China is not the only totalitarian power seeking to get control of what its people can read and discuss on the Internet and the Web. The Internet is now being threatened by big 
business interests in the US which seek to gain control over the content of the traffic passing through the internet channels which they own — everything from e-mails to websites to blogs. The companies concerned are offering substantial 'inducements' to members of the US Senate and House of Representatives to support legislation to permit this, and to resist amendments designed to preserve the freedom of the Net. One such amendment has already been defeated.
Despite its scope for abuse, trivia and ego-tripping, the Internet and its anarchic freedom represent a fantastic international asset and a genuine bulwark against the control freakery of illiberal governments and commercial interests. It would be a tragedy for us and our children and grand-children if that were all to be bought up and stifled by those who see it as a threat to their control over public communication and ultimately to their untrammelled freedom to make money at the expense of our freedom of expression and debate.
Full information about this potential nightmare is available on Owen's blog at http://www.owen.org/blog/536, including links to other informative websites and to where you can find any of seven ways in which you can help to avert this chilling threat. These naturally concentrate on urging US residents to write to their Senators and Congressmen and Congresswomen to express their concern. Those of us who live elsewhere than in the United States are just as much under threat as US residents: so another option for non-Americans is to write to or e-mail (or even fax — remember fax?) our MPs, MEPs or other parliamentary representatives to alert them to what is going on. This is pre-eminently a matter on which action at the level of the EU might be effective. You can get the names and addresses here. Please do it now!
Brian
Two examples of the collected prose works of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair have recently become available to his eagerly waiting fans: the first, extracts from a 22-page handwritten letter to the then Labour Party leader Michael Foot, was written on 28 July 1982, not exactly an annus mirabilis for the party. The second, an article about the future of the Labour Party and government, appealing for no more "coded references and implied critiques" but instead open and candid debate on policies, was published earlier this month, nearly a quarter of a century later. The first is part of an article by Robert Taylor, who came across the letter in the course of his researches for a history of the parliamentary Labour Party: it appeared in the New Statesman of 19 June; the second, in the Guardian of 27 June 2006.
Blair's 1982 letter provides a sadly ironical commentary on the philosophy and record of his later years after nearly a decade as prime minister:
Look at Thatcher and Tebbit and how they almost take pride in the rigid populism of their political thought. There is a new and profoundly unpleasant Tory abroad – the Tory party is now increasingly given over to the worst of petty bourgeois sentiments – the thought that there is something clever in cynicism; realistic in selfishness; and the granting of legitimacy to the barbaric idea of the survival of the fittest. … Like many middle-class people I came to Socialism through Marxism (to be more specific through Deutscher's biography of Trotsky). The trouble with Marxism is that it is fine if you make it your political servant but terrible if it becomes your political master. I actually did trouble to read Marx first hand. I found it illuminating in so many ways; in particular, my perception of the relationship between people and the society in which they live was irreversibly altered…. In one sense he [Tony Benn] is quite right in saying that the right wing of the party is politically bankrupt. Socialism ultimately must appeal to the better minds of the people. You cannot do that if you are tainted overmuch with a pragmatic period in power. The phrases that rouse us, or should rouse us, are bound to seem stale in the mouth of anyone who has been too closely intertwined with the establishment. It may not be fair but it is true…
Fast-forward to June 2006:
The second thing, as I've said many times, is to renew the Labour party in a way that builds on the big idea behind New Labour: that economic efficiency and social justice are entirely compatible. This is the whole basis on which myself and Gordon Brown [sic] have worked since 1994. Indeed without expanding opportunity there will be no economic success… In my view, renewing the Labour party means taking further what we've done …I would go further on the law-and-order policies of the past nine years, where we have been more on the side of the people than either Tories or Lib Dems. I would keep our alliances with the US and the EU both strong and where necessary interventionist. I think we have to be a party of enterprise and business as well as trade unions… We must balance rights with responsibilities… we need to complete a radical reform of the criminal-justice [sic] system that focuses on the offender, not simply the offence and the rights of the victim. On welfare reform we need to go further with the principle of new entitlements matched by higher expectations. Our foreign policy must be interventionist, internationalist, multilateralist – and above all driven by our values…
Marx and socialism have of course been long discarded in favour of "economic efficiency", "expanding opportunity" (what was that in the letter to Michael Foot about "the barbaric idea of the survival of the fittest"?), "a party of enterprise and business", and the 
qualification or curtailment of fundamental human rights by the imposition of 'responsibilities' to 'balance' them. Foreign policy is to continue to be "interventionist" — a shameless demand after the terrible blunders and crimes committed in Iraq and Kosovo with Blair's enthusiastic sponsorship. All these are fundamentally Tory nostrums; indeed, it's hard to find anything in this month's Guardian article that couldn't have been written by a moderately enlightened Conservative leader.
