I find the killing of British citizens by drone strike in Syria a very disturbing development. UK military forces killed two of its own citizens in a pre-emptive drone strike. Two problems emerge:

1. The use of armed force in Syria defies the will of Parliament which voted against the extension of extend armed military action from Iraq into Syria.
2. It appears to violate international law.

Overruling Parliament’s Will

David Cameron has argued that, “in an emergency”, the Prime Minister can take military action against the will of parliament.

Firstly, this demonstrates the woolliness of our famously unwritten constitution, giving great power to the executive of the day to make up the rules as they go along, to suit current needs.

Secondly, I have seen no evidence of any intended actions by the targets which would amount to an “emergency”. What appears to be the case is that these evil, misguided individuals were plotting to take violent, murderous action at some high profile events which have already happened, so they didn’t actually do it.

Illegality

A test case of 1837 established that it is legal for a country to take pre-emptive lethal action in self-defence in very limited circumstances. A threat against the state must be imminent and there must be no feasible alternative option to prevent the threat. The action must be proportionate to the threat. There is nothing in the government’s statement that could possibly be interpreted that the threat from these individuals was imminent. So the criteria were not met and the action was illegal.

Imminent?

The government has so far resisted publishing the legal advice it was given on the legality of the attack. Of particular concern is the suspicion that the British government has adopted the same re-writing of the meaning of “imminent” as the Americans. A leaked internal US white paper from 2011 radically redefined the idea of “imminence”. It states:

The condition that an operational leader present an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on US persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.”

In plain English: “imminent = they might attack us at some time in the future”.

British Values or Barbarism?

Cameron and his predecessor have been banging on about so-called “British values” for some years. Key tests of those values include respect for the law and following due process. Civilized democracies don’t do extra-judicial killing. Those targeted were truly evil individuals who wanted to do grievous harm, including the murder of innocent civilians in pursuing their warped and ultra-intolerant views.

But Britain now appears to be more barbaric than at any time since 1837. Every time we take a step towards the barbarism they espouse, the terrorists score a victory.

…doesn’t include David Cameron.

The dismal performance of our Prime Minister seems to have come to a head in the past week. I’m thinking in particular of his uncomfortable, embarrassed, eye-contact avoiding interview on TV recently in response to the continuing humanitarian crisis of mass migration into Europe.

It has been obvious to me for some years just how weak a politician he has turned out to be. An example was the controversial veto of an EU agreement 2-3 years ago: a double own-goal. The rest of Europe’s leaders simply ignored his veto and went ahead without the UK. Cameron’s action reduced further any goodwill the other leaders may show him in future negotiations over EU reform.

I also quickly noticed his repeated habit of making pious, sympathetic, statements on some topic and then proceeding to do the exact opposite of what he had said. This seems to be driven by a desire to be liked by his audience, at the expense of being seen to be inconsistent and untrustworthy. For example, his pre-2010 tree-hugging, husky-loving “greenest government ever” public claim soon gave way to an overheard private comment to cut the “green crap”.

Cameron has repeatedly demonstrated poor judgement, as the following two examples show. Firstly, the appointment of Andy Coulson as his communications director was made despite warnings that the choice would be unwise. Secondly, the rash claim to reduce net immigration to a few tens of thousands was made despite him not having the powers to control this figure, as the recent record figure of over 300,000 for 2014 has shown.

His weakness is seen in the failure to stand up to his own backbenchers and UKIP, which had two main consequences:

1. Being gradually forced into a position where he had to concede an “in-out” referendum on EU membership with an arbitrary target date when the timetable for proper negotiations was outside his control;
2. On immigration, a deliberate, and morally despicable, blurring of the distinction between asylum seekers, refugees and “economic migrants” has boxed him into a position where he cannot convincingly speak on the more heart-rending news events without appearing to contradict his earlier narrative. The repeated assertion of the myth that immigrants are attracted to Britain because of our generous benefits has no basis in evidence. It also leaves Cameron nowhere to hide – when pictures confirming the sheer desperation of people fleeing murderous regimes show just how ludicrous such a claim is.

The tragic sight of little Aylan Kurdi on the beach and the desperation, dignity and determination of a group of Syrians marching together from Hungary to Austria has changed the moral landscape of the immigration issue. It puts Angela Merkel and Germany on the moral high ground and leaves Cameron – and by implication the rest of us – portrayed as mean-spirited and misanthropic.

Cameron needs to be reminded of three things:

1. There is such a thing as compassion: people can rise to performing acts of enormous kindness to strangers, particularly if given inspirational leadership to do so. Look at the cheering crowds at a German railway station!
2. There is more to life than the narrow pursuit of material self-interest.
3. The “national interest” is not synonymous with that of his rich friends and Tory Party donors in the City.

Perhaps it’s too much to expect a member of the Bullingdon Bully Boys Club to understand these simple facts. Britain deserves better than this.

Imagine the scene: a discreet, oak-panelled office, somewhere in Whitehall. The year is 1952. A man sits at a large, highly-polished desk. A young woman, in her mid-twenties, enters the room. The man stands up to greet her.

Man (interviewer): Good morning, Mrs Windsor, do take a seat.

Woman (candidate): Thank you.

(They sit)

Man: Do make yourself comfortable. There’s a glass of water* there if you need it, Mrs Windsor, or do you mind if I call you Betty?

Woman: Yes, I’m afraid one does mind.

