Shared Values

According to Kim Howells the UK and Saudi Arabia can unite around "shared values". What would they be then? Wahabism? Misogyny? Torture? It's particularly amusing coming from Howells because last summer he appeared on David Aaronovitch's programme about the general indecency of the left complaining about banners which proclaimed "We are Hezbollah" which he, rather bizarrely, characterised as "the military wing of the Iranian government" which doubtless pissed off the Iranian army no end. I hold no particular brief for Hezbollah but if one is going to object on principled grounds to reactionary theocratic politics, one ought not to suck up shamelessly to the Saudis.

Howells remarked: "Some commentators will focus on our differences and ask how we can talk of shared values." No shit, Sherlock.

Hysteria

Polly Toynbee on Rowan Williams:

Joining the Catholics and evangelicals, that pathetic weather-vane windbag, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has now dithered his way into the debate. Wobbly Williams is hand-wringing over "too many" abortions and loss of "moral focus" and "weakening of the feeling that abortion is the last resort". His Observer article last Sunday calling for a review of the 24-week limit was an archetypal self-parody, wandering around the moral maze and getting lost. Too many! Either abortion is murder - which some think - or it isn't, which 83% think in a new NOP poll. So are a few murders OK with the archbishop, and if so, how many? His contribution was yet another intellectual contortion to mollify his church's woman-hating, gay-bashing, Daily Mail wing instead of standing up for whatever it is he thinks.

Which is, of course, nonsense. It is entirely possible to believe that something is not morally equivalent to murder and is still morally wrong. It is also possible to believe that something is morally licit but ought to be the option of last resort, hence the slogan "safe, legal and rare". So presumably either Williams thinks that abortion is morally wrong, but not equivalent to murder (which, incidentally, puts him in the same camp as Augustine and Aquinas) or something that in some circumstances is allowable but ought not to be common. Neither of which strike me as being dishonourable or obviously absurd positions.

What is it about abortion that brings this sort of thing out in people? I remember asking a friend of mine what he thought about the issue and he replied that he was against abortion but thought that pro-lifers were a bunch of loonies so he tried to stay off the issue. On some issues if one is unsure one can have a look at who lines up how and judge accordingly. On abortion you either have the screaming angry people who think you want to murder babies or the screaming angry people who think you hate women. As I find screaming angry people disconcerting I tend to flip-flop a lot. At the moment Planet Zinfandel favours a review of the time limits, an end to the two signature rule, better sex education and better access to contraception. This may change if I think of something else or I come across an argument I find convincing and where I feel that I'm not being hectored.

Iraqi Employees

More from Dan Hardie:

Our Government is still proposing to abandon people to the death squads for having worked for the troops it sent, in our name, to Iraq.

The ‘twelve month’ stipulation is utterly unacceptable. In the Miliband statement, the Government committed itself to doing nothing to shelter people at risk from death squads for having worked for British soldiers or diplomats, unless they can prove that they have worked for the British for a continuous period of twelve months.

There are a lot of local employees who fled their jobs before 12 months precisely because they had been targeted, or who did a 6-month tour for one British battalion and were then told to go and work for the Americans, or who did 12 months or more with interruptions, or who the Army didn’t give proper documentation too. Mark Brockway (former Sergeant-Major, TA Royal Engineers) said so, several times, at the meeting on October 9th; so did Andrew Alderson (Major, Yeomanry); so do the employees, and serving soldiers, who are in touch with them, or with me, by email.

This is indescribably shabby. It has to be changed.

The first letters to MPs worked. Telephoning the offices of MPs, I was frequently told ‘They’ve written to the Home Office about it- they got all these letters from constituents.’ So without the letters that you wrote, we wouldn’t have had Brown’s partial climbdown, which may at least save the lives of those hundreds of Iraqis who can prove that they worked for twelve months for us. Write another letter- or write your first- and we can save some more lives.

As before, bullet points for a letter are below. So is a form letter, but don’t send it unchanged: adapt it a lot. It’s just there to help people over writer’s block. Again, be courteous when writing to your MP and put your full address including the postcode, to indicate that you are a constituent. If you don’t know who your MP is, you can find out here. You should address letters to: (MP’s Name), The House of Commons, Westminster, London. SW1A 0AA. When you get a reply, let me know (in comments, or to danhardie.blog@gmail.com ) so that we can see which MPs we can work with, and which need persuading.

Bullet points:

• David Miliband’s Statement on ‘Iraq: Locally Recruited Civilians’ of 9th October stated that Britain will help to resettle- in the wider Middle East, or in the United Kingdom- Iraqis who can prove that they have worked for this country’s soldiers or diplomats for a continuous period of twelve months.
• Hundreds of Iraqis have been targeted for assassination for having worked for this country. Some have worked for a period of twelve months exclusively for the British and can prove this. Some have not but have been pinpointed for murder anyway. We have a responsibility to save these people from being murdered for the ‘crime’ of working for the British.
• There are a lot of local employees who fled their jobs before 12 months precisely because they had been targeted, or who did a 6-month tour for one British battalion and were then told to go and work for the Americans, or who did 12 months or more with interruptions, or who the Army didn’t give proper documentation too.
• Iraqi staff members must be given shelter not because of their provable length of service but according to whether they have been identified for murder by local death squads. This can be investigated on the spot by Army officers and referred rapidly to London: the process needs to start now.
• Mr Miliband’s statement did not mention the families of Iraqi employees. As Iraqi militias also murder the families of their ‘enemies’, we must resettle our employees’ families as well. Mark Brockway, an ex-soldier who hired many Iraqis, estimates that we are talking about a maximum of 700 Iraqis to resettle: this country admits 190,000 immigrants net every year.
• Iraqis have already been targeted for murder for having worked for this country. We will be shamed if we allow more to be killed for the same reason. Our soldiers, who are angry at this betrayal, and our diplomats, will be placed at risk if they gain a reputation for abandoning their local helpers.

