Simply unbelievable

The BBC news report confirming the authorities' conclusion that Bob Woolmer's death was of natural causes, omits a vital and elementary point: how he actually died.

Pretty inept, huh?

Also inept to the point of straining credulity, the police investigation which claimed 100% certainty of foul play, fingerprinted all the players, and now proclaims that the investigation which was apparently 100% barking up the wrong tree was excellent. Apparently they have also been praised by Scotland Yard.

As usual it is left to the Pakistanis ,in the guise of aspiring pol Imran Khan, to assert the cause of Woolmer's death, with an innuendo of his ill-health which rather suggests they were saints to tolerate such an obvious physical and mental basket case for a moment as their national coach.

"Bob Woolmer had diabetes, he had blood pressure, an enlarged heart, he had respiratory problems. On top of it, the depression of losing and then he drank a bottle of champagne. They should have first ruled out natural causes before this whole drama about the murder"

Khan truly is egregious, leaving it to his nation's cricket captain, his beard a little more clipped than I remember during the World Cup, to act all magnanimous:

"Inzamam-ul-Haq says Pakistan should not take legal action over how the team was treated during the Bob Woolmer affair."

"I don't feel court action would be of any use now.", says Inzamam Ul Haq, Pakistan Captain.

Well thanks Inzi. I am frankly amazed that the Woolmer family so meekly accepts the current word of this mazy investigation. I feel deeply sorry for them. It seems to me that what this badly needs is a court case to clear the air- if it's the incompetence and irresponsibility of the police that's under scrutiny, and if heads are on the block, maybe then we'll find out the real reasons for their uneqivocal statements and initial enthusiasm for the murder investigation. After all, it wouldn't have been hard to sustain the scenario of death by natural causes from the beginning and indefinitely, and sane people would have been inclined to were it not for strong counter-arguments. What were they and why are they now irrelevant in the wake of the UK intervention of a few weeks back?

Nice chap that he is, nevertheless a student of mine was tut-tutting, in that slightly distant, airy way that Euros tend to have, about problems on the Mexico-US border.

To be fair to him he had actually visited the Mexico-US border, and he was commenting on the fence he saw there. I pointed out that the fenced areas were comparatively small- concentrated on urban areas. They do intend to expand them though.

But the difference between Europe and the US can be seen in the fact that in the US the debate on immigration is open, is transparent, a source of conversation across the whole nation.

In Europe the border issues may be more acute, taking "borders" to mean the borders of the EU. The problems are primarily to the South, although it seems to me that immigration from the East is just more tolerable to the Euros, in part because it isn't as visually obvious.

As so often with Europe though, the disgrace is so immediately under our noses we can't see it. There's a mechanism, it seems, that enables us to switch off to problems in other EU countries, while claiming them for our own when there's something positive and noteworthy going on in them. It may be the fact that we're just not Europeans at all ;-).

Ok, ok, and the issue is: the scandalous deaths and hardships endured by immigrants from Africa in Morocco and on the high seas.

According to the Goethe Institute, "Between November 2005 and February 2006, 1,300 people died en route to the Canary Islands alone.".

But you want fences, right? Well, the EU's got 'em, all right. And they're 6 metres high, backed by over a thousand border guards, tear gas, watch towers, rubber bullets- all of which are quite liable to be brought into action. The fences enclose those little colonial enclaves which the Spanish have never wanted to give up in North Morocco, even as they desired the return of other alleged real estate.

I dare say there is some heated rhetoric in the US about a war on immigrants. In Europe, or on Europe's edge, it's a reality. One episode illustrates:

"on 28 September 2005, the refugees decided to storm the fence. Night after night, hundreds of them scaled the barricade using homemade ladders. The guards shot at them, and at least seven died in the hail of bullets. 1,200 were locked into buses by the Moroccan Army and driven to the southern border of Morocco in the Sahara, where they were left in the desert without any food or water. Even weeks later the local inhabitants reported that they were still finding bodies".

In fact, what appears to be the case in Europe's border strategy is an approach of Darwinian selective cruelty- make the crossing so hard, so vicious, that only the fittest either attempt to make it or succeed in making it. And even when they have, that's not the end of the story.

This all happens under our noses, without much of a murmur. Indeed, how would we affect it, even if we considered it our problem? It's a policy so extreme that it has all the hallmarks of never having been discussed in an open forum, but instead imposed by some shadowy securicrats. That, there, is the Euros' democratic deficit. Right there.

Enigma Bush

Well, it's good to see a good speech from Bush again. Many things closed in Prague today. Many people were ambivalent to say the least about his visit. Yet the speech he put forward managed to be eloquent, informed, flattering to his hosts, and honestly his own, as well as consistent with past messages.

