This week it finally emerged that Tony Blair has been waging a 20 month battle to keep some of his advisory relationships secret, and the committee that vets this sort of thing finally got fed up with Blair’s stalling. On Wednesday The Guardian revealed that Blair has been seeking to protect two relationships, one with a South Korean oil firm, the other with the government of Kuwait. Conveniently, as The Guardian points out, the South Korean firm has interests in the Kurdish area of Iraq. Who knew? The Guardian recounts:

According to a committee spokesman, Blair’s claims of the need for secrecy were first made in July 2008, when the committee agreed to break its normal rules, and postpone publication for three months.

Blair’s office went back to the committee in October of that year and asked for a further six months. They promised to let the committee know as soon as the “market sensitivity” had passed.

Committee sources said they heard nothing further and had to “chase” Blair. This culminated in a formal letter from the committee last November. Blair’s office responded last month, claiming the deal was still too sensitive to reveal.

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Jerusalem, by Jez Butterworth, has been one of the hits of the season here in London. There has been pretty much nothing but adulation for the play itself, and the performances, particularly Mark Rylance as the protagonist. It opened at the Royal Court last fall and has since moved on to the Apollo Theatre for what looks set to be a very long run (well, April 24th anyway). And it will undoubtedly be hitting America soon. So we had high expectations when we went to see it last week. And now we’re completely baffled. This is a very long (three hours and twenty minutes, with two intermissions) and very bad play, much of which makes no sense whatsoever. And audiences and critics love it. An “instant modern classic,” according to The Telegraph.
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Prime Minister Gordon Brown has just finished testifying (at his insistence) in front of the Chilcot Iraq inquiry. After some discussion of how he thought that invading Iraq “was the right thing to do,” we’ve been getting a stream of figures and more figures and then even more figures in an attempt to justify why the military had what it needed, irrespective of what anyone else has said. Brown himself came across as a rather pleasant and well-meaning sort of fellow—he wasn’t nearly as patronizing as Tony Blair was, nor as abrasive as Alistair Campbell was, nor as apparently clueless as Jack Straw and Geoff Hoon were. He seemed to be trying to be both avuncular and precise at the same time, but he couldn’t help himself—he kept butting into questions with long and detailed explanations as to why the Ministry of Defense (MOD) was in fine shape.
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Sometime between now and June 7 the UK will have a general election—and if consensus is correct, 7 May is the day. What is starting to look possible—indeed, likely—is that there will be no Parliamentary majority. If there were a majority, it will be either Labour or the Conservatives, since the Liberal Democrats are unlikely to emerge as the new majority, although they are well represented on local councils all around Britain, and they may hold the balance of power in the event of a hung parliament. And up to a couple of months ago, it seemed pretty clear that it would be the Tories. David Cameron had done an admirable job of reconstituting the Conservatives into a party that seemed to have some thinking, some vigour, and some common sense. He rode his bicycle around, he supported (and still supports) the NHS, and he’s made a determined effort to broaden the appeal of the party.
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Well, sadly, I couldn’t take my laptop into the auditorium, so it’s all written notes. You might as well head over to the Guardian Iraq Inquiry website for the live blog there. It’s the best one out there. So before I start watching the talking heads give their analysis, or, even worse, that of other Labour Party hacks (Margaret Beckett is droning on right now on Sky–anyone who lives in the UK will know what a dreaded prospect that is) here are some observations.

It was a bit surreal, in fact–the Alternative Viewing Facility turns out to be the large auditorium in the Queen Elizabeth II Center where the inquiry is being held. There must have been 800 people in there, not many of them likely to have been on Blair’s side. All very well behaved, I must say–and a really broad age range, Clearly a lot of people had taken time off from work, as I had. This was important. It’s like being in the Iraq marches in 2002 and 2003–there was a need to bear witness, and this was one of those occasions that required it. Chilcot, to his credit, understands this, I think. It goes without saying that neither Tony Blair nor the current Prime Minister, Gordon Brown (who testifies next month) wanted this inquiry. There were lots of demonstrators outside, of course, but there seemed to be even more police. Full Story »

OK, today is the big day. We’ve already had three hours of Tony Blair this morning, but they’re only letting the public in to either a morning or an afternoon session for Blair’s testimony, and I got the afternoon. I can’t believe I got one of these tickets—I never win anything. But here we are.

