Day 5364: Lines in the Air, Lines in the Sand

Monday:



I was going to review the Doctor Who story "Mummy on the Orient Express" today. I was going to make a joke about "a shambling creature trapped by its history into perpetuating a war that ought to have been long forgotten and now just murdering by-standers…"

Unfortunately, this ISN'T the plot of "Mummy on the Orient Express" but the Prime Minister's announcement to the Commons of a drone strike in Syria.

I'm very concerned that the British Prime Minister appears to have secretly ordered the de facto invasion of Syrian airspace to carry out extrajudicial execution of British citizens.


Back at the start of the long summer break, the Tories were making noises about getting into more macho posturing, with Mr Cameron claiming he would personally "wipe out the caliphate". Total nonsense.

Keen to take part in more American-led adventurism, the now-Lib Dem free Tory government wanted to extend the air force mission against Islamic State from its current remit of assisting the Iraqi government forces (legally justified by the invitation of the recognised government of Iraq) across the border into Syria (not remotely legally justified, and probably not a hope of getting the UN mandate that might make it so). The reasoning of the Defence Secretary being: "well IS don't recognise the border; it's just a line in the air".

That "line in the air" is of course the difference between International Law and a bunch of terrorists. And the British Government is saying that it wants to cross to the other side.

Just where are those lines anyway?

To be pedantic, it is true that the House of Commons has not said that British forces should not be deployed against Islamic State in Syria. But that's because it hasn't been asked.

The question two years ago was whether to attack the Syrian government (against whom IS were fighting even then – so we'd have been inadvertently intervening on IS side. Which is one of the reasons that we didn't.).

For the moment, the Government is maintaining the position that Islamic State is not a "State". (Also that it's not Islamic, but that's neither here nor there at the moment.) As such, they need to remember that that makes Syria the state that they would be invading, and that the House of Commons has very much said they are not to do.

The history of our non-involvement in the Syrian civil war is a murky one, largely because Ed Miliband tried to exaggerate his own influence by claiming to have stopped it. Actually, both Coalition and Labour put motions to the Commons that would have theoretically authorised military intervention (with caveats, including aforementioned UN mandate), but they unwittingly cancelled each other out. This however suited the mood of the country, tired of spending "blood and treasure" on pointlessly sticking our oar into situations that we only seemed to make worse.

Spectacularly, David Cameron appears to have found a way to make it worse anyway, by lobbing high ordinance into a territory from which millions are already fleeing for their lives.



And in related news, 20,000 refugees over five years is PATHETIC. Germany has already taken four times as many just this year. And George Osborne is robbing the international aid budget to pay for it.

Shameful. Utterly shameful.

PS:

Edited to add: it gets worse!

Minister in the Lords just confirmed refugee orphans and children brought in under Cameron's scheme will be deported at age 18.

— Paddy Ashdown (@paddyashdown) September 7, 2015

Day 4657: If Theresa May Was A Terrorist – a Thought Experiment

Tuesday:


This week Theresa May accused Cap’n Clegg of Hating Britain* for putting the Human Rights of terrorists and criminals above ordinary people.

That’s because Ms May does not understand that Human Rights are not to protect terrorists, they are to protect people who get called “terrorists”.

So, as an experiment, let us imagine that Theresa May is a terrorist.

It’s not that hard to imagine… she’s the head of an organisation that preaches messages of hate to frighten people, snatches people off planes for intimidation, targets certain people in the streets and, of course, occasionally shoots innocent people dead.

Er, okay, this is just a thought experiment, isn’t it?

Anyway, since Ms May doesn’t believe “terrorists” deserve Human Rights, then let’s see how well she does without them, shall we?

Let’s call her a “terrorist”.

Shouldn’t we have to prove that?

Well, a Fair Trial is one of her Human Rights, so I guess not.

So we’ll lock her up.

Oh, no we can’t do that because Liberty is one of her Human Rights… oh hang on.

