EIBF: Mark Urban on urban warfare, and the Red Tory who's Blond

This is a horrible cliché, but with only a few days left the Book Festival is entering its final chapter. The quality is in no way dipping, and Thursday served up two more fascinating events.

Iraq is always a topic likely to elicit strong opinions, but Newsnight editor Mark Urban was able to negotiate us through his take on the subject without causing too much friction.

His thesis is a controversial one. In his view, the “surge” of Western forces in 2006 and 2007 was highly effective, and his book’s subject matter was responsible for much of it. The Special Forces units he studied were able to overturn decades of conventional thinking on counter-insurgency by making a genuine and lasting impact on violence in post-invasion Iraq. As they kicked in insurgents’ doors and battled sectarian militias, they were able to convince Sunni leaders to back the government and stave off the threat of civil war.

The book , Task Force Black, is more focussed on the soldiers’ experiences of operations. Dangerous midnight raids and bloody firefights are described in unsparing detail. Throughout their time in Iraq, which ran from the invasion in 2003 to May 2009, Urban claims the SAS contingent of the Task Force arrested or killed over 3,500 insurgents. The audience was startled to hear that this huge body count was achieved by a 150 man unit with only a few dozen soldiers.

Task Force Black was very nearly consigned to the publisher’s dustbin, after the government launched a legal challenge. Urban said this was more of a “war of attrition” than a concerted attempt to block publication, and spoke of 12-hour-long meetings where MoD lawyers went through the book line-by-line. The book itself enraged some of the Army’s top brass, but apparently went down well with the soldiers on the ground.

Next, Phillip Blond and Dan Hind, another installation of the New World Order series.

You’d be hard pressed to find a more impassioned political speaker than Blond. As he pontificates on mutualism and public ownership he’s got all the fury of a man railing against the establishment. But his political philosophy will leave many scratching their heads.

“Red Toryism” might seem to be a contradiction in terms. Blond says that he’s done more than create a catchy phrase, but an ideology which combines the best of the left and the right. He claims that both Labour and Conservatives administrations over the last few decades have produced a society where individuals feel less empowered than ever. Labour have destroyed working class traditions through their welfare programmes, whilst the Tories’ “statist” approach to the free market has left us indebted and disenfranchised. At the heart of all this is a critique of liberalism, or more accurately the “extreme individualism” which means we are less connected to each other.

Added in to this ideological milieu is Blond’s religion. A former theologian, he believes that Britain’s secularism isn’t helping much of society’s ills. He evoked some murmurings of disquiet from the audience when suggesting that secular conceptions of public service are unsustainable.

Dan Hind has an altogether different style. Quiet and reserved, he doesn’t have the hectoring approach that Blond does. However the two share much in common in terms of their politics.

Blond is enthusiastic about Hind’s proposal for a publicly commissioned team of investigative journalists to hold government to account. This would involve around 250 journalists, funded by the taxpayer, who would look into subjects selected by the public. This would, they argue, get around the biases of the commercial media and lead to a better informed public. His book, The Return of the Public, fleshes out much of the thinking behind this.

The two disagreed over Blond’s suggestion to mutualise the public sector (Hind sees it as a byword for privatisation) but most of the time their ideas seemed to be in harmony. The two manifestos will doubtless attract many supporters in the new coalition government, but will also be met by many who will point out their contradictions and flaws.