And I haven’t heard back on whether they have Wi-Fi in the room that I’ll be sitting in, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to post. If not, it will all come out in one large post later.

So what happened this morning? Blair was asked about what happened at Crawford (nothing special, no secret deal), the relation of Iraq to the mid-east peace process (none, apparently, although he said he was “frustrated” at the lack of progress), his relationship with Bush (fine, and did not set conditions). So far, Blair’s main point is that 9/11 changed everything—specifically, the perception of risk. So even though he more or less conceded that the actual risk posed by Saddam Hussein did not change, the perceived risk did. And he was very fudgy on one point—he saw no real difference between regime change and disarming Iraq, an interesting non-distinction for someone who trained as a lawyer to make. Blair also said that his comments in his now-notorious interview with Fern Britton of the BBC last year was a mistake. We’ve also learned that Blair seems to worry a lot about threats—he’s mentioned Iran several times today. Is he secretly lamenting that he didn’t get an attack on Iran in while he still could? Full Story »

We learned a lot this past week in the Iraq Inquiry. Jack Straw, for example, told us that he almost thought the war was a bad idea, and was, well, awfully close to being illegal. But then he changed his mind, apparently, maybe. That’s the way it went pretty much the whole week. Geoff Hoon agreeably admitted that he did what he was told to do. I suppose reading between the lines, we learned that everything that was done under Tony Blair was against the will and judgment of those who worked for him–and yet, somehow, they managed to do what he told them to do anyway.

And we have an exciting week coming up. First, we have a bunch of people from the Foreign Office, who will be telling us that in all likelihood the invasion of Iraq was illegal without a second UN resolution, which of course Tony was happy to ignore. Full Story »

This forthcoming week we expect some more outright lying to go on in the Chilcot inquiry. This is because those appearing—-particularly former Defence Minister Geoff Hoon and former foreign secretary Jack Straw-—have an occasional habit of doing this. Both are expected to provide some interesting testimony, especially in light of testimony this past week from Alistair Campbell, and testimony in December from a number of senior military figures.

Before getting to what we might expect, let’s look at what we learned this past week. P.G. Wodehouse’s Lord Emsworth, whose motto was “Stout Denial!” would have been proud of Alistair Campbell. Campbell, Tony Blair’s Communications guy, can lie with the best of them, and we presume he did. In fact, what was unsurprising about Campbell’s testimony was the extent to which he stuck to the script, while at the same time the extent to which he tried to blame everyone else. Campbell’s testimony and answers to questions even included a reference to Psalm 56 on his whiny blog, “All day long they twist my words”, which, as Hugh O’Shaughnessy pointed out, would be funny if it came from someone else. Full Story »

The pledged cuts to carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) won’t be enough to hit the targeted 450 ppm of CO₂ thought to be necessary to keep the Earth’s mean temperature from rising more than 2 °C. This isn’t news to anyone who’s followed climate closely for a few months. What’s news, however, is that the UN knew this as well and yet they’re still saying that 2 °C is possible. Earlier today an early draft of an internal UN analysis of GHG cuts leaked, and the document shows that the UN Secretariat knew in advance of the Copenhagen meeting that the cuts wouldn’t be enough.

According to the 2009WEO [World Energy Outlook], global emissions in 2020 are projected to be about 5 Gt for the reference scenario. According to the 450 ppm scenario, global emissions peak around 2015 at the level of 43.7 Gt and remain broadly stable at that level before starting to decline in 2020.

The UN Secretariat’s “reference scenario” puts the global emissions peak at or above 550 ppm, occurring after 2020, and at least 3 °C. Full Story »

