The supply and demand of energy is quite complex. You cannot, for example, decouple EVs from the electricity production and supply chain. A third of our electricity is currently generated from fossil fuels (Gas) for example. So for a third of journeys in your EV you are simply transferring the pollution upstream.
The progress towards renewables for power generation has been commendable and will continue. However significant parts of our overall energy consumption mix are “oil specific” and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Aircraft and Ships and much of the Commercial Road Transport sector cannot change from oil. Even a quarter of our trains run on diesel and to replace them with the greener electric trains requires a substantial investment in transmission systems.
Natural Gas which replaced coal, and in some cases oil, in industry (etc.) is also unlikely to be replaced by renewables for some time. Hospitals, for example, will have Gas-fired boilers for years to come. And space heating in the home will be reliant on gas for decades.
Much of the “debate” about the need to switch from fossil fuels to greener energy is depressingly ignorant. If ever there was a subject requiring an understanding of the “Art of the Possible” its energy. It’s sadly lacking.
Paper for: “Noël Coward: Past, Present and Future” University of Birmingham
How Noel Coward and David Lean held a mirror up to middle-class Britain in the inter-war years
“Brief Encounter” is arguably Noel Coward’s most widely seen and popular work. But it’s more than just a romantic story. Coward was not indulging overtly in cinema verité revelations, creating a faux-documentary or being political. Towards the end of his life, he said “I’ve had no social causes. Do I have to? I wanted to write good plays, to grip as well as amuse”[1] . But Coward’s acute understanding of the English class system, and the genius of David Lean, combine in “Brief Encounter” to tell a layered but understated story in which character, norms, propriety, events and, especially, language reveal the truths lurking below the veneer of convention. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
The contemporary Times reviewer of “Brief Encounter” in 1945 said that the film “shows Mr Coward more as a serious psychologist than as a flippant commentator”[2]. Nine years earlier in 1936 The Times theatre critic had said that in “Still Life” Noel and Gertrude Lawrence (who played Laura) “… discarding their usual airs and graces, play … with a deliberate colourlessness which draws from the play its last ounce of emotion.” That “colourlessness” is reflected in the film by the use of black and white (a very deliberate choice – Lean and Coward’s previous collaborations “This Happy Breed” and “Blithe Spirit” had both been in colour). Pioneering film critic C.A. Lejeune summed up what many felt about “Brief Encounter” “It is, to my mind, not only the most mature work Mr. Coward has yet prepared for the cinema, but one of the most emotionally honest and deeply satisfying films that have ever been made in this country.”
The film, as with all movies, was a collaborative effort. David Lean’s biographer Kevin Brownlow says that Anthony Havelock-Allan, on Coward’s production team, claimed that “…Noel Coward did not write any of the script [it] was written by David, and myself and Ronnie (Neame)”[3]. In fact, of course, there was plenty of pure Coward from “Still Life” in it and much of the new dialogue was either his or a sort of ersatz Coward of which he approved “Which of my little darlings wrote this brilliant Coward dialogue?” he said at one point. Lean himself said “Luckily, Noel proved to be very good at adapting his plays to the screen. We worked with him, of course [but] the dialogue was always his.”[4] “Brief Encounter” is authentic Noel Coward and, as Barry Day says, the screenplay “…was Noel’s crowning achievement on film.”
In this paper I explore the extent to which the characters are imprisoned or freed by the conscious and/or unconscious characteristics of their social class. This includes looking at the counterpoint between the claustrophobically middle-class Alex and Laura, on the one hand, and the freer working-class Albert and Myrtle on the other.
In his definitive survey of Class structures in Britain[5] David Cannadine describes the inter-war years in Britain as a society that is “quintessentially middle-class”. When G.D.H. and Margaret Cole surveyed the “Condition of Britain” in 1936 they divided the social order into the “Rich”, the “Comfortable” and the “Poor”. “Still Life”, the play on which “Brief Encounter” is based, first appeared in that year and is mainly about this comfortable (and for some, aspirational) increasingly dominant middle. Evelyn Waugh, looking at it from above in “Brideshead Revisited”, describes how the historic hegemony of the Aristocracy was giving way to “The Age of Hooper” – modern, technocratic, and overwhelmingly middle middle-class.
