So, as we’re firing rockets at Libya, why should the Syrians miss out? The injustice annoys me. It’s like parents who blatantly favour one child over another. Justin throws his plate to the floor in anger and mater says we have to understand the growing process. Piers does the same thing and he’s acting stupidly. All right, Justin is three and Piers is 25, but now I’m destroying my own argument as I just made them both up and could equally, had I not been intent on a bad joke, have assigned them the same age. So Colonel Gaddafi puts down an armed insurrection by force and therefore we have to defend Libyan citizens by shooting a few firecrackers into their houses. Fair enough. But isn’t Bashar al-Assad doing exactly the same thing? And yet we don’t feel obliged to defend Syrian citizens in the same way. Why not? Don’t we like Syrians as much as we do Libyans? When did we develop this grudge?
I fear our bombing for democracy is getting it a bad name, especially as we seem to have very little idea of what it is. We tour the planet obliterating swathes of humanity in its defence, but what is it? It certainly doesn’t mean a system where the person getting most votes becomes Prime Minister, or we wouldn’t have to put up with David Cameron. And Nick Clegg, with 23 per cent of a 65 per cent turnout, would hardly be his deputy. Equally, democracy doesn’t mean respecting an election where a majority of people vote for a particular party. Hamas is a good example. When it won a majority in the 2006 Palestinian elections, we promptly cut off aid and treated them like pariahs. Tony Blair was very cross, saying Hamas had “to decide between a path of democracy or a path of violence”.
The Palestinians thought they had just demonstrated democracy in action. So did Edward McMillan-Scott, the British Conservative head of the European Parliament’s monitoring team who said the polls were ‘extremely professional, in line with international standards, free, transparent and without violence’”. But what do they know about it? Perhaps democracy means we want these Middle Eastern johnnies to sport pin striped suits, have Prime Minster’s Question Time and open a bar on the terrace. Being mainly shepherds, they should be OK with the noises parliamentarians make during opposition speeches. Essentially, we are striving to get remote people with tribal bases to get proper jobs with mortgages. They could also cut out those silly Arabic names, squiggly writing and heathen religions. We will know we have succeeded when they are all called fforbes-Hamilton and take up church-wardening.
Tories have always had difficulties with democracy. Margaret Thatcher was particularly clueless, especially when she started interfering with unions. Do you remember her anti-union laws? Of course you do, because after 13 years of New Labour, we’ve still got them. I loved the lack of understanding of working people she demonstrated when she legislated that general secretaries must be elected by membership ballot. Actually, I think this is fine. But her motivation was so wonderfully wrong, The demented soul thought that union members would elect reasonable, polite chaps who didn’t want to cause trouble, wore nice ties and entertained moderate ideas. How wrong can you get? Does anyone want to send a compromising, lukewarm, able-to-see-every-side-of-the-argument, inoffensive, malleable nice boy to argue for their wages? Of course not. They want a maniac. They want an utterly committed, blind-to-argument, born-again, ill-tempered pugilist who is blindly prejudiced in their favour. It was splendid naivete. But it is vital that we disguise such internal follies from foreign chaps. We need to maintain our standing in the world for fairness, justice and equality. Part of that is not letting Syrians down. Let’s get a few missiles into their homes.
