Britannia Radio

16 October 2011 8:58 AM

A nudge and a wink... what the Left are really saying about Liam Fox

Hypocrisy isn’t what it used to be. Once, Christian preachers would thunder about the virtues of marriage and then be discovered canoodling with women who weren’t their wives. Everyone would laugh.

Now, pious politically correct persons seek, by innuendo and hint, nudge and wink, to damage a Cabinet Minister by suggesting that he is a secret homosexual. And nobody laughs at the slimy dishonesty of it all.

Everyone pretends to be very concerned about the ‘Ministerial Code’, and about various boring meetings in hotels which may or may not have been attended by some youth.

They even discover, with feigned horror, that the Ministry of Defence is sometimes approached by people who want to make money by selling weapons. Gosh.

But none of this serious, detailed stuff is the real point of what’s really being said. Everyone knows it. Nobody admits it.

Here’s what is really happening. The modish Left know deep down that the public don’t agree with them about homosexuality. In private, they themselves may not even believe the noble public statements they so often make.

And so, without ever openly admitting what they are up to, they destroyed a Minister they disliked for allegedly doing something they officially approve of.

I am no friend of Liam Fox. I know nothing about his private life and care less. But I think it is a very dirty business that Left-wing newspapers, which claim to believe that homosexuality is no different from heterosexuality, behave in this way.

It’s particularly striking that this came almost immediately after the Prime Minister deliberately teased what is left of the Tory Party by saying he favoured homosexual marriage.

I suspect that Mr Cameron was trying to goad the enfeebled Right wing of his party. If they had reacted, he would have crushed them to show who’s boss.

The Left – and Mr Cameron is of the Left – have done this for many years. Moral conservatives have foolishly lumbered into the trap by objecting. And so they have allowed themselves to be smeared as the cruel persecutors of a gentle minority.

But the events of the past week show clearly that the Left, for all their noisy sanctity on the subject, are far from free of prejudice against homosexuals, and quite ready to use such bigotry when it suits them to do so.

Protecting the wrong flock

How typical of the furry Archbishop of Canterbury that he can stand up against the persecution of Christianity in Africa, but isn’t aware of it here.

We shall see in time if he did any good by sharing tea and scones with the sinister Robert Mugabe.I doubt it.

But his behaviour is typical of a church which has been so obsessed with the Third World for so long that it has forgotten the country of its birth, where legions of bureaucrats – often aided by soppy vicars – are quietly strangling the Christian faith.

My guess is that there will be a thriving Anglican church in Africa several centuries after Canterbury Cathedral has been converted into a mosque, and St Paul’s into a museum.

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A worrying film of a worrying book, We Need To Talk About Kevin, is about to open in this country.

It concerns the culprit of a school massacre, and – though the fictional killer is on SSRI ‘antidepressant’ medication, as almost all such killers are – neither book nor film grasps the significance of this. They minimise it. What a pity.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the alleged culprit of the latest rampage killing, Scott Dekraai of Seal Beach, California, is said to have been suffering from ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’, which in the USA is often ‘treated’ with SSRI pills. He is also said by his ex-wife to be ‘a diagnosed bipolar individual who has problems with his own medication and his reaction to same’.

Eight more people are dead, quite possibly at the hands of someone who had been taking ‘antidepressants’. Isn’t it time the authorities looked into this connection?

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Rock superstars such as ‘Sir’ Paul McCartney are the new aristocracy.

Normal human beings bow and simper in their presence, their path is cleared through life, and their dull, unoriginal thoughts are treated with respect.

They also exude a tremendous smugness, these vegetarian, animal-loving, charity-supporting types who cram their unfortunate children into state schools to prove that a billion pounds hasn’t turned them into conservatives.

But when it comes to basic neighbourly behaviour, they are as yobbish as the over-rated music that made them rich and famous. Council officials had to be called to the McCartney wedding party in London in the small hours of last Monday to get him to turn down the racket.

If he’s so nice, why didn’t it cross his mind that others have jobs to go to and might need to sleep?

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In a prison in ‘liberated’ Libya, Amnesty International inspectors report having seen instruments of torture and having heard ‘whipping and screams’ from a cell.

There is also clear evidence of racial bigotry in the savage treatment of non-Arab Africans. So, if we intervened there to ‘protect civilians’, why aren’t we intervening now?

