What's at the heart of Britain's foreign policy confusion?

Here we have Brendan O'Neill at his best, on the subject of the Libyan intervention. It is an old piece but it is doing the rounds on Facebook because I expect it bares some relation to the Gaza conflict. In writing the piece he concludes that the Libyan intervention was;

"an act of violence driven not by clear geopolitical interests but by the utter failure of modern Western governments to work out what their geopolitical interests are, and to act accordingly. In the rubble of various compounds and airfields in Libya, we can spy the incoherence of the Western political elites, and their elevation of the reckless, narcissistic politics of short-term gain over anything resembling a strategy or aim."

Readers of this blog will know I am quite fond of picking holes in O'Neill's work because he's one of those journalists who is very often nearly right, but too often omits critical detail that undermines his case. Specifically, when he was referring to the Ukraine EU Association Agreement as "trade deal".

This irks me especially since it was a grotesque understatement given that it covered everything from electoral procedure to air-space over the Crimea (and a certain Russian naval port). It was some months later when Spiked finally got with the programme and offered this from Tara McCormack, which surrounds the issue nicely.

He is also one of those people who uses the term "plane" in place of "aircraft". Now this seems like an unnecessarily pedantic attitude but such abbreviated terms like "trade deal" and "plane" actually betray a certain lack of care for technicality and detail. I expect it from our so-called mainstream media, but where O'Neill is concerned, I expect and demand slightly better - because it matters.

That said, if you read the above piece on Libya, you will be hard pressed to disagree. Every word is golden. Whichever angle you take, you cannot escape his conclusion. Western foreign policy is in complete disarray.

However, there is a certain reason to this insanity, and again, as I have outlined here, a knowledge of military affairs can come in handy in any such assessments. If you want to know what our foreign policy is, look at the toys we buy - and the mess that is our procurement policy.

Before we became embroiled in Iraq and Afghanistan, our military spending priorities were very much in line with EU integration and our entire forces were being reshaped to become an interventionist EU rapid reaction force.

The RAF were to have the Airbus A400M, a big, expensive composite beast, costing ten times what an aircraft of its type should, designed to carry lightweight (and useless) military vehicles, modular in nature, and interchangeable with other EU assets. They were all to be guided and directed by the Galileo GPS rival, less-than-ably supported by the single European fighter-bomber, aka Typhoon. Unwittingly we gradually blundered into EU defence co-operation which sucked up all the money.

Having decided that Iraq and Afghanistan were short term blips of foreign policy, little was done to dissuade the MoD from pursuing the rapid reaction force procurement programme. Then, forced by the deterioration in Iraq, we were to order US compatible kit and more robust IED protected vehicles. The NATO/US alliance momentarily became more important than "ever closer union".

One would now expect to drift back into the mode of EU co-operation, but we now find ourselves provoking Russia into reigniting the cold war, having dispensed with the facility to build tanks and things that are actually useful. Now we need to hide under Americas skirt once more. The EU rapid reaction force must wait.

Meanwhile, divorced from all this, the Royal Navy is being reshaped for window dressing and  "national prestige" purposes so as to pretend we are a still an independent nation, capable of looking after our own interests, as we did in the Falklands. Consequently we've spent a billion quid each on our new destroyers, and six billion on a totally useless aircraft carrier, which will be operational long before the aircraft it was designed for are even remotely safe to fly. And because that wasn't a dumb enough idea, we bought two of them.

Because none of this procurement happens in a hurry, and each administration having its own direction, we find ourselves with a muddled array of equipment, each a monument to the confusion that infects every other part British governance.

Here we are essentially straddling three horses with our foreign policy. We are dithering and drifting as we fail to make our minds up between being the fig-leaf for American imperialism, a bit part of a federal Europe or, god forbid, an independent sovereign nation. We seem to want all three.

As much as it is all that O'Neill says it is, there exists a schism, whereby Britain needs to make up its mind. Who are we, where are we going, and what are we about? I'm sure O'Neill would agree that this confusion is not strictly limited to our foreign policy and our blundering on the world stage. We have a national identity crisis - and our catastrophic meddling is but a symptom of that disease.

Idle comparisons are not helpful

There is a great folly in comparing military interventions on a like for like basis. Plenty of people have drawn parallels with what is happening in Israel and what the West did in Libya. Now I know there are more critical factors than merely the body count, as we have already discussed, but were we to look at Libya we find just a handful of casualties in 10,000 sorties. And there is a good reason for this. The Libyan operation was more about being seen to be doing something rather than actually doing something.

It is often the case that Britain deploys its military not for any particular military objective but as a demonstration of prestige. Our new Type 45 destroyer has been uselessly deployed all over the world already, and the Royal Navy would have been better off sending a cargo container in its place. No doubt very soon we will see our new aircraft carrier, HMS White Elephant, paraded round the world long before it takes delivery of a single F35.

Similarly many suspect with good reason that the RAF were keen to press for the Mali intervention having been delivered an ultimatum of "use it or lose it" by the MOD, which would have lead to the early retirement of Sentinel ISTAR aircraft.

In that vein, our fly-boys have been itching to clock up a few combat hours on the Typhoon and the million pound Storm-shadow bomb, and as far as I can see, the majority of those sorties, from the footage at least, involve firing these guided white elephants at empty huts on military bases (to no great effect), and targeting only areas where we knew there were command bunkers and weapons caches. A flag waving exercise and little more.

While some commentators would have it that the West was instrumental in creating the chaos that now exists there, I think this overestimates the capability and competence of our air forces, and I think perhaps history will record events a little differently when we get a clearer idea of what happened on the ground.

While the Arab world is ever keen to blame us, it seems we are only too happy to accept the blame. It is most peculiar. Even now the popular narrative has it that the CIA was instrumental in the removal of Mosadegh, but the Iranians tell that story a little differently. Every culture has its own narratives and I am not sure I trust our version of events from Libya any more than I trust the reported events in Ukraine.