Form letter:

(MP’s Name)

The House Of Commons

Westminster

London. SW1A 0AA.

Your full name and address.

Dear (MP’s Name)

As you will have read in the Times, Iraqis who have worked for British soldiers or diplomats are being targeted for murder by local militia. An unknown number have already been killed and more have been forced into hiding.

On October 9th, David Miliband’s statement on ‘Locally Recruited Civilians’ in Iraq said that Britain would offer assistance with resettlement for Iraqis who had worked with British forces, but only if they could prove that they had worked for us for 12 months or more. This is effectively leaving hundreds of Iraqis, who have risked their lives for this country’s forces, to the mercy of the death squads.

Mark Brockway, a former soldier who employed many Iraqis, told Channel Four News on 9th October that local staff often worked for six months for British units, during which time they were frequently identified as ‘enemies’ by the local militias. I believe that the Government has a direct responsibility for the safety of these people.

I feel that it is morally unacceptable that this country is following such a policy. I also believe it will endanger our soldiers and diplomats in Iraq and Afghanistan. Can I please ask you to write to the Foreign Office, and also to the Home Office which has charge of asylum policy, to ask why the Government is prepared to ignore the plight of hundreds of people who were placed at risk serving this country’s soldiers.

Yours sincerely

Mock Tudor

Once upon a time there was a man called Robert Graves who wrote, among other things, I, Claudius and Claudius the God. One day a nice man from the BBC bought up the serialisation rights and 'lo and behold' a new genre of television was born. The historical adaptation combining literary flair and high class smut. It is, a difficult genre to manage. I, Claudius was a first rate historical novel and Jack Pullman's adaptation does justice to Graves' creation, neither following him slavishly nor departing so far from his version that it became unrecognisable. The Borgias, a flagrant attempt to do much the same, managed to provoke critical ignominy and a protest from the Holy See. My spell checker wants to change 'Borgias' to 'orgiastic' and I suspect that it was this aspect of Pope Alexander's career that the Holy Father would have preferred not to have been reproduced in sitting rooms the length and breadth of the country. The latest attempt is The Tudors, whose first episode aired on Friday. All the staples are there. Lots of bonking - check. Glossy costumes - check. Court intrigue (much cheaper than, say, warfare) - check. Historical figures that every forward schoolboy in England has heard of, thus flattering the viewer they are well informed - check.

Based on the first episode it seems safe to say that Pullman's crown is not in any real danger. When Claudius prophesied that "the man who dwells by the pool will open Graves" it was an entirely forgivable piece of self indulgence. This sort of crude signalling is par for the course in The Tudors, where Thomas Boleyn addresses his daughter as "Anne Boleyn" when we first meet her in case we miss the point, Wolsey and More babble on about "Pan-European Institutions" like they've twigged that the Reformation is going to hit and they are planning to find a berth as interns on Prospect and, in a blatant piece of homage to The Borgias, the French Cardinal reassures Wolsey of the French Cardinals votes as "Pope Alexander" lies dying (Alexander, aka Rodrigo Borgia died several years before Henry's accession. The French Cardinal should be referring to Julius II, Leo X or Adrian VI - probably Leo as there is a reference to a Dauphin which would presumably be Francis, son of Francis I born in 1518 and who died in 1536. This then has to be reconciled with Charles Brandon who by this point was Duke of Suffolk and married to Henry's sister, Mary being single and a commoner - oh what the heck.)

The Tudors have become rather too obvious as a source for historical drama. Henry was done recently by Ray Winstone, so the casting of Jonathan Rhys Meyers marks a transition between "Oi, Wolsey shaht it!" to "Top of the morning to ye, Wolsey".

Meanwhile, in other breaking news the new series of Robin Hood is up and running. Robin is less of a wimp than last time - he would kill the Sheriff were it not for the fact that Prince John has promised to raze Nottingham to the ground if he does so. As always invidious comparisons abound. Robin Hood immediately invites comparisons with Robin of Sherwood and suffice it to say the latter remains vastly superior. Nickolas Grace's Sheriff, whatever his other faults, would not have a) called a conspiracy to advance Prince John to the throne 'The Black Knights' and b) would not have told Robin all this as he dangled over a pit of snakes, with the intention of disposing of him later.

It's time to break away from these well trodden paths. How about an series on the 'Trial of the Templars' with Derek Jacobi as de Molay, Richard Armitage as Philip the Fair, Richard Allen as Guillame de Nogaret and Nickolas Grace as Clement VI?

Foreign Secretary's Statement On Iraqi Employees

And a pretty poor deal it is too. According to the press release:

In recognition of that, we have decided to offer those staff, on an ex gratia basis, assistance which goes above and beyond the confines of what is lawfully or contractually required. Assistance will be based on objective criteria, taking into account determinable and relevant factors. It is offered in recognition of the service by these courageous Iraqis in direct support of HMG’s efforts to help the Iraqi Government and people build a peaceful, stable and prosperous Iraq.

