Just over two years ago, in February 2011, I wrote about AV, the Alternative Vote, suggesting it amounted to a Second Past the Post system. Pleasingly, the electorate roundly rejected it. Our system, for all its faults, tends to produce clear winners and to marginalise the smaller parties.
The consequences of retaining it are being illuminated by events in Europe, where PR is widespread. It's been apparent for a while that the damage done to southern Eurozone economies by the currency mismatch with the north is going to be played out in terms of domestic policies. Mario Draghi's OTR mechanism has put the lid of bond yields for the moment, but austerity is driving up unemployment and increasingly making it clear to the richer nations that there will be a price to be paid in terms of bailing out the south. On both sides of the divide this is having political ramifications which can only grow. Extremist parties, mostly on the far right, are flourishing in Greece, Italy has Beppe Grillo and now in Germany there is a new party, Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), calling for a Eurozone split. These countries' electoral systems give fringe parties a real chance of power in a coalition government.
It couldn't happen here. UKIP may be on the rise in the polls, but the most they can do is derail the Tories. And actually this illustrates a way in which First Past the Post works rather well. Whether you like UKIP or not, their increasing popularity encourages elements in the Conservative party to demand an adjustment in policy rightwards. When Labour lost repeatedly in the 80s and 90s it made an adjustment rightwards to accommodate the public. So when it is said that FPTP leads to monolithic, OK duolithic, politics, that demands at least the observation that the two biggest parties don't remain the same. They are in fact consistently shifting like trees in a wind to catch the smallest gust in voter sentiment.
PR can of course work much more quickly than this. I don't like it much, or AV, but it may in the end bring down the Euro. A consummation, to borrow from Hamlet, devoutly to be wished.
Monday 11 March 2013
Wednesday 6 March 2013
Why I love . . . #5 Jose Mourinho
A strange thing for a Mancunian to be writing, I know, after The Special One's Real Madrid knocked United out of the Champions League last night. And that dodgy sending-off. But Jose is irresistible. To be fair, there's more grey in the hair and more pork in the chops than there was when he did that famous sprint down the touchline after his Porto team did the same thing to United all those years ago. But he still broods with that air of utter self-possession that those of us who resemble a gibbering peanut would kill for.
Mourinho's record as a manager speaks for itself, but, curiously, I'm not sure how much he actually knows about football. His real skill - and this is also true of Sir Alex Ferguson - might be in man-management. Manipulation in other words. It doesn't matter whether he is a good coach or tactician, because he is a genius at making players want to please him and do their best for him. Interviewed after the match last night he said, "The best team lost". Would he have said Madrid deserved to lose if United had won? I doubt it. Slagging off your team when they've won reminds me of another big-mouth genius - Brian Clough. Madrid will be trying even harder in the next round.
And what about Mourinho's way with words? This is what he had to say about Christiano Ronaldo, returning to Old Trafford for the first time since his departure. "Mentally it was not easy for Ronaldo. I played at Stamford Bridge after I left. Not easy. I played Porto. Not easy. One day I will go back to the San Siro. Not easy. One day I will go back to the Bernabeu. Not easy. So Cristiano, not easy. It is not easy".
Upstairs, I hope Harold Pinter's taking notes.
PS About the sending off - the referee can only have been invoking the "serious foul play" law. That's defined as when someone "tackles an opponent with excessive force or brutality when the ball is in play". But Nani was not tackling Arbeloa. Nani was trying to control the ball, and didn't realise Arbeloa was coming until the last moment.
FIFA have muddied the waters by saying "any player who lunges at an opponent in challenging for the ball from the front, from the side or from behind using one or both legs, with excessive force and endangering the safety of an opponent is guilty of serious foul play". Again, Nani didn't lunge at Arbeloa and didn't use excessive force. The force came from Arbeloa who was running. When Nani began his movement the Madrid player was nowhere near him. Arbeloa in fact runs on to Nani's foot from the side. Arbeloa then made the most of it.
The referee wrecked a great occasion with a bad decision. We was robbed.
Mourinho's record as a manager speaks for itself, but, curiously, I'm not sure how much he actually knows about football. His real skill - and this is also true of Sir Alex Ferguson - might be in man-management. Manipulation in other words. It doesn't matter whether he is a good coach or tactician, because he is a genius at making players want to please him and do their best for him. Interviewed after the match last night he said, "The best team lost". Would he have said Madrid deserved to lose if United had won? I doubt it. Slagging off your team when they've won reminds me of another big-mouth genius - Brian Clough. Madrid will be trying even harder in the next round.
And what about Mourinho's way with words? This is what he had to say about Christiano Ronaldo, returning to Old Trafford for the first time since his departure. "Mentally it was not easy for Ronaldo. I played at Stamford Bridge after I left. Not easy. I played Porto. Not easy. One day I will go back to the San Siro. Not easy. One day I will go back to the Bernabeu. Not easy. So Cristiano, not easy. It is not easy".
Upstairs, I hope Harold Pinter's taking notes.
PS About the sending off - the referee can only have been invoking the "serious foul play" law. That's defined as when someone "tackles an opponent with excessive force or brutality when the ball is in play". But Nani was not tackling Arbeloa. Nani was trying to control the ball, and didn't realise Arbeloa was coming until the last moment.
