‘The Iron Lady’ – Not Totally Magnetic
Margaret Thatcher gets the rare honour of a biopic made in her lifetime; and Meryl Streep’s starring role as ‘The Iron Lady’ makes for an entertaining, occasionally moving but flawed film. Part Lear, part Queen Elizabeth, part Iris Murdoch, totally Streep, this is not so much a political movie, more a meditation on power and the loss of same. There’s a nod to feminism, albeit in a general manner, and a kaleidoscopic take on her rise and fall. This film will go down a storm in the States but it could have been a lot better.
Screenwriter Abi Morgan is going through a particularly purple patch. Writer of ‘The Hour’ and ‘Shame’, Morgan’s script sees Thatcher look back on her past from the present as a dementia sufferer. We return to WWII and Alf Roberts influence on his daughter, her meeting with Denis, her time in Heath’s cabinet, rise to the leadership, election as Prime Minister and eventual Götterdämmerung. This is inter-cut with scenes of an elderly, confused woman almost a prisoner in her own home.
The cast is excellent; Streep gives a superb leading performance; a mixture of a Michael Sheen-style impression and in-depth method acting. Thatcher never quite comes across as likeable, but is, at the end, a figure worthy of pity and it’s a tribute to Streep that she imparts so much humanity to the role. Alexandra Roach hits the mark as the younger leader in waiting, moving up the greasy pole, juggling family and career. Jim Broadbent is an English national treasure at this stage, and his Denis Thatcher is a departure from the ‘Private Eye’ ‘Dear Bill’ view of the man, while keeping some of the best/worst well-known characteristics. Olivia Coleman shines as Carol Thatcher and, of the politicians, Richard E Grant captures the Heseltine drive/egotism remarkably well.
For Thatcher-watchers, there are some terrific pen-portraits of early figures influential in her political life and rise to the top. Gordon Reece, one of her key image-makers, is given the prominent role he deserves; he advised her on how and why to lower the pitch of her voice, how to dress, what to say; he, and Tim Bell, were crucial to transforming Thatcher from neophyte Minister to Prime Minister. Geoffrey Howe is a grey as his dead sheep image and John Major is similarly nondescript. Michael Foot gets a couple of short scenes as do John Nott and Al Haig; there’s lots for the political anorak to look out for.
Overall, however, the political focus of the movie is a little disappointing. While the broad principles of Thatcher’s ideology; self-reliance, there ‘being no such thing as society’, English Nationalism, low taxation, are covered, there simply isn’t enough time to explore all these points and give more than a cursory view to each issue. There isn’t a huge amount of depth to the portrait either; apart from some travel over the well-travelled ground of the Thatcher upbringing, we never really get to the root of what drove this woman. While issues such the rights and wrongs of EMF membership are scarcely the stuff of entertaining cinema, there could have been greater attention paid to events over personality. Similarly, try explaining the Westland controversy in a drama and you’ve a huge writing problem on your hands but you could at least reference it. The script is non-committal on the rightness or wrongness Thatcher’s politics.
There is much to like about ‘The Iron Lady’. If you’re old enough to remember when her reign, you’ll know how much she dominated the news-cycle. The British Media is largely right-wing at heart and her legacy there is assured but for anyone on the left, this movie won’t change their opinion. She will be remembered as the most divisive British political figure of the 20th Century.
Change We Can All Believe In
‘This new world requires something else beyond more promises, something beyond new theories of interpretation, something that might, just might, make us feel that the tools fit the job.This new world requires a new politics’
The world is a chaotic place. We seek to put structure on it, vainly looking for simplified patterns where complexity exists and ask governments and business leaders to manage the unmanageable. Who can we look to lead us through the chaos? Who can we turn to for hope and empowerment? In Carne Ross’s ‘ The Leaderless Revolution – How Ordinary People Will Take Power And Change Politics in the 21st Century’, the answer is that ultimately we must turn to ourselves. No selfish manifesto here, instead a rallying call to ruthlessly interrogate authority at all times and reject it where it has failed. Do not wait for leaders – trust in yourself.
The author of ‘Leaderless Revolution’ has had an interesting journey. Ross is a former diplomat whose renounced the speciousness and cynicism of much of what passes Relations. He became disillusioned with the British Foreign Office, where he was on a fast-track career path; his loss of faith in ‘the system’ was both personal and political following the WMD fiasco around the events of the second Iraq War. Unlike most of us, he stood up to be counted, resigning his position. Now running a New York-based NFP think tank, Independent Diplomat, Ross and his institute help the stateless and powerless get a seat at the diplomatic table.
