It is 8.50 am on February 3rd and I have used the past two hours since rising in what has become a daily struggle to attend to do what I should rather than do what I want. In part it is a getting old problem, in part its is the continuing colder winter than usual, and in part it is me being me.
I am glad to have seen the back of January, an overall cold and miserable month in which the one immediately memorable highlight was the relay of a new production of Carmen from the Metropolitan Opera House New York highlight was Carmen, despite having a cough following a cold. There has been some excellent television and I have made some progress in my artwork project but overall all it is a month of dissatisfaction with myself, a failure to have made a made a valuable contribution to anyone else and a sense of having failed to make the best of what could prove at anytime to have been my final weeks of self aware consciousness.
I have decided to make better use of today, having completed the washing up from yesterday, I will first check on my commitments over the coming weeks including the trip to London when I could attend the Iraq Inquiry if there is a public session of interest, and then attend to two outstanding matters which I have put off. I need to write thanking the lawyers for their work in relation to the car accident and check the intray. How far I will make progress we shall see. I will go out again later as there has been no further snowfall to get some planters and bulb compost but the real test will come when I feel up to wrapping up and sorting out the patio and for garage for the Spring when both will be repainted. I will go and see Invictus at Bolden Cineworld, probably tomorrow afternoon a film where both lead actors have been nominated for Oscars, but the film itself has not. The nominations were announced yesterday and I for the first time in a decade I have not seen most of the films nominated.
Given everything that has gone wrong for the country and Gordon Brown’s Government, significant reduction in the Conservative Party opinion poll lead over the Labour Party at the weekend is extraordinary, and indicates the maxim that seven days is a long time in politics, the devil you know is always better and so on. The greatest miscalculation made by David Cameron over recent weeks is to take positions and immediately change them as soon as the media questioned and the polls indicated public disquiet. The present outcome is likely to be a hung Parliament with neither major party having an overall majority and the country run by the civil servants to a greater extent than now! This may, in part, reflect, the public view of a plague on both your houses and an innate conservatism which will prevent the majority from gambling that one of the minor parties will be able to do any better in practice.
It is impossible to generalise about how the non political will vote come General Election Day, not just those who are not members of a political party but the large number who have no interest in politics unless they become personally affected, the council is taking no action to clear pavements and side roads of icing snow, the government raises taxation or cuts a service which is used, or there is a dramatic loss of livelihood and the ability to care for dependents and having any control over the important aspects of ones life. What immediately affects or impress is likely to govern those who vote while a high percentage will abstain.
There is a significant different between the personalities of the remarkable women who appeared before the Iraq inquiry on Tuesday and Wednesday Clare Short and Ann Clwyd. I begin with the Ann Clwyd a bright star in the political firmament.
According to Wikipedia Ann was brought up in Flintshire attending the grammar, now High school in Holywell and the Queens School in Chester where I lived during my first year working for Cheshire County Council before moving to Bromborough. After university she worked as a journalist for the BBC and became Welsh correspondent for the Guardian and Observer for 15 years, becoming vice-Chair of the Arts Council of Wales from 1975-9 and then chair until 1997 when she left to become a member of the Royal Commission on the National Health Service. She remains a Trade unionist and stood twice for Parliament unsuccessfully until becoming a Member of the European Parliament 1979 to 1984. She was elected to Parliament in a by-election following the death of Ioan Evans and became the first woman to sit for a Welsh valleys constituency. She served as Shadow Minister of Education and Women's Rights from 1987 but was sacked in 1988 for rebelling against the party whip on further spending on nuclear weapons. She returned as Shadow Secretary of State for Overseas Development from 1989 to 1992 and then served as Shadow Secretary of State for Wales in 1992 and for National Heritage from 1992 to 1993. She was the Opposition Spokesperson for Employment from 1993 to 1994 and for Foreign Affairs from 1994 to 1995 when she was again sacked, along with Jim Cousins, for observing the Turkish invasion of Iraqi Kirkuk without permission. In 1994 she staged a sit-in down Tower Colliery mine in her constituency to protest at its closure.
