Too early to tell

This is where we are

2010-10-20T19:18:00.005+01:00

In 1997 the British people elected a Labour government, because it wanted a Labour government.

A government to invest in a shattered infrastructure and a fragmented society.

A government prepared to counter the buffets of the economic cycle by an intelligent growth-oriented investment strategy coupled with a commitment to improving public services.

That government, that New Labour government no less, was so committed to change and progress and well ...REFORM

So committed was it, that it spent its time in government attacking poor public services, changing delivery, contracting out services - you know reforming.

Targets were set to deal with poor performance and when things improved new ones were set.

Every morning on the Today programme we heard about their battle.

Every day was difficult, every service needed improving (not to say reforming).

Through ten long years of economic growth all we heard was bad news - and we weren't listening to Radio Africa...

New Labour also triangulated, it took on the Tory's on their own ground - you know, it met them halfway, it used their language, it went round the back ...and then it blew a raspberry; with increasingly little success as the years dragged on.

That nice red raspberry got bluer.

By 2010 the New Labour Party had spent thirteen long years explaining to the British public why they were wrong to want a Labour government.

It took a long time but eventually they agreed.

Though they weren't sure they wanted a Tory government either. Indecision eh, its a killer, luckily the British public were helped out by some people who did want a Tory government.

Those people were called Liberal Democrats, but actually they were rather similar to the other ex-merchant bankers and global corporate economists that they looked very similar to on the Tory benches.

Today as we look at George Osborne's delight lets remember Vince Cable's prescription back in April just before the election: 'five miserable years' promised Vince. Lets hope he was right. More than five will be a killer, even more of a killer than the five coming up.

Thanks Tony, thanks Alistair Darling [have you noticed yet that as you briefed against the rest of your party just before the election by saying that their economic forecasts were over-optimistic that they were actually under-optimistic - and you were wrong?], thanks Gordon for your inarticulacy, your tiredness, your lack of ideas and above all your inability to positively motivate anyone other than Paul Dacre - whom you had far too many dinners and theatre trips with. Thanks David 'immigration is a problem' Blunkett.

You've got a tough job Ed but at least you havn't got a tough act to follow.

Brown will pay the price for Iraq; but he deserves to.

2010-01-29T02:05:00.006+01:00

As we prepare for Blair's mesopotamiam swansong before Chilcot later today we reflect and and ponder the many negative impacts of Blair's decision to back Bush's fantasy of preemption.

In the here and now it is Brown who will pay the electoral price for Iraq, while Blair's reputation is already too tarnished for his Chilcot appearance to make any difference; but back then what was Brown's position?

Steve Richards with his usual razor-sharp analysis, explains why and how the Iraq nightmare began with what he terms, "the origins of New Labour, a frail, insecure and defensive project from the beginning".

There is much in this and he is right to skewer Brown's support for it too, he also hints at why, "Acutely aware of Labour's vote-losing past when it was regarded as soft on defence and anti-American, Blair was always going to stick with the US over Iraq and seek as broad an international coalition of support as was possible.

In terms of domestic politics, Brown made similar calculations.Working on the wrong assumption that he would be prime minister by 2004 he did not want to inherit a government that had opposed the war, sided with mediocre European leaders against the US..."

Yet there was more to it than that, Blair believed; and as a SPAD of the period put it recently: 'he understood the importance of backing America, whatever our concerns about Iraq.'

Apparently he elucidated this in one of his regular weekly briefings to his SPADs at the time. Now there is a document I'd like to see the contents of in full; perhaps Chilcot could ak for that.

For a broader view and a sharper cutting edge we should look to John Kampfner, whose article sat adjacent to Richards' in the print edition today, spread across the centre of the paper. Kampfner says, "One man bears supreme responsibility for this most ignominious chapter in British foreign policy and political life. But many others played their part too, with their sins of omission and commission. Not one, not a single person, has been held to account, least of all Blair. He got away with it a long time ago. He always knew he would."

Brown and New Labour however won't get away with it, nor will the rest of us, paying as we are a number of very real prices for Blair's historic miscalculation that Britain's future lay not in Europe but in the Lone Star state and a middle eastern bonfire of his vanity:
John Kampfner: And still no one has been held to account for Iraq

Standing in the way of control

2010-01-20T03:30:00.006+01:00

As Massachusetts' voters prepare to derail healthcare reform in the US, Britain's electorate are preparing to vote themselves back into recession by opting for hardcore class war Toryism 1980s-style.

What allows this apparently illogical set of outcomes?

Despite the gaping gap between reality and Cameron and Osborne's economic analysis, British voters are preparing to choose the two Old Etonians as the individuals they will trust to deliver this economic enema.

Meanwile over at New Labour Johnson and Brown were tying themseles in knots over class. Brown is middle class this week while Johnson is too, yet Johnson is nonetheless in touch with his dissolute workerist past and backing the proles right to drink themselves to death at least until the middle class take the pledge. Thus the Home Secretary rejected calls for a minimum unit price for alcohol on the basis that while this was an effective solution to alcohol-fuelled health problems it might enforce its benefits on the poor while as he put it 'allowing the rest of us to carry on as before'...

The real revelation here is New Labour's view of the poor: take away their booze and they'll vote Tory? Watch out Alan, they may do so anyhow...

The takeaway is that voters in 'big decision' elections don't welcome diffidence and won't vote for parties which triangulate their own position toward their opponents rather than robustly defending it. In big votes voters opt for clarity and the situation is exaggerated by those who are typically non-voters opting to vote in large numbers [which may be an issue in Massachusetts] and voting against encumbent parties of power.

Your Starter For Ten (to 15 percent cuts) AKA Same Old Tories Too

2009-06-29T14:20:00.004+01:00

The temptation is to say 'this is where it starts...' but actually it started ages ago.

It started when Gordon's men got an itchy election trigger finger, swiftly followed by a squeaky political bum.

It started when the financial elite needed a new dialogue beyond Gordon's 'sustained growth that has removed boom and bust'; beyond Boris' 'Don't blame the bankers'; beyond Fred the braindeads 'blame me, I ate all the cakes'...

It started when New Labour realised through the Pavlovian masochism of the Ten Per Cent Tax Rate Removal Fiasco that it still had a base to protect, if little else.

There was a need for clear blue water. There was a need for a new dialogue.

...Once our poor benighted government, not so much a ship of fools as a pig in shit, had used its, for once useful, familiarity with global finance, to actually save our banking system (while the Tories tried to play nationalisation politics over Northern Rock and blame Gordon's alleged profligacy for global financial meltdown, which at best Brown was guilty of watching lazy-eyed from the sidelines while the longest consistent period of growth in post-war history gave his party a lengthy political blow job through two unpopular wars and a perhaps unique disconnect between manifesto pledges and Acts of Government - no student loans, no university fees... err whatever "...f**K that was good Gordon, over to you now, I'm off to make some SERIOUS MONEY"]

...De-railed momentarily by Expenses and the Telegraph's uniquely arrogant attempt to flush the toilet known as parliament [by themselves, principally] clean, bi-partisan, non-triangulated out of all linkage to reality, good, old-fashioned, British politics was quietly trying to make a comeback.

...it was time - Time for politics as usual:

So obligingly the Tories are going to stop playing 'New Labour Vintage 97' and get back to cutting propgrammes for the poor (and the middle classes)...

Well lets face it the Tories never represented the mass of the British people did they? But they are on occasion damn good at pretending to.

Still, sometimes they help to clarify things:

Tories to bin pledge to protect Sure Start cash

The Conservatives have announced that they are reneging on their pledge to protect early years scheme Sure Start from spending cuts if they are elected.

Speaking to Haymarket-published magazine, Regeneeration and Renewal Regeneration yesterday, Phillip Hammond, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, is reported as refusing to commit to a previous guarantee that the overall budget of the Labour government's flagship early years programme would be ring-fenced. "We will be looking at individual projects and workstreams, but we haven't made announcements about individual budgets yet," he said.
Last year, at the Tory Party conference, Oliver Letwin, chair of the party's policy review, said that Sure Start would continue under a Tory government at the same level to which Labour was committed (Regen.net, 1 October 2008). "Sure Start is a programme we value and one we intend to continue," he said. "It will not be cut back."

But now Hammond has signalled that the programme would be subject to the same scrutiny and possible ten to 15 per cent cuts subjected to all departments.

He also confirmed to the haymarket magazine that, as previously announced, the Tories would take part of Sure Start's budget to fund health visits to vulnerable families with newborn children.

A spokesman for childcare charity the Daycare Trust said: "We seriously hope that it is not official Conservative Party policy to remove Sure Start's ring-fenced funding. Sure Start has grown into a much needed and valued public service for families, and parents will rightly be angered if its funding is threatened."

Next stop funding the rights and localism agenda, or was that the 'right localism agenda' - lets just see...

New Labour's Final Ecstasy? - New Labour's leaders have gone from Rabbits in the Headlights of History, to Duracell Bunnies in the Debt Disco

2009-01-31T14:21:00.020+01:00

When New Labour came to power in 1997 Blair and Brown were paralysed by fear of a radicalism they never possessed.

They had been rewarded with a huge majority and an unprecedentedly broad coalition of support for, at the very least a programme of social investment, in a country which was literally falling apart, as both society and transport infrastructure creaked after a period of two decades where major infrastructural investment had been limited to a new bankers metro in the east end and even our great national museums were reduced to excluding the poor and charging the rich in order to remain open.

As one senior forex expert of my acquantance put it at the time - it makes more sense for me to vote Labour than to keep buying more expensive alarms for my house'.

This was the first time in the 40 or so years he had been eligible to vote that he had felt that such an action made sense, the excesses of Thatcher and the incompetence and thievery of the Major years when, as his patrician city peers used to put it, 'the shit floated to the top', had horrified him - he saw the future and he didn't like it.

Flying over the Favelas of the Future
'I don't want to end up like a member of the Brazilian ruling class,' he continued, 'flying home by helicopter to my gated compound, to avoid driving through the favelas'.

He had worked across the globe, from the States to Asia, he loved Japan and indeed New York, though more for the salt beef and beigels than for the new Wall Street ethics downtown. He respected the dynamism of the Chinese and hoped that the cultural revolution would be as strong a lesson to the emergent nation as had been the period of warlord dominance, probably the strongest cultural lychpin in the development of the Chinese nation, a sort of outrider of chaos, standing as a warning of what could befall the nation should the unwritten rules of deference be forgotten. He knew the value of money and the fact this was mobile, this after all was his trade.

And he voted Labour in 1997, because, like so many of us, he believed in society, in ethics, in the need for laws as well as returns, for values as well as valuations. Because valuations change, because markets can go down as well as up. Because one of his friends spent the cultural revolution paraded in a dunces cap for the crime of teaching and was then sent to work in the fields - but was now an international banker, employed by the Chinese state.

He was to be fair an experienced man with connections across global business, whereas the leading lights of New Labour had Peter's friends in Notting Hill, their old [Labour] friends in the unions giving them sleepless nights like a sort of postmodernist tsetzuo or bogey man; and a profound lack of experience.

Rabbits in the Headlights of History
So they started not with a Barack-style bang but witha whimper. Two Years of Tory Spending. 'No change while we think of what to do, eh, Gordon,' whispered Tony breathily, 'settle in, find our way around, chat to people a bit, reassure them; really we'll do nothing in the first term, just a sort of creating foundations thing' .

'We can play some of those tax changes Kenneth was planning as 'aid for the forgotten poor', though' says Gordon, 'they will help, after all, those who actually work, and we can do some work around the tax credit ideas I have, to emphasise that. Telling a story of hard work and reward, not scrounging and the rewards of sloth and shiftless inactivity'.

Thus followed a period in which New Labour listened. To lobbyists, to Thatcherites, to deregulators, to American republicans and democrats in equal measures, to Goldman Sachs, to a brash new city which had found ways for international markets to create money without burdening public treasuries. Growth was to be funded through a proper and realistic assessment of risk and the trading and insuring of this risk to spread it. In a curious echo of the old imperialism, the new imperialism consisted of emergent Asian economies buying Western debt in order to fund the consumerist longings of the developed world they were rapidly becoming a fully-paid up part of.

Odd warnings had sounded, banks had occasionally broken throughout this period and indeed before it, the Leeson Barings debacle the clearest parallel, as the trader tried to trade his way out of a derivatives hole in a market which notoriously lacked a ceiling and, he thought, a floor; and operated without either external regulation of any meaningful sort or even the most mundane of internal controls.

Yet New Labour, the ultimate professionals, the managerialists who thought they knew the Rulers of the World and worse still that they had been invited to join the club, took a rationalist approach. The institutions would self-police because it was in their own interests not to suffer the ignominious meltdowns that had befallen aberrant old-timers like Barings. The message they heard was that Barings were old-fashioned, unable to cope with brash new realities. The Banks of the New Church, Jesuit priests of international capitalism would take their boys at five and make them compliance-friendly men.

Duracell Bunnies in the Debt Disco
So for ten years the Duracell bunnies of New Labour danced in the debt disco. Occasionally they would turn to each other asking,
'Any idea whats going on with this economic cycle Gordon? Seems to have been going on rather a long time...'

'Huh, huh, huh, no idea Tony'
pants Gordon, his huge lop ears flopping to the pumping music,

'I doon't really care, but I'm happy to keep dancing as long as someone keeps giving me these brilliant free Es.... sorry dollars'.

And traded debt derivative dollars at that.

The bad news
The bad news is that the derivative-funded industries in the UK don't simply extend to the financial services sector.

A few days ago Home Shopping Direct [Littlewoods catalogues as was] announced huge job cuts.

The really bad news is that cheap credit card debt to fund catalogue shopping you can't afford is just another version of buying houses you can't afford, just another part of the 'debt time bomb' if you like, Daily Express. Leading to the view among some people, not least Foreign Exchange experts that our whole economy may be over-valued.

Better start making something fast, but not cars, please, Peter.

Taking Sides Against the Innocent – why is the BBC backing Hamas and the men of war?

2009-01-27T01:50:00.007+01:00

The BBC [and Sky]’s decision to decline to broadcast the Disaster’s Emergency Committee Appeal for Gaza is wrong.

It reveals some profoundly muddled thinking by its increasingly irrational, defensive and spineless DG, Mark Thompson. Thompson’s actions over both this and the recent Ross-Brand-Voluptua-Sachs fiasco, tell us a lot about why the Senior Editor and DG roles should be separate; but a lot more about why Thompson is simply not up to the job he was given on the back of the BBC’s pasting by HM Government and the noble Lord Hutton*

[*over, you'll remember, the BBC Today Programme's allegedly inaccurate claims that the government had sexed up its Iraq weapons dossiers - which of course we now know didn't happen, after all those WMDs were found in Iraq ...oh, no, sorry... that was in an alternative dimension wasn't it...].

But muddled thinking is not the worst aspect of Thompson’s befuddled decision-making

The BBC is a news and editorial organisation – so everything that its senior editor does and says becomes an editorial statement.

So by arguing that the BBC cannot be seen to take sides, Thompson has accepted the Israeli government’s implicit argument that its well-resourced and powerfully armed ‘Defence’ forces are at war with the whole Palestinian people.

Or at any rate that Israel is at war with the whole population of Gaza, which they have conveniently given the temporary status of an independent state, in order to declare war on it and its population.

Mark Thompson today announced, in effect, therefore, that the targeting of Palestinian civilians by the IDF is reasonable.

Mr Thompson should move to the Hague immediately – after all who needs an International War Crimes Tribunal when Mr Thompson can do the job of deciding whether it is reasonable to use missiles with phosphorous warheads on civilian populations for a fraction of the cost – and indeed in an iota of the time - that it will take to convene the trials which are prompting Ehud Olmert to establish a specialist war crimes defence team, and fund, to protect members of the IDF who may be held to account for their actions in Gaza over recent weeks.

Thompson’s stance is doubly unfortunate given the sterling work being done by Jeremy Bowen, BBC Correspondent, in covering this ‘conflict’.

Worst of all Thompson is accepting the argument of all men of war, terrorist or statist, over the needs, and, supposedly internationally-assured, human RIGHTS, of civilians.

He is therefore implicitly justifying the notion of ‘total war’ which predated the Geneva Conventions and has been exploited subsequently by evil-doers as diverse as Hitler and the militias of Rwanda.

Congratulations Mr Thompson, now maybe you can try yourself for incitement to genocide as the DJ’s and hosts of Radio Interahamwe in Rwanda and the Congo were tried for crimes against humanity, for you are justifying and inciting future slaughter of the innocents as surely as they ever did.

Now perhaps you could also resign while some vestige of the BBC’s independence and moral authority as a news organisation and as an institution committed to the defence of human rights remains. Or are human rights a bit one-sided for you these days, Mark?

Though it really ISN'T about sides, is it Mark? Not at all, as it happens, since I imagine that Hamas would agree with your analysis, as much as the IDF will; for it is they who will benefit, while the civilian population continues to suffer; and with each new slight and signal of your imbalance and lack of care for the conditions of the civilian population of Gaza, greater hatred is bred.

Obama

2008-11-05T15:14:00.004+01:00

Yes he did.

'That one' did it.

And like most of us, I'm still in the emotional phase - and in a funny way, perhaps just for today, it is an 'us'. Because Obama's universality and the universality of our interest around the globe in his candidacy, has created - if only momentarily - a community of interest.

Who knows where this may take us. Who knows how long it will last.

But just for a moment it is irresistible to savour the spectacle, the experience, the emotionally buffeting rollercoaster, of history being made. Of history occurring, before our very eyes.

Change certainly can happen. Change has happened.

-o0o-

The cynic in me, the realist it likes to call itself, reminds me of 1997 and tells me that another larger generation may have to grow up disappointed. As the red wedgers of the British 80's grew up when the lies and war crimes of blood red Blair came to haunt their 21st century.

But I can't buy it because, for all that the day may come when President Obama chooses to bomb somewhere back to the nineteenth century, or when a Pashtun wedding party gets atomised by a high level bombing raid on his watch, it won't change the significance of today.

As Justin Webb said last week and indeed last night, when America looks in the mirror it will see a black 'first family'.

He may not be the son of slaves but he hasn't married a white chick either. Michelle Obama and those two daughters might just turn out to be the real signifiers of change as much as their husband and father.

-o0o-

In Praise of Independents - or Why do Manuel and the Mail have it in for a certain maned male?

2008-10-30T15:37:00.014+01:00

Firstly yes I have felt moved to comment on Russell Brand and second, no, I don't think its a big deal.

But I did love the bitchiness of the Independent's front page today 'Manuel's Revenge' - because that in essence is rather what this is all about.

Well that and what exactly we treasure as a nation and why.

Andrew Sachs incidentally hates being referred to as Manuel and loathes the fact that his apparently stellar career on stage and screen is often reduced to 12 episodes of slightly racist pastiche performed several decades ago.

He has said this. But this is his problem.

And he is a national treasure because of those 12 episodes. Not in fact because of all his lovely voice over work for Radio 4, or his serious stage work, or indeed all the other stuff that bought the house and educated the kids, etcetera.

Ah yes the kids - well the grand daughter to be exact. What exactly does she do again?

She's a dancer isn't she, by the name of Voluptua as it happens and she dances with the Satanic Sluts.

So I suppose I'm right to assume that she is a bit of a shrinking violet and probably spends her evenings working in a homeless shelter run by the church she attends every Sunday, with her granddad? ...Oh OK that was another Voluptua, well I'm sure she's lovely anyway, at any rate Russ seemed to think so - and lets face it he doesn't have to pay for it, does he?

Though I imagine the holy Voluptua did get paid for her recent revelations to The Sun, which included confirmation that she'd shagged Brand - or at any rate serviced his sexual needs in one way or another.

