Johann Hari

For most of us, the Palestinian peace conference in London yesterday seemed like tentatively good news - but beware. This gathering of world leaders to discuss Palestinian self-determination after 38 years of Israeli occupation has caused a dip in the Rapture Index - the score that predicts the likelihood of the return of the messiah and the imminence of Armageddon. At www.raptureready.com - one of the most popular Christian sites in the US - the index has dipped to 153, the lowest this century - so this gathering of Mahmoud Abbas, Kofi Annan, Condoleezza Rice and Tony Blair is plainly a disaster.

You see, they are simply putting off the "inevitable" confrontation in the Middle East between the Forces of Good (Israel and the US) and the Forces of Evil (Muslims, the godless Europeans, and the "United Nobodies" of the UN). The prophecies contained in the Book of Revelations can only unfold when the Jews have regained control of the biblical land of Israel and the Middle East finally blows. It's a great script: the good will physically ascend to heaven, the bad will remain on Earth for a hellish 1,000-year war and the messiah will return - but Tony Blair, damn him, is thwarting God's plan.

Okay, so there are a lot of lunatics out there. Why should we worry about these people? There's a simple reason: these rapture-hungry evangelicals are George Bush's core vote, and they have been a brake on progress in Israel/Palestine for the past four years. Nearly half of Bush's voters at the last election - and the most enthusiastic - describe themselves as born-again evangelicals. Of them, no less than 71 per cent believe the world will end in a battle between Jesus and the Anti-Christ in Israel - and a third expect it to happen in their lifetimes.

By trying desperately to nudge the Americans to restart peace talks in Israel/Palestine, Blair is - whether he realises it or not - in a fight for George Bush's soul with these evangelicals. Blair wants payback for Iraq. The evangelicals want payback for their votes. On Israel, Bush can only please one side. If yesterday's conference is going to come to anything - if it is going to be more than another Roadmap to Nowhere - Bush is going to have to turn on his heartland, and hard.

In his first term, Bush refused to, because Daddy Bush lost in 1992 by supposedly being "too tough" on Israel - prompting three million evangelicals to stay at home on election day. So, in practice, Bush Jnr allowed Israel to do whatever it wanted in the Occupied Territories - from house demolitions to not-so-targeted assassinations to building yet more settlements. There were many reasons for this (all bad), but pleasing the Christian Coalition was a key factor. It's not the tiny, and mostly left-wing, Jewish vote or even the real, but exaggerated, Jewish lobby that skews American foreign policy. It's hard, amoral geopolitics mixed with this "Christian Zionism".

I know, I know - it seems impossible that such fantastical beliefs could actually have an impact on the policies of a superpower. I used to think so, too - until two years ago, when I went on the Christian Coalition solidarity tour of Israel. It was me (under cover) and 10 evangelicals, all buckled-up for a holiday in End-Times. I ended up (for my sins) sharing a room with Tracey Ammons - the Christian Coalition's main lobbyist in the Senate. His vision of Middle East peace was simple - and constantly explained at very high volume: "Soon, the Palestinians will be left with nothin', praise be. Give the Arabs the desert. They like to be Bedouins. They can do that and we'll be happy - so long as they behave." (At every biblical site we visited, Tracey would ring his wife. "Honey, I'm in Golgotha!", he would yell into his mobile. "If I see Jesus, I'll say hi from ya!" This reached its apogee when we visited the Wailing Wall. "Say honey, do you want to talk to God?", he said, before holding the phone to the Wall for 10 minutes).

Tracey is on first-name terms with every Republican senator. "They are men of God," he explained. "We pray together all the time. They all agree with me in private that Israel shouldn't have to negotiate. This is God's land, and he gave it to the Jews," he said. We stood at Meggido - the site of Armageddon in the Book of Revelations - and he muttered hungrily: "Soon. Soon."

But now Bush is safely back in the White House, will he make the calculation that he can finally ditch the Christian Coalition - or is he a true believer? Tony Blair points optimistically to the fact Bush supports the withdrawal from Gaza - but Gaza is not part of the biblical land of Israel, and the evangelicals don't care much about it. Blair also points to the fact Bush has come out for a two-state solution, which will have to include some of the biblical West Bank. But will Bush anger the evangelicals, or will he let the two-state vision thrash about painfully and die, as he did with the road map? If this week's London conference is going to mean anything, Bush is going to have to play holy hardball with his closest friends - something almost without precedent in his career.

