The noose tightens - by Richard... Friday, October 01, 2010

The noose tightens - by Richard... Friday, October 01, 2010

Bad news has followed the Irish government around for so long now that virtually everyone is inured to it. But surely no one can have been expecting the latest, with the announcement that another €12 billion is needed to bail out the banks, bringing the total to about €50 billion (according to The Financial Times).

This figure is described as "horrible" by an Irish government official. It will swell the deficit for one year to a staggering 32 percent of economic output, the biggest in post-World War II Europe, equivalent to €10,000 for every man, woman and child in Ireland.

The Wall Street Journal reckons it's a gamble, swelling the government's own debts instead of allowing the banks to default on payments to creditors. The tactic, says the paper, increases the risks that the government itself will default – and there is certainly doubt about the ability of the Irish state to prevent default on the sum total of its own debt and the bank debt.

The Guardian, however (amongst others), is saying that the markets seemed "reassured" that Ireland had faced up to the worst of its troubles. Irish government bonds actually rose, while losses were capped on European stock markets. This paper is also telling itself that leading business indicators in Germany and the US are fuelling hopes that the world would avoid a double-dip recession.

Meanwhile, the Irish are having to vote with their feet: over 100,000 Irish workers expected to leave country before 2012. With a jobless rate of 13.6 percent, it means return to Ireland's culture of emigration as the double dip recession bites - the very recession that the pundits say isn't going to happen..

Peter Bunting, the Irish Congress of Trade Union's northern general secretary, warns that, in the north and the south, there is a danger that the unskilled and semi-skilled unemployed, the sector least able to migrate, could become a new pool of disaffection that might be exploited by dissident Republican terrorists on either side of the Irish border.

He is maybe not wrong there, although this could be a little alarmist. But such talk is becoming common currency (more so than the euro), with the additional news that Portugal's minority socialist government is urging the opposition to back tough austerity measures for 2011, or "catastrophe" will be the result. Portuguese unions, on the other hand, are warned they could step up industrial action in response to cuts which they say will hurt workers.

Nevertheless, there is always the danger here that one is seen to be a "chicken little". For all the warnings, the sky has not yet fallen in. It is, though, interesting to see the events in Ecuador, where president Rafael Correa has been pelted with tear gas by police angry at a new law that cuts their benefits. They have launched a chaotic rebellion that has put the president in hospital, recovering from the effects of the gas.

Ecuador, of course, is a long, long way away – and South American countries are not a good model for predicting events in Europe. It is fair to say, though, that we have something in common - a breaking point. Few would care to predict how far we are away from ours here. Then, the sweet aroma of tear gas in the morning may be the least of the administration's woes.

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On being prepared - by Richard... Thursday, September 30, 2010

Almost every one of the people I talked to yesterday – and it was quite a few – raised spontaneously the story of Ed Miliband and his brother, but in terms of speaking dismissively of the media treating it as a "soap opera".

Nevertheless, that is how the media deals with its affairs, reducing everything it can to the lowest intellectual level, revelling in the trivia and the drama, oblivious to the important issues and, most often, not even beginning to understand them.

Immersed in the news coverage of yesteryear, however, I am warming to the thesis – often advanced by my erstwhile co-editor – that it has never been any different. While I have seen in the past some very interesting and accurate coverage of technical issues, it does seem to be the case that the last place you can go for analysis and understanding is the media.

Many journalists like to think of themselves as writing the "first draft of history". But more often, their work is an intellectual cul-de-sac, so wrong and so misinformed that it provides only markers as to the fact that something happened - the actual facts having to be gleaned from other sources.

However, for that basic news, the media does still serves a purpose, and it is The Daily Mail which provides the most colourful coverage of the strikes and violence sweeping Europe, and in particular of the General Strike in Spain.

What we do not get, though, is any sense of whether this reflects wider sentiment in those countries, representing Europe on the brink, or whether this is just the action of a few disaffected hotheads with an eye to maximising publicity for their cause.

The evocative pictures, though, warn of things to come here – and the idea of "spending cuts" triggering violence has been much touted by the unions and, most recently, by senior police officers.

With their fingers deeply embedded in the tills, their self-serving cant conceals what we would like to think is the real truth – that the trigger for riots and disorder will be the failure of government to make the necessary cuts, as it continues to slice off greater and greater proportions of our incomes, while delivering less and less.

Talking over the possibility of violence with someone else last night, the view was advanced that a better option is pushing the likes of the EU Referendum campaign, a non-violent option that has the merits of giving activists something to do.

The trouble with this is that doing something, for the sake of doing something, is not necessarily better than doing nothing. And it can be worse. We have to contend with the idea that much of what we do as eurosceptics is actually counter-productive. The other thought is that simply repeating the same tactics that have consistently failed for the last 30 years is not exactly a winning strategy.

Better, perhaps, if we stopped trying to create a mass movement and concentrated on building structures which would enable us to exploit the mass movements than arise spontaneously, when the time is right. For that, we need a different approach – and a very much smaller number of people.

The point, of course, is that violence, if it is going to come, will come for reasons entirely unrelated to our own preoccupations. What is important is that the instability it creates – if it goes far enough – presents opportunities to seek and effect change. But that is only any use if we are prepared, and we are not.

Certainly, gathering signatures and going cap in hand to our rulers to ask "pretty please" if they would be ever so kind and give us a referendum is a complete waste of time and life energy. The time for that is when we have built up the infrastructure that can put a million people on the streets, at a time and place of our choosing. Then, we don't ask ... we demand.

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Rewriting history - by Richard...

Two articles yesterday, one in The Daily Telegraph and the other in The Daily Mail trailed a new BBC documentary called Secret Iraq. A three-part series, showing at 9pm on Wednesdays, it purports to tell the "real" story of the Iraqi occupation and insurgency.

The Mail starts its report with the legend: "Britain's withdrawal from Basra was a 'defeat' which left the city 'terrorised' by militias, according to a damning verdict by British and American generals." Yet, many will recall how much effort went into portraying this defeat as a "victory", with sundry generals all offering a carefully crafted concerted line, not least Gen Dannatt, with his infamous "we have achieved what we set out to achieve" speech.

Typically, though, in order to progress the narrative, the producers rely on the tired and wholly unreliable device of using "talking heads". And one of those heads is Gen Dannatt. This is not only lazy journalism, it runs the risk of misleading the watcher. Players are being allowed to state positions which are partisan, yet their contributions are accepted without challenge, effectively as stated fact.

I will not comment a great deal more, holding the bulk of my fire until the series has ended. But I would note the comment in October 1941 of Sir Stephen Taylor, Director of the Ministry of Information's home intelligence division, when he was discussing the need for a working definition of morale.

In a highly relevant observation, he said that: "Morale must be measured not by what a person thinks and says but by what he does and how he does it." The same must apply to journalism and history. Events must not be measured by what the persons involved think and say about them (especially afterwards) but by what they did and how they did it at the time. Actions should speak louder than words.

By that yardstick, Dannatt – and many other actors – come out very differently than they would have you believe from their subsequent claims. Needless to say, though, I have a dog in the fight, with my book Ministry of Defeat. Despite this new narrative being better and more expensively resourced, I still prefer my version to what the BBC has so far offered.

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