The Middle East's 1989

Read reports by agencies such as the Humans Right Watch, Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders and you quickly get a sense that Egypt is a very nice place to live. The country has been in a state of Emergency for 30 years, a fig leaf to cover President Mohamed Mubarak cracking down with brutal force on any dissent and to detain political rivals.
Egypt, it seems, is ripe for a revolution which is why almost every other Middle Eastern country where authoritarian regimes are the norm, will be nervously watching the events in Cairo this weekend.
The trigger was the four week of demonstrations in Tunisia helped by damaging disclosures from Wikileaks ending Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali's corrupt 23 year reign forcing him to flee with 1.5 tonnes of gold.
Now Egyptians are rioting and the Yemenis and Jordanians have taken to the streets albeit in smaller, less violent numbers.
What will make or break the potential revolutions is the role of the army. In Tunisia, the refusal of the military to fire on protesters proved to be the turning point. In Egypt, all eyes are on the military and waiting for which side they will decide to come down on.
This could very well turn out to be a false dawn much like Tiananamen Square in China when the Army brutally stomped out dissent or the Middle East's very own 1989 when surpressive regimes fell like dominoes one after another.
The ramifications for the West could be enormous as Mubarack has long been a friend of ours, Tony Blair even holidaying with the much maligned Mubarack and American Vice President Joe Biden recently calling Mubarack 'an ally of ours.'
However this ends, and i hope the Egyptians and the citizens of the Middle East get the freedom and Governments they want, this could well be an historic time for the region much the same way the 90s was for Eastern Europe

To Cheer Or Jeer

We are coming to the end of the football transfer window and this is the time when the best, most exciting transfers take place which leads to a conundrum that i have never really solved in my mind. what to think of our teams players that leave.
Is it okay to boo a player that you lauded a few weeks ago just because he has upped sticks and joined another team?
Most fans seem to go with a player by player basis and how they left. Paul Ince left West Ham to go to Manchester United and got a roasting everytime he went back to Upton Park as did Theo Walcott when he returned with Arsenal to play against his former team Southampton.
Emmanuel Adebayor almost started a riot when Arsenal fans tried to get at him when he scored against the Gunners for his new team Manchester City and Wayne Rooney's ears ring after the abuse he receives when returning to Goodison Park with Manchester United.
On the flip side, Thierry Henry and Patricik Viera are hailed as returning heroes despite both taking their boots to pastures new and Liverpool fans cheered Robbie Fowler to the rafters when he turned up at Anfield wearing another teams colours.
There does not seem much logic behind who the fans cheer, boo or are indifferent to when they come back but i always get caught between wanting to thank them for all they did during their time at the club and wanting to join in the boos and screams of 'TRAITOR' and 'JUDAS' at them everytime they prance near the ball.
It's a dilemma but at least Ashley Cole had the decency of being a complete cock outside of football as well to make it easy for Arsenal fans.

UK Government Safety Announcement

Britain it seems, is halfway towards falling back into recession with the announcement that the economy shrank by 0.5% at the end of 2010.
Nothing to do with the Government economic policy though according to Dave, it was because of the snow.
If the economy can go backwards during the busiest shopping period of the year, and before the VAT increase, job losses and public service cuts hit, you don't need a degree in economics to see we are paddle less up a very smelly creek.
Yes, we are being run by a group of rich boys who don't have the first idea of what they are doing so it's time to listen to the safety announcement the Conservatives are planning to broadcast in case of the countries complete collapse.

Good afternoon, can i have your attention please.
The Conservative Government would like to take this opportunity to welcome you plebs aboard this country destined for hell in a handcart and we would just like to go through some safety procedures.
Please ensure that your belts are fastened at all times throughout the journey and should be tightened at regular intervals until they are extremely painful.
In the very likely event of an economic collapse and we are left floating adrift by George Osborne's incompetence, the emergency exits are here, here and here but they are just for us rich people.
To speed up the evacuation, make sure that all your possessions have already been sold and as the country slips slowly beneath the waves, feel free to weep pathetically .
It just remains for us to thank you for travelling with the conservative party and we hope you have a very enjoyable voyage.

The Palestine Papers - Day 2

Day 2 of the Palestine leaked papers and we continue that the sacrifices seem to be coming from one side only and it is the side with the least to offer.
One of the demands that Israel have been making constantly in return for a partial freeze on settlement building is for the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish State.
In October 2010, Palestinian negotiators agreed stating: 'If you want to call your state the Jewish state of Israel you can call it what you want.' Settlement building continues today unabated.
The negotiators agreed to limit the return to Israel of Palestinians refugees expelled by Israel in 1948 to 10,000 out of the 5 million scattered across the Middle East despite the right to return being one of the Palestinian red lines.
America had it's own suggestion to make for the refugees in the most startling revelation to come out of today's papers. Relocate them to South America,
Condoleezza Rice, the Bush administration's secretary of state, wanted to settle displaced Palestinians in Argentina and Chile as an alternative to letting them return to former homes in Israel and the occupied territories.
Nobody is going to be coming out of this with any credit but the biggest losers will be the Palestinians who have bent over backwards and are rewarded with suggestions that they move to another continent and shifting goalposts.

