The Obscurer

Saturday 19th March 2005

The Night Before

I have just been reading a website called Last Night’s BBC News, a brilliant idea that is the brainchild of one Nicholas Vance. I don’t often have time to watch the news, so a blog devoted to telling me what I have missed is a splendid idea. I hope that in time he will broaden it out to include ITN and Sky, as I rarely see their bulletins either.

Only joking, of course. I was directed there by Biased BBC, a website I vowed not to read again (it’s just getting silly now, more and more like the Daily Mail On-line) but curiosity got the better of me the other day, and it made fascinating reading. In a couple of recent B-BBC posts, while complaining about the BBC’s less than balanced coverage of the Israel-Palestine situation, the comments section started to degenerate into out and out Islamophobia. It is only fair to stress that such statements were made in the comments section, not in the main blog itself, but it was still quite surprising to read some views professing an apparently widespread and paranoid concern about the impending threat of an Islamic dominated world. Very odd.

Anyway; back to Last Night’s BBC News. Biased BBC invited me to read this “great post” where Mr Vance was struck by a comment made by Stephen Sackur on the Ten O’Clock News, so I did. Discussing the events marking the anniversary of the Madrid bomb, Sackur said “Spain’s Muslims also used this day to issue a message: absolute opposition to terrorism.” This seems to have annoyed Nicholas Vance, who was moved to respond by stating “Spanish authorities believe there to be hundreds of Muslims actively plotting further terrorist atrocities”. What? Really? Do you reckon? Well thanks for that revelation.

What has so upset Mr Vance about Sackur’s report? I guess it would have been more accurate to have referred to “some” or “many” of Spain’s Muslims, but I think we can assume that Sackur is not claiming that every single Muslim stands opposed to terrorism; there are the terrorists themselves, for a start. Perhaps when they returned to the studio after the report, the newsreader could have said “And we would like to point out that some Muslims are in favour of terrorism, are willing to blow themselves up for their cause, and consider George Bush to be the great infidel”; but I think we know that already.

Mr Vance goes on “Mr Sackur would do well to avoid making sweeping generalisations about Muslim opposition to terror, just as he would never dream of making sweeping generalisations about Muslim support for terror”. Well yes, sweeping generalisations are certainly to be avoided, but again, I am not convinced Sackur was actually claiming that all Muslims are angels who oppose terrorism; some things can be taken as read. I doubt it occurred to him that there would be some picky sod taking notes and analysing every last word and phrase in order to bolter an argument about the BBC’s leftist bias, although he probably should know better by now.

But Mr Vance is not quite finished; he concludes with a flourish. “Consider also that the Spanish Muslims to which Mr Sackur is referring include a boy interviewed last week by the Guardian’s Timothy Garton Ash: “I ask another Muhammad (‘just call me Muhammad’), a voluble 16-year-old, about last year’s bombings just down the road, at the Atocha station. Well, he says, he doesn’t like to see people dying ‘even if they are Christians and Jews.'”

Well there you go, proof if proof be need be; a Muslim boy (a boy, mind) isn’t too fond of Christian’s and Jew’s. I have seen the light. Personally, I suspect that some Muslim’s go further, and say even nastier things about Christian’s and Jew’s. You know what? The feelings are reciprocated; I know some people who have a few choice words to say about Muslims, and Islam in general. Just what point is Mr Vance trying to make here?

Quite baffling. In trying to attack the BBC, has Last Night’s BBC News in fact revealed the author’s own prejudices? Perhaps not, but how else does one explain someone feeling so aggrieved by an innocuous comment in a news report. To me it appears that some people are not qualified to accuse others of bias.

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Monday 14th March 2005

Bye Bye KK

I don’t know; you take a short trip to the Lakes to get away from it all, and on the first morning you are dragged back into the real world when you hear on the radio that the manager of your team has left the club by mutual euphemism. Typical.

I am sad to see Kevin Keegan go, but not surprised. The lesson of Ferguson, Strachan and Robson is that you cannot set a date for your retirement and then see it through; you either have to go early or postpone your retirement. Keegan was always going to go early; it was just a matter of when.

Oh City will be all right, don’t worry about us; but my sympathies are for Keegan at the moment, particularly when you read the various footballing obituaries and profiles of the man. It seems to be a part of media law to refer to his playing days as something like “a triumph of hard work over natural ability”, which is damning him with faint praise when you consider he was probably the most famous footballer in Britain during the Seventies. It suggests we could all be European Footballer of the Year if we just knuckled down a bit.

