The irresistible rise of the Muslim Brothers Fawas Gerges Published 28 November 2011

23 commentsPrint versionEmail a friendListenRSS For years, the west has feared the Muslim Brotherhood succeeding to the highest levels of Egyptian political power. With Islamists poised to win the lions share of seats in Egypts election, is the nightmare about to become reality?

An anti-government protester and member of the Muslim Brotherhood prays in front of soldiers at Tahrir Square, Cairo, February 2011. Photograph: Getty Images Since the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak in February, a political struggle has raged in Egypt along ideological, generational and class lines. The fall of the authoritarian wall, built more than half a century ago, has led to a reawakening, a revival of mass politics and social mobilisation. In this context, although initially welcomed as saviours, Egypt's military rulers have miscalculated monstrously by resisting the transition to civilian rule and tightening their grip on power. Tens of thousands of Egyptians have risen in revolt against the military council in recent days, sending a clear message about the changed mood and the psychology of the people. At the same time, after decades of being outlawed and persecuted, religious activists, or Islamists, have emerged above ground as a pivotal force, openly mobilising their old supporters, who number in the millions, and recruiting new members.

Of all the Islamist groups, the Muslim Brotherhood has the broadest base, with a membership of about half a million and a formidable political machine. Founded in 1928, the organisation did not participate actively in the protests that drove Mubarak from power, but it has mobilised its followers ever since in a newly formed political party, Freedom and Justice. Positioning itself as a voice for the poor, a huge constituency representing almost half of Egypt's 82 million people, the Brotherhood aims to win 40 per cent of the seats in par-liamentary elections scheduled to begin on 28 November. Whatever the outcome, the Brotherhood will be a dominant player in post-Mubarak Egypt and will shape the country's domestic and international relations.

The Muslim Brotherhood's chance of gaining a majority of seats in the new assembly has alarmed Egyptian liberals and minorities and secularists, who fear that the organisation will impose rigid, regressive religious laws on society. They accuse the Muslim Brothers of paying lip-service to democratic principle and of plotting to hijack the secular state and replace it with sharia-based rule.

The secular-religious divide is the most fundamental fault line in Egyptian politics, and it is one that threatens the transition from authoritarianism to pluralism. Deeply suspicious of Islamist parties' commitment to plurality, the secularists have called on Egypt's military rulers to put in place safeguards to limit the clout of their ideological rivals, in case they should triumph at the ballot box. They want guarantees that a new constitution will ensure freedoms of religion and expression.

When the Brotherhood's political and charitable machine launched Millioniyyat alKhayr (the million-man act of goodwill) to provide 1.5 million kilograms of discounted meat to five million Egyptians for Eid ul-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice, early this month, it was denounced as vote-buying using foreign funding. Egyptian liberals have accused Gulf states, in particular Qatar, of secretly funding Islamists to spread their brand of conservative religion to the most populous Arab state, and the region's capital of cultural production. In pitting themselves against the Islamist parties, liberals (represented by the Egyptian Bloc alliance) risk alienating a society that is deeply religious. As with their Tunisian counterparts, they will find it difficult to attract voters who do not already identify with their cosmopolitan world-view. At the centre of the current revolt against the military council which will most likely play into the Brotherhood's electoral strategy - lies that same secular-religious divide. As Egyptians battled the police and the army this month, the Brotherhood issued a direct challenge to liberals. "Will you respect the will of the people or will you turn against it?" And: "Your credibility is now on the line."

the Muslim Brothers variety and in the struggle for peace. "Either us or the extremists," Middle Eastern dictators warned western officials.

Until his last day in power, when millions of Egyptians called for his departure, Mubarak used the menace of the Brotherhood to warn the US of what lay ahead if he should go. As the political crisis reached a climax at the end of January, Barack Obama telephoned Mubarak and tried to find a way for him to leave the scene gracefully. A White House official summarised the response as: "Muslim Brotherhood, Muslim Brotherhood, Muslim Brotherhood."