Call off this risky demonstration

Street demonstrations are usually a waste of time at best. But they can also be dangerous or harmful. And I must appeal to any readers I have in Boston in Lincolnshire to stay away from a march against immigration planned to take place there next month. I also appeal to the organisers of the march to call it off. And I’m hoping for sleet, and a strong east wind off the Wash, on that day. Let me explain.

Some weeks ago I described the damage that stupid Government policies have done to Boston, which now has a huge migrant population mainly from Eastern Europe.

I did not blame the migrants, whose enterprise I admire, or those who employed them. I hoped to illustrate the wrongness of our open borders, and of the EU membership that forces us to keep them open. I also wanted to assail the terrible schools, the dim welfare policies and the family breakdown that have left so many British-born young people unemployable.

Some concrete-headed councillor in Boston chose to attack what I had written, and cast doubt on its truth, reasonably angering many Bostonians who knew that what I had said was correct.

But a demonstration in such a place can do no good, and may well cause tension and bring undesirable political chancers to the town. Already, an outfit called ‘Unite Against Fascism’ (what ‘fascism’, by the way?) is planning a counter- demonstration on the same day. Just imagine the stupidities that could lead to.

If there is trouble, it will only damage the cause of those who want common sense to prevail in this country again. Call it off.

The sound of whipping and screams is heard in Libya

I confess I had been thinking of having a go at Amnesty, which last week posted on the web (it’s still on the Guardian site) an infantile attack on me. I found this pretty galling, as I have been a member of Amnesty for about 30 years and am currently paying them £24 a year in subscriptions. How then is it right for them to use £400 of their funds on such tripe, which isn’t even an intelligent argument against the death penalty? Note also the anti-Israel propaganda attached to it.

But this morning they changed my mind, by doing the job they’ve always been best at – recounting, without fear or favour, the truth about torture and repression.

Their latest report ‘Detention Abuses Staining the New Libya’ , answers a question I posed in a recent article here. What was the new regime doing to its opponents?

Here’s the answer:

‘The new authorities in Libya must stamp out arbitrary detention and widespread abuse of detainees, Amnesty International said today (12 October), as it published a new report revealing a pattern of beatings and ill-treatment of captured Gaddafi soldiers, suspected loyalists and alleged mercenaries in western Libya.

‘Since late August, armed militia have arrested and detained as many as 2,500 people in Tripoli and al-Zawiya. During late August and September, Amnesty researchers visited 11 detention facilities in and around Tripoli and in al-Zawiyah, and interviewed approximately 300 prisoners.’

‘None of those seen by Amnesty had been shown any kind of arrest warrant and many were effectively abducted from their homes by unidentified captors carrying out raids on suspected Gaddafi fighters or loyalists. Detainees were almost always held without legal orders and mostly without the involvement of Libya’s General Prosecution authority. They were held by local councils, local military council or armed brigades - far from the oversight of the Ministry of Justice.’

And then : ‘Amnesty says there is clear evidence of torture in order to extract confessions or as a punishment. At least two guards - in separate detention facilities - admitted to Amnesty that they beat detainees in order to extract “confessions” more quickly.

In one detention centre Amnesty found a wooden stick and rope, and a rubber hose, of the kind that could be used to beat detainees, including on the soles of their feet - a torture method known as falaqa. In another they heard the sound of whipping and screams from a nearby cell. The organisation said that detainees appear to suffer beatings and torture particularly at the start of their detention, being given a "welcome" on arrival.’

The report notes that children have not been spared, that ‘arrested’ persons are sometimes bundled into the boots of cars or shot in the legs, and jeered at by their captors. It also confirms a fear I expressed: ‘Sub-Saharan Africans and black Libyans remain particularly vulnerable to arbitrary arrest on account of their skin colour and the belief that al-Gaddafi forces used African mercenaries to fight forces loyal to the NTC. While al-Gaddafi forces used foreign fighters – particularly towards the end of the conflict – the targeting of dark-skinned individuals is based on widely exaggerated claims about mercenaries made early in the conflict by forces opposed to Colonel al-Gaddafi, and fuelled by discriminatory attitudes in Libyan society.’

There are pictures of lacerated backs, accounts of beatings with electric cable, wrists tied by wire, candles lit on prisoners’ heads, all the weary normal catalogue of cruelty that one can expect in the prisons of despotisms.

