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It pays to riot in Europe
Ireland must now pay more than Greece to borrow.
Dublin has played by the book. It has taken pre-emptive steps to please the markets and the EU. It has done an IMF job without the IMF. Indeed, is has gone further than the IMF would have dared to go.
It has imposed draconian austerity measures. The solidarity of the country has been remarkable. There have no riots, and no terrorist threats.
Yet as of today it is paying 5.48pc to borrow for ten years, or near 8pc in real terms once deflation is factored in. This is crippling and puts the country on an unsustainable debt trajectory if it lasts for long.
Yet Greece is able to borrow from the EU at 5pc and from the IMF at a staggered rate far below that (still too high for the policy to work, but that is another matter). These were the terms of the €110bn joint bail-out.
To add insult to injury Ireland is having SUBSIDIZE Greece to meet its share of the rescue fund.
I am sure you can all see the absurdity of this. It has moral hazard written all over it, and shows what happens once a dysfunctional system twists itself into ever greater knots rather confronting the core issue.
Yes, I know that the Irish and Greek maturities are different but the fact is that Greece has extracted better terms by letting matters get further out of hand.
George Papandreou’s PASOK has benefitted from dilly-dallying on the first set of austerity measures, and – not to be too diplomatic about it – by insulting the Germans with demands for war reparations. Hotheads also set fire to downtown Athens and Thessaloniki, improving the effect.
If I were Irish – (and I suppose in a sense I am: Sir John Parnell was my great, great, great grandfather) – I would be a little annoyed.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Economics
Why the Referendum is a “Good Thing”
John Jackson is a lawyer who has never practised the law professionally. He is chairman of Mishcon de Reya and ‘History Today’ and a director of openDemocracy.Whilst I agree with Stuart Weir that the referendum is ‘an ugly and undemocratic manoeuvre’, for all the reasons he has set out in his post of 11 August, it is nonetheless a “good thing”.
I say this for two reasons. Firstly, it represents an undeniable and irretractable acknowledgement (intentional or accidental) by the political establishment that ‘we’, a sovereign people, have the right to decide how ‘we’ are to be represented. In this respect it is a faint echo of the idea which flourished for a very short time during our civil war (before being extinguished by the ‘executive’) namely that ‘we’ are all born free and equal.
Secondly, because the Alternative Vote system (AV) on offer (for which I will vote), although an imperfect system, could have the desirable consequence of putting our main political parties on a slippery slope from which, hopefully, they will not escape and with the result that what I see as the real problem could eventually be dealt with.
The real problem is not so much how those who are empowered to represent us are selected: it is more what, once selected, they do or can do.
There are two aspects to this: First, are representatives ‘entitled’ to give free rein to their own opinions or are they to be mandated to make potent the collective opinion of those they represent? Second, is it they who should appoint, and hold to account, an executive (the Government) to manage the nation’s affairs?
The answer to both questions, so far, is part of our very strange national history. It is the political parties, which determine what, in reality, the opinions of our representatives on national – as distinct from local – matters should be. It is to their political party that our representatives owe allegiance, not us. And, as a consequence, it is those political parties that both who shall be in government and how far they are accountable to the peoples’ representatives.
The way in which the political establishment has achieved this power base is well known. It started in the eighteenth century when the power wrested from the Crown by the parliamentarians was stolen by the emerging political parties. Legislation that would have prohibited ministers from being MPs was frustrated, the practice of whipping began to emerge and so on. The possibility of the three powers – legislature, judiciary and executive – being separated and working within a constitutional framework determined in a popular and democratic way never got off the ground. It was the rebelling American colonists who created the system we could have had - some 150 years after our homegrown champions of freedom and equality had been incarcerated in the Tower for advocating it.
The grip the political parties is demonstrated by observing what someone who would like to serve their country by becoming a minister has to do. They must be ‘acceptable’ to a political party with the capacity to win an election. They must then be adopted as a candidate for a constituency – preferably a ‘safe’ constituency. They must serve an apprenticeship in Parliament, obey the whips and demonstrate a capacity to support the government. How likely is such an aspirant to ‘rock the boat’ by asking awkward questions let alone sticking to what he or she thinks best? The system stinks. But, naturally, the political parties can't want to wave it goodbye.
Although it will not happen quickly, the adoption of AV could result eventually in changes that will erode this situation. It could accelerate the rate at which we move to a multi-party system covering a wide range of political opinion and reduce the number of ‘safe’ seats. That in turn could lead to coalition becoming the norm. That could lead to an acceptance that ministerial careers can be different and separate from parliamentary careers. And that could lead to acceptance of the separation of powers and the need for a written constitutional framework blessed by us all. A lot of ‘coulds’ in all that? Yes, but it is worth going for.