On the other hand, what Bush doesn't seem to realise is that in the Czech Republic, even the dissidents were in some sense elite- educated, descendents of the affluent upper-middle class dispossessed by the Communists. Havel was a great example of that, if he could even be termed middle. His Grandfather built the Lantern theatre which Bush alludes to in his speech- a grand affair far from the ideals of the ordinary people. Havel was criticised too for having his head in the clouds, when president. People prefer the more bruising Klaus who isn't frightened to take on and slag off such luminaries as Al Gore. With Klaus there is content and courage, a recognition that flattery is no good and hard-headed decisions must prevail. With Bush there is courage, now and then, and content if you believe.

But believing oughtn't to be the condition for content where battling Islamofascism is concerned, and it's a problematic legacy if that becomes accepted wisdom.

Globalised sensitivities

I couldn't help being interested in this article about Tony Blair's foreign policy principles (via Con. Home), and one particular quote, in the light of the Woolmer case discussed in the post below.

Tony said:


"What happens today in Pakistan matters on the streets of Britain."

It's ironic too in his choice of language:

"Be a player not a spectator"-

and certainly whatever you do don't be a coach.

In a way the Woolmer case would be the perfect illustration of the "Pakistan point", were it to be the case that the British had decided to close down the Jamaican investigation to prevent another inflammatory anti-British issue for the imams in the madrassahs to ponder, and for the Pakistani population in the UK to absorb as another "grievance". That Mark Shields must be a rubbish policeman- he said at one point that he was 100 percent certain that Woolmer had been murdered... or maybe he's just amenable to a good talking to from his erstwhile colleagues from Scotland Yard.

By the way, Pakistan has a population of 165 million with 37 percent below the age of 14.

Still No Cricket.

So, from the BBC we receive the news that Bob Woolmer was not murdered after all. Or at least we think we do. Who knows what to think now? It was held to be certain after a decent period for initial investigation that Woolmer had been strangled. Then that was questioned. Then it was asserted that he was poisoned and strangled. What was noticeable was the interventions of the Pakistani cricket authorities, again and again pushing for a naturalistic explanation. Then the UK police stepped in; and the UK pathologists. My reaction to that was twofold- good to have extra police weight behind the investigations; bad that they were becoming internationalised and politicised too early in the process.

Whatever Woolmer's state of health (and the family stated he had no serious health issues), he was a lifelong sportsman who still exercised with his team. How unhealthy could he have been? The only cause of such sudden death brought on by stress that is generally known is a heart attack, and this is so easy to determine it could have been immediately announced.

If this is the final resolution by the authorities then there is nothing more to be said (the motivations for a cover up are quite obvious); but that still doesn't make it cricket.

I feel a pattern emerging...

Maragaret Hassan, Ken Bigley, the British navy servicemen, Alan Johnston, the five contractors kidnapped in Baghdad. Horror. Manipulation. Cat. Mouse.

Who needs money?

What LGF says about kidnapped BBC journalist Alan Johnston's statement is all too true:

"unfortunately, what he says isn’t that different from the BBC’s day-to-day reporting under normal circumstances"

I feel a touch of the old Humbert Wolfs coming on. Sing along:

"You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.
But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there's
no occasion to."

Nowadays no-one is scared of the British polity, so why bribe when you can just take hostages?

Yet one could reaonably ask, why bother when the Beeb are so pliable to the cause of the terrorist anyway? I think it's something in the criminal mind- they just want to make sure. And anyway, criminality is fun, innit?

Legal Calculation

When I make a few remarks on the British legal system, one of the things I have to explain to the uninitiated is how numbers just mean different things in Britain. Take the case of Sheik Abdullah el-Faisal. He's the guy who preached serious hate and went to jail for a hefty nine years. four years. And now he's out and sunning himself in the Caribbean (which, after all, is what he should have stuck to).

According to the BBC at the time "The judge recommended that el-Faisal, from Stratford in east London, should serve at least half of the sentence and then be deported."

Maybe we're there now, taking into account custodial time before the trial. Or maybe we're not. And maybe that too is a point worth arguing. In any case, it's simply absurd to append the tag "nine years" when we only mean four.

But that's me naively assuming that a crime carries a price, rather than prison as being a form of social management. We're all part of that continuum.

When a comment is a rebuttal.

Matthew Parris has one of those typically high-handed moments of his, concealed under his trademark upper-class self-deprecation, as he debates the insufficiency of democracy.

A commenter sets him straight:

If you can't trust democracy, who can you trust? For the last 900 years (approx) in England we have been moving towards greater democracy because of the failures of kings (King John, Charles I, James II and others). Our rulers are not necessarily wise.

Taxation without democracy is nothing more than demanding money with menaces.

For a democracy to function, the electorate must be fully and impartially informed. Therefore the press must be free and impartial. I am not sure how this could be achieved but could the owner of this newspaper please take note.

