Joanna Lumley (pictured below with the much-decorated Gurkha veteran and holder of the Victoria Cross, Tul Bahadur Pun VC) describes on the Gurkha Justice Campaign website the campaign for a decent deal for former Gurkhas who want to settle permanently in Britain with their families:
Gurkhas are fighting for Justice. They want the same terms and conditions as their UK and Commonwealth counterparts.
Britain has had no greater friends than the Gurkhas. They have served all across the world in the defence of our country for nearly 200 years. Over 45,000 died in the two World Wars as part of the British Army. They are still fighting in the British Army today.
You may have seen in the media that the Gurkhas have been fighting in Parliament and the Courts. Step by step, things are getting better – but there is a long way to go.
The Government decision of 25th April 2009 on Gurkha settlement rights is yet another huge betrayal of the Gurkhas who have served our country.
Only a tiny fraction of the Gurkhas who retired before 1997 will win settlement rights under the new policy. A Gurkha will have to have served 20 years or more or won one of a handful of medals: the big majority of Gurkhas served for 15 years under standard army policy.
You can read the full details of the Government’s decision online.
The campaign for full Gurkha Justice will now be taken back into Parliament and the courts. The Government needs to know they will have a huge campaign against them who will commit to righting this wrong.
Please sign up to the campaign below. We will keep in touch with you about how you can help: there is now much that needs to be done.
Join me in the campaign: together, we can finally right this wrong.
The extent of the good faith of the government’s decision can be judged by one of the absurdly demanding criteria for permission for ex-Gurkhas to settle in the UK:
You completed 20 or more years’ service in the Brigade
– and as Joanna Lumley points out, apart from officers, Gurkhas aren’t allowed to serve for longer than 15 years.
This decision, effectively excluding from settlement in Britain huge numbers of men who have served our country bravely for many years, as well as their families, doesn’t only shame our government, with its phobia about immigration and its cowardice in the face of the most reactionary tabloids: it shames us all, if the decision is allowed to stand.
You can sign up in support of this hugely worth-while campaign at
http://www.gurkhajustice.org.uk/
(which has attracted nearly 200,000 signatures at the time of writing — pm on 29 April 2009). Please also e-mail or write to your MP — if you don’t know it, you can probably get his or her e-mail address from the MP’s website by Googling his/her name, or you can do the whole thing through the excellent free facility at the “Write to Them” website:
The government was challenged on this issue this afternoon on a LibDem-sponsored motion. At the last moment, –
Two concessions on the right of former Gurkhas to settle in the UK have been made by the government in an effort to avert a potential Commons defeat.Ministers have promised to start a review of rules by the summer – and said veterans would not be deported.
[BBC report, 29 April]
Unbelievably, these two token gestures — the first of which is brazenly meant to buy time, and the second apparently to incite Gurkhas who don’t qualify under the draconian rules to stay on in Britain anyway, presumably risking imprisonment if they do — are believed to have satisfied some Labour MPs who had been contemplating voting against the government. Nevertheless, –
The government has lost a Commons vote on its policy of restricting the right of former Gurkhas to settle in the UK. MPs voted by 267 to 246 in favour of a Lib Dem motion that the government should extend an equal right of residence to all Gurkhas. Earlier Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg said the current policy, announced by the government last week, was “shameful”.
Gordon Brown said earlier he wanted justice for the Gurkhas but any policy change had to be affordable.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8023882.stm
The government has been deservedly humiliated by this result and will now presumably have to return to the drawing-board. This makes even more urgent (and potentially productive) maximum pressure on Ministers and MPs for all Gurkha veterans and their families to be allowed to settle permanently in Britain on their retirement — the least we can do for them to repay a debt of honour. The prime minister’s reported insistence that “any policy change had to be affordable” is beneath contempt.
Brian
Some interconnected thoughts on the financial and economic crisis that have struck me in recent days:
1. The media pundits (including the lead story in the FT of 25-26 April) and opposition spokespersons have all been crowing triumphantly over the dreadful GDP figures for the first quarter of 2009, claiming that they demonstrate the absurd over-optimism of Alistair Darling’s assessment of the extent of the shrinkage of the economy and his forecast that the economy should start to grow again towards the end of this year. But on an inside page of the same FT Chris Giles records some major reservations:
There is a big risk, however, of adding two and two together and coming up with five. The first quarter of the year was truly terrible but Mr Darling was braced for it to be bad.
The Treasury’s failure to spot just how dire official figures would be was shared by all City economists. And for all these mistakes, the bad quarter does not translate mechanically into worse figures for the rest of the year. The chances of recovery by the end of 2009 are not dented by the size of the first-quarter contraction. …
The bigger point that the Treasury was making last night was that the growth figures do not necessarily mean worse public finances.
One bad quarter will make almost no difference to the £175bn borrowing in 2009-10, nor the path of consolidation thereafter. This is far more dependent on years of public spending austerity than on rapid growth. If anything, the Budget was an attempt by Mr Darling and the Treasury to get all the bad news on borrowing out of the way well before the election.
It was much more pessimistic on borrowing than the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the International Monetary Fund, the City and all but the most pessimistic of external forecasters.
What a pity that other right-wing commentators haven’t been making the same points! But they no doubt take the view that there’s no need to spoil a good political bash at the government by giving half the game away in the process.
