spinoff

Jack Straw has been wheeled out to refute claims made by a top civil servant® that the UK’s involvement in Iraq has acted as a recruitment tool for terrorist fundamentalists.

A leak to a Sunday newspaper showed that as early as 2004, the government was warned by top Whitehall spoddos that our troops’ being in Iraq was a sop to terror recruiters. The result – an increased risk of domestic terrorist attacks. Oh dear.

The UK went to war in order to make itself safer. The free world needed to fight terror head on – it had to get in there and start hammering the people who threatened the basis of western civilisation. Hammer the right people, and civilisation would be protected, free from worry. Safer, even.

This leaked memo rubbishes that whole picture. Rather than making the country safer, the implication is that the war has made the country more at risk than before.

The government of course, denies this. The war is right. It must be right. Until now, the excuse quietly bandied about by Labour apologists has fixed on US isolation. The argument runs that someone had to stick to the US through the war, or else we’d end up with the single, global-hyper power out there on its own, isolated, with no friends left in Europe, acting unilaterally.

Someone’s got to stick with them; and if it’s us, then we might even be able to boss a few situations.

But apart from the second UN resolution, the UK has got nothing in return for sticking with the US; neither influence nor security.

And so the question now has to be asked; is the UK's blind faith in the US’s Middle East charade worthwhile? Have we had any return from this project aside from a large pile of British bodies? And a more dangerous country in which to live? And heightened paranoia in the capital?

The war has made us less safe. Spinoff massages its temples, furrows its brow, and thinks furiously to itself – has there been any thought given to planning this war at all? And if so, who on earth could have possibly expected to benefit from it?

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

This is a peculiar country because, inevitably, every time the (mostly non) summer ends, we all take it so personally. It is as if your best friend suddenly decided he didn’t like you any more, and turned away, taking the sunshine and light evenings along with him.

The population of the UK immediately assumes the worst. Winter is coming. Happiness is over. It is The End of Summer. This is an annual devastation for most people living in Britain, and at the same time never a surprise. Every single time we are caught off guard.

Well, this Spinoffite doesn’t mind a bit. I love the winter: the nights drawing in, cosy evenings inside away from the horrors of the freak-filled streets of London. Standing waiting for a bus as it begins to snow, with the bittersweet prospect of Christmas approaching.

But then I love the spring too, when snowdrops pop out their brave white buds, and the daffodils are little mini stars, the main event not due to make its cameo for at least a couple more months. And the anticipation builds…

And then summer comes again, and it’s sweltering and muggy and everybody goes on holiday. It is sticky and uncomfortable and the tube is like torture. The talk is all monotonous and the legions of people returning a deep shade of brown constitute an army of blankness.

It feels like it will never end. But then autumn creeps up, slowly, casually putting its arm round the shoulders of cheap-date summer, and the clasp turns into an embrace, and suddenly you can smell the leaves on the trees turning brown.

I love the autumn. I am bored of the summer, of its promise always coming to nothing. I look forward with anticipation to the evenings of shadows and whisky.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

The sight of Jewish people being driven out of their homes by soldiers is horrifically resonant – the shame of that will outlive us all. However, the sight of Jewish families being driven out of their homes by their own soldiers – though still deeply unsettling – indicates something altogether different.

First and foremost, it indicates a vast, almost total, political failure for the Israeli state, which allowed its citizenry to settle on land that it now tacitly admits was not its own to occupy. But also, this drastic circumstance shows the gap between polity and citizenry in Israel.

Those who settled in Gaza, some of whom are convinced that God gifted them the land via a miraculous intervention on Israel’s behalf during the 1967 war, cannot understand why their own government would now turf them out.

But the Israeli Government has decided it shall be done, for reasons which are currently hidden from its electorate. External – i.e. international – political pressure seems the most likely reason for the sudden withdrawal from Gaza, and only over time will the motivating factors behind it become apparent.

We must hope now that this fracturing between the Israeli government and sections of its citizenry does not lead to militancy amongst disgruntled former settlers. If it does, then civil war threatens. There have been too many political failures already.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

Nature has not been all that kind to Charles Clarke, as evidenced by this here snap. But, as one Spinoffite pointed out, there are plenty more reasons to dislike Charles Clarke than simply his jaw-dropping looks.

On the Radio 4 Today Programme this morning, Charles Clarke suggested that there may be a link between the two bouts of bombings that took place in London last month. Listeners were also enthralled by his revelations concerning the Pope's religious leanings as well as his fascinating insights into ursine defecatory patterns.

But one thing this government will not say; one thing it will not countenance; one thing that it will not hint, suggest, imply, or even allow any of its ministers to think, is that there is any link whatsoever between the continuing war in Iraq, and the rash of terrorist activity across Europe.

The day that the government comes out and acknowledges that it sees the same world that everyone else does, the better. And until that moment, we at Spinoff will continue to dislike Mr Charles Clarke.

