Buried inside the Sunday Times of 31 July 2005 is a report that while the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, is away on holiday, the prime minister has given David Blunkett temporary responsibility for the Home Office — Blunkett, the most reactionary and aggressively anti-libertarian Home Secretary in living memory, out-doing even Michael Howard in his scorn for legal process and the judiciary; Blunkett, the discredited politician with one of the messiest personal lives of our time! (The Sunday Times report is made even more ominous by its assertion that "many in Whitehall believe Clarke is not up to the job of running the war on terror and are unimpressed by his performance in the aftermath of the July 7 bombings", which smells suspiciously like one of No. 10′s more egregious efforts at surreptitious, off-the-record briefings.) With Blunkett’s Home Office re-appointment, however nominally temporary, Mr Blair pokes his thumb in the eye of those in his own party and outside it who care for our historic liberties: and, worse, he sends a surely deliberate signal about his determination to re-open his and Blunkett’s conflict with the senior judiciary in which they were routed last December by the judgements of Lord Bingham and his Law Lord colleagues, in which the judges declared the Blunkett régime of indefinite detention without trial incompatible with Britain’s obligations under the European Human Rights Convention and quashed the emergency order under which the government had sought to suspend some of its obligations under the Convention.
This seems the only possible interpretation, not just of the defiant restoration of Blunkett to the Home Office (or is it vice versa?), but also of Blair’s characteristically contorted remarks on the subject at his monthly press conference on 26 July:
“Question: …in December I think it was – the Law Lords striking down the laws that David Blunkett had introduced, saying to us that the threat to our security came not from your warnings about terrorism but from the very laws that you were seeking to introduce. Have you got any guarantee that Parliament will pass laws, as you say you want to expel radical clerics, but is there any way you can ensure the judges take account of what we think is now public and parliamentary opinion, and that they will impose those laws, or that they will put the sort of strict interpretation of human rights above my right and everybody else in this room not to be blown up on the tube?
Prime Minister: Well that is a good question. I mean the independence of the judiciary is a principle of our democracy and we have to uphold it. But I hope that recent events have created a situation where people can understand that it is important that we do protect ourselves and that in a sense if we can take measures to protect ourselves, it then becomes easier in a sense to protect our own way of life and our democracy and I doubt those words that you were quoting from one of those judgements would be uttered now, so I think the mood on this thing does change. But I will say to you because I feel this about the terrorism laws and you know we wanted to introduce laws before the Election on these issues, I say this in relation to some of the measures that I think we need to take in trying to get this fundamental and extreme ideology rooted out abroad, I feel that for several years we still have not woken up to what this thing is about … I suppose really what I was also trying to say… is that if we are not careful we will get into the thought process that says it is our behaviour that should change: if we did something different, these people would react in a different way. I don’t believe that. I think this is a very, very extreme ideology, but it is an ideology. These are not isolated criminal acts and that is why I think when you look at the laws that we need, we need to take account of that in what we do … one way of making sure we keep together is to make sure that the laws that I think the country would regard as the minimum necessary are actually passed and are then upheld.”
By one of those weird coincidences beloved of playwrights and novelists, on the very same day Cherie Booth, QC, distinguished British civil rights barrister and in private life the wife of the prime minister, delivered in Malaysia an intricate and genuinely learned lecture about the role of the judges in democratic societies in the age of human rights and the threat of terrorism. The lecture, whose full text is published on the Malaysian Bar’s website, deserves to be read in full, not least for its many telling quotations from the judgements of Lord Bingham and other judicial luminaries; the shrill cries of mock horror at her supposed marital infidelity heard from the Tory press are models of misleadingly selective quotation and interpretation. At the risk of committing the same offence myself, I offer my own selective quotations:
“Nothing I say here could possibly be construed as making light of those horrible acts of violence, or of the responsibility imposed on the UK and other governments to keep the public safe, or of the difficult and dangerous task performed by the police and intelligence services… at the same time it is all too easy for us to respond to such terror in a way which undermines commitment to our most deeply held values and convictions and which cheapens our right to call ourselves a civilised nation. … Independent judges providing purposive interpretations of their country’s most fundamental rights are an important component of any true democracy. As judges embark on constitutional interpretation they are afforded the chance to narrate the values that underpin the very essence of our humanity. This is not only a democratic role played by courts that act as guardians of the weakest, poorest, and most marginalised members of society against the hurly-burly of majoritarian politics. It is also a chance for judges to play a vital role as teachers in a national seminar on the topic of meaningful, inclusive democracy in the twenty-first century. In this role, the rhetorical possibility exists for judgments to draw upon relevant comparative and international rights experience to paint enriched and enriching tapestries of our common human rights and international law commitments. We live in challenging times. Our institutions are under threat; our commitments to our deepest values are under pressure; our acceptance of difference and others is at a low point. It is at this time that our understanding of the importance of judges in a human rights age should be at its clearest. And it is at this time that our support for the difficult task that judges have to perform must be at its highest.”
