Melanie Phillips's Blog, page 4

Why the west should be holding its breath over the desperate battle for Britain

Current events in Britain’s Parliament are making politics in both Israel and America look positively sane and tranquil by comparison.

Around the world, jaws are dropping at the UK’s convulsions over leaving the European Union. This resembles not so much a divorce as an amputation without anesthetic using blunt knives and a broken saw, with the surgeons throwing punches across the operating table.

This week, the deal struck between Prime Minister Theresa May and the EU over the Brexit terms was thrown out by an enormous majority in the House of Commons.

Although this was the largest prime ministerial defeat in British history, Mrs. May survived a motion of no-confidence the following evening.

This was largely because of two factors: the infighting among Tories about who should replace her, and the fear of precipitating a general election which might bring the far-left Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to power.

At the core of May’s spectacularly inept EU negotiating strategy lay a fundamental conceptual error. Britain is bitterly split down the middle between Brexiteers and Remainers, who want to stay in the EU. May wanted to deliver a Brexit deal which would bring both sides together by giving each a little of what it wanted.

But on the issue of sovereign British independence, there can be no compromise. The UK is either out of the EU or it is in. May’s deal would have left the UK under the thumb of the EU over which, as a non-EU member, it would no longer have any influence at all. It was Brexit in name only – or Remain by stealth.

The lesson here for the wider world is that negotiating with the non-negotiable always leads to surrender. Under pressure from the West, Israel has tried to bridge an unbridgeable gulf with rejectionist Arabs. As a result, it has been unable to extricate itself from a perpetual state of war and terrorist attack.

May has survived; but Brexit itself now faces its moment of greatest peril. For a majority of MPs are Remainers, and many if not most are determined to stop Brexit in its tracks.

Westminster is currently heaving with plots aimed at reversing the 2016 referendum result – while purporting to honor it. So MPs are coming up with demands to delay the legal date for the UK’s departure, demands for a second referendum, demands for “compromise” departure terms that are, in effect, forms of Remain.

This is all to break what is widely reported as the parliamentary “deadlock” over the issue. But there’s no deadlock. The legally binding default position is that if no deal with the EU is struck, Britain will leave on March 29 without a deal.

This is enshrined in an act of parliament passed last year. So the way forward is in fact very clear. The problem is that MPs who passed this act of parliament now want to dump it. They claim that leaving with no deal is out of the question because it would plunge Britain into chaos and ruin.

Britain has been subjected to a blizzard of scare stories about starving to death, running out of medicines or being unable to fly to Europe if it leaves with no deal.

These are ludicrous exaggerations. Much more to the point, the EU itself has far too much to lose from having no deal. But it will only do a deal on Britain’s terms if its own back is to the wall. In other words, leaving with no deal is essential to get the deal that Britain wants.

Yet instead of helping bring that about, Remainer MPs are spitting in the eye of democracy by seeking to reverse the referendum result, thus setting parliament against the people. Why?

At the core of much Remain thinking lies a profound indifference toward or even contempt for the very idea of a sovereign nation. For people who take pride in their cosmopolitanism and who regard national ties as a form of bigoted atavism, democracy can be endlessly reinvented in their own image.

Such Remainers thus grossly underrated the depth of feeling behind the vote for Brexit because they grossly underrate Britain itself.

Britain is a very special country; which is why it’s the one country to leave the EU. The countries of mainland Europe, with their long histories of mutual invasion, permeable borders, shifting national boundaries and attachments to democracy that are fitful and tenuous, have a shallow understanding of national identity.

By contrast, Britain is an island nation with an unequivocally distinct and separate identity. It hasn’t been invaded for 1,000 years and has consistently repelled attackers from across the seas.

This history has created its national character: independent of mind, stoic under pressure, opposed to extremism but ferocious in defense of its liberties and very, very averse to being bullied or told what to do.

This is why Britain was the cradle of political liberty. And this is why it voted to leave the EU – because despite the cultural demoralization of its post-war elites which took it into the European project in 1973, it still knows itself to be special.

There are three nations which have this view of themselves as being uniquely blessed: Britain, America and Israel. All have played an outsized role in bringing the benefits of civilization to the world.

Yes, all have had their faults. The British Empire had episodes of great cruelty; America had vicious racial prejudice; Israel’s political system is corrupt and dysfunctional.

All three countries, however, are beset from within by an intelligentsia determined to distort their nation’s history, exaggerate its failings and prove it was born in original sin.

A nation cannot be defended unless its people love and admire it, and unless it is led by men and women who acknowledge it for what it is rather than what they want it to be.

People look for leaders who will defend their way of life, promote the historic culture that binds their society together into a nation they can call their own, and take all necessary measures to keep it safe and inviolate.

The failure by the political establishment to deliver that led directly to the Brexit vote, the election of US President Donald Trump and, in Israel, to the destruction of the Left as a political force.

The idea of the modern nation state grew out of the Enlightenment which first came up with the notion of limited government, the consent of the governed and sovereignty within national borders.

Britain was first into the Enlightenment – but having led the West for the past half-century in secular ideologies which repudiate truth and reason, it’s also been the first out. Through restoring national independence, Brexit offers Britain its last chance to become itself again.

This titanic fight has now entered its final agony. If this battle for Britain is lost, the repercussions for all who believe in political freedom, democracy and moral integrity will spread far beyond its shores.

