Martin Bright

Easter/Pesach is always a good time to be at the Jewish Chronicle with all the combined holidays. This year it is all the more congenial now the Pope has been so kind as to absolve the Jews of blame for the death of Christ. A time for reflection, perhaps, and a reassessment of history. I am still mulling over the peace process simulation I took part in earlier this month, playing the role of Jibril Rajoub, the PLO enforcer. You can read my account the event here. My "Palestinian" delegation was led by Saeb Erekat as played by Jonathan Freedland, who also wrote about his experience. We took away different things from the simulation, but we both agreed that the very structure of the negotiations led personal ego and the desire to "win" to dominate proceedings.

Some political organisations chase the news agenda, others just plough their own furrow driven by the overriding morality of their cause. The work of Gerry Gable and his anti-fascist organisation Searchlight has never been fashionable, but his tireless monitoring and exposure of the extreme-right has acted as an important check on violent racism over four decades. His latest report, “Lone Wolves: Myth or Reality?”, was commissioned by John Denham when he was Communities Secretaries and it is an extraordinarily detailed examination of the history of right-wing extremist violence.

I have always thought “nudge” theory was an absurd excuse for a political ideology: just another way of arguing against state intervention. But Nick Clegg has almost forced me to eat my words with his comments about free internships. The Deputy Prime Minister has probably done more in one speech to improve the conditions of young, unpaid interns than any central government diktat. It is, after all, already illegal not to pay the minimum wage.   This furore has sent a chill through the political and media classes which are both awash with privileged and/or exploited young people who can afford to work for nothing.

So finally the media is waking up to the reality of the government’s new welfare to work scheme. The Single Work Programme (SWP), it turns out, is a top-down contractual model dreamed up in Whitehall and imposed with no consultation with any of the people who will be providing or receiving the services. It is designed to replace the plethora of little-understood New Labour work creation schemes and aims to simplify the process. Payment by results means that the companies who have won the contracts will only be paid once they have proved they can find people sustainable jobs. Patrick Butler’s Cuts Blog in the Guardian has a brilliant dissection of the SWP and asks whether the Big Society is getting its fair share of the work from the new contracts.

Today we will hear our fate. As the head of one of hundreds of organisations waiting to hear whether we receive Arts Council funding, I have to admit these are nervous moments. My small organisation, New Deal of the Mind, was set up two years ago to help young unemployed people find jobs in the arts and the creative industries. We happen to think this is worth a small amount of government funding. My attitude to the Arts Council will hugely depend on whether or not it is enlightened enough to see the worth of what we do. And this, I’m afraid, is the Arts Council’s biggest problem.

On the morning of the March for the Alternative, a friend alerted me to the brilliantly angry Andrew Lansley rap (chorus: “the NHS is not for sale you grey-haired manky tosser”). Admittedly not the most sophisticated political polemic, but as agit-pop goes, pretty effective. Andrew Lansley’s health reforms are fast become a deep embarrassment to the government. The Liberal Democrats hate them. The country is suspicious. Nobody quite understands how David Cameron took his eye so spectacularly off the ball on this one and now he is left with a policy nobody wants. I have always been mystified that the coalition decided to reform and cut at the same time.

David Cameron’s attack on the “enemies of enterprise”, his version of the “forces of conservatism” shows that he and those around him are still following the Blairite script, at least in terms of rhetoric. But the coalition still needs to decide what it means to be a “friend of enterprise”. There are many in the libertarian ranks of the Conservative Party who believe the state has no business interfering in such matters. The architects of the Big Society remain confused about whether it is possible to encourage a bottom-up approach with a top-down message, or, to put it another way, decentralisation by government diktat.

It is nearly two decades since the murder of Ali Abuzeid, a Libyan dissident, who was cut down on the streets of London in the most brutal fashion. Having been identified as one of Colonel Gaddafi’s “stray dogs”, he was tracked down to his west London grocery, where he was living out his time in exile and assassinated. It was a particularly brutal murder: kebab skewers were thrust through Mr Abuzeid’s face.   I first wrote about the case in the Observer with my colleague Antony Barnett when Security Service files were leaked that showed how MI6 had been led a merry dance by a senior Libyan diplomat they had hoped to recruit. The diplomat involved, Khalifa Bazelya, was expelled shortly after the murder.

I was invited to Somerset House on the Strand yesterday as part of the Big Society Network to watch David Cameron take questions for the best part of an hour on his pet subject. My organisation, New Deal of the Mind, has been helping deliver two welfare-to-work contracts since last year and, along with most people in what I have learned to call “the third sector” I am prepared to give this idea the benefit of the doubt. There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly ideological about the Big Society, although Ed Miliband showed in his Independent on Sunday article at the weekend just how convenient a whipping boy this has become for Labour You can’t blame Ed Miliband for his cynicism.

One of the most wonderful of many wonderful aspects of the anti-totalitarian uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt is that they have nailed the myth that Islamism represents the “authentic” voice of the Arab street. This was always a pernicious nonsense and the diversity of those demonstrating across the Maghreb and Egypt has been one of the most noticeable features of the revolt. This must be particularly galling for the Foreign Office, which has spent considerable resources in cultivating the Muslim Brotherhood and other revivalist groups across the Middle East. It is gratifying for those of us who warned against this orthodoxy that Islamist fellow-travellers such as Frances Guy, the UK’S blogging ambassador to Lebanon, have been proved so wrong.

The real question raised by Suzanne Moore’s latest impassioned piece for The Guardian is whether the coalition government likes young people at all, or even gave them a thought when considering their cuts-reform double whammy.   Here’s the rub: “There are no jobs. The most beautifully manicured CV will not get you a minimum-wage job in a pub. Your brilliant degree is meaningless when what employers repeatedly emphasise is 'experience'… Every rite of passage of becoming an adult – a job, an income you can live on, affordable housing, independence from parents – is being taken away.”   This is overstated for effect. It isn’t quite true that there are no jobs, but there are very few.

I find myself asking the question again. Why did the Coalition decide to cut and reform at the same time? In terms of raw electoral politics it cannot be explained. If Cameron and Clegg had come to power promising not to tinker further with the health service and the education system, but simply to manage the cuts they would have had a much easier ride. Welfare reform is a different matter – popular in principle but devilishly difficult when it comes to the detail.