Most Scots know where the blame lies, except for the 1 in 8 Labour diehards who are oblivious to what was done to them under the thirteen year New Labour regime.
We have a real choice in Scotland in May 2011 - to choose again the party that stands outside this corrupt UK power structure of ConLibs and 'New Generation' Labour. The English have no real choice, but we do have one.
Cut through the fog of lies and misinformation that Labour and the ConLibs will spread over Scotland before the Holyrood elections - reject those that brought us to this pass, Labour and the ConLibs, and vote for the SNP.
Linda Norgrove's death touched us all - a young, idealistic woman from the island of Lewis, born in Altnaharra, Sutherland - a fellow Scot, intelligent, committed, with a bright future ahead of her - a future that now, tragically, will never be realised We should also remember that at least two other women were killed in this rescue attempt, but because they were Afghan women, we will never know who they were, what they were, and what they could have become.
Yesterday and this morning the media gave huge prominence to the initial version of events put out by the American forces. The tabloids could hardly conceal their delight, under a mask of grief, at the opportunity to run headlines like "murdered by the Taliban", "killed by Al Quaeda" etc. and The Herald, the one remaining Scottish quality newspaper, ran a front page story that accepted uncritically at face value the version of events provided to them by the ISAF task force. Any journalist worth their salt would at least have looked hard at the assertions about the hostage takers killing Linda, or detonating their suicide vests, on the old principle that the dominant force in a military engagement writes the narrative to serve their own ends.
But it is worth recognising that our democracy still permitted the truth to emerge, and it is to General Petraeus’s credit that he went beyond the first, predictable version of events, and sought the truth, which is still emerging.
That the Taliban are capable of such a brutal murder I do not doubt for a moment, nor that Linda's kidnapping was an act of utter cynicism by her captors, with no regard for the fact that this incredibly brave young woman was there to unselfishly serve the people of Afghanistan. They are therefore ultimately responsible for the events that led to her death.
But questions must now be asked about the strategic and tactical judgments that led to the decision to mount an assault in darkness on Linda's captors instead of following the route of negotiation that had earlier led to the release of other hostages, after intervention by tribal elders. Such operations are fraught with risk, the primary danger being that the hostage or hostages will be inadvertently killed. The Iranian embassy siege and assault by the SAS in London many years ago was a model of how this can achieved the desired result. As the ex-SAS man on the programme sadly observed, one thing the rescuers don't do is throw grenades.
The sight and sound of William Hague, our new Foreign Secretary, inflated with Churchillian pomposity, attempting to gloss over the clear inadequacies of the judgements that led to this tragic failure sicken me. Churchill, as a young man, saw active service, placed his life at risk in the Boer War, and was captured then escaped. William Hague is a precocious schoolboy grown into a right-wing Tory, who has made himself rich by his undoubted public speaking talents, but he has never seen any active military service as far as I know, has never been in harms way, and all his rhetoric seems hollow and, frankly, revolting in the present situation.
We needs some answers, for Linda's sake, for her parents sake, and for all our sakes.
(Iman and Imam – a slight variation in spelling but a vital distinction in meaning. Iman means faith, Imam means leader, something not always recognised by Western journalists and commentators. Panellist Ajmal Masroor is an Imam and a politician.)
Does UK behaviour contribute to terrorism – are we partially responsible for home-grown terrorists?
My reflex response is Yes, with the rider that UK behaviour is one of the principle causes of home-grown terrorism, but since that is begging the question, let’s listen to some of the arguments.
The forum is Sunday Morning, the replacement for The Big Debate, which I criticised in its initial format and structuring, but which has since improved significantly.
The other significant contributor to home-grown terrorism and to conflict all over the globe, is of course, religion, a fact which is usually glossed over, even on a programme like Sunday Morning, which has a religious basis. What the major world religions have demonstrated, over the millennia, is an undoubted propensity for attacking and killing each other.
The main players in this endless blood feud are the Christians, the Muslims and the Jews, all three of which are derived from the same root traditions.
A departure from this unholy trinity was of course the conflict following the partition of the India into India and Pakistan in 1948. Buddhists, while regularly persecuted by others, rarely, if ever, have been the aggressors. We might of course add the behaviour of Japan under Hirohito and the Shinto religion, but this owes more to the militaristic, nationalistic, quasi-religious cult of the Bushido (dreamt up by a converted Japanese Quaker with an American wife and living in Philadephia) that exploited Shinto and Buddhist religions, and the emperor.
But let the participants in this little aspect of the great debate speak for themselves -
I ought to like and respect someone like Ann McKechin – a guid Scots lassie, a lawyer by profession (Scots Law at Strathclyde University), widely experienced in politics and representing the Glasgow North constituency.
