Tony Benn & the British National Party

 Tony Benn and  BNP   singing from the same hymn sheet!!!!

Front Page Headline in all major newspapers on April 23rd, 2010, St George’s Day

Ridiculous? Sure. But strangely enough they do agree on one thing.

St George’s Day, 2010: the day which revealed to the British electorate that the system of political parties by which Britain has been governed is now utterly obsolete.

Both Tony Benn  and Nick Griffin advocate immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan. If those two, representing as they do extreme opposites in political alignment, agree on anything, we must concede that Right and Left have become meaningless distinctions in politics.

 If Tony Benn can agree with Nick Griffin about anything, the old alignments of right and left in politics are manifestly meaningless.

 On the eve of St George’s Day, there was a second debate between the three political leaders: Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Nick Clegg. Brown and Cameron were both determined to dim the lustre Nick Clegg  acquired in the first debate a week earlier.

 As in that first debate all three leaders were equally incoherent about the steps they would take to restore Britain’s finances.

 Perhaps the most serious division of policy with which the electorate is presented is the issue of Trident. Should Britain buy a replacement for Trident at a probable cost of £100 billion? Clegg for the Lib-Dems says no; Brown and Cameron say yes. In the debate, Gordon Brown got a laugh by saying he agreed with David. Agreement about Trident, yes. Agreement also in their attempt to crush Clegg, and return the election contest to the good old knockabout between two unrepresentative parties.

 And so to the agreement between those two representatives of the extreme opposites in the right-left political line-up: Tony Benn and Nick Griffin.

 Should British troops continue to kill and be killed in Afghanistan? This, like the argument over Trident, is a serious issue. The three-cornered leaders’ debate in Bristol on April 22nd gave a fascinating illumination of why each leader believes Britain should continue to wage war there.

 Fascinating because the illumination was non-existent. Cameron and Clegg simply assumed Britain should continue the war, and saw no need to explain why.

 Since a British general who commanded in Afghanistan has said the war is unwinnable,  one would have thought an explanation of why we are continuing to fight an unwinnable war would have been helpful. Clegg and Cameron, terrified of seeming unsupportive  of the army, preferred glorifying the soldiers’  bravery to telling us why they should be there at all.

 Gordon Brown, however, rose to the occasion magnificently. He justified Britain’s military presence in Afghanistan with reference to Al-Qaeda. We need to hunt down terrorists. But in the same sentence, he informed us there were members of Al-Qaeda plotting terror from bases in the Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and other places. Why are we not hunting these Yemen and Somalia terrorists? Why have we not invaded Pakistan?  Yes, I could agree there is an argument for sending small detachments of SAS into terrorist hiding places, perhaps working in conjunction with Pakistani special forces. But how can major military operations against the Taliban help in tracking down terrorists who work in teams of less than ten?

 Why exactly do Nick Griffin and the BNP want to withdraw from Afghanistan? In a sense, their reason is irrelevant to anyone like myself who is against the rest of their policies.

Tony Benn’s opposition to the war in Afghanistan is stated with bald clarity: history shows that no foreign power has ever succeeded in dominating Afghanistan. Britain failed, Russia failed, and now NATO is failing.  

I return to the headline, which the newspapers neglected to print. More than ever before there are issues on which the citizens of Britain would like to vote. More than ever before there is less and less reason to trust any political party to resolve these issues.

Even Brown, even Cameron, and certainly Clegg, mixed their sycophantic references to the electorate “It’s for you to decide, it’s your choice, etc” with vague promises of referendums. Let us see how quickly these promises are forgotten after the election.

 Why don’t we have a referendum about the war in Afghanistan, if only to enjoy the sight of Benn and Griffin voting on the same side?

Minority Government & Collateral Damage in Afghanistan

Leading the nation to war is the prerogative of the sovereign. 

In the seventeenth century and before, the British sovereign was the monarch, who was an absolute ruler. By the end of the seventeenth century sovereignty rested with Parliament, as the representative of the British people. From time to time a British Prime Minister with a commanding majority has been able to act like an absolute monarch. This was the case with Tony Blair when he led Britain into an invasion of Iraq, declared illegal by the United Nations. That Tony Blair should wield absolute power  for a few years at the beginning of the 21st century seems especially wrong, when we realise that only 37 % of the British electorate voted Labour into power in 2001.

