Joe's Jottings

Category: Politics

Denver and the progressive knee jerk point-scoring…

I rarely write about serious stuff like mass murders here on this blog. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that I regard it as pompous and pretentious for me to pontificate on the bleedin’ obvious disasters that befall this world unless I’m somehow involved.

The Aurora cinema shooting is just another tragedy in America’s long and difficult relationship with firearms and the Second Amendment of the US Constitution (for those who don’t have a copy : “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.“) It’s a combination of multiple personal tragedies, cultural and governmental failures to legislate and one person’s evil or psychosis. I guess that we may get some idea of why this young man did what he did – whether it will make any sense is another matter.

I’ll come straight out – I love a lot of Americans. Their governments may make me weep on occasion, and they have some religious leaders that make we wonder whether we read the same Bible, and they also produce the Khardssians. But – on the whole, I like ’em. I like to think of myself as a left-wing libertarian in political terms, so I sometimes find myself dealing with a lot of people from the left who disagree with my views of the American people, and a lot of people from the US who think I’m a particularly weird type of Libertarian.

What I have found is that hatred of the US is one of the last remaining acceptable bigotries. So I wasn’t desperately surprised to see this little gem pop up in my Twitter stream – still not sure whether it’s serious or a ‘joke’:

“What American’s don’t understand is that they’re insane.”

Now….let’s pretend I tweeted…”What Greeks don’t understand is that they’re insane.” I wouldn’t do such a thing – they’re exhibiting some of the sanest behaviour in the world right now – but listen carefully….hear that low rumbling, that sound of wailing and gnashing of teeth, the sharpening of disembowelling cutlasses? Good. Because that’s the sound of ten thousand people who’d support that sentiment about the Americans on Twitter getting ready to turn around to me and yell ‘racist’.

I can’t see the difference in comments, but one would be acceptable to a lot of people who consider themselves to be liberal, free-thinking, non-bigoted progressives and one wouldn’t.

To my friends on the left – this isn’t the time for cheap political point scoring based on the actions of one lunatic, no matter how often this particularly American tragedy is played out. The shadow of the man with the gun is long in US culture – it will not easily go away and I’m sure that we’ll see this sort of thing happen again. But I’d like to think that we could all have the decency to get through these dark times without point scoring and cheap jokes.

July 21, 2012
Running with the hares and hunting with the hounds….

The title of this piece alludes to an old English saying; to ‘run with the hares and hunt with the hounds’ is a way of saying that someone attempts to benefit from both sides in a dispute.

This saying was bought very much to my mind last week by the actions of two entertainers whose behaviour might be regarded as jarring somewhat with the ‘public persona’ that has made them famous.

The first of these is the satirist Armando Iannucci – described by the Daily Telegraph as ‘the hardman of political satire’ for his work with TV show ‘The Thick of It’ and the film ‘In the loop’. It seems odd that such a person should accept an OBE – which is what has happened. In other words, satirist honoured by the system that he apparently despises so much, and who then chooses to accept the honour. Consider yourself neutered, Armando.

The second is Jimmy Carr, comedian and someone who has been shown to be ‘frugal with his tax payments’ by using a legal tax avoidance scheme. There is an old joke that says ‘What’s the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion? About 7 years in Pentonville prison….’; well, Carr has apparently seen the light and accepted that what he did was wrong. After all, sheltering 3 million a year from HMRC at a time when most of us are under the cosh might seem a little unfeeling- especially coming from a man who’s humour has included comments about the fact that Barclays Bank only pays 1% tax. But it’s OK – it’s all a joke, isn’t it?

These two gentlemen, in my eyes, do seem to want the benefits of appearing edgy and slightly risky, whilst apparently accepting all the perks and benefits that the current establishment and economic system have to offer. To me it leaves a rather nasty taste in my mouth.

I have to say that I’m not a fan of the work of either man – I guess that’s made it easier for me to be grumpy about it – but my estimation of both of them would have gone up had they walked the walk that goes with their talk.