But shouldn’t she be allowed to hire a lawyer at least?

Well, we’ll just seize all her money. No protection of Property without your Human Rights you see.

But we can’t just do that because of what she thinks… can we?

As it happens Freedom of Thought is another of those pesky Human Rights.

Isn’t she allowed to protest?

Aaaaactually, guess what, Free Speech is one of her Human Rights, so that’s gagged her too.

You can’t actually gag her though, that’s cruel and unusual!

But, since you mention it, Protection from Torture and Degrading Treatment is, guess what, a Human Right.

If you carry on like this you’ll end up killing her!

Funnily enough, I was just coming to that…



So Ms May, if you want to abolish the Human Rights Act, which rights don’t you want? It’s not hard; there’s only ten of them:

1. the Right to Life
2. the Right to Protection from Torture and Degrading Treatment
3. the Right to Protection from Slavery
4. the Right to Liberty and Freedom
5. the Right to a Fair Trial and No punishment without Law
6. the Right to respect for Private Life, including the right to Marry
7. the Right to Freedom of Thought, Religion and Belief
8. the Right to Free Speech and Free Assembly and Protest
9. the Right to Freedom from Discrimination
10. the Right to Protection of your Property


*Or was that was the Daily Heil.

Day 4622: Syrians versus Badgers

Tuesday:

One day, I would hope, people will stop thinking that the solution to a problem is to throw ordinance at it.

But apparently that’s not today. No, today we are talking about curing cows by shooting badgers and curing a civil war by lobbing bombs into Syria.

Since being dead means they don’t have TB any more this is supposed to be “better for the badgers too”; presumably Lord Blairimort – hmm, “TB” – will pop up shortly to make the same argument about Syrians.

In either case, we’re in danger of making the cure worse than the disease.

Can we please resist this drift into military action in Syria.

It seems that a successful intervention in Libya has cleansed military minds of the cataclysm that we brought about by wading into Iraq.

This accelerating drum beat to war is being driven by some pretty horrific stories in our newspapers and on the television.

Why do our media seem to care more about massacres in Syria when we barely hear a report on the ongoing conflicts in Africa, the more distant parts of Asia and Latin America? Partly, I suspect, it’s immediacy, novelty even; partly it’s because of the effect on our so-called “national interests”, our allies in Turkey and Israel being closely affected by the conflict, and then there are all those nearby oilfields (although of course the war in the African Congo is paid for by the mining rights for those rare metals that we need for our smart-phones and sadPads); partly even it may be that after years of reporting on “Middle Eastern Crises” (from Cyprus to Yom Kippur War, from Lebanon to Intifada; from Iraq to Arab Spring) there’s just a core of embedded, committed journalists there with on-the-ground knowledge and stories to tell.

But are highly emotive stories of the horror of civil war entirely the best way to be deciding on whether we throw our armed forces into yet another conflict?

It would be nice to think that everyone agrees that gassing civilian populations is an act of evil. Although clearly not everyone agrees or it wouldn’t happen.

But do we really protect people from bullies by being the bigger bully?

We certainly don’t seem to be willing to take these people out of harm’s way by offering them safe haven thousands of miles from the conflict in the United Kingdom. No, it appears we’d much rather they stayed there in the firing line while we take some pot-shots at the Syrian army to “give them a taste of their own medicine”. (Not, obviously the poison gas kind of medicine.)

“There are no good outcomes in Syria,” we are warned, “but non-intervention is the worst.”

Really?

Because this civil war is the outcome of nothing but interventions, ever since the “great powers” decided to carve up the Ottoman Empire, and since perfidious Albion (that’s us, by the way) promised the same small acreage to about a dozen different mutually-antagonistic factions, we’ve kept on sticking our noses into the Middle East, picking sides for proxies in the Cold War, supporting dictators because they promised to keep the oil flowing, supplying billions of dollars (to Israel, to Egypt, we don’t discriminate) with which their military can buy weapons from us for “self-defence” in order to support jobs at home without thought as to where those weapons might one day be pointed (that means at us, by the way).