 All this will form the subject of other posts. For the moment, I merely want to stress that the rights and wrongs of going to war, or continuing a pointless war, are an integral part of our notion of national sovereignty.

 We, the British people, the British taxpayers,  have been dragooned against our will into supporting involuntarily, first an illegal invasion of Iraq with consequent deaths of British service personnel and many many more Iraqi civilians,  not to mention a huge expenditure of cash,  and then secondly – with the same deaths of British service personnel and innocent civilians,  and further huge expenditures of cash – a war in Afghanistan which is declared unwinnable by a British officer commanding there, and for the continuance of which no minister has given adequate explanation.

Sovereignty is only granted to Parliament as our representatives. How many of us consider ourselves represented by Parliament? The only secure justification for sending troops to Iraq and Afghanistan would be if the British citizen body as a whole had voted for such invasions by referendum.

So war points the way to constitutional reform.. A possible first step: hold a referendum of the British people on whether to bring the troops home from Afghanistan. If the British people voted for withdrawal from Afghanistan, they might also throw in a vote to free Joe Glenton from prison. 

Nuclear Sub

 On March 23rd, 2010, the BBC News  contained an item which stated that Britain’s defence budget would be £36 billion in deficit within the next ten years. To replace Trident will cost at least £20 billion.   

At present, Britain has four Vanguard class nuclear submarines armed with 16 Trident nuclear missiles, each missile with 10 independently targetable warheads.

 I have just seen Sound and Fury’s  production of Bryony Lavery’s play Kursk.

The Kursk was, according to Wikipedia,  “a Russian Oscar II class submarine which sank in the Barents Sea. The generally accepted theory is that a leak of hydrogen peroxide in the forward torpedo room led to the detonation of a torpedo warhead, which in turn triggered the explosion of up to seven other warheads about two minutes later. Despite a rescue attempt by British and Norwegian teams, all 118 sailors and officers aboard Kursk died.”

 Lavery’s play is set in a British nuclear submarine whose orders were to shadow the Kursk, and even to dive underneath it, so as to photograph it in detail. In the course of the play, the British Captain says the Kursk has more destructive power than the total destructive power let loose in the entire Second World War.

 The creators of the play – the two directors worked with the writer – spent a long time on research, including time in a nuclear submarine and discussion with two submarine commanders. The navy passed the play as factually accurate.

 One thing emerged from the play which, on a moment’s thought, is obvious. Nuclear submarines patrol the oceans, and nobody – nobody in the Ministry of Defence, nobody in the Cabinet – knows exactly where a particular submarine is.

 The previous post suggested the British Prime Minister as Commander in Chief will be able to strut the world stage for a while longer as possessor of a fairly posh nuclear deterrent. As long as Vanguard submarines and Trident nuclear missiles can be maintained, there is still enough destructive power on board one submarine to devastate over a hundred cities and create nuclear winter.

 Surely rather than spending £20 billion on replacing Trdient, the sensible thing to do is to use the remaining lifetime of the existing nuclear missile system to negotiate for a world where every nuclear missile is destroyed.

Nuclear subs cost a lot to maintain. A pun comes to the surface: if we  can’t afford nuclear subs, will we be able to afford the Sub for our membership of the Nuclear Club?

Even posh bankrupts can’t afford war.

Nuclear arsenal? Bankrupt Britain

On March 23rd, 2010, the BBC News contained an item which stated that Britain’s defence budget would be £36 billion in deficit within the next ten years. To replace Trident will cost at least £20 billion.  

British politicians are, at present, arguing whether Britain should buy a new nuclear missile. A TV channel has been running repeats of Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn’s Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. In one episode there is a discussion between Jim Hacker (Paul Eddington)  and Sir Humphrey Appleby (Nigel Hawthorne). Hacker is proposing to scrap Trident. Sir Humphrey dissuades him with the following appeal – (I quote from memory):

“Among the nuclear missiles it (Trident) is the Savile Row suit of nuclear missiles, the Rolls Royce, the Chateau Lafitte 45.”

