Born Again

An exclusive interview with Al Gore

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Gore: Bush is 'renegade rightwing extremist'

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Labour needs urgently to rediscover its discipline. And we do, too

Blair must put dull competence ahead of legacy seeking. The rest of us should quit this flirtation with Cameron

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London doesn't need Las Vegas-on-Thames

Published in the Evening Standard 25 May 2006

By rights we should be celebrating: we’ve just won two shots at the jackpot. The prize in question is the right to open Britain’s first super-casino – a huge gambling palace with no fewer than 1,250 slot machines offering an unlimited payout. On the final shortlist of eight, announced yesterday, London is represented twice. Now both Wembley stadium and the Millennium Dome will slug it out against rivals from Blackpool, Cardiff, Glasgow, Newcastle, Sheffield and Manchester. That gives us a one in four chance – or as the bookies would put it, 3 to 1.

After our triumph in the Olympics last year, we should be confident: we’re on a winning streak. Besides, London has a serious advantage. Industry sources tell me that casinos flourish when they’re close to a diverse population. Apparently, ethnic minorities – Chinese, Cypriots, Jews, Indians – are disproportionately keen on a night out at the blackjack tables. So much so that the white homogeneity of a town like Blackpool could count against it. As it did with the Olympics, our very variety could bring us success.

And surely Londoners should be crossing their fingers for this contest. What could be better than finding a clear, profitable use for the Dome – once doomed to be a white elephant, transformed instead into a Vegas-on-Thames? Alternatively, wouldn’t it be great if the beleaguered rebuilding of Wembley stadium could be redeemed by victory in the race to build the biggest casino in Europe?

Advocates say it won’t just be gamblers who will benefit. The whole, winning area will gain from the massive injection of cash. And this will be massive. An initial spend of £250m with much more to come, one bidder told me yesterday: “This will be a development on the scale of a Bluewater or Brent Cross.” It could, he enthuses, amount to the biggest inward investment into the UK since the arrival of the Japanese car companies.

If either Greenwich or Wembley win, they will be regenerated, as developers build not just a casino but an entertainment complex from shops to bowling alleys to cinemas, maybe even, Las Vegas style, a new hotel or two. That will mean fun for locals – and plenty of jobs.

So why am I not blowing on my lucky dice, muttering a mantra and praying for London to win? Why is this one competition I hope we lose?

Perhaps it’s a memory I have of a trip to New Orleans more than a decade ago, shortly after the US had liberalised its gambling laws, allowing the roulette wheels to spin not only in Vegas and Atlantic City but across the country. I remember the hoopla and glitz of the moored Mississippi paddle-steamers converted into floating casinos, as well as the big promises of urban regeneration that came with them.

The trouble is, I also remember the costs they exacted. The casinos certainly made their operators big bucks, but they hardly regenerated the surrounding areas: local restaurants and bars went to the wall, unable to compete with the bargain-priced (or free) drinks and meals
at the gaming palaces next door. Casinos can afford to offer free food, drink and entertainment to lure in the crowds – knowing they will recover their costs twice or three times over when the punters lose and lose again.

Perhaps the loss of a few small restaurants, shops and cinemas is no tragedy, hardly enough to stand in the way of what the government insists is “a diverse, vibrant and innovative industry and a popular leisure activity.” But there is a more severe human cost.

Charity groups estimate that Britain already has 370,000 problem gamblers and the evidence shows that the more prevalent and available gambling becomes, the more people become addicted. The advice group GamCare have just reported a stunning rise in the number of people seeking their help – a leap of 41.3% since 2004, an increase mainly attributed to the phenomenal rise of internet gambling.

Behind those cold numbers are families driven to poverty as a father or mother shoves every penny they have – and plenty they don’t - into a machine they believe will soon shower them with riches. Wayne Rooney can lose £700,000 and survive – but speak to the families who found their furniture pawned to feed a habit that could never be sated.

