Week 32 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

Nick Clegg

          Do you remember the televised debates of the Party leaders prior to our last parliamentary General Election?  I don’t usually listen to politicians sounding off – but I did watch those debates, and thought that I learned from them. 

 I had for many years considered myself to be an internationalist and a democratic socialist. More recently though I had come to the conclusion that the most important task any new British government needed to undertake was the reduction of the yawning gap between the incomes of country’s wealthiest and poorest citizens. I had been impressed by The Spirit Level by Quakers Kate Picket and Richard Wilkinson which demonstrated that reducing that gap benefited the whole community and not just the poor. I had become a modest supporter of the Equality Trust* and had come to realize that public ownership of the means of manufacture and distribution (whether by local or national government) was only one of the means by which greater economic justice could be secured.  .

During the decade of New Labour rule the gap between the incomes of the rich and poor had actually widened!  Lord Mandelson, a creator of New Labour had publicly declared that he had no problem with billionaires.  Well, I believe that while there are families that are homeless, ill-clad, and don’t know where the next meal is coming from, he should have a problem with them! 

Despite being well into my eighties at the time of the last election I was one of those ‘floating voters’ that politicians are eager to persuade. I intended to vote for the candidate of the Party most likely at least to attempt to reduce that ever-widening gap.

           I have to confess it.  I was taken in by Nick Clegg.  He I thought was the most inspiring of the three speakers, and the one with the most radical ideas.  He appeared to have a ‘fire within’ that reminded me of some of the early twentieth century Labour Movement pioneers  Because of this, for the first time in my life, his party received my vote and although with our system of voting it would have made no difference which way I voted, I have since deeply regretted it.

            Tony Blair, although he abandoned many of the purposes for which the Labour Party was created, did at least win elections for his New Labour.  Nick Clegg didn’t.  His party did quite well – but not well enough.  He went into an unequal coalition with the Conservatives and began to drop the principles on which he had been elected.  I had hoped that he might work towards a more equal society.  He supported the new Chancellor’s early gift to the super-rich, the reduction of the highest rate of income tax, thus benefiting those with a taxable income in excess of £150,000 a year – while beginning an austerity programme that particularly affected the poor and disadvantaged!  In his election campaign he had tried for the student vote – promising not to raise tuition fees.  In coalition this was one of the first promises that he abandoned.

            He would no doubt claim that by membership of the coalition he had been able to modify his Conservative partners more objectionable policies in a way that would have been impossible had he been in opposition.  In the world of British politics today, I don’t believe that that is true.  When a government doesn’t command the majority of votes in the House of Commons a determined opposition party can support the government on matters about which they agree or at least find acceptable, and join (or threaten to join) with other parties to defeat legislation that they find unacceptable.  Thus, in modifying the policies of a ‘minority’ government  a determined opposition party can exert more effective influence than a coalition partner.

            Nigel Farage’s UKIP has an increased representation in the European Parliament - where the Ukippers revealed themselves as an ill-mannered rabble, insulting their fellow parliamentarians by ostentatiously turning their backs on the European Anthem!. In the European and local government elections UKIP have shown themselves capable of appealing to the xenophobia, greed and fear of a great many electors and of taking votes, particularly from Conservative candidates.  They haven’t yet any Westminster MPs and they haven’t gained control of any local authority, but they have gained many Council Chamber seats and, again and again, have driven representatives of the Conservative, Lib.Dem. and Labour parties into ‘third place’ in the polls.

            Anybody surveying the UK political scene today can see that it is the Ukippers rather than the Lib.Dems. who pose the greater threat to an overall  Conservative Majority at next year’s General Election. Ukippers themselves are becoming increasingly confident.  I have always regarded our own Conservative MP Douglas Carswell as a Crypto-Ukipper.  He has the essential qualification of acute Europhobia and has even been singled out for praise by Nigel Farage.  Yet UKIP has selected a candidate to oppose him in the forthcoming General Election.  That candidate probably won't win – but he could take enough Conservative votes to ensure that Douglas Carswell doesn’t win either.  It isn’t surprising that David Cameron is much more concerned with out-flanking Nigel Farage with ever-more Europhobic measures to halt the flow of EU visitors and immigrants, than he is with the concerns of his own Lib.Dem. ‘deputy’.

