They're out to get me

6:17pm

According to Al Fayed:

Harrods owner Mr Al Fayed claimed former prime minister Tony Blair, MI5, MI6 and the British ambassador to France were all part of the conspiracy...Asked by Ian Burnett QC, counsel to the inquest, if he stood by his claim that Diana and Dodi were "murdered by the British security services on the orders of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh", Mr Al Fayed replied: "Yes." He also pinpointed alleged security forces in the ambulance crew, the then British Ambassador to France Sir Michael Jay and the princess's brother-in-law Sir Robert Fellowes as all being involved in the plot. And he said Prince Charles was complicit, hoping to make way so he could marry his "crocodile wife" Camilla Parker Bowles.

We've been wondering why the comments facility keeps going wrong on this blog. Now we know. It must be because of posts like this.

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Humphrys at it again

4:37pm

There are many different reasons why I prefer Nicky Campbell in the morning to the Today programme, but the main one is John Humphrys.

He excelled himself today. Alastair Darling deserves to be, and can quite easily be, rilpped to shreds over his handling of Northen Rock. But Humphrys' performance was simply shameful, wilfully distorting Darling's position and words, as Andy McSmith makes clear: 

A word on the exchange between John Humphrys and Alistair Darling on this morning's Today programme, in which the Chancellor of the Exchequer was accused of having either said or agreed that nationalisation would be 'lingering death' for Northern Rock. It seemed odd that Darling would ever say anything so interesting, having built his career on never expressing a controversial opinion. The record shows that, much as we all admire the great Humphrys, on this occasion he was being unfair.

He was referring to an exchange in the House of Commons on 19 November, in which the Labour MP Jim Cousins, said: "The whole House will have noted that the Liberal Democrats have as much regard for the 5,500 employees of Northern Rock in the north-east—and the 6,500 nationally—as they had for the job of their former leader. Two or three faces in public, 10 in private—that is the policy of the Liberal Democrats."

Cousins added: "Does my right hon. Friend accept that the policy of nationalisation would lead to a slow lingering death for the jobs of the Northern Rock workers, its assets and Britain's reputation as a major financial services centre, with my right hon. Friend the Chancellor cast in the role of undertaker—and that only by finding a successor business to grow on those jobs, assets and reputations can we offer any real prospect of the taxpayers getting their money back?"

Darling replied: "I agree with my hon. Friend. It is regrettable and surprising that the Liberal Democrats never seemed to support our earlier proposals to keep Northern Rock open. It would also, however, be a mistake to shut off all other options and simply go for one at this stage; that does not seem to me to make any sense at all."

In context, it is clear that Darling was agreeing with Cousins's attack on the Liberal Democrats and not, as Humphrys inferred, with his warning about nationalisation. 

Quite.  When is Humphrys going to be put out to grass? There must be some hope that when Evan Davis arrives Today might be worth bothering with again. But for the moment, I'll stick with Nicky Campbell, who seems to realise that an interview can be tough without resorting to Humphrys-style contradiction and showboating.

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The unmissable and the very, very missable

10:37am

You can safely ignore almost everything written about the Northern Rock fiasco. Most of it is repetitive and misses the real point.  But on no account miss the great Anatole Kaletsky who gets to the heart of it: 

He should have announced that Northern Rock would be nationalised not to keep it in business, but to close it down; that the bank would stop lending new money or accepting new deposits as of tomorrow; that all the company's retail deposits would be shifted immediately to the National Savings system, while all the wholesale bonds would be replaced with Government gilts. The company would then be put into run-off, with the Treasury recouping its money gradually as existing borrowers repaid their mortgages over the years.

Nationalisation, in other words, made sense only as a necessary legal stepping-stone to the orderly liquidation that Northern Rock required as soon as it ran out of money in September.

To use nationalisation to keep the bank in business and its staff in state-subsidised employment would be a travesty of all the economic principles that “new” Labour has claimed to believe in. It would represent a grossly unfair distortion of Britain's banking business and would make a mockery of all the arguments Mr Brown has vociferously advanced in Brussels against state subsidies and protectionism elsewhere in Europe. Worst of all, the provision of £100 billion of state guarantees to a grossly mismanaged and insolvent mortgage bank would be a gross insult to the hundreds of thousands of workers in businesses from coal, steel and textiles to performance cars and advanced electronics whose jobs could have been saved with Government guarantees or “temporary” nationalisations costing one-tenth or even one-hundredth of the £100 billion that the Government is now devoting to just 6,000 jobs at Northern Rock.