The rules on gambling were recently relaxed in New Zealand, allowing poker machines and the like in pubs. Now landlords speak of queues forming before 7am, made up of punters desperate for a fix. On Thursdays it’s even worse, as jobless men arrive to gamble away their dole money. I spoke to the daughter of a New Zealand publican yesterday; she described finding toddlers wandering alone in the pub, separated from parents too fixated on the one-armed bandits to notice them. What was once a pleasant diversion during a pint has become, she says, “hideous and predatory.”

The casinos insist they are a world apart from such grubby squalor. They’re helped by an image of James Bond glamour that persists in the public mind, all Martinis and white tuxedos (an image that will surely be refreshed by the release this year of Casino Royale). But US data show that one in three casino gamblers are addicts, and that 6% of the population in the immediate vicinity of a casino get hooked.

So I can understand why both Brent and Greenwich have bid for the supercasino licence: they see big winnings, either a share of the revenue or a promise from the developer to do some serious building in the area. All but starved by central government of the right to raise their own funds, they see gambling as a way to bring in some desperately needed cash.

But that need should not trump all others. Whoever wins this prize, they should promise to put the result to a referendum of local people: do we want this super-casino, yes or no? The councils can’t predict the result, but they should do it all the same. After all, isn’t that what gambling’s all about.

Israel must halt the crisis among the Palestinians - for its own sake

If Israelis won't deal with Hamas, they could end up facing a more radical alternative: Islamic Jihad or even al-Qaida

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How a writer got us talking

Published in the Jewish Chronicle 19 May 2006

The great Israeli novelist Amos Oz likes to remark that Israel still adheres to a tradition almost absent from the Anglo-Saxon world, in which writers are treated as prophets, their words seized on as guidance for where the nation is going wrong - and where it should go next.

The last fortnight has seen proof that Oz's maxim still holds true - indeed, that it extends beyond Israel. For it is a writer, Oz's contemporary AB Yehoshua, who has sparked one of the most intense and thoughtful debates among world Jewry for many years.

To summarise, Yehoshua caused a storm at the centennial symposium of the American Jewish Committee when he joined a panel of luminaries to discuss the future of the Jewish people. He articulated the position for which he has long been well-known, namely that a true, complete Jewish identity was only possible in Israel. Diaspora Jews, distant from both the land and language of the Jewish people, necessarily lived only a partial, incomplete Jewish life. They were not taking part in the creation of a living, breathing Jewish society. Their Jewish values were “located in a fancy spice box that is only opened to release its pleasing fragrance on Shabbat and holidays.”

This is not a new argument for Yehoshua or indeed for the Jewish people. On the contrary, it's as old as modern Zionism itself. For more than a century, since a lunatic fringe first suggested Jews should live in their own state, this debate has raged among our people. It's just that these days it is so rarely heard, when arguments over Zionism tend to be about Israel's conduct and its treatment of the Palestinians. There was a time when the question of Zionism was the one raised so ferociously by Yehoshua: namely, how can Jewish life best flourish, in a Jewish state or by living as a minority among the nations of the earth?

My gut instinct is still with Yehoshua. I say “still” because his brand of hardcore, classic Zionism is the one I was filled with as a teenager, raised with the Zionist verities of Habonim-Dror. We too believed, with Yehoshua, that diaspora life was doomed, either to murderous destruction or to a gradual fading away, like a drop of ink in a bowl of water.

So my 20 year old self cheers Yehoshua. Indeed, check out the Haaretz website where this argument has been running and you’ll see he’s not the only one who still holds the Zionist faith: fascinatingly, there is a long list of Israeli leftists whose Zionism is just as unflinching as his. Among them is Yossi Beilin, whose very intelligent essay struck a particular chord. He noted how the diaspora Jew “will find himself in a synagogue belonging to one Jewish movement or another, even if he is not religiously observant at all”, for want of a collective outlet for his Jewish identity.

That could be me – and plenty of people I know. In our youth movement days we never imagined it would come to this, that, like our parents before us, we would resort to the old modes of Jewish practice. Back then, we held to Beilin’s view: “In Israel, you can stay away from religious ritual and still know that your children will remain Jewish, because their environment is a Jewish environment,” speaking Hebrew, studying Jewish history.

