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‘Gunboat Diplomacy’ has a bad name these days: the idea was that if a gang of killers murdered a British subject in a far-flung country, a gun-boat would be sent out. If the local potentates were considered to be accomplices of the killers, the gunboat would bombard the government palace until the potentates agreed to hand over the killers or execute them locally. Otherwise a joint-punitive expedition would be organised with local involvement.
To the extent that the US supported by the UK, carried out such an operation in Afghanistan last year, I approve. My reasoning is that there was a very clear chain of events which anyone, regardless of which side they support, could understand. As regards Iraq however, no such clarity of purpose exists.
The real justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein is that he is
- a tyrant
- the highest profile Arab government opponent of the West.
Therefore Saddam’s overthrow would demoralise Islamic fundamentalists. But the US government won’t put it this way because it looks too much like an imperialist anti-Arab position. Instead an arbitrary objection to the Iraqi regime’s attempt to build nuclear weapons is invoked, creating an opportunity for the campaign to be side-tracked by the weapons’ inspectors issue. There is no mileage for the British government to get involved in this.
First, never start a war which you would be unable to finish if your allies pulled out: the sad truth is that the UK would lose a war against Iraq, unless Mr Blair launched weapons of mass destruction on Iraq.
Second, war against nuclear proliferation cannot be won. There is first the hypocrisy of letting Russia, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea develop nuclear technology, whilst threatening war on a dictator who is no worse than some of the leaders of all the other nuclear powers (all of them anti-American at various times too). Then there is the fact that this is sixty year old technology. We might as well try to prevent cross-bows or hard-encryption from spreading.
Third, unless the British government gets serious about its own internal terrorist threat: Islamic, eco-terrorist and of course the IRA, what is the point of sending British troops to traipse around the Middle East?
Finally, the equipment is so poor, the fighting capability so stretched, the politics so unrealistic, that sooner or later the British Army is going have another Majuba Hill.
The next time one of you says that “The so-called war against Al Qaeda has got nothing to do with us in the United Kingdom, we must just leave the Yanks to sort out their own problems”, please wait a moment while I read the following list of British names to you:
Neil Bowler
Jon Ellwood
Ian Findley
Marc Gajardo
Paul Hussey
David Kent
Peter Record
Chris Redman
Clive Walton
Douglas Warner
Tim Arnold
John Beaumont
Daniel Braden
Chris Bradford
Matthew Chappell
Rachael Edwards
Lucy Empson
Emma Fox
Laura France
Tom Holmes
Chris Kays
Annika Linden
Daniel Miller
Natalie Perkins
Stephen Speirs
Edward Waller
All these British people were murdered in Bali by Islamic terrorists whilst on holiday. Add them to the 67 British reasons from September 11th as to why this is not just a matter for the United States .. and then please shut the fuck up.
In the aftermath of what has been bizarrely described as a landmark speech by Prime Minister Tony Blair (or ‘The Naive Idiot’ as he seems to be known in IRA circles), we are now told in no uncertain terms that the IRA will not disband. Gosh, what a surprise.
As has been the case since British Prime Ministers started making ‘landmark speeches’ about Northern Ireland from 1968 onwards, and republicans started replying to them, “Sinn Fein’s” political spokesmen would have people believe that the Marxist Nationalists of the IRA and the Nationalist Marxists of Sinn Fein are not in fact one and the same thing, regardless of the manifest absurdity of the claim:
Pat Doherty, the Sinn Fein vice-president, said: “The IRA is not Sinn Fein’s private army. Sinn Fein is in government because of its electoral mandate and its absolute commitment to the peace process.”
And I suppose the SS was not the Nazi Party’s private army either. The difference in objectives between the IRA and Sinn Fein are what exactly? Sinn Fein is in government in Ulster in order to induce the IRA to stop setting bombs off. Although it has been manifestly within the capabilities of the British state to achieve a drastic military solution to the main problem of Ulster, the post war British system has ensured that the sort of people who find themselves with their hands on the levers of power in Westminster lack the ruthless Imperial disposition to actually do what would need to be done to put that into effect. Similarly arming the Protestant majority and allowing a bloody ‘domestic’ demographic solution (i.e. the way it was ‘solved’ in the former Yugoslavia) is simply far beyond the mindset of modern British polity. None of that is going to change in the foreseeable future of course, as Sinn Fein/IRA are well aware.