But I find it hard to do either. She has been in Westminster since 2001 – the year of the Afghanistan invasion, and has been a loyal member of the Blair and Brown governments. No MP survived and prospered in either regime, as she has done, without submerging their liberal instincts and the values that used to be held by the People’s Party.
Who can touch pitch, and not be defiled by it ?
Corinthians
Her voting record shows the contradictions and the struggle with conscience that bedevilled some of the members of the Blair/Brown regimes’ more principled MPs.
She supported gay rights, was anti-hunting, sort of against Trident, and wanted an elected House of Lords, and to her credit, three years into her career, voted strongly against the Iraq War. I applaud her unreservedly for that.
But when the career chips were down – and you can bet they were down - she supported the most illiberal Labour regimes ever to have disgraced their party, Westminster and betrayed the country in the other contemptible things that defined Blair, Brown and New Labour.
She voted strongly
for Labour’s anti-terrorism laws
for a stricter asylum system
for allowing ministers to intervene in (i.e. intimidate) inquests
for ID cards
against laws to stop climate change
and she voted very strongly against an investigation into the Iraq War.
She was Jim Murphy’s right-hand woman in the Scottish Office, and together with the series of Labour apparatchiks - Wendy Alexander, Iain Gray - who replaced the men of stature who once led Labour in Holyrood - Donald Dewar and Henry McLeish – she actively participated and supported the blocking of almost every initiative by the SNP government under Alex Salmond to address the fundamental problems facing the Scottish people.
Here she is, attempting to justify the contemptible, politically expedient opposition to minimum pricing on alcohol, something supported by just about every objective Scottish institution – the Police, the Health Service, the churches, etc.
Ann McKechin has now been rewarded for all of this by Ed Miliband by becoming the Shadow Scottish Secretary, and will sit beside the members of the New Labour Scottish Old Guard who were up to their necks in that betrayal of Scotland, – Murphy, Alexander et al – and will become Westminster’s woman in Scotland, if Labour are re-elected instead of being Scotland’s woman in Westminster.
I plan to say something more substantial on this worrying topic, based on the terrifying revelations in Channel Four’s recent Dispatches programme, but meanwhile, Question Time had some highly relevant exchanges on the matter.
I noted the irony that Max Mosley – whose political opinions I respect – took on the News of the World and won over his private life, in marked contrast to poor Tommy and Gail Sheridan, who took them on and won what looks like being a Pyrrhic victory, and a very short-lived one at that. Whatever the truth of the Sheridan affair, he appears not to have helped himself or his loyal wife by the way he handled it.
Whatever he did or didn’t do, my sympathies lie with him and Gail, not with the News of the World.
His political career is in ruins, and that small, but sometimes worthy and idealistic segment of the voice of working people is wrecked along with him. With friends like Tommy had, who needs enemies?
But there always appears to be that Achilles Heel in extreme left politics. It’s sad …
Apropos Mosley and Sheridan, I am reminded of the remark of an American boss of mine once when someone commented on the sexual pecadilloes of a colleague - "Well, Pete, the best guys always have trouble keeping their pecker in their pants ...". He probably reprised that opinion when President Bill Clinton was having some little local difficulties.
Bye bye, Baroness - Charles Kennedy's prediction. “She’s just not up to the job …”
Please let it be soon ... If I have to listen to that unstoppable torrent of words for much longer, I don't think I could stand it. Even David Dimbleby had trouble shutting her up on Question Time last night.
How many members did you say the Tories had, Sayeeda? Still don't know? How strange! Funny, the Labour Party in Scotland has suffered the same confusion, even amnesia.
Michael Heseltine and Ken Loach go at it, head-to-head, on the impending cuts and their impact on the poor of the UK – the undeserving poor, a brutal concept from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, which mercifully died in the 20th century under the intellectual force and human values of the Webbs,Beveridge, and what used to be the People’s Party, Labour.
But the idea of the undeserving poor never died in Tory hearts, and now it has been insidious revised by Cameron - aided by the political Quislings that used to be the Liberal Democrats under Clegg – under the cloak of the nonsense about The Big Society.
Heseltine starts in his usual opening mode of calm reasonableness, but under the relentless, gentle force of argument from Ken Loach, descends rapidly into hectoring, aggressive name-calling.
Michael Heseltine will be remembered by posterity – if he is remembered at all – for brandishing the Mace in the Commons and for being an ally of Margaret Thatcher as she destroyed jobs, whole industries and communities leaving the way open for unbridled greed and self-interest in the 1980s, and paving the way for what Ken Loach accurately called Tories Light – New Labour under the Blair/Brown Gang.
Thatcher at least only fouled up Britain – Blair and Brown fouled up the world and are responsible for, at a minimum estimate, the deaths of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions.
Heseltine is probably the archetypal self-made Tory, as contrasted with the ancient land-owning class, a man described contemptuously by another Tory minister – Alan Clark - early in his career, as “a man who who bought his own furniture”. He made his money by property speculation, buying and selling hotels.