Andy Gray Red Carded

Is anyone really surprised that a man who sneaked off to hotels with the model wife of his best friend and whose ex-wife gave birth to his son, four months after he marryied his second wife hold females with such low regard?
Rightly, Andy Gray has been sacked by Sky Sports as its head football presenter, a man who puts the W in anchor, for sexist remarks directed by him and his co-presenter Richard Keys, a man who puts the Ass in Association Football, at female match official, Sian Massey, when they thought the mic was turned off.

Richard Keys: Well, somebody better get down there and explain offside to her.
Andy Gray: Yeah, I know. Can you believe that? Female linesman. Forget what I said – they probably don't know the offside rule.
RK: Course they don't.
AG: Why is there a female linesman? Somebody's fucked up big.
RK: I can guarantee you there'll be a big one today. This is not the first time. Didn't we have one before?
AG: Yeah.
RK: Wendy Toms.
AG: Wendy Toms, something like that. She was fucking hopeless as well.
RK: The game's gone mad. See charming Karren Brady this morning complaining about sexism? Yeah. Do me a favour, love.

As much as it irks me to give any credit whatsoever to a Murdoch organ, Sky has to be given credit for sacking Gray, especially as other clips of his crude antics with the opposite sex came to light.
The broadcaster said that it had made clear to both that their comments were "totally unacceptable" and "inexcusable from anyone at Sky regardless of their role or seniority". Then it sacked Gray although Keys may have saved his own scrawny neck by phoning Sian Massey and apologising which is a shame because he is not only a sexist idiot, but a terrible presenter to boot.
I just hope it was a female holding open the door for Gray when he was shown it.

The Palestine Papers

The Guardian newspaper and Al Jazeera have got their hands on almost 1700 leaked documents, secret accounts of ten years of talks between Palestinian and Israeli negotiators.
The two media outlets plan to release all 1700 over the course of this week but already the first days findings show what most suspected all along, and now has been confirmed by the then foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, that Israel were creating facts on the ground to prevent the possibility of a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
At a west Jerusalem meeting in November 2007, she said during negotiations that she believed Palestinians saw settlement building as meaning 'Israel takes more land so that the Palestinian state will be impossible, that the Israel policy is to take more and more land day after day and that at the end of the day we'll say that is impossible, we already have the land and we cannot create the state.'
Then the admission that 'It has been the policy of the government for a really long time.'
More revelations will come out, the other big news from today's leaks is that the Palestinians offered Israel all but one of the settlements in occupied East Jerusalem in return for land of equal size elsewhere but the Israelis, and Americans, turned it down as inadequate.
The result of the documents will be that more and more Palestinians will reach the conclusion that non-violence and negotiations have not worked, so more violence might. And who can blame them because Israel has no interest in peace, just stealing as much land as they can with the backing of the United States whose already diminishing global reputation is sure to take another beating. And rightly so.
Israel, its own reputation already in the gutter, does not make it easy for anyone to like it and hopefully a few more eyes will be opened to its atrocious tactics by the end of this week.

LA LA LA NOT LISTENING

Fully aware for the stick he took for sneaking in the side door last time, Blair turned up to his second appearance at the Chillcott Enquiry into the Iraq War and breezed in the front door.
After pausing at the entrance for a photographer, he strolled confidently inside ready to put his side of events and to tell the public that he was able to ignore the advice of the top lawyer in the land that the Iraq invasion was illegal because he hadn't asked for it.
'I had not yet got to the stage of a formal request for advice' he explained before going on to says he "regrets the loss of life in Iraq but the West should stop apologising for the invasion'.
Fair enough, we have all used the sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting I'M NOT LISTENING defence before. True when i do it the result is we end up lost and not in a million dead people and a wrecked country but the principle is the same.
Just how keen Blair would have been to sashay in the front door if he had not turned up in the dark, two hours early and when the protesters were still making there way to the venue we won't know. Whether he would have hung about having his photo taken while being bawled at is also cause for speculation.
We didn't actually find out anything that we didn't already know. Blair is still an odious little man and the Chillcott enquiry isn't going to hang him out to dry like most of the country is baying for.
Disappointingly, we have to face it that he isn't going to end up at the Hague alongside George W Bush and he will never be held to account for his actions in 2003.
We did manage to get his book tour cancelled though and he is forced to turn up at places under the cover of darkness hours before he is due to avoid protesters and that's something.
What's that Mr Blair? You think we should invade Iran? LA LA LA NOT LISTENING LA LA LA.

