Category Archives: Government

Britain, Economic, European Union, Government, Politics, Society

Should we really despair over Brexit? Europe is in a mess.

BREXIT–EUROPE

THE Brexit debate has plunged British politics into a rollercoaster of agony and self-doubt.

Following a year of political high drama and turbulence, and, given the parliamentary impasse over the Prime Minister’s deal, there are significant anxieties about the consequences of leaving the EU without a withdrawal agreement in place.

Some will ask whether it will plunge us into an economic depression? Others are predicting that prices will rocket and ask whether essential goods will be in short supply? And some doom-mongers even suggest that there will be riots on the streets as the ugly new social divisions opens up as Brexit plays out.

We shouldn’t doubt for one moment that these concerns are wholly understandable, and it is right that we focus on them.

But we are also in a position where we should be counting our blessings. We are not the only country experiencing turmoil – and for many of our European neighbours it is far worse.

Around Europe, many leaders have spent the last few months contemplating chaos and political confusion, widespread public dissatisfaction, growing unrest and even violence. For some, economic winter is already descending.

Indeed, the continent of Europe confronts a growing crisis which could yet cause the collapse of the EU.

So whatever our Brexit troubles – and there are doubtless more to come – we should remind ourselves that unemployment is at a record low, and that since 2009 the UK has enjoyed continuing economic growth.

Compare this with Spain. Whilst our rate of youth unemployment stands at just 9.3 per cent, the comparable rate in Madrid is just under 35 per cent – and more than a third of young people who are able to work have never had a job. Moreover, this human tragedy is directly linked to Spain’s membership of the EU because the euro has rendered large tracts of the Spanish economy hopelessly uncompetitive.

Economically, Italy’s story is even more harrowing. Its economy is barely any bigger than it was twenty years ago, employment stands at 10.6 per cent and youth unemployment is 32.5 per cent. The national debt stands at almost 2.5 trillion euros – more than 130 per cent of Gross Domestic Product. That money will never be paid back and Italy is heading once more for bankruptcy.

No wonder so much of the country feels total frustration and fury at distant EU bureaucrats whom they believe – and with some justice – have condemned Italy to economic decline and failure, let alone their incompetency on migration, which Italians feel they are now bearing the brunt of.

In Greece, the very birthplace of European democracy, an epic tragedy continues to play out: membership of the eurozone has wiped out businesses, jobs and entire industries that will take generations to recover.

Let’s look, too, at fraud and corruption. We’ve had serious problems on this front here in Britain, not least among scores of MPs who infamously were found to have fiddled their expense claims. And, yes, the occasional business executive is disgraced or imprisoned. But Britain is a remarkably honest country compared with what has been happening throughout the EU.

Take Malta, viewed by most Britons as a holiday paradise. Recently, a dark underside came to light with the murder of a journalist investigating government corruption, including the sale of EU passports to shady figures from the former Soviet bloc. Many believe Malta escapes sanction from Brussels because the country’s deeply compromised ruling elite can be relied on to do what the European Commission tells it to do.

Romania and Bulgaria are two other countries where corruption flourishes. The culture of greed and backhanders in these two former Iron Curtain nations helps explain the poverty and mass emigration to the rest of the EU. The problem is so flagrant that the Romanian government has sacked the EU-backed chief anti-corruption prosecutor.

As for concerns about law and order, well we have no reason to be complacent. London has seen 131 murders during 2018 – an increase of 38 per cent (excluding deaths by terrorism) on 2014.

There is public anxiety about the ability of our police forces to deal with everyday crimes, while the recent events at Gatwick – when the drone scare brought the airport to a standstill – did us few favours by exposing lax security.

Politicians were slow to react, while the police, military and intelligence services were made to look foolish.

But compare that with France, where for more than seven weeks now, the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) fuel protestors took violent unrest to the streets.

The protests are about more than just France; they are of existential importance to the EU because President Macron has become the poster boy for the European project as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s star starts to fade in Germany.

Macron’s response has so far been weak. He has responded with a mixture of police brutality and concessions to rioters which so far have not worked.

As for political stability in Europe, well therein lies the greatest crisis for the EU.

In Britain there have been warnings that the two-party system which has governed us for more than two centuries may collapse – damaged irreparably by the Brexit fallout. And there are menacing signs that the far-Right racist parties are on the rise, all the more so now UKIP employs the thug Tommy Robinson as an adviser.