So let us not pretend that the persistent terrorist violence of the IRA has not been successful politically and that Sinn Fein is both the beneficiaries and authors of that violence. Accept that and just get on with the process of managing Britain’s incremental surrender and withdrawal. Of course if my Green and Orange Northern Irish relatives are anything to go by, what Sinn Fein/IRA will actually get in a post-UK Ulster will be rather different to what they hope for. The Protestants are no more going to disappear under republican pressure than the Nationalists have under British/Loyalist pressure, regardless of what Britain does in the future. The current situation is an Indian Summer, a comfortable delusion that in the long run will be seen to mean a lot less than it currently appears to.
I have always thought it will end extremely badly in Ulster and nothing has changed my mind in the last few years… but to be honest, if I did not know both communities so well I would care a lot more than I actually do.
Paul Marks sees who is really getting shafted by state
It is well known that Sweden has the highest taxes in the Western world (one should always been careful to remember that it is the Western world – the corrupt regimes and plundering rebels in much of the rest of the world make their ‘tax as a percentage of G.D.P.’ stats quite meaningless).
However, as the Adam Smith Institute has reminded us, it is Britain were taxes have gone up the fastest (in the European Union and, I believe, in the Western world generally world) since 1997.
There is one good thing about this. At least now people will stop talking about there being an economic concept behind ‘New’ Labour.
There may be many new things about the present government, but its economic policy of tax, spend and regulate is not new.
Paul Marks
The first round of the Mayoral elections are in from Stoke-on-Trent, a provincial town in the British Midlands.
The Labour Party incumbent is running pretty much neck-and-neck with an Independent cadidate but the real news is that the British National Party candidate is only just tucked in behind them and the Conservatives have been pushed into a rather feeble fourth place.
Not time to man the panic stations yet but I suggest that a careful watching brief is maintained.
In the maelstrom of epic and terrible world events, prosaic, but nonetheless, important bits of news have a tendency to slip anonymously beneath the waves of sound and fury. Entirely understandable, I suppose, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t throw out a life-saver every now and then and haul one of the spluttering half-drowned items back in.
The man overboard in this case was an article which appeared in the Telegraph yesterday which covered a speech given by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf and during which he boldy opined that British Judges are not bound by decisions of the European Court in Strasbourg.
“”However, if we are satisfied that the Strasbourg jurisdiction is wrong we should be bold and either not follow or distinguish the Strasbourg decision. If that is what happens, we should take particular care to make clear why we have rejected the authority.”
This is significant because I cannot recall having heard any official or serious doubt cast upon universally-accepted position that British Courts are wholly beholden to Strasbourg. It is, if you will, a murmuring of dissent.
Of course, Lord Woolf stresses that conflict would be a rare thing:
“The Lord Chief Justice predicted that occasions when there would be a conflict between the House of Lords and Strasbourg were “likely to be few and far between”.
Maybe, maybe not. And, in his position, Lord Woolf could hardly suggest otherwise but the consequences of rejecting a Strasbourg ruling even once means that a precedent is set for further rejections and that kind of thing can so easily snowball to the point where, for all intents and purposes, Britain’s judiciary is independent again.
However, the champagne should be kept on ice for now. First of all, Lord Woolf is not a politician and cannot introduce legislation. He is the highest Judge in the land but this is not a ruling, merely an opinion and, as such, has no force of law. His colleagues in the House of Lords are free to reject his invitation but also may take him up on it and proceed accordingly.
Secondly, the entire address was couched in terms of the overriding concern for the rights and welfare of immigrants. This may have been due to the nature of the audience but could equally be the result of the obsession with ‘asylum-seekers’ that has taken a hold of our entire political and judicial class. Whilst it is not a damnable concern by any means, is it too much to ask that they consider the liberties and rights of the other 60 million people who live here? Still, one step at a time, I suppose.
Overall though, an address in which the country’s most senior Judge gives a green light to his fellow Judges to tell Europe to take a hike, must, on balance, be seen as positive.
Thanks to Scrofula we know that the British MP, George Galloway is still out there, way out there.
