The Virtual Stoa

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:

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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…

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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.

The BBC:

The Milibands are the first brothers to sit in Cabinet since Austen and Neville Chamberlain (in fact, half-brothers) in 1924.

What about the 4th Marquess of Salisbury (Lord Privy Seal) and his brother, the 1st Viscount Cecil (Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster) in Baldwin’s second government, 1924-7?

(Maybe they weren’t both Cabinet posts?)

I quite enjoyed the sixty-eight minutes during which we were primeministerless yesterday, but that’s probably because I spent virtually all of them eating a delicious lunch at Gino’s on Gloucester Green.

The BBC usefully covers the crises that hit the nation during this period of acephalousness (acephalocity?): Chantelle and Preston split up, a man was attacked by a buzzard in Aberdeenshire, and so on.

P.S. If anyone can produce a suitable-sounding German word for “primeministerlessness”, I shall be very pleased. I imagine it’d be quite long.

So if Jack Straw is the new Minister for Justice, do we have a new Lord Chancellor or not? Is it still Charlie Falconer? Do we have one at all? Presumably we do, because otherwise Brown would be in the same mess Blair was in when he tried to abolish the post. Or has something changed? Anyway: what’s going on?

By my count there are seven PPEists in Gordon Brown’s new Cabinet: Jacqui Smith (Hertford & Home Secretary), Yvette Cooper (Balliol & Housing), Ruth Kelly (Queen’s & Transport), Ed Miliband (Corpus Christi & Cabinet Office), James Purnell (Balliol & Culture - an unlikely combination), Ed Balls (Keble & Schools), David Miliband (CCC & FCO). That’s a lot of PPEists. And at least three of the Chancellor’s most recent team of special advisers are PPEists, too (Shriti Vadera, Dan Corry, Stewart Wood; I’m not sure where the other two studied. Perhaps Michael Jacobs and Gavin Kelly did PPE, too? Who knows?). So Gordon Brown may not like Oxford University much, but he does seem to like the PPE degree (or at least a subsection of those who take the course) very much indeed.

The candidate, on Newsnight:

Jeremy Paxman: Do you think the Party should say sorry for what happened?

Jon Cruddas: I do actually, as part of a general reconciliation with the British people over what has been a disaster in Iraq…

Harriet Harman: I agree with that.

Jon Cruddas: And I don’t think we can actually rebuild a sense of trust and a dialogue with the British people unless we fundamentally reconcile ourselves to what the situation is on the ground and our own culpability in creating it.

Harriet Harman: I agree with that.

The Deputy Leader:

She said she had not been referring to the need for an apology, but agreeing with the need for reconciliation with the public.

“I have not said I will press for a public apology from the government or the Labour Party,” she said.

I suppose she’s no more craven than the average New Labour politician, but, still, she’s pretty craven.

Stoa readers: who should I vote for in the Deputy Leadership contest?

The various candidates keep sending me email, which I delete; and Harriet Harman has written to me at home twice, because she got my initial initial wrong on her initial attempt, and I think both of those ended up in the bin, too; and publications I subscribe to have arrivied containing Peter Hain flyers, which go into the bin.

But now I have to cast a vote, and while the Fabian Society has sent me this morning a handy booklet called “Labour’s Choice” with stirring essays in it (”Building on Success”, by Hazel Blears, that kind of thing), but I’m not sure I can face reading it with the care it no doubt deserves all the way through.

But I will read the comments thread to this post before filling in my ballot paper, so if anyone does have anything to say, please fire away.

At the moment I’m hesitating between Hilary Benn and Jon Cruddas, because I can think of at least some nice things to say about those two, and I struggle in the case of the other four. (Though I also have a vague memory of Alan Johnson being one of the less bad ministers for higher education, and that should count for something.)

One of the faintly annoying things about last week’s coverage of Mr Blair’s resignation announcement is that not enough attention was being paid to the extent to which he was, at bottom, being deposed by his party.

