26/04/2006

On brazenness

Today marks a new low in British political life. Is it "a low"? Perhaps not; perhaps it's a high. The difference depends on what line of work you happen to be in; for Yardie granny-murderers it's a high, while for Home Secretaries a terrible low.
                           
1,023 foreign criminals have been let out of UK jails and nobody knows where they are. This number includes a range of highly-skilled individuals, with extensive experience of rape, kidnap, murder, drug-running and kiddy-fiddling. It is, without doubt, a massive, utterly awful breakdown of domestic security.
                         
It betrays deep inefficiencies in Government, lack of organisational capacity, failures on the part of the Prison Service, the Home Office, the Immigration services, the Police, Civil Servants, their secretaries, cleaners, temps, family, children and pets - the whole shebang.
                        
The favoured phrase in such cases is "systemic failure", ironic seeing as the Home Office wants to introduce the single biggest computer profiling system the world has ever seen - ID cards. Can the Home Office catalogue data on 60 million people, keep it safe, make sure it's all correct and use it to fight international terror networks when they can't even keep an eye on 1,023 cons already in UK jails? The words "pissup," and "brewery," suggest themselves.
                                        
This is uselessness of the highest order - the person responsible must go. We are fighting a war at the moment, and when you are fighting wars you need clued-up people running domestic security. The man in charge has now been shown up as a fool, more obsessed with tin pot schemes than the fundamentals of security.
                               
But who is "the man in charge"? The roar going up from the crowd surrounding the great British political guillotine roars back in unison "Charles Clarke!" and it would give Spinoff a great deal of pleasure to see Charles "Fat, Unfriendly" Clarke relieved of that large-eared potato atop his shoulders.
                      
But the problem for the government is greater than just deciding whether or not bring down the blade on Clarke. Responsibility for this idiocy extends to former Home Secretaries too. David Blunket was on the throne during accidental prisoner releases too, but then again he got shot down long ago, and you can't put forward a sacrificial lamb if it's already dead now, can you? No sir.
                 
Much more alarming for the New Labour machine, accidental releases also happened on Jack Straw's watch. This is  tricky as it prohibits Clarke - in public at least - from using the staple "it was all the previous administration's fault," defence, as the previous administration in this case happens to be the current Foreign bloody Secretary.
              
Oh the cheek of it! The cheek that people should ask Charles to flap off into political obscurity because of a problem that kicked off under Jack sodding Straw! Pah! No wonder Charles wobbled so furiously under questioning during his round of the TV news sofas last night. Being hung out to dry for other people's screw-ups is always sickening - bloody Straw; he owes me one, the bastard.
            
But despite all this, Clarke has factors on his side, the main one being that actually it is not all his fault and the polity knows it. Also, because it's an inherited problem that reaches back to Straw's tenure, Clarke will get backed to the hilt by Labour because they know if they try and sacrifice Clarke, he'll point out that blame also rests with his predecessors, ie. Jack Straw.
           
So it's simple - either Clarke goes, possibly taking Jack Straw with him too, or Labour closes ranks, the PM pledges support, Clarke stays, and the whole thing is held together with sellotape, blu-tack, media bluster and sheer will power until the 4th May local elections are done, by which time hopefully everyone will have forgotten about: the armies of al Quaeda-trained paedophiles Labour accidentally released onto our streets, Charles Clarke's massive head and deep general unpleasantness, and - perhaps worst of all - the fact that John Prescott turned out to be a dirty old shagger.
              
Which prompts the question; nowadays, just what do you have to do to get sacked? How bad does a boob have to be before you get the push? Clarke is in charge of the mass accidental release of killers, rapists and so on, so surely he should shoulder responsibility and go. After all, there's a bloody war on you know.
             
But no. No - despite it all, he's blindly, stupidly, counterintuitively determined to stay. What is best for the country - that he gets the boot and we get someone competent - has become clouded by Clarke's desire to cling onto power. This desire is not of Clarke alone. Don Rumsfeld has run the worst war ever prosecuted by the US and has Generals left right and centre calling for his resignation, but he refuses to go. Trish Hewitt is delivering a crash course in 'brazening-it-out' so shocking it could stun a rhino at fifty yards. De Villepin's labour reforms nearly destroyed Paris, yet he and his glorious haircut still grace the corridors of power, and as for Berlusconi's election performance, only one word will do - 'woah'.
                         
'Brazenness' is the word. As the General said, "Oh well - if all else fails, a complete inability to look facts in the face will have to see us through". It's a very great shame our current crop of politicians seem determined to cling to this incredibly damaging mantra with the tenacity of very determined limpets.
                 
Yours etc.,
                    
Spinoff.

