The Left is wrong about racism

Witnessing the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK over the summer, I felt an old sense of frustration: the Left is wrong about racism and has been wrong for a long time. I know this, because I have lived much of my life near the hearts of the black community in London – Notting Hill, North Kensington and Brixton – and attended, back in the 1980s, a very rough and very multiethnic, largely working class and black secondary school: Holland Park Comprehensive. I was a white, Left-wing, ‘right on’ (as ‘woke’ was then called) teenager who joined the Labour Party Young Socialists and agitated against Apartheid South Africa. But my lived experience taught me that racism was not how the Left perceived it.

Our multiracial, mostly Left-liberal teachers taught us that racism was white and anti-black. In English class, we studied Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry; Mildred Taylor’s 1976 novel about racism in Mississippi in the 1930s. But London in the 1980s was not the Jim Crow South. I honestly cannot recall a single incident at Holland Park of any pupil or teacher ever being racist to a black person to their face. There was, however, plenty of racism, and it primarily involved white and black kids being racist towards ‘Asians’; i.e. children whose families were from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka. I recall a playground fight, in which a very large black boy punched a much smaller Asian boy in the face so hard I could hear the blow, and was later told by a teacher it had begun with the black boy racially taunting the Asian. On another occasion, an Asian supply teacher took our class for a lesson and a black boy commented ‘this school is being P***-ised’. A white girl in our class went on a racist rant when a new boy turned out to be Asian, complaining ‘Why can’t we have someone English ?’ An Arab boy was reduced to tears when a white girl he fancied called him a ‘P***’.

Continue reading at Uncancelled

Britain’s uncertain Brexit march

The popular vote of the UK on 23 June 2016 to leave the EU has been politically an earthquake for the first and a shock to the second. Retrospectively, the outcome was likely, given the structural factors both within Britain and between Britain and the EU. Yet these same factors have obstructed a clear British postreferendum strategy for secession: Britain does not know what kind of Brexit it wants, or whether it wants one at all. This briefing will examine the causes of the Brexit revolution and the reasons for its uncertain execution, before considering the likely outcome.

Britain’s relationship to Europe is traditionally ambiguous. Britain’s identity – of a Protestant island-state formed in 1707 from the AngloScottish union – was cemented during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in wars against the Catholic powers of continental Europe. It was successively reinforced by Napoleon’s anti-British Continental System; by nineteenth-century imperial ‘splendid isolation’; and by Britain’s ‘Finest Hour’ in 1940, standing alone against Nazi-dominated Europe. But to maintain the European balance of power, Britain had to be closely involved in Europe’s politics. When Britain became too detached from Europe, as during the American Revolution and the Boer War, it found itself in peril.

Continue reading at IRMO Brief

David Cameron, the Henry Jackson Society and the Libya intervention

There have been plausible suggestions that the Henry Jackson Society (HJS) think-tank influenced the foreign policy of the Cameron government. The following passages suggest, at the very least, a remarkable confluence of thinking between the HJS and David Cameron over the case in favour of military intervention in Libya in 2011.

As the HJS’s European Neighbourhood Section Director, I published the following analysis on the Henry Jackson Society website on 13 March 2011:

‘We cannot afford to let Gaddafi win… The allied invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was, of course, prompted by our desire to strike against al-Qaeda’s terrorist training-camps. That such camps were present in Afghanistan was the product of conditions arising from the state’s collapse and unresolved civil war. We should be very concerned at what the consequences for Europe would be if a similar state collapse and civil war were to be perpetuated indefinitely in Libya – it would be an Afghanistan on our doorstep. An imploded Libya could be a source of terrorism and piracy, as well as of mass immigration into Europe of the kind that sends right-wing politicians apoplectic… And Gaddafi, be it remembered, was never simply a pedestrian dictator of the Mubarak sort, but the ‘Mad Dog of the Middle East’, in Ronald Reagan’s memorable phrase. Most of us remember his support for the IRA and extremist Palestinian factions, and the Lockerbie bombing… Cameron has already shown himself a leader with vision, and must not allow himself to be deflected by US and EU irresolution from the path that he has correctly laid out. This trial will prove the efficacy or otherwise of his military entente with France, so there is a lot riding on this crisis for the prime minister’s vision of British strategy… The urgency of the situation in Libya is one that calls for immediate, decisive leadership. David Cameron must rise to the challenge.’

