Spiked

I've just been looking at an online magazine that I thought might be of interest to other impdecers.

It's called Spiked and describes itself thusly:

Spiked is an independent online phenomenon dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms. spiked is endorsed by free-thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, and hated by the narrow-minded such as Torquemada and Stalin. Or it would be, if they were lucky enough to be around to read it.

I can't vouch for all its contents - I've glanced at a couple of articles on Free Speech that I quite liked the look of - but I think it's worth checking out. As I understand it, spiked is a descendant of Living Marxism, its founders being former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, who have since metamorphosed into pro-corporate libertarians. (They seem to oppose a lot of the conventional wisdom on climate change, which at the very least suggests they are willing to march to the beat of their own drum. Or more specifically, that they'd like to march up and down on George Monbiot.) Frank Furedi is one of their regulars.

On a personal note, I like them because they oppose the band on junk food advertising to kids. (It's a TV thing.)

Anyhoo, see what you think.

Irwin Stelzer on immigration

Irwin Stelzer's answer to the immigration dilema:

'The solution to all these problems lies in a four-phase policy. First, limit those allowed in to those most likely to enrich the nation. Secondly, allocate the available places to those who will be the largest net contributors to British economic life. Thirdly, require the beneficiaries of immigration to share their gains with those who bear the costs. Fourthly, bar immigration from countries noted for producing terrorists.'

But wouldn't that include the UK? The 7/7 bombers were British citizens after all. Is Stelzer suggesting baring British imigrants from other countries too?

Lets talk about Tax

There's been a lot of nonsense in the press about the recent Tax proposals recommended by a Tory Party policy group. The Times reports that if all the proposed cuts where implemented they would amount to £21 Billion in tax cuts.

The thing is that isn't a lot of money.

I know that sounds insane, how can £21 Billion not be a lot of money? Well for a start and just to be absolutely clear it wouldn't mean cutting public spending. I repeat, it wouldn't mean cutting public spending. The £21 Billion would imply slowing the growth of public spending (i.e public spending would grow by about 1.2% a year compared to the 1.7% Gordon Brown is pencilling). Secondly, and I think this is more important, this is really taking off only about 1.5% of GDP. To put it another way, the Tax burden is set to rise further under the current Government, so if it evolves as the Treasury expects and the Tories won the election and implemented all of these proposals they would be slashing the tax burden back to the level of ... 2005/2006. Hardly radical.

Matthew Parris vs the Neo Cons

Matthew Parris in The Saturday Times attacks the Neo Cons. He argues that the excuse that the strategy was awful won't wash. The vision was fatally flawed from the beginning.

'It is no small thing to find oneself on the wrong side of an argument when the debate is about the biggest disaster in British foreign policy since Suez; no small thing to have handed Iran a final, undreamt-of victory in an Iran-Iraq war that we thought had ended in the 1980s; no small thing to have lost Britain her credit in half the world; no small thing — in the name of Atlanticism — to have shackled our own good name to a doomed US presidency and crazed foreign-policy adventure that the next political generation in America will remember only with an embarrassed shudder.

[...]

Our British neocons have invested heavily in this ill-fated craft, and the wreck is total. How shall they be saved? Never fear. They’ve been working on the elements of a rescue plan. By Christmas all will be singing from the same sheet. All together, now, warrior-columnists and soon-to-be-former Cabinet ministers: one, two three . . .

“The principle was good but the Americans screwed up the execution.”

[...]

Funny, because I don’t quite recall most of you saying it at the time — some of you wrote columns and some of you delivered speeches declaring that Iraq was making giant strides; most of you blamed the difficulties on “Saddam loyalists and foreign fighters”, and some of you actually visited and returned rejoicing at the progress — but let’s overlook that. Let’s for the sake of argument grant that you worried from the start that the US just didn’t have the hang of this nation-building business. Now, you declare, we know that’s the reason the whole strategy hit the rocks.

Crap. The strategy failed because of one big, bad idea at its very root. Your idea that we kick the door in. Everything has flowed from that.

We were not invited. We had no mandate. There were no “good” Iraqis to hand over to. We had nothing to latch on to, no legitimacy. It wasn’t a question of being tactful, respectful, munificent, or handing sweets to children. We were impostors, and that is all.'

Well, I don't consider myself a Neo-Con but I must admit I did think some good might have come out of the invasion. Now, well I'm not so sure. I also believe the strategy was flawed and far too naive about the challenge of establishing a functioning democracy. I still think that. Parris dismisses the suggestion that there weren't enough troops saying that more than 100,000 troops is hardly derisory as a military presence but historically it really isn't many soldiers. As Naill Ferguson writes in the Telegraph 'The number of troops currently in Iraq is less than 140,000. That's roughly as many soldiers as Britain sent to the same country to defeat an insurgency in 1920 — at a time when the population of Iraq was a tenth of what it is today.'

Parris is right about one thing though, things don't look good for Neo-Cons. Both the UK and the US have made signals that they will be looking to start handing over sooner rather than later. The US Iraq Study Group, headed by Republican grandee James Baker, is recommending the US military withdraws to bases outside Iraq and seeks Iranian and Syrian help. And if the Democrats win both House and Senate (which is a possibility, partly due to the growing unpopularity of the war) the US will attempt to get out of Iraq even quicker.

Should Britain separate Church and State?

An excellent long article from the estimable Bryan Appleyard.

Is it time to take God out of the state?
The Sunday Times
October 22, 2006
Bryan Appleyard

Faith groups are increasingly demanding new rights or complaining of being wronged. Some say the time has come for Britain to create a clear divide between state and religion. Are they right?

Detainee Rights

I've blogged quite a bit about the erosion of our civil liberties by the UK government in Labour's Authoritaranism. Well, if Gordon Brown's recent promise to push for 90 day detention is anything to go by these erosions look set to continue apace. With all this in mind, I found this article comparing detainee rights in Israel with America particularly interesting. The article suggests that Israel, which is under constant terrorist threat appears to operate with a greater deference to human rights standards than the USA.

[...]

BEFORE ENACTING the ``Detainee Bill " (otherwise known as the Military Commissions Act) two weeks ago, Congress should have spent more time learning from the Israeli experience. Compared with Israel's security measures during a long and difficult experience with terrorism, the US Congress has gone too far in its willingness to compromise human rights and civil liberties. Security considerations, as legitimate and forceful as they are, do not justify such excessive measures, as the Israeli practice demonstrates.

[...]

The article compares the US Military Commissions Act and the Unlawful Combatants Law passed by the Knesset in 2002. Read it here.


(via TNR's blog The Spine)

Old fashioned British Multiculturalism

(courtesy of Mark Steyn)

'In a culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of “suttee” — the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural: “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

India today is better off without suttee. If you don’t agree with that, if you think that’s just dead-white-male Eurocentrism, fine. But I don’t think you really believe that. Non-judgmental multiculturalism is an obvious fraud, and was subliminally accepted on that basis . . . . But if you think that suttee is just an example of the rich, vibrant tapestry of indigenous cultures, you ought to consider what your pleasant suburb would be like if 25, 30, 48 percent of the people around you really believed in it too. Multiculturalism was conceived by the Western elites not to celebrate all cultures but to deny their own: it is, thus, the real suicide bomb ..'

Iraqi Bloggers on the War

13 Iraqi bloggers were asked the question 'Do you think the War was worth it or not?' Their answers are a must read for anyone interested in what Iraqis really think about the War.

Here are just two of the responses given to that question:

'Yes. The war was totally worth it. Why? Because I now decide what I want to do with my life, not the dictator'

and

"It was worth it from the side.. that we are over with Saddam dictatorship..(even though the situation now is incomparable with the situation when Saddam was is power.. it was way better)..and its not worth it from the side that we lost our safety.. now criminals, gangsters and kidnappers.. roam in the streets.. do whatever they want.. and there is no law to stop them.. as well as for the Islamic militias.'

Read the whole thing here.

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is one of my favourite science writers right now, and he has been mentioned in the blog before, for example:

A Natural History of Jewish Intelligence

Top Public Intellectuals

and

Labour's Authoritarianism

I just read about a debate, encompassing the political, philosophical and the scientific, between Pinker and George Lakoff, a rival linguistics professor, who wrote an anti-Republican book Freedom?: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea, which Pinker castigated in a review. Lakoff fought back, and you can follow the intellectual ding-dong in the links below.

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Pinker's actual review (scroll down a bit)

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Lakoff's response: Defending Freedom

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Some blog comments:

Pinker v. Lakoff
ScienceBlogs.com
October 7, 2006

George Lakoff has published two new political books, Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea, and Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision, as follow ups to his Moral Politics and Don't Think of an Elephant. Steven Pinker's review of Whose Freedom? in the New Republic has sparked a reply from Lakoff, and a debate is born.

