From Max Hastings to Giles Fraser.
Daniel Hannan is not convinced, as of course one would have to be under circumstances such as these.
Whereas Owen Jones has been taken to task by a man who tweets as @Shachtman.
Daniel Hannan is not convinced, as of course one would have to be under circumstances such as these.
Whereas Owen Jones has been taken to task by a man who tweets as @Shachtman.
And Israel has granted the first Golan Heights oil drilling license, to a company which has links to Dick Cheney and which has Rupert Murdoch as a shareholder.
Over the years, I have been as critical as anyone of the Stop the War Coalition. But it has an emergency demonstration on the Embankment at 12 noon on Saturday. No one else has.
Sir Max should make it his business to get along to that, and then to get himself onto the committee of the Stop the War Coalition, doing both along with Peter McKay, Mic Wright and Peter Hitchens.
Plus, of course, Patrick Cockburn, Owen Jones and Giles Fraser.
We should never have left it to the SWP a decade ago. We actually cannot leave it to the SWP this time.
And Philip Johnston - http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/philipjohnston/100232765/intervention-in-syria-who-decides-what-would-be-legal-or-legitimate/
ReplyDeleteAnd Tim Stanley - http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100232698/syria-why-would-assad-invite-a-western-intervention-by-using-wmds-in-a-war-he-was-winning/
ReplyDeleteObama has been a disappointment, of course. But nowhere near as great a disappointment as Chuck Hagel.
There is no justification for involvement. However, there is also no justification for a recall of Parliament - given that the power to declare war comes under the prerogative powers of the monarch now enshrined in the body of the First Lord of the Treasury
ReplyDeleteThere may be no constitutional need, although that is now disputable, following the decision to have a vote on Iraq and again on Libya. The precedent is clear. Thus does an unwritten Constitution evolve.
ReplyDeleteBut there is every political need. Crossing over with constitutional ones, since of course it is impossible to become or remain First Lord of the Treasury without the confidence of the House of Commons.
The Royal Prerogative is a disappearing phenomenon. It is now difficult, or even more than that, to imagine any significant use of it without a Commons vote.
Better that one man is held responsible for the decision than an entire Parliament. Given that troops will be dispatched whatever the will of the house.
ReplyDeleteFurther, we do not have an unwritten constitution - though sections of it are uncodified. Finally, just because something has happened twice does not (except perhaps in Durham) mean that it has become an accepted tradition.
Held responsible by whom? By what? There we are, then.
ReplyDeleteThis could be the point at which the benefits of this development of the last decade become clear.
Labour looks increasingly likely to vote against, so does the half of Liberal Democrats not on the payroll, and so, it is now quite clear, do a very good many Conservatives.
It is plausible, therefore, that this motion is going to be defeated. At which point, military action, though constitutionally possible, would become politically inconceivable.
Obama has been a dissapointment?
ReplyDeleteNot to anyone who actually knew anything. The Democrats have always been the pro-war party in America, they are just reverting to type.
The destruction of Kosovo, East Timor, Turkish Kurdistan and Lebanon under Clinton.
The Vietnam and Korea War both started by Democrats (President Kennedy, of course, being one of the biggest warmongers of all).
The same Democrats who succeeded in taking America into World War Two ( with some help from Emperor Hirohito) after years of Republican opposition.
Great US Leftists like Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky and Patrick Cockburn have never liked the Democrats.