Media people are always wildly excited by media events, most of which tend to leave the rest of us relatively calm. One such event is the departure of Michael Grade from the top 
of the BBC Governors' (soon to be Trustees') tree to the top of the much shorter and humbler ITV tree where, however, he will have much greater scope for transforming his organization's flagging fortunes, and earn vastly more money. Media insiders have focused on the unhappy timing of the Grade defection, shortly before the government decides whether to approve a substantial increase in the BBC licence fee (the poll tax we all pay to keep Auntie in the style of life to which she is accustomed), for which Grade has led the argument: or whether it will limit increases in the licence fee to a little below the rate of inflation, entailing a small annual cut in real terms, as reportedly proposed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown; or whether there will be a compromise — a permitted annual increase corresponding to the inflation rate, as allegedly favoured by the Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell. Now Grade isn't there any more to keep the pressure on right up to the moment of decision. But in an emotional farewell e-mail to all BBC staff to explain and defend his departure ("Being the chairman of the BBC was the most unexpected job I have ever had. The welcome you gave me on my arrival is embedded deep within my emotional DNA"), he assured his former colleagues that they would survive without him:
Look after Auntie, I am sure you won't need me again. And thank you for having me.
The BBC's proliferating blogs are predictably preoccupied with these momentous issues, to the point where I yielded to the temptation to contribute to one of them a very slightly tongue-in-cheek attempt to put matters into perspective. This particular blog belongs to Newsnight's Business Correspondent, and it's called 'Talk About Newsnight: Paul Mason's Idle Scrawl', the relevant post being 'Grade – big socks to fill…', a reference to the great man's predilection for wearing red socks. As my humble comment is already buried under the dead weight of countless further comments in innumerable similar blogs, I'll try to rescue it for both posterity and what it's worth by reproducing it here:
"It's natural that BBC and other television people should be agog over Michael Grade's move, but to most of the rest of us it's really a bit of a yawn, these elderly gentlemen making grandiose statements to bunches of microphones and then shuffling around the chess board in different permutations: only the names remain the same. None of it seems especially relevant to those of us who get more entertainment (not in the form of television programmes, though) from our computers than from those weary old programmes on the box, mostly as unchanging in their tired formats over the years as the channel bosses or the New York Times. Coronation Street! Panorama! Does anyone really watch them still? OK, we all listen to the Today Programme and the World at One and PM, and watch Channel 4 News and Newsnight, with snatches of Sky News in between, but that's because we're hooked on politics and news, not on BBC Radio or television any more.
"Of course we cherish the dear old BBC (it's a National Institution, right?) — and we get really annoyed when the government tries to mess it about: long live Andrew Gilligan and Greg Dyke! But we also think it's recklessly extravagant — why do all the big name presenters have to troop out to the US every time there's an election there? how many resident correspondents does the BBC keep in the US at any one time and why can't they be left to cover events Stateside without an army of household names rushing out to steal their thunder every third week? how many technicians and general hangers-on are really needed to make a run-of-the-mill programme? ever watch those credits rolling on for twenty minutes at the end of each pot-boiler?
"So it won't break our hearts if the licence fee is kept to just under the rate of inflation, and if that prevents the BBC from going ahead with its barmy plan for moving to 
Manchester, tant mieux. Oh, and does anyone seriously think that Greg Dyke (right) is going to be the government's choice for the new Top Trustee of the BBC after the things he has said about Blair and co. when he was given the old heave-ho last time? If he does get it, it will be the ultimate proof that Blair's authority really has drained away out of the lame duck and that Gordon's already driving the plane, if you'll pardon the mixed metaphors. Come to think of it, appointing Greg would be a sweet revenge. So maybe it's not so far-fetched after all. (Excuse me yawning like this: it must be bed-time, and I doubt if I'll stay awake through Newsnight tonight any more than I have done for weeks….)
"Sail on, O BBC, our mate: sail on, broadcaster strong and great: but don't imagine that humanity with all its fears, with all the hopes of future years, is hanging breathless on thy fate, because it ain't."
Brian
I wonder whether in their exchanges of private messages President George W Bush and our Prime Minister, Tony Blair, ever quote poetry to each other? It seems, on the face of it, unlikely, although any suggestions as to poems that either might appropriately quote to the other will be most welcome in Comments.
This idle thought is prompted by the experience, commoner as one gets older, of being haunted for days by a phrase from a poem which one can't quite place, often — as indeed in this case — because it isn't quite right. The phrase that's been keeping me awake in recent nights is: "Slowly, O how slowly", which I have finally tracked down as an unforgivable misquotation from Arthur Hugh Clough's "Say not the struggle nought availeth":
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.