Intensely.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

The Prime Minister is a man of action not words. He has proven this countless times to us, who elected him. He wasted no time in 1997 on trashing clause four, and establishing the Labour party as the new conservatives, paving the way for the implosion of the traditional party of the right.

He wasted no time making friends with Mr Clinton, but at the same time making Europeans feel they had an ally in forging ahead with a new European way, expansion, the euro et all. Everybody knew where he was coming from.
He changed the way the economy was run and put at the head of it a man whose life has been spent preparing for running such an economy, and whose brain is the size of the Sudan.

He also appointed many other good men, ex Socialist Worker proffering, oft-marching, northern, even blind! men and women to his cabinet for revolution to put behind ‘those years of boom and bust’ and make Britain a force to be reckoned with.  

One of these men was Robin Cook. Foreign Secretary from 1997 to 2001, Cook was a man who was amazing because, if nothing else, he managed to get at least two women to have sex with him despite looking like the original poisoned dwarf. But his personal life aside, he was a talented politician who commanded great respect from political friends and enemies alike. However, Jacky Straw wanted his job, and Cook did not always say the right thing, so he went: little Jacky was much better at reading out the script on the telly.

But Cook, although still in shock from his sudden ejection, still went on to make one of the best leaders of the House of Commons in decades. His understanding of parliamentary procedure, and what the Commons is actually for was acute, and under his auspices business was conducted very nearly sensibly.

Most importantly Cook was committed, more than any other Labour politician was or will be, to the reform of the House of Lords. Blair began the ‘reform’ years ago and promptly swept the problem under the carpet because it was his personal project to get enough Labour peers in there so they were no longer trampled by Tories and Independents every single time there was a divisive issue to discuss. The entire foxhunting debacle never would have happened if he could have managed it sooner, but this system of patronage has ensured he got his way. The Conservatives no longer have a majority over there.

Go democracy.

Cook’s vision for the second chamber was visionary and he pushed and pushed to try and finish what the Prime Minister had half heartedly started, but sadly he got nowhere. His concern for the way our democracy works, in a country without a written constitution, was ignored, and nobody listened.

Other voices were shouting louder, and shouting for war.  

Blair, as is increasingly the case, has had his eyes set overseas, and his closeness to Bush, as we all sadly found last month, has not earned him many friends at home.

Cook quit over the war, but his anger was over many things, over Blair’s refusal to listen to the people around him, or his refusal to sort out the pig’s ear of legislation which was being forced through the mangler at the time. It seems that Blair had bigger fish to fry.

Blair is a man of action, not words, and he doesn’t need to say anything this time either. His absence, due to his holiday, from Mr Cook’s funeral, says it all.

There are people in the UK who maintain, support and sustain organisations committed to destroying the UK. The UK permits people to say and think whatever they want, and this permissiveness is at the core of our post-Enlightenment, Humanist society. To give up this totem of civilisation is to be dragged back into a bleakly inhuman vision of a perfect and ordered theocracy.

Our response has to come in two parts. On the one hand we must fight these utter utter bastards; we must get our metaphorical boot onto their metaphorical throat and we must not remove it. But on the other hand, we must not provide an obvious enemy against which to rage. Because this is to give the revolting middle-aged men who con impressionable youngsters into suicide yet more handy recruitment propaganda.

Blair et al will have seen the hard-ball rhetoric employed by Bush post-9/11 and now, in statements such as his “the rules of the game are changing,” we can see a direct parallel with the GW Bush “you are either with us or against us”. Both comments seek to define lines of engagement – to remind us that there are two sides, and those two sides are squaring up.

This is unhelpful. It mirrors the world view that the bombers are conned into accepting. As does the banning of Islamist organisations. Ban them, and you not only drive them underground, but also reinforce the “us and them,” mentality. By doing this, you increase the incredibly dangerous impression that “Islam and its followers are under attack”.

Which of course is balls.

Don’t ban these groups. Their message must be defeated in the open. Ban them, and they become clandestine and in turn all the more attractive to radicalised youth, for whom membership itself becomes an act of resistance. Ban them, and they will go down on the list of other radical Islamist groups, such as; Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Al-Qa’eda, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and Hizbullah, which have never lacked either members or support.

Illegal groups are more potent symbols than legal ones. Banning Hizb ut-Tahrir and others like it is a counterproductive pointless gesture.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

The Telegraph’s favourite for Tory leader, Mr David Davis, today in that paper suggested solving the problems of our domestic ‘porous’ borders and Muslim extremism by, amongst other things, scrapping the Human Rights Act. It makes our country less safe. He also said this:

‘Religious leaders have a special responsibility when those who commit crimes claim to be motivated by religion. We must acknowledge that there are good imams and bad imams. Most preach the true Muslim faith in a manner consistent with the society in which they live. Others, though, do not represent Islam properly and fail to understand the conventions of British society.’

