The garrison is at Mount Pleasant which almost certainly isn't. You can read all about it in today's Sunday Telegraph.
I can just about understand why anyone would want to live in the Falkland Islands; I can't understand why "we" want to keep the Islands. The inhabitants don't contribute anything to the British Exchequer but "we" spend vast amounts on defending them from the Argie threat. The Falklands are a loss-making subsidiary and "we" have more than enough of those already (Northern Ireland, Wales, arguably Scotland)
When the Germans occupied the Channel Islands in World War Two, "we" didn't rush to kick them out: the Channel Islands are not part of the United Kingdom and "we" were rather more concerned to defend the UK from its enemies. That bears remembering: all that money spent on the Falklands could be spent undermining the appeal of terrorism to people living in the UK.
My suggestion is this: since the Argentinians are so keen to own the Falklands, why not let them buy the Freehold for a deficit-busting amount - and on condition that they grant a 99 (or 999 year) lease to the existing tenants.
After all, Imperial Russia did not die of shame when it sold Alaska to the Americans, even though Alaska is on Russia's doorstep rather than America's.
My suggestion would also work well for Gibraltar - though in the past I have supported the idea of offering Hastings to Spain in an exchange deal. It would really transform Hastings into a great place for a day out.
Sunday, 29 January 2012
Friday, 27 January 2012
Honours and L S Lowry
I don't believe in Honours, whether they are awarded by Elizabeth II, Kim III or even an elected President. They are almost inevitably part of a corrupt system, even if some of them have to go to "deserving individuals" to disguise the fact. Every dedicated doctor is twinned with a dodgy dealer.
I have always made a mental exception for awards for bravery, though I realise that this is not as simple a category as it seems. In his recent book, Losing Small Wars, Frank Letwidge points out that British soldiers never get medals for "courageous restraint" - never get honoured for resisting provocation in order to uphold their role or reputation. Medals are given for going in guns blazing and killing some Natives.
Yesterday, the Cabinet Office was forced to release the names of those, now dead, who have refused honours from Queen Elizabeth II, something they really did not want to do in a year when our Ruling Family will be celebrating itself (again). Freedom of Information legislation had to be used to drag out the names.
Some good ones too. L S Lowry refused every honour he was offered - and they kept trying, increasing the temptation all the way up to Companion of Honour.
Also refusing that award, I found Philip Noel-Baker (the peace-maker), "L S Woolf" who I guess is Leonard Woolf (well done, Bloomsbury!), Robert Graves and "B Nicholson" who I guess is Benedict Nicholson.
The list of refuseniks isn't that long but it is Honourable. You can honour them by reading the list of names (published yesterday by The Daily Telegraph)
I have always made a mental exception for awards for bravery, though I realise that this is not as simple a category as it seems. In his recent book, Losing Small Wars, Frank Letwidge points out that British soldiers never get medals for "courageous restraint" - never get honoured for resisting provocation in order to uphold their role or reputation. Medals are given for going in guns blazing and killing some Natives.
Yesterday, the Cabinet Office was forced to release the names of those, now dead, who have refused honours from Queen Elizabeth II, something they really did not want to do in a year when our Ruling Family will be celebrating itself (again). Freedom of Information legislation had to be used to drag out the names.
Some good ones too. L S Lowry refused every honour he was offered - and they kept trying, increasing the temptation all the way up to Companion of Honour.
Also refusing that award, I found Philip Noel-Baker (the peace-maker), "L S Woolf" who I guess is Leonard Woolf (well done, Bloomsbury!), Robert Graves and "B Nicholson" who I guess is Benedict Nicholson.
The list of refuseniks isn't that long but it is Honourable. You can honour them by reading the list of names (published yesterday by The Daily Telegraph)
Tuesday, 24 January 2012
London Hotels: Getting Rid of "Catering Grade"
I am in Wiesbaden staying in a cheap enough Ibis hotel. Cutting my mixed grain bread this morning, I began thinking about Catering Grade ...
Stay in a ** hotel near any of London´s railway termini and you will encounter Catering Grade - a device by which your hundred pound a night B and B can avoid spending anything on your breakfast. Most visitors to the Olympics will discover Catering Grade and their rooms will cost one fifty a night.
Teabags which produce dishwasher grey tea, chalk white squares of bread, confitures which are coloured jellies, sausages which ... it`s too awful to contemplate.Given the chance, they will serve you UHT milk just like municipal cafes.
Time I say for the EU to act. Make Catering Grade illegal!
Stay in a ** hotel near any of London´s railway termini and you will encounter Catering Grade - a device by which your hundred pound a night B and B can avoid spending anything on your breakfast. Most visitors to the Olympics will discover Catering Grade and their rooms will cost one fifty a night.
