by fellow Jews, a Jew does not fulfil a basic moral obligation but, in breaking tribal solidarity, “separates herself from the community”. Thus we have the full implication of Norm and Eve’s “Self-Appointed Jew” – those Jews who deviate a millimetre from what the Engagenik milieu determine to be legitimate criticism of Israel – and that’s a very narrow spectrum indeed – forfeit their right to be called Jews. Meanwhile, atheists of Jewish background can assert their membership of the “community” by obeisance to the Zionist golden calf.

Well, I have held my nose and procured Nick’s little book. From first impressions, it’s even worse than I feared. This is sad in a way, because a lot of Nick’s latter-day comrades are people I would expect no better from. Nick, on the other hand, has quite an illustrious history and used to be downright brilliant on domestic politics – Cruel Britannia was probably the best analysis of Blair’s Britain, and Pretty Straight Guys was a good read too, although the incongruous chapter on Iraq, which gave all the signs of having been added at the last moment, pointed the way to his current position. Foreign policy was always Nick’s weak point, so it was probably inevitable that his downfall would come from that quarter.

So, what are we to make of What’s Left? Well, as I say, there are people from whom nothing better could have been expected. Kamm’s book was utter bilge, but then we all knew what Kamm was like. To find Nick, sometime one of my favourite journalists, writing something like What’s Left? is deeply depressing, and it gives me no pleasure to say that he has been digging ever more frenziedly since publication, probably encouraged by good notices. It seems to me that Nick is completely losing his grip, and one thing we don’t need is a lefty Britney Spears (or, perhaps more accurately, David Icke) on our hands.

The best way to approach this book is in chunks. Nick’s previous books were after all collections of his journalism, and What’s Left? carries this on by being a series of disjointed little essays – and the essays are bad enough singly without Nick’s desperate attempts to make them fit an overarching thesis. So, when Norn Iron commitments allow, I will be blogging a review of Nick in instalments. Since the good folks over at Aaro Watch are finding the book too depressing to cover in much depth, the Sunrise will step into the breach.

Reviewing What’s Left? will also give us an opportunity to look at the phenomenon of the Decent Left as a whole. Since most of the book, those bits not recycled by Nick from his old columns or springing out of his fertile imagination, is lifted from his mates’ books and articles, and sympathetic blogs and websites, some examination of Nick’s sources will be in order. Just look at the rogues’ gallery in the acknowledgments at the back for a veritable Who’s Who of Decentism.

So, readers may expect to be regaled with occasional looks at Nick. Feedback will as always be welcome; and, unlike Nick’s composition of his dire screed, the reviewing process will involve some homework and concern for factuality.

PS. This rather intemperate review by my old friend Ian Birchall in Socialist Worker may be of interest. Not that I am likely to be more temperate, but Ian does have the advantage of concision.