Nosemonkey's EUtopia

Time to start updating blogrolls, folks – BlogCode is up and running, a handy new tool for finding blogs similar to those you like from Mr Ireland. Used in conjunction with Wikablog it could end up rather useful for discovering yet more ways to waste time reading the opinions of people you’ve never met on topics over which you have no control. Hurrah!

We all know Gordon’s rather good at pretending the economy’s doing better than it is; I must, however, admit to having been duped into thinking he was better than the usual Charles Clarke/David Blunkett/John Reid New Labour bullshitter. Apparently not:

“The chancellor told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that ID cards were necessary in the fight against terrorism and would prevent identity fraud.”

Utter crap, Gordon, and you know it. But hey, you’re not unofficial joint Prime Minister, are you? Oh no! It’s long been traditional for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to make policy announcements in areas outside the Treasury’s control:

“Mr Brown is set to announce a raft of new security measures, which are expected to include a public review which will focus on counter-terrorism and security.”

Joy. Rapture. ANOTHER review of counter-terrorism nonsense being announced just before a major vote on ID cards, which the government is desperately trying to tie in to terrorism, despite all evidence to the contrary, and despite senior government ministers themselves having admitted that ID cards would have done little to prevent the 7th or 21st July attacks?

But wait, what’s this? A day after the papers were full of Brown’s denials that he’s now jointly in charge of the country (despite not having been invited to this lofty position by Her Majesty, the only person with the power to do so), it seems he’s changed his mind already:

“the chancellor said he was taking decisions alongside Mr Blair on a range of issues including security, the environment and housing.”

So which is it, Gordon? Are you unconsitutionally co-running the country or aren’t you? Was Charles Clarke wrong when he admitted that ID cards wouldn’t have prevented the 7th July attacks, or are you wrong now? Are you deluded, misinformed, or simply stirring up shit when you bring up the “ricin plot” again, despite there having been no evidence it actually existed?

Note to all those (including me at one point) who hoped Gordon would bring Labour back to being a party they could vote for again: not a chance. The guy’s just as tainted as the rest of them. The only respectable Labourites are on the backbenches, and will be easily identifiable by voting against the government this evening.

Note to Labour party chairman Ian McCartney: you ask the right question –

“If some Labour MPs are determined not to vote Labour in Parliament, how can we expect our supporters to be determined enough to vote Labour at the ballot box?”

But you come up with the wrong solution. The Labour rebels have no obligation to support the party leadership no matter what. They have no obligation slavishly to vote for every single policy in the breeze-block of a manifesto you churned out before the general election. They have an obligation purely to their constituents’ best interests and wishes. The fact that they feel that their obligation to their constituents is in opposition to your party’s policies indicates one thing only – Labour’s leadership, apparently including the leadership in waiting, is in opposition to the best interests and wishes of the country.

Update: Talk Politics on why the ID Cards bill “compromises” are anything but.

Update 2: Bugger off, Brown:

“Over the last few years the major terrorist suspects arrested, typically, have had up to 50 false identities each”

Yes, and they have, typically (the July lot were anything but), not been British nationals, so wouldn’t be covered by the ID cards scheme anyway. And what’s this nonsense?

“If we withdraw glorification from the definition of indirect incitement, or from the grounds for proscribing organisations, as is being proposed by opponents this week, this would send the wrong signal that we could not reach a consensus on how serious this issue of glorification is”

Erm… If we managed to covict Abu Hamza without the “glorification” nonsense, why is it necessary? We already have incitement laws. No more are needed.

In any case, if you bring in specific laws to clamp down on this particular aspect of free speech, all it will do is make them more careful not to say things that will lead to prison terms – cf. BNP leader Nick Griffin, who is far too canny to risk getting done for race hate following anti-racism legislation, so instead uses euphemism and innuendo. Allowing the buggers to “glorify” acts of terrorism simply allows them mre rope to hang themselves with, as they won’t be as careful with their wording and, like Abu Hamza, are more likely to slip into outright incitement, on which they can be done.

It’s the one year anniversary issue of the Britblog Roundup. Hurrah.

And in an utterly unscientific manner, one of mine got named joint post of the year – which considering the subject of mine and who the other one’s from seems somewhat wrong… Either way, I imgine the cheque’s in the post.

As predicted, Defence Secretary John Reid’s rather odd comments about how our brave boys should be cut some slack and allowed to commit war crimes come in for less scrutiny in the face of a non-regular enemy were indeed attempting to form the course of debate prior to new allegations of abuse in Iraq.

“Soldiers are shown chasing youths involved in the disturbance, dragging four of them into the compound and beating them on various parts of the body with batons and kicking them, one in the genitals.”

Let’s face it, it’s no Abu Ghraib, but it hardly comes at a good time, what with all the easily-manipulated muslims around the world already braying like maniacs over those cartoons. As the video was apparently taken two years ago, it’s rather tricky to see quite how, in the current over-heated situation, the Screws can justify publishing the story. It’s hardly going to calm things down, is it?

