Someone should tell the Prime Minister that dissent is like putty: if you press it down at the top it squeezes out somewhere else.. I LEARN from inside sources that in the course of the next year the tobacco industry has decided to come clean. Yes, the tobacco industry has finally agreed to admit something that it has never admitted before.
It has finally agreed to admit that there is a link – let me spell this out clearly – that there is a DEFINITE PROVEN LINK between tobacco and smoking.”For years the tobacco industry has denied that there is any link between cigarettes and smoking,” says Adrian Wardour-Street, the PR man who is spearheading the campaign to admit the link without seeming to do so. “And we were quite right so to refuse! Oh, yes, there was plenty of anecdotal evidence to link tobacco and smoking, but we could never find the ultimate proof, the unshakeable, 100 per cent evidence that there was a direct link between tobacco and smoking.”But surely there could never be any doubt, could there? Why else would people buy tobacco in the shape of cigarettes except to smoke it?”For hundreds of reasons,” says Adrian “To look glamorous To offer to other people To barter at the end of World War Two To throw to people in Third World countries To use as stakes in friendly card games To leave them as tips To imitate Humphrey Bogart To put behind your ear…”OK, OK. LABOUR’S internal elections for its National Executive have long been derided as a beauty contest, but now the spin consultants of Millbank Tower want to turn it into the real thing. Tony Blair’s reforms, designed to neuter the party’s ruling body – sorry, ensure a constructive and supportive relationship with the Government – will kick MPs off the section elected by ballot of the entire membership. This will stop Tony Benn’s avatar using it as a power base, but might let in a fifth column of Hattersleyites (as Trotskyists are known these days) among the unknowns on the ballot paper.
So, out goes to the call to loyal Blairite actors and pop stars on the membership list to put their names forward But Mr Blair should beware.
Perhaps it will have to wait until Islamic agnosticism emerges as a dominant religion of Turkey, as Christian doubt has elsewhere, but it is important to offer the Turks a genuine chance to prove their liberal democratic credentials.. Bosnia could have been a model for a secular, tolerant and liberal state in which Christians and Muslims lived together. If Turkey could follow that model, then it should certainly be a candidate for European Union membership.Trying to tie part of the Islamic world to western liberal democracy is not a strategy that has worked with Egypt, the greatest recipient of American aid after Israel. But the chances of success are much greater with Turkey, and the prize is great. Bosnian Muslims certainly feel strongly that Europe’s Christian heritage ensured that they were left to their fate, and there is much truth in that. It is a history divided by religion, but it is a division (like the division of Europe by communism) which the EU could overcome.That is why we should wrestle with the shadow of Hassan.
But Europe, as the region bordering on the Mediterranean, has a much longer history than the land-mass of north and west Europe. This is the external open-endedness which yesterday saw the future eastern boundary of the Union pushed to the Black Sea and the steppes. But, as a permanent condition of the EU, this process of expansion is just as disorienting as a process of permanent unification. Why stop at the Urals or the Bosphorus?Well, it has to stop somewhere, or the EU would simply be a free-trade and single-currency zone for advanced, liberal and democratic countries, regardless of cultural identity or geographical location.
But it should force us to ask: is there such a thing as a European identity, and does the EU exist to give expression to it? Because there is a radical open-endedness about the Union which is unsettling. There is the internal open-endedness of the integration process, enshrined in the phrase “ever- closer union” in the Treaty of Rome. It was precisely to counter this endless ambition that moderate Euro-sceptics, including our present Foreign Secretary, have championed the cause of an ever-wider union. He claimed that Paul-Henri Spaak, a Belgian founding father of the European Community, was a collaborationist and former intellectual admirer of Hitler, and that Jacques Delors was a disciple of a crypto-Nazi in the 1930s.This is nonsense, given the EU’s high and democratic principles.
John Laughland’s book The Tainted Source last year argued that the ideology underlying the European Union is corrupted by German supremacism in a pan-European guise. The spectre of the heathen at the gate even featured in British domestic politics as recently as Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign, fought on the demand that the Ottomans be ejected from Europe “bag and baggage”.So is the enlarged European Union simply a neo-Christendom, an ethnic and cultural entity based on Christianity and Caucasian genes? (Never mind that the Caucasus mountains which gave their name to a racial type are to the north and east of Turkey.) It cannot be, and it is as well to spell out why not. Ever since the giant Hassan stormed the wall of Constantinople at the head of a wave of Janissaries in 1453, ending a thousand years of the Christian Roman Empire of Byzantium, his shadow has fallen across the continent. Up to the walls of Vienna and back, modern Europe’s identity was forged in opposition to Turkish Islam. Despite its aspirations, and despite the very recent democratic credentials of the convoy of countries which has jumped the queue ahead of it, Turkey’s political system still fails to qualify. Istanbul’s politicians are not fully insulated from the military and there have been abuses of human rights, especially those of ethnic minorities such as the Kurds.
But this is not the whole story, and it is worth pursuing further the reluctance to admit Turkey even into the EU’s waiting room.
