To say that Israel is sometimes its own worst enemy is to be reminded of Ernest Bevin’s famous retort when someone commented to him that Herbert Morrison, home secretary in the 1945 Attlee government and former leader of the London County Council, was ‘his own worst enemy’: "Not while I’m alive he ain’t," growled Ernie. Israel won’t be its own worst enemy, probably, as long as Hamas — and now apparently a clear majority of the Palestine electorate — are around.
Hamas’s spectacular victory has sparked a predictable debate in the chattering classes on whether this is a positive development which will ultimately augur well for "the peace process" (remember the peace process?), or whether it spells the end of dialogue and negotiations, giving the post-Sharon Israelis the green light to pursue with renewed vigour the unilateralist policies of their lost leader: unilateral decisions, taken without consultation with the Palestinians or even, apparently, with their American paymasters, on crucial questions affecting any eventual settlement such as the extent, timing and manner of any Israeli withdrawals from the occupied territories, the opening of new settlements on the west bank with or without compensating closures of old ones and partial Israeli withdrawal from them, the future of Jerusalem, the future of the fence or wall built and manned by the Israelis to keep out the suicide bombers, much of it on Palestinian territory and thus constituting a de facto annexation of more Palestinian land to Israel, and so forth. Even more than Israeli unilateralism, the brutality of much Israeli reaction to terrorist acts by the Palestinians (much reduced since Hamas declared its recent truce): the over-reaction to any movement of Palestinians close to the Israeli line, with the periodic shooting of young children and other innocent people by Israeli soldiers: and Israel’s policy of assassination of Hamas leaders from the air, often involving the deaths of innocent civilian bystanders — all these lay Israel open to justified criticism and condemnation in the west and especially in Europe. Israel does indeed sometimes seem to be its own second or third worst enemy.
But awareness of Israeli excesses and brutality can’t justify some of the recent emetic attempts in parts of the western media and in the blogosphere to welcome the imminent installation as government of Palestine of Hamas, and to try to justify or excuse its utterly repugnant record and policies. We have seen ignoble efforts to gloss over or deny the manifest incompatibility between Hamas’s aims and policies on the one hand and, on the other, the principles of any eventual settlement with Israel laid down in 1967 by the UN in Security Council resolution 242, still almost universally accepted as the last best and only hope for a peaceful end to this interminable conflict. The essence of 242 is a bargain under which Israel withdraws its "armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict" (the 1967 war) in exchange for Palestinian and Arab recognition of Israel’s right to "live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force". Both sides have hitherto eventually accepted this deal, each of them however demanding evidence of the other fulfilling its side of the bargain before doing so itself. But the arrival of Hamas as the new democratically elected administration of Palestine represents a fundamental change in the nature of that stand-off, since Hamas is committed to a rejection, not only of the Palestinian and Arab half of the bargain, but to Israel’s as well. Hamas has so far resolutely refused to give up "threats or acts of force" as a means of achieving its objectives: worse, it also rejects the recognition of Israel’s "right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries" even after an Israeli withdrawal from all the occupied territories. Hamas regards the whole of Israel as illegally occupying Palestinian land, an occupation that can never be accepted and which can legitimately be resisted by all means including the use of force, like any other illegal occupation. This is, of course, a wholly tenable and consistent view. But it sends the whole of the hitherto accepted basis for any internationally accepted settlement back to the pre-1967 drawing board. And it faces the world with two logically irreconcilable positions on the part of the parties to the conflict, one denying Israel’s right to exist at all, the other insisting on that right as its irreducible bottom line, as any conceivable Israeli government is bound to do.
Against this new and frightening impasse, the issue of the continuation of payments to the Palestine Authority by the US and the EU after Hamas assumes control of it pales into insignificance, although it has been the subject of much discussion and sophistry in the western media ever since the Palestinian election results became known. Perhaps the most offensive piece of grovelling appeasement of Hamas in the arguments of the Arab-leaning media and blogosphere has been the extraordinary argument that since Hamas has won a democratic election, its policies and aims must be ‘respected’, since failure to respect them would amount to a neo-colonialist attempt by a still instinctively imperialist west to impose its ideas and values on an Arab people which has expressed its views in a democratic election. Of course western governments must now reappraise their policies towards Palestine and Israel to take account of the tsunami that has just swept away the whole intricate framework constructed over the past 39 years as the basis for an eventual peaceful settlement. But the fact of having won a democratic election can’t legitimise Hamas’s commitment to violence and to the elimination of the whole of the state of Israel. Nor can it possibly be interpreted, as some dewy-eyed commentators have tried to do, as capable of bringing a peace settlement nearer. As for the future of American and EU payments to the Palestine Authority once Hamas comes into office, it’s impudent to suggest that victory in a democractic election confers on Hamas a right to receive from foreign governments and their taxpayers a continuing subsidy in support of policies and aims that those governments regard as repugnant and wholly inimical to any hope of peace, or that to withdraw the subsidy would represent some kind of dishonourable failure on the part of our governments to uphold the principles of democracy that they profess.
