Events, My Dear Boy, Events

The news this morning is full of two extraordinary stories that underline the truth of Macmillan’s maxim.

The first was to be expected. The nationalisation (although the government is avoiding the term) of Northern Rock has provoked cries of “unfair competition” from other banks, howls from commentators about government dithering and fears of job losses running into thousands for which Labour will now be responsible. The problem of Northern Rock was not something that Brown saw coming, but it has shaken his administration as much as anything.

But the big story at this moment must be the announcement that Fidel Castro is to retire. This is an event that has been so long coming that its actual arrival is a surprise. There can be no doubt that this is a welcome development for the democratic world.  For Cuba, this will mean radical change. 70% of Cubans were born after the revolution and have never known any other leader. There is a hope that this might herald an era of better relations with the US (which is more likely if Obama wins than McCain) and real economic reform.

Let’s just hope that these events all turn out for the better in the long-run.

An End for Zimbabwe

Along with many people in the UK, and many Tories in particular, I have deep feelings for the present situation in Zimbabwe. The passing, yesterday, of Ian Smith is not one that the country should mourn. His actions contributed greatly to the sense of agrievement that many Zimbabweans rightly feel, but which has unfortunately led to allowances for some of Mugabe’s behaviour.

A reminder, if it were needed, that Mugabe is a lunatic, comes with the news that he has announced that he is ready for a UK-led invasion of the country. Such action may, or may not, be a good idea, but it is certainly a long way from happening. Such ideas are useful only to Mugabe in finding an external enemy to focus the nation’s attention upon.

Lech Walesa, Political Cool?

So, the same politicians that did not get that excited about meeting Kasparov, did have something else to look forward to.

They were cheering the imminent arrival of the former Polish President, Lech Walesa.

I have to say, this did impress me, too. As the leader of the Polish trade union, Solidarity, Walesa led the fight against communism in Poland and was awarded the Nobel Peace Price in 1993 in recognition of his efforts. He attributes much of his success to the Polish-born Pope John Paul II, whose support and moral authority Walesa valued highly. It is hard to meet someone who has achieved something so extraordinary and not be impressed. He is a man who was made for his time and met the challenges of it head-on.

The difficult nature of the timing of his presence, however, was not discussed at the conference, anywhere and I was surprised about that. The EU has issued the Polish government with a warning, on competition grounds, about the subsidies that it offers to the Gdansk shipyards were Solidarity first took hold. This is an iconic place for Poles, and rightly so. Sadly, without the subsidies the yards have little future. Somehow, they seem less worried by this than I had expected. It seems that the Poles have moved on from their past and are happier to abide by the rules of their present. That says a lot that is positive about them, too.

The Vision Thing

I am sitting in a conference hall in a Warsaw hotel. 300 other centre-right activists, politicians and associated hacks are here under the umbrella of the European Ideas Network, a rather impressive pan-European grouping that works to stimulate political thoughts among like-minded people associated with parties that are members of the EPP.

Among the other attendees are several Conservative MEP’s as well as some MP’s, including a couple of shadow ministers and  a shadow cabinet member or two.

What is really striking is the level of debate. Some of what is being discussed is really mind expanding stuff and I am very much at the junior end of the attendees. The discussions have a theme, “The World in 2025″ and there are some very impressive speakers coming up. My first impression though is overwhelmingly positive and this is for one main reason: there are big ideas here, there is vision and the contrast with the managerial nature of politics at Westminster at the moment is very stark. Some of what is being said is inspirational and for those of us who are followers of politics that is exciting.

So, over the next day or so I will do my best to blog some of my thoughts as they happen and offer my flavour of what is happening here.

The Clash of Civilisations

You know how it is. While innocently sitting at my desk this morning, the father of a friend of mine sent a round-robin email with a link to a piece of video. Mostly, these things tend to be rubbish, occassionally funny, but rarely informative. Today, this one was.

In this clip from Al Jezeera,  Wafa Sultan, an Arab-American psychologist from Los Angeles, takes on a panel of Arab traditionalists and other Muslim leaders. It is a fascinating comment on the debate taking place within the Muslim world. It is a “must see” clip.

Why is Bush not weaker?

Given that so much has been written about the UK party leaders over the last week and how their poll ratings determine their authority, I have been thinking about why the same is not the case in the US. After all, a quick look through the polls on pollingreport.com suggest about 30% of Americans think he is doing OK and more than twice as many, 65%, think he is doing a bad job!

Contrary to many views, the US President is not unlimited in his power. Congress, the Supreme Court and the federal system all conspire, deliberately, to provide boundaries to what the President may do. So, given that Bush Jnr’s popularity is so low, why is he able still to act with such authority in overseas diplomacy?