I suppose that after the Daily Mail had publicised the little-noted broadcast by Brand and Ross featuring their childish answerphone messages, Voluptua thought that there was little to be gained from maintaining that "they're just cads grandad and I in any case am still virgo intacta"
[as opposed to brando penetrata] .

Then I suppose its just a small step from there to telling the paper that features a half naked teenager most mornings, exactly who has been giving you one recently - and, naturally, what a cad they are.

Want more, see thelondonpapersblog or for a more 'eyecatching' approach see more of Voluptua at Hotties in the News:

Want Russell try http://www.russellbrand.tv/

The Independent incidentally also had two other killer headlines today: A backpage splash of 'Harry Houdini' on Tottenham's great escape from the Emirates last night (and possibly relegation) courtesy of the remarkable Mr Redknapp - who I still think is a bit of bastard for going to Tottenham but can't help respecting as a motivator of men, a manager who knows good footballers when he sees them, and an all round cunning devil.

The other was a vaguely approving bit of editorial comment entitled 'Brand Values' suggesting that Brand, by virtue of a well-timed resignation, was coming out of this rather better than the somewhat over-exposed Jonathan Ross.

But for all that I think this is a Daily Mail witchhunt led by an embittered old Queen [or two] the best reason to read and savour the Indy today had nothing to do with Brand or Ross, Sachs or Voluptua [somehow I feel there's another joke to be made about 'sacks' and voluptua but I'm sure it'd be bollocks really...].

No forget the fripperies of entertainment wars as the Tories look for excuses to humble the BBC anew in preparation for an easy start to their campaign of public service cuts once in power....

Instead read a true Independent, Russell can and will look after himnself and Jonathan is as rich as Croesus, but there are more important things going on in the world which demand I'm afraid greater attention....

Read Johann Hari instead on how we are fuelling the latest bloody round of the Congolese Resource War: Johann Hari: How we fuel Africa's bloodiest war

The world's not looking 2

2008-10-16T14:03:00.003+01:00

France The French police are investigating the discovery of toxic mercury pellets in the car of a human rights lawyer who was taken ill in Strasbourg on Tuesday, a day before pretrial hearings in Moscow into the killing of one of her best-known clients, the journalist and Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya. (B)

The world's not looking*

2008-10-13T20:23:00.000+01:00

Zimbabwe Last month Robert Mugabe said he could flout the power-sharing deal brokered with the MDC while the world was distracted by the credit crunch. Now he pushes ahead with his plans. (A)

Austria Far-right Austrian politician Joerg Haider dies in car crash (C)

A - definite consequence of credit crisis
B - probable consequence of credit crisis
C - interesting coincidence (and gift to the conspiracy junkies ;-)

*In honour of Jo Moore.

Same Old Tories? Or ‘This is not America’ - Tory Pickles says that British “cities should continue to be built around the car”

2008-09-30T13:17:00.008+01:00

Remember how Blue is the new Green? You know all that Oak Tree Logo-led Tory Renewal?

Not very flexible in wind incidentally oaks and subject to being struck by lightning...still:

Tory transport spokespeople may be trying to seem greener than Labour with their talk of new trainlines to replace new runways [as opposed to Barmy Boris' idea of an island airport off Kent to kill our dolphins but make Kew Gardens quieter...] but Eric Pickles, a man who has spent his whole career in politics making Coronation Street look modernist and innovatory by comparison, is not buying any of this socialist claptrap:

The prospect of congestion charging in cities outside London "does not have a rosy future" under a Tory government, shadow communities secretary Eric Pickles said this week.

Speaking at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, Pickles said he hoped Greater Manchester residents would vote No in December’s referendum on the city-region’s Transport Innovation Fund (Tif) bid – which would see £3 billion of investment in public transport and the introduction of a peak time congestion charge.He said: I’ve not the slightest doubt [the Tif bid] will be rejected by the people of Manchester and that would be a good thing.

Only hours after transport secretary Theresa Villiers attempted to bolster the Conservative Party’s green credentials by announcing its support for high speed rail over an expansion of Heathrow – as well as signaling that under a Tory Government the Tif would be used in more flexible ways to encourage bus and bicycle use within cities - Pickles said cities should continue to be built around the car.

He said: Public transport can be a very good thing but the way people want to live is with a car. I think we should a way to make our cities pleasant places to be but they should be places built on consent, without Government forcing an anti-car agenda onto people. I don’t think congestion charging has a very rosy future at all.

GO ERIC - Vote Tory for a sustainable future ...NOT

Gordon is a Moron - And The Guardian has a 'punt'

2008-04-15T01:07:00.026+01:00

Michael White starts his blog post analysing the media buzz around Brown's continuing capacity for self-immolation with the potentially hazardous statement 'Here's a punt...' [No, I'm not a betting man, you've seen his byline pic, you KNOW what I mean...]

ANY-WAY... call me prescient but not having posted since last October, its like nothing's changed at all...

Our new PM is still burning votes like they're going out of fashion and there's a whirlwind of media speculation over why he's such a dork, whether he realises what a dork he is and whether he can 'turn it around'. And the current majority view is that he cannot.

This isn't totally un-related to upcoming elections in which the Tories hope to score some high profile victories as a platform for a realistic assault on gaining a majority in the next General Election in 2010 / 11. Nor is it unrelated to the fact that the media needs change and crisis to write about and is showing a depressing willingness to see the Tories as 'new', not to say 'news'; when they are merely the old lot with a few wheelchairs and trees up front.

So, OK something has changed since last October, the wind...
- and Gordon Brown's face has got stuck in last Autumn's Mr Bean mode, caught between expressions like a drunk using a self-timer, vapid, flaccid and yet somehow curiously Blairite.

And lets get this straight now, the 'dork dialogue' of 'Gordon is a moron' propagated by the sneering public schoolboys over at Dave's house ISN'T THE ISSUE.

Its not even, just, the economy, stupid. Its the policies. And its the decisions, or lack of them. Above all it is the lack of change.

Gordon hasn't dithered, he's hardly made a decison since attaining power. A little window dressing but nothing of substance.

A 'Supercasino dropped' soundbite disguises approval for the far more damaging introduction of 20 odd regional casinos. A farcical Iraq withdrawal re-announcement disguises a continuing commitment to a doomed US-led middle east agenda whose most tragic consequences form an atrocity exhibition of misjudgement and misunderstanding from the refugee ghettoes of Damascus and Amman to the broken bridges of the Bekaa Valley and the whirling centrifuges of Iran.

And now everyone has noticed. That tends to happen if you keep appearing in public looking like that... Above all the media have noticed.
Thus, a feeding frenzy...

SO, what happens now?

Well, over at the Guardian Blog, where we started, Michael White tries to persuade us that its all about the moon. Well the timing of the Easter recess at any rate. In fact White ignores the potential for upcoming New Labour electoral slaughter virtually altogether. Something I find myself unable to do, since Gordon Brown's ineptitude might yet [and I still maintain hope that this won't happen] cost Ken the mayoralty in London and land us with Boris Johnson. A disturbingly bright and ideologically right wing politician who disguises his narrow free market instincts behind a smokescreen of bluster and mock-buffoonery.

I pray that London will not be taken in mayor-wise. Ken isn't perfect but he's been a good mayor thus far and has started laying foundations for London's future; despite the delays caused by Gordon's PFI nonsense vis the tube and by the mayoralty's odd mix of powers. He's even obtained some new ones in areas like housing which don't come into force until this month. Boris will simply focus on saving money by dismantling strategic institutions designed to protect London's voters from the unfettered profiteering of his mates in big business.

Don't be fooled by Boris' vagueness - you can't ask a plc nicely to act against its shareholder's profit-maximising interests. But you CAN use planning control to ensure that it has no choice - give it a choice and it can only reasonably put private profit before public good.

Over and above the London mayoralty White may be right to imply (if only through ommission) the limited potential for wider electoral damage to Labour on May 1st. After all, Labour were slaughtered last time around, but these ARE different constituencies and surely Labour doesn't want EVERY council occupying their every waking hour trying to make government look stupid.

That's the party politics - but what about the REAL politics?

Well, wake up and smell the coffee, children of Thatcher, your hearts are about to be broken again.

Through all the worst excesses and gravest disappointments of Blairism you all persuaded yourselves that one day Gordon [or was that Bevan] would rise from the ashes to reclaim the left's victory over the venal Tories for the, err, left. Or, if we must be less controversial - and, to be frank, more accurate - to reclaim society's victory for society, since the coalition of support for Labour in '97 gelled around belief in the need for social investment, rather than any narrow ideological position.

Blair mistook this absence of an old-fashioned sloganeering ideological belief in left-politics for an absence of belief in the ability of politicians to initiate change. He proceeded to spend ten years making this misunderstanding into a self-fulfilling prophecy, since he - like his right wing predecessors - saw society as a creature of market capitalism, rather than vice versa.

However the twenty and thirty and forty-somethings who had waited so long for change, through the long years of Tory rule, through the harsh Midwinter of King Tony, believed that under Gordon things would be different. There would be no more of Blair's rabbit caught in the headlights fear of losing the 'middle-England' voters whom he had never understood adequately enough to comprehend his own success in converting them to a belief in the need for public investment.

No more kow towing to the scaremongering of the Daily Mail. No more Chequers weekends for Ross Kemp. No more cosying up to Murdoch... well, you get my drift...

YES, the Red Wedge generation believed, things WOULD change come 'Gordon-time'...
Gordon believed in society. Gordon - unlike Blair - was interested in politics. Gordon believed in making change not just managing it. In intervention rather than explanation. Gordon would pull the levers of power rather than merely oiling the wheels of capitalism...

Oh f**k OFF!

Let's face it anyone who remained in the cabinet throughout the build up to the Iraq War and then stayed on through the debacle which that flawed and fraudulent decision was to become, has to be seen as of questionable morality and above all judgement. But Gordon went further, silently funding it. And that's before we even get onto tax rises for the poor to fund tax cuts for the better off.

If Gordon Brown wants a real legacy, and a positive one, he needs to find a new policy direction, one that he can make his own and yet which will appeal to his base. Thus far he's shown no inclination to do this, or even to understand how important this is.

He needs to start understanding this, FAST.

If only for the sake of Ken Livingstone and the people of London.

And 'Team Brown' needs to stop doing what they were up to this morning - which was sending out people like Hazel Blears to talk nonsense assertively. I closed my eyes in pain and exasperation and in that moment realised just how much like Big John Prescott Little Hazel Blears now sounds - try it, its scary...

Nothing ever changes - it all remains the same...

SO - its 'First Lord of the Treasury, Deliver us from Boris...'
Or you'll find that we might just, somehow, deliver ourselves of you...

...Whatever that uber-loyalist punt at the Guardian has to say about it.

Hungry Looks on the faces of the dogs of war

2007-10-16T00:36:00.002+01:00

After a long break being busy with life and living it, rather than writing about it, I was thinking about a post on how THE WORST place for a post-Blair change-ringing Prime Ministerial appearance would be Iraq.

What a Difference a Day Makes
I was pondering a rumination on how Gordon Brown could fail to realise this and preparing to expound upon the nature of the Westminster bubble and its disjunct with street reality. After all few things can be worse in a country which wants to 'bring its boys home' than a publicity grabbing attempt to gain short-term credit from re-announcing the fact that 10% will be 'home for Christmas' - especially when half of those were already home for Indian Summer [a big improvement on Afghan winter].

Home for Christmas
Why is it that politicians use that phrase? Redolent as it is of the broken promises and shattered skulls of the Somme.

If it was possible to make a bad week worse, this little exercise crossed one of those irony rubicons that the smirking slaughterers of New Labour never seem to spot. Yes, remarkably, its true, Brave Gordon's views on war and the umma are as cockeyed as those of his more generously eyeball-endowed predecessor.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Iraq's Christians aren't coming home for Christmas, or anytime soon, and the dead are all still dead.

Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away...
Just a few short weeks ago Gordon was riding high. The sun shone out of his Jacqui Smith and even his Straw cod-piece smelt almost fresh enough to swallow.

The only Iraqi's he had to worry about were the suicidal situationist comics of Al-Qaeda's Celtic Fringe, whose pre-Festival tour had ended in an impromptu foam party at Glasgow Airport but failed to ignite popular interest.

How, one asked, HOW, did we get to HERE from THERE?
The weekend [13th and 14th October] produced some interesting evidence. After all the phoney election shenanigans, I was already wondering if a Blairite trap had been sprung. All the elements of Gordon's previously unflappable and principled political persona blew away, like so much spinning chaff before the hot blast of Charlie Falconer's disdain.This also led to John Hutton first being quoted as a Gordon apologist and then clarifying that he wasn't really saying that - and was thus doing even less good for faith in Gordon's leadership than employing Dawn Primarolo.

Be my dog...
Then the Liberals showed the way with a play within a play.

While a right of centre Orange Book-carrying Lib Dem leader might ultimately pressure Cameron more than Menzies Campbell's familiar patrician; it is nonetheless another easy win for Cameron, with barely a finger lifted.

Once more we are reminded why the Liberals havn't been elected to office since the Second World War.

Gordon and more pertinently 'yon Milliband' must learn from this:
That means protecting you core vote, Cameroon stylee. Not dragging it rightwards until its arms pop out and it forgets whom it is meant to vote for - and who represents what, or whom.

Gordon had the benefit of the doubt, now we simply doubt him. Doubt his sincerity, doubt his abilty and doubt he cares or understand the people whom he doesn't trust to elect him.

Charity Begins At Home ...and legacies fade first where least substantial

2007-07-12T00:42:00.000+01:00

Gordon Brown hinted at a decision today, its a generally popular one, at any rate it is with core Labour supporters, with regeneration experts [and indeed inexperts] and with sane human beings everywhere. Supercasinos may just be getting dropped.

Gambling policy as a whole is being reviewed and recent controversial enabling legislation along with the regional casinos it was to enable may go too.

However for all the goodwill this ghost of a decision, this, mayhap, hint of a policy shift, is getting, we have to note that it has not been taken yet. Which is a worry, because dollars, many many dollars, will even now be starting to be spent in lobbying and PR firms on reversing it.

But fear not, Gordon is firm and he may just decide to prove that in one area at least he is not a Blairite, by keeping his hand out of the till that Bernie Ecclestone, Philip Anschutz, Lakshmi Patel, the Brothers Hinduja, Lord Browne, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Lord Sainsbury all shut Tony Blair's begrimed party and corporate [ergo national] paws in.

For many people, influential well-informed people, this policy had been the final straw.

At one and the same time a reminder of the very first things to go wrong with 'whiter than white' Blairite probity in public office, and equally the ultimate expression of policymakers lost in the corporate funhouse, as befuddled as the tame business unions brought to Manchester to persuade the local TUC that a deal could be done to remove the danger of competition from cheap, un-unionised, immigrant labour.

Manchester's ambition and potential was to be prostituted by locally accented croupiers; the whores might come from eastern europe or Somalia but they were, in the current legislative environment, outwith the regulatory framework to be administered by the 'family-friendly' US conglomerates bidding to do in Manchester what back home they would need an Indian reservation to get away with.

Maybe, just maybe, if Gordon Brown sticks to his apparent policy shift and kills Jowell's bloated pig of a policy to tax the poor and call the moral degredation of licensing policy a form of urban regeneration, he has drawn a line in the sand.

Maybe, just maybe, his charity toward the predilections and aspirations of the core voters who can keep him in power in two years time marks the start of something genuinely new; rather than just a gesture to buy a hundred days of poll ratings to be squandered come the winter.

On the positive side Gordon posited 'regeneration' as an alternative to super-casinos. An industry heaved a huge sigh of relief. For over a year frustration has mounted over the idea that it is necessary to explain to GOVERNMENT that a super-casino is not a regeneration option in any traditional sense. Not least because it exists purely to draw money out of the local economy and can economically survive only as long as it does so on a massive scale and because its business model is based on maintaining the maximum possible separation from surrounding retail and leisure infrastructure to avoid 'revenue bleed'.

If Gordon's apparent common sense take on gambling legislation - and indeed on expanding the supply of affordable housing - is a sign of things to come, he may just convince a cynic or two and persuade a few voters that New Labour is not so utterly amoral and compromised by power that it might just be time to give the Tories a go. He only needs to do a bit of that to survive. Cameron, after all, is just Blair as Mr Punch - and that is not a show many will yet pay to watch on primetime.

Cleaning Out My Closet - or: I hope you're going to clean up that mess after yourself, Tony [as if...]

2007-06-27T23:43:00.000+01:00

Tony Blair's time in office has been about nothing if it has not been about the rewards of deluded expectation.

Commentators have spent ten, perhaps twelve, years queueing up to acclaim Blair as Social Democracy's Rubicon-crosser, the third ways herald, and other such non sequiturs.

One always felt that a social democratic Labour Party in government would be a big growing up experience for the adolescent left which occupied the farthest flung corners of New Labour's big tent. Tony was not to disappoint us. Nor for that matter were his cronies or indeed the band of phonies and crazies who populated his wake - when Ian McCartney, John Reid, David Blinkered and Peter Mandelsson have all fulfilled multiple roles in your administrations, one has to accept that you are truly an equal opportunities employer.

Yes reality is about the crooked, crooked, timber of humanity. From which no straight thing was ever made.

Blair asked what Labour was, challenged it to be anything other than what he made it. A challenge that it often appeared to flinch from.

Blairism was undoubtedly a phenomena of power and about power; and like all true excercises in power made extant, power exercised, power apparent; it asked us either to take it like men or to try and take its horse.

However, for all that Sedgefield's Fettes Cowboy showed a distinct attachment to the saddle, there was nonetheless a feeling that maybe, just maybe, the media's heralds of the new dawn, the high priests of Hip Hop-racy and the Lords of the Labour New Church were all just a tad previous - and that, after all, the oft-derided real left, or 'Old Labour', would cope.

Cope, not because of its strength, nor because its support, nay not even because of inertia - but, above all, simply because disappointment and disillusion were after all A Way Of Life. For all that there may have been times when Old Labourites simply felt that the Labour Party was Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition - which of course, 90s dance club references aside, it was - one still felt that something called Labour might just survive the premature reports of its demise.

And, in a sense, perhaps those feelings were right. For it is after all Tony who has finally walked away from Labour and not vice versa. Nor indeed have the voters quite deserted the party of government yet.

Yet Tony has perhaps finally crossed a Rubicon, if only an ironic one. After months in which his team have attempted to persuade us that Iraq and crisis in the middle east are not in fact Blair's true legacy, [then pray what could be? - broken-hearted Trotskyists with tears down their parkas?], he finally finds himself washed up, on a sand bar.

Yes after all those months of trying to scrape the word 'Iraq' from Tony's political tombstone, the big ego has finally bitten the bullet [so as to speak] and determined that he must go with the flow and take his next thirty pieces of silver [or £100,000 per annum] where the tidal flow of his story [or was that history] drives him. And that is, inexorably, to the disputed shores of the orient.

One thing is for sure, Tony Blair's legacy will indubitably be found in the middle east. He at least has now accepted this, as, like a weary pasha, bloody but unbowed, he finally rises from his diwan to meet his nemesis. The question that he and all the other actors in this revenge tragedy must ask, is when the killing can stop and the healing begin; and who can turn the bone train around.

Who said the BNP don't have a voice in parliament?

2007-05-22T00:55:00.000+01:00

And to think I used to get hot under the collar when David Blunkett talked about the 'problems of immigration' in his Sheffield constituency.

Not content with her crazed fantasy - almost Mosley-ite in its misconception - that 8 out of 10 of her Barking voters might vote BNP Margaret Hodge hit a new high with her call for a 'white is right' housing policy. No 10 rushed to her defence of course, while social housing organisations pointed out that supply was the issue in housing not distribution.

Meanwhile Cameron's grammar school games indicate that he at least has the sense of humour required to deal with being continually out-manouvered from the right by New Labour. Gordon Brown's conversion to the joys of the 11Plus is eagerly awaited.

