It is ten minutes to eight on Friday February 5th and I am recovering from another unsatisfactory night of broken sleep, the second in succession, waking up what felt to be constantly with a need to visit the bathroom and a mouth unpleasantly dry to an extent I feel I know what John Mills and his companions felt like at the of the film Ice Cold in Alex. There is three hours of TV to watch late evening as the final chapter season of Lost commences and season three of Babylon 5 end and the second part of a two part end of season or start of season NCIS year. Wow
I will watch the news before making a drink as during the last moments of the after midnight politics show, the great political argumentist Andrew Neil, announced that agreement had been reached in Northern Ireland over the devolution of policing and justice from Westminster to Stormont. This morning The Prime Minister flew back to Northern Ireland to meet his Irish counterpart and the chief negotiators of Sinn Fein and the DUP-The Democratic Unionist Party, to confirm that after 10 days of prolonged negotiations agreement has been reached on the last and most important aspect of the Good Friday agreement of 1988.
While BBC gave the development top billing, Sky relegated confirmation of the settlement below a reminder that at 11 am this morning the Director of Public Prosecutions will reveal if the three Labour Party Members of Parliament and the two Labour and one Conservative Peer in the House of Lords are to be prosecuted arising from their financial accounting, under the umbrella heading of Parliamentary Expenses. Democracy itself is once more on trial in the UK at a time when European nations struggle to bring the basics to Afghanistan and millions are spent reviewing the involvement of the UK in bringing democracy to Iraq.
The most vivid recollection of yesterday was the interview with a twelve year old girl who had escaped the control of her brother who previously had forced her nine year old sister to wear a waistcoat of explosives and driven her off crying for her mother not to return home. Those who have interviewed the girl believe her story and that the bother was responsible for a number of atrocities in the country. That is the nature of fundamentalism. I used the word advisedly as it implies an integral and rational perversion of a belief system which should not be given the status of a religion.
8.40 over the first cup of coffee for the day and already I have jettisoned the original plan for the day as I need to write further about the news stories already mentioned.
I was fortunate in having a fundamentalist catholic upbringing in which the Sermon on the mount predominated and my unusual family circumstances, unusual as I thought at the time, resulted in being drawn to the non violent passive resistance and direct action teachings of Mahatma Ghandi, and I still occasionally read from Satyagraha, one of the first 2000 English translation editions published by Jivanji Dahyabhai Desai, Navajivan Press, Ahmedabad.
“Satyagraha is literally holding on to Truth and it means therefore, Truth Force. Truth is soul or spirit. It is, therefore, known as soul-force,” as it opening words and immediately goes onto explain that the concept excludes violence because individual human beings can never expect to know absolute truth and, therefore are not competent to punish.
To my eternal shame I once accused two elderly packers of Peace News, one evening in the basement of the building used for the publication editing and for Houseman’s bookshop, in the Caledonian Road, close to Kings Cross station, that all their talk of peace, criticism of governmental and military force was a manifest of the lack of peace within them and their aggression towards institutions of power. I was being insightful and truthful and destructive and punitive, and endangering their continued voluntary participation in the weekly activity. Later I resigned from the Committee 100 when I could no longer cope with 100 diverse personalities and its subsequent executive committee interminably arguing of the minutiae of policies and strategies and individual actions, and the proven blatant disregard of its effective director, Ralph Sheonman, in acting upon what was agreed. I was also was to resign my position as a temporary field organiser for the Direct Action Committee after a similar heated and fraught meeting in Glasgow prior to the Holy Loch demonstration in 1961, because what had then been decided was radically different from what I had advised the authorities was the agreed plan.
I therefore can only marvel at the patience and endurance of the negotiators on behalf of Sinn Fein and the DUP who, perhaps under the coaxing of the British, Irish and USA administrations, talked for the greater part of ten days to find a way to move forward from the potential bring of yet another suspension or collapse of the power sharing executive and elected assembly of the Northern Irish people
Too often, and what seems to me to be normal for political interaction within and between Parties and Movements, everything becomes reduced to conflicting personalities and personal interests, bids for power and vendettas against anyone who thinks and acts differently. However in Northern Island the issue is that for two decades the republicans bombed and shot policemen and judges and Protestant unionist feared that electoral swings would inevitably lead to the republicans gaining control of policing and the Justice system bringing with this retaliation.
