Timmyhawk

PRIORITIES, PLEASE
Have I missed it, or does the current edition of the Spectator not carry one single full article on last weekend’s EU action? I mean, this is The Story. Instead we get some more stuff on Gordon Brown (as if we hadn’t had enough), which all things considered, for now is just trivial flim-flam. Given the debate about what resulted from the EU meeting (possibly the legal creation of a confederation, or maybe not), surely this should have been top priority. Sorry Speccie, not good.

WORTH THE WHOLE LICENCE FEE
Nobody should ever claim the BBC doesn't bring you the most important news right here and right now:

THE FUTURE OF THE BBC
The Beeb has just secured itself some big happy funding increases, and inevitably there’s been some debate about the future of the corporation.
Needless to say the increase is funding is completely unjustified, but it’s worth reiterating why this is so.

I support the BBC existing as a public broadcaster in order to have news reporting and investigation that will be free of commercial pressures. It can also serve as a focus for experimentation which may be too risky for a commercial broadcaster and help to inform a national narrative (not too popular point, I know). So, this is its basic public service remit.
So, how should public services be funded? There are two ways. Either we decide this is a general, indivisible social good and then it should be free at the point of use and paid by general taxation (see defence, policing, the NHS). Alternatively we could decide that a given service is inherently monopolistic and then the state is the most efficient provider, which would then mean that its users simply buy the service directly from the provider/state as in a market place.

How on earth does the licence fee fit this? It doesn’t. The licence fee forces buyers of television sets to pay for a service they may never use and not want, so it doesn’t meet the requirement of being a state-provided service. I think the BBC is a general good so it should be paid out of general taxation. If you believe it should be considered a service, then you should favour a BBC subscription system where you have to pay especially to get access like with any other tv service provider. Only these two options are fair. The current licence fee is illegitimate.

The BBC’s public service remit I am advocating would also require changes to the Beeb’s programming. The point of it would be to provide a service that the market won’t provide. That means anything that’s commercially viable, such as soap operas, game shows and the like should not be the BBC’s business. The exception would be news and documentary making which can be commercially viable. But as pointed out above there is a risk of a private channel’s financial interests biasing such work. I can’t remember what it was but Noreena Hertz had a good example for this.
And talking of biases, the BBC will also have to sort its political and cultural biases as documented en masse by Biased BBC.

These transformations would of course much reduce the current BBC budget which is why the increases are unjustified.
All in all these changes would make the BBC one the great British institutions again.

DISPIRITING TIMES
I know I have these sorts of moans every once in a while. Recently I have been having one of those phases again, where everything just seems to be going wrong for no good reason and people who should know better don’t.

Look at the Lebanon war’s aftermath. The outcome of Tzahal’s very lacklustre performance has left the Hizb’allah in place, albeit weakened. But what is happening now is that Lebanese and international troops are going to moved into position in between the Hizb’allah’s fighters. As these forces are neither willing nor capable of disarming the militia, that means that inevitable there will be a second round of fighting at some point in the future. And when it comes to that Israel will find itself seriously hamstrung by the presence of these forces. Diplomatically this will make serious Israeli action nigh on impossible. The result will be that Hizb’allah will become ever more stronger and aquire ever better weapons from Iran with ever more destructive consequences. Tremendously stupid outcome. Peace will only come about when the Hizb’allah ceases to exist as an armed force. This should be clear to any decent analyst. Perhaps that is the reason why so far troop commitments have been so weakly.

But talking of which, if all these countries can stump up thousands of troops for a dangerously counterproductive mission in Lebanon, why not reroute them and deploy them to Afghanistan. Here there are some real difficulties, and here it matters as we cannot allow the Taliban to retake the country. With the highly unpopular prospect of German forces being deloyed beyond their breaking point, I wonder why the Italians and the French can send their forces further eastwards. On the other hand, I can’t avoid the sly suspicion that there are people, particularly in Paris, who wouldn’t mind failure in Afghanistan too much as it is currently a NATO-mission.

I remember Geoffrey van Orden warning that the possible failure by NATO would do massive and possibly irrevocable political damage to the alliance. Together with ever stronger anti-Americanism this could finally seal Britain’s fate by taking away our alternatives to being sucked into the EU ever further. Actually, I didn’t really expect much of a debate about this. Still despressing though.

