A chronic problem

Britain, today, does not have a coherent defence and security policy. Parliament is not interested – the only MPs who turn up to defence debates are the ones on the Defence Select Committee, and they are chiefly interested in defence industrial policy i.e. getting jobs for their own constituencies. (Americans, with their gift for the pithy turn of phrase, would call this pork.) The MoD is not interested in defence – the civil servants who run the place are merely on their way to higher and greater things: a Deputy-Secretaryship at Health, a Permanent-Secretaryship at Transport, maybe a nice quango. The Government is not interested, which is why the Minister of Defence is a part-timer. The Foreign Office, which ought to be in charge of upholding British interests to foreigners, mainly sees its job as representing foreign interests against Britain. The public is not interested – understandably so: abroad is a long way away for most people, and no-one in authority is giving any kind of lead. Consequently we blunder from one crisis to the next, and always the PBI to bail us out. Here is one piece of evidence to that effect.

 

But this is nothing new. Very few British politicians of the past century have had any kind of strategic vision. They have mostly regarded defence as something nasty and embarrassing, best avoided. That was already becoming true even before 1914, and since 1918 has been the default setting. Only a handful of Prime Ministers (certainly no other Ministers) have had any kind of vision or focus. Churchill, Attlee, Thatcher and Blair were lucky, in a sense – they had a clear-cut issue before them and an over-riding priority to pursue. Attlee and Blair had the job (which they actually did well) of setting the parameters for British policy at the start of a long conflict: Churchill and Thatcher found their conflicts already running and simply determined on a more vigorous prosecution thereof. But even they had to work in a context of a substandard defence industrial capacity, to name but one impediment.  

 

Enough carping. What would a sensible security policy look like? In the first place, it would require a bigger stick. And here I realise that the problem is not something that can be addressed simply at the policy level – for instance, by putting the military requirement first in procurement decisions, rather than (as at present) putting political and economic requirements first (which is how we end up with overruns and overspends as with Nimrod, Apache, SA80A1, Typhoon etc. etc. etc.). The problem comes earlier, with the shared presuppositions about defence held by politicians, bureaucrats, commentators and the public.

The first issue is about the very nature of the armed forces. What is the value the nation receives from money spent on army or fleet? Is it wasted if we spend a lot of money on a weapons system (and on the training of the crew needed to operate it) that rarely or never sees action? No-one would dream of saying, ‘well, we spent hundreds of pounds last year insuring the house. It didn’t burn down, so obviously that was money wasted’. Because that is just what the forces do: they insure.

 

One of the most witless things I have read in recent years was a comment – where I now forget – that the European foreign policy elite sees war as the failure of policy whereas the US policy elite sees military action as a potential tool of policy. The writer seemed to think this showed the superior wisdom and humanity of the EU. It is superficially attractive, but, as I say, witless. It is witless because it leads one to pretend that a policy is working long past the point where it has in fact become actively damaging. If one gets to the point where the choice is a) persistence in a failed policy which allows an open enemy to grow stronger or b) war, then it is far from obvious that (a) is the right choice (though it might be under certain special circumstances). Yet it is the choice that the Euro-outlook predisposes towards, since (b) is pre-defined as failure.

Such an outlook actually makes war (and warlike acts, such as hostage-taking, which has been openly practised in recent years against British subjects by tyrannical governments such as Iran and Sudan without consequences) more likely, by emboldening one’s enemies and making them think they can get more than you are prepared to give. The Euro-outlook only makes sense if one assumes that everyone is reasonable and has reasonable demands. It is a matter of common knowledge that this is not so. The demands of the Southern slaveholders of 1860 were not reasonable; the demands of the Communists and Fascists were not reasonable; the demands of the IRA or the Argentine Junta were not reasonable. (Here I define ‘reasonable’ as ‘respecting the Golden Rule’, that is recognising that the other party has legitimate rights and concerns of equal value to one’s own.) The demands of the Iranian theocracy are not reasonable, and they are not alone in their unreasonableness.

 

If the Euro-outlook became general throughout all the world, of course, it would be a good thing. But it is not general today. We may need all the insurance we can get.

Of henges and hillforts

England is probably not specially endowed with Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments. I don’t know how many barrows, henges and hill-forts there might be in other countries, but there are more than enough in England to satisfy even an avid ruin-bibber.

