Lots of fun and games coming out of the Telegraph / George Galloway libel trial, so I thought I might as well dig up the second ever post I did on CT, handicapping the race a bit. I’m not sure that I’ve got much to add to that post, to be honest; even the links seem to still be alive. The Telegraph is going for a defence of qualified privilege, and Galloway isn’t trying to suggest that the documents were fakes, so it is likely to all turn on the question of whether the Telegraph’s journalism at the time was “responsible”. In which case, my guess is that much will depend on the judge’s interpretation of a Telegraph editorial at the time which contained the phrase “there is a word for taking money from a foreign power … treason”. Charles Moore’s trash-talking of Galloway during the period when he thought GG wasn’t going to sue might also come into the equation. My guess is that Galloway wins, but wins small as he is in large part the author of his own misfortune by cuddling up to Saddam so much. A bit disappointing for free speech fans, because it maintains the irritating state of affairs arising from Times vs Reynolds; while the House of Lords has hung out the tantalising prospect of a generalised public interest defence, nobody has actually won a case on one yet.
From the category archives:
UK Politics
Currently “Tradesports”:http://www.tradesports.com/ has Bush at about a 56% chance to win the Presidency. But the “Iowa Electronic Markets”:http://128.255.244.60/quotes/78.html shows a slight lean towards a Kerry victory.
To be sure, the IEM tracks overall votes and Tradesports electoral votes, so these leanings could be consistent. And if Kerry wins the popular vote and loses outright they will be. But that looks rather unlikely. Kerry’s national vote has trailed his battleground states vote in just about every poll that’s looked at this split. This is not particularly surprising since the Bush campaign and its surrogates have massively overspent the Kerry campaign (and its surrogates) on _national_ advertising with Kerry focusing almost exclusively on battleground state advertising.
The IEM numbers are fairly close, but if they hold I suspect one or other (or quite likely both) markets will end up on the wrong side of this election. On the other hand, if Kerry does repeat Al Gore’s efforts and win the popular vote without taking over the White House, I might have to revise my faith in the success of these markets. (Of course if that happens I’ll have much more to worry about than being wrong on a technical question like this one.)
Mark Steyn promises to resign if Kerry is elected.
Having failed to read correctly the mood of my own backyard, I could hardly continue to pass myself off as a plausible interpreter of the great geopolitical forces at play. Obviously that doesn’t bother a lot of chaps in this line of work — Sir Simon Jenkins, Robert ‘Mister Robert’ Fisk, etc., — and no doubt I could breeze through the next four years doing ketchup riffs on Teresa Heinz Kerry, but I feel a period of sober reflection far from the scene would be appropriate. My faith in the persuasive powers of journalism would be shattered; maybe it would be time to try something else — organising coups in Africa, like the alleged Sir Mark Thatcher is alleged to have allegedly done; maybe abseiling down the walls of the Presidential palace and garroting the guards personally.
I doubt he’s quite up to it, but at least his heart’s in the right place.
James, in comments to my Condorcet post, writes
bq. It will only anger the American voter to suggest that foreign nationals should be involved in electing the US President.
Of course (some) foreign nationals are allowed to vote in British general elections (Henry, Kieran and Maria would be if they were resident). I’m guessing that there are other countries that also allow (some) foreign nationals to vote in national elections. [1] Information?
fn1. EU citizens can vote in countries other than their own in European elections and in the UK I think they can vote in local elections too.
Compass is a new organisation that has emerged out of what could perhaps best be termed the thoughtful ex-Blairite left. It’s closely connected with the magazine Renewal. Its first national conference is coming up, with speakers like Polly Toynbee, Ruth Lister, Stuart White, Michael Meacher and Gordon Brown. Looks well worth going to, for those of you who don’t live thousands of miles from London.
Via the Virtual Stoa I have learned that you have to sign up to MPs’ email lists. I suggest that Tim Collins find out who is faking his site and email list, and close them down. I know it’s a fake, because if it were true Gyles Brandreth would be listed.
The Hansard Society “have produced a report on political blogging”:http://www.hansardsociety.org.uk/node/view/189
bq. “Political Blogs – Craze or Convention?”:http://www.hansardsociety.org.uk/assets/Final_Blog_Report_.pdf [pdf] reports on the relatively new phenomena of political blogging and examines whether these blogs can offer an alternative to traditional channels of political communication in the UK . The research study focuses on eight political blogs as representative examples of how individuals and organisations are harnessing blogging as a tool to promote political engagement. The research monitored activity on these blogs and, in addition, a blogging “jury” of members of the public with little or no experience of blogging scrutinised the blogs to assess their relevance as channels of political thought and debate.
[via “Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/ ]
Last night’s Newsnight had a nice what-he-said-then/what-he-says-now juxtaposition, and “the same quotes”:http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=538832 appear in today’s Independent:
bq. We are asked to accept that, contrary to all intelligence, Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd. (Tony Blair, 18 March 2003)
bq. I have to accept that we have not found them and we may not find them. He [Saddam] may have removed or hidden or even destroyed those weapons. (Tony Blair 6 July 2004)
On Parliamentary Questions the other day they played a clip of David Owen, recorded in 2003, admitting without embarrassment that when he was Foreign Secretary he seriously considered ordering the assassination of Idi Amin. There was no explanation of why the idea was rejected (it was a clip in a game show), but my immediate, and non-reflective, reaction was that it was the first good thing I had heard about Owen (whom I couldn’t stand when he was a real politician, even before reading Crewe and King’s fantastic biography of the SDP in which he emerges as a deeply unlikeable and destructive character). Without giving it a lot more thought, which I can’t do right now, I can make a very rough judgement that certain objectionable leaders are legitimate candidates for assassination (Hitler, Amin, both Duvaliers, Stalin) whereas others are not (Khomeni, Castro, Rawlings, Botha). I could tell a story about each, and probably be dissuaded on each of them (except Hitler). But I couldn’t give anything approaching necessary and sufficient conditions for candidacy. What makes a leader a legitimate target of an assassination attempt?