Another point I have to raise is the possibilty that some of the Afghan troubles are due to Britain being the de-facto lead nation in the south. After the desastrous conduct of Britain in Iraq recently, the Taliban would be quite likely to conclude that this former lion was already half on the run. So why not prod and prick him a bit more and he might grant you a great victory by buckling under political pressure and doing a completely runner. And when you’ve got him on the run why not take a few more shots, he might even give himself up completely. There is no such thing as conciliation toward totalitarian and fanatical enemies. All such moves will be seen as weakness, which will simply invite more attacks. When will we learn?

And this is just the foreign arena. At home we have more immigration nonsense doing the rounds. I’m sorry but we if we let countries into the EU, we have to give them full membership. If we don’t they will simply go adrift and go slack on maintaining the already shaky membership conditions. The same will be the case for other potential new members. Once they start seeing that they will not be admitted properly they might stop trying. This will probably mean that they will also stop reforming their governance structures. The consequence will be less stability and security in the EU’s neighbourhood. This is exactly the thing the EU exists to prevent. That people don’t seem willing to see this simply point just annoys me.

If the consequence of more EU-migrants is wage pressure that is a problem that can and should be fixed at home. As for the real problem of poverty and unemployment in Britain, that is unrelated to immigration. This is down to economic overcentralisation withouth labour flexibility, to rotten educational and social circumstances of Britain’s poorest, who simply are either unwilling or unable to take up any kind of employment. This is the big problem underlying the current row. But nobody seems to be paying much attention to their plight.

Part of this is the media’s fault for pandering to headline grabbing tales of foreign welfare scroungers or alternatively of rampant racism in Britain. Because I’m in a bad mood I’m going to pick on the Daily Mail in particular. What we see here is a complete misunderstanding of some of Britain’s big challenges. We need to be engaged in the EU, and accepting migrant workers from new member states is a price we have to be wiling to pay, if indeed it is a cost, rather than an advantage. Ok, so I’m Eurosceptic too, but the Mail doesn’t seem to be serious about this. Sure it’s views on the EU are far more hostile than mine, by far. What matters however is the context in which this debate has Britain positioned. Because the one thing that really drives me bonkers about the Mail is its anti-Americanism, which certainly wouldn’t look out of place in the Indy or Groan. Now, fine you may say, the Daily Mail is for isolationism, which would certainly fit its generally closed-minded and parochial approach. Theoretically this is a legitimate view to take. However in practice this is simple nonsense. Spreading anti-Americanism is absolute poison for the Eurosceptic cause. The only political forces in Britain that can utilise anti-American sentiment are those of staunch Eurofederalism. Isolationism, for better or for worse, is a non-option in British politics. If you really want to keep us out of the EU, the attractiveness of the alternative avenues of influence, the special relationship and NATO needs to be fostered. In the current circumstances there is little emotional energy focused on the EU, but far too much on America. So if the Daily Mail wants to keep us out of the European superstate perhaps its commentary and reporting ought to reflect this. Blaming more and more of our ills from terrorism to trashy television on America will simply drive the British into the arms of Eurofederalism. Can the Mail’s chiefs really be so misguided as not to see this?

Just some things I needed to get off my chest. I’m feeling better already.

WHAT A DOUR WEEK
I should be blogging properly on all of this, but it’s not so much anger but despair that marks my reaction to what’s been going on in the past days. Where to start?
ID cards. Has anybody anywhere seen anything resembling a convincing argument that we actually need these breathing licenses? Sure their cheerleaders have argued well, if not convincingly, that they won’t turn this country into a police state and that they won’t bankrupt us. And that’s it. And some of the cheek they use in their arguments - just consider our probable future prime minister:

