Scotland: the ins and outsof 'In or Out?'

If the polls are anything to go by, the ‘Yes’ campaign is going to get a hammering in the Scottish referendum. And yet Wee Eck has run a far better and worthier campaign. This vote is about nationalism; Salmond has appealed to Scot’s history, culture, achievements on the world stage. The ‘No’ campaign has been colourless without any passion as befits the leader, the charisma-lite Alistair Darling. His approach has been the slightly-demeaning emphasis on money – how many more bawbees people will have in their pockets if they stay in the family.

 

According to him, the figure is £1400. Salmond says it will be £1000 by leaving. Both figures are probably spurious, but it does not take much for the Yes supporters to present  Darling’s as 30 pieces of silver. In the run-up to the vote, Salmond would be well advised to stay away from finance and economics and appeal to Scottish pride and sense of national identity. When he gets into the cash-nexus the wheels fall off his entire bandwagon.

 

He makes much of ‘Scottish oil’, one of the main drivers of nationalism in the first place. But his whole approach here is fatally flawed. It is based on optimistic forecasts of future oil prices, a triumph of hope over reality. The market is notoriously volatile, but in the absence of complete melt-down in the Gulf the best guess is that the onset of fracking on a world-wide scale plus the discoveries of vast new reserves of carbon energy in Africa and elsewhere suggests stable or falling prices.

 

And, of course, it is a wasting asset that is difficult and expensive to exploit. The day will come when there’s not a drop in Scottish waters, and then Scotland would be faced with the multi-billion cost of the decommissioning and clean-up.

 

Meanwhile the Nats would have us believe that Scotland would reap £7.3 billion in tax revenues in the first year of independence. But they fell to £6.5 billion last year on a downwards curve; the OBR reckons that they will fall to £3.4 in the first year of independence.

 

There is little export replacement opportunity. Oil accounts for more than 50% of the value of Scottish exports. Whisky has about 10% share, most of the remainder being banking and services.

 

It would lose much of the service sector. The large banks would have no option but to relocate to London, since EU regulations require a bank’s HQ to be where its business is concentrated. The value of Scottish exports even now is far below Britain’s as a whole, as is productivity.

 

There are related social and demographic problems which will have a major impact on the economy. The population is aging, and the workforce declining whereas in the rest of the UK it is growing. Life expectancy for males in Glasgow is just 69, about the same as North Korea and Ukraine. It is inevitable that demands on the public purse for health care and pensions will increase considerably and could well become unaffordable at the present levels of provision.

 

Then there are ‘institutional’ problems. Scotland would have to apply for EU membership, which is far from a ‘given’ as Spain has already made it clear that it will not endorse  what would give credence to the separist campaign in Catalonia. There are other European nations that would not feel this to be a comfortable precedent; Belgium springs to mind.  A unanimous vote would be required.

 

It has already been made clear that Scotland would not be allowed to use the £ Sterling, and it could not adopt the Euro without EU membership. Neither would it have access to the Bank pf England: it would have to establish its own reserve bank. Then there’s a whole raft of problems about defence, diplomatic representation, membership of NATO, and many others that would have to be sorted out before an independent Scotland was truly up-and-running.

 

But these are all negatives, implying how much the Scots owe England., when the line should be that since 1707 Scots have exercised a power over the governance of Great Britain out of all proportion to their population – eight Prime Ministers in modern times -  and have been an integral and invaluable part of a stable, tolerant, wealthy, powerful and successful major power. Darling is in danger of being told ‘Awa an’ bile your heid!’ with his constant emphasis on money and how much the English taxpayer subsidises the Scots.

 

And if Scotland does depart, it should be to the sound of the pipes, not the cash register.

Lord who?

When Dave was doing his soft-shoe reshuffle it was assumed by the pundits that perhaps one of rejects would be shunted off to the European Commission, or at least he would appoint a big-hitter at this  crucial time, when he has to start getting his act together for the Referendum; someone who would put a bit of stick about in Brussels, maybe a Eurosceptic bruiser who, as an added bonus, would make Juncker’s life a misery.

 

Experienced old-timers such as Malcolm Rifkind were trailed, along with Michael Howard and Andrew Lansley plus the usual bag of political has-beens.

