Look up Luke Coffey. There is a longstanding neoconservative scheme to abolish the RAF within a single EU defence "capability" under overall American command and run by the Germans, although that role might now have passed to the French in these days of Sarkozy. As for the idea that "we are beating "the Taliban" [whoever they might be] in Afghanistan", who do you think will leave Afghanistan first? British and other NATO forces? Or "the Taliban"? Which of them will ever leave? Which of them has anywhere else to go?
And if there really is some sort of "day of action" in Iran today, then what, exactly, do the organisers or the participants want instead of the present regime? Do they want to retain more women than men at university, the most acclaimed contemporary cinema in the world, regular and hotly contested elections, no nuclear weapons, no war started in modern times, and reserved parliamentary representation for Jews, Armenians, Assyrians and Zoroastrians? Are they merely expressing what we saw the last time, the supremely petulant union between privilege and adolescence, egged on by Western media too lazy to set foot outside North Tehran and thus unable to comprehend that anyone might actually have voted for Ahmadinejad? Or are they something an awful lot more sinister than that?
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Obviously like you, I love the way your statements of the facts in the first paragraph keep being taken down from NeoCon Counghlin's blog. He is shifting back to more classical SIS Toryism, as you have said before. But he is not there yet. The struggle within the SIS is being played out on his blog day by day. Not in the comments, in the posts themselves. Keep up the fight.
ReplyDeleteThank God for Durham.
ReplyDeleteAlways the great bastion. What with who David's father was and who his university mentors were, the great tradition is in safe hands well into the twenty-first century.
ReplyDeleteOh, in far better hands than mine. As no doubt you know. But bless you, all the same.
ReplyDeleteAh, my mentors and tormentors. Still going strong, of course. Still very much around the place. Long may they remain so.
Thank God for Durham indeed. The pro-Commonwealth, America-sceptical, anti-Zionist High Toryism of the university meets the old municipally based right-wing Labourism of the wider county. The perfect politician.
ReplyDeleteLess of the "right-wing", please. Right-wing is as right-wing does.
ReplyDeleteA defining influence on my political consciousness has been knowing David Lindsay, and I am not the only one by a very long way. The same goes for his influence in keeping me in the Church. Truly a great man.
ReplyDeleteDavid certainly did develop his social democratic, socially conservative, patriotic views within the traditional Labour movement in County Durham. People like that, including me, were becoming less pro-American, less pro-Israeli and less pro-war anyway, although some of them had never been keen on those things.
Did David move in that direction around the old fashioned Tories at Durham University? If so, then good. Tories like that had social consciences, and a man capable of uniting that tendency with ours is just what this country needs. David Lindsay is that man, I do not see any others. We knew at school that he was destined for greatness.
It's not a one-man job.
ReplyDeleteAnd I am a crade Arabist, born to a High Anglican clerical father who had served in British Mandated Palestine. As well as in Egypt, in fact. He was very fond of that part of the world.