I was struck during the recent Mo Mowlam documentary drama by her explaining to Unionist murderers in he Maize prison that the eventual Good Friday agreement would involve the release of “soldiers” from both sides and the sitting down together in the same room to discuss political decisions of people who previously had murderous intent on each other or who regarded many of those present as responsible for the murder and severe injury of colleagues, friends and family, albeit indirectly.
It therefore does not surprise me that it has taken twelve years to reach some agreement on the devolving of responsibility from Westminster to Stormont. It was recalled that Sir Christopher Patten made 175 recommendations in 1999 on the future of policing in Northern Ireland and that it was not until 2006 that the basis for establishing a Parliament again was agreed and then only that all participants would agree to support the police and its devolution. It was not until January 2007 that Sinn Feign Members, about 900 of them, voted by 90% at a special meeting to officially support the police for the first time in their history. The intention was for agreement to be reached by the spring of 2008 at which he DUP stated this was aspirational!
The first Assembly did get off the ground when the six counties went to the polls in March 2007 with the DUP the largest Party with 36 of the 108 seats overtaking the then more moderate UUP with 18 and Sinn Fein with 28 and the SDLP 16 and the Alliance with 7, Dr Iain Paisley leader of the DUP became the first Minister and Martin McGuiness, number two Gerry Adams, the deputy first Minister. Sinn Fein then took up its seats on the Policing Board with the DUP and representatives of the political parties
In September last year Gordon Brown requested the political leaders in Northern Ireland to set a date for the devolution of the police and justice system, publishing proposals for a budget of up to £1 billion and a legislative framework. Then the DUP leader rejected the Christmas deadline and an influential spokesman claimed that that devolution was unlikely during the lifetime of the Parliament. Within a few days, an amazing coincidence, some would say, the scandal broke regarding the wife of the first Minister, coupled with allegations of the misuse of public funds. He was required to step down while this aspect was investigated and his deputy took over responsibility as lead negotiator in the devolution meetings. A private meeting takes places in London between the DUP, the UU and the Conservative Party over greater cooperation between unionist parties including the possibility of an electoral pact, thus revealing the fact based fear that at the next Assembly elections Sinn Fein is likely to become the largest party and therefore in a position to appoint someone as first minister. By January 21st oft his year there appeared to be deadlock with the possibility of the Assembly breaking down all together, hence the intervention of the prime Ministers of the UK and Ireland in three days of discussions which ended a week ago but the continuation length and detailed discussions in Ireland and in London with one news report saying that the Prime Minister had as many as twenty phone calls a day as the possibility of an agreement was reached.
9.55 I await the news and will continue to listen until 11 when the announcement whether there will be prosecutions will be made. Yesterday the latest investigation resulted in about half the existing members of Parliament being asked to pay back over £1 million, together with the information that the cost of the investigation was several hundred thousand pounds more. The investigation concentrated on some aspects and not others presumably because almost everyone was unlikely to be included in what was excluded! The sense of unfairness and arbitrariness prevails but on Question Time last night two of the Westminster politicians present explained that although they believed the decisions in their instance were incorrect and unjust they were both paying the required amounts as a means of starting the process of rebuilding trust and confidence on the part of the general public.
10.40am I watched the last part of the media conference given by the two Prime Ministers and Sinn Fein and DUP leadership, including a separate brief statement and interview with Gerry Adams. The media is right to be cautious over those who said this was an historical day, the day when democratic politics came of age in Northern Ireland, perhaps for the time. The two principal parties and the two governments will now involve the other political parties and interest groups with a view to taking the agreement through Parliament on what happens to be my birthday in March. As a student of body language including facial expressions and words used I believe today will prove historical for the development of the political progress in Northern Ireland, for relationships between the UK and Eire and for the peaceful solution of long standing genuine grievances and problems.
The agreement will do the Prime Minister no harm in terms of his personal standing and the forthcoming General Election. I was also pleased that David Mellor the former Conservative Social Services Minister shared my view that David Cameron in his drive to be more like Blair and New Labour than Blair and New Labour is at risk of alienating his traditional supporters on the right of the party and the middle ground voters who seek good leadership from someone who appears to know what they are doing and why. I have sympathy with Mr Cameron nevertheless. It is one thing to argue that action to restore Britain’s financial basis and standing should be taken now and that such action will affect taxation levels and public service provision, it is another to be specific until you have command of the accounting books and processes. Remember the wisdom of Labour’s first period in office from 1997 when Br Brown and Mr Blair emphasised that it would be two years before they would be in a position to alter the inherited financial balance in any major way and they also limited the number and extent of what they would achieve in the first Parliament to five goals which were printed on a credit card size card.