Five days later, on 18 March 2011, Cameron made the following statement in the House of Commons:

‘In this country we know what Colonel Gaddafi is capable of. We should not forget his support for the biggest terrorist atrocity on British soil. We simply cannot have a situation where a failed pariah state festers on Europe’s southern border. This would potentially threaten our security, push people across the Mediterranean and create a more dangerous and uncertain world for Britain and for all our allies as well as for the people of Libya. That is why today we are backing our words with action.’

Given how badly the HJS went wrong since 2011, people sometimes ask me why I waited so long before breaking with the organisation. The answer is that the policy ideas that I and my colleagues were promoting seemed to be having a positive impact. Although the Western alliance did not plan properly for the aftermath of the intervention in Libya and the situation in that country remains critical, we only have to compare it with the ongoing nightmare and bloodbath in Syria to see how much worse things could have been if we had not stopped Gaddafi. A lot of people in Benghazi and elsewhere are alive today, who would be dead if we had not acted. David Cameron should feel proud that he stood up to the tyrant.

 

Will Britain’s exit from the EU cost Bosnia a friend ?

The following interview with me was published in Bosnian translation in Dnevni Avaz on 23 June.

What’s you personal opinion about Britain leaving or remaining in the EU ?

Britain leaving the EU would be a major setback both for Britain and the democratic world. Britain would lose much of its influence in Europe and the world, and would turn inwards, to become a more fearful, xenophobic country. It might trigger a full collapse of the EU, with all the chaos and economic decline that would cause. Or it will result in Europe reconstituting itself as a super-state without Britain. Britain would still have to accept rules made by the EU, contribute to the EU budget and accept EU immigration. But we would have no say in making EU rules. We would be abandoning our friends in Europe; above all, our friends in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Brexit would also probably trigger the secession of Scotland from the UK; hence, the break-up of Britain.

What consequences would Brexit have for the stability of Europe ?

The likelihood is that a vote for Brexit will encourage anti-EU forces in other countries, such as Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France. Thus, it could potentially trigger the complete break-up of the EU, which would have calamitous consequences for the economy and political stability of Europe. Even if that doesn’t happen, Brexit would destabilise the EU; it would swing the balance of power further towards the Franco-German bloc, particularly Germany itself, and away from those countries that, like Britain, prefer a looser Union. The creeping centralisation that is responsible for much of the anti-EU mood and economic difficulties across the continent would thereby be strengthened. We have seen how the single currency has helped wreck Greece’s economy, in turn destabilising the Union. An EU without Britain would be more prone to such crises.

Some analysts claim that Bosnia-Hercegovina in that case would lose a true friend. Your comment?

Yes. EU policy in the Balkans will be made without Britain, which has been a friend of Bosnia-Hercegovina and other Balkan countries. Britain will retreat from the outside world, and will lose interest in helping BiH and other friends. Ministers on both sides of the Brexit debate, including former good friends of BiH like David Cameron and Michael Gove, have been ready to offend and alienate Balkan allies such as Turkey and Albania in order to score points in the debate. So Cameron has distanced himself from his former support of Turkey’s EU accession, and Gove has stereotyped Albanians as criminals – all in order to appease anti-immigration sentiment in Britain. Whichever side wins, Britain is becoming less of a friend to Balkan states, as a result of the Brexit debate.

What would an eventual Brexit bring for the enlargement process?

Britain’s exit will greatly set back the enlargement process, as Britain has been a key supporter of enlargement. Although the mood in the EU is shifting against enlargement, irrespective of whether Britain stays or goes.

Your comment on the murder of Jo Cox ?

