We are half way through 2014, heading into the British mid summer holiday-strewn time of year. How are we doing? (Let's leave sport out of this).
Already the Iraq mess looks worse by the day and intransigent President Maliki makes a unified solution ever more difficult. At home Andy Coulson has been banged up for phone hacking, albeit probably in a nice prison for the better classes of criminal rather than the real thing ,while all his co-defendents have been found not guilty. On the troublesome sports field the almost pointless England World Cup team headed home to Luton on their charter after their final defeat by diminutive Puerto Rico a team rated lower than Scotland in the Fifa ( that fine body of men) tables. What more can go wrong? Probably quite a lot actually but let's not be too miserable. It's mid summer after all.
Back to Iraq. Despite the excesses of Saddam and the Baath Party weren't the Sunnis the west's best friends back in the days of Saddam? Not now. The extreme and fundamentalist organisation, Isis, has swept out of Syria and across northern Iraq leaving a bloody trail of murder in its wake and promising more for its opponents throughout the country.Using terror to subjugate its opponents and settle old scores is a primary weapon. No peace and reconciliation on their part. Indeed Isis has named itself as the successor to the Ottoman Empire and declared a "Caliphate" across a swathe of Syria and Iraq , while warning Muslims everywhere that they are now the boss and they had better get in line and do whatever the charming new Caliph tells them. That fortunately is unlikely but they have been extremely successful in marking out a domain and describing their ultimate ambitions (Watch out Spain). Meanwhile women are banished back to the home, most forms of pleasure are forbidden and mosques of rival groups are being demolished. The fate of any remaining Christians, their freedoms and buildings is clear.
There isn't much sign of peace and reconciliation from President Maliki either . His army has gone on the rampage and indulged in retaliatory killings of Sunnis. Not a wonderful response if he wants to keep the country together. He needs every friend or at least neutral he can get and to be pushing for national unity if for no other reason than to encourage America to do more to keep his head out of the Isis noose.His actions don't make it easy for anyone to help him and just to rub the point in the Kurds, historically badly treated by everbody, have staked out their share of the country and plenty of oil.
In the field of peace and reconciliation, post Arab Spring Egypt isn't doing any better. Again , rather than talk about peace and reconciliation President al Sisi is sharpening divisions between supporters of ousted democratically elected though equally divisive President Morsi .
Next door to the left in Libya, nasty but stable under Gadaffi, chaos and loss of life continues. To the right Israel and Hammas have escalated mutual provocation with Hammas looking determined to provoke Israel into serious bloodshed ,-probably mainly of its own people but the leadership has never cared much about that,- in an attempt to up the ante.
That's the Middle East.
Back home politics are already mired in what is going to be a long and tedious drag towards the General Election in May next year. From the autumn onwards it is going to look increasingly like a World War 1 battlefield.
We have just had what looks very much like a media-manufactured passport crisis. People,inevitably mainly hard working families spending the last of their hard earned cash on a holiday, have been finding that new passports have been taking longer than usual to come through. That's not surprising at this time of year and by shouting "crisis" from the rooftops the media have done their best to create one. Applications "inexplicably" surged in June and now the wait is another week or two. No surprise there. What would you do if you want to travel in say November? Yes, you've done it. Shout about a crisis and you make one.
This hulabaloo disappeared almost as quickly as it arrived when the perceived much bigger opportunity to castigate David Cameron came into sight. The dull, grey, Eurocrat, Luxemburg's Mr Junker, was about to become President of the EU. Few leaders actually wanted him. Some, including Merkel had indicated that they would help Cameron to block him but come the day they melted away and let something everybody knew wasn't the right answer happen. All very EU and exasperating to Cameron and most of thinking UK Plc.(that isn't all of it) to whom this spat exemplified much of what is wrong with the organisation. In the almost certain knowledge that he would lose the battle and it being too late to go back to a softly softly behind the curtains campaign, Dave went for broke and forced a vote. The result was that he stood alone. Howls of protest from the usual suspects including the CBI whose only interests here are those about their perception of what's good for business. They have none in the fundamental question of sovereignty and nor have Labour or the LibDems. Two these two Europe is a nice socialist place. The reality is that the tactic was as good as any and better than many. By forcing a crisis Cameron is more likely to get something out of the whole affair than he would wringing his hands and begging for scraps of comfort from the overladen EU table. He does need though to reposition the argument . It should not be about concessions for Britain. it should be about a looser, much more free EU for everyone. The target should be the hugely expensive overweight and stifling apparatus which in business terms is simply an enormous overhead and most of all the ditching of the idea of an eventual European mega-state .No majority of its citizens anywhere has ever voted for that.
The next sky filling issue to roll in has been allegations of the "establishment" stifling reporting and evidence of widespread child abuse in high places until at least the 1980s. A wide ranging top level enquiry has been set up to expose who was up to what. All well and good but it will take a lot of time and many millions of pounds. There is also the risk that it will distract attention and resources from probing what is going on here and now, something instinctively popular with politicians. Its conclusions are likely to be pretty much what everybody already knows. The "establishment" , including the aristocracy, political parties, the churches, schools (private boarding in particular) , and other high level enclosed groups, have indulged in some bad behaviours for centuries. These have been covered up directly and indirectly (He's terribly influential you know") enforced silence and a muzzled police force. Any career minded police officer will have been made very aware of cases where the message is "Go no further".
Given a free shot these powerful groups, now reinforced with some very sensitive celebrities, would keep it that way as we have seen from their promotion and support of the media muzzling proposals coming out of the Leveson report. It is only recently that 24 hour rolling news coverage, a breakdown in respect for authority and authorities of all kinds has led to high level coverups and blindness being seriously challenged.
Rumours of a cabinet reshuffle have been flying about for some time now and Monday 14th July looks like the date. Inevitably pure rumour has been added to by leaks, one courtesy of a loudly spoken mobile "I'm on the train" conversation by a young lady out to impress her fellow travellers. Why do these people do it? We constantly hear details of confidential upcoming contracts, the transgressions of Flossie or Bill who "just can't hack it" who come Monday are about to be fired. Too much information. Unless we are a competitor or a friend of Flossie or Bill,- which we might be,- we just don't want to know. Back to this Monday it looks as if Dave will be out to convince that he has no problems with women. The boys had therefore better not get too excited. It's not entirely about best person for the job.
Whatever the cabinet looks like by Monday evening , the reshuffle and a few new smiling faces are very unlikely to deal with a problem currently common to the top of all three parties. The Conservative and Labour leaders are surrounded by small coteries of long standing trusted mates, some going back to school days. Nick Clegg on the other hand is surrounded by 20 paid advisors. Maybe his supposed old mates perhaps either don't exist or are suspected as maybe having long knives in their pockets. In all three cases the result is that the men themselves are seen as remote from other MPs, let alone party members. They are surrounded by a wall of gatekeepers and minders who keep the boss free of contamination by real contact with lesser mortals. The everlasting stage managed meetings between political suits and the masses in the form of teachers, nurses, smarty turned out factory workers etc don't hack it. The masses aren't daft.
Any new ministers will not have much time to be be seen displaying their wisdom, gravitas and deservedness on live TV before Parliament breaks up for its very long summer recess/hols. School,- which many of its members have never mentally left those days behind so they are still free to think in terms of prefects, sports and even the occasional beatings,- breaks up on July 30th. It does not then return with its tuck boxes and suntans from overseas fact finding tours until 13th October. The prefects and pupils ,all of course strictly ranked by seniority, then have to manage nearly a whole month before the Half Term Exeat begins on 11th November. After that, hey ho, it's just a month until they head home for Christmas.