Oh and Ruth Kelly is keen to abolish local communities right to oppose unacceptable developments; while simultaneously abandoning her right to intervene on their behalf - thus creating a perfect New Labour managerialist system where noone can be held accountable by anyone for anything.

She also failed to use the opportunity provided by a live radio interview this morning promoting her rollback of the state, [or handover of its planning responsibilities to those whom it is meant to regulate] to slap down Hodge's far right dalliance. Plus ca change. Let us hope she regrets this.

Suicide is painless, Mr Blair

2007-05-11T02:01:00.000+01:00

It brings on many changes

A BBC correspondent reflected this evening on Blair's departure and signaled the mass demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq as a turning point. He cited the way in which the decision to go to war alienated Blair's natural supporters, as the axis upon which our Dark Knight's fortune turned.

Whisper it softly, but it is now acceptable to say how many people attended the demonstrations against the war without a bizarre and unfeasible reference to the Blairite fantasy that the Poll Tax Demo was larger.

Curiously the Blair babes forget how Major accessed the thorny throne. So perhaps do the Brownites, barely distinguishable as they are to all but the blind who of necessity must listen carefully for content and meaning; and for whom it has been a hard, if ultimately rewarding, decade.

The BBC report of course propogated a classic Labour believer's error, or at least a daydream believer's, far more important in fact was Blair's loss of his wider coalition.

The gloves came off. Home Secrataries were no longer safe ... - nor indeed were the domestic servants of their associates.

Now of course this should not distract us from the fact that Paul Dacre is a crazed loony who thinks that Blair damaged his baby, nor that we, the Labour Party's natural supporters, were generally opposed to 'the Iraq intervention' too. Indeed, given our greater knowledge of the Iraqi exile community - and indeed of middle eastern politics in general - this was mostly with good reason too.

But what Iraq tells us, apart from the lessons about imperialism and its all-but Fanonite dis-junction with neo-conservativism in the third world - which we knew anyway, is that Blair was never about the left.

This above all was why he siezed upon the neo-conservative paranoia of 2002 like a debtor meeting an old friend; why he was a master of missed oportunities; why two years of To[n]ry spending plans were Blair's breathing space; and why Gordon will be hard-pushed to escape the sense of guilt by association as the death toll, and indeed the bills, mount.

Same Old Tories?

2007-03-22T02:30:00.000+01:00

If it makes sense to take poor pensioners out of the tax and benefit systems by raising taxation thresholds (or 'tax free allowances'), then why does it also make sense to abolish the 10% rate of income tax and to make a larger number of low income families more benefit-dependent (as opposed to taking them out of the system as well)?

Likewise, why are poor single people in work having part of their meagre wealth redistributed by this budget to wealthier members of society?

And why are tax credits called tax credits when they are not automatically delivered as a credit against tax and instead have to be claimed like a benefit?

And why is an allegedly social-democratic government cutting corporation tax? Something, one imagines, to do with Tories - and nothing to do with the left.

Sugaring the pill: Is it really racism which has left Lord Levy, Blair's Little Drummer Boy, out in the cold over cash for honours?

2007-03-09T13:40:00.000+01:00

Today a strange PR campign started in which friends and associates of Lord Levy (well his local rabbi and Alan Sugar at any rate) started talking up the notion of a racist witch hunt against Blair's tennis partner, chief fundraiser and Middle East envoy extraordinaire .

I use the term extraodinary advisedly, if only in the sense that his embassy appears to have achieved precisely nothing during one of the most volatile periods in modern Middle Eastern history - unless you count Jordan recently closing its border to Iraqi refugees.

Sugar talked of Levy's 'blind loyalty' and in an intentionally homespun, halting and bonhomie-laced performance stuttered confusedly and contrivedly about how he couldn't really see what Lord Levy got out of this personally - I mean he opined its not like he's making lots of money out of this or anything.*

Interviewing Sugar on the issue on this morning's Radio 4 Today Programme, John Humphrey's mentioned the whole Middle East envoy thing - which if nothing else gets one regular stays down at the Dead Sea spas courtesy of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan**. Sugar didn't seem convinced that this role was of any significance in what was, on reflection, the most believable part of his interview - after all noone in the Middle East believes that Levy's role as an envoy should be taken seriously either.

That said this hasn't stopped him accompanying 'wor Tone' (as he is rarely known in his North East English parliamentary constituency) to the region on an alleged trip of great diplomatic importance as recently as December 2006.

**[Note the British public purse never pays for Lord Levy's trips except when he is entertained by our Ambassador's according to ministers Kim Howells and Geoff Hoon in answers to questions by Mark Francois MP (Conservative) recorded in Hansard dated 19 Feb 2007].

*For the record here is Sugar's slightly sickening homily to the man who arguably has done more than anyone since Jonathan Aitken and Neil Hamilton to destroy trust in our political system:
'what's in it for Levy?' Sir Alan said on BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
"This is not a man who has lined his own pocket, this is not a man who has done some insider trading dealing or something like that in the stock market and has stolen from shareholders.
"This is a man who has blind devotion - I don't know why - to Tony Blair, blind loyalty for Tony Blair and has gone out and blagged people for money for the party.
"That to me is his worse [sic] crime."

I suppose that in the New Morality of New Labour that is OK then. And I suppose Lord Levy's crimes or misdemeanours may be slight alongside invading a country and destroying it as a functioning state on the basis that you have managed to convince some naive backbenchers and racist tories that you thought the country concerned, authoritarianism notwithstanding, might have a weapon that could threaten Cyprus in 45 minutes despite the fact that the name of the country didn't begin with 'Turk' and end in 'ey'.

But then again maybe you have to consider what, or who, after all Lord Levy was fundraising for. If you are Tony Blair's Middle East envoy you can hardly plead ignorance of the effects of his policies can you?

I suppose that explains why he might well have felt safer asking donors if they wanted a peerage, rather than asking them if they wanted the blood of 100,000 Iraqi civilians on their hands - ermine, after all, being so much nicer to the touch than gore.

Doom laden...

2007-01-22T18:27:00.000+01:00

Or scaremongering?

The second holocaust will be quite different. One bright morning, in five or 10 years, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran's acquisition of the Bomb, the mullahs in Qom will convene in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by then in his second or third term, the go-ahead.

The orders will go out and the Shihab III and IV missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa and Jerusalem, and probably some military sites, including Israel's half dozen air and (reported) nuclear missile bases. Some of the Shihabs will be nuclear-tipped, perhaps even with multiple warheads. Others will be dupes, packed merely with biological or chemical agents, or old newspapers, to draw off or confuse Israel's anti-missile batteries and Home Front Command units.

Read on.

The Russians Love Their Children Too - but don't try telling the Bee Gee in Number Ten that the Iraqi's do...

2007-01-05T00:34:00.000+01:00

A seasonal message from Iraq.

Riverbend reflects on the price of delay, overstay and the disaster that our friends in Number 10 and the White House visited upon the Iraqi people and by extension on our people too, or at any rate on those who have the misfortune to find themselves fighting there.

"Here we come to the end of 2006 and I am sad. Not simply sad for the state of the country, but for the state of our humanity, as Iraqis. We've all lost some of the compassion and civility that I felt made us special four years ago. I take myself as an example. Nearly four years ago, I cringed every time I heard about the death of an American soldier. They were occupiers, but they were humans also and the knowledge that they were being killed in my country gave me sleepless nights. Never mind they crossed oceans to attack the country, I actually felt for them.

Had I not chronicled those feelings of agitation in this very blog, I wouldn't believe them now. Today, they simply represent numbers. 3000 Americans dead over nearly four years? Really? That's the number of dead Iraqis in less than a month. The Americans had families? Too bad. So do we. So do the corpses in the streets and the ones waiting for identification in the morgue.

Is the American soldier that died today in Anbar more important than a cousin I have who was shot last month on the night of his engagement to a woman he's wanted to marry for the last six years? I don't think so.

Just because Americans die in smaller numbers, it doesn't make them more significant, does it?"

Predictably she also has her thoughts on the Saddam execution and what it tells us about the Maliki government.

Though we can read our own message into Maliki's pathetic complaints about the woes of office as his bizarre execution-timing backfires. I suspect, however, that this was driven more by a need to see Saddam executed for Bush's sake, before he announced his notably delayed 'new' Iraq policy. Using the execution as a laughable 'achievement line' in the sand Bush will try to talk about part one of the mission being accomplished and an end-game being in sight as he launches a rise in troop numbers after sacking the two senior military commanders who opposed this lunatic policy.

Meanwhile Maliki's talk of leaving office may in fact be an attempt to get US support, having done as Bush asked and timed the execution to insanely bridge the religious festivals of Christians and Muslims and indeed guarantee a symbolically bloody end to 2006 and start to 2007 - not to mention maximising TV coverage

I'm sure Bush wasn't hoping this would work as a distraction from the Democrats seizure of the House and Senate, itself a comment on his failed middle east war strategy (if we can honour it with such a term); but if he was, New Speaker Nancy Pelosi ensured in her opening address that the war didn't slip off the agenda.

Still I'm sure there's someone somewhere (at Harry's Place for example) who thinks its all for the best...

though I'm not sure that Gene at Harry's Place, like many Americans in public life (though thankfully not in comedy-writing), altogether understands irony...

That aside, its a little late for Harry's bootboys to try shyly laughing at themselves now - endearing it ain't.

Christmas message

2006-12-16T23:04:00.000+01:00

The BBC may have the Queen and C4 a comedy turn but Too Early To Tell can exclusively (well, actually its lifted from the comments on a post on Pickled Politics in response to a lengthy slagging match) bring you an early Christmas Message from the geezer whose birthday we're supposed be celebrating.... remember him?

Jesus Christ on 12th December, 2006 at 7:19 pm

Oi!

Give it a rest!

Just enjoy yourselves. Even the Muslims. All of you just calm down. I bring peace and goodwill to all men and women.

Chill out.

Drink some wine.

Enjoy my birthday.

Shake hands with a Sikh.

Hug a Hindu.

Kiss your family members.

Say 'hosannah!' to a Muslim if you see them.

Pinch the bottom of a woman in a burqa, you know they probably just want a bit of saucy attention.

But please, stop fighting, for Nebuchadnezzar's sake!

Oy Vez, if it's not one thing it's another. What am I, chopped liver?

And if anyone has Mel Gibson's contact details, could you pass my e-mail onto him please? I have a bone to pick with him about something.

nazareth_gangster@yahoo.co.uk

Thanks. And, uhhh, peace and love to you all.

~JC~

Free from the Welsh jackboot?

2006-12-15T09:16:00.000+01:00

So Flanders is not declaring independence after all. Watch the spoof news report that threw French Belgium into panic here.

Shame, as a region boasting Antwerp, Bruges and Ghent is unfairly tarred with the boring brush. More to the point I was wondering - when Scotland becomes independent, will England be able to win independence from Wales and Northern Ireland? And if the Scots woke up to what side their bread was really buttered on, as the Wallonians recognise theirs, wouldn't they be the ones to panic if the BBC screened a spoof on a snap move for English independence...?

Day Becomes Night

2006-12-11T01:43:00.000+01:00

Bush and Blair may agree that, as they subtly put it, 'we are not winning' in Iraq, but unsurprisingly Iraqi President Jalal Talabani disagrees with their developing strategies.

In Bush' case this seems to be to let his successor organise a pullout while he talks big and serious, and, as even the odd correspondent, on Fox News' site is now allowed to suggest, sticks his head in the sand, see Susan Estrich: President Bush: State of Denial About Iraq.

Blair meanwhile is talking about regional stability again - and talking up our friends in the hijab and our friends in the Baath (Iran and Syria).

Still Jack Straw always argued that a bird in hijab was worth two in the baath but hey that's another country, I mean story...

More pertinently old cronies like Geoff Hoon appear on Radio 4 to remind us that the Brits were never in favour of disbanding Saddam's army - that was those crazy yanks with their failing Iraq policies which we have been so successful in mediating through our participation in them.

Remember how we were showing them the way in Basra - before the shit hit the fan and we got confined to barracks and handed the streets over to the militias. Jesser Greenstock has been making similar noises to Geoff's recently on this front, explaining how well it was all going before the Americans f**ked it up. As Tony's red-handed loyalists try to persuade us all that they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong rednecks - and that really this unfortunate (if bloody) mix-up should not, God forbid, constitute the legacy of their leader's poppy-red reign.

Oddly none of that early positive stuff ever matched what soldiers returning from Iraq would tell you even in the early days; when they wondered whom they should tell the real story to, the press or the politicians. 'Stay quiet' advised wise heads of military families, unwisely, though perhaps they knew that only individual careers would be at stake, since policy was, so as to speak, so embedded, at that point.

- Well so much for defeating fascism Geoffaroony, there was I thinking we were at least principled in our dementedly ignorant approach to the whole post-conflict[sic] situation. Never mind the pre-conflict choreography of lies and hysteria - never frankly a great basis for a principled liberation - heck sometimes even the liberated get the wrong end of the stick!

Then again it was Tony your mate who offered Saddam a last minute reprieve, so what the hell - after all, that kind of thing can really muddy the water

Meanwhile Mr Talabani rages at the coming of the night

Saddam prepares for his, as Riverbend discussed, appropriately enough one might say, on Guy Fawkes Night: http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_riverbendblog_archive.html

And over at Iraq Body Count the figures keep climbing. Though as reporting deaths becomes ever more disorganised with increasing social breakdown, their methodology, while applaudable, looks to be reaching the limits of its usefulness.

And perhaps they should start adding Lebanese casualties too, not exactly, after all, the law of unintended consequences, when one talks of 're-making the middle east'...

Night becomes day

2006-12-08T16:07:00.000+01:00

I actually agree with every word Tony Blair says. In particular I am pleased that the government appears to be finally making the link between Islamic facism and the home-grown kind.

Those whites who support the BNP's [British National party] policy of separate races and those Muslims who shun integration into British society both contradict the fundamental values that define Britain today: tolerance, solidarity across the racial and religious divide, equality for all and between all.

Thought for the Day - Is John Reid the Anti-War Candidate?

2006-11-27T14:34:00.000+01:00

A couple of weeks back John Reid, Labour's weegie hardman par excellence, (by way of contrast for example to Ian McCartney - who is their whining lard-man par excellence) had some kind of cerebral aschemic attack and came over all reasonable on the Today Programme.

This was such a remarkable event that my half-dressed partner rushed out of the bedroom and into the bathroom where I was shaving to tell me. Her unusual speed (normally nothing can interrupt her leisurely progress toward 'readiness' of a morning) was fortuitous. Had she left it a few seconds longer we might have clashed at a high speed on the short flight of stairs between our bedroom and bathroom, as I was just about to launch into a similarly motivated race into the bedroom to relay very much the same expression of surprise; and it has to be said that in such instances my progress is rarely leisurely.

The Reid reasonable-ness was triggered, intriguingly, by an exchange with Jim Naughtie over whether Reid would back extending the time for which 'terrorist suspects' could be held without charge [I could start to mull whether in the interests of journalistic accuracy the term 'terrorist suspect' should in such instances be replaced with the far more accurate and easily understood term 'anyone' or 'you or your family' ..but now is clearly not the time for such argument over mere semantics...]

Naughtie was musing on whether evidence from opinion polls about 'support for jihad' among the UK population should lead us to conclude that millions of our muslim brothers were secretly plotting to destroy our way of life. In a sort of reverse attack word use of historical analogy he reminded the former Glaswegian Stalinist that he would surely remember a time when opinion polls taken in Western Scotland could have demonstarted similar levels of support for our last major bunch of (sort of) homegrown terrorists - the IRA.

Its unclear whether the analogy helped Reid get in touch with reality over the issue of what 'support' constitutes or whether he is simply becoming a cleverer politician since his last abortive re-positioning effort, when he attempted to persuade us that he was a sort of anti-war candidate for Governor of the Pashtun, went tits up in the face of a Taliban resurgence.

Or perhaps he just saw this as a rare opportunity to put some clear blue water between himself and Tony Blair or more intriguingly between himself and Gordon Brown - who had earlier indicated a desire to increase the period to 90 days like his putative pedecessor.

Brown wants to watch himself, as he backs 90 day detention, Trident replacement and every other Blairite sacred poisoned chalice he can wrap his blubbery lips around. Soon he will have nothing left (oh...forget it...) to reposition himself with except the possibility of re-launching Blair's war with his own party; perhaps coupled with a comedy caper in which he argues with his own chosen successor at the Treasury over how to pay for all this craziness.

Reid on the other hand came over all David Davis-like and said he'd not seen any convincing evidence for this yet - it could be nothing or it could just be his cunning plan to stuff one up Peter Hain, if he can't stuff it up Gordon himself.

Hain, like the rest of the Cabinet has been making very Blairite noises lately - not least about uniting behind the decision to take the most expensive option in Trident replacement. There is a sense in which all the bigger beasts are trying to play the same game so that they all have an equal claim to at least their current share of the cake when the new chief dinner lady turns up. This is also linked to an awareness of the almost suicidal level of damage done to government and party-alike by events around the succession earlier in the year.

So there is an attempt to even the keel, to stop as Hain (and others) earlier put it 'urging more open debate in the Labour Party on replacing Trident, and start talking about the responsibilities of global power '"we're a serious Government and a serious Cabinet ...in charge of one of the world's global powers" said Hain yesterday to the BBC's AM Programme, in a moment of self-delusion chillingly reminiscent of Dr David Owen.

But 'Dr' John Reid, as he was briefly known during his time at Health, is taking a more interesting path. A subtle piece of personal re-positioning may be in the offing as the former bully boy seeks the role of eminence gris, Willie Whitelaw style, in an effort, if not to decide the future of our nation, at least to have a long-term career in the cigar clubs of social democracy.

Reid is playing a long game and I suspect his revenge on those who have questioned his ability will be bitter indeed.

Or that, failing this, there will simply be a lot of bitterness, as Labour positions itself for an internal cold war over who backs which weapons systems and abuses of civil liberties while Reid looks wearily on and wonders how all these kids who havn't even had to make such decisions can possibly have the right to express an opinion.

Reid is distancing himself from his own opportunist past and those leaping into his discarded shoes may come to find themselves barred from the swimming club because of the verukas they catch in the process.

Reid has realised that these will be yesterday's positions and that tomorrow's victors will be those who appear to have moved on.

Maybe that is what is moving the normally admirable Max Stafford Clark to call for the ditching of 'dabblers' like Reid and other Cabinet 'amateurs' who he says endanger judicial principals and civil liberties in the pursuit of policies inspired by opinion polls then leave after only a few havoc-wreaking months in the job to find another department of government to confuse.

I can only hope his speech for the Longford Lecture has been under-reported however, since his notion of professional law-makers being a solution for political opportunism smacks even less of human rights than the former positions of Uncle Joe Reid.

Meanwhile back in politics...
If (sorry 'when', fate notwithstanding) Brown wins the Labour leadership, he would do well to exile Reid North of Hadrian's Wall - to Nato maybe - or more intriguingly perhaps back to his 2001 job in Northern Ireland - where, who knows, he might actually be able to make a real contribution to something substantive.

However it is more likely that the eternally disappointed members of the benighted British party of democratic socialism will find themselves feasting on the wormwood of John Reid as a defender of the left's traditions (if not its policies, a la Prescott) come 2009.

And of course those various final scenarios are not mutually exclusive.

Generation Game, Countdown, or the Price is Right?

2006-11-16T18:02:00.000+01:00

A couple of interesting passages from Michael Scheuer's latest bulletin for your soaraway Global Terrorism Analysis.

On the MI5's Dame Eliza's latest assessment on the threat to the UK:

A final note that will please al-Qaeda was the Dame Eliza-Prime Minister Blair refrain that it will take the UK a generation to defeat the threat. For al-Qaeda, this is a clear signal that British leaders still believe they face a limited threat that can be defeated over time, a conclusion which Islamist leaders—who know their forces are growing geometrically—will welcome as a self-defeating delusion.

