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Election 2016 – A Limey’s View
September 9th, 2016
By Jeremy Sare.
What has amazed the British public regarding the forthcoming US Presidential election is the seemingly unending degree that Trump’s outrageous statements have consistently failed to impact on his polling numbers. How can these insults, wackjob policies, clumsy gaffs and flirtations with prejudice never be considered as ‘going too far’?
Trump began his assault on the White House with an unprovoked attack on Sen. John McCain who I recall was shot out of the sky over North Vietnam and spent years in prison suffering isolation and torture. On a score for patriotic hero, it’s hard to give McCain less than the maximum. Yet Trump deliberately belittled his service, “I prefer people that weren’t captured.” The first jaw-dropper of many.
Then followed a catalogue of increasingly disgraceful remarks underlining his credentials as the slayer of political correctness but equally exposing himself as a thin-skinned bigot with a crude worldview and the vocabulary of a privileged yet foul mouthed 12-year old.
His campaign is blunt, negative and artless. It is a strategy borne out of stupidity, which thinks it is smart. His pitch to the African American vote, “what have you got to lose” is about the most insulting I have seen in any democratic election. It implies that to be black and American means you are necessarily uneducated and close to destitution. It shows he only has psychopathic talents to persuade. It is the equivalent of being on a first date, saying to a potential partner, “your hair’s terrible, your nose is too big and you dress like a tramp. So you why don’t you sleep with me….no-one else is going to.”
In Britain, we look to the States for future social and political changes which invariably come later across the Atlantic – it all appears increasingly dystopian.
The main tension among the US electorate appears to be between those who will vote on the basis of what they think (Clinton) and what they feel (Trump). ‘Psy Ops’ was a very important factor in or disastrous Brexit vote. The arguments in favour of leaving the European Union were either deliberately illusory or entirely false. But enough people felt like they wanted some sense of change and to shake up the establishment. The worrying parallel would be if Trump could mobilize the many millions who don’t usually or who never have voted.
That kind of operation means a massive ground game across many hundreds of counties. Fortunately, it appears Trump can’t be bothered to spend that kind of dough so would rather be parachuted into various swing states, point his hat at the whooping crowds and insult women, African Americans, media, etc. This cannot play out for him, even with a strategy of winning only Pennsylvannia, Michigan, Ohio and Florida. He may not see it past his Zeppelin-sized ego but, from over here, it looks like there are simply not enough angry white guys for him to win.
Great Britain has traditionally favoured the Democrats, like Roosevelt and Kennedy, even preferring Carter to Reagan. I personally only know one person who would vote Trump over Clinton. Our politicians have felt free to attack him on an unprecedented scale for a major party candidate. Former British Prime Minister, David Cameron described Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the US as ‘divisive, stupid and wrong’. Recently elected London Mayor, Sadiq Khan called the policy ‘ignorant’. Trump’s subsequent demand for a comparison of IQ tests with the Mayor shows he struggles to understand the difference in meaning between the words ‘ignorant’ and ‘stupid’. That’s quite an irony.
There is concern here that the lack of honesty around private email servers could derail Hillary Clinton’s bid. But any simmering disdain for her dubious IT practices are massively outweighed by Trump’s adulation of Putin and his reckless approach to NATO as the basis of the West’s defense strategy since WWII.
Trump has certainly made a conscious decision to rip up the election rulebook while Clinton follows a fairly traditional path. But his strategy appears suicidal by pouring contempt on the main bastions of Republicanism such as Fox News and the senior members of the GOP.
But America hasn’t yet forgotten what it’s about just yet. At last his polling suffered when he chose to carry on verbally attacking the parents of a soldier, Humayun Khan, who fell in Iraq. But behind these boorish remarks lies something more troubling that challenges the traditions and legal tenets of American society. His bar room threat to ban Muslims and create a deportation squad are prima facie in contradiction to any citizens’ rights under the Constitution.
America means, to us, a land of great bounty and opportunity where people are not judged on religious grounds and rights are protected under constitutional law. To defy that through policies of direct discrimination as Trump has, is not what we expect of America, in fact it appears from England to be, in essence, un-American.
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Accidental Divorce
June 28th, 2016By Jeremy Sare.
British politics is growing up to be more like the US. And with it comes a deeply divided nation, an angry electorate and wholesale deception from ruthless politicians.
The reason for calling a UK referendum on EU membership was little to do with a genuine spontaneous desire for better democratic representation. It was, in essence, about political expediency and the personal ambition of one man: Boris Johnson MP. The British public has been drawn through a mendacious campaign into a political vacuum where all our relationships with our immediate neighbours, close allies and domestic partners are all in a state of flux.
Prime Minister David Cameron called the referendum last year to shore up the right of his party prior to the General Election. In short, it worked and the Conservatives fell over the line with a 12-seat majority in the House of Commons. He had delivered the first Conservative victory since 1992 and the Right wing showed precious little gratitude. There has been a significant element within Cameron’s Conservative Party which has always opposed the membership of EU and now they could exploit the electoral timing in full.
The campaign turned when the most likely successor to Cameron, his old Etonian chum, Boris Johnson declared himself in favour of leaving. As former Mayor of London, he was well aware of the deeply negative impact on the finances of the City of London in the event of amputating ourselves from lucrative European markets. The City is 15 percent of the UK economy. He had a different view as recently as 2013, “I’d vote to stay in the single market. I want us to trade freely with our European friends and partners.” Regardless of the economic consequences, it was clear Johnson was using the referendum as a launch pad to succeed Cameron as PM. Yes, British politics can be that cynical.
The campaign was characterised by a succession of untruths and downright lies forming the central plank of the argument to leave. The projected costs of EU membership of £350m per week was easily debunked. The promise to invest the same amount in healthcare was transparently false. The threat of Turkey joining the EU was a illusory threat and similarly establishing a European army appeared like Brigadoon through the mists.
Yet people voted for it. People voted for and against all sorts of things. They voted against the severe economic austerity of the last six years, against zero hour contracts, against little prospect of an improved economic life. The balance of the UK economy has shifted in recent years to a consolidation of wealth for the older, more comfortable, middle class at the expense of the youth and many working class communities.
Neither did those communities, particularly in the North, share London’s enthusiasm for Polish plumbers and Portuguese waitresses. A distinct tension between these electorates meant the Remain camp lost control of the outcome and the Leave camp lost control of what people were voting for.
Still they stoked those prejudices over immigration. The leader of the UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage even suggested that remaining in the EU increased the risk women suffering sexual assault from migrants. Posters portraying an invasion of brown-skinned people debased the political conversation and obvious parallels were drawn with Trump’s crass racial outlook.
The atmosphere around the campaign became febrile, divisive and intolerant, not qualities usually associated with Britain. Since the result it has boiled over into anger and retribution. The older generations have unwittingly voted to deny their grandchildren the right to live and work in Paris, Amsterdam and Rome. The predicted political and economic fallout is massive and still unraveling. Many of those who voted to leave are aghast about the dire consequences. Many have acted self-indulgently on base instincts not rational analysis. They have cheered for a political nuclear war with Europe and yet are staggered by the devastating damage.
Today there is no Government in UK. The Opposition has imploded. The Prime Minister is gone. Scotland will leave the union established in 1707. The Northern Irish Peace Treaty is under threat. The currency and stock markets are in turmoil. Recession is inevitable.
