There's been a lot of muddled talk in the media and in the debates in both Houses of parliament about the obnoxious agreement between the US and the UK on the procedures for extraditing people in either direction — the procedures under which the NatWest Three (prejudicially and repeatedly referred to in the Commons by the Solicitor-General, Mike O'Brien, as 'the Enron Three') were today flown to Houston Texas to be shackled and handcuffed on the say-so of the Americans without any vestige of an opportunity to defend themselves against the US charges or to rebut them or to submit evidence in their own defence in a British court before they were handed over.
Some have spoken as if the most objectionable thing about all this is that we have brought the agreement into effect, and saddled ourselves with these obligations, before the US Senate has even ratified the agreement. Of course this shows up the feebleness of our government in its dealings with Washington, and the utter lack of judgement or principle of the home secretary who negotiated and signed the agreement (yes, David Blunkett, of course); but the fact is that US ratification would make matters worse, not better, by making it even more difficult for us to denounce the agreement and start again. The idea that it was a positive move to despatch Baroness Scotland to Washington to persuade the Senators to ratify the agreement is wholly misconceived. Luckily, the Senators seem to be too busy to see the Baroness. Anyway, the Irish-American lobby, still apparently unaware of the Good Friday Agreement and the conversion of the IRA into peace-keepers, will continue to resist ratification for fear that it will make it easier for us to extradite Irish Republican activists from the US for trial in Britain. And with the mid-term elections looming, few Senators are likely to want to risk offending the Irish-Americans. No-one seems to have explained these simple truths to Lady Scotland, although there's plenty of evidence on the web and elsewhere.
Others here have focused on the iniquitous imbalance under which the agreement permits the Americans to extradite from the UK anyone they feel like locking up, simply by providing a factual statement of the charges they want to bring, whereas to extradite some villain (or Irishman, or both) from the US we have to show 'probable cause' why the person should be tried in our courts, something not far short of making a prima facie case against him. This is another measure of the government's obsequious attude to the American administration and its apparent inability to utter the word 'No' to any US request, however outlandish: but it is not the key issue here. If the imbalance were to be removed by making it just as easy for us to extradite from the US as it is for the Americans to extradite from the UK, that wouldn't solve anything — indeed, it would actually double the iniquity of the whole arrangement.
The really fundamental objection to the agreement, and the UK Extradition Act that brings it into force for the UK, is the denial of the most elementary rights to those whom the Americans want to get hold of: the right to challenge and rebut the charges being brought against them in a British court and to bring forward evidence in their own defence; the right to argue to a British court that the trial in question ought to be conducted in Britain but not in the US; and the right to benefit in appropriate cases from the discretionary power of the home secretary to decline to approve the extradition order in the interests of justice or in the British public interest (under the agreement and the Act, the home secretary, unbelievably, no longer has any such discretion). All these denials of elementary rights represent a grotesque betrayal of the government's duty to protect its own citizens. None of these fatal flaws would be cured by US ratification of the agreement or by reducing the evidentiary burden on Britain in seeking an extradition from the US so as to match that laid on the US. Both are irrelevant to the real issue. We should abrogate the agreement (much more easily done in the fortunate absence of any sign that the US will ratify it), and amend the relevant provisions of the Extradition Act. This could be done in a single day: it would be approved by acclamation by both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. It would be too late to rescue the NatWest Three, but how many more Brits have the FBI and the CIA got their beady eye on?
Matters are made even worse by additional factors which we are powerless to change: the American practice of claiming world-wide extra-territorial jurisdiction, even enabling them to put on trial in the US foreigners whose alleged offences have been committed in their own countries against their own compatriots, as in the case of the NatWest Three; the pernicious American practice of plea bargaining, under which even wholly innocent people can be coerced into pleading guilty to a lesser charge so as to avoid the danger of receiving a savage sentence on a graver alternative charge (something likely to face the NatWesters); the barbaric conditions in many American prisons, even worse than the worst of our own; the frequently interminable delays in bringing accused persons to trial, and the exorbitant conditions often set for bail in the meantime; and, not least, the huge and disproportionate sentences often handed down, sometimes condemning even relatively young people to spending the rest of their lives in prison with no possibility of early release on licence or probation, for offences that in many cases would attract much more moderate sentences in any European court. It is because of these factors that it's essential to restore the home secretary's discretionary power to withhold consent to an extradition when circumstances demand that it not take place.