I nod to most of that, but not all. For though a Jewish life in Israel is more automatic, even more natural, than diaspora it is not as uncomplicated as Yehoshua and Beilin imply. For a form of assimilation exists there too, as countless Israelis grow up, despite their schooling, with only the dimmest knowledge of Jewish, as opposed, to Israeli tradition and thinking. We’ve all met them. They are the men and women who the late, unlamented extremist Meir Kahane said were turning Israel into a “Hebrew-speaking Portugal,” a Mediterranean country like any other.

More painful is the harsh fact that Israel in its day to day conduct is often a long way from what most of us would consider Jewish values – in its treatment of Palestinians and foreign workers especially. This, after all, was the week when Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that while Israeli Jews can live with their non-Israeli spouses in Israel, the same right does not apply to Israeli Arabs when their partners are Palestinian. A clear violation of human rights, in the words of Israel’s Chief Justice, who was in the dissenting minority.

The truth is that there is no perfection on either side. Israeli lives may be more automatically Jewish, but not necessarily more deeply so. Either way, this is a conversation that we Jews, in Israel and outside, badly need to have. And how Jewish that it took a writer to make us have it.

The thirsty work of the private sector

Free-market ideology is to blame for this unnecessary drought.

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Winners, losers and broken promises

Arsenal FC have more than last night's defeat to mull over. Their move to a new stadium has short-changed the local community

Published in the Evening Standard 18 May 2006

There's a cloud over Highbury today. The whole of N5 was readying itself for a victory parade; instead it will be a day for stoicism and graceful acceptance of defeat. The talk in Gunner-land will not be of Thierry's glory or Arsene's magic, but of a Champions League final marred by a red card, missed opportunities and heavy disappointment.

Now, I don’t want to add to their woes, but there's another, different competition which Arsenal deserve to lose. In the contest to be a good corporate citizen, the club - not the team - have let themselves and their supporters down badly. Their conduct shames them more than the defeat last night – and it tells a story that goes way beyond both Arsenal and football. It’s a story about the power big companies wield in cities like London - and the failure of our elected representatives to stop them.

I’m talking about the new Emirates stadium where Arsenal will kick off the next season. It’s widely seen as a success story, built on time and to budget: a shining, steel-and-glass contrast with the fiasco of Wembley. But the Emirates tale is not all cheers and laps of honour. For Arsenal and the developers it hired have angered local people by breaking one promise after another.

When they were granted planning permission in 2002, Arsenal said that coaches carrying supporters would park underneath the stadium. Now that plan’s been dropped on grounds of “security.” Instead up to 40 coaches will park on surrounding streets, choking those areas to all who live on them.

That’s not all. Arsenal promised they would rebuild a sports centre demolished as part of the new development. There was great excitement, especially among Highbury’s young people; the club said its players and coaches would be involved in the new site. But that plan quietly disappeared too: instead Arsenal have promised to give £1m to existing “local sports facilities.” No specifics and no details have been fixed – and most expect Arsenal to spend much less than they would have.

What’s more, Arsenal promised to build plenty of affordable homes as part of the surrounding development, and 40% of the 3000 new homes will indeed be affordable. But campaigners have noticed that these low-income houses and flats have been allocated to the least attractive site: close to the waste recycling centre across Holloway Road, built by Arsenal to replace the old rubbish dump on which the Emirates stadium now stands.

How did this happen? Islington’s opposition parties blame the borough’s ruling Liberal Democrats. “They have been supine in the extreme and allowed the developers to get away with murder,” Catharine West, Labour group leader, told me yesterday. The borough had reached a whole cluster of agreements with Arsenal, but when Arsenal wanted to break, or “renegotiate”, them the council just rolled over. (Voter anger over that capitulation surely played a part in the slashing of the Lib Dems’ majority earlier this month.)

Local politics being what it is, there’s a queue of people ready to see this as a Lib Dem problem. The critics say the party got too close to the club, even posing with Arsenal officials on their election literature. But this is about more than a group of councillors who allowed themselves to be dazzled by a glamorous football club.