So even though the peace process was nudged a few inches forward yesterday, it is still vulnerable to sabotage from the ugly triplets of Islamic, Jewish and Christian fundamentalism. I've met exemplars of all three. Whenever there's a suicide bomber, I rush to Israeli news websites to check if the killer was one of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad members I met in Gaza, those sad, absurd young men who bragged about how they longed to "die in the name of Allah". Whenever I see the Jewish fundamentalist settlers thrusting their banners into the air and damning Sharon - Sharon! - as "Hitler's little helper" for ordering the derisory dismantling of a few illegal settlements, I check to see if they are the bilious racists who told me I didn't understand the "Arab mind". Whenever I hear Bush pandering to his evangelical base, I think of Tracey and his hunger for a Holy Land cleansed of Palestinians. And every time I think of them, it strikes me how very similar they all are, locked together in their shared madness.

It's true this peace process is deeply imperfect. It demands that the Palestinians pre-emptively disarm - while they are under violent, grinding, daily occupation - in return for a vague pledge that further down the line Ariel Sharon and George Bush will show good faith and help establish a Palestinian state. I wouldn't bet a punnet of strawberries on the good faith of Sharon and Bush, never mind the future of the Palestinian people.

Worse, Sharon has made it clear that he will not withdraw to the 1967 borders - which means he is effectively demanding the permanent theft of Palestinian land. It's hard to see how this can lead to an acceptable two-state solution. But - as Tony Blair always says in the context of Northern Ireland - "a bad peace process is better than no peace process at all". Even with its crippling flaws, this is a process worth defending from the three fundamentalisms - because without it, the Middle East will certainly be locked in an endless war.

And here's a tip for how to figure out how well the peace process is going. Keep an eye on the Rapture Index - if it's low, you know the Palestinians might just stand a chance.

POSTSCRIPT: Let's try a new rule for the comments section to make it a bit more readable. Nobody can post more than one message in a row; once you've posted one comment, you have to wait for somebody to reply before you can say anything more, okay? Hurrah.

Oh, and the full account of my trip with the Christian Coalition is at http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=28

Please read that before you comment on 'Christian Zionism', because it is a more indepth analysis of that phenomenon.

Weather of Mass Destruction is here, and it is on the rise. Every week, at least one major scientific study hurls yet more evidence at us. In the past seven days, researchers with the British Antarctic Survey have found that the huge ice sheet in the western Antarctic appears to be already collapsing. Scientists from George Bush's Department of Energy - those tree-hugging hippies - found a "stunning correlation" between the rise in ocean temperatures over the past 40 years and atmospheric pollution. And the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research conducted one of the biggest computer simulations of climate change - using all this new data - and concluded: "The danger zone is not something we are going to reach in the middle of this century. We are in it now."

That's just one week in the chilling (or warming) world of climatology. It might seem a long way from these catastrophic predictions to a marsh in Kent - but there is an intimate link. Over the past year, there has been a bitter debate about whether to build a wind farm in Romney Marsh, a large, lush, nature reserve which is home to thousands of birds. The wind turbines wouldn't destroy the marsh, but they would kill some birds and - according to local protesters - destroy the aesthetics of the landscape. Is that a price worth paying to provide 80 per cent of the area's population - 55,000 homes - with totally clean electricity? This debate is about to reach its climax. Last week, the public inquiry in Romney closed, and Patricia Hewitt, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, is expected to make a decision by the end of the year.

The debate in Kent - like the debate that is accompanying the building of wind turbines across the developed world, from Cape Cod to Berlin - has thrown up two interesting divisions. The first is the most obvious. It's between people who see that climate change is a real and massive problem and are prepared to make sacrifices to deal with it, and people who don't.

