On 4 March 2008, next Tuesday, Alan Sillitoe will celebrate his 80th birthday, and tens of thousands of other people the world over should be celebrating it too. Everyone remembers him for those early masterpieces, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, two works that changed the English fiction landscape for ever and whose film versions, with Alan's screenplays, are imprinted on the minds of everyone over 40 (and many younger too). Alan Sillitoe has so far written (I calculate) 79 other books besides those two: more than one book for every year of his long life; all published in the half-century from 1957 to 2007, this works out at just over one-and-a-half books a year, a truly Stakhanovite record — and the other good news is that he's still writing and seems set to continue writing for at least another half-century. His versatility is also very remarkable: the books include (in addition to the prolific fiction) autobiography, writings for children, plays, essays, poetry, screenplays, short stories, and travel. His bibliography on the Web is extraordinarily impressive. Many of his books have (unsurprisingly) won literary awards.
As this picture shows, Alan does most of his writing by hand, so it's the more remarkable that he is also an expert amateur radio ham, including a reader and tapper-out of Morse Code, as well as a devoted collector and connoisseur of maps, activities descended from his service in the RAF in Malaya. He has lived at various times in various places in Europe and north Africa; now a Londoner, but still unalterably nourished by his Nottingham roots: how appropriate, then, that he is shortly to be made a Freeman of the City of Nottingham (which, I'm told, will give him the right to drive a flock of sheep through the centre of town). He's an undaunted but highly discriminating man of the left. He has too a distinguished academic record: Visiting Professor of English at Leicester de Montfort University (1994-7), Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Geographical Society, and an Honorary Fellow of Manchester Polytechnic (1977). He has been awarded honorary doctorates by Nottingham Polytechnic (1990), Nottingham University (1994) and De Montfort University (1998).
Meeting this sharp, observant but strikingly unassuming and friendly figure, you'd never guess that he's what the tabloids would call a legend in his own lifetime: a writer whose style is so deceptively clear and simple that you'd easily miss the artifice and skill that lies behind it. A review of one of his books in the Guardian, published in 2004, gives an excellent impression of him.
Not least, he's the devoted and long-time husband of the distinguished poet Ruth Fainlight, of whom I'm proud to be a second cousin — as well as an admiring and affectionate friend of this amazingly productive and beautiful couple.
Happy birthday, Alan, and many more of them: all, let's hope, still at an average rate of a book and a half a year!
Brian
Here are two truisms.
(1) Gross overcrowding in our prisons has been a major problem for years. It contributes to the inhuman conditions in many of our jails, obstructs rehabilitation and thus promotes re-offending, consequently doing incalculable harm to both prisoners and society. It demoralises both prisoners and prison officers and frustrates probation officers. It is phenomenally expensive compared with any other kind of treatment of offenders. And we imprison a higher proportion of our population than any other comparable western country except the United States (with the highest percentage in the whole world), Luxembourg and (surprisingly) New Zealand, according to the 2005-2006 statistics (PDF file).
(2) A very large number of the people now imprisoned in Britain ought not to be in prison at all: many are there primarily because of their drug or alcohol addiction, or psychological problems, illiteracy and other educational inadequacy, or other kinds of inability to adapt to life in society, all of them conditions best treated outside rather than inside prison; rates of re-offending are sky-high, demonstrating that prison in current conditions doesn't work (except in the primitive sense that a person in prison can't commit offences in society until he or she is released); and in particular people serving very short sentences — less than a year, say — generally derive no benefit from their imprisonment and their imprisonment confers no benefit on society.
