The Deal is Done

 About an hour ago, it was announced that Britain and EU have done the Brexit deal.

This ends a disconcerting four and half year period when Brexit (how I've grown to hate that word) completely dominated the British media. It was hell for editors - the most important news story for a generation was also the most complex and boring one. 

I'm no fan of Boris Johnson, but at least he, or at least his former special advisor Dominic Cummings knew something about negotiation. That something is that in order to negotiate from a position of weakness you have to appear slightly crazy. Downright insane at times and willing to do the unthinkable like walk away and go for a non-deal Brixit. 

That was Teresa May's problem - she was far too sane and rational to make that threat look real, so the EU negotiators didn't take her seriously enough. Boris Johnson is a bit of flake and isn't ashamed to show it - a much more volatile and impulsive character and in the Brexit negotiations that counted for a lot.

Sadly those traits are rubbish when it comes to the applied science of COVID repression. Here Boris is weak and plodding cautious methodical Teresa May would have been outstanding. Ipswich is joining the rest of the South East in Tier 4 from the first minute of Boxing Day. Thankfully there are no fewer than three effective vaccines available soon so I'm hoping at some point in the late Spring of 2021 Britain will return to something like normal. 

The task of rebuilding the economy and coming to terms with what the Brexit deal really means will consume the country for the next few years. 

Free Speech

I'm worried about the effects of the "I'M OFFENDED!" tactic on free speech.

The latest example was yesterday when Sir Kier Starmer, the new leader of the Labour Party, sacked the left winger Rebecca Long-Bailey for the heinous crime of approving an interview which contained an 'antisemitic' (i.e anti-Israel) remark.

Brendan O'Neil puts it much better than me in an article in today's Spiked:

The sacking of RLB by Labour leader Keir Starmer is wrong. It is a shrill overreaction to the mere sharing of an article. RLB’s tweetcrime was to praise the actress Maxine Peake and to share an interview with Peake that was published in the Independent today.

Bad Weekend

It was a bad weekend - nice weather and of course due to the lock down there was little chance to enjoy it.

The frustrating thing was my lack of motivation. There are fence panels to paint, cars to maintain, oil to order and collect... I did none of that - just stuck indoors and restless.

The Queen made an excellent broadcast to the nation on Sunday evening. Her speech writer(s) did an excellent job, and for once the delivery seemed a little less stiff and unnatural than previously. I particularly liked the reference to her first broadcast to the nation, accompanied by her sister Margaret, in May 1940. It reminded us that this 92 year old and her country had been through tougher times than this.

Boris Johnson has been taken to hospital, his condition has obviously worsened, and Catherine Calderwood, the impressive Chief Medical Officer of Scotland has been forced to resign due to a stupid mistake. She visited her holiday home 45 miles from Edinburgh, on consecutive weekends, breaking the law and her own advice. Not even the brilliant Nicola Sturgeon could save her. Why is it that such clever people can be so thoughtless?!?

The Day After

Some initial thoughts on the general election.

To begin with I was filled with despair but now I've had a chance to think things over I can see some positive aspects of last night's defeat for Labour and the crushing of the Lib Dems:

1. Boris Johnson now owns Brexit. Any difficulties or problems with Brexit are now his alone to deal with. Brexit was never going to be easy and it's possible that Johnson will get the blame for the inevitable problems, compromises and general under achievement that Brexit will bring.  
2. Labour may find a new and charismatic leader to lead them to victory next time round. 
3. Nigel Farage is yesterday's man and yesterday's news. 
4. Ruth Smeeth  lost her seat.

Election Night

The exit poll has Boris Johnson with a majority of over 80 seats.

I'm in despair.

I was So Wrong!

I made three predictions this year:

1) Maria Sharapova would be banned from tennis for two and a half years for doping.

WRONG - She was banned for two years, which (scandalously) was reduced to 18 months on appeal.

2) Britain would narrowly vote to stay in the E.U

WRONG - Britain narrowly voted to leave the E.U with completely unpredictable consequences. Personally I think this will be an appalling mistake, whose full impact won't be apparent for several years. But then all my predictions have been wrong recently.

