Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Category: News and politics

  • A Little Local Difficulty

    As you may have gathered, the plug has been pulled on the Dutch government. It’s been quite an exciting few days this week. There was an emergency debate in the Dutch parliament on the evening of June 28th – and it went on through the night until 04:30 on June 29th. The subject was l’affaire Hirsi Ali and did she or didn’t she have Dutch nationality.
     
    The debate was televised live on Dutch TV and I found myself riveted by it. Even though I found it difficult in places to follow, I kept watching until 02:30. The debate contained high drama and low humour. The humour was provided by the minister of finance, Gerrit Zalm, called into the chamber at 01:00 from home. He apologised for the delay in getting there, but, as he explained, he lived in Scheveningen and his chaffeur lived in Voorburg.
     
    The drama was stoked by the minister of immigration, Rita Verdonk. What struck me was that minister Verdonk (Lovely Rita, as I cannot help but ironically call her) was finally hoist by her own petard and as a result brought down the government. She refused to bend or to admit any of her own shortcomings in the debate (nothing new there, then). She had engineered an agreement that Hirsi Ali had to sign in order to get her passport back (Hirsi Ali quite rightly called this a "political deal"). It seemed to me (and to the D66 party who withdrew their support from the government as a result) an abuse of her political power.
     
    It was interesting to watch the debate where members of parliament asked about the facts in the case. Verdonk stonewalled, but prime minister Balkenende let slip (at around 02:15) the fact that a political compromise had been reached, i.e. Verdonk had included an admission of guilt on Hirsi Ali in the statement that Hirsi Ali was put under pressure to sign (in order to get her passport back). The admission of guilt says that Hirsi Ali had “wrong-footed” Verdonk. It became clear that the agreement was not so much a simple piece of legal formality but something designed to absolve Verdonk of any error of judgement.
     
    Once that particular cat was let out of the bag by Balkenende, then a censure motion was put in place by Femke Halsema of the Groenlinks party, and Lousewies van der Laan of the D66 party went in with guns blazing. The upshot was that the three ministers in the government of the D66 party resigned, and hence Balkenende said that the whole cabinet had to follow.
     
    Balkenende has today said that he blames D66 for the fall of his government. It seems to me that they hold the moral high ground in the affair, painful though it has been. If Balkenende really wants to blame someone, then he could do worse than consider Rita Verdonk, whose "lady’s not for turning" persona has been the catalyst of this whole bizarre affair.
     

  • It’ll All End In Tears

    Justin, over at Chicken Yoghurt, observes the unedifying spectacle that is Noo Labour finger-pointing and says "I told you so". Yep, he’s right. To hell with the lot of them.

  • I’m Sorry, What Was That Again?

    “The weight of international leadership is not borne easily,” Rice said, “but we as Americans are more than equal to this challenge, and we must be, for if we imagine a world without American leadership we are led inescapably to this solemn conclusion: If America does not serve great purposes, if we do not rally other nations to fight intolerance and support peace and defend freedom, and to help give all hope who suffer oppression, then our world will drift toward tragedy.”
    The truly terrifying thing is that she probably believes, in the face of all the evidence so amply provided by the current administration, that she is fulfilling this aspiration. But from where I stand, she and her colleagues are part of the problem, not part of the solution…

  • “Diplomacy”

    My dictionary defines the word "diplomacy" thus:
    The art of conductiong negotiations between nations; the art of negotiating with foreign nations; skill in conducting negotiations of any kind; adroitness, tact.
    Funny, that’s what I thought it was; particularly the skill, adroitness and tact bits.
     
    No matter, here comes Colleen Graffy, apparently the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, to disabuse me of that quaint notion. She has described the suicide of three detainees at Guantanamo Bay as "a good PR move to draw attention".
     
    One wonders what she might say were she being undiplomatic…

  • I Had A Dream…

    …Only it turned out to be a nightmare. Sebastiaan Gottleib sums up my misgivings precisely.

  • Reason Prevails…

  • From Frying Pan To Fire?

    A row has broken out around the Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She is accused of being economical with the truth when she arrived in The Netherlands seeking asylum in 1992.
     
    The result has been that she has decided not just to step down from the Dutch parliament, but also to move to the US where she will take up a position in the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative thinktank based in Washington.
     
    I confess to having mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I can see why the conservative elements in US politics would want to embrace Hirsi Ali as someone who stands against "islamic facism", and I can see why she might want to leave all the shit she’s been getting in the Netherlands behind. But I can’t help feeling that, if she really is true to her views on women’s and homosexuals’ rights that these will ultimately jar with her new paymasters, and I predict a divorce in the not too distant future.
     
    It’s either that, or she’s just another typical politician, willing to change her views for her own survival. Time will tell.
     
    Update: reactions from various people in Dutch politics. Wiegel’s reaction is a typical smug Dutch pronouncement. I find that sort of attitude irritating beyond belief. He is clearly in the "I’m alright Jack" mode of thinking whilst rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Peter van Ham, however, points in the same direction as my feelings – Hirsi Ali will find strange bedfellows in the AEI.
     
    Update 2: the story is now emerging in the UK press, e.g. The Guardian and The Telegraph. The latter does point out that apparently the fact that Hirsi Ali lied about her background in order to get asylum status "has been common knowledge since September 2002". Still, that’s not going to sav her. Today, the Dutch papers are reporting that the lovely Rita Verdonk, the hard-line Dutch Immigration Minister, is now saying that Hirsi Ali should never have been granted Dutch citizenship in 1997, and therefore it is possible that she will be stripped of her citizenship.

