Ratko Mladic reminds me why we are in Libya

I'll always remember their faces when I told them about Bosnia. I once taught a group of boys, the majority of whom were Muslim. We had some fascinating conversations about foreign policy, particularly around the time they were going on the protest marches against Israel's actions in Gaza. They were in the middle of insisting that it was another example of the Christian world sitting back once again whilst Muslims are massacred.

I asked them to explain to me why then Tony Blair and Bill Clinton had intervened in Bosnia to stop the Christian Serbs killing the Bosnian Muslims. They sat, and they stared at me in complete incomprehension. I asked them the question again. Blank faces. It began to dawn on me that they had no idea what I was talking about. Bosnia didn't fit with 'the narrative', so they hadn't been told about it by those in their community who were (for reasons I won't guess) been fuelling their victim complex. It had simply been erased from history as an inconvenient anomaly. Or so I thought.

After the weekend they came back into class with triumphant looks on their faces. "Why Sir did the UK and USA wait until after so many Muslims had been killed before interveneing? Why did the West allow Sebrenica to happen?"

This conversation (and the faces of my former pupils) came into my head when I heard that Ratko Mladic had been arrested in Serbia this week. It was he and Radovan Karadzic who had led the Sebrenica massacre in 1995. It was three more years before the UK and USA intervened.

And this leads to the situation in Libya. It seems the mission has crept, in that the words of Barack Obama and David Cameron this week suggest they will not leave until Muammar Gaddafi is 'removed' as leader of the country. They call this 'removing the war machine' but many call it 'regime change'. The problem, of course, is that the West went into Libya without really understanding what would mark the end of the campaign. That gives useful fuel to those who question why we actually went into Libya in the first place, and why we are there but not doing anything about similar issues in Syria and Bahrain.

The facile answer is that we are in Libya because it has oil and Syria doesn't. (Bahrain DOES have oil but again probably not useful for 'the narrative').  I say facile because it is easy to say but hard to prove. The Arab League itself had asked the Western World to intervene in Libya and Gadaffi and sons had loudly proclaimed their intention to go "house-to-house" killing people in Benghazi.

This put David Cameron in an awkward position. If he believes in muscular liberalism then he had little choice but to intervene in Libya given from what Gaddafi was saying there was about to be a massacre in Benghazi. The trouble was that, had Kosovo and Sierra Leone been the last examples of liberal interventionism it would have been consistent to have also got involved in Libya. Alas, Iraq and Afghanistan had made it far more complicated.

Also making it far more complicated was the inability to understand the consequences of intervention. In one day a few weeks ago I read two articles in different broadsheets. One argued that getting involved in  Libya would be a recruiting tool for Islamic terrorism as we would end up killing Muslims. The other argued that not getting involved in Libya would be a recruiting tool for Islamic terrorism as we would be doing nothing about the killing of Muslims.

If you think that sounds ridiculous, let's go back to the conversation in my classroom over two and half years ago. The 6th form boys I was talking too said that it was as much a problem that the West was killing Muslims in Iraq as it was that the West allowed Muslims to be killed in Bosnia. Damned when we do, damned when we don't.

At the end of the day, there is a reason why most of Parliament (I believe it was less than 10 MPs who voted against) voted for intervention in Libya. It's because of one of the more impressive lines David Cameron has come up with so far. "Just because we can't do everything doesn't mean we should do nothing". We simply can't afford to be in Bahrain and Syria as well, so does that mean we let people die in Libya?

If we had we would have learned nothing from Sebrenica. And that, for me, would have been a worse crime.

Privacy laws leave a vacuum, causing "information-jigsaws"

Having revealed the fact that Sir Fred Goodwin - former CEO of RBS - had obtained an injunction to cover up details of his affair with a "senior colleague", Lord Stoneham then provided some information which, for those wanting to know what actually happened and who understand the way public companies are run, was extremely useful.

Let's look at the central part of what Lord Stoneham said.....

"Every taxpayer has a direct public interest in the events leading up to the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland, so how can it be right for a super-injunction to hide the alleged relationship between Sir Fred Goodwin and a senior colleague. If true, it would be a serious breach of corporate governance and not even the Financial Services Authority would be allowed to know about it."

