All The More Reason

What unites all the Labour MPs who have queued up to criticise John Prescott? Is it merely a loathing of croquet? Let's have a look at the culprits:

Stephen Pound (MP for Ealing North…Majority 7000)

Andrew Dismore (MP for Hendon…Majority 2699)

Dr Ian Gibson MP (Norwich North…Majority 5459)

Now, the more eagle-eyed observers will notice that the MPs pictured above are all sitting on relatively slender majorities, well within the target range of the Conservative Party at the next election. A few well placed, well publicised words of condemnation and concern will, the argument presumably runs, protect them from any backlash from their constituents. This is an incredibly short-sighted view of things.

Labour MPs should learn the lessons of history when it comes to attacking the leadership for their own ends. Conservative MPs tried it in 1997 when they undermined John Major's attempts to coordinate the Tory Party's policy on the European Single Currency. Remember their names? No, I thought not. They went down with the sinking ship, never to be seen again.
The sort of internecine squabbling that we are starting to see only ever has one result: defeat. If twenty years of opposition hasn't taught the Labour Party this, maybe the latest opinion polls will focus their minds.

Michael P

As feuds go, the one between Christopher Hitchens and George Galloway is pretty good value for money. The latest salvo in the exhange has come from the Hitch, as a response to Galloway's claim that it would be morally justifiable for a suicide bomber to assassinate Tony Blair.

Leaving the legal rights and wrongs of what Galloway said to one side, his comments smack of a particularly acute form of moral idiocy. To describe something as 'justifiable' is qualitatively different from labelling it, say, 'excusable'. Whereas the latter implies that the action is morally permissible but nonetheless blameworthy, the former expresses approbation of the activity itself. If something is morally justifiable it is morally correct.

Taking Galloway's words at face value, it is difficult to surmise how one could morally justify the murder of the Prime Minister. One possible way of doing so, I suppose, would be to resort to an argument based on self-defence:

X killing Y would prevent Y from doing Z, where Zis an imminent, unjustfiable threat to X.

It's the old parlour game of 'going back in time to kill Hitler'. If you could, would you? I shall leave the answer, and any moral equivalence, to your own conscience. Galloway isn't talking about going back in time to kill Tony Blair though. He is advocating his assassination in the here-and-now.

The pseudo-utilitarian argument that murdering Tony Blair or George Bush would serve 'a greater good' is, by Galloway's own admission, a nonsense. He describes the hypothetical murder as 'counter productive', as it would, he says, create a 'backlash' (strange that).

When one scratches the surface, we see that George Galloway is advocating murder as an act of vengeance. For a Stalinist psychopath, I suppose this would be par for the course. Totalitarian regimes have often elevated murder-as-revenge to the level of the morally justifiable. Galloway's pronouncements are yet another example of the reactionary left's moral confusion. We see it in their support for the 'insurgency' and their apologies for suicide attacks on civilians in Israel and elsewhere.

Just a mischievous thought though. If revenge for a harm inflicted justifies murder, I would be interested to see how relatives of the children who died as a result of the misappropriation of Oil for Food money might seek to apply The Galloway Principle in practice.

Michael P