Week 28 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

A prophetic blog reader!

            A fortnight ago I published in this blog an email received from a regular reader on the subject of the jihadist extremists in the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent and Africa.   It contained the following sentence:

The day surely cannot be far away when they succeed in overthrowing the government of a major country, or carve out a completely new country by annexing bits of other countries.

            Today it seems that that is happening.  The Isis invaders of Iraq and Syria have declared the areas that they have occupied to be a new Islamic Caliphate under their control in which ‘Sharia Law’ will be enforced.  The Shia Iraqi President desperately needs western help but apparently is not quite desperate enough to be prepared to widen his government to represent a truly united Iraqi nation.  That, he says, would be a negation of democracy – that word again.  It clearly means whatever its user wants it to mean!

            We have seen the inspiring spectacle of hundreds of young Iraqi Shia militia volunteers marching up and down with automatic rifles on their shoulders shouting words of defiance against the fighters of Isis.  I’m afraid they’ll discover that there’s a big difference between posturing at patriotic gatherings safe in the middle of Baghdad and actually facing a resolute enemy, with mortars and shells bursting all around you, comrades killed and wounded, and machine-gun fire sweeping the battlefield.

            I think it unlikely that 300 American troops can train an Iraqi army to a standard in which they can defeat those Isis fighters in the few weeks – or perhaps only days – available to them.  It would surely be disastrous for the UK or the USA to become more involved in this conflict than they already are. When we and the Americans withdrew our forces from Iraq after that disastrous and illegal invasion, I wrote in this blog that I thought it likely that within a few years Iraq would be divided into three separate states; an independent Kurdistan in the north, Shia Muslim with close ties to Iran in the south and a Sunni Muslim state in the centre.  It really took someone as ruthless as Saddam Hussein to hold those three opposing factions together.  Already there is virtually an independent Kurdistan in the north and it seems apparent that Sunni and Shia Muslims can’t and won’t live together in peace.  They’ll learn eventually (just as Protestant and Roman Catholic Christians in Europe eventually learned to live together) but we can’t, and shouldn’t try to, hasten the process by force of arms. 

            I wasn’t surprised to learn that very few members of this Isis Army that is trying to take over Syria and Iraq are actually either Syrians or Iraqis.  They are a hotchpotch of fanatics convinced that they’ve got God on their side, from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kosovo, Chechnia and, to our shame, from the United Kingdom and, no doubt, from wherever else there are Muslim communities with a few fervent jihadists or malcontents among them.

            But just as the members of Isis are from a number of different countries there is quite a surprising array of countries opposing them. I remember that when during World War II the Fascist government of Italy was overthrown and the Italians changed sides – we couldn’t bring ourselves to call them ‘allies’ – they were co-belligerents.  Perhaps we’ll have to use that expression again, though most of those concerned aren’t actually fighting yet.

            One that definitely is, is the army of President Assad in Syria.  We seem to have conveniently forgotten that Isis had its origins in Syria and was one of the groups that we were supporting in their efforts to topple President Assad.  The Syrian army is no doubt grateful that Isis has transferred its main attention to Iraq, but Isis definitely intends Syria to be part of its new Islamic Caliphate! 

Then, of course, there’s Iran.  It seems but yesterday that Iran was considered by ‘the west’ to be the centre of all evil in the Middle East.  'We' were quite sure they were  trying to make weapons of mass destruction (just as 'we' had been sure Saddam Hussein had been doing the same in Iraq!) and had to be stopped at all costs.  However Iran is now definitely keen to support Iraq’s Shia government against a Sunni invasion – and we’re welcoming that support.

Finally, Russia has supplied the Iraqi government with some second-hand jet fighter aircraft!   Who knows?  If Iraq has the trained pilots to fly them they could make the air strikes on Isis targets that Barak Obama is so reluctant to authorise, unnecessary.      

            What a muddle!  And most of it brought about by the interference of foreigners in the affairs of both Syria and Iraq.  I think it likely that if all those in Syria and Iraq who are not citizens of those benighted countries were to go home, the natives – those who haven’t yet either fled or been killed – would find a way of resolving their differences and living at peace with each other.

