Nick Cohen: 'It's farcical how Cameron has rescued Blair's ideas from the rubbish dump' (original) (raw)

When the rich move into politics, journalists normally ask where their money came from. In the case of Zac Goldsmith, the Conservatives' new adviser on the environment, there is no mystery about his £300 million: it came from his father, Sir James Goldsmith, a merciless financier who came over all mystical in his declining years.

Nor should it be a surprise that a son of the corporate aristocracy is the editor of the Ecologist. The children of what we once called the ruling class have always dominated the green movement. Lord Melchett used to run Greenpeace and Sir Jonathon Porritt Bt., ran Friends of the Earth. The father of George Monbiot, Britain's leading anti-globalisation campaigner, is Sir Raymond Monbiot CBE, the deputy chairman of the Conservative party and an executive who made the family's fortune working for Campbell's global canned-soup empire.

You'll already know about Prince Charles's mother.

It is unusual but not unprecedented for greens to end up as Tories. That strain of greenery which longs for the organic, pastoral life before the Industrial Revolution fits well with the romantic conservative tradition which regrets the passing of a pre-capitalist world where everyone knew their place.

Harder to explain is what David Cameron hopes to get out of Goldsmith. He is certainly congenial company. Activists who have campaigned with him told me he was anything but a spoilt dilettante. Goldsmith was a hard worker, they said, who was committed to the whole green package. He is against nuclear power, even if it would reduce the burning of fossil fuels. He loathes the National Farmers' Union - 'It has let us all down very badly'; Tesco - 'Squeezing the last drops of life from the struggling rural economy'; global corporations - 'It is impossible to exaggerate their political influence'; and 'progress' - if that means 'unrealistic, undesirable and impossible' economic growth.

The Conservatives have to win back the section of the middle classes which shops at farmers' markets and treats recycling as a moral duty. The loss of the votes of the people who are always 'travellers' and never 'tourists' has helped lose it three elections.

What, though, of the majority of current Tory supporters who have no trace of romance about them? They don't believe for a moment that the state has the right to tell supermarkets what to do or to close down the genetically modified food industry.

Cameron must expect that they will stick with the party because they've nowhere else to go. If this sounds familiar, then that it is because it is precisely the tactic Tony Blair used in the mid-Nineties when he erected his 'big tent' that could hold both trade unionists and their bosses.

Karl Marx said that history repeated itself, 'the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce'. And there is something farcical about the thoroughly green way Cameron has rescued Blair's old strategies from the rubbish dump, pulped and recycled them, and sold them back to the public like so much reconstituted lavatory paper.

On the one hand, he has signed up Bob Geldof, who wants the rich world to slash Africa's debt. On the other, Cameron's aides are all over Michela Wrong of the New Statesman, who has been the spokeswoman for the African dissidents who think Geldof is rewarding the genocidal and kleptomaniac tyrants who are keeping Africa poor.

I wouldn't have thought there was a tent in the world big enough to contain these points of view, but I may be wrong. Big-tent politics worked for Tony Blair, and it could work for 'Dave' Cameron.

There is, however, one huge difference. The media's anti-New Labour narrative holds that Tony Blair's control freaks seized power and forced Labour MPs to accept Blairism or perish. It wasn't like that. Left-wing MPs supported the Prime Minister initially, not only because they were desperate to win but because they were intellectually convinced that Blair and Brown offered the only way to raise more money for public services and alleviate the lot of the poor.

There has been no similar intellectual revolution on the right. Conservatives overwhelmingly believe in a smaller state and deregulation; in education vouchers and an end to a tax-funded NHS. You may think they're wrong, but you should not doubt their sincerity.

All of which means the Conservative press has been gobsmackingly hypocritical these past three months. The editors and columnists who have laid into Tony Blair for his policies and style are biting their tongues now that a Conservative leader is stealing the policies and aping the style.

I wonder how long it will last. What we are seeing is not so much a farce as an illusionist's show with a novel twist. The magician can pull off his tricks only if the Tory audience suspends its belief.

When blind belief collides with reason

The most uncompromisingly atheist series British television has dared to screen begins tomorrow at 8pm. Channel 4 is allowing Richard Dawkins to explain how religion is a 'virus' that spreads murder and ignorance.

In The Root of all Evil?, Oxford's professor of the public understanding of science uses the very Darwinism fundamentalists reject to explain why they are so keen to 'abuse childhood innocence' in religious schools. Children can't follow the scientific method and test everything their parents say. If they decide to find out whether it is truly dangerous to walk off a cliff, they will be in no position to pass on their genes when they grow up. Evolution has preprogrammed them to believe what adults tell them.

With a shockingly irresponsible Labour government preparing to use sectarian schools to divide our country by religion and race, Dawkins is giving us a warning as well as an argument. Channel 4 dramatises it by sending him to confront fundamentalists of all faiths. He treats them with donnish puzzlement rather than aggression.

You can't say the same of his interviewees. A Muslim in Jerusalem tells him to prepare for the Islamic world empire. A Protestant pastor in Colorado has the charm of the boy next door, until Dawkins asks him about biology. He chases Dawkins out of his church, screaming that he has called his children 'animals'.

A north London rabbi comes back with what I think will be the dominant criticism. Not believing in God because of the evidence for evolution is itself a form of religion, he says. This dunderheaded trope is everywhere. As Ophelia Benson of the Philosophers' Magazine put it: 'Not playing poker does not make me a gambler. Not playing football does not make me an athlete. And not being a theist does not make me a believer. Not believing is not simply a kind of believing - it's not believing.'

Mind you, after Sikh fanatics closed a play in Birmingham and Christian fanatics hounded the families of BBC executives, Channel 4 will probably be grateful if the worst thing to hit it is a philosophical howler.

Galloway's new Big Brother

In the 1990s, George Galloway flew to Saddam's Iraq and greeted a genocidal tyrant with: 'Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability!' Since the war, he has joined with European Holocaust-deniers to demand the release of Tariq Aziz, and said that Syria 'represents the last castle of the Arab dignity'.

If this makes him sound like a neo-fascist, I should add in fairness that he's a walking Hitler-Stalin pact. He described the fall of Soviet communism 'as the worst day of my life', and said of Fidel Castro, the dictator of Cuba: 'He's not a dictator.'

After saluting so many big brothers, it is no surprise that he is now on Celebrity Big Brother. What remains incredible over the years has been the refusal of all the nice, respectable liberals in the media to scrutinise the leader of the anti-war movement.