I don't really know where to start on this. Lakoff's reply is one of the most intellectually dishonest pieces of writing I've seen from a cognitive scientist, and if anyone other than Lakoff had written it, I'd probably just ignore it. But Lakoff is not only famous, he's influential, and more than a few liberal bloggers take him seriously. So I feel compelled to say something. I guess the best way to go about this is to detail their disagreements, and show where Lakoff sinks to all new lows in defense of his position.

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Fight! Fight! Pinker vs. Lakoff

Parenting

A placeholder for "parenting" discussions (obviously). Since I'm not a parent, I'll defer to impdecers who are!

What do those parents think of this? One of the interviewees, Annette Mountford of the charity Family Links, thinks that a parent should never call a child 'naughty', as it's bad for the child's self-confidence.

BBC Radio 4
Today Program
16/10/06

0837 Should we call our children naughty?

Listen | Permalink

At last, some weapons found!

Andy alerted me to this:

A large cache of bombs, chemicals and rocket launchers has been found in two houses in North West England. Both houses were owned by men with links to an extremist group... but it's not an Islamist one.

Read the story here and here.

Comment from bloggers here and here, pondering why the story hasn't had more coverage.

You Al Qud'nt Make it Up

Alright, it is a VERY weak pun, but the story (I think) is serious.

Please follow the link below to Harry's Place and read more about Al Quds day, what it commemorates, who's speaking and so on. The nice people at HP are thinking that it might be worth organising a counter demo (like German anti-fascists have successfully done) but acknowledge that they've probably left it a bit late this year.

Anyway, please read all about it here:

http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2006/10/11/against_al_quds_day.php

The BBC - where facts are expensive and comments run far too free

Nick Cohen on the BBC:

Although it is impossible to generalise about such a vast organisation, the bias charge has enough truth in it to stick. If you doubt me, research one opinion outside the liberal consensus. Read up on the arguments for making Britain a fairer country by giving trade unionists more rights, for instance, or saying that abortion is murder or that Tony Blair’s foreign policy is correct in its essentials.

You don’t have to believe it, you just have to convince yourself that serious people can hold it for good reasons. You will then notice something disconcerting about most BBC presenters. Although they subject opponents of, say, abortion to rigorous cross-examination, their lust for ferocious questioning deserts them when supporters of abortion come on air. Far from being tested, they treat upholders of the liberal consensus as purveyors of an incontestable truth.

The way out for the BBC is not to swing to the right - it is not an advance to replace soft interviews for Menzies Campbell with soft interviews for John Reid - but make a tactical withdrawal from the opinion business. Less airtime should be given to talking heads and celebrity interviewers in London studios and more to reporters who leave Television Centre to find out what is happening in the world.

Read the full article here.

Republicans - Fuck, Yeah!

Follow the link to Dizzy Thinks for the most unbelievable political ad I've ever seen. It was directed by David Zucker of Airplane / Naked Gun but has been pulled in the wake of the N. Korea nuclear test.

Makes our own party political broadcasts look a tad tame.

Watch it. Now! (Regardless of what you think of the actual message,)

http://dizzythinks.blogspot.com/2006/10/gop-pulls-prescient-electoral-ad.html

(This should perhaps have gone in JP's N. Korea thread, but then I couldn't have had my groovy headline.)

North Korea

Stratfor Intelligence Report
10/09/06

Red Alert: North Korea: Underground Nuclear Test Reported

Reports spread Oct. 9 that North Korea tested a nuclear device in the eastern part of North Hamgyong province at 10:35 a.m. local time. China has indicated it did detect a small underground test, although the South Korean military has not raised its alert level. Australian Prime Minister John Howard said his government has confirmed there has been seismic activity from North Korea, although he has not received reports on its magnitude.

The U.S. Geological Survey detected a 4.2 tremor in North Korea, which is smaller than expected and not big enough to make North Korea an unequivocal nuclear power.

If a test did occur, the most immediate U.S. response will likely be a strong condemnation and a call for a U.N. mandate for sanctions. If there is no U.S. military response, Pyongyang will see that as an acceptance of North Korea as a nuclear power.

Many questions remain, however. Even if this were a nuclear test, it is not clear that it was a weapon rather than a device. A nuclear device produces an in-place blast from a mechanism of indeterminate size and structure. A weapon can be fitted on a missile or on an aircraft, and is therefore highly compact and ruggedized.

China's response will be hesitant. China does not seem ready to cut off food or fuel to North Korea, particularly before winter sets in. Beijing has deployed additional troops to the border, but that is to seal the frontier. Beijing will be angry, but its primary concern is to keep the North Korean people from spilling across the border into northeast China.

South Korea will, of course, suspend cooperation in Kaesong and Kumkang and will probably put its forces on alert. With the drawdown of U.S. troops in South Korea, the South Korean army is now the border patrol. U.S. military units remaining will have to go on heightened alert and rush Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries to the peninsula. South Korea could deploy high-level officials to North Korea

Japan will work for U.N. for sanctions and Chapter 7 invocation. Japan also will heighten its military posture and increase diplomacy with China and South Korea in an attempt to show a united front against North Korea

North Korea will go on high alert nationwide. The military will assume a high-readiness posture, and the North Koreans will proclaim their entry into the nuclear club, using sanctions to tighten control and rally domestic backing. Pyongyang might quickly invite the International Atomic Energy Agency in to make its nuclear status "legitimate." It will petition international bodies to accept the new reality.

In any event, North Korea will view the test as a victory. It will mark the acceptance of the government as a nuclear state. Further negotiations will have to take place under this new reality. North Korea cannot be isolated forever. North Korea has bet that anything less than a complete military invasion is a capitulation. Pyongyang will press for acceptance, similar to Pakistan. China and South Korea will be key; both desperately want to avoid any military action. They will end up negotiating with North Korea, finding a way to make the North comply with international regulations.

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Red Alert: North Korea -- Is There a Military Solution?

Summary

Whatever the political realities may seem to dictate after a North Korean nuclear test, an overt military strike -- even one limited to cruise missiles -- is not in the cards. The consequences of even the most restrained attack could be devastating.

Analysis

The reported detonation of a nuclear device by North Korea on Oct. 9 raises the question of potential military action against North Korea. The rationale for such a strike would be simple. North Korea, given its rhetoric, cannot be allowed to have nuclear weapons. Therefore, an attack to deny them the facilities with which to convert their device into a weapon and deploy it is essential. If such an attack were to take place, it is assumed, the United States would play the dominant or even sole role.

This scenario assumes that North Korea is as aggressive as its rhetoric.

But what about North Korea's well-armed neighbors -- Russia, China, South Korea, Japan? Would they not be willing to assume the major burden of an attack against North Korea? Is the United States really willing to go it alone, even while engaged in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Leaving these obvious political questions aside for the moment, let's reverse the issue by posing it in military terms: What would a U.S. strike against North Korea look like?

The USS Kitty Hawk is currently sitting in port at Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan. The USS Enterprise is operating in the Arabian Sea, while the Nimitz and the Stennis are conducting exercises off the coast of California. All are an ocean away, and none is less than a week's transit from the region. Nevertheless, naval cruise missiles are readily available, as are long-range strikes by B-2A Spirit stealth bombers and B-52H Stratofortresses and B-1B Lancers currently supporting NATO operations in Afghanistan out of Diego Garcia. A more robust strike package would take longer to deploy.

When U.S. military planners have nightmares, they have nightmares about war with North Korea. Even the idea of limited strikes against the isolated nation is fraught with potential escalations. The problem is the mission. A limited attack against nuclear facilities might destabilize North Korea or lead North Korea to the conclusion that the United States would intend regime change.

Regime preservation is the entire point of its nuclear capability. Therefore, it is quite conceivable that Kim Jong-Il and his advisors -- or other factions --might construe even the most limited military strikes against targets directly related to missile development or a nuclear program as an act threatening the regime, and therefore one that necessitates a fierce response. Regime survival could very easily entail a full, unlimited reprisal by the Korean People's Army (KPA) to any military strike whatsoever on North Korean soil.

North Korea has some 10,000 fortified artillery pieces trained on Seoul. It is essential to understand that South Korea's capital city, a major population center and the industrial heartland of South Korea, is within range of conventional artillery. The United States has been moving its forces out of range of these guns, but the South Koreans cannot move their capital.

Add to this the fact that North Korea has more than 100 No-Dong missiles that can reach deep into South Korea, as well as to Japan, and we can see that the possibility for retaliation is very real. Although the No-Dong has not always been the most reliable weapon, just the possibility of dozens of strikes against U.S. forces in Korea and other cities in Korea and Japan presents a daunting scenario.

