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? 

The was first published ten years ago in June 2014

Aided by a compliant media much of the political noise over the past year or so has come from the mad insurgents of UKIP. Now before anyone accuses me of intemperate language let me stress that I use the adjective “mad” and the charge of insurgency advisedly. We are observing here a popular movement with an appeal to between a quarter and a third of the population – an appeal sufficient to win them the EU Parliament elections and potentially be major spoilers in next year’s General Election. I do not charge the voters who have supported them with madness – but I do direct that charge at Nigel Farage and his co-conspirators.

History, particularly that of the Twentieth Century for which we have so much archive film, shows the power and the danger of the demagogue – and that is what Farage is. His oratory is effective in the same way that that of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco or even Oswald Mosley was effective. He appeals, as they did, to the basest emotions of his audience. That is the way it works with these men. Farage has no manifesto of substance and no coherent political ideology. Compared with the Social Democratic Party (SDP) – the last real challenge to the established order in British politics – he is shallow and single issue driven. That single issue is, of course, an obsessive opposition to multiculturalism and to anything that limits Britain’s power (as he sees it) to govern ourselves. So the Anti EU stance (preceded of course by UKIP’s anti Euro campaign) combined with an anti immigration polemic is what you get.

Farage rages and most of the time against the dying of the light. I am sure that many of the voters who support UKIP do so because they object to the way their environment has changed. I would like to quote anonymously here from a message to me from quite a well-known sportsman about his friend’s mother’s decision to vote UKIP in a Northern town. He also expresses his own opinions fairly emphatically: 

“My best friend from school’s mother taught in local schools for 30 years and has just retired. She lived in a nice cul-de-sac in Blackburn. She is now the only person in that cul-de-sac who celebrates Christmas. She has been a Liberal Democrat voter for most of her life but has now changed completely. This is not cultural improvement. She no longer feels part of her own community. The other fact is that we are not in a a financial position as an economy to be able to allow non skilled or low skilled labour into the U K. We cannot afford the benefit system we have currently never mind letting new people in who can access NHS/Welfare etc. Maybe what is needed is a five year gap between moving here before being eligible for welfare….”

And so on ! This is essentially the sportsman feeding back to me the UKIP message. Nigel Farage told a story a short while ago about being on a train to London on which nobody was speaking English. He was mocked for making this remark but he knew exactly what he was doing ! This was a small rage against the dying of the “white”. Against the change that means that whereas 50 years ago the 8:15 from Orpington was full of people just like Nigel it no longer is. The change that the quoted sportsman comments on in simple code “… the only person who celebrates Christmas” means, of course, the only white person of traditional British origins. The lady doesn’t, not to put too fine a point on it, like living close to non-white British Asians with a different culture.

UKIP’s voter support comes I think substantially from people like the lady in Blackburn. People of a certain age who feel uncomfortable with the changes that have happened and who seek scapegoats. But it is a rage “…against the dying of the light” in that multicultural change cannot be unwound.Nigel  Farage in power could do nothing about that cul-de-sac in Blackburn even if he wanted to – nothing, that is, unless he indulged in Nazi style ethnic cleansing ! 

Metropolitan liberals like me argue that multicultural Britain is a far better place than the mono cultural Britain we grew up in. I believe this emphatically and so, I am pleased to observe, do most young people who have never known a non-diverse Britain. But UKIP’s appeal is not to me or to them. It is to those like the Blackburn schoolteacher and to a predominantly working class target group. In “Revolt on the Right” the authors show that those most likely to vote UKIP are angry old white men – older, less skilled, less educated working-class voters who have been “written out of the political debate”. This was the group, remember, who also supported Oswald Mosely and Enoch Powell whose messages were not dissimilar to that of Farage. 

In his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968 Enoch Powell said this:

“We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.”

I suspect that the retired teacher in Blackburn and the “left behind” group identified in “Revolt on the Right” would say that Enoch was right. And I have little doubt that Nigel Farage would as well – although whether he would admit it directly is another matter! Farage rails against “immigration” because this is a coded way of railing against “multiculturalism”. Immigration, in theory, is something that Britain can do something about – multiculturalism is a fait accompli. Enoch Powell predicted this:

“For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they [the British people] found themselves made strangers in their own country. They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition…”

Nearly fifty years on it is these fears that Farage and UKIP pander to. There is little or no difference between Powell and Farage in beliefs or rhetoric. Indeed Farage has said recently:

“I would never say that Powell was racist in any way at all. Had we listened to him, we would have much better race relations now than we have got,” 

Powell was, of course, also a fervent anti-European. He said in 1971:

“The very use of the word ‘Europe’ in expressions like ‘European unity’, ‘going into Europe’, ‘Europe’s role in the world’ is a solecism which grates upon the ear…” 

There is little doubt that Farage would agree with that as well! However the anti European Union message that launched UKIP  would be insufficient to sustain it without the anti-immigration message as well. Europe is low down the list of issues of concern of the population at large, but immigration is high up. So Farage finesses his opposition to the EU to opposition to immigration from EU countries – a movement of labour that membership of the Union encourages. If you oppose this immigration you have to oppose Britain’s membership of the Union because the only way to stop it would be to withdraw.