But it certainly seems agreed that his managerial career suffers by comparison with his playing days. He was often criticised for his sides defensive frailties and for his inability to win a major honour; but personally it is not the allure of a well organised back-four that draws me to a game, and the managers who have won major trophies are in a pretty select club. Overall, his record in management is remarkable.

Taking over Newcastle as they were about to tumble out of the First Division, getting them promoted as Champions the following season, and finishing as runners-up in the Premiership just a few years later is a tremendous achievement. Of course he will probably always be remembered for throwing away a huge lead over Manchester United that season, and for his emotional rant against Alex Ferguson (which you can listen to here, via Anthony at The Filter^); but Ferguson and Wenger have also thrown away leads in their time, and in fact it is unusual for a team to win the title leading from the front. Keegan is still revered on Tyneside, and Newcastle have not hit those heights since.

At Fulham he was also a success, again winning promotion as Champions in his first season in full charge of the team, before leaving for the England job by popular demand. And at the risk of seeming revisionist, it is often forgotten that at England he took over a team going nowhere under Glenn Hoddle, yet we managed to qualify for Euro 2000. The performances in Belgium were poor (despite victory over Germany), but don’t forget we were just a minute away from qualifying for the Quarter Finals before Phil Neville’s intervention inside the 18-yard box. Had we gone through who knows what could have happened? A good performance then would have erased memories of the earlier matches; it is largely on this basis that Messrs. Venables and Robson have a decent reputation with regards their spells in charge of the national team.

So onto City, where he took a side that had just been deservedly relegated from the Premiership (one season after they were fortunate to have been promoted from the First Division under Joe Royle) and turned them into a side that eventually romped away with the League title, brushing teams aside and scoring goals for fun. This was not City’s usual style; we’ve had more than our fair share of promotions, and we usually achieve it by scraping through on the last day of the season; but not under Keegan. On the day we won the Championship I turned to my mate Jim and said, “I don’t think the future has ever looked so bright”, and he agreed.

And in the Premiership we finished a respectable 9th in our first season, flirted with relegation last season (and honestly, we were really unlucky that year; we played far better than our position suggested. We had a positive goal difference for God’s sake, despite finishing 16th), and are now looking at a third season of safe, mid-table mediocrity. Perhaps that doesn’t excite some, but for me, recalling our recent history – having watched us lose at home to Stockport County and being relegated to the division below them; playing Macclesfield on an equal footing in the Second Division; being beaten home and away by Lincoln in the League Cup, watching the second leg at Maine Road in an almost deserted stadium with only blue plastic seats for company – I can take a bit of mid-table mediocrity, to be honest with you.

Yes, Keegan has made some mistakes, and some bad purchases – Vuoso for £4m (yes, you may well ask “who?”), Macken for more than 50 pence – but many signings such as Trevor Sinclair and Steve McManaman were warmly received by most City fans, myself included; no-one expected them to perform so abjectly, as if they had left any semblance of talent at the door. However, I think the good by far outweighs the bad when you look at Keegan’s contribution as a whole; we even have one of the best defensive records in the league this season, for those who get worked up about such things.

To me, Keegan’s overall reputation as being permanently tainted by failure is way harsh. Perhaps if he had left on a high with City after that first barnstorming season then people would view him differently; but had he done so he would just have confirmed some peoples’ opinion that he is a quitter; an unfair allegation when you look at the facts. He is even our longest serving manager since the Seventies; although that probably says more about City than anything else.

But Kevin has now gone, and good luck to him. Fingers crossed that Stuart Pearce can make a good job of it; he has been my choice for a while, especially as there appears to be a queue forming of managers stating they don’t want the job. Keegan’s legacy? Well, a lot of good memories, particularly of the promotion season, and some great performances and results against United. He leaves us as an average team in the Premiership; not perhaps what one dreams about, but still a better position than the club has known for years.

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Saturday 12th March 2005

Blow Up

The BBC is screening one of its adverts at the moment promoting their current affairs documentaries, Panorama and Whistleblower. I haven’t seen Whistleblower before, but the clip they are showing makes it pretty obvious what it will be about. We see a BBC journalist on board a plane, explaining how easily she has managed to get past security; the clear implication being that if she was so minded she could simply plant a bomb and hey presto, another terrorist outrage.

We regularly hear of such security breaches and how disturbing they are; Fathers4Justice getting through security at Parliament or Buckingham Palace, or Aaron Barshak gate crashing the royal party at Windsor. Now, clearly, these are serious lapses of security and should be dealt with, lessons should be learned; but occasionally I do wonder why so much time is spent worrying about such events when there are a plethora of soft targets all over the place which we can do nothing about?