‘Time’ readers have already declared 2011 the ‘Year of the Protestor’…from those on the Frontline, marching, and dying for democratic rights, to those in the West protesting economic inequality and speaking for the 99%. ‘Leaderless Revolution’ appears as a zeitgeist work, tapping into these fears and concerns and giving practical advice on how to protest. Whether this year turns out to be as epochal as 1968 remains to be seen, but the issues of 2011 are here for at least the coming decade.
Ross writes of a broken pact between governments and the governed; that corporate power and lobbying have rendered representative democracy almost completely ineffective. He proposes a participatory democracy, i.e. where the individual participates in more decisions about their everyday life. Ross posits that peaceful anarchism, where authority is replaced by democratic involvement, is the best solution. He constructs some impressive arguments to persuade that anarchy does not equal chaos; authentic anarchism promotes stability over much of the chaos behind international relations and capitalism.
How can the individual become empowered? Surely the issues are too big, too complex for one person to make a difference? Ross drills down into how people can change the system, and it is an important part of the book, where theory can be turned into practice. Included in his prescriptions are goal defining; what’s the ‘bottom line’?/what do you want to achieve? Getting to the roots of the power structure is crucial too; who is in charge? Embracing cosmopolitanism is also central; Ross defines this as adhering to the ‘Golden Rule’. He proposes that non-violence is at the core of this empowerment.
‘Leaderless Revolution’ could well be 2012′s ‘No Logo’. By offering us truly democratic alternatives to the status quo, Ross presents us, the reader, with a choice. We can either continue abrogating responsibility by ‘slacktivism’ and doing nothing or, we can act. We are all part of a greater society – change starts with the individual; ‘[in] a world that is more interconnected than ever before, where each person is only a few links away from anyone else….actions in our own microcosmos have global consequence’
‘ The Leaderless Revolution – How Ordinary People Will Take Power And Change Politics in the 21st Century’, Carne Ross, Simon & Schuster, £16.99
Unkind Suskind – ‘Confidence Men’ and Obama’s First Two Years’
Ron Suskind is a distinguished journalist; a Pulitzer Prize winner, he has been a heavyweight Beltway commentator and writer for much of the last twenty years. ‘Confidence Men – Wall Street, Washington, & the Education of a President’ is his highly readable yet problematic account of the first two years of the Obama administration, garnered from interviews (off and on record) with key White House players. Suskind presents a directionless West Wing, with little strategic planning, where senior advisors frequently clashed and the where the President was sorely lacking in organisational planning and execution. Obama’s team has hit back, with Tim Geithner, Jay Carney and Larry Summers all criticising the book – Suskind insists his portraits, characterisations and quotation attributions are correct; he stands by his story.
The dramatis personae would make for an interesting dinner party, to say the least. Rahm Emanuel, with his profanity, political pragmatism and street fighting ability, makes for a fascinating character anyway; he gets hit with a lot of the blame stick for his failures as Obama’s Chief of Staff. Remember Leo McGarry as Bartlet’s right-hand man? Doubt he ever told an assembled group of Principals to ‘shut the fuck up’. Emanuel’s departure to the Chicago for the mayoral elections was as a stroke of good luck for both the Chief of Staff and the President; Obama was all set to move him as part of an organisational shake up. Larry Summers (Director of the National Economic Council for the 2009/10) comes across as, well, Larry Summers: highly intelligent, arrogant, egotistical and dismissive of his boss. The strongest thread of Suskind’s narrative highlights the nexus between Government and Finance; Summers, along with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, are painted as friends of Wall Street, happy to do the bidding of Big Banks and Big Business. If Geithner and Summers are the villains then Elizabeth Warren and Paul Volcker, Suskind’s heroes, are firmly in the camp of friends of Main Street.
The book is overly ambitious in scope in seeking to chronicle the causes of the 2008 Crash and beyond; it, among other things, covers derivatives, CDOs (all the acronymic ‘weapons of mass destruction’ are discussed in detail), draws pen pictures of Wall Street Players (volumes could and have been written about some of these characters) and looks to record the definitive reporter’s view of Obama’s first two, turbulent years; Suskind’s trying to do a Michael Lewis and Bob Woodward in the one book. He thanks his literary agent in the acknowledgements, Andrew Wylie. Wylie isn’t known as ‘The Jackal’ for nothing; he has a legendary status in the bookworld for the huge advances he gets for his clients. This may be where the problem lies; Suskind might easily have ‘sexed up’ off-record events and phrases attributed to Obama’s advisors; this is not lying – one person’s ‘livid’ is another person’s ‘troubled’. Allegations of sexism in the administration where Communications Director Anita Dunne and Chairperson of the Council of Economic Advisors Christine Romer, among others, state that a boys club atmosphere prevailed, are, perhaps, more a criticism of Emanuel and Summers’ toxic interpersonal skills and attitude to women than of Obama himself.