Here in Britain, it's a simple and refreshing Labour vs Tory split. The current British government has a mixed record on climate change, and recently it disgracefully blocked an ambitious EU proposal for a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 60-80 per cent by 2050. But Tony Blair deserves credit for ploughing huge sums of money into wind power. The Government is on course to ensure that 10 per cent of our energy needs come from clean wind power by the end of this decade, and 20 per cent by 2020. It's nowhere enough, given the scale of the global crisis; but it's a start.

Yet - as with all worthwhile political acts - there's a cost. It means that the countryside needs to be crammed full of wind turbines and, yes, they can be noisy and ugly. Here's where the division in British politics kicks in. The Conservative Party has come out aggressively against wind power. Michael Howard has given a "not round 'ere" speech in Romney, and the Conservatives have made it clear they will give up nothing - not even a pretty view - to deal with climate change. They are supposedly committed to the Kyoto targets, but proposals to achieve them without a significant transition to wind power and other renewables are pretty unconvincing.

Even if the Tories prefer nuclear power as a way of cutting carbon emissions (wrongly, in my view), it would take 15 years for new stations to become operative. We would still urgently need wind power in the meantime, or we would crash out of Kyoto. (You can make the transition to wind power in your own home by going to www.ukgreenpower.co.uk. It only takes five minutes and it might even save you money on your current energy bill.)

The Tory-Labour division on this issue is important but pretty predictable. But there is a more interesting and genuinely surprising division thrown up by the Romney debate, and by the hundreds of Romneys across the world. It's among environmentalists themselves. In Kent, there are greens on both sides of the debate. English Nature and David Bellamy have campaigned against the turbine, stressing the certain damage to local wildlife and the area's natural beauty. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have strongly backed the project. Greenpeace's executive director, Stephen Tindale, explains: "The people of Bangladesh could have their lives and nation wrecked by climate change. It would be immoral to tell them we couldn't do much because we didn't want to spoil the view."

This points to a tension within environmentalism that has always been there and is only now - as European governments at last realise the greens' warnings were often correct - coming to the fore. There has long been a romantic strain to environmental thought that can be traced back to Wordsworth, Blake and the first generation of humans to witness the contrast between large, sprawling industrial cities and the countryside. They tend to believe that gaining a connection to the rhythms of the land or just directly experiencing a meadow or a rainbow offers spiritual truths not available in a "soulless" urban life. As a result, their main impulse is to conserve wilderness from destruction by humans.

It's not hard to understand why - from this perspective - tampering with a natural and beautiful ecosystem, even for environmentalist reasons, seems like a bad thing. Isn't the whole point of environmentalism to save natural sites and stem human arrogance? Their every reflex is to prevent yet further human interference in areas like Romney Marsh; they find talk of "managing the global environment" hubristic and obnoxious.

But there is another shade of green: a pragmatic, utilitarian environmentalism that believes the problem of climate change is now so vast - and so urgent - that we cannot limit our actions to preserving existing chunks of nature. We now have no choice but to become proactive. We need to start acting to alter the balance of nature - as carbon emissions have already been doing for decades anyhow - by developing new forms of clean energy and creating carbon sinks. This means that sometimes there will be tough decisions.

I'm a pragmatic environmentalist. I don't think climate change reveals underlying spiritual emptiness or a shameful disconnection between modern man and nature. I just think it reveals that there's far too much carbon in the atmosphere, and if we don't deal with it, lots of people - and potentially the human species - will die. We don't need a new religion. We need an urgent, global political programme to reduce carbon emissions, along with stopping other acts of environmental vandalism like desertification and the destruction of rainforests. Not because they are magical places - give me Piccadilly Circus at rush-hour any time - but because without them, we can't survive. Sometimes, places like Romney and its birds will pay a price for that survival. But if we don't bring climate change under control, those birds and that marsh are going to face terrible problems anyway.

So the war of Romney Marsh is not just between Labour and Tory, or between Nimbys and people with a sense of global responsibility. It is - in its own small way - a barometer of the future direction of the environmentalist movement.

And here's a prediction: over the next seven days, there will be more evidence that if we don't kick our carbon habit, future generations will be living smack bang in the middle of a global Ground Zero. And the week after, the news will continue. And the week after that. This is no time to get romantic about a marsh; we have a planet to save.

johann@johannhari.com

Don't be lulled into complacency by the bogus campaign over the past week to present Ken Livingstone as an anti-Semite. We are in the middle of a global resurgence of Jew-hating - and no foolish newspaper witch-hunt should make us doubt it.

