17th December 2012
For the first time in her 60 year reign the Queen will sit in on a cabinet meeting in Downing Street tomorrow as an observer. She will be presented with a gift which members have bought to commemorate her Diamond Jubilee year.
One aspect of the Andrew Mitchell story is how The Sun and Daily Telegraph found out about the row in Downing Street that day. It seems the Metropolitan Police came into some information last Thursday which led them to arrest a policeman in the diplomatic protection group on Saturday on suspicion of misconduct in a public office. He was not on duty when the incident happened. He will appear in court next month.
There was a discussion on Today this morning about Sryia. It seems a certain amount of manouvering has started. Possibly some elements of the Syrian regime, and some of their friends in Russia, have realised they cannot win militarily and wish to negotiate the best outcome for themselves. On the other side though I think various parts of the opposition would like to see some form of forceful killer blow.
In his piece in last Friday’s FT Philip Stephens starts with the recent report of the umbrella American state security body, the National Intelligence Council, which concludes that in 2030 the States will still be the world’s primary power. However by then it will have to use persuasion much more than it does now. He predicts at that time not only China and India but Mexico, Indonesia, Turkey, Vietnam and Iran also will be be significant entities. Our real challenge in the future is to deal with those forces which do not belong within country borders, such as multinational corporations and global capital flows and networks. That means countries need to start cooperating with one another more than they have done in the past. Whether they can rise to the challenge remains to be seen.
Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party have got back into power after a break of three years taking over 300 seats in the 480 member parliament. That means they can change the country’s pacifist constitution if they wish. They are a right wing, nationalist party and will take a much tougher stance with China on territorial disputes. We will have to see how that goes.
We have 160,000 charities in the UK apparently and at the beginning of last week it was reported that in a survey of 252 of those a sixth said they might have to close next year due to public spending cuts and falling donations. The Cabinet Office response was that the charity sector cannot be immune from cuts.
One of those deep editorials in Saturday’s FT about data collection and analysis. Carefully worded I would say so as not to reach any conclusions but highlighting the dangers nonetheless. Modern technology means states, large companies and even social networks can hold a huge amount of data they may make use of. Details of how we live our lives are available like never before. Battles of privacy against freedom of action will ensue. Everyone hopes, I am sure, we will get the balance about right.
And then, blow me down, another far seeking article on the opposite page, by Robin Harding. Although central bankers and politicians kept us out of recession in 2008 by reducing interest rates to zero and introducing QE, they have not got us back on the path to growth. When all said and done they have not served us as well as they might. The precedent of Japan’s financial crash indiectly helped me in getting my book written, as I relate at the start of Chapter 7. Robin’s conclusion about their never ending financial slump in the 1990’s is that a positive psychological element might have been missing. If people felt secure in the policies articulated by their leaders and were motivated by confidence, not greed or uncertainty, they would borrow money so to get the economy moving. The thoughts at the moment are that the mantra of an inflation target should be dropped and long term growth policies adopted which would not be broken. Bankers are not politicians though and it is the latter who need our votes, so there are obviously dangers. Again, as for the editorial, you just hope the end result is about right.
Michael Portillo writes in that paper about Tory politics. Amazingly he says that for some eurosceptics it is more important that we should leave the EU than whether the Conservatives win the next election. With friends like that Mr Cameron does not need enemies. Another point that Michael makes is that Tory MPs come from a very narrow opinion base in relation to the public as a whole. That problem though should be easily solved. If we do not agree with their views we should take the trouble to tell them what we do think.
After watching Channel 4 News this evening I am sure Barack Obama wishes to do something about America’s gun laws. That is brave of him. It seems likely he will try and go back to the position that applied bewteen 1994 and 2004 when assault rifles were banned. Yesterday the President went to Newtown. He said that mass shootings should end. The only way that can happen though is for Americans themselves to change. They have no other choice. Such happenings must not be accepted as routine. He asked whether his people are prepared to look upon themselves as powerless to bring about change. That it is all too hard. Can it really be that continuing acts of irrational mass violence against strangers by one or two means that everyone else is free because, although they have guns too, they don’t use them. Sometimes it is not that dificult to make a prisoner of yourself.