Western powers are just as anxious about the rise of the Brotherhood to power, if not more so. They view the group as a bitter foe and especially as a threat to Israel, which signed the Camp David peace treaty with Egypt in 1979, ending the state of war between the two neighbours. Since the 11 September 2001 attacks, fear of Islamism in general, not just of al-Qaeda, has taken hold of the western imagination. Pro-western, autocratic Arab rulers such as Mubarak exploited this unnecessary fear by portraying themselves as partners in the fight against "extremists" of

Historically, the US and its European allies accepted this binary model of the Middle East, in which religious fundamentalists were seen as the only alternative to pro-western dictators. The implicit assumption among western officials was that there was no third way, no public opinion, only an "Arab street" code for the notion that Muslims, if allowed to vote, would make the wrong choices, that democratic forces, untried and unknown, would not be as pliant and accommodating to US interests in the region as the autocrats. The late Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served as US ambassador to the UN, quipped about Arabs and democracy: "The Arab world is the only part of the world where I've been shaken in my conviction that if you let the people decide, they will make fundamentally rational decisions."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged as much in a 7 November speech about Washington's response to the Arab spring that toppled several US clients.

"For years, dictators told their people they had to accept the autocrats they knew to avoid the extremists they feared," she told an audience at a National Democratic Institute event that included the former secretary of state Madeleine Albright. "Too often, we accepted that narrative ourselves."

profound influence on Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

In a marked shift of US foreign policy, Clinton said that the Obama administration would work with the ascendant Islamist parties in Tunisia and Egypt if they played by the rules of the political game.

That dark and bloody period came to an end in the 1970s when the leaders of the Brotherhood renounced violence, settling on a strategy of political participation. However, the violent confrontation in the 1950s and 1960s between the two biggest political trends - pan-Arab nationalism and panIslamism - created a historic rift that has not yet been bridged. The current secular-religious divide illustrates that the old wounds have yet to heal. The legacy of imprisonment, persecution and humiliation left deep scars on the Brotherhood's institutional memory, evolution and development.

As Egyptians prepare to go to the polls to elect the first free parliament since the fall of Mubarak, all eyes at home and abroad will be watching the performance of the Brotherhood and sizing up its share of parliamentary seats. Myth and reality are intertwined in the Brotherhood. Since the 1920s, when it was established by a charismatic 22-year-old preacher and Arabic teacher named Hassan alBanna in the city of Ismailia, 60 miles northeast of Cairo, it has evolved from a youthfocused organisation to a broadly based social and political movement. Between the 1940s and 1960s, the Brotherhood kept one foot above ground and another underground. Its "Secret Apparatus", a paramilitary network, carried out assassinations and armed attacks against rival politicians and civilians. Successive governments suppressed the Brothers, culminating in a systemic campaign by the pan-Arab nationalist president Gamal Abdel Nasser to dismantle the organisation and defeat it. Thousands of rank-and-file members were incarcerated and tortured and top leaders executed. They included Sayyid Qutb who, after his execution in 1966, became the master ideologue and theoretician of militant Islamists and was a

Among the Old Guard or first generation (an influentially coherent but dwindling segment whose members spent at least a decade in Nasser's dungeons), a sense of martyrdom and an abiding mistrust of the outside world persist. After their release from prison by Nasser's immediate successor, Anwar alSadat, in the early 1970s, these conservative veterans focused on rebuilding and replenishing their social networks and gaining legitimation. They put survival, social cohesion and unity above political transparency and accountability. (Sadat's assassination in October 1981 by an Islamist lieutenant precipitated a prolonged conflict between Mubarak, who then became the next president, and the Zawahiri generation of local militants.)

Today, the Old Guard's monopoly of executive power is challenged by a rising generation of

pragmatists, university graduates who joined the Brotherhood in the 1970s. The pragmatists are much more at ease with modernity and pluralistic politics than their elders, who have resisted internal attempts to democratise the decision-making process and open up to the outside. Over the years, I have interviewed members of both generations, and the differences in sensibility, world-view and education are striking. Insisting on absolute loyalty and secrecy, members of the Old Guard - such as Mahmoud Izzat, secretary general and gatekeeper of the organisation's finances and secrets; Mohammed Akif, the Brotherhood's former mufti and general guide; and Mohamed Badie, the present general guide - lack the intellectual and political vision to transform the organisation into a transparent, modern political party.

the organisation. The young Brothers will probably vote for him in defiance of the Old Guard.