Having studied the raids in some detail, I have to say that I honestly don't know what effect we had in Libya, but I'm untrusting of those who have made lazy comparisons and idle generalisations. Yes the symbolism and perception matter, which is why we shouldn't have got involved, but it's not a good idea to pontificate on such things without having done the homework first.

These are issues where nuance and detail matter, and perception of events may not match the reality. It is for this reason I maintain that a working knowledge of military kit and procedure is essential if you want to pontificate on Western interventions. Narratives may tell one story, but the equipment tells us another, as demonstrated by the shooting down of MH17.

You will get no argument from me that the Libyan intervention was a particularly golden example of Western stupidity and hypocrisy, but I urge people to be much more cautious about making casual comparisons with other theatres. You never know, some geek like me might be reading it.

For the beginners and amateurs among you, here is something to get you started...

Answer me this, Mr Gold

Dore Gold of the LA Times states that "anyone who complains about “disproportionality” must explain exactly what the IDF should have done to neutralize the terrorist threat from Shajaiya while causing less destruction than what occurred". Well, I have. Here, here, and here.

More to the point, this tunnel network is the Rue de Sacrée for the Hamas military offensive. It did not spring up overnight, and it did not happen without the knowledge of the Israeli defence ministry. If it did, then heads need to roll.

Destroying the tunnel network should be an ongoing security operation, and thwarting it is an intelligence and engineering challenge that cannot be addressed though conventional means for lasting effect. It must be a sustained effort. In any case, it is not a justification for firing artillery into residential areas when the technology exists to do otherwise.

One could get a little annoyed here in that far too many are prepared to trot out the same tired old excuses and mantras, each making the same old arguments for whichever team they have chosen to support. But few on the Israeli side have stopped even for a moment to ask whether this war is necessary, and whether it will accomplish anything of lasting value.

If Dore Gold wants to defend this clumsy and brutal operation, then he must explain exactly why a more scientific approach will not work, and just what the hell has the Israeli defence ministry being doing all these years, and why it has waited until now to do something about it.

Colonel Richard Kemp: An idiot at home

A Rupert. Not a very bright one.

Colonel Richard Kemp spent most his 30-year career in the British Army commanding front-line troops in fighting terrorism and insurgency in hotspots including Iraq, the Balkans, South Asia and Northern Ireland. He was Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan in 2003. From 2002 - 2006 he headed the international terrorism team at the Joint Intelligence Committee of the British Prime Minister's Office.

It is that kind of prestige that lends weight to his opinions among the great and the good, and I as a mere blogger really ought to know my place and not question him. But this somewhat overlooks the fact that our counter insurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan were a total disaster and we had not properly equipped our forces for these operations until it was almost over - and the worst of the damage had already been done.  

First off, Kemp argues that the civilian body count from Gaza is not all that it appears. Analysis of casualty details released by Qatar-based Al Jazeera indicate that so far most of those killed in Gaza have been young men of fighting age, not women, children or old people.

But this actually tells us nothing. This report addresses that argument.

First, Abrams does not consider possible patterns in civilian behavior during strikes or following warnings of impending strikes, or the movement more broadly in various public and private spaces of adult men when compared with women and children.  For example, do parents generally keep their children in safer locations?

Such information, together with data about the Israeli military’s targeting practices and patterns, would need to be taken into account when considering whether certain groups in a population were more or less likely to be killed during attacks. It may or may not be relevant in a particular context, but it cannot be assumed that all civilian members of a population are equally at risk of injury or death.

In fairness, many of Kemp's arguments stand up in that Hamas is engineering civilian casualties and there are inherent risks to these particular operations - and the IDF does make some effort to avoid collateral damage. "The truth is very different", he complains. "The IDF has developed the most comprehensive and sophisticated measures to minimize civilian casualties during attacks against legitimate military targets."

But it is no good complaining that things are not as they appear. How things appear is every bit as important as how things are. If Kemp was half the expert on asymmetric warfare he claims to be, then he would know this. When the enemy relies on the propaganda of collateral damage, the last thing you want to do is give him that moral victory.

We have seen over the last few days countless dead babies, scores of deaths from artillery fire and massive black clouds over Gaza. Certainly many large smoke clouds will be the result of secondary explosions from Hamas ordinance, but the public doesn't think about these things, nor will they trouble themselves to find out. Mitigating circumstances aside, Hamas is still rubbing its hands with glee at the mountains of dead baby pornography how ever much care was taken.

It is true that such collateral damage is inescapable when conducting a conventional military intervention. So the obvious answer that escapes Kemp is not to mount one. Here below Kemp describes the high-tech techniques employed, without once questioning whether such measures are effective.

Mandatory, multi-sensor intelligence and surveillance systems to confirm the presence or absence of civilians precede attacks on every target from the air. Text messages, phone calls and radio messages in Arabic warn occupants to leave. Air-dropped leaflets include maps showing safe areas. When warnings go unheeded, aircraft drop non-lethal explosives to warn that an attack is imminent.

Only when pilots and air controllers are sure that civilians are clear of the target will authorization be given to attack. When pilots use laser-guided munitions they must have pre-designated safe areas to which to divert the missiles in flight should civilians suddenly appear. In the last few days IDF pilots have aborted many missions because civilians remained in the target area.

There's a few problems here. Even if a munition is laser-guided and delivered to within an inch of the target, it makes very little difference if the munition itself is a 2000lb Paveway II or a 155mm artillery shell. The blast and shrapnel radius alone guarantees civilian casualties. Moreover, if you helpfully tell Hamas where you are going to bomb, that is where Hamas is going to put civilians.

Kemp acknowledges this, but it does not occur to him to use alternatives such as a Small Diameter Bomb or Viper Strike. And of course NOT bombing the hell out of the place is also an option. This operation is totally unnecessary.