FIFA have muddied the waters by saying "any player who lunges at an opponent in challenging for the ball from the front, from the side or from behind using one or both legs, with excessive force and endangering the safety of an opponent is guilty of serious foul play". Again, Nani didn't lunge at Arbeloa and didn't use excessive force. The force came from Arbeloa who was running. When Nani began his movement the Madrid player was nowhere near him. Arbeloa in fact runs on to Nani's foot from the side. Arbeloa then made the most of it.
The referee wrecked a great occasion with a bad decision. We was robbed.
Sunday 3 March 2013
The Iraq War - Singing and Dancing in the Park
Ever since I started writing this blog in 2009 I have known that at some point I would have to write about the Iraq war. That was partly because it was bound to crop up as a news item - now is pretty much the 10th anniversary of the invasion - but also partly because it was something I got very exercised about at the time.
Let me explain. I supported the invasion.
Feel free to stop reading now. But if you do, reflect on how closed your mind is.
To be clear, at the end of 2002 when the possibility of invasion was first mooted, I was fervently against it too. In fact I wrote a tongue in cheek letter to the Guardian pointing out that if the Blair government was looking for a country to invade which had treated some of its citizens disgracefully, which undoubtedly had weapons of mass destruction and which was in breach of UN resolutions, it need look no further than Israel.
I suppose I started to change my mind when the poverty of this position became apparent. Our government might well have been inconsistent in its choice of foes, but as so often in life it was not enough merely to accuse them of hypocrisy for targeting Iraq but ignoring other countries' transgressions: I also had to decide which position to support - to invade or not to invade.
Sometime after the war I read Ian McEwan's novel Saturday. Like most of McEwan's work it is a book flawed by glaring plot implausibilities, but in its description of the day of the anti-Iraq war demonstration as seen through the eyes of the surgeon Henry Perowne it has the priceless merit of ambiguity. On its least interesting level it is a story of a psycopath stalking Perowne's family, but it is a book which examines other aspects of Perowne's life with a kind of hyper-lucidity.
The scene which struck me at the time was the argument Perowne has with his daughter. She has just returned from the anti-war March filled with righteousness, to find Perowne not only dismissive of the protestors' case but contemptuous of her unawareness of the consequences of not going to war. "If the price of getting rid of Saddam is war", he says, "then the price of no-war is Saddam". Of course a massive row ensues, analagous to the similar ones I had had with my wife and friends, every single one of whom - bien-pensant Lefties like me - opposed the war.
The really striking thing was that the anti-war faction had not grasped the nature of the choice being presented. The choice was not as the protestors apparently believed between one thing self-evidently good (no-war) and another self-evidently bad (war). The choice was between two bad things. We were being asked to decide which bad thing we preferred.
But it wasn't just that the antis had misjudged the kind of dilemma the invasion presented; it was also that they felt so pleased with themselves. They really did think they occupied the moral high ground under a cloudless sky. On the other hand I felt that the decision to oppose invasion should have been an absolutely agonising one. Their smugness was, I felt, symptomatic of a failure to look at the issue squarely. And this in turn was a consequence of fear. This was the fear that George Bush and Tony Blair might be right.
It seems to me now a decade later that three issues should dominate discussion of the invasion. The first is whether it did enough good to justify the undoubted harm it did. The second is what it tells us about our domestic politics. The third concerns international law.
As far as the first is concerned you might start by measuring how many people were killed during the invasion and its aftermath. Estimates have run into millions at the more hysterical end. Handily, there is a website dedicated to counting every single named individual known to have died - iraqbodycount.org. Today it stands at about 120,000 deaths. To be clear, the bulk of the deaths occurred in about 2006/7, three years after the invasion. Now 120,000 is an awful lot of people, even spread over ten years. But it's not enough to say how terrible this is - to criticise the invasion persuasively you also have to demonstrate the alternative would have been better.
But here the alternative would have been to leave Saddam in place. What would that have been like? Well, probably quite like it was in the years up to 2003. You can start trying to find out about this by going to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein's_Iraq, a page on which the eye scrolls down past atrocity after well-documented atrocity to an extract from the New York Times which sums it up nicely. "(Saddam) murdered as many as a million of his own people, many with poison gas. He tortured, maimed and imprisoned countless more. His unprovoked invasion of Iran is estimated to have left another million people dead. His seizure of Kuwait threw the Middle East into crisis. . . Other estimates as to the number of Iraqis killed by Saddam's regime vary from roughly a quarter to half a million, including 50,000 to 182,000 Kurds and 25,0000 to 280,000 killed during the repression of the 1991 rebellion. Estimates for the number of dead in the Iran-Iraq war range upwards from 300,000."
And yet this was the regime that those against the war felt it better to leave in place. I find that very hard to explain.
What would have happened to Iraq in the Arab spring? Well perhaps there would have been an uprising. If so, an awful lot of people would have been killed - look at Syria today. Perhaps more likely Saddam would have kept control. And after him, one of his psycopathic sons; and after that some other Ba'ath party strongman. To paraphrase Orwell, "If you want a vision of Iraq's future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."
What about our domestic politics? The most common charge against the Blair government is that it exaggerated the claims about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and deluded the electorate into supporting the war. I found this baffling even at the time.
Why? Well firstly, everyone believed Saddam had such weapons anyway - the circumstantial evidence, from the massacre at Halabja to the dodging of the UN weapons inspectors, was overwhelming.
Secondly, paradoxically, no-one believed the dodgy dossier. I spoke to many people who opposed the war. Not one was taken in by the dossier. I never met anyone who believed it. People pretend now that it made a difference, but it made none whatsoever. They believed in the WMD anyway because of the circumstantial evidence.
