At the risk of allowing some of these blog entries (I hate that word 'posts', don't you?) to deteriorate into a family mutual admiration society — see an amused comment in Tim Worstall's 'Blogs of the Week' column yesterday — I can't resist recommending a new entry in Owen Barder's blog which looks at the common claim by Americans to have fought two world wars in the defence of freedom and against tyranny, in the light of the actual circumstances (including the dates) surrounding the entry of the United States into those wars. Almost all Europeans, and millions of Asians, unquestionably owe a huge debt of gratitude to the United States and the brave Americans who risked (and in many cases lost) their lives in the cause of the liberation of Europe (and much of Asia and the Pacific) from fascism and aggression, and there's no question that America's role in ultimate victory was absolutely crucial (as indeed was the role of the Soviet Union in the second world war, as Owen points out). But the idea that the US twice came rushing to the rescue of the Europeans out of sympathetic idealism, without regard to America's national interest, does benefit from a little factual scrutiny.
There's a sort of parallel with the claim often made by ageing (and other) British politicians, when they visit Poland or encounter Poles, that Britain went to war in September 1939 to defend Polish freedom and independence against German attack. It's true of course that the immediate trigger for the British declaration of war on Nazi Germany was Hitler's invasion of Poland following British and French guarantees of Poland's integrity. But Poles are not slow to counter British boasts of this kind with the reminder that having declared war on Germany, Britain did virtually nothing to support Poland's spirited but doomed resistance to the German invasion. On that autumn Sunday morning Poles cheered Chamberlain's radio announcement of the declaration of war and scanned the Warsaw skies for the appearance of the Royal Air Force. They cheered again when a squadron of aircraft approached over the horizon. But the cheering stopped abruptly as the planes of the Luftwaffe began to bomb the Polish capital, and the RAF never arrived. Britain certainly lacked the military resources to come physically to Poland's aid at that point, but it remains the case that we failed to honour a promise that we should not have made unless we knew we could keep it. And Poland's independence was not restored until half a century later, after the genuinely heroic struggles of the Polish Solidarity movement and the implosion of Soviet communism under the weight of its own failures and internal contradictions.
Myths like these develop a life of their own, though, if enough people have a need to believe them, so perhaps it's unnecessarily cruel to dip them in the icy water of the facts.
Brian
[In Poland 1986-88]
Today’s Observer (28 August 2005) leads with a front page story under the banner headlines:
Leak shows Blair told of Iraq war terror link
Top official warned in 2004 of British Muslim anger
Secret document said UK seen as ‘crusader state’
The story quotes extracts from a letter sent in May 2004 by Sir Michael Jay, the senior official at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, to the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Andrew Turnbull, about the effects of the Iraq war on British Muslim opinion, representing the letter as a sensational revelation of FCO disapproval of British government policies in Iraq and by implication as a solemn warning that these policies will tend to encourage terrorist attacks in Britain.
I don’t think this story is in fact very interesting or exciting. The Observer’s printed edition publishes only highly selected and unrepresentative extracts from Jay’s letter, but it has put the full text of it on its website. Contrary to my initial expectation, based on the television press reviews and the implication of the Observer’s headlines, the Jay letter and another related document also acquired by the Observer don’t deploy or even imply the disgraceful and untenable argument, much bandied about in the media and the blogs, that UK policy on Iraq should be changed in order to reduce the risk of terrorist attack in Britain, or (even more shamefully) in order to avoid upsetting and annoying British Muslims. It is abundantly clear from the full text of the Jay letter that its only purpose was to contribute to the necessary and perfectly proper debate in Whitehall on the problem of alienation and disaffection among British Muslims, its causes, and a raft of proposed measures designed to address it. There is nowhere in the letter any suggestion, explicit or implied, that Muslim indignation or the possible aggravation of the risk of a terrorist attack in Britain would justify changing the government’s Iraq policies. (Of course many of us will agree that there are plenty of other reasons, compelling and legitimate, for changing our Iraq policies, but it is manifestly wrong to argue that they should be changed in order to appease terrorists or to buy off terrorist blackmail: and despite what the Observer’s story might lead you to believe, Sir Michael Jay’s letter makes no such suggestion.)
It is not clear whether the Observer obtained the letter (and the other document that accompanies it) under the Freedom of Information Act, as implied by the ‘foi’ in the website address of the full text of the letter on the Observer website, or whether they have been leaked, as the Observer headline explicitly claims. If the latter, whoever leaked the documents to the Observer presumably did so in the confident expectation that they would be misrepresented in the media and over the Islington dining-tables as evidence that Blair, Straw and co. had been ‘warned’ by this senior official that UK participation in the Iraq war was upsetting the Muslims, which would lead to yet more anger, which would lead to terrorist attacks in Britain — with the further and even more indefensible implication that Blair’s ‘failure’ to heed this and other warnings made him partially responsible for the London bombings and their victims’ deaths. And the media have duly obliged. For example, the Observer story says:
Despite repeated denials by Number 10 that the war made Britain a target for terrorists, a letter from Michael Jay, the Foreign Office permanent under-secretary, to the cabinet secretary, Sir Andrew Turnbull – obtained by this newspaper – makes the connection clear.
Contrary to this Observer spin and the current received wisdom, Blair has not denied that the Iraq war was among the issues prompting anger and indignation among many British (and other) Muslims. For example, he said in his monthly press conference on 26 July 2005:
I read occasionally that I am supposed to have said it is nothing to do with Iraq, in inverted commas. Actually I haven’t said that, if you go back and look at the comments I have made over the past couple of weeks. What I do say is this, and I said this I think to you last Tuesday or Wednesday… of course people are going to use Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed if you look at what a lot of these terrorist statements say they use both Iraq and Afghanistan … They will use Iraq to try and recruit and motivate people. They will use Afghanistan. Before Iraq and Afghanistan, and 11 September, which happened before those two things, they used other things. But I think most people understand that the roots of this go far deeper…. Whatever excuse or justification these people use I do not believe we should give one inch to them, not in this country and the way we live our lives here, not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, not in our support for two States, Israel and Palestine, not in our support for the alliances we choose, including with America, not one inch should we give to these people.