Suskind harks back to Grant Park and the idealism of 2008. At some level, he wants Obama to succeed, to defeat his own observation that Barack Obama is, after all, human. There’s little recognition of the sheer vitriol, extremism and downright lies (spurred on by right-wing talk show hosts and the ‘Tea Party’) Obama faced and still faces. You can plan and strategise for the big picture all you like, but if a lot of the media and many Americans don’t believe you’re even an American citizen, you have a daily war on your hands. In short, Suskind gives Obama nowhere near enough credit for getting anything done in a political climate as poisonous as the current. As the Western World teeters between Recession and Depression (with economic recovery looking like a distant prospect), the 44th President could and should have done more to fundamentally address structural market fault lines by punishing Wall Street when he had the chance; but, looking at the Republicans and their remedies for the US economy, is there a realistic alternative to the incumbent, who is, at heart, still a Progressive?
Suskind displays hindsight in spades, chiding Obama for not getting more done on health care and bank regulation. We’re left with a ‘pile on’ on the President, and ‘Confidence Men’ is a converging arrow of a book heading towards a conclusion vindicating Suskind’s central thesis that Obama just didn’t cut hit on the economy or health for much of 2009 and 2010. If Barack Obama wins in 2012, and, despite everything, this author remains optimistic about his chances, he will have a vast amount of crisis management experience under his belt. When it comes to the Obama Presidency, the narrative is far from finished.
‘Confidence Men – Wall Street, Washington, & the Education of a President’, Ron Suskind, Harper, $29.99
‘The Ides of March’ – The Political Is Personal
Politics can be a noble art. It can advance worthy causes, promote capable and sincere men and women to Office and help make the World a more civilised place. But, and these are the central themes of ‘The Ides of March’, it can also be a brutal, dirty business where loyalties are routinely discarded, ideals frequently betrayed and where the whole trade resembles a form of civic espionage, where ‘truth’ is subjective and the game itself takes over. The US electoral cycle has long been a mix of profound and profane and George Clooney’s film captures this dichotomy with grace and style.
The plot is Shakespearean in its consideration of love, passion, betrayal and ambition (the film is based on the stage play, ‘Farragut North’). Ryan Gosling plays an idealistic, young, senior campaign wonk for George Clooney’s charismatic, liberal, Governor Mike Morris. They’re on the campaign trail in Ohio, a make-or-break state for Morris to win the Democratic Nomination for President where he’s facing Ted Pullman, a Senator from Arkansas. The rival campaign managers become embroiled in a powerplay at Gosling’s expense. There’s a love interest which goes tragically wrong and the film turns on a phone call when we find out Clooney’s character isn’t as perfect as he seems.
‘The Ides of March’ nods to previous political thrillers and has been compared to ‘The Candidate’; the main characters are the backroom players, the spindoctors, those who want no more in life than to be the guy behind the guy. There are ‘West Wing’ references too; the idealism of a campaign team in thrall to the just ruler, the exhilaration of the Primary seasons highs and lows, the chance to make history. There’s at least one scene which pays overt homage to ‘All the President’s Men’. In short, it’s impossible to see this film without comparing it to other works on large and small screen about politics. Yet the ‘Ides of March’ succeeds on its own merits.
The acting is superb. Clooney is on autopilot for much of the film but pulls out all the stops later in the movie. Gosling is perfect as the callow youth and innocent abroad who will have to fight against his ambition and the corrupting influence of power. Marisa Tomei gets it spot on as a duplicitous reporter, Evan Rachel Wood is a rising, hot, star. But, if there’s any justice in the World (and after seeing ‘Ides of March’ it’s a justified question) there should be a ferocious Oscar duel-off between Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Both wear the characters of hard-bitten, cynical, amoral political operatives with an ease that displays their skills as two of the greatest character actors of their generation.
Is it the system,/process itself that corrupts or does it attract potentially corrupt people? Human nature, our capacity for pettiness, greed, treachery is, in this milieu anyway, as strong as our propensity for nobility, fairness and service to others. We decry electoral, democratic politics and politicians from the sidelines; we’re content to let others do the dirty, messy work for us (or,as Homer Simpson would say, ‘Can’t someone else do it?’).With most of the West in Recession and with warnings that we’ve already passed the point of no-return into Depression, politics, leadership and democratic participation are called into doubt when, it appears to Left and Right, that the system isn’t working.