After he said it, the High Court was forced to lift the part of the injunction that was hiding Goodwin's name, allowing it to be released into the media. However, the name was unaccompanied by the name of the "senior female employee" not any details of the "alleged relationship". So, in the absence of this information we are left putting pieces of the jigsaw together, because an information vacuum usually has to be filled with something, and in the absence of facts, rumour is King.

But let's take a step back. Why do we need to know anything about the alleged relationship? Just because something is interesting to the public doesn't make it in the public interest, surely?

In the Sunday Times today, Dominic Lawson suggested that the idea that Sir Fred Goodwin's affair distracted him from running RBS properly is preposterous - if only he had been distracted he wouldn't have made so many mistakes Lawson said, and so the affair is irrelevant to the public interest.

But the clue comes in Lord Stoneham's use of the word "corporate governance", and that he felt the Financial Services Authority might want to know about it. Lawson's article didn't mention this, but it is important.

The "senior colleague" is not allowed to be named, but if they are a colleague then they were on the RBS payroll. For this affair to have had corporate governance implications the colleague would have likely been in either legal or compliance or finance. If she was a "senior colleague" she would have been high up in her department and responsible for advising Goodwin on actions he undertook as CEO. If that advice was compromised in any way it IS in the public interest as it could be said to have contributed to the downfall of RBS to the point where they had to be taken into State ownership.

Let me give you a hypothetical example:

In 2007 RBS (as part of a consortium) bought ABN-AMRO, the Dutch Bank, for over 3 times its book value. In the run up to the deal ABN-AMRO had sold its best asset (the LaSalle unit) to Bank of America - leaving RBS acquiring only the ABN-AMRO's underperforming London based investment banking franchise (which had plenty of bad loans on its books) and some smallish Asian operations. Added to this, the credit crunch started to hit in 2007. Put those two issues together RBS should have tried to amend the terms before the sale went through. But they didn't, and the rest...is now history.

So, why did Sir Fred Goodwin push through with this toxic deal? What happened to the trusted financial advisers within RBS? What happened to those within RBS paid to speak truth to power? Was Fred Goodwin in a relationship with one of those advisors? Was that the "senior colleague". If it was, then that is a corporate governance issue.

Ah, you might say, but surely the board needed to agree to an acquisition that large? Don't shareholders have to have a vote? What if the presentations given to try and persuade the board and the shareholders included this "senior colleague", helping the person she was allegely in a relationship with to continue to build his empire to an enormous size? THAT is also a corporate governance issue.

I am actually reasonably relaxed about the current privacy issue. I agree that everyone has some right to privacy. I do believe that if a footballer is earning money from endorsements from his family man image then an injunction to stop details of an affair emerging is not about privacy, it's about protecting those endorsements. I believe that if an actor famed for playing reliable family men uses an injunction to stop details of an affair emerging then that too is not about privacy, it's about protecting their career. But in the absence of ulterior motives I do agree they should have a right to privacy.

But if Fred Goodwin's affair led in any way to the State having to bail out RBS to the tune of as many billion pounds as it did, then it IS in the public interest, and privacy be damned.

"We got him" - but was justice done?

One of the reasons I love politics is that there is rarely a right answer. The question of whether Osama Bin Laden should have been captured alive at all costs and tried in a court of law is one of them. You would imagine it is a simple answer - yes - he should have a fair trial and the Western World should act as an exemplar of what to do with people who commit crimes. But, as with everything in global politics especially, it is far more nuanced than that.

Let's start with the members of Navy Seal Team 6 who performed the actual operation. In the UK especially we lack understanding of the chain of command (which is why many still want the person who shot Jean-Charles de Menezes in 2005 to be put on trial instead of the person or people who ordered him to do it). In the US they don't have that problem, and they understand that the man who shot Osama Bin Laden was aware of the need not to risk anyone's lives and had to make a split second decision on whether he or others were in danger.  We know wasn't armed and he didn't use his wife as a human shield (what WERE they thinking saying that?!) but he was retreating into the bedroom, and as far as the soldier know could have been getting a weapon. The only way to know he wasn't carrying a suicide bomb underneath his clothing was if he had been naked. In fact his clothes were bulky (which turned out to be money sewn into them).  As more information comes out of the US, it is becoming more and more clear that capturing Bin Laden was most probably a secondary objective, killing him the first.  But is that wrong?

