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UKIP on TV last night

Now, this is a serious confession. I'm such a politics geek that I actually decided to watch a Party Election Broadcast last night. After all, our dear friends from the UK Independence Party were on and I dearly wanted to see how they managed. I wasn't disappointed. The spot looked something like a Yorkshire TV ad for "Mike's Carpets" or Tong Garden Centre circa 1992. A variety of odd-looking men in dated suits made their pitches in a mysteriously seaside-compere, aren't I kerazy voice. And who chose that colour scheme? Purple and yellow? The substance was poor, of course - a variety of dodgy statistics, wild hyperbole and thinly disguised xenophobia, and a couple of factual errors. The delivery was worse. There were signs of an effort being made - a token black member made an appearance - but it was still dominated by the dodgy estate agent characters who typify this lot. Why they didn't put Kilroy-Silk on it I've no idea - he may be a failed talk show host, but at least he used to be a pro. But - what do you expect from a party with folk like Mike Narrass, their national chairman who played a prominent role in the ad, in it?

Mike was a member of the New Britain party in the 70s, a far-right, anti-immigration, pro-Rhodesian/South African outfit founded (weirdly) by Patrick Moore with the support of General Sir Walter Walker's paramilitary GB75 group. This was a weird gaggle of retired officers, spooks and wealthy rightwingers that fantasised about a military coup and influenced various organisations as fronts and as political vehicles (especially the National Federation of Ratepayers and New Britain), as well as setting up a network of supporters known as "Civil Assistance". (NOTE: Most information on the web about this episode should be treated with extreme scepticism, as it usually either comes from paranoid far-left conspiracy nuts or hagiographic fascists.)This lot were ostensibly meant to offer aid to the constituted authorities in the event of a breakdown of law and order, and did things like drawing up lists of "trusted citizens". It was all very sinister but slightly ridiculous, and in the long run all it achieved was to legitimise the NF and to give lefties some good stories. (Mind you, some say they played all kinds of spooky roles in the miners' strike, Northern Ireland, Thatcher's election..) He's not the only one - another of their candidates at the last election, Alastair Harper (Dunfermline West), was the editor of something called "Northern World", a "Nordicist" magazine whose conferences had in the past greeted former SS officers. Mr H doesn't seem to be standing this time around, more's the pity. But who needs him when your party name appears in places like this?

UKIP - the BNP it's OK to like!

Held under water and made to believe he might drown

"In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as "water boarding," in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown."

NYT link
Sounds like torture to me...

Things slide again in Iraq - did we really just collapse a Masjid?

It is being reported (here, and via Juan Cole) that the US Army in Karbala has destroyed half the Al-Mukhayyam Mosque as heavy fighting went on in the city. How stupid is that? This stupid - recent reports have suggested that a political solution between the coalition and Al-Sadr was imminent. There is talk of a "Najaf Brigade" on the Fallujah pattern being formed - perhaps a sign of a strategy of recruiting the party and religious gunmen into a real Iraqi army in embryo? Other reports suggested recently that the Shia religious authorities had convinced Sadr that he would have to quit Najaf, and that the governor of Najaf had offered him immunity from prosecution on condition that he demobilise his army (mind you, they also sent their families out of the city..) But there seems to be a deep inconsistency between this military-political line, although Cole attributes it to General Dempsey of the 1st Armoured Division, and the tactics being employed by that same formation.

"One Iraqi who witnessed the carnage said the even Saddam had not used that kind of firepower in Karbala."

Well, that's really going to repair the damage to our reputation. It seems that the machine inertia is on the side of the Bushist demand to "kill and capture" al-Sadr. (I still can't believe they really said they would kill him and capture him.) This also had a bearing on the departure of the Spanish army - (link) - apparently the US command wanted them to thrash into Najaf, an operation their intelligence on the ground suggested was foolhardy. The Spaniards requested guidance from Madrid, where international lawyers for the government concluded that a major offensive operation would be incompatible with UN Security Council Resolution 1511, the legal basis for their presence, and should be left to the official Occupiers. And, their officers added, should not militarily be attempted!

"The highest-ranking Spanish military officers in charge in Iraq sent a report at the beginning of April to the North American command in which they observed that increased harassment of Al Sadr and his devotees would aggravate the situation in Iraq and would provoke "a large-scale military operation"."