There is plainly no inconsistency between that position and the one implied by Sir Michael Jay’s letter. Acknowledgement of the fact that extremists exploit anger over the Iraq issue to foment terrorism is a far cry from saying that UK participation in the Iraq war caused the London bombings or that those responsible for the Iraq war are therefore also responsible for the bombings. Nor does it warrant the inference that UK Iraq policy should be changed to reduce the risk of terrorism – or even that changing policy would necessarily succeed in reducing it. In fact, the letter is not a ‘warning’ at all, whatever the Observer story might say.
Accordingly, I see no reason in the Observer’s ‘revelations’ to modify the views I expressed in Ephems last month on the question of the relationship between Iraq and the bombings, and the disreputable imputation of blame to Tony Blair for having failed to heed the ‘warnings’ (warnings that we already knew had been given by the intelligence services) about the likely effects of attacking Iraq on Muslim sentiment in Britain, and the concomitant risk that this might be exploited to encourage a terrorist attack. Mr Blair deserves the most severe censure for his numerous blundering misjudgements and misrepresentations over the Iraq war: perhaps most of all for his abject failure to insist to President George W Bush that without the explicit authority of the UN Security Council in a second resolution, Britain would not take any part in the use of armed force against Iraq. Had the prime minister adopted such a position with Bush, and stuck to it, the Americans might quite possibly have drawn back from the brink of war, fearing the effect on US public opinion of having to go it alone. With such an indictment hanging over our prime minister’s head, it can only serve as an unnecessary diversion to lay against him charges, such as those implied in the Observer’s misrepresentation of the Jay letter, which simply can’t be sustained. Perhaps this is the Observer trying to make belated amends for having initially and bizarrely supported the war. If that’s the case, it should find other and more reputable ways of doing so.
In a stimulating and challenging departure, Owen Barder has proposed a completely new approach to House of Lords reform: a second chamber whose members would represent, not geographical constituencies or areas, but sectional interests and groups. His proposal deserves to be read in full, but the examples he gives of the groups which might be represented are:
- 400 Senators elected by vocational groups (eg shopworkers, civil servants, farmers, small businesses, stockbrokers, artists)
- 150 Senators elected by the country’s largest membership organizations (eg Trades Unions, Churches, Mosques, UK Athletics, Automobile Association, RSPB, Oxfam, Football Supporters’ Club)
- 50 Senators elected by designated professional, industry and representative groups (eg CBI, Royal Society, British Medical Association, Royal Geographic Society).
There would be a ban on Senators having party political affiliations; they would be eligible to serve for a maximum of two 6-year terms, rotating every two years, and would be unable to move to or from the House of Commons except after an interval of at least 10 years. They would be elected by Single Transferable Vote. Senators would not be eligible to be ministers. The plan is worked out in a good deal more detail than in this brief summary, and includes a compelling and lucid rationale. It clearly merits (but seems at present not to be attracting) serious debate.
I’m reluctant to risk appearing to pick holes in such a welcome attempt to approach the problem from a wholly new angle, but it does necessarily prompt (not, please, ‘beg’) a number of questions, to which its ingenious author can no doubt provide convincing answers. Much the most important of these must be the powers and role of a parliamentary chamber with the membership proposed. What will these 600 worthy and miscellaneous people actually do? Presumably the Senate would have similar powers and functions to those of the present Upper House — basically, scrutinising and reviewing draft legislation, with the right to delay for a limited period Bills that fail to command majority support; and, perhaps most important of all, holding the over-mighty executive government to account (a function which the House of Commons no longer usually performs, because of the stranglehold of the party whips over back-benchers and because a major and successful revolt by MPs over a significant government measure is likely to bring down the government which the majority otherwise supports, precipitating an election which could put their political careers in danger). There is no reason in principle why a Senate elected on the basis now proposed should not have much the same powers and functions (provided that it was debarred, like the House of Lords, from discussing or voting on financial measures): its members would be usefully free from subjection to the powers of the party whips or the lure of patronage: but their opposition to objectionable government measures would be no more effective in threatening the future of the government than that of the present House of Lords, if their sole sanction (apart from exposing defects) was to impose a limited delay. There is also the problem that a very large chamber, with an extremely diverse membership and no political party affiliations, would be almost completely unpredictable. Neither the government nor the House of Commons would have any way of knowing, or even of guessing, which way the Senate was likely to jump on any particular proposal. On any specific issue, the great majority of Senators would by definition have no special expertise or knowledge: the representatives of the doctors would be voting on town planning matters while the representatives of the farmers would be voting on education Bills. Would this be a significant improvement on the existing situation, or on the situation that other less radical reform proposals under discussion would produce?
There’s another problem. This would be a very large chamber, bringing the total number of our active legislators at Westminster to more than a thousand. True, that’s no more than in the past, with the old House of Lords: but the great majority of the peers who used to be entitled to attend and vote in the House of Lords hardly ever turned up, except on rare occasions (e.g. when some favourite bloodthirsty rural pastime was under attack from the city slickers in the Other Place). The 600 Senators, all chosen by and representing the interests of their respective groups, with a maximum of 12 years in the Upper House, would be much likelier to treat their membership as a full-time job. Debates routinely attended by four or five hundred Senators, most of them eager to speak, would be hopelessly unwieldy. If the United States, with a far larger population and land area than ours, can manage with 100 Senators, there seems little reason why we should need six times as many.
