BREXIT PLUS PLUS PLUS.

 

ADVANCE OF THE RIGHT.

The same anti establishment roar of anger that is taking Britain out of the EU has now landed us with President Trump.

The comparisons between the two seismic events are uncanny. Donald Trump in particular, and Nigel Farage to a lesser extent, broke the conventional rules and became “the bloke at the bar” to get past the elite and appeal to the “left behind”. The same tactics of flirting with racism and wild exaggeration were used by both men. Millions of Turks were due to settle in Britain according to Farage. Turkey is not even close to EU membership. Trump is pledged to deport two million illegal criminal immigrants. There are 178,000.

UKIP has indulged in endless infighting, Trump made lewd remarks about women. None of it mattered. Indeed the unseemly behaviour seems to add to the “authenticity” of Trump and Farage. The establishment right in the UK and America have been unable to handle the disruption. David Cameron was forced to concede a referendum which destroyed his career. Donald Trump, not a real Republican at all, managed to see off 15 rivals in the primaries.

And one more similarity, the polls. This is now the third time in 18 months they have got it wrong. Last year we were heading for a hung parliament, last June we were voting to Remain, last weekend Hillary Clinton was going to win the White House. The polls didn’t pick up shy Tories and enough pro Leavers. With Trump you had the classic candidate where people would hide their intention to vote for such a man.

RETREAT OF THE LEFT.

Hillary Clinton is the latest victim of the collapse of the centre left in European and American politics. They have no answer to the problems of the world where a refugee crisis is fuelled by terrorism and globalisation has left millions behind. Extremists want to polarise us and they are succeeding in a frightening way. Watch out for the German and French elections next year.

Clinton would have made a good President but had accumulated too much political baggage over three decades in the public eye. She never fully won over the Bernie Sanders radicals. She was sabotaged by the FBI over her emails and she couldn’t defy history. Only once since the Second World War has the White House been won by the same party three times on the run.

WHAT NOW ?

Trump has made a large number of dangerous promises. Will he actually build that wall on the Mexican border? It will be compared to the Berlin Wall and America will be shamed. Will be try and ban all Moslems? That will delight ISIS and violate the constitution. Will he repudiate the NATO pledge that an attack on one is an attack on all? Conscription is back in Lithuania. And will he tear up all those foreign trade treaties?

You can see where we’re going. In the UK and the US we’re pulling up the drawbridges, turning in on ourselves, allowing racists to feel a sense of legitimacy.

One final thought, The Donald will have the nuclear weapons codes. Dark times indeed.

Follow me at www.jimhancock.co.uk

A VORTEX OF VIOLENCE OR LONG TERM REMEDIES

 

We may have to live with terrorism for generations but there are things that can be done to try and avoid us getting into the vortex of violence that the Parisian madmen want us to descend into.

It is not in any way to give a scintilla of justification to what happened in Paris to suggest that the massacre has historic links to Britain and France’s colonial past. History is a rolling story with one event linked to another. In the 1920s our two countries carved up the Middle East with no regard to the local Arab interest. Britain promised a homeland for the Jews whilst promising to protect the interests of the Palestinian Arabs.

When the colonial era ended and the Arabs became responsible for governing the Middle East themselves we saw the setting up of military dictatorships and even more significantly the hoarding of the vast oil wealth of the region in the hands of a few. If that money had been fairly distributed across the region, it might now have been an area of prosperity. Instead unemployment and instability has created a sense of anger and hopelessness on which terrorism has fed.

The last chapter of the recent history of the Middle East saw the western powers returning to remove the military dictators who’s only virtue was to keep a lid on the festering divisions. Following the removal of Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein all hell has broken loose. I’m not a spokesman for the Stop The War coalition who issued a tweet (subsequently repudiated) saying we were reaping the whirlwind, however it is true. But “we” includes not just western countries who made bad choices in the Middle East, but greedy oil sheiks and religious fanatics who ought to know that the true basis of both Christianity and Islam is to love thy neighbour and do good.

So what is to be done now? In the short term ISIL’s territory has to be conquered by local troops backed up by western air support. But that won’t be the end of them, there a re plenty of failed states where they will emerge again unless fundamental issues are resolved in the region. The most important is better wealth distribution. Then comes some really controversial changes. The creation of Palestine and Kurdistan (the least they deserve for being the only effective troops fighting ISIS) as nation states and possible boundary changes to ease Sunni and Shia tensions.

At home a massive “not in my name” demonstration by our British Muslim colleagues would help ease the worrying rise of entirely unjustified Islamaphobia. The Chancellor next week should protect funds for community policing. It is the height of folly to damage that part of the police service which is often the first to detect extremists. And finally the Prime Minister needs to be careful to avoid gloating when we, sometimes necessarily, execute terrorists without trial. His demeanour in announcing the death of Jihaddi John was in marked contrast to the remarks of some of the people who’d actually had relatives beheaded by the ghastly murderer.