In contrast, members of the 1970s generation - such as Essam el-Arian, vice-president of the Freedom and Justice Party and a law and medical school graduate, and Abdel Moneim Abul-Fotouh, a medical doctor and former member of the Brotherhood's highest executive policy-setting "guidance bureau" are progressive. They profess commitment to an open society and representative government. Some voiced pointed criticisms of the Old Guard for their autocratic ways and pledged to challenge the status quo once there was an opening in the closed political system under Mubarak.

During recent years, intergenerational differences within the Brotherhood manifested themselves in an open challenge by young Egyptians to authoritarian practices by the ultra-conservative veterans. Younger Brothers have used new media such as blogs and Facebook to criticise their elders and call for the demo-cratising of the movement as a prerequisite to building a pluralistic civil state in Egypt. Young Brothers are the single largest subgroup in the organisation, and their worldview is closer to that of their liberal and nationalist counterparts than their conservative elders, as shown in the past ten months. Frustrated by the closed leadership, younger members of the Brotherhood established four political parties of their own and were promptly expelled from the organisation for disobedience.

The balance of power has tipped in favour of the pragmatists and Mubarak's downfall will hasten the transition to the new generation. Abul-Fotouh is a case in point. He has decided to run for the presidency as an independent candidate, against the wishes of the leadership, and submitted his resignation from

The intergenerational and ideological divisions show that the Brotherhood is not a monolith, frozen in time and space. Far from it: there is increasing evidence that its leaders respond to pressure from within and without and are sensitive to public opinion. In the past decade, they have laboured to reassure critics at home and abroad that they accept the rules of politics and do not wish to establish a theocratic state along the Iranian model. "We'll build a civil state with Islamist references," the head of the Freedom and Justice Party, Mohammad Mursi, told the French ambassador in Cairo this month. Exhibiting maturity during the mass protests against Mubarak, the Brothers stayed in the shadows for fear that they would alarm Egyptians and the western powers.

As the electoral campaign intensifies and concerns mount about the Brotherhood's agenda, the two top leaders of the Freedom and Justice Party, Mursi and el-Arian, have stressed that if they win they will form a government of national unity with other parties. Addressing assertions often made by their secular opponents, they insist that the party "would hand over power if we lose" because the public mood will no longer tolerate dictatorship. El-Arian pledged that Freedom and Justice will not add terminology to the Egyptian national constitution to make explicit old demands that all legislation comply with sharia law. Article 2 of the constitution already states that the "principal source of legislation is Islamic jurisprudence".

Increasingly, Egyptians are questioning the utility of the Camp David Accords with Israel, though few call for their abrogation. More than 70 per cent of Egyptians who were recently polled by the New York-based International Peace Institute stated their preference for maintaining the agreement with Israel. This finding is corroborated by polling conducted by Egypt's leading al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.

The Brotherhood has been denounced for being strongly anti-Israeli and anti-American. Hardliners in the US are sounding the alarm: if the Brotherhood rises to power in Egypt, it "would be calamitous for US security", warns Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, who served as a senior official in the state and defence departments. "It would be delusory to take the MB's democratic protestations at face value," he says.

Similarly, although leaders of the Brotherhood frequently call for all parties to revisit the peace accords, they stress they would not take any unilateral decisions that risk national security but, instead, would submit such decisions to the will of the people. Far from showing brinkmanship and recklessness, senior Brothers say they would uphold diplomatic treaties signed by Egypt, a clear signal of realpolitik. The Brotherhood craves recognition by the western powers and the international community. A cleric and presidential candidate affiliated with the Brotherhood, Hazem Abu Ismail, told CBC TV in September that even though he opposes the peace treaty, he would not abrogate it as a leader, or wage war against Israel.

