Clever, clever, little David Cameron!

 David Cameron announces that British troops will pull out of Afghanistan in 2015, before the General Election.

The many, many, British citizens who want our troops to leave Afghanistan now, may be tempted to say “At least that’s something.”

No it is not. It is clever politicking.

5 years more. We’ve been there already for 9 years. Cameron is happily countenancing a war of 14 years. For what? No one is yet able to explain what the British people can gain from this war. All it achieves is allow British ministers to strut the world stage as though Britain was a “Great Power”.

How many more British soldiers will die to boost Cameron’s ego? How many more Afghan civilians?

And the politicking. Cameron will order British troops home just before the 2015 General Election, taking credit for brining them home, rather than admitting his disastrous decision to keep them there. Do not be deceived. Cameron’ s recent speech indicates very clearly that he does not care about the deaths of British soldiers or Afghan civilians. All he cares about is the possibility of using this dreadful war to secure re-election for himself in 2015.

Anti-terrorist expert says British troops should leave Afghanistan

A week before the General Election a candidate’s leaflet came through my door. A certain Crispin Black MBE was offering himself as an Independent for the constituency where I live – West Wiltshire.  

I checked his biography. He had been commissioned in the Welsh Guards   in 1982, just in time for the Falklands War; just in time to be bombed in the Sir Galahad  by the Argentine air force. Speaking with the authority of someone who’d survived battle, he was contemptuous of generals who had not been shot at.

 He became an intelligence expert, and wrote a book called 7 – 7 The London Bombs – What Went Wrong.  As a lieutenant-colonel, he was seconded to the Cabinet Office 1999 – 2002, and prepared intelligence briefings for the Joint Intelligence Committee and COBRA.  

 This is part of his manifesto:

“Sadly, British troops in Afghanistan do not make us safer from terrorism in the UK. It’s time to withdraw them. The threat is here in the homeland.”

 The only reason ever given by any British politician for continuing to fight in Afghanistan is that fighting there protects us from terrorists. That always seemed extremely dubious.

 Now, there is no excuse whatsoever for sending British soldiers to die, and killing thousands of innocent Afghan civilians as ‘collateral damage.’ A top British terrorism expert has said the Afghan war is a useless waste of lives and money.

 Bring the troops home.  

—

Clegg’s ‘democracy’?

Nick Clegg  has just announced a programme of political reform ‘greater than anything since the Reform Bill of 1832,’

Many commentators have already questioned his claim. 1832 widened the suffrage only to 18% of adult males in England and Wales. Working class males did not get the vote until nearer the end of the century, and women were only given the same voting rights as men in 1928, living memory to those aged 82 and over.

Was the 1832 Reform Bill such a huge reform of poltics? How do the proposed Clegg reforms stand in relation to other extensions of franchise to ordinary British citizens?

Nick Clegg offers us, the citizens of Britain, the right to object to laws we don’t like. Well, do you believe this? I’m afraid I don’t.

Here are some decisions on which I should like to vote. They all require straightforward yes/no answers. They all involve questions of money.

Should British taxpayers fund the replacement for Trident, which may cost about £100 billion?

Should cannabis be legalized? Subsidiary question: should it be sold over the counter like cigarettes and taxed similarly?

Should all drugs – even heroin – be legalized? Subsidiary question: should it be sold over the counter like cigarettes and taxed similarly?

Should British soldiers be withdrawn from Afghanistan?

Should wars only be undertaken if the decision to go to war is confirmed by referendum?

In my capacity as an ordinary British citizen, I do not claim the right to decide complicated problems in the NHS, or Education, nor do I have the solution for controlling bankers. (Nor do the politicians, but that’s another issue.)

The five questions noted above could all be put to the citizen body. They are all important. They all involve cost. They all impinge on our lives. If Britain was a democracy, as opposed to being governed by representative oligarchy, we would all have a right to take part in these decisions.

Politicians who say it would be wrong to put these questions to the citizen body, should also acknowledge that they do not believe we should be a democracy.

Then of course the next question rears its head: Should Britain continue to be governed by representative oligarchy, or should it take the first steps towards becoming a democracy?

CRUISE MISSILE OBLITERATES STOCKHOLM

Cruise Missile Obliterates Stockholm!

At 3.0 am this morning, a cruise missile with a nuclear warhead landed in the centre of Stockholm. The city is now flattened, and there is at the moment no report of any survivors .

At 10.0 am the Chinese broadcast an ultimatum to the Swedish Government: if they did not hand over IKEA, its entire stock, its financial assets in totality, China was declaring war on Sweden. Commentators hastened to condemn the oriental perfidy which attacks first, and then declares war after the pre-emptive strike. …

Absurd of course.

Is Nuclear Deterrence helped by a Nuclear Deterremt? Sweden has no nuclear deterrent. 

 Sweden last went to war 200 years ago. Switzerland also has not waged war for about 200 years. Even in the Second World War Sweden and Switzerland avoided being invaded. The duty of a nation’s government is to defend the lives of its citizens, and to maintain the nation’s currency. In both these fundamental tasks, the British government has failed conspicuously, by comparison with the governments of Sweden, and Switzerland. Sweden is almost certain never to be invaded, because it has given up invading other countries. The last significant war fought by Sweden was two hundred years ago, the Russian-Swedish war of 1808 – 1809. (There was then a minor war in 1814, when Sweden invaded Norway; it did not last long, or cause many casualties) Dare we say the Swedish people have sensibly realised there is nothing to be gained by fighting wars? We can find a long list of Swiss wars … in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth, centuries.. But the only war in the last two hundred years was the Sonderbund War, a civil war fought between the League of Catholic cantons and the Swiss Federation.  It lasted from November 3rd to November 26th, 1847. There were less than a hundred casualties. Immediately the Federal army had won, they started ministering to the wounded, an action which led to the founding of the Red Cross. I think we might certainly say the Swiss have sensibly realised there is nothing to be gained by fighting wars.

