Despite questions over Prince Harry’s paternity, it looks as though nurture has triumphed over nature as the breaking news right now is that he’s just like his grandad. The News of the World have got an excellent video of Harry proving that the royal family are still relevant in the 21st century, by showing him use the words “Paki” and “raghead” as casually as you or I might say “Ginger twat” or “Jugheaded wanker”.
The obvious defence of this – and indeed the defence already trotted out by a former soldier on the phone on Sky News – is that this is “just the sort of thing you might expect” in the army. Tory MP and probably arse Patrick Mercer was sacked for saying exactly this a while back.
Obviously the MOD has said that the language is “unacceptable in the modern army” but the soldier on the phone wrote this off as (sigh) “political correctness”. In fact, the soldier on the phone said – and this is somewhere between verbatim and paraphrasing – “when you sign up to the army, you sign up for that sort of lifestyle. If you don’t like it, get out”. Which sounds remarkably similar to what BNP supporters tend to say about coming to this country.
The implicit thing is that, er, insitutional racism is fine? I can’t possibly imagine why dehumanising other ethnicities could at all be a dangerous thing to do in, say, Iraq or Afghanistan. I’m sure all of those trained killers with their lack of GCSEs are really great at handling the cultural sensitivies and subtle nuances involved in those wars.
Today’s Daily Express front-page is screaming “EU WILL GRAB BRITAIN’S GAS” – and as you might expect, what with this being the Daily Express they’ve got it wrong again.
The story concerns an apparent clause in the Lisbon treaty that would apparently share Britain’s gas supplies with other EU states in times when supply is compromised, such as in the current situation of Russia turning off the taps to the Ukraine (and thus the rest of eastern Europe). Of course, The Express being The Express, are completely misrepresenting the issue at stake here: that of energy security.
The report contains quotes from a Tory MEP and UKIP’s crackpot leader Nigel Farage saying that Britain shouldn’t share its supplies with the rest of Europe – apparently the Conservative party will “resist any moves towards EU common energy resources”. This is unbelievably short-sighted. It’s all well and good wanting to hang on to the gas you’ve got – but that’s no good if you’ve got none in the first place.
In 2004 the UK became a net-importer of energy (ie: oil and gas) – I can’t find an exact figure for gas alone but this 2004 report speculated that it would happen in 2006, so it’s safe to say we’re probably a net importer by now, or at least will be very, very soon. This means that the gas and oil we need is going to have to come from somewhere else. And this issue of energy security is linked to a bigger issue: security.
Unfortunately for us, that somewhere else where the gas is is quite likely going to be Russia, the non-Israeli bastards of the moment - one of the biggest potential security threats to Britain and the rest of the EU. “Resurgent Russia” or not, Russia is a powerful country so obviously figures heavily into any calculations on national security. The question is simple: Russia has what we want, how can we sustain our supply of it?
Russia need to be tamed if we want to keep the lovely, lovely gas flowing, and the only way this is going to happen is through further Europeanisation of energy security. It’s very easy to demonise BRUSSELS for stealing our energy, but the only thing that is going to give us and the other EU member states any clout when talking energy with Russia is by working together.
Russia currently has the upper-hand in the energy dispute because it follows a strategy of divide and rule- quite sensibly from it’s perspective, it won’t talk to the EU as a whole (something the Express would presumably applaud), but instead prefers to deal with individual member-states, and in effect, is playing them off of each other. Obviously due to factors such as geography and infrastructure, certain states are more dependent on imports than others – Denmark is self-sufficient, for instance, whereas Germany have what in EU-speak is called an Energy Dependence Rate (EDR) of 64.6%, making them a big net-importer, with a big chunk of that energy coming from Russia.
This plays into why the EU is so ineffective dealing with Russia – each country has a different relationship with it, which Russia can exploit. Look at the Georgia war last year on which the EU was utterly conflicted – Britain slagged off the stunningly disproportionate Russian response pretty hard, whereas Germany was much quieter on the issue. I wonder if this had anything to do with Russia being a major supplier of German energy and not being afraid to turn off the taps? (See: Ukraine 2006 – the Germans certainly did.)
The Germany/Russia energy relationship is bilateral. This is important when you consider the physical infrastructure for the transmission of gas. There’s currently talk of building the Nord Stream pipeline from Russia to Germany (and then on through northern Europe) that will go through the Baltic sea rather than any of the intervening former-Eastern bloc countries. There’s plans for a similar pipeline in the Mediterranean. What this will allow Russia to do is threaten to cut off gas supplies to Poland and the Ukraine and the like unless they get their own way (“Don’t put those NATO missiles on your territory!”, “Stop looking to the west!”, etc), without compromising western European energy supplies. And this is an obvious threat to the integrity of the European Union and will threaten any pooled European counterweight to Russian power.
If the EU wants to protect its interests and stand up to Russia more effectively than the current strategy of “not standing up to Russia” allows, then the strategy must be to further integrate the EU energy market. More physical infrastructure is needed and political changes are needed to assure that Russia must deal with the EU as one and not individual countries.