The British tend to prefer more calm in their lives. So the expected successor Boris Johnson may yet find, “the hand that wields the knife shall never wear the crown.” Lurid details of his dubious personal life will no doubt come increasingly under the spotlight. It is impossible to look with any certainty into the future through all the billowing smoke and debris.
But it seems inescapable that Britain’s international standing will be much diminished. President Obama was right when he said during his last State visit, “the European Union doesn’t moderate British influence – it magnifies it.” But that was then. We can now expect future Presidents looking wistfully down from Airforce One at our little island then flying right over London, on the way to Berlin.
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Not Inconsiderably Disagreeable
December 6th, 2013
By Jeremy Sare.
Although Major as PM expressed his desire for, “a nation at ease with itself”the policies of his Government (1990-7) did little to heal the deep social divisions caused by unyielding Thatcherism. He may have held a vision of England of old ladies cycling to church, village cricket and friendly dark-beamed pubs selling warm brown beer. But during his tenure, the unfettered banking sector thrived as many areas saw major industries exterminated while social housing stock withered. He was never a proper ‘One Nation’ Tory neither did his contempt for Labour politics diminish after office. So it is all the more surprising that he is indicating a redistributive method to solve the issue of “excess” profits of energy companies.
There were many personal flaws of Major’s leadership qualities which resulted in the slow strangulation of his administration but being privileged and remote wasn’t ever one of them. Major grew up in Brixton in the 50s in abject poverty and despite their respective faults both his predecessors, Heath and Thatcher, rose from very modest backgrounds and understood from an early age the pressures of tight family budgets.
It is impossible to say exactly why Cameron resists every call to tell any industry that their super profits are “unjustified” but his class is under focus again. Norman Tebbitt put it succinctly on the traditional test of a leader’s credibility: knowing the price of a pinta. “It’s not so much that Cameron and [George] Osborne didn’t know the price of milk, but that they didn’t know emotionally that the price of milk was important to people,” he said in a Guardian interview.
And the same could be said of energy bills. When the big six companies all announce rises around 10% almost every year, then to millions of consumer’s the reaction is not simply tutting to themselves, “bloody typical”. To many, up to their eyes in debt, there is an immediate mental calculation of what they will have to do without. John Major recognised that in all too many cases it means an inenviable choice between, “keeping warm and eating.” These companies’ culture of disposal labour and corporate dominance make it possible that an employee can be given a powerpoint presentation in his hospital bed just five days after a heart attack and given his cards in front of the rest of the ward.
It is a perception problem ‘for-whose-side-are-you-on’ not just for the front bench but also the party. Gove showed his callousness for people reduced to relying on foodbanks by saying they were for thoe who did not have the skills to manage their money. Last week, the unsinkable Dennis Skinner was shouted down by Tory backbenchers as he relayed the pathetic tale of constituent David Coupe reduced to abject poverty by an Atos assessment. He died of cancer waiting for his appeal against loss of benefits after being deemed fit for work. The circumstances were bad enough but to be berated by the Government side showed them either lacking any self-awareness or compassion.
Ed Milliband’s masterstroke in pledging a freeze on energy bills for 20 months has left Cameron in a blue funk. At PMQs, he wailed Ed was a “conman” and was slapped down by the Speaker for questioning his honesty. He then chucked his green credentials in the bin to shave a couple of quid of some bills and destabilise the Coalition further. He even used some useless adviser’s suggestion to try and turn the blame of Millband for what he did as Energy Secretary five years ago. Even the Telegraph called it a “dreadful performance.”
The economy went into steep decline following the banks’ crash: Cameron had the opportunity to ensure the sectors responsible paid their fair share and that cartels and monopolies were not allowed to succeed. His instinct is clearly against that and he claims the economic crisis was simply “Labour overspending”. The economy is out of balance, and hard-pressed families are feeling deep stress about the unaffordable contribution they have to make. Cameron is not the man to re-adjust it because he has no idea what those pressures feel like. I mean, what’s the problem?
Thatcher: Future Buried in the Past
April 8th, 2013By Jeremy Sare, England.
Everyone is allowed to express a little extra kindness to the recently departed. It is only a truism to say that eulogies are not objective.
But the death today of (Lady) Margaret Thatcher has prompted the most fawning statements from her political offspring in the modern Conservative Party. Former Cabinet member, Lord (Ken) Baker said when she left office, the UK was the strongest economy in Europe when clearly (West) Germany had outperformed Britain since the late 1960s.
Prime Minister, David Cameron went even further by claiming, “she didn’t just lead the country…she saved it.” To be a British saviour is a quality only really attributable to Churchill. Such prosaic tributes and obvious hyperbole risk giving a highly false impression of such a domineering figure in Britain’s history.
Former London Mayor, Ken Livingstone, was one her perennial foes. He did not cow to the obsequious mood and said, “her legacy was fundamentally wrong.” He pointed to the sale of council houses as root cause of a chronic shortage of housing now. Her tax and industrial policies created the underclass of benefit dependency and as a female politician she did nothing for women’s rights whatsoever.
The Conservatives’ toadying tributes all point to her political demise in 1990 as PM as being prompted by the introduction of the iniquitous flat rate local ‘poll’ tax. One or two suggest she had gone too far over her opposition to policies over the European Union. The truth is she had lost her mental faculties to be able to carry out the onerous task of being Prime Minister. Increasingly eccentric public performances in Parliament were matched by delusional behaviour around the Cabinet table as chronicled by her Deputy Geoffrey Howe when she forced his resignation in fit of pique.
Many of the political class who are describing her as a great patriot are deeply selective of her version of it. Certainly she, by her powerful political will, enabled the Falkland Islands to be recaptured in 1982. But equally in her determination to break the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1984-5 strike, she ensured the price the country paid was the loss of energy self-sufficiency.
There are few political figures who have attracted such adoration and opprobrium in equal measure. Former French President Francois Mitterand captured both sides when he said, “ She has the eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe.” Writer and director, Dr Jonathan Miller said, “ her odious suburban gentility and sentimental, saccharine patriotism, cater to the worst elements of commuter idiocy.”
It is not altogether easy to find many of Thatcher’s achievements made simply for the good of her fellow man. But she did introduce harm reduction measures and needle exchanges to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS in mid 80s. Her scientific background overcame what appeared to be a highly toxic media issue at the time.
However her political philosophy was heavily influenced by Neo-Conservatives Keith Joseph and the discredited Enoch Powell. Her view that there was “no such thing as society,” will be her epitaph – these words constitute a philosophical heartlessness based on economic consumerism and acquisitiveness as the sole path to the nation’s happiness.
She detested her predecessor’s, Ted Heath, “One Nation” approach and he hated her back. At a formal photograph of former PMs, he was asked if he could stand further to the right of her, “Not sure that’s actually possible,” he grumbled. Her unyielding support for Chilean tyrant General Pinochet during his arrest in Britain in 1998 showed she was morally fallible.
But her impact on the Conservative Party is still immense. In the Shires of rural Britain, David Cameron is still compared highly unfavourably to her 23 years after she was deselected by her backbenchers, as were the other four party leaders in between.
In many ways Thatcher’s greatest mark has been on her own party, the Conservative Party have only been victorious in one election since she won easily in 1987. All subsequent leaders have been trying to emulate her dominance but have simply come across as divisive.