Other, more practical, questions suggest themselves. How would candidates offering themselves as representatives of (say) the farmers be chosen? Would any old farmer who fancied a parking place in central London for six or twelve years be eligible to stand? He might have to produce names of a given number of supporting farmers, but how would the farmers themselves be able to make a meaningful choice between candidates whom they would not know personally and who would not be standing on any party ticket? How would ordinary workers who are not members of a trade union — now a majority — be represented and how would their candidates be selected? Who would define a ‘church’ entitled to elect representatives? Would Christian Scientists, Mormons, Scientologists, Flat Earthers qualify? How would the vast majority of the population which practises no religion be represented? How would eligibility to vote as a church member be decided? Millions of Britons vaguely define themselves as "Church of England" without ever translating that nominal membership into action except for christenings, weddings — themselves rare events these days — and funerals: would a mere declaration of membership of the C of E be enough to qualify for a vote? If members of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds are to have their own Senator (Senators?), why not bridge or poker groups with some national association to promote their hobby? The field is in truth so gigantic that it’s hard to imagine ever achieving a national consensus on who should and who should not have a finger in the pie.
No doubt answers to many, perhaps all, of these questions could be devised. But the development of a consensus, even among existing practising politicians, never mind the population at large (including the media!) would be a back-breaking and protracted task, simply because the whole idea is so novel, so far removed from anything that has been debated and argued over in the past 90 years. Of course a good proposal should not be dismissed because of its novelty: but there is an argument for sticking to a plan for second chamber reform which has already come tantalisingly close to achieving all-party, majority support in both houses of parliament: namely, the proposals in the report of February 2002 of Tony Wright’s excellent Select Committee on Public Administration. There is no space to spell these out here: the report speaks for itself. Moreover, I have to declare an interest: I have already set out my own views on House of Lords reform so often and so extensively that I feel entitled to be excused from repeating them here yet again. All right, if you really want to know what they are, you can read what I have written in a submission to the Select Committee; in another, earlier submission to the Lord Chancellor’s Department in response to a consultation exercise; in two letters published in The Times; and in at least one previous entry in Ephems. Download them all, along with the Select Committee report. They will be much more effective than Bournvita.
This is a case where the best, if Owen’s proposals are the best (and they could be), could be the enemy of the good. We’re almost there: a wholly or mainly elected Upper House elected by PR on a different timetable from the Commons and with limits on the length of service permitted. The biggest single obstacle to agreement on this is Tony Blair’s confused fear that a chamber with even a few elected members, and still more a chamber with a majority of elected members, will challenge the primacy of the House of Commons. But the way to assure the continuing primacy of the Commons is to limit the powers of the second chamber, and to continue to have the government of the day chosen by and from the House of Commons — not by denying to one of our two houses of parliament the democratic legitimacy it needs.
Brian
Two key articles in today’s New York Times throw an unforgiving and depressing light on where President George W Bush is taking the US (and us). They make dismal but compulsory reading:
http://tinyurl.com/dhoaa: John Bolton opens his wrecking campaign at the UN – a deeply saddening report,
enough to make Kofi Annan jump out of his 38th floor UN office window. So this is why George W. was so determined to get Bolton into place in New York, over the metaphorically dead body of the Senate).
Also:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/24/opinion/24dowd.html (grateful acknowledgements to Tony Hatfield, his blog, for highlighting this): a witty but disturbing commentary by Maureen Dowd on George W., his need for a holiday from the ranch and Cindy, and the insane logic of the case for staggering on in Iraq.
PS: On the John Bolton piece, now please see http://tinyurl.com/7lzsg.
Brian
BBC Radio 4 has just broadcast a short but charming programme about our great Non-National Anthem, Land of Hope and Glory, describing its genesis, and how the words came to be written to Elgar’s splendid tune, with clips of majestic contraltos past and present warbling it or belting it out, and finally of the audience singing it lustily, con brio, as the traditional high point of the last night of the Proms, the BBC’s flagship classical music festival at the Royal Albert Hall (the Proms are on now, broadcast live every evening on BBC Radio 3). The programme prompted the thought that the British middle class, and perhaps also the few remaining Britons not answering to that description, can be divided into two categories: those who squirm with embarrassment at the camp kitsch and maudlin patriotism of a mass audience at the Proms inviting the Deity at full throttle to make the borders of the British Empire "wider still and wider"; and those who revel in the exhilaration of a thousand lusty voices singing words and music that have become a great national secular celebration owing as much to self-mockery in a very British spirit of irony as it does to residual patriotism. I know which of those categories I’m in.
The full text of the lyric written for LOHAG in 1902 by the otherwise shy and retiring A C Benson (1862-1925) is overwhelmingly steeped in now unfashionable flag-wagging patriotism and glory in Empire, while at the same time serving as a stirring reminder of national pride and confidence barely a hundred years ago, only just over thirty short years before I was born. Who could now write with a straight face such immortal lines as these, addressed of course to the aforesaid Land of Hope and Glory? –
Thine equal laws, by Freedom gained,
Have ruled thee well and long;
By Freedom gained, by Truth maintained,
Thine Empire shall be strong.
Nor are these sentiments entirely vanished even now: there is a splendid website, well worth a visit, whose home page sports no fewer than five swirling animated Union Jacks (as I persist in calling the Union Flag), the words of the main and best-known verse, and the spirited slogan of defiance: "They can stop us singing it at the Proms, but never in our hearts", a reference to a recent controversial decision by a new and misguided conductor of the Last Night to excise LOHAG from its traditional place in the programme. (But the thought of the devoted fans of LOHAG being reduced to singing the great Coronation Ode only "in our hearts" is somewhat dispiriting, isn’t it?) The quiddity of this memorable website, incidentally, is richly embellished by the information that "This site is sponsored by Worldwide Aromatiques UK who supply Essential Oils & Health Supplements by Free Delivery Mail-Order in the UK". Make a note of it.
