The US is seriously rattled by the Palestinian application for UN ‘non-member observer status’ which is due to be presented to the General Assembly on 29^th November. Already accepted as a member of Unesco, their new status would allow the Palestinians to apply for membership of other UN organisations – and the ICC. This would open up the opportunity for the Palestinians to challenge the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in court.

This would undoubtedly be an embarrassment for the US, but that is not the real reason for their unhappiness. The truth is surely that the US no longer believes in a two state solution or believes that a two state solution will ever be possible. It is dead and buried.

This year more building contracts to build illegal settlements have been let in the Occupied Territories than in the previous three years.  The US has remained silent. And the peace process? Never mentioned. The dilemma now facing the US is how to announce a change in policy without lighting the fuse to massive unrest in the Middle East and how to convince a right wing Israeli government that there can never be Jewish state.

The single state solution is the only way forward, but making that a reality is going to be a long and hard road.

Maz Hussein’s article ‘The inevitable state of Israel and Palestine’

Buried within the news of the merger of Israel’s two major right-wing political parties, Likud and Yisrael Beitenu, was a subtext which has as yet not registered in popular discourse on the Middle East – the final death of the “peace process” between the Israelis and Palestinians and of the prospect of two separate states existing between them.

Despite the presence of a highly conciliatory, and by many accounts obsequious, Palestinian partner in President Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli leadership has moved farther away from the prospect of a two-state solution than at any time in recent memory and has firmly demonstrated their practical abandonment of the framework for peaceful separation outlined in the Oslo Accords.

The Israeli left-wing which favoured a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians is nearly dead and buried – the formation of Likud and Yisrael Beitenu’s popular right-wing governing party is reflective of the fact that the centre of gravity in Israeli politics has been pushed so far to the right that mainstream foreign policy debates regarding the Palestinians today focus more upon deciding on appropriate means of violently confronting them rather than upon drafting terms of a peace accord.

Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli leader who came closer than any in history to delivering the peace treaty, which dovish Israelis have sought for decades, was murdered in a hail of bullets by a right-wing settler extremist, and today the ethno-nationalist agenda of his killer has formally ascended to the heights of power in the country.

Once considered to be dangerous and intractable extremists, Avigdor Lieberman and Yisrael Beitenu have today formally taken their place within Israel’s legitimate political mainstream, while the segment of society which Rabin represented – that which was willing to make serious concessions to create two separate, sustainable and independent countries, has been pushed to the remote, irrelevant margins of Israeli political life.

In its place is a political majority which is in practice committed to the creation of a legally unprecedented Greater Israel at the expense of the Palestinian people, a position which observably exists today with the accelerating pace of settlement expansion but which has not been formally acknowledged due to the political expediency of maintaining the façade of an ongoing “peace process”.

Among Israel’s international supporters, suppression of dissent towards this fraught trajectory has led to boycotts and fierce attacks against self-described “liberal Zionists” for merely attempting to bring Israeli policy in line with official rhetoric on the Palestinian issue, a sign of how far rhetoric has diverged from actual policy intentions.

In the long-term, this set of circumstances can ultimately only lead to one of two things – the creation of a formalised system of unequal separation where Palestinians live in isolated cantonments without basic rights and freedoms or the creation of a bi-national state with equal rights for all citizens regardless of religion and ethnicity.

Supporters of Israel today characterise, with some degree of justice, the label of “Apartheid” as being hyperbolic and inaccurate. However, if Palestinians are given neither equal rights within Israel nor a viable state of their own, this label will become undeniably accurate – and the latter outcome appears to have become an impossibility given changing political mores within the country.

For Israel, a relatively small, young and regionally isolated country reliant upon international support to maintain its legitimacy today, there increasingly appears to be only one viable and sustainable choice available on its horizon – a single democratic state with full equality for all its inhabitants.

The end of ‘two states for two peoples’

The Oslo Peace Accords which created the Palestinian Authority and was intended to be the first step towards a future final-status agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians is today viewed by many on both sides as a disingenuous charade cynically utilised to maintain the status quo.

The prospect of a peaceful settlement which would leave both parties with viable, separate states and put an end to decades of vicious conflict – a prospect which seemed so tantalisingly close in the early 90s when it was negotiated – appears today to have been nothing but a cruel mirage.

