Johann Hari

So the jihadists who pine for 7/7 24/7 are back, trying to make a Brown week into a black one. It is only luck that their incompetence turned their attempts at mass murder in London and Glasgow into a scene from Carry on Up the Jihad, where one of their car bombs was towed away and their merry tossing of Molotov cocktails succeeded only in incinerating themselves.

But as we sit anxiously on the highest security alert, the old question is back. Why? Why would young British men (and they will probably turn out to be British) want to randomly murder as many of their fellow citizens as possible in nightclubs and airports? The French intellectual Regis Debray once called car-bombs "manifestos written in the blood of others." What does this manifesto say?

I have interviewed jihadis and wannabe-suicide-murderers from London to Gaza, from Abu Hamza's hooks to the teenagers he inspired. Their motives are a black gloop of contradictions, but let's look at the two over-arching - and conflicting - explanations that have been most frequently served up for home-grown jihad, because both contain some truths.

We can call the first the Blowback Thesis. In the early 1950s, the CIA invented this term to describe the unintended consequences that would hit the United States for interfering in other countries. Its application here is obvious: turn Iraq into a killing field, and some Muslims back in Britain will be so enraged that they will - to use the old phrase coined by violent anti-Vietnam protestors - "bring the war home".

The exponents of this view have some impressive evidence on their side. In the videos they left behind, the 7/7 bombers named the British government's invasion of Iraq and support for Israel as their primary motives. Britain's own Joint Intelligence Committee had warned before the war that "the threat [from al Quaeda] would he heightened by military action against Iraq".

But the blowback thesis also contains holes. It can make the jihadis sound far more humanitarian than they actually are. One expert declared this weekend on the BBC World Service that these bombers are "outraged by the killing of civilians in Afghanistan" - but actually, these Islamists vehemently support the killing of Afghan civilians, as long as it's done by Jihadis Like Us. When the Taliban were butchering civilians in Afghanistan for the "crimes" of adultery, homosexuality or simply being female and showing your face in public, they held them up as a model for the world. Abu Hamza told me it was "the perfect society".

A bigger problem still with this thesis is that jihadist bombs have been recently planted on trains in Germany (thankfully defused). In Canada a plot was just rumbled to behead the Prime Minister. Both countries vehently opposed the war in Iraq and offer vast sums in aid to the Palestinians.

So blowback is a necessary but not sufficient explanation for these bombings. What fills the holes in this case? We can call the second explanation the Totalitarianism Thesis. This argues that jihadism is not simply a mirror-image of what our governments do to Muslims: it has its own vision of a renewed Islamic Caliphate under sharia law that it wishes to impose on the Middle East and eventually the world. In the absence of achieving this impossible goal, jihadis will voraciously seek out grievances based on the failure of the world around them to conform to their Puritanical desert morality.

Is this true? A few hours before the first carbomb was discovered, a contributor to the chatroom on the Islamist al Hesbah website wrote: "Today I say: Rejoice, by Allah, London shall be bombed." He gave his reasons for the murder plot he was clearly involved in: the Iraq war, and - just as important - the honouring of perhaps our greatest novelist, Salman Rushdie. The choice of target - a club on Ladie's Night - is also revealing. When a similar gang plotted to blow up the Ministry of Sound in 2004, they talked about their desire to burn alive the "slags dancing around."

This is a reminder the bombers are not only reacting against the worst in our system of government: the torture and the use of chemical weapons in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, support for Arab dictators. They oppose the best in our system of government too: the intellectual freedom to write novels that question religion, the sexual freedom of women to pick their own partners. When I receive my own tedious drizzle of jihadi death-threats, they always mention my homosexuality long before they get to my views on foreign policy. In his "Address to the American People" in October 2002, Osama Bin Laden said "the worst kind of event" committed by America was not a foreign policy atrocity - of which there are many - but "your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the official Oval Office" with Monica Lewinsky. To them, this is a war against blowjobs and novellists as much as a war against occupation.