Jerusalem Post

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No-deal is the only legitimate way forward. MPs themselves voted for it.

There is no impasse in parliament over Brexit. There is no stalemate. There is no need whatsoever to delay the date the UK is to leave the EU. There is no need to look for alternative ways forward.

MPs themselves mapped out the next step when they passed an act of parliament last year committing the UK to leave the EU on March 29 2019. They did so in full realisation of the fact that, if no deal could be negotiated with the EU on the terms of the UK’s departure, the UK would nevertheless leave regardless. That’s what that law means.

And that remains the case. Nothing about that has changed. The only thing that has changed is that many of those very same MPs now want to pretend they never voted for the UK to leave the EU whether or not a deal had been struck.

But they did. And yet now they are feverishly plotting and scheming to reverse the decision they themselves made, in order to reverse the vote for Brexit by the British people in the 2016 referendum which delivered the largest popular vote in British history.

Their behaviour is unconscionable. Last night’s crushing defeat served to fire the starting gun for the final, most desperate, most unprincipled and squalid all-out attempt by these MPs to tear up the act of parliament they themselves passed, betray their own manifesto pledges to honour the referendum result on which they stood for parliament, and spit in the eye of the British people.

What they are saying is preposterous and ridiculous. There must now be a delay to Britain’s exit date produced by triggering Article 50, says Labour MP Yvette Cooper.

Even if that proved to be possible in practice, how on earth would it resolve anything? It would merely mean a further period of ruinous delay, with MPs revisiting all the arguments they have so painfully rehearsed for the past two years but with no prospect of any settlement between them.

The real reason for this proposed delay is to allow more time for MPs to cook up a scheme to reverse the referendum decision on which Remainers can agree.

There is no need for more time to re-open negotiations with the EU, since the EU has repeatedly said there can be no further negotiation. Moreover, with MPs loudly urging a delay the EU would have zero incentive to give any negotiating ground at all. As I wrote here yesterday, the only way to get the EU to shift its position is by announcing the UK will leave with no deal, a situation the EU cannot tolerate for very long.

Then there’s parliament’s very own Robespierre, the arch-Remainer Dominic Grieve, urging a second referendum because “there’s no appetite for the government’s deal and indeed there is no majority for any other version of Brexit either. We must bring the people back into this discussion by legislating for a final say”.

Why? On what possible grounds? The people are no better informed about the consequences of Brexit than they were two years ago. Grieve conveniently ignores the majority in parliament that passed the act committing the UK to leave the EU with or without a deal. And astonishingly he has also said that, in such a second referendum, the people shouldn’t even be offered the choice of leaving with no deal. For Grieve, it seems, the democracy he deploys as his shield of political virtue is to be allowed only on the terms he himself will dictate.

Meanwhile, Mrs May herself is doubling down on precisely the error that led to last night’s catastrophic defeat. She has offered cross-party talks on “ideas that are genuinely negotiable and have sufficient support in this House”.

Oh dear. She still doesn’t understand, does she. There can be no negotiated compromise over this because there is no common ground whatsoever between those who want to leave the EU and those who want to Remain.

There is no “moderate” or “soft” Brexit, or being out of the EU but still a little bit in, because being a little bit in is to Remain in. The UK is either in or out; either it Leaves the EU or it Remains.

What is called “common ground” – a customs union, the Norway option etc – actually amounts to nothing other than Remain. These are all proposals being advanced by Remainers who want to conceal their intention to reverse the Brexit vote by dishonestly pretending they are proposing a “moderate” kind of Brexit. They are not. They are instead attempting to stop Brexit in its tracks.

Mrs May’s flaws – her inability to grasp the big picture, her profound sense of personal insecurity which closes her mind to alternative and wise advice, her blinkered failure to realise that her aim to bridge an unbridgeable issue in British politics would necessarily end in disaster – are painfully obvious for all to see.

But she also reportedly possesses one great virtue. She is said to have an overriding sense of duty as a public servant. She has said repeatedly she intends to honour the referendum decision to leave the EU. She believed her deal would do that; in doing so, she was badly mistaken. But what she must do now is clear.

She must fulfil her stated duty to honour the referendum result and to honour the stated intention of parliament by announcing that the UK will now leave the EU with no deal. She must defend parliament against its wrecker MPs and save democracy itself from a potentially fatal alienation of the people.

If she does this, she will redeem herself as the prime minister who faced down the MPs’ attempted coup against the people, and who finally enabled instead the recovery of the independence of Britain’s island nation for which its people have fought so indomitably and for so long.

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Now tell your MP: if you block no-deal you lose my vote

Mrs May’s faux-Brexit deal has been rightly smashed to pieces in tonight’s massive Commons vote.

There is now only one legitimate way forward. Parliament has passed a law committing the UK to leave the EU on March 29. Since it has not agreed to a deal with the EU on the terms of leaving, the UK must leave with no deal.

That is the legally binding default position. The fact that the majority of MPs don’t want to leave with no deal is irrelevant. The majority of MPs also want to remain in the EU. But they gave the decision about continued EU membership to the British people, who voted to leave. MPs have a duty to honour that decision, not least because they pledged to do so in the manifesto commitments which got them elected to parliament.

The people weren’t asked, and they didn’t say, whether they wanted to leave only with a particular kind of deal or with any deal at all. They just wanted to leave. There is zero justification for not now doing so.