The two pieces however have some things in common. Both reveal an unmistakable shallowness and intellectual superficiality. Neither in 1982 nor in 2006 did young or older Blair betray any understanding of a key ingredient of the socialism that he proved so impatient to abandon: equality, not just of opportunity (a polite Tory euphemism for eventual untrammelled inequality) but much more importantly of outcomes. Did he never read Crosland? J S Mill? Tawney? Michael Young? Certainly not Young's "The Rise of the Meritocracy", a brilliant analysis of the cruelty and injustice inevitably produced by a meritocracy — "the barbaric idea of the survival of the fittest" expressed in a social and economic system; yet Blair repeatedly refers to a meritocracy as the kind of society he wants Britain to become.
Neither in 1982 nor in 2006 is there any hint of understanding of the centrality of liberty and human rights to socialism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The letter of 1982 seems to contain no commitment to, or even interest in, the idea of the absolute right of the individual to liberty, and to a fair trial by his peers before he may be deprived of it, as protection against the rapacious demands of the power-hungry state. There is no contradiction on this score between the letter to Foot on the one hand, and on the other hand the philosophy of a prime minister who has presided over the greatest assault on our civil liberties for more than a hundred years. He seems genuinely unable to grasp why reasonable, law-abiding people, even judges, don't immediately accept his deeply flawed concept that the interests of national security as defined by the government must be allowed to override the fundamental rights of the individual as developed and enshrined in law and political theory over centuries.
Nor is there any suggestion, then or now, of that humane Labour tradition according to which the application of military force can be justified only, if at all, as a genuine last resort, to remedy a blatant wrong so overwhelming, so patently incapable of being corrected by any other possible means, that it justifies the terrorising and killing of innocent people, the destruction of people's livelihoods, the widowing of women and the orphaning of children, and all the other tragic but unpredictable consequences which war always entails. Instead we see a Boy's Own Paper fascination with the use of military force, put into practice more often by Blair than under any other prime minister in living memory, and in at least two cases with neither ethical nor legal justification. And still he wants yet more intervention, along with the removal of the tiresome constraints imposed by the United Nations Charter, just as he wants carte blanche to trample on human rights without the tiresome constraints imposed by the European Convention. If he and his government and his security forces want more powers, they must obviously have them: and anyone who obstructs their provision must be soft on terrorism or mentally incapable of understanding the arguments for conferring them, or both.
Both pieces also suggest a self-regarding preoccupation with Blair's own "passionately held" views and an urgent desire to communicate them to a mystifyingly uncomprehending world lacking the intelligence to understand their transcendental rightness. There's always an underlying suggestion that the passion with which he holds his views, however jejune they might be, defines their value and cogency. But there's still a residual altruism, even a kind of simplified socialism, in 1982, of which not a trace remains in 2006.
A devastating verdict on Blair is delivered in the New Statesman of 26 June by Sir Rodric Braithwaite, former British ambassador to Russia and chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee:
Like Eden, he has had his successes. But they have been wiped out by the disaster of Iraq. A country has been wrecked. Terrorism flourishes. Our closest ally has been discredited and humiliated. The Middle East, the source of much of our energy, is in turmoil. Muslims throughout the world have been turned against the west and its values. Our ability to construct a society in Britain in which people of all faiths and backgrounds can live harmoniously has been compromised. Blair has done far more damage to British interests than Eden, more perhaps than anyone since Chamberlain. Tory appeaser meets Labour adventurer: history at its most ironic.