This poem, in itself pretty unremarkable, has acquired a huge potency for people of my generation (and earlier, if any such still survive) by having been quoted by Winston Churchill in one of his great wartime speeches in early 1941. He did so in reply to a shorter quotation from an American poet which had recently been sent to him by President Roosevelt to encourage Britain to continue its desperate war effort against Nazi Germany at a time when Pearl Harbor (7 December 1941) and Hitler's subsequent declaration of war on the US had not yet brought the Americans into the war. The lines by Longfellow quoted by Roosevelt to Churchill, and also quoted by Churchill in another of his speeches, have also acquired a special emotional charge for those of us who remember them in that war-time Anglo-American context.
For the benefitof those who weren't even a calculating glint in their grandmother's eye at the time, here are both the items concerned, the full text of Clough's poem and the lines of Longfellow actually quoted, or slightly misquoted, by Roosevelt in a manuscript letter to Churchill. This is how Churchill introduced Clough's poem in his speech to the nation on 27 April 1941:
Last time I spoke to you I quoted the lines of Longfellow which President Roosevelt had written out for me in his own hand. I have some other lines which are less well known but which seem apt and appropriate to our fortunes tonight and I believe they will be so judged wherever the English language is spoken or the flag of freedom flies…
[http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/timeline/410427awp.html]
And he quoted the last eight lines of Clough's poem:
Say not the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been, things remain;If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.For while the tired waves vainly breaking
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.– Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–61), Say not the struggle nought availeth, 1855
And the Longfellow, in a manuscript letter from Franklin D Roosevelt to Churchill:
Dear Churchill
Wendell Wilkie will give you this — He is truly helping to keep politics out over here.
I think this verse applies to you people as it does to us:
"[Thou too, S]ail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hope of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!"As ever yours
Franklin D. Roosevelt
– Roosevelt to Churchill, 20 January 1941 [punctuation and text corrected] [http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/churchill/interactive/_html/wc0112.html]Quoted in Churchill’s broadcast of 9 February 1941, his celebrated appeal to North America, ending:
"Give us the tools and we will finish the job." http://www.heritage.org/Research/PoliticalPhilosophy/hl835.cfm
Tailpiece: An interesting example of how styles change is Roosevelt's opening salutation in a hand-written and quite intimate letter to his friend and colleague, Winston Churchill: "Dear Churchill". ("Dear Mr Churchill" would have been regarded as suitable only for a letter to a tradesman or other social inferior, of course.) No-one can doubt that if Blair received a manuscript letter from George W Bush beginning "Dear Blair", he would wonder what he had done to give such dire offence, although he probably wouldn't realise that "Dear Mr Blair" would have been even worse. He won't even allow his own civil servants to address him as "Prime Minister"! Still, I'm happy in these informal times to sign myself off as plain old –
Brian
According to the lead story in today's Observer, Tony Blair is about to issue a virtual apology for the slave trade in an article for a black community magazine, New Nation. It's only 'virtual' because he nimbly avoids the words 'apologise' or even 'sorry', but he announces that the trade was 'profoundly shameful' and that 'we condemn its existence utterly', and 'express our deep sorrow that it ever happened' (oops, that's dangerously close to saying we're sorry, isn't it?).
In a crisp comment on this latest buffoonery, Tim Worstall is disposed to be generous about the 'apology' ("I wouldn't say that I'm all that worried about Blair's apology for slavery"), although he goes on to despatch pretty briskly the even more ludicrous assertion that those who apologise for a wrong committed by others must pay 'reparations' to those wronged (or, in this case presumably, their great-great-great-great grandchildren). Personally, I'm less inclined than Tim to be generous about the Blair quasi-apology. Those who assert their right to apologise for the wrongs committed by others, especially when those others are long dead, devalue the whole concept of apology, which entails contrition and an acknowledgement of guilt. The offence is all the greater if the apology is issued on behalf of the whole current population of Britain (or, by implication, that part of the population whose ancestry in Britain goes back to the period between 1450 and the early nineteenth century; more recent immigrants and their descendants are no doubt excused), all of them equally guiltless of the offence apologised for.
The Blair 'apology' also commits the serious ahistorical blunder of seeking to apply 20th and 21st century moral values to a much earlier age. Ideas of right and wrong which seem to most of us timeless and absolute are in many cases socially derived and organic, changing from century to century. When will our prime minister apologise for the hanging of children for stealing a loaf of bread, or for the tortures inflicted by the Star Chamber, or for the practice by a former monarch of having his more unsatisfactory wives beheaded? All these things, like slavery, once seemed part of the natural order of things. The judicial killing of murderers and flogging of schoolchildren were fiercely defended by upright moralisers in my own lifetime (a few left-overs on the far right, and rather more Americans, would still advocate restoring them). But Mr Blair can't grasp the concept that what seems obviously wrong to us now once seemed perfectly OK to our ancestors:
'It is hard to believe that what would now be a crime against humanity was legal at the time,' the Prime Minister will say.