On a potential "phased" withdrawl of US forces from Iraq:

Quite simply, that decision would allow bin Laden to score, in the perception of most Muslims, an unprecedented hat-trick of successes; U.S. withdrawal would: (1) Allow the redeployment of many Iraq-based foreign fighters to the Arabian Peninsula, Europe, the Levant and the Horn of Africa; (2) Dramatically increase bin Laden's stature as a leader—and almost a prophet—by disproving the Islamist leaders who damned him for bringing down the "unbeatable military wrath" of the United States on Muslims via the 9/11 attack and validating his contention that Washington lacked the will and ruthlessness to defeat Islamist forces; and, by far the most important, (3) Exponentially surpass the motivational power of the Afghan-Islamist defeat of the Soviet Union via the Arab-Islamist defeat of the United States, the world's second and last superpower.

C2 or not C2...

2006-11-09T15:14:00.000+01:00

I've never been a fan of Carling, obviously, but after a night of sticking to the 3.7 per cent Youngs for the morrow was a "school day" I like the look of their new lager.

According to the breweries it's perfect for a swift one-at-lunch pint, a cheeky on-the-way-home pint, a rewarding after-football-training pint or a responsible big-meeting-tomorrow pint.

Or indeed a Know Your Limits pint?

8 November 2006 to...

2006-11-08T13:12:00.000+01:00

Maybe it will be picked up more widely, but in the event that it is not, I think this is the most omninous development to come out of yesterday's Beit Hanoun attack.

"America is offering political, financial and logistic cover for the Zionist occupation crimes, and it is responsible for the Beit Hanoun massacre. Therefore, the people and the nation all over the globe are required to teach the American enemy tough lessons," Hamas said in a statement sent to The Associated Press.

While critical of the U.S., Hamas has always focused its violent campaign of suicide bombings and rocket attacks against Israeli targets. Wednesday's threat signaled that the group is identifying with global Islamic extremist movements, such as al-Qaida.

I wonder if future historians will consider this thus-far little-remarked upon announcement marks the moment when the War on Terror became the Third World War? Hamas, after all, is the government of the Palestinian state entity and as the article points out this effectively globalises the Palestinian/ Israeli conflict. I don't think their claims that the military and political wings are separate - pace IRA/ Sinn Fein - will cut much ice with the Americans.

Pickled

2006-11-06T21:01:00.000+01:00

I know, I know... but it's not easy to keep opining. Well, actually it is, but not necessarily easy to find the time to actually blog...

Also, winter's coming on and you know sometimes I'm just too irritated to go on about another idiot politician, of whatever ideological hue.

Meanwhile, note an addition to the side bar - Pickled Politics - which I've recently been reading and enjoy.

So, enjoy!

Stoopid

2006-10-16T08:11:00.000+01:00

Alan Johnson's "25 per cent" sop on religious schools does little to ameliorate a problem entirely of the goverment's own making. What non-Muslim parent of a girl would send them to a school where the second-class status of their daughter was institutionalised?

But perhaps I am being unreasonable...

Yesterday Leicester City Council said it did not believe the scarves would deter non-Muslim parents from sending children to the school.

Education spokesman Hussein Suleman, who is also a member of the school's temporary governing body, said: 'We have to find a balance.

'Governors have to take into account the fact that 10 per cent can be of a non-Muslim background and use discretion where appropriate.

'At the same time, parents have a right to send or not send their children to this school. I hope discretion will be used if there are any disagreements.'

The school, which is not expected to make boys cover their heads, was also backed by Suleman Nagdi, of the Federation of Muslim Organisations.

He said: 'All Islamic schools have certain criteria for school uniform. I can't see anything different about the criteria they are setting in this instance.'

How about a benchmark for the idiocy of any Labour policy being the extent to which it is supported by the Conservative Party?

Sticky wicket....

2006-10-13T17:53:00.000+01:00

Britain's top general may know all about pincer movements but he could do with some brushing up on honey traps...

Can Your Bunny Do Hijab?

2006-10-06T18:02:00.001+01:00

Hugh Hefner today defended his statements on women's dress at the Playboy Mansion (or 'bunny ranch' as it is often known).

Hef said that he only requested that all women dressed as Playboy bunnies at the Mansion and that this was a matter of choice and personal freedom.

It was also revealed today that female visitors were always asked to remove their blouses during audiences with the sex magnate.

"Its just the way that we communicate" argued Hef, "If I can't see a woman's breasts I don't feel like we're really making a connection".

He went on to state that it was a free country and that this sort of personal freedom was fundamental to American values, (which he would also be exporting to the rest of the world in his new club openings)

"These are my values," Hef said, "the Playboy Mansion is my society and I set the rules. Women don't have to come and live here, they choose to do so - and they can leave and 'go back home' whenever they want to."

Hef said that criticism from feminists wasn't Cramping his style but misquotes were the last Straw

In yer face

2006-10-06T08:14:00.000+01:00

"Jack Straw can't tell me what to wear, I can wear what I like!" said a Muslim "sister" on the radio this morning. And quite right too - isn't that the kind of attitude decades of public policy has encouraged?

Which is why I believe multiculturalism is inherently racist. Not necessarily in principle but in practice - Jack Straw's objection to the full veil perfectly illustrates the point.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect there was always an assumption by (invariably Christian secularist) policy makers that isn't it lovely for our rainbow society to have its curries and its carnivals - what a multiculti mix! - but difference is only acceptable to a point.

Naturally our New Britons would appreciate the obvious benefits of our society - democracy, liberty, freedom of speech and to have your belly hanging out - which we take so much for granted that we have rarely appreciated these "benefits" are actually hard VALUES. Cultural values that can be accepted (as we arrogantly presume) or rejected. It is our racist assumption that our values are so obviously superior that the other cultural values will simply bow down to them.

The fatal flaw of this assumption has literally been staring Jack in the face.

Get those oiks orf my Easy Jet!

2006-10-03T20:15:00.000+01:00

Sorry Dave, going green doesn't make you any more cuddly to me. OF COURSE I'm concerned about the environment, but I might believe you were more of a friend of the working class (or heavens, even the asprirational lower middle class) if you weren't considering banning the oiks cheap flights.

Don't want them trappling all over Provence, do we.

The circle is now truly closed. The Guardian has long been the most elitist rag on Fleet Street with a higher quota of privately-educated staff than any other (sure, call a chip a chip) and I have always suspected while they publicly sneer at each other in the comment pages the City meet the Chatterati over dinner and in the bedroom. And you can bet THIS policy got a long approving ABSOLUDLEEEEE.... in the salons of Notting Hill.

One of the reasons I quit working for charidee was because it dawned that all these people were preaching poverty BECAUSE THEY COULD AFFORD TO and while I returned home in my hair shirt to my Haringey bedsit (well, almost) they were supping Chianti in their Clapham four-bedroom and looking forward to their ethical holiday building schools for gratifyingly DESERVING orphans in Africa when Alistair's bonus came through (the same applies to immigration by the way: assauge your guilt by championing it for the foreign poor while having nothing but contempt for your own, whose class consciousness has been fragmented to the extent that the "chavs" can only express solidarity through Pop Idol and the Death Of A Princess - well at least they're not asking why we're more unequal now than ever before, eh? And where DID you get your cleaner?).

But I digress... the environment has always been a fave of the aristocrats ever since they got pissed off the Industrial Revolution was drawing their peasants away from the Estate and, horrors, giving them ideas above their station.

Nothing changes. Except, actually, I think its getting worse.

Cherie Blair: just misunderstood (again)... OR: That's not what I meant when I said it was 'a lie' you idiots! - it wasn't THAT lie I meant...

2006-09-26T16:50:00.000+01:00

Apparently Carolin Lotter, a TV producer with the American news agency Bloomberg said she heard the Prime Minister's wife say "Well, that's a lie" after Mr Brown told delegates: "It has been a privilege for me to work with and for the most successful ever Labour leader and Prime Minister".

Clearly what Cherie really meant was simply that Tony Blair is most certainly NOT 'the most successful ever Labour leader and Prime Minister' - Clement Attlee was!

Actually given the woman's notorious hair-splitting ability (for example over whether a given Aussie conman helped her buy some flats...) she could in fact have been troubled quite separately by the truthfulness of both subclauses of the statement. For example viewing Attlee as the former (most successful Labour Leader) and say Churchill, or indeed, maybe her husbands hero Mrs T, as the latter!

Then again maybe she thinks Tony IS the most successful ever leader of Labour and its just the 'most successful prime Minister' tag that she can't swallow.

Just Like the rest of us...

Islam and violence

2006-09-23T10:48:00.000+01:00

Enlightening essay in the Australian that examines the doctrinal relationship between Islam and violence. Not because it focuses on the usual suspects, but because it helps contextualise it both in relation to modern Islam and Christianity.

Cynics might claim that only the mad and bad choose to justify their behaviour on this basis, and in the UK they may have a point, but as there are plenty of examples of energised minorities playing decisive roles in history - from the Bolsheviks to bin Laden - that does not mean we should dismiss them, or the basis of their belief, out-of-hand.

In addition to the inherent difficulty of the sources, many secular Westerners rely on certain crippling preconceptions. One is the often-heard mantra that "all religions are the same". Another is the claim that "anyone can justify violence from any religious text". This idea stretches back at least to Rousseau, who considered any and all forms of religion to be pernicious.

Either of these views, if firmly held, would tend to sabotage anyone's ability to investigate the Koran's distinctive take on violence.

There is another obstacle, and that is Western culture's own sense of guilt and suspicion of what it regards as Christian hypocrisy.

Any attempt to critique some of Islam's teachings is likely to be met with loud and vociferous denunciations of the church's moral failings, such as its appalling track record of anti-Semitism. And did I mention the crusades? Finally, the reality is that Muslims adhere to widely varying beliefs and practices. Most people are understandably afraid to come to their own conclusions about violent passages in the Koran, lest they find themselves demonising Muslims.

But does the Koran incite violence, and how does its message compare with the Bible?

Scheuer thing?

2006-09-20T08:05:00.000+01:00

Former Chief of the bin Laden Unit at the CIA's Counterterrorist Center Michael Scheuer always gives good copy and his latest is worth reading.

He said, "I tell them your leaders are concealing from you the true size of the disaster which will shock you. The days are pregnant and they will give birth to new events with God's permission and guidance. I tell them: You have provided us with all the legal and rational reasons to fight you and punish you. You have committed ugly crimes, breached treaties that you used to impose on others to abide by. For our part, we have repeatedly warned you and repeatedly offered you a truce. So now we have legal and rational justifications to continue fighting you until your power is destroyed or you surrender...We have repeatedly declared our political offer to the West, but the leaders of the West, especially Bush and Blair, are keen on causing confusion about that. Sheikh Osama bin Laden, may God protect him, offered a truce to America and the West. I have already told the West that the way to peace is the withdrawal from our countries, stopping the plunder of our resources and ending support for the corrupt governments in our lands."

In previous articles, Scheuer has explained that these are far more than empty threats - it is his belief that their purpose is to provide theological "cover" for a forthcoming attack. This is why he refers earlier in the article to this impassioned reminder to his Muslim audience that he, bin Laden and al-Qaeda had done all that is possible to find a peaceful settlement to Islam's war with the United States, but to no avail as ominous.

Yo Neville!

2006-09-19T09:47:00.000+01:00

If you've got Realplayer or similar, and you share my curiosity about how the weaknesses of great men shape events more surely than their strengths, I really recommend this lecture by mine and Chris B's old tutor at Newcastle University, the inestimable Professor Hugh Berrington. He more or less invented this subject of The Psychology of Politics, and still after all these years, he's as sharp as a needle.

The parallels between Chamberlain and Blair are superb, even if there is a difference between kissing Hitler and high-fiving Dubya.

Post-Osama terrorism

2006-09-12T13:25:00.000+01:00

It's been on sale a few days already, but if you can get hold of it, I really recommend this week's New Yorker. Excellent stuff on Hamas, Sudan and a funny, almost affectionate portrait of the USA's top al Qaeda informant Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl.

It's worth getting solely for this brilliant piece by Lawrence Wright on jihadism. It picks up some of the themes of Jason Burke and the flawed but unfairly maligned Power of Nightmares documentary to illustrate how Osama isn't some omnipotent master criminal, but in fact one current of a powerful, varied and deeply worrying ideology.

It set me to thinking: if the muscular liberal/neo-con nightmare of the Salafists establishing a Caliphate came true, would it be the launching pad for a war against the west, or an economic basket case with no international sponsors to take a begging bowl to? In one section, a blueprint to build a Caliphate from scratch in 20 years (now there's a Good Housekeeping cover line I'd like to see) involves the Islamists persuading the world to switch to gold as the international medium of exchange to undermine the dollar.

Hmm, I'm sure there's a reason we did away with this.Isn't the point with gold as a medium of exchange that it's pretty much useless as a commodity and only works if you can find someone to buy it at a higher price than you paid for it? Or simply, only if you can find a bigger idiot than yourself? Not a great model for a putative economic superpower.

Elsewhere the piece analyses the writings of the shadowy Abu Bakr Naji, one of the more rounded and shrewder jihad theorists, where he airily dismisses health, agriculture, economics and more or less all non-war/ coercive functions of government as the business of non-mujahid technocrats. ("As for the one who manages the techniques in each ministry, he can be a paid employee who has no interest in policy.") I would suggest he's riding for a fall by entrusting the health of his theocracy to secularised civil servants. None of which lessens the jihadists' ability to cause murder and mayhem on a horrific scale while in opposition, but it provides an interesting spin on their pretensions to power.

Anyway, there's plenty to talk about here. And it's a much more rewarding read than that bloody Martin Amis thing. (BTW if your local newsagent doesn't stock it, the New Yorker puts a stupidly generous amount of its excellent writing online gratis. All this and the God-like Anthony Lane , the greatest film critic in the World too!)

The Unwinnable War and the Enemy Within

2006-09-12T00:41:00.000+01:00

As it is still September 11th (which is to say that it was when I started writing this), I feel obliged to post something on what is ludicrously known as the War on Terror. Mis-conjugation (as opposed to Miss Congeniality) apart, this is not a notion I am fond of, but, for all that, it is easy to get lost in semantics and neglect to mention that this 'war' has killed (and terrified) an awful lot of people. The vast majority of this war's casualties are neither British nor American. Though that does nothing for those who grieve, in New York and elsewhere around the world, today. Then again neither did invading Iraq. Or destroying Lebanon's infrastructure and de-legitimising its fledgling democracy.

I am partly motivated to post by a need to reprise a '7/7' article which I wrote on July 8th last year. Thus, having missed that anniversary, 11/9 calls...

I was asked to write a personal response to the 2005 London bombings for a Kurdish newspaper and I duly wrote a call for unity against terror (natch) and commented on the fact that I saw these acts not as a part of any ideological or tactical battle but as attacks on humanity and civilisation by murderous nihilists. In particular I saw them as attacks on the flourishing international city which London (like New York) is. I further commented that I saw this as having nothing to do with religion and that no religious person I knew in London had anything in common with the bombers. Perhaps over-comprehensively I also dismissed Iraq - this was not about Iraq, I airily claimed.

Now I might not be so comprehensive, though I am in no way suggesting that our disastrous campaign in Mesopotamia in any way justifies the actions of the Midlanders who chose to blow up so many of my fellow Londoners in the course of taking their own lives last July.

I suppose I was polemicising, and while I rejected the notion of an international conspiracy of terror, I was well-aware of the dangers of a backlash against people who had nothing in common with the bombers except OUR perception of them as 'islamic'.

As it happened, all it took for one distinctly un-islamic member of the Universal City's population, was for an armed and nervy copper to percieve him as looking a bit foreign (and maybe shifty). Eight bullets in the head later the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes wasn't in a position to explain anything.

Meanwhile, Asian commentators start to claim that our foreign policy is 'fanning the flames of extremism', our civil liberties gradually erode, and endless words are written about the exact nature of this 'islamic extremism' and how to combat it. Three Labour Home Secretaries have ludicrously promised to vet imans and 'monitor mosques'.

MI5 have speculated that 'we' have 1,200 'home-grown' islamic extremists - as if they are daring the politicians to order them to 'bang 'em up'.

This was Osama's first real victory, we handed him hegemony over our notion of islam and, because we are the majority and the hegemonic group in society, Osama's Islam became our Islam - and we were very terrified, and Islam was very alienated - because it did not recognise the version of itself which it saw reflected in our media.

In this frankly deranged context it is perhaps pertinent to look at exactly how terrorism exists within society.

Attempting to prevent domestic terrorists blowing up tube trains by banning 'extremist imans' and attempting to 'intervene to prevent the radicalisation of young moslems', as one of the younger Millibands recently promised, is a bit like banning caves so that you can prevent Osama hiding in them. That's before we even get onto how you define a 'hideable-in-cave' - or indeed 'a dangerous degree of radicalisation'.

In this sort of style, further endless words have been written on the progenitor of the enemy within, attempting to dissect 'islamic extremist' ideology in order to purge it from 'mainstream mosques' (and no doubt from 'hardworking families' too).

And so, maybe, to Iraq, where we are now fighting the War on Terror. According to George and Tony.

And, indeed, to my reservations about that airy dismissal I made, in July 2005, of Iraq's place in a discourse on the explosive hatred stemming from our so-called enemy within....

I have not changed my view that terrorism is NOT principally caused by an unpopular foreign policy but such a policy CAN just make it more successful. Not principally because this makes the terrorist recruiting sergeants's job easier, though clearly it does; nor because it may marginally legitimise the terrorists dialogue, though clearly it does; but because it makes it easier for terrorists to hide.

If there is a lot of background noise about our terrible foreign policy etc, etc, then it is easier for the real terrorist to be missed. Annoyingly if you look harder (- i.e. try to bang up all the 'extremists') you are likely to simply inflame opposition and dissent - creating more noise (if not necessarily more terrorists) and offering your real terrorist further cover.

So lets all think a little before we assume, John Reid style, that what is needed is a symbolic show of force to unsettle the opposition.

Our best defence really is ignoring the bastards and getting on with our daily lives.

Talking up the threat really is aiding and abetting the enemy - both because our terror is their victory and because they need Tony Blair and George Bush to hide behind. WE don't need either.

What is more if we accept the big scary definition of brothers in arms messrs Blair, Bush and Bin Laden, we actually run the risk of persuading more no-marks from the fringes of our society that they have an important role to play in the future of the world.

This above all is the link between today - and all the other numerous psycho-numerary anniversaries - and the actual risks posed by domestic terror.

The world really didn't change on the 11th of September 2001. Allow that belief to flourish and we are entering Osama's world, a future made by Al-Qaeda. I don't buy that - no matter how hard Mr Blair tries to sell me Dubya's delusions.

The trouble with Martin

2006-09-11T14:15:00.000+01:00

I was absorbed yesterday by reading the Martin Amis essay on Islamism in the Observer and desperately wanted to post something on it. Damnably the always provocative Graham at Harry's Place has beaten me to it (unfortunately the comments box debate has been taken up by the usual self-styled Hammers of Islam, but ho hum).

Like much of Amis' stuff, the writing is fabulously fluent and technically astonishing, but the grasp on reality is tenuous. His old buddy Hitch has lent him some Paul Berman, and from this he has constructed a monolithic Islamist Frankenstein that dominates the religion and holds the middle east in thrall. The different political situations in these countries; the doctrinal differences between different schools of Islam, the economic influences that have shaped the variants of political Islam over the last 30 years are absent.