Figures released this month show that anti-Jewish attacks in Britain rose by 40 per cent last year, with teenagers beaten for wearing yarkmulkas, and swastikas carved into the side of synagogues. Some 24 per cent of British people, in a recent poll, agreed with statements like "Jews only care about their own kind" and "Jews have too much power in this country" - up from 18 per cent in 2002.

This is happening in almost every country for which we have data. Even anti-Semitic ideas that have long been lying dormant are reawakening across the world - from Mel Gibson's blockbuster depiction of hook-nosed Jews slaughtering Jesus Christ to a prime-time adaptation of the old, insane Protocols of the Elders of Zion on Egyptian TV.

There is no other form of racism that would make decent progressive people equivocate. But how many of us hesitate before we call this hatred by its proper name? How many of us wonder - just for a moment - if perhaps this wave of hate is a legitimate response to the crimes committed by Ariel Sharon in the Occupied Territories? But wait. Does anybody think the global wave of hostility towards Muslims was a legitimate response to Bin Laden's crimes?

Yes, I know what many people think when they hear the word "anti-Semitism": that the writer is trying to silence criticism of Israel. It is true that some hucksters and intellectual crooks abuse the term in this way. But regular readers will know that I regard Sharon as a war criminal, and I have reported from the Occupied Territories on the slow-motion suffering of the Palestinians. I have even - ridiculously - been accused of anti-Semitism myself. But the fact that a few people cry wolf for disreputable reasons is not a sign that the wolves don't exist. Twenty-first century anti-Semitism is real and epidemic, and there is a danger that the row about Ken - who has been falsely accused of anti-Semitism by right-wing trouble-makers - will encourage the people who want to dismiss the entire surging hatred as a myth.

Why is this happening, and should we be worried? A few months ago I was talking to an old woman who survived Auschwitz. She said: "Growing up in Weimar Berlin, I used to laugh when I heard my grandparents ranting about anti-Semitism. I told them they were paranoid. Well, I wasn't laughing in the cattle trucks. I obviously don't think Britain is about to turn Nazi. But in Jewish terms, sixty years is nothing. Nothing. Sure, we're on top today - but how many times in history have the Jews been on top and thought we were safe, only to see it disappear in the blink of a gentile eye?" I must have looked sceptical because she quickly added: "Sure, we have the support of most Americans today. But power passes. The Pharoah looked very powerful once upon a time. American power will ebb away, and then what will my grandchildren be left with? At this rate, it will be a world that hates us more than ever."

And, yes, the debate about Israel is being infected with anti-Semitism. I passionately support the creation of a Palestinian state - and a real Palestinian state, not the string of Bantustans offered to Yasser Arafat in the summer of 2000. But why the constant rhetorical inflation of Israel's crimes to put them on a par with Nazi Germany? A recent poll found that 51 per cent of Germans believe "there is not much difference between what Israel is doing to the Palestinians and what the Nazis did to the Jews". In truth, more people died in one afternoon in Bergen-Belsen than have been killed in twenty years of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. That doesn't make the murder of single Palestinian justifiable - but it does make me question the motives of those who would draw the comparison. Is it suppressed guilt? Is the old Jewish saying - the gentiles will never forgive us for what we revealed about them in Auschwitz - true?

Israel is committing real and terrible crimes in the Occupied Territories - but it does seem that human rights abuses committed by Jews provoke far more rage across the world than human rights abuses committed by any other group. Over the past 15 years, Russia has slaughtered at least 300,000 people in Chechnya - 40,000 of them children. This is more than ten times the number of Muslims who have (unforgivably) been killed by Israel. Western governments mostly supported and excused the killing in Chechnya, and Russia is - like Israel - a semi-democracy. So where's the comparable outrage? Does anybody constantly demand that Russians condemn Vladimir Putin before they have a right to be protected from racism?

