Letter of the Day – from The Times

Wearing a poppy is a visible sign of support for the services

The Times: 6 November 2007

Sir, Jon Miller (letter, Nov 2) seems bored with remembrance and feels it is time we moved on. He also fails to understand the significance of the poppy. It is not worn as a badge of honour. It is a particularly poignant reminder of those men and women we never knew, who fought for the freedoms we enjoy today.

Three of my great-uncles, scarcely out of their teens, returned from the First World War with broken minds and bodies. As with so many others, the country they fought for offered no help and they ended their days as down-and-outs. I never knew them, but there is a place in my heart for them, and I buy a poppy to make a contribution to the appeal and to remember them. When I see other people wearing their poppies I know that we are together in this act of national remembrance and that they have their own special memories.

The BBC has swung from one bizarre extreme to the other, first banning the wearing of poppies then obviously compelling anyone who appears in front of a camera to wear one. This is all wrong. People can choose whether to remember or to forget. They can choose whether or not to wear the poppy. That’s the point.

Ruth Homer
Bury St Edmunds

When is good news no news? When it comes from Iraq

A very interesting editorial could be found in The Times on Saturday (The Petraeus Curve: Serious success in Iraq is not being recognised as it should be – The Times, 3rd November 2007) The Editorial calmly sets out the progress in Iraq that has been seen in the last few months, and gives a reason for it: 

“There has been striking success in the past few months in the attempt to improve security, defeat al-Qaeda sympathisers and create the political conditions in which a settlement between the Shia and the Sunni communities can be reached. This has not been an accident but the consequence of a strategy overseen by General David Petraeus in the past several months. While summarised by the single word “surge” his efforts have not just been about putting more troops on the ground but also employing them in a more sophisticated manner. This drive has effectively broken whatever alliances might have been struck in the past by terrorist factions and aggrieved Sunnis. Cities such as Fallujah, once notorious centres of slaughter, have been transformed in a remarkable time.”

 It goes on to explain the encouragement to be found in the statistics of success.  The Times is not viewing Iraq through rose-tinted spectacles, it explicitly acknowledges the grave errors made in the initial post-liberation responses from the Coalition of the Willing: 

“There are many valid complaints about the manner in which the Bush Administration and Donald Rumsfeld, in particular, managed Iraq after the 2003 military victory. But not to recognise that matters have improved vastly in the year since Mr Rumsfeld’s resignation from the Pentagon was announced and General Petraeus was liberated would be ridiculous.”

 In addition the newspaper warns that just because the Iraqi government and its allies are currently enjoying success, continued improvement is not inevitable.  Indeed it stresses that this very success could be the catalyst which generates great atrocities: 

“None of this means that all the past difficulties have become history. A weakened al-Qaeda will be tempted to attempt more spectacular attacks to inflict substantial loss of life in an effort to prove that it remains in business. Although the tally of car bombings and improvised explosive devices has fallen back sharply, it would only take one blast directed at an especially large crowd or a holy site of unusual reverence for the headlines about impending civil war to be allowed another outing.”

 So why do we not hear more about these successes?  Why is the good being done by the Iraqi government, our armed forces and those of the other constituent parts of the Coalition not being trumpeted? As usual, when you’re not being told the full story, you must ask in whose favour the spin is playing.  Cui bono?  The Times offers a suggestion: 

“The current achievements, and they are achievements, are being treated as almost an embarrassment in certain quarters. The entire context of the contest for the Democratic nomination for president has been based on the conclusion that Iraq is an absolute disaster and the first task of the next president is to extricate the United States at maximum speed.”

 So there you have it.  Until the Democrats in America and the left-wing media in the UK have got over their wish to see us mired in “another Vietnam” you won’t be told the full story.  In the meantime, as ever these days, do some digging outside the mainstream media yourselves and you will find the real news.

Letter of the Day – from The Guardian

Licence fee doomed 

The Guardian: 30 October 2007

The successful global expansion of BBC Worldwide, the corporation’s commercial arm (New channels galore, October 29), highlights the increasing absurdity of a compulsory licence fee in a multichannel televisual market.  

The BBC’s high-quality programme output does not deserve to be protected from the full impact of market forces, but neither does it need to be. The revenues generated by the corporation’s flagship productions, such as Doctor Who and the Teletubbies, should persuade even the most ardent supporter of the Beeb that an enforced annual subscription of £135 is ananachronism.  

A wider concern must be the apparently limitless proliferation of BBC channels. This doesn’t provide the public with the sort of programming that isn’t available elsewhere, but makes it harder for independent channels to compete.  

The BBC has the reputation, the personnel and the expertise to stand on its own feet. It needs to be broken up into sensible constituent parts and encouraged to do so. 

Mark Littlewood

Progressive Vision

Recession? What recession?

You may have picked up in recent weeks that there is a bit of grumble in the markets. Share prices are fluctuating wildly as a result of bad lending by US banks and poor investment decisions by hedge fund managers worldwide.

But things may not be as bad as all that. It’s reported today that GDP in the United States rose to 4 per cent in the second quarter of 2007, up from the Department of Commerce’s initial estimate of 3.4 per cent.