June 27, 2012
“I heard the news today, oh boy…”

…which many will recognise as the opening line of the Beatles song, “A Day in the Life”. Unfortunately, I had to change the next line to ‘…and was as angry as Hell’ rather than ‘About a lucky man who made the grade’.

Today, on Westminster Bridge in London, people protesting against Government Plans to ‘reform’ the NHS are gathering in an event called, on Twitter, #blockthebridge. It appears that a few thousand people are gathering, and at the time of writing the protest was peaceful. Although you might be ignorant of this protest unless you’re following it on social media like Twitter and Facebook, becasue neither the BBC or Sky News have seen fit to report on it.

After all, there is a more important story happening..Sir Paul McCartney is getting married! Yes! We’ve had the interviews with the waiting fans, know that Sir Paul and his bride to be went for a workout this morning, know the colour of the wedding car and it’s just popped up as ‘Breaking News’ on the BBC News channel where we have live footage of a car parked in a driveway waiting to drive off.

Quite honestly, it’s shameful – McCartney and (on Sky) dead pop singer Michael Jackson have managed to provide some suitably anodyne and irrelevant ‘OK’ or ‘Hello’ style celeb puff pieces to cover up that people are fighting for the future of the NHS. It’s either piss poor editorial decision making or censorship, and given the coverage not given to the Wall Street occupation in the last week I’m going with censorship.

Oddly enough, it would have been John Lennon’s birthday today, and I like to think that as the co-writer of the song I quoted above he would have been tempted to go and join the protesters rather than attend the wedding, had he still been with us – were he not already occupying Wall Street, of course.

And in case you’re interested, the BBC are now showing a bus pulling up at a Register Office….

October 9, 2011
Left to Apple, 2014 could be like 1984…revisited…

Those of us of a certain age in IT will remember Apple’s famous TV advert for the groundbreaking ‘Macintosh’ computer back in 1984. The advert, here on You Tube, portrayed how the Mac would free computer users from the grasp of the evil Corporate Computer giants (such as IBM and Microsoft) and did a lot to help Apple’s image as the ‘good (albeit expensive) guys’ in the computer world, providing computers that were fun to use, cool and trendy.

Macs were always hard to write software for, compared to the PC. But the ease of use and availability of high quality software for media use, combined with a large number of users who might be regarded as ‘opinion formers’ – writers, authors, musicians and other media players – ensured that the Mac would survive. In recent years the iPod, iPhone and iPad have created new markets for Apple products – indeed, I have an iPad on loan at the moment and I really enjoy it, despite my original qualms about the iPad. But Apple kit has become increasingly ‘walled garden’. I first explored this in this Blog post: https://joepritchard.me.uk/2010/04/apple-why-2014-could-be-like-1984/, expressing concern about the way in which Apple were controlling what you viewed and accessed with the iPad.

So, what’s new? Why am I back here?

Take a look at this Patent. The stated purpose is to allow the owners of concert or conference venues to turn off the cameras of any devices in the venue that are using technology that is described in the Patent. You might wonder why someone in the digital camera / video business would want to put circuitry in their cameras that would allow them to be remotely disabled. Well, if you’re a media publisher, then you might be very interested indeed in being able to prevent people filming concerts and such that you might actually have the rights for. At this level – that of Digital Rights Management – then it’s a useful technology – especially if, like Apple, you make money by selling media, or if you think that governments, encouraged by media companies, may consider beefing up DRM laws to protect more forms of media.

The patent relies on infra-red light to disable (or change the function of) the cameras. Wireless signals would have range issues or might even be disabled by the simple expedient of the user of the camera simply disabling WiFi. As far as I can see, the patent works by using Infra Red light coming in through the camera lens – there might be a way to filter this, but I’m not entirely sure – probably suitable IR filters would dim and distort the colour of the image beyond usability.