I was surprised to learn that 2009 is the 60th anniversary of The Commonwealth—the association of former British colonies that still, amazingly, continue to work with each and talk to each other on a variety of issues. This would be a cause for celebration, one would think. And it appears there have been some. But I only learned about it when we visited Marlborough House, which is where the Commonwealth members meet from time to time to have their pictures taken, and who knows what else. It’s actually difficult to know, because the UK government has made no effort to publicise this event, which one would think would be a cause for celebration. The entertaining but not hugely informative Commonwealth website is here–there’s certainly a lot of stuff going on.
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We have this great little library around the corner, which is very convenient. In London, there are lots of libraries, but it’s such big city geographically that it’s not always the case that there’s a library just around the corner. It’s a nice library—it’s right next to The Keats House, where John Keats lived next door to Fanny Brawne before heading off to Italy and an untimely death. The trees at the edge of the Keats House grounds hang over the path that leads to the library doors, and in Spring there are lovely blossoms dropping petals on the path. The building itself is that curious medley that one often encounters in England, a combination of a bit of old grandeur with some 1960s crap thrown in to make the interior more “functional.” But it’s comfortable, it has a good collection of books and newspapers, an attractive children’s room, and a bunch of PCs that people use for internet access, and it used to have a neighbor’s cat, Moggy, who would wander in and sleep all day before she died last Spring, much to the dismay of the regulars. Full Story »

The past couple of weeks have been pretty interesting musically–we’ve been to a number of choral concerts, and they ranged from the truly boring to the magnificent. But what most characterized them was a distinction between the excessively academic approach to performance, versus what I guess we need to call a more Romantic approach. Not that the second label is remotely applicable to most of the music in question–it’s pretty much, with two exceptions, music of the 13th through the 17th centuries. Full Story »

The Tate Museum has the finest collection of the works of J. M. W. Turner in the world, and from time to time they feel the need to refresh the public with another show to keep proving that Turner deserves the “greatest British artist ever” tag. Back in 2005 this resulted in a hugely interesting show called Turner, Whistler, Monet, which looked at the interactions between the three, and it was a genuine treat. This time around it’s Turner and the Masters, a look at the painters that influenced Turner. At least that’s the intention. And everyone loves it. Well, not quite everyone—only Brian Sewellseems to give it the critical eye it deserves. The Times calls it a “Magnificent and hugely ambitious exhibition.” It’s quoted right there on the Tate website. What it turns into, however, is something completely different, something along the lines of Turner the Competitive Cockney Gnome who Tried to Outdo Everyone without Ever Having an Original Idea.
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This is an unusually personal post for me. I lost my Dad to cancer several years ago. I wasn’t ready for that – he still had more to teach me. He was an avid photographer. The last of his personal effects amounted to several boxes filled with slides, negatives and prints from a life long hobby.

One series of pictures I found especially moving were from two January days in 1958. He photographed his home town to share with his fiancee, my Mom. Here is a look at London in 1958.

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It was, I admit, a bit of a surprise to discover that my new country has anarchists around. Not the Kropotkin bomb-makers, of course–the bomb-makers we do have don’t seem motivated by anarchy, exactly. It’s a much more reasonable form of anarchism, as far as I can tell, although I haven’t really investigated it in any depth. But, still, some folks I admire–artist Clifford Harper, folk group Chumbawamba–claim to be anarchists. And it’s not just here, I gather–there’s an annual Anarchist Book Fair in Ghent, and one in London, and who knows where else. This has probably been a good year for this sort of thing, considering the death of capitalism and all.

And they have certainly had lots of good news this week, of a sort. The English have always had a bit of a libertarian streak–just look how they drive–and those of that persuasion got lots of confirmation recently. For one thing, it’s autumn, which means it’s time for the annual party conferences. So last week we had the Liberal Democrats blowing themselves up a little bit, this week we seem to have had the Labour party disengaging completely from reality, and next week who knows what the Conservative party will manage to come up with. For another thing, it was just one of those weeks that had a lot of news flow that would make an anarchist smile.
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Back in August, the UK government administration (collectively known as Whitehall) was criticized by Members of Parliament for failing to meet their own carbon emission targets. On September 15, UK Cabinet Office minister Angela Smith claimed in a BBC article that Whitehall had “saved enough carbon dioxide to fill almost 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools.”

2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools sounds like a lot. Swimming pools are big, after all, and 2,500 of them would hold lots of water. But when I dug a little further, I found that Whitehall’s carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions were actually reduced by only 12,000 tonnes, a nearly negligible amount.

To put this into perspective, in 2006, the Energy Information Administration estimated that the total emissions for the United Kingdom was 585.71 million metric tons (aka tonnes). 12,000 tonnes is only 2 thousandths of one percent of the UK’s total emissions three years ago.

So how did we get from 12,000 tonnes to “2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools?” It’s called the ideal gas equation. Full Story »