Britain Playing its Part on the World Stage
Posted as a comment to Daniel Finkelstein@s piece in The Times of 3.2.10 daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk
The news today (press and radio), mentions the review of defence spending. We hear and phrases like “Britain Playing its Part on the World Stage”, “Britain being an Important Player.” I see ten year old boys (nine, eight, year old?), myself included, strutting their stuff. “I’m the leader, ’cause I can beat you up.”
Britain and France still spend much more of their GPD on Defence than other European countries. (Did I say “Defence”? Surely “Attack” is the correct term.) This is because British and French politicians delude themselves that national greatness depends on having plenty of guns and bombs with which to beat other nations up.
I hope – I think – that by the age of fourteen or so, I no longer believed being able to beat up other boys was most important thing to achieve.
Haven’t British politicians learnt yet that Britain’s greatness has nothing to do with shooting and bombing foreigners?
What British people will be remembered by the historians? William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin. Poets and scientists. Not generals and politicians.
The plays of Sophocles and Aristophanes are still being performed two and a half thousand years after their deaths. How many members of the public attending one of those performances would be able to say who Pericles was. The ‘great leader’ of Athens at her greatest did not even merit a biography for nearly five hundred years.
“Britain Playing its Part on the World Stage.” Maybe British leaders should take that phrase literally rather than metaphorically, and increase expenditure on arts and sciences, rather than on exploding bombs.
Showing posts with label Chilcot Inquiry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chilcot Inquiry. Show all posts
Wednesday, 3 February 2010
Friday, 29 January 2010
Behold the head of a traitor!
A cold January day. The deposed King Blair, stripped of his royal robes, wearing only simple breeches and a white shirt with the collar open, is marched by a squad of soldiers bearing pikes and muskets, to the scaffold on Tower Hill. The executioner, dressed all in black, his face masked except for the eye slits, waits motionless, the enormous axe at his side. Blair kneels at the block. The traditional drum roll. The axe descends.
“Behold the head of a traitor.”
The camera’s time code flickers between January 1642 and January 2010.
Let it flicker a bit more. A more appropriate execution scene. It is 1789. Le Roi Tony, condemned by the people of Paris, is being driven by tumbril to execution, while Queen Cheri Antoinette nibbles at cake sandwiches helplessly. The tumbril approaches. Suddenly, the crowd is pushed aside; an unutterably hideous washerwoman, using her stinking laundry baskets like clubs, shoves her way to the guillotine. As Le Roi mounts the platform, the washerwoman draws a rapier, and disposes of the entire guard with a few fancy thrusts and ripostes. For, of course, once we see a hideous washerwoman anywhere near Madame Guillotine, we know it is that master of disguise and accent, Sir Percy Blakeney Bush, turning his aristocratic drawl into perfect Parisian gutter argot. Robespierre raises his impotent hands in horror, as Sir Percy Bush whips up the horses, and the tumbrel, with the King on board, gallops unscathed through the entire French Republican army, and another Carry On film shoot hears the call “Wrap.”
Today will be a farce. We all know Blair knew the invasion of Iraq was illegal. But Blair has escaped the scaffold, and will live out his life of shame, struggling in penury, forced to depend on pathetic hand-outs of $20,000 dollars a minute on the American lecture circuit.
Blair acted like an absolute monarch. Cromwell and co attempted to abolish absolute monarchy for ever. Absolutism popped up again, once the British Prime Minister established his right to act like a monarch and declare war.
In 2003 Parliament was incapable of checking Blair. Parliament is no longer a suitable defence of our rights as citizens to say whether our fellow citizens should die in foreign field.
Let the lesson of Britain’s illegal invasion of, and ultimate disgraced retreat from, the ravaged country of Iraq be written into our non-existent constitution. The right to declare war must be exercised by referendum of the entire citizen body. No other person or organisation should be allowed to usurp that right of ours.
“Behold the head of a traitor.”
The camera’s time code flickers between January 1642 and January 2010.
Let it flicker a bit more. A more appropriate execution scene. It is 1789. Le Roi Tony, condemned by the people of Paris, is being driven by tumbril to execution, while Queen Cheri Antoinette nibbles at cake sandwiches helplessly. The tumbril approaches. Suddenly, the crowd is pushed aside; an unutterably hideous washerwoman, using her stinking laundry baskets like clubs, shoves her way to the guillotine. As Le Roi mounts the platform, the washerwoman draws a rapier, and disposes of the entire guard with a few fancy thrusts and ripostes. For, of course, once we see a hideous washerwoman anywhere near Madame Guillotine, we know it is that master of disguise and accent, Sir Percy Blakeney Bush, turning his aristocratic drawl into perfect Parisian gutter argot. Robespierre raises his impotent hands in horror, as Sir Percy Bush whips up the horses, and the tumbrel, with the King on board, gallops unscathed through the entire French Republican army, and another Carry On film shoot hears the call “Wrap.”
Today will be a farce. We all know Blair knew the invasion of Iraq was illegal. But Blair has escaped the scaffold, and will live out his life of shame, struggling in penury, forced to depend on pathetic hand-outs of $20,000 dollars a minute on the American lecture circuit.
Blair acted like an absolute monarch. Cromwell and co attempted to abolish absolute monarchy for ever. Absolutism popped up again, once the British Prime Minister established his right to act like a monarch and declare war.
In 2003 Parliament was incapable of checking Blair. Parliament is no longer a suitable defence of our rights as citizens to say whether our fellow citizens should die in foreign field.
Let the lesson of Britain’s illegal invasion of, and ultimate disgraced retreat from, the ravaged country of Iraq be written into our non-existent constitution. The right to declare war must be exercised by referendum of the entire citizen body. No other person or organisation should be allowed to usurp that right of ours.
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