 

So we have Lord Hill.

 

Lord who?

 

What do we know about him. Nothing because there is nothing to know. He is not even a nonentity.  Even Wiki struggles to make more than a couple of paragraphs. His CV is a tribute to brevity.

 

Digging around (in a very shallow hole) it can be revealed that his previous is a mixture of PR and Tory Central Office. He was Michael Gove’s understrapper before becoming Leader of the Lords.

 

That’s it.

 

Four years ago he was given a peerage. What exceptional service he rendered to the nation to have deserved such high elevation is unbeknownst.

 

If this appointment is Dave’s subtle way of showing his disdain for Brussels, that would be possibly forgivable, After all, Brown did the same in the person of Lady Ashton. The much simpler reason is that he wished to avoid a potentially embarrassing by-election, one which amongst other worries would have given another platform for UKIP when a General Election would be appearing over the horizon.

 

It sets the whole tone of the reshuffle. Has it improved the effectiveness and efficiency of British governance? It was all about image at a time when Britain’s real need is the smack of firm government

 

Michael Gove, the best modern Education Minister, was removed because he was beastly to the NUT. Had he not been so, that would have been a proper reason to get rid of him. The excellent Dominic Grieve took an early bath for putting justice above the party line. Hague just got tired of politics, True, Ken Clarke was well-past his ‘use by’ date, but the changes generally are to fit Dave’s ‘Mr Nicey’ image that he will now cultivate up to the election.

 

Promoting a  gaggle of women was aimed at the ‘image’ factor. We once had Blair’s babes. Now we have Cameron’s crumpet.

 

 

 

 

Muslim mayhem: what's our policy?

 

Exactly what are the West’s policies towards the MENA countries? Are there any? ‘Policies’ suggests a considered and consistent approach, not something made on the hoof.

 

Foreign policy for the region has always been a mess of contradictions.

 

Gaddafi was the villain if the piece until we see him  shaking hands with Tony Blair, but we backed the rebels when he finally got into trouble. Saddam was supported by the US in his war against Iran that cost maybe 1.5 million lives When Israel bombed his nuclear facility in 1981, it was roundly criticised  by the US  and condemned by the UN unanimously. When he killed maybe 100,000 Kurds with chemical weapons etc the world reaction was –shall we say – muted. And the French profited mightily from arms sales of sophisticated weapons, jet fighter planes, helicopters, state-of-the-art artillery, not to mention the nuclear reactors taken out by Israel and chemicals that could be developed into WMD.

 

Saddam may have been a bastard but in those days he was our bastard.

 

Successive Egyptian dictators were supported by the West; now we don’t know which way to turn.

 

Years previously,  the C IA and the UK  overthrew the only democratically elected government in  Iran and installed the Shah as dictator

 

The ‘Arab Spring’ was seen by many as the birth of democracy in countries where it had never previously existed. Fat chance! Democracy took 1000 years to develop in the West. It was only fully established in sophisticated Europe in the second half of the20th Century. Instead we have shambles in Libya which is being fought over by a variety of militia, reversion to military dictatorship in Egypt, permanent instability in Lebanon, civil war in Syria and Iraq, Al Qaeda in Yemen.  It is never-ending

 

We tend to think of Islamic jihad as  relatively recent threat. It is not. Assad Snr was fighting it over 30 years ago, and destroyed it at a cost of 40,000 dead. With Assad Jnr it is a case of history repeating itself. It is reckoned that there are approximately 1500 separate terrorist groups  in Syria right now, fighting over their own slice of territory.

 

Now we have a bunch of lunatics dubbed ISIS – more lately, the Caliphate. So what should the West do about it? Nothing. ISIS  is an existential threat to all the neighbouring states. It has made too many enemies. It will be obliterated by them without any intervention by the West for the simple reason that it is a sheer matter of survival

If Assad goes, what then? It is a reasonable certainty that, unlike  Assad, his successor is likely to be a major threat to the West.

 

And the situation in Palestine is normal, but there are no terrorists there. Only Freedom Fighters, according to the BBC and the Guardian.