You might think that putting these two truisms, neither of which is seriously disputed by anyone except possibly those who write and read the Daily Mail, together leads to an obvious and irresistible conclusion: namely that the solution to the problem of prison overcrowding is to remove from the prisons a sizeable number of people now in them, arranging for their problems to be addressed in other ways, and to ensure that far fewer people are sent to prison in future. You might also think that no superhuman courage is required on the part of our political leaders to proclaim these elementary facts, to propound the obvious solution, and to put it into effect. Unfortunately neither of these suppositions seems to hold good in the weird and frightened world of Whitehall and Westminster, where pandering to the tabloids' reactionary prejudices supersedes decency, common sense and logic:
The Home Office is working to find solutions as prison populations rise. In July, Home Secretary John Reid announced plans to build 8,000 new prison places to cope with rising prison populations. The first 900 of these new places will be ready by Autumn 2007, but before then there's an immediate demand for more space. To keep the public safe, it is critical that those who are convicted of crime – particularly of violent crime – serve their sentences behind bars, so room must be found for all of them. (October 2006, Home Office website)
Or this:
Three "super-prisons" each housing about 2,500 offenders are to be built, Justice Secretary Jack Straw has said. Following a review of overcrowding in jails, he said a building programme would take prison place numbers up to 96,000 from the current 81,000 by 2014. … The building programme … would cost an extra £1.2bn on top of the current £1.5bn, Mr Straw said. … One of the so-called Titan jails, which will be larger than any prison currently used in Britain, will be in service by 2012. The other two are expected to be built by 2014. He suggested they should be built in London, the West Midlands and the north-west of England. [BBC news report, 5 December 2007]
Everyone with any claim to an expert view on the matter agrees that the prison population needs to be significantly reduced and that building more and more prisons is no solution, especially when the new prisons are to be so huge: all the evidence shows that the smaller prisons achieve much better results than the big person-warehouses (none of the existing ones being as vast as Mr Straw's proposed Titan jails). Successive Chief inspectors of Prisons, Lord Chief Justices and other judges, the Howard League for Penal Reform, the prisons' Independent Monitoring Boards, all recognise the logic of the situation and plead for a radical reduction in prisoner numbers as an infinitely superior solution to the knee-jerk, tabloid-appeasing alternative of simply building more and bigger prisons. Tony Hatfield, retired solicitor and blogger, who knows whereof he speaks, puts much of the blame for the unnecessarily swollen prison population on the magistracy, which persists in sending more and more minor offenders to prison for uselessly short terms (his supporting facts and figures here).
Or here is the Howard League on the impact of prison over-crowding:
- Overcrowding means that over 12,000 prisoners are being held two to a cell designed for one. Many of these cells have unscreened toilets which fail to provide even the most basic of human dignity.
- In a desperate attempt to find empty beds, prisoners are being transported all over the country. In 2001, 37,000 prisoners were being held over 50 miles away from home, for 5,000 of these the distance was more than 150 miles. This cost the taxpayer millions of pounds in transportation costs and in delays to the criminal justice system as a result of late arrivals for court appearances. It also jeopardises family relationships and the chances of successful re-integration back into the community on release; tow of the most important factors in reducing re-offending.
- The huge prison population is undermining any good work the prison service is trying to do in terms of making the prison experience constructive for the majority prisoners. In 2001-2 the prison service failed to meet its own target of providing prisoners with at least 24 hours of purposeful activity for week. Only 3 out of 40 of the male local prisons (those holding predominantly remand and short sentence prisoners) which suffer the worst overcrowding, managed to meet this target.
- Prisons cost £2.2bn a year. With re-offending rates after release still at about 60% (and over 75% for young offenders) prison is an expensive failure, which has no impact on crime levels or the fear of crime.
[Howard league website]
It's understandable in a way that relevant recent ministers of the limited capacity of, e.g., Michael Howard, David Blunkett and John Reid should be incapable of overcoming the promptings of the tabloids and their own baser instincts by doing what's so obviously the right and necessary thing. Charles Clarke might possibly have summoned up the necessary intestinal fortitude to set about reducing the prison population, had he not been banished from office by an ever-timid Tony Blair (over the relatively minor issue of failing to deport foreigners convicted of offences). Jack Straw, ubiquitous and indestructible as ever, is no fool and has even admitted that he knows what ought to be done:
The Government will not be able to build its way out of the prison crisis, Jack Straw suggested yesterday. He indicated that the only way the pressure could be relieved was by sending fewer people to jail and using more noncustodial sentences. (The Times, 12 July 2007)
– but the monstrous prison building programme goes on regardless and the swelling 
prison population continues to break all records month by month. By what intellectual gymnastics does Mr Straw justify this resounding failure to do what he knows to be the right and obvious thing? (The same gymnastics, no doubt, as those which allowed him to remain in office as Foreign & Commonwealth Secretary at the time of the aggression against Iraq after his own department's legal advisers had warned him that the attack would be illegal, indeed a war crime.)