The answer is that the race to become the next President is more unusual and less able to predict than any other of the last 50 years. The leading Republican candidates are from the North-East, although no one matching that description has one the Presidency in modern times. The Democrats always need to be from the old-South to win and neither of the leaders match that requirement, either. Whatever happens, there will new rules after this election.

One article I read recently pointed out that Iran makes a habit of continually analysing US politics in more depth than any TV pundit as they attempt to foresee the political climate. The Iranians, like the other players in Iraq and beyond, monitor US politics and try and work out whether future expected changes, like who might be the next President, are good or bad for them. This explains why the Iranians are still willing to deal with the Bush administration over Iraq, in line with the deal announced two weeks ago. Like the rest of us, they have no idea of whether what comes next will be worse for them.

The fear of the unknown outweighs Bush’s current weakness.

Extraordinary ‘Extraordinary Renditions’

The news that the US rejected UK protests will not be a surprise to everyone. The lie of Blair’s influence over the Bush administration has been widely acknowledged. But the scale of this particular form of illegal action may take many years to uncover.

A start has been made by Andrew Tyrie MP who has investigated this area thoroughly. Some of what he has found is covered in the latest edition of the TRG’s Reformer.

Time to Agitate for Mugabe to Go

The University of Edinburgh made the extraordinary move, today, of stipping a previous recipient of an honorary degree of their award.

In this case the recipient was Robert Mugabe.

There are many people in the UK with links to Zimbabwe. The colonial legacy means that this is true at the governmental level, too. Sadly, rather than those links leading to a movement within the UK to agitate more strongly for Mugabe to go, we seem to be weighed down by history, to the point where it has prevented us from expressing the outrage that the appalling conditions in Zimbabwe demand. For the Conservative Party the situation has seemed even worse. Many senior figures seem cowed into silence for fear of accusations of Imperialism. Michael Ancram has been a notable exception. We should be ashamed.

On his recent trip to Africa, Blair backed a “softly-softly” approach to dealing with Mugabe, echoing the stance of South Africa’s President Mbeki, who leads the one country that could topple him quickly by cutting power supplies to the country without resorting to military force.

Blair has, effectively, ignored Zimbabwe as he has many of the other problems in Africa (Sierra Leone is a notable exception for which Blair deserves credit). The excesses of the Mugabe regime have taken place during his time in Downing Street and he has consistently failed to address them. Kate Hoey stands as an example to the Labour Party for her efforts in drawing attention to the problems and the need to be more active in dealing with the situation.

Since independence in 1980, under Mugabe, Zimbabwe has gone from being the bread basket of Africa to being a net food importer. Three out of every four adults is unemployed. Thousands have died in the clashes between political supporters of Zanu PF, Mugabe’s party, and opposition groups. Farms have been seized and razed. An education system that was the envy of Africa has been decimated. According to the World Health Organization, life expectancy for men in Zimbabwe is now just 37 years for men and 34 for women, the lowest of any country on earth.

One man’s desire to hold on to power at any cost is the root cause over all of these ills.

Both Labour and the Conservatives have been too timid in dealing with Mugabe. The time has come to recognise the part the UK played in bringing him to power and to become more active in supporting efforts to remove him.

TRG By Invitation: Where is the Responsibility to Protect?

Benedict Rogers, Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission, asks a difficult question

Zimbabwe, Sudan, Burma, North Korea – these are just four of the human rights and humanitarian disasters in the world today. And where is the United Nations, the organisation whose very Charter exists to promote and protect human rights and basic freedoms? What has happened to the Universal Declaration, that wonderful document signed by most countries in the world to declare that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”?

…more

Parliamentary Approval for War

MP’s have voted to ensure that Parliament, in future, will be able to vote on decisions to go to War. This is one of the topics that the TRG’s recent foreign policy publication covered.

In his article, “The Trouble with Our Foreign Policy”, Lord Hurd discusses the need for a new body that would be able to advise the government and inform the public about the decisions running up to war. It was a timely article.

Blair and the Americans

Isn’t amazing, given how hard he tries, that Blair seems to annoy the US administration so often?

It seems that when he called off the Serious Fraud Office’s investigation of BAe into Saudi export contracts, the Americans lodged a formal diplomatic complaint, according to this BBC story.

Some are still arguing about the rights and wrongs of this decision, whether national interest (meaning export orders) should have over-ridden moral concerns and principles, but that was not something that seems to have troubled Blair. In making the decision he did he may have forgotten that Bush is a man who has one-to-one conversations with God and who, for all of his mistakes, takes principles seriously.

More seriously than Blair, he seems to think.

Goodbye, Boris

Boris Yeltsin passed away on Monday.

The Russian government has made the decision to honour him with a national day of morning and his body will lie in state in Moscow ahead of his funeral on Wednesday.