2. I find worse than distasteful the confident repetition by Cameron, Osborne and the right-wing press that the government is responsible for the financial crisis. The massive spending by the Blair and Brown governments since 1997 on, especially, health and education was made urgently necessary by the disgraceful under-investment in those vital services under preceding Tory governments: and even the Tories accepted that. Gordon Brown’s ‘golden rules’ — borrowing only for capital expenditure, ensuring that recurrent expenditure would be matched by revenue over the economic cycle — were self-evidently sound, even if they left some waggle-room for adjustment of the dates of the cycle. And I don’t recall the Tories denouncing the government’s regulation of the investment banks and other financial institutions for being too light: on the contrary, they were constantly clamouring for even lighter regulation. Anyway, blaming the government for failing to regulate the disastrous behaviour of the bankers, even if they could (see next item), is a bit like blaming the police for a burglary. The burglar bears the prime responsibility for the burglary: the crime might (or might not) highlight some procedural, structural or operational failing on the part of the police, but that’s a separate issue.
In the Punch-and-Judy world of British politics, I suppose it’s inevitable that the Conservative Loyal Opposition will exploit every opportunity offered by the economic crisis to discredit the government generally and the prime minister in particular. It just seems a pity that in the greatest national crisis since the second world war, the opposition lacks the statesmanship to offer the government its support in doing what plainly needs to be done, reserving its criticisms for issues where ministers have clearly transgressed or adopted seriously questionable policies. If they had chosen that more responsible and constructive path, the Tories would still almost certainly win the next election hands down — and then find themselves in a much better position politically to tackle what’s bound to be a pretty poisonous inheritance, as well as then having earned the right to ask for Labour Party support for their essential remedial measures.
3. It’s obviously right, with hindsight, to review now the structure of the regulatory system introduced in 1997 by Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the light of what has happened. But it’s also legitimate to question whether even the most efficient and stringent regulatory system would have stood much chance of pre-empting the bankers’ determined march to self-destruction. The financial system is now so extensively globalised that only a global authority, effectively meaning a world government, would have been able to control it in the global public interest. The system is now beyond the control of any single national government. Yet when the G20 were preparing to assemble in London to debate what action to take, and Gordon Brown and a few other national leaders proposed a new international regulatory system, the Americans in particular and many other countries’ leaders took fright at this idea of sacrificing an iota of their national sovereignty in the interest of the prosperity of the whole world, and the idea sank almost without trace. No foreigners are going to tell Uncle Sam what to do! All that could be agreed was some form of future consultation among the main national regulators. So when the taxpayers of the world have pumped enough of their own money into the banks to induce them to start doing their job again, we shall return to the old arrangements for regulating them on a national basis, and the global-scale banks will have us all over a barrel once again.
4. World government, although plainly desirable in principle — not only to regain democratic control of the globalised economy — is clearly out of the question for as far ahead as it’s useful to look. But there may be lessons to be learned from the unique experiment of the mis-named European Union. For all its faults, the EU represents a novel and extremely ingenious compromise between, at one extreme, all-out untrammelled national sovereignty for each member state, and at the other extreme, a European supra-national super-state with all the attributes of a standard sovereign state. EU members voluntarily surrender elements of their sovereignty to the EU centre for the common good, in areas where the whole EU working collectively can be far more effective than the individual member states working on their own. One of the EU’s great virtues is that this new form of internationalism may become a model for a much wider form of international co-operation, going far beyond Europe. Such a control structure may become essential if the planet is to be saved — even more important than preventing another economic disaster. It’s a pity that hostility to the EU in Britain is so widespread, and so intense, that commentators are deterred from pointing out most of its great merits.
5. Once we all begin to emerge from the worst of this crisis, almost all governments are going to have to choose where to place the main emphasis in their recovery strategies: higher taxes, or cuts in government spending. Of course both will be necessary. But David Cameron has already made it clear that a Conservative government in Britain will be looking chiefly to impose stringent cuts in public expenditure, perhaps even accompanied by reduced taxation, although he’s so far been extremely coy about where the cuts will fall. (Certainly the Tories have exhibited very strong distaste for the new 50% marginal rate of income tax on the very highest and richest earners, even though it has attracted strong majority support in the polls.) Any Labour government, as last week’s budget shows, will instinctively prefer to raise taxes on the rich rather than attacking the essential social services on which the most vulnerable people in society depend so heavily. It looks as if this distinction may open up an ideological gap between left and right in British politics of a kind that we haven’t seen in decades. Perhaps politics will begin to focus on policy differences again, rather than the ad hominem and trivial point-scoring attacks that disfigure the national dialogue at present.
6. Two factors that have contributed heavily to the crisis: huge house price bubbles, especially in the US and the UK; and the massive trade imbalance between the US and China, with China in effect lending the US colossal amounts of money to finance both private and government over-spending. The British government could, and with hindsight should, have acted to rein in mortgage lending to borrowers unlikely to be able to service the debts, by regulating the size of permissible mortgage loans in relation to income: but this would have been highly unpopular in a situation where there’s a sharp shortage of low-income housing, largely thanks to Mrs Thatcher’s misguided destruction of local authority housing provision. But no British government could have done anything about American sub-prime mortgages, the US house price bubble, or the China-US trade imbalance, all of which helped to make the global economic collapse inevitable. It’s questionable, too, whether as a matter of political reality any US government could have done much if anything about those three doomy phenomena. But former President GW Bush clearly didn’t need to make them even worse.
7. In all the bleating from the billionaires and their media apologists about the 50% marginal rate of tax on very high incomes, and the angry accusations that it represents a reversion to 1960s tax-and-spend Labour Party socialism (we should be so lucky!), the key word ‘marginal’ tends to be conveniently overlooked. The bleaters are happy to reinforce the widespread belief that the new rate will mean those earning — or at any rate raking in — over £150,000 a year having to pay half of that £150,000+ back in tax each year, whereas of course the 50% rate applies only to that part of income which exceeds £150,000. The idea that such a tax will drive hundreds of otherwise decent, hard-working, socially responsible citizens into exile seems on the face of it barmy. Anyway, if it drives out some of the avaricious financiers who helped to visit this economic disaster on the rest of us, so much the better. Few of those who lose their homes, their jobs and their savings because of it will shed many tears for them.