Prison over-crowding is a major national disgrace. The solution to the problem is obvious, conforms to the evidence, saves money, benefits society, is favoured by the experts and professionals concerned, and represents a humane and practical course of action. So what's the matter with these people who rule our country?
Brian
In September 2005 the Blair government, having introduced the odious system of control orders ('house arrest lite' without charge, trial or time limit) earlier that year, was proposing to extend to three months the period in which terrorist suspects could be imprisoned for interrogation without charge. A letter of mine, published in the (London) Times newspaper on 23 September 2005 — no longer apparently accessible on the Times website, but quoted in full at the time on this blog, qv — argued that since control orders were even more objectionable in principle than detention without charge for a few weeks for questioning provided that the latter was intensively monitored and supervised by a high court judge, parliament should trade the repeal of the control orders régime for a short extension of the maximum period of detention without charge for questioning subject to proper judicial supervision and approval.
Of course neither suggestion was adopted: the repulsive control orders régime continues, and although the proposed extension of detention without charge to three months was rejected in Blair's first parliamentary defeat, now, nearly three years later, a new prime minister and his home secretary are once again asking for an extension of detention for questioning, this time from the present 28-day maximum, already the longest in the western world, to 42 days, even though hardly anyone in or out of parliament can see any need or justification for it: and parliament agreed last week by 267 votes to 60 to renew the discredited control orders régime for yet another year.
Once again we have the worst of all possible worlds. It defies belief that only 60 MPs were prepared to stand up and be counted for the ending of control orders. Such is the potency of the fear of being labelled 'soft on terrorism' in our ruthlessly adversarial political system; such is the flabbiness of spine of our politicians, or most of them, and the blind obstinacy of our ministers.
By an irony that one may describe as delicious or savage, according to taste, –
the day after the legislation was extended for a year, the supposedly significant and sensitive intelligence used to justify imposing one of these control orders was revealed as a sham when a high court judge dismissed the control order against 25-year old British national Cerie Bullivant, ruling that there was no "reasonable suspicion" that he intended to take part in terrorism abroad… [the justification that had been advanced for the imposition of the control order]
– in the words of the British historian Andy Worthington. I can't improve on Mr Worthington's comments on these shabby events here. Please take a few minutes to read them, including the comments appended to them. A description of what it's like to be subjected to a control order, recommended in one of the comments on the Worthington blog, is also worth reading — all eight web pages of it.
Nothing changes, alas.
As long as we persist in subjecting people who are entitled to the presumption of innocence, and who have not been charged with any offence, to control orders which in many cases are sufficiently harsh to ruin their lives, or locking them up for weeks of questioning before any charge is brought against them, we are really in no position to denounce the iniquities of Guantanamo or extraordinary rendition — both undeniably worse, but only in degree. Denial of our basic civil rights, and the oppression of ordinary people on the basis of mere suspicion, are intolerable in either greater or lesser degree, and on whatever side of the Atlantic they may be practised.
Brian
I am proud to have played a modest part, as a junior civil servant working in London and as a young diplomat at the United Nations in New York, in the great enterprise of decolonisation carried out by Britain, mainly in the 1950s and 1960s, following the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. This self-divestiture of a great empire was virtually entirely voluntary, almost all of it achieved, with remarkably little violence, in co-operation with the political leaders in the former colonial territories. Such violence as occurred was in most cases generated by fierce competition between different groups of local people — tribal, political, geographical — to inherit dominant power from Britain on independence. Sometimes minority or backward groups were afraid that with Britain's withdrawal they would come to be dominated by more numerous, sophisticated and better organised fellow-countrymen — that when the former referee left the field, the rule-book would be torn up and the strongest would prevail. All too often their fears proved to be well founded. Such minority groups would often seek to resist or retard the inexorable movement towards independence, supported by conservative voices at home who would always claim that each colonial territory in turn "was not ready", "needed more time to prepare". In general the British Colonial Office, the small department responsible for managing decolonisation, stoutly resisted such siren voices, recognising that once there was a critical mass of local opinion desiring early (but not necessarily immediate) independence, progress towards it developed its own momentum and that trying to resist it would be likely to end in tears. In any case, after six years fighting a savage global war to preserve our own right to govern ourselves, British people no longer had any appetite for denying the colonial people for whom we had previously been responsible that same right.