(* tap water, of course: This is 1952! Duchy Original Royal Deeside Mineral Water, 95p for 750ml from Waitrose, came much later. Also, yes, I made up the Betty bit, just for fun. No one in 1952 would dream of being so informal to a stranger they’ve just met. False bonhomie, pretending to be your best friend, by telephone cold callers and the like, is a 21^st century phenomenon. But I digress…)

Man: Sorry, Mrs Windsor. So, first, let me ask you, what skills do you have that make you suitable for this job?

Woman: Well… (pause), one was born…

Man (interrupting): Thank you, Mrs Windsor, no more questions. Or should I call you Your Majesty? Congratulations, you’ve got the job.

Ridiculous? I think so – let me explain.

Choosing a Head of State

When it comes to choosing a head of state, I start from two basic principles:

1. Like the Americans say: we hold these truths to be self-evident: all are born equal.
2. Selection for head of state is the greatest honour the people of a country can bestow on one of its citizens.

Dangerous, subversive stuff? I don’t think so – just plain common sense. Reducing the choice of head of state to an accident of birth, to me, creates two problems:

1. As it takes no effort on behalf of the “winner”, it devalues the honour of the appointment to a meaningless nothing.
2. It insults the whole electorate, who cannot be trusted to make the “right” choice.

I find the idea that some people are born “better” than others abhorrent and quite out of place in a modern democracy. Surely people must earn their status through their own efforts. All sorts of basically undemocratic practices follow from the status quo. For example, the politicians who passed the Parliament Act in 1911 would surely be horrified to learn that, 104 years on, reform of the House of Lords – an intrinsically corrupt body based on past or present patronage – has not been completed.

Let’s Have a Debate

I have no fully-formed set of proposals for what should replace the monarchy – although the Republic of Ireland seems a good model to start from. My wish would be that we start a grown-up debate around 2 points:

1. What should the role of our head of state be?
2. What is the best method of selecting him or her? This would include term of office, and qualifying criteria, if any, that candidates must possess. (As a starter, I would exclude people who have been MPs or senators, either for life or perhaps for a fixed period: 7 years seems about right.)

At any rate, can we please be treated as adults and have a mature public debate about such matters before the next one is thrust upon us?

Most people remember the line “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”. This comes at the end of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, when the idealism of the original Seven Commandments has degenerated to this last, cynical, depressing “rule”.

But earlier in the tale, the animals do their best to learn the original seven. The sheep, bless their dear, stupid woolly socks, can only manage to bleat “four legs good, two legs ba-ad”.

Which reminds me of something…

The FMFs Again

I wrote about Free Market Fundamentalism (FMF) in my post Why George Osborne Is Only Half Human. The FMFs make a number of assertions:

• Societies work best when markets are free from government interference
• Private sector organisations work better than public ones
• Salary is a reliable guide to someone’s worth to the economy
• Making poor people poorer by cutting benefits incentivizes them to work harder
• Making rich people richer by cutting their taxes incentivizes them to work harder (or stay in the country and add value)
• Wealth trickles down naturally from the richest to the poorest
• Using the law to settle disputes works better than regulation
• Taxation should be as low as possible (and ideally at a flat rate for all)
• Government spending crowds out private investment
• Consequentially, Governments should shrink.

That’s a long list for people to carry around in their heads all the time, unless they’re professionally involved in economics: people have busy lives. But busy people such as politicians, business leaders and journalists, just like the sheep in Animal Farm, do seem to keep one idea in their heads:

“Private sector good, public sector ba-ad”.

I’ll comment more on the assertions listed above in future posts. But, for now, I say: “Ba-ah, humbug!!”

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes…

So sang Leonard Cohen in 1988.

Labour lost the 2015 election in 2010-11 when they failed to nail the twin lies that:

• The economy was in dire straits, as bad as Greece
• It was all Labour’s fault.

See my verdict on these issues here.

The groans at the televised leaders’ debate on 30^th April, followed by Ed Miliband being called a “liar”, said it all. Polls had shown that, by 2012, over 60% of the population believed these lies. The intervention in December 2014 into the debate by Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England at the time of the 2008 crash, made no difference.

Matters got worse when the following acts of “economy with the truth” went by without serious challenge:

• “Benefit scroungers” were to blame. The figure quoted repeatedly, over two years, was £5 billion of “fraud and error” – note the order of those words – in the benefits system. This failed to point out that only 20% of this was fraud, representing just 0.7% of the benefits bill. It’s doubtful that attempts to drive this down further would be cost effective and would run the risk of penalising basically honest people who sometimes make mistakes.
• Immigrants were to blame. Even the Economist, not known for its left-wing sympathies, refuted this in quoting a late 2014 piece of research which, like all previous such research, shows that immigrants continue to benefit the economy as a whole.
• The EU was to blame. Numbers galore get bandied around in the debate, usually by someone (often, but not always, from UKIP) who has found some numbers purportedly showing the direct “cost” of EU membership. Occasionally, a pro-membership voice quotes some numbers about jobs lost if we quit. With the scope for selecting only those “facts” (which are sometimes just oft-repeated assertions) which suit the opinions of the author, any chance of arriving at a reasoned conclusion in all the noise is, frankly, impossible.

The so-called debate between the remaining contenders for the Labour Party leadership seems also to be constrained into a debating space which accommodates these lies. The usual suspects in the media will continue to ensure the dice stay loaded.