Teabags which produce dishwasher grey tea, chalk white squares of bread, confitures which are coloured jellies, sausages which ... it`s too awful to contemplate.Given the chance, they will serve you UHT milk just like municipal cafes.
Time I say for the EU to act. Make Catering Grade illegal!
Saturday, 21 January 2012
You Think This is Easy ....
It's a good job I don't have to write a daily column for The Independent. I might be driven to drink or plagiarism. Here, I always have a choice, to Blog or not to Blog.
Most mornings, I go on line and scan the headlines from BBC News and some of the newspapers. There are always things which sadden me, irritate me, frustrate me, anger me. I try not to become repetitive and petulant (though it's clear that I don't try hard enough).
I usually try not to write in a Blog about tragic or simply vast subjects where a few hundred words of my prose would tend to diminish the subject rather than reveal the depths of pain or complexity involved. Sometimes, I suspect, I don't write about a topic - or treat it only cursorily - because I simply despair.
Sometimes I write autobiographically, but I exclude certain subjects. Other people are still alive and so am I.
I like doing the Book Reviews, which make me work a bit harder - reading the book (always cover to cover), assembling the review - and I have thought of hiving off the Reviews to a separate Blog.
Actually, it's not really necessary. This Blog (unlike my specialist Philately Blog at www.armeniazemstvo.com) does not have a regular following. It picks up readers because of its Back List of Old Blogs - a few hundred now. Google searches ("Does the Kingdom of Yugoslavia still exist?", "Does Prince Harry have a Job?") turn up posts from the Back List and those who read them may or may not go away enlightened or satisfied. I simply don't know.
Most mornings, I go on line and scan the headlines from BBC News and some of the newspapers. There are always things which sadden me, irritate me, frustrate me, anger me. I try not to become repetitive and petulant (though it's clear that I don't try hard enough).
I usually try not to write in a Blog about tragic or simply vast subjects where a few hundred words of my prose would tend to diminish the subject rather than reveal the depths of pain or complexity involved. Sometimes, I suspect, I don't write about a topic - or treat it only cursorily - because I simply despair.
Sometimes I write autobiographically, but I exclude certain subjects. Other people are still alive and so am I.
I like doing the Book Reviews, which make me work a bit harder - reading the book (always cover to cover), assembling the review - and I have thought of hiving off the Reviews to a separate Blog.
Actually, it's not really necessary. This Blog (unlike my specialist Philately Blog at www.armeniazemstvo.com) does not have a regular following. It picks up readers because of its Back List of Old Blogs - a few hundred now. Google searches ("Does the Kingdom of Yugoslavia still exist?", "Does Prince Harry have a Job?") turn up posts from the Back List and those who read them may or may not go away enlightened or satisfied. I simply don't know.
Wednesday, 18 January 2012
Frank Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars. British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan
Read this book and you will likely want immediately to confine British forces to barracks and base. It's not safe to let them go anywhere or do anything.
Lieutenant Commander Ledwidge spent fifteen years as a Naval Reserve military intelligence officer and served in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is now retired. He begins rather uncertainly, as if unsure that he should be writing this kind of book at all, but as he gets into his stride, he delivers page after page of understated, but to an outsider like me, seemingly withering critique.
His book is not about the politicians who, out of weakness or ignorance or vainglory, despatched British forces to Iraq and Afghanistan. He is concerned with how the armed forces - and principally the army - handled the missions they were assigned or, in default of proper political direction, invented for themselves.
At the very top, Ledwidge rebukes the top brass for having failed to "speak truth to power": "generals, ill-trained and inadequately educated in the basic elements of strategy, failed in their role as speakers of truth to power" (p 262). In thrall to bluff and hearty notions - Can Do, Cracking On - they failed to demand a clear mission brief, failed to say that - as they understood the brief - it could not be delivered with the resources available, failed to raises issues about what might be legitimate in the circumstances, and so on.
In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the invading and occupying British forces actually did very little - except kill and antagonise local civilians.
In southern Iraq (Basra), they were initially welcomed but squandered goodwill by aligning themselves with militias and gangsters posing as the local administration. They simply lacked the on-the-ground intelligence to realise that this is what they were doing. In the end, they ended up largely confined to base. When they did venture out, in very small numbers, local civilians were quite often terrorised and occasionally tortured and killed.
Ledwidge makes some scathing remarks around this subject. We are frequently told that problems arise when we don't understand the local culture. Nonsense, says Ledwidge, culture is the same in Basra as in Basingstoke: in neither place do people want their doors kicked in at night by heavily armed soldiers speaking a foreign language and uncertain about their reasons for being in your living room.
