Later today, Iain Duncan Smith, the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, will face a vote of confidence in his leadership that he’s widely expected not to survive. (For those of you looking for blogged coverage during the day, I recommend British Politics, Anthony Wells, Iain Murray and our own Matthew Turner. We’re yet to have a blogging Conservative MP, but there’s some interesting perspectives from inside Westminster from the MPs Tom Watson and Richard Allan.)
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Tag Archives: britain
Sex and the Singapore Issues
OK, before anyone tries to get us round to the painful reality that I’m a tiresome old bore: some titilation for you. Unfortunately, this is not about ‘sexual tourism’, except, that is in the most general sense. (Although if anyone wants to pick up on this in the comments, I think we’re in the same ballpark). No the ‘topic du jour’ here is a bit nearer home. And the underlying issue is – believe me – one of the Singapore Issues: use and abuse of ‘indirect obstacles’ to prevent the free exercise of a service. Whatever the ethical stand you take on this, my feeling is that the French law got involved because the business was being ‘outsourced’ in the wrong direction. Well, at least we British are good at something.
French court officials looked baffled and bewildered by the sheer scale of the scrum of British journalists, photographers and camera crews waiting to get into Courtroom 14 of the Palais de Justice
Some thoughts on borders
One of the things about living in an island state is that you rarely cross over national borders on land. To get to any other country from Britain you have to fly, sail or travel underground and all these have their various formalities for border crossing and, like most Britons travelling abroad, my travels within Europe in recent years have been a case of going from Britain to another country and then coming back.
So, on a day trip to France on Monday, we took a brief detour into Belgium and crossed a European border on land for the first time in several years. Having spent some time travelling through the US last year, it was quite an interesting experience to notice how little paraphernalia there is to mark the border nowadays, especially compared to the changes you notice on the borders of many US states. A simple ‘Belgie’ sign, a sign telling you the new speed limits and a single police car on the French side of the border are all that marks the transition from one country to another, which is a rather strange state of affairs. There are obvious differences that soon become apparent – the signs are now in Flemish, rather than French, and there are subtle differences in architecture – but the ease with which one can now cross borders within Europe is, in my opinion, one of the great benefits of European integration.
However, even though the physical borders have gone, it does not mean that there has been any homogenisation of the culture across the border. Adinkerk, the first town across the border in Belgium, is still unmistakeably Flemish, even with the large number of shops there selling cheap tobacco to British (and now also French, after their tobacco tax rises on Monday) visitors, and the other side of the border is still clearly French.
Anyway, what I want to do here is open up the floor to our readers for your thoughts on and experiences of travelling across borders. Are there places where the borders are unnoticeable physically and culturally? Where are there still strong border controls within the EU? What do you think the future is culturally for the borderlands of Europe? Will they maintain their identity or will continual cross-border traffic eventually create a homogenous border culture?
And, for a quick consumer travel tip for our readers. If you are planning on travelling between Britain and France then Eurotunnel are currently charging ?39 (approx ?59) to take a car and passengers for a day return trip.
German Is Getting Sexy Again. Again.
The controverse reaction to Edward’s use of a French block quote in a blog that claims to be the place for intelligent English language coverage of European affairs, made me remember my first blogging conversation. It was a discussion about Germans not publishing in English and the stipulation by the Norwegian blogger Bj?rn St?rk that ??nothing beautiful or sensible should ever be written in Norwegian, if it could be written in English.? So after speaking French all evening, and in light of the above mentioned comments as well as my imminent visit to the Frankfurt International Book Fair (link in English) I felt compelled to recycle my defence of linguistic diversity as a virtue of its own right, which was first published in a slightly different version in almost a diary on February 2nd, 2003.
Bj?rn St?rk had a look around the web and was astonished by the fact that he could find relatively few European, particularly German and French, (particularly political) blogs published in English. Contemplating the deeper issue at hand – the relation of national cultures and supra-national languages – in this case English – in an age of global interaction – Bj?rn made an interesting argument concerning cultural imperialism, linguistic protectionism, linguistic economies of scale and scope as well as the advantages of publishing in English instead of one?s native language.
No doubt about it – English has become some sort lingua franca in many respects.
Libert?, Egalit?, Fraternit?. And, of course, Credibilit
It might not be the obvious comparison, but Scott’s ponderings about the state of transatlantic breast relations and the state of French feminism made me remember another Franco-analogy that recently crossed my mind: I believe the current relationship between many countries, certainly in Old Europe, and the US of A has a lot in common with the relationship between the Third Estate (aka “the people”) and Louis XVI in the time immediately preceding July 14th 1789, the date usually considered to mark the beginning of the French Revolution. And no, I am not attempting to compliment President Bush for his fashion sense…
The Truth, The Whole Truth, And Nothing But The Truth
Today, the British government has once again been cleared by an Intelligence and Security Comittee (ISC) report [600kb, pdf] of the alligation to have deliberately “sexed up” a report on the state of the former Iraqi regime’s Weapons of Mass Destruction programme. Really? It has? Well, I guess that will depend on what your definition of “is” is…
On a philosophical level, there might be room for discussion regarding the inter-subjective differences of meaning between truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. For any practical purposes, there should not. Obviously, I am saying this against better knowledge: scores of people are making a living by creating precisely this kind of confusion, especially in politics.