The sad truth is that the Brotherhood's rhetoric on Israel and US foreign policy does not differ much from that of its nationalist and leftist counterparts. Egyptians of all persuasions feel that their country must reclaim its leadership role in the Arab arena and resist Israel's oppression of the Palestinians.

For more than four decades, Brotherhood leaders laboured to join the political space and gain legal status. They learned the art of compromise and pragmatism through hardship and persecution. Ideology takes a back seat to the interests and political wellbeing of the Brotherhood. More than ever, their message targets specific constituencies and interest groups - a sign of an ideological shift. In fact, secular opponents criticise leaders of the Brotherhood for being too opportunistic and Machiavellian, too willing to align themselves even with the Mubarak

regime and then with the new military leadership to advance their interests. In similar vein, militants such as al-Zawahiri have accused the Brotherhood of sacrificing faith and ideological purity on the altar of a bankrupt political agenda.

In truth, the Brotherhood has been unable and unwilling to free itself from a heavy ideological inheritance. In contrast to Turkish and Tunisian Islamists, the Brothers are allergic to the terms secular and secularism and view them as "anti-Islamic". After welcoming the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to Egypt in September, the Brotherhood's reception turned hostile when he told a TV channel that religion could coexist with a secular state. "I hope there will be a secular state in Egypt," said Erdogan, a pious Muslim whose AKP party has Islamic roots. A Brotherhood spokesman accused Erdogan of interfering in Egyptian internal affairs.

The challenge facing the organisation is not to gain a sizable share of seats in parliament but to govern effectively and offer solutions to Egypt's structural crises. Egypt is almost bankrupt. About 40 per cent of the population lives on less than $2 a day. There is mass unemployment and national literacy rates are among the lowest in the Arab world. The country's fragile institutions must be rebuilt painstakingly - at a time when there is no shared vision about the future among opposition groups. And what to do about the quickening appetite of the military for politics?

Particularly alarming is the movement's stance on women and minorities, a position that the Old Guard legitimise on religious grounds. Scriptural interpretations are deployed selectively and haphazardly to claim that women and Christian Copts cannot be fully equal before the law, can't hold the office of president, or even be magistrates. Although this position is contested within the organisation among the pragmatists and younger Brothers, it is a symptom of a greater predicament facing the Brotherhood. Beyond its statist mindset and road map, the organisation has not come up with original ideas and well-delineated socio-economic or political programmes. The body of the Brotherhood has expanded faster than its brain.

Time and again over the past two decades, the Muslim Brotherhood's fine-tuned political machine proved its worth and effectiveness. If it wins a majority and forms a government, it will have to deliver the goods. Given the magnitude of the problems that Egypt faces and the organisation's lack of clearly articulated blueprints for job creation to jumpstart the economy, the odds are against it. And if it does fail, its election slogans - "Islam is the solution" and "We hold good for Egypt" - will be turned against it with a vengeance.

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Is Osborne borrowing more or less?

Posted by George Eaton - 29 November 2011 09:13

The Chancellor is set to borrow more than Gordon Brown planned.

Chancellor George Osborne will deliver his autumn statement at 12:30pm today. Photograph: Getty Images.

and higher unemployment (which leads to a larger welfare bill), public sector net borrowing is expected to be around 86bn higher (the Reuters figure) than forecast at the time of the Budget in March. Even before today, Osborne was forecast to borrow 46bn more than expected. When the OBR publishes its latest forecasts today, that figure could rise to an enormous 132bn (46bn + 86bn), taking Osborne's total borrowing over that planned by Alistair Darling. The Brown government was forecast to borrow 127bn in 2011-12 and 106bn in 2012-13. Osborne is expected to borrow 129bn ths year (up from 122bn) and 117bn next year (up from 101bn). Labour's smart attack line is that while the Chancellor is borrowing to meet the cost of high unemployment, it would have borrowed to fund growth. Then there's the structural deficit, the "black hole" the FT refers to. The structural deficit the part of the deficit that remains even after growth returns - is now forecast to be 30bn bigger. This is because the output gap - the difference between actual and potential growth - is smaller than previously thought. In other words, the economy is capable of less growth than initially forecast. This can't be blamed on Osborne's policies and, worryingly for messrs Balls and Miliband, has implications for Labour's own deficit reduction plan. It also means that the Chancellor is almost certain to miss his selfimposed target of eliminating the structural deficit before the next election. However, he is still likely to meet his formal fiscal mandate - to eliminate the structural deficit over a rolling five-year period. For example, from today, he has until 2016-17 to eliminate the deficit, from next year, he'll have until 201718. But meeting this target means extending austerity into the next parliament. A structural deficit can only be eliminated by

