Michael White, in tehgraun:
[Gordon] Brown is a Shakespearian tragedy in the making, says one MP: Othello’s jealousy, Hamlet’s indecision, the futile rage of Lear and Brutus’s weakness for bad advice. “But at least we’ve got rid of the Macbeths.”
So, Mr Blair’s become a Catholic, and there are a billion pop explanations in play — that Blair’s keen to wallow in guilt for his disastrous foreign policy, and nobody does guilt better than Catholics (cf going straight into the Middle East job after doing so much, and in such a well-intentioned way, to bollocks up the region) — that it’s the long-term result of being married to Cherie Booth, once you’ve jumped through all the Carole Caplin papaya-flavoured hoops that have been set up along the way — that you can’t quite keep that much moralism bottled up inside you without letting it spill out all over something, and now he doesn’t have the British people anymore he might as well absorb himself into the Holy Roman and Apostolic Catholic Church. (I’m sure we can always come up with more: if you do, pop ‘em in the comments).
But it seems to me there’s a more interesting, longer-term trajectory at work in what we can usefully for the purposes of this post call Blair’s mind, and I’ll say a bit about that over the fold.
Daniel Davies, no stranger to internet flamewars, explains why blogs are likely to spell the death of both far-left and far-right politics in the UK:
Blogs are rather like sodium pentathol or Stella Artois in their effect on social inhibitions, so when you add them to a scene which is largely composed of people with poor impulse control at the best of times, then you are basically lighting the blue touch paper…
To watch the SWP/Respect bust-up, Socialist Unity is the place to go; the BNP is self-destructing in blogland over here.
I basically tuned out the Lib Dem leadership contest. Did I miss anything? Is there anything worth knowing about Nick Clegg? Did anyone write anything interesting about the contest / Party during the last six weeks or so? I suspect the answers are “no”, “not really”, and “no, I don’t think so”, but it would be nice to have confirmation from more informed Stoa-readers out there.
Dan Hardie writes:
David Miliband is the Minister responsible for Government policy towards its Iraqi ex-employees, including those in fear of their lives. In a recent webchat on the Number 10website, Mr Miliband was asked the following question by Justin McKeating:
‘I would like to ask the Foreign Secretary why the assistance being offered to locally employed staff in Iraq, who are being threatened with reprisals - including torture and death - from local militias, is being rationed according to length of service. Isn’t it perfectly possible for an Iraqi employee who has only been employed for five months to face the same dangers as a colleague who has been employed for twelve months or longer?’…
[Read the Foreign Secretary’s reply, and more, over the fold.]
Dan Hardie writes: I’ve had emails from three people who claim to be - and who almost certainly are- Iraqi former employees of the British Government. All three say that they and their former colleagues are still at risk of death for their ‘collaboration’.
We’ll call the first man Employee One. He worked for the British for three years: ‘I started in the beginning of the war with Commandos (in 30 of March 2003) then continued with 23 Pioneer Regt, and in 08 / 07 / 2003 I have joined the Labour Support Unit (LSU)’. His British friends knew him as Chris. The British Government has announced that he can apply for help if he can transport himself to the British base outside Basra, or to the Embassies in Syria or Jordan. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that there might be problems with this. I can email and telephone this man: so can any Foreign Office official. It should not be impossible to verify his story and then send him the funds he needs to get to a less unsafe Arab country. But that is not happening.
Go over the fold for Dan’s email exchange with Employee One, details of two more cases, and information about what you — what we — can be doing about this.
Oliver Kamm makes the correct point that Paul Foot’s book on The Rise of Enoch Powell is really very good indeed; Mary Beard provides a classicist’s perspective on his notorious speech; and Simon has a very interesting discusison of West Midlands Toryism.
UPDATE [4.45pm]: So, here’s Hastilow’s article; here’s the transcript of the “rivers of blood” speech, and there’s some blog-discussion by Tories here, here, here [ConservativeHome] and here [Iain Dale]. Also Michael White and Sunder Katwala on CiF.
Someone recently arrived at the Stoa while searching on this question. Stoa-readers! Do any of you know the answer?
This made me laugh, from tehgraun:
“Blair was really astonished and angry,” says the UN official who gave him a presentation on the devastating effects of Israel’s “security barrier”, settlements, checkpoints, and closures on the lives of Palestinians in the occupied territories. “He asked very smart questions, though I did think that someone who was prime minister for so long should already have known these facts.”
Apparently in response to queries from people like me, the Foreign Secretary David Miliband has posted on his blog about the on-going Iraqi employees issue. Please read what he has to say and comment, but please please please take extra care to be polite when you’re over at his blog. If you’re looking for points to make, some suitable thoughts are easily available in the bulletpoints here.