With typical arrogance, EU Council President Donald Tusk has said that if MPs cannot agree a deal and don’t want to “crash out” without one, they should consider reversing the referendum vote.

The fact that the people of Britain voted to leave the EU does not appear even to figure in his thinking. Why should it? The EU is a profoundly anti-democratic institution which treats citizens as mere ciphers to do the will of the Eurocrats. That’s precisely why the UK wants to get out.

But many MPs are displaying a similar anti-democratic disorder. If they try to block Brexit by whatever means they are now dreaming up, they will show a contempt for the British people and for the democratic process which should see them thrown out at the next general election.

Every British citizen who cares about democracy should be telling their MP in no uncertain terms that if that MP now blocks Brexit, he or she can kiss their vote goodbye.

The fears over no-deal are in any event ludicrous. Far more preparations have been made for it than have been reported, as a civil servant blurted out a short while back. The British will weather any problems and disruption. Most who voted Leave have long factored all that in because they believe that in the medium to long term the benefits of independent self-government, both economic and political, will be more than worth it.

In any event, “no deal” won’t last very long because the EU needs a deal. As I wrote here yesterday, they will make a deal on terms congenial to the UK – but only provided the UK says it is leaving with no deal.

In the Telegraph, the former Brexit secretary David Davis (who resigned after he was shafted and sidelined by Number Ten in the Brexit negotiations) gets it right.

He writes that there is now a clear route forward

“by proposing an alternative withdrawal text to the EU, and by following it up with the full text of a comprehensive, advanced free trade agreement that draws on what the EU has already agreed, including its current and prospective free trade agreements with Canada, South Korea and Japan, and its sectoral insurance agreement with the US and its meat products agreement with New Zealand.

The EU will not accept everything we ask for, of course. But our aim now should be to maximise the strength of our negotiating position. How?

First, use our own leverage. We want a deal. We don’t want to punish EU farmers and car exporters. But the EU has a large trade deficit with us in agriculture and, if we leave without a Withdrawal Agreement, we will have to be more open to the rest of the world, in effect forcing French wine producers, Bavarian dairy farmers, and critically Irish beef farmers to compete against big non-EU agricultural exporters in order to curb food price inflation. The effect will be a dramatic loss of market share for EU farmers. We can use WTO-compliant direct payments for environmental remediation and stewardship to help out our own farmers for the limited time this situation persists, as the EU will want a free-trade agreement in these circumstances, as do we.

Second, prepare properly for exit on WTO terms. In truth, the state people call “no deal” will not be tolerable to the EU for long. The economic and political forces against it in Europe will be too strong. As we know well, preparations have been under way for over two years, but we must be clearer about them and we must step them up.

…It is still not too late. The EU has a track record of coming to the table in the waning hours and will do so if they come under real pressure. We must not take that pressure off by asking for more time before we have put an actual, serious opening bid on the table.

Their offer to us is – and has always been – a comprehensive free trade agreement. It is what we want too. It would take negotiating ineptitude on a grand scale not to achieve it.”

It’s within the UK’s grasp – but only if it now keeps its nerve, and if MPs back off from the huge constitutional crisis which they are threatening to unleash by setting parliament against the people, and against democracy itself.

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Vindictive punishment of James Watson

James Watson was one of the Nobel prizewinning team that discovered the double helix structure of DNA in 1953. Now the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory he ran in New York has revoked all his titles and honours on account of his “reprehensible” comments about race and intelligence. The move leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.

There’s no question but that Watson, described as perhaps the most influential biologist of the second half of the last century, has expressed some dubious and unacceptable views.

He has suggested that fat people are less ambitious than others. In 2007, he argued that antisemitic comments could be legitimate “just like some anti-Irish feeling is justified”. He also claimed a link between skin colour and libido, and called stupidity a disease affecting the lower 10 per cent of the population.

The fact is, though, that he has been coming out with all this stuff for years. What was the point of revisiting him at age 90 to ask whether he still had these views? As Michael Wigler, a molecular biologist at the lab, said: “It is not news when a 90-year-old man who has lost cognitive inhibition, and has drifted that way for decades as he aged, speaks from his present mind.”

This sudden punishment smacks of today’s disturbing tendency to persecute prominent people for a range of contemporary heresies.

To read my whole Times column (£), please click here.

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Why it’s imperative that Britain shows itself to be firmly behind no-deal

We all know the problem over Theresa May’s Brexit deal, don’t we. The EU insisted on its red lines, offering nothing that would allow Britain to trade outside the customs union or single market. Hence her deal was botched because she was under the EU cosh.

But what if this analysis were 180 degrees out? What if the opposite were the case?

What if the EU had in fact offered the UK a comprehensive free trade agreement for the whole of the UK with zero tariffs and no quantitative restrictions, with regulatory co-operations and measures to facilitate customs and Irish border controls?

And what if in response the UK had refused to accept this but had itself insisted on some measure of customs union/single market alignment, so that the EU thought all its Christmases had come at once?

Crazy? Impossible? Turning reality on its head? After all, why on earth would the UK turn down an all-but-ideal Brexit agreement with the EU for one which, as Mrs May’s deal does, would keep the UK under the EU thumb but with no influence, thus ensuring it left the EU in name only and remained on terms that would leave it worse off that it is now?