Jo Cox was a great MP; a friend of BiH and other peoples in need of solidarity, including the peoples of Syria and Palestine. Her death is a tremendous loss to Britain. Her murder by a far-right extremist cannot be blamed on the Leave campaigners as a whole, but there is a current of hatred that is being generated by this campaign, and by anti-establishment, anti-European, anti-immigration and anti-Muslim discourse in Britain generally, that should be held responsible and tackled. Her death was not an aberration.

Michael Gove’s anti-Balkan Brexit propaganda

I recently received a pro-Brexit pamphlet through my door that argues I should vote for Britain to leave the EU because of the danger that further EU expansion into the Balkans will result in more immigrants from the Balkans coming over (see image, above).

This echoes an article Michael Gove published in the Daily Mail some weeks ago:

The Albanian Option. It sounds like a John le Carré novel. You imagine a story with political intrigue, huge sums of money going astray, criminality and double-dealing. And you’d be right. But the Albanian Option isn’t holiday reading fiction — it’s diplomatic fact. Albania is on course to join the European Union — alongside four other countries, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey. The already unwieldy group of 28 is due to become a throng of 33. And Britain isn’t just backing this move. We’re paying for it. Every week we send £350 million to the EU. And now millions of your hard-earned taxes are being directed to these five prospective members. Between now and 2020 the United Kingdom will pay almost £2 billion to help these nations prepare for membership of the EU — that’s more than we will spend on the NHS Cancer Drugs Fund over the same period. This bounty will be our greatest gift to Albania since the comic talent of the late Sir Norman Wisdom, that country’s improbable national hero, lit up the dark days of Stalinist dictatorship. Indeed, I wonder if the Albanian people are now convinced that Britain’s Foreign Office is full of Norman Wisdom characters, lovable chumps whose generosity and good-heartedness make them easily gulled into accepting all sorts of bad advice. How else could they explain their good fortune in being on the receiving end of a £2 billion Balkan bonanza?

…

As Justice Secretary, I am well aware that there are around 10,000 foreign criminals in our jails — and one in 20 of those is Albanian. Of all the prisoners in our jails who come from European countries, 10 per cent come from Albania — yet Albania comprises less than half of one per cent of the overall population of Europe.

…

Those prisoners currently cost the British taxpayer almost £18 million a year to keep in custody. And that’s before Albanian citizens even have the right to move to the UK! The Home Secretary knows the problem is very far from diminishing. Already this year we’ve seen 20 gangsters from Albania convicted of running a brutal drugs ring in Manchester.

…

Of course, as the Home Secretary rightly noted, Albania is not the only accession country with an organised crime problem. Albania’s neighbour on the Adriatic Sea, Montenegro, has a breathtakingly beautiful coastline and romantic interior. It also, unfortunately, has mafia gangs, a reputation as a centre for money-laundering and a record for narcotics trafficking. The prime minister, Milo Djukanovic, has been a leader of the country almost continuously for the past 30 years. He started as a Communist apparatchik and friend of the murderous Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. But today he is a fan of the European Union and chummy with EU power brokers.

Has everyone got that ? Albanians and Montenegrins are basically all criminals and we need to leave the EU to stop them flooding into our country and swamping it. Huge, China-sized countries that they are. Gove’s exploitation of stereotypes of Albanians and Montegrins as criminals echoes the sort of propaganda popular among the supporters of Slobodan Milosevic and his successors, who first attempted to destroy the Albanian people of Kosovo as a group, then to deny their state international recognition. Note that Gove does not distinguish between Albanian criminals and Albanian people in general. Consider this sentence: ‘I wonder if the Albanian people are now convinced that Britain’s Foreign Office is full of Norman Wisdom characters, lovable chumps whose generosity and good-heartedness make them easily gulled into accepting all sorts of bad advice. How else could they explain their good fortune in being on the receiving end of a £2 billion Balkan bonanza?’ He is concerned that ‘the Albanian people’, not just Albanian criminals, might consider British officials to be ‘chumps’.