Robert Taylor ends his New Statesman article about the 1982 letter to Michael Foot in no less damning terms:
It is his personal tragedy, as well as the tragedy of the Labour Party, that the ambitious idealist was transformed into an authoritarian and hubristic machine that destroyed the ethical values of a Labour movement he once claimed to hold so dear.
He destroyed them, I suspect, because he never understood them. The Guardian concludes the Blair article of 27 June with the helpful explanation that –
Tony Blair is the prime minister.
And that is our and the Iraqis' personal tragedy.
Brian
Tam Dalyell, then MP for West Lothian, posed what has become known as the West Lothian Question: why should MPs representing Scottish constituencies at Westminster be allowed to vote on legislation which affects England but not their own constituents, because the subject of the legislation — education, health, etc. — has been devolved to the Scottish parliament? Today's (25 June 06) Sunday Times graciously allows me to ride one of my six or seven hobby-horses, all familiar to regular readers of Ephems:
The Sunday Times June 25, 2006
Letters to the Editor: Scots belong in a federal UK
MICHAEL PORTILLO is, for once, resoundingly wrong (The Scottish drift that is unnerving Brown, Comment, last week ). His answer to the West Lothian question — Scottish independence — would make the current anomaly infinitely worse by dismembering our country, without solving the underlying problem. This arises from our doomed attempt to run the Westminster parliament with two incompatible functions: both a federal legislature for the whole of the UK, but with limits on its powers to deal with matters devolved to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland: and simultaneously a legislature for England dealing with everything.
With devolution we have sleepwalked halfway into a federal constitution. The solution is to go all the way: a parliament for England, a written constitution defining the respective powers of Westminster and the regions, and a federal Westminster parliament exercising those powers not devolved to the regions — mainly foreign affairs and defence — and those shared with them.
The Portillo proposal to destroy the United Kingdom by hiving off Scotland would be like healing a stiff leg by amputating it: the Scots are essential to our sense of nationhood (I am not even half Scottish).
Sir Brian Barder
London SW18
Michael Portillo may or may not have had half a tongue in his cheek in recommending the dismissal of Scotland from the Union as a pretty drastic remedy for a non-life-threatening malady — especially as it would leave unresolved the identical problem in respect of Wales and (if devolution is ever resurrected in that unruly province) Northern Ireland. Portillo, though, is not the only politician proposing daft solutions to a relatively straightforward problem. Lord Baker, former Tory minister, is tabling a Bill to empower the Speaker of the House of Commons to declare draft legislation dealing only or predominantly with a devolved subject, and therefore applicable only to England, to be a special England-only measure, on which MPs representing Scottish (and presumably Welsh and in future Northern Irish) seats would not be allowed to vote. The Tories generally are cautiously toying with some similar arrangement, entranced, no doubt, by the thought that an English Grand Committee of MPs for English constituencies would have a Tory majority. Such a nostrum would be fairly obviously unworkable. Some aspects of England-only Bills would generally affect Scotland and the other devolved regions to a greater or lesser extent. It would create a category of second-class MPs, entitled to vote on some measures but not others. Would they be allowed to speak on the special Bills even though unable to vote on them? Could a Scottish MP be appointed as minister for a devolved subject? Could we have a prime minister elected by a Scottish electorate (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, to take but one example) with overall responsibility for all government policy but prohibited from voting on a wide range of his own ministry's proposed laws, and unable to rely on a majority of exclusively English MPs to support them?
Of course a truly federal solution such as I propose would hold out the prospect of a parliament and government for England with a Conservative majority, alongside a federal parliament and government of the whole United Kingdom with a Labour majority. But why not? It happens all the time in the US, Australia, Germany, Canada and in every other democratic federation. The challenge of winning a majority in an English parliament could have a powerfully rejuvenating effect on the Labour Party under a new leader.