‘The Ides of March’ focuses on the gap between political rhetoric and human failings, the role ambition plays in a political contests and how hopes and expectations fall foul to the lust for power. There are better movies about the political process out there but Clooney should be commended for making this fine, smart, and always topical film. One for the geeks and mainstream too, it deserves to be seen by a wide audience.
Margaret Thatcher, Vote Snatcher – Britain in the 1980s
‘There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.’ Margaret Thatcher
Ah the 80s. A time that, for this columnist, doesn’t seem like long ago but for most people under 30, won’t be remembered at all. It was the best of times: anthems of protest, redemption songs, freedom from tyranny…it was the worst of times: industrial strife, mass unemployment, and in Britain, the decade of that ‘bloody woman’, Mrs Thatcher. Nostalgia histories are coming out thick and fast these days but Andy McSmith’s ‘No Such Thing As Society’, is well written and a highly entertaining and, even for someone who lived through them, a most informative read.
McSmith has had a distinguished career as Political Correspondent/Writer for the Observer, Telegraph and Independent and as a Labour party spin-doctor. He is well placed to write this authoritative and accessible cultural & political history of the 1980s. And for McSmith, as with anyone who had even a passing interest in the politics of the period, all roads lead back to Margaret Thatcher. An icon for the Right, loathed on the Left, we are reminded of how Mrs Thatcher’s first and last cabinets were against her (the first, full of ‘wets’, the last, of ‘traitors’). Nobody was a more divisive figure; ask the Scots, or, indeed, anyone north of Watford. In Britain, it will be for two wars (on within, one without) that the ‘Iron Lady’ is best remembered; the Falklands War and the Miners Strike.
The Falklands, was, yes, like two bald men fighting over a comb. It was an imperial adventure. But the Argentinean Junta were, in Michael Foot’s own words, ‘fascist’ and Thatcher, despite initial cabinet opposition, took a huge political and military gamble by going to war thousands of miles of away over a small outcrop in the South Atlantic. McSmith recalls how Labour were snookered into supporting the war and how it saved one of the most unpopular Prime Ministers ever in late 1981 to spurred her to achieve a thumping 1983 General Election victory. Yet, for Thatcher, compromise was not a preferred political option: when it came to taking on the miners, she wanted to smash them. In doing so, she decimated employment prospects for generations in traditional mining communities and showed that she really meant it when she said there was no such thing as society.
And for some, the greed is good society was very good for them indeed. Deregulation in the City led to an explosion in financial services activity. City bonuses became front page news, public share offerings of denationalised industries and utilities were commonplace and as McSmith observes, North and South became more divided. ‘Loadsamoney’, Harry Enfield’s satirical creation, became a hero for the very people he was caricaturing. Culturally, things were changing too.
The Singles Charts were still hugely important for breaking into the Big-time. LPs and Cassettes would start their relatively swift decline. McSmith reminds the reader of some of the great music of the time; particularly the Smiths and The Specials. Could a song like ‘Ghost Town’ get to Number One now? But to talk of 80’s music is too much of a generalisation; for every Billy Bragg, there were many Duran Durans. Band and LiveAid are rightly namechecked as hugely culturally significant events; music could be political with both a big and a small ‘p’. Bob Geldof became a people’s hero for his ability to cut through the crap. Music became further subdivided into tribes with the rise of the New Romantics among other musical genres and sub-genres.
So what’s changed since the 80s? Arguably we have more social but less economic freedom. We buy the latest electronic devices that are remarkably advanced by 1980s standards but we seem to have less consumer choice since the rise of the hyper corporation. We have become more connected yet more atomised. As consumers we’re happy with the intangible but want it for nothing. Politics appears powerless against global capital yet we routinely hold governments accountable for recessions at election times. And yet, we can’t define the ethos of a decade until we get perspective. Mostly, we just grow older and arguably, not a lot wiser.
* ‘No Such Thing As Society – A History of Britain in the 1980s’ Andy McSmith, Constable, 2011
All The News That’s Fit To Hack
Like Banquo’s Ghost, the Murdoch Phone Hacking story keeps hovering and refuses to go away. Civic order may collapse in London but all roads eventually lead back to Wapping. The affair is one of the biggest political scandals since Watergate. Carl Bernstein has already
highlighted the similarities, albeit with Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, not a Richard Nixon-type White House, being the focal point for revelations and investigations. The latest headlines are extraordinary (in the words of the Guardian ‘News of the World’s ex-royal editor Clive Goodman said phone hacking was ‘widely discussed’ at paper’s meetings’). James Murdoch may be recalled to appear before parliament (whether he appears is another matter) and the scandal comes back to Cameron in the form of the dirty bomb that is Andy Coulson. Look at my works ye mighty and despair.