The assistance announced by the Prime Minister yesterday will allow Iraqi staff, including but not limited to interpreters, currently working for HMG in Iraq, who have attained 12 months’ or more continuous service, to apply for a one-off package of financial assistance of between 6 and 12 months’ salary, depending on length of service, to meet the costs of relocation for themselves and their dependants in Iraq or the region, if they are made redundant or have to resign from their job because of what we judge to be exceptional circumstances. Alternatively, these staff will be able to apply for exceptional leave to enter the UK, or to avail themselves of the opportunity for resettlement in the UK through the UK’s Gateway refugee resettlement programme, provided that they meet the criteria for the programme, including that they satisfy UNHCR that they meet the criteria of the 1951 Convention and need resettlement.

In addition, interpreters/translators and other Iraqi staff serving in similarly skilled or professional roles necessitating the regular use of written or spoken English, who formerly worked for HMG in Iraq, will be able to apply for assistance for themselves and their dependants provided that they satisfactorily completed a minimum of 12 months’ service, and they were in our employ on or after 1 January 2005. Former staff meeting those criteria will be able to apply for a one-off package of financial assistance similar to that available for serving staff, or to avail themselves of the opportunity for resettlement in the UK through the Gateway programme as set out above.

So there you are. I can just see the jihadists sitting there debating as to whether or not to bump off an interpreter. "Let us smite the infidel dog!" "No, no Neil, he's only been employed by the British Army for five months". Yep, that'll happen.

File under "Bloody Disgrace". More, as always, here and here.

Iraqi Employees Campaign - Don't let the Home Office get away with doing nothing

This is lifted bodily Dan Hardie's blog. I can't improve on it so read, mark and inwardly digest.

Another excuse dies the death: the Americans, or at any rate their Congress, are doing what the British Government lacks the moral courage to do. (Hat tips to these two gentlemen.)

There will be a meeting at Parliament on Tuesday October 9th, to call for the British Government to recognise its responsibilities and give shelter to the Iraqis endangered by their work for this country's troops and diplomats. You can invite your MP. And if you care about these people, you should.

The more MPs we get in the meeting, the better. They are not going to listen to Mark Brockway, who is getting desperate emails from the Iraqis he hired, and walk away indifferent; they are not going to listen to Richard Beeston of the Times and decide that they can ignore this. We are going to make it impossible for the Home Office to carry on with its delaying tactics.

This is how to invite your MP:

1) Find your MP: type your postcode into 'They work for you'.

2) Copy-and-paste or better still, adapt this form invitation below (and make any changes you want, but we have to keep these letters courteous). Also; make sure that your address and postcode are on the letters

3) You can then either email it to your MP (email addresses for MPs take the form surnameinitial@parliament.uk- thus Gordon Brown is BROWNG@parliament.uk ) or you can post it to 'MP's name, The House of Commons, Westminster, London, SW1A 0AA.' If you have the time, printed letters are better than emails: and it's not that hard to write a letter, is it? If you get a bounceback from an MP's email address, get in touch with me ( danhardie.blog@gmail.com ) as I have a bunch of alternative contact details now, or -better still- write the print letter and post it. Please make sure that your address and postcode are clearly written on either emails or print letters, so that the MP realises they are dealing with one of their own constituents.

4) If you are in London on the evening of Tuesday 9th October, please come along to the meeting in person. Go to St Stephen's entrance, facing College Green (the police tend to be helpful here) and ask for admission. There will be at least one campaigning blogger at the entrance, ready to point you in the right direction: remember the meeting starts at 7pm.

Thank you- and, hopefully, see you there.

FORM INVITATION:

Iraqi Employees of British Forces – Parliamentary Speaker Meeting, Tuesday October 9th

Dear NAME

As your constituent, I am writing on behalf of 'We can't turn them away', an online campaign for resettlement for those Iraqis threatened by death squads for their work with British forces. We would like to invite you to a meeting in Committee Room 14 of the Houses of Parliament on Tuesday October 9 ^th from 7 to 9pm .

As you may well have seen in The Times, Iraqi citizens who have worked as interpreters for British forces are being tortured and murdered by death squads for having worked with the occupying forces.

Speakers will include:

Mark Brockway (a former Warrant Officer in the Territorial Royal Engineers, who ran the

British Army's Quick Impact Reconstruction Projects in 2003, when he hired a great many

Iraqi staff in 2003. Mark has been in close contact with them since and knows of at least

one who has been recently murdered;

Richard Beeston, senior Foreign Correspondent for 'The Times' newspaper.

Ed Vaizey MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.

Lynne Featherstone MP, Liberal Democrat spokesperson for International Development.

A senior Labour MP.

A number of reporters from television, the national press and BBC Radio will attend the meeting.

This is a cross-party, moral issue, on which both opponents and supporters of the Iraq war can agree. Whilst the Government has said that it is reviewing the policy, no change has yet been made, and further delay is likely to leave Iraqi employees at the mercy of the local death squads. Attendance at this event certainly does not imply any agreement with the aims of our campaign: you are welcome to come and ask searching questions, or to send a Researcher to represent you.