Nor is this simply a technical, dry-as-dust, constitution-happy, nerdish issue. It goes to the heart of the need to escape from the paranoid over-centralism that seems to grip our national politicians as soon as they kiss hands on appointment as ministers. The full-hearted federal solution that I propose would blow away with derision such aberrations as the current debate at Westminster on how to impose new rules and regulations on local authorities as regards car parking and traffic meter attendants. No longer would MPs sitting far from the Shetlands or Derry or Newcastle be trying to lay down the law on which areas of pubs and clubs should or should not be made smoke-free. These all ought to be matters for local decision by locally elected legislatures and regional ministers accountable to (and able to be influenced by) their local communities.
It's not a valid objection to the federal solution that there's at present 'no demand' for an English parliament (or several of them). Government should be about leadership, not about obediance to the editor of the News of the World. An English parliament and government with real powers over most of the matters that touch people's daily lives would soon attract interest and support. If politicans of all parties had the guts and gumption to declare with passion the manifest benefits of completing our half-baked federation, incidentally solving at a stroke the otherwise insoluble West Lothian question, there would soon enough be a positive response. No other 'solution' has been offered that won't create more problems than it solves. Time to grow out of our national f-word phobia!
Brian
What Gordon Brown actually said about the future of Britain's nuclear weapons in his Mansion House speech on 22 June 2006 was this:
And I mean not just stability by securing low inflation but stability in our industrial relations, [....] the same strength of national purpose we will demonstrate in protecting our security in this Parliament and the long-term [sic] – strong in defence in fighting terrorism, upholding NATO, supporting our armed forces at home and abroad, and retaining our independent nuclear deterrent. [My emphasis -- BLB]
Many of us have reacted to these extraordinary, apparently unnecessary, out-of-context words with dismay. I cling to the faint hope that he deliberately avoided any explicit commitment to replacing Trident when it wears out, confining himself to repeating the manifesto pledge to retain it (until after it doesn't work any more? surely not).
But actually it looks very much as if a firm decision has already been made to replace it – money allegedly allocated already to Aldermaston to work on a successor — and the refusal to admit it, along with the promises of a public and parliamentary debate before any decision is taken, is simply a lie designed to deceive those who ask such tiresome questions as: whom is a future British nuclear capacity meant to deter, and deter from doing what? What is the threat against which a nuclear weapon might be relevant? In what conceivable circumstances would any future British govermnment actually use a nuclear weapon and against what kind of target? What imaginable future enemy might be deterred from attacking us by the belief that Britain was likely to retaliate with nuclear 
weapons? Is it seriously envisaged that we might one day use nuclear weapons — perhaps small battlefield nuclear weapons — against a non-nuclear power, or against a nuclear power that had not itself used nuclear weapons against us? Do we claim the right to adopt a First Strike strategy? In what way will continued possession of a nuclear weapon make us more secure than the Germans, Italians and Spanish? Is it ever going to be technically or politically possible to use a nuclear weapon in any circumstances whatsoever without the prior permission of the Americans? If we used a nuclear weapon without US approval or contrary to Washington's wishes, could we seriously expect to continue thereafter to enjoy the nuclear collaboration with the Americans without which we couldn't anyway maintain a nuclear capability? What political and diplomatic price shall we have to pay for indispensable American technical support in developing a replacement for Trident? How much will it all cost and what effect will such massive expenditure have on our ability to find the additional money to meet the conventional weapon and equipment requirements of our armed forces? What are we going to do to honour our solemn promise and obligation under the NPT to promote universal nuclear disarmament, including by the five recognised nuclear powers?
I'll be amazed if we ever get satisfactory replies to any of these questions, because the die is already cast. In his admirable commentary on these issues in the Guardian on 23 June, Richard Norton-Taylor profusely illustrated the lengths to which the government is already going to withhold vital information about decisions already taken and about the essential facts and figures without which a serious national debate is impossible. Norton-Taylor quotes the defence secretary to devastating effect as innocently admitting that even if MPs are permitted a vote on the issue in parliament, it will take place only after ministers have taken the fateful decision (this in the pretence that such a decision hasn't already been taken):
Des Browne, the defence secretary, said the government promised full transparency and the fullest possible parliamentary debate on this hugely important issue "when the time is right". However, he added, it was too early to decide whether MPs would be allowed a vote. That would "in part depend on what decisions we actually take in the future".
