Unintended consequences, or the West's blunder in Iran

As war rages in Iran, it’s worth pausing to imagine a different kind of leadership.

Smoke over Tehran following an Israeli attack on 13 June 2025
By Mehr News Agency, CC BY 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons

Think of it as a kind of fantasy exercise — like fantasy football — assembling the best possible team, while knowing it won’t be perfect.

So let’s imagine a leader of Iran not simply appointed by a bunch of religious figures, backed by armed groups whose main role is suppressing opposition. The leader we’re looking for owes his position to the support of the country’s secular parliament. And among the pledges to which he owes his election is putting an end to power built on brutal repression. Equally, he’s committed to working to limit the power of the clergy over wider society.

On the positive side, he’d be set on improving social benefits across Iranian society, ensuring that poorer Iranians, in towns and countryside alike, have the jobs and land they need to prosper. To fund that kind of programme, he’d use the revenue generated by Iran’s immense oil industry as well as by a progressive taxation system, in which the wealthiest contribute a greater share to government spending than the poor.

He needn’t be some kind of secular saint. What might his faults be? I suspect that in his hurry to achieve his laudable goals he might want to take emergency powers and would ask them to be granted to him by the very parliament that put him in office. That would reduce parliamentary authority. He might even go further and start to act against people who oppose him, leading to fracturing in his support.

So by no means a perfect leader. Even one who might in the long run prove the architect of his own downfall. But wouldn’t that be preferable to what both the Iranians and we, citizens of other countries, are having to deal with today?

Well, that was actually no fantasy. What I’ve been giving you is a thumbnail picture of Mohammad Mossadegh. He was Prime Minister of Iran, for a little under two and a half years, between 1951 and 1953. 

Mohammad Mossadegh

Public domain picture from Wikimedia Commons

This was the time when the British Empire was going into its terminal decline. India had already won its independence. The fifties would be when, in the phrase of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, a wind of change began to blow through Africa as colony after colony in that continent left the Empire too.

Iran was never a colony. Most of its oil, however, was controlled by the Anglo Iranian Oil Company (AIOC, which later became British Petroleum and today is known as BP). The British government had a controlling stake in the company so, in effect, Britain held undue authority over Iranian affairs.

When Mossadegh decided to nationalise the oil industry, to deliver the revenues he needed for his ambitious social programmes, the news was badly received in London. Declining power though it was, Britain still had the capacity to do damage, and it also had close ties with the power that was growing to replace it, the United States. The British put a blockade on Iranian oil and, with the Americans, persuaded Saudi Arabia to step in and increase production so the West wouldn’t suffer as a result. 

The effect was massive. Iran’s oil revenues collapsed, Mossadegh’s programme was doomed to failure, and the Iranian people condemned to poverty. As opposition grew, Mossadegh found himself becoming increasingly dictatorial in his moves to hold on to power. 

Now the American CIA, far better resourced than Britain’s spy agency MI6, began to take the lead role. Supported by Britain, US intelligence agents organised and funded a movement against Mossadegh. In August 1953, it succeeded, he was brought down, and with that, Iran returned to rule by the Shah — but now more dependent than ever on Western support.

In return, the western powers regained control of the oil.

It would prove to be a decision with long and far-reaching consequences.

A rare opportunity, to move towards a stable, secular and at least slightly democratic system in Iran, was lost. Over the next 26 years, the Shah steadily increased his power. That became particularly significant after the oil shock of 1973, when a surge in oil revenues seemed to put the Shah in a stronger position than ever. The growth in wealth gave him unprecedented power, allowing him to pursue rapid and far-reaching modernisation.

But the pace of change unsettled Iranian society. Economic disruption, social tensions, and growing opposition forced the regime to rely increasingly on repression to maintain control.

Even so, he could not hold the line. Opposition spread across the country, and in the end the army, though still intact, would not act decisively to keep him in power. In 1979, it was his turn to fall.

What replaced him?

Well, another Mossadegh regime might have been something to celebrate. But that wasn’t to be. Instead, out of the many currents that had opposed the Shah, many of them secular, it was the one led by the leading cleric, Ruhollah Khomeini, that took power. Iran was converted into a theocracy, the Islamic Republic. 

A few months later, supporters of the new regime had seized the US embassy in Tehran. Embassy staff were held hostage for 444 days, well over a year.

Within a year of the embassy seizure, Iran was at war with Iraq. It was a horribly bloody war that would last eight years. Despite Iraq’s powerful military, at the time still being armed by the US (who’d be fighting it themselves within twenty years), Iran emerged badly hurt but having lost no territory – effectively a victory from the Iranian point of view.

Khomeini died in 1989 and was succeeded by Ali Khamenei, who would rule for the next 37 years until he was killed at the outbreak of the present war. 

He headed a nation shaped and militarised by the war with Iraq and steeped in anti-American feeling, to which was added hostility towards Israel. It’s his nation which, despite the loss of its leader, is now putting up far stronger resistance to American and Israeli forces than many expected.

The war has inflicted severe damage on Iran and caused major disruption to the global economy, driving up oil prices and restricting the supply of key products such as fertiliser and helium.

Led by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, the United States and Israel appear to have entered the conflict without a clear and agreed set of objectives. So far, the gains are hard to discern.

And the tragedy is that it’s hardly the West’s first error over Iran. It flows from its much earlier mistake. The blunder made 73 years ago. 