And that's exactly what they got: here.
"Tuesday night, the Americans made a high-risk gamble by trying to breach the Mukhaiyam Mosque, situated just west of the Shrine of Hussein. The attack was one of the largest operations carried out in the past year by the First Armored Division, which until now was responsible for controlling Baghdad. Fighting raged on all sides of the mosque, with soldiers scrambling through rubble-strewn streets and ducking sniper shots and rocket-propelled grenades.

The Americans relied heavily on the devastating cannons and machine guns of their M-1 Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, which pounded surrounding buildings, setting many on fire."

Competitive savagery, terrorism, and failure

Since the torture scandal broke, we have now seen within the space of two days an American civilian being beheaded and a Hamas member waving a bag of body parts to a furious mob in Gaza. You could despair. If there is a war on terrorism, by the way, it is a war fought in terms of propaganda. Some would say "soft power" in Joseph Nye's words - much the same thing as Hans Morgenthau's notion of national power being subdivided into military, economic and persuasive power. Because we are the status quo, we are the ones who have to persuade by our example. The enemy doesn't want to be seen as good or legitimate - they want to show the maximum degree of horror. It's the essence of terrorism, and it is the source of their myth. The heroic myth of revenge and resistance is the heart of terrorist propaganda, both externally (recruiting) and internally (validation). It's truly astonishing the degree to which the reckless wielding of the military arm has been allowed to poison the other two. What is happening is that we are getting into a savagery contest, one that cannot do us any good.

See what I mean?

"The Web site showing the video also carries a photograph of a naked Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghraib cowering before a growling police dog."

Fake photos, real problem, still no ICRC publication

Reports are increasing that the Daily Mirror photos have been debunked (BBC link. Further, Mirror Group issued a statement saying that they were confident that the pictures "accurately illustrated" serious abuse - a wording that suggests backtracking. Among other things, I've heard that the army's inventory of trucks was used to trace where they might have been taken - some suggest a territorial barracks in Preston of all places. As a health warning, it should be recalled that the Daily Torygraph has a record of publishing sensational defence-related stories that later fail to stack up. And who really wants Geoff Hoon to be right? In his statement yesterday, he provided chapter and verse on how he didn't manage to see the Red Cross report on detention in the British zone. Typically for Hoon, it was all someone else's fault - those people at the Permanent Joint HQ in Northwood decided it wasn't important, he says. I'm sure a minister with his honed sense of self preservation might have realised it could be dangerous. But naturally he knew nothing.

In the statement, he referred to three allegations made by the ICRC - the case of Baha Mousa, the practice of hooding suspects, and the case of a man who claimed his car had been stolen. It could have been much worse, I suppose. But if this is the case, the ICRC didn't consider any of the shooting incidents - which now seem worse than the detention allegations. Really? That doesn't seem convincing to me. Why not publish the document? Alternatively, why not resign anyway dammit? There is no other way to salvage any decency in this but complete openness. Not that it will do any good, of course, but sometimes "things should be done simply because they are right" in John Smith's words. Full disclosure would fall in that category. So would Hoon's departure...

Meanwhile in Iraq: that Fallujah "solution"

The FT is reporting that friction has developed between the so-called Fallujah Protection Army/1st Battalion Fallujah Brigade (depends on terminology, see below) and the various "notables" who are now to be in charge there. It would appear that they are not happy with the idea of this force co-operating as expected with the Americans, nor with the fact that it's made up of old Ba'athists. After all, its commander has apparently been sidelined on the advice of Ali Allawi, an IGC member with a slightly unsavoury background himself. General Mohammed Saleh was, as blogged below, the deputy chief of the Iraqi general staff during the suppression of the Shia after 1991. Why the FT should say he is "accused" of being a a former Republican Guard commander is obscure to me. That doesn't sound promising, and neither does this:

""We will welcome police and the civil defence corps back to their posts provided they come from Falluja," said one of his guests, Kais Nazzal, who owns Falluja's largest factory. "But the Mujahideen must continue to give orders - if the police co-operate with the Americans against the people of Falluja they will be killed."

Well, surely that does for any hope of those "local caucuses" of "notables" ever playing the part assigned to them by the CPA? Saleh's solution to his dilemma appears to be to say that all the nasty people they sent him to get have gone away, conveniently for his chances of survival. After all, he has a point - looking for "foreign fighters" among the people who really were fighting could have some negative effects, both by showing up that there weren't any and by stirring the real fighters up all over again. And this is weird:

""The angels fought with the people," says Mr Nazzal's cousin Jawad, a colonel in the former Iraqi army. "They sent forth huge spiders to support right against wrong."

Still, in times like these..

"An extremely ineffective commander and leader"

Washington Post story on conditions in Abu Ghraibh and the internal politics of the Military Police there.

