Author Archives: markdowe1

Britain, Government, Middle East, Palestine, Politics, Society

Guarding our freedoms in the battle against extremism

BRITAIN

HISTORY AND EXPERIENCE shows that where there is an increase in tension in the Middle East is often followed by an increase in terrorist activity in the West.

It should come as no surprise, then, that our intelligence agencies are warning of an increase in “chatter” on the communication networks used by Islamist fanatics.

The analysis suggests that the situation is as bad now as at any time since the terror outrage of 9/11, 2001.

This is a worrying indication of a rising temperature, and Westerners would do well to heed it. You do not even have to take sides on the long-running Israel-Palestine dispute to recognise that events in Gaza are causing immense distress throughout the Arab and Muslim world – angst which violent zealots will be happy to exploit for their own ends.

Such people swim in the murky waters of extremism, so when there is more extremism, they are safer and stronger.

We must add to this the appalling increase of anti-Semitism in Britain over recent months, including the open support for Hamas expressed by some participants in repeated demonstrations in London and elsewhere.

Enter now the maverick George Galloway, whose undoubted victory in the Rochdale by-election, will be disturbing for many. Mr Galloway’s political win arises directly out of the failure of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party to sort out its deep internal contradictions on anti-Semitism in its ranks.

Sir Keir seemed tough enough on this nasty form of bigotry when it flourished among hard-left supporters of the deposed leader Jeremy Corbyn. But as the behaviour of Labour’s now-disowned official Rochdale candidate, Azhar Ali, showed, Labour’s past wooing of the Muslim vote had made it less vigilant about anti-Semitism in such places. And so, Sir Keir had to abandon his own standard-bearer in what is being perceived as one of the most important by-elections, pre general election.

For the Labour leader, this is a question of competence, leadership, and principle. He claims to have changed his party so often that it is tempting to wonder whether he isn’t all that sure he has done so. Anti-Semitism in the Labour Party remains rampant and rife.

For the nation, however, the election of Mr Galloway is a warning that the civilised majority among all faiths must work a great deal harder to resist the siren calls of militancy and extremism.

The vote for Mr Galloway is understandable, but for voters elsewhere in the country not really excusable in anyone who values civilised debate. The attitude of his Workers Party of Great Britain to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel places him far from the civilised limits of our political discourse.

There is much in Britain that brings citizens together, whatever our faith and background. But as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has rightly warned: “There are forces here at home trying to tear us apart.” So, how do we beat these forces?

There are Government initiatives, such as the Prevent programme, which try to identify the problem of radicalisation early and to counter it with education.

There is simple vigilance and awareness, though the Government must be careful before imposing any more of the travel restrictions and surveillance that followed 9/11. The long-suffering public have had their liberties and freedoms more than constrained in recent years.

There is the public condemnation of repellent views – and at the very limit, there can be the prosecution of people for bigoted incitements.

Britons should never forget that our nation is founded on freedom. We will not save that freedom by restricting it out of existence.

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Arts, Books, History, Maritime

Book Review: A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks

LITERARY REVIEW

STARING across the Solent in 1545, Henry VIII was appalled when he witnessed the sinking of his warship, the Mary Rose.

The Holy Roman Emperor’s ambassador of Charles V wrote: “Through misfortune and carelessness… the ship foundered, and all hands-on-board, to the number of about 500, were drowned, with the exception of about five and twenty or thirty servants, sailors and the like.”

More than 400 years later, the Mary Rose was raised from the seas. Its resurrection is one of the most significant achievements of maritime archaeology that is celebrated in this engrossing book by David Gibbins.

Gibbins is the ideal person to tell the story of shipwrecks. He is a distinguished underwater archaeologist, veteran of thousands of dives, and a best-selling novelist whose narrative skills are more harnessed to fact rather than fiction.

His earliest wreck is the Bronze Age boat discovered in 1992, its timbers miraculously preserved in the oxygen-free mud at the bed of the river that ran through Dover in prehistoric times. The Dover Boat was probably constructed some time between 1575 and 1520 BC. It would have been able to cross the Channel and make extended coastal journeys, possibly as far as the Baltic Sea northwards and the Bay of Biscay to the south.

The most recent wreck is the SS Gairsoppa, sunk by a U-boat during the Battle of the Atlantic in 1941. It had been carrying 17 tons of silver bullion. Some of this was recovered and the Royal Mint garnered some 20,000 coins from it.

Between the Dover Boat and the Gairsoppa, Gibbins highlights ten other wrecks. The Bronze Age ship found off the Turkish coast in 1982 was carrying an “astonishing diversity” of goods, from pottery to weaponry. It also had enough metal on board to make 5,000 swords. Another, more unorthodox find, was a folding writing tablet which some history scholars have described as “the world’s oldest book”.