North Korea has cultivated a reputation for unpredictability. Although it has been fairly conservative in its actions compared to its rhetoric, the fact is that no one can predict North Korea's response to strikes against its nuclear facilities. And with Seoul at risk -- a city of 20 million people -- the ability to take risks is limited.

The United States must assume, for the sake of planning, that U.S. airstrikes would be followed by massed artillery fire on Seoul. Now, massed artillery is itself not immune to countermeasures. But North Korea's artillery lies deep inside caves and fortifications all along the western section of the demilitarized zone (DMZ). An air campaign against these guns would take a long time, during which enormous damage would be done to Seoul and the South Korean economy -- perhaps on the order of several hundred thousand high-explosive rounds per hour. Even using tactical nuclear weapons against this artillery would pose serious threats to Seoul. The radiation from even low-yield weapons could force the evacuation of the city.

The option of moving north into the North Korean defensive belt is an option, but an enormously costly one. North Korea has a huge army and, on the defensive, it can be formidable. Fifty years of concerted military fortification would make Hezbollah's preparations in southern Lebanon look like child's play. Moving U.S. and South Korean armor into this defensive belt could break it, but only with substantial casualties and without the certainty of success. A massive stalemate along the DMZ, if it developed, would work in favor of the larger, defensive force.

Moreover, the North Koreans would have the option of moving south. Now, in U.S. thinking, this is the ideal scenario. The North Korean force on the move, outside of its fortifications, would be vulnerable to U.S. and South Korean airstrikes and superior ground maneuver and fire capabilities. In most war games, the defeat of North Korea requires the KPA to move south, exposing itself to counterstrikes.

However, the same war-gaming has also supposed at least 30 days for the activation and mobilization of U.S. forces for a counterattack. U.S. and South Korean forces would maintain an elastic defense against the North; as in the first war, forces would be rushed into the region, stabilizing the front, and then a counterattack would develop, breaking the North Korean army and allowing a move north.

There are three problems with this strategy. The first is that the elastic strategy would inevitably lead to the fall of Seoul and, if the 1950 model were a guide, a much deeper withdrawal along the Korean Peninsula. Second, the ability of the U.S. Army to deploy substantial forces to Korea within a 30-day window is highly dubious. Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom both required much longer periods of time.

Finally, the U.S. Army is already fighting two major ground wars and is stretched to the breaking point. The rotation schedule is now so tight that units are already spending more time in Iraq than they are home between rotations. The idea that the U.S. Army has a multidivisional force available for deployment in South Korea would require a national mobilization not seen since the last Korean War.

It comes down to this: If the United States strikes at North Korea's nuclear capabilities, it does so placing a bet. And that bet is that North Korea will not respond. That might be true, but if it is not true, it poses a battlefield problem to which neither South Korea nor the United States will be able to respond. In one scenario, the North Koreans bombard Seoul and the United States makes a doomed attempt at shutting down the massive artillery barrage. By the time the guns are silenced -- even in the best-case scenarios -- Seoul will be a mess. In another scenario, the North Korean army executes an offensive of even minimal competence, which costs South Korea its capital and industrial heartland. The third is a guerrilla onslaught from the elite of the North Korean Army, deployed by mini-subs and tunnels under the DMZ. The guerrillas pour into the south and wreak havoc on U.S. military installations.

That is how a U.S. strike -- and its outcome -- might look. Now, what about the Chinese and Russians? They are, of course, not likely to support such a U.S. attack (and could even supply North Korea in an extended war). Add in the fact that South Korea would not be willing to risk destroying Seoul and you arrive at a situation where even a U.S. nuclear strike against nuclear and non-nuclear targets would pose an unacceptable threat to South Korea.

There are two advantages the United States has. The first is time. There is a huge difference between a nuclear device and a deployable nuclear weapon. The latter has to be shaped into a small, rugged package able to be launched on a missile or dropped from a plane. Causing atomic fission is not the same as having a weapon.

The second advantage is distance. The United States is safe and far away from North Korea. Four other powers -- Russia, China, South Korea and Japan -- have much more to fear from North Korea than the United States does. The United States will always act unilaterally if it feels that it has no other way to protect its national interest. As it is, however, U.S. national interest is not at stake.

South Korea faces nothing less than national destruction in an all-out war. South Korea knows this and it will vigorously oppose any overt military action. Nor does China profit from a destabilized North Korea and a heavy-handed U.S. military move in its backyard. Nevertheless, if North Korea is a threat, it is first a threat to its immediate neighbors, one or more of whom can deal with North Korea.

In the end, North Korea wants regime survival. In the end, allowing the North Koran regime to survive is something that has been acceptable for over half a century. When you play out the options, the acquisition of a nuclear device -- especially one neither robust nor deployable -- does not, by itself, compel the United States to act, nor does it give the United States a militarily satisfactory option. The most important issue is the transfer of North Korean nuclear technology to other countries and groups. That is something the six-party talk participants have an equal interest in and might have the leverage to prevent.

Every situation does not have a satisfactory military solution. This seems to be one of them.

Jack Straw Talks Sense Shock!

I don't have time to this justice, but basically Jack Straw has said he prefers Muslim women to remove their veils when they meet him as he thinks it's quite nice to see people's faces. You can read the story here and here (if you're worried that the Telegraph is making the whole thing up) and get the Harry's Place view here (includes Galloway's risible response.)

Worth looking at the reactions from the Muslim community. Those hostile to Straw display a predictable disparity between what he actually said and what they are condemning. The response of the Tories and LibDems (quoted in the Telegraph piece) range from disappointing and banal to frankly vomit inducing (Simon Hughes.)

It's also worth quickly noting the extent to which 'assimilation' has become a dirty word because it "is saying that one culture or one way of life is superior to another". Uh, yeah. It is. Deal with it. My dad (an immigrant) used to use 'assimilated' as a term of high praise for anyone who had successfully adapted to the customs of the host country and was able to fully participate in it. But he was an apostate, so what did he know anyway?

Thatcher on Tax Cuts

This quote came from an interview with Brian Walden in January 1983.

Brian Walden: You used to say "Let's have the tax cuts and then we shall get the growth".

Margaret Thatcher: No. Not always. That was a Laffer-ism you know, and I remember having arguments with Laffer and saying "Yes, but there's probably a three year gap and how are we going to get back that three years, how are we to survive that three years?" And also, I've been in politics a long time—you know that, we were in it together—and I've watched many many years reductions in public spending as an objective… If you actually hold it, you're doing very well, and then you take the growth to reduce your personal taxation. Once or twice one's been able to do certain reductions because one's found inefficiencies.

(hat tip Daniel Finkelstein)

Borat

Here is the Kazakh Ambassador to the UK on Borat.

Fair point?

Or a massive sense of humour failure?

And here is Borat's official website if you still can't decide.

Funding the Threat: Dr Liam Fox Speech

Shadow Defence Secretary, Dr Liam Fox's Speech on the link between oil and national security:

We are all too familiar with the fact that recent years have seen substantial rises in the price of crude. What is seldom discussed is the cumulative wealth shift that this represents, how it is being spent and the foreign and security policy implications that flow from it.

Let me begin with a few numbers. In the past five years Europe alone has pumped $49bn into the economy of Iran and an astonishing $232bn into the former Soviet Union, mainly Russia- and this for crude oil alone. This does not include the financial transfers resulting from gas or petroleum product sales. Of these two examples, at a national level, Germany has contributed $54bn to Russia while Italy handed $10.1bn to Iran. The global figures are, of course, much greater still.

In both Russia and Iran this windfall has been used to finance military buildup. In other words we in the West find ourselves in a security Catch-22. Our dependence on oil means that we cannot avoid paying whatever price is demanded of us. That in turn produces huge financial flows out of our economies into those oil producers, some of whom may be hostile to us. They in turn use this to finance a defence build up. In other words, our addiction to oil results in us funding the potential threat against us and our interests.

There is, in addition, the consequence that there is little incentive for a state like Iran to reduce international tension as greater uncertainty will inflate the oil price and keep revenues high.

You can read the whole article here.

Health Matters

A placeholder for any discussions we might want to have about Health matters. Here's one on the Brits and their awful diets for starters.

-------------------

Given that I consumed two bananas while blogging this, my mind is currently boggling: One in five [Brits interviewed] claimed that it was just "impossible" to eat the Government's recommended five portions of fruit and vegetables a day.

Ready-made excuses put Britons off healthy food
Telegraph
02/10/2006

Reducing obesity may be the aim of doctors, Government ministers and health campaigners but most people lack the discipline to change their eating habits and are brilliant at making excuses, a survey has found. Researchers identified 10 common excuses used by people to justify their consumption of unhealthy food.

...read on...

South Africa: ANC 'power grab' after poll defeat

The only mystery is why anyone would think the ANC would give a damn about "failing the key test of democracy".