And the scale of this is obviously large.

One can only wonder what has been happening elsewhere, where Amnesty has not penetrated. Now, if this is the case, it seems to me that a very large part of the righteous justification for the whole event dissolves. Where now all the utterly biased reporting of the conflict as if it was a straightforward combat between good and bad? Where now the justification that we were ‘protecting civilians’? I think I must keep asking if there have been massacres as well as mistreatment? How would we know?

By the way, I have recounted instances , during the conflict, in which it was unquestionably the case that NATO bombs killed innocent civilians.

Oh, all right then, I’ll write about Liam Fox, well, almost…

I’m generally uninterested in political scandals. They are a substitute for proper politics, which I think are enjoyed by political reporters far more than they are by voters. To this day, I do not understand the Westland Affair which led to the resignation of Michael Heseltine, and I was working at the House of Commons at the time, surrounded by gossip on the subject. I think my brain just glazes over as soon as I hear the words ‘Ministerial Code’.

I have tried, for some years now, to point out that the MPs’ expenses scandal was wholly selective in its victims. I don’t know if all those who had actually committed criminal offences were prosecuted ( I suspect not). But it wasn’t what was illegal that mattered. It was what was legal. If you look at the much wider question, of naked greed, lawfully pursued, some MPs were utterly destroyed and others sailed through the storm unruffled and not even damp.

Some of you will recall the account I gave of David Cameron’s meeting with his Witney constituents about his expenses claim, here. I still think it astonishing that this event was attended by only three national newspaper journalists (me, Stephen Glover of the Daily Mail and Ann Treneman of ‘The Times’) given the scale of the story, and the fact that Mr Cameron was widely expected to be our next Prime Minister at the time. No national broadcaster had its own equipment or staff there (Witney is 70 miles from London). I only knew about the meeting because it had been mentioned in the local newspaper, the Oxford Mail and I live just outside Mr Cameron’s constituency. I had then mentioned it to Stephen Glover one day in the lift at Associated Newspapers, who also lives in Oxford. At that time I had assumed that it was already widely known in Fleet Street. It wasn’t. I believe Ms Treneman had been alerted at the last minute by her newsdesk, who had been called by a Witney taxpayer to let them know.

When I tell normal people (i.e. those not obsessed with the news) the story of Mr Cameron’s generous (to himself) housing claims, they are amazed by the information. They know about the wisteria and the chimney (giggle, giggle, how trivial and silly!) but they are completely unaware of the scale of his claims for mortgage interest, among the highest made by any Member of Parliament. If the media flock had seized on this and run with it (Millionaire MP gets you to pay his Mortgage Interest’ ‘Millionaire MP’s taxpayer-subsidised country home’ etc) I don’t think Mr Cameron would now be Prime Minister.

Why didn’t this story ever take off? Well, you will have to guess, but regular readers here, and readers of my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’ will know my views on the flock mentality of the bulk of British political journalists (from this I very much except my excellent colleagues on the Mail on Sunday, who diligently pursue their own stories and are not part of any flock). Sometimes they bleat wildly and charge around the field like mad. At other times they gaze soulfully at you as they chomp their jaws, and refuse to get excited. Peter Oborne, another non-flock journalist, has also written very interestingly about this, and recently accurately described most political journalists as ‘courtiers’.

So scandals can be, and are, selective. And the increasingly tight rules applied to MPs and Ministers are designed to treat them as employees (of whom, exactly? This is one of the most interesting questions in our constitution) rather than independent men and women.

It’s a cliché to say that Winston Churchill or David Lloyd George could never have survived the sort of scrutiny politicians now face. But it’s a cliché because it is true. And people really should work out the implications of that. Which would we rather – that politicians had faintly dodgy friends who bankrolled them through periods in the wilderness, or that they were meek, pliable employees of the executive who never dared to speak an independent word?

And if they keep their private lives private, and treat their fellow creatures decently and kindly, is it in our interests to destroy them? I’ve grown increasingly tired of the scandal approach to politics, not least because I’ve been involved in it in the past.

When I was a reporter in Washington DC, I got marginally involved in the ‘Troopergate’ affair, in which Bill Clinton was accused by a rather sweet young lady called Paula Jones of, well, pursuing her round a Little Rock hotel room with his underpants off. I spent a long time on the phone with Miss Jones, much of it almost doubled up with laughter at her entirely believable descriptions of the then Governor of Arkansas in his semi-naked state. I was never after able to watch a State of the Union address in the same way.

