The fourth (!) British inquiry into the War on Iraq started this week. Most likely it will be yet another whitewash and I agree with Jamie that the real reason the UK went to war is because America wanted it, but it’s still worthwhile to read the Iraqi Inquiry Digest every day. Perhaps this time an inquiry will reveal why the UK chose to give in to the US in the first place. The reasons for the Netherlands to support the war “politically, but not military” are fairly clear: a combination of zealotry, fear and a desire to be the teacher’s pet. It might be that the same reasons swayed Blair as well.
UK politics
Quite
The Beeb says any legally constituted political party is entitled to have its ideas discussed. The BNP’s sole idea is that the country should be run entirely on racial lines. So Question Time for the BBC: what the hell are you playing at that this should be entertained as a subject for discussion?
The BNP is not nor ever will be a normal party and the BBC should stop pretending it is. The BNP wants to ethnically cleanse the UK. This is not something that needs to be legitimised. And no, this is no an infringement of their freedom of speech:
The final faulty assumption, the one that is least convincing in my view, is that depriving the BNP of a platform constitutes an abridgment of their ‘free speech’. By no understanding of free speech that I am aware of is any person obliged to share a platform with a fascist organisation, or to offer one to its spokespersons. In fact, in recognition of the demonstrable threat that the far right poses to even minimal democratic norms of free expression, we actually have an obligation to frustrate the BNP, to obstruct their growth, prevent them from organising, and so on. But the ‘No Platform’ policy doesn’t even go that far: it clearly just asks people not to assist the BNP. It is only good manners.
p.c. babble, or the only honest man in this is Gaddafi
So then Megrahi was freed, went home to Libya and got a heroes welcome, in the process providing us with yet another opportunity to witness how much political news is route, ritualised scripts. Was anybody surprised that the White House condemned the release? That the then director of the FBI as well as the American leader of the Lockerbie investigation were not best pleased? And of course the family and friends of those who died in the bombing are angry and upset, though interestingly there seems to be somewhat of a mid-Atlantic split in their attitudes, with the British survivors being more inclined to be merciful, if only because they’re more sceptical about Megrahi’s guilt. For the Americans this was all a bit of a bombshell of course, having missed much of the buildup towards the release and only hearing about it days or even hours beforehand.
All these responses could’ve been taken as read, none of them was “news” in any real sense of the word, but they still ate up hours of news time. As did the protests coming from Westminster about the way the Libyans treated Megrahi –did Gordon Brown really think either Gadaffi or the Libyan people believe in Megrahi’s guilt? Might as well expect the pilots involved in the 1986 US terror bombing of Tripoli to be made honorary citizens….
More interesting, the even more indignant and outraged squeels following Gadaffi’s thanks to Brown and the queen. Dropped Brown right in it, he did. Everybody knew or suspected that Megrahi’s freedom had been prepared from Westminster as much as Edinburgh, for example by having signed a prisoner exchange treaty with Libya a while back, that all the diplomatic spadework had been done from London,, but nobody mentioned it until Gadaffi. What a world we live in when it’s the “madman dictator” who tells the truth rather than the “democratically elected statesman”.
Because the truth is that Megrahi was just one concession given to Gadaffi for being a good boy and that all attempts to leave all responsibility soley to the Scots are just toytown Machiavellianism. Sure, the SNP is in the doghouse at the moment, but this will inevitably boomerang back to Westminster.
Meanwhile, why is it so hard to understand that Scotland has no control over the Libyan reception of Megrahi, that the Scottish justice system has no obligation to take into account the feelings of the US government on this matter, that the Libyans do not believe in Megrahi’s guilt, or that the feelings of his victims do not have or should have anything to do with granting his appeal for compassion?
Are you good enough to be an UK citizen?
Take the test, courtesy of Charlie Stross.
My favorite was:
Question 17 of 24
Which TWO of the following can vote in all UK public elections?
[ ] Citizens of Irish Republic resident in UK
[ ] Citizens of EU states resident in UK
[ ] Citizens of the Commonwealth resident in UK
[ ] Anyone resident in UKwhich I read as: “Which two of the following would not overlap on a Venn diagram”?
So did I, but I got the wrong non-overlapping set… I’m actually afraid to look up the equivalent Dutch test, as anytime the UK gets up to crap like this, we get it a few years later in a slightly inferior version, just like the UK itself seems to get its worst ideas from across the Atlantic…
Nero fiddles
Penny Red went to the launch of the Demos’ Open Left project:
Purnell believes that left ideology necessitates ‘choice in public services’, which is a tad rich coming from the man who single-handedly purged the welfare state of its last remaining shreds of compassion earlier this year with his intricate schemes for lie detector tests, workfare-style sickpay deals and a punitive scheme for addicts and alcoholics. Will Hutton, fashionably late as always, talked a great deal about the language of fairness and ‘just deserts’. The tone of the debate was consistently philosophical, which is absolutely fine when debate is also inclusive – but the elephant in the room was its narrow field of vision.
Purnell opened his talk by declaring that he had been refreshed, since leaving the cabinet, by the expansive vision and energy in the wide, wide political world of….thinktanks! I listened for the sniggers, but there weren’t any. And looking around I saw why: in a roomful of 100 people meant to be talking about the future of the left, there were precisely no activists and nobody who looked like they’d ever spent time on state benefits. There were, however, plenty of Guardian journalists, a lot of folks from Demos and the Fabian Society and five – five! – people I personally knew from Oxford university. So where were the have-nots in the debate? Surely it was their conversation to have as much as anyone else?
Sounds to me the future of the left could’ve been much improved by a well-timed bomb here… Demos should’ve been honest and called this the “oh shit we’re losing the next elections, bang go our cushy jobs, quick, we need to justify our existence again” project. A whole cohort of New Labour hanger-ons and coattail riders is going to be thrown out of work when the Tories get into power — the smart ones have already hitched their cart to Cameron — and they’re panicking. These are not people used to work for a living.