Unless the responsibilities of government, combined with an urgent need to keep the dollars and euros coming in, bring about a sensational shift in Hamas policies and objectives (which most middle eastern experts seem to dismiss as almost inconceivable), it looks as if the best we can now hope for is a continuation and prolongation of the Hamas ‘truce’, i.e. its temporary suspension of violence against Israel, presumably in exchange for a similar suspension by Israel of its own use of violence against Palestinians. But it’s an open question how long such a mutual truce could be sustained if even Hamas proves unable to control the activities of enthusiastic suicide bombers from smaller extremist Palestinian or other Arab groups, or freelances; or — even likelier — if Israel continues to expand settlements on the west bank and unilaterally seeks to impose a readjustment of the land borders between Israel and Palestine that would split Palestine into unviable bantustans and permanently exclude Palestinians from all parts of Jerusalem. The arrival as the government of Palestine of Hamas, by any possible definition a terrorist organisation that practises deliberate violence against civilians[1], goes uncomfortably far towards justifying the Sharonist assertion that in present circumstances Israel has no legitimate negotiating partner, no interlocuteur valable, on the Palestinian side, and therefore has no alternative but to proceed unilaterally to safeguard the security both of its people and of its borders. With Hamas about to be installed in power, it looks very much as if all previous bets are off.
[1] It may fairly be countered that Israel too practises violence against civilians, and may therefore equally justly be labelled a terrorist state; but at least Israel has a partial justification in claiming that it resorts to force only in self-defence and that it never deliberately targets civilians. Hamas can argue that it practises violence only in resistance to illegal occupation, but that can’t excuse the deliberate targeting of civilians, outlawed under numerous international conventions and repugnant to all civilised people (including of course many Arabs and at least some Palestinians).
Brian
Gates and Brown back new global war on TB
– headline inWeekend Financial Times, 28/29 January 2006
At last the gloves are off!
Brian
Full marks to Martin Bright for his article in the New Statesman of 23 January 2006 [1] quoting extracts from the advice of Jack Straw’s private secretary, Irfan Siddiq, to Ms Grace Cassy, a private secretary at No. 10 Downing Street, on how best to handle questions about British involvement in the American practice of rendition (both ‘extraordinary’ and ‘ordinary’). Full marks too once again — I seem to be praising it all the time these days for this and that — to Phil’s Actually Existing blog for a penetrating and thought-provoking analysis of the leaked document. And, finally, full marks to the New Staggers itself for putting the full text of the FCO letter, all 20 paragraphs of it, on its website (PDF file).
But I was struck by what could be the implications of a single rogue alphabetical letter in para 19 of the FCO document. Here it is (please scroll down to see it):
[down more]
[down more]
[Here it is:]
See what I mean? Could it just possibly suggest an American input into the drafting? The CIA, even? Could Mr Siddiq possibly have saved himself trouble by copying-and-pasting into his letter a formula taken from some document thoughtfully provided by our American cousins, bless ‘em? I merely ask the question. O, what a tangled web we weave, / When first we practiCe to deceive…
[1] Only one NS article a day may be downloaded free by non-subscribers.
Brian
Phil Edwards, of the always highly readable blog ‘Existing Actually‘ (aka ‘Actually Existing’), posted on Christmas Eve an interesting piece about the use of ‘infantile’ as a term of political abuse, springing from Lenin’s gibe at ‘Left-Wing Communism’ as an ‘infantile disorder‘, thus triggering long dreary decades of ur-Marxist splinter groups slagging each other off in dog-eared and impenetrable jargon. This evidently led Phil to dust off a poem written in his own salad days and never published until he quoted it in full last month in his ‘infantilism’ piece.
The poem,Our Infant, begins:
Tell me, Vladimir Ilyich: when you swam
Those bright days, history running fast about you;
When the paint was flaking, when last month’s posters
Flapped torn in the streets; when time resumed
And progress was stemmed; were you the only adult?
In an answer to comments on his post, Phil wrote that:
I’d write this one less flashily now, but I still rather like it.
I ‘rather like it’, too; indeed, it’s a striking piece of work, well worth reading in full and savouring, perhaps especially to be appreciated by those of us old enough to remember those gruesome Marxist polemics, all that bitter dissension among the comrades. Where are they now? Writing for the Spectator, I suppose. Meanwhile Our Infant provides a foretaste of the exceptional literacy, both political and literary, which — if I may say so without sounding patronising — characterises Existing Actually. (And Actually Existing.)
Brian
In her allegedly make-or-break statement in the House of Commons on 19 January about sex offenders being permitted to go on teaching, Ruth Kelly, the young and talented education secretary, had the opportunity to speak on the following lines, but didn’t:
12.2 pm
The Secretary of State for Education and Skills (Ruth Kelly): Mr Speaker, I am now ready to give the House my conclusions from a careful study of the facts surrounding the controversy over whether we should automatically ban from teaching for life everybody who has been convicted of or cautioned over any kind of sex offence, and whose name is on the sex offenders’ register or List 99. (I wish the honourable member for Havant, David Willetts, would calm down and listen for a moment.) As the House knows from the hysterical panic in the tabloids in recent days, some people have been concerned to discover that two known past sex offenders have been cleared by ministers to resume teaching on the grounds that careful investigation has confirmed that they pose no danger to children.
