Never, or rarely, one to shirk a challenge, especially when it's accompanied by flattery, I'm trying to scrape the barrel of my memory to reconstruct what I was doing on 20 March 2003, The Day War Broke Out (the catch-phrase, I should explain for the benefit of younger readers, of the sublime radio comedian Rob Wilton during the second world war).
The challenge and the compliment have been launched at me by that admirable blogger, Ministry of Truth, in a post that passes on a killer meme:
Bloody hell, I’ve been meme’d not once, not twice but three times in a matter of days – twice as a ‘thogger’ (Thinking Blogger, apparently) by Paul Linford and DK, and once by Bob Piper who, courtesy of Tim Ireland, wants to know if I can remember what I was doing four years ago when the invasion of the Iraq was launched.
The answer to the latter is ‘buggered if I know’ – probably shaking my head ruefully in anticipation of the complete screw up to come, as for the former, it seems I’m required to nominate five other ‘thoggers’, which is rather more difficult than you might think as many of the best out there (Mr Eugenides, Jim Bliss, Chicken Yoghurt, Chris Dillow et al) have already got multiple nominations – but none the less I’ll give it a go and nominate the Yorkshire Ranter and UK Today for starters, add Brian Barder, whose ephems are a must-read, and express some small measure of amazement at finding that neither Obsolete or Phil Edwards have been tagged as yet.
Leaving aside the 'thogger' label — not sure what to make of that — I have to report that 20 March 2003 was a pretty ordinary day back at Ephems House apart from what was going on in Iraq. J and I watched the 
unforgettable live television coverage of the first American and British attacks on Baghdad, brazenly labelled by the confident neo-cons as intended to produce Shock and Awe, as huge explosions lit up the Baghdad skyline, with flames and smoke rising lazily from them. We watched in unfeigned horror and disgust, shaking our heads in the shameful knowledge that this was being done in our name, by the Labour government which, back in 1997, we had enthusiastically helped to get elected. I had followed with mounting incredulity in the preceding weeks the increasingly desperate attempts of the UK delegation in the UN Security Council to get that elusive 'second resolution' authorising the use of force, attempts that continued long after it had become obvious that a substantial majority of the members of the Council were firmly opposed to the use of force at that time. I had followed with increasing indignation, especially as someone who had once been a middle-ranking delegate to the United Nations during four exhilarating and frustrating years, Tony Blair's fluctuating and mutually contradictory public statements about the purposes of the forthcoming attack on Iraq and his unqualified undertakings not to take Britain into an Iraq war without express UN authority save in defined hypothetical circumstances which never in fact arose: on 20 March we watched the murderous evidence that our prime minister, a Labour prime minister, had dishonoured that undertaking. (Weeks later I put some of that damning evidence on my website and I have never understood why it has not been quoted back at Mr Blair every day of every week of every month in every media organ that cares about putting these things on the record.) I remember believing that they would soon find evidence of WMD and that they would then crow that the whole enterprise was thereby justified, although of course the discovery would do no such thing. I remember thinking that this must be Britain's most shameful hour since Suez in 1956, when the Labour Party had led the nation's opposition to Eden's defiance of the United Nations and of international law: Law Not War, we had chanted then as we shuffled through the streets. Now, nearly half a century later, watching murder live on television, I felt physically sick. (A few months later, that November, during George W Bush's state visit to Britain, I was on another protest march against another illegal act of aggression and against the two political leaders who bore, and bear, the main criminal responsibility for it: it was the biggest protest march and demonstration on a weekday that London had ever seen.)
But there were major personal distractions on that grim March day in 2003 which explain, if not excuse, my failure to help others to raise the roof in protest at what was being done in the days and weeks that followed. We were in the throes of complex negotiations and haggling to sell our house and buy another, smaller one, something that came to fruition only the following July. Four days later, on the 24th, we were to fly to New York to visit our daughter and granddaughters, and despite a lifetime spent in airports and on aeroplanes it still takes me a good four days to pack for even the shortest of expeditions; and we were away without internet access for a crucial fortnight or so. Perhaps most frustrating at such a time, my computer had developed a bug which prevented me from uploading new material to my website: I did manage an Ephems post in April about elections in Zimbabwe but it was only in mid-May that everything was working again (as commemorated here). So we watched and grieved at the death of Iraq and of Britain's honour, but selling the house and battling with the computer and going off to New York absorbed a good deal of our energies too.
