Norman Kember, a 74-year-old Briton from Pinner, was one of four soi-disants Christian Peacemakers kidnapped in Iraq 119 days ago. One, an American, was murdered. On Thursday, 23 March, Kember and his remaining two fellow-hostages, both Canadians, were rescued in a bloodless, multi-national military operation spear-headed by the SAS. Martin Kelly’s short, sharp and sensible blog post betrays a certain impatience with Professor Kember’s escapade:
"Whilst the release of Norman Kember from his captivity at the hands of Iraqi neck-smiters is certainly to be welcomed, one hopes he’s flying home commercially. He made his own way there, so he can make his own way back. Preferably with a bill from the SAS in his pocket."
I agree with that.
In the past 24 hours the question of Kember’s attitude to the military and to their action in rescuing him (when he had said before he was kidnapped that in such an event he wouldn’t want 
any military operation to rescue him) has been in all the headlines and lead reports here in Britain, the subject of heated discussion in the chat shows and current affairs discussion programmes, and extensively argued out in the blogs (2,430 posts currently contain references to Norman Kember, according to Technorati). Did he or didn’t he, when first released, thank the SAS special forces and other military who rescued him and the two Canadians? Last night on television General Sir Michael Jackson, Chief of Defence Staff, said he had not thanked his rescuers, unless he (Jackson) had missed it. Uproar! — see e.g. today’s report in The Times Online, headed: "Army’s top general attacks Kember for failing to thank SAS rescue team". Kember did include a word of thanks to the soldiers in his formal statement issued this afternoon on his return home to Pinner, but it wasn’t much better than perfunctory –
"Another group that I hope you do not forget are the relatives of British soldiers killed or wounded in Iraq. I do not believe that a lasting peace is achieved by armed force, but I pay tribute to their courage and thank those who played a part in my release."
And at least one spokesperson for his religious organisation, Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), has been quoted as answering criticisms (of Kember’s action in going to Iraq when he knew he was liable to be kidnapped, and of his ungracious reluctance to thank his rescuers) by pointing out that he had made it clear that he didn’t want the military to do anything for him if he was captured, and that since his express wishes had been ignored, it was hardly surprising that he had been in no hurry to say thank you. This is partially contradicted by a statement from CPT according to which —
The Rev Bob Gardiner, of Harrow Baptist Church, said: "We are grateful to the British government for its close co-operation with myself and the Kember family since Norman was kidnapped in November. We were impressed by the sensitivity with which it responded to our concerns about any possible use of force in any rescue attempt. We are thankful for the way in which they honoured their promises to intervene only when there was a considerable degree of assurance that there would be no loss of life."
The FCO and MOD have declined to confirm that any such promises were given. But it saves face all round to pretend that they were, even if they were not; and it’s difficult to believe that they could have been. An SAS source has been quoted as saying that the army in Iraq could do without having to divert scarce resources to rescuing people who had ignored official advice not to go to Iraq; they had enough on their plates without that. Meanwhile, according to the same BBC News report,
Despite the kidnappings, another CPT member, Jan Benvie has told BBC News she intends to go to Iraq in July. She said she did not accept her presence should mean an extra responsibility for the security forces.
It’s not entirely clear what the CPT members have actually been doing in Iraq, although CPT claims to have been the first to discover and publicise the abuses at Abu Ghraib and also abuses of Iraqi detainees by British soldiers. They say they have been building bridges and making peace by their day-to-day contacts with Iraqis in the course of shopping, doing the laundry, etc.
According to the BBC, "Between 10 and 40 Iraqis are kidnapped every day – often children snatched on their way to school and held for a ransom of between £3,000 and £30,000."
It may not be entirely fair to suspect Kember and his three kidnapped companions of actively seeking Christian martyrdom, General Gordon style, but they do seem to have acted with culpable disregard of the possible implications for others of their own recklessness. It’s all very well to make a kind of Living Will with instructions that there’s to be no military action to rescue you if you’re captured (or alternatively that there’s to be no rescue attempt if there’s a risk of loss of life in the process, which is rather different), but such demands are wholly unrealistic. No government could contemplate confronting public opinion at home with an abject failure to take whatever action might be necessary, at almost any cost[1], to save its citizens whose lives are in imminent danger, on the excuse that the captives had said they didn’t want to be rescued by soldiers: and any military rescue attempt is bound to entail a risk that people will be killed or wounded.
[1] According to the Times report quoted earlier, –
The hunt for Norman Kember and his fellow hostages involved:
250 men from the Task Force Black US/British/Australian counter-kidnap unit;
100 men from Task Force Maroon, the Paras and Royal Marines backing special forces;
15 men in helicopter crews;
AND tens of thousands of pounds spent on helicopter and transport aircraft flights.
Which I suppose says it all. If a single British or other soldier had been killed in the course of the rescue operation, the welcome home for Mr Kember might have been a good deal cooler. Professor Kember’s statement today ended:
"I now need to reflect on my experience – was I foolhardy or rational? – and also to enjoy freedom in peace and quiet."
He shouldn’t need very much time for reflection to arrive at the obvious answer to his own question.
Postscript: For an interesting discussion of the economics of dangerous activities voluntarily undertaken by individuals regardless of the potential cost to public funds and risks to the lives of others, look here.
