The inevitable consequence of inexperience

Well, Boris Johnson may be, as Neil says, in danger of underming his own narrative but it seems that he's well on the way to delivering on the narrative that I set out for him before he was elected.

Which is, for those of you that need reminding, that someone without the experience of running a large organisation or mananging a budget or a team of people will not have the experience to know whether they have chosen the right people to shore up that lack of experience. So 'having good people around him' will never make up for the fact that he is a dilettante playing at being Mayor.

The resignations of first, James McGrath and now Ray Lewis just show that Boris is lacking in judgement when it comes to people. Mr Lewis' seeming inability to distinguish what as actually happened against what he would like to happen, in the way he claimed to be a magistrate when he wasn't, is a character flaw that shouldn't have been too hard to pick up.

Boris Johnson is now having to play with the grownups and it would see that for all his intellience he just doesn't have the experience to do it well.

The Saudi Regime's attachment to corruption is odious, but its gender apartheid is far worse

Riazat Butt posts this piece about her experiences in Saudi Arabia whilst reporting on the Hajj; may I commend it and the comment thread to you.

You know, I can’t help thinking that if the discrimination that was going on in Saudi Arabia was race based (and I know that there is race based discrimination in Saudi, but it is not hardwired into the law like it is for women) then it would be impossible for our Government to cosy up to the Saud family like they do. Instead of inviting them to tea and bribing them to buy our armaments we would be boycotting them and refusing to allow the ruling family to travel in Europe, like we do with African regimes that we disapprove of.

I was and still am tremendously proud of Vince’s stand back in October by refusing to meet members of the Saud family on their visit. The government’s stance over the BAe investigation and Saudi corruption is odious. And of course, we always tag on the end ‘..and they treat women appallingly’ in the way that everybody did when justifying the invasion of Afghanistan.

However, I would prefer if our elected representatives in the Liberal Democrats (or any other party for that matter) did not fell they needed corruption as the hook on which to hang their criticism of the Saudi regime’s treatment of women. It should be a big enough hook for a campaign in itself. The apartheid practised in Saudi Arabia is a gender apartheid not a racial one yet it is just as abhorrent and just as damaging to human rights. Successive UK governments tolerance of it should put us all to shame.

Getting better at catching the rule breakers…

What Derek Conway did, in defrauding the tax payer, was wrong (obviously); he broke the rules but there is no need to change the rules as a result.

We don’t need to ban politician’s families from working for them…indeed it is one of the few areas where the valuable contribution that spouses often make to the careers of ambitious people is actually given a value. If someone is doing the work, they should be paid for it…it doesn’t and shouldn’t actually matter what their relationship to the employer is.

If someone breaks the rules, the fault will be down to their dishonesty and a lack of proper application and scrutiny of those responsible for enforcing the rules.

But the current media reaction: 'the rules must change!' happens all the time; a rule is broken, we are all aghast and then there are calls for the rules to be changed! Why? The rule itself works; it is its application that wasn’t working. But then changing a rule is easier and cheaper for those in charge then actually making existing rules and legislation work.

It is a particular disease of the Labour government but we in the Liberal Democrats are just as bad. When a number of local parties were struggling under the weight of potential candidates recruiting ‘phoney members’ to skew the votes towards them in selections instead of getting the returning officers, the local party and membership services to enforce rules that were already in place¹ to deal with this phenomenon, we banned new members from voting in parliamentary selections for the first year of their membership. This, in the case of the recent list elections in London disenfranchised about 25% of the membership from voting. So much for our much vaunted one member, one vote!

Creating new rules instead of enforcing ones that are already there is at best sticking plaster and at worst throwing the baby out with the bath water. Just like disenfranchising a quarter of our membership, banning family members from working for MPs would punish those who work twice as hard as a non family members and serve their community as much as their spouse does.

¹That is, the requirement on local parties to ‘agree’ to new members – which they can only do if membership services send them the details of their new members in time.

How proud am I of Vince Cable today?

Oh, very! I am grinning with pride and have been since I heard that Vince was going to be boycotting the Saudi Dictator’s visit to the UK!

I remember years and years ago, sitting in an 'International Relations Theory' lecture and learning for the first time about the two different paradigms of nation state behaviour in an international setting. It is soo good to be part of a party that actually puts their commitment to internationalism into practice!!

There were basically two ways to behave in international relations: you could be a ’realist’ or an ‘idealist’. No prizes for guessing which point of view chose the terms!!

