CentreRight

By Bob Seely

Yet another bishop puts his foot in it by saying: “The Taliban can perhaps be admired for their conviction to their faith and their sense of loyalty to each other.” Sadly this bishop, The Rt Rev Stephen Venner, is the new bishop for the armed forces.

I had to think a bit before deciding why I was offended, and it should be said that the bishop apologised for his remarks, but criticism of what he said is still valid.

It’s not the fact that the man is bishop for the armed forces, and that his remarks may damage moral, although I suspect they will, and I have no doubt that our enemy will use his statement against our troops.

It’s not the fact that he calls for understanding. Maybe he has little understanding of our enemy, but the Armed Forces are not stupid. They have no illusion about who we are fighting; a hard core of skilled insurgents fired up with Pashtun nationalism and a vicious, intolerant God, and a broader mass of young, bored, Pashtun men, many of whom would be reconcilable if they saw progress in their country. They fight because they are paid, because they are bored, because they are indoctrinated, because tribes come together at the approach of an outsider, regardless of whether that outsider is the Afghan state or the British army.

I think what is objectionable about the bishop’s thoughts are: his ignorance about our enemy, his self-defeating self-hatred, an overfondness for humanising those who hate us, and a moral relativism - a sometimes useful tool for understanding the complexity of the world - taken to absurdity.

David Cameron said two important things this week; both relate to Afghanistan.

First, yesterday in Afghanistan he said:

"We must never do or say anything that gives the impression to the Taliban that we will not see this through.”

Second, during this week’s Parliamentary debate Cameron warned against troop reductions in the near future.

"I don't want us to raise false hopes. It's pretty unlikely you're going to see a reduction in British troop numbers next year. As soon as you can hand over lead responsibility to the Afghans in a district you should do so... but do it based on success.”

Cameron, thank God, is now aware, or has been made aware, that the more we talk of exit strategies, the more the Taleban will believe victory is in sight, and that to put artificial timetables on troop withdrawal is to invite future defeats.

In Iraq, we pulled out of districts and handed them over to ill-prepared Iraqi police and security forces, often riddled with enemy militia or openly corrupt. We pulled out before the job was done so that the Government, which had committed UK forces to a war it no longer had the stomach to fight, could pretend things were on track according to its timetable, perhaps the most wretched example of this administration’s ‘target’ culture.

Posted by Bob Seely.

Apologies to those who hate predictions, but by the time we’ll have finished hearing the Iraq War evidence sometime next year, may I predict the following:

The remaining vestiges of respect to which Tony Blair still clings, a result not of his personal qualities but of the fact that people genuflect to those who have held authority, will evaporate. This will be due to the overwhelming evidence that secrecy came before honesty, preparation and integrity. He will be seen by the media and the majority as a morally bankrupt individual who misled the people. He will spend the next 30 years of his life being held in increasing contempt and irrelevance – a more wretched version of Harold Wilson. This will strengthen the hand of those in the Conservative Party who do not believe that Conservatives should be modelling our strategy on this man.

The reputations of the BBC and Andrew Gilligan (remember him?), as well as those moderate voices who came out against the war (including people such as Sir Malcolm Rifkind MP and Ken Clarke MP) will be enhanced. By contrast, the Conservative Party’s position on the war will increasingly be seen as an error, not because one should oppose wars for political opportunism, but because there was a strong suspicion at the time that things were not as they seemed. It was as if the issue was too big, too serious and too important. The Opposition’s inability to hold Government to account will strengthen the opinions of those who see our current political system as broken.

By Bob Seely

I wish the Left would stop lying about history. I also wish conservatives would do a much better job of highlighting the fantasies and misrepresentations of others.

Yet another example came with Labour’s party political broadcast this week. Mid way through, the narrator said that “at one time it seemed impossible to turn the tide of fascism, until good men and women stood in the way,” the good men and women presumably not being Conservative blue rinses but solid working class people and their Fabian masters.

At the heart of the Left's moral posturing is the myth that Socialism was the antidote to Fascism. This is largely, but not entirely, a lie.

The British Union of Fascists was initially Labour splinter group – as was Mussolini’s movement in Italy. And while many Trades’ Union members did oppose fascism in the 1930s, the British intelligentsia - the Guardian-reading classes – were rather less honourable. From the mid-1930s the collective voice of the Left Book Club (approx 50,000 members, the heart of the British Intelligentsia) believed that there was no moral difference between fascism and the British Empire.

After 1939 when the Nazis and Soviets allied to divide up eastern Europe, many Left intellectuals sat on their hands. Only after the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia and the turn of the war did the intelligentsia throw themselves wholeheartedly into our war effort. The working classes were patriotic, Labour MPs defeatist and Left intellectuals sometimes treacherous – and if in doubt read Orwell’s wartime journalism in which he showers the intelligentsia with contempt. In eastern Europe from 1930 through to the fall of the Berlin Wall, socialism was generally indistinguishable from fascism.