If Kaletsky's is the one unmissable piece, then I suppose I should be balanced and link to the one truly missable piece by that hilariously pretentious twit, CPGB-stalwart Martin Jacques, entitled

Northern Rock's rescue is part of a geopolitical sea change

Er, no. It's coz it wasn't run proper, innit.

BTW, I like Harry's take on the ridiculous Martin J:  

There's not usually any reason to bother reading the utter drivel Martin Jacques produces these days but I'm glad I scanned through his latest effort today because at the foot of the page there is a link to the new online archive of the entire back catalogue of Marxism Today from 1980 till the end in 1991.

...Jacques has a rather immodest take on the magazine he edited and I had a particular chuckle at this:

If the 1990s was, true to the idiom of New Labour, characterised by fad and fashion, Marxism Today was quite the opposite: it was a magazine of profound political and intellectual substance.

I'd say that, not for the first time, Jacques has that exactly the wrong way round. While the Marxism Today crowd of CP affiliated 'intellectuals' drifted off into irrelevant think-tanks, pointless areas of academia and some of the most unreadable journalism of the nineties (just think Charles Leadbetter), it was MT's readers in the Labour Party who got on with the political substance - you know finally winning elections, getting power and improving the country, all that kind of boring stuff.

And if you glance through a lot of the MT material, particularly the later stuff, that is hardly surprising. While Labour got on with the hard business of modernising and dealing with the far-left, Jacques and co were waffling about the cafe society and turning into a proto-type of the Guardian's G2 section.

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BBC reporter on terrorists and elected politicians - both great leaders

9:00am

A report last week by the BBC correspondent Humphrey Hawkesley, on what he called "an amazing day for Lebanon" - the day when a memorial rally for Rafik Hariri was followed by Imad Mughniyeh's funeral - concluded with this astonishing sentence:

The army is on full alert as Lebanon remembers two war victims with different visions but both regarded as great national leaders.

That's a former Prime Minister being equated by the BBC with one of the most unspeakable terrorists ther world has ever known.

Not that it went unnoticed. As the Jerusalem Post reported:

Don Mell, The Associated Press's former photographer in Beirut, lambasted the parallel, drawn by BBC correspondent Humphrey Hawkesley in a BBC World report last Thursday, as "an outrage" and "beyond belief."

American journalist Mell was held up at gunpoint by Mughniyeh's men as his colleague Terry Anderson, AP's chief Middle East correspondent, was kidnapped in Beirut in March 1985.

...In his letter to the British state broadcaster, Mell wrote: "For you to refer to former prime minister Rafik Hariri and Imad Mughniyeh as 'great national leaders' in the same sentence is beyond belief. One was an elected leader who spent years and millions of his own money rebuilding his country. The other was probably the world's second most notorious terrorist, who was responsible for, in addition to running a major criminal enterprise, destroying the US Embassy, the French and US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983; the hijacking of TWA 847; the bombing of the Israeli cultural center in Buenos Aires, [and] the kidnapping and murder of many Westerners in Lebanon, including Terry Anderson, Terry Waite, John McCarthy."

Mell noted that he personally had "a familiarity with these events" since he had witnessed many of them and "was with Mr. Anderson when he was kidnapped in 1985."

Responding to Mughniyeh's death last week, Anderson called him "the primary actor in my kidnapping and many others."

...In his letter to the BBC, Mell went on, "Most recently, Mr. Mugnhiyeh was responsible for provoking the Israeli-Lebanese conflict in 2006, which one may ask, accomplished what?"

He concluded: "I seldom criticize the reporting of others because of my great belief in the exchange of differing viewpoints regardless of source, and for my great respect for the first amendment of my country's constitution. But today you went too far. You've done your great institution and nation a huge disservice."

This is, of course, far from unusual. The BBC thought it fine for its reporter to openly weep at Yassir Arafat's funeral. This time, however, it has made a semblance of an apology in a statement to the Jerusalem Post:

While there is no doubt that supporters of Hizbullah did regard Mughniyeh in such terms [as a great leader], we accept that the scripting of this phrase was imprecise. The description of Imad Mughniyeh should have been directly attributed to those demonstrating their support for him.