John Jackson, Our Kingdom 15 August 2010
What next in the Conservative Party's relationship with Churchgoers?
In the previous series we have looked at how prior to the general election a great many practising Christians were becoming deeply disillusioned with Labour as a result of the government’s sustained attack on historic British liberties such as freedom of belief and the right to express it.
We have also seen how it was Conservative peers who alone of the three main parties had stood up against this assault on Britain’s historic Christian liberties. With between 3 and 4 million practising Christians who were deeply concerned about this issue there was the potential for this to significantly affect the outcome of the general election. This was the equivalent of more than 4,500 voters per constituency. If only 1,000 of those 4,500 voters had switched from voting Labour (or Lib Dem in Lib Dem held seats) to voting Conservative, then we would have gained an overall majority.
However, in the actual election period a number of factors led to much of this potential vote dissipating. In part 4 we examined these, which included a lack of any specific encouragement to Christian voters that on the issues that most concerned them, the Conservatives would treat them fairly, or at least more fairly than Labour had done. There were also instances that more specifically led to a degree of alienation of Christian voters from the Party. Most prominent of these were the party’s reaction to Chris Grayling’s comments that Christians offering bed and breakfast in their own homes should be allowed to set ‘house rules’ as to who shared a double room, while those offering accommodation outside of their personal homes should be required to make it indiscriminately available to all.
These comments were initially greeted with a huge sigh of relief by many Christians, that at last someone was trying to be fair to both Christians and gay people. But there was predictably a huge sense of disappointment when Chris Grayling was forced to retract them; This sense was heightened by the deselection of a parliamentary candidate by the Scottish Conservative Party because the candidate’s website stated that whilst he would always treat gay people equally, he couldn’t personally endorse homosexual practices. This action by the Scottish Party created a strong impression among many Christians that the Conservative Party was intolerant of Christians and prepared to actively discriminate against anyone holding orthodox Christian beliefs on sexual ethics to the extent that they would prevent any such person from becoming a Conservative MP.
The result was that whilst some practising Christians did vote for us, for many others we failed to secure their votes because we had (quite wrongly) allowed an impression to be created that on the issues that most deeply concerned committed Christians we were ‘just as bad as the other lot’. Yet if only a third of these 4,500 voters who were practising Christians in each constituency had switched from voting Labour (or Lib Dem in Lib Dem seats) to voting Conservative then we would have secured a majority of around 26 seats and if only 1,000 (less than a quarter) had done so we would still have gained an overall majority.
Clearly, this was a corner that we should never have allowed ourselves to get pushed into. The Conservative Party needs to be seen as tolerant and open at all levels, including being parliamentary candidates, to anyone in Britain, whether straight or gay, Christian, Muslim, Jew, atheist etc. who holds to basic Conservative principles.
What we should have done as a minimum was to:
a) Emphasise that we were the party of equality that would treat ALL people equally, whether gay or straight, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Humanist etc.
b) Set and publicise clear boundaries in how far we would go along with the agenda of gay rights organisations, boundaries that voters could clearly see did not compromise values such as freedom of speech. If you read David Cameron’s election interview with Gay News he actually did this – refusing to follow Labour’s lead in agreeing to ban all criticism of homosexual acts. However, as a party we clearly failed to set out that boundary line for the wider public to see. As a result we allowed the impression to be created that the Conservatives would show the same degree of intolerance towards Christians as Labour had done.
c) At least steer a middle course. Why did we not as an act of reassurance to Christians put up a gay shadow minister to say that whilst as a gay person they naturally disagreed with Christian views on homosexuality, it was fundamentally wrong in a free society to ban people from expressing such opinions?
The future
Clearly there is a lot of fence mending that needs to be done before the next election. The Conservative Party needs to make very clear that it is in no sense intolerant of Christians or anyone else for that matter who holds to basic Conservative values. In particular, it needs to:
a) Adopt a policy that all who accept basic Conservative principles are welcome in the Conservative Party at all levels regardless of religious belief or non belief specifically including Christians, Muslims, gay and straight etc.
b) Positively adopt a policy that the Conservative Party will not discriminate against anyone becoming a parliamentary candidate on the grounds of their religious beliefs, provided that they accept basic Conservative principles – such as freedom of the individual, freedom of speech, economic liberalism etc.
c) Avoid Lib-Dem coalition partners dragging us into any further erosion of religious liberty in the UK.
d) The coalition government urgently needs to look at ways of addressing the exclusion of Christians from public life, such as registrars and magistrates on adoption panels, that began under the last Labour government. Interestingly, Labour leadership hopeful Andy Burnham has recently felt the need to apologise to Christians for the way they were marginalised under the last Labour government.
Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Eric Pickles has recently made a good start – and created a positive impression - by meeting Christian leaders and telling them that:
“The days of the state trying to suppress Christianity and other faiths are over.”
However, we clearly need to follow up words with actions if we are to reverse some of the damage that has been done. In May 2010 we failed to persuade more than 36% of the electorate to vote for us. As William Hague said in 1998:
‘Millions of people who share our values and our principles felt they could not support the Conservative Party with their votes. We need to reconnect with those people, to persuade them that we share their hopes and their concerns for the future of our country.’
Martin Parsons | Permalink
No-win journalism
Israel's president has accused the English of being anti-semitic and claimed that MPs pander to Muslim voters. Shimon Peres said England was ‘deeply pro-Arab ... and anti-Israeli’, adding: ‘They always worked against us.’
He added: ‘There is in England a saying that an anti-Semite is someone who hates the Jews more than is necessary.’ His remarks, made in an interview on a Jewish website, provoked anger from senior MPs and Jewish leaders who said the 87-year-old president had ‘got it wrong’.
I blanched for two reasons. First, although Jew-hatred is certainly part of the English historical story, so too is philosemitism, as well as just plain indifference towards Jews; and although Jew-hatred is undoubtedly a crucial, if itself complex, part of the mix, the anti-Israel bigotry currently consuming Britain is the product of a confluence of a number of factors. So such a blanket denunciation of the English themselves -- as opposed to the discourse, which is a different matter -- would be quite wrong. And second, it is a favourite device of the Israel-bashers to fend off criticism by falsely accusing all those who defend Israel of claiming in turn that its accusers are all ‘antisemites’. So to find Israel’s President saying something quite so false and damaging was dismaying.
But Peres did not say this in these bald terms at all. The Sunday Telegraph had picked up on an interview he had given on the on-line Jewish magazine Tablet with Israeli historian Benny Morris. This is the salient part of the interview in full (Morris’s questions are in bold type):
Our next big problem is England. There are several million Muslim voters. And for many members of parliament, that’s the difference between getting elected and not getting elected. And in England there has always been something deeply pro-Arab, of course, not among all Englishmen, and anti-Israeli, in the establishment. They abstained in the [pro-Zionist] 1947 U.N. Partition Resolution, despite [issuing the pro-Zionist] Balfour Declaration [in 1917]. They maintained an arms embargo against us [in the 1950s]; they had a defense treaty with Jordan; they always worked against us.
But England changed after the 1940s and 1950s. They supported us in 1967, there was Harold Brown and Mrs. Thatcher [who were pro-Israeli].There is also support for Israel today [on the British right]. But in Labor there was always a deep pro-Israeli current. But [the late 1940s prime minister and Labor leader Clement] Attlee was [anti-Israel].
Anyway, this [pro-Israeli current] vanished because they think the Palestinians are the underdog. In their eyes the Arabs are the underdog. Even though this is irrational. Take the Gaza Strip. We unilaterally evacuated the Gaza Strip [in 2005]. We evacuated 8,000 settlers and it was very difficult, after mobilizing 47,000 policemen [and soldiers]. It cost us $2.5 billion in compensation. We left the Gaza Strip completely. Why did they fire rockets at us, for years they fired rockets at us. Why?
Maybe because they don’t like us?
Peres: You fire rockets at everyone you don’t like? For eight years they fired and we refrained from retaliating. When they fired at us, the British didn’t say a word.
Maybe it is anti-Semitism?
Yes, there is also anti-Semitism. There is in England a saying that an anti-Semite is someone who hates the Jews more than is necessary. But with Germany relations are pretty good, as with Italy and France.
But there is erosion of public pro-Israel sentiment—at the universities, in the press. I’m not talking about the governments.
I’ll tell you why. On television there is an asymmetry that can’t be corrected. What the terrorists do is never broadcast. Only the response is broadcast. And then critics charge: “This is disproportionate.” You don’t see the terrorist act. When a lawful nation fights a lawless nation there is a problem in the media. When an open regime fights a secret regime there is a problem.