More shocking abuse in Iraq . . . well not really. We get a journalistically indefensible running of abuse image of Abu Ghraib. Why this qualifies as “news” escapes me, as it’s the same incident, the same day, that we have already worked through and it offers nothing in the way of new evidence. The only thing it does is provide material to the opponents of the Coalition. It’s almost like the responsible media want us to lose this war . . .
And as for our own boys, am I missing something here? I only read about it and didn’t see the images so I was expecting something disturbing. So I was rather dismayed to see the whole furour was kicked up only about a few troops in rather desperate circumstances kicking and hitting a little too much during an arrest. Admittedly, too much is too much and it is necessary for disciplinary action to be taken. But given the circumstances of an mob assault on the Army base, a mere few kicks and hits are pretty mild to the possible alternative of machine gunning the crowd. Again, this abuse only really shows again how we remain on the moral highground even if we lose the PR battle.
Which moves us on to the smoking ban. What to make of that? Is this fox hunting for pubbers? I don’t really see how this can be popular, or why we need it. In consequence pubs will wither lose customers, or change their licences to being private premises. As for people who don’t go to pubs, and who are probably the majority backing this move, they’re not going to be showing up in Ye Old Rose anytime soon. The only change is that now we have to waste the resources of public order on implementing this idiocy. What a day for limited government.
The final straw I think was the bizarre Dick Cheney shooting incindent. Sure, given that the victim seems in good shape, it’s certainly worth a giggle and some jokes in satire shows, but can anybody give me any reason why this was given whole minutes on prime time British tv news? Or why does it warrant any real attention? It’s all beyond me. It does however, along with the above raise questions about the competence of the journalistic profession.
All in all I just feel that sensible argument is just being lost.

“BOMB AL JAZEERAH!”- WHY?
So we see the return of the story about how Bush allegedly wanted to bomb the headquarters of the Al Jazeerah tv channel in Quatar. I don’t know whether or not this is accurate but there is something else I have been wondering about: why would he even consider it? I am just assuming from hearsay that al-J’s reporting of Western military effort is biased against the Coalition. But if that’s what was bugging Bush, he would have been singling out al-J rather unfairly, given that there are plenty of other tv channels that are not noted for their enthusiasm for the war in Iraq. Some of them rather closer to home too.
Ok, so perhaps he really is the kind of war-mongeringly thoughtless nutter that the anti-war likes to make him out to be. Despite being a fully committed pro-American über-hawk I cannot of course rule this out theoretically. Well, I’ll leave that to the theorists then.
Another possibility that also can’t be discounted is that he was joking. Who knows? He might have been discussing the difficulty of getting any kind of good PR, and after mulling over the frustration of al-J specifically, might have jested, “we should just bomb them!”. If that were the case I can also see why no one would want this published because it would appear rather immature to be making jokes like that in the midst of a war crisis. And that’s still an understatement.
But here’s my guess at what could have been the driving factor. Apologies for the fuzzy detail and I don’t have any links at present, but I remember there was a story about al-J paying insurgents to carry out attacks so they had some exciting material. Additionally there were a whole host of allegations about collusion between al-J reporters and insurgents. I don’t know if those stories ever really got substantiated, but it would be quite a serious situation if it were true. Perhaps Bush indeed suggested to Blair that bombing al-J’s HQ might be an option of dealing with the problem. To my knowledge nothing was ever done. So the problem I see for Bush in regards to this memo is that it shows he had evidence of al-J/insurgent cooperation and then did nothing about it. This would be a real damper in regards to his standing with more hawkish types. Remember of course when this supposed discussion took place, frustration and even anger was on the boil about Bush N’ Blair’s refusal to send enough troops in the right fashion to win in Iraq (see archives of timmyhawk and Weekly Standard ad nauseam). Bush and Blair may simply now be trying to avoid coming under even more pressure from within their own camps.
There is one final reason for suppressing the memo. It’s a memo of a confidential, i.e. secret, deliberation between heads of government. If such conversations can in future not take place because of an overbearing fear of unprofessional civil servants leaking anything that tickles their fancy, communication between our governments will become ever more difficult, and in consequence it will become evermore harder to act. Particularly damaging to the Government in times of war.
Well that’s my quid’s worth, we’ll see one day I suppose. We always do in the end.