""Detainee care appears to have been made up as the operations developed with reliance on, and guidance from, junior members of the unit who had civilian corrections experience," Taguba later found.

Those members included Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II, 37, who had worked as a correctional officer at Buckingham Correctional Center in Virginia, and Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr., 35, a divorced father of two who worked as a prison guard in Greene County, Pa. Frederick was the top enlisted man in charge of 1A, where he and Graner worked closely with intelligence officers, their colleagues said.

The officer in charge of the prison was Lt. Col. Jerry L. Phillabaum, a reservist who commanded the 320th Military Police Battalion. Taguba found that Phillabaum was "an extremely ineffective commander and leader" who did little after the Camp Bucca beating incident five months earlier to put his soldiers on notice about proper detainee treatment."

Torture and Media, part 2

I'm not sure I really expressed myself accurately in the last post, so here goes again. I'm beginning to suspect that in the last few years our political systems have been polluted by the possibilities of the networked world. Not that "it's all the fault of the media" - it's the fault of politicians. It seems to me that the Abu Ghraibh torturers' obsession with photographing their own crimes - in effect, preparing the evidence for their own trial - is similar to the politics that put them there. They seem to have transferred a trash culture of bizarre porn images and yelling patriotism into action (it is no surprise that in among the war crimes, they also filmed themselves having sex) - after all, according to the New York Times, the same kind of sadism has been reported in ordinary civilian jails in the US. Several of the people involved were screws in civil life, and the chap responsible for reopening the Iraqi prisons (or should that be "reclosing"?)was forced to resign from his job running Utah's state prisons after

"an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time."

A vicious prison-gang culture plus a media world driven by sensation and horror, transplanted into a distant war in conditions of impunity...it seems simple enough. I think much of the current British migrant-basher hysteria has a similar source in the combination of unchallenged scare propaganda and a government obsessed with trying to get ahead of its press opponents - it just provides the validation.

I suppose this also supplies some of the answers to our situation. The US authorities have already said that the Abu Ghraibh torturers will be tried publicly in Baghdad. This makes sense. Robin Cook's suggestion of demolishing it does too. From a British point of view, though, this is already losing out. The government is currently refusing to publish the Red Cross report on detention in the British zone, whilst protesting that they did not know about the report - this demonstrates Alan Watkins' view that scandals in Britain always concern whether or not someone had the right to say what they did, not the facts, and also demonstrates that the government is still obsessed with trying to show mythical "toughness" in the belief that the Murdoch press will love them again. They will not, and the cruelty increasingly evident in the government's every idea (demanding that doctors refuse treatment to failed asylum-seekers..)will only increase this way.

Note - The London News Review is of a similar view about the torturers - apparently Graner had a record of stalking his ex-wife with guns and setting up secret video cameras...

Have we built a cruel society? Torture and media...

The torrent of filth didn't stop all week. I didn't blog - I'm sorry - really because I couldn't see any useful angle to cover. Torture's evil. I'm ashamed. That was about it - it's not very original, is it? Best to wait and let the pressure build....until it has to get out. We have seen the complete collapse of our legitimacy, our minimal claim to decency. The pictures, especially the latest menacing deliveries from Abu Ghraibh, are the western version of the 11th September TV footage. That attack, with its calculated use of the world communication system, was conceived to deliver violence to everyone like poison in the water supply. The torture pictures have done exactly the same in reverse, permeating the Islamic world with a total message of hatred, contempt, and sordidness. They will, of course, generate over time their own self-amplifying waves of conspiracy and nonsense, the equivalent of those people who think the airliners were flown by remote control into the buildings by Mossad - or who think Iraq was behind it all. It's already happening - see the Basra preacher who yesterday waved papers he claimed showed the rape of Iraqi women by British soldiers at his congregation. Unless it's much, much worse than anyone thinks, he is lying; but it doesn't matter. Bloggerheads reports that a porno site called iraqbabes.net exists that claims to show rapes committed in US custody in Iraq - some of its product has already turned up in the Middle East, being treated as genuine. What a world this is.

What do we know? We know that the US Army's 800th Military Police Brigade managed to recruit a considerable number of people who were potential torturers, and failed to hold them in check. We know that they were at least tacitly encouraged by members of military intelligence, and that a grimly exotic variety of privatised spooks were also torturing, far more seriously. These men - outside the military law and the Iraqi law, and according to Robert Fisk not even US citizens - were hired by "other government agencies", presumably the secret services. It seems clear that their purpose is or was to provide deniable interrogators, to allow the intelligence services to escape the laws of the US. The effect was unsurprising - apart from their own actions, their very existence will have gone a long way to providing the validation, the sense of rightness, needed to trigger the rest of the guards. The US prisons in Iraq were allowed, to go no further, to become enclaves outside law run by true-believer spooks and halfwitted thugs.