She was a member of the International Development Select Committee from 1997 to 2005. Having been prominent in her concern for the situation in Iraq before the war there in 2003, Tony Blair made her a Special Envoy on Human Rights in Iraq in the run-up to the War. She was the first journalist to put forward claims that some Iraqis were killed in woodchippers. On 9 August 2004, she became a member of the Privy Council. Ann Clwyd, chosen for a Private Member's Bill via Ballot was pressurised by hundreds of pressure groups in order to publicise their group. Clwyd chose the Female Genital Mutilation Bill (to prohibit parents from sending, or taking, their daughters abroad for operations such as female circumcision) By Ann Clwyd speaking about this bill, Female Circumcision was banned in 1985. She was once regarded as on the left-wing of the party and has been a vocal supporter of the Iraq War.
She is currently Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Human Rights Group and the All Party Parliamentary Iraq Group. She is Vice-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Coalfield Communities, and Secretary of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Cambodia. She is a former Chair of the British Group of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), an Executive Member on the (IPU) Committee on Middle East Questions and an Executive Member on the (IPU) Coordinating Committee of Women Parliamentarians. She has been appointed by the Prime Minister as a Member of the British Delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council for Europe.
These are her credentials. Before the inquiry she casually explained that she has pressed the Iraq Prime Minister about his country’s continuation of the death penalty while the first of five bombs went off in close proximity and she was forced to leave the building for security reasons, that she explained she had not been able to make the point that the death penalty was not proving a deterrent for murder. She spoke of one man who had brought to her information about the atrocities of the regime before the to allied invasion of 2003. After 2003 he was able to tell Ann his real name and has since sold his business interests in order to create a fee speech radio station. Ann had three messages, The first was the view that why did it take so long before the intervention took place. The second is that there has been considerable improvement despite the continuing security problems and sectarianism, drawing attention that 25% seats of the Parliament are female who all withdraw when the Speaker of the House argued they should be home as wives and mothers. The speaker was replaced and the women are pressing for an increased percentage. The third is that it is important to continue to be vigilant about human rights which appeared to be her continuing passion. She brought the position of the military, the civil servants and politicians into the perspective of what had gone on before and what was happening now to individuals and their families.
This balance perspective followed on from Richard Madeley, the former chat show host with Judy, his wife. Which became very popular with over 2 million views for the greater part of a decade. He made all the points I made in my comments about the appearance of Tony Blair at Inquiry last week and for once Andrew Neil and his new assistant failed in their blatant attempt to undermine the strength of his arguments. The only agreement was that Tony missed the opportunity to express regret at the loss of all the lives lost in conflict.
To counter the suggest that Tony Blair was right we had the testimony of Clare Short who combined her personal experience and prejudices into a devastating indictment of her former leader, but the strength of her case quickly emerged when one of the panel quietly asked, do you have any evidence, to which Clare responded in effect any other conclusion beggar’s belief.
I have a lot of time for Clare as I had for Mo Mowlam. I was on a train in London one evening when I overheard a civil servant from her department speak in glowing terms about what her boss was achieving in terms of the quantity and the processing of providing overseas aid in a structured and positive way. Such testimonials from civil servants, however junior, are rare, I suspect.
According to Wikipedia Clare although born in Birmingham has an Northern Irish Catholic background and has been sympathetic towards the aspirations of a peaceful Sinn Fein. My personal position developed after hearing from a journalist who visited the Northern Ireland prior to the insurgency when the unionist had total power and boasted openly about how they used Westminster money to keep the Catholics in their place depriving them of political influence, let alone power. One can still see the anti Catholicism which pervading certain interests in the UK, when only yesterday there was outrage on the BBC because the Pope had politely and carefully told Labour’s deputy leader that to apply a proposed new law to legislation currently before Parliament undermined a fundamental aspect of the present Catholic faith and should be reconsidered. The amendment was immediately withdrawn which added to the outrage on the part of some. The issue is more complicated than this but it nevertheless reflected the problem of trying to run a society where no individual religion, or those with no spiritual religion are allowed political dominance over others to the extent that it interferes with the liberty of others to practice their beliefs, but which in turn do not going against the basic human rights that are agreed should apply to everyone.