Everyone knows Stonehenge, but it is only the best preserved of many such places. I recently read Mike Pitt’s book Hengeworld, a good read, full of such interesting insights as the fact that, when you dig down, the bases of the Stonehenge sarsen megaliths are shaped rather like the business end of hand-axes. The Stonehenge sarsens are the end-point of millennia of development of stone technology, so it is fitting that they should resemble the biggest stone tools ever made.

For me, though, Stonehenge is hardly worth visiting. Not being able to get close up to the stones, the way (one presumes) they were meant to be experienced, reduces the interest. Much more fascinating to go down the road to Avebury, which is vaster and just as old, or to the Danebury hill-fort, a vast relic of the Celtic invasions (probably) – though whether built by the Celts or those they displaced, it would be hard to say. It is always quite stunning to remember that Avebury was as ancient when Danebury was built as Danebury is now.

The Trundle hill-fort outside Chichester will always be dear to me. It was the first prehistoric monument my daughter ever visited, unless you count Wimbledon railway station.  

In fact there is no shortage of oldness wherever you go in England. Less than an hour (on a good day) from Manchester is Arbor Low, for me as evocative a place as I have ever visited. At the top of a hill one drops a coin into the box in the farmer’s backyard, walks through the farmyard and comes to a classic bank-and-ditch containing a stone circle.

 

At some point in history, for some reason, every single stone was toppled over.  

The difference between being pro-business and pro-market

In the twentieth century there was a mostly unstated assumption in most Western discourse that to be pro-business meant being pro-market. That made some sense when the main point of reference for political discourse was socialism – one was either for or against it. It followed that, since socialism stood against big business and the free market, the demands of partisanship required the supporters of one to support the other, at least in theory.

This leads to no end of hypocrisy, of course. All business people, big or small, say they like the market economy, in theory. It lets us operate freely, they say, and competition is healthy. Of course, our industry is special. We have unique circumstances. It’s a national strategic priority, and have you heard about all this unfair foreign competition we’re getting? So really we need a little levelling of the playing field – the odd subsidy, a bit of a quota, a modest tariff. Do you really want to be the politician who throws thousands of people out of work?

 

Sometimes they even have a valid case. But in general, the public interest lies with the market rather than with business. After all, the public are the market. The market is not some economist’s abstraction: it is nothing other than ordinary people deciding what to buy. The very fact that the public are the market, however, is also the reason that business gets its way more often than it should. Because the public are many, by definition, and the benefits of a free-market approach tend to be diffuse, whereas any particular business, or even any particular industry (in an economically advanced country – this doesn’t necessarily apply to peasant economies) involves relatively few people for whom the benefits of special treatment are concentrated. The classic case of this, in the advanced countries (defining advanced as those countries with highly diversified economies) is agricultural policy. The EU’s CAP is the most familiar example to us, US farm policy is no better, the Japanese have perhaps the daftest policies of all.

Perhaps it is encouraging that there everyone agrees that the CAP deserves to be killed, since it shows that it is possible to get cross-party consensus for a pro-market position. Or perhaps we just don’t have enough farmers to make the (ahem) pro-business case.

 

To return to my original intent: the end of socialism as a practical project has meant the clarification of this issue. Today, the key political-economic debate and contest in the West is: capitalists against the free market. We see this in a myriad of forms, but always the same substance. Northern Rock persuading the government to give them access to the bottomless pit of money otherwise known as the taxpayer; EdF enjoying limitless protection from the French government in defiance of the EU treaties; the way that government procurement in Italy always seems to mysteriously favour the same people. We are lucky, of course. The rich world can afford this kind of corruption – which is what it is. The poor countries can’t, but suffer it anyway.  

Another piece of the puzzle

My suspicion that there was a deal between Israel and Syria gets more suspicious. It is straining belief to think that the Syrian secret police would allow both Mughniyeh and Suleiman to be killed within a few months of each other. My guess is that Assad Junior is clearing house in the traditional Baathist manner, preliminary to some grand bargain with Israel. Although it couldn’t happen to more deserving people, I am unsure of the wisdom of making a peace deal with the Assad regime. It will probably mean Israel and the West will probably end up supporting a nasty Middle-Eastern tyranny that rules without the consent of its people – again.

Comparing dynasties

Interesting coincidence this week: the BBC is broadcasting two new dramas, House of Saddam and The Tudors. The temptation to compare the two is irresistible.

Both families came to power through violence, without any strong degree of legitimacy, even by the standards of their time and place. Both killed off politically dangerous individuals to consolidate their power (Edmund de la Pole, the Duke of Suffolk, most of the al-Sadr family) and carried on doing so throughout their reigns, usually with a great deal of fanfare. Members of the family itself, and near relations, were not safe.