Ousting Mossadegh in 1953 certainly benefited oil interests in Britain and the United States. But the price of those short-term gains has been a long chain of consequences — from the Shah’s increasingly repressive rule, to his overthrow, to the establishment of a far more rigid regime — leading to yet another destructive conflict today.

It’s impossible to know what would have happened if Mossadegh had been left in place. There would, I’m sure, have been serious problems. But would they have been as bad as what has actually happened?

I seriously doubt it.

The Spanish fighters again: liberation achieved. And denied.

When we last saw our gutsy Spanish Republican fighters in the French Foreign Legion, they were rather twiddling their thumbs in North Africa waiting for something to change.

Well they did eventually change. And in a big way.

Men of the Nueve with their halftrack Guadalajara

In 1943, the Americans landed in Morocco and, together with British forces, in Algeria. The local French military was still ostensibly supporting the Vichy regime of Marshall Pétain and serving under its orders, which meant Nazi orders. They put up a bit of a fight but soon caved, though not before some three thousand men had been killed and a lot more injured.

At that point, the local leadership, specifically the commander of the French forces, Admiral Darlan, suddenly realised they had always been lifelong democrats and switched to the Allied side. They required little in return, except being kept in office, which might have led to some friction with the Free French and in particular with de Gaulle.

Fortuitously, a young royalist decided the best way to secure the return of the rightful King to the French throne was to assassinate Darlan, which he duly did. It turned out he was wrong, as far as getting the King back was concerned, but he certainly removed a major irritation for de Gaulle.

Meanwhile the Allies, advancing from Morocco in the West and Algeria in the East, eventually drove the German army to defeat in Tunisia. The French, having switched sides, fought with the Allies, and that included the French Foreign Legion, who saw some tough battles, in which its Spanish Republican forces played a key role. And lost many men.

Not all the French forces had had to switch sides. Some soldiers had been with the Free French right from the start. In particular, one idealistic young officer had raised a small force in the French colonies south of the Sahara, marched it across the desert and joined the British effort against General Rommel in Libya.

Leclerc with his Armoured Division, during the liberation of France

His name was Leclerc (well, it was Philippe de Hautecloque, really, and Leclerc was just a nom de guerre which he’d adopted in the hope that it would deflect the attention of the authorities from his family back in occupied France). De Gaulle made him a major general and gave him the Second Armoured Division, the iconic Deuxième DB, to command. It was selected to be the only French unit to be included in the Allied landings in Normandy when they eventually came.

Unfortunately, he only had 4000 men and he needed 15,000. He set out to recruit new soldiers. One group from whom he found it easy to recruit were the Spaniards, who transferred in droves out of the Foreign Legion and into his Deuxième DB. Manuel Fernandez, whom I quoted yesterday, summed things up:

“The ideas of de Gaulle corresponded more to ours than those of the others who’d stayed with Pétain. The officers of the Legion considered us as red Spaniards, as revolutionaries… The senior officers would say to us, ‘you’re not in Spain here. You’re not going to make a revolution here.’ We’d keep quiet. The officers with de Gaulle, on the other hand, said ‘oh, did you fight in Spain? Good…’ The men the officers wanted were Spaniards. We had a certain experience, not just in Spain, but in the campaign in Tunisia too.”

Spanish recruits to the Deuxième DB
parading on the beach in Morocco

From the many Spaniards mobilised into Leclerc’s division, one company, the ninth, was almost exclusively Spanish: 146 out of 160 men. Commanded by a Frenchman, Raymond Dronne, and his number 2, the Spaniard Amado Granell, from Valencia, who had commanded a division in the Civil War, it passed into legend as ‘La Nueve’, ‘The Nine’.

The Deuxième DB landed in France in August 1944. The American high command had committed to allowing French troops to lead the Allies into the French capital.

On the 20^th, an insurrection broke out in Paris, with Resistance units taking action against the Nazi occupiers. De Gaulle asked for and obtained authority to press on to their support as quickly as possible. On the 24^th, Leclerc told Dronne and the Nueve “leave and go to Paris”. They left at 7:30 that evening and by 9:30 the company, supported by a squadron of tanks from the French 501^st armoured regiment, arrived at the Paris Town Hall. There, the first ‘French’ soldier to make contact with the Resistance forces that had taken control was Lieutenant Granell, the officer from Valencia who had held general rank in the Spanish Civil War.

The next day, as well as attacking several key points around the City, Spanish soldiers also accepted the surrender of the German Commander and took him into custody, before handing him over to French authorities.

The men who had fought so hard to keep Spain free, at least had the satisfaction of leading the liberation of France’s capital.

One of the halftracks in the parade down the Champs-Elysées
celebrating the liberation of Paris

The action in Paris wasn’t the Nueve’s last. They fought on through the rest of the war, even reaching Berchtesgaden and Hitler’s hilltop eerie, the Eagle’s Nest. By then though, only 16 of the 146 Spaniards of the combat were still fit for combat. They had lost 35 dead and 97 wounded.

Captain Dronne, their commander, said of them:

Some of them are experiencing a clear moral crisis due to the losses we've suffered and above all to the events in Spain.

The Spaniards who fought with the French had hoped that after overthrowing Fascism in Italy and principally in Germany, the Western Powers would turn their attention to Spain and finish it off there too. It wouldn’t happen.

The best slant to put on that decision is that the Western Powers had bled enough in the war and they didn’t want to fight another. That may be partly true. But Franco was no Hitler, the Army he led no Wehrmacht. Overthrowing his regime would not have required anything like the force or the losses that the battle against the Nazis had cost.