I can now inform the House that after the most exhaustive research and enquiries, it has become clear that since the system was first introduced in 1926, a number of former sex offenders or suspects of varying kinds have been cleared by ministerial decision to teach in schools, often subject to stringent conditions. Recent concerns have focused on discretionary decisions by Ministers not to include an individual on List 99, despite that individual being on the sex offenders register. The review that I set in place has identified 10 cases since 1997. In each case, the recommendations after expert evidence were that those individuals posed no threat to children. I can also now state that there is no evidence whatsoever that a single one of these has subsequently been convicted or even accused of any offence against children. This tends to suggest that ministers of both Conservative and Labour administrations have exercised sound judgement in making these decisions, and I have no reason to fear that this will cease to be the case.
It has been suggested in some quarters that ministers should be relieved of the responsibility for deciding whether in borderline or other doubtful cases a lifelong ban is either fair or necessary: and that such decisions should be taken by an independent panel of experts. I have decided however that these decisions should continue to be taken by a person, that’s to say a minister, who is accountable to this House and who may be required to defend and explain his or her decisions to honourable members and to public opinion, in a way that would not be possible if independent experts took the decisions. However, I shall lay down by regulation what has always hitherto been the practice of governments of both parties, namely that before taking a decision the minister must seek the advice of professional representatives of the main parties involved, including the police, social services, local education authorities, psychiatric social workers and school heads and governors concerned. In the few cases where the minister decides to act otherwise than in accordance with the experts’ advice, he or she will be required to state the reasons for the decision in a written statement that will be placed in the library of the House of Commons.
I have also decided not to follow the suggestion made by some commentators (but, contrary to some reports, not by Sir Michael Bichard in his Soham Inquiry report) that we should merge into a single list the seven existing lists of persons whose freedom to work with children may be in question, including the sex offenders register and List 99. If all such persons were to be put on a single list, we would risk blurring the important and relevant differences between widely varying kinds of offence or other activities that have aroused doubt. For example, there is obviously a huge difference between, on the one hand, someone who has persistently sexually abused children for his or her own gratification until found out, and on the other hand a then 16-year-old boy who, perhaps twenty years previously, had a consensual sexual relationship with a girl one year younger than himself and who has done nothing since then to suggest that he might represent any risk whatever to children if allowed to teach. We must keep the circumstances of each individual case in sharp focus and preserve the flexibility necessary to balance the safety of our children from abuse against the need to be fair to individuals. An automatic teaching ban imposed indiscriminately on whole large categories of disparate people would be both unjust and probably in breach of their rights under the Human Rights Act.
Finally, Mr Speaker, I have considered the suggestion that for purposes of imposing a ban on any future employment affecting children, those who have been formally cautioned by the police in connection with an alleged sex offence should be treated in exactly the same way as those who have been charged and convicted of a sex offence. I have come to the conclusion that this would risk giving rise to grave injustice in some cases. It is true that a person who agrees to accept a police caution must also, by doing so, admit his or her guilt. But we need to recognise the intense pressure on a person accused of a sexual offence against children to admit guilt and accept a caution, even if completely innocent, in order to avoid the public stigma of being charged and brought before a court, with the risk of being convicted and perhaps sent to prison even where no offence has been committed. To reduce as far as possible the risks of injustice inherent in the police caution system, I have agreed with my Rt Hon Friend the home secretary that he will make new regulations requiring the police, before inviting a suspect to admit guilt and accept a caution, to warn the suspect of the possible consequences in terms of future employment as a teacher or in any other job involving contact with children; the police will be required to explain that the suspect has the option of being charged and tried rather than accept a caution; and they will be obliged to remind the suspect of his or her right to consult a legal adviser before deciding whether to accept a caution. I am disturbed to discover that not all of these warnings have always and automatically been given, and the House will, I am sure, agree that they must be given in future. Moreover, my Rt Hon Friend has also agreed to ensure that in future the police may offer a caution instead of a charge only in cases where, if the offer of a caution is refused, they have enough evidence on which to base a charge. A caution must never be treated as a convenient way of penalising a suspect against whom there is insufficient evidence to be likely to secure a conviction.
Mr Speaker, I am satisfied that on the basis of the decisions which I have just announced, honourable members and parents everywhere in Britain may be reassured that the existing and long-standing system now in place, operated without complaint by governments of both complexions for many decades, and with the small adjustments that I have described, strikes a fair, safe and reasonable balance between the paramount need to protect our children from harm and the need to keep a sense of proportion, flexibility and fairness in dealing with the many borderline cases of individuals who on close investigation may prove not to present a risk to the children whom they can safely be allowed to teach. Of course there can be no guarantee that a mistake will not be made at some time in the future, however conscientiously the decision has been made. But where the risk is remote and the danger of grave injustice is real, I believe the House and the public would wish us always to come down on the side of justice, and that is what I have done today. (Hon Members: Hear! Hear!)
