Vladimir Putin and Iraqi Elections

It's just been put to me that Vladimir Putin's recent speech about Russia supporting the Iraqi elections is an indicator of important political events. Specifically, that the next president of Iraq will be - Viktor Yanukovich by a landslide!

Thanks, Dad.

ID Cards: You Too Can Have the Fallujah Experience

The Boston Globe reports on the frankly sinister plan for the inhabitants of Fallujah now that "it's over". The US Marine Corps is apparently going to bring back the 300,000 or so people who fled the city in time for the elections. So they can fully enjoy the benefits of democracy, certain special arrangements have been made.

"One idea that has stirred debate among Marine officers would require all men to work, for pay, in military-style battalions. Depending on their skills, they would be assigned jobs in construction, waterworks, or rubble-clearing platoons.

"You have to say, 'Here are the rules,' and you are firm and fair. That radiates stability," said Lieutenant Colonel Dave Bellon, intelligence officer for the First Regimental Combat Team, the Marine regiment that took the western half of Fallujah during the US assault and expects to be based downtown for some time.

Bellon asserted that previous attempts to win trust from Iraqis suspicious of US intentions had telegraphed weakness by asking, " 'What are your needs? What are your emotional needs?' All this Oprah [stuff]," he said. "They want to figure out who the dominant tribe is and say, 'I'm with you.' We need to be the benevolent, dominant tribe."

The militarisation of labour, eh? Leon Trotsky would have been pleased. The whole thing's worth reading, especially for connoisseurs of stupidity ("Suhad Molah, a young woman in a veil that showed only her eyes, was indignant that a translator said she might be Syrian because of her accent, implying she was the wife of a foreign fighter. "I am Iraqi," she said, adding that she and her children had been trapped in their house for weeks."), but this is a point that really stands out:

"Under the plans, troops would funnel Fallujans to so-called citizen processing centers on the outskirts of the city to compile a database of their identities through DNA testing and retina scans. Residents would receive badges displaying their home addresses that they must wear at all times. Buses would ferry them into the city, where cars, the deadliest tool of suicide bombers, would be banned."

I feel a slogan coming on. Perhaps "David Blunkett - Bringing Fallujah to a high street near you."

You will be assimilated! (Warning - long post)

Cabalamat Journal has an interesting post on the European Union and its influence in the world under the amusing title The European Union is the Borg. They've also started blogrolling us, so have a link! They refer to this article in the Washington Post by Robert "Paradise and Power" Kagan.

Some points - I think Kagan is right that the prospect of EU membership has been a powerful force for peace and democracy in the ex-communist bloc and that this will go on. Mind you, I'm not as clear about how this can be reconciled with the practicals of enlargement and the EU's institutional structure. Once you get past Turkey things get tough - is an EU much like the current one, with its capital in Brussels, really credible if the eastern border is the Pacific? Really, of course, this is just the old traditional question about where Europe ends to the east in a new form. And I think there's a danger, especially when folk like Robert Cooper (favourably quoted in the article) talk about the EU as a voluntary empire (in Geir Lundestan's words, an empire by invitation), that a degree of geographical and intellectual hubris sets in. Kagan:

"By accident of history and geography, the European paradise is surrounded on three sides by an unruly tangle of potentially catastrophic problems, from North Africa to Turkey and the Balkans to the increasingly contested borders of the former Soviet Union. This is an arc of crisis if ever there was one.."

Note that he seems to conceive of the whole perimeter around the EU (hell, forget the Arctic Ocean) as one entity. Which suggests that the lure of membership should be applied southwards, as well as eastwards and southeastwards. Now, you could make a case for this. After all, the countries on the southern shore of the Mediterranean were once the subjects of Ottoman Turkey - which was a European power. Surely - say - the politics of Algeria might be progressively rendered less vicious and more democratic if they had the prospect of membership as a motivator. Look at Turkey itself! And there's natural gas in them thar sands!