Albania has been one of Britain’s staunchest allies over the past two decades. Its troops have fought alongside ours, sustaining casualties in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Gove is, of course, a neoconservative who strongly supported the US-led intervention in Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein. While the Albanian troops were shedding their blood in support of the unpopular intervention in Iraq, while other British allies refused to step forward, Gove did not say at the time ‘Go home; we don’t want you on our side as you’re a bunch of criminals and scroungers.’ No, he waited until the Brexit campaign cynically to stab them in the back. Though it is not inconceivable that he launched his anti-Albanian tirade in a fit of pique after his suggestion that the UK could form part of a ‘free-trade zone’ of countries outside the EU, along with Albania, was trashed by the Albanian prime minister, Edi Rama.

His portrayal of Montenegro’s Djukanovic as a ‘friend of the murderous Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic’ is another exercise in cynicism, given that Djukanovic has been a longstanding ally of the West who, as Montenegro’s president, visited Tony Blair in London during the Kosovo War in 1999 to declare his opposition to Milosevic’s policy – at considerable personal risk, given Montenegro was then under the military control of Belgrade’s forces.

Gove was, until 2011, a trustee of the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society, whose policy at the time was to support the expansion of the EU to include the Western Balkan countries and Turkey. According to its manifesto, The British Moment, published in 2006 and currently selling on Amazon for as little as 29p, ‘The EU should contemplate expanding to include Turkey, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia.’

Gove did not express any dissent from this policy at the time. He thus subscribed to a political vision that was outward-looking, seeking to combat totalitarianism and human-rights abuses, and promote Western liberal-democratic values across the world, and that sought to embrace Albania, Montenegro, Turkey and other Balkan states as allies in this project. He has now done a 180-degree turn, and subscribes to a political vision that is inward-looking and isolationist; the counterpart of Donald Trump’s call for a wall to be built against Mexican immigrants. Instead of seeking to export our positive values, Gove wants to keep the outside world out. No longer allies, Balkan states in Gove’s eyes are now threats; sources of immigrants who will come over, import crime with them, steal our jobs and scrounge off our taxpayers. The tension in neoconservatism was always present between its positive, optimistic, liberal-interventionist tendency that perceived a world inhabited by sisters and brothers in need of solidarity and freedom, and its regressive, pessimistic, Islamophobic and anti-immigration tendency that perceived a world inhabited by hordes of unredeemable economic migrants and jihadis. Orcs, one might say. Gove’s definite defection to the second tendency is a powerful indication of the movement’s degeneration.

What a disgraceful, miserable political evolution Gove has undergone. A powerful European union of democratic states including all the countries of the Western Balkans and, one day, a fully democratic Turkey is one we Brits should be proud to be part of.

Vote REMAIN on 23 June

Parliament has sent a clear message to Assad: he can go on killing without fear of British reaction

We live in small-minded, mean-spirited times. More than two years into the Syrian civil war, with 100,000 dead and Iran, Russia and Hezbollah openly supporting Assad’s murderous campaign, Britain’s parliament has narrowly voted to reject Cameron’s watered-down parliamentary motion for intervention. This motion would not have authorized military action; merely noted that a ‘strong humanitarian response is required from the international community and that this may, if necessary, require military action that is legal, proportionate and focused on saving lives by preventing and deterring further use of Syria’s chemical weapons.’ Cameron would still have needed a second parliamentary vote before he could have authorised the use of force. Parliament’s rejection of even this feeble step sends a clear message to Assad that he can go on killing without fear of British reaction.

The strength of isolationist, Little Englander feeling in Britain has been demonstrated. Cameron was defeated by the same uncontrollable ‘swivel-eyed loons’ of the Tory backbenches and grassroots who tried to sabotage gay marriage and want to drag Britain out the EU. It was perhaps too much to expect a parliament that is so savagely assaulting the livelihoods of poorer and more vulnerable Britons to care much about foreigners, particularly Muslim foreigners.

