Why MI5 comes out of the shadows
By Ben Macintyre (THE TIMES, 07/01/09):
Why do you want to join the Secret Service?” demands John Cleese, the British spymaster interviewing a new recruit in the old Monty Python sketch.
“Can you keep a secret?” “Yes.” “Good, well you’re in then.”
Some British spies have proved notoriously bad at keeping secrets, but for most of the last century the British intelligence agencies insisted on complete secrecy as the central defining tenet of their work. MI5, the Security Service, and MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, worked in deep shadow, anonymous, deniable and invisible.
As the historian Sir Michael Howard remarked in 1991: “So far as…
Boxing Day Is for Giving
By Judith Flanders, the author of Inside the Victorian Home and A Circle of Sisters (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 26/12/08):
Ask most British people what Boxing Day is for, and they will answer, “It’s the day the sales start.” Or, possibly, the day for “visiting the rellies” — Brit-speak for relatives. Ask an Irish person and you will get a history lesson on Christian saints and martyrs, reminding you that it is St. Stephen’s Day in Ireland. Ask an American, of course, and the answer is: “Boxing what?”
Boxing Day, usually thought of as Dec. 26, but technically the first weekday after Christmas, has…
Britain has lost the stomach for a fight
By Michael Portillo (THE TIMES, 21/12/08):
Last week Gordon Brown announced a date for Britain’s withdrawal from Iraq. Most troops will be back in time for a spring general election. The prime minister posed with soldiers and expressed his sorrow over yet more fatal casualties in Afghanistan. He did not dwell on Britain’s humiliation in Basra, nor mention that this is the most inglorious withdrawal since Sir Anthony Eden ordered the boys back from Suez.
The fundamental cause of the British failure was political. Tony Blair wanted to join the United States in its toppling of Saddam Hussein because if Britain does not…
Exit Iraq, heads high
By Jock Stirrup, the Chief of the Defence Staff (THE GUARDIAN, 18/12/08):
‘Basra - mission Unaccomplished” ran the headline on a Guardian editorial a week ago today. On the same day Seumas Milne argued on these pages that we will be leaving Iraq “in shame”. Not so. The British people have every reason to be proud of what their armed forces have achieved in Iraq generally and Basra specifically.
Historians may debate the decision to go into Iraq, but we do not need to wait to judge the contribution that the British military has made. We never claimed that we could solve the problems…
We are fighting the same terrorist disease
By Hamid Karzai, president of Afghanistan (THE TIMES, 15/12/08):
In Afghanistan, and across the Muslim world, we have just celebrated the great Festival of Sacrifice - the Eid al-Adha. We came together with our families to mark an event known also to Jews and Christians: the willingness of Abraham (or Ibrahim, as we call him) to sacrifice his son in obedience to God.
But God intervened, and provided a lamb instead for the sacrifice. Which is why hundreds of millions of Muslims will have feasted this week on lamb - or whatever they can afford - to mark Abraham’s acceptance of the…
Long, detailed, impressive - but futile in the face of runaway climate change
By George Monbiot (THE GUARDIAN, 02/12/08):
Lord Turner has two jobs. The first, as chair of the Financial Services Authority, is to save capitalism. The second, as chair of the committee on climate change, is to save the biosphere from the impacts of capitalism. I have no idea how well he is discharging the first task, but if his approach to the second one is anything to go by, you should dump your shares and buy gold.
His climate change report, published yesterday, is long, detailed and impressive. It has the admirable objective of trying to cap global warming at two degrees or…
Call me a killjoy, but £70bn seems a lot for a sports car
By Marina Hyde (THE GUARDIAN, 29/11/08):
Of late Gordon Brown reminds one of a chap whose wife has informed him that there is a massive hole in the family budget. She will watch with a raised eyebrow as he finds a temporary VAT cut down the back of the sofa, and presents it to her with an imploring look. She will sigh in exasperated sympathy as he remembers £700m worth of supertax in an old post office account. And then she will point gently at the utterly undiminished hole in the balance sheet, and say: “I don’t mean to state the bleeding…
A telling reminder of our enduring captivity to myth
By Madeleine Bunting (THE GUARDIAN, 26/11/08):
It’s been astonishing how the British Museum’s director, Neil MacGregor, has got away with it. For several years he has embarked on a radical redefinition of the role a museum plays in public life. Not so much a repository of beautiful objects that generates tourist dollars, but a place for some of the most fraught and contentious of contemporary political debates. If that seems a far-fetched claim, then the recently opened exhibition Babylon: Myth and Reality will convince you. After wandering past cuneiform tablets and exquisite carvings, you end up in front of footage of armed…
Did Britain Just Sell Tibet?
By Robert Barnett, the director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia and the author of Lhasa: Streets With Memories (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 25/11/08):
The financial crisis is going to do more than increase unemployment, bankruptcy and homelessness. It is also likely to reshape international alignments, sometimes in ways that we would not expect.
As Western powers struggle with the huge scale of the measures needed to revive their economies, they have turned increasingly to China. Last month, for example, Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, asked China to give money to the International Monetary Fund, in return for which Beijing…
Our haven for war criminals
By Ken Macdonald. Ken Macdonald QC concluded his term as director of public prosecutions last week (THE GUARDIAN, 08/11/08):
In the shadow of the Congo conflict, next month sees the 60th anniversary of the United Nations genocide convention. Humanity spoke with one voice in December 1948. The Nazi extermination camps had been uncovered and nations came together to say “never again”. Since then, “never again” has happened repeatedly. One plain lesson of history is that great unmarked crimes have a habit of returning to haunt us. Addressing a group of Nazi leaders and Wehrmacht generals on the brink of the second…
Preachers of pluralism
By David Edgar, a playwright (THE GUARDIAN, 29/10/08):
Jacqui Smith’s announcement yesterday of tougher measures to exclude “preachers of hate” is the latest in a series of initiatives to prevent young British Muslims turning to violent extremism. A mushrooming array of guidelines for schools, colleges and councils emphasises the need to challenge the narrative al-Qaida uses to attract recruits.