In many cases the transfer of power to local hands involved a massive and complex diplomatic negotiation with representative, usually democratically elected, local leaders, to determine how power should be distributed after independence, what safeguards there should be for minorities, how fundamental human rights should be protected in the independence constitution, and what package of development aid should be put in place to give the new state the best possible send-off. The greater part of the conflict that occurred over all these key issues was between different local groups, not between local leaders and the colonial power. In the great majority of cases the extent of the goodwill and spirit of cooperation that existed between those transferring power and those receiving it was quite remarkable. The majority of the exceptions to this were in territories where independence entailed the surrender of privilege and power by white settler communities, most of whom (rightly or wrongly) perceived the advent of "black majority rule" as a threat to the political and economic position they had enjoyed during the colonial period. In other territories, where Britain had never permitted white settlement on any scale, the transition was generally accomplished in a friendly and mutually cooperative spirit, and without bloodshed.
So having seen a good deal of this at first hand during the height of decolonisation (but never as a Colonial Service officer at the sharp end), I'm naturally sad that a new generation of British people has been led to believe in a quite different version of events: a version according to which in each territory local freedom fighters had to fight and spill their blood in a struggle to the death with their savage and repressive colonial masters, finally achieving their freedom literally over the dead bodies of the British imperialists, following decades or centuries of incessant racism and brutal exploitation. Of course what we now perceive as racism and exploitation did take place in many of the British colonial territories and protectorates, often in ways that seemed to most people at the time part of the natural order of things; just as racism and exploitation have continued to occur in many of the independent countries formerly under British rule, as well as here in Britain. But the idea that British colonial rule also brought many benefits to local people, especially in the latter period of colonialism during and after the second world war, is now regarded as heretical and self-serving, the province of Blimps, reactionaries and fascists: colonial rule is seen as indistinguishable from 'imperialism', riddled with racism, contaminated by exploitation, just a barely disguised continuation of slavery by another name. In this simplistic and self-congratulatory way the great achievements of the colonial era, and especially of the process of voluntary decolonisation, are in imminent danger of being wiped from the history books; and generations of idealistic, hard-working British colonial administrators, often deeply and emotionally committed to the local people whom they served, frequently in extreme and dangerous conditions, are daily betrayed by those who have come after them.
Many of these knee-jerk perversions of what actually happened permeated an article about Kenya by the Guardian correspondent Chris McGreal on 7 February 2008, under the give-away heading 'Who's to blame? It depends where you begin the story' . So it was a real pleasure to read, a week later on the 14th, a spirited refutation of the McGreal version, lavishly supported by facts, written by Ian Buist, an old friend and colleague from my own decolonisation days and subsequently. Ian is a man with, probably, more extensive first-hand experience of Kenya both before and after independence, gained both in Kenya itself, elsewhere in east Africa, and in two government departments in London, than almost anyone else now alive. The whole rebuttal should be compulsory reading for the anti-imperialism brigade, but this extract may give the flavour:
Chris McGreal traces the origins of the unrest in Kenya to the alleged wrongdoings of British colonial policy (Who's to blame? It depends where you begin the story, February 7). He says the Kikuyu people "were robbed of almost all their land … mostly from fertile areas beyond Nairobi that the colonists called the White Highlands". He quotes one source saying that the "struggle for independence and … Mau Mau" were based on a situation where "the best land" was in the hands of a very few, and "the rest of the population was driven on to dry, rocky, waterless areas".
I was in charge of Colonial Office policy towards Kenya at various levels for most of the 1950s, and spent two years there working for its multi-racial government. I was involved in the great agricultural revolution we brought about in Kikuyuland, and in legally scrapping the White Highlands.
