Hadrian's Wallet: Scotland's independence referendum and oil

Depending on who’s talking, the prospect of an independent Scotland would see either the arrival of a new, modern and confident state or it will be fed into the Euro-blender to be destroyed forever. The idea of an independent Scotland is not new – it dates back to those unhappy with the original Act of Union in 1707. What is new is the proposed referendum in 2014 to give Scots a chance to vote on the matter.

The governing Scottish National Party put the cat among the constitutional pigeons with their announcement on 10 January they would hold a referendum in autumn 2014. The referendum will ask two questions. The first is whether there should be an extension of the powers and responsibilities of the Scottish Parliament, short of independence; while the second asks whether the Scottish Parliament should "also have its powers extended to enable independence to be achieved".

In many respects, the controversy over the referendum is a storm in a tea-cup. All the polls suggest that voters will turn down the proposal. YouGov’s polling from 1990 to 2009 show support for full independence hovering around the high 20s to low 30s percentiles. A clearer majority – though never more than 60 percent – are happier with more tax raising powers for the existing Scottish parliament created in 1999. The referendum that created that parliament two years earlier showed most Scots wanted power over their own taxes (currently they can vary the basic rate of personal income tax by a maximum of 3p in the pound). The issue with that was as First Minister Alex Salmond said in October 2010, “there is no point in being a pocket money parliamanet when the pocket money stops.”

The 2011 study of Scottish attitudes showed 70 percent of the population saw themselves as Scottish first compared to about 15 percent who thought they were British. The study also showed that support for increased devolution is also on the up but there was a lot of ambiguous findings on specifics that show there is much to play for. Specific questions on who should pay for what and by what amount narrowed opinion in a way that was rather different than the ungranulated question of whether you support nationalist or unionist.

Opinion is also divided as to whether Scotland would do better alone with its annual £6.5b North Sea oil wealth. According to Michael Moore, the secretary of state for Scotland, the year on year variations of oil prices in 2011 were better managed in a UK wide economy where Scotland could share in the risks as well as rewards. But Scottish finance secretary John Swinney disagreed saying Scotland contributed far more to the UK Exchequer than its share of population which underlined the strength of Scotland’s finances and the opportunities of independence. Scottish opinion polls consistently support the latter view with most Scots thinking those south of Hadrian’s Wall do better from the Union than they do.

Yet opinion polls are less clear on the economic benefits of independence. Most people think they would pay slightly more tax under an Edinburgh administration and there is no consensus on whether the nation would be better off financially. The debate reflects a strong and complex intertwining of English, Scottish and British traditions that make most Scots slightly ambivalent about their nationality.

Unlike the Irish Act of Union a century later, the English-Scottish Act of Union of 1702 was a genuine marriage of near-equals. Scottish kings had sat on the throne of England for over a hundred years (until ousted by the Glorious Revolution). Scotland was still the minor party in the marriage, and as in the case of Ireland, bribery was needed to get the Act passed in Edinburgh. Scotland was still reeling from the economic catastrophe of the Darien Scheme which hoped to set up a Scottish colony in Panama. But the Act of Union was good for Scotland; it gave its economy free trade with England and led directly to the Scottish Enlightenment of the mid 1700s. Thinkers like David Hume and Adam Smith had an immense effect not only on Scotland but on the newly United Kingdom and beyond.

Scots became a driving force in the new British Empire, despite the continued rebellions of the highlanders. The lowlands were transformed by the Industrial Revolution with linen, coal and steel and a massive financial centre. Glasgow became a powerhouse city based on shipbuilding and railways. Scottish cities paid a terrible price for their industrialisation in World War II with extrensive bombing by the Luftwaffe. The deindustrialisation of the post-war years was balanced by the discovery of oil in the North Sea in 1970. Though production has fallen in recent years, a 2010 report said there was still 25 billion barrels of oil in Scottish waters, though they are in harder to reach areas near the Shetlands.

The importance of oil in any border negotiation between England and Scotland cannot be underestimated. 85% of British oil is in Scottish waters. The nationalist site Oil of Scotland claims Westminster moved Scotland's marine boundaries in 1999 from Berwick-upon-Tweed to Carnoustie “illegally making 6000 miles of Scotland's waters English.” The website called the Scottish Adjacent Waters Boundaries Order 1999 an “unjust act secretly passed, without the consent of the Scottish People” that took 15% of oil and gas revenues out of the Scottish sector of the North Sea and £2.2 Billion out of the Scottish economy. “This lost revenue is more than the proposed £35 Billion Scottish budget cuts for the next 15 years,” the group said.

Clegg and Cameron: It's Complicated

The funniest joke doing the rounds on social media today is that British LibDem leader Nick Clegg has now changed his Facebook relationship status to “it's complicated”. It is an amusing but accurate enough summary of where things stand after the tightest British election since February 1974. That year’s hung parliament forced another election later that year and many are predicting the same outcome after last Thursday’s election produced no clear winner. Despite losing seats from 2005, Clegg’s party is in a position to woo a suitor and some heavy duty negotiation is on the cards before a shotgun wedding can happen in the days and weeks to come. (Photograph: Luke Macgregor/Reuters)

The most obvious and workable coalition would be between the Conservatives and the LibDems. The Financial Times reports David Cameron and Clegg are involved in “intense negotiation” to agree on a power-sharing pact before the markets open on Monday morning. During the election campaign Cameron had ruled out such an arrangement but he appears to have now woken up to the realpolitik of the situation.

Cameron is likely to realise his dream of being the first Tory Prime Minister since John Major yet the election must be tinged with some disappointment. After seemingly heading for a landslide victory in poll after poll, his popularity slumped in a mediocre election campaign. Voters wanted Gordon Brown out but did not trust Cameron enough to give him an undiluted majority. The Tory-leaning Telegraph is openly talking about who might replace him if attempts at forming a government fell apart.

With 649 seats up for decision, a party must get 325 seats to form a majority. In practice it needs to be even higher to counter the risk of MPs crossing the floor or losing by-elections. The Tories had the most votes and the most seats in a swing of 3.8 percent but could only turn this into 306 seats. With the LibDems on 57 seats (down 5 from 2005), a coalition between the two would muster 363 seats for a comfortable majority of 77 seats. The question remains however is whether either would survive for five years to another election, given the philosophical differences between the parties.

A possible alternative would be allowing the Tories to form a minority government on the understanding the LibDems would not block supply, but this would appear to be a very slippery slope towards an early election. What Clegg wants most is electoral reform so that their 23 percent of the vote translates into a similar number of seats (at the moment they have 8.8 percent). Neither the Tories nor Labour (nor the media which prefers the clean lines of "first past the post") are inclined to support this reform.

But if Clegg has some hope of getting a negotiated settlement with Cameron, there appears no chance of him supporting Gordon Brown to return to 10 Downing Street, even though the two parties are closer. With Labour on 258 seats, the combined parties would be 12 seats short of an outright majority and requiring the support of motley nationalist groups such as the Scotland’s SNP (6), Wales’ Plaid Cymru (3) and Northern Ireland’s SLDP (3) to get them over the line. While such a rainbow coalition is possible and common enough in Europe, experience suggests they rarely last for long.

There was also probably a great deal of truth in the rumour the post-election phone call between Clegg and Brown ended acrimoniously. It seems reasonable that Clegg might have suggested Labour was tainted by Brown’s leadership and the two parties might work better together with a new Labour leader. A senior unnamed LibDem source told the BBC’s Jon Sopel the conversation went downhill after Clegg’s resignation suggestion with Brown launching into a “diatribe and a rant” though both parties have strenuously denied Sopel’s report.

Yet whatever the outcome, Labour can cling to the idea the election was a relief. Previous by-elections had seen the party slaughtered with the ultimate humiliation of finishing fifth behind the Greens and the BNP in the 2008 Henley by-election. At that stage, YouGov were polling the Tories at 46 percent to Labour’s 28 percent. Labour haven't improved much since then - they only took 29 percent of the vote last week. But the big difference is the Tories lost 10 percent of the vote in the last two years saving Labour from an electoral whitewash.

Smart money at this stage has to be on a repeat of 1974 and another general election in November or thereabouts. Gordon Brown will be gone by then and one of the Miliband brothers will probably lead the party (it is just too difficult to imagine a British political party led by a man named “Balls”). Just as in 1974, the biggest party should win outright second time round. It is likely the Tories will learn from the mistakes of this campaign and get over the line as UK citizens worry about the effects of continued instability and Labour struggle with a new line up. And electoral reform is likely to wither on the vine.

