Blair in the Nation

Fallujah: liberated with white phosphorous

Leave it to an American magazine to provide the best broad-brush wrap-up so far of the Chilcot inquiry.

There are so many things wrong with the Chilcot Inquiry–the British government’s official investigation of “the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken”–that it’s hard to know where to begin: none of the witnesses are under oath, Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s promise that “no British document” would be withheld has been repeatedly broken, all the questioners are far too deferential and (though much of the controversy has centered on whether the invasion of Iraq was a violation of international law) none of them are lawyers. After watching Tony Blair bob and weave his way through more than six hours of mostly feeble cross-examination in January, the chronically independent Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews complained of “a tribunal without teeth providing trial without tribulation.”

Comments D.D. Guttenplan in the Nation, before going on to note that-

-one invaluable lesson of the Chilcot Inquiry is the terrible cost to any country–not just in terms of its soldiers’ lives but in terms of its leaders’ sanity–that defines the national interest as standing shoulder to shoulder with Washington. Self-respect won’t allow Blair to admit the truth: he took Britain into Iraq because without American patronage and protection it would be just another country that used to have an empire, like Italy or Spain–or Turkey.

On that note, Blair’s self-righteous bullshit and now Campbell’s teary moment on the BBC make me fucking sick. Somebody punch one of these bastards please.

“”I’ve been through a lot on this…I’m a bit upset”

I bet the people of Fallujah are more than a bit upset too…

Shoulder-to-shoulder and sharing toothpaste...

*Apologies for the thin postings. It’s going to be this way for a while until me life gets sorted out a touch here in the non-blogosphere…

Lies, Damn Lies and the Guardian

Colourful reporting on the environment by the Guardian...

“Britain must launch GM food revolution, says chief scientist” screamed the Guardian early in January.

“Oh no I fucking didn’t say anything of the sort you lying journalist scum” screamed the chief scientist back in a letter.

Or more specifically:

Your article (Britain must launch GM food revolution, says chief scientist, 6 January), misrepresents my position and my paper at the Oxford Farming Conference.

The paper makes no mention of GM and I have not said that Britain must launch a GM food revolution.

Oh. Dear. God. What in the name of fucking world-class hackery happened there? The Institute of Science in Society can only speculate…

Just to reiterate as I have blogged here and here, reporting on GM food is often profoundly misleading and under close scrutiny usually unravels faster than you can Google “Monsanto“.

I leave you with the wise words of the Libertines: “You’re like a journalist, the way you cut and paste and twist, you’re awwwwfullll…”

Nuclear Alert

"Hoho, you funny people. Don't touch the red button ok?"

So a bunch of Belgian activists got into a U.S. airbase in Belgium, hung about for a bit, failed to get arrested, ambled through a random door that had been left open so it didn’t get frozen shut and found themselves surrounded by nukes. Or something like that.

They were then finally asked what they were doing by one bemused Belgian soldier with an unloaded rifle.

And to think that photographers are getting arrested under anti-terrorism legislation for taking photos of fish ‘n chip shops…

Land Reform and the Crown

Birmingham: a more exciting place than you might imagine...

A fascinating debate is raging over at the Birmingham Post, whose reporters and bloggers have often impressed me with their insightful writing and out-of-the-box thinking.

It started here, when John Clancy and Professor David Bailey argued that a little land reform might be a good way of reducing the budget deficit.

Yup, the Post have a revolutionary business professor on their hands:

However, how would you like a new revenue policy that helps to significantly cut the deficit but that only affects some 100 or fewer people? Surely, this is a dream from another age, a pre-credit-crunch, pre-banking- crisis world that is consigned to history?

Well, the policy itself comes from history. It’s called crowning. We crown land. We return to the ownership of the Crown in Parliament the country’s great landed estates, which have been languishing for centuries in the hands of individuals and families who won the state lottery at various stages over the last 600 years in a series of land grabs, in some cases going back to the Norman Conquest.