ANC 'power grab' after poll defeat
Telegraph
30/09/2006

South Africa's ruling party has been accused of "failing the key test of a democracy" by trying to reverse its first major election defeat. Helen Zille, from the opposition Democratic Alliance, became mayor of Cape Town after her party won 91 seats in council elections in March, compared with 81 for the African National Congress (ANC).

For the first time since apartheid's demise 12 years ago, an ANC mayor was ousted. Mrs Zille now governs the city in coalition with six small parties but the ANC has responded to defeat by trying to strip her of all her powers. Since the election, Mrs Zille, 55, has governed Cape Town as an executive mayor, with overall responsibility for 22,000 employees and a budget exceeding £1 billion.

But the ANC-controlled government of Western Cape province has proposed reducing her to a powerless symbol with ceremonial duties only. It favours abolishing Mrs Zille's job and running Cape Town with an executive committee. The ANC and its allies would have six of the committee's 10 members. This plan would, in effect, cripple the mayor and return the ANC to power in Cape Town in defiance of the election result.

"It raises the question of whether South Africa is a genuine democracy," said Mrs Zille. "You can't have a democracy when the ruling party only accepts the outcome of the elections it wins. They're failing the key test of a democracy, which is accepting the election result when you lose."

The ANC created the post of executive mayor four years ago. For as long as the party won every election and the mayor was an ANC member, it was happy to run Cape Town in this way. Mrs Zille pointed out that the decision to downgrade her job was only taken after the opposition won the city council election. At present, the ANC runs every other major city. Only in Cape Town is the party proposing to do away with the executive mayor.

... Even if the mayor defeats this bid to oust her, Mrs Zille expects the ANC to try again. "It's like the waves of the sea," she said. "When one goes, you wait for another to gain momentum. They keep coming at you. And then they blame us for causing instability."

State Stupidity

How somebody thinks this is a good idea baffles me. So called minor offenses will no longer go before the magistrates and will be dealt with by means of a summary 100 pound fine.

Let's set aside any quibbles about police and prosecutors determining guilt. What is mad is that this applies to muggers. Yep. Someone can mug you and will (providing they catch the bugger) simply get a ticket and be sent on there way. Oh and they include assaulting a police officer among these minor offences.

SERIOUS crimes such as assaulting a police officer and mugging will be punished by instant fines of up to £100 from next year under plans to keep hundreds of thousands of offenders out of court.

You would have thought that the State would try and deter as much as possible assault on a police officer by punishing it severly. Otherwise it becomes more difficult to promote the respect for the unarmed police officer.

Tim Worstall has a different suggestion - make assaulting a Politician cost 100 pounds.

Raise a glass to the fight against Islamism...

An essential article about how liberal values are being defended in Bahrain under the guise of maintaining the right to drink, wear short skirts and smoke cigarettes. (I'm 2 for 3 in showing solidarity with the movement - I just don't have the legs for the short skirts.)

A Bahraini liberal fights for his right to party.
Drinking Liberally

by Joseph Braude

Manama, Bahrain

Civil rights activist Abdullah Al Madani has drawn a line in the sand within this tiny desert island kingdom--and stockpiled plenty of whiskey and beer well behind it. "Let them try and take away our simple pleasures," he warns over a cold one. "We won't go down without a fight." Behind this frothy threat to prohibitionists in Bahrain stand 31 civil society organizations and a new grassroots movement Madani leads called We Have a Right (Lana Haqq). The group has signed up feminists, labor organizers, musicians, and other typical victims of Islamists' restrictive social agenda to a platform espousing equality of religions, genders, lifestyles, and every skirt length. The country's conservatives appear to take the movement seriously enough to denounce it: Several prominent mosque preachers reportedly declared its adherents to be "pagans"--fighting words in Arabia--accusing We Have a Right of spreading alcoholism and prostitution. American policymakers, meanwhile, have largely ignored or snubbed the organization.

"Your National Democratic Institute representative in Bahrain told us we weren't serious," Madani tells me, puffing a cigar between swigs. "He said we should focus on the real issues in Bahrain, and personal liberties will come later." The International Republican Institute, which has also actively engaged Bahraini leaders, has no contact with We Have a Right either. Nor does the State Department's Middle East Partnership Initiative, which now funds several Bahraini projects in tandem with the government and private sector.

But Madani's nascent movement--which is well-publicized and hard to ignore--represents a smart new strategy for Arab liberals in the Middle East, and American reformists active in the region ignore We Have a Right at their own peril. The group's niche agenda exploits the widespread resentment secular Muslims feel toward encroachments on their individual rights by Islamists--while behind the hot button campaign lies a deep and wise long-term vision. The group's initial success in attracting followers in Bahrain, a national Petri dish of the Middle East's political and religious schisms, suggests there may be similar opportunities to galvanize Islamism's opponents in larger Arab and Muslim countries. So, rather than turn a blind eye to Madani's merry crew of libertine activists, the United States would do well to raise a glass to them--and figure out how to promote a similar approach in Iran, Iraq, throughout the Gulf, and beyond.

Read on...

Pakistan

I found it very sad, as a massive fan of Imran Khan the cricketer (far better than Botham, in my opinion) to find out how he has been hypocritically pandering to Islamists in Pakistan in his later guise as Imran Khan the politician.

Khan Artist
Imran Khan, the man who sparked the Newsweek riots: Islamist politician by day, London playboy by night
Weekly Standard
31/05/2005

With 17 people dead and anti-American sentiment even higher than usual in the Muslim world, people are looking for someone to blame for the riots that flowed from Newsweek's Koran story. So far, it has been pinned on everyone from Mark Whitaker to the U.S. military. But the real villain is Pakistani politician Imran Khan.

On Friday, May 6 Khan catapulted the 300-word Newsweek story about a Koran being flushed down the toilet into headline news across the Muslim world by brandishing the article at a press conference and demanding that Pakistani president Gen. Pervez Musharraf secure an apology from George W. Bush for the incident. It is unlikely Khan chanced upon the item. Just days before, Khan had tried to spark a similar firestorm over a Washington Times cartoon depicting the Pakistani government as America's lapdog. Clearly in search of grist for the anti-American mill, Khan's demagoguery speaks to his own two-facedness and to a downside of military rule in Pakistan.

Khan embodies the hypocrisy of Muslim elites who inveigh against the West by day and enjoy its pleasures by night. ... After his playing career ended in 1992, Khan entered politics under the tutelage of Lt.-Gen. Hamid Gul, the former Pakistani intelligence chief famous for fueling the Taliban's rise in Afghanistan. (Gul believes that September 11 was a U.S. conspiracy.) Khan, a man who once captained the Oxford University cricket team and was a feature at London's trendiest places, now turned against the culture he had previously enjoyed.

In 1995 he denounced the West with its "fat women in miniskirts" (presumably the skinny ones in miniskirts Khan had dated were okay) and proclaimed that the "West is falling because of their addiction to sex and obscenity." He also chastised Pakistanis who looked to the West for ideas, saying "I hate it when our leaders or elite feel that by licking the soles of the feet of foreign countries we will somehow be given aid and we will progress."

...

Even his political allies find Khan's duplicity hard to take. In 2002 one of his party leaders remarked: "Even we are finding it difficult to figure out the real Imran. He dons the shalwar-kameez and preaches desi and religious values while in Pakistan, but transforms himself completely while rubbing shoulders with the elite in Britain and elsewhere in the West." Khan claims that his marriage proved he wasn't a politician but his divorce and his recent demagoguery show that he now is one, albeit one of the worst sort.

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US threatened to bomb Pakistan, says Musharraf
Telegraph
22/09/2006

President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan said that after the September 11 attacks the US threatened to bomb his country if it did not co-operate with America's war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Gen Musharraf, in an interview with the CBS news magazine show 60 Minutes, that will be broadcast at the weekend, said the threat came from the deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, and was given to Gen Musharraf's intelligence director.

"The intelligence director told me that (Armitage) said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age,'" Gen Musharraf said. "I think it was a very rude remark." Not long afterwards Pakistan announced it was standing with America and its allies in fighting terror. It granted permission for US fighter jets to use Pakistani airspace as the attack began on the Taliban and al-Qa'eda, which were protected by the Afghan militia.

But Mr Armitage told CNN that he never threatened to bomb Pakistan, would not have said such a thing and did not have the authority to do it. He said that he did have a tough message for Pakistan, telling the Muslim nation that it was either "with us or against us," but did not understand how his message was recounted so differently to Gen Musharraf.

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Musharraf lashes out on US 'book tour'
Telegraph
26/09/2006

General Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, has attacked his Afghan counterpart on his controversial tour of America.Gen Musharraf, who is visiting the US with the twin aims of promoting his memoirs and representing his country, told Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, that he should stop blaming Pakistan for his own country's instability.

