The second one is "off" - by Richard... Wednesday, June 16, 2010

The second one is "off" - by Richard... Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Announcing a complete review of how "Britain" collects and disposes of rubbish, Caroline Spelman, the Cleggeron environment secretary, has promised to make the country a "zero waste economy".

She says biodegradable waste like food could "no longer be allowed" to just rot in landfill. This is likely to mean that all councils have to introduce slop buckets so that food waste can be collected separately.

But "allowed" by whom, she does not reveal ... and this is the administration that wants to be "in Europe but not ruled by Europe". Thus does she say on behalf of her EU masters, "We need a new approach to waste ... We cannot keep putting recyclable and biodegradable material into landfill."

So, we already have a waste bin, another bin for paper, an insert for glass and tin cans, a woven bag for cardboard and another for garden waste. And now we have to have another waste container, making six in all?

We have two words for Caroline "slop-bucket" Spelman. The second one is "off". Following that, we have some extremely detailed instructions on where she can put her slop buckets, the results of which would be extremely painful.

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And now for the Saville Report - by Richard... Tuesday, June 15, 2010

As The Boy stands up to make a statement on the £191-million Saville Report, news comes in that two soldiers from 1st Battalion The Duke of Lancaster's Regiment have been shot dead in separate incidents in Afghanistan. They died while on patrol in the Nad Ali district of Helmand province. 

Their deaths bring the total number of UK troops killed in Afghanistan since 2001 to 298. Two more and we have a magic round number, so we can have another media blut-fest. It may just beat the historical account of the Paras slaughtering 14 innocent civil rights demonstrators and bystanders, an event which was to rack up the intensity of the "Troubles" and cost many more lives.

It is axiomatic that crowd control requires very special skills and discipline. Putting poorly-trained troops under the command of inexperienced officers on the front line, with rifles and live ammunition, is asking for a disaster. We did not need a report costing £191 million to tell us that. 

The disaster happened on 30 January 1972, so-called "Bloody Sunday", when the gung ho* 1st Para manned the line, a Regiment which has a proud history of "killing people and breaking things", for which purposes it was designed, trained and equipped. 

The resultant carnage, therefore, was not the fault of the soldiers (the Army was to lose over 100 troops that year), any more than the failures in Afghanistan are the fault of individual soldiers of the line. For that, we must look to the politicians who put them there and their senior officers. Talk of prosecution of the soldiers who fired the shots is misplaced.

But, as so often when innocent people get killed, the PBI takes the shit and we pay the bills. The lawyers walk away with the dosh (in this case, several of them have "earned" millions in fees), the officers get gongs and more sewing badges and the politicians get honours and awards. Then as now, nothing really changes.

* Saville Report: Chapter 4, para 4.8: "... a force with a reputation for using excessive physical violence". 

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Moral and intellectual cowardice - by Richard...

It is a bit of a cop-out for the Tory Boy blog just to paraphrase Liam Fox's speech to RUSI yesterday, and then to offer a link with no analysis. But, like the rest of the Tory blogosphere, they're running frit on defence issues, not even picking up on the Great Leader's speech. It seems they can do the soft and girlie issues but can't cope with real political meat. 

Talking to a journalist yesterday about the reluctance of the "right wing" blogs to deal with defence, he suggested that individual writers might be deterred by their lack of first-hand experience. They are intimidated by men in uniform, with their medals and sewing badges and tales of derring-do, and fear laying themselves open to criticism for "not being there". 

I certainly had to deal with that in writing Ministry of Defeat - a whole book about the campaign in southern Iraq without ever once going as far as Basra. In that precise context, reading accounts of the great 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu (where I was also absent), I came across in Bernard Fall's book this observation:

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was lost during the brief fortnight between Novermber 25 and December 7, 1953. It was not lost in the little valley in Viet-Nam's highland jungles but in the air-conditioned map room of the French commander-in-chief. Once Giap had decided to accept trial by battle at Dien Bien Phu, it remained only for 15,000 French and 50,000 Viet-Minh troops to act out the drama in pain and blood and death.

So it was with Iraq. The British lost the battle not in the streets of al Amarah and Basra, but in the corridors of Whitehall and the claustrophobic rooms of 10 Downing Street (yes, I have been inside). "Being there", in the sense of being where the action was, would mean being in many different places (often simultaneously) and many where only insiders had access. Constructing a historical narrative, therefore, requires the use of research skills, not direct observation of events.

In the context of the military telling us that there is no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan – one thing the limited intellects of the military brass seem to be able to understand – the "battle" is essentially political. Thus, the battle is being lost not on the streets of Kabul, Kandahar and Musa Qala, but in the corridors of Whitehall and the claustrophobic rooms of 10 Downing Street. 

The refusal to follow the narrative and engage with the politics represents one of the greatest failings of the right-wing "claque". There is a moral and intellectual cowardice here – which explains the lack of response to my recent challenge. However, this is not the first time I've taken on the "claque", having written a strongly-phrased piece inSeptember 2006 and again in January 2007.

I know the pieces were read, and the lack of comment and response is driven by a sense of shame and embarrassment – some have admitted as much to me privately. And as well they might hang their heads in shame.