Over the centuries, kings and queens awarded land in return not for money but for past and (more importantly) future services like raising an army (services long since forgotten about) and gave the grantees of the land fancy titles as part of the lottery win, like Viscount, Earl, Duke, Marquess and Baron. Alternatively, they simply stole the land, grabbed it out of opportunity, or fenced it off and enclosed it; possession, in reality, being 9 tenths of the law when it came to land, historically speaking.

Our research estimates that some £100 billion at least is available in asset value, currently in the hands of about 100 men (an almost exclusively male club, by the way), consisting of a sizeable chunk of the land surface of the UK, including much of the commercial property in the hearts of our towns and cities. This land simply has been handed down generation after generation from eldest son to eldest son.

Let’s ‘ave it back! They cry…

This won’t affect Birmingham, will it? This is about the landed gentry in the ‘Shires, surely? No – it’s about central Birmingham.

For rising high at no 6 in our top 20 is our very own Sir Euan Anstruther Gough Calthorpe. Yes, he of the great sprawling Calthorpe estate. By accidents of Birth (and marriages, as it happens) he has come to own the freehold, and more, of great swathes of our city, commercial and residential. You may very well be reading this on Calthorpe Estate land.

This is not a business matter, is it? Well, the wealthiest British-born business man in the Sunday Times Rich list 2009 is The Duke of Westminster. He has assets at his command of £20billion in land simply inherited over centuries to run one of the biggest businesses in Britain, Grosvenor Estates.

All we are saying to the likes of the Duke of Westminster and Sir Euan Anstruther Gough-Calthorpe is: thank you very much for looking after our land for the last few hundred years, you’ve done very well, now mosey along and do something else. Our need is greater than yours, Sir Euan. This land will now be returned to the Crown in Parliament, where it belongs.

This is brilliant stuff! And from a business professor blogging in a Trinity Mirror paper too!

Read an angry response from a fellow blogger at the paper here and their reaction to that here…

The Fed Under Fire

The British Housing Disaster Continues

What happened to the fear and capitulation stage dammit?

Via Rob Williams at Compass:

…House prices should have crashed in 2007, following the longest, largest and most expensive credit boom in history. In fact house prices should never have been allowed to climb to such astonishing levels in the first place. The Labour government failed to include house prices in one of the main measures of inflation measures and ignored the increasingly obvious fact that there was a rampant property boom.

…For decades housing has suffered from appalling planning, management and decision making, but it was only in the last decade when the lunatics finally took over the asylum (and did a “makeover” and sold it on for a hefty, capital gains free profit).
During the same period, remember, average earnings rose by just 52%.

…If the property you are letting was previously your primary residence, Capital Gains Tax (CGT) is waived if you sell within three years of it becoming a rental property. Since 1 April 2008, working out how much CGT you are liable to pay when selling a rental property has become clearer. The amount due was previously tapered depending on how long the property had been owned, but the new system consists of a single CGT rate of 18%.

…In short, buy to let landlords are getting a huge tax handout from the government at the expense of people who work in more productive and, I would suggest, more socially useful parts of the economy, and, of course, at the expense of tenants.

…This has to change. We are, both as a country and as individuals, in massive debt, and we can’t afford another boom. If we do get one, then we will become de facto, a rentier, almost feudal society, which may, in extremis, cause social cohesion to break down. The merry go round has to stop.

Well said.

Miscellany

Remember this, remember nobody has been charged and conclude only that Devil's Kitchen's words, below, are too tame...

• A 70-year gagging order Lord Hutton imposed on records and photos relating to the death of the government scientist Dr David Kelly may be lifted…

• Those suicides at Guantanamo Bay? Scott Horton, after talking to four members of the US military who were serving at Guantánamo in June 2006 that, thinks in a report that is causing ripplies, that they were murders.
• Devil’s Kitchen is in fine form on the police…
• Campaign against World Bank-backed mining projects in El Salvador and you’re likely to wind up full of bullet holes, even if you’re a young woman eight months pregnant.
• There are apparently 22,500 people on waiting lists for accommodation in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, so what are council workers doing trashing empty council flats?
• Pete at Prison Photography puts together a harshly poignant post on a single death in Haiti, that of Fabienne Cherisma, shot by police while holding two paintings, one of a vase of flowers.