Rebecca Brooks clung on and on as News International’s Chief Executive. Rupert Murdoch appears to have closed a newspaper in vain, albeit a tawdry rag that won’t be missed, to try to save the career of his favourite henchwoman. The Murdoch brand has been destroyed, his aura of power, his bullying contempt for decency and democracy in Britain has been scythed; he may well hang on to the rest of his business conglomerate, but when it comes to exercising raw political power, he is a spent force. He has polluted journalism and has been a stain on the notion of a ‘free press’.
The Tories and Labour have kowtowed to Murdoch since the 1970s. Traditionally, he will back whoever can push through his agenda – he broke Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party and forced ‘New Labour’ to be a supplicant at his feet. The Conservatives, and David Cameron in particular, have been hobbled by their Faustian pact with the Murdoch press; Cameron’s appointment of Andy Coulson looks particularly idiotic and brings his judgment into question. The more David Cameron claims he wasn’t warned of Coulson’s disastrous potential, the more Labour and the Guardian pile on the pressure.
Ed Miliband was having an indifferent few months; his handling of the hacking scandal could well be the making of him. He has acknowledged Labour’s mistakes from the past and frankly, shame, at cosying up to Rupert Murdoch and now has the look of a man unbound; he and his party more to gain than to lose by going after News International. He has surveyed the bizarre Met Police investigation, the unconscionable hacking of possibly thousands of phones and the public disgust at the recent turn of events. Labour have set many of the terms of the debate; they could drive a wedge in the Coalition and align Labour and the Liberal Democrats as future government partners.
The only party that can really hold its head up for past behaviour are the Liberal Democrats. From the days of Paddy Ashdown’s humiliation (‘Paddy Pantsdown’) and before, Clegg’s party have never curried favour with News International. And now they can get some major brownie points by pointing this out. They never took the Murdoch shilling. Nick Clegg needs to grasp this as an opportunity to recover lost ground after having been perceived as Cameron’s mudguard.
A great deal of credit must go to Hugh Grant and others in ‘Hacked Off’ campaign who have done a lot of the running in this whole scandal. They and all decent people have been revolted by the behaviour of News International. Regulation of the Press will be strengthened; Lord Justice Levenson, will, according to Cameron, have the following frames of reference:
‘The culture, practices and ethics of the press, their relationship with the police, the failure of the current system of regulation, the contacts made, and discussions had, between national newspapers and politicians, why previous warnings about press misconduct were not heeded and the issue of cross-media ownership…The second part of the inquiry will examine, the extent of unlawful or improper conduct at the News of the World and other newspapers. And the way in which management failures may have allowed this to happen. This part of the Inquiry will also look into the original police investigation and the issue of corrupt payments to police officers. And it will consider the implications for the relationships between newspapers and the police.’
Levenson’s recommendations will be keenly awaited. In the meantime, criminal investigations proceed apace; the Murdochs are still in charge of News International and Rupert Murdoch is still an incredibly wealthy man. But his bid for BSkyB majority control, which he was forced to withdraw, would have had the contempt of Westminster and the British people. The man who brought you the ‘News of the World’ is watching his own world implode all around him. Millions of people will be happy with this
Building the Mili Brand – ‘Ed: The Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader’
Ed Miliband is a leader in progress. After nearly a year in the job, the British public is still making up their collective minds about who he is and what he stands for. Initially dubbed ‘Red Ed’ in the aftermath of his victory over elder brother and leadership favourite David, Ed Miliband is only now finding his feet with the media, speaking with confidence and projecting leadership. He was written off as a ‘dud’ only a few weeks ago but has garnered enthusiastic praise from the left and (some of the) right-wing press for his handling of ‘Hackgate’. ‘Ed: the Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader’ by Mehdi Hasan and James McIntyre, profiles the man charged with the task of bringing Labour back into government by 2015.
The Milibands could not but have been politically engaged; the authors description of parents’ Ralph and Deborah’s nurturing of the boys considerable intelligence shows that David and Ed had an essentially happy childhood. Ralph and Marion were Jewish, but secular, intellectuals; Ralph Miliband was one of the foremost ‘New Left’ thinkers of the time and a giant in the sociology world; they had both escaped from Nazi occupied Europe to find freedom as British citizens. The boys attended Haverstock, a local comprehensive, where former MP Oona King was a fellow pupil.
