Scaredy dogs - or dangerous dogs of war?

Have you noticed that dogs usually bark, growl and bare their teeth when they are frightened? That, I imagine, is why so many small canines are so yappy and aggressive. They hope that by getting in the first yap or nip they'll scare off what they see a big threatening hulk of a beast. It's apparently what tourists are recommended to do when confronted with a tiger defending her young - not the nipping, just making a loud noise. It's certainly what we were told to do in the Mount Kenya forest if we encountered elephants or, worse, buffaloes. So there was the occasional clashing of pangas on our way up. 

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I wonder if this is the reason for the continual shouting about China and Russia indulged in by our government and our large friend across the pond. We're like a Jack Russell terrier and a stout Rottweiler seeing an Afghan hound and a Great Dane in the park. If we had any self-confidence, we'd not bother to see sinister intent whenever they looked at us. Instead we snarl that one looks messy and the other leaves larger deposits than other dogs.

Or maybe we're like street gangs. I gather that often the motive for carrying knives is fear. If I'm threatened, I'll get in first with my weapon, and so we brandish our verbal aggression to forestall a perceived threat. However, what if the threat is imagined but not real? Our politicians and the media whom they feed are busy creating a narrative of threat, which may or may not be real. Certainly China is a major player now in terms of global economic power, and by our standards is among the most repressive states in the world. Russia, geographically huge, was once our ally in fighting the greatest scourge of the last century, but is now a declining economic force.

I don't pretend to know the facts and fiction of all the anti-Russia stories we're fed. (Nor the ones about China, or Iran.) There are a lot of puzzling elements in accounts which go apparently unquestioned. For example, why in a time of supposed international transparency and cooperation should a state bother to hack vaccine research, especially when it had made a deal with Astra Zeneca for the leading contender in the field? Or why should it send two incompetent spies on a plane together in an attempt to bump off another one in a CCTV-abundant country? 

Clearly the government would prefer us not to know as, according to the ISC report, it didn't ask the security services to investigate any potential interference with elections or referendums in the UK, thus leaving it able to say with a straight face, "See, the report found no evidence of Russian interference." Of course, if you don't look for something, you won't find it. (Sadly now it appears that even the Opposition has entered the anti-Russia game questioning the right of RT to broadcast here.)

If a government is in trouble, the traditional way out was to find a war to fight and call the country to unite against a common foe, whether Argentina or Iraq. Failing that, the current policy is to wage a war of words, to create a phoney enemy and maintain a barrage of propaganda, in cooperation with the media - which on the whole your country will believe. The trouble with this policy is that it does not tend towards peace. It tends to real war, economic or physical. And the people who suffer in war are the ordinary citizens. You have only to look at the effects of the United States' sanctions on countries such as Russia or Iran. Personally I don't wish to be part of a nation of self-righteous warmongerers. it may make us feel great, but it doesn't hide the fact that we have feet of fear. 

However, it's reasonable to ask, in what way can our government possibly be "in trouble" with its landslide majority in Parliament? Primarily because it is presiding over a country both divided and economically threatened by Brexit. The more the headlines are dominated by pandemic stories, or failing that Russia and China stories, the less notice journalists will take of the surrender of our EU-won protections (for example of food standards and the environment) and the loss of Parliamentary oversight of our national interest (for example of the NHS). Ironically even the Dominic Cummings' story would have served as a welcome distraction, because there was no way that he would have had to resign. The first "enemy" that presented itself was the Covid-19 pandemic, which our Prime Minister faced with Churchillian bravado. Sadly, although the country was remarkably united in defensive measures, the victory hasn't been won, and if and when it is, it will prove to have been terribly Pyrrhic. And so instead we have let slip the dogs of hostility on our ever useful bogeymen with a succession of stories fed to the horse-leech media.

Or maybe the "trouble" is merely a matter of Mr Johnson's and Mr Trump's approval ratings, which are disturbingly (for them) low.

In the words of the nineteenth-century poem:
"O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing." Or, in other words, "Shut up, you warmongers - and give peace a chance!"

Politicking politicians

'Tis not yet the season to be jolly, so I hope you will allow me some disillusioned observations before we're all ho-hoing down the supermarket aisles. They were sparked off when Jane read me an extract from the Humanitarian Aid and Relief Trust winter newsletter. In it Baroness Cox wrote this:

"After one visit to Karabakh at the height of the war (between Armenia and Azerbaijan 2011), I brought back photographs of children shredded by cluster bombs. I asked the then Minister at the Foreign Office if the British Government would make representations to Azerbaijan, concerning the use of cluster bombs on civilians – a violation of international conventions. The Minster’s reply was brief and brusque:

'No country has an interest in other countries; only interests – and we have oil interests in Azerbaijan' – and I was shown out of the room." 

I shared Caroline Cox's sense of shame at being British and disappointment in our political class. This augmented later by both our Deputy Prime Minister and our Prime Minister. 