A footnote

Reviewing, in the Radio Times a tv programme about the 'Bay of Pigs' episode in 1961 that ended in total disaster, when the USA sponsored an armed attempt by Cuban exiles to invade Cuba and oust Fidel Castro, Gill Crawford quotes an unnamed US academic as saying: 'Every country has a right to figure out its own destiny......every time we intervene........we produce consequences that are ugly and resonate for generations'.

 If I may quote the Book of Common Prayer, I'd like every American President and every British Prime Minister, to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest, that quotation.

The Idol with Feet of  Clay!

            A recent story-line in Holby City  BBC 1’s popular hospital ‘soap’ related to a terminally ill man in his nineties who came into Holby City Hospital accompanied by his granddaughter in her late twenties or early thirties.  She obviously loved him dearly and was very proud of his Polish origins and of the fact that, after coming to England in the immediate aftermath of World War II he had worked in the Fire Service, saving the lives of others at the risk of his own.  He was brave, loving, kind and generous. He was admired, not only by his grand-daughter, but by all who knew him.

            Except - that research revealed that he wasn’t Polish at all but German, and as a young man during World War I he had been a member of Hitler’s dreaded Waffen SS.  He had been a guard at a concentration camp, where he had been feared by all for his cruelty and disregard for human life.  At the end of the war he had stolen the identity of a dead Polish prisoner, in whose name he had come to England and found work in the Fire Service.  Neither his English wife nor his grand-daughter had known anything of his Nazi past and that he was, in fact, a still-wanted war criminal.

            I felt something like the shock and horror and – in the first instance – disbelief, that the grand-daughter felt on learning of her well-loved grandfather’s past, when I realized that Rolf Harris, a tv personality for whom I had felt warm and sincere admiration, had for decades been an abuser of any personable young girl who had the misfortune to make his acquaintance.

            Somehow, although I was shocked at the endless string of offences of which Jimmy Savile is  said to have been guilty, I really didn’t feel the same about him.  My early 20^th century sensibilities had been suspicious of his hairstyle and his very professional showbizzy manner.  Although I watched several of his ‘Jim’ll fix it’ programmes  and had felt admiration at his apparent working as a hospital porter, I wasn’t all that surprised when he was revealed as having been a predatory paedophile.

            I really had been taken in by Rolf Harris though. He was just as much part of the ‘showbiz’ scene as Jimmy Savile but somehow he always managed to give the impression of being an extremely gifted amateur.  And he certainly was gifted, both as an artist (he wouldn’t have had the opportunity of painting the Queen had he not been) and as an entertainer.  He gave hours of innocent pleasure to thousands of viewers and listeners and, like Jimmy Saville, did a great deal of work for thoroughly deserving charities. He had even played a leading role in a film warning children of the danger of paedophiles!

            All of that though counts as nothing compared with the now-revealed activities that have led to his downfall and exposure as an abuser of young women and girls.  I feel desperately sad and sorry for Rolf Harris’ victims, and for the thousands who have seen their idol shattered. Was Rolf Harris' prison sentence too lenient?  I reckon that he found his very public shame and disgrace, after years of adulation, a harsher punishment than any number of years in prison.  There's a couple of lines from Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol that may come to his mind:

All that we know who lie in gaol is that the walls are strong,

And every day is like a year - a year whose days are long!

Supporting Clacton’s Tourist Industry

          It isn’t very often that I find myself eye to eye with our MP, Mr Douglas Carswell – a right-wing, climate-change-denying Europhobe; a Crypto-Ukipper if there ever was one!  However I am right behind him in his support of a campaign for the reduction of VAT payable on such tourist-specific items as accommodation in hotels, guest houses and caravan sites and on, for instance, the attractions on Clacton Pier, from the current 20 percent to 5 percent.               

            I believe that the Chancellor could recover the cost of this from income tax – perhaps by making all ‘state benefits’ (including the Attendance Allowance I get because of my very limited mobility!) subject to that tax.  It is the nature of income tax that no-one is ever asked for more than they can afford to pay, whereas VAT hits the poorest the hardest and the very richest the least because, of course, the VAT on any purchased goods or services is a much smaller proportion of the income of the wealthy purchaser.

            Clacton-on-Sea does not attract the very wealthy.  In fact it attracts precisely those whom the government claims to support – the hardworking man or woman who can just afford to take his or her family for a seaside holiday on Britain’s sunny east coast but for whom a few extra pounds one way or the other make all the difference. 