So the challenging finger of the rolling meme now points at –
Tony Hatfield's Retired Ramblings
Peter Harvey's Lavengro in Spain
Rob Jubb's Consider Phlebas and (well, obviously) –
Not sure if there's a crafty hi-tech way of telling them of their duties (by tagging them? what does that mean?) so I'll have to e-mail them. Should be some good responses by this literate crew of, er, thoggers. Sorry, chaps.
Brian
I don't usually approve of blog posts which merely reproduce newspaper articles. In this case, though, I don't think there is any need for comment on an article by Alan Travis in the Guardian on 22 March 2007. Here are extracts:
The Home Office round-up of released foreign prisoners for deportation in the wake of last year's crisis was so indiscriminate that it included some British citizens, the chief inspector of prisons reveals today.
Anne Owers says that the trawl carried out in the wake of the crisis that cost Charles Clarke his job as home secretary also wrongly involved the detention of some Irish ex-offenders, even though they had lived in Britain for decades with all their family ties here, and some who had committed only minor offences.
The follow-up report on the foreign prisoner crisis says that immigration authorities were unable to cope with the workload created by the decision to detain 1,000 ex-prisoners who had been released without being considered for deportation.
"As a consequence, foreign nationals, suddenly and unexpectedly threatened with deportation, also found it impossible to find out what was happening to them, and were held in prisons and immigration removal centres far past their sentence expiry dates, even those who were desperate to return home," says Ms Owers. The chief inspector adds that their presence has "significantly contributed" to the prison overcrowding crisis of the last six months and destabilised immigration removal centres.
…
Ms Owers says that although extra staff and resources were provided to deal with the problem the inherited backlog of cases and lack of proper systems prevented a swift resolution.
This was compounded by the fact that the immigration officials involved, operating at a distance and on paper, often seemed unaware of the human cost of their decisions. [Emphasis added -- BLB]
You can, and should, read the full report here. Shaming.
How can the minister responsible for this remain in office?
Brian
Lord Turnbull broke the most basic rules by speaking about Gordon Brown to a national newspaper as he did. But it's not as straightforward as it looks.
In the Financial Times on 20 March 2007 Lord Turnbull, former Treasury Permanent Secretary and subsequently Head of the Civil Service, savaged Gordon Brown, with whom he had worked closely for years:
Gordon Brown, the UK chancellor and likely next prime minister, has exhibited a “Stalinist ruthlessness” in government, belittling his cabinet colleagues whom the Treasury treats with “more or less complete contempt”, according to the man who was Britain’s top civil servant until two years ago.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Lord Turnbull, permanent secretary to the Treasury for four years under Mr Brown before becoming cabinet secretary in 2002, accused the prime minister-in-waiting of a “very cynical view of mankind and his colleagues”.
Now Owen's blog has excoriated Lord Turnbull for his flagrant breach of the civil service rules which he, Turnbull, had quoted with emphatic approval less than two years ago in evidence to the Public Service Select Committee:
“Civil servants should conduct themselves in such a way as to deserve and retain the confidence of ministers” and “Civil servants should continue to observe their duties of confidentiality after they have left Crown employment.”
Owen's judgement is severe:
Civil servants have no business revealing their views of Ministers and their behaviour – even after they cease to be civil servants. That is part of the job. Turnbull should not have spoken as he did.
That must be right. There can be no bond of trust between ministers and their senior officials, a bond that is essential to the proper process of decision-making in public affairs, if ministers have reason to suspect that within a short time, when they are still in office, their officials are going to go public with criticisms of their working methods and personal style.
And yet…
Two reluctant reservations. First, it takes two to bond as well as to tango. Officials are also entitled to feel confident that their ministers will not break that bond of trust by publicly blaming their officials for policy and operational failures for which ministers should accept responsibility. Ignorance of what is going wrong in a minister's department can never be an excuse: it's a minister's duty to make sure he knows what is going on, and wrong, and to satisfy himself that the relevant officials can be trusted to keep him informed. The principle of ministerial accountability is wrecked if ministers get away with constantly blaming their officials for their own failures.