Alas! Ms Kelly said the exact opposite on almost every point: and on the points where she didn’t say the opposite, she was silent. At the first whiff of gunshot from the tabloids, she hesitated for ten days while her officials burrowed in the files; and when not a single skeleton had been dragged from her own or anyone else’s cupboard, not the faintest sign or smell of a smoking gun produced from her handbag, she went to the House of Commons and unconditionally surrendered. Left to her own devices and judgement, might she have come out of her corner with fists flailing to defend her and her predecessors’ eminently defensible records? Was that pathetic white flag forced on her by a besieged and tremulous prime minister, perhaps speaking through his creepy vicar on earth, the inappropriately named Lord Adonis? Perhaps we shall know when the Blair or Adonis Memoirs are published; probably not before.
What does this pre-emptive surrender tell us about the likely fate of the forthcoming Education Bill, allegedly designed to put flesh on the ugly bones of the Education White Paper that is already proving so indigestible to more than half of Mr Blair’s and Ms Kelly’s back-benchers? Will there be another pre-emptive surrender, and if so to whom — to the Tories who mischievously offer to support the Bill provided that it remains faithful to the White Paper, or to the Parliamentary Labour Party which demands a U-turn on at least three of its key proposals? No doubt Mr Blair would feel more at home with the Tories in defending every last dot and comma of the White Paper, come what may. But will John Prescott and a raft of other senior party and government figures allow him to impose a radical change of education policy whose approval by the House of Commons depends on Tory support against a huge slab, perhaps a majority, of Labour back-bench opinion? Would the Crown Prince, Gordon Brown, allow him to do it? Would he really be prepared to carry on in the face of threats of resignation by key members of the government? Might even Ruth Kelly be prepared to threaten resignation if prevented by No. 10 and her notional underling, Baron Adonis, from negotiating compromises with their own party that would in truth amount to another surrender? We should know the answers soon. Meanwhile my money is on a messy and largely meaningless batch of compromises that will be just enough to buy off a sufficient number of Labour rebels to get the Bill through, perhaps with the Tories abstaining, and to save at least a part of Mr Tony’s face. But I could easily lose my shirt.
Renewed hat-tip to Tony Hatfield whose magisterial deconstruction of the police caution system (based on his own personal experience as a criminal lawyer) hasn’t received anything like the attention it deserves; and another to Michael Portillo, of all people, whose column in today’s (22 January 2006) Sunday Times is spot on as regards sex offenders and teaching, but hopelessly wrong on future education policy and the White Paper.
PS: Yes, I have changed my mind about the desirability of ministers continuing to take responsibility for deciding in borderline cases or appeals whether a past offender or suspect should be allowed to work with children in future, having stated in a recent Ephem, Ruth Kelly and the Plague of Pervs, my then opinion that they should not.
Brian
As everyone knows from reading all the deeply respectful reviews by all the critics in the world, Brokeback Mountain is a beautiful and moving film, beautifully acted, directed and photographed, truthful and courageous in its sympathetic treatment of the love of two macho men for each other. The Wyoming[1] scenery and even the music are beautiful, too. It’s all beautiful. I hated it. It’s relentlessly miserable from start to finish. Compared with this movie, Brief Encounter was a barrel of laughs. Everyone in Brokeback spends most of the time making everyone else even more miserable than before. It doesn’t have a happy beginning, middle, or (least of all) ending. If you have read even a single-paragraph review of it before you see it, you will know precisely what is going to happen right up to the last five or ten of the film’s interminable 134 minutes (it’s based on a short story!), and you can easily guess what’s going to happen in the last ten minutes, too. There is no suspense, no ambiguity, no humour, no occasional lightness of touch to put the tragedy into sharper relief. It moves at a slug-like pace from start to merciful finish. After the first twenty minutes or so I began to resent the obligation imposed by the movie’s dolorous style to watch it with reverence; I had to resist the pressure to allow myself to be emotionally manipulated by it. After the first hour I wanted to stand up in my seat and shout, "For God’s sake, get on with it!" I felt increasingly like Lucky Jim at the lecture on Merrie England. And because I know from all those respectful reviews that this was Great Art and probably the Film of the Year, if not of the decade, heading for a shoal of Oscars and already hung about with Golden Globes, I felt more and more personal shame at my visceral dislike of it.
I saw it with three companions, including my wife. They all loved it. Everyone but me loves it. You will too, if you haven’t yet seen (and loved) it. My extremely discerning daughter says: "You’re just wrong. Brokeback Mountain is fantastic." Of course she’s right, like everyone else. Just don’t go if you’re suffering from depression.
I have hesitated to put these remarks on the blog for fear of suffering the blogosphere’s equivalent of a lynching. I have found the reckless courage to do so in the hope that it might find a kindred spirit out there somewhere, and in the determination not to read any hostile comments.