As can be seen from this, Peres first talked about the problem Israel has with England without referring to ‘antisemitism’ at all. When the question was raised, he agreed it played a part. But it is quite clear from his remarks that he ascribes anti-Israelism in England, which he says is not shared by all, to a range of factors – large numbers of Muslim voters, historic pro-Arab feeling, support for the underdog, distorted media coverage – with Jew-hatred included as an afterthought. So for the Sunday Telegraph to say Israel president claims English are ‘anti-semitic’ and then further to whip up somefury over a distorted version of his remarks, and to put this whole inflammatory hype on the front page, no less, is pretty shoddy journalism.
For which there are two possible explanations: malice or sloppiness. It’s possible that this was a malicious attempt to whip up more anti-Israel feeling. But it’s surely more likely that the Daily Telegraph writers elided anti-Israel feeling with Jew-hatred because they themselves think that each flows into the other.
If so, it is really very telling. For the Israel-bashers tell us ad nauseam that to be anti-Israel is not the same as being anti-Jew. Yet when the Israeli President talks about anti-Israel hatred, he is said to be talking about anti-Jewish hatred pure and simple, with no other factors acknowledged.
Thus Israel’s defenders get it in the neck either way. It's what might be called 'no-win' journalism. And only one country is treated to it.
Melaine Phillips
Geert Wilders Is No Right-Wing Populist
Dutch politician Geert Wilders may be many things, but he is not the right-wing populist he is accused of being. What the debate over his film "Fitna" reveals most clearly is the West's cowardice toward Islam.
There's a key for every lock, just as there's a perfectly fitting label for everyone who refuses to fit in. At the moment, the term "right-wing populist" is hot. Everyone and his brother is calling Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders by that name at the moment, but hardly any commentators or reporters have taken the time to explain what a "right-wing populist" actually is. And what distinguishes it from other political standpoints like, for instance, "left-wing populists."
Geert Wilders may be many things -- he is self-confident to the point of vanity and stubborn to the point of sacrificing himself. But he's not a right-wing populist.
For one thing, he's a radical liberal. For another, what he's doing at the moment is extremely unpopular. Six years ago, Pim Fortuyn, who was murdered by an animal rights fanatic, was also called a "right-wing populist." He was indeed very popular -- not because he was "right-wing" but because he insisted on drawing attention to things that the traditional elites of Dutch society had steadfastly ignored.
The label "right-wing populist" resonates negatively today the same way that "communist" did in the '50s and '60s, "fascist" did in the '70s and '80s and "climate change denier" does today. It saves the speaker from having to engage with the actual content of the argument and makes the bearer of the term solely responsible for the consequences of his or her actions.
If fanatical Muslims do, in fact, go ballistic over Wilder's film "Fitna," it's not because they have a flawed relationship to freedom of speech and religion, but because they've been insulted and provoked by Wilders -- or so the reasoning goes.
So, it comes as no surprise that TV presenter Tom Buhrow opened the Friday late-evening news on the German TV channel ARD with a report on the "anti-Islamic video of the right-wing populist" Geert Wilders -- as though there were a central authority in the otherwise censor-free Federal Republic of Germany that is responsible for prescribing the vocabulary of Euro-Islamic affairs. It was followed by a report on the relaxed response of Dutch Muslims, who were shown sitting in their cafes peacefully drinking coffee while Wilders raised havoc outside.
According to Buhrow's narration: "The knives are already being sharpened -- but only for the doner kebabs." But he forgot to mention that, by that point, "Fitna" had already been pulled off the video portal LiveLeak, where it had been first published. The British provider had received death threats that it took as seriously as they were intended -- a not entirely irrelevant bit of information that the ARD anchorman opted to omit, so as not to confuse his viewers with too many details.
According to this interpretation of events, Wilders has only himself to blame for the fact that he has to be under 24-hour police protection and sleep in a different location every night. If he'd taken on, say, the Federation of Dutch Floriculturists, his private life would be fully intact.
Unfortunately, one needs to point out at this juncture that it's not Wilders' obsessive arrogance that has robbed him of his private life, but the memory of how and why director Theo van Gogh was murdered, namely by a Dutch-born Muslim of Moroccan heritage. He, too, probably liked sitting in cafes drinking coffee peacefully -- until one fine morning, when he set off to kill the "provocateur" van Gogh, who would presumably still be alive today if he hadn't been so silly as to make an "anti-Islamic" film.
We should take comfort in the fact that Wilders -- to quote a female Muslim writing for SPIEGEL ONLINE -- "avoids the mistake Theo van Gogh made by connecting the Koran and sexuality," which didn't go over well among "less tolerant Muslims" and which would apparently have "raised the chances of a violent reaction to Wilders' film." She doesn't feel the least bit insulted by Wilders, and goes so far as to state that Wilders' film shows "nothing but facts, even if they are somewhat one-sided."