Secondly, in the case of Gordon Brown, there must be a case for putting into the public domain by one means or another important evidence by which ordinary citizens can judge his fitness to be prime minister: how he works, his relationships with his colleagues and his officials (as distinct from those with his small coterie of political advisers), his openness or secretiveness, his willingness to listen to unwelcome advice, his ability to delegate. Of course there is plenty of evidence already on public record about these matters, not least in Tom Bower's revealing and uninhibited biography, but also in many harsh comments on the secretive Chancellor coming out of a frustrated No. 10, and occasional outbursts by frustrated colleagues such as Charles Clarke. But these can be partially discounted as the products of political jealousy, the resentments always generated by a Chancellor who won't give spending ministers as much dosh as they want, and the general frictions of politics at the top. The evidence of a top civil servant with first-hand knowledge of the subject is less easily dismissed and must carry more weight. Would it have been right to suppress it when the public interest arguably demands that it be made available?
Lord Turnbull has claimed that he had not intended the FT to quote him verbatim on Mr Brown (a curious claim from an official who must have long experience of dealing with the media and ensuring that the basis on which he speaks is firmly established before he says anything): perhaps his intention was to get his judgement of Brown into the public domain without revealing that he had been the source. But (a) that would have weakened the impact of his comments, which depended crucially on the fact that they came from himself; and (b) the issue is what he said, not the basis on which he thought he was saying it.
On balance Turnbull was plainly wrong to have spoken as he did, and he has done more harm than good by doing it. But the arguments are not as straightforward as they seem at first sight.
Meanwhile the Guardian distinguishes itself by asserting editorially that if strong ministers such as Mr Brown place themselves firmly in the driving seat, it's natural that 'mandarins' (the Guardian's old-fashioned give-away term for civil servants) feel uncomfortable with them — an almost childish expression of an old Labour prejudice and paranoia that ten years of Labour government ought to have banished by now. No surprise then that the Guardian didn't publish the letter that I sent it yesterday, citing my 37 years in the public service:
In today's main editorial (Gordon Brown, The character thing, March 21) you repeat the old canard that "mandarins are rarely comfortable when strong ministers and their advisers place themselves firmly in the driving seat, as Mr Brown and his lieutenants have done." In fact civil servants are most comfortable with a decisive minister who knows his or her mind and gives a strong lead. What makes them uncomfortable is when ministerial decisions are made without first using the immense resources of their departments to encourage frank and uninhibited analysis of them, sometimes including warnings by officials — and Cabinet colleagues — about their likely unintended consequences. Ministers are perfectly free to reject such advice and warnings in their final decisions, which officials (pace Yes Minister) will then loyally execute, doing their best to make them work whatever their private misgivings. But the quality of ministerial decisions is bound to suffer, and the country to be worse governed as a result, if decisions are taken without first being tested by exposure to the advice of experienced and dispassionate officials and of interested ministerial colleagues. Even after nearly ten years in office, neither Mr Blair nor, apparently, Mr Brown seems to have learned this rather basic lesson.
[Note: Passages in bold italics are those omitted from the version of this letter published in the Guardian on 23 March 2007: see Update, below.]
These harmful myths die hard: they pop up again repeatedly in many of the comments on the Guardian editorial on Comment is Free. As I have remarked many times before, Yes Minister was brilliantly funny but has a lot to answer for.
Update, 23 March 2007: Contrary to expectation, today's Guardian has published my letter about ministers and officials, or at any rate a version of it. But three quite minor editing changes, especially the third, have obscured its main point so as to make it almost unintelligible. In the text of the letter as submitted, quoted above, I have now put in italics the three passages omitted from the version as published. Without these, you have to read the whole thing several times before you can work out what the letter is driving at. Yet the saving in space is negligible. This is not the first time I have experienced this frustrating process at the hands of seemingly wooden-headed Guardian letters editors or their sub-editor colleagues. Needless to say, there is no consultation before they mangle their correspondents' texts: they just telephone to check that you are who you say you are and that it was you that sent the letter. Still, I should rejoice that they did print something approximating to what I had written — even if the letter is buried among a lot of other letters about the fine points of the budget.