Kemp further complains of Hamas using the dead and wounded:

This sickening exploitation of their own people's suffering, and media's complicity in it, is nowhere more cynically demonstrated than in the operating theaters of the Gaza Strip. Without the slightest regard for life-saving hygiene, or for the care, privacy or dignity of the wounded, Palestinian officials enthusiastically hustle camera crews in to the emergency room as desperate surgeons battle for a bleeding and broken child's life.

This is nothing at all new. We saw this in 2006 in Lebanon and many times before. The propaganda aspect of asymmetric wars, and in fact all wars, is a feature of the modern world, along with our morally bankrupt media. This is a fixture for the now and forever, so it's really no good Colonel Kemp complaining about the facts of life. If you don't want dead bodies being used in the propaganda war, the answer is not to create the dead bodies if you don't have to.

Kemp complains of a "naive and uncomprehending willingness to believe" what we are told about the IDF. Sadly, due to institutional prestige, there exists a similar naive and uncomprehending willingness to take men like Kemp seriously. Until that is otherwise, the body count will continue to climb.

Gaza: Moving forward

Prime real estate: If Gazans want it enough

What I find especially perverse and particularly sad about the war Hamas is waging, is that Gaza very much has the potential to be a resort of choice on the Med. They are sitting on a potential goldmine that could make for a very prosperous life for all Palestinians, but they would rather provoke death and destruction. It is well within their power, but choose otherwise. It's sad because a thriving economy is more likely to bring down the walls than rockets, but they would seemingly prefer to teach their children to hate.

But it really doesn't help that Israel is giving them plenty reason to. We are nearly 70 years on from the creation of Israel. It exists and that is not going to change, but hatreds that should be long forgotten are kept alive by these clumsy, disproportionate and careless military assaults on a people held captive in more ways than one. Any child wondering why they live in squalor and rubble need only look upward to the flights of F15s to see why - and that is what they will teach their children.

It's starting to look like neither side has any real interest in peace. The ongoing military operation has moved far beyond what we might call self-defence. When you see 2000lb GBU10s falling on apartment blocks, it starts to look a little like a herding operation. These are the tactics of a nation that has gone to all out war. And for what? What will it serve?

Will it bring peace? Will it bring security? Will it stop the rockets? Will it end Hamas, Will it end the hatred? No on all counts. It may bring a period of relative peace while Hamas restocks and digs out the tunnels but all that is being done here is the creation of a humanitarian crisis. For sure the IDF provides supplies and field hospitals but that's a bit like offering an Elastoplast to someone you just stabbed. Moreover, it is done not for any genuine concern for life, but as a propaganda tool.

What this intervention will do is create more orphans, more hatred, more pain, more anger, more rubble and more disease - and that can only mean one thing: more war. Bombardment to break the enemy's spirit did not work during the Blitz, it did not work in Dresden and it won't work here.

It comes down to whether Israel is more concerned for peace than petty revenge. Were tactics shifted to a policy of containment, and Israel were disciplined enough not to react, eventually Gazans would realise who is actually holding them back. Hamas. It is not good enough to say "If the rockets stop, then so will the airstrikes". It has not worked thus far and it is not going to.

Hamas are now expert at playing the victim card, and the world is happy to let them. Meanwhile Israel gives them everything they need by filling our screens with pictures of huge explosions and dead babies. Peace has never looked so remote. At this point you really do have to ask, is Israel so stupid as to give its enemy what it wants, or is Israel getting something out of this too? One can only speculate.

Yes. John Kerry IS that stupid.

Ultimately this war will only end if Gazans collectively decide that it must, by throwing out Hamas, ruthlessly punishing those launching rockets and mortars, and showing Israel that it is ready to talk - with demands that can be taken seriously. Palestinian demands thus far are deliberately unrealistic. Superficially they may seem plausible to the more gullible, but the subtext is always the same: the destruction of Israel.

Were their demands more along the lines of security assistance and economic development to become a first world seaside resort, with a positive vision for the future, then there would be a way forward. Right of return is an impossibility, and as for reversing the last hundred years of history, well, fuhgeddaboudit! But these are talking points. The reality is that Hamas does not want peace. It doesn't even want to create a state of Palestine. It wants to eradicate the Jews. That's really not much of a starting point for any negotiations.

It comes down to a basic choice. Does Gaza want yet more war or does it want to be a prosperous city by the sea: a popular tourist destination, brimming with Western tourists with fat wallets? Those are the only two options on the table.

But Israel needs to make room for that to happen. It cannot happen if every few years the entire might of the IDF is brought down upon the people of Gaza. It can't happen while Gazans permit Hamas to launch rockets, and certainly not while the IDF keeps lobbing artillery at children. Until both sides put away their weapons, both sides get the neighbours they deserve.

And justice for all?

Regular readers will be aware that I am a criminal. Some cowboy bailiffs, without lawful authority, clamped my car for council tax that was not owed and added illegal charges. I cut the clamp off with an angle grinder and didn't pay their fees. For my trouble, I now have a record of criminal damage against my name and a fine of £1300.

Phillip Johnston, one of the few adults left at The Telegraph, has noticed that such punishments are part of a much larger trend where the justice system serves not justice, but exists to enforce state policy, needlessly criminalising ordinary people while making a few quid in the process. (read the whole thing).

That in itself is brewing up a toxic resentment, but it runs in tandem with a more obnoxious phenomenon. So-called “petty offenders” which includes shoplifters, vandals and people who assault their spouses regularly escape criminalisation. Even burglary can be dealt with by way of a community order.

I have seen this in action myself. While defending myself against a speeding charge (going at moderate speeds in good conditions), I witnessed a recidivist walk free with only small deductions from benefits to pay a fine, having ruthlessly battered his sister and taken the contents of her purse to go drinking with.