Simultaneously, we have had our own thug eruption. Even less seems to be firmly known about the treatment of prisoners in the British zone - what is clear is that there is a case to answer. Currently, it is said that out of some 33 cases, 15 were dismissed and 6 have been referred for prosecution. They are all many months old. It would be good if the Army Prosecuting Authority could finally produce, and either issue charges or give reasons, no? The scandal has meant that there are now a clutch of cases before the High Court, another with the APA, and no-one seems to know whether more have emerged. Some of the cases are of a pattern - they involve the apparently accidental or negligent shooting of persons in the streets, often after gunfire had been heard. This is horrible - but why do I feel that it is less so than the allegations of torture? Those are harder to pin. There is the grim case of Baha Mousa, allegedly (and almost certainly) beaten to death. There are the Daily Mirror's allegations - or are they the same case? I am sceptical of the Mirror's photos, but (curiously) less so of the allegations. If Piers Morgan deserves criticism, it will be because his lunge for the pictures discredited the real story.

Stealth ID strikes again! Education cards this time

The Guardian reported yesterday that the Government wants to introduce an identity card for everyone involved in education. This would carry a Unique Learner Number and a wide variety of information: "such information as a person's qualifications, course aims, employment situation and possibly income details." Income details? It gets worse: "The most sophisticated system would allow any agencies permitted to do so "to track what happens to people, matching what work they end up in, what their earnings are"...Employers might be able to buy data equipment to read details of individuals' qualifications and previous periods of employment and unemployment, which would help defray costs." Isn't this just a little bit intrusive? Especially as it would link up with a national ID scheme nicely.

This is one of several pseudo- or stealth-ID schemes currently active. There is the planned national Unique Child Number, and the associated database as blogged here. Like that one, it would throw off a large database covering a chunk of the population almost completely - after all, practically everyone goes to school, and a lot of adults take on further education. As there's no mention of the data being deleted when you turn 18 or leave, it's a database that can only grow. Much of the information involved would parallel that proposed for the national ID scheme, but these sub-IDs would also bring in much more, like those income details. It seems that the government is doing its level best to launch as many expandable, mutable ID schemes as possible in the hope that even if some are shot down, enough will get through. After all, the only other justification Charles Clarke could give for this massive invasion of privacy was that it might stop people applying to be further education lecturers under false pretences. Even he couldn't say that this was a problem, though. But who needs excuses when we've got civil servants like this one:

"Our view is that we can do this without a national ID card. It doesn't mean we're anti it - we're not particularly pro it either, but if we're going to have one we'll bolt all this on," said the civil servant. "What we're saying is that ID cards could be helpful in terms of some of the things that we are going to do anyway."

Well, that brings up the possibility of a whole range of new abuses no-one had ever thought of. Hell, you could use an ID card "security check" to keep people below a certain income out of - say - an upmarket shopping centre or gated community. Or alternatively, you could block a certain educational profile...I'm told that during the 1970s, German government anti-terrorist ads on TV said that reading Kant was a risk factor for being a terrorist. Wouldn't it be great if our cities ended up like Manchester in the time of Friedrich Engels, the rich and poor not architecturally but electronically segregated this time?

The Law of Goats

The Yorkshire Ranter is the only Google result for "the law of goats". I'm not sure what the nameless netizen from New Zealand was after when they punched that one in, but it nailed my remark that some business types had "all the respect for the law of goats". I hope they weren't too disappointed.

Torture and stupidity

So, the US staff sergeant accused of sitting on a prisoner's head whilst masturbating at a camera has had his lawyer tell the world that he "had not had the opportunity to read the Geneva Conventions before being put on guard duty". So that makes it all right then? I'm meant to believe that he didn't know it was wrong? He thought there might be a clause in there somewhere that permitted him to sit on prisoners and wank? God, this is sordid. Not only that, but you can apparently get away with rape if you're a mercenary:

"Colonel Jill Morgenthaler, speaking for central command, told the Guardian: "One contractor was originally included with six soldiers, accused for his treatment of the prisoners, but we had no jurisdiction over him. It was left up to the contractor on how to deal with him."