In other words, possession of Trident makes Britain a posh nation able to lord it over the yob nations which do not possess it.

And now, we taxpayer-citizens are told, we must pay up for an even posher version.  In The Guardian of Saturday March 20th, Simon Hoggart wrote of a wine-tasting he attended to drink some Chateau Pétrus, the most expensive claret, costing £2,792 a bottle.

So I suppose our 2010 Sir Humphrey will urge the buying of the Lamborghini, the Chateau Pétrus of nuclear missiles on an even more impoverished nation than we were in the 1980’s.

 Trident will last for quite a few years longer. British Prime Ministers who wish to strut the world stage as leaders of a nuclear power will, we hope, be prevented by angry taxpayers from flaunting Chateau Pétrus nuclear missiles, but they still have some time to flaunt their aging Chateau Lafitte Tridents.

 Bankrupts can’t afford War

Participation Politics & Tony Benn

 The Guardian on March 17th, 2005, contained an article by Tony Benn titled Not apathy, but anger. 

 “My own experience,” he wrote “four years after leaving parliament to devote more time to politics, has convinced me that, far from being apathetic, most people are angry that no one seems to be listening to them; nor do they believe what they are told. Anger and mistrust are highly political responses and in no sense can they be described as apathy.”

Tony Benn is living up to what he promised. He tours the country incessantly, calling on British citizens disillusioned with government, politicians, Parliament, and the inadequacy of a system which describes itself as democracy, but is not democracy, to take to the streets in public protest.

 One of the causes for which he campaigns tirelessly is the call to bring back British troops from Afghanistan. Anyone who bothers to read history will know that no foreign power has ever succeeded in occupying Afghanistan. 

The Afghan war is unwinnable. NATO  should admit defeat, and if NATO insists on continuing to fight, Britain should anyhow withdraw its troops.  

The Afghan war is unwinnable.

Bring the troops home.

See next post

Mary Robinson on government role in saving Planet Earth.

 Mary Robinson was President of Ireland 1990 – 1997 , and then worked for the United Nations in New York, first as High Commissioner for Human Rights  1997 – 2002  until George W. Bush had her removed from that post because of her support for the Palestinians.

 Now she has been asked by Nelson Mandela to become one of the Elders,  a group of 12 ‘wise people’ under the chairmanship of Desmond Tutu.  

She was the subject of The Aida Edemariam  Interview, in The Guardian of Saturday March 13th, 201, The article described her disgust with the failure of the Copenhagen Conference. Mrs Robinson regards governments as incapable of dealing with the crises which face humanity.

 If not governments, who then? Mrs Robinson suggests:

”Civil society: “I mean churches, I mean business, I mean trades unions, I mean the normal environmental groups, development groups, youth groups – as never before we have to build up the pressure.”

From that article, and in general, it is difficult to see what practical projects Mrs Robinson envisages.

But leave that aside for a while. What is immediately noteworthy is that a politician of her stature has given it as her opinion that governments – and therefore, by implication, the whole political process – is irrelevant to the important issues facing this generation.

Many of us powerless individuals have been saying for some time that Prime Ministers and Presidents, Cabinets, Parliaments, and Congresses, are now more or less irrelevant. Now, an ex-President, has said she agrees with us.

Has Gordon Brown become a democrat?

Has Gordon Brown become a democrat? I doubt it. But let’s cheer his first hesitant toddler-stumbles towards democracy.

Britain, called a democracy by its political leaders, is usually governed by a political party for whom not much more than a quarter of the British people have voted.

Surely every British citizen — apart from Members of Parliament and the various entourages — must consider our method of selecting our rulers to be ludicrous. Our system in effect forces the British people to choose their government from one of two parties. We might as well save the expense of elections, and toss a coin to decide which party will form the government, while each constituency organises a drawing of straws for the local MP. That would be no less democratic than our current system, save a lot of money, and save a lot of politicians from having to tell lies.