You can come home now, Baroness.
Hat-tip: Owen's much pithier blog post making the same points, he having apparently read my mind with uncanny precision before I had had a chance to write this (something to do with heredity, I suppose).
Brian
Things are moving fast and becoming increasingly interesting in the affair of the book by Craig Murray, former ambassador in Uzbekistan, the passages deleted from or rewritten in it at the behest of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), and now the FCO's efforts to force Craig to remove from his website the texts and passages bowdlerised from his book, many of them actually released earlier by the FCO under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) or the Data Protection Act (DPA).
The background and some of the legal issues now raised by the FCO's ultimatums to Craig are described in my previous blog entry, below — see especially the substantial update appended to it earlier today, 11 July, and the Comments on the original post.
The latest development is a further exchange of letters between the Treasury Solicitors acting for the FCO and Craig: you can read the texts of both here. The earlier letter from the Treasury Solicitors is here. This is the letter containing the extraordinary assertion that just because documents have been released to an applicant under the FOI or the DPA it doesn't mean that the recipient of them is free to reproduce them or put them on a website, since they are still protected by Crown Copyright — food for thought for (e.g.) newspapers which manage to extract information under FOI but which are now apparently being told that they are not allowed to publish it.
The documents which the FCO, through the Treasury Solicitors, is trying to compel Craig Murray to remove from his website can all be read, as of now (Tuesday evening 11 July), by clicking the links to them here. As this is not actually Craig's own website, it's not entirely clear how Craig is expected to have them removed from it — or from the growing numbers of other websites which have uploaded the documents and made them available online.
There are some interesting media commentaries on what is going on, e.g. at:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/10/murray_fco_injunction/
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,,1817625,00.html
and
The second of these, an article in today's Guardian, quotes extensively from the offending texts. The implications of these extracts appearing in a national newspaper, both in print and on its website, are considered in the 11 July update to my previous blog entry.
The government's attempt to use Crown Copyright to prevent the publication on the Web, in a book, or (by implication) anywhere else, of material which has been released under FOI or the DPA raises issues going far beyond the outcome of Craig's bitter battle with his former employers, significant though that is in itself. The proliferation of texts of the documents objected to on a mounting number of websites in several countries suggests that the FCO's attempt to suppress them all is probably doomed: Spycatcher Plus. These events may decisively change the balance of power between future whistleblowers and the State — with sombre as well as welcome consequences for transparency on the one hand and good government on the other. There are important implications, too, for the availability or otherwise to government of the Official Secrets Act as a means of protecting sensitive material whose disclosure may damage the national interest (which is the interest of all of us). But whatever the legal outcome of the impending debates and probably law suits that will decide these issues, it would be utterly indefensible for the FCO to pursue its dispute with Craig Murray to the point either of bankrupting him, or of breaking his already fragile health. Whatever one might think of the rights and wrongs of his actions in Uzbekistan and subsequently (and there's ample room for two or more views on that), it's surely enough that he has lost his career and his livelihood at the hands of the government: clarifying the legal issues he has raised and doing whatever can realistically be done to protect sensitive material from even wider dissemination plainly need not entail inflicting more damage on him as a person. Vindictiveness ill becomes democratic government.
I'm going to be Away From Keyboard, as they say, from next weekend until the end of the month, and unable to continue to monitor developments on this front during that time. Plenty of other websites will be doing so: just type "Craig Murray" (with the quotation marks) into the admirable Technorati or http://blogsearch.google.com/. Meanwhile, I'll aim to add periodic updates to this post as necessary between now and Saturday the 15th. If you're interested, watch this space.
Update, early hours of Friday 14 July: Craig Murray has now been forced by the government's threats of legal action against him (for resistance to which he lacks the enormous resources required) to remove the offending documents from his website, even though most have previously been released to him or others under the Freedom of Information and/or the Data Protection Acts. The documents however remain freely available on numerous other websites, easily identified either by doing a search on Technorati or Google's blog-search facility, or by referring to the list of mirror sites on the website of Craig's friends.
Meanwhile Craig's book is now in the bookshops and available from Amazon.co.uk. Highly readable, highly recommended, even after its treatment at the hands of the New Labour censors.