That's enough to make you laugh if you weren't already crying. Several MPs have already begun to demand a firm pledge that they will indeed be allowed to vote on the issue once the promised White Paper has been published and the matter publicly and fully debated. But the outcome of such a vote can't be in doubt: the Tories are already committed to support for a replacement for Trident, so however big any Labour back-bench rebellion by the usual suspects (and perhaps others), the government can be assured of a clear majority for indefinite retention of a nuclear capability.
No doubt Mr Broon threw this firecracker into his otherwise unutterably tedious speech (I endured it live, in full, on television) as a signal to the Blairites that he wouldn't play lefty politics with defence policy if and when he is given a go at No. 10. The whole speech was a promise to continue tenderly to nurse big business and the City when elevated to the big one. Maybe all this is indeed the price he has to pay to prise Blair out of office before the prime minister scuttles the whole ship as his final vengeful gesture: après lui, le déluge. I continue to believe that Broon can't be any worse than Blair and that in some areas he could be significantly better. But the way things look now, he — or anyone else who succeeds Blair — will have only a few months in office before rosy-cheeked Master Cameron arrives on his bike to claim the keys to No. 10 Downing Street, and with them the keys to the nuclear black box. What a bummer.
Brian
In a recent Ephems post I quoted a pointed limerick about himself by Clem Attlee, the greatest ever Labour Party leader and Labour prime minister. Now my wife has unearthed a longer example of the great and versatile man's verse. Can anyone verify it as genuine Attlee with reference and source? I haven't yet tracked it down on the Web.
Here it is:
The Civil Servant
No more the old street corner
Where the busy traffic plies
No more the dear old platform
And the cause that never dies.
I've got a government job now
Propaganda isn't wise.No more I'll take the platform
With my comrades tried and true
And talk for twenty minutes
To three men and a dog or two.
I've got a government job now
That sort of thing won't do.No more the old branch meeting
Where I learned and where I taught
The minutes, correspondence
And delegate's report.
I've got a government job now
My silence has been bought.I feel a sort of traitor
But who the stone can cast?
The dread of unemployment
And the workhouse at the last.
I've got a government job now
And the job has got me fast.But when my time has ended
And my pension in my hand
Though I be old and weary
I'll join again our band
And have just one job only
Preach our gospel through the land.— C.R. Attlee, c 1907
So if the date attributed to it is correct, it's now 99 years old. Born in 1883, he would have been 24 years old at the time, and was to join the Independent Labour Party the following year, after working with and for poor slum children in the east end of London. He served in the army in the first world war (and was wounded in action), becoming Mayor of Stepney in 1919 and first elected to parliament as MP for Limehouse in Stepney in 1922.
I wonder if any other future or serving prime minister produced comparable verse?
Brian
Commenting on Gordon Broon's promise to retain Our British Bomb, Clare Short became so apoplectic that she contrived to split her infinitive by inserting no fewer than 13 words into it (is this a record?):
Ms Short told Radio 4's The World at One: "To just, in a Mansion House speech that's meant to be about the economy, throw it away and say 'this is what we are going to do' – I can't support that kind of leader, absolutely not.
A few days earlier, Neal Lawson, Chair of Compass, opening a Robin Cook Memorial Meeting in Central Hall Westminster, recalled some celebrities who had used the same hall in the past:
When the suffragettes, Gandhi and Atlee [sic], met in this great hall in their times, I’m sure they were daunted too. But it didn’t stop them.
It certainly took a lot to daunt those sufragettes.
While we're on the subject of Clem Attlee, this memorable limerick about him is supposed to have been written by Attlee himself:
Few thought he was even a starter.