Then an hour later there was a Panorama programme about the Barclay twins who live on Brecqhou, a small island off Sark. I wrote about Sark in my diary note dated 4th November 2012. It seems the brothers are the beneficial owners of several companies such as the Ritz and Littlewoods but, quite legally, do not pay a lot of tax. They also seem to fall out with other people and organisations easily. A little perversely you may think they are pursuing a legal claim at the moment against HMRC. One not very nice person it appears in the situation is Sark resident Mr Kevin Delaney who publishes The Sark Newletter. Several islanders appeared on the programme to say that Mr Delaney had made their life a misery through his writings. There was also a section in the programme where the Panorama reporter was crowded five times within four hours by the same man as the presenter travelled around the island. Crowding is a word I use quite a lot in my book.
Whether it has got anything to do with Friday’s tradgedy in Newtown I do not know, I suspect it has, but today’s FT reports that John Boehner has made a suggestion to Barack Obama about rasing income taxes to try and avert the fiscal cliff.
Bearing in mind that it is a financial newspaper I was very pleased to see the FT editorial today write about the Newtown shootings. It refers to the argument sometimes used that it isn’t guns who kill people but people who kill people. It calls than nonsense and asks if such an intellectual would use the same reasoning for atomic weapons.
There was a first UN meeting in Doha last week to try and start regulating the internet in the 21st century. However it broke up without agreement.
18th December 2012
The British Antartic Territory is part of Antartica owned by Britain. This morning the Queen went to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to be formally told we are renaming part of it Queen Elizabeth Land in honour of her Diamond Jubilee. Before that she attended a Cabinet Meeting, the first time a monarch has done that apparently, outside of war, since the American war of independence in 1781. All members of the Cabinet contributed to their gift to her of 60 table mats showing images of Buckingham Palace from the Royal Collection. I am sure they will be a talking point when she has people round.
Those tributes no doubt will have been planned earlier in the year. However I do wonder if the exact circumstances and manner of the events is something that was decided on recently. Something I remember Mrs Thatcher used to say a lot when she was Prime Minister was that a healthy society is built around strong family structures. From my own experiences I can certainly testify that a family under continuous pressure does find it difficult to cope. And Royalty is a family just like the rest of us. I hope the purpose of today’s happenings was to make the Queen feel truly valued, as she deserves to be. If your daughter-in-law has had her name associated for several weeks with a most tragic death, just because she happens to be expecting a baby, must be extremely difficult for all concerned.
I was so pleased to see Anrew Mitchell on Channel 4 News this evening talking strongly and with conviction on his plebgate story. Feeling very different from 19th October no doubt when I expect he was at the end of his tether and thought he had no option but to resign.
Instagram is a website and smartphone application allowing users to upload and edit photos. Last April Facebook bought Instragram for $1billion although both sites operate as independent entities. It seems Facebook have been finding it difficult to work out how to get Instagram to produce an income stream for them. Their solution I think is that the subsidary should allow advertisers access to it’s database of members’ photos. The not-very-nice thing however is that the policy change to global publication of private photos will be made next month to all live accounts. There is no opt out clause.
A good news story for Greece for a change. Today Standard and Poor’s have announced they are lifting the country’s credit rating by six notches, praising the strong determination of fellow eurozone states to help it remain a member country. I hope eurosceptics can see it does help to have some heavies backing you up sometimes.
I do try and be careful what I write. I worry that my diary note of 12th December 2012 on Northern Ireland could have been like a red rag to a bull. Anyway, against the trend, there were more significant disturbances in the province last night involving the throwing of bricks, stones and fireworks. Locations were Belfast city centre, Lisburn, Carrickfurgus and Portadown.
Just because you choose to follow politics as a career does not necessarily mean, in my opinion, that you have good judgement. Why it was thought Andrew Mitchell should not tell the truth (that is what any responsible adult would tell a child in trouble to do, after all) when it was known the Sun were about to break the plebgate story, I have no idea. Possibly it was not what Mr Mitchell himself wanted to do. If so he was out-voted. To be kind hearted perhaps we should just put it down to panic.