Returning to that BBC reporter on board the plane; if she has a bomb then she will indeed be a risk to passengers due to fly on that aircraft; but presumably, if she has a bomb she will be a danger wherever she is. The problem is the bomb and the terrorist, not so much where they are.

Imagine that same reporter being in any number of different situations; imagine yourself being in any number of situations where you are surrounded by a large crowd of people. You are at a football match, in the Trafford centre during the January sales, at a level crossing with two inter-city trains approaching, in a traffic jam beneath a flyover at spaghetti junction while sitting next to a petrol tanker. Now, think what you could do if you were a suicide bomber packed with explosives, think of the havoc, the chaos, the death and destruction you could cause; and all without the merest breach of security, with no slip up required.

I think we have to be realistic about what we can and cannot do in a free society. I am not suggesting that we wave a white flag, that because there are millions of soft targets we should give up and not bother about security measures. We should maintain security, and tighten any loopholes we become aware of. More importantly we should concentrate on intelligence in order to prevent terrorist attacks – I personally am happy to make use of intercept intelligence (as are Liberty) – and when we identify those who are planning an atrocity we should of course swiftly arrest, charge and (if found guilty) gaol them.

Alongside this, however, I personally think it is sensible not to engage in the sort of activities that I believe will only encourage terrorism; you know the sort of thing, unjust wars of dubious legality, draconian security measures reminiscent of internment. Apart from anything else, nothing short of complete totalitarianism, a sort of The Prisoner meets 1984, can prevent terrorists from murdering people if they are determined to, and if the intelligence just isn’t available.

But I also think we really have to put the “war on terror” in perspective. I want to cry whenever I hear a high-ranking politician talking about defeating terrorism; such people shouldn’t be in positions of responsibility, they should be sectioned. Unless human beings evolve beyond all recognition some people will always want to kill others; if people are determined to commit a terrorist attack then they will, and there is little we can do about it. Terrorist are often just criminals with a cause; if you can erase both of these things then you can defeat terrorism, but we are talking about a Utopia now; and Utopia, of course, means “noplace”. Winning the war on terror will just never happen. In any event, we can spend all our time and energies trying to prevent terrorism, but that doesn’t prevent natural disasters like the tsunami causing more deaths than any terrorist could ever imagine.

And perhaps there is a lesson in the tsunami. Perhaps we should treat terrorist attacks as we treat natural disasters; we accept that they are going to occur. Of course we do whatever we can to prevent them, and to forewarn people about them, we do what is humanely possible; but in the end we just have to accept the way things are. Bad things are going to happen, and to think anything else means we are just deluding ourselves.

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Monday 7th March 2005

Maybe The People Would Be The Times Or Between Clark And Hilldale

At work the other day I read a copy of The Sun that someone had left lying around. It didn’t take long, of course, but I was struck by one article by Trevor Kavanagh, the Political Editor (I can’t find it online, so you will just have to take my word for this). If you ignore Kavanagh’s usual slagging off of the “many sneering western lefties” who opposed the Iraq war (who he associates with “clerics who claim the Boxing day tsunami was Allah’s vengeance on homosexuals” and who accept “the treatment of women as slaves”) then it actually makes interesting reading. He quotes the Lebanese political leader Walid Jumblatt (via a David Ignatius article), a man noted for many loopy and insanely nasty anti-US and anti-Israeli statements in the past; but this time we are invited to take him seriously. Regarding the current developments in Lebanon Jumblatt says “It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world”. He goes on “The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it”. Oliver Kamm writes in a similar vein, calling the cause of democracy and liberty “the crux of the case for the grand strategy that the US and UK have pursued since 9/11”.

If this does indeed come to pass and freedom sweeps through the Middle East, where does this leave those of us, like myself, who opposed the war? Since the war is the event that has brought about the democratisation of Iraq, and could therefore bring democracy to the whole Arab world, is it time I just accepted that the war was ultimately a good thing, a bitter pill perhaps, but one that has resulted in a freer world?

Well I don’t, and there are at least two main reasons. Firstly, I still have this quirky idea that invading other countries in an unprovoked attack is wrong, even if that country’s dictator is an evil piece of work. This I feel is more or less an absolute; I am not saying there aren’t any circumstances where such a war could be justified, but in laying down the conditions where I feel such an action could be acceptable I set quite a high bar. The Iraq war, in both the Coalition’s stated war aims, and in what I feel were its real aims, doesn’t meet those conditions.