Clare had a child at 17 who was adopted and with whom she had no contact until 1996, discovering that he was a staunch conservative, married with three children. She had a brief marriage while still a student and her second ended in tragedy when her husband died, a former Labour Minister died of Alzheimer’s disease, thus he childhood and experience will have given her a personal insight and empathy with the impact of horror and violence of humanity and the belief that we should constantly strive to do much better.
Clare became a civil servant, working in the Private Office of a Conservative Minister, which held her to the conclusion she could do as good if not better job than some of the politicians she encountered. She was elected to the Ladywood constituency in 1983, the area in which she was raised and immediately created a problem for herself by accusing the infamous Conservative politician Alan Clark of being drunk at the despatch box. There was outrage at this and she had to withdraw the accusation although honest as ever when he wrote his diaries, Alan admitted he had been. When she conducted a campaign against the page three photos of Sun newspaper she got the label killjoy Clare.
Clare was always on the left of the Party but independent minded leaving the Socialist Campaign group when Tony Benn decided to challenge Neil Kinnock for the leadership of their political Party. In 1994 she supported of Margaret Beckett against Tony Blair and John Prescott for the leadership. Having supported the withdrawal of troops from Northern Ireland it was not surprising that she resigned her from a place on the opposition front bench because over the support given to the Prevention of Terrorism Act and then to the UK 1990 Gulf War involvement. She supported the legalisation of cannabis and other causes considered too controversial to become acceptable to the electorate
Clare became openly critical of the Prime Minister in the period before the decision to join the USA in armed intervention in the absence of a further mandate from the Security Council of the UN called him reckless, but did not immediately resign, in contrast to Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary. She told the Iraq inquiry that she had been given a number of promises by Tony Blair in relation to pressing the USA over a settlement of the Israel Palestine problems and in assisting Iraq after the removal of the regime. However two months later she resigned and became increasingly critical of Blair personally and the government alleging that the UK was intercepting United Nations Communications including those of the Secretary General. Although not denying the charges she was attacked by the Prime Minister as being irresponsible and typical of her character. She was contacted by the Cabinet Secretary and warned about further public discussion of security matters, disclosing his letter to TV with its implication of formal action being taken against her. In 2004 she released An Honourable Deception? New Labour, Iraq and the Misuse of Power and with covers her relationship with Tony Blair and his with Gordon Brown. In 2006 she announced her retirement from Parliament as a protest at the Labour Government, hoping for a hung Parliament and the introduction of proportional representation. In relation to the subsequent expenses scandal Clare confirmed that she had been overpaid £8000 in relation to a mortgage in 2003 which had been repaid in 2006, that is long before the recent change in legislation and leaking of the information.
There was therefore no surprise in her evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry which she communicated with great conviction resulting in prolonged applause at the end according to media reports. There were several allegations of key figures being economical with the truth and that she and Parliament had been manipulated.
She strongly opposed the Presidential style of government which Tony Blair had introduced and which she alleged was contrary to the constitution. I have an Advanced level General certificate of Education in British Constitutional History and copy of Walter Bagehot’s English Constitution in which he sets out the doctrine of Cabinet Government, arguing in 1867 that the balance of power was first achieved between the Monarchy, the Aristocracy and Parliament, and second with the Prime Minister being the first among Equals- primus inter pares. I have Harold Laski’s work on Parliamentary Democracy in which he argues for the strength of Parliament to balance the power of the Executive. The problem, although some would say its advantage, is that the constitution is unwritten excepts for components which have become law and therefore more open to change and flexible interpretation. The problem is also that most people do not understand the nature of the international economy and international politics and the limitations this places on all governments. The best example is the Chinese who suddenly understood the true nature of international capitalism and are the process of becoming an even greater superpower than the USA.
Most people do not fully appreciate the limitations of democracy in terms of making positive changes and getting things done without the consent of the individuals who carry out the decisions, assuming it is possible to reach agreement about anything in the first instance. It is not sensible for Ministers with specific departmental responsibilities to comment on the decisions of other Ministers unless they have experience or expertise in the subject. Policies should be a matter for the Political Party system and the Election manifestoes.
