Moral Leadership

The debate about what to do, if anything, about the murderous civil war and the use of chemical weapons in Syria - continues to dominate the opinion pages of most newspapers.

But here's one that's a bit different - by Nick Cohen, a regular columnist in the Observer, who writes from a decidedly 'leftwing' point of view - and who believes that on Syria Ed Miliband has failed to rise to the occasion.  

Now I can understand 'isolationists' who take the view that "Arabs and Muslims are all the same. They all want to kill each other. They are all barbarians. 'Why should we try to save them? They will only turn onus if we do'."

And while I disagree with that point of view it does at least have the virtue of being simple, honest and straightforward - if a little difficult to sustain over the broad sweep of human history.

So, I think that Nick Cohen has hit a few nails on the head in his piece - and isn't it strange that 'socialists' in France share his analysis.    

Don't look to Ed Miliband for moral leadership

The Labour leader has shown a worrying lack of courage over the gassing of Syria



By Nick Cohen

Ed Miliband: lacks the bravery to rise to a grim occasion. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

It would be dishonest of me to try to out-Jew Ed Miliband. What's the point? We are both the children of Marxist atheists with no connections to religious Judaism. I wouldn't even raise the Jewish question if Ed Miliband did not keep trying to remind us of his link to the horrors of the Holocaust.

In speeches introducing himself to the nation, he announced his anti-fascist pedigree by saying that his parents were "two young people [who] fled the darkness that had engulfed the Jews across Europe" to find "the light of liberty in Britain". How well his words once sounded. As a politician whose grandfather had been murdered in a Nazi death camp, he would oppose crimes against humanity. As the child of immigrants, he would never play the race card.

One unnoticed casualty of the Syrian crisis is that Miliband Minor will never be able to use the Holocaust link again. As things stand, he is willing to speak out against the gassing of Jews with Zyklon B 70 years ago. But when he is called on to speak against the gassing of Syrians with vaporised sarin in the here and now, when what we say and do could make a difference, the anger vanishes, and with Miliband – as with Hamlet – "the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought".

Ever since the Syria vote, Labour politicians have been disputing the notion that they have abandoned Barack Obama and the French socialists to go along with Assad, Putin, Hezbollah, the Iranian ayatollahs, Ukip, the BNP and Stop the War – with, in other words, half the assorted creeps, kooks, crackpots, conspiracy theorists, collaborators and criminals on the planet.

Labour, they protest, was prepared to see Assad punished for breaking one of the few restrictions on man's inhumanity to man that all governments, however cruel, have observed – with the bloody exception of the Ba'athist regimes of Syria and Iraq. The opposition just wanted due process to be followed after Iraq. Labour sources point out that anti-war elements in the party were so convinced that Miliband was preparing to support Cameron that one frontbench spokesman resigned in protest – and is feeling a bit of an idiot now.

This is not the way the anti-Miliband media, or Labour dissenters, see it, and not only because Labour MPs cheered Cameron's defeat and Labour leaders flounder like wet fish on a quayside whenever interviewers ask what the party's Syrian policy amounts to now.

As far as most people are concerned, the big truth behind the crisis was that Cameron was taking Britain to war against a murderous dictatorship and Labour and its allies on the Tory right stopped him. Miliband's enemies are less keen on admitting that the vast majority of voters were with the Labour leader all the way.

Far from enraging public opinion, chemical attacks made the British less likely to support intervention. A poll taken after news of the massacre broke found that respondents said by a majority of four to one that they wanted nothing to do with Syria.

The type of person who regards any western intervention as always wrong and every dictator as the "demonised" victim of "orientalist" prejudice will be pleased by that result. But I wouldn't cheer too loudly if I were in their shoes. What the majority of the public believe cannot be translated into any kind of leftwing sentiment. They think, I guess, that Arabs and Muslims are all the same. They all want to kill each other. They are all barbarians. "Why should we try to save them? They will only turn on us if we do."

If leftists still imagine that the anti-war sentiment is a blessing, they should notice its links to anti-immigrant sentiment. Just as the worse Assad behaves towards Syrians the less willing the public is to confront him, so the worse the government behaves towards immigrants the more the public likes it. After the coalition sent vans on to the streets telling illegal immigrants to get out, people like me protested that this was the type of stunt you saw in tinpot dictatorships. The pollsters at YouGov found that the voters liked the look of a tinpot country and support for ministers increased.

What applies to foreign wars and foreigners in Britain also applies to foreign aid. Middle-class liberals comfort themselves with the illusion that if only they could expose the "lies" of the tabloid press, the masses would embrace enlightened ideas.

Last year, the foreign policy think-tank Chatham House put that notion to the test. Its researchers found that the voters overestimated the size of the aid budget by almost tenfold. Chatham House put them right. It told them the truth. No difference did it make. The voters still thought Britain spent too much on aid.

I am not going to start screaming about racism. The attitudes of the broad mass of working- and middle-class people are nationalist or communitarian, rather than xenophobic. They believe that British jobs, the British welfare state, the protections of the British law and the benefits of British taxes should be confined to members of the club, who have either been born in Britain or proved that they have accepted British society. Come on, own up, do not even the most scrupulously liberal Observer readers feel that way too, sometimes? If, as I believe they will, cynical Labour politicians try to outflank the Tories and Liberal Democrats on the right at the next election and say that they will pay for the NHS by slashing overseas aid, will you protest or nod approvingly when you think no one is watching?

There is no reason to shocked. All societies think that charity begins at home. But all societies also need leaders with a morsel of courage in them; men and women who are prepared to say at rare moments that the wider world cannot be shut out forever. If the first use of chemical weapons since Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds in 1988 is not such a rare moment, what is?

Ed Miliband is not the appeaser of totalitarianism his enemies make out. He is just a leader who lacks the bravery to rise to a grim occasion. In an unselfconsciously revelatory passage about his family and the Holocaust, he said: "On one level I feel intimately connected with it – this happened to my parents and grandparents. On another, it feels like a totally different world."

Miliband did not understand that world of tyranny and atrocity is no different now than it was 70 years ago. And in that failure of imagination and of sympathy lies his littleness.