Labour’s love lost: British politics

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shap. In the modern day. The faith of Islam has had an uneasy relationship with the West. But look beyond the news about fundamentalism and violence. A generational shift is underway that will help to resolve cultural tensions. And our Russia editor has a bit of a side gig helping out one of the world's most notable playwrights. We talk about linguistics, consciousness, journalism and ultimately truth. But first, Seven parliamentarians from Britain's Labour Party have announced that they will be leaving their colleagues.

This has been a very difficult, painful but necessary decision.

They're unhappy with the hard left leanings of the party's leader, Jeremy Corbyn. They insist Labour has failed to root out anti Semitism and they don't like the party's position on Brexit. Mr. Corbyn responded on Twitter saying he was disappointed the group of seven broke away. The MPs aren't forming a new party, but they will be separate, calling themselves the Independent group.

The main mood in the room was one a sense of finally, because this had been coming for a long time, every single person, every MP there had been a long term critic of Jeremy Corbyn. So something like this had been expected for a while.

Our political correspondent Duncan Robinson was at the conference where they announced their departure.

The MPs all come from a relatively similar part of the party. They're all relatively Blairite, they're from the right of the Labour Party, they're all very pro eu, They've all been deeply critical of Jeremy Corbyn's handling of various issues, whether it's his foreign policy or whether it's his handling of anti Semitism in the party, which is a real, real issue for these MPs and for a lot of other MPs in the party.

Duncan, what do you think that these defectors think they will achieve with this?

I think the main thing they want to achieve is to stop Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime Minister. Fundamentally, this is a man they think is not up to the job and they queued up to criticize him as a man and as a politician.

This isn't the first time centrist MPs have quit the Labour Party. In 1981, the so called Gang of Four, unhappy with Labour's far left policies, split to form the Social Democratic Party.

The point about this new party is that it is a party which for the first time in Britain in the period since the war, is breaking with any of the major interest groups and trying to put the interests of the country first ahead of those other interests.

So will the gamble of the Magnificent Seven pay off?

I think for this breakaway group it's not just a tactical crusade, it really is a moral one too.

Anne McElvoy is a senior editor at the Economist and one of our most tireless political junkies.

In Jeremy Corbyn and his hard left outlook, they see someone who's not just ill advised or wrong in political terms. They think this has fed through to a failure to tackle anti Semitism in the party. They think it has fed through to a kind of weaponizing of Brexit without coming to a settled conclusion about it. So I think they really do feel that they have an ethical argument as well as a tactical one.

So Anne, on this charge of anti Semitism in the party, what has the party been doing about the problem so far? Why hasn't that been enough for these critics?

For this group, it just clearly hasn't been enough because it hasn't tackled the issue what they think the root of it is which is a tolerance of a form of anti Semitism which often starts with a particular worldview which has Israel very much in its sights, but they claim goes further and actually becomes outright anti Semit. So one of the main defectors is Luciana Berger, a Jewish MP in the northwest in Liverpool, and she says the party has taken no steps to tackle, she calls an institutionally anti Semitic outlook. She feels she's been at the sharp end of that.

So she is then the sort of the ringleader of this breakaway group?

No, actually she isn't the de facto leader, although they say at the moment they don't need a leader, they're a grouping in Parliament. But everything has a leader in politics. And really the leader figure is Chuka Umunna. He is a high profile advocate of a second Brexit referendum. He's a very good media performer. He's a London mp, he's black British, so he stands out in the overwhelmingly white world of Westminster. He ran for the leadership not very successfully, it must be said, against Jeremy Corbyn. So he's more used to being in the firing line.

And so how do you reckon that will go? How influential do you think this new group will be?

I think it will be very influential in that it brings to a head an argument that has boiled in the late Labour Party since Jeremy Corbyn became leader. How acceptable is his leadership to moderates? This group of people, all of whom are respected MPs, are saying no. Can they bring others with them? Well, Jason, I think that's a bit less clear. They all have broadly the same views. They're all in favor of a second referendum. If you look to other disruptions in politics, you often have to put together an alliance of people who aren't the same but feel so strongly about one thing that they're prepared to come together. Could they reach out to the Conservative Party? Still unproven. It feels very labor in terms of what it's talking about at the moment, but I think it will have some form of impact. And we see a lot from the history of politics and splits. It's not always that it achieves what it sets out to do, but it sets off a ripple effect.

In the wake of this announcement, a lot of people have been talking about another instance of defections from the labor towards a new center in the 1980s. Do you think there are useful parallels there?

I think there are very useful parallels. I think there are warnings and some differences. It was 1981, the so called Gang of Four who were unhappy with the far left policies of leadership. Remind you of anything? Split off to form something called the Social Democratic Party. It did very well for a while and then it didn't. And I think one of the lessons of that is that you have to go out there very quickly and start to fight and win elections.