One final thought. When the television channels broadcast classical music concerts, the camera-work is almost always superb, homing in unerringly on the instrument and player contributing a key element to the music, pulling back to show the whole orchestra at big ensemble moments, glimpsing the conductor as he strains, sweating, to impart his passionate feelings through baton and hands to the players: the camera director always revealing an intimate knowledge and understanding of the score. You may miss the excitement of being present at a performance with hundreds of others, but in compensation for that you probably get a better and more informed view of the playing on your television screen than you do from the most expensive seat in the stalls. (And to those purists who say that the televised visual images accompanying the sounds of great music are a distraction from concentration on the music itself, I put the question: when you go to a concert, do you keep your eyes closed throughout the performance?) So why, when televised classical music is such a treat, and so expertly transmitted to us, do the BBC and the other television channels broadcast so very little good music? Why isn’t every single Prom broadcast on BBC 2 television, instead of the occasional broadcast on a digital channel that hardly anyone watches or has access to, the occasional BBC 2 broadcast if a Prom, usually on a Saturday, contains some item of wide popularity — and, of course, the Last Night, which is more a celebration than a classical music concert? The Proms are a huge popular success, attracting massive riveted audiences at the Royal Albert Hall, including many young people: why does the BBC assume that there isn’t a similarly enthusiastic audience out there in the country for the nightly Prom on television? Listening to the Proms on BBC Radio 3 is better than nothing, but it’s not the same as seeing it on the screen while listening to the music. Apart from anything else, on Radio 3 you can’t enjoy watching that lovely blonde young lady with the Alice in Wonderland hair, playing her heart out among the first violins…
Brian
Despite the understandable public concern over the tragic death of a young Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, victim of mistaken identity, at the hands of the Metropolitan (London) Police at London’s Stockwell tube station on 22 July, the day after the second (abortive) attempted bombings in London, it seems clear that there are no grounds whatever as of now for the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, to be called on to resign. Even his most hysterical current critics can hardly believe, or claim, that his remarks immediately after the shooting were knowingly untrue or deliberately intended to deceive. Only one point in his statement then is now seen to be probably (but not yet certainly) wrong: the statement that Mr Menezes had been challenged by the police and had failed to obey their instructions. And until we see the report of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) inquiry, we shan’t know for sure that this actually was wrong. Other details in the first media reports that were later contradicted by the document mysteriously leaked to a commercial television news channel were not given out by the Commissioner, who has denied that they were officially released by the police at all. Presumably they were pieced together by the media in the first confused hours and days from assertions by people claiming to have been eye-witnesses: for example, at least one ‘witness’ claimed that he had seen Menezes wearing a heavy belt from which electric wires were dangling. There seems to be no evidence so far that any of these early reports were derived from informal off-the-record briefings by police officers, and until such evidence materialises, it is obviously quite wrong to accuse the police, still less Ian Blair personally, of having deliberately or negligently issued false information soon after the shooting.
Those who have rushed to judgement against the Commissioner and the policemen involved in this desperately sad affair perhaps need to be reminded that:
1. The alternative version of events in the leaked document is only one person’s account: we don’t yet know what other witnesses have said or will say. Why should this one account be accepted as gospel? Why was this particular version leaked, if not as part of an anti-police agenda? Was this one witness necessarily in a position to be sure that the suspect wasn’t challenged at any point? Eye-witness accounts of dramatic and fast-moving events notoriously vary widely from witness to witness, even when one or more of the witnesses is a policeman.
2. Much has been made of the conflict between, on the one hand, media stories (however sourced) according to which Menezes was wearing a heavy padded jacket, and, on the other hand, the truth (as demonstrated by the leaked photograph of his body) that he was actually wearing an unpadded denim jacket. But the difference is essentially immaterial: he could have been concealing explosives under a denim jacket as well as under a padded coat. Wearing any kind of jacket on such a hot day could have seemed to tend to confirm police suspicions that he was one of the four failed bombers, when taken together with the other pointers (the building he came out of, his remarkable likeness to one of the 21 July suspects, making for the tube station, running onto the train, etc.), even if these have subsequently turned out to have innocent explanations or to have been of no significance.
3. It is extremely difficult to see what possible alternative there can be to the so-called ’shoot to kill’ policy as applied to suspected suicide bombers. If there are real grounds for believing that a person may be about to blow up a group of innocent civilians (as well as him- or herself) by pressing a button on a bomb-belt concealed under outer clothing, even an attempt to pinion the suspect — as one of the policemen apparently did, according to his leaked account — risks setting off the explosion: and shooting at any part of the suspect lower than his/her head carries a wholly unacceptable risk of either detonating the explosives by impact of the bullet, or leaving the suspect wounded but not dead and therefore able immediately to press the fatal button. The inescapable logic is that in such a situation a shot or shots to the head must be the only sure way to pre-empt the explosion. The policy setting this out has apparently been approved at high political level and by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO). It is an operational matter which, contrary to much media and blog comment, cannot and should not be determined by public opinion as expressed in the letters columns of the heavies or the populist editorials of the Sun. Such policies must be for professional decision, subject to political approval, not for decision by opinion poll. ACPO confirms that it is reviewing the policy in the light of the Stockwell tragedy, but clearly without much confidence that any better policy can be devised.
4. Ian Blair was well within his rights in initially resisting the transfer of the investigation from the police to the IPCC, and he has in no way sought to “cover up” the fact that he did so (as he has said, writing a letter to the Permanent Secretary of the Home Office and copying it to the Chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority, the body that monitors and supervises the Metropolitan Police, and the Chairman of the IPCC would be a very odd way to cover anything up). At a time when it still seemed perfectly possible that the dead man had in fact been involved in terrorism, with the police investigation of the bomb attempts of 21 July at its peak of activity, and the imperative need to maintain the complete secrecy of how that investigation was proceeding and what leads it was pursuing, Ian Blair was arguably perfectly justified in resisting an immediate transfer of this important part of the investigation to an outside body whose own enquiries were bound to distract the anti-terrorism police from their primary task (catching the 21 July failed bombers and pre-empting a further terrorist attack). Moreover he apparently didn’t trust the IPCC to maintain proper security in handling such highly sensitive information, and the prompt (and disastrous) leak of a key document and photograph, apparently by a member of the IPCC staff, seems to indicate that his lack of trust could prove to have been well founded.