Is George Osborne borrowing more or less? You won't find a simple answer in today's papers. The Guardian reports that "Britain will borrow 21.5bn less than previously forecast" but the FT warns that "the black hole in UK public finances has increased by almost 30bn." Elsewhere, Reuters reports that the Office for Budget Responsibility's forecasts are expected to show a "borrowing overshoot of at least 86 billion pounds over four years." Who's right? The answer is that they all are. In his autumn statement, at 12:30pm, Osborne will announce that Britain's record low bond yields have saved the taxpayer 21.5bn, the so-called "safe haven dividend". Money that would have been spent on financing the national debt can now be spent on enterprise schemes, free childcare, business tax breaks and so on. But unfortunately for the Chancellor, that's not the end of story. Owing to lower growth

spending cuts and tax rises, so Osborne will go into the next election warning of further pain to come. The Chancellor's pledge to eliminate the structural deficit in one parliament was based on a political timetable, not an economic one. By 2015, Osborne envisaged that the Tories would be able to boast that they had cleaned up "the mess" left by Labour - a powerful political narrative - and offer cuts in personal taxation. But, as the grim figures above show, this is now a distant dream.
Tags: George Osborne

will never fully understand some aspects of it, in particular the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the historian must do his best. Max Hastings has studied the war for 35 years and has written eight previous books on specific episodes such as the Battle of Britain and D-Day, as well as a volume on Winston Churchill as war leader. All Hell Let Loose is an attempt to describe not only the high politics of strategy, but also the experiences of ordinary people involved in the conflict, and what the war meant to those caught up in it. Henry James once described the Victorian novel as a large, loose and baggy monster. This book is also a large, loose and baggy monster, as it must be if it is to comprehend such vastly different experiences as those of the British housewife, the German Panzer officer in occupied territory, the

All Hell Let Loose: the World at War (1939-45)

By Max Hastings
Fascists fight better
All Hell Let Loose: the World at War (1939-45) Max Hastings

Soviet peasant, the Japanese kamikaze pilot and the Polish soldier who, after fighting bravely on the Allied side, found himself an exile in his own country when it came under communist rule. All Hell Let Loose is a masterpiece of reportage, but it is not for the squeamish: parts of it are almost unreadable, the atrocities committed by the Germans and the Japanese being loathsome beyond belief. Britain's colonial record also comes in for a pummelling. In 1942, 50 battalions were

HarperPress, 768pp, 30 needed to keep order in India, more than were then The Second World War was the most terrible event in human history, killing roughly 60 million people, most of them non-combatants, an average of about 27,000 for each day of the war. More people were slaughtered by their fellow human beings than ever Yet the misdeeds of the British owed less to brute before. A vast number of books has been written sadism and more to insensitivity and faults of about the war. Is there anything new to say? omission, sometimes on a large scale, as with the Perhaps not, but this does not mean that the task of Bengal famine of 1943-44, in which between one the historian has been completed. The challenge is and three million Indians died. Bengal was ruled to seek to understand this catastrophe. No doubt we being committed against the Japanese. Some of the repressive measures employed in India "were similar in kind, if not in scale, to those used by the Axis in occupied countries".