For decades, Presidents and Prime Monsters have talked about “draining the swamp” of the Middle East. Instead, we just keep pumping in more mud.

There are hard questions to ask: Can we do anything? Can we actually stop this sort of thing happening? Are we sure we will make things better? Regardless of what good we do, what harm will we also cause? What will be the consequences?

If we say we will intervene, will this provoke the Assad regime to greater atrocities in an attempt to “win” before our forces can reach the battlegrounds? Or will our tacit support of the rebels drive them to recklessly assault government-held positions in the assumption that we will arrive to back them up? How will Vladimir Putin’s Russia – already feeling isolated, ignored, insulted and impotent – react? Does the West’s reputation for selfishly hoarding the World’s resources and randomly blowing up any bits of the planet that get “uppity” about it really need any more sullying?

Civil war is very rarely the best route from dictatorship to democracy; replacing one regime with another does not a liberal democracy create. What you need is time, rule of law, stability, broader education and even a dollop of affluence. But imposing a democracy from outside is even worse. You cannot, after all, impose self-determination.

John Stuart Mill, writing in 1859, had a Few Words to say on Non-Intervention [pdf]. At a time when the British Empire saw itself as a “civilising influence” he may have rather gone along with that attitude towards “barbarians”, but when it came to civil war, his answer was this:

“When the contest is only with native rulers, and with such native strength as those rulers can enlist in their defence, the answer I should give to the question of the legitimacy of intervention is, as a general rule, No.”

And he explains:

“The reason is, that there can seldom be anything approaching to assurance that intervention, even if successful, would be for the good of the people themselves.”

As for the badgers: I am constitutionally against the assassination of fluffy animals!

But even if I wasn’t, would it not be better to await the outcome of the vaccination trials currently being conducted in Wales? As I recall the evidence from the last time a cull was tried was that the cases of bovine TB actually went up, (presumably because badgers are territorial and wiping them out allows for greater movement of badgers and hence greater chance of infection and cross-infection) and even DEFRA’s own scientists only estimate a reduction in new TB cases of 12% to 16%.

Killing things hardly seems to be a solution.

Who’d have thought!


PS:

There is an E-petition to stop the badger cull (care of Dr Brian May!).

Having already gained more than double the 100,000 signatures threshold this ought to be debated in Parliament, were they not all off on recess, but please continue to sign to increase the pressure on them to do so.

Day 2405: SO when IS an innocent man being shot dead a calamity, Mr Mayor?

Thursday:


Today we got the report into the aftermath of the tragic shooting of Mr Jean-Charles de Menezes.

If you remember, this was in the days after REAL terrorists had exploded fifty-two people on the London tube and on a bus, so the police were on high alert and probably a bit PANICKY when they mistook him for a threat and so shot him very, very dead.

In anybody's book, this is a TRAGEDY. Another innocent victim in the War on Adjective, and doubly so because we are supposed to be the GOODIES.

Well, I SAY in anybody's book, but not, apparently in the book of our very own Mayor of London Mr Ken, who rubbished the idea "that this is some sort of catastrophic error of judgment on the part of an officer".

The office in question is Mr Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman who was ALSO in charge of the shooting of ANOTHER innocent person in the raid in Forest Gate last year. Though that is just a coincidence and you shouldn't hold it against him.

"Well, basically, he's my mate so he can shoot anyone he wants to, really," the Mayor very nearly added.

Of course, the report – which DID find errors of judgement – was in fact about the rather curious events AFTER the police made their horrible error. I am talking about the news stories that were MYSTERIOUSLY leaked to the press about how Mr Jean-Charles was wearing a heavy overcoat (suspicious in the HOT July weather) and how he supposedly LEAPED over the barriers at the tube station, clearly making it more urgent that the police catch him before he could escape or WORSE explode himself.