So what can we do to defuse the ticking bomb of British jihadism? On all fronts, the solution lies not in abandoning the values of liberal democracy, but in adhering to them much more scrupulously. If we restrain our leaders whenever they try to violate our values by using torture, or chemical weapons, or arming tyrants - indeed, if we put them on trial for it - we will choke off the more obvious blowback. But that's not enough. We also need to unpick the totalitarian ideology of jihadism by democratically opening up Islamic theology, so that over a generation, fewer and fewer young men can convince themselves they are "good Muslims" when they murder innocents.

At the moment, there is an epic battle within Islam between jihadi literalists and those Muslims (disproportionately women) who want to reinterpret the Koran to make it compatible with modernity, but today this is a horrifyingly lop-sided fight. The literalists are lavished with cash from the Saudi Arabian monarchy: their mosques are flooded with petrodollars, their imams are trained in Mecca, they receive piles of poisonous textbooks, and they are even given British government cash to run their own schools. The liberals, by contrast, scrape by with almost no funds at all.

We need to reverse this situation by banning the Saudi money designed to fundamentalize British Islam, and instead lavish government cash on the brave Muslim women's groups sprouting across the country. Free, independent Muslim women will raise their children with liberal readings of the Koran incompatible with blowing up "slags" or novelists. The French government has just begun to do this, with Nicholas Sarkozy appointing the heroic Muslim feminist Fadela Amara to devise his strategy for the Banlieues. But our government is failing to stop the Saudi poison because we are addicted to the oil they pump our way. As in Iraq, it seems that securing petroleum trumps undermining fundamentalism every time.

Until we complete this slow work of whittling down blowback and opening up Islam, we could face a carpark full of car-bombs - and we may not be so lucky next time.

You can send comments on this article to johann -at- johannhari.com or for publication in the Indie to letters -at- independent.co.uk

You can read my article about how 7/7 showed three faces of British Islam here, and my articles written immediately after the massacres talking about the long-term ways to undermine jihadism here and here.

The last days of Tony Blair - with a standing ovation, a tear, and the faint echo of 'Things Can Only Get Better' in the distance - threw up a string of harbingers for Gordon Brown. In Blair's final gasps of power, you could begin to glimpse the shape of the woes and worries waiting in his in-tray - and a few reasons to hope.

It is strangely apt that Gordon Brown should take over Britain as thousands of the country's houses lie underwater, and the victims of a freak weather incident are buried. This week's storm-floods follow hard on the floods of 2000 and 2001, which the distinguished meterologist Philip Eden says would have only naturally happened once every 750 years.

While it's hard to trace any one specific event to global warming, the evidence suggests these floods are part of a pattern of increasingly extreme weather events that have been predicted by virtually all the world's climatologists. The Association of British Insurers - who have no vested interest except calculating the risk - say flooding in Britain is going to increase by a factor of twelve this century.

This Weather of Mass Destruction, unleashed by us, is going to dominate both the geopolitics and domestic politics of the Brown years, as the planet's natural systems begin to unravel all around us. London and the South-East are extraordinarily vulnerable: when the London Assembly investigated our flood defences after the drowning of New Orleans, the findings were startling. Five percent of East London’s defences are in “poor or very poor” condition – about the same proportion as New Orleans’ levees.

But has Brown caught up with this yet? On the contrary, he is actually encouraging the growth of Britain's fastest-swelling contribution to destabilising the climate: air travel. Flying currently accounts for 20 percent of our impact on global warming, and it is growing at 7 percent a year. Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute has calculated that, on this trajectory, even if we stopped every other form of greenhouse gas emissions, air travel would make up 134 percent of Britain's safe level of carbon emissions by 2050 - a guarantee of total failure.

Brown has always rejected the arguments for limiting air travel as "not politically possible": we all love cheap flights. But the floods are a reminder that political reality on global warming is going to be given a hard shove by physical reality, again and again.