Brian
Amid all the usual wrangling over the pros and cons of today's budget, it's perhaps worth recalling a few items that the Chancellor of the Exchequer seems to have chosen to play down in his budget speech:
Item: The Iraq war. Cost to Britain (never mind to Iraq!) currently more than £1 billion a year, so cost thus far: about £4 billion, and counting.
Item: The Olympic Games in 2012. Cost to Britain, current estimate (likely to be far exceeded by 2012): £9.3 billion.
Item: Renewal of the Trident submarine nuclear deterrent platform: current estimate, including recurrent costs: about £100 billion.
Item: National Identity Register database and ID cards: estimate by LSE experts, nearly £30 billion ("The average annual running cost for issuing the controversial cards alongside passports was put at £584m." — Guardian report.)
Total commitment or expenditure of all four items: £143 billion. (Since the individual totals include both money already spent and estimates of future expenditure over different periods of time, the overall figure is purely indicative of the order of magnitude involved.)
These four items, ranging from a war crime to unnecessary and extravagant wastes of public money on a heroic scale, have all been accepted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and approved by the full Cabinet without a single resignation from Cabinet in protest by a living Labour minister or ex-minister. The principal blame for all four inevitably belongs to Mr Blair. But almost equal blame must rest with a supine Chancellor and spineless cabinet ministers, along with mostly supine, spineless Labour MPs who have allowed a reckless prime minister to ignore the precautionary processes of orderly cabinet government and thus constantly to be allowed to get away with monumental follies — at our expense. They dwarf the Dome in absurdity and have cost, or will cost, a fortune in blood and treasure, with absolutely no benefit to the national interest. Any one of them could have been stopped by enough ministers and MPs being prepared to put their votes where their heads and hearts are instead of in tame obedience to the whips.
How on earth has it been allowed to happen?
Brian
Letters, Financial Times, 17-18 March 2007:
A reformed Lords essential to hold executive to account
By Brian Barder
Sir, For once Christopher Caldwell's feel for the British constitution and politics has deserted him ("An impasse at the House of Lords", March 10). An all-elected second chamber would not result in "'gridlock' arising from two co-equal legislatures with clashing cultures and interests", because the two chambers would not be "co-equal": the Commons would retain its primacy as generator, host, sustainer and potential destroyer of governments, the chamber in which virtually all significant ministers sit and which alone controls supply, and the one able ultimately to override objections of the second chamber to its decisions.
If in addition the second chamber is elected a third at a time on a different timetable to the Commons, with each member serving for a longer term, and by a different electoral system that denies an overall majority to any single party, no danger of a challenge to the Commons or even of a claim to equality with the Commons can arise.
For all these reasons Mr Caldwell's analogy with the US Senate is faulty. However, Mr Caldwell is correct in pointing out that the current controversy over alleged "cash for peerages" has effectively discredited any idea of appointing even a small proportion of members of the second chamber, a proposal (along with the suggestion of party lists for elections to it) brazenly designed to perpetuate the executive's power of patronage and its already excessive control over both Houses of Parliament.
Finally, Mr Caldwell should know that the question whether we "need a second house in the first place" is often raised and that the answer to it is that abolition of the second chamber would leave us with a House of Commons already almost completely subservient to and controlled by the executive via the party system and the whips, whereas what is needed is much greater parliamentary power to hold the executive to account, for which a reformed, wholly elected second chamber is absolutely essential.
Brian Barder
London SW18
(HM Diplomatic Service 1965-94)
I very much appreciate the trouble you have gone to in writing so fully to all members of your (and my) constitutency party to explain your vote on 14 March in support of the government's decision to renew Trident. I am sure that the arguments for this in your letter constitute the best case that can be made for this policy. But, like very many other members of the Labour Party, including 95 of your fellow Labour parliamentarians and a dozen who abstained, I don't believe that the arguments stand up.