Responding to Mr Karzai's claims that Pakistani religious schools are fanning terrorism across the border, he said: "The sooner that President Karzai understands his own country, the better." He added that Mr Karzai - who is also in the US - was partially to blame for disenfranchising the majority Pashtun ethnic group in Afghanistan, and warned that the Taliban cannot be defeated by military might alone.

The leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan are due to meet with President George W Bush on Wednesday to discuss ways to bridge their differences.Gen Musharraf is causing a storm in the US with his book, In the Line of Fire, in which he claims that America threatened to bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age" if it failed to support the war on terror after the Sept 11 attacks. He also criticises the invasion of Iraq for making the world "more dangerous", and claims that the United States and Saudi Arabia created an extremist "monster" by supporting Islamic groups fighting the Soviet Union's 1979-89 occupation of Afghanistan.

U.N (Unbelievably Nuts)

Steyn and Ferguson both comment on last week's U.N Assembly.

Here's Steyn: It may be news to the Council of Foreign Relations types and the Dems, but the U.N. demonstrated this last week that it is utterly incapable of reform. Indeed, any reforms would be more likely to upgrade and enhance the cliques of thugs and despots than of the few states willing to stand up to them. The most sensible proposal this week came from Chavez, who demanded the U.N. relocate to Venezuela. You go, girl! Dershowitz would be better off trying to get America expelled from the U.N., and encouraging it to join a new group of nations serious about defending freedom in the world: It would be a very small club. This week Jacques Chirac dropped the threat of sanctions against Iran. A few months ago, he briefly mused about nuking the Persians, but he's now folded like ... well, not like the Arabs and their tents: They're busily pitching them all over Europe with no plans to fold at all. Anyone who thinks the U.N. is the body to mediate Iran's nuclearization or anything else is more deluded than Ahmadinejad. At this rate, the Twelfth Imam will be the next secretary-general.

And here's Ferguson:I was wondering why the antics of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly seemed so familiar last week. Then I realised. It was just like a university faculty meeting. Extravagant, long-winded denunciations of the president are what professors do, not politicians. Sure enough, the Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez could not resist brandishing a book by Noam Chomsky – the America-hating darling of all campus Lefties.

Ex Muslim Blogger seeks asylum in Canada

Here is an interesting blog from a Pakistani citzen explaining in great detail why he is seeking asylum in Canada.

Police to check with Muslim Leaders before raids

The Police have agreed to consult with Muslim Community Leaders before carrying out raids. This sounds like a really silly idea. I would have thought that there was a danger that the targets of the raids would be tipped off. Maybe I'm missing something.

A cry for help.

Ok Wembley, I need your help.

I've tried to give this Government the benefit of the doubt (no really I have) but stories like these three listed below seem to confirm all my worse suspisions:

1) Hampering Democracy

Councillors have been banned from discussing local park-and-ride schemes if they own a car under an ethical watchdog created by John Prescott. The Deputy Prime Minister is accused today of undermining local democracy and stifling free speech by imposing "draconian" rules on thousands of councillors.

Even councillors who have been elected specifically to fight a particular issue have fallen foul of the rules and found themselves told they cannot speak or vote on it. A damning report reveals how local authority members are being barred from speaking or voting on subjects simply because they are perceived to have taken a position on the issue.


2) Labour Party officials have met to work out ways of closing hospitals without jeopardising marginal seats:

Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, called for those at the meeting to be provided with “heat maps”, showing marginal Labour seats where closures or reconfigurations of health services could cost votes.


3) Government attacks on Privacy:

Last week, in a significant announcement issued under the guise of an innocuous-sounding "information-sharing vision statement", the Government proposed to reverse the presumptions of confidentiality under which Whitehall has, until now, conducted its relationships with businesses and individuals. Departments will be able to share personal information obtained for one purpose with other departments that might want it for an entirely different reason. In effect, they will be able to gather all this data in one place, something we were always assured would not happen.

[...]

Once you accept that the government has the right to know where you are at all times, to demand that you tell its agents when you move home or to render up your private musings at its behest, then you have changed the nature of the individual's relationship to the state in a way that is totally alien to this country's historic, though ill-defined, covenant between the rulers and the ruled.

Please explain how these stories aren't just signs of a hopelessly corrupt, undemocratic, tired, meddling Government (we'll leave aside the cash for peerages scandal and increasing authoritarianism).

Yours sincerely,

Floating voter

Ted Honderich on Terrorism

Just caught the second half of a Channel 5 documentary The Real Friends of Terror, a work purportedly of moral philosophy by a philosophy professor, Ted Honderich, a name I vaguely remember from college days. I say purportedly, because I think its real purposes was to see how many times you can say the phrase "neo-Zionism" in a 45 minute show. A quick look at the guest list will give you some idea:

Rt. Hon.Tony Benn, minister in several Labour governments
Lord Ian Gilmour, minister in several Conservative governments
Mr Reg Kees, father of a British soldier killed in Iraq
Baroness Helena Kennedy, barrister and human rights advocate
Dr. Ghada Karmi, academic and consultant to the Palestinian Authority
Dr. Brian Klug, Senior Research Fellow & philosophy tutor
Prof. Steven Rose, Department of Biology, Open University
Baroness Jenny Tonge, past member of the Liberal Democrat shadow cabinet.

I saw half the programme and I reckon the least demented among the interviewees I saw was probably Tony Benn. The show actually went way past outrageous and into downright ridiculous. An example of the philosophical rigour (I paraphrase, but not by much):

Benn: I equate stealth bombers with suicide bombers, they both kill innocent people
Interviewer: What about intention to kill innocents?
Benn: Doesn't matter, it's only the fact of killing that matters.

That someone who pretends to be a moral philosopher could just let that statement go unchallenged... unspeakable. Other gems were Jenny Tonge saying that what Bush/Blair should have done on 9/11 was "sort out Palestine".

Apparently next week (so 26/09/06, presumably Ch5, 19:15) David Aaronovitch is giving the other side, so should be worth watching. But this one was something special. I have the last 20 mins on video if anyone wants.

For more on Honderich: he talked about The Principle of Humanity, and has written about his views here.

Great Britain - A Land Fit For Criminals

This is an extraordinarily powerful review of what appears to be an extraordinarily powerful book:

Real Crime, Fake Justice
Theodore Dalrymple
City Journal, Summer 2006

For the last 40 years, government policy in Britain, de facto if not always de jure, has been to render the British population virtually defenseless against criminals and criminality. Almost alone of British government policies, this one has been supremely effective: no Briton nowadays goes many hours without wondering how to avoid being victimized by a criminal intent on theft, burglary, or violence.

An unholy alliance between politicians and bureaucrats who want to keep prison costs to a minimum, and liberal intellectuals who pretend to see in crime a natural and understandable response to social injustice, which it would be a further injustice to punish, has engendered a prolonged and so far unfinished experiment in leniency that has debased the quality of life of millions of people, especially the poor. Every day in our newspapers we read of the absurd and dangerous leniency of the criminal-justice system. On April 21, for example, even the Observer (one of the bastions of British liberalism responsible for the present situation) gave prominence to the official report into the case of Anthony Rice, who strangled and then stabbed Naomi Bryant to death.

Rice, it turned out, had been assaulting women since 1972. He had been convicted for assaulting or raping a total of 15 women before murdering Naomi Bryant, and it is a fair supposition that he had assaulted or raped many more who did not go to the police. In 1982, he grabbed a woman by the throat, held a knife to her, and raped her. Five years later, while out of prison on home leave, he grabbed a woman, pushed her into a garden, held a knife to her, and raped her for an hour. Receiving a life sentence, he was transferred to an open prison in 2002 and then released two years later on parole as a low-risk parolee. He received housing in a hostel for ex-prisoners in a village whose inhabitants had been told, to gain their acquiescence, that none of the residents there was violent; five months after his arrival, he murdered Naomi Bryant. In pronouncing another life sentence on him, the judge ordered that he should serve at least 25 years: in other words, even now the law has not quite thrown away the key.

Only five days later, the papers reported that 1,023 prisoners of foreign origin had been released from British prisons between 1999 and 2006 without having been deported. Among them were 5 killers, 7 kidnappers, 9 rapists and 39 other sex offenders, 4 arsonists, 41 burglars, 52 thieves, 93 robbers, and 204 drug offenders. Of the 1,023 prisoners, only 106 had since been traced. The Home Office, responsible for both prisons and immigration, still doesn’t know how many of the killers, arsonists, rapists, and kidnappers are at large; but it admits that most of them will never be found, at least until they are caught after committing another offense. Although these revelations forced the Home Secretary to resign, in fact the foreign criminals had been treated only as British criminals are treated. At least we can truly say that we do not discriminate in our leniency.