There's a suggestion that the Middle East isn't ready for democracy, because they always vote for the wrong parties that smacks of Brecht's demand that the government should dissolve the people and elect a new one. Then he castigates Ken Livingstone for being too understanding of the root causes of suicide bombers, before dabbling in some inverse rationalism of his own by implying Islamist "horrorism" has somehow brutalised the West into creating Gitmos and Abu Ghraibs. But the thing that really rankles is the lack of politics at the heart of the essay. Amis lives in a stately bubble of big ideas, with little appreciation of the material actions and opposite reactions which birth an al Qaeda, a Hezbollah, or a second term Bush presidency.

In his recent short story about 9/11 ringleader Muhammad Atta, Amis ignores the real figure of Atta to impose his own vision of an atheistic nihilist motivated solely by a hatred of humanity and a disgust for his own flesh. In truth he was a far more complex character, arguably politicised to the apocalyptic creed of al Qaeda through his disgust at poor town planning in his native Egypt. The reality provides more blackly comic material for a writer, but it also calls for an engagement with the issues of real people, Amis seems reluctant to commit to.

Craig Brown, whose parody of Amis included here is one of the funniest things I've ever read, raised another chuckle recently when discussing the Betjeman forgeries which recently fooled his biographer AN Wilson.

"In fact, one might almost say that authors are their own worst forgers: most people are agreed that Martin Amis has been producing some pretty unconvincing Martin Amises over the course of the past decade."

Well maybe all too convincing as himself I fear, but convincing as a guide to the complex times we live in? Maybe if you believe that Bono's an economist.

Racism in football? Makelele and Gallas comments show us that Jose Mourinho is no more a fascist than Luis Aragones... but no less a disgrace

2006-09-07T01:32:00.000+01:00

Football first.

Jose Mourinho has a particular approach to team motivation. It is an approach honed on his achievements with mediocre players at the highest level. It is about subjugation of personality to team ethos. Because a great team comprised of average players will (and indeed should) always be greater than the sum of its parts. It is also about leadership, about who is boss and following orders. But it is also about individual skill and motivation in the service of shared goals. In many ways this is an applaudable approach, which would be praised in areas of human endeavour far wider than sport; and not least in business and public service.

Every now and again this approach meets a rock in the road like William Gallas. This inevitably happens more often as your club's buying power grows.

Mourinho sticks to the book in such instances - unfortunately the book concerned is the Lord of The Flies, rather than the FIFA rulebook.

For Mourinho is a bully. And like the streetfighting gangster he pretends to be, he must first humiliate those who threaten his authority; before binding their loyalty to him with a kiss and the offer of a position in his family business.

Gallas however declined to kiss the ring, perhaps because he always felt a lingering loyalty to the very different Chelsea manager who brought him to the Club, the disarmingly emotionally open Claudio Ranieri. A man who not only wore his heart on his sleeve but garlanded it with his every human uncertainty.

Ranieri was among the first to express his personal horror and professional distaste for Chelsea's statement alleging that Gallas had threatened to sabotage the team if played against his will. But he was not short of company, whether from Gordon Taylor of the PFA or from the Manager of the French National Team, Raymond Domenech.

When all is said and done Mourinho is above all a cold-eyed tactician to Ranieri's emotionally uncertain Tinkerman. And, while Jose is undoubtedly personally slighted by Gallas' decision to turn his back on the somewhat Mansonian Chelsea 'family' he has created, his main aim in attempting to blacken (sic) Gallas name is to overshadow the victory Arsene Wenger has achieved over him with the acquisition of Gallas (and £5 million) from Chelsea in exchange for Ashley Cole.

Arsenal get a player who has won at the highest level and who can play in any defensive position, if admittedly one who wishes to be played consistently in one of them. Chelsea get a sulky one-trick pony who can play in only one, has won little and who had alienated the fans with his unseemly courtship of Roman Abramovitch's deposit account. Not only this, Arsenal had flourished without Cole last season during his long period of injury.

Mourinho had thought that his acquisition of Cole would be a psychological sucker-punch for Arsenal in a season also likely to see Thierry Henry head to Catalonia's cathedral of football the Camp Nou. But the best laid plans can come to naught and ironically it is Chelsea's discarded striker Eidur Gudjohnssen who now plies his trade for Barca, while Thierry earned himself immortality on the Holloway Road for his almost universally unexpected decision to grace the Emirates with his prescence this season.

Against this background Mourinho saw his best option in attempting to make Gallas appear as sullied a batch of goods to Arsenal as Cole undoubtedly is to Chelsea - for Cole's name is already pretty black among most football neutrals and Chelsea fans must wonder a little at the defensive limitations his prescence underlines.

Then of course there is the small matter of slavery. What? Yes, 'slavery', for that apparently, in Mourinho's manipulative little world, is what the relationship between Raymond Domenech's French national team and Chelsea midfielder Claude Makelele represents, when he is called to play for France after earlier announcing his international retirement.

But should I have read I the Sun yesterday it would have been Gallas I encountered first.

Bizarrely, as the British PM clung to power and UK troops suffered another of the grimmest days of casualties in combat since the 'end' of the (latest) war in Iraq, Sun readers woke to see a front page dominated by Gallas and the word 'Blackmail'.

Now I know (really) that the editor of the Sun is not as racist as this front page might lead you to believe. It is essentially a joke and a good way to fill the front page after Rupert and Tony fell foul of the international dateline and Mr Blair had to find another day to announce his likely departure from what one might call 'frontline' politics.

But with its ironic nod to all those infamous but utterly apocryhphal stories about 'loony lefty' councils banning 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' in the 80s and, more recently, 'political correctness gone mad', the Sun is, like Mourinho, sailing close to the wind and while Gallas might have a job pinning a charge of racism on them, he would certainly get them on what laughing boy Tony and his authoritarian cohorts might call 'a lack of respect'.

First witness for the prosection, Mr Lilian Thuram.

A very British neo-con?

2006-09-01T17:31:00.000+01:00

Had a blast from the past this week when I read the obituary of proto-Thatcherite Sir Alfred Sherman. He's someone whom I confess to not having thought about in many years, but in the spicier political climes of the eighties he was a perfect folk devil. The brains behind Keith Joseph who was the brains behind Thatcher, he was responsible for introducing scorched-earth monetarist economics to our shores, as well as a few crazier stunts designed to raise the hackles of the eminently teasable eighties Left, such as inviting Jean Marie Le Pen to address a Tory conference fringe meeting.

It's tempting to dismiss him as an Eighties anachronism, but maybe he was the forerunner of the current crop of crazy American Trots who moved to the hard-right of the GOP without ever losing the desire to try to stick a saddle on a cow. Some selected highlights: he too began on the left: a Communist Party firebrand who jacked in his studies to fight for the goodies in the Spanish civil war; much later via an organisation called Western Goals (even the name summons up one of those slaps in the face for "relativism" neo-cons are always promising to deliver!) he espoused a neo-con's obsession with terrorism as a self-serving entity in itself, notoriously trying to demonise the ANC by linking it to the IRA. He finished up as a pioneer of "Eurabia", his curious attachment to Serbian nationalism rationalised by his fear of a muslim Bosnia. Some of his bizarre writing on the subject, here and here has more than a touch of Mark Steyn or Mad Mel, a sort of Silovitz Likudism if you will.
There's a cautionary tale here for the "Hitchensist" left.

The important thing is not where you start or where you finish but the progress of your ideological journey. Sherman's Guardian obituarist Dennis Kavanagh described him as a "political entrepreneur", a wonderful phrase I've had in my head all week. Among such characters there's often an addiction to the thrill of new ideas that makes old principles look staid and dull. The only constant is the urge to change the world, but to invert an aphorism from a wiser man than me, maybe the point is actually to understand it first.

He's a biggun

2006-09-01T09:04:00.000+01:00

He's a one. Fascist's friend Ken Livingstone brands black chair of the CRE racist.

One can't help wondering if he's familiar with a technique pioneered by some other bogeymen he's fond of evoking.

The new race card?

2006-08-15T23:09:00.000+01:00

Cameron criticises terror effort the BBC and everyone else tell us...

Apparently Conservative leader David Cameron has said that our fear-loving (or was that god-fearing, or indeed merely scared, or SCARY) government is not doing enough to fight Islamist extremism in the UK.

Ho hum.

You may recollect that I was musing only last week, in my post: Old LAG Sandy shows Little John that there's no such thing as a triangular race card ...on how Labour can never successfully triangulate the Tories on 'immigration fears', or dear reader in other words on race (for all that they have spent almost ten years and at least two Home Secretaries on trying to do so).

Well, in an almost equally fantastic attempt to stretch the rules of populist politics beyond their capacity to accomodate what Dave and Tony cutely call 'political cross-dressing', Dave the Chimera has decided to attack the government of the day, which has, we are led to believe just saved us from the globe's largest ever airborne terrorist media opportunity and mass murder plot, on... yes you got it, not being tough enough on terror...

Dave, DAVE... DAVE!!!!

Still once a Tory always a Tory eh? It really is about time you asked Tony for your natural territory back.

What will now be of slightly frightening interest will be the nature of Tony and his loyal attack-dog namesake, Sir Ian at the Met,'s responses.

After all they shot that poor Brazilian guy while the Tories were PRAISING them.

I blame Tim

2006-08-10T17:19:00.000+01:00

For anyone who has hoped and believed, as I have, that the British way of integrating Muslim citizens is more promising than the French one, the last year has been discouraging writes Tim Garton-Ash.

Not just "discouraging", shurly, given that in 2004 article Who was to blame? Tim graphically laid waste to the French capital in an imaginary nuclear attack perpetrated by a pair of sisters narked that they couldn't wear their hijab in class.

Who knows, by 2009 when Tim set his nightmare vision, things may have changed. By which time he will have no doubt performed yet another graceful back-flip.

Meanwhile: whatever the mix of causes for this alienation, we need to escape from seeing British Muslims only through the prism of two currently prevailing paradigms: the terrorism paradigm and the backwardness paradigm...

The idea that these young British Muslims might actually be putting their fingers on some things that are wrong with our modern, progressive, liberal, secular society; the idea that rational persons might freely choose to live in a different, outwardly more restricted way; these hardly feature in everyday progressive discourse. But they should.

So, while accepting that the more "muscular" attitude of the French may have garnered results (81% of British Muslims polled said they were Muslim first and a citizen of their country only second, compared to 46% of French Muslims) he then continues head-long over the same old precipice.

But who is to blame for our current difficulties? Well I'd suggest Tim and the policy-makers his views reflect could bear some of the responsibility - conjuring up imaginary horrors, their relativist fantasies have helped create real demons.

And in that same real world the French are beginning their vacances while we, grounded, turn upon ourselves.

Domino Effect? Lieberman is a casualty of war for the muscular liberals - but which one...

2006-08-09T13:58:00.000+01:00

Senator Joe Lieberman the so-called 'muscular liberal' or pro-war left's poster boy on the Democratic side of Congress has lost his primary to an anti-war newcomer.

On Sunday the Washington Post was reporting that the Connecticut Race Could Be Democratic Watershed explaining, as the anti-war challenger Ned Lamont raced ten points ahead in the pollls, that:

"The passion and energy fueling the antiwar challenge to Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman in Connecticut's Senate primary signal a power shift inside the Democratic Party that could reshape the politics of national security and dramatically alter the battle for the party's 2008 presidential nomination, according to strategists in both political parties.

"A victory by businessman Ned Lamont on Tuesday would confirm the growing strength of the grass-roots and Internet activists who first emerged in Howard Dean's presidential campaign. Driven by intense anger at President Bush and fierce opposition to the Iraq war, they are on the brink of claiming their most significant political triumph, one that will reverberate far beyond the borders here if Lieberman loses.

"An upset by Lamont would affect the political calculations of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who like Lieberman supported giving Bush authority to wage the Iraq war, and could excite interest in a comeback by former vice president Al Gore, who warned in 2002 that the war could be a grave strategic error. For at least the next year, any Democrat hoping to play on the 2008 stage would need to reckon with the implications of Lieberman's repudiation."

Lamont's stunner of a result asks further question for Democrats debating the parties best stance in the next Presidential campaign, as the Post ponders.

Its not just about bringing the boys home from Baghdad for all that the reverse is currently happening with even regiments due for time back in the US sent straight back onto Baghdad operations, it is also about how much the current war in Lebanon is starting to influence the domestic US analysis of the last (and ongoing) one in Iraq.

Sure Lamont campaigned on opposition to the Iraq war, but the growth of his lead in the polls as Lebanon burned, the UN fiddled and the US supplied the bombs, suggests that it might juist be what Israel's government likes to portray as the new front in the War on Terror which actually cost Liberman the Senate nomination.

Lebanon, for people like me, who have Lebanese friends with relatives in Beirut now, is above all about Lebanon; but for the voters of Connecticut Lebanon is also about Iraq and about the War on Terror and above all about the nature of the US' engagement with the wider world. For them, perhaps, Lebanon is about the future, about whether US troops are once again in a peacekeeping role in the middle east and about which peace they will be trying to keep.

Old LAG Sandy shows Little John that there's no such thing as a triangular race card

2006-08-09T00:52:00.000+01:00

When will New Labour's reactionary home secretaries learn that attempts to triangulate the right on immigration just leave you wrongfooted and astride a supposed central reservation which appears to be suspiciously, and indeed perilously, positioned right down the 'centre' of the right hand carriageway.

The Telegraph reports approvingly: Reid to set limit on immigration

The Guardian sucks in its cheeks and describes the Home Secretary, John Reid, saying yesterday that he wanted to see "an optimum level of immigration" set for Britain
as a 'major departure'

While, Reid: 'Talking about immigration is not racist' says the Daily Mail which isn't either...

While the uber-cautious FT.com has Reid merely 'hinting' at a limit

A story, to be fair to the local government press, first trailed on Monday, by Public Finance: http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/news_details.cfm?news_id=28439

Sandy Bruce-Lockhart is of course a Tory, Labour's longstanding control of the LGA having been a casualty of Blair's third term and the Second Gulf War. Still wor Sandy makes a change from the unremittingly tedious former LGA Chair Sir Jeremy Beecham a man who looks like Michael Howard's dark side but whose own has been so effectively laid to rest that Mr Healey's old dead sheep Geoffrey Howe analogy could be applied. That said, whatever the Daily Mail has to say about Little John Reid's (non)racist tendencies, I wouldn't be too sure about what Sandy is up to...

Forza il Herald Tribune!

2006-08-07T09:48:00.000+01:00

Some brief observations from my all-too-brief holiday location, a sleepy seaside town in Southern Italy.

1. If there was a newspaper in Purgatory, it would be this one. The only English rag available, it made the Herald Tribune seem, well, jaunty.

As Lebanon and Israel burned, Castro keeled over and, heavens, there was another expulsion from the Big Brother House, it led on ...

AARRRGGGGHHHH... I'd rather read the baseball results.

2. Italians like to round off their TV news reports with a "funny" that ivariably focuses on a slice of English eccentricity like this, yet their government can take decisions like this and still not win the top comedy slot.

3. While it may be true that "you will never eat badly in Puglia", even the greatest Spaghetti cazza (sha) can seem monotonous after day five.

An Abuse of Common Sense - or Winning the War on State Terror

2006-08-04T11:26:00.000+01:00

It is a not inconsiderable irony that it is our staid and elitist judiciary who are once again found defending both human rights and logic.

It is no surprise that the democratic poseurs like John Reid who are manning Mr Blair's increasingly authoritarian last stand against the forces of history should once again be arguing from positions of populist fiction against both logic and principle.

Like Michael Howard before him - who similarly manned the Alamo of authoritarianism for another morally bankrupt and duplicitious Prime Minister, if arguably a marginally less dangerous one - John Reid is taking punches.

This is good. It also feels right, if only because Reid is a man for whom the term pugnacious was coined and if you take one 'pugnacious' scottish muscular liberal, shaven headed and proud of his stalinist past, trying once again, just as all those years ago in the CP, to shape the tide of time through the abuse of democracy and appeals to false logic and dubious theory, well... lets face it, he's gotta expect a battering, right? - I mean frankly he's LOOKING FOR IT. Probably quite literally.

~ Please note, legal eagles, that the term 'probably' now means that the subject of the sentence is extremely improbable. As in the sentence, "The prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy" - which apparently means, that, while things in Iraq are a little tricky at present, we don't really have to worry because Colonel Tony has things in hand - and that in particular there is absolutely no need to worry about the division of Iraq, despite the fact that the Kurds (as evidenced below) are already pursuing an independent political and economic model called errr Free Market Kurdistan (or rather, if you see my point, South Kurdistan); while the former South of Iraq looks to Iran to defend it from the West and the Centre; and the Centre looks increasingly to little other than war and dreams of Sunni triumph on a pan-regional scale as the only logically positive dream option for a once-powerful and now hated minority which the rest of the country want to keep disempowered and in some cases would quite like to annihilate - if only in revenge for past blood debts.

Meanwhile... back to the former Defence Secretary, whom you'll recollect was so reassuring, during his brief stint as Commander of the Imperial Red (white & blue) Army, about our Afghan 'mission of reconstruction'....

Somewhere, whether literally in a basement club, or metaphorically in a semen-stained fantasy, a woman is wielding a birch over Little John's blue-pink ass and lordy it makes him feel good. I cannae lie aboot it - it gie's me the strength of purpoos tae gae oon. Ken, throo ma oon pain I can coom to undeystann the suffring of the peeple whoo we are actually fighting this whor wit.

Yeah right - well, whatever JR gets up to in private, at least the birch boys on the hard benches of her Majesty's judiciary are paying attention to satisfying his needs in public and giving him a regular beating - in our democratic interests (if admittedly at our financial expense) - in the highest courts of our fair democratic land .

Still its a small price to pay to see the b*stard getting his just desserts - I just wish I didn't get the feeling he enjoys it so much. Almost as if this bizarre team of unimaginative middle managers of capitalism see the judicial system which they and so many of their spouses and friends belong to, or have belonged to, as the only reliable mechanism for deciding what should properly be decided by the people and through the ballot box.

Own Your Own Bit of (what used to be) Iraq - Live Tax-Free in Kurdistan

2006-08-01T18:18:00.000+01:00

The PR Week Global Newswire tell us that:

Kurdistan hopes promotional push will increase foreign interest
Ted McKenna 31-Jul-06
WASHINGTON: Kurdistan, part of northern Iraq that has been spared the violence roiling the south, is tapping a US agency to highlight its natural beauty, tax-free living, and 100%-foreign-ownership of businesses as reasons to visit and invest in the Kurdish-controlled province.

BrandRepublic - part of the same Haymarket family which produces PR Week, Campaign, Marketing, Revolution [no pun intended], etc., tells us a little more for free - though of course its the same report (check that article ID code in your browser after clicking the link):
"San Francisco-based Russo, Marsh & Rogers (RMR) has launched a PR and ad push on behalf of the Kurdistan regional government of Iraq, seeking to promote Kurdistan in the US as "the Other Iraq" - a relatively safe place for Western investment. Contrasting Kurdistan with war-torn central Iraq, the new Kurdistan campaign boasts on the www.theotheriraq.com Web site, for instance: "It's spectacular. It's peaceful. Welcome to Iraqi Kurdistan. Where democracy has been practiced for over a decade." "We were concerned a little bit that the violence in Lebanon was going to overshadow Middle East coverage," said RMR founder Sal Russo. "But on the other hand, while it..."

Ahhh, the other Iraq: http://www.theotheriraq.com/ Love the logo guys, it'd be funny if it wasn't so...unfunny - still every empire needs a buffer state and its always cool to have a free market one; and, remember, once Turkey joins the EU, Kurdistan is our buffer state with the terrorist playground of Central (and indeed southern) Iraq. That might just make you think twice about the embroidered hat business and the holiday home.

How many dead children does it take to make a Liberal Muscle flex?

2006-07-31T16:06:00.000+01:00

At a sitting, (Titus Andronicus reference not wholly unintended), 34 apparently.