“Brief Encounter” can be seen as a story which holds a mirror up to the ubiquity of middle-class sensibilities of the times. It is not to denigrate Alex Harvey nor Laura Jessop and her husband Fred to describe them as bourgeois. Nor is it insulting to observe how the working-class Myrtle Bagot’s attempts to be “Refined” (or “refained”) is aspirational. When “Brief Encounter” first appeared in November 1945 the anonymous reviewer in “The Times” described Alex and Laura as “Upper middle-class”. For that reviewer it was insufficiently accurate to describe them as “Middle-Class” (which they indisputably are) but further to specify that they are at the upper end of it. Noel says that Fred was a Senior Partner at a firm of Solicitors and Alex is a doctor and a graduate of Aberdeen University. Their status as qualified professionals place them at the upper end of the Middle-class stratum. Laura’s class is determined not by her own family background but by her husband’s. There is no evidence either in “Still Life” or in “Brief Encounter” of Laura ever having had a job. She married at 22 and had two children rapidly. She is, in Noël’s description, a “pleasant, ordinary married woman”. Laura’s friends, or acquaintances like the intrusive Dolly Messiter, come from the same social milieu as her.
If the characters are firmly Middle-class with servants and with shared social mores and values so was Coward’s audience as Frances Gray points out in her insightful “Modern Dramatists” book. “The rich might be silly, the poor might be vulgar… but the middle classes, the backbone of Coward’s audience… were the guardians of order, decency and the family… if they could control their unfortunate passions and come through to do the right thing”[6]. The view that Coward’s main audience was firmly middle-class is reminiscent of Terence Rattigan’s “Aunt Edna” who he described as “…a nice, respectable, middle-class, middle-aged, maiden lady, with time on her hands [who] enjoys pictures, books, music, and the theatre…”[7] In Laura’s case the library books are paid for from Boots, not free from the public library, and she has a “penchant for a particular kind of middlebrow fiction aimed at middle-class women” as Richard Dyer (in his BFI Film Classic book on “Brief Encounter”) puts it.[8] Dyer also quotes Nicola Beauman, founder of Persephone Books, who says that Laura’s reading has a presumption that “marriage and passion are irreconcilable: you can’t have the thrill of romance and the comfort of ordinary life”. Dyer says the film presents this in definite class terms “such irreconcilability is a middle-class dilemma”
Time and place are crucial to the story. Time is quite difficult. The film was made in early 1945 and premiered in November that year – close still to the end of a war which directly touched everyone in Britain. Coward was deliberately telling a story set in a more “normal” and peaceful world. In “Still Life” Coward says “Time – the present”, that is to say early 1936. But in the “Brief Encounter” filmscript it is said that “… this film takes place during the winter of 1938/39”. This is, I think, problematic. Is the idyllic and peaceful almost complacent world portrayed really believable as being in the high stress times after Munich? I think that Coward and Lean were deliberately making a film to mark the end of the war without mentioning it. War and rumours of war were avoided. That said there is a strong element of “fin de siècle” about the film. In 1945 it was not just the war that ended but it was also the triumph of the “Age of Hooper” with the election of a Labour Government with a substantial majority. Although this happened after the film was finished by November, when it was shown, change to the social order was very much underway.
Laura and Alec in suburban Ketchworth
If the time is somewhat imprecise the place rather less so. Ketchworth, Chorley and Milford are fictitious places, but we know them and where they were. We are in Southern England – the scenes and, above all the way the characters speak and behave tell us that this is outer suburbia or just beyond, probably in Surrey or Kent. In describing Alec Noel says that he is researching his special subject [pneumoconiosis] at Milford “as there are coal mines [nearby]”. This I think we have to take as poetic licence though at a stretch we could say that the location is near Canterbury or Ashford where some of the Kent coalfields were. Philip Hoare[9] says that the station was “probably based on Ashford” the nearest station to Coward’s home Goldenhurst.