A couple of days ago we went to King Kong (187 minutes!). It’s absolutely marvellous. Its tongue isn’t quite so far into its cheek as to spoil the delicious, Rover-comic pathos of the scenes between pretty, lively Naomi Watts and the Great Ape with its huge sad bewildered eyes. The computer animations and morphings are massively spectacular, totally incredible, and incredibly convincing. Some of the battles between humans and dinosaurs, giant spiders, enormous land-based lobsters, and so forth, do go on a bit, but even they are good for a white-knuckled laugh. The final scene on and up the Empire State Building is terrific cinema, however childish and predictable. It doesn’t demand reverence or depend on solemnity. It’s nicely judged in its balancing of wild adventure, sentimentality and fun, rather like the best of the Batman films only more so. Taking into account the usual deafening trailers and crash-bang commercials that precede it, it requires a formidable commitment of time, but if you can spare it, do go. (However, if you arrive about half an hour into the film, you won’t have missed a thing. Kong doesn’t make his, or its, appearance until about the eighth reel.) Not recommended for acrophobics.
One small idiosyncrasy is that King Kong could, anatomically speaking, just as well be Queen Kong, which I suppose would give it something in common with Brokeback Mountain . I bet no-one thought of that post-modernist twist.
My wife, however, was bored stiff. It takes all sorts.
[1] Alberta playing the part of Wyoming, I’m now told (see Comments below). So even the scenery was ersatz!
Brian
“Lord Crickhowell also made a coruscating attack on the government’s secrecy.”
– Simon Hoggart, on the ID cards debate in the House of Lords, Guardian, 17 January 2006.
coruscate: verb
1 sparkle, scintillate, coruscate
be lively or brilliant or exhibit virtuosity; "The musical performance sparkled"; "A scintillating conversation"; "his playing coruscated throughout the concert hall"
Category Tree:
- sparkle, scintillate, coruscate
2 sparkle, scintillate, coruscate
reflect brightly; "Unquarried marble sparkled on the hillside"
Category Tree:
emit; give_out; give_off
- reflect; shine
- sparkle, scintillate, coruscate
– http://www.wordreference.com/definition/coruscating
Or could it be that the son of the author of The Uses of Literacy meant ‘excoriating’?
Both the (London) Times and, with more irony, Le Monde ("L’ambassadeur Campbell choque le Vatican"), both well worth reading, have commented on the two interesting and novel features of the appointment of Britain’s new ambassador to the Holy See (the Vatican).
First, breaking with hallowed tradition, Francis Campbell, 35, is the first Roman Catholic since the Reformation to be appointed to represent Britain at the Holy See — not, incidentally, to be ambassador to Italy, as the headline of the Times report might suggest. Secondly, his arrival there coincides with the closure of the former residence and embassy of the British ambassador at the Vatican and their effective merger, at any rate physically, with the larger and more prestigious British Embassy in Rome, headed by the much more senior British ambassador to Italy.
The former convention whereby the ambassador (formerly Minister) to the Holy See has always been a practising Anglican, and his senior deputy a practising Roman Catholic, made a great deal of sense, for obvious reasons, and there seems to have been no obvious reason for breaking with it. The purely physical merger of the two Rome embassies, principally in order to save quite a lot of the taxpayers’ money but also in the interests of security post-9/11, comes perilously close to a breach of the formal agreement that countries will always have a representative to the Holy See, if any, who is separate from the ambassador to Italy, even though both will (normally) necessarily be resident in Rome. The Vatican is understandably anxious to prevent a situation where countries give their ambassadors to Italy dual accreditation also to the Holy See, which would obviously lead to the Holy See getting second-class attention from ambassadors whose main focus and interest lie elsewhere. Hence the formal protests by the Vatican’s equivalent of a Foreign Minister at Britain’s new arrangement.
I have been following this mini-saga with amused curiosity ever since the announcement of the appointment and of the new cost-cutting residential and office arrangements. I have the impression, possibly false, from some reports that the two ambassadors now have a joint staff, i.e. that Ambassador Campbell will not only have his official residence in the grounds of the Rome embassy, but that he will also in effect have to rely on the existing staff of the British embassy to Rome for his political, diplomatic, and logistical support (probably in practice much more advantageous for him than having a tiny and inadequate staff of his own). That, if so, does look very much like a merger of the two embassies, but I suppose that as long as there are two discrete ambassadors, the proprieties are formally observed.
The fact that H E Ambassador Campbell was formerly a first secretary in the Rome Embassy adds to the somewhat surreal character of the arrangement. In effect we have closed down our embassy to the Holy See, and appointed a 35-year-old first secretary in the embassy to Italy as a rather notional ambassador to the Vatican. No wonder the cardinals are peeved. If we get away with it — and because of the financial savings involved I guess we’ll be difficult to shift — it will be surprising if others don’t follow suit. Having an ambassador resident in Berlin or Paris and accredited to the Holy See (as some other countries do — see the Le Monde article) must in practice be even more inconvenient and humiliating for the Vatican diplomats than the new British arrangement, under which they can at least claim to have a separate ambassador within easy reach.
