Saturday, April 25, 2009 

Weekend links.

A slow weekend, apart from the news that we're all shortly to die of pig flu. Oh, and Nadine Dorries, showing once again what an utterly revolting, hypocritical, shameless coward she is.

On the blogs then, Lenin comes up with a simple solution to the huge deficit we will shortly have, Craig Murray, blogging more than ever, has pieces on Hillary Clinton and Pakistan, as well as one person's evidence that waterboarding was specifically used by the US in an attempt to get intelligence linking al-Qaida to Iraq, Paul Linford thinks it's all over bar the shouting for Labour, Shiraz Socialist attacks the idea that we're a totalitarian politically correct state, rhetorically speaking deals with Paul Dacre's hilarious claim that the Daily Mail was never against the MMR vaccine, Laurie Penny responds to the Orwell prize winning blogger's post on the "Evil Poor", and finally the Daily Quail does his rather good Littledick impression.

In the papers, Matthew Parris rightly calls for some more definition from Cameron, Peter Oborne decides he was wrong about Gordon Brown, Sarfraz Manzoor wonders what Muslims have to do not to be all tarred with the same brush, Janice Turner thinks the rich are complaining too much, Andrew Grice also believes Labour are doomed, and Patrick Cockburn, another Orwell prize winner, discusses how well the Iraq war was reported.

Lastly, a clear winner in the worst tabloid article of the weekend award, which simply has to go to Lorraine Kelly for putting pen to paper and stating that you don't need diet pills, you just don't have to eat junk and regularly exercise. Thank you so much for that insight, Ms Kelly.

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4/25/2009 09:50:00 PM | | | links to this post

Friday, April 24, 2009 

The budget aftermath.

As always happens with budgets, regardless of the party or the individual who delivers them, within hours they begin to unravel. No can genuinely envy Alistair Darling his task, except perhaps for Ed Balls, and there is much to be said for Darling's apparent calmness and unflappable nature, one of the very few to be around since 97 to not have become in some way tarnished by the travails of office. Such were the constraints on what any chancellor could have done given the circumstances, he did pretty much all he could, knowing full well that extensive cuts or extensive tax rises would doom his party to certain defeat. In perhaps the only comment that might be remembered, apart from the 50p rise in income tax for those earning over £150,000, he was clear that you cannot cut your way out of a recession. That much is obvious.

Likewise, his predictions that the economy would shrink by 3.5% this year, recovering to 1.25% growth next year and then growing at 3% plus afterwards were marked not so much by their infeasibility, but that he had to be optimistic for political reasons. Surely, for Labour to have any chance whatsoever of winning a fourth term next June, the economy needs to have began to recover by the turn of the year, at which point the government can say that they were right to be optimistic, to not have to wielded huge cuts so quickly, instead waiting to see if the fiscal measures taken had begun to work and that even though they may have wrong about many things, they were right when it really mattered. For there to be any chance whatsoever of this fantasy scenario becoming reality, today's GDP figures needed to be bang on the predicted 1.5%, or even better lower, reflecting the slight encouraging signs which some have suggested have started to become evident. Instead the drop was 1.9%, which means that it only needs a further drop of 1.6% in the second quarter, certainly not out of the question, for Darling's predictions to be already ruined.

Those figures, it should be noted, are provisional, and based only on the first two months' activity, meaning they could be revised both downwards or upwards, as the last quarter of 2008's were. Nevertheless, we have to go back to the third quarter of 1979 for worse figures. For all the hyperbolic, ridiculous talk of returning to the 70s this week, on this measure the analogy is undeniable. Add into the mix that the Institute for Fiscal Studies believes there's a £45bn hole in the budget, almost certainly to be filled by savage cuts to spending rather than tax rises, again the most severe since the dreaded decade, and the bleakness seems to be all enveloping.

