Author Archives: Mark Griffin

How to build a ship: The State does it, or Private Enterprise does it

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Way back in 1998, the Ministry of Defence decided it needed new aircraft carriers and announced a competition amongst defence contractors. In 2003, they announced a winner, and in 2007 they signed a contract worth £3.9 billion for two vessels. As of mid-2011 they are expected to cost £5 billion (widely regarded as a gross underestimate) and the first carrier will not enter service until 2020. It will not have any aircraft. When the second carrier is ready for service, the first will be sold or moth-balled. The carriers will be 932 feet long, and will displace 65,600 metric tons.

Five days ago, the US Navy announced the name of a new aircraft carrier it was building, the USS John F Kennedy. Construction had already begun in early 2011 and it is to enter service in 2018. It will be longer (1092 feet) and heavier (101,600 tons displacement) than the Royal Navy carriers, will carry 75 aircraft, and cost an estimated $10.2 billion. The US Navy currently has eleven carriers.

Today, P&O Cruises announced they are to build a new luxury cruise liner. It too will be longer (1082 feet) and substantially heavier (154,407 tons gross) than the Royal Navy carriers, will carry the same number of aircraft as HMS Queen Elizabeth (ie none), will be in service in 2015, and will cost £500 million.

So private enterprise can build a bigger, better ship at a fraction of the price and have it at sea sooner. If we had given P&O the job at the outset we’d have two carriers off Libya right now making a useful contribution to our campaign, and have a lot more money in the coffers.

The Royal Navy's new luxury cruise liner

Boycott FIFA’s sponsors and have a fan-led Soccer Spring

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It’s hard to see that there is anything positive to be found in the fiasco that is FIFA right now. Only the whistle-blowers who went to Chuck Blazer and showed him the $40,000 in cash that Mohamad bin Hammam tried to bribe them with come out with any credit. Jack Warner, who seemed to be acting as facilitator, and bin Hammam were suspended and then Blazer was in turn sacked and reinstated. Sepp Blatter who has for decades presided over a secretive culture of back-room deals sails serenely on, winning a further term of office as president by default because bin Hammam had withdrawn after the bribery scandal hit the world’s media. Even the English Football Association come away looking clueless and out of their depth because all the other delegates rallied round Blatter. Well, of course they’d rally round him, it’s a magnificent gravy train they’re all on and he’s the train driver.

It’s the way they rally round that’s interesting. In each case during the so-called Arab Spring, the despot has a coterie of loyalists who in many cases are more hardline than the despot himself. At some stage there is a tipping point where members of his inner circle desert him, or gather their courage together and tell him he has to go. That happened in Tunisia and Egypt, but it’s not happening yet in Libya, Syria or Yemen. If we substitute brown envelopes stuffed with cash for tanks and bullets, might we have a parallel between FIFA and certain Arab countries? How can Blatter be deposed? Will his coterie turn against him? Can we look forward to a Soccer Spring?

We can, because there is a further element involved: The sponsors. Adidas, Coca-Cola, Emirates, Hyundai-Kia Motors, Sony, and VISA pump many millions of dollars into FIFA and they do it for one reason only: to win favour with the world’s consumers. Withdraw that favour and their money is wasted. Worse, if association with FIFA is seen in a negative light it could even be damaging. Just look how quickly sponsors withdraw from any event that is suddenly a PR disaster. This FIFA fiasco is a PR disaster of major proportions, we just have to let the sponsors know.

One of Our Aircraft is Over-Budget, or, the Modern Ministry of Defence

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Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is a work of genius. His description of the absurdities of petty military bureaucracy are devastatingly accurate and despite the humour, frightening, because anyone who’s been in the forces knows it’s all too real. When you combine it with the Peter Principle that tells us everyone rises to their level of incompetence, we begin to get a picture of what life must be like at the highest levels of the Ministry of Defence.

For most of its time in office, the Labour government appointed ministers of breathtaking incompetence to run the department. They in turn favoured admirals, generals, and air marshals who spoke the same language, that is, when they spoke at all. How else do we explain the shambles that we have today, with front-line troops fighting a hot war while badly equipped and about to bear the brunt of the economic cutbacks? Our military capability is tiny and becoming miniscule.