Brian
The battle between Craig Murray, controversial former Ambassador to Uzbekistan, and an increasingly baffled Foreign & Commonwealth Office, has taken a curious, perhaps worrying, new turn. Craig's book, 'Murder in Samarkand' , has finally been published despite the FCO's fierce objections to some of the things in it, mainly official documents that Craig wanted to quote in full in the book. Apparently the documents in question were all in the public domain via the Freedom of Information Act, and all have been available for some time on the Web. Despite this, the FCO now claims that their publication is in breach of Crown Copyright and has forced Craig's publisher to remove them. The government's lawyers are now threatening Craig with legal action unless he also removes the documents from the Web by tea-time on Monday.
There's a very good account of all this, with links to the pertinent texts and a useful discussion of the peculiar issue of Crown Copyright, on Tim Worstall's blog, here, so there's no need to repeat it here, except to recall that in January I put on my website a summary of an exchange of views I had had over several weeks with Craig Murray about the issues raised by his experience and in his book, including a notably courteous reply by Craig to some of the points I had made. This might be worth re-reading now that the book is finally out, if somewhat bowdlerised, and a fresh row is brewing over the copyright issue. The latter should keep teams of lawyers happily occupied (and paid) for years.
But there's a more general issue here: if the government succeeds in using Crown Copyright to suppress the availability of official documents that are already publicly available through Freedom of Information applications or leaks, this would be a useful precedent for all kinds of censorship to limit the availability of information that the government of the day doesn't want us to have. Beware!
Update, 11 July 06: Now see an especially interesting and apparently well informed article on this in today's Guardian, "Former ambassador posts censored passages from memoir on website". David Leigh zeroes in on the key and perhaps most controversial assertion in the letter to Craig Murray from the Treasury Solicitors:
Even if a document is released under the Freedom of Information Act or the Data Protection Act, that does not entitle you to make further reproductions of that document by, for example, putting them on your website.
As Craig has pointed out, this poses a fundamental challenge to the media and indeed to everyone who wants to resist a further serious erosion of our freedom of expression: if a newspaper (or anyone else for that matter) receives documents under the Freedom of Information Act, is it (or he or she) really not entitled to make further reproductions of it for publication either in print or on the web, as the Treasury Solicitors are now solemnly claiming? If they are right, it drives an enormous hole (I shun references to a coach and horses) through the middle of the Act, rendering it virtually useless. Whether the same thing applies to material released to an individual under the Data Protection Act (such as some of the material released to Craig and now placed on his website) will be an interesting and important question that one hopes will ultimately be resolved in Craig's favour. Other material, if any, not released under either FOI or DPA but in effect leaked and 'published' without authority on the Web may be in a different category again, but that would seem to be governed by the Official Secrets Act rather than by the law of Crown Copyright, the latter surely pertinent only to material actually published (or 'released'?) by the State.
The other fascinating and important aspect of the Guardian article is that it reproduces at length much of the most sensitive and controversial material which the FCO required to be deleted from Craig's book, or substantially re-drafted before publication, and which the FCO is now seeking to force Craig to remove from his website. Quite apart from the fact that the material has now been made available on several other websites besides Craig's, and that Craig has no means of requiring the owners of those websites to remove it even if he wanted to, the fact that some of it has now appeared in a national daily newspaper, both in print and on the newspaper's website, surely makes the government's efforts at Web censorship utterly pointless.
It was brave of the Guardian to publish in this way, even if only on page 7, material which the government is seeking to suppress. It implicitly asserts the right of a newspaper to publish material available on the Web even if the government is trying to use legal means to get it removed. Usefully, the Guardian sets out its own legal advice in support of what it has done:
Lawyers say Mr Murray would be able to argue a defence of public interest for his own non-commercial disclosures, as would the media if quoting from the government documents on his website while reporting on current news events.
Let's hope, for all our sakes, that the Guardian's lawyers are right. As I have made clear here in comments on this post and elsewhere, I differ from Craig in accepting the need for some kind of legal protection against leaking or other unauthorised publication for certain categories of sensitive material that can't be put into the public domain without unacceptable damage to the public interest on a scale that outweighs the desirability of making public as much official material as possible, the principle underlying the FOI Act. But when the government has released material to anyone under any legal system, FOI or DPA, it's surely in the public domain with government agreement and the recipient ought to be able to do what it likes with it. Did the Treasury Solicitors really understand the implications of what they wrote to Craig?
