I am just back from the 'pictures' to see Slumdog Millionaire. 
A terrific movie and one where you don't mind your emotions being manipulated by what, at one level, is a somewhat clichéd love story. It has not been universally praised - especially by some who know India well - but you can't please 'em all. And, anyway, isn't the pleasure of any piece of fiction, in any medium, the willing surrender of one's emotions and rational mind for manipulation? It gets a Rudin five star rating.
The choice of movie for this family outing was something of a compromise – the current Mrs R touting for Australia, which sounded too much like a 'chick flick' for my taste, and I most wanted to see Frost/Nixon and still do!
I was agitating though to get out of the house and do something to take my mind off my fury at that sanctimonious, toadying, deceitful and, by his own admission, prone to "mistakes" of a financial nature, posturing politico Peter Hain, 
who was huffing and puffing on The World This Weekend about EU law, and waffling about how it must be challenged.
Oh yeah? this disastrous former Europe Minister is more responsible than most for the trashing of our constitution - by giving more powers to those whom we do not elect and cannot remove and loftily dismissing the temerity of ordinary citizens who campaigned to have a vote on the former and present EU Constitution that the Irish had the temerity to vote against, and now, of course, in classic EU style are being made to vote again until they get it 'right.' "You're wasting your time", he said when the UK government was refusing to allow a vote on the original attempt at the Constitution, scuppered by French and Dutch voters (or so we might reasonably have thought). "You're not going to get a vote." And then, voila, when the Labour government was forced into promising a referendum, he opined that it was a good thing to have one because the Constitution needed democratic legitimacy. The man is totally shameless. Listen, buddy: There is nothing you can do about the situation with Total. You know it, so stop pretending.
You, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Gordon Brown and the rest know that a promise of "British Jobs for British Workers" is a lie and that there is nothing you can do to support strategic parts of the economy such as the automotive industry on which hundreds of thousands of jobs depend…and now, because you're panicking about the possible developments of the latest protest, you pretend that you're outraged and will do something about it! You've long sold the pass on any control over the right to live and work in the UK by the EU's 500 million citizens. You've allowed foreign courts to demand the arrest of British citizens for 'crimes' which aren't even offences in this country. It's amazing how even those ardent Europhiles, the Liberal Democrats, seem outraged and surprised when such instruments are actually used to prosecute people for merely voicing what are, to me, obnoxious and ludicrous opinions (but I will defend to the death your right to voice them, etc.).
You, Peter Hain, once possessed admiral radicalism and were a courageous anti-apartheid campaigner (earning the close attention of the South African security service, BOSS, who tried to frame you) but you've fully framed yourself and become a full part of this over-compensated, self-justifying, self-perpetuating political class; a class which has brought us close to ruin and in doing so earned the justified opprobrium of everyone who has been paying attention to what has really been going on over the last 15 years or so (under both Tory and Labour governments).
Mind you, if we had followed your enthusiasm for 'the European project' we would have been in the Euro years ago and lost even that fragment of control over our economy and quite probably now would be experiencing French and Greek civil disturbances, because if you can't control interest rates and increase them to keep inflation down, you have to control – i.e. cut - public spending. Alternatively, you are unable to cut the rate when you desperately need to boost credit. But then, virtually the whole of the British political class – including the CBI and the TUC - were in favour of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) and it was only when we were forced out of it that we started our 15 year run of economic growth, which Labour have only just now managed to ruin.
Rudin's Rule No. 1: When the political class is united in its support for a policy, that policy is almost certainly wrong.
You (you in this case being the UK political elite) long ago sacrificed the bulk of the UK's fishing fleet – one of the prices worth paying, apparently, for EEC membership; a tiny bit of a disadvantage to the UK, given that 80% of fishing waters in the EU lie in UK territory. You've continued to back the Common Fisheries Policy, resulting in absurd bureaucratic quotas for certain types of fish which, frustratingly for the bureaucrats sitting in their Brussels palace, refuse to swim in carefully allocated parts of the ocean and the consequent chucking over the side of literally billions of fish, dead – the most obscenely wasteful scheme ever devised. You've been content to watch our taxes be thrown at millionaire farmers and landowners such as The Queen, Duke of Westminster and Prince Charles (through the Duchy of Cornwall) and them raking in an extra £1 billion due to the decline in exchange rate, and seen millions of tons of 'excess' food - produced under the utterly mad and corrupt Common Agricultural Policy - dumped into developing world countries, thus undercutting their producers and directly causing the starvation and deaths of untold millions.
Furthermore (oh yes, there's more) as the excellent They Work For You shows, you, Peter Hain, have (quote) voted "very strongly" for introducing ID cards, strongly for student top-up fees, strongly for Labours anti-terrorism laws, and very strongly for Iraq war.
Any one of these would be sufficient for condemnation…
So, please, sincerely, *censored* off, or, as a truly great Labour leader commented about one of his ministers: "a period of silence from you would be greatly welcomed".
Praise, though, for our quality press for two great exposes: first, the Sunday Times with the classic sting that exposed the 'cash for amendments' (annoying lack of alliteration there!) in the House of Lords. Yes, after nearly 12 years of Labour government (and credit, where credit's due, the culling of a couple of hundred hereditary peers) we are still in a position where our laws - which, don't forget, include the criminal laws and can result in us being incarcerated - can be blocked, amended and even introduced by a completely unelected, unaccountable bunch of political toadies, failed politicians…and Bishops. See, I don't mind if they want to give people titles and if they then want to ponce around in ermine. But I do – really strongly – object to the laws of this country being partly determined by yet more unelected people. Worse still, many of these are non-domiciled, non-UK taxpayers. Representation in the Upper House AND without taxation! Fantastic! Admittedly what we don't want is a chamber stuffed full of second-rate, failed politicians (as with most of our MEPs) and Rudin has a cunning plan to ensure we have democratic representation through a revising, non-party chamber, consisting of representatives outside the political class, who can bring in their knowledge and judgement on science, the arts, industry and more. This plan received the approval of the saintly Tony Benn (no less) when I appeared on a BBC 5 Live phone-in a few years ago. More on that story soon…
And then we have The Guardian's series, starting tomorrow (February 2nd), previewed in La Toynbee's Saturday column), on the third of the UK FTSE 100 companies that paid NO tax in the last financial year available. Yet, of course, these companies rely on UK taxpayers to finance the roads, the health service, and the 'top up' benefits that allow these companies to rake in huge profits. But don't expect any action from this government – New Labour has been so far up the arses of big business they must have a great view of its lower intestines.
But at least these revelations give me hope: we have not yet seen the death of serious, investigative, campaigning journalism, which means we still have a chance to put things right.
OK, I am now at nearly 1,500 words and I haven't even touched yet on my joy on the first 12 days of the Obama Presidency, my part in the the Winter of Discontent, my later attempts - in a one-to-one interview - to prise out of the then Prime Minister, 'Big Jim' Callaghan, how the Cabinet had secretly approved the upgrading of Polaris, and…. But I am always telling my students that 'less means more'...
So that and more will have to wait…!
Interesting site, always a new topic .. good luck in the new 2011. Happy New Year!
Posted by: school_dubl | December 30, 2010 at 07:46 PM