I would like to imagine how a conversation might have gone between Wing Commander Guy Gibson and whoever his boss was following the successful Dam Buster mission. I say “whoever his boss was” because I’m certain ‘Bomber’ Harris would never have survived in the kind of climate we have in the modern Ministry of Defence.

I think it would have gone something like this:

HQ: Gibson, HQ here, do you hear me, Old Boy? Over.

Gibson: Loud and clear, HQ, over.

HQ: Good show on the dams. Pass on our congratulations to your crew.

Gibson: Thank you Sir, they will appreciate that.

HQ: Now, here’s the thing, Gibson. Now that there are no dams to attack, we’re rather over-manned in the dam-busting role.

Gibson: I see Sir.

HQ: So what we need you to do is find the nearest airfield, and land your plane there.

Gibson: But they’re all enemy-held airfields over here Sir.

HQ: Well that’ll be more mouths for them to feed, eh? Ha ha.

Gibson: But don’t you want us to come back Sir?

HQ: No. Do not come back Gibson, we don’t need you any more.

Gibson: But we could re-train Sir?

HQ: Not on Old Boy, we got rid of training in the last round of cutbacks.

Gibson: There must be something we could do Sir, they might rebuild the dams or something?

HQ: No, we’ve thought about that, they won’t and there’s no point maintaining capabilities we don’t need. There is a war on, you know.

Gibson: But what do I tell my crew?

HQ: Tell them these are difficult times for the economy and we must all share the pain.

Gibson: Can’t we make some economies at HQ instead Sir? Cut back on some of the back office staff?

HQ: Really, Gibson, I’m surprised at you. We at HQ are going to have to work much harder to manage the same number of operations with fewer front-line staff. I myself am having to accept a pay rise to reflect the added responsibility. I don’t want it, but we don’t all get what we want in these situations, Gibson, and don’t you forget it.

Gibson: I’m sorry Sir, I don’t know what came over me.

HQ: So just go ahead and land your plane, and hand yourselves over to the enemy, there’s a good chap.

Gibson: As you wish, Sir.

HQ: And with any luck, you’ll have that plane paid-off by the time the war’s over.

Gibson: Excuse me, Sir?

HQ: Well, we’ll deduct the least amount we can from your wages, but you’ll have to pay for the plane you’re not bringing back.

Gibson: But it’s not my choice not to bring it back, you’ve ordered me not to!

HQ: We can’t make an exception for you, Gibson, or there would be no incentive for the other crews to bring their planes back.

Gibson: They don’t need an incentive to bring their planes back, Sir, they will do anything they can to defend their country.

HQ: Now Gibson, that’s just silly talk. Do you think we at HQ would put in the hours that we do, working until almost gone 5 o’clock, the endless committee meetings – with no biscuits I might add, all those important papers to read, if we weren’t incentivised? Reports don’t just write themselves, you know. Everyone needs incentives.

Gibson: But the Nazis don’t.

HQ: Exactly, do you want us to all end up like them? That’s what this war is all about and that’s why we need incentives.

Gibson: Very well Sir, I’ll crash-land the plane forthwith.

HQ: Good show, Gibson.

Gibson: Thank you, Sir.

HQ: By the way, Gibson.

Gibson: Yes, Sir?

HQ: We’re going to award you a Victoria Cross.

Gibson: That’s very kind of you, Sir.

HQ: It’s the least we can do. I’ll deduct the cost from your salary of course, but would you like it presented by the King?

Gibson: How much extra would that be, Sir?

HQ: Now you’re getting the idea, Gibson.

One Swallow Does Not An [Arab] Spring Make

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Forgive me for injecting a note of realism, but as much as Western leaders seem in thrall to the prospect of democracy sweeping the Arab world, I am filled with dread at what the future holds. There is much heady talk of the benefits of the Arab Spring, from drastically reduced numbers of refugees fleeing repressive regimes, to a welcome boost to global trade as free enterprise takes off across the region, as well as genuine pleasure on behalf of the soon-to-be-liberated masses and the happiness in store for them. If only.