The Kikuyu were not "robbed of almost all their land". There were disputes around Nairobi and the borders of adjoining Kiambu district. Some were settled by compensation, and the Native Trust Lands Order of 1939 protected all Kiambu people from any further alienation. The White Highlands were never part of Kikuyuland. They were occupied by Masai nomads who agreed to turn the highlands over for settlement under two formal treaties in 1904 and 1911.
Anyone who saw Kikuyuland, even before the land reforms of 1959, would laugh at the idea that it was "dry, rocky and waterless". Those reforms involved consolidating each occupant's fragmented land into viable holdings; planning them; issuing freehold title; and helping their development with cash crops such as coffee, tea and modern dairying. Assessment of who owned what was done by large Kikuyu committees, to avoid corruption.
And there's more, equally fully documented, in the same vein. Full marks to the Guardian for publishing it, almost entirely undoctored.
I hope that readers of this, and of Ian Buist's magisterial rebuttal, who may be offended, even enraged, by what they will see as an attempt to defend the indefensible, will resist the temptation to fill the comments spaces below with indignant examples of the many nasty things done in the course of our imperial history, from the response to the Indian mutiny to the Hola camp massacre. No-one is denying that these things happened, as they happened elsewhere in the world in both similar and different circumstances — and indeed as they continue to happen long after that once mighty empire has been systematically and enthusiastically dismantled. But cataloguing the evils of that long-ago era can't erase the many good and brave things that were also done, not only in the heyday of empire, but especially in the decades, still just about in living memory, of deliberate and astonishingly peaceful decolonisation. Lest we forget!
Brian
Assiduous listeners to the BBC's Thought for the Day, five minutes of assorted religiosities to start us off right each morning, and readers of the Guardian's Face to Faith 
column, will recognise the name and voice of the Revd. Dr Giles Fraser, Vicar of Putney and Oxford philosophy don, and a dead cert to succeed Dr Rowan Williams one day. I don't share his religious beliefs, but he's a good reliable lefty and small-L liberal and I can't improve on Fraser's charitable comments on the recent utterances of the Archbishop of Canterbury regarding Muslim Shari'a law and the asserted need for English law to reach some kind of accommodation with it. You can listen to the Revd. Dr Giles's thoughts on the matter here (afrter a brief introduction). Worth five minutes of anyone's time and much better than most of the contributions to Thought for the Day, apart of course from those by the good vicar himself.
And that is all I have to say on the matter!
Update, 12 Feb 2008: Well, just a couple of words more, to commend to you another civilised piece by Dr Giles Fraser (here), and a harsher but persuasive piece by Andrew Anthony arguing for the disestablishment of the Church of England (here), both in the Guardian of 12 February 2008. Mr Anthony's concluding remarks seem sensible:
Much of the grievance members of other religions and denominations currently feel stems from the privilege – state endorsement, parliamentary representation – that Dr Williams's church conspicuously enjoys. Who can deny that the church's special treatment looks increasingly absurd in our multicultural society? Even Dr Williams himself has acknowledged that Britain is not a Christian country in terms of "active churchgoers". Therefore the choice on offer is either to downgrade the Church of England, or upgrade other religions. Dr Williams has made his preference obvious.
He should think again. If he really wants the hateful media off his back, he ought to separate his church from the British state. Then his pronouncements would more properly be a matter only for him and his vanishing congregation.
There's room for argument about the claim that the C of E congregation is 'vanishing', 
but the secular trend (in the statistical but not the theological sense) is certainly downwards, as this graph for "usual Sunday attendance" from 1968 to 2005 demonstrates. (The 2006 figures show a further decline; figures for 2007 seem not to be available yet.)
Brian
Another crop of blunders, grammatical, syntactical and substantive, from the print media of early 2008:
"Was it wise of [Dr Rowan Williams], as head of the Church of England, to be passing judgment… Rowan Williams's position as head of the established church gives him a double advantage… his church enjoys unique privileges in law. The Queen is its nominal head."
Observer, editorial, 10 Feb 08
So which of them is it?