BRITAIN’S SELF-DESTRUCTION CONTINUES
That Sir Michael Rose, eh? I wonder if anybody is surprised by today’s news that he’s joined in the chorus of “impeach Blair!”. I’m certainly not. According to Sir Mikey, Blair “mislead” Parliament and the public over invading Iraq. There are arguments I can’t be bothered to enter into anymore, and this is certainly one of them. But there is something else going on here. Even if there was more truth in Rose’s claims that I can see, what on earth does he think he’s doing? He’s not going to achieve anything positive or constructive.
On another revealing wider point, his argument about wmd, where do you link to, if you want to refutation of that view? In the US it’d be fairly easy, and this piece is the first that comes to mind. But from a British perspective? I can’t off my head reading anything in, say, the Spectator, that made a similar argument about Britain’s war. Where are our hawks? (Even if they go ott.)
This only reflects the sheer and ever growing lack of nerve by the “great and the good”, of which a former general should be considered a member. Increasingly I get the feeling that the British establishment is losing its sense of political seriousness.
It is after all one thing thinking that invading Iraq in 2003 was a bad idea, it is quite another beating the anti-war drum long after the decision has been made and our troops are in the field. The only thing that will achieve is in undermining public support for a war that can’t be made undone anymore. In turn this saps away at the troops’ morale. Think about it, would you want to be a soldier risking his life in Iraq, when at home everybody’s saying that you shouldn’t be there and we’re going to lose anyway and everything you’re doing is a waste of space et al? No? Neither would I.
I find this episode all the more disappointing because Sir Michael Rose is a former general himself. He could at least counterbalanced his complaints about the political procedure prior to the invasion with a few strong words of support for his former colleagues.
And Britain sinks a little more . . .

A BAD BEGINNING TO THE NEW YEAR
Whereas most of the UK press seems to be obsessed and “surprised” by the fact that Charles Kennedy may have enjoyed a drink or two more than his thirst required, in other parts of the world actually important things are happening: Iran ready to remove U.N. seals at nuclear sites. Perhaps this should warrant more attention? Just a thought.

SLOPPY EDITING, TODAY THE TIMES
In a report on the EU budget argument over the rebate:

2 million? That’s it? What’s all the fuss been about then?!

TIM MONTGOMERIE ON COOL NEW SPECCIE SITE
I quite like the redesigned Spectator website. There’s a links section, never a bad thing, and there’s a news aggregator bit which collects the most substantive news items around. Whilst I have been sceptical about “oficial” blogs in the past, the Speccie’s blog is quite readable. There’s a good entry there by Tim Montgomerie who normally edits ConservativeHome on the still dire prospects for British conservatism, not just in form of the Tory party, but as a general movement. He points to the relatively more successful right in America. I am particularly pleased that he shares my concern, voiced previously, that the British right is very lacking on the think-tank front. What’s needed is unfortunately more money. That’s not quite so easy to fix I fear. But the more voices point to the problem the better.

FAIR PORTRAYAL OF MUSLIMS IN BRITISH MEDIA
Well I suppose it had to happen some day. David t at Harry’s Place has the story. Whilst it may be the remaining liberal do-gooder instinct in me that are the main course for my occasional concern over the vilification of Muslims, I think right-wing hawks should bear in mind that this matters a lot. Think about some of the arguments raised against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Very prominent amongst them was the idea that these military actions were going to inflame Muslims to the extent that hordes of terrorists, including within our own country, were to be unleashed on the world. That is nonsence of course. But it’s an argument that has a lot of traction for the simple reason that the only British Muslim voices that are giving space in the msm are those of extremist nutters like Abu Hamza, or the often mealy mouthed apologists from self-declared community representations. The latter may say no to terrorism, but, well, there’s always a but. A but that often implies that the terrorists actions may be sort of wrong, but that their arguments were basically right; just a bit misguided the chaps. If this image of seething Muslim masses that are incapable of operating their own independent critical faculties to reach individual moral decisions, were true (which it isn’t), I can see that the best course of action in fighting terror would indeed be to lie low and hope you don’t get noticed.
But if you agree that the best way to fight terror is by confronting and facing down the enemy, with all means necessary, then it is obviously necessary to counter the myth of the mad and wild Muslim hordes. For if people believe in this myth they will be unwilling to shoulder the burdens of fighting a war that in their minds would unwinnable and best avoided. Of course by not acting against terror cells you actually let them grow as we saw with bin Laden’s gang in the 1990s.
So, by believing the racist mythology that there’s a jihadi lurking behind every Muslim neighbour, you actually increase the chances that it will be so.

