Booker - by Richard... Sunday, June 20, 2010

Booker - by Richard... Sunday, June 20, 2010

An interesting and unusual Booker column today, in three parts as usual. The lead story, aboutforced adoption is not our bag but, as another story in the paper attests, something has gone very wrong with the system.

In the second part of his column, Booker takes on board the experience of The Boy at his first European Council, and ventures on a few reasons as to why he might come to regret breaking his promise of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

Then, for the final story, we get observations about the cuts announced last week. These were deeply revealing of the Cleggerons' priorities as the most significant cut in the £2 billion public spending programme was an £80 million loan to Sheffield Forgemasters – to finance a 15,000-ton press for the huge castings needed for nuclear reactors.

This would have helped Britain to build the new generation of nuclear power stations that we desperately need, but which our lover boy Chris Huhne so dislikes. I t would also have made Britain a world leader, with the potential to generate billions of pounds of exports, enabling the loan to be swiftly repaid.

But with Huhne at the helm, this was not to be. Still in place, however, is a £200 million loan to Nissan (£20 million from our administration, the rest from the European Investment Bank), to enable its Sunderland plant to build thousands of Leaf electric cars, which will only be able to drive 100 miles before they need recharging – with electricity from CO2-emitting fossil fuels.

What puts the £2 billion cuts into depressing perspective, of course, is the fact that our public debt is now rising by £3 billion a week. I suspect that, by the time Osborne gets to grips with this (if at all), many a Leaf will have fallen – and it won't even be autumn.

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Go boil your head - by Richard... Saturday, June 19, 2010

We really do not need any lessons on duty from David Cameron, the man who has presided over a lacklustre opposition, which more often than not has failed to engage and lacked coherence .

The Boy is stating that with Britain at war in Afghanistan, the public has to give full and unequivocal support to troops and their families. And that demand comes a week after he returned from his first visit since taking office to Afghanistan, where the number of British troops killed since 2001 stands at 299 and will soon reach 300.

But there is no "has to" about giving support to the troops, and especially not about giving support to the Afghan adventure. If Cameron chooses to keep the troops in Afghanistan, that is his decision. But it is not one with which we agree and it is that which places the greatest stress of the armed forces, and the greatest damage and hardship. If he wants to improve the lot of the armed forces, therefore, he needs to get them out of Afghanistan – not come bleating to us about our duty.

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No place in government - by Richard...

"This might seem a minor story when set against issues such as Afghanistan, the economy and numerous other major topics. But if this country is ever to move beyond political pygmies and to enjoy honest and responsible government, liars and cheats like Huhne need to be weeded out of positions of responsibility."

So says Autonomous mind on hearing the news of Huhne's latest infidelity. "Huhne has broken a trust and cannot be relied upon to be honest or honourable. In short, he has no place in government." But actually, nothing has changed. The man was a shit before he did this, and he's still a shit now.

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A jolly good unit - by Richard...

Simon Hoggart in The Guardian today recalls how he had had published in his newspaper six days before "Bloody Sunday", a story headed "The Brutal Soldiery".

In the article, he had made specific allegations about the conduct of the Parachute Regiment and had asserted that some Army units were so fed up with the Paras storming into their areas, firing rubber bullets, beating people up, and undoing months of improved community relations in 10 savage minutes, that they had asked for them not to be sent in again. "Thugs in uniform," one officer had called them.

The article, says Hoggart, caused a great furore, even though he did make it clear – as he was later to do inoral testimony to the inquiry - that the Parachute Regiment was one of enormous skill, enormous courage and enormous resource, but not entirely appropriate in a civilian setting.

Rather than any of the allegations being investigated, though, they were flatly denied. Hoggart and his newspaper "were frozen out for months by the military". He was thought to be in the pocket of the IRA.

From the written evidence submitted to the Saville Inquiry, we can see precisely how the establishment reacted, with Army public relations complaining to Hoggart's boss that even to produce such an article was "unethical and unprofessional conduct."

We can also see that the Army actively considered launching an "attack" on the journalists in the papers Belfast bureau, although it noted that it did not have "enough concrete evidence" against one, who had "covered his tracks very carefully." "However," it went on to say, "Hoggart is professionally vulnerable as a result of his unethical conduct."

Nor were the politicians any better. From the undersecretary of state came the view that there was a "growing feeling" that soldiers were talking too much to the press. HQ Northern Ireland also issued a general warning against any approach from Guardian journalists.

Sadly, one of the observations recorded by Hoggart had been from an Army officer who had told him (of the Paras): "I have seen them arrive on the scene, thump up a few people who might be doing nothing more than shouting and jeering, and roar off again ... They seem to think that they can get away with whatever they like."

It appears though, that the rejection of Hoggart's charges stemmed for a more nuanced position than just a simple, outright refusal to believe them – and anything bad of the Paras. This is hinted at by 1 Para's then adjutant, a certain Captain Mike Jackson – who was to become in 2003 the CGS as General Jackson.

Back in 1972, he dismissed the report as "designed to be divisive", adding: "This is not a realistic picture of the relationship between the Paras and other units in Belfast. We are here to give operational assistance, and we shall continue to do so."

The position is explained more fully in an article by T E Utley published in The Sunday Telegraphon 23 April 1972, nearly two month after Bloody Sunday. He then claimed:

The strategy of the civil rights movement henceforth [that is in context in the autumn 1971] was to keep up a sustained, efficiently directed propaganda campaign, not only against internment, but also against the Army as such. The most vulnerable targets for that campaign were the paratroopers who had been brought into Ulster to act as a reserve force for employment in emergencies that required quick reaction and tough tactics.

