AI
Thursday, January 15, 2009 5:37:15 PM
Zimbabwe: Leftists to blame for Robert Mugabe's blood-letting
By Simon Heffer .. 26 Dec 2008
One, feels like, very conservative view
Miliband: getting the message at last
A few years ago, when the tyrant of Zimbabwe was moving from being wicked to being downright evil, I wrote that we should invade Harare, depose him, and supervise free elections. Invited to appear on a BBC programme to defend this stance, I was assailed by an "Africa expert" who told me that diplomatic pressure on Mugabe was bound to work, that the idea of sending the Parachute Regiment in to sort the monster out was offensively colonialist, and that I was wrong.
White liberals like him are as much to blame for the terror, starvation, brutality and genocide that now scar this once-rich and stable country. The supposedly civilised world has allowed Mugabe and his horrors to happen, mainly unchecked. Sanctions on his country merely starve those who disagree with him. Zimbabwe has all the natural, and had all the human, resources to be an example to the rest of Africa. It is now merely a symbol of what happens when a dictator takes charge, and those who might rein him in simply look away.
So it is infuriating to hear some Leftists and liberals saying, through the teeth of their post-imperial guilt, that perhaps an armed intervention is the only way to rid the world of this brute. Had this been done years ago, when they took the opposite view, how many lives might have been saved? How many productive people, black and white, would have felt able to stay in Zimbabwe, rather than flee with their talents abroad? Would it still be a country with a life expectancy in the low thirties, something not heard of in Europe since the early Middle Ages? How proud does the Left, with its stupidly romantic notions of the inviolate nature of "black freedom fighters", feel about what it has so ably helped Mugabe achieve?
Of course, even now the Leftists who are recanting cannot bear the thought of a military operation being conducted by Britain alone - not that our exploited and resource-starved Armed Forces are in a position to take out Mugabe. It is argued that there should be a UN or multinational force, something that most of us old cynics will believe only when we see it. Frankly, I couldn't care less who liberates Zimbabwe - North Korea, the Taliban or Venezuela are welcome to it: they couldn't be any worse than the incumbent.
Yet the gutlessness of our Foreign Office continues. The disastrous Lord Malloch-Brown, who is to international diplomacy what a lamp post is to a dog, said this week that it would be wrong for "the mangy old British lion" to strip Mugabe of his honorary knighthood. Let us ignore for the moment the question of whether a Foreign Office minister should insult his country so, another sign that this oaf is unfit for office. Four days later the knighthood did indeed go, on a recommendation from David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, to the Queen. Mr Miliband had said just two weeks earlier that removing the knighthood was not a good idea. And the Tories are no better. This week they ordered the suspension of a prospective parliamentary candidate who made the blindingly obvious observation that the late Ian Smith was better than Mugabe. It is time these people grew up.
I know what a shock it must be to Leftists of all parties, with their uncritical adoration of African leaders from the saintly, such as Nelson Mandela, to the repulsive, such as Mugabe, to see that sometimes black people can be evil too. But that is the truth. And Zimbabwe may be the prologue to what may happen in South Africa after a decade of failure by Thabo Mbeki is followed by the rule of the dubious Jacob Zuma. It may be very uncomfortable and embarrassing for whites to intervene to stop the butchery of black tyrants. But if they don't, hecatombs of lives will be lost.
The pointless Spelman deserves the boot
A couple of months ago I appeared on BBC's Question Time with the chairman of the Conservative Party, Caroline Spelman.
As the titles ran at the end I had identical text messages from two Tory MPs from opposing wings of the party, thanking me for representing the Tories' interests on the panel that evening. As well as being perhaps the most pointless incumbent of her post in history - most of her job is done either by George Osborne or the interesting Lord Ashcroft - Mrs Spelman now turns out to have been using a parliamentary allowance to pay for childcare that most other working women have to fund out of their and their husbands' heavily taxed income.
I have yet to meet a senior colleague of Mrs Spelman's who imagines she is in her post for any reason other than her chromosomal make-up. What in my memory of sleaze scandals - and Dave must surely sack her or look a chump - is unique is that it would be the first time a party chairman had ever become famous by being booted out of the job.