That ultimately is Thatcher’s legacy: a nation uneasy with itself and a party trying to recapture the elusive past.
Do the Right Thing
March 4th, 2013By Jeremy Sare, England.
Imagine a Democrat Congressman was caught making a false legal declaration to the police and was forced out of his very marginal seat, facing incarceration. The ensuing election would probably be an easy win for the Republicans, you would have thought.
Well so thought the Conservatives at the by-election in Eastleigh near Southampton, England last week. But in a two-horse race the Conservative candidate contrived to come third. The incumbent party held on, and second place was taken by the Tea-Party type candidate from the UK Independence Party which constitutes the acceptable face of the very right wing of British politics.
The obvious conclusion drawn by the grey beards of the Conservative Party is that their leader, Prime Minister David Cameron, has no prospect of delivering an overall majority in the General Election of 2015. Unless there is a new big idea.
So panic and back-stabbing has ensued. For their own purposes each faction of the party evokes the image of Margaret Thatcher and speculates what she would have done, in the same way Republicans seek guidance from the late President Reagan.
Much of the entrenched unpopularity of Cameron springs from his Cabinet’s perceived incompetence over the economy. His Chancellor George Osborne, who has no financial or business qualifications or experience, has made a series of judgments based on political prejudice rather than economic soundness. For example, next month when huge cuts in support for disabled families take effect, the top earners rate for tax is also to be cut from 50 to 45 percent. His former plea that “we’re all in this together” has been abandoned as more of a sick joke than a rallying cry.
All Prime Ministers are pulled in different directions but the particular pressures for Cameron look too much for mere mortals to bear. To satisfy the huge phalanx of right wingers he must throw them some policy ‘red meat’. But to impose greater cuts on welfare would drive millions teetering on poverty line straight over it and confirm the party’s ‘nasty’ image it has been at pains to detoxify.
Cameron and his team have been scrambling around trying to identify a ‘cost neutral’ solution to display tough patriotic credentials without making anyone, especially the poor, poorer. The big idea they have stumbled upon is to repeal the Human Rights Act (HRA). The Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling said: “I cannot conceive of a situation where we could put forward a serious reform without scrapping Labour’s Human Rights Act. “
This Act is the domestic version of the European Convention on Human Rights drawn up immediately after WWII. It is the nearest thing in Britain we have to a written constitution and protects family life, privacy and the right to a fair trial. So why is this a bad thing exactly?
Criminals seeking to use any desperate defence to evade prosecution will reach for HRA, invariably it doesn’t do them any good because one person’s rights need to be balanced against another’s. So a burglar may claim to be imprisoned would damage his right to family life but any court would overweigh the right of residents not to be burgled of their property. The HR defence doesn’t work in about 69 out of 70 attempts.
But to read many British tabloids you might get a different impression. They have created a ‘bogey man’ out of the HRA, perhaps because of its European origins and their deep antipathy to anyone beyond the white cliffs of Dover.
The falsehood they seek to perpetuate is that the Convention was an appalling social liberal experiment created by pro Europe idealogues. In fact it was drawn up by British Conservative lawyers 25 years before UK even joined the EU and has nothing to do with EU membership. In the same vein, the right wing editors want us to abandon the Health and Safety laws which have prevented thousands from death and serious injury from unscrupulous employers.
The Conservatives have joined in the mythmaking and the Home Secretary, Theresa May, even made a speech citing a criminal who was protected from deportation because his ownership of a cat constituted “family life’. “I’m not making this up,” she trilled. Beware any politician who says that.
In popular consciousness ‘human rights’ is now shorthand for something foul and underhand rather than a source of reassurance. This is because the wholesale misrepresentation means people often don’t think of human rights applying to them but somebody else; a benefits scrounger, a foreigner or criminal.
The beating heart of the Conservative Party membership is encapsulated by the Daily Mail newspaper who yesterday proclaimed it was, “A Great Day for British Justice”. Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said: “Churchill must be spinning in his grave as modern Tory Cabinet ministers trash his post-war legacy.”
The Conservative Party is full of intelligent people but they would obviously rather perpetuate this dangerous illusion for the sake of popularity and another crack at Government. But it is far from clear this retreat to a pre-Victorian regime will garner any significant numbers of votes.
The policy of abolishing human rights confirms the familiar characteristic of the current Prime Minister; all tactics, little strategy.
Freedom’s Just Another Word
December 3rd, 2012By Jeremy Sare, England.
In the few days since Lord Justice Leveson delivered his 2,000 page verdict on the “culture, practice and ethics of the press”, there has been a visceral rejection by the newspapers against any law to underpin the media’s new self-regulatory body.
The law would in essence be no different from any organisation’s legal anchor such as exists for lawyers, police even MPs not to mention BBC, ITV and Sky News. It would be the guarantor that the self-regulated body would function as intended and not how press barons would chose to corrupt it; huge fines would be paid and prominent apologies printed when ‘mistakes’ were, inevitably, made.
Yet this modest proposal has been presented as a full scale assault on press freedom (“this pernicious law” ” a dark moment”). Otherwise intelligent people have suggested it amounts to “state control” and would turn Britain into the equivalent of Zimbabwe or Cuba. As Lord Leveson said himself, not one witness (of 337 who gave evidence) argued for any degree of political interference in the press.
The public, when asked, are massively in favour of the law, which also, incidentally, would enshrine in statute, for the first time, the Government’s duty to protect the freedom of the press. It would be Britain’s very own First Amendment, as it were.
But in the meantime most newspapers seek to entirely debase the issue and conjure terrible injustices just over the political horizon where future tyrannical Governments would seek to strengthen any existing law even further. “There be dragons”, they warn sternly.
All we are witnessing is the historical propaganda from the familiar outlets of the Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph churning out deeply misleading stories which do not convince the public but only satisfy those attending their own editorial meetings. As Lord Leveson said during his address, the press is uniquely powerful in holding power to account – except its own.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. The common man had hoped the Inquiry would lead us to the sunlit uplands away from the grimy tabloid gutter. But to be led, we would first need a leader. And instead we have Prime Minister David Cameron who clearly had decided long ago he would reject any recommendation for a law to institute the regulatory body. And with that he sided with the forces of conservatism and inertia.
Cameron may be able to draw out his bluff for a while before Parliament even if the Deputy PM is clearly in a different place philosophically. Supported by his barely able Culture Secretary ‘Mumsy’ Maria Miller, Dave can face down all the Labour members and many of his own MPs but he has not had the courage to address the victims of hacking and intimidation who, to a man, want to see a legal basis to self-regulation. The word they grasp at is “betrayal” and show Cameron to instinctively place political expediency before principle and ordinary people’s access to justice.
The law would not be some alien imposition on Britain’s traditions. In fact, for the doubters and naysayers, we can see how it works already. The Republic of Ireland has been working under this exact system since 2009, and nearly all of British papers have quietly signed up to it. Yet we are expected to believe the sky will fall in, if the same law is enacted in Britain.
This is not an issue which appears to have a strong parallel in the US, for which you should be thankful. Whatever the failings of the US media, and there are many, at least you do not have national newspapers owned by foreign residents who seek to propagate their personal agendas often against the national interest.
