The latest spike in the casualty figures from the dismal conflict in Afghanistan has provoked a flurry of comment and criticism from all sides. At one end of the spectrum you have the armchair warriors who say we must never surrender to the Taliban and who will willingly fight to the last drop of someone else’s blood. And on the other end, the troops-out peaceniks of the Stop the War Coalition and similar organisations.
What is the ordinary person to make of it? By persuasion, by calling, I am of the peacenik party. I was against the Iraq War. I called it the wrong war, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, against the wrong enemy, for the wrong reasons. I had my reservations about going into Afghanistan. Picking a fight with the Taliban because they refused to surrender Bin Laden was a big ask. Did they even have the power to surrender him in the first place? Did George Bush even care, as long as the TV audiences at home could see US bombs falling somewhere, on someone vaguely Muslim, in retaliation for the lamentable failure of US foreign policy that was 9/11?
The reasons for being in Afghanistan today are a lot different from those advanced in 2001. The original reason, to flush out Bin Laden, has been unsuccessful largely owing to the porous nature of the Afghan-Pakistan border, the lack of sufficient resource to do the job, and the fact that the mission got deflected, along the way, into a larger mission to win over the hearts and minds of the population. Quite how you win over the hearts and minds of the population by invading and bombing them has become an increasingly problematic question, and one to which there is no answer. In using violence to try and change the culture of radical Islam and in attempting to use it to weld together an uneasy amalgam of warlords to a government that many feels lacks legitimacy, the UK/US forces in Afghanistan have probably radicalised more than they have converted. We’ve created an unholy alliance of the Taliban and Al Qaeda where none existed before. In short, we have incited every hothead east of the Euphrates with access to an AK47 or a grenade-launcher to take a pot at us.
It is often advanced by the Prime Minister that our military presence in the area is somehow making us safer from terrorism. The problem I have with this approach is that the people who perpetrated the worst atrocity on British soil since the dark days of the IRA were actually from Leeds and Reading. They were moved to carry out their actions by our presence in Iraq and, er, Afghanistan. So far from being a preventative measure in the circumstances, I feel that our presence there is exacerbating the situation.
Wednesday 2 September 2009
Silly Buggers and Silly FOCAs
I was not amazed at the story which emerged recently of the News of the World allegedly using snooping agencies to try and tape the voicemails of the rich and famous. After all, there was a court case about it a while ago now, and someone even went to jail as a result. Whether he was the right person of course is a moot point, given the wider prevalence of the practice now being suggested. It was not even surprising that the practice was more widespread. After all, the speed and ease of modern digital communications has made mass e-mailings and mass SMS-texting a reality. No, what amazed me is that allegedly the police knew all about it and did nothing! I am not a lawyer, but I would have thought that snooping on someone else’s voicemail must contravene some statute or other, even if it is only the Data Protection Act, which local authorities and call centres are so fond of quoting whenever they want to get out of actually being helpful.
I am not surprised, either, that the News of the World – if they did it, which is still unproven – actually got away with it. In general, the tabloid press in the UK has an incredible power, frequently misused. Their constant mixture of dirty tricks and surveillance with “celebrity” news and gossip makes for the worst of both worlds and risks eventually bring down a draconian “privacy law” on the heads of all the media, which will prevent even legitimate investigation of stories which are in the public interest. To a certain extent, we get the press we deserve, or so runs the well-rehearsed argument. But I am not so sure that the tail does not wag the dog. After all, it’s not as if there is any real choice of an alternative media to peruse and choose instead, for those of us who don’t want salacious red-top tittle-tattle about who is currently going to be evicted from the Big Brother House.
I would love to hear the excuse used by the police for not pursuing this, and I look forward to a successful private prosecution opening the floodgates for many more of the same.