Britain set for an election and a change of power

In one of those wonderfully quaint British rituals, Gordon Brown drove the short distance from Downing Street to Buckingham Palace today to seek “permission” to dissolve parliament next week and call a general election for 6 May. Brown is heartened for his four-week campaign by a narrowing of the polls according to Guardian ICM. Nevertheless most pundits expect David Cameron’s Conservative Party to win their first election in 18 years in what will be a test of new faces. It is the first election in charge for all three major party leaders Brown, Cameron and the LibDem’s Nick Clegg.

The latest yougov opinion poll has the Tories on 41 percent, Labour 31 and LibDems 18 which is typical of most UK polls which give the Conservatives a lead of 10 points, enough to win an outright majority if it is applied consistently across the country. They are also favoured by notionally redrawn electoral boundaries. The number of seats has risen by 4 since 2005 to 650. Labour had a majority of 66 seats in 2005 with 35 percent of the vote. This has been reduced by successive by-election losses to a working majority of 48. The Tories need a uniform swing of 4.3 percent to be the largest party in parliament and a swing of 7.0 percent for an overall majority. However the first past the post system complicates matters entirely: Labour got almost double the Tory seats in 2005 despite only getting 3 percent more of the popular vote and the LibDems got less than 10 percent of the seats despite getting 22 percent of the vote.

Gordon Brown missed his best chance to win an election in his honeymoon period after he replaced Tony Blair in June 2007. At the time Cameron said Brown had shown "great weakness and indecision", and had made a "humiliating retreat" but he later admitted the Conservatives would have most likely lost that election. By the end of the year, the Tories had regained the lead in the polls they had gained in the dying days of the Blair Government and never looked back.

The 2008 GFC left the British economy in ruins and by 2009 the MP expenses scandal had erupted. All parties were affected (and both Brown and Cameron apologised) to the effect the 2005 election was dubbed “the rotten parliament”. But it was Labour who bore the public brunt of the anger with high-profile casualties such as Speaker Michael Martin (the first to be forced out of office since 1695), and Cabinet ministers Shahid Malik, Jacqui Smith, Hazel Blears and Tony McNulty.

In the event of a hung parliament, the fortunes of the minor parties could become crucial. The LibDems have not made the advances they expected five years ago but the balance of power offers them their best chance to change the voting rules to something more democratic. The Greens have their best ever chance of a breakthrough in Brighton Pavilion and may also do well in Lewisham Deptford. Respect MP George Galloway moves to fight Poplar and Limehouse while they hope to retain his old Bethnal Green and Bow seat too. BNP party leader Nick Griffin is likely to stand in Barking where new boundaries give him a good chance of success. The UKIP’s best hope is Buckingham where their former leader Nigel Farage takes on new Speaker John Bercow.

Nevertheless the main political narrative will be the presidential style contest between Brown and Cameron. Both men are hamstrung. As Matthew Flinders (the British academic not the sailor) wrote, Brown may have the political inclination to deliver far-reaching reform but he lacks the capacity; Cameron is likely to have the capacity but not the inclination. Both will campaign around the state of the economy and whether it is too early to jeopardise the recovery by applying the spending cuts the Tories want. But in the end, it may just be about change. The electorate is tired of Labour. Cameron will most likely win, despite his Posh Boy baggage, simply because he is not Gordon Brown.

Michael Foot dead at 96

The great British parliamentarian and journalist Michael Foot died last week aged 96. He was a Labour MP for ten years from 1945 and then another 32 years from 1960 and led the party to defeat in the 1983 post-Falklands poll as Margaret Thatcher won her second election. While often flayed in the media for his leadership woes and his poor dress sense (his duffel coat wearing at the 1981 Cenotaph memorial service infamously mislabelled by the right-wing press as a “donkey jacket”), Foot held the party together during one of its lowest ebbs and was a great servant to British democracy. (1982 photo of Michael Foot by Jane Bown)

Michael Mackintosh Foot was born and raised in the south-western city of Plymouth, the fifth of seven children of a Scottish mother and Isaac Foot the former mayor of Plymouth. He was schooled there and in a Quaker school in Reading before graduating from Oxford with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics. He graduated in 1934 at the height of the depression and took a job as a shipping clerk in Birkenhead on Merseyside. Foot was shocked by the scale of unemployment he found in Liverpool and it was enough to shake him out of his erstwhile Liberal views and become a socialist.

In 1935 he joined the Labour Party and contested the Welsh seat of Monmouth but lost. He worked for the New Statesman and then was one of the first journalists on the weekly magazine Tribune when it was set up in 1937. Aneurin Bevan recommended him to Lord Beaverbrook to work on the Evening Standard and he eventually became editor in 1942. Under the pseudonym of “Cato”, he also co-authored a book about Chamberlain’s appeasement policy called “Guilty Men” which became a surprise bestseller. His own chronic asthma prevented him from signing up in the war.

Although Foot would continue as a distinguished journalist throughout the 1940s and 1950s, a new career beckoned at the end of the war. He went back to his home town Plymouth and contested the 1945 election which he won as Labour under Clement Atlee ended Churchill’s rule. He held it again in 1950 and 1951 but was a shock loser in 1955 as the Tories increased their majority by 60 seats under Anthony Eden. In 1960 he returned to Wales and contested and won the Ebbw Vale by-election made vacant by his mentor Aneurin Bevan’s death.

After barely a year back in parliament then Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell expelled Foot from the parliamentary party after he led a rebellion against the leadership over defence spending. Gaitskell’s sudden death in 1963 and the ascension of Harold Wilson paved the way for Foot’s return to the party. Foot turned down a role in the Wilson ministry in 1964 preferring to offer criticism from the back bench on matters such as wage restraint, Vietnam and Rhodesia.

After Wilson’s defeat in 1970 the party moved leftwards and arrived at a rapprochement with Foot. When Labour was re-elected in 1974, Foot finally accepted a cabinet position as Secretary of State for Employment. He lost the leadership battle to James Callaghan in 1976 but was elected deputy leader and it was his job to somehow keep the Lib-Lab pact going as the government tottered towards the end of its reign. After the “winter of discontent” in 1979 Labour was put out of its misery by Thatcher, Callaghan resigned and Foot finally had the top job, aged 67.

His immediate task of uniting the badly fractured party was made more difficult by the defection of the Gang of Four to create the Social Democratic Party. With media support and favourable polling, the SDP looked as if it could overtake Labour as the alternative party of power to the Tories, who themselves were in strife as Thatcher’s early policy reforms showed no signs of bringing rewards.

The 1982 Falklands Crisis restored Thatcher’s lead in the polls, Labour’s vote fell by three million and she won the 1983 election with an increased parliamentary majority of 144 seats. Though Labour only polled two percent greater than the combined SDP/Liberal vote, Britain’s first-past-the-post system meant they still took 203 seats to the Alliance’s 23. The scale of the defeat was enough to sink Foot. Harold Wilson’s press secretary Gerald Kaufman famously described Foot’s anti-nuclear, anti-European election manifesto as "the longest suicide note in history". Foot went to the back benches and finally retired from parliament at the 1992 election.

All throughout his life, Foot remained a fervent member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a possible relic from his Quaker education. He was also passionate about the arts and music and a lifelong fan of Plymouth Argyle FC. Neil Kinnock, who followed him as Labour leader, called him “a resolute humanist with profound faith in the ability of free men and women using free institutions to secure irreversible advances in standards of living and liberty for every country and community”.

Although some opinion polls have nominated him the worst Labour leader in history, it is likely no-one else would have done better with the poisoned chalice he was handed in 1979. As well as the Jenkins-inspired ructions on the right, the Militant Tendency was making great strides on the far left while Tony Benn remained a major destabilising influence within the party. As the Guardian said in its obituary, the ultimate judgment may well be he performed the vital service of holding his party together when it was dangerously polarised between Healey and Tony Benn.

Foot was an eloquent parliamentarian with friends across the political spectrum. Enoch Powell loved him because he spoke beautiful English. Foot was well-read, eloquent, devoted to literature and regularly quoted Swift, Disraeli, Hazlitt and Byron. As a student of history, he might have enjoyed the irony of how Labour’s current problems mirror many of his own in the late 1970s. He might also have told them not to despair despite their current problems. As Foot was only too aware, all things must pass.