I am glad to have seen the back of January, an overall cold and miserable month in which the one immediately memorable highlight was the relay of a new production of Carmen from the Metropolitan Opera House New York highlight was Carmen, despite having a cough following a cold. There has been some excellent television and I have made some progress in my artwork project but overall all it is a month of dissatisfaction with myself, a failure to have made a made a valuable contribution to anyone else and a sense of having failed to make the best of what could prove at anytime to have been my final weeks of self aware consciousness.
I have decided to make better use of today, having completed the washing up from yesterday, I will first check on my commitments over the coming weeks including the trip to London when I could attend the Iraq Inquiry if there is a public session of interest, and then attend to two outstanding matters which I have put off. I need to write thanking the lawyers for their work in relation to the car accident and check the intray. How far I will make progress we shall see. I will go out again later as there has been no further snowfall to get some planters and bulb compost but the real test will come when I feel up to wrapping up and sorting out the patio and for garage for the Spring when both will be repainted. I will go and see Invictus at Bolden Cineworld, probably tomorrow afternoon a film where both lead actors have been nominated for Oscars, but the film itself has not. The nominations were announced yesterday and I for the first time in a decade I have not seen most of the films nominated.
Given everything that has gone wrong for the country and Gordon Brown’s Government, significant reduction in the Conservative Party opinion poll lead over the Labour Party at the weekend is extraordinary, and indicates the maxim that seven days is a long time in politics, the devil you know is always better and so on. The greatest miscalculation made by David Cameron over recent weeks is to take positions and immediately change them as soon as the media questioned and the polls indicated public disquiet. The present outcome is likely to be a hung Parliament with neither major party having an overall majority and the country run by the civil servants to a greater extent than now! This may, in part, reflect, the public view of a plague on both your houses and an innate conservatism which will prevent the majority from gambling that one of the minor parties will be able to do any better in practice.
It is impossible to generalise about how the non political will vote come General Election Day, not just those who are not members of a political party but the large number who have no interest in politics unless they become personally affected, the council is taking no action to clear pavements and side roads of icing snow, the government raises taxation or cuts a service which is used, or there is a dramatic loss of livelihood and the ability to care for dependents and having any control over the important aspects of ones life. What immediately affects or impress is likely to govern those who vote while a high percentage will abstain.
There is a significant different between the personalities of the remarkable women who appeared before the Iraq inquiry on Tuesday and Wednesday Clare Short and Ann Clwyd. I begin with the Ann Clwyd a bright star in the political firmament.
According to Wikipedia Ann was brought up in Flintshire attending the grammar, now High school in Holywell and the Queens School in Chester where I lived during my first year working for Cheshire County Council before moving to Bromborough. After university she worked as a journalist for the BBC and became Welsh correspondent for the Guardian and Observer for 15 years, becoming vice-Chair of the Arts Council of Wales from 1975-9 and then chair until 1997 when she left to become a member of the Royal Commission on the National Health Service. She remains a Trade unionist and stood twice for Parliament unsuccessfully until becoming a Member of the European Parliament 1979 to 1984. She was elected to Parliament in a by-election following the death of Ioan Evans and became the first woman to sit for a Welsh valleys constituency. She served as Shadow Minister of Education and Women's Rights from 1987 but was sacked in 1988 for rebelling against the party whip on further spending on nuclear weapons. She returned as Shadow Secretary of State for Overseas Development from 1989 to 1992 and then served as Shadow Secretary of State for Wales in 1992 and for National Heritage from 1992 to 1993. She was the Opposition Spokesperson for Employment from 1993 to 1994 and for Foreign Affairs from 1994 to 1995 when she was again sacked, along with Jim Cousins, for observing the Turkish invasion of Iraqi Kirkuk without permission. In 1994 she staged a sit-in down Tower Colliery mine in her constituency to protest at its closure.
