William Hague’s recent remarks in an FT interview, and in a speech to the Royal United Services Institute give us some idea of the purposes and shape of Conservative foreign policy, in the aftermath of a Tory election win. In short, it is exactly the same sort of interventionist twaddle spouted by New Labour, overlaid with the same veneer of humanitarian concern that Blair liked to bathe in.

All the recent talk about whether or not British troops have been given the equipment they need reflects a fundamental problem in British politics: all of the main parties accept Britain’s intervention in Afghanistan, and, to a lesser extent, Iraq. William Hague’s speech gives every indication that a Tory government will continue, and risk expanding, Britain’s military presence abroad.

Hague, unsurprisingly, also repeats the meme about Britain’s credit rating being a worry, citing the ‘recent’ Fitch warning about the loss of the triple-A rating. I say ‘recent’ because Fitch has been carping about this since last year, so a new press release about it is hardly serious news. What makes this interesting is that Hague is all about the deficit reduction…and yet continuously talks up “Britain’s role” abroad.

With what equipment, in this Tory-led deficit-free utopia? Spitballs and paper aeroplanes? continue reading… »

One story I didn’t get a chance to add my tuppenceworth to, over the vacation, was the news that Iris Robinson MP is to step down from her parliamentary position as a result of, “an ongoing battle with severe depression” (BBC). Robinson is a DUP member, wife of the current leader of that party, and is probably most famous in British politics for her hateful remarks about homosexuality.

What interested me about this story was the outpouring of well-wishes from Iris Robinson’s colleagues at Stormont and Westminster. Danny Kennedy, David Ford, Shaun Woodward, Nigel Dodds and others have held forth on their wishes for a speedy recovery and/or admiration for Robinson as a “dedicated” parliamentarian. I’m curious as to how honest they are each being.

It is rather expected that, when someone from the opposition is ill or suffers a bereavement, you wish them well. But how many of these wishes are genuine? I certainly don’t wish Iris Robinson well; I’d happily see the entire DUP dropkicked into the Atlantic Ocean. Indeed were she gay, and not such a vigorous gay-basher, there’d probably be some obscure Free Presbyterian Minister claiming her ill-health was vengeance sent by God.
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The High Court ruled today to stop the 12 day strike of BA workers from going ahead. The grounds for this decision were the irregularity of including in the ballot cabin crew members of the union who were set to leave BA anyway prior to the strike itself. However I think there are grounds for viewing the decision by Mrs Justice Laura Cox as a political one.

Firstly, the inclusion of the 800 workers who are leaving (the number provided by BA’s legal team) could not have altered the outcome of the ballot. Unite represents 12,500 staff. On an 80% turnout, with 92.5% voting to strike (figures from BBC), 9,250 workers voted to strike. Even if all 800 of those leaving voted and voted yes to the strike, it would still not have been enough to sway the outcome.

Secondly there are some of the remarks made by Justice Cox herself:

“A strike of this kind over the 12 days of Christmas is fundamentally more damaging to BA and the wider public than a strike taking place at almost any other time of the year,” (BBC)

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BA Cabin Crews have voted to go on strike over the Christmas period against the threat of reducing staffing levels through imposed redundancies and changes to staff contracts. 90% of the crews, on an 80% turnout, voted for the action.

There was some fantastic rhetoric flying about yesterday morning on Radio 4. BA Chief Executive Willie Walsh was reported to have said that the union shouldn’t bother going on strike, it should concentrate on helping the company reduce costs.

Of course the union might well have been in the mood to do that, but it wasn’t asked to help out. It was simply bypassed.

And now, though Walsh claims to be available for talks at any time, he has said that the central issue is not up for negotiation. So the union is absolutely correct to go on strike; this is not a case of simple costs it is now an attempt to de-recognize the whole union.
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Anthony Seldon had an article in the Sindy lamenting how unfair everyone has been to Tony Blair. There’s just not enough sympathy in the world for megalomaniacal twits with a god complex and their finger (formerly) on one of the Big Red Buttons.