   I think it likely that Nick Clegg will be remembered in history as the man who finally destroyed the once-great Liberal Party.

*For further information about the Equality Trust and ‘The Spirit Level’ contact www.equalitytrust.org.uk or Equality Trust, 18 Victoria Park Square, London E2 9PF   Email – info@equalitytrust.org.uk

The Slaughter of the Innocents!

          Last week the CIA announced that it had found no evidence of Russia being directly involved in the destruction of that Malaysian air liner.  That, I am sure, was not what their political bosses had wanted them to report and I am equally sure that, had the Russians been directly involved, the CIA would have found evidence of it.

            On 28th July,  a spokesman for the Kiev Ukrainian Government declared that the aircraft’s ‘black boxes’ had revealed that the air liner had been destroyed by a ground-to-air missile as had been surmised.  That was surely extraordinary.  We had been told that the ‘black boxes’ had been handed over intact by the pro-Russian insurgents to representatives of the Malaysian Airline and that they were being sent to the UK to be opened and have their contents analysed.  How, I wonder, did those boxes fall into the hands of the Kiev government and had they tampered with them in any way?

It was a fortnight before international inspectors were able to secure the site of the crash and begin to make a proper inspection of the remains of the plane and even now their situation is far from safe and secure.  This has not been because of lack of co-operation from the insurgent authorities (they, after all, found and secured the ‘black boxes’ and handed them over untouched to the Malaysian air line). The reason the inspectors can't get on with their work is continued shelling by the artillery of the Kiev Government and the refusal of that government’s forces to cease their attacks while inspection is going on. 

In fact, we still don’t know for certain how that air disaster took place.  We don’t know if it was shot down by a missile and, if it was, who fired that missile, why they fired it and from where.   This hasn’t prevented the leaders of the EU from deciding that it was all the result of Russia’s support of the Ukrainian rebels – and they have imposed a further set of economic and political sanctions on Russia.  Meanwhile, NATO is holding a series of naval exercises in the Baltic Sea and the UK is sending troops to take part in military exercises in Poland. Both actions are surely quite uncalled for and dangerously provocative.  Can we really have already forgotten the horrors of the two twentieth century world wars?  The few of us who still remember World War II certainly haven’t.

Meanwhile in the ‘Holy Land', Israel is conducting a bloody and destructive campaign in Gaza which has so far resulted in the deaths of nearly 2,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians and many of them women and children. A fragile temporary cease-fire lasted only a matter of hours and the Israeli Prime Minister has suggested that the campaign may go on for much longer. Yes, they have been provoked.  HAMAS too bears some responsibility for the slaughter – but the Israeli response has been and is totally disproportionate.  The situation is made worse by the fact that Israel exerts a tight blockade on Gaza which means that the unfortunate victims haven’t even the choice of fleeing their country and becoming refugees. Twice at least, Israeli forces have bombed or shelled United Nations buildings in which hapless civilians have sought safety.  ISIS, Al Qaeda and the like must be delighted by the extra recruits that the situation is producing!

Why is there not even talk of sanctions and dire ‘consequences’ for Israel and those who support her and supply her with the weapons of death?  Israel is responsible for many more deaths and much more destruction than those east Ukrainian insurgents.  Are the lives of Middle Eastern women and children less sacred than those of European countries?  Or is it, as I suggested in this blog a fortnight ago: It’s not what is done, it’s who it is does it, that really matters?  How much more strident and belligerent the voices from 'the west' would have been if only it were the 'Russians’ who were slaughtering innocent women and children in Gaza! 

Week 30 2014

Tendring Topics………on Line

The Day of the Assassin

            I think that I may have referred before in this blog to the story that at the very beginning of the Battle of Waterloo a gunner officer reported to the Duke of Wellington that Napoleon himself was squarely in the sights of one of his cannon.  ‘Should he open fire?’ ‘Certainly not!’ the Duke is said to have replied, ‘We’re soldiers, not assassins’.  Yet if that cannon had been fired and had hit its target, thousands of lives would possibly have been saved.  Without its charismatic leader the French Army would surely have crumbled and the Battle of Waterloo would have been won and lost before it had even started.  Perhaps – but no-one can be quite sure of that.  The final effect of acts of violence is rarely predictable.

