The only consequence of Sir Jeremy Greenstock’s profoundly stupid and craven comment is to... ‘This scent is the message of the Islamic message worldwide: Islam is coming, and Gaza is the spearhead that sets the nation in motion...The heroes were selected by Allah to carry out their mission: the mission of awakening the nation... These are people who wish to be martyred for the sake of Allah; as much as they want to reach Gaza, the other way is more desirable to them. Martyrdom, in case anyone still doesn’t get it, means in this case killing Jews in the cause of the Islamic jihad. That was the real aim... Gaza’s markets are full of produce, thousands of tons of supplies are travelling into Gaza every week through the Israeli-controlled border crossings, and there is no starvation or humanitarian crisis. It was always obvious that the flotilla was not the humanitarian exercise it was said to be. Here is footage of the IDF offering to dock the Marmara -- the main flotilla ship -- at Ashdod and transfer its supplies and being told ‘Negative, negative, our destination is Gaza’. And now we... Daily Mail, 31 May 2010 Well, that didn’t take long, did it? A mere two weeks and two days after David Cameron and Nick Clegg stood together in the Downing Street garden to announce the start of a new type of politics, we found ourselves back with the same old politics that was supposedly buried with a stake through its heart. The stellar career of David Laws has been ruined by yet another episode of that long- running Westminster drama: how to rip off the taxpayer and nearly get away with it. For let there be absolutely no mistake: despite all the self-justifying soap-operatics about how he had been too terrified to reveal that he was gay, the events that brought him down had absolutely nothing to do with his sexuality. After all, his much-vaunted ‘desire for privacy’ had not forced him to claim some £40,000 in expenses to cover his ‘rent’ — which went straight to his long-term gay lover, thus effectively channelling taxpayers’ money into his own household. Nor — even more damagingly — had his ‘desire for privacy’ caused him to reduce his expense claims for ‘utilities’ from between £50 and £150 per month to a mere £37 after the rules were changed in 2008, requiring MPs to provide receipts for any claims above £25. Moreover his claim that James Lundie, his lover for the past nine years, was not technically his partner was clearly unsustainable. After all, in 2007 Laws had extended the mortgage on his main Somerset home to help Lundie buy a property. One of the most alarming aspects of this episode is that, just like the serial offenders of the Labour years, Laws appears to have genuinely persuaded himself that he hadn’t really done anything dishonest — even though such actions stink to high heaven. Yet this new coalition was supposed to herald an end to such political arrogance and deceit; an end to the attempts by venal politicians to spin and squirm their way out of trouble by treating the public as idiots; an end to the widespread belief that ‘they’re all the same as each other’. But of course, the general election didn’t suddenly create an entirely new breed of politician cleansed of all grubbiness. Just to ram that point home, we also discovered over the weekend that the Tory party is still embroiled in that other long-running Westminster farce, ‘cash for honours’. For the House of Lords vetting body has blocked one of the Conservative party’s biggest donors, Sir Anthony Bamford, from becoming a peer through apparent concerns over his tax status. And this after David Cameron had personally recommended Sir Anthony for ennoblement. Nor was the expenses scandal itself properly purged from the Tory party. A number of politicians got away with ‘flipping’ the designation of their first and second homes, or claiming other expenses which they then had to pay back, because they were deemed too invaluable to the Cameroon project to be sacrificed. There’s more than a whiff of this over David Laws: an implication in some quarters that he’s just too valuable for anyone to care about a little thing like ripping off the public. There are clear hints — not least from Nick Clegg — that this debacle is merely a temporary glitch and that Laws will soon be back in office. But when Peter Mandelson came back from disgrace not once but twice, people were sickened by such cynical expediency. Now, many are shocked once again by the laws scandal. For it is undeniably the case that many really did think the coalition heralded a new political dawn. Although people voted for individual party politicians rather than for such an alliance, the outcome struck a widespread chord among a public which really had totally lost faith in the adversarial electoral system. As a result of this terminal disaffection, a hope emerged that the coalition would rub the harsh edges off the Tories while simultaneously making the Lib Dems less woolly. The touching hope that it would produce effective