3) Hillary Clinton would beat Donald Trump in the US election.

WRONG - Trump won the election, although it's a small consolation to realise he actually lost the election by two million votes due to anomalies in the US elective system.

I've been blogging since 2004, but it's safe to say that 2016 has been the most historic and surprising year since this blog started. It really shook me up, and caused me to question some deeply held beliefs and attitudes. Perhaps I'll do another post about those next time.   

Still Shocked and Disorientated

This has been the most extraordinary and disconcerting week I can ever remember. Here's a brief summary of what's happened since Friday June 24th, when the result of the E.U referendum was announced:

1) David Cameron, a popular and successful prime minister resigned in tears.

2) The Chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, disappeared for three days. Then he reemerged to try and calm the markets. Then he announced the centre piece of his economic strategy, getting budget into surplus by 2020 had been abandoned...

3) Boris Johnson, widely regarded as the Prime Minister in waiting and the charismatic leader of the "Brexit" campaign appeared pale and shaken by the result. A few days later, after Micheal Gove, his partner in crime and the de facto Brexit intellectual publicly lost faith in him, Borris withdrew from the leadership race to replace David Cameron.

4) Micheal Gove himself then tried to become leader of the Tory Party, but having betrayed both Cameron and Johnson found his trustworthiness was rather low...

5) Roy Hodgeson the England manager has resigned in tears after we were beaten by Iceland of all countries.

6) The Labour Party is in complete disarray with strong attacks mounted on Jeremy Corbyn. 

Soon, and for many many years to follow - books will be written about the week just gone, docu-drama series and films. It's been utterly amazing and rather scary, and it's terrified overseas investors - the pound has plunged and the stock market has been up and down (down mainly) like a big-dipper. 

I'm anxious about the future and what the 52% have done to this country for the future. It looks very much like a self inflicted wound.

Shocked and Sad

One of the first political events I remember is a spirited debate about the forthcoming referendum on the Common Market around the dinner table of my grandparents house in Stoke on Trent. It must have been the summer of 1975.
Back then, the result was a 2/3rd majority in favour of staying. Last night, it was much closer. But 52% of the people voted for the country to leave the European Union, as old Common Market became.
This result has been one of the most profound shocks of my life. As someone who lived in France from 1998 to 1996, and worked and visited many other European countries during that time, I never ever believed until a couple of days ago that Britain would ever leave the E.U. This despite an uneasy relationship with the E.U that has never been really comfortable for any extended period.
I don't know how to process this result, or what the future holds. Essentially it looks like a colossal gamble. Lets hope it pays off. John Harris writes a typically excellent piece about the referendum here:
In the meantime there's Glastonbury to console us, along with Wimbledon starting on Monday.

Two Predictions

Blogs are great for sticking your neck out and making predictions.

Here are two from me:

1) The British people will decide to remain in the European Union on the 23rd of June this year.

2) Maria Sharapova, recently caught doping at the Australian Open, will be banned from tennis for two and half years by the ITF.

I really ought to back up my predictions with a couple of bets.

Commemoration

This August, Britain has been commemorating the start of the first world war, which began 100 years ago.

As part of the commemoration, 800,000+ artificial poppies have been placed in the moat at the Tower of London, each poppy representing one British or Commonwealth life lost.

It must have been the most devastating war to live through. What always strikes me travelling through Britain and France is how many names there are on each village memorial. Particularly as the villages were almost always much smaller in those days, at least in Britain. Some small communities must have lost all the guys aged between 16 and 35. Probably every family in Britain lost someone; mine certainly did. There was a brother of my father's mother 'shot while trying to escape' from being taken prisoner, which she seemed to find entirely in character. Then there was my mother's mother's father, who survived the trenches only to die in vile influenza epidemic that broke out during the last year of war and the first years of peace.

On my many travels I've developed a theory that Britain and America were actually quite similar in outlook up to 1914. There was an unashamed patriotism, and a strong belief in science and technology as agents of positive change. There was also quite a lot of religious belief expressed and publicly celebrated. Both nations, and indeed countries like France and Germany, felt they were special and unique and blessed by god, or at least good fortune.