For all the accusations flying Darling and Labour's way regarding dishonesty, as usual they cut both ways. No one can begin to pretend that Wednesday's budget was inspiring; it was rather all that could have been expected. Although putting off the real pain until after the election is pure politics, it's also the right thing to do. The same is the case with the 50p top rate of tax: it won't raise much, but it is equally absurd to call it a "return to class war", and not just because under Thatcher for a long period the rate was even higher. It is undeniable that an over reliance on the City, the laissez-faire attitude towards financial regulation, and New Labour's sickening sycophancy towards the filthy rich are the main causes of the current crisis. The public sector did not create this disaster; the private sector did. True, if Brown hadn't borrowed so much during the good times, we would not currently be facing such a monumental deficit, but we would almost certainly be facing a recession regardless, probably one only slightly less severe than the one we're experiencing. Things could be even worse if the Tories were in power and had carried out their promises to even further slash regulation, and as Stephanie Flanders points out, the last election was fought over little more than £12bn in public spending. That's a drop in the ocean to the amounts we are now boggling over. Even if it is purely a symbol, as Shuggy and Chris agree, the 50p rate is perhaps what the country wants to hear right now. You can argue about the unfairness of that, or the precedent it sets, but not the motivation.

For all the impressive rhetoric delivered by both David Cameron and George Osborne, and even if you revile the politics behind it, Cameron's response on Wednesday was probably one of his best moments as Tory leader, their plans for how to deal with the economy should they enter government next year are even more hollow than Labour's. All they have told us is that they would be making cuts now; they refuse to illustrate where, and how harsh they would be. Again, the politics behind this are obvious: no opposition party is going to present their own budget a year before they are actually going to deliver it, but they have to at least give some idea of what their intentions are. All we know is that they're not going to step into the trap of promising to repeal the 50p rate, and that somehow and incredibly, they're still going to find the money from somewhere to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1m. As Chris again suggests, now would be the time to be taking a larger proportion of unearned wealth, not less.

Similarly, the claims that this budget means the final death of New Labour are also wide of the mark, and based on a misreading of what New Labour was about. The thing about New Labour is that there has never been an ideology behind it; instead it has always been about pure populist opportunism. This has not always tallied into truly populist policies, otherwise they would have slammed the door on east European migrants being able to come and work here, but on almost every other measure they have followed not their actual supporters' values, but those which they believe are both popular and superior. Sometimes they have relied on newspaper headlines and the demands of tabloid editors and their shadowy backers, but they have also relied extensively on focus grouping, which sometimes offers different results, such as the 50p top rate of tax, opposed by the right-wing rags they usually obey, but supported by the public at large. To now introduce such a popular measure is fully in keeping with what they have repeatedly done. Meanwhile, nothing will change whatsoever as regards to triangulating, the thinking behind the policy making that truly defined New Labour. New Labour's true demise might be only a year away, but the living dead are not yet fully exhausted.

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4/24/2009 08:26:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, April 23, 2009 

Iraq, the insurgency, and the capture of Omar al-Baghdadi.

There have been many false dawns in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, none more so than the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, although the group was more properly known as the Mujahideen Shura Council at the time. Although the insurgency in Iraq was always far more varied than just involving Zarqawi's group, which was renamed al-Qaida in Iraq after he pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden, having formerly dreamt of building his own rival terror organisation, over-the-top media coverage and Zarqawi's brutal tactics, especially the beheading of foreign hostages, some of which he supposedly carried out himself, meant that his death was given far more significance than it was probably due. Reports of the capture of al-Zarqawi's self-proclaimed successor, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, do little other than suggest that there will still be life in the Iraqi insurgency for some time yet.

Like with Zarqawi and with the other man who may well be the real leader of the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, Baghdadi has been presumed both dead and captured before, but for now it does seem as if he has been arrested. This itself may come as a surprise to some within the US army, who have claimed repeatedly that Baghdadi does not actually exist, instead a phantom that gives an Iraqi leadership to a group which has always been regarded by others in the insurgency as being of foreign origin, but photographs of the man have supposedly previously emerged, showing someone who looks to be suffering from pattern baldness.

