Covering Prime Minister's role and the MoD

We are now hacking through all those briefings. "It is apparent..that Dr Kelly apprehended that his name would soon become public knowledge" (Hutton) "We have an amazing press in this country that does not take long to find out such details"(!)

(now moving to the Q&A briefing)

Allegations now being detailed. Arguments about the BBC Governors and public interest grounds for publication. Hutton recommends that there be a review of relations between the intelligence services, parliament and the media.

Now we're coming to it...

Moving onto the Mail article and the 45 minutes claim.

Hutton statement - preambling

Currently giving an overview of the history/handing out the factoids.

Here we go - blogging the statement

Final submissions are to be published on the website....perhaps including Tony's note from his Mum? "Dear Lord Hutton, I am very sorry about my son's behaviour.."

The snark hunt has officially begun!

Well, he made it by five votes after Nick Brown's mystery change of principles. It reminds me of the old crack about William Hague being against the Euro "in principle" but only for the length of a parliament - that is to say that his principles lasted a maximum of five years. Mr. Brown's lasted a few weeks. The rumour machine is running on full power, with all media pouring forth thousands of words of speculation about Gordon Brown's role in the affair. Personally I am an extreme sceptic about Blairbrownery, I think it's largely the product of speculating about things that are unknowable. So I will make no comment. I suspect it's really a story about old-fashioned whips office, black book bullying.

The big burst came later, though, with the loanshark-influenced Sun's claimed leak of the Hutton Report. Quite in keeping with the "newspaper"'s strangely contradictory position of lauding Tony Blair whilst pouring vitriol on his government, policies, appearance, family and probably underpants, the Sun claims to have seen a "precis of Lord Hutton's conclusions" which exonerates - well - everybody except those pesky journalists. Not even Geoff Hoon. Curiously, their political editor Trevor Kavanagh stated on the BBC Today programme that the leak came from someone who stood to make neither financial nor political gain. Most extraordinary. Somebody was really so exercised by a moral need to advance the date of publication by some twelve hours that they decided to place themselves in contempt of court for no reward! What a paragon of virtue! Strangely enough, though, they did not bestow their gift without discrimination - they selected one particular newspaper!

How strange.

Mind you - I'm keeping a provisional BS rating on this, especially as Mr Kavanagh took care to deny that he had seen the report, or even (if I understand the word precis correctly) extracts of its text. He remarked to the BBC that they would have been equally keen to publish had the leak claimed that it was all Tony Blair's fault as if this was interesting. Who would not have been keen to publish? The next phase, of course, is the mole hunt. Who would not gain politically and had an advance copy? (We may assume that Kavanagh's remark about financial gain means that they received no moneys directly from the Sun. Someone will make it worth their while.)

Alistair Campbell has been the first out of the traps to deny everything. The damage is done, though - the public mind seized.

Referring to the last post

Given Professor Stephen Hill's attitude, perhaps this email was no surprise:

Dear Student,

The Student Fees Office would like to inform any student with an overdue debt that we will shortly commence the College’s disciplinary process in respect of non-payment of fees. Please refer to the Student Handbook 2003-2004 (sections 3 & 4 of the Student Fee Regulations, pages 29-30) for more information.

It is crucial that payment is made by the 26th January 2004 to avoid inclusion in this process - which, if debts remain unpaid, may lead to the termination of your registration as a student of the College.

Payment can be made in the following ways:

· On-line at www.rhul.ac.uk/epay
· Credit/debit card payment line, 01784-414099, 9am-4pm, Monday to Friday.
· Cheque or credit/debit card at the Student Service Point, FW141, 10am-4pm Monday to Friday (Term time).
· Self-pay deposit box for cheque payments only, Available 24 hours a day using the envelopes provided outside the Cash Office FW143.
· Cash payments are taken at the Cash Office, FW143, 10am-4pm Monday to Friday (Term time).

Late payment surcharges will be applied in accordance with Section 3.1 of the Student Fee Regulations.