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Week 26 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

Middle East Maelstrom

          A recent email from a regular blog reader sums up the current situation relating to Islam and its neighbours in the Middle East, a considerable part of central Africa and the Indian sub-continent:

Well, I said the militant Islam thing was going to come to a head, and almost immediately the Pakistan Taliban come very close to capturing Karachi main airport, and ISIS are getting close to taking Baghdad. And still the Nigerian school girls haven't been returned.  The day surely cannot be far away when they succeed in overthrowing the government of a major country, or carve out a completely new country by annexing bits of other countries.  Would have been better to have left Saddam Hussain in Iraq, but I see Tony Blair is very sensitive to that obvious criticism and has tried to pre-empt it. Likewise, it is crystal clear the west should have given no support to those trying to overthrow Assad. These dictators may be bad and use their powers arbitrarily and brutally, but an ultra orthodox religious regime is ten times worse because it so deeply affects the lives of ordinary people; especially women, who make up 50% of the population and gays who make up 7%, and anyone else of a different religion, or of a more moderate version of Islam.

I couldn’t have put it better or more succinctly myself – though he’s missed out the second batch of schoolgirls who have been abducted by jihadist militants in Nigeria, or the massacres that have recently taken place there.  Nor did he mention the atrocities that have taken place after ISIS victories.  Perhaps, as a former POW, I am particularly affected by tv images of Iraqi soldiers being cold-bloodedly shot en masse by these ‘religious zealots’ after capture. In North Africa in 1941/’42 we on one side and the Germans and Italians on the other tried to kill each other – but we did all adhere to ‘the rules of war’.  Many years later, when my family and I were on holiday in Austria, we encountered a German family remarkably similar to ourselves.  We discovered that the father, like me, had been taken prisoner in Tobruk in 1942 – I, by Rommel in June, and he by ‘Monty’ in November!  Because, all those years ago, both sides had adhered to those rules, we had both survived to look each-other in the face and shake hands as friends.

I was fascinated by Tony Blair’ attempts to suggest that the current conflict has nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq into which he and George Bush lured us.   It is, so he says, the clear result of our failure to intervene in the Syrian Civil War. On which side does he think we should have intervened?  It is possible that, early in the conflict, many of the rebels did seek a more democratic Syria.  It has for some time though been clear that the current rebellion is led and dominated by Islamist zealots of the same breed as those who perpetrated 9/11, were responsible for the subsequent bomb outrages in London, who kidnapped those Nigerian teenagers, and who are now fighting their murderous way through Iraq.  Does Tony Blair really suggest that we should have helped them overthrow Hassad?

When David Cameron expresses concern about British radicalised Muslims returning from Syria to the UK after learning the terrorist arts he doesn’t, for one moment, imagine that they’ll have learned those arts from President Hassad’s supporters. Their teachers will have been those anti-Hassad activists that we have been supporting but, according to Tony Blair, not supporting strongly enough!

I suppose that one good thing that can be said to have come out of the present crisis is a more friendly relationship with Iran.  I heard a Conservative MP in the House of Commons warning the government that this might damage relations between ourselves and our present Middle East allies.  Could he possibly have been referring to such ‘allies’ as Saudi Arabia and Qatar?  These countries, to which we blithely sell arms, are the source of the jihadists bloodthirsty inspiration.  They are the patrons and supporters of Sunni Muslims as Iran is the inspiration, patron and supporter of the Shia.   I have little doubt that these wonderful Middle East allies of ours have been supplying the Syrian rebels with arms (probably some that we have sold them!) and funds to keep them going.  I wouldn’t wish to live either in Saudi Arabia or Iran but, if I were compelled to make a choice, I would certainly settle for Iran, as being the less restrictive and the lesser offender against what I (and I think, Messrs Cameron, Clegg and Miliband) regard as inalienable human rights.  But, of course, human rights are all very well - but business is business! And the manufacture and sale of the weapons of war (the instruments of death) is very big business indeed.