Brian
Owen has beaten me to it with his post about the government’s decision to drop its long-incubated and utterly indefensible Mental Health Bill, and instead to insert its most objectionable features into the existing Act. As Owen says,
The Government has announced new mental health detention plans under which people who are deemed mentally ill with a condition that cannot be treated, and who have committed no crime, can be detained in
Lubyankaa mental hospital indefinitely.
The Government has concluded that it will not be able to get its controversial draft Mental Health Bill through Parliament to make these changes, because of criticism of the measures from mental health experts and civil rights groups.
So instead they are going to introduce similar measures by amending the existing Mental Health Act 1983 and Mental Capacity Act 2005. The main difference is that patients who are locked up without their consent will be given a right to appeal. As things stand, Parliament will need to approve the amendments.
This government seems to have a mysterious and disreputable passion for locking people up indefinitely without trial, indeed without even the minor inconvenience of any obligation to charge them with any offence. The mental health (Orwell-speak for sickness) proposals are the fourth manifestation of this passion.
Detention without trial, Mark 1: The government became increasingly frustrated by its inability to deport a handful of foreigners deemed by the home secretary to pose a threat to national security but who, if deported to their native lands, would risk being tortured, or worse, which would breach their rights under the European Human Rights Convention. So our ministers took powers to lock such people up without trial until such time as their native lands stopped torturing their citizens and the undesirable aliens could safely be thrown out. Because detaining them without trial also constituted a breach of their human rights under the Convention, the government shamelessly declared a purely fictitious state of emergency so that they could suspend the application to the UK of the relevant provision of the Convention under a ‘derogation’ from it. The Court of Appeal, increasingly erratic these days, upheld this unbelievable set of measures as lawful and consistent with the Convention. The Law Lords, under the always reliable Lord Bingham, struck them down as discriminatory and disproportionate, declared them inconsistent with Britain’s Convention obligations, and quashed the derogation. Note that it wasn’t parliament that threw out this disgraceful assault on basic civil liberties by a panicky and illiberal government, but a group of elderly judges.
Detention without trial, Mark 2: Frustrated by the Law Lords, the government decided to turn their judgement to its own advantage by extending the liability to be detained without trial to British citizens, not just foreigners, thus circumventing the Law Lords’ finding of unlawful discrimination. To get round the Convention prohibition of detention without trial, ministers devised a regime of restrictions and prohibitions under Control Orders which, in their most extreme form, fall just marginally short of house arrest (which would fall into the category of detention). Under this regime the suspect is unable to earn a living and support his family, to leave his home (likely to be a small flat shared with a sizeable family) for more than an hour a day, to meet any person without the government’s permission, to use a computer or a mobile telephone, to move house, or to publish his views in any form. All this without any obligation on the government to charge the suspect with any offence, still less to give him a trial. Control Orders may be indefinitely renewed. Any breach of the Order is punishable by imprisonment. No wonder at least one suspect subjected to this savage routine has demanded that he be returned to prison, and another has decided to risk life and limb by agreeing to be returned to his country of origin despite the real likelihood that he will there be tortured, imprisoned in conditions even more horrific than those at Belmarsh, or possibly executed. The Control Order regime remains in force, indeed has just been renewed for another year by a supine parliament. Its legitimacy has not yet been challenged in the House of Lords or the European Court of Human Rights.
Detention without trial, Mark 3: The government responded with alacrity to the demand by the police and security services for power to detain a terrorist ‘suspect’ without trial or even charge for up to three months while the police conducted an investigation of his affairs with a view to a possible eventual prosecution. The government accordingly included a provision for such a power (replacing the former limit of 14 days) in the latest of its interminable procession of anti-terrorist laws. Parliament at last rebelled. Ministers indignantly protested that the security forces needed much longer than a fortnight to complete complex investigations likely to entail decrypting masses of computer data and awaiting replies to their enquiries from slow-moving foreign security agencies. This slyly evaded the issue. No-one disputed the need for adequate time for the police to complete complex investigations: the question was why they needed to put behind bars throughout that investigation a suspect against whom they had insufficient evidence to support a prosecution. After protracted and largely irrelevant debate, parliament agreed to a ‘compromise’: a suspect can now be detained without charge or trial for up to 28 days. The home secretary has already indicated his intention to try again for 90 days in the next of his anti-terrorist Bills.
Detention without trial, Mark 4: Ministers are still determined to take powers to detain indefinitely people who have committed no offence and are unconnected with terrorism, but who suffer from an ill-defined (perhaps indefinable) "severe personality disorder" for which no treatment is possible other than what amounts to sedation. They have so far failed to reveal where and by whom such unfortunate people are to be detained: prison would seem obviously out of the question, not only because the prisons are already grossly overcrowded, but principally because these detentions cannot be imposed as punishments: no question of guilt, retribution, remorse or rehabilitation can arise. Nor can they sensibly be detained in hospitals if they cannot be treated, indefinitely blocking beds needed for patients who can and need to be treated — as well as obliging hospitals to set up all the apparatus required for compulsory detention: the locks and keys, the 24-hour guards, the control and searches of visitors. And is the sponsoring minister really going to put his or (more likely) her name to the obligatory declaration that the measure involves no inconsistency with the Human Rights Act and the Human Rights Convention? Well, yes, I suppose she or he will sign up without a hint of hesitation.