Well, Mr Blair may find it hard to believe, but there's a lot more, and more cogent, evidence for it than there ever was for WMD in Iraq. What's more, slavery had not only that barely credible legal backing that so astonishes Mr Blair, but sound biblical authority too, as our bible-reading prime minister ought to know:
However, you may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you. You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance. You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way. (Leviticus 25:44-46 [NLT])
(Exodus 21:2-6 and 21:20-21 are worth a glance, too.) And, even better known, from the New Testament, lest Leviticus and Exodus be regarded as superseded:
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear. Serve them sincerely as you would serve Christ. (Ephesians 6:5 [NLT])
Admittedly, the devil may quote scripture for his purpose, but it's a free country, even for the devil.
The Observer article recalls that two years ago, a group was demanding an apology for slavery from the Queen, when–
Rendezvous of Victory, a group which seeks to combat the legacy of slavery, said it would call on the Queen to issue an apology. Its joint co-ordinator, Kofi Mawuli Klu, said he was disappointed by Blair's suggestion that slavery is a thing of the past: 'He's missed the point. They do not understand contemporary enslavement. There is nothing in this statement about the enduring legacy of slavery in terms of racism and global injustice.'
According to Mr Klu, it seems that "racism and global injustice" can be equated with slavery, so we're (nearly) all guilty after all, although it's not clear what would be achieved in the cause of eliminating racism or global injustice by a mass apology for their existence by either the Queen or Tony Blair on behalf of the rest of us. Blaming others for past evils (as we now perceive them to have been) comes a lot cheaper than doing something practical and effective about the elimination of current ones, which requires energy and clear thinking. And Mr Klu might care to direct his condemnations at the modern, existing practitioners of slavery in its true and original sense. He could start by visiting the website of the Anti-Slavery Society, "Fighting Slavery Today", including its documenting of slavery practised now in west Africa. Tackling such wrongs calls for a lot more than an apology.
Brian
Like all the other UK television broadcasters, the BBC is notoriously miserly with its opera productions, even though much opera is so well suited to television (the indispensable subtitles come absolutely naturally and don't distract, and you're assured of the best possible views of the action, without that 6' 7" lady with the enormous hair in the seat in front). BBC4 made handsome amends for this neglect of opera with this evening's transmission of Nicholas Hytner's current Glyndebourne production of Cosi Fan Tutte, surely the most beautiful, funny, touching and musically inspired of all Mozart's operas — which is really saying something. For those of us who can't afford or contrive to get to Glyndebourne, this television version was an excellent second best, especially if you have a wide screen television set, stereo sound and decent speakers.
The open secret of a truly successful Cosi (apart from all the usual and obvious requirements, musical and theatrical) must be the credibility of the four lovers. They have all got to be young, beautiful and above all sexy, or the whole thing falls flat. Hytner's quartet passes this test triumphantly, with a pair of 
gorgeous sisters in the soprano Miah Persson (Fiordiligi, right) and mezzo-soprano Anke Vondung (Dorabella), and their suitably masculine boy-friends ("suitors" in opera-speak), tenor Ferrando (Topi Lehtipuu), and bass-baritone Guglielmo (Luca Pisaroni). Their nationalities can all be deduced easily from their names: Swedish, German, Finnish and Italian respectively. All sing like angels, and look like Hollywood sex symbols. They even act, too: Ms Persson, for example, possesses a splendidly authentic 21st-century giggle and impish laugh, and deploys both to irresistible effect. How Mozart, entranced by women and their voices like no-one else (until Richard Strauss came along), would have loved it, if only he had had television or a ticket to Glyndebourne!
Wonderful playing by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, conducted by Ivan Fischer (Hungarian), and fine uncluttered sets, lit as through honey, top the whole thing off a treat. This is the most glamorous and enjoyable production of Cosi that I have seen since a similarly good-looking production done on a shoestring on a tiny stage with only a huge double bed for a set and prop, by the Opera Company of ?ód? (Lodz) in Poland (pronounced like a badly slurred 'woods', as in 'woodge'), in a minuscule auditorium on the first floor of the museum, nearly 20 years ago in Polish communist days. Like many of the singers in Polish opera and concert halls, the performers were young and attractive, with entrancing voices — just waiting to be snapped up after a year or two by enterprising western opera companies, but a splendid asset for Polish musical life in the meantime.
Just a pity that the BBC lacked the guts to put Cosi on either of its two terrestrial channels, where it might have won a few million converts to opera, if only because of those Swedish blonde and German brunette stars. Instead, it went out on BBC4, a digital channel watched, I believe, by a couple of dozen viewers on a good night when there's no footie on elsewhere. The way the Ashes are going at present in Brisbane (literally as well as metaphorically), viewers would happily have switched from cricket to Cosi with infinite relief, given the chance.