One other thing: I’ve had comments I’ve posted at that blog vanish without trace in the past. I think it’s cock-up rather than conspiracy, and that the FCO isn’t entirely in control of how to run blogging software. So save a copy of your comment before you hit “submit”, just in case, and do be patient — the comments don’t appear immediately (I suppose for fairly obvious reasons).
The ministerial statement is here; comments from Dan Hardie, Daniel Davies, Jamie Kenny, Tim Ireland.
I agree — and I also have the same reaction I used to have when Michael Howard used to beat up on refugees and asylum seekers.
It seems to me extraordinary that the Foreign Secretary, whose father escaped from Ostend on the last boat to leave for England in May 1940 and was granted refugee status while at sea, should sign his name to a document arbitrarily abandoning some of the Iraqis whom we employed in and around Basra to the tender mercies of the Shi’ite death squads, and to whom we can easily offer sanctuary, just because they were employed for less than a year. That’s pretty disgraceful, and I expected better from Ralph Miliband’s son.
UPDATE [6.45pm]: Also: Sunny Hundal.
Dan Hardie, who is not and has never been any kind of doctor, writes:
Gordon Brown may apparently be making a statement on Iraq to the House of Commons tomorrow afternoon, sometime after 2pm. He may or may not mention Britain’s Iraqi employees and the need of some of them for asylum. The Times article of Saturday promises nothing but gave the Government a big, positive headline: classic spin. I have always said, when writing to Jacqui Smith and other Ministers, that to pre-announce asylum for Iraqi employees before they’d actually been taken to safety would increase the risks to them and to the British soldiers who would have to evacuate them. I hope desperately that this won’t happen. I also hope that we will see a genuine promise of resettlement for all who are identified as being seriously at risk for having worked for the British in Iraq.
Brown may or may not promise this on Monday afternoon: frankly they have been so grudging that I doubt it. The Government are going to have to be pushed to do the right thing, so the meeting on Tuesday, October 9th is now more important than ever: we can win if we keep pushing. It’s
at Parliament, Committee Room 14, St Stephen’s entrance[UPDATE!] in the Attlee Suite in Portcullis House, which is the MPs’ own office block, opposite the Houses of Parliament from 7-9pm. Invite your MP and come yourself.
I can’t make it down to London on Tuesday, owing to teaching commitments. But I’ve urged my MPs to attend; and if you’re around the capital, perhaps you’d like to show up, too?
The Giroscoper reports from the Tory Party Conference.
If Mr Brown wants an election on 25 October (the last Thursday before the clocks go back, and also incidentally St Crispin’s Day), he has to call it early next week, which neatly allows him to steal the headlines away from the Conservative Party conference.
But where does the requirement that an election be called (at least) seventeen working days before polling day come from? Is it just custom and practice, part of the unwritten British Constitution, or is it encoded in statute somewhere?
(Similarly: why always Thursdays? I approve of holding elections on Thursdays, as lots of children get the day off school, and this, among other things, helps to persuade them that parliamentary democracy is a good idea, but have elections always been on Thursdays in this country for ever and ever, and if so, why?)
For what it’s worth (bugger all), I’m thinking that there probably will be an election. I used to think that there wouldn’t be, as the Labour Party didn’t have enough money; but now people tell me that the Tories are planning to flood marginals with cash in the period between now and whenever an election is called, which seems to make it sensible to go sooner rather than later. (Unless the cupboard really is completely bare, but if it were, then presumably the Party would have killed this talk of an early election much much sooner?)
After a flurry of stories earlier in the Summer, the papers have quietened down a bit about the ongoing question of whether Iraqis who worked for the British in and around Basra are going to be given sanctuary in this country. The Government says it’s looking at the matter, and we expect to hear something later in the Autumn, but nothing has been done yet, many people are at risk of lethal attack right now, and we don’t have any reason to think that the Government will end up honouring the key demand that all those who have worked for the UK Armed Forces in Southern Iraq be granted asylum over here.
The papers aren’t entirely silent, though. You can read here about the grim situation in Basra and here about the violent death of Moayed Ahmed Khalaf.
And you can continue to do your bit for the cause: write to your MP, if you haven’t already; reply to your MP to emphasise your on-going concern, just in case you think he or she might be thinking that the issue has gone away; and, in particular, try to encourage your MP to go along to Committee Room 14 (St Stephen’s Entrance) on Tuesday 9 October, 7-9pm, for a cross-party meeting organised by the on-line campaign, and supported by Amnesty International and other groups. And if you’re in London that day , you might want to pop along yourself.
PARTLY UPDATED [20.9.2007]: See also here for a recent radio snippet, in which Mark Brockway presents some pretty grim details; here for Dan H’s most recent posting; and here, which is where you should send any details of MPs’ responses. But they can be crap: my local Lib Dem MP Evan Harris, for example, still hasn’t replied to the letter I sent him on 24 July.