On 14 January, two weeks before the shootings, Richard Cox, then defence correspondent for The Daily Telegraph had "alerted his readers to the next phase in this propaganda chain." He had claimed that Irish journalists were seeking to entrap officers of other regiments into admitting that the use of the Paras in Ulster had been disastrously counter-productive.

In effect, therefore, the allegations against the Paras were all part of an IRA propaganda campaign and could safely be ignored. Thus, almost exactly 30 years later, the first soldier to give evidence to the Saville Inquiry was to describe the Paras as a "jolly good" unit.

This was General (then Brigadier) Frank Kitson, in January 1972 the commander of 39 Brigade, of which the 1 Para was part. In his oral evidence, he told the Saville Inquiry:

If some people in Northern Ireland associated 1 Para with a reputation for toughness and brutality, I think they were mistaken. The regiment's reputation in this respect was probably fuelled by its effectiveness in controlling difficult situations. By their resolute action they often prevented situations escalating into violence between the Catholic and Protestant communities which was the one thing above all others that we wished to avoid, because it provided an excuse for gunmen to present themselves as defenders of their local community. I believe that 1 Para's effectiveness in this field contributed greatly to the saving of life.

Hoggart, however, takes "a little satisfaction" in the Saville Inquiry finding that he was right. He was in Belfast on Bloody Sunday and, he writes, "everyone realised instantly what a terrible turning point it would be ... Even the army immediately realised what had happened."

For the IRA, says Hoggart, it provided in an instant all the moral justification they needed to kill as many people as they pleased. Every victim of the Paras, shot while crawling down the streets of Derry, carried dozens more people with him to the grave.

But, if the Army had realised this, there was still the charade of the Widgery Inquiry later in 1972, when the cover-up was cemented into place. And a few months later, the CO of 1 Para, Lt-Col Derek Wilford, a man now criticised by the Saville Inquiry, was awarded an OBE.

The meaning of the signal sent to the Irish by that award is obvious. The Paras were a "jolly good unit", and no amount of killing was going to change that.

Saville Inquiry thread

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Take up crochet - by Richard...

This is the best football report you'll read. And no, it isn't advice to the England players – although it could have been.

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Bored witless - by Richard...

I shall let you into a little secret – after writing and thinking about it for more than 20 years, I am bored witless with the euro, and the vanity and stupidity of the "colleagues" in trying to keep the project going. I just want the bloody thing to collapse, as it was always going to, so that I can say "I told you so" and we can get on with clearing up the wreckage.

That said, Charles Moore writes in The Daily Telegraph about how the "inevitable failure" will be "horrendous for us all" - although those of us who, in the 1990s, predicted this denouement, he writes, "would not be human if we did not permit ourselves a quiet, smug little smile."

"Smug" could so easily be my middle name by now, although being right about anything these days doesn't pay the bills. In fact, unless you are a lawyer, or a smug, above-the-line bastard like Moore, it's an almost certain guarantee of penury. No-one likes smug, below-the-line bastards.

For us "savage and homicidal" is probably a better option – it doesn't make you any richer or better liked but, during the short time it takes for the establishment to decide whether to rub you out or adopt you (or ignore you, which is what it usually does), it can make you feel better.

Not quite in that category – although getting there – is the delicious and much under-ratedWitterings from Witney. Why the self-regarding Iain Dale gets his hit rate, when there are writers on the blogosphere of this quality is one of those perpetual mysteries.

The answer is possibly that Iain's regular readers are as low grade as the writer – a match made in heaven, so to speak. It would be great if we bloggers could grade our readers and then exclude those who didn't come up to standard - a sort of bloggers' revenge, getting back at all those stupid readers who don't understand or appreciate what we are writing.

I quite warm to this idea. Perhaps it is a service Blogger could do for us, running special reader tests for anyone who wants to read a blog. We could have "pre-approved" and graded readers, with special "reader filters" so we could define who was allowed to read our golden words. We could send the bottom grade - and politicians - over to Guido where they naturally belong. Grade seven could go to Dale, six to ConHome and so on.

This has endless possibilities. Instead of fretting (or braqging) about the hit rate, we could preen ourselves by saying, "yes, I know we have fewer readers but they are better quality - only grade ones allowed here". And when the hit rate goes down, we can blame it on the shortage of high quality readers, just like the MSM.

Anyhow, talking of quality and being under-rated, there's Mary Ellen Synon who should be at the top of the rankings (although me saying so is probably a kiss of death).

She has a picture of The Boy at the European Council (which I've nicked), which has him to a tee. Those who remember the pics of Blair and Brown in Brussels (especially Blair) will recall them not looking anything like as much at ease. In this pic, The Boy looks as if he has come home, which in a sense he has. He is naturally one of the "colleagues" and he fits in so well.

Synon's analysis is pretty good as well, much better that that offered by Norman Tebbit, another grossly over-rated writer, who is largely living off his reputation – but much-loved by the Daleites and the rest of the claque, which tells you what you need to know about him.

But hey! When you've finished with my erstwhile co-editor and her update, if you want some real rubbish, go and look at Subrosa. I'm off to write another piece about Bloody Sunday, which is only for high-grade readers. I expect the hit rate to be seriously down by the time I next look.

Did I tell you I was bored witless, by the way? I must do something about the death wish though. And one can't even trust Tory MPs to do it properly these days. If only he'd asked for help ...

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