Cameron’s “Misspeaks”

Hmm...

David Cameron is a long way from George W. Bush’s league in terms of mis-speaking, but the past couple of weeks have been rather interesting and perhaps slightly concerning.

It’s hard to believe that someone so polished, with so much media experience, and with a term of handlers who know exactly how the media will react to anything, could be making so many deliberate mistakes though. From his frank talk about council housing, to speaking the truth about Gaza, or getting the Iranians’ backs up, and then marching Pakistan’s President up the hill and then down it again, it really hasn’t been a good time for him lately in the PR stakes.

We can only assume, given they wouldn’t deliberately be putting their foot in it, that these are actually the first tentative steps of a Prime Minister not yet acquainted with the extremely diplomatic language used on the world stage. A sign of inexperience. Not yet ready for prime-time, as some might cruelly quip.

The question, though, is maybe his approach is right. We all, apparently, want our politicians to be straight-talking with us. But how much “straight-talk” can we accept before they start saying things we really don’t want to hear? See Election 2010 for the proof, and the lack of acknowledgement of what cuts were around the corner.

The bizarre thing is that Cameron actually seems to be being liberated by power, rather than being constrained, as is the norm. In opposition, desperate to detoxify the Tory brand, everything the Tories said or did was carefully planned and co-ordinated. Sure, muppets like Chris Grayling would occasionally make a mistake, but on the whole, the top brass moved in lockstep, and nothing came from their lips unless it had been approved by eight out of ten focus groups.

But now, Cameron is increasingly speaking his mind, something he wasn’t really known for.

It might get him into trouble, especially on the international stage, where no one says boo to a goose. Indeed, the only person who ever really did in modern times – George W. Bush – ended up being quite widely despised for his total lack of refined character and inability to press the flesh or keep people sweet. Coalition building was never his strong point…

And that’s the problem. Coalition government requires the key players to keep talking all the time, and certainly not in public. Not if you want to keep the presumption of good faith on all sides.

Perhaps discretion from our politicians is the best thing after all…

The Drones May Fall Into Line

Well, it sort of makes sense here...

Praise be!

Our Lord President Obama has actually taken an opinion on something!

Yesterday he unveiled an opportunity to extract large sums of cash from the corporate monster that is the banking sector.

The plan itself is remarkably bold for a man who has been so timid on various issues throughout the first year of his presidency, when he should be at the peak of his mandate. And yet, it is actually a fairly modest tax that would extend over 10 years, and only be more punitive to those who deserve it the most: the ones with substantial borrowings. It should still, however, raise significant sums of money.

Bankers in the US will bleat and moan that many of them didn’t even accept taxpayer’s money during the height of the crisis; and that they will just have to pass on this cost to the consumer. Of course, that’s all just part of the PR game. First of all, no bank would be left standing if it wasn’t for the unprecedented scale of loans, investments, nationalisation and quantitative easing that has kept the sector going. They should be grateful they’re still here.

And as for passing on charges… well, many banks were planning to do this anyway in order to enhance their profitability after a couple of years of hits. Now they have a perfect excuse to do so, and can blame the government in the process. It’s all about the rhetoric.

With a bit of luck, the plans will make it through the US Senate relatively unscathed. It is an election year after all, and all the polls are still showing a great degree of negativity towards banks, bankers and their bonuses.

What will be most interesting, however, is whether other countries will react in the same way. British efforts to rein in our banking sector now look rather tame in comparison. Surely we should take the opportunity provided by Obama to copy the policy and extract our own pound of flesh? It would be a relatively free hit and wouldn’t be as damaging to UK competitiveness if our biggest rival in the banking sector is doing exactly the same.

That old chestnut of national interest, however, is probably what’s going to stop us. There is still a banker love-in going on in the City of London, and many of them will currently be wondering if Obama’s actions could lead to another round of offshoring. Maybe once our 50% bonus tax has worked its way out of the system we might be in line for even more banking jobs, and even more bonuses…

And this, my friends, is why we need global co-operation. If only Obama had told everyone last year that this was what he was planning all along, we might have got better agreements at the various G20 and G8 summits last year.