Whilst the DRM issue of recording performances has been the overt driving force behind this patent, I’m more worried about how it might be used to disable the camera at demonstrations, civil unrest, etc. Capturing footage such as that seen in the UK Student Demonstrations, the UK G20 evidence about the death of a passer by and all the footage from Egypt and Greece might no longer be possible for users of cameras fitted with such technology. All the authorities would have to do is ‘paint’ areas of the scene they don’t want filming with a suitable IR signal and that’s that – apart from any ‘old tech’ that doesn’t have this patent incorporated. This would be a simple step – the technology to paint with IR could be as simple as a battery of high intensity infra-red LEDs emitting the required coded signals. One can imagine the situation – the authorities wish to violently break up a demonstration, they turn the infra-red emitters on, the phone cameras go dark, the kickings start.

Apple seem to have come a long way since their ‘freedom from authoritarian power’ beginnings in the 1970s and 1980s. The revolution will not be televised; certainly not with Apple kit, anyway.

June 21, 2011
Wikileaks – ‘Heat’ magazine for the Political classes?
Hear me out on this one.

I’ve been a political animal for over half my life; for me it came with the turf of being working class boy, avoids going down the pit by going to university, comes home and sees the five pits that I could see from my bedroom window as a kid closed down within a few years. I was active in ‘Old Labour’ – Chair of Ward, vice Chair of Constituency, District Labour Party, etc. before quitting in disgust at the direction New Labour was taking the party. Since 1995 my politics have been with a small ‘p’ – they’ve been about community building – bottom up helping people create their own solutions, a little writing, a little online community building, whatever.

So, you might be surprised to read this item, in which I am going to argue that many of the ‘big leaks’ of US Military and Diplomatic Information from Wikileaks have been ultimately pointless, organisationally egotistical and distracting from the issues at hand. The lack of US security, the possibility that some of the information is ‘black propaganda’ and the personal life of Mr Assange are matters for another day and probably another writer.

Going back to the first time that Wikileaks hit the headlines, the release of papers showing that there had probably been war crimes in Iraq perpetrated by Allied troops, that torture took place and other stories associated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was undeniably valuable and the sort of traditional ‘investigative journalism’ that we might expect from the Fourth Estate. These were relevant and important leaks in any number of ways – wrongdoing by US and UK citizens, possible war crimes, lies in Government about the prosecution of a war – possible further indications that the wars themselves were illegal. They removed the last shreds of the idea that these were ‘just’ wars being legally and effectively prosecuted.

Now, the October/November 2010 release. More of the same to some degree, with added diplomatic cables – what embassy staff said about world leaders, stuff like that. And stuff going back 20 or 30 years. Here’s where I start having misgivings – the Diplomatic leaks.

Diplomacy has been defined as the art of saying ‘What a nice doggy, here doggy, have a biscuit, cute doggy…whilst looking around for a large rock with which to hit said dog.’ A great deal of diplomatic traffic is ‘private’ – a concept that many people in Wikileaks and who believe that ‘all information wants to be free’ have problems with. Does it benefit anyone in the world to find out that British sailors were released from Iranian detention after possible involvement by the Pope? Or that a US Diplomat regards the British Government as having slight paranoia about the so-called ‘Special Relationship’? I’m not sure it does – to me it genuinely appears to be gossip on a par with that published in Heat about the status of the marriages of people in the public eye – but I’m sure that it gave the chattering classes a great deal of vicarious pleasure by apparently letting them in to what CS Lewis called ‘The Inner Circle’ – a group of people who know something that most other people don’t… But ultimately, I’m reminded of the story from World War II surrounding ‘Enigma’ intelligence. Messages were decrypted that often gave lots of useless personal details about German officers – like one chap constantly complaining about gout. Whilst it was amusing it was also pointless to the allies, and potentially dangerous to the Enigma decoding project, as were it to get back to the enemy that the allies were having a good laugh at the General’s throbbing toe, it would soon lead to a review of policy and procedure that might shut down the Enigma source for good.

There are other diplomatic leaks that should be kept secret – simply because they deal with ‘work in progress’. Diplomacy is not a spectator sport. Those of us of a certain age can remember that the Camp David agreement was greatly facilitated by ‘back channel’ diplomacy where people could speak to each other in secret without knowledge of these meetings, which would have probably scuppered political careers at the very least, getting out until after the event. This sort of ‘get lots of data, apply no self-censorship, dump the lot on the Internet’ approach from Wikileaks will undoubtedly make any diplomats think twice about what they say in such situations in future.