No one should dismiss the reality of these fears. Only Italy’s government, out of the EU’s Big Four (France, Germany, Spain), has strong support and a clear political majority.

And that is for the so-called “government of change” – made up of two populist parties – which has flouted EU budgetary edicts, and rails heavily against immigration policies.

Consider also the bitter dispute between Madrid and the Catalan separatists, whose leaders either await trial at home or are in exile.

In Germany, social democracy is on the wane and the far-Right poses a menacing threat with the electoral successes of the popular nationalists of the neo-fascist Alliance for Germany party.

Even Belgium, the headquarters and the centrepiece of the EU, is in a political shambles. Prime Minister Charles Michel has resigned leaving a vacuum, while concerns about chronic unemployment and immigration fester.

Further east, the situation is much more threatening with the rise of far-Right parties exploiting popular fears about immigration. Poland and Hungary, both at daggers drawn with Brussels, increasingly present a chilling authoritarian alternative to the EU model of liberal democratic politics.

Brexit confronts Europe with a fresh problem. As one of the biggest financial contributors to the EU, the UK has been essential for balancing the books.

At a time of economic stress, Germany, Holland and the other large contributors will refuse to pay more. However, supplicants such as Bulgaria and Romania will be furious at receiving less.

Elections are due in the spring for the European Parliament and these may prove a shock to the EU elite as Right-wing parties score more significant gains. We will see new populist politicians emerge.

There is no question the EU is about to enter the greatest crisis in its 60-year history – and Brexit is just a small part of it.

This is not a reason for the Brexiteers to gloat. Trouble among our closest neighbours will hurt us badly at home. We are entering truly troubling times, but we should keep a sense of perspective during 2019 and remind ourselves we have every reason to feel some pride in the stability, prosperity and decency of 21st-century Britain.

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Britain, Cyber warfare, Government, Society, Technology

We’re losing the fight on cyber terror

CYBER WARFARE

MICROSOFT boss, Brad Smith, has warned that cyberspace has become the new battlefield.

He has said that terrorists and rogue states are using it to mount devastating attacks on civilians.

He admitted tools created by technology firms were being turned into weapons – and called for a “digital Geneva Convention” to prevent a global arms race.

Mr Smith, president of the US tech giant, said cyber attacks had already caused real “human suffering” around the world, pointing to a virus which last year crippled NHS hospitals in Britain and caused thousands of appointments – including operations – to be cancelled.

Days before a peace conference in Paris timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary commemorations of the First World War armistice, Mr Smith, 59, also drew comparisons with the build-up of arms in the early 20th century and said history was at risk of repeating itself.

Tech firms need to do more to prevent the use of their services in hacking attacks and governments must come to a global agreement to halt the escalation of cyber attacks, he told Web Summit in Lisbon.

“We cannot remain silent in this century,” he said. “Like it or not – and I don’t think we should like it – the reality is we have become the battlefield. We will do the future an injustice if we don’t also recognise this new generation of technology has also created a new generation of challenges and threats.

“Tools we have created have been turned by others into weapons. If a hospital loses access to its computers and electricity, people’s lives are put at risk.

“We need a moral revolution with this technological revolution. There are lessons from a century ago.”

Mr Smith said almost one billion people were estimated to have been victims of cyber attacks in 2017 alone. Power stations, hospitals and other vital infrastructure will be at even greater risk as more objects are connected to the internet, he warned. He said last year had been “a wake-up call” for technology companies, following the devastating Wannacry and Notpetya viruses that swept through computer systems across the world.

More than one third of NHS trusts were affected by Wannacry, with almost 7,000 appointments cancelled.

The virus, known as ransomware, locked staff out of computer systems and demanded payments to allow them access. The UK and US governments blamed North Korea for the attack.

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Arts, Britain, First World War, Government, History, Society

The art of remembrance that can never fade

GREAT WAR CENTENARY

Euphemism-free: in John Singer Sargent’s ‘Gassed’, blinded soldiers hold on to the man in front to find their way.

AN exhibition earlier this year at the Imperial War Museum (North) – best described as Lest We Forget – was a memorable and deeply sad tribute to the fallen of the Great War. At the end of the display, visitors were asked whether we’re in danger of forgetting the First World War.

There isn’t much chance of that. Not in this centenary year of the Armistice, following four years of remembrance of the anniversaries of Ypres, Gallipoli and all those blood-soaked, out-of-the-way names we’d never know but for the history of war.

