Steve_Bamlett_blog

I ought to apologise to Alexander Pope for twisting his tritest lines – the opening of ‘Epistles to Several Persons: Epistle II: To a Lady on the Characters of Women. But the lines are indeed trite and bear nothing much beside the most rank misogyny – but pointed at political women. But it does have one important feature – it is the best expression of the use of the word ‘character’ to indicate moral qualities that also lend to persons a kind of stolid solidity, an earnestness that Oscar Wilde also played with as the very opposite of his flippant character studies of the lighly given rich.

But there is a sense that the political tragedies of our own age are being created by lack of character – an earnest belief that principles matter and are not exchangeable for attempts at popularity that are themselves misguided. I am not ready to write my blog on this but have been so appalled by having just read Chapter 7 of the wonderful new book, Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza, by Peter Oborne, which politicians, the press and pundits have, in line with its truthful messages about them, been so keen to keep from the public overview, as Peter says in a tweet on Twitter (or X as we have to call it).

That chapter, named ‘The Political Formation of Sir Keir Starmer‘, tells not only of his lack of principle, but also his retreat from a belief in international law (paradoxically best defended in the history of international relations by Margaret Thatcher as the book shows). It was Starmer who engaged in the international case against Serbia in relation to accusations of genocide in Croatia, defining genocide in a manner that fits perfectly the case against Israel in Gaza. It is this definition that he has abandoned solely to maintain his own power in a party he further destroys daily and the hold over it of the Right and the lobbyists for an apartheid State, that is using its wins from genocide in order to further deplete Palestinian livelihoods in the Occupied West Bank by approving aggressive new colonial settlement there, on land farmed by Palestinians.

Let no-one think that those of us who refuse to accept being branded antisemitic because we despise age-old settler-colonialism, usually tied with apartheid creating imposed favour to a culture and/or ethnicity and its processes, themselves complicit historically with genocide – in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and so on. Of course the ones who completed their genocide now admit it and some cry some tears, but in Israel the process is still occurring in front of our eyes, backed by unequal treatment to groups on ethnic grounds and an aggressive policy of immigration based on selective criteria.

Antisemitism is an evil, but its increase is precisely the effect of tying its definition to the defence of Zionism not the well-being of diaspora Jews. That increase is not, and never will be, justifiable but its authors in Israel and the USA (not Jews – there is no Jewish conspiracy – but people tied to the ‘security of their grasp of assets in the region of the Middle East) knew what they were doing when they made it inevitable.

The end of the chapter makes the sad case of the drift that replaced ‘character’ in Sir Keir Starmer clear.

Sad. But the least anyone should do is read Oborne’s book. It is fortunately not the moral judgement on a slippery politician that matters but the fate of Arab integrity in the face of world onslaught on Muslim races, and those supported in their midst – the Christians in Gaza for instance.

With love

Steven xxxxxxxx