Labour were very bad losers in Henley
Had a performing seal in a blue rosette been put up by the Tories in the Henley by-election it would have won, a contention for which there is some evidence. Yet nothing can conceal that the performance of Labour, coming fifth behind the Greens and the BNP, jolly nearly being beaten by UKIP and losing its deposit with a pitiful 3.7 per cent of the vote, is dire.
Dave has ordered his party to go soft on Gordon Brown, since the Tories know their best chance of winning the next election is to keep this blundering, tunnel-visioned, disconnected man in Downing Street for as long as possible.
I wonder whether the abominable performance in Henley will convert a few more Labour MPs to the growing number who see the dole queue beckoning within the next two years unless Mr Brown is pensioned off sharpish. I also see why Labour isn't running in Haltemprice, where there are 26 candidates: the party would come about 24th, behind the Miss Great Britain Party and the Church of the Militant Elvis.
Sadly, there will always be danger on the road
I do not diminish the grief of the family of Michael Buston, killed when a lorry driver ploughed into the back of his vehicle while engrossed in a conversation on his hands-free phone. However, the demands that have followed this awful incident for such phones to be banned are pointless.
Someone could just as easily stop paying attention to the road because he is having a row with his wife in the passenger seat, trying to placate children who are squabbling in the back, or is simply rather taken by the song playing on the stereo at the time. Are we going to ban spouses, offspring and car radios as well? What about heating, in case someone fiddles with that? Going on the roads will always have some risk attached: it's as simple as that.
There's an ill wind blowing through the country
Our readers are outraged by the ludicrously named "eco-towns" that the Government wants to dump on our countryside, and rightly so. Most are planned for charming areas where many Telegraph readers live, and are being put there, in a Prescott-style act of vindictiveness, to punish areas that insist on voting Tory. The Co-op is seeking permission to build 15,000 houses on 4,000 acres of farmland near Leicester, something clearly unconnected with Labour's £13.5 million overdraft with the Co-op bank.
The danger of complaining, though, is that you may end up with a revolting wind-farm shoved on your horizon instead. These too are often selected for areas that Labour seems to think have a bit too much going for them, such as in one of the most beautiful parts of Herefordshire where the composer Michael Berkeley is leading a campaign to stop them. With Labour, being eco-friendly depends on what class you are in.
Passports prove to be a nice little earner
Although we know the Government is determined to find as many ingenious ways of relieving us of our money as possible, I feel it is a useful service this column can perform to alert you to new ones. A friend's stepdaughter lives in Canada, but is a British subject.
She wanted to renew her passport. She sent it to her mother in England to be renewed. The Passport Office said it could not process the application as the applicant was resident abroad: and it was duly returned. Not returned, however, was the whopping £72 fee that had been submitted, which (a covering note explained) "has been retained to cover the cost of administering the passport application". Since it wasn't administered at all, this would appear to be downright theft.
No doubt it is also something that other parts of our greedy bureaucracy will seek to emulate: getting the postcode wrong when applying for a driving licence will no doubt soon result in confiscation of any fee. And when ID cards come in, it will be like Las Vegas for the Treasury.
Army deaths: coroners can discover the truth
In my recent experience of discussing military matters with Labour politicians or certain senior officers, I have noticed one thing about which they are all very touchy: the suggestion that defective kit might have been responsible for the deaths of servicemen and women in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The usual formula now is that some kit used to be bad, but those problems are solved: and that when coroners, in inquests on dead soldiers, highlight the difficulties with kit, they are referring usually to defects that no longer exist. However, are we sure this is true?
One reservist wrote to me this week to highlight the Snatch Land Rover, which is "on display at the National Army Museum, which is where it belongs" but which has been responsible, according to some coroners, for many deaths in Helmand. It is being phased out. There have been suggestions that the Government might try to gag coroners, however. I hope the slightest attempt to do this will be met by a very public howl of protest from them.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/simonheffer/3559929/Zimbabwe-Leftists-to-blame-for-Robert-Mugabe%27s-blood-letting.html
The passport comment was of personal interest as, while living 'abroad', in
2001 i renewed mine in short time, with no problems and at little cost.