The less honourable explanation is that the West was already turning its attention against the Soviet Union. Far from wanting to take on Franco’s rather eccentric brand of Fascism – he was always more of a Franquist than a Fascist – they preferred to concentrate their efforts against Communism. In that fight, Franco could if anything be something of an ally, just as soon as he could be brought out of his pariah state. Which happened in the fifties, when the easing of measures against his regime was the price paid for stationing American forces in Spanish territory.

Ultimately the thousands of Spanish Republicans who fought and died for France and for the freedom of their own country, would be let down. “We weren’t fighting for a flag,” Manuel Fernandez would tell the 2017 documentary makers, “we were fighting for ideas”. They were fighting for freedom, in their country as well as France.

Well, they were cheated of that goal. But at the very least, we owe it to them to remember their sacrifices and their courage.

The lesson for me? Even in Europe, the Second World War didn’t start on 1 September 1939. It began on 17 July 1936, with the nationalist uprising against the Second Spanish Republic.

Nor should it have ended when it did. Once they’d finished off Hitler and Mussolini, the Western Powers should have seen off their ally Franco. Which means the war would not have ended in Europe on 8 May 1945.

But it did. With the work not quite done. Sadly.

Poignancy

All Saints Day. The day after Halloween. You could tell here in Madrid, if only because some of the people we saw had clearly not finished celebrating from the night before.

Halloween revellers in the Madrid metro
Heading home late the morning after

We were in Madrid because that’s where my company’s offices are. My ex-company. That ‘ex’ is the reason I had to visit the office at all. Because, while an event that should have happened on Halloween didn’t, one that shouldn’t have, did.

31 October was the latest date that Britain was to leave the EU. This was absolutely clear. To Boris Johnson, Prime Minister, it was a matter of ‘do or die’. Indeed, he said he would rather die in a ditch than accept that he had to get a further extension to the Brexit timetable.

But he didn’t do Brexit by the deadline he set. Nor did he die. A ditch? No trace of one in his existence yet. It’s enough to make one wonder whether one can entirely trust his word. Many tell me that you know that Boris is lying by the fact that he’s breathing. However, as my American friends can no doubt testify, you just don’t get pathological liars leading major nations.

Do you?

So no Brexit. Or at least not yet.

On the other hand, the event that wasn’t supposed to happen was my brusque and involuntary departure from the company. Halloween was the day of my latest redundancy. But at least, on this occasion, I’m going out on a high. This was undoubtedly the best job I’ve had, with the best boss and the best team. What’s more, a great many people with whom the team worked have written to say how much they’re going to miss us. My quarrel isn’t with anyone I know but only with people who haven’t the faintest idea about what the team was doing. Just a pity that, despite knowing so little, they were the ones taking the decisions.

Good memories accompany my departure, and contacts I hope will endure, with former colleagues who are also good friends.

We took advantage of our presence in Madrid to see our sons and their partners and, in particular, our new granddaughter Matilda.

Matilda appreciating life

It was on our way to one of those visits that I was struck by a statue near the metro station we were using. It’s dedicated to the “Atocha lawyers”. They were members of a group involved in the defence of workers’ rights in the early years of democracy, after the death of the dictator Franco. On 24 January 1977, far right terrorists attacked them, leaving five dead and four injured.

Monument to the Atocha Lawyers

The main targets of the attackers were trades union leaders from the Communist Party, at that time still banned. Ironically, its legalisation was accelerated by the attack. That’s the response we should all have to terrorism: when our rights are attacked, we should respond by strengthening of those rights. That’s not always the case: since the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox in England, the momentum for Brexit, which she loathed, has if anything increased.

The statue in Madrid is a moving reminder of how costly it can sometimes be to defend rights. And how important.

Equally touching was a pair of paintings I saw in one of my favourite galleries, the Thyssen-Bornemisza. The first was a portrait of Quappi in a Pink Jumper, full of affection but also of forceful personality. 

Powerful, intriguing portrait by Beckmann
Quappi in a Pink Jumper

I hadn’t previously come across the painter, Max Beckmann. He was German, but he died in the US, and the painting was dated 1932-1934. Which places it in just the time Hitler was coming to power.

Max Beckmann in one of his many self-portraits

Later, I looked him up. When Hitler denounced ‘degenerate art’ in 1937, many of Beckmann’s canvasses were seized and some were included in the degenerate art exhibition of that year. He fled with his wife to Amsterdam, where he somehow managed to survive the war and German occupation, in the course of which the attempt was made to force him into the German Army, even though he was 60.

In 1948, they left Europe for the US where he renewed a successful career not just as an artist, but as a teacher. Far too short a career, as longstanding heart disease killed him in 1950 at the age of 66 (my own age, so I can testify that it’s far too young to die).

According to his widow, he had been on his way to see one of his paintings in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

And who was that widow? Why, the Quappi of the painting. It seems that the affection it radiates isn’t simply art. It reflects a real sentiment.

Degenerate art? How could the failed painter Hitler have any idea of what was good or what wasn’t? And what a disgraceful abuse of power it was to oppress men like Beckmann, as it was to murder the Atocha lawyers.

The US gained by Germany’s attempt to crush Beckmann. As the Spanish Communist Party benefited from the right-wing attempt on some of its leaders. A lesson worth remembering at a time when many in America, or Britain, seem indifferent to the value of tolerating opposing views to one’s own.