Quite often people say to me, "Well the war might have done some good, but it wasn't sold to us on that basis. It was sold on the basis of weapons of mass destruction". But that isn't true either. Of course the focus was on WMD, but Blair also sold it on the basis of regime change. I saw him on Newsnight on 6th February, taking questions from a hostile studio audience. "But the one thing I hope we can all agree on", he said, "is that Saddam Hussein is in a different category from virtually any other regime in the world in terms of his use of appalling repression against his own people, external aggression against other people and the fact is, he is the one power in this world that has actually used chemical weapons against his own people. . . the people that have suffered most from Saddam are the Iraqi people themselves . . . I mean I spoke to ten Iraqi exiles the other day, who were women, who described to me, not just the deaths of members of their family, but the appalling human rights abuses, torture, the fact that they were still, some of them, under threat of death - living abroad - from this guy. I mean, you know, this, this is not a humane regime . . . "
But let's assume the antis are right, that we were lied to, and the lies made a difference. Undoubtedly this would have been A Bad Thing. But if there is a special place in hell for politicians who have lied, it will be a very crowded place. For me, the opprobrium reserved for Blair verges on the hysterical.
His opponents seem to think his deceit, real or imaginary, is a kind of get-out-of-jail card which saves them from thinking about the wider issue of whether the war did any good. But that only works if you think considerations of domestic politics trump removing a vile dictator and his retinue of thugs and torturers. It doesn't do it for me.
What about international law? Didn't Blair and Bush flout the UN Charter by the invasion? It was surprising how many people thought so. A lot of people who had never been nearer a legal textbook than a visit to their conveyancing solicitor became experts overnight. "This illegal war", they used to say. How did they know?, I wondered.
Now I am not an international lawyer, but I have practised law and at the time I did a bit of research about this. The first thing to say is that the discipline of international law predates the UN Charter by the best part of a century. No-one knows whether the Charter replaces it or runs alongside it. In fact if you can say anything certain about international law, it is that there is not much certain about it, for the very good reason that there is not much jurisprudence. The law concerning theft, for example, is long-established and litigated every day: it's rare that an issue of law comes up to puzzle the judges. But areas of certainty in international law are much fewer and further between.
If someone tells you he knows the invasion of Iraq is illegal you can be pretty certain that he is a bullshitter. Even if he is an international lawyer. Some of them think it was; some don't.
A family friend of ours is a leading human rights lawyer, a kind of latter day Mark D'Arcy. At the time of the invasion he wrote an article in the Guardian setting out the case against the invasion. It was detailed and sounded authoratative. Of UN Resolution 678 he wrote that it only authorised such force "as was necessary to restore Kuwait's sovereignty". Interested, I Googled the resolution. It said no such thing. It actually authorised "all necessary means to uphold and implement resolution 660 (1990) and all subsequent relevant resolutions and to restore international peace and security in the area". Recognising that for a lawyer this was a loophole big enough to drive a tank through,I emailed our friend wondering why he had not referred to it. He didn't reply. I have never pressed the point. I wouldn't want to embarrass him.
Two things arise from this. One, the war may have been illegal; but it may not have been. We'll probably never know. The second one refers to the UN Charter itself. After the invasion Kofi Annan gave a speech in which he acknowledged that the Charter itself might be defective. It was set up after the war, in circumstances where two of its signatories, the USSR and China, wanted very much to minimise the possibility of sanction on the basis of things governments did to their own populations. That's why the Charter focuses instead on prescribing actions governments take against other countries. It's arguable that an invasion of Nazi Germany in 1938 to protect its Jewish population might have been illegal under the Charter, for example. Annan said the Charter might have to change. It hasn't.
I have often wondered why those against the war were so ready to ignore the bleedin' obvious, most egregiously the wicked nature of Saddam's regime. I have commented elsewhere on this blog that the film In The Loop, devoted as it is to the Dodgy Dossier scenario, never once mentions him. My own tentative theory is that whereas Saddam was a comedy dictator in a far away country of which they knew very little, George Bush was a pantomime Texan villain who had stolen an election and, being a right-winger, stood for everything they hated. Similarly, Tony Blair was a man in whom they - we - had all placed our political faith, a man who had led Labour back from the wilderness. How dare he betray us in this way?
For me, the Iraq war opened up political cracks that have since widened a good deal. If the Left could think so limply and so dishonestly about Saddam, what did it say about their thinking elsewhere? From 2003 onwards I was freed from the tribalism which had allied me to Labour all my adult life. For this I have been berated by friends and family as a conservative; but actually I have changed my mind, whereas many of them doggedly retain the political views they had at 19, when the world was a very different place and their understanding of what was going on it was nothing like as well-informed or experienced. I don't see myself as conservative.
I see the antis as people in something like the Kubler-Ross stages of grief. We have had anger, we are having denial. In the end I think we will get acceptance. Here is Martin Kettle, the Graun's chief leader writer, in its op-ed pages last week: "it needs saying that . . . there is a fair amount of good news coming out of Iraq these days, as well as the bad stuff". Another No Really moment there. I expect I will live to see Kettle recant, if he dares: almost alone amongst Guardian journalists, Nick Cohen and David Aaronovitch came out in guarded support of the war. Aaronovitch, evidently marginalised, left shortly afterwards. Cohen is still writing for the Observer, and today has written as pertinently as ever on the foreign policy consequences of liberal interventionism and post-Iraq refuseniks like President Obama.
