The Ireland I grew up in was a repressive place. Some of the best friends of my adolescence were gay but they could not tell anyone. It wasn’t until they were in their 20s or 30s that they finally had the confidence to come out.
The country’s ban on homosexual relations was overturned primarily because of one man: David Norris. Throughout the 1980s, he fought a long battle in the Irish courts. He didn’t win, so he took his case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, where he did. Eventually, gay relations were decriminalized. That was in 1993, a mere 18 years ago.
Today, David Norris is a candidate for the post of Ireland’s president. As an emigrant, I don’t have a vote in the election scheduled for next month. If I did, I would cast it for him.
Norris has tirelessly championed human rights at home and abroad. Together with a retired bus driver Tom Hyland, he made the situation in East Timor a priority issue for Irish foreign policy in the 1990s. And while the Dublin government accommodated the invasion of Iraq by allowing Shannon Airport become a de facto US military base, Norris called for George W Bush and Dick Cheney to be tried for war crimes.
Palestine solidarity lands him in trouble
Yet it is his support for the Palestinians that has landed Norris in the most trouble.
As I wrote last month, Norris withdrew from the presidential race because of a smear campaign undertaken by Zionist blogger John Connolly. (Happily, Norris has now returned to the contest and has been formally nominated as a candidate).
Connolly drew attention to how Norris had written to an Israeli court in 1997 urging it to be lenient towards his former partner Ezra Nawi, who was convicted of having sex with a minor. By Norris’s own admission, it was an error of judgment for him to make the appeal. But there is a huge difference between requesting leniency for an offender and approving of an offense. In this case, all Norris did was say that his friend was an otherwise decent man, who would be unlikely to ever commit such an offense again.
Well-respected
Although I have met Norris a few times, I don’t know Nawi. But I understand that he is well-respected among Palestine solidarity activists. A plumber by profession, Nawi has spent many years rebuilding Palestinian houses that have been destroyed by the Israeli military. In October 2009, he was sentenced to a month in a jail for obstructing an Israeli bulldozer that was being used to demolish Bedouin homes in the South Hebron area. Norris has been hugely supportive of his ex-partner’s political work by, among other things, raising funds for it.
John Connolly has written that his knowledge of Nawi is mostly based on conversations he had with “the Jewish community of Judah and Shomron, who have fought with Nawi for many years.” Judah and Shomron – or Judea and Samaria – is a name Zionists give to the West Bank. The “community” referred to here is comprised of illegal settlers.
Nawi has been punished for his past misdemeanor. Yet the settlers who keep Connolly “informed” enjoy the full support of the Israeli state, even though their activities contravene international law.
I don’t see why Israeli settlers should have any say in who becomes president of Ireland. And I don’t see why David Norris should be pilloried for doing nothing worse than saying his friend was someone of good character.
Our president is supposed to represent all the Irish people, wherever they live. I would be proud to have David Norris representing me.
●First published by The Electronic Intifada, 29 September 2011.
Showing posts with label Ireland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ireland. Show all posts
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Monday, September 26, 2011
Dublin treated with double standards by Brussels elite
Sometimes it is the softly-spoken who can be the most dangerous. Olli Rehn is a case in point.
A few months ago, Ireland’s EU commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn made this observation about Rehn’s initial handling of the financial crisis in her country (and mine): “This was ‘Mr Nasty’ coming in to tell the Irish people and the Irish government what to do. And then suddenly, he gave an interview on television and people said, ‘This guy. Mr Nasty?’ It doesn’t fit with the man at all. He explained everything in a very reasonable way.”
Rehn may be an affable bloke. But as the Union’s economic policy chief, he is implementing measures that have nasty consequences.
I have obtained copies of the briefing notes that Brussels officials prepared for Rehn when he was pondering what should be done about Ireland in 2010 and the beginning of 2011. The stench of arrogance and callousness from these papers is overpowering.
Right now, I am reading a “scene setter” that Rehn perused before a November meeting with Irish opposition leaders and “social partners” (as representatives of bosses and workers are called – misleadingly – in Brussels parlance). It dismisses a call by trade unions to extend the 2014 deadline by which Ireland has been enjoined to bring down its budget deficit to within 3% of gross domestic product (GDP). “Even if this was politically feasible, it would be an arithmetical impossibility,” the document says. “Financial markets will simply not allow Ireland to kick the can further down the road.”
“We know best”
I’m not a huge admirer of Ireland’s trade union leadership, mainly because it has been too eager to curry favour with the powerful. But the EU officials’ attitude of “we know best” is disgusting. The deficit limits they regard as sacrosanct are the result of arbitrary criteria that make sense only to the German government and its slavish followers in the Commission and the European Central Bank.
It is also significant that another internal Commission document contradicts the line from Rehn’s team. This second document is a briefing note prepared for a meeting between José Manuel Barroso, the institution’s president, and Klaus Regling, head of the European Financial Stability Facility (the “bail-out” backstop for eurozone countries), in December. It says that the 3% deadline should be postponed to 2015 as this would be a “more credible target”. Something that was an “arithmetical impossibility” less than a month earlier became feasible with a click of the fingers.
A third paper indicates that a general election held in Ireland during February this year was essentially fought on lies. The centre-right Fine Gael, which emerged as the largest party after that poll, promised voters that it would “burn the bondholders” and that Irish banks would not receive another cent from the state until they imposed losses on creditors. Yet the Commission’s document, dating from January, suggests Brussels had already told senior figures in Fine Gael to rule out that option. “A possible involvement of banks’ senior bondholders (‘haircut’) has been excluded and renegotiating this would run counter to the progamme’s main objective – restoring confidence in the Irish banking sector,” it says.
Callous indifference to suffering
The most disturbing thing about the 11 internal documents I’ve seen is how they call savage cuts to social expenditure “appropriate”, without registering a smidgen of concern for the people affected. The cuts are proving especially cruel to children with learning difficulties. A report shown by the national broadcaster RTE recently illustrated how one school in Wexford – a county in the south-east – has lost five special needs assistants. That story is being replicated across Ireland, hampering children from learning the most basic skills such as the ability to write their own name.