After 1918, in Britain and Europe, many people felt that modern war had rendered such beliefs absurd. How do you believe in a technological utopia when science has produced poison gas, high explosive and the machine gun? How would any kind of loving god sit on his hands whilst Europe bleeds itself white, and then rewards the peace with an influenza outbreak that kills almost as many people who died in the war? How can one be patriotic, when patriotism has led to so many pointless deaths? Above all else why was the war fought and was the price in blood and treasure remotely worth paying?

Now I know America did enter the war (late as usual as British cynics would add). But although Imperial Germany felt the growing weight of American arms towards the final months of war, American casualties were, by European standards, tiny. Now don't get me wrong, 100,000+ deaths is awful - far greater than the numbers of US dead in for example, Vietnam. But from a population of 90 million, they don't have anything like the same effect as 700,000+ British dead from a population half that size.

So in the years that follow, the United States remains very religious (at least on the surface), supremely optimistic about science and technology, and unashamedly patriotic. European culture is the exact opposite; and I reckon it's because of the first world war.

Margaret Thatcher

Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, otherwise known as Maggie Thatcher or That Bloody Woman died this morning at the Ritz Hotel after a stroke.

She’d been going potty for years, a fact rather cruelly exploited by Abi Morgan, the screenwriter of The Iron Lady, a generally sympathetic and more or less accurate biopic released a couple of years ago. Meryl Streep was brilliant in the title role (did anyone expect anything less?) and the script imbued Margaret with a number of humanising qualities absent in real life, such as grace and a sense of humour.

I suppose the humourless quality of her personality is one of the many reasons I could never abide Margaret Hilda Thatcher; zero sense of humour it seems to me the one defining trait of all true fanatics. And a fanatic she was, or at least became, famously working till midnight, and then up again at 4am manic and driven, ready to greet another action-packed day of red boxes and meetings. None the less it probably did need a fanatic to break the will of those other fanatics; wannabe revolutionaries such as Arthur Scargill, Ted Knight and the other ‘brothers.’ It was always brothers, never the sisters of British trade union movement, whose leaders ruthlessly exploited a unique set of circumstances in post war Britain; lousy industrial relations, lousy managers, a ruling class that was losing it’s nerve, high demand, high employment and high inflation. The brothers had a good scam going, but like so many others who have a good scam, they always want that little hell-of-a-lot-more.

Thatcher took them on, collectively and individually, and I’ll never forget their faces as they trooped out of Downing Street after the one and only official meeting between the British Government and the TUC in the first week she took power. The meetings called Economic something or others were a legacy of Jim Callaghan’s pink socialism. That last gathering was over in under 15 minutes and never repeated. Some fools are already saying that Thatcher was a friend of freedom, and it’s true one of the many reforms she introduced and that New Labour was careful not to repeal was her insistence that trade union democracy was democratic; previously major strike decisions had been taken on a show of hands with all the opportunities for intimidation and miscounts that that implies. But true democracy was always optional for the priggish Margaret; hence the genuinely warm and friendly relations with turds like General Augusto Pinochet, President Suharto and the unqualified support of apartheid South Africa.

If the breaking of the unions was a necessary and long overdue evil, then I’m much less impressed by unnecessary evil of the Falklands War, often billed as Thatcher’s triumph. True it was started by a breathtakingly stupid move by a particularly stupid military dictatorship (has there been a clever one, since Julius Ceaser?).  But what really grates is that the war was at least partially provoked by stupid and unimaginative spending cuts to the Royal Navy. The conflict was completely avoidable. Thatcher’s much despised predecessor Jim Callaghan (who as Chief Petty Officer Callaghan had served in the Royal Navy with  distinction in World War 2), got wind of a possible invasion of the Falklands in the mid 1970s. He immediately dispatched several frigates and destroyers to the islands and discreetly made sure the move was known to Argentina. With the prospect of any landing craft having to fight their way through a naval battle before landing a single soldier, the invasion of the Falklands was quietly shelved. No lives lost, no ships sunk, no invasions and counter invasions, the kind of cold ruthless competence Thatcher herself was supposed to embody.