Makes no sense at all, does it?

Yet according to one well-informed observer, that is precisely what happened.

Shanker Singham is an international trade policy expert, a trade and competition lawyer who has advised US politicians and administrations on trade, competition and regulatory issues. Later today, at a meeting with various Brexiteer MPs and the DUP, he is presenting a revised proposed deal which builds on the free trade agreement he says the EU was previously prepared to offer.

According to him, while the EU was prepared to offer an advanced free trade agreement which would work for the complex supply chains in the EU-28, the UK insisted on incorporating parts of the single market and customs union. There would be differences in a free trade agreement, of course, but just-in-time supply chains flourish inside such agreements, particularly very liberalising ones like NAFTA or the Australia-New Zealand deal. But the UK wanted to keep in alignment to some extent with the EU.

Why? There are three possible reasons.

Utter incompetence and a failure to understand what a free trade deal involved;
A conspiracy to defy the referendum result and set out effectively to keep the UK in the EU;
Under enormous pressure from major corporate players such as the CBI, Japanese car manufacturers etc who wanted the UK to remain in the single market/customs union, Mrs May and her civil servant Brexit negotiator Oliver Robbins tried to square the circle.

The EU thus had no incentive to return to its free trade deal offer as long as it believed Mrs May would get her deal through parliament. But if that deal is voted down – and crucially, if it looks like the UK will thus leave the EU without a deal – the EU will need a deal that will get through.

Singham says he knows this to be so because it has already happened. Around two weeks before the Withdrawal Agreement was finally agreed, when the EU thought Mrs May wouldn’t do it, Singham says that in a meeting he had with politicians and technical experts the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, suggested that he prepare an alternative deal and reiterated the EU offer.

So the EU, Singham says, will agree a free trade deal on the UK’s own red-line terms of no customs union or single market or ECJ control – but only if it believes that otherwise the UK will leave with no deal.

Which is why the MPs’ current tactics in doing everything they possibly can to thwart leaving with no deal is utterly disastrous and deeply hostile to the UK’s national interest. All the hysterical talk of postponing the Brexit date, holding a second referendum, seizing from the government control of the negotiations and giving it instead to a committee of MPs – all this tears up the UK’s biggest negotiating card, that it is prepared to walk away with no deal which would be ruinous to the EU.

Only if the UK shows it is prepared to walk away with no deal will the EU make the deal the UK wants. This is negotiation 101. It was obvious from the very start. It is no less obvious now.

But MPs are doing absolutely everything they can to stop Brexit from happening, reportedly including a backbench coup against the government supposedly aided and abetted by the Commons Speaker, John Bercow. Last week, this supposed champion of the House of Commons tore up its own rules in order further to enable Remainer guerrilla activity.

These MPs claim to be ultra-democratic because they intend to remove control of Brexit from the government and hand it instead to backbenchers. But that’s not democratic at all. It is instead a gross abuse of Britain’s democratic compact between leaders and led.

Britain’s system mainly consists of representative democracy, punctuated on rare occasions by a plebiscite of the people on fundamental constitutional issues. In 2016, MPs used their democratic representative power to hand to the people themselves the decision whether to remain in or leave the EU.

The MPs voted to hold this referendum by 544 to 53. They then stood for election in 2017 on manifesto promises to implement the result, which they enshrined in the European Withdrawal Act 2018.

So by trying to block Brexit, they are not only betraying the people’s decision but are tearing up their own manifesto promises on the basis of which they were elected to parliament in the first place.

Now Mrs May is using those MPs’ aberrant behaviour as a further cudgel to get her way. She says MPs must vote for her deal or parliament may block Brexit altogether.

But here’s what MPs need to have in the forefront of their minds today: Mrs May’s deal does not deliver Brexit but is Remain in disguise. Under its terms, the UK would remain under EU control – but since the UK would no longer have any say in the EU, it would mean remaining under worse terms than now.

In a podcast on the Briefings for Brexit website, Professor Gwythian Prins has revealed that a secret tape recording fell into his hands in which senior civil servants explained how they intended to dupe the public by ensuring that Brexit would be an exit from the EU in name only.

“Now, in this tape … you hear this young man who is two heartbeats away from the Prime Minister saying several things which are constitutionally astonishing. The first is that he explains openly an intention to hoodwink the British public who voted to Leave with pretence, with what he calls ‘fluffy language’ which will seemingly conform to the mandate to Leave. But in the defence area, the language and the technical agreements – which I have just indicated to you in the earlier answer – will all lock us into a subordinate role in defence and security under the emerging military EU. He actually states it.

in name only.

“The tapes are called ‘the Kit Kat tapes’. And the reason they’re called the Kit Kat tapes is that on it you also hear another official, another civil servant, a woman called Victoria Billing, and she says it’s like a Kit Kat bar, you have a shiny label on the outside which seemingly conforms to the will of the people to leave the EU, but inside you’ve got a chocolate bar which is constructed to keep us engaged with . . . it is in fact Hotel California, as I argued in one of my pieces on Briefings for Brexit – and you’ll remember the Eagles’ song, ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave’ – or BRINO as people now call it – Brexit In Name Only”.

Now MPs who are implacably against no-deal are threatening to resign from government or resign the whip if Mrs May, having lost the Meaningful Vote this evening, decides to stick with the default position of leaving with no deal.

