A Slow Motion Legal Car Crash
The goings-on at Dale Farm, were just described in that way on the BBC. In fact, everybody seems to have got involved from Tony Blair to the UN and perhaps half the lawyers in Essex.
I’m not going to argue for either side in this dispute, except to say that the only beneficiaries of this long-running farce have been the lawyers. Everybody else has lost. I suspect in the end, we’ll all pay something out of central taxes.
It will run and run. For instance what would happen, if they found bats in some of the dwellings on the site?
The Second Tragedy of September 11, 2011
The attacks on this day were awful and no words can express the damage done to individual and collective lives.
The second tragedy of this event, is that Bush and Blair pursued such a misguided strategy afterwards that they made a second serious attack more likely to happen.
To show how badly they performed, you just have to look at how many people think the attacks didn’t happen and were an event staged by the CIA and the Israelis to get at Muslims. Or something else equally false and bizarre!
We should probably have gone into Afghanistan, but Iraq now looks in the eyes of nearly everybody to be a colossal mistake. Although saying that, Saddam was a cruel tyrant and had to go, if only to protect his own people. But the Arab world seems to specialise in people like him. Just look at Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria and Egypt. And don’t get me going on places like Saudi Arabia and a few others. How many women would like to live in those countries?
The attacks gave us a chance to deal with the real problems of the world. But we just made it worse, by our vengeful actions and our complete disregard for human rights at Guantanamo and other places we are just starting to know about.
An Ideal Present For Your NuLabor Friends
I saw this lamp in John Lewis yesterday.
I wonder if Tony Blair did a deal over the naming rights!
A Quote from T. E. Lawrence
As the players came out in the Fourth Test at the Oval, a quote from T. E. Lawrence was on the wall.
All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.
I’ll go with that! I actually think, that when you dream in the daytime, you do it because of real stimuli around you, so your dreams fit the facts. When you do it at night, you imagine advice from past friends and companions, which keeps you going in difficult times. I had such a dream in Hong Kong.
I would suspect that Martin Luther had his dream in the daytime, when he analysed what he could see going on around him.
Lawrence is a great source of quotes.
I particularly like this one.
The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armoury of the modern commander.
And this one.
I’ve been & am absurdly over-estimated. There are no supermen & I’m quite ordinary, & will say so whatever the artistic results. In that point I’m one of the few people who tell the truth about myself.
It just shows what a great man he was. It’s a pity we didn’t realise it fully at the time.
We didn’t even learn from this quote.
The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour.
Tony Blair and Dubya certainly didn’t see it coming.
Did John Major Dye His Hair?
I doubt it, especially as a few years ago I shared a lift with him in the Grande Bretagne hotel in Athens, as he was going down to his car to make speech at the British Council. His hair didn’t look dyed to me.
It must have been about 1994 or so, when I saw him speak to the Cambridge Chief Executives Club. He was rather embattled at the time and he gave a speech which predicted what would happen to Europe in the next few years. He got it substantially right especially about the Balkans. He also criticised the Germans for their reunification policy over the Deutschmark.
But he reserved his biggest bile for News International and especially The Times, which at the time had just discovered Tony Blair and NuLabor. He used the phrase, “The Times which used to call itself a newspaper” and said that it had accused him of dying his hair. He then joked that would anybody in their right mind dye it this colour.
It was a very good speech and it often makes me feel, that if he’d had a better set of cards, he might have made a very good Prime Minister.
I remembered it today, when Harriet Harman called for the power of News International to be reined in.
But of course, it was perfectly alright for them to exercise that power, when they were backing NuLabor. Pots and kettles come to mind.
Incidentally, I wonder if Ms. Harman has searched the Internet for sites about herself!
Colonel Tim Collins Shoots From The Hip
Colonel Tim Collins, was the army officer who gave the inspirational speech to his troops before the last Iraq War.
He’s just been on Kate Silverton’s program on Radio 5, being as forthright as anybody I’ve heard in the last few months.