Senior writer for the Observer, Will Hutton said, “Freedom is not only menaced by the state; it is also menaced by private media barons and their servants…..an avalanche of highly spun journalism to serve partisan interests has become habitual. The public realm has become degraded. The trade and craft of journalism has been abused…”
Cameron’s strategy is obviously the slow strangulation of the report but the issues will not die. This depressing realisation was exemplified perfectly the day before the report was published when the X-Factor judge, Louis Walsh, received $600k in compensation from the Sun for inventing a story about him sexually assaulting another man. This inquiry was meant to signal a cultural change which would enhance our national life, restore journalistic integrity and reputation and it is intolerable to see the opportunity to be squandered by the Conservatives for the sake of cheap politics.
As Lord Justice Leveson said, in Britain there had been seven similar enquiries into the power of the press in the last 70 years, “no-one can think it can be sensible to contemplate an eighth.”
Imminent Relapse
November 26th, 2012By Jeremy Sare, England.
It was summer last year, when in Britain we learned Milly Dowler, the murdered 14 year old schoolgirl had her phone hacked by News of the World (NOTW) journalists. There was also evidence the act of listening into her voicemail messages led the family to believe, wrongly, that she was still alive.
The public’s revulsion at these excesses of the press eventually led the Prime Minister, David Cameron, to establish an inquiry under Lord Justice Leveson into the “culture, practises and ethics of the media” and the inter-relationships between press, politics and policing.
The impact was sudden and devastating: amid the exposure of corruption, collusion and criminality, the News of the World was culled, several senior police were forced out and Rupert Murdoch’s $15Bn takeover of BSkyB fell apart. More recently, dozens of journalists have been arrested and charged with hacking, paying officials for information and perverting the course of justice. The Prime Minister’s former chief pressman, Andy Coulson, is facing a perjury trial.
Leveson reports on Thursday this week, and yet, many current press stories about the potential findings blithely ignore all the turmoil and heartbreak the excesses of the press had revealed.
Phone hacking extended way beyond celebrities and the royal family although that is certainly reprehensible too if you consider the daily hounding and privacy invasion of the actress Sienna Miller as an example. But the revelations that editors saw fit to hack the 7/7 bomb victims and the widows of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan spilled over into public fury.
Illegal phone-hacking became the default position of tabloid investigation, whatever the level of the story, however marginal the advantage it could offer over its rival newspapers. Campaigns against celebs and individuals, suddenly thrust into the limelight, were nothing short of organised harassment and intimidation through stories which were, “a mixture of smear, innuendo and complete fiction.” Editors clearly acted with arrogant impunity. So far phone hacking has only been accepted as a practise by the Murdoch media empire but disgraceful bullying by journalists also concerned the Mirror Group and Associated newspapers.
When the scandal was finally exposed by the Guardian newspaper, the Metropolitan Police refused to progress it and the multiple ties between the force and News International seemed to make them complicit. The one story which linked all three sides: media, police and politics was the farcical revelation that the Met had lent former NOTW editor Rebekah Brooks a horse on which her neighbour, the PM, had enjoyed a jolly good ride.
The Leveson report published on Thursday presents PM, David Cameron, with the most difficult series of dilemmas. First, he was arthritically slow to react to the urgency of the situation, partly because he is implicated himself by his friendship with Rebekah Brookes. His testimony to the Inquiry was desperately defensive, very memory selective and lacked the statesmanlike performance the role required. He looked like any grubby politician desperate to save his skin. To lead the country back to the moral high, the Prime Minister will be forced to distance himself from the actions of this David Cameron chap.
His cabinet is mostly opposed to any statutory changes which would tie all editors to an ethical guide. Any acquiescence by Cameron to Leveson would be heartily opposed by his closest generals and the charge would be led by Cam’s greatest rival, London mayor Boris Johnson. But 70 of his own Conservative MPs have made clear their support for change to the media power balance which means if it came to a Parliamentary vote it would be carried. Dave faces being shot by the right wing of his own party or picking a confrontational and obviously losing strategy.
A compromise could be cobbled together, ‘legislation but not yet’ which would show him to be expedient and gutless but could be the option left to him in the end.
Press behaviour can be compared to some degree of power addiction. After years of abuse culminating in the Milly Dowler outrage, all parties agreed initially a “moment of clarity” had been reached.
But last Saturday the Daily Mail included a 12 page preposterous and transparent hatchet job of one of Leveson’s assistants, Sir David Bell. This is exactly the kind of irresponsible, twisted journalism Leveson was established to prevent.
This Sunday “Government sources”, in other words resistant Ministers, began counter briefing. Brian Leveson, always formidable, focussed and good-humoured has faced many personal attacks suggesting impartiality. On Sunday in the Mail, apropos of nothing, he was described as an “Orthodox Jew” (he isn’t) as if that made a difference to his judgement (it doesn’t).
This enquiry has performed the function of the therapy towards recovery. Yet now the moment of truth has been reached, it seems they can’t bring themselves to change. Relapse appears imminent.
Knife at a Gunfight
November 15th, 2012By Jeremy Sare, England.
When you are called to appear before a Congressional hearing or Parliamentary Committee what is the worst accusation you can face? That you were obstructive, wilfully ignorant? No, worse, by far, is to be deemed, “not serious”.
And so it was with Andrew Cecil, Public Policy Director for Amazon Europe when he was summoned before the Public Accounts Committee in Westminster to explain why his company pays next to no corporation tax in the UK.
His brief from his Amazonian masters was quite clear: maintain the line that the UK is simply one element of a European wide business based in Luxembourg. But his preparation clearly did not include identifying the ‘elephant traps’ which the committee, chaired by the formidable Margaret Hodge MP, may have sought to lure him into. Cecil clambered out of one and immediately collapsed into another during quite simply the most embarrassing, shambling performance I have ever seen in committee.
Business leaders often come ill-prepared to select committees and the assumption is that private industry only engages with Parliamentary scrutiny begrudgingly. It is as if the mere act of questioning their actions affords them a sense of superiority by dint of their role as “wealth creators” over these grubby public servants. The transparency of that business operation and its responsibility to pay its due to its ‘host’ nation were the points under examination here. How annoying then, for these pesky democratic representatives to be asking such damn impertinent questions.
In fact, the questions which were, on the face of it, the most straightforward seemed to the hardest for the hapless, bewildered Cecil to answer. Of the 9Bn Euro turnover in the European operations what was the sales volume for the UK? First, Cecil said he didn’t know then that it was not usual to disclose those confidential figures. He would have to check back. So who exactly was the holding company for Amazon Europe? No, didn’t know that. What, really? What’s your job title again? This incredible assertion was understandably followed by much spluttering and exclamations, “ridiculous…pathetic.”
Ms Hodge, was clearly losing her cool and when he asked to “check back” on the next six or seven questions she just flipped, “You come to us with absolutely no information…pretend ignorance…I don’t know what you take us for.” After that kind of lambasting, you don’t seek solace in strong drink: you find the closest bridge and throw yourself off.
What is so deeply dispiriting is that these tax arrangements similar to Google, Starbucks and most recently for some UK water utilities were exposed by newspaper reports. The Government is always crowing about how it is cracking down on tax avoidance despite laying off thousands of tax inspectors. These are just weasel words: the truth is that officials inside Her Majesty’s Treasury know full well what level of tax these huge companies are paying yet there appears no urgency to seek to upset the status quo.