You "maintain that having an independent nuclear deterrent is necessary…some believe that we could rely on the United States or France to protect us, but this would make an independent foreign policy harder to sustain." But our nuclear deterrent is already (and will remain) wholly dependent on American technology and it is inconceivable that we could ever use it, or even credibly threaten to use it, against the wishes of the US government, so it's wrong to describe it as an "independent" nuclear deterrent, or to suggest that it enables us to avoid having to "rely on the United States to protect us". If ever we are again exposed to the threat of nuclear attack against Britain by another state, we shall be every bit as reliant on the US for our protection as, for example, Germany or Italy which have no nuclear deterrent of their own, 'independent' or otherwise. If they feel that they can maintain their security without any need for a separate national nuclear deterrent, why can't we?
The fact is that retaining our not-independent nuclear deterrent makes us more, not less, dependent on US foreign policy and on retaining the good will of every future American government. It actually reduces our scope for developing a genuinely independent foreign policy, something that has become increasingly obviously necessary since the Iraq débacle. In any case, complete independence is no longer available in this globalised world for any one country, even for the global super-power. We should be accepting and welcoming our interdependence within the European Union. Perpetuating our nuclear deterrent with its dependence on the United States is potentially inconsistent with that.
It has been widely pointed out that all the arguments that have been advanced for retaining and upgrading the British nuclear deterrent and its delivery platform are equally valid for every country in the world that does not currently possess nuclear weapons: and if even a tenth of those countries acted on those arguments to justify proceeding to the development of their own nuclear deterrents against the remote possibility of unforeseeable future circumstances requiring them for their own security, non-proliferation would be a lost cause.
But the principal and little-recognised argument against this huge waste of public money — £15bn-£20bn on current predictions, certain to be much more in practice — is that it's irrational to try to guard against every possible future contingency, however remote and unlikely, on the grounds that (in your own words) it's "just not possible to predict with any accuracy the global security environment of the next 50 years." This is risk-aversion taken to lunatic extremes. It is impossible to construct a credible scenario in which any state in the next 50 years will be deterred from attacking the UK with nuclear weapons by fear of exclusively British nuclear retaliation. Plenty of non-state actors (terrorists being the most likely) might well wish to attack us, perhaps one day with nuclear weapons, but such groups or individuals can't be deterred by our nuclear deterrent, for obvious reasons.
The likelihood of our nuclear deterrent actually deterring a nuclear attack on Britain by another state in the next 50 years must be roughly equivalent to the likelihood of London being struck by a giant meteor, or of large areas of Britain being swamped by flooding due to global warming and a rise in ocean levels, or of half the population of Britain being killed by an avian flu pandemic — indeed, nearly all these are several times likelier to happen than the threat of nuclear attack by another state. Yet any politician who advocated spending 20 or 30 billions of pounds on protective measures against every single one of these potential threats to our security would be regarded as being out of his mind.
The rational response to a potential future threat is to ensure that the cost (financial and in terms of disruption to ordinary life) of defensive measures is roughly in proportion to the likelihood of the threat materialising. In the case of deterring a threat of nuclear attack by another state, that likelihood is now so low that the diversion of at least 20 billion pounds of the defence budget into guarding against it is sheer madness.
This is just the latest example of this government's flabby and irrational reaction to any future risk, however remote. Occasional remarks by Mr Blair have revealed the reason for this. He and his ministerial colleagues are consumed by the fear that if any single one of these risks materialises, they might be accused of having failed to act in advance to protect us against it, through complacency or indolence. So they are driven to accumulate a log of activity designed to protect them from blame if almost any of a million unpleasantnesses should occur: a foreigner who has served his term in prison and been released commits a murder; a man with an untreatable and indefinable mental illness but no previous history of aggressive behaviour attacks a woman; a man suspected of being associated with terrorists, but against whom no evidence of wrong-doing exists to sustain a prosecution, explodes a bomb on a tube train; a child falls off a trampoline; a passer-by hits his head on a hanging flower-basket; a schoolgirl gets lost on a mountainside during a school outing; a demented fanatic threatens an air stewardess with a small pair of household scissors; a non-smoking barman in a pub that allows smoking dies of lung cancer. Action must be taken to avoid blame in case any single one of these, or thousands of other potential 'threats', should ever materialise, regardless of the assault on our traditional civil liberties and the interference in our everyday lives that such action is liable to entail. The waste of £20 billion or more of our money on Trident is just the latest and craziest of these disproportionate responses to almost inconceivable future risks.