But secondly, I believe war should only be used as a last resort. This is hardly a revolutionary statement, it is one I think most people would accept, even if we may differ on exactly when all other options have been tried and failed and we have to resort to war. So, with regards the spreading of democracy, can the Iraq War be in any way described as a war of last resort? Even nearly? Was this the only way to spread democracy throughout the Middle East? Are we really saying that all other avenues had been exhausted, and war was the only option left?

I cannot think of many attempts at peacefully spreading democracy through the region, and it is not as if it couldn’t be tried. Leaning on Iran in the hope that they will set elections is unlikely to prove fruitful, but there are pro-western countries in the area who we could at least attempt to persuade to reform their institutions. Wasn’t there a golden opportunity after the 1991 Gulf War when we could have liberated Kuwait on the proviso that, once reinstated, the Kuwaiti royal family would make moves towards democracy and a more open society? If democracy is so important then why wasn’t that ever considered? If Iraq can apparently set off a domino effect transforming the Middle East, then why couldn’t Kuwait? Imagine the TV screens full of Kuwaiti voters, going to the poll, hopefully untroubled by the sort of terror being endured by the Iraqis; why wouldn’t that similarly snowball through the region, triggering election after election? Perhaps if that had been done in 1991 the tremors could even become felt in Saddam’s Iraq, and with support a popular movement could depose the tyrant. Wishful thinking of course, but any more wishful than the theory that Iraq can be the catalyst for a Berlin Wall style makeover? And even if you think my suggestion is silly, can anyone say, with their hand on their heart, that every other peaceful method of spreading democracy has been tried, that they have all run their course, and that war was the only answer?

Anyway, my suggestion didn’t happen, and nothing like it would ever happen. Kuwait was liberated and handed back to the old autocrats, and why not? Far nastier regimes than the emir’s have been supported in the past, and are being supported now. Democracy has its place, and its place is clearly after the self-interests of the Western nations. It has always seemed preferable to have pro-western dictatorships than unreliable democracies.

But we have had our war, and Iraq has had its elections, and I sincerely hope that a democracy can take root there. I hope the theory that there will be a clamour for votes in the neighbouring countries turns out to be true, and will lead to the spread of democracy across the region. Time will tell whether this is a genuine “Cedar Revolution” or just a kind of “Beirut Spring”. I guess the real test will be if Saudi Arabia becomes a democracy and looks like it will “do an Algeria”, but we are a little way off that. Perhaps we will be able to look back in a few years time and see that the war did lead to a much-improved situation in the Middle East, but I will take a lot of convincing to believe there could not be another, less bloody way. For all the comparisons currently being made with the fall of the Berlin Wall, what some people seem to overlook is that it didn’t take a war to bring freedom to Eastern Europe; the most important single factor was probably that a superpower decided to stop interfering and propping up its friendly despots. South America can tell a similar tale.

In the end, though, I think that rather than the onus now being on me to accept that the war was justified, it is up to others to prove that military action was the only way to advance democracy through the Middle East; and until they do I will accept it as a truism that good ends can spring from bad means.

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Thursday 3rd March 2005

The Other Rowntrees

Fresh from the whole Sudan 1 scare, Premier Foods are currently withdrawing another product from our supermarket shelves, this time a rather more scary substance called “Jelly”. According to The Independent, Premier are axing the Rowntrees jelly brand, memorable in my youth for the “Shakin’ all over” advert (there’s tremors in the lemons, apparently). In future they will manufacture jelly under their Hartleys brand name.

The reason for this change is that while Premier own the Rowntrees name for jelly, Nestle own it for sweets such as fruit pastilles and fruit gums. It seems that this is a cause of confusion.

What confusion? How many people do you think wander into a shop looking for some nice, lovely Premier Foods Rowntrees jelly, and instead wander off with some nasty, evil Nestle Rowntrees fruit gums by mistake? Not very many, I suspect.

Put another way, how many people actually know that Rowntrees jelly and Rowntrees fruit pastilles are owned by different companies, and does it have any influence on their purchasing decisions? I very much doubt it.

So Rowntrees jelly will now be called Hartleys jelly; but isn’t that confusing. As far as I remember there used to be a company called Chivers Hartley, and they sold jelly under the Chivers brand name. Are Chivers Hartley now part of Premier Foods, and if so, why not resurrect the Chivers name for jelly?

I think some people at Premier Foods seem to have too much time on their hands, rectifying problems that don’t appear to exist. But what I really wonder is what is the point in running a company that goes around buying famous, historic brands if you are then going to ditch these very brands for no good reason?

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