Brian
A few amusing or striking items from this week-end's press:
From an article in the FT about high-roller life in Dubai ("Yachts are last word in luxury for the Gulf"): "The proliferation of luxury brands has generated a cacophany of advertising and glossy magazines pandering to luxury lifestyles." Perhaps they got that idea from the big glossy magazine published every few weeks by the Financial Times and entitled "How to Spend It", replete with full-page advertisement for unfathomably expensive extravagances — well, 'pandering to luxury lifestyles'. Why go to Dubai when you needn't go any further than Bond Street?
Still with the FT, an unusual (for the FT) linguistic-cum-logical foul-up:
"…Iraq's foreign minister … told the FT that the compact was an attempt to organise international aid on a more permanent basis, most specifically for the next five years" ('US hopes donor compact will rebuild Iraq').
'More permanent'? Like being pregnant, being permanent can't be more or less: it is or it isn't. In this case, it's evidently neither permanent nor more permanent, since it's to last for only five years. Mark a query, too, over that odd phrase "most specifically". What would 'less' or 'least specifically' indicate here? Perhaps though we should blame all this on the Iraqi foreign minister, not the FT.
One grim statistic, still from the FT, before we move on: according to the paper's first editorial ("Revisiting Bush's 'Axis of Evil' speech"), "1,200 bodies landed up in Baghdad's morgues in June…"
On a mercifully lighter note, an article in the Sunday Times News Review ("What I've learned about husbands") quotes Lady Sarah Graham Moon, the lady who cut off the sleeves of her erring husband's Savile Row suits and left his fine wines on neighbours' doorsteps like milk bottles when he moved his mistress into a nearby house, on being invited shortly afterwards onto the Oprah Winfrey Show:
I think Oprah expected me to cry or something… She asked me if I wanted a hug. I said, 'Get away from me, you loon. I'm English.'
Note to Gordon Brown: 'English', not 'British'. (Lady Sarah etc. Moon's response to Oprah's offer constitute a formula well worth remembering in case you ever find yourself at a service in one of those evangelical churches where you are instructed to give the complete stranger next to you in the pew a hug. 'English' may of course be replaced by 'Scottish', 'Irish', even 'British', etc., according to taste. Not by 'American', though, I'm afraid.)
And, lastly, poor besieged John Prescott, quoted elsewhere in the Sunday Times News Review:
Mr Anschutz said: 'Would you like to come and see a cattle ranch?', which I was very much interested in … I saw the cowboy films over my young years, didn't you?
He's a national treasure and should be preserved for the nation, although perhaps less rather than more permanently. Mr Prescott, I mean, not Mr Anschutz, who will have to content himself with the Dome and his casino.
Brian
In a recent item in Ephems , I reported as a recent news item from the asylum that –
A man called Steve Jago has been arrested in Whitehall for carrying a banner bearing a quotation from George Orwell ("In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act") and three copies of an article from Vanity Fair headed "Blair's Big Brother Britain". He has been charged under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act. At the police station a police officer stated for the record that he was showing the defendant the Vanity Fair articles which appeared to be 'politically motivated material'.
The politically motivated article (shock, horror!) in question turns out to be a superb and scrupulously documented analysis of Blair's frontal assault on a wide range of our historic civil rights and freedoms by the Observer columnist (and London editor of Vanity Fair), Henry Porter. It is in the July 2006 edition of the magazine, and fortunately the full text is on the Vanity Fair website. It makes for compulsive and riveting reading, and is strongly recommended to anyone who doubts that New Labour has subverted the English tradition of individual rights, probably beyond repair. Just don't print it out and carry a copy down Whitehall while the cops are looking.
A bonus in Porter's article is a link to the remarkable exchange of e-mails between himself and none other than Tony Blair, published in the Observer in April 2006, and also available in full on the Web. This too is obligatory reading. It can't be often that a busy prime minister is so incensed by a newspaper column attacking his human rights record that he starts banging out e-mails to the offending columnist. He begins his counter-attack in uncompromising language:
Frankly it's difficult to know where to start, given the mishmash of misunderstanding, gross exaggeration and things that are just plain wrong.
Needless to say, Porter returns to the charge with redoubled vigour. A terrific read, if in many ways a deeply depressing one.