How much influence or control Baghdadi actually had over the organisation is impossible to know. Apart from irregular audio messages issued as videos, none of which Baghdadi has formally appeared in, unlike the gregarious al-Zarqawi, all of which give credence to the idea that he is simply a puppet to the formal "Minister for War" al-Muhajir, he doesn't seem to have done anything other than contribute to the war of words which ultimately led to the split between the insurgent groups and with it the rise of the Awakening councils, almost completely composed of former insurgents, although few were members of al-Qaida, or the ISI. The recent rise in violence in the country, although nowhere near the levels of 2004 to mid-2007, attributed by some to the dissolution of the Awakening councils in certain areas, reflects the difficulty with which those who have been ostensibly fighting for the last six years will be reintegrated into Iraqi society. Contributing to the problems is that a Shia government is simply not trusted by the Sunni fighters; their sudden dissolution threatens to be a repeat of the disbanding of the Iraqi army, almost certainly the biggest factor behind the rise of the insurgency.

From controlling almost all of the so-called "Sunni Triangle" at one point, the Islamic State of Iraq has been pushed back into the provinces of Diyala and Mosul, where the Salafist jihadist groups, which also includes Ansar al-Islam, are still reasonably strong. It's difficult to know just how much of an effect al-Baghdadi's arrest might have on the groups and their supporters, especially considering how unknown his power has been, and while al-Zarqawi's death was actively mourned by jihadists, it will still be some sort of a setback to the group. The suicide bombings today, which are almost certainly coincidences rather than the group striking back, show that the ISI still has the capability to carry out devastating attacks, but on a far reduced scale. The insurgency in general, which has been in decline since its high point at the heighth of the civil war which al-Qaida in Iraq did much to foment, seems to be shifting up a gear, if the number of videos released by the groups is a measure to go by. The real problem in Iraq though remains reconciliation between the Sunni and Shia, which despite some reasonably encouraging results in the recent elections, where secularists appeared to win out against the religious parties, seems as far away as ever. Al-Baghdadi's arrest will do nothing whatsoever to alter that.

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4/23/2009 09:08:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, April 22, 2009 

The government should be in terror, not the people.

3 years ago, after the police had conspicuously failed to find anything more dangerous in the Kamal family's house in Forest Gate than a bottle of aspirin, a "senior police source" told the Graun that "[T]he public may have to get used to this sort of incident, with the police having to be safe rather than sorry." For the most part since then, most of the major anti-terrorist raids, while scooping up some innocents along the way, have resulted in prosecutions rather than the authorities emerging with egg on their faces. Instead, the most objectionable thing that has characterised the arrests has been the febrile briefing of the media with the most outlandish and potentially prejudicial, as well as exaggerated, accounts of the carnage which would have taken place had the attacks not been foiled. These leaks, despite the self-righteousness of former Met chief anti-terror officer Peter Clarke over the stories which appeared in the press concerning the plot to behead a Muslim soldier, appear to have came from all sides, with the police, security services and the government all involved.

Along with the leaks, we have become wearily accustomed to politicians commenting on what are after all, criminal operations, with no apparent concern for whether their remarks might subsequently influence a jury. The apogee was reached when John Reid famously said that the disruption of the "liquid bomb" plot had prevented "loss of life on an unprecendented scale", something that the jury in the first trial decided not to agree with. Their second trial is still on-going. I can't recall however any politician making similar comments to that which both Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith did about the raids in Manchester and the north-west two weeks ago where those arrested were subsequently released without charge. Politicians may have defended the police after the Forest Gate raids, but at no point did they appear to specifically say that a "very big plot" had been disrupted as the result of the police's actions. In the case of the ricin plot where there was no ricin, much which was inflammatory was spoken by politicians and the police, but in that instance Kamel Bourgass was at least guilty of murder, as well as stupidity in that his ideas for using the ricin that he wouldn't have been able to produce would have failed to poison anyone.