A second offender had walked down the high street, smashing car wing mirrors off and kicking in shop doors. He was given a small fine, again deducted from benefits. As to me, I was hit with the full fine and banned from driving for a whole year, costing me my job, my relationship and consequently everything I owned. It is for this reason I hold the police, the court system - and the politicians who make these laws in bitter contempt.

This is conveyor belt justice, eroding the very concept of criminality, where the system is run for its own convenience, much like the police, and our only role is to pay up and do as we are told. We are sleepwalking into a corporate state where we are mere economic units to be managed like cattle, without a shred of democracy or due process. And that will come with a heavy price. Because I am certainly not alone in waiting to get even.

Gaza: there are always choices

Today we learn from Gaza that a school has been hit by artillery. Or so we are told. A spokeswoman from the Israel Defence Forces said that its initial inquiries showed that “Hamas militants fired mortar shells from the vicinity of the school, and [Israeli] soldiers responded by firing towards the origins of the fire”. An investigation was continuing, she added.

I expect to see more of these incidents before that investigation is concluded. But there is no need. Here we have a manifest refusal to learn from past mistakes and it seems a lack of actual concern. No doubt defenders of Israel will trot out the usual excuses, that Hamas uses human shields etc, but it doesn't hold water for me. If there are children in the way, you don't fire. It's that simple. The excuses are even less convincing when this kind of incident is entirely avoidable.

You couldn't have a more predictable launch site than somewhere designated as a "UN shelter". So if you know the likely launch point, and you know that mortars are short range weapons, then you know the most likely glidepath of the munition ... and then you know where to park one of these...

The machine itself (C-RAM) uses a Gatling gun to paint a block of lead in the path of rockets and mortars which explode on impact with the bullets. It's effective, tried and tested, and it's cheap. So here we have the capability in tandem with intelligence (and common sense) to stop rockets and mortars without handing the enemy the propaganda gold of a truck load of dead infants. What's not to like?

But then that is a downstream argument. We have to ask how it is that such ordinance gets into Gaza in the first place. Palestinians have been building tunnels for well over a decade. An infrastructure of tunnels crisscrossing the border with Egypt built to smuggle over goods as big as cars. Infiltration tunnels into Israel have also existed for some time.

But this has not happened without the knowledge of the IDF. Such things do not happen overnight and they do not happen without leaving a trail of evidence. Satellite geospatial analysis can offer clues when supplemented with real time footage from UAVs, where sophisticated computers can alert operators of changes in the landscape, and radio gradiometers can detect miniscule changes such as a hidden Improvised Explosive Device. This has proven effective in Afghanistan, so why not Gaza? It's not as if the border is a vast expanse. There are means of detection and there are means to collapse the tunnels without the use of artillery. All that's missing is a bit of imagination, innovation and of course, political will.

This is not to say the Israel has not experimented with such technologies, and in fact Israel is a global leader and exporter of it, but they have not been exploited to the fullest because the military paradigm is still stuck in the past. This is pretty typical. When campaigning for MRAP vehicles in Afghanistan, the MOD actively resisted any such progress because it interfered with their spending priorities. This is the same political dynamic that exists in the IDF who campaigned against C-RAM and Iron Dome. The one journalist who could have helped influence this debate was Melanie Phillips who sadly chose to repeat the Israeli defence ministry mantras, thus delaying Iron Dome by a matter of years.

And now, we learn there has been the same bureaucratic resistance to Ground Penetrating Radar technology for tunnel detection. Academics and military analysts alike have been screaming at the Israeli defence ministry for a decade about the potential of GPR and associated technologies and, unsurprisingly, it falls on deaf ears.

Further to this, Israeli tech company, Magna, has an interesting proposal. Magna believes that just like Iron Dome intercepts a rocket, a tunnel 30 meters deep loaded with sensors and radar on the border with the Gaza Strip can provide a decisive solution to attack tunnels designed to enable terrorist squads to penetrate into Israeli and commit massacres. 

The solution proposed by Siboni is based on precisely the same radar system that has already proved itself over several years, and which is well known to the defense establishment. According to Magna, what works well above ground can, with slight software and hardware adjustments, also work well tens of meters underground, and can provide a feasible solution to the growing threat of attack tunnels from Gaza aimed at Israel. "Our answer to the this threat is sensors - the same sensors we deploy on the borders and at secured facilities all over Israel and overseas will do the same job, even underground. The rate of detection, identification, and alerting will be 99.9%, and the system is advanced enough to prevent false alarms to the security forces. We'll demonstrate our solution to the defense establishment soon," Siboni stated.

It sounds entirely feasible to me, but they say it will cost billions. So the question then becomes an economic one. It is here I am reminded of a somewhat nerdy joke from economist Thomas Sowell. "Two economists meet in the street... Hey Mack! How's the wife? says the first. The second replies "Compared to what?". 

Operation Protective Edge is set to cost 8.5 billion, and though I can't find a good figure for Cast Lead I'll bet it was considerably higher. Add to this the costs to the Israeli economy in a domestic sense, and the opportunity costs from damaged international relations and it soon mounts up. In the long run, the application of science and intelligence is going to be far cheaper (and more humane) than big set-piece battles that accomplish precisely nothing, and need to be played out perennially.

We have already discussed on this blog the importance of the propaganda element of modern war, and particularly how collateral damage incidents erode domestic support. But this is not such a powerful argument here, in that this operation has a high approval rating among Israelis. But it does have an economic cost and it does gradually delegitimise such operations. Consequently, what we need to see is a paradigm shift in Israel's military strategy and for them recognise there is no conventional military solution.

Any security policy will have to be a multi-tiered counter-insurgency operation, working with local intelligence assets, geospatial analysis, UAVs, Iron Dome, radar, sniper rotorcraft and satellites. Moreover, C-RAM technology is well over 20 years old, so adapting the principle to the modern integrated CO-IN battlefield means that it could be programmed to work in conjunction with other assets. 

