The Sunni-Shia conflict is simple stuff compared to the Blair-Brown feud
Arabs will never understand contemporary British politics unless they study the BlairiteBrownie schism. It has divided the Labour party in the late 20th century. That might sound like long ago. But Britons have long memories. The schism explains the violence that racks Labour today.
Arabs tend to compare it with the SunniShia schism of the ninth century AD. But it is far more complex than that. The Sunni-Shia conflict was to do with a dispute as to who was the rightful heir to the Prophet. This was a relatively simple matter. It was either one Muslim or one not all that dissimilar. The Blairite-Brownie conflict, however, was to do with some of the most profound theological issues that can trouble the human heart, such as who should rightly have paid the bill at Granita, the shrine in the holy borough of Islington. The site now has a different name, but is still sacred to both faiths.
Since then — and for reasons too labyrinthine to go into here, but some of which are about who best could lure the nonLabour middle classes into voting Labour the minority Blairites have ruled the majority Brownies. But Mr Blair has become unpopular among those very middle classes who put him into office. Brownies believe that the hour of deliverance from Blairite oppression is at hand. They threaten to make the party ungovernable. There was activity on their behalf in August from suicide bombers such as Siôn Simon, the MP for Erdington.
Yet Arab ‘experts’ on the Labour party insist on depicting it as a monolith which Mr Blair controls through his brutal police state of whips, and offers of peerages and jobs. That is of course one of the explanations for his continuance in office, but not the only, or indeed most important, one. It takes no account of the Brownies’ smouldering power, ready to ignite and install their brooding Scottish imam when the time comes. Have any of these Arab Labourists actually travelled much in the Labour party? Do they have any direct experience of the squalor in which people live on the Labour backbenches? How many linguists do they have who can understand John Prescott?
This last is especially important. Mr Prescott speaks for Old Labour. They are always Brownies. We must assume, or at least hope, that covert MI5 agents are present, and taking notes, when Mr Prescott inflames the Old Labour faithful in their places of worship, known as ‘Labour clubs’. But only the faithful can fully understand everything he says; such as his mishearings, and his Francophone use of the definite article. They would have understood his reply had Mr Blair ever offered him, say, Minister for the Arts: ‘Thank you, Tony. I’ve always been interested in the darts. Y’know, when I play in Hull, down my local of a weekend, I imagine that the board is Mandelson’s head.
‘It improves my aim no end. I’ll work for darts lovers all over the country. Building modern darts complexes is a better way of spending public money than shoving it at the toffs for all their poncy opera and ballet, eh, Tony, lad?’ What, then, should be done if, when Mr Blair retires, the civil war worsens in the Labour party? The Arabs cannot just do nothing. It is time for serious thought on this matter in Baghdad, and elsewhere.
Articles and television documentaries on this 50th anniversary of Suez tend to the same conclusion: Britain was broken as a world power.
It is true that the Egyptian president humiliated the British prime minister. I have never been a Suez revisionist. Even if we had reoccupied Egypt 50 years ago, we could not have held on to it. It is irrelevant to the situation in 1956 that we had put down previous nationalist agitations there. When we did so, Egypt was a monarchy. Its kings, however much mass support they commanded — and they commanded much more than the Left has ever admitted — were British clients. In 1956 Nasser now ruled, but was not our client. His violence had already forced us to leave the Canal Zone two years before the Suez crisis.
But there remains the question of which politicians, and which country, did better after Suez: Britain or Egypt? The anniversary writings assume that it was Britain. It is true that, at first glance, events seemed to move in Egypt’s favour. News of the nationalisation of the canal reached Eden while he was hosting a dinner in 10 Downing Street, for the visiting pro-Western king of Iraq, Faisal. All present agree that the Iraqi prime minister, NuriesSaid, told Eden across the dinner table something like, ‘You must hit him, and hit him hard’ — that is, Nasser.
Suez made Nasser a symbol throughout the Middle East. In 1958 Baghdad’s Nasserite mob murdered Faisal and Nuri; overthrowing the monarchy and installing the pro-Soviet General Kassem. Events still appeared in Nasser’s favour. But in the same year the United States put troops into Lebanon to prevent Nasserites taking that country over; a reversal of Washington’s tolerance of Nasser when he had opposed Britain in 1956. The United States was learning. In 1963 a Baathist coup in Baghdad, in which the young Saddam Hussein participated, murdered Kassem and hundreds of Iraqi communists. Neither Nasser nor the Soviet Union could from then on assume Iraqi support for their stratagems. This was because Baath was an opportunistic, nationalist party prepared to ingratiate itself with any great power, of East or West, if it served Iraqi interests to do so. Nasser was now becoming weaker.
Four years later either his hubris or his need to regain influence caused Nasser to lead an Arab war against Israel. Israel destroyed much of his air force, and those of the other Arab states, on the first day. Six days later Egypt had lost Gaza, Syria the Golan Heights and Jordan the West Bank and its share of Jerusalem. Nasser resigned, resuming office after his party and police had induced the Cairo ‘street’ to plead for his return. He died at 62 in 1970.
Sadat’s Egypt went on to make peace with Israel. The traditionalist Arab regimes, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Gulf states — which Nasser’s triumph in 1956 had ‘doomed’ exist still. Nasser’s agitating Egypt is gone. Britain was strong enough successfully to oppose the pro-communist Sukarno’s attempt to spread his power to his neighbours in the 1960s.
The Tories went on to double their majority in 1959. Suez remained, and remains, solely the concern of those who write articles and documentaries about ‘imperialism’.
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