Continue reading at Left Foot Forward

If Miliband continues to dither on Syria, he may go down in history as Labour’s John Major

According to the dictum attributed to Edmund Burke, all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Yet evil will triumph even more easily if good men help the evil-doers. In the Syrian civil war, with more than 80,000 dead and no end in sight, that is what the European Union has been doing, by upholding an arms embargo on the supply of weapons to all sides.

This in practice assists Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship; freezing in place its military superiority over the poorly armed Free Syrian Army, and enabling the dictatorship better to massacre its own citizens. FSA soldiers, demoralized by their shortage of arms, have been responding by defecting to the relatively well-equipped Islamist militia Jabhat al-Nusra, whose leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani had pledged loyalty to al-Qaeda.

Meanwhile, Iran systematically violates the arms embargo by sending arms to its Syrian ally.

Continue reading at Left Foot Forward

The degeneration of British neoconservatism

In my last post, I pointed to the claim by Henry Jackson Society Associate Director Douglas Murray, that ‘London has become a foreign country’ because ‘in 23 of London’s 33 boroughs “white Britons” are now in a minority’, and that by remaining silent about mass immigration, ‘white Britons’ are ‘abolishing themselves’ and undergoing the ‘loss of their country’. I also pointed to the claims by HJS Executive Director Alan Mendoza, linking ‘anti-Israel feelings’ in Europe to the fact that the ‘European Muslim population has doubled in the past 30 years’, that ‘Muslims in Europe will likely speak out against Israel whenever any Middle Eastern news breaks’ and that ‘their voices are heard well above the average Europeans’ [sic]. I argued that it was not appropriate for the small number of Labour MPs on the HJS’s Advisory Council to go on supporting the HJS, given such views on the part of its leadership.

My post appears to have sufficiently rattled the HJS leadership to prompt a series of online attacks on me by Mendoza and one of his HJS subordinates, Raheem Kassam. They made no attempt to explain or justify the disgusting statements in question, but are apparently sufficiently embarrassed by what I am publicising of their nature that they are seeking to discredit me as a witness. I was a senior staff member of the HJS – from the days when it still had some claim to being a bi-partisan, centrist political organisation – and this is something Mendoza is trying to deny. He now claims ‘At no time since HJS’s establishment of corporate form [sic] in April 2006 was Hoare a staff member’.

Unfortunately for Mendoza, although he has done his best to erase all online traces of what the HJS once was and of whom its original senior members were, the internet has not allowed him to get away with it. Here is a link to the HJS’s website from around March 2008, in which I appear two places from the top of the HJS’s staff list: HJSStaff9Mar08 (a screenshot appears at the end of this post). Indeed, his comments in the discussion at the thread beneath my article at Left Foot Forward are well worth reading for the comical nature of his attempts to deny this evidence.

Mendoza also claims that my involvement in the decision-making process in the HJS in my last years there was ‘precisely zero’, and that I rarely visited the London office. This is true: as I explained in my original post exposing him and his record, he ended the practice of holding meetings of the founding members, excluded them from any opportunity to participate in the decision-making process, and effectively abolished democracy within the organisation, turning it into his personal fiefdom and cash cow.

Finally, Mendoza claims that I am ‘frustrated’ because the HJS website had been the ‘sole outlet’ for my work – even though I am a published author with a rather more extensive record of online and paper publication than Mendoza himself. Though I do not pretend I was happy when Mendoza’s efforts to cut off his new HJS from its past involved a ‘reorganisation’ of the website that erased seven years’ worth of my articles – articles that he and the HJS had used to build its reputation, such as it is, as a ‘think tank’.

But all these personal attacks on me do not make the HJS and its current political views – on race and immigration, Islam, Europe, Israel and Palestine – any less ugly. The funniest part of Mendoza’s response to me was this bit: ‘Is HJS a pro-Israel organisation? Yes, HJS is certainly pro-Israel, just as it is pro-UK, pro-USA, pro-Canada, pro-India, pro-Australia, pro-Japan, pro-Taiwan, pro-Brazil, pro-Chile, pro-Uruguay, pro-Ghana, pro-South Africa, pro-Mongolia, pro-South Korea. We think you get the picture.’ Does a single person exist who would buy the line that the HJS’s view of Israel is the same as its view of Mongolia ?!