So it is not on the whole surprising that I can never view the portraits of the early Tudors (with their assorted hangers-on) at the National Portrait Gallery without reflecting on what a bunch of crooks they look like. And yet, to draw an equivalence between the two families would be quite unfair to the Tudors. For there to be a real equivalence, one would have to imagine an alternate history running something like the below.

Having consolidated power, Henry Tudor bankrupts the country with a long and futile war against France, encouraged by the Holy Roman Emperor, the Pope and the Sultan, who each have their own agendas. Suspecting the Welsh of plots, he obliterates every village in Powys and Gwynedd, and ethnically cleanses Cardiff. He then signs a truce with France and decides to sort out England’s economic and financial woes by invading and annexing the Netherlands, thereby enraging his former supporters. The Holy Roman Emperor leads a huge army to drive the English out of Antwerp. Henry signs a peace treaty, which he violates constantly for the next twelve years. Most of the North and Midlands revolts, but Henry represses the revolt with extreme cruelty. Henry then proclaims a great victory and builds massive palaces all over the country, most of them unused. As no-one will trade with England any longer (at least not openly), the economy decays, causing great suffering.

A new Emperor, having for various reasons lost patience with the England Problem, invades the country. The English put up relatively little resistance.  Henry’s sons, Arthur and Henry, are tracked down and killed hiding out in York. Henry himself is caught hiding down a hole in Shropshire.

That, at any rate, is how things might have gone. The Tudors were, indeed, a bunch of crooks: but they were not in the same division as Saddam & Co.

On management

Management is a form of mental derangement characteristic of, but not confined to, those persons whose job title includes the word ‘manager’. Here is a case in point, of a company developing software to spy on its freelancers working at home.

Managers are usually either pitied or feared. The saving grace of this kind of management fad is that it is usually self-limiting: the companies which adopt this sort of thing collapse messily. Enron, for instance, had an insane staff policy called ‘rank and yank’. Under this system, all staff were appraised annually, and those in the bottom 20% were fired. Rank and yank did not cause Enron’s demise, but it was a good indicator of the hyper-macho corporate ethos which did.

We’re probably not doomed

There are parallels between the demographic doom peddled by pessimists of the political right and the climate doom played up by their mirror-images of the left. I read a fair number of American conservative websites and there appear to be quite a few people over there who think Britain has already surrendered to the jihad, or at any rate will inevitably do so, along with the rest of Europe, as our Muslim population increases, as it will, over the next few decades. Similarly there is something like panic in the comments pages of the Guardian about climate change. Both sets of doom-mongers propose major shifts in public policy to spare us from the doom de jour.

 

The underlying assumption of both groups is: ‘if present trends continue’. But of course they won’t. They hardly ever do. Over the next few decades, the ways we generate and use energy will be transformed. Climate change will happen, of course, but on nothing like the scale threatened.

 

Likewise Britain, and Europe, will get a bit more Muslim, nominally at least, but the Triumph of Jihad scenario is ridiculous. The assumption is that the Muslim propensity to want sharia law will remain at least as high as today, or even increase. But this assumes that Muslims are impervious to knowledge about the effects of sharia and jihad in practice. It assumes that European Muslims don’t know (or do know and actually like) the joys of living under the Taliban et al. The message takes time to get through, of course. But there are signs already that jihadism has become very unpopular, such as the Pew global attitudes poll which found plummeting support for al-Qaeda and suicide bombing throughout the Muslim world between 2002 and 2005. That poll relates mainly to Muslims outside Europe, and it shows a persisting, idiotic tendency to blame America for everything, but it shows that Muslim hostility towards modernity is not inevitable.

 

Furthermore, the current generation of Islamist head-bangers are going to have trouble keeping their kids in line (so long as we do not give in to the madness of allowing local sharia jurisdictions – which will multiply the power of the head-bangers enormously). They will revolt. It’s what kids do.

 

There is no room for complacency, though. Europe’s Muslim population must be given a culture to integrate into. It will be easier if we do a few things that we ought to do anyway, such as improving the position of marriage (for instance, by making parental leave rights fully transferable between married couples), increasing the legal disincentives to alcohol abuse (such as by reducing the drink-driving limit to zero) and eliminating the provision of information about government services (local and central) in any languages other than English (and Welsh in Wales). Culture matters.

