Here are the first reactions of an Australian friend, John Greenwell, written immediately after the results became known:
The result was worse than predicted with the government increasing its majority to about 26 –an increase of about 3% in its overall vote. The worst aspect is that the government will now effectively control the Senate. This will mean a number of disagreeable things: notably, we will have our deferred Thatcherite revolution. Telstra will be sold and industrial relations transformed. It will also mean the anti-terrorist legislation in its most extreme form will be enacted. The other worrying feature is the performance of a new party — the Family First — which is a conservative, Christian party. It won one seat in the Senate and got about 3% in the overall vote. The Greens did not do as well as expected and we can assume that the old forests in Tasmania will be cut down, except for the relatively small area mentioned in the Opposition policy.
The war in Iraq, the deceit attached to our intervention, the obsequious compliance with United States policy and the inhumane treatment of asylum seekers all proved irrelevant.
John Howard, re-elected Australian prime minister
What was the reason for this? Fear. The electorate feared that the state of the economy — due in part to good economic management by the government — would be jeopardised by a change.
Of course the future is uncertain but short of a nasty economic downturn we can expect to have a coalition government until 2010.�
Not a good omen for the US presidential elections in barely three weeks’ time!
Brian
11 October 2004
http://www.barder.com/brian/
First, what the charge is not. It is not that he won’t apologise for the Iraq war. The cult of apology is a diversion. If a political leader has misled parliament and the people, whether deliberately or from incompetence – and our prime minister has done so – to such a degree that an apology is required, then the only thing he can properly do is resign. If a political leader receives intelligence which carries a plain caveat that the information is patchy and sporadic, and he repeatedly tells parliament and the people that the information is certain and reliable, and a solid basis for the decision to go to war, then an apology for that gross misrepresentation is irrelevant: there is an inescapable obligation to resign. If a political leader has made a public pledge that he will not take his country to war unless certain specific conditions are met, and those conditions are not met, but he takes his country to war anyway – and our prime minister has done so – then his duty is not to apologise (and then to carry on as if nothing has happened), but to resign. Mr Blair says he ‘can apologise’ (but signally fails to do so) for the fact that intelligence reports asserting that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction turned out to be wrong. But, as he must know, that is not the issue. The intelligence was not itself ‘wrong’: it conveyed reports which it warned were not to be relied on. It was the way the information in them was presented to parliament and the people by the prime minister that was wrong. That is a resigning matter.
If a national leader acknowledges before a war that there can be no justification in international law for the use of force to remove another country’s government, however repressive and unjust that régime might be, and then, when the only positive result of his war is that a tyrannical government has been removed by the use of overwhelming force, he claims that result as a sufficient justification for having gone to war, the only possible conclusion is that his credibility has been fatally undermined and he should resign.
A recent letter in the Guardian argued that Tony Blair should resign over Iraq, "and perhaps Jack Straw as wellâ€?. It doesn’t seem to be generally understood that if a prime minister resigns, his entire government resigns too: all ministerial appointments are at the disposal of the new prime minister as soon as he or she has been commissioned by the Queen to form a government. Responsibility for the Iraq disaster is necessarily shared by all those who were collectively responsible for the actions of their government, not confined to any one man, notwithstanding that he acted autocratically and without proper consultation with his Cabinet and other colleagues. It was up to them to insist on restraining him, calling him to account for what he was doing, and if necessary threatening mass resignations if he persisted in his folly and deception. With the honourable exceptions of Robin Cook and Clare Short, they failed in that duty, and in that failure they share the responsibility for the biggest humiliation of British diplomacy since Suez, almost half a century ago.