And thanks for joining us.

Pleasure as always. Foreign.

Hi, this is Christy from Back to the Bar. You've probably heard about GLP1 weight loss medications and the side effects that can come with jumping in too fast. That's why I love Noom makes getting started easy. Their microdose GLP1 program begins with a smaller dose and gradually scales up based on how your body reacts. The Noom GLP1 microdose program starts at 99 and is delivered to your door in seven days. Start your microdose GLP1 journey today at noom.com that's n o o m.com Noom micro changes big results average weight loss 8 pounds in first month meds and personalization based on clinical need and not available to all individuals. Medications are not reviewed by FDA for safety, efficacy or quality. Pricing based on first month only.

Islam frightens many in the West, Jihadists kill in the name of religion. Muslim conservatives believe it allows them to force their daughters to marry. When asked, Westerners say that Islam is the religion they least want their neighbors to follow. But there are 26 million Muslims in Europe, excluding Turkey and Russia, and in the United States, around three and a half million. Islam is in the west to stay. Our special report in this week's edition of the Economist examines how this traditionally conservative religion is adapting, finding its way in open, liberal democracies. Islam is undergoing a transformation that's little noticed in the West, a change that's doing more than any government initiative to tame the threat posed by Islamic extremism.

There's a very interesting process that has taken place in Islam in the west over the decades.

Anton LaGuardia is our deputy foreign editor.

You can broadly categorize it in terms of generations. The first generation of migrants who came at the end of the war. The second generation felt their parents Islam didn't have anything to do with them. They didn't probably understand the language yet they didn't feel entirely rooted in the host countries, and a small minority of those took to violence. And it is striking how many of the jihadist attacks were perpetrated by people who are in the second generation. And now you have the rise of a third generation who don't feel the need to rebel and feel more Willing to engage with their host societies and their institutions.

Islam may be adapting in the west, but conservative Islamic beliefs are harder to change. In particular, the roles and rights of men versus those of women are at the heart of how Western views of Islam are shaped.

I've never had any other identity, any political affiliation other than American. This is the land I was born in. This is the land I grew up.

Yasir Qadhi is America's best known Muslim preacher. A theologian based in Memphis, he believes it's possible to be a faithful Muslim in a liberal democracy. He says that's true even when it comes to issues of gender.

There's no question that me having been born and raised in America is going to shape the way I view the role of men and women, because that's the society I was born into. You know, you cannot expect a Muslim born and raised in Pakistan and Karachi to be fully cognizant of how to live in a liberal democracy to gender roles. They're not really exposed to these issues. So there is this cultural awareness of an American Muslim and a British Muslim who meet. They'll actually have a lot more in common than a Pakistani American with an actual Pakistani back home. So that is something that we call a Western Islamic identity.

Hi, I'm Moona. I'm a black British Muslim. I live in London but grow up in Yorkshire.

Like Mr. Qadhi, Muna Ahmed, whose family originates from Somaliland, has only ever known a Western way of life.

My relationship with Islam is slightly different to my parents and my grandparents because they're far more practicing than I am. I miss prayers. I don't pray all the time. I don't always go to the mosque. I don't always wear a headscarf.

I.

But none of these things make me a bad person or a bad Muslim. I posted a video on Facebook about how the tabloids vilify Muslims. The first person to comment was one of my childhood friends. And she said, yeah, we need these people out of our country, Muslims in general. And I was like, well, do you have more of a right to be in this country than I do? Me and you grew up together. We went to the same school, we went to each other's birthday parties. But yet again, you feel like you have more of a right in this country than I do. And she replied with, you also have blood on your hands.

Fear of terrorism and the rise of anti immigrant populism have led governments in the west to try to control Muslims. President Donald Trump has banned travelers from some Muslim majority countries. France and other states have banned head or face coverings. Anton LaGuardia says such policies are counterproductive.

I think that there's a danger of pushing Muslims back into their communities, of isolating, stigmatizing them. You know, ultimately fighting against extremism is to identify those who are violent or potentially violent within communities. So you need the cooperation of communities to help you identify who is likely to become dangerous. You need to maintain consent.

I started questioning my own identity, so I decided to go to Africa to search for my own roots, to try and see where I actually belong. You know, I felt like I didn't belong in England anymore. I think once I got to Somaliland, I realized that I was, like, completely different to everybody in Africa. I completely stood out. Some of the people that lived there were like, we know you're not from here simply by the way you walk. When I went to Africa, I realized I'm actually a Yorkshire girl. I'm from Yorkshire, I'm British, and no matter how much I try, I can't get away from that. And that's who I am. And that's made me realise that I shouldn't feel out of place and I shouldn't let anyone make me feel like I don't belong, because I do.