She was a member of the International Development Select Committee from 1997 to 2005. Having been prominent in her concern for the situation in Iraq before the war there in 2003, Tony Blair made her a Special Envoy on Human Rights in Iraq in the run-up to the War. She was the first journalist to put forward claims that some Iraqis were killed in woodchippers. On 9 August 2004, she became a member of the Privy Council. Ann Clwyd, chosen for a Private Member's Bill via Ballot was pressurised by hundreds of pressure groups in order to publicise their group. Clwyd chose the Female Genital Mutilation Bill (to prohibit parents from sending, or taking, their daughters abroad for operations such as female circumcision) By Ann Clwyd speaking about this bill, Female Circumcision was banned in 1985. She was once regarded as on the left-wing of the party and has been a vocal supporter of the Iraq War.
She is currently Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Human Rights Group and the All Party Parliamentary Iraq Group. She is Vice-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Coalfield Communities, and Secretary of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Cambodia. She is a former Chair of the British Group of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), an Executive Member on the (IPU) Committee on Middle East Questions and an Executive Member on the (IPU) Coordinating Committee of Women Parliamentarians. She has been appointed by the Prime Minister as a Member of the British Delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council for Europe.
These are her credentials. Before the inquiry she casually explained that she has pressed the Iraq Prime Minister about his country’s continuation of the death penalty while the first of five bombs went off in close proximity and she was forced to leave the building for security reasons, that she explained she had not been able to make the point that the death penalty was not proving a deterrent for murder. She spoke of one man who had brought to her information about the atrocities of the regime before the to allied invasion of 2003. After 2003 he was able to tell Ann his real name and has since sold his business interests in order to create a fee speech radio station. Ann had three messages, The first was the view that why did it take so long before the intervention took place. The second is that there has been considerable improvement despite the continuing security problems and sectarianism, drawing attention that 25% seats of the Parliament are female who all withdraw when the Speaker of the House argued they should be home as wives and mothers. The speaker was replaced and the women are pressing for an increased percentage. The third is that it is important to continue to be vigilant about human rights which appeared to be her continuing passion. She brought the position of the military, the civil servants and politicians into the perspective of what had gone on before and what was happening now to individuals and their families.
This balance perspective followed on from Richard Madeley, the former chat show host with Judy, his wife. Which became very popular with over 2 million views for the greater part of a decade. He made all the points I made in my comments about the appearance of Tony Blair at Inquiry last week and for once Andrew Neil and his new assistant failed in their blatant attempt to undermine the strength of his arguments. The only agreement was that Tony missed the opportunity to express regret at the loss of all the lives lost in conflict.
To counter the suggest that Tony Blair was right we had the testimony of Clare Short who combined her personal experience and prejudices into a devastating indictment of her former leader, but the strength of her case quickly emerged when one of the panel quietly asked, do you have any evidence, to which Clare responded in effect any other conclusion beggar’s belief.
I have a lot of time for Clare as I had for Mo Mowlam. I was on a train in London one evening when I overheard a civil servant from her department speak in glowing terms about what her boss was achieving in terms of the quantity and the processing of providing overseas aid in a structured and positive way. Such testimonials from civil servants, however junior, are rare, I suspect.
According to Wikipedia Clare although born in Birmingham has an Northern Irish Catholic background and has been sympathetic towards the aspirations of a peaceful Sinn Fein. My personal position developed after hearing from a journalist who visited the Northern Ireland prior to the insurgency when the unionist had total power and boasted openly about how they used Westminster money to keep the Catholics in their place depriving them of political influence, let alone power. One can still see the anti Catholicism which pervading certain interests in the UK, when only yesterday there was outrage on the BBC because the Pope had politely and carefully told Labour’s deputy leader that to apply a proposed new law to legislation currently before Parliament undermined a fundamental aspect of the present Catholic faith and should be reconsidered. The amendment was immediately withdrawn which added to the outrage on the part of some. The issue is more complicated than this but it nevertheless reflected the problem of trying to run a society where no individual religion, or those with no spiritual religion are allowed political dominance over others to the extent that it interferes with the liberty of others to practice their beliefs, but which in turn do not going against the basic human rights that are agreed should apply to everyone.