If it was naive of Bush and Blair to imagine a democracy could be created in Iraq without bloodshed, it is naive of their opponents to judge post-Saddam Iraq by the very same standard. Democracies are not created without pain. As the American writer Alan Wolfe wrote, "Behind every citizen lies a graveyard".
Finally, in his Observer piece, Cohen too quotes from Ian McEwan's Saturday. "Why is it amongst those two million idealists today I didn't see one banner, one fist or voice raised against Saddam", Henry Perowne asks his daughter. "He's loathsome, it's a given", she replies. "No, it's not", says Perowne. "It's a forgotten. Why else are you all singing and dancing in the park?"
Let me explain. I supported the invasion.
Feel free to stop reading now. But if you do, reflect on how closed your mind is.
To be clear, at the end of 2002 when the possibility of invasion was first mooted, I was fervently against it too. In fact I wrote a tongue in cheek letter to the Guardian pointing out that if the Blair government was looking for a country to invade which had treated some of its citizens disgracefully, which undoubtedly had weapons of mass destruction and which was in breach of UN resolutions, it need look no further than Israel.
I suppose I started to change my mind when the poverty of this position became apparent. Our government might well have been inconsistent in its choice of foes, but as so often in life it was not enough merely to accuse them of hypocrisy for targeting Iraq but ignoring other countries' transgressions: I also had to decide which position to support - to invade or not to invade.
Sometime after the war I read Ian McEwan's novel Saturday. Like most of McEwan's work it is a book flawed by glaring plot implausibilities, but in its description of the day of the anti-Iraq war demonstration as seen through the eyes of the surgeon Henry Perowne it has the priceless merit of ambiguity. On its least interesting level it is a story of a psycopath stalking Perowne's family, but it is a book which examines other aspects of Perowne's life with a kind of hyper-lucidity.
The scene which struck me at the time was the argument Perowne has with his daughter. She has just returned from the anti-war March filled with righteousness, to find Perowne not only dismissive of the protestors' case but contemptuous of her unawareness of the consequences of not going to war. "If the price of getting rid of Saddam is war", he says, "then the price of no-war is Saddam". Of course a massive row ensues, analagous to the similar ones I had had with my wife and friends, every single one of whom - bien-pensant Lefties like me - opposed the war.
The really striking thing was that the anti-war faction had not grasped the nature of the choice being presented. The choice was not as the protestors apparently believed between one thing self-evidently good (no-war) and another self-evidently bad (war). The choice was between two bad things. We were being asked to decide which bad thing we preferred.
But it wasn't just that the antis had misjudged the kind of dilemma the invasion presented; it was also that they felt so pleased with themselves. They really did think they occupied the moral high ground under a cloudless sky. On the other hand I felt that the decision to oppose invasion should have been an absolutely agonising one. Their smugness was, I felt, symptomatic of a failure to look at the issue squarely. And this in turn was a consequence of fear. This was the fear that George Bush and Tony Blair might be right.
It seems to me now a decade later that three issues should dominate discussion of the invasion. The first is whether it did enough good to justify the undoubted harm it did. The second is what it tells us about our domestic politics. The third concerns international law.
As far as the first is concerned you might start by measuring how many people were killed during the invasion and its aftermath. Estimates have run into millions at the more hysterical end. Handily, there is a website dedicated to counting every single named individual known to have died - iraqbodycount.org. Today it stands at about 120,000 deaths. To be clear, the bulk of the deaths occurred in about 2006/7, three years after the invasion. Now 120,000 is an awful lot of people, even spread over ten years. But it's not enough to say how terrible this is - to criticise the invasion persuasively you also have to demonstrate the alternative would have been better.
But here the alternative would have been to leave Saddam in place. What would that have been like? Well, probably quite like it was in the years up to 2003. You can start trying to find out about this by going to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein's_Iraq, a page on which the eye scrolls down past atrocity after well-documented atrocity to an extract from the New York Times which sums it up nicely. "(Saddam) murdered as many as a million of his own people, many with poison gas. He tortured, maimed and imprisoned countless more. His unprovoked invasion of Iran is estimated to have left another million people dead. His seizure of Kuwait threw the Middle East into crisis. . . Other estimates as to the number of Iraqis killed by Saddam's regime vary from roughly a quarter to half a million, including 50,000 to 182,000 Kurds and 25,0000 to 280,000 killed during the repression of the 1991 rebellion. Estimates for the number of dead in the Iran-Iraq war range upwards from 300,000."
And yet this was the regime that those against the war felt it better to leave in place. I find that very hard to explain.
What would have happened to Iraq in the Arab spring? Well perhaps there would have been an uprising. If so, an awful lot of people would have been killed - look at Syria today. Perhaps more likely Saddam would have kept control. And after him, one of his psycopathic sons; and after that some other Ba'ath party strongman. To paraphrase Orwell, "If you want a vision of Iraq's future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."
What about our domestic politics? The most common charge against the Blair government is that it exaggerated the claims about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and deluded the electorate into supporting the war. I found this baffling even at the time.
Why? Well firstly, everyone believed Saddam had such weapons anyway - the circumstantial evidence, from the massacre at Halabja to the dodging of the UN weapons inspectors, was overwhelming.
Secondly, paradoxically, no-one believed the dodgy dossier. I spoke to many people who opposed the war. Not one was taken in by the dossier. I never met anyone who believed it. People pretend now that it made a difference, but it made none whatsoever. They believed in the WMD anyway because of the circumstantial evidence.