As if we needed reminding, the nation’s lower and middle classes are groaning under wage freezes, wholesale slashing of public services and support benefits. To see millionaires and multi-nationals blithely refuse to face the same rule book and neither be compelled to do so, is a rank injustice.
Successive Governments in the UK and many other countries, including the United States, have allowed the creation of an effective “accountocracy” where the creation of favourable jurisdictions mean multinationals can rely on the benefits of a nation’s infrastructure and skills of its workforce and then suck up all the profits for its owners.
Besides calling the more “credible” senior executives from the tax haven of Luxembourg, the Public Accounts Committee must next call in the finance ministers and ask what they intend to do about it.
I fear the answer is the familiar lament: all bluster and do bugger all.
Children First
October 24th, 2012
By Jeremy Sare.
Britain is currently reeling from daily revelations about acts of child molestation carried out by one of its biggest television stars of the 60s, 70s and 80s, Sir Jimmy Savile.
What at first appeared to be isolated, but no less disturbing, cases has rapidly broadened and deepened suggesting whole rings of paedophiles linked to the celebrity who sexually assaulted young, often vulnerable, teenage girls with apparent impunity. Only his death last year has allowed his despicable secret life to be finally exposed. There are currently at least 200 cases being investigated.
The scandal has convulsed the BBC and its media rivals have wasted no time in wielding early revenge – particularly when the suggestion still hangs that an investigation programme was pulled last December in favour of a nauseating tribute to Savile. But the scandal has also drawn in several charities, the National Health Service, Crown Prosecution Service, police and Ministers.
It was, therefore, quite disgraceful timing for the new Justice Minister, Chris Grayling, to step into the fray and boast through a tabloid how the Government was going to “crack down” against convicted sex offenders. His article in the Sun newspaper on Monday referenced Savile and then announced all sex offenders would be fitted with GPS on release from prison. It is not entirely clear how this expensive tracking will definitely prevent attacks on children, particularly if there are no extra resources promised to electronically monitor these offenders. Moreover, Savile was not charged let alone convicted of any sex crime so GPS is nothing more than an absurd irrelevance in his case.
Grayling is not the first Minister to try and squeeze political capital from atrocious criminal acts against children and young adults and I am sure he will not be the last. But he deserves to be considered, at least, for the prize for cynical political manoeuvring of the year.
Child protection is a complex and sensitive issue generally administered by dedicated professionals who have huge experience of dealing with sex offenders weighing up carefully what is practical in controlling their behaviour. I have seen close at hand how Megan’s Law works in the States allowing communities to access information about these offenders, including their addresses. This option was explored in 2006 in UK but rejected for fear of public retribution. In any event, these measures fail to protect children and families from the greatest threat which is unconvicted offenders. That would include Savile.
Articles from supposedly responsible Ministers quickly invoke fears of strangers in the dark which every study shows amounts to a small proportion of sexual offenders. Ten years ago the News of the World’s ‘name and shame’ campaign led to mobs marching the streets of Portsmouth and attacks on innocent people, including a paediatrician whose profession was confused with paedophilia.
Below yesterday’s newspaper report were long list of baying comments calling for castration or death. Grayling must have been pleased to have aroused such blind anger, much to the dismay of his better informed officials.
This guy has form on playing for the common denominator: at the Conservative Party Conference last month he banged the drum about allowing householders to use “unreasonable” force against burglars. It is a purely emotive issue; these cases of robbed householders being charged with assault have arisen in the courts only a handful of times in the last ten years.
On child protection he has promised, “protection services, councils and police will work together and share information.” But in reality Grayling was merely describing the multi-agency arrangements, called MAPPA, which have been operating across the county for over 15 years.
While brazenly ambitious Ministers such as Grayling seek to stoke anger from the nation’s evident distress, most of the population quietly struggles to come to terms with the horrendous stories being uncovered with sickening regularity. For many of us, the 1970s were our childhood and were innocent, happy days – that is part of what we reflect on with deep sadness through the victims’ harrowing stories.
Innocent fun was clearly an illusion in the world of 70s pop music – Saville’s heinous crimes follow on from convictions of pop stars and managers of the time such as Gary Glitter and Jonathan King who proved to be relentless sexual predators. Something of that era just died and is now to be associated with shame and fear.
That’s tough enough to swallow without a loudmouth politician seeking to attract the basest popularity and so to calve himself a macho image. The British public at large have not forgotten, the obscenity that all the authorities failed to stop Savile when he was alive.
Dispassionate Conservatism
October 10th, 2012By Jeremy Sare
If your doctor’s response to your medical complaint was to merely exhort you to “pull yourself together” you would be likely to lose trust in his prowess as a physician.
And so it is with Prime Minister David Cameron whose message to Britain at this year’s Conservative Party conference was, “sink or swim”. It conjours up an unedifying image of us all up to our necks in icy water, watching the good ship Great Britain slip beneath the waves. Note to Cameron’s speech writers – remember a PM should show leadership.
This lack of a credible plan — to rescue prosperity from austerity — was a theme which ran through the week. The mantra was simply cut, cut, cut and lower the budget deficit. The Chancellor George Osborne’s dreadfully bleak and tedious speech did not actually include the key word ‘growth’.
The British Conservative Party has essentially the same presentational problem as the Republican’s: they favour a laissez faire economic approach with tax cuts restricted to the wealthy. The image of self-interest and privilege has solidified around their respective shoulders.
Cameron in opposition had followed President George W. Bush’s example of promoting a Compassionate Conservatism. It is the kind of balanced political ticket which appeals strongly to the electorate – promoting competitive business while ensuring no-one gets left behind.
But Dave’s old liberal policies, such as environment protection and extending gay rights, are now a distant memory. In office, Cameron has been forced to throw plenty of red meat at the rabid end of his party to momentarily quell the voices of rebellion. So there have been lower tax rates for the top earners, a second round of huge welfare cuts, a possible vote on leaving the EU and mass deportation of foreign students.
His drift to the right will not help him electorally: his party is already about 10-15 points behind Labour who are determined to move into the recently vacated centre ground.
Cameron is an affable fellow, no doubt, as he showed in his recent Letterman performance. But unlike Margaret Thatcher he appears less of a Prime Minister over time.
His economic plan, such as it is, has proven so severe that tax revenues have plummeted and the deficit has actually risen. It all looks ultimately self-defeating. Cameron’s Government is in danger of saving the disease and killing the patient.
A Worse Job than Veep
September 29th, 2012
By Jeremy Sare, England.
I can’t be the only one to notice the strong parallels between the posts of Deputy Prime Minister of Britain and Vice President of the US.
For most of the time, they are both considered a political joke, whose daily attempt to restore some credibility ends in inevitable futility. When it is convenient to the boss, they perform their dutiful role as their leader’s human shield. They are also expected to be the one who greets the Presidents of Botswana and Fiji when they come to visit.
Nick Clegg, as leader of the Liberal Democrat party and DPM, will always be, at best, the head of the third force of British politics. Given his catastrophic leadership since the 2010 election, he actually risks making his party less popular than the minor one issue party for UK Independence.
Clegg’s speech this week to the party’s annual yawnathon/conference was a pitiful display of a politician trying to carve out his relevance to the voting public. He continually shouted “be in no doubt!” referring to several dubious assertions on education and the environment where his party has been utterly dominated by their Tory overlords. He tried to portray himself as the linch-pin of the Coalition Government when his party just make up the numbers in Parliament, constantly voting against their longstanding Liberal principles and simultaneously embracing electoral oblivion.
