Of all the assorted journalists who write columns for The Guardian, the one who sticks out like a sore thumb is Simon Jenkins. A former editor of The Times, his always trenchantly expressed views are usually well to the right of the newspaper’s familiar editorial line. Indeed, he is at his most trenchant when kicking lumps off some cherished Guardian sacred cow. To many of the paper’s most devoted readers, he simply doesn’t belong in the pages of “their” Guardian.
But every now and again he writes a piece which is well to the left of the views pedalled by even the most radical of the other writers who share the paper’s comment pages. Thus, a few weeks ago, he wrote a column attacking the entire basis of Britain’s defence budget, suggesting that our three armed services might as well be scrapped for all the good they were doing anyone.
Perhaps the readers thought he was joking, but the astonishing piece produced remarkably little reaction on the letters page – and none whatever on the leader page.
Jenkins was clearly rather miffed by this, because I suspect that at least a part of his motivation in writing such articles is to get up people’s noses – and what is the point, if no one pays any attention?
So, the other day, he returned to his theme, remarking that it didn’t seem worth his while to keep going on about the matter when so few people seemed to share his view. This seems to me to be very sad, since all he needs to do is take out a subscription to Tribune, where he will find that lots of readers – and writers – share his view.
His defeatism is all the sadder in the light of the “slash and burn” spending cuts operation currently under way in Whitehall. While it is true that the armed forces are to suffer astonishingly brutal cuts in their budgets – astonishing, that is, coming from this Tory-dominated Government – some of the most idiotic bits of arms spending have been at least partially preserved. We are to have both those monster aircraft carriers, although perhaps with only French aircraft to fly off them.
And the Trident nuclear “deterrent” lives on, even though its ridiculously costly replacement is to be delayed a little longer.
True, both these expensive white elephants were originally dreamed up by the last New Labour Government, presumably in order to head off the accusation that past Labour governments have always been half-hearted about national security – an absurd allegation, incidentally, since it was a Labour government which gave us the nuclear bomb and another which secretly updated the Polaris missile system.
But the aircraft carriers and the Trident replacement were both dreamed up before the financial crisis broke, at a time when Labour ministers officially believed that the era of boom and bust was over. They could afford to buy idiotic bits of equipment – or so they may have thought.
However, now we are said to be in such dire circumstances that we need to snatch child benefit back from single mothers and force poor families out of their homes in the inner cities.
Things are being proposed that are so unchristian that the Archbishop of Canterbury has been moved to protest. Nevertheless, all of it will have to go ahead, because otherwise we won’t be able to buy those two stupid aircraft carriers and we won’t be able to keep a submarine at sea with enough nuclear hardware aboard to obliterate a couple of dozen unidentified cities (just the job, I suppose, to deter a Yemeni cleric with a talent for shoving plastic explosives into other people’s underpants).
Simon Jenkins may be a bit of a right-winger in some respects, but at least he has a sufficiently well developed sense of the absurd to spot the lunacy of these policies. I for one hope he will keep at it.
Maybe he might try writing his heresies in The Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail as well, where the shock value would be rather higher than in The Guardian. He needs to get up the noses of less-usual suspects than Guardian readers.
What’s got into Harriet Harman? Her pronouncement that Phil Woolas would not be re-admitted to the Labour Party even if he won his appeal against the ban on his membership of the Houser of Commons is clearly well beyond her powers as deputy leader of the party.
I don’t think it is even wholly within the powers of her boss, Ed Miliband. Decisions of that sort, I think, rightly belong to the National Executive Committee – although membership of the Parliamentary Labour Party can be withdrawn by the PLP and the Labour whip can be withdrawn by the Chief Whip.
True, some of Woolas’ election literature was horrible and many of the emails from members of his staff were frankly disgusting. But, as a letter in The Guardian asked, what would the judges have said if Labour’s campaign literature had said that Woolas’ Liberal Democrat opponent had no intention of honouring his promises on tuition fees, immediate spending cuts, VAT increases and retaining Trident?
Which sort of lies are worse? l
