Syrian intervention and pleasing President Assad

So Parliament has chucked out David Cameron's attempt to get agreement in principle for military action in Syria.  The Guardian thinks this a good thing, judging by its leader this morning.  "The most important objective in the current phase of the Syrian war", it writes, "is to stamp out any use of chemical weapons". 

As I argued yesterday, killing 500 people with chemical weapons is not much more loathsome than killing 50,000 with conventional ones, and possibly quite a bit less so.  But moving on, "That is best achieved by making a renewed case to the nations of the world that chemical weapons must always be beyond the pale, by establishing that a breach of that global proscription of such weapons has occurred, and ensuring that the international ban on them must be upheld and enforced.  The world's message is more effective when most widely supported".

Gosh. The person who wrote that must have been welling up.  I almost got a lump in the throat reading it.

But the key word here is "enforced".  Enforced by whom?  As the Graun knows very well, there is absolutely no chance whatsoever of the ban on chemical weapons being enforced.  Even getting an UN resolution condemning the Assad government's conduct is impossible, because any motion will be vetoed by Russia. The idea that the international community is going to enforce a ban is laughable.

But for the Graun, trotting out ringing declarations of principle is infinitely preferable to facing the reality that, at least according to their own view, something outstandingly dreadful has happened and they aren't willing to support the only action that might plausibly reduce the chances of it happening again.

The only people who might have the reach and resolve to do something are the much-reviled Americans. No-one else will.  The "world's message" the Graun speaks of is, "we think it's dreadful, but not so dreadful we're actually going to do anything about it".

Foreign policy as self-delusion.

Did Parliament do the right thing?  These are agonisingly difficult choices, but on balance I would say no. Undoubtedly the legacy of Iraq, which British politicians remember chiefly for Blair's manipulations and the accompanying failures of military intelligence rather than the free press and free elections which followed Saddam's downfall, has made it very difficult to get MPs to authorise foreign adventures.  It's a shame they don't think back a little further, to Kosovo, where Blair persuaded Bill Clinton to authorise limited air strikes which eventually brought the Milosevic government down.

At present, I'm guessing that President Assad is quietly pleased with David Cameron's defeat.

PS Here is Paddy Pantsdown, aka Lord Ashdown, trending on Twitter this morning - "We are a hugely diminished country this a.m.  MPs cheered last night.  Assad, Putin this morning".

Syrian intervention - the moral maze

Let's assume for a moment that the nerve gas incident outside Damascus last week was the responsibility of the Syrian government.

Personally I find it slightly perplexing that for over two years the Assad regime should be terrorising its own people, killing tens of thousands in the process, accompanied only by the slippery sound of Western hand-wringing; yet when it kills five hundred with sarin this is felt to be going a bit far.

I am willing to believe that dying via nerve agent poisoning is spectacularly unpleasant, but not that it is much worse - morally or actually - than being blown to bits by high explosive or bleeding to death from gunshot wounds.

Superficially, waiting for the UN weapons inspectors to report makes sense; actually it makes none.  Why does it matter how these people died?

For that matter, waiting month upon month for President Assad to wheel out his WMD made no sense either. It has been clear for years what was going on in Syria, and the case for intervention is no better now than it was at the beginning; actually in some respects it is worse, because now the fundamentalists, supported from Iran, have got their hooks in the country and it would have been easier to shoulder them out if the West had intervened earlier.

It seems to me the only question worth asking is, "Could we intervene militarily in any way which might result in less suffering than there would otherwise be?"  Obviously I can't answer the military aspect of that question in any authoritative way, and any answer to the political aspect is speculative at best.

But - if we do nothing, the Assad government will probably survive, pro tem.  At some point in the future however it will be toppled.  What will happen then?  Answer, there will be mass bloodshed.

In other words, the conflagration the hand-wringers fear will probably come to pass eventually even if we do nothing now.  As Tony Blair pointed out, doing nothing is a kind of decision too, and one with consequences. As with Iraq, the opportunity exists to fast-forward Syrian history, to by-pass what would otherwise have remained of the Assad years, and start Syria on the messy road to democracy.

Go Ape, and the perception of risk

A couple of weeks ago my wife and I took the girls to Go Ape, the adventure theme park near Grizedale. Go Ape is set in a forest, and features high-wire larks between trees, with the occasional zip-wire thrown in. It takes about four hours to get round.

Obviously for an attraction whose McGuffin is the precarious feeling occasioned by being twenty, thirty, forty feet off the ground, safety precautions are vital.  You are given a harness with two (and sometimes three) carabinered points of attachment, and are encouraged to keep one clipped to a safety line at all times.

Now I am not on the whole afraid of heights, at least not per se, and for me Go Ape, if not exactly a lame experience, is at least not the thrill ride its progenitors might have hoped for.  Part of the difficulty lies in the appreciation of risk and exposure.  Once you understand that the security features - essential for any organisation which hopes to be able to afford its insurance premiums - have in fact made Go Ape as safe as houses, you are essentially paying a fair amount of money to walk from swaying plank to swaying plank in circumstances in which you cannot possibly fall.  The only point at which for a nano-second you do really feel exposed is in the final few feet of the round, where you must launch yourself from a platform and briefly, exilharatingly, find yourself free-falling.