NOTES: THE EU-JUGGERNAUT, PRESERVING THE CHURCH, LOSING OUR MORALE OVER IRAQ, APPEARANCE OF NEW TORY FOREIGN POLICY?, ARMENIAN CONSTITUTIONAL REFERENDUM
Whilst I complained that many people in this country were going slack in regards to the expansion of EU (and less recently), that was more of an aside, I had little idea just how fast and far the EU was actually going. In the Speccie's cover story Anthony Brown recounts some of the major development from only the past few months. It is pretty dizzying reading. Whilst one could try to find solace in Brown's remark that

I fear the EU is simply doing its usual thing in flying under the radar. Again it's a shame that the main press doesn't really pick these stories up properly. In turn of course that leads to angry-old-man-syndrome when it suddenly becomes apparent that the EU has instigated some mind bogglingly stupid and rightfully unpopular move like forcing out the Red Ensign. Well, probably too late if true. By the time you see the result of EU regulations or an expansion of EU institutional competences it's probably already too late to do anything about it - that's how it works. It's time the wider public got to understand this better. It's good of the Speccie to run these stories (and reminds me why we really need it), but that is just not enough.


Having spent the day in Canterbury I am impressively reminded why I stand by the Church of England, despite some of its growing troubles. When you look at the Cathedral but also some of the smaller Church buildings spread around you are not immediately struck by it. It's when you look closer, that what really conveys the quiet splendour of the Anglican faith are the little details and the air of historical matter-of-courseness that accompanies the Church and its works. It certainly grew on me again while I was there.


In Saturday's Times Matthew Parris has an interesting comment on Iraq, in which he says that whatever we may consciously argue, subconsciously we all agree on Iraq having failed. I am afraid I know what he means. When Iraq hawks talk and particularly blog amongst themselves it all seems less bad, but the moment you open a newspaper, switch on the telly or the radio you can't avoid this sinking feeling. I see no reason (yet?) to change my mind over invading and occupying Iraq, but the emotional commitment to the enterprise had been gone for a long time. In the lead up to the invasion there was a real feeling that things were changing for the better, and this was a just and necessary war that it was a pleasure to be an advocate for. I can't really say when that tipping point came. Looking back there are two points that stand out for me.
The first was Bush's "mission accomplished" show. At the moment when the war was going into its more difficult phase of reestablishing order in Iraq Bush was effectively saying there's nothing to do anymore, let's go home. That built up exactly the wrong kind fo expectation both in the military and the public. After you've created the impression that the job is as good as done and you then say, "yes, but I need to send an extra two hundred thousand troops in for at least a year" (a realistic war plan I would wager), people are going baulk at that. I think this is when I began feeling that our leaders were possibly going to mess things up.
The second was the David Kelly affair. Whether or not Andrew Gilligan was journalistically right or not to blow the wmd story up at a time when public support was already beginning to wane I will leave to others to debate; ultimately there’s nothing that can be done about freedom of the press, even if that freedom gets used badly. But again like Bush’s speech this was in the transformationary phase of the war. To run a proper nation building war effort would have required public backing. The Kelly affair set off the then sheer endless stream of officials past and present rolling out supposed exposes about wmd lies. This helped undermine public morale. Why the Government was so incompetent in meeting this bad pr remains a mystery to me, given how good they are normally at spinning.
But both those incidences I think we’re instrumental in pushing the emotional dimension of the Iraq war debate in the wrong direction. To be sure, there is plenty that went wrong policy and argument wise to be sure.
If you read the Economist's fine leader on Iraq this week you are struck by the level of disappointment that seeps through the comment. That is a feeling I sadly share. What makes it worse is that I know it's possibly too late to make a real shift in strategy. That would also be politically difficulty increasingly in Iraq itself now I guess. Otherwise I think this posting from more than two years ago describes what would needed to be done.
(As an aside, advocating the invasion of Iraq may have been a pleasure, but socially comfortable it wasn't; I guess people don't really like debating politics properly in a social environment; it's more about finding commonality with other, which intensifies ten-fold the displaesure on realising the other side diagrees with you.)