But one person not afraid to get stuck in is our feisty "Dundee wifey" who vastly outshines these big, butch political bloggers who are so full of themselves. She picks up a military blog called Think Defence which has The Boy's strategy sussed. This is the "Iraq gambit", which comprises two broad elements:

1. Get the fuck out of dodge;
2. Pretend it was a victory.

In fact, while the girly-boy bloggers cower in their bunkers, it is very much the fairer sex which makes the running, with Mary Riddell telling us that, "Britain is stuck with a war it can't afford and can't win".

In a powerful turn of phrase, she writes of "Mr Fox's batsqueak of truculence" which "echoes the discredited Blairite credo that Britain should punch above its weight and beyond its purse." Both Mr Cameron and the opposition, she says, "owe the country more honesty." 

Indeed they do, but as long as the fabled right-wing blogosphere is sitting on its hands, with its collective heads in a physiologically impossible position, The Boy has neither need nor incentive to do anything other than to continue on his ruinous course. But he will need more than a metal detector (pictured) to chart his way though this minefield. We've seen it all before with Iraq so some of us already know what he is doing. We will not be silent, even if the "claque" has muzzled itself.

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Seriously scary - by Richard...

The Oil Drum is a reputable and well-founded site, and its talking about the collapse of the well in the Gulf of Mexico and the leakage of the entire reserve ... billions of barrels. In other words, it's about to get a whole lot worse.

"The magnitude and impact of this disaster will eclipse anything we have known in our lifetimes if the worst or even near worst happens ... ", it says. And Obama is to address the nation live,tonight. He is as much on the rack as BP – it will be interesting to hear what he says. It had better be the speech of a lifetime.

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Germany falling - by Richard...

The Guardian is reporting that Angela Merkel's centre-right coalition government looks to be close to collapse, weakened by a string of disagreements and intense infighting over austerity cuts, policy reform and the departure of senior conservatives.

Merkel called at the weekend for the government partners to bury the hatchet over their disagreements after a week when relations reached such a low that members of her government had variously referred to each other as "wild pigs" and "gherkin troops" (rank amateurs).

But much of the mistrust and anger is being directed at Merkel herself. This week's Spiegelmagazine called her the Trummerfrau, a reference to German women who cleared away the rubble after second world war bombings. It painted a picture of a woman presiding over a government in ruins and used its title page to request the government in one word to "Aufhören!", or stop.

It just couldn't happen to a nicer government ... and sets a wonderful precedent for The Boy.

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Belgium - by Richard...

The non-country just got even more fragmented. Subrosa tells the story. 

People don't realise just how desperate the situation is there. Not so very long ago, I took a taxi from Brussels to the Catholic University of Leuven, in the heart of Flemish country. The taxi driver (French-speaking), had no idea where to go, but rather than ask the way, got me, an English-speaker, to ask for directions. 

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Our mission is doomed - by Richard...

So, "Call me Dave" made a statement to the Commons yesterday, his first since his trip to Afghanistan as Cleggeron leader, supposedly spelling out his administration's approach to the ongoing conflict.

Heavily trailed as paving the way for a change in strategy, it followed extensive talks with Karzai at Chequers and meetings with US defence secretary Robert Gates and Gen David Petraeus in Downing Street – all on the back of a delegation of three Cabinet ministers being sent to Afghanistan to see the situation on the ground for themselves.

But, if there were expectations of a change in strategy, they were not fulfilled. One even wonders why The Boy actually bothered with a statement. He offered nothing new, nothing different. All he really wanted to do was emphasise why, in his view, our troops were in Afghanistan. It was all about national security. Afghanistan was not strong enough to look after its own security and without our presence it could emerge again as an al Qaida base.

What had changed then, one might ask, to which The Boy provided the answer: we needed to be clear on national security perspective. 

Our route home was to put security first. We were six months in to the surge and had to give it time to take effect. We would not stay a day longer than necessary – the key was in training the Afghan security forces so that we could transfer the security responsibility, but based on facts on the ground not pre-determined timetable. Then we could come home, job done, heads held high.

And that was it. In a sparsely attended chamber there was no hint of the huge controversy which has been raging over the weekend, with the likes of Matthew Parris asserting that Cameron and Clegg "must know our mission is doomed", up against the controversial General Dannatt who believes the war can be won.

Of these two, soldier Dannatt is ostensibly better qualified - but Parris has the advantage of consistency. He has always been against the Afghan adventure, right from 2006, when he decided that the mission could not work with 3,000 or even with 30,000 men, in June 2008, when he declared we couldn't win and now, when he thinks we are simply sacrificing soldiers to keep the US on-side.

Parris is too sincere and his case too well argued for it to be dismissed as cynical, while Dannatt is too stupid for his case to be considered at all. He trots out the bog standard "exit strategy" meme, arguing that the Afghans must run their own security and "the Afghan economy must be converted as quickly as possible from one based on the illegal opium trade, to one profiting from traditional cash crops, such as wheat, saffron and pomegranates."

If pigs could fly and politicians could think coherently, the world would be a very different place, but either is about as likely as Dannatt's nostrums for Afghanistan. And then you realise that the General is offering exactly the same prospectus as "Call me Dave". The mission is indeed doomed.

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