Wikileaks themselves have admitted that their approach to releasing documents without review or ‘redacting’ (blacking out text, for you and me) could mean that the site would ‘one day have blood on it’s hands’. To say that and still persist in the same publication method is arrogant and ego-driven. Amnesty International have already raised the issue of redaction of the names of Afghan civilian workers from released documents – i.e. people helping the Coalition forces in Afghanistan who’re now at risk of death (as are their families) because of the leaked documents. There is also information about techniques and equipment used to tackle ‘roadside bombs’ in the leaked documents. Whilst it’s likely that anyone with reasonable technical knowledge could work a lot of this stuff out, there is no point in making the task easier. I am forced to wonder how much blood will be spilt on the backs of these two stories alone? Afghan civilian and bomb disposal officer? Feeling queasy yet, Wikileakers? People on the liberal left quite rightly decry the waste of life of these wars; I’m not hearing the same voices decrying the waste of life caused by the release of documents by Wikileaks.

And the whole Wikileaks business has been a massive distraction here in the UK. Whilst a fair number of mainstream media outlets have been publishing leaked Wikileaks documents, running stories on them, and then most recently getting in on the personal stuff about the Wikileaks founder, Britain has had a number of student protests and ‘bottom up’ political protests that have received either biased or no coverage at all. To people in Britain, Wikileaks will have :
- Academic / prurient interest for journalists, the chattering classes and teh wannabe ‘heroes of open data’.
- Serious interest if you’re serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, or have family or friends there, from teh point of view of your own life or the lives of others being put in greater jeopardy by the data released.
- Political impact (probably negative) in terms of diplomatic negotiations
- Very little impact at all on the vast majority of people in the UK.
That’s not to say people are not interested and concerned about leaks that deal with wrongdoing at a personal, governmental or corporate level. That’s what organisations like Wikileaks SHOULD be doing, but with a degree of care, and not with teh arrogance and narcissism that they currently display.

But things like the Student Protests and the protests against unpaid tax made against High Street shops and businesses such as BHS, Vodafone and Top Shop are relevant to people on day to day basis – they will be paying for that unpaid tax, their children will be paying more for education. Their children are getting their heads broken (literally) by Police batons. And these stories are only getting out to the public slowly and with great effort.

Wikileaks is a distraction to these stories and activities that are more relevant to the British people. But, I guess they’re not as sexy as things with ‘CLASSIFIED’ written on them that smell, ever so slightly, of spilt blood.

Like I said, ‘Heat’ magazine for the Political classes, political porn for the poseurs.
December 19, 2010
A case of censorship and wrongful imprisonment?

This has absolutely nothing to do with Wikileaks.

Or maybe it does.

All stories like this have two sides, and it’s inevitable that we only get to see one side of it – and perhaps therein lies the Wikileaks link – it would be so nice to see both sides of this story so that the ‘truth will out’ as they say. The story revolves around a young man called Steven Neary who suffers from an Autistic Spectrum Disorder. The story is detailed here – ‘The Orwellian Present – Never Mind the Future’ – and it is a very sad tale. I know from experience that the behaviours of people on the Autistic Spectrum can vary between baffling, frightening and infuriating. Folks dealing with such people as Steven need a lot of patience and support – unlike the situation here where, through a minor illness on the part of Steven’s carer, resulted in Steven being imprisoned against his will and the will of his father ‘for his own good’.

Whether Steven will be released back to his father’s care is still a mystery. The situation has existed for several months now – since last winter – and has received some media coverage but in my opinoon nowhere near as much as should be given to such a case.

The ‘rendition process’ that Steven has gone through is as effective at depriving him of his freedom as any that may be read of in Wikileaks. Kafka’s Trial springs to mind to deal with the process – Steven did little wrong; his behaviour was deemed ‘bad’ by professional carers and they considered him unmanageable:

Now the Positive Behaviour Unit is a mighty politically correct place. Tap someone on the shoulder to attract their attention, and they don’t think ‘that is how Stephen has always attracted my attention since he was a child’ – they say – ‘he touched me, that is an assault’ and promptly record it in their daily log…..