The BBC and Nick Griffin

When Nick Griffin and fellow British National Party candidate Andrew Brons won two seats at the recent European elections there was no rioting or storming the gates of parliament. Yet when Griffin was invited to talk on the BBC last week all hell broke loose. Television succeeded where the ballot box did not and the appearance of Britain’s fifth largest party on the BBC caused an outbreak of national soul-searching and riots that besieged the broadcaster’s London headquarters. Opponents were furious that the venerable broadcaster was legitimising a far-right wing group by giving them the “oxygen of publicity”. Anti-fascist protesters tried and failed to shut the program down. Supporters said the BNP deserved to be heard, and some free speech advocates defended Grffin’s right to appear on Question Time while expressing a Voltaire-like disagreement with every word he uttered. (photo of BBC riots by Reuters)

The entire affair seems overblown given how irrelevant the BNP are. The party won ten percent of the European election vote in heavily working class areas where the Labor Government is on the nose. Its overall vote was actually down on the 2004 election. It is likely many this year’s protest votes will swing back at the next general election. The BNP are a lunatic fringe for the disaffected with few coherent policies. Its now illegal membership criteria requires that all members be part of the "Indigenous Caucasian" racial group (purely on looks alone) and want everyone who is not so Aryan to go “home”.

Membership of the party is currently closed while apparatchiks write a new constitution to be presented to members for acceptance. The BNP’s limited appeal is based (as was the National Front of the 1970s) in the notion that Britain is being “swamped” by miscellaneous “others”. The party will never win an election or gain any sort of power. While their views might be repugnant to many, they also give voice to the frustration of many who want to blame someone else for their own inadequacies.

What the controversy really showed is the immense power of the national broadcaster. Popular media such as the BBC can amplify any subject matter. According to www.ranking.com, bbc.co.uk is one of the world’s 25 most used websites and the second most accessed news site (after CNN). Its British television stations remain hugely influential and eight million people watched Thursday’s episode of Question Time which featured Griffin and other British politicians including Labor Lord Chancellor Jack Straw.

In Britain there has been a strong tradition of public ownership of media going back to the invention of broadcasting in the 1920s. The BBC was created with a government-appointed board of governors and funded by an annual licence fee. Under John Reith the BBC established a high-minded tradition that eschewed the position of the popular tabloid newspapers in favour of high culture. Committed to the avoidance of sensationalism, it did not hire its first newspaper journalist until 1932. According to journalism academic Michael Schudson, the BBC forbade discussion of birth control in the 1930s and 1940s under its government-regulated monopoly. In the face of changing social values and competition from ITV in the 1950s it was discussed along with divorce and other controversial topics. Competition finally gave the BBC something to worry about other than their political paymasters.

The BBC rose to the new challenge with a topical political question-and-answer radio program. “Any Questions?” started on the Home Service in 1948 and runs to this day. Notably the program was stopped for ten minutes in 1976 when far-right politician Enoch Powell appeared and anti-fascist protesters threw bricks at the church where the show was recorded. Three years later, the format was tried on television as Question Time. Three panel members from each of the main parties were joined by a non-politician to face questions from the audience. In 1999, a fifth panel member was invited who was either from the minor parties or another non-politician. Over 30 years the show has become the BBC's flagship political panel show.

The BNP have been persona non grata until their recent European and council victories. When Griffin finally did appear on the show, it was almost an anti-climax. The BNP leader was sensible enough to leave his more outrageous opinions in the dressing room and he tried to steer a course of a drastic, but understandable, reaction to an immigration crisis. Like most politicians he used as many words he could to say as little as possible. He claimed was a “moderniser” who simply wanted to end immigration. He was also nervous and the target of intense questioning and jeering from the crowd.

Nearly every question was related to BNP politics and Griffin was pilloried by a multi-cultural audience. One person told him that “the vast majority of this audience finds what you stand for to be completely disgusting.” The libertarian Brendan O’Neill wrote in Spiked called the debate “surreal” and a “cultural lynching of Griffin by members of a political elite bereft of ideas and lost for words.” He saw it as an act of moral distancing that established a sense of “us and him” that made Griffin a “voodoo doll they can stick pins in to try to ward off their own political misfortunes.”

Griffin will probably feel the pain of these pinpricks is worthwhile and the BNP will undoubtedly gain traction as a result of his appearance. The party’s issues will temporarily get on the agenda. Many will sympathise with the way Griffin was torn apart on the program and others will react positively to his racist message. Nevertheless the BNP will always be a fringe party that will be handicapped by Britain’s first past-the-post electoral system. The BBC was right to allow him on Question Time and have the right to invite who ever they see fit to appear on their shows. Broadcasting asserts a right to public access. By encouraging more people to keep informed it encourages more participation in public life. More participation will likely mean more unsavoury voices in the public sphere but it is crucial they be heard. Anything less is toxic to democracy.

Brighton bombing - 25 years on

On the 25th anniversary of the Brighton Conservative Party conference bombing, British media announced that the man behind the attack would attend a reconciliation ceremony at the House of Commons. Patrick Magee served 14 years for the bombing before being released as part of the peace process. But he was now been invited to a reconciliation and forgiveness event at Westminster on the 84th birthday of former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher a day later on 13 October. Baroness Thatcher would not be there but Magee would renew acquaintance with Jo Tufnell (nee Berry) the daughter of one of the five people killed in the explosion. (photo of Grand Hotel after the explosion from Wikipedia)

Patrick Magee is a former IRA operative who was born in Belfast in 1951 but moved with his family to Norwich when he was two. He returned to Belfast at the age of 18 in 1969 and joined the Provisional IRA soon afterwards just as the Troubles began to escalate. Magee had an aptitude for bomb making and rose to become the IRA's Chief Explosives Officer. He was imprisoned from 1973 to 1975 for being a member of the IRA before returning to active service and leading a massive mainland bombing campaign in 1978.

In 1979 Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister in a landslide election win. Within two years she was deemed public enemy number 1 by the IRA for her strong stance against the Maze hunger strikes which led to the deaths of Bobby Sands and nine other prisoners. Brighton would be the IRA’s revenge dish served cold.

The then 34-year-old Magee planted the bomb three and a half weeks prior to the explosion. He checked into the Grand on 14 September 1984 under the name of “Roy Walsh” and stayed there for three days. The receptionist allocated him Room 629 “because it was a nice room facing the sea”. There he put his Libyan bomb making skills to good use and primed a 30 pound (13 kg) explosive. He hid the bomb in a bathroom wall with a timing device set for 24 days ahead during the Conservative Party annual conference held at the hotel.

At 2.54am on 12 October, the bomb went off and blasted a massive hole through the hotel's facade. Five people died in the blast. They were Sir Anthony Berry, 59, the MP for Enfield Southgate; Roberta Wakeham, 45, wife of Tory Chief Whip Lord Wakeham; Conservative North West Area Chairman Eric Taylor, 54; Muriel Maclean, 54, wife of Scottish Chairman Sir Donald Maclean (the Macleans were in room 629); and Jeanne Shattock, 52, wife of the Western Area Chairman. Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Norman Tebbit, was rescued from the rubble but his wife was left paralysed for life.

Margaret Thatcher was awake and working on her conference speech at the time of the explosion. It was a day before her birthday. She was on the same floor as the blast but she and her husband Denis were uninjured. Afterwards, the IRA famously released their chilling message. "Today we were unlucky, but remember, we only have to be lucky once; you will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no war."

But peace was the last thing on authorities’ minds. Sussex Police launched their biggest ever investigation to solve the crime. They meticulously tracked down 800 people from 50 countries who had stayed at the hotel in the month before the attack. Just one man could not be accounted for: Roy Walsh. The direction of the explosion pointed to his room. After three months, police finally matched a palm print on a hotel registration card to a print taken from Magee years earlier when he was arrested as a juvenile in Norwich. Police did not reveal their find hoping he would eventually return to the country.

But Magee did return to Britain without police knowledge. Their breakthrough came when Glasgow police tracked another IRA suspect Peter Sherry to an IRA safe house in the city. Magee was sprung. At his trial in June 1986 Justice Boreham recommended Magee serve a minimum of 35 years after an Old Bailey jury found him guilty. Boreham called him "a man of exceptional cruelty and inhumanity" who enjoyed "terrorist activities". In September Magee received eight life sentences, seven of them (planting the bomb, exploding it, and five counts of murder) were for Brighton.

Magee served thirteen years during which time he studied for two university degrees. He was transferred from Britain to the Maze jail in Northern Ireland in September l994, just after the start of the first IRA ceasefire. He was released in 1999 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement after serving a third of his sentence. Then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s spokesman said early prisoner releases were "the most unpalatable and awkward part" of Northern Ireland's peace process. But they were crucial to its success and so Magee was released along with many others despite the howls of protest by Tories and Unionists.

Magee met Jo Tufnell a year later. Tufnell had been profoundly impacted by the death of her father Sir Anthony Berry in the blast and was determined to find out more about the Northern Ireland conflict. After recovering from the shock of Magee’s early release, she decided she had to meet him. They initially met in secret at the house of a friend of Magee, a woman who runs a Belfast peace group called Seeds of Hope. The pair started talking immediately and did not stop for three hours.