 

It can be only a matter of time before Saudi Arabia implodes, the difference being that the people will be seeking the direct opposite of Islamic fundamentalism; they have had their fill of that. As ever, the West will be caught on the wrong side with its trousers around its ankles. Hopefully this will put an end to Saudi paying danegeld to terrorist groups around  the world.

 

So who’s side should we be on? The simple answer is ‘nobody’s’.

 

In the past 30 years Muslims have been killing each other in ever-increasing numbers. There is no possibility of imposing a solution from outside, and a likely scenario is that the various factions will simply continue to fight each other to a standstill, ceasing only from total exhaustion.

 

The West must remember that it does not have a dog in this fight. The essential foreign policy question should be ‘ What vital Western interests are at risk?’, remembering always the wise Gladstonian principle of  ‘No unnecessary foreign entanglements.

 

Current policy should be ‘masterly inactivity’. Surely Dave can manage that?

O's woes.............

O's foibles are beginning to accumulate to the point where even steadfast democrats are abandoning ship. Political talk has sharply turned to his successor. If he has his way, it would not be Hillary as the now famous Clinton-Obama feud makes the Hatfield and McCoy bust up look like a girl scout picnic.

 

 

For her part, Hillary is doing everything in her power to alienate the public. In a recent effort to associate with the hoi palloi, she droned on about how poor she and Bill were after he finished his second term as President. That ploy of hers has since come back to bite here in the bum. Her new book, Hard Choices, has been a total flop as her incredibility rating continues to soar.

 

Meantime, O is busy laughing off efforts to bring him back down to earth. He is being sued by the Speaker of the House, he is under several threats of impeachment, his health care program is in the toilette, his foreign policy is crumbling and his domestic policy needs serious housekeeping. His defense of the past six years in office is a cornucopia of platitudes generally delivered from the golf course or basketball court.

 

 

He is soon to be off on a three week holiday at Martha's Vineyard where the Obamas will be living in a palatial residence fit for billionaires and above. While most Americans don't disdain his wealth, they heavily castigate the manner in which he makes use of government funds and services to enhance his lifestyle. Whatever popularity he enjoys is largely from his super cool image typical of individuals who have nothing more to offer the world than a personality disorder.

 

Mitt Romney is making sounds to the effect that he will make another attempt to contest the presidency. This is after he, and more emphatically his wife, proclaimed that he would never run again for this office. To my mind he remains unelectable even though he is leading the polls of republican hopefuls by a wide margin.

 

 

Chris Christie, the Governor of New Jersey, is a distant second.

 

 

And would you believe, running last is a new name of the roster, Jeb Bush. Critics claim that Jeb's run will be futile owing to a massive case of Bush fatigue in America. His supporters claim he is far and away the best Bush yet. Also, being wed to an Hispanic woman brings substantial Hispanic support to the table.

 

 

This is something that has been sorely missing among republican contenders and indeed among republicans in general. They just can't seem to bring themselves around to courting anyone of colour.

 

 

Translated into political terms, the republicans are facing an uphill battle to overcome overwhelming demographic odds. In the last election, they lost the black and Hispanic vote,  American youths, liberals and far to many women.

 

 

We have another grueling two years of campaigning ahead of us before we can begin again with the 2020 election.

 

Foreign aid: 'beating the drum'.............

Wopusa adayimba ng’oma, ochenjera anabvina’

 

‘One who is foolish beat a drum while those who are clever danced’: Chichewa proverb.

 

Cameron recently declared that foreign aid has been his proudest achievement. Now a Lib-dem MP is introducing a Bill for the budget to be ring-fenced by law at 0.07% of GNI. That’s our earnings. At a time when key Departments like Education are getting cut, the aid budget has been increased to £12.6 billion from £8.4 billion since this Government came into office. That’s nigh on 50% in four years. Some austerity! This year it has increased by 28%. Meanwhile Britain has the smallest army since the 18^th Century and the smallest navy since Henry VIII; it has been dangerously weakened as a result, and the NHS is facing a major funding crisis.

 

Where does all this money go?

 

Well, name a ‘developing’ country and it’s on the list of beneficiaries, be it never so corrupt, incompetent, or a terrorist haven. A kleptocracy where the ruling elite steal everything not nailed down and much that is? Help yourself to some more from HMG. The former President of Malawi spent his aid money on an executive jet and a fleet of Mercs for his cronies, and there are endless similar examples. In another place, aid money to buy ambulances was spent on SUVs for the big-shots…………and so and so on!