History tells us it will be different. In too many cases, sweeping away a despotic regime has resulted in a long period of turmoil at least, and bitter civil war at worst. The stages are clearly defined: a population lives under the thumb of a ruthless regime; the regime is removed, peacefully or otherwise, with or without external help; then after a brief honeymoon period they descend into factional fighting over the future of their newly liberated country. It is sometimes a long and painful period before peace arrives.

The scars have barely started to heal in the Balkans after Marshal Tito died and Yugoslavia fell apart, giving us the most graphic example of this process from recent times. Within a decade of his demise, we saw vicious intercommunal wars and the spectre of ethnic cleansing, leading to the fracturing of the country into smaller independent states. So bad were the atrocities, there and in Rwanda, that the international community was moved to establish a criminal court to pursue justice for those who suffered. (Update: Ratko Mladic, accused of orchestrating the Siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre, has just been arrested. Daily Telegraph, May 26, 2011)

We saw the same pattern in Iraq. Bush and Blair led us into war to remove Saddam Hussein and liberate the Iraqi people. Once liberated, Iraq descended into bitter sectarian conflict stoked by al-Qaeda and Iran. Only now is a truly democratic government beginning to take shape, after countless billions of US dollars expended, thousands of US and allied lives lost, and untold thousands of civilian deaths. Bush was blamed for not having a post-Saddam strategy, we must not make the same mistake again.

But it looks like we are making the same mistake again.

The Egyptian people threw President Mubarek out of office in an amazingly peaceful revolution, however, the cracks are already showing and sectarian violence is rearing its head. What can the West do to prevent an all-out civil war? We already have a particularly bloody civil war taking place in Libya where Colonel Gaddafi is clinging to power by turning his heavily-armed army against what at first was an unarmed civilian population. Charges of war crimes have been filed against him at the International Criminal Court, as they have also against President Assad of Syria who has turned his security forces against his own population. Similar upheavals are taking place elsewhere, in Yemen, and in Iran where the Green Revolution was ruthlessly crushed. Some of the Gulf states too are simmering with discontent.

When you look across the region as a whole, calling it an “Arab Spring” is perhaps naive.

Instead of patronising words, the West needs a strategy for helping the Arab world transition from dictatorship to democracy and fending off those forces that would destabilise it. In other words, we need a Marshall Plan for the Arab world. We need clear goals, and a clear process for achieving those goals.

What we don’t need is to clumsily stitch this together with the Israeli/Palestinian problem and I believe that President Obama is seriously mistaken in trying to do that. The problem, the imperative and the solution are entirely different. Leaving aside Gaza which has its own added complications, both sides already have functioning democracies; both sides are – off and on – engaging in peaceful discussion; neither side is ruled by a dictatorship. The occasional outbreaks of violence are triggered more by outside agents and causes than from within the two sides. Any updated Marshall Plan for the Arab world which aims to facilitate peaceful change, promote democracy and encourage free enterprise is not going to be relevant to Israel and the Palestinians, and including them will simply complicate the matter and alienate the rest of the Middle East.

Sack no Soldiers; Sack no Coppers; Sack no Nurses

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I wish I had their confidence. The government is so convinced there could be no Mumbai-style attack in Britain they are cutting back on every resource we might need to deal with it. And as Liam Fox, Defence Secretary, told a Chatham House conference yesterday, there is more to come. He is right to say, “Tackling the crisis in the public finances is not just an issue of economics but an issue of national security too,” but as I asked in a post last year, “Should economic reality trump military necessity?” After all, we either spend the money and defend ourselves adequately, or we have no need for budgets for anything. This is a matter of survival, plain and simple.

Al-Qaeda could continue to target London, or they might do what the IRA did and seek out softer targets where they can stage what they also now call a “spectacular” with a higher percentage of success. In other words, an attack could happen anywhere in the country and we need the resources to cope with it throughout the country. But what are we doing instead?

Defence:
Reducing front-line capabilities, but not tackling top-heavy administration.

Police:
Reducing front-line capabilities, but not tackling top-heavy administration.

NHS:
Reducing front-line capabilities, but not tackling top-heavy administration.

