Christopher Hitchens Is Not Great

Yesterday, I saw something very sad: a lady, who looked reasonably intelligent, reading a book entitled 'God is Not Great' by Christopher Hitchens.
Hitchens is a writer who has been proved wrong on just about everything he has ever written.
Here, for instance, was his pre-invasion prediction about Iraq::

"This will be no war -- there will be a fairly brief and ruthless military intervention.... The president will give an order. [The attack] will be rapid, accurate and dazzling.... It will be greeted by the majority of the Iraqi people as an emancipation. And I say, bring it on."

So for anyone who still doubts the existence of the Almighty, here's the incontrovertible proof that God does indeed exist.

Christopher Hitchens thinks he doesn't.

How to make flying pleasant again

This piece of mine appears in today's First Post.

Across the political spectrum there is widespread agreement that Britain's airports, with their long queues, lack of seats and tacky, shopping mall atmosphere, are a national disgrace. But the solution is not to break up BAA's monopoly and introduce 'more competition' as some have suggested. The answer is to simply take BAA back into public ownership.
Sir Terence Conran, who designed Terminal One at Heathrow and the North Terminal in the 1960s, has contrasted the brief he received from the owners of the airports back then - the British state - with the instructions Lord (Richard) Rogers, the architect of Terminal 5, got from BAA.
Conran was told to put in as many seats as possible, with the priority being to make passengers 'relax and feel at ease'. At Terminal One there were only three shops.
The privatised BAA told Rogers to put in as few seats as possible: there will be only 700 seats for a terminal handling an average of 80,000 passengers a day when it opens in March 2008. BAA wants people to pay to sit down at the terminal's expensive cafes and restaurants - not sit down for free, eating their own sandwiches.
The approach perfectly illustrates the difference in ethos between a publicly-owned company, for whom profit is not the be all and end all, and a privatised one.
We can't blame BAA for treating every square foot at Heathrow as a profit centre: it's a private company which wants to maximise returns for its shareholders. But we can blame the politicians foolish enough to sell off BAA in the first place. Allowing other profit-hungry plcs to compete to run our airports would only mean more of the same.
If we really want Heathrow and our other airports to be comfortable and reasonably easy to negotiate, we need to change the whole philosophy under which they operate. And that means returning them to their most appropriate owners: the British public.

Iraq: Time for a Reckoning

This article of mine appears on the Guardian's Comment is Free website.

In his excellent Guardian Comment piece last week, John Gray lauded the end of liberal interventionism. But while liberal interventionism - and its close ideological ally, neoconservatism - are both highly discredited creeds, one problem remains. Despite the death and destruction their ideology has caused, and the lack of public support for their agenda, neoconservatives and liberal interventionists are still disproportionately represented in the corridors of power and in the media.
Both the prime minister and the leader of the opposition supported the Iraq war. So too did their front benches. Tony Blair may have gone, but warmongers still abound in the Palace of Westminster, with Iran next in their line of fire. And in the media, pro-war commentators such as Nick Cohen, Niall Ferguson and Melanie Phillips continue to impart their "wisdom" on international affairs as if the humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq had never happened.

The failure to hold the war lobby properly to account is a sad reflection on the state of democracy in modern Britain. But while moving Britain to a more peaceful foreign policy orientation requires moving away from the present turbo-capitalist economic system which makes wars of plunder like Iraq inevitable; in the short term, there's much we can do to rectify the situation. If your MP supported the Iraq war, write to them to ask if, in the light of events, he/she is ready to publicly recant and to pledge that he/she will support no more illegal attacks on sovereign states. If they refuse to do so, simply inform them that you won't vote for them at the next election. Find out too who the prospective candidates are from the other parties, and ask them if they are prepared to make the same pledge.

Regarding the leaders who took us into war, support the legal moves to prosecute Tony Blair for war crimes. In Scotland, the former SNP MP Jim Sillars has submitted to the Lord Advocate a request that she review the powers of "declaration" which rests with Scottish courts, to have Tony Blair arraigned as a murderer on the general charge that he has led an "aggressive war" in Iraq.
Let's not forget that the Nuremburg judgment held that to initiate a war of aggression was "not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole". Allowing Blair and his fellow warmongers to get off scot-free for the illegal, murderous attack on Iraq would put us - the British people - in the same moral category as the Germans who stood by and watched as Jews were herded on to trains bound for the concentration camps.