The Israelis and Palestinians have come face-to-face in several bloody confrontations in the intervening years and state-sanctioned illegal settlement construction is today increasing at a rate unseen in years.

The creation of “facts on the ground” through settlement-building coupled with vehement opposition to any attempt by Palestinians to seek international recognition of their future state is indicative of Israel’s fundamental opposition to the prospect of a two-state solution despite its continued protestations to the contrary.

Perhaps, the most damningly explicit indictment of the Oslo formula for a peace came in the form of the “Palestine Papers“; the thousands of internal documents leaked to the media on the details of Israeli-Palestinian talks over the past decade.

Within them was revealed the true nature of the “negotiations” which for years had purportedly been continuing with the good faith intention of creating two states for two peoples; a shambolic process in which Palestinian negotiators expressed a near-fawning willingness to cede upon almost every Israeli demand but yet were repeatedly rebuffed by their negotiating partners.

Among the historic and unprecedented concessions revealed to have been repeatedly offered to Israel by the Palestinian Authority negotiators were disavowals of claims to the “right of return” of refugees and of claims upon illegal settlements built in the East Jerusalem neighbourhoods intended to make up part of a future Palestinian capitol.

Perhaps most tellingly was the utterly supine attitude displayed by Palestinian leaders – a far cry from the incorrigible militancy portrayed by the Israeli government as the main barrier to a peaceful settlement.

As reported in the leaked documents, when former Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei mildly protested the refusal by Israel to cede the West Bank settlement of Ma’ale Adumin, the sharp rebuke he received was that “then he would not have a state!” – an outcome which seems all but assured today despite the official Israeli position that a two-state solution is the only possible resolution to the conflict.

Indeed this past week, the Israeli government formally threatened to end Oslo and with it the Palestinian Authority for the transgression of attempting to seek non-member observer status at the United Nations.

The incongruence between Israel’s claim to be fighting for two-states while simultaneously doing everything in its power to either ignore or undermine any move towards such an outcome is indicative of its true present aspirations – and in the long-term of the inevitability of a one-state solution.

Maintaining international viability

Contrary to popular perception that Israel maintains its support from the United States and other allies simply due to skillful lobbying or economic ties, there is abundant evidence that international support for Israel rests upon the belief that it holds shared values regarding democracy and human rights with Western democracies.

Accepting this fact and recognising the exponentially increased diplomatic costs to the US and other countries would incur to maintain essential support to a future state of Israel which abandons democratic values, it can be clearly seen that the trajectory which the Israeli political mainstream is taking the country is one that will lead it to unprecedented isolation and worldwide opprobrium.

Attempting to impose an Apartheid-style solution upon the Palestinians, the natural outcome of the abandonment by the political class of the two-state formula, would turn Israel into an international pariah.

At such a point, returning to a two-state solution would be impossible and the only avenue back into the global mainstream would be through dismantling the system of de facto legal and military separation and recognising Palestinians as full citizens within Israel.

For Israel, a country dependent in large part upon international patronage, maintaining support from foreign benefactors whose help is contingent upon the existence of a pretence of democracy is a vital national interest.

In the scenario which its leaders have created for the country, the zero-sum option of the future appears increasingly likely to be either unsustainable global isolation or an embrace of equal rights for both Palestinians and Israelis within one state.

The fight for equality

Today, Palestinians and their leadership are faced with a clear choice: either continue to perpetrate the charade of the non-existent peace process for the benefit of their occupiers or formally begin the fight for equal rights within a shared state of Israel.

In a situation which even its own leaders appear to recognise, the Palestinian Authority has become nothing more than a de facto contractor for the Israeli occupation, and gradual usurpation, of the land which was intended to have one day become Palestine.

The vision of “two states for two peoples”, bravely articulated by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat before an extremist settler ended the life of the former, is dead and gone. Its perpetuation in the public sphere today is done solely in order to maintain a system of inequality and oppression by paying lip service to a future reward upon which no will exists to deliver, and which has in practical terms has become impossible to achieve.

A future state of enforced separation and racial inequality; the inexorable trajectory of today’s Israeli political mainstream, will ultimately serve no one and its maintenance will not be lastingly possible in the face of international censure.

An Israel in which the rights of all are respected regardless of race or religion is the only solution which will deliver peace and stability to the present-day inhabitants of this land, and when presented with the alternative represents the only solution capable of creating an Israeli state which is both secure and viable in the long-term.