These faux-democrats should instead resign their seats and stand for re-election on the basis that they are thus taking a stand against enacting the democratic decision of the people to leave the EU and against their own election manifesto commitment – and then see what their voters make of that.

In practical terms, all mooted alternatives to no-deal are worse than pointless. Putting off the date of leaving would further extend this ruinous uncertainty, and for what?

A second referendum is not just an anti-democratic ruse to vote again and again until the “correct” result is achieved; voters would also be no better informed about the likely results of leaving than they were two years ago.

In that referendum, people didn’t vote to leave under a particular kind of arrangement, or with a deal rather than with no deal. They voted for one thing only: to leave the EU. Every MP who either votes for Mrs May’s deal or tries to thwart the default of no-deal will be thus trying to thwart the democratic will of the people.

The fear of leaving with no deal has been exaggerated to ludicrous proportions. Take the projected crippling queues of road hauliers resulting from new checks at Calais. According to Jean‑Marc Puissesseau, President Chairman of the ports of Boulogne-Calais, however: “There will not be any delay. The trucks will be passing as they are doing today.”

Of course there will be some problems and disruption. But many have made the calculation that short-term difficulties will be worth it for the long-term gain, both economic and democratic.

So why are so many Remainers so frantically against no-deal? First, because no-deal seems to them to be the only way of actually leaving the EU, which in their minds seems to be an act against nature itself. And second, because they really don’t believe that Britain can go it alone.

For among other divides, this is a split between those who believe in Britain and those who don’t. This isn’t just about believing that the world’s fifth largest economy would take the basket-case EU to the cleaners. It’s also about the British people’s visceral love of freedom, the commitment to defend the independence of their island nation which is in their collective DNA, and their deep, deep dislike of being pushed around and told what to do. This lies at the very core of what it is to be British.

Yet the referendum terms being dreamed up by the former Attorney-General and arch-Remainer Dominic Grieve wouldn’t even have no-deal on the ballot paper.  This would instead present a choice between Mrs May’s Remain deal and, er, Remain.

Who would ever have thought this supposedly punctilious lawyer would turn into Britain’s very own fanatical Robespierre?

For this is potentially a revolutionary moment. In the 17th century, England was engulfed by a civil war between parliament and the Crown. This is shaping up, scarcely less disastrously, to become parliament versus the people.

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Two national leaders: two TV addresses to fire up their base

Last Monday evening, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went on TV to make what was billed in advance as a “dramatic announcement.”

Reacting to rumors that Israel’s Attorney General, Avichai Mandelblit, might announce during Israel’s general election campaign an indictment against him on the three corruption cases under investigation, he declared that this would be unjust, and that he hadn’t been allowed to confront the three state’s witnesses in the investigations against him despite asking twice to do so.

“How can you get to the essence of the truth if I can’t confront the witnesses?” he asked. And so he was now renewing the “demand” to go face-to-face with his accusers, and “as far as I am concerned, it can be on live television.”

On Tuesday evening, U.S. President Donald Trump went on TV to explain to the nation his decision to shut down the federal government in protest at the refusal of the Democrats in Congress to fund the barrier at the Mexico border.

The barrier was vital, he said, to protect America from illegal immigration across that southern border. This was acting as a “vast pipeline” for illegal drugs, allowing criminals to enter the country and fueling a “humanitarian crisis” of thousands of children being used as “human pawns” to gain entry to the United States.

Both these TV appearances were cameo performances that served to highlight, in very different ways, the alarming trend now accelerating across the West: the breakdown of respect for the rule of law and democratic institutions, a breakdown being fueled by politicians as well as mobs being unleashed on the streets.

Netanyahu used this “dramatic” televised announcement to present himself as the victim of a politically motivated attack, in order to rouse his voter base in support of himself and against Mandelblit.

I have no idea, of course, whether there is any substance to the claims against him that Mandelblit is currently investigating. But Netanyahu has not yet been indicted; and under Israeli law, a suspect has no right at this stage to confront witnesses. Indeed, the imbalance of power involving a prime ministerial suspect could turn any confrontation into something approaching intimidation of such witnesses.

The Israeli police usually allow such a confrontation to occur when they think this will flush out a suspect’s lies or resolve contradictions in the evidence.

Moreover, an unnamed source close to Mandelblit’s investigation told Israeli TV news that having twice asked to confront his accusers, Netanyahu had said he would need to check with his lawyers first, though never actually pursued the request.

Such a stunt — in which a prime minister running for re-election attacks the independent law officer who is upholding the law by investigating claims of corruption against him — is the kind of thing more associated with a banana republic than a democracy.

In the United States, Trump is being accused of holding the entire federal administration hostage in order to get his way over the Mexico-border barrier. Yet the Democrats remain opposed.

Their opposition is not just intransigent but anti-democratic, for they are attempting to prevent the U.S. president from fulfilling his election pledge to build the border wall. They are therefore preventing him from fulfilling his undertaking to protect the people against crime and illegality.

A briefing paper by Paul Teller, special assistant to the president for legislative affairs, says most asylum claims made by migrants arriving from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador have proved to be worthless. That’s because widespread knowledge of loopholes in U.S. immigration procedures have enabled migrants who are being coached to fraudulently claim “credible fear” and be released into the United States.