My Halloween trip was full of poignant moments. Leaving a much-loved job. Seeing some much-loved family members. And admiring two works of art dedicated to the protection of much-loved freedoms.

Have a happy Independence Day. But maybe remember what it means too

Twelve score and three years ago, the fathers of our cousins across the Atlantic, brought forth on their continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Well, all men in the strictly limited sense of the word ‘man’. Women weren’t given the vote or anything radical like that. And even amongst men, it wasn’t really every man. The main author of the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, was a slaveowner himself and able to live with the notion that anyone black amongst men created in supposed equality, could be held in slavery, his rights being pretty much equal to those of livestock.

Roger Taney, Chief Justice of the USA
who denied African-American any rights a white man was bound to respect

The fact that slavery existed at the same time as the founding fathers issued the Declaration of Independence, suggested to many that its lofty sentiments were only ever intended to apply to whites. This led, as I’ve pointed out before, to what today is a shocking claim at the conclusion of the Dred Scott case in 1857. Chief Justice of the United States, Roger Taney, declared in his judgement that from the earliest days of the nation, ‘negroes’ were seen as inferior and, indeed, “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

There have been many cases, for instance of police shootings of black men, which rather suggest that some still feel that African Americans have no rights a white man is bound to respect.

Nor were all white men precisely equal. Most of the states of the time applied fancy franchise rules, with the vote only available to those who held certain levels of wealth. There was a widespread feeling around the western world at the time that those without property had nothing to lose from political decisions, and might therefore act recklessly if they were given a say in them.

But none of that really matters. Or rather, it matters a great deal, but only to show the way humanity makes progress: through compromise, through half measures, through what may sometimes seem nothing less than hypocrisy. Despite all the contradictions and equivocations, the Constitution that was written based on Jefferson’s powerful words, has stood the test of time remarkably well, surviving a devastating civil war that led to the abolition of slavery; the often brutal measures to repress the women’s suffrage movement; and the authoritarian attempts to hijack the Constitution during the McCarthy era.

Senator Joseph McCarthy:
tried to distort the US Constitution into authoritarianism

Through its existence, it has been a beacon to millions around the world. When that Constitution was launched, ‘democracy’ was a derogatory term in Europe. It implied chaotic rule by the masses, by their nature incapable of rule and opening the door to anarchy. When Lincoln claimed, in the Gettysburg address, that the aim of his war was to ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”, he wasn’t exaggerating. Precious few parts of the Earth allowed the people much of a say in government; Lincoln’s efforts ensured that rather more of the US people had such a say; the enfranchisement of women half a century later extended that for the first time to a majority of the people. The other nations we now think of as democracies followed in the wake of the United States.

It is, therefore, hard to overstate the importance of the event the US celebrates on 4 July, not just for Americans but for the world. Certainly, it took a lot longer to come even close to recognising that all men, and women, should be seen as equal, and we’re still far from realising that equality in practice. But at least the aspiration has been there since 1776 and we’ve slowly moved towards it.

Sadly, the vision Jefferson and his contemporaries championed, flawed and contradictory as it may have been, but still profoundly invigorating and freeing in the long term, is now more under threat than ever. Donald Trump is once more trying to distort the Constitution in an authoritarian direction, as Senator McCarthy did in the fifties – but this time with the power of the White House behind him.

So perhaps today’s celebrations need to be a little muted. Among the festivities, Americans need to realise that a man elected under the provisions of the Constitution is undermining it. And, to adapt Lincoln’s words once more, they should highly resolve that those who preceded them shall not have struggled in vain, and continue the fight to ensure that a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all and not just some people have an equal right to freedom, can indeed endure.

Donald Trump:
trying McCarthy's trick again, but with the power of the White House

The fine British tradition of wishing Americans well on Independence Day

Best wishes to all my American friends, this fourth of July.

I say that with complete sincerity, even though I’m British, and the celebration is of American independence from Britain. In fact, by wishing them well on this day, I’m merely perpetuating a tradition fully rooted in Britain. It stretches back to the time of that breach, nearly two and a half centuries ago.

The names of many of the leaders of the American side in that struggle still resonate today. Men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton or Benjamin Franklin, though we draw a delicate veil over the inconvenient truth that the first two of those champions of liberty were slave owners, and the other two endorsed a constitution which allowed them to continue.

Their opposite numbers in Britain are far less well remembered. Maybe some retain a vague sense that there were two William Pitts, the elder and his son the younger, and even maybe that they both became Prime Minister. Some still recall the name of Edmund Burke, if only as the father of modern Conservatism. And there may even be those who remember the great wit and maverick, rival of the younger Pitt, Charles James Fox.

Pitt the Elder, Pitt the Younger, Charles James Fox, Edmund Burke

If I had to pick four figures who stand out as extraordinary from that period of British history, it would certainly be those. And they stand head and shoulders above those who prosecuted the war against the Americans, most notably King George III and his Prime Minister, Lord North.

What did those four have to say about British action against the colonists?

In 1775, even before the Declaration of Independence was issued, the elder Pitt, by then Earl of Chatham, by then already suffering from his final illness, came into the House of Lords to call for conciliation of the colonists:

We shall be forced ultimately to retract. Let us retract while we can, not when we must.

On 12 June 1781, his 22-year old son, by then a Member of Parliament himself, made his own heartfelt declaration about the conflict in America to the House of Commons:

It is a most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust and diabolical war… Where is the Englishman who on reading the narrative of those bloody and well-fought contests can refrain lamenting the loss of so much British blood shed in such a cause, or from weeping on whatever side victory might be declared?