If the EU has a single energy market, it will be physically impossible for Russia to hold any country to ransom like it has been doing in Eastern Europe (think of it like a parallel electrical circuit compared to a serial one) – and it’ll be a cold day in hell, or a warm day in Siberia before Russia cut off all of the EU’s supplies. Why? The relationship is symbiotic: The EU members combined are Russia’s biggest customer – more than 50% of Russia’s GDP is oil and gas revenues, and more than half of the federal budget is from money oil and gas has brought in.
And everyone knows that money talks – it’s hard to mount a disproportionate response to an attack in the caucuses if you can’t afford the tanks to do so, so Russia needs Europe. But the Express needs to learn that it doesn’t need Europe individually.
James O’Malley is a blogger and should currently be writing an essay on energy security and the EU-Russia relationship, but is blogging instead.
2009 hasn’t got off to a great start – there’s a great stench of blood on it its hands. People are dying. Not just in Gaza, or in Afghanistan, or even in a way that the media can tenuously link to the credit crunch, but people are dying of the worst thing of all: old age.
All this death is bad news, because it puts Morris Dancing under threat. The Morris Ring, who appear to be essentially the equivalent of FIFA but with added bells and whistles have earned themselves some press this last week by being brutally honest and saying that all of the old Morris dancers are dying off and young people aren’t replacing them because dressing up with ribbons and bells, and spending hours at a time banging sticks together with beardy men in the village hall is seen as “embarrassing”. I can’t possibly imagine why.
Apparently the worry is that in 20 years time, Morris dancing will be “extinct”, and for some reason, this is a bad thing.
“This is a serious situation”, a spokesman said whilst not noticing all of the war and conflict in the world. “Once we’ve lost this part of our culture it will be almost impossible to revive it.”, he continued, inadvertently articulating what I’m hoping for.
I’m sorry for my lack of sympathy towards the Morris dancers plight, but when I see Morris dancers, I tend to thank the corporations for the fruits of globalisation for marginalising British traditions like this. As a young person who grew up in the late 80s and 90s, and indeed this decade to some extent, I’m glad I’ve had a diet of American cultural imperialism rather than the unpleasant choice I assume my dad got, between either dancing with bells and sticks, or around the May Pole.
When I hear the alarm bells jingling and look at the current Morris crisis though, all I see is textbook Darwinian natural selection: by dancing around dressed as mental patients the participants are putting themselves at an evolutionary disadvantage by severely reducing their chances of propagating their genes to a new generation. This has clearly already happened as young people today no longer have the gene that blocks out any sense of shame.
Maybe there is a way out for them though. After all, this is space-year 2009, and we’ve developed all sorts of amazing genetically engineered and mind-altering technologies. Surely there’s some sort of technology we can use to keep the tradition of Morris dancing alive for reasons that may become clear some day? I think I know the solution:
Booze.
If there’s one thing young people love, it’s getting smashed in nightclubs and (here’s the key bit) dancing. All the Morris Ring need to do is have a little rebranding exercise. Take Morris Dancing out of the village fetes and instead host it in inner-city clubs. Replace the bells with glow-sticks and the twee accordion farts with hardcore trance and the orange juice refreshments with a licensed bar, and before you know it young people will flock to it.
Then again, maybe it’s sometimes better to just let some things die?
Remember a few months ago when everyone was horrified by Baby P? Well it turns out that if you’re not an elitist like Barack Obama or the liberal media, Real People are still giving a damn and Baby P, or “P the Baby”, as he has been dubbed, has almost literally become a poster-boy for misdirected political outrage everywhere. Forget all of the babies dying in Gaza or Darfur or the Congo – the only thing that matters is a baby that happened to die in slightly closer proximity to where you probably live.
Lydia Rivlin, a concerned citizen who has presumably only just given up the search for Maddy is going so-far as to stand in a by-election to Haringey council, to represent a ward she doesn’t live in (she actually lives in Tottenham), on the Baby P ticket. No doubt her campaign will go just as well as the seemingly single-issue campaign of Rudy “9/11″ Giuliani.
Apparently she really wants to get rid of the Labour councillors – so she’s decided to do this by standing in the by-election – apparently a Labour safe-seat – to further dilute the anti-Labour vote. An excellent plan.
My favourite thing though is the stunningly poor-taste campaign song. This is real:
Poor Woolworths. A few weeks ago you were the shop that no one ever goes into, and now you’re destined to become another entry in the collective consciousness of uniquely British things that don’t exist any more, like Radio Rentals, BBC Choice and Opal Fruits – the sort of thing that Peter Kay might use as material in one of his stand up acts.
I walked past my local Woolworths today for the first time since it has closed down, and it was a shocking sight – just an empty shell.
I hope they replace it with something decent, as it’s literally the closest shop to my house and a mere one minute’s walk from my front door. If they could turn it into a new stop on the Bakerloo line it would be excellent.
I also went to Camden today, and was surprised to see that Camden High Street Woolworths is still open – so out of morbid curiosity and a desire to say we were among the handful of people to have been in Woolworths in 2009, my friend Dan and I decided to take a look around. It was bleak.
All the shelves were empty and there seemed little point of the shop being open – the only things they appeared to have not been able to get rid of were these:
Today’s Daily Express front-page is screaming “