It is a tenet of elementary justice that nobody should be punished for a crime he or she did not commit. Why is Olli Rehn punishing Irish children for a crime of which they are entirely innocent? And why should education be hit at all? Even during its “Celtic Tiger” boom, Ireland was spending proportionately less on schooling than the average for industrialised countries, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
If Rehn’s team had been a little more thorough in its research, it would have realised that despite Ireland’s problems, the country still has a fair amount of wealth. Merrill Lynch (now Bank of America’s wealth management division) has calculated that the country had 19,000 “high net worth individuals” (HNWIs) last year, a rise of 5% from 2009. HNWIs are people with over $1 million in “investable assets”.
It is striking that the Irish Business and Employers Confederation (IBEC) has been demanding all kinds of measures that hurt ordinary people. It has demanded the scrapping of the minimum wage, downsizing of the public sector and reform of social welfare to “incentivise” work. Yet IBEC and its chums in the Irish government and the Brussels institutions won’t contemplate going after the rich. Why can’t a limit be set on the amount of money people can have, so that they are required to hand over anything above that limit to the exchequer?
Paul Krugman, the economist, last week compared Europe’s austerity agenda to bloodletting. Doctors no longer believe that patients can be healed by draining their blood; they will just get weaker. The same goes for economic management, yet Rehn and the blinkered bureaucrats around him are continuing to prescribe medicine that simply doesn’t work.
●First published by New Europe, 26 September 2011.
A few months ago, Ireland’s EU commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn made this observation about Rehn’s initial handling of the financial crisis in her country (and mine): “This was ‘Mr Nasty’ coming in to tell the Irish people and the Irish government what to do. And then suddenly, he gave an interview on television and people said, ‘This guy. Mr Nasty?’ It doesn’t fit with the man at all. He explained everything in a very reasonable way.”
Rehn may be an affable bloke. But as the Union’s economic policy chief, he is implementing measures that have nasty consequences.
I have obtained copies of the briefing notes that Brussels officials prepared for Rehn when he was pondering what should be done about Ireland in 2010 and the beginning of 2011. The stench of arrogance and callousness from these papers is overpowering.
Right now, I am reading a “scene setter” that Rehn perused before a November meeting with Irish opposition leaders and “social partners” (as representatives of bosses and workers are called – misleadingly – in Brussels parlance). It dismisses a call by trade unions to extend the 2014 deadline by which Ireland has been enjoined to bring down its budget deficit to within 3% of gross domestic product (GDP). “Even if this was politically feasible, it would be an arithmetical impossibility,” the document says. “Financial markets will simply not allow Ireland to kick the can further down the road.”
“We know best”
I’m not a huge admirer of Ireland’s trade union leadership, mainly because it has been too eager to curry favour with the powerful. But the EU officials’ attitude of “we know best” is disgusting. The deficit limits they regard as sacrosanct are the result of arbitrary criteria that make sense only to the German government and its slavish followers in the Commission and the European Central Bank.
It is also significant that another internal Commission document contradicts the line from Rehn’s team. This second document is a briefing note prepared for a meeting between José Manuel Barroso, the institution’s president, and Klaus Regling, head of the European Financial Stability Facility (the “bail-out” backstop for eurozone countries), in December. It says that the 3% deadline should be postponed to 2015 as this would be a “more credible target”. Something that was an “arithmetical impossibility” less than a month earlier became feasible with a click of the fingers.
A third paper indicates that a general election held in Ireland during February this year was essentially fought on lies. The centre-right Fine Gael, which emerged as the largest party after that poll, promised voters that it would “burn the bondholders” and that Irish banks would not receive another cent from the state until they imposed losses on creditors. Yet the Commission’s document, dating from January, suggests Brussels had already told senior figures in Fine Gael to rule out that option. “A possible involvement of banks’ senior bondholders (‘haircut’) has been excluded and renegotiating this would run counter to the progamme’s main objective – restoring confidence in the Irish banking sector,” it says.
Callous indifference to suffering
The most disturbing thing about the 11 internal documents I’ve seen is how they call savage cuts to social expenditure “appropriate”, without registering a smidgen of concern for the people affected. The cuts are proving especially cruel to children with learning difficulties. A report shown by the national broadcaster RTE recently illustrated how one school in Wexford – a county in the south-east – has lost five special needs assistants. That story is being replicated across Ireland, hampering children from learning the most basic skills such as the ability to write their own name.
It is a tenet of elementary justice that nobody should be punished for a crime he or she did not commit. Why is Olli Rehn punishing Irish children for a crime of which they are entirely innocent? And why should education be hit at all? Even during its “Celtic Tiger” boom, Ireland was spending proportionately less on schooling than the average for industrialised countries, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
If Rehn’s team had been a little more thorough in its research, it would have realised that despite Ireland’s problems, the country still has a fair amount of wealth. Merrill Lynch (now Bank of America’s wealth management division) has calculated that the country had 19,000 “high net worth individuals” (HNWIs) last year, a rise of 5% from 2009. HNWIs are people with over $1 million in “investable assets”.
It is striking that the Irish Business and Employers Confederation (IBEC) has been demanding all kinds of measures that hurt ordinary people. It has demanded the scrapping of the minimum wage, downsizing of the public sector and reform of social welfare to “incentivise” work. Yet IBEC and its chums in the Irish government and the Brussels institutions won’t contemplate going after the rich. Why can’t a limit be set on the amount of money people can have, so that they are required to hand over anything above that limit to the exchequer?
Paul Krugman, the economist, last week compared Europe’s austerity agenda to bloodletting. Doctors no longer believe that patients can be healed by draining their blood; they will just get weaker. The same goes for economic management, yet Rehn and the blinkered bureaucrats around him are continuing to prescribe medicine that simply doesn’t work.
●First published by New Europe, 26 September 2011.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Israel lobby dictates who may run for Ireland's president
Until recently, I was convinced that the tiny pro-Israel lobby in my native Ireland was of little significance. When the first Gaza Freedom Flotilla was attacked last year, the best that lobby could do was wheel out two guys named Tom. Both Tom Carew and Tom Cooney competed with each other on the TV3 channel to see who could make the most absurd argument in support of Israel’s murder of nine peace activists onboard the Mavi Marmara.
On a quick visit to Dublin last week, I was surprised to hear that one of this wacky duo is now working for the national government. In April, Cooney was named an advisor to Alan Shatter, the Irish minister for justice and defense. A statement announcing the appointment indicated that Cooney, a law lecturer in University College Dublin, was something of an iconoclast, alluding to his track record of championing civil liberties at home and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.