from Britain, yet there was no equivalent for its population of the great British airlift of food to Holland in 1945, since, as India's viceroy noticed, there was "a very different attitude towards feeding a starving population when the starvation is in Europe". If there is a moral to this book, it is a highly uncomfortable one. It is that totalitarian states are much better at fighting than democracies. Ninety per cent of Germans who died in the war were killed on the Russian front. Thirteen million Soviet citizens died under bombardment or under German occupation, and another two million perished from hunger in territory under Soviet control. Indeed, deaths from hunger in the Siege of Leningrad exceeded the total of British combatants killed in the war, which was won largely because the Russians fought on under unspeakable conditions. "A people who could endure such things," Hastings insists, "displayed qualities the western Allies lacked, which were indispensable to the destruction of Nazism. In the auction of cruelty and sacrifice, the Soviet dictator proved the highest bidder." By contrast, an American battalion commander complained that "our boys aren't professionals, and you have to condition them to enjoy killing". General Eisenhower and Field Marshal Montgomery have often been criticised for exercising excessive caution, but both acted in the knowledge that they were leaders of democratic armies. They felt a profound responsibility towards the men they led. "What's your most important possession?" Montgomery asked a soldier in the Eighth Army. "My rifle, sir," came the reply. "No, it's not, you fool it's your life, and I'm going to save it for you." Hastings will no doubt provoke raised eyebrows among the prim historians at universities who, in the

words of Max Beloff, treat history as Haydn treated music - something to be written only when wearing a frock coat. But All Hell Let Loosedoes not pretend to compete as a work of scholarship. The most scholarly book on the Second World War remains A World at Arms (1994) by the American Gerhard Weinberg, whose name Hastings irritatingly misspells as Weinburg. But Hastings's book is livelier, and a better introduction, perhaps the best available for those seeking to understand what the experience of war was like. Inevitably, there are omissions. There is nothing about the argument, held behind closed doors in 1939-40, about a compromise peace, a matter that has been chewed over by historians. Hastings believes the rejection of that idea owed everything to Churchill. "It is hard to imagine," he argues, "that Britain would have continued to defy Hitler after June 1940 in the absence of Winston Churchill, who constructed a brilliant and narrowly plausible narrative for the British people, first about what they might do, and later to persuade them of what they had done." That was not Churchill's view. "I have never accepted," he declared in 1954, "what many people have kindly said, namely that I inspired the nation. It was the nation and the race dwelling around the globe that had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar." The British people were determined in 1940 to defeat Hitler, and would not have tolerated any government that did not share this aim. It is often said that we in Britain are too fixated on the Second World War. Nevertheless, it confirmed our identity, made us who we are today, and, for better or worse, confirmed us in our suspicions of the continent, suspicions that prevented us from

joining in the postwar movement towards European unity. Amid our present troubles, perhaps it does us no harm to be reminded of the quiet stoicism of an earlier age, a time when, in Churchill's words, we were fighting by ourselves alone but not for ourselves alone. Churchill had been one of a very small number who understood the ideological challenge posed by Nazism. The left understood the challenge, but did not support the measures of rearmament necessary to meet it. The counterpart to appeasement, which resulted from an inability to comprehend that a supposedly advanced state had given birth to a regime that threatened the whole basis of liberal civilisation, was an inability effectively to combat it. Today, similarly, in a world that has by no means experienced the "end of history", the left has to understand that there may be creeds whose full dimensions are inaccessible to the ideological framework that we have inherited from the liberal era. Vernon Bogdanor is writing a history of Britain in the 20th century Get the full magazine for just 1 a week with a trial subscription. PLUS get a free copy of Penny Red: Notes from the New Age of dessent by Laurie Penny

Island, New York City, 3 December 2011. Credit: Getty Images "You're from Britain? You want to watch out," says the man with the Newt 2012 sticker plastered across his paunch. "If you don't do something soon, your country will be under Sharia law. And that won't be any good for you, miss. You know what I'm saying."

I have come to a meeting of the Staten Island Tea Party, where Newt Gingrich, currently the front-runner in the Republican presidential debate, is about to give a campaign speech.