There were many who thought themselves smarter.
But he ended PM,
CH and OM,
An earl and a Knight of the Garter.
He also of course 'ended' as one of Britain's greatest prime ministers and Labour Party leaders of the 20th century.
I wonder if Mr Blair can produce an equally crisp limerick about himself.
(Please don't start another great Commentfest about how pedantic it is to automatically condemn a split infinitive even when to awkwardly avoid it is to obviously make the end product uglier. I ought to damn well know that by now — and I do, I do.)
Brian
It's astonishing that the politicians, assorted moralists, parsons and media gurus are once again rushing onto the airwaves to announce their support for a review of the current law on abortion, on the grounds that scientific advances enabling ever younger foetuses to survive outside the womb may require a reduction in the number of weeks of pregnancy during which abortion should be permitted. For a lucid and persuasive demolition of this extraordinarily widespread misconception (no pun intended), you need to go no further than to this post on Owen's blog, including his answers to comments there.
It's especially desirable to expose, as Owen does, the hypocrisy of those (such as some 
Roman Catholics and others whose views on this topic are religiously determined) who exploit the argument about viability in order to promote a reduction in the period of a pregnancy during which abortion is permitted, when their real intention is to whittle that period down to the point where abortion is never permitted at all. Such people don't really believe in the argument from viability, not for the logical and ethical reasons set out by Owen, but because they are actually opposed to abortion at any stage, regardless of viability. That is a perfectly tenable position to take, although for some of us, both religious and pagan, it entails some unsavoury and unacceptable consequences. But those who hold that view should have the honesty to come clean with it, and not pretend to believe that viability is a valid criterion.
Brian
The news increasingly reads like self-parody or April Fool's Day spoofs. High comedy, low farce, and eye-watering tragedy mingle relentlessly day after day.
This morning (20 June 2006) the BBC Today programme picked up a report in yesterday's Guardian that Fifa (the international football authority) has been making Dutch World Cup football fans remove their baggy orange leather shorts because they are decorated with the name of a Dutch brewery which is not one of the World Cup's official sponsors. The victims are left to watch the match in their underpants (if any). One Mr Nigel Currie, chairperson of the 'European Sponsorship Association' (I'm not kidding) and also director of the sports marketing agency brand Rapport, said: "Sponsors pay huge amounts of money and it is all about TV exposure." That might have been better expressed.
In the Sunday Times Michael Portillo, once a serious contender for leadership of the Conservative Party and in recent years a rather sensible political commentator, suggests in all apparent seriousness that the solution to the West Lothian Question (why MPs for Scottish constituencies should vote in parliament on such matters as education and health affecting England but not their own electorates) is for Scotland to become independent, and thus break up the United Kingdom. "If thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee" (not Mr Portillo's comment).
Prison Service Governors, the Chief Prisons Inspector, the probation service and just about everyone else warns that the prisons are seriously overcrowded and that a substantial number of their inmates ought not to be in prison anyway: and that the overcrowding hampers the rehabilitation of dangerous criminals and aggravates the likelihood that many will re-offend on release. The overcrowding represents a threat to public safety. The immediate response of the prime minister and home secretary is not to institute arrangements to transfer to other institutions or the community those imprisoned for failure to pay fines and taxes or the mentally ill, who pose no threat to anyone, but instead to build yet more prisons (Britain already leads Europe in the proportion of its population in prison).
BT, generally recognised as a very mediocre broadband provider, advertises itself in large letters in the national press as "The best performing broadband service" — and in much smaller letters " — when compared to AOL, Wanadoo, Tiscali and Pipex" (well, that's not saying much).
An apparently straight-faced dance review in the Guardian includes the following entirely typical paragraph:
His [Rafael Bonachela's] two new pieces are not only linked by an overarching theme, the relationship between voice and dance, but they are also defined by his own very powerful choices about staging. The first, Ahotsak, is the most powerful. It is set to a Berio score for viola, percussion and tape in which sounds from real life – a snatch of Middle Eastern song, a wail of hysterical sobbing – assault and invade the live musicians. It is an aural collision of worlds and Bonachela's choreography responds to it graphically. His basic vocabulary is a sticky, angry kind of partnering in which his six superb dancers slump, curve and swing through closeknit dialogues.