Then, of course, you've got a problem, because the southern border is suddenly an ill-defined line pushing against some of the world's nastiest crisis zones. What you might call Vulgar Kaganism would suggest that we now open accession negotiations with the Central African Republic. And then Burkina Faso. Over on the eastern front, meanwhile, the shining lure of membership will surely be gradually snaring the states of the Caucasus, whether via the northern route (after the Ukraine and Russia) or the (perhaps less difficult) southern route (via Turkey). When the next border dispute, upburst of Islamist violence or nuclear accident erupts, of course, the answer will be to commence talks with Uzbekistan. Hell, why not Afghanistan and Iran? Finally, somewhere near the Dzungarian Gate, the Schengen area's ever expanding frontier collides with China and (hopefully) recoils. There's a name for this phenomenon, classically elaborated by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson in Africa and the Victorians. It is called the Crumbling Frontier, and it is important because its crumbling can bring on cycles of intervention beyond it, often followed by bursts of retrenchment, as the great power within the frontier searches unavailingly for security. Gallagher and Robinson describe how, during the 1840s, the frontier of British South Africa was pushed out in an effort to keep the expansion of Boer settlement under control and (it was thought) prevent war with the Zulus. Every time British sovereignty was extended, not surprisingly, the Boers just moved on out of it. Not that the Zulus and Xhosas were too happy, either. As the length of the frontier grew, security became less and less likely. Then London intervened and ordered the governor at the Cape to wind his neck in and cut costs. Did he really have to administer all those miles of windswept veldt and lonely kopjes at taxpayers' expense? So they went into reverse and decolonised back to the last-but-one start line.

Then, of course, the trouble began all over again. (Note - if you're reading this, Professor Stockwell, I hope you're impressed that I remember all that crap about the annexation and dis-annexation of British Kaffraria, Sir Harry Provo and the Sand River Convention from your lectures. Taking the way I behaved in that first term into account, it's a wonder I remember which courses I took let alone British Kaff-Bleeding-Raria.) Now for the Ranter take-home message: When do you get a crumbling frontier? When you're an empire and you run into people who don't want to be part of it - or more importantly, don't really understand what all your crap about courts and lawbooks and policemen with funny hats and water mains and railways is about and don't care. And what's the problem with it? That once it gets going, you can't control it. All that stops it is usually when you run into somebody too big and nasty to deal with, or something natural. Like the sea.

And how do you think the Africans and Russians will look at us with our fantastic all-purpose peacemaker when we rock up and suggest they take a seat back in Brussels? Yep, just another bunch of honkies who know what's best for us. Bah. The whole thing about "soft power" is that it doesn't look like an empire.

Reject ID Cards: Scare Tactics

If the current Identity Cards Bill is passed, remember that appealing against decisions involved is a crime. Well, not quite. Even though most of the monster fines - up to £2,500 a time if your card fails to swipe properly and is considered "damaged" - will be treated as a "civil penalty" rather like an Anti-Social Behaviour Order, it isn't any better. You can't get legal aid for civil cases. And if you dare to object to the New Poll Tax - Section 34(3) of the Bill gives David Blunkett the power to increase the fine for troublemakers like you.

What is the purpose of this? Or rather, can anyone tell me any other purpose than to scare the public off challenging decisions by the ID bureaucracy? Remember, the ID Cards Bill explicitly states that the Home Secretary has no obligation to correct false information on the National ID Database. If you have given yourself the right to hold falsehoods - potentially libellous ones - against all our names, objections would get in the way so. Dave's time is likely to be short, filled up with consultations with the Treasury Solicitor over who should pay for the latest billion pound cost overrun. So just whack those troublesome people with a threat of a million quid fine if they lose - most will run like hell.

This is now the basis of British governance. Vote Labour.

Blunkett in love: the bit they've missed

Among the portfolio of accusations against David Blunkett, there is one I suspect is the most significant of the lot but hasn't got the ink it deserves. In accordance with the best Labour traditions, of course, it's also one of the matters that the Home Office's self-investigation doesn't cover. Mind you, the Sunday Torygraph did get it today - if you can bear it, the link is here (use Bugmenot if it don't work). Now, I suspect that the allegation that he pulled rank to secure a visa for his lady's nanny quicker than usual will probably die. A civil servant or two will be sacrificed and a ton of waffle dumped on the issue like sand on an oil spill. Blunkers will be helped by the fact that his department tend to be incompetent in both directions - visas are known to take either years or no time at all to process - and that a policy in place at the time fits the story. The rest (railway ticket, lifts in official car) is trivial.