Once the triumphs over the brothers and Argentina are dealt with, the rest of the Thatcher legacy becomes more nuanced, less spectacular and more opaque. We’re still dealing with the effects of her economic policy. Pissed away on benefits was the once in a century North Sea Oil money, which could have been used for almost anything else more productively. She (I suspect half unwittingly) deregulated the banks, sold off the council houses, and (again half unwittingly) told manufacturing industry, mostly based in the ‘red’ North of England to go fuck itself. As a student living in Preston and then Manchester during the height of Thatcherism (1981 to 1986) and then as a junior employee in the booming South of England from 1986 to 1989, I think I can speak with some authority on the effects of her economic policies. Reading, Berkshire was booming, booming to the extent that the population had completely overrun the town’s services and the roads were a congested nightmare. Europe's largest housing estate, Lower Early was on the Easten flank. Designed by building companies, it had not a single shop or church, just road after curved road of tiny Barret style houses.

I hated my years in Reading, and have always turned down job offers in Thames Valley ever since. By contrast towns like Preston never recovered from the loss of manufacturing industry in the Great Recession of early 1980s. Legacies like long term unemployment, ‘ghost towns’ and depression in the North all date from that time, and it’s horrifying to think they are still very much with us. Manchester, by it’s sheer size and cultural assets, did manage to reinvent itself during the Blair boom of the naughties, but before that there were still the best part of two lost decades when the city lost its wealth and almost lost its confidence.

In short I was so scarred by the government and culture of Thatcher’s Britain that I ended up leaving the country just as soon as I could, and didn’t return until the dawn of New Labour in 1996.

So you might ask, how did Thatcher do it? How despite such flaws and horrors did she manage to win three general elections? In short, she was unbelievably lucky. 1979 and thanks to the brothers and their Winter of Discontent, anyone sane and breathing could have been elected Prime Minister. 1982, Thatcher is the most unpopular Prime Minister in polling history, running the most unpopular government in polling history. What happens? Argentina invades the Falklands and thanks to the outstanding efforts and professionalism of the British armed forces Thatcher wins a war and fights a “khaki election” against a split opposition the following year. 1987 the Labour Party is at its most extreme and unlikable, whilst the Social Democratic Alliance formed of moderate Labour Party heavyweights steals most of the moderate Labour Party vote. Thatcher is elected on around 30% of the votes as usual. 1992, and Thatcher has already gone power crazy and has been out of office for the best part of two years. That last fact is an important one – never underestimate the ruthless desire to win of the modern Conservative party – the most successful political party in Western Democracies for the last 50 years.

I’ll finish with two things you didn’t know about Margaret Thatcher – she was an alcoholic who hit the bottle hard when chucked out in November 1990, and she privately despised Ronald Reagan as a twit with “nothing between his ears” – an opinion I share.

I only saw Margaret Thatcher once. It had been a long rather lovely day at Wimbledon, and I’d watched a compelling semi-final on Court No 1 between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal. The Spaniard had won after poor Novak couldn’t continue from his blisters caused by an epic match the previous day (the tournament was blighted by bad weather for most of the fortnight). Wondering back past the outside of Centre Court, a crowd had gathered outside. Hoping for a sight of Roger Federer, we joined the crowd. 

No such luck – out of the double doors comes a frail, somewhat bird-like little woman with famous but thinning hair and crazed eyes. It’s Margaret Thatcher and the crowd politely applauds.

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair - The Rehabilitation

Blair is back, or at least attempting to return to British political life.


The brilliant Matthew Norman reminds us why this must never take place:

He was arsenic in the party's bloodstream for a reason so self-evident that it doesn't much matter what Chilcot concludes. Everyone, or almost everyone, knows it all anyway: that he struck the deal with Bush long before he admits; that it was mendacious drivel to claim Jacques Chirac refused to countenance a second UN resolution "under any circumstances"; that the intelligence was cynically stripped of all caveats for political purposes; and that, in terms of foreign policy catastrophe, Iraq makes Suez seem a trifling diplomatic gaffe on a par with mis-seating the Panamanian ambassador at a banquet.