OK, that’s all a bit grim isn’t it? I went to Happy News to see if there wasn’t something uplifting to share: headlines included “Chinese Mountain Renamed for “Avatar”; “Prince William Enjoys Rap, BBQ on Aussie Tour”; and “Korean Pair Truimphs at Texting Challenge”.

The misery: spare us…

Panopticon Highway

One nation and all its roads under far more than simple CCTV

If the ramifications of real-time monitoring of every vehicle in the UK through automatic numberplate recognition cameras on every road don’t arouse more than a vague unease and the visions of some dystopian future state you read about when you were young in one of the classics of the literature, then nothing will.

And if the fact that every movement of every vehicle will be stored on a database for five years doesn’t fill you with the strange feeling that you have somehow gone down the rabbit hole and ended up in some parallel planet where the pragmatic democracy and presumption of innocence of the United Kingdom was substituted with the police state and permanent suspicion of North Korea, then you are far too comfortable in front of your TV.

You know what, fuck it, I can’t even be bothered to blog about it. Just read the Wikipedia entry on Police-enforced ANPR in the UK, or Henry Porter’s “Panopticon Highway“ and weep. And realise that this is happening now. And if you have gone to protests before you can expect to have your car flagged on the system and to be pulled over and harassed on a regular basis.

And note that this is just the start and the police use of drones to monitor wizards and pixies having a spliff at Stonehenge was not an aberration, but the beginning of a long dark night from which the dawn may just be an endlessly flashing red and blue

Or wonder whether some night-time escapades with a pair of bolt-cutters,  a hammer or a paintball gun might not be in order…

And if you have kids, or even if you don’t, buy (or read it for free here*) Cory Doctorow’s excellent novel Little Brother, remember the importance of not just dissent but active dissent, and start thinking of ways to subvert this oppressive apparatus.

***

*He distributed it for free under a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. And it still spent six weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. Which goes to show that all the corporate hysteria about file sharing and “piracy” is such a crock of shit.

God and the Boxer

Neon crosses litter the night sky in Seoul. Picture by Dan Himes

You can’t escape God in South Korea. He’s even nestling like a strange foetus or pacemaker in the chest of professional boxers.

And if I had a W1000 note for every time someone approached me on the tube asking if I knew their friend Jesus, I’d make George Soros look like a pauper.

But my formerly laconic boxing coach  didn’t seem the type. Now I know:

“Do you believe in god J?” He corners me menacingly in the changing room.

I don’t know what ignostic is in Korean and I don’t want to brush him off with a yes or no answer, either of which would be a lie. I opt for deflection…

“I think god means different things to different people…”

“But do you believe in Jesus?”

(As a historical figure, likely; as a spiritual leader, probably; as the son of god: um, metaphorically? But I’m cornered by a pro-boxer not given to semantics or hair-splitting nonsense. “Yes” I mumble, pathetically.)

“When I fight, god is in me; that’s why I win. My mother prays 24-hours continuously before I fight; that’s why I win… God is in here!” (Gestures expansively with bruised hands at his chest…)

“That’s great… I can see, yes…” I mutter again, wondering what God thinks about people being beaten to a pulp because he has shrunk to Lilliputian size and made his home in the left atrium of a Korean pugilist.

“Go to church regularly J!” he barks into the chill air of the gym.

I return to skipping in the thin morning sun.

***

Unlike Japan, Christianity took strong root in Korea and continues to flourish, sometimes to the discomfort of foreign subway passengers, in the South. Prior to the division of the peninsula and the ascension of the communists in the North, Pyongyang was even known as as Jerusalem of the East for its status as stronghold of protestantism.

Theorists have been divided over exactly why this is; earlier thinkers presumed that a population that has suffered the massive turmoil of war and resulting extreme poverty is likely to turn to religion as a salve for worldly ills, but numerous other examples fail to bear this out.

