Rupert Matthews - Articles

The Defenestration of Prague
The Spreading Word
What would happen if Britain tried to leave the EU?

A fundamentalist Islamic movement that seeks to achieve its political ends by murder, mayhem and terrorism, infiltrating agents into Christian lands and Moslem territories to recruit local supporters and carry out acts of the most brutal violence. Al Qaeda? No, the Assassins who flourished eight centuries ago. The Assassins are with us no more, so what can their activities and the way they were ultimately defeated teach us about how to face up to Al Qaeda today?

The Assassins were formed in 1094 when the defeated faction in an Islamic civil war fled to Persia under the leadership of Hassan i Sabbah to seize the remote Persian fortress of Alamut. From Alamut Hassan propounded an austere, fundamentalist form of Islam that promised salvation through a mystic form of Shia Islam together with an egalitarian political doctrine drawing on ancient Greek philosophy. It made a heady mix. About this time Hassan’s militant sect became known as the Hashashiyyin, or Assassins in English. This was probably derived from a term meaning “followers of Hassan”, but was used by their enemies to imply that they used drug hashish.

The Assassins sent out agents posing as merchants, traders or craftsmen. Their task was to move into a city, spreading the sect’s faith through covert preaching and secretive conversions. Once a large number of converts had been made, the Assassins would organise a coup to take over the city and add it to the diverse, fragmented but increasingly powerful Assassin state.

The Assassins are, of course, best known for their practice of political murder - or assassination. This technique was used to eliminate political rivals or rulers who were thought to be hostile to the sect. Because the sect had agents living undercover in most cities or towns of the Middle East, it was possible for them to strike without warning almost anywhere. Specially trained killers known as Fedayeen were sent to live with the covert agents, integrating into the local society seamlessly. Once they had worked out a plan to get close to the target, the killing would take place. Some assassins worked alone, others in large groups if this were necessary to achieve success. Always the weapon of choice was a dagger as there could then be no mistake about either the target or the severity of a wound inflicted. Bows, poison and other methods always left open the possibility that the wrong man might be killed or that the wounds might be non-fatal.

The terror inspired by these killers who came seemingly from nowhere to press home their attacked with suicidal bravery was immense. Even the great Saladin was dissuaded from a campaign against an Assassin town after he awoke one morning to find a note pinned to his pillow by an unseen intruder.

The sect was in something of a decline after 1200 as other branches of Islam became more attractive to believers and more active in achieving conversions. Then the Mongols invaded Persia under Hulagu Khan. Fedayeen were sent to assassinate Hulagu, but they were unable to blend into the court of a ruler who came from a different ethnic background and religious belief. The attack served only to antagonise Hulagu who, in 1256 captured Alamut, going on to destroy all Assassin strongholds and break their political power forever.

The faith of the assassins survived the destruction of their political power, however, and today forms the base of the Islamic sect led by the Aga Khan.

The comparisons with Al Qaeda are obvious. Al Qaeda also preaches a fundamentalist version of Islam combined with a radical political agenda. It too seeks to impose political power through killings, terror and intimidation. And it has a similarly diffuse yet fiercely loyal internal organisational structure. Agents of Al Qaeda can, like the Assassins before them, move unnoticed through Moslem communities by hiding their true nature while at the same seeking to recruit followers, converts and killers.

It is unlikely that a military solution akin to the Mongol capture of Alamut will offer itself, even in Osama bin Laden should ever be captured or killed. Instead the most likely route by which Al Qaeda may be defeated might be the route that was weakening the Assassin even before the Mongols struck. Other branches of Islam need to set out actively to convert those sympathetic to Al Qaeda to their own doctrines and versions of Islam.

No doubt it will be a long haul. Meanwhile we must all be vigilant - that well known price of freedom down the ages.

Article by Rupert Matthews for Corriere del Sera (Turin newspaper)

Why Everyone Should vote in the EU Elections

I am standing for election in the European Elections being held in the first week of June – but do not worry, I am not asking for your vote. Even if I did, it would do no good. I am standing for election in England, not Italy. You could not vote for me even if you wanted to do so.