Colonel Blair was however quick to remind his supporters that, should the children killed be Iraqi children, rather than Lebanese, different multiples would apply...

Meanwhile, carrying a report from New York Times reporter Neil MacFarquhar in Damascus, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports on another of those apparently unintended consequences of this apparent attempt (or 'opportunity' in Condi-speak) to re-draw the map of the Middle East. MacFarquhar tells us that Arab leaders change tack as public supports Hezbollah - all bringing Mr Gingrich's Third World War that little bit closer [see references to Kurt Andersen's New York Magazine article in my posting last Friday, below]

Qana, as we all know, is famous for two things. It is supposedly the site of the miracle in which Jesus Christ turned water into wine (John 2:1-11) . It was also the site of a massacre of civilians sheltering in a UN Compound in 1996, during a previous war which Israel was fighting in Lebanon. It is unclear quite what miracle those who bombed Qana this weekend were trying to perpetrate, perhaps something to do with restoring the power of sight to the international community after the collective blindness of the last two weeks. George Bush and his Israeli friends may not be squinting in the new-found light but it appears that the muscular Mr Tony might just be about to blink.

Of course, as he talks NATO buffer forces, the families of military men across Britain will be pondering how many middle eastern wars we wish to be caught in the crossfire of at one time - and how many more of these we can start before they cease to be viewed as independent wars and become just one big war - not so much 'on Terror' as Of Terror.

In an article entitled Days of darkness Gideon Levey writing in the Israeli paper Haaretz states, "Lebanon, which has never fought Israel and has 40 daily newspapers, 42 colleges and universities and hundreds of different banks, is being destroyed by our planes and cannon and nobody is taking into account the amount of hatred we are sowing." He concludes, "Long before this war is decided, it can already be stated that its spiraling cost will include the moral blackout that is surrounding and covering us all, threatening our existence and image no less than Hezbollah's Katyushas."

Haaretz also reported, as early as the 23rd July, on an Anti-war Tel Aviv rally drawing a Jewish, [and] Israeli Arab crowd referring to this as 'the first cracks in the consensus', and reflecting that in the 1982 war with/in Lebanon such 'cracks' had taken ten days to emerge, against slightly less than a week in this case. The article also ponders the apparent start of an anti-American flavour in this incipient Israeli anti-war movement. That would indeed be a crack, or at any rate it might be if it ever amounted to more than the current coalition of the politically isolated.

It is disgusting to speculate about anything good coming out of Qana 2006 but it might just shine a bloodstained light into that crack.

And the beat goes on - on and on and on - It's all Just a little bit of History Repeating

2006-07-28T11:03:00.000+01:00

Your choice: Jim Muir of the BBC in Tyre (title link), saying very much the same thing that I was two weeks back (below), or the Propellerheads and Miss Shirley Bassey

For other perspectives on the systematic destruction of one of the Middle East's emergent democracies, here's a piece from New York Magazine talking to people including Anthony Bourdain the media chef and author of Kitchen Confidential who was in Lebanon when, as he puts it, George Bush-style, "in a moment, it turned to shit." It also tells us that at this point a notice went up on the Time Out Beirut Website saying: "Beirut's favourite entertainment and listings magazine is now suspended. Lebanon is being, once again, used as a battleground for a war that neither its government nor its people want. They are killing our city."
Read the article: Life in Beirut Before Wartime -- New York Magazine

Also from New York Magazine, Kurt Andersen gives a slightly more nuanced take on the situation's 'insane duality' in What We Won't Talk About in the Israel-Lebanon Conflict including the following paragraph which manages both to accuse Newt Gingrich of being a Manichean dualist heretic (if subtly) and to point up the onanistic approach of Fox News to other people's war's as their newsreaders use Israel's incursions into Lebanon as a sort of Chris Morris-style psychic dildo, after such rhetorical fireworks Mr Andersen ends soberly by considering Austrian Archduke's in the Twentieth Century,

"So at this time of staggering new complexity comes a two-front Israeli war - which temporarily serves, like all wars, to make a complex situation seem simple. Some on the right are pleased because (like Islamist radicals) they are bloody-mindedly eager for a wider war. The Weekly Standard suggested last week that the U.S. should use "this act of Iranian aggression" - that is, Hezbollah's attacks on Israel - as a pretext for "a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait?" "It's World War III," Newt Gingrich declared, a wishing-for-1914 mantra that half the Fox News stars masturbatorily repeated. And Gingrich, shrewd and frank, was clear about his rhetorical intentions in painting a stark, black-and-white, Manichaean picture. "The minute you use the language," he explained, the discussion becomes, "Okay, if we're in the Third World War, which side do you think should win?"

Andersen continues, "To insist wishfully that World War III has started - to try to recast a trope as a fact - is hideous. However, that such a proposition can be bandied about on network TV by a national politician (and former historian) gives even sober people the willies. Might the Israeli soldiers' capture turn out to be our century's assassination of an Austrian archduke...? "

The Price of Freedom from Syrian Occupation...

2006-07-17T17:54:00.000+01:00

The rewards of freedom eh?

A few short months ago, many in the West, not least those camp authoritarians the self-styled 'muscular liberals', were celebrating an apparent popular uprising of the Lebanese people which led to the final withdrawal of Syrian troops from the country.

The country had been significantly rebuilt under former President Rafik Hariri, and the Syrians apparent assassination of 'Mr Lebanon' had been the final straw. Just as he stood poised to lead a return to power for the band of practical men and women with whom he had played such a key part in reinvigorating the Lebanese economy and creating a climate fit for inward investment. Hariri's achievements saw the country feted by publications as diverse as the Wall Street Journal and Wallpaper as the next big thing in investment terms. A colossal missed opportunity was once again open for business. Then someone blew him up.

But the Lebanese people stood firm, revolted by this act of barbarism - whether perpetrated in fact by Syria or by its increasingly unruly proxies in the South of Lebanon - or indeed by other factions altogether.

This was a process of re-birth. It was a case of tentative steps on the path toward a new democracy. Even the muscular liberals raised their T-Shirts in glee and gazed lecherously at this sexy new member of the progressive club, while talking fantastically, ar at any rate with forked tongues, about 'Region change'

After decades of civil war and occupation Lebanon was starting to rise again.

The link at the top of this post is to a Harry's Place comment on this period - it appears that the answer to the placard in the doctored photo asking 'Syria, Who's next?' is 'YOU ARE'

And the price of freedom from Syrian occupation is apparently Israel destroying your state infrastructure (and in particular your civilian transport infrastructure) just as you struggle toward becoming an independent state.

Lebanon never got the chance to control Hizbollah because Israel destroyed its authority first.

Yes it did not have the authority now, but it had only just thrown out a foreign occupier for the first time in over 20 years.

It was given no time to become a viable state.

Walid Jumblatt is a man of Lebanon no less bloody than some of the men of Israel with whom he has shared several decades of mutually destructive conflict, he is also no friend of Syria - in fact in 2005 US and muscular liberal critics were holding him up as middle eastern democracy's latest herald of change - see Jumblatt: Iraq is the start of a new Arab world

But this morning Jumblatt was drawing different parallels, between Israel's treatment of Lebanon vis Hizbollah and of the PLO and Fatah vis Hamas and then most recently of the Palestinian Authority vis Hamas. Jumblatt argued that Israel's key interest was to destroy any regional authority other than its own. The Palestinians must be kept from maturing toward responsible democracy, Lebanon must be stopped in its economic tracks, its EU-funded infrastructure destroyed, its reopening US investment banks scared off. What asked Jumblatt would anyone else in the region do except seek to make Israel pay a similar price?

Let us be clear, the bombing of Lebanon's ports, viaducts, highways and international airport are nothing to do with two captured soldiers. This was a plan that was ready to roll, awaiting a trigger, the most tenuous of justifications which could offer the hypocritical grandmasters of the Great Game a last shot at changing the balance of power in the middle east.

The key question now has once again become, what will Syria do? Is Syria strong enough to act or will it feel rather that its long-term power and viability as a state and regional power-broker is enhanced by staying its hand.

The logic says Syria will wait - sit back saying 'we told you so' as Israel writes a harsh message for Lebanon - 'without a powerful occupier, you are nothing'. But a shocked Arab and wider Moslem world is hearing that message too. The notion that Syrian inaction should be praised is a horrible folly, for all that Syrian action would ignite World War 3 - or at least Gulf War 2.5

To praise Syria inaction is to tell the Lebanese that they have no right to independence, to legitimise the failure of their state. It is neither accidental nor ironic that it is in Israel's interests to make Syria the arbiter, for by doing so Israel asks the question, of America and others, 'When will you deal with Syria?' or as George puts it 'get Syria to stop (Hizbollah) doing this shit'.

This is a high stakes game and it is by no means certain that Syria would not consider an attack on Israel were it not for internal dissent and a percieved lack of Arab League backing -motivated not least by self-interest - as noone wants Israel bombing their infrastructure and civilian population next. This is fine for the Grandmasters, this is fine for the despots - this is the brutalised realpolitik that keeps people's enslaved to despots and stifles democracy in the middle east. How ironic is it that Israel has just attacked the region's only two other peacefully elected democratic governments - for all that the Palestinians will correct us by pointing out their (mutual) state of war.

Tony and George's inadvertently overheard conversation tells us one thing only- that the people of the middle east don't matter and that the Great Game is still just that.

The Lebanese I have spoken to this week take a different view and are disgusted that the first reaction of the British government was not to call for a ceasefire and for Israel to stop killing innocent civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure but rather to talk of evacuating another generation of those who can leave Lebanon - so that Israel's morally repugnant promise to knock the country back 20 years can be allowed to come to pass.

Elephant

2006-07-15T09:33:00.000+01:00

A friend was talking about a recent visit to Kenya and the tension there between Africans and Asians. Whatever the rights and wrongs, it struck me that much of the blame actually lay at the door of the colonial administration, which had "imported", for want of a better word, a ready-made middle class from its subcontinental possession. The colonial elephant may now have left the room, but it had certainly broken the crockery and someone was going to have to get a shovel.

I had a similar feeling on my recent visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The Christian NGO-working friends we were staying with were, rightfully, highly critical of the brutish Israeli treatment of the Palestinians and their church was busy organising a boycott of the company that produced the bulldozers destroying Arab property.

But although I could recognise the many wrongs perpetrated by the Israelis and reinforced by our stateless, Islamist taxi driver who despairingly pointed out the settlements encroaching on Palestinian land and the wall dividing families, I could not bring myself to condemn them. After all, they had been persecuted with even greater severity for 2000 years, culminating in an orgy of butchery which left 6 million dead. They had learned the hard way that might is right, brutalised for millennia by us, the Christians.

When the Christians wrested Jerusalem from the Muslims back in the 12th Century, they slaughtered every living thing in the city - Jews, Muslims and even their own kind. A few centuries later the Muslims took back the city and gave its Christian occupiers safe passage out. This was the end of meaningful Christian occupation of the Holy Land, but their brutal legacy remains the source of the suffering we see today.

They left their mark - Crusader crosses etched into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Gruesome Twosome Two?

2006-07-13T13:43:00.000+01:00

A slightly perplexed Washington Post columnist reports that British Foreign Secretary Makes No Waves in Visit Across the Pond.

Where there were some clear differences, Beckett was almost apologetic. Asked about a U.S.-U.K. extradition treaty, which Britain has implemented but the Senate has failed to ratify, she said that she could "understand and accept" that it isn't an American priority. On the U.S. military prison, she asserted that "we would like to see Guantanamo Bay closed" before quickly adding: "My understanding is President Bush has said he would like to see Guantanamo Bay closed."

It was an impressive show of deference, even for a British government that has been famous for such behavior. Prime Minister Tony Blair followed Bush into Iraq so eagerly that he has been called Bush's "poodle" at home. Rice got so close to Beckett's predecessor, Jack Straw, that she gave him the bed in her cabin on a flight to Baghdad and slept on the floor in the aisle. The two visited each other's home towns, and Fleet Street hinted at romance.

Eeuuuwwww... well that last bit didn't get into the British media! Does Mrs Straw know? What Popbitch would call a "gruesome twosome" if ever there was one...

The elephant in the living room

2006-07-12T04:48:00.000+01:00

What changed between the 2002 Government Energy Review - which nixed nukes on grounds ranging from vast cost, to vast risk, poor safety records and long (very very long) term waste problems...

AND

The new 2006 Government Energy Review, which backs nuclear as an answer to carbon emission targets we've been missing, capacity we'll be needing and something called 'security of supply' by 'back in black' government minister Alistair Darling this morning on the Today programme, (something which forward thinking Mr Blair was talking about in the United States as early as 2002 incidentally) ...now what was that thing that changed again?

WELL, I wonder...

....begins with an 'I' and ends in a 'War'; as Tony might say.

OUR................................... AFGHANISTAN

2006-07-12T04:13:00.000+01:00

(July 3rd 2006) UK commander admits Afghan mission is 'changing' ...but denies mission creep and 'stressed that there had not been a request for extra troops.'

The next day Colonel Tony repeated the denial but admitted that the UK's
Afghanistan troops may need more resources and talked about sending 'engineers' and 'enablers' in the first instance, to make it clear that he hadn't earlier misled parliament,
among other things....

The defence minister (yet another unrelated brown Scot rather inappropriately called Des, which I'm pretty sure is neither an abbreviation completed by 'ert Fox' nor by 'ert Orchid') admitted that the Taliban had been "energised" by the British troops arrival in southern Afghanistan...

US Analysts and military officials, including the commander of NATO's Afghan force, 'merely' said that the international community's attention was diverted by Iraq, allowing power vacuums in Afghanistan that the Taliban have filled.

On Monday 10th July (Des) Browne announced 900 more troops for Afghanistan ...and some big helicopters...

Talking of helicopters in Afghanistan, these were, incidentally, recently described, with no hint of irony whatever, as 'lifesavers' by the Telegraph : "After years of suffering derision for being over budget and late into service, the Apache attack helicopter has become a vital asset on the Afghan battlefield as a life-saver for paratroopers on the ground.

For the first time the sleek gunships have been tested in a hostile environment and have performed beyond expectation, said the Army Air Corps pilots who fly it."

'Sleek gun ships', eh? ...remember those?

The great game

2006-06-20T07:21:00.000+01:00

Speaking of football, I'm on a flying visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority at the moment and as we stopped at the Israeli checkpoint before crossing over into Jericho the soldier saw my girlfriend's Italian passport and said: "Ah, see the match? Forza Italia!".

When we arrived in Jericho, one of the first people to greet us (tourists being rare birds in these parts) was a young man who asked "where you from?" When I replied London, England, he said: "Ah, Arsenal! Football!".

Universal Soldier?

2006-06-19T17:21:00.000+01:00

The young Tony

2006-06-15T07:42:00.000+01:00

Tony Blair's youthful enthusiasm for radical socialism and his admiration for communism's founder Karl Marx are revealed in letter written in 1982.

In the 22-page letter, the 29-year-old Mr Blair tells then Labour leader Michael Foot how reading Marx had "irreversibly altered" his outlook.

He also praises Tony Benn, agreeing with the left-winger's analysis that Labour's right-wing was bankrupt...

"I actually did trouble to read Marx first hand. I found it illuminating in so many ways; in particular, my perception of the relationship between people and the society in which they live was irreversibly altered," he wrote.

"But ultimately it was stifling because it sought to embrace in its philosophy every facet of existence. That, of course, is its attraction to many."

Mr Blair signs off advising Mr Foot to make clear he would be leading Labour into the next election and that he would win it - Mr Foot would go on to lead Labour to defeat in the 1983 poll.

The Labour Party's 1983 manifesto was of course described as "the longest suicide note in history".

An Act of War in the Wasp Factory

2006-06-14T02:28:00.000+01:00

Reuters tells us that the US rows back from Guantanamo suicide comments

Too late.

What more exposing statement can be made about this self-perpetuating and endless war against our own fears than that?

Meanwhile in Forest Gate fear clearly gets the better of an armed police officer on a darkened stairwell.This time a dark-skinned man survives to tell his tale after over a week in custody (and hospital).

But it is notable that as late as 48 hours before the two brothers arrested in the raid were released, the police were requesting a 14 day extension of the period for which they were allowed to hold them. This was pinned back to 24 hours by a judge after which they were released (had it not been be assured the brothers from Forest Gate would still be in Paddington Green).

Could it be that the police, at this late stage, as speculation mounted that the raid was a spectacular mistake yielding nothing, were attempting to buy time to kill the story a little using our great new liberal anti-terror legislation?

It could be.

This aside, however, what fear exactly got the better of the superiors of the officer on the stairwell, not to mention those at a JIC-level who authorised this game of fantasy fanatics?

The Police 'had no choice... they tell us. No choice but to send 200 officers by night. Call me a simpleton but didn't one just used to arrange an MI5/6 burglary team? Or use surveillance equipment? And doesn't a weapon of mass destruction necessitate an area evacuation?

Or is this just another manifestation of messrs Ian and Tony Blair's strategy of tension.

If it is, then it is working in Forest Gate, it's positively buzzing with tension.

Zarqawi's family: he was a good boy really who loved his mum

2006-06-09T07:55:00.000+01:00

Members of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's family gathered Thursday to mourn the death of the notorious al Qaeda in Iraq leader.

"We hope that he will join other martyrs in heaven," said Zarqawi's brother Sayel al-Khalayleh.

He said Abu had always been a very good child who had loved his mother. His chief interests were biology and pyrotechnics - he would often be found pulling the legs off insects and once got into trouble for attaching a fire cracker to the tail of a neighbour's cat. But then there wasn't much to do in this out-of-the-way desert town. "I mean," said Sayel. "It's not as if we could go after girls."

"We're not sad, we're happy because he's a martyr and he's now in heaven," added Abu's uncle, who claimed he lost one of his legs fighting Russian forces in Afghanistan as part of the Islamic Mujahedeen, although local gossip went he had lost it falling drunk in front of a tram in Hamburg.

Abu Qudama was later arrested as he was giving a live interview to Al-Jazeera praising al-Zarqawi, the channel reported. Jordanian officials refused to comment on the arrest.

"I'm so sad about my uncle," said a boy, who identified himself as Omar. "I too want to grow up to cut off the heads of the infidel. Look." The boy pulled the severed heads of a handful of Action Men out of his pockets. He had scribbled in red felt tip around their neck.

As news of al-Zarqawi's death spread in his hometown, some 50 boys - aged 8 to 14 - took to the streets, hurling stones at reporters.

"These are lies, Zarqawi is still alive," said one the children, who identified himself as Mohammed.

However, speaking from Heaven in a break between fucking 7659 supermodel virgins, Zarqawi said:

Iran could have barbers by 2010, intelligence chief warns

2006-06-03T08:08:00.000+01:00

Calling Tehran "the principal state sponsor of bad hair", US Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte told BBC radio Iran seemed determined to introduce barbers by 2010.

"The estimate we have made is that some time between the beginning of the next decade and the middle of the next decade they might be in a position to get their hair cut, which is a cause of great concern," he said.

Western intelligence chiefs fear shaved mullahs may appear more plausible.

"People may start taking them seriously," said Negroponte. "If they start becoming more presentable, people might actually think they have a point."

The move has been prompted by new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose recent move to ban Western music from Iranian airwaves was in part attributed to concern about the corrupting influence of Kenny Gee's long curly locks.

Gee - corrupting influence

In the future all Iranian men will have to be clean-shaven and keep to a regulation short back and sides.

Although some men may suffer, the development is expected to come as huge relief to Iran's women who have been deprived of hair care since the Islamic Revolution. Most are so ashamed of their unkempt barnets they now keep their heads covered.

It has been a 30 year bad hair day for Iranian women

But the move is likely to come in for criticism from traditionalists like Iran's spiritual leader Ayatollha Khomeini who are concerned they won't look so scary without their beards.