There was no mention of his views on Israel, a curious omission given that his new boss Shatter is a committed Zionist. Whereas the Irish government was generally more balanced in commenting about the Freedom Flotilla II than many of its EU counterparts over the past few months, Shatter was openly hostile to the effort, declaring it was “something of a mystery” to him why anyone could feel the need for a “political protest” against the Gaza blockade. Worryingly, Shatter has been put in charge of the department of defense by Ireland’s relatively new prime minister Enda Kenny; that department has awarded contracts to Israeli weapons firms in the not-so-distant past.
My trip also coincided with a protracted debate about who should be Ireland’s next president. Even though the role of the president in Ireland is largely ceremonial and the holder of that office has no executive power, elections for the position can be vicious affairs.
According to opinion polls, the front-runner in the race (the election is still several months away) was David Norris, a scholar of James Joyce who undertook an eventually successful legal challenge against Ireland’s ban on homosexual relations in the 1980s. This week, however, Norris from the contest after it emerged he had written a letter to an Israeli court in 1997 urging that it be lenient in sentencing his former partner Ezra Nawi, who was convicted of statutory rape of a 15 year old Palestinian.
Don’t get me wrong. I am horrified by the very idea of an adult having sex with a child. Unquestionably, Norris showed poor judgment in making his appeal, particularly by writing it on official headed paper supplied by the Irish Senate, of which he is a long-standing member.
Nonetheless, there is no evidence than Norris did anything more sinister than seek mercy for somebody he loved.
It is telling that it was not child protection advocates that drew attention to Norris’ relationship with Nawi. Rather, it was Zionist blogger John Connolly, an Irish law graduate living in London.
Connolly stated that his “main problem with Norris in recent times has been his outspoken criticism of Israel”. Among the alleged misdemeanors he cited were that Norris had invited Ilan Pappé, the dissident Israeli historian, to address his colleagues in the Oireachtas, Ireland’s parliament.
Connolly’s blog post inspired journalists with the reactionary Irish Independent to delight in Norris’ difficulties. Kevin Myers, one of Ireland’s best-paid columnists, inferred that Norris wouldn’t dream of writing to Arab governments demanding that they treat gay men or lesbians fairly. This was a patently ludicrous claim as Norris has been a consistent champion of human rights throughout the world.
Despite being few in number, Irish Zionists appear to be growing in clout to such a degree they can determine who may and may not stand in elections. The conclusion that they have no qualms about undermining democracy seems inescapable.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 3 August 2011.
On a quick visit to Dublin last week, I was surprised to hear that one of this wacky duo is now working for the national government. In April, Cooney was named an advisor to Alan Shatter, the Irish minister for justice and defense. A statement announcing the appointment indicated that Cooney, a law lecturer in University College Dublin, was something of an iconoclast, alluding to his track record of championing civil liberties at home and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.
There was no mention of his views on Israel, a curious omission given that his new boss Shatter is a committed Zionist. Whereas the Irish government was generally more balanced in commenting about the Freedom Flotilla II than many of its EU counterparts over the past few months, Shatter was openly hostile to the effort, declaring it was “something of a mystery” to him why anyone could feel the need for a “political protest” against the Gaza blockade. Worryingly, Shatter has been put in charge of the department of defense by Ireland’s relatively new prime minister Enda Kenny; that department has awarded contracts to Israeli weapons firms in the not-so-distant past.
My trip also coincided with a protracted debate about who should be Ireland’s next president. Even though the role of the president in Ireland is largely ceremonial and the holder of that office has no executive power, elections for the position can be vicious affairs.
According to opinion polls, the front-runner in the race (the election is still several months away) was David Norris, a scholar of James Joyce who undertook an eventually successful legal challenge against Ireland’s ban on homosexual relations in the 1980s. This week, however, Norris from the contest after it emerged he had written a letter to an Israeli court in 1997 urging that it be lenient in sentencing his former partner Ezra Nawi, who was convicted of statutory rape of a 15 year old Palestinian.
Don’t get me wrong. I am horrified by the very idea of an adult having sex with a child. Unquestionably, Norris showed poor judgment in making his appeal, particularly by writing it on official headed paper supplied by the Irish Senate, of which he is a long-standing member.
Nonetheless, there is no evidence than Norris did anything more sinister than seek mercy for somebody he loved.
It is telling that it was not child protection advocates that drew attention to Norris’ relationship with Nawi. Rather, it was Zionist blogger John Connolly, an Irish law graduate living in London.
Connolly stated that his “main problem with Norris in recent times has been his outspoken criticism of Israel”. Among the alleged misdemeanors he cited were that Norris had invited Ilan Pappé, the dissident Israeli historian, to address his colleagues in the Oireachtas, Ireland’s parliament.
Connolly’s blog post inspired journalists with the reactionary Irish Independent to delight in Norris’ difficulties. Kevin Myers, one of Ireland’s best-paid columnists, inferred that Norris wouldn’t dream of writing to Arab governments demanding that they treat gay men or lesbians fairly. This was a patently ludicrous claim as Norris has been a consistent champion of human rights throughout the world.
Despite being few in number, Irish Zionists appear to be growing in clout to such a degree they can determine who may and may not stand in elections. The conclusion that they have no qualms about undermining democracy seems inescapable.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 3 August 2011.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Emigration haunts Ireland once again
One perk of being married is that I have acquired a new grandmother. She is a sharp-witted woman in her early nineties and lives beside a “fairy fort” in rural Ireland; to this day, local farmers will not tamper with that site, lest they upset ancient spirits. Visiting Granny over the Easter break, I was reminded of a bleak past. Her own father came from a family with nine children but never knew some of his siblings. Five brothers and a sister all took the boat to America, never to return.
Emigration is back at epidemic levels in the Ireland of 2011. Each week an estimated 1,000 people leave a country that has raised and educated them but offers no work.
Are those young emigrants supposed to be comforted by a recent assurance from Jean-Claude Trichet that the European Central Bank acts as an “anchor of stability”? According to the official narrative, the ECB has selflessly come to Ireland’s rescue. Where, I wonder, is the stability for families rent asunder by the ECB’s prescriptions of austerity? Skype might make it easier to keep in touch with loved ones; it doesn’t cure homesickness.