The only reason why there doesn't seem to far more deserved criticism of this latest fiasco is that it's been overshadowed completely by the budget. From getting off to one of the most inauspicious starts imaginable, things have in actuality got worse. If we were to believe the media's initial reports, if the men arrested had not been taken off the streets, there would now presumably be hundreds if not thousands dead, up to six places of varying interest and importance would have been badly damaged if not destroyed, and new anti-terrorist legislation would almost certainly be back on the agenda. Instead, 11 Pakistani students are going home far sooner than they would have anticipated, and no one can explain adequately how the position changed from there being an attack imminently prepared to there being not even the slightest evidence that there was anything beyond the murmurings of one.

Not that anyone from the very beginning even managed to get the facts straight. Variously the targets were meant to be two shopping centres, a nightclub and St Ann's Square, or Liverpool and Manchester United's stadiums. Then there were no targets, as the planning had not reached that stage, then they were photographs found of the places previously briefed, the only real piece of circumstantial evidence which seems to have been recovered and then finally there was no plot at all. Depending on who you believe, the men had either been under surveillance for some time, or the intelligence had only came in very recently. Like with the claims that the men arrested at Forest Gate had been under surveillance for up to two months, it reflects rather badly on the police/security services if the case is the former. Having hoped to find something more explosive than bags of table sugar, the police turned to desperately searching the suspects' computers and mobile phones. After nothing incriminating enough to bring any sort of charge was found on those, they seem to have declared defeat. We should be glad for the small mercy that the police seem not to have tried to string out their detention for the full 28 days allowed.

That will of course not be any sort of comfort for those who now find themselves in the custody of the Borders Agency, their studies disrupted for no good apparent reason. The BBC is suggesting that their cases will be considered by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, which meets in secret and hears evidence which is inadmissible in the normal court system. Presumably this means that the very intelligence which resulted in their arrests, despite being proved either downright wrong or speculatory at the least, will be used against them. It also happily means that none of the men can talk directly to the media about their experience, something which in the past has led to embarrassment all round, whether it was the person released without charge who described this country as a "police state for Muslims", or Hicham Yezza and Rizwaan Sabir, both arrested after Yezza had printed out an al-Qaida manual for his student, which he had downloaded from a US government website, with the intention that Sabir was to use it to write his MA dissertation. In a bizarre reversal of fortune, after Gordon Brown had lectured Pakistan on how it had to do more to combat the terrorist threat, it's now the Pakistan High Commissioner who's doing the honourable thing, offering legal assistance to the men so they can continue with their studies. As Jamie says, it takes some nerve to call Pakistan the failed state in all this.

As previously noted, it was from the outset strange that such a imminent threat should emerge considering the way that the head of MI5 and the government had begun to downplay the threat for the first time since 9/11. When you bear in mind how the previous head of MI5 scaremongered about "the evil in our midst" just three years ago, it instantly suggested that something substantial had changed. It's not unknown for surprises to be sprung, but this one seemed to be too outlandish to be accurate. That within 48 hours it was already becoming clear that no attack had genuinely been disrupted should have rung alarm bells then in the minds of the media, but still they kept with the fallacy for the most part that something would turn up. Only now that it hasn't will questions be asked.

It has to be kept in mind that intelligence work is not an exact science. It often turns out to be wrong, or just too unreliable to be used to carry out the sort of arrests which we saw two weeks ago. As the senior police source didn't quite say, it is better to be safe than sorry, but this is beginning to become a habit. At the very least, if such raids are to be carried out, then politicians should keep their mouths closed and the media should not be used to put completely unsubstantiated rumours into circulation which then can colour a person for the rest of their life. We have however said these things before, and no notice whatsoever has been taken. After the incompetence of the patio gas canister attacks, both Smith and Brown seemed to be keeping to their word not to exaggerate things in the same way as their predecessors so copiously did. The irony of this is that as politicians continue to use security threats as a way to justify their serial dilutions of civil liberties and the imposition of ID cards and databases, the public themselves become ever more cynical when these threats turn out to be nothing more than hyperbole with a motive. It also surely isn't coincidence that today of all days MI5 shows the Sun their brilliant invention that can stop a "suicide truck bomb" in its tracks, as long as the driver keeps the speed below 40. That terrorists have shown no inclination whatsoever to use such bombs in this country, when explosives are incredibly difficult to obtain and where the next best thing, such as TATP, is even more difficult to produce in such quantities is neither here nor there. This we are advised will be part of the government's "Fortress Great Britain" counter-terrorism strategy, where more or less every public building may well be reinforced in case it becomes a target. This is not just a colossal waste of time and money, it's a colossal waste of time and money with the intention of scaring people. The quote goes that governments should be scared of the people, not people of the government. Despite its almost certain imminent electoral demise, this one doesn't seem to be. That may be what needs to change the most.