These guidelines do nothing to challenge the dominant narrative by which violent extremism is commonly explained, a narrative that sees even peaceful groups as transmission belts on which insecure Muslims are shuffled towards violence. However, there is a very different narrative of British…
Stand-alone Scotland could look after itself
By Alex Salmond, first minister of Scotland (THE TIMES, 20/10/08):
Scotland has changed decisively in the past 18 months. As I said on the evening of the SNP’s election victory in May last year, we are a country that has moved on for good and for ever.
Part of that change is the new confidence in every part of the nation, among young and old alike. And allied to that confidence is that people no longer believe the scare stories put about by our Unionist opponents.
The Unionist argument has always been, at its very core, a dishonest and insidious one. In the…
Back to the Blitz
By Andrew O’Hagan, the author of three novels and The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 16/10/08):
If one is willing to wait long enough, the looniest books can come to seem like masterpieces of common sense. For instance, this has been a very good week for Edmund Wilson’s 1963 rant “The Cold War and the Income Tax,” in which Wilson, the great American stylist and Britain-hater, chooses to unload on those who would use his taxes to build nuclear bomb shelters.
Only yesterday I saw a man in a three-piece suit reading Wilson’s tome rather avidly in…
Nuclear-free Nationalists
By Norman Dombey, professor emeritus of theoretical physics at Sussex University (THE GUARDIAN, 14/10/08):
What will be the fate of “Britain’s” nuclear deterrent if Scotland becomes independent? If the result of the Glenrothes byelection on November 6 mirrors that of Glasgow East, an answer may soon be needed. This is the biggest conundrum among a series of challenges concerning Scotland’s stance on defence if the country were to become an independent state - leaving England, Wales and Northern Ireland (EWNI) as a separate independent state.
Defence is a fundamental attribute of statehood. Yet “Britain’s” nuclear forces, which are supported by MPs and…
No one wants this terror bill
By Lord Goldsmith, attorney general from 2001 to 2007 (THE GUARDIAN, 13/10/08):
Today sees the return to the House of Lords of the contentious issue of extending to 42 days the time someone can be held by the police without being charged. I would have wanted to take part in the debate, though unavoidably I will be absent overseas. My view is that this pernicious provision should be removed from this bill now.
I regard it as not only unnecessary but also counterproductive; and we should fight to protect the liberties the terrorists would take from us, not destroy them ourselves. This…
Stop playing politics with our safety
By Andy Hayman, Assistant Commissioner for Special Operations at Scotland Yard (THE TIMES, 06/10/08):
With the money markets heaping turmoil upon the Government, it is easy to forget that another crisis threatened to bring down the Prime Minister just a few months ago. The Counter-Terrorism Bill, with its controversial proposal to allow the detention of terror suspects for up to 42 days, returns to the House of Lords this week.
As someone who has been deeply involved in every main counter-terrorism investigation since 2005, I am convinced that we will soon need the power to hold suspects for more than the current…
Más circunstancia que pompa
Por Roger Jiménez, periodista (EL PERIÓDICO, 26/09/08):
Un famoso cirujano abrió una vez el cerebro de un hombre y, con gran sorpresa, encontró en él una corona, la Biblia, una taza de té, el carnet de un club, un impermeable, una botella de whisky, un caballo, una adolescente con medias negras y un ejemplar de The Times, ante lo cual se apresuró a cerrarlo de nuevo, pues se dio cuenta de que había descubierto el contenido de un inglés. Esta caricatura hace tiempo que se perdió envuelta en la niebla y fue reemplazada por un pueblo muy consciente de que lo…
Fairness is still our guide
By Gordon Brown, the prime minister of the United Kingdom (THE GUARDIAN, 20/09/08):
This week’s financial turbulence provides the starkest demonstration yet that we are living in an era of dramatic global change. Financial markets across the world are in uncharted waters. The British economy prospers as a global hub for investment, trade and services. That openness is a source of strength. But it also means that we cannot insulate ourselves from the contagious effects of the financial crisis in the United States, and the sharp increase in world commodity prices.
Nobody should underestimate the severity of this crisis. The US government…
Trial by jury no longer guarantees justice
By Sean O’Neill, crime and security editor of The Times (THE TIMES, 15/09/08):
Why is it considered an ancient liberty that must be defended at all costs, to have guilt or innocence decided by a dozen people who would rather be anywhere else than stuck in a stuffy courtroom being in turn bored and bamboozled by barristers?
Who says that those 12 jury members - open to intimidation, vulnerable to romance and faction fighting, susceptible to corruption or simply to listening to their iPods under their hijabs - can guarantee that justice will be done.
Much has been said about the “maverick” nature of…
Statistical Powellism
By Philippe Legrain, Philippe Legrain is the author of Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them (THE GUARDIAN, 11/09/08):
With a stagnant economy and Led Zeppelin performing, Britons could be forgiven for thinking they had travelled back to the 70s. This week saw yet more throwbacks, with the proposal of Labour MP Frank Field for non-EU migrants to be thrown out after four years - sorry, for “balanced migration”, and the return of manpower planning. Oh dear.
Field should know better than to team up with the Tory MP Nicholas Soames and MigrationWatch to put forward a “one in/one out” temporary-worker scheme. The plan is…