This particular exhibition shows how quickly and how very effectively our ways of remembering the war today were set in stone after 1918. Literally, in the case of the Imperial War Graves Commission. By 1919, they had already come up with prototypes of the curved headstones, which they presented to Parliament that year and which were on display, in pristine condition. The headstone epitaphs, too – ‘A Soldier of the Great War’; ‘Known Unto God’ – were also worked out in 1919, thanks to Rudyard Kipling, who lost his son in the war, and his advice on memorial wording in The Graves of the Fallen (1919).

The commission’s diktats were direct and unremitting. Soldiers’ bodies were not to be repatriated but were to be buried where they died; officers were to be buried alongside their men. It was an early burst of progressive, democratic emotion and feeling.

At the time, these orders caused understandable heartache and pain among the bereaved, who had no consolation of a nearby grave to visit, or a tombstone design to even choose. Lady Florence Cecil, who lost three sons, instigated a petition to the Prince of Wales by seeking the use of crosses instead of headstones. Her attempts failed.

Families were permitted only three lines of their own composition on tombstones; and, even then, the commission had copy approval, to prevent ‘the sentimental versifier, or the crank’ – as Sir Fabian Ware, the commission’s founder, put it. However cold all this may sound, the result today is a funerary triumph. Those serried ranks of identically shaped tombstones across the fields of northern France give a sharper picture of the breathtaking scale of the losses than an asymmetrical free-for-all – Highgate Cemetery writ large – would have done.

This enforced burial of soldiers abroad led to an explosion of memorials over here: from the Cenotaph, caught on film at this exhibition, with George V laying the first wreath in 1919; to the heartbreaking visiting cards, and even fire screens, engraved with the names of the dead. In the 1920s, the flood of relatives aching to see the war graves began. The green cemetery signposts and printed guides to the battlefields have a hauntingly jaunty look to them.

Most moving of all was the idea (first proposed by army chaplain the Rev David Railton) of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, one of the few bodies brought back from the Front, in 1920.

For the Warrior to be claimed by all the bereaved as something of their own, he had to belong to no one. As Henry Williams, a British officer charged with selecting the body, said, ‘We examined them very, very carefully to make certain there was no possible identification, even by teeth.’ Brutal, but more affecting for it.

We’re hungry to remember the dead of the Great War today, even though we never met them. The popularity of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, for example, is testament to this. The much more intense desperation of loved ones to remember lost soldiers they knew so well was also palpable during this display. They longed for photographs of their sons’ tombs or first-hand reports of how they perished.

By the end of the war, there were a staggering 559,000 unidentified bodies on the Front: that makes for millions of relatives who didn’t know the true fate of their loved ones. Some went years, wrongly believing their sons, husbands and fathers were still alive. Many fewer were in the happier, but still agonising position: like the family of Lt HD Bird, pictured in the exhibition, wrongly reported as killed in 1918, but in fact taken prisoner and repatriated in 1919.

Euphemisms – or gentle lies – were necessary in the telegrams to mothers from officers who did know the truth. After the Third Battle of Ypres, Jessie Nicholson was told by the CO that her husband ‘suffered no pain as he was killed instantaneously by a fragment of shell’. This was a well-worn line, unverifiable in the fog of war.

The Great War poets – original manuscripts by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were on show – held concordance with the art on display – admirable, harrowingly euphemism-free. John Singer Sargent’s Gassed. The line of blinded boys walking, hand on the soldier in front, past piles of bodies, so shocked the first viewers in 1919 that many felt physically ill.

Paul Nash’s The Menin Road reveals an utterly smashed, dead moonscape on the Front. CRW Nevinson’s The Harvest of Battle is unrelenting in its depiction of open-mouthed bodies, outstretched arms stiff with rigor mortis.

The impressive thing is that these paintings – the polar opposite of triumphalist art – were government-approved, commissioned in 1918 by the British War Memorials Committee.

The most famous of the war’s memory symbols was the poppy. Before it became an official totem, with the first Poppy Appeal of 1921, the poppy was the soldier’s rare, informal blast of beauty on the Front. The show had four cards sent back to sweethearts, enclosing a fragile poppy. One, describing war as ‘Hell on earth’, sent the flower with the words, ‘This I plucked while I was convalescent, a souvenir from France.’

The show was well-balanced. It was neither jingoistic, nor was it a lions-led-by-donkeys agitprop. But it makes a difference in that Britain won. The British won’t forget. How could we?

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