Plenty of work piling up for the Law Lords, then.
Brian
A disproportionate number of the horrors that follow come from our old friend the Grauniad, long famous for its misprints (hence the affectionate ‘Grauniad’) but until fairly recently not notorious for its errors of syntax and grammar. But the Gnaurdia probably sins less often than most other comparable organs: it is no doubt over-represented here because it’s the paper I read regularly, and in hard copy. In many cases the authors named and shamed here can plead ‘not guilty’ and blame their copy editors or sub-editors.
Sticklers will argue the toss over one or two of these items — one such stickler, shown a preview of the first few, already has — but I maintain my view that every one of these quotations ought to make even moderately sensitive ears and eyes wince, if an ear or eye can be said to wince (mine do). Here they are:
“Daniel C—- and Danielle M—— … had paid their last respects to a teenage friend who had died of a brain tumour before getting into the car which struck a lamppost then a wall in St Leonards…” Audrey Gillan, Guardian, 31 Oct 05
“Within seconds I was embracing Karrim, whom I thought was dead!”
– Lt. Col. the Hon.Ian Chant-Sempill, MOD (Foreign Liaison section), Financial Times magazine, Oct 29/30 2005, p. 7.
“But they knew whom they were, who they represented and what mattered most.” Jackie Ashley, ‘Take the voters for granted and they will throw you out’, Guardian, 13 Feb 2006 [a wonderful double!]
“…a pair of property developers, David and Simon Reuben, whom he argued were obstructing plans for the 2012 Olympics.” Guardian editorial, 24 March 2006
“The lynchpin of the BBC’s autumn – a series of updated Shakespeares – starts on Monday.”
– Mark Lawson, Guardian2, 2.11.05 [“linchpin, not ly- “ – Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors]
“The vision of a Europe where free trade and the exchange of services flows is looking increasingly like a utopian dream, as the European Parliament today watered-down plans to throw open competition in Europe’s vast service sector.” BBC Newsnight daily e-mail, 16 February 2006. [Pity about that hyphen in 'watered-down' used as a verb: the hyphen belongs only where the phrase is used adjectivally ("a watered-down version") which should not only look different from the verb, but is actually pronounced differently, too: so no excuses, please.]
Here are three recent examples of an increasingly common failure to distinguish between chalk and cheese in lists:
“This should do something to boost growth, consumer choice and improve worker mobility…”
Guardian first editorial, 17 February 2006
“The photography is strong, the headlines are well written, smart and tie in perfectly with the images.” — Society for News Design, New York, citation of the Guardian as the world’s best designed newspaper, 22 Feb 2006.
“This economic strength also enabled me to do more to help families, the older generation and to continue improving our public services.” – Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Budget Day e-mail message to Labour Party members. (Real author unknown.)
“[When David Cameron’s brand of Conservatism crosses the Channel or the Atlantic,] claws are sharpened, views toughened and centrist instincts discretely hidden away.”
Guardian second editorial, 17 February 2006.
“And they were enjoying their part in Rudman’s success, for without their efforts, she may well not have been at the games.” Guardian, 17 February 2006, p.2. (Well, was she at the games or wasn’t she?)
“Uttered 50 years ago tomorrow, this was Khrushchev’s secret speech: a coruscating indictment of Stalinism…” Tom Parfitt in Moscow, Guardian, 24 February 2006
[Coruscate: To give forth intermittent or vibratory flashes of light; to shine with a quivering light; to sparkle, glitter, flash. OED 2nd ed.
Excoriate:
* condemn: express strong disapproval of; "We condemn the racism in South Africa"; "These ideas were reprobated"
* chafe: tear or wear off the skin or make sore by abrading; "This leash chafes the dog's neck". -- http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn%3Fs%3Dexcoriate ]
“Hewitt Announces Action To Turnaround NHS Finances
… Today’s report highlights that: …
* as a result of this assessment, 18 organisations will get immediate turnaround support to help them tackle financial problems; and,
* a further 23 organisations will also receive additional expertise to support financial turnaround.” Department of Health Press Release, 25 January 2005
[Hat-tip: Thersites’s blog. The press release here uses ‘turnaround’ as a verb, an adjective or adjectival noun, and a noun, within just a few lines. The OED Second Edition describes ‘turnaround’ as ‘mainly US’ and almost all its examples show it as hyphenated. None is a verb.]
“In the final summary, King Kong is fine, but nothing more. Unless we are talking sheer volume; there it reins supreme.” — Review of King Kong, Jonny Lieberman, Ruthless Reviews
“As a life-long Labour voter it is sad (not to say distressing)…” – Letter from the Isle of Bute, Sunday Times, 12 March 2006.
“Possibly people like you or I, possibly weird people…” – Rod Liddle, Sunday Times, 12 March
2006.
“If the Labour party’s treasurer was unaware of the £10m loans, into who’s bank accounts were these sums paid?”
– Letter, Guardian, 18 March 2006
“Mr Blair has a majority of 69 in the Commons, but more than 35 leftwing rebels and disgruntled ex-ministers are prepared to vote against Labour legislation. They taunt him as Ramsey MacBlair – a reference to Ramsey MacDonald, the first Labour prime minister, who split the party in 1931 by forming a national government with the Tories.”
