Wednesday 14 June 2017

North Korean tourism is ghoulish and wrong, part 2


I've written before about why I think visiting North Korea as a tourist is wrong, the equivalent of ghoulish on-lookers oggling a deadly car-crash. One thing I didn't mention there was the possibility of becoming a hostage of the Kim's regime, held as a pawn in North Korea's diplomatic game.

The fate of Otto Warmbier should be a warning to everyone considering visiting the DPRK as a tourist that this is indeed a possibility. By all accounts Otto Warmbier did nothing really wrong - taking a poster,apparently as a memento, in an apparent act of care-free thoughtlessness than in any other country in the world would not result in any serious sanction. Instead he is now being returned to his family in a coma, explained by the North Korean regime as the result of either taking a sleeping pill or botulism he had suffered whilst serving his 15-year sentence of hard labour for “hostile acts against the state.”

The conclusion of all this is quite obvious: don't go to North Korea. The kind of thing that happened to Otto Warmbier could happen to anyone else, and once you have entered into the Kim regime's clutches you may not leave alive.

[Picture: a border guard at Sunan airport, North Korea. Via Wiki]

Tuesday 13 June 2017

Panama switches recognition to China

China's successful diplomatic coup, announced today, that Panama will sever relations with Taiwan (officially the Republic of China) and establish them with China, has already led to Taiwan breaking off relations with Panama to "preserve its national dignity".

China has progressively squeezed the Taiwanese out of every forum it possibly could, and cutting off the last official diplomatic relations it still maintains appears to be the last phase of this decades-long process. Following the ending of a "diplomatic truce" during the Ma presidency, and the severing of relations with the Gambia and Sao Tome and Principe, Taiwan's 23 million people now enjoy full diplomatic relations with only twenty other states, of which the largest in terms of population is probably the land-locked African state of Burkina Faso.

One thing the PRC leadership does not seem to have asked itself is whether this is an entirely self-defeating move. By progressively stripping the Republic of China of it's last remaining vestiges of legitimacy on the international stage, it makes the point again to the Taiwanese people that clinging to it has little value. Even were the Chinese nationalist KMT to again win the presidency, whilst China's communist party leadership might stop attempting to undermine Taiwan's diplomatic relations, they would not be likely to allow Taiwan's leaders to establish new diplomatic relations with anyone - this is therefore a one-way process in which the Taiwanese essentially have little to gain.

[Picture: The flag of Panama flies on a hot day at Gatun locks, taken on a stop there during my honeymoon in 2015]

Monday 12 June 2017

Things that are and are not true about a Tory-DUP coalition deal

So, it seems that as of writing the coalition deal with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) that Theresa May wishes to conclude in order to stay in government is still up in the air, however much has already been written about its possible effect on the Northern Irish peace process and UK political scene in general. Some of it, though, seems particularly dubious, and potentially dangerous (or at least deeply misleading) if taken seriously. Let's take the common points in turn:

1) The DUP is linked to terrorist organisations and therefore a coalition deal with them is unconscionable.

Some members of the DUP have informal, non-official links to Loyalist paramilitaries, DUP officials certainly has "winked" at Loyalist paramilitaries by, for example, thanking their friends in certain strongly-loyalist neighbourhoods, as is noted by the BBC here. At the same time officially they do not accept endorsements from paramilitaries and condemn the attacks that Loyalist paramilitaries have carried out.

The connection between the DUP and the Loyalists paramilitaries is therefore not even nearly the kind of official relationship that exists between the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein. DUP politicians do not praise the UVF or the UDA the way Sinn Fein politicians do the IRA. DUP politicians do not accept the endorsement of former "Prisoners of War" (that is, men jailed for acts of heroism like, say, leaving a bomb with a timer set in a busy highstreet, or kidnapping and murdering a single mother of ten) as Sinn Fein do.

The idea that the DUP is simply the protestant, Loyalist mirror-image of Sinn Fein, and that a deal with them is just as unacceptable as a deal with Sinn Fein would be, does not hold water.

2) A deal with the DUP would be illegal under the Good Friday Agreement since that requires that the Westminster government be neutral in Northern Irish affairs.

As the legal comentator David Allen Green pointed out, this is clearly a political issue on which no court would pass judgement even if a breach of the agreement could be clearly identified (which it hasn't been). This hasn't stopped Sinn Fein from making this claim, however.

There is plenty of reason, though, for being highly dubious about Sinn Fein's claim. The biggest one from my point of view is that when the Good Friday Agreement was concluded the government of the time was in what amounted to an informal coalition with a Northern Irish party  (SDLP's MPs take the Labour party whip), and was for years after that, and neither Sinn Fein nor any other Northern Irish party thought this worth objecting to or impacted on the UK government's neutrality.

Moreover, taking Sinn Fein's stance on this at face-value, it would seem to preclude them ever being involved in the government in Dublin (which has a similar role under the Good Friday Agreement), which given their efforts to take power there cannot possibly be their position. 

3) The DUP's positions on abortion and gay rights put them beyond the pale in modern British politics.

The DUP's position on abortion is the same as that of the SDLP (and for that matter, Sinn Fein). As has already been noted above, the Labour party were in what amounted to a coalition with the SDLP for years and this point was never raised. Perhaps it should have been?

The DUP's position on gay rights is just as reprehensible, in my view, as its position on abortion, but again Labour did not see this as a barrier when they approached the DUP to form a coalition in 2010.

