You are in the company of Roger Warren Evans, Welsh socialist lawyer and company director, on a journey to work out a new socialist order capable of generating equality and freedom for the world.  Nothing less will do.
    

 

 

 

  
 



New
Living Diary
Index

Renewing participatory democracy

"Tame the Corporations!"

My Little Red Book

A New Socialist Settlement

Globalise the Left!

Bevan
Re-visited 

Multiple Differential Uncertainty

Who am I? Biography  

 

       


0133  Make sure you have not missed the previous edition of LivePolitics  Check it out  
And the one before that?   
Other recent topics highlighted here

Week 35
Sunday
31 August 2003

Alistair Campbell
was never the problem

I want to "move on", as they say, and forget about Alistair Campbell.  I have considerable admiration for Campbell, because he was good at reading the contemporary media-dominated political arena.  He successfully steered the Labour Government through many meeja shoals and rapids.  But he did nothing to solve the underlying problem of over-concentrated power.
Golden Evidence

Do not underestimate the remarkable revelations of the Hutton Inquiry about the processes of government.  They remain a  sideshow, but they are nevertheless diverting, and absorbing. The web-publication of these internal Whitehall files is not only unprecedented - it is quite simply fascinating, riveting. 

My own fascination may not be "normal", as I am both a political activist and a historian by degree.  But I cannot keep my eyes off these replica documents, here on my screen - with scribbles, notes, filing-holes and everything!  We can all now see them at the Hutton Inquiry's own website - although the path to the website, through the Department of Constitutional Affairs, is extremely convoluted - I have tracked it down for you..

Improper surveillance

Nobody could have guessed that the process of re-stacking Tesco's shelves would constitute the latest threat to our civil liberties.  Yet that is what has happened.  A new system for verifying shelf stock-levels involves photographing the removal of items from the shelves - and could easily be used to track people rather than products.  Liberty is protesting against this further erosion of personal privacy.  Electronic surveillance is expanding apace.

 Principles challenged

No sooner than I had penned these  surveillance principles than this challenging report appeared in The Guardian.  Right here in Swansea, random Police surveillance identified a nasty case of child neglect, which really put me on the spot.

back to top
My penchant for new stamps strikes again - I have never collected stamps, but I am intrigued by their aesthetic impact in the hurly-burly of ordinary life - flashes of light and colour flitting across the screen - this pub-sign series is the Royal Mail's theme for this month, although I will never understand how it can be profitable to produce such beautiful creations - for whom?  For the collectors alone?  For me?  Does anyone have the answer?

The continuing price
              of illegality...

The bombing of the UN Baghdad HQ was the direct and tragic consequence of the illegality of the Coalition's attack upon Iraq. It is that illegality which continues to prevent the full-hearted participation of other leading UN member-states. The remedy is to bring in the UN  Blue Berets  , in spite of the obvious risks of doing so. 

The risks are greater, if we do not change course.

I am ashamed that the UK continues its supine support for US bully-boy politics, for the Republicans' unprincipled militarism.  Kofi Annan has called clearly for a power-sharing resolution - and Britain should be leading that diplomatic drive.  We should be willing to distance ourselves from the US, if that is what it takes.  Jonathan Steele, writing in the Guardian, charts the same course.  So does Will Hutton, in this Sunday's Observer.

  • My shame is that the UK has become a co-defendant, in the dock with the US, defending the indefensible.

back to top

Swansea Bay to have
Windmills Offshore?

Porthcawl is just off the map, bottom right - my home is at bottom left.

 Porthcawl, on the Eastern edge of Swansea Bay, has been the centre for protest this weekend about the extension of wind-turbine generators, three-miles offshore in the Bristol Channel.  The protesters do not have my support - I positively like the sight of these elegant and useful mobiles, both onshore and inland.  Where the site is right, I welcome them.

back to top

At our local "live" surfing site, you can check out the state of the surf in Mumbles, at my local Langland Bay, with the live webcams installed there - check out www.surfsup-mag.co.uk...

And the Gower Peninsula has also generated an stylish local weblog - the work of the enterprising Chris Elphick - for those who share our fascination with the world of Gower..

Rowan may
be dissed..

Theo Hobson, writing in the Observer, has quite a different slant on the upcoming worldwide Episcopal Convention, on the subject of clerical homosexuality.  He sees the whole business as the prelude to the dissolution of the Church of England, certainly its disestablishment.  Coming from a disestablished Church himself (i.e the Church in Wales) the Archbishop would probably get used to the idea...

I confess that "Church news" rarely commands my attention, but I found this quite absorbing...

back to top

Linguistic Conundrum
 What is "Welsh"?