Some of what Seldon says is pure comedy gold, such as his comparison of Blair to Gladstone: “For them, moral conviction in foreign policy was core.” One wonders what difference it makes if your foreign policy is still resulting in the deaths of the same foreign people as that of your “immoral” Opposition.

He was dealing with someone who was an evil dictator and that was the right thing to do, in his mind, because what was at stake was world peace. In another sense he has been remarkably consistent and I think is tremendously frustrated at not having the opportunity to say that.

If there is one thing worth pointing out to Professor Seldon, it’s that Mr Blair is very good at re-writing history all by himself, without needing the help of his accomplices in the declaration of war, or the media.
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So apparently in the US there are circular emails and facebook applications claiming that President Obama has renamed the Christmas Tree at the White House, a ‘holiday tree’.

The facebook application amused me. Much in the way of the age old question, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” it asks “President Obama says that they will have a Holiday Tree this year instead of a Christmas Tree. Do you agree with this?”

It’s popping up in discussion forums and on news sites like myFOX. It’s going up as a question on Yahoo.

It’s being posted about on right-wing blogs. No mainstream news organisation that I can see has picked it up yet, but you just know that Bill O’Reilly is waiting in the wings to condemn someone, somewhere for not being Christian enough, as he did with a hapless group of Seattle atheists last year.
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Early tomorrow morning, I shall be awake and walking down to the local Royal Mail depot to support the postmen and CWU in their dispute.

As Dave Osler points out, the issue has gone far beyond the mere question of who is right and who is wrong over the specific issues of modernisation. The question is now whether or not Royal Mail has the unmitigated right to do what it wants with its business.

Bearing in mind that the business survives on the labour extracted from tens of thousands of postal workers up and down the country, few of whom are paid very well – whilst their bosses enjoy bonuses on a level with parts of the City of London – I’m inclined to say that no, they do not. Modernisation must be agreed with the workers, or it simply should not be permitted to happen. It hasn’t been agreed.

In fact, Royal Mail have now said that they will only take the question to arbitration if the CWU give up their planned strike – which has been endorsed overwhelmingly by CWU members in a national ballot.

This amounts to asking the union to surrender before negotiations begin, and with the leaked Royal Mail policy document indicating that they want nothing less than union derecognition, it would be criminal to concede it.
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When the 2005 referenda on the EU constitution began to go sour – with France and Holland rejecting it and most other countries postponing their referendum – the leaders of the EU learned an important lesson.

Don’t ask the electorate a question unless a) you actually want to hear the answer or b) you think you can control the answer. Which is why virtually no country has held a referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon – the only one that did hold such a referendum was Ireland.

And if the people of Ireland had rejected the Treaty? Well then there would have been another referendum, or the question would have been folded into a General Election where it would have been obscured by fifteen other concerns.

Not to mention that the two political parties which campaigned for a no vote have neither the manpower or resources to beat every major Irish political party, the Irish media, the Irish Business and Employers Confederation (the Irish version of the CBI) and certain sections of the trades unions in an election.

Leaving aside the politics of whether or not the Treaty is a good thing or a bad thing, the fact that yet again, the government held a second referendum because it didn’t like the answer of the first one is scandalous.
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Why is everyone in such a tizz over the release of Al-Megrahi? As has been documented time and time again by Private Eye, a question mark hung over his conviction anyway – and the man had cancer.

We do tend to release the terminally ill on compassionate grounds, in this country, and it probably saved the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of pounds in continued appeals anyway – not to mention the cost of keeping the man prisoner. So what is the furore about?

Then I read these two articles by Cllr Piper. Iain Dale, Newmania and the other Tory trolls are involved; suddenly all becomes clear. Despite the Westminster government having nothing to do with the release – beyond Bill Rammell saying that he and his colleagues hoped al-Megrahi wouldn’t die in prison – the issue has become a stick with which to beat Gordon Brown.

