Reason departed - by Richard... Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Reason departed - by Richard... Tuesday, July 19, 2011

I was actually rung by a London-based BBC World Service journalist this afternoon, inviting me to go on a discussion programme this evening, to talk about the select committee hearing. "A lot of our overseas listeners", he said, "are amazed at the amount of coverage that was being given to this issue".

My response was that you did not have to be overseas to feel that way. Here in Yorkshire, 200 miles from the "crime scene", it feels as if we are on a different planet. Don't get me wrong here. This issue is not unimportant. What is wrong is the totally disproportionate coverage. And yes I did check ... there has been far more media coverage today than was given in the newspapers to the outbreak of the Second World War.

Today, incidentally, is the 71st anniversary of Hitler's "Last Appeal to Reason" speech in Berlin, addressed to the British people in the hope that they would force their government to "see sense" and sue for peace. I don't know is there is a foreign dictator up to doing the job now (appealing for reason), but he would be wasting his time, I fear. In 1940, reason prevailed - contrary to Hitler's expectations. It has now departed.

With that, I am departed for a short time ... to rant on the BBC World Service.

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Failure writ large - by Richard...

It's not just the British press, police and politicians that are in crisis, writes Michael White for The Guardian. "Spare a thought for Britain's armed forces, who are risking life and limb in support of state policy, while those of us at home hyperventilate over a squalid political row".

My immediate response to this is "speak for yourself, mate". We did a lot more than spare a thought over the weekend and we – unlike the scumset and associated turd-eaters - are by no means hyperventilating over a media storm.

This, though, is a Guardian journalist with a narrative to sell, a man who, from the depths of the most profound and disturbing ignorance, tells us that, while most weekend attention was focused on the Murdochs, the police and the politicians, the Commons defence select committee issued "a powerful condemnation" of the way the mission to Helmand was handled from day one.

Mr White is, of course, far too grand to read independent blogs but, if he had, he might have seen the alternative view expressed. From that he would have learned that, far from offering "a powerful condemnation", the select committee's analysis was weak and its conclusions tepid.

The clue to the direction of the narrative, though, is White's views on the select committee report. The interesting thing is, he says, "that its ire is not directed against the late Labour government or the then-defence secretary, John Reid".

Instead, he writes, "it is focussed on the top military brass who underestimated the threat from the ever-resourceful Taliban ("you have the watches, but we have the time") and told Reid there were enough helicopters to provide air support when there were not. Ministers were not told the risk level, which later proved fatal to so many young lives".

Now here comes the rub. White describes the committee chairman, Tory ex-defence minister James Arbuthnot, as "soft-spoken but solid". But what he does not say is that he was one of the "good ol' boys", part of the Tory defence claque, who actually maintained the myth – right through the critical period – of ministerial responsibility. It was all Brown's fault, remember?

I recall of the period, from 2006, when I watched every defence debate online, and then read the transcripts. I knew most of the personalities involved, and could read the mood music. Defence then was a political football, the mantras of "over-stretch" and "underfunding" being chanted with semi-religious fervour. The Generals were lauded and praised. Dannatt was treated as a demi-god.

Anyone who had half a brain and a little inside knowledge could work it out. I had a lot of inside knowledge ... through parliamentary and other contacts. Furthermore, I was writing consistently on this theme, culminating in October 2009 when I wrote a piece headed, "The generals must share the blame", celebrating the fact that, at last, the Spectator had published a half-decent piece.

This was by Paul Robinson, professor in the Graduate School of International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, whence I noted that, after years of ploughing the solitary furrow, pointing out that the military should bear some of the blame for the (then) current parlous state of our Armed Forces, and their lacklustre performance in first Iraq and now Afghanistan, only now did the magazine pop up saying the same thing.

In my own piece, I had referred to a particularly trenchant piece of my own in April 2009, where I wrote of "the real enemy in Whitehall" – the MoD.

All this was evident at the time – to the politicians and to the specialist correspondents like Michael White. Yet all of them chose to hold their fire, and focus instead on the Ministers, playing a dirty, devious and thoroughly dishonest game. And only now, are the likes of Arbuthnot – the Tory politician who no longer wishes to put Ministers in the frame - prepared to admit that the military was the author of its own downfall.

What I wrote on Sunday, therefore, is even more evident today. We have had and have now, two egregious failures. Firstly, Parliament – and the long-stop of the Defence Committee, failed to pick up what was going on. Secondly, the media likewise failed, and then failed to note that the Defence Committee was completely dysfunctional.

I despair in writing this. Even as I write, we have a three-ring media circus, centred around the proceedings of a select committee, chaired by an acknowledged crook, grandstanding for all it is worth. The same failed system represented by the Defence Committee, reported by a failing media.

From it, nothing of any substance will come and, in truth, no one seems to care. The soap opera is everything. The hard, grown-up job of analysing what is going wrong, and coming up with serious solutions, seems beyond the capabilities of anyone involved.