Ian Wyld, Marlborough,

I agree with almost all of this, but it seems pretty clear how a "fully and impartially informed" public could be achieved, and that is by imposing a free market on the UK media through the progressive privatisation of the BBC. Naturally legal powers would need to be buttressed against monopoly interests (which should be the number one priority of the Government of the land in all sectors), and obviously the public would perforce have to wake up to the idea that there is no "given" view to be held, but all this would be to the good, and democracy the winner.

Christopher Hitchens comes home, and finds it another country (well he has settled in America, but that's not quite what I mean...)

Scary and real

I had this article about Britain's coming disillusion pointed out to me, and it really struck home. The fiddling of figures in the UK has reached desperate proportions; the imperative to deceive out of control. From immigration to education to unemployment there has been a general whitewash of data, leading to a bubble of false confidence and false alarms to go with it.

All due to burst sometime soon, according to a book written by former Guardianistas Elliot and Atkinson, reviewed by Jeff Randall.

Yes, they're Daily Mail themes, and yes, such things sell books, and no these authors are not the only two good apples in the rotten basket. In fact though, the greatest disservice done by our fetid media, as well as our fetid politicians, is that they have so promiscuously oversold the truth, mingling it with their little lies to such a point where truth and lies are indistinguishable. I won't be reading the book, I don't think, but it seems to me that it's a truth in this case only slightly oversold.

Hope for Gaza and the West Bank: gangs of fascists are fighting each other in what might ironically be titled a "civil war". The BBC chooses to avoid the irony, for some reason.


So what's the good news (apart from the above)? Well, as noted by Instapundit from this Times' report, "Some Palestinian analysts predict that a collapse of the Palestinian Authority would pave the way for Jordanian custodial rule in the West Bank and a similar arrangement for Egypt in Gaza."

Which would mean the reunification of the Palestinian ethnic grouping, and an end to the farcical pretense of a nation used by the Arab world to undermine Israel, more or less.

The Wall is working, t'would appear.

Oh, and the second hope would be that such rule of law would end the Kassam missile attacks into Israel.

The Big Story you haven't heard about.

The BBC is usually all over stories of violence from America, especially those with a racial dimension, like this.

Curiously enough they're not all over this story, which comes via the excellent la Shawn Barber. And saying that the US media would rather ignore it is not an excuse: Greg Dyke boasted once that the BBC covers topics too hot for the US media (he was actually talking about Iraq, but the same would be true regarding white on black crime, which would be generally referred to as race hate crime). Not on this occasion, it seems.

It made my blood boil. Swift and accurate justice would stop people such as the criminals concerned from getting as far down the line of evil callousness as to commit such crimes against the very humanity of us all.

Update: HotAir now has a barnstorming vent on the subject which pretty much says it all.

"I look like an exploding tomato and shout like a jet engine and every time I see it makes me cringe."

Sweeney Crawling

The above quote is from John Sweeney, of the BBC's Panorama, and is a calculated attempt to make it look as though he was just out of control when lambasting the Scientologists. In fact, I'd say he seemed to have an icy control behind his bellowing, as though indulging a whim out of contempt for his subjects.

Hello again.

Black is not the conspiratorial type.

Mark Steyn is in danger of turning me into a Conrad Black trial-geek. His coverage is getting hotter and sharper by the day, as is the nature of the case. The point, however, that I have summarised above, is the Black may be an intellectual dreamer, an other-worldly oddly patriarchal figure out of his time- but he is no conspirator, whereas David Radler clearly is.

I only hope US justice is strong enough to demonstrate that, since it wasn't strong enough to prevent the abuse of Black's name and twilight years up till now. And, yes, since you ask, I am buying the Steyn line on his former boss and friend.

If you view one thing on the internet this week, I recommend this, a Bloggerheads discussion between Robert Wright and Eli Lake. Bloggerheads, in case you are wondering, is a site where two way video conversations are broadcast. Robert Wright's a liberal, Eli's a conservative journalist. Eli's embedded in Iraq, following the "surge" of US troops there; Robert's back in the USA. It's nighttime in Iraq when this is recorded, daytime in the USA. Eli's account is full of excitement and tension- the real thing in other words. (via Instapundit)

Also fascinating, to get into the mood of Lake's reporting, this from Michael Yon- Rattlesnake- embedded with the British army and active on night missions. Again, electrifying.

I should also add that I will be away for the next few days, visiting relatives. I may be absent from these pages for five days or so. Then again, maybe I won't be.

Ah, happy days. Some joke, perhaps? The BBC had it as their front page photo all day.

As Mark Steyn said about the BBC in a recent column, "On the European Union, on the Iraq war, on Northern Ireland, on Islam, on America, the BBC trends not merely well to the left of the Conservative Party but well to the left of Tony Blair’s New Labour."

Is the IPCC doing harm to science?