Tony Blair's final comments on Iraq offer Brown another bleak harbinger. He insisted "the problem in Iraq is entirely" due to "two elements": "the Iranian government and al Quaeda". But this is delusional. General George Casey, former commander of the multinational force in Iraq, recently esitimated there are 500 foreign fighters in Iraq. Does Blair really believe this depraved handful are responsible for the 650,000 civilian deaths? Or that Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh - another repellent figure - is more responsible for the deaths than the non-military US mercenaries ravaging the country, say, or the disastrous IMF "structural adjustment" that has produced 60 percent unemployment?

Brown needs to return to reality on Iraq - and that means acknowledging two truths. The country is in a hellish Sunni-Shia civil war, and 78 percent of Iraqis in the latest poll believe the occupying forces are making the situation worse.

But as the clock finally ran out on the Blair years, there was also a hopeful sign for the future - even though it may not have seemed so at first. The right-wing press reacted to the election of Harriet Harman as deputy leader of the Labour Party with astonishing viciousness, laying into her hair, her accent, her fingernails. (Funny how male politicians don't get any of this, isn't it?). They then savaged her politics as "far left" and "an obvious electoral liability."

What this showed is, in fact, how out of touch the right-wing press is with public opinion - and how Brown can afford to defy them. Let's illustrate this by looking at a particularly sour piece by Quentin Letts, who calls her - in openly sexist terms - "a hectoring, bleating, finger-wagging nanny." He announced with great confidence that "Middle England thinks Miss Harman is about as appealing as a case of raging trench foot." But in reality, when ordinary Middle England voters are shown Harman speaking by opinion poll firms, they become 15 percent more likely to vote Labour - and among female swing-voters, this rises to 22 percent.

This is important for Brown to learn now: Britain is not a conservative country. In reality, Middle England supports almost all of the "far left" policies Harman articulated in her campaign. Saying the war in Iraq was wrong? 76 percent. Not renewing Trident? 54 percent. Redistributing more money from rich to poor? 70 percent. Giving parents the right to demand flexible working hours (which Letts calls "extreme" and "authoritarian")? 66 percent.

It is not the centre-left that is grossly out of touch with ordinary British people. It is people like Quentin Letts. Yet throughout the past decade, Tony Blair mistook press opinion for public opinion. He bought into the Mail and the Sun's bogus claims to speak for ordinary people, and ended up with a miserly 35 percent of the vote. Brown must not repeat this mistake.

For the past forty years, at every single general election, parties committed to higher taxes and higher public spending have won a majority of the votes. It is a divided left and a dodgy electoral system that has skewed Britain to the right - not the will of her people.

Brown needs to start healing this division now, before these structural advantages may hand the country to David Cameron. Reaching out to Menzies Campbell, before electoral arithmatic could demand it in a hung parliament, was a smart move (and it was foolish of Campbell to decline it). Brown's unexpected openness to talking about electoral reform is also a sign that he is at least partly aware of this problem.

And this, perhaps, brings us to the most glistening moment of hope from Blair's curtain-call. If you had said in 1997 that the final question Blair would take at his final Prime Minister's Questions would be from Ian Paisley pledging his commitment to power-sharing and pledging that "every man, woman and child in Ulster will have the same rights, opportunities and liberties", you would have been swiftly drug-tested. (You would have got the same reaction if you had explained that his final press conference would be with Arnold Schwarzenegger talking about global warming).

But it happened. The world turned. Prime Minister Brown needs to know that "political reality" is not static; it is dynamic. Seemingly unshiftable rocks become eroded over time. So much that seems impossible today - a turnaround on global warming, say, or a victory over the right-wing press - can be done with political will. Brown has the right values. He needs now to find courage because, yes, embedded in Blair's last moments were some terrible warnings - but each one is a shimmering opportunity for our new Prime Minister too.

In the past few weeks, both the far right columnist Mark Steyn and the far right columnist Richard Littlejohn have responded to my detailed, factual criticisms of their 'writing' with equally detailed, equally factual rebuttals.