If you cannot come to the meeting, I would also ask that you write to the Home Secretary, and to the Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne, asking for an explanation of why policy has not changed despite the announcement of an 'urgent review' of the matter on August 8th this year.

Thank you very much for your time.

David Irving's Comeback Tour

David Irving is reportedly attempting to rehabilitate himself.

It has been interesting over the years to watch Irving's tergiversations over the holocaust. Irving has been torn between two poles. His desire to be regarded as a credible historian and his view of himself as a future leader of the far right. His position on the holocaust has shifted as to whether which of the two is uppermost at the time.

Irving's first book Hitler's War, published in 1977, maintained that the holocaust had, in fact, happened but that Hitler was entirely ignorant of the fact that it took place. Whether he sincerely believed this at the time is, I imagine, only known by Mr Irving and God. Certainly, according to Ray Hill (former Nazi turned anti-fascist activist) when he met Irving in 1983, Irving told him that only a million Jews had died but that it was impolitic to attempt to establish the fact. 'The time isn't right' he told Hill. (The Other Face of Terror, p245). According to Deborah Lipstadt, in 1988 Irving came out as a fully fledged holocaust denier as a result of Ernest Zundel's trial. He claims to have been convinced by the Leuchter report, a scientifically worthless 'proof' that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. Why he moved is an interesting question. According to Hill, when not a fully fledged denier he had established fairly strong links with revisionist circles and one wonders whether keeping his credit in those circles meant standing up for Zundel in his hour of need? Despite being hired by Andrew Neil at the Sunday Times to translate the Goebbels diaries, Irving's reputation continued to slide during the 1990s. His publisher dropped him, his books ceased to be prominent in the history section of high street bookshops. In 1996 Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt for libel for claiming that he was a Holocaust Denier. One suspects that his desire for historical credibility was reasserting itself. The mid-nineties was pretty much a dead end for the far right. Perhaps he thought that Lipstadt would be reluctant to defend a libel suit. As the world knows it was a horrible miscalculation. If Penguin had declined to fight their reputation would have taken a permanent knock and, lets face it, being sued by Irving over claims that he was a holocaust denier was a bit like being sued by Alex Ferguson, upset by the claim that he was a football manager, it was eminently winnable. I imagine that Penguin, confident of victory imagined that it would do Lipstadt's sales no harm. The bookshop near my office had a bank of copies eminently displayed throughout the trial and yes, I bought one. Lipstadt was triumphantly vindicated as the judge ruled what everyone knew that Irving was a racist and a holocaust denier.

Irving recanted his views in November 2005, acknowledging that there were actually gas chambers at Auschwitz. It would be nice to report that he did so having genuinely seen the light but, in fact, at the time he was on trial for holocaust denial in Austria. He has now got a speaking tour lined up and plans to publish a series of books. Apparently the gas chambers have gone again, but 2.4 million Jews were killed on Himmler's orders. (Needless to say Irving doesn't have much sympathy.) This looks to me to be a direct triangulation between the kameraden on the far right and the "say what you like, he knows his stuff" position that kept his reputation artificially inflated for so long. The Grauniad seems to think that he' s sufficiently newsworthy to run an article on - there can't be that many apologists for Nazism who get pre-publicity from the mainstream press. I suppose that he is betting that he is deemed suitably newsworthy for his books to at least be reviewed and doubtless he can depend on some bold contrarian to tell us that he is necessary as some sort of gadfly.

Who knows. Hopefully everyone will realise that his historical opinions are based not on a search for truth but on the needs of the moment and are, therefore, entirely worthless. History will regard Irving a colossal narcissist, for spending his life revising the casualty figures of the Holocaust up and down to suit his own needs. But being a colossal narcissist isn't necessarily a bar to being a public figure. Whilst it would be welcome, a long period of silence from Mr Irving seems unlikely.

Iraqi Employees

The advice for Iraqi Interpreters is now Get Out or Die.

Please, please, please support the campaign to have the British government do the honourable thing as far as employees of the British Army in Iraq are concerned. More information here, here, here, here, here, and here.

I am not under any great illusions as to how much traffic this blog gets. But if you blunder across it and have not yet written to your MP, please do so.

Varieties of Anti-Semitic Experience

When I was at University the Labour Club put before the Student Union a motion calling for a two state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (this was in the 1980s when such a position was considered dangerously radical). The Jewish Society took exception to this and spent the run up distributing photocopies of an article by Elie Wiesel which gave a potted history of anti-semitism from the Macabbean revolt to Yasser Arafat and which more or less finished off by saying “don’t criticise Israel if you don’t want to be in this company”. Fast forward fifteen years ago. My wife was invited to the marriage of a colleague at the local synagogue. As we milled around in the porch afterwards I took a cursory look at the noticeboard. Along with details of the womens fellowship and the coffee rota and the other bits and bobs - the sort of thing you find in the porch of any country church - there was a notice explaining he drill in the event of a suspected letter bomb.

From these disparate incidents I think we can deduce three things. Firstly we ought not to underestimate the amount of anti-semitism in modern British society. Secondly it is ancient and protean – what else connects Antiochus IV Epiphanes, Tacitus, St John Chrysostom, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Martin Luther, Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, Adolf Hitler and Mohammed Ahmadinejad? Thirdly, where Israel is concerned the subject does get milked rather shamelessly.