 

Leading with the begging bowls are Nigeria, an immensely wealthy oil state renowned for its endless looting of the national treasury,  Pakistan (the money would help it to finance its nuclear weapons programme and it massive defence budget, instead of taxes which nobody pays anyway), India (one of the BRICS and another nuclear weapons owner), Afghanistan (say no more), Ethiopia with a particularly oppressive and unpleasant regime, Sudan where the President has an ICJ warrant out for him, Zimbabwe, and so on ad nauseam. Pick any nasty, corrupt, failed state run by a brutal dictator and British money is going there.

 

So here is the £50 billion question. Does it actually do any good?

 

The answer is that it does much more harm.

 

It is good for the rapacious consultancy firms that specialise in ‘good governance’ particularly. I have scrutinised  Financial Proposals on behalf of the beneficiary. It is not uncommon to charge out their specialists at $1200 dollars a day while paying $400 a day. A good mark-up, then. They play games with air-fares, daily subsistence allowances and ‘lump sum’ items that require no supporting documents. There are undoubtedly projects that have delivered the goods, mostly those involving fixed and visible capital assets like roads. But they are the exception.

 

Apart from theft, fraud and all the other malfeasance, whether money is spent wisely and usefully is questionable.

 

Example: Monserrat is a tiny Caribbean island half of which is uninhabitable due to a series of volcanic eruptions. Its current population is about 4500. The capital city now lies under volcanic ash; almost nothing is visible. The main  port and the airport were completely destroyed. A new airport was built with UK aid funds at a cost of $18.5 million. The locals protested vehemently that it was in the wrong place, but DFID knew better. The runway ends abruptly at a cliff edge. Millions have been spent on  ‘good governance’ programmes for a community the size of a small parish council.

 

Cash grants for resettlement might have been a better solution.

 

The basic fault with aid is that it creates dependency. My Malawian  counterpart reckoned that it was the worst thing that had happened to Africa; without it Africans would have had to stand on their own two feet. He described it as colonialism in a different guise, not far from reality when the donors  contribute  a large proportion of the budget that they can dictate to the beneficiary government – and do.

 

Most importantly, it severs the tie between politician and voter/taxpayer. When aid replaces tax revenues, the need for public accountability is minimalized, and this opens the door for politicians to plunder the Treasury safe in the knowledge that the public will not much care; it is not their money. Corruption becomes the norm.

 

In the UK the simple fact is that such generosity is unaffordable.

 

No wonder we have a shiny new aircraft carrier without any planes. It’s a mad world, my masters!

Rolf Harris: 'We are all guilty........!

 ‘White male over 60? Then you are likely to be a criminal’. This is the clear implication of R. vs. Harris.

 

There has been scant information of what he actually did. Perhaps the hacks were spending all their time covering the trials of Andy Coulson and the woman with hair like an explosion in a mattress factory. Just what did Rolf do with his didgeridoo? We gather that he was a serial groper.

 

Back in the long-gone era before the Pill, sex, drugs ‘n rock and roll, groping was part of a young man’s rite of passage. It was called ‘heavy petting’ by the Agony Aunts; not by us, though; we were the Wandering Hands Gang. It was the closest that a lad got to the real deal until he went into an unwisely early marriage out of sheer frustration.

 

One witness said that he touched her on the breast. Outrageous! Another on the bottom. Disgusting! He is alleged to have twanged a girl’s knicker elastic. Presumably this was around her waist, unless she was wearing the knee-length wrist-breakers of old. We would go for the bra strap in preference. He put his hand up the back of a girl’s leg, for which she was paid £33,000 by the meeja in Oz when she recently sold the story. We favoured the front of the leg until restrained about 6 inches into the journey.

 

Needless to say, some of the victims are hungrily eyeing Harris’ £11 million stash and seeking compensation. This could raise some interesting questions.  What loss or injury  did the plaintiff suffer? What is the quantum of damages?

