Anyone can see what the position is. The Government simply cannot make up their mind, or they cannot get the Prime Minister to make up his mind. So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent. So we go on preparing more months and years – precious, perhaps vital to the greatness of Britian – for the locusts to eat.
Winston Churchill — 1936
The Parallax Brief falls into that category of males who are embarrassingly leaden and graceless on a dance floor. Ms Parallax Brief is a wonderful dancer, which would be a big positive if she didn’t love it and expect the Parallax Brief to dance with her at every opportunity. Worse, of the Parallax Brief’s drinking buddies, one danced semi-professionally while at university, and another is a regular at salsa evenings, casting the Parallax Brief’s syncopated plodding in an even crueler light.
But at least the Parallax Brief can feel comfortable that he’s not quite as bad or embarrassing as Boris Johnson, who engaged in some awesomely bad dancing at the London Mayor’s Christmas bash. The photo below is suggestive, but please follow the link to the video on the Sun website, because it might actually challenge Mandelson’s and Prescott’s toe-curling swaying to Things Can Only Get Better at the 97 victory party.
The Parallax Brief was unwell over the weekend, but one piece of polling data particularly caught his eye, and could have a tremendous effect on the outcome of the election. The consistent gold mine that is the UK Polling Report blog has the goods:
The News of the World has a new ICM poll of marginal seats in tomorrow’s paper. ICM’s sample covered the 97 seats where Labour are in first place and the Conservatives in second place, and where the Conservatives need a swing between 4% and 10%
[…]
The topline voting intention figures in these seats, with changes from the last electon, are CON 40%(+9.2), LAB 37%(-7.4), LDEM 14%(-3.8) – so a swing of 8.3% from Labour to the Conservatives. In contrast the last ICM national poll showed a national swing of 6.5%, so once again we find a slightly larger swing towards the Conservatives in the Con-Lab marginal seats they need to win. This has been pretty consistent in all polls of marginal seats in the last couple of years.
Reading this, the Parallax Brief had one of those head-slapping “of course!” moments.
A safe Labour seat is bound to have a larger number of voters which are immovable than would have a marginal. While large swings can occur in safe seats without the change in MP that would give the swing publicity (gone from a super safe seat to a really safe seat isn’t a headline), it is still necessarily the case that safe seats have a greater percentage of voters who will only ever vote one way irrespective of circumstances.
Therefore, as one moves along the constituency list, from safest to most marginal, one moves further and further away from one’s heartland, and moves into constituencies that have a higher portion of voters who may have recently, or could in the future, swing one way or the other.
Of course, all things are not equal, and local issues can matter, but in general, it follows that marginal seats are not just vulnerable because they only have a small buffer zone, but because they also have a greater volume of swing voters.
And the Parallax Brief suspects that with an unpopular, and long standing government, this may make the marginals more vulnerable than the current national polling might suggest.
A six month-long French Parliamentary report concluded that Muslim dress should be banned schools, hospitals, public transport and government offices.
From the Jakarta Globe:
“The wearing of the full veil is a challenge to our republic. This is unacceptable,” the report said. “We must condemn this excess.” The commission however stopped short of proposing broader legislation to outlaw the burqa in the streets, shopping centres and other public venues after raising doubts about its constitutionality.
…the commission called on parliament to adopt a resolution stating that the burqa was “contrary to the values of the republic” and proclaiming that “all of France is saying ‘no’ to the full veil.” The National Assembly resolution paves the way for legislation making it illegal for anyone to appear with their face covered at state-run institutions and in public transport for reasons of security.
[...]
Women who turn up at the post office or any government building wearing the full veil should be denied services such as a work visa, residency papers or French citizenship, the report recommended. Critics of the “burqa debate” have warned the measures risk stigmatising France’s six million Muslims who are already bristling at the government’s launching of a national identity debate that has exposed fears about Islam.
The Parallax Brief may not know enough about the “values of the Republic” to argue whether the burqa is contrary to them or not, but he does know that the authors of the report have produced a conclusion that is contrary to the values of western-style liberal democracy.
Western democracies are founded on a tiny clutch of magnificently simple and irreducible values, perhaps the primary of which is that a private individual has the right to do just about whatever he pleases as long as he is not infringing on the rights of others. Obviously, that’s something that is permitted to differing levels in different democracies, and which can have a variety of interpretations, but it is a belief which is integral to our way of life.
This belief even extends to activities which we view as damaging or immoral. Having unprotected sex with a great many partners is both dangerous and, many would argue, immoral, but we don’t pass a law to make illegal the activities of the nation’s lotharios.