Quite often people say to me, "Well the war might have done some good, but it wasn't sold to us on that basis. It was sold on the basis of weapons of mass destruction". But that isn't true either. Of course the focus was on WMD, but Blair also sold it on the basis of regime change. I saw him on Newsnight on 6th February, taking questions from a hostile studio audience. "But the one thing I hope we can all agree on", he said, "is that Saddam Hussein is in a different category from virtually any other regime in the world in terms of his use of appalling repression against his own people, external aggression against other people and the fact is, he is the one power in this world that has actually used chemical weapons against his own people. . . the people that have suffered most from Saddam are the Iraqi people themselves . . . I mean I spoke to ten Iraqi exiles the other day, who were women, who described to me, not just the deaths of members of their family, but the appalling human rights abuses, torture, the fact that they were still, some of them, under threat of death - living abroad - from this guy. I mean, you know, this, this is not a humane regime . . . "
But let's assume the antis are right, that we were lied to, and the lies made a difference. Undoubtedly this would have been A Bad Thing. But if there is a special place in hell for politicians who have lied, it will be a very crowded place. For me, the opprobrium reserved for Blair verges on the hysterical.
His opponents seem to think his deceit, real or imaginary, is a kind of get-out-of-jail card which saves them from thinking about the wider issue of whether the war did any good. But that only works if you think considerations of domestic politics trump removing a vile dictator and his retinue of thugs and torturers. It doesn't do it for me.
What about international law? Didn't Blair and Bush flout the UN Charter by the invasion? It was surprising how many people thought so. A lot of people who had never been nearer a legal textbook than a visit to their conveyancing solicitor became experts overnight. "This illegal war", they used to say. How did they know?, I wondered.
Now I am not an international lawyer, but I have practised law and at the time I did a bit of research about this. The first thing to say is that the discipline of international law predates the UN Charter by the best part of a century. No-one knows whether the Charter replaces it or runs alongside it. In fact if you can say anything certain about international law, it is that there is not much certain about it, for the very good reason that there is not much jurisprudence. The law concerning theft, for example, is long-established and litigated every day: it's rare that an issue of law comes up to puzzle the judges. But areas of certainty in international law are much fewer and further between.
If someone tells you he knows the invasion of Iraq is illegal you can be pretty certain that he is a bullshitter. Even if he is an international lawyer. Some of them think it was; some don't.
A family friend of ours is a leading human rights lawyer, a kind of latter day Mark D'Arcy. At the time of the invasion he wrote an article in the Guardian setting out the case against the invasion. It was detailed and sounded authoratative. Of UN Resolution 678 he wrote that it only authorised such force "as was necessary to restore Kuwait's sovereignty". Interested, I Googled the resolution. It said no such thing. It actually authorised "all necessary means to uphold and implement resolution 660 (1990) and all subsequent relevant resolutions and to restore international peace and security in the area". Recognising that for a lawyer this was a loophole big enough to drive a tank through,I emailed our friend wondering why he had not referred to it. He didn't reply. I have never pressed the point. I wouldn't want to embarrass him.
Two things arise from this. One, the war may have been illegal; but it may not have been. We'll probably never know. The second one refers to the UN Charter itself. After the invasion Kofi Annan gave a speech in which he acknowledged that the Charter itself might be defective. It was set up after the war, in circumstances where two of its signatories, the USSR and China, wanted very much to minimise the possibility of sanction on the basis of things governments did to their own populations. That's why the Charter focuses instead on prescribing actions governments take against other countries. It's arguable that an invasion of Nazi Germany in 1938 to protect its Jewish population might have been illegal under the Charter, for example. Annan said the Charter might have to change. It hasn't.
I have often wondered why those against the war were so ready to ignore the bleedin' obvious, most egregiously the wicked nature of Saddam's regime. I have commented elsewhere on this blog that the film In The Loop, devoted as it is to the Dodgy Dossier scenario, never once mentions him. My own tentative theory is that whereas Saddam was a comedy dictator in a far away country of which they knew very little, George Bush was a pantomime Texan villain who had stolen an election and, being a right-winger, stood for everything they hated. Similarly, Tony Blair was a man in whom they - we - had all placed our political faith, a man who had led Labour back from the wilderness. How dare he betray us in this way?
For me, the Iraq war opened up political cracks that have since widened a good deal. If the Left could think so limply and so dishonestly about Saddam, what did it say about their thinking elsewhere? From 2003 onwards I was freed from the tribalism which had allied me to Labour all my adult life. For this I have been berated by friends and family as a conservative; but actually I have changed my mind, whereas many of them doggedly retain the political views they had at 19, when the world was a very different place and their understanding of what was going on it was nothing like as well-informed or experienced. I don't see myself as conservative.
I see the antis as people in something like the Kubler-Ross stages of grief. We have had anger, we are having denial. In the end I think we will get acceptance. Here is Martin Kettle, the Graun's chief leader writer, in its op-ed pages last week: "it needs saying that . . . there is a fair amount of good news coming out of Iraq these days, as well as the bad stuff". Another No Really moment there. I expect I will live to see Kettle recant, if he dares: almost alone amongst Guardian journalists, Nick Cohen and David Aaronovitch came out in guarded support of the war. Aaronovitch, evidently marginalised, left shortly afterwards. Cohen is still writing for the Observer, and today has written as pertinently as ever on the foreign policy consequences of liberal interventionism and post-Iraq refuseniks like President Obama.