 

Cui bono? Well we know the answer to that. Primarily the lawyers who have had their snouts deep into a particularly generous trough. Plus the media that has been able to salivate over the ruination of an elderly icon, and the publicity-hungry Crown  Prosecution Service that desperately needed a success after a series of humiliating failures. The losers are us, who will for an enormously expensive investigation and trial as the price for the Establishment cover-ups over Savile.

 

So when 18 cops smash down your front door at 4 a.m. and nick you before you can scarper on your Zimmerframe you will know that you are bang-to-rights.

 

We are all guilty!

 

Postscript: there’s a much better scandal on the way. Grub Street as got hold of a story about a missing dossier detailing kiddy-fiddling by senior politicians in the 1980’s. This will run and run.

 

 

 

 

Europe: the long goodbye......

Now that the dust is at a least settling after the Juncker donnybrook, the chatterati are fairly unanimous that Cameron’s ‘humiliation’ makes it more difficult for him to take an ‘In’ stance for the referendum and that the UK has edged closer to Brixit.  The one certainty is that he will have no ‘piece of paper’ promising the changes that the British people want – in essence  what they voted for in 1975, a Common Market, not ‘ever closer union’. Brussels will show him the same distain as at Ypres.

 

That’s Dave’s problem.

 

But he now knows how EU politicians operate. Dirty deals at dinner. He has found out who his friends are. Nobody. He has experienced at first hand the treachery, lying, and back-stabbing that goes on.  No different from the Tory Party, then. But it is the complete lack of anything resembling statesmanship that should worry him and the rest of us. Where there should be giants there are only pygmies.

 

The reality is that unless there are seismic changes in the whole structure of the European ‘project, which have no chance of being forthcoming, we are now witnessing the early stages of the complete disintegration of the whole  corrupt, anti-democratic, bureaucratic tyranny of this rotten construct. Maybe 20 years will be needed for it to finally disappear into history but there is an awesome inevitability about it, like having a ring-side seat at the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

 

Little mention is made of the real weakness at the heart of Europe.

 

Its founders had ambitions for Europe to match or even outstrip America economically. Not only has this not happened but Europe has gone into economic decline relatively and absolutely. The Eurozone economy is sclerotic except in Germany, which continues to prosper on the back of an artificially low exchange rate. Overall growth stagnates, industrial production is declining, unemployment is at levels that are a threat to the very peace that the EU was supposed to ensure, and living standards are falling.

 

Already the nay-sayers are trying to make our flesh creep with misinformation about the economic disaster that would befall Britain outside the EU. They maintain that with more than 50% of Britain’s experts going to the EU our industry would be devastated with 3 million unemployed.

 

There are two things wrong with this argument.

 

First, it is simple fantasy that Europe would stop buying our goods and services. And we have run an adverse balance of trade with EU from the start. Does anyone really believe that Europe is going to put that favourable market at risk?

 

It disregards another key aspect. Outside the EU , Britain would be free to enter into free-trade agreements with the economies that really matter, the US, China,  India   and the Commonwealth.

 

Secondly, it isn’t true. The real proportion of exports to the EU is less than 50% because a large part of Britain’s export trade is transhipped world-wide via Antwerp and Rotterdam and other major European ports so they rank as ‘EU exports’.  Foreign imports to Ireland via Belfast count as ‘British’ exports when they are actually American or Japanese or whatever.

 

Meanwhile, it continues with its insane ambitions for an ever-wider EU.

 

The current chaos in the Ukraine is a direct result of EU provocation of Russia by attempting to bring t EU up to Russia’s borders. Membership for Albania is being seriously considered, a country that appears not to have a single qualification and an economy based on people-smuggling, drugs and stolen cars. Then there are Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo and Bosnia.  Just what they will bring to the party is not clear. This could be revenge time because Cameron can veto every new application, and must unless he gets major concessions on immigration.

 

It does not need to be this way. The British would be happy with the EU if its main concern was the incomplete creation of a single market in goods, labour, capital and services.(Germany has consistently blocked the latter to protect its own, a contradiction of what the EU is for). Instead, Brussels has increasingly strayed into territory where it has no business. This will be its downfall without radical change of which there is not the slightest sign.

 

To plagiarise WSC, ‘This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning’.

Benefits culture: taming Leviathan...............

