I see that the Labour Party has decided to bash the Conservatives, led by David Cameron, using the image of a chameleon riding a bicycle. Ouch. I am not sure what is more damning: the chameleon image or the bike. Of course, this blog has already vented a fair deal about the supposed limitations of Cameron, so I will not tarry long on this point, other than to say that some of the fizz seems to have gone out of the Cameron charge of late, although it may be that he is simply waiting and watching while Blair, enmeshed in scandal and policy paralysis, meets his political Waterloo. I am still unconvinced whether Cameron will play a convincing Wellington, however.
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There has been a chain email doing the rounds. It seems to have caught the public imagination to the extent of being used as a source by at least three well-known national columnists to my knowledge. There are some unwarranted speculations in it, however, and it is worth going through and picking out what’s not true, because what’s left is quite frightening enough. This is long, sorry.
Actually it is now the Identity Cards Act 2006, and (after a strange and unprecedented delay in getting the final text published, and, unlike all other Acts at time of writing, only in pdf) is now available on the Cabinet Office website here (pdf).
Not, quite, all. → Continue reading: Fisking ‘the anonymous email’ April 17th, 2006 | Comments are closed
 Not content with bullying its own population, the British Government is now spending taxpayers’ money to export the culture of fear. This from the website of Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy to Romania: 
The existence of the IOM ‘Managing migration for the welfare of all’ is unwelcome news to me.
…asks the IOM, seeking to explain its purpose, but begging the question. The assumption is that states will naturally ban travel and trade (which is what ‘control their borders’ means) and then decide what are ‘legitimate purposes’ for permitted movements. But this is a convenient doctrine invented by states in the 20th century, a generalization of the conditions of the Tsarist police-state and the petty, nationalist bureaucracies that emerged in the 19th. Where – let alone why – I choose to live or travel is no business of states, unless I am doing injury to their citizens. By going from place to place I do accept that places are different legally as well as culturally and physically. If there were no differences there would be no point in travel. But the natural condition of borders is openness. They are just lines on a map. April 17th, 2006 | 103 comments - (Comments are closed)
Just when I thought e-government couldn’t get any sillier, I happened upon this site. “Anti-social behaviour practitioner” is a particularly glorious piece of tin-eared bureaucratic jargon. “Tackling alcohol disorder” is alternative to “Taking a Stand Awards”, suggests to me that many of those approaching this site are expected to be unable to stand. But apart from being stupid and unintentionally funny, it is another scary glimpse into how unlimited is the appetite to regulate and manage social life in Britain. April 16th, 2006 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
When the British left is worried about getting its vote out, a standard tool in the box is the scare story about “the extreme right” (meaning not us but the racist parties), being about to break through. This is not generally convincing nationwide, but that does not stop it being tried. Before the general election the New Statesman published an absurd story/slur that 1 in 5 Britons could vote far right – which spintastic headline involved counting UKIP, Veritas, and the English Nationalist Party as the much the same thing as the BNP and the National Front. Now they are at it again for the local elections. Margaret Hodge, an impeccably New Labour minister, is quoted more or less everywhere today. (Though, now the story is more or less everywhere, she seems to have resiled from it somewhat. Strange that, a highly experienced, high profile minister mis-speaking in a set-piece interview for a national.)
You might think she is trying to have it both ways – and succeeding – by pretending to worry about xenophobia, while simultaneously acknowledging it, and suggesting it may be catered to. As anyone who had read the Labour general election manifesto might suppose it would be, what with half a page on e-borders, asylum and ID cards as immigration control. But there is another possibility. The working-class voters of Barking and Dagenham might genuinely prefer the BNP. Not for its racist tendencies, but because they would rather vote for a less authoritarian variety of socialism than that offered by Mrs Hodge and her colleagues. April 16th, 2006 | 62 comments - (Comments are closed)
April 16th, 2006 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Brits take note – see what happens when there is no decent succession plan for your monarchy?
Oh dear.