In Korea, I’d imagine, the reasons are complex but a few can be teased out crudely: it is one of the few countries where Christianity wasn’t seen to come hand-in-hand with a colonising force. China, Japan: yes. Korea, no.

In face, in Korea early missionaries were among those most fervently opposed to Korea’s occupation by the Japanese. This gave it a historical legitimacy that is lacking in, say, Japan.

The division of the peninsula also left millions impoverished, but more importantly, separated from their hometowns, which Koreans attach great value too; whether for their role as seat of the family, location of family grave which must be tended and ancestors propitiated at, or simply because that is where the community you know is.

Churches took on the role of substitute family and hometown, as the destitute and despairing were reeled in by the promise of company, sympathy and often, simply, food. (Modern-day South Korean churches often offer money to North Korean refugees in Seoul… canny defectors rotate from church to church, hauling in some extra cash…)

And several friends have commented to me that Christianity chimes with the Korean national character and expression of “한” (“a mixed feeling of sorrow and regret, unique to Korea” according to the dictionary, but a little more complex than that…), for the depiction of suffering, victim-hood and loss.

Interesting stuff, even if its modern manifestations can be a bit overbearing. Andrei Lankov’s excellent 2005 article in the Asia Times, “North Korea’s missionary position” is a fascinating read on Christianity in that troubled country. Worth a look for those interested…

Plus ça Change, Plus c’est la Ploutocratie Approfondit

Supremely plutocratic

In some change we can truly believe in, the plutocracy of the U.S. just deepened. Or, as one critic puts it, a step was just taken that is  ”the most radical and destructive campaign finance decision in the history of the Supreme Court.”

Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

***

"And he will judge between the nations, and will decide concerning many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." Umm... maybe they're not using that passage methinks.

US and UK soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq are killing Muslims using guns with optical sights marked with Christian Gospel references, manufactured by Trijicon, an avowedly Christian Evangelical company in the US, writes Craig Murray.

Trijicon’s website states: “We believe that America is great when its people are good. This goodness has been based on biblical standards throughout our history and we will strive to follow those morals.“

Before adding pithily that “peculiarly, having read the Gospels many times, I can’t recall Jesus advocating shooting people from a great distance.” Jesus, indeed, did no such thing. But these are evangelicals and hence likely to take the Old Testament literally… And Leviticus 20:13 for example, does tell people to kill homosexuals. The bible is a complicated thing…

***

Saving all their money for their kids' education while we go large on 100% mortgages and sell debt to the Chinese government to fund our "fantasy island" spending...

“Wat Tyler” at Burning Our Money parses the words of BOE Governor Mervyn King, the silence from the Tories on their plans to cut the deficit, the pregnant silence of the markets ahead of the election, and UK’s living beyond its means as East Asia races ahead. And concludes we are totally fucked and that dark days are around the corner. Or rather, that right after the election, this is what’s going to happen:

The tradesmen’s entrance from No 11 suddenly bursts open and an ashen faced George races in waving the secret Treasury file spelling out the real options:

1: Lean and mean – immediate 20% cut in all Departmental Expenditure Limits, increase in State Pension Age to 70 by 2015, outright abolition of Child Benefit and other working age benefits, 5 year freeze on all public sector salaries and pension entitlements.

2: Siege economy – whack up taxes – double VAT, 30% standard rate of income tax, 60% higher rate, 35% Corporation Tax – manage loss of competitiveness by leaving EU and imposing Bennite tariff wall.

3: Weimar Republic – rescind Bank of England independence, fire up the presses, inflate the debt away

4: Whistling in the dark – do none of the above and hope the economy somehow grows us to salvation before the markets take fright

So corporations run the so-called democracy in the U.S., evangelicals don’t take “thou shalt not kill” too seriously, and the UK economy is a basket case. It’s plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose across the globe apparently… But this is all a bit negative: why not mosey over to Positive News and read about people doing nice things before the weekend kicks off?