Sunday, 23 October 2011, 2:28

http://www.island.lk/index.php?page_cat=article-details&page=article-details&code_title=37431

October 22, 2011, 5:55 pm

by Rajan Philips

It is not clear how or why the paths of British Tory Liam Fox’s career and Sri Lankan politics crossed. He is known in Colombo for making peace in 1996, not between the government and the LTTE, but between Chandrika Kumaratunga and Ranil Wickremasinghe. But after the two destroyed one another in political murder-suicide, Fox kept his long arm in Colombo befriending the wily Mahinda Rajapaksa and his cronies. He remained a friend of the Sri Lankan government even when his government in London was turning hostile towards Colombo. By then he had become Minister of Defence in David Cameron’s coalition after decades in opposition when the Labour Party was in power. Last week, Liam Fox, embarrassed by his inability to separate his private male friend from government business, was forced to resign from cabinet.

The sky has not fallen anywhere because of Fox’s resignation, although in Colombo shards from the sky are falling on the government for other reasons of its own making. Fox’s life story in British politics is not worth recounting in this newspaper except for the forays that Fox made into Sri Lankan politics. But again Sri Lanka has seen much better men from the British Isles come and go in times past leaving footprints that have remained past their time. That someone like Liam Fox with grand ambitions but a nondescript profile and mediocre endowments should have made common cause with the three most highest ranking Sri Lankan political leaders in the last twenty years, not to mention the reported business socialization with the Governor of the Central Bank, says something of the rut that Sri Lanka’s political leaders and their cronies have fallen into. Unable to deal with the fundamental problems of our politics, our leaders turn to any snake oil salesman who comes knocking on doors promising miracle solutions.

Ideology and ambition

Liam Fox is a Scottish Catholic commoner who climbed high in the British Conservative Party of English Protestant elites. A qualified Medical Doctor, he left his General Practice to take to politics and let ideology and ambition be the main engines of his ascent. Even after resigning from the Cabinet, he is the most conservative person in the government parliamentary group. Faith-based conservatism is his creed, although, and despite being Catholic, he has identified himself as a progressive on sexual matters. That is to say unlike other hardnosed conservatives Fox is tolerant of homosexuality.

In fact, Dr. Fox has been more than tolerant, especially of his male friend Adam Werritty, who was the best man at Fox’s wedding and nothing has parted them since.While innuendos have tailed them for years, it was their frequent flights together to many countries including Sri Lanka with Fox on official business as Minister of the Crown that hit the Whitehall fans. The flying Fox was forced to crash land. Sex was never mentioned in the accusations, but leftwing commentators have been chided for taking advantage of the obvious implications to embarrass Fox and cause his resignation.

The real effect of Fox’s resignation will be on his longstanding ambition to lead the Conservatives and become Prime Minister. In the 2005 Tory leadership race, Dr. Fox came within striking distance of a second round ballot against David Cameron. At 50, Fox was poised to make another bid for leadership in 2017-2020, Cameron’s intended time of retirement. But his resignation as Defence Minister puts an end to fulfilling his two ambitions.

Liam Fox is a Thatcherite and is known to have had a fractious relationship with Prime Minister Cameron in the government. Cameron’s goal is to give the Tory Party a modernising shake up, while Dr. Fox’s motives were always to keep the Party within the Thatcher mould. He has been a vocal opponent of implementing cuts to the defence budget as part of the government’s controversial austerity measures. On the other hand, he was critical of the government’s positive decision to commit by legislation British governments to spend 0.7% of the GDP on foreign aid, the UN aid target for Western countries. Fox is also an Atlanticist and a fervent supporter of Israel, passionately believing in transatlantic defence cooperation and skeptical of Britain’s place in the European Union. He is closer to the Republicans in America while others in the Tory cabinet fawn over Barak Obama.

But apart from establishing himself as an ideological vortex within the Party, Dr. Fox has not been able to make any significant mark in national politics. Although a Thatcherite, Fox is no Margaret Thatcher, who in the reckoning of some was one of the three most gifted politicians in twentieth century Britain (the other two being the notorious classicist Enoch Powell, and Dennis Healey of Labour). He lacks the gravitas and the substance of fellow Scotsmen who joined the Labour Party, the late Robin Cook and former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. And he has not been able to capture the imagination of the broader society like others of his own generation – Prime Minister David Cameron, Lib-Dem leader and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, or the Miliband brothers of the Labour Party.

In British politics, Dr. Fox could not have climbed any higher, but not for the want of trying. I cannot see any altruistic motive behind his foray into Sri Lankan politics in 1995 when he was still a young and unknown member in John Major’s Conservative government. The only political reason one could think of is that Dr. Fox was trying to build up his profile and Sri Lanka seemed a congenial place to start that journey. Chandrika Kumaratunga and Ranil Wickremasinghe,the two petulant co-habitants of a unique presidential-prime-ministerial system, were convenient guinea pigs for a 34-year old political upstart from Britain.

After Fox, it is Solheim again

After the war, on the other hand, Dr. Liam Fox became one of the rare Westerners that the Rajapaksa government could desperately depend on to counter the mounting allegations over the conduct of the war. The acquaintance continued even though it became increasingly clear that Dr. Fox was not able deliver on anything that the government may have expected of him. Now, the political journey of Liam Fox has ended but the external predicament of the Rajapaksa government is nowhere near its end. And the government is reportedly turning to Erik Solheim, the Norwegian peacemaker whom many in the government previously disparaged, to "counter those trying to haul the Sri Lankan leadership up before an international war crimes tribunal."

However, an External Affairs Ministry missive, reported in the Island last week, quotes Solheim as saying to Sri Lankan ministers that "it would be difficult for Norway to ignore the views of the rest of the international community on Sri Lanka and in order to dilute such pressure, it would be important to engage the TNA in a political dialogue." It should not be surprising that three Sri Lankan Ministers should visit Oslo for enlightenment when there are enough people in Colombo who could have said the same thing even without asking.

Izeth Hussain has emphasized the importance of political dialogue in an Island article (Tuesday, October 11) and quoted from the Indian Foreign Secretary’s statement that at their recent New York meeting, the Indian Prime Minister had reiterated to the Sri Lankan President that "a successful conclusion of negotiations and discussions with the representatives of the Tamil parties would in fact obviate the need for outsiders to start passing judgment or to get involved."

Mr. Hussain believes that "the war crimes allegations and the threatening postures accompanying them are really aimed at making the government move towards a political solution." But the government appears to be willing to do anything other than move towards a political solution. The government would rather seek visiting miracle workers and spend loads of money on fruitless public-relations campaigns than honestly deal with the fundamental problems of our politics. The government is also making matters worse by its ill-advised irritants, the latest of them being the requirement for land registration in war affected areas.

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