Brian
BBC’s Newsnight programme is appealing for viewers’ proposals on how best to cut public expenditure. Myself, I agree with the government that cutting public spending in the early stages of a massive recession would be insane (although HM Loyal Opposition doesn’t seem to grasp the reason for that view, the strongest reason currently on offer for not risking a Tory government next year). But sooner or later public expenditure clearly will need to be cut back, so I have offered this ten-course menu of cuts to Newsnight:
1. Scrap ID cards and the associated giant national database (obviously). They are intrusive, irrelevant to terrorism, won’t bother serious crooks, will intensify discriminatory stop-and-search, won’t be capable of storing reliable information, and will be open to every kind of abuse.
2. Don’t renew Trident. We don’t need nuclear weapons, nor rockets, submarines, ships, aircraft or hot-air balloons to deliver them. For the foreseeable future Britain can’t afford to pretend to be a world power. A cold douche of realism will be salutary.
3. Don’t build any more prisons — neither three Titans nor five smaller ones. Reduce the size of the prison population, don’t keep on building new homes for an even bigger one. Around half the prison population ought not to be there: it’s far cheaper to address their problems outside prison than in it.
4. Scrap the NHS giant computer system.
5. No more failed politicians, businessmen, actors, ministers’ nephews or other amateurs to be appointed as ambassadors or high commissioners. Career diplomats are much cheaper (and far more effective).
6. No more Private Finance Initiatives, Public-Private Partnerships, or other kinds of sleight-of-hand dodges to postpone public expenditure or keep it off the public accounts: in practice risk can’t be transferred to the private sector and the private sector is hugely more expensive.
7. Nationalise the failed banks — much cheaper than paying off their bad debts for them and then pouring money into them as bribes to induce them to do their job of lending.
8. Bring the quangos, hived-off agencies and most privatised bodies performing public services (such as privatised prisons) back under direct ministerial and departmental control. Not only will they work much more economically: you won’t need to pay their chief executives and other senior managers nearly so much when they are middle-ranking civil servants again.
9. Abolish, or severely limit, private medical practice by doctors etc. trained by the NHS at public expense. Consultants will deliver much more to the NHS, for no more money, if they don’t spend half their time in Harley Street treating Saudi princes while pretending that private practice only accounts for 3 per cent of their time.
10. Remove all British troops from Afghanistan within three months. Their presence entails unacceptable casualties, serves no discernible purpose, is irrelevant to the real problem of al-Qaeda terrorism (i.e. Pakistan), antagonises ordinary innocent Afghans, is set unattainable goals, and costs millions.
Actually all ten proposals are desirable in themselves, even if there were unlimited money available. Taken together they should free up enough resources to double overseas development aid, launch a huge programme of public building of houses, roads and other amenities as a job-creating fiscal stimulus, take a few million people out of income tax to get them spending again, and bribe the International Olympic Committee to give their damn games to someone else.
Brian
All the press loves a crisis: it sells papers. The Opposition loves a crisis: it attributes it to the government’s failure — sometimes correctly, sometimes not. The masochistic British in general are easily convinced by the right-wing tabloids and the rest of the Tory press, not to mention the CamerOsborne duo, that the UK is at the bottom of all the league tables, and heading rapidly for even lower places in them. So here are some facts and figures from recent publications of all shapes and sizes. I can’t vouch for any of them; for all I know, they have all been invented. But they’re perhaps better than nothing. Or are they? Anyway, here they are:
In the fourth quarter of 2008, nominal gross domestic product shrank at an annualised rate of 4 per cent in the UK, 4.2 percent in the eurozone, 4.6 per cent in Germany, 5.8 per cent in the US and 6.4 per cent in Japan. This, then, is a world of grossly deficient demand.
FT 11.4.09 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1b2576cc-25f9-11de-be57-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1
The UK went into this recession with the second lowest level of debt of all the G7 rich nations; by next year it will have slipped to mid-table.
Guardian editorial 21 iv 09 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/21/recession-budget-darling
The government’s much-criticised cut in VAT is working and has led to a big boost in consumer spending, according to a leading economics consultancy. The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) says that the cut, which took effect on 1 December 2008, has led to £2.1bn of extra sales.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7995850.stm
Hat-tip: http://twitter.com/lukewaterfield
Eric Hobsbawm’s assertions that the UK will suffer more in this recession because it has “stopped making things” and “put its money on becoming the global centre of financial services” do not stand scrutiny. The UK’s proportion of GDP based on manufacturing is around 13.6%… it is actually higher than France. Further, recent OECD figures show that countries which derive a higher proportion of GDP from manufacturing are faring worse in the downturn. Germany’s GDP is forecast to fall by 5.3% in 2009, Japan’s by 6.6%, the UK’s by 3.7%. Financial services accounts for around 10% of GDP in the UK, rising to 14% only when ancillary services are included — so manufacturing is just as important as finance as a contributor to the economy.
[Andrew Harris, letters, Guardian 15 April 09.]
The median pay increase in the private sector was about 3.8 per cent last year, significantly above the 2.8 per cent public sector equivalent, according to Incomes Data Services, a research organisation. [ FT 18-19 April 2009 p6]
(This is for the panickers who think public sector pay has been rocketing ahead of the suffering private sector out of control and has thereby precipitated the country’s bankruptcy.)
The IMF [predicted] that recession in the UK would be “quite severe”. The economy will shrink by 4.1% this year and continue to contract, by 0.4% in 2010, it said…. Britain is no longer the sick man of the G7. Several countries, including Germany and Japan, which until recently were thought to be escaping the worst of the credit crunch, are now expected to suffer deeper recessions than the UK. The IMF expects Germany’s GDP to shrink by 5.6% this year, and Japan’s export-dependent economy to contract by 6.2%.