If it was naive of Bush and Blair to imagine a democracy could be created in Iraq without bloodshed, it is naive of their opponents to judge post-Saddam Iraq by the very same standard. Democracies are not created without pain. As the American writer Alan Wolfe wrote, "Behind every citizen lies a graveyard".
Finally, in his Observer piece, Cohen too quotes from Ian McEwan's Saturday. "Why is it amongst those two million idealists today I didn't see one banner, one fist or voice raised against Saddam", Henry Perowne asks his daughter. "He's loathsome, it's a given", she replies. "No, it's not", says Perowne. "It's a forgotten. Why else are you all singing and dancing in the park?"
Friday 1 March 2013
Eastleigh, Triple A and Triple Dip
On Saturday I was nattering with a friend who works in the City. We were climbing a mountain in Scotland at the time. Did he think the UK would lose its AAA rating, and if so what difference would it make? Possibly, and probably not much, was the reply. The gilt markets are not as febrile as equities. While equity markets operate on sentiment and rumour, the state of a government's economy is plain from the published figures, and the gilt markets can see as well as the ratings agencies what's going on. The agencies, in other words, aren't telling us anything we don't already know. Sterling has not slumped on the news, or not yet.
If Moody's had had a little more patience I wonder what they might have made of the latest ONS figures, released yesterday. We have not yet had a triple dip recession, and the ONS now thinks we might well not have had a double dip one either. First estimates of GDP only use about 60% of the data, and as the other 40% comes in the view can change. While the first quarter of 2012 showed a fall in output, it was only 0.1%. The rise in the third quarter was a whole 1% (the Olympics) and only the last quarter showed a marked decline (at 0.3%).
Interestingly, if you strip out the effect of North Sea oil field closures for maintenance at the end of of 2011 and 2012, the economy did not double dip at all. And it turns out that the final quarter 2012 dip can be accounted for by the extra bank holiday.
Now of course there are ifs and buts, statistics and damned lies, but this appears to show that the onshore economy grew slightly in 2012, which might explain why unemployment, traditionally a lagging indicator, continues to fall.
In the Guardian this news featured only as an aside in the parliamentary sketch. It was entirely absent from the news and finance pages. The Torygraph splashed it, naturally.
George Osborne has lost face over the AAA withdrawal, but he will take some comfort from the ONS figures. If he can just get a little growth in the first quarter of 2013 and avoid talk of a triple dip, he may feel the worst is over for his Chancellorship.
On the other hand for the Tories, judging by the result of the Eastleigh by-election this morning, it looks as if the worst is yet to come.
If Moody's had had a little more patience I wonder what they might have made of the latest ONS figures, released yesterday. We have not yet had a triple dip recession, and the ONS now thinks we might well not have had a double dip one either. First estimates of GDP only use about 60% of the data, and as the other 40% comes in the view can change. While the first quarter of 2012 showed a fall in output, it was only 0.1%. The rise in the third quarter was a whole 1% (the Olympics) and only the last quarter showed a marked decline (at 0.3%).
Interestingly, if you strip out the effect of North Sea oil field closures for maintenance at the end of of 2011 and 2012, the economy did not double dip at all. And it turns out that the final quarter 2012 dip can be accounted for by the extra bank holiday.
Now of course there are ifs and buts, statistics and damned lies, but this appears to show that the onshore economy grew slightly in 2012, which might explain why unemployment, traditionally a lagging indicator, continues to fall.
In the Guardian this news featured only as an aside in the parliamentary sketch. It was entirely absent from the news and finance pages. The Torygraph splashed it, naturally.
George Osborne has lost face over the AAA withdrawal, but he will take some comfort from the ONS figures. If he can just get a little growth in the first quarter of 2013 and avoid talk of a triple dip, he may feel the worst is over for his Chancellorship.
On the other hand for the Tories, judging by the result of the Eastleigh by-election this morning, it looks as if the worst is yet to come.
Thursday 28 February 2013
James Purnell - liberal Humanities graduate
The appointment of former Labour minister James Purnell to a top BBC job - one of those titles like Head of Vision or Strategy or something - is old news now, but computer problems have silenced this blog as effectively as the Stasi for a week or so, and Purnell has been on my mind.
The hoo-ha about his appointment is overdone. For one thing, try finding a person fit to be Head of Strategic Vision, say, who doesn't have political views of one sort or another. Impossible. For another, the head of the BBC Trust is Chris Patten, a former Tory minister, and I don't remember anyone being up in arms much about that.
But if the BBC really wanted to appoint Left wingers to senior posts, it wouldn't have to go to former politicians like Purnell. It would just carry on with the same recruitment policies it's had for years.
If an organisation recruits from a fairly narrow - in educational and class terms - band of people, it will tend to get people with a fairly similar outlook. To be specific, the BBC tends to recruit intelligent, well-educated middle-class people with a Humanities degree from a good University. Who could possibly have thought that they would tend to be Left of centre?
Despite the moanings of various disgruntled BBC luminaries like Antony Jay and Michael Buerk, I very much doubt that there is anything resembling overt political bias at the Corporation. But the BBC, the window through which British people tend to view the world, is a product of the attitudes of its staff, which in turn are a product of their background and education. Andrew Marr hit the nail on the head when he remarked that if your staff tend to live in a fairly small area of West London, and eat, drink and in some cases sleep together (he should know), "a certain group-think emerges".