And next time you read a hawkish article by a pro-war journalist - arguing for "strong action" against Iran/Russia/Syria or whichever country has been designated the neo-con's baddie of the week - remind him/her of the claims he/she made on Iraq. I'm sure many pro-war journalists wish what they had written five years ago about the Iraqi "threat" could be erased from the public record forever; thanks to the wonders of Google, it never will be.

Until those who supported the assault on Iraq either publicly show remorse, or better still, do the honourable thing and leave public life for good, we must keep up the pressure. Of course, we will be accused by the "let's move on from Iraq" brigade of attempting to claim hollow moral victories. We shouldn't let that worry us. The arrogance of the pro-war brigade, pre-invasion, has been matched only by their arrogance to acknowledge they were wrong, post-invasion.

The issue is not, however, about trying to force arrogant people to show some humility.

It's about doing all we can to make sure that a disaster like Iraq never happens again.

There was only one Nazi Germany

"There is an interesting problem with selling the "Iran as Nazi Germany" line. If Ahmadinejad really is Hitler, ready to commit genocide against Israel's Jews as soon as he can get his hands on a nuclear weapon, why are some 25,000 Jews living peacefully in Iran and more than reluctant to leave, despite repeated enticements from Israel and American Jews?"

writes Jonathan Cook in his excellent piece 'Kosher in Tehran', published today on the Guardian's Comment is Free website.

Jonathan's observations remind me of the war lobby's ludicrous attempts to portray President Milosevic's rump Yugoslavia as the 'new Nazi Germany' in the 1990s. The weak point in the argument- aside from the fact that Yugoslavia was a thriving multi-party democracy led by a life-long anti-fascist whose parents were Partisans, was that thousands of non-Serb refugees from the wars in Bosnia and Croatia headed to guess where...? Yup, Milosevic's rump Yugoslavia. I might be wrong, but I can't recall any Jews emigrating to Nazi Germany in the 1940s, can you?

Lee Hazelwood R.I.P.

Take it away Nancy!

A Question of Transparency

I've argued for a long time that journalists should reveal any financial interest in issues they write about.

Here's a good example.

"Hoemopaths (sic) are quacks, homeopathy is uttter (sic) drivel, and those who give in (sic) any credence are utterly misguided."

Now, it may well be true that "homeopathy is uttter (sic) drivel" etc, etc, and that the writer honestly believes the words he has written. But don't you think that in the interests of transparency the person who wrote these lines should, in addition to brushing up on his spelling and grammar, have revealed that he is President of a think tank which is financed by the world's largest research-based drugs corporation?

Shock, Horror: Plc puts shareholders first!

"British Gas has announced record profits of £533 million. That works out at £3 million a day and a staggering £676 million increase on the same time last year. Announcing the results, Roger Carr, Chairman of British Gas’ parent company Centrica, said shareholder value was “top of the agenda”.
It certainly doesn’t look like customers are a priority. Research by price comparison website uSwitch found that British Gas has put prices up by 36% (£299) in 2006. Since then, the wholesale price of gas has dropped by 56%. However, British Gas has only reduced its prices by 18% and says it won't be cutting them further."

writes financial journalist Simon Ward.What a surprise! The astonishing thing is that some people still believe that when privatisation takes place customers, and not shareholders, will come first. If we want customers to come first, then our public utilities should be publicly owned, and run not to make as much profit as possible, but for the good of the whole community.
That means keeping branch railway lines open, even if they are, in a narrow sense of the word, 'uneconomic', putting in seats (lots of them), and not shopping malls into new airport terminals, keeping village post offices open, guaranteeing a next day first class mail delivery to even the remotest part of the British Isles and keeping telephone boxes in working order in isolated rural areas.

Those who supported privatisation of gas, electricity, water, telecommunications,
the railways and Britain's airports, are in no position to turn round now and
complain that plcs like British Gas are putting shareholders and not customers first. It's simply what plcs do. And always will do. Which is why plcs are totally unfit to run public utilities.