I am angry about both Chechnya and Palestine - but why do so many people get furious about one and ignore the other? Some of my friends in pro-Palestinian campaigns say it's because our government is intermeshed with Israel when it comes to diplomacy, geopolitics and arms sales, so we have more responsibility for what happens there - but is that enough to explain the disparity? Aren't those things also true of Russia?

Others say it is because Zionism is inherently racist, because it is based on the idea of a Jewish state that, by definition, Arab-Israeli citizens cannot identify with. I worry about this too, and I would like to see Israel gradually become post-Zionist, in line with proposals by the Israeli historian, Tom Segev. He has argued that Israel must adopt a more flexible and open self-identity based on the Hebrew language rather than Jewish ethnicity, and end the legal restrictions against Arab citizens. But the racism faced by Arab-Israelis - bad though it is - is a tiny fraction of that faced by the black population of Darfur who are being slaughtered in their thousands as you read this with the help of Western corporations, who we could stop if we wanted to. Why is Darfur attracting only a fraction of the attention?

In case you still doubt the rise of anti-Semitism, let me offer you a small anecdote that opened even my flabby eyelids. At a recent debate about Iraq, one person in the audience came up to me afterwards and said: "Your skullcap is slipping, Mr Hari." Now, as it happens, I'm not Jewish (although a few of my relatives are). I asked him is he realised he was an anti-Semite, and he replied indignantly: "Criticising Israel isn't anti-Semitic!" I replied: "I agree. I criticise Israel all the time. But how are you criticising Israel by talking about my non-existent skullcap? You didn't mention Israel once, and nor did the debate." He scowled:. "You Jews are so paranoid!" he declared, before storming off. Jews across Britain are experiencing moments like all the time now.

So here's the challenge for those of us who support Palestinian self-determination but want a clean and honourable argument. Whenever we discuss the crimes committed by Israel - and we must never stop until the Palestinians are free - we must also debunk anti-Jewish myths. How many people know - for example - that, according to every opinion poll, American Jews are more supportive of creating a Palestinian state than any other ethnic group except African-Americans? So much for the all-powerful "Jewish vote" - but how often do you hear this canard trotted out as fact?

We also need to take care to accurately reflect the complexities of the origins of the Israel-Palestine conflict. There has been a worrying rhetorical shift over the past few years from criticising the current policies of Israel – a moral necessity – to describing Israel itself an inherently evil, a project conceived in sin and perpetuated in sin. The word “Zionist” is now used as a term of crude abuse; I have been repeatedly accused of “putting forward Zionist propaganda” about Saddam Hussein, although what Israel has to do with an accurate reporting of Saddam Hussein’s crimes is beyond me.

So let’s get this straight: Zionism was created by a desperate people – many of them still emaciated from the camps – fleeing genocide. It was not, of course, morally simple. The cruel reality is that there was not – as many diaspora Jews had dreamed – "a land without people for a people without land". There was only historical Palestine, which had many Arab inhabitants who loved their land and their homes. 700,000 of these totally innocent people were ethnically cleansed to create the new state, as Israel’s new historians like Benny Morris and Tom Segev have shown.

This was a bitter tragedy, and an injustice against the Palestinians that should have been put right by Israel in 1967 with the creation of a heavily-compensated Palestinian state on all of Gaza and the West Bank. Every day of occupation since then has been unforgiveable. But I fear that only somebody with a prejudice against Jews would act as though – in the circumstances of 1948, fleeing the most psychopathically murderous anti-Semitism – they were acting in a purely evil way, even though the impact on the Palestinians was horrible and undeserved. We need to constantly remember that the Jews are not in the Middle East out of malice or as part of a “colonial project”, but because they were driven there; too often, in our desire to rightly criticise contemporary Israeli crimes, we forget this, and we forget to show that there have always been consistent Israeli advocates of Palestinian self-determination free to operate and campaign within Israeli society.

The great leftist historian Isaac Deutscher described the Israel-Palestine situation with an analogy. He said a Jewish man had jumped from a burning building, and he landed on an Arab man, breaking his arms and legs. The natural response of the Arab is to blame the Jew – but in truth he should blame the arsonist and try, slowly, to physically recover alongside the Jew.