When Stephen’s Father went to collect him after three days, they had logged many such ‘assaults’ – and announced that they were retaining Stephen for ‘assessment’. No! His Father couldn’t take him home.

Now, some of you may think that this is Sectioning – nope, it’s not. It’s another piece of fun legislation bought in for our protection by those fun loving liberals called New Labour in 2005 – http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2007/12/schedule/7 – basically, it’s designed to lock people up for their own protection.

And, if you should try and get back to your own home, where you are loved and cared for, you’re in trouble because you’re showing that you need locking up for your own protection because you’re trying to take yourself to a place where you don’t need ‘protecting’.

Kafkaesque process, followed by Orwellian Doublethink and, eventually, probably becoming an un-person as you disappear form view with only your family to care about the problem. And if you have no family? Doesn’t bear thinking about.

Many of us in the IT profession exhibit traits of behaviour on the Autistic Spectrum – it’s almost a given that engineers, mathematicians, programmers, etc. will be there. I wonder whether any of our own lapses of ‘socially correct’ behaviour could get us there?

Steven’s behaviour appeared normal for someone scared and wanting to go home; the behavioural issues that got him in to the Positive Behaviour Unit are much less of a problem than the behaviour we see in our city streets every Friday night.

So, why aren’t our liberal bleeding hearts who’re having palpitations about Wikileaks and Mr Assange engaging in similar lobbying for this man? After all, he’s detained agaisnt his will, and additionally has had no warrant for arrest issued against him. Why isn’t the case being published by the newspapers so gallantly printing the equivalent of HELLO style gossip for the political classes?

Possibly because the chattering classes who get their kicks from reading the secret squirrel stuff on Wikileaks recognise that Neary has been incarcerated by their own kind, under laws put in place by folks just like them.

I actually believe that little of what comes out of Wikileaks is of day to day (or even long term) relevance to the population as a whole. Anyone with a brain knows that this sort of thing is happening; it’s nothing new. People get vicarious thrills by feeling that they’re ‘in the loop’ whilst they may actually being fed ‘secrets’ and lies and be unable to tell the difference.

Freedom of speech and expression is not something new; journalists have been dying and being improsoned to tell the truth for as long as there have been newspapers, and we should be grateful that people are willing to take the risks. But for most people the issues that most affect their day to day lives aren’t whether the US Ambassador to Great Britain thinks that our government are a bunch of paranoids. What matters is how our own national and local government beaurocracies are impacting on our day to day lives and removing the few freedoms that New Labour left us with.

Don’t allow the sparkly baubles from Wikileaks to distract you from the fact that freedom starts with being able to live in your own home without fear of wrongful or arbitrary arrest or imprisonment. The legislation that Neary is detained under sounds awfully like the old laws of Soviet Psychiatry – if you disagreed with the Soviet Government you were clearly barking mad and so needed locking up for your own good.’

As you go through your day today, might I suggest that you take a look at your own behavioural ticks and foibles, and wonder whether any of them are enough to get you in trouble.

December 8, 2010
Liberals and ‘acceptable’ bigotry
The last visit from a Pope to the UK before the most recent one was back in 1982 – I’m old enough to remember that one. I was just finishing university at the time, and I remember doing some revision while the visit was on TV in the background.

But it was not a state affair – that is, the Pope was not invited by the Queen and was not given treatment accorded to a head of state. This time around, he is. The visit has cost the taxpayer £12 million, and has upset a vocal minority in the UK who’re objecting to the papal visit with regard to:
- The Holy See doesn’t meet the rqeuirements for a state under the Montevideo Protocols
- The Catholic Church’s beliefs on homosexual rights
- The Catholic Church’s failure to deal adequately with paedophilia within the priesthood
- The Church’s rejection of condoms causing the spread of AIDS
- The Church’s support for segregated education
- The refusal of the Vatican to sign various international human rights treaties, and instead form concordats with other countries, that have negative effects on human rights issues for people within those countries.
The full list is here. And the list is totally accurate – the Catholic Church does need to get it;s house in order on a lot of issues, and at the same time the Vatican needs to review it’s links to other countries in the world. As an Anglican I don’t have to believe in Papal infallibility; the Catholic Church and the Vatican must get their act together.