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4/22/2009 06:22:00 PM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, April 21, 2009 

Spinning and kicking while down.

One of the things that newspapers specialise in is kicking people when they're down, usually after they were the ones that were primarily responsible for building them up in the first place. A recent case in point was the sudden deflating of James Corden and Mathew Horne, having been ridiculously over praised for the middling Gavin and Stacey, who were little less than assaulted over their film, Lesbian Vampire Killers, their piss-poor eponymous BBC3 sketch show, and a charity appearance which was deemed to be little better.

More pertinently politics wise is the way that Damian McBride has been set about since the "smeargate" emails emerged of him batting about ideas for a blog in which Tories had their private and personal lives appraised for gossip value. The latest example is in today's Graun, where McBride is linked to an "infamous incident" back in 2004, so infamous that this self-confessed politics nerd has no recollection whatsoever of it. More astonishing than the fact that McBride was fingered as the person responsible for leaking details of the meeting to the Sunday Times is that a "secret investigation" was launched in which phone records and presumably security assets were used to find the culprit. It says more about Downing Street's paranoia and fury at the slightest criticism at the time than it does about how much of a "wrong 'un" McBride always was.

Peter Wilby pointed out yesterday that prior to the last two weeks McBride had hardly been mentioned in the papers, his existence and apparently his dark arts of no interest to anyone when both sides were profiting from his dripping of poison. In 2004 the Graun mentioned McBride but once - and that was in a City diary. Even last year, at the apparent height of McBride's operations, he was only mentioned in dispatches 34 times, and 5 of those were in the little read online lobby column by "Bill Blanko", the rest mainly coming from reports concerning the defenestration of Ruth Kelly. As spin doctors go, you can hardly get more visible than Alastair Campbell, while it seems you can hardly get less visible than McBride was. Only once he had fallen on his sword did we learn about his work in the shadows, mainly briefing Tory newspapers, the ones so outraged by the smears which would never have emerged and seemingly never have been used if someone hadn't hacked Derek Draper's email account, with venom about under performing ministers. Almost every whisper about plotting by various pretenders to Brown's throne seems to have originated with McBride - either that or he's just a handy receptacle to now blame.

There is something in the argument made by various bloggers that the journalistic lobby at Westminster, because it is complicit in the spinning, cannot be trusted to tell us the whole truth about what goes on there. At the same time, the idea that blogs can be trusted to do just that is equally spurious, if not more so. However much bloggers denounce the MSM, the two are inseparable because they cannot operate without each other. Guido had to sell the emails to Sunday newspapers because they would have not gained the same coverage that they would have on his site, however much he and Iain Dale boast about their visitor figures. Gossip is well suited to the web because it requires few resources: just a few indiscreet individuals. Genuine investigative journalism however, such as that which brought down Jonathan Aitken, or more recently exposed the rendition programme or the Saudi slush funds needs constant backing up and funding. Even when it comes to videos which expose the truth, such as the one showing Ian Tomlinson being pushed over by a police officer, it requires the reach of a paper like the Guardian for it to truly spread quickly: if it had simply been sent up to YouTube or a blog like the dozens of others of the G20 protests, it would have taken days for it to reach critical mass.

Perhaps the biggest reason for the pique and faux outrage which followed McBride's resignation then is that it wasn't a blast against the spin culture, which after all cannot operate without the media's connivance, even as they decry it, but rather because one of their finest sources for muck had been forced outside of the circle. The motto was and remains, "don't get fucking caught". That applies to journalists and spin doctors equally.