Unfortunately the circumstances are different and if Mr Cameron believes that action should be taken now and will be taken immediately upon gaining office, he must be more specific and at one with his Shadow Chancellor. The problem is that Mr Brown and his Chancellor have the support of the public in general for postponing the potential worst effects of the action required for the good reason hat supporting public services and businesses and giving ongoing support to the banking and financial services industry, will, if it works have the double effect of limiting unemployment and increasing government income while reducing payouts for unemployment and other welfare benefits, and therefore the level of cuts and tax increases will not be as great, Already unemployment levels have reduced and presumably the banks are already paying back loans and maintaining if not improving dividends on shares as well as paying taxes on their profits.
The imminent cloud on Mr Brown’s horizon is his appearance before the Chilcot Iraq inquiry over his role as Chancellor in controlling expenditure on the war. Mr Cameron used his first three P M questions to raise the issue in the Commons on Wednesday. Mr Browns response was to say that no request was turned down (although this does mean that all that was asked for was given) and that expenditure under Labour had risen in real terms compared to the reductions under the conservatives. The other interesting aspect is that all the revelations at the Inquiry is not having any impact on the opinion polls. That Mr Cameron decided to go on the offensive now suggests he knows that there will be little to gain in terms of party politics later. Clare Short was remarkably subdued during her Question Time experience and more effective for being so whereas George Galloway’s a plague on all your houses was good political theatre but is unlikely to cut much ice with the public at the crunch time. Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, Theresa May, Conservative Shadow spokesperson on Work and Pensions and Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail, all explained their support for the decision to go to War and their continuing support despite the horrific problems which eschewed. For once their was a fair balanced discussion.
This reminds of a NCIS programme earlier in the week in which two members of the team were sent to Iraq to investigate the murder of a marine and a sub story involved the newest member of the team who wanted to meet the teenage sons and daughter of an Iraq who had been killed as an insurgent while going to the aid of her brother who survived and was back home in a coma. It was a brutal but encouraging reminder of all those statistics of civilian death in wartime. More on this later.
There are to be four prosecutions of Parliamentarians for alleged false accounting, with three Labour Members of Parliament and one Conservative Peer being named. In the same statement a fifth was named where it was felt there were insufficient grounds for a successful prosecution and in a sixth instance the work was ongoing. I have noted that two of those named have since given interviews to the media. The issue of what can be reported or should be reported when legal situations are involved was also raised in relation to the Chelsea and England captain John Terry. It can be argued that Mr Terry brought on himself the wrath of the media, especially the tabloids by attempting a blanket media ban through the courts which would have prevented reference to the legal action being taken. When this failed it was inevitable that the gloves would be taken off and further revelations can be expected over the weekend. As one member of the audience intervened with so many important issues occurring why was the media giving so much attention to the matter. Significantly although Andrew Neil made reference in his introduction to the programme last night they steered clear during the actual discussion with a psychologist about a situation where young women now appear to be queuing up to become trophy wives and bed partners of footballers who far from turning down the opportunities, embrace, some with relish in much the same way as music performances and films stars and others have done so over the past century and throughout history.
Where I disagreed with members of the audience is that just because England is playing in the world cup this Summer, the position of the captain should be unaffected. This is wrong. Captaining the English football Team is the biggest honour and position in the English sport. And if half the things now being reported are accurate then his continuing captaincy must be in question, potentially damaging as it is for the team and beings elected to hold the 2016 or 2020 world cup. Later it was announced that he had stepped down.
12.15 I have enjoyed three rolls with chunky Italian salami for an early lunch before moving onto other things with first a long overdue deep clean of the bathroom, spurred by the arrival of an engineer to service the central heating and hot water boiler. This followed on from yesterday braving the cold to attend to the existing patio plants and their containers and plant teh sprouting bulbs in three new containers as well as well as existing ones. I have now five oblong containers over those original purchased after moving and deciding use the patio area and part of the covered garage with plants using hanging baskets increased from the original three to six last years. The three large evergreen shrubs continue to thrive with the variegated leaved making excellent progress over the past months. The hedging evergreen bought last year is also showing signs of strengthening. There is one likely casualty which I failed to protect two years ago from frost had to settle with weaker growths although it had looked dead but the root ball must have survived. Having made the same mistake this autumn and left it in the open and I fear it will be spring before the extent of the damage can be assessed. The new container will mean that I will be able these to die out naturally without delaying the purchase and plating of summer flowers.