*
I wonder if any of those allegedly bugged by the News of the World’s agents were bishops? Specifically, I wonder if they were the bishops who seem unusually exercised by the word “bugger” in alternative connotations. I refer of course to the Fellowship of Committed Anglicans, or FOCA for short, the hard-line faction within the Church of England who have set out to challenge the authority of Rowan Williams by “upholding” “traditional” Anglican values (such as being anti-Gay). This of course is just what we need in the world today – yet more gay-bashing religious fundamentalism. As if the Taliban were not enough! What really irks me about these people is not so much their fundamentalist views – they are, after all, entitled to their opinions, however loopy. It is the fact that the whole “are gays OK by God” argument (and its offshoot on women bishops) is so massively irrelevant.
I don’t know what it is that gives FOCA the right to assume they are more “committed” than any other Anglican (unless the “committed is taken in the legal sense and they have all been getting pissed on communion wine or fondling choirboys); and in any case, the idea of an Anglican fundamentalist doesn’t exactly conjure up visions of suicide vests. If an Anglican were really angry with you, he might serve you sweet sherry instead of dry.
But FOCA should wake up and smell the coffee. There are lots of problems they could be bending their not inconsiderable traditionalist talents towards the slowing of: for a start, not many people actually go to church any more. Then there’s all those people dying of hunger, lack of clean water and disease. Oh, and the odd war needing sorting out as well. Tell you what, FOCA, here’s the deal. Let’s get all that sorted out and when it’s done and dusted, and churches up and down the land are rammed to the rafters with throngs of happy worshipers, then we can have an international conference, somewhere warm and sunny if you like, to decide whether or not Leviticus says it’s OK for gays to dance on the head of a pin, or what the original Aramaic text of the Apocryphal Book of Spartacus has to say about women bishops and whether they can only move diagonally. Can’t say fairer than that, can we? Or, failing that, bugger off and let these other committed Anglicans sort things out without you sniping from the wings.
I am not surprised, either, that the News of the World – if they did it, which is still unproven – actually got away with it. In general, the tabloid press in the UK has an incredible power, frequently misused. Their constant mixture of dirty tricks and surveillance with “celebrity” news and gossip makes for the worst of both worlds and risks eventually bring down a draconian “privacy law” on the heads of all the media, which will prevent even legitimate investigation of stories which are in the public interest. To a certain extent, we get the press we deserve, or so runs the well-rehearsed argument. But I am not so sure that the tail does not wag the dog. After all, it’s not as if there is any real choice of an alternative media to peruse and choose instead, for those of us who don’t want salacious red-top tittle-tattle about who is currently going to be evicted from the Big Brother House.
I would love to hear the excuse used by the police for not pursuing this, and I look forward to a successful private prosecution opening the floodgates for many more of the same.
*
I wonder if any of those allegedly bugged by the News of the World’s agents were bishops? Specifically, I wonder if they were the bishops who seem unusually exercised by the word “bugger” in alternative connotations. I refer of course to the Fellowship of Committed Anglicans, or FOCA for short, the hard-line faction within the Church of England who have set out to challenge the authority of Rowan Williams by “upholding” “traditional” Anglican values (such as being anti-Gay). This of course is just what we need in the world today – yet more gay-bashing religious fundamentalism. As if the Taliban were not enough! What really irks me about these people is not so much their fundamentalist views – they are, after all, entitled to their opinions, however loopy. It is the fact that the whole “are gays OK by God” argument (and its offshoot on women bishops) is so massively irrelevant.
I don’t know what it is that gives FOCA the right to assume they are more “committed” than any other Anglican (unless the “committed is taken in the legal sense and they have all been getting pissed on communion wine or fondling choirboys); and in any case, the idea of an Anglican fundamentalist doesn’t exactly conjure up visions of suicide vests. If an Anglican were really angry with you, he might serve you sweet sherry instead of dry.
But FOCA should wake up and smell the coffee. There are lots of problems they could be bending their not inconsiderable traditionalist talents towards the slowing of: for a start, not many people actually go to church any more. Then there’s all those people dying of hunger, lack of clean water and disease. Oh, and the odd war needing sorting out as well. Tell you what, FOCA, here’s the deal. Let’s get all that sorted out and when it’s done and dusted, and churches up and down the land are rammed to the rafters with throngs of happy worshipers, then we can have an international conference, somewhere warm and sunny if you like, to decide whether or not Leviticus says it’s OK for gays to dance on the head of a pin, or what the original Aramaic text of the Apocryphal Book of Spartacus has to say about women bishops and whether they can only move diagonally. Can’t say fairer than that, can we? Or, failing that, bugger off and let these other committed Anglicans sort things out without you sniping from the wings.
