There's a superb column by Barry Rubin in today's Jerusalem Post, which introduces a reality check into some of the praise heaped on Salam Fayyad after his speech at the Herzliya conference (which I was at). Do read the whole thing, but his key point is that whilst the fact of his presence, and his tone, might have been conciliatory, the content was anything but. 

Fayyad demanded that Israel must unilaterally pull out of the rest of the West Bank, getting nothing in return; it must immediately stop all construction on settlements; the IDF should never enter PA-ruled areas, even if the PA doesn’t arrest terrorists who have murdered Israelis or are planning attacks;
Israel should end its blockade of the Gaza Strip, even though the Hamas
rulers there refuse to make a deal with the PA, openly announce their
goal of destroying Israel and smuggle in as many weapons as possible.

As Rubin puts it:

Fayyad
is the most moderate guy in the PA leadership. He was doing about the
best he could. But that’s the point. He has no base of support, isn’t a
Fatah member, and doesn’t really represent Palestinian thinking. He is
in office only to keep Western donors happy. Thus, Fayyad couldn’t go
any further because he knows his Fatah bosses, Palestinian constituents
and Hamas enemies would throw him out if he offered the slightest
concession and demanded any less than everything they want.

...Since 1993 not a single
Palestinian leader has ever made a speech to his own people like
Barak’s, never said that they should have to give up something to get a
state other than their claim to all of Israel (which they don’t quite
seem to give up), never urged the media and public debate to become
more moderate.

Here's my explanation: they don't actually want talks.

Max Arkinson has a clever proposal with regard to the ongoing negotiations on the party leaders' election debate:

The Guardian is warning that the party leaders' election debates are in danger of 'being negotiated to death', and today's Times is reporting that Brown is calling in 'the Obama team for help with television debate'.

As readers of this blog will know, I'm fully expecting the 'debates' to be as boring as all the other interviews the media will be inflicting on us during the election.

But all this talk about the debates about the debates has given me an idea:

Why
don't the BBC, ITN and Sky insist that all further negotiations with
the main political parties about the rules and formats for the debates
must be conducted in front of the cameras?

The most astonishingly wrong sentence I have read anywhere this year, from Mary Dejevsky in the Independent:

There is no sign that Iran harbours malign or expansionist intentions,
or even that a nuclear Iran would present a global threat. 

I thought I’d share my encounter with David Abraham, C4's new chief executive, with you.

A few years ago, when I was working on the Express, we held an awayday for execs. We’d just appointed Mr Abraham’s then company, the ever-so-trendy St Luke’s, as our ad agency. (I’ll leave for another time the unspeakably bad, beyond mere embarrassing ads they came up with for us).

So the editor thought it would be useful to ask them along to the awayday.

It didn’t start auspiciously. Mr Abraham’s partner, Andy Law, started the day with a pep talk for us, telling the 20 or so tabloid hacks that ‘cynicism is a forest fire in a workplace’ and that instead of being cynical and questioning we should embrace the world around us with cheer and good spirit. This to a room full of people whose livelihood was based on digging into stories, questioning what people say and finding out what lies people come up with.

At dinner, I found myself seated next to Mr Abraham. However bad my impression of him was – he seemed to embody every ad exec caricature I’d come across – I thought I should indeed not be so cynical, and instead should relish the chance to converse with the man who founded the most of-the-moment ad agency.

I began with a very dull, admittedly, but well intentioned opening conversational gambit.

“Where are your offices?” I asked him.

He looked at me with utter contempt, as if I had asked him how long his wife had been on the game.

“We don’t have offices”, he spat out in reply. “We have space”.

The first useful thing John Bercow has done as Speaker. Responding to a Point of Order yesterday by Julian Lewis on the apparent drift towards Friday ballot counts at the forthcoming general election, Mr Speaker has made clear that this is simply unacceptable:

For my own part, I am a passionate believer in instant,
not slow motion, democracy. It seems to me that it is in the interests
of the House and the country that the count should take place on the
night, and there are two overwhelmingly compelling reasons why: first,
I believe that there could be a threat to the security of the ballot if
the count is delayed; and, secondly, it seems to me that on the day the
election takes place, it should be possible for the count also to take
place so that we get the result speedily.

Frankly, it should not be
beyond the wit and sagacity of humankind—or indeed of local
authorities—to ensure that that happens. I politely suggest to the
House that what is required is not a passive acceptance of the
particular views of individual local authority chief executives, but
rather an assertion of leadership nationally and politically, at a
local level, to achieve what I sense the House is uniting in wishing to
see.

Quite right.

(via conservativehome)

The JC website received its highest ever number of hits the day after we were hacked.

Thanks, chaps.

Tim Worstall has an aposite comment on some of the trite comments which have been doing the rounds about Haiti:

Folks, no one “made Haiti poor”.

Certainly there have been actions by all sorts of people of right
and left, thugs and even the well meaning, which have made Haiti poorer
than it should be or could be. Everything from supporting grossly
incompetent dictators to demanding reparations and stupidity about
trade.

But the sort of poverty that Haiti is enmired in is not something
that is made. This is the natural state, this $1 or $2 a day
disgusting, foul, entirely a blemish upon us all, level of destitution
is something which is the result of something not being made.

It is the result of wealth not being made. That may well have been
the result of actions by all sorts of people of right and left, thugs
and even the well meaning. Everything from supporting grossly
incompetent dictators to demanding reparations and stupidity about
trade.

But the basic point remains. They’re in the Malthusian trap. GDP per
capita is (at PPP) around $1,300. That’s not notably different from
England in 1600. Indeed, it’s not notably different from England in 900
AD, from the GDP per capita in the Roman Empire.

Haiti’s poverty is not something that man hath wrought. It’s the result of what man hath not wrought.

In the longer term what they need is just what everyone else needs
and has needed. Economic development. More factories, more trade, more,
dare I say it, of that liberal capitalism stuff that dragged our own
forefathers up out of the horrors of that $2 a day destitution.

 

The MCB, newly readmitted to Whitehall,  has been emailng flyers for
its first Muslim Leadership Dinner.

It advertises the following:

Confirmed Guests

• Rt Hon Jack Straw MP, Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain
and Secretary of State for Justice

• The Rt. Hon. Nick Clegg MP, Leader of the Liberal
Democrats

• Chris Grayling MP, Shadow Home Secretary (tbc)

Chris Grayling - a 'confirmed guest' who is, er, 'to be
confirmed'.

There's a serious point here. Straw is one of the MCB main cheerleaders in the government and Clegg is a hopeless case when it comes to such things. But Chris Grayling was very strong in his interview with us in
October:

Mr Grayling emphasised that there would be a fundamental
shift of community policy under a Conservative government. Theories of
multiculturalism that suggested that communities should be permitted to live
side-by-side without integration had sometimes created cultural and religious
ghettoes.

“My view is that the role of government is to support
activities and organisations that break down community divisions. It is not the
job of government to accelerate the ghettoisation of our society.”

...With the interview nearing its end, we return to the subject of Prevent. I am keen to know if there is already a formal review of the policy within the Conservative Party. “There isn’t now, but there will be after the election if we are successful,” he says. “There will be a review of Prevent and where the money has been spent.

“It is a difficult financial climate anyway. But I will want to be very clearly persuaded that the money is being used in the right
ways. What above all it must not do is be spent in a way which actually continues to create a climate of extremism. I want us to break down community barriers, not to ghettoise society.”

I suspect that the reason for the 'tbc' by his name is
that he's been invited and hasn't yet replied. It's all the more important, in
the wake of the government's craven decision to talk again to the MCB, that
when he does come to reply, it's with a loud and pointed 'no'.