Murtaza Hussain is a Toronto-based writer and analyst focused on issues related to Middle Eastern politics.

“We are dealing with the darkest of bourgeois taboos. Of all the things on which the world has declared “war” in modern times, self-harming substances must be the daftest. Yet the result has been to destroy millions of lives, expend trillions of dollars, and helplessly corrupt sovereign states, from Afghanistan to Colombia. It is the greatest single failure of modern statecraft. It is the dark ages, and we are still in them”. Simon Jenkins.

There’s one good thing about tough times, bad things surface. Bad things and things politicians want to hide or shuffle onto the back burner. So it is with drugs. As Simon Jenkins so eloquently points out in his article below, our political class want nothing to do with drugs reform. It’s too difficult, they haven’t a clue what to do, and of course, there’s no political dividend.  Instead they’ve christened the mythical crusade “the war on drugs”, and made it seem like one of those ‘all in it together’ causes – which, as we all know are meaningless, and lead nowhere.

The failure of politicians around the world to tackle the drug problem is not only having a huge societal impact, but more importantly, the vast amounts of illicit cash that the drugs trade generates is corrupting states, politicians, policemen and public servants to such a degree that civil society as we know it is under real threat.

And the amount of drugs money laundered each year? Nearly 2 trillion dollars which is about 3% of world GDP. The amounts of money are so huge they’re almost unimaginable, and it’s all in the wrong hands. The power of these trillions of dollars is a very real threat to you and me, and the democracy we hold dear.  By their inaction and unwillingness to grasp the nettle, our fallible, ineffective, and frankly, stupid politicians, are leading us to a very bad place.

Here is Simon Jenkin’s article:

Imagine the Afghan war had run for the past 40 years. Imagine 2,000 deaths a year. The enemy remains 400,000-strong, despite 40,000 being taken prisoner annually. The war costs £1bn a month. Casualties vary from time to time, but there is no hope of victory. Were that the case, I suggest public opinion might be exasperated. Parliament might debate the matter. Ministers might review policy. Yet such is Britain’s fatuously entitled “war on drugs”. Each year governments re-legislate their “war on terror”, despite the minimal threat, but reject any need to revise the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act. They refuse to see if it is working, and do nothing but waste public money.

Home secretaries trumpet idiotic “drug seizures”. They pass “awareness” budgets, arrest and imprison thousands of citizens for drug possession and sale. The war has failed. But it continues to immiserate countless families and wreck countless lives. It is stupid, knee-jerk British government at its worst.

There is now a small industry of liberals who spend their time saying so. I am probably one of them, having wasted hours on commissions, inquiries, conferences and lobbies. Worthy charities dole out money for fact-finding trips to California, Switzerland, Portugal and the Netherlands, all with lessons, none of which we learn. The British go abroad, as always, to have their prejudices confirmed. If we were investigating terrorism, the death rate would have ministers racing to the Commons in panic. As it is, the victims of the 1971 act die un-atoned.

I sat on Lady Runciman’s Police Foundation inquiry in 2000 which, like her “Runciman Two” this week, reiterated that criminal law had failed to end drug use or reduce harm. It suggested we go easy on cannabis possession and concentrate on treatment for hard drugs. Prison was the wrong place for users or abusers. We dodged the question of supply, as does every drugs report, because that involves discussing manufacture, money and retail. Liberal Britain has always had a distaste for trade.

I hesitate to suggest that Runciman Two is a reprint of Runciman One, but after a decade of inaction I wonder what is different. The police have let up on cannabis possession, as in most countries, largely because they know that the law is unenforceable. This week’s report says that government action is immaterial, drug consumption being unaffected by changes in classification, prison sentencing or education. Drug use seems to ebb and flow with price, fashion and, in the case of ecstasy and skunk, perceived harm. None of this stopped the home secretary, Theresa May, beating her chest and howling her rejection of Runciman from the rooftops.

Britain on drugs is where China is on hanging, Saudi Arabia on beating, Russia on censorship and the Taliban on girls’ education. Drugs policy is the last legislative wilderness where “here be dragons”, a hangover from days when abortion and homosexuality were illegal and divorce expensive. It petrified home secretaries of left and right alike, Jack Straw and Jacqui Smith as much as Kenneth Clarke and Theresa May. So scared was Tony Blair that Alastair Campbell had to order the smothering of the 2000 Runciman report.

