INDEX	February 13, 2024
Machiavellian goings on in Rochdale
SOURCES	Labour's decision to disown its candidate in the Rochdale by-election (See BBC report.) is a typically Machiavellian manouvre. Are you there Peter Mandelson? It was always fairly likely that George Galloway would win the contest and as all serious players know the best way to avoid a defeat is not to compete. This way Labour gets it both ways. If Galloway wins they can say 'ah but we didn't have a candidate'. If Azhar Ali wins (increasingly likely now that he has shed his poisonous Labour Party label) then the party can say 'we all know Ali was the Labour candidate really'. It looks like an unbeatable strategy. But the trouble with Machiavellianism (as Mandelson should have found out by now) is that such trickery works better in the shorter than the longer term. If you are just chasing tomorrow's headlines quick fixes like this seem to be sauve and sophisticated. But the risk is that you antagonise the large UK community identifying as Islamic (about 3m people) without pleasing anyone much. Of course, there is a Jewish community too but many (most?) are not Zionist. The Hassidim, a very large Jewish community, believe that if God had wanted a Jewish homeland God would have created one. And Jews when they are not massacring the innocents (see Herod) tend to be nice people. Many are appalled by what's happening to the Palestinians in Gaza. So it looks like a no win rather than a no lose strategy. But that's often the way it is with Machiavellianism. Machiavelli himself did not believe in all this trickery. He said the best strategy was to be liked but Starmer gave up on that ages ago.
BBC February 11, 2024 Labour candidate Azhar Ali apologises for Israel comments
My blog February 11, 2024 Israel should have known in advance...
INDEX Jonathan Brind	February 13, 2024