In our ten plus years out of power I wish some donor had had the foresight to fund a research project on the Left’s favourite lies and those who repeat them (BBC London, the Guardian, etc). We can’t win the cultural arguments unless people stop believing these false claims.

The leaders of the Left have never defended Britain against Fascism.

Posted by Bob Seely

For those who have five minutes to spare, please watch Dan Hannan’s fascinating exposition about the benefits of leaving the European Union. (Daniel Hannan: The TaxPayers' Alliance Great EU Debate)

I don’t want to repeat his arguments, but Dan makes one incredibly important point that some euroskeptics miss: that there is no point in repealing powers from an undemocratic state in Brussels only to keep that power within a flawed system in Whitehall.

To bring, as Hannan says, “honour and purpose to the act of voting, dignity to our legislature and freedom to our citizens,” exit from the European Union, if it were ever to be achieved, would only be the start of the type of revolution arguably last seen in Britain during the Glorious Revolution in the second half of the 17th century.

At a national level reform measures could/should include an elected second chamber, a directly elected post of Prime Minister, and open primaries for all members of Parliament, giving the people the power to apply their own checks and balances to the system as well as allowing individuals to chose their Parliamentary representatives free of party machines.

At a local level, Hannan mentions self-financing councils (and we know that often councillors’ most important relationships now are with central Government, not the people), local referendums and elected local sheriffs - the mind boggles at the extent to which we could revive the fortunes of our democracy and our nation.

In the American psyche is the story of settler John Winthorp, who spoke in a famous 1630 sermon about New England being a ‘city on the hill,’ with the eyes of the world upon it. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to build something like that in Britain? To have politics as a respected civic/patriotic duty rather than a fringe activity for a caste separate from the people, and held in contempt by them? To build something seen by Europeans as a model for a New Europe and a new style of democratic accountability? To revive and dignify our political parties by giving them a mandate that, let’s be honest, their falling membership numbers show they lack?

Please can we have another Glorious Revolution!

It’s genuinely good to see the Sun attacking Labour and supporting the Tories, and to see Lord Mandelson today complaining about bias is risible. However, I don’t want to be churlish ... but ... some aspects of this relationship make me uneasy. I know that many of you are going to roll your eyeballs, but hear me out. Just because the Sun is bad for Labour, doesn’t mean it’s entirely good for us. Here’s why:

First, let’s be realistic. The strategy of the Murdoch media is to find a man on the up (Blair, Cameron, etc), build him up further and destroy his opponents, in order to ride the zeitgeist and maximise its relationship with those in power, for the benefit of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. There’s nothing wrong or illegal in this, and I don’t share the Guardian readers’ views that Murdoch as the devil incarnate - in many ways he is an impressive man - but he extracts a price, and we don’t yet know what it is.

Second, the Sun’s change of heart changes nothing fundamental. It’s playing catch-up. The Sun’s position, unlike with Mrs T in the 1970s and 80s, is neither radical nor brave. They are following their readers, not leading them – which partly explains the OTT abuse of PM Brown. Third, there’s another reason for the OTT attacks; tabloid power is waining. The Sun needs to maximise its impact on the coming election for political and ad revenue purposes. If the Sun ain’t the story, it’ll hit its bottom line. Hence the reason to dump Brown the day after his speech – all’s fair in love and war (and advertising revenue). The same could yet happen to us. Both the above mean that the Sun has lost a lot of its clout. It’s not as important as it once was.

Posted by Bob Seely.

It’s easy to blame the messenger for bad news, and there’s certainly a long and ignoble history of politicians attacking reporters and media organisations for telling difficult truths. But I wonder if we have now moved to a new era when the media are as responsible for mistruths as politicians. I ask because although the media is meant to reflect reality, I wonder how accurate their reporting is of Afghanistan? I have some doubt, and it is based on experience.

When I was in Iraq, even a year after it was clear that the Coalition and the Iraq authorities had defeated the insurgency, journalists still arrived in theatre with the assumption that we were beaten (the role of the UK in SE Iraq is debateable, but that’s not the point here). Some reporters had real difficulty accepting victory. It was almost an inverse of traditional war journalism. Through most of the modern era, journalists assumed ‘their’ side was winning unless it was undisputedly obvious that it wasn’t. In the final two years of the Iraq War, the opposite took place – an assumption of failure even when it was clear that the insurgency was spent.

I’m still trying to work out the reasons for this: the lazy, soft-left assumption that the Iraq Government was a Western stooge, a bitter resentment of George Bush, a breakdown of relations between the MoD and the media, or just a legacy of the previous Iraq reporting. Whatever it was, some in the media acted as if they resented the fact that ‘their’ side had won. More broadly, I wonder if journalists now have an addiction to disaster. Watch TV news nowadays and almost every story is reduced to a ‘catastrophe’ or ‘tragedy,’ no matter how parochial the story or how few people are involved. If journalists can’t wallow self-indulgently in mawkish sentimentality the story is hardly worth bothering with. Straight reporting seems to be a dying art.