Whatever really happened to Joint Intelligence Comittee’s Iraq Dossier – today’s report claims that its chairman, John Scarlett, assured the investigators
“… that he did not at any time feel under pressure, nor was he asked to include material that he did not believe ought to be included in the dossier…’ (page 31) –
has likely already fallen in the cracks between the different versions of truth mentioned above. Legally, the dossier might have been corect. But it was obviously slanted in a way that was supposed to increase the credibility of the government’s rather unpopular Iraq policy. By accident? Well, if it was really just an accident, some organisational changes in the British administration appear to be overdue. In this case the British government cannot avoid to explain such a severe administrational failure in all the detail available. No one on Whitehall can possibly believe they have the benefit of the doubt in this respect. Quite to the contrary – cleared or not, what is one supposed to make of the Comittee’s statement that the dossier’s
“… 45 minute claim, included four times, was always likely to attract attention because it was arresting detail that the public had not seen before. … The fact that it was assessed to refer to battlefield chemical and biological munitions and their movement on the battlefield, not to any other form of chemical or biological attack, should have been highlighted in the dossier. The omission of the context and the assessment allowed speculation as to its exact meaning. This was unhelpful to an understanding of the issue.? (page 43) –
– or that –
“Saddam was not considered a current or imminent threat to mainland UK, nor did the dossier say so. The first draft of the Prime Minister?s foreword contained the following sentence:
?The case I make is not that Saddam could launch a nuclear attack on London
or another part of the UK (He could not).?
This shows that the Government recognised that the nature of the threat that
Saddam posed was not directly to mainland UK. It was unfortunate that this point was removed from the published version of the foreword and not highlighted elsewhere.” (page 43, hightlighted by me)
Unfortunate, indeed. Neither this report nor the Hutton Inquiry are going to end the affair. The Blair government is facing a credibility crisis that spreads like metastasizing cancer. Maybe a quick surgical removal of Geoffrey Hoon, singled out in today’s report for explicitly not mentioning a part of the truth, will buy time. With the next election years away and still no opposition to speak of it is clearly to early to tell what the consequences will be for Labour. Tony Blair still has reason to hope that the cancer of mistrust has not yet spread too far in Britain.
But he will have to seriously change his government’s communication attitude. The British public might not know whether technical details in intelligence reports relate one or another category of weaponry. But it evidently has a very clear idea under which circumstances it should be willing to enter into a philosophical discussion about truth with its government. What might still be acceptable with respect to NHS-waiting lists is apparently not in order when it comes to sending soldiers to the desert.
And rightly so.
The UK as number one
Since the 1960s Germany has had the largest economy in the EU but Nigel Griffiths, the UK trade minister, thinks all that might change :
“I think that construction and manufacturing alone as sectors could ensure that within 10 years we [the UK] overtake the German economy. We’ve got to see whether we cannot become the third biggest economy in the world* in terms of gross domestic product. I think that is feasible.”
Now before our British readers start singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and waving their Union flags, an important point. He’s talking rubbish.
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Creating Europe through tourism?
One of the long-running stories in the British media over the summer has been the antics of British tourists in the Greek resort of Faliraki on the island of Rhodes. Stories of the misadventures of ‘Brits abroad’ have been a staple of the British media over the last few years, fuelled by TV programmes like the Uncovered series that’s highlighted various resorts over the year such as Ibiza and Ayia Napa, but this year there’s actually been a real story for them to focus on. First, a British tourist was killed in a bar brawl and then others were arrested for lewd conduct and indecent exposure, giving the media a chance to moralise and ‘why oh why?’ about what goes on when British youth meets the Mediterranean.
However, while the existence of resorts like Faliraki is often portrayed as a new development, it can be seen as merely the latest incarnation of the British experience of the rest of Europe as a location for escape from the realities of life at home.
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Papists Under The Bed
There’s an utterly mad article in this week’s Spectator, in which a rather overheated Tory called Adrian Hilton argues, with apparent sincerity, that the EU is a grand Papist conspiracy to subject Protestant Britain to Roman Catholic tyranny. I mention it, not just to point and laugh, but because one passage in it illustrates a peculiar blind spot that is very common amongst UK Europhobes:
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