However, it’s likely that very few world leaders could happily jump through all the hoops here. I assume therefore that we’ll eventually see:
- Protests against President Obama for continuing human rights problems at home and abroad.
- Protests against President Sarkozy for his treatment of the Roma population.
- Protests against the Dalai Lama (who regards homosexual sex as ‘sexual misconduct’)
Will we see protests against these leaders? It may happen….who knows…but I doubt they would have the same amount of vehemence from corners of the liberal establishment and press that this Papal visit has seen. In size, the number of protesters has been quite small compared to the numbers obviously supporting the visit, but the media attention given to the protesters seems to have been disproportionately large compared to the amount of support the protests have garnered.

What has really upset me, though, is the bigotry and sheer offensiveness that I’ve seen from people that I know personally; indeed, some folks have now been given a permanent leave of absence from my Facebook and Twitter accounts; it’s not that I disagree with their beliefs, it’s just the way those beliefs were expressed. Indeed, I’ve heard comments that must come pretty close to inciting religious hatred from some so-called liberals and ‘progressives’, and whilst I can understand they’re angry about the attitudes expressed by the Pope and the Vatican, it’s worth them remembering the simple rule of thumb that ‘Two wrongs do not make a right’.

It’s been an eye-opener, to be honest; I have to say that seeing 18th Century expressions of ‘anti-popery’ made by people who surely regard themselves as civilised people living in the 21st Century was quite something. Maybe teh liberal veneer on soem people is a lot thinner than they’d like to think.
September 26, 2010
Why I WON’T be re-joining the Labour Party

In the period since the General Election here in the UK I’ve seen a fair number of blog posts and Facebook notes entitled ‘Why I’m rejoining the Labour Party’ – typically by folks who were members of the Labour Party at some point in the past decade and who left when Blair and Brown didn’t live up to expectations. But now, given the Liberal-Conservative coalition Government, these folks are keen to get back in to the Labour Party fold and ‘fight the good fight’ against the ‘auld enemy’ – a Tory Government. (Those of us of a cynical bent and who’ve been around in left wing politics long enough to remember the 1980s can remember when the ‘auld enemy’ was actually people within the Labour Party with whom you didn’t agree…but that’s another story.)

I left the Labour Party around the time that ‘Clause 4’ disappeared from the membership cards – the start of the great re-invention of the Labour Party as New Labour. I’d served time as a Ward Chair, Constituency Vice Chair and been a delegate to the District Labour Party here in Sheffield. I even considered running for election as a City Councillor, and very briefly toyed with the idea of trying for a Parliamentary seat, but eventually stayed as a local party activist and school governor. I was a member of the Party when it was distinctly un-trendy to be so; a time when the Labour Party was in opposition, stood as much chance of getting in to power as England did winning the World Cup.

Despite the fact that I was self-employed, running my own business, the old Labour Party held much appeal for me. Even with Clause 4 – detailed here with the ‘revisions’ – I always felt I had more to gain from a Labour Government than from the Tories. The Labour Party was good on issues that mattered heavily to me – civil liberties, for example – and whilst some of the economic policies would be personally bad for me, I could understand the underlying philosophy. And I always regarded it highly unlikely that Labour would drag us in to wars….

I left the Labour Party after the death of John Smith – nowadays I think there are lots of people who’ve never heard of this man, which is a great shame. I’m pretty sure that Labour would have won the 1997 election with him as leader – without the massive changes from the new Labour experiment being carried out. Whether the party would have had such a big majority – I have no idea – but they would still have been the Labour Party I grew up with and joined. I think reform was inevitable, but New Labour is no longer a party of the people – more a party of the chattering classes. I’ve often considered that left to it’s own devices the New Labour experiment would eventually move the party to either a dilute form of Gramscian Marxism or the political philosophy of the Frankfurt School – neither of which I have much time for.