The Palestinians themselves can hardly be blamed for failing to see the situation this way. Is there anybody in the world who would happily surrender half their land to a dispossessed and stateless group? In this country, we begrudge even giving the most paltry benefits and a few run-down council houses to asylum seekers. Imagine how we would react if the Kurds claimed Cornwall for a free Kurdistan, or the Roma violently seized Devon, ethnically cleansed the inhabitants and tried to establish a state there.

But – although it is understandable for the Palestinians to respond with rage and incomprehension – what excuse do the rest of us have? Is it really just that we are angry on behalf of the Palestinians? I would like to think so – but why the myopia about other victim groups? I fear that our reaction to Jewish crimes shows a latent anti-Semitism, because it is so disproportionate to our response to other, even larger horrors. Yes, be angry about Israel - very angry - but in the context of objecting to all human rights abuses. To single out Israel for unique condemnation - rather than the simple, shared condemnation it deserves - is a worrying sign that Israel has inherited the pariah status once applied simply to the Jews as a people.

The problem with anti-Semitism isn't with Ken Livingstone, folks. It is all around us.

You can watch my appearance on Question Time (if you are especially masochistic) at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/question_time/default.stm

Haven't we heard this tune before? In the blue corner, Ken is accused of evil crimes by the right-wing press. In the red corner, Ken says it's all a gross distortion and won't back down. The crowd takes its position on the Mayor's cheeky chappie persona - and the facts are quickly forgotten.

Well, just for a moment, let's block out the nasal voice and the long-buried moustache, and look instead at the truth about Ken. The current row about Ken's supposed anti-Semitism is a case study of how his arguments have been distorted throughout his career.

If you depended on the reports in the Evening Standard or the rest of the right-wing press, you would think Ken had randomly, viciously singled out a Jew and deliberately accused him of being a Nazi. Here's what happened in the real world. In the middle of the night, Ken was approached by a reporter from a newspaper that has been running a vicious and highly personal hate campaign against him. My guess is that the reporter was there for one purpose and one purpose only: to stitch Ken up. The Mayor snapped at the reporter, asking him why he worked for a company that has a history of supporting fascists and remains stridently right-wing today.

This was a bit of a cheap shot, but it's perfectly true. The first Viscount Rothermere - whose family still owns the company that publishes the Evening Standard and Daily Mail - took a pro-Nazi line throughout the 1930s, writing articles like "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" and writing fawning accounts of their meetings with Adolf Hitler. His newspapers attacked the Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany for bringing "crime and disease" in remarkably similar terms to those used in the same papers today.

I don't know how lucid Ken's critics are when they leave a party at midnight after a few drinks, but Ken is clearly like most of the population: a bit all over the place. He didn't make his argument very well, and ended up comparing the reporter to a concentration camp guard. Crude? Yes. Anti-Semitic? Don't be silly.

But these basic facts - which are not in dispute - have not prevented the right-wing press whipping up a fake row. Never mind that last year, anti-Semitic attacks in Britain rose by 40 per cent, or that the most grotesque defamations about Jews are creeping back into our public debate. Nope; the real problem with anti-Semitism comes from the Mayor of London - a man with a long history of opposing all racism, all the time.

Distortions like this have plagued Ken Livingstone throughout his career - and in the long term, it's usually Ken and not his critics who is vindicated. Look at gay rights. At the height of a hysterical homophobic campaign about the "promotion" of homosexuality to children - led by the Murdoch press and their playthings in the Conservative Party - Ken dared to stand in defence of London's gay community. He funded and tirelessly defended "loony left" policies like helplines for gay teenagers and the distribution of leaflets aimed at children with lesbian mothers - and in return, he was dubbed "the most odious man in Britain" by The Sun. And now? Even Michael Howard and The Sun clamour to support gay marriage. When it comes to gay rights, we are all Livingstoneites now.

And in another, even more controversial area, Ken has turned out to be more right than wrong. As head of the Greater London Council, Livingstone invited Gerry Adams - the head of Sinn Fein-IRA - to this city. Northern Ireland was on fire, and the smoke was getting into the eyes of every British citizen. The British government was arming a sectarian war, and within a few years it would - we now know - back paramilitary death squads. Retaliatory IRA bombs were exploding across Britain, often - appallingly - against civilian targets.