Leaving aside the fact that it seems a little excessive to kill someone because he made a "mistake," can facts be shown any other way than one-sided?
Is it possible to have anything other than a one-sided position on the murder of Theo van Gogh, the beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, the execution of a woman in a stadium in Kabul, the hanging of homosexuals and the stoning of adulterous women in Iran? Wouldn't you then have to mention after, say, a plane crash, that such things don't happen every day and that most planes land in one piece in order not to present the facts one-sidedly?
SPIEGEL ONLINE is currently working together with the respected Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad to bring you the best reporting and broadest perspectives available in English about Geert Wilders' anti- Koran film. Read NRC Handelsblad's coverage at NRC.nl/international.
Wilders is as "one-sided" as any filmmaker trying to compress reality into a documentary film. His film is as "anti-Islamic" as Michael Moore's are "anti-capitalist." The hostility does not lie in the eye of the beholder, but rather in the nature of the film's subject. Part of the ritualistic response of Muslim communities to the observation that Islam is not always a peaceful religion is invariably the threat of violence, should the "insult" not be retracted -- regardless of whether it was made by the pope, a politician or a poet.
And Wilders is guilty of breaking with yet another aspect of the prevailing consensus. He opted to act, not just react. Since announcing his film three months ago, he has been defining the course of the debate, driving his opponent away from him. Nobody would have been surprised if Wilders had ended his game by confessing that the film itself did not actually exist.
What he wanted to accomplish had already been accomplished with the threat to show an "anti-Islamic video." He showed the "free West" to be a paper tiger. The Dutch government distanced itself from the project and asked its ambassadors in Muslim countries to explain to their host governments the situation in their home country, where the government is not as omnipotent as it would like to be.
The EU, wanting to please all sides, issued a statement that emphasized the importance of freedom of speech while at the same time relativizing it: "We believe that acts such as (Geert Wilders') film serve no other purpose than inflaming hatred."
Even UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon chimed in to condemn the Wilders film "in the strongest terms." He said that nothing can justify hate speech or incitement to violence. "The right of free expression is not at stake here. ... Freedom must always be accompanied by social responsibility."
This is the kind of tone that one waits for in vain when Islamists call for jihad, fanatics massacre non-believers or Holocaust deniers organize conferences. The only objective of these exercises is to prevent a repetition of what happened in 2006, when a dozen harmless Muhammad caricatures caused a blaze of indignation from Jakarta to Rabat. At the time, many politicians, including the prominent German Green Party politician Claudia Roth, called for "de-escalation."
The call was not aimed at the arsonists who were burning Danish flags and destroying embassies, but at the Europeans, who were watching the jihadists in bafflement, in a bid to not pour more oil on the flames.
A similar thing happened recently in Sudan, when a British woman innocently named a teddy bear Muhammad. Or when Salman Rushdie was knighted by the British queen. Muslims were outraged and Europeans sought cover until the storm had blown over.
And now the "right-wing populist" Wilders is being sacrificed on the altar of appeasement policy. He is no cineaste, and his film is certainly no masterpiece. It is, however, a brute challenge to us to at least recognize reality.
By Henryk M. Broder
Bravo, Sarkozy - from one jogger to another
There are some people I know who are not so keen on Nicolas Sarkozy, the new President of France. Some prudes have been dismayed by the way he turned up at a press conference in a state of apparent alcoholic intoxication. Some think it a bit off that he tried to grab the steering wheel at the recent European summit, and change the fundamental principles of the EU Treaty.
Some people find him altogether too Tiggerish and bumptious. I have, I confess, been so far in a state of glorious detachment on the Sarkozy issue - until yesterday morning, when I read that he was once again under attack from the French intellectuals, and I found my sword leaping from its scabbard in his defence.
In the cafés of the Left Bank, they have fastened on what they regard as the single most objectionable and Right-wing aspect of the Sarkozy agenda - and what do you think it is? Do they object to his views on immigration? Are they worried about his plans to make French universities more competitive?
Quite possibly; but their feelings on these questions are anaemic next to their central charge against the new regime. The most appalling thing about the Sarkozy presidency, says Professor Alain Finkelkraut, a leading French philosopher and veteran of the 1968 manifestations, is an event that takes place every morning. The President of France goes jogging! Choc horreur! He exposes the presidential knees to the entire world, says Finkelkraut, and it is extremely undignified.
Worst of all, say these heirs of Sartre and Saussure, the very act of le jogging - or le running as it is now more fashionable to call it - is a cultural humiliation. It is, in the first place, an offence to national honour, they say, that the President of the Republic should totter back into the Elysée Palace looking like a sweat-drenched miniature version of Sylvester Stallone.
