One of the very few crumbs of comfort in the aftermath of September 11 was that it seemed that there might finally be a breakthrough in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. At long last, an American President was admitting that things could not go on as they were, and that a viable Palestinian state was the only possible long-term solution to the relentless cycle of revenge killings in the region.

Now, the latest episodes in this decades-long tragedy seem to have dashed those hopes of a brighter future. The appalling suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Haifa, and Israel's similarly deadly response, have left us with a situation in which peace looks further away than ever.

I'm 41 years old, and there are two violent international conflicts that have been around for as long as I can remember, regularly cropping up in the news, usually in the form of tales of horrific carnage. One has been the seemingly endless struggle in the Middle East, and the other has been the long tribal conflict in Northern Ireland. There are, of course, major differences between the two situations, but there are also some striking parallels. Both are territorial disputes in which the depth of hatred on both sides is severely exacerbated by religious differences, and in which violence has been continuing for so long that trust between the two sides is almost non-existent.

Parallels can also be drawn between some of the key players. For Yasser Arafat, read Gerry Adams: two figures once widely denounced as terrorists, but now accepted as statesmen. Both are now publicly committed to peaceful solutions, and thus attract the scorn of some of elements in the movements they represent who regard them as sell-outs. For PLO, read IRA; for Hamas, read Real IRA.

And now, in terms of attitude: for Ariel Sharon, read Ian Paisley. Mercifully, the bellicose Ulster Protestant leader Paisley has never had anything like the degree of political power that Sharon wields as Israeli premier, but both display a shamelessly partisan attitude towards the opposing tribe in an ancient conflict. Both pay lip service to the idea of pursuing peace, but apply far more energy and enthusiasm to the task of painting the other side as evil barbarians. Both enjoy great electoral popularity, winning support for what those in their tribe see as strong leadership, and what outside observers often see as being rather closer to dangerous bigotry.

Having gained popularity by being aggressive, Sharon has little to gain in career terms by encouraging peace processes. Just as Margaret Thatcher's popularity in Britain soared after the Falklands War in the Eighties, so Sharon's opinion poll ratings in Israel appear to improve every time another missile lands in a Palestinian area.

A further parallel between the Middle East and Northern Ireland is that the peace processes in the two conflicts have reached very similar sticking points. The Northern Irish unionists have constantly demanded proof that republican paramilitaries were disposing of their weapons as their price for power-sharing, even though the main loyalist paramilitary groups have made it clear that they won't be giving up their guns. Sharon, likewise, insists that he wants peace - but demands that all violence from the Palestinian side must cease before he'll countenance negotiations about the future of the region.
The official Israeli line is that Arafat hasn't done enough to root out the Palestinian militants who have killed civilians. But it is rather difficult to arrest a suicide bomber after he's carried out his mission; and it seems highly unlikely that Arafat can do much to control Hamas, given that they reject the line that he has pursued as Palestinian leader.

Sharon demands that Arafat should arrest and imprison those he perceives to be dangerous extremists. But given that the Israeli authorities have often openly pursued a policy of assassinating anyone they deem to be a danger to their security, one wouldn't give much for the survival chances of any alleged Palestinian militants whom Arafat had imprisoned. If the location of a prison full of Palestinians branded as extremists by Arafat was known, how convenient that would be for one of those rocket strikes that have become an Israeli military speciality.

Arafat, meanwhile, has said that he really has tried to get to grips with the hardliners on his side, but that Sharon
'doesn't want me to succeed, and for this he is escalating his military activities against our people, against our towns, against our cities, against our establishments. He doesn't want a peace process to start.'

Frankly, that's the way it looks to me too.

In the face of world events, British domestic politics once again seems rather trivial. I have, nevertheless, been happy to see some signs suggesting that we UK voters might be given more of a real choice the next time we vote in a General Election. Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor (finance minister) Gordon Brown have both been broadly hinting that taxes may soon be increased so that more money can be made available for Britain's National Health Service.

This means that a great taboo has finally been broken. Since Margaret Thatcher's triumphs in the Eighties, the orthodox view among the British political classes has been that the electorate absolutely will not, under any circumstances, vote for a party that proposes tax increases.

That widespread belief was cemented by the result of the 1992 General Election, one that a divided and unpopular Conservative government was expected to lose. Throughout the campaign, the Conservatives' propaganda emphasised one point above all else. Again and again, they repeated one message: if the Labour Party wins, you'll have to pay more taxes.

Labour weren't denying it. In earlier decades, British voters had often backed higher taxation in return for better public services, and it seemed that we might do so again. Opinion polls, right up to polling day, suggested that the result was going to be too close to call, or that Labour was slightly ahead. But in the event, a late swing to the Conservatives delivered a sufficiently large majority to John Major's beleaguered government to keep them in power for another five years.