If you are unable to pay your overdue fees, it is important that you make an appointment, at the Student Service Point, to see ****** ***** or ***** *** to discuss the matter further. Alternatively, you may contact the Student Fees Office mailbox, Student-Fees@rhul.ac.uk


Student Fees Office

Great. Signed by a thing, not a person into the bargain!

Speaking of top-up fees and the Crisis..

I notice in my newspaper that a wedge of university principals, vice chancellors and other Mucho Pomposos have signed A Statement in favour of the government. I didn't see that in a report. No. They took out a full-page ad - seventy thousand quid at least! Worst of all, the principal of my own dear college is one of them. Grrr.

I think it's safe to say I'm going to blog a great deal over the next few days - we can consider this a Total Alert, locked and loaded, end of the desolate runway. There ought to be sirens. Anyway, I suspect I'll spend much of tomorrow strapped to a computer with Blogger and four different news sources open. Thinking about it, probably ought to look up my Hutton notes and blog posts first...you wouldn't want to confuse Richard Hatfield with Kate Wilson would you...

BBC NEWS - Leading fee rebel to back Blair

BBC NEWS | Politics | Leading fee rebel to back Blair

Damn. Didn't see that one coming - Nick Brown, their leader has changed sides at not quite the last minute. Apparently the offer of a "review" of the top-up fees' effects convinced him. It doesn't convince me - since when would any action that shuffles cash off the official tax numbers be reversed by any "review"? God knows what the whips dug up on him.

Speaking of whips, as we hurtle into the Crisis of '04 all the oldest and worst parliamentary traditions have switched right back on. Sick MPs being driven hundreds of miles by the whips' office to make the vote (whilst ensuring they vote the right way..), rumours of the weather taking a hand (talk of Northern Irish MPs being grounded by snowstorms in Belfast. Why didn't they go earlier? The snow has only been forecast for a week.) - it's all there, and I'm sure that the participants will carry it away with them in their personal mythology. We will read newspaper articles in the future in which old hacks and politicos will pontificate about things not being as bad as back then in '04, just as we hear about the repeated vote crises of the Callaghan government now. Oh yes, back then the Labour whips used to fetch MPs in ambulances to the Commons and once they wiggled a drip to show the Tories that he was still alive (or was it an oxygen pipe? or was it in fact Julian Critchley years later? the story moves under pressure). Yah yah yah.

I wonder whether all this is not just the sport of politics, though, more tiresome posturing and party machine bullying. For that reason the government deserves to lose - in the last weeks it has shown all the dirtiest, smallest, weakest traits of John Major's at its worst. Just as the Tories did with the Scott Report in 1996, they have done their best to gerrymander the publication of the Hutton Report by giving themselves a day's start, and by allowing the opposition a minimum of time to read it under pathetic conditions (locked in the Cabinet Office). At least they have been slightly less blatant - back then the Conservatives quietly permitted themselves a week's uninterrupted study of the papers before grudgingly permitting Robin Cook four hours to examine the 800-odd pages prior to debate. But the principle holds - if they are going to lock the Liberals and Tories in to prevent leaks, why not start at the same time as No. 10 gets the report? At the absolute least, what I hoped for from Labour was an end to this kind of bare-faced fraud.

It's shar'ia for secular now, but the Big Mullah says Vote! How confusing can it get?

"On Wednesday our darling Iraqi Puppet Council decided that secular Iraqi family law would no longer be secular- it is now going to be according to Islamic Shari'a. Shari'a is Islamic law, whether from the Quran or quotes of the Prophet or interpretations of modern Islamic law by clerics and people who have dedicated their lives to studying Islam.

The news has barely been covered by Western or even Arab media and Iraqi media certainly aren't covering it. It is too much to ask of Al-Iraqiya to debate or cover a topic like this one- it would obviously conflict with the Egyptian soap operas and songs. This latest decision is going to be catastrophic for females- we're going backwards"

This is astonishing - whilst the world is meant to believe that we couldn't possibly allow elections in Iraq for fear that those Shias might get in, (and you know, they're not really your sort of chappies at all - civilised values have to come before strict formal democracy, as I'm sure any rational man, and especially woman understands) our friends of the Iraqi Governing Council (much more, ah, respectable, reformist, modernisers, I'm sure we agree) want to introduce a new civil code based on shar'ia.