[Heather Stewart, Guardian, 23 Apr 09, p.7.]
“UK net debt, which includes the cost of stabilising the banking system, will, as a share of GDP, increase from 59% this year, to 68% next, 74% in 2011-12, and 78% and 79% in 2013-14.” [Budget speech]
Public sector net debt is forecast to almost double over the next four years – from 43% at the end of 2008-09, to 79% in 2013-14. This will be the highest level of debt seen since the mid-1960s…
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/apr/23/budget-gemma-tetlow Guardian p.5, 23 Apr 09] (Emphasis added.)
Can Britain afford this recession, or are we, as forecast by the investment guru Jim Rogers, destined to become an Icelandic-style basket case? The one thing we can draw some comfort from is that Britain starts from a relatively low level of overall public debt compared with other G7 economies. Over the next few years, we’ll be catching up fast, but ignoring the banking liabilities, which are in any case largely matched by assets, public debt as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product should just about remain containable.
Even the International Monetary Fund, which is particularly gloomy about prospects for the UK economy, thinks British debt as a proportion of GDP will remain below that of Germany, Italy, France and the US, and get nowhere near that of Japan. Thanks in part to quantitative easing, there is no sign yet of any problems in financing these deficits. Investment appetite for government debt seems undiminished. What’s more, the increase in public debt is, in a sense, only compensating for the contraction of private credit.
[Independent, 20 March 09, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/jeremy-warner/jeremy-warner-now-its-public-debt-we-must-worry-about-1649696.html]
France has a debt GDP ratio of 60%+ We are at 41% as at end of 2008. We are going to ramp that up over the coming years but just for reference we were at twice the 41% level in 1995. That’s what we did with the big budget surpluses during the celtic tiger – we paid down debt.
- - - - -
Quite right: the UK is currently 50% [debt-GDP ratio] and Germany is 64%, we could increase ours by 50% and still be lower than Germany in percentage terms. Also on unemployment, we are at 10%, Spain are at 15.5% and France are at 8.6%…
[http://www.politics.ie/chat/58730-q-6th-april-8.html]
Net debt as a proportion of GDP soared to 49% – another record – and even excluding the impact of financial sector bailouts, still stood at 40.7%, the highest since June 1998. (Emphasis added)
[Metro, 19 March 09, http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?Public_sector_borrowing_soars_to_record_high&in_article_id=588483&in_page_id=34]
Credit ratings of many OECD countries’ government bonds could be hit before the end of the decade due to mounting pension costs – although the UK will fare relatively better than most, analysts at Standard & Poor’s (S&P), the ratings agency, say. [...] The ratio of debt to GDP of a typical OECD country will rise to 139% by 2050 from 47% in 2010 if measures are not taken to tackle the cost of ageing, S&P said in a report. [...] The worst affected countries with debt burdens exceeding 200% of GDP by 2050 would be France, Germany, Portugal, Greece, Poland and the Czech Republic…
[Publication: Pensions Week Date: Monday, April 5 2004 -- < nb date]
PARIS, March 31 (Reuters) – France’s public sector debt stood at around 68 percent of gross domestic product at the end of 2008, Budget Minister Eric Woerth said on Tuesday. Speaking on LCI television, Woerth also said that France’s deficit will have hit around 3.4 percent of gross domestic product at the end of last year… Analysts have expected the figure to be in excess of the European Union’s debt to GDP ratio limit of 60 percent. (Reporting by Tamora Vidaillet)
http://uk.biz.yahoo.com/31032009/323/french-end-2008-debt-gdp-ratio-around-68-pct-woerth.html
___________________________
If I’m going to be accused of cherry-picking highly selective quotations, I shall plead guilty without a tremor. If told that other quotations could easily be assembled to make a diametrically opposite case, I shall cordially agree. I just think my selection suggests that it could be (even) worse, and undoubtedly will be, but not necessarily only here.
Postscript: The government deserves some credit (no pun intended) for resisting strong pressures for cuts in overseas development aid, says development economist Owen Barder[1], but the poorest countries, especially in Africa, with the least responsibility for this rich-country crisis, will suffer as a result of it much more than we will:
The UK Government has been vocal in resisting protectionism, and rightly so; but restricting the fiscal expansion to the domestic economy is also a form of economic nationalism.
I welcome the decision of the UK Government not to cut the aid budget today. But what I really wanted to see was the developing world getting a big part of the fiscal expansion that the Government announced today.
And in a comment over on the Oxfam blog, Owen adds:
I agree: kudos to the Government for holding the line when it would have been easy to cut the aid budget.
But what does it say about the state of our global community, and our aspirations for making it better, when almost nobody argues that at least part of the fiscal expansion should be spent abroad?
Between this financial year and next there is an increase in public spending of £30.2 billion. Could we not have spared a billion or two of that for the world’s poor?
Bad as things are in the UK, nobody there will starve to death as a result of this recession. Nobody will have to take their kid out of school. Here in Ethiopia, that is exactly what is going to happen.
Sobering thoughts.
[1] Acknowledgement: are we by any chance related? Yes.
Brian
My good intention to leave the Kosovo issue alone for a while, lest I be accused of obsessing about it (which I am, and do), was torpedoed by David Clark’s stout defence of the NATO attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 in his Guardian article of 16 April 2009 (“Kosovo was a just war, not an imperialist dress rehearsal“). There was never any possibility of leaving this unanswered, and today’s Guardian publishes my rebuttal letter. It’s only slightly pared down from my original text, but for comparison, and to preserve a few lost nuances, here’s the original as submitted:
Sir,
I hope that David Clark’s advice to the FCO was more balanced and dispassionate than his article about Kosovo (Kosovo was a just war, not an imperialist dress rehearsal, Comment, 16 April). His defence of that ill-conceived and unsuccessful operation relies mainly on misrepresenting the motives and arguments of its critics.