Now we, with the Americans as our ‘senior partners’, are considering intervention to halt the progress of ISIS and prevent the downfall of the present Iraqi government.  We’re not going to put troops on the ground, but we’ll possibly bomb ISIS troop concentrations and so on.  Unmanned ‘drones’ may be used to ‘take out’ some of the ISIS commanders and political leaders.   Inevitably, in doing so innocent civilians – men, women and children will be killed and maimed.  Whatever might be the conclusion of the current fighting it will certainly result with Middle Eastern Muslims – Sunni and Shia alike – uniting in their hatred of the western infidels who inflicted even more death and destruction on their benighted countries. History demonstrates that foreign intervention in civil conflicts always makes them bloodier and more protracted

Twenty-five years ago Christians were a tolerated minority in many Muslim majority countries though not, of course, in Saudi Arabia. In Iraq and Syria in particular there were thriving and long-established Christian Communities.  They set an example of tolerance in an increasingly intolerant world. Today, Christians have been a target of extremists in both those countries.  Christian lives are in daily danger throughout the Middle East and those who can get out have done so.  Our Christian faith is in danger of becoming extinct in the very area of the world in which it was born.

That is the true and lasting legacy of the policies of George W. Bush junior and Tony Blair.  I wonder if they’re proud of it?

Spoiling for a fight?

I have just been listening to an interview with the Secretary-General of NATO about Iraq and the state of the world generally. Perhaps we need reminding that NATO was created during the Cold War specifically to deal with the perceived military threat from the Soviet Union.  The United Kingdom is a member and, unlike our membership of the European Union, joining NATO was taken on quite arbitrarily by the government without any referendum or consultation with the British people.  It is now concerning itself with matters far beyond its original purpose.

The Afghan war for example, is now coming to a less-than-victorious end, after a decade long struggle.  It was a war in which, theoretically at least, NATO was attempting to combat jihadist terrorism at its source.  This was considered to be in Afghanistan, where Al Qaida was protected by the fundamentalist Taliban Government.  All that has happened is that Al Qaida has moved its bases elsewhere, what has been portrayed as ‘western aggression’ has gained recruits for the terrorists, and the Taliban remain undefeated. Meanwhile the conflict has cost the UK and, of course, the USA hundreds of lives and millions of pounds and dollars.  The best place to combat terrorism is in the western countries in which acts of terrorism are threatened or are taking place.  The only role that NATO should take is ensuring the dissemination of intelligence about terrorist groups, and experience of foiling their activities – a field in which, if official sources are to be believed, the UK has been very successful.

That however is not the way Anders Rasmussen. NATO’s Secretary General sees it.   In his Radio interview  he gave the impression of a man spoiling for a fight.  ISIS aggression against Iraq, he averred, was a threat to all of us – it was imperative that firm action be taken against them.  Fortunately for us all, American President Barak Obama (without whose OK, NATO certainly won’t act!) is a great deal more cautious.  He has reinforced the defence of the US Embassy in Baghdad and is sending 300 ‘advisers’ to help organise defence against ISIS but not to get directly involved in conflict.  He doesn’t rule out air strikes against carefully selected targets, but they are not to be taken for granted.  He does not want ‘mission creep’ dragging the USA deeper and deeper into the conflict. 

Mr Rasmussen hasn’t forgotten the Ukraine.  There’s Russia’s virtually bloodless ‘annexation’ of the Crimea, to the satisfaction of the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants! There’s the ‘provocation’ of military exercises near Ukraine’s borders, and Mr Rasmussen is sure that Russia is encouraging the armed separatists in Eastern Ukraine. I’d have thought that much more provocative were NATO’s naval exercises in the Baltic and Black Sea and the reinforcement of NATO troops in Poland and the Baltic states.  As for encouraging the armed separatists, we do know that they have asked Russia to send troops over the border to assist them – and that Russia has declined.  Russia has had more experience than any other country at opposing jihadist terrorism. They were fighting it in Afghanistan when we and the Americans were supporting the fathers and grandfathers of today's Taliban fighters. Instead of thinking up more and stronger sanctions – which affect us as much as they do them – we should be co-operating with them in combating this world-wide scourge.  Goodness knows, we were happy enough to co-operate with a much less amiable Russia to defeat Hitler and the Nazis.  But, of course, neither Mr Rasmussen nor any of the world’s statesmen are old enough to remember that!

Week 49 2011

Tendring Topics......on line

A Career in Local Government?

            There was a time when a ‘career in local government’ meant getting a job at the Town Hall when you left school, starting off as a junior clerk and studying in your spare time for a qualification appropriate to the department of the council employing you.  That was my intended career path.  In 1937, aged sixteen and armed with the London University School Leaving Certificate with Matriculation Exemption I obtained employment in Ipswich Corporation’s Public Health Department as a Junior Clerk/Student Sanitary Inspector. 