However, I have never accused the HJS of being ‘pro-Israel’, just as I have never accused Hamas of being ‘pro-Palestine’. The HJS treats the Palestinians as unworthy victims who deserve only colonial subjugation, and the Israelis as cannon-fodder for its own warmongering agenda. Anyone who really does want to destroy Israel would do well to donate money to the HJS, as it seeks to fight Iran and the Arabs to the death of the last Israeli.

Just as the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 was a final wake-up call to anyone who harboured any illusions in the ‘progressive’ character of the Communist movement, so Murray’s and Mendoza’s views on race, religion and immigration should serve as final proof of the complete degeneration and moral bankruptcy of the tiny neoconservative faction in British politics, for anyone who may once have harboured illusions in it.

PS Despite his spurious claim to have a ‘well-established track record of support for the Bosnian Muslim population’, Mendoza was removed a year ago from the International Expert Team of the Institute for the Research of Genocide Canada, which fights genocide denial over Bosnia, Srebrenica and the Holocaust. The IRGC’s director, Professor Emir Ramic, and its Governing Board were rather quicker than I was myself in correctly understanding him and taking appropriate action.

PPSS Contrary to what Raheem Kassam is claiming, I am not his ‘old acquaintance’; I have never met him, and only learned of his existence a few months ago. I have never submitted anything to The Commentator; as far as I know, it has republished just one of my articles – without asking my permission.

Labour’s shameful links with the anti-immigration right

The right-wing pundit Douglas Murray recently wrote:

‘To study the results of the latest census is to stare at one unalterable conclusion: mass immigration has altered our country completely. It has become a radically different place, and London has become a foreign country. In 23 of London’s 33 boroughs ‘white Britons’ are now in a minority…

We long ago reached the point where the only thing white Britons can do is to remain silent about the change in their country. Ignored for a generation, they are expected to get on, silently but happily, with abolishing themselves, accepting the knocks and respecting the loss of their country. “Get over it. It’s nothing new. You’re terrible. You’re nothing”.

For what it is worth, it seems to me that the vindictiveness with which the concerns of white British people, and the white working and middle class in particular, have been met by politicians and pundits alike is a phenomenon in need of serious and swift attention.’

Such words, one might expect, should place their author beyond the pale of respectable political opinion, in the sole company of UKIP and the rest of the fringe anti-immigration right.

Continue reading at Left Foot Forward

Brendan Simms, Europe and the Henry Jackson Society

In an opinion piece in the Guardian entitled ‘We eurozoners must create a United States of Europe’, the Cambridge historian Brendan Simms calls for ‘the immediate creation of an Anglo-American style fiscal and military union of the eurozone’ as a means of resolving the eurozone crisis. This should, Simms argues, involve ‘the creation of a European parliament with legislative powers; a one-off federalising of all state debt through the issue of union bonds to be backed by the entire tax revenue of the common currency zone (with a debt ceiling for member states thereafter); the supervised dissolution of insolvent private-sector financial institutions; and a single European army, with a monopoly on external force projection.’ Such a union should be modelled on the successful examples of the Anglo-Scottish union of 1707 and the United States of America: ‘The British and the American unions made history. If we eurozoners do not act quickly and create a single state on Anglo-American lines, we will be history too – but not in the way we had hoped’ (‘we’, because the author is Irish, as well as German on his mother’s side).

In a follow-up piece in the Evening Standard, subtitled ‘Only Germany can be trusted to restructure the failed eurozone into a democratic single European state’, Simms argues:

‘Last week, one British journalist described Frau Merkel as a potential European Abraham Lincoln. What we require, however, is not somebody to defend the current union — which is broken beyond repair — but to create a new one. The better analogy is with the 19th-century Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who created the Second German Empire out of the ruins of the old and ineffective German Confederation. Today, the eurozone needs a democratic Bismarck, probably though not necessarily from Germany.’