First of all, and most importantly, you will hear many people talk about 'international law'. There is no such thing (yet). There are some agreed principles and an attempt at global governance through the United Nations but there is no binding body of law that covers all eventualities all over the world. So the argument that Bin Laden should have been tried under the principles of International law is not as applicable as many think. To illustrate the complications, we have an International Criminal Court (in which we attempted to try Slobodan Milosevic and are trying Charles Taylor) but it's jurisdiction applies from when it was created (April 2002) and it can exercise jurisdictiononly in cases where the accused is a national of a state party, the alleged crime took place on the territory of a state party, or a situation is referred to the court by the United Nations Security Council. Effectively, Osama Bin Laden could not be tried by this court.

So could the USA have tried him in one of their courts? Well, the National Defence Authorization Act that went through Congress recently effectively bars anyone that would be detained in Guantanamo from being tried on USA soil. There is little chance that Osama Bin Laden would have been held in a prison on USA soil as no state would have agreed to take him. So it would have been a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, the results of which would not have been recognised by many people.

But let's get away from practicalities and look at the reality. Holding Osama Bin Laden in captivity would have most probably unleashed a wave of terror the like of which we haven't seen in order to secure his release. The USA were never going to be prepared to risk that. Even retaining his body on land would make it a shrine and a focus for serious disturbances. Furthermore, the trial process would have dragged on for many years as it was a very complicated case. We are looking at someone, for example, who was for a fact armed and trained by the Americans in the 80s in order to help the fight against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There are serious skeletons in Osama's cupboard, and many would not want them to come out. Finally, Eric Holder, the US Attorney General pointed out that it is a War on Terror and Bin Laden was an enemy combatant so the USA had the right to kill him.

The most important reality is that the USA wanted closure. Yes, it wasn't 'justice' in many peoples' sense of the word. There is a reason why people get tried in Western Courts in front of a jury of their peers and victims aren't allowed to decide on guilt or sentence, and in a way the USA was a major victim of Osama Bin Laden and decided to be the judge jury and executioner. We can certainly question this. But the Americans in this particular case felt that justice was done for the crimes Bin Laden committed, including the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, the bombing of the USS Cole in 1998 and 9/11 most of all meant he should face the death penalty and in the long term the world is a safer and better place without him.

The irony of it all was that Al-Qaeda had been weakened beyond all recognition by the events of the last few months. They believed, and stated often, that the Muslim people wanted to live under Sharia Law and Islam wasn't compatible with democracy. Yet the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other places makes it quite clear that young Muslims especially really DO want to have some input into their lives and really DO want some form of democracy. Effectively then, all Al-Qaeda were doing were killing people who didn't share their view of how the world should be run, which is why more victims of Al-Qaeda were Muslims than those of any other faith.

The argument that killing Bin Laden will unleash a new wave of terrorism is irrelevant. It can be added to all the other explanations and excuses for new waves of terrorism which are likely to happen all the time.

On a personal level, I would have preferred if at all possible for the West to have shown the restraint and respect for justice as an example to everyone else of how to treat those who have comitted a crime. I do understand though why it just wasn't possible, or even advisable, in this particular instance.

The people spoke - and this is what I heard

It has been a fascinating fortnight in politics and I wanted to wait a little bit to see if there was any major fallout from last Thursday's referendum, local and devolved national elections before I made any comment.

First, here are the headlines..

1) The AV referendum vote was a resounding 'No'. I always felt that if AV was the answer we were asking thh wrong question. So it was that less than a third of a surprisingly high 42% turnout voted 'Yes' to AV. I do wonder what would have happened if it had been a choice between FPTP and AV Plus or AMS or a properly proportionally representative system. But we now won't find out for a generation. The Lib Dems blamed Ed Miliband for not pulling his Labour party together behind the 'Yes' vote. But Miliband did the right thing, more than half his MPs were voting 'No' so he really couldn't afford to push too hard. The fact that the 'Yes' camp had the burden of proof that FPTP needed to be changed and hid behind hogwash like 'it will stop expenses scandals' or 'it will make MPs work harder' instead of the real arguments, and wheeled out Eddie Izzard and Colin Firth against David Cameron is the reason the country voted 'No'. Does this mean the fabled 'progressive majority' doesn't actually exist?