Big set-piece military incursions simply do not work. All they do is pile up the propaganda against you and create more new recruits to the enemy. So the key is to keep it mundane, low key, cheap, and out of the headlines by using a strategy of containment. An intelligence lead approach. Israel does have these assets but they are employed as supplementary assets rather than central to a containment policy.

Critics point to the costs and the shortfalls of such emerging technologies, and given how high profile programmes like F35 play out in the media as grotesque white elephants, plagued by delays and cost overruns, they are right to be sceptical. But what we are looking at is not necessarily new technology, but a new way of thinking as to how established counter-insurgency technology is deployed. It requires not a change of political stance, but a change of military doctrine.

Of course I do understand that all this technical theorising is very easy for a Westerner sat behind a computer, far from any danger with no dog in the fight. I also realise that we are talking about how to humanely contain violence spilling out of an open prison run by an Islamist Mafia. I'm not so arrogant so to suggest I know the answers, but in the mean time, I know that when a politician tells me there is no other choice but to lob artillery at children, I know they are speaking from ignorance. There are always choices.

Why pick on Israel? Self-propelled artillery, that's why

Many are asking why such special attention is given to the conflict in Gaza when the daily massacres in Syria are only mentioned as a token gesture. Israel gets the brunt of global revulsion when ISIS are apparently beheading people and posting pictures online.

Where Syria is concerned, apathy reigns. Collectively we expect basketcase Arab dictatorships to be bloody murderers, and while we might wish for a humanitarian intervention, we have to ask who we are helping if we do? Very often, what follows is far worse, and the modern paradigm of Western military intervention is that our forces will magnify trouble by their very presence. So we turn a blind eye. There is little to be done, except to face the cold reality that we had more than a small hand in bringing this to bare. But that won't stop us from pontificating on what Israel should do.

Some have suggested that anti-zionism and anti-semitism are the reasons for the fierce anti-Israel sentiment. For many, that is probably true. But I'm no Jew hater. I can't say I know enough about Jews to hate them. I think they have stupid beards and equally stupid hats, but I can say that of most other faiths too. I'm not even opposed to zionism as a concept. But I do think that fighting a counter-insurgency war with F15s and heavy artillery is as barbaric as it is stupid, and a first world democracy that we call an ally should not be doing this.

It will fail in achieving any of the military objectives in any meaningful sense, and among the bereaved and the displaced there will be fresh recruits for Hamas. Israel knows this. So there is a different agenda at play here. Israel knows, like Hamas, that there will always be a large global audience of individuals willing to repeat their mantras and excuses. Each side will talk past each other, convincing nobody, each blind to the death and destruction while it continues to serve their own nefarious and narcissistic ends. Due care is not required.

Because it has become such a divisive issue, all we can do make the token appeals to Israel for restraint, but never go as far as actually condemning it. But it's not working is it? High tech, intelligence-lead counter insurgency warfare has gone out of the window and now Israel is lashing out, not giving a tinkers damn what we think. And why should they?

This is a natural consequence of criticising Israel whatever it does. Why go to the expense of being a moral army if people are still going to say you are engaged in "genocide" along with other such hypocritical, deranged hyperbole? Why should Israel care about all this lofty moralising and pontificating when mass slaughters happen every day in Syria (sometimes involving chemical weapons) and nobody bats an eyelid.

For Israel it now comes down to economics. Hamas can bleed Israel dry of funds if it can make Israel spend a million dollars to counter a hundred dollar rocket. All wars comprise of a propaganda war, an economic war and a shooting war. If you can't win the propaganda war either way and you are spending money only to lose that aspect of the war, then you concentrate your assets on the aspects you can win. Artillery is a lot cheaper than a precision low yield guided missile.

With the domestic approval rating for this incursion in around eighty per cent, and there is little domestic outcry, why on earth would they give collateral damage a second thought? Doing the right thing has thus far not paid dividends. Moreover, the low key operations don't make the headlines, and that's not good because Israel is playing to its own international crowds as much as Hamas are.

As Brendan O'Neill observes "The logic of the internationalisation of the Middle East crisis is that both sides become the willing servants of western opportunists and voyeurs. Do not look at the TV news and ask why all this senseless killing is taking place: they are killing for you."

Indeed they are. They have a found a willing audience and Palestine has become the new South Africa for the self-righteous. It is a conflict sustained by our undivided attention. This needs to stop. There was a time when I might had made excuses for Israel, but in amongst the grief tourism photographs passing themselves off as journalism, there are pictures of real black smoke clouds, real piles of rubble, real dead babies and real human suffering. Israel could avoid this if it chose to. But it has chosen not to.

Israel has made it quite clear that it no longer cares for the humanitarian view, and has crossed a line. But ultimately, if you want someone to blame, there's a mirror nearby. Go take a look. Both Israel and Hamas play their games directed at media, but who are the willing consumers?

The recession is over, apparently

I see dead people: they don't know they're dead

It's a "Big day for Britain" says The Telegraph as the economy bounces back to pre-recession levels. Such self-congratulatory preening will doubtlessly be greeted with incredulity by anyone living outside the Westminster bubble. It's a matter of semantics, you see.

To economists and politicians the word "recession" means that GDP is in decline. To just about everyone else it means a decade of wage freezes, long term unemployment, debt problems, job insecurity, belt-tightening and a fear for the future. While policy wonks and Tory politicians are slapping themselves on the back for a job well done, the rest of us look onward with dismay. The numbers on screen look a little different to reality.

This is where less honest writers would dive in to describe a scene of Dickensian decay as children starve in the streets and families are forced to eat their firstborn. For sure there are now food banks and marginal cuts to marginal government services, but as far as recessions go, this has been a pretty weird one. We have not seen mass strikes of any significance and certainly we haven't seen the kind of civil unrest that comes with times of hardship.