The British blood whose loss he lamented was being shed on both sides – like most of his contemporaries, he saw this fight as pitting British subjects against British subjects.

Charles James Fox said something similar, speaking presciently to denounce Lord North’s behaviour towards the colonists in October 1775. He was:

the blundering pilot who had brought the nation into its present difficulties ... Lord Chatham, the King of Prussia, nay, Alexander the Great, never gained more in one campaign than the noble lord has lost—he has lost a whole continent.

In a pamphlet of April 1777, Edmund Burke was even blunter in his denunciation of British government policy:

When any community is subordinately connected with another, the great danger of the connection is the extreme pride and self-complacency of the superior, which in all matters of controversy will probably decide in its own favour…

They have been told that their dissent from violent measures is an encouragement to rebellion. Men of great presumption will hold a language which is contradicted by a whole course of history. General rebellion and revolts of an whole people were never encouraged, now or at any time. They were always provoked.

The government had provoked the uprising against its rule. But it wasn’t an uprising against Britain, only against certain British leaders. Burke, Irish born and therefore aware of what oppression from London could feel like, knew what he was talking about and backed an opposition that would have hoped to do things differently had it been in office.

It was indeed the short government in which he held ministerial office that ultimately forced the King to recognise American independence.

It’s not the outlook of the men who waged a brutal and futile war in North America, but that of these outstanding figures, that I’d like to emulate.

And it’s in the spirit that I wish all my American friends a happy July the fourth.

A Low cautionary tale

Do you know David Low's cartoons?

Low was a New Zealander who spent most of his working life in Britain. There he developed a style of sharp satirical cartoons on the politics of his time - particularly from the 1920s through to the postwar period - which can still be counted on to generate smiles. More to the point, they have a quality which makes them highly relevant today.

Keeping the hate fires burning in 1920
to block the League of Nations

For instance, he ridiculed the inability of the powers of his time to give the League of Nations - forerunner of the United Nations - any real clout as an organisation to preserve international peace after the bloodbath of the First World War. Instead, the most powerful nations, in his words, seemed to want to "keep the hate fires burning".

He saw the tariffs imposed on imports by the US as nothing short of an aggressive act - and hypocritical too, given American demands on Europe. Indeed, Low would point out later that it's hard to expect to earn income from exports to, say, Europe if you're starving Europe of the funds they need to buy their imports. Counterproductive, you might say.

1929: tariffs can be as aggressive as an act of war

This cartoon, of tariffs as a gigantic artillery piece, was drawn in July 1929, only three months before the US economy was brought down by the great Wall Street crash. That might just be a lesson for Trump supporters wanting to make America "great again" by abandoning free trade raising protective tariff barriers, as they have done just recently.

Nationalism was a recipe for disaster to Low. In 1933, with Hitler in power in Germany, he satirised the powers who, on a raft of "world statesmanship" with nobody rowing, adrift on chaotic seas of economic nationalism, debated whether to pull together but failed to do so.

In 1933, the powers fail to pull together against the chaos
of economic nationalism

The result was that "Civilisation 1933" was reduced to a series of nations hiding in their own molehills, refusing not only to work with together but even to see each other.

Civilisation in 1933: the nations down their boltholes

Low painted a dismal picture of the world. But isn't it sadly similar to today's? Where the League of Nations was being undermined in the twenties and thirties, today Britain is setting out to undermine another institution for international collaboration, the EU, by pulling out and retreating into economic nationalism. The same economic nationalism Low saw as a source of chaos in the 1920s. Meanwhile, in Trump the US has a President committed to isolation behind tariff walls, and even physical walls along its borders. Other nations too have hard right parties keen to emulate the American and British examples of isolationism.

In some cases, indeed, it isn't just the hard right. The far left sometimes come close to the far right in its commitment to nationalist economics. There is a trend on the left in Britain, for instance, indistinguishable from the populist right in its commitment not just to Brexit but to a hard Brexit.

Oh, well. Perhaps today's nationalists have forgotten that back then, isolationism led to rather a spot of bother in Europe between 1939 and 1945. After all, these aren't the only lessons nationalists and xenophobes have forgotten, with Muslims attacked today as Jews were in Low's times. Walls between peoples are going up as quickly as those between nations. 

Colonel Jessop, powerfully portrayed by Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, proclaims, "we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns." As Low showed in 1929, those guns don't have to be actual firearms - economic measures can be just as damaging. But let's not forget that ultimately the problems of the thirties led to a shooting war with real guns - that particular spot of bother left between 50 and 80 million dead.

The charm of Low's cartoons is that they provide us a satirical smile along with a cautionary lesson on the sad effects of going down that road again.

Healthcare: doing the right thing and finding the right words to say it

Every now and then a conference – and I’m at one now – is enlivened by masterful presentation, brimming with insights on vital matters, the whole sharpened and enhanced by intelligent use of humour.

Such was the talk given by Walter Ricciardi, President of the Italian National Institute of Health. It was entitled From evidence to action in health policy making: a mission impossible? His subject was how senior clinicians concerned with the strategic direction of health, and convinced of the value of practising evidence-based medicine (the theme of the conference) could work with politicians in government to take the necessary decisions.