So what template would a Tory Government do to deal with such a situation? Not easy to tell. Back in June I had pointed out that the Conservatives needed to debate and develop clear thinking on foreign policy. Whilst Michael Howard's positions had already hinted in an interventionist, hawkish and sovereignist direction, it seems that outlook is gaining traction amongst the Tories. In this week's Speccie Peter Oborne reports on a London meeting of the Henry Jackson Society. Plenty of up and coming Tories in there. It certainly looks like this is where the Conservatives seem to be heading in terms of forging a new foreign policy consensus. This will definitely help the Conservatives win the next election. After all, one of my favourites themes I like to go on about is how you can’t fight properly in politics if you don’t have certainty on the national strategy, Britain’s place in the world and on how you would decide matters of war and peace. Even if there is a wide political range in the Henry Jackson Society itself, most are centre-right and I think it is no safe to say that therefore the Tory revival edges closer.
(see also Stephen Pollard)


After the doubtful occurances during Azerbaijan’s elections recently, time to turn to another South Caucasus state and an expression of public will, the constitutional amendment referendum in Armenia. The proposal would most importantly have moved powers away from the presidency towards parliament. After first hearing about it I thought this looks a lot more promising avenue for bringing genuine democracy into the post-Soviet sphere than trying to do so in single big steps such as revolutions or general elections. By gradually starting to move things from the bottom up, piece by piece, chances are far better that the democracy that emerges from that will hold. Sadly, it seems the referendum has followed the dubious routes that similar events have gone in the ex-USSR. Shame really. Hopefully it will work one day.

SLOPPY EDITING, TODAY: THE SCOTSMAN
The headline looks familiar enough these days:

But the question remains, who is this „Bash“ fellow?

SOME NOTES ON THE PAST WEEK
Am I the only one who notices an uncanny resemblance between this EU Referendum posting and this comment piece in the Sunday Times? Ok, well the Sunday Times article mentions the must-read arrse, but otherwise it's hard to see any other ground being covered there. Still, I suppose it's good to see these arguments moving from the blogosphere to the "proper" media.
Staying with defence and the Times, Saturday had a strange comment about the Navy's future:

Yes, the Army is more important, but the RAF? There is, to be clear, only a very limited need for an air force at the moment. What our forces need are deployable and close-in support assets, such as would be ideally provided by aircraft carriers equipped with the Joint Strike Fighter. We could hope . . .
Lot of work in those regards to do for the next Conservative prime minister. From the most recent polling it looks like Cameron will be it. Not that he's spent an awful lot of time on saying what his defence policy would be, but a BBC poll says Party members are going to vote him in. Whether it's Davis or Cameron, I am confident that the Conservatives will carry the day in 2009/2010. Having so far only followed this leadership race in print for the past three months I was pretty amazed at the visual difference between the two Davids. Whereas Cameron always seems to look fresh, healthy and energetic, Davis looks clapped-out and finished. I guess that will shift the balance in Cameron's favour too.
On the other hand perhaps the BBC is still continuing its practice of presenting people it doesn't like in a bad ligh. Evidence for this could be seen on Sunday's The Politics Show when they interviewed noted Eurosceptic Daniel Hannan, he had a sinister menacing shadow over the left half of his face, funny that with all the technology available in terms of make-up, lighting and computer retouching something like that should still happen . . . (Not that these methods are restricted to this side of the Big Pond mind you.)
While we're on the issue of that show, am I the only one who thinks that the presenters' insistence of not wearing ties makes the whole programme look a little tacky and akin to some Sunday afternoon football chat show?
Talking of politics on the BBC though, is it possible that the coverage has actually gotten fairer? For example on Newsnight they had an interview with two American experts (one was Dick Morris) about Bush's remaining years in office after such a week of crisis, all of which was possible without the usual anti-war and Bush-bashing claptrap clouding out sober analysis as used to be the case for the often. And again, on the Politics Show Sunday morning, the Tories interviewed were given proper space to speak and even the appropriate respect. Has the BBC seen the journalistic light? Or is it scared what will happen to its future once the Conservatives are back in power?
If you happen to be curious about the further developments on the German election front, I will be bringing an update soon given the current troubles (includes more demonic lighting, what's going on . . . ?!). I see that the Times seems to agree with my call for a second round of elections. Looking back though I will say that going for another election campaign now will be a better option than it would have been in late September. The leftward shift apparent in Schroeder's social democrats should lead to a workable majority for a Christian-democrat/right-liberal coalition that I have argued here occasionally.
So, David Blunkett has gone from office again. Well, I don't really know my way around the ministerial code of conduct, so I can't say anything useful about that. The only thing I noticed again, is that here was a Labour minister leaving office due to some form of corruption. Whilst that is good in itself, it masks the fact that there has been quite a dearth in the past years when it comes to ministers being sacked or resigning due to incompetence. And to be sure, there's been plenty of it: Geoff Hoon anyone . . . ? In the broader scheme of things I would say that incompetent Government is a bigger problem than incompetent Government and I think we should shift the balance of accountability in back in that direction.
As a side-note, it is quite funny really that Blunkett sat on the board of a company specialising in paternity testing isn't it?
To end this post on a gripe though, I was intermittently watching Sky News during the day. Is David Blunkett's resignation the only event worthy of reporting the whole day?