For many, what was billed as the worst recession in living memory turned out to be the dog that didn't bark. For sure, if you're a Northerner you have job insecurity, debt problems and wage freezes, but that is pretty much the natural state of existence, - and for Scotland, the economy for most Scots was in the toilet even at the height of the boom. This is not to say life has not been tough for a great many more since 2008, but in terms of material wealth, most people in the country can count themselves as wealthy by contrast with the majority of the planet.

If you were looking for the typical imagery you would associate with a recession of this magnitude such as bankers leaping off tall buildings, food rationing and wheelbarrows full of cash to buy a loaf of bread, you will find no such thing. But there is an underlying, more subtle decay in all this.

We don't see queues around the block for food handouts, but instead we do see queues around the block of people waiting to be seen by a magistrate, as thousands of people are summonsed for council tax arrears and business is booming for bailiffs. Our courts are no longer places of justice. They are merely state revenue collection branches.

Moreover the fundamentals of the economy as as rotten as they were in 2007 and little, if anything has been done to address them. If you can see past the creative accounting by shifting pension liabilities around and double-counting of savings, the deficit is still wildly out of control, and the national debt stands at around one and a half trillion. More employment red tape and more taxes prohibit any kind of meaningful employment growth, and what red tape doesn't deter, energy costs will.

We are told there are record numbers of new businesses starting up, but this is essentially individuals registering as a limited company, taking contract work now that permanent jobs as we know them have been abolished. The banks have been brought back from the brink of a fiscal apocalypse but our society is much more transient, less financially secure and many of working age wonder if they will ever manage to retire at all.

There was a time when a life of savings would provide an adequate private pension. But not any more. Pensions are a black hole into which you pay lot's of money with the same uncertainty you would feel if you were throwing money at a blackjack table. The only people who can now be certain of a decent retirement are our public sector CEOcracy. There is a justifiable feeling that we are being robbed blind.

It's inescapable. More of our services which are notionally covered by the taxes we pay now carry charges, and we know the direction of travel for that trend. I wouldn't mind if it came with a proportionate tax cut so that we might procure these services for ourselves, but here we have the worst of all worlds: big government, big taxes, but "privatised" services we have already paid for. I've never believed in the Leftist concept of equality, but I do believe in the concept of fairness, and if you or I tried what our parasitic corporates and governments tried on, we would find ourselves in jail.

We are on a slow march toward a more hostile, less free, expensive society where those who have license from government to prey on the citizen can do so unhindered. Because we are a docile population brought up to belief that government is inherently a good thing, and that paying our taxes is a civic duty of a sort, we have become pushovers for authorities. They can now treat us any way they choose. Some people are brave enough to show a bit of backbone and complain, but the state can pick us off one by one and throw the book at us.

One of the most telling runes to read is the gradual retreat of police into central police fortresses. The service is becoming impersonal and remote. Police are now policy enforcers rather than public servants. The service has departed entirely from the Peelian Principles and they are gearing for a defensive role; not to defend the people from the state, but to defend the state from the people.

While the GDP numbers look good on screen, I get the feeling we are a zombie country. The essence of what makes Britain free is gradually being replaced with something much uglier and sinister, where the state fears us and seeks to monitor everything that we do.

Rather than allow us shape our own destiny, it borrows in our name to "create jobs" but with no idea how we are ever going to pay for them - and government is digging a fresh grave for us all. While the clapping seals of Westminster pop their corks at today's news, I am far less optimistic. I am reminded of the film The Sixth Sense and that most poignant exchange...

Cole Sear: I see dead people.

Malcolm Crowe: In your dreams?

[Cole shakes his head no]

Malcolm Crowe: While you're awake?

[Cole nods]

Malcolm Crowe: Dead people like, in graves? In coffins?

Cole Sear: Walking around like regular people. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead.

They have us over a barrel

Speaking as a complete bastard, I certainly know one when I see one. Today, Kwikfit Insurance presents as one of the worst offenders outside of local government. It seems they, like the rest of the industry, have concocted a fun little game called "we will auto renew without telling you". Apparently this has been going on for some time. If you renew your car insurance elsewhere, Kwikfit will charge you £200 to cancel the policy you didn't want, didn't know you had - and didn't ask for.

The excuse being that I didn't check a tick box on the form over a year ago, so it's all right for them to do it. They are not interested in satisfying the customer. They gotcha! They just want to hold you as a customer against your will, and threaten to pass the bill through to debt collectors if you don't pay it. Today, Kwikfit get the full one-finger salute for the worst, most obnoxious customer services I have ever experienced in my life.

Thankfully, a very nice lady from Zenith Insurance rang them on my behalf and sorted it out, but what should have been a very straightforward transaction was time-consuming, blood-boiling and left a very sour taste in my mouth. And why do they do this? Simple. Because they can.

As with the bailiff industry, there are toothless "regulators", watchdogs and ombudsmen "services", all of which require you to jump through several hoops to get boilerplate answers, but very little in the way of justice (and zero chance of stopping it happening to other people). Of course you do have one option, which is not to pay, but then it stays on your credit rating for six years. This is how Welcome Finance prevented me from getting a mortgage by charging me £2500 for a car they had taken back under the terms of the agreement some months before.

Eventually they took me to small claims court. I defended myself and won, but a lot of damage was done in terms of missed opportunities. Similarly, I recall being stung by Vodafone for £700 for an internet dongle which, unbeknown to me, did not switch off when a laptop lid was closed and consequently was churning data all night. That went on my credit rating too.

Now you can argue that a contract is a contract, and one must always read the small print, and in most circumstances I would probably agree, but we have somehow drifted into a cartel culture, where corporates can treat you like shit and get away with it. They can cope with a certain churn rate because they know full well that everyone in the market will treat you equally badly - and you have no real choice in it.