Walter Ricciardi
Witty, insightful and spot on about the need to get it right – and say it right

I’m keen on evidence-based medicine. That may sound like a trivial statement: who wouldn’t be? Well, you might be surprised how often medical decisions are taken on the basis of a clinician’s gut feel, or confidence that years of experience are enough, rather than evidence. Worse still, they’re often taken on the basis of politics: for instance, the UK government has made funds available to allow GP practices to stay open later, without putting in place any kind of process to check whether the move leads to any of the desired effects – most notably reducing attendances at Emergency Departments of hospitals.

The reason why Ricciardi feels this kind of discussion is vital now is the well-known observation that demand for healthcare seems to keep climbing uninterruptedly, as the population of the advanced economies ages and the technology available for care increases in sophistication (and cost). As he suggested, there has to be a limit to the amount society can sensibly be asked to invest in healthcare.

That reminded me of a presentation I attended some years ago, when one of the speakers pointed out that, on present trends, the USA would be spending 100% of its GDP on healthcare by the end of this century. That’s clearly impossible – something has to go into schools and roads and things, to say nothing (this is the USA we’re talking about, after all) about defence. So what is the maximum US citizens will accept? 50%? Surely that’s too high. 30%? It’s hard to imagine. 20%? If so, things are urgent indeed: they’re already spending 18%.

That’s without even providing full healthcare coverage for the whole population.

Limiting healthcare expenditure, wherever the limit lies, means that at some stage we’re going to have to start denying care. That’s where evidence-based medicine comes in. There are a great many treatments that could be denied without doing patients any harm – indeed, where the denial would do them good.

At one end of the scale, prescribing antibiotics for viral conditions harms us all and does no good to the patient.

At the other end, intense and highly expensive interventions for a patient with a fatal condition can wreck the end of a life and incur huge waste.

We have to start finding a way to avoid this kind of wasteful, if not downright harmful, way of practising medicine.

That’s where Ricciardi turned up the humour a notch or two. He suggested that the people who understand the issues have a vocabulary of 140,000 words; the general public, and he included politicians in that category, a mere 7000.

I don’t know where those numbers came from. Frankly I find them highly questionable. In fact, I’m inclined to ask, where’s the evidence? However, the underlying point is worth making: specialists in medical information need to find a way of communicating the case for some of these notions more effectively to the population. They need to persuade politicians of the need for action, and help the politicians find the words to express their decision in a way voters will accept.

At this point he made a point I found particularly amusing, though he may have meant it seriously. He referred to Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, as intelligent and honest. It was wonderful to see how the English in the room all started in their seats and shuddered: Juncker is viewed as a figure of derision in England. He’s disliked in a great many countries, but it was striking how much stronger the English reaction was.

He went on to quote Juncker as saying, “we know what to do. We just don’t know how to get elected afterwards.”

Jean-Claude Juncker: a smart and honest politician?
Not according to the English, but are they right?

Now, that really is both honest and true. The things that need doing are tough to make popular. A politician that does them may indeed find it hard to win office again.

There’s an excellent example in Ricciardi’s own country, Italy: the Italian government has taken an extraordinarily courageous decision, to make childhood vaccinations compulsory. The anti-vax movement has reached dangerously high levels, with herd immunity being lost and long-vanished diseases like measles and mumps making an appearance again. The government took the action necessary, based on the mass of evidence available: the potential harms of the vaccinations are less serious and less common than those of the diseases they eradicate.

But will they have persuaded the voters that the decision was right? Popular anger in response to the measure was intense and widespread. We’ll see in next year’s elections how well the government has done in taking popular opinion with it.

It’s important to practise evidence-based medicine. But it’s just as important to find the words to explain what you’re doing. The former is what we have to do but, without the latter, the politicians who do it will be unable to stop their achievements being unravelled by their successors.

A sneaking admiration for Trump

I never thought I’d write these words, but I feel a little wry admiration for Donald Trump right now.

Even more amazing, that admiration is about the level of intelligence – or at least cunning – he’s shown. That’s surprising because I’ve come to think of him as one of the dumbest politicians around. Isn’t it odd how the Republican Party has managed to outdo itself each time it’s won the White House recently, following an accelerating downward trajectory? 

It’s clear these days that Reagan was already suffering from the Alzheimer’s that fully declared itself after he stepped down. George H. W. Bush was staggeringly incoherent. Dubya needed documents summarised for himself, presumably using short words only. And now Trump’s smartest comment on the presidency was that it turns out to be harder than he thought (“I thought it would be easier”).

What a brilliant insight that is.

Against that setting, you just have to pause in at least a little wonder at the way he’s handled the firing of James Comey as Director of the FBI. 

Trump and Comey: a drama of craftiness. Nastiness too

Follow the steps carefully.

First Comey revealed, on 28 October 2016, that the FBI was investigating another batch of e-mails of Hillary Clinton’s to establish whether they were evidence of a criminal act. 28 October. The election took place on 8 November, just eleven days later. On 6 November, he announced that there were no grounds for a prosecution – but that was only two days before the election and the damage was done. 

The fault for losing was certainly Hillary’s, for a poorly run campaign, but there’s no doubt that Comey nailed her coffin lid shut: without his intervention, states like Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania which Trump won by excruciatingly tight margins, might have tipped into her camp and her victory in the popular vote would have been turned into a victory overall, giving her the White House.

But then Comey turned on the man he’d helped elect. He let it be known that the FBI was actively investigating links between the Trump campaign and the Russian secret services. However enthusiastic it was about the 28 October revelations, the Trump administration was unlikely to be quite as pleased about these ones. 

It’s hard to grasp what Comey could have been about. Was he trying to be even-handed? If so, it turned out to be misguided.