As Rolf Harris used to say, “Can you see anything yet?” Is there a pattern emerging? Yes there is. Soldiers, policemen and nurses are bearing the brunt of the cut-backs, but not the generals, police chiefs and hospital administrators. Yet in a Mumbai-style attack, the police will be the first on the scene, large numbers of casualties will need to be taken to hospitals, and ultimately the army will need to be called in to assist as even a small number of armed terrorists rampaging through a city would be beyond the resources of any local police force. The police and medical services would still be stretched even if the attack was a series of coordinated bombings across a city. I ought to acknowledge that the fire service also has a vital role to play in these scenarios.

The government needs to focus attention on making the cuts where they are most warranted – at the highest levels, and not where they are most damaging – at the front line.

When is starving someone to death ever acceptable?

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These tragic cases hit the headlines every few years. A loving family applies to the courts for permission to stop “life sustaining treatment” to allow a loved-one in a persistent vegetative state to “die with dignity”. The “life sustaining treatment” bit is just some weasel words that mean removing their feeding tubes and letting them starve to death. Now I don’t question the love that the family has, or the agony and torment they’re going through, or their desire to do whatever is best for their loved one, but I do have two serious concerns.

My first concern is the method. I really do mean that weasel words are used to conceal the real horror of what’s being done. If the patient has a heart attack and the medics do not resuscitate, that’s fine with me, but that’s not what this is all about. This is about actively bringing about their death. It’s about removing their oxygen supply if they have one, and removing their feeding tubes. If they’re not able to breathe without assistance, they will suffocate. If they are able to breathe, they will stay alive until they have starved or dehydrated.

I’m not happy about that.

If all the expert medical opinion is agreed, and all the tests are conclusive, and no mistakes have been made, and the patient can be considered medically and legally dead, then I can understand the desire to bring a peaceful end to a tragic situation. But still. By starvation? Would we treat a dog like that? If we judged that a much-loved pet had to be “put to sleep” – more weasel words – would we be happy if the vet put the pet into a cage and left it there until it had starved to death? Then why would we treat a human being like that?

My second concern is alluded to above. What if they’re wrong? Mistakes are made and misdiagnoses do occur. Medical malpractice lawyers in America make a very lucrative living from such cases and while the culture of litigation here in the UK is different, I’m sure we make just as many mistakes. They will be very rare mistakes. But what proportion of potentially recovering patients to patients with no prospects of recovery would we be happy with? How many living people must we kill before we become uncomfortable with this whole process?

We can combine my two concerns into one hypothetical. Let’s say that the patient really is just a breathing cadaver. Why shouldn’t we let surgeons harvest the organs while they’re still fresh? If we are so convinced the patient can feel no pain, where’s the harm? But if we are still a bit squeamish about it, if we don’t like the way the body twitches when the surgeon cuts the heart out, then why don’t we just put a bullet through the brain? Far better than damaging useful transplant organs by using poisonous gasses or chemicals to terminate life.

Whatever we do, it has to be quick and humane. Starving to death is neither and we are just dancing around the issue. Should a court find that circumstances are such as to warrant life support being withdrawn, it should also rule that measures can be taken to actively end the life. It cannot be right that a court can sanction a barbarous act and encourage the suffering which will be the likely result. If everyone is so convinced there would be no suffering if life support is withdrawn, then do the job properly and bring peace to all involved.

Finally, I would not have been prompted to write this piece were it not for an article in the Telegraph today reporting that a mother is applying for just such a court order concerning her daughter.  She has been in a “minimally conscious state” since February 2003, a truly tragic situation.  But what was the bigger aspect of the story that piqued the Telegraph’s interest? It was that the mother has also obtained an injunction to protect her family’s privacy and this was the first to explicitly cover social media, citing Facebook and Twitter by name.

First injunction specifically bans Facebook and Twitter

So an upcoming death by legally sanctioned starvation is not as big a story as anything about Twitter is.  Such is modern reporting.