The two texts are not, strictly speaking, irreconcilable. But they obviously reflect a sharp difference of emphasis. Let’s hope that the three Cs (Cherie and Charles Clarke, if he’s allowed to get his job back from his disastrous predecessor) prevail over the two Bs (Blunkett and Blair T). And three cheers for a gutsy barrister who’s clearly not going to be intimidated by the more vindictive of the media into forgoing her right, as a private and unelected citizen and a responsible senior lawyer, to freedom of speech, come what may.
Cherie Booth QC
Brian
Three, no four, cheers for ‘Brownie’ of the illustrious ‘Harry’s Place’ blog for his rousing attack on the bien-pensants on a recent Question-Time Special programme who sought to blame just about everyone except the bombers for the London bombings. A specimen quotation:
“….one could have been forgiven for thinking that everybody, but everybody was responsible for the 7/7 atrocity, apart from the fanatics who actually carried bombs onto trains. “We need to understand why these young men felt so detached, blah, blah…” Self-hating Brits, I’d call them. Well, I’m sorry, but I’m just your ordinary Joe: wife and kids, mortgaged up to the hilt, unfulfilling job, not enough money, etc., etc.. It’s a hard enough slog as it is without some one-step-removed apologist insisting that I take partial responsibility for the irrational actions of people I’ve never met, never hurt, but who would, given half the chance, slaughter me and everyone else I love. Its not my fault, see, and I resent being asked to contemplate the possibility it might be. In fact, it makes me quite angry… when I hear people whose most important decisions each day are what to play on the iPod lecturing the country’s most senior policeman about the rules of engagement for suicide bombers, telling him how his men are “executioners” (these being the officers who ran towards, not away from, a man they suspected of being half a second from committing mass-murder), I want to be sick, have a shower, scream……do anything in fact, but speak. ”
There was an excellent article in the Guardian by Professor Norman Geras on 21 July that made much the same points. Needless to say, he subsequently got stick for his views from the usual suspects among Guardian readers (of whom I’m one, though not one who belaboured the Professor for his gutsy views). I have made some similar comments, also attracting some heavy gunfire in response, on this blog.
Unlike some of the contributors to the Harry’s Place blog post, I’m a committed opponent of the war in Iraq, a historic blunder that will tarnish Tony Blair’s place in history almost as much as Suez has wrecked Eden’s. But to say that Blair is responsible for the bombings because he refused to re-order major foreign policy decisions (however misguided on other grounds), purely in order to appease blackmailing terrorists, is grotesque.
Brian
Back in June the Guardian published an article by the American writer and polemicist David Rieff asserting that Bob Geldof’s Live Aid, and the other NGOs active in the mid-1980s famine relief programme in Ethiopia, had contributed to more deaths than they had saved lives. The Guardian later published a letter from me that rebutted the more far-fetched and baseless of Rieff’s allegations, and I posted an account of the exchange here in my blog, including the full text of the letter I had sent to the Guardian before parts of it were edited out.
The Guardian‘s article was a shortened version of a considerably longer piece by Rieff that had appeared in Prospect magazine’s July 2005 issue. Prospect has now published in its August issue a further letter from me rebutting Rieff’s original accusations at greater length than was possible in my Guardian letter and from a somewhat different angle. Two other letters attacking Rieff’s article, one of them from the head of the Oxfam operation in Ethiopia in the later stages of the famine relief effort, are also published on the Prospect website (but these are unfortunately not included in the printed magazine).