Next Comey appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on 3 May and gave blundering testimony which had to be “clarified” (i.e. corrected) later.

Now comes the final act. This is where Trump displayed his cunning. On 9 May, Trump fired Comey – but not for the Russia investigation. Oh, no. For his actions in the Clinton case.

Talk about win-win. Trump gets the bump eleven days out from the election that the revelations provided. Then he can use exactly those revelations to fire the man that made them, when he became embarrassing in turn.

Pretty cunning, isn’t it? Low cunning, maybe, but cunning all the same.

Except, of course, if I can see through it, so can most people. It’s a pretty crass manoeuvre obviously guided by pure self-interest. And whatever Trump does, the pressure on him isn’t going to let up. In fact, the pressure keeps growing precisely because of what Trump does.

Not cause for all that much admiration, then. But when you’re talking about Trump, you don’t wonder about how much admiration you can have for him. You wonder at feeling any admiration at all.

Down Memory Lane. A frighteningly long way

It was with some pride that I realised, in my thirties, that I remembered events in my life that had happened twenty years earlier, even though I had been practically adult at the time. It felt like a sign of growing maturity. But then, some years on, it struck me that I was talking to my sons about thirty-year old memories, and remembered how, at their age, I’d been shocked when my parents had talked about such things. With my conscious mind, I knew it was possible to remember things that old, but something deeper in my being simply couldn’t adapt to the notion.

This morning I boarded a plane for a destination which brought back a fifty-year old memory. Fifty years. Half a century. It makes me feel like a living history book. Only history measures matters in fractions or multiples of a century.

The destination was Philadelphia – or Philly, as I’m assured I should call it – and I was last there when I was fourteen. Practically half a century, since in two weeks I shall start a year of boring all around me by asking them whether they’ll still be sending me a Valentine, birthday greetings, bottle of wine.

My parents were living in New York at the time. I travelled to Philly with my then girlfriend’s family. They were artists and they were taking us to see an exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Museum. Only one canvas sticks in my mind: it was the first time I’d seen a “white-on-white”. The artist – for such, I was assured, he was – had gone to considerable trouble to screen print white paint onto a white canvas.

White on White: profoundly meaningful. Right?

Callow, uncouth youth that I was, I couldn’t bring myself to take this seriously as a piece of art. How shall I put this? Translating a fine old Anglo-Saxon expression into more clinical terms – I don’t want to shock, after all – I was more inclined to view it as extracting the urine.

Of course, fifty years on I’ve become far more sophisticated in my appreciation of art. Today, I fully grasp the concept that behind such a piece of work lies a great mind, a fount of insight, generating a message of complexity and power.

It’s just, sadly, that I still don’t grasp it.

It’s fun to be back in Philly, half a century on. The place where the colonists first declared they’d had enough of their British overlords. It’s a sentiment with which, as a subject today of the descendants of those same overlords, I entirely sympathise.

In fact, it was a little odd, when I made my way into the plane, to discover that the greeting message was being spoken in a British accent. English, indeed. Home counties, even. I’m told it’s an accent, like the Scottish one back home, that’s trusted out here.

My advice? Be less trusting. I know people with that accent who have my confidence but plenty, sadly, who don’t – many of them in government.

I shall enjoy my brief stay here. Even if it does remind me of how old I’ve become. Still, as I always say, there really is only one way of not growing old.

That’s to die young. That was never an attractive proposition. In any case, it’s a great deal too late for me to adopt it.

Our age of political dilettantism...

Ken Loach is a great film maker. I could perhaps have done without the hackneyed story line of The Wind that Shook the Barley, but The Navigators or Sweet Sixteen are masterpieces as is, in a different genre, The Angels’ Share.

So I have great admiration for him in film, the area where he does outstanding work.

A scene from Sweet Sixteen: film-making is what Loach does best

Sadly, however, he’s recently decided to speak out on politics. Here his performance strikes me as rather more underwhelming. In fact, it strikes me as a pity that he’s wandered into this field at all – forbearance might have suited him much better.

He was quoted in the Guardian saying, “The deselection of MPs is presented as a threat [but] it is not a job for life. Labour party members have the right to be represented by someone they choose.”

Labour Party members, and I speak as one myself, have no such right. We shouldn’t try to arrogate it to ourselves. Our right is to select a candidate. Our duty is to try to choose one who is the best placed to represent the interests of those most requiring protection in the system in which we live. In other words, we should select candidates who, if elected, will be particularly good at representing those the Labour Party is committed to serve.

That doesn’t necessarily mean representing their views, but their interests. But it doesn’t mean representing them – voters and, above all, the least privileged of voters – not the membership of the Labour Party.

To me, the lesson of Loach’s foray into Labour politics seems that it’s probably better not to let amateurs (like him or, indeed, like me) call the shots. Which makes it all the more frightening to contemplate the other great political amateur of the day. He, sadly, hasn’t just made some silly statements about politics, but has been elected to the most powerful political office in the world, the Presidency of the United States.

Elected, that is, not by winning a majority of voters – he received 1.7m votes fewer than his opponent Hillary Clinton – but by dint of winning a majority in the electoral college that ultimately chooses the president. That makes him president-elect but it doesn’t make him the choice of the people, even though he speaks as though he had the authority such a mandate would give him.