Tufnell described the reaction of her 7-year-old daughter: “[She] got very angry when she found out I was going to meet the man who had killed grandpa. She wanted to come too. When I wouldn't let her, she asked me to tell Patrick that he's a bad man. She later asked if he was sorry. When I said yes, she asked, 'Does that mean grandpa can come back now?'”

Tufnell and Magee have since met many times. Magee still believes in the justness of his cause but says Norman Tebbitt's continued crusade against him was "understandable". Tufnell said her meetings with Magee have put a human face on this conflict. “I now see men like him as people with their own struggles, no longer as a faceless enemy, and that helps me,” said Tufnell. “I think it's been quite a struggle for Patrick to see me and my dad as real people rather than as justified targets.”

London waits as Labour face massive council election defeat

While counting continues in the London mayoral contest, the ruling Labour Party has suffered a massive defeat elsewhere in council elections in England and Wales. As of midday Friday, British time, the Conservatives had taken 44 per cent of the votes with the Liberal Democrats on 25 per cent and Labour relegated to third place with just 24 per cent. The margin of defeat is significant as it is similar to the watershed defeat of John Major’s Tory Government in the 1995 council elections just two years before he was voted out of office. If these results are repeated in the next general election which must happen by mid 2010, the Conservatives would win a landslide victory of about 150 seats under Britain’s crude first-past-the-post electoral system.

The London mayoral election is one of the few British elections that uses proportional representation and this is the main reason why it is proving so hard to call. Labour maverick Ken Livingstone is seeking a third term in office since he won the resurrected mayoralty in 2000. Livingstone was also mayor of the Greater London Council in the 1980s until it was abolished by Margaret Thatcher. Livingstone has always been to the left of his party and has been a constant thorn in the side of his own national leadership. But he can take credit for the successful congestion charge policy that has cut traffic by a fifth in the capital though has not yet impacted air quality.

Livingstone’s opponent this time is a fellow maverick. He is 43 year old Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, more plainly known as Boris Johnson. Johnson is an MP, a journalist and TV personality with chaotic blond hair and a shambling, jokey image. Educated in the classics at Eton and Oxford, he worked his way through the journalist ranks to become editor of The Spectator in 1999. He was elected Tory MP for Henley-on-Thames in 2001 after the retirement of Michael Heseltine. He became a shadow minister in 2004 but was sacked that same year for lying about a sexual affair. He won a place back in the shadow cabinet a year later and this time held onto it despite allegations of another affair, this time with Times journalist Anna Fazackerley.

Johnson resigned his post in July 2007 when he announced his decision to stand for London Mayor. After comfortably winning the Tory party nomination, he announced in typical flamboyant style that "King Newt's days are numbered," alluding to Livingstone's hobby of keeping newts in a garden pond. Significantly Johnson has dropped his opposition to the congestion charges in an effort for voters to take him seriously as a candidate. He has also concentrated his campaign on London’s more populous outer suburbs while Livingstone prefers to court the more trendy inner suburbs.

Johnson’s gamble may now have paid off with a final exit poll showing he has won a narrow victory. A YouGov survey suggested that Johnson was six percentage points ahead of Livingstone with low profile Liberal Democrat candidate Brian Paddick a distant third. Many analysts had predicted Paddick’s preferences would decide the election but if the YouGov result is accurate, Johnson will win outright. The final result will be announced later today, British time.

The result will be another shattering blow to the tattered regime of Gordon Brown. With results from 100 out of 159 local councils officially announced, the Conservatives had won 45, Labour 14 and the Liberal Democrats six. The remainder were not controlled by any single party. Speaking this morning, Brown blamed his party’s poor performance on the effects of the global credit crunch on Britain. But while his party has been dogged by scandals, poor polls and dissent over tax and anti-terrorism laws, his position as Prime Minister remains safe for now.

Writing on his BBC blog site, Nick Robinson says that despite the results, there is no clamour among Labour MPs for a change of leader. However he says that the Tory’s most successful election result since John Major surprisingly won the 1992 election (despite polls suggesting he would lose to Neil Kinnock’s Labour) means that “something drastic” needs to happen to prevent David Cameron from defeating Brown in the next election. The only advice Robinson has for Brown is: “he will simply have to hope that - in the words of the old election song - things can only get better”. This election song is of little comfort to Brown, and in the context of current worldwide economic conditions, highly unlikely to be sung.

On Message: communication strategies in Blair’s landslide victory 1997

David Cameron has admitted that despite taunting Gordon Brown for pulling out of a snap autumn election, the Conservatives would probably have gone down to another defeat had it been called. The remarks are in stark contrast to his boasts last year that claimed they would have won the election if called. Cameron made the admission in a BBC documentary by former Tory Cabinet Minister Michael Portillo. In the documentary Cameron told Portillo an October election would have been tough. When Portillo asked him if defeat could cause a party split between traditionalist Thatcherites and Cameron’s left wing faction, he replied: "There are certain questions starting with 'if' that I never answer - and that's one of them."

Despite recent gains by Cameron, his comments show how much his party has struggled to come out of the giant shadow cast by Tony Blair’s landslide Labour victory in 1997 that ended 18 years of Conservative rule. In their landmark study of the effects of communication on British voting: “On Message: communicating the campaign”, a team of researchers led by Harvard’s Pippa Norris have provided a comprehensive and original analysis of the impact of political communications during election campaigns.

The sheer size of Labour’s 1997 victory surprised everyone including Tony Blair. The conventional account stressed Blair’s victory was a result of the radical party rebranding in the image of New Labour. Chief strategist Peter Mandelson was credited as the primary architect of the win. Started in the 1980s under Neil Kinnock, the project involved party modernisation, by-passing radical activists and the abandonment of traditional socialist policies in favour of the ‘third way’ so beloved of Bill Clinton. Above all, according to this view, it was the deployment of strategic communications that conveyed the image of New Labour to the people.

Their assiduous wooing of the press paid off as nearly all the newspapers backed Labor including the bellwether The Sun. In 1992, The Sun backed John Major and later proudly proclaimed “it was The Sun wot won it”. The prominence of Labour’s spin doctors and the obvious movement in the endorsements of several major newspapers gave the researchers the opportunity to answer two big questions: Firstly are party strategic communications important for electoral success and secondly, do news media have a powerful impact on election results?

The earliest political researchers such as Walter Lippman believed that the effects of mass communication were pervasive. However key 1940s research by Paul Lazarsfeld showed that theories of propaganda had exaggerated their effect and were useful only as a reinforcement tool. Today, many schools of thought stress the importance of “pocket-book” voting as demonstrated in the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid”. To that end, the argument suggests the Conservatives lost the 1997 election as early as “Black Wednesday” in 1992 with the currency crisis following Britain’s withdrawal from the Exchange Rate Mechanism. The Tories' reputation as sound economic managers was in tatters and they never subsequent recovered in the polls.

Yet this theory fails to take into account the subsequent recovery of the British economy or the fact that election took place a full five years later. In the run-up to the 1997 election, Britain was in the middle of a boom and the Major government’s economic record was healthy. But the press had turned against Major. In 1993, a succession of scandals involving Conservative ministers created headlines while the party suffered internal splits over its attitude to Europe and the Maastricht Treaty. In 1997 six of Britain’s ten dailies endorsed Labour in the election.

Labour had a very effective election machine with its media management centre at Millbank Tower modelled on the war room of the Clinton campaign. In its tight inner core were Mandelson, Blair, Gordon Brown, press secretary Alastair Campbell, pollster Philip Gould, Lord Irving of Lairg, chief of staff Jonathan Powell, and Blair’s personal assistant Anji Hunter. Gould had conducted a constant program of focus groups since 1994 tackling Labour’s weaknesses on taxation, trade unions and crime. They launched a dry run manifesto in 1996 to iron out any policy kinks. This allowed them to run a safe and bland campaign during the election itself. The other major Labour success was a recruitment drive that saw membership increase from 261,000 in 1991 to 405,000 in 1998. Meanwhile Tory membership dropped substantially while its politicians brawled among themselves and launched a negative campaign against Labour.

While the Tories bickered and sent out messages of fear, Labour marked out the territory to be fought over in the coming election. The Tories fought on three fronts: firstly to convince the electorate that life was better under them, secondly to warn about the dangers of Labour and thirdly to counter Labour’s message of “time for a change”. It was this last front that was to prove most difficult for the 18 year old government. Its only effective option was a negative campaign in the hope voters’ fears of Labour would outweigh their boredom threshold of the current government. Their election posters of Blair’s “demon eyes” attracted widespread criticism and crucially, failed to swing opinion polls.