Hasan & MacIntyre chronicle Ed Miliband’s time at Oxford where he studied PPE and honed his political skills in the university Labour branch. He was a popular, if geekish student and made many friends and few enemies. The irony of Ed’s Labour leadership slogan ‘Ed Speaks Human’, an obvious dig at David, was that Ed, while by no means dull or emotionally detached, was never the life and soul of the party (although ‘Ed Speaks Robot’ would be a more apposite response to a recent ‘youtube’ mash-up of Miliband repeating a soundbite to death).
The authors give a particularly good account of Miliband’s time as a Special Advisor (SPAD) to Gordon Brown; Brown worked him hard and came to greatly admire his ability, mind, and potential and this feeling was reciprocated from Miliband to Brown. Such was the Brown’s inner court’s disdain for the Blairites post-Granita, that Ed, as a SPAD, when delivering news in his (usually) customary mild-mannered way, became known as an ‘Emissary from the Planet Fuck’. He was and is a wonk but has, according to the authors, usually sought to persuade, rather than cajole.
Miliband became an MP for Darlington in 2005 and was rapidly promoted to the Ministerial post of Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. The authors contend that even though the 2009 Copenhagen Summit on the environment and climate change was adjudged a failure, Miliband’s efforts, application and achievements deserve high praise. He remained deeply loyal to Brown during all the aborted heaves on his leadership, saying that overthrowing the Scot would ‘be like killing our father’.
The leadership race, saw a huge breach in fraternal relations between the two brothers; ‘In the space of a single summer, David and Ed had gone from political allies and friends to sworn political enemies.’ Hasan & MacIntyre hear from friends of Ed and of David and there are some sharply different views of the leadership contest coming from each camp. The brothers themselves may patch up their relationship sooner rather than later but it could take longer for their respective followers to do so. Married with two children, Ed is a family man himself now and will be conscious of how family and politics can be a difficult mix.
Miliband has been in the role for less than twelve months and had been accused of failing to connect with swing voters on the ‘shares our values’ scorecard. The News International implosion has been a game changer for him however; gone is the view of Miliband as hesitant and overly cautious so typified in his hedging during recent public sector strikes. The authors present an Ed Miliband that’s more than capable of leading from the front on a post- New Labour platform.
At 41, Ed certainly has time on his side. If he can continue his recent form, then there’s every reason to think that there’s a bright future ahead for him and his party. Anything can and does happen in politics, just look at the Murdoch collapse of the last fortnight; who could have predicted the speed and impact of the story over the past two weeks? Ed Miliband has his window of opportunity now and he can’t afford to waste it.
Mehdi Hasan & James MacIntyre have written a highly readable, informative and observant biography. Both have excellent contacts in the Labour Party, on either side of the Miliband divide. A book more for the cognoscenti of the Blair-Brown era and politicos rather than for the general reader, ‘Ed, the Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader’ makes for an enjoyable, comprehensive and well written account of Ed Miliband’s (mostly political) life so far.
‘Ed: The Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader’ – Mehdi Hasan &
James MacIntyre – Biteback Publishing – £17.99 – pp336′
Explosive Material – ‘Countdown to Zero’
“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” Robert Oppenheimer [ ‘father’ of the atomic bomb]
Nuclear annihilation is something that most of us, as a species, are in complete denial of. Armageddon is just too horrific a concept; since the end of the Cold War, many optimistically believe it’s an unlikely prospect . This could well be humanity’s hubris, and the team behind ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ have produced another high quality documentary in ‘Countdown to Zero’; they consider the hard and terrifying realities of nuclear proliferation and destruction. It makes for discomforting viewing.
‘Countdown to Zero’s theme and refrain is a JFK quote when he warned that the dangers of global nuclear self-immolation stem from ‘accident, miscalculation, or by madness’. The Cuban Missile Crisis was an example of all three. We were then at a minute to midnight and the filmmakers say we will come close to, or horrifyingly go beyond, that time in the near future.
In the Palomares Incident (1966) – an actual event, not a Jason Bourne film, a B52 carrying four nukes crashed with a refuelling plane; three bombs fell to earth in Spain, one dropped into the Mediterranean. Two years later, another B52 and another crash, in Thule, Greenland. A cover up was immediately enacted to disguise the seriousness of the event. ‘Broken Arrow’ isn’t just a more than passable John Woo movie, it happened. Accidents, being what they are, will always happen.