The station scenes at Milford Junction were filmed, of course, famously at Carnforth Station which is near Morecambe Bay and not far from the Lake District. But neither the story nor the characters are in any way “Northern”. There is minor confusion from the fact that the platform notices (behind Laura when Alec tells her about the job in South Africa) still show the next train’s destinations as “Hellifield, Skipton, Bradford, and Leeds”. This was, I think, an editing mistake. Also, in the film script Albert is described as having a “North Country” accent. In fact, Stanley Holloway speaks with a fairly neutral southern accent, only just (and not very convincingly) borderline Cockney. No northern vowels at all and not characteristically “Working-Class”. Similarly, Joyce Carey’s Myrtle is not trying to refine a Yorkshire accent but a working-class southern one.
Carnforth location shot
A recent study[10] has shown that the UK has some of the highest levels of accent diversity in the English-speaking world. The study showed that accents “reflect differences in what region people come from, their family’s social class background, their age and their current professions.”. Celia Johnson’s Laura speaks in an up-market Received Pronunciation (RP) voice which rather confirms the Times’ reviewer’s description of “Upper Middle Class”. It is, I think, Ms Johnson’s natural speaking voice. Born in Richmond Surrey and educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School she was part of what her daughter and biographer Lucy Fleming calls a “comfortable, respectable, Edwardian, English middle-class family” and “very, very English”. Kevin Brownlow says, “from the moment the idea [of Brief Encounter] took shape [Lean] and Coward wanted Johnson to play Laura Jessop.” Her impeccable middle-class background and accent determined the social positioning of Laura. Trevor Howard’s Alec has a less mannered RP voice, more neutral than Johnson’s, but still solidly complementing his upper middle-class vocation.
Coward had been stung by critics who detected in “This Happy Breed”, a previous collaboration with David Lean, “an attitude on my part of amused patronage and condescension towards the manners and habits of suburban London.” “Suburban London” is, here, a euphemism for “Working class”. Of course, the social milieu in which he was most comfortable was that of “Hay Fever” and “Private Lives” set towards the upper end of the social spectrum. But Coward also wrote well, if not so frequently, about people at a more humble level and three of his films with Lean (“Blithe Spirit” the exception) have working class or lower middle-class characters in them. Which brings us to Albert and Myrtle and Stanley and Beryl in “Brief Encounter”.
Albert and Myrtle
In “Still Life” in the Methuen Edition the first three pages of dialogue are these four Station employees. And throughout the play, and later to a lesser extent in the film, these characters act as a necessary positioning counterpoint to Alec and Laura. However, they are often forgotten in popular descriptions of “Brief Encounter”, and they are not universally liked nor thought necessary. David Lean disliked them “They embarrass me every time I see them” he said, but Coward wished to retain them believing that the story would be “intolerably sad without those scenes”.
The social positioning is that the relative freedoms of behaviour and expression of Albert and Myrtle show up the excessive restraint of Laura and Alec. Here there are echoes of Present Laughter which appeared a few years before the film. In “Present Laughter” the libertine actor Garry Essendine has a working-class valet called Fred who has a girlfriend called Doris of whom Essendine, rather satirically, accuses Fred of “taking advantage”. “Why not?” says Fred “I like it, she likes it and a good time’s ‘ad by all!” The parallel with “Brief Encounter” is clear and even more so in “Still Life” where Stanley says that Myrtle is “… out having a bit of slap and tickle with our Albert”. So, whilst Alec and Laura are showing middle-class restraint Albert and Myrtle are getting on with a relationship and enjoying it. The social limitations imposed on Laura and Alec by their class and situation means that they are not, in Laura’s words “…free to love each other, there is too much in the way”. They know that if they “followed their secret heart”, as Noel had put it in a song in “Conversation Piece” in 1934, it would be a scandal in their 1930s suburban middle-class world. So, they become “Suffused with restrained emotion” in Philip Hoare’s words.