My new friend, Kevin Coach, is a retired police officer in his early sixties. He was a supporter of Herman Cain, but as the former pizza-chain mogul's presidential bid recently collapsed in a welter of sexual assault allegations, Kevin has switched allegiance . "Anyone but Mitt Romney," he says.

We need to talk about Kevin, and the five hundred other overwhelmingly white, middleaged Americans who have gathered to hear Gingrich speak today.

Newt encounters a different kind of Tea Party Posted by Laurie Penny - 05 December 2011 11:19 "To my astonishment, the audience applauds. Gingrich is in a spot." This man -- a former cop with fists like ham hocks that he thumps on his knees for emphasis, a libertarian blogger, a Tea Partier and, finally, a person wearing a baseball hat without a shred of irony -- is everything that people like me are supposed to loathe. But I don't.

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich speaks at a town hall meeting, Staten

When he informs me about the practical dangers of the burqa -- "no side vision. Those

women are constantly getting run down by cars" -- he flashes a grandfatherly smile, and I suspect that the safety of young women on the roads of a notional Islamic Caliphate of Britain is, on some level, a genuine concern for him.

- roughly three minutes to lose the interest of half the audience.

The basic emotional language Kevin Coach is speaking is one of fear, and I believe that this fear comes from a place that is chillingly familiar.

The people gathered here are less rapt by Gingrich's clunky, high-school-debate-champ, pro-market propaganda than they are by praise for the idea of America as an "exceptional nation", which draws the largest cheer of the afternoon.

Suddenly, it's time for the Gingrich show.

The presidential hopeful takes the stage, surrounded by an entourage of security personnel, well-wishers from central casting and a terrifying fem-bot of a wife who is here to promote a children's book she has written about American exceptionalism, which stars Ellis the baby elephant on a journey of neoliberal indoctrination. The book is available in the lobby.

Stand-up fights nearly break out at two separate points in the speech, the first when a group of infiltrators from the Occupy movement stand up and attempt to disrupt the proceedings by shouting "Mic check!". As they are evicted, thick-necked men seated all around me stand and pump their fists in the air, chanting "Newt! Newt! Newt!"

There is a call to stand, and the pledge of allegiance is chanted with hands on hearts and the veterans in the audience applauded with that peculiarly American cultish credence that is somehow less, rather than more, frightening when it's happening all around you rather than on the television.

This Tea Party gathering is a jumpy, anxious crowd, teetering between violence and implosion. It is a crowd that wants its prejudices pandered to, a crowd that is worried about jobs, a crowd that has allowed itself to be convinced of a wholescale, unfair confiscation of privilege from white, middleaged, middle-class Americans; a crowd whose members want to believe that they are still special and powerful, as if they ever were.

We take our seats, and it takes Newt Gingrich -- a man with the aspect of a toad with expensive dental work and whose forced exit as Speaker in 1998, under a cloud of corruption, followed midterm election defeat-

It is not a crowd of monsters. If it were, it would be easy to dismiss. It is a crowd of frightened, angry human beings watching their lives get steadily worse, and that is a far scarier prospect.

These people could come from any state in America. They are parents and grandparents

and teachers and small business owners, the core of the Republican vote, and they are swallowing hard lumps of rhetoric about dissolving the welfare state and cutting taxes for the rich washed down with bland Obamabashing that always steers far enough away from overt racism to avoid headlines.

"I'd just like to say," says the questioner, quietly repeating the mantra of the Occupy movement, "that I am one of the 99 per cent, and I appreciate this dialogue."

This is how the trick is done. This is how -with the Eurozone is in crisis, with rioting and protest in the streets of major cities across the world and the Durban climate talks likely to signal the end of even the limited climate concessions offered by the Kyoto protocol -- a friend of big business like Gingrich persuades white-collar workers to vote in their millions to protect banks and corporations from regulation.

It's a dialogue of desperation and hope that answers the same concerns shared by many of the ordinary Americans gathered here, without resorting to co-optable xenophobia or cheap cultural prejudice. It's a dialogue that gets to the heart of injustice in the developed world.