BBC Radio Five Live’s Pods and Blogs show recently covered the Iraqi employees story, and the blog-based campaign in support of asylum in the UK for those threatened by death-squads in Southern Iraq. You can listen to the relevant segment here, which includes an interview with a man who has been working as a translator with American forces, now in the USA, and with Dan Hardie, too, who stresses that wars have consequences.
If you haven’t already, do write to your MP about this important issue (though a real letter would be even better: the postcode for the House of Commons is SW1A 0AA). If you want to get up to speed on where things stand right now, Dan’s blog is probably the best place to start.
Neil Clark is even more objectionably stupid than Stephen Pollard. In fact, it’s not even close. He’s been ahead of Pollard in the stupidity stakes ever since he started conversing with a spambot in the comments section of his own blog (18 months ago or so? not sure), but he’s now way, way out ahead of the rest of the field.
And remember: this isn’t just about 91 interpreters, and nothing, but nothing has actually yet been achieved. This campaign is about everyone who is in in fear of their lives owing to their links to the British forces in Iraq, and their families: i.e., quite a few thousand people. If you haven’t already, write to your MP. Especially if your MP is Hugh Bayley, who doesn’t seem to have much of a clue.
Campaign video over here. (It’s both funny and gruesome, so be careful.)
UPDATE [5 minutes later]: Jamie Kenny says it so much better than I ever could.
My old friend Dan Hardie, whom I met at university and haven’t seen for many years, pops up on blogs from time to time to have arguments with people with whom he disagrees. (They can get quite heated.) But now he’s turned his attention to starting a political campaign, which I want to publicise here, and to support.
The British have been occupying Basra and a chunk of Southern Iraq for four years now. During this time, lots of Iraqis will have worked in one way or another for the occupying forces. And those Iraqis are now the targets of local death squads: see here, for example, for details of what’s been happening to people who have worked as interpreters.
Incredibly, it seems that the British Government is not willing as a matter of course to grant refugee status and asylum in the UK to these people. Dan wants us to write to our MPs to ask that they be promised this status immediately. Whether or not you thought the war was ever a good idea, whatever you think the future of British forces in Southern Iraq should or should not be, however many other Iraqis you think the British Government ought to take in as refugees in recognition of its share of the responsibility for creating the bloody mess that is Iraq today, you ought to be able to agree that those Iraqis whose lives are now at risk because of their work for the British Government in Iraq are at the very least owed sanctuary by that Government.
So write to your MP: this website can be helpful (though politicians always take letters that arrive in the mail on a bit of paper and with a stamp on them a bit more seriously). I’ll be sending my letters off to the two Oxford MPs tomorrow.
And Dan’s original post [here], which provides more details, is reproduced over the fold:
Johann Hari reviews Nick Cohen’s recent book for Dissent. It’s quite a good piece.
Over here. The humiliation!
(Did they ever withdraw the whip from Lord Archer?)
As some readers will have spotted already, Stoa-favourite Tim Collins x-MP has recently failed to be adopted as the prospective parliamentary candidate for Gillingham and Rainham.
Indeed, it was a selection exercise of keen interest to this blog, as Stoa pantomime-villain Liz Truss failed to be selected from the shortlist, too.
But instead they plumped for some turncoat called Rehman Chishti.
Back when I was a student some time in the early 1990s, I remember discussing with a friend our impatience with the transformations then underway in the economic policies of the Labour Party, then led by John Smith and with Gordon Brown as the Shadow Chancellor. And we joked that we wouldn’t mind the shift to the right so much if the substance of the new policies could be presented to the electorate in properly Marxist language, labour theory of value, declining rate of profit, calculations of relative surplus value and all the rest.
And, as so very often, be careful for what you wish for, just in case it comes to pass. The very same Gordon Brown, freshly arrived at the top of the greasy pole, has just been calling for “vigilance“. So, see over the fold for the entry on “Revolutionary Vigilance” from R. N. Carew Hunt’s indispensable Guide to Communist Jargon (1957), pp.143-5…
Here’s a handy chart from The Times showing how tall Hazel Blears is, as compared to (i) hitherto well-documented and in some cases actually-existing varieties of penguin and (ii) the Extinct Giant Tropical Penguin discussed below. [Thanks, David E.]
I don’t think there’s any significant facial hair in Mr Brown’s new Cabinet, if these pictures are anything to go by. Beards were absent from the Cabinet room from 1931 to 1997, as I’ve discussed before, and it now looks as if the Blair era, for all its faults, was a unique Bearded Cabinet Minister Interlude, with Robin Cook, Frank Dobson, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke and (a bearded) Alistair Darling all holding Cabinet office. I’m not sure there are any obvious ministerial beardies on the horizon, either, but perhaps we’ll find out more tomorrow when the junior ministers get reshuffled.