A Greek ship from the 5th century BC, also located off the coast of Turkey, had a cargo that consisted mainly of wine. Letters stamped on the amphoras, huge jars, showed that it came from Erythrae, a place renowned for drink.

A scalpel handle found on a 2nd century AD Roman wreck revealed the probable presence of a skilled eye surgeon on board. It was most likely used in cataract operations.

What wrecks often show are patterns of trade. The discovery of a 9th century ship off an Indonesian island provided evidence of goods passing between Tang dynasty China and Persia. The huge cargo included more than 50,000 bowls, candlesticks, incense burners, and mirrors.  One of the items was already an antique when it sank beneath the waves.

More recently discovered wrecks have shed light on British and global history of the past 300 years. The Royal Anne Galley went down off the Cornish coast in 1721. Only three out of the 210 individuals on board survived.

Among those drowned was Lord Belhaven, sailing to Barbados to serve as the colony’s governor. Reportedly, the day before its departure, he was warned of his fate by “a mysterious woman in a mantle and hood”, but misguidedly chose to ignore her. Had the ship made it to the West Indies, it would have ben used to hunt down the buccaneer “Black Bart Roberts”.

Gibbins is a careful and sensitive narrator; he never loses sight of the reality that wrecks represent the tragic loss of human lives. However, he also knows they can open up “many fascinating byways of history to those willing to be fully immersed”.

– A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks by David Gibbins is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 304pp

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Britain, Europe, Government, NATO, Russia, Society, Ukraine, United States

The West dithers over Ukraine

UKRAINE WAR

AFTER two years of atrocities, pain, grief, and mass bereavement, the focus has turned once again on the Ukraine war, a tragedy which disgraces the modern world.

Not so long ago the civilised nations of Europe and North America could never have believed that a huge region of our continent would once again be turned over to dismal trenches, makeshift hurried graves, and the unending rumble of artillery fire. We thought we had put such horrors behind us in a new order of rules-based diplomacy and civilised negotiation. And yet here we are, with the flag-shaded war cemeteries filling up and the ammunition factories working day and night, as if it was 1917, not 2024.

This is a war, however, that remains strangely limited. The nations which a few years ago were offering Ukraine the warmth and protection of NATO membership now baulk at the idea for fear of a general war that might inflict on them the dire hardships that Ukraine’s people daily endure. In Europe, the air is full of the sound of uncertain trumpets, as the leaders of major nations dither between naked self-interest – cheap gas and a quiet life – and their solemn duty to protect a vulnerable neighbour against a snarling and ruthless threat.

If the democracies cannot stand together against the menace from Vladimir Putin’s increasingly despotic Russia, they will one by one fall under its appalling influence and power.

Since its inception, the whole point of NATO has been to avoid that danger by invoking into its treaty an assault upon its weakest member the trigger for a unified political and military response – “an attack on one is an attack on all”.

Of course, such an alliance has to be careful not to extend its promises so far that it cannot keep them when tested. And it is more or less politically impossible now to fulfil the promises of future membership offered to Ukraine in 2008.

Nonetheless, there remains an inviolate obligation to help, outside the direct provisions of the NATO treaty but within the bonds of mutual friendship and support that hold the free countries of Europe together. It is not as if the danger from the East is growing any smaller, or that the regime in the Kremlin is showing any signs of civility. The upcoming fraudulent election, which is grotesquely rigged to confirm Putin in his presidency, will only serve to strengthen him at home. From what can be garnered and gleaned from public opinion in the Russian Federation, the current course of the war is boosting his popularity, and it would be unwise to assume that he will face any serious internal challenge in the near future.

The deeply sinister and suspicious circumstances of the recent death in an Arctic prison of the Russian freedom campaigner Alexei Navalny is a gruesome warning of just how totally Moscow has forsaken the democracy and the rule of law it seemed to embrace after the fall of communism in 1991.

The state of the conflict today is also a warning that the Russian army, which performed so badly in the original invasion, has learned from its previous mistakes to become a growing and more formidable fighting force. Britain, for its part, accustomed over centuries to defy continental tyrants, has done better than most other nations in Europe in trying to deal with this confrontation.

The Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron, has expressed clear and unambiguous support of Ukraine’s desperate struggle. So, too, has ex-prime minister, Boris Johnson. But as the spectre of Donald Trump falls ever more over America, and as US Congress fiddles while Kiev burns, the West still has miles to go and much to do.

President Zelensky should be given the tools to defend his country.

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