  • Shuffling the Rats

    Simon Hoggart nails it as usual. But the biggest rat of all didn’t get shuffled- he was the one doing the shuffling. There ain’t no justice in the world.

  • The Benefit of the Doubt?

    The latest twist in the Tessa Jowell/David Mills saga is that they have now agreed to a separation. Part of me wants to believe that they had the best of intentions throughout this whole sorry affair, but an ever more vociferous part of me is starting to ask the same questions as Curious Hamster and Nosemonkey.
     
    My father was a politician. He was an honest and honourable man. He hated politics, but thought it was his social duty to do what was right for his fellow human beings. Why is it that his like seem to be as rare as hen’s teeth in today’s world?

  • Manx Voters Getting Younger

    I see that the land of my birth – the Isle of Man – intends to lower the age at which people can vote from 18 to 16. The intention is to attract young people to get involved in politics. Hmm, well good luck to them, it will be interesting to see whether it makes any difference.
     
     The story in the Guardian also comments that this is not the first time that the Island has led the way in democratic reform, it granted the right to vote to women of property back in 1881. I couldn’t help but have a wry smile at that "led the way" line. The Island also kept the birch (corporal punishment for male offenders) well into the 1970s, and kept anti-gay legislation on the books until well into the 1990s. There was a right little hotbed of anti-gay bigots on the Island, and at least one gay man I knew of committed suicide as a result of the poisonous atmosphere there at the time.

  • The European Parliament Debates Homophobia

    Doug Ireland, over at his blog, provides a good summary of the recent debate in the European Parliament on the topic of homophobia. The full text of the resolution adopted by the parliament is here.

  • RIP, Coretta

    Barely three months after the death of Rosa Parks, comes the news that another great light in the US Civil Rights Movement has been extinguished. Coretta Scott King has died.

  • Surely You Jest?

    This has to be a joke, surely? I mean, I know that New Labour has a tenuous grip on reality at times, but please, Mr. Coates, you are pulling our legs, aren’t you?

  • And The Award Goes To…

    The lovely Rita Verdonk, Dutch Minister for Integration and Immigration, won an award last night: the Big Brother award for privacy violations in the Government category for 2005. Couldn’t have gone to a more deserving person, I thought. She’s obviously on a roll, following her idiotic idea concerning how far Dutch should be enforced in public speech on the streets of our fair cities.

  • In The Thick Of It

    Life imitates Art. Although real life politics seems even more morally bankrupt than that portrayed in the TV satire. Why am I not surprised?

  • Noooooo…..

    Please tell me that this won’t happen…

  • A Delicious Irony

    The trial of Leo O’Connor, accused of breaking the Official Secrets Act, has started. The document at the centre of the trial, you may recall, is the record of a meeting between Bush and Blair in which the former is alleged to have suggested the bombing of the al-Jazeera TV station, while the latter is alleged to have suggested that this would not be a good idea.
     
    The Guardian reports today that O’Connor’s lawyer has now read the document and says that "I don’t think there was anything in it that could embarrass the British government". Brilliant. If the alleged contents of the document are true, then he is perfectly accurate. The fact that it confirms that Bush is a few marbles short is not the British government’s fault and is merely a delicious irony.

  • Not Worthy Of Respect

    Whatever happened to "Respect"? No, I don’t mean it in the way Tony Blair means it, I mean whatever happened to that perfectly innocent little word? How come it’s been appropriated by New Labour’s army of management consultants and spin doctors, and turned into some kind of Frankenstein’s monster?
     
    The latest example is the publication of Labour’s Respect Action Plan, an appalling piece of management-speak from beginning to end. What makes it worse is that all the ridiculous verbiage ("Everyone is part of everyone else") has successfully driven out any useful content that might actually be part of a plan of action.
     
    Justin McKeating, over at the Chicken Yoghurt blog, gives the document a fine old fossicking* and fails to come up with any nuggets of value in its 44 pages. Simon Jenkins, in the Guardian today, also blows the plan a well-deserved raspberry. His opening paragraph is a model of well-aimed derision at the mindset of the people that seem to have infiltrated New Labour.
     
    I’ve been watching The Thick of It on TV recently. It’s painfully funny and, judging by the antics of New Labour, painfully accurate.
     
    * To fossick – to search for gold in abandoned claims, or to rummage around for anything of value.

  • Is The Lid Coming Off?

    It would appear that the story that the UK government uses intelligence that has been acquired via torture in Uzbekistan has just been turned up a notch or two higher. Documents in the possession of the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan have been re-published on multiple sites in the blogosphere in an attempt to beat what is allegedly the UK government’s attempts to suppress the information.
     
    Justin McKeating over at The Chicken Yoghurt has a good summary of this story, including the alleged documents, and I recommend reading it.
     
    One thing that caught my eye was a supposed quote from Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary. He apparently said:
    "One of the things that is done with intelligence that comes from liaison partners, obviously an assessment is made about its provenance.
     
    Because it does not follow that if it is extracted under torture, it is automatically untrue. But there is a much higher probability of it being embellished."
    Embellished!? I am appalled that he could choose this word. It means "to add incidents or imaginary accompaniments so as to heighten a narrative". In other words Straw is assuming that the information obtained under torture is basically true. He apparently refuses ever to consider the possibility that the information could be false in every respect. I find that sickening, and morally repugnant.

  • Charles Socarides

    I see that Dr. Socarides died last Sunday. I can’t say I’m sorry – as the obituary says, he inflicted enough pain and suffering on gay and lesbian people in his time, and the organisation he founded (NARTH) continues to do so.