So why do I want to urge you to go out and vote? Simple – the more people who vote in the elections the more seriously the bureaucrats who run the European Union will take the result. At the moment, they do not take the results very seriously. Talk to anyone who works for the European Union Commission, as I have done, and they will smile at you. The real power in Brussels lies elsewhere.

The European Council is made up of the national leaders of each EU state – they control how much money the EU gets. The Commission is composed of full time bureaucrats – they understand the details of how the system works and so they can manipulate it. They look on the European Parliament as an interesting place where debates can take place, but where little power is to be found. It is useful to make the EU look like a democracy, when it is not, but that is about all.

It must be said that they have a point. Some Members of the European Parliament are there only because they failed to get elected to their national parliament. Others are there to enjoy the privileges and the pay. They can get away with this because few people in Brussels takes the European Parliament very seriously. One reason why this is so is because fewer people vote at European elections than for national, regional or local elections.

I remember one European election in England that I campaigned in – delivering leaflets and knocking on doors. After 4 weeks of hard work by activists of all politial parties, only 11% of voters bothered voting. That is an extreme example. But it remains true that most voters do not take the European elections seriously. So long as that is the case the EU will not take the European Parliament seriously.

We need to have a European Parliament that has real authority. If MEPs are elected in elections when large numbers of people vote, they will have that authority. There are many Members of the European Parliament who work very hard and very effectively, but they are always undermined by the lack of people voting for them.

As more and more power moves from the national government to the European Union, it is even more important that the European Parliament has authority to question Commissioners, to make sure that EU money is spent wisely and properly and to make sure that democracy is not trampled on as it has been so often by the EU in the past.

And once you go to vote – as I hope you will – there is one party that I think you should take seriously. The Movimento Libero takes representing people very seriously. I know some of the people involved in this party and I know their views. They believe that honesty is important in government. They believe that the little man is more important that the grand bureaucrat. They want to boost business and trade so that there are more jobs and more wealth to share around. In fact they have much in common with the Conservative Party that I represent.

I would urge you to visit their website on www.movimentolibero.it. Then you can decide what you think about them for yourself.

But whatever you think and whoever you support, please go and vote in the European Elections. It really is important.

Article for The Freedom Journal
May 2009

Stamping out Piracy

The attacks by pirates on merchant ships off the Horn of Africa has been much in the news recently. The pirates have demanded – and been paid – millions of pounds in ransom money for the ships, cargoes and crews. The Royal Navy is cruising the seas, as are other EU ships and forces of the USA. The rules of engagement under which these ships operate make it clear that the lives of the captured crews are paramount. Once a ship is captured the naval forces are forbidden to open fire.

It is, perhaps, worth looking back at how past outbreaks of piracy have been stamped out. But first an historic distinction must be drawn. First there were privateers such as Sir Francis Drake or John Paul Jones – who effectively operated privately owned warships during times of war. Second there were Buccanneers such as Harry Morgan or Sir Christopher Myngs – who fought against Spanish attempts to exclude all other settlers and traders from the Americas. Finally there were, and are, pirates who are criminals in ships liable to attack, rob and kill anyone they can lay their hands on.

The heyday of what might be termed “traditional piracy” was in the Caribbean between about 1680 and 1720. This was when Blackbeard, Black Bart, Anne Bonny, Calico Jack and Henry Avery were active. The period was brought to an end by Captain Woodes Rogers who was appointed Governor of the Bahamas in 1717.

Rogers began by offering all pirates a free pardon, setting a deadline beyond which all pirates would be hanged on sight. He then set up a militia and anti-pirate flotilla. Finally he brought in tough laws for anyone trading with pirates. Most accounts of the campaign that followed focus on the fights with pirates at sea or on the dramatic executions – Rogers strung up almost 100 pirates in a single morning in December 1718 – but Rogers himself always maintained that his real victory came from cutting off the pirates from a source of money and supply. In the old days pirates had put into ports around the Bahamas to sell their stolen goods, spend their ill gotten gains on women and rum, then restock their ships and go back to sea. No more. With nowhere to sell their loot the pirates could no longer turn a profit. Most gave up piracy, those determined to continue went elsewhere.