But the killer might be the allegation that, on the 13th of August, Blunkett's principal private secretary, Jonathan Sedgwick, and the Home Office's head of news, John Toker, took part in a meeting with Mrs. Quinn and her solicitors. It is claimed that they attempted to get her to sign a statement that her marriage was "over in all but name". Now, if verified this is dynamite - Blunkett would have outed himself as a total bastard, and more importantly one who ordered civil servants to do his dirty work. Non-UK readers may not realise the full significance of this. In Britain, the divide between politicians and officials, and even more the impartiality of the civil service, is considered very important (not least by civil servants). It has also been a difficult issue for this government. Hence the inclusion in the government's denial of the apparently ridiculous point that Sedgwick and Toker were "in their lunch hour" - that is, not being paid for their time by the state. If the only one involved had been his private secretary, Jonathan Sedgwick, this might have been excusable. But the departmental head of news's involvement implies that the Home Office had an official line on this. It makes it a political matter.

If this turns out to be more than spin - the Torygraph goes so far as to claim that the solicitors have a detailed record of the meeting - this could catapult the whole thing into Hutton country.

ID's: Chris Lightfoot Gets It

Chris Lightfoot runs a detailed critique of the ID Cards Bill, and pulls up exactly what I did on Tuesday. That is, the Bill's killer clauses that give the Government powers to force us to carry the cards (despite their denials), to force us to show them to use the NHS, public education and social security (despite their denials), and to discriminate between groups of citizens (despite their denials). A clause in Section 15 - the bit the government will spin as preventing the card's use to control access to public services - explicitly removes this protection from anyone forced to register under Section 6. This legislative landmine means that once, as planned, the card becomes compulsory, people without them will be banned from using public services. It's that simple. Another beauty in section 6 gives the government power to oblige "individuals of a description specified in the order" to register. This provides for the creation of a class of people who would be forced to carry ID cards when everyone else does not - or for the creation of a class of people barred from carrying them when everyone else must. Either way, for the first time we will have legislation designed to create second-class citizens.

Well, if they don't intend to use these powers, why are they so keen to legislate them?

Just to add to the chorus of joy, may I offer this report (in French) from Le Monde? According to the French Commission on Citizens, Justice and Policing, more cases of police brutality occur during ID card checks than any other procedure. This is perhaps not very surprising as ID checks are common, but that is small comfort to the chap described in the article who had his head cracked against a car. It also shouldn't be terribly surprising that some 60% of cases were inflicted on foreigners, and that many of the other 40% involved persons whose "appearance or name might cause one to think they were of foreign origin" (I quote). The commissioners concluded that:

"the legality of identity checks carried out "preventatively", whose multiplication has provoked more disturbances of public order than they prevent, should be brought into question". (my translation)

Well said.

Lest we forget

Today is the 20th anniversary of the world's worst ever industrial accident, at Bhopal in India. Thousands - we don't know exactly how many - of people were gassed when a huge tank of methyl isocyanate leaked at Union Carbide's plant there. Multiple layers of safety should have been present but were not. The victims died in horrific pain, shitting themselves and eventually drowning in their own blood and lung fluids. Those who survived are mostly still suffering twenty years later.

Union Carbide abandoned the site after the accident. The plant and tons of chemicals are still in situ and the water supply is contaminated. Neither UC nor their new owners, Dow Chemical, have even bothered to say exactly what (as well as the MIC) escaped on the night. They originally claimed the stuff was no more deadly than teargas but eventually admitted that 3,800 people died. The Indian government estimates between 10,000 and 12,000 people. Organisations in Bhopal itself reckon some 20,000.

Nobody has ever admitted responsibility.

If you want more detail, try here.

That Awful Obscene Wallpaper!

The FT reports, via Suburban Guerrilla, on a bizarre request by US cinema distributors to the director of a film version of The Merchant of Venice. Michael Radford was a little surprised when he was asked to "paintbox the wallpaper", as he didn't think wallpaper existed in the 16th century. Closer examination showed that the wallpaper was in fact a priceless Venetian fresco by Veronese.

On the fresco, a cupid. On the cupid, insufficient clothing for their sense of decency.

You couldn't make it up.

Ohio: Blackwell Before Beak

Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell has been summoned to Congress' Judiciary Committee to answer a detailed list of electoral irregularities. It's too long to repost here, but as a taster, it includes places where there was a 124% turnout, others where 5,000 more people voted for a Democratic judge than for a Democratic president, a district where huge numbers of voters apparently registered in 1977 (a year when there were no federal elections)....it's all very Ukrainian. I wonder what he'll come up with?

UN Peacekeepers for 119 Farringdon Road?