"Women are outraged… this is going to open new doors for repression in the most advanced country on women's rights in the Arab world! Men are also against this (although they certainly have the upper-hand in the situation) because it's going to mean more confusion and conflict all around."

You bet. This is a brief taste of a much longer text by an Iraqi bloggeress, River Bend, which was quoted by Fistful of Euros. I really suspect that if this turns out to be dinkum, it means that our (nice, western, modernising) Iraqis are making a play for the religious nut vote to undermine those (nasty, not quite kosher) Shias who would like us to risk (early, ill thought out, unripe time) elections. Brilliant.

Blogroll - The Young Fogey

The Ranter welcomes the Young Fogey's Agreeable World: link Not quite sure how to categorise this one yet.

Getortet! A new German verb

I learnt a new German verb recently - torten, or to cake, as in hitting someone with a custard pie. The reason for this was that the students at Vienna University are out protesting again, and this time it seems they have seized the media after unknown persons successfully "torteten" the Rektor, Georg Winckler, and the sektionschef (UK - permanent under secretary) for higher education in the ministry, Sigurd Höllinger, at a discussion held at the university with the students. I care about this because I spent quite a lot of time in the winter and spring of 2001-2 at that fine institution, protesting against their lovely government and its amusing education policy. Back then, although we did all the usual things - mass demos, sit-ins on the Ringstrasse, occupying the main lecture theatre, blockading the Ministry of Education, transferring lectures into parks and the like - nothing much happened, except that I got the back of my head into Die Presse and an amusing time was had by all.

This time, they are angry at the concrete arrangements set up by Winckler to put the Universities Act 2002 (which is what got us furious) into effect. And this is what led to the Tortung.



The instant of impact on Winckler. Note that the pie was directly delivered rather than thrown, and that the UTV (Independent TV) camera was clearly close behind the piethrower at the moment critique. Given many of their staff's political sympathies one might almost suspect complicity. Note also the rapid escape of the senior academic, Eva Blimlinger, on his left, who ducks rapidly out of harm's way.



The reality of pie. You could almost feel sorry for the pompous ass. The pie, reportedly procured from your friendly local Aida, clearly achieved both excellent bursting and high stickiness.



Surprise was evidently achieved. Note that the woman to Winckler's left seems to be having difficulty suppressing laughter. It's a pity the same cannot be said of the political Right - a wide range of nationalist and Catholic-conservative figures have condemned the "outrageous escalation of violence", "breach of all rules of the democratic game" and similar remarks, whilst the Interior Minister has given the case to the Office for Combating Terrorism and the Protection of the Constitution (Landesamt für Verfassungschutz und Terrorbekämpfung), a new post-11/9/01 body established in imitation of the German Verfassungsschutz (=the internal secret service).

Perhaps Tony Blair might yet announce that cakes suitable for terrorist use have, indeed, been discovered in Iraq.

I doubt very much that this will change anything at all, and I beg forgiveness for wasting bandwidth on the frivolity of student politics. But the pictures were too good to miss. ( and you can see the film here)

BBC NEWS - Paisley to stand down as MEP

Link to report

The Reverend Ian Paisley, a not infrequent target of this blog, has decided to leave the European Parliament. Not surprisingly, the reason is not to remove his unpleasant influence from public life but to concentrate on "negotiating" with Sinn Fein. (I suppose that means "making sure the underlings don't agree to anything I haven't sabotaged".)

It's only odd that he's been there so long without resigning - after all, he did once declare that the parliament was keeping a secret 666th seat open for the return of Satan. Funny, eh. Maybe the expenses had something to do with it.

Oh God, it's happening!

BBC News

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's representatives have announced a direct action campaign in the event that Paul Bremer's planned "indirect" elections go ahead. Well, we've finally done it now. Shia rage was one of the biggest worries anyone had at the time of the war, but the restraint shown by their leaders has so far prevented a southern crisis. Unfortunately it seems we're in for the worst, unless some rabbits are rapidly produced from hats.