The cumulative effects of trivial cheating

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There are two stories in the New York Times today which illustrate the scope and scale of the problem we have with corruption. This isn’t about America where these stories happen to come from, we have the same problem in the UK. It’s about our collective inability to “do the right thing” and our willingness to cheat even at the most banal level. Take the first story:

Texas Passes Bill to Make Some Fish Tales a Crime

That is rather a misleading headline, which is ironic given what I’m writing about. The story is not about people in pubs who idly brag about the size of some fish they caught, it is specifically about cheating in fishing tournaments:

Senator Glenn Hegar, a Republican who sponsored the bill, said it was intended to address cheating in high-level bass fishing tournaments, some of which offer tens of thousands of dollars in prizes. In one notorious case in 2009, an angler who entered the Bud Light Trail Big Bass Tournament on Lake Ray Hubbard, east of Dallas, put a one-pound lead weight inside the stomach of the 10.49-pound bass he had entered to win the grand prize, a $55,000 fishing boat.

“Some people are literally taking scissors and cutting off the tail of a fish to make it fit into a certain category,” Mr. Hegar said. “Unfortunately, they’re not playing by the rules.”

Trimming a fish tail with scissors? That’s cheating at a pretty trivial level, but when you scale it up and involve a large number of people all willing to cheat on what they may each regard as a trivial level, then we have this problem:

Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire investor who once ran one of the world’s largest hedge funds, was found guilty on Wednesday of fraud and conspiracy by a federal jury in Manhattan

As the article explains:

What made Mr. Rajaratnam stand out was not his proprietary computer models nor his skills in security analysis. Instead, colleagues marveled at the deep set of contacts he had cultivated inside Silicon Valley executive suites and on Wall Street trading floors.

All of these people he cultivated were willing to blur the edges or even cross over the line completely. They knew right from wrong. Yet had Rajaratnam had only one or two contacts willing to cheat he could not possibly have had the success he had, but he had hundreds of them all willing to cheat. How absurd would it be if every contestant in a fishing tournament cheated on the same level as well? It becomes a farce.

There is a growing problem in society with people willing to cheat, to get an edge if they think they’ll get away with it, and it’s becoming farcical.

It’s long past time to put some moral standards back into our lives.

Bin Laden: A Death on the Field of Battle

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Some people find it difficult to square the killing of Osama bin Laden with the actions of a law abiding state. There are questions in some quarters about extrajudicial killings, even of execution, and suggestions that he ought to have been captured alive – at any cost – and put on trial like the Nazi leaders of Germany were after the Second World War. But I think that confusion is entirely the result of regarding al-Qaeda “operatives” as ordinary criminals who should be prosecuted according to civil law. That is wrong. al-Qaeda is at war with us, and consequently, we with them.

It is true that we have developed the concept of war crimes since Nuremberg and we now have a permanent international court to aggressively prosecute anyone, including heads of state who offend international morality. Former President of Serbia Slobodan Milosevic is the most recent high-profile defendant to have been arrested and brought to trial. He died before his trial was completed, but the warning is currently being given to Colonel Gaddafi of Libya and President Bashar al-Assad of Syria regarding the mass murder of their respective civilian populations.

However, in all of these cases, prosecution followed, or would follow, the end of hostilities. The war with al-Qaeda is still on-going. So yes, bin Laden had a case to answer for war crimes, but that had to take second place to dealing with him not just as an active combatant, but as the leader of al-Qaeda. He was actively engaged in planning and directing continuing acts of terrorism against the West. He had a “second front”, as it were, against other Moslems who did not conform to his radical vision of Islam and his legacy is that he killed more Moslems than Christians.

Any reasonable person should accept that bin Laden was actively directing al-Qaeda from his Abbottabad compound and that he was not just a legitimate military target, but a necessary target. His death was therefore no different to any other combatant on the field of battle. An opportunity to surrender is not always offered to an enemy, a soldier’s first duty is to himself and his comrades, especially with an enemy who uses suicide as a weapon of war. As it is, the actions of the US Navy SEALs will go down in history as one of the outstanding commando raids.

In brief, we are at war with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden was tracked down and killed at a location where he was actively planning and directing a war against us.

It is a nonsense to regard al-Qaeda as civilians and to put them through civil courts and prosecute them in the ordinary way, as if they had committed a traffic offence. These people are at war with us and their chosen weapon is terrorism. The fiasco of Guantanamo Bay shows the folly of such an approach, releasing combatants to go back and resume fighting against us when they should remain locked-up for the duration. We didn’t treat German prisoners of war that way, nor Argentines taken prisoner on the Falklands. We didn’t hand them their weapons back and say, “Now don’t do it again.”