Brian
http://www.barder.com/brian/
9 October 04
To celebrate what will probably be our last new car, my wife and I drove down to Tuscany early in September, conscious not only that there would be no more new cars but also that this would be our last long driving holiday. Having spent so much of our adult lives overseas, and almost none of it in Europe, we had never before been to Tuscany, apart from a week in Florence soon after retirement. I know it’s generally thought rather passé to holiday in Tuscany, unless of course you’re a Blair and can stay with Mr Berlusconi, but it was certainly worth the visit, as they say in Michelin, and would have been worth the détour if we hadn’t been going there anyway. Wonderful countryside, food and wine, fabulous churches and museums and galleries everywhere, everything just as claimed by the travel agents and guide-books. We were even converted to frescoes depicting religious subjects, often in entertainingly gory detail. But it did involve an awful lot of driving. It was noticeable that drivers on the French autoroutes were generally highly disciplined, driving in the near lane except to overtake and, having overtaken, returning immediately to the ‘slow’ lane; and on the whole their speeds were high but not 
excessive. By contrast we found most of the Italian autostrada a near-nightmare: maniacs in the fast lane screaming along at 160 or 180 kph, halogen headlights blazing, not slowing down for anything or anyone, tailgating and harassing mercilessly; terrible road surfaces, throwing the car about at or even a bit below the speed limits and often making steering problematical; idiosyncratic signposting, showing where the exits lead to but often no indication of where you’re going or the number of the road you’re on for miles between exits; innumerable dark tunnels from which you emerge, still at speed, into blazing sunshine that sends the pupils dilating and contracting like strobe lights so that your eyes are just beginning to adapt to the light when you plunge into another dim tunnel. But it was all worth it just for Siena and San Gimignano. Fortunately we had foreseen that driving all the way back to Calais would be burdensome after the long outward journey and local touring, so we had arranged to drive on our last day of holiday from just outside San Gimignano, where we had been staying, to Nice where we would put the car on the French motorail overnight to Calais, from which it would be a short drive to the tunnel. This worked well, although our sleeping compartment was the tiniest we had ever encountered, there was no restaurant car on the train for supper (forewarned, we took bulging baguette sandwiches, fruit and a bottle of wine on board with us), and when we reached Calais at nearly 10 a.m. next morning, it was more than two hours before they drove our car off the train and we could get away. But the views of the Riviera coast as we sped along in the train from Nice to Marseilles were stunning. A good way to go. And if you haven’t been to Tuscany, go now, before you’re too old (like us).
Brian
http://www.barder.com/brian/
8 October 2004
Seeing the film ‘Wimbledon’ at the Wimbledon Odeon wasn’t quite like seeing ‘Casablanca’ in Casablanca (not that I have done that, alas). Nor do ‘Wimbledon’ and ‘Casablanca’ have a lot in common: ‘Casablanca’ one of the great movies of all time, ‘Wimbledon’ surely one of the worst ever made, even by the sad standards of most recent British films. Clichéd, implausible, saccharine, maudlin, above all tedious beyond description — even more tedious than watching actual tennis, if such a thing be possible. The grossly protracted wide-screen close-ups of leading man Paul Bettany’s great moon-like face linger, cringe-making, in the memory. The love scenes between Bettany and girly, skittish Kirsten Dunst make you hide your face in embarrassment. The script seems to have been plagiarised from an original prepared for the British Tourist Board to provide gullible foreigners with a glamorised image of London. One imagines the script conference: "So this place Wimblydon is in London England, right? So we have scenes in TRAFFalga Square, right, and Piccadilly Circus, right, and that damn rotating wheel thing, OK? And this tennis guy stays at the Dorchester hotel, we got stock footage of that, and they go to Brighton, ditto, right?" As for pleasant, leafy Wimbledon, it doesn’t get a look in apart from the tennis stadium itself, the film’s real star.
True, the tennis sequences are skilfully done — but there are an awful lot of them, and they go on interminably with absolutely no hint of suspense, since it’s painfully obvious from the first frames that Bettany is going to confound all predictions and, although a lousy tennis player, he’s going to win Wimbledon and get his girl, virtually simultaneously. The acting doesn’t begin to pass muster, and the only really professional performances, by Eleanor Bron and the ever reliable Sam Neill, only serve to show up the amateurishness of the rest. Heaven knows what those two old troupers thought they were doing in this dire and embarrassing production. I shudder to think of it being offered to American audiences.