What he calls the Rambouillet “peace conference” was in reality a partisan exercise to manufacture an excuse for bombing the Serbs to punish them retrospectively for Bosnia. NATO’s attack on Yugoslavia was in flagrant breach of our Charter obligations and thus an act of aggression. Far from stopping Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, it provided the excuse and motive for accelerating and greatly aggravating it: Kosovo Albanians started to be driven out of their country only after the NATO bombing began.
The bombing completely failed in its objective (forcing the Serbs to accept withdrawal of their forces from Kosovo and installation of an international regime instead). It was only when President Clinton discreetly invited the Russians and the Finnish President Ahtisaari, with his own representative, to re-write the Rambouillet ultimatum, and accepted Russian participation in the eventual settlement, that the Serbs were forced to accept the new terms — which could have been agreed three months earlier if the US and UK delegations had been negotiating in good faith at Rambouillet, without the need for a single bomb being dropped.
It’s obvious in retrospect that the misrepresentation of this disastrous, unnecessary and illegal misuse of force as a huge success, especially for Tony Blair, was at least one factor predisposing him to commit us three years later to an uncannily similar misadventure, on an even bigger scale, in Iraq.
Yours sincerely
Brian Barder
It’s heartening that the great majority of the six Web pages of comments on Mr Clark’s defence of the NATO misadventure disagree, with varying degrees of passion, with his account of it. It’s obviously unnecessary to be a Serb, an apologist for Milosevic, or an anti-NATO crusader, to see through the web of misleading interpretation that has been woven over this unhappy episode.
David Clark — whom on a different topic I salute for his magnificent ‘minutes’ of the Cabinet meeting at which it was decided to go to war over Iraq — was a special adviser to Robin Cook as Foreign Secretary at the time of the Kosovo débacle and co-chair of the Rambouillet conference which engineered the implausible excuse for the NATO attack on Yugoslavia. When I thought the Guardian was not going to publish my letter, I sent its text to Mr Clark in a message which included this:
I have put a longer and more detailed analysis of the subject, quoting my sources wherever possible, on my website at
http://www.barder.com/politics/international/kosovo/.
You might also care to glance at http://www.barder.com/ephems/384, about Robin Cook and Rambouillet. I had a lot of time for Robin Cook, but I have never been able to understand how he allowed himself to be associated with Madeleine Albright’s essentially fraudulent role at Rambouillet.
Finally, I don’t really apologise for harping on this neuralgic subject. It’s important that future historians should draw the right lessons from what happened at Rambouillet and what happened to Yugoslavia as a result, and not the distorted lessons which apologists for the NATO action, including Mr Clark, seek to draw. It was those distorted lessons which clearly contributed, along with many other factors, to the even greater catastrophe of Iraq, only three-and-a-bit years later.
Update (24 April 09): I’m happy to see that the Guardian’s formidable security editor, Richard Norton-Taylor, has quoted my Guardian letter about Kosovo with approval in a column about Tony Blair’s recent inexplicable reaffirmation of the misconceived interventionist policies proclaimed in his infamous Chicago speech of ten years ago. The less good news is that the Norton-Taylor article has appeared only online, not in print, for some unfathomable reason. It’s worth reading, not only for its quotations from my letter, but also for the way it takes apart the now comprehensively discredited Mr Blair (who, incidentally, as Mr Norton-Taylor knows but many others don’t, is not a middle east or any other kind of ‘peace envoy‘: his rather more narrowly defined, but hardly less difficult job is to encourage foreign investment in Palestine). nb: One of the 98 or so ‘comments’ on the Norton-Taylor article purports to quote from an article, or articles, by me, but its author acknowledges in a later comment that the pieces quoted are by someone else.
Brian
As yesterday’s statement by the Director of Public Prosecutions said with some emphasis, the decision not to prosecute Damian Green, the Conservative front-bench MP who for two years has been receiving official documents stolen and clandestinely supplied to him by a mole in the home secretary’s private office, doesn’t mean that no offence has been committed. The Guardian reported on 17 April 2009, –
In his statement yesterday the DPP [Keir Starmer QC] said although the evidence gathered did not meet the threshold necessary for criminal proceedings there was evidence upon which a jury could conclude that Green “aided or abetted” what was a clear breach of public duties by Galley, in leaking the information. Starmer said the breach of duty did cause “damage” to the proper functioning of the Home Office and that the unauthorised leaking of restricted and/or confidential information was not beyond the reach of the criminal law.
Given that a pattern of leaks had been established by the permanent secretary of the Home Office, Sir David Normington, Starmer said: “It was inevitable that a police investigation would follow.”
On the same day, the Guardian’s editorial comment on Mr Galley, the home office mole who has admitted supplying most (but, interestingly, not all) of the stolen information to Mr Green, is also worth pondering:
Ms Smith and her top officials had been angered by the steady stream of leaks which eventually turned out to be flowing through Mr Green. They had a right to be. The young official who set it flowing, Christopher Galley, seems to have had motivations that went beyond any desire to expose specific wrongdoings; he has a track record of ambition within the Conservative party. Aside from ministerial blushes, the chief effect of much of the material he released was to increase anxiety about immigration. With access to an extraordinary range of sensitive papers, he had – as the director of public prosecutions said yesterday – the potential to damage good governance.
I have written about this affair in two earlier posts, and in responses to comments on them (here and here), and there’s no need to repeat all that now: nothing that has happened since causes me to change my views as expressed then. But a couple of points are worth reflecting on before we are all deafened by the crowing of Damian Green in his understandable but entirely bogus claim to have been ‘vindicated’: bogus, because the DPP’s decision in no way confirms Green’s self-serving pretence that in maintaining contact over a long period of time with a spy close to the heart of government in order to obtain stolen information with which to attack it, he was “only doing his job”.