It was started by David Blunkett, Sheffield MP and former Home Secretary, speaking about the newly settled Slovakian Romas in his home city. He said: "We have to change the behaviour and the culture of the incoming Roma community because there's going to be an explosion otherwise. We all know that."

Mr Clegg, Sheffield MP too and Deputy PM, adding fuel to the fire, weighed in with: "There is a real dilemma when you get communities that behave in a way that people find sometimes intimidating, sometimes offensive. I think it is quite right that people should say so. We have every right to say if you are in Britain and you are coming to live in Britain and you are bringing up a family here, you have got to be sensitive to the way that life is lived in this country." As the Western Morning News sensibly commented: "This might all sound quite reasonable, were it not for the fact that the Slovak Roma in Sheffield have done little that could be described as either intimidating or offensive. But when it comes to gypsies, the age-old prejudices are trotted out with impunity; from the Brothers Grimm to Enid Blyton, they have been insulted and scapegoated."

The politicians should both have listened to Professor Yaron Matras, an expert on Roma culture from the University of Manchester, who accused both Nick Clegg and David Blunkett of "ethnic profiling" gypsies and claimed their use of "medieval stereotypes" was likely to increase rather than prevent the likelihood of attacks on Roma, who would inevitably then retaliate.

"People who meet Roma personally have a positive experience," said Professor Matras. "Those who get their information from indirect sources, such as parts of the media, have negative impressions – but there is nothing in Roma behaviour that is inherently more offensive or intimidating than for any other group."

One doesn't know what talks David Cameron has had in China about human rights on his current trade mission, but his press office has been keen to tell us what a success it's been, generating in a week, apparently £6 billion's worth of trade. It was sad therefore that the photo opp which appeared on the news I was watching was of him with a lady entrepeneur from the "gaming industry" who's going to invest in Britain - yippee! More of our countrymen getting into debt chasing an illusion!

And only last week, Tsar Boris, aka the Mayor of London, in the annual Margaret Thatcher lecture declared that inequality is essential to fostering "the spirit of envy" and hailed greed as a "valuable spur to economic activity". Envy and greed used to be two of the seven deadly sins. The ambitious Mr Johnson clearly thinks he knows better. I'm not sure he does, any more than he understands the mathematics of the IQ test. "Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16% of our species have an IQ below 85 while about 2% …" he said as he departed from the text of his speech to ask whether anyone in his City audience had a low IQ. To muted laughter he asked: "Over 16% anyone? Put up your hands. 16% have an IQ below 85 while 2% have an IQ above 130. And the harder you shake the pack the easier it will be for some corn flakes to get to the top." Well, they would do, old chap, as the IQ test is a bell-curve based round an average of 100. That's the normal distribution  - get it? 

It is truly depressing when a politician tipped by many as a future Prime Minister lauds envy and greed as economic and social virtues, and attributes wealth to intelligence and poverty to the lack of it. "You're poor, because you're stupid."

I also found it depressing to listen to another potential PM on Desert Island Discs. I'm not able to judge Ed Miliband's musical tastes, since I shared none of them, but was interested to hear what he had to say about his political assassination of his brother, David, in the Labour Party leadership election. You may remember that Ed declared he was running after David and narrowly won only with the support of the big union votes. As I heard it, his justification was that he wanted to put party before family. It was an extraordinary insult to his brother's abilities, and seemed to me a weasel way of saying, "I wanted to put self before family." I'm sorry, Ed Milicain, I can't vote for someone who lacks both selflessness and transparency.

Finally, as you'll detect, I'm quite even-handedly disillusioned with politicians of all three mainstream parties. One omission from my scatter-gun seems to be women. In fact two of the outstanding political breakthroughs have been achieved by women. The MP for Walthanstow, Stella Creasey's unremitting pressure has at last led to a U-turn by the Government on capping the interest rates of Pay-day lenders, and, on the international stage, it appears that the interim agreement between Iran and the big powers over its nuclear industry was largely engineered by Baroness Ashton, the EU's High Representative for Foreign Affairs. Women seem to be doing all right in politics.

So to redress the balance let me have a go at Cherie Blair, not exactly a politician but certainly a political figure. She was recently interviewed in The Independent. The headline was "Being a mother isn't a job. It's a relationship"  It sounds exactly like a politician's sound bite. So I looked at the article and came across what she said about being a mother. In a way it sounds unexceptionable. “Don’t say being a mother is the most important job to do because being a mother isn’t a job. It’s a relationship. The quality of the relationship is what matters . The most important thing is the relationship we have with our children.” And yet it does sound like the words of someone who can afford a nanny, someone like a... millionaire barrister, or someone... married to a prime minister, or even... better, both. You might not like to describe motherhood as a job, but whatever you call it, there's nothing more important to do well than bringing up children. And whatever else it isn't, it certainly is hard work. I would reply, "Don't say being a mother is just a relationship. It's much more than that." 

I know politics is what politicians do. But it doesn't seem to me that ours are doing it very well.

Now for the season of goodwill!

PS Here's hoping George Osborne doesn't come up with some madness tomorrow.