Clare had a child at 17 who was adopted and with whom she had no contact until 1996, discovering that he was a staunch conservative, married with three children. She had a brief marriage while still a student and her second ended in tragedy when her husband died, a former Labour Minister died of Alzheimer’s disease, thus he childhood and experience will have given her a personal insight and empathy with the impact of horror and violence of humanity and the belief that we should constantly strive to do much better.
Clare became a civil servant, working in the Private Office of a Conservative Minister, which held her to the conclusion she could do as good if not better job than some of the politicians she encountered. She was elected to the Ladywood constituency in 1983, the area in which she was raised and immediately created a problem for herself by accusing the infamous Conservative politician Alan Clark of being drunk at the despatch box. There was outrage at this and she had to withdraw the accusation although honest as ever when he wrote his diaries, Alan admitted he had been. When she conducted a campaign against the page three photos of Sun newspaper she got the label killjoy Clare.
Clare was always on the left of the Party but independent minded leaving the Socialist Campaign group when Tony Benn decided to challenge Neil Kinnock for the leadership of their political Party. In 1994 she supported of Margaret Beckett against Tony Blair and John Prescott for the leadership. Having supported the withdrawal of troops from Northern Ireland it was not surprising that she resigned her from a place on the opposition front bench because over the support given to the Prevention of Terrorism Act and then to the UK 1990 Gulf War involvement. She supported the legalisation of cannabis and other causes considered too controversial to become acceptable to the electorate
Clare became openly critical of the Prime Minister in the period before the decision to join the USA in armed intervention in the absence of a further mandate from the Security Council of the UN called him reckless, but did not immediately resign, in contrast to Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary. She told the Iraq inquiry that she had been given a number of promises by Tony Blair in relation to pressing the USA over a settlement of the Israel Palestine problems and in assisting Iraq after the removal of the regime. However two months later she resigned and became increasingly critical of Blair personally and the government alleging that the UK was intercepting United Nations Communications including those of the Secretary General. Although not denying the charges she was attacked by the Prime Minister as being irresponsible and typical of her character. She was contacted by the Cabinet Secretary and warned about further public discussion of security matters, disclosing his letter to TV with its implication of formal action being taken against her. In 2004 she released An Honourable Deception? New Labour, Iraq and the Misuse of Power and with covers her relationship with Tony Blair and his with Gordon Brown. In 2006 she announced her retirement from Parliament as a protest at the Labour Government, hoping for a hung Parliament and the introduction of proportional representation. In relation to the subsequent expenses scandal Clare confirmed that she had been overpaid £8000 in relation to a mortgage in 2003 which had been repaid in 2006, that is long before the recent change in legislation and leaking of the information.
There was therefore no surprise in her evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry which she communicated with great conviction resulting in prolonged applause at the end according to media reports. There were several allegations of key figures being economical with the truth and that she and Parliament had been manipulated.
She strongly opposed the Presidential style of government which Tony Blair had introduced and which she alleged was contrary to the constitution. I have an Advanced level General certificate of Education in British Constitutional History and copy of Walter Bagehot’s English Constitution in which he sets out the doctrine of Cabinet Government, arguing in 1867 that the balance of power was first achieved between the Monarchy, the Aristocracy and Parliament, and second with the Prime Minister being the first among Equals- primus inter pares. I have Harold Laski’s work on Parliamentary Democracy in which he argues for the strength of Parliament to balance the power of the Executive. The problem, although some would say its advantage, is that the constitution is unwritten excepts for components which have become law and therefore more open to change and flexible interpretation. The problem is also that most people do not understand the nature of the international economy and international politics and the limitations this places on all governments. The best example is the Chinese who suddenly understood the true nature of international capitalism and are the process of becoming an even greater superpower than the USA.
Most people do not fully appreciate the limitations of democracy in terms of making positive changes and getting things done without the consent of the individuals who carry out the decisions, assuming it is possible to reach agreement about anything in the first instance. It is not sensible for Ministers with specific departmental responsibilities to comment on the decisions of other Ministers unless they have experience or expertise in the subject. Policies should be a matter for the Political Party system and the Election manifestoes.
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