Call it an atrocious strategic misjudgment, a dementedly misguided Neocon experiment, a war crime or whatever, it is perfectly well understood in these child-like terms: Mr Blair did a truly terrible thing, with unspeakably terrible consequences for the people of Iraq, the troops killed and maimed in prosecuting his folly, and those who died and were injured here in retaliatory bombings in July 2005, the morning after the 30th Olympiad was hereby awarded to the city of London.

You can read Mr Norman's article in full here.

Immigration, Football and Monday Morning

I just can't get it together this Monday morning, so decided to write a blog entry during my mid-morning break. 


Over the week-end, I read the best article I've seen on the edgy topic of immigration. You can find it here at the excellent Flipchart Fairytales business blog.


Last night England were totally outclassed by Italy in the 1/4 finals of the European Championships. It was a rather harrowing game, which featured full-on dominance by Italy. We did well to hang on, riding our luck and defending gallantly to reach the penalty shoot-out. That, needless to say, went badly. I've seen every England penalty shoot-out since 1990, and this one was by far the least harrowing - because we thoroughly deserved to lose the match and of course did. The Italians were simply better at all aspects of football and that included taking penalties, full stop.

Anxious Times

Since my last post the bad weather has continued, with some of the more hysterical papers like the Daily Express talking about the wettest June on record to compliment April. 

The hosepipe ban has been lifted, and Mandy and myself have played a lot of tennis on damp courts and in drizzle. Marvellous.

Of course all this is really just whinging, because behind it all the Eurocrises rumbles on, seemingly immune to any possible cure. I don't really understand the ins and outs of it, but it appears private banks are heavily in debt and so are national governments. This means the banks are vulnerable to going bust, because the government isn't a credible lender of the last resort. It's scary to contemplate what happens when a government goes bust. Add to this the fact that many of the countries in trouble are part of the Eurozone, and you have the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of 1929-1936.

A great depression is more or less what's happened to Greece and what may well happen to Spain and Portugal. Interest rates on Spanish government bonds are perilously close to 7% which is held to be unsustainable, and the credit rating for Greece is now junk status, which means the country cannot raise money on the open market. There are hair-raising tales of Greece being told in the media; things like children passing out in lessons due to hunger, hospitals running out of medicines, and runs on banks that have led to billions being withdrawn and kept under mattresses in cash. The worry of course is that if Greece does leave the Euro (I think it will) people's money will be instantly devalued by at least 1/3rd, maybe more. Tourists are not visiting the country because they are worried that ATMs might cease to function, or airlines and ferry companies might go bankrupt and leave people stranded.

Britain seems to have been comparatively well managed compared to other countries, although its doubtful Gordon Brown and David Cameron will be able to claim credit for that. One of the many depressing things about democracy is that voters don't do gratitude. They just do whinging.

Me? I'm just grateful to have a job that seems relatively secure, and a partner who loves me. Given the current climate, millions of Europeans must dream of having what I have. But there's a definite feeling at the moment that things might very suddenly fall apart, and unlike almost every other scare of the past 40 years (the energy crisis, nuclear war, the AIDS epidemic, BSE etc) this one has me worried.

Missed Post - and an Election

Oh dear - for the first time since starting this blog years ago, I broke my rule of posting something at least once every month.

As David Young discussed on his blog, I too blame the ever growing popularity of Facebook - particularly for random self-indulgent blogs like this one that have no theme, no dedicated audience, and are really just vanity publishing albeit on-line. Facebook is great for random thoughts and instant feedback.

None the less this blog has given me a lot of pleasure, and it's fun to discover what seemed important two, three or even four years ago. Rather like a seldom kept diary, I'm loathe to throw it away or declare it officially closed.

***

So what is on my mind right now? Well like most thoughtful people, there is the little matter of the election tomorrow. Unlike the past two or three elections, the outcome is still in some doubt, although it seems pretty certain we'll have a new Prime Minister at the end of it, and most probably a new government.

Here's a prediction based on observations of every election since 1979.

The Conservatives will win tomorrow, and David Cameron will move into No 10 over the week-end.

This may surprise you, as the media is still excited with the prospects of a hung Parliament, and possibly Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats (are there any non democratic liberals?) making some kind of breakthrough.