Why does the innate ‘foreignness’ of Muslims, British or otherwise, make people look towards religious leaders? Yes there are imams who are irresponsible, but the current his holiness the Pope goes around suggesting that millions of Catholics risk their health by not using condoms.

Do people berate the Pope for soaring HIV infection rates the Catholic third world – an epidemic that has killed thousands of times more people than all Al-Qa’eda attacks combined? Did people berate religious leaders when the IRA killed, or when Loyalists retaliated, or during the massacres in Rwanda, or lynchings in the southern United States.

Of course, these atrocities were not carried out in the name of any religion; but according to imams and leading Muslim clerics worldwide, neither were the London bombings.

Behind Davis’ show of understanding for UK Muslims [note - at a time when hate crimes are going off the radar], lies an old Tory sentiment, and with it a clear pointer to the reason why Tories are – and will for now remain – unelectable.

And that reason? They have no idea what modern Britain actually is.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

Three tubes and one bus. This was the pattern for both sets of bombers. On July 7th it looked like a mistake; as if one of the four men ran into problems, and instead of getting on another tube line – possibly the northern line south – he changed plans and got the bus.

But then on the 21st, the same targets were picked again.

By attacking three tubes and one bus, were both teams of bombers conforming to a pattern of attack spelled out by a commander? Does this configuration have some significance, or meaning for the attackers?

Or was an accidental selection of 7th July targets mimicked by a second group of copycat amateurs on the 21st? The difference in bomb-making capability seems to answer yes – the dud bombs imply that the resources behind the 21st were of lower quality than those on the 7th. This implies a different organisation, different minds, different people.

However, intelligence has shown links between the two cells, and that members of both attended the Finsbury Park mosque.

And so the most vital question of all – are these men connected? Are they part of a wider web? Were they directed by a commander, or did the cells act in isolation?

The cells could have attacked at any time, but they did so within two weeks of one other, using identical methods. To suggest that the plots were arranged in isolation, or that there was no operational link between the two, would be to assume a fantastic coincidence.

And so it seems highly likely that there was a link between the two cells. The sooner the Italians give up Hussein Osman, the better. He urgently needs to be questioned, and the links between the two cells thoroughly scrutinised, or else again we will see three tubes and one bus become targets.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

Now is the time to be magnanimous about the French. Throw aside the fact that ‘french military victories’ in Google was one of the best and longest-running jokes on the net. Throw aside their basket case economy, their massively over-generous social provision, or the fact that their secret service sank a Greenpeace ship in the harbour of a friendly nation, ignore their xenophobic protection of their own language, and admit it: France is about the best European country, bar none.

Firstly, they have virtually made a religion of food. When Jacques Chirac accused the British of having the worst food in Europe, apart from the Finns, he was half right (the Finns have wonderful food, though their creamed vegetables are vile and one can tire of reindeer).

Take a walk down the street market of the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir and see the sheer care and attention they pay in presenting a range of food wider and more varied than any you will find in any one place in the UK. Go sit in any little café in Paris, and eat steak tartare with a fresh roll and a glass of wine for less money than a pizza in the UK. Find a supermarket (there aren’t many of them, for good reason) and even the food there is better than any one in the UK.

Secondly, their belief in their country and its culture comes through everywhere – from the grands projets of Mitterand (go to the top of La Defense; visit IM Pei’s entrance to the Louvre) to the little signs scattered around the place identifying all the places of interest. There are museums of everything, usually world class.

Stagger back from one of the varied night clubs early in the morning, and in Paris at least the streets are being washed. WASHED, for god’s sake, and not just the streets but the pavements as well.

Ambling round Paris these last few days, sniggering at the Paris 2012 posters that they clearly haven’t summoned up the energy to remove, you find another one, saying the ‘Paris still loves sport’ – and congratulating the victors of the competition. Imagine the Brits – home of fair play – putting up posters congratulating the French…

Some things are still patently barking: the Bastille Day parade this year was larger and grander than anything the British or Americans put on, despite the fact that the French have, as is often noted, no military history that should elicit national pride.

But go, on the same day, to the Paris city museum and read the posters on the declaration of the rights of man that the revolutionaries put up, and you will find the precursor to every liberal constitution, writ large and proud. Right down, surprisingly, to enshrining in the constitution the right of the people to insurrect against a bad government (which may be one reason why they have had so many republics).

Yes, the drains smell. Badly, sometimes. But the public transport system is cheap and flawless. Yes, they couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag. But their multiracial state is harmonious and integrated. Yes, their economy desperately needs reform. But their healthcare system is compassionate and coherent.

There’s a lot the French have to be proud about at the moment. It’s about time we recognised that, and rather than treating them as a convenient place for a second home (at best) or a cheap destination for booze and fags (at worst), we realised that they have a country, a culture and a history from which we could learn a lot.

Though probably not how to fight wars, obviously.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.