On a typical day, he writes, the border police apprehend 21 wanted criminals at the southern border.

“Our porous southern border has allowed drugs to flood into our country and endanger the security and well-being of American communities. Mexico is the source of more than 90 percent of wholesale heroin seized by law enforcement in the United States, up from only 10 percent in 2003.”

Although most of those on the terrorist watch list try to enter the United States by air, he writes, there’s also a need also to stop those trying to enter by land. At the southern border last year, the Department of Homeland Security encountered more than 3,000 “special interest aliens”—individuals with suspicious travel patterns who may pose a national security risk.

Furthermore, he says, it’s wrong to argue that there is no illegal immigration crisis on the grounds that the rate of illegal borders crossings is lower today than in previous years.

In 2000, the vast majority of these attempting to enter illegally were Mexican single adults, and, as such, they were detained and repatriated to their home country within hours. Today, he writes, the influx contains many minors who can’t be dealt with in this way but are merely released into American communities.

Across the Atlantic, Britain is experiencing its own challenge to the democratic order. In the great fight over Brexit which is now in its final, most desperate stages, MPs who want to reverse the 2016 referendum vote to leave the E.U. are joining forces through a series of maneuvers, including voting to stop funding preparations for leaving without an agreed deal.

Since leaving with no-deal is the default position should Prime Minister Theresa May’s hugely unpopular E.U. Brexit deal be voted down next week, it is hard to exaggerate the irresponsibility and anti-democratic nature of this tactic. Leaving with no deal requires the maximum preparation to avoid disruption or chaos. And opposing “no-deal” is in effect to thwart the people’s expressed wish to leave the E.U.

Meanwhile, street thugs have been harassing and intimidating Remain MPs on their way into parliament.

In Israel, the grave of Mandelblit’s father was desecrated by unknown people who attacked no other grave in the cemetery.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron has lost control of the streets to the thuggery of the “yellow vests” protesters.

Some of us have been warning for years of the dangers of political alienation. Mass immigration, Islamization and the erosion of national identity, democratic sovereignty and the rule of law have produced a revolt against the entire political establishment in Britain, Europe and America. Now we’re further seeing a no-holds-barred attempt to squash that revolt, which will surely increase that alienation to dangerous levels.

In Israel, the dysfunctional nature of the Israeli political system, in which tiny parties can hold governments hostage, plus the intellectual collapse of the left and Netanyahu’s towering achievements through his superior strategic understanding have created the unhealthy situation where he is virtually unchallengeable. Hence his shocking stunt.

But since the Israeli public believes that there is no other national leader who could deal so effectively with the immense perils facing the country, they have been prepared to park any concerns they have about his character.

The same process is at work with Trump. Indeed, every time the Democrats scream about impeaching him, they fire up his base for him.

Similarly in Britain, the unprecedented attempt by MPs to reverse Brexit is causing such revulsion and outrage that even some of those who voted to remain in the E.U. now support coming out with no deal because they are so appalled by the attempted hijack of democracy.

The damage all this is doing to the Western compact between leaders and led is simply incalculable.

Jewish News Syndicate

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Once again into the fray in TV’s gladiatorial circus

I did two TV appearances in one day yesterday – the first on the BBC’s daily Politics Live, and the second on the BBC’s flagship political debate show, Question Time. It was the first edition of Question Time with Fiona Bruce in the chair after the retirement of its venerable anchor David Dimbleby who had become something of a national institution. So it was a show that attracted much attention and considerable comment in today’s newspapers.

All eyes were on Fiona and whether she could fill Dimbleby’s patrician shoes. You can watch the show below. I appear fairly near the start and towards the end (where there are some fireworks).

I was able to say rather more on Politics Live, mainly about Brexit (of course) but also on other topics. There were some feisty exchanges! You can watch the whole show below.

If you want to fast forward, you can find me talking about the fantasy of thinking there’s any alternative to the choice between Mrs May’s deal and no-deal at around six minutes in; how this is shaping up as a crisis of parliament v the people at around 11.55; why a second referendum is a dishonest ploy at around 23.40; why no-deal is the only way to honour the referendum result at around 29.35; Speaker Bercow’s Humpty-Dumpty politics at around 32, and my response to the “ageist” comedian at around 38.

I wrote an instant commentary on Question Time after it was recorded (as usual, about an hour and a half before transmission) for today’s Times (£). I can’t republish the whole piece as the usual paywall restriction applies, but I provide an extract here.

The difficulty of chairing it became apparent when the argument between Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, and James Cleverly, the Conservative vice-chairman, went on for far too long.

David would probably have shut that down earlier. But stopping politicians in full flow is a particular skill that can only come with experience.

Fiona will probably be mulling that over. But her style was refreshing, if different. If David was the stately cruise liner sailing serenely on through the squalls around him, Fiona was more like a darting jet-skier.

The question in my mind was about the joke that David always made at the end of every recording (the show is recorded about an hour and a half before transmission). When it finished, having asked the audience to wait for just a little longer, he would listen intently to the voice in his earpiece and then announce with cod relief: “I’m glad to say the recording has actually worked.”

It never failed to produce a belly laugh, every time. So would Fiona make the same joke? She didn’t.

Ah well, end of an era.

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Obesity is a national obsession, not a disease

The Royal College of Physicians has said that, in order to bring obesity under control, it should be viewed not as a result of lifestyle choice but as a disease.