Death of a Thousand Cuts
It is looking increasingly clear that the next election will be fought largely on the issue of public spending cuts. Both the major parties, currently, are maintaining a fundamentally dishonest position on this issue. Labour is pretending that everything is going to be OK, that the economy will pick up, and therefore no real “cuts” will be necessary. The Tories have built their entire platform on the necessity of cuts, but other than generalised statements about quangos, have been strangely reluctant to specify where, when and how the cuts should fall. My next sentence was going to be something like, “Quite how we can have an election when both the main parties are lying, escapes me.” But then I thought … hang on.
I don’t even know which one is the more dishonest, although I do know that the Tories have the edge on populist appeal. Labour’s Micawber-ish whistling past the graveyard attitude will not find favour with a cynical electorate who are even now seeing jobs and livelihoods vanishing before their very eyes. Whereas Cameron, with the instinct of the apparatchik to mount every passing bandwagon, has tapped into a rich seam of Daily Mail public sector-hating bigots who would have you believe that the ratepayers of England are regularly subsidising the Lesbian Muslim Hopscotch Agency, or similar.
At the same time as calling for the quangos to be hacked down, root and branch, Cameron has also added his voice to the many which have been clamouring for better equipment for our troops in Afghanistan, specifically more helicopters. So at least we can safely infer that he is broadly in favour of maintaining or increasing defence spending in an era where the government coffers have been used to bail out Lloyds and the Halifax. And even now we are unsure if we can afford Trident’s replacement and the two new huge aircraft carriers that will be the backbone of the Fleet for the next generation.
So assuming we’re going to find some extra money for extra helicopters (in response to the latest casualty statistics, I don’t recall Cameron being that concerned before we lost 15 soldiers in one week), plus the money for Trident II, plus the two aircraft carriers, what is he going to cut to pay for all this? So far, all we have heard is vague rumblings about Natural England (they never did care for the environment, preferring to leave it to rich farmers). Natural England will not pay for all this. Someone should ask Cameron outright, and keep on asking, no matter how often he blethers and obfuscates and tries to change the subject, how many schools and hospitals he will cut to pay for all this.
In fact, Broon should start asking that question now, and continue until the eve of polling, if he wants to avoid a landslide disaster for the Labour party, and the even greater disaster for the rest of us of a slash-and-burn Tory administration, protecting the rich and making sure the poor are the ones who pay for their mistakes.
I don’t even know which one is the more dishonest, although I do know that the Tories have the edge on populist appeal. Labour’s Micawber-ish whistling past the graveyard attitude will not find favour with a cynical electorate who are even now seeing jobs and livelihoods vanishing before their very eyes. Whereas Cameron, with the instinct of the apparatchik to mount every passing bandwagon, has tapped into a rich seam of Daily Mail public sector-hating bigots who would have you believe that the ratepayers of England are regularly subsidising the Lesbian Muslim Hopscotch Agency, or similar.
At the same time as calling for the quangos to be hacked down, root and branch, Cameron has also added his voice to the many which have been clamouring for better equipment for our troops in Afghanistan, specifically more helicopters. So at least we can safely infer that he is broadly in favour of maintaining or increasing defence spending in an era where the government coffers have been used to bail out Lloyds and the Halifax. And even now we are unsure if we can afford Trident’s replacement and the two new huge aircraft carriers that will be the backbone of the Fleet for the next generation.
So assuming we’re going to find some extra money for extra helicopters (in response to the latest casualty statistics, I don’t recall Cameron being that concerned before we lost 15 soldiers in one week), plus the money for Trident II, plus the two aircraft carriers, what is he going to cut to pay for all this? So far, all we have heard is vague rumblings about Natural England (they never did care for the environment, preferring to leave it to rich farmers). Natural England will not pay for all this. Someone should ask Cameron outright, and keep on asking, no matter how often he blethers and obfuscates and tries to change the subject, how many schools and hospitals he will cut to pay for all this.
