Winning the Revolution

(Libyan celebrate in Martyr's Square)

Merry Christmas to all. 

And in Libya, happy Independence Day, being celebrated for the first time since the Gaddafi revolution of 1 September 1969 - under Gaddafi, only his revolution was deemed worthy of celebrating.

But what is also interesting today is that the Libyan Revolution - as well as the other revolutions of the "Arab Spring" - continue long after the end of the previous regime. And arguably, the continuing work on constitutions and accountability mechanisms is going to be the thing that secures the gains already made through the emergence of civil society. This is why the call today for increased accountability from the Libyan National Transitional Council by Lawyers for Justice in Libya is both welcome and timely: civil society does need to play its role in ensuring there is accountability.

So, happy birthday Libya, and hearty applause to LFJL for ensuring that the peace is won as well.

An outbreak of common sense?

("Hi, I'm back. Can we all be friends again? Hello? Angela? Nicky? Hello?")

A very interesting article from The Sun. As many of you know, The Sun isn't my natural paper of choice, but if the report is true that David Cameron is seriously looking at what they hilariously describe as a "EU-turn" (oh what witty banter they come up with in Wapping!), then thank goodness for that. 

It won't immediately overcome the impact of the non-veto at the Council, and as The Sun correctly notes, 

"If the PM did sign a new treaty it would spark fury from Tory Eurosceptic MPs". 

Indeed, because as I argued at the time, unless Cameron wants to put the UK irreparably on the exit ramp from the EU,  this confrontation needs to happen. It also lays bare the fact that that this row is now (and probably always was) largely about internal Tory party party management, not about the substance of the new institutional arrangements - which is doubly damaging for Cameron who persistently claimed (in the face of the evidence) that he was "doing what was right for Britain".

So, let's hope that the PM can find a face saving route to climb down over Christmas and face down the Eurosceptics / Europhobes in his own backbenches. The sad truth is that if he doesn't do it now, then he'll either be in hock to them for the rest of his time in charge (shades of John Major and the "Maastricht Rebels") or he'll have to face them down later at much higher political cost. Unless, of course, he wants to leave the EU (which I'm sure he doesn't). 

Attaboy, Dave! Up and at them, and all of that.

History's curious juxtapositions

(One took Frost's Road Not Taken. That'd be the bloke on the left, in case you were confused.)

History sometimes has a sense of humour.

In one of those uncanny historical parallels, two children of war and communism who came to lead - and define - their countries died this past weekend. One will be remembered for entrenching a Cold War divide with an illicit nuclear programme, the other for presiding over the break up of the country he had done more than anyone else to liberate from the Cold War. By the end, in everything other than the temporal proximities of their deaths, the lives and reputations of Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-il could not be more different.

I celebrate Havel not just as the sometimes grumpy and irascible philosopher king of Czechoslovakia - though this would be more than enough - but also with a profound gratitude for changing the way I saw politics and the responsibility of the citizen when I read The Power of the Powerless at Middlebury. A good and madly moving book under any circumstances, it was a profoundly brave book to have edited in 1985 with the Czech secret police (StB) sniffing about for anti-communism. I'm looking forward to re-reading it over the Christmas break.

(Awesome. Go and read it.)

Kim Jong-il was just a tyrannical criminal who apparently ate lobster and drank cognac whilst 6% of his population starved to death in the 1990s, more than a million were political prisoners in labor camps, and the remainder of his population were real and mental prisoners in the collective punishment that is laughably called the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. He was also the world's most accomplished golf cheat, it now turns out. Or just possibly like the rest of the Hermit Kingdom, it was merely lying to himself and the rest of us - in between kidnapping film-makers to make socialist remakes of Godzilla. Frankly, in an irony that Kim Jong-il as a film buff may have appreciated, he was such an egregious bad-guy, that if we'd have seen it scripted in a movie it would've completely lacked credibility. Kim did like looking at things, however; fortunately, so does his son.

So, this monstrous criminal dies in his private train without any judicial intervention. And just like that, history steps in and provides a beautiful juxtaposition of two forms of leadership and moral courage.

RIP, President Havel.

Eurodebacle, continued.

(One view. Helpfully unencumbered by any actual facts, of course.)

In haste - an interesting take that I'd missed from the BBC's Mark Urban. The main point is that UK seems to have had a negotiation fiasco - the idea of bouncing the rest of the EU into something unrelated to saving the euro at a day's notice was always going to be difficult, and in fact it was a shambles. Fortunately, the UK is walking back on this at this point.

More SDSR fallout...

 

("Minister, I'd like to drop this bomb on Libya this afternoon if we can afford it..."
"Dunno, let me get back to you.")

Briefly, those disreputable lefties at the Guardian have come up with a scoop, with an authentic-looking paper on cutting senior officers and civil servants in the UK Ministry of Defence. Naturally, the MoD are refusing to comment on leaks (which is sensible, and not just because there have recently been times when arguably they wouldn't have done anything else), but the numbers are remarkable.

Not, I hasten to add, because we didn't already know that there were lots more senior officers than the UK's force size would suggest, nor because we weren't all too clear that the MoD had a largely unreformed management structure, in which classic pyramids abound (if I'm a 1-star officer, then I must have one or more Captain / Colonel / Group Captains working for me, who in turn need the full array of Lieutenant Commanders / Majors / Squadron Leaders working for them who in turn etc etc).

No, on a first pass, the most notable factoid (assuming, as seems likely, this leak is real) is that the numbers of senior officers really grew after the end of the Cold War in 1990. Not sure yet whether this is absolute numbers or merely as a proportion of the forces - I'll get back to this later in the week.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with the ever-prescient words of Bremner, Bird and Fortune:

(Well, yes...)

Edit: updates here and here.