One scandal not mentioned by Henry Porter in Vanity Fair or in his e-mails is the agreement with the Americans under which they may demand the extradition to the US of British citizens whom they wish to try in the American courts even if the offences of which they are accused were committed outside the US, and without any obligation laid on the US authorities to provide even prima facie evidence against the person sought in support of their request for his extradition. The imminent extradition of three British businessmen to stand trial in the US under this outrageous agreement, and the Act of the UK Parliament which brought it into operation despite the fact that even now the US Senate has not ratified it, has belatedly ignited controversy and protests in the UK media and even on the streets. There's no need for me to go into detail about it here (a full account is available on the Web here) . I and others tried to draw it to public attention, e.g. in my letter published in the Sunday Times on 6 June 2004, on this blog in the following February, and in other ways.
The three men are expected to be flown to the US next week. Despite a reckless promise in parliament by Blair to see if he could do anything to ensure that the men are granted bail while they await their trials (perhaps for anything from one to three years), nothing seems to have been done and even if bail is granted, it is likely to be on such huge sureties that the men are unlikely to be able to raise it. If and when they come to trial, they are almost certain to have to consider a plea bargain to avoid the risk of being sentenced to imprisonment effectively for the rest of their lives if convicted: under such a bargain they will be forced to plead guilty, perhaps to slightly lesser charges than those originally brought, in exchange for a promise of shorter sentences, perhaps five or ten years rather than the 30 or 40 years to which they might well be condemned if they refuse the offer of a bargain. So we have here three UK citizens, charged with offences committed in Britain against a British company, for which they have never been charged in Britain: the Americans claiming extra-territorial jurisdiction as if Washington were the seat of a world government and a world court; an Act of Parliament under which all this is allowed to happen (thus effectively preventing the UK courts from offering protection to the victims); the cowardly refusal of the British law officers or the home secretary to exercise their discretion to prevent extradition from going ahead; a deeply flawed and one-sided agreement with the US, for which David Blunkett is unsurprisingly responsible from his days as home secretary; and three Britons about to be the victims of the deeply unjust American systems of plea bargaining, over-charging (remember Louise Woodward?), and grossly over-long prison sentences. Other Brits have already been extradited under these monstrous arrangements: it's only when prosperous middle-class British bankers face the same fate that the media become seriously agitated. All this on top of the catalogue of attacks on the rule of law compiled by Henry Porter.
Truly, you couldn't make it up.
Brian
Some time ago (on 23 June, to be precise), in the comments on an Ephems post about some verse written by Clement Attlee, Labour's greatest prime minister to date, including an Attlee limerick about himself, I invited Ephems readers to contribute some verse about Tony Blair, in the absence of evidence that he writes any about himself (or indeed about anything else). I tried to start the ball rolling with this:
A young politician called Blair
Was distraught to be losing his hair
He said, "I'm appalled!
I shall soon be quite bald –
It just shows that the system's unfair."
I added: Not brilliant, but it's a start. More, please.
Now Baralbion has gallantly risen to the occasion:
From Baralbion
July 2nd, 2006 at 7:00 pm
A pity no-one has taken up the challenge posed by the prospect of a Blair Limerickfest. Here's my go:
Please don't disclose this letter
(Mrs B, I don't want to upset her).
But that Tony Blair
Is beginning to wear.
After him things can only get better.
I suppose you could say this had the makings of a new poetic form, the Blimerick. But you could also adapt that neglected form the Clerihew to produce a Blairihew, as in:
Of power Blair
Has had his share.
If he has any more
He'll become a bore
To which I added:
Brian applauds: An excellent double whammy for starters. Come on, chaps, follow that! A Haiku (or Blaiku) would be welcome, too: "an unrhymed verse form of Japanese origin having three lines containing usually 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively; also : a poem in this form usually having a seasonal reference" – Merriam-Webster. Better these (not too difficult!):
Blaiku:
Ageing Tony Blair
Moves slowly towards winter*
Not wanting to go
*[Note seasonal reference]
Blimerick:
Tony Blair told his wife with a frown
That it wasn't yet time to stand down
But by 2009
It would surely be fine
To hand over to Chancellor Brown.
Blairihew:
Tony Blair
Thought it very unfair:
He was increasingly afraid
He wouldn't complete his decade.
More, more!