– Financial Times editorial, 18-19 March 2006
“Overall, Mr [Gordon] Brown summed up his thinking: ‘…instead of cutting investment, to hold firm and not waiver, on the principles that have given Britain stability.’ “ – Jonathan Freedland, Guardian, 23 March 06.
“Two weeks ago at least 52 drowned when two boats sunk after leaving Mauretania.” – Giles Tremlett, Guardian, 23 March 06.
* * * *
As resident of a glass house, I know the risks of throwing stones like these. I’m fully prepared for the sound of smashed glass in comments.
Brian
Guess which was the political leader of whom it was written that he –
…had a tendency to think in terms of right and wrong, instead of terms of legal and illegal. Because he thought that his motives were always good for the things that he wanted to do, he found difficulty in thinking that there could be legal limitations on them. [He] was not a legalistic-minded person. He was not an economic-minded person. He was a strong thinker in terms of right and wrong, for which he frequently went back to quotations from the Scriptures. Certain things just were not right in his view’.
Does that ring a bell? Wrong. It was about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, from the memoir of 
Roosevelt, ‘That Man’, the last paragraph of Chapter 4 (‘That Man as Lawyer’), OUP 2003, by Robert H Jackson. Jackson was United States Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials, Attorney General of the United States, and a Supreme Court Justice. In 1953 he began to write a portrait of FDR which was still unfinished when he died in 1954. The manuscript was discovered and edited by John Q Barrett, a law professor at St John’s University in New York. Barrett also incorporated excerpts from transcripts of oral history interviews Jackson gave to Dr Phillips of the Columbia University Oral History programme. The transcripts had been edited by Jackson, and were finished just eight days before his death.
There’s a different contemporary resonance in a description of the last dinner Jackson attended with the President on 17 March 1945[1], St Patrick’s Day and the Roosevelts’ 40th wedding anniversary. After dinner there was a movie show, including home movies of the visit to Yalta and theYalta Conference, taken by members of his own family and staff:
Then, too, there were movies of the entire reception of King Ibn Saud, the King of Egypt, Haile Selassie of Abyssinia and the Oriental potentates. The President told us a good deal about Ibn Saud and his forty-five sons, and apparently found him an intensely interesting character. He commented on the fact that he was not allowed to have any cocktails or smoke while the King was aboard his ship and he was for four hours without a cigarette. This was out of deference to Ibn Saud as head of the Mohammedan Church [sic]. Also no women were allowed aboard the ship while the King was there. Accordingly women members of the family were taken off for the occasion. (‘That Man as Companion and Sportsman‘, p. 153)
Barely 60 years ago!
Hat-tip to my wife, voracious reader, who spotted these splendid pieces.
[1] See date of this item.
Brian
Some of us expect the Labour party and a Labour government, even a New Labour one, to behave better and more honestly than the other parties, so the fresh revelations about the sale of peerages in exchange for very large donations to the party are another blow to our confidence in the system under its present management; and the further revelation that some of the donations have avoided any obligation to be publicly declared and transparent by being dressed up as ‘loans’, without even the knowledge of the Labour Party’s elected Treasurer, can only make matters worse.
It’s worth, though, making a few relevant points, not in mitigation but of context with a view to future remedy.
First, the issue of state honours has got hopelessly confused with the totally different issue of appointments to the second chamber of the legislature. The first implies recognition of public services rendered and, in the sunlit uplands of the honours system, involves the conferring of a handle to the honorand’s name, often much coveted: Lord, Lady, Baron, Baroness, Sir, Dame. The second process need not be related to past services but instead implies suitability by experience and skills for service in the pretty humdrum work of scrutinising and reviewing legislation as an unelected member of our parliament. It’s become urgently necessary to disentangle the two quite different procedures. Once membership of the second chamber is recognised as a demanding and mainly routine and unglamorous job, even (or especially) the richest wannabe politicians may be more reluctant to offer to pay big money to get it.
Secondly, and as a corollary of the first point, it’s ridiculous to go on giving what are essentially bogus peerages to everyone appointed to the second chamber, and calling them Lord or Lady. 
The great majority of the hereditary peers have by now been removed, mostly kicking and screaming, from the chamber, and the rest are due to follow soon. There’s really no more reason to make every remaining or new member of this workaday institution a Lord or a Lady than there is to make every elected member of the House of Commons a Prince or a Princess. Still less need we dress up the appointed members of what is in practice the lower house in pantomime costumes on state occasions or put them through embarrassing fake-mediaeval rituals on first appointment.
Thirdly, this is no longer going to be a ‘House of Lords’ when in the near future there won’t be a single proper Lord left in it. In most serious western democracies the second chamber is called the Senate. Everyone knows what that means and there’s no possible reason to go on calling our second chamber something that’s not only different, but actively misleading too.