Now Gordon Brown has suggested Parliament should consider another system of voting. We automatically assume this is because he thinks it might benefit Labour. It is not Proportional Representation, and we can safely assure ourselves that a very small number of the British people will know how the suggested system, referred to as the Alternative Vote System, www.electoral-reform.org.uk/votingsystems/systems.htm  will actually work.Nick Robinson www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/nickrobinson  in his blog of 2.2.10, offers an explanation. 

 The only significant thing is this. Mr Brown has proposed this method of voting should be discussed by Parliament, and if Parliament passes the Bill, it should be referred to the citizens of Britain in a referendum. No doubt, if it ever gets that far, the width of choice offered the citizens of Britain will be minimal. But whatever the wording of whatever referendum may finally be offered to the British people — if indeed it ever is offered, however limited, even unreal, the choice presented to us, this could be the breach in the walls of elected tyranny, this could be the tentative beginnings of turning Britain into a democracy.

The possibility of a referendum. The possibility of the British people being asked how they want to be governed. Such a referendum would be a baby’s first struggle to walk upright compared to the march past of the rigidly erect political parties.

If this proposal ever gets to a referendum, the wall of oligarchy has been chipped, the gate of democracy is ajar.

Behold the head of a traitor!

A cold January day. The deposed King Blair, stripped of his royal robes, wearing only simple breeches and a white shirt with the collar open, is marched by a squad of soldiers bearing pikes and muskets, to the scaffold on Tower Hill. The executioner, dressed all in black, his face masked except for the eye slits, waits motionless, the enormous axe at his side. Blair kneels at the block. The traditional drum roll. The axe descends.

“Behold the head of a traitor.”

 The camera’s time code flickers between January 1642 and January 2010.

Let it flicker a bit more. A more appropriate execution scene. It is 1789. Le Roi Tony, condemned by the people of Paris, is being driven by tumbril to execution, while Queen Cheri Antoinette nibbles at cake sandwiches helplessly. The tumbril approaches. Suddenly, the crowd is pushed aside; an unutterably hideous washerwoman, using her stinking laundry baskets like clubs, shoves her way to the guillotine. As Le Roi mounts the platform, the washerwoman draws a rapier, and disposes of the entire guard with a few fancy thrusts and ripostes. For, of course, once we see a hideous washerwoman anywhere near Madame Guillotine, we know it is that master of disguise and accent, Sir Percy Blakeney Bush, turning his aristocratic drawl into perfect Parisian gutter argot. Robespierre raises his impotent hands in horror, as Sir Percy Bush whips up the horses, and the tumbrel, with the King on board, gallops unscathed through the entire French Republican army, and another Carry On film shoot hears the call “Wrap.”

Today will be a farce. We all know Blair knew the invasion of Iraq was illegal. But Blair has escaped the scaffold, and will live out his life of shame, struggling in penury, forced to depend on pathetic hand-outs of $20,000 dollars a minute on the American lecture circuit.

Blair acted like an absolute monarch. Cromwell and co attempted to abolish absolute monarchy for ever. Absolutism popped up again, once the British Prime Minister established his right to act like a monarch and declare war.

In 2003 Parliament was incapable of checking Blair. Parliament is no longer a suitable defence of our rights as citizens to say whether our fellow citizens should die in foreign field.

Let the lesson of Britain’s illegal invasion of, and ultimate disgraced retreat from, the ravaged country of Iraq be written into our non-existent constitution. The right to declare war must be exercised by referendum of the entire citizen body. No other person or organisation should be allowed to usurp that right of ours.

One fifth of the British army is unfit to fight

One fifth of the British army is unfit to fight.

No politician of any party has given us any real reason for continuing the war in Afghanistan. All they do is waffle.

No foreign power has ever succeeded in conquering Afghanistan; the current campaign – and the whingeing justifications for continuing it, the whining appeals for more soldiers to be sent out there – resembles more and more closely the American slide into ignominious defeat in Vietnam.

Now we learn that our soldiers, however brave, however well-trained, are not numerous enough to carry on with the campaign efficiently. Why do we continue? Merely because our political so-called leaders wish to posture as statesmen among the big boys.