The worst thing is that he's damn right, too. The so-called indirect elections will certainly be indirect, but they won't be elections in any democratic sense. In fact, the plan proposes the formation of "local caucuses", appointed by the powers that be (whether this will be the Governing Council or the occupation administration is not clear), who will then elect a government from their membership. Well - that isn't democracy, but rule by local busybodies, tribal chiefs and jacks-in-office, plus a scattering of carpetbaggers recently returned from exile and supported by our bayonets. It's a mess. At best the Iraqis will get oligarchy, with a sort of ramshackle consociation deal sharing out jobs between groups. At worst the "caucuses" will be bunches of self-appointed bosses, manipulated by the CPA, the political parties, tribes, clerics, foreign powers and anyone else in the manipulating business, who will select a shaky committee of themselves. And who came up with the idea of importing one of the most obscure and strange features of American politics - the Iowa party caucus - into Iraq? How exactly do you translate "caucus" into Arabic? And, after you have had a primary election, in America you get a real presidential election. Sure, all the Mucho Pomposos and mad politics junkies in the party caucuses might have ensured the candidates are something like the Three Wise Monkeys - but at least you finally get to choose your monkey, a feature notably absent from Mr. Bremer's thinking.

Now, various justifications have been given. It might be difficult to organise. (But everyone in Iraq has an identity card and a ration card.) Even so. (But you could make it easier by localising the elections - elect the bloody caucus if you must have caucuses, and if that's the plural and not a range of mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian.) The real one, I suspect, is that the ideologues who thought people like Slick Ahmed Chalabi were the real thing are still clinging on by their fingertips to the idea of rigging them into power.

I hope those ceramic plates have finally arrived for the lads in Basra, they're going to need them...

Security - again...

The Americans have apparently owned up that there are "problems" with airport screening in the US. No surprise there after the Sudanese chap who appeared at Heathrow on a Virgin flight from Washington Dulles (of all places) with live ammunition in his baggage was arrested. Question - if they can't spot someone who really has bullets on him, why should we listen to any of these "security warnings"?

The last time British merchant shipping or aircraft was threatened to this degree, during the second world war if you believe the hype, we set up our own security agency inside the States, British Security Co-ordination. This outfit was led by a Canadian zillionaire called Sir William Stephenson who supposedly had mafia connections (but also wrote a huge book about how great he was, after the war) and had the task of detecting German shipping spies and saboteurs. They were originally established whilst the US was neutral, which did not make them astonishingly popular - no-one likes foreign police and spooks running around their city. But at least it worked, which was important as the FBI had very little counter-intelligence capacity to begin with. Which brings me to my point - if we can have British immigration controls at the Gare du Nord in Paris, surely it's not unthinkable to take over the responsibility for the security of British aircraft (and ships, in so far as there are any) travelling to, from or through the US?

The obvious objection is that this way madness lies - will every major airport soon be a weird multinational broth of policemen? And, of course, I objected to the sky marshals on those grounds among others. Here's the problem - this will eventually happen if there is no confidence in land-side states' efforts (or indeed good faith) and continued alerts, because things will get intolerable.

Shells found in southern Iraq NOT chemical

FOX News link for rightwingers
Australian ABC News
Wired for net weirdos

On the other hand, there's a bunch of shite

Mind you, just so I don't give the impression of liking the Grauniad too much, I think it's a bit rich of a paper that runs a weekly Bad Science column to run huge two-page ads for a device that "gives off streams of positive and negative ions, components of healthy air" which apparently "actively seek out allergens", turn into "cluster-ions" (WHAT? Don't these people do GCSE chemistry?) and render them harmless. Which is all very good news for little "James", the emetic blond child whose likeness takes up one of those two pages with the tag "Mum, I can't breathe". Surely an exclamation mark missing? Mind you, the lad looks weirdly unconcerned by his predicament, but then I suppose you can't really express emotion if your eyes have been obscenely enlarged by PhotoShop until you look like a deep-sea fish. (You're colder than the fishes/in the Arctic Ocean/But at least they flap their fins/to express emotion..."A Fine Romance", Cole Porter) With floppy blond hair. What Sharp are trying to push on parents of asthmatic kids is nothing more or less than that good old fashioned 1980s fraud object, an ioniser! Yes! That weird little box well-off health freaks used to swear by, which contained in effect a piece of wire carrying current and a little red light!