If you don't believe me that the rest is in the same vein, check it out here . To name the reviewer would be sadistic. To sit through the performance, on the other hand, would be masochism.
At a charity auction at the Althorpe (pron. Althrop) estate, Princess Diana's last resting-place, the goodies auctioned included dinner in Moscow with Mr Gorbachev (remember him?), a flight in a MiG fighter, an artwork by Tracey Emin, a night in a Russian maximum security prison and a custom-made dress from one Matthew Williamson. The event was co-hosted by Mr Gorbachev and the Editor of the Tatler. That's perestroika for you, folks.
In another room of the madhouse, the home secretary is looking into the possibility of making public the names and addresses of former child abusers, presumably to ease the task of lynch mobs.
The same home secretary attacks a judge for passing an unduly lenient sentence on a man convicted of kidnapping and assaulting a 3-year-old girl, although the (non-mandatory) sentence passed was life imprisonment. The gutter press goes to town in excoriation of the judge, asserting that the offender would be released in a mere five years' time (actually the judge used a formula established by parliament to calculate the 'tariff', i.e. earliest date at which the offender could be considered for release on licence, making it clear that such early release was extremely unlikely). The home secretary tells the Attorney-General to refer the case to the Court of Appeal for undue leniency. The Attorney-General tells the home secretary, in effect, to mind his own business. The Lord Chancellor comes to the defence of the judge, saying that he had acted correctly and that it was the system that was at fault. One of the Lord 
Chancellor's junior ministers, a respected QC, then attacks the judge on television, claiming that he had misunderstood the formula and set the wrong tariff. She is then forced publicly to retract her comments with an abject statement that she now realised that what the Lord Chancellor had said (but apparently not what the home secretary had said) represented government policy and that she accepted it as such. The prime minister rushes in to announce a review of the whole criminal justice system and yet more new legislation from the home office before parliament's summer holidays. Home office officials are manifestly taken by surprise by this announcement and have no idea what the prime minister has in mind (nor, probably, has the prime minister).
In a Guardian poll, Labour's standing sinks to its lowest point for 20 years. Another poll indicates that almost a quarter of Labour voters agree that the party needs "a period out of office to rethink what they stand for and what their vision is for the future of the country". Labour Party membership falls below 200,000, two-thirds of whom want Mr Blair to stand down by autumn 2007, and a hefty proportion want him to go this year. It looks increasingly as if the prime minister is deliberately clinging to office to ensure the total destruction, once he steps down, of the party for which he has always had a fastidious distaste.
Echoing the Labour voters who want their party to lose the next election, England footballers are reported to hope that they will lose today's match against Sweden so that they won't have to play against Germany in the next round. They are sharply admonished by Fifa that if they deliberately play to lose, they will be disqualified from the rest of the World Cup. (How will they tell?)
Things are no less surreal beyond our shores.
A British Anglican clergyman is teaching an evangelican course in the heart of Baghdad to convert Iraqi Muslims to Christianity, thus exposing them to the extremely high risk of execution for apostasy.
In a secret memo to Washington, the US ambassador to Iraq says embassy staff members have reported that it is now dangerous for men to wear shorts in public in Baghdad; they no longer allow their children to play outside in shorts. People who wear jeans in public have come under attack. Temperatures in Baghdad have recently reached 115 degrees. Embassy employees all confirm that, by the last week of May, they were getting one hour of power for every six hours without. By early June, the situation had improved slightly. In Hal al-Shaab, power had recently improved from one in six to one in three hours. Central Baghdad neighborhood Bab al-Nu'atham has had no city power for over a month. One employee reported that he had spent 12 hours on his day off waiting to get gas. Another embassy Iraqi employee asked the embassy for press credentials because the guards held her embassy badge up and proclaimed loudly to passers-by "Embassy" as she entered. Such information, commented the ambassador, was a death sentence if heard by "the wrong people". American embassy staff can't call Iraqi employees in on weekends or holidays without blowing their "cover". A Sunni Arab woman employee has reported that family pressures and her inability to reveal details of her employment were very tough; she told her family she was in Jordan when the embassy sent her for training to the US. (There's much more in this vein here .)