The reason I don't think this will happen is because the British first past the post system is fiendishly difficult for a third party to crack open. I'm speaking from personal experience here, having been involved in the Liberal/Social Democratic alliance between David Steel and David Owen back in the 1980s. We got to within 2% of the Labour Party and were rewarded with... 17 seats. That's how close you can be with a first past the post system and still end up nowhere.

Despite this I'm still a fan of the first past the post system and of British politics. Why? Because coalition government frequently produces a terrible inertia, or worse (as in the case of Israel) various bigots and extremists end up holding the balance of power and are able to extract huge and loathsome concessions from a party with a far larger majority. It's difficult to imagine the reforms of Clement Attlee or Margaret Thatcher taking place in a coalition system. At least one of the coalition parties would have lost their nerve.

Secondly, the British system has Prime Minister's questions, which is a wonderful really tough I.Q and conviction test. It basically protects us from charismatic fuckwits like George W Bush, Sarah Palin, Ronald Reagan, "Ambassador" Alan Keyes and so on. They wouldn't last five minutes in Parliament, as George Galloway showed when he verbally destroyed a group of stunned U.S Senators a few years ago.

Interestingly, I believe Bill Clinton and Barack Obama would have faired very well under the British system, although there's no real way of testing that.

Anyway, lets have the election tomorrow and see what happens. I'll try and post something here on election night - which I intend to watch downstairs in a sleeping bag!

Pledge of Allegance

The excellent Johann Hari has come up with an alternative pledge of allegance to replace the dreadful durge we make immigrants recite at citizenship ceremonies across the land.

With a few trivial edits (e.g. remove references to the dreadful soaps East Enders and Coronation Street, add references to bacon sandwiches and HP sauce and the songs of Ray Davies) I'd be happy to recite it myself:

I pledge allegiance to the Queen Vic, not Queen Elizabeth. I pledge allegiance to Coronation Street, not Downing Street. I pledge allegiance to The Office, not the office of Prime Minister. I pledge allegiance to the Life of Brian, not the Life of Christ. I pledge allegiance to Marmite – and to people who can talk for hours about precisely why they hate Marmite.

I pledge allegiance to deep-fried Mars bars, cold doner kebabs, and girls who wear mini-skirts in sub-zero temperatures. I pledge allegiance to the NHS, the BBC, and M&S. I pledge allegiance to Shakespeare and to the belief that "there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio".

I pledge allegiance to Radio 4 documentaries about the history of drinking water, told in six parts. I pledge allegiance to George Orwell, George Formby, George Eliot, and George Michael. I pledge allegiance to the Notting Hill Carnival, the Edinburgh Festival, and the people who – for no reason at all – wander around Glastonbury dressed as giant pigeons.

I pledge allegiance to our national dish, chicken tikka masala. I pledge allegiance to the people who sell candy floss on muddy beaches on muggy days. I pledge allegiance to fog and hail and rain, and to people who wear three layers of clothing and shed them and put them back on several times a day, each time declaring with an optimistic smile, "The weather's lovely today".

I pledge allegiance to the Beatles and the conviction that life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. I pledge allegiance to queuing, and to the people who tut and cluck and scrunch their faces when anybody tries to push in. I pledge allegiance to William Wallace played by an Australian and Gandhi played by an Englishman.

I pledge allegiance to Fawlty Towers and faulty trains and that small, almost silent sigh that shudders across a carriage when the train stops for no reason in empty fields. I pledge allegiance to the wrong kind of snow.

I pledge allegiance to the fact that the London Olympics in 2012 will be messier and shabbier and far more prone to disruption by protesters than the Beijing Olympics.

I pledge allegiance to the boys who died in the mud at Normandy so I could be free. I pledge allegiance to the women who slept in the mud at Greenham Common so I would not burn. I pledge allegiance to Ateeque Sharifi, who came here as a refugee from Taliban Afghanistan, only to be blown up by Talibanists on the Circle Line. I pledge allegiance to everyone who drives an ambulance or teaches a child on this rainy island for paltry wages because they know it's the right thing to do.

I pledge allegiance to the people of Britain, not because they're the best in the world, but because they're mine."

Amen.