This restraint is not a common moderation on Noel Coward’s part – his plays ooze sex! Is there anywhere, for example, in the pre-war years a sexier play than “Private Lives”? There are casual liaisons everywhere in Coward amongst his beautifully described theatre people and the upper class or upper-middle class world in which they live. At the beginning of “Present Laughter” the Deb Daphne phones her friend Cynthia to tell her about what is later described as “losing her latch key” to Garry Essendine. So, we have the “Rich” happily “scampering about” as Liz in Present Laughter puts it, the “Poor”, like Essendine’s “Fred” and Myrtle and Albert in “Brief Encounter” doing much the same. It’s only the “Comfortable” in the middle, like Laura and Alec, who miss out! And suffer guilt into the bargain. For them “Marriage is the fatal curse” and “Love crucifies the lover” (as Noel put it in “Bitter Sweet”)
Oliver Soden’s new biography reminds us that “Noel’s own family had placed a great emphasis on gentility” and that his mother, Violet Veitch, believed that diction was important – her upbringing was in “Genteel poverty” with the emphasis on the genteel. They may not have had much money, but they spoke well and had the attitudes of the newly emerging middle class, not aristocratic but not from the working class from which Myrtle aspires to escape either. This “middle-class morality” dilemma echoes George Bernard Shaw who coined that phrase in 1912 in “Pygmalion” in which the working-class Alfred Doolittle lives a life free of it in the same way that Albert and Myrtle do. “Doolittle is delighted that his job as dustman is so low on the social class scale that it has absolutely no morals connected to it.”[11] They cannot afford to be moral, so they are not bound by any rules or standards
That other indicator of class and status dress is also crucial in “Brief Encounter”. A study[12] of dress norms in the inter-war years said “…for white-collar employees and their wives seeking to demonstrate their status …wearing gloves and a hat when outside the house was a prerequisite. Gloves were essential for a woman as a symbol of “gentility,” the mark of a lady who had no need to work …. hats mattered a great deal for men. Wearing a trilby was a way of signalling “I am not working class.”. In the film Laura nearly always wears a hat and gloves and in Coward’s description “Her clothes are not particularly smart but obviously chosen with taste.” Alec always wears a suit, collar, and tie and usually a trilby as well – even on and in, the boating lake!
In describing the differences between the classes “Brief Encounter” is quintessentially Home Counties English and as Richard Dyer puts it has “… a voice of the BBC, of our déclassé monarchy, of Churchill during the [war] which has often presented itself as the voice of the nation” “Narrow and class-specific” perhaps but what passed in those monocultural times as the quintessentially English “national culture”. Barry Day says “… Europeans generally couldn’t understand why Alec and Laura hadn’t gone to bed together”[13] and that further underlines the distinctive middle-class Englishness. Laura’s sense of guilt, even to the extent of contemplating suicide, is excruciating at times. Not just guilt about her unconsummated passion but about trivial things like the cost of the “terribly expensive” birthday present for Fred about which she needed to “square her conscience” and in buying she had “committed [a] crime”. Or her belief that “Upstairs is too expensive” at the cinema. The language here reveals the restrictive norms of her class in which extravagance is a sin and white lies are permitted to cover up embarrassment. Self-denial is a virtue.
Looked at from today “Brief Encounter” is a great film because like all the very best works of fiction it holds a mirror up to the social and behavioural mores of the times in which it is set. That past is a foreign country to us today and middle-class morality has mostly disappeared. Writing on the use of the Rachmaninov second piano concerto, so essential to the film, Oxford’s Dr. Leah Broad says, “Just as in Brief Encounter, by the 1940s Rachmaninoff’s music had come to symbolise something of an escape from encroaching modernity.” I think that the film can indeed be seen as an escape from the changes clearly underway when it appeared in November 1945 and after the Labour landslide election win that year. Perhaps, also, our modern-day love of the film is based on nostalgia for a past that those of us of a certain age have seen vanishing in in our own lifetimes – in the same way that we also turn to Rachmaninov for harmony and romance in a divided and dissonant modernist world.
The US Presidential Election of 1960 was the first of the mass communications age. When Dwight Eisenhower was elected in 1952 around 20 percent of American homes had a TV set. Ten years later, nearly 90 percent of homes had one. Along the way, and especially in the Kennedy v Nixon election of 1960, television became the main tool of political campaigning.