The madness is all around for us to see – the twin menaces of terrorism and proliferation were amply aided and abetted by Pakistan’s AQ Khan. Khan is a national hero is his homeland after building a ‘Muslim Bomb’. He also had a successful career in supplying nuclear weapon technology and equipment to North Korea and Iran. He was eventually banged to rights, rumbled after trying to sell off-the-shelf nuclear bomb secrets to Libya. A latter day Prometheus Unbound, the actions of Khan’s international nuclear supply chain ripped much of the Non Proliferation Treaty to pieces. On the terrorism front Al Qaeda would have gone nuclear if they could. As long as enriched uranium is being smuggled out of the former USSR, terrorist/non-national agents will seek to acquire a ‘primitive’ nuclear bomb.
Miscalculation? We have come very close to nuclear war on several occasions – the most alarming being comparatively recently in 1995. A small non-military rocket launched in Norway led to a real life ‘War Games’ scenario in the Kremlin. Boris Yeltsin was less than ten minutes from launching Russian ICBMs in response to a supposed NATO attack. As the film sardonically and chillingly notes, the human race was fortunate that Yeltsin wasn’t drunk; we have never been definitively informed as to what transpired in those moments. Testimony from a former ‘Minuteman’ turnkey (the NORAD Officers who would launch their missiles within one minute of the balloon going up) highlights how it was down to sheer luck that war never broke out because of ‘hairtrigger’ controls being activated in error. ‘Dr Strangelove’ was more real than we thought.
The documentary has a string of talking heads interviews – Tony Blair, Jimmy Carter, Robert McNamara and former CIA agent Valerie Plame to name but a few. Mikhail Gorbachev gives a powerful and emotional account of the Reykjavik Summit and provides a reminder of how transitory political power can be.
Some slight criticism of an otherwise excellent documentary; Osama Bin Laden is still alive (the film was released in the US in 2010), there’s no interview with Mohamed ElBaradei or indeed any current IAEA official and, as such, it’s very American-centred. There’s only a passing mention of Israel, the only country in the Middle East to have the Bomb.
The filmmakers end with a rallying call to arms (pun intended) for muscular non-proliferation protocols and regulation. They advocate an increase in the multilateral governance of nuclear arms and material leading aiming towards containment and destruction (and sooner rather than later). Barack Obama spoke in Prague of the need for a nuclear weapon-free world: ‘I’m not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly –- perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence’. The alternative is to continue playing Russian roulette with the lives of billions until we do not live to survive the consequences of our folly; Oppenheimer’s words could prove all too prophetic.
Enough Blatter, Time to Blow the Whistle
‘What I am most proud of is the legacy of hope that FIFA and football leaves around the world. It makes all of the efforts and energy I pour into this job worth it’, Sepp Blatter
‘All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely’, Lord Acton
How much is a vote worth? A peerage, a knighthood, a Rolex watch or all of the above? These, and other, questions of governance, bribery, and politics have cropped up again in the ongoing soap-opera that is FIFA (Federation of International Football Associations). Football’s governing body is dragging itself and the game through the mud and, predictably, money is the root of it all. The unregulated power that the organisation’s delegates have in deciding who will host the quadrennial World Cup allows for massive bribery opportunities. Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s current Don Corleone, looks, at time of writing, like he’s seen off any meaningful corruption investigation. This show, unfortunately, goes on and on; football’s no longer the People’s Game.
Of course, both Ireland and England have grounds for believing that FIFA can not be reformed. Ireland were denied an obvious replay after the infamous handball incident against the French while England were outplayed and outspent (possibly corruptly) in their attempt to become host for the 2018 tournament. The 2022 event is scheduled for Qatar, a boiling patch of desert with no football tradition where the promised air conditioning technology hasn’t even been invented yet; this was, by any reasoning, a bizarre decision; now (confirming most people’s suspicions), it’s alleged to have been a corrupt one. Corruption and football have become, sadly, synonymous.
Millions are funnelled through FIFA’s annual accounts; very little of this is of this largesse is properly accounted for. David Yallop’s ‘How they Stole the Game’ was written about this creative accounting endemic to João Havelenge’s previous regime; there have been few changes since the book’s publication more than ten years ago. If anything, the last decade have seen even more multiples of cash sloshing round the higher echelons of the game. FIFA essentially gets sovereign states to subjugate themselves every four years for the honour of hosting a loss-making (but not for FIFA) World Cup. Football can do a lot better.
Yes FIFA can run tournaments effectively; but they organise them under FIFA’s laws and to FIFA’s benefit; their ‘Fairplay’ mascot seems like a bad joke when compared to tales of gold watches, cash bribes and other venal demands. The South African World Cup attracted millions of viewers and still had the pulling power to stop events in an afternoon and bring joyous scenes across the globe. But it was still run by ‘the man’ – a greedy, bloated and discredited figure that has an insatiable demand for cash.
