Israel’s announcement of plans for 1,600 new settler housing units in illegally occupied Palestinian territory has triggered both stern condemnation from Washington and rioting on the streets of East Jerusalem. And just to highlight their heartfelt regret over these adverse reactions, the Israeli authorities have today confirmed their desire to build 300 more.

It is difficult to interpret such intractable obstinacy as anything other than deliberate provocation, and not just in respect of the timing. As Netanyahu is well aware, substantial withdrawal is the sine qua non for the two-state policy increasingly pressed on his government by the rest of the world.

Yet his evident determination to scupper this outcome is so deep that he is willing quite literally to try and build his way out of his impasse. Not only can he not be allowed to succeed; he cannot succeed, even within his own terms.

Netanyahu’s hardline position puts him directly at odds with majority opinion in his own country. Most Israelis do not regard preservation of settlements in Palestinian territory as a fundamental objective of the state, and do not believe that the interests of settlers take priority over those of the population in general.

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Lord Adonis says the British Airways strike is ‘deplorable’, and Gordon Brown says the British Airways strike is ‘deplorable’. Adonis calls the impending walkout ‘totally unjustified’, but Brown holds back and simply designates it ‘unjustified’.

Woooah! Did you see that? The prime minister failed to use an adverb of degree. Labour leadership split! Hold the front page!

Such is the underlying logic of what was at the time of writing the lead story on the Daily Telegraph website, which was running under the headline:  ‘Brown declines to criticise Unite over BA strike’.

I notice that the Torygraph piece runs under the triple by-line of Rosa Prince, Heidi Blake and Chris Irvine, so perhaps the publication’s sub-editors made some sort of slip in bolting three pieces of copy together. Or perhaps this really is plain and simple distortion of the truth, in line with the newspaper’s strident rightwing agenda.

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Lurch, according to my dictionary, is an archaic or dialect intransitive verb, which means ‘to prowl or steal about suspiciously’. Seemingly its sole use in twenty-first century English is to provide Tories with an all-purpose pejorative designation for any identifiable outbreak of milquetoast social democracy inside the Labour Party.

Labour, you see, never moves to the left in a cautious and considered manner after a period of due ideological reflection and deliberation. Nor does it ever hop, skip and jump in a general westerly direction, or veer to port in the wake of demonstrable justification for setting just such a course. Oh no. As far as the Conservatives are concerned, Labour is perpetually ‘lurching towards the left’, even when it is idling in neutral.

You can find a classic example of the genre on conservativehome.com, which warns its readership that Labour is lurching leftwards after … get this … selecting trade union officials for winnable seats. The piece is based on an article in The Times, headlined ‘Safe seats for union backers prompt fears that Labour will turn Left after election’. Seduce my aged footwear.

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Has somebody gone and invented time travel, and the story broke on a day when I was just too hungover to listen to the Today Programme? Or could it be that Peter Mandelson is secretly a Time Lord? They are supposed to look like human beings, after all.

I only ask because William Hague is set to give a speech today, arguing that a Labour victory at the general election will take Britain back to the 1970s.

This riff seems to play the same role in contemporary Tory discourse as the opening chords to Honky Tonk Women do at a Rolling Stones gig. Keef only has to launch into that famous look-no-hands duuuh … dum dum duuuh … dum dum bit on his open-tuned telecaster, and the joint goes wild. That’s because the audience knows what’s coming next.

So it is when Daily Telegraph editorial writers and the Federation of Small Businesses trot out their lame cover versions of one of Conservatism’s greatest hits. The dead unburied on Merseyside! Uncollected garbage in Leicester Square! Picket lines everywhere!

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I’m all for the coinage of snazzy neologisms, and I have never been big on political correctness.  But premising an argument for the intellectual superiority of conservatism on the contention that anybody not blinded by the right is perforce a ‘libtard’ seems to sink the underlying contention straight away.

Yet such is the thesis of a blog post hosted by the Telegraph website yesterday, hot off the keyboard of one James Delingpole. For those that haven’t had the pleasure, this guy is a two-bob shock jock wannabe, who routinely adopts a writing tone reminiscent of Rush Limbaugh going cold turkey on the hydrocodone. That’s just to prove how really, really outrageous he can be, you understand.

Let’s leave aside what the casual deployment of a portmanteau word conflating ‘liberal’ and ‘retard’ reveals about his attitudes towards people with learning disabilities. Sick jokes can make a point, if they are funny. But it is not just humourless lefties that won’t feel particularly inclined to ROTFLMAO at this one.

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If you are even momentarily persuaded by the crazily mendacious thesis that ‘secular fundamentalists are the new totalitarians’, reflect for a moment or two on why 500 people were slaughtered in Nigeria over the weekend.