In 1820 the US Captain David Porter was sent to tackle a smaller outbreak of piracy in the Caribbean. He had a different problem since the ports from which the pirates operated were in Spanish Cuba and could not be closed to them. Instead he adopted a twin strategy of forming US merchant ships into escorted convoys and of stopping every vessel to question the crew. Any crew that could not come up with a reasonable explanation of what they were doing were arrested and hauled off for trial. Even those acquitted spent months in US custody before they were released. It took until 1825, but in the end Porter stamped out the resurgent piracy.

What emerges from these events, and from other successful anti-piracy campaigns – is that it is relatively easy to destroy pirates. If a military option is chosen, what is needed is ships designed for the job, determination to see the task through, a disregard for the human rights of the pirates and a willingness to accept that some casualties will be suffered.

But the most effective weapon is the economic one. If piracy does not pay then criminals will not turn to piracy. Woodes Rogers proved that. The paying of millions of pounds in ransoms to the modern pirates makes the crime profitable and only serves to encourage more men to take up piracy.

Rudyard Kipling, when writing about the Viking raiders, summed it up neatly:
“And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.”

Article for The Freedom Journal
January 2009

The Futility of Porcelain

In the opening months of 2009 the financial news was bleak. More depressing still for those of us who believe in the importance of free markets and free enterprise was the news coming out of governments. All the talk was of job creation schemes, government investments and business rescues. The aims for laudable, but the means were almost uniformly pointless or counterproductive.

And then there was the news that Wedgwood was going into receivership. It struck me that there was a close link between the two pieces of news, albeit a link centuries old.

It all has to do with the futility of porcelain.

Back in the mid-1600s a small number of European merchants were making a fortune importing porcelain from China and Japan. Oriental porcelain had a number of advantages over the contemporary crude European pottery that made it highly sought after. It could be made thin and light, and yet very strong. It also had a high resistance to thermal shock, meaning it could be filled with boiling hot water to make tea or coffee without cracking. Not only that, but it was capable of being moulded into intricate designs with tiny details that remained firm during firing. And it could take dyes and slips of bold colouring.

These properties meant that porcelain could be used to make the sort of high quality dinner services and ornaments craved by the royalty and nobility of Europe at the time. Porcelain pieces sold for high prices. It was not long before European potters realised that if they could find a way to make porcelain in Europe they could make a lot of money.

Then, in 1707 a German conman named Johann Friedrich Böttger announced he could make gold from base metal. He was promptly grabbed by Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony, and told to get on with it. Unsurprisingly Böttger failed to produce any gold, so he then said he could make porcelain instead. Convinced that he had found a way to make a fortune, Augustus poured government money into setting up a new factory at Meissen to produce Böttger’s porcelain.

Sadly, Böttger had not invented a way to make porcelain at all but was making a hard form of stoneware. But with the floods of government cash pouring in, Böttger was able to hire some decent chemists and by 1720 had discovered that adding kaolin to clay and firing at a high temperature did make genuine porcelain. By 1730 Meissen was making the boldly coloured figurines for which it has been famous ever since.

Other European rulers now wanted to jump on the bandwagon, convinced that establishing a porcelain factory would make them rich, create jobs for their subjects and give their governments an inflow of cash. What all these rulers missed, however, were some basic economic facts. Porcelain was a prestige product with a limited market among the richer sectors of society. The royals and nobles loved it, but nobody else could afford it.

As factory after factory opened up, the output flooded the market leading to a collapse in profit margins. Most factories ended up making a few dinner services for the royal family that had founded it, then closed. Governments across Europe lost money hand over fist. A few porcelain factories survived: Meissen, Sevres and Nyphenburg among them, but only if the royal family involved was willing to subsidise the works to maintain for their family and state the prestige of having a porcelain factory. What had begun as a government bid for profits ended as a subsidized industry.

Meanwhile in Britain a potter named Josiah Wedgwood was also trying to make porcelain. Among his many experiments – most of which went hopelessly wrong – was one that involved mixing powdered animal bone into clay. This did not make porcelain, but it did make bone china. Wedgwood quickly realized that bone china had many of the properties of porcelain, but not to the same high degree, and that it was a lot cheaper to produce than was real porcelain.