Brian
The Queen's Speech on 15 November 2006 announcing the government's intentions for the next parliamentary session contained little that was surprising or even interesting, apart perhaps from the note of irony (presumably unintended) in the first sentence of the brief passage on the middle east:
My Government remains committed to peace in the Middle East. It will continue to work to find a lasting settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, to support the new Iraqi Government in its efforts to build an enduring constitutional settlement, and to assist the Government of Afghanistan.
The British government's enthusiastic participation in the illegal and fraudulently represented attack on and occupation of Iraq in 2003 might be thought a curious manifestation of its continuing commitment to 'peace in the Middle East'. Still, better late than never.
More worrying, though, is a striking sentence in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office 'briefing paper' on "Iraq Policy" [pdf], one of a series of briefs published on the prime minister's website as background to each section of the Queen's speech:
Prime Minister Maliki’s government has been in power for less than six months and it faces immense security, political and economic challenges. We will support the government and people of Iraq over the long term. Our aim is to give them every assistance to build democratic structures, build up their own security forces and develop their economy. On the security front, the UK will continue to provide troops for as long as the Iraqi Government wants us to remain. UN Security Council Resolution 1637 authorises our presence. This Resolution expires at the end of December 2006 when we expect a simple rollover will take place. We have no desire to stay in Iraq for longer than is necessary; but nor will we leave before the job is done. [My emphasis -- BLB]
So the decision on when British troops are to be withdrawn from Iraq will depend, not on any judgement by the British government, but on the wishes (and fears) of the ramshackle and deeply divided government of Iraq, whose collapse under the weight of the chaos and anarchy now afflicting the country could well occur at any moment. Rarely can such a momentous decision, literally a life-and-death issue for our country, have been surrendered to the government of a foreign country whose interests are in many respects diametrically opposed to ours.
It's true that a few days earlier, in her speech to the Royal United Services Institute on 9 November (quoted in an earlier item on this blog), the Foreign & Commonwealth Secretary, Margaret Beckett, had spoken in similar terms:
We will leave when they [the Iraqi government] are confident that they can take the role of security in the country on their own shoulders.
[My emphasis -- BLB]
This might just possibly have been forgiven as sloppy drafting — I understand that Mrs Beckett rarely speaks off the cuff — but the same can't, obviously, be said of a formal briefing paper prepared to assist interpretation of the Queen's Speech and published on the prime minister's website. How strange that the media seem to have failed to notice this disgraceful abrogation of our government's solemn responsibilities!
Brian
Any fellow-bloggers who followed yesterday's State Opening of Parliament on television with sufficiently rapt attention might have been struck by the appearance in the midst of all the weird ceremonial of Princess Anne, the Princess Royal and daughter of the Queen, in an ornate uniform and waving a yellow rod of some description. It turns out that Her Royal Highness is the (honorary, I assume) Colonel of the Blues and Royals, one of the regiments of the Household Cavalry, and that this already onerous position automatically also makes her something called "Gold Stick in Waiting": hence her bit part, in full costume, at the State Opening. A similarly useless piece of supporting information from a website devoted to the wife of the heir to the throne, Camilla, Princess of Wales (who prefers to shelter behind the title "Duchess of Cornwall", for reasons best known to her husband) tells us that in the 1970s Camilla's first husband, Andrew Parker-Bowles, was -
Colonel Commanding the Household Cavalry and Silver Stick in Waiting to Queen Elizabeth II. And was [sic] ADC to Lord Soames, when he was Governor-General of Southern Rhodesia in 1979. Silver Stick is merely the title that comes with being the Colonel Commanding the Household Cavalry. Silver Stick in Waiting is the assistant to Gold Stick in Waiting. These court titles date back to Tudor times, when two army officers were placed near the Sovereign to protect him or her from danger. Their name derives from their staffs of office, which have a gold or a silver head.
The same website quotes an anonymous 'friend' as saying that Andrew Parker-Bowles is -
an ex-boyfriend of Princess Anne, and the late Queen Mother saw him as one of her favourites.
So Camilla's former husband once held the office of assistant to an office of state now occupied by the lady who is now her sister-in-law and a former girl-friend of the same former husband. I hope that's clear?
It's important not to confuse the Princess Royal's costume when she is in her Gold Stick role with the naval uniform (possibly that of an admiral or more likely some slightly lower rank — see below, and please be patient) which she tends to wear on out-of-doors occasions such as the Remembrance Day ceremony at the Cenotaph in Whitehall on the nearest Sunday to 11 November, anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I. Although Princess Anne (once again according to Wikipedia ) is Colonel-in-Chief of some 20 army regiments, British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand, she quite understandably seems to find that naval rig suits her best, relying no doubt on her position as 'Rear Admiral and Chief Commandant for women, Royal Navy'. Nor should we forget that –
In 2002, she made history by being the first non-reigning woman to wear military uniform at a funeral, when she wore a Royal Navy uniform at the funeral of her grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.