In his seminal book on the 1960 election, “The Making of the President”, Theodore White showed how the extensive TV coverage of the campaigns was crucial, In particular the televised debates between the two candidates affected the outcome in Kennedy’s favour.
Electioneering changed dramatically as television ownership became ubiquitous. Where previously candidates’ rallies were seen only by those attending them now they were live in prime time.
Political advertising, mainly on television, grew enormously in the 1950s and as TV ownership increased its reach was by 1960 almost to the entire electorate.
A TV commercial for JFK in 1960
In effect politics became a branch of the communications industry and candidates became brands. By 2024 the marketing of the candidates was in technique and delivery no different from the marketing of fast moving consumer goods (FMCG). Many of the elements of the pitch for, say, Coca Cola were identical to the pitches for Trump and Harris. The jargon of branded marketing, the idea of the “Unique Selling Proposition “ (USP) for example , were important elements of the campaigns.
Visual Identity and familiarity are key aspects of brand differentiation and again this equally applies to political brands and especially to politicians. Name recognition is crucial as it is in the branded product world. Without its brand name (etc.) Coca Cola is just another sweet fizzy drink. Add into that name recognition a strong emotional USP and you potentially have a winner. Coke’s use of the 1971 popular song “I’d like to teach the world to sing” appealed to the emotions – it said nothing about rational product attributes. It didn’t need to.
I’d like to teach the world to sing
In the post war era only three incumbents in the Presidential race have failed to be elected if they stood – Jimmy Carter (1980), George Bush senior (1992) and Donald Trump (2020). In brand terms choosing the familiar, the incumbent, is more common than choosing the new. But performance can matter and both Carter and Trump lost in the main because their presidencies were seen to have failed. Bush lost because Ross Perot, a third party candidate, took nearly 20% of the vote – mostly from natural Republican voters.
Roll forward to 2024 and to the decision of the incumbent Joe Biden not to stand. His presidency was generally seen to have been a success and normally a second term would have followed. With Donald Trump securing the GOP nomination Biden was, one factor aside, a logical choice. He had beaten Trump by over 7m votes in 2020. There seemed no reason why he could not do it again. Except, that is, for his age (82) and some superficial signs of failing mental capacity.
In retrospect the replacement of Biden by Kamala Harris was a fatal error by the Democrats. What name recognition Harris had was limited and she was seen to have contributed little to the success of the Biden administration in which she was Vice President. She was largely unknown – not the first Veep to suffer this fate!
Harris ran an excellent campaign along with Tim Walz, an inspired choice as running mate. The contrast with Trump was huge. We saw the ex President bumbling on stage and spouting inanities. The irony was that whilst Joe Biden had been discarded because it was perceived that he might have early onset dementia Trump’s public appearances were consistently demented ! Harris, by comparison, was bright, coherent and rational. She built her brand well in a short time. Or so we thought.
So why did Trump beat Harris? Again FMCG marketing can help us understand. Trump was by some margin the more familiar brand. Here a couple of quotes can help us. Oscar Wilde – “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” – and the Donald had certainly been “talked about ! The second quote is attributed to Phineas T. Barnum, the 19th century circus owner “There is no such thing as bad publicity” And Trump has had plenty of that!
So does content matter or are we only selling the image – “Where’s the beef ?”. In the recent campaign the policy proposals were minimal from Harris (who focused on the risks of electing her opponent ) and often deranged from Trump. “We will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft. Very simply: If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store,” he said , and that was far from his only insane proposal.
So has one collection of brand values put together as an ideology triumphed over another ? Up to a point. Trump’s choice of JD Vance as Vice President suggests that the hard right Project 2025 ideology will influence policy strongly. If Trump is only capable of inanities (a take out from the campaign) then Vance and his friends will do the policy bit. And they have majorities in the Senate, the House and the Supreme Court to help them
Trump will soon be the incumbent again and there seem to be few checks and balances to restrain him. The election suggests that in brand terms he has achieved, improbable though it may seem, what Kevin Roberts of Saatchi and Saatchi has called “Lovemark” status: “… loyalty that goes Beyond Reason?” Roberts was, of course, talking mainly about FMCG brands
Lovemarkbrands
The idea of “loyalty beyond reason” is in a cynical age unlikely, especially for a politician! Loyalty to Trump may not last and of course he hasn’t persuaded all the people all the time. But, again, he doesn’t need to. The triumph of identity and polemics over ability and substance should make us all uncomfortable. We live in interesting times !