3.30 pm I am having a bad food and drink day in that so far I have consumed a plate of Muesli before a midmorning lunch, a cooked breakfast and later spiced chicken wings.
About a month before Christmas I discovered my ideal combination of 50 % fruit and nuts with oats for £1.09 at Lidl’s produced by Goody. When returning this January I purchased the remaining 4 bags and the saw a new batch in coloured green pack instead of the previous blue at the same price but now only boasting 45% fruit and nut content with raisins, sultanas, banana, apricot, dates, papaya and pineapple with Wheat, oat and barley flakes. It is crunchy and tasty a good first thing in the morning and late at night.
I was hungry around 11.15 made up three small brown rolls with Italian salami, mentioned earlier. This is best eaten in thick slices, almost chunks and reminds of the whole salami’ sausages sent by relatives in Christmas food parcels from Tangiers or Gibraltar or those purchased by my birth and care mothers as a once a year treat, along with Queen olives as part of the goodies which they brought on their annual visits at Christmas until the millennium when they were both in their 90’s. Originally these were purchased from a store in Soho but in latter decades they went to the food part of a famous departmental store in Oxford Street, where the price is about double that available in most supermarkets today and the British adjustment to continental and other foreign foods takes hold.
This afternoon I decided that with all my activities I would treat myself to a prepared breakfast with two small sausages and small pieces of bacon with a little scrambled egg, beans, tomatoes tin potato cubes. The overall quality was poor but in fulfilled a need along with a cup of tea and two cans of diet coke earlier in the day. Later in the evening I had my first drink of alcohol this year, a bottle of Peroni beer. At the supermarket for fresh fruit and some spiced chicken wings and drumsticks and my second treat of the day, a packet of liquorice twists. I had been in search for Pontefract Cakes after Portillo’s visit to the town as part of the his British train journey series. The supermarket visit was overall a failure as I forgot the cooking oil for a stir fry. There was a drenching downpour so I appreciated that there was a ground floor carpark beneath the supermarket. For once I could only find space on the far side.
4.15pm Also earlier this afternoon I watched a film about the Korean War which I do not remembered previously experiencing, called Retreat Hell! with baby faced Russ Tamblyn looking younger than the 17 year old he was playing. The film is a fictionalised account of the great withdrawal which was forced on the allies when China poured in hundreds of thousands trained troops to support the Korean communists.
The story of the war is for another day but broadly there was a stalemate in the country similar to that in Vietnam with the communist controlling the north and a repressive dictatorship in the south where the majority were poor and often starving so the communist ideals appeared attractive and gained popular support. It was the North Koreans who broke agreements first and invaded the south catching the UN and the allies unprepared. It was sometime before the UN was able to agree on mounting a combined force with the USA providing close to half a million men and the UK 60000, Australia another leading contributor with over 20000 and the South Koreans 600000 making a total of 1.2 million facing a similar number made up of Chinese over 900000 and 250000 North Koreans and a token force from Russia.
Civilian casualties were high on both sides with the number of dead and wounded estimated to be of the order of two and half million, although of the 1 million total for the South the majority of the 400000 who became missing are thought to have been abducted into the north. Similarly there was a disproportionate number of military deaths and injuries on the part of the Koreans themselves with over half a million each side.
The USA had over 30000 killed and 90000 wounded and The UK over 1000 dead and over 2500 wounded. The great retreat, occurred after the allies invaded the North and had made considerable progress until the Chinese were ready to counter attack. In the end there was a stalemate at the 38th parallel which remains to this day.
The main purpose of the film is to demonstrate that the allied forces retreated with honour fighting every yard of the way and bringing back as many of their dead and in injured as they could. Russ plays the younger of three brothers, eldest having fallen during the second world war and the elder an officer in Korea who Russ only finds his body. Under the rule that in such situations, (Saving Private Ryan the best known example, a family can petition the President for the discharge of the remaining son) Russ is to be sent home under protest and spends the night before departure with his company having recently been promoted as the driver runner for the commanding officer. He then gets caught up in the counter offensive and is badly wounded although as is the nature of the Marines, they refuse to leave their dead and injured behind and he is brought to an airfield to be flown home. It remains a surprisingly good film which sets the trend for a realistic and generally unsentimental transmutation of warfare into popular entertainment.