2) In Scotland, the AMS electoral system - which was brought in for the sole reason that it would ONLY produce coalition governments - produced a majority government for the SNP. This was a fantastic result for Alex Salmond, who has grown into the role of Scotland's First Minister in ways nobody expected when he first took power in 2007. I do worry for him though. Firstly, he will have to hold a referendum on independence, and 2/3rds of Scots are against it, mainly because they know that should it happen they would have to pay for their own national defence and their share of the UK's deficit, which was hugely affected by having to bail out RBS and HBOS (and we all know what the 'S' stands for!). Secondly, Salmond won the election partly because of promises he made on having no tuition fees and free prescription charges among other things. He is an economist so will know there is an opportunity cost to these promises - in that some things will have less money. OR he will have to borrow a large amount of money and put Scotland in even more debt. It is quite possible the electorate didn't understand that. More likely is that they had little reason to vote for the others.

3) The local election results were surprisingly favourable to the Conservatives, unsurprisingly damning for the Lib Dems, and in my view unsurprisingly unrewarding for Labour. Labour increased their share of the vote by 11% but the Conservatives still won on share of the vote, although they lost 2% of their vote in 2007. The Conservatives also gained seats when it was believed they could lose as much as 800. . I believe Labour didn't do as well as they might because they haven't come up with a realistic alternative to the Conservatives' current course of action. Talking to a Labour activist the other day I asked what the alternative was, and he said "cut less" and I said "cut WHAT less" and he said "you know, just cut slower". Couldn't tell me what changes he would actually make apart from say he wouldn't do anything the Conservatives are doing - at which point I said, "yes, but what WOULD you do" and he went back to "cut less", and we were back at the beginning. I  believe that unless he is playing a canny long game, Ed Miliband is going to have to become far more of a leader than someone who seems merely to carp from the sidelines, because his followers have no idea where they are going.

As for the Lib Dems, they were almost obliterated, and are very unhappy about it. They have complained about the tactics the 'No' campaign used and they have complained about being a human shield for the Conservatives.  But here's a little story for you.

During last year's election campaign I happened to know the Conservative and Labour candidates in a particular constituency quite well. They finished up 42 votes apart and actually got on very well, with mutual respect developing between them despite clear ideological differences. The Lib Dem candidate finished third in this particular consistuency with over 16,500 votes, which is a considerable amount for a third placed candidate, and more than many seat-winners elsewhere.

During this campaign, the Conservative candidate was questioned about his pro-Israel fervour as a result of a leaflet produced by the Lib Dem campaign that assured voters he was heavily pro-Palestinian. Nothing strange there right? Well you'll be interested to know that the Labour candidate was also questioned about her Pro-Palestinian views as a result of a leaflet ALSO produced by the Lib Dem campaign assuing voters that the candidate was, in fact, a committed supporter of Israel.

The winning candidate noted that in her many years of politics it was the nastiest campaign she had been involved in, entirely because of the behaviour of the Lib Dem candidate. On further investigation it was found that the Lib Dems are particularly happy to fight dirty, something revealed by the press in response to the Phil Woolas case last year, where a Labour MP was stripped of his seat because of lies his campaign spread about the Lib Dem candidate in Oldham East.

The reason I'm telling you about this is because when the Lib Dems cry foul about others' campaigns, as they did about the 'No' campaign during the AV referendum (and I don't disagree - see this blog), they need to be careful as the stones they throw are all piled up next to them in their glass house.

The real issue for the Lib Dems is that when you are a protest party of opposition you can gain plenty by being all things to all people - as they famously were over issues like tuition fees, and in the example above, the Middle East peace process - but when you are a responsible member of a Coalition government you can't get away with that. Granted - there are plenty of Lib Dem Ministers who aren't very good at acting responsibly (HELLOOO Mr Cable), but to be fair to Nick Clegg, at the very least he has understood his collective responsibilities now he is Deputy Prime Minister (which is lucky because so unused are we as a country to coalition that it seems very few of the public or the media understand at all).

Ultimately - right now there is very little reason to vote for the Lib Dems. When they went into Coalition with the Conservatives they must have known that for the first year or two they would struggle in the polls. Given that the Coalition is front-loading the pain in terms of deficit cutting, there was always going to be protests and fightbacks and yes, the Lib Dems are bearing the brunt of it.

But if they have any guts they will stay the Coalition out until the year before the next election in 2015, then develop a programme of their own which takes into account this time that they MIGHT actually get into government, instead of the 2010 manifesto, which can only have assumed that they wouldn't. Should they do that, they could, with proven experience that they can govern a country, do better than the last election. But if not, we could be back to a two-party system again in the UK, and politics will be all the poorer for it.