I have blogged on these aspects before:

The problem with treating enemy combatants as civil defendants. It doesn’t work.

What part of “We’re at war” do you not understand?

A fatal addiction for Ireland; a warning for the rest of us

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There’s this free and independent country, with it’s own government running it’s own affairs, which gives it all up in a moment of madness. It’s a story every addict knows well. Befriended by a pusher who gives them a few free samples, they experience the thrill of drug-fuelled highs. Life has never seemed more exciting and they’re hooked. Now the pusher makes demands on them and they must pay the price of continued supply. Ireland is owned.

The Irish try to break free. They have a referendum on implementing a new treaty giving more power to the EU, and they vote it down. The EU is furious at this act of defiance, they order Ireland to vote again – and keep voting until they get it right. Then as the global economic crisis begins to bite, the EU offers Ireland a loan it doesn’t want on terms it can’t afford. But the EU are loan sharks as well and the Irish will not be allowed to refuse the offer.

Broken in spirit, the dream long dead, Ireland tries to patch up a ruined country. They adopt painful and unpopular economic measures, but it’s not enough, the EU wants more pain. The government is close to collapse and wants fresh elections for a new mandate to tackle the crisis. But their EU masters won’t permit it, they make it very clear that elections at this time would be “very irresponsible”. Ireland learns the price of disobedience.

No longer a free and independent country, no longer with a government of it own in any meaningful sense, unable to run it’s own affairs, Ireland is what every drug addict becomes. The exodus of Ireland’s young talent to seek new opportunities abroad compounds the impression of a drained and depleted body, aged before its time, its life ebbing away. Ireland’s only use now is as an awful poster child to warn others of the perils of further EU integration.

The problem with treating enemy combatants as civil defendants. It doesn’t work.

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The scene: The Old Bailey, sometime in 1942. Four German Luftwaffe airmen are in the dock charged with dropping bombs over England.

Defence Counsel rises: “Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, my clients emphatically deny the charges you have heard today that they did deliberately drop explosive bombs on the Assembly Rooms in Bath, Somerset, causing the deaths of several residents of that fine city. The prosecution have presented no evidence whatsoever to link those bombs which tragically fell on the city that night, to my client’s aircraft, a Ju 88 manufactured by Junkers and Company of Dessau, Germany. My clients were in just one of many aircraft flying in the area at the time and any one of the others may have accidentally released the bombs with unfortunate consequences. Yet the prosecution have singularly failed to arrest any of them as suspects or even to question them as witnesses. The case against my clients is therefore one entirely of speculation. My clients were on an innocent pleasure flight, wishing only to enjoy by moonlight the pastoral scenes made famous by such renowned artists as Mr John Constable, RA, and to admire the architecture of some of our great cities, assisted in their exploration by a guide to Great Britain published by that noted Anglophile, Herr Karl Baedeker, a copy of which they had with them on their journey. It has to be said that their treatment as visitors to our country has been deplorable. They were quite outrageously attacked and shot at by a Royal Air Force fighter plane, causing them to crash land and to sustain whiplash injuries which may keep them away from operational duties for days if not weeks. The unprovoked attack on their aircraft, from behind, was a cowardly act completely disproportionate to the offences for which my clients stand accused and which they emphatically deny. Furthermore their subsequent treatment at the hands of the police fell far short of that expected in a civilised society such as ours. The police failed to provide wurst and sauerkraut when requested, and served instead tea with cucumber sandwiches from which the crusts had not been removed. Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, I am sure you share a deep sense of shame at what has been done to these fine young men in the name of our country, and I urge to you find them innocent of all charges.”

Verdict: Not guilty. Crown ordered to pay compensation to the aircrew, and damages to the German government for the loss of their aircraft.

Further news: An un-named RAF pilot has been arrested and charged with causing criminal damage to a Junkers bomber.

Further further news: A former poet has been jailed for life for race hate crimes after inciting violence against the residents of Slough, Berkshire. Sir John Betjemen said as he was lead away to prison, “I weep for my country.”