Khomeini - less scary?

Death threat

2006-06-01T21:34:00.000+01:00

I'm trying to shy away from the obvious these days, but this one from (ok) neo-con website Little Green Footballs did make me laugh - the perils of making a death threat and having it tracked back, particularly if you work for one of the world's leading news agencies...

My Zionist lizardoid ultrasuperpowers tell me that the Reuters IP address 192.165.213.18 has hit our site 134 times since midnight, and it looks like there may even be one or two Reuters people online right now.

Call me an old romantic but...

2006-06-01T13:54:00.000+01:00

A Sky News poll is 3-1 in favour of the proposed laws to provide cohabiting couples with similar rights to married ones. Well, we all want equal rights these days, don't we.

But I wonder if this isn't another government initiative that makes a good headline but can have unforeseen consequences?

Yesterday Burnley Council was offering a Mea Culpa over its well-meaning housing policies that just happened to spark race riots. Last week the PM was slagging off the human rights legislation he introduced, and wasn't there a furore some time ago about the legal reforms that happen to have promoted a compensation culture?

Instead of celebrating equal legal rights for living-in-sin, I wonder if a decade on we will be wringing our hands at a commitment-phobic culture whereby men - already wary of the potentially catastrophic financial consequences of a failed marriage - now avoid any semblance of cohabitation for fear of the same? Where once couples would "suck it and see" so to speak, they now keep a (legally-measurable) distance?

On the contrary, according to Sir Roger Toulson, the High Court judge developing the proposals.

More people might marry because partners would no longer avoid financial responsibilities.

Er... up to a point, Sir Roger.

Give this man a job!

2006-05-20T14:40:00.000+01:00

Here is the BBC News 24 footage with the chap who went for an interview as an IT bod for the channel and ended up on TV.

The look on his face when he realises what is happening is priceless. He also does a bloody good job in the circumstances.

Amusing too when they cut to their reporter standing outside the High Court who says: "As your Mr Kewney remarked, it's come as quite a shock."

If it walks like a duck...

2006-05-19T14:01:00.000+01:00

Human rights groups are raising alarms over a new law passed by the Iranian parliament that would require the country's Jews and Christians to wear coloured badges to identify them and other religious minorities as non-Muslims...

The Iranian parliament, called the Islamic Majlis, passed a law this week setting a dress code for all Iranians, requiring them to wear almost identical "standard Islamic garments."

The law, which must still be approved by Iran's "Supreme Guide" Ali Khamenehi before being put into effect, also establishes special insignia to be worn by non-Muslims.

Iran's roughly 25,000 Jews would have to sew a yellow strip of cloth on the front of their clothes, while Christians would wear red badges and Zoroastrians would be forced to wear blue cloth...

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre has written to Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, protesting the Iranian law and calling on the international community to bring pressure on Iran to drop the measure.

Who's who

2006-05-11T22:41:00.000+01:00

Hats off to the Muslim Association of Britain's PR team. A representative from the hardline anti-democracy Islamists banned across the Middle East got to posit wither young Muslims to Jon Snow on Channel 4 News alongside Muslim Labour MP Sadiq Khan. Three hours later a group of young Muslims were interviewed by Ashad Ahmed on BBC1 London's News at 10 about whether they would ever sign up to MI5.

Unsurprisingly they all condemned the UK's foreign policy as the main reason they would never dream of such a thing. Among the three men and two jilbab-sporting women was the same chappy who had earlier piped up on behalf of the MAB on Channel 4 News.

C4's item was about why young Muslims were being radicalised.

When TV insists on depicting hardliners as ordinary Muslims, shouldn't the question be exactly who is radicalising who?

Space cadets

2006-05-11T08:31:00.000+01:00

A judge rules gun-toting Afghan hijackers can stay in the country as refugees.

They made worldwide headlines in 2000 when they fled the Taliban by hijacking a Boeing 727 on an internal flight from Kabul and forcing the crew to fly to England.

Armed with guns and explosives, they held the plane at Stansted Airport for 70 hours before giving themselves up to police and SAS...

The nine are not allowed to work, but instead depend on state hand-outs and report regularly to the immigration authorities.

The cost to the taxpayer of the whole affair has been unofficially estimated at around 10 million pounds.

Meanwhile another UK court decides that a Crouch End twat caught hacking US computers in search of UFOs can be extradited to America under terrorism laws.

Last year Twat told the Guardian he had carried out most of his hacks in a north London house belonging to his girlfriend's aunt.

He claimed to have uncovered evidence of a secret space army of US "non-terrestrial officers".

In a lengthy judgment, District Judge Evans rejected arguments including the possibility that Mr McKinnon could suffer prejudice at his trial because of his political opinions.

He added: "I readily accept, if convicted in the US, the probable sentence is likely to be appreciably harsher in the US than, in comparable circumstances, it would be in the UK.

"It must be obvious to any defendant that if you choose to commit a crime in a foreign country, you run the risk of being prosecuted in that country."

This Charming Man and the blood on his hands

2006-05-10T11:05:00.000+01:00

I was at 10 Downing Street recently, which was interesting as it is a while since I have been able to observe our Prime Minister close up.

For a bit of context I should add that this was before the recent re-shuffle and also before the local election results which this sought to distract attention from, and arguably draw some kind of line under. Though quite how is a mystery, given that those most responsible for the dire results are still in the cabinet (Jowell, Beckett, possibly Prescott, and certainly the Prime Minister himself), while those least so (Straw) are not; for all that the jug-eared reluctant authoritarian, Clarke, is no longer dining at the big boys table.

The timing of my visit to number 10 is relevant because I was moved to comment to a colleague how assured and relaxed Blair still was in his role - far more so in fact than he used to be. While Blair's media friendliness has always been commented on from the moment of his election as Labour Party leader - and he has always given good TV - in person he was often slightly awkward and uncomfortable with informal interactions, whether involving small-talk or indeed unscripted questions on the detail of policy matters.

Emeritus Profesor Hugh Berrington of Newcastle University views that awkwardness, rightly I think, as the slightly distant psychology of one of the perpetually needy over-compensating outsiders who are so often elected as leaders of nations in order to fight their personal battles with low self esteem and compensatory paranoia across rather more substantial battlefields, such as those of the coalfields of the North and the oilfields of the Middle East.

Blair has now turned the remnants of this personal awkwardness into a faux self-deprecatory camp which he uses to great effect on all and sundry (he has probably always done this, but now the originating awkwardness is generally nowhere to be seen). Curiously the matured Blair act is more Prince Charles than Queen Margaret. It is very 'chat show' too, he didn't pull a guitar out on my visit but he was moved to a suggest that 'these days I think all we are good for is photo shoots' before strolling though for some shots during which he variously complemented everything from his audiences triumphs over personal adversity to their weight loss and muscle development.

Blair is at this point very much the finished article, ironically enough just as he is indeed finished. But he is still a performer, indeed a better one than he ever was.

All those in public life and indeed in any communication role have to be. It's important, you have to give attention to people, appear to focus on them, you have to look engaged and indicate that you have noticed them through comment, while also indicating - through thought and pauses - that you are paying attention to what they have to say - and, indeed, to what they represent, as well as to the simple fact of their prescence. This is all good, this is all necessary.

But now to business, as the PM may have thought as he left his photo-shoots to turn his attention to more substantial matters.

Blair's re-shuffle confirmed my reactions at number 10 in so far as it was in no sense the action of a man preparing to hit the US lecture circuit, though, for all that, one must also reflect that this is a man with a big, if not quite Clintonesque, ego and look a little at Clinton's final months in office. It is not in the nature of such egos to ever truly admit even to themselves the imminence of the loss of power and status about to befall them. America with its habit of calling all ex-Presidents 'Mr President' (did someone mention camp? - oh, get over it), building celebratory libraries and offering roving ambassadorships to the world and roles in reconstruction after national disasters such as Katrina, does much to assist the ex-leader in fostering this illusion.

That said Blair's elevation of his lieutenants and cheerleaders and demotion of those who appeared to have begun planning for a post-Blair world, offers little hope to those who would be glad to see the back of him soon enough for Gordon and the party to have a slim chance of re-building and refocusing in time to avoid the hung parliament which appears increasingly inevitable at the next election and which it is quite possible that Blair secretly sees as his true legacy to British politics.

That the likely coalition will be between the liberals and conservatives rather than inviolving Labour is a reality which the rest of the parliamentary Labour Party and what is left of the party in the country is gradually waking up to. Of course in Blair's wettest political dreams it would be between Labour and the Conservatives against the anti-warriors of Liberal Democracy but even Blair's great performances have not so detached Labour from its roots, nor indeed convinced those roots that the path he led us on to war was right.

Education, Education, Education

2006-05-10T10:50:00.000+01:00

Salam Pax' former comrade in blogging Raed Jarrar explains (from San Francisco) another of the reasons why the world - and the middle east in particular - will be living with the consequences of the misguided decision to invade and occupy Iraq (as opposed to any of the other possible varients on that phrase which the war's cheerleaders conveniently ignored before the war and claimed not to have been made aware of afterwards) for a very long time.

In his ever-readable blog Raed in the Middle Raed also asks 'Is there an Iran "Dilemma"?'

Freedom

2006-05-09T13:30:00.000+01:00

Zeina also shows, in a way that will surely give pause for thought even to those people in Britain who supported the war, how women's lives are being curtailed by the rise of religious fundamentalists who have stepped into the power vacuum. "All the time in the television and the newspapers there is propaganda concerning women. It is really disgusting, it is nothing to do with Islam, but everything to do with taking women back into the home and depriving them of rights."

To show the negative effects of these developments on women, Zeina travels to Basra. It will not come as news to those who have followed developments in southern Iraq that women are being forced to wear the hijab and prevented from living their lives freely. But it brings these developments home when we see young women and their families talking about being sent bullets and death threats because they played sport or did not wear a headscarf. As Zeina emphasises, this kind of experience is new to most women in Iraq, who enjoyed economic and social freedom before the occupation. "A while ago, I was looking at photographs of my aunt in college in the 60s, wearing pants and sleeveless tops, playing sports in the college yard; and then I looked at the photographs of the women in college today, and they are covered in black from head to toe, their faces also covered."

Atwar Bahjat

2006-05-07T19:55:00.000+01:00

In February one of Iraq's leading journalists, Atwar Bahjat, was killed by insurgents while covering an attack on a mosque.

At the time, eye witness reports suggested she had been shot but evidence subsequently recovered reveals the grotesque reality of her murder.

Hala Jaber writes:

The voice of one of the Arab world's most highly regarded and outspoken journalists has been silenced. She was 30.

As a friend of Bahjat who had worked with her on a variety of tough assignments, I found it hard enough to bear the news of her murder. When I saw it replayed, it was as if part of me had died with her. How much more gruelling it must have been for a close family friend who watched the film this weekend and cried when he heard her voice.

Opponents of the war who delight in the charnal house that is modern day Iraq and, quietly among friends, derive some satisfaction in the mayhem, should reflect on this killing. But so too should the war's cheerleaders.

It is simply not good enough to take the Euston Manifesto's "war was right, peace was wrong" approach. It denies the inevitability of the one following on from the other - it is, to twist a term used often enough by the self-styled "hard" left, to divorce "right" from "responsibility". Bahja symbolised everything good they must have hoped would come of their war, launched on a wave of ideological wishful-thinking. Her dreadful end says much about its grim reality.

The film Fateless, based on an autobiography of the same name, tells the story of a 14 year old Hungarian Jew sucked up by the Holocaust. Throughout the film, Gyorgy rejects the notion - repeated by fellow Jews - of a shared Jewish "fate" of suffering. When he returns home, someone says to him, thinking to sympathise, 'it must have been the seventh circle of Hell.' 'Hell,' he replies, 'doesn't exist. The camps do.'

Myths drive our culture, but whether conjuring up Heaven or Hell we should be wary of confusing them with the real world.

We choose...

2006-05-04T21:14:00.000+01:00

to lose.

Balls

2006-04-29T14:59:00.000+01:00

The BBC's security correspondent Gordon Corera figures the latest release from OBL is about aligning the Palestinian cause to... etc etc. Maybe so, but in the light of the video from Ayman al-Zawahiri, itself following hot on the heels of a shifty-looking performance by Musab al-Zarqawi I wonder if the message is more about the medium, so to speak?

Why would global terror's three pin-up boys all be so keen to get their bods on the box in as many weeks?

Is something about to kick off that will really turn up the heat in the next couple of months?

Or do they just want to get business out of the way so they can settle down and enjoy the footie?

I tell you, that was definitely off-side!

Irony, Irony, they've all got it... oh nevermind

2006-04-26T20:50:00.000+01:00

The Israeli ambassador is understandably upset that his nation's flags were burned to chants of "Intifada" at yesterday's march to celebrate Italy's liberation at the end of the Second World War.

Many members of Prodi's coalition, which spans from Roman Catholic moderates to hardline Communists, criticized the jeering - but not everyone.

Francesco Caruso, an anti-globalization leader who won a seat in parliament for the Communist Refoundation party at this month's general election, said the protest was justified.

"Whistles are not an act of violence but a legitimate form of dissent," he told reporters.

Communist Refoundation head Fausto Bertinotti was less understanding, saying the jeers were contrary to the spirit of the April 25 commemorations, which mark the day in 1945 when a Nazi occupation army left Milan after a partisan insurrection.

Was a time when anti-semitism was the preserve of the right, but now it seems more at home on the left. There are of course strong arguments against Israel's policies in the Middle East and many of the same kinds of people who now criticise the Jews may once have argued for their homeland - they are the champions of the oppressed if you like.

But one has to ask oneself, if this is really the case, why weren't they burning the flags of Iran - where gays and adulterous women are regularly strung up - China or Zimbabwe or Sudan or... well, you get the idea.

Sadly, I suspect those flag-burners were driven by a deeper, older loathing. Burning a Chinese flag just doesn't provide the same... buzz, you know?

Courtesy of Harry's Place, Jewish Brigade soldiers celebrating Passover in Italy

Woman held over 'nail bomb art' - something about stunts comes to mind

2006-04-26T13:03:00.001+01:00

Now I understand what my colleagues in West London were raging about this morning (real lot of raging going on by the way and not about traffic delays either)

Woman held over 'nail bomb art'

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

That's the cue for someone to go 'nah, nah, nothing is off-limits for art'.

Which is fine if you want to go to prison and get hate mail for much of the rest of your adult life.

Yeah all right, I know we should stoically ignore the fool, the oxygen of publicity being the last thing needed, but...

Quote of the day

2006-04-26T13:03:00.000+01:00

Ms Temple's boyfriend, lorry driver Barrie Williams, 46, told the Daily Mirror: "I just can't believe that my darling Tracey has been sleeping with John Prescott behind my back."

Hysteria? Immigration, New Labour and the BNP - Why New Labour isn't coming up smelling of roses

2006-04-25T17:14:00.000+01:00

'Most Britons support BNP policies' reports the ever-so- liberal 'This is London News' online edition of the Evening Standard.

Over at Harry's Place the sites progenitor has been kicking around the nature and causes of BNP voting with the sites usual array of political exiles and slavering lunatics from both fringes.

I agree with Harry about the waywardness of Patricia Hodge' statement that BNP support was growing because Labour had ignored voters legitimate (sic) concerns over immigration (thus leading to a danger that Labour voters in her Barking constituency will allegedly defect en masse to the BNP in the upcoming Local Council elections). As Harry reminds his increasingly right of centre readerhip BNP votes are racist votes and the answer to racism is not to pander to it.

However Hodge' statement hides another side of the story which our Stalinist friend of New Labour is less keen to acknowledge.

This is what I call The Blunkett Effect, or looked at another way New Labour's passive aggressive love affair with Paul Dacre and the Daily Mail. I feel a fisting analogy coming on...
Well, lets put it this way, Tony and co's strategy of trying to out-do the right on immigration hasn't exactly contributed to a growing liberal consensus on the virtues of foreign workers joining the great British egg race.

New Labour has never been keen to try and lead public opinion. It has always tried to 'respond', though in fact less to that opinion itself than to the right wing of a popular press which has no qualms at all about leading it - though of course under the guise of 'expressing' what real people - or at any rate White Van Men - think.

In fact while Tony Blair and in particular David Blunkett, during his time as a muscular Home Secretary, argued that Paul didn't like it up him and that they could play an ID card to his race card and deport a few refugees to Zimbabwe , Iraq and various other places of safety while they were at it, it was nonetheless New Labour and the long arm of its anti-asylum-seeker legislation that came out smelling of shit.

In this sense, if no other, it is New Labour which is responsible for the rise of the racist right. And if YouGov's dubious looking Pole (sorry poll) is true, then they bear some responsibility for that too.

However, maybe those whom YouGov polled would feel different, if they looked to the facts, rather than demostrating how fascinating cognitive dissonance is by changing their minds (in distressingly small numbers) according to whom is proposing a policy, rather than what the policy is. The Refugee Council has attempted to rebut a few myths; while Nigel Morris, Home Affairs correspondent of the Independent, recently reported that an Amnesty on illegal immigrants is worth six billion to the UK - the hidden story here being not 'how many immigrants there are' but how productive they are.

Even in 2003 when asylum applications were higher than last year there were less than 50,000 while there were nearly 1.4million (mostly white) overseas workers in the UK. It is estimated that over a quarter of a million French people live in the Greater London and South East regions alone, then there's the Americans, the Canadians...

But the 'immigrants' the barking population of the expatriate east end (in Barking and Dagenham) are howling about are more than likely taxpaying productive UK citizens (as if it matters) contributing to the cost of the public services that they, those 250,000 French people, the Americans, the Canadians and Patricia's barkers are all using every day.

Is it just me or are YouGov's polls starting to get as odd as Mori's?

Plus ca change...

2006-04-10T20:42:00.000+01:00

How rapidly the resolve of the French government wilts in the face of student unrest, yet how firm it remains as the banlieue burns.

Could there be some truth in "Theodore Dalrymple's" suggestion that the striking students motives were not as selfless as they may at first have appeared?

It is often pointed out that French unemployment under the age of 26 is the highest in Europe, running at about 25 per cent. Moreover, in the banlieues it is 50 per cent. These banlieues are homes to millions of people, disproportionately young. It follows - does it not? - that there must be a considerable section of the young population in which unemployment is less than a quarter, actually much less. One would hardly have to be de Tocqueville to guess in which section of the young population the unemployment was less: the section from which the demonstrators, or at least their leaders and agents provocateurs, are drawn. In an increasingly desperate situation, the demonstrators are so afraid of the future that they want to hang on to their privileges and job security by hook or by crook, even if it means that the youth of the banlieues will eventually have to be kept in order by the Compagnies Republicaines de Securite, the much-feared riot police, the CRS. There is nothing idealistic or generous about the demonstrators, just as there wasn't in 1968.

Could wily old Chirac and co simply be remembering their natural constituency?

...plus c'est la meme chose.

The Times They Are A-Changing

2006-04-07T18:32:00.000+01:00

For some time reports have been coming out of Iraq which indicate re-alignments - the top link here is to a story (in February) which was essentially repeated more widely yesterday on some international media.

Basically the story is that the US forces are talking to some of the insurgents in an effort to separate the 'arab / iraqi nationalist' insurgency as they now call it from the jihadists.

Meanwhile last weekend Jack Straw went to Iraq with Condie in a most bizarre piece of choreography which saw a trip to watch Blackburn Rovers followed up with a quick flight down country to Baghdad to call for Iraqi politicians to take note of the 'allied blood' shed and 'vast cost' of the operation to liberate them.

Basically Jack was saying 'hurry up and form a government you ingrates'. ince he is keen to end situation where every time he talks about the glory of bringing democracy he finds people muttering about the place not even having a government never mind a representative one or any sense of security, law or order. You know all that stuff Tony and Charles Clarke rattle on about, concerning the ultimate human right being the right to live free of terrorist threats... well as long as you're a British citizen.