In all such circumstances, the odds are against the customer, from mobile phones, to car insurance and the likes; they have all the protections of the state, whereas we have none. You can waste your time and life energy on "independent regulators", but they're basically counting on you becoming disillusioned and going away. It's what I call "The Fuck Off Loop".

Even as someone who believes in limited government, I do think our regulators need to have teeth and the strength to intervene. We are being ripped off by these cartels, there is no market competition - and if safeguarding fair trade is not a function of government, then what is?

It is precisely this kind of grubby, cynical operation that makes life that little bit more unpleasant for all of us and takes the food out of our mouths. They do it to us because even our elected representatives can only mouth platitudes in response to this cancer. A cancer that tarnishes the name of capitalism and free markets.

Since we lack the democratic mechanisms to hold these people to account, I fear the frustration will eventually boil over, and somebody somewhere will see to it that somebody in their ranks pays a high price. On that day, I might permit myself a little cheer!

Council tax: creating poverty in ways only government can

Council Tax is coming into sharp focus as the effects of council tax benefit reform begin to bite. Council tax is unpopular because it's money we have, and it's money we miss when we are forced to pay it. That makes us acutely aware that government hits us in the wallet. Because that money is missed, people recognise the connection between what they pay and what the councils do, and what they waste.

It is a tax that makes people angry. And that is why it is a good tax. All tax should make people angry. Everyone should be acutely aware of just how much they are paying for what little they receive. This is why I would prefer to see income tax collected locally in the same way as council tax. It is because income tax it is invisibly deducted from our wages that we psychologically don't miss the money. You don't miss what you never had and you don't see the opportunity cost by paying it PAYE.

What the country needs now more than ever is more angry people who are paying attention to our rulers and what they spend our money on - and we especially need more people waking up to the fact that everything government spends is money taken by force.

Just recently, councils have been surreptitiously adding fees and charges to services that were once covered by council tax. This is to avoid holding a referendum on council tax increases over 2%. They do this because they know that if they asked for our consent, they know they wouldn't get it. It is for this reason that if a referendum is ever held on council tax, there will never ever be an option on the ballot paper to reduce council tax by two per cent or more. They would rather keep the larceny under the radar to stop the public waking up to the fact they are being fleeced at every turn by their own governments.

Additionally, for too long we have had a welfare class who pay little, if any tax, thus are barely aware of the relationship between what they receive and where that money comes from. As much as this leads to irresponsible and feckless lifestyles and results in poor choices which are free of personal consequences, it also promotes political disengagement. If you are not paying anything yourself, then who cares how taxpayers money is spent? It creates a whole class of welfare serfs, looked after by state employees who will never vote for cuts to government.

There is a strategic nudge value in cutting council tax support. While life on benefits certainly isn't easy, for many it beats the alternatives. Some can, and do, live quite comfortably on benefits. If the extra squeeze on budgets such as council tax benefit reform and the bedroom tax put the squeeze on just enough to get people out of the house and into work, then in the long run, that is the kinder and fairer thing to do. And if it gets people more politically engaged, then all the better.

But there will always be households who really can't pay, and really shouldn't pay. But that is of no consequence to most councils. In 2013 the government cut the grant by £300m – and told councils they would have to find the difference from saving or by reducing the benefit to poor residents. They chose the latter. As a result, we learn from the Independent that nearly 16,000 people in London alone have been referred to the bailiffs for non-payment. Councils are now engaged in mass harassment of the people they are supposed to serve.

What makes council tax especially evil is the way in which it is collected. It assumes everyone is paid monthly, it assumes that a missed payment is refusal to pay and councils are trigger happy with court action, adding hundreds of pounds in extra costs, far exceeding the value of the "debt". They are ever keen to unleash their privateer bailiffs, who resort to whichever tactics they so choose with the full cooperation of councils and the police, who themselves willfully and knowingly turn a blind eye to the crimes of bailiffs.

This epidemic now extends to such a degree that this now the number one cause of debt problems reported to Citizens Advice - and considerably worse than those problems created by pay-day loan companies, which it seems are hated more by our paternal political class than the people who actually use them. I guess when it comes to bullying and grand larceny, the government hates the competition.

Our councils are now wholly parasitic, they are accountable to no-one, and there is no limit their greed. Notionally, a great many of the services they provide are designed to help those in poverty but they have no shame in driving those very same people into deeper poverty.

Dead baby porn

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Reality check for David Ward MP

Stealing words from Dan Gordon over at Theo Spark, contrary to the perception of some, that the core reason behind this conflict is Israel’s occupation of lands conquered in the defensive war of 1967, Hamas could not, and does not, give a tinker’s damn about “ Occupied territory” . This is so because Hamas regards ANY territory on which there is a sovereign Jewish state as “occupied territory”. Moreover, Hamas believes that any such Jewish state has no right to exist.

Indeed, Hamas believes it is duty bound, by both religious and political ideology, to destroy such a state, on its road to establishing the kind of Caliphate which ISIS is in the process of making a reality. According to both of their ideologies and religious beliefs, everything from the Persian Gulf to Spain, is, by virtue of once having been ruled by Muslims, “occupied territory”, which they mean to liberate, by any means possible.

To Hamas, it would not matter if Israel were Christian, Buddhist, Scientologist or Mormon. It is the same mentality that today sees the destruction by ISIS of an 1800 year old church in Mosul.

Hamas are not the plucky underdog freedom fighters that the Left so loves. They are dangerous, corrupt, Islamic fanatics who, like suicide bombers, do not care who they kill or how. They are the enemy of every liberal and progressive value you can name.

Ultimately the victims in all this are Gazans who are held prisoner, not by Israel, but by Hamas. Bring me an argument that Israel is using heavy handed and tactically unwise methods in fighting them, and I am open to a discussion. But there is no middle ground on Hamas. Either you oppose religious fanatics who will slaughter anyone who is different to them (and anyone who gets in their way) - or you don't. If not, you are not fit to stand as a Member of Parliament.