Lost and the X files merit separate writings over the next few days.
I will watch the news before making a drink as during the last moments of the after midnight politics show, the great political argumentist Andrew Neil, announced that agreement had been reached in Northern Ireland over the devolution of policing and justice from Westminster to Stormont. This morning The Prime Minister flew back to Northern Ireland to meet his Irish counterpart and the chief negotiators of Sinn Fein and the DUP-The Democratic Unionist Party, to confirm that after 10 days of prolonged negotiations agreement has been reached on the last and most important aspect of the Good Friday agreement of 1988.
While BBC gave the development top billing, Sky relegated confirmation of the settlement below a reminder that at 11 am this morning the Director of Public Prosecutions will reveal if the three Labour Party Members of Parliament and the two Labour and one Conservative Peer in the House of Lords are to be prosecuted arising from their financial accounting, under the umbrella heading of Parliamentary Expenses. Democracy itself is once more on trial in the UK at a time when European nations struggle to bring the basics to Afghanistan and millions are spent reviewing the involvement of the UK in bringing democracy to Iraq.
The most vivid recollection of yesterday was the interview with a twelve year old girl who had escaped the control of her brother who previously had forced her nine year old sister to wear a waistcoat of explosives and driven her off crying for her mother not to return home. Those who have interviewed the girl believe her story and that the bother was responsible for a number of atrocities in the country. That is the nature of fundamentalism. I used the word advisedly as it implies an integral and rational perversion of a belief system which should not be given the status of a religion.
8.40 over the first cup of coffee for the day and already I have jettisoned the original plan for the day as I need to write further about the news stories already mentioned.
I was fortunate in having a fundamentalist catholic upbringing in which the Sermon on the mount predominated and my unusual family circumstances, unusual as I thought at the time, resulted in being drawn to the non violent passive resistance and direct action teachings of Mahatma Ghandi, and I still occasionally read from Satyagraha, one of the first 2000 English translation editions published by Jivanji Dahyabhai Desai, Navajivan Press, Ahmedabad.
“Satyagraha is literally holding on to Truth and it means therefore, Truth Force. Truth is soul or spirit. It is, therefore, known as soul-force,” as it opening words and immediately goes onto explain that the concept excludes violence because individual human beings can never expect to know absolute truth and, therefore are not competent to punish.
To my eternal shame I once accused two elderly packers of Peace News, one evening in the basement of the building used for the publication editing and for Houseman’s bookshop, in the Caledonian Road, close to Kings Cross station, that all their talk of peace, criticism of governmental and military force was a manifest of the lack of peace within them and their aggression towards institutions of power. I was being insightful and truthful and destructive and punitive, and endangering their continued voluntary participation in the weekly activity. Later I resigned from the Committee 100 when I could no longer cope with 100 diverse personalities and its subsequent executive committee interminably arguing of the minutiae of policies and strategies and individual actions, and the proven blatant disregard of its effective director, Ralph Sheonman, in acting upon what was agreed. I was also was to resign my position as a temporary field organiser for the Direct Action Committee after a similar heated and fraught meeting in Glasgow prior to the Holy Loch demonstration in 1961, because what had then been decided was radically different from what I had advised the authorities was the agreed plan.
I therefore can only marvel at the patience and endurance of the negotiators on behalf of Sinn Fein and the DUP who, perhaps under the coaxing of the British, Irish and USA administrations, talked for the greater part of ten days to find a way to move forward from the potential bring of yet another suspension or collapse of the power sharing executive and elected assembly of the Northern Irish people
Too often, and what seems to me to be normal for political interaction within and between Parties and Movements, everything becomes reduced to conflicting personalities and personal interests, bids for power and vendettas against anyone who thinks and acts differently. However in Northern Island the issue is that for two decades the republicans bombed and shot policemen and judges and Protestant unionist feared that electoral swings would inevitably lead to the republicans gaining control of policing and the Justice system bringing with this retaliation.
I was struck during the recent Mo Mowlam documentary drama by her explaining to Unionist murderers in he Maize prison that the eventual Good Friday agreement would involve the release of “soldiers” from both sides and the sitting down together in the same room to discuss political decisions of people who previously had murderous intent on each other or who regarded many of those present as responsible for the murder and severe injury of colleagues, friends and family, albeit indirectly.