Trichet, the ECB’s president, did not cause all of Ireland’s woes but he is exacerbating them. Brian Lenihan, Irish finance minister before a recent change of government, is more directly culpable for the country’s economic collapse. Though he is not trustworthy, I am inclined to believe Lenihan’s “revelation” – published in The Irish Times earlier this month – that the ECB put him under enormous pressure to accept an €85 billion “bail-out”, with excruciating conditions attached, in November 2010.
Also according to the official narrative, Trichet is a master of technical details who does not trifle with the base concerns of elected politicians. His mind is perennially focused on inflation and interest rates, not the interests of his chums in the top layers of the financial system, the spindoctors want us to believe. But who really stands to benefit from the “anchor of stability” he has thrown into our stormy waters? French and German banks have lent €900 billion to countries on the periphery of the euro-zone, including Ireland. The ECB cannot contemplate hurting these bondholders; so the innocent have to suffer instead.
Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist, has called the terms flanking the loan provided to Ireland by the ECB, European Commission and International Monetary Fund a “noose” around the country’s neck. “In effect, the International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank are asking ordinary Irish workers and citizens to bear the burden of mistakes that were made by international financial markets,” Stiglitz wrote recently. “But it is important to recognise that these mistakes are at least partly attributable to following deregulation and liberalisation policies that were advocated by the IMF and ECB and that these policies provided significant benefits to the financial sector.”
Economists of a more conservative hue than Stiglitz have arrived at similar conclusions. Colm McCarthy, a lecturer in University College Dublin, tried to deliver a metaphorical uppercut on the smug face of Nicolas Sarkozy in January. “From an Irish perspective, what looks to him [Sarkozy] like financial assistance from Europe could as readily be characterised as a bail-out of European investors foolish enough to lend to Anglo Irish Bank and other insolvent banks, courtesy of the Irish taxpayers,” McCarthy wrote in The Sunday Independent.
Thumbing his nose at the French president is unlikely to have repercussions for McCarthy’s career, unless perhaps he fancies a secondment in the Sorbonne. It is telling that he has been much more acquiescent towards the Dublin establishment. In a new report for the Irish government, McCarthy recommends that large chunks of the state-owned electricity, broadcasting and public transport services should be privatised. Under the terms of an “agreement” reached with the EU institutions and the IMF, the proceeds from the sale of these assets would be used to pay back the bail-out debts.
McCarthy’s recommendations for a jumble sale of essential services were delivered a few days before the 95th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, that most hallowed event in Ireland’s struggle for independence from Britain. I read the Dublin newspapers carefully on the day the anniversary fell, yet did not see one commentator expressing disgust at how Margaret Thatcher’s poisonous philosophy is now guiding Ireland’s economic policies. The closest I saw was a mildly-worded analysis in The Sunday Business Post noting that the “trailblazing initiatives” of the Thatcher administration had ushered in a worldwide phenomenon whereby $2 trillion worth of assets were transferred from public to private hands between 1977 and 2008.
This is not a problem unique to Ireland; the EU and IMF want numerous countries to swallow the same medicine, with the same toxic side-effects. This week anti-poverty activists will gather in Athens for a conference against the austerity agenda that Europe’s elites are forcing on the masses. Its participants will include representatives of the Jubilee campaign that has mobilised millions to demand that debts crippling African economies be dropped.
The popular rebellions in Tunisia and Egypt earlier this year were in part driven by contempt at the inequality-widening agenda of institutions like the IMF. There is no reason why there shouldn’t be similar mass protests in Europe. As Jim Larkin, a pioneer of the Irish trade union movement, once said: “The great only appear great because we are on our knees. Let us rise.”
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 1-7 May 2011
Emigration is back at epidemic levels in the Ireland of 2011. Each week an estimated 1,000 people leave a country that has raised and educated them but offers no work.
Are those young emigrants supposed to be comforted by a recent assurance from Jean-Claude Trichet that the European Central Bank acts as an “anchor of stability”? According to the official narrative, the ECB has selflessly come to Ireland’s rescue. Where, I wonder, is the stability for families rent asunder by the ECB’s prescriptions of austerity? Skype might make it easier to keep in touch with loved ones; it doesn’t cure homesickness.
Trichet, the ECB’s president, did not cause all of Ireland’s woes but he is exacerbating them. Brian Lenihan, Irish finance minister before a recent change of government, is more directly culpable for the country’s economic collapse. Though he is not trustworthy, I am inclined to believe Lenihan’s “revelation” – published in The Irish Times earlier this month – that the ECB put him under enormous pressure to accept an €85 billion “bail-out”, with excruciating conditions attached, in November 2010.
Also according to the official narrative, Trichet is a master of technical details who does not trifle with the base concerns of elected politicians. His mind is perennially focused on inflation and interest rates, not the interests of his chums in the top layers of the financial system, the spindoctors want us to believe. But who really stands to benefit from the “anchor of stability” he has thrown into our stormy waters? French and German banks have lent €900 billion to countries on the periphery of the euro-zone, including Ireland. The ECB cannot contemplate hurting these bondholders; so the innocent have to suffer instead.
Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist, has called the terms flanking the loan provided to Ireland by the ECB, European Commission and International Monetary Fund a “noose” around the country’s neck. “In effect, the International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank are asking ordinary Irish workers and citizens to bear the burden of mistakes that were made by international financial markets,” Stiglitz wrote recently. “But it is important to recognise that these mistakes are at least partly attributable to following deregulation and liberalisation policies that were advocated by the IMF and ECB and that these policies provided significant benefits to the financial sector.”
Economists of a more conservative hue than Stiglitz have arrived at similar conclusions. Colm McCarthy, a lecturer in University College Dublin, tried to deliver a metaphorical uppercut on the smug face of Nicolas Sarkozy in January. “From an Irish perspective, what looks to him [Sarkozy] like financial assistance from Europe could as readily be characterised as a bail-out of European investors foolish enough to lend to Anglo Irish Bank and other insolvent banks, courtesy of the Irish taxpayers,” McCarthy wrote in The Sunday Independent.