Personally I think it’s a mistake to appoint a Roman Catholic as British ambassador to the Holy See, since there’s bound to be a conflict of interest, loyalty and obligation sooner or later, given the degree of obedience to the Roman Catholic Church and to the person of the Pope required by his Church. But this obvious consideration is evidently outweighed by the fact that the youthful envoy once worked in No. 10 and Mr Tony presumably liked him. He’s obviously a very talented and well qualified person (Campbell, not Blair) who will no doubt go places in due course, i.e. go real places. I doubt if the ambassador to the Holy See has a serious and demanding job to do, nor enough genuine work to occupy him for more than two or three days a week, so there seems to be no obligation to take all this terribly seriously, any more than the splendidly-named M. Tincq of Le Monde appears to do.
Sir Ivor Roberts, British ambassador to Italy, is a splendidly robust character. I can imagine him pressing for this sensible ‘reform’ of the physical and staff arrangements and dismissing with peals of laughter the likely objections of the cardinals. But that’s pure speculation on my part: for all I know (i.e. nothing), he might have been opposing it tooth and nail.
[Hat-tip: Peter Harvey, who reminded me of all this when he sent me the article from Le Monde.]
After-thought, 17 January: Could it be that the prime minister, asked to approve the appointment as ambassador to the Holy See of a Mr Campbell who had previously been on the staff of No. 10 Downing Street, assumed that this must be Alastair of that name and instantly gave his enthusiastic approval?
Brian
The hysterical witch-hunt over rabid child abusers being cleared in their thousands by the Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly, to infest our schools (according to the media) should be treated with profound scepticism. We still don’t know how many people whose names are on the ‘sex offenders register’ have been permitted by ministers to work as school teachers, how many actually work as teachers, whether any single one of them has been convicted or even accused of any offence against a child after having been put on the register and subsequently employed in a school, or even the criteria used by ministers to decide whether an index-listed person should be cleared to teach, or under what conditions.
What we do know is that a person called Paul Reeve, who had never been convicted of any offence but who had received a police ‘caution’ after his credit card number had appeared on a website in the United States which included child pornography and whose name had accordingly been added to the 24,000 or so names on the sex offenders register, had had his case reviewed by a then Department of Education minister (not Ruth Kelly) and had been cleared for employment as a school teacher, a decision which seems on the available evidence to have been entirely defensible. The idea that tens of thousands of people who have never been before a court of law or accused, still less convicted, of any offence, should be automatically barred for the rest of their lives from taking any kind of job involving contact with children, and in effect publicly shamed into the bargain, should be dismissed as manifestly unjust, especially when one considers the many reasons for people having been cautioned by the police but which should have no implications for their future dealings with children. A system involving such a life-long penalty on such a flimsy basis and without any kind of due process would, on the face of it, be in obvious breach of the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights which it incorporates in our domestic law. Hence the provision for exceptions to be made, where appropriate, at the discretion of a minister.
It is certainly weird and wrong that a politician should be entrusted with this responsibility (and Ms Kelly has already promised that this will be changed), but there obviously needs to be some scope to be given for exemptions to be made in appropriate cases from the ban on employment with children, preferably by a trained professional with knowledge of the individual case. The sex offenders’ register should not be confused with the so-called List 99 of people who have been tried and convicted of various crimes and whose inclusion in the list warns local authorities and other employers not to employ them in any job involving or close to children.
Yet in the last bout of national hysteria following the gruesome Soham murders, an inquiry into the whole system was set up under Sir Michael Bichard, who recommended, among other things, that all the various lists, registers and indexes should be merged into a single list[1], despite the quite different characters of the existing lists and the differing status of people on them as judicially convicted offenders or merely recipients of a police caution. It is true that cautions are notionally ‘voluntary’, in that the person concerned can opt not to accept the caution but instead to risk being charged with an offence and taken to court. But where the reason for the caution carries with it a likelihood of terrible damage to the person’s public reputation, family life, and job (even if totally unconnected with children), the temptation to accept the caution, rather than risk an appearance in court and a possible prison sentence if convicted, must be almost irresistible, even when the person knows himself or herself to be innocent. To blight someone’s life for ever on the basis of what may be little more than police suspicion is a serious matter. Yet that is what would seem to be an inevitable consequence of the Bichard recommendations. True to form, the tabloids are nevertheless belabouring the government for having delayed implementation of the Bichard report.
No-one, however, with the possible exception of Kim Howells (the minister who authorised the employment of Mr Reeve and who publicly acknowledged that he had made the decision to do so), comes out of this sorry tale with any great credit:
- Ruth Kelly, the besieged Education Secretary, has promised to accelerate the implementation of Bichard (even though she must know that some at least of its recommendations are gravely flawed), and she seems on the face of it to have made a misleading statement to parliament about the implications of being included on the sex offenders register. But her main offence is to have been the education secretary who had the misfortune to be holding the parcel when the music stopped, the parcel having previously been in the possession of dozens of education ministers, Labour and Tory, all of whom have hitherto escaped unscathed (and probably unknowing).