Fourthly, the spectacle of a wholly appointed chamber of the legislature of a modern western democracy has become an embarrassment too far. Of comparable democracies only Canada sheepishly maintains an entirely elected appointed second chamber, and as a result it is generally despised by sensible Canadians. ‘House of Lords’ reform here is long overdue. A clear majority of members of the elected chamber favour a second chamber which is either wholly elected or else which has a substantial majority of elected members, preferably elected on a system different from that of the House of Commons and which will ensure that no one party has an overall majority in the second chamber. Only the obstinacy of the prime minister continues to obstruct this manifestly overdue reform. He fears that a mainly elected second chamber will challenge the primacy of the House of Commons. That is rubbish. The primacy of the Commons is assured by its function of choosing and sustaining or dismissing governments, by its almost unlimited (if largely notional) powers, and by the strictly limited powers and functions of the Other Place, none of which needs to change with ‘Lords’ reform.
And, finally, we must resist the siren voices of self-interested politicians arguing that if the political parties can no longer fund themselves by selling peerages, they must be given large slabs of the taxpayers’ money so that they may continue to keep our democratic system running. The financial crises of the main parties has nothing to do with the difficulty of selling patronage: it reflects the general disillusionment of ordinary men and women with the way our democracy has been hijacked by an over-mighty executive which has seized control of the parliament it is supposed to serve and answer to, not to manipulate and bully into doing its bidding. It reflects resentment of the power-grabbing centralism of Westminster politicians who preach empowerment at local neighbourhood level while enthusiastically legislating to determine whether an unemployed former miner in Durham should be allowed to have a cigarette in the local pub or working men’s club. If a political party can’t arouse enough enthusiasm among its supporters to generate the financial wherewithal to enable it to function, it should be allowed to go to the wall. The draining away of willingness on the part of ordinary people, including through companies and trade unions and other bodies, to stump up for the good of the party should concentrate political leaders’ minds wonderfully on the reasons for their failure, and on the need for radical remedies. It should be no business of the taxpayer to rescue them from that salutary discipline.
If these simple and sensible recommendations were to be adopted, the problem of cash for peerages would vanish almost overnight. Some hope!
Postscript: To pre-empt some predictable comments, I am trying to resist the temptation to get into the separate question of reform of the honours system, also long overdue. The only relevant aspect of that to this discussion is the question of new peerages. If the grant of a peerage is decoupled from the appointment of a member of the second chamber, as I recommend earlier, then there would be no need or justification for making new peers. To avoid a breach of faith with existing ‘life peers’, they would, I suppose, have to be allowed to keep their titles until they die. Lower down the honours system I would strongly favour abolishing all honours that entail a change of handle to the name, all honours in recognition of services for which the person concerned has been paid in the course of his or her principal career, and the hierarchical structure of the honours system which in practice relates mainly in effect to social class. But all that is really for another day.
Brian
Last week the admirable US television and radio program Democracy Now broadcast its 1-hour weekday shows, comprising news and interviews or discussions on civil rights and war-and-peace issues, from a small rented studio in London (London, England) instead of from its usual home in New York. The second half of the program on Thursday (9 March 06) was devoted to a discussion of civil rights in Britain in which I took part along with the splendid Shami Chakrabarti, Director of the UK civil rights organisation Liberty, and Milan Rai, founding member of Voices in the Wilderness, an organisation opposed to economic sanctions on Iraq, currently coordinating the group Justice Not Vengeance. Milan Rai is the first to be charged with “organizing an unauthorized demonstration” under the Serious Organized Crime and Police Act after his arrest at an anti-war demonstration in London last year as he and a colleague read out the names of British soldiers killed in Iraq, and he is bracing himself for a possible prison sentence at his imminent trial.
You can hear (but not watch) our discussion here: it begins about 33 minutes into the 1-hour programme. The discussion is chaired by the presenter and presiding genius of Democracy Now, 
Amy Goodman. Amy is very amiable (bad pun) and simultaneously extremely professional (as she should be, considering her long and distinguished experience). We had no discussion at all before we started doing the programme so I was impressed by how much they knew about me, including not only the background to my resignation from SIAC but also that I was one of the 52 signatories of the open letter to Blair attacking UK and US middle east policies and the author of an article in the Guardian in October 2004 about the use in evidence of information got by torture. The programme’s small cadre of researchers had obviously done their stuff, more than can sometimes be said of much better resourced programmes on major British networks. I was also impressed by Amy Goodman’s excellent short, ‘open’ questions, giving lots of scope to say what I wanted, unlike the long rambling ‘closed’ or leading questions by people like James Naughtie of the Today programme on BBC radio 4 which can generally be answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’, thereby revealing nothing at all about the views of the interviewee, but plenty about those of the interviewer. Shami Chakrabarti commented on this to me as we were leaving. (She is so telegenic and articulate and hyper-intelligent that I was in two minds about whether it was a good idea being on the programme with her.)