By Simon Heffer .. 26 Dec 2008
One, feels like, very conservative view
Miliband: getting the message at last
A few years ago, when the tyrant of Zimbabwe was moving from being wicked to being downright evil, I wrote that we should invade Harare, depose him, and supervise free elections. Invited to appear on a BBC programme to defend this stance, I was assailed by an "Africa expert" who told me that diplomatic pressure on Mugabe was bound to work, that the idea of sending the Parachute Regiment in to sort the monster out was offensively colonialist, and that I was wrong.
White liberals like him are as much to blame for the terror, starvation, brutality and genocide that now scar this once-rich and stable country. The supposedly civilised world has allowed Mugabe and his horrors to happen, mainly unchecked. Sanctions on his country merely starve those who disagree with him. Zimbabwe has all the natural, and had all the human, resources to be an example to the rest of Africa. It is now merely a symbol of what happens when a dictator takes charge, and those who might rein him in simply look away.
So it is infuriating to hear some Leftists and liberals saying, through the teeth of their post-imperial guilt, that perhaps an armed intervention is the only way to rid the world of this brute. Had this been done years ago, when they took the opposite view, how many lives might have been saved? How many productive people, black and white, would have felt able to stay in Zimbabwe, rather than flee with their talents abroad? Would it still be a country with a life expectancy in the low thirties, something not heard of in Europe since the early Middle Ages? How proud does the Left, with its stupidly romantic notions of the inviolate nature of "black freedom fighters", feel about what it has so ably helped Mugabe achieve?
Of course, even now the Leftists who are recanting cannot bear the thought of a military operation being conducted by Britain alone - not that our exploited and resource-starved Armed Forces are in a position to take out Mugabe. It is argued that there should be a UN or multinational force, something that most of us old cynics will believe only when we see it. Frankly, I couldn't care less who liberates Zimbabwe - North Korea, the Taliban or Venezuela are welcome to it: they couldn't be any worse than the incumbent.
Yet the gutlessness of our Foreign Office continues. The disastrous Lord Malloch-Brown, who is to international diplomacy what a lamp post is to a dog, said this week that it would be wrong for "the mangy old British lion" to strip Mugabe of his honorary knighthood. Let us ignore for the moment the question of whether a Foreign Office minister should insult his country so, another sign that this oaf is unfit for office. Four days later the knighthood did indeed go, on a recommendation from David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, to the Queen. Mr Miliband had said just two weeks earlier that removing the knighthood was not a good idea. And the Tories are no better. This week they ordered the suspension of a prospective parliamentary candidate who made the blindingly obvious observation that the late Ian Smith was better than Mugabe. It is time these people grew up.
I know what a shock it must be to Leftists of all parties, with their uncritical adoration of African leaders from the saintly, such as Nelson Mandela, to the repulsive, such as Mugabe, to see that sometimes black people can be evil too. But that is the truth. And Zimbabwe may be the prologue to what may happen in South Africa after a decade of failure by Thabo Mbeki is followed by the rule of the dubious Jacob Zuma. It may be very uncomfortable and embarrassing for whites to intervene to stop the butchery of black tyrants. But if they don't, hecatombs of lives will be lost.
The pointless Spelman deserves the boot
A couple of months ago I appeared on BBC's Question Time with the chairman of the Conservative Party, Caroline Spelman.
As the titles ran at the end I had identical text messages from two Tory MPs from opposing wings of the party, thanking me for representing the Tories' interests on the panel that evening. As well as being perhaps the most pointless incumbent of her post in history - most of her job is done either by George Osborne or the interesting Lord Ashcroft - Mrs Spelman now turns out to have been using a parliamentary allowance to pay for childcare that most other working women have to fund out of their and their husbands' heavily taxed income.
I have yet to meet a senior colleague of Mrs Spelman's who imagines she is in her post for any reason other than her chromosomal make-up. What in my memory of sleaze scandals - and Dave must surely sack her or look a chump - is unique is that it would be the first time a party chairman had ever become famous by being booted out of the job.