These were new words I cannot ever recollect Mr Starw making much reference to casulaties certainly not in the context of waving the tunics of our battle-bloodied sons before the iraqi ingrates, let alone moaning about how much this has cost us in financial terms.

Lets face it though, it seems to have cost them a bit too, in all senses, and they may well see Mr Staw's point as therefore of rather less earth-shattering import than he did. Certainly the response was hardly instant.

Watch this space as they say...

Place your pin

2006-03-26T09:23:00.000+01:00

Despite being a bit posting-light of late (ok, I've been a bit tardy), I've filched a map thingy off Triffid Boy in the event that any of our readers would like to make their mark. Just scroll down and click on the icon that says place your pin.

With friends like these

2006-03-25T10:38:00.000+01:00

Richard Norton-Taylor's article on the British army's "deep fury" at Donald Rumsfeld's decision to disband the Iraqi army after the invasion, evolves into a predictable but accurate rant on the current state of US/UK "special relationship".

What is Washington doing in return for all Blair's help? Bush has blocked a billion-dollar deal with Rolls-Royce to build engines for the proposed joint strike fighter - which Britain wants for its two new aircraft carriers - despite repeated lobbying from Blair. The US still refuses to share advanced military technology with us. It is refusing to let British agencies question terrorist suspects, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged September 11 mastermind; it won't even say where they are being held.

Meanwhile the Telegraph reports Britain is 'likely base for son of Star Wars'.

British officials were startled by the disclosure, insisting that, as far as they were concerned, nothing had changed since Geoff Hoon, then the defence secretary, told parliament in 2004 that a decision to base interceptors in Britain would be "open to scrutiny and debate in the normal way".

"No one asked us the question [whether Britain was now ready to be a formal candidate]," a British Embassy spokesman said.

Keeping it in the family

2006-03-24T18:20:00.000+01:00

A gangmaster has been found guilty of causing the deaths of the 21 drowned Morecambe bay cocklers.

'Lin Liang Ren, originally from China... He and his Chinese girlfriend and cousin were also convicted at Preston Crown Court of helping cockle pickers to break immigration laws.

A father and son from Merseyside were cleared of the immigration charge.

During the trial the court heard that 29-year-old Lin Liang Ren was behind a huge operation in which illegal immigrants scoured the beaches for cockles.'

It is applaudable that someone has been prosecuted for this, after all its not often that such negligence is established and it is of course unfortunate that earlier warnings (before the tragedy) were not heeded. Clearly it is a relief to us all that the evil (& originally Chinese natch) gangmaster has been convicted and of course its good that the names of the innocent have been cleared...

Talking of which...

'David Anthony Eden Snr, 62, from Irby, Merseyside, and David Anthony Eden Jnr, 35, from Prenton, Merseyside, were found not guilty of the facilitation offences.

After the verdicts were read out, judge Mr Justice Henriques QC said he would sentence the three defendants on Tuesday.

All three Chinese could ultimately face deportation, he added.

The Edens were accused of running a company which bought cockles harvested by the cocklers.
Prosecutors alleged they had therefore indirectly employed the cocklers who died, but the jury rejected the claims and cleared the men of trading with the Chinese cockle gangs.'

So that's clear then: they weren't employing them and they didn't run a cockle company...

'The judge refused applications from the Edens for costs after hearing that Mr Eden Snr lied to police about the importance of cockling to his business.'

I can't possibly add anything else.

Patronage

2006-03-21T14:39:00.000+01:00

This morning the lady in my newsagent presented me with a thought-provoking question (it probably wasn't her intention but shoot me...)

'What did that man mean' she asked me.

'Huh' I asked, raising my head from perusing the great and the good of the alleged centre-left displayed across the days papers under headlines such as The rich list

'He said he liked to patronise local shops - what did he mean?'

I had to do a bit of a doubletake here as a menacing post-modern irony trap appeared to gape before me in the light of the fact that I'd never considered the shop-owners english to be any less comprehensive than my own for all that (or perhaps because) her accent betokened a possible trip to the UK from Uganda some years back and an origin in the sub-continent.

'The word patronise, what does it mean when he uses it in that way?' she clarified (emphasising that my concerns over the potential for minor ironic debacle were, while theoretically well-founded, yet completely un-founded in this instance)

'It means use, like regularly I suppose, like you patronise your local pub or restaurant' I improvised 'It's got two different meanings - that one and the one that now means condescend to' I was late, but this was intriguing, she seemed to get me and I would have liked to kick it about a bit more, she could already see the funny side particularly given the slight pomposity of the previous customer's delivery... 'It comes from being a patron of, buying something from someone...' I concluded.

And my morning had completed one full circle already.

I walked towards the tube thinking that I wished I had time today to research when the term to 'patronise' became linked to condescension - my instinct is that the answer lies in the rise of the middle class in the nineteenth century.

In the sense that this was the point at which the dominant language became the property of a new self-made merchant and manufacturing class for whom the notion of patronage was an archaism. A term redolent of a time when the only means of advancement for their forefathers were at the whim of a member of the aristocracy.

This in a sense is why Tony Blair's notion of Victorian charity is rather different from that of the Victorians. Your Victorian wants everyone to know what he gives and indeed for those who recieve that charity to understand from whence it came.

Tony likes a little less clarity over what we are getting for his money.

Joined Up Government

2006-03-17T19:42:00.000+01:00

Remember 'Joined-Up Government'

Well there's a quick question I was thinking about as I listened (yes I know) to woman's hour (but it IS worth listening to this report) on Forced marriages ...

Jasvinder Sanghera, Director of Asian women's group Karmen Nirvana, was on but especially worth listening to was Shazia Kayoom, victim of a forced marriage.

Lisa Bandari, Head of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office Forced Marriages Unit was also on the programme discussing (sensibly) the pros and cons of criminalising the families responsible (ie would it make people forced by their families into marriages more or less likely to come forward if they were criminalising their families, against the need to make it clear that this is criminal in order to discourage it happening... etc)

One aspect much-commented on was the need to comunicate with children in school about the fact that they could not and should not be forced into such unions ...then it hit me:

This must be why the government is promoting more faith schools

Go Tony! .. AS in GO, Tony.

Witch?

2006-03-03T13:23:00.000+01:00

Apparently Chester Cathedral has cast out the "heretical" Unitarian Church and banned its ministers and members from holding their annual service - the high point of their General Assembly - there.

The decision by the Dean and Chapter, which consists of laity as well as clergy, has caused dismay among Unitarians. One said: "In the entrance to Chester Cathedral there are signs saying 'welcome' in 26 languages. A Unitarian could be forgiven for doubting their sincerity."

I don't know about you, but I'd never heard of the Unitarian Church which, according to the Times, was founded in the 17th century, has no creed and rejects the doctrine of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ.

Which all sounded pretty sensible to me, so I thought I'd find out more. I ended up at Hampstead Unitarians who say their religion is a spiritual journey and each one of us is an explorer. Reason is our map and conscience is our compass.

Our Chapel seeks to provide a loving community in which to explore, question and celebrate the meaning and value of life, without creed or dogma.

Apparently all sorts attend their services, including athiests and humanists! More to the point, these harmless heretics helpfully include on their website a Beliefomatic test to find out if you share their beliefs.

It's quite good fun even, I suspect, for "those of no faith". Anyway my top ten was:

Neo-Pagan (100%)
Reform Judaism (92%)
Sikhism (85%)
Unitarian (80%)
Liberal Quakers (80%)
New Age (80%)
Scientology (73%)
Mahayana Buddhism (70%)
New Thought (69%)
Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (65%)

So, I'm a total witch (or a wizard) which will come as no surprise to some. I found it quite a relief that at the bottom of my league table came Jehovah's Witness at 14 per cent, though slightly disconcerting to discover I'm more of a Scientologist than C of E!

Who's Choice is it Anyway?

2006-03-02T10:30:00.000+01:00

On Tuesday George Bush said that Iraqis have to choose "chaos or unity".

He may just as well have said that workers at the World Trade Center have to choose between remaining 1,000 feet in the air or hitting the ground very fast.

First-time non-voter

2006-02-24T15:00:00.000+01:00

I've been thinking about who I'm not going to vote for at the next general election for a while now. I think it was the debacle over Kennedy that may have finally pushed me into the arms of the UK's largest political wing, the None Of The Above I mean.

Up until 2001 I had always voted Labour. Post-Iraq I began shopping around and at the last election voted Lib Dem because they reminded me... well of the people I thought I was voting for back in 1997.

But the nastiness over Kennedy, the pomposity of Ming, mendacity of Hughes, the opacity of Who seem all too familiar to someone already let down by Labour. Charlie-boy may have been a genuine Whig but his replacements all look like the rest of our parliamentarians - reactive Tories of one hue or other.

So what's left then?

Respect: a mix of everything that was wrong about Old Labour along with a nasty streak of anti-Semitism/ fascism courtesy of their MAB bedfellows. Headed by a moustachioed firebrand, they would probably be better re-branded The National Socialists... well, they're national and they're socialists, aren't they?

The Greens: running a close second to the Conservative Party among graduates of agricultural colleges, they're really just a bunch of aristos who hark back to the days when the toffs ruled the countryside, there were none of these nasty corporate johnnies getting the best seats at the opera and their tenants knew their place. In short: Zac Goldsmith.

Speaking of which: Camonblair... well the name says it all really.

So why not go back to a post-Blair Labour Party? Because Brown will be the same but worse. Because Labour are already kept in power by a bulwark of Scots MPs who do to the English what the English used to do to the rest of the world: impose laws that have no force in their own land while soaking up English taxes to fund educational and health services denied to those south of the border.

The last thing we need is a Scottish PM whose only real interest will be to keep the milch cow chewing the cud while exercising the kind of brutish rule on the English (remember PPP on the Tube?) he would never dare impose at home.

Now the economic argument is over the only socialist bone left in the government's body is its least attractive one: authoritarianism.

While we can be grateful it failed in its first attempt to restrict our freedom of speech, don't forget it succeeded second time around. As the case of the Nat West Three illustrates, thanks to 2003 legislation Britons can now be extradited by a foreign power with no requirement of habeas corpus (a step the Americans would never dream of taking). Meanwhile octogenarian protestors at Labour Party conferences are arrested under anti-terror legislation and peaceniks at the Cenotaph under laws barring protests within hearing distance of Parliament (you really couldn't make that one up could you - no dramatist would have gotten away with it).

Deceit (and deceit and deceit) has become almost a requirement for office, while ministers assure us that we can trust them with new laws that will enable them to amend any legislation without the say of Parliament. This is before one mentions fresh terror legislation, identity cards and the like, some of which may actually be necessary, but can we really trust anything this bunch say?

As Mary Ann Sieghart points out in today's Times, with all the main parties moving to the centre, choice will become more a case of personality than policy. But who would want to vote for any of these monkeys?

Happy holidays

2006-02-22T15:31:00.000+01:00

Moving article in today's Times by Danny Finkelsteim on David Irving's imprisonment.

One of Irving's contentions, one that helped to bring him a three-year prison sentence, was that "74,000 (Jews) died of natural causes in the work camps and the rest were hidden in reception camps after the war and later taken to Palestine, where they live today under new identities". Let's examine this for a moment, shall we?

Yesterday my mother told me of the day, as a young girl in Westerbork concentration camp, she said goodbye to her aunt and uncle and to her 14-year-old cousin, Fritz. These much-loved family members had been listed for the Tuesday transport train to Auschwitz. My mother still has the pitiful letter from her aunt promising that "we will meet again". But, of course, they never did. David Irving presumably thinks that Fritz and his parents survived and are living in Israel. In which case, the joke is over: they can come back now, don't you think?

Applying Irving's logic, his three year sentence presumably translates into three months poolside in Mauritius. Enjoy the sun Dave!

They're doomed

2006-02-14T13:02:00.000+01:00

An article-by-numbers in the Washington Post celebrating (surely mourning?, Ed) the Decline & Fall of Europe.

These must have been appearing every other year for the past 50 and seem to provide much the same purpose that articles on gormless yanks serve in "Eurabia" (The cartoon controversy has powerfully highlighted the difficulties Europe is having with its immigrants).

But while I may not have been to the States for a decade, I certainly see few signs that continental Europe (the author has the grace to exclude increasingly neo-con UK from his polemic) is on its way to becoming the impoverished shadow of its former self depicted. Indeed, from the cars on the street to the consumer durables in the homes, I can see little difference. And that's before we get on to the supposedly "unsustainable" leisure lifestyle.

Truth is figures will say whatever you want them to and here's some more - 300,000 of the richest Brits now live in France, 500,000 in Spain, and this one, at least part-time, in Belgium. If Europe's doing so bad, then why the hell is it so damn good? Trying adding that one up matey.

While You Were Sleeping...

2006-02-13T04:05:00.000+01:00

It was a wierd weekend in the fantasy politics of New Labour.

First Charles Clarke informed us that we had a joint premiership - which has nothing to do with Blunkett's grass laws I assure you - which has nothing to do with foreign nannies I assure you (David) ANYWAY...

Then Gordon announced that he was going to announce a new range of anti-terror measures and we all thought that surely that should be Captain Tony's job, or perhaps that of the rotund jug-eared policeman who usually looks after locking up the enemies of our state.

I suppose that at least explained why it was the jug-eared Charlie who announced our new curiously seventeenth century mode of government, rather than the minister for constitutional affairs.

Then Gordon announced that he was tough on the causes of terror and that civil liberties really must go (on the Today programme) and set up a seemingly hilarious prospect in the process - which is that he might just become a lame duck Prime Minister before he even becomes Prime (as opposed to joint) Minister.

Since, in a most curious turn of affairs, the Captain's plane has been delayed in SouthAfrica and as a result that he will miss the key ID cards vote - well its just one of those things isn't it - after all as we all know the South Africans only have one plane capable of reaching blighty and now that's broke the captain's knackered.. err yeah...

So Gordon gets to lead the government to victory over the backbenches - and dumbass offences like glorifying terrorism are back on the agenda. What a curious coincidence that this oportunity should present itself after a weekend of the Chancellor (finally) flagging his support for Captain Tony's agenda of repression and trying so hard to emphasise that he too puts security first and liberty fifth - after whippets and flowerpot men.

Well only time will tell whether this is a master-stroke to pass the vote and simultaneously end Brown's chances of becoming PM by leaving him smeared with the execrable legislative agenda of his master's choice, or simply another round of New Labour's fantasy politics game.

The thing is that at some point the carousel must stop and a dazed electorate, as much as a confused party, will want an answer over where (on earth) Dorothy-style the wind has dropped us.

Personally, I think Brown's decision to apparently place himself publicly alongside Blair (where he always stood anyway) reveals his weakness - for New Labour it is a barricade strategy - all hands to the wheel as Cameron attempts to position himself as a New Blair with less blood on his hands and less shit in his hospitals. What is good for Labour however may not be good for Brown and thus, at the closing of his day, his light may finally be extinguished not by his opponents but by his own predilection for positioning himself as the ultimate party man.

Furthermore this is not a case of 'Well done Gordon your party valued your contribution' - because the irony is it doesn't and neither do I - so thanks Gordon for your lose-lose strategy: You lose the prime ministership and we lose our civil liberties. Sap.

Whichever way this vote goes Gordon, you come out of that lobby smelling of dirty nappies not bouncing babies.

Fearless Vampire Killers

2006-02-13T04:00:00.000+01:00

Her Majesty's Press are of course to be applauded for running the footage of Our Boys beating up defenceless Iraqis, heroically disregarding the increased danger in which it will place our troops. I look forward to our media casting their own concerns about security aside and finally publishing the cartoons that set much of the Middle East aflame.

Joke. Of course their reticence had nothing to do with cowardice.

Playing by the rules

2006-02-10T17:11:00.000+01:00

Um...

The spark for his attack on Mr Blair was a question from Labour MP Colin Burgon on whether British policy in South America was shaped by a "rightwing US Republican agenda". The prime minister replied that Venezuela needed to take care when it formed a close alliance with a non-democracy such as Cuba.

"If they want to be respected members of the international community, they should abide by the rules of the international community," he told MPs. "I say with the greatest respect to the president of Venezuela that when he forms an alliance with Cuba, I would prefer to see Cuba a proper functioning democracy."

Mr Chávez said the remarks showed Mr Blair was "nothing but a pawn of imperialism trying now to attack us from Europe". He added that Mr Blair lacked the moral standing to make them.

"You, Mr Blair, do not have the morality to call on anyone to respect the rules of the international community," he said. "You are precisely the one who has flouted international law the most [...] siding with Mr Danger to trample the people in Iraq.

"I'm going to be closely watching what you say and what you do. Because the British government has no moral standing - and even less yourself - to get involved in Venezuela's affairs."

El Presidente could also have added it's a bit rich to slag them off for building alliances with Cuba - which incidentally for any surviving socialists out there has more doctors per head than any other nation - while the UK continues to snuggle up to the likes of Saudi Arabia...

But hey, don't do as we do, right?

Columnist admits mistake

2006-02-10T02:21:00.000+01:00

Sadly couldn't find the link, but in So I was all wrong about the drink laws in today's Standard, Will Self admits:

I was among those who thought the liberalisation a bad thing... I now realise that i fell victim to the oldest clouding of judgement there is: prejudice.

Who next I wonder...?

It's good to stalk

2006-02-09T17:56:00.000+01:00

Quite a frightening article explaining how to stalk the one you, um, love, courtesy of their mobile phone. Very Spooks...

Hat tip: Linkmachine

Slam drunk

2006-02-08T22:44:00.000+01:00

Huge fall in violence as pubs open all hours reports the Standard in a tucked-away inside page 2 column that becomes Violence down despite drink law on the web and loses the quote by a West Yorkshire police spokesman saying concerns about the drink reforms had been "vastly overestimated".

Could this reflect the Standard's own enthusiatic overestimations I wonder?

Tampering with licensing laws will not liberate drunks for sobriety. It will free them to prolong their drinking, multiply the problem and spread the loutish consequences further into the night. All-night drinking means all-night rowdyism, all-night violence, all-night spewing, all-night public defecation and all-night noise.

Now all we need is for Teresa May and the rest of the right-wing press to admit they were wrong.

Yeah, yeah...

Labour's losing whip

2006-02-07T07:31:00.000+01:00

Poor old Hilary Armstrong, labour's chief whip has had to suffer not only the embarrassment of losing a vote but the added indignity of being patronised by Dave Cameron. Apparently Dave and the new Tories stole a trick from the west wing and hid in a closet lulling labour into a false sense of security, given recent revelations from the lid dem camp it's surprising there was any empty closet space in Westminster but that's a another matter.

Anyway back to the lost vote on incitement to religious hatred, is it possible that Tony Blair was actually not to bothered about losing this vote, clearly losing a vote is a bit embarrassing, but the cost of winning the vote would have been much worse.

Nick griffn's trial in Leeds shows that prosecutions can be brought without a new law. The case against any new law was widely made, the proposed legislation was clearly badly thought out, illiberal and managed to alienate just about everyone.

Maybe just maybe even Tony Blair realised that this bill simply wasn't worth fighting for and decided to make labour backbenchers feel a bit more empowered.
I really can't see too many down sides for Blair in losing this vote, he can tell the religious types he personally supported the bill but what could he do when faced with the will of parliament? The parliamentary party feels it can reduce the dictatorial tendencies of the cabinet, in short it looks like a victory for parliamentary democracy.

It is probably cock up rather than conspiracy but the final outcome of a lost vote is actually a lot better for Blair than winning, he has not really lost any authority, a crap bill has not become a crap law,freedom of speech remains as it was, in short there is no real loser in this loss.

Hilary Armstrong could be a political master looking like a political knave or more likely she is another over promoted Tony crony.