It is about the weaknesses of democratic local authorities in the face of big business. Arsenal had serious leverage: they could leave the borough altogether, taking prestige and jobs with them. (The club did indeed threaten to move to Kings Cross, or even to the edges of the M25.) That’s the last thing any local authority would want. On the contrary, they’re desperate to lure the big commercial beasts to their patch. Note the joy of a Birmingham or Leeds when a Harvey Nichols or Selfridges arrive. A Marks and Spencer or John Lewis is deemed an “anchor shop”: once it’s there, others will follow, securing an entire retail area. In their desperation, councils end up giving these giants whatever they want.

Even when a business decides to move into or stay in an area, it still has clout. Any council minded to hold a big corporate player to its legal agreements will face an opponent with much deeper pockets: it can fight a court battle with greater resources than any single London borough can muster. So councillors end up accepting defeat, allowing the commercial Goliath to wriggle out of its promises. The same process of intimidation might even explain why authorities who punish you and me if we stray anywhere near a bus lane, seem strangely tolerant of the supermarket delivery trucks which park in them for half an hour at a time.

In other words, the Arsenal experience is far from unusual. A Friends of the Earth report earlier this year found councils across the country surrendering to big retailers because they feared bankruptcy if they fought them. The group also found big players like Tesco regularly ignoring the terms of their planning consent. “The system is stacked against local authorities,” Friends of the Earth concluded.

But there could be an answer. Weak on their own, boroughs would be much stronger if they collaborated. If they agreed some collective standards, then businesses could no longer play one authority off another: there would be no way for a company to get a better deal somewhere else.

Councils could also propose a concordat with the businesses which most affect our neighbourhoods, an agreed set of standards to be signed by the High Street’s biggest names. If Tesco’s or Asda broke the concordat, they would take the hit of bad publicity, being named and shamed as poor corporate citizens.

The key point, missed by Islington council, is that big companies are not the only ones with leverage. Joined together, our elected representatives can have muscle, too – forcing corporate players to consider a bottom line that goes beyond pure profit. And that, as they say in football, would be a bit of a result.

Reform need not mean privatisation if public services are localised

Small social networks designed by the users themselves could help to restore the ailing public realm for the 21st century

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The talented Mr Stopford

Let us salute the phoney earl who has exposed the British class system for the medieval flummery it is.

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Did we really learn the lessons of 7/7

Published in the Evening Standard 11 May 2006

Of course it would be on a Thursday. There was a time last summer, after bombers had struck or tried to strike on two Thursdays in July, when the mere arrival of the fourth weekday was enough to send a shiver through this city. I spoke to commuters who admitted that, come the next Thursday, they would walk, cycle or drive - anything to avoid being on a bus or Tube on that dread day. Thursdays seemed cursed.

So it's grimly fitting that two official reports into the July 7 bombings are published today. Their arrival immediately stirs memories that have hardly gone away. Perhaps they were in a kind of deep freeze for the winter months, when the atmosphere of last July was harder to recapture. But yesterday, with the sun shining again, it was easy to remember how London felt and looked when it was struck on that summer morning. One glimpse of those pictures in yesterday's Standard - the wounded in blankets or wearing oxygen masks, the CCTV images of the killers - and we were back.

After the attempted second wave on July 21 I remember fearing that life in this city would never be the same again, that a pervasive angst would descend on us. I had spent plenty of time in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv - places that, at the height of the intifada in 2001 and 2002, were hit by a July 7 every other week - and I worried that their fate would become ours: that we would never again get on a bus or train without fearing for our lives. If there had been more London bombings, in August and September and October, that is indeed what would have happened to us. Instead London has been able to move on, to put July 2005 behind us. Get on a bus or Tube now and you'll sense most of the angst has drained away.

These two reports might dispel that complacency; they remind us just how easy it was for four young men to wreak havoc in the capital on July 7. The Home Office "narrative" of the events leading up to that day is expected to confirm that the bombers were amateurs. They were not al-Qaeda operatives following instructions from Osama Bin-Laden, but rather four lads who scoured the internet for tips on how to make a homemade bomb. With just a few hundred quid, they bought drain cleaner, bleach and acetone, mixed them in a bathtub, and set about making devices that would claim 52 lives.