By language and deed we must not be goaded into the vortex of violence.

 

FRACKING: LET ALL VOICES BE HEARD.

 

LET’S HEAR BOTH SIDES IN FRACKING DEBATE

Later this month Lancashire County Council will finally decide whether exploration for onshore gas can go ahead at two sites in the county.

We know what a group of protesters feel about the idea. They have attracted widespread media coverage for their opposition activities in Lancashire and Salford. But do they speak for the majority of people in the county and beyond?

Centrica Energy is bringing together a panel of guests next Wednesday to take part in a live debate on the role of gas in the region. The panel members are all in favour of the go ahead but I will be the independent chair and all views are welcome. The phone in will take place on Wed June 10th at 5pm and anyone wanting to take part or find out more should register at www.nwenergychat.com

There are believed to be trillions of cubic feet of shale gas under Lancashire. To get it energy firms would need to use a process called fracking. Water and chemicals are pumped into shale rock at high pressure to extract the gas.

Centrica holds a 25% stake in energy company Cuadrilla’s Bowland exploration licence which will soon be determined by Lancashire councillors. They have a difficult decision because opponents have dominated the debate spurred on by the so called Blackpool earthquake in 2011, TV pictures from America showing tap water being set on fire and a belief that we should be cutting our dependence on carbon based fuel due to global warming.

Councillors also will have in mind that their planning officers initially recommended that the drilling applications be refused. Crucially however their objections related to surface noise and traffic movements. They gave the green light to the drilling operation. Cuadrilla hope they have addressed those issues now.

There is the positive case for fracking in a county that has been meeting the nation’s energy needs since the days of the Lancashire coalfield. Heysham provided one of the first nuclear power stations and for thirty years offshore gas has been extracted from Morecambe Bay.

The UK is facing a potential energy crisis due to the closure of old nuclear plant, environmental limits on burning coal and a growing reluctance to rely on Russia for gas supplies. Our margins are slim and could be severely tested during a hard winter.

There is also the potential for extra jobs at companies like Centrica who already employ 5,000 people in the North West supporting 10,000 people in the supply chain.

I look forward to hearing your views next Wednesday at 5pm.

CHARLES KENNEDY.

I reported on the former Lib Dem leader in his good times and his bad. His opposition to the Iraq War seems more justified every day that ISIS advances across Syria and Iraq.

He was the only Lib Dem MP to vote against his party going into coalition with the Tories in 2010. As they sit in parliament with their eight members now, perhaps he was right about that too.

My last interview with him at a Southport conference in 2005 was not a happy experience. He was clearly struggling with his alcohol problems and I prefer to remember his sunny smile and firm convictions.

Follow me at www.jimhancock.co.uk

JE SUIS CHARLIE,BUT…..

..

 

The crazy logic of the people who gunned down the staff of Charlie Hebdo is that it will bring nearer the day of a holy war between the West and the Caliphate.

As the shock and grief continues, we have to ask ourselves if that day is getting nearer.

 

It seems unbelievable in this hi tech 21st century world that I should be writing in language more appropriate to the age of the Crusades or the sixteenth century when the Ottoman Empire was at the gates of Vienna. More poignantly we can go back to 732 when the Umayyed Caliphate nearly took Poitiers in the centre of France during the incredible early expansion of Islam.

 

At the moment the conflict does not take the form of armies confronting each other. The British and American experience in Afghanistan and Iraq has ended that for now. We prefer drones, air strikes and arming the Kurds to boots on the ground.

 

The dreadful events in France have left us in a very dangerous position. Islamophobia and anti semitism are on the rise, our civil liberties are under pressure, and parties of the right are gaining support. Meanwhile the causes of all this are hardly mentioned.

They are in no particular order, the post World War One colonial settlement in the Middle East; the grossly unfair distribution of oil wealth that should have benefited all the people of the region; our ignorance of the complexities of the Middle East when we intervened militarily; the mindset of some Muslims that their religion and way of life should be imposed on all of us and above all our failure to deal with the plight of the Palestinians. Barrack Osama should use the remaining years of his presidency, when he is less beholden to the powerful Jewish lobby in America, to achieve a two state solution for Israel and Palestine.

 

Of course that is very difficult to achieve, but it could be the beginning of unwinding the mounting crisis between the West and elements of Islam. If the terrorists could no longer point to the plight of the Palestinians, then one of the major causes of tension would be ameliorated. This might then lead to a waning of real and tacit support for terrorism upon which organisations like ISIS and Al -Qaeda rely.

 

Finally let me go back to the title of this blog and my thoughts on publications like Charlie Hebdo. Whilst we must all defend free speech, we must recognise that it is not absolute in France or here. There are laws curbing racial hatred and obscenity. Much more widely people of a religious belief are entitled to be offended and angered by blatant mockery of Muhammed or Jesus. Emphatically it does not entitle them to kill or intimidate those that publish such material, but we must acknowledge its effect on the heightened tension we are all feeling.