What is the role of Government? The role of Government is to defend the lives of its citizens, and to maintain the currency. Which Government has defended the lives of its citizens more successfully, that of the United Kingdom or that of Sweden? Let us imagine the answer to that question given by a British mother who has received the body of her son blown to unrecognisable bits by an Iraqi or Afghan bomb.

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. 

Afghan Civilian Casualties, Queen’s Regulations, & PTSD Complex

 

On Friday March 5th, 2010, Lance Corporal Joe Glenton was sentenced to 9 months in a military prison for going absent without leave during the summer of 2007, as his unit was preparing to return to Afghanistan. He first went to Afghanistan in February 2006 with 4 Logistic Support Regiment

His defence lawyer, Nick Wrack  said “He (Joe Glenton) thought he was going to help Afghanistan, to help the local people. The experience and the reality began to conflict with that.”

After going AWOL, Joe travelled in South East Asia and Australia, then flew back to Britain, handed himself in to the military authorities, but then campaigned against the Afghan war, delivering a letter to the Prime Minister, and addressing a rally in Trafalgar Square.  

Is it right to send Joe Glenton to prison for 9 months? Well, Army discipline insists on punishing him for going absent. What sort of verdict would a civilian court have reached?

During the 1950’s, popular feeling turned against the death penalty. There were instances of juries refusing to bring in a verdict of ‘Murder’, because they did not want to be responsible for sending someone to judicial death. Thus the law of innocence and guilt was brought into contempt because the punishment exceeded what most people regarded as right.

If Joe Glenton had been tried in a civilian court, and if I had been on the jury, I should have voted for his acquittal, even though it was apparent that he had gone absent without leave. In previous posts, I’ve argued that the Afghan war is unwinnable,  Senior British officers agree. It is being waged for no clear reason.  Certainly no member of the British Government has ever seriously explained why British soldiers are being sent there to be killed and wounded.

Joe Glenton, however, offers us a different perspective on the war. His defence lawyer said “He (Joe Glenton) thought he was going to help Afghanistan, to help the local people. The experience and the reality began to conflict with that.”

We are regularly told NATO forces are in Afghanistan to help the country.

It has been difficult to calculate the number of Afghan civilians killed. But, by every estimate, more have been killed by NATO forces than by the Taliban and Afghan warlords. One estimate reckons between four thousand and five and a half thousand killed by Afghans, but between five and a half thousand killed and eight and a half thousand killed by NATO.

There are also the indirect deaths, including a vast number of children who have died as a result of starvation; one Afghan estimate states that 120,000 Afghan civilians have been forced out of their homes.

How does killing Afghans help Afghanistan?

If neither the British or the American government can give a good reason for continuing the war,

and if NATO forces have killed more innocent people than the Afghan forces,

we should now judge the war as not only ill-conceived, not only unwinnable, but also immoral.

Joe Glenton went to Afghanistan hoping to help the Afghans. Our leaders affirm that to be the purpose of the war. Joe Glenton has given up 9 months of his life for protesting that if we cannot help the Afghans, we should bring the troops home.

You may not approve of War Resisters International.  But if the war in Afghanistan continues, protest against it is bound to grow, and to become more violent.

How does killing Afghans help Afghanistan? Bring the troops home.

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

Reform Parliament: Corruption Education

 The political process provides outstanding object lessons for youth in what can best be described as corruption education.

 So let’s congratulate David Chaytor, Eliot Morley, and Jim Devine. Although all three of them are well blessed with handsome salaries, and therefore should not be eligible for legal aid when accused of fiddling expenses, this noble trio has managed to manipulate the system so that when they come to trial, their luxurious legal fees will be paid by us, the British citizen body. If the case goes to Appeal, it may apparently cost us £1 million pounds.  

The first lesson in corruption education gained from observing this piece of relatively petty chicanery is the obvious one. In politics, it pays to be a bit dishonest. Think back over history, most ‘great’ leaders have been rogues and cheats for much of their time in power.

But the important lesson is a subtler one. Reform Parliament is the shout. Too many MPs have cheated on expenses making us, the taxpayers fund their duck houses and second home furnishings, and so on. So – reform Parliament. Everyone says their piece, and a few MPs are sacked. Then there’s a General Election; new MPs arrive in the House of Commons, and most of the silly things done in Parliament for the last few hundred years will continue to be done by the next Parliament.

The real lesson of this sorry episode is that the forthcoming election will be argued on trivialities. Of course Britain’s enormous debt is not triviality. But the politicians of all parties have made it very clear to us that they have no idea whatsoever as to how to diminish the debt. So if we are thinking about how to reduce Britain’s deficit we might as well vote by spinning a coin as by listening to Messrs Darling  and Osborne  

There are questions, serious, important, questions, which the forthcoming lection should decide:

1. Should we withdraw from Afghanistan?

2. Should we now decide not to replace Trident nuclear missile system?

3. How can we most quickly and efficiently produce electricity for all the nation’s needs without using fossil fuels?

4. How can we turn Britain into a democracy, ie stop Britain being ruled by a political party elected by a small proportion of the nation’s citizens?

Reform Parliament/ We may have to scrap it and start again from scratch.

The General Election of 2010 is already full of rich examples.

The first lesson: in politics never, ever, be right. 

David Chaytor, Eliot Morley, Jim Devine