"John McCain… stood on the brink of winning the Republican party's nomination yesterday… with almost half of the magic number of 1,191 delegates needed to win the race… McCain [pushed] his total delegate count to 680 and rising…"
Ed Pilkington and Suzanne Goldenberg, Guardian, 7 Feb 08
Which of them can't do arithmetic?
"Mr Bush's successor will think twice before tearing up treaties or undermining international institutions and, if they are a Democrat, will think three times before playing at being a soldier."
Guardian editorial, 7 Feb 08
Will she, or he, or they?
"The exit polls suggested [that] Obama was winning-over [sic] young, educated and black voters, while Clinton had greater appeal among women, the working class [sic] and Hispanics."
Guardian, front page report by Ewen MacAskill, 6 Feb 08
The hyphen seems to have wandered — and wasn't necessary anyway.
"[Romney] has been under attack … for his rejection of punitive laws on illegal immigration and his support for campaign finance reform and global warming."
Ewen MacAskill, Guardian, 5 Feb 08
Perhaps Romney was on to something with his support for global warming? Didn't work out, though.
"Q. Who can authorise … surveillance using bugs and other listening devices?
"A. Chief constables and officials of equivalent rank, ie, in Revenue & Customs."
Ian Cobain and Vikram Dodd, Guardian, 5 Feb 08
i.e., "e.g."?
"…David Cameron and his advisers are seriously concerned about the damage being done to their project of abolishing the Conservatives' image as 'the nasty' party, as Theresa May famously dubbed it."
Miranda Green, The Observer, 3 Feb 08
Or as she famously didn't dub it, as a few minutes with Google would have established. "You know what some people call us — the nasty party. I know that's unfair. You know that's unfair but it's …"
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/tories2002/story/0,,806370,00.html
"Since then, a Prime Minister has been questioned by police, the Liberal Democrats' biggest donor has been jailed for fraud and the Labour party treasurer and a cabinet minister have resigned over improprieties in the declaration of donations."
The Observer, editorial, 3 Feb 08
And the Observer's leader-writer is about to be sued for libel by the treasurer of the Labour Party — or should be.
"There is no evidence yet that Labour donors received favours for their endorsements of deputy leadership candidates."
The Observer, editorial, 3 Feb 08
Don't you love that sneaky "yet"? A distasteful smear in three letters.
"Offences of the type committed by Derek Conway are more egregious and easier to remedy than the arcana of party funding."
The Observer, editorial, 3 Feb 08
And therefore less serious, apparently — not a judgment many of us would agree with. And which of the OED definitions of 'egregious' is intended here — "Remarkably good or great. Of events and utterances: Striking, significant. ?Obs.", or "Remarkable in a bad sense; gross, flagrant, outrageous"? Neither seems obviously apposite.
[I]f [MPs] fail to put their house in order, they will all [sic] stand guilty of moral complacency. That is not the same as sleaze, but it is a form of corruption none the less."
The Observer, editorial, 3 Feb 08
No, I'm sorry: it plainly isn't either sleaze or corruption.
"… MPs' expenses … should be as transparent as other parts of a politician's income … the parties must return to the negotiating table… they must vote on new guidelines… Europe should put a brake on Beijing's excesses … The EU must use the power that wealth brings…"
The Observer, editorials, 3 Feb 08
Must, should? Who gives the orders around here?
"Draconian rules left my baby and I stranded"
Headline in Wandsworth Borough News, 3 Oct 2007
Well, blow I !
Brian
In the previous post I argued, with no pleasure at all, that the United States (not only the United States of George W Bush) and the Europe of the EU, including Britain, were and are steadily drifting apart, socially, politically and culturally, and that the European view of America was no longer founded in almost unreserved admiration, as it once was.
Today's Guardian carries a long and highly suggestive article ("The empire strikes back") 
which provides strong analytical support for that proposition. The article is by the American scholar and writer Parag Khanna, Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Global Governance Initiative of the American Strategy Program. Khanna's labelling of the EU as a new and benign form of empire, expanding by political, social and economic attraction rather than by armed conquest, may be debatable, but what's in a word? "Empire" will do.