‘We must roll back the frontiers of the State’ was the clarion-call from a precocious, pudgy, pudding-basin coiffed 16-year old William Hague at the Tory Party conference all those years ago. He has not done much about it since.

 

There is a strong feeling in the US and  UK (but not in dirigiste Europe) that the state ‘has grown, is growing, and ought to be diminished’. The feeling is a tad inchoate. There is not much idea on how to achieve it.  The Tea Party doesn’t concern it with such niceties. It simply wants to roll the clock back to the19th Century when the Federal State was so small it had not even introduced income tax and the good ol’ boys could get on with their lives without ever coming into contact with officialdom. They may not realise this but it makes them disciples of Karl Marx part of whose philosophy was that under communism the central state would largely wither away along with capitalism as the workers took control of their own destiny. So Sarah’s really a commie.

 

No use looking to the Land of the Free for solutions: it is an over-regulated swamp, over-governed with myriads of official bodies the purpose of which is, in many cases, totally opaque, plus vested interests such as agricultural subsidies designed for poor farmers during the Great Depression being grabbed by agribusiness, plus over-mighty public service unions that plunder the revenues.

 

To find a cure for over-government we must first find the cause.

 

And it’s not Them. It’s Us.

 

We constantly insist that government should do more –‘They should do something about it’ is the plaintiff cry in almost any situation. We want bigger, better and more services. We have become welfare junkies. The Welfare State was largely conceived by the Webbs way back in Edwardian times, but its real father, Beveridge, was the architect. His concept was a safety net. Welfare has since become a lifestyle choice. We have created a dependency culture that creates entire nuclear families in which nobody has done a tap of work since leaving school. We are now told that 56% of taxpayers take more money out of the system than they put in. Half the country is grub-staking the other half.

 

Iain Duncan Smith’s reforms are a start to putting things back in order, but they go nothing like far enough. The cut-off point for benefits is £24,000 a year. This is the average wage (not the minimum). Not much incentive to work there, then. A family nearby lives courtesy of welfare in a large expensive house currently on the market for around £800,000. There are 5 adults all living on benefits. If they are drawing at the ’cap’, that’s £120,000 going into the household. They each have a car.

 

Politicians of all stripes know that this is unsustainable and something must be done. The trouble is that they have yet to figure out how to get re-elected afterwards.

 

It does not have to be this way. Elsewhere they do things differently.

 

In parts of Asia social services are not delivered by Government  but by NGOs specifically set up for the purpose and which are subject to very stringent performance ratings. If they fail to meet them the funding is cut off and they lose their jobs.  In Singapore welfare is funded by a levy of 20% on wages and 15.5% on the employer. What you get out is what you put in.

 

In the Nordic countries, the smug socialism ran out of money. Reform moved from desirable to necessary or bankruptcy was certain to follow. A system in which income tax could exceed 100% had no alternative.

 

There has been a revolution in social welfare.

 

Pension funds have been put on a defined-contribution basis in place of defined-benefit. Most education is provided by in dependent schools with a voucher system for parents so that they have a choice. Much of health-care has been privatised, and there is a small charge for treatment. The retirement age has been raised to 67. Taxes have been slashed, productivity increased as people return to the work-force, and the Scandinavian economies are amongst the strongest in the world.

 

Like it or not, radical change must come to Britain. Leviathan can be cut down to size.

 

But we have to get our snouts out of the ‘eat all you can’ running buffet.

 

As Maggie was wont to say ‘there is no alternative!’

 

Between Iraq and a hard place................

‘As I sit here in the bar of the Hotel Splendido all around me men are dropping like flies’.

 

Peter Cook’s parody of foreign correspondents, possibly inspired by Sefton Delmer’s eyewitness account  for the Daily Express of the mutiny of the Congolese Force Publique  in 1960,  written in the Elephant and Castle Hotel in Zambia, might be apt for the confused reports about what is happening in Western Iraq.

 

We are told that Mosul was taken by 1000 ISIS fighters against 30,000 Iraqi troops in one of history’s greatest routs and mass cowardice on an epic scale, with soldiers ‘casting away their arms in the face of the enemy’. Inexplicably,  they also abandoned their transport.

 

The probable truth is that there was no battle at all; the army simply scarpered. And they may have had good reason.