Now what did I say about newspaper ad managers?

That Society Guardian Ad, part 2

It's now been reported that many of the quotes in Michael Howard's Grauni-ad were dodgy. What a surprise. And apparently Shadow Culture Secretary Julie Kirkbride...who?..."will no longer pursue her complaint about public sector bodies placing most of their job ads in Society Guardian. "She is not saying anything about this any more", he (a spokesman) insisted." " No shit, Sherlock.

Michael Howard, Society Guardian, and public stupidity

The lovable conservative (it says here), Michael Howard, has placed a full-page ad in the Guardian's Society supplement. He's apparently looking for real live public sector workers to contribute to his search for "waste and bureaucracy", led by banker David James. We've dealt with the Bureaucracy Myth quite frequently here - the belief that there is always a huge quantity of money marked WASTE in the budget that could be magicked up and parcelled out as tax cuts without any cost to society as long as you vote for me - and this is of course just another example. Why, for example, is a financier with a reputation as an insolvency expert in charge? Wouldn't someone with an operational business background be better? A management accountant perhaps? This is where the myth kicks in, lads. Mr. James was hired by government to sell the Dome, and Michael Howard (despite his membership of the cabinet that invented it) wants to create an association between the public sector and the dome, having done a good propaganda job on it in his first trip in the shadow cabinet.

The interest, though, is that the Guardian's Society supplement is an obsession with the Right. For non-initiates of British newspaper politics, this supplement which appears every Wednesday is meant to cover the world of the state sector and carries more public job ads than any other paper. The Right like to do things like measuring it and declaring that "there are more non-jobs now than ever before". They thunder that it is a deliberate attempt to ensure people "who think a certain way" are employed. (The Daily Mail: "the paper that is the bible of statism, welfarism and every other ism involving spending taxpayers' money". Who would want welfare employees who didn't believe in welfare?)

The true reason why the Rightist press are obsessed is of course brutally financial. Newspaper advertising managers are a hard and non-ideological breed and any buyer will do. Those public sector vacancy adverts are a damn good earner - this is why columnists like Richard Littlejohn call the paper a nationalised industry. Speaking of that particular wealthy propagandist - the man who, they say, earns a million a year for his gay-bashing rants - he never seems to notice the masses of adverts for ultra-high interest loans pitched at the poor and already debt-ridden that fill most of the Sun. Funny that. Or should that be the "loan-shark controlled" Sun? Whatever. Business managers at papers like the Telegraph, now under the million mark and losing ads fast, would love to muscle in on lucrative Grauniad territory - it is pure mafioso stuff. After all, why would - say - a teacher in Harlesden or Manningham or Rossington who was angling for a promotion even consider reading a paper that, day after day, year after year, pours forth tens of thousands of words of op-ed loathing, denigration and abuse on the heads of teachers? Why would a social worker in Bransholme looking for a change from trying to stop the kiddies burning the old codger next door's house down and then pelting the fire brigade with broken bottles "because there was nothing to do" even stand near a newspaper that regularly claims that he or she is worse than a paedophile? The answer is obvious - the business managers and the editorial ideologues are on a collision course.

It's very amusing, against this background, that Mickey-H has decided to subsidise the Guardian - almost as funny as the Adam Smith Institute getting most of its money from the State.

Tanks-for-Water, economics and the future (part I)

It's been reported recently that a treaty has been signed by Israel and Turkey providing for the shipment of fresh water from Turkey to Israel, in huge ships, in return for military stores, especially Merkava tanks. LinkThis is just as depressing as it sounds, because it shows that one of the fashionable intellectual worries of the last 20 or so years is finally to be activated into power reality. That's the one about "if you think we fight over oil, just wait until we fight over water" in the Middle East. Now, I've been hearing pundits grand about this for so long that it became one of those problems that seemed to have disappeared through over-funkiness, like Antarctic resources or giant volcanoes. But now, it seems that this one is going to burst.