The British 'independent nuclear deterrent' is not independent. There is no-one for it to deter. No-one would believe in our willingness or ability to use it without Washington's permission, so it adds nothing to the American nuclear deterrent. It gives our political leaders delusions of grandeur and a dangerous illusion of possessing non-existent power and influence. It undermines the possibility of developing an independent foreign policy in conjunction with our EU partners. The likelihood of our needing it in the foreseeable future is so remote as not to warrant further expenditure on it. We don't and shan't need it, and it does us more harm than good.
I am sorry to write at such length, but I felt that your comprehensive letter in defence of the government's policy deserved an equally comprehensive reply.
My confident guess is that 75% of the westerners who notice a headline about a war crimes trial concerning Kosovo will automatically assume that the defendants facing war crimes charges are Serbs, with their unsavoury reputation for ethnic cleansing and attendant brutalities. Actually the chief defendant who went on trial last week is a Kosovo Albanian, a former leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (freedom fighters or separatist terrorists, according to taste) whose violent campaign against Serbian rule provoked the disproportionately savage Serbian repression which in turn led to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, which in turn aggravated and accelerated the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo by the Serbs and drove thousands of Kosovo Albanians into squalid refugee camps in neighbouring countries (note: this happened after the start of the NATO bombing, which can't therefore be justified as having been designed to stop it).
According to an AP report of 2 March 2007 in the International Herald Tribune, –
Former Kosovo Prime Minister and rebel commander Ramush Haradinaj pleaded innocent Thursday at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal to charges of involvement in the murder, rape and torture of Serbs and suspected Serb collaborators in the province's 1998-1999 war.
Haradinaj is scheduled to go on trial starting Monday together with two other former KLA fighters, Idriz Balaj and Lahi Brahimaj. Prosecutors say all three were part of a criminal plot to drive Serbian forces out of the Western Kosovo region of Dukagjin.
The trio sat impassively as presiding judge Alphons Orie read out a total of 37 war crimes charges against them, including multiple counts of murder, persecution and torture against each. A conviction on any charge could carry a sentence of up to life in prison….
Ramush turned to politics after the war and was prime minister for 100 days before being indicted by U.N. prosecutors in 2005.
The same report mentions in passing that –
After NATO air strikes against Serb forces ended fighting in 1999, Haradinaj transformed himself from a tough KLA commander — prosecutors say ruthless — into a political leader… [my emphasis -- BLB]
– thus once again helping to perpetuate the myth that it was the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia that "ended fighting in 1999". Actually the NATO bombing did no such thing; it accomplished nothing but the killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of innocent civilians, the destruction of much of the economic infrastructure of Belgrade and neighbouring countries, and the inevitable revival of Serbian nationalistic support for the crook Milosevic. What ended the Serbian repression in Kosovo and some (but not all) of the ruthless activities of the KLA was the constructive and flexible behind-the-scenes diplomacy of the emissaries of the US and Russian governments and of the then President of Finland, Martti Ahtisaari. But the myths are well on the way to being accepted as historical truth. (Don't blame me: I've tried to do my tiny bit to stem this tide, as you can see from e.g. this, and in more detail this. But it's hopeless.)
Brian
This evening, 1 March, I offered to the new Labour open debate forum set up by those two dodgy ex-Cabinet ministers, Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn, a pithy 10-point programme for a new Labour leader willing to take risks to re-energise a disillusioned Labour Party and to attract the attention and approval of an equally disillusioned electorate — especially, perhaps, the bits of it inhabiting Middle England, wherever that is. At the time of writing, a couple of hours after I posted my proposals on their website, the Clarke-Milburn moderator is still presumably mulling over the pros and cons of passing it for public exposure. In case it gets binned in the CC-AM thinktank out of a loss of nerve by its censor-in-chief, here's what I offered. It's not so revolutionary, now, is it? –
Here's a 10-point policy manifesto for a new Labour Party leader that would revive the enthusiasm of a now deeply disillusioned party membership (including the thousands who have left it but who might return after Mr Blair's departure) — and a programme that would also attract widespread support in Middle England where the next general election will be won or lost:
1. Renationalise the railways.
2. Abandon the plans for a National Identity Register and ID cards.
3. Begin the process of establishing an English parliament and executive with the same powers and functions as the Scottish equivalents.