The Guardian's separatist insurgency gathers pace towards all-out civil war. After the now-notorious articles on the Ukraine by Jonathan Steele and John Laughland, it was the paper's liberal-hawk tendency's turn to hit back. On Tuesday, columnist David Aaronovitch delivered this rant about Mr. Laughland, who returned fire in the letters page the next day. Bizarrely, Laughland claimed that Aaronovitch had done nothing more than "an internet trawl", but didn't say why this made his statements wrong. No wonder he was angry, though - who wouldn't when one of your colleagues gets outed as denying that there was ever a genocide in Rwanda of all places? On Thursday, it was the turn of Tim Garton-Ash to weigh in with this piece, which is perhaps the best writing I've yet seen about the Ukrainian situation. As well as an elegant analysis of the row, there is (of course) a stinging rebuke for the other side. I've previously blogged about rows in the Grauniad as a form of ritual on the left, but if this one keeps up they'll end up with blue helmets policing the ceasefire line between facts and comment, behind a barricade of overturned desks.

This isn't really a row about the Ukraine, though. This is a very local British problem indeed, despite TGA's references to Italian and German papers. In some ways it's part of the last echoes of the boom in the British far left of the 70s and 80s - although the Communist Party of Great Britain was well into its decline by then, a variety of Trotskyist and other far-left groups were able to recruit intellectuals and trade unionists in considerable numbers. (In 2001, no less than six government ministers were extreme-left veterans.) The Revolutionary Communists (at least three versions of), the Workers' Revolutionary party, the Socialist Workers' party - they all had their heyday, and their main achievement was to infiltrate the Labour party and have some really good rows. All those old conflicts are rolled up on the broader left in Britain - the ex-Trotskyists and ex-Militant types, the traditional Labour left, the traditional Labour social-democratic right, the non-socialist liberals. Any understanding of either the Labour or Liberal Democrat parties has to take this into account (the Lib Dems' version of this is the tension between old-fashioned economic liberals and the post-Social Democrats who left Labour because of the Trotskyists....and now because of Tony Blair..).

The same goes for the Guardian, a newspaper without a proprietor, regulated by a charter that binds it to "Liberal principles", editorial independence of management, and the paper's continued financial independence. Or should those be "liberal principles"? Its origins in Manchester were as the paper of - well - Manchester Liberalism, which would put it quite a distance to the right of its position for the last forty years at least. But it has spent much of the intervening period aligned with the Labour party (but sympathetic to the Liberals), and its staff is without doubt the most leftwing in Britain. I get the strong impression that, faced with the problem of defining a left/liberal consensus in their newsroom, the Guardian's editors have decided instead on creative ambiguity. You might get Hywel Williams, a Welsh nationalist who made his career in the Conservative party (work that out). You might get Seamus Milne or George Monbiot. There are two ways of looking at this - one is that this offers real diversity and debate. The other is that it tends to let through too much nonsense.

French Socialists say YES

The French socialist party's membership has voted yes to the European Constitution in an internal referendum. This probably kiboshes the former prime minister Laurent Fabius's attempt to rebuild his career after his disgrace in the contaminated blood scandal. I'm not sorry, especially given some of the No camp's arguments - Fabius argued that the constitution wasn't socialist enough because it didn't provide for European tax harmonisation. This may seem counterintuitive for British readers, who are more used to seeing it criticised either as a mechanism to prevent socialists from putting up taxes, or else a means of forcing everyone to have higher taxes. Fab's argument was just that - that tax rates outside France should be pushed up so as not to compete with French industry. A depressing and negative view of socialism, I think, and one with a big problem.

Namely, if as he said Estonia has a zero corporate tax and France has 30%, what reaction can be expected from the Estonians? I think we can exclude "joy", "goodwill", and "gratitude" from the list. "Fury"? "Resistance"? "Grumpiness?" "Francophobia?" All possibles, surely. This is a key point about Europe. Whatever the central institutions are like, they have to be a zone of consensus between the member states - and this is most likely to be achieved if the amount of stuff to argue over is minimised. Trying to prejudge the basic political direction of member states is well over the mark. If you want a more socialist settlement, you'd do well to start at home, or in the European Parliament. Nobody will thank you for trying to rig the constitution to your advantage.