To save you the bother of jumping to the text of my letter on the Prospect website, here it is:
“It’s sad to see discredited allegations about 1980s Ethiopian famine relief popping up again in David Rieff’s article (July). His implicit syllogism is this: NGOs, including Live Aid and by implication donor governments, colluded with the Mengistu regime’s "murderous" resettlement programme; the resettlement programme caused between 50,000 and, according to the maverick agency Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), 100,000 deaths; therefore Live Aid and the others contributed to more deaths than the number of lives saved. Since both premises are completely false, the conclusion, which anyway doesn’t follow from them, is not surprisingly rubbish too.
Here are some corrective facts, from my personal experience as British ambassador to Ethiopia at the time, and rigorously documented by, among others, Kurt Jansson, the experienced Finnish UN relief co-ordinator, better informed than anyone else on earth about the famine and relief programme:
1. Resettlement of people from the arid northern highlands to the fertile southwest where the land could support them has been accepted as necessary since a World Bank report in 1971, and remains Ethiopian government policy.
2. What was objectionable about resettlement was not the fact of it but the way it was done—hastily, harshly, sometimes by compulsion.
3. No western NGO, including Live Aid, nor the donor governments, supported or colluded in the assembling and transporting of settlers: indeed, we all protested to the regime about how it was being done.
4. Rieff’s principal (only?) source of information, MSF, was in no position to assess resettlement casualty figures; it never worked anywhere near the affected areas. Other NGOs, and Jansson, with excellent sources of information, all dismissed MSF’s estimate of 100,000 deaths as hugely exaggerated and irresponsible; deaths on such a scale couldn’t possibly have been concealed from all other western observers.
5. Live Aid and other NGOs bore no responsibility for the brutalities and casualties of resettlement: but even if they had, the allegation that the relief effort did "more harm than good" would still be absurd.
6. It’s generally agreed, including by Jansson, that the relief programme saved around 7m Ethiopians from starvation. Even MSF’s discredited figure of 100,000 deaths from resettlement doesn’t approach that. Rieff’s article shamefully traduces those who made the relief effort an extraordinary success, from the young Ethiopian and western relief workers in the field to Geldof, Buerk, the RAF and the taxpayers and charitable donors who paid the bills.
Brian Barder
London…”
It will be interesting to see whether Mr Rieff, son of the late and much missed Susan Sontag, will return to the charge after seeing these various replies. It’s even more interesting, I think, to speculate about the reason for the constant attempts by a small group of people, including Rieff, Alex de Waal and Médecins Sans Frontières (both cited by Rieff), to discredit what was by general consent, backed by a wealth of established facts and figures, an extraordinarily successful relief effort, sustained by the brilliant publicity of Geldof, Michael Buerk and the BBC, and many others, and by the generosity of millions of taxpayers and private donors all over the western world, in saving many millions of lives. There seems to be something at work here beyond a merely juvenile itch to plant banderillas in a sacred cow. However many times the misrepresentations and bogus arguments are demolished, up they pop again as bold and bright as if they were new. And of course no amount of factual rebuttal can ever completely erase the malign suspicions aroused in people’s minds by the original defamatory attacks. Let’s just hope that future historians will read the replies and the source documents and not just the wild allegations of an exceptionally malodorous campaign.
Brian
(Ethiopia 1982-86)
Returning to London after nearly three weeks away in France on holiday (but reading the same day’s English newspapers as well as some of the French almost every day while away), one feels somewhat better able to see the issues over the London bombings, Islam, and terrorism in perspective. Most of these are pretty fully discussed in my last (pre-France) post and especially in the comments on it, of which there are 48 at the last count, by no means all of them by me and by no means all agreeing with me, which is how it should be. But I have not yet offered for comment my reading of the new security measures now being proposed by the government (some at the request of the police), or of the lamentable episode of the innocent Brazilian killed on a tube train by plain-clothes police, an event already being widely denounced (including in comments on the previous post in this blog) as a dire example of fatal over-reaction and panic by the police — a view which I see as wrong-headed to the point of perversity, for the reasons set out later.