Spotting a market for bone china dinner and tea services among the merchants, yeoman farmers and other middle class families of Britain, Wedgwood went into production. He and his company made a lot of money, and continued to do so for decades. Even when the company went into receivership in January 2009, the bone china side of the business was still turning a profit – the problems were elsewhere in the group.

So next time to take a sip of tea or eat a dinner off bone china, just think. You are holding in your hand a clear example of how governments can waste huge sums of money investing in prestige companies that lose money, while private enterprise can employ thousands turning out more humble products people actually want.

The European Policies of political parties 1 - Labour

With the European Elections now only three months away all the political parties will be busily drafting – and no doubt redrafting more than once – their manifestos for those elections. No doubt there will be plenty of fine words and worthy ambitions set out in those manifestos, but it might be instructive to have a quick look at the recent policies and actions of the other parties regarding the European Union. That should give us a clearer idea of what they really think than will the shiny new manifestos. I shall start with Labour.

In the past, Labour’s policy regarding the EU has famously flopped about between extremes. Labour has both advocated outright withdrawal from the EU and vociferously criticised Conservative governments for not going along with everything wanted by Brussels. Since getting into power in Britain in 1997, however, Labour policy on the EU has settled down a bit.

The best way to describe Labour policy toward the EU over the past 11 years would be that they can’t see the wood for the trees. Consistently, Labour ministers - and prime ministers - have got themselves bogged down in detailed horse-trading over individual regulations, directives and rules. They have trumpeted their successes in the little things, but have generally remained silent – or worse made catastrophic mistakes – when it comes to the bigger picture.

Remember Tony Blair’s agreement to hand back some of the British rebate in return for reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)? The EU pocketed our cash, but the French then cunningly and predictably sabotaged CAP reform. By then there was talk of Mr Blair becoming the first President of Europe under the new constitution – talk that has recently surfaced again – so perhaps that coloured his thinking. Gordon Brown’s decision to sell our gold reserves when the price of gold was low and buy Euros had its origins in a similar desire to be seen to be ‘good Europeans’ – and disregarding what was right for Britain. Yes, I know that the Euro has risen against the pound since then, but it has fallen spectacularly against gold.

Take a look at Labour’s 2005 manifesto. The main policy on the EU was this: “We will secure Britain’s place in the EU.” What does that actually mean? Well, not much.

When the 2005 manifesto made specific commitments, they have ended in abject failure. “We will work to promote economic reform, bear down on regulations, make progress in the Doha development trade round, bring closer EU membership for Turkey and improve the focus and quality of EU [overseas] aid,” it says. Failure on every count.

Labour’s true attitude to the EU is really given away not so much in the 2005 manifesto but in what has happened since. Mr Blair famously gave an unambiguous pledge on the Constitutional Treaty: “We will put it to the British people in a referendum and campaign whole-heartedly for a ‘Yes’ vote.” Getting a yes from the British people was always going to be difficult. As soon as the French and Dutch voted no, the promised British referendum was shelved. Gordon Brown then took advantage of the shameful semantic stunt of redrafting the Constitutional Treaty as the Treaty of Lisbon and then denying the British people a referendum. The clear promise given to the British people was broken.

Of course, Labour loves a big government. Labour ministers and left-leaning special advisers and civil servants (remember this Labour government has politicised the civil service as never before) find it easy to fit in with the EU’s self-appointed bureaucratic elite. The built-in attitude that holds sway in Brussels is that the experts know best and that the common people need to be guided and cajoled into doing what is best for them rather than what they actually want. It is Labour writ large. No wonder Labour are happy to hand over authority to Brussels.

The Treaty of Nice and the Treaty of Lisbon have both handed extensive powers to Brussels. In return, Labour has got corporatist, big state government without all the bother of putting it through the House of Commons or explaining it to the British media.

They can see the trees of left-wing advantage, but not the wood of EU hegemony. Even if they did, would they care? Probably not. Labour shows a desire to fit in with their congenial European buddies rather than protect Britain’s interests. After all, why should Gordon Brown debate in the House of Commons or be interviewed by Jeremy Paxman when he can slip over the Channel and have a polite meeting behind closed doors instead?

Article for The Freedom Journal
January 2009

The Defenestration of Prague

On 5 December last year the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, welcomed a delegation from the EU Parliament to his offices in Prague Castle. He was soon to wish he had not.