Having spent a whole August week I spent last week in a beautiful North Wales valley, improving my fluency in Welsh I found myself asking - "What precisely are we studying?  Whose Welsh was it?"  Can this complex sound-system, plagued as it is by a multiplicity of regional variations and elisions, really be considered a national language?   My answer is -

Welcome back to Steve Bell! He has re-joined The Guardian team after his hols, and his wit and perception will again illuminate the absurdities of the political scene...

back to top

Top Tutor?  BBC Wales

My fellow students at Nant Gwrtheyrn  lavished praise on the online tutorial Catchphrase, provided by BBC Wales.  Interested?  Check it out.

back to top

Try BBC News, the public service website for the best and quickest access to the news, as well as a huge political data resource, the BBC is unbeatable. We must never lose sight of the distinctive qualities, and unique potential, of public service institutions.  I assert that, in spite of present differences with Greg Dyke...

One year ago

August moves to a close - last year at this time, we had just returned from Estonia and Russia - I will be updating my Russian Diary - but there's lots more to tickle your intellect...

back to top

Special Footnote

I love the online newspapers, which are my access to the world - share them with me - click through to their Homepages from here - we had a visit from three new-arrivals from China this weekend, coming to study at Swansea University - so this week, I have added the English-language China Daily ... and with the awful bombings and crowd stampedes in India, I now offer you the leading English-language paper The Hindu.  They are all just a click away.

The  price of international fame...

I picked up from the China Daily this pic of David Beckham being mobbed by Chinese nurses at a "friendly" match in China in early August...

My diary

Now up to date (well, more or less...) 
I have re-structured my Diary to give you a day-to-day means of looking back to January 2002 - just click through

back to top

 

          

Blair successfully
diverts the charge

Media opinion seems to confirm that Tony Blair "did well" under cross-examination by the Hutton Inquiry.  What he did was to rebut the charge that Downing Street had intervened to doctor the evidence of Saddam's military potential, particularly as to the 45-minute claim.  I have no doubt that the dossier was "fashioned" by the Executive in ways which would have been unthinkable before Thatcher's day.  But I have long taken the view that responsibility for this tangled mess lay principally with the tragic combination of Kelly, Gilligan, Sambrook and Dyke, and so I am not greatly surprised by Blair's apparent "success" on this narrow point.

But that was never the real charge. Blair and Campbell have finessed the real charge, with brilliant sleight-of-hand. The case against the Prime Minister is that, in using the dossier evidence in his public case, he grossly over-egged the pudding.  After all, he was the advocate, he made all the key presentational judgments, and he must take responsibility for the exaggerations of the presentation.  As a lawyer he knew that, other strategies having failed, it was only proof of imminent threat that could bestow legality upon the planned war, as a matter of international law.

And so he set out to make that link - by oratory, by force of character, and by using the presidential power of his office.  The tail undoubtedly wagged the dog.  As the supreme persuader, he pulled out all the stops, grossly exaggerating very fragile evidence - which had failed to convince other senior participants in the process.  This was, after all, a case that Blair believed he had to win.

And win it he did.  And he "won again", last Thursday before Hutton.

  • But the verdict of history, on the principal charge, is turning inexorably against him.  And he knows it.

back to top

More than three
gorillas are needed

Greg Dyke is a combative, competitive character, a good man to have in your gang.  He is life-long Labour supporter - I have on occasion met him at Labour Party Conference. He conveys the image of a genuinely "tough" man. 

But I suspect that it was Greg Dyke that triggered the BBC's current descent into competitive tabloid journalism, resulting in the David Kelly tragedy.  And I am also doubtful about his analysis of the TV medium as a jungle in which "three gorillas are needed", to maintain a competitive balance.

back to top

Pantomime Brazil

Some 72 Brazilian musicians and supporters last week arrived at Heathrow Airport, invited to play at Liverpool's Mathews Street Festival, in honour of the Beatles.  They were interrogated by Immigration officials, and six were refused entry.  This one little incident, perhaps more effectively than any number of speeches and reports, demonstrates the absurdities of current migration management systems.

Keynesianism
should stay buried

 From all sides, I hear murmurs of a new approval for Keynesianism - for John Maynard Keynes, the only modern economist to have confronted in his own working lifetime (1920/1950) the ravages of deflation and real economic "Depression".  Modern Keynesians deplore the current "global demand deficiency", and it carries the blame for a weak global economy.