This is a particularly interesting proposal, given that Brendan is the founder and titular president of the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), of which he is also a trustee. He founded the HJS as a centrist, pro-European political force, but it has since lurched in a right-wing and Europhobic direction, and its leading figures actively despise the pro-European principles espoused by those such as their own nominal president.

The HJS’s Associate Director, Douglas Murray, appointed in April 2011, is on record as having stated that ‘the EU is a monstrosity – no good can come of it… The best thing could just simply be for it to be razed to the ground and don’t start again [sic]‘).

Prominent HJS supporter William Shawcross, who was appointed as a trustee of the organisation in October 2011 and resigned a year later to avoid a conflict of interest, is on record as claiming that ‘New Labour has forced Britain to become a mere piece of the bland but increasingly oppressive Bambiland of the E.U., promoting such PC global issues as gay rights (except in Muslim lands) and man-made climate change.’ Furthermore, ‘The Lib-Dems are in many ways even more dangerously authoritarian than Labour. Clegg is an extreme Europhile. They want the Euro and total control by Brussels, amnesty for hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, disarmament, and attacks on wealth-creating businesses like Marks and Spencer.’

The HJS’s Executive Director Alan Mendoza – the real owner and controller of the HJS – attacked the EU at the conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in March of this year, accusing it of being hostile to Israel. As reported by the Washington Jewish Week‘s Suzanne Pollak, he blamed this on the EU’s supranational character and on its rising immigrant and Muslim population:

‘European countries should be electing economic experts, but instead they are “responding by moving toward extremism. Europe has lost its sense of greatness. They have lost faith in their abilities” to deal with their specific problems, he said. Immigration is also a reason for rising anti-Israel feelings. In 1998, 3.2 percent of Spain was foreign-born. In 2007, that percent had jumped to 13.4 percent, Mendoza said. In cities such as London, Paris and Copenhagen, 10 percent of residents are Muslim. “The European Muslim population has doubled in the past 30 years and is predicted to double again by 2040,” he said.

For all the benefits that immigration has brought, it has been difficult for European countries to absorb immigrants into their society given their failure to integrate newcomers. Regardless of their political views, Muslims in Europe will likely speak out against Israel whenever any Middle Eastern news breaks, just as they will against India in the Kashmir dispute. Their voices are heard well above the average Europeans, who tend not to speak out Mendoza said, adding that the Muslim immigrants do this with full knowledge that they would not be allowed to speak out like that in many Middle Eastern countries.

Yet another reason Israel is demonized is that it is a nationalist state, but Europe turned against that concept following World War II. “They are supernational, and Israel is just national,” he said.’

Thus, in the view of the people at the head of the HJS, the EU is a ‘monstrosity’; an ‘oppressive Bambiland’ containing too many Muslims and immigrants, whose ‘supernational’ character leads it to despise ‘nationalist’ states such as Israel, and that ought to be ‘razed to the ground’.

How is it possible for such an extremely anti-European outfit to retain, as its titular president, a visionary supporter of deep European integration; of a ‘United States of Europe’, no less ? After all, James Rogers, who along with Simms was the other leading creator of the HJS, was repudiated by the organisation because he published a letter in The Times calling for Britain’s signature of the EU constitution treaty, and signing it with his HJS affiliation. Part of the answer is that Simm’s articles, unlike those of other HJS staff members, simply do not appear on the HJS website. This is the case not only for articles arguing a position which for the HJS is anathema – such as greater European integration – but also for those with which it agrees, such as the need for intervention in Syria. Despite being an incomparably more serious intellectual figure than the other HJS staff members, as well as the organisation’s principal founder, his name does not even appear on its list of authors. Conversely, Simm’s articles do not mention his HJS affiliation.