A wasted opportunity, methinks.

The Rise Of China

That's what a Chinese "recession" looks like. The rest of the world looks on in envy...

Events of the past few days have showed just how much China is enjoying its new status as world economic powerhouse.

I was watching an interview the other day with a guy known as the BBC’s China Editor. I’m not sure what that job involves, but either way, he seemed to know what he was talking about. He told the interviewer that the Chinese have an extraordinarily long memory regarding the British, and our legendary imperalism in the Far East.

One of the things they enjoy sticking to us the most is the ancient Opium Wars from the late 19th Century. That’s quite a grudge, one has to say, but it’s a free world.

And memories of the British continually smuggling opium into China in spite of it being illegal there are what lingered in the mind, according to this guy, when the Chinese decided to execute Akmal Shaikh for a similar crime.

To me, it just goes to show the futility of awarding the Olympic Games to China. Their human rights record was and continues to be a disgrace. Why should they have been awarded the Games in the hope that it would give them the impetus to sign up to our version of human rights? That’s a mad equation.

And yes, I appreciate I probably sit here in Chinese-made clothes, typing on a computer made of Chinese components, but that is the hypocrisy of Western existence, alas.

Either way, I get a sense that they really enjoyed our predicament. Fancy the old Imperial enemy coming to you and begging you to show leniency. Over a matter of life and death, which inexorably will end with you showing your brutal strength and killing them anyway. And, even better, you get to sit atop the high horse and enjoy a feeling of superiority.

It shows two things: the weakness of Britain on our own against the Chinese (yet another argument for being part of the EU) and the fact that we are now totally dependent on the power of China.

It’s going to lead to a very different world in the future, but the effects can already be seen now. The global economy is entirely centred on the ability of China to produce goods extremely cheaply. The American economy is utterly dependent on it.

The key problem above all else, though, is that it’s not in Britain’s interests to pursue this any further. There have been the usual diplomatic manoeuvres, summoning the Chinese ambassador, etc… but will we really hear any more about it after today?

Of course not. Realpolitik is the name of the game on the international stage. There is too much at stake to jeopardise our relationship with China.

Perhaps the days of appeasement are on the way back…

No World Cup In North Korea? Let’s Invade Them

I wouldn't mess with him either

The news breaks this morning that, apparently, the North Korean regime is going to ensure that it’s long suffering residents will only be able to see their national team play if they are fortunate enough to achieve yet another Glorious Victory.

Denial of the facts and rearrangement of them to prove otherwise is as old as humanity itself. Repressive regimes certainly don’t have a monopoly on it. After all, its what our politicians attempt to do on a daily basis. Spin is the name of the game.

The real difference is that rather than sitting back and taking such arrant nonsense from our politicians, we are, for now, allowed to hit back. Well, I say we, but most of us just sit back and let the media do it on our behalf. That’s not always a good thing, but it’s better than nothing. And it keeps those dastardly pols on their toes.

But what intrigues me most is that we like to forget about North Korea. OK, we’re a bit worried about the crackpot in charge of the country, and whether he has or hasn’t got nuclear weapons. But otherwise, we don’t really have anything to say about the fact that the vast majority of the country are living in great poverty, and the regime doesn’t tolerate any dissent.

Over here in the West, we call those human rights abuses. Sometimes we use terms like “crimes against humanity” or even “genocide”.

When it suits us (which is definitely not when anyone talks about China), we like to use such positions to sit atop a high horse of moral superiority. And, perhaps, rightly so. After all, in a direct matchup between state-sponsored murder of trouble-makers we really ought to come out much lower than they do.