The Liberal Democrats’ unholy political pact with Cameron’s Conservatives hardly helped him on the day and in two and a half years, has decimated his standing in the country. He is required to simultaneously appear independent from and supportive of an administration which has made deeply painful cuts for the poorest, while dropping tax rates for the top earners by 5p in the pound.
The policy decision he made which has damaged him most severely was to make a swift 180 and support hiking tuition fees for students immediately after getting three quarters of them to vote for him on that singular promise. Clegg’s acute and apparently growing political naivety was exposed cruelly when he decided to make a Youtube apology which was immediately lampooned in song.
It is quite a long time since I heard such ‘brass neck’ statements in a speech – it was simply the most sensational nonsense. Apparently, only his party, “could be trusted on the economy and to deliver a fairer society.” On the economy, the UK is in its third quarter of a double-dip recession and the last two years have seen the most regressive policies on the poor since 1920s. To gauge how hard-hearted the Government is, it was only last week they showed their soft side by not removing benefits for those under going radio and chemotherapy for cancer.
Clegg’s crowd were thoroughly polite in the face of this relentless barage of empty rhetoric, even making laughing sounds at Clegg’s dismal attempts at humour. Clegg knows, we all know, that his party faces political wipeout at the 2015 election. His own leadership is utterly doomed – the speech sounded like he was reading his own obituary. Even one of his colleagues, Lord Smith, described Clegg as, “a cork bobbing in the waves.”
Overall it must be better to be Veep than DPM. At least Joe Biden will get to keep his moniker of ‘Mr Vice President’ to allow him the semblance of respect after his days in office. Clegg will be no more than a footnote in one chapter of political handbook of how the desire for power destroys the weak.
“Plebs, Morons …” a Cabinet Minister said
September 22nd, 2012By Jere
my Sare, England.
When your job entails travelling all around Westminster or DC for that matter, then as a matter of necessity, you soon work out how to best handle the police and the security guards at every entrance and gate.
The one obvious lesson in diplomacy for lowly officials and Secretaries of State alike is, never try to hurry the police or challenge their authority. It is quite simple: let them do their job, be polite and respectful and everyone gets on fine.
So step forward, brand new Chief Whip to Her Majesty’s Government, Andrew Mitchell who, given his lofty position, felt entitled to spit out various expletives and general abuse at the officers guarding the gates to Downing Street on Wednesday evening. The calls for his head are legion and has prompted his sudden disappearance from media scrutiny.
The circumstances of the case are depressingly ordinary. Mitchell sails around Whitehall on what appears to be his mum’s bike. It was the police officers’ refusal to let hm cycle merrily through the security gates which prompted Mitchell to bellow about them being, “f**king plebs” and “morons” who should “know their place”. He also reportedly said somewhat comically, “Open this gate, I’m the Chief Whip. I’m telling you – I’m the Chief Whip and I’m coming through these gates.”
Mitchell’s crude bullying tactics may work on his timid colleagues, MPs caught between satisfying their consciences or furthering their Parliamentary careers, but clearly should not be deployed so bluntly against public servants. His outburst also betrayed the perceived snooty attitude of the higher echelons of the Conservative Party toward the ‘lower classes’, a politically toxic image which David Cameron has tried so hard to smother since he became leader in 2005.
It gets considerably worse. Dave himself was forced to take a break from paying tribute to two WPCs in Manchester who had been killed in a gun and grenade attack this week, to publicly admonish his Chief Whip for disrespecting police officers. By any standard, that’s seriously bad politics.
Mitchell then compounded his guilt by denying the words reported in the Sun newspaper and so implied the officers were so unprofessional as to invent outright lies about a senior Government figure. His “half-hearted” apology implied he still expected subservience from the police and felt they should bow meekly to his version of the truth.
To their credit, both officers made written records of the incident at the time and are sticking to them. They may have been inspired to be so resolute following the savage cuts in policing introduced by the Coalition Government, resulting in considerably depleted pensions and contracting out of frontline work to private companies such as G4S. John Tully, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, said, “I know what the officers have told me, and what was reported … is absolutely what happened. I think Mr. Mitchell needs to address his position and resign as soon as possible.
The London Mayor, Boris Johnson, easily the most popular Conservative in the country, called last year for anyone caught swearing at a police officer to be arrested. That could still happen which would mean Cameron trawling for another Chief Whip next week. The Met police usually do not need much encouragment to make an arrest, for example they once banged up a student who inquired whether a policeman’s horse was ‘gay’.
If this wanton display of arrogance is sufficient to cost Mitchell his job then it will be one of the most careless ways ever to lose a senior Government position, but given his boorish and reprehensible behaviour it will be thoroughly deserved.
The View from Over There: Margins of Error
September 12th, 2012
By Jeremy Sare, England.
“Opinion polls don’t tell the whole story … the only poll that counts is on election day …. these polls certainly don’t reflect what the people have been saying to me up and down the land.”
These are all familiar lines used by all losing candidates in the run up to their impending electoral defeat in U.S. and elsewhere. I am not aware of Governor Romney using any of these phrases yet as his national numbers have stood up pretty well until recently. But the party conventions saw a slight widening of the President’s lead so confirming Romney’s lacklustre performance in Tampa and his inability to convince the American public he is worthy of their affection and trust.
But there are some abysmal poll numbers which cannot be explained away with a string of rationalisations. Obama leads Romney on women by about 15 points and Latinos by about 40. The lead among African Americans for the Democratic candidate has strengthened from 2008 when Senator McCain took a measly four points. Obama’s lead is total: 94-0.
Now in Europe there has been some polling about how we would receive a Romney Presidency. First, we in Europe understand 99 percent of the U.S. population ‘could not give a rat’s a**e’ what France, Germany and Britain think about it and no country would be significantly swayed by an outsider’s view of their own domestic election. Nevertheless, the poll does illustrate how poorly Romney’s public image is playing to a wider audience. The average number in those countries who thought the former Governor would make the U.S. be received more favourably was just four percent.
Romney’s rather dismal effort at diplomacy in his summer tour of UK, Poland and Israel started with denigrating the Olympic organisation in London just prior to its huge success. His effort to portray himself as Master of the Olympics showed flaky advice and even worse judgement. His tactless condemnation of Obama following death of the U.S. Ambassador in Libya, without emphasising statesman-like condolence, may linger disastrously for him.
As the numbers slowly run away from Romney, he is getting plenty of advice from fellow Republicans. Fox News analyst, Sarah Palin’s suggestion that he get “severely aggressive” with the President already seems tactically idiotic. Romney, for all his faults, has got those upper middle class and blue collar white male votes solidly in his base. Shouting louder at an audience he has already won over will not win him any more states on 6 November.
Even stirring greater antipathy to the incumbent by another slew of negative campaigning does not mean support transferring to the challenger. Certainly not at this late stage. These would be desperate options for a candidate feeling the pressure. And he hasn’t even had to face the silky debating skills of President Obama in the debates yet.
That will be time to roll out the platitudes of the ‘soon to be defeated’.
Consenting Adults
September 2nd, 2012
By Jeremy Sare
Any day, another Royal story.