My then newspaper was quite interested in this stuff. My hopes of concentrating entirely on higher things during my Washington DC posting had been shattered when I found myself living in a rather basic motel in the pleasant town of Manassas, Virginia (scene of two major Civil War battles), covering the appallingly explicit trial of Mrs Lorena Bobbitt , who had removed her husband’s manhood with a kitchen knife. This event was obviously interesting, though I think a few years ago we would have hesitated to report it. Newspapers, as I so often say, stay independent by being commercially successful. They have to follow public taste to some extent. Had I been at home, I’d never have reported on any such thing, as the newsdesk would reasonably and rightly have assumed I was the wrong person for such a job, but a foreign-based reporter has to do everything that turns up (I once found myself pursuing Princess Diana around the District of Columbia too. She was escorted by a car prominently marked with the words ‘Secret Service’, a thing that has always made me smile).

And sexual scandal – of the type involving Mr Clinton - is interesting, much more interesting than financial scandal, or conflict-of-interest scandal. But I have since reflected that Bill Clinton may have invaded the, er, privacy of quite a lot of women, some more willing than others – but he never invaded Iraq. And which is more important?

Likewise, many of Anthony Blair’s Cabinet fell to the scythe of scandal – David Blunkett, Peter Mandelson, and others I now forget. But the really scandalous members of that government, Mr Blair and Mr Brown themselves, remained in office throughout.

What about Liam Fox? I’m not a Thatcherite and find his brand of conservatism unappealing and sterile. I think his review of our defences has been mismanaged and wrongly directed, even on the assumption that most of these cuts were really needed. I don’t like his taste in birthday-party shirts. I’ve had two conversations with him in my life, the latter a couple of weeks ago when he chatted to me about a recent flight he’d had in an RAF Typhoon jet. I’ve heard gossip and rumours about him as I have about many politicians, but I wouldn’t pass it on because I have no idea if it’s true, or just the usual mildly malicious tittle-tattle that requires no evidence and may easily be wholly false.

What’s important is the government of the country. Scandal, in which the occasional minister is forced to resign, is a substitute for our lost power to remove a government and replace it with a different one. If we remove a government now, we get the same one with different faces stuck on it.

Tripoli Revisited

There is a certain smugness about the supporters of the Libyan adventure just now. Are they right to feel that way? I of course have an interest to declare, having opposed the intervention on principle, regardless of whether it did good or not. I did not think, and do not think, that the internal affairs of Libya are any business of the United Kingdom. I do not in any way withdraw from these positions now. I still think they were right, and I will try to explain why.

But, more to the point, I did not think that the backers of our interference knew what they were doing, or why they were doing it. I strongly suspect that France’s President Sarkozy was anxious for a foreign policy success to strengthen his feeble political position. And his enthusiasm, dressed up as humanitarianism, infected the British government too. They then had a machismo contest. Both governments, in my view, were very lucky that things turned out as they did. But their luck doesn’t cancel out the strong arguments for non-intervention. Nor does it show that their initial judgement was right. Anthony Blair was similarly lucky with the short-term outcome of his bravado in Kosovo and Sierra Leone. Because he mistook his luck for judgement, he entangled us in the Iraq tragedy, a disaster so serious that it is hardly even mentioned any more. Who knows what future frightfulness David Cameron will get us into, now he’s a war hero?

Who now bothers to look at Iraq, and see how it is governed and who is really in charge, and how free it really is, and what the tensions are between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds, and what sort of future lies ahead for it? It is as if it no longer existed. Yet once it was so important to us that it was worth a hugely violent and expensive invasion (one of the main reasons for the economic crisis we’re now in, by the way) . Mind you, it’s also a while since I’ve seen much of an analysis of Kosovo or Sierra Leone . Afghanistan, another alleged success, is about to be abandoned , a retreat we will conceal by declaring victory. But everyone knows it has been a devastating, wasteful failure.

I have never been convinced by arguments that our actions prevented a massacre in Benghazi, or that this serves as a justification for the whole business. We have no real idea if such a massacre would really have happened if Colonel Gadaffi’s troops had taken the city. I am, I must admit, a bit short of information on what has really happened to Gadaffi supporters since ‘our’ side took over, though it is plain that sub-Saharan Africans, accused of being Gadaffi mercenaries, have had very rough treatment indeed, which I think can fairly be described as racialist.