            Who for instance, in 1914 would have imagined that an assassin’s bullet fired in Sarajevo would trigger the activation of a series of alliances that would lead to the mass slaughter of World War I?  In the 19^th Century a Russian aristocrat declared that the Russian system of government was autocracy tempered by assassination. American President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.  So was John F. Kennedy, one of his successors. Not one of those assassinations made any progress towards the end for which the perpetrator had hoped.  In her autobiography Hons and Rebels Jessica Mitford expresses regret that she didn’t seize her opportunity to assassinate Hitler – her sister Unity was in love with him and her father, the Earl of Redesdale, was a pre-war sympathiser.   It wouldn’t have been too difficult to have contrived a meeting.  Perhaps in the late 1930s the assassination of Hitler would have changed the course of history.  But there would have been others eager to step into his shoes.  No-one can be sure of what would have happened.  When in 1944 an attempt was made on Hitler’s life, the attempt failed and scores of suspects were cruelly executed or, as in the case of folk-hero Field-Marshal Irwin Rommel, forced to commit suicide.

            Do governments arrange assassinations of those they consider to be their enemies? Until recently they have always denied it but, if there is any truth at all in the popular James Bond novels, during the ‘cold war’ both the Soviet Union and ‘the West’ did assassinate or attempt to assassinate individuals among their opponents.

            In recent years though, the US government at least has admitted – declared triumphantly in fact – that it has used and is using a form of assassination to eliminate known terrorists and terrorist leaders. Unmanned, but lethally armed drones – robotic pilotless and crew-less aircraft – can be directed from a control room thousands of miles away to hit a human target.  It’s true, of course, that as well as ‘taking out’ their intended target they may also accidentally kill a few innocent civilians standing nearby but that’s just unavoidable collateral damage.  Drones offer a means of assassination without risk to the assassin, who is sitting safely in a control room far from the scene of action..

            During World War I battle-weary soldiers in the trenches would say fatalistically that if a bullet’s got your number on it (or a shell has your name on it) it’ll get you, no matter what you do.  The number was, of course, the army number engraved on the identity discs that every soldier wore round his neck. It is a number that, so it is said, is never forgotten. That may well be true.  It’s nearly 70 years since I marched out of the army into ‘civvy street’ but, although I’ve forgotten most other things, I have never forgotten my army number – 912411, or my POW identity number 229456!  The ‘shell’ would, of course, have had room on it for several names!

      
                That, of course, was nonsense. It does seem possible though that assassins of the future may, in effect, be able to put the identity of their victim on their bullets and fire their weapons with a certainty that they’ll find their target!  A US military agency has conducted its first successful tests of guided bullets which can track a target regardless of external factors or even where the sniper rifle is aimed. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an arm of the Department of Defence, is developing a smart .50-calibre bullet which can hit a moving target, rather like a guided missile.   The agency, which researches new technologies for use by the US military, announced its fruitful trials with a YouTube video demonstrating the in-flight guidance of the bullets.

It is being developed as part of the organisation’s Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO) project, a programme tasked with improving “sniper effectiveness and troop safety” and to “revolutionise rifle accuracy and range by developing the first ever guided small-calibre bullet,” the government department says.  The bullets have fins and on-board computers to direct them towards laser-marked targets as far away as 1.2 miles.  The work is being carried out by a subsidiary of Maryland-based private defence firm Lockheed Martin and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging.   In 2010 Teledyn received $25.5 million in funding from the US government.

      
        I suppose that I ought to be pleased at a development that should reduce the ‘collateral damage’ of the slaughter of the innocent when a government has decided, without any pretence of a trial, that some individual is an ‘enemy of the state’ and have ordered their assassins to ‘take him out’.  It saddens me though, to see so much effort, intelligence and money devoted to finding more efficient means of killing our fellow humans.   If only the same amount of effort and finance could be devoted to the prevention of war and conflict!

‘A plague on both your houses!’

            So said the dying Mercutio, of the Montagues and Capulets in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  I sometimes feel much the same about the one-sided struggle that is going on between the Israelis and the residents of Gaza.

It is one-sided because the Israelis have overwhelming fire power, a disciplined and well equipped army, navy and air force at their disposal and the knowledge that, no matter how blatantly they ignore the pleas and injunctions of the United Nations, the USA will always support them.  Their missiles, their air raids, their bombardments from the sea, and now the invasion of their army, are reducing the towns of Gaza to rubble and the land to shell-scarred desert.  The toll of the dead – men, women and little children – rises daily.