She did not specify the accusation facing the contractor, but according to several sources with detailed knowledge of the case, he raped an Iraqi inmate in his mid-teens."

I didn't even know they'd outsourced interrogation! What is a privatised interrogation like - "Talk! Or we'll put the wires on you again! But first, a word from our sponsor..."? If it was a British privatised operation, of course, first of all the nasty cop would be late. You'd be there for hours watching the nice cop pace up and down sucking his teeth and looking at his watch. Then they wouldn't be able to torture you due to health and safety requirements, so that would take up more time. With luck, the job might have been given to the firm who released that murderer from jail in Scotland not so long ago and you'd be out in no time. Or if Jarvis had the job, the interrogator would probably get the thumbscrews caught in his cuffs, trip over, fall on the generator and electrocute himself. But the US does these things better, or at least with less embarrassment.

Why they don't outsource interrogation to China like everything else is a mystery.

So, in the same week, we've managed to subject detainees to sexual humiliation, let a rapist go scot free, attempted to solve our legitimacy crisis by shipping in more tanks, forced a flag in Israeli colours on the Iraqis and handed over Fallujah to a Ba'athist general with some shady bunch of gunmen who looks like Saddam on a really bad day. Seriously. This character was deputy chief of staff immediately after the 1991 war and "Chemical Ali"'s right hand man. (Back to Iraq link)

His "Fallujah Protection Army" is, by my reckoning, the 9th western-sponsored militia in Iraq. There are now: The police. The border police. The river police. The Facility-Protection Service. The Iraqi Civil Defence corps, which isn't anything to do with civil defence, isn't a corps, and is only arguably Iraqi. The Iraqi Army. The Fallujah Protection Army. The Iraqi police SWAT teams. The Iraqi Army emergency reaction force. Things are getting better in Iraq, clearly, at least as far as the employment prospects for gunmen go.

BP Boss says Iraq is a job for Iraqis

Lord Browne, the head of Britain's biggest company BP, and the oilman's oilman has said that his firm has given up on Iraq as an investment. Link Apparently, he believes that the lack of a sovereign and legitimate Iraqi government and the small matter of guerrilla war means that "It's not obvious to me that you need foreign oil firms" and that redevelopment of the Iraqi oil industry should be left to local state-owned groups. Does he mean - the Iraqis? Perish the thought! This is serious, though. Lord Browne is, as much as anyone can claim to be, the uncrowned king of British industry. BP has been astonishingly successful on his watch, especially compared with Shell's accounting shenanigans and poor reserve-replacement ratio (put simply, Shell is having trouble finding oil, which is a problem if you're an oil company). The firm itself is something like the last bastion of the British Empire - it was created, dear God, by Winston Churchill in 1911 with State funding to assure oil supply for the new generation of fast, oil fired battleships that Winston's Admiralty had introduced. Its foundation was the old Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, but as the years went by it prospered and grew. Up until the late 80s, throughout its history it had been partly State-owned. This is as close to the deep state as business gets, so politics must surely listen.

Look, Tony, in the last week you've been wapped by 1) the Diplomatic Service, 2) the Church, 3) the Army, 4) British Petroleum - and you still know you are right! It's a great pity, just think what could have been accomplished with such gifts of determination and blatant pigheadedness. He could almost have been a Yorkshireman. But no. He's always stubborn over trivialities and stupidities, whilst being utterly spineless whenever he is right. Again and again Mr. Blair digs in for the citadel of his final stand - but carefully digs all the trenches facing the wrong way..

Tell me again - what was it fight promoters do for society?

Frank Maloney, well-known boxing promoter and UKIP candidate for Mayor of London (Doesn't the sheer crappy populism of that make, as Simon Hoggart put it, your teeth fur over?) has got into trouble by ranting at gay people. He declared that he would not be campaigning in Camden because there were "too many" of them, and that he "didn't want to campaign around gay people...I don't think they do a lot for society". Eh? Can anyone remind of the great social benefits boxing promoters bring us, other than encouraging poor people to beat shit out of each other in the name of profit, entertainment, gentlemanly competition, and of course profit, and then doing their level best to hang to as much of their money as humanly possible? Oh, and did I mention profit? Not, of course, that I accuse Mr. Maloney personally of defrauding any of his boxers. Mind you, it would be damn hard to find a promoter who we could discuss honestly without having to mention anything actionable. Not that I'm against boxing, but I find it pretty rich to hear a member of Don King's profession lecturing the public on morality.