- A man who has a conviction for an assault on — meaning an illegal sexual relationship with — a 15-year-old girl and is accordingly on List 99, has nevertheless been employed, however briefly, as a teacher, through a failure somewhere to check the list before employing him (it doesn’t yet seem clear who was at fault here, although it appears to have had no adverse consequences in practice and may well prove to be an isolated though serious case).
- The Department of Education is clearly at fault in not knowing, and in taking so interminably long to find out, how many cases there have been of ministerial approval for the employment of persons notwithstanding their inclusion in the sex offenders register. The department, and its ministers, must also take the blame for their failure of nerve in not daring to confront the tabloids by pointing out the flaws in the Bichard recommendations and making it clear that the government would not implement them (or at any rate the ones involving a merger of the lists).
- Various Parent-teacher Associations and their spokespersons are at fault for rushing in front of the television cameras with wild talk about British parents not being able to sleep at night for fear that their kids are being daily molested by fiends masquerading as teachers, with the knowing acquiescence of Ruth Kelly personally. Perfect examples of the irrationally risk-averse obsessions of our safety-first society.
- The Conservative Opposition has sought to make political capital out of all this by encouraging public opinion and the media to heap the blame for everything that has gone wrong (or could possibly go wrong) on the hapless Ruth Kelly, and by demanding her resignation ("she should consider her position", according to the shadow education secretary, mealy-mouthed politician-speak for ‘resign’) — a move which will undermine their credibility next time they call for a minister to resign when they actually have solid grounds for doing so.
- And the tabloids — well, it doesn’t need to be spelled out.
The only positive consequence of all this, in my view, is that Ruth Kelly’s standing will be so badly damaged (however unfairly and disproportionately) by the hubbub that it will make it that much harder for her to get the government’s forthcoming and highly controversial Education Bill through the house of commons and/or the house of lords. If that bill proves to be anything like the white paper on which it is supposed to be based, we shall all be much better off without it. But it will be a pity if the able and engaging Ms Kelly, appointed to this senior and burdensome position long before she was ready for it by Mr Blair’s misjudgement, is allowed to see her career run into the buffers because of a media frenzy over sex offenders followed by the hopeless task of getting through parliament a measure which a majority of the government’s own back-benchers cordially detest: another prime ministerial misjudgement.
Hat-tip: to Simon Jenkins, who as usual articulates with deadly clarity the issues at stake here, in his column in today’s Sunday Times. (But I had been planning to write on these lines before I read his piece.)
[1] Update (16 January): I may have done Sir Michael Bichard’s report and recommendations an injustice in the aspersions cast on them above. According to a press report I have just read, Bichard actually recommended the creation of a new register of all persons working in any capacity with children, whether or not any of them had been convicted of a relevant offence or offences or been cautioned in relation to an offence. It seems that the government has rejected this proposal on grounds of cost and plans instead to merge all the existing lists and registers into one. So it’s apparently the government, not Sir Michael, who’s to blame for this fairly obviously flawed proposal.
Brian
The media have been consumed for days by the Charles Kennedy mini-saga, part smallish tragedy, part comedy. Since the LibDems have no conceivable hope of forming a government at any time in the foreseeable future, and whoever leads them is never going to be prime minister, we can afford the luxury of enjoying their leadership shenanigans on a purely personal level and not bother about the alleged ideological differences between the various protagonists. The only circumstances in which these people might have a marginal influence on government policy are if there’s a hung parliament, not entirely unthinkable now that Mr Cameron seems to be rousing the Tories from their long sleep and with all three major parties (if one can pretend for a moment that the LibDems are a major party) fighting the next election under new leaders, making prediction unusually difficult. We all feel sorry for Charles Kennedy, naturally, but the sanctimonious tributes to him all over the radio and television programmes by those whose knives are still quivering in his back are a little hard to take. Funny that this is the third Kennedy assassination. Well, not really funny, I suppose.
* * * * *
The irrelevance of the LibDems is the subject of a typically sharp and perceptive column in today’s Sunday Times by the irrepressibly patrician Simon Jenkins, always worth reading even (or especially) when at his most mischievous. Several of his remarks so closely resemble what I have been saying for years about the LibDems, here and elsewhere, that I might almost suspect him of plagiarism, if I thought he was likely to visit this blog occasionally (but see below). For example:
- The Liberal Democrats represent no great interest. [This always seems to me to be their greatest weakness, rarely remarked on. -- BLB]
- For decades the one distinctive Liberal policy
has been not to replace one of the two big parties but to win electoral
reform and thus a centrist “blocking third” in the House of Commons. It
has been to exchange too little power for too much. It has sought
perpetual minority government, to remove democracy from the polls to
the bartering rooms of parliament. [The pithiest and most economical demolition of the PR myth that I can remember -- BLB]- The business of Commons leadership, of shadow
cabinets and frontbench portfolios, is a charade for an opposition with
no hope of power.- From the moment of his election in 1994 Blair
was not going to allow the Tories to outflank him on the right. He
would adopt the Thatcherite settlement lock, stock and barrel.- Blair’s strategy worked for Blair. But it left Labour’s
demographic base vulnerable, a free pass to the Liberal Democrats. To
exploit that pass the latter needed a leader capable of seeing the
opportunity on the centre left and pursuing it with passion and
ambition…. Kennedy… opposed the war in Iraq and was
emphatically to the left of Blair on income tax, student fees, drugs
reform and civil liberty…. But no war
was declared, no trumpet sounded. Kennedy was not the leader to shift
the tectonic plates of British politics and restore the old Liberal
pre-eminence. The opportunity, such as it was, passed.