Presumably it never occurred to the SNP, a party with no love for Labour – who are the main Opposition in Scotland, to tell London to stuff it up their jumpers. Tory blogger Iain Dale predicates his claim of pressure on the fact that three Ministers sent letters to the Scottish executive outlining the position of the UK government on the issue. Dale dismisses, of course, that in each of these letters the outlining of position is counterbalanced by acknowledgement that the matter is one for the Scottish government entirely – and so it is.
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Sunny highlights an interesting article in the recent New Statesman, by Mehdi Hasan, which argues that far from being biased towards the Left, the BBC is pro-Establishment.

What Sunny doesn’t highlight is the ‘twin’ of this article, written by Peter Hitchens, which attempts to refute the contentions of Hassan, asserting instead that of course the BBC is left-wing, though BBC bigwigs are unlikely to notice it, having never questioned their own assumptions in their journey from Oxbridge junior common rooms to White City.

Because the Oxbridge universities are such a bastion of socialism. Beyond such absurdities, however, I think the Hitchens article is much more instructive than its Hasan counterpart. The Hitchens article is mostly waffle, rarely reaching for examples which can be said to encompass the whole of BBC political, social and cultural coverage – whereas the previous allegiances of people like Andrew Neil and Nick Robinson probably do have an effect on coverage – but to dismiss Hitchens is to miss an incisive and important point.

“What troubles the BBC is not a party bias. (…) It is a set of potent cultural, moral, social, sexual and religious assumptions, which touch on all topics from cannabis to the EU, and which affect everything from the plot-lines of The Archers to the use of the metric system on nature programmes.”

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Notwithstanding stupidity, or that their full-timers are embroiled in power struggles when not suffering ‘depressive illness’, the BNP are still a threat.

This will not be helped by the announcement that the BNP are to face court over their non-compliance with the 1976 Race Relations Act.

I have no doubt that the EHRC doesn’t see it like this: they have a duty under the law etc etc, it’s not a choice, it’s built into their mandate etc etc. But I suspect that go-to excuse of the BNP is at least partially correct – that the Labour government have a hand in this somewhere. At the very least, it is endorsed by the upper echelons of Labour, as Harriet Harman made clear today.

A great number of people in this country feel alienated from the institutions of power and the ‘respectable’ faces of democracy and civil society. Pitting these ‘respectable’ faces against the BNP will not warn people off the BNP, it will solidify their reputation as anti-establishment.
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There is a sentiment being twittered and retwittered about the place that the row over Dan Hannan’s self-publicizing anti-NHS comments on Fox News is a perfect storm for Labour, and that Andy Burnham’s intervention is a big plus.

Perhaps not for Guardian readers, who are a bunch of simpering, effete wet-noses obviously – but this will definitely chalk up some points with the solid English-as-the-White-Cliffs readers of the Daily Mail. Well on this one I’m joining the effete Guardian readers, because damned if I’m not unpatriotic too – and so should you be.

I don’t care whether the issue is Malkin attacking Dunkin Donuts, or Pelosi attacking immigration laws, or Hannan on the NHS or the Home Office declaring that protesting against British troops is considered unpatriotic and grounds for denying people citizenship.

Patriotism is a retarded sentiment which should be left to the fifteen year old kids in AOL and MSN chatrooms who type variations on a theme of “My country can beat your country!!!” as fast as they can, as though this justifies any action and can win any argument.
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I didn’t think much in the world of politics could shock me anymore. Yet the news that the BNP are to be invited to Buckingham Palace shocks me. My republicanism has not been pronounced over the last few years because there’ve been other things to attend to.

When attending picket lines or passing out leaflets there isn’t a lot of time to be denouncing the parasitic organism that is the Royal Family. Not when there are Tories aiming to take every last penny from the working man’s pocket and the Fascists aiming to relocate half of Britain abroad just because we don’t measure up to what they consider to be British.
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Credit where it’s due, Rahm Emmanuel masterfully pinched the jam-tomorrow glee of some nuttier revolutionaries when he said, “Never allow a crisis to go to waste, they are opportunities to do big things.” That is precisely what Alistair Darling has done with the new budget.

