Author: David Landon Cole

Letter to the Guardian

Posted on by David Landon Cole

I am delighted to have had a letter published in today’s Guardian; it’s the second one down on this page. It reads

Your article (It was murder: the Chávez version of liberator’s death, November 17) neglects the importance of Bolívar’s last days to any interpretation of his impact on Latin America. Reviled by the educated classes and with just a few friends who remained loyal, Bolívar was leaving for Europe when he died. He considered himself a failure, believing that “those who have served the cause of the revolution have ploughed the sea”.
David Cole
London

First published letter. The original article is here.

xD.

Conspiratorial liberals

Posted on by David Landon Cole

As many people will have seen, some of the great and the good of the liberal/left of the UK blogosphere have come together to form an uberblog called Liberal Conspiracy, named with tongue firmly in cheek.

It’s raisons d’être are, I think, threefold: firstly, to give the liberal/left region of the UK polity a place to discuss things amongst itself without harping from the right; secondly, to come up with a set of discussion points to frame the former; and thirdly (I believe) to show that there is a problem with the blogosphere and to show a potential solution.

The problem is that an awful lot of comments on some of the bigger, better-known blogs are, frankly, inane. There is a lot of name-calling, fatuous remarking and not very much engaging with argument. In short, people want to rant but not to listen and try to convince without being prepared to be convinced. I had been thinking about writing that the best responses to posts were not in comments but in other posts that linked back to the original. Looking at Liberal Conspiracy, though, I begin to change my opinion. There is actual debate, with give and take, going on in the comments on each post.

I declare an interest here. I commented here about justifications for hate-crime laws on a post from Sunny of Pickled Politics and these comments were posted by Sunny on Liberal Conspiracy here. I’m delighted to have someone think my comments are worth reproducing and to have them on a blog like Liberal Conspiracy, so thank-you Sunny.

The name of the website reminds me of a mailing list amongst the right at LSE – the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, aka the Very Right-Wing Conspiracy.

xD.

Luke Pollard for South West Devon

Posted on by David Landon Cole

My friend Luke Pollard has been selected as Labour’s prospective Parliamentary candidate for South West Devon, standing against the Tory Gary Streeter. I’m delighted that Luke is standing in the county from where he hails. He’s a hard-working candidate with the experience, both professional and campaigning, to make a real difference to the area. His knowledge of all levels of political life will prove, I’m sure, invaluable.

His website is at lukepollard.net.

xD.

Tasteless money-grabbing

Posted on by David Landon Cole

The Tories have failed to prevent an £8.3m bequest to them being overturned on the grounds of mental illness. The details are unimportant; while I feel that it’s unfortunate that the Conservatives felt the need to contest what seems, prima facie, a clear, if tragic, case. It is not, though, the Conservatives that, in this instance, I am accusing of ‘tasteless money-grabbing’; rather, it is the system that forces parties to go after every last penny.

I am no advocate of state funding of parties, but the financial situation of the parties is parlous, opening them to undue influence from single individuals. A good start would be for the parties to stop advertising on billboards. Quite apart from, as Adlai Stevenson put it, that “the idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process”, I’m not sure that it’s effective; the image a party presents is developed over the parliament preceding an election, not in the few short weeks leading up to it. It may even be self-defeating, as people are probably smart enough to realise that if political parties believe they can secure votes with a clever logo or a catchy slogan, they’re probably not going to be doing detailed, community-based policy formulation.

A rather better solution would be for the parties – all parties – to focus on membership. We could all learn a useful lesson from Howard Dean, who, with average donations of less than US$80 in the famously moneyed world of American politics, beat the previous Democratic record for single-quarter donations by US$4.5m (the previous record of US$10.3m having been held since 1995 by one William Jefferson Clinton). Beyond the financial factor, I am of the opinion that one friend saying that they are a member of a party and are voting for it is worth more than a party political broadcast and that a knock at the door – which requires motivated people to do the knocking – is worth more than an election address.

Of course, to do that, you have to show that it’s worth the party member’s while; I’d suggest, for various reasons that we’re all familiar with, that this is not happening at the moment.

xD.

House Resolution 106

Posted on by David Landon Cole

I agree with Ewan Watt that the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Relations Committee should not have recognized the Armenian Genocide as such, but perhaps for slightly different reasons. Ewan is, in foreign policy terms, very much a realist and I do agree that the results of the Committee’s decision have already been profoundly negative – Turkey has summoned its ambassador to Washington back to Ankara for ‘a week or ten days of consultation’ but has stopped short of a recall. With US troops deployed in Iraq, a country that borders Turkey, Turkey’s strategic position and role and the desire not to alienate a country that teeters between West and East or to fuel the continuing problems between Turkey and Armenia – Karabakh and Baku-Ceyhan for instance – it seems like a poor decision.

Nevertheless, fiat justicia ruat coeli stands as a principle; if it is just, I feel it should be done, even though the consequences are uncomfortable, shall we say; to do otherwise is hypocritical and leads to a host of problems in international relations.

I question why the Committee felt the need to address the issue at all. Ewan also identifies the answer – special interest lobbying – but the implications haven’t been thought through. There are many other crimes – some committed by the US – that could be condemned.

More importantly, it is not the role of a Government to decide what history is; there can be no official version without grave risk of a government interfering unjustifiably in the process of discussion and debate. Equally, as Nye Bevan put it, ‘this is my truth; tell me yours’; whether ordained by the state or not, there is no one, true version of history, only arguments that are more or less persuasive. When the arguments are emotionally and geopolitically loaded, officially recognising a term can only cause problems and is, from a state, philosophically invalid.

As a note, I think it is wrong to use a category to encompass the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust; they are both sui generis, IMHO.

The Committee chair, Tom Lantos, put it well in his comments ahead of the vote:

Today we are not considering whether the Armenian people were persecuted and died in huge numbers at the hands of Ottoman troops in the early 20th Century. There is unanimity in the Congress and across the country that these atrocities took place. If the resolution before us stated that fact alone, it would pass unanimously. The controversy lies in whether to make it United States policy at this moment in history to apply a single word – genocide – to encompass this enormous blot on human history.

xD.

Government recognises the problem but doesn’t do enough

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Two pieces of news on the Iraqi employees front. Firstly, the meeting has been moved to the Attlee Suite, Portcullis House. It will still take place at 1900 tomorrow, Tuesday 9th.

Secondly, the Government has committed itself to supporting Iraqis who have worked for the British in Iraq for over a year; that is woefully insufficient. It recognises the problem – that people who are seen as ‘collaborators’ and their families face death, but won’t help all of them.

xD.

Time to let them in

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Let’s say that a company comes and offers you a job. There aren’t any other jobs and you need to feed yourself and your family. It’s a dangerous job, but the company offers to protect you. Then the company decides it doesn’t need you. Not only are you out of work, but you’re now being hunted down by people who don’t like that company. They refuse to help you.

Would you work for that company again? Would you work for that company for the first time if you saw how they treated ex-employees?

Probably not. The company in question is the UK, the employees are Iraqis employed in Iraq as translators and so on and if, for no other reason than it will make it impossible to recruit local staff anywhere in the world again, should we need to, we should give them and their families asylum in the UK. We can’t turn them away.

xD.