5. We need to be seriously concerned about the implications of this shrill and premature campaign against the Metropolitan Police and its chief for the morale of the police involved in combating terrorism, and in particular for the readiness of an armed policeman to shoot on a future occasion when that might be the only way to prevent a further terrorist attack involving numerous civilian deaths. To act in that way demands real courage: it involves getting very close to someone who you reasonably believe may be about to kill you, and who is quite likely to do so before you can stop him (or her). It involves accepting the real risk that if your suspicions turn out to be mistaken, you might end up on a murder charge — or at best as the object of popular vilification. The current campaign has hugely aggravated those risks. It must have made it extremely unlikely that any individual policeman would take such risks in the future. If similar circumstances occur again, and if next time the suspect really is a bomber, I just hope that I’m not one of the passengers on the train.
Sir Ian Blair
The Guardian editorial of 20 August 2005 has got it right (apart from an unbalanced headline). We ask an awful lot of our policemen, and none of us has the right to condemn them out of hand long before we know the full facts or the results of the official independent inquiry. If anyone has the right to the benefit of the doubt until the facts are known, it’s surely the policeman entrusted by our society with both a gun and the awesome responsibility of having to decide in a split second whether to use it.
(In case you have a feeling of déjà vu when reading this, you could be right: most of it was originally posted as a comment on an item about the Stockwell shooting on Owen Barder’s blog. I have transferred it here in agreement with him, with a trackback to his post.)
Brian
According to my trusty web counter, this website has received visits from the following countries or category of visitor, with the domain and number of visits after each. I’m intrigued to know what has prompted the 8 visits from Croatia, and 3 from the Faroe Islands; and why there have been twice as many visits from Vietnam (2) as from Tuvalu (1 – come on, you Tuvalan web surfers, you can do better than that!). The United States score (38) looks rather mean until you add in a high proportion of .com and .net visits, not to mention many of the three and a half thousand ‘unknown’, the 64 from the US Government (oops), and a lucky 13 from the US Department of Defense (oops again).
Anyway, whatever brought you here, you’re very welcome … bienvenu … Willkommen … benvenuto … bienvenido … ????? ?????????? (dobro pozhalovat’) …
Commercial (.COM) 6270 (27%), Networks (.NET) 5931 (25%), United Kingdom (.UK) 4960 (21%), Unknown (.???) 3426 (14%), AUSTRALIA (.AU) 474 (2%), Educational (.EDU) 391 (1%), NEW ZEALAND (.NZ) 159 (0%), FRANCE (.FR) 151 (0%), CANADA (.CA) 146 (0%), GERMANY (.DE) 109 (0%), NETHERLANDS (.NL) 105 (0%), JAPAN (.JP) 74 (0%), ITALY (.IT) 71 (0%), Organizations (.ORG) 69 (0%), BELGIUM (.BE) 68 (0%), US Government (.GOV) 64 (0%), FINLAND (.FI) 51 (0%), SOUTH AFRICA (.ZA) 46 (0%), AUSTRIA (.AT) 45 (0%), SPAIN (.ES) 42 (0%), UNITED STATES (.US) 38 (0%), SWEDEN (.SE) 35 (0%), POLAND (.PL) 33 (0%), ARGENTINA (.AR) 33 (0%), GREECE (.GR) 33 (0%), DENMARK (.DK) 32 (0%), BRAZIL (.BR) 31 (0%), ISRAEL (.IL) 25 (0%), RUSSIAN FEDERATION (.RU) 20 (0%), HUNGARY (.HU) 19 (0%), TURKEY (.TR) 15 (0%), INDIA (.IN) 14 (0%), PORTUGAL (.PT) 14 (0%), SWITZERLAND (.CH) 14 (0%), MEXICO (.MX) 13 (0%), NORWAY (.NO) 13 (0%), US Dept of Defense (.MIL) 13 (0%), Int. Organizations (.INT) 12 (0%), PAKISTAN (.PK) 10 (0%), THAILAND (.TH) 8 (0%), CROATIA (.HR) 8 (0%), PERU (.PE) 8 (0%), CZECH REPUBLIC (.CZ) 8 (0%), SINGAPORE (.SG) 7 (0%), SLOVAKIA (Slovak Republic) (.SK) 7 (0%), HONG KONG (.HK) 6 (0%), MALAYSIA (.MY) 6 (0%), IRELAND (.IE) 6 (0%), BULGARIA (.BG) 5 (0%), INDONESIA (.ID) 4 (0%), PHILIPPINES (.PH) 4 (0%), MOROCCO (.MA) 4 (0%), SLOVENIA (.SI) 4 (0%), ICELAND (.IS) 4 (0%), ROMANIA (.RO) 4 (0%), SAUDI ARABIA (.SA) 3 (0%), CYPRUS (.CY) 3 (0%), UNITED ARAB EMIRATES (.AE) 3 (0%), LUXEMBOURG (.LU) 3 (0%), ZAMBIA (.ZM) 3 (0%), FAROE ISLANDS (.FO) 3 (0%), MALDIVES (.MV) 2 (0%), ESTONIA (.EE) 2 (0%), VENEZUELA (.VE) 2 (0%), VIET NAM (.VN) 2 (0%), LEBANON (.LB) 2 (0%), NEPAL (.NP) 2 (0%), BELARUS (.BY) 1 (0%), LITHUANIA (.LT) 1 (0%), DOMINICAN REPUBLIC (.DO) 1 (0%), PAPUA NEW GUINEA (.PG) 1 (0%), ECUADOR (.EC) 1 (0%), TAIWAN (.TW) 1 (0%), EGYPT (.EG) 1 (0%), MALTA (.MT) 1 (0%), TURKS AND CAICOS ISLANDS (.TC) 1 (0%), TUVALU (.TV) 1 (0%), UKRAINE (.UA) 1 (0%), MAURITIUS (.MU) 1 (0%), GREENLAND (.GL) 1 (0%), URUGUAY (.UY) 1 (0%), UZBEKISTAN (.UZ) 1 (0%), MOLDOVA (.MD) 1 (0%), CHINA (.CN) 1 (0%), YUGOSLAVIA (.YU) 1 (0%), JAMAICA (.JM) 1 (0%), ZIMBABWE (.ZW) 1 (0%), ALBANIA (.AL) 1 (0%), COLOMBIA (.CO) 1 (0%).