Another popular vote that he certainly didn’t win was that of the British electorate. In Britain, he has all the authority – unfortunately – that holding the world’s most powerful office confers. He holds no authority to speak for Britain. So it was amusing in a dry kind of way when Donald Trump told the British government that it ought to appoint Nigel Farage as British ambassador to the States.

It was no surprise that Trump should make that particular choice. Farage leads the United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP, a thoroughly toxic organisation which uses xenophobia for a cover for what is actually downright racism. He is, in other words, a man very much after Trump’s heart.

What was more surprising was that Trump seemed to feel that his election, which will mean a huge change in personnel in Washington, would lead to a similar night of the long knives in London. Above all, he felt he had a say in the process.

In a long and not always salutary history – British behaviour towards the Americas left a lot to be desired, for instance, and there were far more deplorable incidents elsewhere – Britain has at least developed a reasonably sophisticated way of dealing with bumptious fools in diplomacy. liked pleased with the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary's response to Trump’s suggestion for a new ambassador.

“There is no vacancy,” they said.

From opposite ends of the political spectrum, Loach and Trump illustrate the same point, that amateurs do best to keep out of politics.

Loach is a man of huge talent. He ought to focus on the area where he shines. Trump, of course, is talentless.

Perhaps he could just sink into deserved obscurity at the earliest opportunity?

There are lies, damned lies and straight bigotry. Then there are right-wing campaign pledges

How appropriate it is that ‘post-truth’ has been selected by the Oxford Dictionaries as the new word of the year.

It doesn’t refer to what happens after the truth. The ‘post’ means beyond the time a notion was relevant, as in ‘post-modernism’, the concept which expresses the baby-boomer conviction that modernity ended with their youth. After all, we invented sex, as Philip Larkin pointed out:

Sexual intercourse began 
In nineteen sixty-three 
(which was rather late for me) – 
Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban 
And the Beatles' first LP.

Post-truth is our current period in which truth is merely an optional, and not particularly desirable, adjunct to political discourse. There was a time when one felt politicians made unrealistic promises, or promises that were far-fetched aspirations rather than real deliverables, but avoided downright lies.

Not any more.

In Britain, the point was made powerfully during the Brexit campaign. Supporters promised leaving the EU would release £350m a week for the NHS. They knew the EU didn’t cost £350m a week and that any funds would be needed for other purposes, but that didn’t stop them.

Once they’d won their campaign, they simply announced that well, no, the money wouldn’t actually be available. But who cared? The point was to win, not to deliver.

The other side was as bad, of course. They claimed the economy would collapse if the electorate voted for Brexit. Because that didn’t happen many Brexiteers are now trumpeting the success of Britain outside the EU. That’s before the country’s even started the process of leaving. It also ignores the timelag, measured in months or even years, that economic change requires to make its effects felt.

Many have pointed to the links between Brexit and Trump’s campaign in the States. Rightly. Even if post-truth is their only common feature.

Let’s take one of Trump’s more toxic pledges. He promoted building a wall along the US-Mexico border to keep immigrants out. Now, though, Trump is admitting that stretches of his ‘wall’ would be more accurately described as ‘fence’. Much of that fence is already in place and it doesn’t work.

But he also had less vile ideas, even if he expressed them with ugly violence. ‘Drain the swamp’ is a brutal way of putting it, but who would oppose the underlying idea, of ending corruption and the power of naked money in Washington?

What, though, has Trump done since his victory? He has appointed four members of his immediate family to his transition team. One of them, Jared Kushner, is the son of Charles Kushner. In 2005, Charles was in federal prison on 18 counts of tax evasion, witness tampering and making illegal campaign donations.

Now, that’s not a reason for turning on his son: I don’t believe in visiting the sins of the father on the next generation. No, where the story turns ugly is when we come to Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, a keen Trump supporter who was expected to chair his Transition team. He had, however, been the very US Attorney who prosecuted Charles Kushner, describing his jailing as a “great victory for the people of New Jersey”. 

I like to picture the scene as Christie found himself in meetings with the son of the man he had jailed with such gloating triumph, and realised the victim’s son was going to have a major say over his political aspirations. The arrangement would prove career-limiting for Christie, who soon had to make his excuses and leave.

Kushner And Trump
The power behind the throne alongside its occupant?

He wasn’t the only one to go. An ally of Christie’s, Mike Rogers, previously a national security adviser to Trump, was the next out, followed on Wednesday of this week by Kevin O’Connor, another man close to Christie, who’d been leading on Justice matters in the Transition team.

So Trump has started the process of draining the swamp by appointing his son-in-law and giving him the power to settle old scores.

Meanwhile, he’s also appointed Steve Bannon Chief Strategist and Senior Counsellor. Bannon owes his reputation to promoting White Supremacist views on his Breitbart website, mouthpiece for the ‘alt-right’ (another candidate term for Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year, as a less offensive synonym of ‘crypto-fascist’).

As well as his track record for racial harmony, Bannon brings in a flavour of high finance, as a former Goldman Sachs executive. In other words, he represents precisely the kind of arrogant banking interests that made the swamp Trump claims to want to drain.

It seems that Trump didn’t really intend to drain the swamp any more than he planned to build his wall. But then, that wasn’t the purpose of the exercise, was it? Like the £350m a week for the NHS, this wasn’t a policy, just a trap for votes. It achieved its purpose not by being delivered itself, but by delivering a victory to the campaign that voiced it.

Truth? Who needs it when victory is more easily gained without? This is the post-truth epoch.

Oh well. These things are temporary. Perhaps someday we can make ‘post-far-right-lies’ the new term of the year.