In any event the story has acheived prominence again and the current threads in the background indicate the following. It seems Michael Crick has been investigating for a couple of weeks as a result of which, I imagine, he asked the Cabinet Office for some comment. That led them to believe a conspiracy might have taking place so I think it will have been them who sent the police, last Thursday, a copy of an email a constituent had sent the Tory Deputy Chief Whip informing me he had heard Mr Mitchell utter those alleged words as he walked past the bottom of Downing Street with his nephew. The conspiracy bit probably arises because the CTTV footage for that evening shows no pair walking along the pavement at the crucial time. The street is extremely quiet. The Metropolitan Police took prompt action and arrested the constituent on Saturday. On Sunday the Prime Minister discovered that the man is a serving police officer. Using his jornalistic skills Michael found out where the officer lives and had a 20 minute unrecorded conversation with him on his doorstep. Michael says he came over as a pretty fightened man who hinted that the whole episode was not his idea at all.
However I cannot see the essence of the situation has changed a great deal. Originally it was three men’s word, the two police officers in Downing Street who wrote the police log and the constituent, against Mr Mitchell’s. Now it is two against one. Even if the policeman constituent is ultimately shown to have lied I can’t see the other two policemen changing their evidence. They have too much at stake for that.
I see from London’s Evening Standard yesterday that Boris Johnson and the Met Police chief constable have used a photo opportunity outside New Scotland Yard to highlight a crackdown on uninsured drivers in the capital. 44,000 cars have been seized and 1,000 arrested. The point is made that such individuals are much more likley to involve themselves in criminal activity than others. Mr Hogan-Howe obviously realises that policing is as much a political activity as anything else.
A section of last weekend’s FT Magazine was about the women of 2012, one of which was Angela Merkel. I had not realised it but one of her sayings is step by step, another, there is no alternative. For the last three years she has told her population that if the euro fails so too will Europe. And her voters are happy with that. She has managed the trick of being pro-European but still there to protect German interests. She is a pragmatic, formidable politican second only to Barack Obama in world pecking order. She is also persistent. Apparently she only has setbacks, not defeats.
I understand that consistently for the last 30 years America has suffered 20 mass shootings annually with the loss of 100-150 lives. Then when I was driving into London yesterday for my first leaflet handout to publicise the website and book, I also heard some figures on the Jeremy Vine show. The place in America with the highest murder rate by firearms in 2011 was Washington DC at 12.5 per 100,000 people and one of the lowest was Connecticut at 2.6
Just so that we don’t all end up as criminals no doubt the director of public prosecutions has issued guidelines today making it plain that authors of messages on Facebook and Twitter should not be prosecuted just because they shock, offend or satirise. The dividing line is anything which harasses, intimidates or breaks court orders.
It seems to be the consensus of opinion that Mr Netanyahu will easily win Israel’s January general election. Kevin Connolly on Today this morning had a few excerpts of the prime minster sounding relaxed and confident at a Christmas party. I hope that is genuine and shows Mr Nethanyahu is not afraid of possibly testing times ahead.
There is a piece in today’s FT that points out 23 children and an adult were injured in a knife attack in China last Friday. Apparantly, as in America, young innocents are subject to attack. The difference of course though is that China is not a gun owning society, so fatalites are less frequent.
Both the MacQuarrie and Pollard reports have now been published on recent events at Newsnight. I would have been extremely surprised if any conspiratorial cover up had been found and that has proved to be correct. Just a massive cock up from start to finish, especially with the paedophile report when it appears experienced journalists somehow forgot how they conduct their trade. One person has resigned, one been reinstated and two have been moved sideways.
20th December 2012
Have just seen the most amazing weather radar map on the Met Office website. At 9am the whole country is exactly blanketed with a hourglass shaped area or rain. It has been nearly stationary for the last few hours, just moving up very slowly from the south. Completely horrible.