government was based on the belief that negotiation and compromise were much more productive than fighting and name-calling. So if erstwhile political adversaries really could work alongside each other, a new and better type of politics would be born. But this was surely terribly naive. For if two parties embodying an old way of doing things go into government together, you don’t get a new type of politics at all — you merely end up with twice as much of the old sort. People also think that if politicians speak the language of conciliation and the burying of differences, this must lead to sounder and more principled government than if they engage in vigorous argument and confrontation. But so often this merely results instead in blurring the difference between right and wrong, producing governments that take the path of least resistance rather than strong initiatives to tackle danger or injustice. We can see a classic example of this across the pond, where mass wish-fulfilment and fantasy on the part of an electorate that was sorely disillusioned with its political elite put Barack Obama into the White House on a promise of ‘hope and change’. It didn’t take long for the American public to be consumed by ‘ buyers’ remorse’, as Obama set about changing America’s iconic spirit of independence into state-controlled servility, and giving hope to foreign tyrants threatening the free world that America would no longer fight to defend it. It’s precisely when politicians make grandiose claims, such as the aim of radically transforming society or human nature — as did also a certain Tony Blair — that we should start counting the spoons. For since politicians cannot conjure up utopia, such claims are based on a lie. They accordingly result in, at best, terrible disappointment and, at worst, oppressive social engineering at home and catastrophically muddled meddling abroad. Contrary to popular fantasy, what is driving this coalition is not a new type of politics but a cynical bargain to enable each party to stay in power. Which is why the Tories — who were the most desperate for office — gave the Lib Dems so much; and why David Laws was so useful to David Cameron. For Laws was Cameron’s fig leaf. Not only was he prepared to swing the public spending axe more ruthlessly than most Tories, but because he was a Lib Dem he made Cameron fireproof against the charge of Tory heartlessness. Now the terms of the coalition deal have prevented Cameron from appointing the next best man for the job of Chief Secretary, the sharp and clear-thinking Tory Philip Hammond, in favour of the less clued-up lib Dem Danny Alexander. Nor is this the only cloud on the horizon. The talismanic ‘free schools’ agenda of the Tory Education Secretary Michael Gove is surely compromised by the pledges in the coalition’s Programme for Government that all schools will be ‘held to account’, and that ‘independent’ academies and faith schools will be forced to tailor their admissions policies to be more ‘inclusive’. These apparent threats of ‘more’ local authority or central government control over schools are nods to the lib Dems as part of the price of their support. Far from ushering in a new dawn, coalitions are messy compromises — operated by the same old politicians, driven by the same old lust for power and subject to the same old venality and weaknesses. Which is why the fall of David Laws should bring us sharply back to earth.
Tuesday, 1st June 2010
Why the double standard, Sir Jeremy?
9:18am
So let’s get this right. Israel kills Islamic terrorists who are trying to lynch its soldiers by clubbing them to death, stabbing them with massive knives and firebombing them – and according to Sir Jeremy Greenstock, this shows that Israel must now start talking to Hamas, an Islamic terrorist organisation which is committed to the destruction of Israel and the genocide of the Jews. In other words, when attacked by Islamists waging war on the free world, the correct response is to give in. This was of course the British response right from the start of Arab violence against Jews returning to the Land of Israel in the 1920s – a policy of appeasing terror and punishing its victims that the British continue to this day.Monday, 31st May 2010
The truth about the Turkish terror convoy
9:56pm
As mobs across Europe are incited to demonstrate against Israel for protecting itself against Turkish terrorist aggression, here is avideo clip of Gaza-based Yemeni professor Abd al Fatah Nu’man who spells out what that convoy was really all about:'Peace convoy'? This was an Islamist terror ambush
4:04pm
As the international community rushes to condemn Israel for the violence on board one of the ships in the Gaza flotilla, which left a reported 10 people dead and dozens injured, it is now obvious that the real purpose of this ‘armada of hate’ was not merely the further delegitimisation of Israel but something far worse.
Tuesday, 1 June 2010
May 31, 2010
A new dawn for politics? No, the same old sleaze
Posts