The ‘Project for Democratic Union‘, which Simms established to promote his ideas about Europe, has a name that recalls the HJS’s ‘Project for Democratic Geopolitics’, but is otherwise entirely separate from – and unendorsed by – the HJS. The two organisations did jointly host a talk by Simms on the project of a ‘United States of Europe’, at which he apparently argued that ‘the Democratic Union should then work closely with the other great democracies, especially Great Britain and the United States… while British support for such a project is highly desirable, her involvement in the new state would be incompatible with national sovereignty, and in any case unnecessary. What is now required is not a European Britain but a British Europe.’ Arguing for deeper eurozone – as opposed to EU – integration may be a way of reconciling the HJS’s Europhobia with Simms’s Europhilia. Yet an alliance of convenience between hard-line British Eurosceptics on the one hand, and non-British Euro-federalist supporters of deeper integration for a geographically narrower Europe without Britain on the other, may not ultimately prove fruitful.

Brendan, in fact, supports a much deeper model of European integration than the HJS ever previously did, even at the time of its pro-European inception, when it favoured a broader, looser EU expanded to include Turkey and former-Soviet states such as Ukraine and Georgia. His new vision is not one that I share. The successes of the Anglo-Scottish and American unions were built upon radical measures that cannot feasibly be translated to the eurozone context: in the case of the first, the abolition of Scotland’s separate statehood and parliament; in the case of the second, the actual military conquest and crushing of the South by the North in a brutal civil war. As for the precedent of Bismarck and the German Second Reich – it should not need pointing out that their legacy has not been entirely positive. ‘Democratic Bismarck’ is an oxymoron, of course.

I feel relieved that Britain has avoided joining the euro, with the concomitant erosion of national sovereignty and democracy that this would have involved; a loss that Greece, Cyprus, Portugal and other South European states in particular are feeling. Yet the establishment of a United States of Europe incorporating only the eurozone and excluding the rest of the EU would consign Britain and other non-eurozone members to the geopolitical backwater of a second-tier Europe. Britain has traditionally sought to prevent the domination of Europe by any foreign power, and it is unclear why abandoning this policy now should be in our interest. While there may be Brits who love European unity so much that they are willing to sacrifice the national sovereignty of the Portuguese, Spanish, Italians, Greeks and others in order to save it, I cannot help but feel that the double standard will not pass unnoticed among these nations, and that they will be rightly reluctant to make a sacrifice that Britain, equally rightly, does not want to make itself. Finally, if Mendoza’s reasoning is correct, then the United States of Europe, as a ‘supernational’ state, will presumably be extremely anti-Israel, and may even criticise a West Bank settlement or two.

Nevertheless, Brendan is right that eurozoners, and leaders and citizens of the EU generally, have to think as Europeans, not as narrow nationalists, and take radical measures to rescue European unity. Absorption in a federal European super-state would not be in the national interest of Britain (or of any EU member), yet it is the anti-European separatists who pose a greater threat to Britain’s national interest, as they threaten to consign us to the status of an isolated, inward-looking geopolitical irrelevance – a UN Security Council permanent member aping Switzerland.

What a pity that the HJS, a think-tank established in part to promote a powerful Britain at the heart of a vibrant, expanding European Union, has been hijacked by those working for the opposite goal.

Update: Since this post was published, HJS Associate Director Douglas Murray has published, in The Wall Street Journal, what can only be interpreted as an outright rebuke of Simms: ‘For as Brussels and its foxes throughout Europe kept crashing the continent into walls, they also kept pretending that their way of ordering things—an undemocratic, increasingly expensive United States of Europe—was the only reasonable option.’ The article, which carries Murray’s HJS affiliation, lauds the UK Independence Party (UKIP), which favours Britain’s secession from the EU.

Another article written at about the same time by a senior HJS staff member – Raheem Kassam, at the time HJS Director of Communications, subsequently removed from the post, though he remains an HJS Associate Fellow  – has called for a Tory-UKIP electoral alliance, arguing ‘it seems the Tory-UKIP rollercoaster is determined, like most rollercoasters, to have us a) wondering how and why the hell we got on this ride and b) despite some vomit-inducing moments, hoping it will never stop.’  Kassam, as editor of The Commentator, which is published from the HJS office, is on record as stating ‘I also loathe the European Union’.