He was, however, right about two things at least:

"What's it got to do with them? The Gay Conservatives are not going to vote for me anyway"

And

"I have said I don't want to campaign around gays because I don't think they will vote for me. "

That's probably the safest bet of his career.

Student lives in library, builds blog - this is news?

It is reported that a student at New York University spent the last eight months sleeping in the basement of the library at his college because, despite working four jobs and drawing a scholarship, he couldn't afford hall fees. Students have, of course, a reputation for catlike powers of sleep, and with the best will in the world an academic library can sometimes get soporific. (My degree was in European Studies. The Journal of European Community Studies. Take my word for it.) But this chap claims not to have had a choice. Just to prove he wasn't asleep over his books, he built a blog (Blogs - we don't report the news we are it! to misquote William S. Burroughs), here. As in the Blogger "What to do if your mother finds out about your blog" tutorial, it was when the college authorities stumbled on traces of blog that he was rumbled. He has apparently been given a room in halls (or perhaps they buried him down there!).

Is this really how we want to run our higher education?

(BTW the blog's lying in a pool of credibility after LiveJournal cut him off for using too much bandwidth. Serves him right for using crappy livejournal, no?)

Hartlepool: Hart of British Democracy

British Spin reports that Hartlepool's citizens are about to embark on no less than eight opportunities to exercise their civil rights in the next two years. That makes four elections a year - just think of all the leaflets! and tea! and shameless lust for power! Just for added value, they'll involve Peter Mandelson and Stuart, the guy who used to be the monkey mascot at Hartlepool FC until he was mayor. As a politics addict, it's tempting to hop on a train right now in time to get my slice of the action. This is a positive orgy of democracy! Or possibly just an exhausting and awkward theatre of envy, self-seeking and forced enthusiasm far less attractive or enjoyable in theory than practice - wait, wouldn't that be an orgy?

They will get the opportunity to vote in local elections, European elections, a referendum on regional government for the North-East, a general election, an election for Mayor, elections to the regional government if they vote yes first time around, the Euroconstitution referendum and another set of locals. Hartlepool, I don't need to remind anyone, was where they hanged a monkey because they thought he was a Frenchman. No prizes for guessing which way they'll go on Europe.

Fed up to here with Tony Blair?

As predicted, sky marshals begin to disappear...

Back in January, during the great aviation security flap, I blogged that the flakiness of the arrangements for sky marshals on flights from Europe perhaps suggested that some officials were hoping to accept the scheme but let it fail. It now appears that the US is rowing back on the idea: US ditches effort to persuade EU to use sky marshals

Hugo Young - and some predictions

I've been reading Supping with the Devils, Hugo Young's collected columns, recently. It is sad and astonishing how often he got it exactly right. I am going to ask readers of this blog to guess when each of these major statements were made:

1. " In the end, it's a question of how you define leadership. Is leadership a matter of soft-soaping the editors and readers of the Sun? Or is the relevant constituency one whose interest is served by doing things the Sun does not like? This constituency could be called the nation as a whole. Its concerns are massively wider than the lowest common denominator of xenophobic prejudice to which the Sun consistently plays. Who, one must ask, is running this country? Who was elected by the readers of other papers? Is the European Union a threat to the sovereignty of the British government? On present evidence, it cannot hold a candle to the Sun.

2. "The second chamber could be one such institution. What its proper reform must surmount is not only the passion for control but the constitutional weariness that is already setting in. We have done plenty, I hear ministers say. The people do not want yet more upheaval. With the descendants of the centuries now departed (next clause removed as a giveaway), the comedy is over, which is all that anybody ever knew they wanted anyway. The countervailing case against this requires energy and belief. I predict it will not be made. The peers will soldier on. Those progressives who joined the Lords under the impression they would soon cease to be there will be, poor fellows, disappointed. An irony will engulf them. The only elected bottoms on the red benches will be the rump of ninety-two, who will have the merit, at least, of being chosen by a group somewhat larger than the PM's patronage committee."

3. It is safe to say, I guess, that not a single glass of Chateau Petrus has been drunk in the Dorchester Grill by anyone who ever voted Labour, or ever would. But the leadership still sounds more anxious to make the world safe for the Petrus-drinking vclasses, for fear of alienating the £10-a-bottle brigade, than standing up for an equalisation that would drive an even bigger inroad than £960 a time into their taxed income."

A total critique of Blair in three quotes, really. This is the worrying one, though:

4. "It shows that our country and its politics have a capacity for outrage, and reserves of bold vitality, that nobody could credit."

It's coming, and it will probably go Right, unless the process of toxic waste removal begins soon.