I surprise myself by finding the new measures proposed by the government in response to the bombings remarkably modest in scope: certainly not the frontal assault on what’s left of our civil liberties that I had gloomily expected. Perhaps the most controversial is the suggested extension of the period in which terrorist suspects can be held for questioning without being charged from 14 days to 3 months. The police point out that it can take much longer than 14 days to scrutinise the entire contents of a computer hard disk where the evidence to support a charge may well be concealed behind passwords and attempted deletions. Other investigations may similarly be necessarily quite protracted. In the special circumstances of terrorism, there are obviously cogent arguments against allowing a suspect to remain at liberty while this kind of supporting evidence is ferreted out and analysed. To describe such a provision as tantamount to internment seems to me far-fetched. Suspects may be held without charge for investigation for much longer than 14 days or even than 3 months in several continental European countries which operate an investigating magistrate system, and the difference between our two systems for investigation doesn’t appear to affect the arguments for and against holding suspects for this kind of length of time before they are charged. We shall need to scrutinise the small print with great care to ensure that there is a degree of independent scrutiny of detentions for questioning and investigation to make sure that the grounds for suspicion are sufficiently strong to justify this kind of short-term detention, and that the police are not using the power casually or at random. But subject to some such safeguards, I think it would be unreasonable to object to the extension proposed, despite the fact that the Guardian has already condemned it editorially.
The main other proposal is to create new offences of ‘acts preparatory to terrorism’, ‘incitement to terrorism’, and the provision of training for terrorism. Even the formidable civil rights solicitor Louise Christian, in her Guardian article of 30 July, was restrained in her criticisms of these proposals, rightly warning about the possible implications and questioning whether existing laws might not be adequate to cover most such activities, concluding uncontroversially that –
"We need independent-minded members of parliament who will break free of any misconceived political consensus and stop laws going through that will create injustice and risk recruiting terrorists."
So far, then, most reasonable observers, however strongly committed to the preservation of our historic liberties in the face of the terrorist threat and the excuse it gives to power-hungry politicians and policemen to extend their already exorbitant powers, will probably accept that the new measures now proposed are generally acceptable, subject to careful scrutiny of the small print. And we should be hugely relieved that the new proposals have been explicitly de-coupled from the promised scrutiny of the deplorable ‘control orders’ legislation hustled with difficulty through parliament last March only because of a commitment to a thorough review and opportunity for amendment or repeal early next year (2006). A different Home Secretary might well have seized the opportunity afforded by the London bombings this month (July 2005) to rush parliament into bringing forward the control orders review and making them permanent, at a time when it would have required special courage on the part of MPs to oppose their entrenchment in our security system.
Which brings us to the unfortunate Brazilian. Even the usually sensible Mary Ann Sieghart, in her Times column of 28 July, ridiculed the justification advanced by the police for their action in shooting in the head the man they believed was probably on the point of detonating a bomb on a crowded tube train:
‘AFTER the terrible shooting of the innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, I’ve been pondering a list of crimes that now seem to warrant summary execution by armed police as a punishment.“Wearing a padded coat in a built-up area,” is apparently good enough justification. “Failing to buy a ticket before entering a Tube train,” has to be added to the charge list. Worst, for all Asian or East African Londoners these days: “Carrying your gym kit in a rucksack on public transport." ‘
Wittily put, but fair? The answer hinges on whether the police had serious grounds for believing that the Brazilian was about to explode a bomb that would have killed them, many tube passengers and himself, and that the risk of killing an innocent man was outweighed by the risk that many more innocent people were in imminent danger of being killed unless the police acted immediately to prevent the detonation of the presumed bomb. What were these grounds? According to various witnesses (although some of the facts are denied), (a) the man came out of a house that the police knew or suspected was being used by terrorists and which was under surveillance, (b) despite the warm weather he was wearing a coat of some description which could have concealed a bomb strapped to his waist, (c) he began to make his way to a tube station previously involved in a bombing incident, (d) when the police identified themselves as policemen and ordered him to stop for questioning, he disobeyed the order and ran to the tube station, and (e) he vaulted over the ticket barrier and threw himself onto a tube train standing at the platform. The police, catching up with him on the train, had a split second to decide whether to give him an opportunity to press a button to detonate a bomb, or to kill him before he could do so. There was no middle way. They could not shoot to wound but not to kill: that would have given him time to detonate a bomb. They could not fire at his body rather than at his head: that might itself have set off the bomb. In those circumstances, what would you have done that the police didn’t do?