An example more pertinent to France’s burqa debate is that we allow fascist parties to exist, despite the fact they stand against much of what we believe, and, if they ever gained power, would likely abrogate many of our freedoms: They may stand against our liberal beliefs, but our liberal beliefs lead us to conclude that we must tolerate their existence.
Similarly, in Britain, we believe that people are free to wear what they want, and free to practice their religion, and just because the burqa is a physical manifestation of a culture that is neither western nor liberal, doesn’t mean that we should ban it. Indeed, despite the fact that the Parallax Brief sides with the standard feminist view that forcing the burqa on women — or bringing up girls so they ‘want’ to wear such a thing, whichever way you want to phrase it — is absolutely against western liberal values, he also knows that our western liberal values demand we permit it. There’s no right not to be offended by clothing. A woman has the right to wear what she wants, whether that be a tiny miniskirt and top which covers barely more flesh than a bikini, or a burqa at the other end of the spectrum.
Our culture is not defined by a specific set of clothes, but by the freedom to wear virtually whichever clothes one wants. Within this context, wearing the burqa in a land with a Judeo-Christian heritage is as much a part of Western culture as kids dressed like Sid Vicious.
In his ten predictions for 2010, the Parallax Brief stuck his neck on the line and backed Esther Rantzen to become MP for Luton South. He felt that while it has been notoriously difficult for independents to win seats in modern day elections, the expenses scandal and the increasingly narrow dividing lines between the main parties might offer independents an opportunity to capture a mood of public protest. Further, Ms. Rantzen has an oven-ready high profile, and an unimpeachable background in charity work and public advocacy, which, combined with her centrist “floating-voter” politics, will enable her to take votes from both sides of the political spectrum.
Mike Smithson, of the brilliant Political Betting website, notes that Ms. Rantzen is already gaining extraordinarily positive publicity, and will likely continue to do so, which, combined with a unique political and demographic situation in the constituency, could turn it into a four-way marginal:
Looking at the 2005 notionals [for the Luton South constituency] LAB 42.8: CON 28.1: LD 22.5 this should fall easily to the Cameron juggernaut even though the incumbent Labour MP who figures so much inn the expenses affair is not standing.
Yet hugely complicating factors are the candidature of Esther Rantzen – the former “That’s Life” presenter and what happens to the very large Muslim vote at a time when Chilcott is putting the Iraq war on the agenda again.
Esther, who has always been a publicity magnet, has been getting some remarkable coverage and the chances are that this will continue until polling day.
The Parallax Brief believes this should be right. With a high profile independent entering the race, a big political defection taking voters from the first to the third placed party, and a swing away from Labour mitigated by the resignation of the tarnished incumbent, the race should be as open as any seat within the country.
Ms. Rantzen last year participated in one of Think Politics’ Twitterviews — interviews on Twitter where the questions and answers must be completed in a single tweet. If you’d like to read a transcript of that, click here.
The Pinnacle, from the Guardian:
A soldier who joined the French Foreign Legion after he was rejected by the British army on medical grounds is in line to be received into the Légion d’honneur for his bravery.
Alex Rowe, from Gloucestershire, was turned away by British recruiters as a teenager because he had a detached retina but, determined to follow a military career he signed up for the Légion étrangère ,which accepts troops from any country.
Now 43, Rowe has served in the Gulf, the former Yugoslavia and has just returned from Afghanistan, where he earned his award after fierce fighting against the Taliban.
He was previously awarded for bravery while serving in Sarajevo after braving sniper fire to run across a city plaza and shield a mother and daughter from a hail of bullets. In all, his mother said he had already received four awards for bravery.
In Afghanistan he has been fighting alongside Britons, dozens of Russians, and others from as far as Algeria and China. He was involved in a gunbattle recently in which 10 comrades were gunned down.
“We got hit from 360 degrees,” Rowe said. “Two of the Americans we were with were hit by bullets – one in the back plate, two bullets in the helmet and one in the hand.”
His family are set to visit France in the summer to watch as Rowe becomes a member of the Légion d’honneur.
And the depths, from the Augusta Chronicle:
A new professional basketball league will boasting rosters made up exclusively of white Americans has its eyes set on Augusta, but the team isn’t receiving a warm welcome.
The All-American Basketball Alliance announced in a news release Sunday evening that it intends to start its inaugural season in June and hopes Augusta will be one of 12 cities with a team.