The Princess is not the only royal personage to don slightly surprising military uniform on ceremonial occasions. Those watching the recent Remembrance Day ceremony at the Cenotaph may have wondered about the identity of the youngish-looking man in military uniform viewing the proceedings from a Foreign Office balcony with other non-participating royals. Surely, we thought, this couldn't be HRH the Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, whose career in the Royal Marines came to an embarrassingly premature end after only three months when the Royal Marines decided that the Prince was not for them, and he sensibly decided that the 
Royal Marines were right? For a man whose military career had been so short-lived now to appear in public in some form of military uniform might seem just a little — well, insensitive. But the next day's Court Circular solved the mystery. Yes, it was indeed Prince Edward on the balcony, in his role and uniform of — wait for it — "Royal Honorary Colonel, The Royal Wessex Yeomanry", a unit of the Territorial Army. As a footnote, it's reassuring to see from the accompanying illustration (right) of the Royal Earl inspecting his royal yeomen that he sports a number of medals, perhaps including a medal for bravery when he risked his father's wrath by deciding to call it a day with the Royal Marines.
We have Wikipedia once again to thank for the following further tantalising titbits:
The Earl of Wessex is mostly famous for his television production and presenting career and his brief service with the Royal Marines. In connection with the television production, he has used the names Edward Windsor and, later, Edward Wessex, leading The Guardian, for one, to refer to him as "the Edward formerly known as Prince". … In 1994, the leaders of Estonia's Royalist Party, with 10 percent of the seats in the Estonian National Parliament, wrote to Prince Edward indicating that they would, if they came into power, like to offer him the position of King of Estonia. In their letter, they said that they wanted Edward as King because of their admiration "for him, Britain, its monarchy, democracy and culture". It is unknown how, or even if, the Earl of Wessex responded, but he obviously has yet to assume the throne of this Baltic State.
Imagination quails at the thought of the uniforms His Royal Highness (potential Majesty) could wear if only he were to decide to accept that Estonian offer.
Brian
It's hard to know whether to laugh or weep at President George W Bush's gut-wrenching public appeal for "any idea or suggestion" from anyone, anywhere, that might get the 
mighty United States out of the morass of its Iraq policies. Surrounded by the whole of his Cabinet (apart from Rumsfeld, sacked a few minutes earlier but still nominally in office), and looking both rattled and mortified by the news that the Senate, as well as the House, had now definitely fallen to the Democrats, the President told a press conference on national and international radio and television:
One of the most important challenges facing our country is the war on terror, and Iraq is the central front in this war. Our country now has more than 149,000 men and women serving bravely in that country… I'm open to any idea or suggestion that will help us achieve our goals of defeating the terrorists and ensuring that Iraq's democratic government succeeds.
Well, that's one way of thinking up changes in policy when they seem to be needed. One suggestion I've heard is the single word: "Leave!" I can't improve on that. Send this and any other ideas or suggestions to comments@whitehouse.gov — but only if they are constructive, please.
By contrast, Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, Margaret Beckett, needs no suggestions or ideas for changes in our Iraq policies. Mrs Beckett has just re-confirmed that our government has transferred to that country's government, such as it is, the heavy responsibility for determining the timing of Britain's troops' withdrawal from Iraq :
Mrs Beckett insisted that Britain would honour its commitment to the government of Nouri Maliki, the Iraqi PM, to retain UK forces in the country for as long as they were required. "We will leave when they are confident that they can take the role of security in the country on their own shoulders," she said.
(British Foreign & Commonwealth Secretary Margaret Beckett, speech to the Royal United Services Institute, London, 9 November 2006; my emphasis)
Let's hope the Iraqi government will remember to let us know when they are ready to let us go.
Less serious tailpiece: At a roundup of Guy Fawkes Night bonfire news, a Canadian website confirms a Guardian report that the celebrations in Lewes, Sussex, included the burning on the bonfire of effigies of Guy Fawkes and — of all people — Condoleezza Rice, including a rather striking photograph, captioned: "An effigy of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dressed as Wonder Woman parades down Lewes High Street in East Sussex".
Why Condi, I wonder? And why did they dress her up as Wonder Woman before burning her? No doubt the sober citizens of Lewes had their reasons. Anyway, it knocks spots off that tedious American import, Halloween, excuse for begging with no discernible historic or political undertones. Save the fifth of November, Gunpowder, Treason and Plot, for Guy Fawkes!