This complicates discussion of anti-Semitism somewhat. So I was intrigued to pick up ‘The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism’ by Walter Laqueur in my local library. It comes with an imprimatur by Abraham ‘Armenian genocide, what Armenian genocide?’ Foxman, which was slightly worrying and the book, without notes or index is obviously written for a popular audience with an obvious ideological purpose. But Laqueur writes well and is generally fair minded. So we get an interesting overview of the issues and a canter through the lowlights of anti-semitic history, beginning with the Hellenistic era and finishing off with the present day.

It is Laqueur’s political judgements that raise eyebrows. After remarking that criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic he goes on to argue that “Israel does not border on Holland and Switzerland” (the country which does is Germany which is an interesting choice of comparison) and therefore ought not to be held to Western European standards. He then goes on to point out that Russia and China are rich and powerful and, therefore, exempt from criticism whereas Israel is neither. The first is special pleading, unless Iran’s human rights violations, say, or those of Hamas are to be considered in a local context as much as Israel’s. In the second instance Israel undoubtedly gets flack because it is considered an American client state (a view which strangely is compatible with belief in an all powerful Israel lobby bending America to its will) but if the price of the hostility of Libya or the Socialist Workers Party is support from the US, then Israel has probably got the better of the deal.

Laqueur certainly overstates the resistance of post-war immigrants to Europe to integration with the host cultures. The gastarbeiter scheme in Germany was virtually set up in order to keep immigrant communities at arms length from the host culture. Racist attitudes were hardly unknown among the European population during this period. (One of the reasons there are so many black churches in the UK is because West Indian immigrants in the 1950s who innocently turned up at St. Agatha’s-By-The-Gasworks were promptly told “we don’t want your sort here”.) Terrorism by Muslim groups in Europe is later than racism by decades and so cannot function as an explanation of it. I would hazard a guess that “New York” and “East Coast” are not used as euphemisms for Jews in France and Germany and when told that radical feminists dislike Jews because they invented patriarchy or that neo-conservative is a euphemism for Jews, I am sceptical. I would at least have liked citations. One can doubt the thesis that the holocaust is unique without doubting that it was evil, and one can hold that the holocaust is exploited for political ends whilst holding that it is imperative to remember it.

All that said, Laqueur makes some interesting points. He is right that Israel should have taken Palestinian national aspirations more seriously than it actually did, he is right that relentless anti-semitic propaganda in the Arab world is used to distract attention from other popular grievances and he is right that a rise in anti-Semitic sentiment will not be slow to find politicians to exploit it. To that end Laqueur cites the Labour party’s depiction of Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin as pigs. I thought this was rather splendid. For one thing if the political party in power starts doing this sort of thing, it is rather more important than the activities of minor Trotskyist sects which are so important in the phony war between “Stoppers” and “Decents”. For another thing the “anti-Semitism on the left” campaigners are rather apt to grant free passes to like minded souls. Hence the free pass allotted to Oona King, despite comparing the occupied territories to the Warsaw Ghetto and announcing her boycott of Israel in the same article or the comparative silence about the depiction of Michael Howard as a pig or as Svengali. (Actually, whilst I am on the subject I can’t be the only person who is uncomfortable about the whole “something of the night” bit, can I? Howard has always struck me as being comparatively decent on a personal level and prone to nasty right-wing dog-whistle politics on a political level. Don’t tell me that Widdecombe objected to the latter.)

In any event, there is undoubtedly a problem. It is necessary to oppose anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is on the rise. Anti-Semitism is exploited by defenders of Israel to get it off the hook. At least to some extent opposition to Israel is anti-Semitic. Laqueur wisely declines to come to any conclusions. How does one hold things in balance? Here the child killed by the IDF. There the victim of anti-Semitic violence. There is no equivalence, no economy of evil whereby these things can be weighed and one function as an apologetic for another. The occupation does not excuse the Hamas charter. The holocaust does not excuse the occupation.. The subject is a matter for Aeschlyus. The death of Agamennon is not justified, neither is the murder of Clytemnestra. What Minerva will turn the vengeful furies into the Eumenides.

The Home Office Have Been In Touch

David Lepper, MP has passed on a letter from Meg Hillier, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Home Office. The jist of it is as follows:

• Thank you for your letter to the Home Secretary on behalf of Planet Zinfandel, I have been asked to reply.
• The UK is signed up to the 1951 Refugee convention and ECHR. Any Iraqi who qualifies is in.
• The refugee convention defines a refugee as someone out of their country of origin. Iraqis in Iraq, therefore, don't count. There is no scope within the Immigration Rules for considering asylum applications made from abroad.
  
• HMG is very grateful for the service of locally employed staff in Iraq and takes their security seriously. The matter is under review. (At this point I should cough to using the 'I' word in my letter before everyone decided against it. Happily Ms. Hillier notes that at least 15,000 Iraqi employees could have a claim to assistance. Well done those of you who used the 'E' word.)
• The Home Office, MOD and FCO are looking into the matter and I don't want to pre-empt their recommendations. Hopefully this will reassure you we are taking the matter seriously.

So no real surprises. But better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

October 9th: Bring Your MP

Lifted bodily from the blog of Dan Hardie

The letters are working. Twelve days ago I met with my MP: ‘Ah, the letters’ was almost the first thing she said. ‘We’ve all been having a lot of them, and we’ve all been on to the Home Office to get the policy changed. What are you hearing? They haven’t changed it?’ Policy is going to change, but slowly. There’s a distinct lack of speed.