Loach is a highly-committed, crusading dramatist and filmmaker, with an unrivalled body of television and film work to his credit, including some of the most – perhaps the most – memorable and effective social documentaries of the 1960s. He never succumbed to the blandishments of Hollywood. He is a great artist, and will always be remembered for his work and his commitment to the poor and the most vulnerable in our society
Watching them debate, in a short, but riveting seven minutes, I saw all that is great and all that is contemptible in modern Britain, in its rotten political system, and its Establishment.
Heseltine said, in response to Loach’s simple, but devastatingly accurate observation that a tax of 5% on the top 10% of the wealthy would wipe out the deficit, that the ‘wealth creators’ would leave the UK and go elsewhere.
If only they would, including the bankers and speculators who got us into this mess.
For God’s sake, go go!
Let Scotland escape from the cynical, unequal UK before it is too late.
Tobias – there a name one doesn’t often come across. But hold on, isn’t Toby its diminutive? There are lots of Tobys, not counting the jugs. And there was Toby in the West Wing – a passionate man of liberal values. There’s Tobias Mead, of Britain’s Got Talent notoriety.
Tobias comes from the Hebrew Biblical name טוביה which becomes in Greek Τοβίας - it means Yahweh is good i.e. God is good. If God exists, and is good, then he or she has some explaining to do when contemplating the religious wars that ravage our little planet.
In fact, if God is Yahwehand Allah and the Christian god – usually just called God or God the Father - not to mention a few hundred others, give or take a god or two, then He (or is it She) really must have a word with His most dedicated followers in Israel, in the Muslim world and in the West about settling their differences amicably, instead of massacring each other at regular intervals and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and unspeakable horror to wreak further carnage, called – in the euphemism to end all euphemisms – the nuclear deterrent.
However, I digress, and in the process offend many good people who prefer not to have to consider such fundamental questions.
Let’s come down to earth and have a look at a more mundane Tobias, one Tobias Ellwood, Parliamentary aide to Liam Fox, UK supremo of WMDs, warship and all things designed to attack other nations - called Defence of the Realm – and custodian of the defence budget.
Poor old Liam must at times wish he was a humble doctor again, ideally a country GP, handing out pills and comforting his patients in a quiet Scottish country village, instead of trying to balance the conflicting needs of sustaining Trident as the emblem of power in the remnants of the British Empire, aircraft carriers as a lynchpin of the Tory - and apparently all the other parties’ - job creation scheme, and the embarrassing requirement to stop starving our brave boys of critical equipment in the illegal, immoral wars they are sent to fight in foreign climes. Leaked letters may have been one little weapon in this struggle, even if it backfired a little.
Who better to stonewall to the media on all this than a New Yorker with a European education in Vienna and Bonn, and a former British Army captain, one Tobias Ellwood? Tobias left the Army in 1995, and thus missed the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan by six years. (He may well have faced combat with the Green Jackets between 19991 and 1995 – I don’t know whether he saw combat in this period, but I’m sure he served honourably.)
Today, Tobias faced the politician’s nightmare adversary, Andrew Ferguson Neill. (Paxman has long since become a caricature of his former incisive self.)
Tobias turned out to be an exponent of the torrent of words technique to attempt to overwhelm interviewers, one used by Baroness Warsi, Chairman of the Tory Party, who doesn’t know how many members the Party has. The technique has not been working well for its practitioners of late, since under pressure, it descends into the frantic babbling defence. The Baroness has already failed spectacularly on the electoral fraud allegations debacle, and now today on whether or not Tory Party membership has declined under Cameron.
Poor old Toby must think that God was not so good to him today, since he rapidly followed the same downward path in the face of Andrew Neill’s implacable questioning.
The torrent of words technique fails the Baroness yet again - she doesn't know how many members the Tory Party has. Andrew Neil unkindly point out that she is Chairman of the Party.
The Tories have now raised obfuscation to the status of an art, especially since the coalition - or to put it another way, disingenuousness now reigns supreme.
Lieutenant Mark Evison died as a result of a misconceived mission by his superiors and failures of equipment and communications. He displayed outstanding courage in the face of fire, and during his needlessly long wait for an air ambulance. He was loved by his platoon, and his men exhibited bravery by carrying him over open ground under fire to the compound.
This fine young man exhibited true heroism and professionalism, but was betrayed by the the politicians who sent him into this misconceived war, this benighted land, then failed to support him. He was a Welsh Guard, and a brother in arms - and death - to Fusilier Gordon Gentles, a Scot who was also betrayed by the UK government and the MOD.
Get the troops out - now.
This was one more tragic component of Blair, Brown and Labour's poisoned legacy to the UK.
Mark Evison is a true hero, betrayed by his country - his was not to reason why - his was but to do or die.
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