In any case, we (the British government and interventionist lobby) are not that opposed to massacres. Our attitude to the appalling savagery and repression of the regime in Bahrain has been utterly complacent, if not actually supportive. Our posturing over Syria’s unmerciful repression of dissent has been simultaneously self-righteous and feeble.

Personally, my criticism of this position is this . We should not pretend to an outrage we cannot or will not express in action. By doing so, we only encourage people to believe that help will come when it won’t, and so make it more likely that they will take terrible risks which they would be wiser not to take.

I know that some people find my readiness to stand back, and my open admission that I do not truly care about repression in the Arab world, hard to stomach. I don’t like it much myself. TV coverage makes the world’s ugliness all too obvious. Knowledge of horror, without the power to stop it, is an awful burden on us. I hate to see cruelty and brutality, and I love liberty. But when I am moved by witnessing the plight of people far away, I honestly confess to myself that my emotions are just self-indulgence, especially when there are lonely old ladies and other sad persons living within a mile of my home, about whom I do little or nothing. Essentially, I would be acting, if I supported these interventions, to make myself feel better about myself. I would not be acting to do actual, measurable, unselfish good.

But when I say I do not care, I am provocatively contrasting my position with those who say they do care, but take no effective and consistent action to prove it. If they reply, ‘We act when we can’, as they do, I reply, ‘But when you say you “can” you actually mean, when you like, or when it suits you, or when it is easy, because it would be perfectly physically possible for the British or US governments to take military action anywhere in the Arab world if they really wanted to. The truth is that they are not prepared to pay the price in blood or money or lost influence that would be demanded.’

True chivalry, the thing they pretend to have, does not pay any attention to such considerations. It acts at all costs.

And so, once again, I point out that anomalies and inconsistencies are signposts to the truth. If someone claims to have a principle, and he does not apply it universally, it is not a principle. Nor is it the reason for the action which he says is principled. There must be another reason.

These days, I suspect that reason is mainly personal vanity combined with electoral calculation.

My very longstanding position, that the nation is the largest unit in which it is possible to be effectively unselfish, is in reality kinder and more sensible. It is kinder particularly because it does not encourage people into futile revolts which will then be crushed amid fire and screams. I might add that Syria’s regime, which is unlovely and which I have often criticised in the past when it was not fashionable to do so, may yet be preferable to whatever replaces it. Syria, for example, is one of the last countries in the Middle East in which the Christian Arab minority lives without persecution. That is why it is host to so many Christian refuges from Baghdad, where our war has led to horrible persecution of the remaining Christians in that country. It is unlikely this arrangement would survive the fall of the Assad dynasty.

My secondary position, that the extraordinarily rare and delicate liberties of Protestant Christian Anglospshere nations, founded on centuries of inviolate sovereignty behind broad seas, cannot be transplanted into recently decolonised Muslim semi-desert states, should also be borne in mind.

Everyone knows this really, but rather than admit it, we close our eyes to the unavoidable lawlessness and intolerance of the new regimes we have brought into being, and concentrate on the empty forms of democracy (elections, parliaments etc) which we make them adopt as the price of our continued benevolence.

What a lot of rubbish all this intervention is. But we repeatedly solve the problem by declaring ‘mission accomplished’ and then ceasing to pay any attention at all to what is really happening in the newly-liberated paradises whose revolutions we were celebrating the day before yesterday. Those who rejoiced over the fall of South Africa’s apartheid regime have been particularly good at ignoring the faults of what has followed . Apartheid was of course indefensible, but, while the radical interventionists weren’t at all responsible for the nasty old arrangements, they will be partly responsible for what follows. And if there is one day a Mugabe-like despotism in Pretoria, which is by no means impossible, who will do the accounting to say that we have actually done good there? It is beyond me to make the calculation.

There’s a thought-proving scene at the end of that clever film ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’, in which this aspect of intervention is explored through a parable. The message is that, again and again, what you think is a good outcome turns out to be bad, and vice versa. If you wait long enough, you find out the truth, too late. It seems to me to be far too early to be describing our Libyan intervention as a success. Please forgive me if I continue to argue that we shouldn’t have done it.