We are going nowhere with this, and nothing will be solved. In due course, the circus will pack up its tents and move on to another show, and we'll be none the wiser. Except that, before this show is even over, real life outside the tent will take a hand. While these fools play, the economy and the world order is falling apart.

Damn them all to hell, for their foolishness, their stupidity and their venality. We deserve better than this.

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How Hacking Started - by Richard...

A propos the current hystérie du jour, we have from Actionmagazine, the publication of the British "Blackshirts" organisation, in 15 May 1937:

WHY do men go in for politics? The cynic will reply, to feather their nests, but I believe that quite a large proportion go in with the belief that they might be able to do some good.

But why did Douglas Hacking take it up? Douglas, as you probably know, has got on as a politician. Since 1918 he has represented the Chorley Division of Lancashire, and is now chairman of the Conservative Party organisation. Big promotion is certain to come his way.

But Douglas had no urge to do anything. He was no reforming zealot. "Twenty-five years ago my father entertained Lord Derby to lunch", said Hacking, a few days ago. "After lunch, Lord Derby asked my father whether he would consider my entering the political field."

And that was how Hacking started. And, perhaps, that is why he is doing so well!

So now you know. Forget the NOTW and Coulson. It all started a long time ago ... but it was the Tories wot dun it. It is always the Tories ... then and now.

And Hacking, having been first elected in 1918, never really amounted to much ... just a steady political workhorse - a political hack, you might even say. He was finally unseated in the great general election clear-out of 1945.

As was the custom, he was then raised to the Peerage, taking the title of Baron Hacking, of Chorley in the County of Lancaster.

So Hacking ended up in the Lords, where they looked after their own. And there is nothing new under the Sun, as Mr Murdoch might now say.

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The smell of death - by Richard...

Between them, the turd-eaters and the hand-wavers are going to make today insufferable. Raedwald had it sussed and I stand by my analysis. This is not real.

You want real – read Ambrose and, God help us, The Gruaniad. Even The Financial Times is getting worried. The important point, it says, is that the eurozone's leaders must dither no more. Any suggestion that they will put off consideration of a comprehensive solution until September could be fatal.

Nearly two years ago, I wrote a piece about the smell of decadence. If I wrote that piece now, it would not look a lot different. One could add that the smell of decadence is the smell of death ... the death of our civilisation. You will see that event lurch a lot closer today.

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Lovely people - by Richard... Monday, July 18, 2011

... these MPs. This one is suggesting that Melanie Phillips might be "punched" for her views.

From where do they get these dregs, and how do they manage to get elected?

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Noted By Madame Defarge - 7 - by Richard...

In the tradition of Madame Defarge, we continue to record the 274 MPs who gave away £9.8 billion of our money, with their votes.

The next on the list is Stuart Andrew, a Conservative (In Name Only), supposedly representing the constituency of Pudsey in West Yorkshire. His facebook profile is here, which he does not seem to use very much. Perhaps he ought to, as his seat is highly marginal, won in 2010 on 18,874 votes (38.45%) against Labour's 17,215 (35.07%), giving him a majority of 1,659. Limp-Dims polled 10,224, BNP 1,549 and UKIP 1,221.

Mr Andrew has an interesting history. Openly homosexual, he campaigns openly for homosexual issues and, noting that the party had set up an LGBTory Group, thought that "perhaps it was time to set up a European version to help form new opinions across the EU".

He stood as a Conservative candidate in the 1997 Parliamentary election in Wrexham. Subsequent to this, he left the Conservatives citing issues with the "direction of the party". Those "issues" may or may not have been connected with the fact that, during the campaign he was beaten unconscious in what was described as a politically-motivated street attack. He was hospitalised along with his father, who had come to his aid.

He then joined the Labour Party, for reasons claimed to be over the Conservative Party's attitude to homosexuals.

However, there are different versions of this tale. After winning a council seat in Wrexham in 1995, the only Conservative gain in the whole of Wales and the parliamentary candidate in 1997, he tried to become Welsh Assembly candidate for a winnable seat but was was voted 5th in the PR list, realised he would not be elected and decided to defect to Labour in the middle of the campaign.

Only after he was narrowly defeated in the 1999 election did he move to Leeds and rejoin the Conservative Party. He then got a ticket on Leeds City Council from 2003–2010, initially representing the Aireborough ward, and following boundary changes representing the Guiseley and Rawdon ward – during which time the Conservative-coalition authority provoked a marathon strike by binmen by threatening to cut wages by 30 percent.

For the last period as a councillor, before getting elected as an MP on 6 May 2010, he managed to rack up £19,477 in expenses. He was also heading the fundraising team at Martin House, Yorkshire's hospice for children and young people where he was responsible for leading a team charged with raising over £3 million a year.

When he was elected to the richer pickings of Westminster, he resigned as a councillor, with the by-election for his vacated council seat being held on Thursday 14 October 2010. That same month, Mr Andrew joined the Welsh Affairs Select Committee. He now lives in Rawdon and says he enjoys walking his dogs on Rawdon Billing, socialising with friends and attending the gym.