SLOPPY REPORTING, TODAY: THE TIMES
(As a blogger it should of course be my duty to rap the msm over the knuckles noe and then, and this is certainly a duty I have neglected. But betterment begins today.)
The Times reports today on a study which claims that Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side':

I have my doubts. Either way, the report in the Times is not actually helpful is it? For the most interesting aspect for me would be the question, why a decrease in religiosity would improve society causally. Simply listing statistical correlations, which is the only part of the research the Times reports here, doesn’t really get us very far in understanding the problem. I haven’t read the full article yet so at the moment, so I can’t make any statement about the article’s utility or otherwise. What I want to criticise here is they way that the Times’ religion correspondent Ruth Gledhill has reported the academic article (or maybe it was editor’s cutting?).
Her story doesn’t show up the possible causal connections between atheism and a good society made by the academic Gregory Paul. Equally she doesn’t ask or query what his statistics show or don’t show. Undoubtedly on a lot of indicators such as murder and abortion, the comparatively secular European societies perform better than the more religious US. At the moment that is. What I would need to know as a reader though is, what the rates of change are. That is what really matters. Religion has rebounded in America in the past two decades, while it has kept floundering in Europe. How have the indicators developed in that period? Did Paul make a difference between people in the US who (re)embraced religion and those who didn’t? Did the study look at differences between people who believe in the existence of God and people of a religious mentality? The two are not the same, certainly not for me. Did the study take into account other factors that would influence society’s wellbeing, such as character and extent of a welfare state?
I only mention these factors, not to disparage Paul’s research which may have serious political, social and cultural implications, but simply to question the quality of the Times’ report. Without taking stock in any way of the issues about methodology I raise above the article is clearly of little informative value. Additionally I wonder why Gledhill reports no criticism of the article which there surely is. Was there no time? Surely this news story was not such a priority that it couldn’t incorporate different views on the subject due to time constraints.
The disappointing conclusion is that the Times shouldn’t have run the article. Instead of enlightening its readers, it simply provides a possibly misleading first impression, and thus makes its readers less well informed than if the page had been left blank.

(More to follow when I have done my homework and actually read the study. . . )

A GROWING BRITISH PROBLEM IN IRAQ
Following on from the recent story about Iranian meddling into the British zone in Iraq, it seems that insurgent violence in the south is beginning to increase:

This is quite a logical development, since it is becoming more difficult to stage attacks in the western Sunni provinces. The real questions that need to be asked though are why have British forces been so complacent? It seems likely there is a political component to this, with the Government trying to keep Iraq off the political radar screen, because of the venture's unpopularity. After all, this is not actually the first warning sign that our zone in southern Iraq is all it's cracked up to be. As I complained at greater length on a general posting on British concerns on Iraq, I still think the media make a lousy job of reporting what our own forces are doing. To that I would also add the politicians that are supposed to hold the Government to account. Parliament and particularly the Conservatives should be pressurizing the Government about deploying adequate forces to succeed in Iraq. It is no good to complain that it was a bad idea to go into Iraq, we’re there now and we need to finish the job properly too. This should be natural Tory territory, but so far I see far too little effort.