And boy does it. The experience of moving to the provincial suburbs after 16 years of London (Balham, Notting Hill and finally Stoke Newington) has persuaded me that the majority of people in Britain march to a different drum-beat, and their views - conservative with a small c - are very different from the metropolitan elite. I don't always agree with them, but it's clear to me that the BBC doesn't represent them.
You notice it in the programmes that don't get made, the people who don't get interviewed, the questions that don't get asked and the assumptions that are made about where the centre ground in politics lies. The BBC retains a surprising deference about the Royal Family, but on the whole it sees the world through the eyes of liberal Humanities graduates. There are worse ways of seeing the world, but nevertheless the appointment of James Purnell is a red herring. It's the big picture that's a bit fishy.
The hoo-ha about his appointment is overdone. For one thing, try finding a person fit to be Head of Strategic Vision, say, who doesn't have political views of one sort or another. Impossible. For another, the head of the BBC Trust is Chris Patten, a former Tory minister, and I don't remember anyone being up in arms much about that.
But if the BBC really wanted to appoint Left wingers to senior posts, it wouldn't have to go to former politicians like Purnell. It would just carry on with the same recruitment policies it's had for years.
If an organisation recruits from a fairly narrow - in educational and class terms - band of people, it will tend to get people with a fairly similar outlook. To be specific, the BBC tends to recruit intelligent, well-educated middle-class people with a Humanities degree from a good University. Who could possibly have thought that they would tend to be Left of centre?
Despite the moanings of various disgruntled BBC luminaries like Antony Jay and Michael Buerk, I very much doubt that there is anything resembling overt political bias at the Corporation. But the BBC, the window through which British people tend to view the world, is a product of the attitudes of its staff, which in turn are a product of their background and education. Andrew Marr hit the nail on the head when he remarked that if your staff tend to live in a fairly small area of West London, and eat, drink and in some cases sleep together (he should know), "a certain group-think emerges".
And boy does it. The experience of moving to the provincial suburbs after 16 years of London (Balham, Notting Hill and finally Stoke Newington) has persuaded me that the majority of people in Britain march to a different drum-beat, and their views - conservative with a small c - are very different from the metropolitan elite. I don't always agree with them, but it's clear to me that the BBC doesn't represent them.
You notice it in the programmes that don't get made, the people who don't get interviewed, the questions that don't get asked and the assumptions that are made about where the centre ground in politics lies. The BBC retains a surprising deference about the Royal Family, but on the whole it sees the world through the eyes of liberal Humanities graduates. There are worse ways of seeing the world, but nevertheless the appointment of James Purnell is a red herring. It's the big picture that's a bit fishy.
Thursday 7 February 2013
Quentin Tarantino, Hilary Mantel and Edward Elgar - all in one post
I wrote last summer about seeing Elgar's Coronation Ode performed at the Proms; to recap, it is a piece of jingoistic pomposity written for the coronation of Edward VIIth. The music isn't the Worcester Wizard's finest, but the really startling thing about it was the libretto, served up by A.C. Benson. Since Benson wrote the words to Land of Hope and Glory no-one should be surprised to find the Coronation Ode offered a disconcerting glimpse into the Edwardian mind, a place as remote from our sensibilities as the ice planet Hoth.
At the time I contrasted this almost incomprehensible difference with Hilary Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies, a historical novel which none of its admirers seems to have noticed superimposes a modern consciousness on Henry VIII and his hangers-on. Whatever else it is, BUTB (and its predecessor, Wolf Hall) is not a portrait of 16th century Britain.
If Elgar and Benson are utterly foreign to us only a hundred years on, Henry and his chums can only be recreated by a supreme act of imagination, which Mantel does not even attempt. I have always wondered what is the point of the historical novel, but one which doesn't even have a go at showing what might have motivated a people and informed their culture is more baffling than most.
I didn't expect to find Quentin Tarantino's new film, Django Unchained, doing this at all, let alone doing it a lot better, but it really does.
I'm not a Tarantino fan, finding the violence just a bit too pointless, but I like the bits of his films where the characters just talk to each other, and sure enough there is a quite wonderful encounter between Django, a runaway slave, Dr. Schutz, his mentor, and a slave owner, Calvin Candie, which forms the climax of the film (or should have - in a rare failure of pacing there's a further half hour tacked on in which Tarantino himself makes an ill-advised appearance). Candie, very well played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is a monster, and through him Tarantino has a very decent stab at doing something Mantel cannot. That is, showing someone thoroughly inhabiting a set of attitudes utterly alien to our own and yet functioning recognisably as a human being. Despite all the gore - the hallway of Candie's mansion appears at the end to have been showered in blood - I thought it was, as my children might say, proper good art.
I have recently found myself wondering what the composer of the Coronation Ode would have made of Britain today. Empire gone, locked in an uneasy embrace with the EU, gripped by austerity, in and out of recession. "Mightier still and mightier / Shall thy bounds be set"? Hardly. So I have written a five-minute orchestral piece, Blighty, which imagines a Pomp and Circumstance march for the new century. It is of course unperformable, a piece of post-modernism in which the language of Eric Coates rubs shoulders with hip-hop and ends with a whimper of defeat. But some pieces just have to be written.
As for Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies has just won another award. Funny old world.
At the time I contrasted this almost incomprehensible difference with Hilary Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies, a historical novel which none of its admirers seems to have noticed superimposes a modern consciousness on Henry VIII and his hangers-on. Whatever else it is, BUTB (and its predecessor, Wolf Hall) is not a portrait of 16th century Britain.