A few points.
- He said that Tony Blair had surrounded himself with obsequious advisers who weren’t up to the job.
- He wished that the second Iraq war had been more like the first, with a coalition of sixty countries.
- On Northern Ireland he said that Yesterday’s men are still trying to get the war going. But the real problem is lack of jobs and especially for young people in the province.
- He was very scathing about Defence Procurement, saying that they squandered all the money.
- Asked about the defence cuts, he said something like if Virgin could do the long-range troop deployments, the Navy the strike and the battlefield helicopters were under the Army, then what is there for the Air Force to do.
- As Colonel Tim is a proud Irishman, I was surprised he would want to have dinner with Oliver Cromwell. But then he said he wanted to get to know the man.
It was an amazing interview full of common sense and humanity.
Blair on Fox Hunting
This is in the Guardian’s report on Tony Blair’s new book.
He regrets the hunting sort-of ban, incidentally. He hadn’t understood how important it was to many people. Careless Tony; he should have known. But banning hunting is a class issue of great totemic importance for parts of the Labour tribe and he went along with it. Typical Tony in his early years: inexperienced, ill-read and eager to please.
In other words he didn’t let the truth get in the wayof his gut feelings. How many other decisions he took would have been different, if he’d properly researched the subject and also listened to those with alternative views?
Blair’s Extradition Legacy
If there was one awful legacy fromn the Blair years, it is the one-sided extradition agreement with the US. Another story has surfaced in the papers today.
Nobody should be allowed to be extradited anyway without a proper hearing in a UK Court.
Let’s hope the Coalition repeal this law as soon as possible.
The Iraq Inquiry
I can’t see the point to the Iraq Inquiry.
Never has so much hot air and money been wasted on so much to generate so little. Well possibly the Inquiry into Bloody Sunday has wasted a lot more and all of the money wasted would have far better been spent on the victims.
But that is only the start to this pointless inquiry, which will not find anybody guilty and never get anywhere near the truth. Probably, in my view, because the truth isn’t actually written down and it is much more a cock-up by lightweight incompetents, rather than any conspiracy.
You have to ask why Tony Blair was the politician and his wife was the lawyer. Perhaps she had the brains to earn the money and he had the style to convince the average man in the street. Could he convince the average judge and jury? He gave up the Bar too soon for anybody to find out.
But what really gets me about the Iraq Inquiry is that the best daytime radio programme of the week, the Mayo/Kermode film review has been cancelled.
Shame on the BBC for giving us endless drivel instead of entertainment. I doubt more than a dozen people outside the Westminster circle are listening. And that is the problem with British politics. It’s them in control and us what pays for it!
How to Break the Law
One of the ridiculous laws brought in by Blair and Brown is the rules about entertainment licences.
Perhaps it was well-meaning, but it meant that loads of places could fall foul of the law for just a single impromptu performance.
Take the case of Faryl Smith, who got up and sang to promote her record at HMV in Kettering. It’s reported here on the BBC. HMV are now being prosecuted for not having a licence.
The trouble is if you create stupid laws like this, that are not properly thought through, you get even more stupid cases like this.
Surely, the test of laws like this, should be that if no-one is annoyed or disturbed, then you are not breaking the law. I suspect, in Faryl’s case, everybody was enchanted.
Laws like this cost businesses a lot of money and don’t serve any worthwhile purposes. I suggest that most are created by civil servants to make sure that there are lots of jobs that need to be done in the public sector.
Years ago in the UK, we used to have a dog licence. It went because it cost a lot more to collect, than was brought in. No-one mourns such a silly law and has there been any adverse affects. Some will say yes, but when you look at the dog laws in detail, other laws have been brought in to deal with the more extreme cases.
All laws need a cost benefit analysis. If they cost more to implement and keep than any benefits, then they should be broken on the anvil of progress.
That’s the way to really break the law!
The Anonymous Widower 