Britain’s view of the Royal family is mainly that they are a very popular anachronism of the past: good business for the tabloids and the tourism industry. The regular Jubilees, and less regular weddings and funerals, are also a very welcome source of public holidays.
We have all been taught in our history lessons that her Maj’s position is symbolic and she has no right or inclination to tamper with or influence legislation. Her only involvement is for the historic and quaint formality of granting Royal Consent, where, for no good reason, the clerks still write the laws in Norman French on goatskin.
But we have now discovered great tracts of new law are subject to the Queen’s, and by extension, Prince Charles’s Consent.
Officials in the Ministries have been following ‘discrete’ guidance for many years which dictates early consultation with the Monarch on any legislation which could impact on the Queen or Charles’s vast incomes. Charles’s Duchy estates are estimated at £700m and the Queen is the world’s richest woman.
The Guardian newspaper discovered Ministers had, on 17 occasions since 2005, written to Clarence House and begged humbly for Charles to oblige them his approval. It would seem this ‘power’ was granted to Edward III’s son in the 14th Century and was not rescinded even by the great Parliamentary reformer (among other things) Oliver Cromwell.
On the face it, there can hardly be a more outrageous example of the right of Royal privilege and protection of patronage over the democratic will of the people.
But to some extent the issue depends rather on what Charles’s behaviour has been when granted this opportunity to meddle in the laws of the land. Either he always let the Bills through unquestioningly and slightly annoyed at the fuss. Or he took the opportunity to express his misgivings, concerns or outright opposition to various measures on planning or employment law.
Unfortunately Charles’s previous form would suggest he took enthusiastic advantage of sounding relevant for once. Despite the convention for the monarch and heir to remain neutral in all matters, HRH has bombarded Whitehall offices for years with his rambling letters of complaint known as the ‘black spider memos’.
The reaction from Ministers said a lot. They took immediate steps to suppress the guidance and have just been told by the Information Commissioner they must divulge it. They have until the 25 September but will resist heartily yet.
As Charles himself is prone to say “It really is appalling.”
Battle Royal
August 29th, 2012By Jeremy Sare.
First, MPs and peers found their personal standings plummet as the expenses scandal revealed a great many had been bending, and in some cases serially breaking, the rules on their allowances. Huge settlement checks were written, careers fell and some were even imprisoned.
Next came the phone-hacking scandal which saw the voluntary closing by the Murdochs of the 150 year old News of the World and many senior police at the Met swept out of their offices. Almost every week gangs of journalists appear in court for plea hearings before their trials. Some will being go down.
The MPs have had an election since and have put their calamity behind them. The media are still in the midst of the Leveson Inquiry so cannot display any relaxed mood. There have recently been some isolated protesting voices suggesting the Inquiry has had a “chilling effect” on news reporting.
Of course this is all a lot of nonsense. The tabloid editors who are moaning have simply found there is a lot more criticism of their salacious stories and the public’s appetite for lurid tales, celebrity intimidation and entrapment appears to have waned somewhat.
The editors have been waiting for an issue where they can fight back. The good old days of humiliation, harassment and blatant false reporting may be gone for now but they cannot let go just yet.
This week they found their opportunity. It was not a tale of a vast environmental cover-up by a multinational. It was not exposing criminal gangs preying on vulnerable people. It concerned a dispute over the publication of a nude picture of Prince Harry.
It would seem this “story” encapsulates the cause the editors want to hold up as emblematic of their “rights” of papers to publish. Former News of the World executive editor, Neil Wallis, took to the TV studios to declare, laughably, “Leveson is … killing investigative journalism in this country.” I would argue paying £10k then printing pictures taken at a drunken party in Vegas does not make you Woodward, nor Bernstein.
Wallis went on … some might say, too long. “Newspaper editors, newspaper executives are terrified of controversy now. If they get a controversial story that causes a furore an editor could lose his job, advertisers could be panicked into not advertising in their newspapers, because the mood in the newspaper industry is now so febrile. Some people might say that the Prince Harry story is a classic example of where the newspaper should basically wave two fingers at Leveson … and just stick it in the paper.”
The Sun did that anyway.
Mr Wallis, besides trying to resurrect his PR career, has tried to fix our attention on the wrong target. The embargo on publication was sought by St. James’s Palace (aka Prince Charles) who argued, unconvincingly, it was an invasion of privacy. Those sort of pointless restrictions from the Royal family have been going on for decades and has nothing whatever to do with Leveson.
And to elevate the battle over publishing a pixilated naked Royal to the denying the basic freedoms of the press, shows the tabloid editors for what they are – compulsive recyclers of trivia, nonsense and nudity.
Gotta Serve Somebody
August 23rd, 2012By Jeremy Sare.
The first ever scene of the BBC’s political comedy, ‘Yes, Minister’ shows a new Secretary of State arriving at his Department and amazed to find his work diary for the coming months already full.
“But you didn’t know I was coming,” he protests.
“We knew there would be a Minister,” says one of his knowing civil servants.
Easy continuity has been the hallmark of the British Civil Service for over 200 years. Until now. Under the Coalition Government the traditional power balance and mutual co-operation between officials and their masters is under severe strain.
One indicator has been the rapid disintegration of the top rank of officials. Since the election in April 2010, all but two top officials (Permanent Secretaries) have resigned. The latest, Dame Helen Ghosh of the Home Office (responsible for law and order), has cast aside the lofty trappings of office, to run the relatively lowly National Trust charity.
It seems a huge shift-down in her career trajectory to take voluntarily. The civil servant gains his/her kudos from the status of the department. So it seems peculiar for Dame Helen to exchange being custodian of the nation’s police and prisons for administering its historic houses and gardens.
This battle at the top of Government is partly a numbers game. The Coalition arrived promising to cut departments by 25 percent in their drive for austerity. That is not simply trimming the fat; slashing budgets on that scale means lobbing off limbs. Some Ministers joined in with, perhaps, too much gusto making savings of 40 to 50 percent; in other words on their way to successfully abolishing their own departments.
There has also been a concerted attempt by Ministers to portray public servants as “wasteful” and “the enemies of enterprise.” The Prime Minister, David Cameron, joined in the bashing of public servants, delivering a speech last year which made him sound rather like he was still in opposition. He referred to, “The bureaucrats in government departments who concoct those ridiculous rules and regulations that make life impossible.” As PM he relies on those public servants to carry out his wishes. Such public criticism can only discourage them from trying their damnedest to making his policies succeed.
The combination of the cuts and the insults has seen staff morale become measurable as ‘below sea-level’. People have been removed from jobs which the public still expects them to do. The Home Office cut the numbers of immigration staff to the extent that queues for passport checks at British airports were routinely three hours. An international PR calamity during the Olympics by this over zealous penny pinching was only just averted by employing more (expensive) personnel.
But mostly the public have not sided with the ‘bureaucrats’. The politicians’ familiar rhetoric is somewhat buoyed by sections of the press which are relentless in their wish to show the coddled public servants have “gold-plated pensions.” In reality the average civil servant retires on just £4,200 per annum.
The architect behind it all is Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude. He appears to consider public servants worthy only of contempt and is constantly seeking more imaginative ways of firing them. His top civil servant, Ian Watmore, after just six months in post, chose to be a house husband rather than continue being sidelined by an over-bearing Minister.