We're Still Led by a Coward

Foreign Secretary Straw Man

We are the hollow men,
We are the stuffed men,
Leaning together,
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when,
We whisper together,
Are quiet and meaningless

- TS Elliot 1925

Actually there’s no “we” involved here, instead it’s the pathetic performance of the Straw Man yesterday that’s the issue.

Faced with a tricky situation in the Palestinian prison of Jericho, the Straw Man writes a few letters to the marginalised Palestinian Authority President, and then cuts and runs leaving Palestinians (once again) to be invaded, killed and captured by the Israeli terror machine.

So far so bad, but the way this terror machine swung into action a mere 20 minutes after the British and American monitors left the prison makes a bad decision an abysmal one.

There is just no way that a full scale invasion and assault could be planned and started in that time. Straw’s insistence that there was no collusion insults the intelligence of anyone who cares to listen to him.

But what if Straw Man is telling the truth?!? The only plausible explanation then is that the leak came from the Americans. If so, Straw must go public with this information, and threaten to withdraw British troops from Iraq as payback for the danger caused to British nationals and property all over the Middle East.

But of course that requires courage from the Hollow Man, the Straw Man.

We Were Cowards Once, and Weak

Picture by Ron Haviv

As part of an article on the problems of prosecuting war criminals, the excellent Max Hastings has the decency to admit he was wrong about Britain’s cowardly response to genocide in the Balkans in the 1990s:

Those of us who opposed military involvement in early-1990s Yugoslavia were probably wrong. The fact that it was difficult to do something should not have become an excuse for doing nothing.

I’m very pleased about this because it gives me another opportunity to type the most beautiful phrase in the English language:

I told you so.

But to be fair, Max is being a little harsh on himself. It was stinking bad luck for the former Yugoslavia that Britain and France, the only two European powers capable of effective military intervention, both suffered a crisis of leadership in the early 1990s.

In Britain, Prime Minister John Major was leading a divided, discredited, and ineffective government, with a shrinking majority in the House of Commons. All these factors lead the PM to shy away from controversial decisions, if we assume that the prevention of genocide is controversial.

None the less, nice guy John made the decision to do nothing, and when public opinion and the news coverage of the massacres and “ethnic cleansing” got intolerable, the policy changed to doing as little as possible.

This policy was fully endorsed by foreign secretary Douglas Hurd, a liberal sadist. In his article, Max reveals that dear Douglas (christened by the Americans “Douglas Turd” for his vacillating windy indecision) now has doubts about his policy of leaving the Serbs alone to massacre their opponents:

"I hope that history does not judge that it was easier than it seemed to us at the time, to act in the Balkans."

Well Doug, history’s answer = Yes.

In France, we now know that far from ruling the country, President Francois Mitterrand was mainly occupied with dying of cancer. Never a delegator, the net result of his illness was something close to the feeble British policy, but with a very French bureaucratic twist. On one infamous occasion, a French commander refused to provide air support to a Dutch unit because the request was written on the wrong form…

It’s to Europe’s lasting shame that effective intervention finally came from the US military lead by an exasperated President Bill Clinton. If ever there was a moment that the European Union project lost its way, not just with us sceptics in Britain but in the European heartland, it was at the sight of a pathetic European leadership having to be led by the Americans to ‘do the right thing.’

Small wonder American foreign policy has drifted towards unilateral action in the last decade…

The Thick of It

It’s rare that any TV series really grabs me, although I still have fond memories of Cracker and the cruel yet compelling Cardiac Arrest from the 1990s, and more recently the gritty satire of Bodies.

Both the medical dramas were scripted by the brilliant Dr. Jed Mecurio, who was forced to write Cardiac Arrest under the pen name John Macure, as he was still a serving NHS doctor at the time. I suppose under the right set of circumstances, it's possible to view both as very dark comedies.

Last night was the last episode of another very dark comedy, the wonderful political drama The Thick of It which walked a very clever line between comedy and realism. The acting and the fly-on-the-wall atmosphere (it's all hand-held cameras and what appears to be natural light) are a treat. Let's hope there's another series in the works...

Core belief: If you keep your eyes open you can get all the laughs you’ll ever need at work…