‘Realism’ refers to a belief in the primacy of the nation state, acting in its own self interest and pragmatically interacting with other states on the basis of how much can be gained for and lost for itself from the interaction. Idealism on the other hand, is more internationalist in nature believing in co-operation between states, that nation states should be subject to international law and through this global stability can be achieved. Think Machiavelli for the first and United Nations for the second…..

I knew immediately which one I believed in. I also remember sitting in the lecture theatre half way up Penglais Hill, bristling with indignation (some things never change) that the so called realists had won the spin war decades before by referring to ‘idealism’ in such pejorative terms….and it does still seem that to call somebody an idealist is to call them naïve, immature and foolish.

You see, with Saudi Arabia, there is no question that it is a vicious dictatorship, which spreads its corruption throughout the world, which effectively enslaves the female half of its population by treating them as the property of men and that exports such an extreme and illiberal ideology as wahabism throughout the world including the UK, under the guise of community investment. Nobody is actually arguing that that is an incorrect analysis of how Saudi Arabia conducts itself in its own country and in the world; what they are arguing that despite all of that it doesn’t matter because the pragmatic approach, the approach that is in the best interests of the UK is to ignore all that, invite them to dinner and let them ride around in a big golden coach.

And this is what we need to deal with, the idea that the pragmatic ‘realist’ way is best and there is no alternative. We need to point out that it is harmful to the UK if we allow companies such as BAe Aerospace to be corrupt, that we undermine free trade in such a way to undermine the competitiveness of our own defence suppliers. We need to point out that a ‘pragmatic’ approach is generally the short term, tactical approach and therefore rarely best in the long run. We need to point out that the Sadu family is basically blackmailing us into accepting them by refusing to cooperate with gathering intelligence on terrorism. For sure, global warming is not the only reason why we should be looking to find alternatives to oil; money used to bribe the Saudi Royal family might be more productively spent, in the interests of the UK, in investing in alternatives to oil. But we need to challenge the idea that, given our current dependence on oil, that the only option left open to Britain is to pay backhanders to the dictator and invite him to tea.

And you know what, even if it does just come down to principle, then what can we really thinking about people who curry favour with a man who rules a country so that torture is carried out in the way described by Sandy Mitchell, in Johann Hari’s once again, excellent column in the Independent today? I do hope Messrs Brown and Cameron think of the years of dried blood on the walls of the office where … …. was tortured as they shake King Abdullah’s hand over the next couple of days. I know that the country never expected integrity of David Cameron but surely this must put an end to any rumours of Gordon Brown being a man of principle and integrity.

I know, I know…politics is a dirty business and we may expect too much of our leaders to keep themselves above the fray. But I say, you get the government that you deserve and if we don’t make a stand, as Vince Cable is, then we should not be surprised if our political class lacks integrity and principle not just in its dealings with other countries but in its dealings with us.

Girls are humans too!

The Johann Hari column in the independent this morning, got me going again…I have hardly been blogging of late but every now and then a topic comes up that inspires in me the hopeless desire, in an almost Liberal Polemic type way, to write a series of essays on a subject – an urge almost completely missing from my university career more’s the pity!

There are lots of things in politics that get me quite excited, especially when I am applying them in a practical sense, for example, as a school governor instead of just proselytising on them. BUT there are two subjects that to me a so big and important that I metaphorically pace up and down in my head, I get so worked up about them. One is the current assault on our civil liberties (and anybody else’s, for that matter) and second, and related, is human rights and specifically the lack of human rights that are attributed to women all over the world.

Hari makes a compelling case for the fact that too much respect for multiculturalism makes us blind to what is often a blatant disregard and contempt for the human rights the female half the world. So often our analysis of a situation is based on the experience and sensibilities of men; the experience of a woman is invisible or silenced. But in every oppressed, minority or dispossessed group or culture, the women will be there, at the bottom of the pile.

One of the courses I took at University, as part of my degree in International Relations, was entitled ‘Feminist Theories of International Relations’; at the time it was the only course available in the UK on such a subject. In fact I must have been writing an essay, after all, because I remember my Step Dad’s surprise, as he looked at my pile of books brought home for the holidays from the university library, that it was possible to find enough to say on such a subject to fill one book, let alone the six that were on the kitchen table.