              I was to work in the general office for two years while, at evening classes, studying Typing, Shorthand and Building Construction and Drawing.  I would then be transferred to the Sanitary Inspectors Office and spend two years gaining practical experience while travelling up to London once or twice a week for theoretical training. I would then take the exam for the appropriate professional qualification and would apply for the post of Sanitary Inspector when there was a vacancy either in Ipswich or elsewhere.  The Council would lend me £100 (a pretty trivial sum today but far-from-trivial in 1937!) to cover my tuition fees and travelling expenses.                          

  

Myself as Housing Manager

    Thanks to Hitler my own career took a totally different direction.  I did my two years ‘hard labour’ in the Public Health Department General Office but in September 1939, when I was about to commence my practical training,  I was called up  with the Territorial Army and didn’t give another thought to public health for seven years!                                                                                         

And as freelance writer

Discharged from the army in 1946, I attended a special full-time course for Sanitary Inspectors at Battersea Polytechnic.  I passed the qualifying exam in 1947 and was first employed as a Sanitary Inspector (to be renamed Public Health Inspector), later as a Housing Manager and finally as a Public Relations Officer in the local government service, before taking early retirement at the age of 59 and spending the next twenty-three years (until I was 82!) pursuing a second successful career as a freelance writer.  A similar career path in local government was still available until the economic crisis and the savage cuts in public spending limited or closed altogether local authority training schemes.

            Today though, there is another way in which to make a living out of local government without all that tedious business of studying for paper qualifications and enduring years of drudgery while ‘gaining experience’. It’s the political path. 

            Essential qualifications are an easy smile, a ready tongue and allegiance to whichever political party you think has the best chance of gaining a majority at the local elections.  Firmly held political convictions are an optional extra (they can even be a disadvantage) but absolute loyalty to the leaders of the party you have chosen is a key to success, at least in the early stages of your career.

In my day elected councillors were unpaid.  They presented themselves for election because they had strong political views that they believed should be represented when local decisions were made, or simply because they had plenty of the sound common sense and the local knowledge that they felt was needed.  There was no question of personal gain, though they could claim reimbursement of travelling and other necessary expenses and loss of earnings.   Councils made their decisions after considering the recommendations of committees comprising members of all political parties and those who had no political allegiance.

            Nowadays councillors are paid just for turning up at meetings of the full council.  The pay varies but Tendring District councillors get paid a basic £4,983 a year; not enough to live on but a useful addition to the income from ‘the day job’.   That could be just the beginning.  The old ‘committee’ system that I remember has been abolished at the insistence of central government.  Each council now has its ‘cabinet’ of a handful of members of the majority party. These consider all the issues coming before the Council.  Their recommendations can, of course, be amended or rejected by the full Council but – since the party that rules in the cabinet has a majority in the council chamber – they are usually accepted without too much trouble. 

           

            In Tendring, most cabinet members receive a special annual allowance of £10,738 on top of their £4,983.   That, for some people, would constitute a living wage – but it need not be the end of the line.  The Council’s political ‘leader’ gets additional allowances and there is no reason why a member of the district council should not aspire to being a county councillor at the same time – and county councillors, county cabinet members and their leader receive higher allowances!  It isn’t quite true to say that ‘the sky’s the limit’ for the aspiring local politician – but the limit is certainly well up in the clouds!

           

Turkeys voting for Christmas?

          The ‘cabinet’ system of local administration combined with the government’s demand that local authorities cut their expenditure, has produced a situation within Tendring District Council’s Council Chamber which an opposition councillor described as comparable with ‘inviting turkeys to vote for Christmas’.

 

            Tendring Council’s services had been organised in ‘departments’ with a portfolio holder (one of the ten members of the ‘cabinet’) presiding over each.   In September a money-saving internal reorganisation cut the number of departments to five.  At the last meeting of the full council, Labour councillor Ivan Henderson called for the number of cabinet members to be reduced to reflect the new structure, thus saving the council approximately another £40,000 a year.

          This seems an entirely reasonable idea and the Council could have debated it and voted on it immediately.  However the Council Chairman, needless to say a member of the ruling party, decided that the motion should be sent to the cabinet for consideration.   That puts off the final decision at least till the next meeting of the full council, which won’t be till February next year!   Ivan Henderson has calculated that the extra cost of four redundant cabinet members between September (when the number of departments was halved) and February, will amount to £20,000.