Most sane politicians – including David Cameron – advocate reform in opposition, and again after leaving power. A phalanx of Latin American ex-presidents are in favour of cocaine legalisation, the so-called “formers”. Yet fear grips the collective brain when in office. The mere word drugs gives every politician the heebie-jeebies and turns libertarians into control freaks.

As Jonathan Haidt has argued in his book The Righteous Mind, political attitudes on most things, certainly drugs, are irrational, rooted in tribe and upbringing. Politicians who stuff their brains with alcohol, nicotine and amphetamines view ecstasy, cannabis and cocaine as dangerous exotics, like the black death or yellow peril, imported from dusky parts to corrupt the young. They shudder at decriminalisation, relying instead on their favourite legislative juju – “sending a message” and washing their hands.

What should be researched is not drugs policy but drugs politics, the hold that taboo has on those in power, and the thrall that rightwing newspapers have over them. This has nothing to do with public opinion, which is now strongly in favour of reform. Most sensible people find the present regime disastrous and want drugs regulated, rather than the wild west that is the urban drug scene today. It is politicians who think “soft on drugs” implies some loss of potency.

Just as few recreations are harmless so are few recreational drugs. To imply otherwise is silly. But the sheer longevity of marijuana use has embedded it in youth culture alongside alcohol. The menace to public health comes from the failure of government to legalise, test and regulate supply, which is what it should do for all narcotics. Over-prescribing of benzodiazepines is now far worse, and more dangerous, than the over-prescribing of heroin in the 1960s, which led to its disastrous banning and proliferation. No one is proposing to ban legal drugs today, so why leave illegal drugs, and their users, to the tender mercy of crooks?

There is no reason in all this. We are dealing with the darkest of bourgeois taboos. Of all the things on which the world has declared “war” in modern times, self-harming substances must be the daftest. Yet the result has been to destroy millions of lives, expend trillions of dollars, and helplessly corrupt sovereign states, from Afghanistan to Colombia. It is the greatest single failure of modern statecraft. It is the dark ages, and we are still in them.

Don’t be fooled that Israel thinks that Iran poses a nuclear threat to the so-called Jewish state. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s actually about the balance of power in the Middle East. He who has the nukes, rules – or at least is perceived to have an upper hand, a state of affairs which, up until now, has suited Israel – and the US.

If Iran were to have nuclear weapons, the whole dynamic in the Middle East would change, and that’s something Israel and the US appear unable to accept. As Kate Hudson points out in her article below, it would also trigger the start of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, a totally pointless and potentially catastrophic outcome.

With sanctions starting to bite in Iran, the US is probably now hoping that they will be the catalyst for regime change. Whether they are or not, those saner heads in Iran need to know that the West has a vision for Iran. A vision which offers it the opportunity to ‘rejoin the fold’, to be included rather than excluded: a vision which will allow it to live in peace with its neighbours – and to exist in a nuclear free Middle East. A nuclear free Middle East? Yes, exactly that.

The time has come for the West to start making noises about a Middle East free from nuclear weapons. No nuclear weapons in Iran, no nuclear weapons in Israel. Could Israel sign up to such proposals? Unlikely? It might seem so right now, but Israel has to have a vision too. It has to transform itself from a belligerent pariah state into something better. It has much to gain by showing an example, but that too may require ‘regime change’.

The following article is by Kate Hudson, general secretary of CND.

As tensions mount in the Middle East, so do the demands for a regional WMD-free zone. Nearly 40 years after such a zone was first proposed on the floor of the United Nations, the need is as urgent as ever. So it’s good news that finally some tentative steps are being made to move forward on outlawing the Middle East’s weapons of mass destruction.

This December, the Finnish government is hosting a conference in Helsinki, on behalf of the UN, with experienced diplomat and politician Jaakko Laajava bringing together the region’s states to discuss this most elusive but necessary goal.
Many will see this proposal as a pipedream, but Nuclear Weapons-Free Zones (NWFZs) are highly successful forms of collective security across large parts of the world. Currently, 115 states and 18 other territories belong to 5 regional treaties, covering a majority of the earth’s surface, including almost the entire southern hemisphere.