Anyone writing about “America” as if it was a homogeneous whole with a high level of sovereignty and a universal culture is heading down a blind alley. It’s the most diverse, culturally mixed and economically divided nation on earth. Even Disraeli’s “Two Nations” descriptor doesn’t come close to describing it. It’s far more than two.
The US was created by immigration and the sentimental idea of a uniting “melting pot” is fading away. The Hispanic population (63m) is now large enough and confident enough to represent a distinctive Spanish speaking minority that has less need to assimilate than in the past. Other minorities are also flexing their muscles.
50m Americans are of African heritage (black) and like the Hispanics they have built their own identity and culture. Black Lives Matter in more ways than one. Successful Afro-Americans in business and politics (etc.) detach themselves from this. Neither Obama nor Harris has much in common with others of their ethnicity.
The determination of all America politicians to eschew a welfare state means that poverty is rife. Life expectancy in prosperous states is eight years higher than in Mississippi. To understand why many Americans voted for Trump, and will again, visit the boondocks of deprived America. It’s a protest against power and privilege – they’ve nothing to lose. Ironically many with that power and privilege will vote Trump as well! He’s built an unlikely and intellectually bereft coalition.
Over the decades oil and gas multinationals like BP (I refuse to use the ludicrous lower case descriptor !) have flirted with diversification but failed. Their corporate memory is almost exclusively about hydrocarbons.
The often missed point is that the oil/gas corporations do not themselves have much impact on the environment. Yes the products they produce and sell damage the planet and hazard its future. But it’s not the corporations polluting, it’s their customers. You and me for example.
There is no technical or commercial synergy between a wind farm and an oil or gas production platform. Utterly different science and operation. There is no reason for BP, Shell or Exxon to operate wind farms. Their corporate memory brings nothing to the task. Unlike, say, Unilever or Proctor and Gamble they are not multibrand portfolio operations. They find, produce and trade hydrocarbons and succeed when they “stick to the knitting” of doing this.
The world is going to need hydrocarbons for a very long time no matter how many wind farms, electric cars and heat pumps we make. BP has a prosperous future if it sticks to what it does best.
The exit from Empire was uncomfortable for some Brits, not least for the two monarchs and two Prime Ministers under whom it started to happen. So to help soften the blow the “British Commonwealth” was created. Churchill and Attlee saw it as “Empire Lite” and George and Elizabeth could persuade themselves that they were successors to the nineteenth century Empress Queen. It was all bunkum.
The descriptor “British” was dropped to imply that having once been possessions of Imperial power was no longer the only thing that held the Commonwealth nations together. More delusion of course. True most of the nations spoke English as a first or second language but that’s now the case of most of the world. And unremarkable.
The modern world is comprised of a very few big sovereign countries and a few more power blocks united economically (EU) or militarily (NATO). The Commonwealth is neither. Nor does it have a common culture either between its members nor with its once Imperial master. The Head of the Commonwealth is also the Head of the Church of England, but there are more Hindus and Muslims in the Commonwealth than there are Christians.
Dean Acheson’s observation that ‘Great Britain Has Lost an Empire But Not Yet Found a Role’ remains as true today as when it was made in 1962. The idea that we could have a role via the Commonwealth had probably vanished then and it’s certainly anachronistic nonsense now.
Under Salmond and his erstwhile protégée Nicola Sturgeon there was a monomaniacal focus on constitutional change rather than fixing problems.” Iain Martin in The Times 17/10/2024
And there you have in elegant summary a description of not just Scotland’s problem but of Britain as a whole in the now near a decade since 2015. When Cameron won the General Election that year he surrendered his freedom to act to the Tory Right who wanted not just to kick the LibDems out (they succeeded) but to shove traditionally One Nation Conservatives aside and institute a National Conservatism that would take us out of Europe. They succeeded on this as well.