It’s true that his departure doesn’t look much like Mrs Thatcher’s in 1990, but the underlying politics are pretty much the same: if you’re supported by the Cabinet but by not nearly enough of the back-benchers, you can’t remain Prime Minister for long. (The funny thing in Mrs T’s case is that she forgot this crucial rule: in her first term, she knew half the Cabinet didn’t want her as Prime Minister, but she had a keener sense than they did that this didn’t really matter.)

Shrewd observers (well, Jamie K at B&T) have been saying for a while now that the Blairite response would be along the lines of wanting to dissolve the ungrateful people and elect another one, that he was too good for us, etc., and we got this in great steaming dollops from John Rentoul at the weekend. But Rentoul at least acknowledged that “the real story behind his promise in September 2004 not to fight a fourth election” was “not a mistake, it was a tactic of self-preservation”, and that Blair was leaving office because he was being forced out.

And I’m writing this because I’ve just read Avi Shlaim’s new piece up at tehgraun, which starts with the words, “Tony Blair’s opposition to an immediate ceasefire in the Lebanon war last summer precipitated his downfall.” And I think that’s more or less right. Certainly in my neck of the Labour woods, there was a perceptible shift in attitudes to Mr Blair’s continued tenure in office last Summer over precisely this issue, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the historians do ultimately judge that it was this more than anything else that meant that he left office in 2007 rather than 2008, which is what he must have been thinking at minimum when he said he’d serve for a “full term”.

Idiot.

If (as we all hope and now, thank goodness, expect) Tony Blair announces his departure from politics tomorrow and resigns the leadership of the Labour Party immediately, does that mean John Prescott will be the Acting Leader over the Summer (just as Margaret Beckett held the fort during the Euro-elections in between John Smith’s death and Tony Blair’s election). Or if John Prescott is going at the same time, does this mean that we’ll have someone else as an interim leader? And, if so, who? Or will we have an acephalous Party for a bit?

Ross McKibbin writes in the LRB on the Blair decade. Bottom line: “Blair’s government has been so disappointing not because it is without achievement, but because its achievements are much less than they might have been and its mistakes much worse.”

I don’t think I have ever heard of Patrick Mercer, though the headline tells me he is a “Top Tory”. I wonder how many other Top Tories there are, of whom I have similarly never heard.

(On the other hand, I do know who Tim Collins CBE x-MP is, and have done for a while.)

Two good pieces on David Cameron, from The Quiet Road and S&M.

[Less good, but useful background, here and here.]

There’s already an internet petition, over here.

Tony Blair says that Ruth Turner is “is a person of the highest integrity”. Tessa Jowell says that “she is a person of utter decency and conscientiousness”. Lord Puttnam says that “She’s one of those half-dozen, dozen people who I would stake my life on.” David Blunkett has spoken of her “decency and honesty” in a BBC interview. Even bloggers like Will Parbury (and an occasional Stoa-commenter) are getting in on the act saying that “Having met Ruth I simply will not believe that she would do anything wrong.”

I’m sure that settles it.

I think that I should like members of the Prime Minister’s staff to be arrested every day. (Maybe just every week-day.)

As exceptionally long-term Stoa-readers will remember, I don’t really recognise Oxford as a part of the “South East”, but as far as elections to the European Parliament are concerned, we’re part of the “South East”, and although I do my best not to pay attention to who my MEPs are and what they’re up to, I couldn’t avoid noticing today that I’m now represented in the European Parliament by a rancid lunatic.

Ashley Mote — elected on the swivel-eyed loons ticket, but even UKIP doesn’t want anything to do with him anymore — has just signed up for the Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty grouping, which looks — at first and second glance, which is all I’ve given it so far — to be a bunch of fascists, Holocaust deniers and assorted rancid scum.

So he’ll sit in the Parliament alongside Alessandra Mussolini, a chap from the Austrian Freedom Party, two Le Pens, some Bulgarian kiddy hack, another Italian fascist (who claims his views on the Holocaust have been ‘misunderstood’, diddums), and various Romanian nationalists and Flemish separatists.

The Bodleian’s got one of his books: I’ll have a look at it soon.

Yuck.