But as you would expect of French philosophers, they make a deeper point. Jogging, they say, waving their Gitanes angrily at the camera, is a Right-wing activity. It is all about the management of the body; it is about performance, and individualism, and the triumph of the will.
It is no wonder, they say, that physical jerks have generally been associated with fascist regimes; and above all they believe that by staggering around in his NYPD T-shirt, the French President is making a tragic act of obeisance to America.
François Mitterrand did not jog, they say. Even when he played golf, he never allowed himself to be pictured on the course. Jacques Chirac is a man of hyperkinetic energy, but he would never have taken his trousers off in public, run up and down, and asked the French people to take him seriously.
As for Charles de Gaulle, he moved with the stately undulation of a giraffe, and never broke into so much as a trot.
The Sarkozy jog, say his critics, is a sad imitation of the habits of American presidents, and a capitulation to the défi Américain as bad as the influx of Hollywood movies, and if you doubt the seriousness of their attack, you should have a look at the Left-wing newspaper Libération, and the French political blogs; and that is why it is now time for all jogging politicians to come to Sarkozy's aid.
I speak as one who rises every morning and makes the pavement echo to the slap of my tread, and I have no doubt that, on purely aesthetic grounds, I would face the strictures of Prof Finkelkraut. It was not long ago that one of my friends and colleagues told me that he was quite put off his breakfast by the sight of me going round the local park at the speed, he claimed, of an elderly hippopotamus.
But I am not deterred by such jibes, nor by the accusation that jogging is Right-wing. Of course it is Right-wing, in the sense that the facts of life are generally Right-wing. The very act of forcing yourself to go for a run, every morning, is a highly conservative business.
There is the mental effort needed to overcome your laziness. There is the pain in the calves and the ache in the lungs, and the keen sense that everyone is looking at you and sniggering.
And then slowly the endorphins start to flood into your brain, and the effort gives way to reward, and the deferred pleasure arrives, and you come back home feeling you could bite a tiger - and, above all, that nothing else you do that day can be quite as painful and exhausting.
And plenty of Left-liberals have realised this, and go jogging as well. One thinks of Jimmy Carter, who famously collapsed while out on a run, so eager was he to attain those endorphins; and then there was the late Roy Jenkins, who was once spotted sneaking out of his chauffeured limo in the Brussels twilight, and briefly puffing, in a tracksuit, through the Bois de la Cambre.
And is it not sad, in retrospect, that Roy should have been so furtive in his exercise? The whole point about President Sarkozy's running is that he is actually putting himself publicly through the same hell as the rest of us. Far from being a surrender to American values, the Sarkozy jog is in conformity with the principles of the French Revolution, and the equality and brotherhood of man.
With every weary plod he is parading his mortality, exposing his vulnerability, and sharing with the rest of the human race the via dolorosa of the morning stagger. One day, as we all know, he will be able to run no more; one day he will cark it like Jim Fixx, the jogging pioneer.
But until such time we should salute his willingness to expose those knobbly knees to public derision, and we should challenge our Labour masters to get out of their Zil limousines and do likewise.
Boris Johnson is MP for Henley
The rule of law itself seems to be breaking down in Britain.
Under the combined weight of ideology and bigotry, the rule of law itself seems to be breaking down in Britain. For the second time, a jury has acquitted people charged with criminal acts because it appears to sympathise with their cause.
In September 2008, a jury decided that it was ok to break the law and cause more than £35,000 criminal damage to a coal-fired power station because of the threat of man-made global warming.
In the latest case, seven activists who caused £180,000 damage to an arms factory have been acquitted after they argued they were seeking to prevent ‘Israeli war crimes’. The Guardian reported yesterday, after the acquittals of the first five:
They believed that EDO MBM, the firm that owns the factory, was breaking export regulations by manufacturing and selling to the Israelis military equipment which would be used in the occupied territories. They wanted to slow down the manufacture of these components, and impede what they believed were war crimes being committed by Israel against the Palestinians.
... Hove crown court heard the activists had broken into the factory in the night. They had video-taped interviews beforehand outlining their intention to cause damage and, in the words of prosecutor Stephen Shay, ‘smash-up’ the factory.
As Robin Shepherd observes in horror, it seems that in bigoted Britain all you have to do these days to be acquitted of a crime is to act against Israeli interests. But what really jumps out from this story is the direction the jury received from the judge in the case:
In his summing up, Judge George Bathurst-Norman suggested to the jury that ‘you may well think that hell on earth would not be an understatement of what the Gazans suffered in that time’.