Le Monde report

Losing the roads...and possibly your shirt

AP reports on the collapse of security on the roads of Iraq, including the route to Baghdad airport. Although the military now call it RPG Alley and the British Embassy has banned its staff from using it, the alternatives are even worse. After all, the route to the western border passes through Ramadi and Fallujah. The northern route out goes via Mosul. The southern route goes through the main battle area at the moment - the Iskandariyah area - and then Najaf and Karbala, and the southeastern route passes through Amarah where carjacking is common. Looks like it'll have to be the airport then. Stand by for Iraq's first air-taxi service. Bound to happen.

And then we'll know we've really lost.

On the same theme, Back to Iraq is - well - back in Iraq, and reports that the mobile phone network is failing because the insurgents are destroying the base stations. Oh, and the electricity's going to buggery again. But that doesn't stop some of us - like Dr. Omar al-Damluji for example, Iraq's Minister of Housing and Construction:

"Finally, a flunky brought me and my photographer into the room to behold His Excellency. He was holding a meeting and didn’t bother looking up as we came in. For 90 minutes he listened to his subordinates and answered their questions about concrete and tar factories. Then he told them he wanted all the factories profitable so they could be privatized and sold on the Baghdad Stock Exchange, noting approvingly of Margaret Thatcher’s actions in Britain in the 1970s and ’80s. Later, in the few minutes I had with him after the meeting, he admitted that he also wanted foreign investment but that he worried that if the companies weren’t profitable, there wouldn’t be any buyers."

As Michael Herr would have put it, "what could you say to that except "Colonel - you're insane!"?" No electricity. No security. No phones. And the good doctor's still daydreaming about loading up on skyrocket soaraway Baghdad equities. In The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux describes meeting the South Vietnamese Minister of Tourism in 1974. The Minister describes his plans to advertise beach resorts and tours of Hue (a shelled-out city under siege). Theroux's reply was as follows: "But - the tourists might be a bit worried about getting shot!" The same, of course, would go for Dr. Pangloss's foreign investors. Mind you, the Minister did have a suggestion for the Iraqis:

"We will appeal to their curiosity - people in America. So many had friends or relatives in Vietnam. They have heard so much about this country." Sounding distinctly ominous he said, "Now they can find out what it is really like."

Mr Ngoc said, "Places like Bangkok and Singapore are just commercial. That's not interesting. We can offer spontaneity and hospitality, and since our hotels aren't very good we could also appeal to the more adventurous. There are many people who like to explore the unknown..."

Shredding the Documents

The Kyiv Post reports on the frantic events yesterday in Ukraine (separatist referendum called off due to insufficient supply of separatists, vote of no confidence in the prime minister, prime minister says he will ignore it, talks break down, talks back on, agreement reached - maybe..). Broadly, the government side agreed to the principle of new elections and the opposition agreed to lift the siege of major government buildings (but not to leave the streets). Both parties renounced force and any actions likely to affect Ukraine's territorial integrity. Well, that's all good, but the argument will now be about implementation, specifically it seems about the date of the new election. The government want to push the vote off as long as possible in the hope that the protest movement will tire or develop splits. On the contrary, the opposition want to conserve their momentum and go for a quick end.

Another reason to spin things out as long as possible was pointed up by a regrettable incident outside the Ministry of the Interior, when

"Earlier in the day, independent broadcaster Channel 5 showed footage of protesters who had halted a dump truck attempting to leave the Presidential Administration. In the truck, protesters found huge piles of shredded and partially destroyed documents hidden under snow."

Ah, the shredder, the emblem of our times. It is to be hoped they don't shred in alphabetical order, because the Viktor Bout file would be revealing in the extreme. In a bizarre way, though, tolerating a degree of Aktenvernichtung might help to ensure a peaceful resolution - one reason to cling on to power is to forestall the investigation of your past actions, as several politicians much closer to home than the Ukraine could tell you.

Simon Jenkins in the Times has a rather pompous article about mobs.

"The mob may have been outdated by democracy, or at least by opinion polls, but it can still play its lethal game. It made America’s withdrawal from Vietnam inevitable. It reformed and decentralised France after 1968. It signed the death warrant of Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax in 1990. But it does not always win. The largest crowd ever to gather in Britain, against the Iraq war last year, had no impact on the Labour Government. Nor did the pro-hunting crowd in Parliament Square this year.

Such crowds are the manifestation of failure. They suggest that constitutions have lost consent and democratic institutions collapsed. They are an extension of politics in the direction of civil war. A crowd in the street is not an argument won but an argument lost. Its leaders merely hope that crude numbers will silence the guns and get the cameras rolling, to drive forward the blitzkrieg of publicity in support of the great god, No! We may accept the mob as a necessary evil, but should remember that evil it remains."