Ah, how sweet of them to be so concerned about the feelings of Mughniyeh's mourners. 

I can think other words I'd use to describe Hawkesley's report rather than "imprecise"; I'm sure you can, too. And there was, after all, something of an apology: 

We accept that this part of the report was open to misinterpretation. We apologize to anyone who may have been offended by this item.

But it's not that people were offended that's the problem. It's the mindset of the reporter, and the editors who let his words through, that's the real issue.

UPDATEL Apologies - Melanie had already covered this at her blog.

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A criminal's view of punishment - I don't like it!

10:28pm

Erwin James, who is out of prison after serving a 'life' sentence (which says all one needs to know about both Mr James and our criminal justice system) had this to say about my Times piece last week:

Of all the examples of disingenuous and irresponsible reporting of criminal justice issues, however, one of worst in recent years appeared in an edition of the Times this week. 

To be labelled irresponsible by the likes of Mr James is indeed a singular achievement.

What surprised me, however, was the overall tone of the comments. I had expected Comment is Free readers to weigh in with him against the idea of punishment for criminals. I could not have been more wrong. Comments such as these are plentiful on the thread:

Let's start by ensuring they serve their full time, in a harsh environment with no time off for good behaviour (but double time for poor behaviour). And life means life.

Then we can worry about 'rehabilitation'.

The criminal justice system is not supposed to be a service to the offender. I'm fine with rehabilitation but punishment should be a big part. If someone beats the crap out of me for my wallet and they're caught, I'm happy for them to receive some sort of training that might prevent them re-offending, but I also want them to serve a long, lonely, miserable prison sentence. Call me stupid and barbaric all you want.

And then one from someone who, unlike Mr James, appears able to grasp the concept that punishment and rehab can go hand in hand: 

I have no objection to rehabilitation; I do object to it being used instead of punishment. That I think was Stephen Pollard's point, and one that you do not appear to address.

What a huge surprise it is to discover from Mr James that a criminal doesn't like the idea of punishment.

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Comments

7:00pm

I'm sorry that so many of you have been annoyed by the breakdown in comments. Something has been wrong for weeks now, and we thought it was better now but plainly that's not so. Thanks to all of you who've emailed me about it.
Do keep looking - you'll know when the facility is working when you see comments appearing on the recent posts.
Sent from Blackberry

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Walk in

11:06am

There's a 'walk in' clinic in Finchley. And it's a perfect example of modern Britain.

Needing to have my knife wound re-dressed, I thought I'd save myself some time by wandering off to the clinic rather than my (private) GP, who is a bit of a trek away.

I walked in and explained what I needed. "Do you have an appointment?". "No," I said, pointing out that the name 'Finchley Memorial Hospital Walk In Clinic' implied that one could 'walk in'.

"Can't see you without an appointment". I asked why it was called a 'walk in clinic' when one could not walk in. "You need an appointment". Etc.

To cut a long story short, I eventually persuaded them to see me - strictly as a one off.

You have to be awed by the NHS, really. What on earth is it for?

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Yeah, it's like book, like well wicked

5:34pm

Comment is Free is hardly my preferred reading, but this is simply wonderful. Have a read of the comments. Fantastic. In a horrible sort of way.

UPDATE: I wish I hadn't posted this. The thread developed into a teally nasty, vicious attack on the, I'm sure, perfectly harmless writer.

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Oi gevalt!

2:16pm

There really is only one word for Oliver Kamm: unique.

UPDATE: Oh dear, not a very clear post. I think you'd have to be telepathic to realise my headline's intention. It was Media Lens to which I was referring, not the wonderful Oliver.

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I buy, you sell

11:43am

Tim Worstall has a funny take down of Polly Toynbee's grasp of markets: 

She’s really not got this markets thing, has she?

A story headlined "Homeowners looking to sell" said "Non-dom foreigners living in the UK are preparing to sell their homes", quoting Knight Frank estate agency saying it "could lead to an exodus". But further on, another agent, Chesterton, reports "a record few months" in Knightsbridge.

Umm, if there are a few months of record purchases, this really rather has to mean that there are a few months of record sales. A rise in the number of people selling their homes is in fact entirely consistent with a rise in the number of people, umm, selling their homes so as to leave the country.

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