Scandal has followed scandal. A short time later, we learned that prisoners had been absconding from one open prison, Leyhill, at a rate of two a week for three years—323 in total since 1999, among them 22 murderers. This outrage came to light only when a senior policeman in the area of Leyhill told a member of Parliament that there had been a crime wave in the vicinity of the prison. The member of Parliament demanded the figures in the House of Commons; otherwise they would have remained secret.

None of these revelations, however, would have surprised a man called David Fraser, who has just published a book entitled A Land Fit for Criminals — the land in question being Great Britain, of course. Far from being mistakes—for mistakes repeated so often cease to be mere mistakes—all these occurrences are in full compliance with general policy in Britain with regard to crime and criminality.

Fraser was a probation officer for more than a quarter of a century. He began to doubt the value of his work in terms of preventing crime and therefore protecting the public, but he at first assumed that, as a comparatively lowly official in the criminal-justice system, he was too mired in the grainy everyday detail to see the bigger picture. He assumed also that those in charge not only knew what they were doing but had the public interest at heart.

Eventually, however, the penny dropped. Fraser’s lack of success in effecting any change in the criminals under his supervision, and thus in reducing the number of crimes that they subsequently committed, to the great misery of the general public, was not his failure alone but was general throughout the system. Even worse, he discovered that the bureaucrats who ran the system, and their political masters, did not care about this failure, at least from the point of view of its impact on public safety; careerist to the core, they were only concerned that the public should not become aware of the catastrophe. To this end, they indulged in obfuscation, statistical legerdemain, and outright lies in order to prevent the calamity that public knowledge of the truth would represent for them and their careers.

The collective intellectual dishonesty of those who worked in the system so outraged Fraser—and the Kafkaesque world in which he found himself, where nothing was called by its real name and language tended more to conceal meaning than to convey it, so exasperated him—that, though not a man apt to obtrude upon the public, he determined to write a book. It took him two and a half years to do so, based on 20 years of research, and it is clear from the very first page that he wrote it from a burning need to expose and exorcise the lies and evasions with which he lived for so long, lies and evasions that helped in a few decades transform a law-abiding country with a reputation for civility into the country with the highest crime rate in the Western world, with an ever-present undercurrent of violence in daily life. Like Luther, Fraser could not but speak out. And, as events unfolded, his book has had a publishing history that is additionally revealing of the state of Britain today.

By example after example (repetition being necessary to establish that he has not just alighted on an isolated case of absurdity that might be found in any large-scale enterprise), Fraser demonstrates the unscrupulous lengths to which both bureaucrats and governments have gone to disguise from the public the effect of their policies and decisions, carried out with an almost sadistic indifference to the welfare of common people.

He shows that liberal intellectuals and their bureaucratic allies have left no stone unturned to ensure that the law-abiding should be left as defenseless as possible against the predations of criminals, from the emasculation of the police to the devising of punishments that do not punish and the propagation of sophistry by experts to mislead and confuse the public about what is happening in society, confusion rendering the public helpless in the face of the experimentation perpetrated upon it.

The police, Fraser shows, are like a nearly defeated occupying colonial force that, while mayhem reigns everywhere else, has retreated to safe enclaves, there to shuffle paper and produce bogus information to propitiate their political masters. Their first line of defense is to refuse to record half the crime that comes to their attention, which itself is less than half the crime committed. Then they refuse to investigate recorded crime, or to arrest the culprits even when it is easy to do so and the evidence against them is overwhelming, because the prosecuting authorities will either decline to prosecute, or else the resultant sentence will be so trivial as to make the whole procedure (at least 19 forms to fill in after a single arrest) pointless.

In any case, the authorities want the police to use a sanction known as the caution—a mere verbal warning. Indeed, as Fraser points out, the Home Office even reprimanded the West Midlands Police Force for bringing too many apprehended offenders to court, instead of merely giving them a caution. In the official version, only minor crimes are dealt with in this fashion: but as Fraser points out, in the year 2000 alone, 600 cases of robbery, 4,300 cases of car theft, 6,600 offenses of burglary, 13,400 offenses against public order, 35,400 cases of violence against the person, and 67,600 cases of other kinds of theft were dealt with in this fashion—in effect, letting these 127,900 offenders off scot-free. When one considers that the police clear-up rate of all crimes in Britain is scarcely more than one in 20 (and even that figure is based upon official deception), the liberal intellectual claim, repeated ad nauseam in the press and on the air, that the British criminal-justice system is primitively retributive is absurd.

At every point in the system, Fraser shows, deception reigns. When a judge sentences a criminal to three years’ imprisonment, he knows perfectly well (as does the press that reports it) that in the vast majority of cases the criminal in question will serve 18 months at the very most, because he is entitled automatically, as of right, to a suspension of half his sentence. Moreover, under a scheme of early release, increasingly used, prisoners serve considerably less than half their sentence. They may be tagged electronically under a system of home curfew, intended to give the public an assurance that they are being monitored: but the electronic tag stays on for less than 12 hours daily, giving criminals plenty of opportunity to follow their careers. Even when the criminals remove their tags (and it is known that thousands are removed or vandalized every year) or fail to abide by other conditions of their early release, those who are supposedly monitoring them do nothing whatever, for fear of spoiling the statistics of the system’s success. When the Home Office tried the tagging system with young criminals, 73 percent of them were reconvicted within three months. The authorities nevertheless decided to extend the scheme. The failure of the British state to take its responsibilities seriously could not be more clearly expressed.

Fraser draws attention to the deeply corrupt system in Britain under which a criminal, once caught, may ask for other offenses that he has committed to be “taken into consideration.” (Criminals call these offenses T.I.C.s.) This practice may be in the interests of both the criminal and the police, but not in those of the long-suffering public. The court will sentence the criminal to further prison terms that run concurrently, not consecutively, to that imposed for the index offense: in other words, he will in effect serve the same sentence for 50 burglaries as for one burglary, and he can never again face charges for the 49 burglaries that have been “taken into consideration.” Meanwhile, the police can preen themselves that they have “solved” 50 crimes for the price of one.

One Probation Service smokescreen that Fraser knows from personal experience is to measure its own effectiveness by the proportion of criminals who complete their probation in compliance with court orders—a procedural outcome that has no significance whatever for the safety of the public. Such criminals come under the direct observation of probation officers only one hour a week at the very most. What they do the other 167 hours of the week the probation officers cannot possibly know. Unless one takes the preposterous view that such criminals are incapable of telling lies about their activities to their probation officers, mere attendance at the probation office is no guarantee whatever that they are now leading law-abiding lives.

But even if completion of probation orders were accepted as a surrogate measure of success in preventing re-offending, the Probation Service’s figures have long been completely corrupt—and for a very obvious reason. Until 1997, the probation officers themselves decided when noncompliance with their directions was so egregious that they “breached” the criminals under their supervision and returned them to the courts because of such noncompliance. Since their own effectiveness was measured by the proportion of probation orders “successfully” completed, they had a very powerful motive for disregarding the noncompliance of criminals. In such circumstances, all activity became strictly pro forma, with no purpose external to itself.

While the government put an end to this particular statistical legerdemain, probation orders still go into the statistics as “successfully completed” if they reach their official termination date—even in many cases if the offender gets arrested for committing further offenses before that date. Only in this way can the Home Office claim that between 70 and 80 percent of probation orders are “successfully completed.”

In their effort to prove the liberal orthodoxy that prison does not work, criminologists, government officials, and journalists have routinely used the lower reconviction rates of those sentenced to probation and other forms of noncustodial punishment (the word “punishment” in these circumstances being used very loosely) than those imprisoned. But if the aim is to protect the law-abiding, a comparison of reconviction rates of those imprisoned and those put on probation is irrelevant. What counts is the re-offending rate—a point so obvious that it is shameful that Fraser should have not only to make it but to hammer it home repeatedly, for the politicians, academics, and journalistic hangers-on have completely obscured it.

By definition, a man in prison can commit no crimes (except against fellow prisoners and prison staff). But what of those out in the world on probation? Of 1,000 male criminals on probation, Fraser makes clear, about 600 will be reconvicted at least once within the two years that the Home Office follows them up for statistical purposes. The rate of detection in Britain of all crimes being about 5 percent, those 1,000 criminals will actually have committed not 600, but at least 12,000 crimes (assuming them to have been averagely competent criminals chased by averagely incompetent police). Even this is not quite all. Since there are, in fact, about 150,000 people on probation in Britain, it means that at least 1.8 million crimes—more than an eighth of the nation’s total—must be committed annually by people on probation, within the very purview of the criminal-justice system, or very shortly after they have been on probation. While some of these crimes might be “victimless,” or at least impersonal, research has shown that these criminals inflict untold misery upon the British population: misery that they would not have been able to inflict had they been in prison for a year instead of on probation.