It was interesting to be talking about the erosion of our civil liberties in Britain for a television and radio audience in the United States and Canada: also slightly inhibiting, as one couldn’t assume as much background knowledge of the situation here as one does, possibly mistakenly, in talking to fellow-Brits, but also because it’s surprisingly uncomfortable criticising one’s own country, or at any rate its government, to foreigners. So I was glad to be able to squeeze in, at the very end of the programme, after being warned by Ms Goodman that we only had 5 seconds left, two small but important points: one, that however bad the deterioration in the civil liberties situation in Britain, it was still nothing like as bad as that in the US and places for which the US was responsible such as Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib; and secondly, that the 7/7 London bombings on the London tubes by Islamist extremists had not been nearly as traumatic for us as 9/11 had been for the Americans, not just because many fewer people had been killed or injured here, but also mainly because we in Britain have much longer experience of terrorist attacks (anarchists, the IRA, etc.) than the Americans. I might have added, if time had permitted, that we are probably a good deal more phlegmatic about such things than the majority of Americans appear to be, although whether that is a compliment or a criticism of us (or them) is moot. According to an interesting article in the week-end issue of the Financial Times (11-12 March 06) by Edward Luce, –
In some respects the Democrats are now as guilty of stoking fears on national security as the Republicans. Their logic is impeccable. A majority of Americans believe there will be another large terrorist attack on American soil. Such is the depth of anxiety that one-fifth or more of Americans believe they will personally be victims of a future terrorist attack. This number has not budged in the last four and a half years.
It would be interesting to know the corresponding figures for Britain.
Brian
In the absence of even the thinnest evidence that Tessa Jowell has done anything illegal; or has breached the ministerial code of conduct; or failed to record anything in the register of MPs’ interests that she ought to have done; or lied about anything she has done; — in the absence indeed of the slightest plausible excuse for seeking to pull her down, the slavering witch-hunters of the media and (I’m sad to say) the blogosphere are now lambasting her for having married a man who earns his living, perfectly legally as far as all available evidence shows, by advising others on how to ensure that they are not paying any more tax than is legally necessary. Mr Mills’s other offences are apparently (a) to make, and sometimes lose, quite a lot of money — and no-one has even charged him so far with having made it illegally, still less convicted him of illegality; (b) to move money around from place to place in order to maximise the return on it; and (c) periodically to borrow money in the course of these transactions by means of loans and mortgages and other devices in order to enable him to use his capital and investments in the most productive ways.
Here, for example, is Roy Hattersley (with whom I agree more often than not, but he sometimes goes woefully astray) in the Times on Tessa’s husband:
The analyses of his activities, which have preoccupied the newspapers recently, have all described him as a specialist in tax avoidance, hedge funds and off-shore investments. Such is the transformation, for which Tony Blair must take credit, that not one commentator has expressed surprise that the husband of a Labour Cabinet minister should earn his living in this fashion.
Can it be that Roy Hattersley, with all his long experience of the world, including the management of his considerable and well-earned income, doesn’t know the difference between tax avoidance (i.e. avoiding paying unnecessary tax) on the one hand, and tax evasion (illegally dodging one’s legal tax liabilities) on the other? If he is so disapproving of tax avoidance specialists, are we to take it that he himself is quite content to pay whatever the Inland Revenue demands, without checking their figures and questioning any apparent exaggeration of his tax bill? Doesn’t he employ an accountant to advise him, among other things, on how to make sure that he doesn’t pay more tax than necessary? You need to be pretty well heeled to be able to afford not to bother about such trivia.
There’s something unsavoury about socialists denouncing other socialists for having money and managing it sensibly, even insinuating that such antisocial behaviour is incompatible with holding socialist views and espousing socialist values. Now we’re to understand that you can’t even be a socialist and be married to someone who has money and manages it sensibly. It isn’t hard to imagine what Nye Bevan, whose status as a genuine socialist is rarely questioned and who was no stranger to the good and expensive life, would have thought of such distasteful Pecksniffery.
Personally I’m glad to campaign for more progressive income tax rates and higher taxes on the relatively better-off, even if that means an increase in my own tax liabilities: but it seems to me infantile to suggest that this opinion imposes an obligation on me to add a voluntary contribution to the Treasury on top of the tax that I already willingly pay.
Can this be the same Roy Hattersley who began his column in today’s Guardian thus? –
Were I still a member of parliament, I would vote for the second reading of the education bill.
I don’t for a moment blame him for not flaunting his membership of the Upper House of Parliament, but he goes a shade too far in seeking to deny it.
Here’s Dickens on Mr Pecksniff, in Martin Chuzzlewit:
Mr. Pecksniff was a moral man: a grave man, a man of noble sentiments and speech…Perhaps there never was a more moral man than Mr. Pecksniff: especially in his conversation and correspondence. It was once said of him by a homely admirer, that he had a Fortunatus’s purse of good sentiments in his inside. In this particular he was like the girl in the fairy tale, except that if they were not actual diamonds which fell from his lips, they were the very brightest paste, and shone prodigiously. He was a most exemplary man: fuller of virtuous precept than a copy-book. Some people likened him to a direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there: but these were his enemies, the shadows cast by his brightness; that was all.
Mr Pecksniff would no doubt have issued the severest of reprimands to anyone richer than himself who stooped to the caddishness of minimising his or her tax bill, while discreetly making very sure that he himself didn’t pay a penny more in tax than he had to.
Stick it out, Tessa! Nil illegitimibus carborundum!
– Brian (who is happy to disclose that he employs an accountant, not only because he can’t understand his annual tax return form sufficiently to fill it in himself, but also to make sure that he ‘avoids’ paying more tax than he has to on his modest but very adequate public service pension and even more modest savings, preferring to leave a few quid to his children and to spend some of them himself while he can, rather than make a voluntary present of them to the Inland Revenue. So expel him from the party in disgrace. At least he’ll be in excellent company.)