I’m sure you heard this on the BBC earlier today: no? Well, here is the story so you get both sides of the argument.

Hurrah for the Rolling Stones!

That earnest voice of impartiality and fairness, the BBC, reports that the Rolling Stones broke the law again. No, they didn’t take drugs as they famously did in the 1960s – the smoked on stage during their concert last night.

Neither the Rolling Stones nor the venue, the O2 Arena, will be fined as Greenwich Council said it was satisfied that the incident was a one-off. One of the men quasi-criminalised for enjoying a fag was Keith Richards who smoked at Hampden Park last year.

Is it not time that this absurd ban was repealed or that the Tories announced they would repeal the smoking ban?

BBC panders to extremist voices again

I found an interesting story on the Daily Mail’s website today.

It seems that the BBC was going to start the newest series of their popular medical drama Casualty with a bang, a terrorist bang to be precise.  Holby City Accident & Emergency was going to be shown dealing with the aftermath of an Islamist terror attack.   And then the bureacrats got involved…

Now the bomb is going to be set off by animal rights extremists instead.

The BBC has previous as far as this politically correct view of terrorism is concerned.  Their otherwise excellent MI5-based drama series, Spooks, has been forced to mention Islamic extremism, but has also portrayed Evangelical Christians, shady civil servants, environmental activists and pro-life campaigners as serious British terror threats.  Indeed in one infamous double-bill which did appear to involve an Islamic plot the terrorists eventually turned out to be Mossad agents!

The BBC should stop pandering to self-appointed voices promoting extremism under the guise of claiming to represent minority communities.  Every time a programme is censored and a nonsensical story line is employed to assuage the anger of a vocal campaign group, especially one which then points the finger at our partners in the Global War on Terror, the BBC’s claims to impartiality are damaged and public service broadcasting once more becomes a political tool.

George Galloway kicked out of the Commons

If you want a laugh – and a look at the paranoid mind of Gorgeous George Galloway – check out yesterday’s Hansard.

This is from the debate on him being chucked out of the Commons for 18 days.

Backlash against globalisation

The nose-ringed and matted-haired brigade would be delighted to read (assuming they can actually read) a report in yesterday’s Financial Times.

The author of the piece, Chris Giles, writes:

“Large majorities of people in the US and in Europe want higher taxation for the rich and even pay caps for corporate executives to counter what they believe are unjustified rewards and the negative effects of globalisation.Viewing globalisation as an overwhelmingly negative force, citizens of rich countries are looking to governments to cushion the blows they perceive have come from the liberalisation of their economies to trade with emerging countries.”

Except that isn’t what the polls show at all. Here is a graphic representing the results:

I read those results as showing a desire for free competition in the EU and a strong recognition, despite all the cultural pressures from left-wing journalists and broadcasters in the West, that the free market is best for everyone. But then why let the results get in the way of a good headline, eh?

Musical endorsements for presidential candidates

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign received an enormous boost from this song, “I’ve Got a Crush…on Obama”:

Now this has been produced to promote Fred Thompson’s campaign. I’m not sure it’s quite as catch though!

Still it’s less nauseating than the Billary campaign song:

The real racists

Black Information Link styles itself as an “independent community interactive site for the black community”. In a society where we all strive for true equality, one wonders how a website for the “white community” would be treated but I digress. Breaching BLINK’s net apartheid policy, as a white man I nonetheless read something disturbing on its site today.

Black Information Link has launched a new campaign “to discipline members who write racist comments on blogs”. The logo for the campaign consists of screen caps from a number of blogs including Conservative Home, Guido Fawkes, Bloggers4Labour and LibDem Voice – all in breach of copyright (and one hopes the slurred sites will now be consulting lawyers).*

What one person perceives as racist, another may not. It is somehow acceptable to us the “n-word” in friendly conversation if you are a black rapper but not if you are white. While outright racial prejudice stands contrary to our shared British values of equality and tolerance and is rightly to be condemned, Black Information Link wants to broaden the definition of racism to include those who post comments that it disagrees with.

That is the antithesis of what a free society is.

The High Court recently stressed that there is no such thing as a right not to be offended. On the contrary, it upheld the concept of a right to offend.

Suggesting that Lee Jasper should be hung from a flagpole outside City Hall, as one person recently did on Conservative Home, was deemed to be racist and unacceptable in the eyes of BLINK. I suspect that the person who posted this comment under the pseudonym “Genuine Conservative” was not calling for a southern-style lynching of Mr Jasper, who happens to be black. Would there have been the same furore if Ken Livingstone or Gordon Brown had been suggested instead of Mr Jasper?

The victim mentality perpetuated by the likes of BLINK does more to damage race relations in this country than puerile posts on blogs written by anonymous individuals.

And yet rather than focussing proactively on working for an end to discrimination and the realisation of Martin Luther King’s inspiring vision of true equality before the law, BLINK is more interested in perpetuating racial division. Shame on them.

* 5.55pm UPDATE: Under threat of legal action, Black Information Link has removed the screen caps which suggested a number of prominent blogs and websites across the political spectrum were racist.