Only joking! Instead, they have responded to my detailed, factual criticisms, drawning on hard figures, statistics and academic studies, by essentially calling me a faggot.

After I exposed that Mark Steyn's use of figures is innumerate and that he uses urban legends as the basis for whole books, he didn't defend his figures, nor did he defend his use of plainly fake anecdotes. Instead he wrote:

"I think he has the hots for me. Next time don't be so shy, man. I'd be happy to sing you a couple of choruses of "These Foolish Things"."

(Read the blog entry here.)

Similarly, after I exposed Richard Littlejohn as an outright liar about the money given to asylum seekers and as suffering from a psychiatric obsession with gays, cottaging and lubricants, he wrote in the Daily Mail (sadly, no link):

"HEARTFELT thanks to all of you who have bought Littlejohn's Britain and propelled it to Number One in this week's non-fiction bestsellers' chart.

Many readers have written to ask if I'll be doing any signings. I'll keep you posted.

Special thanks, too, for the glowing reviews and tributes from all my friends and admirers at the Guardian and the Independent, especially the excitable work experience trainee 'Dirty' Hari, who appears to have a Littlejohn fixation.

I think he fancies me."

That's it. That's his defence. Why am I "dirty"? Because I'm gay. That's all. Unable to defend his arguments, he simply points his finger and yells - but he's a fag!

I think that means I won the argument, boys.

The political planets have aligned this week in such a sweet formation that they provide Gordon Brown with an opportunity to finally act on his better instincts. Our new premier's political beliefs were shaped and smelted in the Scottish hills by a hatred of extreme inequality. Now he is ascending to the Prime Ministership at the very moment when anxiety about Britain's soaring inequality is causing a sweat among the middle class Middle England block he needs to woo. Even the Financial Times warns that the gap between the super-rich and the rest "is now greater than at any time since the 1930s" and "it is the incomes of the top 0.1 percent that have grown most strikingly." Even the Daily Mail's front page howls: "Wealth divide 'could lead to rioting'."

The gap that is groaning loudest is between the haves and the have-yachts, as the middle class struggle to keep up with prices artificially inflated by the mega-wealthy. In the past decade, London has become swollen with a class of the untaxed uber-rich, due to a tax loophole nervously protected the government. If you are resident and domiciled in the UK, you have to pay full taxes on your worldwide income. But if you live in the UK yet claim not to be "domiciled" here, your worldwide income escapes tax entirely. The result? Of the 400 people in Britain earning more than £10m a year, only 65 pay any income tax at all.

We are living through an era when the rich have unilaterally exempted themselves from paying the membership dues for a civilised society, with the complicity of our governments. As Nicholas Ferguson, chairman of SVG Capital and one of the head honchos in private equity, warned last week, he and his colleagues are now paying less tax than the cleaner on the minimum wage who slumps into their offices at 6am.

This soar-away at the top has consequences all the way down the economic chain. One of the reasons London and the South-East now has such crazy house prices - well out of the reach of even middle-class twentysomething couples - is because this overclass is artifically inflating prices with their untaxed incomes. The upper middle class now has to compete with the impossibly rich for domestic staff, school places and status symbols - and they are squealing with politically important pain.

To picture what is happening here, the Dutch economist Jan Pen came up with a useful metaphor. Imagine that everybody in the British economy was to march past you in an hour-long parade, and that the marchers are organised by income, with the poor at the front and the rich at the back. Now imagine that the height of the people marching by is proportional to their height, so a person with average income will be average height, a person earning half the average income will be half the average height, and so on.

What would this parade look like? Most of us would picture a parade where people slowly, steadily got taller. We'd be wrong. The writer Charles Crook summarises what would really happen: "As the parade begins, the marchers are tiny. For five minutes or so, you are peering down at people just inches high - pensioners, or those without regular work who make a little from odd jobs. Ten minutes in, the full-time labor force has arrived: to begin with, mainly unskilled manual and clerical workers, burger flippers, shop assistants, and the like, standing about waist-high to the observers. And at this point things start to get dull, because there are so very many of these very small people. The minutes pass, and pass, and they keep on coming."