European nations need to take the lead and act in concert to either threaten to leave FIFA or actually resign and start up a new governing body for world football. Greed is so much at the heart of the modern game that national football associations may not be able to see that it’s in their own financial and political interests to no longer tolerate the status quo. Solidarity in sport has never been more important.
Football has an incredible power to bring people together and needs to be organised fairly and effectively on an international basis. Sepp Blatter, as a symbol of all that is wrong in the sport, must go, but FIFA can no longer be fixed. It needs to be broken up and replaced so the so the beautiful game can be beautiful again. We need to put Football First.
‘Jaw Jaw’ and ‘War War’
‘I was called a terrorist yesterday, but when I came out of jail, many people embraced me, including my enemies, and that is what I normally tell other people who say those who are struggling for liberation in their country are terrorists. I tell them that I was also a terrorist yesterday, but, today, I am admired by the very people who said I was one’ Nelson Mandela
‘If inciting people to do that [9/11] is terrorism, and if killing those who kill our sons is terrorism, then let history be witness that we are terrorists’ Osama Bin Laden
The beauty of really good satire is that it makes us question our assumptions and our politics. So when Ali G asked ‘What is Terrorism?’, it wasn’t solely for our amusement. It’s a very good question to which there is no clear answer.
The maxim that ‘one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist’ still applies. In ‘Talking to Terrorists’, Peter Taylor reflects on his career of reporting on and interviewing (and let’s be careful about definitions here) non-state paramilitaries that use violence to achieve political ends (in the broadest sense of the word). Mandela and Bin Laden couldn’t be more different when it comes to respect for human dignity and democracy but terrorism is a hugely subjective term; you can label any non-governmental guerilla force as ‘terrorist’ depending on your point of view.
Peter Taylor has a long and distinguished career as an objective and trustworthy reporter. He earned his journalism chops from reporting on Northern Ireland in the early 1970s and became one of the most informed writers on Republicanism and Loyalism. He later became a noted expert on Al Qaeda. ‘Talking to Terrorists’ principally focuses on these two areas.
Almost everyone who lived through the worst of the ‘Troubles’, as they were so euphemistically called, felt that the conflict/war/terrorism could have gone on forever. Apart from John Hume and a very small circle of politicians, government officials, and ‘spooks’, few had any optimism that a negotiated settlement was possible. One of those optimists was Derry businessman Brendan Duddy and Taylor gives this remarkable man, known as ‘the Mountain Climber’, his well-earned place in history. Duddy was a go-between and facilitator for IRA negotiations in the 70s and 80s when literally no-one else would meet them. His role as a sherpa for peace is worthy of John Le Carré and Taylor does justice to this unsung and modest hero. Taylor’s first-hand observations about Martin McGuinness make for interesting reading too.
Al Qaeda and the Taliban are fundamentalist in their world view, ruthless in their tactics and long term planners when it comes to strategy. They would also fit most people’s definitions of terrorists. Taylor meets with jihadists and Islamic extremists and seeks to understand their motivation; he asks them how they were radicalised and questions them directly as to whether they consider themselves to be terrorists. The responses are significant and varied; future negotiation may be possible on some narrow issues and Taylor notes that while issues like Palestine are clearly well-defined political subjects for discussion, the re-establishment of a Caliphate is an obvious non-runner; there is limited room for manoeuvre.
Many aspects of ‘The War on Terror’ have been hugely damaging for the US. Guantanamo has been both a policy and PR disaster with little actual intelligence coming from the detainees. Waterboarding and torture have been morally wrong – Taylor quotes an Intelligence source as saying torture can never be justified, even with a ‘ticking bomb’ scenario – and the US, and the CIA in particular, has suffered terrible ‘reputational damage’ over the last decade. Taylor highlights the refusal of the FBI to take part in ‘enhanced techniques’ and rightly praises them for upholding the rule of law. His account of the London ’7/7′ bombings is chilling.
Taylor is an old-school journalist: unassuming, reliable and a collector of impeccable contacts. He lets the story speak for itself and never hogs the limelight. This book is essential reading in the burgeoning Al Qaeda and the War on Terror literature. It is a parable for our times, for ‘terrorists’, as used to be said about the poor, will probably always be with us. ‘Talking to Terrorists’ is a superb show-case for Taylor’s expertise.
‘Talking to Terrorists – Peter Taylor’, Harper Press, £14.99