A curious case of Lib Dem derangement

 

As a Bradfordian, I am proud to say that the majority of people in Bradford East did not vote for David Ward, he who mused on Twitter today: "The big question is - if I lived in Gaza would I fire a rocket? - probably yes."

This has caused a Twitter mob outrage. But actually, I can see why. Here we have a member of the House of Commons expressing sympathy with a terrorist organisation, saying that he would fire a rocket indiscriminately into Israel with the intent of killing civilians.

That's odd, because if I lived in Gaza, I would be looking to build an underground resistance to oust Hamas, and I would be feeding intelligence to Israeli forces on the location of weapons caches and rocket stores.

Is that because I have any particular sympathy for Israel? Not really. It's because Gaza is ultimately the architect of its own destiny, which starts with its own leadership. In this instance, Hamas, who routinely brutalise Palestinians and deliberately put children in harms way.

I suppose it comes down to whether you believe in peace and human dignity or not. Here is yet another Lib Dem who clearly doesn't.

Let's please not have more social housing

Whenever one sets about formulating ideas to counter a crisis, it is often useful to ask if there is actually a crisis, or whether it is a contrivance of NGOs and media, operating from within the London bubble. In this instance, as I attempt to weed out the untruths about housing, you could be forgiven for thinking that there might not actually be a housing crisis.

What we have is an affordability crisis. Specifically, a London affordability crisis. As a Yorkshireman, living in Bristol, I am hard pressed to care. One is reminded of a certain Ella Fitzgerald song.

As I remarked earlier today living affordably in London is not a human right. London is what it is. It's a very special and exciting place with huge attractions, and people who want to live there do so by working hard and making sacrifices. If you want to live there, it's not going to be cheap and you accept that fact as precursor.

Some of us are not so imbued with blowing black grime into our handkerchiefs, having to spend a significant portion of the day underground, for the sake of access to London's crappy museums, boring galleries and lame theatres. We don't really have all that much sympathy for those who are either. We also do not feel particularly inclined to subsidise their lifestyle choices - and living in London certainly is a lifestyle choice.

Looking around the country, there are plenty of "affordable" houses. Affordable in the context of a young couple that works hard, plans, sacrifices and saves - and after three years, they will have a deposit - and will be able to find something on the bottom rung for three times their salaries. Even during the mortgage drought this was the case. Just not in London.

For those of us who have zero intention of ever performing an act of DIY, even so much as putting up a shelf, there is still a healthy letting market. Most people can find what they need for a price they can afford. Again, just not in London.

It has never been the case that having your own home was an easy stretch, not unless you were prepared to wait and be filed in one of the concrete filing cabinets of the 1960's, or one of those ghastly pebble-dashed huts designed to bribe the plebs with. What people actually mean when they say they want affordable housing is that they want housing without having to make any sacrifices, and preferably somebody else should pay for a large portion of it.

Of course, if local authorities then provide subsidised housing, there is going to be quite a large demand for it. We are told there is a crisis on the basis of long waiting lists for massively subsidised housing. By this measure, if I am selling Ford Mondeos for £100 and a million people register to get one, if I only have a handful of them, does this mean we have a car crisis? No. And nor do we have a housing crisis. Few on these council waiting lists are actually homeless as you or I would define homeless in the real sense of the word. What we have is a crisis caused by social housing.

Social housing housing will never keep up with demand. Subsidised, cheap housing will always create more demand. Therefore allocation has to be rationed. There is no fair way of allocating social housing, especially when housing is awarded on the basis of acute need. It's a perverse incentive if ever I heard one. People will delay taking actions that will improve their lives in order to maintain their position on the waiting list.

Then once people are in social housing the tendency is to stay within the social housing sector, meaning that their movement is restricted by what the council can supply. That then means we get long term self-imposed poverty and people end up stuck somewhere where there are no jobs, often hanging on to properties bigger than they need, while young families languish in smaller council accommodation - again unwilling to step into the private sector market. There is only really a housing crisis if you believe it is the job of the state to find you a house, and pay for most of it, if not all of it.

Then there's the housing benefit distortion. Rents are underpinned by a floor price, set by what the state will pay in housing benefit. As well as being a cash cow for welfare-farm landlords, we get to a situation where capable people deliberately stay below a certain income threshold to continue to qualify for state assistance. Meanwhile working people live in equally expensive, smaller homes with only marginally more disposable income for their efforts. That isn't fair, and it's immoral.

As a country, we need to move beyond the notion that it is the job of the state to provide us with a home. Because the state has assumed this role, Brits are now born with the expectation that it is somebody else's responsibility to put and keep a roof over their heads. That makes us all clients of the state from birth. That places a ceiling on our ability to exceed our own expectations and all that will breed is yet more poverty.

The real job of the state is to create the conditions for enterprise to thrive, facilitating better homes, but letting the market do its thing. Any time the state has attempted to be the monopoly provider in social matters, it has manifestly failed. I remember well the welfare slums of my hometown. These were unpleasant slums in the 80's as I remember them, but as they have gradually moved out of state ownership, they have manifestly improved.

What government can do is get out of the way. It can slash housing benefit to put some competition back into the market, it can hold firm on the so-called "bedroom tax", it can devolve more powers to local authorities to release land, and it can use tax incentives to stimulate more home building if needed. With the right reforms, a bit of innovation and a bit of honesty, we might discover that this so called housing crisis is not as acute as we might think, if indeed it exists at all. It wouldn't be the first time a crisis had been fabricated by opportunistic politicians.

Propaganda FAIL

Some genius in the Israeli PR machine asks "What would you do?" in reference to rockets being fired at the House of Commons. In this instance, an animated GIF speaks a thousand words.