Brian
Three former liberal rocks — Polly Toynbee, Mary Riddell, Nick Cohen — have begun to look as if they are crumbling. Each has argued the case for abandoning a fundamental point of principle for defenders of liberty: opposition to identity cards and their even uglier twin, the readily accessible, universal, national data-base and the universal DNA register, ubiquitous CCTV cameras, and the rest of the surveillance obsession; support for reason and empirical evidence in their conflict witn non-rational religious belief; and the absolute ban on the use of torture as a means of procuring information in the name of national or private security. All three of these betrayals gain a kind of spurious respectability through their appearances in those temples of liberalism, the Guardian and the Observer.
The following extracts give the flavour and plausibility of the arguments — so obviously flaky that point-by-point rebuttal seems unnecessary, for once, so I'll content myself with the briefest of comments.
First, here's Polly, with a classical Guardianesque bit of middle-class guilt at fussing over ID cards when the poor are starving in the gutter:
CCTV conspiracy mania is a very middle-class disorder
Paranoid speculation on imaginary surveillance abuses betrays a moral blindness when real social injustice abounds… Those opposed to the assembling of data are mainly from the anti-state, individualistic right. There is a sad lack of voices to praise the benign state these days…. on a scale of threats to Our Way of Life, where would you place CCTV and speed cameras, electronic health records, DNA storage or ID cards that carry the same information as passports? Most people are not in a delirium of alarm about the Big Brother potential of any of these. Surveillance conspiracy mania is a symptom of something else – the wish for the middle classes to be victims too. This is a middle-class obsession by those who are least likely to be surveyed. There is some decadence in paranoid speculation about imaginary abuses when real social injustice is all around. Why aren't people as angry about the galloping inequality in living standards between the 30% who will never own homes and the overpaid at the top who are fuelling property prices?… ID cards is [sic] the issue these fears coalesce around… The money might be better spent in myriad other ways, but the threat to fundamental civil liberties somehow eludes me.
(Polly Toynbee, The Guardian, Tuesday November 7, 2006)
One of the many other things that seems to have eluded Polly is that the ID cards are just the tip of the monstrous national database that will bring together far more information about every one of us than the state has any reasonable need for and to which all manner of narks and bureaucrats will have almost unfettered access. Another strangely elusive point that Ms Toynbee seems to have missed is that opposition to this whole nightmare of control-freakery that seems to her so trivial is in no way incompatible with deep concern over gross inequality in our society. Some of us manage somehow to combine both concerns in our heads simultaneously.
Mary Riddell in the Observer thinks that a rational reluctance to believe religious propositions which are empirically improbable and unsupported by evidence is just as 'dogmatic' as fundamentalist religious belief:
Dogmatic atheism will never trump faith
What do Prince Charles and Richard Dawkins have in common? Both are defenders of faith. This may sound a curious proposition… Religious critics hint that Dawkins must spend less time studying theology than Prince Charles devotes to buying socks in Primark. But even godless readers unoffended by any lack of comparison between Aquinas and Duns Scotus may be appalled by his venom. Dawkins claims that he is no fundamentalist and has no plans for bombings, crucifixions or flattening other people's skyscrapers. But then neither, presumably, has the Bishop of Oxford.
I am a Dawkins fan and a fellow atheist. But this book, whose stridency makes Ian Paisley sound like Kylie, takes me back to my Catholic primary school, where Sister Sabina kept an armoury of weapons against sinful five-year-olds. A board-rubber to skin the knuckles of those who couldn't say the six-times table; a cane for those who forgot their prayers. Though Dawkins favours verbal assault, his dogma is as rigid as any Carmelite's. His book, shorn of compassion and tolerance, will stir sympathy for religion even in the godless. That makes him an unwitting defender of faith… Despite Dawkins's derision, private faith should not be subject to evidential test or external criticism.
(Mary Riddell,The Observer, Sunday November 5, 2006)
Ms Riddell claims to be a "Dawkins fan" and generalises confidently about his latest book, yet every argument she advances is conclusively demolished with wit and flair in The God Delusion, a magnificent polemic which Mary either hasn't read or, if she has read it, hasn't understood. Either way her column amounts to a dreadful misjudgement, despite (or because of) faithfully reproducing the knee-jerk reactions to Dawkins of far too many of the faithful.