After leaving the Party I was broadly sympathetic to the activities of the New Labour government in most areas – but there was a certain ‘control freak’ attitude – the ‘Big Nanny’ state – obvious in policy form the very beginning, and that made me concerned for civil liberties from very early on. After 9/11 then it became more obvious; again, I was supportive of certain policies, but not others. Economically, I was concerned that we were seeing a subtle form of old style ‘tax and spend’ taking place, with a bloated and increasingly ineffective public sector being paid for by various ‘one off’ financial wind falls, such as selling off gold (ultimately a £7 billion LOSS) or the 3G Phone licenses (23 billions). Jolly japes like this earned Brown the sobriquet of the ‘Iron Chancellor’ – but it’s pretty easy to balance the books in the short term when you get nice one off payments. Just wait until you have to keep the books balanced when things get tight….

I was also concerned by the increasing levels of surveillance and law changes that worked against our civil liberties. We’re now the most filmed population in the world; this technology exploded under New Labour. Anti-terror laws bought in by New Labour were used to keep people under surveillance to see whether they were using their dustbins correctly, for crying out loud. And let’s not get started on ID cards, vetting to work with children, the Digital Economy Bill, etc. And then there’s the whole business of illegal wars….

I honestly believe that the 2010 election, had New Labour been re-elected, would have been a further blow to civil liberties – combined with the economic crisis I could easily see these Stasi-like powers being expanded to cover all aspects of our lives.

New Labour are no longer in power but the people within the New Labour machine, the officers, the MPs, the leadership candidates, the local members – they’re still there and they are still, in most cases, the same people who have implicitly agreed to all of these assaults on our liberties. I’m not saying that the new Coalition Government have got it right – but I’m happy to give them a try rather than vote in authoritarianism. To the thousands of new members of the Labour Party I say this; do you support reduction of civil liberties and economic mis-management – because by joining the Party today, unless you are joining to get some change of people and policy at the top, you are supporting the people who were in power during one of the most authoritarian decades in the UK’s history.

Think before you join or re-join. I have; and I’m not for joining.

July 9, 2010
70 Years of get out clauses…
Early today Israeli Defence Forces attacked a convoy of ships carrying aid that were heading for Gaza. The details are sketchy; the IDF allegedly opened fire on the ships, wounding volunteers and damaging the vessels, and then boarded at least one ship. The IDF claim that they were attacked by people on the ships with knives, and in the ensuing shooting (there is no evidence at all that the people on board the ships had any firearms) between 10 and 20 volunteers were shot dead.

Let’s just look at this.
- First of all, this attack took place 40 miles out – that’s International Waters. Israel therefore committed an act of piracy. Even if the crew of the ship boarded did resist, I think that they were justified in repelling acts of piracy. There is no difference in what the Israelis did to what Somali pirates do.
- If the organisers of the convoy were attempting a provocation, then the Israelis have proved themselves to be singularly incompetent at dealing with provocation. Why not wait until the ships enter Israeli waters before stopping them? Why not park a destroyer across the route of the convoy to force the convoy to stop or turn?
The Israelis will now no doubt spend a lot of time claiming that it was self defence – just like the many occasions when IDF members have shot dead aid workers or reporters. Just as they did when they attacked the USS Liberty in International Waters in 1968.

There is, of course, a great irony here. The action of the British Royal Navy in stopping the SS Exodus docking at Haifa in 1947, and the subsequent sending of the refugees on board back to Europe, was a massive propaganda coup for groups like the Hagen-ah fighting for the establishment of the Jewish State. It may well be that this action by the Israelis will engender massive support for Israel. The blindness to historical irony of a country so formed by history is astonishing.