I found that the closest I came to death or being maimed for life came when old rock climbing habits kicked in, and - this happened a couple of times - I undid both carabiners at once.  It's my second time at Go Ape, and I would say that the biggest single danger, perhaps the only one, was my own loss of concentration.

If I want to die from failure to concentrate, I can spend four hours crossing roads.  That really is dangerous. And it's free.

Broad Stand revisited; and chucking your wicket away

Yesterday I took a day off from painting the loo and drove up the Duddon to Cockley Beck Bridge.  I hadn't climbed the Scafells for ten years or more, and thought it was worth another go.  Up Moasdale, skirting the bogs where possible, then the slog across Throstle Garth to the boggy wilderness of Upper Eskdale.  The morning's mist was doing its best to clear, and all the bristling lower buttresses of the high mountains gleamed in the sun, Esk Buttress rearing up like a crag that has just been told to improve its posture.

I climbed Thor's Buttress, a Grade 3 scramble that takes you up to the summit of Pen, a southerly outlier of Scafell Pike.  The hardest move was about what you'd expect on a Difficult rock climb, though in walking boots, alone, without a rope and above a big drop, that was quite gripping enough.

After counting the other climbers on top of the Pike (46 including myself), I went down to Mickledore, where the mantrap of Broad Stand awaited, a sunlit cuboid of dangerous allure.  I had climbed it three times before, as far as I could remember: once with my Dad aged about 9 or 10 (when I was probably dragged up on a rope), once in 1987 when I helped a Spanish waiter from Keswick up, and the last time in September 1992 on my stag weekend in the pouring rain.  Despite this, I felt nervous.  Broad Stand is a notorious black spot - people regularly fall off and some die.  No-one else was on the route, and there was no-one to be seen on the easier ground above it either.

The entrance lies up a narrow slit, now wet and polished, known as Fat Man's Agony.  Then you go round a little corner and up to Broad Stand itself.  The bad step is a sloping slab about the size of a ping-pong table whose lower end drops abruptly the best part of a hundred feet to scree.  Standing on the slab you are faced with two walls at right angles about 7 or 8 feet high.  The right wall you can forget.  The left is the way up.

There are pretty much two alternatives only.  At the left side of the left wall there is a crevice just a little too small to accommodate an adult.  It looks easy, and this is indeed the way my Dad took me aged 9.  But it is right over the slab edge, and if you fall from here without a rope you are finished.  I may be stupid, but I'm not that stupid.

In the middle of the wall there is a small block, a mounting block if you like, and obliquely up left a polished-smooth sloping scoop of a hold; up left again a really quite good foothold that looks as if it might be a game-changer.  All you would need to do is hold yourself in balance against the tendency of the wall to push you outwards, and step up.  But the top of the wall is rounded and offers little of the reassuringly positive variety, and the second foothold, the polished one, yesterday had a small stream running down it in a thin pulse.

I had three or four goes, flapping about with my hands on top of the wall to try and find the generous handhold that memory assured me had been there last time.  Nothing better than a thin crack for the finger-ends.  I retreated, puzzled and intimidated.  I even had speculative look at the crevice on the left, which left me shuddering at the doom-laden possibilities.

By this time I noticed that a man on Mickledore below had stopped to watch my efforts.  It would be humiliating to give up in front of an audience, and if I fell off I would probably stay on the slab.  Probably.  I picked up my rucksack and chucked it on top of the wall.  I made a feeble and unsuccessful attempt to dry the polished scoop, stepped on the mounting block, cantilevered my left foot high on the good foothold, got my right foot into the scoop, pushed up on my left, got my fingers in the crack and somehow thrutched over the top, with all the grace of a wave trying get to the top of the beach and then collapsing into the sand.  It was over in ten seconds.

Elated, I waved at the man watching.  He waved back.  At least I think he was waving.

A few things occur to me.  One, it was much harder than I remembered.  When I got home I googled "Broad Stand" and "missing hold" but nothing came up.  But yesterday I asked my Dad (now aged 90) what he remembered about it, and he too thought there had once been a massive jug handle hold over the top.  So maybe it was once easier.  On the other hand maybe that was because 21 years ago everything about my body worked, and now much less of it seems to.

Secondly, above Broad Stand there used to be a path.  There isn't any more.  In fact you can see where the path used to be, but it now has grass growing on it.  Maybe internet warnings (like this one) mean that walkers can read about the accidents (one a year for the last few years) and are warned off.  Funnily enough Lord's Rake, the easy but unpleasantly loose way to the top which wends its way underneath the crags, is now apparently "closed" to walkers because of a precariously poised boulder; and when I got to the top of Scafell there were only three or four people there.  Scafell is now quite hard to get to from the Pike, and demands a detour via Foxes Tarn.

Thirdly, the rock climbing grade for Broad Stand, is ridiculous and misleading.  Even if it isn't harder than it used to be, grades are given for climbers with a rope and wearing rock boots.  Alone, in walking boots, which is certainly the way most people used to climb it, the impasse is a much more serious undertaking than the "Difficult" grade attributed to it.