The British government announces triumphantly that the first province of Iraq is soon to be handed over to Iraqi control. It transpires that it consists almost entirely of desert.
When three desperate prisoners in Guantanamo, facing the prospect of having to endure that hell-hole for the rest of their days, with no recourse to the courts, no hope of a trial or opportunity to challenge their accusers, hang themselves by strips of their bed-sheets, dying a horrible and protracted death, a lady named Colleen Graffy, 'deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy' (public diplomacy!) tells the BBC that the deaths were "a good PR move to draw attention". The camp commander, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, describes the three suicides as "an act of war". Guantanamo regulations require the guards to check each inmate every two minutes.
Some of these items make you want to cry. A few might make you laugh. Some do both. As I have had occasion to remark before: O tempora, O mores!
Brian
Don't panic, Ma'am: (a) it's your 80th birthday celebration, (b) they aren't loaded, and (c) anyway they're only rolled umbrellas (all the real guns are with our lads in Iraq and Afghanistan).
Brian
The simple answer to your not-so-simple question is that it doesn't. Article 1 of the Genocide Convention –
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish
Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article 3
Thus "the obligation to intervene" (not a word used anywhere in the Convention) is not an obligation as such, but an option, and the option must obviously be interpreted in a way that is in conformity with the UN Charter, which is specifically mentioned.
Two other points that might have got our old pal Jamie into a spot of difficulty, had he been asked about Kosovo and the Genocide Convention:
1. Even if there was a conflict [which there isn't] between the obligations imposed by the Genocide Convention and the UN Charter respectively, Article 103 of the Charter makes it crystal clear that the Charter obligation would prevail.
2. However badly the Serbs were behaving in Kosovo before the NATO attack on Yugoslavia, nothing they were doing came anywhere near the definition of 'genocide' in Article 2 of the Convention. Virtually all the acts of brutality against the Kosovo Albanians committed by the Serbs before the NATO bombing began were reactions, often culpably disproportionate, to acts of violence by the KLA which (however much you sympathise with the Kosovo Albanians) fit any conceivable definition of 'terrorism' like a glove. There's no evidence of any intention on the part of the Serbs to eliminate physically the entire Albanian population of Kosovo — anyway a numerical impossibility, even for the Serbs — nor even to drive them out of the province, which they only started doing after the NATO attack on Yugoslavia began.
o o o o O o o o o
As a post-script to that, it's worth noting that Mr Shea holds the following positions in addition to his central role in the NATO secretariat: * Professor, Collège d’Europe, Bruges
* Lecturer, Brussels School of International Studies, University of Kent
* Associate Professor of International Relations, American University, Washington DC; Director of the Brussels Overseas Study Programme
* Adjunct Associate Professor of International Relations, James Madison College, Michigan State University
* Director of the MSU Summer School in Brussels.
It would be interesting to know how he answers penetrating questions from his students about the illegality of the Kosovo war, its failure to achieve any single one of its various proclaimed objectives, the fraudulent character of the Rambouillet conference which preceded the NATO attack, the failure even to seek UN authority for the use of force (still more the failure to obtain it), and the appalling incompetence of the NATO bombing (hitting refugee convoys, the Chinese embassy, television studios, bridges and power stations, as well as killing thousands of innocent civilians, all to no possible purpose). Perhaps 1999 is too long ago for Mr Shea's students to know of these crimes and blunders; they have all probably swallowed, without chewing, the now conventional wisdom according to which Bush's and Blair's Iraq may have been a dreadful mistake, but Clinton's and Blair's Kosovo was a stunning and legitimate success. But Mr Jamie Shea was only doing his job, and one has to admit that he did it spectacularly well, as no doubt he still does.
Brian