In fact, Broon should start asking that question now, and continue until the eve of polling, if he wants to avoid a landslide disaster for the Labour party, and the even greater disaster for the rest of us of a slash-and-burn Tory administration, protecting the rich and making sure the poor are the ones who pay for their mistakes.
Local Homes for Local People
The government seems to be suffering from an outbreak of common sense. Sadly, it has taken from 2007 until now to incubate, and even now it is only at an early stage, and may yet perish before it becomes pandemic. Still, maybe Gordon Broon is finally listening, or maybe he’s got some new advisors, or both. Still, cancelling ID cards and shelving the part-privatisation of Royal Mail in the same week is at least a start, in the same way that seeing two feminists doing the washing up is a start.
There’s still the same acute lack of vision, of any sense of purpose though, still the same feeling of flying desperately by the seat of your pants, and what there has been in the way of positive announcements in Gordon’s master plan for the future of Britain is still unlikely to have crowds thronging the Mall or people doing the conga in Trafalgar Square, heatwave or no heatwave. Teachers will have to have a test every five years, and this on top of all the other crap they get dumped on them from on high, and, in a move not widely reported, the sneaky bastards are proposing a measure whereby farmers have to insure their livestock against the possibility of their being the source of an outbreak of foot and mouth or similar, which, considering that the most recent outbreak was sourced back to the government’s own laboratory at Pirbright, is rich indeed.
Both those proposals are inherently nasty, sneaky, and unlikely to benefit the people targeted – teachers and farmers – but the proposal which should perhaps give us most pause for thought in the new plan for Britain’s future is the one which has been characterised as “local houses for local people”.
For a long time, people, including me, have been trying to tell the Labour Party that they neglect the needs and concerns of white, working class voters at their peril. Nature abhors a vacuum and, into the vacuum which the New Labour project has created by ignoring huge areas of what used to be its most solid, bedrock supporters, has slipped the BNP. They start by empathising with the disenfranchised, disaffected people in deprived communities, many of whom are elderly and who have probably, in their eyes, had enough of a world of madness, deprivation and uncertainty, a world where the things they used to be able to take for granted, a job, a neighbourhood, the friendliness of neighbours, a reasonable standard of living and healthcare, the local pub and post office, bus services and housing, are all either gone or under threat. It is no wonder they hark back to a byegone era.
The BNP offers tea and sympathy, and agrees with them that their lives are shitty. The voters respond. At last, someone is listening to them. Then the BNP play their trump card – “And do you know who is to blame for all these problems? Immigrants!”
You can’t entirely blame the voters. It’s a very plausible argument, one that comes with its own ready-made solution. No one in the BNP’s target audience, or very few people at any rate, will respond by saying, “Well, actually, immigration isn’t really as simple as all that, you have to take into account the numbers of people who actually leave the country as well as those who enter it, and nobody, not even the government, knows how many illegal immigrants there really are, and the whole debate is skewed anyway by the issue of the EU, which says we have to accept any Tom, Dick or Harry, as long as he’s an EU citizen”.
Nobody points out that social housing is under particular pressure, never having really recovered from the onslaught of Thatcher’s selloff.
You can prove anything with statistics, particularly if you use them selectively, which is why the BNP concentrates on the influx and ignores the exits. It’s much easier to come up with the simple two-trick pony answer that the BNP peddles. Your life is shit right now. (That, for many white working class or elderly voters, particularly in Labour’s traditional heartlands, is often true). And it is all the fault of Muslims, immigrants and asylum seekers. (False, of course, and even if it were true, these are three very different kettles of fish, but it suits the BNP’s rhetoric much better to pretend they are all the same).
The BNP’s whites-only admissions policy is also ridiculous, ignoring as it does the fact that the Anglo-Saxon ethnicity it demands is in itself a product of immigration, albeit a thousand years ago. Perhaps it takes a thousand years to establish a Reich, Hitler certainly thought so, and look what happened to him. But of course, once you have bought the BNP’s simplistic lie about immigration being the cause of all our ills, it follows quite naturally that you will believe this tosh. The BNP’s justification for it, as far as I can discover amongs the verbiage on their web site, is that there are other, similar rules which apply, unchallenged, apparently, to black-only or asian-only organisations.