"Good ol' John Maynard would've fixed it..."

back to top

Oswald Mosley
and my Dad

Just before he married the beautiful Diana Mitford (who died last week), Sir Oswald Mosley had dinner with my Dad, at his flat at No 16 Heoldon in Whitchurch, Cardiff.  My Dad was a widower at that time, having lost his first wife in 1916, without having yet met my mother.  And he was a leading "Independent" Councillor on Cardiff Rural District Council. 

back to top

118500 - 118118 - 118888

Deadline at last!  Last Saturday, at midnight, a new, painfully-constructed artificial "market" in Directory Inquiries ground into life, with three major players. There were originally TEN competitors when the process was launched by Oftel, last December.  There are now 16, all now competing for the same market.

The cruelly-expensive advertising war is reduced to three major players, in the way of markets.  But who are they?  One is BT, but who are the others? They are advertising anonymously without explaining who is behind them.

Teenage Concourses? Caerphilly replies...

Peter Fitzgerald, a Labour Party colleague from Caerphilly, questions the practicality of handing over Concourse management to teenagers themselves, particularly in areas of urban deprivation - check out our correspondence.

back to top

Correct Decision
Wrong Strategy

As a planning Barrister, I cannot fault John Prescott's grant of planning consent for the Bicester Asylum Centre.  There were no proper land-use planning grounds for refusal.

But that is not the point.  It is the Government's whole vicious anti-asylum strategy that is at fault.  It is wrong that asylum-seekers should be isolated and corralled in large prison-type concentrations of this kind - anywhere in the country, not just in Bicester.  I accept that it is more difficult, more time-consuming for the Authorities, to administer effective tracing systems where newcomers live in the open community - but that must be the right option. 

We should accord to asylum-seekers the full dignity of common humanity, and stop treating them harshly - merely as a deterrent to others who might come after. 

  • That is a barren, inhuman, and degrading strategy.

back to top

Moral Incompetence

I favour the relaxation of the drink-licensing timetables, for they remove unnecessary restrictions upon personal freedom.  The Government is pursuing a liberalising strategy, of which I thoroughly approve.  My nose tells me that their parallel policies on the gambling front, although anathema to Nonconformity (particularly the Quakers) are also politically sound, and I do not suspect Labour of merely giving in to the corporate battalions.

How can the same Ministers, then, be so purblind when it comes to psychotropic drugs?  We celebrate our pub-signs, demonstrating a traditional and civilised approach to the management of alcohol consumption.  Evidence pours in on every side of the relatively innocuous effects of cannabis and ecstasy (indeed, the medicinal advantages of cannabis) and "the Authorities" continue to generate crime, poverty and disorder by retaining its their illegal status. 

This policy is morally wicked, politically perverse.  I salute again the ten brave MPs who have signed the anti-prohibition petititon - which you can also sign yourself, on-line, at the Angel Declaration. I enjoy dipping into informed US West Coast chat, always up to the minute, which can be found at www.metafilter.com.

back to top

The City's
impudence continues

Last week, the Unilever Board were wrongly praised for their mealy-mouthed attack on their won shareholders, accusing them of passivity in the management of the Company's affairs. This week, the exploitative practices of the Australian company BHP Billiton were paraded before the public, reporting on their £2.3m one-year pay-deal with their 44-year-old new Chief Executive Chip Goodyear.  But there is nothing that shareholders can do about any day-to-day management matters - certainly not the CEO's salary!

Given their powerlessness, the shareholders are right to stay away.  Until "the authorities" (both in Europe and the USA) give shareholders real powers to act as a check upon the corporate salariat, shareholders should sit on their hands...

back to top

Other recent topics
  • New legal Profession needed >>>
  • The great Pensions Crisis >>>
  • Six-month Notice for all >>>
  • Judges v. Politicians >>>
  • TU socialism insufficient >>>
  • Six key Socialist issues >>>
  • Baha'i and The Truth >>>
  • Crooked Company conspiracies >>>
  • Prohibit immigrant health checks >>>
  • Are borrowers mistaken? >>>
  • Building many more houses >>>
  • "Concourses" for teenagers >>>
  • PFI Contract faultlines >>>
  • Will Blair resign?  >>>
  • Economies must be responsive >>>
  • My chat with Beryl Richards >>>
  •  
  • And read my Big Theory itself, at
    Multiple Differential Uncertainty
  • Also my more practical political thesis about the Corporate Sector and the Left Coming to Terms
back to top

Sunday
31 August 2003

Did you miss last week's copy?  Check it out

 

 

 

 
                           
     
 

 
 Created by GMID Design & Communication

COPYRIGHT NOTICE
The originating content of this website is my own work, and subject to my copyright. But on one condition only, I hereby give my consent to its unrestricted reproduction for any purpose: the condition is that its source is subject to proper acknowledgment, giving my name, my assertion of copyright, and the name of this website as its source, namely: www.warrenevans.net - is that a deal?  Roger WE