That was during the first round of the Balkans wars and only then was rape becoming recognised, in mainstream as opposed to just feminist dialogue, as a bona fide weapon of war. Of course, it always has been from the Vikings to the fall of Berlin, but it’s only in the last 20 years or so that academic discourse has included it along side analysis of, say, military hardware and intergovernmental organisations. Until that point the experience of women in war, beyond keeping the home fires burning and knitting socks, was yet again invisible.

It’s not just war; a different set of human rights standards exists in everything - from the fact that women in Iran often spend far longer in jail for political crimes than men (see www.wafe-women.org for more info on this topic), for no other reason that I can identify other than a deep seated misogyny, to the approach to educating women in countries and cultures, we may consider as highly educated. It is often just the elite that is so; I have a friend, from the Sinai, whose sister was taken out of school aged 9 to help her mother look after the rest of the kids, whilst he went off to university to study English. Such an education is an impossible dream for her as she can’t actually read. When travelling in Egypt, much is made of experiencing traditional Bedouin culture. I’m sure there’s not many women tourists who would really like to experience it, in all its glory – there’s a lot more to it than camels and tea!

And then, don’t even get me on to the topic of Saudi Arabia! We are all so rightly repulsed by the idea of BAe bribes, hardly blink at their human rights record as it pertains to women, but again are rightly outraged when a western contractor is flogged for smuggling in alcohol.

Human rights and respect for others cultures includes everybody, women and men…and, as Hari points out, we must not allow any fear of appearing racist or intolerant of other cultures get in the way of that.

Who stands to gain...

You know there's this rule of thumb, that if you want to know who has leaked something to the press ,then look at who has most to gain.

Well, you could also apply that to pressure on the government; if you want to understand whether it really is commercial or national security that has led Blair to instruct the SFO to drop the case against BAe then look who has most to gain.

According to this Guardian Online article BAe share value has risen by £900m since the news!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/saudi/story/0,,1973073,00.html

Do we know if our security threat staus has gone down at all?

National Security, my foot!

Sure, it’s realpolitik ….

..but is it what we really want and shouldn’t we be striving for something different?

Today’s news that the Attorney General has stooped the Serious Fraud Office investigation into corruption of a £billion Saudi arms deal is depressing, if unsurprising. That the Blair government have sought to manipulate the legal process is just one more of many nails in the coffin of New Labour’s much trumpeted ethical foreign policy 10 years ago.

They quote our national interest, security, peace in the Middle East (as if that’s worked!) as reasons. They say, commercial interests were absolutely nothing to do with it. Even if that were true, nobody is going to believe it.

And those commentators supporting the intervention and its explanation quote ‘realpolitik’, that that’s the way the world works.

A familiar refrain that reminds me of being back at Aberystwyth in my ‘International Relations Theory’ seminars! Where at the beginning of the 19th century those who believed that realpolitik, self fulfilling as it was, was the only way to operate called themselves ‘realists’ and called those who believed in international cooperation the ‘idealists’; they meant it in its pejorative sense.

And already, I can feel the ‘realists’ pat me on my little blond head, as they smile condescendingly at my naivety in actually believing that things should be done differently.

Well, first I would question, as many others have done today, whether this is in our national interest. Perhaps it is in the short term interests of the 4,000 BAe employees but I fail to see in the wider, longer term how deploying corrupt tactics cosy up to the Saud family is a sound foundation to our long term economic interests.

Sadly, it is not just that it is ineffective but that it has such far reaching implications.

It shows that BAe is effectively above the law. It shows that a foreign government can effectively blackmail the UK government. It shows other governments that the UK is not capable of maintaining its own standards, it’s own laws. Dictatorships, military leaders, phoney democracies; they’ll all got the message that the UK doesn’t care about the rule of law. And what is good enough for us, is surely good enough for them?

And, in whose national interest? How it is my interest for a government to collude with a country that has such an appalling human rights record? Where the female half of the population are not even treated like second class citizens but not even treated as human beings. We have a long way before we rid our own country of misogyny e.g. lad’s mags that offer its readers the chance to win plastic surgery for their substandard girlfriends. So if we support a regime such as Saudia Arabia, what message are we sending to those who objectify and belittle women in our own country let alone the other misogynistic regimes of the world? Would we find friendship with this country so important if the issue were not one of gender but of race?
As someone who believes in the rule of national and international law this is a sad and depressing day. But even if I thought that the end justified the means, I would question that this action by the government gets us anywhere near the place we want to reach. Shame on them.