Thumbing his nose at the French president is unlikely to have repercussions for McCarthy’s career, unless perhaps he fancies a secondment in the Sorbonne. It is telling that he has been much more acquiescent towards the Dublin establishment. In a new report for the Irish government, McCarthy recommends that large chunks of the state-owned electricity, broadcasting and public transport services should be privatised. Under the terms of an “agreement” reached with the EU institutions and the IMF, the proceeds from the sale of these assets would be used to pay back the bail-out debts.
McCarthy’s recommendations for a jumble sale of essential services were delivered a few days before the 95th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, that most hallowed event in Ireland’s struggle for independence from Britain. I read the Dublin newspapers carefully on the day the anniversary fell, yet did not see one commentator expressing disgust at how Margaret Thatcher’s poisonous philosophy is now guiding Ireland’s economic policies. The closest I saw was a mildly-worded analysis in The Sunday Business Post noting that the “trailblazing initiatives” of the Thatcher administration had ushered in a worldwide phenomenon whereby $2 trillion worth of assets were transferred from public to private hands between 1977 and 2008.
This is not a problem unique to Ireland; the EU and IMF want numerous countries to swallow the same medicine, with the same toxic side-effects. This week anti-poverty activists will gather in Athens for a conference against the austerity agenda that Europe’s elites are forcing on the masses. Its participants will include representatives of the Jubilee campaign that has mobilised millions to demand that debts crippling African economies be dropped.
The popular rebellions in Tunisia and Egypt earlier this year were in part driven by contempt at the inequality-widening agenda of institutions like the IMF. There is no reason why there shouldn’t be similar mass protests in Europe. As Jim Larkin, a pioneer of the Irish trade union movement, once said: “The great only appear great because we are on our knees. Let us rise.”
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 1-7 May 2011
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Corporate tax avoidance: a global scourge
Almost six years ago, I made the best decision in my life: to stop drinking alcohol. As a convert to sobriety, I feel embarrassed by my past. And so I stayed well clear of Irish pubs last week, for fear of being reminded of how I used to spend Saint Patrick’s Day quaffing a lot more beer than my liver could absorb.
If there is one thing more unsettling than how Ireland’s national holiday prompts many of my compatriots to reinforce national stereotypes, it is the behaviour of the new Dublin government. Enda Kenny, the taoiseach (prime minister), is engaging in a huge deception by claiming that the programme for misery imposed on Ireland by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund can be renegotiated. As the most he will be granted are a few trivial concessions, it would be more honest and honourable to default now than to cripple an entire nation with unpayable debts.
Kenny insists that Ireland’s low rate of corporate tax is sacrosanct and that he will not raise it under EU pressure. Foreign investors will quit the country if they are not allowed to keep the bulk of their profits for themselves, the argument goes. Everyone who tries to question that orthodoxy is portrayed by the Irish establishment as a far-left fantasist.
Simon Johnson, a former chief economist at the IMF, can hardly be labelled as far-left. In a piece published on The New York Times website in November, he stated that at least 20% of Ireland’s gross domestic product derived from “ghost corporations”. Although firms operating in Ireland are officially taxed at 12.5%, the more shrewd among them “are able to construct complicated schemes involving other offshore tax havens that reduce their effective tax rates to the low single digits,” Johnson wrote.
Kenny is not the only one who is being Jesuitical. Attending his first summit of EU leaders earlier this month, he had a row with Nicolas Sarkozy over Ireland’s rate of corporate tax. Sarkozy alleged that Ireland has an unfair competitive advantage in luring multinational companies to its shores because its 12.5% rate is the lowest in the euro-zone.
But that is only part of the story. The target of Sarkozy’s ire is the statutory rate of taxation, not the actual amount that companies pay. What he neglected to mention is that while France’s statutory corporate tax rate stands at 35%, its effective rate stands at 14%, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The effective rate gives a more accurate picture, as it takes depreciation and a range of exemptions and reliefs into account.
When the EU holds yet another summit later this week, leaders will try to give the impression they are navigating their way out of the financial crisis skilfully and sensibly. You can be sure they will not bother themselves with ensuring their “solutions” are socially just.
In a recent paper, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) in Washington contended that corporate income tax is “one of the most progressive” forms of taxation. “Since stock ownership is concentrated among the very wealthiest taxpayers, the corporate income tax falls primarily on the most affluent residents of a state,” ITEP said. “The wealthiest 1% of Americans held just over half of all corporate stock in 2007, while the poorest 90% of Americans owned just 10% of the total.”
Although that message is cogent, there is a reluctance to make corporations pay tax on either side of the Atlantic. The European Commission has lately recommended a common system for calculating corporate taxes. But national governments will continue to set rates and allow multinationals avoid taxes.
Tax avoidance is a reason why much of the world’s population lives in poverty. In 2008, Christian Aid estimated that trade mispricing – whereby companies underreport their profits in order to wriggle out of paying tax on them – deprived poor countries of $160 billion per year.
Richard Murphy, a prominent tax researcher, stated in August last year that wealthier countries have allowed the concept of a limited liability corporation “to become debased, to become opaque to the point where we know little or nothing about most of the world’s corporations – even to the extent of not knowing where some of them are incorporated or if they even exist on registers anywhere.”
Through banking secrecy rules, many EU countries or their dependent territories have become tax havens. In 2009, the Tax Justice Network published a league table of 60 tax havens or “secrecy jurisdictions”. These included the Cayman Islands, Madeira, the British Virgin Islands, Austria, Cyprus, Luxembourg and Hungary.
Because tax avoidance is a global scourge, it must be tackled on a global level. Yet Europe is preventing this from happening. Last summer the United Nations launched an inquiry into how it can beef up its capacity to promote international cooperation on tax. In a submission to that inquiry in January, the EU argued against giving more power to a UN committee of tax specialists. Britain is particularly opposed to the idea because it wants to preserve the City of London’s status as a tax haven.
One of the most inspiring protest groups formed in recent times is UK Uncut, which targets corporations that avoid tax. There is a desperate need for this to grow into a truly international movement, so that corporations are finally made to pay their fair share.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 20-26 March 2011.
If there is one thing more unsettling than how Ireland’s national holiday prompts many of my compatriots to reinforce national stereotypes, it is the behaviour of the new Dublin government. Enda Kenny, the taoiseach (prime minister), is engaging in a huge deception by claiming that the programme for misery imposed on Ireland by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund can be renegotiated. As the most he will be granted are a few trivial concessions, it would be more honest and honourable to default now than to cripple an entire nation with unpayable debts.