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4/21/2009 08:10:00 PM | | | links to this post

 

The plague has nothing on Blair.

Via Liberal Conspiracy, I come across the thoughts of the Independent's John Rentoul, one of the very few Blair-fanciers left on the face of the planet:

Just to prove my utter devotion to the finest peace-time prime minister, I confess my reaction when I read that the Tony Blair Faith Foundation Facebook page had been defaced with, among others, this comment:

"Tony Blair was about as good for Britain as the bubonic plague."

My recollection of medieval economic history is that the bubonic plague was good for Britain. By reducing the population, it increased wealth per head in a relatively stable society and forced it to improve agricultural productivity.

It was not just good for Britain, it was the basis of the economic pre-revolution that laid the foundations for this country to become the leading economic and military power of the world.

Just as, in a few centuries, Blair's creation of academy schools will again.

It's an interesting point. The analogy isn't quite apposite, as during Blair's tenure we didn't have to bury the diseased bodies of our brethren in mass graves, although we did have to do that to the bodies of millions of livestock, which rather than improving agricultural productivity instead decimated our farmers when vaccination against foot and mouth was another option which was rejected. No, Blair instead decided that the Iraqis, having already had recent experience with burying thousands of bodies were the best people to get back in the mood of the middle ages, and you have to admit, Blair succeeded on that score beyond even his wildest dreams.

You can't really argue with Rentoul's logic in any case. That he completely sidesteps the intended meaning of the barb, and then regardless decides to suggest that the plague was in fact good for Britain, if not so wonderful for the entire villages which were decimated, almost makes it seem as if he secretly accepts that Blair wasn't the greatest thing since sliced bread. Instead, as David Blunkett said, we can't seem to appreciate a prophet in our country; it'll only be in 200 years, when you and I will have long since turned to dust, that Blair will be truly feted. That unpleasantness in Iraq will be thoroughly overshadowed by Blair's fabulous constitutional reforms and the introduction of academy schools, turning out an entire nation equipped with the skills to function as call centre operators. Perhaps in 2209, when these septic isles are no longer known as the United Kingdom but instead Offshore Telephony Solutions #1 and #2, they'll truly admire the sage that we refused to acknowledge.

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4/21/2009 07:37:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, April 20, 2009 

I love the smell of propaganda in the morning...

If it's on the Sun's front page on a Monday, it's probably propaganda. This seems to be a rule of thumb which is well worth following. Previous examples have included claims that al-Qaida fighters in Algeria had contracted the plague (they hadn't) and that Nimrod aircraft flying over Afghanistan had heard Taliban fighters talking in "Brummie and Yorkshire" accents (unconfirmed, possible). Today's, also authored by John Kay, is more easy to trace direct back to source: the MoD have the exact same story up on their website. It's also a hoary old tale which while possibly true, is equally likely not to be:

MIRACLE soldier Leon Wilson told last night how a high-velocity Taliban bullet hit his helmet and missed his head by two millimetres — the thickness of a beer mat.

The Sun further embellishes the story by adding some extraneous detail:

Travelling at 1,000 metres a second, the bullet pierced the left side of his combat helmet, ripped through a forehead pad inside and exited the front without touching him.

At 1,000 metres a second! Not 999 metres a second, or 1,001 metres a second, but an exact 1,000! That's impressive!

A typical tale of derring-do follows on, tedious in its evocation of such heroism and bravery. There are two things that do cast a dampener on the story though.

Firstly, if we are to believe this isn't just an MoD stunt, desperate for some good news from Afghanistan, it isn't as rare as is being made out. Only last July a highly similar story was reported, without apparent MoD involvement, the soldier in that example being David Poderis, also shot through the helmet without being harmed. Secondly, another previous case, reported back in 2003 in Iraq, involving a soldier supposedly shot four times in the helmet and surviving, subsequently turned out to be a prank or hoax, depending on which you prefer, the Sun proudly reporting the soldiers' ingenuity. The author? One John Kay. Is history repeating itself? You decide...

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4/20/2009 11:25:00 PM | | | links to this post

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