The so-called Power Commission report (pdf) is well worth reading, if only to check whether it lives up to that stirring title with its revolutionary ancestry. ‘Power to the People‘ has been used in a less-than-articulate lyric by John Lennon, more wittily in the campaign to restore the supply of electricity to California, the name of a political party (Vlast Narodu) in Moldova, and a slogan of the Black Panthers. It’s a healthy corrective to the old revolutionary Bolshevik call, ‘All Power to the Soviets‘, which, consciously or unconsciously, it echoes:
The mass of the Petrograd working class was on the streets. So was the mass of the troops of the garrison. And the soldiers, spurred on by attempts to transfer them to the front in support of another bloody and futile offensive, were, if anything, more militant than the workers. The slogans and the banners were entirely Bolshevik in inspiration – “All power to the Soviets”, “Down with the ten capitalist ministers” [only ten? -- BLB], “Peace, Bread and Liberty”.
(Duncan Hallas, ‘All Power to the Soviets‘, 1976)
The reforms proposed by Baroness Kennedy are not, unsurprisingly, in quite the same league. Here are some selected recommendations from the Executive Summary (pdf):
1. A Concordat should be drawn up between Executive and Parliament indicating where key powers lie and providing significant powers of scrutiny and initiation for Parliament.
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3. Limits should be placed on the power of the whips.
4. Parliament should have greater powers to initiate legislation, to launch public inquiries and to act on public petitions.
5. 70 per cent of the members of the House of Lords should be elected by a ‘responsive electoral system’ – and not on a closed party list system – for three parliamentary terms …candidates should be at least 40 years of age.
6. There should be an unambiguous process of decentralisation of powers from central to local government.
7. A Concordat between central and local government setting out their respective powers.
8. Local government to have enhanced powers to raise taxes and administer its own finances.
9. Government should commission an independent mapping of quangos and other public bodies to clarify and renew lines of accountability between elected and unelected authority.
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12. A responsive electoral system should be introduced for elections to the House of Commons, House of Lords and Local Councils in England and Wales to replace the firstpast-the-post system.
13. The closed party list system to have no place in modern elections.
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16. The voting and candidacy age should be reduced to sixteen (with the exception of candidacy for the House of Lords).
17. The introduction of automatic, individual voter registration at age sixteen. This can be done in tandem with the allocation of National Insurance numbers.
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21. Text voting or email voting should only be considered following other reform of our democratic arrangements.
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24. Citizens should be given the right to initiate legislative processes, public inquiries and hearings into public bodies and their senior management.
Some of these proposals obviously deserve serious consideration and debate. I would single out as especially interesting those for ‘Concordats’ between the Executive and Parliament, and between central and local government "setting out their respective powers" — an indication that the Commission was groping its way towards a recognition of the quasi-federal character of the now partly-devolved United Kingdom and the need, as in any federal system, for a written definition of the powers of the various tiers of government and legislative authority (I have spelled out the case for this elsewhere).
It’s just a pity that among so many worth-while suggestions, the Commission has come up with the ridiculous (and therefore headline-grabbing) suggestion that the voting age should be ![Baroness [Helena] Kennedy](http://www.barder.com/wp-content/uploads/helenakennedy.jpg "Baroness [Helena] Kennedy")
reduced to 16 — and that 16-year-old children should be eligible for election to parliament. It’s no wonder that this has stolen the thunder of the other, sane, recommendations in the report. Even the proposal for the introduction of "a responsive electoral system" for the House of commons and other legislative body falls commendably short of trying to force on us Proportional Representation ("Power to the LibDems") with all its malign consequences.
Apart from the intrusive little idiocy of Votes At Sixteen, the report stands up well, especially considering the motley and Politically impeccably Correct character of the composition of the Commission:
Baroness (Helena) Kennedy (barrister, peer, former Chair of Charter88 and the British Council); Ferdinand Mount (head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit (1982-4), a director of the Centre for Policy Studies (1984-91), and editor of the Times Literary Supplement (1991-2002)); Emma B (Radio1 presenter), Paul Boakye (editor of Drum, the UK’s new lifestyle magazine for black men), Phil Carey (Sports Coach on the Sport 4 U project in Hastings, a unique project taking sport onto the streets for young people – "sports halls are replaced by supermarket car parks and other unused urban spaces"), Philip Dodd (until December 2004 Director of the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA), co-founder of an agency, ‘Made in China’, which develops projects between Asia, particularly China, and the UK, across the fields of culture, education and business; Ben Freeman (Finance Director of Prudential Property Investment Managers Ltd (PruPIM), a part of M&G Investments, UK investment arm of Prudential plc, one of the largest property investment managers in the UK; Barbara Gill (died on 3 November 2005, former Chairman [sic] of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes); Bano Murtuja (freelance consultant, Blackburn; conducting an equality assessment of social services provision from the perspective of service users; research associate on the Northern Towns Citizens Jury Project that "seeks to develop and promote democratic participation and racial unity through citizens’ juries"; chair of the Black and Minority Ethnic Health and Social Care Forum); and Frances O’Grady (TUC Deputy General Secretary since January 2003).