Does this mean that Reid was right when he said “let us be very slow to condemn our troops, our forces, and very quick to support them and understand them”? Well, to say “no” outright is an obvious nonsense.

To “understand” a wartime situation is tricky, but we’ve all seen enough war films to know that things can easily get out of hand, that a few people may get a kicking. In war there are different standards of morality – and a beating is, after all, preferable to a bullet.

Does that make whacking people with sticks and kicking them in the bollocks with steel toe-capped combat boots right? No. So those responsible should indeed be condemned.

But should our troops also be supported? Yes. Of course. They’re in a crap situation, and the vast majority are undoubtedly trying their best to achieve the objective of a peaceful and stable Iraq.

The News of the World has just put our troops in danger. In a time of even more heightened tensions than we had already – which is no mean feat considering how fucked up the world’s been for the last three years – they’ve just taken another hefty swipe at the hornets’ nest.

And for what? A grainy video of the sort of beating which, though nasty, you could see in most provincial British town centres at 2am any Saturday morning. Not exactly systematic abuse in secret detention facilities, is it? Hardly the scoop of the year. Yet it could well get a bunch more British soldiers killed.

John Reid evidently had the tip-off, hence the nonsense he spouted earlier in the week. His attempt to excuse war crimes should be ignored and ridiculed for the uncivilised nonsense it is. This should not be the time to excuse illegal actions.

Neither, however, is it the time to reveal relatively minor infractions. Should one single British soldier be killed or injured as a result of revenge attacks prompted by this story, The News of the World should be held responsible.

Though I am obviously fully in favour of complete freedom of the press, there are indeed – as people have been mistakenly arguing over this cartoon business for the last couple of weeks – occasions where publishing simply because you can is the wrong move.

No one could have predicted the massively over the top response to publishing those crappy cartoons. The News of the World was and is fully aware of the potential for a violent response in publishing this story. Yet they went ahead and ran it anyway, putting British troops in further danger, isolating them further from the average Iraqi. In a regular wartime situation, that could be considered tantamount to treason.

No leader + sex scandals = less of a liability than having Blair in charge as Dunfermline and West Fife turns orange. I find that rather funny. Well done, Lib Dems – turning a Labour majority of 11,500 into a Lib Dem one of 1,800 is no mean feat, even if that constituency had rather special circumstances at the last election. Maybe you chaps would be better off staying without a leader?

Stop it already with this stupid nonsense over those bloody cartoons… Now some bright spark – aka the EU’s Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini – seems to be caving in to the barmy religious fundamentalist brigade. He’s called for a meeting of media leaders to be hosted by the Commission in May, the result of which he seems to have pre-determined:

“The press will give the Muslim world the message: we are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression, we can and we are ready to self-regulate that right”

At least he acknowledges that “any kind of unilateral imposition coming from institutions should be avoided”, but what the hell? If the EU gets involved in the media in any way, shape or form it should be to enforce a complete lack of governmental interference in media content, breaking the ability of the likes of Silvio Berlusconi to build up propaganda machines to advance their dodgy political ends.

Of course, Frattini was Berlusconi’s choice as Commissioner – after the original option, Rocco Buttiglione, had to withdraw after unsavoury, supposedly religiously-motivated comments about women and homosexuals.

Could this, despite nominally being aimed at diffusing the current cartoon controversy (which, following revelations that the offending scribbles were published in Egypt back in October looks more manufactured by the day), actually be another attempt by the EU’s Italian contingent to protect the more old-fashioned aspects of Catholicism?

Back in November 2004, Buttiglione attempted to launch a campaign to highlight what he saw as an EU-wide discrimination against religions (i.e. Catholic) beliefs. He failed dismally in his efforts to start up a debate over the place of God and religion in a continent which has seen more than its fair share of religiously-motivated violence over the centuries. Could his replacement now be heading down the same route?

Is there anything Blair and co AREN’T going to announce major “reforms” of before the local elections kick off? (Note that in the councils going to the polls, Labour only had 69 more seats than the Tories last time around…) Or was it all for the benefit of today’s by-election?

We’ve already had that “Respect” nonsense, attempting to reform civil society; we’ve had proposals for fairly major healthcare reforms; there’s been quite a bit of fuss about pensions and the like; the Education White Paper has been causing a lot of excitement; now the Child Support Agency and the Prison Service are both in for headline-grabbing overhauls. Have I missed anything? It’s getting quite hard to keep track…

Labour really do seem to be terrified of getting wiped out in elections at the moment. (Which would tend to suggest they’re not quite as stupid as they appear…) Or is their alleged plan to scrap next year’s local elections entirely innocent?

Where has this latest rubbish sprung from? Who, exactly, is condemning our troops? (Well, other than the Ministry of Defence that Reid heads, which still isn’t supplying them with all the equipment they need and is about to send another vast chunk of our already stretched armed forces to Afghanistan).