This has also been the week in which the Israeli Government have expressed their fierce resistance to the idea of a nuclear weapons free Middle east as suggested by President Obama. And let’s not go in to the business of the Israeli secret service ‘borrowing’ UK and Irish passports for the death squads to use. Not a good year for Israeli PR…

As a child and a teenager, and right through to my mid-twenties, I felt great sympathy and admiration for Israel – they successfully resisted numerous invasion attempts from Arab nations, and stood firm against terrorism. But in recent years I’m increasingly of the opinion that they’re becoming a serious threat to world peace. In fact, I’d regard their antics serious enough to get them in to the ‘rogue state’ category. Let’s face it – today’s act of piracy indicates that either the government has no control over it’s forces, or that the government has control over it’s forces and no respect for International Law.

70 years ago the world quite rightly had great sympathy for the formation of a Jewish state in the aftermath of WW2 and the Holocaust. For the last 70 years the Israelis have traded on the guilt of the Western World in letting the Nazis get away with what they did, and with Israel’s position in the Middle East as a western ally in the Cold War and more recently in the ‘War on Terror’. Well, sorry guys, the Cold War’s over, the ‘War on Terror’ is rapidly changing complexion and even becoming discredited, and you can’t guilt-trip Governments made up of people who were not even born until 20 or 30 years AFTER WW2.

From a one time supporter to Israel – please behave like a civilised member of the family of nations.

To my own Government – can we expect sanctions to be called against Israel? If not, why not?
May 31, 2010
When ‘ethics’ is a county in the south of England
There’s an old joke about politics – politicians are people who think that:
- Ethics is a county in the south of England
- Morals are paintings on plaster
- Scruples is the Russian currency
Unfortunately it seems that this joke is rapidly becoming a reality – within 48 hours we’ve had two Chief Secretaries to the Treasury who’ve had, shall we say, slight incongruities in their financial backgrounds. Ignoring the red-herrings that have been tossed around about David Laws’ sexuality, the bottom line of this is that it appears that the Liberal Democrats didn’t audit the financial backgrounds of their senior members – something that both Labour and the Tories did in the aftermath of the expenses scandal. It shouldn’t have been rocket science for the Lib Dems to do this; indeed, I would have thought that it should have been pretty easy and straight forward to achieve; after all, there were not as many LD MPs as Tory or Labour MPs, and over the years we’ve often been regaled by the Liberals with how they represent honesty and integrity against the perfidy and entrenched privilege of the other two major parties.

Well, a quick exposure to power has revealed the the LD MPs have as many financial ‘D’OH’ moments to deal with as their blue and red colleagues.

Perhaps Nick Clegg honestly never believed his MPs would play fast and loose, perhaps they genuinely didn’t think they’d done anything wrong. Perhaps they never expected to gain power and so come under public scrutiny – but the Lib Dems are now under the same sort of withering fire from the media as Labour and Tory MPs were at the start of the expenses row. I’ve already suggested in a previous post that Laws has bought the Coalition in to disrepute and has carried over the issues surrounding the integrity and financial probity of MPs from the last parliament in to this one. Now that Danny Alexander appears to have dropped the ball as well, it does begin to look like there is a systemic problem at the heart of the Liberal Party which needs sorting out if they’re to retain the moral high ground they’ve previously had.

I’ve found it interesting this evening to briefly debate the issue with Liberal Democrat apologists on Twitter, whose main argument has been to try and sidestep the allegations Alexander’s financial irregularities by trying to focus attention on the tax status of the Barclay Brothers who own the Daily Telegraph, who’re publishing the Alexander information. The difference is that the Barclay Brothers did not get elected to Government on the back of people’s despair over MP’s expenses. Neither do they run the country.

To all members of the Liberal Democrat Party. Fix this mess. Audit your people, come clean, accept that some of your folks have issues that need addressing and address them. Don’t try and bullshit us with claims of homophobia (for Laws) or feeble attempts to blame the messenger (for Alexander). I hope that the Alexander issue IS something out of nothing, and that the situation is satisfactorily explained to us over the next day or so.

But let’s just say I’m not holding my breath. In the meantime, how many Liberal Democrat MPs are left who can take the job on?
May 31, 2010