PS: Don’t worry if you can’t decypher the last ‘welcome’ at the top: it just means your browser isn’t configured to display Russian.
Brian
Robin Cook will, as all the commentators and obituarists have been saying since he died, be sorely missed. He was a big figure (at least metaphorically) on the political scene, and there’s no obvious candidate to replace him as a respected and eloquent mouthpiece for opponents of the disastrous war in Iraq, with a record as a former heavy-weight minister and what we all assumed was going to be an assured place near the top of a future Labour government.
But obituarists and commentators on the recently departed sometimes go over the top in hagiography, and even more often gloss over their hero’s blemishes. Several have noted (and others have denied) that Cook was a political loner, lacking clubbability or a coterie of Cookites comparable to the Blairites and Brownites: that he could be short-tempered and abrupt, sometimes intimidating; in short, a bit of a cold fish. I remember him arriving forgivably late at a local Labour Party Christmas dinner at which he was the guest speaker. Mo Mowlam, guest speaker at the previous year’s dinner, had spent the whole time before dinner working the group of party members, shaking hands and hugging, exchanging warm and friendly words with every single person present. Robin Cook went straight to his place at the table, took his speaking notes out of his inside jacket pocket, and spent almost the whole of dinner reading them and annotating them, barely addressing a word to the local party Chairperson on one side of him or to the 1000th member to be recruited by the local party, a distinguished harpist, on the other. Shyness, probably; nervousness about his speech, apparently — but both a little surprising at such an unchallenging and informal occasion and with such an experienced and apparently self-confident politician.
But the matter on which the comments have been most loudly silent is surely Cook’s prominent role in the encouragement and prosecution of NATO’s attack on Serbia over Kosovo. Last December (2004) I was prompted by one of Cook’s articles in the Guardian about the new doctrine of ‘humanitarian intervention’ to write a piece in Ephems recalling that Cook, with Madeleine Albright, then US Secretary of State under Clinton, had been a prime architect of the attack on Serbia in 1999 (it was hardly a war), and with Albright had played a leading role in the fraudulent charade played out at the Rambouillet conference in order to justify the attack. I summarised there what I had written earlier in a much more detailed analysis backed up by ample chapter and verse. But it’s important that history should not swallow the current heavily air-brushed version of the Kosovo affair. NATO attacked Serbia because the Serbs would not accept an ultimatum crafted at Rambouillet specifically to ensure that the Serbs would reject it (no conceivable Serbian government could have accepted it), while arranging that it should be accepted by the Kosovo Albanians in return for a fraudulent promise of independence following an act of self-determination, a promise that has still not been kept and which probably never can be kept. Far from stopping or preventing a humanitarian disaster and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the ruthless NATO bombing precipitated a sharp aggravation of both, and caused a flight of refugees into neighbouring countries at untold human cost. The military action was in brazen violation of the UN Charter: the Security Council never authorised it, indeed was never invited by NATO to authorise it, on the ludicrous pretext that the Russians would have vetoed an authorising resolution (failure to apply for legal permission required for an action can hardly be justified by the expectation that it would probably be refused). Three months of bombing, steadily escalated and entailing heavy civilian casualties and economic havoc, failed to coerce the Serbs into accepting the Rambouillet ultimatum. President Clinton was eventually persuaded by a gung-ho Mr Blair to threaten the Serbs with a land invasion, but the Serbs knew as well as everyone else that no such invasion would be agreed to by all the members of NATO, some of whom were already becoming deeply worried by the effects of the bombing and the lack of progress towards the settlement that it was meant to achieve. Eventually a settlement was agreed behind NATO’s back by the Americans, the Germans, the Russians and the Finnish President, who presented the Serbs with terms from which the unacceptable (and unnecessary) elements from Rambouillet had been excised, thus facing Milosevic with the threat of international isolation and UN sanctions if he refused them. Had NATO, bear-led by Cook and Albright, been sufficiently far-sighted and flexible to offer those revised terms at Rambouillet, the terms could have won Russian and therefore UN support, the Serbs would have been forced to accept them then instead of only three months later, and the bombing would never have happened. It was illegal, unnecessary, and unsuccessful. And, perhaps worst of all, it set a disastrous precedent for Iraq four years later. Tony Blair got away with it over Kosovo, skilfully spun into a great success and a monument to the pernicious and dangerous doctrine of humanitarian intervention without international authority; no wonder he thought he could get away with it again. Meanwhile the Serbs have been ethnically cleansed from most of Kosovo, at further enormous human cost; no way has been found to enable Serbs and Albanians to live together in Kosovo in anything resembling peace; and the future of Kosovo remains unresolved, the province still under international military and civilian occupation.