Kenny insists that Ireland’s low rate of corporate tax is sacrosanct and that he will not raise it under EU pressure. Foreign investors will quit the country if they are not allowed to keep the bulk of their profits for themselves, the argument goes. Everyone who tries to question that orthodoxy is portrayed by the Irish establishment as a far-left fantasist.
Simon Johnson, a former chief economist at the IMF, can hardly be labelled as far-left. In a piece published on The New York Times website in November, he stated that at least 20% of Ireland’s gross domestic product derived from “ghost corporations”. Although firms operating in Ireland are officially taxed at 12.5%, the more shrewd among them “are able to construct complicated schemes involving other offshore tax havens that reduce their effective tax rates to the low single digits,” Johnson wrote.
Kenny is not the only one who is being Jesuitical. Attending his first summit of EU leaders earlier this month, he had a row with Nicolas Sarkozy over Ireland’s rate of corporate tax. Sarkozy alleged that Ireland has an unfair competitive advantage in luring multinational companies to its shores because its 12.5% rate is the lowest in the euro-zone.
But that is only part of the story. The target of Sarkozy’s ire is the statutory rate of taxation, not the actual amount that companies pay. What he neglected to mention is that while France’s statutory corporate tax rate stands at 35%, its effective rate stands at 14%, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The effective rate gives a more accurate picture, as it takes depreciation and a range of exemptions and reliefs into account.
When the EU holds yet another summit later this week, leaders will try to give the impression they are navigating their way out of the financial crisis skilfully and sensibly. You can be sure they will not bother themselves with ensuring their “solutions” are socially just.
In a recent paper, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) in Washington contended that corporate income tax is “one of the most progressive” forms of taxation. “Since stock ownership is concentrated among the very wealthiest taxpayers, the corporate income tax falls primarily on the most affluent residents of a state,” ITEP said. “The wealthiest 1% of Americans held just over half of all corporate stock in 2007, while the poorest 90% of Americans owned just 10% of the total.”
Although that message is cogent, there is a reluctance to make corporations pay tax on either side of the Atlantic. The European Commission has lately recommended a common system for calculating corporate taxes. But national governments will continue to set rates and allow multinationals avoid taxes.
Tax avoidance is a reason why much of the world’s population lives in poverty. In 2008, Christian Aid estimated that trade mispricing – whereby companies underreport their profits in order to wriggle out of paying tax on them – deprived poor countries of $160 billion per year.
Richard Murphy, a prominent tax researcher, stated in August last year that wealthier countries have allowed the concept of a limited liability corporation “to become debased, to become opaque to the point where we know little or nothing about most of the world’s corporations – even to the extent of not knowing where some of them are incorporated or if they even exist on registers anywhere.”
Through banking secrecy rules, many EU countries or their dependent territories have become tax havens. In 2009, the Tax Justice Network published a league table of 60 tax havens or “secrecy jurisdictions”. These included the Cayman Islands, Madeira, the British Virgin Islands, Austria, Cyprus, Luxembourg and Hungary.
Because tax avoidance is a global scourge, it must be tackled on a global level. Yet Europe is preventing this from happening. Last summer the United Nations launched an inquiry into how it can beef up its capacity to promote international cooperation on tax. In a submission to that inquiry in January, the EU argued against giving more power to a UN committee of tax specialists. Britain is particularly opposed to the idea because it wants to preserve the City of London’s status as a tax haven.
One of the most inspiring protest groups formed in recent times is UK Uncut, which targets corporations that avoid tax. There is a desperate need for this to grow into a truly international movement, so that corporations are finally made to pay their fair share.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 20-26 March 2011.
Monday, November 29, 2010
How the ECB wages class war
Dublin’s Kilmainham Jail is not somewhere you can easily forget. Even though I only recall visiting it twice, I have had a morbid fascination with this cold, dark place for most of my life. More particularly, I am obsessed with its Stonebreaker’s Yard, where the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule were executed; James Connolly, a socialist visionary who demanded that all children be cherished equally, was so badly injured that he was carried before the firing squad on a stretcher.
When the centenary of the rising occurs in 2016, any celebrations by official Ireland will be a sham. Far from being independent, Ireland’s destiny is now in the hands of a foreign cabal which is callously indifferent to how the children Connolly wished to cherish are reduced to begging on the streets. (Merchants Quay Ireland, a charity, reported a 17% increase in the number of people using its homelessness services in the first six months of this year, compared to the same period in 2009).
One of the most disgusting things I read last week was a presentation given by Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank, to MEPs. Trichet had the gall to boast of the “achievements” made by his institution over the past 12 years at a time when he was forcing misery on Ireland.
It has become clear that Trichet strong-armed the Dublin government into “requesting” a bail-out from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Under its terms, Ireland’s budgets will be determined not by the needs of the Irish people but by the diktats of the ECB and IMF. The new rulers of my country are an unelected and unaccountable elite who use language to obfuscate, rather than illuminate.
Has Trichet spouted so much technocratic gobbledygook that he can no longer speak plainly? What kind of guy can praise cutbacks that will leave the poor even poorer as “confidence-inspiring policies”? Where is the morality in a man who warns that there will be a “lost decade” in Europe unless austerity becomes the norm? Is he happy that there will be a lost generation of unemployed people because of the medicine he has prescribed for millions?
And, of course, this enforced hardship is in no way confined to Ireland. Last week the ECB, IMF and European Commission also concluded a second “review mission” to Greece. It decided that in order to qualify for a €80 billion loan from the euro-zone and a further €30 billion from the IMF, Greece would have to spend less on health. You can be sure that the “missionaries” didn’t trek around inspecting cancer facilities in Thessaloniki before declaring health expenditure in Greece as “inefficient”. As it happens, Greece spends about €225 less per head of population on healthcare each year than the €2,300 average for members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. But I doubt that the missionaries worried about the human consequences of applying the cut-throat logic of profit and loss to professions traditionally dedicated to caring and public service.