Leaving the European Union was the largest constitutional change the UK has had in modern times. And it required Theresa May and her successors to focus on it to the exclusion of everything else. Problems remained unfixed. They still are.
More than a hundred years ago constitutional change (Home Rule and women’s suffrage) were dominant issues but it didn’t stop the great reforming Liberal government from acting on a range of issues. But when Britain needed an Asquith they got a run of shallow Conservative leaders utterly preoccupied with Brexit.
Constitutional change is certainly necessary in Britain with our unelected Upper House, our undemocratic voting system and our medieval mindset about governance. We are not a serious nation as we see in our current trivial headline-grabbing preoccupations.
Adolf Hitler had as a primary war aim the goal of Lebensraum – expanding the boundaries of Germany to give ethnic Germans more land. This goal included, of course, the ethnic cleansing of those he did not regard as legitimate Germans at all – hence The Holocaust.
Israel’s ongoing expansion imperative is, irony of ironies, analogous with that of the Third Reich. The Arab/Israeli wars each led to the acquisition of more land. Only Sinai, a desert they didn’t want, was handed back. The present day incursions into Gaza and the West Bank unquestionably have the goal of building Greater Israel as a driver.
Zionists initially established the settlement of (mainly) displaced European Jews in a small part of the Holy Land. The creation of an Israeli state in 1948 took this further to nationhood. Israel was no longer about sanctuary but about sovereignty. And that sovereignty has been expansionist protected by military might and, above all, by massive military and material support from the United States.
Jewish peoples know all about pogroms having suffered them for centuries. They know how they are done. And how to do them.
In advising Keir Starmer many on the Left point to the same level of changes being required that Clement Attlee introduced in his post war governments. They have a point.
On the face of it Attlee seems “radical” but he did not ride headlong into public ownership, or anything else. The feeling that postwar society had to change was fairly universal – it was not really a “Socialism v Capitalism” battle. The new Education and Healthcare models were less about the failure of the private sector and more about fairness. Yes there was an ideological underpinning but Clem was no Marxist!
Attlee is the perfect model for Starmer and he seems to be following his example. But much of the social structures we have now will stay in place. We will remain a mixed economy. Where he does need to be more radical, the unraveling of the grotesque private sector monopolies like water and much public transport, he will I think.
The Conservatives have leadership candidates who have publicly eschewed the mixed economy. Their worship of Thatcherism ignores the disaster that some, not by any means all, of her changes were. The private sector monopolies she created have universally failed – the pollution in our lakes, rivers and beaches an all to visible example.
Attlee’s government had to be governed by the need for efficiency and at a macroeconomic level by financial probity – hence austerity. Later Harold Wilson’s government is most noted for social reforms introduced by that great social reforming Home Secretary Roy Jenkins. Tories might not like this truth but it is post war Labour governments – Attlee, Wilson, Blair that changed our quality of life for the better! That’s Keir Starmer’s challenge as well.
If you look at the map of Israel over the years since 1948 you will see a gradual expansion of territory and a consequential decline in the size of Palestine. It’s an uncomfortable fact but in effect Israel has been seeking, and seizing what in another context was called Lebensraum.
Benjamin Netanyahu has made no secret of his wish to increase further Israeli settlement. Other than the desert of Sinai, which they didn’t want, no Arab land sequestered militarily has been returned. And the task of creating ever greater Israel continues.
Violent protest and terrorism cannot be condoned even in opposition to land grabs – but nor can the extreme violence of war on the people of Palestine and those who support them.
Starmer is right that a two state solution is the only one. But can you see Israel returning any Palestinian land, including now Gaza? A few years ago I was in Bethlehem in the West Bank and talked with a Palestinian shop owner and his daughter. They were sad, but not strident. No doubt the hopelessness they felt then will be all the greater.
That the descendants of people who were victims of mankind’s worst ever crime are now perpetrators of destruction and murder themselves is beyond belief. When will we ever learn?
Paddy’s Blogs in a crazy world 