It therefore does not surprise me that it has taken twelve years to reach some agreement on the devolving of responsibility from Westminster to Stormont. It was recalled that Sir Christopher Patten made 175 recommendations in 1999 on the future of policing in Northern Ireland and that it was not until 2006 that the basis for establishing a Parliament again was agreed and then only that all participants would agree to support the police and its devolution. It was not until January 2007 that Sinn Feign Members, about 900 of them, voted by 90% at a special meeting to officially support the police for the first time in their history. The intention was for agreement to be reached by the spring of 2008 at which he DUP stated this was aspirational!
The first Assembly did get off the ground when the six counties went to the polls in March 2007 with the DUP the largest Party with 36 of the 108 seats overtaking the then more moderate UUP with 18 and Sinn Fein with 28 and the SDLP 16 and the Alliance with 7, Dr Iain Paisley leader of the DUP became the first Minister and Martin McGuiness, number two Gerry Adams, the deputy first Minister. Sinn Fein then took up its seats on the Policing Board with the DUP and representatives of the political parties
In September last year Gordon Brown requested the political leaders in Northern Ireland to set a date for the devolution of the police and justice system, publishing proposals for a budget of up to £1 billion and a legislative framework. Then the DUP leader rejected the Christmas deadline and an influential spokesman claimed that that devolution was unlikely during the lifetime of the Parliament. Within a few days, an amazing coincidence, some would say, the scandal broke regarding the wife of the first Minister, coupled with allegations of the misuse of public funds. He was required to step down while this aspect was investigated and his deputy took over responsibility as lead negotiator in the devolution meetings. A private meeting takes places in London between the DUP, the UU and the Conservative Party over greater cooperation between unionist parties including the possibility of an electoral pact, thus revealing the fact based fear that at the next Assembly elections Sinn Fein is likely to become the largest party and therefore in a position to appoint someone as first minister. By January 21st oft his year there appeared to be deadlock with the possibility of the Assembly breaking down all together, hence the intervention of the prime Ministers of the UK and Ireland in three days of discussions which ended a week ago but the continuation length and detailed discussions in Ireland and in London with one news report saying that the Prime Minister had as many as twenty phone calls a day as the possibility of an agreement was reached.
9.55 I await the news and will continue to listen until 11 when the announcement whether there will be prosecutions will be made. Yesterday the latest investigation resulted in about half the existing members of Parliament being asked to pay back over £1 million, together with the information that the cost of the investigation was several hundred thousand pounds more. The investigation concentrated on some aspects and not others presumably because almost everyone was unlikely to be included in what was excluded! The sense of unfairness and arbitrariness prevails but on Question Time last night two of the Westminster politicians present explained that although they believed the decisions in their instance were incorrect and unjust they were both paying the required amounts as a means of starting the process of rebuilding trust and confidence on the part of the general public.
10.40am I watched the last part of the media conference given by the two Prime Ministers and Sinn Fein and DUP leadership, including a separate brief statement and interview with Gerry Adams. The media is right to be cautious over those who said this was an historical day, the day when democratic politics came of age in Northern Ireland, perhaps for the time. The two principal parties and the two governments will now involve the other political parties and interest groups with a view to taking the agreement through Parliament on what happens to be my birthday in March. As a student of body language including facial expressions and words used I believe today will prove historical for the development of the political progress in Northern Ireland, for relationships between the UK and Eire and for the peaceful solution of long standing genuine grievances and problems.
The agreement will do the Prime Minister no harm in terms of his personal standing and the forthcoming General Election. I was also pleased that David Mellor the former Conservative Social Services Minister shared my view that David Cameron in his drive to be more like Blair and New Labour than Blair and New Labour is at risk of alienating his traditional supporters on the right of the party and the middle ground voters who seek good leadership from someone who appears to know what they are doing and why. I have sympathy with Mr Cameron nevertheless. It is one thing to argue that action to restore Britain’s financial basis and standing should be taken now and that such action will affect taxation levels and public service provision, it is another to be specific until you have command of the accounting books and processes. Remember the wisdom of Labour’s first period in office from 1997 when Br Brown and Mr Blair emphasised that it would be two years before they would be in a position to alter the inherited financial balance in any major way and they also limited the number and extent of what they would achieve in the first Parliament to five goals which were printed on a credit card size card.