Galloway spoke last Friday at the American University of Beirut, urging students to take to the streets in massive demonstrations if they wanted to avoid a century in which they will see their resources stolen and continued Israeli domination in the region. He talked about a Western plan aimed at carving the Arab world into smaller and even weaker states.
He claimed that British officials are deciding whether Saudi Arabia will be two or three countries and if Sudan will be two states or not. Their intention, according to Galloway, is to create a holy Saudi Arabia for the Muslims and keep the other Saudi Arabia that has oil fields for themselves.
Nothing’s missed, we have it all here – Israel, oil, British imperialism – Brendan O’Neill should leap for joy… I wonder whether Mr Galloway reads Spiked (former Living Marxism).
Galloway told the audience that people in Britain have done their bit by organising protests against a war on Iraq. But he said it is time for Arabs to demonstrate that they can threaten interests of the West in the region.
I led the biggest demonstration in the history of Britain two weeks ago, half a million people marched through the streets of London under the slogan ‘Justice for Palestine and no war in Iraq’
Apart from confusing two very different demonstrations and blatantly lying about importance and size of the anti-war one, what the hell is going on here?! How can a representative of the British public, a member of the nation’s legislature, incite violence (as in inviting ‘demonstration of a threat to insterests of the West in the region’) against his own country? This used to be called treason, fair and square, and George Galloway is guilty of it many times over. If democracy has any spine, why is he running around spewing such non-sense as an elected member of the Parliament? Do the people who voted for him agree with his treason? → Continue reading: What’s the punishment for treason nowadays?!
I remember seeing an American-made TV movie thriller a few years ago where a young female babysitter, alone in a big house, receives threatening phonecalls from a psychotic killer. She calls the police who advise here to stay calm while they trace the origin of the calls. Meanwhile the abusive phonecalls from the killer grow more deranged and fenzied. Terrified out of her wits, she then receives a call back from the police telling her to get out of the house: they’ve traced the call and it’s coming from an upstairs bedroom!
Well, we’re all young female babysitters now; a transformation formally recognised by the Telegraph:
“Terrotist recruitment and fundraising by Islamic militants centred on a London mosque were ignored for years by the British security services, a former Special Branch informant claimed yesterday.”
Perhaps the spooks were on leave or something.
“While his British handlers preferred to keep a watching brief on the mosque, where the imam is the radical cleric Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri, the French became increasingly infuriated.
French counter-terrorism experts refer to the capital as “Londonistan” because of the number of wanted extremists who have sought and found safe haven there.”
We actually managed to infuriate the French through lack of action. Surely a world first?
“”The French felt British law was very, very soft on these people. Britain was looking at Irish terrorists; it couldn’t see the threat. It gave these people flats, benefits, passports, citizenship.”
That’s a relief. For a minute I was worried that some of their needs were not being fully catered for. Anything else required? Satellite TV? Chauffeur-driven limousine? Jacuzzi? Comfort girls?
As I type, Detectives from Scotland Yard are jetting off to Bali to look for terrorists. One wonders what, precisely, has been stopping them from taking a bus to Finsbury Park? And if any non-Britons are mystified as to how this bureacratic indifference on the home front squares with Tony Blair’s (quite genuine, I believe) hawkishness in the War on Terror, all I can say is, join the club.
Whatever the explanation (assuming there is one at all), we find ourselves in the tangled undergrowth of the most dangerous possible combination of tactics in response to Islamic terrorism: aggressive foreign policy and an inept domestic policy.
Those phonecalls are getting increasingly threatening. I sincerely hope we don’t all end up running from the house screaming.
After periodic, and if the truth be known, inevitable paedophile scandals in Britain of the sort that occurs in every school system in the world, checks on the backgrounds of teachers have been stepped up and made more rigorous. No problem there as if someone has a history of paedophile activities, it is entirely reasonable that a potential educational employer should want to discover that.
But then why does the state insist that as part of this information gathering process, that the prospective teacher reveals their banking details and how to access their secure password to get at their financial details?
It is because the Panopticon state regards privacy as in and of itself a cause for suspicion.
I suppose it is only to be expected that Iain Duncan Smith would round off the Conservative Conference in Bournemouth with a triumphal assertion that the ‘the Tories are back’. The poor man could hardly do otherwise having presided over a week of fractious in-fighting, broody soul-searching and insurrectionary plots to topple him as leader. He just had to try to end things on an upbeat note and stamp his authority.