At the time, the Northern Ireland issue was widely presented as a question of "terrorism"; Margaret Thatcher declared that the IRA were "simply criminals, nothing more" and said: "Belfast is as much part of Britain as my constituency." Ken, by contrast, understood that we were not in the middle of a crime spree but a war, and it could only be brought to an end by a negotiated peace. At the time, this argument - never mind negotiating with Gerry Adams - was depicted as an act of raw evil.

And now? Adams has been greeted and embraced by a British prime ministers. These days, only eccentrics deny that Sinn Fein - the elected representatives of a majority of Northern Ireland's Catholics - have to be at the dead-centre of peace in Northern Ireland.

And there's more. Ken saw the importance of well-funded public transport, at a time when Margaret Thatcher was saying that "anybody who still travels by bus at the age of 30 is a failure". Ken understood the importance of environmentalism long before it entered the political mainstream, and he is currently pushing through plans for London to become far more dependent on renewable energy sources. (But who cares about such trivia when there's a juicy, stupid row to be had?)

Is he perfect? Of course not. His influence on national Labour politics has often been appalling. He was far too close to the anti-democratic madmen of Militant tendency, and he made a terrible misjudgement when he opposed Neil Kinnock's party reforms and later - bizarrely - attacked Gordon Brown as a "right-wing influence dragging down Tony Blair". Recently, he brought the far-right Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi to London, played down his extremism and slandered critics of Qaradawi as "Islamophobic".

But Ken's willingness to veer wildly off the political script in strange directions can also be an asset: he is, for example, the only senior British politician today calling for "a United States of Europe" and vehemently defending refugees.

Perhaps that is his greatest strength of all: Ken is resolutely, violently un- boring. In an age of Geoff Hoons and Michael Ancrams - pure electoral Valium - Ken keeps us awake. You can order me a triple espresso of Livingstone any time.

Oh, how we smirk. When we look at the McWorld of American politics - where both major parties are financed, fuelled and fine-tuned by corporations and the mega rich - we feel a warm, smug glow. Senator Barak Obama recently noted: "I belong to the smallest caucus in American politics. The non-millionaires." The rest, he said, have been feeding at the corporate teat for a very long time. Bette Midler even dubbed America "the Land of the Fee". Is there a single Brit - from left to right - who does feel a vague sense of superiority when they hear this tune?

Lose the smile. We're moving in the same direction, and faster than most people have realised. In Britain, the wall between our public and private spheres is rapidly changing into a revolving door. Look, for example, at Alan Milburn. He is in charge of Labour's general election manifesto and he is among the most influential men in British public life. But his recent career is also an example of the blurring between public and private interests.

This weekend it was revealed that, as soon as he quit as Health Secretary in 2003, Milburn walked into the arms of a string of private firms, including companies who directly profited from Labour's health policies. His total corporate takings in the year he was out of office totted up to £85,000 and a luxury holiday in the south of France - in addition to his parliamentary salary. Milburn was even paid £25,000 by the parent company of Alliance Medical, which received a £100m contract from the NHS to provide mobile MRI scanners.

It is becoming increasingly common for public servants to leap into the hands of private interests, and back again in this way. Between 1996 and 2004 there were strict rules - imposed in the wake of Tory sleaze scandals - that made it possible for independent watchdogs to stop this from happening. Tony Blair wants to put the watchdogs to sleep. He personally over-ruled them to ensure that Air Chief Marshall Sir John Day - a top RAF officer - could go to work for BAE Systems, the arms dealers. Blair even considers the current rules - which permitted Milburn's Whitehall-to-boardroom hopping - to be too strict and has ordered a review.

The result is clear. Even when they are working for the Government, many public servants must now have half an eye on their potential private employers. This is not good for us, the public, who look to government in part to protect us from overweaning corporations. Won't it now be harder for Milburn to criticise the corporate agenda of health companies?