This is the sort of man who is clearly comfortable with Mr Cameron's modern "Conservative" party, and equally at home with the idea of giving away large amounts of our money. His portion of the giveaway is £36 million, which he now owes us. He can, therefore, now consider himself Noted By Madame Defarge (NBMD). The knitting gets longer and longer.

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A grand old tradition - by Richard...

Back in 1999, when UKIP got its first three MEPs, we decided that, above all else, we needed to build credibility. It was too easy for our opposition to dismiss us as loons, and thereby trash an entirely legitimate case.

I like to think that, over the next few years, we enhanced UKIP's reputation, but much of the good work was destroyed in the crazy period after the 2004 election, when the Robert Kilroy-Silk madness dominated.

It got worse with the 2009 election, as electoral enthusiasm for the party was not matched by the quality of candidate – the selection process having been dominated by Farage, thereby ensuring a high proportion of compliant dross made it into the lists.

With such a handicap, however, you would have thought that the party could steer clear of the great pretender, Christopher Monckton, whom it styles as deputy leader and head of research. The man is and continues to be an embarrassment.

It really is hard enough pushing the eurosceptic agenda – to say nothing of the climate change argument – without being saddled by egregious self-publicists such as Monckton. But, once again, UKIP manages to do the wrong thing, giving succour to our enemies, scoring yet another own goal, as Monckton is publicly humiliated.

An axiom in politics is that your most dangerous enemies are invariably on your own side – something known since Julius Caesar and even earlier. To its credit, therefore, UKIP is at least maintaining a grand old tradition.

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Delete "Armed Forces" - by Richard...

Reference the Defence Committee report on Operations in Afghanistan, I have received by e-mail the note illustrated above. I am totally at a loss as to why this was sent merely as a corrigendum. Surely it is better framed as a succinct expression of government policy?

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Nothing yet will change - by Richard...

"As Ed Miliband said yesterday, this saga is changing the very psyche of British politics", opines The Grauniad in today's somewhat ponderous lead editorial. The writers could not be more wrong. The "very psyche of British politics" changed a long time ago, from being morally corrupt to overtly corrupt as well.

All that has happened is that the Scumset has been outed. They are, of course, trying to put the lid back on it, and will partially succeed as greater events reassert their dominance.

For some, lifting the lid to reveal the turgid inner workings of government and politics has come as a surprise. But not to us. For sure, we haven't known the details, but who needs to dissect a turd to know what it is? The stench as you approach the midden tells you all you need to know.

And what is being lost in this "frothing turd mousse" is any proper understanding of the scale and nature of the fractures in our system. And when this is all over and done, those fractures will still be there. Nothing will be done about them, because the Scumset will still be there.

Fundamental change is not yet upon us. We need the political equivalent of the the above before the air will smell sweet again.

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Riding the tiger - by Richard...

In the style of Dean Swift, Ambrose is offering a "modest proposal for eurozone break-up". He suggests that, if a euro break-up was properly planned and handled, with all back-stop measures in place, it might prove less traumatic than assumed. As Czech premier Vaclav Klaus once said, it is surprisingly easy to end a currency union: the Czechs and Slovaks did it calmly in a morning.

Thus, does Ambrose declare: "There is no necessary reason why the EU could not weather such a crisis, continuing such useful functions as competition enforcement and global trade talks. A more modern EU shorn of its great power pretentions and 20th Century imperial nostalgia would be a healthier organization".

He then asks whether any EU leader will grasp the nettle, concluding that most of Europe's governing elite is ideologically compromised by the Project and will attempt to defend an unreformed EMU with scorched earth policies. We can only hope, he says, that the less compromised judges of Germany's Verfassungsgericht bring matters to a swift head in September.

But there he has hit the nail on the head. The euro is a political project, where economic rules have been suspended by the "colleagues". They are, in any event, relying on the "beneficial crisis" doctrine, anticipating that it will take an existential crisis to enable them to install economic governance amongst the eurozone members.

And here lies hubris, in industrial quantities. Even at this late hour – contradicting all evidence – the "colleagues" believe that they can put it off. In the style of V I Lenin, the worse it gets the better it gets, as long as they can keep riding the tiger.

Lenin, however, survived his own folly. The young lady of Riga didn't survive hers. And hers looks closer to the model the "colleagues" have chosen.

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Is there no end - by Richard...

... to this man's talents?

The admission is the first time that a senior British politician has suggested that the problems in Greece, Spain and Italy could affect Britain. Thank goodness we have him to warn us. We'd never have noticed otherwise.

But it does seem as if the turd-eaters are waking up. Yet, with the classic arrogance of the MSM, just because they have noticed, it becomes "news" and they start scribbling that all we lesser mortals should sit up and take notice.

Then we get Wolfgang Münchau in the Financial Times writing: "The biggest single danger in the eurozone crisis now is that events are moving too fast for Europe's complacent political leadership. Last week, the crisis reached Italy. And the European Union looked the other way".

Thus do we get some belated recognition that the obsession with "self" is doing real harm. While the Scumset have been out to play, the world is going to hell in a handcart.

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