Pots And Kettles

The Chinese are in America and President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao agree to a dialogue on human rights although they haven't said which countries human rights are up for discussion.
In 2007, China issued 'the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2007' in response to the 'Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2007' issued by the US Department of State which highlighted China's abhorrent human rights record including unlawful deprivation of life, disappearances and use of torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.
The Information Office of China's State Council listed a multitude of cases to show the human rights situation in the United States and its violation of human rights in other countries including:

the increase of violent crime in the United States
lax gun laws resulting in tens of thousands of gun deaths every year
abusive law enforcement officers
the highest inmates per population ratio in the world
the financial restraints on anybody other than millionaires seeking the US presidency
how one out of eight US citizens lives in poverty
the disproportionate wealth distribution
how racial discrimination is a deep-rooted social illness
the notorious record of trampling on the sovereignty of and violating human rights in other countries.

The report ends: 'It is high time for the US government to face its own human rights problems with courage and give up the unwise practices of applying double standards on human rights issues'.
The dialogue will go along the lines of 'If we don't mention Tibet, torture or citizen surveillance do you promise not to mention Iraq, Guantanamo Bay or spying on UN members?'

Stay There Piers

It is part of the British character that we like our celebrities to be humble, self deprecating and one of us and to stay that way forever. The second a celebrity moves out of that circle then WHAM, we gleefully rip them down and pour scorn on the arrogant little upstart getting ideas above their station.
Catherine Zeta Jones went from lovely Welsh lass to stuck up tart before her feet even touched down in America with her new hubby Michael Douglas.
Strangely, this doesn't seem to have happened with Piers Morgan because everyone considered him to be a smarmy, arrogant troll to start with.
Good for him that he somehow managed to land the job as Larry King's replacement and he starts in America with none of the baggage that followed him around over here.
Things like the £67,000 worth of shares he bought in Viglen just before his newspaper tipped Viglen as a good buy sending the share price soaring, or the faked Iraqi prisoner abuse photographs that cost him his job at the Daily Mirror or even how Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson punched Morgan three times at an award show over Morgan's newspapers invasion of his privacy.
Apparently the reaction to Morgans first interview with Oprah Winfrey was mixed with the main criticism being that he was too soft and fawning. As Brits we can only hope that he ups his game for the forthcoming interviews, otherwise he might come back and heaven knows we don't want his smug face back on our screens.
As we are palming off our unwanted celebrities to American television, we've got loads more talentless presenters our American friends are very welcome to. Have you met Davina McCall?

Privatisation Doesn't Work

Few things can be more obvious than that Margaret Thatcher was wrong. Wrong about closing the coal mines and wrong about introducing the poll tax but the greatest thing that she got wrong was her policy of privatisation because it just doesn't work.
The spread of the privatisation movement is grounded in the belief that market competition in the private sector is a more efficient way to provide services provided by the Government and allows for a better deal for us.
In practice, however, it increase costs, lowers the quality of services and leads to rising unemployment because simple logic tells us it's impossible for the private sector to deliver the same service for less and make a profit as well and making a profit is the only reason they are there.
Private companies exist to make a profit for their investors even if they are providing a service to the public, and the only way to increase profit is to reduce the money they pay out (wages) or increase the money they bring in (prices), both of which comes at a huge cost, financial and personal, to the public.
Cutting jobs does not mean cutting out the work those people once did, those who remain see their workloads increase resulting in the public receiving a standard of service less than they received formerly.
We are unlucky enough to see first hand today the results of Margaret Thatcher and her Governments round of privatisations in the 1980's and 1990's when she sold off the electric, gas, water, railways, council homes and telephones services.
The sale of these industries raised £48 billion for the Government and left us with a legacy of poor service and spiralling costs. Take a look at your utilities bills and wonder why your gas and electric has gone up by 10% this winter while Centrica, which operates British Gas, published figures stating a £922 million profit and shareholders enjoying an 18% gain in the value of their holdings .
An amazing 4.5 million households are living in fuel poverty, spending over 10% of its income on heating their homes and that was before the latest round of 7%-10% price increases across the board yet gas and electric companies are making billions in profits.
Now David Cameron is picking up the Thatcher baton and is looking to privatise schools, Royal Mail, forests, motorways and the National Health Service.
We know how this will turn out and we know that there will be a Government charm offensive to convince us that this is the best thing to do for us all with the excuse being the reduction of the deficit.
We know because we have been here before and it doesn't all turn out okay, it ends up with swelling unemployment, poor service and private companies bleeding us dry to make a profit.
Balance sheets are by nature unconcerned with suffering or providing anything to anyone at a loss and that is where the Conservative Party is leading us unless we can find a way to bring this folly of a Government policy to a screeching halt.