First, it’s been instructive to see how the combined forces of two powerful vested interests have been brought to bear to protect Mr Green (and, incidentally, his home office mole). Opposition MPs and disaffected government back-benchers share a vested interest with journalists and their newspapers and magazines in encouraging unauthorised and generally illegal “leaks” of information that the government of the day for whatever reason doesn’t want to make public, or doesn’t want to make public at that particular moment. There’s an important distinction here between (1) leaks designed to expose corrupt or otherwise illegal and deceitful behaviour by ministers, and (2) leaks designed purely to embarrass the government and benefit its critics. Even the former kind can be justified only if the procedures laid down for reporting such illicit behaviour by government have been followed; and if they have, the law now affords considerable protection to the whistle-blower. The latter kind of leak can never be justified: it constitutes a flagrant breach of trust between the government and its paid employee, a betrayal of the loyalty owed by an appointed official to his or her elected minister, and an action liable, in the DPP’s words, to damage the proper functioning of the government in general and of the department whose information has been stolen in particular. Contrary to Mr Green’s protestations, his mole’s stolen documents appear from the evidence now available to have fallen into the latter (unjustified) category, not the first.
Secondly, an overlapping vested interest, combined with the vested interest in encouraging and seeking to legitimise leaks, helped to obscure the real issue at stake in Damian Green’s behaviour — namely, the right and duty of government to protect its own information from unauthorised and untimely publication. The second vested interest was that of members of parliament in protecting themselves from stringent investigation by the police. Even though MPs had to acknowledge that they could not invoke parliamentary privilege to claim immunity from investigation of a possible crime, they nevertheless raised an enormous storm of protest over the arrest of Mr Green and the search of his papers and computers in his parliamentary office. On the face of it, both of these were probably justified. The police were perfectly properly seeking to establish what information had been clandestinely leaked to Mr Green: whether any of it had been classified Secret (or above), whether any of it touched on matters of national security, and to what extent, if any, Mr Green had actively or implicitly encouraged his mole to continue his acts of treachery over at least two years. If any security-sensitive and highly classified information had been passed to Mr Green, there would have been an obvious risk that it would be destroyed had Mr Green received advance warning of the impending search. That was the unacceptable risk of inviting Mr Green down to the station for a polite chat over a coffee instead of formally arresting him. As for the search of his office files and computers, the police had not sought or obtained an ordinary search warrant, but they did have the explicit permission of the Serjeant at Arms, the senior parliamentary official in charge of security, for the search, and they presumably knew that the Speaker had been either informed or consulted in advance and that he had raised no objection. It seems obvious that this, in the special circumstances of a police search inside the Palace of Westminster, was a much more authoritative form of permit than an ordinary search warrant would have been.
But whatever the rights and wrongs of the arrest and the search, the unfortunate fact remains that the real issue was almost completely drowned out by the hullabaloo over the arrest of Green and the search of his offices, a hullabaloo raised by MPs outraged that one of their number, suspected of having committed an offence, had been treated by the police in exactly the same way as any member of the public would have been treated in similar circumstances. (It’s worth bearing in mind, too, the DPP’s explicit judgement that given the series of leaks over such a long period, it was “inevitable” that the police should have been called in.)
Against such a background of clamour by double vested interests, vociferously backed by most of the country’s parliamentarians and almost the whole of the country’s press, it was entirely predictable (and widely predicted) that the Director of Public Prosecutions should decide not to go ahead with charges against Damian Green or his mole. But it’s unfortunate for the government, and potentially damaging to the cause of good government, that the DPP’s decision is being almost universally interpreted as a leakers’ charter. Henceforth any minor (or senior) official with a personal grudge against his minister, or motivated by his personal political views or by a desire for either the excitement of clandestine activity (“I’m more important than I might seem”), or for fame or even fortune, will feel free to decide for himself what official information should be passed over to the public domain, in what form and on what timing, regardless of the considered policy and views of elected ministers. Appointed officials will believe themselves quite free to substitute their own judgement for those of their elected ministers as to what should be given to the government’s political adversaries or to the national press, and what should be withheld.
If and when Mr Green and his front-bench colleagues find themselves sitting on the government benches in, probably, just about a year’s time, they might begin to realise what they have done. But you may be sure that if so, they won’t admit it.
Post-script: Many will disagree with some, or all, of the judgements made in this post. Most of these have been exhaustively debated in comments on my two earlier posts on the subject, cited (with links) above; and I have responded to most of them there. There’s little or no point in repeating those debates here. Dissenters can be assumed to persist in their dissent. Comments on genuinely new aspects of the case are, however, most welcome, as always.
Brian
From the Sunday Times extract from Paddy Ashdown’s memoirs, published 12 April 09 (Lord Ashdown relates how news of a long-ago extra-marital affair was leaked to the News of the World in January 1992):
All this made life for my family even more difficult and seriously undermined my self-confidence, too. That, it appears, was precisely what was supposed to happen – as we discovered after the election, when we learnt that some Tories had imported a group of US activists called “the Nerds”, whose job was to spread malign rumours and make unfounded personal accusations against senior opposition MPs.
Perhaps this was done without official sanction from the top of the Conservative party. But after the election Kelvin MacKenzie, then editor of The Sun, revealed that at least one cabinet-level Tory minister had approached him seeking to retail scurrilous and untrue allegations against a number of senior opposition MPs.
Ring a bell? The News of the World was one of the scurrilous Sunday newspapers to which the right-wing blogger ‘Guido Fawkes’ (real name Paul Staines) gave the McBride-Draper emails containing the squalid smears of leading Tories and their wives. To quote Guido’s own blog post of 11 April 2009:
Stephen Pound [MP] says Guido is laughing all the way to the bank – actually Guido gave the story to the News of the World and the Sunday Times for pleasure not profit. [Emphasis added]
Funny way to get one’s pleasure, you might think. It takes all sorts….