Meanwhile, let us not forget that the enemy our brave boys face are EEEEEEVIL, without “any legitimacy, any morality, any international convention”. It’s classic wartime tactics – up there with the cartoons of German soldiers eating babies from WWI (echoes of which can be traced back to the middle ages and various pieces of simplistic propaganda from all the various sides of the interminable continental conflicts). EVIL EVIL EVIL. Not one ounce of a legitimate grievance. EVIL.

(Shush now about the foreign troops occupying what they see as their soil – shush. The enemy are EEEVIL. Even if we don’t know precisely who the enemy are, and even if the enemy isn’t a homogenous group with shared objectives. Shush. They’re all EEEVIL.)

But taking his quote in full, the implications of what Reid is saying run rather deeper and into rather more dodgy territory than the ongoing (rather unnecessary) efforts to make a bunch of psychopaths who strap bombs to themselves seem even worse:

“We can’t continually have an uneven battlefield for our troops, where we are facing an enemy, unconstrained by any legitimacy, any morality, any international convention and at the same time, subject our troops to a level of scrutiny, accountability, media intrusion, questioning and every conceivable opportunity to criticise them…

“I say in that kind of world, where we are facing that kind of enemy, let us be very slow to condemn our troops, our forces, and very quick to support and understand them.”
(my emphasis)

You see, you follow the logic of that, what Reid’s argument seems to be is the following:

“We’re fighting an enemy with no principles, so we should have no principles”

Reid seems to be suggesting that breaches of the established rules of warfare are excusable in a situation in which the warfare is abnormal. That breaches of the Geneva Convention should be ignored, because the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan is “special” in some way. In other words, that when fighing an enemy that uses terror tactics, terror tactics should be used in return. Fight fire with fire, and all that.

In a small-scale strategic sense, he may have a point. Nothing like a bit of midnight kidnapping, months of solitary detention and a wee touch of vicious beating and torture to keep the peasants in line.

But really – what the fuck, John? We’re British, for Christ’s sake – we don’t hold with that sort of thing. We may well get other people to do it for us, but one British soldier gets directly involved, that’s a direct slur on the good name of the country – and of Her Majesty, whose armed forces they still remain.

Of course, the other question is, why is Reid saying this now? No one has condemned the troops – public support for the troops themselves remains high, bolstered by positive, supportive media, who (almost universally) see the soldiers as unwitting yet brave victims of politics and maniacs. What is condemned is the political decisions that lead to our troops getting killed.

So, what’s going on? Has Reid got wind of another Abu Ghraib-style war crime? Is he trying to cut something off at the pass?

Or is he just an idiot who should think a bit more carefully before opening his mouth and prompting this sort of speculation?

Oh well, only another three and a bit years until the next chance to boot these morons out of office. And who knows – we might even have a viable opposition by then. (I doubt it, but stranger things have happened…)

Why do we need new laws against inciting hate and violence again? They seem to be working OK to me – once the political climate finally got to a favourable position for prosecuting the nutter, that is…

Oh, and – erm… why don’t we need an enquiry into the 7th July bombings again?

“British officials were told by the FBI and New York police before the July 7 attacks of a warning that suicide bomber Mohammed Sidique Khan ‘was trouble’ and should be ‘checked out'”

Tony Blair in “clueless idiot” shocker. Apparently The problem with the West Lothian Question isn’t that Scottish MPs can provide the votes needed to impose policies on England which will not affect Scotland thanks to its separate legal and political systems, it’s that to NOT allow them to override the auld enemy to the south would “create two classes of MP” and this would create “all sorts of problems”.

Problems for who, Tony? For your party, which got 600,000 fewer votes than the Tories in England, by any chance?

“We have got a UK Parliament. In the end I totally understand why people think it’s a good idea from other political parties, but in the end, if you try to divide MPs up into two categories and then you have to define the legislation they are able to vote on, you will find it very hard”

No Tony, it’s not very hard. You look at the legislation and ask “is this going to affect England only?” (e.g. quite a chunk of education and health policy) – if the answer’s “yes” then Scottish MPs shouldn’t vote… If you find that “hard” you’re a moron, Tone.

Standard lazy “I’m a bit busy” post no. 406. The amusing Google search result:

This blog is No.1 Google search for “BBC is great” – discovered thanks to someone landing here from the BBC at quarter past five this morning from that search. Presumably they needed cheering up at that ungodly hour.

Is David Cameron a Whig? I mean, no true Tory would ever attack the monarchy, surely? But he’s apparently teaming up with Tony Benn, of all people.

What next? Renationalising the rail system? Disestablishing the Church? Raising inheritance tax?

Good work! Education Secretary Ruth Kelly, going to give evidence at the trial of a man accused of pelting her with eggs, is pelted with eggs. Hurrah!

Erm… I mean… How childish and irresponsible. *snigger*