Now, I don’t know if this is true or not. A detailed study of the consititution of the Black Police Officers’ Association has not been high on my agenda of late. If it is true, then it’s equally as odious as the BNP’s stance, and should be challenged, but in either case, two wrongs don’t make a right.
It is disappointing, but not altogether unexpected, that the Labour Party’s only answer to the duplicity of the BNP seems to be to try and ape its policies, but this is, of course, partly a reflection of the corner into which they feel they have painted themselves. All of the mainstream and Labour politicians bleating about the voters and the success of the BNP and UKIP in the May elections have only themselves to blame. They took their eye off the ball.
So what do we need now? We need a politician of the left, or of an independent caste of mind, who will be able to take apart the BNP’s policies forensically, and demonstrate the fallacious links in the thinking. To point out, for instance, that if you were to repatriate everyone who was even faintly brown, the NHS for one would grind to a halt overnight. To state boldly and simply that when it comes to immigration, it’s just not as simple as the BNP likes to make out. And to have the courage to stand up and say that all Britons should be treated equally, whatever the colour of their skin, and to formulate policies that demonstrate it, both ways. And if that also means an end to pointless “positive discrimination” so be it.
Ending “positive discrimination” of the mindless, box ticking kind kicks a plank out from under the BNP straight away. I’ve never been a strong advocate of “positive discrimination” of any sort, beyond the physical kind, of making streets, homes, workplaces and public buildings accessible to people with medical difficulties, but certainly in a situation where you have a group of unscrupulous opportunists using any perceived inequality as a stick with which to beat you, I think you should think very carefully before handing them that weapon.
Ending positive discrimination of the worst, the most damaging sort, does not mean, though, going too far the other way, into negative discrimination, which is where Labour are currently heading with local homes for local people. For a start, they should make clear, and continue to make it clear, that by “local people”, they don’t just mean local white people, if they persist down this road.
The BNP, for all its success in the elections, is still a small, minority party, for the moment. But it has certainly fired a warning shot across the bows of the Labour Party, and it is high time they responded by hoisting the red flag to the top of the mizzen-mast, and letting fly a few salvoes of their own, instead of sailing under the swastika and crossbones, and trying to out-Pugwash the pirates.
There’s still the same acute lack of vision, of any sense of purpose though, still the same feeling of flying desperately by the seat of your pants, and what there has been in the way of positive announcements in Gordon’s master plan for the future of Britain is still unlikely to have crowds thronging the Mall or people doing the conga in Trafalgar Square, heatwave or no heatwave. Teachers will have to have a test every five years, and this on top of all the other crap they get dumped on them from on high, and, in a move not widely reported, the sneaky bastards are proposing a measure whereby farmers have to insure their livestock against the possibility of their being the source of an outbreak of foot and mouth or similar, which, considering that the most recent outbreak was sourced back to the government’s own laboratory at Pirbright, is rich indeed.
Both those proposals are inherently nasty, sneaky, and unlikely to benefit the people targeted – teachers and farmers – but the proposal which should perhaps give us most pause for thought in the new plan for Britain’s future is the one which has been characterised as “local houses for local people”.
For a long time, people, including me, have been trying to tell the Labour Party that they neglect the needs and concerns of white, working class voters at their peril. Nature abhors a vacuum and, into the vacuum which the New Labour project has created by ignoring huge areas of what used to be its most solid, bedrock supporters, has slipped the BNP. They start by empathising with the disenfranchised, disaffected people in deprived communities, many of whom are elderly and who have probably, in their eyes, had enough of a world of madness, deprivation and uncertainty, a world where the things they used to be able to take for granted, a job, a neighbourhood, the friendliness of neighbours, a reasonable standard of living and healthcare, the local pub and post office, bus services and housing, are all either gone or under threat. It is no wonder they hark back to a byegone era.