Some background - back in the 1970s, a group of economists at Tel Aviv University began to concern themselves with water as a resource. (As usual in economics, this shows the way the science tends to follow the problems of the day - Keynesianism was founded on depression, Monetarism on inflation, and water economics on Israeli agriculture.) They were rather surprised to discover that some of the countries they studied could not possibly find enough water to supply what they must use every year. It was like bees not theoretically being able to fly, and the economists realised they had broken into a seam of knowledge. They formulated the idea of "virtual water" - that is to say, the countries in question solved their water problem by importing crops and goods that were water-intensive even if they seemed cheaper to produce locally. For every ton of wheat they bought elsewhere, they effectively shaved the water bill by several hundred gallons. The economists proposed a re-orientation of Israeli farming, concentrating on growing crops that were cheap in terms of water and trading the surplus for virtual-water imports. It was simply an application of David Ricardo's Theory of Comparative Advantage - not only do countries trade, but they specialise on their best trading products. As is usual with rational ideas, though, politics didn't like it. They were fiercely attacked and some of them left the country, although the government (as always) later had to accept their ideas. The problem was that agriculture has a special status for Israel, which goes all the way back to the founding of Zionism - the chalutzim were always meant to return to eternal values through honest labour on the land, building the independence of the future state from the true foundation of the simple life. That was why local Zionist branches throughout Austria-Hungary and Russia held training courses in farming for young Jews. For the Labour Zionists, self-sufficient communities of farmers were their own road to Socialism - expressed as the kibbutz movement this became one of the pillars of the Jewish state, and remains at the emotional core of Labour just as places like Barnsley and South Shields are for most members of the British Labour party. For the Right, possession of land meant permanence and power, and a step on the way to possessing the whole of Eretz Israel. The settlers are almost a political mirror image of the kibbutzniks. You can't be a real Labour Zionist if you don't at least wish you were a kibbutznik. You can't be a real Likud hawk if you don't at least wish you were a settler. Economic rationality (and I don't mean what the Australians call "economic rationalism" - it ain't rational) never survives political unreason. That is the meaning of this proposal, with its vast initial sunk costs of building or procuring ships (Will they be VLWCs - Very Large Water Carriers - as opposed to VLCCs?), port facilities and integration into the Turkish and Israeli water supply, its gouging unit prices (far higher even than desalination - desalination costs 50-56 US cents a cubic metre, import $1:Haaretz report), and the dull truth that even under perfect conditions it will supply only 3% of Israel's water - it has the grandiosity that bears witness to political madness, like the huge economic-ecological engineering schemes of the Soviet Union or the marble stadiums of mad military tyrants.

The wider results are menacing - the plan will pour weapons into Turkey, strengthening the army and the army party in politics and giving them even greater interests in bossing the eastern mountains and dragooning the Kurds. It will fire the first shots in making water an open, rather than hypothetical, object of politics. It will forge further links between the Israeli Military Industries, the army, and water-wasting interests - a water-military-industrial iron triangle could anchor the far Right in power. A more depressing development could hardly be imagined. And what better target could a terrorist dream of than a half million ton tankerful of drinking water from Turkey to Israel? (Note: Palestinian towns get on average 60 units of water a day, compared with a minimum of 300 in Israel.) The propaganda message would be something like "Rich states ganging up to keep others thirsty/Evil apostate traitors/Zionist Entity/Western technology". Just what Osama likes really. And what will Syria do in terms of building up its navy? There's a nice new arms race.

The final message? The water problem will be solved - one way or another. That's a fact, because people must eat and drink. It might be solved by the strong grabbing from the weak, each trying to stake out a little pond of their own. And that will mean, as their "turbulent frontier" problem drags them further on, war. Perhaps they will kill each other until there is plenty of water to go around. There is an alternative, though. That will be part 2.