And you thought Prince Charles regularly dressing up like an Imam was a bit embarrassing. (Via Silent Running) April 15th, 2006 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
 In the years following the First Opium War and the (forced) Treaty of Nanking in 1842, and the consequent establishment of Shanghai as a treaty port, areas of Shanghai were conceded to the Britain, the United States, and France between 1846 and 1849. Extraterritoriality applied, and foreigners were not subject to Chinese law. The French Concession (which never contained all that many French people – there were actually more Russians) was ruled essentially as a French colony – officials were appointed in Paris to adminster it. On the other hand, the British and American concessions were merged in 1863 to form something called the “International Settlement”, which elected the “Shanghai Municipal Council” to govern the city. On this basis, Shanghai was close to being an independent city state (albeit with some use of the Brtish and American legal systems and military) until the second world war. This peculiar status still remained somewhat intact even after it was controlled by the Japanese from 1937 (who had started trading in Shanghai along with the Europeans in the first half of the twentieth century, and had gradually taken control of the city and other parts of China by force), and as a consequence Shanghai was the only port in the world unconditionally open to Jewish refugees from Europe. By 1941 over twenty thousand mostly German and Austrian but also Polish and Lithuanian Jews had arrived in Shanghai, creating a new Jewish area in the Hongkou area of Shanghai, which had once been the American concession but in the 1920s and 1930s was a predominantly Chinese area of the International Settlement. As I wrote last month, I went for a wander around this area when I was in Shanghai last month.  The Japanese had nothing against Jews (Japanese brutality being largely reserved for the Chinese), and the Jews in this area built what of a community they could, including the Ohel Moishe Synagogue, schools, theatre and newspapers, and they received some aid from the existing (very weallthy) Jewish community in Shanghai and from (largely American) Jewish philanthropic organisations. If you look very carefully, you can still see one or two handwritten signs which date from that era.  After 1941, partly under pressure from their new German allies, the Japanese confined the “stateless refugees” in Shanghai to one relatively small area of Hongkow. Conditions in this “Shanghai Ghetto” were not good, and the area was somewhat disease ridden. In 1945, thirty odd Jews were killed by an American bombing that was attempting to destroy a Japanese radio station. But the vast majority of the Jews in Shanghai were still alive when the Americans liberated the city shortly afterwards. Joy at the arrival of the Americans was followed by news of the Holocaust and that virtually all Jewish friends and relatives back in Europe had been murdered, so it must have been a strange liberations. Over the next few years the Jews in Shanghai were dispersed to Australia, Hong Kong, Canada, the United States and Palestine, and relatively few were there when the communists took over in 1949. Still, visiting the former Shanghai ghetto is a far less depressing thing than visiting almost anywhere described as a former ghetto in Europe. In Warsaw a couple of months ago I reflected that half a million Jews had once been confined to a small area there, and that basically all of them were subsequently murdered, something just too depressing for words. The ghetto in Shanghai is a place where at least twenty thousand were saved, and the memorials commemorate that. The Ohel Moishe Synagogue is a museum to the events of the time, and if you go there a nice Chinese gentleman welcomes you, shows you a film about the events, and shows you around the exhibits of photographs and documents of the time. (He also gave me a parish bulletin from a local (modern) Jewish community, inviting me to join them for shul and other events, but I am alas not Jewish so it didn’t really apply).  Other memorials nearby suggest much the same thing. There is a certain amount of pride in the fact that this is a place where people were saved.  April 14th, 2006 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yesterday afternoon I was out and about in the Parliament Square area, and saw yet another weird demonstration by Fathers for Justice, this version of them now known as Real Fathers for Justice. It would appear that they were a day early with their over-the-top visual metaphor, but maybe that was how they wrong-footed the authorities.  