Finally, here's the admittedly often erratic Nick Cohen, also in last Sunday's Observer, on the need for us English to be just a shade more understanding about the merits of a little mild torture when the need arises, despite our long tradition of rejecting it:
We have to deport terrorist suspects – whatever their fate
…A boy is missing and the clock is ticking; who's to say it's wrong to pin a suspect to the wall and pummel him until he talks? The [German] authorities tried and convicted Daschner, but the judge gave him a token punishment… Respectable [German] politicians of the right and left said that the case proved that there could be exceptions to the total ban on torture.I think we are going to hear the same thing here, even though for very different reasons, torture is as much a taboo for the English as the Germans. Unlike the rest of Europe, the Common Law has never accepted forced confessions. When medieval Europe discovered that Roman law allowed the torture of suspects, everyone from the Scots to the Spanish embraced the rack. Only the English held firm…This is why Lord Bingham, the senior law lord, said last year that he was 'startled, even a little dismayed' that ministers thought they could use evidence in British courts which may have been obtained by torture in the Middle East. Despite his open incredulity, torture will be all over the news in the coming weeks and, as in the Daschner affair, I suspect it is going to be hard to say automatically that what the authorities want to do is wrong.
(Nick Cohen, The Observer, Sunday November 5, 2006)
It's hard not to admire Nick's chutzpah in writing an entire column about the alleged need to 'balance' the prohibition of torture against the need for it to protect security, without once mentioning the UN Convention against Torture or the European Convention on Human Rights, both of which categorically prohibit the use of torture in any circumstances whatever, regardless of security factors, and both of which are legally binding on Britain. The idea that any British government — or any Observer columnist — could gain international agreement to the amendment of either of these instruments in order to permit torture in even the most extreme of circumstances is simply fanciful. All this is fully spelled out in the legal judgment delivered by Lord Bingham and his fellow law lords last December, a judgment actually quoted but seemingly not read, or if read, not understood, by Mr Cohen. Nick and Mary really need to be a little more careful about quoting expert texts which rebut almost every word that either of them writes. (No doubt they would say that I'm doing the same thing here.)
At a time when fundamental principles protecting our liberties and civil rights are under unprecedented attack from politicians exhibiting panic or populism, or both, and when the liberal society is threatened for the first time in many years by various forms of extremist fundamentalist religion, those who discuss those principles in the liberal press have a clear duty not to give comfort or ammunition to the enemies of freedom and reason. Don't they?
Brian
The death sentence pronounced yesterday on Saddam Hussein is just the latest chapter in the obscene and pre-ordained process leading to the judicial murder of a tyrant. Few can feel pity for a man who has committed as many vile crimes as Saddam Hussein. Having unfortunately been captured alive, he clearly must be held to account for his murderous acts, and if convicted in a fair and impartial trial, he should be punished, ideally by exile in obscurity to some remote spot for the rest of his days. Unfortunately none of that is happening. His show trial, funded and stage-managed by the Americans, has been a chaotic shambles, with judges under pressure and resigning or being dismissed, defence lawyers murdered or resigning under the pressures, shouting matches, political harangues from both sides, and television cameras and microphones emphasising the status of the proceedings as mass entertainment. At yesterday's climax Saddam was informed of his death sentence before he was told the verdict: indeed, it's not clear whether the court bothered to deliver a verdict at all.
As Geoffrey Robertson QC pointed out on BBC radio this morning, the crimes of which Saddam has (presumably) been convicted, and for which he has certainly been sentenced to die, are literally 'crimes against humanity', not merely crimes against the Iraqi people. But American insistence on handing their captive over to the Iraqis for trial and execution has deprived 'humanity' of its right to try this man in a properly constituted international court. Why? Because it would have been impossible to recruit internationally respected judges for an international court empowered to impose the death penalty. Few Americans, accustomed to the leisurely judicial killing of hundreds of their fellow-citizens (and others) in American jails — now the only western democracy to practise this grisly ritual — seem to understand the revulsion felt by millions of people around the world at the idea of cold-blooded killing as an act of a civilised state. The result has been actually to evoke some reluctant admiration of Saddam's defiance in his court cage, his refusal to plead for mercy or forgiveness in what he must know are the last weeks of his life.
There are other indecent aspects to this ghastly ritual. As Sir Max Hastings says with brutal irony in a powerful article in today's Guardian,
To justify hanging Saddam, Bush and Blair needed moral ascendancy, which they have forfeited. His execution will appear to be merely another dirty deed in the endless succession that have taken place in Iraq since 2003, backed by our bayonets. Now the president will preside over a hanging that will be as much his handiwork as if he pulled the lever, with Blair performing the usual associated functions – attaching the hood, tightening the knot and otherwise making himself useful. In Texas this sort of thing is no big deal. But in Britain we have got out of the habit. Blair may need coaching.
Hastings also mentions the suspicion, whether or not misplaced, that the Americans want Saddam dead before 'Chemical Ali' goes on trial, for fear that if still alive Saddam could be called as a defence witness to the extent of American and other western collaboration with Saddam's régime during the period before the first Gulf war. Even if such a suspicion has no basis in fact, its existence is another reason for a feeling of the utmost discomfort over the whole ugly process.