We journalists are gullible. One falsehood that we have swallowed is that French political figures have an aversion to the unbridled capitalism favoured in the US. This myth becomes untenable when one realises that Frenchmen are in charge of three of the most powerful economic groupings in the world: Trichet in the ECB, Pascal Lamy in the World Trade Organisation and Dominique Strauss-Kahn in the IMF. This inglorious triumvirate are as wedded to the Washington Consensus – that toxic doctrine under which deregulation and market liberalisation should be pursued no matter what the social costs – as any American. In the case of Trichet, he is even more zealous in defending neo-liberal orthodoxy than his nearest US counterpart. Whereas Ben Bernanke, the Republican who heads the Federal Reserve, is injecting $600 billion into the US economy as part of a second round of “quantitative easing” – and has emphasised that the money should be used for fiscal stimulus purposes – Trichet is parroting Margaret Thathcher’s line that “there is no alternative” to punishing the masses for a crime they never committed.
A second falsehood is that the ECB’s economists are simply giving technical advice. In truth, they are class warriors, intent on widening inequality. Indoctrinated in the Ecole nationale d’administration, Trichet hails from a highly privileged milieu. Though ostensibly established by Charles de Gaulle to “democratise” access to the civil service, the ENA serves the same purpose as Oxford and Cambridge in Britain. With few exceptions, its champagne-sipping alumni think they have an innate entitlement to shape the policies that everyone else must live with.
Next year Trichet’s term as ECB head will expire. The frontrunner in the race to success him is Axel Weber, president of the Bundesbank in Germany, although Weber may have damaged his chances by speaking out against the ECB’s decision to buy up government bonds in May.
Regardless of who leads it, the ECB will continue to lack democratic legitimacy. Almost unique among central banks, it is independent of political control and is under no obligation to address what effects its prescriptions may have on employment or poverty. The ECB does not serve Europe’s citizens; it takes decisions solely with the interests of the corporate class in mind. Maybe that explains why it is so contemptuous of the little people in our societies.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 28 November – 4 December 2010
When the centenary of the rising occurs in 2016, any celebrations by official Ireland will be a sham. Far from being independent, Ireland’s destiny is now in the hands of a foreign cabal which is callously indifferent to how the children Connolly wished to cherish are reduced to begging on the streets. (Merchants Quay Ireland, a charity, reported a 17% increase in the number of people using its homelessness services in the first six months of this year, compared to the same period in 2009).
One of the most disgusting things I read last week was a presentation given by Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank, to MEPs. Trichet had the gall to boast of the “achievements” made by his institution over the past 12 years at a time when he was forcing misery on Ireland.
It has become clear that Trichet strong-armed the Dublin government into “requesting” a bail-out from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Under its terms, Ireland’s budgets will be determined not by the needs of the Irish people but by the diktats of the ECB and IMF. The new rulers of my country are an unelected and unaccountable elite who use language to obfuscate, rather than illuminate.
Has Trichet spouted so much technocratic gobbledygook that he can no longer speak plainly? What kind of guy can praise cutbacks that will leave the poor even poorer as “confidence-inspiring policies”? Where is the morality in a man who warns that there will be a “lost decade” in Europe unless austerity becomes the norm? Is he happy that there will be a lost generation of unemployed people because of the medicine he has prescribed for millions?
And, of course, this enforced hardship is in no way confined to Ireland. Last week the ECB, IMF and European Commission also concluded a second “review mission” to Greece. It decided that in order to qualify for a €80 billion loan from the euro-zone and a further €30 billion from the IMF, Greece would have to spend less on health. You can be sure that the “missionaries” didn’t trek around inspecting cancer facilities in Thessaloniki before declaring health expenditure in Greece as “inefficient”. As it happens, Greece spends about €225 less per head of population on healthcare each year than the €2,300 average for members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. But I doubt that the missionaries worried about the human consequences of applying the cut-throat logic of profit and loss to professions traditionally dedicated to caring and public service.
We journalists are gullible. One falsehood that we have swallowed is that French political figures have an aversion to the unbridled capitalism favoured in the US. This myth becomes untenable when one realises that Frenchmen are in charge of three of the most powerful economic groupings in the world: Trichet in the ECB, Pascal Lamy in the World Trade Organisation and Dominique Strauss-Kahn in the IMF. This inglorious triumvirate are as wedded to the Washington Consensus – that toxic doctrine under which deregulation and market liberalisation should be pursued no matter what the social costs – as any American. In the case of Trichet, he is even more zealous in defending neo-liberal orthodoxy than his nearest US counterpart. Whereas Ben Bernanke, the Republican who heads the Federal Reserve, is injecting $600 billion into the US economy as part of a second round of “quantitative easing” – and has emphasised that the money should be used for fiscal stimulus purposes – Trichet is parroting Margaret Thathcher’s line that “there is no alternative” to punishing the masses for a crime they never committed.
A second falsehood is that the ECB’s economists are simply giving technical advice. In truth, they are class warriors, intent on widening inequality. Indoctrinated in the Ecole nationale d’administration, Trichet hails from a highly privileged milieu. Though ostensibly established by Charles de Gaulle to “democratise” access to the civil service, the ENA serves the same purpose as Oxford and Cambridge in Britain. With few exceptions, its champagne-sipping alumni think they have an innate entitlement to shape the policies that everyone else must live with.
Next year Trichet’s term as ECB head will expire. The frontrunner in the race to success him is Axel Weber, president of the Bundesbank in Germany, although Weber may have damaged his chances by speaking out against the ECB’s decision to buy up government bonds in May.
Regardless of who leads it, the ECB will continue to lack democratic legitimacy. Almost unique among central banks, it is independent of political control and is under no obligation to address what effects its prescriptions may have on employment or poverty. The ECB does not serve Europe’s citizens; it takes decisions solely with the interests of the corporate class in mind. Maybe that explains why it is so contemptuous of the little people in our societies.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 28 November – 4 December 2010
Saturday, April 10, 2010
The Tories - still the nasty party
Those posters still haunt me. ‘Wanted for Murder’, they proclaimed in heavy type above a stony-faced Margaret Thatcher. It was 1981; I was 10 years old. Young men were starving themselves to death 70 miles away from my sleepy hometown in north Dublin. There were black flags everywhere; I was fascinated by how they would proliferate but also a little frightened.
I trace my loathing of the Conservative Party back to that spring and summer 29 years ago. Although I never supported the IRA, Thatcher’s withdrawal of political status from its prisoners and her indifference to the ensuing hunger strikes in Long Kesh convinced me at an early age that the Tories were a heartless bunch.