As a trivial postscript, I was intrigued by something that Jonathan Freedland wrote about the Power Commission report in the Guardian on 1 March 06:
Take one of the most innovative ideas, recommendation 24, which would give citizens the direct right to initiate legislation or launch a public inquiry. The report envisages a petition acting as the trigger, so long as it included the signatures of 1% of registered electors… the gains would be tangible: nothing abstract about a new school or the right for the sick to skin up [my emphasis -- BLB].
What on earth is meant by the "right for the sick to skin up"? To die with dignity? To scratch their itches? Not to be flayed alive? To enjoy free medical care at the point of delivery? Is it a misprint, and if so, for what? If there was ever an excuse for that old cliché about what the imagination does in the face of such a challenge, this is surely it.
Brian
We have all been having a knowing chuckle over the widely published story about President George W. Bush having been briefed well before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans about the danger that the levees would be breached, apparently giving the lie to Bush’s subsequent assertion that nobody had foreseen that this might happen. Thus the BBC reported on 2 March:
Video shows Bush Katrina warning
Video showing President George W Bush being warned on the eve of Hurricane Katrina that New Orleans’ flood defences could be overcome has emerged. The footage, obtained by the Associated Press, also shows Mr Bush being told of the risk to evacuees in the Superdome.
Speaking by video link from his Texan holiday ranch on 28 August, Mr Bush tells federal disaster officials: "We are fully prepared to help." Critics say more could have been done sooner to evacuate the city. Mr Bush does not ask any questions as the situation is outlined to him.
"I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees" — George W Bush, speaking after the disaster.
The BBC’s Justin Webb reporting from Washington said the footage did the president no favours. It shows plainly worried officials telling Mr Bush very clearly before the storm hit that it could breach New Orleans’ flood barriers.
Sadly for those whose admiration for the President is in short supply, including me, the story turns out to be wrong. AP has now issued the following correction:
WASHINGTON (AP) _ In a March 1 story, The Associated Press reported that federal disaster officials warned President George W. Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees in New Orleans, citing confidential video footage of an Aug. 28 briefing among U.S. officials.
The Army Corps of Engineers considers a breach a hole developing in a levee rather than an overrun. The story should have made clear that Bush was warned about floodwaters overrunning the levees, rather than the levees breaking.
The day before the storm hit, Bush was told there were grave concerns that the levees could be overrun. It wasn’t until the next morning, as the storm was hitting, that Michael Brown, then head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Bush had inquired about reports of breaches. Bush did not participate in that briefing.
(Hat-tips: Clive Davis’s blog; The Corner)
How many of us have seen the correction printed or broadcast by any of the media who ran the original story? Perhaps I’ve missed it.
Less seriously, it’s faintly irritating to hear 99 per cent of the British television and radio newsreaders and pundits, including some actually speaking from New Orleans, continuing to pronounce the name of that city "NeworLEENS" (or sometimes, a shade pretentiously, "NeworLEEYuns". Has none of them heard Americans say the name, or read about President Bush going even further and calling the place "NyORlins"? They can’t all have cloth ears, surely.
Brian
At last night’s contest between candidates for the British entry in the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest, kitsch show of the year, the winner — chosen, apparently, by popular vote throughout the kingdom — was a "rap dance track Teenage Life" led by a dancer and rapper with the slightly soapy name of Daz Sampson, who, according to the BBC website report, –
has scored a number of dance hits with Blue Bus and Uniting Nations, whose song Out Of Touch made the top 10 in 2004 and was also a hit in many other European countries. … In his Eurovision entry, Sampson raps over a school choir type backing from a group of female singers. He co-wrote Teenage Life with his long-term [sic] collaborator John Matthews.
The setting purports to be a school classroom with Mr Sampson’s female backing group, dressed as schoolgirls in gym-slips and school blazers, writhing suggestively at school desks. Daz, presumably in the role of their middle-aged school teacher, leers at the schoolgirls while droning an unintelligible lyric. The ‘schoolgirls’ leer back. At a time when the entire nation is apparently in the grip of a paedophilia panic, it’s hard to imagine anything more embarrassing — or perhaps more appropriate as Britain’s entry. It should certainly offer a delicious target for Terry Wogan’s world-weary irony on the night.
Few seem to be betting the farm on ‘Teenage Life’ emerging as the Song Contest winner in Athens on 18 and 20 May (don’t ask me why it takes place on two nights: one would seem quite enough). According to a member of something called ‘Team Eurovision’ (slightly dated inverted title, one might think) on the Eurovision blog, —
Here at Team Eurovision, we can’t say we’re entirely surprised by the result. OK, so the song veers dangerously close to a novelty record, but it was certainly a lot more fun to watch than any of the other contenders on tonight’s show, and as we’ve been saying for the past few weeks, offers countless opportunities for some visual fun on the big night (in this case, it appears to involve backing singers dressed as schoolgirls sitting at classroom desks). It’s true that the UK is taking a gamble with this one. It’s the kind of entry that could either win or score us another resounding nul points. But given our recent track record, we really have nothing to lose from taking a bit of a risk with our song. After all, we can’t do any worse than we did in 2003 …
All good clean fun, I suppose. Well, cleanish.
Brian