The meeting kicked off with Daniel Cohn-Bendit MEP, who rose to fame as a prominent student leader during the 1968 unrest in France, slapping the EU flag down on Klaus’s desk. The tone of the meeting quickly deteriorated. After haranguing Klaus on various issues, Cohn-Bendit turned to the Lisbon Treaty. “I don't care about your opinions on it. Will you respect the will of the representatives of the people? You will have to sign it. And I want you to explain to me what is the level of your friendship with Mr Ganley from Ireland. How can you meet a person whose funding is unclear?” This was a reference to Cohn-Bendit’s allegation, for which there is no evidence, that Ganley is funded by the CIA).

Klaus was taken aback. He responded “Nobody has talked to me in such a style and tone for the past 16 years. You are not on the barricades in Paris here.”

The leader of the Euro Parliament delegation, Hans-Gert Pottering, stepped in to back up Cohn-Bendit. Pottering is the former leader of the EPP group that we Conservatives are thankfully pledged to leave. Pottering slapped down Klaus saying “Any member of this delegation can ask you whatever he likes.” Turning to Cohn-Bendit, he said “Please continue.”

And so it went on for almost twenty minutes. The arrogance of the European Parliament delegation, which included Irish MEP Brian Crowley was breathtaking. After the meeting Cohn-Bendit hurried to tell the press that Vaclav Klaus was “paranoid” and that any discussion with the Czech president was “madness”.

Prague has been here before. In the 17th century, the city was capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, a self-govenrrng state within the Holy Roman Empire. Emperor Mathias gave the Protestant Bohemians a lease on some land to build a church. In 1617 Mathias died and was replaced by the staunchly Catholic Ferdinand II. In 1618 Ferdinand wrote to the Bohemians ordering them to pull down the church and return the land. The Bohemians, armed with a lease, refused.

In May 1618 two Imperial representatives, Vilem Slavata and Jaroslav Borzita, arrived in Prague. At a meeting in Prague Castle they truculently demanded that the Bohemians do as they were told by the emperor, brushing aside the rights to self government enjoyed by the kingdom and threatening military action. The Bohemians were outraged. Led by Count Thurn a group of nobles grabbed Borzita and Slavata and threw them out of the window. The pair landed on a pile of horse dung, which saved them from injury by did nothing for their dignity.

This event, the Defenestration of Prague, led Ferdinand to invade Bohemia. Protestant states rallied to the Bohemian cause and the Thirty Years War began.

Klaus managed to restrain himself from throwing Pottering, Crowley and Cohn-Bendit out of the window, though no doubt some readers would feel he could have been excused for doing so.

Instead he took advantage of a speech he made to the European Parliament in February of this year to take his revenge. He started with a forensic dissection of the EU's centralising tendency. He spoke at length about the gap between MEPs and citizens, insisting that ordinary voters felt closer to their national MPs and their national governments than they did to remote EU institutions. He said that more power, more centralised decision-making, such as that envisaged in the Lisbon Treaty, would increase the alienation from the political process already felt by citizens, who were caught up in a process which the did not own and could not control. Several MEPs got up and stormed out at this point. Klaus went on to hint in pretty clear terms that he saw close parallels between the centralisation and over-regulation of the EU, and the authoritarian régime that the Czech people suffered for forty years under the Communists.

It then fell to the president of the parliament, none other than Hans-Gert Pottering MEP, to give a vote of thanks. He was clearly furious and gave a petulant little tirade, ending with transparently unfelt obsequious courtesy.

We are, thank goodness, less prone to declaring war than in the past. But the nature of supranational authority does not seem to change very much. Compare and contrast the two meetings in Prague Castle held in 1619 and 2008, as my old history teacher would have put it.

Article for The European Journal

The Spreading Word

Openness, transparency, accountability. Three words that are not generally used when writing about the European Union, unless the word ‘not’ is also in the sentence.

It used to be thought that it was only in Britain that people got worked up about this sort of thing. The argument went along the lines that Germany was so hung about its recent past that they would put up with anything to be accepted back into the community of nations, France was pretty much running the EU and most other states were doing so well out of the EU gravy train that they weren’t going to ask questions. To illustrate the point, The Times reported that Nicholas Sarkozy’s reaction to the Irish “no” vote on the Lisbon Treaty was “The Irish are bloody fools. They have been stuffing their faces at Europe's expense for years, and now they dump us in the s**t”.