Brian
There’s mercifully little to add to the Canadian forests of newsprint and gigabytes of bandwidth devoted to this foolish and shameful caper in which a political adviser at No. 10 Downing Street and a former Labour Party spin doctor, now active, with others, on a pro-Labour blog, exchanged juvenile e-mails about the idea of a new left-wing blog designed to break the right-wing bloggers’ monopoly of scurrilous gossip about their political adversaries. The plotters claim, reasonably credibly, to have abandoned the idea several weeks ago, but some of their e-mails fell into the hands of a notorious right-wing blogger, one Paul Staines, calling himself Guido Fawkes (Guido = Guy — geddit?) on his fairly unsavoury blog; and the rest is history.
The collection of nasty personal smears, some against Tory politicians, some against their wives, despatched from the No. 10 adviser to the Labour blogger as possible material for the proposed new blog, gives off a foul smell. Its disclosure discredits the two foolish plotters, the Labour Party and the government. It sheds a harsh light on Gordon Brown’s judgement of the kind of people he employs as advisers and of their more questionable activities on his behalf (it’s unlikely that he knew of these in detail, but he must have known in general terms of the kind of person Mr McBride was and how he conducted himself). Derek Draper, the blogger, has apologised humbly and insists that the plan to publish the smear material had been abandoned weeks ago. McBride has resigned from his No. 10 job, with similar apologies; his hitherto starry career is over, and he’s only in his 30s, so he has paid a high price for an act of spectacular and distasteful folly.
I can’t improve on a comment made by Paul Halsall (of the English Eclectic blog) on yet another blog, that of Tom Harris MP, and posted there today:
I think the actions of Draper and McBride are despicable, but it is Paul Staines ['Guido Fawkes'] who has chosen to publish these letters for, as Iain Dale says, his “pleasure.” I don’t even see that this is especially bad for the government. It looks like cheap students politics on TV news – the more so whenever Draper or Staines speak – and it has taken attention away from Jacqui Smith’s expenses. I bet she loves Paul Staines just now!
Happy Easter to all.
A few points about this squalid story seem worth adding.
First, virtually all the smear stories sent privately as possible blog material by McBride to Draper are now in the public domain — in the newspapers and on radio and television, not just on an obscure and scurrilous blog — and causing real pain and embarrassment to their victims, at least one of whom is threatening legal action (against whom?). And who was responsible for this widespread publication? ‘Guido Fawkes’, who somehow got hold of copies of the e-mails, wrote about them on his blog and gave them to the newspapers (he denies having sold them), and the newspaper editors who have seen fit to reproduce the juiciest elements of them in extensive print while piously denouncing McBride and Draper for their wickedness in passing them from one to the other and daring to contemplate making them semi-public in a blog. The Conservative Party leadership and the other victims of the smears must be very grateful to Guido/Paul and his right-wing media contacts for so enthusiastically exposing this muck to public view.
Secondly, Damian McBride — contrary to a lot of blogging and media reporting — was not a ‘civil servant’ at the time of his resignation: IOW, he was not a member of the Home Civil Service, subject to the civil service code of conduct which governs, among other things, party political activity[1]. He was a special political adviser appointed by the prime minister to do the kind of political work that civil servants can’t (and generally won’t) do. McBride had been a civil servant in the past and was apparently still paid from public funds; one lesson to be drawn from this and earlier similar escapades is surely that all these special advisers to ministers should be paid by the ministers’ party, not by the taxpayer. (Wasn’t that the arrangement at one time?) Draper neither was nor is a civil servant, either. He was at one time a ministerial special adviser and press spokesman but he seems currently to have no formal position in relation either to the government or to the Labour Party. Demands for his ‘dismissal’ or ‘resignation’ accordingly seem nugatory.
Thirdly, it looks from the account of the smears in at least one of today’s Sunday papers as if at least some of them were extrapolated from established fact. In other words, not all of them were necessarily or entirely fictional. To say that is not to condone their public dissemination: they will have been even more damaging and distressing if partly or wholly true.
And fourthly, the clandestine (or, often, open) spreading of smears and smut to the disadvantage of one’s political opponents is as old as politics itself. On top of this, using ministerial party bag-carriers to ‘brief’ against members of one’s own side has become common practice at least since Mrs Thatcher’s premiership and probably long before that. The disclosure of scandal has been used to destroy political careers, or at least to damage them, from time immemorial. William Hague’s demand on television this evening that steps must be taken to ensure that the current departure from virtue “never happens again” is frankly fatuous, and he knows it. As the distinguished columnist and political writer Alan Watkins used to say, politics is a rough old trade. To feign horror and outrage when the seamy side of politics occasionally surfaces, before diving again into the murky depths, is sheer hypocrisy; actually to be horrified suggests an innocence amounting to disqualification from meaningful comment.
Paul Halsall, quoted approvingly above, is probably right to suppose that all this is of much less interest or concern to the man (or woman) on the Clapham Omnibus than to the frenzied denizens of the Westminster Village. It will no doubt soon be largely, but not completely, forgotten: just one more nail in the coffin of Gordon Brown’s reputation. It won’t lose him the forthcoming general election because he has precious little chance of winning it anyway.
Meanwhile the 95 per cent of the citizenry who very sensibly can’t be bothered to read the small print, or who gain a vague impression of what’s going on from the muddled and inaccurate accounts by self-appointed experts on television, will blithely assume that Gordon Brown’s “attack dogs”, “practitioners of the dark arts”, and other time-expired clichés, have been exposed as spinners of public lies designed to discredit Labour’s enemies, the Tories. Few will stop to wonder why it was actually the bloggers and newspapers of the political right, the Tories’ natural allies, who worked so hard to ensure that such damaging smears and allegations against their own side were hustled into the public domain. To quote Alan Watkins again (and this time Margaret Thatcher too), it’s a funny old world.