4. Set up a Royal Commission to recommend measures for rationalising devolution arrangements throughout the UK (following the setting up of an English parliament and re-establishment of power-sharing in Northern Ireland) having as their final objective a federal United Kingdom with a written federal constitution.
5. Establish a second chamber of the Westminster parliament wholly elected under a form of proportional representation, one-third of its members retiring by rotation every four years. No party lists, no bishops, no members appointed by party leaders. Functions and powers to be unchanged pending report of the constitutional Royal Commission (see (4) above).
6. Phase out foundation hospitals and government funding of faith schools. End contracting out of hospital cleaning services and bring them under the direct control of ward managers, as one of several essential measures to bring MRSA and C-Difficile infections in NHS hospitals under control.
7. Replace Control Orders by measures enabling the criminal courts (including judges and juries) in exceptional circumstances to hear limited and specially sensitive evidence in closed session so that terrorist suspects may be put on trial with due process, ending restrictions on anyone's liberties without trial.
8. Phase out tuition fees for higher education institutions and substitute generous tax concessions for all donations to them; restore means-tested grants to all qualifying students.
9. Introduce road pricing by road tolls and/or congestion charges in areas where traffic congestion imposes costs on society, but abandon any plans for vehicle tracking systems. Increase fuel duty rates as the fairest way to reduce carbon emissions from vehicles.
10. Announce a 9-month programme for withdrawing all British forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. Initiate discussions in the EU of establishing a standing peace-keeping force, including contributions by EU governments, under the auspices of the United Nations for deployment by decision of the Security Council.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Can such a programme really be too bold and radical for a party that claims to be centre-left? (I fear so. What do you think, Comrades Clarke and Milburn?)
Regular visitors to Ephems may detect the sound of hoofs on a keyboard when they read this. It's just a couple of my best-loved hobby-horses galloping along trying to keep up.
Update (2 March 07): My contribution to 2020 Vision, whose text is above, has now appeared on the Clarke-Milburn website — several hours after it was posted, but better late than never.
I have now posted the following further message on the 2020 Vision website:
>>I am posting this comment as the only way to change my settings so as to remove the fatal tick from "Notify me of follow-up comments", in the hope that this might staunch the torrent of e-mails I'm now receiving containing the text of each comment posted here since my own of yesterday. (My advice is to delete them all in your server's e-mail web-page or from a website such as mail2web, where they have already been downloaded, rather than wait for hours while your own PC downloads them into Outlook Express or Thunderbird or whichever e-mail system you use.) Much easier to read all the comments on the 2020 Vision website, if you have the stamina for it.
Since it's impossible to reply to any individual comment (as you can in a blog as distinct from a website — see below), the check-box for receiving "follow-up comments" is misleading, pregnant with unintended consequences and redundant. It should be removed.
While I'm at it, though, I might remark that this unstructured comments system is hopeless. The comments inevitably address thousands of different policy issues (or in some cases none at all); they are far too numerous for anyone of sound mind to plough through them all; the delay in putting them up while some moderator, or censor, decides whether they merit it means that hardly anyone takes up or argues the points in an earlier comment; there seems to be no separate website address for any individual comment (as there is on most proper blogs), so it's anyway impossible to refer back to a specific comment to distinguish it from hundreds of others — you can only 'search' for a name on the current page; so posting a comment is like bellowing into a telephone that isn't plugged in. No replies, no counter-comments, no dialogue or debate at all.
However, there's the beginning of a discussion in an interesting comment on my earlier contribution to 2020 Vision here and in the comment that follows it. Proper blogging works better.
I doubt very much whether Comrades Clarke or Milburn will spend the necessary hours every day reading page after page of largely unrewarding comments, and it's hard to see what criteria a paid reader could use to single out those worth passing on to them. The 2020 Vision project should, I fear, be aborted.
Pity.<<
Brian