What I’m hearing from soldiers who have hired Iraqi employees, and who are now in contact with these people as they flee to Syria and Jordan, or hide out in Basra, is: lack of speed is killing. One ex-Royal Engineer told me on the phone last night about a man he recruited in 2003 who hoped to build a new Iraq, then fled the country, and then was murdered at some point in the last few weeks.

What can you do?

If you’ve already written to your MP, write or email him or her again: and this time, invite them to a speaker meeting at Parliament on the second day of the new session, Tuesday 9th October.

If you haven’t already written to your MP, please do so. You can find out about your MP here. utline what’s happening and why we should be concerned, ask them to contact the relevant Ministries (particularly the Home Office but also the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) and also invite them to the meeting. Talking points for both letters are below. Any blogger who has participated in this campaign is invited, and so is any blogreader who successfully invites their MP: just email me at danhardie.blog@gmail.com and an invitation will be heading your way. Stress to MPs that mainstream print and TV journalists will be present: that is the kind of thing that tends, for some reason, to attract them. And stress that this is the first blog-based campaign in the UK: this is how politics is going, and they need to see what it looks like.

Talking points for an invitation letter- if you’ve already corresonded with your MP on this subject:

• The Government has not yet altered policy, despite calling an inter-departmental review, and in the meantime Iraqis who worked for the British are successfully being hunted down by death squads.
• There will be a cross-party meeting, organised by the online campaign for Asylum rights for Iraqi employees. It will take place in Parliament in Committee Room 14 (St Stephen’s Entrance) from 7-9pm on Tuesday 9th October. Please arrive early to avoid hideous disappointment, etc.
• The main speaker will be a British soldier who hired a number of Iraqis and is in contact with many of them now, including many who have fled Iraq ahead of the death squads: he will give an up-to-date, detailed picture of events on the ground.
• There will also be speeches by Ed Vaizey (Conservative MP for Wantage, Spokesman for Culture, Media and Sport) and Lynne Featherstone (Liberal Democrat MP for Hornsey and Wood Green, Spokeswoman for International Development), and by at least one senior Labour backbencher.
• Stress this: It will be reported by Channel Four News and probably other TV news organisations, BBC Radio Four and Radio Five Live, and by reporters and columnists from The Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Evening Standard, The New Statesman, The Observer and The Evening Standard.
• The event is supported by Amnesty International, The Refugee Council and Human Rights Watch, who will all have people present.

To write a first letter on this subject to your MP:

Use these talking points, then give them the location and timing of the meeting, and don’t forget to tell them about the TV crews.

Thank you.

The Left: Is It All Bad?

In 1793, inspired by Georges Danton, the French revolutionary Camille Desmoulins began a newspaper called the Vieux Cordelier - the Old Cordelier. The title was suggestive. The Cordeliers were one of the clubs of revolutionaries that had been a feature of the Parisian scene in the early 1790s - the most famous was the Jacobin club, and the Old Cordelier was a reference to the likes of Danton, who had been supporters of the Revolution from the outset and who stood for the traditional values of the left - The Rights of Man, Internationalism, Dodgy Historical Analogies (Issue three purported to be a translation of Tacitus' account of the reigns of Nero and Caligula with unsubtle modern parallels, well, it makes a change from the Third Reich or Vietnam) against indecent leftists like Robespierre who stood for monotheism, head-chopping and the new puritanism. So, sort of like Democratiya, only with more readers. The Parisians, who were well ticked off with the Terror, picked it off the news stands with alacrity. Robespierre who was, to put it politely, a bit on the sensitive side took umbrage with this, among other things and Desmoulins and Danton ended up under the national chopper, although not before assuring themselves of immortality. Show my head to the people it is worth seeing, said Danton and indeed it was.

This demonstrates, I think, that the crisis on the left is as old as the left. The left is not perfect. The left has often supported dodgy regimes. The left has often been guilty of naivety and has always been divided against itself. This is not, of course, of itself a vindication of the left - not being as bad as the days of the Jacobin Terror is hardly a glowing encomium. Still, the notion that the left went bad in 2003 when Noam Chomsky and George Galloway signed up is, perhaps, a tad unhistorical.*

So, the charge sheet against the left. Firstly the left has made common cause with fascism.

This is set out by Nick Cohen in 'What's Left':

On 15 February 2003 , about a million liberal-minded people marched through London to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime. It was the biggest protest in British history, but it was dwarfed by the march to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in Mussolini’s old capital of Rome, where about three million Italians joined what the Guinness Book of Records said was the largest anti-war rally ever. In Madrid, about 650,000 marched to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in the biggest demonstration in Spain since the death of General Franco in 1975. In Berlin, the call to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime brought demonstrators from 300 German towns and cities, some of them old enough to remember when Adolf Hitler ruled from the Reich Chancellery […] On a memorable day, American scientists at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica produced another entry for the record books. Historians will tell how the continent’s first political demonstration was a protest against the overthrow of a fascist regime.