[1] Update 1: on McBride’s formal status in No. 10 Downing Street, please now see the correction in Owen Barder’s helpful and important comment below, and my response appended to it.
Update 2 (19 April 09): Today’s Sunday Times carries the following confession in small print at the foot of page 2 (the Web version incorporates it, almost invisibly, into the end of the body of the article):
A complaint about last week’s coverage of the Damian McBride affair was made by Frances Osborne to the Press Complaints Commission. That complaint was resolved after The Sunday Times agreed not to republish Mr McBride’s untrue smears in relation to Mrs Osborne and to remove specific references to them from our website.
(Mrs Osborne is of course the wife of the Conservative Shadow Chancellor.) How strange that the action of the Sunday Times (and the News of the World, both Murdoch newspapers) in publishing these libellous smears, and of Guido Fawkes in providing the text of the smears to those newspapers with the intention of getting them published, should have virtually escaped public censure, while McBride and Draper, who never published any of them, nor passed them to others for publication, have been subjected to more public obloquy than anyone since Jack the Ripper! It would have been perfectly legitimate to report the story about McBride’s and Draper’s plan to use a website for gossip designed to discredit leading Tories, and to describe (without naming or identifying the intended victims) the kind of repulsive smears they had contemplated posting in it: but to publish those smears in such detail, naming the unfortunate Mrs Osborne and other putative victims, was every bit as reprehensible as the action planned, but never taken, by McBride and Draper. The jackals of the press and the brave commentariat are presumably no longer afraid of McBride — now that he has resigned — but remain as scared of Mr Murdoch and his rags of newspapers as ever.
Brian
From time to time books and articles appear announcing that aid to developing countries does more harm than good. These have proliferated recently, just at the time when the global recession and collapse of credit are beginning to do incalculable harm to the poorest people in the poorest countries. The recession is doing great damage in our rich ecionomies with millions losing their jobs, almost as many losing their homes, others losing their life savings, and all because of the reckless greed and incompetence of the financial sector moguls of north America and western Europe. But in the poorest areas of the world, there will be millions more unnecessary and avoidable deaths, especially among vulnerable children, as a direct result of the mismanagement of the rich economies. This imposes a clear obligation on us in the richest countries to do much more to protect the poorest from the consequences of our own follies and selfishness. Rather than cutting back on aid, as the anti-aid campaigners propose, we should be stepping it up — unless, as they claim, it actually harms those who receive it, instead of helping them.
One of the most widely publicised recent statements of the case against aid has come in the book Dead Aid, by Dambisa Moyo. Ms Moyo is described in the review of her book in The Independent newspaper as
an African woman, articulate, smart, glamorous, delivering a message of brazen political incorrectness: cut aid to Africa. Aid, she argues, has not merely failed to work; it has compounded Africa’s problems. Moyo cannot be dismissed as a crank. Educated at Harvard and Oxford, she heads the Africa strategy of a major bank. Nor can she be dismissed as a renegade who has rejected her roots. She is deeply wounded by the lack of development in Zambia, her home country.
Here, it seems, is a serious argument from an apparently impeccable source which finds an echo in the instincts and prejudices of conservatives everywhere who, like the Victorian conservatives before them, blame the poor for their poverty and insist that any help they might receive from more virtuous and hard-working people like themselves will simply be wasted or corruptly diverted; it will encourage dependency, drunkenness and idleness, discourage thrift and hard work, and condemn its victims to perpetual poverty — the modern global equivalent of the workhouse.
Those of us who recoil from such a self-serving approach to the problem of world poverty and the role of aid as one of many tools in the effort to eliminate or at least to reduce it will thus be reassured to read a clinical deconstruction of Ms Moyo’s work by an experienced development economist in a detailed and comprehensively sourced review (pdf). Owen Barder[1] concludes his point-by-point analysis by writing:
Moyo has the cheek to accuse people working in the aid industry of promoting their own interests, and then`– as an investment banker from Goldman Sachs — to advocate instead that the poorest countries should be encouraged to borrow more in private capital markets. And her argument is based on what appears to be a deliberate mis-statement of the evidence.
Moyo advocates some commendable policies other than aid which might accelerate the development process. But these are already conventional wisdom, and Moyo’s book does nothing to challenge the view that progress on these can be faster with more support from aid.
There is a debate to be had about aid, but Moyo’s book, sadly, does not advance it. Dead Aid is poorly researched, badly argued, mendacious in its use of evidence, and pedestrian in its suggestions for alternatives to aid.
The saloon bar commentators with their airy dismissal of aid as a waste of our taxpayers’ money will have to do better than this. But at a time when the need for more, and more effective, aid is so overwhelming, it seems a pity that time and energy should have to be wasted on rebutting the case for giving no aid at all.
Up-date, 2 April. Dambisa Moyo appeared on the Colbert Report on US television on 1 April (no, it’s not an April Fool — at least, I don’t think it is). You can see and hear her defending her views on aid here. Even making allowances for the frivolity of the interviewer and the meanness of the allocation of time to Ms Moyo, her performance is wholly unconvincing. Any ordinarily perceptive viewer would surely want to know why the various measures she advocates, including mainly private sector investment, have to be alternatives to aid rather than simultaneous contributions to development; and many will, one hopes, spot the flaw in her fundamental syllogism: African countries have been receiving aid; but some of them have become poorer; therefore aid makes countries poorer. No doubt she’s a clever lady, but either she doesn’t know that that’s nonsense, in which case she’s not that clever; or else she does know, in which case – oh, you know.
[1] I declare an interest in that the writer of the review happens to be my son.
Brian