To compare the reconviction rates of ex-prisoners and people on probation as an argument against prison is not only irrelevant from the point of view of public safety but is also logically absurd. Of course the imprisoned will have higher reconviction rates once they get out of jail—not because prison failed to reform them, but because it is the most hardened, incorrigible, and recidivist criminals who go to prison. Again, this point is so obvious that it is shameful that anyone should have to point it out; yet politicians and others continue to use the reconviction rates as if they were a proper basis for deciding policy.

Relentless for hundreds of pages, Fraser provides examples of how the British government and its bloated and totally ineffectual bureaucratic apparatus, through moral and intellectual frivolity as well as plain incompetence, has failed in its elementary and sole inescapable duty: to protect the lives and property of the citizenry. He exposes the absurd prejudice that has become a virtually unassailable orthodoxy among the intellectual and political elite: that we have too many prisoners in Britain, as if there were an ideal number of prisoners, derived from a purely abstract principle, at which, independent of the number of crimes committed, we should aim. He describes in full detail the moral and intellectual corruption of the British criminal-justice system, from police decisions not to record crimes or to charge wrongdoers, to the absurdly light sentences given after conviction and the administrative means by which prisoners end up serving less than half their time, irrespective of their dangerousness or the likelihood that they will re-offend.

According to Fraser, at the heart of the British idiocy is the condescending and totally unrealistic idea—which, however, provides employment opportunities for armies of apparatchiks, as well as being psychologically gratifying—that burglars, thieves, and robbers are not conscious malefactors who calculate their chances of getting away with it, but people in the grip of something rather like a mental disease, whose thoughts, feelings, and decision-making processes need to be restructured. The whole criminal-justice system ought therefore to act in a therapeutic or medical, rather than a punitive and deterrent, fashion. Burglars do not know, poor things, that householders are upset by housebreaking, and so we must educate and inform them on this point; and we must also seek to persuade them of something that all their experience so far has taught them to be false, namely that crime does not pay.

All in all, Fraser’s book is a searing and unanswerable (or at least so far unanswered) indictment of the British criminal-justice system, and therefore of the British state. As Fraser pointed out to me, the failure of the state to protect the lives and property of its citizens, and to take seriously its duty in this regard, creates a politically dangerous situation, for it puts the very legitimacy of the state itself at risk. The potential consequences are incalculable, for the failure might bring the rule of law itself into disrepute and give an opportunity to the brutal and the authoritarian.

You might have thought that any publisher would gratefully accept a book so urgent in its message, so transparently the product of a burning need to communicate obvious but uncomfortable truths of such public interest, conveyed in such a way that anyone of reasonable intelligence might understand them. Any publisher, you would think, would feel fortunate to have such a manuscript land on his desk. But you would be wrong, at least as far as Britain is concerned.

So uncongenial was Fraser’s message to all right-thinking Britons that 60 publishers to whom he sent the book turned it down. In a country that publishes more than 10,000 books monthly, not many of which are imperishable masterpieces, there was no room for it or for what it said, though it would take no great acumen to see its commercial possibilities in a country crowded with crime victims. So great was the pressure of the orthodoxy now weighing on the minds of the British intelligentsia that Fraser might as well have gone to Mecca and said that there is no God and that Mohammed was not His prophet. Of course, no publisher actually told him that what he said was unacceptable or unsayable in public: his book merely did not “fit the list” of any publisher. He was the victim of British publishing’s equivalent of Mafia omerta.

Fortunately, he did not give up, as he sometimes thought of doing. The 61st publisher to whom he sent the book accepted it. I mean no disrespect to her judgment when I say that it was her personal situation that distinguished her from her fellow publishers: for her husband’s son by a previous marriage had not long before been murdered in the street, stabbed by a drug-dealing Jamaican immigrant, aged 20, who had not been deported despite his criminal record but instead allowed to stay in the country as if he were a national treasure to be at all costs cherished and nurtured. Indeed, in court, his lawyer presented him as an unemployed painter and decorator, the victim of racial prejudice (a mitigating circumstance, of course), a view that the prosecution did not challenge, even though the killer had somehow managed alchemically to transmute his unemployment benefits into a new convertible costing some $54,000.

The maternal grandmother of the murdered boy, who had never been ill in her life, died of a heart attack a week after his death, and so the funeral was a double one. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the killer killed not one but two people. He received a sentence of eight years—which, in effect, will be four or five years.

I asked the publisher the impossible question of whether she would have published the book if someone close to her had not had such firsthand experience of the frivolous leniency of the British criminal-justice system. She said she thought so: but what is beyond dispute is that the murder made her publication of the book a certainty.

A Land Fit for Criminals has sold well and has been very widely discussed, though not by the most important liberal newspapers, which would find the whole subject in bad taste. But the book’s publishing history demonstrates how close we have come to an almost totalitarian uniformity of the sayable, imposed informally by right-thinking people in the name of humanity, but in utter disregard for the truth and the reality of their fellow citizens’ lives. Better that they, the right-thinking, should feel pleased with their own rectitude and broadmindedness, than that millions should be freed of their fear of robbery and violence, as in crime-ridden, pre-Giuliani New York. Too bad Fraser’s voice had to be heard over someone’s dead body.

The Liberal case for controlled Immigration

This article on US immigration probably isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I thought it was interesting to hear the Libertarian case against unlimited immigration. It's a thought provoking piece and makes a powerful arguement that open borders actually threaten the freedoms of a Liberal society.

The Fallacy of Open Immigration

'To the degree that a nation is like a house, and requires the security of a house, its inhabitants must have the ability to decide whom they wish to invite inside, whom they wish to enjoy the many investments already made in it. If the house is designed to protect individual liberty, its maintenance requires the exclusion of people whose ill-advised decisions might endanger liberty's protective mechanisms.'

No one has the right to move to a free country and destroy its freedom. But this is precisely what happens when people who are unused to the political culture of individual liberty, or who disapprove of it, swing the balance of national decisions.

Many libertarians imagine that all economic and political problems will be solved if only the proper economic and political framework is established: free enterprise, limited government, clear recognition of individual rights. But the question is, How can such a framework, such a "house," be preserved? It can't be preserved if people must continually be convinced, by the tens of millions, that liberty is a good idea, better than the welfare state or some structure of political repression and intolerance. It can be preserved only by a culture in which the vast majority of people assume that individual liberty and responsibility are the ultimate political good. Not every culture makes these assumptions.

There is no foreign army occupying Mexico, Canada, or Saudi Arabia. The political systems, the political errors, of these countries are the result of their own political cultures, just as America's political errors result from its own political culture. An essentially libertarian political system must be supported by essentially libertarian cultural assumptions, by a culture in which virtually no one sees a cartoon satirizing a religious figure and immediately concludes, "Somebody should be punished for this."'

Did you hear the one about the Prophet's penis?

An alleged quip about the Prophet's penis led to torture and 13-years in jail in Saudi Arabia.
Brian Whitaker


Hadi Saeed al-Mutif grew up in the countryside in southern Saudi Arabia and at the age of 18 started training to become a policeman. Two months into his training, Hadi had gathered with other recruits for afternoon prayers, as required by the rules. "Let us pray upon the Prophet .." the Imam said - at which point Hadi allegedly quipped: "... and upon his penis".

A couple of his fellow recruits reported Hadi to the authorities at the training centre and he was ordered to stand under the Saudi flag for two hours as a punishment.

That might have been the end of the matter, except that a military inspector happened to be visiting at the time. Instead, this silly incident set in motion a train of events which is still continuing after almost 13 years, involving every level of Saudi Arabia's Byzantine justice system and even reaching the ears of the king.

Read on...

Makes you grateful for the freedom to tell the joke about Jesus saying "I can see your house from here..."

British Airport security gets tough...

T-shirt a risk to air security.

David Cameron outlines his vision for US-UK relationship

Not the catchiest heading I've ever written, but I felt uncomfortable writing (or at least beginning) with anything too flippant on the five year anniversary of 9/11.

David Cameron, however, has marked the occasion with a speech in which he distances his Conservatives from the "failures" of neo-con foreign policy, while outlining his own vision of a "liberal conservative" one.

According to the FT he 'hit out' with an 'outspoken attack'. The Times has him in a 'clash' with Baroness Thatcher.

Given the hyperbolic use of nouns in (even broadsheet) news reporting you might be forgiven for thinking that Cameron showed the sensitivity of a Chelsea footballer, calling Bush a cunt before wiping his arse on the stars and stripes.

This is not the case. Indeed, I strongly recommend reading the whole speech, which you can find here.