And it's a dialogue with which, soon enough, even the Republican Party may find itself forced to engage.
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The trick, however, is wearing thin. During the question-and-answer session, a middle-aged man in a fleece jacket takes the microphone and tells the crowd, struggling to stop his soft voice from breaking, that he is at risk of having his home foreclosed, that he is fighting a bank that wants to take everything from him and his family. He wants to know, should Gingrich become president, "What would you do regarding the financial crisis and making the banks pay?"

To my astonishment, the audience applauds. Gingrich is in a spot. This man has obviously not been listening to the preceding hour of gentle tubthumping about giving banks even more freedom to do whatever the hell they like with public money. The candidate gives a mitigated statement in support of small, local banks, and the audience cheers.

David Allen Green

A critical and liberal look at law and policy

improvement. In the words of its detailed terms of reference, the inquiry is to make recommendations: a. for a new more effective policy and regulatory regime which supports the integrity and freedom of the press, the plurality of the media, and its independence, including from Government, while encouraging the highest ethical and professional standards; b. for how future concerns about press behaviour, media policy, regulation and cross-media ownership should be dealt with by all the relevant authorities, including Parliament, Government, the prosecuting authorities and the police; c. the future conduct of relations between politicians and the press; and d. the future conduct of relations between the police and the press. However, what went wrong occurred when there was -- on the face of it -- the laws and the enforcement bodies already in place. The misconduct happened anyway. In terms of law, there was the Data Protection Act, the Computer Misuse Act, and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. These statutes provided clear prohibitions in respect of almost all the "dark arts" of which we have heard; it was just that the legislation was not enforced. The PCC "Editors' Code of Practice" has -- on the face of it -- a sensible regime for guiding press behaviour. And, as with the black letter law, that also was not properly enforced.

What do you do when an entire system fails?

Posted by David Allen Green - 05 December 2011 14:10

The Leveson inquiry is revealing a problem for which there may not be a solution.

Lord Justice Leveson at the Leveson inquiry (Photo: Getty Images)

The evidence continues to accumulate at the Leveson inquiry as to the sheer scope of British media malpractice in the first decade of the 21st century. The inquiry is not only there to investigate what went wrong, but also to suggest proposals for reform and

One by one the enforcement bodies -- the Metropolitan Police, the Information Commissioner's Office, and the Press Complaints Commission -- had the opportunity to act, and, for whatever reasons, chose not to do so. Had only one of these entities discharged its obligations

properly, then the illegal and immoral behaviour of the tabloids would have been significantly checked. Had all three done so, then the scandals may not have even occurred at all on any great scale. Words on paper -- however well-intended and comprehensive -- have no greater meaning than enchantments in a book of spells unless they are translated into realworld action. Whatever are the recommendations of the Leveson inquiry, yet more words on paper will not be enough. Perhaps there is nothing the Leveson inquiry can usefully recommend. As one eminent Victorian politician said in rebuke to another: problems may not actually have solutions. In the face of a general systemic failure of compliance and enforcement, then, the mere positing of a new system is futile. Furthermore, the commercial and operational pressures of the tabloids over the last decade may now be changing. There is less scope for "celebrity exclusives" where the splashes are on the internet and communications between stars and those who follow them can be done directly, and not through a Show Business column. There are now different ways for tabloids to buy in their stories which are more cost effective. The Leveson inquiry came about because a system failed comprehensively. And we may never have known, had it not been for the Royal Household complaining of hacking in a manner which could not be ignored (leading to the arrest of Clive Goodman and the seizure of Glen Mulcaire's notebooks), the investigative journalism of the Guardian and the New York Times, and the brilliant lawyering of Mark Lewis and Charlotte Harris. Between them, they were able to force results where the Metropolitan

Police, the Information Commissioner, and the Press Complaints Commission all failed. The value of the Leveson inquiry may therefore be in the accumulation of evidence and its documented exposure of routine illegal and unethical activity, rather than in any particular recommendations. The Leveson inquiry is simply telling us the story of what happens when an entire system fails.