Not only will this execution constitute a gross obscenity: it will be another act of political folly, likely to cost many more lives than those of Saddam and his two co-defendants also sentenced to be hanged. Nothing could be more divisive than to kill at leisure the former champion of the Sunni community which is now the main source of the blood-letting and sectarian violence, at the very time when what Iraq manifestly needs is acts of reconciliation and unity. Of course it's no doubt true that a large majority of Iraqis want Saddam hanged, but this can't in practice be their decision alone: the Americans control the country (to the extent that anyone does), responsible with the British and a few others for creating the situation in which a recognised head of state, however tyrannical and murderous, has been illegally overthrown by external military invasion in defiance of the rule of international law, and the Americans, apparently with British acquiescence, have taken the key decisions on Saddam's fate and the manner of it. In these circumstances, it is the purest hypocrisy for our ministers to go on television to scold those in this country who wish them to represent to the Americans and to the Iraqi authorities the widespread sentiment of revulsion among informed opinion in Britain at yesterday's tragi-farce and to appeal for humanity and political sanity to be allowed to prevail over victors' 'justice'. Our ministers describe any such representations as unwarranted 'intervention' in Iraq's internal affairs, yet they are ready enough in other cases to pronounce scalding moral judgements on other countries' perceived shortcomings. Once again our ministers' blind attachment to a reactionary and brutal American administration ("their country, right or wrong"), manifests itself as moral cowardice and complicity in political folly. The price of the Iraqi catastrophe just goes on rising.
Update, 8 Nov 06: Hat-tip to David Tothill for sending me Robert Fisk's savage piece on this subject from the Canberra [? Times] of 7 November (it seems to have started life in the Independent): a must-read.
Update, 10 Nov 06: Also an excellent piece from the Melbourne Age of 8 November by Gwynne Dyer, which seems to me to say all that needs to be said on this squalid subject.
Brian
The British investigative journalist Stephen Grey has done more than any other single person to expose the illegal American practice of Extraordinary Rendition, under which the CIA has been kidnapping people in other countries whom they suspect of involvement in terrorism and smuggling them (in contravention of the laws of the country concerned and of international law) to third countries where they can be interrogated and if necessary tortured without the constraints imposed by the laws of the United States: see, for example, the postscript to this. Now Grey has pulled together the results of his investigations over recent years into a fascinating book, Ghost Plane, a spectacularly gripping read and a masterly exposé of one of the greatest scandals of our time. Ghost Plane is published in the UK, the US and Canada, and in Germany (in German <duh>)
Grey was recently a runner-up for this year's Paul Foot award for investigative journalism. His citation said, justly:
Stephen Grey, for his work on the CIA's secret rendition policy, which he first investigated for the New Statesman two years ago and followed up with further revelations in the New York Times and Guardian. The judges admired "a long term, painstaking and immaculate piece of journalism that began with flat denials from the Bush administration and ended with a reluctant admission. A most remarkable victory for one outstandingly dogged journalist against a very mean machine."
Publication of Ghost Plane was marked by numerous radio and television interviews with Stephen on both sides of the Atlantic and by enthusiastic reviews. The interviews included 
a long discussion with Amy Goodman on the liberal American television and radio programme Democracy Now (on which also see this); and the book has been chosen for the BBC Newsnight programme's book club, with a long extract on the Newsnight website.
All this is recognition in spades, and fully warranted by sheer professional achievement.
I have to declare a double interest here: Stephen is a good friend, and he has over-generously included me among the many acknowledgements that preface the book, although in truth my contribution, to the extent that there was one, was less than minimal.
Stephen Grey's book and the revelations of official crookedness that it charts demonstrate that the monstrous apparatus of official secrecy to protect indefensible behaviour by governments can still be penetrated by dogged, determined and principled journalism, if the working journalist can rely on the equally courageous support of editors and proprietors (remember Watergate). Some discreet help and encouragement from officials on the inside are probably also indispensable, and it's heartening to see Grey acknowledging the help he received from some in the CIA itself, to whose other work he pays striking tribute, as well as the support of his various editors and journalist colleagues.
One saddening postscript: Ghost Plane reveals that what appears to be the original authority for Extraordinary Rendition was formally granted in a Presidential Decision Directive PDD-39 of 21 June 1995 — by, of all people, President Bill Clinton (Ghost Plane, p. 121). There could hardly be a clearer demonstration that state powers taken by one administration with the acquiescence of those concerned because of its benign intentions will sooner or later be exploited and abused with relish by a successor administration whose intentions are very far from benign. When the Blairs, the Reids, the Blunketts and the Straws ask us to trust them to make only principled use of the sweeping powers which they demand and take, parliament, in our names, should always say No; but almost never does. We shall live to rue our legislators' negligence.
Meanwhile, read Ghost Plane, and shiver.
Brian