If we believe that the message of UKIP is a deranged message we have to admit that there is method in Farage’s madness. Nigel Farage is, give or take a detail or two, Enoch Powell’s representative on Planet Earth today. He is an anachronism living in a time (or at least hankering after it) which is long gone. But as “Revolt on the Right” shows, and the UKIP electoral support proves, there is a strong minority in Britain that rejects the modern structure of our society and naively belives that Farage has a message that has practical options attached to it. But in truth the cul-de-sacs’s in Blackburn are not going to change and multicultural Britain is here to stay –  much to our collective benefit many of us would say. Similarly the free movement of labour in Europe is unlikely to be significantly changed, although there may be some tinkering on the edges. It is, I suppose, possible that the political class may so mess things up that we find ourselves after a referendum withdrawing form the EU. But that is pretty unlikely as well. In the meantime Farage will carry on tilting at windmills and making us feel uncomfortable.

As with Enoch Powell Nigel Farage appeals to our basest fears and he simplifies unbelievably complex matters into banal slogans. The intellectual challenge to UKIP is robust and unchallengeable. But can those of us convinced of this translate this challenge into simple messages that combat UKIP’s polemics? That’s is much more difficult.

The term “Starmerite” used by Lara Spirit in The Times today suggests that the man has an ideology that we are invited to follow. If he has he’s kept it well hidden, and all the better for that. He’s the ultimate political pragmatist, certainly in his pre election persona which concentrated , understandably, on Opposition – the job the nation actually paid him to do. 

But governing is different – now he has to deal with “events” , and they are unpredictable. The last Labour Prime Minister had to deal with the event of the American sub prime economic collapse which became global. He did it exceptionally well, much good it did him electorally! His Tory successor created his own “events” , not least two wholly unnecessary referendums. Scotland was close to being lost – Europe was. A disastrous premiership caused by cowardice and the failure to take on the extremists as a predecessor John Major had.

The term “Blairite” is still commonly used – generally by the Hard Left to abuse “centrists”. They ignore the fact that to succeed as a Labour Prime Minister you have to “govern from the centre” as Harold Wilson put it. Starmer knows that.

Wilson managed to have good relations with the United States despite shrewdly refusing Lyndon Johnson’s plea to send British troops to Vietnam. Earlier Attlee had not done this in Korea and later Blair also committed troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, equally disastrously. Starmer needs, again, to learn from Wilson. 

There was no such thing as a “Wilsonite” ideology. Sir Keir is the same. Good.

Back in 1980 I read about the rumblings about an emerging “third way” in British politics called the “Campaign for Social Democracy” (CSD) lead by four Labour politicians of which David Owen was one. I liked it because it was perfectly consistent with the modern socialism espoused in Tony Crosland’s “The Future of Socialism” – internationalist, pro mixed economy, pro social reform, pragmatic.

I wrote to Bill Rodgers (one of the four) and when quite rapidly the CSD morphed into a political party, the SDP, I was an early recruit. In early Thatcherite Britain those of us who were Croslandite (now really Jenkinsite) needed a new home with Labour under the cosh of Michael Foot , an anachronistic Bevanite relic. The SDP offered it.

I take the view that the SDP , in alliance with the Liberals, would have won an election in 1983/4 had the Falklands War not happened. But it did and the Blessed Margaret never looked back. And that was the end for the SDP. I was an Owenite refusing to join the new Liberal Democrats. I was living in Hong Kong at the time and we had a small group of hard core SDP members who formed an Owenite local branch. We invited Owen to meet with us (he was en route to Peking) and he did.

I hadn’t met Owen before and at our meeting I found him the rudest person I’d ever met! Far from welcoming our support he dismissed us. He was ineffably arrogant. Never meet your heroes they say!

Blair’s Labour was the SDP in all but name. So , I think, is Starmer’s. Hooray !

The models for the next Conservative Party leader to follow? How about Angela Merkel and Ronald Reagan. The former flew the banner of moderate, sensible Christian Democracy for years. She was economically of the Right, but the pragmatic, electable, internationalist Right. She wasn’t particularly charismatic but hugely respected. Ronnie R didn’t have Merkel’s intellectual depth , though he was no fool. What he had was charisma in spades. You didn’t have to be conservative to vote for Ronnie.

Britain is at heart a conservative nation but not normally of the Farage or Jenrick type. The archetypical conservative politician who succeeds is a mixture of Ken Clarke – affable but a solid man of the centre Right – and John Major. Not screamingly posh but decent with down to the earth solid Tory values.

Post John Major the Conservatives flirted with three leaders of the ideological Right. They all failed. Cameron was much closer to the electable Conservative model. The disastrous Referendum aside Dave might have eventually morphed into a decent conservative leader – not Merkel or Reagan perhaps but to an extent in their mould. That’s the model. For now none of the leading candidates meet it.