Meanwhile Labour campaigned on “hope not fear” and Blair had transformed his party. He told the trade unions they could expect only “fairness not favours” and publicly expressed his admiration for Margaret Thatcher saying there would be no substantive repeal of her trade union legislation. They also portrayed themselves as fiscal conservatives. Blair courted the owners and editors of the tabloid press, convinced their hostility in 1992 had proved damaging. Nevertheless, the researchers showed it was the Liberal Democrats who ran the most internally coherent campaign, probably because they were the least scrutinised by the media.

With the opinion polls remaining flat and in Labour’s favour there was little media interest in the ‘horse race’ component of the 1997 election. This may also have been impacted by the 1992 election where the polls were badly caught out, as they were predicting a Labour win. Instead the media concentrated on strategy and political activity on the campaign trail. There was little correlation between media agenda and party agenda. Though the parties tried hard to get their message across, the press followed its own priorities with such headlines as “Hamster eats through car” (The Sun, 12 April) replacing constitutional reform or the agricultural policy.

John Major called a six week election campaign to try and claw back some ground. This was twice as long as a typical British election period and it had a negative effect on the public. Although the BBC News added an extra 20 minutes coverage each night, its audience went down. ITN also lost audience share during the six weeks. Public interest flagged during the long and uneventful campaign but came back to life spectacularly on the night of the election itself. 12.7 million (one third of the electorate) watched the election special. As Labour’s landslide became obvious, 5.2 million remain glued to the TV at 1.45 in the morning. Audiences between 1.4 and 6.5 million watched all next day as Blair went to the Palace and emerged triumphant to throngs in Downing St.

Yet the researchers failed to find evidence television influences voters. British television aims for neutrality in three respects: directional coverage (favourable versus unfavourable messages about a party), stop-watch coverage (how much time is devoted to a party) and agenda coverage (how far coverage focuses on issues that favour party positions). The researchers found no evidence any imbalances in these coverage factors influenced the election. The three major parties received broadly similar treatment in the broadcasting media.

Similarly they could find no evidence to support the claim the transfer of support of The Sun was decisive. The researchers’ analysis showed The Sun’s conversion did not bring new recruits to Labour nor new readers to The Sun. Other newspapers also changed their view between 1992 and 1997. The Times advised their readers to vote Eurosceptic (in practice mostly Tory). The Independent switched from being neutral to supporting Labour. The Star also switched from Conservative to Labour. The difference all these papers made was to mobilise their existing readership to vote in a certain way.

In the end, the researchers concluded all the sound and fury of electioneering did not signify much at all. In this respect the parties would have been better off going on holidays for six weeks and giving one pound to each British citizen for the £54.1 million spent on the campaign.

Yet party campaign managers, advertising consultants, and market researchers in all parties believed the campaign was a vital component in Blair’s victory. Philip Gould said that right to the end, the 1978 Winter of Discontent haunted the campaign and it wasn’t until the final Sunday before polling he was convinced Labour were going to win. But the researchers say the win was not contingent on either long campaign (the last year before the election) or the official short campaign (the six weeks prior). Labour led steadily in the polls since September 1992 around the time of Black Wednesday. In the view of Pippa et al, it was the stupid economy, after all.

Frank Furedi: Politics of Fear

Government policies on parenting is akin to mind control, a University of Kent conference on childrearing was told last week. That university’s Professor Frank Furedi told the conference that today’s parents are being bombarded by advice and guidance that ends up leaving them demoralised and disempowered. Professor Furedi told the conference entitled 'Monitoring Parents: Childrearing in the age of intensive parenting' that parents now need a PhD in developmental psychology when all parents really need is the space to learn from their experiences. “What they really need is better-resourced childcare and more flexible working,” said Furedi.

Frank Furedi is the professor of sociology at the University of Kent and author of the books Politics of Fear, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?, Therapy Culture, Paranoid Parenting and Culture of Fear. Furedi is a Hungarian émigré and a former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. He has now moved away from left-wing politics and describes himself as a humanist. According to ABC’s Michael Duffy, Furedi is one of the most interesting thinkers in the humanities today.

The subtitle of his book Politics of Fear is “Beyond Left and Right” and the book argues that the political terms left and right have become devoid of meaning and need to be replaced with less simplistic language. Furedi’s thesis is that government has become the art of micro-management of individual behaviour instead of presenting a wider political vision. Furedi states that being scared has been a culturally sanctioned affectation that pervades all aspects of life. Fear politics is commonplace and is used by all political parties. It is symptomatic of what he calls a “pervasive sense of exhaustion and disengagement that affects public life”.

The 18th century enlightenment offered the promise that people have a degree of control over their destiny. People became less disposed to accept disease and death as the will of God. Through science, art, medicine, commerce and politics people believed their lives could be altered and improved. But that trend is now changing. People are becoming seen as object and not agents of change. Despite the new forms of activism that is offered by the internet, Furedi sees this type of response as the “politics of denial”. It not only denies the relevance of politics but it also denies the underlying reality of deep-rooted disengagement. Furedi argues that what matters now is the role of humanity and the individual. Only by upholding the achievements of human civilisation and keeping an open-minded view of the future can this politics of fear be defeated.

Furedi begins his argument by discussing the dearth of ideas in politics. He finds the term the Third Way devoid of meaning. The name serves only to show that Blairite Labour in the UK lacks imagination and has no big ideas to call its own. And the Tories are no better. There was a time when it was possible to differentiate between progressive and reactionary politics. In simple terms the left wanted social change and human emancipation. The right sought to uphold the status quo and the traditional way of doing things. But today, the right no longer defends tradition and the left is no longer interested in change. Instead there is a detachment from issues and a lack of commitment; it is a culture that endorses scepticism, relativism and cynicism or as Furedi calls it a doctrine of the “conservatism of fear”.

It can be found on the left and the right. Those protesting against globalisation on the streets of Davos and Seattle are peddling a fear of human ambition and experimentation and a desire to seek refuge in a predictable existence. It is an estrangement from the future which undermines the capacity to generate new ideas. Meanwhile the multi-national companies and the objects of their wrath apologise for themselves and aim for re-invention as ethically responsible firms, almost more charity than business.

Much of the retreat of political ambition can be traced back to the 1980s and the Thatcherite mantra of “There is no alternative” (TINA). TINA decried the futility of political imagination, because if there was no alternative, politics itself was pointless. And politicians have been quick to acquiesce to this outlook. Governments play down their responsibilities and see themselves as facilitators rather than managers. Policies are no longer the result of informed debate but instead imposed by global forces. The assumption now is that big ticket items such as the economy, the environment, technology and social policy can not be significantly improved by government policies. Furedi calls it a “pessimistic account of human limits”, held by the left and right alike.

But while the public sphere has become depoliticised, the private sphere has become the site of major political disagreement. Issues involving the family and personal behaviour have become the province of debate. The personal is now political: the body, food, health, cancer and victimisation. Public involvement is atomised, passive and personal. One of the prominent slogans of the anti-Iraq war protests was “Not in my name”. It was not inclusive and does not offer an alternative. It is nimby-esque and simply means "do not involve me".

The terms left and right date back to the French revolution. Its National Assembly was divided by those who sat on the right and advocated the separation of political power and those who sat on the left who wanted full popular sovereignty. Throughout 19th century Europe these “wings” fought conflicts over democracy, capitalism, economics, human rights, religion and science. Both sides advanced each other as they were forced to account for themselves, rethink their ideals and develop new insights about society.

Little of that conflict remains in the 21st century. Socialism is dead; conservative thought has dissolved. New movements avoid ideology. The West’s triumph at the end of the Cold War revealed an absence of purpose and vision. Society has become estranged from the past and traditions have little meaning in everyday life. Meanwhile the left has become suspicious of the future. Today’s prevailing slogan is “more of the same”. And so, Furedi says, by different routes – giving up on the future and losing the past – the left and right have converged on the terrain of the present. On the left is the disenchantment in the promise of modernity, on the right the decline of traditional authority.

Deference to authority has now been replaced by deference to fate. People no longer believe they can shape or alter their circumstances. It is a process of declining subjectivity. Instead of change, people want compensation, apologies, recognition or affirmation. The citizen has become the customer. Sociologists describe this process as “loss of agency”. This is reflected in policy documents which assume people are not trustworthy and cannot live responsibly. The electorate is infantilised, vulnerable and insecure. The human centred view of future possibilities and making a difference have been replaced by an increasingly narrow range of options and a sense of impotence.