12:25 Posted in News | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this

30/03/2006

Identity crisis

We are to have ID cards. After the House of Lords repeatedly sent ID legislation back down to the lower house, a compromise has been reached. Now, after 2010, when renewing a passport you will automatically have to apply for the ID card as well.
                                              
Spinoff - or at least this Spinoffite - is against the ID card, describing it previously as (and forgive me if memory fails, as it frequently does), "a complete cowpat of an idea". Which it is. A nasty one.
                              
The ID card is a pointless waste of vast amounts of money, it will not make us safer and it will provide a handy shortcut for people looking to rip us off by assuming our identity. To update that great, albeit fictional, Elizabethan exclamation, "ID cards? Pooey".
                                     
However, the debate is interesting for reasons other than the government's blithering stupidity. In fact the government's approach - fingers in ears, eyes closed and shouting "la la la la, not listening, can't hear you!" - is becoming very much the norm.  
                             
Much more interesting is the oppo. I  mean, who would possibly have thought the Tories would be taking to task a Labour government over a point of civil liberty? Who would have thought that, eh? Because that's what's happening. Sort of.
                                            
'Fascist Robot' David Davis has announced that if the Tories win the next election they'll be tearing up ID card legislation. This is as encouraging as it is surprising. Perhaps less surprisingly, the Lib Dems also object. A "ridiculous incursion of the state on the individual," was how Simon Hughes described the card project.
                                       
Another surprise - the Lords. In the face of a quite devastating prolix of political windbaggery from the government, the Lords has retorted with an equally dizzying prolix of political windbaggery, sending the legislation down five times.
                                               
Who would have thought it? Who would have thought that the Upper Chamber, that bastion of Old Boy networks, anti-democratic noodlings and disgusting, outdated privilege would have ever assumed the role of Defender of the Plebs (Plebis defensor?)
                                         
Who would have though that the institution the Blair government has set about reforming with a febrile, swivel-eyed zeal in the name of accountability and modernity has been the only institution standing between the UK and a very nasty and insidious piece of legislation indeed?
                                                      
Home Secretary Charles Clarke, (described recently to this Spinoffite by a member of the Home Office as being "quite simply a very fat, very unfriendly man,") has called the deal a "sensible and acceptable compromise".
                               
As far as Spinoff is concerned however, the only "acceptable compromise," would be for this legislation to become intimately acquainted with the interior spaces of the Home Secretary's capacious and hirsute fundament.
                              
Yours etc.,
                                       
Spinoff.

11:15 Posted in News | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this

28/03/2006

Schadenfreude

1.) Declaring Victory

"Iraq Is All but Won; Now What?"
(Los Angeles Times headline, 4/10/03)

"Now that the combat phase of the war in Iraq is officially over, what begins is a debate throughout the entire U.S. government over America's unrivaled power and how best to use it."
(CBS reporter Joie Chen, 5/4/03)

"Congress returns to Washington this week to a world very different from the one members left two weeks ago. The war in Iraq is essentially over and domestic issues are regaining attention."
(NPR's Bob Edwards, 4/28/03)

"Tommy Franks and the coalition forces have demonstrated the old axiom that boldness on the battlefield produces swift and relatively bloodless victory. The three-week swing through Iraq has utterly shattered skeptics' complaints."
(Fox News Channel's Tony Snow, 4/13/03)

"The only people who think this wasn't a victory are Upper Westside liberals, and a few people here in Washington."
(Charles Krauthammer, Inside Washington, WUSA-TV, 4/19/03)

"We had controversial wars that divided the country. This war united the country and brought the military back."
(Newsweek's Howard Fineman--MSNBC, 5/7/03)

"We're all neo-cons now."
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)

"The war was the hard part. The hard part was putting together a coalition, getting 300,000 troops over there and all their equipment and winning. And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but it is not as hard as winning a war."
(Fox News Channel's Fred Barnes, 4/10/03)

"Oh, it was breathtaking. I mean I was almost starting to think that we had become inured to everything that we'd seen of this war over the past three weeks; all this sort of saturation. And finally, when we saw that it was such a just true, genuine expression. It was reminiscent, I think, of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And just sort of that pure emotional expression, not choreographed, not stage-managed, the way so many things these days seem to be. Really breathtaking."


(Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly, appearing on Fox News Channel on 4/9/03, discussing the pulling down of a Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad, an event later revealed to have been a U.S. military PSYOPS operation--Los Angeles Times, 7/3/04)


2.) Mission Accomplished?

"The war winds down, politics heats up.... Picture perfect. Part Spider-Man, part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan. The president seizes the moment on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific."
(PBS's Gwen Ifill, 5/2/03, on George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech)

"We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple. We're not like the Brits."
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 5/1/03)

"He looked like an alternatively commander in chief, rock star, movie star, and one of the guys."
(CNN's Lou Dobbs, on Bush's 'Mission Accomplished' speech, 5/1/03)

 

 -- ALL THE ABOVE TAKEN FROM fair.org

Yours etc.,

 

Spinoff.


 

10:20 Posted in News | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this

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