In a way, this is much more frightening than if the Home Office or Commons Intelligence and Security Committee had laid the blame on a hardcore al-Qaeda cell. To realise that such devastation could be pulled off by four blokes looking at the web, with less than a month's preparation, reveals the true extent of our vulnerability.

Similarly, there's little comfort in the knowledge that our security services were at least partially aware of these men: MI5 had taped ringleader Mohammed Sidique Khan months before the attack, discussing holy war and wondering how to say goodbye to his family. Separately, yesterday's Standard reported that the Aldgate bomber, Shezhad Tanweer, was discovered, probably by a foreign intelligence agency, searching extremist websites for bomb recipes - though British security sources say that information was never passed onto them.

This prompts an obvious tough question. If our security services had vital clues, why did they not act? How could surveillance officers have filmed Khan meeting a group of suspected terrorists a year before the attacks and still not have tailed him? MI5's answer, apparently accepted by the parliamentary committee, is that it had insufficient resources.

I'm not sure that' s good enough. When the 9/11 Commission investigated the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, it concluded that there had been not a failure of intelligence but a "failure of imagination." America's protectors had simply not foreseen that terrorists would use hijacked planes as missiles (even though, in fact, there had been ample warning of just such an attack). Americans accepted that, but Britain's security agencies can hardly plead the same excuse. We had had the warning of 9/11; we all knew that Britain's mass transit system was a target for terror.

Nor is it very reassuring to read that Khan had been dismissed as a mere fund-raiser for terror, rather than a would-be bomber. Again, the 9/11 experience had surely taught the security services that extremists can do extreme things.

The Commons report is expected to say this was not a failure by any single agency, given how badly stretched they all were: at one point just 20 agents had to monitor 400 suspects. But if it's not a failure by the security services, it's certainly a failure by government. As the Home Office narrative apparently admits, despite Tony Blair's absurd insistence to the contrary, the invasion of Iraq did play a part in radicalising British Muslims. Of course it did - just as opponents of the war had insisted it would.

But the greater blame relates to this key question of resources. Of course it takes time to hire and train new recruits, but what lunacy allows a situation in which agents have a man like Khan in their sights - only to let him go because they don't have the manpower to follow him?

The course of action for the new Home Secretary, John Reid, should be clear. Instead of wasting billions on a futile and illiberal wheeze like ID cards - which his predecessor, Charles Clarke, admitted would have done nothing to stop the July 7 bombers - spend the money on simple, direct police and intelligence work. An estimated 400 al-Qaeda suspects are at large in Britain. We need to watch their every move, and those who do the watching on our behalf need all the help they can get. Only then could we feel confident that 7/7 is a memory - and not a warning.

Blair's failure is to think public goods can be delivered by private means

The limits of New Labour have been exposed. The next stage will be nothing less than a refashioning of the state

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'This feels like the beginning of the end'

Read the front page commentary on the local election results and Tony Blair's cabinet reshuffle on the Guardian website

Will red London turn blue for Cameron?

Published in the Evening Standard 4 May 2006

You've got hand it to them for sheer dedication. Yesterday - cutting it fine, I'll admit - the Conservative party of Hackney dropped a leaflet through the door, asking for my vote in the local council elections that take place in London and across England today. That's dedication because, as I'm sure even their most bullish partisan would confess, Hackney falling to the Tories is about as likely as Wayne Rooney throwing off his plaster cast and dancing Swan Lake at the Coliseum.

Still, that hasn't deterred them from offering a robust local message, denouncing the council for wasting #70m on a new Town Hall, and offering a slate of candidates that reflect some of the borough's ethnic mix: the three Tory names on my ballot paper are Jacob Landau, Eric Ollerenshaw and Shuja Shaikh. Their mayoral candidate is Andrew Boff, a gay man who took part in one of the first civil partnership ceremonies last December.