Particularly loud bells are rung by Khanna's passage on the Europeans' view of America:
Europe has its own vision of what world order should look like, which it increasingly pursues whether America likes it or not. The EU is now the most confident economic power in the world, regularly punishing the United States in trade disputes, while its superior commercial and environmental standards have assumed global leadership. Many Europeans view America's way of life as deeply corrupt, built on borrowed money, risky and heartless in its lack of social protections, and ecologically catastrophic. The EU is a far larger humanitarian aid donor than the US, while South America, east Asia and other regions prefer to emulate the "European Dream" than the American variant.
The US and the EU increasingly differ about both the means and ends of power as well. For many Europeans, the US-led war in Iraq validated their view that war is not an instrument of policy but a sign of its failure. The al-Qaida attacks on European soil served to heighten this disdain. It is often said that America and Europe make a strong team because America breaks and Europe fixes, but this cliche has long begun to grate on Europeans, who would rather spread their version of stability before America destabilises countries on its periphery, particularly in the Arab world.
It's almost (but not quite) tempting to wonder whether Mr Khanna had been reading my blog. The whole piece should be made compulsory reading for our quaint, old-fashioned Europhobes and Eurosceptics, with their cramped tunnel vision of the European adventure of which Britain is, happily for us, a part.
Parag Khanna's Hindu family fled from Lahore to Calcutta, presumably a not uncommon event on the subcontinent, to which Parag has returned, writing vividly of his impressions of the experience in Prospect magazine (Sept. 2005). He's currently an adviser to Barack Obama, who certainly seems to need insights into Europe's view of the US as the Chair of the European subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee who has never called a meeting of it. Realistic advice on Europe from Mr Khanna would certainly be in order, judging by the following extracts from Obama's famous article in Foreign Affairs, admittedly chosen highly selectively:
Throughout the Middle East, we must harness American power to reinvigorate American diplomacy. Tough-minded diplomacy, backed by the whole range of instruments of American power — political, economic, and military — could bring success even when dealing with long-standing adversaries such as Iran and Syria…. To renew American leadership in the world, we must immediately begin working to revitalize our military. A strong military is, more than anything, necessary to sustain peace… [As President and commander-in-chief,] I will not hesitate to use force, unilaterally if necessary, to protect the American people or our vital interests whenever we are attacked or imminently threatened… …[T]oday, NATO's challenge in Afghanistan has exposed, as Senator Lugar has put it, "the growing discrepancy between NATO's expanding missions and its lagging capabilities." To close this gap, I will rally our NATO allies to contribute more troops to collective security operations and to invest more in reconstruction and stabilization capabilities.
No doubt any US presidential candidate has to inject generous helpings of machismo into his (or indeed her) speeches and writings, especially those aimed primarily at American audiences and readers. Nor is the concept of American leadership, including military leadership, by any means exhausted; we are all in its debt. I just have a hunch that Parag Khanna would have expressed these sentiments differently. (I hope it won't now be revealed that Obama's Foreign Affairs article was drafted by Mr. Khanna.)
Parag Khanna is a name to look out for.
Update (3 Feb. 03): Parag Khanna's Guardian article, discussed above, is even more impressive when read alongside his long essay, published by the New York Times on 27 
January as the cover story of the magazine and adapted from his forthcoming book, The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, to be published in the US in March and in the UK in April. This represents a survey of global trends and realities in the next decades of the 21st century of breathtaking, Kissingeresque breadth and scope. Many seemingly disconnected international phenomena, such as the apparent drifting apart of the US and Europe and the significance of the role of the EU in the developing global balance, fall into place as Khanna's analysis unfolds. The last two of the essay's eight web pages are especially stimulating and suggestive. The whole thing is probably a little neater than it will prove to be in real life, but the essay is an eye-opener for those of us trying to make sense of the way the world is going, and puts many current issues and problems into a cogent perspective. That's how it strikes me, anyway; and if that's how important an eight-page essay appears to be, consider the impact that the book from which it's distilled is likely to make when it comes out in the spring! Bear in mind, too, that the author is an adviser on international affairs to the man who just might have become the 44th President of the United States in a year from now. Are others as strongly impressed as I am?
PS If you prefer to read the Khanna essay on a single web page, in smallish print, the full text is available here.
Brian