But is he right? Like Perry, I think that the answer is ‘no’ and, furthermore, I feel that the situation is unlikely to be improved by any well-spun policy initiatives. The problem for the Conservatives was, in fact, highlighted this last week by their Chairman, Theresa May when she exhorted the assembled party faithful to work to shed their ‘nasty image’. Therein lies the crux of the problem: nobody likes the Conservative because they are popularly seen as being ‘nasty’ and ‘uncaring’, i.e. it is believed that, once in power, they will cut taxes, curtail generous welfare handouts, privatise healthcare and education and stop creating sinecure jobs in the public sector for the competence-challenged.
Now there’s a sublime irony here because, in the event that the Tories ever did ascend the throne again, they are highly unlikely to do any of those things. For sure, about half of the party consists of people who would very much like to do those things but the other half consists of people who would rather stick their genitals in a food blender and press the ‘On’ button before they rocked any boats whatosever, and it’s the latter half that usually wins (as well as being the half that toppled Mrs.T). → Continue reading: Conservatives up the creek
Whither the Tories as a low-tax party? Well, I came across this piece of defeatism by Danny Finkelstein, who was once an adviser to former Prime Minister John “bonker” Major.
Essentially, Finkelstein writes that the Conservatives should stop talking at all about tax cuts since it would give them nil public credibility in arguing for reform of the public services.
“There have been times when tax cuts have been a sure-fire election winner and such a time will undoubtedly come again. Yet in deciding to put so much emphasis on public services, the Tories have decided that the next election is not such a time. for if public services are to come first, something must come second.”
Firstly, I was not aware that any senior Tory, unless under the influence of booze, has made a principled and coherent argument for cutting taxes in the last five years. In fact, it seems this previously major feature of what passes for Tory thinking has fallen completely off the radar. More’s the pity.
Secondly, the supply side argument. Surely Finkelstein and others should have grasped the point that most major governments, including the present British one, set taxes at rates which actually means they raise less revenue than otherwise would be the case due to the blight on incentives high taxes cause. While I don’t expect every pundit to have heard of the Laffer Curve it would be nice to think that the enormous success of Ronald Reagan’s and Margaret Thatcher’s tax cut measures would have left some kind of mark. Clearly some reminders are needed.
Increases in public spending or holding spending where it is has not proven to work in delivering good health or education, as the shambolic state of Britain’s socialised system of health care proves. Many of the problems have little to do with money, more with ideology. Finkelstein’s argument is predicated on the idea that reform necessarily will cost as much, if not more, than what is being spent at the moment. That is questionable, to say the least.
And finally, by accepting the notion that one cannot cut taxes while sorting out health, education, etc, the Tories would be allowing the Labour government to dictate the very terms of the debate. That is a recipe for instant failure. That is why Labour-leaning commentators anxious to shaft the Tories urge it as the Tories’ only hope for salvation. Such folk are false friends and should be shunned.
And Mr Finkelstein should recall that although his domestic agenda is now either in tatters or in cold storage, one reason why George W. Bush made it to the White House was on account of tax cuts.
Overheard on Radio 4 this morning – a plan by Westminster Council to fine the homeless who sleep in the ‘tourist sensitive’ areas around Westminster. What a marvellous idea, fine the homeless, like they have the £500 ($750 US) proposed fine! Why don’t they just admit they want to lock them up – and cut out the court admin of chasing the fine? The state is not your friend, whether you are rich or poor…
Also, why is David Trimble really so upset with Sinn Fein spying on the Northern Ireland Assembly? Yes, there are security implications given their ‘links’ to the IRA but surely it couldn’t have come as a surprise? Is he just making political capital out of his opponents being caught with their listening devices out? Is he covering his embarrassment that his party wasn’t doing it? Or is he protesting too much to cover up the fact that he was doing the same thing?
Finally, a policeman’s take on the “after the war in Iraq” question (from a trusted source close to the police, i.e., a policeman I know):
“Iraq’s population is a combination of three different and ethnically varied races who hate one another with a vengeance. They hate us [the West] even more than each other and may be unwilling and unable to support the west should a strike occur. However, if intervention is necessary and the aftermath is about putting together a new and effective ‘junta’, then there might be a chance. If not, it will be a hell of a hole to police.”
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