Unfortunately the circumstances are different and if Mr Cameron believes that action should be taken now and will be taken immediately upon gaining office, he must be more specific and at one with his Shadow Chancellor. The problem is that Mr Brown and his Chancellor have the support of the public in general for postponing the potential worst effects of the action required for the good reason hat supporting public services and businesses and giving ongoing support to the banking and financial services industry, will, if it works have the double effect of limiting unemployment and increasing government income while reducing payouts for unemployment and other welfare benefits, and therefore the level of cuts and tax increases will not be as great, Already unemployment levels have reduced and presumably the banks are already paying back loans and maintaining if not improving dividends on shares as well as paying taxes on their profits.
The imminent cloud on Mr Brown’s horizon is his appearance before the Chilcot Iraq inquiry over his role as Chancellor in controlling expenditure on the war. Mr Cameron used his first three P M questions to raise the issue in the Commons on Wednesday. Mr Browns response was to say that no request was turned down (although this does mean that all that was asked for was given) and that expenditure under Labour had risen in real terms compared to the reductions under the conservatives. The other interesting aspect is that all the revelations at the Inquiry is not having any impact on the opinion polls. That Mr Cameron decided to go on the offensive now suggests he knows that there will be little to gain in terms of party politics later. Clare Short was remarkably subdued during her Question Time experience and more effective for being so whereas George Galloway’s a plague on all your houses was good political theatre but is unlikely to cut much ice with the public at the crunch time. Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, Theresa May, Conservative Shadow spokesperson on Work and Pensions and Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail, all explained their support for the decision to go to War and their continuing support despite the horrific problems which eschewed. For once their was a fair balanced discussion.
This reminds of a NCIS programme earlier in the week in which two members of the team were sent to Iraq to investigate the murder of a marine and a sub story involved the newest member of the team who wanted to meet the teenage sons and daughter of an Iraq who had been killed as an insurgent while going to the aid of her brother who survived and was back home in a coma. It was a brutal but encouraging reminder of all those statistics of civilian death in wartime. More on this later.
There are to be four prosecutions of Parliamentarians for alleged false accounting, with three Labour Members of Parliament and one Conservative Peer being named. In the same statement a fifth was named where it was felt there were insufficient grounds for a successful prosecution and in a sixth instance the work was ongoing. I have noted that two of those named have since given interviews to the media. The issue of what can be reported or should be reported when legal situations are involved was also raised in relation to the Chelsea and England captain John Terry. It can be argued that Mr Terry brought on himself the wrath of the media, especially the tabloids by attempting a blanket media ban through the courts which would have prevented reference to the legal action being taken. When this failed it was inevitable that the gloves would be taken off and further revelations can be expected over the weekend. As one member of the audience intervened with so many important issues occurring why was the media giving so much attention to the matter. Significantly although Andrew Neil made reference in his introduction to the programme last night they steered clear during the actual discussion with a psychologist about a situation where young women now appear to be queuing up to become trophy wives and bed partners of footballers who far from turning down the opportunities, embrace, some with relish in much the same way as music performances and films stars and others have done so over the past century and throughout history.
Where I disagreed with members of the audience is that just because England is playing in the world cup this Summer, the position of the captain should be unaffected. This is wrong. Captaining the English football Team is the biggest honour and position in the English sport. And if half the things now being reported are accurate then his continuing captaincy must be in question, potentially damaging as it is for the team and beings elected to hold the 2016 or 2020 world cup. Later it was announced that he had stepped down.
12.15 I have enjoyed three rolls with chunky Italian salami for an early lunch before moving onto other things with first a long overdue deep clean of the bathroom, spurred by the arrival of an engineer to service the central heating and hot water boiler. This followed on from yesterday braving the cold to attend to the existing patio plants and their containers and plant teh sprouting bulbs in three new containers as well as well as existing ones. I have now five oblong containers over those original purchased after moving and deciding use the patio area and part of the covered garage with plants using hanging baskets increased from the original three to six last years. The three large evergreen shrubs continue to thrive with the variegated leaved making excellent progress over the past months. The hedging evergreen bought last year is also showing signs of strengthening. There is one likely casualty which I failed to protect two years ago from frost had to settle with weaker growths although it had looked dead but the root ball must have survived. Having made the same mistake this autumn and left it in the open and I fear it will be spring before the extent of the damage can be assessed. The new container will mean that I will be able these to die out naturally without delaying the purchase and plating of summer flowers.