Look out for a big BBC climate change splash this weekend, unless that is they think the weather's too cold in London or they think people are looking the other way. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), you see, is due to release another climate change paper on Friday.

Der Spiegel have written an interesting analysis of the current state of play, explaining the international wrangling that goes on about the use of language, and how the EU (with the UK) has tended to have its way in hardening forecasts.

What struck me most was this concerning CC "denier" Richard Lindzen:

"Lindzen's arguments sound convincing, but they are still nothing but claims, popular theories as opposed to a transparent global process, a global plebiscite among climate researchers."

I grew up in a family headed by a scientist, and this was not the way I understood it should work. Politics and science just don't mix, which appears not to be good enough for some.

Oh, another highlight from the Spiegel article (unserious one), concerning Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC:


"When colleagues describe him they mention his beard, the way he combs his hair straight across his head and his diplomatic skills."

Ah, I think this is the polite German way of saying that he has a wicked comb-over.

Nations Run Deep : France's positive moment.

I've heard recently from several sources of an old quote from the perennially influential Adam Smith:

"There is a great deal of ruin in a nation"

True enough, but the corollary must be that there is a great deal of repair required from time to time.

I am glad to hear of Nicholas Sarkozy's victory in the French Presidential elections, but Commentary's Michael Gurfinkiel sounds a cautionary note, and with good reason.

It's difficult reading his analysis of the situation, with France dominated by elite bureaucrats in Government, and by numerous, youthful and active Eurabian inmigrants on the the ground, to see how Sarkozy will be more than temporary respite for France. Maybe he will show people what needs doing- ie. a massive and alien revamping of France's political culture and social ideas. It's doubtful that he can actually do this himself, but perhaps he can be a trailblazer who buys France some time.

It would be nice for Europe if he can be more than that.

My comparison of the French situation with that of Britain, meanwhile, would be that while the French need to swallow their pride and accept alien solutions to their problems (and I mean more traditional Anglo-Saxon ones), Britain needs to awake to its own interests and show even greater robustness in its elected War on Terror. What we have seen in France is creeping Islamisation; in Britain we are vulnerable to the sudden terrorist shock. The French need to take their self-imposed blinkers off; the British to wake up. Neither is in a good position, but the French have taken a step forward today, undoubtedly.

By the way, I rather enjoyed the sour grapes BBC comment that "the BBC's Caroline Wyatt in Paris says he will have to work hard to unite the French, and try to win round those who voted against him". Clearly since this vote was a choice of two philosophies, it would be a betrayal of Sarkozy's voting base to pander to the Royalists. But that's, I expect, the Beeb's only consoling consideration at the moment. I wonder whether the Beeb will ever tire of their boilerplate.

Beeb-based observations

Ordinarily I ignore local elections. There seems to be a pretty good case for ignoring the most recent ones. That, one can imagine, is what the attuned folks at the Beeb concluded when they analysed the Conservative performance primarily through the prism of a notional national voting percentage barely increased on the previous year's less comprehensive local elections results (40ish percent versus 40ish percent). Yet there I was on Thursday night poring over the results at 3 in the morning. True, it was really just the consequence of insomnia- but somehow I had begun to care.

I wonder if others are beginning to feel that way? The Beeb are probably shuddering at the thought. A litmus test though of whether Cameron is really a statist or is actually a pretty good conservative liar would be whether (assuming- big assumption- his election in three years' time) the BBC was permitted to continue as the state sponsored global broadcasting monster which it has evolved into, or whether Cameron would engage in some conservative-minded natural selection of BBC functions, with the aim of stimulating the free media market.

Also in my mind during the coverage was the Beeb's very own Lothian question- where they gave primacy to the decision making processes of less than an eighth of the British population by headlining the elections to the assemblies in Scotland and Wales.

I wonder if that would have happened had Labour enjoyed a relatively relaxed Thursday night south of the border? It must be a comfort to lefty Beebites that they can always retreat to covering a truly leftist country when they need to get their breath back. Something similar has usually been true of conservatives in England- there was always the South East. Though we never had a giant broadcaster to cater for such escapism, news tends to follow the money, so...

I very much like Scotland, actually. The main reason, aside from motive, that I can't imagine ever locating there is the suffocating essentialness of the state to people's existences there. The same for me would apply to Sweden, probably Norway too. Where I currently reside, in the Czech Republic, the state has a bit of an image problem, having had a forty year term of office statifying (stultifying?) everything. The roll back from that is therefore instinctive and there's an instinct to leave alone; as well as the imperative of not actually being a very rich state to begin with.

I fear for Scotland though, or rather for its people. A retreat from the Union would be a fundamentally unserious step, a step towards EUification and away paradoxically from national identity. The fact that the deciding factor would be the opposition of the Lib Dems to such a move says it all really.