For all of his faults, including the manner of the invasion of Chechnya and his well-publicised drinking, Boris Yeltsin was a remarkable man. His actions in 1991 when he led the resistance to the anti-Gorbachev coup rescued the USSR and the rest of the World from a potentially dark period of tensions and a return to the Cold War. As President, he gave more political freedoms to the Russian people than they had ever previously enjoyed. His actions did as much as those of anyone to bring the final stages of Cold War tensions to an end and we have much to collectively thank him for.

Alan Johnston

The TRG would like to offer our voice of support to the BBC’s campaign to highlight the kidnapping of Alan Johnston in Gaza last month.

We wish him and his family well and hope his safe release proves to be imminent.

Leaving Bosnia - Relief for the Welsh on St David’s Day

Today is St David’s Day.

Fitting then, that it is the Welsh Guard that who are the subject of the very positive news that the UK is to pull most of our remaining troops in Bosnia out of the country. Total numbers will be cut from 700 to 100. Most of those that remain will

Speaking on BBC News 24, today, Col Bob Stewart, former UN Commander in Bosnia, said, “We could have done better, but we haven’t done badly.”

It is clear, though that we should learn lessons from the Bosnian experience. Top of his list was the need to “move fast, do not sit on our hands.” It is interesting to note that Paddy Ashdown made the same observation not so long ago, although Blair and Co do not have seem to be listening when it comes to current overseas operations.

The troops went for six months after the Dayton Peace Accord was agreed. They ended up staying for twelve years.

Yet, there are still things to do. There are several indited war criminals that have yet to be captured, for example. But it is encouraging that the Bosnian and Serb authorities are now strong enough to stand on their own and it is credible when they claim that they will be able to accomplish these tasks.

We must remember these lessons for future situations, benefiting from where we got it right as well as where we have made mistakes. There are circumstances when it is right to intervene militarily overseas for purely humanitarian reasons. It is what happens after that intervention that need to be calculated more accurately in future. Such lessons must be learned.

Ashdown is a Man to Listen To

Paddy Ashdown is not a figure that is widely loved by many Tories, particularly those that find themselves regularly fighting tooth and claw with local Lib Dems.

However, in the area of post-conflicy reconstruction there are few more authoratative figures and his observations deserve to be noted and acted upon. Writing in The Independent yesterday, he makes clear the extent to which the UK-US efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq are under-scale and under-resourced. He notes the lessons of past situations, such as Kosovo, and highlights the lack of recognition Blair’s government pays to the history of such events.

His key point is the level of resources needed after a major conflict, often more than was needed in the war itself. Most starkly, he points out that:

“In Afghanistan, we have 1/25th the number of troops and 1/50th the amount of aid, per head of population, that we put into Kosovo. There is political short-sightedness: a combination of hubris, nemesis and amnesia.”

If that is an indication of what will be required to render anything close to a satisfactory outcome in Iraq and Afghanistan we must acknowledge this now, but we cannot act alone. Sadly, the situation remains as it ever was: without international support we cannot hope to redeem the situation and there is little to suggest that coming together.

Reading the White House - from Iraq to Polar Bears

With White House counsel Harriet Miers resignation last week, I just wonder if there is evidence of a new realism in the Bush administration about what is possible and the need for friends, that is leading to a new White House direction based on a simple strategy:

Give ground on every issue to buy political capital and expend that on Iraq.

Today, that capital is being spent on extending military operations to Somalia, for example, and the much trailed plans to increase the number of US troops in Iraq. Bush has seen that he will be remembered for Iraq and intends to do everything he can to make it work.

[As a side note, Blair has chosen the opposite path. Play up all other areas in the hope that Iraq is forgotten. As with his timing on comments about Saddam's execution (see previous post) that shows another unusual error by Blair - is he losing his touch?]

What effect will this change of heart by Bush (if there really has been one) have on us in the UK? Well, Iraq itself will remain an issue, but in the long run, perhaps the change with the biggest impact comes from one of the other fronts on which Bush has now given up. Over Christmas, there was an admission of guilt hidden in a statement on polar bears.

Essentially, the White House now admits that the global environment is changing for the worst as a result of man’s activities. This is the first time they have acknowledged such a basic step. The principle that led to them refusing to co-operate with almost every major global initiative on climate change has now gone. That can only lead to movement in some of the most difficult international negotiations of them all. And we have the failure of Iraq to thank.

While that is not much of a consolation, at least it proves the old adage that every cloud has a silver lining.

Blair and the Great Dictator

The row over the execution of Saddam roles on. Blair has waited a week to condem the unsavoury behaviour of Saddam’s executioners - a rare political gaff by him as his failure to comment earlier has meant that his recent comments have prolonged its life and added ever more dirt to the pile on top of his political coffin.