If Elgar and Benson are utterly foreign to us only a hundred years on, Henry and his chums can only be recreated by a supreme act of imagination, which Mantel does not even attempt. I have always wondered what is the point of the historical novel, but one which doesn't even have a go at showing what might have motivated a people and informed their culture is more baffling than most.
I didn't expect to find Quentin Tarantino's new film, Django Unchained, doing this at all, let alone doing it a lot better, but it really does.
I'm not a Tarantino fan, finding the violence just a bit too pointless, but I like the bits of his films where the characters just talk to each other, and sure enough there is a quite wonderful encounter between Django, a runaway slave, Dr. Schutz, his mentor, and a slave owner, Calvin Candie, which forms the climax of the film (or should have - in a rare failure of pacing there's a further half hour tacked on in which Tarantino himself makes an ill-advised appearance). Candie, very well played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is a monster, and through him Tarantino has a very decent stab at doing something Mantel cannot. That is, showing someone thoroughly inhabiting a set of attitudes utterly alien to our own and yet functioning recognisably as a human being. Despite all the gore - the hallway of Candie's mansion appears at the end to have been showered in blood - I thought it was, as my children might say, proper good art.
I have recently found myself wondering what the composer of the Coronation Ode would have made of Britain today. Empire gone, locked in an uneasy embrace with the EU, gripped by austerity, in and out of recession. "Mightier still and mightier / Shall thy bounds be set"? Hardly. So I have written a five-minute orchestral piece, Blighty, which imagines a Pomp and Circumstance march for the new century. It is of course unperformable, a piece of post-modernism in which the language of Eric Coates rubs shoulders with hip-hop and ends with a whimper of defeat. But some pieces just have to be written.
As for Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies has just won another award. Funny old world.
Tuesday 5 February 2013
Despising Chris Huhne
So now we know it was true all along. Chris Huhne really did put pressure on his wife to take speeding points for him.
The scale of the former Guardian journalist's dishonesty is extensive. Obviously he lied at the time of the initial charge. He lied in his public statements. Then he must have lied to his legal team (who could otherwise not have represented him). He made strenuous and unsuccessful efforts to have the prosecution struck out (at considerable expense to you and me, the poor old taxpayers). Only when the reality of the trial hit him did he finally listen to his legal advisors' warnings about the likelihood of a conviction.
Huhne has pleaded guilty in order to get some discount on his sentence.
Amidst the many unattractive features of his behaviour is the depth of ambition it reveals. Here is someone who has clawed his way up the greasy pole only to find the depths beneath yawning. Realising that ruin beckons, he scrabbles all the more desperately to stay aloft.
Here too is the arrogance of power. Motoring convictions are for the little people. People like me don't take a prosecution lying down - we try to get them struck out and issue public protestations of our innocence, deploring that the state should have been so misguided. We call a press conference!
Shades of Rebekah Brooks.
And yet amidst the loss of his career (although I wouldn't bet against a comeback) there is worse. The papers reveal a vituperative exchange of texts between Huhne and his son, a relationship apparently sundered when it became apparent that the ex-minister was leaving his wife for another woman. Of all the woes of his current situation this must be the most painful.
As time goes by the opportunities for philandering become mercifully fewer. So, less mercifully, does the inclination. Flowing blond locks (I have the photos to prove it, honest) fell out long ago, washed down the plughole of life. The clean cut jawline sags like an underdone doughnut. Infidelity, which might once have been attributed to an unscrupulous admirer or a moment of weakness, could now be achieved only by a determined campaign.
Thank God. Because nothing, nothing, would be worth the torment of my children's contempt.
Prison is the least of Chris Huhne's problems.
The scale of the former Guardian journalist's dishonesty is extensive. Obviously he lied at the time of the initial charge. He lied in his public statements. Then he must have lied to his legal team (who could otherwise not have represented him). He made strenuous and unsuccessful efforts to have the prosecution struck out (at considerable expense to you and me, the poor old taxpayers). Only when the reality of the trial hit him did he finally listen to his legal advisors' warnings about the likelihood of a conviction.
Huhne has pleaded guilty in order to get some discount on his sentence.
Amidst the many unattractive features of his behaviour is the depth of ambition it reveals. Here is someone who has clawed his way up the greasy pole only to find the depths beneath yawning. Realising that ruin beckons, he scrabbles all the more desperately to stay aloft.
Here too is the arrogance of power. Motoring convictions are for the little people. People like me don't take a prosecution lying down - we try to get them struck out and issue public protestations of our innocence, deploring that the state should have been so misguided. We call a press conference!
Shades of Rebekah Brooks.
And yet amidst the loss of his career (although I wouldn't bet against a comeback) there is worse. The papers reveal a vituperative exchange of texts between Huhne and his son, a relationship apparently sundered when it became apparent that the ex-minister was leaving his wife for another woman. Of all the woes of his current situation this must be the most painful.
As time goes by the opportunities for philandering become mercifully fewer. So, less mercifully, does the inclination. Flowing blond locks (I have the photos to prove it, honest) fell out long ago, washed down the plughole of life. The clean cut jawline sags like an underdone doughnut. Infidelity, which might once have been attributed to an unscrupulous admirer or a moment of weakness, could now be achieved only by a determined campaign.
Thank God. Because nothing, nothing, would be worth the torment of my children's contempt.
Prison is the least of Chris Huhne's problems.
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