The victims were Christians, those who hacked them to pieces with machetes were Muslims, and it’s a safe bet that none of them had even heard of Richard Dawkins. The brutality was in retaliation for an equally grisly Christian attack on Muslims earlier this year. Now run that stuff about ‘interfaith dialogue’ past me one more time.

There’s a lot more to the story than that, of course, and some of it will be said below. But only the wilfully blind will seek to airbrush the undeniable truth out of the picture; believers in Allah perpetrated the mass murder of believers in God, seemingly oblivious to the recent Indonesian high court ruling that the two are in fact the same deity.

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Two radio stations I have never listened to in my life are about to get the chop. Being the sort of bloke former BBC boss Greg Dyke famously describes as ‘hideously white’, and pushing 50 to boot, the suits at Broadcasting House probably assume that I couldn’t less.

Yet somehow the death sentences pronounced on BBC 6 Music and Asian Network strike me as something of a dealbreaker. The whole idea of the BBC is that it offers the nation a package deal. We pay for the lot, irrespective of the parts we choose to take up.

In its way, Britain’s state broadcaster is a standing rebuke to free market fundamentalism. No wonder Murdoch and the Tories hate it.

Its very existence represents implicit recognition that private sector provision necessarily gravitates towards mass market pap, rather than intelligent programming. That’s why Mastermind doesn’t run on Men & Motors.

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What sort of newspaper runs with headlines such as ‘We must arm ourselves for a class war’?

I mean, not even publications of the kind that get flogged outside Dalston Kingsland shopping centre of a Saturday routinely urge the comrades to break out the Kalashnikovs. That sort of juvenile ultraleftism is just embarrassing.

If you were just about to say Socialist Worker in response to my opening question, you may be surprised to learn that the correct answer is the Daily Telegraph this morning. No kid.

In fairness to economics editor Edmund Conway, I suspect the subs were getting a little carried away.

The piece at no point actively incites the bourgeoisie to stockpile automatic weaponry in anticipation of the need to gun down hordes of Jobseekers’ Allowance claimants on the rampage through the leafier parts of Richmond upon Thames.

But the article does offer an insight into what sections of the right are thinking right now.
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I’ve always argued that the trouble with Pol Pot is that he was just too damn soft on the urban petit bourgeoisie, and I was pleased to learn this morning that Simon Heffer shares that assessment.

The Daily Telegraph pundit’s big problem with the genocidaire prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea is not so much his penchant for trivial workaday misdemeanours like the annihilation of a quarter of all living Cambodians, but rather that he tried to ‘impose fairness’.

Just like Harriet Harman and her ‘mad Equality Bill’, in fact. Unfortunately, Simon doesn’t quite clinch the parallel by nailing Hattie on her policy on forced agrarian collectivisation. But let’s not quibble; all but fools will instantly identify the immediately obvious basic underlying continuity of the two politicians’ inherently socialist thought processes.

All this and more can be found in the somewhat febrile if highly entertaining examination of Labour’s latest campaign slogan – ‘A future fair for all’ – to which Heffer devotes his column today.
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Mathematician and scientist Dr Simon Singh – the man getting sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association after writing about their particular brand of ‘alternative medicine’ – will find himself in the Court of Appeal on Tuesday.

The case will be heard by three of the most powerful legal figures in the UK, namely Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge, Master of the Rolls Lord Neuberger and Lord Justice Sedley.

Given my own impending appointment with Mr Justice Eady over a 2007 post concerning Baader-Meinhof suspect turned Tower Hamlets Tory activist Johanna Kaschke, I am extremely pleased to be one of the speakers at a solidarity meeting for Simon in London on Monday night.

Also on the bill is consultant cardiologist Dr Peter Wilmshurst, who faces a libel action after criticising research by US company NMT Medical, in what is a test case for the freedom of scientists to engage in academic debate.

The other guest is Dr Ben Goldacre, author of the ‘Bad Science’ column in the Guardian, who successfully fought off a libel action from a vitamin manufacturer who promoted his pills to AIDS sufferers in South African townships.

I have over the years shared platforms with many luminaries of the left and the labour movement, including Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone, Peter Tatchell and Arthur Scargill. But this gathering will be more daunting than even those rallies, not least because I will be the only bleedin’ thicko without a PhD.

The event kicks off on Monday night at 7.00pm, at the Monk Exchange pub in Strutton Ground, SW1. Nearest tube: Victoria. It’s two quid to get in. I’d love it if any Liberal Conspiracy readers are able to get along. Wanna see four guys bricking it at the prospect of being homeless and bankrupt? This is the place to be.