 

Many will have been Sunnis who would have no stomach for doing Shia dirty-work against their co-religionists. Shias themselves would have little cause to defend Sunni towns against Sunnis. Officers were nowhere to be seen.

 

Sunni now occupy almost the whole of their ancient lands. They will not give them up.

 

The winners are likely to be the Kurds. Kurdistan, which has been doing very nicely economically, is now a de facto state.

 

But there are deeper causes.

 

Since taking over, Maliki has followed an aggressive anti-Sunni agenda. An early action was the attempted arrest of his Sunni Deputy. He has got rid of Sunni army officers painstakingly trained by the Americans and British painstakingly, sold commissions to Shia, and reduced the fighting capability of the military to what is now being displayed. He deliberately undermined the military so that it could not become a political threat. He installed political ‘commissars’, and used the army against political rivals. His government has been thoroughly corrupt, looting the treasury on a massive scale. But what will destroy Iraq is the marginalisation of the Sunni when exactly the opposite was vital.

 

It is now a reasonable certainty that what we are now seeing is a redrawing of the post-WW1 boundaries carved out by the British and French. Iraq can only survive as a Sunni/Shia/ Kurdish federation, but there is the strong possibility that three new countries will emerge out of the rubble.

 

The eventual losers may be the victors; ISIS. Its barbarity, ruthlessness and primitivity have alientated its erstwhile allies in Syria, and neither the Syrians, nor the Iraqis, nor the Iranians in particular can permit its survival.

 

Republicans have said that the fault lies with Obama for pulling out of Iraq prematurely. Prematurely? US troops had been in Iraq for11 years. When Maliki refused to indemnify them against prosecution in Iraqi courts Obama had no alternative.

 

Obama’s best and most likely stance will be masterly inactivity. He doesn’t have a dog in this fight and will wisely stay out of it. He is not going to get into bed with Iran. That country has the most to lose by a Sunni takeover in Baghdad; this would be ‘finis’ to Iran’s ambitions for dominance in the region. Maliki’s days are almost certainly numbered. He needs American help, but is unlikely to get it. And the US is very adept at ‘regime change’.

 

As for ourselves, we should not get over-excited about the prospect of 200  - or is it 2000 -British Muslim mercenaries with ISIS bringing terrorism home with them. If the anti-terrorist authorities really know the numbers, then it is reasonable to suppose that they also know their identities.

 

The role of the West should be as spectator only.

‘They make a desert and call it peace’’.

Obama was pontificating about Iraq on BBC  a last week, and got it completely wrong. So have all the chattering classes.

 

They chunter on about jihadists, Islamic extremists, terrorists and more.

 

It’s none of the above. It is both a religious and a civil war. These have always been notable for massacres and atrocities on a barbaric scale.

 

What we are seeing is a resumption of the Sunni – Shia conflict that has been going on spasmodically for centuries and the disintegration of the artificial states that were so casually and treacherously created by the British and French after WW1, breaking all the promises made to the Arabs on the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. Saudi Arabia is justifiably worried. The fall of the House of Saud is only a matter of time, although it keeps paying danegeld to ISIS and every other Wahhabi militant grouping .

 

Syria has ceased to exist as a viable state and may well emerge as three separate entities, a major cause of the destabilisation of Iraq. Kurdistan is a de facto state.

 

Western policy and activity in Muslim countries has been such an unmitigated disaster that it is difficult to imagine how it could have been worse. The initial idiocy was to overthrow the only stable, secular regime in the Middle East for reasons that have still not been fully explained. It was clear at the time that the notion of replacing Saddam’s autocracy with democracy was not going to happen.

 

There was no follow-up plan after ‘shock and awe’. The Iraqi military was disbanded but not disarmed. Anyone with a Ba’athist connection was banned from public office i.e. everyone with administrative skills since membership of the Party was a prerequisite. Looting was virtually unchecked. The rule of law was almost non-existent and ‘democracy’ was a mockery.

 

When the US occupied Iraq, it put in place politicians who were incompetent crooks whose sole qualification was that they were well-disposed towards America. Every Government Ministry was an opportunity for  enrichment on a breath-taking scale, including 10years ago more than $1 billion intended for arms procurement. The US authorities must have been aware of it.