In Afghanistan, it was insane for the top brass to agree to deployment in Helmand - a province where the British have been hated ever since they were last there.
It was insane to suppose that you could separate the "people" from the "insurgents" (Taliban) when you actually had less to offer the people by way of provision of security and available justice than did the insurgents and when your orders were to ally yourselves with prime sources of local unhappiness - a criminal police and judiciary.
As in Basra, the Brits ended up confined to base with occasional adventures into the occupied territory. Tragically, in Afghanistan, such adventures were often enough backed up with heavy weaponry and missile attacks. Many civilians dead, many more "hearts and minds" lost. What makes us think that it is even legitimate to be firing these missiles, as if Helmand is some kind of battlefield in which we face an enemy threatening our very existence?
Ledwidge goes after these failures with chilling anecdotes, sharp thumbnail analyses, detailed critique of the Army's military culture, and occasionally open exasperation. He rejects the notion that it was all the American's fault, or NATO's fault. These were British mistakes.This is how he sums up:
"The defeats - let us not mince words - in the civil wars - the "counter-insurgencies" - in Helmand and Basra need not have been so comprehensive; indeed, they need not have happened at all... in Basra, the British started with a "winning hand" and played it poorly. In Helmand, they managed to ignore several factors to which any Afghan could (and would) have drawn their attention (and to which several soldeirs did) - this was the single worst possible province into which the British could crash" (p 259)
Lt Cdr Ledwidge is too polite to add, the politicians and the top brass even thought that Helmand would be a good place to deploy one of our spare princelings, Prince Harry.
There is one topic which Ledwidge does not address but which complicates the picture. The wars he discusses have been fought for domestic political consumption. That is why there are so many VIPs on the ground (see Cowper-Coles' Cables from Kabul for examples). That is why there have to be Photo Ops involving bullets and missiles, when really - as Ledwidge several times observes in a discussion of "courageous restraint" - the real military challenge is to manage things so that you don't fire many bullets - and certainly don't fire any missiles.
I can't see the PR man installed as Prime Minister in Downing Street reading this book - which is one reason why I say: Read This Book!
Lieutenant Commander Ledwidge spent fifteen years as a Naval Reserve military intelligence officer and served in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is now retired. He begins rather uncertainly, as if unsure that he should be writing this kind of book at all, but as he gets into his stride, he delivers page after page of understated, but to an outsider like me, seemingly withering critique.
His book is not about the politicians who, out of weakness or ignorance or vainglory, despatched British forces to Iraq and Afghanistan. He is concerned with how the armed forces - and principally the army - handled the missions they were assigned or, in default of proper political direction, invented for themselves.
At the very top, Ledwidge rebukes the top brass for having failed to "speak truth to power": "generals, ill-trained and inadequately educated in the basic elements of strategy, failed in their role as speakers of truth to power" (p 262). In thrall to bluff and hearty notions - Can Do, Cracking On - they failed to demand a clear mission brief, failed to say that - as they understood the brief - it could not be delivered with the resources available, failed to raises issues about what might be legitimate in the circumstances, and so on.
In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the invading and occupying British forces actually did very little - except kill and antagonise local civilians.
In southern Iraq (Basra), they were initially welcomed but squandered goodwill by aligning themselves with militias and gangsters posing as the local administration. They simply lacked the on-the-ground intelligence to realise that this is what they were doing. In the end, they ended up largely confined to base. When they did venture out, in very small numbers, local civilians were quite often terrorised and occasionally tortured and killed.
Ledwidge makes some scathing remarks around this subject. We are frequently told that problems arise when we don't understand the local culture. Nonsense, says Ledwidge, culture is the same in Basra as in Basingstoke: in neither place do people want their doors kicked in at night by heavily armed soldiers speaking a foreign language and uncertain about their reasons for being in your living room.
In Afghanistan, it was insane for the top brass to agree to deployment in Helmand - a province where the British have been hated ever since they were last there.
It was insane to suppose that you could separate the "people" from the "insurgents" (Taliban) when you actually had less to offer the people by way of provision of security and available justice than did the insurgents and when your orders were to ally yourselves with prime sources of local unhappiness - a criminal police and judiciary.
As in Basra, the Brits ended up confined to base with occasional adventures into the occupied territory. Tragically, in Afghanistan, such adventures were often enough backed up with heavy weaponry and missile attacks. Many civilians dead, many more "hearts and minds" lost. What makes us think that it is even legitimate to be firing these missiles, as if Helmand is some kind of battlefield in which we face an enemy threatening our very existence?