That impotence is matched by a growing contempt for the public among elites. Ordinary people are marginalised as Nascar dads, rednecks, battlers, tabloid readers and so on. The intelligentsia uncritically transfers responsibility for the malaise of political life to an uneducated electorate thereby distracting attention from its own sense of moral confusion. There is no zeal to enlighten, to instruct, to convert.

The absence of political purpose about the future encourages the cultural sensibility that gives rise to the politics of fear. It is not simply the manipulation of public opinion, though there is no doubt political campaigners use fear to promote agendas. Fear has become one of the defining features of public life in the wake of 9/11. While Governments have used fear to strengthen authority, business groups, advocacy organisations and special interest groups have also to manipulate public anxiety to further their agendas. The media compete with each other in the promotion of different scare stories. Fear is a language that has a wide cultural resonance.

Meanwhile the exhaustion of politics has channelled energies once devoted to it into the colonisation of everyday life. Governments embark on crusades targeting diet, health, sex life, parenting, alcohol and public behaviour. Politicians have eschewed the macro issues in favour of the micro. They have abandoned distinct philosophies and ambitious projects and instead are preoccupied with banal lifestyle issues. In Britain school dinners became a major 2005 election issue. In the US, President Bush broke off his holiday to sign emergency legislation to keep brain-damaged Terry Schiavo alive.

People’s private lives are now a legitimate area for legislation. Governments have mooted policies to help people prepare for marriage, cope with arriving babies and proposed parenting orders on those deemed to have failed to control their children. Paternalistic pamphlets about marriage convey the impression that adults are actually children playing at being grown-ups.

Nanny state supporters claim these policies simply continue progressive traditions such as the abolition of child labour. But they are less about improving health than about directing how people ought to live. British Labour MP Frank Field said Britain is moving away from the politics of class to the politics of behaviour. Field was describing legislation to deal with anti-social behaviour but it remains a sinister notion that can easily invade into other spheres. It is a statist intellectual outlook that shows scepticism concerning people’s ability to act as responsible citizens without the support of professionals who know what is in their best interest.

Furedi argues there is a better way. Society needs to re-establish a claim on the past and future. People making choices do not need support from bureaucratic institutions but instead need the freedom to engage with new experience. We must recover from our uneasy relationship with science and knowledge. In the 18th century Immanuel Kant said enlightenment was man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. It remains pertinent today. The ideal of individual autonomy was perhaps the enlightenment’s greatest gift. To regain it, people must be encouraged to take risks, experiment, and exercise critical judgement. Thatcher and TINA are wrong. There is an alternative.

Vultures feast on Zambia

A UK High Court judge ruled last week that Zambia will have to pay a significant part of a nearly 30-year debt to what is commonly called a "vulture fund". Justice Andrew Smith ruled in favour of Investment funds company Donegal International but Zambia is claiming a moral victory after the judge struck out key payment terms which drastically reduces the country’s liability. The exact amount of the liability will be determined at a later date when the judge announces his full findings, but the judgement comments suggest it is likely the court will advise Zambia to pay about half the amount Donegal asked for. That forty million dollar plus amount was equal to all the debt relief Zambia received last year.

Known as “Distressed and Vulture funds”, these debts are money spinning devices for investment companies. These companies buy up the debt of poor nations cheaply when it is about to be written off, then sue the country for the full value of the debt plus interest. These assets may include actively traded debt, so-called "lender of last resort" securities, bankrupt issues and hedge funds. The idea was the brainchild of Paul Singer, a reclusive New York billionaire. In 1996, he bought up some of Peru's debt for $11 million, and then successfully threatened to bankrupt Peru if they didn't give him $58 million.

The cause of the British high court case dates back to 1979. In that year Zambia bought $15 million worth of Romanian tractors. Due to the collapse of world copper prices, Zambia could not pay in cash and Romania agreed to loan the money. Over the course of time, Zambia reneged on the repayments and in 1999 the outstanding debt was renegotiated to $3 million. However before the deal was finalised, another company stepped to pay Romania $4 million for the debt. That company is based in the Caribbean tax-free haven known as the British Virgin Islands. The company is called Donegal International and they are partially owned by a shadowy US outfit called Debt Advisory International (Note: Not to be confused with an international sustainable development group also called DAI).

Debt Advisory International keeps a low profile but they are active in the US political scene. In the last three years they paid Greenberg Traurig LLP half a million dollars to lobby for them in Washington. Greenberg Traurig is a Miami-based 1,350-lawyer full-service international law firm "with the fourth-largest number of lawyers in the United States and eighth-largest worldwide." The company have substantial links to the Bush family having represented George W Bush in the 2000 election court case and are the personal lawyers of brother and Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

It is also possible that Debt Advisory International may now be using a second set of lobbyists, Navigators who see themselves as an “elite team of lobbyists, political strategists and public relations experts that offers integrated campaigns to solve difficult public policy problems”. With friends like these, Debt Advisory International can afford to ignore any flak related to their actions. Once their subsidiary Donegal took charge of the Zambian debt, they immediately demanded repayment of the full amount due, plus interests and costs, which amount to $42 million.

$42 million is a lot of money in Zambia. Home to 12 million people, Zambia ranks as 153rd out of 176 countries in terms of poverty. Over 70% percent of Zambians live below the breadline. Per capita annual incomes are $395 and life expectancy is about 37 years. One in 6 adults is infected with HIV. 100,000 died of the epidemic in 2004, and 710,000 Zambian children are AIDS orphans. 40% of women are illiterate. Schooling is only free up to year 7 and most children drop out then.

It is unlikely the fate of uneducated Zambian schoolchildren carries much weight in the corridors of power in Washington especially with the likes of Greenberg Traurig and Navigators working hard to protect the interests of their wealthy clients. But there are calls to clamp down on vulture funds. In 2002, British treasurer Gordon Brown made a statement to the International Monetary and Financial Committee in Washington. In it, he called for “a trust account, funded by donors, to pay for technical assistance to help any HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Country) being sued by a creditor who refuses to deliver relief, including vulture funds.” With Brown likely to take over the reins of power from Blair sometime in the next 12 months, it will be interesting to see if he clamps down on a company based in the British-owned Virgin Islands.

Thatcher faces the music

Following in the footsteps of such unlikely musical superstars as Jerry Springer and Roy Keane, the life and times of Margaret Thatcher has finally been set to music. The theatres of regional Britain are currently packing them in with a tour of “Thatcher – The Musical!” the life and times of the country’s most controversial 20th century Prime Minister set to music and comedy. It features an all-singing, all-dancing cast of ten women who croon their way to such standards as The Cabinet Shuffle, The Grocers Daughter and The Thatcher Anthem.

The idea is the brainchild of the Wolverhampton-based women's company Foursight Theatre. The show documents her rise from grocer's daughter to international stateswoman. The cast play eight different Maggies; the Grocer's Daughter, Twinset Maggie, Power Suit Maggie, Military Maggie, Britannia Maggie, Sacrificial Maggie, Broken Maggie and Diva Maggie, and also take turns as the men in her life husband Dennis, Ronald Reagan, Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine. The musical ends with the line of Diva Maggie “"I am the iron in your bloodstream, I'm in your DNA!".

The last comment refers to Thatcher’s most well-known nickname; The Iron Lady. The moniker dates back to 1976. Then leader of the Opposition, she made her famous “Britain Awake” speech at Kensington Town Hall where she attacked the Soviet Union. In the speech she said “The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet politburo don't have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns.” The Soviet Defence Ministry newspaper Red Star picked up the speech and called her the “Iron Lady”. The label was popularised by Radio Moscow and Thatcher herself quickly saw its advantages.

Thatcher was always steeped in politics. Born in 1925, she was the daughter of a grocer and Methodist lay preacher Alfred Roberts who was a local independent councillor of Liberal sympathies. She was educated at Oxford where she graduated in chemistry in 1947. She was elected president of the student Conservative Association at Oxford and made herself known to the leadership of her party at the time of its General Election defeat of 1945. She worked as a research chemist at J Lyons and co where she was a member of the team that developed the first soft frozen ice cream.

In the early 1950s she ran and lost elections in the strong Labour seat of Dartford though she did considerably cut the majority both times. She also won national publicity as the youngest female candidate in the country. There she met a local businessman Denis Thatcher. They married in 1951 and had twins, Mark and Carol, two years later. Denis went on to a successful career in the oil industry and became a director of Castrol. He funded his wife’s training as a lawyer, specialising in taxation. Finally she found a safe Tory seat and was elected to Parliament in 1959 as MP for the London seat of Finchley.