The uncomfortable truth is that Madeleine Albright regarded Kosovo as a re-run of what had happened in Bosnia and Croatia, and was determined not to repeat the mistake made there by the west with its reluctance to resort to the use of force against the Serbs. Her aim at Rambouillet was not to negotiate a peaceful settlement which both the Serbs and the Kosovo Albanians could legitimately accept, but to contrive a set of proposals which the Serbs would be forced to reject, thus offering a bogus pretext for military action. In a weird pre-echo of what was to happen later over Iraq, the objections of British government legal advisers were overridden at the behest of the Americans. Just as Tony Blair could not find the courage to tell Bush that unless there was explicit UN approval, Britain would not take part in an attack on Iraq, so neither Blair nor Robin Cook could quite summon up the spititual fortitude to dissociate themselves from Madeleine Albright’s determination to attack the Serbs, come what may, while pretending to look for a peaceful settlement which both sides could accept.
Robin Cook was an outstanding and principled politician who will long be remembered for the courageous stand he took against an illegal, unnecessary and unsuccessful war. But there was an almost unrecognised skeleton in his political cupboard, labelled ‘Kosovo’. Perhaps that was why, deep down, he couldn’t bring himself to connive at the same blunders and fraud a second time.
Madeleine Albright, we have learned in these days following Robin Cook’s funeral, wanted very much to attend the funeral but was prevented from doing so by sickness. Tony Blair didn’t attend the funeral, either, in his case because he was on holiday.
Brian
Footnote: The case against the NATO attack on Serbia over Kosovo is further documented here and here.
A frequent visitor to this blog has found that at least one of the links in my Ephems won’t work for him, although it works fine for me. I have just realised what the problem is. Because most of my hyperlinks are configured to open in a new window (to save readers having to keep using the Back button to return to my post), in some browsers opening the new window involves a pop-up: and generally in Windows XP pop-ups are ‘blocked’, i.e. turned off. To make it work, you need either to allow pop-ups (by clicking in the bar above the text which says pop-ups have been blocked, and exercising the option to allow them), or else <b>right</b>-click on the link and choose ‘Open in new window’, which ought to work.
I suspect, although I may be wrong, that the problem arises in MS Windows Explorer but not in the (much superior) Mozilla Firefox* browser; and probably only if you are running Windows XP.
But from now on I’ll generally make my links open in the same window.
What did we all do to pass the time before there were computers?
Brian
*That link should open in the same window and therefore not involve a pop-up.
The government is trying out a new procedure for deporting non-British subjects suspected of involvement in terrorism, not convicted of any offence, but not hitherto able to be deported to their countries of origin because of the likelihood that they would be tortured, or worse, on arrival. For a long time people in this category couldn’t be deported but couldn’t be locked up in this country either, unless there was evidence against them of an offence against the law on which they could be convicted and jailed: so they were effectively free to stay in Britain with no constraints on their activities apart from being, presumably, under surveillance by the security authorities. Detention in prison was legally possible only for a limited period while the suspect awaited deportation: he or she could not be detained if there was no realistic prospect that deportation would become possible.
This was an obviously unsatisfactory situation, especially after 9/11 as the terrorist threat became more real. The government accordingly took powers to detain indefinitely and without trial foreigners suspected of being terrorists, with a right of appeal to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) on the issue of whether the home secretary’s detention order was reasonably justified — something well short of a criminal trial for specified offences. To exercise this power of detention without trial, the government had to declare a State of Emergency under which it registered a derogation or exemption from the relevant provisions of the European Convention of Human Rights forbidding detention without trial. But last December the Law Lords, in a historic decision, struck down and quashed the derogation as being disproportionate to the threat with which it sought to deal, and declared the power to detain without trial incompatible with the Convention. The government’s response to this unwelcome defeat by England’s highest court was to introduce, after a prolonged battle with a sizeable minority of MPs and a sizeable majority in the House of Lords, a new provision under which unconvicted terrorist suspects, whether British or foreign, could be subjected to Control Orders limiting their freedom of action, amounting virtually to house arrest. In order to get this draconian measure through the Lords, the government had to promise that it would be independently reviewed during its first year and that there would be an opportunity to renew, amend or repeal it when yet another anti-terrorism Bill is published in the autumn of this year (2005) and put before parliament next spring. Many of us who regarded the Control Orders régime as unacceptably illiberal, amounting as it does to harsh punishment over an indefinite period of time of people who have not been charged with, still less convicted of, any crime, have been arguing that the Act should not be renewed next year but that there should be new provisions enabling anyone reasonably suspected of involvement in terrorism to be charged with a specific offence, or offences, and tried in a proper criminal court. This would restore the essential position that no-one should be imprisoned or otherwise punished except by a court after conviction and sentence by a judge and jury — not on the say-so and suspicion of a politician.
The government’s new ploy is to get from the countries which routinely practise torture, and to which it has therefore been impossible to deport suspects, solemn promises that deportees received from Britain would not be tortured, and that the honouring of these promises would be monitored by a new independent body with members nominated by both governments. An agreement on these lines has already been secured from Jordan. More are said to be imminent, including with Algeria and Egypt. Meanwhile ten foreign nationals have been arrested and detained pending deportation to their countries of citizenship as soon as the relevant agreements have been signed and the monitoring bodies appointed.
A battle royal between the government and the British judiciary now looms, as ministers have explicitly foreseen. The ban on the deportation of aliens to countries where they are at risk of torture stems from the European Convention on Human Rights and the way it has been interpreted by the European Court of Human Rights, whose decisions are binding on the British courts. Inconveniently for the government, the European Court (which, like the Convention, has nothing at all to do with the EU) has already declared in the ‘Chahal’ case that even when the receiving country has made a formal promise not to torture a deportee, such deportation would be contrary to the Convention if the receiving country could be shown regularly to practise torture. A full account of this case and its implications for the government’s hopes is, fortunately, available on Tony Hatfield’s magisterial blog, to which anyone interested is strongly recommended to refer. Tony concludes his posting by saying: "The letter by Human Rights Watch to the Prime Minister of Jordan says it all." The Human Rights Watch letter should also be required reading.