 

Iraqis regard their leaders as racketeers who will steal everything possible

 

The war cost trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of military casualties. Iraqi civilian dead numbered more than 100,000. Nearly 10,000 were killed in 2013.

 

Whether the carnage in Iraq will increase the risk of terrorism in the West remains to be seen, but there is little sign of it in the present conflict.  The one certainty is that there will  no Western ‘boots on the ground’, but real diplomatic and foreign policy opportunities might arise.

 

The media has belatedly caught on to the prospect of a rapprochement between the US and Iran. Already Iranian military assistance is arriving in Baghdad. Saudi Arabia will  have a fit of carpet-biting, but the House of Saud is yesterday; Iran is tomorrow.

 

In the likely event of Iraqi oil supplies being disrupted there is a pretext for immediately lifting the oil embargo on Iran.

 

Will the West see this as a ‘carpe diem’ moment? Not on previous performance!

 

Junking Juncker: Dave's dilemma........

No doubt about it; Cameron is painting himself into a corner with his desperate attempts to stop Juncker getting the top job in the EU nomenklatura; it will make absolutely no difference whoever gets selected because all the candidates are dedicated and fanatical federalists who will push ahead with ‘ever closer union’.

 

 

Of course, it is difficult to think of anyone less acceptable to Britain than the boozy, bombastic Luxembourger.

 

 

His ‘previous’ was leading Luxemburg, a statelet about the size of Watford, dependent on money-laundering and tax-avoidance schemes for big-hitters such as Amazon. He departed under a cloud after being involved in a security scandal. (The previous Luxembourger in the top job got an early bath for corruption, along with rest of the Commission).

 

 

He is well-known for his total disregard of democratic principles; his political  mentor might well be Machiavelli.

 

 

Dave’s problem is that he is a closet Europhile, and he is worried that the appointment of Juncker will result in his reform proposals being DOA followed by a massive ‘Brexit’ result in the Referendum. Contrarily, Juncker might be prepared to concede much if it neutralises the annoying Brits and leaves them in the EU slow lane, allowing the Fourth Reich to further consolidate.

 

 

But if Cameron junks Junkers, not only will he make enemies but also he will simply get another federalist fanatic. All the candidates are out of the same box who, like the Bourbons, ‘forget nothing and learn nothing’.

 

 

And it is a delusion to think that anything will change after the large Europhobe vote in the recent elections. Brussels will simply ignore it. As proof, the results had scarcely been published when it was up to its old meddlesome tricks. Within days it had infuriated Osborne by telling him what to do about the largely non-existent housing bubble (mainly a London phenomenon) and attempting to impose regulations on British banks.

 

 

To add insult to injury, it has been persistently blocking IDS’s plans to further restrict benefits payments to immigrants by throwing writs at him. He is not impressed.

 

 

Farage must be doing cartwheels of delight; the circumstances are near-perfect for the Europhile demolition squad.

 

 

The latest is that the EU Parliament election for the President  (which is disputed by the national leaders who rightly say that the choice is their prerogative) will be a secret ballot. So much for promises of more openness and democracy. But then the EU has always shown a fine disregard for the law, witness their illegal bail-outs during the Euro crisis.

 

 

Dave would do well to get close to the AfD, the Action for Germany Party that gained seats at the recent EU elections. It is not Europhobe. That would be political suicide in Germany. But is fiercely anti the Euro which it rightly regards as a disaster and  doomed to failure without fiscal union. It  views the idea of a European Defence Force as an absurdity. It is anti the ‘green’ power obsession that is making Germany’s economy increasingly uncompetitive, with energy costs nearly four times those of the US.

 

 

In a recent TV interview, its spokesman, Dr Hugh Bronson – a German despite his name  and impeccable English - questioned the entire EU construct as it exists at present, with the incompatibilities between successful northern economies and the semi-third world status of some countries to the east and south. He reflected on whether the solution was to reconstruct the EU  as a trading bloc comprising only the North.

 

 

Dave’s possible supporters might be The Netherlands and the Scandinavians.  Italy will be behind him. A long way behind.

 

 

The one certainty from this squalid shambles is that if Dave returns empty handy from his reform negotiations the outcome of the referendum in 2017 will be a foregone conclusion.