The BBC website reports this morning that a 23 year old man, not a member of police staff, was arrested last night in connection with the plebgate affair. It is alleged that on or around last Friday, the day after the Met Police received their new information and the day before the constituent’s arrest, he may intentionally have encouraged or assisted the commission of an indictable offence. That looks like an attempted cover up to me.
I started Chapter 10 of my book by noting that Stieg Larsson appeared to think the essence of his gang was that they hated woman. It seems to be a recurring theme. There was a killing of a polio worker in Pakistan in October. Then this week there have been a further nine assassinations, seven of them women, againgst the annual joint UN-Pakistani government three day immunisation programme. It is suspected the Taliban have been involved. In 1988 there were 125 counties where polio was endemic. Today it is only Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. And Pakistan is doing so well. This year it has only had 56 polio cases. Such a shame.
Political pressure is obviously building on the police. Last night the Police Federation declined to appear on PM. Tonight they gave a full interview making very soothing noises. I suspect the Federation’s chairman has been told by senior police officers that there is a good chance the plebgate police log can be shown to have been false. He therefore needs to do a bit of back-tracking.
I am not critiscising them in any way, I applaud them, but yesterday’s FT editorial clearly connected the Connecticut shootings with movement in the American fiscal cliff negotiations. That is more than I dared do in my diary note. Then on our side of the water that political unravelling is also taking place, in my view, in our plebgate affair.
The conclusion I take from the two stories is that the Gang are not particularly clever people. I will not be any stronger than that. Because of their ruthlessness they will always be able to keep themselves hidden in their own sphere but once enough of us know what they are doing, and they venture out into our normal world, everything really does start to fall apart. If you go around causing the killing of young innocent children for no reason other than pure bad feeling that is bound to have a massive impact on a normally motivated knowing person. In Chapter Five of my book I relate how I wrote to Mr Boehner in the autumn of 2010 and what happened afterwards. That sort of tactic however only works when you are dealing with an ignorant body of people.
Similarly you might think to apparently blantantly lie about seeing something in Central London when technology is readily available showing that to be false, is a bit foolish. That is not how the Gang see it however. For them it is just a question of whether it will work or not. They made a hard headed calculation that the Conservative Party as a body would be too embarrassed to highlight how they dealt with an email sent to their Depurty Chief Whip. And for nearly three months they were absolutely right. But they did not reckon for an inquisitive journalist. Nor that the Conservative Leader, when he realised what it might be possible to show and with the knowledge he has, would be prepared to do the right thing.
Although I do not know of the circumstances in America I would be pretty sure that the other essential party in the triumvirate of police, politicians and journalists will also have been playing a key role. In Britain the press were essential in making Mr Mitchell feel he did not want to carry on. I expect the police will soon be in their sights. Yet they cannot agree amongst themselves how their writings should be made fairer whilst vowing that elected politicians must not be allowed to decide for them. If they cannot get their act together I suspect they might find that our elected parties trust each other a bit more than they trust themselves.
Half of the UK’s 9,500 military force in Afghanistan will have been brought home by the end of the month. Yesterday David Cameron announced that a futher 4000 will be withdrawn next year, with the remainder out by the end of 2014. Today’s FT reports that President Obama is expected to make a similar announcement about American forces next month. Also like the States we are looking strategically towards the future. It seems our intention is to withdraw from influence in south Asia over the next few years concentrating on north Africa and the Middle East.
The same issue reports that Mario Monti has agreed in principle to seek election as Italy’s prime minister early next year. I feel that is exceptionally good news.
Building on public opinion I hope, Mr Obama has appointed vice president Joe Biden to head a task force to investiagate his country’s gun violence problem. I think he has asked for a bipartisan agreement to be reached so he can announce it in his State of the Union address next month.
The FT are a very well connected lot. They had an article in today’s paper entitled A Time for Christians to Engage with the World, penned by the Pope. A bit littered with religious liturgy but nonetheless concisely argued in modern day English and, for me, extremely well written. It lifted my view and did capture the spirit of Christmas.
Yesterday South Koreans elected a new lady president. That area of the world therefore has now had three new leaders in the past few months, also taking into account China and Japan.