(Via: it seems to have vanished from the Observer website)

I think most of the other items on the charge sheet are rather more substantive. I thought I would get this one out of the way as it is trivial and dishonest. Imagine a court case where the police essentially cook up the evidence against someone who they have good reason, but no solid evidence, to believe is a criminal. The judge throws it out. Is the judge a defender of criminality or, possibly, might it be the case that the ends do not justify the means, particularly if the ends are uncertain (the police might be wrong). In the same way one could deplore Saddam's regime without being convinced of the case for the Iraq war. Used universally Cohen's worst case style could be cast in other directions. It can be quite accurately claimed that in September 1939 the British government went to war in defence of an anti-Semitic dictatorship which had gladly acquiesced in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia but it would be misleading to do so.

Next up (when I get round to it): Is the left anti-Semitic?

Crisis? What Crisis?

There is, it is alleged, a crisis on the modern left. We have, apparently, gone from being defenders of truth and justice to apologists for fascism, religious obscurantism and terrorism. No-one ever specifies in context at this point what the left exactly means. Something like sixteen million people voted for either the Labour Party or the Lib Dems at the last election. It is difficult to verify anecdotal experience, but based on the conversations I've had with various people in the last few years I am struggling to imagine that sixteen million people are fans of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Respect scored something like sixty nine thousand which may, perhaps be alarming but I imagine that most of those were in Bethnal Green where a predominantly Muslim electorate wanted to give a bloody nose to Oona King for her support for the Iraq war.

The two authors who have published books denouncing the left in these terms are Nick Cohen and Anthony Andrews. I confess to having read neither. I did have a go at Cohen's book but after the claims that a) priests hijacked the Iranian revolution and b) that conservatives have supported fascism because they mistakenly supposed it supported the democratic ideas they shared, then, like Paolo and Francesca I could read no more. Still, we all know the charge sheet which has been set forth repeatedly in the last few years. In the next few posts I will have a look at some of the issues that have been raised. Next up: Is the Left a supporter of fascism in its modern guise?

A Good Egg

Needless to say David Lepper is already on the case, being involved in the case of an individual constituent. He is in touch with the Home Secretary and has promised to get back in touch when he hears more.

X-Files: Continuity Glitch

Not quite a case for Mulder and Scully, but it made me chuckle. Richard Dawkins in the Sunday Times on August 5 2007:

Obviously not a great television viewer, he also performed the minor miracle of altogether missing The X Files, although he approved of setting the sceptical Agent Scully against the paranormal proselytiser Mulder.

From 'Unweaving the Rainbow' in 1998 (page 28):

"But isn't it just a harmless fiction then? No, I think the defence rings hollow. Imagine a television series in which two police officers solve a crime each week. Every week there is one black suspect and one white suspect. One of the two detectives is always biased towards the black suspect, the other biased towards the white. And, week after week, the black suspect turns out to have done it. So, what's wrong with that? After all it's only fiction. Shocking as it is, I believe the analogy to be a completely fair one. I am not saying that supernaturalist propaganda is as dangerous or as unpleasant as racist propaganda. But the X-Files systematically portrays an anti-rational view of the world, which by virtue of its recurrent persistence is insidious.

Don't tell me that the old boy is mellowing!

The Title Deeds To Western Europe

Having recently had to re-familiarise myself with all things medieval, I came across this again. There are two crude forgeries which have shaped the destiny of Europe. One is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the other is the Donation of Constantine. The Donation purports to be an edict by the Emperor Constantine. According to legend Constantine was afflicted by leprosy and was advised to bathe in the blood of murdered infants. Constantine was struck with a bout of squeamishness, whereupon St. Peter took pity on him and directed him to Pope Silvester who promptly cured him. Constantine, in gratitude handed over the Western Empire. Of course, this is nonsense. The miraculous elements aside Constantine divvied up the Empire between his sons after his death and neglected to tell them that the Pope had dibs on the West. The pagan Emperor Julian the Apostate, whom one would have expected to repeal such an edict, is silent about it. Furthermore the edict refers to the Emperor's satraps when satraps were a Persian and not a Roman official. These points were all made in 1440 by Lorenzo Valla. The Donation was almost certainly written between 750 and 850 AD. As recently as the early 1300s Dante, who objected strongly to the claims of the Papacy to temporal power accepted the authenticity of the document, arguing in De Monarchia that Constantine didn't have the authority to sign over half the Empire and lamenting the Donation in the Inferno.

How such a forgery imposed on European opinion for over half a millenium is an interesting question. Part of the answer relates to the widespread rate of illiteracy during the period. The literate tended to be clergy who, therefore, were disinclined to question the Donation. Part of the answer relates to the absence of a sense of the past. Great rulers would, for various reasons, donate huge tracts of land to the Church. The Donation was only a contemporary magnates endowment of an abbey or church writ large. Part of the answer was, I think, an inabillity to question the assumptions that dominated society. Valla's sterling work notwithstanding, the decline of High Papalism was brought about when Boniface VIII over reached himself. Philip IV of France sent a royal official, Guillame de Nogaret (who was later instrumental in the condemnation of the Templars), to kidnap Boniface who died of a stroke shortly afterwards. For the next century the Papacy would be based at Avignon. It would still be important but it would no longer presume to depose kings. By the time Valla exposed the Donation as a fake it was a dead letter. There was no rear guard action, no attempts to silence or condemn Valla.

Doubtless we are all a bit more sophisticated than people in the Middle Ages. But it does make one wonder. Dante, after all, was not stupid or incurious or unlearned. What unquestioned assumptions of our society will future generations regard with bewilderment?