Perhaps the official enquiry into the tragedy will reveal that the facts were otherwise than as summarised above and that the decision of the police will accordingly appear in a different light — either more favourably or less so. Until then, I suggest that the only fair-minded verdict must be that the police acted correctly; indeed, that they had no real alternative. If the man had indeed been a bomber, and, benefiting from the hesitation of the police, had had the half-second necessary to detonate his bomb, killing perhaps forty or fifty people as well as himself, the police, who had been chasing him and who had had the opportunity to stop him exploding his bomb, would have been universally blamed for their failure to do so. Of course, being blamed for the mass murder would have been the least of the coppers’ problems, since they would all have been dead, too. PS: In the same column Mary Ann Sieghart makes the interesting point that, according to a recent Daily Telegraph poll, the proportion of Muslim men condemning western society as decadent and immoral, so that Muslims should "seek to bring it to an end", and denying any sense of loyalty to Britain, was three times as great as the proportion of Muslim women holding the same view. Could Mary Ann be right to infer from this remarkable statistic that one of the principal features of western society to which a significant number of Muslim men (but not women) object is the status and rights of women in the west and the constraints that western society places on the right of men to "subjugate their womenfolk in the way that they can in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or Somalia"? Brian
(Back in the Tooting front line)
E-mails flying around in the last few days have been polluting the air with glib denunciations of Tony Blair for supposedly having precipitated the London bombings of 7/7 by joining the Americans in invading and occupying Iraq. Similar voices have been heard on radio and television, too, notably from Mr George Galloway, fresh from his victory over the United States Senate. It’s there in the blogosphere, too.
Diligent readers of this blog and website will have noticed (pay attention, now: you’ll be tested on this in a moment) that I’m no slack-jawed admirer of Tony Blair, still less of his monumental blunders over Iraq or his government’s dismal assaults on our civil liberties. But fair’s fair: he has had a good week or two lately in which at least two brave gambles – aka foolhardy, as we would all have said if they had failed – have succeeded either spectacularly (winning the Olympics for London) or significantly (making perceptible progress on all fronts in the G8 under his chairmanship). The hat-trick came with his response to the bombings on 7/7: sober, defiant, calm, realistic – genuinely speaking for the nation at a time of grief and shock, something that even his sourest critics need to recognise he does well. As I wrote in my previous piece on the bombings, you would need to be a ferociously committed anti-Blairite not to have felt sorry for him when the glitz and glamour that were his due after the Olympics and the G8 were rudely shattered by a string of murders committed for no discernible political, religious or other purpose by a criminal gang lacking in all humanity or moral sense.
Yet the usual suspects emerge blinking into the daylight with their trite, complacent and predictable assertions that the finger of blame points, not at the murderers, but at the British prime minister. I’m afraid I find this exploitation of the London bombings as yet another stick to beat Blair with singularly offensive. For once Blair has been a genuine credit to his office (over the Olympics, the bombings and the G8), not putting so much as a toe wrong on any of the three issues. This is surely a good moment to suspend polemical trivia for a while. Anyone who thinks that if Britain under Blair hadn’t been with the Americans in the Iraq operation, London wouldn’t have been bombed, can’t be taken seriously. Those who voice that view anyway need to be careful about implying that the government’s major or other foreign policy decisions ought to be influenced in the smallest degree by fear of annoying murderous terrorists. They would do well to read a letter from Madrid in the week-end FT at http://tinyurl.com/cz9pc. The attack on Iraq was disastrously wrong for all sorts of reasons, but risking provoking murderers wasn’t one of them.
It’s encouraging, on the other hand, to see many of the heavyweight Sunday columnists (including the Sunday Times trio of Simon Jenkins, Michael Portillo and Minette Marin) making the essential point that the bombings must not be used as a pretext for yet more erosion of our civil liberties in new, panicky, tabloid-driven ‘anti-terrorism’ legislation, pushed through parliament in the aftermath of the bombings while MPs and even peers are afraid to provoke tabloid wrath by opposing it. Further dismantling of our historic liberties represents only a sort of victory for the murderers. If, as ministers constantly tell us, the terrorists want to “destroy our way of life”, dismantling our ancient safeguards against arbitrary and oppressive control of the people by an over-mighty executive sounds like just the sort of thing they have in mind.