There now seems little doubt that Mossad took out Hamas commander Mahmoud al Mabhouh, either with or without the complicity of other Palestinian elements. Yet astonishingly enough, the debate on the assassination somehow centres on alleged duplicitous use of British passports on the part of the Isrealis.

Effectively, the Israeli ambassador to London has been summoned to the Foreign Office for a bollocking, at which David Miliband will tell him: ‘Look, no problems with you lot bumping off that dodgy Pally bloke. But it’s just not on for your country’s hit squads to travel on fake UK papers, old chap. Don’t let us catch you doing it again.’

What is being missed here is the question of whether premeditated extrajudicial murder of specific individuals at the behest of a state can ever be morally legitimate, and whether or not it was morally legitimate in this instance.

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‘Conservatives champion gay equality,’ according to the title of a speech Tory frontbencher Nick Herbert will deliver in Washington today. If he was being entirely honest, he would add the words ‘but only after Labour actually delivered it and didn’t leave us any choice in the matter’.

Of course nobody can credibly argue that David Cameron and his Notting Hill Set coterie personally harbour the type of crude homophobia that was dominant during the hey-day of Thatcherism.

But it remains a fact that the Tories are the party of Section 28 and Labour are the party of equalised age of consent, civil partnership, gay adoption rights and a prohibition on anti-gay discrimination in the provision of goods and services. And don’t forget that it was Labour that decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting adults in private in the first place.

In short, every single advance for gay rights in this country has occurred under a Labour government. Labour has set the agenda for decade after decade, often in the face of concerted opposition from the Tory right.

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I’m not exactly certain when advocacy of workers’ self-management along the lines of 1950s Yugoslavia became official Conservative Party policy. But deliberate emulation of Josip Broz Tito is surely taking the notion of Red Toryism one step too far.

Little wonder, then, that yesterday’s commitment to John Lewis-style co-operatives and social enterprise across the public sector left Labour thoroughly flummoxed.

Shadow chancellor George Osborne bigged up the move as a “a transfer of power to working people” on a scale not seen since the introduction of the right to buy council houses during the hey-day of Thatcherism.

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Spy boss Jonathan Evans cannot even be bothered to spell Binyam Mohamed’s name correctly, rendering it with three Ms in both the online and print versions of his article in defence of MI5 carried by the Daily Telegraph  this morning.

That alone points to a worrying lack of attention on the part of Britain’s security services. You kind of want to hope that the funny people manage to identify the right guys to keep tabs on and bust when necessary, at least most of the time.

 But Mr Evans – looking all calm and relaxed in his open neck Tattershall check shirt, sleeves rolled up to indicate readiness to get down to work – does make one very important and entirely correct assertion.

The international Islamist far right will indeed extract maximum advantage from the Mohamed case, enabling them to undertake ‘propaganda and campaigns to undermine our will and ability to confront them’. So the pertinent question becomes: who provided them with this wonderful opportunity?

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Thanks to the Greek financial crisis, there is now a new punch line to an ancient music hall joke. The correct response to the question ‘I say, I say, I say, what’s a Greek urn?’ is no longer ‘oh, about 50 drachmas a day, I reckon’ but rather ‘4% less than they used to, on account of the latest public sector pay cut’.

The decision, taken by socialist government of George Papandreou, comes in response to a debt crisis that might have been more easily manageable but for the actions of hedge funds, who on Friday alone took $79bn in bets on the future value of the euro.

These people have also staked huge sums of money on a fall in the value of Greek government bonds, most prominently through the use of instruments known as credit default swaps. The price of CDSs has hit record levels in recent days.

Outfits such as Paulson and Moore Global Investment, who are leading the pack on this one, are politely described in the financial press as ‘speculative investors’. The second half of that designation might conjure up connotations of solidity. In the public mind, investment equates to new plant and machinery or roads and and schools and bridges.
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Police corruption might not appear to have much in common with guitar-based rock bands. But what is beyond dispute is that both were so much better in the 1970s.

Look at the Met’s Obscene Publications Squad, for instance. Those guys would not have stooped to fit up whatever back then constituted the equivalent of a website designer for a few hundred poxy quid. Why bother with stuff like that, when they were busy trousering millions in bribes from criminals like Jimmy Humphreys, the porn king of Soho?

When Commander Ken Drury went down for eight years in 1977, Mr Justice Mars-Jones was clear that he had headed a regime of “corruption on a scale which beggars description”, and the judge was not wrong on this one.

But Ali Dizaei is to his predecessors what the Noisettes are to the Pistols or Zep. His efforts to frame Waad al Baghdadi obviously brand him a boorish alpha male little bully. But the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad in its paddy-bashing hey-day would have laughed him off as an obvious lightweight.
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There’s an old joke about the Pope’s attitude to contraception, attributed variously to Irish comedian Dave Allen or the Italian-American community at large. The punchline runs: ‘If he doesn’t play the game, he shouldn’t try to make the rules.’