Click to get a bigger picture. I genuinely do not know whether these people are publicity geniuses or publicity maniacs, forcing their case upon everyone’s attention, or just annoying everyone and proving how much better it would be if they were never allowed near their children again. Much depends on what you think of their website, which they did at least advertise quite effectively with this demo, although most of the news pictures seem not to have included the banner that I chanced upon. No doubt their hit rate has been going off the top of the page. So far it looks to be long on flashy graphics and feuding, and short on arguing their case. But, on balance, I suspect that they are doing quite well. This is how you do things these days. It does make you wonder, though, how clever the system is for stopping people planting bombs in such places. That part of London has gone insane with physical barriers, armed policemen by the hundred, and numerous law changes from inside the buildings being protected. Yet still, a few nutters with a banner and a lurid piece of religious sculpture seem to be able to clamber about at will, and remain there for a couple of hours while all the world takes photos. I reckon Real Fathers for Justice are an al-Qaeda front. (Come to think of it, those Islamists are also pretty obsessional about keeping hold of their children in the event of divorce, aren’t they? It fits.) April 14th, 2006 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
The world is becoming a very disturbing place. I never thought to find myself in full agreement with the lefty journalist John Pilger – whose name was turned into a verb by the late Auberon Waugh: to pilger, to utter whining, systematically-slanted, effusions blaming western capitalism for all the trouble in the world. Yet here he is in The New Statesman this week:
Meanwhile Michael Moorcock writes in The Spectator on becoming American, of his unexpected admiration for the “constitutional fundamentalism” of Ron Paul and how:
Given the passivity of our own rather less sovereign people, and the sanguinary noises from all quarters, I do not find myself as hopeful. April 14th, 2006 | 57 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was talking to a civil engineer friend of mine today. I asked him what he knew about the vulnerability of underground facilities, such as those rumoured to be under construction in Iran as part of their nuclear programme. He told me that one does not need to go that deep underground to make such facilities impervious even to a surface level nuclear strike. The flipside is that once you get inside the underground caverns, it is fairly simple to demolish them. If Iran’s nuclear programme is made up of significant subterranean facilities, any effort to end the programme using military means will require a ground offensive of some kind. A concerted air offensive is not going to be enough – bodies on the ground will be necessary to infiltrate and destroy the facilities. Assuming the intelligence about Iran’s underground laboratories is correct, thoroughly disarming Iran will require more than the easy solution we saw used against Serbia in 1998/99. It remains to be seen whether the United States has the stomach for another ground war in the Middle East – a war they would probably fight alone or in concert with Israel as a (very) junior partner. Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that some are questioning American resolve on the issue. Unfortunately, the possibility of Iran successfully acquiring nuclear weapons is far from remote. April 14th, 2006 | 55 comments - (Comments are closed)
I remember, on either September 11 or 12, 2001, in a conversation about the war, I predicted that we would not get out of the current unpleasantness without nuclear weapons being used. While the strength of my belief in this prediction has wavered a bit over the years, it has now hardened into near certainty. Read it and weep. Additional thoughts: There is no chance whatsoever that the Americans will end the Iranian nuclear threat by preemptive military action. The threshold for certainty and “imminence” has been set too high, the political consequences for waging “preventive” or “preemptive” war have been made too dire, for American politiicans by the last five years of relentless dishonesty and fecklessness in the American media and political scenes. The Iranian mullahs will get their nukes, (and sooner than the ten years generally bandied about in the media). Once they have them, they will be immune from diplomatic and military pressure. The odds that they won’t use one, either directly or by proxy? Nil. There remain two interesting questions: Who will they nuke, and what will we do about it? I doubt they’ll hit Israel, for all their bluster, because Israel is the one country that is certain to launch a massive counterstrike. There are lots of easier targets for them. There probably won’t be any need to nuke Europe – the descent of that continent into dhimmitude will most likely be satisfactorily accelerated by the mere presence of nukes in Iran. I wouldn’t be surprised if the mullahs chose Baghdad or possibly the Iraqi oil port as their first target, to get the Americans out of their face and off their borders. No one but the Americans will be in a position to respond to the Iranian nuclear attack. Whether we respond in a meaningful way depends on whether whoever happens to be the leader of the US on that day will have the fortitude to nuke them back. The odds of that are rather small, I fear, and once the mullahs have used a nuke with impunity, they will do it again and again. Why not? Is there any reason whatsoever to believe that their behavior of the last 30 years will change for the better once they obtain the combination of more leverage and immunity from real consequence provided by nuclear weapons? April 13th, 2006 | 162 comments - (Comments are closed)
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