The result was traumatic for the British left - and for the UK's opinion poll industry. When asked by the opinion poll researchers, many people had declared their willingness to pay a little more tax in order to support the public health and education services on which many of Britain's less fortunate citizens. But when it came to the crunch, in the privacy of the polling booth, many of the country's more prosperous citizens had cast their secret ballots in favour of policies that would keep taxes low. Selfishness had won the election.

Since then, the UK Labour Party has regarded public spending rather like an anorexic regards food. They've always known that some of it is necessary to sustain healthy life, but they've feared that indulging in will make them unattractive. Now, however, a government-commissioned report by former National Westminster Bank chief executive Derek Wanless - hardly a man whom one would expect to be reckless with money - has concluded that our National Health Service needs to have more money spent on it, and that the best way of raising that money would be via general taxation. This obviously implies tax rises; and when asked whether they would be willing to countenance imposing higher taxation in order to make the NHS healthier, both Blair and Brown have refused to rule out such a move.

The idea that Britain's public health services might need more money spent on them won't surprise anyone who's regularly used them, and statistics clearly back up the Wanless report's conclusions. In Britain, we spend a stingy 6.9 per cent of our Gross Domestic Product on health, considerably less than other European nations.(Germany, for instance, invests 10.3 per cent of its GDP in keeping its citizens healthy.) What's surprising here is not that the problem of underfunding exists; it's that the government is willing to admit that it exists, and we're all going to have to pay more if we want to do something about it. At last, the government is no longer seeking to deny the obvious truth that if you want better public services, then you have to pay for them.

Perhaps, in a way, we have the current Conservatives to thank for this refreshing frankness from Blair and Brown. If Iain Duncan Smith's party looked anything like a credible opposition, Labour might not be willing to break the tax taboo. But the Ipswich by-election a couple of weeks ago showed the Conservative share of the vote in the Suffolk town shrinking. Traditionally, governments suffer in by-elections, when voters get the chance to register a protest vote safe in the knowledge that the result can't really change very much; but in Ipswich, the Tories were even less popular than they'd been a few months earlier, when Blair secured his second successive landslide. Significantly, perhaps, the party that made the greatest advance both in the by-election and in the General Election were the Liberal Democrats - who have, until now, been the only major UK party willing to advocate even modest tax increases.

Thus far, Blair and Brown's public statements on the subject have been cautious; and there is good reason for their wariness. At the time of writing, a BBCi poll on the question of 'Would you pay more tax for the NHS?' suggested that voters were split almost exactly 50-50 on the issue. But it does seem as if, at long last, the idea of improving the services available to the needy by taxing those who can afford it may be coming back on to the British political agenda.

And not before time.

At times, the idea of arresting certain musicians doesn't seem like a bad one at all. I can think of quite a few bands, particularly of the boy and girl variety, who I've occasionally wanted to see slung in the slammer for inflicting grievous audio inanities on innocent music lovers.

But I was still rather startled to read that the Swiss police had arrested Pierre Boulez, the enormously influential modern classical composer and conductor. Boulez was dragged from his bed in a dawn raid at a five-star hotel in Basle, Switzerland, on November 2.

He was, it appears, regarded as a terrorist threat because, back in the 1960s, he'd once remarked that opera houses should be blown up. Taking his words somewhat literally, the Swiss authorities placed him on a list of potential terrorists - and never removed it, despite decades' worth of accumulated evidence suggesting that Boulez was, in fact, far more interested in making music than in waging war.

A spokesman for Basle police later admitted:
'Unfortunately, three officers entered Mr. Boulez's room and confiscated his passport, despite the fact that he was due to fly to Chicago later that morning. He was not very pleased.'

'However',

said the spokesman, Mr. Boulez
'was really quite understanding after he eventually realised what was going on.'

Fortunately, the confusion was soon cleared up, and the chief of Basle's police has since sent Boulez a letter apologizing for his officers' over-zealous conduct.

It's a strange and comical story, but one with a serious side. At the moment, we keep being told that we shouldn't worry about the new curbs on civil liberties and security clampdowns that are being imposed in the wake of recent events, because they're necessary and they will - honestly - be handled with care and sensitivity. But if police in a country as supposedly sophisticated as Switzerland can see fit to swoop on a world-famous 75-year-old musician, that doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the notion that the innocent have nothing to fear.

And if anyone has been eavesdropping on my conversations, and was thinking of telling the authorities what I said should happen to Steps and Hear'Say: I was only joking, OK?

Ormondroyd

06.12.01. Front Page

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