"The Great God, No?" Or "the great god. No!" I'm not sure what that bit means, but let that pass. There's a more important point here, though. "They suggest that constitutions have lost consent.." Jenkins doesn't seem to consider the situation when the constitution, far from losing the public's consent, is ignored by the powerful. Arguably this is perhaps the most common event that brings out the mob. It certainly is in Ukraine - there, an impeccably democratic constitution exists, one identical with the Russian federal constitution, but the government does not obey it. Just as in Russia, to give a simple example, the ministers are meant to be responsible to parliament. But the so-called power ministries, defence, interior, finance and foreign affairs, in fact serve at the president's pleasure - but this is not stated in the constitution. Neither is the role of the presidential administration, which both in Russia and in the Ukraine is located in the former Central Committee Secretariat with most of the same personnel and many of the same tasks. When the state itself ignores its own constitution, it is pretty poor stuff to blame the public for not consenting. Of course a mob is undesirable, but the alternative is a functioning democracy in which power is constrained by law. One of the features of the Ukrainian situation is that the previously government-dominated parliament and supreme court have begun to function, to provide that constraint and criticism.

Yet More Reasons to say NO to ID cards

(Part of an occasional series)

The draft ID Cards Bill is now out, (you can get a copy here) and it is just as bad as we thought. After all, you might think a huge government database linking all its information about all of us was bad enough. But what would you say to this?

"(5)
The Secretary of State—
(a)may at any time modify the Register for the purpose of correcting information recorded in it that he is satisfied is inaccurate or incomplete; but

(b)is not, by virtue of any provision of this Act, to be under a duty to correct such information unless, in a case where he is so satisfied, he considers that it is appropriate to do so."

In clearer English, this means that even if the Home Secretary is satisfied that your file is incorrect, he is not obliged by law to correct it. Whether this would stand up in court or not, of course, is another matter, but it hardly fills you with confidence as to the fairness and accuracy of the information held on the database. I'd rather got my hopes up when I noticed that the draft provides for the register to hold any other information that you, the citizen, asks to be added to your record - I was thinking along the lines of "I LOVE KIMBERLEY FORTIER", for example - but section 3(2) rules this out by making such information subject to (3(2)b) rules set by the Home Office and (3(2)c) the Secretary of State's approval. More seriously, 1(5)h includes on the proposed database

"information about occasions on which information recorded about him in the Register has been provided to any person;".

If the Home Office's hopes for the widespread use of ID card readers were to come true, this would provide a means of following the movements of individuals - as every time the card was checked, this would be logged in the Big Computer. This would be pointless unless such a log included details of which terminal had checked the ID card and when. The "information of a technical nature for use in the administration of the Register" and of ID cards that will also (section 3 subsections 1b and c) be stored against your name would also seem to offer considerable possibilities (not least because it is entirely unspecified in the legislation). In Schedule 1, Section 9, this is made entirely explicit:

"The following may be recorded in the entry in the Register for an individual—
(a)particulars of every occasion on which information contained in the individual’s entry has been provided to a person;

(b)particulars of every person to whom such information has been provided on such an occasion;

(c)other particulars, in relation to each such occasion, of the provision of the information"

Section 15 permits the authorities to make the provision of public services conditional on identity checks. In a bizarre twist to this, subsection 2 then excludes any service that involves a payment being made to the persion involved or any service that is provided free of charge. I am struggling to think of a personal public service that is neither free of charge nor involves the issue of a benefit in cash. And how, given this explicit exclusion of education, health and social security, will any of the savings Blunkett claims the ID card will bring actually happen? All is revealed, however, when you read down to the bottom of section 15. Here we find a little beauty of a clause that excludes the exclusion in as far as it affects "individuals of a description required to register in section 6". Section 6 includes the procedure for the eventual introduction of compulsory registration. So, everyone will indeed have to show their cards to get medical treatment. Just not yet. In section 18 ("Prohibition on Requirements to produce identity cards"), there is not one but two similar get-out clauses. One excludes any regulation under section 15, and another excludes those section 6 individuals. Ha.