Statistics about obesity are contestable and should be treated with caution. There is no doubt, however, that being overweight exacerbates both the incidence and severity of certain conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

To call obesity itself a disease, however, is an abuse of language. A disease is an organic disorder that affects a particular function and happens beyond your control. Obesity is another word for being grossly fat.

Mealtimes have been widely replaced by a semi-permanent state of grazing. You can see this on public transport such as the London Underground where people are eating at all times of day, even consuming entire meals complete with plastic cutlery.

There are other public health challenges, such as smoking, excessive drinking or illegal drug-taking. Yet obesity stands out on account of the blizzard of contradictory advice it produces and the divisions it provokes about its causes and remedies.

All this owes little to logic or evidence. It would appear, therefore, that it isn’t so much obesity that should be treated as a pathology but rather the obsession with it.

To read my whole Times column (£), please click here.

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The terrorist murder of Aisha Rabi

As the result of an Israeli gagging order being partially lifted, it has been revealed that five Jewish teenagers from a yeshiva in the disputed territories have been accused of the murder of a Palestinian woman, Aisha Rabi.

This was a heinous and appalling crime. Rabi, the mother of nine children, was killed last October when a rock was hurled at her car.

Lawyers for the five teenagers claim that the Israeli security service, the Shin Bet, used torture and ill-treatment against the boys who the lawyers say are innocent and have an alibi, and that the gag order has been lifted only because the case against them is crumbling.

We don’t yet know, therefore, whether or not these boys committed this murder. It would be appalling, however, if they had done so.

Time and again, Israeli Jews have been the victims of precisely this kind of murderous attack, among many others. Whatever the supposed provocation on either side, there can never be any justification or excuse whatsoever for murdering the innocent. It would be deeply shocking if this was committed by Jewish boys, and religious Jewish boys at at that. It would surely be a chillul hashem, a desecration of the name of the Almighty as a repudiation of Jewish ethics.

But unfortunately, the Shin Bet have long claimed that there are Jewish extremists in the disputed territories who plot precisely such outrages which security agents periodically thwart.

Indeed, according to The Times of Israel the Shin Bet confirmed an earlier report that, after the Rabi murder, nationalist extremists known to them had driven to the yeshiva, violating religious laws that prohibit driving on the Sabbath, in order to coach students they suspected were involved on how to withstand interrogations and urging them to remain silent as much as possible.

A further report claims that this was authorised by two settlement rabbis, no less. They apparently decided that, in the light of the suicide attempt by another minor after being interrogated following the 2015 terror attack that killed three members of the Palestinian Arab Dawabsha family, warning the yeshiva students was a “matter of life or death”.

By this deeply specious reasoning (on this basis, all Jewish suspects should be shielded from the Shin Bet regardless of whatever terrible crime they are suspected of committing) that group of rabbis and Sabbath violators would seem to have abused religious authority to put themselves outside the rule of law in order to prevent justice from being done.

The security agency also reportedly claims to have identified an effort to slander and delegitimise its interrogation methods, which it maintains are carried out in accordance with the law and under the supervision of the State Attorney’s office.

It is unlikely that Israeli Jewish terror suspects would be treated worse than Palestinian Arab ones. It is unlikely that either group would be handled with kid gloves, but the details the lawyers have revealed of the boys’ treatment, although harsh, hardly amounts to torture:

“’From morning to night (my client) was shackled to a chair, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, in a small cell’… the interrogators had ‘cursed, spit on and even sexually harassed’ his client. He claimed that the Shin Bet agents had even performed a jailhouse informant exercise with cops posing as inmates who pressured the suspects to confess.”

More worryingly, when one of these lawyers, Itamar ben Gvir, was asked why he hadn’t criticised the Shin Bet’s interrogation tactics against Palestinian suspects, he denied that the murder of Aisha Rabi was terrorism at all.

“‘When a Jew throws a rock at a Palestinian, it is not terrorism. When a Palestinian throws a rock at a Jew, it is terrorism because it’s part of a larger effort to wipe us out from our land,’ he argues.”

That is wrong and repellent, hardly mitigated by his lame addendum that the “extreme” tactics used by the Shin Bet against his client should not be used against Palestinian inmates either.

The murder of Aisha Rabi was indeed a foul and murderous act of terrorism – violence against the innocent carried out for political motives. Whether or not it was committed by the boys currently in custody, not only the perpetrators but also those who tried to obstruct justice on their behalf should feel the full force of the law.

Unlike the Arab communities in the disputed territories, where the murder of Jews – whose incitement is institutionalised within Palestinian society – is celebrated with sweets and fireworks by jubilant throngs, Jewish terrorism is rare and is viewed by the vast majority of Jews with horror and revulsion.

But it exists; and however small, it is a foul stain on the Jewish conscience. It must be dealt with.

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How western humbug gives antisemitism a free pass

A few days ago, I wrote about antisemitism in the Labour party following the rough ride given to shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry when she spoke at Limmud.

I suggested that those who, like Thornberry, were concerned about the egregious examples of antisemitism in their party were nevertheless unable to face an inconvenient truth. This was that the bigotry against Jews which so horrified them was symbiotically connected to the commitment throughout progressive circles to the Palestinian cause, whose foundation, activities and goals are defined by virulent, murderous Jew-hatred.