Lastly, for a father of three, climbing Broad Stand, or Thor's Buttress for that matter, is probably an unjustifiable risk. But these are a bit like the big hit in cricket - get it to the boundary and everyone says "Good shot"; get it wrong and they say, "He chucked his wicket away".

At the moment I am still not out; but undeniably giving the bowlers a bit of encouragement.

Fracking, democracy and the law

Fracking is going to mess up the countryside to some extent, even if it won't do all the things its opponents claim to the water supply and the stability of their houses.  And it looks rather like barrel-bottom scraping in our desperation to find more burnable fossil fuels and avoid the really hard questions about sustainable energy resources for a population that is too big and whose growth is out of control.

But I have grave misgivings about the carnival of protestors that has descended onto the village of Balcombe in Sussex to stop one of the fracking companies, Cuadrilla, carrying out test drilling.

What Cuadrilla are doing is lawful, whether you like it or not, according to laws passed by an elected government. The protestors are trying to impose their will on Cuadrilla.  They're bullies, in exactly the same way as animal rights protestors who attack researchers in Cambridge.

The costs of policing their blockade has been reported to exceed £500 million.  When the government doesn't have two beans to rub together, I wonder whether they think this is money well spent,

Gibraltar, Trafalgar and other Spanish practices

A fortnight ago I drove past Gibraltar, and, remembering the stories about the Spanish contriving six hour queues at the border, congratulated myself for having organised a flight to Malaga instead.

There is one fact curiously missing from the news coverage of the current dispute, which apparently started when the Gib government placed some concrete blocks in Algeciras Bay to prevent illegal Spanish drag netting of the sea floor. It is that Spain has its own Gibraltar.  To be exact it appears to have five of them, across the Med in North Africa.

I have posted a link here to a page which shows where they are. I think it's in Catalan, which is pertinent.  

The funny thing is that the Spanish don't realise that the issue is ultimately about democracy, but that's why the Catalans have drawn attention to it.  Their case rests on the proposition that the Madrid government should respect the Catalans' democratic wishes for an independent state.  

So just imagine how annoying it must be for Catalans that Madrid is happy to hang on to the enclave of Cueta, for example, on the basis that its inhabitants, just across the Strait of Gibraltar, would rather be governed from Spain than Morocco, but would like Gibraltar back even though its inhabitants quite like being British.

Incidentally, Cape Trafalgar, just west of Gibraltar, has a couple of memorials to the thousands who lost their lives in the 1805 battle.  Tactfully, neither mentions that Spain lost.

Revisiting Bongo Bongo Land

No story is too old to be exhumed by this blog, and so here is another outing for the sad case of the UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom, forced to apologise for referring to countries in receipt of UK foreign aid as Bongo Bongo Land.

I wouldn't use the term myself,  for reasons I'll come back to.  But is it racist?  People like Mr Bloom use the term as a derogatory epitethet for, generally, African countries (although he apparently doesn't like Pakistan much either).  The only racist construction I can attribute to it is the suggestion - implicit at best - that the inhabitants of the countries he has in mind do nothing but sit around all day playing Bongos.

But where does this inference come from?  Not from Mr Bloom. He suggested that UK aid went into the pockets of government officials in foreign countries. Undoubtedly sometimes this is true. He also suggested that it was immoral to pay money to foreigners when we had people going to food banks in the UK.  It's a point of view.  Nowhere did he say, "And by the way, these people are doing it because they're black, and that's the kind of thing black people do".

Not for the first time, the racial stereotypes come from the critics rather from Bloom himself.

But even if it isn't racist, is it right to use a derogatory term like this about another country at all?  I don't often refer to Frogs and Krauts personally, but I'd quite like to retain the option if the need arose. Where do we draw the line?  Can we no longer use the word Yanks? Jocks? Taffs? Ockers? Or if for some reason I don't like another country (for example because its people carry out female genital mutilation) and wish to speak derogatorily about it, is that OK just provided I use its proper name?

I said I wouldn't use the term Bongo Bongo Land myself.  It's crass and unspecific, and, as Bloom has discovered, makes things easy for people who'd rather attack the messenger rather than discuss the message.

There is a case to be made against foreign aid.  Some of it is stolen.  In some cases it puts sticking plaster on problems which would otherwise have to be addressed directly by indigenous people.  Some countries have a lower top rate of tax than we do (Pakistan).  Some countries have a nuclear weapons programme (Pakistan).  Every penny we spend in aid has to be borrowed by the Government on the wholesale money markets.  We have plenty of people who don't have enough in the UK.  Ringfencing the Aid budget has tightened the squeeze on other government departments.

Bloom might have been better couching his tirade in moderate terms; but then the Guardian would never have run the story or the BBC picked up on it.

The monstering of Bloom, coming on a slow news day in the silly season, seems to me just another in a long line of insidious failures, firstly, to think carefully about words and what they mean, and secondly, to consider what is the cumulative effect of compiling a kind of Thesaurus of words you're allowed to use and opinions you're allowed to hold.

At the moment we seem to be arguing about what the Thesaurus should contain.  In my book we shouldn't have a Thesaurus at all.