I am inescapably reminded of the quip after reading about the intervention of the world’s most prominent former Hitler Youth into current UK debates about employment equality and gay adoption.

Well, New Labour in office has been adamant about its wish for ‘dialogue’ with ‘faith communities’, so it can hardly feign surprise when a religion with over 4m adherents takes it up on the idea.

I’ve heard it said that Catholic adoption agencies do good work, frequently finding homes for severely handicapped kids that are the hardest to place.

But why have specifically Catholic adoption agencies in the first place? Aren’t they a throwback to the days when knocked-up Catholic schoolgirls needed somewhere to dump the unfortunate sprog before getting carted off to the nearest Magdalene Laundry?

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Opportunities to skive, doss, bugger about on Facebook in company time, spend three hour lunches down the pub, take multiple fag breaks and generally put in as little effort as is consistent with not being sacked are not entirely lacking in the private sector.

I make these elementary points after reading the latest bollocks  in the Daily Telegraph on ‘the record gap between public and private sector pay’. The article is shockingly private sector supremacist, and built on the assumption that state and local government employees are labour market Untermenschen poncing off the soul-sustaining largesse of the wealth creation master race.

You know this guff off by heart by now:

Workers in the public sector are now being paid more than £2,000 extra a year compared with employees in the private sector, after public sector pay continued to race ahead of inflation.

The average public sector worker was paid £23,660 a year, compared with private sector workers who were paid £21,528 a year, in the three months to the end of November.

Cue the inevitable whingeing from the sort of people who often pull down 20k a month.

David Frost, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, warns us that public sector pay has “exploded out control”.

John Philpott, the chief economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, weighs in with the observation that “everyone knows the public sector gravy train is going to be derailed.”

Doubtless he would argue that the investment banking gravy train – a veritable Train à Grande Vitesse compared to the council white collar employee suburban stopping service – must be allowed to trundle on in the national interest. Perhaps I am missing something here?

Corin Taylor, policy director at the Institute of Directors, adds: “There will have to be a public sector pay freeze or public sector pay cuts. It will be painful but it is necessary.”

And here’s Frost again: “This just isn’t sustainable … The wealth-creating private sector is losing out to the public sector.”

Now that’s what I call a broad spectrum of opinion, ranging all the way from private sector bosses’ organisations to, well … private sector bosses’ organisations. Maybe the reporter didn’t have the number for the Unison press office.

Yes, there is a gap between public and private sector pay. There is also an obvious reason for it. Most unskilled jobs that were once in the public sector – refuse collection, hospital cleaning and that sort of stuff – have long been outsourced to private companies.

Public sectors workers are increasingly likely to be graduate professionals and expect a graduate professional’s wedge. Of course civil engineers get paid more than crew members at Burger King.

Inevitably, then, comparing mean averages is not comparing like with like. Grade for grade, any disparity remains decidedly in favour of forex traders rather than social workers.

Writer Harry Wallop and the Daily Torygraph damn well know this elementary argument. Yet they prefer to slant the debate to suit their small state ideological agenda. Opinion pieces should be labelled accordingly.

For an Old Etonian to promise a ‘brazenly elitist’ approach to state education – as Tory leader David Cameron has done this week – is nothing if not brazenly cheeky.

It’s a nice catchphrase of course, chiming as it does with the popular perception that something is wrong with the system, and that sex-crazed pothead Sirs and Misses of the type parodied in that Channel 4 comedy-drama a few years back bear most of the blame.

To be sure, there is nothing wrong in principle with offering more money to attract people to a sector where vacancies are hard to fill. That, the economics textbooks tell us, is how labour markets are supposed to work.

But let us not even pretend that any government is going to provide state school teachers with the kind of starting salaries that Oxbridge graduates can pull down in the City or at a City-oriented law firm.

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Say someone of Basque extraction, working in London, hangs behind his desk a flag obviously based on the Union Jack, save that the crosses are white and green and the background red.

Just for clarification, we’ll add here that all his colleagues know that to refer to him even casually as ‘Spanish’ is making a one heck of a mistake. And when the story breaks that Euskadi ta Askatasuna tried three times to assassinate Jose Maria Aznar, failing on each occasion, our hypothetical friend maintains in conversation that they were right to do so, and that he hopes that they have better luck next time.

Alternatively, anyone old enough to remember the days of lock ins at Irish pubs may have found themselves standing to attention at some point in the small hours, as the show band played a passable version of Amhrán na bhFiann and the buckets started passing round and filling up with cash.
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