Labour were very bad losers in Henley
Had a performing seal in a blue rosette been put up by the Tories in the Henley by-election it would have won, a contention for which there is some evidence. Yet nothing can conceal that the performance of Labour, coming fifth behind the Greens and the BNP, jolly nearly being beaten by UKIP and losing its deposit with a pitiful 3.7 per cent of the vote, is dire.
Dave has ordered his party to go soft on Gordon Brown, since the Tories know their best chance of winning the next election is to keep this blundering, tunnel-visioned, disconnected man in Downing Street for as long as possible.
I wonder whether the abominable performance in Henley will convert a few more Labour MPs to the growing number who see the dole queue beckoning within the next two years unless Mr Brown is pensioned off sharpish. I also see why Labour isn't running in Haltemprice, where there are 26 candidates: the party would come about 24th, behind the Miss Great Britain Party and the Church of the Militant Elvis.
Sadly, there will always be danger on the road
I do not diminish the grief of the family of Michael Buston, killed when a lorry driver ploughed into the back of his vehicle while engrossed in a conversation on his hands-free phone. However, the demands that have followed this awful incident for such phones to be banned are pointless.
Someone could just as easily stop paying attention to the road because he is having a row with his wife in the passenger seat, trying to placate children who are squabbling in the back, or is simply rather taken by the song playing on the stereo at the time. Are we going to ban spouses, offspring and car radios as well? What about heating, in case someone fiddles with that? Going on the roads will always have some risk attached: it's as simple as that.
There's an ill wind blowing through the country
Our readers are outraged by the ludicrously named "eco-towns" that the Government wants to dump on our countryside, and rightly so. Most are planned for charming areas where many Telegraph readers live, and are being put there, in a Prescott-style act of vindictiveness, to punish areas that insist on voting Tory. The Co-op is seeking permission to build 15,000 houses on 4,000 acres of farmland near Leicester, something clearly unconnected with Labour's £13.5 million overdraft with the Co-op bank.
The danger of complaining, though, is that you may end up with a revolting wind-farm shoved on your horizon instead. These too are often selected for areas that Labour seems to think have a bit too much going for them, such as in one of the most beautiful parts of Herefordshire where the composer Michael Berkeley is leading a campaign to stop them. With Labour, being eco-friendly depends on what class you are in.
Passports prove to be a nice little earner
Although we know the Government is determined to find as many ingenious ways of relieving us of our money as possible, I feel it is a useful service this column can perform to alert you to new ones. A friend's stepdaughter lives in Canada, but is a British subject.
She wanted to renew her passport. She sent it to her mother in England to be renewed. The Passport Office said it could not process the application as the applicant was resident abroad: and it was duly returned. Not returned, however, was the whopping £72 fee that had been submitted, which (a covering note explained) "has been retained to cover the cost of administering the passport application". Since it wasn't administered at all, this would appear to be downright theft.
No doubt it is also something that other parts of our greedy bureaucracy will seek to emulate: getting the postcode wrong when applying for a driving licence will no doubt soon result in confiscation of any fee. And when ID cards come in, it will be like Las Vegas for the Treasury.
Army deaths: coroners can discover the truth
In my recent experience of discussing military matters with Labour politicians or certain senior officers, I have noticed one thing about which they are all very touchy: the suggestion that defective kit might have been responsible for the deaths of servicemen and women in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The usual formula now is that some kit used to be bad, but those problems are solved: and that when coroners, in inquests on dead soldiers, highlight the difficulties with kit, they are referring usually to defects that no longer exist. However, are we sure this is true?
One reservist wrote to me this week to highlight the Snatch Land Rover, which is "on display at the National Army Museum, which is where it belongs" but which has been responsible, according to some coroners, for many deaths in Helmand. It is being phased out. There have been suggestions that the Government might try to gag coroners, however. I hope the slightest attempt to do this will be met by a very public howl of protest from them.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/simonheffer/3559929/Zimbabwe-Leftists-to-blame-for-Robert-Mugabe%27s-blood-letting.html
The passport comment was of personal interest as, while living 'abroad', in
2001 i renewed mine in short time, with no problems and at little cost.
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