3.30 pm I am having a bad food and drink day in that so far I have consumed a plate of Muesli before a midmorning lunch, a cooked breakfast and later spiced chicken wings.
About a month before Christmas I discovered my ideal combination of 50 % fruit and nuts with oats for £1.09 at Lidl’s produced by Goody. When returning this January I purchased the remaining 4 bags and the saw a new batch in coloured green pack instead of the previous blue at the same price but now only boasting 45% fruit and nut content with raisins, sultanas, banana, apricot, dates, papaya and pineapple with Wheat, oat and barley flakes. It is crunchy and tasty a good first thing in the morning and late at night.
I was hungry around 11.15 made up three small brown rolls with Italian salami, mentioned earlier. This is best eaten in thick slices, almost chunks and reminds of the whole salami’ sausages sent by relatives in Christmas food parcels from Tangiers or Gibraltar or those purchased by my birth and care mothers as a once a year treat, along with Queen olives as part of the goodies which they brought on their annual visits at Christmas until the millennium when they were both in their 90’s. Originally these were purchased from a store in Soho but in latter decades they went to the food part of a famous departmental store in Oxford Street, where the price is about double that available in most supermarkets today and the British adjustment to continental and other foreign foods takes hold.
This afternoon I decided that with all my activities I would treat myself to a prepared breakfast with two small sausages and small pieces of bacon with a little scrambled egg, beans, tomatoes tin potato cubes. The overall quality was poor but in fulfilled a need along with a cup of tea and two cans of diet coke earlier in the day. Later in the evening I had my first drink of alcohol this year, a bottle of Peroni beer. At the supermarket for fresh fruit and some spiced chicken wings and drumsticks and my second treat of the day, a packet of liquorice twists. I had been in search for Pontefract Cakes after Portillo’s visit to the town as part of the his British train journey series. The supermarket visit was overall a failure as I forgot the cooking oil for a stir fry. There was a drenching downpour so I appreciated that there was a ground floor carpark beneath the supermarket. For once I could only find space on the far side.
4.15pm Also earlier this afternoon I watched a film about the Korean War which I do not remembered previously experiencing, called Retreat Hell! with baby faced Russ Tamblyn looking younger than the 17 year old he was playing. The film is a fictionalised account of the great withdrawal which was forced on the allies when China poured in hundreds of thousands trained troops to support the Korean communists.
The story of the war is for another day but broadly there was a stalemate in the country similar to that in Vietnam with the communist controlling the north and a repressive dictatorship in the south where the majority were poor and often starving so the communist ideals appeared attractive and gained popular support. It was the North Koreans who broke agreements first and invaded the south catching the UN and the allies unprepared. It was sometime before the UN was able to agree on mounting a combined force with the USA providing close to half a million men and the UK 60000, Australia another leading contributor with over 20000 and the South Koreans 600000 making a total of 1.2 million facing a similar number made up of Chinese over 900000 and 250000 North Koreans and a token force from Russia.
Civilian casualties were high on both sides with the number of dead and wounded estimated to be of the order of two and half million, although of the 1 million total for the South the majority of the 400000 who became missing are thought to have been abducted into the north. Similarly there was a disproportionate number of military deaths and injuries on the part of the Koreans themselves with over half a million each side.
The USA had over 30000 killed and 90000 wounded and The UK over 1000 dead and over 2500 wounded. The great retreat, occurred after the allies invaded the North and had made considerable progress until the Chinese were ready to counter attack. In the end there was a stalemate at the 38th parallel which remains to this day.
The main purpose of the film is to demonstrate that the allied forces retreated with honour fighting every yard of the way and bringing back as many of their dead and in injured as they could. Russ plays the younger of three brothers, eldest having fallen during the second world war and the elder an officer in Korea who Russ only finds his body. Under the rule that in such situations, (Saving Private Ryan the best known example, a family can petition the President for the discharge of the remaining son) Russ is to be sent home under protest and spends the night before departure with his company having recently been promoted as the driver runner for the commanding officer. He then gets caught up in the counter offensive and is badly wounded although as is the nature of the Marines, they refuse to leave their dead and injured behind and he is brought to an airfield to be flown home. It remains a surprisingly good film which sets the trend for a realistic and generally unsentimental transmutation of warfare into popular entertainment.
Lost and the X files merit separate writings over the next few days.
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