The establishment of such a zone in the Middle East was first proposed in 1974 by Iran. In 1990, it was extended by Egypt to include other WMD, reflecting the serious concern around chemical and biological warfare in the region. A resolution on achieving a WMD-free zone was adopted at the 1995 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference.

Subsequently, the 2010 NPT Review Conference identified five steps necessary towards the goal of establishing a WMD-free zone in the Middle East, including convening a regional conference in 2012 and appointing a facilitator.

As this conference draws near (The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s (CND) free international conference, Building towards a nuclear weapons-free Middle East: Civil society input for a new Helsinki process, which draws together anti-nuclear activists from Britain and the Middle East to discuss input and raise the profile of this crucial issue, takes place in London on Saturday, October 13.), not surprisingly, questions over whether it can succeed are surfacing. But the consequences if it should fail are unthinkable.

Regional insecurities

While Israel steps up its rhetoric over Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons, it continues to ignore the part its own nuclear weapons play in regional insecurity. Meanwhile, other states have made it clear that if Iran did develop a nuclear weapons capability, they would seek their own.

As one senior Saudi Arabian official in Riyadh said: “We cannot live in a situation where Iran has nuclear weapons and we don’t. It’s as simple as that… if Iran develops a nuclear weapon, that will be unacceptable to us and we will have to follow suit.”

Preventative diplomatic action must be taken now to halt nuclear proliferation and ensure the disarmament of WMD within the Middle East. Building support for the UN’s conference not only in both high-level meetings, but also within grassroots movements is crucial.

To this end, CND is holding a free public conference in London this weekend. Drawing speakers from around the Middle East, we are seeking to discuss how civil society can input into and support this process – as Jaakko Laajava has himself requested – and highlight the urgency of action (for more information see here).

Amid escalating tensions between Iran and Israel, both policymakers and the public in the region would do well to look to the African and Latin American examples. They demonstrate how regional security can be far more effectively achieved through co-operative, transparent and rigorously verified security frameworks.

Building genuine security

In the Treaty of Pelindaba (Africa), South Africa set a precedent, becoming the first state with nuclear weapon capabilities to enter into a NWFZ: preferring the long-term benefits of collective security over the totemic status but ultimate insecurity of maintaining a nuclear arsenal.

In the Middle East, the proliferation of WMD has persistently been a strain on diplomacy. In a region where one state is widely acknowledged to have nuclear weapons, four others have at some point violated their safeguards agreements with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and another has been found conducting undeclared activities, transparency is key to building trust.

Open discussions about security concerns and weapons capacity will be vital to the success of this zone: and it begins with opening channels of communication which are the building blocks of peace and genuine security.

There are of course significant obstacles to overcome before this conference can succeed, but certainly, the biggest threat to the region would be failure. Failure to move forward in establishing a WMD-free zone will mean that the stakes will remain higher in any potential conflict. And the stakes are always a human cost.

In a document submitted in May to the planning committee of the NPT Review Conference in 2015, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said the Arab League sees the Helsinki conference as an important crossroad with regard to its nuclear policies. If realistic and practical steps towards WMD disarmament cannot be agreed upon, then nuclear proliferation will become a dangerous reality across the region. The international community should do all it can to avert this.

NWFZs are fundamental mechanisms for tackling precisely these insecurities and subsequent escalations. The Treaty of Tlatelolco (South America) included two competing treaty members, Argentina and Brazil, both with large nuclear power industries with the capability of developing nuclear weapons. The treaty provided the confidence-building framework and a norm of non-proliferation which defused the potential and perceived need for pursuing nuclear weapons systems.

And it is not unthinkable to suggest that this is a feasible outcome in the Middle East: the landmark co-operation and negotiations which would be essential in establishing a WMD- free zone would be positive for intra-regional relations. And while states may be cautious in their approach, if they believe that this can be a serious framework for peaceful co-existence then of course they would be supportive. Such caution can be gradually turned to confidence, through robust and transparent verification measures, as well as binding mechanisms with teeth.

This Finnish-led UN conference represents a significant moment which we would do well to seize upon. To allow this momentum to falter could well result in a hitherto unseen scale of nuclear proliferation across the region, the implications of which are grim. But if we are to build on this momentum it could represent a significant step towards global disarmament and completely transform security relations within one of the world’s most unstable regions.

Dr Kate Hudson was chair of the UK-based Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from 2003 to September 2010, when she became general secretary. She is a leading anti-nuclear and anti-war campaigner nationally and internationally.