Britain has long ago lost her empire. But there are still far too many people who talk of Britain’s one time ‘greatness’ in terms of that empire, and military might. What is ‘great’ about conquering with machine guns armies equipped with spears?

We should praise the ‘greatness’ of Britain in the nineteenth century. But the ‘greatness’ of Britain which history will record will be the greatness of Faraday, Brunel, Darwin, Dickens, the greatness of scientists, engineers, and writers, not that of generals or politicians, just as the greatness of Germany is the greatness of Bach and Beethoven, without any possibility of alternative, since we who do not pay much attention to European history, have already – I’m happy to say – forgotten about Bismarck.

In a previous blog, I suggested that the only just Sovereign of Britain was the citizen body of Britain. The citizen body of Britain does not have to strut on the world stage as a ‘great’ statesman. Let the citizen body of Britain exercise its right to bring the soldiers home from Afghanistan.

Is Alastair Campbell mad?

 Is Alastair Campbell mad? I don’t mean “Is he wild, crazed with testosterone-stuffed aggression, and possessed by an ego inflated to the size of a helium balloon en route for the ionosphere?” That question must obviously be answered in the affirmative. No, I ask seriously whether he is a schizophrenic, completely unable to tell the difference between reality and his private delusions. I allude of course to his impersonation of a talking robot at the Iraq Inquiry on Tuesday January 12th. No human being with normal intelligence, and five senses in working order, could possibly, after nearly seven years, assert complete confidence in the ludicrously false intelligence reports which Blair used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq.

The question whether Alastair Campbell is a schizophrenic – or indeed a robot – is the most supremely uninteresting question to be posed by current events. At the moment we, the citizens of Britain, can relax in the hope that Alastair Campbell is confined to a dirty past, stained by the wrong judgements and grinning self-assurance of the disastrous premiership of Mr Blair. But Campbell’s robot impersonation takes our minds back to 2003.

Everyone whose intelligence I respect was perfectly well aware that the Iraq invasion was illegal, and would probably have disastrous consequences. I guess the majority of the British people would have voted against the invasion, had they been given a chance. I salute a businessman by the name of Julian Dunkerton www.drapersonline.com/julian-dunkerton, who owns a chain of fashion stores. So that his work-force had a chance to protest, he gave everyone a day off in order that they could, if they wished, march against the war. He reckoned it would lose him £100,000. (I heard later that he made this money back again later: happy ending)

Just as it is almost impossible now to find a white South African who “supported apartheid”, it is likely that many people who now say they opposed the invasion of Iraq may not have done much opposing in 2003. But had the wretched Blair thought a referendum on the invasion would have gone his way, he’d have ordered one. Blair must have known his arrogant action appalled the majority of the British people. Or is Blair a schizophrenic too? Was it a Blair robot full of Bush disks that led the Iraq invasion?

In 2010, it would be impossible to find a sane British citizen willing to defend the Iraq war. Objection! There are politicians who still do defend it. I exclude politicians from the ranks of the sane; constrictions of party discipline impose a kind of schizophrenia and delusion on every member of a political party. How else can we explain the fact that Campbell was allowed to say what he did, and, apparently, leave the enquiry unscathed?

Blair’s high-handedly wrong decision raises an important matter of political philosophy. When Britain was ruled by absolute monarchy, as it was up till Charles I was dethroned and then beheaded, the King / Queen took the decision to go to war. Once the office of Prime Minister was established, the Prime Minister, as de facto Sovereign, takes the decisions for war or peace, and when he has an overwhelming parliamentary majority as Blair had, can start a war without reference to anyone else. This is, in the 21st century, patently absurd, horrifically unjust. What right to order the deaths of British people did Blair have? A nonentity politician who happened to lead a political party voted into power by a minority of the British people as result of our ridiculous electoral system.

The disaster of Iraq should ram home to us who should be the Sovereign of Britain. There is only one just solution. Sovereignty belongs to the citizen body as a whole.

The sooner we, the citizens of Britain, work to bring this about, the better. I’m hoping The Guy Fawkes Option blog can become a forum to encourage this.