A collection of random thoughts

At Victoria station there is a large poster of Paul McKenna proclaiming ‘I can make you thin’ advertising a ‘live weight loss event’. I doubt if there is any tackier way to make a living, and would rather like to put a rocket through the smirking twerp. (Through the face on the poster, that is, for avoidance of doubt.)

 

James Delingpole’s book Coward on the Beach is a good read – I got through it in a day – but there are a few annoying glitches. Coward probably could not have interviewed kamikaze pilots in early 1944 when the ‘Special Attack’ missions only got underway later the same year (accounts vary of exactly when, but it seems to have been in October 1944). His little sister’s friends could not have been killed by a doodlebug (V1 flying bomb) before D-Day as the V1 bombardment only began in mid-June 1944. Overall, the book, though well-written, feels very much of its time: Coward talks and thinks like an early-twenty-first-century young man who happens to find himself in 1944. But that can hardly be helped. Verdict: a good page-turner especially for explosion-nerds.

 

There are myriad stories of courage, skill and duty that have come out of Iraq: and the ones that get written down are presumably only a minority. This one is perhaps the best I have read lately, about an Iraqi officer with a penchant for disabling roadside bombs. Favourite line: ‘bombs don’t normally talk back’. After so many decades of dictatorship and war, it sometimes seems surprising that there are any good men left in Iraq. Evidently, though, there are. The best of luck to Major Fakhir: even with only one and a half legs, he is more of a man than any terrorist.

United Humanity

Human kind, it seems, can never be united on any question of how to organise itself, that is, on any social, economic, or political question. ‘Poverty is terrible. We should all unite to end poverty,’ one might say. The first part is true, the second is desirable, the whole is unworkable. If we say we should end poverty, we will instantly start to disagree about how to do so.

 

If we wish to unite humanity, to end or at least reduce the incidence of war, we need a project that will guide the energies otherwise used for conflict into a constructive channel. This assumes that wars happen – at least in part – for the reason suggested by, I think, Aldous Huxley: because people get bored with peaceful, ordinary life. I happen to think that it is foolish to get bored by ordinary life – work, family, religion and sport, to name but four common areas of interest, ought to provide quite enough stimulation for any reasonable person – but I also think that people in general, and young men in particular, are attracted by foolishness. I should know: I was a young man once, indeed by some measures I still am one.

 

But (to return to the point) the constructive channel cannot be any political or socio-economic project: it would be impossible to get sufficiently shared agreement about the tasks required. Instead, the project would have to be technical. A case in point is the eradication of smallpox. That was done, even despite the Cold War, because both the free world and the communists could agree it was a good thing. No-one ever tried to found a pro-disease political movement (with the partial exception of some of the zanier sort of Greens. Actually, I recall reading somewhere that the Taliban banned vaccinations for polio in Afghanistan: the resumption of such programmes has apparently caused a substantial drop in the infant mortality rate there since 2001).

 

What would work? Disease-eradication programmes are a good start, but they aren’t on the scale needed. What is needed is something that requires large-scale participation, even if vicarious, and an easily-defined outcome which brings a clear benefit to humanity in general – something that can be summed up in a sound bite.

 

Which is why I am in favour of crewed space flight. Mars awaits. It has water, so it can be colonised. Let’s get on with it.

Was there a deal?

Looking at Israel’s northern front (Syria-Hezbollah-Lebanon) over the last ten months, I confess myself baffled, or even more baffled than usual. Consider: Israel destroys Syria’s nuclear facility, but says very little about it, and Syria says even less. Imad Mughniyeh is assassinated in Damascus by persons unknown. Hezbollah attacks its political rivals in Lebanon. Those rivals then allow Hezbollah into the government. Israel and Syria start peace talks. Then there is the recent prisoner release, in which Israel appears to have got a very poor exchange.

 

Or did they? It might just be wishful thinking on my part, as I really don’t want to think that the Israelis are so demoralised as to release a sadistic child-murderer in return for two mutilated corpses, but I wonder if some kind of deal was done after the reactor attack. Assad was given an ultimatum. Syria would arrange Mughniyeh’s demise (better late than never where he was concerned) followed, at a respectable interval, by the prisoner release. (Otherwise, the US would make the full story of Syria’s nuclear dabbling public.) Knowing that the prisoner release was in the works, Hezbollah felt able to launch their mini-coup in Lebanon, knowing that there was now no risk of Israeli intervention.

 

There might be a silver lining to the cloud of Samir Kuntar’s release. According to this report, he has vowed to renew the fight against Israel. That makes him a legitimate target. My best wishes go to any Israeli soldier or pilot who gets Kuntar into his sights.