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Hat tip: PB

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Imagine that the following had been part of the history of the United Kingdom in the 19th and 20th centuries: no-one could buy cigarettes and tobacco in the late nineteenth century, except from an Iranian-owned monopoly.

All the hope behind the great reforming Liberal administration of 1906 was shattered two years later as an Iranian monopoly took effective control of our economy by an extortionate deal to control all sales of coal.

In the twenties, it disrupted government and supported a leader who sought to break most links with the Christian churches.

Between 1941 and 1946 we were occupied by Iran and the Soviet Union.

In 1953 Iranian intelligence agents conspired with another foreign power to remove a democratically-elected Prime Minister. In the seventies, Iran actively supported a harsh and undemocratic British government.

Yes, I’ve made all this up. But only just. Swap Iran and Britain around, and it’s all true. Between 1820 and the 1950s Britain dominated Iranian politics – and much that’s happened since is a direct result of that intervention.

There was a tobacco monopoly granted to a British company in the late nineteenth century – so preposterous that it led to a nationwide boycott.

There was an oil deal with a British company in the early twentieth which was frankly extortionate. A blind eye was turned by Britain to the authoritarian government of Reza Shah as he sought to impose a poor imitation of what Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic, was doing with much greater consent in Turkey.

Then there was the British occupation of Iran, jointly with the Soviet Union, for five years between 1941 and 1946; Britain’s direct involvement with the US in the removal of Mossadeq, a democratically elected Prime Minister, in 1953; and our continued, if apologetic, support for the Shah to the end – long after any serious connection between him and his people had ended.

Iranians know all this, but remarkably few do in the UK. Yet Iran has long been the single most important nation in its region, and is of huge strategic significance to a resolution of the conflicts in Afghanistan, between Israel and Palestine, in the Lebanon, to stability in Iraq.

Iran is rarely out of the international news. And given President Obama’s welcome shift in the US approach to the country, it will be right up the agenda in the weeks and months ahead.

Given that, the more we try to understand Iran and its history, the better it will be for all of us.

This week I opened a brilliant new exhibition at the British Museum about Shah Abbas, who ruled Iran between 1587 and 1629 and whose legacy lives on today. In part that is because of the way he reached out to the rest of the world.

There is now a real chance – after 30 years of silence between the US and Iran – for a change in relations which will have an impact on us all.

I fervently hope that Iran and the West will seize the opportunities here and ensure that the history books of the future include a chapter which will make more comfortable reading than some of the horror stories of the past.

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The bit that President Barack Obama did not fluff when taking the oath the first time was his middle name – “Hussain”.

The President’s paternal grandfather was a Muslim. Hussain is a name revered in Islam. During the election campaign, some of his more vitriolic opponents thought that they might damage Obama’s growing popularity by claiming that he too was a Muslim. At one stage in the campaign 12 per cent of the electorate, according to some polls, believed this.

In any event this did him no harm at all.Indeed the claim, albeit inaccurate, may have reinforced his own campaign’s message that Obama was genuinely different from those who had preceded him, and could offer a fresh approach to the huge challenges facing America and the world, and not least in US foreign policy.

A week into his presidency and we now have an initial but strong indication of that different new approach, on the Middle East. Giving his first major television interview not to US or European TV, but to the Dubai based Al Arabiya satellite news channel, he mentioned with approval those of his relations who were of the Islamic faith, and spoke at length about America’s future relations with the Muslim world.

The most important thing, he said, was to get engaged right away, and “start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating.” Part of his job, he said, was “to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives”. He pledged to work for a comprehensive peace in the Middle East, with a secure State of Israel, and a separate and independent State of Palestine with free movement for its people, trade and business to flourish. (He’s appointed former Senator George Mitchell, whose tireless work helps bring the warring communities in Northern Ireland to lead that work).

The US “had good relations with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago; there’s no reason why we can’t restore that.” And most significantly of all he said that he wanted to engage in direct talks with both Syria, and Iran. Of all the countries across the wider Middle East, Iran is key. It’s one of the largest population (65million); exceeded in the region only by Egypt (80million) but with a GDP per head at nearly $3,000 (2006 figures) more than twice that of Egypt, and with huge reserves of oil and natural gas.

The US has had no diplomatic relations with Iran since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the 444-day siege of the US Embassy which followed. As British Foreign Secretary I visited Iran five times; though none of my British counterparts had done so before or since, after 1979. I became convinced through my engagement with Iran, and that conviction has only grown in recent years, that top level face-to-face contact and negotiation by the US, and major EU countries was the only way forward.

It is terrific that President Obama has made this one of his key priorities so early in his Presidency. The President has got that right, like so much else so far.

Meanwhile I am afraid here at home the leadership of the BBC is giving further evidence of dreadful misjudgement. Its refusal to screen the Disaster Emergency Committee’s appeal for humanitarian aid to the suffering people of Gaza defies belief. Far from this underpinning the BBC’s reputation for political impartiality, it undermines it.

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How does it feel to be free?” Vice President Richard Nixon once asked of a black guy sitting in the front row of an event held in Ghana to celebrate the country becoming an independent state.

“How the devil should I know?” Came the reply. “I’m from Alabama.”

That was 1958. If you were black, and from one of the southern states of the US, you most certainly were not free.

Condi Rice may be one of the most successful and highly regarded women in the world as US Secretary of State. She’s black too.

When she took my wife and I to Birmingham, Alabama, the city where she grew up, the hurt that she and all other black people felt was palpable about the appalling way they were treated for a whole century after the Civil War was supposed to set them free.

So we saw the turning where her father and his friends had had to barricade their street to keep out the Klu Klux Klan and the white supremacist thugs of the local police from torching their homes and killing innocent people.

And we also saw the 16th Street Baptist Church where four young black girls were burnt to death in a bombing. As Condi once said: “when the Founding Fathers said “we, the people” they didn’t mean people like me”.

Finally, in the sixties, the Civil Rights Act was passed, and black people, and other minorities began their journey from oppress-ion. But every black American I know, howe-ver successful, is aware that there are higher hurdles in their way than in the way of white.

And by “black” I mean anyone who isn’t all white. To racists, if you’re of mixed race, you’re black. Many black people responded to what they saw as double standards in the land of the free by resignation and apathy, by opting out of politics altogether.

Turnouts even in Presidential elections have been low compared to the UK, and ours are not great (In 2004, 56 per cent of the voting age population voted in the Presidential election, while there was 61 per cent turnout in the general election here in 2005).

Overnight on Wednesday that changed. America changed. It is predicted that more than 130 million Americans voted in the election, the most since 1960 and several million above the 2004 figure.

And one of the indelible and abiding consequences of President-elect Obama’s campaign is the way that he at last has given non-whites in the US the power and equality they previously enjoyed only on paper.

I’m personally delighted by Barack Obama’s victory for two reasons.

First, and above all, because of what he and his party stand for.

The Democratic Party is not an exact parallel of the British Labour Party, but it is firmly in the democratic left, part of the progressive consensus as it’s now called.

What Obama has been campaigning for is essentially what we’ve been in business for over decades: things like improving health care, fighting for equal pay for women, supporting low income workers.

The second reason is that Obama’s victory, and the extraordinary scenes which have accompanied it – from the queues of people waiting to vote through to that spine-tingling victory speech in Grant Park in Chicago – proves something dear to me: politics can inspire.

People are interested in being involved, in ideas and in debate.

Democratic politics, the choices and the freedoms it gives, is noble, and Barack Obama showed that.

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