VIDEO: Eric Schmidt is Executive Chairman of big, bad Google no less. He’s not normally the sort of guy you would expect to be preaching revolution. He’s not, but within this conversation he appears to suggest an almost revolutionary change to the way governments operate and the way they deal with ‘vested interests’ (he hasn’t got any, of course!) Reading between the lines, he seems to have very little time for the political class – of any country – and sees their inability to think beyond austerity as a cure for current ills as symptomatic of their moral and creative bankruptcy. (Don’t we all!)
For the likes of Eric Schmidt to be expressing these views so publicly is remarkable – and very welcome. Could his comments be a signal that we are entering a period of fundamental political change where pressure for change stems from the most unlikely of places? It would be nice to think so. Crisis begets change, so maybe. One thing’s for certain, if we are, our current batch of politicians will remain blissfully unaware – until the thirteenth hour.

This is the week of the annual AIPAC  conference in Washington. (AIPAC, America Israel Public Affairs Committee, the leading pro-Israel lobbying  group in the US) Every member of Congress will be there. They have to be, their campaign funds depend upon it. This is the gathering that demonstrates all too clearly – for those who care to look – the power of the Israeli lobby and the total grip that it has on the US Congress.

This is the week when the President of the most powerful country in the world kowtows to its ungrateful ally in the Middle East, and is made to look feeble and foolish by Benjamin Netanyahu, son of a militant Zionist, Arab hater, right wing bully boy, and the man most likely to plunge the world into chaos and economic catastrophe should he attack Iran, which he appears increasingly likely to do.

What is it with Americans? Why do they allow a foreign country to hold such sway over their legislators? What is it with President Obama that he doesn’t tell Netanyahu where to get off?  Does it really all come down to money? The simple answer is ‘yes’. It would be a very brave president that offended the mighty Israeli lobby in an election year, but that is exactly what Obama needs to do.

Netanyahu and his fellow travellers only understand tough talk, and any tough talking needs to be backed up by the threat of ‘adverse consequences’ for US relations with Israel if it were to undertake uncoordinated military action against Iran. Obama needs to make clear that sanctions have to be given time to work and make clear that he will not be pushed around by Netanyahu and his right wing cohorts.

America needs to wake up to the fact that it is being taken for a ride by the current Israeli administration. It must stand up to the Israeli lobby and take back ownership of its Middle East policy. For a country that has been brainwashed to believe that to be anti-Israel is to be anti- American, this is going to be a tough call, but a call that needs to be made – urgently.

It may be an election year Mr President, but the world is relying on you to say what needs to be said.

On Friday the price of oil closed at $123 a barrel and the price of petrol on forecourts across Britain reached a record high. With petrol prices on their way too £1.50 a litre, we’ll soon be paying nearly £1 in tax and duty on a litre of petrol. This is absolutely ridiculous.

Britain is now the fuel tax capital of Europe.  Nobody else pays as much tax and duty as we do, and if the Chancellor has his way, we’ll be paying even more, an extra 3p a litre in September.

If we had a booming economy, the cost of fuel wouldn’t be quite so critical. As it is, our economy is on its knees.  Britain has a road based economy. The cost of fuel affects practically everything. What on earth is the sense in increasing the cost of this critical commodity at a time when we should be doing everything to reduce costs, encourage demand and generate growth?  High energy prices hammer growth and stuff demand. Politicians keep mouthing the word ‘growth’ hoping that if they say it often enough the genie will be released from the bottle and it will just ‘happen’. It won’t. And it definitely won’t with fuel prices at their current level.

If that wasn’t bad enough, Israel’s premier, the right wing lunatic Netanyahu, is doing all he can to persuade the US to attack Iran and if they won’t he may decide to do it himself. If that happens the Iranians will close the Straits of Hormuz and we’ll be paying £2 a litre.

High fuel prices feed straight into inflation. Britain’s debt-burdened consumers are not going to be able to take high fuel prices for much longer. There are rumblings about fuel protests. They need to become louder. It seems the only way George Osborne is going to be persuaded to act to reduce the tax and duty on fuel, is to bring the country to a grinding halt.

What do we want? The abolition of VAT on petrol and diesel. The outcome? A reduction in prices and a boost in demand. It could be the one positive thing George Osborne ever does to stimulate growth, but we may have to make him do it.