DEFICIENCIES OF CULTURE FOR DEFENCE
This story about the death of a Royal Marine trainee is on the face of it just a simple tragedy. But have a look at the way the story has been ran at the Daily Mail:

Now, why is the Mail’s first instinct to put in question whether the training should be altered? Nothing in the facts as far as I can see at the moment would give any justification for such a move. But by employing such a headlining technique, the Daily Mail writer responsible is suggestively hinting that there is something wrong with Royal Marine training. And in the Daily Mail of all places! The first impression the reader is left with is the anti-military slant that somehow, an undoubtedly heartlesss and uncaring military establishment is irresponsible driving young men to their deaths. Of course this is complete nonsense.
If the accidental death by a non-military cause can be put up by the media elite as something that would necessite softer training we really do have a problem. The idea of “train hard, fight easy”will be dead in the water if troops can not even be put at risk of scratching their legs. This is just another little piece of evidence that shows how are political culture is enfeebling our ability for military readiness.

JOURNALISM’S QUALITY: USA VS UK - POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS
To follow up from this Clive Davis post, the beginning of this puff piece on Brian Anderson got me thinking again about affairs this side of the Big Pond:

I’ll just second Clive Davies on this: where is the British equivalent to the
Atlantic Monthly, to Commentary or Policy Review? I have purposefully only picked right-of-centre publications, because I think the left-of-centre Prospect easily matches the quality and depth of aformentioned US publications.
As in the quote above part of the secret lies in think tanks: the US has them by the wagon load, but the UK? We can hardly say that the Centre for Policy Studies -as good as some of its work undoubtedly is- is quite in the same league as such Washington monsters like the Heritage Foundation or the AEI. Or more specifically, where’s the British equivalent to, say, the Lexington Institute? Is this it? Again, the politics here matters. Even if I disagree with a lot on political gronds, the quality and influence of say Demos, the Fabian Society or the Foreign Policy Centre is sufficient for them not to feel inadequate in comparison with their American counterparts. So, where are the right-of-centre big hitters in the UK think tank scene? Restricted to largely economic issues, at the Adam Smith Institute and the IEA.

Where am I going with this? I am just trying to emphasise that the British right’s political decline is connected to an intellectual one as well. And this becomes especially apparent in comparison to conservative power in the US. As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge note:

If British conservatives are interested in regaining positions of power and influence, not just in politics, but also in society and the wider national culture, there needs to be some good hard thinking. Given that this requires, besides time and the virtue of patience, money, I’m not sure how this can be achieved.
Necessary it is though. It might have spared us the choice of immigration policy for the election.

YES, TELEVISION IS RUBBISH
Well, so I went away for a couple of days and “forgot” to take enough work with me, so I had plentiful time to watch the box. It was a fairly sobering experience I can tell you. Here are two samples of what caught my ire:

-Newsnight Review: One of the topic’s was an exhibition of pre-Ottoman Turkish culture. For sure it looked interesting and beautiful and all, but that’s not really the point though. They all just sat around fawning at how great and fanstastic and everything it all was and saying how the “American neocon Christian right” and assorted other baddies should look at this and be ashamed and change course (presumeably because Ossama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein present the continuation of the greatest traditions of Islamic-Turkish civilization; or what?). Anyways, the point I’d have to make about this is that there was a consensus on the whole issue by all the pannelists. I mean what is the point of having a “debate” in which everyone agrees on everything? Ok, so in the age of political correctness I didn’t really expect anyone to say “Yes, the Turks incorporated all the best of the Christian cultures they found in the lands they had newly conquered and then they expelled and exterminated those Christians”; or perhaps more mildly “This show is purely being put on for political reasons to boost Turkey’s drive to enter the European Union by getting it some positive cultural press”.
In sum a pointless programme really.

-Ultimate Force: What on earth was this? Now look, I like a good Army action flick as much as the next guy, but somehow it just got everything wrong: the acting, the politics, the fighting. Actually coming to think of it, that’s a little unfair. All of these aspects were right, but just not quite wholesome yet. It’s like somebody handed in the script and said, “oh, something roughly like this, but I need mor time to finish it”, and the producers said, “Nah, it’ll be fine. Nobody cares to have a good quality British army action series”. Well I would. Disappointing, though like all the above programmes I’ll probably be mindless enough to watch it again at the next opportunity (that being next week).

Well that’s enough moaning for now.

On the plus side . . .
I finally got round to watching the videotaped first part of the BBC2 series on Auschwitz, which I can can so far only recommend; well put together and the dramatisations are sensible instead of their normal habit of distracting from the issue and looking silly at the same time. I’m looking forward to seeing how the series will go from here.