Some years ago, some of you may remember a small conflict that occurred in the Middle East. It involved a country called Iraq. There was an exchange of gunfire, and a small handful of military largesse, and soon enough we’d got rid of the blighters. Our justification at the time was that the country was posing a grave threat to the West. “45 minutes from destruction”, some fella quipped. That convinced everybody.

As the years passed, we realised we’d been duped a little. It seems, in fact, that the leader of the country was playing us along, hoping we’d believe he did have weapons of mass destruction and so would leave him alone just in case he was crazy enough (and he was) to use them against us.

But just like politicians, they cannot be trusted. All of a sudden the war was never about WMDs. No. It was because the leader of Iraq was an “evil dictator”. A brutal repressor of human rights. Stock footage of the man firing shotguns off balconies and ordering people to be executed soon rolled on the airwaves. Apparently, without us even knowing it, the war was actually fought to liberate the Iraqi people of such tyranny. And who could disagree? The man was batshit, after all.

Yet there remained troubling questions to those who were sceptical all along. “Why Iraq? Why now?” was what they used to say, before they would get shouted down by some Blair character for daring to have no compassion for the suffering of their fellow humans in Iraq.

It was classic memory hole stuff. The original pretexts for war were shuffled into the fire, and an ex post facto justification emerged.

The unfortunate consequence of such a doctrine can be seen in the headline to this post. A little facetious, yeah, but I’ve gotta get your attention somehow.

Got a repressive regime? Genocidal tendencies? Feeling the need to butcher a few of those people with the wrong skin colour or religion?

Well watch out, cos the World Police will soon be knocking on your door. Maybe. If they can be bothered.

And you aren’t China, or one of their chums.

Here’s to realpolitik!

The Realpolitik of International Affairs

What a fine cartoon!

I don’t know what it is, but I really can’t get excited over the continuing developments regarding the release of the Lockerbie bomber. The only prediction I made was that the Scottish government wouldn’t fall over the issue, as a certain newspaper suggested, and otherwise, it really wouldn’t be the storm that the media are making it out to be.

Well… perhaps I was wrong to a limited extent. There has indeed been quite a deep narrative to this story, enhanced by Gordon Brown doing his usual disappearing act when something controversial arises, which then allowed the London-centric media to do their worst to turn it into a story about Labour.

And so we’ve seen days of leaks, claims, counter-claims and endless publication of documents to try to prove who said what to whom. Once it gets to that stage, I am certain that 90% of the country has tuned out. For them, the story is merely about more political mendacity, more petty politicking, and most of us will choose the part of the story we like that fits our existing prejudices.

In fact, much like anything. It’s not certain many minds have been changed over the issue. Despite majorities opposing the decision, it is extremely unlikely to be the defining issue of any election campaign. Let’s face it, no one’s vote is going to be voting based upon whether the Scottish Justice Secretary has a different definition of “compassion” to everyone else.

This is why the issue hasn’t really captured my imagination. Are we surprised that politicians take decisions in the national interest, that realpolitik is not the order of the day in international affairs? Of course we aren’t. That’s why most of us didn’t believe the prospectus for the Iraq War. That’s why we are now so sceptical about Afghanistan. Because what is in it for us? What are our soldiers dying for?

Like it or not, principles tend to go out the window when other countries are involved.  That’s why Robin Cook’s “ethical dimension” to foreign policy, which he tried to make so much of when he became Foreign Secretary, was not all it cracked up to be when we soon learned that arms sales to oppressive regimes were still continuing.

As a result, I don’t believe that any other government would have taken any other decision on al-Megrahi. Even the Americans. This one is very convenient for them; it allows them to complain on the sidelines while having to bear none of the responsibility. But they will sure reap the reward when Libya continues to enhance its new ties to the West, both in terms of oil and intelligence sharing.

And just to prove my point, this morning Alastair Darling has ordered the world to “keep spending” – mainly because it would benefit us the most for that to happen by making us look less like the debt-laden nation we are.

National interest? Twas ever thus.

(Cartoon from: http://www.rachelperkinsillustration.com)