Labour Does Defence Cuts(ish): Part Two

(Ainsworth addresses the Commons in December 2009 on defence cuts. He might have said "I've done some sums, and they don't add up. But don't worry, I'm not going to be here after the election to worry about that.")

Apologies for the lack of postings from here at SRM HQ - I've been very busy and, as they say, all will be revealed shortly. Thus, it is with apologies that this follow up to part one has been delayed - but here we are now.

The figures are stark: the UK MoD is broke, and despite the cuts from the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) that we've discussed here and here before, there are reasonable grounds to assume that there are more cuts to come. Indeed, whilst Liam Fox told Parliament on 18 July 2011 that the defence budget was "broadly in balance", it must be assumed that "broadly in balance" actually means "not actually in balance, so more cuts are required".

But this is not news. Indeed, prior to the 2010 election, Labour belated recognized that they'd blown the budget. This was made powerfully clear in Bernard Gray's report, which famously described the budget as undeliverable under any likely future budget. This was demonstrated in his chart on p. 94:

 (Not ever going to work)

Moreover, Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls has made clear that Labour will accept the Coalition's cuts, meaning that Jim Murphy and his team need to meet the same challenge as the Government - find £74bn over ten years to balance the  defence budget. And that will mean a proper discussion of what the UK is going to do with it's place in the world, setting the Government's aspirations, and then providing the budget to cover them.

Jim Murphy, over to you....

Anglican Human Rights

(His Grace Archbishop Dr. John Sentamu, Archbishop of York)

Nothing divides the Anglican Church like homosexuality. This is hardly news, but the genius of Anglicanism has always been that it is most opposed to intolerance, rather than letting rip with hellfire, brimstone and heaven only knows what else. So when Archbishops - as John Sentamu of York has - start lecturing politicians on gay marriage, I get worried in a hurry.

I wade into this quagmire with reticence; the challenge is that the Anglicans have been going at this issue for years, and that there is little or nothing like a debate - instead there's lots of shouting from the anti-homosexuality side, and only a little less from the pro-human rights side. 

I deplore Sentamu's comments. And I hope he is slapped down by Rowan Williams - and David Cameron - quickly. The challenge that Sentamu's reported position holds is that it makes it ok for homosexuals to be discriminated against: imagine what the outcry would have been if he had held that Christian marriage was only acceptable between whites. Sorry, universal human rights are universal - and that includes homosexual couples. Christian love is not limited in this way.

Complementarity

This week is madness here at SRM HQ. However, ICC complementarity is a very live issue at the moment, especially as it pertains to Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi.

In the spirit of not reinventing the wheel, here's an excellent piece on the current state of play from IntLawGrrls.

Those crazy Victorians

 

(Well, it can be a long walk. And it does rain. Quite a lot.)

In Britain, the majority of railways were built in the three "railway manias" - most famously 1844-46 but also again in the 1850s and 1870s - when something like the internet bubble happened for roughly the same reason; a disruptive technology that made the flow of information and services easier than ever before. Some of the routes promoted were outright fraudulent, others were directly competitive (there was no obvious reason to have two mainlines from London to Birmingham or three from London - Manchester), and until the 1923 grouping there were a plethora of lines - more than one hundred survived to join the Great Western, London Midland & Scottish, London North Eastern and Southern Railways.

But this very national network - reaching into odd corners (Laxfield), hopelessly romantic names (Ashby Magna), high peaks (Bakewell) and the mountain fastnesses (Cwm Prysor) and some - like Steele Road - that served nothing but the railway itself - would be cut back by Beeching and the failure of network economics. But some of the strangest bits of Victorian over-enthusiasm for railways survive. And the Snowdon Mountain Railway is one of the oddest.

So mass tourism came to North Wales in the 1880s and 1890s. And Snowdon (snow hill in Anglo-Saxon) or Yr Wyddfa (The Tumulus in Welsh) Wales' highest peak, stood proudly at 3,560ft over the lake at Llanberis, along with a number of paths to the top. But it's a steep walk, and besides, railways (in this case imported from Switzerland) could do almost anything - in the case, literally climb mountains. And thus was born the SMR.

It is steep.

 

(The lake at the top of the picture is the bottom of the railway.)

And since the opening, little steam engines (and in more recent years, some diesels) have pushed one or two coaches up the mountain. And continue to do so....

Bravo!

But the walk is also lovely, and if you come up the other side of the mountain, you can see this:

(And then you get to see steam trains at the top, and have a nice lunch in the new cafe on top too. Bonus!)

Torture is Wrong

(Enough to give God a bad name)

Briefly, Omar Othman, known as Abu Qatada, has a long track record for advocating the use of reasonably indiscriminate violence in support of political Islam. Terrorism, in other words. Today the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled that the UK couldn't extradite him to Jordan. But this is not the "liberal courts are coddling terrorists" mantra beloved of the Daily Mail and the other bits of the right wing press.

Rather, the Court seems to have ruled on the narrow issue that the Jordanian prosecution of Mr. Othman was likely to be based on evidence extracted under torture, therefore violating the right to a fair trial. Rightly so. But the ECtHR also accepted that the UK could rely on the diplomatic assurances provided by Jordan that it wouldn't torture Mr. Othman, and therefore in future the UK could do so again to States with questionable human rights record.

We shall see. All very interesting, and I expect Mr. Othman to face trial at some point. But after waiting for nearly a decade, it could be a while.