Plunging swiftly into the grubby universe of financial interest, we come to the section on "Fees and charges". As well as the bits we already knew (the £85 ID and passport charge), this includes a truly impressive scale of possible bills:

"a)applications to him for entries to be made in the Register, for the modification of entries or for the issue of ID cards;

(b)the making or modification of entries in the Register;

(c)the issue of ID cards;

(d)applications for the provision of information contained in entries in the Register;

(e)the provision of such information;

(f)applications for confirmation that information supplied coincides with information recorded in the Register;

(g)the issue or refusal of such confirmations;

h)applications for the approval of a person or of apparatus in accordance with any regulations under this Act

(i)the grant of such approvals.

So that's a fat nine opportunities to milk everyone in any way involved with the scheme, with apparently no limit on the bill in the Bill. I will offer you three questions: Firstly, can anyone tell us how much it will cost, both to individuals and to the state? Secondly, can anyone tell us what the explanation of the arguably dishonest drafting of section 15 is? (Shorter - if it will be required for access to social security, education and the NHS, why not say so in plain honest terms?) And thirdly, who can say they really have nothing to hide?

Those "Anti-Semites": The Jewish View

Ha'aretz reports on Ukrainian Jews' view of the election crisis, revolution, etc. They quote Leonid Finberg, director of the Jewish Institute of Kiev, as follows:

""I am convinced the article was commissioned to blacken the name of Yushchenko and sabotage a source of support for him," said Leonid Finberg, director of the Judaica Institute in Kiev and chairman of a publishing house. "Presenting him as a person who supports anti-Semitism is a terrible distortion. His father was in Auschwitz, and it is known that his family saved Jews during the Holocaust. The Ukrainian intelligensia, including the Jews, supports him completely. He had made a great contribution to constructive dialogue between the Jewish and the Ukrainian intelligensia."

Finberg also told of the strong position Yushchenko took at a conference on anti-Semitism in Sweden and about an appearance he made before a group of Ukrainian Jews.

Finberg attached little importance to graffiti calling to strike at Jews and Russians that was painted on the walls of clubs associated with Yushchenko, "There are nationalist and anti-Semitic elements on the fringes of all political personalities here. I have no doubt that Yushchenko and his people are not connected to this. Such graffiti can be found today all over the world, including Israel."

Oh yes, and the president of the Jewish Community

"rejected what he called "absurd rumors" connecting Yushchenko to anti-Semitism"

. For balance, I checked out the Jerusalem Post, but they didn't even find it worth ink.

The real story of those Ukrainian demos

Something was annoying me about all this stuff of "US-guided branding strategies" that's coming out of the Grauniad, and I fortunately remembered what it was. All the features they spoke of as being invented by evil political consultants are actually part of a genuine European history of the recent past. "One-word branding"? Well, it's certainly true that the Ukrainians chose a one-word punch meaning "It's time!" just like the Georgians - and the Serbs - but then so did the Czechs of 1989. Rereading Tim Garton Ash's 1989 memoir, We the People, this continuity is very clear. In Prague in November, 1989, that was exactly - exactly - the slogan that the first demos on Wenceslas Square chanted. And the Otporniks were themselves recapping their previous attempt in 1996 (Zajedno - Together!). Looking even further back, though, there was another civil revolutionary movement that made use of the same tactics, indeed almost invented them - Solidarity.

What are those tactics? Not so much an assault on the regime, as desertion from the regime. Self-organisation in a parallel structure to the state. Mass non-violent demonstrations and strikes. Creating a samizdat media to discredit the official version of events. The crucial point was that by 1989, even the vastly more controlling regimes of communist Europe did not rule by force but by deceit and by the dead weight of incumbency. In a semi- or fake democracy like the Ukraine, the importance of rule by deceit is even greater - Milosevic didn't maintain his grip on (Serbian) Yugoslavia by force, but by propaganda and manipulation. Control of the media permits the rulers to get out their version and suppress anything else. Control of the economy permits them to divert scarce goods or services to those who support them. Control of the secret service provides surveillance, but only in extreme cases is it used to kill (although a little terror, as always, goes a long way). The answer - the supposed "US strategy" - is to tell the truth and organise outside it. It is necessary to get as broad a coalition as possible - this was very true of the Central European revolutions, and requires willingness to compromise from all sides.

It is not a new programme, and it was not invented out of whole cloth by Madeleine Albright in 1999 as some people seem to think. Exactly the same elements were in action in 1980 in Poland, in 1989 in Central Europe, in 2000 in Yugoslavia.