Instinctively, I think, we support the underdog and the Palestinians clearly are the underdogs.  I am sure that the tragic civilian population of Gaza do need and deserve our support but I am beginning to think that they need protection from their own HAMAS government as well as from the Israelis.

It is clear to me that the present Israeli offensive is a violent and disproportionate response to continual rocket attacks from HAMAS.  If the constant hail of rockets towards Israeli targets ceased, the Israeli bombardment would cease too.  This wouldn’t solve all Gaza’s problems but it would put a halt to the daily toll of civilian deaths.  That would surely be a start.

HAMAS knows this but persists with its futile rocket attacks.  Militarily they are a total failure.  Something like half the rockets are intercepted by the Israeli defences and the rest, for the most part, explode harmlessly.  They are not, in any case, properly targeted.  The sole Israeli civilian casualty in the current flare-up was killed by an ‘old fashioned’ mortar bomb.  I reckon that the ordinary Israeli civilian going about his daily business, is more likely to be killed in a traffic accident than by being struck by a rocket from Gaza!      

Why then, does HAMAS persist in firing them on Israel?  The only explanation that occurs to me is that those deciding HAMAS policy are jihadist fanatics of the same nature as those who are ravaging parts of Syria and Iraq, are kidnapping schoolgirls and murdering Christians and anyone who does not subscribe to their own perversion of Islam, in Nigeria.  They provoke the Israelis into violent, disproportionate – and all too effective – reprisals because they know that Israeli slaughter of the innocent will persuade angry young Muslims round the world to enlist in or support ISIS, Al Qaeda or whatever local jihadist movement exists in their area, and will swing world-wide public opinion to their support.

They’re no doubt sorry about the civilians, women and children who die in the Israeli onslaughts but can console themselves with the thought that, as Muslim martyrs, they’ll go straight to Heaven – as, so they believe, will those who provide the Israelis with an excuse for their murderous reprisals.  Those who hope to bring peace and security to Israel and peace and justice to the Palestinians, must cast away the conviction that because one side in the dispute is clearly in the wrong – their opponents must be ‘in the right and deserving of our support’.  Both sides need to cast aside thoughts of vengeance, of exacting ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’, and heed the message of the local boy who, as an adult, taught that we should love our enemies, bless those who curse us, and do good to those who seek to do us evil.

It’s about the only option that hasn’t yet been tried!

That Airliner

Like everyone else, I am appalled at the loss of that Malaysian Air Liner and all its passengers and crew.  I think though that I'll wait till a little more is known before deciding who was to blame. One thing that is quite certain (unless it was the work of a jiihadist suicide bomber) is that it was an accident.  Not one of the groups involved, not the Ukrainian separatist rebels, not the Kiev government, nor the Russians, could possibly have intended to destroy a airliner loaded with passengers.

The separatist rebels and/or the Russians are being blamed - and they may well be guilty of an appalling misjudgement.  The rebels had succeeded in bringing down lower flying Kiev government military aircraft and may possibly have imagined that that government was sending in a high altitude bomber to attack them.

I don't understand the current furore about the international inspectors being denied access to the crash site.  I have seen on tv pictures of lots of foreign (to the Ukraine) press and tv folk examining and taking pictures of the site.  Why can't those international inspectors get there?  Could it possibly be that it's because they insist on coming via Kiev and the Kiev Government - despite the crisis - continues to shell rebel-held towns and villages?

The site has been unsecured?  Reports say that the airliner's wreckage is strewn over a corridor a mile wide and several miles long.  Securing that, in the middle of a civil war, would surely be an impossible task.  The rebels are in possession of the 'black box''?   We should surely be pleased that it has been removed from the site and is, presumably, being kept safely. It will be time to protest when the separatist rebels decline to hand it over.

Already 'the west' has passed judgement and is busily deciding what extra sanctions it will impose on Russia.  In the meantime Israel has invaded Gaza and the civilian casualties - men, women and little children already outnumber those on the airliner.   The 'west's reaction' - they've asked for a cease-fire!

Years ago, there was a popular song; 'It ain't what you do - it's the way that you do it'.  Perhaps nowadays that should be changed to, It ain't what's done - it's who it is does it!.  

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