21st December 2012
A scientific theory is a tool for understanding better what goes on around us. I have just read a book review in the Life and Arts section of last weekend’s FT which explains that the Higgs bosun is best looked at as a field which can exist in empty space, affecting what goes on in it and creating mass when something does happen. If a subatomic Higgs bosun particle arises there, it does so for a fraction of a second before it changes into other particles. And, I think the argument is, that once mass has been created in that previous vacuum the way things work is different than before.
I know from my own business experience that if someone owes you money all you have to do is tell the court office on the correct form. You are not required to prove the case initially in any way. They assume you are right and take it from there. When you think about it, it cannot work any other way. I am sure it is exactly the same for the police. The BBC webpage reports today that three separate people have been to see police to allege a former ITV weatherman sexually abused them as boys when he taught at a Cheshire school they attended in the 1970s. The past weatherman is currently sailing in the Carribean. I personally do not feel the profession concerned is a coincidence.
22nd December 2012
The National Rifle Association let it be known at the start of the week that they would be giving a news conference yesterday on the Connecticut shootings. That time lag I suspect was to give anit-gun campaigners a false sense of hope. There reply has been that America needs more guns not less. One of the NRA’s arguments is that if you have a bad guy who wants to harm you with a weapon, which for example could be a candlestick, you need a good guy who wants to harm him back with another weapon of equal force. I feel the second guy however should think to himself whether he is good or just frightened.
Yesterday the High Court rejected an application from a Pakistani man living in this country that the government should be forced to tell him whether we provided any secret intelligence to the Americans which allowed them to kill one of his relatives in a drone attack in Pakistan last year. The mere fact the the hearing came about indicates to me that the allegation will be true. It suits the Gang’s political aims that as many of us should know as possible. From today’s FT I understand the allegation is that GCHQ have provided locational intelligence to the Americans which means I presume live information from agents on the ground.
I was wondering whether Thought for the Day on the Today programme would address the Connecticut shootings. It did this morning by the best person qualified for the job, in my opinion, the Archbishop of Canterbury. It must have been a great temptation to mix in the Christmas message as a primary reply but Mr Williams did not. He dealt with the issues head on. He used the simile of a hammer saying that it’s holder will want to look for a nail. If you have a gun everything tends to look like a target. Such arrangements help along an atmosphere of fear and hostility, creating a pressure to release your anxieties in dangerous ways.
I personally don’t think you can quibble that John Boehner has not done his best on the fiscal cliff. As far as his colleagues are concerned you can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. Some people unfortuntely cannot see things outside of their own small existence. It seems there are a lot of Republican polititians like that.
Yesterday’s FT reports that the day before, 100 national and regional newspaper editors and publishers had a meeting to try to thrash out an agreed way forward for future self regulation of their industry. They will meet again on 10th January when they hope a conclusion will be reached.
The policeman and the politician were in discussion on Today this morning, in the form of Sir Hugh Orde and David Blunckett. I don’t think you would have heard that even a few months ago. Mr Orde said he though a natural tension between the two camps is healthy. And, as he has asked on the programme in at least one other connection in the past, he reminded the listener that the vast majority of policemen and women in this country are totally honest. None of us are perfect of course, policemen or not. The critiscism might even apply to you.
Apparently the present chairman of the Police Federation was due to retire at the end of January. As it happens he is now vacating immediately so that his successor can initiate an independent review to ensure the organisation represents it’s members’ interests in the most effective and efficient way.
23rd December 2012
Yesterday’s FT reports that President Obama has said he intends to make gun control a key political aim in his second term.
Everyone has now gone home for Christmas in Washington. People are beginning to look over the cliff edge. A commentator in yesterday’s FT says it looks as though it might have to be the markets that bring them all to their senses. A stark definition of, we are all in this together, I suggest.
Instagram have now backed down in their data sharing proposals with advertisers. Apparantly their product has 100 million users so you can see the financial pressures at work.
Overnight a fire has destroyed at least 600 shops in Kabul’s main market, close to government buildings. An electrical fault is thought to have been the cause. I understand the watchman guarding the market seems to have done a runner.