Clarification: as jdw says below we are talking about a government authorising the assassination of a foreign leader, rather than a citizen assassinating his/her own country’s leader, the assumption being that governments require more justification.
On this sacred day of democracy, two old posts of mine putting forward the case for not taking part in this complete farrago. I would add two points in the context of the current UK elections:
1) Given the large-scale use of postal ballots, the “electoral bezzle” (the proportion of the turnout which consists of fictional characters who are the result of electoral fraud) is probably much larger this time than in previous elections.
2) As the FT points out today, the list system used in the European elections means that there are substantial numbers of political hacks and placemen who will get elected no matter what, making it even more pointless to bother voting.
Don’t encourage them.
Americans are often shocked when they learn that not only does ‘public school’ mean ‘private school’ in the UK, but also in the UK the state not only funds, but collaborates with religious organisations in running, religious schools. I used to be strongly opposed to this practice, at least in principle, though I have also long thought that Muslim schools should be candidates for funding given that RC and C.of E. schools were funded. I’m still unenthusiastic about the situation, but also have a suspicion that the practice is part of the reason that religion, though powefully present in the public culture, is a less rich source of social division than it is in the US. Alan Carling has very nicely posted my idiosyncratic take on this subject on his website. The piece is written really for a UK audience, but its nice and short, and comments somewhat on the US situation. Although it is scheduled for publication as is I’m very curious about reactions to it and, as usual, take my own tentative views to be evolving objects of critique rather than anything set in stone.
Chris’s post on higher education in the UK has reminded me of an idea I devised when I was experiencing the regime of UK Higher Ed. Numerous UK academics are dissatisfied with their working conditions in exactly the way that Chris’s correspondent is, though not all of them would feel comfortable decamping. If I were a member of the Welsh Assembly or Scottish Parliament I would be very tempted to capitalize on this. I’d try to get a long-term commitment for funding a small new academic institution in whichever country I was in, which would provide an elite undergraduate and graduate education to a small number of students (at first), and would, by providing much happier working conditions and slightly better incomes, provide a magnet for high-quality academics in English institutions (whom I would pursue aggressively).
A prominent philosopher in the UK emails to tell me that he has had enough and that he’s looking for employment in the US. The proximate cause of his frustration is the ridiculously complicated process that the Arts and Humanities Research Board (soon to be Council) imposes on us as a condition for distributing the pitiful funding that is available for research students. Increasingly, universities have to demonstrate that they are providing all kinds of “training” in order to access this money and this is part of a wider trend where government (or its arms-length agencies like the AHRB, HEFCE etc) seeks to regulate and micromanage activity within higher education by such conditionalization of funding. My correspondent draws attention to the recent review of “Business-University Collaboration” undertaken by former FT-editor Richard Lambert at Gordon Brown’s behest. Suprisingly, given Brown’s predilection for micromanagement and control across the public sector, one section of the report offers a trenchant exposition of the mess that the government has made as it has tried to subject higher education in the UK to its will.
I recently bought the DVDs of the first three series of The West Wing, which make for far too compulsive viewing. Watching it, the same thought occured to me as has occured to many others: namely, how much better “President Josiah Bartlet”:http://westwing.bewarne.com/pres.html is than any recent real-life incumbent. But it isn’t just Bartlet, 24’s “President David Palmer”:http://tv.zap2it.com/tveditorial/tve_main/1,1002,274%7C87105%7C1%7C,00.html would also get my vote (if I had one) over most post-war Presidents. Fictional Presidents seem to incarnate the ideal virtues of the office. Not so fictional British Prime Ministers, who seem to be either Machiavellian (“Francis Urquhart”:http://www.tvheaven.ca/fu.htm ) or ineffectual (“Jim Hacker”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/guide/articles/y/yesprimeminister_1299003453.shtml ). Perhaps only “Harry Perkins”:http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/tv/100/list/prog.php3?id=66 comes close to matching an ideal in the way that Bartlet and Palmer do. I’m not sure what this says about our different political and televisual/cinematic cultures and I’m sure there are more examples of fictional leaders to play with. Suggestions?
Great news for British people who occasionally worry that they might be stranded away from the comforting gaze of a CCTV camera, or who think that the police force has too many restraints placed on it in the name of civil liberties.
As of a speech yesterday, our blessed Prime Minister has decided that telephone tapping (an investigation methodology more usually associated with terrorists and international drug gangs) should be permitted for investigations into criminals suspected of offences which would carry a sentence of less than three years if convicted. I know the civil liberties crowd will whine, but as far as I’m concerned, the prospect of not knowing who might be listening in to my phone calls is a small price to pay in the fight against dangerous driving, carrying a knife in public, graffiti and similar massive threats to our lives and liberty.
Even better news, though, is the introduction of “individually targeted CCTV”. It’s horrendously wasteful to just put CCTV cameras up in public places and hope that someone happens along to commit an offence in front of them. Similarly, to wait until an offence is reported and then find out who did it is a waste of scarce resources that could be spent on the NHS. What you need to do is select people who the police think are criminals, put a CCTV camera in their house, then watch them like a hawk until they do something illegal. Then you can swoop down and whizz them off to jail without bothering with a costly and time-consuming jury trial. Since the British State has recently become perfect and never makes mistakes, it’s flawless. Hurray for Tony!