Maude has relished his “bonfire of the Quangos” (Quasi Non-Government Organisations) and boasted on numerous occasions of all the “waste” he has saved. Maude culled organisations regardless of their highly successful records, for example the UK Film Council which had been making £4 for every pound spent, was abolished without consultation. This was described at the time as, “an act of cultural vandalism.”
Civil servants have had to endure a long-standing pay freeze, their pensions slashed (twice), their train fares sky rocketing as well as compulsory redundancies while their achievements are publicly denigrated and their standing insulted. It must be like living in a highly dysfunctional family headed by a raging schizophrenic.
All they can do in response is to deliberately fail to do their jobs to the Ministers’ satisfaction. The problem is the Minister thought that in the first place.
The Asylum Years
August 16th, 2012By Jeremy Sare, England.
In Britain’s colonial era there used to operate what was termed ‘Gunboat diplomacy’ which equated fairly closely to President ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt’s maxim of, “wave a big stick.”
It would appear such archaic bullying tactics are still within the armoury of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office in their “threat” to revoke the Ecuador’s London embassy’s sovereign status under the 1961 Vienna Convention. British authorities have been exploring every last legal option to arrest Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, who has been holed up their since June. Assange has already lost appeals in the British courts against extradition to Sweden to face police questioning (rather than charges) over alleged sexual assault.
But quite what the UK Government lawyers were thinking when they considered deploying the hardly known Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987 which would allow police officers to force entry into another country’s embassy, is hard to discern. The Act was drafted in response to the lawlessness and violence perpetrated within the Libyan People’s Bureau in 1984, culminating in the murder of police officer Yvonne Fletcher.
To equate Ecuador’s behaviour in assessing Assange’s legal case for asylum with Gaddafi’s hoodlums is, at least, stretching a point. Senior lawyer, Lord Carlisle, said such a move against diplomatic immunity would be, “Extremely inadvisable … we cannot set a precedent which could be replicated in other countries.”
In any event, there followed a predictably prickly response from Ecuadorian’s Foreign Minister, Ricardo Patino, who condemned the UK’s, “attack on Ecuador’s right to consider asylum … which threatened to plunge relations into the dark ages”.
It would appear Quito already had it in mind to grant asylum to Assange so such a provocative move by the British Government could only backfire. Extradition lawyer, Peter Binning, told Sky News the case for asylum was not legitimate as Assange was not charged with “a political crime”. But that appeared to be rather a one-eyed view. Ecuador granted asylum because it recognised Assange’s fear of political prosecution by a third state. The obvious inference why British authorities are being peculiarly studious about this particular case is the invisible hand of the Pentagon who would like to see Assange extradited to Sweden where diplomatically it would be easier to seek his removal to the U.S.
Any future application for extradition for a U.S. court hearing would need to be signed off by the UK as well as Sweden. According to Foreign Minister Patino, London, “showed no willingness to negotiate on that issue”. Neither would Swedish or U.S. diplomats be drawn on giving any view to the Ecuadorians on that point. As they already considered Assange’s fears as “legitimate” they were bound to offer him political asylum.
In the U.S. such is the institutional outrage and angry embarrassment at Wikileaks’ disclosure of thousands of classified U.S. defense and intelligence papers in 2010 that Assange would face a concerted legal effort to have him incarcerated for much of the remainder of his natural life. The unusually cruel treatment of his ‘accomplice’ Bradley Manning would be sufficient incentive for Assange to seek asylum any place he can get it. Manning’s lawyer claims he has been held in solitary in a cell 6ft by 8ft, compelled to stay awake for 17 hours a day and regularly forced to spend long periods naked.
However, British Foreign Secretary, William Hague, insisted, “It’s important to understand this is not about Mr. Assange’s activities at Wikileaks or the attitude of the U.S.”
Julian Assange’s ‘imprisonment’ in the comfortable surrounds of the Ecuatorian Embassy in London’s chic Knightsbridge will continue for the foreseeable future. The British are clear they will not allow “safe passage” for Assange to leave the country so he faces immediate arrest if he steps outside. Despite their sympathy with his plight, it would be most unlikely Ecuadorian diplomats would seek to smuggle him out through any of their channels. So for all the mass flurry of news cameras and chanting of protestors, Assange has actually neither moved an inch nearer extradition nor his freedom.
Let’s Make This a Fair Fight
August 14th, 2012By Jeremy Sare.
The perennial problem with public debates on drugs policy is that, in no time, the views of either side of reformers and prohibitionists become hugely misrepresented, to both their mutual fury.
These discussions are invariably highly polarised with hardly any, or usually no, middle ground being agreed upon. If it were a boxing match, both fighters would be called constantly by the referee for illegal throws.
Last Friday’s Newsnight (10 August) on BBC television was an even more extreme example of confrontation than usual about illegal drugs. The issue was abstinent recovery or controlled management of heroin addiction. The humour and original wit of actor and comedian Russell Brand as a protagonist saved it from being yet another of those thoroughly depressing encounters where one side wants a free for all and the other wants to imprison half of society.
Brand knows his material: he was for some years a fairly chaotic and committed addict who could consume heroin, crack and alcohol in substantial quantities. His forthcoming programme on BBC3 Russell Brand: From Addiction to Recovery, includes Brand sat in the comfort of the Savoy Hotel, London watching footage of himself, ten years earlier, smoking heroin.
Despite his career success in the UK and now in the U.S. he remained “jealous” of his former self. “It means nothing to me: the money, the power, the fame, the sex, the women. None of it. I would rather be a drug addict.” Such intense levels of addiction have led him to conclude abstinence is the only solution and that it is a huge mistake for the Government to provide methadone as a heroin substitute to 149,000 UK addicts.
I personally agreed with one of his guest experts, Dr. Clare Gerada, Chair of Royal Society for General Practitioners, that for many dependant on heroin, taking prescribed methadone is the best way to stop them overdosing and keeping their lives stable and away from crime.
But Brand’s adversary on Newsnight on Friday, Daily Mail columnist, Peter Hitchens took the harshest possible line when he declared addiction as simply a “crime”. In his blog he has already stated, contrary to decades of medical science that he, “doesn’t believe in addiction”. In Hitchens’ monochrome view of a complex social issue, the mere threat of imprisonment, effectively policed, would be sufficient to deter use. If it were only that simple, I think Governments would have tried that already. It would appear that people desperate enough to take heroin are not deeply troubled by the prospect of being arrested.
Brand treated Hitchens with good-humored contempt calling him, “like an unusual child” and his proposed solution to drug addiction was, “foghorn madness from bygone times”.
Hitchens was also promoting his new book, “The War We Never Fought” where he seeks to illustrate how drug use in UK has been de facto legalised. At a recent hearing of a Parliamentary committee, where Brand also gave evidence, he chose to illustrate the rise in use by referring to the number of arrests. This seemed odd if not perverse; you could hardly prove legalisation is a reality when a million people in UK have been arrested for drug offences in the last ten years. And more than that, addiction to opiates predates our drug laws by centuries so there was certainly a time when it was de jure not a “crime”.
Eventually the encounter produced more heat than light and more laughter than anything. In the middle of the fray was Conservative MP David Burrowes whose ideological influence on UK drug policy has been infuriating drug reformers. In the midst of the battle of outrageous statements and verbal counter punches, his controversial views sounded almost mild and reasonable in comparison.