I think it's quite a clever speech. It looks like he's laying the groundwork for a post-Bush White House (which of course there will be in 2008). Regardless of whether the new occupant is a Democrat or a Republican there will no doubt be some degree of distancing from the Bush strategy. It also struck me that the speech potentially outflanks Gordon Brown, staking out the 'I'd do things differently' ground before he gets there. (Though it's very much worth reading the Fink's analysis, which is is essentially that he denies being a neo-con while supporting neo-con policies.) And the bit that really tickled me (purely as a close reader) was the bit in which he implied that the Conservatives were the only ones who really 'got' the special relationship, that they were the traditional custodians of it and that Tony Blair (and New Labour) were too inexperienced and were generally ballsing it all up. (DC's chosen metaphor is the diffenece between old and new friends.) I also liked his apparent repudiation of democracy as an end in itself.

Of course, there are things I don't like - I wasn't thrilled with the word 'disproportionate' popping up again (though I'll give him that Israeli air strikes may not have been the best strategy - that particular debate goes on elsewhere.) Also his use of the 'junior partner' metaphor seems curiously unironic. I believe (though can't cite a reliable source) that it was orginally a slightly more rueful phrase and certainly a post-war one. I'm not sure it is correct to apply it to Churchill / Roosevelt (or for that matter Thatcher / Reagan).

This would be the point where I would ordinarily sum up and offer some form of conclusion. But I don't really have one. I thought it was a good speech overall with a decent grasp of some of the challenges. What he would do (or would have done) differently I'm not sure.

Steyn on John Howard

Here's Mark Steyn writing in his inimitable style on John Howard, the Australian PM:

'Look, I'm a supporter of the Bush doctrine to spread liberty throughout the Muslim world, but I support it on hard-headed grounds of national security. You only have to watch a couple of minutes of the lads in Gaza and southern Lebanon on the telly every night to realise freedom comes pretty low down on the list of their hearts' desires. So, when the US President insists on reprising the line week in week out, he begins to sound utopian, if not utterly deluded. American conservatives would appreciate a rationale less hermetically sealed from reality.*

By contrast, the Prime Minister's rhetoric meets what the law used to regard as the "reasonable man" test. When Howard refers to blokes "raving on about jihad" and the way that those so inclined are "utterly antagonistic" to a free society, he's merely stating the obvious in a way that other Western leaders can't quite bring themselves to do. His words align with reality, and one can't underestimate the value of that.

[...]

The day after the London bombings, Blair said that the terrorists would not be allowed to "change our country or our way of life". Of course not. That's his job, from accelerating European integration to his "reform" of the House of Lords. The British Prime Minister has turned the upper chamber into a house of cronies, the Islamists would like to make it a house of imams.

But once you accept the idea of tearing up a thousand years of history, the rest is largely a difference of degree. After a decade of modish vandalism, Blair has abandoned a lot of his sillier novelties because he's belatedly understood the dangers that arise when your citizens start to feel unmoored from their past. Howard didn't need to learn that on the job.'


*If even Steyn is qualifying his support for Bush, the President is really in trouble.

Wanker

I must begin with an apology as this post will undoubtedly be of very limited interest to some impdecers, but the epithet that headlines this entry was what sprang from my lips when I saw which minister is having to explain the government's wonderful 'shop a smoker' hotline.

Plans for 'shop-a-smoker' hotline

Have a break... or else!

I wonder how many of us have at some time in our working lives failed to comply with this particular EU directive?

Business forced to adopt EU six-hour work limit
By David Charter, Europe Correspondent

EMPLOYEES will be banned from working for more than six hours without a break after a defeat for the Government in Europe.

Businesses were ordered yesterday to ensure that their staff took minimum rest periods, after existing guidelines were dismissed as “meaningless” by the European Court of Justice.

The ruling means that employers must ensure that staff take off at least 11 hours between working days, and have a minimum of 1 day off a week, as well as a 20-minute rest after every 6 hours of work. Business groups said that employees would be unable to choose to work long hours to earn more money because they would be forced to take breaks against their will.

But Brussels said that the decision simply brought Britain in line with the rest of Europe.

Read on...

It's a tricky one. On the one hand I do think that employees have a right to avoid being forced to work lengthy hours without a break. However, I have also been part of businesses that frequently required (and indeed thrived) on midnight oil burning sessions and to be completely honest I look back on the days when I regularly worked a 70-80 hour week with a certain measure of pride. (It's worth mentioning that I was paid overtime.)

The bit that bothers me is this:

The ruling from the court in Luxemburg stated: “The [DTI] guidelines are liable to render the right of workers to daily and weekly rest periods meaningless because they do not oblige employers to ensure that workers actually take the minimum rest period, contrary to the aims of the Working Time Directive.”

Not being forced to work long hours is one thing. Being forced NOT to work long hours is another. Can anyone suggest a sensible balance between regulation and personal freedom on this issue? (A genuine question, not a rhetorical gauntlet.)

Anti-Semitism on the rise in the UK

Today the Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism in the UK was published. Panel chairman is Denis MacShane, and here's his comment:

Anti-semitism is back
Guardian
07/09/06
Our parliamentary report finds that many British citizens who happen to be born Jewish face unacceptable harassment, intimidation and assault.

Another report:

British Jews facing more anti-Semitic sentiment than ever
Haaretz
09/07/06

Ian Duncan-Smith and the loathsome Bunglawala debated it on the Today Program this morning:

0730 There has been a disturbing rise in anti-Semitism in Britain. Listen

Here's what the loathsome one is defending:

Muslims boycott Holocaust remembrance
The Sunday Times
January 23, 2005

On the same Today Program there was another very interesting debate between the even-more-loathsome Steven Rose (organiser of the academic boycott of Israel) and Shalom Lapin, a peacenik left-wing Israeli academic. An unusually good choice of debating partner for Rose, Lapin does a great job of exposing the moral and factual bankruptcy of Rose's position. Well worth a listen

Related:
Important Decisions: Jewish graveyards attacked in the UK
Important Decisions: Ditch Holocaust day, advisers urge Blair

Tony Blair R.I.P?

This battle between Tony Blair and the rest of the Labour Party feels like Politics at its most absurd to me (the leaked memo of Blair's farewell tour was really beyond parody).

Gordon Brown might want to hold off popping the champagne corks just yet though. Westminster Blogger Guido has an interesting take on Blair's statement today. According to him Blair has left himself what he calls the Aznar option (where he would stand down as Party Leader BUT not as PM).

Here's Blair's statement:

"The next party conference in a couple of weeks will be my last party conference as party leader, the next TUC conference next week will be my last TUC - probably to the relief of both of us." (nothing about standing down as PM)

Interestingly, Blair has been rumoured to have asked the Cabinet Secretary and Cabinet office to look into the constitutionality of him remaining PM after resigning as Leader of the Labour Party.

Interesting theory, personaly, I still think he's toast.

For more on this story see here & here.

Inheritance tax - the case for abolition

Interesting, wonder if any of you are convinced by Daley's arguments for abolishing inheritance tax?

The evil of inheritance tax lies in punishing the thrifty
By Janet Daley
Telegraph Comment
04/09/2006

Which of these households is the most deserving: two spinster sisters who have spent their lives caring for their parents, a married couple without children, a married couple with children, a gay couple in a civil partnership with children, a gay couple in a civil partnership without children?

Depending on your personal scale of values, you might rank these cases variously, but I doubt that many of you would feel comfortable with the peremptory arbitrariness of the Government's order of merit. Under the present rules of inheritance tax, the households without children – both heterosexual and homosexual – are the only ones that escape untouched. When either of the partners in such a ménage dies, the other inherits the entire estate, including the shared home, without having to pay a penny to the Treasury. The savings that the childless couple has accumulated (which are likely to be considerably more than those of the couple with children) will be untouched by the state. The childless are the outright winners in the Treasury's inheritance lottery.

Next comes the married couple (or the gay couple in a civil partnership) with children, who will enjoy the same exemption as the childless when one of them dies. But the children who have presumably been at the centre of their shared lives – for whom they have worked, saved and aspired together – will be hit, on the death of the second, by a 40 per cent tax on whatever is left to them. No matter that this money was taxed when it was earned, and again when it was invested.

Then there are the absolute losers in this game: the two spinster sisters who have devoted their lives selflessly to the care of elderly relatives and each other. The surviving one will get clobbered instantly and brutally on the death of her sibling. Because their relationship, however loving and stable it may be, is not a sexual partnership, they get no recognition at all from the state.

Just such a couple, Joyce and Sybil Burden, both in their eighties, are now challenging what they consider to be unlawful discrimination against them in the European Court of Human Rights. The sisters worked on their father's farm during the war and then went on to care for their parents and two aunts until they died. They remain in the family home, which cost £7,000 to build in the 1960s and which is now estimated to be worth £875,000. Needless to say, having to pay 40 per cent of the difference between this sum and the absurd inheritance tax threshold of £285,000 on the death of either of them would mean the surviving sister having to sell the home in which she has spent her self-sacrificing life. Can this be right? Does it strike you as just or appropriate?

read on...