Strictly speaking, the May 6 general election in the UK is none of my business, considering that I hail from the Irish Republic. Yet as Britain has interfered so brazenly in the affairs of innumerable other lands, I feel an innate entitlement to express a preference for who should and should not take up residence in Downing Street. For the next month, I’ll be hoping that the baton of power won’t be handed over from a repugnant Labour government to the even more repugnant Conservatives.
My distrust of the Tories has grown considerably by monitoring the activities of the party’s MEPs. David Cameron’s ill-advised decision to enter a formal alliance with anti-Semites and homophobes in the European Parliament has rightly generated much outrage in the blogosphere. Far less attention has been paid, unfortunately, to the regressive positions taken by his Euro representatives on a range of issues.
Whenever an effort is made to temper the increasingly raw capitalist orientation of EU policies by giving employees some basic rights, the Tories act as a proxy for the continent’s most unreasonable bosses.
Frequently, they employ spurious arguments to justify the unjustifiable. Marina Yannakoudakis, a London MEP, is currently leading a campaign against a plan to extend the EU-wide minimum maternity leave from 14 to 20 weeks. Giving mothers a longer period of paid leave would “reduce a woman’s right to choose”, she has said.
Her frankly absurd arguments echo those made by the Tories in 2008 when they fought unsuccessfully to ensure that Britain wouldn’t have to sign up to an EU law stating that nobody should have to slave away for more than 48 hours per week.
On that occasion, the Tories claimed that Britain’s exemption from the working time directive was beneficial for employees as it made them free to choose their own hours. (Interestingly, Gordon Brown also sought to maintain the UK’s opt-out but most Labour MEPs voted in favour of its removal).
There may not be many politicians in Europe more cravenly obsequious towards the US than Brown and Tony Blair but veteran Tory MEP Timothy Kirkhope is one. Whereas a majority in the European Parliament recently opposed a secretive transatlantic deal enabling the American authorities to snoop on our bank transactions, Kirkhope has happily swallowed assurances from Washington that our privacy and civil liberties will be respected.
That guarantees from such a malign force in world affairs as the US State Department should never be taken at face value does not appear to have occurred to him.
Given how the political grouping to which Conservative MEPs belong is led by the notorious Jew-hater Michal Kaminski, it might seem ironic that Charles Tannock, the Tories’ foreign policy spokesman in Brussels, is an inveterate supporter of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians.
In practice, however, the Israeli establishment has been willing to court anyone unscrupulous enough to defend its addiction to war. It is instructive that the first senior diplomat received by the European Conservatives and Reformists after the group’s inception last year was Israel’s EU envoy Ran Curiel.
Meanwhile, Tannock’s compassion for the plight of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in Gaza, is at odds with his approval of Israel’s use of white phosphorous and other abominable weapons against Gaza’s civilians.
After 13 years of being cheated on by New Labour, I can’t blame any voter who thinks a change is necessary. If David Cameron becomes prime minister, it will surely be a change for the worse.
First published by The Samosa (www.thesamosa.co.uk)
I trace my loathing of the Conservative Party back to that spring and summer 29 years ago. Although I never supported the IRA, Thatcher’s withdrawal of political status from its prisoners and her indifference to the ensuing hunger strikes in Long Kesh convinced me at an early age that the Tories were a heartless bunch.
Strictly speaking, the May 6 general election in the UK is none of my business, considering that I hail from the Irish Republic. Yet as Britain has interfered so brazenly in the affairs of innumerable other lands, I feel an innate entitlement to express a preference for who should and should not take up residence in Downing Street. For the next month, I’ll be hoping that the baton of power won’t be handed over from a repugnant Labour government to the even more repugnant Conservatives.
My distrust of the Tories has grown considerably by monitoring the activities of the party’s MEPs. David Cameron’s ill-advised decision to enter a formal alliance with anti-Semites and homophobes in the European Parliament has rightly generated much outrage in the blogosphere. Far less attention has been paid, unfortunately, to the regressive positions taken by his Euro representatives on a range of issues.
Whenever an effort is made to temper the increasingly raw capitalist orientation of EU policies by giving employees some basic rights, the Tories act as a proxy for the continent’s most unreasonable bosses.
Frequently, they employ spurious arguments to justify the unjustifiable. Marina Yannakoudakis, a London MEP, is currently leading a campaign against a plan to extend the EU-wide minimum maternity leave from 14 to 20 weeks. Giving mothers a longer period of paid leave would “reduce a woman’s right to choose”, she has said.
Her frankly absurd arguments echo those made by the Tories in 2008 when they fought unsuccessfully to ensure that Britain wouldn’t have to sign up to an EU law stating that nobody should have to slave away for more than 48 hours per week.
On that occasion, the Tories claimed that Britain’s exemption from the working time directive was beneficial for employees as it made them free to choose their own hours. (Interestingly, Gordon Brown also sought to maintain the UK’s opt-out but most Labour MEPs voted in favour of its removal).
There may not be many politicians in Europe more cravenly obsequious towards the US than Brown and Tony Blair but veteran Tory MEP Timothy Kirkhope is one. Whereas a majority in the European Parliament recently opposed a secretive transatlantic deal enabling the American authorities to snoop on our bank transactions, Kirkhope has happily swallowed assurances from Washington that our privacy and civil liberties will be respected.
That guarantees from such a malign force in world affairs as the US State Department should never be taken at face value does not appear to have occurred to him.
Given how the political grouping to which Conservative MEPs belong is led by the notorious Jew-hater Michal Kaminski, it might seem ironic that Charles Tannock, the Tories’ foreign policy spokesman in Brussels, is an inveterate supporter of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians.
In practice, however, the Israeli establishment has been willing to court anyone unscrupulous enough to defend its addiction to war. It is instructive that the first senior diplomat received by the European Conservatives and Reformists after the group’s inception last year was Israel’s EU envoy Ran Curiel.
Meanwhile, Tannock’s compassion for the plight of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in Gaza, is at odds with his approval of Israel’s use of white phosphorous and other abominable weapons against Gaza’s civilians.
After 13 years of being cheated on by New Labour, I can’t blame any voter who thinks a change is necessary. If David Cameron becomes prime minister, it will surely be a change for the worse.
First published by The Samosa (www.thesamosa.co.uk)
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