“Only players that are natural born United States citizens with both parents of Caucasian race are eligible to play in the league,” the statement said.
[...]
Don “Moose” Lewis, the commissioner of the AABA, said the reasoning behind the league’s roster restrictions is not racism.
“There’s nothing hatred about what we’re doing,” he said. “I don’t hate anyone of color. But people of white, American-born citizens are in the minority now. Here’s a league for white players to play fundamental basketball, which they like.”
Lewis said he wants to emphasize fundamental basketball instead of “street-ball” played by “people of color.” He pointed out recent incidents in the NBA, including Gilbert Arenas’ indefinite suspension after bringing guns into the Washington Wizards locker room, as examples of fans’ dissatisfaction with the way current professional sports are run.
“Would you want to go to the game and worry about a player flipping you off or attacking you in the stands or grabbing their crotch?” he said. “That’s the culture today, and in a free country we should have the right to move ourselves in a better direction.”
The first story is of on a man who ran across a city plaza through a “hail of bullets” to protect a mother and children; who is part of an organization in which skin colour and nationality take second place to bravery, loyalty and comradeship. The second story is about a racist man who is starting an organization because he thinks that blacks are what’s wrong with sport and that America should move in a better direction, away from “their” crotch-grabbing, finger flicking culture.
Amazing what’s on display in the very same day.
Now Britain is out of Iraq, we tend to forget that there is still a bloody, desperate effort underway by the United States and the Iraq government, as it is, to stabilise the country. Just because it seems to have quietened of late, doesn’t mean the problem has gone away.
Tom Ricks, the pulitzer prize winning military correspondent and author, has written on his Foreign Policy magazine blog that he recently received an email from “A friend who doesn’t scare easily”:
“I’m afraid things are coming to a tipping point here. If the Chalibi-Iranian faction succeeds in keeping those 15 pro-Alawi Sunni parties off the ballot all bets are off. I can see a Shiia-on-Shiia civil war (with the Sunnis backing the Alawi faction) or a military coup as real possibilities. At this point, the best thing to happen would be to postpone the election. If they go ahead toward March the way they are heading, all bets are off. I don’t think Washington is fully engaged with Haiti and Afghan distracting them. A lot of bad vibes here.”
A civil war is a frightening prospect, and the idea of Iraq ending up with Chalibi running a pro-Iranian, anti-western fundamentalist dictatorship would be a sickening blow: what would all the treasure and blood spent in Iraq have been for if that was the end game?
It’s also a reminder that the big winner from George and Dick’s Mesopotamian Adventure was Iran. A powerful, stable Iraq is a bulwark to Iranian power in the region, and by weakening its neighbour, and leaving it prostrate so that Iran is free to meddle and manipulate, America has vastly improved Irans strategic position. (Not to mention that the US is now so impoverished and war weary that Iran is much less likely to have to face military interference with its nuclear weapons program.) And really, time is on Iran’s side. It would like a friendly dictatorship next door, but it can just keep meddling, keep the Iraqis killing eachother, keep the brutality simmering, and still be a strategic winner.
But what does the august Mr. Ricks think the architects of Iraq would make of this?
“What will the Doug Feiths and Richard Perles of the world say if he winds up running Iraq as an anti-American, anti-democratic, pro-Iranian leader? I’m sure they’ll find some glib, bullshitty way of blaming it on President Obama.”
It’s funny, because it’s true.
Today is the 60th anniversary of the death of one Eric Arthur Blair, better known to the world as George Orwell. He was an Eton old boy, Imperial policemen in Burma, a socialist, an advocate for the poor, a soldier in the Spanish Civil War — during which he was shot in the neck by a sniper — and author of perhaps the most important English language novel of the twentieth century.
The Parallax Brief is sure more erudite writers than he will pen far greater tributes to Orwell today, but Orwell has a special place in the Parallax Brief’s heart.
On the Parallax Brief’s first trip to Moscow several years ago, he was walking down a street and heard a voice behind him saying, “You’re English! You must be Prince Charles.” He turned around to see a wrinkled old man of about five feet seven, with a hawkish face and a slim physique. ”No, perhaps not Prince Charles, but tell me, do you know who Eric Arthur Blair is?” The Parallax Brief had to admit he did not. “He was George Orwell! You know now? In the 1970s, I left Russia for the first time on a trip to Germany to translate. One day, I slipped away from the people watching me, and bought Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. I did not dare bring them back to Moscow, because I knew the KGB would search my luggage and to have these books would have meant prison at least, so I read and memorized as much as I could.”