Two years after election Margaret was appointed Parliamentary Secretary for the Ministry of Pensions, a position she held until Labour won the 1964 election. In opposition, she was a Ted Heath supporter and was eventually rewarded with a role in the shadow cabinet in 1967. When Heath won power in 1970, Thatcher was appointed Education secretary and was charged with reducing the budget. Her immediate decision to abolish free milk for 7 to 11 year olds in state schools led to the cry of “Mrs. Thatcher, Milk Snatcher”. Despite protests from Labour councils, Thatcher got her way and the cuts saved £14m a year.

Heath lost to Harold Wilson again in 1974 and Thatcher was named shadow environment secretary. After he lost a second election later that year, the party held a leadership ballot. Thatcher surprisingly pipped Heath’s preferred successor William Whitelaw to become Britain’s first female party leader. Thatcher slowly won over the party to her views and sat back and watched as the Labour government unravelled, finally collapsing after the widespread strikes in the 1978-9 Winter of Discontent.

The Conservative Party won the 1979 election with a margin of 44 seats. Thatcher had a mandate for change but her first two years in office weren’t easy with unemployment remaining stubbornly high and economic improvement slow. Bobby Sands led an IRA hunger strike in the Maze Prison in 1981 in which he and 9 others starved to death. Despite criticism by the European Commission of Human Rights and the Irish Government, Thatcher maintained a public hardline attitude saying "Crime is crime is crime. It is not political." Behind the scenes however, Ulster Secretary James Prior did manage to negotiate a package of concessions with the surviving Maze prisoners.

Domestically, Thatcher increased interest rates and VAT. But with an election looming and defeat likely, salvation came for Thatcher with the Falklands War. The Argentinean junta, looking to deflect attention from their own domestic woes invaded the South Atlantic islands in April 1982. Riding a wave of nationalist sentiment, Thatcher launched a naval task force to reclaim the islands. After the sinking of the light cruiser General Belgrano, the Argentinean fleet retired to port and left the islands open for re-capture. British forces stormed the islands in May and took three weeks to take the capital Port Stanley. Despite the deaths of 255 British troops, Thatcher’s popularity was boosted and she romped home in the 1983 election.

Aided by a Labour split, Thatcher won that election in a landslide increasing her majority by 100 seats. Her next term was marked by battles against the union movement. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) launched a massive strike in 1984 to protest proposals to close a large number of mines. Thatcher was ready for them. She insisted that coal stocks were built up to avoid politically sensitive electricity cuts. She increased Police powers and rushed anti-union laws through parliament. Former political commentator Brian Walden described the miners' strike as "a civil war without guns". Eventually she wore down the miners, split their leadership and forced them to concede defeat after a year of picketing.

The IRA came back to haunt Thatcher in October 1984. The Prime Minister was staying at the Brighton Grand Hotel on the eve of both her 59th birthday and the annual Conservative Party conference. The IRA detonated two large bombs in the hotel at 3am, one of which tore through her bathroom barely two minutes after she had used it. She and husband Denis escaped injury, but five others including a Tory MP were killed and many were injured. The following day the IRA responsibility with the chilling message “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.” Thatcher meanwhile spoke to the conference as scheduled at 9:30am that morning.

Economically, Thatcher maintained her fervent belief in the power of the markets. She started to sell off the large state utilities and council homes to their residents. She abolished the large city councils including the Greater London Council as these were all controlled by Labour. With the country in the middle of an economic boom, she had another comfortable election victory in 1987 with a slightly reduced majority. Towards the end of her regime, the chemist in her returned as she started to champion environmental issues. She began to discuss the issues of global warming, ozone depletion and acid rain. At the 1988 conference she told the party "No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy- with full repairing lease. This Government intends to meet the terms of that lease in full".

But with the economy starting to stall again, her popularity declined. She fell out with her foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe and Chancellor Nigel Lawson over EU monetary union. In 1990, her new system to replace local government rates by the deeply unpopular “poll tax” proved to be her biggest mistake. With interest rates running at 15%, Howe resigned and precipitated a party leadership ballot. Michael Heseltine ran against her but the first ballot was inconclusive. Before the second ballot, Thatcher decided to resign. She supported John Major as her successor who went on to retain power in 1992.

That same year, she was appointed to the House of Lords as Baroness Thatcher. She continued to have a high public profile and spoke out on many issues of the day. She famously supported Pinochet during his incarceration in London in 1998. By then Labour had finally ended the Tory stranglehold on power by moving to the middle of the political spectrum. When Margaret Thatcher celebrated her 80th birthday in 2005, her old colleague Geoffrey Howe said "Her real triumph was to have transformed not just one party but two, so that when Labour did eventually return, the great bulk of Thatcherism was accepted as irreversible". But there was nothing left to do for Thatcher herself – except, of course, to make the musical.

God Save the Queen

In an early signal of intent for the Oscars, Helen Mirren made off with best actress at LA's Golden Globe awards overnight. Mirren won the award for her starring role as Elizabeth II in Stephen Frears' "The Queen". The film tells the story of the days following Diana’s death in 1997 and the Queen’s awkward relationship with the newly elected Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair. Accepting the award Mirren said Elizabeth Windsor at the age of 25 walked into the role of a lifetime. "I honestly feel this award belongs to her, because I think you fell in love with her, not with me," Mirren said.

Whether you fell in love with her or not, “The Queen” is an excellent treatise on three forms of power. These are the unwritten constitutional power of the monarchy, the executive powers of the Prime Minister and the social and commercial power of the Fourth Estate; the media that set the agenda during the tumultuous week after Diana died. The Queen badly misread public opinion, the flames were fanned by the attack dogs of the media and the media-savvy Blair came to the royal rescue, saving the Windsors from themselves and gaining giddy new heights of popularity for himself.

The narrative starts three months earlier on the day Blair is elected to end 18 years of Tory rule. On his way to Buckingham Palace to accept his appointment he is coached by royal flunkeys on the correct way to address Her Majesty: “It is ma’am as in ham, not marm as in farm”. Meanwhile the Queen bemoans to her artist she not allowed to vote and enjoy the thrill of “being partial”. The Queen has the upper hand at the first meeting. She tells Blair that he is her tenth Prime Minister and the first of those, Winston Churchill, coached her well in the ways of life.

Both the Queen and Blair are woken up in the early hours of Sunday 30 August 1997 to hear the news Diana was in a car crash in Paris. The royals and the Blairs are glued to the 24 hour news stations to watch the consequences just like all their subjects. When the news comes through that Diana is dead, Blair is quickest to read the public mood. His media chief and spin doctor Alastair Campbell coined the phrase “people’s princess” for Blair’s first speech on the morning of Diana’s death. That sound byte and Blair’s interview are repeated ad nauseum on media outlets for the next few days.

Meanwhile the Windsors are holed up in their summer retreat at Balmoral Castle stalking deer. Remote from the goings-on in London, the Queen has no desire to make a public statement, return to Buckingham Palace or show any public sign of grief. Diana is no longer a member of the Royal Family and therefore there is no reason to change plans one iota. While the crowds gathered on the Mall in an astonishing outcry of public grief for an ex-Royal, the sitcom Royal/Royle family gather around a TV set watching the coverage with disbelieving eyes and expressions of ingratitude. When a commoner grumbles about the lack of a half-mast flag on the empty palace, Prince Phillip is exasperated about the media and public’s lack of knowledge of royal protocol. When Blair rings the Queen to complain about her inaction she tells him how her family prefers to grieve quietly and with dignity. "That’s how we do things in this country, and that’s what the rest of the world admires us for," Mirren's Queen says.

But even if that were true, the Queen could not grieve quietly. The royal family became caught up in the politics of global mourning. Australian academic Rosanne Kennedy perceptively noted that Diana, unlike Charles, had a remarkable ability to re-invent her image, and in that regard, was a very modern figure. According to Kennedy, Diana’s 16 years in the media spotlight saw her represented as “a naive nineteen-year-old kindergarten teacher, a fairytale princess, to a depressed, bulimic wife and mother, to an angry divorcee, to a confessional talk show interviewee, to a glamorous cover-girl with a humanitarian message and a political mission”. Diana’s use of the confessional genre enabled ordinary people to feel that they knew her and could identify with her. But it put her starkly at odds with the preferred Royal approach of “quietness and dignity”.

Eventually the pressure is overwhelming and the Windsors agree to London and a public funeral. Prince Philip rages against the decision and the fact the funeral will be full of “homosexuals and celebrities”. But they had to bow to the power of the media and public pressure. The Queen had to grin (or smile politely) and bear it as Diana’s funeral was a global event watched by billions.