And funnelling money directly to senior politicians isn't the only way that corporations can try to skew the public sphere in their own interests. Half of the Labour Party's funds and a clear majority of the Tory Party's bank balance comes from corporations and the ultra rich. We were given a rare public hint of their massive influence when Iain Duncan Smith was toppled as Tory leader two years ago. It was not his MPs or his grassroots party that began the movement to depose him - it was a handful of the Conservative Party's biggest donors.

Some people argue that these fantastically rich people are pouring money into our political system out of "a desire to put something back". Well, it's possible. But the altruism of billionaires and corporations seems like a pretty thin thread on which to hang our public life, especially when you bear in mind their reluctance to perform much more basic public duties - such as paying tax.

Yes, you might reply, but why should we care? So a few rich people try to rig the system - what's new? Let's look at just one of the many areas where all this cash is harming British people right now. If I were to tell you about an easily implemented policy that directly benefits 7.4 million voters and is supported by 82 per cent of the electorate, you would assume that our politicians would battle to implement it. If I then told you that most of the beneficiaries are those hard-to-attract female voters, many in Middle England seats, you would assume that Blair and Howard would seize this territory.

But in the middle of a general election campaign, I bet you haven't heard a word about extending basic workplace rights to part-time workers. A Trades Union Congress report released yesterday tried to shove the issue into the election debate. It showed that part-time workers were often paid artificially low wages and "trapped in low-paid jobs with poor prospects". The TUC argued that giving these workers greater rights would help the British economy in the long term by ensuring we had a better-trained, more motivated workforce.

So why - given the potentially massive electoral benefits - have none of the major political parties come out for this? Simple. Part-time workers don't earn much. They don't have swish lobbyists and massive advertising budgets, only the funds put up by weakened trade unions. They can't pay thinktanks to produce "research" that "proves" their case, or wine and dine journalists to make their case. The business lobby - which on this issue, remember, speaks for a paltry 14 per cent of the British people - can afford all this and more. They can produce reams of "evidence" showing that business will have to flee Britain if "prohibitively expensive" workplace rights were extended to part-time workers.

It's all a myth. Most part-time workers are in cleaning, education and catering. You can't send your office to the Philippines to be cleaned, or contract out hospital canteens to Indonesia. The truth is that the business lobby doesn't want to pay for greater training or more flexible hours because it will hurt their short-term profits. So - on this issue as on many others - they use their concentrated wealth to compensate for their lack of public support.

That's the reality of British politics in 2005: a tiny group of the rich with the support of fewer than one in 10 people can, in practice, veto a very popular policy that would benefit some of the poorest people in Britain.

The risk all this money poses is not so much direct corruption, where politicians bung contracts to specific corporations. It's a more subtle problem: that the corporate agenda becomes taken for granted by all politicians because it is the source of their donations and much of their income. In this situation, social democratic policies - such as extending workers' rights or increasing the minimum wage - become almost impossible, as they have in the US.

If we want to turn back from this steady Americanisation, the only solution is to build a Chinese Wall between the public and private spheres. It's not hard. Introduce full state funding for political parties, and ban private political donations. Ensure there's a buzzing public sphere - paid for out of general taxation. Introduce strict rules stipulating if you want to be a minister or a civil servant, you should be forbidden from taking a private job in the same sector - ever.

Sadly, Tony Blair is taking us in precisely the opposite direction - so prepare yourselves for a slow, steady slide into McGovernment, folks.

POSTSCRIPT: I didn't have space to mention it in this piece, but I wanted to point out that Big Money makes the political weather in other ways. Let's look quickly at an area where its influence has recently been exposed: think tanks. In an extraordinary piece of whistle-blowing, a senior figure revealed this month that many of Britain’s most prestigious think tanks – which are supposed to propose ideas for public policy – are in effect auctioning themselves off to any wealthy bidder that comes along. Rob Blackhurst, former Editorial Director of the Foreign Policy Centre, revealed that his own organisation had agreed to conduct research into Russian democracy after receiving £100,000 from a Russian oligarch. Demos – another supposedly Blairite think tank – published ‘research’ into "the future of Telecoms regulation" recommending the breaking up of BT – paid for by Cable and Wireless. "Think tanks have turned themselves into unofficial lobbyists," Blackhurst notes. "Corporate cash has totally skewed their agendas."