Only in the last ten minutes would you be able to look anyone in the eye - and then, only for a fleeting moment because, suddenly, "heights begin to surge upward at a madly accelerating rate. Doctors, lawyers, and senior civil servants twenty feet tall speed by. Moments later, successful corporate executives, bankers, stock­brokers—peering down from fifty feet, 100 feet, 500 feet." And then in the last second you see the unimaginably huge giants: Roman Abramovich, Rupert Murdoch, the great untaxed. The very sole of their shoes is hundreds of feet thick.

What has happened in the past decade is that the giants got even bigger. In 1997, the richest 0.1 percent would have been 1,380 feet high. Now they are way over a mile, and soaring further beyond the clouds every day.

It is true that the government has mildly redistributed wealth through tax credits - but it has only taken from the middle class and given to the poor. The giants at the end of the parade have been required to give nothing. And once this redistribution to the bottom has happened, a lot of the money is then perversely redistributed back - to the very top.

There are dozens of ways in which the tiny Lilliputian dwarves at the end of the parade are, for example, effectively bailing out the Golliaths who work for private equity firms. These equity chiefs get away with paying a derisory 10 percent of tax on their vast incomes - and then force us to pick up the tab for their destructive behaviour. The GMB - Britain's general trade union - has shown that 96 pension funds have collapsed as a result of private equity gambling. The tiny little tax-payers have to bail the stricken pensioners out, to the tune of £2bn.

So what can Brown do to bring us all closer to a normal height? The populist potential of an international crusade to make the mega-rich pay their fair share is vast. First he could close the loopholes for foreign billionaires and prive equity kings in Britain overnight. Then, to stop the minority of the super-rich who would actually act on their threats to leave Britain, he could lead an international battle to shut down the world's tax havens, which act as stinking drains on all progressive governments everywhere.

A British Prime Minister has extraordinary leverage here. Half of all the money stored in tax havens by the tax-avoiding rich across the world - which totals £11.5 trillion - is either in British overseas territories such as the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands, or British Crown Dependencies such as Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man. Brown could issue an ultimatum: bring this money into the taxed economy, or cease to have the military and political protection of Britain. This could be an great bargaining chip with other leaders: you give up your tax havens, and we're prepared to close ours.

A campaign to bring the super-rich back into taxation could have many more popular prongs. The trade unions are calling for a windfall tax on private equity firms, to make up for the tax giveaway they have enjoyed for too long. Development agencies are calling for a Tobin Tax, which would tax international currency speculation by just 0.1 percent, but raise $200bn a year - enough to give every African child a free education.

Blairites like the failed deputy leadership contender Hazel Blears have warned that this would be an abdication of the centre-ground, and an "attack on aspiration". It is precisely the opposite. This is the new centre-ground of British politics, where even the moderately wealthy can sweatily see that a grossly unequal society is dangerous for us all. Far from being an attack on aspiration, it is an attempt to spread it to far more people, using all those gross profits stashed in Bermuda to create better schools for everyone.

But the giants speak very loudly, and they boom in Brown's ear that he will bring catastrophe if he dares to ask them to pay even a fraction of the tax level you and I pay. They will threaten to rain newspaper campaigns and economic disinvestment on his head, and to withhold their political donations. This has kept him cowering for the past decade, supressing his best side. Now he has the keys to Number Ten, will Brown have the courage to see beyond their intimidation and seize the new mood - before it turns on him too?

You can read another article I wrote a few years back about the tax avoidance of the super-rich here, an article about why we must stop being dependent on them funding out political parties here, and an article about why proposals for the flat tax would be a super-gift for the super-rich here.

You can send comments on this article for publication in the Independent to letters -at- independent.co.uk or just for me to johann -at-johannhari.com

You can hear it here. You can read the review here and the interview here.