Let’s get our heads round this, folks: an English judge in an English court of law effectively directed a jury to acquit people of criminally smashing up a factory, because he chose to believe Hamas propaganda about the suffering of people in Gaza during a war about which he presumably has no knowledge whatever apart from what he has read or seen in the media – a war, moreover, launched solely to prevent Gazans from aggressively firing rockets into Israel in order to murder its civilians, during the course of which war Israel went to heroic lengths to avoid hurting Gazan civilians who were being put in harm’s way by Hamas, the true cause of Gaza's 'hell on earth'.
Quite apart from the ignorance and bigotry of Judge George Bathurst-Norman, what on earth is a judge doing imposing his political prejudices upon a jury and thus taking the side of the defendants in the case he is trying – with the result that he effectively directed the jury to acquit them of a crime?
Ironically enough, given the way he has now brought the justice system into disrepute, he declared indignantly on a previous occasion -- using his own tough record to rebut criticisms by the Home Secretary of the day of allegedly ‘soft’ sentencing by the courts:
‘The trouble is, if you go on for political reasons undermining the public's faith in the judiciary, sooner or later you are heading for anarchy and... in due course for the equivalent of a police state.’
No bleeding-heart liberal is Judge George Bathurst-Norman, it seems. Here he is jailing Paul Kelleher for three months for beheading a statue of Margaret Thatcher, saying that
although many people sympathised with him, smashing up property deserved a custodial sentence.
Really? So how come this apparent law’n’order zealot gave the people who smashed up this factory a free pass in this way? Could this – as the veteran anti-Zionist Tony Greenstein exults -- be the explanation? (Hat tip: Yisroel Medad)
Perhaps the fact that His Honour was born in the Arab town of Jaffa opposite Tel Aviv might have something to do with it!
Well, just fancy that. And here is yet another lenient sentence passed by this law’n’order judge –
Abu Bakr Siddiqui, a procurement agent for the A. Q. Khan network, receives what an individual familiar with the case describes as a “remarkably lenient” sentence for assistance he gave the network [through smuggling a shipment of special aluminium to the AQ Khan nuclear programme in Pakistan]. The judge, George Bathurst-Norman, acknowledges that the crimes Siddiqui committed (see August 29, 2001) would usually carry a “very substantial” prison term, but says that there are “exceptional circumstances,” claiming that Siddiqui had been too trusting and had been “blinded” to facts that were “absolutely staring [him] in the face.” Siddiqui gets a twelve-month suspended sentence and a fine of £6,000 (about $10,000). Authors David Armstrong and Joe Trento will comment, “In a scenario eerily reminiscent of earlier nuclear smuggling cases in the United States and Canada, Siddiqui walked out of court essentially a free man.” They will also offer an explanation for the volte-face between conviction and sentencing, pointing out that there was a key event in the interim: due to the 9/11 attacks “Pakistan was once again a vital British and American ally. And, as in the past, it became imperative that Islamabad not be embarrassed over its nuclear program for fear of losing its cooperation….”
Anyone spot a connecting thread here?
Greenstein also helpfully notes about the Hove travesty that
Judge George Bathurst-Norman was brought out of retirement to hear the case.
Really? Why? And just who decided to do that?
What in judicial hell on earth's name is going on here?
Melanie Phillips
Why we still love bashing the Boche: As we face Germany in the World Cup tomorrow, we salute the silly side of our old enemy
My sister and I were brought up to be grateful and proud to be English, and to participate in and enjoy the English way of life. I particularly empathised with the English sense of humour.
I believe the English humour is a unique trait, and one that separates us from less-fortunate people, like the Germans
I loved those Sunday lunchtime comedy shows, such as round The Horne and The Navy Lark - although I was never sure about The Clitheroe Kid.
I think listening to those programmes started me on the way to becoming a comedy writer myself. They subtly imbued the notion that our national sense of humour was one of our most important and defining national characteristics.
Indeed, I don't know of any other nation that prizes its sense of fun above all other virtues.
This could just be a sign of my ignorance, I know, but I believe the English humour is a unique trait, and one that separates us from less-fortunate people, like the Germans, who have long since swapped a sense of fun for an obsession with efficiency, overly gassy beer and trilby hats with half a partridge stuck in the hat band.
But if the Germans aren't always fun, they are always funny, especially when they aren't holding guns.
We couldn't resist having a crack at them when we set the fourth series of The New Statesman in Brussels.
We made Alan B'Stard a greedy Euro MP on the make (that didn't take much imagination) who horrified the po-faced Germans by exploiting a loophole in EU rules to get himself elected as MEP for a German constituency - after the other candidates fall down a mine shaft.