Before the execution the Labour Government, in the form of Margaret Beckett for one, continued to restate that the Labour government is against the death penalty but that it would not voice opposition to the execution of Saddam Hussein; that was a matter for the Iraqi people.

Oh, what a thing is hindsight. I wonder if they are questioning that particular moral dilema once again. In my view they should have done so earlier. If you believe that the death penalty is wrong, as I expect most One Nation Tories do these days, you can voice those concerns and even suggest alternatives.

And it just so happened that the UK was in a position to offer an alternative. The island of St Helena, where we imprissoned Napolean, is a very log way from Iraq, can be made completely secure and has vacancies. It would also give a role to the island and its 5,000 or so inhabitants who are the most heavily subsidised community in the World.

Why did the government not stick to its principles and make an offer that would have been appreciated by all sides including the Iraqi President who was not willing to sign the death warrant himself?

North Korea, Iran and the Nuclear Question

While most of us were wolfing down our Christmas turkey and slurping our way through bottles or our favourite tipple, hard-bitten diplomats representing the US, China, Japan, South Korea and North Korea were sitting in China discussing nuclear weapons. The North Koreans have threatened to declare they are a nuclear power. The US has jumped the gun (so to speak) and have already stated that they will refuse to recognise them as such what ever happens.

Meanwhile, the last country to declare unilaterally itself to be a nuclear power, India in 1998, signed an agreement with the US on nuclear technology transfer; a reward for defying the wishes of the global community 20 years ago now that it is a global economic power. India may be a democracy, albeit a flawed one, but does that justify the double standard? Is that the same lower standard that applies to Israel? Afterall, Israel’s Prime Minister recently appeared to admit that his country had the nuclear weapons that have been known of for years. The problem is that there is a clause in the Isreal aid bill, placed there at the insistence of Congress, that if Israel is ever “declared” a nuclear power, the $billions it receives each year from the US will be cancelled, all but bankrupting the country. So the US can offer rewards and threaten its friends in a way it cannot do so towards its enemies.

So should the global community act against North Korea if it presses ahead or allow it to happen in the face of little more than protests and motions of condemnation by the UN?

Either way, there are implications for future policy towards Iran against which similar UN motions have been passed. Iran, which, unlike North Korea really does have local ambitions to expand influence (mainly in the ’stans) and the ability to do so now that Lebanon has shown Israel to be less dominate than it was thought to be and America ever more wary and weary while caught in Iraq.

What can be done to stop North Korea?

Not a lot. It is already about as cut-off as it is possible for a country to be so sanctions will not make much difference. Military action, even if the US had all of its resources to hand rather than being tied up in Iraq, Afghanistan and with threats across Central Asia to worry about, could still not seriously contemplate invasion and there would be no international legal basis for it at present.

One of the things that sets One Nation Conservatives apart from other strands of political thought is its optimism and preparedness to strive for more ambitious goals and not to always default to a minimalist approach of looking for the least that we can get away with. However, here the optimism has to be tempered by the reality of the situation. It is sad to say, but I am not sure there is much leverage that can be applied by the US and the others who, wisely and correctly, want to stop North Korea from developing weapons of mass destruction. One Nation Conservatives tend to base foreign policy objectives on the requirements of the British national interest - whether acting alone or in partnership with other nations - and while the objective is obvious in this case, the means to achieve it are not.

North Korea and Iran want nuclear weapons and only invasion will stop them. India, Pakistan and Israel have already defied the threats and set a precedent for getting away with it. The international community has few tools to combat the actions of rogue states and has shown double standards towards its “friends”. And, clearly, if North Korea, one of the most technologically-backward countries in the World can do it, cannot any country with the will?

We have to face the reality that more and more countries are going to gain nuclear arsenals. The British nation interest now demands a shift in emphasis. Prevention is not possible. Limiting the effect of them, making them impossible to use must now be the focus, and other means of limiting the impact of the spread must be pursued.

So where does that leave us?

We don’t want more nations to have nuclear weapons. There are no sanctions that will stop those that are determined, though, and military options are not viable. On top of that, the international legal basis for stopping them has been blighted by letting some countries get away with it. Finally, there are going to be a lot more countries that want to go nuclear in the near future. All of this adds up to the need for a new strategy.

Where might that new strategy come from? It is important to remember that nuclear capabilities can be given up, too. South Africa developed them in the 1980’s and the ANC government dismantled them when they reached office. Perhaps then, the best idea is not to threaten North Korea when we have no real means to harm them, but to work for regime change in any and every way by supporting civil leaders in opposition, with the model being more like the economic and civil carrots offered to the former communist states of Eastern Europe than the direct means of Iraq.

Are there alternatives? Answers on a postcard, please. Or in the comments.