The movie loses 6–0, 6–0, 6–0. Give it a miss!
Brian
http://www.barder.com/
7 October 2004
Like (almost) everyone else on this side of the Atlantic, and apparently more than half of the electorate on the other side, I scored Senator Kerry a clear winner in the first of the presidential debates, relieved to find the President as inarticulate and generally ill-informed (not to mention petulant and irritable) as anyone could have dared to hope. The Veeps’ debate between Cheney and Edwards was much more difficult to call. Both men were much more accomplished debaters than their respective principals: fluent, confident, with an excellent grasp of issues, facts and figures, tough but pleasantly persuasive. Edwards obviously had the best of the argument on substance — how could he not? But Cheney landed some shrewd and damaging punches and sometimes managed to mount a momentarily plausible defence of the manifestly indefensible; and he got plenty of mileage out of his longer experience in public life than Edwards’s. Conversely, Edwards inflicted obvious damage on Cheney by his account of Cheney’s connections with the discredited firm Halliburton, a major beneficiary of huge contracts for Iraqi reconstruction despite being under investigation for assorted frauds. So probably the debate was a draw, each candidate confirming his already convinced supporters in their views. But what effect the debate will have had on the crucial swing or undecided voters it is very hard to guess. No doubt the polls will tell us. In that connection, the very latest opinion poll results, state by state, expressed in terms of the current position in the electoral college which determines the result of the election, brought up to date daily or even more often, can be seen at an outstanding website: http://www.electoral-vote.com/. Vaut la Visite, as Michelin would say. But be prepared to be depressed by what you see there.
Kerry seems to have surprised almost everyone by his display of authority, punchy persuasiveness and even charisma: he appeared much more presidential than George W Bush, and (much less unexpectedly) far more in command of the facts and with a sure grasp of the issues. He seems however to have given an unfortunate hostage to fortune by his reference to the need for US decisions on foreign policy issues to pass a “global test”, which he and Edwards have subsequently been interpreting as meaning only that America should ensure that its policies were understood, respected, and seen to be just by the international community, not that any other country or institution should have a veto over the freedom of action of the United States to do whatever might be necessary to defend itself and its interests. The Republicans have however seized on the phrase as implying that a Kerry presidency would submit itself to the will of the dreaded United Nations, as Bush spectacularly refused to do when he took the US (and the UK) into the invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003, against the wishes and without the consent of a clear majority of members of the Security Council. What a pity that Kerry doesn’t feel able to say loud and clear that as President he would honour America’s commitments and obligations under the UN Charter, and that unless threatened by an actual or imminent armed attack, the US under his leadership would resort to the use of force in the conduct of its international relations only if it had persuaded the Security Council to authorise it by an explicit decision expressed by resolution or consensus! Presumably he knows, or believes (probably rightly), that to promise to abide as president by international law and the Charter of the United Nations would amount to political suicide. A grim commentary on the age we live in.
Brian
6 October 2004
http://www.barder.com/brian/
A new addition to my website: main points from a discussion with a prominent and experienced middle east analyst, with extensive contacts in both the Israeli and Palestinian camps, who challenges the received wisdom on where Ariel Sharon, Israel’s prime minister, stands in the political spectrum, whether President Bush’s policy pronouncements really do depart significantly from the Clinton principles, and whether Israel is weaker or stronger, and the prospects for a settlement rosier or dimmer, as a result of the Iraq war and the Israeli defensive fence. All temperate and courteously expressed comments on and reactions to the views expressed there, either by me or by the respected middle east analyst, are welcome and can be posted here by clicking on Comments, below this. But these issues arouse strong emotions, so please exercise restraint!
Brian
6 October 04