Precisely.
* * * * *
A few blog-posts ago, I was lamenting the gradual passing of that grand old word ‘me’, the accusative and other cases of ‘I’, with hardly anyone nowadays daring to say or write (for example) ‘my mother and me’ even when it’s obviously correct, and ‘my mother and I’ would be ear-piercingly wrong (as in: "It always seems to my mother and me that…"). There was a corker last month in a Guardian interview by James Harkin with Gerry Adams:
We walk out of the House of Commons to look for the photographer. As
soon as we find him, he asks Adams and I to chat while he takes his
pictures.
Doesn’t the Guardian employ sub-editors or proof-readers any more? Or did some wretched sub ‘correct’ "Adams and me" to read "Adams and I" in the belief that he was saving the unfortunate Mr Harkin from an embarrassing howler?
* * * * *
Going back to the subject of party leadership issues, I wonder how many paid-up members of the commentariat will have picked up a remarkable feature of Tony Blair’s interview on the Andrew Marr Sunday morning television programme (formerly David Frost’s slot). For the first time that I’m aware of, Blair referred several times to Gordon Brown in terms which clearly assumed, at least once explicitly, that Brown would succeed him as party leader and prime minister. On all the previous occasions on which I have heard or read Blair on this subject, he has seemed to go out of his way to avoid articulating any assumptions whatever about a Brown succession, tacitly encouraging the speculation that he is privately manoeuvring to try to ensure that the hollow crown goes to anyone else but his old mate Gordon. This morning, though, he even referred to Gordon having been his partner in creating ‘New Labour’; he poured cold water on the idea that on succeeding Blair as leader and prime minister Gordon would revert to Old Labour policies and destroy his, Blair’s, New Labour legacy; and he expressly disagreed with Marr’s provocative suggestion that when Blair went, the succession might usefully pass to one of the younger generation of Labour MPs rather than to another member of Blair’s own generation. What on earth can this mean? Has peace broken out in the upper reaches of the Labour leadership? Perhaps Tony-and-Gordon, that suddenly elderly double act, have cottoned on to the intriguing prospect that when Tony finally steps down, shortly before the next general election, both David Cameron and whoever succeeds Kennedy as LibDem leader will be old hat, their leadership roles by then no longer interesting or newsworthy: by contrast, it will be Gordon Brown as a new prime minister who will have the novelty value, itself probably worth a few hundred thousand votes in the marginals.
* * * * *
One other remark made in one of this morning’s cornucopia of television political programmes, this time a throw-away line, rang a bell with me that (to continue the cliché) was music to my ears. Alan Watkins, doyen (and best-informed, often funniest and most penetrating) of political commentators, speaking through one of those strange television monitors mounted on the Sky News studio wall in a discussion on Adam Boulton‘s weekly programme, speculated that arguably Roy Jenkins and David Owen more than anyone else had been responsible for the decade-long hegemony of Margaret Thatcher.
* * * * *
Much of this blog has been devoted in recent weeks to the issue of the use in British courts of evidence likely to have been procured originally by the use of torture. Back in 2004 when the Court of Appeal, by a 2-1 majority, declared that such evidence should indeed be admissible in our courts (a ruling much later overturned with horror by the law lords), hardly anyone seemed to take much notice of it. For some reason I did notice it and wrote a letter to The Times expressing my dismay over its implications. Happily, my letter was taken up in a splendid newspaper column that concluded:
In The Times on Monday a former
immigration scrutineer, Sir Brian Barder, attacked the appeal court
decision. Surely, he said, the court should have issued “a ringing
condemnation of reliance on evidence obtained by torture, wherever and
by whomever practised, as a basis for imprisoning people indefinitely
and without trial”.
It is scarcely believable that such words need writing in Britain in the 21st century. They do.
That was Simon Jenkins, writing in The Times on 18 August 2004. He told me subsequently that if it had not been for my letter, he would not have been aware of the controversial and objectionable decision of the Appeal Court. (Maybe he does read my blog now after all.) I would like to think that my Times letter, which seems to me to stand up quite well in the light of much subsequent analysis of the issues, played a modest part in sparking off the great debate on the ethics of using, in court or in the investigation of terrorism or other crimes or plots, torture-tainted evidence. Not many people at that time had even heard of Craig Murray!
Brian