Simon Jenkins also however makes the excellent point that the British and American governments’ constant references to “the war on terror” when there is no such war, no clash of armies, no state enemy, indeed no identifiable enemy at all, make it all the more difficult to show up the bombings of innocent Londoners as squalid crimes committed by squalid criminals (which is what they are), and not legitimate quasi-military acts of war by an enemy entitled by the state of war to retaliate when attacked. It is futile and misleading to try to rationalise purposeless crimes committed by psychotics. They have nothing to do with Iraq or a wish to “destroy our way of life”, which is in any case something no amount of murder and mayhem on the Tube could even begin to accomplish. Our way of life is indeed at risk, as one of the Law Lords remarked in the historic judgement of last December: not from a few mindless murderers, but from cowardly or power-hungry ministers in thrall to cynical and circulation-driven tabloids. Happily, there are signs that the home secretary, Charles Clarke, may be resisting the siren calls for yet more attacks on our liberties from the tabloids, the security services and police (always ravenous for more powers and fewer restraints), and probably his own officials (always vigilant for opportunities to slip in a few long-cherished horrors while no-one is looking). He has courageously pointed out that ID cards would not have prevented the London bombings. It’s relevant that the control orders rammed through a reluctant parliament earlier this year, seriously and indefinitely abridging without trial on a politician’s say-so the liberties of people who have not been convicted of any offence, didn’t prevent the bombings, either. For control orders to frustrate criminal attacks, it’s necessary to know who is planning them; and if you know that, there are plenty of ways to stop them. Despite the vengeful howls from the pages of the Sun newspaper, the case against further illiberal laws, and for radically amending existing ones, is wholly unaffected by the dreadful crimes committed in London last Thursday.
Brian
http://www.barder.com/
Nasty business. There are 32 confirmed dead so far, as of early evening on the day of the attacks, but more deaths are expected from the four synchronised attacks (three on London Underground tube trains and one on a bus). Nowhere near the horrific scale of 9/11, mercifully, nor even so far of Madrid, but sobering because the techniques used can be used again at will: there’s really no defence against a suicide bomber on a bus or tube since it’s impossible to search all the millions of people who use them every day, as the Madrileños know all too well. And the other sad thing is that these were co-ordinated attacks requiring considerable planning and collaboration yet none of the informers and moles scattered (we assume) through the extreme Islamicist groups had picked it up. The security people say, credibly, that several attacks of this kind have been planned in London since 9/11 but have been spotted, presumably through informers, and prevented. But there’s no way of being sure to detect and frustrate every single one, as today has proved. The London tube system is of course closed for the rest of the day but the buses are back and running again already and almost all the train services have been resumed so the disruption doesn’t seem too bad.
The timing is pretty clearly designed to disrupt the G8 meeting in Edinburgh, or rather at Gleneagles — it must have been planned well before the decision on the Olympics. Some of us are not at all pleased with the prospect of London being swamped by visitors for the Games in 2012, or of half of London being turned into a huge building site for the seven years between now and 2012, and we would have been more than happy if Paris had won instead. Or indeed New York or Madrid — anywhere but London. If the bombers had struck 24 hours earlier, London might well not have won (or would sympathy have swung even more votes our way?).
For once I actually feel sorry for Tony Blair, his Olympic triumph and any reasonably hopeful outcome from the G8 now irretrievably tarnished or at any rate overshadowed, as no doubt these unspeakable criminals intended. Well, we’ve had to live with the IRA in the past, as the Madrileños and other Spanish city-dwellers have had to live with ETA, and New Yorkers and Washingtonians with the memory of 9/11, and life goes on for most of us. It will be even tougher than usual for British Muslims, anyway for a while: the Muslim Council of Britain has already issued a message condemning the bombings, but some of the mud (or blood) will stick. It remains the case that the odds against any single one of us being killed or injured by a terrorist attack are just as astronomical as they were yesterday — indeed, they are probably even higher — and I think the great majority of Londoners will resume their lives tomorrow with their usual stoicism (not, admittedly, that there’s much alternative). Anyway, we’re all touched by the sympathetic messages pouring in from all over, and the El PaÃs cartoon that our friend in Barcelona (no, not Manuel) kindly sent is splendid. Chirac’s message was moving too. This kind of thing does underline the essentially trivial and ephemeral nature of our squabbles over rebates and British cooking. Nothing trivial about Africa or climate change, though. Perhaps the bombers will shock the G8 into an unaccustomed unity of purpose to tackle the real problems.
From El PaÃs