In any event what is the cabinet’s recommendation likely to be?  Will the four members who could be made redundant vote to be deprived of over £5,000 each – and will the other members of the cabinet vote for the dismissal of their colleagues?  I wouldn’t bet on it.  Council leader Neil Stock is reported as saying, ‘I am planning to reduce the size of the cabinet, but it will be done in a calm and rational way when we have seen how the departments are working’.   If it is just the Council’s political leader who makes decisions of this kind, perhaps we could dispense with the whole of the rest of the ‘cabinet’.  Now that would produce a worth-while saving!

On a lighter note

The news news that two giant pandas from China have been loaned to Edinburgh zoo reminded me of happier days when my wife Heather and I used to write verses each week to amuse our grandchildren.  You can guess how long ago it was from the fact that those grandchildren are now in their late twenties and early thirties!  One of our early efforts was The Giant Panda.  If you have young children or grandchildren it may amuse them too.   Here is a photo of Heather with granddaughter Josie and, below it, The Giant Panda

The Giant Panda used to fight with every animal in sight.

He now looks like a cuddly toy, but once he was a bully boy.

He’d quarrel with the wolves and bears, and challenge tigers in their lairs –

And then he’d settle down to munch someone else’s stolen lunch!

One day he teased a kangaroo, (a very foolish thing to do).

After they’d fought for half a day, the Giant Panda ran away!

And now you’ll find he always hides on lonely, wooded mountain-sides.

His only food is now bamboo (It’s tasteless, tough and hard to chew)

And it will come as no surprise to find that he has two black eyes!

          The Future of Afghanistan – and the Middle East

          Last week an international conference on the future of Afghanistan was held without two voices that are likely to have an important – possibly decisive – influence on that country’s future.  One was Pakistan, boycotting the conference after being understandably outraged at an attack by United States’ forces on one of their border posts that resulted in the killing of a score of Pakistani soldiers. Did they over-react?   Hardly; imagine the outrage there would be in the USA if a score of their soldiers had been killed by Pakistani, or British – or any other – allied armed force. An apology, however abject, and condolences, would not have sufficed.  Believe me, the wives, mothers and girlfriends of Pakistani soldiers killed by ‘friendly fire’ mourn every bit as deeply as would wives, mothers and girlfriends in New York State, Ohio, or California under similar circumstances.

            The other ‘absent voice’ at the Conference was that of the Taliban.  They know perfectly well what they want and are convinced that, in the fullness of time, they will get it.  They are not prepared to compromise, so there was really nothing for them to discuss.   Nothing emerged from that conference that persuaded me to modify my conviction that within months of the departure of the last NATO soldier, the Taliban will be back in control – and may Heaven help those Afghan who had thrown in their lot with the NATO forces!

            Elsewhere it seems that there is little possibility of liberal and tolerant forces emerging triumphantly from the Egyptian general election or from the current post-Gaddafi turmoil in Libya. It is easy to overestimate the attraction of free speech and of liberal, parliamentary democracy as we know it in Europe, to people who have never known anything but autocratic government. In both North African countries it is likely that Islamic political parties will triumph and that they will be unable to curb the activities of jihadist extremists.  This would be bad news for members of Egypt’s nearly 2,000 year old Coptic Christian Church, just as the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime proved to be bad news for Iraqi Christians. Even in ‘friendly and democratic’ Pakistan, Christians come regularly under attack and a woman is currently in prison facing the death penalty for allegedly committing the heinous crime of converting from Islam to the Christian faith.

            Meanwhile ‘the West’ is becoming ever more threatening to Syria, torn by what has developed into a civil war, and to Iran because of its alleged nuclear weapon programme.   I pray daily and with all my heart that the UK will not be dragged into yet another military adventure in the Middle East by that wonderful ‘special relationship’ with the USA!  You think this would be impossible in our current financial situation?  Don’t you believe it.  We may not be able to afford proper pensions, homes for the homeless and generous help for the poor, the sick and the disabled – but governments can always find a few billion pounds for a small war, especially if they can be persuaded – as they were in 1914 and again in 1939, not to mention Afghanistan in 2001 – that, ‘It’ll be all over in a few months!’