Bizarre Spam

My Technorati link cosmos just flashed up with a new blog linking to the Ranter (I have it as an RSS feed into a Firefox live bookmark). Eagerly I clicked on the newcomer - and found an odd, poorly designed thingy with repeated posts about "gift cards". Not posts with information in them really, but lots of links to the same site and the words gift cards over and over again. It was pretty clear that we were dealing with a fake blog, a phenomenon in the science of spamming that has emerged this year. Informed bloggers hold that the point is to drive another site up the Google page rankings, exploiting Google's tendency to rate blogs highly. Simply, the idea is to get as many links to the roboblog as possible to boost the value of the links into your real site in Google's eyes.

I refuse to aid this nonsense by linking to it, so if you want to see it, go to Technorati and search for my URL. I assume it'll be under "gift cards". Whois returns the fact that the registrant is hiding behind a firm called "Domains by Proxy Inc" in Scottsdale, Arizona. Feckin' spammers. On the same theme, I found an odd item of comment spam in my June archives today - among the online poker links was one to www.valeofglamorganconservatives.org, which turns out (deeply to my disappointment) to be an online poker site registered by a firm called Phetermine Deals, who also spam. The chap responsible appears to be one Ron Miles, of English Harbour, Antigua, who gives the phone number (00)268 4606129 as well as his blatantly silly PO box number. The tech contact is in Paris at 38, rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth, a well-known source of spam. Now, I don't know about you, but if I was the Tories' sysadmin I'd make good and goddamn sure that none of my local groups let their domain names lapse. This sort of thing is embarrassing.

Bout and the upcoming Rwandan invasion of the Congo

The Observer reports on the gathering threat of another Rwandan intervention in the DRC. Back in June, I reported that just as fighting broke out anew in eastern Congo, one of Viktor Bout's aircraft had shown up in Kigali. (Linky) It's no surprise to notice this key paragraph, then:

"n the towns of Walikale and Rubaya soldiers of the Rassemblement Congolais Pour la Démocratie, or RCD-Goma, Rwanda's proxy force in eastern Congo, transferred sacks of the minerals cassiterite and tantalite to lorries bound for airstrips from which jets shuttled to Kigali"

A source who regularly comments here mentioned at the time that the Kenyan arms dealer and Bout intimate Sanjivan Ruprah is a relation of the RCD's leader.

Action!

Tomorrow, the ID Cards bill gets its first reading in the Commons. We are holding a public meeting on Tuesday, 30/11/04, at 1900 in the location following:

Tuesday 30 November 2004,
The Brix,
St Matthews Church,
Brixton,
London SW2 1JF

If you go to that - even if you don't - you might also want to write to your MEP with the Open Letter against biometric identification that you can find here. Don't let the Government blame ID cards on the European Union, getting out of the responsibility and incidentally wrecking any chance of ratifying the European Constitution, joining the €, etc.

That "pro-Russian Donbass", examined

Excellent blog here, reporting in detail on just how the elections went on in the officially pro-Yanukovich regions of the Ukraine. It's too long to quote, but well worth reading.

Analysis moment: if you were going to be paranoid about it, Russia might have a lot to gain in the event of a secession by the south-eastern Ukraine. Looking at the map, it would give them most of what they would want in a "reintegration" of Ukraine (direct access to the Crimea and the fleet, most of the gas and oil pipelines, defence industries and a land link to their army in Transdniestria) with a good chance of getting the rest. After all, the presence of their forces in Transdniestria has lasted and kept it as a quasi-Russian province.

I suspect partition won't happen, though, due to the "purple map" issue. What most big media (but not blogs on the spot, interestingly) don't mention is that there is no shortage of oppositionists in the supposedly pro-regime east (and of course of regime supporters in the pro-Yushchenko west), just as the famous map of the US with counties scaled to population and coloured proportionally to the vote demonstrates that there are plenty of Texan Democrats and New York Republicans. Reports have been frequent of demos and other activity in Dnepropetrovsk (especially). After all, the figures that support this meme can be no more credible than the election as a whole - and if you read that link, you won't believe a decimal point of the election. (There are also some useful maps there.)

In Other News: you'll probably know by now that the parliament voted no confidence in the election commission. Interesting echo of 1917 in the report that the railwaymen's union said they would prevent the movement of trains for the government towards Kiev. General Kornilov must be spinning in his grave at that one. Interestingly, the men and women on the spot seem to be much more optimistic than The Commentators - despite the civil war talk, none of the Kievblogs have yet to report any violence or indeed hostility.