Tu quoque arguments are tiresome and illogical, but if you had to judge what is acceptable in British politics by past form, there is no reason to believe that a deal with the DUP is unacceptable simply because of their positions on gay rights and abortion. The real point of contention should be whether the DUP demands an erosion of gay rights and abortion rights in return for the coalition deal, and it is here that we should be wary.

4) This endangers the Peace Process at a serious juncture.


This is, I think, the biggest and best reason to object to a coalition with the DUP. Power-sharing in Northern Ireland has collapsed after the last Northern Irish elections and talks are currently ongoing to re-start it. Why would anyone wish to upset the balance of these talks?

The problem here is that for the UK government to be absent from these talks would also endanger them, and without this deal there cannot be a stable UK government - instead, if no deal were made and the government lost a no-confidence vote, there would be another election which is no more likely to return a majority government than the last one. The Tory-DUP deal represents the only viable deal that is ever likely to happen.

As I said above, we should be very wary of allowing the Conservatives to make a deal that would make unacceptable concessions. The idea of allowing marches to go ahead again, after they repeatedly led to violent stand-offs, in return for a coalition deal, cannot be given credence. Ruth Davidson is entirely correct to hint that she and her new batch of Scottish Conservative MPs will not tolerate an erosion of LGBTI rights in the UK as a result of this deal.

There are indeed reasons to be positive about a deal with the DUP. The DUP is committed to not accepting any special status vis-à-vis the EU for Northern Ireland, and to not accepting a return to a "Hard Border" there, commitments which, taken together, would seem to preclude a Hard Brexit.

[Picture: DUP founder Ian Paisley - more than any single man except perhaps Gerry Adams, to blame for the Troubles carrying on for as long as they did. Via Wiki]

Sunday 11 June 2017

This extraordinary result

I think it was the smiles on their faces that gave the game away a bit: when David Dimbley (pictured above) and his co-presenters opened the BBC election night results special they all had a bit of a jaunty aspect to them, as though they already knew what the exit poll said and were looking forward to the shock it was going to give us.

And what a shock! Not just the polling of the previous year or more, but the results of the local elections less than two months before the result, all pointed to a not-undeserved hammering for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party. Even the tightening in the polls in the two weeks before the election had pointed only to a marginally-less-dire-but-still-dire result for Corbyn's Labour.

On my way to the polling station at my local church hall I was impressed only by the relatively low apparent turn-out, though I did remark on the tellers for Labour at each of the polling stations I had passed - they had been thin on the ground at the previous election where I had been a teller. I put my cross next to the Liberal Democrat's name (my first time not voting Tory in a general election), safe in the knowledge that the Conservatives would sweep not only my constituency (which they did, albeit by a reduced majority) but also most of the country.

Instead, when I switched on my television at 9.55pm, expecting to see the inevitable Tory victory and to be in bed before 11, with not a small measure of satisfaction I saw Mrs. May stunningly denied the majority that she seemed to have thought would be hers by default. May, whose leadership victory I had cautiously welcomed as the only viable option in the aftermath of Brexit, and who had then betrayed every moderate conservative in the country by hitching her star to the xenophobic poison of Hard Brexit, had been brought low.

Not only that, but Jeremy Corbyn had been denied victory. From the point of view of anyone for whom a Corbyn victory would have been a disaster, but for whom also Hard Brexit would be a disaster, this was the best possible result.

It got even better as the Scottish results became apparent: Nicola Sturgeon's arrogance in pressing for another referendum on Scottish independence had back-fired spectacularly. Not only did the Scottish Conservatives under the leadership of excellent Ruth Davidson capture a dozen Scottish seats, but also Kezia Dugdale's Scottish Labour had captured another seven, and the Liberal Democrats had also picked up a couple. The "majority for independence" that we had been told existed in Scotland was obviously a phantom.

The icing on the cake was that UKIP, which at one point threatened both Labour in the north of England and the Conservatives in the South, had imploded, taking bare percentage-points of the vote. The receding of the UKIP tide had raised the vote-share of the two main parties to heights not seen in decades, and puts an end to our supposedly "fragmented" politics.

Since the results became known we have been told that the Conservatives have either made a deal with, or are on the cusp of making a deal with, the Democratic Unionist Party to remain in power. This is a disreputable deal which can only rebound on Theresa May and which sensible Tory MPs will try to distance themselves from. Whilst not as closely related to paramilitary violence as Corbyn's friends in Sinn Fein (who announced - in what Corbyn must feel is a great act of ingratitude - that they would not support a Labour government) the DUP's links to Loyalist paramilitaries are both informal and undeniable, and their endorsement by paramilitary organisations was only grudgingly disavowed.

This coalition cannot last long, nor can the leadership of Theresa May. At the same time the Hard Brexit this election had been called to empower has been left without support opening a narrow window of opportunity to change course. The "Saboteurs" that the Daily Mail had gleefully called to be "crushed" will have their say. At last, there is a bit of hope.

As for the person who I did not wish to win, but whose performance during the campaign undoubtedly did more than perhaps anyone's efforts (apart from Theresa May's, obviously)? Well, I still do not support Jeremy Corbyn, do not agree with his policies, think him a weak leader surrounded by incompetents, think his views on the EU are both dishonest and disastrous, but were he to renounce Brexit tomorrow I would certainly give the idea of voting for his party some consideration.

Finally: I was obviously wrong, many commenters were obviously wrong, about what the outcome of this election would be. From now on I doubt I will think of the polls as much more than slight indicators of what the final result will be, since it is now obvious that people can and will change their minds about who to vote for in large numbers in the weeks leading up to an election.