In response, Thornberry suggested I should read the speech she delivered to last year’s Labour Party conference in which, she said, she dealt with many of the issues I raised.

So I did. This is how she dealt with them. Having declared that the Labour party must “lead the fight against the forces of fascism, of racism, and prejudice, and anti-semitism. Because that is what we have always done both at home and abroad, and that is what we must always do”, she went on:

“But Conference, let me speak to you from the depths of my heart and my soul and say something I never thought I’d have to say in my lifetime as a Labour member and activist, and it is simply this: that if we want to root out fascism and racism and hatred from our world, and from our country, then we must start, we must start, with rooting it out of our own party.

We all support the Palestinian cause, we are all committed to recognise the Palestinian State, and I stand here with no hesitation when I condemn the Netanyahu government for its racist policies and its criminal actions against the Palestinian people.

But I know as well, and we must all acknowledge, that there are sickening individuals on the fringes of our movement, who use our legitimate support for Palestine as a cloak and a cover for their despicable hatred of Jewish people, and their desire to see Israel destroyed. Those people stand for everything that we have always stood against and they must be kicked out of our party the same way Oswald Mosley was kicked out of Liverpool”.

Far from dealing with the issues I raised, this seemed rather to have made my original point for me: that so firmly do Labour and other progressives believe they are defined by their noble fight against racism, prejudice and antisemitism, they cannot ever acknowledge to themselves that they are in fact supporting and promoting racism, prejudice and antisemitism.

For that is precisely what they’re doing by simultaneously falsely defaming Israel’s behaviour as racist and criminal while sanitising the true racism and criminality by the Palestinians they support.

Of course they don’t accept that calling Israel’s policies racist and criminal is an example of antisemitism. But it is. That’s because it singles out Israel for an obsessional campaign of double standards, demonisation and delegitimisation based solely on malevolent falsehoods, distortion and selective reporting – treatment afforded to no other country, people or cause.

At the same time, such people ignore the true racism, prejudice and antisemitism displayed by Palestinians. They ignore the constant incitement to murder Jews, the relentless terror attacks against Israelis, the Nazi style deranged discourse demonising not just the State of Israel but also the Jewish people as a source of cosmic conspiracies and evil intent.

There was recently a graphic example of this egregious double standard. Jamil Tamimi was jailed for 18 years at Jerusalem district court for the murder of 21 year old British student Hannah Bladon whom he stabbed repeatedly with a seven-inch knife.

Her parents were outraged by what they as an unjustifiably lenient sentence. But the court had found that Tamimi was mentally ill, possibly trying to provoke the police into shooting him dead by stabbing someone. “This was not a terrorist incident,” the prosecutor told the court. “This was a terrible murder carried out by a mentally ill person.”

A few days later a Palestinian Arab, Issam Akel, did get a life sentence. He was convicted at Ramallah high court, in the Palestinian-run territories, of acting to broker the sale of a house in the Muslim quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem to a Jewish organisation.

Palestinian law deems it treasonous to sell land to Jews, a crime for which the maximum penalty is execution. It was commuted here to a life sentence with hard labour, possibly because Akel also held American citizenship.

So Israel showed leniency to a Palestinian Arab convicted of murder – while the Palestinians imposed a far harsher sentence on a Palestinian convicted of selling land to a Jew.

The Israelis saw the killer as a person just like any other human being whose mental illness had diminished his moral agency; they treated him accordingly with a total absence of racism. The Palestinians jailed for life a Palestinian who had dared reject the racist law requiring him to discriminate against Jews. The Palestinians thus made not just the Jewish people a victim of their antisemitism but one of their own, too.

Presumably Emily Thornberry, like the rest of Britain, would have been unaware of this since the land-sale sentence was not generally reported. The telling double standard – the very reverse of the western lie that the Palestinian Arabs are the victims of Israeli racism – was not acknowledged by the mainstream media. As Stephen Daisley noted in a fine piece on the Spectator blog:

“If you get your news from the BBC, you might have missed this story, what with it not appearing to merit a single word on the corporation’s website. Happily, there was space on the Middle East page for a puff piece on Kholoud Nassar, ‘a Palestinian Instagrammer in the Gaza Strip [who] wants to show us a different side of life there’.”

It wasn’t reported because to the progressive mind this cannot be happening.

To this mindset, it cannot be the case that the Palestinians are profound antisemites who won’t even sell a Jew a house and will jail for life any of their own who dares do so; because the Palestinians are the victims of colonialist oppression and so are morally pure.

To this mindset, it cannot be the case that the Israelis have law, history and morality on their side on the grounds that they alone are the extant indigenous people of the land, that they are the only people for whom Israel was ever their national home and that they are the historic and present victims of Arab and Muslim colonialist and illegal aggression.

No, to this mindset it must be the case that the Israelis are racist and criminal because the Palestinians say this is so and the Palestinians never lie because they are the victims of colonialist and illegal oppression and therefore as victims they are morally pure.

And it must also be the case because progressives in the west who support them have always been noble, decent people who have always fought racism and antisemitism and stood up against evils such as colonialist aggression and abuses of power and racist ethnic cleansing.

And if the Palestinian Arabs were not morally pure, the western progressives who support them wouldn’t be morally pure either. And that’s simply impossible, isn’t it. Because Emily Thornberry has told us so.

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