The crisis has gone to waste as the clock runs down on a Labour term of office. No mighty reforms to banking, more of the same tokenistic gestures (e.g. the £200 million to be raised by a 50% income tax band) and little else.

I’m probably being a bit too harsh, since there were some very helpful measures included – on pensioners, retraining for employment and on the carers of young people – but delivered with brevity and solemnity amid the jeers from the opposition benches, a 2009 “People’s Budget” it was not.
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It’s difficult to be anything but derisive when discussing people like Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity – presenters on USA’s Fox News. Recently these guys have been on television to claim that not only are people right to talk about their taxes being too high, but that by organising ‘tea parties’ in major cities to protest such taxes, they are generating the sort of economic activity that will save America. A large chunk of the tea parties took place yesterday and are specifically aimed at the spending plans of the Obama administration.

Or are they? Fox News and right-wing talk radio hosts have been agitating for something like this for months now. It shouldn’t surprise us that people are willing to get out and protest about high taxes. In fact, it should encourage the Left – because we don’t have a problem with low taxes…for the working class.

But as far as I can see, this is not an argument being made in the US. Liberal commentators like Keith Olbermann have been very swift to denounce the protests as hypocritical, or astroturf groups or whatever.
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Some say blog posts complaining about Jade Goody coverage apparently vindicate and perpetuate the rather nauseating circus. I think such logic is bollocks, of course, because the mainstream media – TV, radio, newspapers, blogs belonging to all the aforementioned and others – would have merrily continued to spout crap regardless of what a few poxy political bloggers decided to say.

Why bother writing about it then? These are good questions, and the answer is that not five minutes ago, I spotted a ridiculous article on the BBC website titled, Star dubs Jade ‘Primark Princess’, and then made the mistake of reading it. Thankfully we don’t allow firearms in this country or I reckon I’d feel compelled to hunt down Russell Brand and kill him, earning myself a British Comedy Award for services rendered.
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Following a request to write out some of my views on Ed Balls’ latest proposals. Presumably, since I was asked by a homeschooler, I’m supposed to defend the rampant centralisation of education. I am, of course, not going to.

It is a frightening thought that for a government that continues to make noises about empowering communities, the man in charge of DCSF seems intent on grabbing an insane amount of power. Despite claims that it would only be used to counteract something like the scrapping of Shakespeare, one wonders if this government actually believes its own communitarian rhetoric.
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To the dismay of the hysterical anti-PC brigade in Sandwell, the local council has cancelled funding for a St. George’s Day parade. Suddenly a cause celebre, the issue is discussed on Stormfront, and has become part of a campaign by nationalist nutjobs, the English Democrats.

This news has been picked up by our own Bob Piper and has received stinging rebuke from Tory Harry Phibbs of Conservative Home. One wonders if Councillor Phibbs knows what sort of company he is keeping on the issue. He should do, if he reads his own comment box.

It has always seemed something of an irony that the imagery adopted by parts of the far right in the UK has been of a mythical individual, a foreigner, who never visited England.
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I hope to write a few articles discussing different aspects of the Convention on Modern Liberty, beginning with the bedfellows we seem to have chosen – some of which rather dislike one another.

It says something when both animal liberationists – many of whom are also involved with organisations such as the League Against Cruel Sports – and pro-hunting lobbyists can get on the same bandwagon. Why would we jump into bed with this group?

Similarly, why would we allow Conservatives to take stands at a Convention on Modern Liberties? David Cameron has already admitted, on numerous occasions, that he will not be seeking to overturn a lot of the government’s legislation – and indeed, it was the Thatcher government where the trend of legislating for every tabloid headline truly started. Equally, the drive for tougher sentencing and reduced judicial discretion has often come from the Conservative benches.
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Church of England clergy will shortly be forbidden from joining the fascist BNP. Yesterday, the General Synod voted by an overwhelming majority of 322 to 13 for the CoE to become like the prison service or the police in proscribing membership.

It’s a good idea, since it prevents the BNP from using the name of the Church of England at any meetings or six-person rallies they might hold, but it rather misses the point.

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