The film concludes with a postscript several weeks later. Recalling the first scene, Blair goes to the Palace to visit the Queen. The dynamic of their relationship has changed drastically as a result of Diana’s death. Though the relationship remains frosty, there is a new mutual respect between sovereign and executive leader that emerges in their curious circular conversation. The Queen has a prophetic message for Blair that he too might some day become a media figure of hate. The parallels between Diana and the current fuss over Prince William's girlfriend Kate Middleton are also striking. But although the ghost of Diana haunts the film, "The Queen" remains Helen Mirren’s film. Hers is a superlative performance inking out the depths of an unfathomable enigma. Throughout the whole ordeal, her Elizabeth remains a cool, stoic figure capable of evoking sympathy from even the most ardent republican for her dedication to what she saw as her oath of duty.

Mirren fully deserves the Golden Globe for her performance. Shawn Levy of the Oregonian has perhaps the most perceptive commentary on her performance: “Through her diplomatic tussles with Blair, her rustic Highlands romps, her firm dealings with her frustrated son and opinionated husband, her quiet colloquies with her shrewd mother, and her gradual recognition that her stolid response to Diana's death has pained her subjects, Mirren plays an otherworldly woman in a fashion that's palpably real and human.”


The remarkably adaptable veteran director Stephen Frears throws in some cinematic flourishes along the way. Frears contrasts the grand pomp of the Queen’s scenes by filming them in 35mm against the informality and fish finger dinner scenes of the Blair household shot on handheld Super-16. Most scenes are handled deftly with clever, believable and often hilarious dialogue. Only the allegory of the “14-pointed” stag (for the huntress Diana) is clumsy and ill-conceived. Frears reprises his work with writer Peter Morgan and actor Michael Sheen from the 2003 British telemovie The Deal which tells of the Machiavellian shenanigans between Blair (again played by Sheen) and Gordon Brown that led to Blair’s ascent to the leadership of the Labour Party. The film “The Queen” is, in many ways, Act 2 of The Deal.

Menezes, murdered for his Mongolian Eyes

Britain continues to deal with police bunglers in time honoured fashion – by promoting the culprits. Last month, Cressida Dick was recommended for promotion to Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner. She was the police commander in charge of the “shoot-to-kill” operation that led to the pointless death of Jean Charles de Menezes after the London bombings last year.

The Brazilian Menezes was the classic case of the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was shot seven times in the head on a tube train at Stockwell station on 22 July, 2005 by an anti-terrorist squad. They were acting on a tip-off a day after the failed explosions on London’s transport system. Police had been on hair-trigger alert since the 7 July bombings two weeks earlier which caused havoc on London’s peak hour transit system. That morning three bombs exploded within a minute of each other on London Underground tube trains. A fourth bomb exploded on a bus nearly an hour later in Tavistock Square. The 7 July bombings killed 56 people including four suicide bombers, and also sent the city's transport and mobile telecommunications infrastructure into chaos. A fortnight later, terrorists struck again at London Transport with bombs. This time, only the detonator caps fired and the bombs themselves did not go off. No one has come up with a convincing explanation for the simultaneous failure of four bombs on tubes and a bus, though everyone is grateful. There were no injuries and the bombers escaped.

London Police mounted a major manhunt for the attempted bombers. One of the rucksacks they left at the scene held clues. It contained a gym membership card belonging to Hussain Osman, suspected of a bomb attack at Shepherd's Bush tube station. In addition, the number plate of a vehicle spotted at a suspected terror training camp in central Wales had been tracked to a Tulse Hill address. It was a three-storey block of flats in Scotia Road. The suspect address was No 21 on the third floor of the block; De Menezes lived a few doors down at No 17. Police immediately staked out the premises. On the following morning surveillance officers saw a man emerge from the communal entrance to the flats. That man was Jean Charles de Menezes.

Menezes was a 27-year-old electrician. He was born in the small town of Gonzaga in the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. He moved to Sao Paulo to live with his uncle at the age of 14, attended high school and became a qualified electrician. He moved to London in 2002 and had lived and worked legally in the UK. He spoke excellent English and lived in the Tulse Hill flat with two of his cousins. That morning Menezes had received a phonecall to fix a broken fire alarm in Kilburn. As he left the building a surveillance officer compared him to the CCTV footage photo of the bombers. In his own words, felt "it would be worth someone else having a look", but "was in the process of relieving himself". Because he was urinating, he didn’t immediately turn on a video camera to send pictures of Menezes to operational headquarters. And so, on the officer’s ambiguous word, Police thought they had positively identified a suicide bomber.

They tracked Menezes as he walked from his flat to the bus stop. Plain clothed officers followed him aboard the bus. He got off at Brixton underground station. However Menezes found Brixton was still closed after the drama of the day before. He quickly reboarded the same bus before it pulled away. The officers tracking him stated they were satisfied that they had the correct man, as he "had Mongolian eyes similar to Osman Hussain's". Hussain was the Ethiopian suspect from the previous days bombing captured on CCTV. On this Asiatic resemblance, Menezes’s fate was sealed.

Cressida Dick, the Police Commander immediately authorised her officers to prevent Menezes from entering a train. S019 took control of the operation. S019 are Specialist Firearms Command, the armed branch of the Metropolitan police. Menezes continued on to Stockwell unaware he was being trailed by armed units. He rang a work colleague to say he was running late due to the tube station closures. He entered Stockwell station, picked up a free newspaper and used his Oyster Card (London Transport’s electronic ticketing system so called because "the oyster protects a pearl in much the same way that the card protects the cardholder's money") to pay his fare. He slowly descended the escalator to the platform. A train was arriving so he ran the last few metres to catch it. Menezes boarded the train and found a free seat.

What happened next is not entirely clear. Sue Thomason, a freelance journalist from south London, was on the train. She said she heard 11 shots in 30 seconds. She initially feared terrorists had opened fire on commuters and ran for her life along the station platform. One of the surveillance officers, code named "Hotel 3", said he followed Menezes onto the train. He sat near him and waited for the firearms officers from S019 to arrive. When they showed up, Hotel 3 got up. He the blocked the door from closing with his foot and shouted out “he’s here!” pointing to Menezes. The firearms officers boarded the train and challenged the Brazilian. In a panic he stood up and advanced towards them. Hotel 3 grabbed him, pinned his arms against his torso, and pushed him back into the seat. Hotel 3 told his version of what happened next: "I then heard a gunshot very close to my ear and was dragged away onto the floor of the carriage. I shouted 'police' and held up my hands. I was then dragged out of the carriage by an armed officer who appeared to be carrying a long-barrelled weapon. I heard several gunshots as I was being dragged out."

Horrified commuters scrambled away from the train and fled the platform. One of the last to leave said it was empty apart from four or five men in plain clothes who were standing over the body of Menezes. The operation bore all the hallmarks of a Special Forces “shoot to kill” operation. The newly formed Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR), trained by SAS officers had carried out the hit.

The only problem was that almost immediately they knew they had got the wrong man. He wasn’t carrying a bomb. His driver’s licence didn’t match the name they were expecting. Met commissioner Sir Ian Blair went on the offensive and publicly declared that there were "direct links" between the shooting and the investigation into the bombers.

Meanwhile Menezes’s friend De Avila was waiting for him in Kilburn. He rang his mobile regularly during the day without an answer. The police finally rang him in the early hours of the following morning. Detectives arrived at his house. ‘The detective wouldn't tell me what had happened to him," said De Avila, "but he said: 'We suspect this person is a terrorist'". De Avila refused to believe them. "I know him," he said. "We have a social life together. He doesn't come from Muslim peoples. I told him he was a Catholic.” De Avila’s testimony was the final nail in the police case. They killed the wrong man.

It suited the Police to continue the public line they had shot a suspected terrorist. Ian Blair requested the Home Office to delay an investigation while they concentrated on finding the 21 July attackers. The police also issued an incorrect statement Menezes was followed by surveillance officers and his "clothing and behaviour added to their suspicions". They claimed Menezes had refused to respond to police shouts and had jumped over the barrier. But the Met CCTV footage didn’t support that and that footage has now mysteriously disappeared.

At 5pm the following day, Scotland Yard formally admitted the victim was not linked to the anti-terrorism operation. A second statement four hours later revealed the name of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian national. The Brazilian government released a statement expressing its shock at the killing, saying that it looked forward "to receiving the necessary explanation from the British authorities on the circumstances which led to this tragedy."

That explanation has yet to arrive. The first part of the enquiry has now concluded but its findings have not been released to the public. The second part on Ian Blair’s handling of the aftermath is continuing. Osman Hussain was arrested in Rome in July and extradited to Britain to face charges of attempted murder. Menezes was the only victim in the end. Bombing tubes is cowardly and vicious and Britain is right to vigorously seek justice. But paranoia, fear and incompetence show that a shoot-to-kill policy should never be supported as a means of fighting suburban terrorism.