It was only Britain that was in the invidious position of being forced to pay the bills without getting anything very much in return. Only Britain, it was thought, was the one likely to be asking awkward questions.

But things are changing. One German recently asked his Ministry of Justice how much new German law originates in the EU. The answer was 80%. When this figure was raised in our House of Commons, Denis MacShane MP brushed it aside implying that it was a figure concocted by some obscure German EUsceptic.

And just recently our own government imposed a three line whip to vote down a bill that would have gone a long way to revealing the same data for Britain. Mark Harper MP put down the bill that would have made the Government declare when each Bill was brought forward to Parliament whether or not it had its origins in EU measures.

Why was our government so keen to knock this idea on the head? Well they didn’t say, but we can guess. They don’t want anyone to know.

Now news comes out of Italy that a political party there has woken up to the fact that being on a gravy train is not necessarily the best place to be. The Movimento Libero may be only a small party with its roots in the business community of northern Italy, but it is a vocal one that is rising in the polls. It has called for the Italian government to carry out a cost-benefit analysis of Italy’s membership of the EU.

Speaking recently in Varese, Gianluigi Premazzi said “After all, Italy is the fourth contributor to the EU budget and she gives by far more than what she receives from Brussels unlike the other countries from our region [south Europe]. For example, 'sponge Spain' even gains a net contribution from Brussels of more or less 8 billion of Euros. Why on earth?? This looks quite unfair.”

He went on to make the point that EU-based regulations and rules are having a detrimental effect on smaller businesses. A similar point is being made by some in Malta and even in Greece. These are not countries we might think of as being critical of the EU. As President Sarkozy said of the Irish, they have been recipients of oodles of EU cash and might be expected to be suitably grateful.

But they are chaffing under the need to impose EU regulations. After all, these are countries with a long tradition of viewing a new government regulation as being an ideal to aspire toward, not something to obey now. That is one reason why MEPs and commissioners from such countries have been happy to vote so many regulations into being at EU level. They never expected anyone to take them terribly seriously.

Now that we strange northern barbarians are expecting them to follow the rules, the Greeks, Italians and others are beginning to question whether there should be quite so many regulations. On 16 October 2008 Snr Berlusconi objected to a new tranche of red tape saying “Our businesses are in absolutely no position at the moment to absorb the costs of the regulations that have been proposed.” Good for him.

Which brings us back to “openness, transparency, accountability”. There is a good reason why the EU authorities talk about these things so often, but so very rarely put them into practice. If the peoples of Europe really knew and understood what was going on they might not accept it all so readily.

Which is why we should continue to push for honesty in the whole EU debate. Mark Harper may have failed this time, but that is no reason why we should give up. We need to continue to ask how much law comes from the EU and how a cost-benefit analysis would stack up.

It will not be easy, but worthwhile things never are.

Article for Conservative Home

What would happen if Britain
tried to leave the EU?
- A lesson from history

In recent months I have been looking at the build up to the American Civil War and have been struck by the fact that the political and constitutional debates that took place in the USA in the 1850s are strikingly similar to those that I have been hearing recently in this country.

That set me pondering on the question: Would Britain be allowed to leave the EU?

The similarities between the constitutional position of the states of the USA in the 1850s and that of the states of the EU 160 years later are striking. The United States of America was formed by a number of sovereign and independent states which formed a supranational authority which was intended to have a loose - and often poorly defined - authority over the states. In the years that followed, the USA admitted new states while the economies and political outlooks of the existing states diverged. The US supreme court consistently passed rulings that saw the power of the Union government enhanced over that of the states. The EU has had a similar history.

By the later 1850s it was clear that the industrial states, which formed a majority, were going to use their power within the structures of the Union to enforce their will on the agrarian minority. This was caricatured by the industrialists as a dispute over slavery (and is often still viewed in such terms), but there was more to it than that.

Rupert is a regular contributor to Conservative Home. See some of my articles here

The European Policies of political parties 1 - Labour