The BNP offers tea and sympathy, and agrees with them that their lives are shitty. The voters respond. At last, someone is listening to them. Then the BNP play their trump card – “And do you know who is to blame for all these problems? Immigrants!”
You can’t entirely blame the voters. It’s a very plausible argument, one that comes with its own ready-made solution. No one in the BNP’s target audience, or very few people at any rate, will respond by saying, “Well, actually, immigration isn’t really as simple as all that, you have to take into account the numbers of people who actually leave the country as well as those who enter it, and nobody, not even the government, knows how many illegal immigrants there really are, and the whole debate is skewed anyway by the issue of the EU, which says we have to accept any Tom, Dick or Harry, as long as he’s an EU citizen”.
Nobody points out that social housing is under particular pressure, never having really recovered from the onslaught of Thatcher’s selloff.
You can prove anything with statistics, particularly if you use them selectively, which is why the BNP concentrates on the influx and ignores the exits. It’s much easier to come up with the simple two-trick pony answer that the BNP peddles. Your life is shit right now. (That, for many white working class or elderly voters, particularly in Labour’s traditional heartlands, is often true). And it is all the fault of Muslims, immigrants and asylum seekers. (False, of course, and even if it were true, these are three very different kettles of fish, but it suits the BNP’s rhetoric much better to pretend they are all the same).
The BNP’s whites-only admissions policy is also ridiculous, ignoring as it does the fact that the Anglo-Saxon ethnicity it demands is in itself a product of immigration, albeit a thousand years ago. Perhaps it takes a thousand years to establish a Reich, Hitler certainly thought so, and look what happened to him. But of course, once you have bought the BNP’s simplistic lie about immigration being the cause of all our ills, it follows quite naturally that you will believe this tosh. The BNP’s justification for it, as far as I can discover amongs the verbiage on their web site, is that there are other, similar rules which apply, unchallenged, apparently, to black-only or asian-only organisations.
Now, I don’t know if this is true or not. A detailed study of the consititution of the Black Police Officers’ Association has not been high on my agenda of late. If it is true, then it’s equally as odious as the BNP’s stance, and should be challenged, but in either case, two wrongs don’t make a right.
It is disappointing, but not altogether unexpected, that the Labour Party’s only answer to the duplicity of the BNP seems to be to try and ape its policies, but this is, of course, partly a reflection of the corner into which they feel they have painted themselves. All of the mainstream and Labour politicians bleating about the voters and the success of the BNP and UKIP in the May elections have only themselves to blame. They took their eye off the ball.
So what do we need now? We need a politician of the left, or of an independent caste of mind, who will be able to take apart the BNP’s policies forensically, and demonstrate the fallacious links in the thinking. To point out, for instance, that if you were to repatriate everyone who was even faintly brown, the NHS for one would grind to a halt overnight. To state boldly and simply that when it comes to immigration, it’s just not as simple as the BNP likes to make out. And to have the courage to stand up and say that all Britons should be treated equally, whatever the colour of their skin, and to formulate policies that demonstrate it, both ways. And if that also means an end to pointless “positive discrimination” so be it.
Ending “positive discrimination” of the mindless, box ticking kind kicks a plank out from under the BNP straight away. I’ve never been a strong advocate of “positive discrimination” of any sort, beyond the physical kind, of making streets, homes, workplaces and public buildings accessible to people with medical difficulties, but certainly in a situation where you have a group of unscrupulous opportunists using any perceived inequality as a stick with which to beat you, I think you should think very carefully before handing them that weapon.
Ending positive discrimination of the worst, the most damaging sort, does not mean, though, going too far the other way, into negative discrimination, which is where Labour are currently heading with local homes for local people. For a start, they should make clear, and continue to make it clear, that by “local people”, they don’t just mean local white people, if they persist down this road.
The BNP, for all its success in the elections, is still a small, minority party, for the moment. But it has certainly fired a warning shot across the bows of the Labour Party, and it is high time they responded by hoisting the red flag to the top of the mizzen-mast, and letting fly a few salvoes of their own, instead of sailing under the swastika and crossbones, and trying to out-Pugwash the pirates.
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