So full marks for effort to the Hackney Conservatives. They clearly understand something that the wider Tory party is only just beginning to learn: that if the Conservatives are ever to win a general election, they have to rebuild themselves in even the most unpromising areas - which include Hackney.

This is not a platitude; it is hard-headed political reality. Tony Travers, the LSE's local government doyen, believes it's an iron rule that no party can win a parliamentary seat in an area where it has no councillors. That's the Tory party's plight in parts of the Midlands and the north, which is why it's sinking huge resources into individual wards in Manchester and elsewhere, determined to get the local toehold which, according to Travers's Law, will put them back into contention for national elections.

"In that sense," says Travers, "London is the least of their worries, because they do have a presence here." The Conservatives will hold citadels like Westminster and Wandsworth tonight, but they also hope to grab Labour boroughs like Croydon and Hammersmith & Fulham, too. And those are the easy ones. Remarkably, the Tories used to hold Haringey; today it is a Tory-free zone, a northern city inside London. Disaffected residents defected to the Lib Dems, not the Conservatives, squeezing the latter out altogether. When the Tories start winning there once more, picking up council seats in Hornsey or Wood Green, we'll know they're back.

But that is a long process. At a recent briefing of senior Conservatives, Travers (who, rigorously independent, is happy to share his wisdom with all parties) spelled out the challenge. "You have a tall mountain to climb," he told them. "You can take the stairs - or you can take the lift."

The "stairs" refers to the long, gradual process of winning council seats in once hostile terrain. To build up the critical mass required could take as long as 12 years. The "lift" refers to winning not council seats, but mayor's races. Where's there's a mayoral election to be won, the Tories, armed with a sufficiently attractive candidate, could conquer in a single night a city that might otherwise have taken a decade to capture.

That would require the Conservatives to embrace the mayoral idea more emphatically than they have so far - seeing in it the route to their own salvation - but something else, too. They would have to find the first class candidates who could sweep cities and boroughs that have remained impregnable until now.

That is harder than it seems, as London illustrates. For which Tory would have a plausible chance of ousting Ken Livingstone? Steve Norris has made two manful attempts and remains popular, but there's no evidence he would be third time lucky. Sebastian Coe is plausible, but his sights are set on running the International Olympic Committee rather than City Hall. That leaves one other possible, the perennial prince across the water who BC, Before Cameron, was the object of Notting Hill Tory yearnings: Michael Portillo.

The trouble is, Portillo doesn't want to do it; he insists he's given up politics for good, preferring a media career that allows him to speak his mind and nuzzle up to Diane Abbott on Andrew Neil's TV sofa. I'm told that leading Cameroons are advising him that his "media balloon will need reinflating soon," and that there's no better oxygen than a re-entry into politics. Even if he loses, runs this logic, he'll have refreshed his media brand.

Let's say the Tories get lucky with candidates; there's still more they have to do. This is a shift larger than personalities; it is about principle. For the Conservatives would have to become the lead advocates of localism, the belief that decisions are best taken close to the people they affect - which means locally, wherever possible.

Right now, the Conservatives are talking a good game. Oliver Letwin, in charge of the policy review, promises a 'localism audit,' ensuring that all public bodies are "pushing power in the right direction, which is downward." He says the party has learned from its mistake in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher's response to disobedient authorities in London and Liverpool was to claw power back to the centre.

But the words don't quite fit the deeds. One of Cameron's earliest acts was to back the government's education bill, which sought to take power away from local education authorities. He also vowed to block local authorities from instituting selection in schools: whatever you think of the merits of selection itself, that still represented a preference for national government over local. Meanwhile, his health spokesman denounces the 'postcode lottery', which allows certain medicines to be available in some places but not others, promising to impose national standards. That's a funny kind of localism.

The suspicion lurks that David Cameron could turn out to resemble Tony Blair on this matter - officially signed up to devolution, but with none of the in-the-gut commitment such a change in political culture really requires. Yet it's the local that could offer his party their best route back to power - as tonight may well prove.

What The Apprentice says about Blair's Britain: only profit matters

Labour came to power dreaming of a different bottom line. Sir Alan's TV show is evidence that that dream has died

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