Except of course he was NOT wearing a coat and he entered the tube station at a walk, picked up a Metro and read it standing on the escalator.

So, these stories were NOT TRUE. They were FIBS. But they were fibs that were terribly handy to the police in justifying their precipitous and ultimately WRONG actions.

That wouldn't be a problem except that the police, and by "police" in fact the report rather specifically means Mr Mayor Ken's mate, rather seems to have KNOWN that they were fibs and carried on letting people believe that they were true, and by people the report includes his own BOSS the clone of Lord Blairimort who is Head of the Met.


But Mr Livingstone said: "It's all very well for academics, which is largely what the police complaints authority are, sitting in their office saying this is how it should have worked.
You try doing it while you are waiting for the next bomb to go off."

Actually, this report is from the INDEPENDENT Police Complaints Commission, and you might guess that the point of them being INDEPENDENT is that they AREN'T police officers. In fact, the Chair and Commissioners are a group of lawyers and public servants and you can read all about them HERE… but basically they are people pretty much like Mayor Ken and if he thinks that means THEY aren't qualified to oversee the police, then he ought to be calling for his OWN immediate resignation too.

Ooh, just listen to the silence.

And ANYWAY, this FIBBING – well, all right "allowing people to go on believing in fibs that you could and should have corrected" – was being done AFTER the shooting, not while waiting for the next bomb. No, more like in the time after it turned out not to be a bomb at all.


I am afraid to say that this is a very SOCIALIST attitude: "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, unless…" as Mr Mayor Ken might put it "…the one happens to me ME!"

Mr Mayor Ken has done many good things for London… but like any good old-fashioned SOCIALIST DICTATOR, he knows that the first step to a successful POLICE STATE is to get the Police on YOUR SIDE.

Oh, and speaking of the police not having enough evidence, the Joint Human Rights committee says there is not enough evidence to extend detention without trial beyond 28 days.

Day 2389: To the Big Brother Mobile!

Tuesday:


Our new Home Secretay, Ms Jacqui Spliff[*], has decided to allow the police to use road cameras to track our EVERY WAKING MOVEMENT!

This is of course only a temporary measure… until they can fit us all with GPS trackers in our HEADS to monitor everything we are THINKING too!

Ms Spliff gave us the USUAL excuse, TELLING us that this is because we are facing an "UNPRECEDENTED" threat from terrorists.

Now I thought that everyone was pretty much agreed that the lastest bunch of terrorists to crawl out of the woodwork were actually PRETTY RUBBISH. They are only "UNPRECEDENTED" in how BAD they are at exploding things, particularly when you compare them to the villains of the old IRA who regularly used to blow up large buildings like the Baltic Exchange in the City or South Quay on the Isle of Dogs. I do not mean to downplay the threat here, but we do appear to be facing people who cannot explode a car when it is ALREADY ON FIRE!

Under the circumstances do we REALLY want to be abandoning our liberty to drive where we want without the state taking a PRURIENT interest?

But ANYWAY, this document that the Home Office let slip is about giving the police powers to use the cameras to follow ANYONE they suspect of doing anything criminal. i.e. anyone who looks that them funny. So does this mean that they're going to start tracking people who break the speed limit? Double park? Commit DWB, as the Americans put it? You could find yourself a part of almost any criminal investigation just because you happened to be driving past.

And that's without mentioning those people who might have reasons to WANT a bit of privacy – say, because they are on their way to visit their CANNABIS DEALER!

[*] Yes, and so did Mr Ruth Kelly and Mr Alistair Eyebrow-hair Darling – bet you never thought THEY would be INTERESTING!




In other news, Anne the Elephant, Britain's last touring elephant, has been banned from performing.

She is reported to be "disappointed" that she will no longer be being fired from a cannon into the audience…

Who needs drugs when we have stories like this in the news!