Ledwidge goes after these failures with chilling anecdotes, sharp thumbnail analyses, detailed critique of the Army's military culture, and occasionally open exasperation. He rejects the notion that it was all the American's fault, or NATO's fault. These were British mistakes.This is how he sums up:
"The defeats - let us not mince words - in the civil wars - the "counter-insurgencies" - in Helmand and Basra need not have been so comprehensive; indeed, they need not have happened at all... in Basra, the British started with a "winning hand" and played it poorly. In Helmand, they managed to ignore several factors to which any Afghan could (and would) have drawn their attention (and to which several soldeirs did) - this was the single worst possible province into which the British could crash" (p 259)
Lt Cdr Ledwidge is too polite to add, the politicians and the top brass even thought that Helmand would be a good place to deploy one of our spare princelings, Prince Harry.
There is one topic which Ledwidge does not address but which complicates the picture. The wars he discusses have been fought for domestic political consumption. That is why there are so many VIPs on the ground (see Cowper-Coles' Cables from Kabul for examples). That is why there have to be Photo Ops involving bullets and missiles, when really - as Ledwidge several times observes in a discussion of "courageous restraint" - the real military challenge is to manage things so that you don't fire many bullets - and certainly don't fire any missiles.
I can't see the PR man installed as Prime Minister in Downing Street reading this book - which is one reason why I say: Read This Book!
Will Michael Gove go the Way of Dr Liam Fox?
On December 31 2010 I predicted that Dr Liam Fox would not last another year as Secretary of State for Defence and I was right.
So it's tempting to predict that Michael Gove will not last out 2012 as Secretary of State for Education. He was in the News yesterday because he wants to get the Queen a Yacht for her Jubilee and would be very happy for the taxpayer to pay for it.
Today he is in the newspapers because his plan to distribute a King James Bible to every school in the Land has run into difficulty. Who is going to pay for this bit of Gove-promotion? (He apparently plans to sign every copy - clearly there is not much work for a Secretary of State for Education these days).
I'm tempted to say, Three "I'm a Nutter" Stories and He's Out. Like Ruth Kelly, Gove is a bit of an embarassment. David Cameron's PR persons can't just go on slapping him down.So I'll make the prediction: He will provide us with another Story and he'll be out before the end of 2012.
So it's tempting to predict that Michael Gove will not last out 2012 as Secretary of State for Education. He was in the News yesterday because he wants to get the Queen a Yacht for her Jubilee and would be very happy for the taxpayer to pay for it.
Today he is in the newspapers because his plan to distribute a King James Bible to every school in the Land has run into difficulty. Who is going to pay for this bit of Gove-promotion? (He apparently plans to sign every copy - clearly there is not much work for a Secretary of State for Education these days).
I'm tempted to say, Three "I'm a Nutter" Stories and He's Out. Like Ruth Kelly, Gove is a bit of an embarassment. David Cameron's PR persons can't just go on slapping him down.So I'll make the prediction: He will provide us with another Story and he'll be out before the end of 2012.
Sunday, 15 January 2012
Michael Gove: God, the Queen and School Uniform
Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, is in the newspapers today. He wants to give The Queen a new yacht for her Jubilee - or, rather, he wants to take £60 million from taxation for that purpose.He's also the man who is printing King James's Bibles for distribution to every school in the Land, whether they like it or not.
I always think of Gove as a man living in a fantasy world dated 1953, a year in which I got a Mug for the Queens' Coronation from North End County Primary School - a school where children fainted in assembly (they were hungry), where children smelt (they were neglected), where their faces were painted with gentian violet (that's how impetigo was treated).
We did God in those assemblies where children fainted flat on the polished wood floors, we were supposed to do School Uniform of the kind Gove fantasises - blazers, ties, grey flannel shorts, grey wool socks turned over at the top - we did the Queen.
Michael Gove is a Tory nutter just as Ruth Kelly was a New Labour nutter. In the world of British politics, such people end up running Education because The Daily Mail also thinks that Education is about God,The Queen and School Uniform
I always think of Gove as a man living in a fantasy world dated 1953, a year in which I got a Mug for the Queens' Coronation from North End County Primary School - a school where children fainted in assembly (they were hungry), where children smelt (they were neglected), where their faces were painted with gentian violet (that's how impetigo was treated).
We did God in those assemblies where children fainted flat on the polished wood floors, we were supposed to do School Uniform of the kind Gove fantasises - blazers, ties, grey flannel shorts, grey wool socks turned over at the top - we did the Queen.
Michael Gove is a Tory nutter just as Ruth Kelly was a New Labour nutter. In the world of British politics, such people end up running Education because The Daily Mail also thinks that Education is about God,The Queen and School Uniform
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