The old man went on to quote a seemingly endless series of passages from 1984 and Animal Farm, remembering the words he had first had to read in secrecy thirty years earlier.
The Parallax Brief was embarrassed. He had read next to nothing of Orwell, despite being privileged enough to be born in a society which offered the freedom to read just about whatever one wants. So he revisited all Orwell’s works, and was captivated.
To be blunt, the Parallax Brief believes that Nineteen Eighty Four is the most important novel of the 20th Century. It may not have been the best — though it surely would rank high — but it must be the most important. It is a truly crushing novel that elucidates the full terror of totalitarianism, details the means by which a state may assert control over its people, and punctures any modern day delusions that oppressive dictatorships are doomed to failure. It is glib to say, but if Woody Allen had been in charge of naming it, it would have been titled “Everything You Wanted to Know About Totalitarianism (But Were Afraid to Ask)”.
The influence of Nineteen Eighty-Four is immeasurable, on political thought and on language. The word Orwellian is commonplace, and phrases such as “Thought Police”, “Double Think”, “Big Brother”, “New Speak” and “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery…” have all peculated through our culture.
And if that wasn’t enough, it is also brilliant and gripping fiction, with one of the most memorable opening sentences in English literature : “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
Orwell’s essays are also essential reading, and are a wonderful medium for his succinct, direct prose. The Parallax Brief particularly recommends Politics and the English Language, in which Orwell writes on the importance of lucid and precise language.
Orwell’s complete works can be found at george-orwell.org and his articles, novels and reportages are always rewarding.
Brilliantly, George Orwell’s diaries are currently being published as a blog, as if Orwell himself was blogging on the matters of the run up to the war and the war itself.
Even today, Orwell matters.
Several weeks ago, the Parallax Brief signed an online petition to protest at the closure of British Forces Post Office facilities in mainland Europe. The service provides service personnel stationed in Europe with the same postal rates as residents of the mainland UK. The petition stated that “Withdrawal of this long established tradition will further erode personnel’s ability to communicate with their families in the UK and safe receipt of parcels etc through a secure network”.
But today, the Parallax Brief received an emailed response from Number10.gov.uk, the government’s website:
The Government remains fully committed to providing efficient and effective postal service to our armed forces, especially those serving on operations.
The Ministry of Defence is making some changes to the way BFPO services operate in order to ensure we make best use of military manpower and to ensure the service is delivered in the most efficient way possible. The drawdown of the BFPO personnel supporting the UK military in the NATO headquarters in SHAPE, Brussels, Brunssum, Ramstein, Stavanger, Karup, Rome, Milan, Lisbon, Valencia and Norfolk Virginia should achieve a saving in excess of £1M per annum. The drawdown is scheduled to be completed by September 2010, by which time we aim to have in place alternative arrangements.”
So, that’s a no, then.
The full folly of continually cutting military expenditure, caving in to the RAF and Royal Navy top brass on big ticket items designed to fight the last war, and fighting two brutal, and brutally expensive, counter-insurgency wars is only now becoming clear. In the coming months, probably mainly after the Conservatives win power and pass their promised emergency budget, the savage cuts in headline grabbing military projects such as the new aircraft carriers, the F35 stealth jets, and perhaps even the next generation of Trident subs, will get their fair share of headlines. But in the meantime, important services like the BFPO will likely disappear unnoticed.
That should not be the case.
Given that the US estimates it costs USD1 mn per year to keep a soldier in Afghanistan, surely we can find about the same to give cheap and reliable post to all our personnel in Europe?
And when it says that it “aims” to have in place alternative arrangements, what does that usually mean in government-speak?
It all seems like more shabby treatment for our heroes abroad.
The fashion industry really was a soft target for Sasha Baron-Cohen’s Bruno and Ben Stiller’s Zoolander, but it still deserved the skewering. Yet, blithely unaffected, the industry carries on in its colossally self important, fatuous ways like a dim banker in a wine bar who doesn’t realise the joke’s on him.
And nothing combines pretentiousness and tactlessness like the fashion industry.
Read the caption at below the picture the Parallax Brief screen captured above: “The Vivienne Westwood show was based on ‘homeless chic’”.
She really has outdone herself. The Parallax Brief can’t wait to buy clothes that give him a certain air of vagrancy.
Good grief. What next? “Alexander McQueen is inspired by blood diamond slave worker dress”? “John Galliano goes leukemia chic”?
The words ‘rope’, ‘money’, ‘for’, and ‘old’ spring to mind.
Comments [ 0 ]