Brian
The Wind that Shakes the Barley is Ken Loach on top form, implicitly (but never expressly) teaching a complex and subtle history lesson that implies, without ever stating them, a few terribly simple messages for our own times: that military occupation of another nation always ends in violence and brutality: that the act of occupation brutalises not only the occupiers but also, even more tragically, the occupied: that the experience of resistance to alien occupation teaches a habit of violence that may be impossible to shake off even when the occupation ends: and that alien occupation may be disastrously divisive for the occupied, especially if they are already prone to internal division by reason of their religion, tribes, sects, social classes, economic inequalities, or otherwise. Only the deliberately blind can affect to miss the way that all these messages, each one carefully illustrated by Loach as it applied (in some ways still applies) to the Ireland of 1920, are horrendously relevant to Iraq in 2006. Yet Loach never wholly demonises even the most brutal of the oppressors to the extent of painting them in simple black and white. He goes out of his way to show that the Black and Tans are individuals who have gone through the horrors and slaughter of the first world war, ended only two years previously, and have inevitably been brutalised by it; and an act of merciful courage by one British soldier who risks his life to save a group of Irish Republicans from imminent execution shows that even these men have consciences and can be brave in a good as well as a bad cause.
Nor is the Irish resistance depicted as uniformly heroic or saintly: the terrible moral dilemmas that constantly face them are shown to have no perfectly acceptable resolution, leading essentially decent men to commit acts of dreadful cruelty, not only against their oppressors but eventually against each other. Anyone who can't recognise Iraq in all this can't have watched The Wind that Shakes the Barley with much attention.
There are brilliant and sensitive performances by Cillian Murphy and Padraic Delaney as the two brothers; and every other part is played with sometimes gut-wrenching realism. There are scenes of violence and cruelty that are sometimes hard to watch, but they are always essential to the narrative and to the film's basic themes, never gratuitous. The photography is equally outstanding: look out for Loach's and Barry Ackroyd's subtle and effective use of colour and their constant reminders that the conflicts portrayed in the film are linked as if by umbilical cord to the land of Ireland, beautifully represented in contrast to the ugly violence that repeatedly defiles it. The political debates, the participants painfully seeking to find a way through the moral thickets of oppression and division, are seamlessly absorbed into the action, as gripping in their way as the agonising effects of violence on human relationships and the intermittent outbreaks of violence and cruelty themselves.
The squeals of 'anti-British!' from some of the more repulsive British tabloid newspapers can safely be ignored. This is great cinema. It richly deserved its Palme d'Or at Cannes. Don't, on any account, miss it. But don't expect light entertainment or, for that matter, a happy ending, either: the film is set in 1920, and there's still no happy ending in Ireland in 2006. Not an encouraging augury for Iraq, 2003.
Some interesting and perceptive published reviews:
Brian
In a recent post here I quoted some examples of news items that read like April Fool's Day spoofs — or, if not spoofs, news which made you wonder which was crazy, you or the rest of the world. The flow of insanity continues unchecked. Contributions are welcome. Here are some more.
John Prescott, our affectionately regarded croquet-playing deputy prime minister, has been staying at the Colorado ranch of an American tycoon who is lobbying for a casino in Britain, matter which Prescott will be involved in deciding. According to the Sunday Times report, "Prescott denied yesterday that there was any conflict of interest, saying that they had not discussed government business. Instead, subjects had included the abolition of slavery." There's no indication as to which of them was for and which against.
A man called the police when he saw a group of youths starting up his moped parked outside his house. When the youths saw the police car arriving two of them jumped onto the man's moped and rode away. The owner shouted to the police to follow them to try to retrieve his moped. The police refused, pointing out (very reasonably, I suppose) that the thieves were not wearing crash helmets: if the police gave chase and the youths fell off and injured themselves as a result, they could sue the police for damages. Other police force chiefs have agreed that the refusal to chase had been correct.
The estimable Margaret Beckett has let it be known that her reaction on being told by the prime minister that she was to be appointed as Britain's new Foreign Secretary was to say to him: "F*ck!" Whether this eloquent response conveyed delight, pride, disappointment or sheer panic has not been revealed.
As reported in a Sunday newspaper, a meeting has been held at a school in Gereshk in Afghanistan in the Taliban-infested area where the Americans have selflessly handed over the reins of power to a British-led NATO contingent. The meeting was called by the local army commander, a British colonel, to win over understandably suspicious local Afghan leaders' hearts and minds and to explain to them the generous contributions being made by Britain to local development projects, few of which have so far materialised. The colonel was supported by a lady from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and another lady from Britain's Department for International Development (DfID). After each of the three had spoken about their humanitarian mission, one of the elders, an old man with a long white beard, got up and accused the two women of being spies. (Afghan war-lords and other traditional leaders aren't accustomed to being lectured by women, you see, but the British army is helping them to get used to the idea.) The meeting then adjourned to another room to watch a film, specially made for the purpose in Britain, comprising five minutes of the BBC under-water programme Blue Planet, followed by a message from the local Afghan Provincial Governor, followed by five more minutes of whales and dolphins. (Well, that should do the trick. Teach the Taliban a lesson, too.)