We can assume that the ten men now back in jail ‘awaiting deportation’ will exercise their right of appeal, initially to SIAC. Whichever side loses in SIAC can then probably appeal further to the Court of Appeal and thence to the Law Lords. If the suspect whom the government has ordered to be deported loses in the House of Lords, he can in principle then appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. Each of these judicial bodies will then have to decide whether the suspect "would face a real risk of being subjected to treatment contrary to Article 3 if removed to another State" (Article 3 requires that "No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment"), given (or despite) the assurances by the receiving country that the deportee will not be ill-treated. The Chahal ruling makes it unlikely, anyway at first sight, that the courts will allow these deportations to go ahead.
Interestingly and unusually, the prime minister himself has explicitly and publicly acknowledged the likelihood of obstruction under Chahal by the courts. In his [in]famous 12-point plan statement on 5 August 2005, Tony Blair made tthe following extraordinary threat:
However, the circumstances of our national security have now self-evidently changed and we believe we can get the necessary assurances from the countries to which we will return the deportees, against their being subject to torture or ill-treatment contrary to article 3. We have concluded a Memorandum of Understanding with Jordan and are close to getting necessary assurances from other relevant countries. For example, just yesterday, I have had very constructive conversations with the leaders of Algeria and Lebanon. There are around 10 such countries with whom we are seeking such assurances.
France and Spain, to name just two other European countries, do deport by administrative decision. The effect is often immediate and in some cases the appeal is non-suspensive in other words it takes place outside the country. The assurances given by the receiving nation are adequate for their courts and these countries are also subject to the ECHR and apply it directly.
So it is important to test this anew now, in view of the changed conditions in Britain. Should legal obstacles arise, we will legislate further, including, if necessary amending the Human Rights Act, in respect of the interpretation of the ECHR. In any event, we will consult on legislating specifically for a non-suspensive appeal process in respect of deportations. [My emphasis -- BLB]
Mr Blair, a barrister (however inexperienced in the law), knows and implicitly admits that legislation by the British parliament can’t amend the Human Rights Convention or relieve Britain of its obligations under the Convention in international law: and there is no loophole for derogation in an emergency in this case. So his warning to the courts, unless they uphold the system of deportation with assurances, is that the government will invite parliament to pass a new law requiring the domestic courts to interpret the Convention in ways that will be convenient for the government. It’s barely credible that the head of a government in a democracy could utter such a threat of unconscionable interference with the absolute right of the judiciary to interpret the law, a primary and essential function of the judiciary. It ought to be almost equally incredible that any government could expect to get such legislation through either House of Parliament, although in these dog days of a supine back bench and an elected chamber in thrall to the party whips, I suppose anything’s possible: it’s ominously significant that similar threats against the judges have been uttered in recent days not only by Mr Blair but also by the inimitable Mr Blunkett, and, in a striking return to form, Michael Howard (in a newspaper article headed "Judges must bow to the will of Parliament”), thereby casting doubt on the willingness of the official Opposition which he leads to stand up for the rule of law when the time to be counted arrives in parliament. It would however surely be necessary to use the Parliament Act to get such a brazenly unconstitutional measure past the House of Lords. And even after a prolonged process of that kind, the deportations would still be open to challenge in the European Human Rights Court, itself unlikely to accept instructions from Mr Blair on how it should interpret the Convention. All this may well take many months, perhaps even years, to work through the system. Meanwhile the suspects remain in prison, uncharged, untried, unconvicted.
But our prime minister has an answer to that, too. Even if our courts and the European Court uphold the government’s plan for deporting to torturer countries which have promised not to torture our deportees, notwithstanding Chahal, Mr Blair has pledged to introduce another new law under which suspects will be deported first, and only allowed to appeal against their deportation afterwards — from the country to which they have been consigned, by definition one that habitually practises torture. Even if the deportee enjoyed sufficient freedom on arrival to launch an appeal in the British courts at long distance, it’s very difficult to imagine how he could assemble witnesses and other evidence in support of his challenge; and a British lawyer acting on his behalf in Britain would be impossibly hampered by the difficulty of communicating frequently and in detail with his client. Is our parliament really persuadable to enact such a blatant denial of due process and the rule of law?
The prime minister asserts, no doubt correctly, that in going down these shameful paths Britain will be following in the footsteps of France and Spain, both also signatories of the European Convention. I hope that either these alleged precedents can be shown to be invalid, or parliament and the courts will address the government’s proposals on their merits, or lack of them, and consign them to the dustbin of the history of arrogant and illiberal government where they belong.
Postscript (15 August 2005): Since the entry above was written, Tony Hatfield has published on his blog a further article which deals (in my view definitively) with the question, raised by the prime minister: if France can deport terrorist suspects to countries where torture is often practised without apparently any breach of its obligations under the Convention, why can’t we? Tony Hatfield’s explanation, backed up by chapter and verse from past decisions of the Law Lords, is that France adopts an interpretation of the Human Rights Convention under which the ban on deportation to torturing countries applies only where the torturing is done by the state (the government or its agencies). (The same thing applies similarly, but not necessarily in detail, to Germany, and presumably to Spain.) This interpretation has been repeatedly rejected both by successive home secretaries and by the English courts, on grounds which look pretty impregnable, although they rely in part on provisions of existing UK laws that could in principle be amended by parliament if MPs and the Upper House could be persuaded to stoop that low.
Tony Hatfield’s post on this should be read in conjunction with his earlier piece about the directly relevant Chahal case and its implications, recommended above. Both postings provide invaluable information and arguments for those who will need to decide, in the end, whether the government’s proposals are a sensible way of getting round an awkward obligation under international law, or whether they constitute a betrayal of British traditions and principles of long standing.
Brian