It is undoubtedly true that we're in an age of populist politics, of identity politics, and Muslims, I think, in some ways provide a sort of a visible group for which, because of the experience of terrorism, to whom populists can attach a reason to fear. There is some good news, as we've said, because attitudes among Muslims is changing. And I think there's perhaps an appreciation that, or there should be an appreciation that Islam plays much more of a role in sort of Western history and identity than a lot of schools would acknowledge. I think, you know, we're going through a bad phase. I think there is more Islamophobia, but I think there is also the potential for greater understanding.

Anton LaGuardia, our deputy foreign editor. You can read our special report, Islam and the west, in this week's edition of the Economist. For most of his waking hours, Arkady Ostrovsky is the Economist's Russia editor.

So there we are in a wintery Moscow, sitting on the stage of the Ramt Theater, the Russian Youth Theatre. And we're sitting there with Tom Stoppard.

That's Sir Tom Stoppard, a British playwright whose award gathering career spans six decades.

His play the Hard Problem is being put on. Actors are doing their scenes and then after each scene they come up, you know, so much is not in the words. So much is in this chemistry between the actors and their playwright. There is this extraordinary connection happening.

Arkady was there soaking up the chemistry because he has a bit of a hobby.

And I was there because I was very fortunate to have translated that play, the Hard Problem into Russian. And I was there in the rehearsal adjusting the text almost like a tailor does. You know, you try on a suit and say, okay, well here it pinches a bit, so let's make it a bit wider. And this sentence needs to have a bit of breathing space.

Arcadi's tailor fit translations are more than just tinkering with grammar. What he's really doing is tailoring the idea from the playwright's mind through to the actor's delivery. The intellectual content of what you're talking about is your given, and the way you think and speak and live is your.

It's your freedom to do anything you want to do. So the play deals with a hard problem, which is the problem of consciousness and the difference between the consciousness and the brain. We know a computer can calculate, but can a machine really think? You know, if a machine can play chess, does it mind losing? I mean, that, that, that is essentially the problem of consciousness. And it's told through a very human story. There is a young woman who had given up her child for adoption when she was 15. And now, years later, she gets to meet her child.

It's exactly that balance of head and heart that draws people to Mr. Stoppard's plays.

These are in some ways intellectual plays. They're very clever. You really have a sense of thought and thinking as action at the same time. They're not just intellectual, they are grounded in reality. What I mean by reality, they're grounded in the truth of emotion and feeling.

As I say, every year, every decade, theatre is a storytelling form. It's a storytelling art form and you tell the story. It's clearly important to Mr. Stoppard that the storytelling plays out with extraordinary precision.

He's like a, you know, clockmaster. Every scene has its own timing. Everything is very precise and the mechanism works.

Doing translations and translating Mr. Stoppard's plays in particular is demanding stuff. The language, the characters, the high minded themes and the clockwork timing. That's what keeps Arkady interested.

Some people, I suppose, love doing crosswords, you know, puzzles. It's not that different in some ways. I'm not saying it's very easy. It's not very easy. And it can be sometimes quite torturous in the same way as you can't think of a word in a puzzle.

The aim, Arkady says, is to carry a new and culturally different audience to the same emotional and intellectual place.

I think it was a great Russian poet, Boris Pasternak, who translated Shakespeare, who once said, a translator makes the same journey the author has made before him. You sort of retrace the steps, otherwise you can't do it. It has to be emotionally charged. It has to be filled with the same sense of truth and feeling. Because it's the same with journalism. When we write, it's not just the information we convey. We have to give a feeling. You can describe the same event with different words, and sometimes you can be true in fact, but you can be completely false in your choice of words.

So Arkady's hobby, in the end, isn't so different from his day job.

Journalism, to me, is a translation. You translate experiences into texts. You translate a different culture, in my case, Russian culture, Russian politics, into a different language, not just linguistically, but culturally. I have to write about Russia in such a way that a reader can engage with it, can imagine it, can relate to it, most importantly, on whatever level. But I'm trying to translate a foreign picture, a foreign culture into the language of this newspaper, the Economist of British culture. That's what I've been doing all my life.

That kind of translation gives readers and listeners and theater goers a way in, whether it's into consciousness in a Stoppard play or into Russian's foreign policy.

But it's the complexity which interests me and which I'm trying to convey, of ideas and lives and the smells and translating all that into a text, into an article or a book, and then suddenly find out that however local things are, they're also universal. And in fact, the more local they are, the easier they are to relate to, and the more universal they are.

And by the time of the technical rehearsal, the actors have captured are performing a version of the truth, interpreted first by Mr. Stoppard and then by his trusted translator.

I have no notes for you because.

I know that whatever you decide will be truthful. And we're all trying to be truthful. That's all. For this episode of the Intelligence, you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com radio offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds.

See you back here tomorrow, Sam.