Detectives in Shrewsbury investigating the murder of two women have said they are investigating whether the place where the bodies were found were being used as a massage parlour. Detective Superintendent Andy Rowsell, leading the investigation, said: "That's part of the inquiry; possibly it was being used as a massage parlour. But until we know what was going on in the premises we are not going to know." (Here's a clue, Andy: the registered address of the premises is Rachaels Massage.)
According to the Sun newspaper, television viewers in Iran will soon be able to watch the Teletubbies. Psychological warfare? Better than the other kind, if so. Reporting this on 2 July, TG-COM splashed the headline: "I Teletubbies sbarcano in Iran: E Tinky Winky parlerà farsi." Moral: never underestimate the intellectual prowess of Tinky Winky.
A man called Steve Jago has been arrested in Whitehall for carrying a banner bearing a quotation from George Orwell ("In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act") and three copies of an article from Vanity Fair headed "Blair's Big Brother Britain". He has been charged under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act. At the police station a police officer stated for the record that he was showing the defendant the Vanity Fair articles which appeared to be 'politically motivated material'. Mr Jago is to appear in court in September. The report of this surreal but reasonably disturbing event in the Observer of 2 July was written by a co-author of the offending Vanity Fair article, Henry Porter. (If I were you, Henry, old chap, I would go into hiding.) Bloggers beware: if you post politically motivated material on your website, the cops will come after you.
All far too true to be good.
Brian
Like so many other once-great British institutions, Cunard Line has sold itself for a mess of pottage to a vast American conglomerate, Carnival, that owns its own eponymous cruise line among several others. The discovery that Carnival is equipping its own cruise ships with wi-fi internet access for the use of passengers with laptops — but showing no sign of allowing, or requiring, its subsidiary Cunard to do the same — has prompted me to send the following message from the Cunard website, itself apparently wholly Americanised:
According to http://tinyurl.com/gxfaw, Carnival (American owner of once-British Cunard) is equipping all its own cruise ships with wi-fi internet access for passengers, as well as cell-phone (mobile phone) access, while at sea. Why is Carnival not doing the same for all Cunard cruise ships instead of exploiting Cunard passengers with monstrous over-charging for use of slow and limited internet facilities on the ship's own computer system? (P&O of course does the same thing.) When will the Cunard Queens be equipped with wi-fi, an absolute necessity for many 21st-century passengers?
Question no. 2: Why do you try to prevent Cunard customers, mainly British, living outside the US from e-mailing you from this web page, or indeed at all? Why don't you include a proper e-mail address on your website so that anyone anywhere in the world can e-mail you? Not to do so is just lousy customer relations. To send this I have been forced to use a relative's New York telephone number: my real number is +44 (0)20 [**** ****] in London, England.
Question no. 3: Why is Carnival closing down a historic British institution, Swan Hellenic, a cruise line and cultural experience combined, used for almost a century by British writers, academics and others with a genuine intellectual interest in the countries visited? Why is Carnival transferring Swan Hellenic's only ship, Minerva II, to another of its cruise lines, presumably to increase the profits for Carnival's shareholders in blithe disregard of the loss to Britain's cultural life? Is this always the price we have to pay when great historic British companies like Cunard and Swan Hellenic are sold to American
owners who don't care a jot about the effects on their British customers of the money-grubbing changes they recklessly make, still less concern themselves about denying British customers the benefits they provide to their fellow-Americans such as wi-fi access and an e-mail contact facility?
I am putting a copy of this message on my website (http://www.barder.com/ephems/ ) and I shall be glad also to put there any reply I might receive to it.
Brian Barder
London, UK
2 July 06
Don't hold your breath for the reply, though. (And while you're waiting, have a look at the unintentionally revealing account of how the formidable Pamela Conover made her way via "the profit-driven entrepreneurial Carnival" to be nominated by Carnival as President of Cunard. How Nancy would have laughed! Still, at least Pamela's English….)
Brian