In fact, two of this nation's favourite comic moments involve Germans: Captain Mainwaring in Dad's Army saying: 'Don't tell him your name, Pike!' when the poor, young private was intimidated by a German prisoner; and Basil's hysterically ghastly 'Don't mention the War!' routine in Fawlty Towers.
Would we have found these scenes as funny if they hadn' t involved Germans?
Of course not. In fact, they were only funny because they involved Germans.
For not only are the Germans the old enemy - who, let's face it, were asking to become figures of fun after dressing up like pantomime villains for the War - they are also well-known for not possessing any sense of humour at all.
We can laugh at them without them even noticing.
But can it really be true that humour has been bred out of the entire German race? Surely it's racist to dismiss a nation thus?
Well, a friend of mine is married to a charming and witty German lady - who is standing over with a rolling pin as I type these words. She has a terrific sense of fun, but even she admits that likes to be warned when a joke is on its way, in case she doesn't spot it coming.
'Allo Allo': Richard Gibson as Herr Flick and Kim Hartman as Private Helga Geerhart
And when my writing partner Laurence Marks and I went to Berlin to lecture German producers about British comedy, we did discern a tendency to overanalyse and over-intellectualise jokes until the humour withered and died.
Then, over lunch, we met a charming man call Helmut who we were told wrote most of the comedy shows on German TV - programmes heavy on pratfalls and trombone music.
He took us aside and told us he was actually Dutch, not German. And his whispered take on the German light-entertainment industry was that it was a little unreasonable to launch two wars and the Holocaust and still expect to have a thriving comedy industry.
Obviously we all know that the present generation of Germans is innocent of these terrible crimes. But as many young Germans still suffer guilt on behalf of their grandparents, so we Britons still feel entitled to bask in a sense of moral and comedic superiority.
But why is it that nearly 70 years after World War II, the Germans are still the nation we love to hate?
It can't just be that deep down we know they're better than us at football, and particularly at taking penalties? Can it?
Well , the War must have something to do with it, because we haven't always disliked the Krauts. We used to love them. They were family.
In the 18th century, we imported a whole Royal Family from Hanover - the first two Georges didn't even speak English.
Why do we love to hate them? It can't just be that deep down we know they're better than us at football, and particularly at taking penalties? Can it?
And in 1815, the Prussians were our allies against Napoleon and the pesky French; indeed, they helped us win the Battle of Waterloo. (Actually, the Huns claim they were solely responsible for winning Waterloo and saved our bacon in the process - but then they would, wouldn't they?)
Twenty five years later, our new young Queen, Victoria, married Prince Albert, sparking a craze for German fashions - although the leather shorts never took off - and Christmas trees.
Albert went down in our history books as the quintessential German good guy; selfless, hardworking and progressive.
His efforts led to the Great Exhibition and the building of the Science and Natural History museums in Kensington, a stupendous legacy.
But while Prince Albert was many things, a stand-up comic he was not. He was a technocrat, a moderniser.
He had more in common with Bismarck, who was welding Germany's separate princedoms into a nation, than with Disraeli, a prime minister of Jewish descent who wrote witty political novels.
And there, in my opinion, is a key - and too often fatal - difference between our two countries.
As the last century dawned, Germany was a newly constructed nation eager to forge an empire to compete with Britain and France, while Britain was a stable country with sound and ancient institutions.
If we were able to laugh at ourselves, it was a laughter built on self-confidence and a sense of superiority.
Meanwhile, so wanted to be like us that under the Kaiser and then Hitler they wanted to create in months what we shaped in centuries, and were willing to steamroll over anyone or anything that got in their way.
They didn't have time to shape an empire with humour, creativity or sensitivity; they opted for the Blitzkrieg, instead.
Germany became, quite simply, a dark mirror image of what those leaders envied in the English.
Ironically, if we berate the Germans today, it is often because they are not German enough. For example, why have they allowed the French to turn the European Union into a bureaucratic and undemocratic nightmare designed solely to benefit French farmers?
And why are they so timid and pacific when they could be bringing law, order and efficiency to the chaos of Afghanistan?
But do we really still hate them? I don't think so. We're too good-humoured for that. We just like to tease, that's all.
So, tomorrow, we must refrain from tasteless triumphalism as Signor Capello's spoiled mercenaries - sorry, I mean earnest young English patriots - progress serenely to the quarter-finals of the World Cup over the broken, weary bodies of a young and inexperienced German team.
Well , a man can dream, can't he?
By Maurice Gran, The Telegraph