Anti-climax

Having done my bit and written to my MP about the plight of the Iraq employees of the British Army who look likely to be abandoned when British forces leave, I was delighted to receive a letter from my MP. Gosh, I thought, a good deed in a naughty worl!. A small contribution to one's country doing the decent thing! Participation in a great campaign orchestrated by the blogosphere. My heart swelled...

Until I read:

David has asked me to write. Thank you for your communication. We shall be in touch again as soon as possible.

I e-mailed him last Thursday, so I shall give him the benefit of the doubt for another twenty four hours whilst I consider appropriate re-phrasings of the expression "get yer arse in gear". On the other hand David Lepper is generally regarded as a decent bloke round these parts so I have little fear of him not doing the right thing.

Meanwhile, Dan Hardie has asked me to encourage my readers to support the campaign. It is touchingly sweet of Dan to assume that I actually have any, but if you were looking for Little Green Footballs and fetched up here by mistake can I draw your attention to the following links.

Talking points for a letter to MPs

Help with researching your MP is here

Tim Ireland has a campaign video here

Justin McKeating is keeping tabs on MP's responses here

As I said, a good deed in a naughty world. So if you haven't written to your MP yet, get on with it.

Comment is Free

They get a fair number of people from the green ink brigade posting in the comments boxes. Now they've broken out onto the main page.

For balance, here's a link to the admirable Dan Hardie.

Ignatieff: Ideology, Intelligence, Inspiration

It's a bit late in the day, but as I've taken my blog title from David Rees' post I thought I'd say a few words of my own on Ignatieff's Mea Culpa. Lots of people have pointed out that his essay is pretentious and self-serving. I think that it is also worth pointing out that whenever Ignatieff attempts to exonerate himself or point to mitigating factors he invariably shows up the shallowness of his judgement. So:

We might test judgment by asking, on the issue of Iraq, who best anticipated how events turned out. But many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology. They opposed the invasion because they believed the president was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong.

So, Ignatieff concedes, I was wrong, but so in a sense were many of those who opposed the war because they did so for the wrong reasons. Quite apart from the gracelessness of this objection - they were, after all right and Ignatieff was wrong, this is devastatingly hypocritical. Ignatieff indulged in ideology as much as the Socialist Worker's Party did. The ideology in question was one of liberal interventionism, born out of the failure of the west in Bosnia and Rwanda, a dream in which democracy, human rights and the free market would be defended and extended by western power. 'Empire Lite' to cite the title of one of Ignatieff's books. It all seems rather remote now, but that was the oft trumpted claim and how hollow it now sounds.

The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us. They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq’s fissured sectarian history. What they didn’t do was take wishes for reality. They didn’t suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too. They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror. They didn’t suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country of which most Americans knew little. They didn’t believe that because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo it had to be doing so in Iraq. They avoided all these mistakes.

If one is going to invade and occupy a country shouldn't one take steps to acquire this knowledge? It was hardly a well guarded secret that there were both Sunnis and Shi'ites in Iraq and that these two groups don't exactly see eye to eye on stuff. Nor did one have to be Talleyrand to work out that the claims about Massive Weapons of Destruction were bogus. It's well known that for various complicated reasons the Middle East is not a part of the world one naturally associates with democracy. All one really needed was not to get caught up in the euphoria of the moment.

I made some of these mistakes and then a few of my own. The lesson I draw for the future is to be less influenced by the passions of people I admire — Iraqi exiles, for example — and to be less swayed by my emotions.

One would have to have a heart of stone not to sympathise with Iraqi exiles, but it is well known that exiles are hardly the surest guide as to what is going on in the mother country. Kanan Makiya is said to have told an audience that if there was a one in ten chance of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and replacing him with a democracy it should be taken. One in ten. Effectively Makiya was claiming that the west had a moral duty of going to war even if the chances of failure were ninety percent. This is risible. One can hardly blame Makiya for desperation. It is difficult to imagine what it must be like to have ones country ruled by a murderous sadist. But, desperate though things were one really needs decent odds of achieving ones aims before going to war.

No amount of sprinkling quotations around, no special pleading about how others were only right because of ideology, no whinging about being misled by Iraqi exiles, or lack of information about the country can really obscure the fact that Ignatieff got the question of the Iraq war horribly wrong. Through vanity and naivety his 'exercising judgement' counted for less than the 'ideology' of an undergraduate with a set of vulgar Marxist prejudices and the editorials of Socialist Worker as a guide.

Planet Zinfandel

I was stuck for a name for this blog when I came across David Rees' devastating attack on Michael Ignatieff. The following paragraph amused me hugely:

Right off the bat, he's saying: "It was right for me to support the Iraq war when I was an academic, because academics live in outer space on Planet Zinfandel, and play with ideas all day. But now, as a politician in a country that opposed the war, I'll admit I screwed up, because politicians must deign to harness the wild mares of whimsy to the ox-cart of cold, calculated reality." So, although his judgments were objectively wrong, they were contextually appropriate. Sweet! You've been totally 0wn3d by Michael Ignatieff! And so have all those dead Iraqis.

The whole thing is fantastic, but anyway, as I'm currently doing a Ph.D and do the occasional bit of teaching I can consider myself one of the minor inhabitants of 'Planet Zinfandel'. Et voila, one title for a blog. Thank you David Rees.